Read Games of the Hangman Online
Authors: Victor O'Reilly
"Got
him," said Noble.
Andreas
grunted in acknowledgment.
His ears were
ringing.
He thought he heard Noble say
something, and then all he could think of was crouching out of harm's way as
the heavy machine gun again cut in and methodically traced and retraced its
malevolent way across the front of the gatehouse.
The damn gun would burn out its barrels soon
if it kept up this rate of fire.
There was a
pause in its firing s if the gunner had read his mind, and he snatched a look
into the darkness again with the SA-80 sight.
He could see shaped getting nearer and decided to examine the ground in
front of them more methodically.
The
heavy machine gun was still quiet, and the automatic rifle fire, though
intense, was mostly going high.
Fitzduane had
been right.
The opposition was getting
cocky.
Whereas earlier, during daylight
— and even more recently when the firing had commenced — they had all been
nearly invisible under cover, now, confident of the concealing darkness, they
had emerged from their positions and were moving forward slowly for an assault.
The death of
the sapper did not seem to deter them, so something else must be up.
He scanned the line of men again.
There were on signs of scaling ladders or any
other obvious method of gaining access to the castle.
He looked deeper into the darkness.
The Kite image intensifier was at its limit
of operational effectiveness of six hundred meters when he began searching the
road that led up to the castle.
At first
he could detect nothing except a faint impression of slow movement, and then
out of the darkness he could see a large black shape with some long object
protruding in front of it.
He waited
while the shape slowly advanced another hundred meters and then, after a
further look, passed the SA-80 to Harry Noble.
The ambassador
looked where he indicated and then ducked as muzzle flashes stabbed from the
armored monolith creeping toward them.
"I think we're moving toward the surprise event," he
said."
"I hate
surprises," said Andreas.
Noble was
speaking by hand radio to Fitzduane.
He
put down the radio and fired several single shots into the darkness toward the spread-out
line of advancing terrorists.
Andreas
watched them dive to the ground and then cautiously rise again when they
realized that no one had been hit and the opposition was light.
There was an
enormous explosion behind them from the direction of the keep.
They both looked at the radio, which remained
silent.
Noble reached out and picked it
up.
He was about to press the call
button when Fitzduane's voice crackled out of it.
"Relax," it said.
"That's part of the Bear's war, and he's
doing just fine.
Now get on with the
gate."
Andreas looked
at Noble.
"Does he mean what I
think he means?"
"It's
what we planned," said Noble.
"He wants us to open the portcullis."
He pressed the switch, wondering if they
still had power or if they would have to crank it by hand.
The old motor whirred,
then
caught, and the spiked portcullis began to rise from the ground.
"This is
crazy," said Andreas.
"They'll
get in."
"I think
that's the whole idea," said Noble.
Andreas felt
his bowels go liquid.
He could hear
Noble
inserting a fresh magazine into the pistol grip of the
Uzi and the click as the weapon was cocked.
Noble indicated the Hawk grenade launcher and the bandolier of 40 mm
grenades.
"Fléchette rounds,"
he said, "then armor-piercing explosive."
*
*
*
*
*
The fighting
platform of the keep was the best observation point in the castle.
That was fine, except for the fact that it
could clearly be seen to be so and as such was likely to attract unwelcome
attention.
Apart from the
anticipated volume of incoming fire, Fitzduane had been worried about its
nature.
The top of the keep was a flat,
open rectangle with a high crenellated parapet that would tend to concentrate
the effect of blast.
It could be
neutralized with one single mortar round or even a couple of grenades.
Fitzduane's
solution led one student to remark that the Fitzduane family motto should be
"Dig and Live" and its coat of arms a crossed pick and shovel on a
background of sweat-saturated sandbags.
A block and tackle were
rigged on the platform, and a
seemingly unending succession of sandbags and balks of timber and pieces of
corrugated iron was hauled up.
Te result
was a fair reproduction of a First World War trench dugout in the sky.
The roof was designed to be mortarproof — at
least for the first couple of blasts (during which time the occupants, if they
had any sense, would bug out to the floor below).
As it happened, the construction of the
dugout roof made all the difference.
The pilots
selected for the Powerchutes, two brothers, Husain and Mohsen, were Iranians
and followers of a modified version of the teachings of Hasane Sabbah, had
founded the sect of the Assassins in the Elburz Mountains north of Teheran in
the purity of assassination as a political tool had been tempered by the
discovery that the game could work two ways.
After an Israeli hit team had whittled their dedicated band of twenty
down to just the pair of them, they had added the profit motive to the
teachings of Hasane Sabbah.
But they
still retained enough fanaticism, or were just plain dumb enough, in Kadar's
judgment, to be prepared to push their attacks to the absolute limit.
Photographs
and drawings of the main features of Fitzduane's castle had been found in
several books in the
brothers had been thoroughly briefed.
The plan was for the first Powerchute, flown by Husain, to swoop in and
drop a satchel charge on the keep's fighting platform while the second
Powerchute, flown by Mohsen, would send its specially weighted charge through
the slate roof of the great hall, into the yawning aperture made by the explosion
of the weighted satchel charge, thus setting the top floor of the building
alight —one guidebook made great reference to ‘the splendor of the carved oak
beams dating back from medieval times’ — and rendering it uninhabitable.
