‘Oh God, the clever bastard! He’s coming up this side!’

The helicopter slid in towards them once more, low against the side of the hill. They were up and off, headlong down the defile for the fourth time. It seemed to Ansell that in some horrible way the proportions of their world had been reversed: the tiny speck of dancing metal had swollen to immense, crushing dimensions; they had been reduced to minute, scrabbling dwarfs on an endless landscape. The hide-and-seek went on, destructive and inescapable: out of the defile, across to the gully, back, and along the defile again; and always the pilot was clever enough to judge their pace, guess their direction, and peg them tight. They were being run into the ground.

Once more, when they had slipped the aircraft for a few seconds, they lay against the hillside, panting.

‘No good! Can’t lose him. Got to bring him in just right.’

‘What do I do?’

‘Run for the pimple. See it?’

Following the direction of MacConnachie’s trembling arm, Ansell saw the feature he was indicating.

‘Yes.’

‘Get there! Wait!’ MacConnachie swallowed convulsively. ‘When the chopper comes – run back – across my front. I’ll be here. Right?’

MacConnachie gripped Ansell’s arm, waiting for the moment to send him off. Ansell steeled himself to run two hundred yards; it seemed an impossible task. The helicopter thrashed in from their right.

‘Go!’

Ansell ran blindly, with a shocking absence of co-ordination, pitching and staggering over the pitted earth. He seemed hardly to be moving at all, scarcely to grow any closer to his objective from one frenzied glimpse to the next. The more he tried to drive his legs on, the weaker they became. He was on the point of giving up when he ran into the pimple, and lay against it, whimpering. After some moments, he dragged himself round it, to lie hidden from the helicopter.

As soon as Ansell left him, MacConnachie felt stronger, lighter, refreshed by an access of power and confidence. Alone, he could take that chopper. He didn’t need Ansell.

As the helicopter bore in, he slipped round the hill and down the defile, leaving the suitcase at his firing point. The moment he heard the pilot pull up to cross the twin hills, he skidded about and ran back, leaving the defile from the same end, laughing.

I’ve got you. At last I’ve got you cold, you bastard, and you know it.

MacConnachie could hear the pilot’s fury in the roar of the engine as, blind for the first time, he fought to heave his machine tight about. In those seconds of dead visibility, MacConnachie ran across and down into the gully.

Now what are you going to do, bastard? You’ve got to traverse the defile and the hills first; thirty wasted seconds. Then you’ve got to get up and round to sweep the gully, and as you run dead off the hills, I’ll get back among them again. That’s another wasted circuit. Then when you come back to the hills, you’ve got to go left or right; and whichever you choose, I’ll choose the other. You’re cobblered, my friend. You won’t catch me in this lot. And comes the time you have to go after Ansell, I’ve got you.