Avenger (39 page)

"He cut himself, that's what the swine did. He cut himself with a knife, then bled over the shirt. He knew that would drive the dogs crazy. Man-blood always does when they're on a kill patrol. So they would smell the blood, worry the fabric and inhale the chilli. We have no tracker dogs until tomorrow."

Van Rensberg counted up the items of clothing.

"He also stripped off," he said. "We're looking for someone stark naked."

"Maybe not," said McBride.

The South African had kit ted out his force along military lines. They all wore the same uniform. Into canvas mid-calf combat boots they tucked khaki drill trousers. Each had a broad leather belt with a buckle.

Above the waist each man had a shirt in the pale African-bush camouflage known as 'leopard'. Sleeves were cut at the mid-forearm, then rolled up to the bicep and ironed flat.

One or two inverted chevrons indicated corporal or sergeant, while the four junior officers had cloth 'pips' on the epaulettes of their shirts.

What McBride had discovered, snagged on a thorn near the path where evidently a struggle must have taken place, was an epaulette, ripped off a shirt. It had no pips.

"I don't think our man is naked at all," said McBride. "I think he's wearing a camouflage shirt, minus one epaulette, khaki drill pants and combat boots. Not to mention a bush hat like yours, major."

Van Rensberg was the colour of raw terra cotta but the evidence told its own story. Two scars along the grit showed where a pair of heels had apparently been dragged through the long grass. At the end of the trail was the stream.

"Throw a body in there," muttered the major, 'it'll be over the cliff edge by now."

And we all know how you love your sharks, thought McBride, but said nothing.

The full enormity of his predicament sank into van Rensberg's mind. Somewhere, on a six-thousand-acre estate, with access to weapons and a quad-bike, face shaded by a broad-brimmed bush hat, was a professional mercenary contracted, so he presumed, to blow his employer's head off. He said something in Afrikaans and it was not nice. Then he got on the radio.

"I want twenty extra and fresh guards to the mansion. Other than them, let no one in but me. I want them fully armed, scattered immediately throughout the grounds around the house. And I want it now."

They drove back, cross country, to the walled mansion on the foreland.

It was quarter to four.

Chapter THIRTY-ONE

The Sting

AFTER THE SEARING HEAT OF THE SUN ON BARE SKIN, THE WATER of the stream was like balm. But it was dangerous water, for its speed was slowly increasing as it rushed between concrete banks to the sea.

At the point where he entered the water it would still have been possible for Dexter to climb out the other side. But he was too far from the point he needed to be and he heard the dogs far away. Also, he had seen the tree from his mountain-top, and even earlier in the aerial photographs.

His last piece of unused equipment was a small folding grapnel and a twenty-foot twine lanyard. As he swept between the banks, along a twisting course, he unfolded the three prongs, locked them rigid and slipped the loop of the lanyard round his right wrist.

He came round a corner in the torrent and saw the tree ahead. It grew on the bank, at the airfield side of the water, and two heavy branches leaned over the stream. As he approached, he reared out of the water, swung his arm, and hurled the grapnel high above him.

He heard the crash as the metal slammed into the tangle of branches, swept under the tree, felt the pain in his right arm socket as the hooks caught and the rush down-river stopped abruptly.

Hauling himself back on the twine, he crabbed his way to the bank and pulled his torso out. The water pressure eased, confined to his legs. With his free hand digging into the earth and grass, he dragged the rest of his body onto terra firma.

The grapnel was lost in the branches. He simply reached as high as he could, sliced the lanyard with his knife and let it flutter above the water. He knew he was a hundred yards from the airfield wire that he had cut forty hours earlier. There was nothing for it but to crawl. He put the nearest hounds at still a mile away and across the stream. They would find the bridges, but not just yet.

When he was lying in the darkness by the airfield's chain-link fence two nights earlier, he had cut a vertical and horizontal slice, to create two sides of a triangle, but left one thread intact to maintain the tension. The bolt-cutters he had pushed under the wire into the long grass, and that was where he found them.

The two cuts had been re-tied with thin, green plastic-coated gardener's wire. It took not a minute to unlace the cuts; he heard a dull twang as the tension wire was sliced, and he crawled through. Still on his belly, he turned and laced it up again. From only ten yards the cuts became invisible.

On the farmland side, the peons cut hay for forage on spare tracts of grassland, but each side of the runway it grew a foot long. Dexter found the bicycle and the other things he had stolen, dressed himself so as not to burn in the sun, and lay motionless to wait. A mile away, through the wire, he heard the hounds find the blooded clothes.

By the time Major van Rensberg, at the wheel of his Land Rover, reached the mansion gate, the fresh guards he had ordered were already there. A truck was stopped outside and the men jumped down, heavily armed and clutching M-16 assault carbines. The young officer lined them up in columns as the oaken gates swung apart. The column of men jogged through and quickly dispersed across the parkland. Van Rensberg followed and the gates closed.

The steps McBride had mounted to the pool terrace when he arrived were ahead of them, but the South African pulled to the right, round the terrace to the side. McBride saw doorways at the lower level and the electrically operated gates of three underground garages.

The butler was waiting. He ushered them inside and they followed him down a passage, past doors leading to the garages, up a flight of stairs and into the main living area.

The Serb was in the library. Although the late afternoon was balmy, he had chosen discretion over valour. He sat at a conference table with a cup of black coffee and gestured his two guests to sit down. His bodyguard, Kulac, loomed in the background, back against a wall of unread first editions, watchful.

"Report," said Zilic, without ceremony. Van Rensberg had to make his humiliating confession that someone, acting alone, had slipped into his fortress, gained access to farmland by posing as a Latino labourer and escaped death by the dogs by killing a guard, dressing in his uniform and tossing the body into the fast-flowing stream.

