Jack Higgins - In The Hour Before Midnight aka The Sicilian Heritage

“Oh, yes, I’m quite the commando.”

“But to jump into darkness in country like that sounds a more than usually dangerous practice.”

“Possibly, but it can be done.”

“Why, Stacey? Why do you want to do this thing? Why do you live this way?”

“There’s always the money.”

He shook his head. “We’ve been into that – not good enough. No, when I look at you I see myself forty years ago. Mafioso branded clean to the bone.”

“Which is another way of saying I like to play the game,” I said. “And a savage, bloody little game it is, but it’s all I’ve got. That and Burke.”

I stood up and moved to the edge of the terrace and he said softly, “You don’t like him?”

“It goes deeper than that. Everything I am, he made, people keep telling me that and I’m tired of hearing it.” I turned to face him. “He taught me that if you’re going to kill it may as well be from the back as the front, that there’s no difference. But he’s wrong.”

I desperately wanted him to understand, more than I had ever wanted anything. He sat there looking at me gravely. “Without the rules, it’s nothing – no sense to any of it. With them, there’s still something to hang on to.”

He nodded, a slight smile on his face. “ Something else you brought out of this Hole of yours, Stacey?”

“I suppose so.”

“Then it was worth it.” He took out a cigar. “Now go back to the piano like a good boy and play me your mother’s favorite piece again.”

The music was absolute perfection and brought her back to me like a living presence. All the sadness of life, all its beauty, caught in an exquisite moment that seemed to go on for ever. When I finished, there were tears on my face.

When I got back, Hoffer had returned and there was some sort of council of war going on in the lounge. Burke looked completely different. He’d shaved and wore a khaki shirt with epaulets which gave him a certain military air.

But the change went deeper. There was a briskness about him, an authority I had not seen since my return. When I went in, he glanced up from the map and said calmly, “Ah, there you are, Stacey. I’ve just been going over things with Mr. Hoffer.”

Piet stood in the background, a wad of sticking plaster moulding his left ear, Legrande beside him. The South African simply didn’t look at me as I went to the table.

“This is one hell of a good idea,” Hoffer said, rubbing his hands together. “Colonel Burke tells me it’s primarily your suggestion.”

Burke’s voice was flat and colourless as he cut in. “The trouble is getting to Serafino before he realises we’re in the area. His camp, as we understand it, is about four thousand five hundred feet up on the eastern slopes of the mountain. The idea is that we make a night drop on to a plateau about a thousand feet below the summit on the western side.”

“Then you cross over and catch him with his pants down?”

Hoffer’s choice of phrase was unfortunate under the circumstances, but Burke nodded. “We should get over the summit at least by dawn. On the other side there’s a forest belt about a thousand feet down. Oak, birch, some pine, I understand. Once we reach that we’ll have plenty of cover on the final stretch.”

Hoffer seemed genuinely excited as he examined the map. “You know something? For the first time I really believe there’s a chance. Let’s all have a drink on it.”

“Another time if you don’t mind,” I said. “I could do with an early night. It’s been a long day.”

He was pleasant enough about it and as no one pressed me to stay, I left them and went up to my room. Not that I could sleep when I did go to bed. I lay there with the French windows open because of the heat and after a while it started to shower. It was round about that time that Rosa arrived.

She took off the silk kimono she was wearing. “Look, no trouser suit.”

When she got in beside me, she was shivering, though from desire or cold was uncertain and whether she was there for herself or Hoffer didn’t really seem to matter. It was nice, lying there in the darkness holding her in the hollow of my arm, listening to the rain, even when she fell asleep on me!

AS I FOUND out later, Burke didn’t go to bed. Instead, he flew to Crete in the Cessna to pick up a few things we were going to need and was back just before eleven on Saturday morning.

Sunday, being the conventional day of rest, seemed as reasonable a time to catch Serafino napping as we were likely to find, which meant going in that night. There was almost a full moon, which didn’t please Burke much, but he was impatient to be off now that the ball was rolling again and bustled around, full of energy, checking everything.

We used a small private airstrip not far from the villa, a cow pasture really, with a hangar that was barely large enough to get the Cessna inside.

The plane was the 401 model with eight seats and we had those out for a start. A particularly good point was the Airstair door amidships which would give us a clear exit, something we badly needed if all four of us were to get out in time to drop in a nice tight group.

The pilot, a man called Nino Verda, was ex Italian air force, about thirty from the look of him and according to Hoffer the best money could buy. He needed to be. To fly that kind of country in the dark, graze a six-thousand-foot mountain and give us an eight-hundred-foot drop over that plateau was going to take genius.

We were using the X type parachute, the kind British paratroopers used before they changed to the new N.A.T.O. one. Burke preferred the X type. It got you down faster and could be guided with greater accuracy. The reserve chutes were of the same type, and identical with those we had used in the Congo.

Our weapons were unconventional by some standards, but proved in combat, the only realistic test. We were using the Chinese A.K. assault rifle, probably the most reliable automatic combat rifle in the world at that time and the new Israeli sub machine gun, the Uzi, which was better than the Sterling in every way.

Two grenades each, a commando knife – the list seemed endless. Burke even had a kit inspection with each man’s camouflaged jump suit laid out together with every item of equipment.

And he went over the operation with the map and a stop-watch so many times that even Piet Jaeger looked sick by late evening. Towards me he seemed no different and I suppose any touch of formality in our relationship could have been put down to the exigencies of the situation.

At dinner, Hoffer was joviality personified. Only the best was good enough although Burke put his foot down as regards alcohol. But the food was excellent. Surprisingly, I found an appetite for it and Rosa was there, wearing her best, looking absolutely magnificent.

Afterwards, Burke took us through the plan again in detail, including the walk-out if everything went well, which he estimated would take eight or nine hours to the point on the Bellona road where we were to be met by Hoffer himself with the necessary transport.

He shook hands with us all solemnly when Burke had finished and made a little speech about how much he appreciated what we were doing and how he hoped before long to have his stepdaughter with him again, God willing, which I thought was pushing it a bit far.

Later, when I was changing in my room, Rosa appeared. She zipped up the front of my camouflaged suit and kissed me on the cheek. “From you or from Hoffer?” I said.

“From me.” She touched my face briefly. “Come back safe.”

She hesitated in the doorway, and looked at me, a strange expression on her face. She wanted to speak, wanted like hell to tell me something and was desperately afraid of the consequences.