As if in response, the distant whine of a generator starting up floated across the blasted moonscape. There was a metallic click, a low-pitched buzz, a flicker of lightning, and suddenly I was bathed in a flood of luminescence. The huge arc lights on the four big pylons which cornered the assault course like goon boxes had sprung to life. They were so dazzling that for a moment I had to shield my eyes.
There were more lights, coming from behind me, at ground level. A vehicle had drawn up at the entrance to the course. The elongated double conical shafts of headlights on full beam gazed inscrutably at me. I screwed up my eyes and stared back, mesmerised. Now a figure was emerging from between the beams. In the glare of the lamps there was no detail discernible, but there was no mistaking the contour of the silhouette. The tall slim man with the bullet head.
Best get going.
What next? ‘Third Ypres’. A crawl under stout fisherman’s netting for about half the length of a hockey pitch. The netting was firmly secured to the ground via guy ropes to tent pegs and above it, to preclude any notion of bypassing the rigours of the course, a series of rolling, billowing barbed wire defences cascaded across the field. I flung myself under the netting and started tunnelling forward on knees and elbows with all the ungainliness of a seal inching over shingle towards the water’s edge. My progress was painfully slow. But at least I was insensitive to the abrasions and blisters of hands and feet. Keep your head down. Concentrate on technique. Dig in, push forward, keep low, try not to get snagged on the netting. Don’t rise up too high or you’ll end up mangled, twitching on the wire like an insect caught in a spider’s web. Here, at last, was the edge of the netting. I squinted at the neat little white sign pinned into the earth. It read ‘Field Hospital’. I might have need of it. A quick glance back. A serpentine shape slithered under the salient. Halfway across. Keep going.
‘The Somme’ next. What sort of bloodbath would that be? It had been sculpted with all the artfulness of golf course architecture. The theme was of a no-man’s-land between two sets of trenches. There was a further series of red flags and increasingly strident signs indicating extreme danger – exclamation marks, cartoons of bombs and mini-explosions. There was a well-marked, russet-coloured cinder track designed like the long jump runway in an athletics stadium. Just how seriously did I need to take all these skulls and crossbones? No doubt, deadly seriously. It would be as well to stick strictly to the track. Straying off-piste would no doubt have dire consequences. The yawning chasm of the first trench, the ‘friendly’ trench, was now clearly visible. It measured about ten feet across. There was an approach run of about fifty metres. Piece of cake for anybody who had ever done any field sports.
But there was a catch. The first jump would take me into no-man’sland, and no-man’s-land from here looked perilously narrow. Only about twenty metres to the ‘enemy’ trench. Wasn’t that indeed how it had been? And something in my memory reminded me that the enemy trench was broader than the friendly one. I needed to take both jumps as part of a single co-ordinated manoeuvre. Retain balance and momentum after the first jump and accelerate straight into the second.
I sprang forward down the cinder track and accelerated into a sprint. At the chasm of the trench my leading foot fell just short of the precipice and I flung myself high into the air. There was a rush of wind, and a fleeting impression of a moat twenty feet deep. Then I landed with both feet on the other wide, lurched and stumbled, and somehow re-established the sprint. It seemed barely a moment before I was launching forward into the second jump. But my leading foot had fallen well short of the chasm’s edge. And the chasm was wider.
And deeper.
I wasn’t going to make it. The opposite trench wall lurched up at me. I grabbed blindly, kicked, scrabbled and propelled myself over the edge of the chasm’s lip. I got by. Just. I lay supine for a moment, panting. I turned and read the wording on the innocuous little sign. It said ‘Paris Furlough’.
Kramer would have no difficulty with the Somme. Kramer wasn’t human, with his diabolical powers. He would simply float across. I got to my feet and moved forward. What next?
