The Snake Flag Conspiracy

by The Snake Flag Conspiracy (fb2)

  Charlie worried me. He was dangerous with that infra-red sniperscope. He could use it like an invisible searchlight to sweep the woods hunting for me, and I'd never know when the beam lit me up as a target for him. Not until a bullet came slamming into me!

  George was an unknown factor. I didn't know how good a woodsman he was. I heard Charlie crashing around to my left. If he were that clumsy in the woods, he'd give me ample warning if he came anywhere near me.

  I went after George.

  Not directly. Even though I knew that time was on their side, I couldn't be impatient. I had to lure George into a trap.

  The leader had been wrong. There's one hell of a difference between the jungles of Southeast Asia and the forests of New England. The jungles are wet and damp and thick. They hide footsteps, swallowing up sound, so that you can't hear a man until he's right on top of you. I know. I've been there. New England forests are dry, except right after a rain. Leaves rustle; fallen twigs crackle when you step on them.

  I took off Raymond's boots. His socks were thick enough to give me the protection I needed and still let me feel my way. I was going to discard them, but as I was loosening the long rawhide laces, I had another thought. I took time to pull each lace free and tucked them into my hip pocket.

  Then I set out after George.

  I made a long sweep in his general direction. I wanted to get as far away as I could from Charlie with his dangerous sniperscope rifle. It took me about ten minutes to get where I wanted to be. Occasionally I heard movement. George wasn't living up to his reputation as a jungle fighter.

  I finally found the spot I wanted. It was next to a small clearing. Two trails led into it. They were both narrow and lined with young, second-growth trees. As quietly as I could, I used Hugo to trim some of the branches from one of the saplings. Then I bent it in an arc, fastening it with a slipknot to a fallen log with one end of a rawhide lace. The other end was in my hand. I lay down behind the log.

  When you set a trap, you've got to bait it. The bait was me. I had to be sure that Charlie and his damned sniperscope were nowhere around. About five minutes went by. I heard a shot come from about 200 yards away.

  Faintly I heard someone shout, "You get him?"

  There was no answer. The only sound came from more than a mile away. So faintly you could hardly hear it, the strains of the Boston Symphony Orchestra playing a Brahms concerto came floating across the valley on the light breeze. I wondered what the audience would think if they knew about the deadly manhunt going on within a mile or two of them!

  Charlie had sense enough not to give his position away by answering. But now I knew that he was nowhere nearby.

  I tossed a rock into the middle of the glade. I wanted some noise, not too much. Just enough to make it sound as though I'd stumbled.

  Nothing happened.

  I let another few minutes go by and then baited my trap again. The stone landed, rolling a few feet. The noise was barely discernible.

  Then I heard the soft scrape of a boot on the trail. I tightened my grip on the rawhide lace whose other end slipknotted the bent sapling. The second rawhide lace was doubled, the ends wrapped around each of my fists with two feet of slack hanging down.

  George came down the trail. He was quiet; he moved slowly. I would never have seen him if I hadn't been expecting him. He came abreast of me and stopped.

  Animals have an instinct that tells them when an enemy is near. So does man. George sensed something, but he thought I was in front of him somewhere in the clearing.

  He moved forward two steps more, and I pulled the rawhide lacing. The slipknot pulled free. The sapling whipped erect with a swoosh of branches in front of his face. George recoiled from what he thought was an attack.

  Under the cover of the noise, I leaped to my feet. From behind I flipped the loop of the second rawhide lacing over his head and around his neck. The garrote was effectively deadly. It cut off the sound that tried to burst from his throat. Clawing desperately with his fingers at the leather thong that bit mercilessly into his flesh, he flung the M-14 away from him in a spastic jerk. The carbine landed somewhere deep in the brush. I maintained the pressure. George had no chance at all, but then he would have given me none, either. When I lowered him to the ground, the stench let loose from his uncontrolled sphincter muscle filled the air.

