Blackmail North

by Philip McCutchan

  “Do you see?”

  “See what?”

  “You have eyes, so look.”

  Hedge looked as Uthman circled the area with his torch, which was an extremely powerful one. Even so, when the beam was projected upwards, no roof could be seen. When the beam came down again and travelled laterally, Hedge saw that he was in a circular space, a sort of chamber, with smooth walls and a dry floor littered with what seemed to be rock debris. Apart from his and Uthman’s movements and breathing, the silence was intense, dead; there was a strange and unnerving feeling that the chamber had remained in its total silence and darkness for all the millions of years of its existence, until this moment when he and Uthman had shattered the quiet and lit the gloom. A surprising place to enter; the entry itself had been murder. Hedge had been forced to bend and squeeze and flatten, indeed to return to his slug creep, though fortunately not for long — the entry tunnel was no more than around six feet in length.

  Involuntarily Hedge spoke. “Extraordinary!”

  “A natural chamber, excavated by the movements and pressures of water like the rest of the cave system. You see what you see.”

  “What?”

  “There is more yet, behind the seeing.” Uthman urged Hedge forward, towards the chamber walls. When they were closer Uthman stopped again and said, “You would not like to remain here for ever.”

  “No!” Hedge caught his breath, and blood rushed to his face. “Are you suggesting I might?”

  “Yes. In the absence of your co-operation.”

  “God!” Hedge put his head in his hands: the feeling of claustrophobia almost unhinged his mind. A thousand times a second, the walls seemed to move inwards to crush him. His voice came shrilly: “What is it you’re asking?”

  “The authority of a pronouncement from you, Mr Hedge.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Come with me.” Uthman pressed the automatic into Hedge again, propelling him closer to the rock wall of the silent chamber. He beamed his torch onto a device fixed to the rock, with heavy insulated cable running upwards into the darkness. Reaching out, he removed the device from a hook, and Hedge saw that it was a microphone. Uthman said, “The tunnel above us, the shaft, connects with the open air — not directly, but through devious ways. The cable has been led through these ways to the open air of the fellside, where is concealed a transmitter. When you make this switch-you see? — you bring alive the transmitter. When you speak, your voice is cut into a frequency used by your BBC, and what you say is picked up nationwide. Do you understand?”

  “What do you want me to say?”

  Uthman’s eyes shone in the backglow from the torch. “It is quite simple and easy. Already I have put certain demands to your government. You will say that I hold you prisoner, and that you will be the first to die if your government does not pay the money I ask — ten million pounds — and in the form I ask. They will understand, and this is all you need to know yourself. You will confirm that I mean what I have said, all of it, and that Mackintosh also will die if the money is not paid. You will confirm positively that I have Mackintosh here in the cave.”

  “How do I know that?” Hedge asked. “I haven’t seen him.”

  There was a laugh from Uthman, and he swivelled his torch, shining it at a point some distance to the left of the microphone. Hedge saw that the circle was broken by a cleft in the wall, an indentation running into the rock for about six feet. There was a man on the ground, his hands and feet roped and a rough gag of cloth rammed into his mouth and tied with knotted handkerchiefs. The skin was dark, the eyes large, shining in the torch beam. Uthman said, “There is Mackintosh. I intended using him to broadcast, but I think you will be more effective perhaps.”

  “I haven’t said I’ll broadcast.”

  Uthman laughed again. “I believe you will so decide, Mr Hedge. You have my permission to release Mr Mackintosh. His voice can then be added to your own. I shall leave you a torch.” He brought one out from a pocket, and handed it to Hedge. “I advise you not to try to leave by way of the entry tunnel. There are so many cross-passages and you will be in danger of becoming lost and never seen again, and you cannot get out to freedom in any case.”

  *

  Hedge’s fingers shook and fumbled but he managed the job in the end. Mackintosh was stiff, too stiff to move his limbs. Wanting mobile companionship, Hedge rubbed circulation back into arms and legs. “You’re really Mackintosh?” he asked.

