The Sleeper

by J. Robert Janes

  Lowering the light, Beck said, ‘An accident. A woman I was with who had given me a lift and wanted to see the ruins.’

  ‘You … you pushed her!’ cried Hilary, turning suddenly from him, and when he made her turn back, she blurted, ‘Karen needs me.’

  ‘Then listen. Whoever fired that shot must be dead.’ Touching the child’s grimy cheeks, Beck ran a thumb over the tears. ‘So,’ he said, patting her, ‘your mother wants you to come home, Karen, as does your grandfather.’

  Karen tried to tell him that her Opa would punish him if he hurt Hilary, but the words just wouldn’t come, Beck realizing that her loyalties to the Vaterland were gone. ‘Make no mistake, Liebling. I will kill your friend unless you do exactly what I tell you.’

  ‘Karen, he means it. We’d … we’d best go with him.’

  When they left the stope, Hacker sat up and brushed the dust from himself. Bastard Kraut still had his gun, unlike himself. A pity, that, but it couldn’t be helped. Finding his torch, he cupped a hand over it, letting a sliver of light protrude. By a stroke of luck, the next ladder down hadn’t been knocked away. Straightening it, he started down only to cringe as another rockfall came, and then another and another, their sudden rush repeatedly filling the stope with sound until all had trickled away to silence. But the rockfalls would definitely have put Herr Beck off his guard, and he had the child to thank for the name of AST-X Bremen’s agent. Worked properly, the child could prove useful again so long as the schoolmaster didn’t decide to join them.

  It was now nearly 11.00 pm on that Tuesday. Frantic, Ashby laid a hand on the Rover’s bonnet. Unfortunately the engine must have cooled some time ago. From where he stood at the side of the road, he could see that there were no lights on in the cottage. No one else was about. From out on Bodmin Moor, and two miles to the east of Bolventor, he had managed a lift to Bodmin, and from there to here in another farm lorry. Having just told the farmer to bring the constables from Saint Ives, he had to wonder if they would get here in time, for he too had heard the rockfalls.

  Having borrowed a torch, he hurried into the cottage to see at once that rock dust covered everything. ‘Hilary,’ he managed. ‘Hilary, are you still alive?’

  The hearthstone had been lifted with two ringbolts and set aside. Shining the light down into the dust, he found a rough-hewn ladder that had been made years ago from wreck. With difficulty, he climbed down into the dust-laden air and when he came to the ledge on which the ladder rested, began to search for another, but there wasn’t one.

  No sound came up to him other than that of loose rocks sliding against others as adjustments were made. Thinking to call out, he stopped himself, for there had been a different and much better sedan parked at the side of the road some distance from the cottage and much closer to Saint Ives. Had those who had come in it walked back to the cottage? Had it been Brigadier Charles Edward Gordon and Christina?

  The road was dark and unfamiliar, Christina cursing it, for she was having to drive on what in the Reich would be the wrong side. Reading the map while at the wheel was all but impossible. She had to get to Bridgwater, had to get Ernst Reiss to transmit a message to Burghardt. She had killed the brigadier, and then the man who had pushed the food trolley into the suite, he having accompanied her to the car.

  No one had followed her, or so it had seemed. No one had yet been warned to watch for her either, for she had even driven right past a police constable who had been standing under a street lamp in the market town of Yeovil and he hadn’t tried to stop her. But why did there have to be so many little towns and villages, so many bends and turns, the signposts having to be scanned under flashlight?

  To get to Werner and Karen had simply not been possible. Bridgwater was far enough and still another thirty or forty miles, but once there, and the message sent, Burghardt could then notify the embassy to send a diplomatic car that would take her to Croydon and a Lufthansa flight.

  Finding a cigarette caused endless trouble, getting it lit even more, but was Werner with Karen now?

  There it was again, thought Hilary, the sound like that of a badger worrying rocks. They had managed to reach the adit that would lead to the boat shed but had gone in the opposite direction, gone deeply into the mine, and only then taken another crosscut into yet another stope, Herr Beck forcing them farther and farther from the crosscut, the grey of the timbers and the granite giving anything but a sense of security. Never wide, now no more than shoulder width at most, the mined-out stope had pinched, jigged and climbed erratically, causing her at last to lose all sense of direction. Now repeated feelings of despair all but overwhelmed, worse still, claustrophobia and the thought of being left to never see the light of day again.

