Avenger (35 page)

To reach the farmland it had to flow under the runway below the hunter. Clearly strong, square culverts had been inserted below the runway when it was built. Emerging from below the runway on the other side, the now-marshalled water flowed under the chain-link fence as well. Dexter had little doubt there was an impenetrable grille there. Without a grille anyone could have slipped into the stream within the airfield, gone under the wire and used the gully and the flowing water to elude the wandering dogs. Whoever designed the de fences would not have allowed that.

In the mid-morning two things happened right below his eyrie. The Hawker 1000 was towed out of the hangar into the sun. Dexter feared it might be needed to fly the Serb somewhere, but it was only pulled from the hangar to make space. What followed was a small helicopter of the sort traffic police use to monitor flow. It could hover barely inches away from the rock-face if required, and he would have to be invisible to avoid being spotted. But it remained below him with its rotors folded while the engine was serviced.

The other thing was that a quad-bike came from the farm to the electric gate. Using a bleeper to open the gate, the man on the quad motored in, waved a cheery greeting to the mechanics on the apron and went up the runway to where the stream passed under it.

He stopped the quad, took a wicker basket from the back and looked down at the flowing water. Then he tossed several chicken carcasses into the water. He did this on the upstream side of the runway. Then he crossed the tarmac and looked down into the water again. The carcasses must have been carried by the flow to press up against the grille at the departure side.

Whatever was in that water between the escarpment and the grille, it ate meat. Dexter could only think of one fresh-water denizen of those parts that ate meat: the piranha. If it could eat hens, it could eat swimmers. It mattered not if the water touched the roof longer than he could hold his breath, it was already a three-hundred-yard-long piranha pool.

After the chain-link fence the stream ran away through the estate, feeding a glittering tracery of irrigation channels. Other taps underground would duct some of the flow to the workers' village, the villas, the barracks and the master mansion.

The rest, having served all parts of the estate, curved back towards the farm end of the runway, there to tumble over the edge and into the sea.

By early afternoon the heat lay on the land like a great, heavy, suffocating blanket. Out on the estate the workers had toiled from seven until twelve. They were then allowed to find shade and eat what they had brought in their small cotton tote-bags. Until four they were allowed to make siesta before the last three hours' labour, from four to seven.

Dexter lay and panted, envying the salamander basking on a rock a yard away, immune to the heat. It was tempting to throw pints of precious water down his throat to achieve relief, but he knew it must be rationed to prevent dehydration, rather than poured down for pleasure.

At four the clang of the iron rail told the workers to go back to the fields and barns. Dexter struggled to the edge of his escarpment and watched the tiny figures in rough cotton shirts and pants, nut-brown faces hidden under straw sombreros, take up the hoe and mattock again to keep the model farm weed-free.

To his left a battered-looking pickup rolled to the space between the derricks and stopped, after reversing its rear towards the sea. A peon in bloodstained overalls hauled a long steel chute from the back, fixed it to the tailgate and with a pitchfork began to hoist something onto the steel slide. Whatever it was slithered off and fell into the sea. Dexter adjusted his focus. The next forkful gave the game away. It was a black hide with the bullock's head still attached.

Back in New York, examining the photos, he had been struck that even with the cliffs there was nevertheless no attempt to make an access to the beautiful blue sea. No steps down, no diving platform, no moored raft, no lido, no jetty. Seeing the offal go in, he understood why. The water round the whole peninsula would be alive with hammerheads, tigers and great whites. Anything swimming, other than a fish, would last a few minutes.

About that hour Colonel Moreno took a call on a cellphone from his man across the border in Surinam. The Englishman, Nash, had rented his car from a small private and local company, which is why it had taken so long to trace. But he had it at last. It was a Ford Compact. He dictated the number.

The secret policeman issued his order for the morning. Every car park, every garage, every driveway, every track to be scoured for a Ford Compact of this Surinamese registration number. Then changed his orders. Any Ford with any registration number was to be traced. Searching to start at dawn.

Dusk and dark come in the tropics with bewildering speed. The sun had passed behind Dexter's back an hour earlier, bringing relief at last. He watched the estate workers come home, dragging weary feet. They handed in their tools; they were checked through the double-gate one by one, in their five columns, two hundred per column.

They came back to the village to join the two hundred who had not gone to the fields. In the villas and the barracks the first lights came on. At the far end of the triangle a white glow revealed where the Serb's mansion was floodlit.

The mechanics on the airfield closed up and took their mopeds to ride to the villas at the far end of the runway. When all was fenced and locked the Dobermans were released, the world said farewell to 6 September, and the man hunter prepared to go down the escarpment.

Chapter TWENTY-EIGHT

The Visitor

IN A DAY OF PEERING OVER THE EDGE OF THE ESCARPMENT, THE Avenger had realized two things about it that had not shown up on his photographs. One was that it was not steep all the way down. The slope was perfectly climbable until about a hundred feet from the level plain, at which point it dropped sheer. But he had brought more than that length of good climbing rope.

The other was that the nudity of all weeds and shrubs was down to an act of Man, not of Nature. Someone, preparing the de fences had had teams of men come over the edge of the drop in rope cradles to rip every twig and shrub out of the crevices in the slope, so as to give no leaf-cover at all.

Where the saplings were slim enough to be entirely ripped out, they had been. But some had had a stem that was simply resistant to the pull of a man on a rope's end. These had been sawn off short. But not short enough. The stumps formed hundreds of hand-and-toe holds for a climber going down or up.

In daylight such a climber would have been instantly visible, but not in darkness.

By 10 p.m. the moon was up, a sickle moon, just enough to give dim light to the climber, not enough to make him visible against the shale face. Only delicacy would be needed not to cause a rock-fall. Moving from stump to stump, Dexter began to ease his way down to the airfield below.

