assault, the patrol farthest away from the area of contention.
The man had sniffed twice. A clogged nostrils, or nostrils, caused a
temporary blockage and a passage for air was casually demanded. Casually
obtained.
It was enough.
Sam focused in the direction of the sound. His eyes of fifty-odd years
were strained, tired from lack of sleep and from peering for nights on
end into the tropic darkness. But they would serve him, he knew that.
The man was crouched by a giant fern, his rifle between his legs, stock
butted against the ground. Beyond, Tucker could see in the moonlight
the outlines of the lean-to at the far left of the clearing. Anyone
crossing the campsite was in the man’s direct line of fire.
The fern ruled out a knife. A blade that did not enter precisely at the
required location could cause a victim to lunge, to shout. The fern
concealed the man’s back too well. It was possible, but awkward.
There was a better way. Sam recalled the vine that had dropped from the
trunk of the ceiba tree.
He reached into his pocket and withdrew a coil of ordinary azimuth line.
Thin steel wire encased in nylon, so handy for so many things …
He crept silently toward the giant spray of tiny leaves.
His enemy sniffed again.
Sam rose, half inch by half inch, behind the fern. In front of him now,
unobstructed, was the silhouette of the man’s neck and head.
Sam Tucker slowly separated his gnarled, powerful hands. They were
connected by the thin steel wire encased in nylon.
Charles Whitehall was furious. He had wanted to use the river; it was
the swiftest route, far more direct than the tortuously slow untangling
that was demanded in the bush.
But it was agreed that since Lawrence had been on guard at the river, he
knew it better. So the river was his.
Whitehall looked at the dial of his watch; there were still twelve
minutes to go before the first signal. If there was one.
Simple signals.
Silence meant precisely that. Nothing.
The short, simulated, guttural cry of a wild pig meant success. One
kill.
If two, two kills.
Simple.
If he had been given the river, Charles was convinced, he would have
delivered the first cry. At least one.
Instead, his was the southwest sweep, the least likely of the three
routings to make contact. It was a terrible waste.
An old man, authoritative, inventive, but terribly tired, and a
plodding, unskilled hill boy, not without potential, perhaps, but still
a misguided, awkward giant.
A terrible waste! Infuriating.
Yet not as infuriating as the sharp, hard steel that suddenly made
contact with the base of his skull. And the words that followed,
whispered in a harsh command: “Open your mouth and I blow your head off,
mon!”
He had been taken! His anger had caused his concentration to wander.
Stupid.
But his captor had not fired. His taker did not want the alarm of a
rifle shot any more than he did. The man kept thrusting the barrel
painfully into Charles’s head, veering him to the right, away from the
supposed line of Whitehall’s march. The man obviously wanted to
interrogate, discover the whereabouts of the others.
Stupid.
The release-seizure was a simple maneuver requiring only a hard surface
to the rear of the victim for execution.
And it was, indeed, execution.
It was necessary for the victim to rebound following impact, not be
absorbed in space or elastically swallowed by walled softness. The
impact was the most important; otherwise the trigger of the rifle might
be pulled. There was an instant of calculated risk-nothing was
perfect-but the reverse jamming of the weapon into the victim allowed
for that split-second diagonal slash that invariably ripped the weapon
out of the hands of the hunter.
Optimally, the slash coincided with the impact.
It was all set forth clearly in the Oriental training manuals.
In front of them, to the left, Whitehall could distinguish the sudden
rise of a hill in the jungle darkness. One of those abrupt protrusions
out of the earth that was so common to the Cock Pit. At the base of the
hill was a large boulder reflecting the wash of moonlight strained
through trees.
It would be sufficient … actually, more than sufficient; very
practical indeed.
He stumbled, just slightly, as if his foot had been ensnared by an open
root. He felt the prod of the rifle barrel.
It was the moment.
He slammed his head back into the steel and whipped to his right,
clasping the barrel with’his hands and jamming it forward. As the
victim crashed into the boulder, he swung the weapon violently away,
ripping it out of the man’s grasp.
As the man blinked in the moonlight, Charles Whitehall rigidly extended
three fingers on each hand and completed the assault with enormous speed
and control. The hands were trajectories–one toward the right eye, the
other into the soft flesh below the throat.
McAuliff had given Alison his pistol. He had been startled to see her
check the clip with such expertise, releasing it from its chamber,
pressing the spring, and reinserting it with a heel-of-the-palm impact
that would have done justice to Bonnie of Clyde notoriety. She had
smiled at him and mentioned the fact that the weapon had been in the
water.
There were eight minutes to go. Two units of four; the thought was not
comforting.
He wondered if there would be any short cries in the night. Or whether
a measured silence would signify an extension of the nightmare.
Was any of them good enough? Quick enough? Sufficiently alert?
“Alex!” Alison grabbed his arm, whispering softly but with sharp
intensity. She pulled him down and pointed into the forest, to the
west.
A beam of light flickered on and off.
Twice.
Someone had been startled in the overgrowth; something perhaps. There
was a slapping flutter and short, repeated screeches that stopped as
rapidly as they had started.
The light went on once again, for no more than a second, and then there
was darkness.
The invader was perhaps thirty yards away. It was difficult to estimate
in the dense surroundings. But it was an opportunity. And if Alexander
Tarquin McAuliff had learned anything during the past weeks of agonizing
insanity, it was to accept opportunities with the minimum of analysis.
He pulled Alison to him and whispered instructions into her ear. He
released her and felt about the ground for what he knew was there.
Fifteen seconds later he silently clawed his way up the trunk of a ceiba
tree, rifle across his back, his hands noiselessly testing the low
branches, discomforted by the weight of the object held in place inside
his field jacket by the belt.
In position, he scratched twice on the bark of the tree.
Beneath him Alison whistled-a very human whistle, the abrupt notes of a
signaling warble. She then snapped on her flashlight for precisely one
second, shut it off, and dashed away from her position.
In less than a minute the figure was below him crouched, rifle extended,
prepared to kill.
McAuliff dropped from the limb of the ceiba tree, the sharp point of the
heavy rock on a true, swift course toward the top of the invader’s
skull.
The minute hand on his watch reached twelve; the second hand was on one.
It was time.
The first cry came from the river. An expert cry, the sound of a wild
pig.
The second came from the southwest, quite far in the distance, equally
expert, echoing through the jungle.
The third came from the north, a bit too guttural, not expert at all,
but sufficient unto the instant. The message was clear.
McAuliff looked at Alison, her bright, stunningly blue eyes bluer still
in the Caribbean moonlight.
He lifted his rifle in the air and shattered the stillness of the night
with a burst of gunfire. Perhaps the ganja pilot in the grasslands
would laugh softly in satisfaction. Perhaps, with luck, one of the
stray bullets might find its way to his head.
It did not matter.
It mattered only that they had made it. They were good enough, after
all.
He held Alison in his arms and screamed joyfully into the darkness
above. It did not sound much like a wild pig, but that did not matter
either.
They sat at the table on the huge free-form pool deck overlooking the
beds of coral and the blue waters beyond. The conflict between wave and
rock resulted in cascading arcs of white spray surging upward and
forward, blanketing the jagged crevices.
They had flown from the grasslands directly to Port Antonio. They had
done so because Sam Tucker had raised Robert Hanley on the airplane’s
radio, and Hanley had delivered his instructions in commands that denied
argument. They had landed at the small Sam Jones Airfield at 2:35 in
the morning. A limousine sent from the Trident Villas awaited them.