Wild Justice

And the radio clicked into silence.

“We are going to give you dinner now,” Ingrid shouted cheerfully, and there was a stir of interest down the length of the cabin. “And it’s my birthday today. So you’re going to have champagne,

isn’t that great!” But the plump little Jewish doctor rose suddenly to his feet. His grey sparse hair stood up in comical wisps, and his face seemed to have collapsed, like melting wax, ravaged and destroyed by grief He no longer seemed to be aware of what had been said or what was happening. “You had no right to kill her.” His voice sounded like a very old man. “She was a good person. She never hurt anyone ” He looked about him with a confused, unfocused look, and ran the fingers of one hand through his disordered hair. “You should not have killed her, he repeated.

“She was guilty,” Ingrid called back at him. “Nobody is innocent you are all the cringing tools of international capitalism-” Her face twisted, in an ugly spasm of hatred.

“ You are guilty, all of you, and you deserve to die,-” She stopped short, controlled herself with an obvious effort of will, and then smiled again; going forward to the little doctor, she put an arm around his shoulders.

“Sit down, she said, almost tenderly, “I know just how you feel,

please believe me, I wish there had been another way. He sank down slowly, his eyes vacant with sorrow and his fingers plucking numbly at themselves.

“You just sit there quietly,” Ingrid said gently. “I’m going to bring you a glass of champagne now.” Prime Minister.” Kelly Constable’s voice was husky with almost two days and nights of unceasing tension,

it’s after ten o’clock already. We must have a decision soon, in less than two hours-” The Prime Minister lifted one hand to silence the rest of “Yes, we all know what will happen then.” An airforce jet has delivered a copy of the videotape from Johannesburg, a thousand miles away, and the cabinet and the ambassadors had watched the atrocity in detail, recorded by an 800 men. lens. There was not a man at the table who did not have children of his own. The toughest right-wingers amongst them wavered uncertainly, even the puckish little Minister of

Police could not meet the ambassador’s eyes as he swept the table with a compelling gaze.

“And we all know that no compromise is possible, we must meet the demands in full or not at all.”

“Mr. Ambassador-” the Prime Minister broke the silence at last, ” if we agree to the terms, it will be only as an act of humanity. We will be paying a very high price indeed for the lives of your people but if we agree to that price, can we be absolutely assured of your support the support of both Britain and the United States in the Security Council the day after tomorrow at noon?”

“The President of the United States has empowered me to pledge his support in return for your cooperation,” said Kelly Constable.

“Her Britannic Majesty’s Government has asked me to assure you of the same support,” intoned Sir William. “And our governments will make good the 170 million dollars demanded by the hijackers.”

“Still I

cannot make the decision on my own. It is too onerous for one man,”

the Prime Minister sighed. “I am going to ask my ministers, the full cabinet-” he indicated the tense, grim faces around him, to vote. I am going to ask you gentlemen to leave us alone now for a few minutes while we decide.” And the two ambassadors rose together and bowed slightly to the brooding, troubled figure before leaving the room.

“Where is Colonel Noble?” Kingston Parker asked.

“He is waiting-” Peter indicated with a jerk of his head the soundproof door of the Hawker’s command cabin.

“I want him in on this, please,” Parker said from the screen, and

Peter pressed the call button.

Colin Noble came in immediately, stooping slightly under the low roof, a chunky powerful figure with the blue Thor cap pulled low over his eyes.

“Good evening, sir.” He greeted the image on the screen and squeezed into the seat beside Peter.

“I’m glad Colonel Noble is here.” Peter’s voice was crisp and businesslike. “I think he will support my contention that the chances of a successful Delta counter strike will he greatly enhanced if we can launch our attack not later than ten minutes before eleven o’clock.” He tugged back the cuff of his sleeve, and glanced at his watch. “That is forty minutes from now. We reckon to catch the militants at the moment when the drug cycle is at its lowest, before they take more pills and begin to arouse themselves to meet their deadline. I believe that if we strike then, we will have an acceptable risk-“

“Thank you, General

Stride-” Parker interrupted him smoothly, ” but I wanted Colonel

Noble present so there could be no misunderstanding of my orders.

Colonel Noble,” Parker’s eyes shifted slightly as he changed the object of his attention. “Commander of Thor has requested an immediate Delta strike against Speedbird 070. “I am now, in your presence, disapproving that request. Negotiations with the South African Government are at a critical state, and under no circumstances must there be either overt or covert hostile moves towards the militants. Do I make myself entirely clear?”

“Yes, sir. “Colin Noble’s expression was stony.

“General Stride?”

“I understand, sir.”

“Very well. I want you to stand by, please. I am going to confer with the ambassadors. I will re-establish contact as soon as I have further concrete indications.”

The image receded rapidly, and the screen went dark.

Colonel Colin Noble turned slowly and looked at Peter Stride, his expression changed slightly at what he saw, and quickly he pressed the censor button on the command console, stopping all recording tapes,

killing the video cameras so there would be no record of his words now.

“Listen, Peter, you’re in line for that NATO command, everybody knows that. From there the sky is the limit, pat.

Right up there to the joint chiefs just as far as you want to go Peter said nothing, but glanced once more at the gold Rolex wristwatch. It was seventeen minutes past ten o’clock.

“Think, Peter. For God’s sake, man. It’s taken you twenty heart-breaking years of hard work to get where you are.

They would never forgive you, buddy. You’d better believe it.

They’ll break you and your career. Don’t do it, Peter.

Don’t do it. You’re too good to waste yourself. just stop and think for one minute.”

“I’m thinking,” said Peter quietly. “I haven’t stopped thinking since-” he checked, always it comes back to this. If

I let them die then I am as guilty as that woman who pulls the trigger.”

“Peter, you don’t have to beat your head in. The decision is made by someone else.” it would be easier to believe that, wouldn’t it,”

Peter snapped, “but it won’t save those people out there.” Colin leaned across and placed a large hairy paw on Peter’s upper arm. He squeezed slightly. “I know, but it eats me to see you have to throw it all away. In my book, you’re one of the tops, buddy.” It was the first time he had made any such declaration, and Peter was fleetingly moved by it.

“You can duck this one, Colin. It doesn’t have to touch you or your career.”

“I never was very hot at ducking.” Colin dropped his hand away. “I think I’ll go along for the ride,”

“I want you to record a protest, no sense us all getting ourselves fired,” said Peter, as he switched on the recording equipment, both audio and video; now every word would be recorded.

“Colonel Noble,” he said distinctly, “I am about to lead an immediate Delta assault on Flight 070. Please make the arrangements.”

Colin turned to face the camera. “General Stride, I must formally protest at any order to initiate condition Delta without express approval from Atlas Command.”

“Colonel Noble, your protest is noted,”

Peter told the camera gravely, and Colin Noble hit the censor button once again, cutting tapes and camera.

“Okay, that’s enough crap for one day.” He came nimbly to his feet. “Let’s get out there and take the bastards.” Ingrid sat at the flight engineer’s desk, and held the microphone of the on-board loudspeaker system to her lips. There was a greyish tone beneath the sun-gilded skin; she frowned a little at the throbbing pulse of pain behind her eyes and the hand that held the microphone trembled slightly. She knew these were all symptoms of the drug hangover. She regretted now having increased the initial dosage beyond that recommended on the typed label of the tablet phial but she had needed that extra lift to be able to carry out the first executions. Now she and her officers were paying the price, but in another twenty minutes she would be able to issue another round of tablets.

This time she would stay exactly within the recommended dosage,

and she anticipated the rush of it through her blood, the heightened vision and energy, the tingling exhilaration of the drug. She even anticipated the thought of what lay ahead; to be able to wield absolute power, the power of death itself, was one of life’s most worthwhile experiences.

Sartre and Bakunin and Most had discovered one of the great truths of life that the act of destruction, of total destruction, was a catharsis, a creation, a reawakening of the soul. She looked forward,

even through the staleness and ache of the drug let-down, she looked forward to the next executions.

“My friends-” she spoke into the microphone, we have not heard from the tyrant. His lack of concern for your lives is typical of the fascist imperialist. He does not concern himself with the safety of the people, though he sucks and bloats himself on the blood and sweat. outside the aircraft the night was black and close.

Thunderheads blotted out half the sky, and every few minutes lightning lit the clouds internally. Twice since sundown abrupt fierce downpours of torrential rain had hammered briefly against the Boeing hull, and now the airport lights glinted on the puddled tarmac.

We have to show the face of unrelenting courage and iron purpose to the tyrant. We cannot afford to show even a moment’s hesitation.

We must now choose four more hostages. It will be done with the utmost impartiality and I want you all to realize that we are now all part of the revolution together, you can be proud of that-” Lightning exploded suddenly, much closer, a crackling greenish, iridescent flaming of the heavens that lit the field in merciless light, and then the flail of the thunder beat down upon the aircraft. The girl Karen exclaimed involuntarily and sprang nervously to her feet and crossed quickly to stand beside Ingrid. Her dark eyes were now heavily underscored by the dark kohl of fatigue and drug withdrawal; she trembled violently, and Ingrid caressed her absently the way she -might calm a frightened kitten as she went on speaking into the microphone.

We must all of us learn to welcome death, to welcome the opportunity to take our place and add our contribution, no matter how humble it might be, to man’s great reawakening.” Lightning burst in fierce splendour once again, but Ingrid went on talking into the microphone, the senseless words somehow hypnotic and lulling so that her captives sat in quietly lethargic rows, not speaking, unmoving,

seeming no longer capable of independent thought.

“I have drawn lots to choose the next martyrs of the revolution.

I will call out the seat numbers and my officers will come to fetch you. Please cooperate by moving quickly forward to the firstclass galley.” There was a pause, and then Ingrid’s voice again. “Seat number 63B. Please stand up.) The scarred German in the red shirt and with the lank black hair hanging over his eyes had to force the thin,

middle-aged man to his feet, twisting his wrist up between his shoulder blades. The man’s white shirt was crumpled and he wore elastic braces over his shoulders and oldfashioned narrow trousers.

“You can’t let them,” the man pleaded with his fellow passengers,

as Henri pushed him up the aisle. “You can’t let them kill me,

please.” And they looked down at their laps.

Nobody moved, nobody spoke.

“Seat number 43F.” It was a handsome darkhaired woman in her middle thirties, and her face seemed to dissolve slowly as she read the number above her seat, and she covered her mouth with one hand to prevent herself crying out but from the seat exactly across the aisle from her a sprightly old gentleman with a magnificent mane of silver-grey hair rose swiftly to his feet and adjusted his tie.

“Would you care to change seats with me, madam?” he said softly in a clipped English accent, and strode down the aisle, on long, thin,

stork-like legs, contemptuously brushing past the blond moustached

Frenchman who came hurrying forward to escort him. Without a glance to either side, and with thin shoulders thrown back, he disappeared through the curtains into the forward galley.

The Boeing had a blind spot that extended back from the side windows of the flight deck at an angle of 20 to the tail, but the hijackers were so well equipped and seemed to have considered every eventuality in such detail that there was no reason to fear that they had worked out some arrangement to keep the blind spot under surveillance.

Peter and Colin discussed the possibility quietly as they stood in the angle of the main service hangar, and both of them carefully studied the soaring shape of the Boeing tailplane and the sagging underbelly of the fuselage for the glint of a mirror or some other device. They were directly behind the aircraft and there was a little over four hundred yards to cover, half of that through knee-high grass and the rest over tarmac.

The field was lit only by the blue periphery lights of the taxiway, and the glow of the airport buildings.

Peter had considered dousing all the airport lights, but discarded the idea as self-defeating. It would certainly alert the hijackers,

and would slow the crossing of the assault team.

