GAMES OF THE HANGMAN

by VICTOR O'REILLY

  The ambassador looked where he indicated and then ducked as muzzle flashes stabbed from the armored monolith creeping toward them. "I think we're moving toward the surprise event," he said.

  "I hate surprises," said Andreas.

  Noble was speaking by hand radio to Fitzduane. He put down the radio and fired several single shots into the darkness toward the spread-out line of advancing terrorists. Andreas watched them dive to the ground and then cautiously rise again when they realized that no one had been hit and the opposition was light.

  There was an enormous explosion behind them from the direction of the keep. They both looked at the radio; which remained silent. Noble reached out and picked it up. He was about to press the call button when Fitzduane's voice crackled out of it. "Relax," it said. "That's part of the Bear's war, and he's doing just fine. Now get on with the gate."

  Andreas looked at Noble. "Does he mean what I think he means?"

  "It's what we planned," said Noble. "He wants us to open the portcullis." He pressed the switch, wondering if they still had power or if they would have to crank it by hand. The old motor whirred, then caught, and the spiked portcullis began to rise from the ground.

  "This is crazy," said Andreas. "They'll get in."

  "I think that's the whole idea," said Noble.

  Andreas felt his bowels go liquid. He could hear Noble inserting a fresh magazine into the pistol grip of the Uzi and the click as the weapon was cocked. Noble indicated the Hawk grenade launcher and the bandolier of 40 mm grenades. "Fléchette rounds," he said, "then armor-piercing explosive."

  The fighting platform of the keep was the best observation point in the castle. That was fine, except for the fact that it could clearly be seen to be so and as such was likely to attract unwelcome attention.

  Apart from the anticipated volume of incoming fire, Fitzduane had been worried about its nature. The top of the keep was a flat, open rectangle with a high crenellated parapet that would tend to concentrate the effect of blast. It could be neutralized with one single mortar round or even a couple of grenades.

  Fitzduane's solution led one student to remark that the Fitzduane family motto should be "Dig and Live" and its coat of arms a crossed pick and shovel on a background of sweat-saturated sandbags. A block and tackle were rigged on the platform, and a seemingly unending succession of sandbags and balks of timber and pieces of corrugated iron was hauled up. The result was a fair reproduction of a First World War trench dugout in the sky. The roof was designed to be mortarproof—at least for the first couple of blasts (during which time the occupants, if they had any sense, would bug out to the floor below). As it happened, the construction of the dugout roof made all the difference.

  The pilots selected for the Powerchutes, two brothers, Husain and Mohsen, were Iranians and followers of a modified version of the teachings of Hasane Sabbah, who had founded the sect of the Assassins in the Elburz Mountains north of Teheran in the eleventh century. The brothers' early belief in the purity of assassination as a political tool had been tempered by the discovery that the game could work two ways. After an Israeli hit team had whittled their dedicated band of twenty down to just the pair of them, they had added the profit motive to the teachings of Hasane Sabbah. But they still retained enough fanaticism, or were just plain dumb enough, in Kadar's judgment, to be prepared to push their attacks to the absolute limit.

  Photographs and drawings of the main features of Fitzduane's castle had been found in several books in the Draker College library, so the brothers had been thoroughly briefed. The plan was for the first Powerchute, flown by Husain, to swoop in and drop a satchel charge on the keep's fighting platform while the second Powerchute, flown by Mohsen, would send its specially weighted charge through the slate roof of the great hall. Both pilots would then drop their incendiaries on the great hall, into the yawning aperture made by the explosion of the weighted satchel charge, thus setting the top floor of the building alight—one guidebook made great reference to "the splendor of the carved oak beams dating from medieval times"—and rendering it uninhabitable. The pilots would then cut their engines and, using only the steerable ramjet parachutes of the Powerchutes, would land on the cleared fighting platform and hold it while their brethren reinforced them by climbing up from below on ropes.

