The path was picked east of the river at the far right end of the campsite clearing. It would be watched; the M.I.6 defectors were experienced agents. Egress was a priority; the single avenue of escape would have automatic rifles trained on it.
Further, the Dunstone killers knew their prey was downstream. They would probe, perhaps, but they would not leave the hidden path unguarded.
But they had to separate. They could not gamble on the unknown, on the possibility that the survey team might slip through, try to penetrate the net.
It was this assumption that led McAuliff and Sam Tucker to accept the strategy. A variation on the deadly game proposed by Lawrence and Charles Whitehall. Alexander would stay with Alison. The others would go out. Separately. And find the enemy.
Quite simply, kill or be killed.
Lawrence lowered his immense body into the dark waters. He hugged the bank and pulled his way slowly upstream, his pistol just above the surface, his long knife out of its leather scabbard, in his belt—easily, quickly retrievable.
The moon was brighter now. The rain clouds were gone; the towering jungle overgrowth obstructed but did not blot out the moonlight. The river currents were steady; incessant, tiny whirlpools spun around scores of fallen branches and protruding rocks, the latter’s tips glistening with buffeted moss and matted green algae.
Lawrence stopped; he dropped farther into the water, holding his breath, his eyes just above the surface. Diagonally across the narrow river offshoot a man was doing exactly what he was doing, but without the awareness Lawrence now possessed.
Waist-deep in water, the man held a lethal-looking rifle in front of and above him. He took long strides, keeping his balance by grabbing the overhanging foliage on the river-bank, his eyes straight ahead.
In seconds, the man would be directly opposite him.
Lawrence placed his pistol on a bed of fern spray. He reached below and pulled the long knife from his belt.
He sank beneath the surface and began swimming underwater.
Sam Tucker crawled over the ridge above the riverbank and rolled toward the base of the ceiba trunk. The weight of his body pulled down a loose vine; it fell like a coiled snake across his chest, startling him.
He was north of the campsite now, having made a wide half-circle west, on the left side of the river. His reasoning was simple, he hoped not too simple. The Dunstone patrol would be concentrating downstream; the path was east of the clearing. They would guard it, expecting any who searched for it to approach from below, not above the known point of entry.
Tucker shouldered his way up the ceiba trunk into a sitting position. He loosened the strap of his rifle, lifted the weapon, and lowered it over his head diagonally across his back. He pulled the strap taut. Rifle fire was out of the question, to be used only in the last extremity, for its use meant—more than likely—one’s own execution.
That was not out of the question, thought Sam, but it surely would take considerable persuasion.
He rolled back to a prone position and continued his reptilelike journey through the tangled labyrinth of jungle underbrush.
He heard the man before he saw him. The sound was peculiarly human, a casual sound that told Sam Tucker his enemy was casual, not primed for alarm. A man who somehow felt his post was removed from immediate assault, the patrol farthest away from the area of contention.
The man had sniffed twice. A clogged nostril, or nostrils, caused a temporary blockage and a passage for air was casually demanded. Casually obtained.
It was enough.
Sam focused in the direction of the sound. His eyes of fifty-odd years were strained, tired from lack of sleep and from peering for nights on end into the tropic darkness. But they would serve him, he knew that.
The man was crouched by a giant fern, his rifle between his legs, stock butted against the ground. Beyond, Tucker could see in the moonlight the outlines of the lean- to at the far left of the clearing. Anyone crossing the campsite was in the man’s direct line of fire.
The fern ruled out a knife. A blade that did not enter precisely at the required location could cause a victim to lunge, to shout. The fern concealed the man’s back too well. It was possible, but awkward.
There was a better way. Sam recalled the vine that had dropped from the trunk of the ceiba tree.
He reached into his pocket and withdrew a coil of ordinary azimuth line. Thin steel wire encased in nylon, so handy for so many things …
He crept silently toward the giant spray of tiny leaves.