  As a constant, forceful spray of water hit her, Beck switched on his light but allowed so little she couldn’t avoid the sour and icy stream, it catching her fully in the face.

  Beyond the spray, the stope began to pinch out, and when she could go no further, Hilary wedged herself aside so that he could see she wasn’t lying.

  Shining the light fully up into the remaining gap, Herr Beck silently cursed, and she could see that the lines of fear were there in his cheeks but made more gaunt by the water, for he must have known what it meant. Hadn’t twenty been killed a half mile to the north of Saint Just, in the Wheal Owles, in 1893 when they had broken through into flooded old workings, their bodies never to have been recovered? Wouldn’t the rock behind this spray be already weak enough and just ready to burst?

  Seeing her looking at him, he immediately switched off the light and pushed himself away, Karen giving a yelp, for he had inadvertently stepped on her foot, Beck grabbing the child and covering her mouth before angrily shaking her.

  ‘So, now we must wait,’ he whispered. ‘Don’t try anything.’

  Pulling Karen against herself, Hilary began to rub the child’s back. They were both filthy, both soaked right through, exhausted, terrified, and always, as now, with thoughts of being left alone, of being snuffed out like a candle, unable to breathe because the panic was too great and there was no more oxygen.

  Biting her lower lip to still the claustrophobia, she kept up the rubbing, but all too soon, though standing, Karen dropped off, her limpness frightening. ‘She’s asleep,’ she whispered, he feeling for her own lips and pressing a hand against her mouth.

  They must, thought Hilary, be more than a mile and a half from the cliffs. There had been crosscuts, but he had chosen not to go up any of them until that last one. There had been winzes, places in the roof of the crosscut where short bits of tunnel had given sloped access to other levels or had once been chutes down which to pass both waste rock and then the ore. Ladders, pipes, access ropes, mine cars and rails had often been left in places, reminders of them elsewhere, and broken timbers, lots and lots of those, rooms and rooms, chambers, areas where ‘bad chokes’ had clogged a tunnel, forcing the miners to cut a ‘side-lye’ to go round the run. Places, too, where the men, most of whom would probably have had nothing for breakfast but a fried slice of turnip, had once eaten their lunch of larded bread sprinkled with salt and a dusting of black pepper, seldom the much-revered pasties, unless filled with cooked, chopped turnip, leeks and potatoes. But how could she have even thought of Pindanter hiding himself away in this hell?

  When she could no longer hear Beck’s breathing, Hilary eased Karen to the floor and, wedging herself upwards, stepped over the child to blindly feel her way back.

  Now it was as if the badger made no sound, but that constant forceful spray of water continued and soon the sludge of grit and finer dust that would normally have covered the rocks was absent and she could touch the spray.

  Ahead, and unaware of her, Beck strained to listen beyond the sound of the water. He was now perhaps at a point halfway out of the stope. Whoever had been following them had sensed that they had heard him. Probing with his left foot, he felt the floor ahead, the hea
vy tread of the climbing boot telegraphing the differences not only between loose rubble and solid rock, but where the loose was packed hard enough to step.

  By clinging to the walls of the stope, by wedging himself against them, he climbed above the floor and soon heard the Bowker-Brown girl pass stealthily below him.

  The Schlampe would take the brunt of things.

  Climbing down, leaving Karen behind, as she had done, he began silently to follow, but the girl made so little sound, he was forced repeatedly to pause.

  When she reached the crosscut, he heard her give a sigh of relief, for now she knew she and the child could walk out to the adit and from there escape.

  Unknown to him, Hacker lightly ran a hand up over her chest and when he caught the open collar of her shirt, let his fingers close about the base of her throat. Touching her lips, he dropped a hand to a breast and Beck heard the stifled rush of breath and knew the man had found her.

  Again Beck began to climb, wedging himself against the walls. When a loose rock fell, and then another, he held on, clinging to a ledge until again his left boot had found purchase.