When the slope became too steep even for climbing, Dexter used the coiled rope around his shoulders to abseil the rest.

He spent three hours on the airfield. Years earlier another of his 'clients' from the Tombs in New York had taught him the gentlemanly art of picking locks and the set of picks he carried with him had been made by a master.

The padlock on the doors of the hangar he left alone. The double doors would have rumbled if they were rolled back. There was a smaller door to one side with a single Yale-type locking mechanism and it cost him no more than thirty seconds.

It takes a good mechanic to repair a helicopter, and an even better one to sabotage it in such a manner that a good mechanic could not find the fault and mend it, or even notice the tampering.

The mechanic the Serb employed to look after his helicopter was good, but Dexter was better. Up close he recognized the bird as an EC 120 Eurocopter, the single-engine version of the twin EC 135. It had a big Perspex bubble at the front end with excellent all-round, up-and-down observation for the pilot and the man beside him, plus room for three more behind them.

Dexter concentrated not on the main rotor mechanism but on the smaller tail rotor. If that malfunctioned, the chopper would simply not be fit to fly. By the time he had finished, it was certainly going to malfunction and be very hard to repair.

The door of the Hawker 1000 was open, so he had a chance to inspect the interior and ensure that the executive jet had had no serious internal reconfiguration.

When he locked up the main hangar he broke into the mechanics' store, took what he wanted but left no trace. Finally he jogged gently to the far end of the runway, close to the backs of the residential villas, and spent his last hour there. In the morning one of the mechanics would notice with irritation that someone had borrowed his bicycle from where it leaned against the back fence.

When he had done all he came to do, Dexter found his hanging rope and climbed back to the stout stump where it was tied. Beyond that, he climbed, moving from root to root until he was back in his eyrie. He was soaked to the point where he could have wrung the sweat from his clothes. He consoled himself with the thought that body odour was one thing no one was going to notice in that part of the world. To replace the moisture, he allowed himself a full pint of water, checked the level of the remaining liquid, and slept. The tiny alarm in his watch woke him at six in the morning, just before the iron bar began to clang against the hanging rail far below.

At seven, Paul Devereaux raised McBride in his room at the Camino Real hotel.

"Any news?" asked the man from Washington.

"None," said McBride. "It seems pretty sure he came back masquerading as an Englishman, Henry Nash, resort developer. Then he vaporized. His car has been identified as a rented Ford Compact from Surinam. Moreno is starting a country wide trawl for any Ford about now. Should have news sometime today."

There was a long pause from the Counter-Terrorist Chief, still sitting in a robe in his breakfast room in Alexandria, Virginia, before leaving for Langley.

"Not good enough," said Devereaux. "I'm going to have to alert our friend. It will not be an easy call. I'll wait till ten. If there is any news of a capture or imminent capture before then, call me at once."

"You got it," said McBride.

There was no such news. At ten Devereaux made his call. It took ten minutes for the Serb to be summoned from the swimming pool to the radio shack, a small room in his basement which, despite its traditional name, was no shack and contained some highly modern and eavesdrop-free communications equipment.

At half past ten Avenger noticed a flurry of activity on the estate below him. Off-roads streamed from the mansion on the foreland, leaving trails of dust behind them. Below him the EC 120 was wheeled out of the hangar and its main rotors spread and locked into flying mode.

"Someone," he mused, 'appears to have lit the blue touch-paper."

The helicopter crew arrived from their homes at the end of the runway on two motor scooters. Within minutes they were at the controls and the big rotors began slowly to turn. The engine kicked into life and the rotor rate rapidly increased to warm-up speed.

The tail rotor, vital to stop the whole machine from spinning round its own main axis, was also whirring round. Then something in its core bearings seemed to snag. There was a grinding of suffering metal and the spinning hub destroyed itself. A mechanic waved frantically to the two men inside the Perspex bubble and drew his hand across his throat.

The pilot and observer had been told by the instrument panel that they had a major bearing failure in the tail. They closed down. The main rotors ground to a halt and the crew climbed back out. A group formed round the tail, staring upwards at the damaged prop.

Uniformed guards poured into the village of the absent peons and began to search the cabanas, stores, even the church. Others, on quads, went off across the estate to spread the word to the gang-masters to keep an eye open for any signs of an intruder. There were none. Such signs as there had been eight hours earlier had been too well disguised.

Dexter put the uniformed guards at around one hundred. There was a community of about a dozen on the airfield, and the twelve hundred workers. Given more security personnel, plus domestic staff out of sight in the grounds of the mansion and twenty more technicians at the generating station and various repair shops, Dexter now had an idea how many he was up against. And he still had not seen the mansion itself and its no doubt complex de fences Just before midday Paul Devereaux called his man in the storm centre. "Kevin, you have to go over and visit with our friend. I have spoken to him. He is in a high state of temper. I cannot stress enough how vital it is that this wretch plays his part in Project Peregrine. He must not butt out now. One day I'll be able to tell you how vital he is. For the moment, stand by him until the intruder is caught and neutralized. Apparently his helicopter is malfunctioning. Ask the colonel for a jeep to get you over the sierra. Call me when you get there."

At midday Dexter watched a small coaster approach the cliffs. Holding station in the water just clear of the rocks, the freighter discharged crates from its deck and holds, which the derricks hoisted to the concrete apron where flat-back pickups awaited them. Clearly they were for those luxuries the hacienda could not produce.

The last item was a thousand-gallon fuel tank, an aluminium canister the size of a fuel tanker. An empty one was lowered to the boat's deck, and it steamed away across the blue ocean.