“I can’t see anything,” Colin murmured.

“No,” agreed Peter and they both handed their night glasses to a hovering NCO they wouldn’t need them again. The assault team had stripped all equipment down to absolute essentials.

All that Peter carried was a lightweight eleven-ounce VHF

transceiver for “communicating with his men in the terminal building and in a quick-release holster on his right hip a Walther PK 38

automatic pistol.

Each member of the assault team carried the weapon of his own choice. Colin Noble favoured the Browning Hi-power .45 for its massive killing power and large fourteen-round magazine, while Peter liked the pinpoint accuracy and light recoil of the 9 men. parabellum Walther with which he could be certain of a snap head-shot at fifty metres.

One item was standard equipment for all members of the assault team. Every one of their weapons was loaded with Super Velex explosive bullets which trebled the knockdown power at impact, breaking up in the human body and thereby reducing the risk of over-penetration and with it the danger to innocents. Peter never let them forget they would nearly always be working with terrorist and victim closely involved.

Beside Peter, Colin Noble unclipped the thin gold chain from around his neck which held the tiny Star of David, twinkling gold on the black bush of his chest hair. He slipped the ornament into his pocket and buttoned down the flap.

“I say, old chap-” Colin Noble gave an atrocious imitation of a

Sandhurst accent shall we toddle along then?” 4 Peter glanced at the luminous dial of his Rolex. It was sixteen minutes to eleven o’clock.

The exact moment at which my career ends, he thought grimly, and raised his right arm with clenched fist, then pumped it up and down twice, the old cavalry signal to advance.

Swiftly the two men raced out ahead, absolutely silent on soft rubber soles, carrying their probes at high port to prevent them clattering against tarmac or against the metal parts of the aircraft,

dark hunchbacked figures under the burden of the gas cylinders they carried.

Peter gave them a slow count of five, and while he waited he felt the adrenalin charge his blood, every nerve and muscle of his body coming under tension, and he heard his own words to Kingston Parker echo in his ears like the prophecy of doom.

“There is no middle ground. The alternative is one hundred per cent casualties. We lose the aircraft, the passengers and all the Thor personnel aboard her.” He thrust the thought aside, and repeated the signal to advance. In two neat files, bunched up close and well in hand,

the assault teams went out, at the run. Three men carrying each of the aluminium alloy scaling ladders, four with the sling-bags of stun grenades, others with the slap hammers to tear out the door locks, and each with his chosen weapon always a big calibre handgun for Peter

Stride would trust nobody with an automatic weapon in the crowded interior of a hijacked aircraft, and the minimum requirement for every member of the assault teams was marksmanship with a pistol that would enable him to pick a small moving target and hit it repeatedly and quickly without endangering innocents.

They ran in almost total silence; the loudest sound was Peter’s breathing in his own ears, and he had time now for a moment’s regret.

It was a gamble which he could never win, the best that could happen was the utter ruin of his life’s work, but he steeled himself brutally and thrust aside the thought. He ran on into the night.

Just ahead of him now, silhouetted by the lights of the terminal building, the dark figures of the “stick” men were in position under the bulging silver belly; and lightning flared suddenly, so that the tall silver thunderheads rippled with intense white fire, and the field was starkly lit, the double column of black-clad figures standing out clearly against the paler grass. If they were observed, it would come now, and the crash of thunder made Peter’s nerves jump, expecting detonation and flame of a dozen percussion grenades.

Then it was dark again, and the sponginess of wet grass beneath his feet gave way to flat hard tarmac. Then suddenly they were under the Boeing fuselage, like chickens under the protective belly of the hen, and the two columns split neatly into four separate groups and still in tight order every man dropped onto his left knee, and at the same moment, with the precision of repeated rehearsals, every member of the team lifted his gas mask to cover his nose and mouth.

Peter swept one quick glance back at them, and then depressed the transmit button on his transceiver. He would not speak a word from now until it was over; there was always a remote possibility that the hijackers were monitoring this frequency.

The click of the button was the signal to the members of his team in the terminal and almost immediately, there was a rising whistling howl of jet engines running up.

Even though the aircraft were parked up in the northern international departures area, they had been turned so the jet exhausts were pointed at the service area, and there were five intercontinental jet liners cooperating. The combined sound output of twenty big jet engines was deafening even at that range and Peter gave the open hand signal.

The “stick” man was waiting poised, and at the signal he reached up and placed the drill bit against the belly of the fuselage. Any sound of the compressed air spinning the drill was effectively drowned,

and there was only the slight jerk of the long probe as it went through the pressure hull.

Instantly the second “stick” man placed the tip of his probe into the tiny hole, and glanced at Peter. Again the open hand signal, and the gas was spurting into the hull. Peter was watching the sweep hand of his watch.

Two clicks on the transmit button, and the lights behind the row of shaded portholes blinked out simultaneously as the mains power was cut and the air-conditioning in the Boeing’s cabins with it.

The howl of combined jet engines continued a few seconds longer and Peter signalled the ladder men forward.

Gently the rubber-padded tops of the ladders were hooked onto the leading edges of the wings and into the door sills high above them by black-costumed, grotesquely masked figures working with deceptively casual speed.

Ten seconds from discharge of the Factor V gas into the hull, and

Peter clicked thrice. Instantly mains power to the Boeing was resumed and the lights flicked on. Now the air-conditioning was running again,

washing the gas swiftly from the cabins and flight deck.

Peter drew one long, slow deep breath and tapped Colin’s shoulder.

They went up the ladders in a concerted silent rush, Peter and Colin leading the teams to each wing surface.

ten minutes to eleven,” said Ingrid to Karen. She lifted her voice slightly above the din of jet engines howling somewhere out there in the night. Her throat was dry and sore from the drug withdrawal and a nerve jumped involuntarily in the corner of her eye.

Her headache felt as though a knotted rope was being twisted slowly tighter around her forehead. “It looks as though Caliph miscalculated. The South Africans aren’t going to give in. -” She glanced with a small anticipatory twist of her lips back through the open door of the flight deck at the four hostages sitting in a row on the fold-down seats. The silver-haired Englishman was smoking a

Virginia cigarette in a long amber and ivory holder, and he returned her gaze with disdain, so that Ingrid felt a prickle of annoyance and raised her voice so he could hear her next words. “It’s going to be necessary to shoot this batch also.”

“Caliph has never been wrong before.” Karen shook her head vehemently. “There is still an hour to deadline-” and at that instant the lights flickered once and then went out.

With all the portholes shaded the darkness was complete, and the hiss of the air-conditioning faded into silence before there was a murmur of surprised comment.

Ingrid groped across the control panel for the switch which transferred the flight deck onto the power from the aircraft’s own batteries, and as the soft ruddy glow of the panel lights came on her expression was tense and worried.

“They’ve switched off the mains,” she exclaimed. “The air-conditioning this could be Delta.” W “No.” Karen’s voice was shrill. “There are no flares.”

“We could be-” Ingrid started but she could hear the drunken slur in her own voice. Her tongue felt too large for her mouth, and Karen’s face started to distort before her eyes, the edges blurring out of focus.

“Karen-” she said, and now in her nostrils the unmistakable aroma of truffles and on her tongue the taste of raw mushrooms.

“Christ!” she screamed wildly and lunged for the manual oxygen release. Above each seat the panels dropped open and the emergency oxygen masks dangled down into the cabins on their corrugated hoses.

“Kurt! Henry!” Ingrid shrieked into the cabin intercom.

“Oxygen! Take oxygen! It’s Delta. They are going to Delta.” She grabbed one of the dangling oxygen masks and sucked in deep pumping breaths, cleansing the numbing paralysing gas from her system. In the firstclass galley one of the hostages collapsed slowly forward and tumbled onto the deck, another slumped sideways.

Still breathing oxygen, Ingrid unslung the camera from around her neck, and Karen watched her with huge terrified dark eyes. She lifted the oxygen mask from her face to ask: “You’re not going to blow,

Ingrid?” Ingrid ignored her and used the oxygen in her lungs to shout into the microphone.

“Kurt! Henri! They will come as soon as the mains are switched on again. Cover your eyes and ears for the stun grenades and watch the doors and wing windows.” Ingrid slapped the oxygen mask back over her mouth and panted wildly.

“Don’t blow us up, Ingrid!” Karen pleaded around her mask.

“Please, if we surrender Caliph will have us free in a month. We don’t have to die.” At that moment the lights of the cabin came on brightly,

and there was the hiss of the air-conditioning. Ingrid took one last breath of oxygen and ran back into the firstclass cabin, jumping over the unconscious figures of the hostages and of two air hostesses. She grabbed another of the dangling oxygen masks above a passenger seat and looked down the long fuselage.

Kurt and Henri had obeyed her orders. They were breathing oxygen from the roof panels. The German was ready at the port wing panel, and

Henri waited at the rear doorway hatch both of them had the short big-mouthed shot pistols ready, but their faces were covered with the yellow oxygen masks, so Ingrid could not see nor judge their expressions.

Only a small number of the passengers had been quick enough and sensible enough to grab the dangling oxygen masks and remain conscious but hundreds of others slumped in their seats or had fallen sideways into the aisles.

A thicket of dangling, twisting, swinging oxygen hoses filled the cabin like a forest of ha has obscuring and confusing the scene, and after the darkness the cabin lights were painfully bright.

Ingrid held the camera in her free hand, for she knew that they must continue breathing oxygen. It would take the air-conditioning many minutes longer to cleanse the air of all trace of Factor V, and she held a mask over her mouth and waited.

Karen was beside her, with her shot pistol dangling from one hand and the other pressing a mask to her mouth.

“Go back and cover the front hatch,” Ingrid snapped at her.

“There will be-“

“Ingrid, we don’t have to die,” Karen pleaded, and with a crash the emergency exit panel over the port wing burst inward,

and at the same instant two small dark objects flew threw the dark opening into the cabin.

“Stun grenades!” Ingrid howled. “Get down!” Peter Stride was light and jubilant as an eagle in flight.

His feet and hands hardly seemed to touch the rungs of the ladder,

now in the swift all-engulfing rush of action there were no longer doubts, no more hesitations he was committed, and it was a tremendous soaring relief.

He went up over the smooth curved leading edge of the wing with a roll of his shoulders and hips, and in the same movement was on his feet, padding silently down the broad glistening metal pathway. The raindrops glittered like diamonds under his feet, and a fresh wind tugged at his hair as he ran.

He reached the main hull, and dropped into position at the side of the panel, his fingertips finding the razor-tight joint while his number-two man knelt swiftly opposite him.

The grenade men were ready facing the panel, balanced like acrobats on the curved slippery upper surface of the great wing.

“Under six seconds.” Peter guessed at the time it had taken them to reach this stage from the “go. It was as swift and neat as it had never been in training, all of them armed by the knowledge of waiting death and horror.

In unison Peter and his number two hurled their combined strength and weight onto the releases of the emergency escape hatch, and it flew inwards readily, for there was no pressurization to resist, and at exactly the same instant the 7 stun grenades went in cleanly, thrown by the waiting grenade men, and all four members of Peter’s team bowed like Mohammedans in prayer to Mecca, covering eyes and ears.

Even outside the cabin, and even with ears and eyes covered, the thunder of the explosions was appalling, seeming to beat in upon the brain with oppressive physical force, and the glare of burning phosphorus powder painted an X-ray picture of Peter’s own fingers on the fleshy red of his closed eyelids. Then the grenade men were shouting into the interior, “Lie down! Everybody down! They would keep repeating that order Israeli sty leas long as it lasted.

