Avenger (34 page)

For McBride it was a question of orders. He did not know it, but Devereaux feared Zoran Zilic might panic and refuse to fly to Peshawar to meet the Al Qaeda chiefs. Sooner or later someone was either going to have to find the manhunter or tell Zilic.

"Please keep me posted, colonel," he said as he turned to leave. "I'll stay at the Camino Real. It seems they have a spare room."

"There is one thing that puzzles me, senor," said Moreno as McBride reached the door. He turned.

"Yes?"

"This man, Medvers Watson. He tried to enter the country without a visa."

"So?"

"He would have needed a visa to get in. He must have known that. He did not even bother."

"You're right," said McBride. "Odd."

"So, I ask myself, as a policeman, why? And you know what I answer, senor?"

"Tell me."

"I answer: because he did not intend to enter legally; because he did not panic at all. Because he intended to do exactly what he did. To fake his own death, find his way back to Surinam. Then quietly return."

"Makes sense," admitted McBride.

"Then I say to myself: so he knew we were waiting for him. But how did he know?"

McBride's stomach turned over at the full implication of Moreno's reasoning.

Meanwhile, invisible in a patch of scrub on the flank of a mountain, the hunter watched, noted and waited. He waited for the hour that had not yet come.

Chapter TWENTY-SEVEN

The Vigil

DEXTER WAS IMPRESSED AS HE STUDIED THE TRIUMPH OF SECURITY and self-sufficiency that a combination of nature, ingenuity and money had accomplished on the peninsula below the escarpment. Were it not dependent on slave labour, it would have been admirable.

The triangle jutting out to sea was larger than he had imagined in the scale model in his New York apartment.

The base, on which he now looked down from his mountain hideout, was about two miles from side to side. It ran, as his aerial photos had shown, from sea to sea and at each end the mountain range dropped to the water in vertical cliffs.

The sides of the isosceles triangle he estimated at about three miles, giving a total land area of almost three square miles. The area was divided into four parts, each with a different function.

Below him at the base of the escarpment was the private airstrip and the workers' village. Three hundred yards out from the cliff a twelve-foot-high chain-link fence topped with razor wire ran across the land from edge to edge. Where it met the sea, he could observe through his binoculars in the growing light, the fence jutted over the cliff and ended in a tangle of rolls of razor wire. No way of slipping round the end of the fence; no way of going over the top.

Two-thirds of the strip created between the escarpment and the wire was dedicated to the airfield. Below him, flanking the runway, was a single large hangar, a marshalling apron and a range of smaller buildings that had to be workshops and fuel stores. Towards the far end, near the sea to catch the cooler breezes, were half a dozen small villas which he presumed to be the home of the aircrew and maintenance staff.

The only access and egress to and from the airfield was a single steel gate set in the chain-link fence. There was no guardhouse near the gate, but a pair of visible rods, and bogey wheels beneath the leading edge, indicated it was electrically powered and would open to the command of the appropriate bleeper. At half past five, nothing moved on the airfield.

The other third of the strip was consigned to the village. It was segregated from the airfield by another fence, running from the escarpment outwards and also topped with razor wire. The peasants were clearly not allowed on or near the airfield.

The clanging of the iron bar on the railway track stopped after a minute and the village stumbled into life. Dexter watched the first figures, clad in off-white trousers and shirts, with rope-soled espadrilles on their feet, emerge from the groups of tiny cabanas and head for the communal wash-houses. When they were all assembled, the watcher estimated about twelve hundred of them.

Clearly there were some staff who ran the village and would not go to work in the fields. He saw them working in open-fronted lean-to kitchens, preparing a breakfast of bread and gruel. Long trestle tables and benches formed the refectories under palm-thatch shelters, which would protect against occasional rain but more usually against the fierce sun.

At a second beating of the iron rail, the farm workers took bowls and a half-loaf and sat to eat. There were no gardens, no shops, no women, no children, no school. This was not a true village but a labour camp. The only remaining buildings were what appeared to be a food store, a general clothing and bedding store and the church with the priest's house attached. It was functional; a place to work, eat, sleep, pray for release and nothing else.

If the airfield was a rectangle trapped between the escarpment, the wire and the sea, so was the village. But there was one difference. A pitted and rutted track zigzagged down from the single col in the whole mountain range, the only access by road to the rest of the republic. It was clearly not suitable for heavy-duty trucks; Dexter wondered how resupply of weighty essentials like gasoline, engine diesel and aviation fuel would take place. When the visibility lengthened he found out.

At the extremity of his vision hidden in the morning mist was the third portion of the estate, the walled five-acre compound at the end of the foreland. He knew from his aerial pictures it contained the magnificent white mansion in which the former Serbian gangster lived; half a dozen villas in the grounds for guests and senior staff; tonsured lawns, flowerbeds and shrubbery; and along the inner side of the fourteen-foot-high protecting wall, a series of lean-to cottages and stores for domestic staff, linen, food and drink.

In his pictures and on his scale model, the huge wall also went from cliff edge to cliff edge, and at this point the land was fifty feet above the sea which surged and thumped on the rocks below.

A lone but massive double-gate penetrated the wall at its centre with a road of pounded hardcore leading up to it. There was a guardhouse inside which controlled the gate-opening machinery, and a parapet ran along the inside of the wall to enable armed guards to patrol its entire length.

Everything between the chain-link fence below the watcher and the wall over two miles away was the food-producing farm. As the light rose, Dexter could confirm what his photos had told him: the farm produced almost everything the community within the fortress could need. There were grazing herds of beef and lamb. Sheds would certainly contain pigs and poultry.

