Flying Finish

by Dick Francis

  He fingered the note. ‘It was plain carelessness on Billy’s part,’ he said. ‘He didn’t hide the canisters properly.’

  ‘There was a lot of money, then, on the plane?’

  ‘Wheels have to be oiled,’ Yardman said reasonably, ‘and it’s no good paying Yugoslavs in sterling. All agents insist on being paid in the currency they can spend without arousing comment. I do, myself.’

  I watched him turn the scrap of his stationery over and over, frowning. He saw the pin holes in the end, and held them up to the light. After a few seconds he put it down and looked from me to Rous-Wheeler.

  ‘Men,’ he said without inflection. ‘And when you read that, my dear boy, you understood a great deal.’ A statement, not a question.

  Gabriella, I thought dumbly, for God’s sake live. Live and tell. I shut my eyes and thought of her as she had been at lunch. Gay and sweet and vital. Gabriella my dearest love …

  ‘Dear boy,’ said Yardman in his dry unconcerned voice, ‘are you feeling all right?’

  I opened my eyes and shut Gabriella away out of reach of his frightening intuition.

  ‘No,’ I said with truth.

  Yardman actually laughed. ‘I like you, my dear boy, I really do. I shall miss you very much in the agency.’

  ‘Miss …’ I stared at him. ‘You are going back?’

  ‘Of course.’ He seemed surprised, then smiled his bony smile. ‘How could you know, I was forgetting. Oh yes, of course we’re going back. My transport system … is … er … much needed, and much appreciated. Yes. Only the plane and Mr Rous-Wheeler are going on.’

  ‘And the horses?’ I asked.

  ‘Those too,’ he nodded. ‘They carry good blood lines, those mares. We expected to have to slaughter them, but we have heard they will be acceptable alive, on account of their foals. No, my dear boy, Billy and I go back by road, half way with Giuseppe, the second half with Vittorio.’

  ‘Back to Milan?’

  ‘Quite so. And tomorrow morning we learn the tragic news that the plane we missed by minutes this afternoon has disappeared and must be presumed lost with all souls, including yours, my dear boy, in the Mediterranean.’

  ‘There would be a radar trace …’ I began.

  ‘My dear boy, we are professionals.’

  ‘Oiled wheels?’ I said ironically.

  ‘So quick,’ he said nodding. ‘A pity I can’t tempt you to join us.’

  ‘Why can’t you?’ said Rous-Wheeler truculently.

  Yardman answered with slightly exaggerated patience. ‘What do I offer him?’

  ‘His life,’ Rous-Wheeler said with an air of triumph.

  Yardman didn’t even bother to explain why that wouldn’t work. The Treasury, I thought dryly, really hadn’t lost much.

  Billy’s voice suddenly spoke from the far end of the plane.

  ‘Hey, Mr Yardman,’ he called. ‘Can’t you and Mr Rous-flipping-Wheeler come and give us a hand? This ruddy aeroplane’s bloody covered with names and letters. We’re practically having to paint the whole sodding crate.’

  Yardman stood up. ‘Yes, all right,’ he said.

  Rous-Wheeler didn’t want to paint. ‘I don’t feel …’ he began importantly.

  ‘And you don’t want to be late,’ Yardman said flatly.

  He stood aside to let the deflated Rous-Wheeler pass, and they both made their way up past the two boxes, through the galley, and down the telescopic ladder from the forward door.

  Desperation can move mountains. I’d never hoped to have another minute alone to put it to the test, but I’d thought of a way of detaching myself from the mare’s box, if I had enough strength. Yardman had had difficulty squeezing the rope down between the banding bar and the wooden box side when he’d tied me there: he’d had to push it through with the blade of his penknife. It wouldn’t have gone through at all I thought, if either the box side wasn’t a fraction warped or the bar a shade bent. Most of the bars lay flat and tight along the boxes, with no space at all between them.

  I was standing less than two feet from the corner of the box: and along at the corner the bar was fastened by a lynch pin.

