Wicca

by James Follett

  A few people came out to watch but not the cheering crowds that Roscoe had expected. No people spilling off the pavement for the mounted blackshirts to clear. The men stared up at Ellen and Vikki, and looked away in embarrassment. A woman rushed out of a house and snatched away a small boy.

  From his flat over the Catholic church hall on the corner of Market Square, Father Kendrick watched the procession's approach. The gangling youth was leading a small choir singing `We're going to a gangbang! We're going to a gangbang!' to the tune of We're on Our Way to Wembley; they seemed to have little trouble remembering the words. Some of the gangling youth's mates were among the bystanders; he persuaded them to join the procession, jeering at the doubters that they were frightened of not being able to get it up.

  As the dogcart drew level with Father Kendrick's flat, Vikki looked up and saw the priest at the window. She actually smiled, the light of the blazing torches reflected in her green eyes, and made a brave attempt at a wave as best the chains would allow. The Catholic priest was deeply moved. He gave the sign of the cross and offered a fervent prayer for the salvation of both women. In the answering of that prayer he had a small but important part to play.

  He climbed to the disused housekeeper's flat on the 4th floor and entered the living-room. It faced south. He opened the window and leaned out, holding a penlight infra-red laser pointer. The half moon broke through wispy clouds, providing plenty of light for him to identify the dark hump of his target some two kilometres distant. He aimed the pointer at the target and sent dot-dot-dot-dash three times -- the letter V in morse code. He allowed a pause and sent six dashes. Another pause and then two dashes. He repeated the sequence three times.

  Chapter 59.

  AT THAT RANGE THE laser beam from Father Kenrick's pointer could not damage Carl Crittenden's eyes but the tiny point of light was bright enough for him to see it at the Temple of the Winds without his binoculars. He read two sends of the message to be certain and called down from the branches of a tree on the heavily wooded slope above where the great sandstone slab protruded from the hillside:

  `They've just left Pentworth House, Mr Weir. Six blackshirts on foot and two on horseback.'

  `Thanks, Carl -- you'd better come down now.' David turned to Malone. `Just as your informant said, Mike. She's certainly worth looking after.'

  Carl dropped out of the tree just as Dan Baldock with two burly stable lads dressed as blackshirts joined David and Malone for their final briefing. Carl, David, Baldock and Malone were completely swathed in black, even to the extent of black cotton gloves. David opened a tin containing a homemade mixture of lampblack and oil which he used to black all their faces except the two stable lads.

  `We haven't got long,' said Malone. `Let's go over what everyone has to do.'

  The six men talked for five minutes. They shook hands all round and melted silently into the trees. Malone's position behind some gorse bushes afforded him a good view of the track where it emerged onto the plateau. He lay prone, the weight of the .45 he had taken off Faraday pressing reassuring against his thigh.

  A thousand worries crowded in on him as he waited; the main one being that the two mounted blackshirts wouldn't scout ahead. Had the Country Brigade been too successful in establishing that they would be taking no action to stop the executions? That concern was banished when he heard the sound of hooves coming up the track. The others would have heard them, too. A few moments later the two mounted blackshirts appeared. They reined-in their horses in the middle of the moonlit plateau and scoured the area with powerful halogen lanterns, their questing beams whipping back and forth above Malone, stabbing white light into the trees.

  `Look, darling -- if I say you take your knickers off, you take your bloody knickers off!'

  Both beams swung as one to a narrow avenue through the trees towards the sound of the angry voice.

  `Did you hear that?' asked one of the blackshirts.

  `We'd better flush 'em out.'

  Don't dismount! Malone prayed, training his revolver on them. Don't dismount!

  `Hey. Who's there!' yelled the indignant voice in the woods. `Bloody peeping Toms! Fuck off, you perverts!'

  The blackshirts spurred their horses towards the trees. Malone's relief was like a blanket lifting, particularly when the riders broke into a canter.

