Read Games of the Hangman Online
Authors: Victor O'Reilly
He guessed he was up against no more than four to six of the
Sacrificers.
Given the layout of the
room, they'd be on the stage, by the doors, and — probably — in the gallery.
He pointed at a small door set into the paneling farther down the
corridor.
"Henssen and Judith,
that's yours," he said.
"There's a circular staircase behind it that leads to the gallery.
Get up there and move when I do.
Remember, take out the opposition fast or
we'll have a massacre on our hands."
The two nodded and vanished through the paneling.
Fitzduane braced himself outside the main doors with de Guevain, now with
some color back in his cheeks, to one side.
A burst of fire came from the rear of the college.
Fitzduane, carrying his own Browning
automatic shotgun loaded with XR-18 ammunition, nodded to de Guevain.
Acting as one, they flung open the double
doors, sending one guard standing on the inside of the door sprawling.
In the center of the stage, a Sacrificer who
had been threatening the rows of students below him swiveled his weapon toward
the intruders and died instantly under a blast from Fitzduane's shotgun.
Fitzduane fired a second time at another
Sacrificer standing by the facing door.
Wheeling around, de Guevain shot the guard they had knocked to the
ground as they entered the room.
Judith mounted the circular staircase ahead of Henssen.
The sound of firing from the rear of the
building came as she was opening the gallery door a crack to take a look.
A Sacrificer who had been positioned in the
center of the gallery to keep watch over the hostages ran across to the windows
to see the cause of the disturbance outside.
He turned in alarm at the sound of Fitzduane bursting in below and for a
split second stood there uncertain which way to move.
Judith shot him three times in the torso
while he was making up his mind.
Henssen, seeing the body still upright, fired over her shoulder with his
AK-47, sending chips of bone flying in a spray of blood out of the corpse's
head.
The body collapsed against the
gallery rail, pouring blood onto the students below.
Outside, the sound of gunfire intensified.
Inside the assembly hall the students stared uncertainly at their
rescuers.
Many of them still had their
hands on top of their heads, as the Sacrificers had instructed.
They couldn't adjust immediately to this new
development.
Most were still in
shock.
The bodies of the duty faculty
lay where they had fallen after execution in front of the stage.
The floor was slippery, and the air reeked of
blood, cordite, and the smells of sweat and fear.
One body seemed familiar to Fitzduane.
The figure was tall and slim, and a ragged line of bullet holes
punctured her breasts.
Her face still
showed the horror of her manner of dying.
Her round granny glasses were in her hand, and she lay in a pool of her
own blood.
*
*
*
*
*
Kadar stood on the jetty, frustration eating away at his insides.
Most of his unit had been withdrawn from the
tunnel, leaving a scratch force to try for a breakout.
There was no information as to who was
resisting them, but reports from the firing line suggested that the opposition
was light.
Unfortunately, light or otherwise,
it was all too well placed.
He had no intention of leaving his forces in the tunnel, where they were
at their most vulnerable.
He would
accept a delay and try a pincers movement on the opposition.
Radio contact with the Sacrificers had been
cut, so it seemed as if that particular card had been neutralized somehow.
He had tried to raise
Suspicion nibbled at his mind, but he
suppressed it.
Ropes snaked to the
ground as his specially trained climbers led the way up the cliffs.
One way or another they would brush this
irritation aside — and soon.
He was pleased at his foresight in blowing the bridge.
His victims had nowhere to go.
It was only a matter of time.
He ordered Phantom Air to delay landing until
they either broke out of the tunnel or had secured the cliff top.
Whom could he be up against?
Kadar
paced up and down in frustration.
Above
him there was a cry as one of the lead climbers lost his footing and hung, for
a moment, by his fingernails from a rock.
Kadar was almost sorry when his scrabbling feet found safety.
The assault carried on.
*
*
*
*
*
Many of the students knew Fitzduane by sight from his rambles around the
island, and it was this fact that made the difference.
Given confidence by the presence of a
familiar face who seemed to know exactly what he was doing, the released
hostages streamed out of the college toward Fitzduane's castle at a fast
jog.
Escorted by de Guevain and Henssen,
they had two miles to cover in the open, a fact Fitzduane disliked.
But they were fit young people used
to
much longer runs, and the bottom line was that there was
no alternative.
The college layout would
be known to the terrorists, and it was too big and sprawling to be held.
Duncleeve, Fitzduane's castle, was home
ground.
There they had a chance.
A thousand feet up, the pilot and copilot of the Islander spotted the
exodus and radioed Kadar for instructions.
Seconds later the pilot banked and headed for the road between the
running students and Fitzduane's castle.
The strip the pilot had landed on before had already been passed by the
students.
The pilot had no choice but to
try to land on an untested spot.
The
Islander was a rugged aircraft built for poor conditions, so the pilot was
confident he could set it down safely.
He wasn't so sure he'd ever get it off again, but he knew better than to
argue with his commander.
He cinched his
seat harness tighter and prepared to land.
