Games of the Hangman (99 page)

He was not
unaware of the hazardous nature of his mission, but even though he had the
means to make his escape, he no longer considered such an option.
 
He had heard that war generated its own
momentum, and now he knew that it was true.
 
His original objective, the capture of the hostages, hadn't changed, but
his prime motivation now, regardless of the cost, was to win.
 
He knew he was going to.
 
It wasn't that his forces were stronger or
better equipped or for any precise, quantifiable reason.
 
Instead, it had to do with more ephemeral
things such as the scale of his vision, the force of his leadership, and his
sheer overwhelming willpower.
 
He had
always been successful in the end, despite difficulties at times.
 
It had been so nice he had started to control
his own destiny, and it would remain so.

He tired to
imagine how the defenders inside the keep would feel if they knew he was up
here armed with a weapon that was virtually irresistible.
 
Would they pray?
 
Would they try to run?
 
Where could they run to?
 
How would they deal with the unbelievable
horror of being burned to death — hair on fire, skin shriveling, eyeballs
exploding, every nerve ending shrieking and screaming?
 
In the end not a corpse, but a small, black,
shrunken heap scarcely recognizable as ever having been human.
 
On top of everything else it was, in Kadar's
opinion, an undignified way to go.

Ahead of him
the sky turned red with fire as the roof of the great hall fell in and flames
and sparks shot up into the night sky.
 
God, but it was an impressive sight — a tribute to his, Kadar's, power
and vision and a direct insult to Fitzduane.
 
The castle was the man's home, and it had stood for hundreds of years —
and now
he
, Kadar, was casually destroying it.
 
He wondered if he would have the chance of
burning Fitzduane to death — or was Fitzduane dead
already?
 
He rather hoped not.
 
He would enjoy looking into his eyes before
engulfing him in a stream — what flame gunners called a ‘rod’ of burning
napalm.

He decided to
circle again, until the temporary increase in the intensity of the fire from
the great hall had subsided.
 
It was always
like that when a roof fell in — a sudden flare-up that died down very quickly,
a last show of strength before the end.

He would be a
couple of
minutes
late landing on the keep, but that
shouldn't really make any difference.
 
The heat from the great hall combined with the intense heavy-machine-gun
fire must have rendered the top couple of floors untenable.
 
Certainly he could see no one on the dugout
roof
now,
and there had been reports that it had been
manned earlier.

He used the
extra time while he circled, and the great hall fire waned, to rerun through
his mind the details of his assault plan.
 
The flamethrower was the same Russian LPO-50 model he had used to such
good effect at
Camp
Marighella
in
Libya
.
 
He had brought it not for any military reason
— the remotest possibility of the scale of combat that had developed had never
occurred to him, even in his most pessimistic evaluations — but to deploy on
the hostages in case of intransigence.
 
For this reason he had brought along only three ignition charges — tanks
like divers' air bottles containing thickened fuel propelled by pressurizing
charges that fired through one-way valves when the trigger was pressed — which
permitted just nine seconds of continuous use — not enough for general combat
but more than adequate for several very spectacular executions.

The three
charges would also, he was sure, be quite enough to turn the tables in the
narrow stairs and rooms of the keep.
 
One
to two seconds per room should be more than sufficient to incinerate every defender
inside.
 
It had been pointed out to him
by his instructor that the LPO-50 was, in fact, designed exclusively for
outdoor use, for the very good reason that the heat it generated was intense
and the oxygen usage quite enormous.
 
Kadar had brushed aside such caveats.
 
He was confident he could handle the flamethrower, even in the confined
space of the keep, without either cooking himself or being asphyxiated.
 
He was a master of the tools of killing.

Initially he
had considered flying around the keep and smothering each aperture with napalm,
but that would have left him vulnerable to the defenders' fire.
 
There was also the problem that the LPO-50
was bulky and almost impossible to use from the Powerchute without modifying
the airframe, since the unit was designed to be worn as a backpack.
 
He had also disliked the idea of being so
close to all that flaming oil when the only thing that kept him up was a
fragile nylon parachute canopy.
 
He could
see his wings melting and himself reliving Icarus's unenviable experience.

He had
therefore settled on the simpler plan of landing on the now-deserted roof,
breaking through the sandbags to incinerate any defenders below, bringing up
reinforcements by rope from the base of the keep, and then blasting his way,
room by room, floor by floor, to the hostages.
 
It was a simple, direct plan, and it was going to work because no one
can stand and fight when facing a flamethrower.
 
Very soon he would control the keep.

His mind
flashed back to those early, vulnerable, happy days in
Cuba
when he
and Whitney were lovers.
 
He had been
naïve then, naive and ignorant of the reality of the human condition, which is
to control or to be used or to die.
 
He
remembered Whitney's death; it hadn't been in vain.
 
That terrible episode had made Kadar strong
and invulnerable.
 
He recalled his
meticulous plotting and execution of his mother and Major Antonin Ventura.
 
There had been so many since then.
 
It had become easier over time.
 
More recently the violence had become an end
in itself.
 
It had become a
necessity.
 
It was now an exquisite
sensual pleasure.

The Hangman
prepared to attack.
 
Sixty seconds from
making a landing on the keep, his Powerchute engine sputtered and cut out.
 
It was out of fuel — the result of a slow
leak caused by one of Etan's rapidly fired broom handle Mauser bullets during
the flying machine's previous attack.

Terror and
rage suffused Kadar's being.
 
His mood
crashed from euphoria to panic.
 
