the pressure of my hands and knees compacted the snow into ice and I couldn’t make any headway until I learned to keep the pressure directly downward as I went on crawling with the lines on my right side; that was the side where the rocks sloped away to the edge of a shelf and I didn’t know how big the drop was. Any drop would be too big if I went over because there wasn’t time to flake out and start all over again when I came to: by the closeness of their sound I didn’t need to know how many seconds I’d got left to do this job; I knew it had to be done in the fastest time the organism could manage.

The snow slipped under my hands. Even though I tried to keep the pressure downward the snow slipped sometimes and my head swung and the light flickered again and the noise softened away. The primitive brain was moving its creature along and there was no need to do anything about that: it was pushing me at a speed that was just this side of losing consciousness; but the term consciousness was relative because I wasn’t capable of working anything out: there must have been choices and alternatives for me but I didn’t think of any; I just kept crawling through the haze and over the ice towards the indeterminate point in the distance where I could start pulling at the canopy.

Think.

I can’t think. Haze, rocks, the fall of the soft flakes, the enormous drumming in the sky. Those are my thoughts.

But there were vague periods of cerebration when the pain seemed less:

perhaps I ought to be crawling away from the canopy instead of towards it because they were going to see it at any second, now and then they’d see me too. If I turned round and moved in the other direction I could find a cleft in the rocks, some kind of shelter.

Think snow.

Yes, it’s snowing. And they’re coming.

The whole sky thundered with them now and my skull was filled with the noise and I stopped crawling and looked upward and saw one of them, a darkness moving through the whiteness not far above the rocks ahead of me where the parachute canopy was lying. I kneeled there swaying as the air came in sudden gusts, whirling the snow against me and past me in a small blizzard, blinding me.

Think camouflage.

Kneeled with my head hanging. Basic thought process: too late, they must have seen it, so forth.

The sky hammered and the snow came blowing, darting against my face and sticking there. When I opened my eyes and looked down I couldn’t see my hands because the snow had covered them, and the whole thing came together and I got the point, camouflage, yes, the stuff was covering that canopy too. Started shuffling along the other way, fast as I could, the thing was to get as far as possible from this area because they’d be searching along a narrow band in the direction of the Finback’s final flight, and they’d see me even if they didn’t see the canopy or the seat or the lines under the cover of snow.

There was another one coming. It was somewhere ahead of me again but I knew I was facing the opposite direction now so it was no good going that way. My hands slipped as I turned round and I got terribly annoyed and stood up and went forward with my shoulders leaning against the haze and no real sense of tilting over until the rock came up and I made a half-roll to the right and finished on my hand and knees again you bastards will you go away you bastards with the whole sky swinging and the sound of them booming in my head, the last of the thoughts drowned out by the force of it, only a flicker of awareness now, the awareness that I was some kind of animal dodging and scrambling on the mountainside as the eagles came in for the kill.

Period of total unconsciousness.

Better, quite a lot better when I surfaced and looked around me. It could have been hours since I fell but it was obviously minutes because another one was coming in and I picked myself up and staggered across the rocks trying to get away from it but it was no go: the thing was heading straight towards me and it wouldn’t matter which way I went because I couldn’t go far enough to get out of sight. The visibility was about a hundred yards and I could make out a group of boulders, immense blobs in the haze, their outlines rounded by the juggernaut descent they’d made from higher in the range.

I would have to reach them.

Various objections: too far, too little time, so forth. Ignore.

The thing above me was so loud now that I couldn’t understand why it was still invisible: there was just the wasteland of white, with the earth meeting the sky at no particular level, white upon white, and somewhere in it the relentless hammering din of that machine getting closer, louder, while I stood there for another second trying to see it before I moved again, lurching over the rocks with the body leading the mind, the feet finding their purchase by reflex alone and the hands spread against the haze to push it away and let me see as I ran on, let me see the boulders.

The sky had become a storm.

Run.

Run through the storm and keep running.

It’s too far, and too slippery. They won’t see me in all this snow.

That’s dangerous thinking: they’ll be using field glasses and you’re black against white, don’t stop.

Feet skittering and the air freezing in the lungs, aching against the

teeth, stinging the eyes. They won’t see me now if I -

Don’t stop.

The whole world white and without perspective, without definition, a wilderness without end. Don’t stop.

The pace dizzying and the swirling snow mesmeric, I could run as easily with my eyes shut but that would send me off my balance and if I fell down again it would be for the last time because they’d seen me. The boulders were close now, great white shapes humped against the sky with only the grey of shadows to show where they were.

The thundering of the machine was a physical weight trying to push me down and I shouted at it but couldn’t hear anything. I had to look upward now because I was afraid of something so enormous pouncing on me without seeing it: in the final seconds I would have to take some kind of action, scratch at it, beat my hand against it before it blotted me out.

And here it came, a black mass taking shape in the whiteness, the snow beginning to whip into clouds under the storm of the rotors, the air screaming and the rocks trembling under the tumult coming from the machine. It was moving slowly and was low enough for me to see the numbers on it as I reached the boulders and pitched down and burrowed into the crevice below them and stayed there with my eyes shut and my lungs heaving while the sound drew down and over me, passing me by and leaving a vortex in the air that whipped and fluttered at the rocks before dying away, slowly dying away.

The silence was total.

8178716 38 198 18765413 17 1 829.

It was very cold. After the heated confines of the cockpit this degree of exposure was getting through to my bones. I hadn’t changed out of the uniform yet: it was added protection under the hunting furs.

The falling snow accentuated the silence: it provided movement and with movement there is usually noise and there was no noise, and the silence seemed more intense. There had been no further aerial activity: the helicopters had made three more runs along their line of search, spreading out each time they came back and flying slowly up the mountainside, following its contours. Now they had gone. I didn’t know whether they’d located the wreckage.

8 1876 23 489873890 38 782 1 0109.

In the final briefing my instructions had been to disappear at the end of the airborne phase by ejecting at very low altitude and letting the Finback fly into the Khrebet Tarbagatay range and destruct. The missile had taken care of this requirement and the only thing I had failed to do was to photograph the suspect village near Yelingrad, because the surface-to-air crews had opened fire too soon; but Yelingrad was the target area and I might dig up some material on the village later, possibly something better than low-level photographs.