by Jon Land
As if on cue, the heavy door opened and Dolorman walked gingerly out. “Anything to report, Wells?”
“All stations report no intruders.”
“You still sound worried.”
“Just concerned.”
“About McCracken?”
“McCracken’s dead. There may be others.”
Dolorman smiled up at him. “Save your nerves the bother. Thirty-six minutes from now, nothing anyone can do will be able to change what will commence at nine o’clock.” Then, to Verasco, “Are our communications people prepared to receive reports from the spotters?”
Verasco nodded. “They’re in place now.”
“Then nothing can stop us.”
A phone buzzed on Verasco’s desk. He lifted it to his ear and listened briefly, then turned quickly toward Dolorman.
“He wants you back inside.”
Dolorman moved to the heavy door again, gazing up at the wall clock before he entered. “Thirty-five minutes, gentlemen.”
The boatman’s craft rode the waves sluggishly from the extra weight. The currents battered her sides and spilled cold seawater onto the deck. Blaine and Johnny Wareagle remained on deck, while Sandy and the other Indians huddled in the small cabin. They were two-thirds across the inlet to Horse Neck now, and they could see the island gaining substance up ahead. It looked ominous.
“How long before the men on shore spot us?” Blaine asked the boatman, who stood rigidly behind the wheel, eyebrows and beard stubble speckled with ice crystals.
“Soon as we cross the rocks, I’d figure. Ayuh, that’s when the storm’ll stop covering us.”
“Any ideas?” Blaine asked Wareagle.
“If they see us, they’ll blow us out of the water … unless they see no reason to.”
“What do you mean?”
“No one shoots down a horse without a rider. That must be the way we make it seem with our boat. If the spirits are with us, it might work.”
“And if they aren’t?”
“Then we would have been dead already—a long time ago, Blainey, in the hellfire.”
McCracken turned to the boatman. “After we cross the rocks, would it be possible to drift toward the island’s dock?”
“With the currents, you mean, friend? Hard to figure them on a night like this. Storm winds blow the waters all different ways. But with a little luck, ayuh, I think I could manage it.”
“We’ve got my friend’s spirits with us,” Blaine said with an eye on Wareagle. “That should take care of the luck department.”
A minute later, with the island’s erratic shape now clearly in view, they reached the rocks. The boatman’s eyes were locked forward, though they were virtually useless to him when it came to seeing the deadly obstacles reaching up to tear the bottom from his boat. Instead, he focused on the island’s shoreline. He could then chart the murderous rock formations from memory and steer the boat accordingly. Although he had eased the throttle down almost entirely, the craft was still at the mercy of the lashing waves and was shoved from side to side against the boatman’s concerted efforts to hold the wheel steady.
In the cabin below, Sandy could feel rocks scraping at the hull. She could hear the horrible scraping rasp on the wooden bottom and wondered how long it would be until saltwater began to leak in.
Above, the boatman continued to throw all his energies into avoiding the most dangerous formations and risking abuse from the smaller ones. Occasionally the craft would slow with a grinding snarl to the point where it seemed they were scraping bottom and could go no farther. But always the boatman would twist the wheel just enough for the currents to free the craft so it might continue on its deliberate passage. Blaine felt his heart pounding and knew even Wareagle was fighting to retain his calm. The snow was vicious so close to the island, and they could look into it only for brief periods before the stinging on their faces became too much and they had to turn away.
Suddenly the boat’s progress was arrested, as if a giant hand had clamped onto its hull from beneath the water. The boatman advanced the engine patiently and eased the wheel to the right. The sound below was ear-wrenching, fingernails on a chalkboard, but the craft shifted free of the rock formation into the surging black sea. They had escaped the rocks.
In the cabin below, Sandy felt the cold soak of seawater through her gloves. It wasn’t coming from a central leak, but from many smaller ones. Soon she felt it rushing around her legs. A tremor of fear shook her as the engines switched off and the horrible anticipation of drowning made her breath come fast. Then the cabin door eased quietly open and Wareagle lowered himself in, followed by McCracken. While the giant Indian explained the next phase of the plan to his men, Blaine took Sandy aside and went over her role. She accepted it willingly, glad to have something to take her mind from the panic.
