by Iles, Greg
Diaz glanced doubtfully back into the cabin where the bearded Colombians crouched. He dropped a little closer to the trees.
Horn House: The Northern Transvaal
Ilse sat opposite Alfred Horn at the long mahogany dining table and stared sullenly at her plate. All the other chairs were empty. In spite of their furious efforts, she and Stern had been unable to break out of the bedroom before Linah arrived to take them to dinner. Stern had pleaded an unsettled stomach, so Ilse had come alone. She wondered if the old Israeli was still trying. As Linah leaned over her left shoulder to pour white wine, she looked up at Horn. “Where is everyone?” she asked, trying to hold her voice steady.
“Pieter has work to do,” Horn replied. “And of course your grandfather remains in your bedroom.” He smiled. “I believe he would rather finish reading that notebook I gave him than eat.”
Ilse lifted her fork and tried to make a show of eating. Stern had advised her to carry on as she had been, but now that she knew Hans was almost surely somewhere inside the house, she couldn’t contain herself. “Where is my husband?” she cried suddenly. Horn looked up slowly from his plate. “He has not yet arrived, my dear.”
“Liar! He’s here!”
Horn swallowed some wine, then set his crystal goblet on the table. “Who told you that?” he asked quietly. “Your grandfather?”
“No one. I … I just feel it.”
“Ah, woman’s intuition. An overrated faculty, I’ve found. Do not worry, your Hans will arrive soon.”
Ilse quivered with anger. “You’re lying,” she said stubbornly. “I know Hans is here.”
Horn slammed his frail hand against the table, rattling the silver. “I will not tolerate this at my table! You will behave as a German woman should or—”
At that moment Pieter Smuts marched into the dining room with Jürgen Luhr on his heels. “Aircraft approaching the house, sir,” he announced. “Two blips, so far. They’re at the edge of the Kruger Park now.”
“What type of aircraft, Pieter?”
Smuts smiled coldly. “No radio contact, no IFF, but from their speed I would guess helicopters.”
Horn sighed deeply. “Are the bunkers manned?”
“Yes, sir.” Smuts’s face was taut. “Everyone’s in place.”
“And Lord Grenville?”
The Afrikaner shook his head. “I’m not sure where he is.”
While the men spoke, Ilse slid her right arm off of the table, taking her silver dinner fork and salad fork with it.
“Take Frau Apfel to her room,” said Horn. “Then get to the tower. I’ll be in my study.”
“But, sir, with Grenville loose—”
Horn silenced the Afrikaner by ringing a hand bell that summoned Linah. “To the tower, Pieter,” he commanded. “I am in no danger.”
“Bring the girl,” Smuts told Luhr, and hurried out.
“Frau Apfel?” Luhr motioned for Ilse to stand. He forced himself to smile. As soon as Linah had wheeled Horn from the dining room, however, he snatched Ilse up by the arm and dragged her into the hall.
“Lock her in!” Smuts called from up the corridor. “Then meet me at the reception hall elevator!”
When Ilse and Luhr reached the bedroom door, she reached into her pocket and closed her hand around one of the forks. She thought of driving it into Luhr’s neck, but she did not. Better to let Stern make a move if he thought the time was right.
Stern didn’t get the chance. Luhr turned the knob quickly and kicked open the door, knocking, the Israeli backward onto the floor. He laughed, then shoved Ilse inside and jerked the door shut. Ilse pulled the silver forks from her pocket and tossed them to Stern. “Get us out of here!” she snapped. “Now!”
When the elevator door opened in the domed observatory tower, Jürgen Luhr stepped into a room unlike any he had ever seen. He had once been admitted to the control tower of Frankfurt International Airport, but even that see primitive compared to this futuristic command post. Computer screens, satellite receivers, amplifiers, massive banks of switches, closed-circuit television monitors, and countless other pieces of high-tech equipment hung from the ceiling and rose from the carpeted floor. An eerie green glow bathed the circular room, silhouetting three men dressed in khaki who ceaselessly monitored the various surveillance consoles.
One man made way for Smuts, who took a seat before a phosphorescent radar screen.
“Who is in the helicopters?” Luhr asked.
