High Citadel. Desmond Bagley

      DESMOND BAGLEY

       High Citadel

       COPYRIGHT

      HARPER

      an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF www.harpercollins.co.uk

      First published in Great Britain by Collins 1965

      Copyright © Brockhurst Publications 1965

      Desmond Bagley asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this works.

      A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

      This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

      All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

      Source ISBN: 9780008211141

      Ebook Edition © January 2017 ISBN 9780008211424

      Version: 2016-11-23

      CONTENTS

       Cover

       Title Page

Copyright

High Citadel

Dedication

One

Two

Three

       Four

       Five

       Six

       Seven

       Eight

       Nine

       Ten

       About the Author

       By the Same Author

       About the Publisher

HIGH CITADEL

       DEDICATION

       To John Donaldson and Bob Knittel

       ONE

      The bell shrilled insistently.

      O’Hara frowned in his sleep and burrowed deeper into the pillow. He dragged up the thin sheet which covered him, but that left his feet uncovered and there was a sleepy protest from his companion. Without opening his eyes he put his hand out to the bedside table, seized the alarm clock, and hurled it violently across the room. Then he snuggled into the pillow again.

      The bell still rang.

      At last he opened his eyes, coming to the realization that it was the telephone ringing. He propped himself up on one elbow and stared hatefully into the darkness. Ever since he had been in the hotel he had been asking Ramón to transfer the telephone to the bedside, and every time he had been assured that it would be done tomorrow. It had been nearly a year.

      He got out of bed and padded across the room to the dressing-table without bothering to switch on the light. As he picked up the telephone he tweaked aside the window curtain and glanced outside. It was still dark and the moon was setting – he estimated it was about two hours to dawn.

      He grunted into the mouthpiece: ‘O’Hara.’

      ‘Goddammit, what’s the matter with you?’ said Filson. ‘I’ve been trying to get you for a quarter of an hour.’

      ‘I was asleep,’ said O’Hara. ‘I usually sleep at night – I believe most people do, with the exception of Yankee flight managers.’

      ‘Very funny,’ said Filson tiredly. ‘Well, drag your ass down here – there’s a flight scheduled for dawn.’

      ‘What the hell – I just got back six hours ago. I’m tired.’

      ‘You think I’m not?’ said Filson. ‘This is important – a Samair 727 touched down in an emergency landing and the flight inspector grounded it. The passengers are mad as hornets, so the skipper and the hostess have sorted out priorities and we’ve got to take passengers to the coast. You know what a connection with Samair means to us; it could be that if we treat ’em nice they’ll use us as a regular feeder.’

      ‘In a pig’s eye,’ said O’Hara. ‘They’ll use you in an emergency but they’ll never put you on their timetables. All you’ll get are thanks.’

      ‘It’s worth trying,’ insisted Filson. ‘So get the hell down here.’

      O’Hara debated whether to inform Filson that he had already exceeded his month’s flying hours and that it was only two-thirds through the month. He sighed, and said, ‘All right, I’m coming.’ It would cut no ice with Filson to plead regulations; as far as that hard-hearted character was concerned, the I.A.T.A. regulations were meant to be bent, if not broken. If he conformed to every international regulation, his two-cent firm would be permanently in the red.

      Besides, O’Hara thought, this was the end of the line for him. If he lost this job survival would be difficult. There were too many broken-down pilots in South America hunting too few jobs and Filson’s string-and-sealing-wax outfit was about as low as you could get. Hell, he thought disgustedly, I’m on a bloody escalator going the wrong