Алистер Маклин - Borrowed Time

The youth jerked his thumb at the door. They walked four metres along the pavement outside, then he stopped and pointed to a stairway.

Amrit frowned at him. ‘Are you sure?’

‘I swear it…’

Amrit let go his grip on the youth. He climbed the stairs two at a time, silently, tensed for trouble.

On the first landing he found the sack. He picked it up and looked inside. Nothing had been taken. He heard a sound and looked in the corner. The youth he had kicked was lying in a heap. Amrit turned him over. His face was torn and bloody.

‘What did you do to yourself, you idiot?’

The youth whimpered and slid to the floor again when Amrit released him.

‘He did nothing to himself,’ a voice said. ‘I did it.’ A man stepped forward. He was short and stocky. He held up a baseball bat with blood on the thick end. ‘They are thieves. They stole from you, yes?’

Amrit nodded.

‘For weeks now they have used this place as a getaway, you understand? They rob down on the street, then run here to hide until the commotion is over. Well not any longer. This is where I live. I do not want this.’

Amrit nodded again. He took his sack and went back downstairs. He told the youth waiting at the bottom that he’d better clear off, or he would be in line for more pain before the day was over.

Walking back to the café, Amrit wondered at the tiny shifts of circumstance that could make such gigantic changes in a life. If he had been an ordinary mule, the loss of the sack would have been a disaster. He would have been doomed.

If he had been an ordinary mule and the stocky little man had intervened, as he just did, could that man have imagined how with one blow of a stick, he had saved another human being from sudden and painful death – or a whole family from brutal murder?

‘Forget the omelette,’ Amrit told the man in the café. ‘I’ll just have the tea.’

Sabrina left the cabin before dawn, driving a super-tuned green Range-Rover supplied by Commissioner Mantur. He had put the vehicle at the disposal of Lenny Trent with the added promise of a driver and limited additional manpower should the need arise.

‘A small act of thanks,’ he told Lenny. ‘It is not often we are done the honour of being paid in dollars for an assignment.’

The plan was that, by mid-afternoon, Sabrina should be back in the region where she photographed the bandits. She would conceal the Land-Rover in dense hill forest a kilometre west of the spot where she hid to take her shots, and she would keep Mike and Lenny informed of the situation in the region right up to the time they were due to fly south.

‘Any snags,’ Mike reminded her before she left, ‘any sign at all that our arrival could be monitored, let us know and we’ll abort.’

With decent maps and a solid all-terrain vehicle to drive, Sabrina made good time. She took a direct route to the northern perimeter of the village where Aziz lived, then drove the Range-Rover up into the foothills. She kept to the rough, following ravines and rock fissures until she reached the twisting mountain road used by Seaton and his bandits.

Staying on the rocky terrain below the road, she travelled north until she came to the forest. It was high and dense, the foliage so thick that only a dim green light penetrated. It looked, Sabrina thought, like a damp, faintly steamy film set with over-done mood lighting.

She drove into the forest for a distance of twenty metres and parked the Range-Rover in a thicket of smaller trees. She switched off the engine, undid her lap strap and opened the door. She stood to get out and her leg gave way. She fell through the open door and landed on her back among dead leaves and debris.

For a moment she did not move, a habit of the job, checking all was well before she risked getting up. As she lay there she felt the throb in the back of her leg. The wound was not responding to treatment, and now it was infected enough to interfere with the interaction of nerve and muscle. She knew she should have seen a doctor by now, but what with one thing and another …

She sat up and pressed the dressing through the thickness of her camouflage trousers. The moment she removed the pressure of her fingers there was a rebound throb. Not a good sign. Toxins from the infected site would be entering her bloodstream.

Carefully she stood up and leaned on the side of the vehicle. The agitation caused by the fall was definitely affecting her chemistry. Her hands shook and she felt a sensation of clamminess on her skin that had nothing to do with the atmosphere in the forest.

‘Mild septicaemia,’ she diagnosed aloud, feeling the density around her absorb the sound, muffling it. ‘All I need.’

Something rustled and moved across her boot. She jumped aside and saw a snake, over a metre long, yellow-and-black-banded. It slithered away under the back wheels.

‘God …’

She had never seen the species before but she knew what it was: a krait, relative of the cobra and highly venomous, capable of killing half the people it bit, whether they had antivenin or not.

‘You’re supposed to be nocturnal,’ she told the retreating reptile. ‘You’re supposed to live in open country, too.’

Her heart was thumping and now she was aware of darkness at the edges of her vision.

‘Not-so-mild septicaemia,’ she muttered.

She sat on the step of the vehicle and put her head between her knees. The blood pounded harder and her temples began to ache, but the shadowing on the perimeter of her sight disappeared.

Slowly she stood up, reached under the driving seat for her rucksack and pulled out the scrambler radio. She pressed the button and waited until a green light showed she had an encoded line.

‘Sabrina to Mike or Lenny, come in.’

A couple of whistles and Mike was on the line. ‘Where are you, Sabrina?’

‘More or less on top of map reference B.’

‘You’re in the forest.’

‘Just far enough in to still see daylight. It’s extremely eerie and a krait just slithered across my foot.’

‘They’re supposed to live in the open.’

‘I told it that.’

‘Is everything as expected?’

‘Tomb-like,’ Sabrina said. ‘I only called to make sure the radio’s working.’

‘What are you going to do now?’

‘Recce north of here, then south. After that, if it’s all clear, I think I’ll get myself nested into the rocks above the stretch Seaton and his gang were on when I took the pictures. I’ll buzz through every hour until you leave.’

‘Sounds OK to me,’ Mike said. ‘I’ll see you.’

The helicopter took off from a field twenty kilometres north of Srinagar at 3:10 p.m. local time. On board were Mike Graham, Lenny Trent, and ten weapons-and-tactics marksmen drawn from police forces in Srinagar, Anantnāg and Nunkum.

As they flew south across the border, passing over the sprawl of Delhi, Lenny pointed out six or seven areas where he had worked, or had helped co-ordinate offensives against dope peddlers.

‘I look down at them all,’ he said, ‘and I realize that now we’ve moved on, the trade is probably as strong as ever.’

‘You have to keep trying,’ Mike said, shouting above the noise of the rotor.

‘I know, I know. My only regret about the job is that there’s no place for a sense of achievement. Not ever.’

As they drew within a hundred kilometres of the target zone the pilot took a sweeping route south-east. He continued in a wide sweep and came back north-west, avoiding passing over the mountain track. He finally landed in an area southwest of the forest where the Range-Rover was hidden.

From the rounded cleft of two craggy rocks Sabrina watched through binoculars as the police marksmen, led by Mike and Lenny, made their way up the mountainside, heading for the eastern perimeter of the forest.