Smuts smiled thinly. “I’m not sure, but you can bet they’re friends of Lord Grenville, our pet English nobleman. You see those switches there? The red ones?”
“Here?” asked Luhr, reaching.
“Don’t touch them! Christ! Look at the markings. North, East, South, West. When I call a direction, pull the first switch for that heading. When I call it again, pull the second. Got it?”
Luhr nodded. “What do they do?”
“You’ll find out soon enough.”
Taking a last look at the radar screen, Smuts moved to the centre of the room, ascended a short ladder, and climbed into the strangest contraption Luhr had ever seen. A monstrosity of steel tubing, pedals, gears, and hydraulic lines, it looked like something stripped from the belly of a World War Two vintage bomber. Protruding from this strange machine were six long, narrow, metal tubes joined at the centre and extending to within an inch of the dome’s wall. Suddenly, Luhr realized what he was looking at: a Vulcan 20mm rotary cannon. He had seen them many times in Germany, jutting from the stubby snouts of American tank-killing warplanes.
“Hit the blue switch,” Smuts ordered.
Luhr obeyed, and watched in wonder as a narrow oblong section of the domed ceiling receded into a hidden slot in the wall. Smuts touched a button; the barrels of the Vulcan gun moved forward through the opening like the barrel of a telescope. Now the gun could be traversed on a vertical axis.
“Hit the next switch down.”
Luhr gasped as the middle four feet of the circular wall sank into the floor with a deep hum. Through the bullet-resistant polycarbonate glass that now served as the wall, Luhr could see a 360-degree panorama of the grounds surrounding Horn House. The sky was heavy and nearly black with impending rain. Four hundred metres to the north, Horn’s Learjet and helicopter sat like toys in the fast-fading light.
“Next,” said Smuts.
Luhr hit the final blue switch, immersing the room in near-total darkness. Only the luminous green radar screens competed with the gray light outside the turret. Smuts pulled down a leather harness and buckled it across his chest. Then he grasped two elongated tubes and positioned them directly over his eyes. Luhr realized they were laser targeting goggles.
“Sit down and strap yourself in,” Smuts ordered.
“Why?”
Scowling, Smuts jabbed a foot pedal. Instantly the turret began to rotate, throwing Luhr to the floor. “Don’t ever question my orders, Lieutenant.”
Luhr scrambled to his feet and buckled himself into the chair. On the radar screen to his left, two tiny blips crossed the line indicating the western edge of the Kruger National Park, then turned southwest toward an H marked on the screen in grease pencil.
“Fifteen kilometres and closing,” announced a khaki-clad technician. “Approach speed 110 knots.”
Luhr watched the fuzzy green specks pass slightly to the north of the H, then veer left and bore straight in. “Who are they?” he asked, unable to suppress his apprehension.
“Dead men,” Smuts replied from the gun cage.
Hans Apfel could not move. He lay in the absolute darkness of a cell one hundred metres below the earth. This was the same cell in which Jürgen Luhr had spent his first night in South Africa. Hans was bound to a heavy cot with rope and gagged with a thick strip of cloth. He could only breathe through his nose. No sound had reached his ears for hours, save the occasional sibilant hiss of a ventilator blowing air into his cell.
Suddenly, a deep, buzzing alarm blasted through the basement compl
ex. Every muscle in Hans’s body contracted in shock. What was happening? A fire? For the hundredth time he expelled every ounce of air from his lungs and tried to shift his body on the cot. It was no use. He had never felt so helpless in his life. Yet despite his fear for Ilse, one desperate hope flickered in his brain: Is it my father?
“I’ve almost got it,” Stern grunted, working feverishly at the lock on the bedroom door. By intertwining the tines of Ilse’s stolen forks and snapping off several, he’d managed to fashion the dinner fork into a serviceable lock pick.
“Hurry!” Ilse urged. “I don’t think we have much time.”
“Did Horn seem upset?” Stern asked, still working. “Surprised? Frightened?”
“Not really. Please, hurry. We must find Hans!”
At that moment the clouds opened. The rain lashed the roof of Horn House in great sheets, then settled into a steady torrent that would soon turn the surrounding gullies into raging rivers.