  The entire Powerchute attack, Kadar calculated, could be completed in less than ninety seconds. To check this, a rehearsal was carried out on the mock-Gothic keep of Draker College. Using dummy bombs and in daylight, the two brothers clocked in, on their first attempt, at a creditable ninety-four seconds, including a final sweep of the "fighting platform" with automatic rifle fire as they sailed down. They shaved a further five seconds off with practice.

  The actual attack did not work out according to plan except that it accelerated the brothers' path to the goal of all followers of Hasane Sabbah killed in the line of duty: Eternal Paradise. But it was close.

  The Powerchutes achieved total surprise. With the noise of their engines drowned by a fusillade from the cordon of terrorists, Husain was able to sweep in undetected and release his satchel charge—a webbing satchel containing plastic explosive, shrapnel, and a three-second fuse—exactly over the target. Unfortunately the light of the half-moon as it shone intermittently through the scurrying clouds made visibility difficult, and he didn't see the dugout that had been constructed on the platform.

  The bomb glanced off the dugout and slid down toward the slate roof of the great hall. Exploding in a near-perfect imitation of a directional mine, the shrapnel caught the second Powerchute on its approach, which was lower than intended thanks to the fickleness of the Irish wind, in a pattern that would have done credit to a champion skeet shooter.

  Mohsen didn't even have time to complain about the Irish climate or to reflect that it might have been a good idea to practice in advance with real explosives or to curse his miscalculating brother seven different ways. He was killed instantly, his body pierced in a dozen places, and his Powerchute carried him across the castle walls to crash minutes later in a ball of flame against the cliffs of the mainland. Inside the dugout, protected by a triple layer of sandbags, the Bear and Murrough were scarcely affected by the explosion except to feel a little sick at the thought that their attackers seemed to have the very weapon they had feared most—a mortar. Expecting a barrage of further rounds now that the gunner had zeroed in on them with the first shot—not so common with a mortar—they headed as one for the circular stairs and took up fresh positions in Fitzduane's bedroom immediately below.

  The defenders on the battlements outside scarcely had time to think at all. First a huge black shape sailed by, spraying blood like some vampire celebrating the abolition of garlic, and then automatic-weapons fire from the sky made the point that the first vampire wasn't flying about alone.

  Etan, crouched in a sandbag cocoon on the island-facing battlements, was the first to react. The rapid semiautomatic fire of her Mauser caused Husain to take a raincheck on Paradise and to swerve away violently, abandoning any thoughts of dropping the incendiary on this pass. He banked and climbed to prepare for another run. All Etan could see was a black figure almost invisible against the clouds while the moon was obscured.

  "What the fuck is that?" asked Henssen, who was wiping something wet off his face and hoping that it wasn't what he thought it was or, if it was, that it wasn't his. He couldn't feel any pain, but his heart felt as if it were going to pound its way out of his body.

  "I don't know," said Etan, "some kind of flying thing, I think. It's like a balloon, but quick."

  Fitzduane ran up in a crouching run, holding himself easily as if he'd done this kind of thing many times before—which he had. If nothing else, combat taught you very quickly to make yourself small. Fitzduane was an expert. He seemed to have visibly shrunk.

  Etan pointed. Fitzduane, squatting well down behind the parapet and the sandbags, raised his SA-80 and examined the area she had indicated with the night sight. He could see nothing a
t first, given the Kite's limited field of view—one disadvantage of using a telescopic sight instead of wide-angle binoculars—but a quick pan picked up the image of a light metal frame containing a sitting figure with legs outstretched as if driving a go-cart. A checked keffiyeh was wrapped around its head and mouth, the ends streaming close to a giant propeller enclosed in a circular protective guard like that of a swamp boat. For an instant Fitzduane thought that if the keffiyeh would only stream back another couple of centimeters, the problem might solve itself. Then he looked further and saw the familiar outline of a military ramjet cargo parachute. The metal frame turned to head directly toward him, and he could see stabs of flame. He switched the fire selector of the SA-80 to automatic reluctantly, bearing in mind his own strictures on the subject, and opened fire.