For
several seconds he sat in the Powerchute, motionless, incapable of deciding
what to do.
 
Then he noticed the craft's
forward motion, and his confidence returned.
 
Unlike a helicopter, which went vertical rather quickly when the power
was cut off, the Powerchute was a forgiving beast when engineless.
 
It was, after all, no more than a parachute
with something like a propeller-equipped lawn mower engine tacked on.
 
The parachute was quite big enough and strong
enough to bring both pilot and appendages to the ground in a mild and gentle manner.

Unfortunately
for Kadar — given the chute's forward momentum and the way the wind was gusting
— the immediate ground was represented by the burning cavern that had been the
great hall.

Slowly he
sailed nearer and nearer to it until he could feel the heat sear his face.
 
The metal of the Powerchute frame became too
hot to touch.
 
The flamethrower was going
to explode and douse him with burning napalm.
 
Horror overwhelmed him.
 
He began
to shake with fear.

Frantically he
tried to free himself of the flamethrower and at the same time to steer away
from the conflagration.

The
flamethrower had been clipped to the Powerchute frame with D-shaped carabiners
— the things climbers use.
 
They were
easy to manage and utterly reliable if handled at the right angle, but in this
case Kadar had to twist awkwardly back, and the release of each one of the four
carabiners in turn was an endless nightmare.
 
His fingers slipped and skidded and became slimy with blood from his scrabbling
fingernails.
 
He was physically sick with
fear and panic.

He unclipped
three of the carabiners, but the fourth evaded his every attempt.
 
The flamethrower remained tied to the
Powerchute as if it had a mind of its own and were determined to go down with
its owner and burn him to death.

Kadar saw that
he was not going to make it if he stayed with the doomed aircraft.
 
He hit the quick-release buckle on his
safety-harness, balanced himself on the edge of the Powerchute's metal frame,
and, timing it as well as he could, threw himself through the air toward the
edge of the dugout.

The drifting
Powerchute still retained some momentum, which caused him to land hard on a
corrugated-iron-reinforced corner of the dugout.
 
The edge of the rusty metal sliced into his
torso, and he heard a crack.
 
He felt a
terrible pain in his leg, as if his femur were broken.
 
He felt himself sliding, and his hands
flailed frantically, trying to find something to grip.
 
He found a makeshift sandbag, but the
material, previously slashed by heavy-machine-gun bullets, tore in his hands.

He was
screaming — he couldn't stop screaming — and he couldn’t see because blood from
a slash on his forehead mixed with earth from the sandbag was streaming into
his eyes, and he felt a sudden, terrible rush of heat from the flames when the
fire in the great hall burned through the metal casing of the abandoned
flamethrower, igniting the whole twenty-three-kilo backpack.

He felt
himself being gripped by his left arm and pulled forward away from the edge and
dumped facedown on the sandbagged center of the roof.
 
He slid his right hand under his body and
drew his pistol.
 
The weapon was already
cocked with a round in the chamber.
 
He
slid the safety catch to the off position.

"Turn
around," said Fitzduane, who had decided to reoccupy the top of the keep
after the heavy-machine-guns positions had been destroyed.
 
A further incentive had come from a Ranger
report of some as-yet-unaccounted-for flying machine that had been seen taking
off with a hostile aboard.

The form lying
facedown on the sandbags looked familiar, but Fitzduane couldn't bring
himself
to believe that it was the Hangman, or Balac or
Kadar or Whitney or Lodge or whatever he was calling himself these days.

Kadar wiped
the blood from his eyes and blinked.
 
He
could see.
 
It was still possible.
 
It could be done.

He raised his
upper body on his hands, then took most of his weight on one arm and gripped
his pistol with the other.
 
He half
turned to identify the precise location of his target.
 
His eyes locked on those of his rescuer, and
he stirred in surprise and then burning hatred.
 
Good God!
 
It was his nemesis; it
was that damned Irishman.
 
A lust to
obliterate Fitzduane swept over him.

Simon
Balac!
 
The Hangman!
 
The shock of recognition hit Fitzduane with
equal force.
 
He was momentarily
stunned.
 
Somehow he had assumed that the
Hangman would remain safe in the background, directing operations.
 
He had never expected that the man would put
himself in harm's way.
 
He felt a cold,
clinical desire to kill, and then an adrenaline rush.
 
It was a combination he hadn't experienced
since seeing Anne-Marie slaughtered in the
Congo
nearly two decades
earlier.
 
It was a killing rage.
 
He moved a step toward Kadar.

The Bear, who
was out of ammunition and had been delayed while looking for an alternative
weapon, was climbing the ladder leading to the roof.
 
He called out to Fitzduane.
 
It was a casual shout of inquiry, but it
saved Fitzduane's life.
 
The Irishman
turned slightly to acknowledge the Bear and the Hangman rolled and fired.

Fitzduane felt
a burning sensation as the round furrowed his cheek.
 
He staggered backward and slipped on a coil
of rope.
 
He crashed onto the sandbags as
further shots from the Hangman cracked over his head and smashed into the
tripod-mounted block and tackle.

With
difficulty the Hangman hauled himself upright.

Distracted by
his agony, his hands shaking, Kadar made a half turn and fired in the direction
of this new arrival.
 
His burst of four
shots missed, but the Bear lost his original point of aim, and instead of
impacting on the Hangman's torso as intended, the crossbow bolt sank into the
Hangman's broken leg at knee height, splintering bone and ripping
cartilage.
 
He screamed at the sudden
crescendo of pain and emptied his magazine in futile rapid fire in the direction
of his tormentor.