  I got splinters in my wrists, and after I’d moved along six inches I thought I’d never manage it. The bar and the box seemed to come closer together the further I went, and jerking the rope along between them grew harder and harder, until at last it was impossible. I shook my head in bitter frustration. Then I thought of getting my feet to help, and bending my knee put my foot flat on the box as high behind me as I could get leverage. Thrusting back with my foot, pulling forward on the bar with my arms, and jerking my wrists sideways at the same time, I moved along a good inch. It worked. I kept at it grimly and finally arrived at the last three inches. From there, twisting, I could reach the lynch pin with my fingers. Slowly, agonisingly slowly, I pushed it up from the bottom, transferred my weak grip to the rounded top, slid it fraction by fraction up in my palm, and with an enormous sense of triumph felt it come free. The iron bands parted at the corner, and it required the smallest of jerks to tug the rope out through the gap.

  Call that nothing, I said to myself with the beginnings of a grin. All that remained was to free my hands from each other.

  Yardman had left my jacket lying on the flattened box, and in my jacket pocket was a small sharp penknife. I sat down on the side of the shallow platform, trying to pretend to myself that it wasn’t because my legs were buckling at the knees but only the quickest way to reach the jacket. The knife was there, slim and familiar. I clicked open the blade, gripped it firmly, and sawed away blindly at some unseen point between my wrists. The friction of dragging the rope along had frayed it helpfully, and before I’d begun to hope for it I felt the strands stretch and give, and in two more seconds my hands were free. With stiff shoulders I brought them round in front of me. Yardman had no personal brutality and hadn’t tied tight enough to stop the blood. I flexed my fingers and they were fine.

  Scooping up wallet and jacket I began the bent walk forward under the luggage rack and over the guy chains, stepping with care so as not to make a noise and fetch the five outdoor decorators in at the double. I reached the galley safely and went through it. In the space behind the cockpit I stopped dead for a moment. The body of Mike the engineer lay tumbled in a heap against the left hand wall.

  Tearing both mind and eyes away from him I edged towards the way out. On my immediate right I came first to the luggage bay, and beyond that lay the door. The sight of my overnight bag in the bay made me remember the black jersey inside it. Better than my jacket, I thought. It had a high neck, was easier to move in, and wouldn’t be so heavy on my raw skin. In a few seconds I had it on, and had transferred my wallet to my trousers.

  Five of them round the plane, I thought. The exit door was ajar, but when I opened it the light would spill out, and for the time it took to get on to the ladder they would be able to see me clearly. Unless by some miracle they were all over on the port side, painting the tail. Well, I thought coldly, I would just be unlucky if the nearest to me happened to be Billy with his gun.

  It wasn’t Billy, it was the man I didn’t know, Giuseppe. He was standing at the root of the starboard wing painting out the airline’s name on the fuselage, and he saw me as soon as I opened the door not far below him. I pulled the door shut behind me and started down the ladder, hearing Giuseppe shouting and warning all the others. They had ladders to get down too, I thought. I could still make it.

  Giuseppe was of the hard core, a practising militant communist. He was also young and extremely agile. Without attempting to reach a ladder he ran along the wing to its tip, put his hands down, swung over the edge, and dropped ten feet to the ground. Seeing his running form outlined on the wing against the stars I veered away to the left as soon as I had slid down the ladder, and struck out forwards, more or less on the same axis as the plane.

  My eyes weren’t accustomed to the light as theirs were. I couldn’t see where I was going. I heard Giuseppe shout
ing in Italian, and Yardman answering. Billy tried a shot which missed by a mile. I scrambled on, holding my arms up defensively and hoping I wouldn’t run into anything too hard. All I had to do, I told myself, was to keep going. I was difficult to see in black and moved silently over the grass of the field. If I got far enough from the plane they wouldn’t be able to find me, not five of them with Alf no better than a snail. Keep going and get lost. After that I’d have all night to search out a bit of civilisation and someone who could speak English.

  The field seemed endless. Endless. And running hurt. What the hell did that matter, I thought dispassionately, with Billy behind me. I had also to refrain from making a noise about it in case they should hear me, and with every rib-stretching breath that got more difficult. In the end I stopped, went down on my knees, and tried to get air in shallow silent gulps. I could hear nothing behind but a faint breeze, see nothing above but the stars, nothing ahead but the dark. After a few moments I stood up again and went on, but more slowly. Only in nightmares did fields go on for ever. Even airfields.

