Pitt stared into the night but only saw the splash of stars and moon on the sea. He opened his mouth to say he couldn’t see anything when a shaft of light swung across the western horizon, followed by a bright red glow. “Your island has a beacon?” he asked Maeve.
“A small lighthouse on the rim of the southern volcano.”
“At least your family did something to aid marine navigation.”
Maeve laughed. “Thoughts of lost sailors never entered my great-grandfather’s mind when he built it. The purpose has always been to warn ships to steer clear of the island and not to come ashore.”
“Have many vessels come to grief on the island’s coast?”
She looked down at her hands and clasped them. “When I was little, Daddy often talked about ships that were cast on the rocks.”
“Did he describe survivors?”
She shook her head. “There was never talk of rescue attempts. He always said that any man who stepped foot on Gladiator Island without an invitation had a date with Satan.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning, the badly injured were murdered and any able-bodied survivor was put to work in the mines until he died. No one has ever escaped from Gladiator to tell of the atrocities.”
“You escaped.”
“A lot of good it did the poor miners,” she said sadly. “No one ever took my word over my family’s. When I tried to explain the situation to authorities, Daddy merely bought them off.”
“And the Chinese laborers working the mines today? How many of them leave the island in one piece?”
Maeve’s face was grim. “Almost all eventually die from the extreme heat in the bottom of the lower mine pits.”
“Heat?” There was curiosity in Pitt’s face. “From what source?”
“Steam vents through cracks in the rock.”
Giordino gave Pitt a pensive look. “A perfect place to organize a union.”
“I make landfall in about three hours,” said Pitt. “Not too late to change our minds, skip the island and try for Australia.”
“It’s a violent, unrelenting world,” Giordino sighed. “Absolutely worthless without a good challenge now and then.”
“There speaks the backbone of America,” Pitt said with a smile. He stared up at the moon as if appraising it. “I figure we have just enough light to do the job.”
“You still haven’t explained how we’re going to come ashore unobserved by Daddy’s security guards,” said Maeve.
“First, tell me about the cliffs surrounding Gladiator Island.”
She looked at him queerly for a moment, then shrugged. “Not much to tell. The cliffs encircle the whole landmass except for the lagoon. The western shore is pounded by huge waves. The eastern side is calmer but gill dangerous.”
“Are there any small inlets on the eastern shore with a sandy beach and natural rock chimneys cut into the cliffs?”
“There are two that I remember. One has a good entrance but a tiny beach. The other is more narrow but with a broader stretch of sand. If you’re thinking of landing at either one, you can forget it. Their bluffs rise steeply for a good hundred meters. A first-rate professional rock climber using all the latest techniques and equipment wouldn’t think of attempting that climb in the dead of night.”
“Can you guide us into the narrow channel with the roomy beach?” asked Pitt.
“Didn’t you hear me?” Maeve said flatly. “You might as well climb Mount Everest with an ice pick. And then there are the security guards. They patrol the bluffs every hour.”
“At night too?”
“Daddy leaves no door open for diamond smugglers,” she said as if explaining to a schoolchild.
“How large is the patrol?”
“Two men, who make one complete circuit of the island during their shift. They’re followed by another patrol on the hour.”
“Is it possible for them to see the beach from the edge of the bluff?” Pitt grilled her.
“No. The cliff is too steep to see straight down.” She looked at Pitt, her eyes in the moonlight wide and questioning. “Why all the interrogation about the backside of the island? The lagoon is the only way in.”
He exchanged scheming looks with Giordino. “She has the luscious body of a woman but the mind of a skeptic.”
“Don’t feel bad,” Giordino said, yawning. “Women never believe me either.”
Pitt gazed on the rocks that had had a long roll of fatalities, rocks where the shipwrecked men who survived wished they had drowned rather than suffer untold miseries as slaves in the Dorsett diamond mines. For a long time, as the cliffs of Gladiator Island loomed up out of the darkness, no one on the Marvelous Maeve moved or spoke. Pitt saw Maeve’s back as she lay in the bow, acting as lookout for any offshore rocks. He glanced at Giordino and caught the white blur of his friend’s face and the slow nod as he stood poised to start the outboard motor.
