Deathwatch by Robb White Page A

the butte.
    About twenty feet beyond where he stood, but above him, was another ledge, wide and slanting upward; an easy path to the top of the butte.
    No force in the world would hold him against that leaning wall long enough to cross those twenty feet to the wide avenue of stone going to the top.
    Nor was there any way a naked man with no tools could scale the escarpment.
    He was confined to this narrow ledge and the tunnel. He was imprisoned here.
    And Madec knew that.
    Ben could now see exactly what Madec was planning. About where Madec was, Ben remembered, there was a smooth, unclimbable wall from the breccia to a ledge about thirty feet up.
    Ben had studied this place longingly, for once on that high ledge it had looked to him as though the rest of the way to the top would be no more than a stiff walk. Without tools and rope he hadn’t been able to conquer the first, smooth, vertical obstacle.
    Madec had everything he needed.
    Ben studiedthe stone butte, from where Madec would start on the first ledge to where he would end at the top.
    Wherever Madec would be in sight he would be out of range of the slingshot.
    And at those same places Ben would be an easy target for the gun.
    He realized slowly and bitterly that he could not stop Madec from climbing. He could not even harass him and slow him down.
    Ben looked across at the ledge twenty feet above him. He studied it for a moment and then slowly looked back along his own ledge and on into the deep shadows of the tunnel.
    From the wide ledge toward which he was climbing Madec could stand—or even sit comfortably,his elbows wedged down against his legs for firm support—and shoot him.
    Ben could see from one end of the dark tunnel to the other. Not even the bend in the tunnel was enough to conceal him.
    There was no place to hide.
    Ben went back along the ledge and into the tunnel to where the slingshot lay beside the little pile of stones he had gathered.
    The sound of the hammer seemed to beat against him as he sat beside the slingshot and idly fitted it into his hand.
    Ben was listening so intently to the hammer that it was a long time before he realized he had also been hearing the sound above him.
    It was a hollow, rattling, irritating noise. He ran to the mouth of the tunnel and looked up.
    The helicopter was like transparent gold floating in the sky, coming nearer and nearer.
    He could not make out the markings on it, but he was sure that it was the Game and Fish chopper on a routine patrol.
    It was the most beautiful thing Ben had ever seen in his life.

11
    B EN COULDN’T BE SURE , but when the chopper went into a sharp skid and floated gently to the ground not a hundred feet from the Jeep, he would have bet money that Denny O’Neil was flying it.
    Ben felt so good he was jumping up and down on the ledge, yelling his lungs out as the dust of the chopper’s landing blew away and he saw a man get out of it and run, stooped, out from under the rotors.
    He had expected to see a game warden and had hoped that it would be the supervisor, Les Stanton, but the man was in civilian clothes.
    Ben calmed down, saving his breath and waiting for the chopper blades to stop but, as he waited, he realized that although the engine had slowed and the blades were just lazily turning, it hadn’t stopped.
    It wasn’t going to stop. Not if Denny O’Neil were flying it. Denny had told him once, “Ben, the trouble with you is that you think engines
want
to run. Well, I got news for you—they don’t.Any time they can get away with not running, believe me, they’ll do it. And engines are smart. And they’re mean. When everything’s going good up in that chopper and you can see forever, that engine’ll run, but you get in trouble in bad weather and get down in a gorge you
got
to
fly
out of and that engine’ll quit. Engines don’t like people and you better believe it.
    “Out there on the desert,” Denny had told him, “in that chopper, I know that engine’s just waiting