  Knotting Hilary’s hair into a fist, Hacker pulled her against himself and wrapped an arm about her waist. Like this, they waited in pitch-darkness until Karen, in a quavering voice, called out in Deutsch, ‘Hilary … ? Hilary, where are you?’

  A rock fell and they heard the child’s stifled gasp, heard her say in Deutsch, ‘I must not cry.’

  At once Karen began to find her way back down the length of the stope. Now and then she stopped. Accidentally banging a knee, she gave another gasp, Hilary stiffening and trying to move, but Hacker wouldn’t let go, and when Karen again cried out, ‘Hilary, where are you?’ the echoes trailed away to rebound from far-distant walls.

  Beck eased himself down to the floor of the stope, silently cursing the child for having awakened, and when Karen bumped into him, he tried to clamp a hand over her mouth, but she bit him, and as she struggled to get free, her screams filled the air, he flinging her behind himself.

  Hacker waited. Arching as he lifted her up, the Bowker-Brown girl tried to get free, and when the Kraut flicked on a torch, Hacker rushed her at him, Beck’s gun going off, Hilary shrieking as she stumbled into the German, they rolling over, Beck firing again and again, the stench of cordite everywhere, she waiting now—waiting while he clung to her until, at last, he had let her get off him.

  When he had recovered his light, Beck shone it fully at her. Blinded, she saw bright spots long after the beam had left. Getting uncertainly to her feet, she pulled Karen to her and waited.

  Distant from her, Herr Beck was standing in the crosscut, looking down at something. ‘Komm her,’ he said. ‘There is blood.’

  Stumbling, she went out to him only to be knocked to the floor, to lie stunned and bleeding at the mouth, Karen anxiously rushing to hug her and stammer, ‘Hilary … Hilary, are you all right?’

  Beck dragged the bitch up and hit her again. Pitching her from himself, he left her lying there, Karen crying out and being told to follow.

  Though distant, the echoes making it all the harder to pin down exactly where their voices were coming from, Ashby knew he daren’t call out. He was now well along what must be the adit from the boat shed, hadn’t yet taken any of the crosscuts since reaching it, had steadily picked his way deeper and deeper into the mine using the light from his torch but sparingly.

  Hacker must have entered the mine via the cottage—of this he was certain—and whomever the Germans had sent had come in through the boat shed, but was Hacker now dead?

  Faintly, and by echo only, he heard Karen crying, ‘Hilary … Hilary, where are you?’ And then, ‘Mutti, I … I want meine Mutti.’

  Some three miles to the southeast of Bridgwater, and hopelessly lost, Christina waited at the side of the road. Having found a call box, she had, she knew, done the unpardonable. Awakened in the dead of night, Ernst Reiss had told her to stay where she was and that he would come to her. ‘There are marshes nearby. It is a very famous little piece of our history,’* he had said, perhaps for the benefit of his wife.

  Moonlight bathed the farmlands across what must be a plain. From the hill she was on, she could see that hedgerows cut the land into pastoral quietude, and when an owl flew suddenly out of a nearby tree, she watched its dark shape. A dog barked somewhere, the sound of it carrying on a night like this. Clutching her shoulders, she knew the silk dress she wore was far from adequate. Longing for that shawl she’d been given, she realized that she had left it in the brigadier’s suite. Burghardt would have to send help; that was all there was to it. And Ash, she wondered. Would Ash ever know that Colonel Buntington Hacker had killed his barmaid?

  The stope was like a maze. Dusty grey timber posts, streaked with a slime of sulphurous mud, stood sentinel, some so overstressed they resounded when struck, others shaky and teetering at the slightest touch, others all but fallen over.

  Beck swung the beam of the light round the workings, concluding that it was an area of bad ground but that it would have to do. Taking the child by the hand, he walked her well into it, advancing in among the pillars until he found what he was looking for. ‘Sit,’ he whispered in Deutsch. ‘Stay here. This …’ He tapped a pillar. ‘Should hold.’

  ‘Hilary won’t come. She’ll … she’ll know she shouldn’t.’

  ‘Then you must make her come to you, because I must deal with the one who is following her.’