  The powered parachute was moving deceptively fast—somewhere in excess of forty kilometers per hour at a guess—and it sailed low over the castle before he could fire a second burst. A small black shape left the metal frame as it passed and landed on the opposite battlements, exploding among the zigzagging double line of sandbags and sending smoke and flames into the air and streams of liquid fire into the bawn below.

  The powered parachute came into his line of vision again when it turned and prepared for a further attack. He could see the pilot in profile less than two hundred meters away. He fired again. This time the figure arched and its head sagged. The metal frame with its swamp boat propeller dipped but flew on and vanished into the darkness.

  "Holy shit," said Henssen in relief, "but they're an all-singing, all-dancing outfit." He turned toward Etan, who seemed to have sunk out of sight behind the sandbags. "Good for you, Etan," he said. "If it hadn't been for you and your broom handle, we might have been barbecued."

  There was a low moan from behind the angle of the sandbags that concealed Etan. The bags were arranged in a double zigzagging line along the battlements to minimize the effects of exploding hand grenades or mortar bombs.

  Henssen turned the angle.

  Etan lay on her back, her hands gripping her right thigh. Blood, black in the darkness, welled through her fingers.

  Outside Fitzduane's castle—2242 hours

  Abu Rafa, commander of Malabar Unit—the unit responsible for the attack on the gatehouse—could scarcely contain his frustration. In his considered professional opinion, Kadar, who might be brilliant at planning terrorist incidents and kidnaps, was making a mess of a classic but straightforward infantry problem: the capture of a weakly held strongpoint by superior military forces.

  The correct solution would have been to attack immediately on landing while the momentum of the initial assault was with them and when daylight would have allowed them to apply their superior firepower to full effect—and to hell with casualties, which wouldn't have been heavy anyway in a sudden, forceful attack.

  Bringing up the heavy machine guns, waiting until dark, and using such gadgetry as the Powerchutes and the tank-tractor struck Abu Rafa as a load of pretentious shit. Ironically it reminded him of the warnings of his onetime archenemy, he of the black eyepatch, General Moshe Dayan of Israel. Dayan had become disturbed at the tendency of the Israeli Army after the War of Independence to try for clever tactics instead of forcing home the attack—what he called the "Jewish solution." Most times, Dayan argued, what counted was less how you attacked than the spirit and force with which you did it; the intention should be to "exhaust the mission," to keep at it until you succeeded and not fuck around trying to be clever.

  Abu Rafa thought that Dayan, may he rot forever in hell, was right, Allah knows. The accursed Israelis had proved it often enough—and unfortunately by combining the best of both approaches.

  The Malabar commander's frustration was further exacerbated by the latest developments: the tank-tractor, whose attack should have coincided with the Powerchute assault, had broken down less than five hundred meters from the gatehouse. The fault wasn't serious and would mean only a fifteen-minute delay, but it occurred after the Powerchutes were beyond recall so the benefits of a combined strike had been lost.

  The good news was that the defenders' volume of fire was very light and not accurate, except, it appeared, at close range—as the sapper had learned the hard way. Apart from him, there had been no casualties in Malabar. Seeing the weakness of the opposition and fed up with freezing in the chill night air, in what by Irish standards was a comparatively balmy evening, the commandos of Malabar were raring to go.

  At first Abu Rafa thought it must be some trick of the light, and then it became clear that what he was seeing was really happening: the portcullis, that much more serious obstacle than the now-destroyed heavy oak gates, was rising. A sally by the defenders? Most unlikely. A trick? They wouldn't dare, given their inferior firepower. No, either they were surrendering or the incoming fire had affected the portcullis mechanism. Or maybe the Sacrificer was still alive and was working inside in their behalf.

  Whatever the reason, it was visible proof of which side Allah was backing. Abu Rafa looked at his Russian radio and for a second debated getting Kadar's permission to attack—and then frustration won out.