It was High Wood – a variation on the no-man’s-land theme. This time the trenches were replaced by parapets in the form of brick walls about twenty feet high. The first was an easy if cumbersome climb over coconut matting affording barely adequate finger holds. I struggled up. I glanced back. Now my assailant was only a minute behind. He was catching me. I shimmied down the other side, landing heavily on dry clay as hard as concrete. Then back on to the cinder track and the next obstacle. It was the second wall, a replica of the first, but lacking the matting. How the hell am I supposed to climb this? I ran a hand over the rough surface. There were handholds after all. But it was a mountaineer’s climb. I launched myself up, spreadeagled across the wall like a salamander on a tree trunk, searching for holds, all the weight sustained by fingers and toes. A metre to go. There was a snorting, scrabbling, scratching directly below me. I was about to throw myself across the top of the parapet when, on unpremeditated impulse, I drew myself up to my full height on top of the wall. Yes, there was my pursuer’s hand reaching for a hold at my feet.
I stamped down on it with all my might.
The muffled oath was followed by the sound of a heavy body dropping back to the ground. I too fell heavily, but on the far side of the wall. How much more of this to endure? The next sign read ‘Spring Offensive’. The cinder track ran through a pockmarked landscape and a series of realistically recreated shell craters. Next came an enclosed section under a broad corrugated iron canopy, like an open-ended Nissan hut, about fifty metres long. What was the hazard? The interior was unlit: the floodlight seeping into its recesses afforded scant visibility. From the eerie depths of the corridor came a dull green glow. I sniffed. What was that pungent stench? Was it sulphur? No. More searing than that. It was chlorine.
Gas! Gas! Quick, boys!
I took a deep breath, held it, and lunged at the fifty-metre death trap. The green fug quickly dispelled the floodlight. Abruptly, the cinder track gave way to knee-deep mud. A quag. A Grimpen Mire. I forced myself into a squelching, pedestrian trudge. Ignore the eye-blistering sting of the atmosphere, trudge on towards the semicircle of light dead ahead, and, whatever you do, don’t take a breath.
Then blessedly back out into the light. I gave it another ten metres and took a deep breath. Something residual in the air caught at my throat and I pulled up in a paroxysm of coughing.
Behind me, a zombie lurched out of the green billows. Get going! How many more hazards could there be? Surely the armistice will come. What next? Of course. The watercourse. The little notice announced ‘Sambre Canal’. This is where Wilfred Owen bought it, a week before cessation of hostilities. I plunged into the water, floundering in a clumsy dog-paddle. At the other bank I scrambled up and shook myself like a dog.
Now there wasn’t much left in me. Only enough resource to cope with one, maybe two more hazards.
The sign said ‘Bapaume’.
It was another wall, but this one was set at right angles to the previous hazards. There was another flurry of danger signals to discourage any contestants from skirting the edges, more razor wire, and an inviting rope ladder to carry me to the dizzy summit twenty feet up. Wearily I began to ascend.
Something closed round my left ankle with the grip of a vice. I lashed out desperately, freed myself up, and somehow made it to the top. Now there was nothing to hold on to and, ahead, a twenty-metre gauntlet, one brick wide. Time to buy another half minute. Yes – there was the face from hell. I lashed out with my right foot. Crunch. A few broken teeth and, with any luck, a fractured mandible. Now for the Bapaume gauntlet. I ran it with the disinhibition of extreme fatigue. Now then, Herr Kramer, why don’t you bloody well miss your footing and land on a mine and blow yourself to kingdom come? What next? Of course. Now I remembered. It was the last hazard – the flying fox.
‘Passchendaele’.
The crossbar of the
trapeze had been suspended tantalisingly close – but not too close. It was to be a leap of faith – about six feet forward out into the void. I scrambled across the precarious red brick ridge, got a firm foothold at its end, and launched myself forward. The wooden crossbar smacked into my palms and my fingers closed around it. Now the wheel and pulley mechanism of the contraption snapped free and I began the parabolic plunge earthward across the last minefield. How hard would the landing be this time? Here comes the ground! The flying fox levelled out, the pulley hit its stops, and I was dumped unceremoniously into another mud bath.
I kicked out desperately and touched something hard and firm. The mud sump was deep but not bottomless. Now I was wading turgidly through treacle up to my neck. There was a wooden wharf ahead. I collapsed against it, supporting my head free of the mud with my elbows on the wood. But I didn’t have the strength to haul myself out.