His enemy sniffed again.
Sam rose, half inch by half inch, behind the fern. In front of him now, unobstructed, was the silhouette of the man’s neck and head.
Sam Tucker slowly separated his gnarled, powerful hands. They were connected by the thin steel wire encased in nylon.
Charles Whitehall was furious. He had wanted to use the river; it was the swiftest route, far more direct than the torturously slow untangling that was demanded in the bush. But it was agreed that since Lawrence had been on guard at the river, he knew it better. So the river was his.
Whitehall looked at the dial of his watch; there were still twelve minutes to go before the first signal. If there was one.
Simple signals.
Silence meant precisely that. Nothing.
The short, simulated, guttural cry of a wild pig meant success. One kill.
If two, two kills.
Simple.
If he had been given the river, Charles was convinced, he would have delivered the first cry. At least one.
Instead, his was the southwest sweep, the least likely of the three routings to make contact. It was a terrible waste. An old man, authoritative, inventive, but terribly tired, and a plodding, unskilled hill boy, not without potential, perhaps, but still a misguided, awkward giant.
A terrible waste! Infuriating.
Yet not as infuriating as the sharp, hard steel that suddenly made contact with the base of his skull. And the words that followed, whispered in a harsh command:
“Open your mouth and I blow your head off, mon!”
He had been taken! His anger had caused his concentration to wander.
Stupid.
But his captor had not fired. His taker did not want the alarm of a rifle shot any more than he did. The man kept thrusting the barrel painfully into Charles’s head, veering him to the right, away from the supposed line of Whitehall’s march. The man obviously wanted to interrogate, discover the whereabouts of the others.
Stupid.
The release-seizure was a simple maneuver requiring only a hard surface to the rear of the victim for execution.
And it was, indeed, execution.
It was necessary for the victim to rebound following impact, not be absorbed in space or elastically swallowed by walled softness. The impact was the most important; otherwise the trigger of the rifle might be pulled. There was an instant of calculated risk—nothing was perfect—but the reverse jamming of the weapon into the victim allowed for that split-second diagonal slash that invariably ripped the weapon out of the hands of the hunter.
Optimally, the slash coincided with the impact.
It was all set forth clearly in the Oriental training manuals.
In front of them, to the left, Whitehall could distinguish the sudden rise of a hill in the jungle darkness. One of those abrupt protrusions out of the earth that was so common to the Cock Pit. At the base of the hill was a large boulder reflecting the wash of moonlight strained through trees.
It would be sufficient … actually, more than sufficient; very practical indeed.
He stumbled, just slightly, as if his foot had been ensnared by an open root. He felt the prod of the rifle barrel. It was the moment.
He slammed his head back into the steel and whipped to his right, clasping the barrel with his hands and jamming it forward. As the victim crashed into the boulder, he swung the weapon violently away, ripping it out of the man’s grasp.
As the man b
linked in the moonlight, Charles Whitehall rigidly extended three fingers on each hand and completed the assault with enormous speed and control. The hands were trajectories—one toward the right eye, the other into the soft flesh below the throat.
McAuliff had given Alison his pistol. He had been startled to see her check the clip with such expertise, releasing it from its chamber, pressing the spring, and reinserting it with a heel-of-the-palm impact that would have done justice to Bonnie of Clyde notoriety. She had smiled at him and mentioned the fact that the weapon had been in the water.
There were eight minutes to go. Two units of four; the thought was not comforting.
He wondered if there would be any short cries in the night. Or whether a measured silence would signify an extension of the nightmare.
Was any of them good enough? Quick enough? Sufficiently alert?
“Alex!” Alison grabbed his arm, whispering softly but with sharp intensity. She pulled him down and pointed into the forest, to the west.
A beam of light flickered on and off.
Twice.
Someone had been startled in the overgrowth; something perhaps. There was a slapping flutter and short, repeated screeches that stopped as rapidly as they had started.
