Avenger

by Frederick Forsyth

  Did the manhunter not see it? Could he not work out the sense? It would be reasonable that the priest would not normally visit his vestry until Sunday. But today was different. At exactly ten to eleven he would open his vestry cupboard and see the prisoner.

  Why not dump him somewhere else? Why not tape him to his own cot where no one would find him till sundown, or not even then?

  He found the major speaking to the airfield mechanics.

  ‘What’s wrong with it? Sod the tail rotor. I need it back up in the air. Well, hurry it up.’

  He flicked off his machine, listened to McBride, glared and snapped: ‘Your fellow countryman simply made a mistake, that is all. An expensive mistake. It’s going to cost him his life.’

  An hour passed. Even without field glasses McBride could see the first columns of white-cotton-clad workers being force-marched back to the double-gates to their village. Beside the lines of men the uniformed guards were shouting them on. Midday. The heat was a hammer on the back of the head.

  The milling crowd of men in front of the gates grew even bigger. The chit-chat on the radio never stopped, as sector after sector of estate was cleared of workers, its buildings searched, declared clear, sealed and manned from inside.

  At half past one the number-checking began. Van Rensberg insisted on the five checkers resuming their places behind the tables and passing the workers through, one after another, two hundred per column.

  The men normally worked in the cool of the dawn or the evening. They were baking alive in the heat. Two or three peons fainted and were helped through by friends. Every tag was checked until its number matched one passed through that same morning. When the last white-bloused figure stumbled towards the village, rest, shade and water, the senior checker nodded.

  ‘One missing,’ he called. Van Rensberg walked to his desk to peer over his shoulder.

  ‘Number five-three-one-oh-eight.’

  ‘Name?’

  ‘Ramon Gutierrez.’

  ‘Release the dogs.’

  Van Rensberg strolled across to McBride.

  ‘Every single technician must by now be inside, locked in and guarded. The dogs will never touch my men, you know. They recognize the uniform. That leaves one man out there. A stranger, white cotton pants and floppy shirt, wrong smell. It’s like a lunch bell to the Dobermanns. Up a tree? In a pond? They’ll still find him. Then they will surround him and bay until the handlers come. I give this mercenary half an hour to get up a tree and surrender, or die.’

  The man he sought was in the middle of the estate, running lightly between rows of maize higher than his own head. He judged by the sun and crests of the sierra the direction of his run.

  It had taken two hours of steady jogging earlier in the morning to bring him from his allotted work patch to the base of the mansion’s protective wall. Not that the distance was a problem for a man accustomed to half a marathon, but he had to dodge the other work parties and the guards. He was still dodging.

  He came to a track across the maize field, dropped to his belly and peered out. Down the track, two guards on a quad-bike roared away in the direction of the main gate. He waited till they were round a corner, then sprinted across the track and was lost in a peach orchard. His study of the layout of the estate from above had given him a route that would take him from where he had started near the mansion wall to where he wanted to be, without ever crossing a knee-high crop.

  The equipment he had brought in that morning, either in his supposed lunch bag or inside the tight Y-front underpants he wore beneath the boxer shorts, was almost expended. The tough dive-watch was back on his wrist, his belt round his waist and his knife up against the small of the back, out of the way but easy to reach. The bandage, sticky plaster and the rest were in the flat pouch forming part of his belt.

  He checked the peaks of the hills again, altered course by a few degrees and stopped, tilting his head until he heard the gurgle of the flowing water ahead. He came to the stream’s edge, backtracked fifteen yards, then stripped to the buff, retaining only belt, knife and Y-fronts.

  Across the crops, in the dull, numbing heat, he heard the first baying of the hounds pounding towards him. What little off-sea breeze there was would take his odour to the muzzles of the hounds in a few more minutes.

  He worked carefully but fast, until he was satisfied, then tiptoed away towards the stream, slipped into the cool water and began to let the current take him, slanting across the estate towards the airfield and the cliff.

  Despite his assertion that the killer dogs would never touch him, van Rensberg had wound all the windows up as he drove slowly down one of the main avenues from the gate into the heartland.

  Behind him came the deputy dog-handler at the wheel of a truck with a completely enclosed rear made of steel-wire mesh. The senior handler was beside him in the Land Rover, head stuck out on the passenger side. It was he who heard the sudden change in pitch of his hounds’ baying, from deep-throated bark to excited yelping.

  ‘They have found something,’ he shouted.

  Van Rensberg grinned.

  ‘Where, man, where?’

  ‘Over there.’

  McBride crouched in the rear, glad of the walls and windows of the Land Rover Defender. He did not like savage dogs, and for him twelve was a dozen too much.

  The dogs had found something all right, but their yelping was more from pain than excitement. The South African came upon the entire pack after swerving round the corner of a peach orchard. They were milling around the centre of the track. A bundle of bloody clothes was the object of their attention.

  ‘Get them into the truck,’ shouted van Rensberg. The senior handler got down, closed the door and whistled his pack to order. Without protest, still yelping, they bounded into the rear of the dog-lorry and were locked in. Only then did van Rensberg and McBride descend.

  ‘So, this is where they caught him,’ said van Rensberg.

  The handler, still puzzled by the behaviour of his pack, scooped up the bloodstained cotton blouse and held it to his nose. Then he jerked his face away.

  ‘Bloody man,’ he screamed. ‘Chilli powder, fine-ground green chilli powder. It’s stiff with the stuff. No wonder the poor bastards are screaming. That’s not excitement. They’re in pain.’

  ‘When will their muzzles work again?’

  ‘Well, not today, boss, maybe not tomorrow.’

  They found the cotton pants, also impregnated with chilli powder, and the straw hat, even the canvas espadrilles. But no body, no bones, nothing but the stains on the shirt.

  ‘What did he do here?’ van Rensberg asked the handler.

  ‘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 kitted 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 ment
ion a bush hat like yours, major.’

  Van Rensberg was the colour of raw terracotta. 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 custodiet ipsos 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 h
ad 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.