Peter was a hundredth of a second slow, numbed by the blast,

fumbling slightly at the butt of the Walther, thumbing the hammer as it snapped out of the quick-release holster, and then he went in feet first through the hatch, like a runner sliding for home base. He was still in the air when he saw the girl in the red shirt running forward brandishing the camera, and screaming something that made no sense,

though his brain registered it even in that unholy moment.

He fired as his feet touched the deck and his first shot hit the girl in the mouth, punching a dark red hole through the rows of white teeth and snapping her head back so viciously that he heard the small delicate bones of her neck crack leas they broke.

Ingrid used both arms to cover eyes and ears, crouching forward into the appalling blast of sound and light that swept through the crowded cabins like a hurricane wind, and even when it had passed she was reeling wildly clutching for support at a seat back, trying to steady herself and judge the moment when the attackers were into the hull.

Those outside the hull would escape the direct force of the explosives she was about to detonate; there was a high survival chance for them. She wanted to judge the moment when the entire assault team penetrated the hull, she wanted maximum casualties, she wanted to take as many with her as possible, and she lifted the camera above her head with both hands.

“Come on!” she shrieked, but the cabin was thick with swirling clouds of white acrid smoke, and the dangling hoses twisted and writhed like the head of the Medusa. She heard the thunder of a shot pistol and somebody screamed, voices were chanting, “Lie down” Everybody down”

It was all smoke and sound and confusion, but she watched the dark opening of the emergency hatchway, waiting for it, finger on the detonator button of the camera.

A supple black-clad figure in a grotesque mask torpedoed feet first into the cabin, and at that same instant Karen shrieked beside her.

“No, don’t kill us,” and snatched the camera from Ingrid’s raised hands, jerking it away by the strap, leaving Ingrid weaponless. Karen ran down the aisle through the smoke, still screaming, Don’t kill us!”

holding the camera like a peace offering. “Caliph said we would not die.” She ran forward screaming frantically. “Caliph-” and the black-clad and masked figure twisted lithely in the air, arching his back to land feet first in the centre of the aisle; as his feet touched the deck so the pistol in his right hand jerked up sharply but the shot seemed muted and un-warlike after the concussion of the stun grenades.

Karen was running down the aisle towards him, screaming and brandishing the camera, when the bullet took her in the mouth and wrenched her head backwards at an impossible angle. The next two shots blended into a single blurt of sound, fired so swiftly as to cheat the hearing, and from such Close range that even the Velex explosive bullets ripped the back out of Karen’s shirt and flooded it with a brighter wetter scarlet as they erupted from between her shoulder blades. The camera went spinning high across the cabin, landing in the lap of an unconscious passenger slumped in one of the central seats between the aisles.

Ingrid reacted with the instinctive speed of a jungle cat, diving forward, flat on the carpet aisle below the line Of fire; shrouded by the sinking white smoke of the grenades she wriggled forward on her belly to reach the camera.

It was twenty feet to where the camera had landed, but Ingrid moved with the speed of a serpent; she knew that the smoke was hiding her, but she knew also that to reach the camera she would have to come to her feet again and reach across two seats and two unconscious bodies.

Peter landed in balance on the carpeted aisle, and he killed the girl swiftly, and danced aside, clearing space for his number two to land.

The next man landed lightly in the space Peter had made for him,

and the German in the red shirt jumped out from the angle of the rear galley and hit him in the small of the back with a full charge of buckshot. It almost blew his body into two separate parts, and he seemed to break in the middle like a folding penknife as he collapsed against Peter’s legs.

Peter whirled at the shot, turning his back on Ingrid as she crawled forward through the phosphorous smoke.

Kurt was desperately trying to pull down the short, thick barrel of the pistol, for the recoil had thrown it high above his head. His scarlet shirt was open to the navel, shiny hard brown muscle and thick whorls of black body hair, mad glaring eyes through a greasy fringe of black hair, the scarred lip curled in a fixed snarl.

Peter hit him in the chest, taking no chance, and as he reeled backwards still fighting to aim the pistol, Peter hit again, in the head through the temple just in front of the left ear; the eyelids closed tightly over those wild eyes, his features twisted out of shape like a rubber mask and he went down face first into the aisle.

“Two.” Peter found that, as always in these desperate moments, he was functioning very coldly, very efficiently.

His shooting had been as reflexively perfect as if he were walking a combat shoot with jump-up cardboard targets.

He had even counted his shots, there were four left in the

Walther.

“And two more of them,” he thought, but the smoke was still so thick that his visibility was down to under fifteen feet, and the swirling forest of dangling oxygen hose still agitated by the grenade blasts cut down his visibility further.

He jumped over the broken body of his number two, the blood squelching under his rubber soles, and suddenly the chunky black figure of Colin Noble loomed across the cabin.

He was in the far aisle, having come in over the starboard wing.

In the writhing smoke he looked like some demon from the pit, hideous and menacing in his gas mask. He dropped into the marksman’s crouch,

holding the big Browning in a double-handed grip, and the clangour of the gun beat upon the air like one of the great bronze bells of Notre Dame.

He was shooting at another scarlet-shirted figure, half seen through the smoke and the dangling hoses, a man with a round boyish face and drooping sandy mustache. The big Velex bullets tore the hijacker to pieces with the savagery of a predator’s claws. They seemed to pin him like an insect to the central bulkhead, and they smashed chunks of living flesh from his chest and splinters of white bone from his skull.

“Three,” thought Peter. “One left now and I must get the camera.” He had seen the black camera in the hands of the girl he had killed, had seen it fall, and he knew how deadly important it was to secure the detonator before it fell into the hands of the other girl,

the blonde one, the dangerous one.

It had been only four seconds since he had penetrated the hull,

yet it seemed like a dragging eternity. He could hear the crash of the slap-hammers tearing out the door locks, both fore and aft. Within seconds there would be Thor assault teams pouring into the Boeing through every opening, and he had not yet located the fourth hijacker, the truly dangerous one.

“Get down! Everybody down!” chanted the grenade men, and Peter spun lightly, and ran for the flight deck. He was certain the blonde girl would be there at the control centre.

Then, in front of him lay the girl he had shot down, the long,

dark hair spread out around her pale, still terrified face. Her hair was already sodden with dark blood, and the black gap in her white teeth made her look like an old woman. She blocked the aisle with a tangle of slim boneless limbs.

The forward hatch crashed open as the lock gave way, but there were still solid curtains of white smoke ahead of him. Peter gathered himself to jump over the girl’s body, and at that instant the other girl, the blonde girl, bounded up from the deck, seeming to appear miraculously from the smoke, like some beautiful but evil apparition.

She dived half across the block of central seating, groping for the camera, and Peter was slightly off balance, blocking himself in the turn to bring his gun hand on to her. He changed hands smoothly, for he was equally accurate with either, but it cost him the tenth part of a second, and the girl had the strap of the camera now and was tugging desperately at it. The camera seemed to be snagged, and Peter swung on her, taking the head shot for she was less than ten paces away, and even in the smoke and confusion he could not miss.

One of the few passengers who had been breathing oxygen from his hanging mask, and was still conscious, ignored the chanted orders “Get down! Stay down!” and suddenly stumbled to his feet, screaming, “Don’t shoot! Get me out of here! Don’t shoot!” in a rising hysterical scream.

He was directly between Peter and the red-shirted girl, blocking

Peter’s field of fire, and Peter wrenched the gun off him at the moment that he fired. The bullet slammed into the roof, and the passenger barged into Peter, still screaming.

“Get me out! I want to get out!” Peter tried desperately to clear his gun hand, for the girl had broken the strap of the camera and was fumbling with the black box. The passenger had an arm around Peter’s gun arm, was shaking him wildly, weeping and screaming.

From across the central block of seats, Colin Noble fired once.

He was still in the starboard aisle and the angle was almost impossible, for he had to shoot nine inches past Peter’s shoulder, and through the forest of dangling hose.

His first shot missed, but it was close enough to flinch the girl’s head violently, the golden hair flickered with the passage of shot, and she stumbled backwards, groping with clumsy fingers for the detonator.

Peter chopped the hysterical passenger in the throat with the stiffened fingers of his right hand and hurled him back into his seat,

trying desperately to line up for a shot at the girl knowing he must get the brain and still her fingers instantly.

Colin fired his second shot, one hundredth of a second before

Peter, and the big bullet flung the girl aside, jerking her head out of the track of Peter’s shot.

Peter saw the strike of Colin’s bullet, it hit her high in the right shoulder, almost in the oint of the scapula and the humerus,

shattering the bone with such force that her arm was flung upwards in a parody of a communist salute, twisting unnaturally and whipping above her head; once again the camera was flung aside and the girl’s body was thrown violently backwards down the aisle as though she had been hit by a speeding automobile.

Peter picked his shot, waiting for a clean killing hit in the head as the girl tried to drag herself upright but before he could fire, a mass of black-costumed figures swarmed out of the smoke, and covered the girl, pinning her kicking and screaming on the carpet of the aisle.

The Thor team had come in through the forward hatch, just in time to save her life, and Peter clipped the Walther into his holster and stooped to pick up the camera gingerly. Then he pulled off his mask with his other hand.

“That’s it. That’s all of them, he shouted. “We got them all.

Cease fire. It’s all over.” Then into the microphone of the transceiver, “Touch down! Touch down!” The code for total success.

Three of his men were holding the girl down, and despite the massive spurting wound in her shoulder, she fought like a leopard in a trap.

“Get the emergency chutes down,” Peter ordered, and from each exit the long plastic slides inflated and drooped to the tarmac already his men were leading the conscious passengers to the exits and helping them into the slide.

From the terminal building a dozen ambulances with sirens howling,

gunned out across the tarmac. The back-up members of Thor were running out under the glare of floodlights, cheering thinly. “Touch down!

Touch down!” Like prehistoric monsters the mechanical stairways lumbered down from the northern apron, to give access to the body of the Boeing.

Peter stepped up to the girl, still holding the camera in his hands, and he stood looking down at her. The icy coldness of battle still gripped him, his mind felt needle sharp and his vision clear,

every sense enhanced.

The girl stopped struggling, and looked back at him. The image of a trapped leopard was perfect. Peter had never seen eyes so fierce and merciless, as she glared at him. Then she drew her head back like a cobra about to strike, and spat at him. White frothy spittle splattered down the front of Peter’s legs.

Colin Noble was beside Peter now, pulling off his gas mask.

“I’m sorry, Peter. I was going for the heart.”

“You’ll never hold me,” shrieked the girl suddenly. “I’ll be free before

Thanksgiving!” And Peter knew she was right. “The punishment that a befuddled world society meted out to these people was i usually only a few months” imprisonment, and that often suspended. He remembered the feel of the dying child in his arms,

the warm trickle of her blood running over his belly and legs.

“My people will come for me,” the girl spat again, this time into the face of one of the men who held her down.

“You will never hold me. My people will force you to free me.”

Again she was right, her capture was a direct invitation for further atrocity, the wheel of vengeance and retribution was set in motion.

For the life of this trapped and vicious predator, hundreds more would suffer, and dozens more would die.

The reaction was setting in now, the battle rage abating, and

Peter felt the nausea cloying his bowels. It had been in vain, he thought; he had thrown away a lifetime’s strivings and endeavour to win only a temporary victory. He had checked the forces of evil, not beaten them and they would regroup and attack again, stronger and more cunning than ever, and this woman would lead them again.

“We are the revolution.” The girl lifted her uninjured arm in the clenched fist salute. “We are the power. Nothing, nobody can stop us.” When this woman had fired a load of buckshot through the swollen body of the pregnant woman it had distorted her shape completely. The image was recaptured entire and whole in Peter’s memory, the way she had burst open like the pod of a ripe fruit.

