Avenger

by Frederick Forsyth

  At the extremity of his vision hidden in the morning mist was the third portion of the estate, the walled five-acre compound at the end of the foreland. He knew from his aerial pictures it contained the magnificent white mansion in which the former Serbian gangster lived; half a dozen villas in the grounds for guests and senior staff; tonsured lawns, flower beds and shrubbery; and along the inner side of the fourteen-foot-high protecting wall, a series of lean-to cottages and stores for domestic staff, linen, food and drink.

  In his pictures and on his scale model, the huge wall also went from cliff edge to cliff edge, and at this point the land was fifty feet above the sea which surged and thumped on the rocks below.

  A lone but massive double-gate penetrated the wall at its centre with a road of pounded hardcore leading up to it. There was a guardhouse inside which controlled the gate-opening machinery, and a parapet ran along the inside of the wall to enable armed guards to patrol its entire length.

  Everything between the chain-link fence below the watcher and the wall over two miles away was the food-producing farm. As the light rose, Dexter could confirm what his photos had told him: the farm produced almost everything the community within the fortress could need. There were grazing herds of beef and lamb. Sheds would certainly contain pigs and poultry.

  There were fields of arable crops, grains, pulses, tubers. Orchards producing ten kinds of fruit. Acre after acre of salad-vegetable crops either in the open or under long domes of polythene. He surmised the farm would produce every conceivable kind of salad and fruit, along with meat, butter, eggs, cheese, oil, bread and rough red wine.

  The fields and orchards were studded with barns and granaries, machine stores, and facilities to slaughter the beasts, mill the grain, bake the bread, press the grapes.

  To his right, near the cliff edge but inside the farm, was a series of small barracks for the guard staff, with a dozen better-quality chalets for their officers and two or three company shops.

  To his left, also at the cliff edge, also inside the farm, were three large warehouses and a gleaming aluminium fuel-storage farm. Right at the very edge of the cliff were two large cranes or derricks. That solved one problem: heavy cargoes came by sea and were hefted or pumped from the ship below to the storage facilities forty feet above the freighter’s deck.

  The peons finished their morning meal and again came the harsh clang as the iron bar smashed against the hanging length of rail. This time there were several reactions.

  Uniformed guards spilled from their barracks further up the coast to the right. One put a silent whistle to his lips. Dexter heard nothing but out of the farmland a dozen loping Dobermanns emerged in obedience to the call and entered their fenced compound near the barracks. Clearly they had not eaten for twenty-four hours; they hurled themselves at the plates of raw offal set out and tore the meat to pieces.

  That told Dexter what happened each sundown. When every staffer and slave was closed off in their respective compounds, the dogs would be released to hunt and prowl the three thousand acres of farmland. They must have been trained to leave the calves, sheep and pigs alone, but any wandering burglar would simply not survive. They were far too many for a single man to begin to combat. Entry by night was not feasible.

  The watcher had buried himself so deeply in the undergrowth that anyone below, raising his or her eyes to the crest of the range, would see no glint of sun off lens-glass, nor would he catch a glimpse of the motionless camouflaged man.

  At half past six, when the farming estate was ready to receive them, the iron clang summoned the labourers to work. They trooped towards the high gate that separated the village from the farm.

  This gate was a far more complicated affair than the one from the airfield to the estate. It opened inwards to the farmland, in two halves. Beyond the gate, five tables had been set up and guards sat behind each. Others stood over them. The peons formed into five columns.

  On a shouted command they shuffled forward. Each man at the head of the queue stooped at the table to offer a dog tag round his neck to the seated official. The number on the tag was checked and tapped into a database.

  The workers must have lined up in the right column, according to their type of number, for after they were nodded through they reported to a chargehand beyond the tables. In groups of about a hundred they were led away to their tasks, pausing at a number of tool sheds beside the main track to pick up what they needed.

  Some were for the fields, some for the orchards, others were destined for animal husbandry, or the grain mill, the slaughterhouse, the vineyard or the huge kitchen garden. As Dexter watched, the enormous farm came to life. But the security never slackened. When the village was finally empty, the double-gate closed and the men dispersed to their stations, Dexter concentrated on that security and looked for his opening.

  It was in the mid-morning that Colonel Moreno heard back from the two emissaries he had sent out with foreign passports in their hands.

  In Cayenne, capital of French Guyana to the east, the authorities had wasted no time. They were not best pleased that three innocent game fishermen had been detained for the crime of breaking down at sea, nor that five technicians had been picked up and detained without good cause. All eight French passports were pronounced 100 per cent genuine and an urgent request was lodged that their owners be released and sent home.

  To the west, in Paramaribo, the Dutch embassy said exactly the same about their two nationals; the passports were genuine, the visas in order, what was the problem?

  The Spanish embassy was closed, but Colonel Moreno had been assured by the man from the CIA that the fugitive was about five feet eight inches tall, while the Spaniard was over six feet. That just left the missing Mr Henry Nash of London.

  The secret police chief ordered his man in Cayenne to come home, and the man in Parbo to hunt through every car rental agency to find what kind of car the Londoner had rented, and its registration number.

