Frederick Forsyth - Avenger

*And we all know how you love your sharks*, thought McBride, but said nothing.

The full enormity of his predicament sank into Van Rensberg's mind. Somewhere, on a sixthousandacre estate, with access to weapons and a four-wheeler, face shaded by a broad-brimmed bush hat, was a professional mercenary contracted, so he presumed, to blow his employer's head off.

He said something in Afrikaans, and it was not nice. Then he got on the radio. "I want twenty extra and fresh guards to the mansion. Other than them, let no one in but me. I want them fully armed, scattered immediately throughout the grounds around the house. And I want it now." They drove back, crosscountry, to the walled mansion on the foreland. It was 3:45.

After the searing heat of the sun on bare skin, the water of the stream was like balm. But it was dangerous water, for its speed was slowly increasing as it rushed between concrete banks to the sea.

At the point where he entered the water, it would still have been possible for Dexter to climb out the other side. But he was too far from the point he needed to be, and he heard the dogs far away. Also, he had seen the tree from his mountaintop and even earlier in the aerial photographs.

His last piece of unused equipment was a small, folding grappling hook and a twenty-foot twine lanyard. As he swept between the banks, along a twisting course, he unfolded the three prongs, locked them rigid and slipped the loop of the lanyard around his right wrist.

He came around a corner in the torrent and saw the tree ahead. It grew on the bank, at the airfield side of the water, and two heavy branches leaned over the stream. As he approached, he reared out of the water, swung his arm, and hurled the grappling hook high above him.

He heard the crash as the metal slammed into the tangle of branches, swept under the tree, felt the pain in his right arm socket as the hooks caught and the rush downriver stopped abruptly.

Hauling himself back on the twine, he crabbed his way to the bank and pulled his torso out. The water pressure eased, confined to his legs. With his free hand digging into the earth and grass, he dragged the rest of his body onto terra firma.

The grappling hook was lost in the branches. He simply reached as high as he could, sliced the lanyard with his knife and let it flutter above the water. He knew he was a hundred yards from the airfield wire that he had cut forty hours earlier. There was nothing for it but to crawl. He put the nearest hounds at still a mile away and across the stream. They would find the bridges but not just yet.

When he was lying in the darkness by the airfield's chain-link fence two nights earlier, he had cut a vertical and horizontal slice, to create two sides of a triangle, but left one thread intact to maintain the tension. The bolt cutters he had pushed under the wire into the long grass, and that was where he found them.

The two cuts had been retied with thin, green plastic-coated gardener's wire. It took not a minute to unlace the cuts; he heard a dull twang as the tension wire was sliced, and he crawled through. Still on his belly, he turned and laced it up again. From only ten yards the cuts became invisible.

On the farmland side, the peons cut hay for forage on spare tracts of grassland, but on each side of the runway it grew a foot long. Dexter found the bicycle and the other things he had stolen, dressed himself so as not to burn in the sun, and lay motionless to wait. A mile away, through the wire, he heard the hounds find the bloodied clothes.

By the time Major Van Rensberg, at the wheel of his Land Rover, reached the mansion gate, the fresh guards he had ordered were already there. A truck was stopped outside and the men jumped down, heavily armed and clutching M-16 assault carbines. The young officer lined them up in columns as the oaken gates swung apart. The column of men jogged through and quickly dispersed across the parkland. Van Rensberg followed, and the gates closed.

The steps McBride had mounted to the pool terrace when he arrived were ahead of them, but the South African pulled to the right, around the terrace to the side. McBride saw doorways at the lower level and the electrically operated gates of three underground garages.

The butler was waiting. He ushered them inside, and they followed him down a passage, past doors leading to the garages, up a flight of stairs, and into the main living area.

The Serb was in the library. Although the late afternoon was balmy, he had chosen discretion over valour. He sat at a conference table with a cup of black coffee and gestured his two guests to sit down. His bodyguard, Kulac, loomed in the background, back against a wall of unread first editions, watchful.

"Report," said Zilic, without ceremony.

Van Rensberg had to make his humiliating confession that someone, acting alone, had slipped into his fortress; gained access to the farmland by posing as a labourer; and escaped death by the dogs by killing a guard, dressing in his uniform, and tossing the body into the fast-flowing stream.

"So where is he now?"

"Between the wall around this park and the chain link protecting the village and airfield, sir."

"And what do you intend to do?"

"Every single man under my command, every man who wears that uniform, will be called up by radio and checked for identity."

"*Quis custodiet ipsos custodes*?' asked McBride. The other two looked at him blankly. "Sorry. Who guards the guardians themselves? In other words, who checks the checkers? How do you know the voice on the radio isn't lying?"

There was silence.

"Right," said Van Rensberg. "They will have to be recalled to the barracks and checked on sight by their squad commanders. May I go to the radio shack and issue the orders?"

Zilic nodded dismissively.

It took an hour. Outside the windows the sun set across the chain of crests. The tropical plunge to darkness began. Van Rensberg came back.

"Every one accounted for at the barracks. All eighty attested to by their junior officers. So he's still out there somewhere."

"Or inside the wall," suggested McBride. "Your fifth squad is the one patrolling this mansion."

Zilic turned to his security chief. "You ordered twenty of them in here without identity checks?" he asked icily.

"Certainly not, sir. They are the elite squad. They are commanded by Janni Duplessis. One strange face and he would have been seen immediately."

"Have him report here," ordered the Serb.

The young South African appeared at the library door several minutes later, snapping smartly to attention.

"Lieutenant Duplessis, in response to my order you chose twenty men, including yourself, and brought them here by truck two hours ago?"

"Yes, sir."

"You know every one of them by sight?"

"Yes, sir."

"Forgive me, but when you jogged through the gate, what was your formation of march?" asked McBride.

"I was at the head. Sergeant Grey behind me. Then the men, three abreast, six per column. Eighteen men."

"Nineteen," said McBride. "You forgot the tail-ender."

In the silence the mantelpiece clock seemed intrusively loud.

"What tail-ender?" whispered Van Rensberg.

"Hey, don't get me wrong, guys. I could have been mistaken. I thought I saw a nineteenth man come around the corner of the truck and jogged through at the rear. Same uniform. I thought nothing of it."

At that moment the clock struck 6:00, and the first bomb went off. They were no bigger than golf balls and completely harmless, more like bird scarers than weapons of war. They had eight-hour-delay timers, and Dexter had hurled all ten of them over the wall around 10:00 A.M. He knew exactly where the thickest shrubbery dotted the parkland around the house from the aerial photographs, and in his teenage years he had been quite a good pitcher. The crackers did, nevertheless, make a sound on detonation remarkably similar to the *whack-whump* of a highpowered rifle shot.