The Pekin Target

20: March

Dead weight.

The sun was much higher now, its heat throbbing in the air. I had begun making an effort not to look at my watch.

Dead weight on my back.

If he had started from the monastery at the time we had made our drop, it had taken him two hours to reach the area where he'd begun hunting me. It was going to take longer than that for him to return; much longer.

The sun beat down on the three of us. Four of us. One on my back.

Sometimes the two men spoke to each other, a few short words in low tones that I didn't understand; but the tone of the human voice is a language in itself, and universal; and I knew they were talking about the man on my back; there was grief in their voices for him, and hate for the man who had murdered him. I suppose they felt it was rough poetic justice, making me carry his body.

One of them walked ahead, springing easily across the uneven rock in his cushioned track shoes while I laboured and stumbled under my burden; the other man followed me, and my back was already bruised from the prodding of the long rifle. Sweat trickled on me, stinging my eyes so that they watered all the time, making the flat grey rocks look like a stream bed in the wavering light. I would have said we'd been moving for three hours now, maybe rather less, because time dragged under the dead weight.

They had tried mouth-to-mouth resuscitation for half an hour; then one of them had raised his revolver to aim at the centre of my forehead and I'd looked down the barrel and begun counting, for something to do; but the other man had spoken to him sharply, with authority, and the gun had been lowered. I was to be taken to the monastery, I suppose he had said, and dealt with there. The tone of the man's voice had sounded like an order, and it occurred to me that they might be military personnel out of uniform, possibly North Koreans whose uniform in the South would get them arrested.

I had tried them with English, French, German and Russian as we'd started the march out, but had got no reaction. We had moved off as soon as they'd gestured to me to lift the dead marksman and sling him across my back; they'd seen nothing of the haversack, higher up on the ledge behind the wall I'd built, and I hadn't tried to retrieve it; that radio would have been embarrassing: it wouldn't have suited the cover I was working out.

Staggering now across the uneven ground, the stones rippling under the tears flooding my eyes.

The sun's heat rising towards noon.

Dead march.

One of his arms began swinging like a pendulum to the measure of my pace, his hand brushing across and across my chest as if he were trying to catch my attention; but he had nothing more to say to me, and I had nothing to say to him; we'd both been professionals and the match had been fairly even; he'd come close to blowing my head off, so I'd broken his neck, a good enough answer. But his arm was beginning to irritate me and I grasped his hand, a little too late to show friendship.

The man ahead of me was following the oblique cleft towards the south-east, the way de Haven had told me I should go, the way I would have gone alone if these two hadn't heard the marksman's shots, and come down to see if he needed help. Twice in the last hour I'd seen the glint of blue-grey tiles higher on the ridge; we must have climbed most of the thousand feet from the flat area below where my heavy friend had hunted me.

"What?" I asked them, and^-found the sun blinding in my eyes and their hands dragging me upright: I'd just gone straight out with exhaustion. They shoved the barrel of the long blue Remington into me, like poking a pig with a stick, until the pain overwhelmed the urge to go on lying there, freed of the dead-weight load. "Oh shuddup," I told them, "don't be so fucking impatient." I suppose they didn't take it kindly that I'd dumped their friend so unceremoniously, well that was tough luck, he shouldn't have put those bloody bullets quite so close to my head.

They humped him onto my back again and I stood there trying to adjust to the load while bright red spots dripped from me onto the stones; they'd broken the skin somewhere with that thing.

Off we go, then, yes, my friend and I, not much of a conversationalist, you can say that about him. One foot in front of the next through the throbbing heat of the day. And out of a job, by the way: it had been worrying me. They would have written me off by now, because I hadn't sent another signal.

Eagle to Jade One, my present situation extremely hazardous, will report if possible, so forth. Been no report, had there, it didn't look very jolly, one more ferret bitten the dust, it happens all the time. But I bet they don't send Youngquist in; he'd looked too intelligent to let London shove him into a shut-ended shambles like this one.

Stay on your feet.

On my feet, yes, but not your bloody business.

If you keep on falling down they'll shoot you.

Shuddup. Snivelling little bloody organism worried about dying, plain bloody suburban.

They're going to shoot you up there at the monastery.

Well, I didn't think they were going to offer me a franchise in a car wash, for Christ's sake.

Stones swimming. One foot in front of the other.

Gun at my back, prodding.

His arm was swinging again, the arm of my inert and unconversational friend. It was irritating, and after a mile or ten miles or fifty miles in this blinding heat I thought about grabbing his hand again to keep him still, and then I thought now wait a minute, this kind of pendulum motion might be an advantage, because every time his arm swings forwards it helps me keep moving, bloody clever, yes, but every time it swings back, quite, not bloody clever, you're losing your nut, you know that? You're going stark raving bonkers.

A possibility, just a bare possibility, that if I could manage to centre the psyche for a while and then fall down deliberately and land with him on top of me as a shield against the rifle, and at the same time grab the ankles of the man in front and bring him down, you've got no energy left, you bloody fool, I know, but you've got to think about something.

Gun hit my spine.

Get on, yes.

Sound of my breathing, like sawing wood, sawing slowly through a huge tree trunk, in, out, in, out, while the muscles blazed, thirsting for more oxygen, more oxygen all the time, legs staggering with the knees locked, otherwise fall, fall down, ought not to do that, wouldn't take kindly, no.

Blinding sun and streaming stones and his swinging arm and the pain of the gun prodding, on and on, until there were roofs curving against the sky and a bell somewhere, tolling like a brainstorm in my skull, my legs lurching left and right, my feet shuffling like a cripple's and the whole of my body burning under the weight of the man, the weight of the sun, the weight of the sky. Stop.

Several men, coming onto the courtyard, one of them talking in Russian, asking what had happened.

Stood swaying, then no good, went down like an avalanche and hit the stones, man saying in Russian, Put him against a wall and shoot him.