Operation Pax by Michael Innes

shambled off down the road, and they shambled after him. Painfully his sense of the need to plan returned to him. They couldn’t very well kidnap him here and now. The wrecking of their car had dished that. And until they knew that he hadn’t cached Formula Ten somewhere on the route of his flight they couldn’t bring out guns and shoot him. Or not to kill…
    Something had happened to the sounds behind him. There was only one man running. He turned his head. Squire was down on one knee in the road. Routh thought joyfully that he had collapsed. Then he saw that Squire’s left arm was up oddly before his face, and that there was something resting on it. A spurt of dust flew up beside Routh’s feet. There was a sharp report. Squire had tried to wing him. They’d do that, fake him up as part of their car accident, and then manage somehow to smuggle him away – perhaps in a relief car of their own.
    And still A417 was wickedly empty. Squire was running again, but presently he would take another shot. The ditch on Routh’s left had vanished, and in its place was a grass verge and a low stone wall. Beyond were trees. Routh stumbled to the wall and threw himself over; he blundered his way forward, staggering from tree to tree like a ball on a bagatelle board. A bullet won’t wind its way round a lot of bloody trees. He went on and on. There was silence all round him.
    He stopped, not believing it. No pounding feet. His eyes were drawn down to his own feet, which ached beneath him. They rested on a thick carpet of pine needles. The enemy might be quite close, after all; they might be moving up on him in perfect silence, Nor was the cover so very good. This sort of tree was in too much of a hurry to reach the sun. It scrambled upwards with indecent speed, leaving nothing but a spare, businesslike trunk behind it. Routh stood for a moment at bay, radiating futile malevolence upon the straight, still presences around him. He hated the wood. It wasn’t natural – a place that was nothing but trees and silence. People shouldn’t make such places. He longed for the street, for four walls and a roof, for a tough crowd that would see fair play.
    Squire and the bearded man were close to him. The silence, as if retorting upon his dislike of it, allowed itself to be shattered by their voices. The sound seemed to be all around him. Wherever he moved it was in front of him as well as behind. If he turned half-left or half-right it was the same. Perhaps it was a trick of the place; perhaps among trees sound always behaved like that. Or perhaps – he thought in sudden horror – he was dying. Perhaps he was going to die of sheer long-drawn-out nervous tension. Perhaps this confusion of voices was simply the decay of the senses before death. He floundered on.
    The trees thinned and vanished. In front of him stretched a low stone wall. Surely he had seen it before? What lay behind the wall, however, could not be the high road, because he was looking directly at the roof and windows of a small, single-storeyed house. It was far from being a substantial refuge; nevertheless Routh saw in it his last hope.
    But the wall was unexpectedly hard to surmount. His last vestiges of physical strength were leaving him. When he did get to the wall he could do little more than claw at it blindly. One moment it seemed an insuperable barrier; at the next he was lying along the top of it, his head swimming. The drop was steeper on the other side. He glimpsed a hard surface beneath him, and in front of him a pale wall, a blank window of the little house. And then he fell. He was aware of pain, of voices, of two obscurely familiar forms bending over him. Hands were laid on his body, and at their touch he fainted.
    When he recovered consciousness it was to find himself lying on the floor of a small bare room. He was certain that very little time had elapsed, and he wondered how his enemies had conjured up this prison out of vacancy. His limbs were free; he