Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 7, No. 9, September 1962

He could not see well. He set a dogged course through the mesquite. It took him along the base of a triangle formed by the two roads. His vision, impaired by powder burns, was not adequate to show him the catclaw and prickly pear through which he was running. Cactus speared him, forming a diversionary pain for that which already seared his shoulder.

He ran, head down and panting, falling and getting up again, as he had never run before. He felt his compressed lungs reach for air, but they did it without his volition. He knew vaguely that if he could keep going, could move fast enough, he could reach the Santo Tomas road when the truck was making the angle of the triangle.

It was the longest football field he had ever had to run. It was like running its full length through all eleven men of the opposition, plus at least half of the substitutes from the bench. And the roaring in his ears became the cheering of the crowd, on its feet now and urging him on as the white H of the goal posts loomed before him.

Then abruptly it wasn’t the football field, not the tackling players, not even the goal posts. It was a dust-filled road, it was a stinking roaring exhaust, it was the square rear of a waddling, tarp-covered truck moving just beyond the reach of his finger tips, and the H was formed by the white cotton rope that held the trap from being blown off in the wind of the truck’s own making.

Somehow he got his fingers under the rope. Someway he got another hand up higher, taking giant strides as the truck pulled him along. With a great reserve of strength he pulled himself up, got a foot on the edge of the bed of the truck, laid his arms on the canvas top, and hoisted himself to it.

The touchdown had been made.

The roaring crowds were there again, heard dimly as he gasped for breath, and each breath a searing pain in his chest. His team mates were jumping up and down around him gleefully, big thunderous men whose weight moved and stirred the hot earth under him.

Dust was in his nostrils...

Then there was no dust. Only heat.

The earth had stopped rocking.

He was aware that there had been noise. Now there was quiet. The sky above was an empty blue void except for the burning pinpoint that was the sun.

Into his awareness crept a swishing sound, growing in volume until it seemed that hell had broken violently loose directly over him. Then, so close he could almost touch it, a T33 jet trainer blurred across his vision. On one wing he read dimly: “USAF.” As the sound of its passage diminished, he heard a wild cursing below him. In Spanish.

Another swishing roar began. He propped up on his elbows, conscious of coming up out of a tremendous bed of pain, and saw another T33 beginning its run.

Memory flooded back. He knew now that he was on a dusty trap over a stake truck, and that the stake truck contained a cargo of wholesale death. Further than that, he saw the truck was on that part of the Santo Tomas road north which passed through a diabolical upthrust black mass of burnt jagged rock in which lay a small valley the Air Force used as a gunnery range.

He knew that the jets passing over weren’t making runs on the truck, but on the range three miles beyond.

When the next jet swished across with its spine-shivering sound, Randolph hitched himself to the edge of the truck and looked over. Suarez was squatted on the ground below him, his head turning to follow the jet’s path. The cursing was coming from him.

He wasn’t a large man. He was thin to the point of emaciation. He wouldn’t weigh a hundred thirty-five, Randolph judged.

Suarez had the push button in his hand. What, Randolph wondered, was he going to do with it? Bomb a jet?

He hitched himself closer to the edge of the truck. He went over the side in a tight ball, oblivious to pain, oblivious to everything but the necessity to flatten this dangerous subvert who so obviously thought that the swooping jets were directing their efforts at him and the truck.

Primary in Randolph’s reasoning, what there was of it, was the fact that he himself was lying right on top of the impending explosion. Suarez, turning on his heels, was calculating the approach of the next jet with his thumb white-knuckled on the push-button. His wild startled upturned look found Randolph as the big man left the solidity of the truck for the infirmity of the air, dropping down like the two-hundred-pound weight that he was.

He felt the give of Suarez’ squatted, doubled-up thin body under him. He heard his wild scream. He felt the terrible shock of the landing, and then he was blasted on a wave of excruciating pain back into the unconsciousness from whence he had come...

He fought the hands on him until the sound of soothing voices got through to him. He saw a familiar face and found a name to put to it: Haynes.

Haynes said, “They won’t be letting anybody talk to you for awhile, so listen good. A helicopter is setting down over there—” he gestured with his chin “—to take you to the base hospital.”