Frederick Forsyth - Avenger

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 been inserted below the runway when it was built. Emerging from below the runway on the other side, the nowmarshaled water flowed under the chain-link fence as well. Dexter had little doubt there was an impenetrable grille there as well. 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 aerie. 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 four-wheeler came from the farm to the electric gate. Using a remote to open the gate, the man on the four-wheeler 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, and that was the piranha. If they could eat hens, they 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 down 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 toward 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 estat the workers had toiled from seven until twelve. They were then allowed to find shade and eat what they had brought in small cotton tote bags. Until four they were allowed to take a 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 simply to prevent dehydration, rather than gulped 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, nutbrown faces hidden under straw sombreros, take up their hoes and mattocks again to keep the model farm weedfree.

To his left a battered-looking pickup rolled to the space between the derricks and stopped, after reversing its rear toward 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 any access to the beautiful blue sea. No steps down, no diving platform, no moored raft, no beach, no jetty. Seeing the offal go in, he understood why. The water around the whole peninsula would be alive with hammerheads, tigers, and great whites. Anything swimming, other than a fish, would last only a few minutes.

About that time Colonel Moreno took a call on a cell phone from his man across the border in Suriname. 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 Fiesta. He dictated the number.

The secret policeman issued his order for the morning. Every car park, every garage, every driveway, every track was to be scoured for a Fiesta with this Surinamese registration number. Then he changed his orders. Any Ford with any registration number was to be traced, searching was 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 motorbikes to ride to the villas at the far end of the runway. When all was fenced and locked, the Dobermans were released, the world said farewell to September 6th, and the manhunter prepared to go down the escarpment.

In a day of peering over the edge of the escarpment, Dexter had realised two things about it that had not showed 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 done through 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 10:00 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. Delicacy would be needed not to cause a rockfall. 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 rappel 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 Yaletype locking mechanism and it cost him no more than thirty seconds.