The blonde woman shook the clenched fist into Peter’s face.

“This is only the beginning the new era has begun.” There was a taunt and a sneering threat in her voice, uttered in complete confidence and Peter knew it was not misplaced. There was a new force unleashed in the world, something more deadly than he had believed Possible, and Peter had no illusions as to the role that blind fortune had played in his small triumph. He had no illusion either that the beast was more than barely wounded; next time it would be more powerful, more cunning, having learned from this inconsequential failure and with the reaction from battle came a powerful wave of dread and despair that seemed to overwhelm his soul. It had all been in vain.

“You can never win,” taunted the woman, splattered with her own blood, but undaunted and unrepentant, seeming to read his very thoughts.

“And we can never lose,” she shrieked.

Gentlemen.” The South African Prime Minister spoke with painful deliberation. “My cabinet and I are firmly of the opinion that to accede to the terrorists” demands is to take a seat on the back of the tiger, from which we will never be able to dismount.” He stopped, hung his great granite-hewn head for a moment and then looked up at the two ambassadors. “However, such is the duty we owe to humanity and the dignity of human life, and such is the pressure which two great nations can bring to bear upon one much smaller, that we have decided unanimously to agree in full to all the conditions necessary for the release of the women and children, -” A telephone on the table top in front of the American Ambassador began to shrill irritatingly, and the

Prime Minister paused, frowned slightly.

“However, we place complete faith in the undertaking given by your governments-” He stopped again for the telephone insisted. You had better answer that, sir! he told Kelly Constable.

“Excuse me, Prime Minister.” The American lifted the receiver, and as he listened an expression of utter disbelief slowly changed his features. “Hold the line, “he said into the receiver, and then,

covering the mouthpiece with his hand, he looked up. “Prime Minister it is a very great pleasure to inform you that three minutes ago the

Thor assault team broke into Flight 070 and killed three of the terrorists they wounded and captured a fourth terrorist, but there were no casualties among the passengers. They got them all out, every last one of them. Safe and sound.” The big man at the head of the table sagged with relief in his seat, and as the storm of jubilation and self, congratulation broke about him, he started to smile. It was a smile that transformed his forbidding features, the smile of an essentially fatherly and kindly man. “Thank you, sir,” he said, still smiling. “Thank you very much.”

“You are guilty of blatant dereliction of your duty, General Stride, “Kingston Parker accused grimly.

“My concern was entirely with the lives of hostages and the force of moral law.” Peter answered him quietly; it was less than fifteen minutes since he had penetrated the hull of the Boeing in a blaze of fire and fury.

His hands were still shaking slightly and the nausea still lay heavily on his guts.

“You deliberately disobeyed my specific orders.” Parker was an enraged lion, the mane of thick shot-silver hair seemed to bristle, and he glowered from the screen; the vast power of his personality seemed to fill the command cabin of the Hawker. “I have always had grave reservations as to your suitability for the high command with which you have formal been entrusted. I have already expressed those reservations in writing to your superiors, and they have been fully justified.”

“I

understand by all this that I have been removed from command of Thor,”

Peter cut in brusquely, his anger seething to the surface, and Parker checked slightly.

Peter knew that even Kingston Parker could not immediately fire the hero of such a successful counter-strike. It would take time, a matter of days, perhaps, but Peter’s fate was sealed. There could be no doubt of that, and Parker went on to confirm this.

“You will continue to exercise command under my direct surveillance. You will make no decision without referring directly back to me, no decision whatsoever. Do you understand that, General

Stride?” Peter did not bother to reply; he felt a wildly reckless mood starting to buoy his sagging spirits, a sense of freedom and choice of action such as he had never known before.

For the first time in his career he had deliberately disobeyed a superior officer, and luck or not, the outcome had been a brilliant success.

“Your first duty now will be to withdraw all Thor units, and swiftly and in as good an order as possible. The militant you have taken will be returned to London for questioning and trial-“

“Her crimes were committed here. She should be tried here for murder

I

have already had demands from the local-“

“Arrangements are being made with the South African authorities.” Parker’s anger had not abated but he had it better under control. “She will return to Britain aboard your command aircraft, with the Thor doctor in attendance.” Peter remembered what had happened to the terrorist Leila Khaled, dragged from the El Al airliner where she was being held by Israeli security agents. As a guest of the British police, she had spent six short days in captivity, and then been released in a blaze of publicity and glory,

heroine of the communications media, Joan of Arc of terror released to plan and execute the death and destruction of hundreds more innocents,

to lead the attack on the foundations of civilization, to shake the columns that held aloft the rule of law and society.

“I want this woman in London within twenty-four hours.

She is to be strictly guarded at all times against retaliation.

We cannot afford another blood bath like the one you led on 070.”

Peter Stride walked very erect, very tall into the echoing,

marble-columned domestic departures hall of the airport, and his men called to him as he came.

“Well done, sir.”

“Great stuff, General.”

“Way to go-” AM They were tending the released passengers, re-assembling their scattered gear, dismantling the security and communications equipment and packing it away within the hour they would be ready to pull out but now they left their tasks to crowd about him, competing to shake his hand.

The passengers realized that this must be the architect of their salvation and they cheered him as he passed slowly through the hall,

and now he was smiling, acknowledging their pitiful gratitude, stopping to talk with an old lady, and submitting to her tearful embrace.

“God bless you, my boy. God bless you.” And her body trembled against him. Gently Peter set her aside and went on, and though he smiled it was with his lips only, for there was steel in his heart.

There were Thor guards on the main administrative offices on the mezzanine floor armed with submachine guns, but they stood aside for him and Peter went through.

Colin Noble was still in his black skin-tight assault suit with the big .45 on his hip, and a cheroot clamped between his teeth.

“Take a look at this lot,” he called to Peter. The desk was covered with explosives and weapons. “Most of it’s ironcurtain stuff but God alone knows where they got these.” He indicated the double-barrelled shot pistols. “If they had these custom built, it would have cost them plenty.”

“They have got plenty,” Peter answered drily. “The ransom for the OPEC ministers was one hundred and fifty million dollars, for the Braun brothers twenty five million, for Baron

Altmann another twenty million that’s the defence budget for a nation.” He picked up one of the shot pistols and opened the breech.

It had been unloaded.

“Is this the one she used to gun down the hostages?” Colin shrugged. “Probably, it’s been fired through both barrels.” Colin was right, there were black specks of burned powder down the short smooth bores.

Peter loaded it with buckshot cartridges from the pile on the desk, and walked on down the long office with the covered typewriters on the deserted desks and the airline travel posters decorating the wall.

Along one wall the three bodies of the hijackers were laid out in a neat row, each encapsulated in its separate translucent plastic envelope.

Two Thor men were assembling the contents of their pockets personal jewellery, meagre personal effects and they were packing them into labelled plastic bags.

The body of Peter’s Number Two was against the far wall, also in his plastic body-bag, and Peter stooped over him. Through the plastic he could make out the features of the dead man’s face. The eyes were wide and the jaw hung open slackly. Death is always so undignified,

Peter thought, and straightened up.

Still carrying the shot pistol, Peter went on into the inner office, and Colin Noble followed him.

They had the girl on another stretcher, a plasma drip suspended above her, and the Thor doctor and his two orderlies were working over her quietly, but the young doctor looked up irritably as Peter pushed open the door, then his expression changed as he recognized Peter.

“General, if we are going to save this arm, I have to get her into theatre pretty damned quickly. The joint of the shoulder is shattered-” The girl rolled the lovely head towards Peter. The thick springing golden hair was matted with drying blood, and there was a smear of it across one cheek.

Now her face was completely drained of all colour, like the head of an angel carved out of white marble. The skin had a waxen, almost translucent, lustre and only the eyes were still fierce, not dulled by the painkilling drugs that they had injected into her.

I have asked the South Africans for cooperation-” the doctor went on, they have two top orthopaedic surgeons standing by, and they have offered a helicopter to fly her into the Central Hospital at Edenvale.”

Already she was being treated, even by Thor, as the major celebrity she was. She had taken her first step along the rose-strewn pathway to glory, and Peter could imagine how the media would extol her beauty they had gone berserk with extravagant praise for the swarthy ferrety-eyed Leila Khaled with her fine dark mustache they would go over the top for this one.

Peter had never known any emotion so powerful as the emotion that gripped him now.

“Get out,” he said to the doctor.

Sir? “The man looked startled.

“Get out,” Peter repeated, “all of you.” And he waited until the opaque glass door closed behind them, before he spoke to the girl in conversational tones.

“You have made me abandon my own principles, and descend to your level.” The girl watched him uncertainly, her eyes flickered to the shot pistol that Peter held dangling from his right hand.

“You have forced me, a career soldier, to disobey the orders of a superior officer in the face of the enemy.” He paused. “I used to be a proud man, but when I have done what I must do now I will no longer have much of which to be proud.”

“I demand to see the American

Ambassador,” said the girl huskily, still watching the pistol. “I am an American citizen. I demand the protection-” Peter interrupted her,

again speaking quickly. “This is not revenge. I am old and wise enough to know that revenge has the most bitter taste of all human excesses.”

“You cannot do it-” The girl’s voice rose, the same strident tones, but now shriller still with fear. “They will destroy you.” But

Peter went on as though she had not spoken. “It is not revenge, he repeated. “You, yourself, gave the reason clearly. If you continue to exist, they will come to get you back. As long as you live, others must die and they will die stripped of all human dignity. They will die in terror, the same way you murdered-“

“I am a woman. I am wounded. I am a prisoner of war,” screamed the girl, trying to struggle upright.

“Those are the old rules, Peter told her. “You tore up the book,

and wrote a new one I am playing to your rules now. I have been reduced to your level.”

“You cannot kill me,” the girl’s voice range wildly. “I still have work-“

“Colin,” Peter said quietly, without looking at the man.

“You’d better get out now.” Colin Noble hesitated, his right hand on the butt of the Browning, and the girl rolled her head towards him imploringly.

“You can’t let him do it.”

“Peter, -” Colin said.

“You were right Colin.” Peter spoke quietly. “That kid did look a lot like Melissa-Jane.” Colin Noble dropped his hand from the pistol and turned to the door. Now the girl was shrieking obscenity and threat, her voice incoherent with terror and hatred.

Colin closed the door softly and stood with his back to it. The single crash of shot was shockingly loud, and the stream of filthy abuse was cut off abruptly. The silence was even more appalling than the harrowing sounds which had preceded it. Colin did not move. He waited four, five seconds before the door clicked open and General

Peter Stride came out into the main office. He handed the shot pistol to Colin and one barrel was hot in his hand.

Peter’s handsome aristocratic features seemed ravaged, as though by a long wasting disease. The face of a man who had leapt into the abyss.

Peter Stride left the glass door open, and walked away without looking back. Despite the terrible expression of despair, he still carried himself like a soldier and his tread was firm.

Colin Noble did not even look through the open door.

“All right,” he called to the doctor. “She’s all yours now.” And he followed Peter Stride down the broad staircase.

There was a long hard gallop over good going and open pasture to the crest of the ridge, with only one gate. Melissa-Jane led on her bay filly, her Christmas gift from Uncle Steven. She was in the midst of the passionate love affair that most pubescent girls have with horses, and she looked truly good astride the glistening thoroughbred.

The cold struck high colour into her cheeks and the braid of honey-coloured hair thumped gaily down her back at each stride. She had blossomed even in the few weeks since last Peter had seen her and he realized with some awe and considerable pride that she was fast becoming a great beauty.