  By mid-morning the heat on the hills was intense. A few inches from the unmoving watcher’s face a lizard with red, erect ruff behind its head, walking on stones that would fry an egg, stared at the stranger, detected no threat and scuttled on its way. There was activity out by the cliff-top derricks.

  Four muscular young men wheeled a thirty-foot aluminium patrol boat to the rear of a Land Rover and hitched up. The LR towed the vessel to a petrol pump where it was fuelled. It could almost have passed for a leisure craft except for the .30 Browning machine gun mounted in the waist.

  When the boat was ready for sea, it was towed beneath one of the derricks. Four webbing bands suspended from a rectangular frame ended in four tough steel cleats. These were fixed into strong-points on the boat’s hull. With the crew on board, the patrol boat was lifted off the hard pad, swung out to sea and lowered to the ocean. Dexter saw it go out of sight.

  Minutes later he saw it again out at sea. The men on board hauled up and emptied two fish traps and five lobster pots, re-baited them, threw them back and resumed their patrol.

  Dexter had noted that everything in front of him would collapse into ruin without two life-giving elixirs. One was gasoline, which would power the generator plant situated behind the warehouse of the dock. This would provide the electricity which itself would power every device and motor on the whole estate, from gate opening to power-drill to bedside light.

  The other elixir was water, fresh, clean, clear water in a limitless supply. It came from the mountain stream that he had first seen in the aerial photographs.

  That stream was now below him and slightly to his left. It bubbled out of the mountainside, having made its way from somewhere deep in the rain-forests of the interior.

  It emerged twenty feet above the peninsula, tumbled down several rock falls and then entered a concrete-sided channel that had clearly been created for it. From that point, Man took over from Nature.

  To reach the farmland it had to flow under the runway below the hunter. Clearly strong, square culverts had b
een inserted below the runway when it was built. Emerging from below the runway on the other side, the now-marshalled water flowed under the chain-link fence as well. Dexter had little doubt there was an impenetrable grille there. Without a grille anyone could have slipped into the stream within the airfield, gone under the wire and used the gully and the flowing water to elude the wandering dogs. Whoever designed the defences would not have allowed that.

  In the mid-morning two things happened right below his eyrie. The Hawker 1000 was towed out of the hangar into the sun. Dexter feared it might be needed to fly the Serb somewhere, but it was only pulled from the hangar to make space. What followed was a small helicopter of the sort traffic police use to monitor flow. It could hover barely inches away from the rock face if required, and he would have to be invisible to avoid being spotted. But it remained below him with its rotors folded while the engine was serviced.

  The other thing was that a quad-bike came from the farm to the electric gate. Using a bleeper to open the gate, the man on the quad motored in, waved a cheery greeting to the mechanics on the apron and went up the runway to where the stream passed under it.

  He stopped the quad, took a wicker basket from the back and looked down at the flowing water. Then he tossed several chicken carcasses into the water. He did this on the upstream side of the runway. Then he crossed the tarmac and looked down into the water again. The carcasses must have been carried by the flow to press up against the grille at the departure side.

  Whatever was in that water between the escarpment and the grille, it ate meat. Dexter could only think of one fresh-water denizen of those parts that ate meat: the piranha. If it could eat hens, it could eat swimmers. It mattered not if the water touched the roof longer than he could hold his breath, it was already a three-hundred-yard-long piranha pool.

  After the chain-link fence the stream ran away through the estate, feeding a glittering tracery of irrigation channels. Other taps underground would duct some of the flow to the workers’ village, the villas, the barracks and the master mansion.

  The rest, having served all parts of the estate, curved back towards the farm end of the runway, there to tumble over the edge and into the sea.

  By early afternoon the heat lay on the land like a great, heavy, suffocating blanket. Out on the estate the workers had toiled from seven until twelve. They were then allowed to find shade and eat what they had brought in their small cotton tote bags. Until four they were allowed to make siesta before the last three hours’ labour, from four to seven.

  Dexter lay and panted, envying the salamander basking on a rock a yard away, immune to the heat. It was tempting to throw pints of precious water down his throat to achieve relief, but he knew it must be rationed to prevent dehydration, rather than poured down for pleasure.

  At four the clang of the iron rail told the workers to go back to the fields and barns. Dexter struggled to the edge of his escarpment and watched the tiny figures in rough cotton shirts and pants, nut-brown faces hidden under straw sombreros, take up the hoe and mattock again to keep the model farm weed-free.

  To his left a battered-looking pickup rolled to the space between the derricks and stopped, after reversing its rear towards the sea. A peon in bloodstained overalls hauled a long steel chute from the back, fixed it to the tailgate and with a pitchfork began to hoist something onto the steel slide. Whatever it was slithered off and fell into the sea. Dexter adjusted his focus. The next forkful gave the game away. It was a black hide with the bullock’s head still attached.

  Back in New York, examining the photos, he had been struck that even with the cliffs there was nevertheless no attempt to make an access to the beautiful blue sea. No steps down, no diving platform, no moored raft, no lido, no jetty. Seeing the offal go in, he understood why. The water round the whole peninsula would be alive with hammerheads, tigers and great whites. Anything swimming, other than a fish, would last a few minutes.