  “I’m really Mackintosh. And you?”

  “I’m from the Foreign Office. I’d rather say no more than that. What do you suggest we do now?”

  “Give me some time.” Mackintosh looked ill and exhausted. “Put the torch out for now, we don’t want to waste it.”

  “Very well.” Hedge flicked off the beam; the darkness was horrible, his eyes filled for a while with whirling colours that faded into blankness. There was no sound beyond their own breathing, which came across like steam-engines. Hedge asked. “You know Uthman tried to send a body into Libya … making out it was yours?”

  “Yes, I knew that.”

  “Why did he do that? I mean to say … if he wanted the Libyans to believe you were dead, why let them know you’re really alive by making you broadcast?”

  The voice from the darkness said, “It was a question of timing, I think. He wanted VAN to think I was dead, yes, but only until he was ready to use me himself.”

  “And now —”

  “Now it pays him for VAN to know I’m alive and in his hands. There’ll be another pressure on the British now — to pay up and have me released.”

  “So you can be handed over to VAN?”

  “That,” Mackintosh said, “is entirely up to the British Government. Isn’t it?”

  “You sound sanguine.”

  “I haven’t much choice.”

  “You must trust the Government to do its best,” Hedge said, managing to sound unctuous. Mackintosh laughed, a sound of irony, and Hedge flushed in the darkness. He returned to the subject of the broadcast nationwide. “I really don’t know what to say …”

  “Don’t make it at all.”

  “But if I don’t we’ll be left here. We’ll perish.”

  “You must trust the Government to do its best.”

  “Well — yes. Yes. But I don’t see how … if they don’t know where we are —”

  “Do you know where we are?”

  “Actually, no —”

  “Nor do I. Don’t make the mistake of thinking Uthman’s anybody’s fool, he’s not. If we don’t know, we can’t tell the Government.”

  “I still think we’d be wise to comply.”

  Mackintosh said flatly. “I’m giving them no help. Neither are you. If you try to, I’ll kill you.”

  Hedge gave a moan. This was terrible: death stared him in the face from all directions, there could be no avoiding it. Foodless, waterless, in the earth’s stomach-pit … damn Mackintosh! it was all grossly unfair. For a moment he gave way to panic, flailed his arms and legs, contacted Mackintosh, and began screaming and rolling over and over. After a while his screams grew hoarse and faded to a whimper, and he heard Mackintosh shouting at him, telling him to take a grip. Mackintosh shouting … from a distance. Hedge’s whimper stopped and hard determination entered his mind. Mackintosh was out of range and if he kept dead quiet he would be most unlikely to make contact again in a physical sense. Hedge sat up, controlled his breathing, removed his shoes with great stealth, got to his feet and moved forward, inch by inch, until he touched rock. Mackintosh continued calling to him but he took no notice as he circled the wall, reaching with spread fingers at about the height he had seen the microphone earlier.

  Fifteen

  MACKINTOSH WAS AFTER him; he knew that. There was a crunch on the dry debris covering the floor of the chamber, though otherwise Mackintosh was keeping quiet. His very quietness was menacing. British he might be, immensely Scottish his name, but half his ancestry came from the West African coa
st where over the past centuries many terrible things had been practised: Hedge’s distraught mind leapt like a kangaroo, straight into a hotch-potch of voodoo, cannibalism, witch-doctors and totem poles. And sooner or later, as he now realised Mackintosh must find him; like himself, he would be feeling around the walls for the microphone. That, now, was their common objective.

  Moving round the walls, fingers sliding and feeling, Hedge after a while reached his goal. With a shaking hand he removed the microphone from its hook. There was a curious reaction in it, as though it were a pendulum, and Hedge recalled the insulated cable to which it was attached, the cable that threaded its way through those devious cracks and crevices and passages that Uthman had mentioned, until it reached the transmitter far above: pendulums could swing. Hedge gave a sigh of relief and swung the microphone on its lead out into the centre of the chamber, moving with great stealth, tongue protruding between his lips.

