The thin beams of the whip-lamps pencilled across the trees. The balls had stopped but the dogs voiced their excitement, knowing that they would soon be released because that was what the sound of the bells had always meant.
Perhaps Kohn had altered his decision or his advisers in Neueburg, Linsdorf, Hanover had counselled him that Martin had been operating alone with no back-up cell and was a subject for quick despatch rather than interrogation.
The chill of the earth seeped into me. I lay face down.
A car and then another drove fast to the gates, their sound shifting from left to right, behind me. They were military vehicles, heavy-engined, and the earth flickered under the side-wash of their searchlights.
The policy would be circumspect, a reason forwarded to the relevant authority in the Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands: a politically dangerous enemy of the State, shot while attempting to escape.
The heavy engines raced, the wheels losing grip on frost-patches. Men shouted. Boots rang on metal footplates.
I began crawling forward along my rut.
Go to him and give him water and then set him running across open land, then alert the guards. Make him trust you or he may go for cover and we don't want difficulties.
For three nights the moon had been bright through the window but now a nimbus layer filtered its light and at moments the land was almost dark. If I got up and ran for cover they might not see me but I suspected the thought: it could be the onset of panic.
More vehicles were on the move.
I need not go, now, in the direction he had told me. But it was the nearest cover. They would know I was going there, to the trees on the far edge of the field, but if I took another direction they would find me sooner: their lights were already closing in at the flank. I crawled faster.
Men shouted to each other in the frosty night.
Then panic came and all I knew was that my hands clawed earth away from under me and pain began spreading from their fingers into my arms as the hard clods broke away and the smell of moisture rose. The sound was the worst: the innermost core of reason, remote from the tumult of disordered thought, heard an animal burrowing. There is cunning of a kind in panic. Earth was falling across my back, across my legs. My hands shovelled at it, hurrying to make a grave for the living. The only sounds now were the grunt of my own breath and the scrabbling of my own hands: no one was near and this was my world here in the middle of ploughed land and there was work to be done, the quarry to be buried so that the hunters should be deceived as they swung their lights and looked for a running man and gave no thought for worm or mole or this lowly beast whose only shelter was the earth.
Pain swamped my senses and I was lying still, drowning in an ebb and flow of light and dark while the bellows of my lungs reminded me that something was yet alive here, its breath rasping in the hollow of night. Then brilliance swept overhead and lit the ridge of clods my hands had churned. It swept again and I shut my eyes and the panic that had moved me to frenzy now held me paralysed.
Clear thought began. The situation was reviewed. There was nothing more to do: the final decision would now be made by circumstance, by the direction of their lights and the ability of their eyes and the line of their reasoning: they had hunted me before and knew how best to go about it but their very confidence could count against them.
The earth went bright, went dark. The engines throbbed. They turned and backed, sweeping the ploughed area with light, turning and driving on again to probe the trees. Then they sounded to be more distant and the field was dark. And I moved now because the threat in the air had become active: and this danger was the worst. The barking had changed in tone and was more widespread.
They would have given them my coat to scent.
The ruts ran in the direction I had first taken, away from the asylum and towards the thickest of the trees. I knew a road was there: the whole of the ploughed area was ringed. But there was no light showing ahead of me and I scattered earth as I rose and moved at a lurching trot, pitching twice, the horizon spinning, moving on and once halting in an attempt to steady my legs, control them. It was the uneven ground, that was all, the uneven ground: you're far from gone. Get on.
The baying was behind me now and closer.
Light arced across the land to my left and fixed on the low scrub there. The beam appeared to be bouncing but it was my own movement. The ground was bad for running: the frost had crusted the surface and my feet broke through and were caught by the soft earth beneath. I went down again and lay where I fell, listening to the dogs, awareness of their danger blunted by the body's reluctance to get up and go on: it wanted to lie here with its pain and hunger and thirst, to sleep, so as not to feel them.
The dogs must be under the leash still, their handlers making sure it was a true scent before they slipped them, certain of a kill. They were close now.
I was moving again in a drunken run for the dark, for the trees. Brilliance flooded the field's edge and I saw figures grouped. Men's voices mingled with the crying of the dogs.
Somewhere near the trees I fell again, one shoulder hitting the metalled surface of a road. It was very dark here but the shape of the car was visible, massive above me: I had nearly run into it. It had been waiting here with its lights off so that I wouldn't see it. One of its doors swung open. She said: 'Get in.'