Free A Rough Shoot by Geoffrey Household

nearly dawn. Strain on the nerves has no time.
    Then Lex began to thrash about in his dreamland, and somebody above us closed in towards the sound. I hung onto Lex’s legs and Sandorski lay across his chest and arms. Pink must have been near enough to hear Lex’s heavy breathing. He shot in our general direction, and scored a bull. He hit the rectangle between Sandorski’s legs, Lex’s body and my arms. It wasn’t his fault that there was nothing but turf in it.
    The shot was the breaking point for somebody else who had been frozen and terrified like ourselves. A roe deer, away to our left in a patch of thick stuff where one of us easily might have been but was not, broke cover and crashed away. Sandorski, instantaneously appreciating what the enemy would think, broke cover too and went after it, drawing off two of the watchers; they might, if he had given them a moment to think, have spotted the first disturbance as that of an animal, but they couldn’t distinguish the noises–since one was followed immediately by another –and could only assume that two of us had gone.
    Right! Make it a third, I thought! And down the hill I went–after, of course, the interval of some seconds which I needed to catch up with Sandorski’s brilliance. I drew off the other two sentries, one of whom was Pink. His naval language was unmistakable. I led them up again to the turf, and there, where I could run silently, easily lost them.
    I listened. I could hear Pink and his companion blundering through a bit of heavy plowland that lay between me and the airstrip. I guessed that he had given up the pursuit as hopeless–which it was–and was returning to the party’s rendezvous under the boundary hedge.
    There was no knowing what Sandorski would do, for we had not arranged any rendezvous at all. Whether he heard my escape or not, however, it wasn’t likely he would lose touch for long with the unconscious Lex. Meanwhile the position was chaotic. Scattered over half a square mile of down and plow and thicket were Sandorski and myself and the disorganized reception committee, none of us knowing where the others were, and all anxious to find out. Additional complications were Lex snoring in the bushes and his bag in the holly tree.
    Lex gave a heave and a rumble. In the night silence which had now become more absolute and hostile than ever, that noise seemed as outrageous a signal as any flashing light. I decided to shift him at once, while I could be sure that my own section of empty space was really empty. I carried him down the hill and left him in the open, where his odd noises would sound like those of the sheep, memorizing his position as well as I could without any very definite landmarks to go by.
    I settled down on the edge of the turf track above our temporary hiding place. After a bit, Hiart, tall enough to recognize, came flitting cautiously over the grass with one of his men. They stopped and listened at the right spot, gave it up and vanished northwards along the track.
    Where were they going? Well, if Hiart had the intelligence Sandorski attributed to him–and I was immensely impressed by his finding, in a world that all looked alike, the exact patch where we had been–then he would guess that the only explanation of the aircraft coming down in the wrong place and being expected there by unknown persons must be that the beacons had been moved. Having checked that, he would try to find them–for they were evidence that must at all costs be removed–and carry them off to his car. It wouldn’t take him long to discover the one in the open on the edge of the slope, and then the tracks of the landing wheels would lead him somewhere near the other in the hedge.
    I hoped that Sandorski might be close behind Hiart, but he was not. I waited and waited, feeling all the time that we might be within a few yards of each other, and each afraid to break the silence. I needn’t have worried. When Sandorski did come, it was boldly down