The fifth dawn found MacConnachie already awake, waiting impatiently for the mist to clear. His whole body prickled with a sense of dissonance relative to the territory around him. Something was wrong. He shook Ansell.

‘What’s up?’

‘We’ve got to move.’

Ansell peered blearily at the mist.

‘Have we been seen?’

‘No. Something’s wrong, I can feel it.’

Ansell was awake at once. Just the word ‘feel’ communicated the urgency to him: MacConnachie’s instinct had become, for him, hope itself. Rapidly, he repacked their jackets and blanket.

‘Eat now?’

‘Later.’

He roped up the case and laid it at MacConnachie’s other side. Then he tested the weight of the canteen on first one shoulder, then the other. The left was still by far the more painful so, draping the strap over his right, he rested his hand lightly on the knife, quietly waiting MacConnachie’s order.

The mist was maddeningly slow to lift, for they were much lower down than hitherto, and MacConnachie shifted restively all the time. Then, quite suddenly the drifting wraiths were gone, and he could see to his rear.

They had walked on to the stage of a natural amphitheatre, a wide, shallow basin in the face of the slope. To left, right, and behind they were overlooked by a horseshoe of ground higher than that on which they lay – though not so high that MacConnachie could have seen it, by night, against the pale glow. The Goons had only to man the heights, close the neck of the horseshoe, and they would be trapped. Speed was essential.

Ansell muttered, ‘Christ,’ and, turning, MacConnachie saw that he was looking into the ground that lay ahead. A glance gave him a quick impression of cultivated fields, a river system and the mountains beyond, but looking farther to his right he saw that on that side the arm of the horseshoe crumpled away into a confused area of high scrub and trees, where the ground fell away steeply into the valley. He said, ‘Run! Don’t stop!’

They ran flat out, completely exposed to view, until they fell among the tall scrub and tangled branches of the thicket. Just before they reached it, without any warning, the helicopter suddenly roared down out of the thin morning sky, scudding low over the crest of Little Ridge and swishing past above them.

Ansell could not believe it. It was too fortuitous to be chance, and yet he could not accept the possibility that they had been spotted in the valley the day before. That would mean that the Goons had known all the time where they were, and were using their escape to test their own techniques of search and destroy. If that were true, it was the end of him. Unlike MacConnachie, he could not endure without prospect of reward. If he were simply the object of sport, he did not want to go on. Demoralized and chill, he lay dazed with fear, inwardly weeping.

Then he heard the voice of MacConnachie, weary and defiant, murmuring a litany of such outraged and convolute obscenity that small eructations of helpless laughter bubbled up in him like wind. What’s the use? he thought.