The light from the half-moon was more than he dared hope for. It was enough to illuminate the steeply angled palisades, but sufficiently meager to prevent the Marvelous Maeve from being observed by probing eyes on the bluffs. As if the partial moon wasn’t blessing enough, the sea cooperated with a fairly smooth surface of low, passive swells, and there was a following wind. Without an easterly breeze, Pitt’s best laid plans for infiltrating the island would go down the drain. He turned the trimaran on a course parallel to the island’s shoreline. At seventy meters a white horizontal blur, trimmed with phosphorescence, grew out of the darkness, accompanied by the low drumming of seas rolling against the cliffs.
Until they sailed around the tip of the island, and the back of the volcano shielded the little boat from the sweeping beam of the Gladiator lighthouse, Pitt felt like a convict in an old prison movie, trying to escape over a wall with searchlights playing all around. Strangely, all conversation dropped to hushed tones as if they could be heard over the soft boom of the surf.
“How far to the inlet?” he called to Maeve softly.
“I think it’s about a kilometer up the shore from the lighthouse,” she answered without turning.
The boat had lost considerable way after swinging east to north along the shoreline, and Pitt was finding it difficult to maintain a steady course. He raised a hand as a signal to Giordino to start the outboard motor. Three heartbeats slowed and then suddenly increased as Giordino pulled on the starter rope, ten, twenty, thirty times without success.
Giordino paused, massaged his tiring arm, stared menacingly at the ancient motor and began talking to it. “You don’t start on the next pull, I will attack and unnecessarily mutilate every bolt in your crankcase.” Then he took a firm grip on the pull handle and gave a mighty heave. The motor snorted and its exhaust puffed a few moments before settling down to a steady snarl. Giordino wiped the sweat from his face and looked pleased. “One more manifestation of Giordino’s law,” he said, catching his breath. “Deep down, every mechanical contrivance has a fear of being junked.”
Now that Giordino steered the craft with the outboard, Pitt lowered the sails and removed his kite from the deckhouse. He deftly looped a coil of thin line on the deck of the boat. Then he tied a small grappling hook, found at York’s campsite, to the line slightly below where it attached to the kite. Then he sat and waited, knowing in his heart of hearts that what he had in mind had only one chance of succeeding out of too many to count.
“Steer port,” warned Maeve, gesturing to her left. “There is a pinnacle of rocks about fifty meters dead ahead.”
“Turning to port,” Giordino acknowledged as he pulled the steering handle of the outboard toward him, swinging the bows around on a twenty-degree angle toward shore. He kept a cautious eye on the white water swirling around several black rocks that rose above the surface until they were safely astern.
“Maeve, see anything yet?” asked Pitt.
“I can’t be certain. I never had to find the bloody inlet in the dark before,” she replied testily.
Pitt studied the s
wells. They were growing steeper and closer together. “The bottom is coming up. Another thirty meters and we’ll have to turn for open water.”
“No, no,” Maeve said in an excited voice. “I think I see a break in the cliffs. I’m sure of it. That’s the inlet that leads to the largest beach.”
“How far?” Pitt demanded.
“Sixty or seventy meters,” she answered, rising to her knees and pointing toward the cliffs.
Then Pitt had it too. A vertical opening in the face of the palisades that ran dark in the shadows out of the moonlight. Pitt wetted his finger and tested the wind. It held steady out of the east. “Ten minutes,” he begged under his breath. “All I need is ten minutes.” He turned to Giordino. “Al, can you hold us in a steady position about twenty meters from the entrance?”
“It won’t be easy in the surge.”
“Do your best.” He turned to Maeve. “Take the tiller and aim the bow head-on into the swells. Combine your efforts with Al’s on the outboard to keep the boat from swinging broadside.”
Pitt unfolded the struts on his homemade kite. When extended, the Dacron surface measured nearly two and a half meters high. He held it up over the side of the boat, pleased to see it leap up out of his hands as the breeze struck its bowed surface. He payed out the line as the kite rose and dipped in the predawn sky.