  He went away and Karen watched as his light passed among the forest, its trunks grey and sometimes splintered, each throwing a shadow well ahead of him.

  When the light went out, she realized Herr Beck would wait for Hilary to lead the man to him. Hesitating, for her knees were bleeding again, she knew it would hurt to crawl, but she had to find Hilary, had to tell her where Herr Beck was hiding.

  The post was strong, and when she stood up, she wrapped her arms about it. Blindly groping for the next, her hand finally touched it but …

  Hilary heard the stifled cry as Karen stumbled and fell, but the child got up and carried on and when she heard her name being tremulously called, she answered, ‘Darling, stay where you are. I’m coming.’

  ‘No, you mustn’t! Herr Beck, he is …’ Karen shut her eyes and gagged. Choking, she tried to catch a breath, tried to swallow.

  Hacker hit her on the back and let her suck in a breath.

  Having heard her, Beck made a circuit of the stope by feeling from post to post, but when he came up behind where he thought Karen must be, there was no one. Using his light, he shone it ahead, and finding Hilary, grit-covered and staring myopically out of the darkness, he heard the man yank the child against himself and shout, ‘All right, that’s enough. I’ve got the child and I’ll kill her if you don’t give up.’

  Letting the light find them, Beck soon saw that blood soaked the left leg of the Englishman’s trousers and that he had been badly hit. ‘Liebling, you did not do as I told you.’

  ‘Sod it, Beck,’ said Hacker. ‘You haven’t a chance. I’ve men covering every exit.’

  ‘Ach, I must now conclude that if there were any more than the two of us, I would be very surprised.’

  The ginger hair was matted over the broad, pale brow, the moustache streaked with blood, as were the chin and cheeks and the backs of the hands.

  Karen squirmed, the Englishman pulling the child tightly against himself, Beck taking aim anyway as a post sighed, but then a voice in Deutsch came calmly through, though distant from them still, ‘Liebe Zeit, mein Herren. All exits are now covered. Let my daughter go. Give us time to get out with the Fräulein Hilary and then the two of you can take care of each other.’

  Vati … Was it really Vati? wondered Karen.

  ‘Ash,’ cried Hilary. ‘Oh thank God, you’ve come,’ but another post sighed, another toppled, Beck firing as he swung the light at Hacker, she shrieking
now and running, knocking into another post and another, they letting the roof shed more and more loose rocks, which—when she stopped to desperately try to get her bearings—were heard to trickle down among those posts that still held.

  ‘DON’T ANYONE MOVE!’ cried Ashby in English. Beck leapt. Hacker snatched Karen back and kicked out hard only to have his wounded leg collapse and Karen dart away, the beam of the one light catching her and then that of the other.

  ‘KAREN, OVER HERE!’ cried Hilary. ‘HURRY!’

  ‘KAREN, GO TO HILARY!’ cried Ashby as the roof began to fall.

  A pillar snapped, others breaking in rapid sequence, Beck firing repeatedly at Hacker, who tried to get up and escape as a wall of dust rushed ahead into the crosscut, and tons and tons of rock fell.

  Choking, gasping, Hilary crouched over Karen, sheltering the child against herself and trying to cover her own head as rubble raced to lap against them until a trickle of rock fell, and then others but in sequence, each threatening another run, the timber posts tightening so much she could hear the wood creaking and popping as the stress was taken up.

  Cautiously getting to her feet, she called out in English, ‘Ash, can you hear me?’ And when no answer came, cried, ‘Ash, Karen’s safe with me.’

  It did no good, for when Beck found them, he shone his light into her eyes and nudged her chin with the still-warm muzzle of his pistol. ‘Come,’ he said in Deutsch, ‘the two of you, and not another false move, Karen, or I will kill her.’

  His glasses gone, his light also, and with rock dust still smarting his eyes, Ashby could but follow, stopping when they stopped, blindly groping forwards when they continued, not calling out, only letting them believe he had died in the cave-in. He should, he knew, have let Christina have Karen, but constables or no constables from Saint Ives, was she with Brigadier Gordon and now outside, waiting for Beck to bring Karen to them? If so, then neither Hilary nor himself stood a chance.