Blaine led her onto the deck, where they covered themselves with a single tarpaulin. She could not find the boatman and realized he, too, had covered himself up somewhere, leaving the craft to the whims of the water. Blaine had positioned them so he could follow their progress through a crack in the tarp, and Sandy was able to steal a few glances herself. They were heading erratically for a white dock that jutted out into the black water. At first it seemed certain they would overshoot it, but the boatman had calculated the currents well and from twenty yards away their route was straight on.
Blaine noticed the single man on the dock, glad he was alone but unhappy that he held his rifle poised. The man’s job was to watch for approaching craft but this one, obviously deserted, must have been stripped away from its mooring and been propelled here by the wind. Miraculously it had escaped the fury of the jagged rocks. There was nothing to report to headquarters until he had inspected the craft more closely. He expected to find nothing but held his gun steady just in case.
Ten yards later the cabin door opened just a crack, enough for Windsplitter, Wareagle’s knife-wielding man, to make a passage for one of his blades. Blaine stilled his breathing and pulled the tarp farther over him and Sandy. He was totally vulnerable from this position, but there was no alternative. If the dock guard noticed anything that made him shoot or contact his base, their mission was forfeit.
The man watched the abandoned craft pick up pace as it neared the dock. It slammed hard against a piling, and the guard noticed it was riding low, its deck sloshed with sea-water. The boat was obviously sinking. He would have to contact headquarters for further instructions. His hand started for the walkie-talkie pinned to his belt.
Windsplitter hurled his knife through the crack in the cabin door.
The blade split the guard’s chest up to the hilt. He stood transfixed for an instant before tumbling down onto the deck.
Blaine stripped the tarp away. Immediately Windsplitter yanked the blade from the guard’s chest and returned it to the sheath on his belt. Then Blaine undid the buttons and snaps on the dead man’s heavy winter coat. If the guard’s killing had been witnessed by any of his fellows, the area would be crawling in seconds with Wells’s men. If not, and if they worked fast enough, Blaine’s plan might work.
He finally managed to tear the bulky jacket from the corpse and held it open for Sandy. She slid her arms through it and let him buckle it up for her. The final touch was to fasten the hood tightly in place, so from a distance in the blizzard she would appear to be the guard on duty on the dock. Less than a minute after Windsplitter’s blade had jammed home, she was standing on the snow-covered dock with a heavy rifle in her gloved hands, glancing down with a shudder at the dark splotch on her chest.
“All you have to do is stand here,” Blaine told her. “If they call you on the walkie-talkie, don’t answer. Better yet, talk with your hand over the mouthpiece and say you can’t hear them.”
The boatman would remain behind as well to make whatever repairs were needed to keep the craft seaworthy. The one-legged Nightbird, meanwhile, would take up a position away from the dock to cover their return from the fortress after completing their mission. B
laine knew the Indian would have fared much better in the guard’s role than Sandy, but his handicap would make the substitution too obvious. He gazed around. The pier jutted out twenty yards from the shore into the water. After that came thirty yards of snow-covered beach and then the woods that would take them to the fortress.
“Let’s go,” said Blaine.
With Wareagle in the lead, they moved quickly away from the waterfront and found a trail at the entrance to the woods.
“You figure there’ll be any electronic traps?” Blaine whispered to Wareagle. “Trip wires or something?”
“Doubtful, Blainey. Too many small animals around to trigger false alarms.”
A few silent minutes later the small group reached a clearing and stopped at its edge. From where they stood, the mansion was visible through the falling snow, along with a number of guards perched atop the tall stucco wall enclosing it.
“They’re going to be a problem,” Blaine said softly. “More than we expected. I count seven.”
“Eight,” said Wareagle.
A branch snapped not far off, forcing them to silent stillness. A pair of boots approached, crunching snow and closing on their position. Wareagle motioned to Thunder Cloud, the Indian whose specialty was a long chain with a steel ball attached to its end, a variation on the ancient bolo. Thunder Cloud freed his weapon from his belt and quickly unwound it as he glided to the front of the clearing.