Maeve suddenly saw the genius behind Pitt’s mad plan. “The grappling hook,” she blurted. “You’re trying to snag it on the top of the bluffs and use the line to climb the cliffs.”
“That’s the idea,” he replied as he focused his gaze on the obscure shape of the kite, just slightly visible under the half-light from the moon.
Adroitly jockeying the throttle of the outboard and the Forward/Reverse lever, Giordino performed a masterful job of keeping the boat in one spot. He neither spoke nor took his eyes off the sea to observe Pitt’s actions.
Pitt had prayed for a steady wind, but he got more than he bargained for. The onshore breeze, meeting resistance from the rising palisades, curved and rushed up their steep face before sweeping over the summit. The big kite was nearly pulled from his grip. He used a sleeve of his battered leather jacket as a protective glove, holding it around the line to keep the friction from burning his hands. The immense drag was nearly pulling his arms out of their sockets. He clamped his teeth together and hung on, mentally plagued by any number of things that could go wrong, any one of which would end their undertaking a sudden shift in the wind smashing the kite against the rocks, Giordino losing the boat to the incoming surge, the grappling hook unable to find a grip on the rocks, a patrol appearing at the wrong time and discovering them.
He brushed off all thoughts of failure as he taxed his depth perception to the limit. In the black of night, even with the moon’s help, he could not begin to accurately judge when the grappling hook had risen beyond the top of the bluffs. He felt the knot he’d tied to indicate when the fine had payed out a hundred meters slip under the leather jacket. He roughly figured another twenty meters before loosening his grip on the line. Released from its resistance to the wind, the kite began to seesaw and fall.
Pitt felt as if a great pressure was released from his mind and body as he gave a series of tugs on the line and felt it go taut. The grappling hook had dug its points into the rock on the first attempt and was holding firm. “Take her in, Al. We’ve got our way to the top.”
Giordino had been waiting for the word. His struggle to keep the trimaran in a fixed position under the steady onslaught of the waves was a study in skill and finesse. Gladly, he eased the motor into Forward, opened the throttle and threaded the Marvelous Maeve between the rocks into the eye of the cove under the cliffs.
Maeve returned to the bow and acted as lookout, guiding Giordino through the black water that seemed to grow calmer the deeper they penetrated the inlet. “I see the beach,” she informed them. “You can just make out a light strip of sand fifteen meters ahead and to starboard.”
In another minute the bow and outriggers touched the strip of beach and ran up onto the soft sand. Pitt looked at Maeve. The cliffs shadowed the light from the moon, and he saw her features only vaguely. “You’re home,” he said briefly.
She tilted her head and gazed up between the cliffs at the narrow slot of sky and stars that looked light-years away. “Not yet, I’m not.”
Pitt had never let the line to the grappling hook out of his hands. Now, he slipped the leather jacket over Maeve’s shoulders and gave the line a hard tug. “We’d better get moving before a patrol comes along.”
“I should go first,” said Giordino. “I’m the strongest.”
“That goes without saying,” Pitt said, smiling in the dark. “I believe it’s your turn anyway.”
“Ah, yes,” Giordino said, remembering. “Payback time for watching like an impotent snail when that terrorist cut your safety line while you were swimming around that sinkhole in the Andes.”
“I had to climb out using nothing but a pair of screwdrivers.”
“Tell me the story again,” said Giordino sarcastically. “I never tire of hearing it.”
“On your way, critic, and keep an eye peeled for a passing patrol.”
With only a nod, Giordino grabbed at the thin line and gave it a sharp pull to test its immovability. “This thing strong enough to take my weight?”
Pitt shrugged. “We’ll have to hope so, won’t we?”
Giordino gave him a sour look and started up the side of the cliff. He quickly vanished in the blackness while Pitt grasped the end of the line and held it taut to take up the slack.
“Find a couple of protruding rocks and tie off the boat fore and aft,” Pitt ordered Maeve. “If worse comes to worst, we may have to rely on Marvelous Maeve to carry us away from here.”