"So where is he now?"

"Between the wall round this park and the chain-link protecting the village and airfield, sir."

"And what do you intend to do?"

"Every single man under my command, every man who wears that uniform, will be called up by radio and checked for identity."

"Quis custodi et ip sos custodes?" asked McBride. The other two looked at him blankly. "Sorry. Who guards the guardians themselves? In other words, who checks the checkers? How do you know the voice on the radio isn't lying?"

There was silence.

"Right," said van Rensberg. "They will have to be recalled to barracks and checked on sight by their squad commanders. May I go to the radio shack and issue the orders?"

Zilic nodded dismissively.

It took an hour. Outside the windows the sun set across the chain of crests. The tropical plunge to darkness began. Van Rensberg came back.

"Every one accounted for at the barracks. All eighty attested to by their junior officers. And he's still out there somewhere."

"Or inside the wall," suggested McBride. "Your fifth squad is the one patrolling this mansion."

Zilic turned to his security chief.

"You ordered twenty of them in here without identity checks?" he asked icily.

"Certainly not, sir. They are the elite squad. They are commanded by Janni Duplessis. One strange face and he would have seen immediately."

"Have him report here," ordered the Serb.

The young South African appeared at the library door several minutes later, smartly to attention.

"Lieutenant Duplessis, in response to my order you chose twenty men including yourself, and brought them here by truck two hours ago?"

"Yes, sir."

"You know every one of them by sight?"

"Yes, sir."

"Forgive me, but when you jogged through the gate, what was your formation of march?" asked McBride.

"I was at the head. Sergeant Gray behind me. Then the men, three abreast, six per column. Eighteen men."

"Nineteen," said McBride. "You forgot the tail ender."

In the silence the mantelpiece clock seemed intrusively loud.

"What tail ender?" Whispered van Rensberg.

"Hey, don't get me wrong, guys. I could have been mistaken. I thought a nineteenth man came round the corner of the truck and jogged through at the rear. Same uniform. I thought nothing of it."

At that moment the clock struck six and the first bomb went off.

They were no bigger than golf balls and completely harmless, more like bird scarers than weapons of war. They had eight-hour-delay timers and the Avenger had hurled all ten of them over the wall around 10 a.m. He knew exactly where the thickest shrubbery dotted the parkland round the house, from the aerial photographs, and in his teenage years he had been quite a good pitcher. The crackers did nevertheless make a sound on detonation remarkably similar to the whack-whump of a high-powered rifle shot.

In the library someone shouted, "Cover," and all five veterans hit the floor. Kulac, rolled, came up and stood over his master with his gun out. Then the first guard outside, believing he had spotted the gunman, fired back.

Two more bomblets detonated and the exchange of rifle fire intensified. A window shattered. Kulac fired back towards the darkness outside.

The Serb had had enough. He ran at a crouch through the door at the back of the library, along the corridor and down the steps to the basement. McBride followed suit, with Kulac bringing up the rear, facing backwards.

The radio room was off the lower corridor. The duty operator, when his employer burst in, was white-faced in the neon light, trying to cope with a welter of shouts and yells on the waveband of the guards' breast-pocket communicators.

"Speaker, identify. Where are you? What is going on?" he shouted. No one listened as the firefight in the darkness intensified. Zilic reached forward to his console and threw a switch. Silence descended.

"Raise the airfield. All pilots, all ground staff. I want my helicopter and I want it now."

"It's not serviceable, sir. Ready tomorrow. They've been working on it for two days."

"Then the Hawker. I want it airworthy."

"Now, sir?"

"Now. Not tomorrow, not in an hour. Now."

The crackle of fire in the far distance brought the man in the long grass to his knees. It was the deepest dusk before complete darkness, the hour when the eyes play tricks and shadows become threats. He lifted the bicycle to its wheels, put the toolbox in the front basket, pedalled across the runway to the escarpment side and began to cycle the mile and a half to the hangars at the far end. The mechanic's coveralls with the "Z' logo of the Zeta Corporation on the back were unnoticeable in the dusk, and with a panic about to be launched, no one would remark on them for the next thirty minutes either.

The Serb turned on McBride.

"This is where we part company, Mr. McBride. I fear you will have to return to Washington by your own means. The problem here will be sorted, and I shall be getting a new head of security. You can tell Mr. Devereaux I shall not renege on our deal, but for the moment I intend to kill the intervening days enjoying the hospitality of friends of mine in the Emirates."

The garage was at the end of the basement corridor and the Mercedes was armoured. Kulac drove, his employer seated in the rear. McBride stood helplessly in the garage as the door rolled up and back, the limousine slid under it, across the gravel and out of the still opening gates in the wall.

By the time the Mercedes had rolled up to it, the hangar was ablaze with light. The small tractor was hitched to the nose-wheel assembly of the Hawker 1000 to tow it out onto the apron.

The last mechanic fastened down the last hatch on the engines, clattered down the gantry and pulled the structure away from the airframe. In the illuminated cockpit Captain Stepanovic, with his young French co-pilot beside him, was checking instruments, gauges and systems on the strength of the auxiliary power unit.

Zilic and Kulac watched from the shelter of the car. When the Hawker was out on the apron, the door opened, the steps hissed down, and the co-pilot could be seen in the opening.

Kulac left the car alone, jogged the few yards of concrete and ran up the steps into the sumptuous cabin. He glanced to his left towards the closed door of the flight deck. Two strides took him to the lavatory at the rear. He flung the door open. Empty. Returning to the top of the steps, he beckoned to his employer. The Serb left the car and ran to the steps. When he was inside, the door closed, locking them in to comfort and safety.