"O here is my hand," the stranger reply'd,

have heard him had he shouted at the top of his voice. "Well, that was what you wanted, wasn't it?" I asked bitterly. "What I wanted! My God, man, that missile mechanism" "I don't give a single solitary damn about the missile mechanism." I ground the words out between clenched teeth. "Six months from now other scientists will have invented something twice as good and ten times as secret. They're welcome to it, and with pleasure." Hillcrest was shocked, but said nothing. But someone was in agreement with me. "Hear, hear!" Zagero had just come up, his hands swathed to the size of boxing gloves in white bandages. The words were light enough, but his face was grim and his eyes bleak as he stared out across the glacier. "My sentiments exactly, Doc. To hell with their murderous little toys. My old man's in that buggy out there. And your girl." "His girl?" Hillcrest turned, looked sharply at me under creased brows for a long moment, then murmured: "Sorry, boy, I didn't understand." I made no response, but twisted my head as I heard footsteps behind me. It was Joss, hatless and gloveless in his excitement. "Wykenham's anchored, sir," he panted out. "Her" "Get down, man! They'll see you." "Sorry." He dropped to his hands and knees. "Her powerboat's already moving inshore. And there was a flight of four Scimitars already airborne: they should be half-way here already. In two minutes'-time four or five bombers are taking off, with HE and incendiaries. They're slower, but" "Bombers?" I snapped irritably. "Bombers? What do they think this isthe Second Front?" "No sir. They're going to clobber the trawler if Smallwood gets away with that missile mechanism. They won't get a hundred yards." "The hell with their missile mechanism. Do human lives mean nothing to them? What is it, Jackstraw?" "Lights, Dr Mason." He pointed to the spot on the fjord wall where the men from the trawler had already covered two-thirds of the horizontal and vertical distance to the end of the glacier. "Signalling, I think." I saw it right away, a small light, but powerful, winking irregularly. I watched it for a few moments then heard Joss's voice. "It's morse, but it's not our morse, sir." "They're hardly likely to signal in English just for our benefit," I said dryly. I tried to speak fps and digital video camera calmly, to hide the fear, the near despair in my mind, and when I spoke again my voice, I knew, was abnormally matter-of-fact. "It's the tip-off to our friends Small-wood and Corazzini. If we can see the men from the trawler, it's a cinch the men from the trawler can see us. The point is, do Smallwood and Corazzini understand them?" Five seconds later I had my answer in the form of a suddenly deepening roar coming to us across the glacier from the engine of the Citroen. CorazziniHillcrest's binoculars had shown him to be the driverhad understood the danger all right, he was casting caution to the winds and gunning the engine to its maximum. He must have been desperate, desperate to the point of madness, for no sane man would have taken the fearful risks of driving that tractor through sloping crevasse ice with the friction coefficient between treads and surface reduced almost to zero. Or could it be that he just didn't know the suicidal dangers involved? After a few seconds I was convinced he didn't. In the first place, I couldn't see either Corazzini or Smallwood as men who would panic under pressure, no matter how severe that pressure, and in the second place suicidal risks weren't absolutely necessary, they would have stood a more than even chance of getting away with their lives and the -missile mechanism if they had stopped the tractor, got out and picked their cautious way down the glacier on foot, with their pistol barrels stuck in the backs of their hostages. Or would theyrather, did they think they would? I tried fleetingly, frantically, to get inside their cold and criminal minds, to try to understand their conception of us. Did they think that we thought, like them, that the mechanism was all important, that human lives were cheap and readily expendable? If they did, and guessing the quality of Jackstraw's marksmanship with a rifle, would they not be convinced that they would be shot down as soon as they had stepped out on to the ice, regardless of the fate of their hostages? Or did they have a better understanding than that of minds more normal than their own? Even as these thoughts flashed through my mind I knew I must act now. The time for thought, had there ever been such a time, was past. If they were left to continue in the tractor, they would either kill themselves on the glacier or if, by a miracle, they reached the bottom safely, they would then kill their

