Assignment Unicorn (24 page)

His first target was the jumpsuit at the end of the short
line of hurrying men.

His hand was shaking, his fingers were wet, the rain dashed
into his eyes.

He took his time, squeezed the trigger.

The jumpsuit buckled, fell to his knees, tried to rise, fell.
The second unicorn behind the leader reacted with a speed to which Durell was
becoming accustomed. He pushed the tall, ragged-haired man down on the path, spun,
started to charge for the ledge where Durell lay prone. Durell steadied his gun
again, aimed for the chest, fired. The gun’s roar was all but swallowed
by the howling wind. The unicorn vanished. The tall man in front spun away and
raced along the path and over the brow of the hill.

Durell slid from the ledge, headed downward into the valley
between
Mattatuck’s
two mountains. He moved at an
easy lope now, watching his footing. He felt uneasiness in the pit of his
stomach, not knowing whether his second shot had been a hit or not. His
instinct was rewarded when he spotted the unicorn coming through the trees.

The man had been hit, but that did not stop him. Durell
tried to duck away, but the unicorn bellowed something to him, raised his
automatic rifle, and blazed away. Splintered branches, twigs and spruce
boughs rained down on Durell’s head. Fear clutched at his stomach. He
fired at a shadow in the rain-swept woods, fired again. The man
kept coming on. He squeezed the Magnum’s trigger a third time.

The man leaped, coming at him, hurled him backward down the
slope. They rolled over and over, locked in a death grip. The man’s chest was
spurting blood, one arm was useless, he had a bullet in his thigh. Durell had not
missed, but he hadn’t stopped die man, either. His
armlock
over Durell’s throat was like iron. His breath was cut off. He hammered at the
man’s back, tried to get his knee up into his groin, clung to the gun. The
man’s face looked demonic. Durell gouged at his eye, bent his elbow, squeezed
the gun between their rain-drenched bodies. They came up suddenly against the
bole of a spruce that towered high into the windy sky. The jolt separated them
by inches—enough for Durell to dig the barrel of the gun into the man’s belly.
He fired for the last time.

The grip across his throat reluctantly, slowly relaxed.

Durell rolled free.

For a long moment he lay face up to the rain and the wind,
letting the cold lash of the elements revive him. There was blood on his chest,
but it was not his own. The unicorn was dead. He got to his knees, peered through
the tangle of hazelnut bushes that grew wild in the little valley. His heart
still pounded. Slowly, now, he trotted for the main path, came out on it, and
waited, listening to the ragged footsteps coming toward him.

“Enoch!” he called.

The footsteps ended abruptly.

“Drop it, Wilderman,” he said.

The man was a shadow among the other shadows of the
storm-lashed forest.

Then he spotted the glint of the man’s glasses. Wilderman
had stepped off the path and into the evergreens. Boughs creaked and cracked
overhead. The rush of the wind was like a continuous, low roll of thunder; the
rain felt icy cold on Durell’s lips.

“Is that you, Durell?”

“Come out where I can see you.”

“Thank God, they’d taken me prisoner. I don’t know what they
planned to do with me.” Wilderman came out to stand on the path. He had a gun
held low in his left hand. His gray hair was plastered flat to his long
head, and a corner of his mouth twitched involuntarily. “What did you do with
them?”

“I killed them both,” Durell said flatly.

“Ah. Yes. Good work, my boy.”

“Where is Dr. MacLeod?”

“Who?”

“Dr. MacLeod?”

“I believe he’s dead. In Scotland. One of his people—ah—turned
on him.”

“So who has the drug formula now?”

“I—ah—I have it, Durell. Better for us, eh? I mean, my boy,
it’s better that IS should have control of it, rather than an international
predator like MacLeod, eh?”

“And where is this formula?”

“On my person,” Wilderman said flatly, and shot at Durell
without warning.

Durell’s left leg was knocked out from under him with
shocking abruptness. He fell, rolled over twice, grabbed at his thigh. He felt
no immediate pain. He raised his head, peered through the brush, saw Enoch Wilderman
moving cautiously toward him along the path.