The approaching guard was still six feet away when Thunder Cloud crouched and whipped his bolo forward. It swished through the air and twisted around the man’s throat, the chain propelled by the heavy ball, until it shut off his air. His hands groped desperately for the chain, his frame reeling backward as Thunder Cloud took up the slack and the gnarled steel tore through the flesh of his throat. The scream he was forming died in the blood and pain. Thunder Cloud yanked his writhing body into the clearing as he started to fall.
“There will be others patrolling the immediate grounds,” Wareagle cautioned. “The spirits tell me six, perhaps seven between us and the wall.” He nodded to Running Deer, Windsplitter, and Thunder Cloud, who had just finished untangling his weapon from the dead guard’s throat. Together the three Indians fanned out ready, with their silent weapons of death, to clear their approach to the mansion’s wall.
“There are still the wall guards to worry about,” Blaine reminded Wareagle. “We’ll have to scale the wall to get to the mansion.”
He stripped the M-16 rifle and rocket launcher from his shoulder. Wareagle grabbed its barrel and held it.
“Bullets bring with them a noisy message, Blainey. There is another way.”
And McCracken watched the giant Indian and his two remaining soldiers, Swift Colt and Cold Eyes, lift their bows nimbly from their backs and ready their arrows.
In the woods beyond, soft sounds reached them through the storm. A grunt, a groan, a whistle through the air, a thud—all of these were repeated several times and each indicated to Wareagle that another of the enemy had fallen at the hands of his troops. But there was no time to relish the success of his tactics. The dead guards would have reports to make and checkpoints to pass. Soon too much would seem wrong to the men on duty inside the mansion.
“We must move now, Blainey,” Wareagle whispered. “The spirits command it.”
Blaine nodded and followed Johnny from the clearing. Cold Eyes and Swift Colt were right behind with bows ready.
Inside the mansion Wells had returned to his perch in the communications room. The closed circuit monitors had him totally frustrated, and squinting his good eye to make sense of their pictures had done him no good at all. Wells stripped back the shades from the windows overlooking the courtyard, but he could make out only the closest shapes at their posts.
The nagging feeling in his gut increased, the icy fingers of foreboding tightening their grasp. Nothing could possibly be wrong. And yet he felt something was. There had been no reports of anything strange or suspicious from his patrols beyond the walls, and surely no assault could come without at least some of them being alerted.
Wells was nonetheless restless. None of the logical assurances could override his feeling of dread. His nerves were getting to him. Maybe his repeated failure to eliminate McCracken had something to do with it. Failure was something Wells seldom experienced. But McCracken had finally been killed in Arkansas. If there was someone here on the island, it wasn’t McCracken.
“Get me the guard on duty at the dock,” he called to the man monitoring the communications console.
Wareagle stopped.
“What’s wrong?” Blaine whispered.
“More men inside the courtyard,” Johnny told him. “If we shoot down the wall guards but do nothing about the men in the courtyard, our presence will be given away to those inside.”
“The element of surprise is all we have. We can’t lose that.” McCracken thought quickly. “We’ve got to attack the men inside the courtyard at the same time we take out the guards patrolling the wall.”
The three Indians Wareagle had dispatched arrived within seconds of one another. Blaine didn’t bother asking how they had located their leader. They behaved like homing pigeons.
Pigeons … Trees …
Blaine glanced up through the falling snow. Trees surrounded the wall, some of them hanging over or close to it. The right men up there with the right weapons could take care of the courtyard and the wall. He explained the plan briefly to Wareagle.
“Can your boys get up in those without being seen, Indian?” he asked finally.
“They can get anywhere without being seen, Blainey, until circumstances force them to appear. Once in the courtyard, their presence will not be secret long from those inside the mansion.”
“Just get me to the front door, Indian,” Blaine told him. “I’ll take care of the rest.”
Sandy heard her walkie-talkie squawk and nearly jumped out of shock. She hesitated, hoping the call was meant for someone else.