The pilots would then cut their engines and,
using only the steerable ramjet parachutes of the
Powerchutes,
would land on the cleared fighting platform and hold it while their brethren
reinforced them by climbing up from below on ropes.
The entire
Powerchute attack, Kadar calculated, could be completed in less than ninety
seconds.
To check this, a rehearsal was
carried out on the mock-Gothic keep of
Using dummy bombs and in daylight, the two
brothers clocked in, on their first attempt, at a creditable ninety-four
seconds, including a final sweep of the ‘fighting platform’ with automatic
rifle fire as they sailed down.
They
shaved a further five seconds off with practice.
The actual
attack did not work out according to plan except that it accelerated the
brothers' path to the goal of all followers of Hasane Sabbah killed in the line
of duty:
Eternal Paradise.
But it was close.
The
Powerchutes achieved total surprise.
With the noise of their engines drowned by a fusillade from the cordon
of terrorists, Husain was able to sweep in undetected and release his satchel
charge — a webbing satchel containing plastic explosive, shrapnel, and a
three-second fuse — exactly over the target.
Unfortunately the light of the half-moon as it shone intermittently
through the scurrying clouds made visibility difficult, and he didn't see the
dugout that had been constructed on the platform.
The bomb
glanced off the dugout and slid down toward the slate roof of the great
hall.
Exploding in near-perfect
imitation of a directional mine, the shrapnel caught the second Powerchute on
its approach, which was lower than intended thanks to the fickleness of the
Irish wind, in a pattern that would have done credit to a champion skeet
shooter.
Mohsen didn't
even have time to complain about the Irish climate or to reflect that it might
have been a good idea to practice in advance with real explosives or to curse
his miscalculating brother seven different ways.
He was killed instantly, his body pierced in
a dozen places, and his Powerchute carried him across the castle walls to crash
minutes later in a ball of flame against the cliffs of the mainland.
Inside the dugout, protected by a triple
layer of sandbags, the Bear and Murrough were scarcely affected by the
explosion except to feel a little sick at the thought that their attackers
seemed to have the very weapon they had feared most — a mortar.
Expecting a barrage of further rounds now
that the gunner had zeroed in on them with the first shot — not so common with
a mortar — they headed as one for the circular stairs and took up fresh
positions in Fitzduane's bedroom immediately below.
The defenders
on the battlements outside scarcely had time to think at all.
First a huge black shape sailed by, spraying
blood like some vampire celebrating the abolition of garlic, and then automatic
weapons fire from the sky made the point that the first vampire wasn't flying
about alone.
Etan, crouched
in a sandbag cocoon on the inland-facing battlements, was the first to
react.
The rapid semiautomatic fire of
her Mauser caused Husain to take a raincheck on
incendiary on this pass.
He banked and
climbed to prepare for another run.
All
Etan could see was a black figure almost invisible against the clouds while the
moon was obscured.
"What the
fuck is that?" asked Henssen, who was wiping something wet off his face
and hoping it wasn't what he thought it was or, if it was, that it wasn't
his.
He couldn't feel any pain, but his
heart felt as if it were going to pound its way out of his body.
"I don't
know," said Etan, "some kind of flying thing, I think.
Its' like a balloon, but quick."
Fitzduane ran
up in a crouching run, holding himself easily as if he'd done this kind of
thing
many time
before — which he had.
If nothing else, combat taught you very
quickly to make yourself small.
Fitzduane was an expert.
He
seemed to have visibly shrunk.
Etan
pointed.
Fitzduane, squatting well down
behind the parapet and the sandbags, raised his SA-80 and examined the area she
had indicated with the night sight.
He
could see nothing at first, given the Kite's limited field of view — one
disadvantage of using a telescopic sight instead of wide-angle binoculars — but
a quick pan picked up the image of a light metal frame containing a sitting
figure with legs outstretched as if driving a go-cart.
A checked keffiyeh was wrapped around its
head and mouth, the ends streaming close to a giant propeller enclosed in a
circular protective guard like that of a swamp boat.
For an instant Fitzduane thought that if the
keffiyeh would only stream back a couple of centimeters, the problem might
solve itself.
Then he looked further and
saw the familiar outline of a military ramjet cargo parachute.
The metal frame turned to head directly toward
him, and he could see stabs of flame.
He
switched the fire selector of the SA-80 to automatic reluctantly, bearing in
mind his own strictures on the subject, and opened fire.
The powered
parachute was moving deceptively fast — somewhere in excess of forty kilometers
per hour at a guess — and it sailed low over the castle before he could fire a
second burst.
A small black shape left
the metal frame as it passed and landed on the opposite battlements, exploding
among the zigzagging double line of sandbags and sending smoke and flames into
the air and streams of liquid fire into the bawn below.
The powered
parachute came into his line of vision again when it turned and prepared for a
further attack.
He could see the pilot
in profile less than two hundred meters away.
He fired again.
This time the
figure arched and its head sagged.
The
metal frame with its swamp boat propeller dipped but flew on and vanished into
the darkness.
"Holy
shit," said Henssen in relief, "but they're an all-singing,
all-dancing outfit."
He turned
toward Etan, who seemed to have sunk out of sight behind the sandbags.
"Good for you, Etan," he said.
"If it hadn't been for you and your
broom handle, we might have been barbequed."