The Snake Flag Conspiracy

Chapter Thirteen

Even though it was summertime, it was cold in that wine cellar. All I had on was a pair of slacks and boots. My only weapon was Pierre, still taped to my groin.

It was not only cold in the wine cellar, it was dark. The glow of the radiant dial and the hands of my watch told me what time it was: 2:30 in the morning. At twelve noon, according to Bradford, they were going to take me out and execute me.

The whole affair had become Bradford’s private lunacy. The Russians had unconsciously created a monster, a megalomaniac as vicious as Hitler or Stalin! Now he was turning on them. The horror of it was that he had a damned good chance of succeeding! I wondered what that Kremlin economist would say now if he knew how his brilliantly conceived scheme to destroy the U.S. economy had been transformed into the plan for an atomic holocaust that would wipe out Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, Dniepepetrovsk, Minsk and all the rest of the USSR!

The irony of the situation struck me suddenly. With me rested not only the last hope for a stable U.S. economy... but the safety of the Soviet Union, too!

There was still a slim chance of stopping Bradford. Not much of a chance, but as long as I was alive, I had a reckoning coming up with Bradford.

I bided my time. Right after you’re captured, your jailers are most alert. Give them time to settle down. The best time to strike is shortly before dawn, when a man’s body mechanism is at its lowest ebb, when his reactions are slowest and his mind is least alert.

I sat back, trying to ignore the cold and trying to relax as best I could while I figured out exactly what I had to do next. The details of my escape were just the first part. Once I knew what I intended to do to get away, I had to plan what would come after that: killing Bradford. But how? Hawk’s words to me were still ringing clearly in my mind: It has to look like an accident!

The wine cellar hadn’t been used in years. They’d cleared out all the wooden racks. There wasn’t a thing in the place to use as a weapon or even to hide behind. I explored every inch by feel in the pitch dark. Pierre was my only chance. I had to think of a way to use him — and not kill myself in the process. That little gas bomb is absolutely deadly in confined quarters.

At 4:30 I began pounding on the door.

At 4:33 two guards in colonial costume opened the cellar door and pointed guns at me. Not muzzle loaders, but modern M-14 military carbines.

I held up my hands peaceably. “Hey, take it easy! All I want is some hot coffee. It’s cold in here.”

They looked at each other.

“Alright,” said one of them. “I guess it’s okay.”

They shut and bolted the door. They were taking no chances.

I fished out Pierre from his hiding place and held him concealed in my right hand.

At 4:42 they came back.

Before they opened the door, I heard one of them shout at me, “Get away from the door! All the way back to the end of the room!”

“I heard you,” I shouted back, but I moved against the wall beside the door. I heard the bolts being drawn back, then the door swung open, spilling a flood of light into the room.

They took a step inside and stopped.

Bradford should have used some of his world-famous mercenaries to guard me. These two were amateurs.

“Where the hell—” began one of them, looking around for me. That’s when I whipped my arm up, knocking the coffee pot into his face. The other tried to spin around to get at me. I slashed at him with the edge of my palm, sending him sprawling across the room. Almost in the same movement I flung Pierre against the far wall, its fumes beginning to pour out even while it was still in the air. Hastily I ducked out the door. I slammed it shut, throwing home the bolt.

There was a choked-off scream, a wild thrashing of bodies that gradually subsided and then silence. All in seconds. The fumes from that little bomb act almost instantaneously.

I peered down the corridor. It was empty. Apparently they’d thought that two guards at a time would be enough to watch over me, especially since I was being held in a stone cellar without a single chink in its thick walls. There was a small window set high in the wall across the corridor from the wine cellar door. I smashed out the glass. Then, holding my breath, I opened the door to the wine cellar to air it out. I turned and ran to the far end of the corridor, where I opened a second window, filling my lungs full of the clear, clean night air.

At 4:56 I went back to the wine cellar that had been a dungeon for me and was now a crypt for the two dead men.

At 5:10 I was fully dressed in a colonial costume I’d taken from one of the men. I felt like I was decked out for a masquerade ball, except I carried an M-14 U.S. Army rifle with a full clip, and I was prepared to use it if anyone got in my way!

No one did. Not a soul was in sight as I made my way to the ground floor. But at least twenty of them were standing in the main hall. I left the rifle tucked around the corner of the stairs. Right now camouflage was my best defense. I had to look like the others. And none of them were carrying M-14’s.

