She gave the gendarme a poisonous glance, turned and stormed out of the office, pushing past the a.s.sistant and almost trampling over the model airfield in her fury. The others followed her.
"What now?" she said sourly as they stepped out into the street. Under the shade of one of the plane trees that lined the roadway, a little boy was eating an apple and staring at her curiously.
"We go back to the police station," said Martineau. "You don"t understand. Monsieur Parmentier is a friend of the mayor. You can"t accuse him like that, without any evidence."
"I don"t care if his girlfriend"s President of the Solar System!" snapped Roz. "He"s up to something and I want him nailed for it!"
"I cannot allow you to bully respectable citizens in this manner. Especially I cannot allow your a.s.sistant to do it."
It was a moment after he had spoken the last phrase that Roz realized that the gendarme was yet again talking to Chris. She turned to Martineau, stood on tiptoe and pushed her face close to his. "I"m not his a.s.sistant, Monsieur. We"re partners. And you can talk to me directly. I"m intelligent. I talk back."
"Yes, that"s the problem with you," sneered Martineau.
"You talk back. Too often."
Roz stared at him for a while, until Chris caught her arm and pulled her away. "Come on, Roz," he said quietly. "We need these people"s help."
Roz resisted for a moment, then let Chris lead her away.
Martineau followed them, his boots clicking on the paving stones. As they pa.s.sed the plane tree, the little boy standing there threw his apple core down and began jumping up and down, scratching his armpits and hooting like a chimpanzee, all the while staring at Roz.
She shook her head slowly. What was it with these people?
As soon as the gendarme and his two unorthodox companions had left the shop, Monsieur Parmentier shut the door of his office and picked up the earpiece of the black telephone on his desk. He wound the dial until the crackly voice of the operator could be heard.
"Get me a Paris line," he shouted into the mouthpiece.
"Quickly."
The operator told him that there wasn"t a line available.
"Well, make one available," snapped Parmentier. "It"s extremely urgent." His hands were beginning to shake again.
Thank goodness the gendarme hadn"t noticed. Why had he ever reported it to the police? He could have explained it away to the shop staff somehow. Involving the police had been a stupid thing to do.
One of the girls stuck her head round the door: Parmentier waved her away, "Later - later." She mouthed the words "nothing else missing" and closed the door.
At last the operator got a line to Paris. Parmentier had to wait a few more moments, listening to distant, echoing conversations between operators, before he got the number he wanted.
It was answered at once.
"Parmentier here," he said. His voice was shaking now.
He swallowed, struggling to control it. "The word is "Teddy Bear"."
There was a pause, then the voice began speaking rapidly, in the guttural Slavic tongue that Parmentier had once spoken, long ago when he"d had a different name. He was not altogether surprised to discover that the factory knew about his problem already, and that matters were in hand. He listened carefully to his instructions, which as well as being in the foreign language were encoded in phrases about delivery dates, quant.i.ties and toy soldiers. As he took in the meaning of the phrases, the blood slowly drained from his face.
"You want me to -" he began, then choked off the remark.
"The delivery must be made, or plans for the sales recruitment operation will be severely disrupted," said the voice.
Parmentier"s hands were trembling again, but he managed to keep his voice steady as he said, "Very well. I will close the shop for today and make the necessary arrangements."
"We will free the world"s children," concluded the voice, in French.
"Yes, we will free them," replied Parmentier, and the line went dead.
He stood up slowly, walked to the door, locked it, then went to a roll-top bureau set against the wall, unlocked the bottom drawer and lifted out a file full of papers and a locked steel box. He opened the box, took out the little Derringer pistol and stared at it for a while.
I don"t want to do this, he thought. I promised Marie that I would never do this again. That I would leave it to the others.
But he knew he couldn"t do that. He had his orders. He had no choice.
His fingers still trembling a little, he began taking the bullets from the metal case and loading them into the gun.
Chapter 10.
This time it wasn"t going to work.
Gabrielle felt a tightening in her stomach, a sense of panic which she knew she ought to be able to control. She kept her hand on the stick, her foot on the rudder pedal, keeping the plane in as tight a turn as possible. Behind her, the enemy plane kept pace, the deadly wing-mounted guns flickering from time to time. Fifteen hundred metres below, the ground was a crumpled plain of sun-baked earth, scored with the thin lines of trenches.
