The Cry of the Halidon (53 page)

An extended barrage of rifle fire came from the river.

Lawrence blinked. He blinked in the new moonlight that flooded the riverbank of this offshoot of the Martha Brae.

“Okay, mon! Don’t
push.”

They crawled to the top of the slope and started into the overgrowth.

The figure came rushing out of the tangled darkness, a darker racing object out of a void of black. It was Alison. Lawrence reached back to McAuliff and took the flashlight out of Alex’s hand. A gesture of infinite understanding.

She ran into his arms. The world … the universe stopped its insanity for an instant, and there was stillness. And peace and comfort. But for only an instant.

There was not time for thought. Or reflection.

Or words.

Neither spoke.

They held each other, and then looked at each other in the dim spill of the new moonlight in the isolated space that was their own on the banks of the Martha Brae.

In a terrible, violent moment of time. And sacrifice.

Charles Whitehall intruded, as Charley-mon was wont to do. He approached, his safari outfit still creased, his face an immobile mask, his eyes penetrating.

“Lawrence and I agreed he would stay down at the river. Why have you changed that?”

“You blow my mind, Charley …”

“You
bore
me, McAuliff!” replied Whitehall. “There was gunfire up there!”

“I was in the middle of it, you black son of a bitch!”
Jesus, why did he have to say that?
“And you’re going to learn what the problem is. Do you understand that?”

Whitehall smiled. “Do tell … 
whitey.”

Alison slapped her hands off McAuliff and looked at both men. “
Stop it!”

“I’m sorry,” said Alex quickly.

“I’m
not
,” replied Whitehall. “This is his moment of truth. Can’t you see that,
Miss
Alison?”

Lawrence’s great hands interfered. They touched both men, and his voice was that of a thundering child-man. “Neither no more, mon! McAuliff, mon, you say what you know!
Now!”

Alexander did. He spoke of the grasslands, the plane—a plane, not the Halidon’s—the redneck ganja pilot who had brought six men into the Cock Pit to massacre the survey, the race to the campsite, the violent encounter in the jungle that ended in death in a small patch of jungle mud. Finally, those minutes ago when the runner called Marcus saved their lives by hearing a cry in the tropic bush.

“Five men, mon,” said Lawrence, interrupted by a new burst of gunfire, closer now but still in the near-distance to the north. He turned to Charles Whitehall. “How many do you want,
fascisti
?”

“Give me a figure,
agricula.”

“Goddammit!” yelled McAuliff. “Cut it out. Your games don’t count anymore.”

“You do not understand,” said Whitehall. “It is the only thing that does count. We are prepared. We are the viable contestants. Is this not what the fictions create? One on one, the victor sets the course?”

The charismatic leaders are not the foot soldiers.… They change or are replaced
.… the words of Daniel, Minister of the Tribe of Acquaba.

“You’re both insane,” said Alex, more rationally than he
thought was conceivable. “You make me sick, and goddamn you—”

“Alexander!
Alexander!”
The cry came from the river-bank less than twenty yards away. Sam Tucker was yelling.

McAuliff began running to the edge of the jungle. Lawrence raced ahead, his huge body crashing through the foliage, his hands pulverizing into sudden diagonals everything in their path.

The black giant jumped to the water’s edge; Alex started down the short slope and stopped.

Sam Tucker was cradling the body of Marcus the runner in his arms. The head protruding out of the water was a mass of blood, sections of the skull were shot off.

Still, Sam Tucker would not let go.

“One of them circled and caught us at the bank. Caught me at the bank … Marcus jumped out between us and took the fire. He killed the son of a bitch; he kept walking right up to him. Into the gun.”

Tucker lowered the body into the mud of the river-bank.

McAuliff thought. Four men remained, four killers left of the Dunstone team.

They were five. But Alison could not be counted now.

They were four, too.

Killers.

Four. The Arawak four.

The death Odyssey.

Alex felt the woman’s hands on his shoulders, her face pressed against his back in the moonlight.

The grasslands.

Escape was in the grasslands and the two aircraft that could fly them out of the Cock Pit.

Yet Marcus had implied that there was no other discernible route but the narrow, twisting jungle path—a danger in itself.

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 blinked 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.