Alistair MacLean - Fear is the Key

"I'm not likely to forget."

Neither Mary nor the radio operator had stirred. I was pretty sure that the operator wouldn't stir for a long time, I could still feel the ache in my fist and foot. But I wasn't at all sure about Mary, I wasn't even sure that she wasn't faking, her breathing seemed much too quick and irregular for an unconscious person.

"Come on, now," Larry said impatiently. He thrust the gun painfully into the small of my back. "Out."

I went out, through the door, along the passage and through the outer door on to the wind and rain-swept deck beyond. The outer door had opened on the sheltered side of the radio shack but in a moment we would be exposed to the pile-driving blast of that wind and I knew that when that moment came it would be then or never.

It was then. Urged on by the revolver in my back I moved round the corner of the shack, crouched low and barrelling forward into that great wind as soon as it struck me. Larry wasn't so prepared, not only was he slightly built but he was standing upright, and the sudden wavering and jerking of the torch beam on the deck by my feet was intimation enough to me that the wind had caught him off-balance, perhaps sent him staggering several feet backward. I lowered my head still farther until I was in the position of a hundred yards sprinter in the first two steps of the race and lurched forward into the wind.

Almost at once I realised that I had miscalculated. I had miscalculated the strength of the wind; running into that hurricane was like running through a barrel of molasses. And I had also forgotten that while a seventy mile an hour wind offers an almost insuperable resistance to a human being it offers relatively none to a heavy lead slug from a Colt with a muzzle velocity of 600 m.p.h.

I'd got maybe eight yards when the frantically searching torch beam picked me up and steadied on me, and managed to cover perhaps another two before Larry fired.

Gangsters and hoodlums are notoriously the world's worst marksmen, their usual method being to come within a couple of yards before firing or spraying the landscape with a sufficient hail of bullets to make the law of averages work for them and I had heard a hundred times that those boys couldn't hit a barn door at ten paces. But maybe Larry had never heard of this, or maybe the rule applied only to barn doors.

A mule-kick is nothing compared to the slamming stopping power of a forty-five. It caught me high up on the left shoulder and spun me round in a complete circle before dropping me in my tracks. But it was this that saved my life, even as I fell I felt the sharp tug on my oilskin collar as another slug passed through it. Those weren't warning shots that Larry was firing: he was out to kill.

And kill he would if I had remained another couple of seconds on that deck. Again I heard the muffled boom of the Colt — even at ten yards I could hardly hear it over the howling power of that wind — and saw sparks strike off the deck inches from my face and heard the screaming whir of the spent bullets ricocheting off into the darkness of the night. But the sparks gave me hope, it meant that Larry was using full metal-jacketed slugs, the kind cops use for firing through car bodies and locked doors, and that made an awful sight cleaner wound than a mushrooming soft-nose. Maybe it had passed clear through the shoulder.

I was on my feet and running again. I couldn't see where I was running to and I didn't care, all that mattered was running from. A blinding, buffering gust of rain whistled across the deck and made me shut both eyes tight and I loved it. If I had my eyes shut so had Larry.

Still with my eyes shut I bumped into a metal ladder. I grabbed it to steady myself and before I properly realised what I was doing I was ten feet off the ground and climbing steadily. Maybe it was just man's age-old instinct to climb high to get out of danger that started me off but it was the realisation that this ladder must lead to some sort of platform where I might fend off Larry that kept me going.

It was a wicked, exhausting climb. Normally, even in that giant wind, it wouldn't have given me much trouble, but, as it was, I was climbing completely one-handed. My left shoulder didn't hurt much, it was still too numb for that, the real pain would come later, but for the moment the entire arm seemed to be paralysed, and every time I released a rung with my right hand and grabbed for the one above, the wind pushed me out from the ladder so that my fingers hooked round the next rung usually at the full extent of my arm. Then I had to pull myself close with my one good arm and start the process all over again. After I'd climbed about forty rungs my right arm and shoulder were beginning to feel as if they were on fire.

I took a breather, hooked my forearm over a rung and looked down. One look was enough. I forgot about the pain and weariness and started climbing faster than ever, hunching my way upwards like a giant koala bear. Larry was down there at the foot of the ladder, flickering his torch in all directions and even with that bird-brain of his it was only going to be a matter of time until it occurred to him to shine that torch upwards.

It was the longest ladder I had ever climbed. It seemed endless, and I knew now that it must be some part of the drilling derrick, the kidder, I was now almost sure, that led up to the "monkey board," that narrow shelf where a man guided the half-ton sections of the drill pipe, as it came from the ground, into the storage racks behind. The only thing I could remember about the monkey was the cheerless fact that it was devoid of handrails — those would only get in the way of the man guiding the heavy drill sections into place.

A jarring vibrating clang as if the iron ladder had been struck by a sledge-hammer was Larry's way of announcing that he had caught sight of me. The bullet had struck the rung on which my foot rested and for one bad moment I thought it had gone through my foot. When I realised it hadn't I took another quick look down.

Larry was coming up after me. I couldn't see him, but I could see the torch clutched in one hand making regularly erratic movements as he swarmed his way up the ladder making about three times the speed I was. It wasn't in character this, Larry could never have been accused of having an excess of courage: either he was loaded to the eyes or he was driven by fear — fear that I should escape and Vyland find out that he had been trying to murder me. And there was the further possibility, and a very strong one, that Larry had only one or two shells left in his gun: he couldn't afford not to make those count.

I became gradually aware of lightness above and around me. I thought at first that this must be a glow cast from the aircraft warning lights on the top of the derrick, but in the same instant as the thought occurred I knew it to be wrong: the top of the derrick was still over a hundred feet above where I was. I took another breather, screwed my eyes almost shut against the stinging lash of the rain and peered upwards into the murky gloom.

There was a platform not ten feet above my head, with a light shining off feebly to the right. It wasn't much of a light, but enough to let me see something of the dark maze of girders that was the derrick, enough to let me see a dark shadow above and also to the right which looked like some tiny cabin. And then Larry's torch steadied and shone vertically upwards and I saw something that made me feel slightly sick: the platform above was no solid sheet-metal but open grille-work through which a person's every move could be seen: gone were my hopes of waiting till Larry's head appeared above the level of the platform and then kicking it off his shoulders.

I glanced downwards. Larry was no more than ten feet below, and both his gun and torch were levelled on me, 1 could see the dull glint of light on the barrel and the dark hole in the middle where death hid. One little pull on the trigger finger and that dark hole would be a streaking tongue of fire in the darkness of the night. Curtains for Talbot. 1 wondered vaguely, stupidly, if my eyes would have time to register the bright flame before the bullet and the oblivion it carried with it closed my eyes for ever… And then, slowly, I realised that Larry wasn't going to fire, not even Larry was crazy enough to fire, not then. The 185-pound deadweight of my falling body would have brushed him off that ladder like a fly and from that ten-story height neither of us would have bounced off that steel deck enough so that anyone would notice.