Peter was up on one of Steven’s hunters, a big rangy animal with the strength to carry his weight, but the gelding was slogging hard to hold the flying pair that danced ahead of him.

At the hedge, Melissa-Jane scorned the gate, gathered the filly with fine strong hands and took her up and over.

Her little round bottom lifted out of the saddle as she leaned into the jump, and clods of black earth flew from the filly’s hooves.

As soon as she was over she swivelled in the saddle to watch him,

and Peter realized that he was under challenge.

The hedge immediately appeared to be head-high and he noticed for the first time how the ground fell away at a steep angle beyond. He had not ridden for almost two years, and it was the first time he had been up on this gelding but the horse went for the jump gamely, and they brushed the top of the hedge, landed awkwardly, stumbled with

Peter up on his neck for an appalling instant of time in which he was convinced he was to take a toss in front of his daughter’s critical eye; caught his balance, held the gelding’s head up and they came away still together.

“Super-Star!” Melissa-Jane shouted laughing, and by the time he caught her she had dismounted under the yew tree at the crest, and was waiting for him with her breath steaming in the crisp calm air.

“Our land once went right as far as the church-” Peter pointed to the distant grey needle of stone that pricked the belly of the sky, ” and there almost to the top of the downs.” He turned to point in the opposite direction.

“Yes.” Melissa-Jane slipped her arm through his as they stood close together under the yew. “The family had to sell it when

Grandfather died. You told me. And that’s right too. One family shouldn’t own so much.” Peter glanced down at her, startled. “My God,

a comrnu rust in the family. An asp in the bosom.” She squeezed his arm. “Don’t worry, Daddy darling. It’s Uncle Steven who is the bloated plutocrat. You’re not a capitalist you aren’t even employed any more-” And the instant she had said it, her laughter collapsed around her and she looked stricken. Oh, I didn’t mean that. I truly didn’t.” It was almost a month now since Peter’s resignation had been accepted by the War Office, but the scandal had not yet run out of steam.

The first heady paeans of praise for the success of Thor’s Delta strike had lasted only a few days. The glowing editorials, the full front pages, the lead news item on every television channel, the effusive messages of congratulations from the leaders of the Western governments, the impromptu triumph for Peter Stride and his little band of heroes, had quickly struck an odd note, a sudden souring of the ecstasies.

The racist Government of South Africa had actually agreed to the release of political prisoners before the assault, one of the hijackers had been taken alive, and died of gunshot wounds received in the terminal buildings. Then one of the released hostages, a freelance journalist who had been covering the medical convention in Mauritius and was returning aboard the hijacked aircraft, published a sensational eye-witness account of the entire episode, and a dozen other passengers supported his claims that there had been screams from the fourth hijacker, screams for mercy, before she was shot to death after her capture.

A storm of condemnation and vilification from the extreme left of the British Labour Government had swept through the Westminster parliament, and had been echoed by the Democrats in the American

Congress. The very existence of the Thor Command had come under scrutiny and been condemned in extravagant tenons. The Communist parties of France and Italy had marched, and the detonation of an

M-26

hand grenade one of those stolen by the Baader-Meinhof gang from the

American base in Metz amongst the crowd leaving the Parc des Princes football stadium in Paris had killed one and injured twenty-three. A

telephone call to the offices of France Soir by a man speaking accented

French claimed that this fresh atrocity was revenge for the murder of four hijackers by the Imperialist execution squad.

Pressure for Peter’s discharge had come initially from the

Pentagon, and there was very little doubt that Dr. Kingston Parker was the accuser, though, as head of Atlas, he was never identified, total secrecy still surrounding the project.

The media had begun to demand an investigation of all the circumstances surrounding Thor. And if it is ascertained that criminal irregularities did indeed exist in the conduct of the operation, that the person or persons responsible be brought to trial either by a military tribunal or the civil courts.” Fortunately the media had not yet unravelled the full scope of Atlas Command. Only Thor was under scrutiny; they did not yet suspect the existence of either Mercury or

Diana.

Within the War Office and the governments of both America and

Britain, there had been much sympathy and support for Peter Stride but he had made it easier for his friends and for himself by rendering his resignation. The resignation had been accepted, but still the left was clamouring for more. They wanted blood, Peter Stride’s blood Now

Melissa-Jane’s huge pansy violet eyes flooded with the tears of mortification. “I didn’t mean that. I truly didn’t.”

“One thing about being out of a job I have more time to be with my favourite girl.” He smiled down at her, but she would not be mollified.

“I don’t believe the horrible things they are saying. I know you are a man of honour, Daddy.”

“Thank you.” And he felt the ache of it,

the guilt and the sorrow. They were silent a little longer, still standing close together, and Peter spoke first.

“You are going to be a palaeontologist-‘he said.

“No. That was last month. I’ve changed my mind. I’m not interested in old bones any more. Now I’m going to be a doctor, a child specialist.”

“That’s good.” Peter nodded gravely. “But let’s go back to old bones for a moment. The age of the great reptiles. The dinosaurs why did they fade into extinction?”

“They could not adapt to a changing environment.” Melissa-jane had the answer promptly.

Peter murmured,” - A concept like honour. Is it outdated in today’s world, I wonder?” Then he saw the puzzlement, the hurt in her eyes, and he knew they had wandered onto dangerous ground. His daughter had a burning love for all living things, particularly human beings. Despite her age, she had a developed political and social conscience, distinguished by total belief in shining ideals and the essential beauty and goodness of mankind. There would be time in the years ahead for the agony of disillusion. The term “man or woman of honour” was Melissa-Jane’s ultimate accolade.

No matter that it could be applied to any of her current heroes or heroines the Prince of Wales, or the singer of popular songs with an outrageous name that Peter could never remember, to Virginia Wade, the former Wimbledon champion, or to the Fifth Form science teacher at

Roedean who had aroused Melissa-Jane’s interest in medicine, Peter knew that he should feel proper gratitude for being included in this exalted company.

“I will try to live up to your opinion of me.” He stooped and kissed her, surprised at the strength of his love for this child-woman.

“And now it’s too cold to stand here any longer, and Pat will never forgive us if we are late for lunch.” They clattered over the stone cobbles of the stable yard, riding knee to knee, and before he dismounted, Peter indulged himself in the pleasure of his favourite view of the house that had always been home, even though it belonged now, together with the title, to Steven, the older brother, older by three hours only, but older none the less.

The house was red brick with a roof that ran at fifty different unlikely angles. It missed being hideous by a subtle margin and achieved a fairytale enchantment. Peter could never grudge it to

Steven, who loved the sprawling edifice with something close to passion.

Perhaps the desire to own the house and to restore it to its former magnificence was the goad which had pricked Steven to the superhuman effort that a British resident must make against taxation and socialist restrictions in order to amass anything like a fortune.

Steven had made that effort and now Abbots Yew stood immaculate and well-beloved in glorious gardens, and Sir Steven kept baronial style.

His affairs were so complicated, spread over so many continents that even the British taxman must have been daunted. Peter had once skirted this subject with his twin brother, and Steven had replied quietly.

“When a law is patently unjust, such as our tax law is, it’s the duty of an honest man to subvert it.” Peter’s oldfashioned sense of rightness had baulked at such logic, but he let it pass.

It was strange that it had worked this way for the two brothers,

for Peter had always been the brilliant one, and the family had always referred to “Poor Steven’. Nobody was very surprised when Steven left

Sandhurst amid dark whispers halfway through his final year but two years later Steven was already a millionaire while Peter was a lowly second lieutenant in the British Army. Peter grinned without rancour at the memory. He had always been particularly fond of his elder brother but at that moment his train of thought was interrupted as his eye caught the mirror-like finish of the silver limousine parked at the end of the stable yard. It was one of those long Mercedes-Benz favoured by pop stars, Arab oil men, or heads of staTe, The chauffeur was uniformed in sober navy blue and was busy burnishing the paintwork to an even higher gloss. Even Steven did not run to that sort of transportation, and Peter felt mildly intrigued. House guests at Abbots Yew were always interesting. Steven Stride did not concern himself with those who did not wield either power, wealth or extraordinary talent. Beyond the Mercedes 600 was parked another smaller model; this one was black and the two men in it had the hard closed faces that marked them as bodyguards.

Melissa-Jane rolled her eyes at the automobile. “Another bloated plutocrat, I expect,” she muttered. It was the currently favoured term of extreme disapproval, a great advance on “grotty” which had preceded it, Peter could not help thinking as he helped his daughter unsaddle and then rub down the horses. They went up through the rose garden,

arm in arm, and then laughing together into the main drawing-room.

“Peter old boy!” Steven came to meet him, as tall as his brother,

and once he had been as lean, but good living had thickened his body while at the same time the strains of being a professional deal maker had greyed his hair at the temples and laced his mustache with silver bristles. His face was not quite a mirror image of Peter’s, slightly more fleshy and florid but the twin resemblance was still strongly marked, and now his face was alive with pleasure.

“Thought you’d broken your bloody neck, what?” Steven carefully cultivated the bluff manner of the country squire to shield his quick and shrewd intelligence.

Now he turned to Melissa-Jane and hugged her with barely a touch of incestuous pleasure. “How did Florence Nightingale go?”

“She’s a darling, Uncle Steven. I will never be able to thank you.”

“Peter, I

would like you to meet a very charming lady-” She had been talking to

Patricia Stride, Steven’s wife, and now as she turned, the winter sunshine through the bay windows behind lit her with a soft romantic aura.

Peter felt as though the earth had tilted under his feet, and a fist closed around his ribs constricting his breathing and inhibiting the action of his heart.

He recognized her immediately from the photographs in the official file during the long-drawn-out kidnapping and subsequent murder of her husband. At one stage it had seemed that the kidnappers had crossed the Channel with their victim, and Thor had gone to condition Alpha for almost a week. Peter had studied the photographs that had been assembled from a dozen sources, but even the glossy coloured portraits from Vogue and Jours de France had not been able to capture the magnificence of the woman.

Surprisingly, he saw his own immediate recognition reflected.

There was no change in her expression, but it flared briefly like dark-green emerald fire in her eyes. There was no question in Peter’s mind but that she had recognized him, and as he stepped “towards her he realized she was tall, but the fine proportion of her body had not made that immediately apparent. Her skirt was of a fine wool crepe which moulded the long, stately legs of a dancer.

“Baroness, may I present my brother. General Stride.”

“How do you do General.” Her English was almost perfect, a low husky voice, the slight accent very attractive, but she pronounced his rank as three distinct syllables.

“Peter, this is Baroness Altmann.” Her thick glossy black hair was scraped back severely from the forehead with a perfect arrowhead of widow’s peak at the centre, emphasizing the high Slavic cheekbones and the unblemished perfection of her skin but her jawline was too square and strong for beauty, and the mouth had an arrogant determined line to it. Magnificent, but not beautiful and Peter found himself violently attracted. The breathless wholesale feeling he had not experienced for twenty years.

She seemed to epitomize everything he admired in a woman.

Her body was in the condition of a trained athlete.

Beneath the oyster silk of her blouse her arms were delicately sculpted from toned muscle, the waist narrow, the breasts very small and unfettered, their lovely shape pressing clearly through fine material, her clean lightly tanned skin glowed with health and careful grooming. All this contributed to his attraction.

However, the greater part was in Peter’s own mind. He knew she was a woman of extraordinary strength and achievement, that was pure aphrodisiac for him, and she exuded also the challenging air of being un-attainable. The regal eyes mocked his evident masculinity with the untouchable aloofness of a queen or a goddess. She seemed to be smiling inwardly, a cool patronizing smile at his admiration,

which she realized was no more than her due.