  Mackintosh would need much luck to find him now.

  *

  Still in the night’s cover, Shard and his party, guided now by Aurora Lindeman, pushed through mud and rain, and over scattered rocks, towards the high entry to The Hangman. There was a complete absence of humankind; only the ubiquitous sheep being present, bright eyes peering from horned bundles of shagginess as occasionally a torch was flicked on, just briefly to pick up direction. The wind’s strength increased as they climbed and left themselves unprotected. It was a tremendous buffeting that drove icy rain down the collars of the oilskins provided by the nick at Barnard Castle.

  “How far now?” Shard asked the girl.

  “A mile, about.”

  Shard nodded, and urged her to press on faster. It was still full dark and the visibility even when dawn came would be minimal; they might get away with it. They trudged and slipped and wallowed, barked shins on craggy rock, dodged as scared sheep bounded suddenly out of sheltering hollows. Time was passing, time was vital: Shard felt a vast frustration, an almost overwhelming sense that he was going to fail, that the task was just too impossible, the time too short. It couldn’t even be considered definite that Uthman was holed up in The Hangman; Aurora didn’t have to be right, there could be other caves in the various Yorkshire complexes where schists grew, or existed, or whatever it was that schists did … Shard pushed the thought to the back of his mind. Really he didn’t know the girl from Eve, but she struck him as knowledgeable, and anyway he was stuck with her knowledge now; and she’d been very, very definite.

  They pushed on, feet becoming heavier as the layers of mud and sheep manure clung and thickened. The girl had just turned and said, “Not far now,”when one of the PCs from Barnard Castle called out and came ploughing across country towards Shard.

  “Mr Shard —”

  “Yes?”

  “The mobile’s calling on the walkie-talkie, sir. The radio’s picked up a voice, cutting into a BBC transmission. Someone called Hedge.”

  “What!” Shard reached out a hand. “Give me your radio.” The set was unhitched and passed over. Shard flicked the switch to transmit. “Shard here. What’s going on-Hedge, what did he say? Over.”

  The voice came back, through thick interference that buzzed and clicked and muffled in Shard’s listening ear. “He seemed in a bit of a panic, sir. Kept saying Mackintosh was after him —”

  “Mackintosh? You’re sure?”

  “Quite sure, sir.”

  “Did he say where he was?”

  “Not precisely, sir, no. He was shut in somewhere and it was pitch dark …” The policeman’s voice succumbed for a while to atmospherics, then broke through fairly clearly, “… said something else, sir.”

  “Go on. There’s no bloody time to lose.”

  “Yes, sir. He said the British Government must be contacted, the Prime Minister himself, and told that he was being held as a hostage and would be killed, and so would this Mackintosh, if the Treasury didn’t pay up.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Only repeats, sir.” There was a pause. “This Mackintosh, is he the one we’ve been watching out for?”

  “Yes,” Shard said. “Now, pin your ears back for orders. Don’t call us again, if you’ve anything else to report call the military command or North Yorks Police. I want you to get a message through to the army now: I’m nearing the top entry and request a strong troop movement as unobtrusively as possible to ring the main cave approach. They’ll be helped by the poor visibility. Got that?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “If I haven’t manifested in three hours from this moment, I’d like them to move in.” Shard flicked off the two-way radio and signalled to the rest of the party to move on fast. Ten minutes later Aurora Lindeman was on hands and knees, watched by the ring of men as she scrabbled through tufty grass and scrub and the chunks of rock. Shard contained his impatience as best he could: within minutes that passed like hours she had located the entry, overgrown and half concealed by two medium-sized rocks, and Shard, moving closer, shone his torch down the natural shaft. As Aurora had already told him, the drop was straight for some considerable distance, farther, in fact, than his torch would reach. He gave his orders: the descent gear was laid out, the wire-cable ladder pushed over the lip of the pothole and run down, its top secured firmly by the surface party. Each member of the underground party carried a shouldered coil of rope. When all was ready Shard nodded at the girl.

