‘God, this is a bastard. He’s doing a lateral search, sweeping half a mile in each direction, working his way up the scar.’

‘What do we do?’

‘Only one thing. Crawl when he’s at the end of the sweep, freeze when he comes close again.’

‘But that’ll take hours! Days!’

‘I know it.’ Then, urgently, ‘Watch it! Keep still!’

The chopper swept in over their position again, hovered, and slid back the way it had come. As the rotors diminished, MacConnachie said,

‘He’s got to change his pattern sometime. Till he does, we’re lumbered.’

‘But we’ll never get away like this!’

‘We’ll never get away if we’re seen.’

The next hour was one of grinding, remorseless agony: a succession of frantic bursts, too hurried to make anything like optimum progress, interspersed with periods of wracking doubt as, the helicopter once more beating overhead, they lay in rigid, sweating stillness, wondering if their too-hastily-adopted positions were apparent from above. But never long to wonder, for they would be off again, driving their faces through the tearing brush, gulping mouthfuls of dust-thick air, never escaping from the closeness of the baked earth. This was, for Ansell, the most destructive factor of all: never to be able to lift his face from the dirt; to be for ever locked in the ignoble posture of panic. He longed to rise from the stifling confinement, to escape the abject acceptance of their position and the gasping contortions of a beached fish.

Not one of their breaks carried them farther than twenty feet up the scarp; most, less; and by the time the helicopter had reached the peak, and turned off to return to the foot of the ridge, they had travelled no more than another hundred feet up the height. In an agony of discomfort, they watched as the pilot snouted about, setting up another pattern of search.

‘Go left,’ MacConnachie pleaded; ‘go out to the side, you bastard.’

But the helicopter settled on a pattern which took the scar itself for a centre, and they knew they were desperately placed.

It was the same man. It had to be. That man would know, he would not need to be told, that MacConnachie and Ansell were in the scarp. There was nowhere else they could be. It was where, in their position, he would be.

Hating him, admiring him, MacConnachie waited, nagged by the need to go on, watching for the moment to launch himself forward again.

Above all things he hated this: doing nothing.

The punishment continued: an unremitting compound of flustered, ineffective activity and confined, tormenting heat. All the while their precious store of time fled them, and their hearts ached. There seemed no escape: just a slow, persistent draining of their reserve. Ansell knew the tears ran down his cheeks, and he lived in terror of losing his grip on the knife.

At length the helicopter reached the peak for the second time, but it turned, and came back, and started the same pattern of search all over again.