Quickly Peter reviewed what he knew of her.

She had begun her association with the Baron as his private secretary, and in five years had become indispensable to him. The

Baron had recognized her ability by rapidly elevating her to the boards of directors, first of some of the group’s lesser subsidiaries, and finally to that of the central holding company. When the Baron’s physical strength had begun to decline in his losing battle with an inexorable cancer, he came to rely more upon her, trust well placed as it soon turned out. For she ran the complex empire of heavy industrial companies, of electronics and armaments corporations, of banking and shipping and property developments, like the son he never had. When he married her he was fifty-eight years of age, almost thirty years her senior, and she had been a perfect wife as she had been a perfect business partner.

She had assembled and personally delivered the massive ransom demanded by his abductors, against the advice of the French police,

going alone and unguarded to a meeting with killers, and when they had returned the Baron’s fearfully mutilated corpse to her,

she had mourned him and buried him and continued to run the empire she had inherited, with vision and strength so far beyond her years.

She was twenty-nine years old. No, that had been two years ago,

Peter realized, as he bowed over her hand, not quite touching the smooth cool fingers with his lips. She would be thirty-one years old now. She wore a single ring on her wedding finger, a solitaire diamond, not a particularly large diamond, not more than six carats but of such a perfect whiteness and fire that it seemed to be endowed with its own life. It was the choice of a woman of immense wealth and even greater style.

As Peter straightened, he realized that she was appraising him as carefully as he was her. It seemed that he would be unable to conceal anything from those slanted emerald eyes, but he returned her gaze steadily, knowing without conceit that he could withstand any such scrutiny; still intrigued, however, with the certainty that she had known him.

“Your name has been much in the news recently she said, as if in explanation.

There were sixteen for lunch, including Steven and Pat’s three children and Melissa-Jane. It was a happy, relaxed meal, but the

Baroness was seated at a distance that made it impossible for Peter to speak directly to her, and though he strained to follow her conversation, her voice was low and addressed mostly to Steven and the editor of one of the national daily newspapers who flanked her. Peter found himself fully occupied in fending off the breathless attention of the pretty but feather brained blonde on his left. She was a starlet who had married well and divorced even better.

She had been handpicked by Pat Stride. Peter’s sister-inlaw was indefatigable in her efforts to find him a suitable replacement for

Cynthia. Twelve years of straight failures had not daunted her in the least.

There was still time for Peter to notice that though the Baroness sipped once or twice at her wine, the level in the glass never fell,

and she picked only lightly at her plate.

Though Peter watched her covertly, the Baroness never glanced once in his direction. It was only as they went through for coffee that she came directly and unaffectedly to his side.

“Steven tells me there are Roman ruins on the estate, she said.

“I could show them to you. It is a lovely walk up through the woods.”

“Thank you. I do have some business to discuss with Steven before that; shall we meet at three o’clock?” She had changed into a loose tweed skirt and jacket that would have looked bulky on a shorter or plumper woman, and high boots in the same lavender tinted brown.

Under it she wore a cashmere roll-neck jersey, and a scarf of the same fine wool hung down her back. A wide-brimmed hat with a bright feather in the band was pulled down over her eyes.

She walked in silence, hands thrust deeply into the big pockets of her jacket, making no effort to protect the expensive boots from mud,

thorns or damp bracken. She moved with a flowing, long-legged grace,

swinging from the hips so that her shoulder and head seemed to float beside Peter, at a not much lower level than his own. Had she not been a world leader in finance and industry, she might have made a great model, he decided. She had a talent for making clothes look important and elegant, while treating them with indifference.

Peter respected her silence, pleased to be able to step out to match her pace, as they went up through the dark dripping woods that smelt of leaf mould and cold rain, the oaks bare and moss-pelted,

seeming to beseech a purple grey sky with arthritic limbs held high.

They came out on the higher open ground without having stopped once, although the path had been steep and the ground soft underfoot.

She was breathing deeply but evenly, and she had coloured just sufficiently to flatter the high Slavic cheeks.

She must be in peak physical condition, he thought.

“Here they are.” Peter indicated the barely discernible grass-covered ditch that circled the hilltop. “They are not very impressive, but I didn’t want to warn you in advance She smiled now.

“I have been here before,” she said in that intriguing husky accent.

“Well, we are off to a flying start. We have both deceived each other at our first meeting-” Peter chuckled.

“I came all the way from Paris, she explained. “It was most inconvenient really the business I had to discuss with Sir Steven could have been completed by telephone in five minutes. What I had to discuss with you could only be done face by face-” She corrected herself immediately.

“I am sorry, face to face” It was a rare slip. Steven had been strangely insistent that Peter spend this particular weekend at Abbots

Yew, and was certainly party to this encounter.

“I am flattered by the interest of such a beautiful lady-“

Instantly she frowned, and with a gesture of irritation cut short the compliment as frivolous.

“Very recently you were approached by the Narmco section of

Seddler StLel with an offer to head their Sales Division,” she said,

and Peter nodded. Since his resignation had been accepted by the War

Office, there had been many offers. “The terms of employment offered were extraordinarily generous.”

“That is true.”

“You prefer the cloistered academic life, perhaps?” she asked, and though Peter’s expression did not change, he was taken off balance. It seemed impossible that she could know of the offer of the Chair of Modern

Military History that he had been offered by a leading American university, an offer with which he was still toying idly.

“There are some books I want to read and write,” Peter said.

“Books. You have an important collection, and I have read those you have written. You are an interesting contradiction, General

Stride. The man of direct action, and at the same time of deep political and social thought.”

“I confuse myself at times,” Peter smiled. “So what chance do you have to understand me?” She did not rise to the smile. “A great deal of your writing coincides with my own conviction. As for your action, if I had been a man and in your position, I might have acted as you did.” Peter stiffened, resenting any allusion to the taking of Flight 070, and again she seemed to understand instinctively.

“I refer to your entire career, General. From Cyprus to

Johannesburg and including Ireland.” And he relaxed slightly.

“Why did you refuse the Narmco offer? “she asked.

“Because it was presented with the unstated conviction that I

could not refuse. Because the terms were so generous that they left a strange unsatisfying odour in my nostrils.

Because I believe that I would have been required to perform duties in line with the reputation I seem to have acquired since the taking of Flight 070.”

“What reputation is that?” She leaned slightly towards him, and he smelled her particular aroma. The way perfume reacted upon that pet ally-smooth skin, heated by the exertion of the climb up the hill. She smelled faintly of crushed lemon blossom and clean healthy mature woman.

He felt himself physically aroused by it, and had an almost undesirable impulse to reach out and touch her, to feel the warmth and glossiness of her skin.

A man who makes accommodations, perhaps, he answered, “What did you think you might have been asked to do?” This time he shrugged.

“Perhaps carry bribes to my onetime colleagues in NATO Command, to induce them to consider favourably the products of Narmco.”

“Why would you believe that?”

“I was once a decision making officer in that

Command.” She turned away from him and looked out across the special greens of an English winter landscape, the orderly fields and pastures,

the dark wedges and geometrical shapes of the woods and copses.

“Do you know that through Altmann Industries and other companies I

control a majority shareholding in Seddler Steel, and naturally in

Narmco?”

“No,” Peter admitted. “But I cannot say I am surprised.”

“Did you know that the offer from Narmco was in reality from me personally?”

This time he said nothing.

“You are quite right, of course, your contacts with the upper echelon of NATO and with the British and American high commands would have been worth every centime of the extravagant salary you were offered. As for bribes-” She smiled then suddenly, and it altered her face entirely, making her seem many years younger, and there was a warmth and a sense of fun that he would not have suspected, this is a capitalist society, General. We prefer to talk about commissions and introducer’s fees.” He found himself smiling back at her, not because of what she had said, but simply because her smile was irresistible.

“However, I give you my solemn word that you would never have been expected to offer or carry, no, since Lockheed were indiscreet, it has changed. Nothing disreputable could ever be traced back to Narmco, and certainly not to the top men there. Certainly not to you.”

“It’s all academic now, , Peter pointed out. “I’ve refused the offer.”

“I disagree, General Stride. The brim of the hat covered her eyes as she looked down. “I hope that when you hear what I had hoped to achieve you may reconsider. I made the error of trying to keep us at arms”

length to begin with.

I relied on the generosity of the offer to sway you. I do not usually misjudge people so dismally-” and she looked up and smiled again, and this time reached out and touched his arm. Her fingers were like her limbs, long and slim, but they were delicately tapered and the nails were shaped and lacquered to a glossy fleshy pink. She left them on his arm as she went on speaking.

“My husband was an extraordinary man. A man of vast vision and strength and compassion. Because of that they tortured and killed him, -” her voice had sunk to a hoarse catchy whisper ” they killed him in the most vile manner-” She stopped, but made no attempt to turn her head away, she was unashamed of the tears that filled both eyes but did not break over the lower lids. She did not even blink, and it was

Peter who looked away first. Only then she moved her hand, slipping it lightly into the crook of Peter’s elbow and coming beside him so her hip almost touched his.

“It will rain soon,” she said, her voice level and controlled.

“We should go down.” And as they started, she went on talking.

“The butchers who did that to Aaron went free, while an impotent society looked on. A society which has systematically stripped itself of defence against the next attack.

America has virtually disbanded its intelligence system, and so shackled and exposed what is left that it is powerless.

Your own country is concerned only with its particular problems,

as are we in the rest of Europe there is no international approach to a problem that is international in scope. Atlas was a fine concept, limited as it was by the fact that it was a force that could only be used in retaliation and then only in special circumstances. However, if they ever suspect that it exists, the denizens of the left will mass to tear it down like a hunting pack of hyena.” She squeezed his arm lightly, and looked sideways at him with a solemn slant of the emerald eyes. “Yes,

General, I do know about Atlas but do not ask me how.” Peter said nothing, and they entered the forest, stepping carefully, for the path was slick and steep.

“After the death of my husband, I began to think a great deal about how we could protect the world that we know, while still remaining within the laws which were first designed to do that. With

Altmann Industries I had inherited a comprehensive system of international information gathering; naturally it was attuned almost entirely to commercial and industrial considerations, -” She went on talking in that low intense voice that Peter found mesmeric, describing how she had gradually used her massive fortune and influence to reach across borders closed to most to gain the overall view of the new world of violence and intimidation. ” - I was not tied by considerations such as that of Interpol, forbidden by suicidal laws to involve itself in any crime that has political motivation. It was only when I was able to pass on what I had learned that I found myself coming up against the same self-destructive state of mind that masquerades as democracy and individual freedom. Twice I was able to anticipate a terrorist strike and to warn the authorities, but intention is not a crime, I was told, and both the culprits were quietly escorted to the border and turned free to prepare themselves almost openly for the next outrage. The world must wait and cringe for the next stroke,

prohibited from making any preemptive strike to prevent it, and when it comes they are hampered by confused national responsibilities and by the complicated concept of minimum force ” The Baroness broke off. “But you know all this! You have written in depth of the same subject.”

“It’s interesting to hear it repeated.”

“I will come soon enough to the interesting part but we are almost back at the house.”

“Come,” Peter told her, and led her past the stables to the swimming pool pavilion.

The surface of the heated pool steamed softly, and lush tropical plants were in odd contrast to the wintry scene beyond the glass walls.

They sat side by side on a swing seat, close enough to be able to talk in subdued tones, but the intense mood was broken for the moment.

She took off her hat, scarf and jacket, and tossed them onto the cane chair opposite, and she sighed as she settled back against the cushions.