Durell lay about ten feet to the south of the path and about
fifty feet from where Wilderman proceeded toward him. The man was hunched
forward a bit, his gun thrust ahead of him. Rain drummed down with a hissing
sound. Now and then a sparkle of thin sleet was interspersed with the rain. The
sky was a
sulphurous
yellow.

“Durell!”

He did not answer. He pulled at his wounded leg, bent it
under him, saw the blood oozing through his slacks. At least it did not come in
bright arterial spurts. He backed away on his belly, his gun raised. Too many trees
intervened between them.

“Durell!”

He lay still. All at once Wilderman trotted forward, his
paunch jiggling, his gray hair plastered tightly around his skull. His lips
were skinned back in a grin. For the moment, Durell could not move. Then a
distant roaring, like an approaching locomotive, sounded through the trees. The
wind struck in a demonic gust, and a small pine cracked and toppled over in
Wilderman’s path. The man was swept aside by the thrashing green branches.

“Wilderman, wait!" Durell called.

“Ah. You’re still alive?”

“You can’t make it, Enoch. I took out your radioman and set
the transmitter on automatic Mayday. There will be forces here any minute to
take back the island.”

Wilderman’s laugh was unnatural. “In this weather? Not for a
long time, my boy. Meanwhile, we have the President.”

“But you’ll never get off Mattatuck alive if you harm him.”

“We did not intend to harm him. We merely wished to show the
ISCOPP people how we have built up an elite
superforce
of security men. Using the drug, of course. And then we would all leave.”

“Why did you do it, Enoch?”

There was a long silence. Durell raised his head a bit. He
could not see Wilderman through the tangle of branches in the fallen pine tree.
The wind made a howling noise now. Everything thrashed, cracked, whipped, groaned.
The sound of the sea smashing at the island’s rocky shore was everywhere.
Durell got his leg under him and tried to rise. He couldn’t do it. He fell
backward, arms flailing, and rolled ten feet down the slope into the valley
between West and East Hill.

He heard Wilderman’s voice, shockingly nearby.

“I have spent all my life in security, Durell. I have devoted
everything to my job. When the Internal Security Bureau was formed, I was made
head of it. I created it, fashioned it the way I felt it should be organized.
We became an independent part of the most powerful functioning intelligence force
in the world. The most efficient. The most dedicated. And it was all taken away
from me.”

“When the general put Meecham in over your head?”

“He had no right to do that,” Wilderman’s voice came.

“Maybe he had his reasons.”

“It wasn’t fair! I was cheated. He took away my life. So I
used Dr. MacLeod, I used his formula, I made that poor fool of a Finance
officer, Strawbridge, turn his money-transfer schedules over to me, privately.
I thought it would make Meecham look incompetent, perhaps have him removed.”

“But that didn’t work,” Durell observed.

“I saw another future.” Wilderman’s voice was unnatural,
calling through the roaring storm. “I saw a chance to save the world, to keep
it from anarchy. Fight force and terror with power and more terror.”

“That can‘t work anymore,” Durell jeered.

“It can. It will. If it weren’t for you—”

Durell saw the movement of the other man’s figure through
the wildly waving brush and fired.

He missed.

Wilderman now had him spotted. Durell willed himself to his
feet. The rain blinded him. He tested his leg, limped to the left, downward,
toward the sound of gushing, falling water. A huge spruce that had long ago
been struck by lightning still stood, a gaunt sentinel against the gray and
turbulent sky.

His leg collapsed under him again. He felt the pain now, and
saw that his trouser leg was soaked heavily with blood. A moment of dizziness
engulfed him. The sky and the trees reeled overhead. He thought he heard the
blasting of more explosives, quite close at hand. Someone was shouting in the
distance.

It sounded like Maggie.

“Sam! Sam!”

He searched the wooded hillside painfully. The rain and his
pain blurred his vision. He knew that Wilderman could not afford to leave him
alive.

Something cracked in the dead spruce overhead. Durell
scrunched around, dragging his leg after him. Wilderman was coming up behind
him, still wearing the tight, senseless grin. He looked insane.

“Durell, we have your girl!”

“You son of a bitch.”