Bold as brass, I walked through the center hall to the stairway. No one paid any attention to me. I mounted the stairs, passing several low-ranking Sons of Liberty. All of them were in uniform, and all wore sleepy, glazed expressions as if they’d been awake most of the night. At the third floor I turned down the same corridor I’d come down earlier that night trying to find Bradford. I found the darkened bedroom and went out the window I’d crawled through several hours before.

It was a scramble getting from the window ledge to the eave roof, but once I’d made that, I had little trouble in getting onto the roof itself.

Crouched down against the base of the chimney beside which I’d tucked my hang kite and the rest of the equipment, I watched the dawn come up down the far end of the valley.

At 8:30 the sharp, brassy notes of a bugle filled the air and men began pouring out of the mansion and its wings onto the wide expanse of clipped lawn. There must have been a hundred of them — all dressed in colonial costume, all carrying flintlock rifles. They fell into formation.

And then, at 8:45, I witnessed the damnedest sight you ever saw. Around the corner of the far wing, mounted on a prancing white stallion some sixteen and a half hands high, dressed in the full rig of a Revolutionary War general, came Alexander Bradford! Sword in his right hand, reins in his left, he advanced at a walk, jouncing uneasily in the saddle.

I moved to the edge of the roof parapet. From my vantage point I watched the scene below. The officers shouted orders, the men drew up their ranks, and Bradford tried to control the stallion to walk him past the troops in review.

Bradford wasn’t that good a horseman. To make it worse, while the stallion was impressive to look at, he hadn’t been fully broken in. And the flashing steel of the sword that Bradford was brandishing was distracting the animal, making him even more skittish. The long military spurs on Bradford’s high knee boots didn’t help any. The “general” didn’t have a firm seat, and his spurs would punch into the stallion’s flanks so that he reared and tossed his head in fright. Bradford was getting angry.

And that’s when I knew I had him.

I took out the Feinwerkbau 300 match rifle, loaded a tiny .177 calibre pellet into it, cocked the mechanism and took aim. I lined up the globe front sight with the micro rear peep sight. My target was the stallion’s left hindquarter. Allowing for the high angle, I pulled the trigger.

I knew there must have been only the faintest of popping sounds. No one more than ten feet away could have heard it.

But that pellet stung the tough hide of that stallion like a giant bee sting. The horse screamed and reared up, almost throwing Bradford off his back. Bradford dropped both reins and saber and clutched frantically at the stallion’s neck, hanging on to him as tightly as he could. Even three stories up I could hear him cursing loudly at the horse.

I reloaded and fired again.

The stallion bolted.

There wasn’t a damned thing Bradford could do except to hang on.

Again and again I reloaded that pellet rifle and fired, each shot becoming progressively more difficult. But I hit the stallion often enough to drive him in the direction I wanted him to go.

My last shot was at an incredibly far distance for an air gun, but it was all I needed. The stallion was now racing at a full, wild, panic-stricken gallop across the turf in an effort to escape the stinging pains in his haunches.

When a horse like that bolts, he literally goes crazy. He’ll run off a cliff; he’ll run full tilt into the heaviest brush. This one associated the rider on his back with the pain in his hindquarters.

Full out, his mane and tail flying wildly, the big stallion galloped madly toward the inner wire mesh fence. Bradford saw what was coming and began to curse. But he was helpless, unable to control the animal in any way at all.

And then there was the moment of impact when some 1800 pounds of horseflesh slammed into the electrified wire fence! The horrible, high-pitched scream from the big animal was cut off sharply. There was a blinding flash, almost as if lightning had struck them both. They went down together, Bradford and the stallion, sparks flying all around them, burning up horse and rider and even the steel of the mesh fence.

The men broke ranks, running helter-skelter around the grounds, none of them daring to come close to Bradford’s scorched body, which still leaped and twitched from the high voltage pouring through it.

At 8:55 someone had sense enough to throw the master switch, turning off the electricity. Bradford’s corpse lay still. The huge stallion partially covered his body.

Even at my distance — almost 200 yards away and three stories high — I could smell the stench of scorched horseflesh and man flesh drifting up on the soft morning mountain air.

I put down the pellet rifle and moved away from the edge of the roof.

My job was done.