The light went on once again, for no more than a second, and then there was darkness.
The invader was perhaps thirty yards away. It was difficult to estimate in the dense surroundings. But it was an opportunity. And if Alexander Tarquin McAuliff had learned anything during the past weeks of agonizing insanity, it was to accept opportunities with the minimum of analysis.
He pulled Alison to him and whispered instructions into her ear. He released her and felt about the ground for what he knew was there. Fifteen seconds later he silently clawed his way up the trunk of a ceiba tree, rifle across his back, his hands noiselessly testing the low branches, discomforted by the weight of the object held in place inside his field jacket by the belt.
In position, he scratched twice on the bark of the tree.
Beneath him Alison whistled—a very human whistle, the abrupt notes of a signaling warble. She then snapped on her flashlight for precisely one second, shut it off, and dashed away from her position.
In less than a minute the figure was below him—crouched, rifle extended, prepared to kill.
McAuliff dropped from the limb of the ceiba tree, the sharp point of the heavy rock on a true, swift course toward the top of the invader’s skull.
The minute hand on his watch reached twelve; the second hand was on one. It was time.
The first cry came from the river. An expert cry, the sound of a wild pig.
The second came from the southwest, quite far in the distance, equally expert, echoing through the jungle.
The third came from the north, a bit too guttural, not expert at all, but sufficient unto the instant. The message was clear.
McAuliff looked at Alison, her bright, stunningly blue eyes bluer still in the Caribbean moonlight.
He lifted his rifle in the air and shattered the stillness of the night with a burst of gunfire. Perhaps the ganja pilot in the grasslands would laugh softly in satisfaction. Perhaps, with luck, one of the stray bullets might find its way to his head.
It did not matter.
It mattered only that they had made it. They were good enough, after all.
He held Alison in his arms and screamed joyfully into the darkness above. It did not sound much like a wild pig, but that did not matter either.
35
They sat at the table on the huge free-form pool deck overlooking the beds of coral and the blue waters beyond. The conflict between wave and rock resulted in cascading arcs of white spray surging upward and forward, blanketing the jagged crevices.
They had flown from the grasslands directly to Port Antonio. They had done so because Sam Tucker had raised Robert Hanley on the airplane’s radio, and Hanley had delivered his instructions in commands that denied argument. They had landed at the small Sam Jones Airfield at 2:35 in the morning. A limousine sent from the Trident Villas awaited them.
So, too, did Robert Hanley. And the moment Sam Tucker alighted from the plane, Hanley shook his hand and proceeded to crash his fist into Tucker’s face. He followed this action by reaching down and picking Sam up off the ground, greeting him a bit more cordially but explaining in measured anger that the past several weeks had caused him unnecessary anxiety, obviously Sam Tucker’s responsibility.
The two very young old reprobates then drank the night through at the bar of the Trident Villas. The young manager, Timothy Durell, surrendered at 5:10 in the morning, dismissed the bartender, and turned the keys over to Hanley and Sam. Durell was not aware that in a very real sense, the last strategies of Dunstone, Limited, had been created at Trident that week when strangers had converged from all over the world. Strangers, and not strangers at all … only disturbing memories now.
Charles Whitehall left with Lawrence, the revolutionary. Both black men said their good-byes at the airfield; each had places to go to, things to do, men to see. There would be no questions, for there would be no answers. That was understood.
They would separate quickly.
But they had communicated; perhaps that was all that could be expected.
Alison and McAuliff had been taken to the farthest villa on the shoreline. She had bandaged his hand and washed the cuts on his face and made him soak for nearly an hour in a good British tub of hot water.
They were in Villa 20.
They had slept in each other’s arms until noon.
It was now a little past one o’clock. They were alone at the table, a note having been left for Alexander from Sam Tucker. Sam and Robert Hanley were flying to Montego Bay to see an attorney. They were going into partnership.
God help the island, thought McAuliff.
