"Trevor, Elleston as Hall, Adam - Quiller 06 - The Scorpion Signal 1.1" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hall Adam)

NO ESCAPE...

The KGB kidnaps a top British spy, and the lives of the Leningrad cell are immediately endangered.

Quiller is sent to get him out.

Escaping from the Lubyanka will be harder...



Adam Hall

The Scorpion Signal (1979)



1 Shapiro

I turned again, wheeling into the wind with the edge of the' cliff a hundred feet below me. The air feathered against my face, numbing it, and tears crept back from the corners of my eyes, drying on the skin. A pale sun was turning the sea into hammered gold, below on my right side, and the waves were rolling in ice-blue arcs, hanging poised for an instant before they shattered along the shore.

It had been the twentieth turn: I'd been counting them. I was now half hypnotized by the sliding images of grass and cliff and sand and sea as they floated below my prone body, and by the periods of near-weightlessness as the wind gusts dropped me into the troughs and lifted me out again. A minute ago two gulls had come abreast of me and drifted alongside not far away, their sharp heads turned to watch me as they wondered what I was; inland I could see our three shadows gliding in perfect formation across the short brown grass of the cliff top, two small ones and the third much bigger but still the shape of a bird, not of a man. By a degree, however small, I was taking on their character, watching the land below and feeling the lie of the wind, the muscles compensating as evolution worked on my humanoid body and adapted its behaviour to the needs of a bird.

I broke the next turn at ninety degrees and went downwind across the edge of the cliff to try out the air on the lee side. For a moment the car was directly below me and I saw Norton again standing near it and gazing up. Another car was pulling in rather fast from the cliff road and bouncing over the grass, but I lost sight of it as the sail hit some turbulence. I worked on the bar, tilting it back to gain speed and pulling the nose up to get some more height; then I veered into the wind and crossed the cliff again, turning to drift parallel with it After the next turn I saw the other car had pulled up alongside Norton's MG. There were a couple of men in dark uniforms, and Norton started waving to me with wide urgent gestures. I checked the sail and rigging but couldn't see anything wrong. I didn't expect to: I had a rough idea of what had come up. At the end of the run I turned and moved inland again. All three of them were waving to me with flailing downward motions, putting a lot of expression into it; I could now see the white letters on the back of the second car. I didn't like it, any of it, because I'd been on leave only two weeks and my nerves were still trying to shake themselves out.

I made three more runs, trying to forget about them, but they began using the horns at me and a siren wailed into life and died again. They were still waving, so I compromised: I think I could have got enough height to come in and land on the grass and ask them what the hell they wanted, but I gave myself a final fling and put the nose down and swooped over their heads in a long arrowing dive across the cliff and the beach and the sea, wheeling against the beaten gold reflection and moving into wind again, lowering, the trailing edge fluttering near stalling point a few feet above the ground; then I put the nose down and ran in with my feet ploughing up the sand as I got the last of the wind out of the sail. I was still dismantling when Norton came sprinting along from the cliff path to help me.

'London,' he said 'I'm frozen stiff,' I told him. 'Look after this, will you?' I left him and ran hard for a mile, as far as the pier and back, feeling better because I'd worked a bit of the frustration out: there was absolutely no point in getting annoyed just because he'd mentioned London. They couldn't send me out again, not this soon, 'Police escort,' Norton said as he strapped the spars together, 'Not my fault.'

'All I need,' I said, 'is a phone.'

'And the best of luck.'

'Oh, for Christ's sake shut up.'

I hated panic, and a police escort meant someone in London was panicking.

It was ten minutes before we got the kite up the steps in the cliff. The two cops helped us stow it on the rack of Norton's MG, asking a lot of silly questions, what did it feel like, wasn't it dangerous, so forth. They followed us to the hotel and I used the telephone and talked to three people, one of them Tilson; then I put the phone down and came back to the lobby and told Norton:

'You weren't joking.'

He puffed out his cheeks. 'Are you taking your car?'

'Yes. I'll need it to come back in, tomorrow.'

He didn't make any comment. The two cops were looking at us from the entrance doors and one of them called out:

'We were told to get a move on. It's up to you.'

I went over to the desk to pay my bill.