  I tried to find the carbine, but it was no use. It would have taken me all night, and time was my enemy. Charlie and his deadly sniperscope were next, and all I had were two rawhide laces. I knew I couldn't pull the same trick on Charlie. He had a sniperscope to look through. The closest I could get to him might be ten or twenty yards — if I were lucky.

  Which meant that I wouldn't be able to use the garrote again, or Hugo.

  Or could I? The thought intrigued me.

  I moved off the trail, going deep into the underbrush. My eyes had become almost totally accustomed to the darkness. The starlight gave me more than enough light. I found what I was looking for. It took me a few moments to cut down a six-foot length of supple branch about as thick around as my wrist. I trimmed it. Hugo's sharp blade made the work go fast. I cut away the thin bark, except for the center section, where I had to be sure my grip wouldn't slip. Tapering the branch, I cut a groove in each end. The branch was so thick I had to use all my strength to bend it into an arc. I took a rawhide lace and fastened it to each notched end, and when I was finished I had a rough but highly effective bow!

  The arrow took me a little longer to make. I had to find a branch that was straight enough. When I'd found one suitable, I trimmed it clean, cutting off one end squarely and then carving a vee into it to take the rawhide bowstring. I had no vanes to make it fly without a wobble, but then vanes are needed only if you're shooting over a considerable distance. I'd be only a few yards away — that is, if I got a chance to use it at all!

  Hugo was my arrowhead. With part of the second lace, I bound the stiletto to the end of the crude arrow. When I was through, what I had, in effect, was a crossbow bolt that would be propelled by a version of the English longbow! The short pull required almost every ounce of my strength, but it would hurl the arrow with force enough to penetrate two inches of lumber!

  I wanted to test the rig to see how it would shoot, but that was impossible. I had to go after George hoping the makeshift weapon would do its job. Arrow notched into the bow, I stalked down the narrow trail of that New England undergrowth. Overhead the sky was lighter than the darkness of the forest. The trees were black hulks in the night.

  I finally found him. A sniperscope is an unwieldy weapon at best. I heard him thrashing around with the gun in his hand, striking low-hanging branches with the barrel as. he swept the scope from side to side, using it as an invisible searchlight to scan the forest for me.

  I sank down beside the trail and waited. If he spotted me first with that damned beam, I was dead. No matter how you looked at it, all the advantages were his.

  George came down the trail, the rifle held to his shoulder, his eye against the sight of the scope, using it as a flashlight. He would take a few steps, stop, sweep the path ahead of him and then take another few steps. I lay burrowed in the thick undergrowth beside the trail and didn't move a muscle. An ant crawled across my face. It explored my lips. I still didn't move. The ant moved over my upper lip and then into my nostril. The tickling sensation was overwhelming. I used all my self-control not to sneeze.

  George came closer. He stopped only inches away from my head. I blanked out my mind, The ant bit. Fire raced through my nostril. And I took it. The techniques of yoga concentration enabled me to place myself away from my body. The itches and pain my body felt had nothing to do with me. I was somewhere else.

  George took three more paces down the trail, and I came back to my body, rising silently to my feet. With every ounce of strength I had, I drew back on the bowstring. The heavy, crudely carved branch reluctantly bent into an arc until the haft of the stiletto was even with the handgrip.

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p; The branch creaked slightly as it bent, and George spun around, aiming the rifle at me. I released the bowstring at almost the exact instant he pulled the trigger.

  The short, heavy crossbow bolt whipped through the few yards that separated us. The explosion from George's gun blasted my ears. There was a burning sensation along my left shoulder, and then, almost in slow motion, George let the heavy sniperscope rifle fall from his hands. His knees crumpled. He collapsed awkwardly on the trail, both hands fastened around the shaft of the arrow.

  Hugo had been driven into his chest the complete length of the slender blade. If the haft of the knife hadn't prevented it, the arrow would have gone completely through him!

  I went over to George and took the rifle. Dismantling the scope from the weapon, I took it and the battery pack from his body and set off back through the woods.

  Now the advantage was mine. Now I had no trouble in spotting where their men were and avoiding them easily. I made my way to the main road, skirting the last of their flankers.