He must have some kind of remote control for those wing guns, thought Gabrielle. And a lot of ammunition - he"s fired at least ten seconds" worth. She wondered how it was done, why the guns didn"t jam. Elreek would have known, she thought. And Elreek would have done something about it: he would have given her guns that were just as good. But Elreek had been rea.s.signed.
The guns behind her flickered again, and Gabrielle felt the thud of bullets. .h.i.tting the fuselage. It was only a matter of time until something vital was. .h.i.t, and then - Gabrielle swallowed. There was no way out. Not with those guns. He"d follow her all the way to the ground if he had to, just to make sure.
She pulled at the throttle cable, felt the engine shudder as it accelerated beyond its limits. She had to get in tighter, turn faster than the enemy, get behind him. It was the only way.
Looking over her shoulder, she saw that the enemy plane was a little further back, and at more of an angle to her.
But there was still no way that she was going to get a shot at him: and as she watched, he was gaining again, the angle decreasing. She could see the pilot, a Kreeta in brown leathers, huge eyes hidden behind tinted goggles.
More out of sheer frustration than anything else, Gabrielle drew her handgun from its pocket in her own leathers and took a bead on the pilot over the tail of her plane. She fired; at the same moment the enemy"s guns flickered again and more bullets. .h.i.t the fuselage. But Gabrielle saw the pilot slump in his seat, and felt a deep thrill of triumph. She"d got him! Against all the odds!
But she didn"t let the feeling of triumph distract her from the job in hand. The enemy plane might go out of control, or the pilot might recover and take another shot at her. Either way she"d be safer above him. She pulled back on the stick, felt it move easily in her hand.
Far too easily.
The feeling of panic in Gabrielle"s stomach returned.
Control cable"s broken, she thought. She glanced down, saw a ragged hole in the floor of the c.o.c.kpit, the loose end of the cable attached to the stick curled up like a snake around it.
She couldn"t see the other end, the one attached to the elevators. Which meant it was outside: she had no chance of grabbing hold of it, no chance of controlling the plane. The plane"s nose dropped, slowly, irregularly, as the elevators lost trim.
Dead, thought Gabrielle. I"m as good as dead. And: at least I got him first.
But her hands hadn"t given up. They were closing the throttle, shuffling the stick to try and control the dive using the flaps.
Not a chance, she thought. Less than fifteen hundred metres, and no way of bringing the nose up. But still she carried on, keeping the plane level, throttling back so as to slow the dive. She saw the enemy plane tumbling past her, out of control, saw it corkscrew unsteadily to the ground and impact in a blossom of flame.
She thought about that, about that happening to her, and found herself unhitching her straps and crouching down in the c.o.c.kpit, her hand punching at the hole in the floor where the control cable had pa.s.sed through. She gripped a broken piece of wood, pulled, felt the spar snap further down. She pulled at the loose piece, watched it fall away revealing a hole big enough to reach through.
With one hand still on the stick, and the plane keeling to one side, she reached through, scrabbled around on the cold, flapping canvas. The cable had to be there somewhere: it was attached to the frame at regular s.p.a.ces by metal eyelets.
The plane lurched from side to side; twice Gabrielle had to get up to stabilize the dive. Each time the ground was closer.
But she didn"t give up, couldn"t give up because -
- I want to live I don"t want to die Mamma I"ll come back now I"ll have my photograph taken I don"t want to die - now I"ll have my photograph taken I don"t want to die - At last her hand closed over the cable. Her heart hammering, she pulled forward, slowly, steadily. Too fast and it would slip away from her. Too slow and she"d hit the ground before she"d regained control.
At last the end of the cable was through the hole in the floor; but Gabrielle quickly realized that she had another problem. The plane was still diving: the random slack in the elevators had been replaced by a controlled dive. If she pulled the cable any further forward it would start to dive steeply - and would probably hit the ground before she could do anything. Even if she let the cable back so that the plane"s nose came up, a controlled landing descent was impossible: she couldn"t see where she was going and hold the cable in the position for a landing at the same time.
She looked at the broken ends of the cable and wondered if she could tie them together. She wedged the stick between her knees, pulled the slack cable attached to the stick and made a loop in it. Awkwardly, she secured the loop, using her other hand as a wedge. The floor of the c.o.c.kpit sloped more steeply: she could hear the engine screaming as the accelerating slipstream took the prop. But she couldn"t let go of the cable a.s.sembly to attend to the throttle.