“I understand from Sir Steven that he wants you to go into the bank.” She slanted her eyes at him. “it must be difficult to be so sought after.”

“I don’t think I have Steven’s reverence for money.”

“It’s a readily acquired taste, General Stride, she assured him. “One that can become an addiction.” At that moment the children of both

Stride brothers arrived in a storm of shouted repartee and laughter,

which moderated only marginally when they realized that Peter and the

Baroness were in the swing seat.

Steven’s youngest son, bulging over the top of his costume with puppy-fat and with silver braces on his front teeth, rolled his eyes in their direction and in a stage whisper told Melissa-Jane, Je t’aime, ma cliMe, swoon!

swoon!” His accent was frighteningly bad and he received a hissed rebuke and a shove in the small of the back that hurled him into the deep end of the pool.

The Baroness smiled. “Your daughter is very protective-” she turned slightly to examine Peter’s face again or is it merely jealousy?” Without waiting for an answer she went straight on to ask another question. Against the background of shouts and splashes, Peter thought he had mis-heard.

“What did you say?” he asked carefully, certain that his expression had revealed nothing, and she repeated.

“Does the name Caliph mean anything to you?” He frowned slightly,

pretending to consider, while his memory darted back to the terrible micro-seconds of mortal combat, of smoke and flame and gunfire and a darkhaired girl in a scarlet shirt screaming: “Don’t kill us! Caliph said we would not die. Caliph-” And his own bullets stopping the rest of it, smashing into the open mouth. The word had haunted him since then, and he had tried a thousand variations, looking for sense and meaning, considering the possibility that he had mis-heard. Now he knew he had not.

“Caliph?” he asked, not knowing why he was going to deny it,

merely because it seemed vital that he keep something in reserve, that he were not carried headlong on the torrent of this woman’s presence and personality. “It’s a Mohammedan title I think it literally means the heir of Mohammed, the successor to the prophet.”

“Yes.” She nodded impatiently. “It’s the title of a civil and religious leader but have you heard it used as a code name?”

“No. I am sorry, I have not.

What is the significance?”

“I am not sure, even my own sources are obscure and confused.” She sighed, and they watched Melissa-Jane in silence. The child had been waiting for Peter’s attention, and when she had it she ran lightly out along the springboard and launched herself, light as a swallow in flight, into a clean one-and-a-half somersault, entering the water with hardly a ripple and surfacing immediately with fine pale hair slick down across her face, immediately looking again for Peter’s approval.

“She’s a lovely child,” said the Baroness. “I have no children.

Aaron wanted a son but there was not one.” And there was real sorrow in the green eyes that she masked quickly. Across the pool Melissa-Jane climbed from the pool and quickly draped a towel around her shoulders, covering her bosom which was now large enough and yet so novel as to provide her with a constant source of embarrassment and shy pride.

“Caliph,” Peter reminded the Baroness quietly, and she turned back to him.

“first heard the name two years ago, in circumstances I shall never forget-” She hesitated. “May I take it that you are fully aware of the circumstances surrounding my husband’s kidnapping and murder? I

do not wish to repeat the whole harrowing story unless it is necessary.”

“I know it,” Peter assured her.

“You know that I delivered the ransom, personally.”

“Yes.”

“The rendezvous was a deserted airfield near the East German border. They were waiting with a light twin-engined aircraft, a Russian-built reconnaissance machine with its markings sprayed over.” Peter remembered the meticulous planning and the special equipment used in the hijacking of 070. It all tallied. ” There were four men,

masked. They spoke Russian, or rather two of them spoke Russian. The other two never spoke at all. It was bad Russian-” Peter remembered now that the Baroness spoke Russian and five other languages. She had a Middle European background.

Peter wished he had studied her intelligence file more thoroughly.

Her father has escaped with her from her native Poland when she was a small child. “Almost certainly, the aircraft and the Russian were intended to cover their real identity,” she mused. “I was with them for some little time. I had forty-five million Swiss francs to deliver and even in notes of large denomination it was a bulky and heavy cargo to load aboard the aircraft. After the first few minutes, when they realized that I had no police escort, they relaxed and joked amongst themselves as they worked at loading the money. The word “Caliph” was used in the English version, in a Russian exchange that roughly translates as “He was right again” and the reply “Caliph is always right”. Perhaps the use of the English word made me remember it so clearly-” She stopped again, grief naked and bleak in the green eyes.

“You told the police?” Peter asked gently, and she shook her head.

“No. I don’t know why not. They had been so ineffectual up to that time. I was very angry and sad and confused.

Perhaps even then I had already decided that I would hunt them myself and this was all I had.”

“That was the only time you heard the name?” he asked, and she did not reply immediately. They watched the children at play and it seemed fantasy to be discussing the source of evil in such surroundings, against a background of laughter and innocent high spirits.

When the Baroness answered, she seemed to have changed direction completely.

“There had been that hiatus in international terrorism.

The Americans seemed to have beaten the hijacking problem with their Cuban agreement and the rigorous airport searches. Your own successful campaign against the Provisional wing of the IRA in this country, the Entebbe raid and the German action at Mogadishu were all hailed as breakthrough victories. Everybody was beginning to congratulate themselves that it was beaten. The Arabs were too busy with the war in the Lebanon and with inter-group rivalries. It had been a passing thing.” She shook her head again. “But terrorism is a growth industry the risks are less than those of financing a major movie. There is a proven sixty-seven per cent chance of success, the capital outlay is minimal, with outrageous profits in cash and publicity, with instant results and potential power not even calculable.

Even in the event of total failure, there is still a better than fifty per cent survival rate for the participants.” She smiled again,

but now there was no joy and no warmth in it. “Any businessman will tell you it’s better than the commodity markets.”

“The only thing against it is that the business is run by amateurs,” Peter’said, “or by professionals blinded by hatred or crippled by parochial interests and limited goals.” And now she turned to him, wriggling around in the canvas swing seat, curling those long legs up under her in that double-jointed woman’s manner, impossible for a man.

“You are ahead of me, Peter.” She caught herself. “I am sorry,

but General Stride is too much to say, and I have the feeling I have known you so long.” The smile now was fleeting but warm. “My name is

Magda,” she went on simply.

“Will you use it?”

“Thank you, Magda.”

“Yes.” She picked up the thread of conversation again.

“The business is in the hands of amateurs but it is too good to stay that way.”

“Enter Caliph,” Peter guessed.

“That is the whisper that I have heard; usually there is no name.

Just that there was a meeting in Athens, or Amsterdam or East Berlin or

Aden only once have I heard the name Caliph again. But if he exists already he must be one of the richest men in the world, and soon he will be the most powerful.”

“One man?” Peter asked.

“I do not know. Perhaps a group of men perhaps even a government. Russia, Cuba, an Arab country? Who knows yet?”

“And the goals?”

“Money, firstly. Wealth to tackle the political objectives and finally power, raw power. “Magda Altmann stopped herself, and made a self-deprecating gesture. “This is guesswork again, my own guessing based only on past performance.

They have the wealth now, provided by OPEC and myself amongst others. Now he or they have started on the political objectives, a soft target first. An African racist minority government unprotected by powerful allies. It should have succeeded. They should have won an entire nation a mineral-rich nation for the price of a dozen lives.

Even had they failed to gain the main prize, the consolation prize was forty tons of pure gold. That’s good business, Peter. It should have succeeded. It had succeeded.

The Western nations actually put pressure on the victims, and forced them to accede to the demands it was a trial run, and it worked perfectly, except for one man.”

“I am afraid,” said Peter softly, “as afraid as I have ever been in my life.”

“Yes, I am also,

Peter. I have been afraid ever since that terrible phone call on the night they took Aaron, and the more I learn the more afraid I become.”

“What happens next?”

“I do not know but the name he has chosen has the hint of megalomania, perhaps a man with visions of godlike domination-” She spread her fine narrow hands and the diamond flashed white fire. ” We cannot hope to fathom the mind of a man who could embark on such a course.

Probably he believes that what he is doing is for the eventual good of mankind. Perhaps he wants to attack the rich by amassing vast wealth, to destroy the tyrant with universal tyranny, to free mankind by making it a slave to terror. Perhaps he seeks to right the wrongs of the world with evil and injustice.” She touched his arm again, and this time the strength of those long fingers startled Peter. “You have to help me find him, Peter. I am going to put everything into the hunt, there will be no reservations, all the wealth and influence that

I control will be at your disposal.”

“You choose me because you believe that I murdered a wounded woman prisoner?” Peter asked. “Are those my credentials?” And she recoiled from him slightly, and stared at him with the slightly Mongolian slant of eyes, then her shoulders slumped slightly.

“All right, that is part of it, but only a small part of it.

You know I have read what you have written, you must know that I

have studied you very carefully. You are the best man available to me,

and finally you have proved that your involvement is complete. I know that you have the strength and skill and ruthlessness to find Caliph and destroy him before he destroys us and the world we know.” Peter was looking inwards. He had believed that the beast had a thousand heads, and for each that was struck off a thousand more would grow but now for the first time he imagined the full shape of the beast, it was still in ambush, not clear yet, but there was only a single head.

Perhaps, after all, it was mortal.

“Will you help me, Peter?“she asked.

“You know I will,” he answered quietly. “I do not have any choice.” She flew in the brilliance of high sunlight reflected from snow fields of blazing white, jetting through her turns with flowing elegance, carving each turn with a crisp rush of flying snow, swaying across the fall line of the mountain in an intricate ballet of interlinked movement.

She wore a slim-fitting skin suit of pearly grey, trimmed in black at the shoulders and cuffs, she was shod with gleaming black Heierling snow birds and her skis were long, narrow, black Rossignol professionals.

Peter followed her, pressing hard not to lose too much ground, but his turns were solid Christies without the stylish fallback un weighting of the jet turn which gave her each time a fractional gain.

The dun he ran like a stag of ten But the mare like a new roused fawn Kipling might have been describing them, and she was a hundred yards ahead of him as they entered the forest.

The pathway was barred with the shadows of the pines, and sugary ice roared under his skis as he pushed the narrow corners dangerously fast. Always she was farther ahead, flickering like a silver-grey wraith on those long lean legs, her tight round buttocks balancing the narrow waist and swinging rhythmically into the turns, marvelous controlled broadsides where the icy roadway denied purchase, coming out fast and straight, leaning into the rush of the wind, and her faint sweet laughter came back to Peter as he chased.

There is an expertise that must be learned in childhood, and he remembered then that she was Polish, would probably have skied before she was weaned, and suppressed the flare of resentment he always felt at being outclassed by another human being, particularly by the woman who was fast becoming his driving obsession.

He came round another steeply banked turn, with the sheer snow wall rising fifteen feet on his right hand and on his left the tops of the nearest pines at his own level, so steep the mountain fell away into the valley.

The ice warning signs flashed past, and there was a wooden bridge,

its boards waxen, opalescent with greenish ice. He felt control go as he hit the polished iron-hard surface. The bridge crossed a deep sombre gorge, with a frozen waterfall skewered to the black mountain rock by its own cruel icicles, like crucifixion nails.

To attempt to edge in, or to stem the thundering rush across the treacherous going, would have invited disaster, to lean back defensively would have brought him down instantly and piled him into the sturdy wooden guide rails.

At the moment he was lined up for the narrow bridge Peter flung himself forward so that his shins socked into the pads of his boots,

and in a swoop of terror and exhilaration he went through, and found that he was laughing aloud though his heart leaped against his ribs and his breathing matched the sound of the wind in his own ears.

She was waiting for him where the path debouched onto the lower slopes. She had pushed her goggles to the top of her head, and stripped off her gloves, both sticks planted in the snow beside her.

