ADAM HALL - The Pekin Target

I began swabbing her leg and she hissed her breath in, gripping my wrist. "The sooner we start getting you out," I told her, "the more chance we'll have."

"Oh Christ," she said, "I didn't know you were such a stupid bastard."

I finished swabbing and went for the roll of lint in the canvas bag. "Save your energy, Helen. Relax. Are you feeling thirsty yet?"

She closed her eyes and began laughing strangely, and the sound went on until she could speak again. "Am I thirsty? Clive, I'm dying."

I stopped unrolling the bandage. "Of a broken leg?"

"Of a broken leg. And the mountains."

There was a gash on the side of her crash helmet: I'd noticed it when I'd been feeling for damage. Perhaps she'd struck her head on the rockface, and the pain was making her irrational. But somewhere in my own mind there was a cold thought creeping: that she wasn't being irrational at all.

"Did you hit your head? Do you feel disoriented?"

She struggled to move a little, lifting her shoulders and propping herself on her elbows, watching me steadily in the moonlight. I was pulling in her chute.

"Clive, will you bloody well listen to me? I know you're acting according to your instincts, and I understand that. You think the first thing to do is to save life. But there isn't one to save — only yours." She spoke with slow clarity, as if she wanted to make absolutely sure I understood. "I'm not only talking about the sheer physical impossibility of getting me through these mountains with anything left of what I am now; and I'm not only talking about gangrene and pneumonia and no chance in hell of finding competent medical aid in the nearest village, though I'll just mention that morphine isn't totally effective with bone trauma and that I do not intend spending the next two or three days in screaming agony before they see us from the monastery and shoot us both. I'm also talking about why I took this job on, and what they told me when I was briefed, and what I agreed to do. I agreed to give you whatever assistance was necessary in making the drop and getting a fix on the monastery, and then to make my own way out while you proceeded with your mission; those were the actual words, in writing: while you proceeded with your mission. And that's what you've now got to do."

She went on watching me, giving me time to think over what she'd said.

"And leave you here?"

"And leave me here. I'll be all right. You're going to fix things for me."

"Fix things?"

"They shoot horses, don't they?"

"You're out of your mind."

"I've never been more rational in my life." Her voice was perfectly steady. "All you've got to do is cut a wrist. I'm an awful coward when it comes to self-inflicting anything. I can't even get a splinter out. We're all different, aren't we?"

I was aware of the bandage in my hand: conscious thought was overlaying the desperate attempt to deny all she was saying, to believe it wasn't the simple and appalling truth.

"You're asking me to kill you?"

"Don't be so melodramatic, Clive. I'm asking you for your charity. I'm asking you to save me from unbearable pain, and the unbearable waiting for the time when they see us, and come for us. I'm going to be killed anyway; you'll be more gentle than they will."

I thought for a long time, or it seemed long, kneeling on the loose shale beside her with the lint bandage in my hand and nothing to do with it, while I relearned the lesson that had been brought home to me rarely in my life: that to be helpless is the most subtle of all agonies.

"What we're going to do," I said at last, "is to find our way out of here without being seen, and to assume quite confidently that the morphine's going to do its job for as long as-"

"Clive, you've got to face it. You've just got to face it." Her small fingers were dug into my wrist. "If this were just a geological field trip I'd let you try getting me across those mountains before I went out of my mind, but it isn't like that. When they briefed me they told me enough about your operation to let me know it's important. I've worked for D 16 and I've worked for NATO intelligence- which is why your people trusted me with this little trip — and I know the signs of a top secret mission when I see them; I know it's quite likely that if you reach your target you'll save lives, maybe a lot of lives, but certainly more than one — more than this one. You —»

"You're just making up your own weird scenario —»

"I haven't finished. The thing is, Clive, that my integrity is at stake, and if you think for one moment that you can monkey with that, you'll get a real surprise. Who the hell do you think I am? D'you think I'm the type to give my word to your people and sign the clearance form and then go back on it when the going gets rough? You know the kind of form I've signed — you've done it often enough yourself if you're in this game. Last bequests, next of kin, the whole bit. And listen to me, and understand what I'm saying: I agreed that whatever happened to me I would do everything in my power to help you to proceed with your mission. Whatever happened. And now something's happened; one of the many calculated risks we accepted has come up and hit me in the face; and you're asking me to go back on my word. By God, you've got a nerve!"

Her voice had begun shaking with anger because I wouldn't understand, because I wouldn't think it out, as she'd had time to think it out while I was looking for her. "And listen to this, Clive, and it's all I'm going to say. If you try to carry me out of here I'm going to resist, every inch of the way. I'm going to fight you, every bloody inch and every bloody yard, till you realise it's not worth it, and drop me, and leave me to rot." Then the anger was suddenly spent, and she was speaking so softly that I could barely hear. "But if you've got any kindness in you, any humanity, you'll face what you know you've got to do, and be gentle with me, and save me from all those things we all hope never to die with: pain, and humiliation, and indignity."

I knelt there for a time, going over it all, while the shadows in the moonlight crept from rock to rock, lengthening as the night moved on towards the dawn. I don't know when it was that she spoke again, as softly as before.

"Face it, Clive. Bite the bullet."

And at last I knew there was no argument, and no choice.

"I wish there'd been time to know you," I said.

"I've told you quite a bit, in the last few minutes. I'm someone to be reckoned with. Are you going to help me?"

"Yes."

She gave a quick shuddering laugh. "I finally got it into your thick skull."

"That's right."

"What made it so difficult? Because I'm a woman?"

"Probably."

"Then you're a male chauvinist pig. Listen, the monastery is east of here, the other side of that long ridge with the funny-looking rock at the end. Okay?"

"Okay."

"You knew that already, but I'm just cross-checking. To climb that ridge won't be easy, but there's no other way to go. It'll be easier, though, with some of the extra equipment you'll have: you can make hay with the pitons, using mine as well — you won't have to salvage any. And there'll be double the food and water ration. Did you see the terrain the other side of the ridge?"

"Not very clearly, in this light."

"You're not trained. You have to watch for the shadows, and know what they mean, how deep they are, and how high the object is that's throwing them. Listen, the terrain on the far side is almost flat, a narrow strip maybe a dozen yards wide and almost as long as the ridge itself. Are you listening?"

"Yes." But she knew that half my mind was still circling, looking for an escape, an escape for her that didn't demand her life.

"I'd say you'd be in full sight of the monastery, anywhere on that ridge, with one exception. There was a long shadow crossing it at an angle, starting just north of the middle and going obliquely south-east — in other words, towards the monastery. One thing I can tell you for sure: the monastery is something like five hundred feet above that ridge; six hundred at the most. Did you notice the ring formation?"