She threaded the control cable through the loop, and, holding it down with her wrist, made a loop in that too. Then she knotted the loops as best she could, gradually let them take the strain.
They held.
She scrambled into the seat, eased the stick back, felt the dive level out. Just in time, she thought: the ground was only a hundred and fifty metres below.
Time to land, and quickly.
She eased the stick forward a little, felt the linkage slip.
Her stomach lurched - - but although the nose dropped, the plane stayed in trim.
She saw rough mud below her, a brick wall, a wrecked ground-engine. For a moment she thought she was at the site of yesterday"s raid; but no, the ground was flatter, and there was no sign of intensive sh.e.l.ling, or indeed of much activity of any kind. This was a quiet part of the front.
Good.
Gabrielle waited until the ground was thirty metres below, then switched off the engine. The ground looked quite smooth, but it was muddy: the plane might turn over. A glide down was safer. She pulled the stick back.
Felt the linkages slip again.
The plane lurched sideways, hit the ground wing first.
Gabrielle saw the sea of mud stewing sideways, and incredibly close a pile of bricks and mud and barbed wire.
Then the ground was rushing past above her head, and she was falling. She grabbed the wooden frame of the c.o.c.kpit, screamed with pain as something dug into her side. Her other shoulder was pressed into something soft: mud, she realized.
The plane had stopped moving. She was down.
She was down and she was still alive. Instantly, she started to struggle free of the c.o.c.kpit straps. She wriggled experimentally, slipped, fell a short distance. She could see a long wedge of daylight in front of her, formed by a wing, the ground, and the side of the engine cowling.
She struggled, but couldn"t drag her body forward the metre or so she needed to get out into the open. Something was pinning her in place, biting into her hip and her stomach: the side of the c.o.c.kpit, she supposed. She tried wriggling backwards, but couldn"t move that way either. She floundered desperately in the wet mud, her back hurting, her whole body shaking, but there seemed to be no way out.
Then she saw the red-and-yellow legs of the uniform of an enemy footsoldier standing by the engine cowling, a few metres in front of her.
Gabrielle felt her lip quiver. To have survived so much danger, to have been so lucky, and now this - She tried to draw her revolver, but she couldn"t get her arm under her body. As she struggled to lift herself the necessary few centimetres, the enemy crouched down. A torso came into view, then an arm balancing a field rifle, finally a face. The face was human: dark-eyed and dark-haired under the yellow helmet. A woman"s face, Gabrielle realized. A sergeant"s stripes were painted on to the shoulder of the uniform. Gabrielle made one last effort to reach her gun, but her fingers couldn"t quite make contact with the holster. She almost screamed with frustration.
The barrel of the enemy"s rifle swung across the narrow gap, until it was almost touching Gabrielle"s forehead.
She stopped struggling, froze. Watched the sweat forming on the stranger"s face, the uncertainty in her eyes.
Gabrielle wondered what was going through the woman"s mind: for some reason she remembered the sick feeling she"d had yesterday, when she"d seen the Ogrons taking away the human pilot she"d killed for food.
Slowly, the woman lowered her rifle. There was obviously something wrong with her: her whole body was shaking. But Gabrielle couldn"t see any sign of an injury.
Perhaps she was concussed?
The woman reached out an arm, grabbed hold of Gabrielle"s extended hand, and began to pull. Gabrielle cried out as her bruised hips were sc.r.a.ped past wooden struts, then almost choked as her face was pressed into the mud.
Then she was sitting upright, leaning against the side of the plane, blinking at the patch of white glare that was the sun. A hand touched the side of her face, unb.u.t.toned her mask, peeled it back.
"h.e.l.lo," said the enemy sergeant. Her voice was thick, choked, as if she"d been crying.
But no one ever cried. Gabrielle felt a pit open up beneath her, a pit which was as deep as the drop from the walls of the Chateau de Septangy into the village square.
- Mamma wants me for the photograph - Why hadn"t she stayed?
"h.e.l.lo," repeated the woman, when Gabrielle didn"t respond. "My name"s Benny." She paused. " Professor Professor Benny Summerfield. At your service. And you"re a very, very, very lucky little girl." Benny Summerfield. At your service. And you"re a very, very, very lucky little girl."