  About that hour Colonel Moreno took a call on a cellphone from his man across the border in Surinam. The Englishman, Nash, had rented his car from a small private and local company, which is why it had taken so long to trace. But he had it at last. It was a Ford Compact. He dictated the number.

  The secret policeman issued his order for the morning. Every car park, every garage, every driveway, every track to be scoured for a Ford Compact of this Surinamese registration number. Then changed his orders. Any Ford with any registration number was to be traced. Searching to start at dawn.

  Dusk and dark come in the tropics with bewildering speed. The sun had passed behind Dexter’s back an hour earlier, bringing relief at last. He watched the estate workers come home, dragging weary feet. They handed in their tools; they were checked through the double-gate one by one, in their five columns, two hundred per column.

  They came back to the village to join the two hundred who had not gone to the fields. In the villas and the barracks the first lights came on. At the far end of the triangle a white glow revealed where the Serb’s mansion was floodlit.

  The mechanics on the airfield closed up and took their mopeds to ride to the villas at the far end of the runway. When all was fenced and locked the Dobermanns were released, the world said farewell to 6 September, and the manhunter prepared to go down the escarpment.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  The Visitor

  In a day of peering over the edge of the escarpment, the Avenger had realized two things about it that had not shown up on his photographs. One was that it was not steep all the way down. The slope was perfectly climbable until about a hundred feet from the level plain, at which point it dropped sheer. But he had brought more than that length of good climbing rope.

  The other was that the nudity of all weeds and shrubs was down to an act of Man, not of Nature. Someone, preparing the defences, had had teams of men come over the edge of the drop in rope cradles to rip every twig and shrub out of the crevices in the slope, so as to give no leaf-cover at all.

  Where the saplings were slim enough to be entirely ripped out, they had been. But some had had a stem that was simply resistant to the pull of a man on a rope’s end. These had been sawn off short. But not short enough. The stumps formed hundreds of hand-and-toe holds for a climber going down or up.

  In daylight such a climber would have been instantly visible, but not in darkness.

  By 10 p.m. the moon was up, a sickle moon, just enough to give dim light to the climber, not enough to make him visible against the shale face. Only delicacy would be needed not to cause a rock-fall. Moving from stump to stump, Dexter began to ease his way down to the airfield below.

  When the slope became too steep even for climbing, Dexter used the coiled rope around his shoulders to abseil the rest.

  He spent three hours on the airfield. Years earlier another of his ‘clients’ from the Tombs in New York had taught him the gentlemanly art of picking locks and the set of picks he carried with him had been made by a master.

  The padlock on the doors of the hangar he left alone. The double doors would have rumbled if they were rolled back. There was a smaller door to one side with a single Yale-type locking mechanism and it cost him no more than thirty seconds.

  It takes a good mechanic to repair a helicopter, and an even better one to sabotage it in such a manner that a good mechanic could not find the fault and mend it, or even notice the tampering.

  The mechanic the Serb employed to look after his helicopter was good, but Dexter was better. Up close he recognized the bird as an EC 120 Eurocopter, the single-engine version of the twin EC 135. It had a big Perspex bubble at the front end with excellent all-round, up-and-down observation for the pilot and the man beside him, plus room for three more behind them.

  Dexter concentrated not on the main rotor mechanism but on the smaller tail rotor. If that malfunctioned, the chopper would simply not be fit to fly. By the time he had finished, it was certainly going to malfunction and be very hard to repair.

  The door of the Hawker 1000
was open, so he had a chance to inspect the interior and ensure that the executive jet had had no serious internal reconfiguration.

  When he locked up the main hangar he broke into the mechanics’ store, took what he wanted but left no trace. Finally he jogged gently to the far end of the runway, close to the backs of the residential villas, and spent his last hour there. In the morning one of the mechanics would notice with irritation that someone had borrowed his bicycle from where it leaned against the back fence.

  When he had done all he came to do, Dexter found his hanging rope and climbed back to the stout stump where it was tied. Beyond that, he climbed, moving from root to root until he was back in his eyrie. He was soaked to the point where he could have wrung the sweat from his clothes. He consoled himself with the thought that body odour was one thing no one was going to notice in that part of the world. To replace the moisture, he allowed himself a full pint of water, checked the level of the remaining liquid, and slept. The tiny alarm in his watch woke him at six in the morning, just before the iron bar began to clang against the hanging rail far below.

  At seven, Paul Devereaux raised McBride in his room at the Camino Real Hotel.

  ‘Any news?’ asked the man from Washington.

  ‘None,’ said McBride. ‘It seems pretty sure he came back masquerading as an Englishman, Henry Nash, resort developer. Then he vaporized. His car has been identified as a rented Ford Compact from Surinam. Moreno is starting a countrywide trawl for any Ford about now. Should have news sometime today.’

  There was a long pause from the Counter-Terrorist Chief, still sitting in a robe in his breakfast room in Alexandria, Virginia, before leaving for Langley.

  ‘Not good enough,’ said Devereaux. ‘I’m going to have to alert our friend. It will not be an easy call. I’ll wait till ten. If there is any news of a capture or imminent capture before then, call me at once.’