  At the exact second that I first thought I’d got away with it, bright white lights blazed out and held me squarely in their beams. A distant row of four in front, a nearer row of four behind, and I a black figure in the flarepath. Sick devastating understanding flooded through me. I had been trying to escape down the runway.

  Sharply, almost without missing a step, I wheeled left and sprinted; but Giuseppe wasn’t very far behind after all. I didn’t see or hear him until the last moment when he closed in from almost in front. I swerved to avoid him, and he threw out his leg at a low angle and tripped me up.

  Even though I didn’t fall very heavily, it was enough. Giuseppe very slickly put one of his feet on each side of my head and closed them tight on my ears. Grass pressed into my eyes, nose and mouth, and I couldn’t move in the vice.

  Billy came up shouting as if with intoxication, the relief showing with the triumph.

  ‘What you got there then, my friend? A bleeding aristocrat, then? Biting the dust, too, ain’t that a gas?’

  I guessed with a split second to spare what he would do, and caught his swinging shoe on my elbow instead of my ribs.

  Yardman arrived at a smart military double.

  ‘Stop it,’ he said. ‘Let him get up.’

  Giuseppe stepped away from my head and when I put my hands up by my shoulders and began to push myself up, Billy delivered the kick I had avoided before. I rolled half over, trying not to care. The beams from the runway lights shone through my shut eyelids, and the world seemed a molten river of fire, scarlet and gold.

  Without, I hoped, taking too long about it I again started to get up. No one spoke. I completed the incredibly long journey to my feet and stood there, quiet and calm. We were still on the runway between the distant lights, Yardman close in front of me, Giuseppe and Billy behind, with Rous-Wheeler struggling breathlessly up from the plane. Yardman’s eyes, level with mine, were lit into an incandescent greenness by the glow. I had never clearly seen his eyes before. It was like drawing back curtains and looking into a soul.

  A soldier without patriotism. Strategy, striking power and transport were skills he hired out, like any other craftsman. His pride was to exercise his skill to the most perfect possible degree. His pride overrode all else.

  I think he probably meant it when he said he liked me. In a curious way, though I couldn’t forgive him Gabriella, I felt respect for him, not hatred. Battle against him wasn’t personal or emotional, as with Billy. But I understood that in spite of any unexpected warmth he might feel, he would be too prudent to extend foolish mercy to the enemy.

  We eyed each other in a long moment of cool appraisal. Then his gaze slid past me, over my shoulder, and he paid me what was from his point of view a compliment.

  ‘You won’t crack him, Billy. Kill him now. One shot, nice and clean.’

  Chapter Fifteen

  I owed my life to Billy’s greed. He was still hungry, still unsatisfied, and he shook his head to Yardman’s request. Seeing the way Yardman delicately deferred to Billy’s wishes it struck me that Rous-Wheeler’s simile of a tiger on a leash might not be too far off the mark. In any case for the first time I was definitely glad of Billy’s lust to spill my blue blood ounce by ounce, as I really was most averse to being shot down on the spot; and I acknowledged that I already had him to thank that I was still breathing at all. If I’d been anyone but who I was I would have died with the crew.

  We walked back up the runway, I in front, the other four behind. I could hear Rous-Wheeler puffing, the only one not physically fit. Fit … It was only yesterday, I thought incredulously, that I rode in the Gold Cup.

  The plane was a faintly lit shape to the left of the end of the runway. A hundred yards short of it Yardman said, ‘Turn left, dear boy. That’s it. Walk straight on. You will see a building. Go in.’

  There was, in fact, a building. A large one. It resembled an outsize prefabricated garage, made of asbestos sheets on a metal frame. The door was ajar and rimmed by light. I pushed it open, and with Billy’s gun touching my back, walked in.

  The right hand two-thirds of the concrete floor space was occupied by a small four-seater single-engined aeroplane, a new looking high winged Cessna with an Italian registration. On its left stood a dusty black Citroen, its bonnet towards me. Behind the car and the plane the whole far wall consisted of sliding doors. No windows anywhere. Three metal girders rose from floor to ceiling on the left of the car, supporting the flat roof and dividing the left hand part of the hangar into a kind of bay. In that section stood Alf.