“And we are detaining the President as hostage. You’d better
throw down your gun.”

Durell fired at the moving shadow in the wildly waving
brush. He knew he had missed. He fired again and the hammer clicked on an
empty chamber. Frantically, he tried to delve into his pocket for more
cartridges, but Wilderman did not give him much time. The man came toward him
with a rush, paused on the lip of the hollow where he lay, and deliberately
raised his gun in both hands and took aim.

“Goodbye, Durell,” he snarled.

Durell got one cartridge into the cylinder and had no time
for more. He fired his last shot as Wilderman stalked closer to him. The
sound of the Magnum was explosive, ripping and shredding the wild wind. There
was a sudden whirring sound that followed as the dead spruce slanted down and
fell between Durell and his wounded adversary, whose own shot had struck wide
of its target.

Slowly Durell got to his feet. His left leg trembled but
held his weight precariously. He limped toward the tangle of smashed tree
limbs, but the huge bole blocked his passage.

Enoch Wilderman lay pinned under the crushing weight of the
dead spruce with a bullet hole in his chest. Durell thought of the formula, but
it was already too late. Wilderman had thought of it first, and with the
flame from his cigarette lighter he had quickly reduced it to ashes
before Durell could intervene. A slip of paper, outer edge charred unevenly,
was clasped in blood-washed fingers.

The dying man’s face was upturned to the windy, rain-swept
sky. Raindrops glittered like pearls on his broken glasses. He still held onto
the lighter as Durell managed to reach his side and extinguish the small
flame. The ashes of the formula were already scattered in the wind.

52

“THE FACT is, Sam, that the sight of you, alive and well,
when the unicorns were all convinced they would die if not supplied with
MacLeod’s drug, turned the tide of battle in our favor. That man who saw you in
the radio shack passed the good word around. This produced a rebellion in the
ranks, so to speak. When our troops started to arrive—thanks to your distress
signal—they turned over the President and gave up without a fight.”

Meecham stopped talking and looked at the Presidential
helicopter rising from the pad. His bulging eyes showed obvious relief. His
wide mouth curled upward at the corners.

The rain had slackened, the wind had suddenly died. There
was the other side of the storm yet to come, perhaps by nightfall, but for the
moment it was calm.

“You’re sure you’re going to be okay, Sam?”

Meecham looked him over critically. “You seem to have lost a
little blood.”

“I’m fine, sir.”

“You did very well. By the way, how is your girl?”

“I suspect she‘s safe and sound, sir.”

“And Wolfe?”

“Wolfe had the job of distracting Wilderman’s men by setting
off explosives here and there that worried and baffled them. He did his job
well, too."

Meecham nodded his head in agreement.

“I’ll see you later in the cottage.”

53

MEECHAM SAT before the big log fire in the cottage on
the other side of East Hill and accepted a bourbon from Maggie, who wore one of
Durell’s bathrobes as if it had been made for her. She seemed subdued, said little,
and moved about the room quietly and efficiently. Now and then she looked
at Durell with silvery eyes that told him nothing.

Meecham said, “Did you really want to kill him?”

“Yes,” he said. “I had to. A second later and he would have
killed me. I caught him between fire.”

“And what about the falling tree?”

“It didn’t put the bullet in his chest.”

“But it gave him time to destroy the formula.”

“I don’t think we have to worry so long as we know it was
destroyed. I doubt if the President would have cared to use it.”

At this Meecham chuckled. “The President didn’t think any of
it amounted to a hill of beans. But wait until he reads about it in the press
tomorrow morning.”

“It will make a good story, sir. Things have been awfully
quiet lately.”

54

MAGGIE MADE love to him with a desperate ferocity she had
never shown before, Meecham had gone back to the hotel for the night. Wolfe was
asleep downstairs. The rain drummed on the roof over the dark bedroom with renewed
ferocity, but Durell knew it would be over by morning, and perhaps the sun
would be shining again. It was cozy under the blankets. Now and then the
windows rattled.

Later Maggie lay on her back and stared at the beamed
ceiling, their hips touching, their hands clasped between them.

“Sam?”

"I'm awake.”

“Does your leg hurt?”