  “All set. Sure you’ll be okay?”

  “Sure. So long as I’m boss for the descent.”

  “That’s agreed — you’re the expert. Good luck, Aurora.”

  She nodded, her face white but determined. “Don’t forget what I told you, Simon. We reach bottom — halfway bottom — in around six hundred feet. Then there’s a narrow entry to the next section, and a ledge —”

  “And a long, unguarded drop if we turn the wrong way. I remember. Let’s get going.”

  She lost no time; she got down and sat for a moment on the lip of the hole in the earth, then swung her legs down and groped for the rungs of the ladder. Down she went, and as soon as her hands had vanished into the pitch darkness, Shard followed, and after him went Harry Kenwood. Down and down, hand over hand, leg after leg, groping as the ladder swayed. It was one of the eeriest experiences Shard had known. At last they made the half-way bottom. There was just space for all three to stand in close proximity; Aurora had waited for them. As soon as Harry Kenwood was down, she moved through a narrow slit in the rock, shining her torch to the left so that the others could watch for the long drop once they were through into the next section. Shard, emerging from a tight squeeze, caught his breath: the ledge along which they had to advance was horribly narrow, no more than a foot wide, and extended ahead beyond the limit of the torch beam; and to the left there was a void of deep blackness. Keeping his gaze away from the drop, holding fast to the rope coiled from his shoulder as though it were some kind of life-line, Shard edged along behind Aurora. The girl, he thought, was as sure-footed as a mountain goat and hadn’t seemed in the least troubled. Shard was sweating freely when they reached the end of the ledge and carried on through a low tunnel. The tunnel felt a damn sight safer, though progress, when bent in two, was not easy. The tunnel went on for a good distance, something like half a mile by Shard’s inexpert reckoning, taking a number of twists and turns and being cut by many intersecting tunnels and passages, before the girl ahead stopped and, still bent double, spoke between her legs.

  “Here’s the next hole, Simon.” She sounded relieved. “I thought we’d have reached it sooner.”

  “Is this the final one?”

  “Yes,” she said. “It takes us straight into a cross-passage running off the main cave.”

  “Right. This is where I take over the lead, Aurora.”

  “What? You never said —”

  “I’m saying now. You’ve done wonderfully, but your guide-dog job’s over. When we get down, we may meet the villains, and that’s my job.” His tone said he meant to be obeyed. “Hold tight, I’
m coming through.”

  “Through?”

  “Through your legs.”

  “Oh no, you don’t! That way, you go right down the shaft, head first. I’ll back up.”

  “Make it fast, then.”

  In the beam of the torches, she reversed, shuffling over Shard as he lay flat on the rock floor. Shard inched forward until he was against the drop. He called for the ropes from Kenwood and Aurora, and secured all three together with bowlines. The girl asked what the hell he was doing. She said, “We can go down like a chimney, like mountain climbers. Knees and bums.”

  “Speak for your own bum,” Shard said. “Harry’s and mine lack experience and it’s a long way down.”

  “True. What are you going to secure the end to, you thought of that?”

  “No,” he answered, “but Barnard Castle nick did.” From his pocket he brought out a hammer and some metal spikes which he tapped hard into the rock wall. He secured the rope’s end and said, “We won’t put too much weight on it. It’s there as a kind of long stop.”

  “So it is knees and bums.”

  He grinned up at her as he sent the rope’s end flaking down and slid his body into the hole behind it. “But not unassisted. You next, Aurora.”

  They went on down. Shard, after some minutes of controlled slither, found that the shaft was beginning to take a curious bend so that his body was, as it were, laid against the rock rather than hanging free. The slither continued, but on his face and chest and knees. A moment later Aurora noticed it too. Her voice echoed down to him. “That’s funny.”

  “Why?”

  “A year ago, that was when I was last down here, it didn’t do that. Hold on a moment, Simon.”

  They stopped, taking some of their weight on the rope. The girl said in a scared voice, “I think we’ve gone wrong somewhere. I’m sorry.”