  The piano wire strung between two trees caught both blackshirts almost simultaneously across their chests and swept them off their saddles. The two stable lads dressed as blackshirts leapt from cover and grabbed the horses reins to calm them and prevent them returning riderless to the procession. They were skilled horsemen and had the nervous creatures under control within seconds. David and Baldock snatched the shotguns from the saddle holsters and covered the two winded men as they climbed to their feet.

  `One sound!' Malone snarled. `One sound -- and your headless ghosts will be haunting this place for years to come.' He was standing legs slightly apart, clasping the heavy .45 in both outstretched hands in the correct manner to minimise kick so that he could be sure of getting in two fast, accurate shots with the intention of wounding them if they tried to escape.

  The blackshirts put their hands up without being ordered. Malone told them to lie down on their stomachs, hands behind their backs. Carl secured their wrists with cable ties and bound their mouths using a generous amount of wide gaffer tape. Malone had even thought to provide mouth tubes in case the men had colds and were unable to breath through their noses. Carl and Baldock yanked the prisoners to their feet and marched them into the woods at the points of their own shotguns. They were back five minutes later looking pleased with themselves.

  `They have a tree each but seemed most ungrateful,' Baldock reported.

  `Break a leg,' said Malone to the stable lads as they mounted and returned the shotguns to the saddle holsters. One was pushing a flesh-coloured earphone into his ear, looping the wire behind his ear and under his collar so that it could not be seen. `Stay clear of the radius of the torches,' Malone continued, `and listen out for my long burst of carrier.'

  The riders acknowledged, wheeled their horses expertly around and disappeared down the track.

  David called from the edge of the plateau. He was pointing down and to the west. Carl, Malone and Baldock joined him and watched the distant points of flickering lights moving along the valley. The torches were clustered close together and were about a kilometre distant.

  `Okay, back to your positions,' said Malone. `I'll join you just before they get here.'

  David, Baldock and Carl vanished into the wooded shadows. Malone trained his binoculars on the cortege. He picked out the sentinels, easily distinguished by their white gowns. The one at the front without a torch was probably Roscoe. Altogether there were 58 torches. That meant a crowd of about 40 -- less than he had anticipated. He was uncertain whether it would be an advantage or disadvantage. The armed blackshirts were sticking close to the dogcart. As it drew nearer he could see Ellen and Vikki more clearly, standing together, manacled to the crossbar and pressing against it to keep their gowns closed. Seeing the two hapless, innocent women subjected to such humiliation and mental torture made it difficult for him suppress his hatred towards Roscoe. The man was insane but only clear thinking and decisive action was going to resolve this miserable situation. Hatred could wait.

  He switched on his radio, made sure it was set to channel 41 -- a frequency never used by the police -- and sent five bursts of carrier. It was the signal for the seventh member of the rescue team to get ready to join them. The pre-arranged four burst acknowledgement came back immediately. Then the procession was lost to sight behind some trees.

  Malone darted a little way down the narrow track and stopped, listening intently. After a few minutes he heard the faint strains of a lusty but ragged rendition of Onward Christian Soldiers and his heartbeat stepped up as he switched on his radio again. The five bursts of carrier and the acknowledgement was the signal to the approaching 7th member to begin his attack. T
here was no turning back now. Harvey Evans in his microlight biplane-bomber would be closing in. Malone raced back up the track, crossed the plateau, and plunged into the woods.

  `US Cavalry and the Apaches are on their way!' he called and dived down beside Carl.

  The four pulled their gas masks over their faces and waited, eyes trained on the spot where the cortege would appear. They could all hear the uproar of the approaching procession now. Some of the party were yelling the words of the hymn, drowning out those who were singing.

  The blazing crowns of the torches carried by the lanky youth and his boisterous, whooping gang came into view first. The blackshirts had given up trying to keep them behind the main phalanx.

  `Oh, leave them alone,' Roscoe had ordered. `At least they provide a carnival atmosphere.'