  It was almost dawn before I reached Lenox on foot. I knew that Julie must have been waiting impatiently for me to return and that the strain on her nerves must have been brutal. I wanted to take her in my arms and let her know that I was safe. I wanted a hot bath and a dressing put on the shallow flesh wound of my left arm.

  In the darkness of pre-dawn, I came tiredly up the twisting, narrow village streets of Lenox. The Volks was parked about fifty yards from the inn, under a street lamp. Curiously I peered into it as I passed. And stopped.

  Julie was sitting in the driver's seat, her head thrown back against the headrest as if she had fallen asleep.

  But she hadn't. Someone had broken her neck, and she was dead.

  Chapter Twelve

  Pittsfield was too close. I drove the Volks south out of Lenox to Monterey, took Route 23 to Otis, Route 8 to New Boston and, finally, Route 57 through Granville and Southwick. They're all country roads. At that hour of the night there was no traffic on them.

  Julie was my silent companion for the first part of the trip. Silent and dead. Between Otis and New Boston, I found a deserted stretch of road, pulled over and took her from the car. I propped her against a tree where she would be found soon and continued my lonely journey. Now there was more driving me on than just my duty to AXE. There was more than just a feeling of responsibility not to let Bradford — or whatever his true Russian name was — get away with the Kremlin plot. From the time I found Julie dead in the Volks, I began to burn with an intense, personal hatred for the man. From that moment on, my mission was revenge and retribution!

  In Springfield I had an early breakfast, dawdling over coffee until the stores opened. Not wanting to call undue attention to myself, I didn't want to be the first customer of the day. It was around eleven o'clock before I entered.

  The shop specialized in sporting goods. I bought a pair of 7×50 Zeiss binoculars. I looked at a couple of pistols. They had a Luger that balanced in my hand almost as beautifully as Wilhelmina did. I hefted a Winchester 70 with a Browning 2-7x scope that would have been perfect, but I had to discard them both. Hawk's words of warning were clear in my mind: It has to look like an accident!

  I can't really say that the idea was full grown in my mind. It was just an impulse, I guess, but I've learned to trust my impulses. I bought an air gun.

  It wasn't the sort of air rifle kids play around with. It was a Feinwerkbau 300 match rifle that fired .177 calibre pellets. The barrel was of rifled steel, nineteen and a half inches long. In that type of gun the barrel and receiver recoil together, independently of the stock, so that there's no recoil to feel. You hand cock it by pulling a side lever and, even though it's a single shot, you can work it pretty fast. The muzzle velocity of that little .177 pellet is 575 feet per second, which isn't much slower than a .45 calibre pistol. And it's built for accuracy. The palmswell pistol grip, combined with a Monte Carlo gunstock, makes it fit into your arm and shoulder like a part of you. I guess that's why you shell out some $200 for one of these weapons.

  Before I left town, I gassed up the Volks and picked up a map of the area at the service station. It didn't give me enough information about the terrain, so I drove out to the airport and picked up an Airman's Sectional Chart, which pinpoints every hill, road, pond and landmark — and gives you its exact height above sea level.

  Then I drove out to the mountain that Julie had told me about.

  It took me until almost four in the afternoon to circle my way around by way of Pittsfield and come in from the north. I left the car at the foot of the mountain, hidden in a grove of trees, and started my climb. By five o'clock I was lying prone on a ledge near the crest of the mountain. Almost a mile away was Bradford's estate. The 7×50 binoculars pulled in every detail.

  Julie had been right. There was only one road into the area. Through the glasses I could see that it was patrolled by Massachusetts State Troopers. I remembered the two bogus troopers we'd met yesterday, and I knew that these were more of Bradford's private army.

  Around the perimeter of the estate were two double fences. Each pair of fences consisted of a chain-link fence and a wire mesh fence. The inner pair of fences had another foot and a half of barbed wire on top of them. Between the inner and the outer pair of fences was about thirty feet of space.

