Came runing out amain,

and thrust the paper into my inside pocket, along with the gun and the spare ammo clip. It was just at that moment that I heard the sharp metallic sound coming from the front of the dark and deserted plane. CHAPTER FIVEMonday 6 P.M.7 P.M. For maybe five seconds, maybe ten, I sat there without moving, as rigid and motionless as the dead man by my side, bent right arm frozen in the act of folding the newspaper cutting into my parka pocket. Looking back on it, I can only think that my brain had been half numbed from too long exposure to the cold, that the shock of the discovery of the savagely murdered men had upset me more than I would admit even to myself, and that the morgue-like atmosphere of that chill metal tomb had affected my normally unimaginative mind to a degree quite unprecedented in my experience. Or maybe it was a combination of all three that triggered open the floodgates to the atavistic racial superstitions that lurk deep in the minds of all of us, the nameless dreads that can in a moment destroy the tissue veneer of our civilisation as if it had never been, and send the adrenalin pumping crazily into the bloodstream. However it was, I had only one thought in mind at that moment, no thought, rather, but an unreasoning blood-freezing certainty: that one of the dead pilots or the flight engineer had somehow risen from his seat and was walking back towards me. Even yet I can remember the frenzy of my wild, frantic hope that it wasn't the co-pilot, the man who had been sitting in the right-hand pilot's seat when the telescoping nose of the airliner had folded back on him, mangling him out of all human recognition. Heaven only knows how long I might have sat there, petrified in this superstitious horror, had the sound from the control cabin not repeated itself. But again I heard it, the same metallic scraping sound as someone moved around in the darkness among the tangled wreckage of the flight deck, and as the touch of an electric switch can turn a room from pitch darkness to the brightness of daylight, so this second sound served to recall me, in an instant, from the thrall of superstition and panic to the world of reality and reason, and I dropped swiftly to my knees behind the high padded back of the seat in front of me, for what little shelter it offered. My heart was still pounding, the hairs still stiff on the back of my neck, but I was a going concern again, my mind beginning to race under the impetus invariably provided by the need for do xrays damage digital cameras self-preservation. And that self-preservation entered very acutely into it I did not for a moment doubt. A person who had killed three times to achieve her ends -1 had no doubt at all as to the identity of the person in the control cabin, only the stewardess had seen me leave for the planeand protect her secret wouldn't hesitate to kill a fourth. And she knew her secret was no longer a secret, not while I lived, I had stupidly made my suspicions plain to her. And not only was she ready to kill, but she had the means to killof the fact that she carried a gun and was murderously ready to use it I'd had grisly evidence in the past few minutes. Nor need she hesitate to use it: apart from the fact that falling snow had a peculiarly blanketing effect on all sound, the south wind would carry the crack of a pistol-shot away from the cabin. Then something snapped inside my mind and I was all of a sudden fighting mad. Perhaps it was the thought of the four dead menfive, including the co-pilotperhaps it was the inevitable reaction from my panic-stricken fear of a moment ago, and perhaps, too, it had no little to do with the realisation that I, too, had a gun. I brought it out from my pocket, transferred the torch to my left hand, jumped up, pressed the torch button and started running down the aisle. It was proof enough of my utter inexperience in this murderous game of hide-and-seek that it was not until I was almost at the door at the forward end of the cabin that I remembered how easy it would have been for anyone to crouch down behind the backs of one of the rearward facing front seats and shoot me at point-blank range as I passed. But there was no one there and as I plunged through the door I caught a fleeting glimpse of a dark muffled figure, no more than a featureless silhouette in the none too powerful beam of my torch, wriggling out through the smashed windscreen of the control cabin. I brought up my automaticthe thought that I could be indicted on a murder charge for killing a fleeing person, no matter how criminal a person, never entered my mindand squeezed the trigger. Nothing happened. I squeezed the trigger again, and before I remembered the existence of such a thing as a safety-catch the windscreen was no more than an empty frame for the thickening snow that swirled greyly in the darkness beyond, and I plainly heard the thud of feet hitting the ground.Cursing my stupidity, and again oblivious of the perfect target