At 2:30 Alison touched his arm and nodded toward the alabaster portico across the lawn. Down the marble steps came two men, one black, one white, dressed in proper business suits.
R. C. Hammond and Daniel, Minister of Council for the Tribe of Acquaba, high in the Flagstaff range.
“We’ll be quick,” said Hammond, taking the chair indicated by Alexander. “Mrs. Booth, I am Commander Hammond.”
“I was sure you were,” said Alison, her voice warm, her smile cold.
“May I present … an associate? Mr. Daniel, Jamaican Affairs. I believe you two have met, McAuliff.”
“Yes.”
Daniel nodded pleasantly and sat down. He looked at Alex and spoke sincerely. “There is much to be thankful for. I am very relieved.”
“What about Malcolm?”
The sadness flickered briefly across Daniel’s eyes. “I am sorry.”
“So am I,” said McAuliff. “He saved our lives.”
“That was his job,” replied the Minister of the Halidon.
“May I assume,” interrupted Hammond gently, “that Mrs. Booth has been apprised … up to a point?”
“You certainly may assume that, Commander.” Alison gave that answer herself.
“Very well.” The British agent reached into his pocket, withdrew the yellow paper of a cablegram, and handed it to Alexander. It was a deposit confirmation from Barclay’s Bank, London. The sum of $2,000,000 had been deposited to the account of A. T. McAuliff, Chase Manhattan, New York, Further, a letter of credit had been forwarded to said A. T. McAuliff that could be drawn against for all taxes upon receipt of the proper filing papers approved by the United States Treasury Department, Bureau of Internal Revenue.
Alex read the cable twice and wondered at his own indifference. He gave it to Alison. She started to read it but did not finish; instead, she lifted McAuliff’s cup and saucer and placed it underneath.
She said nothing.
“Our account is settled, McAuliff.”
“Not quite, Hammond.… In simple words, I never want to hear from you again. We never want to hear from you. Because if we do, the longest deposition on record will be made publ
ic—”
“My dear man,” broke in the Englishman wearily, “let me save you the time. Gratitude and marked respect would obligate me socially any time you’re in London. And, I should add, I think you’re basically a quite decent chap. But I can assure you that professionally we shall remain at the farthest distance. Her Majesty’s Service has no desire to involve itself with international irregularities. I might as well be damned blunt about it.”
“And Mrs. Booth?”
“The same, obviously.” Here Hammond looked directly, even painfully, at Alison. “Added to which it is our belief that she has gone through a great deal. Most splendidly and with our deepest appreciation. The terrible past is behind you, my dear. Public commendation is uncalled for, we realize. But the highest citation will be entered into your file. Which shall be closed. Permanently.”
“I want to believe that,” said Alison.
“You may, Mrs. Booth.”
“What about Dunstone?” asked McAuliff. “What’s going to happen? When?”
“It has already begun,” replied Hammond. “The list was cabled in the early hours of the morning.”
“Several hours ago,” said Daniel quietly. “Around noon, London time.”
“In all the financial centers, the work is proceeding,” continued Hammond. “All the governments are cooperating … it is to everyone’s benefit.”
McAuliff looked up at Daniel. “What does that do for global mendacity?”
Daniel smiled. “Perhaps a minor lesson has been learned. We shall know in a few years, will we not?”
“And Piersall? Who killed him?”
Hammond replied. “Real-estate interests along the North Coast, which stood to gain by the Dunstone purchase. His work was important, not those who caused his death. They were tragically insignificant.”
“And so it is over,” said Daniel, pushing back his chair. “The Westmore Talions will go back to selling fish, the disciples of Barak Moore will take up the struggle against Charles Whitehall, and the disorderly process of advancement continues. Shall we go, Commander Hammond?”
“By all means, Mr. Daniel.” Hammond rose from the chair, as did the Minister of Council for the Tribe of Acquaba.
The Cry of the Halidon Page 42