  The gang had been a pain, yelling and screaming, pausing occasionally to stand in front of the dogcart and gesture suggestively by jerking their hips and elbows back and forth for the benefit of the dogcart's passengers. One of the new recruits that the lanky youth had picked up on the way had a ghetto blaster perched on his shoulder, with fully-charged batteries judging by the volume of the Bee Gee's Stayin' Alive! that belted from its twin speakers when he switched it on, adding to the uproar.

  And then Roscoe and Faraday appeared, striding confidently ahead of the dogcart towards the centre of the plateau. But the procession had not strung out as the conspirators had hoped to negotiate the narrow track; four of the blackshirts had stayed close behind the dogcart. Malone sent a long burst on his radio and almost immediately there were the sounds of shouts and screams from further down the track. A shotgun boomed.

  `Trouble below!' yelled one of the mounted stable lads, riding fast onto the plateau. `Need help!' He wheeled his horse around and disappeared down the track. Two of the four blackshirts followed the horseman at the double.

  Malone thumped Carl on the back. The young man jumped to his feet and streaked off, a razor-sharp hunter's knife clutched in his right hand. He kept to the shadows as best he could but there came a point when he had to break cover and risk being seen. His job was to hamstring the horse drawing the dogcart. One of the concerns that Malone and David had had about the Temple of the Winds as the site of the ambush was the danger of the horse bolting and taking Ellen and Vikki over the edge. Malone had suggested his shooting the horse with the .45 but a reconnoitre and a study of the angles showed that there was a very real danger of hitting Ellen and Vikki. As much as Carl loved horses, he had volunteered for the job.

  At that moment, just as Malone was about to fire a parachute flare, everything started going disastrously wrong.

  Chapter 60.

  CARL'S RESTRICTED FIELD of vision through the round windows of the grotesque gas mask was one thing that the planners had overlooked -- a shortcoming that was to trigger a sequence of disasters. He tripped on a rock and fell as he was about to dive under the dogcart. A sentinel saw him and yelled. Before Carl had a chance to recover, two more sentinels threw themselves on him and a fourth whipped out a shotgun from under his gown.

  Malone's view of what happened was obscured by the dogcart's wheels. He saw something of the commotion and heard the horse neighing. He assumed that Carl had carried out his task and fired the flare. It climbed lazily into the sky and burst into life -- a burning magnesium sun hanging from a parachute, turning night into day as well as giving a good indication of wind speed and direction.

  A small measure of luck for the ambush team was that Harvey Evans in his microlight had seen Carl dash across the plateau of the Temple of the Winds and had turned toward his objective by the time Malone fired the flare to signal the air attack.

  Evans was already lined up on his target. He put the tiny biplane's nose down to pick up speed and pulled the lever that released the first cluster of four bomblets. Timing was more a question of instinct rather than training. Two exploded harmlessly against the sheer sides of the sandstone scarp but the other two hit the rim, sending dense white clouds rolling malignantly towards the lanky youth and his noisy gang of revellers. One whiff was enough to send the lanky youth into paroxysms of abject terror. He sank to his knees, clutching his face, screaming: `I'm blind! I'm blind!'

  Others in his party reacted likewise, gagging, clutching their throats, rolling about and thrashing their limbs, their screams lost in the roar of the microlight as it swept low over the Temple of the Winds. Malone, Baldock and David charged from their hiding places, firing flares low over the heads of the crowd to help the panic along.

  It was all too much for the horse. The four sentinels hanging on to its reins and bridle, desperately trying to calm it, were shaken off when it reared up. White-eyed, ears laid back, it charged towards the woods but slewed around, throwing its driver clear, when a flare burst in front of it. Ellen and Vikki cried out in terror and doubled-up, their arms hooked around the crossbar as best they could. The terrified beast wheeled again and headed for the only clear way out. With the dogcart crashing along behind it, threatening to overturn while shedding its cargo of spare torches and a case of shotgun cartridges, the petrified horse galloped straight for the rim of the sandstone plateau.

  Chapter 61.

