Read Online Operation Pax by Michael Innes - Free Book Online Page A

its summons and moving forward, as if on a field day. All sense of proportion and likelihood had deserted him; he thought of his pursuers in terms of platoons and companies; had a bomb exploded before him or a shell whistled overhead he would have felt no surprise, nor any appreciable increase of terror.
    There was another shout on his left. He glanced in its direction as he ran and saw several figures break from the trees simultaneously. Then, as if he had been a train entering a tunnel, they vanished. A fence like the one on his right had abruptly risen up on his left. He was labouring along what was in effect a long corridor. If they caught him here he hadn’t a chance. Not a bloody chance. If only he hadn’t emptied that gun. If only…
    The power of thought was leaving him, as if driven out of his body by the fierce pain of his breathing. If he could remember why all this was happening, it would be all right. If he knew where he was, or why he ran, so vast an accession of knowledge must infallibly save him.
    Routh pulled up. There was some crisis and his brain had cleared to meet it. He was at a crossroads – that was it. In front of him the fenced path ran straight on towards a huddle of buildings. To his left a transverse path led directly to the main bulk of the house. And to the right this same path, unfenced and bordered only by low box hedges, ran through an indeterminate stretch of garden to the park. That was the way he must go. He turned to run. As he did so a man with a gun appeared as if from nowhere some twenty yards ahead, leapt the hedge without looking towards Routh, and then moved slowly down the path and away from him, scanning the gardens on either side.
    At any moment this new enemy might turn. There was nothing to do but go straight on, and make what he could of the shelter of the buildings before him. They were, he guessed, stables and places of that sort. The distance was scarcely greater than the length of a cricket pitch. Routh covered it without glancing behind him and found himself in a courtyard that was almost entirely enclosed. To his left was a wing of the house itself– the servants’ wing, probably, and distinguished by a multiplicity of small, sparely draped windows. To face them was like a nightmare – the familiar nightmare of being on the stage of a crowded theatre, with no idea of a part and no means of getting off. On its three other sides the yard was a jumble of coachhouses, storerooms, lofts and the like. The only entrance to it, apart from the narrow one by which he had come, was through a broad archway straight in front. Through this one would come, no doubt, to the main façade of the house. Should he dash straight through, and so make for that part of the park which was vaguely familiar to him? This question was answered even as Routh, with the slender mental concentration he had summoned back, addressed himself to it. Suddenly from beyond the archway came a sound that thickened and slowed his racing blood. He remembered Deilos and for a moment supposed that leopards or hyenas were at large in the gardens. Then he realized that he was listening to bloodhounds; that this appalling sound was the deep bell-note of which he had read in fiction. No living creature holds a more alarming place in the popular mind than does the bloodhound; and Routh was now reduced to sobbing with fear. At the same moment he heard voices and steps behind him. There was no more than the angle of a building between some group of his enemies and himself. He was within seconds of being captured.
    The yard before him was an unbroken stretch of concrete, and it was quite empty. It looked like an arena cleared for some cruel sport. Routh had a fleeting fantastic vision of himself being driven hither and thither about it in abominable torment. His knees shook. He leant against the wall by which he was crouching, and his hands groped over its surface for something to which to cling. They found a small