“Got it!” Stern cried. He cracked the door slightly, then flung it wide.
Ilse darted into the hall. “Where should we start?”
“Beat on every locked door you can find. If Hans is here, he’ll be behind one.”
“Aren’t you coming?”
“You don’t need me to find your husband. I’ve got something else to do.”
“What?”
“After what you told me, you ask me that? Move girl!”
Stern spun Ilse around, put a hand between her shoulder blades and shoved her down the hall. She hesitated a moment; then, seeing that the Israeli meant what he said, she started slowly up the corridor. Stern clenched the broken fork tightly in his fist and set out in the opposite direction.
The JetRanger helicopters skimmed across the veld like great steel dragonflies. In the distance Burton could just make out the copper dome of Horn’s “observatory” glinting through the heavy rain. He flattened his palm and dropped it close to his thigh, indicating that Diaz should fly still closer to the earth. The Cuban muttered something in Spanish, but the scrub brush rose up into the Plexiglas windshield until Burton felt he was tearing across the veld on a horse gone mad. Even the few stunted trees they passed rose higher than the chopper’s rotors.
“See it?” Burton yelled, pointing. The Cuban nodded. “We should see an airstrip soon. That’s our objective. Set right down on it!”
Burton poked his head back into the crowded cabin and gave the Colombians a thumbs-up signal. Most of them looked airsick, but Alberto the guerilla observer grinned back, his square white teeth flashing in the shadows.
Forty seconds later, Diaz wheeled the JetRanger in a wide circle and settled onto the freshly laid asphalt fifty metres from Horn’s Learjet. Burton punched open the Plexiglas door and jumped to the ground. Just as they had practised a dozen times on the Casilda’s afterdeck, the Colombians poured out of the chopper one after another, looking, for all their amateurishness, like a squad of marines securing a hot LZ. A quick glance across the tarmac told Burton that the men on the other chopper were doing the same. “See you after the party!” he shouted to Diaz.
The Cuban shook his head. “English loco, he muttered, twirling his forefinger beside his temple.
The Colombians crouched at the edge of the rotor blast, waiting for Burton to take the lead. The mercenary jumped to the ground and immediately started toward the distant dome at an easy trot. The Colombians, twenty-two in all, followed closely.
Thirty seconds’ running brought them up short at the rim of the Wash. Burton stared angrily into the ravine. He’d been told to expect a shallow trench, no more than a thirty-second delay. But the summer cloudburst had turned this steep-sided gully into a treacherous river that would take minutes, not seconds, to cross. Three feet of muddy runoff churned through the undergrowth near the bottom, and the water was rising fast.
“Move!” Burton shouted, and leaped over the lip of the ravine. He half-fell, half-slid toward the torrent below. Looking back, he saw the Colombians skidding down behind him. Two minutes later they all stood on the opposite rim of the Wash, huddling against the rain. Burton started slogging westward again without a word. For a few minutes he saw nothing ahead but rain. Then, like a mirage, the whole stunning spectre of Horn house appeared out of the downpour.
Burton’s blood ran cold. One glance told him that his “inside” informer didn’t know his ass from his elbow. The “soft” objective he had been briefed to expect stood like a medieval fortress on a hill at the centre of a huge expanse of open ground. Ten men armed with medium machine guns could defend that house indefinitely against a force the size he had brought.
His ragtag outfit had only one hope—surprise.
The Colombians had not yet picked up on the alarming deterioration of their situation, and Burton didn’t intend for them to. “All right, lads!” he barked. “Change of plan! I’d intended to use the mortar to soften the target for you—” Burton paused while a bilingual Colombian interpreted, “but this open ground changes everything. If I open up
before you go in, the target will be warned. Many of you could die in the charge.” Burton saw several faces nod warily as the interpreter conveyed his words. “My suggestion is that you all go in at the double—a quick, silent run. You go in very fast and close to the ground. The Israelis favour this tactic, and they’ve surprised a lot of Arabs with it, I can tell you.” He summoned a bluff grin. “Ready, lads?”