Supposing to have taken bold Robin Hood,

tractor would arrive if it survived Jackstraw's attempts to halt it: Jackstraw was firing in a line well above us now, but we could still hear the thin high whine of every bullet, the metallic crash as it struck the Citroen. Every bullet went home. But that engine was incredibly tough. We were about half-way across when we heard the engine change gear, the high unmistakable whine of the tractor beginning to overrun its engine. CorazziniI could clearly see him now, even without the aid of binocularsmust have found himself losing control on the steepening slope and was using the engine to brake the Citroen. And then, when we were less than a hundred yards away and after a longer than usual lull in the firing -Jackstraw must have stopped to change magazinesthe sixth shell smashed through the riddled hood and the engine stopped as abruptly as if the ignition had been switched off. The tractor stopped too. On that steep slope this was surprising, the last thing I would have expected, but there was no doubt that not only had it stopped but that it had been stopped deliberately: there was no mistaking the high-pitched screech of those worn brakes. And then I could see the reason why. There was some violent activity taking place in the driving cabin of the tractor, and as we neareda maddeningly slow process, there were dozens of crevasses to be jumped, as many more to be skirtedwe could see what it was. Corazzini and Solly Levin were struggling furiously, and, from thirty or forty yards, it seemed, incredibly enough, that Solly Levin was getting the better of it. He had flung himself completely on top of Corazzini where the latter sat behind the wheel, and was butting him savagely in the face with the top of his bald head, and Corazzini, trapped in the narrow space, could find no room to make use of his much greater strength. Then, abruptly, the door on the driver's side burst openwe could see it clearly, having been lower down than the tractor when it had stopped we were approaching it now almost head onand the two men fell out fighting and struggling furiously. We could see now why Levin had been using his headboth hands were bound behind his back. It had been an act of desperate courage to attack Corazzini in the first place, but the old man wasn't to get the reward he deserved for his selflessness: even as we came up to them Corazzini got his automatic clear and fired down point-blank at Solly Levin who was lying helplessly on his back but still gamely trying to get a leg lock on the bigger man. I was a digital cameras with in camera editing split second too late in getting there, even as I crashed into Corazzini and sent his automatic flying away to slide down the glacier, I knew I was too late, Solly Levin was a crumpled little blood-stained figure lying on the ice even before Corazzini's gun went slithering over the edge of a crevasse. And then I felt myself being pushed to one side, and Johnny Zagero was staring down at the outspread stillness of the man huddled at his feet. For what seemed an eternity, but was probably no more than three seconds, he stood there without moving, then when he turned to Corazzini his face was empty of all expression. It might have been a flash of fear, of realisation that he had come to the end of his road that I saw in Corazzini's eyes, but I could never swear to it, the turn of his head, the sudden headlong dash for the shelter of the ice-covered moraine rocks by the side of the glacier, ten yards away, were so swift that I could be certain of nothing. But swift as he was, Zagero was even swifter: he caught Corazzini before he had covered four yards and they crashed to the glacier together, clawing, punching and kicking in the grim desperate silence of men who know that the winner's prize is his life. "Drop that gun!" I whirled round at the sound of the voice behind me, but all I could see at first was the white strained face of Margaret Ross, the brown eyes dulled with sickness and fear. Involuntarily I brought up the rifle in my hands. "Drop it!" Smallwood's voice was curt, deadly, his face barely visible behind Margaret's shoulder as he peered out through the canvas screen at the rear of the tractor cabin. He was completely shielded by her bodyit was typical of the man's cunning, his ice-cold calculation that he should have waited until our attention was completely distracted before making his move. "And your friend. Quickly now!" I hesitated, glanced at Hillcrestthe only other-man with a weaponto see how he was placed, then jerked my head back again as there came a sudden plop from the silenced automatic and a sharp cry of pain from Margaret. She was clutching her left arm just below the elbow. "Quickly, I said! The next one goes through her shoulder." His voice was soft with menace, his face implacable. Not for a moment did I doubt that he would do exactly as he said: the clatter of Hillcrest's rifle and mine falling on the ice came in the same instant. "Now kick them over the edge

And shows the thing much better than it is,

It was Jackstraw who heard it firstit was always Jackstraw, whose hearing was an even match for his phenomenal eyesight, who heard things first. Tired of having my exposed hands alternately frozen, I had dropped my book, zipped my sleeping-bag up to the chin and was drowsily watching him carving figurines from a length of inferior narwhal tusk when his hands suddenly fell still and he sat quite motionless. Then, unhurriedly as always, he dropped the piece of bone into the coffee-pan that simmered gently by the side of our oil-burner stovecurio collectors paid fancy prices for what they Beguiled with foils of sundry subtle sights imagined to be the dark ivory of fossilised elephant tusksrose and put his ear to the ventilation shaft, his eyes remote in the unseeing gaze of a man lost in listening. A couple of seconds were enough. "Aeroplane," he announced casually. "Aeroplane!" I propped myself up on an elbow and stared at him. "Jackstraw, you've been hitting the methylated spirits again." "Indeed, no, Dr Mason." The blue eyes, so incongruously at