A broad arrow with a goose-wing:

him, ready for the explosive leap that would take him across that tiny space in a split second of time and I believed he could do exactly what he said. So, too, I suspected, did Smallwood. "Your old. man?" he inquired. "Your father?" Zagero nodded. "Good." Smallwood showed no surprise. "Into the tractor cabin with him, Zagero. We'll exchange him for the German girl. Nobody cares about her." His point was clear. I couldn't see how we could offer any danger to Smallwood and Corazzini now, but Smallwood was a nan who guarded even against impossibilities: Levin would be a far better surety for Zagero's conduct than Helene. Levin half-walked, was half-carried into the tractor cabin. With Corazzini and Smallwood both armed, resistance was hopeless: Smallwood had us summed up to a nicety. He knew we were desperate men, that we would fling ourselves on him and his gun a moment of desperate emergency: but he also knew that we weren't so desperate as to commit suicide when no lives were in mediate danger. When Levin was inside, Smallwood turned to the young [German girl seated opposite him in the cabin. "Out!" It was then that it happened, with the stunning speed and inevitability that violent tragedy, viewed in retrospect, always seems to possess. I thought perhaps that it was some calculated plan, a last-minute desperate effort to save us that made Helene Fleming act as she did, but I found out later that she had merely been driven and goaded into a pain-filled unreasoning anger and resentment and despair by the agony she had suffered in her shoulder from having had her arms bound for so many long hours in the cruel jolting discomfort of the tractor cabin. As she passed by Smallwood she stumbled, he put up an arm either to help her or ward her off, and before he had realised what was happeningit must have been the last quarter from which he expected any show of violence or resistanceshe kicked out blindly and knocked the gun spinning out of his hand to land in the snow beneath. Smallwood sprang after it like a catthe speed was unnecessary, the low growl of warning from an armed Corazzini put paid to any ideas we might have had of taking advantage of the situationpicked up the gun and whirled round, the gun lining up on Helene, his eyes narrowed to slits against the beam of the searchlight, his face twisted into an unrecognisable snarl, the lips drawn far back over the teeth. I'd been wrong once more about Smallwoodhe could kill without reason. hp digital camera r607 "Helene!" Mrs Dansby-Gregg was the nearest to her, and her voice was high-pitched, almost a scream. "Look out, Helene!" She plunged forward to push her maid to one side, but I don't think Smallwood even saw her: he was mad with fury, I knew he was, and nothing on earth was going to stop him from pressing that trigger. The bullet caught Mrs Dansby-Gregg squarely in the back and pitched her headlong to fall face down in the frozen snow. Already Smallwood's moment of uncontrollable rage was spent as if it had never been. He said not another word, just nodded to Corazzini and jumped up on to the tail of the tractor cabin to keep us covered with searchlight and gun as Corazzini gunned the motor, engaged gear and lumbered off into the darkness to the west. We stood in a forlorn huddled little group and watched the train pass us by, the tractor, the tractor sled, the dog sledge and finally the huskies themselves, running on the loose traces astern. I heard Helene murmur something to herself, and when I bent to listen she was saying in a strange, wondering voice: "Helene. She called me 'Helene'." I stared at her as if she were mad, glanced down at the dead woman at my feet then gazed unseeingly after the receding lights of the Citroen until both the lights and the sound had faded and vanished into the snow-filled darkness of the night. CHAPTER ELEVENFriday 6 P.M.Saturday 12.15 P.M. The white hell of that night, the agony of the bitter dreadful hours that followedand God only knows how many hours these were -is a memory that will never die. How many hours did we stagger and lurch after that tractor like drunk or dying mensix hours, eight, ten? We didn't know, we shall never know. Time as an independent system of measurement ceased to exist: each second was an interminable unit of suffering, of freezing, of exhausted marching, each minute an son where the fire in our aching leg muscles fought with the ice-cold misery of hands and feet and faces for domination in our minds, each hour an eternity which we knew could never end. Not one of us, I am sure, expected to live through that night. The thoughts, the emotions of these hours I could never afterwards recall. Chagrin there was, the most bitter I have ever known, an overwhelming mortification and self-condemnation that I had all along been deceived with such childish ease, that I had been powerless to offer any hindrance or