Two or three Colombians nodded, but most looked a shade paler than they had when they thought Burton’s mortar barrage would precede their attack. The Englishman took a final look at his unit. They were a ragged lot by any standard, standing there in the rain, weighted down by bandolero ammo belts, grenades, and LAW rockets. They would have been comic but for the near certainty of their impending deaths.
Looking past them to the distant house, Burton felt a sudden, almost irresistible urge to order them back to the choppers, to save their miserable lives before they charged the fortress that waited beyond the gray wall of rain. But then he remembered The Deal. “Move out!” he shouted angrily. “Goddamn it, charge!”
The Colombians stared dumbly for a moment; then they turned and trotted down the slope into the shallow bowl. One hung back—a teenager named Ruiz, whom Burton had tried to instruct in the finer points of mortar operation—waiting to see if he was needed. Burton started to nod, then he sensed someone behind him. He turned to see Alberto, the huge MNR guerilla observer. Burton pointed to the mortar tube he had dropped onto the grass and eyed the guerilla questioningly. When Alberto nodded with confidence, Burton decided he would prefer skill to great company today. He motioned for Ruiz to follow the charge.
Alberto immediately began setting up the mortar, but Burton, impelled by some morbid instinct, crouched on the rim of the grassy bowl and watched the Colombians go in. As his eyes followed the camouflaged figures-running now-he suddenly noticed something odd about the floor of the bowl. Subdividing the approaches to Horn House into measured sections were dozens of small, grass-covered mounds. At first glance they seemed only natural irregularities in the ground—animal spoor, perhaps—but Burton soon realized that the humps were anything but natural. His mind faltered for a moment, not wanting to accept it; then his gut instinct grasped the whole, ghastly scene. A killing ground. Those innocent-looking mounds concealed land mines. Burton shouted a warning, but the Colombians had already passed out of earshot. Alberto raised his head at Burton’s shout.
Then it started. Sixteen Claymore mines exploded simultaneously, sending thousands of steel balls scything through the air at twice the speed of sound. Half the Colombians were shredded into bloody pulp before they could scream. The sound came in waves, deep, shuddering concussions muted by the rain. Most survivors of the first blast staggered to the ground, mortally wounded. Shrapnel detonated some of the Colombian ordnance. Grenades flashed in the dusk; one of the LAW rockets exploded in a blinding fireball, consuming the man who carried it.
Burton lay stomach-down
, shielding his eyes against the flashes. Alberto tugged at Burton’s pack, groping for mortar rounds so that he could return fire. Burton slapped the huge guerilla’s hand away. “Bloody hell! All you’d do now is pin-point our position!” He punched his fist into the soggy veld. “Poor bastards.”
In spite of the Englishman’s pessimism, Alberto grinned and pointed down the slope to where, unbelievably, a half-dozen Colombians still crawled doggedly toward Horn House. Having gone too far to retreat with any hope of survival, they went blindly on. Forty metres from the great triangular structure, one of them rose to one knee and let off a LAW rocket. The smoke trail arrowed across the grass, and the exploding warhead tore a jagged hole in the wall above a shuttered window.
Emboldened by their comrade’s success, three wounded Colombians got up and cheered, then charged the main entrance with their AK-47s on full automatic.
At that moment—with a sound like a handsaw ripping through wood—Smuts’s Vulcan gun opened up from the observatory. From the tower, Jürgen Luhr watched the carnage with morbid fascination. He could not quite comprehend the fact that he had obliterated a dozen human beings with the flick of a switch. The land around Horn House looked as if a hundred plows had passed over it, sowing blood and fire. The remotely detonated Claymores had churned the earth into a smoking graveyard.
When the Vulcan gun began to fire, Luhr thought he had gone deaf. White flame spat out of the six spinning barrels; the unbelievable rate of fire made the scarlet tracers look like laser beams arcing across the slope below. Anywhere the gun lingered for a full second, more than a hundred depleted-uranium-tipped slugs impacted in a steady stream of death.
The rain and darkness obscured the remaining attackers, but Smuts seemed to have no trouble finding them. Wearing ear protectors now, he worked the pedals with practised skill, traversing the gun with remorseless accuracy. Watching Smuts’s slit-eyed face behind the Vulcan, Luhr actually pitied the men who remained alive.
