Free Operation Pax by Michael Innes Page A

until they were outside that formidable stone wall. The moment to act would be then.
    The helicopter was moving again. It was passing directly over the house, and not thirty feet above the chimneys. The size and nondescript character of the place were now fully apparent. Routh was aware of a sprawling system of stone and tile ridges, irregularly disposed and alternating with broad, flat expanses of lead. His eye caught the long, low, bitumen-covered roof of the building whence his flight had begun; and beyond he had a glimpse of the lake. Then the helicopter passed over the front of the house. Above the apex of the gleaming white pediment that had been his first impression of the place rose a flagstaff. Against this a white-coated man was steadying himself as he swept the nearer grounds with a pair of binoculars. The man looked up and waved as the machine passed over him. Routh drew back nervously, fearful that his lurking face might be discerned peering through the perspex. But already the roof had vanished.
    Still he dared not move. He had to master a nervous impulse to get a glimpse of the pilot, to estimate from his manner of controlling the machine the chance of bluffing and intimidating him, to study the skull it might be desirable to fracture at a blow. Crouched still beneath his tarpaulin, he had already chosen his weapon for that – a heavy spanner, straight-ended and about a foot long. In his imagination he cautiously poised it, swung it in the air. His breath quickened at the thought of it. He realized, with a strange spasm of moral horror and a dark excitement, that there was a bloodlust in him; that he had killed one man and would willingly kill another. It was part of his new stature, part of the Routh by whom the seventy-bob swindler had been magnificently succeeded…
    There was a queer sound in his ears. For a second he was puzzled, and then realized with terror that what he had heard was his own laughter. He had laughed aloud in a malevolent glee – and with the ear of his enemy within three feet of him. He realized a new danger – the danger that he might go light-headed, hysterical, mad. He lay still as death, biting hard at a wrist.
    The fellow had heard nothing. He would have earphones, of course; for he was in some sort of short-wave contact with the people below. Indeed it looked as if he had received instructions to change his course of action. For he was not flying straight out of the grounds as Routh had hoped. He was moving gradually out on a spiral. There was no other explanation of the circular movement of the terrain below. And the helicopter was an incomparable machine to hunt with. It hovered at will. Several times it sank to within a few feet of the ground to investigate – Routh supposed – one or another suspicious appearance. Nothing, surely, could escape observation so miraculously armed – not Deilos, crouched among his rocks; not even the most timid mammal yet known on this earth… Routh frowned into the perspex, obscurely conscious of some unresolved perplexity deep in his mind. But at that moment he saw the ring-fence.
    It looked something that a child could leap. But Routh knew how formidable it was. And if it really held some electrical charge, as the conversation he had overheard suggested, then it was now insuperable. But the enemy was plainly reckoning with the possibility that he had made such good speed before the first alarm spread that he had actually got through it. Grabbing those keys had been a lucky move after all. But for that, they would scarcely trouble to send the helicopter beyond the fence and the wall.
    And here was the wall. They were actually over and beyond it. Routh trembled at the full realization of how far he had got – of how tantalizingly near to safety he had come. The fellow was going to circle the park – perhaps to range swiftly over the scanty system of roads and lanes bounding it and running away from it. Nobody could stir on these without