There were fields of arable crops, grains, pulses, tubers. Orchards producing ten kinds of fruit. Acre after acre of salad-vegetable crops either in the open or under long domes of polythene. He surmised the farm would produce every conceivable kind of salad and fruit, along with meat, butter, eggs, cheese, oil, bread and rough red wine.

The fields and orchards were studded with barns and granaries, machine stores, and facilities to slaughter the beasts, mill the grain, bake the bread, press the grapes.

To his right, near the cliff edge but inside the farm, was a series of small barracks for the guard staff, with a dozen better-quality chalets for their officers and two or three company shops.

To his left, also at the cliff edge, also inside the farm, were three large warehouses and a gleaming aluminium fuel-storage farm. Right at the very edge of the cliff were two large cranes or derricks. That solved one problem: heavy cargoes came by sea and were hefted or pumped from the ship below to the storage facilities forty feet above the freighter's deck.

The peons finished their morning meal and again came the harsh clang as the iron bar smashed against the hanging length of rail. This time there were several reactions.

Uniformed guards spilled from their barracks further up the coast to the right. One put a silent whistle to his lips. Dexter heard nothing but out of the farmland a dozen loping Dobermanns emerged in obedience to the call and entered their fenced compound near the barracks. Clearly they had not eaten for twenty-four hours; they hurled themselves at the plates of raw offal set out and tore the meat to pieces.

That told Dexter what happened each sundown. When every staffer and slave was closed off in their respective compounds, the dogs would be released to hunt and prowl the three thousand acres of farmland. They must have been trained to leave the calves, sheep and pigs alone, but any wandering burglar would simply not survive. They were far too many for a single man to begin to combat. Entry by night was not feasible.

The watcher had buried himself so deeply in the undergrowth that anyone below, raising his or her eyes to the crest of the range, would see no glint of sun off lens-glass, nor would he catch a glimpse of the motionless camouflaged man.

At half past six, when the farming estate was ready to receive them, the iron clang summoned the labourers to work. They trooped towards the high gate that separated the village from the farm.

This gate was a far more complicated affair than the one from the airfield to the estate. It opened inwards to the farmland, in two halves. Beyond the gate, five tables had been set up and guards sat behind each. Others stood over them. The peons formed into five columns.

On a shouted command they shuffled forward. Each man at the head of the queue stooped at the table to offer a dog tag round his neck to the seated official. The number on the tag was checked and tapped into a database.

The workers must have lined up in the right column, according to their type of number, for after they were nodded through they reported to a charge-hand beyond the tables. In groups of about a hundred they were led away to their tasks, pausing at a number of tool sheds beside the main track to pick up what they needed.

Some were for the fields, some for the orchards, others were destined for animal husbandry, or the grain mill, the slaughterhouse, the vineyard or the huge kitchen garden. As Dexter watched, the enormous farm came to life. But the security never slackened. When the village was finally empty, the double-gate closed and the men dispersed to their stations, Dexter concentrated on that security and looked for his opening.

It was in the mid-morning that Colonel Moreno heard back from the two emissaries he had sent out with foreign passports in their hands.

In Cayenne, capital of French Guyana to the east, the authorities had wasted no time. They were not best pleased that three innocent game fishermen had been detained for the crime of breaking down at sea, nor that five technicians had been picked up and detained without good cause. All eight French passports were pronounced one hundred per cent genuine and an urgent request was lodged that their owners be released and sent home.

To the west, in Paramaribo, the Dutch embassy said exactly the same about their two nationals; the passports were genuine, the visas in order, what was the problem?

The Spanish embassy was closed, but Colonel Moreno had been assured by the man from the CIA that the fugitive was about five feet eight inches tall, while the Spaniard was over six feet. That just left the missing Mr. Henry Nash of London.

The secret police chief ordered his man in Cayenne to come home, and the man in Parbo to hunt through every car rental agency to find what kind of car the Londoner had rented, and its registration number.

By mid-morning the heat on the hills was intense. A few inches from the unmoving watcher's face a lizard with red, erect ruff behind its head, walking on stones that would fry an egg, stared at the stranger, detected no threat and scuttled on its way. There was activity out by the cliff-top derricks.

Four muscular young men wheeled a thirty-foot aluminium patrol boat to the rear of a Land Rover and hitched up. The LR towed the vessel to a petrol pump where it was fuelled. It could almost have passed for a leisure craft except for the .30 Browning machine gun mounted in the waist.

When the boat was ready for sea, it was towed beneath one of the derricks. Four webbing bands suspended from a rectangular frame ended in four tough steel cleats. These were fixed into strong-points on the boat's hull. With the crew on board, the patrol boat was lifted off the hard pad, swung out to sea and lowered to the ocean. Dexter saw it go out of sight.

Minutes later he saw it again out at sea. The men on board hauled up and emptied two fish traps and five lobster pots, re-baited them, threw them back and resumed their patrol.

Dexter had noted that everything in front of him would collapse into ruin without two life-giving elixirs. One was gasoline, which would power the generator plant situated behind the warehouse of the dock. This would provide the electricity which itself would power every device and motor on the whole estate, from gate opening to power-drill to bedside light.

The other elixir was water, fresh, clean, clear water in a limitless supply. It came from the mountain stream that he had first seen in the aerial photographs.

That stream was now below him and slightly to his left. It bubbled out of the mountainside, having made its way from somewhere deep in the rainforests of the interior.

It emerged twenty feet above the peninsula, tumbled down several rock falls and then entered a concrete-sided channel that had clearly been created for it. From that point, Man took over from Nature.