Maeve looked at him curiously. “How else did you expect to escape?”
“I’m a lazy sort. I had it in the back of my mind that we could steal one of your father’s yachts, or maybe an aircraft.”
“Do you have an army I’m not aware of?”
“You’re looking at half of it.”
Further conversation died as they gazed unseeing in the darkness, speculating on Giordino’s progress Pitt’s only awareness of his friend’s movements was the quivering on the line.
After thirty minutes, Giordino stopped to catch his breath. His arms ached like a thousand devils were stabbing them. His ascent had been fairly rapid considering the unevenness of the rocks. Climbing without the fine would have been impossible. Even with the proper gear, having to make his way in the dark a meter at a time, groping for toeholds, driving in pitons and securing ropes, the climb would have taken the better part of six hours.
One minute of rest, no more, then it was hand over hand again. Wearily but still powerfully he pulled himself upward, kicking around the overhangs, taking advantage of the ledges. The palms of his hands were rubbed raw from the never-ending clutching and heaving on the thin nylon line salvaged from Rodney York’s boat. As it was, the old line was hardly strong enough to take his bulk, but it had had to be light in weight for the kite to carry the grappling hook over the top. Any heavier and it would have been a lost cause.
He paused to look upward at the shadowy lip of the summit, lined against the stars. Five meters, he estimated, five meters to go. His breath was heaving in aching gasps, his chest and arms bruised from scraping against unseen rock in the darkness. His immense strength was down to the bottom of its reserves. He was climbing the last few meters on guts alone. Indestructible, as hard and gritty as the rock on which he climbed, Giordino kept going, refusing to stop again until he could climb no more. Then suddenly the ground at the top of the cliff opened before his eyes and spread out on a horizontal level. One final heave over the edge and he lay flat, listening to his heart pound, his lungs pumping like bellows, sucking air in and out.
For the next three minutes Giordino lay without moving, elated that the agonizing exertion was over. He surveyed his immediate sur
roundings and found himself stretched across a path that traveled along the edge of the cliffs. A few paces beyond, a wall of trees and underbrush loomed dark and uninviting. Seeing no sign of lights or movement, he traced the line to the grappling hook and saw that it was firmly imbedded in a rock outcropping.
Pitt’s zany idea had worked incredibly well.
Satisfied the hook wasn’t going anywhere, he rose to his feet. He untied the kite and hid it in the vegetation opposite the path before returning to the edge of the bluff and giving two sharp tugs on the rope that vanished into the darkness.
Far below, Pitt turned to Maeve. “Your turn.”
“I don’t know if I’m up to this,” she said nervously. “Heights scare me.”
He made a loop, dropped it over her shoulders and cinched it tight around her waist. “Hold tight to the line, lean back from the cliff and walk up the side. Al will haul you up from above.”
He answered Giordino’s signal by jerking three times on the line. Maeve felt the slack taken up, followed by the pressure around her waist. Clamping her eyes tightly shut, she began walking like a fly up the vertical face of the cliff.
Far above, his arms too numb to elevate Maeve by hand, Giordino had discovered a smooth slot in the rock that would not damage or cut into the nylon fibers. He inserted the line and laid it over his shoulders. Then he bent forward and staggered across the path, dragging Maeve’s weight up the cliff behind him.
In twelve minutes, Maeve appeared over the edge, eyes tightly closed. “Welcome to the top of the Matterhorn,” Giordino greeted her warmly.
“Thank God that’s behind me,” she moaned gratefully, opening her eyes for the first time since leaving the beach. “I don’t think I could ever do it again.”
Giordino untied Maeve. “Keep watch while I hoist Dirk. You can see a fair distance along the cliffs to the north, but the path south is hidden by a big group of rocks about fifty meters away.”
“I remember them,” said Maeve. “They have a hollow interior with natural ramparts. My sister Deirdre and I used to play there and pretend we were royalty. It’s called the Castle. There’s a small rest station and a telephone inside for the guards.”
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