Ahead, quite visible in the floodlit gazebo, was Nikki. Nikki, seated – as Fox said she would be – staring wildly at me, with an expression of fixed horror on her face. I turned and looked back. I’d reached the end of the road. Kramer was walking unhurriedly along the narrow length of the brick wall. He had taken up the slack of the guy line and was now rapidly retrieving the flying fox on its pulley mechanism. In a moment he would swoop down on to his prey. He would have no difficulty in pushing my head under the mud. I scrabbled to haul myself out. Anything but this miserable, choking death. But I had nothing left, and my arms refused to respond.
Kramer launched himself into the void with all the grace of a circus trapeze artist. I noticed he grasped the crossbar with the prehensile thumb-under grip of a primate. The flying fox released itself and swooped earthwards. Simultaneously there came the deafening crack of a discharging firearm. I turned my head. Nikki had stood up and walked to the edge of the gazebo. She had adopted the two-handed stance of the crack shooter. The service Webley revolver smoked in her hand. Had she hit her target? I swung back round. She had missed, but at least she had thrown Kramer off balance. Kramer’s weight, for a moment uncontrolled, seemed to send a wave resonating down the length of the flying fox cable. The wave reached the bottom with an audible snap and ricocheted back upwards towards its source. It may have been a fluke of timing, but somehow the resonating wave echoed back to its source out of sync. There came a snagging twang of interference, a buckling, and the wheel of the pulley derailed itself. The trapeze flicked crazily and Kramer had suddenly vanished. The flying fox, relieved of its burden, plummeted down the rest of its parabola, dancing and jigging crazily as if in celebration of a new-found freedom. Kramer landed on hard ground, heels first. There was a spine-chilling crunch and he slumped to the ground and lay still.
And nothing happened. I couldn’t move. I was entrapped in a sarcophagus. I could only be a passive observer of the unfolding drama. How much injury had Kramer sustained? Bilateral fractures of the os calcis? A spinal injury?
As if in reply, the body beneath the flying fox twitched and quivered. The head turned and the bloodshot eyes refocused on the trapped prey. Carefully, Kramer flexed his right hip and knee, and propelled himself forward. It was agony – I could see it – but he had come forward a yard. Now he was flexing his left leg and digging in with his left foot. There was an audible grunt of pain. He had broken something. If only I could free myself from this straitjacket.
The inexorable progress of the injured man continued. There was a scream with each forward propulsion. The unblinking eyes never left the prey.
Ten metres to go.
Suddenly there was a smoke puff and an absurd muffled combustion. Now the man’s right hip was flexing and flailing effetely, and Kramer was looking puzzled. Why wasn’t he gaining any purchase? Because his right lower limb had somehow disappeared. It was just no longer there. But the left leg was still functioning. He came on. Eight metres, seven. Now there was another combustion, closer, more powerful, and yet more muffled. This time the lower torso had absorbed the spalling pressure wave of the anti-personnel device.
Now Kramer, the remnant of Kramer, could only use his upper limbs to drag himself forward. There was something indecent about the thought that a body which had sustained such terrible injuries to its lower half should still belong to a sentient being. Yet there was no denying Kramer’s consciousness, even if it had dwindled down to one single intent. The terrible bulging eyes were still fixed on the prey. Six metres, five. I was waiting to die. I took one final glance behind. Nikki, calmly and unhurriedly, as if under the power of hypnosis, stepped off the gazebo and walked towards us across the grass. Now the powerful hands were about my face and head and throat. Just before I went under I took a deep breath. Stay alive for a few seconds more. The cold mud greedily closed round the contours of my eyes and nose and mouth to form the death mask.
I lashed out with my arms and tried to get greater purchase with my feet and all the time the efforts were a turgid, viscous slow-motion parody of struggle. Suddenly I realised that the grip on my head and neck was lessening and my efforts to resurface were unimpeded.
I rose up into the beautiful night air with a gulp and a gasp.