  "Malabar first section," he shouted, "follow me!" With a ferocity that General Dayan himself would have admired, he ran forward, firing from the hip, followed by the shouting, cheering men of the first section, automatic rifles blazing. They stormed through the gateway and were spreading to the left and right to secure the gatehouse and the battlements when Abu Rafa first had the thought that maybe Allah was hedging his bets.

  The courtyard was suddenly illuminated by floodlights. Straight ahead of him and on the battlements there were sandbagged emplacements. A burst of fire hit him in the chest, severing ribs and blowing apart his lungs. He saw three of his men disintegrate as a tongue of flame followed by a shattering roar burst forth from an opening in a pile of sandbags.

  The last sound he heard before his body was shredded by the second concealed cannon at point-blank range was that of the portcullis slamming shut.

  Fitzduane's castle—2250 hours

  Eleven terrorists had gotten in—rather more than had been planned for—before the portcullis was dropped back into place. As a killing ground the bawn was ideal, and for the first few seconds surprise was total. Facing the terrorists were the two cannon manned by the Bear and de Guevain. Fitzduane, Judith Newman, and Henssen fired from the battlements. Noble and Andreas cut off the rear.

  Seven terrorists died in the defenders' first hail of fire before the lights were shot out, and two more were caught by fléchette rounds fired from a murder hole by Andreas as they scrabbled at the portcullis and called to their comrades outside.

  The two surviving terrorists had gone in the same direction but were now on different levels. One had made it to the battlements about twenty meters from where Etan lay wounded and unconscious, the bleeding now stopped temporarily by a tourniquet that had been applied by Henssen. The other, immediately below, had made it to the cover of the outhouse—the one that had been used as a test target for the cannon—located almost immediately under his comrade's hiding place. He was using the windows and apertures to shoot from, and his short, professional bursts were disconcertingly well placed. The Bear and de Guevain were pinned down. They couldn't get around the front of the cannon to reload without exposing themselves on the crossfire from one of the two terrorist positions.

  Andreas had released his loaded fléchette rounds. The next 40 mm grenades in the Hawk were dual-purpose armor-piercing. He checked the ammunition reserve. After he had fired the two in the weapon, he would have two armor-piercing left. Most of the ammunition supply consisted of the standard M406HE (High Explosive), although there still remained some other specialized rounds for specific applications.

  Fitzduane was on the battlements across from the terrorists. The sandbags were now working in the terrorists' favor. The infiltrator on the parapet was well concealed behind the zigzagging fortifications and was well positioned to sweep most of the
bawn with fire. More seriously, if he could hold his position, he would be joined by reinforcements climbing up that section of the wall. It was beginning to look to Fitzduane as if his plan to whittle down the opposition in a killing ground might backfire.

  Fitzduane spoke into the radio. "Harry, what's that armored tractor of theirs up to?"

  "It's halted about five hundred meters away." Noble peered through the night sight. "There are a couple of people working on it, so I guess it broke down. Probably caused by all that weight. I wouldn't count on its staying that way for long. And by the way, we've only got four rounds of armor-piercing left."

  "Have you a shot at either of our visitors?"

  "Without moving, negative. Want us to give it a try?"

  "No," said Fitzduane. "You and Andreas stay where you are and hold that gate. Use the SA-80 on single shot, and see if you can take out the guys working on the tank. We need to buy some time." Fitzduane clicked the radio to another channel. "Check in, Henssen."

  "Etan needs help," answered Henssen. "I'm okay."

  "You've got a hostile about twenty meters away, gatehouse direction," said Fitzduane.

  "I know," said Henssen. "I'm going to take him out."

  "No," said Fitzduane. "No crawling around corners yet. Use the Molotov cocktails. I'm sending Judith along to help."

  There was the explosion of a grenade from behind the battlement sandbags facing Fitzduane, followed by a burst of AK-47 fire. There was a pause of about thirty seconds, and the routine was repeated.