“Water guard one, do you read me,” the voice repeated.
She lifted the walkie-talkie from her belt and covered the plastic mouthpiece with her gloved hand just as Blaine had instructed. Taking a deep breath, she began to speak in a deepened voice.
“I can … hardly … hear … you.”
“Say again, water guard one.”
“You’re broken up. I can’t hear you clearly.”
A different voice came on. “Water guard one, you missed your last report. Is everything all right?”
“Yes. I tried to report but I couldn’t make this thing work.” Sandy tightened a portion of her glove over the mouthpiece. “Could you send someone with a replacement?”
“No need, water guard one,” said the second voice. “Just stay alert.”
Wells yanked the headpiece from his ears and turned to a befuddled communications officer. “What was that about, sir? Water guard one wasn’t scheduled to make a report.”
“I know,” said Wells. “Now get me one of the field guards on the radio immediately.”
“Which one?”
“Any! All! It doesn’t matter!”
The radioman made the call, waited, then repeated it. After the third repetition he turned back to Wells.
“They’re not … responding, sir.”
Wells was already moving fast for the door. “Signal an alert!”
The radioman hit the red button on his console.
Chapter 30
IT WAS TWENTY-TWO MINUTES to eight when Wareagle’s men had finally achieved their positions in the trees. Windsplitter and his knives were in one, Running Deer and his tomahawks in another, and Cold Eyes with his crossbow in a third. Blaine gazed up at the trees and honestly couldn’t see them, so complete was their camouflage. They had scaled the branches so adroitly that they barely disturbed the pilings of snow.
Johnny had kept Swift Colt, wielder of the second long bow, with him, and now they separated to find clearer sightlines to their designated targets on the wa
ll. Blaine went with Thunder Cloud to the base of the wall and watched him fasten gnarled lengths of chain to the ends of a pair of ropes. There was a ridge protruding close to the top of the wall, and assuming there was a similar ridge on the inner side, the gnarled chain once tossed over would hook on it. The Indian handed one of the completed climbing ropes to Blaine and kept the other for himself. They’d climb the wall together and drop into the courtyard, with Wareagle and Swift Colt soon to follow if all went according to plan. The others would drop down from their tree perches a bit later. Taking the courtyard guards by surprise should overcome the advantage of their superior weapons.
The sound of an owl hooting came. It was time.
Wareagle and Swift Colt shot the guards closest to them on the wall and had their second arrows loaded before the next closest pair had even noticed their two fellows plunging to the ground. There were six guards patrolling the inner courtyard, and before they could respond, a series of weapons hurtled on target toward their chests or heads. A pair of Windsplitter’s knives found their marks neatly, along with one of Running Deer’s tomahawks and three whistling crossbow arrows courtesy of Cold Eyes.
Blaine and Thunder Cloud had reached the top of the wall just as the last of the guards atop it fell to Wareagle’s and Swift Colt’s arrows. They had just dropped into the courtyard when the alarm bell sounded.
Suddenly the courtyard was ablaze with light that made the snowflakes seem to dance in its beams. The front doors of the mansion crashed open and a horde of men surged out, machine guns already flashing.
McCracken rolled and fired a burst, taking out a few men of the first rush, and then slid back the catch on his grenade launcher. He pulled the secondary trigger and felt the recoil slam him backward. The grenade blasted into the front of the mansion and sent rocks and wood splinters flying everywhere. Running Deer and Windsplitter dropped into the courtyard, Cold Eyes staying at his perch to provide cover with his crossbow.
McCracken ran along the far edge of the wall, firing at the guards rushing forward and trying to angle himself for a dash into the mansion. Wareagle and Swift Colt, still on top of the wall, released a constant barrage of arrows at the troops charging from the hole blasted in the front of the mansion. The one-handed Running Deer managed to take out two others who’d escaped the arrows. Then, down to his last tomahawk, he raised it wildly over his head and hooted a war cry as he charged into a pack of Krayman’s men. He killed a final one before a bullet spilled his blood onto the snow.