Other Paths to Glory Read Free Page B

months’ work in the briefcase, muggers - mindless thugs who would as soon empty its contents into the river as give it back to him once they had found it all to be valueless –
    ‘Please don’t - ‘ he gasped. But the words were cut off as the man who had spoken to him grabbed his free arm, bending him double over the top rail so that his feet almost left the ground.
    The hold on each of his arms tightened, but the pressure on his back slackened as the hands there shifted down his body to the inside of his thighs. He found himself staring down uncomprehendingly at the olive-green water six feet below him, where it first rippled against the closed weir gate on his left and then slid in a smooth cataract into the open one directly beneath. The roar of the weir was deafening.
    Even before the hands on his thighs betrayed his assailants’ intention the sight and sound of the water had sounded an alarm signal in his brain, tensing his body into rigidity.
    Not his briefcase - oh, Christ! Not his briefcase and not muggers -
    Then he was flying up and over, arms and legs released, flailing and kicking wildly against nothing, darkness and light whirling and the water and noise coming up to meet him - exploding in his face - dragging him downwards. His knees struck the concrete lip of the weir spillway and he was instantly swept over it, his shoulder striking the first leg of the bridge with a bone-cracking shock. He felt himself tumbling and rolling helplessly, and then something slammed into the pit of his stomach - one moment he had been part of the torrent, and the next it was bursting over him, battering him and filling his eyes and nose and mouth. He fought the unbearable pressure on his lungs until his chest seemed full of fire and consciousness was only pain.
    Then, unbelievably, he could breathe and breathe and breathe, each breath a wonderful burning agony. He was still somehow suspended in noise and darkness and water, but in an incomprehenisible bubble of air.
    Where am I?
    There was a slimy hardness under his cheek and under his fingers. He groped slowly over the slime until he felt a solid object - a stanchion of some sort? A pillar?
    God! He was still under the bridge - under the bridge and wedged in the angle of a supporting pillar and an iron cross-girder, wedged like a piece of river flotsam. The lower half of his body was held against the upright by the solid cataract of water racing through the open gate, a stream now buffeting him and cascading over him in a great arch of spray. But the upper half was lying in the protection of the closed gate, in the mere trickle coming from underneath it; it had been that diverted spray caused by his own body which had been drowning him as he struggled instinctively to raise his head above it, and only in beginning to lose consciousness had his mouth and nostrils dropped into safety below it.
    Slowly he tested the pieces of his body. Each piece moved, although he was now aware that the freezing force with which he had been rammed against the pillar had been tremendous. In fact, he could feel nothing except a roaring, numbing cold spreading through him, beyond pain and fear. He had to get out of it, away from it, or it would kill him just as surely as the river itself had tried to do.
    But it hadn’t been the river … a vague memory of events which had occurred seconds before he had been swept under the bridge asserted itself. Someone had deliberately thrown him into the weir, deliberately and unbelievably … casually.
    No, not casually -
    ‘ It is Mr Mitchell, isn ‘ t it?
    The noise all around him was so scarefying that he couldn’t hold his thoughts together.
    ‘ It is Mr Mitchell, isn ’ t it?
    It was Mr Mitchell, and no one else but Mr Mitchell, who was meant to be drowning now, drifting at the bottom of the Conservancy basin below the weir - or tumbling round and round in the undertow in that crashing water a few feet away. The thought of it was blurred and