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

object, round and hard. It was like a cricket ball. Routh’s mind was now scarcely more than a pinpoint of consciousness, and he groped to understand the thing’s function, to give it a name. But even as he did so it turned under his hand, and a door swung inwards behind him. He staggered back a couple of steps and fell. The door, just clearing his numbed body, swung to and closed. A great sheltering darkness had received him.

 
     
2
     
    He lay curled up, his body inert but his limbs intermittently wracked by spasm. All his power of interpreting experience and devising responses to it had left him. He was on the two-stroke, and the smell of hot oil was coming up between his knees. Now between high wooden fences, and now over interminable ribbons of green rubber enclosed in the walls of frosted glass, the two-stroke was carrying him sturdily ahead of danger… Bang! Ominously the engine had back-fired. There had been trouble recently with the timing. Bang!
    Routh stirred uneasily. Bang! What he now heard was the noise of a door being sharply closed. There were voices, footfalls going up and down wooden staircases, the sound of more doors being wrenched open, banged to. They were searching the outbuildings all round the yard.
    With his situation reconstructed around him, Routh struggled to his knees. The smell of oil was still in the darkness about him. He guessed that he was in a garage. But it was, he instinctively knew, a large place, and unusually lofty. It occurred to him that somewhere there might be a ladder that would take him to some obscure perch high up in the rafters. A flicker of confidence returned to him and for a moment he had a glimpse of the wily and undefeatable Routh, peering down from this fastness at his enemies vainly searching for him below. He got to his feet and felt about him cautiously. Vague masses, impossible to interpret, loomed around him. Garages, he remembered, often had the sort of pit used to get at a car from underneath. It wouldn’t do to go straight into one of them.
    Another door was slammed close by, and he heard footsteps more loudly than before. They were coming. Within the next few seconds he must hide himself. He took a further step forward, and stopped with a low cry. Directly before him, dim but distinguishable, hung a pale human face, its eyes on a dead level with his own. He drew back and the face drew back too. It was his own face reflected in a panel of glass. His hand went out and once more found itself on a handle – but this time it must be the handle of a car door. Even as he made the discovery there was a creak behind him and a finger of light shot through the darkness. He had only one possible resource left. He tugged open the door, flung himself through it, and drew it to behind him.
    The finger of light was now a broad beam. He tumbled over the seat on which he was crouched and sought to flatten himself out to gain concealment. The thing was roomy. Conceivably it was a shooting brake, for there appeared to be no back seat. But there was some sort of tarpaulin sheet, carelessly thrown down; and under this he burrowed. Once there was an ominous clink of metal, for on the floor beneath the tarpaulin was what must be a heap of metal tools, loosely disposed. He lowered himself cautiously upon these and lay quite still.
    There were now at least two men quite close to him. One was talking rapidly and the other was giving monosyllabic answers. It sounded like some sort of briefing. Routh was puzzled, for he got no impression that the place was being actively searched. The voices broke off and in a moment were succeeded by a new sound, impossible to interpret. A large door was being pushed back on rollers. At the same time light flooded through the chinks of the tarpaulin. Routh held his breath. An extraordinary possibility, alarming yet carrying with it a wild hope, had flashed upon him. Suppose that…
    The two men were talking again, and this time he could hear