08- The Sinkiang Executive by Adam Hall

Author:Adam Hall [Hall, Adam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Collins, London, 1978.
Published: 1978-08-12T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twelve

SPOTLIGHT

The feathers fell.

'Now,' he said.

'What was that?'

'You will open them now.'

The feathers fell softly.

'All right,' I told him.

'Then, of course, you will destroy them.'

He sounded so bloody formal. What else did he expect me to do with them: post them to the KGB?

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The feathers fell softly on my face.

My head was singing. The heat was underneath, not on top. It didn't worry me. But the blinding white was everywhere and that worried me. I put my hand up and saw someone's glove.

'What the hell do you expect me to do with them?' I asked him. Tost them to -' but he had gone.

Look.

A flying glove. My own glove. My own hand.

Deduction: my eyes are open and I can see. But all I can see is my own hand in front of my face, big deal. The white blindness must be something else, an object, a sheet of some sort.

The feathers were cold as they fell on my face and I brushed them away and the flames leapt, the ones underneath, and the whole thing blanked out to nothing, like switching the set off.

The second time there was a lot more beta-wave cerebration going on and I felt for the release clips and pressed them and fell away from the seat and held my breath for a long time while the pain went on. It was underneath: the left hip, the rib cage and the shoulder. I was lying on that side with my face in the snow.

I could hear a throbbing sound.

The snow wasn't soft, for some reason. I put out my hand and swept some of it away and felt rock underneath. I suppose it hadn't been snowing for long: there was no retrograde amnesia that I could detect, and I remembered there'd been only a light haze when I'd jettisoned the canopy and ejected; the weather had been coming in from the south-east and I'd flown into it just before leaving the aircraft.

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The throbbing was duplicated and I listened to it. Sometimes it went right out of synch and I didn't understand.

Time.

I moved enough to look around and that meant holding my breath again and then respirating slow and deep, slow and deep, drawing in enough oxygen to stay conscious. I could see the crags now, outlines by the snow, jutting against the white background in a faint pattern of shadows, rising above and behind me.

Time. You've been -

Moved again and sat up and waited till the worst of it died away. I didn't know how long it took. The throbbing was much louder and I listened to it and got the message and turned my wrist: 1.17.

Total memory came back like shoving a cassette in the slot and I started moving again and much faster now. There wasn't any data for the periods of unconsciousness but that didn't matter: what mattered was whether they'd had time to put these helicopters into the air since the explosion.

They were quite loud now and the last thing

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