Inside the college Fitzduane and Judith had moved to a second-floor
location that directly overlooked the grounds at the rear and the top entrance
of the jetty tunnel.
He could see where
Murrough and Andreas were pinned down by observing where the fire from the
tunnel mouth was focused.
The greenhouse
the two men were sheltering in was a cascading mass of breaking glass.
Fitzduane hoped the two had found some cover
from the debris.
He could think of more
comfortable places to hide.
Thirty yards away a camouflaged figure was crawling along a gravel path
to the side and rear of the greenhouse, out of sight of the occupants.
He paused and removed two cylindrical objects
from a pouch on his belt.
Fitzduane
imagined he could hear the first grenade pin being pulled and tossed aside.
He had the radio in his right hand and was
trying to raise Murrough.
As the
terrorist came to his feet and brought his right arm back to throw, Fitzduane
pocketed the radio and lifted the Browning to his shoulder.
The firing pin clicked on an empty chamber.
A three-round burst from Judith's Uzi caught the grenade thrower in the
back of the head.
He pitched forward,
the grenade leaving his hand and rolling under a galvanized wheelbarrow.
Fitzduane raised his head soon enough after the
explosion to see the barrow, perforated like a colander, sail through the air
and land in an ornamental pool with a large splash, sending a shoal of goldfish
to a slow death on the stone surround.
Judith was firing single shots into the tunnel entrance.
Fitzduane picked up Murrough on the
radio.
"Are you okay?"
"We're not hit," said Murrough.
"It's hard to get off a clear shot under this much fire."
"There's a fuel tank to the right of the tunnel entrance," said
Fitzduane.
"It's aboveground but
buried for safety reasons in sand and concrete.
A pipe from it runs down the tunnel to the jetty."
"I remember," said Murrough.
"It's that bump to the right of the tunnel entrance."
"Roger," said Fitzduane.
"Tell Andreas to check his grenade bandolier and look for M433 HEDP
rounds."
There was a pause.
Judith turned
to Fitzduane.
"I'm keeping their
heads down," she said, "but I don't have the ammunition to keep this
up for long."
She held up two
magazines.
"Just
these and three in the weapon."
She fired again and inserted the next-to-last clip.
"We've found four," said Murrough, "and then the four
HEDP."
There was another pause, and then Murrough answered:
"Done."
A figure, grenade in hand, made run from the tunnel.
Now reloaded, Fitzduane and Judith both
fired.
The figure buckled but with a
last effort threw the grenade.
Helpless,
they watched it land in the greenhouse.
A cascade of brown liquid shot up into the air and rained downward.
"Shit," said Murrough.
"It landed in some kind of liquid fertilizer tank.
We're covered in the stuff."
"That'll teach you," said Fitzduane.
"Only a moron would pick a greenhouse to
hide out in."
"Get a move on," said Judith.
Fitzduane grinned at her.
She had
a Swiss sense of humor.
She shot like a
Swiss, too.
"Murrough," he
said, "at my command, put the 397s into the tunnel and then put the next
four rounds into the tank — and if it works, run like hell to the front.
We'll join you there."
"And if it doesn't?
"
Murrough muttered
to himself.
"Ready?
"
Fitzduane asked Judith.
"Ready."
"Fire!"
Fitzduane's automatic Browning boomed
repeatedly, and Judith emptied her last magazine in a series of three-round
bursts.
Fitzduane could see movement in
the greenhouse, where Murrough was firing the SA-80 on full automatic.
The fire from the tunnel slackened as the terrorists withered under this
surge in the opposition's firepower.
Andreas broke cover with the bulky Hawk grenade launcher in his
hands.
His covering fire slowed as
Judith ran out of ammunition and Fitzduane reloaded.
The terrorists in the tunnel raised their
heads.
Andreas fired the first two grenades from the Hawk into the
entrance.
The grenades impacted on the
floor, and a small charge in each one flung the projectile back into the air to
chest height, where it exploded.
Shrapnel raked the confined space, and the sound of screaming echoed
out.
He turned the Hawk toward the fuel
tank and fired the four M433 high-explosive dual-purpose grenades in two
seconds, then ran with all his might away from the line of the entrance, with
Murrough sprinting behind him.
The first two grenades — capable of penetrating two inches of armor —
were partially smothered by the concrete and sand safety cover that was itself
blown apart in the process.
The third
and fourth grenades, their way now cleared, exploded inside the
two-thousand-gallon tank, rupturing the container but not immediately setting
fire to the contents.
Fuel poured into the tunnel and then blew when it encountered a red-hot
grenade fragment.
A fireball shot out of
the entrance, engulfing the greenhouse that had so recently sheltered Andreas
and Murrough.
There was silence from the tunnel mouth except for the crackling of
flames.
Black smoke billowed upward and
stained the sky.
At the bottom of the
tunnel, and standing well to one side, Kadar felt the touch of a dragon's
breath on his face.
The men inside were
dead, but most of the others had been withdrawn before the explosion.
The lead climbers were approaching the last stage of the ascent to the
top of the cliff.