  ONCE HE HAD PASSED OVER the Temple of the Winds and was out of shotgun range, Harvey Evans put his microlight into a tight turn, increasing power as he did so to maintain height. He lined-up on the chaos of torches and flares on the plateau for his second run. The wind screamed through the bomb racks, one fitted each side of the fuselage.

  He had never been licensed for night flying and had never flown at night, and would never have agreed to this crazy enterprise but for Malone's tenacity, and the promise of a properly-lit airstrip for his landing. It was one thing to take-off from a familiar field at night, quite another to find it for a safe landing. Another worry had been that his engine would be heard -- the little air-cooled engine was as noisy as they came; it seemed inevitable that his first approach would be heard and that his low-level attack would be greeted by a barrage of shotgun blasts. Malone had come up with a plan to deal with that problem, too.

  It had taken two hours of cajoling by Malone before Evans had eventually agreed to take part in the rescue. Yesterday Charlie Crittenden had visited him to fit the bomb racks, and mount a lightweight plywood framework on the upper wing that held four lengths of plastic waste pipe. Sticking out of each tube was the business end of a marine distress rocket -- their four firing lanyards fitted with wooden toggles and arranged in a neat row just above his head. He fervently hoped that it wouldn't be necessary to use them. Launching rockets from his tiny aircraft was not to his taste. Whereas objects dropped over the side merely fell, there was no knowing what rockets would do.

  He roared down on the plateau and pulled the levers that released the second cluster of four bombs. The flasks rattled down the racks. In the instant that he pulled up, he caught a fleeting glimpse of the horse and dogcart bolting for the edge, with the two terrified women clutching the crossbar. Sick at heart, he knew that something had gone terribly wrong -- the horse was supposed to have been disabled before his attack.

  Chapter 62.

  WHEN ROSCOE FIRST saw the swirling white clouds and what he thought were his supporters, writhing and screaming on the ground, clutching their faces, he ran to the higher ground and raised his arms to calm everyone, but for once no one was taking any notice of him. Several of his faithful sentinels suffered a profound and sudden loss of faith, particularly when the lanky youth staggered towards them, his face a grotesque mask -- eyes bulging horribly, his skin blue. His cries that he was blind decided them. Those that had been armed flung down their shotguns to be rid of their weight and took flight down the track, dragging their cowls across their faces to protect them from the now dispersing white clouds. The blackshirts did the same, and when the sentinels and driver who had tried to control the rearing horse were thrown clear, they too abandoned all hope and joined the panic-fuelled exodus.

  It was two
prancing black demons with hideous, goggling gas mask faces that caused Roscoe's courage to fail him. He promptly decided to put his faith in his legs rather than his silver cross. Demons were notoriously ill-informed on occult matters. He didn't know what had happened to Faraday and didn't much care. His only thought was to get away from this hellish place.

  Malone yanked off his gas mask, fired two shots at the bolting horse, and was suddenly surrounded by exploding bomblets, showering him with glass. He took a deep breath before the white clouds engulfed him and raced towards the brink in time to see the horse crash lifeless to the ground within five metres of the edge, blood spurting from the terrible exit wound in its head. The careering dogcart slewed around the bulk of the dead horse, pivoting on its hafts. It crashed onto its side, but still had sufficient momentum to drag the horse several metres as it went backwards over the edge.

  The cart stopped, its rear wheels spinning, rocking wildly on the sandstone rim, its weight gradually dragging the horse by the one remaining harnessed haft, Ellen and Vikki screaming hysterically, hanging helplessly by the chains of their manacles and leg irons which had saved them from a 50 metre fall.

  Malone threw himself prone and grabbed the dead horse by the harness collar. The slide slowed but didn't stop. His yells brought everyone running, including the lanky youth and his supposedly gassed gang. They all scrambled to their feet and rushed to get a handhold on the dead horse, none of them blind or seeming the worse for wear other than white dust in their hair and clinging to their clothes, and blue dye on their faces.

  One of the mounted stable lads saw what was needed and rode into the woods to retrieve rope and the bolt-cropper from the supplies cache.