She had adopted a combative stance on the wharf directly above. A wisp of smoke issued from the barrel of the Webley. For a moment, Kramer lay supine on the surface of the mud like a basking swimmer in the Dead Sea. Then, slowly, and without listing, the body began to submerge. The wide-open eyes stared unseeing at the night sky until the mud slurped its way into the cavities of their sockets. The last remnants of Kramer to disappear were the laces of a single boot.
The mud belched with callous satisfaction.
III
I have no recollection of getting out of the mud. It must have been a titanic struggle for Nikki, dragging me out on to the duckboards. There was a montage of crazy images, an out-of-body perception of this scarcely human grey shape staggering towards the gazebo using the girl as a crutch, past the gazebo in the direction of the north wall and through its aperture. Why is Nikki dragging me towards a 200-foot cliff?
Of course. One more ordeal. The bungee. And out there, somewhere below us, if only we could make it, the sanctuary of The Captain Cook.
I have no idea how she did it. I think she put the straps of the bungee apparatus round my ankles and dragged me to the cliff edge, and then embraced me and flung herself over, without letting go. I can only remember a rush of air in the darkness, an abrupt halt, and a few moments of oscillation. One moment we were lying on the shingle and then we were in a Zodiac with friends. I remember grasping in a seaman’s grip the forearm of a sailor manning the boarding gantry, and struggling up on board. Nikki found a cabin on Deck 4 with its own shower, pushed me inside, and closed the cabin door behind us. There was the sound of running water and she had helped me out of my filthy things and pushed me gently under the warm water. I leaned up against the wall of the shower and revelled in the wonderful, life-giving massage of the spray on my neck and shoulders. She took a bar of rough soap and languidly, but not coarsely, rubbed the ingrained mud out of the skin of my chest and back. Slowly, consciousness and awareness were returning. She kicked off her shoes and leant in through the open shower door, at first trying to keep her jeans and T-shirt dry. But as her clothes caught more of the spray she abandoned her caution and carried on cleaning the mud, now off my buttocks and thighs. Still dressed, she stepped fully into the cubicle. The mix of extreme danger, fatigue and physical exhaustion is a powerful aphrodisiac cocktail. I leaned over her stooped shoulders and pulled the shower door closed. I half turned and put a hand under the magnificent mane around the back of her neck, and gently coaxed her upwards. I fully turned towards her and she slid upwards across the front of my body, and for an instant on her toes, so that she could lean against me and replace the shower unit on its bracket above my head. Now she had both hands high above her head as she re-sited the shower nozzle so that the spray cascaded down from above on both of us. The saturated, transparent T-shirt stretched against her breasts and
rode high above the exposed midriff, the beautiful cream belly and the curve of her lower back reaching down to the taut buttocks within the tight blue jeans. She let me pull the shirt from below up and over her head. Her forearms fell across my shoulders and her hands clasped round my neck. Her sodden hair fell in pleated rope strands across her face and she buried her face in my chest. I loosened her jeans at the waist and pulled them down over the toned curve of her buttocks. They were tight and soaked and unyielding. She gyrated her hips to help push her jeans down beyond her knees as the Perspex walls of the shower unit steamed over and became completely opaque.
DOCTOR GRADUS AD
PARNASSUM
I
‘I discharged my sidearm twice, sir. One miss, one hit. Then I helped Dr Cameron-Strange out of the mud. I thought it best to vacate ASAP, so we used the bungee.’
‘That was clever,’ said Major Forster.
‘As soon as we got on board The Cook we weighed anchor and it was full steam ahead for Devonport. We saw the flames from Xanadu as we were rounding Cape Colville. What’s going on, sir?’
‘I don’t know.’ Major Forster added, enigmatically, ‘I think there must be other players. Anyway, it’s a police matter now. The cops are swarming all over Xanadu. Or what’s left of it. Chargrilled, I gather.’
Friday morning, January 22nd. Back at the Esplanade Hotel. No idea how I got there. And quite incapable of giving Major Forster any sort of handover myself. Nikki did it all. I sat in stupefied silence. Forster took a few notes.
‘Very good. Now get some sleep. You’ve both done enough. Leave the rest to me.’
The Seven Trials of Cameron-Strange Page 20