  ‘Right,’ said Yardman briskly. ‘Well done, Alf, turn them off now.’ His voice echoed hollowly in space.

  Alf stared at him without hearing.

  Yardman went up to him and shouted in his ear. ‘Turn the runway lights off.’

  Alf nodded, walked up to the wall on the left of the door I had come in by, and pushed up a heavy switch beside a black fuse box. A second similar box worked, I suppose, the fluorescent strips across the ceilings and the low-powered radiant heaters mounted high on both side walls. Beside the switches stood a mechanic’s bench with various tools and a vice, and further along two sturdy brackets held up a rack of gardening implements; spades, fork, rake, hoe and shears. Filling all the back of the bay was a giant motor mower with a seat for the driver, and dotted about there were some five gallon petrol cans, funnels, tins of paint, an assortment of overalls and several greasy looking metal chairs.

  That Cessna, I thought briefly; I could fly it like riding a bicycle. And the car … if only I had known they were there.

  Yardman searched among the clutter on the bench and produced a length of chain and two padlocks, one large, one small. Billy had shut the door and was standing with his back to it, the gun pointing steadily in my direction. Alf, Rous-Wheeler and Giuseppe had prudently removed themselves from his line of fire.

  Yardman said, ‘Go over to that first girder, my dear boy, and sit down on the floor.’

  To say I was reluctant to be tied again is to put it mildly. It wasn’t only that it was the end of any hope of escape, but I had a strong physical repugnance to being attached to things, the result of having been roped to a fir in a Scottish forest one late afternoon in a childhood game by some cousins I was staying with: they had run away to frighten me and got lost themselves, and it had been morning before the subsequent search had found me.

  When I didn’t obey at once, Yardman, Giuseppe and Billy all took a step forward as if moved by the same mind. There was no percentage in having them jump on me: I was sore enough already. I walked over to the girder and sat down facing them, leaning back idly against the flat metal surface.

  ‘That’s better,’ Yardman said. He came round and knelt down on the ground at my back. ‘Hands behind, my dear boy.’

  He twined the chain round my wrists and clicked on both padlocks. Tossing the keys on his palm he stood up and came round in front of me. All five of them
stared down with varying degrees of ill-feeling and I stared glassily back.

  ‘Right,’ said Yardman after a pause. ‘We’d better get out and finish the painting. But this time we must leave someone with him, just in case.’ He reviewed his available troops, and alighted on Rous-Wheeler. ‘You sit here,’ he said to him, picking up a chair and taking it over beside the switches, ‘and if he does anything you aren’t sure about, switch on the runway lights and we’ll come at once. Clear?’

  Rous-Wheeler was delighted to avoid any more painting and accepted his new task with enthusiasm.

  ‘Good.’ Yardman looked at his watch. ‘Go on then, Billy.’ Billy, Alf and Giuseppe filed out and Yardman stopped as he followed them to say to Rous-Wheeler, ‘The cargo will be arriving soon. Don’t be alarmed.’

  ‘Cargo?’ said Rous-Wheeler in surprise.

  ‘That’s right,’ Yardman said. ‘Cargo. The reason for this … um … operation.’

  ‘But I thought I …’ began Rous-Wheeler.

  ‘My dear Rous-Wheeler, no,’ said Yardman. ‘Had it been just you, I could have sent you down the usual discreet pipeline from Milan. Your journey would have been just as secret as it is now. No, we needed the plane for a rather special cargo, and as you know, my dear boy,’ he swung round to speak directly to me with a small ironic smile, ‘I do hate wasting space on flights. I always try to make up a full load, so as not to neglect an opportunity.’

  ‘What is this cargo, then?’ asked Rous-Wheeler with a damaged sense of self-importance.

  ‘Mm?’ said Yardman, putting the padlock keys down on the bench. ‘Well now, it’s the brain child of a brilliant little research establishment near Brescia. A sort of machine. An interesting little development, one might say. Broadly speaking, it’s a device for emitting ultrasonic rays on the natural frequency of any chosen mineral substance.’