  The layout was familiar to me. I'd seen it before in the Soviet Union. It's the kind of set-up they'd copied from the Nazis, who used it to surround many of their concentration camps and all of their stalags — the prisoner of war camps. Which meant that the inner fence was electrified! Then, through the glasses, I spotted the dogs. In five minutes I counted eight of them. They ran free between the fences, which provided a runway for them to roam at will. Doberman pinschers usually run in pairs. They're fast. Once they hit a man, they'll take less than two minutes to rip him to death. In the dark no man stands a chance against them.

  No one — and I mean, no one at all — could get down that road, past the troopers, climb the first pair of fences and try to get over the second pair of fences without it costing him his life. If he made it over the outer fence, the dogs would tear him to shreds before he reached the inner fence. If they didn't, he'd just damn well electrocute himself the second he laid a hand on the wire.

  The estate itself, the manor house, sat in lonely splendor in the midst of an enormous expanse of closely-clipped lawn. It was 200 yards to the house from the nearest point of entry — 200 yards of wide-open terrain without an inch of cover! It was a safe bet that at night the grounds were crisscrossed with electronic sensor beams.

  Alexander Bradford had made sure that no one was going to get at him!

  After awhile, I rolled away from the crest of the mountain and went back down to the Volks. I had to think this one out carefully. In spite of Bradford's precautions, there had to be a way to get at him. I had to find it. Every defense has a built-in flaw. What was his?

  I drove away from the area, back toward Pittsfield, stopping at a small diner to eat a sandwich, have a cup of coffee and think this problem over.

  One way of looking at it was to assume that Bradford was keeping the world away from him. The opposite point of view was that he was just as much a captive in his own private stalag as any prisoner! If he'd set up so impregnable a defense, I figured he wasn't going to run away from it before D-Day.

  I knew I couldn't get to him in daylight. For whatever good it would do me, I needed the cover of darkness. Most of all, I needed some way of getting past the bogus troopers, past the dogs and over the fences to the house.

  It's strange where ideas come from. I was sitting in a small booth in the diner, finishing the last of my second cup of coffee and not paying much attention to anyone else. Across the aisle from me was a family of four. Nice, tourist types. The father was in his middle thirties, I guess. His wife held a baby in her arms. The other child was a boy about five. Idly I watched them. The little boy's father was occupied with folding a paper place mat. When he was finished, h
e held it up, showed it to the kid and then flipped it into the air.

  It swept across the room, soared up in a zoom, circled and came diving down again. A simple delta-wing paper airplane.

  There it was. The answer to how I could get past the road patrol, the fences, the dogs and the electronic sensor beams!

  Maybe.

  If I could find the equipment.

  I paid my bill, got into the Volks and set out for the airport at Pittsfield. If what I needed was to be found anywhere, it would be at an airport in the mountain country, because that's where you find swift air currents and where the sport is most popular.

  It's called "hang-gliding." You're suspended by an aluminum framework from a giant delta-wing kite covered in ultra-light nylon fabric. You'd be surprised how far you can hang-glide and how long you can stay aloft. I've done it a few times. It's quite a thrill to soar through the air without a sound, except for the whisper of wind in your ears, and nothing — not even the cockpit of a glider — around you.

  I was lucky. At the airport I found a man who sold me his personal kite. He also charged me too damned much for it, but I had the kite. A big son of a gun. Big enough, with the currents you get in the Berkshire mountain country, to lift me and the equipment I needed.

  At dusk I was back at the foot of the mountain. Once again I left the Volks in the grove of trees. Once more I climbed up to the peak. According to the airman's sectional chart, it had an elevation of 1,680 feet. The valley below — Bradford's private valley — was about 300 feet above sea level. With good air currents, taking off from that height, I could fly several miles. Much more than I needed to get to Bradford's estate.

  I assembled the aluminum and nylon framework of the kite before it got completely dark. Then I made myself comfortable and waited.

  While I waited, I mentally reviewed another problem. That damned manor was big! The house had at least sixty rooms. Two L-shaped wings branched off from the main section, which was three stories in height. Assuming I got in, where the devil would I find Bradford? I just couldn't go roaming down the hallways, asking people where he was!