“You’ll never know how much I needed that.” She had flown into

Zurich that morning in her personal Lear jet.

Peter had come in on the Swissair flight from Brussels, and they had motored up together. “You know what I wish, Peter?”

“Tell me,“he invited.

“I wish that I could take a whole month, thirty glorious days, to do what I wish. To be ordinary, to be like other people and not feel a moment’s guilt.” He had seen her on only three occasions in the six weeks since their first meeting at Abbots Yew. Three too brief and,

for Peter, unsatisfying meetings.

Once in his new office suite at the Narmco headquarters in

Brussels, again at La Pierre Brute, her country home outside Paris,

but then there had been twenty other guests for dinner. The third time had been in the panelled and tastefully decorated cabin of her Lear jet on a flight between Brussels and London.

Though they had made little progress as yet in the hunt for

Caliph, Peter was still exploring the avenues that had occurred to him and had cast a dozen lines, baited and hooked.

During their third meeting Peter had discussed with her the need to restructure her personal safety arrangements.

He had changed her former bodyguards, replacing them with operatives from a discreet agency in Switzerland which trained its own ryien. The director of the agency was an old and trusted friend.

They had come to this meeting now so that Peter might report back on his progress to Magda. But for a few hours the snow had seduced them both.

“There is still another two hours before the light goes.” Peter glanced across the valley at the village church. The gold hands of the clock showed a little after two o’clock.

“Do you want to run the Rheinhorn?” She hesitated only a moment.

“The world will keep turning, I’m sure.” Her teeth were very white, but one of them was slightly crooked, a blemish that was oddly appealing as she smiled up at him. “Certainly it will wait two hours.” He had learned that she kept unbelievable hours, begining her day’s work when the rest of the world still slept, and still hard at it when the offices of Altmann Industries in Boulevard Capucine were deserted,

except her own office suite on the top floor. Even during the drive up from Zurich she had gone through correspondence and dictated quietly to one of her secretaries. He knew that at the chalet across the valley her two secretaries would be waiting already, with a pile of telex flimsies for her consideration and the line held open for her replies.

“There are better ways to die than working yourself to death.” He was suddenly out of patience with her single mindedness and she laughed easily with high colour in her cheeks and the sparkle of the last run in the green eyes.

“Yes, you are right, Peter. I should have you near to keep reminding me of that. “That’s the first bit of sense I’ve had from you in six weeks.” He was referring to her opposition to his plans for her security. He had tried to persuade her to change established behaviour patterns, and though the smile was still on her lips, her eyes were deadly serious as she studied his face.

“My husband left me a trust-” she seemed suddenly sad beneath the laughter a duty that I must fulfill. One day I should like to explain that to you but now we only have two hours.” It was snowing lightly,

and the sun had disappeared behind the mountains of rock and snow and cloud as they walked back through the village. The lights were burning in the richly laden shop windows and they were part of the gaily clad stream returning from the slopes, clumping along the frozen sidewalks in their clumsy ski boots, carrying skis and sticks over one shoulder and chattering with the lingering thrill of the high pi ste that even the lowering snow-filled dusk could not suppress.

“It feels good to be free of my wolves for a while.” Magda caught his arm as her snow birds skidded on dirty ridged ice, and after she had regained her balance she left her gloved hand there.

Her wolves were the bodyguards that Peter had provided, the silent vigilant men who followed her either on foot or in a second car. They waited outside her offices while she worked, and others guarded the house while she slept.

That morning, however, she had told Peter, “Today I have as a companion a gold medal Olympic pistol champion, I don’t need my wolves.” Narmco marketed its own version of the 9-men parabellum pistol.

It was called “Cobra’, and after a single morning in the underground range Peter had taken a liking to the weapon. It was lighter and flatter than the Walther he was accustomed to, easier to carry and conceal, and the single action mechanism saved a flicker of time with the first shot, for there was no need to cock the action. He had had no trouble obtaining a permit to carry one as a trade sample, although it was necessary to check it before every commercial flight, but it carried neatly in a quick-release shoulder holster.

He had felt theatrical and melodramatic at first, but with a little sober thought had convinced himself that to follow on Caliph’s tracks unarmed was shortening the odds against himself.

Now it was becoming habit, and he was barely aware of the comforting shape and weight in his armpit, until Magda spoke.

“I am close to dying from thirst,” she went on, and they racked their skis and went into the jovial warmth and clouds of steam that billowed from one of the coffee shops that lined the main street.

They found a seat at a table already crowded with young people,

and they ordered glasses of steaming hot GUhuvin.

Then the four-piece hand thumped out a popular dance tune and their table companions swarmed onto the tiny dance floor.

Peter raised a challenging eyebrow at her and she asked with amusement, “Have you ever danced in ski boots?”

“There has to be a first time for everything.” She danced like she did everything else,

with complete absorption, and her body was strong and hard and slim against his.

It was completely dark as they climbed the narrow track above the village and went in through the electronically controlled gate in the protective wall around the chalet.

It was somehow typical of her that she had avoided the fashionable resorts, and that externally the chalet seemed not much different from fifty others that huddled in the edge of the pine forest. There was patent relief amongst her entourage at her return, and she seemed almost defiant at their concern as though she had just proved something to herself but still she did not change from her sports clothes before disappearing into the office suite on the first floor with her two male secretaries. “I work better with men,” she had explained to

Peter once. As Peter dressed in slacks, blazer and silk roll neck after a scalding shower, he could still hear the clatter of the telex machine from the floor below, and it was an hour later when she called him on the house telephone.

The entire top floor was her private domain and she was standing at the windows looking out over the snow-fuzzed lights of the valley as he entered.

She wore green slacks tucked in aprs-ski boots, and a blouse of the same colour, a perfect match for her eyes. The moment Peter entered, she pressed a concealed switch and the curtains slid silently closed, then she turned to him.

“A drink, Peter?“she asked.

Not if we are going to talk.”

“We are going to talk,” she said positively, and indicated the soft squashy leather armchair across from the fireplace.

She had resisted the traditional Swiss cuckoo-clock and knotty pine decor, and the carpeting was thick Wilton to match the curtains,

the furniture low and comfortable but modern, sporty and good fun, the very best made to appear natural and unaffected, blending easily with the modern art on the walls and abstract sculpture in marble and grained wood.

She smiled suddenly at him. “I had no idea that I had found myself a gifted Sales Director for Narmco - I really am impressed with what you have done in so short a time.”

“I had to establish a plausible coven” Peter deprecated the compliment. “And I used to be a soldier the job interests me.”

“You English!” she told him with mock exasperation.

“Always so modest.” She did not seat herself but moved about the room; although never at rest, neither did she give the feeling of restlessness. “I am informed that there is to be a definite NATO

testing of Kestrel after almost two years of procrastination.”

Kestrel was Narmco’s medium-range ground-to-ground infantry portable missile.

“I am further informed that the decision was made to test after you had met with some of your former colleagues.”

“The whole world runs on the old boy system-” Peter chuckled, “you should know that.”

“And you are on old boy terms with the Iranians?” She cocked her head at him.

“That was a small stroke of luck. Five years ago I was on a staff college course with their new military adviser.”

“Luck again.” She smiled. “Isn’t it strange that luck so often favours those who are clever and dedicated and who move faster than the pack?”

“I have had less luck in other directions, Peter pointed out, and immediately there was no trace of laughter left upon her lips nor in the emerald eyes,

but Peter went on.

“So far I have been unsuccessful with the contact we spoke about on our last meeting-” They had discussed the possibility of access to the Atlas computer link, of requisitioning a printout on’Caliph’from the Central Intelligence bank, if there was one programmed.

“As I explained, there was the one remote possibility of access,

somebody who owed me a favour. He was of no help. He believes that if there is a “Caliph” listing, it’s blocked and buzzed.” Which meant that any unauthorized requisition would sound an alarm in intelligence control.

“We’d trigger a Delta condition in Atlas if we put in a printout requisition.”

“You did not give him the name?” Magda asked sharply.

“No. No names, just a general discussion over dinner at Brooks’s but all the implications were there.”

“Do you have any further avenues ?”

“I think so. One more, but it’s a last resort,” Peter said.

“Before we come to that, though, perhaps you can tell me if you have anything further from your sources.”

“My sources-” Magda had never made more explicit descriptions, and Peter had instinctively known not to pry.

There was a certain finality to the way she said it. “My sources have been mostly negative. The seizure of the Netherlands Embassy in

Bonn was unconnected with Caliph. It was exactly what it purported to be South Moluccan extremists. The hijackers of Cathay Airlines and

Transit Airlines were both enthusiastic amateurs, as evidence the methods and the outcome ” She smiled drily and drifted back across the room to touch the Hundedwasser collage that hung on the side wall,

rearranging the hang of the frame in an essentially feminine gesture.

There is only one recent act that has the style of Caliph.”

“Prince

Hassled Abdel Hayek?” Peter asked, and she turned to face him,

thrusting out one hip with her hand upon it, the nails very red against the light-green cloth and the marquise cut diamond sparkling.

“What did you make of it?” she asked. The Prince had been shot dead, three bullets of .22 calibre in the back of the head while asleep in his rooms on the Cambridge campus. A nineteen-year-old grandson of

King Khalid of Saudi Arabia, not one of the particular favourites of the king, a bespectacled scholarly youth who seemed content to remain outside the mainstream of palace power and politics.

There had been no attempt at abduction, no sign of a struggle, no evidence of robbery the young Prince had no close friends nor apparent enemies.

“It does not seem to have reason or motive,” Peter admitted.

“That’s why I thought of Caliph.”

“The deviousness of Caliph-” Magda turned away and her haunches rippled under the elastic of her green slacks.

There was no ruck line of panties, and her buttocks were perfect spheres, with the shadow of the deep cleft between them showing through the thin material. Peter watched her legs as she paced, realizing for the first time that her feet were long and narrow as her hands, fine and graceful bones in perfect proportion.

“If I told you that Saudi Arabia last week made clear to the other members of OPEC that, far from supporting a rise in the price of crude,

she will press for a five per cent reduction in the world price at the organization’s next meeting-” Peter straightened up in his chair slowly and Magda went on softly ” and that she will be supported by Iran in her proposal. If I told you that, what would you think?”

“The King has other, more favoured grandchildren grandsons and sons as well,

brothers, nephews” Seven hundred of them,” Magda agreed, and then went on musing. “The Shah of Iran has children that he divorced one wife to obtain-“

“The Shah paid his hundred-million-dollar ransom promptly to save his oil minister during the Carlos abduction what would he do for his own children?” Peter stood up now, unable to stay still with the itch of new ideas.

“And the King of Saudi-Arabia is an Arab. You know how

Mohammedans are about sons and grandsons.” Magda came to stand so close to him that he could feel the warmth of her flesh through the narrow space between them, and her perfume subtly underlined the ripe sweet woman’s smell of her body, disturbing him, but strangely heightening his awareness. “Perhaps King Khalid has also been reminded of his own mortality.”

“All right.” Peter hunched his shoulders and frowned in concentration. “What are we suggesting? That Caliph has struck another easy formula? Two men who control the economic destiny of the

Western world? Two men who make decisions at the. personal level, who are not answerable to cabinets or causes or governments?”

“Men who are therefore vulnerable to personal terrorism, who have records of appeasement to terrorist pressure.” Magda paused. “The old truths are still good. “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.” Both the Shah and the King will be no strangers to the fear of the assassin’s blade.

They will understand the law of the knife, because they have always lived by it.”

“Hell, you have to admire it.” Peter shook his head.

“There is no need to take and hold hostages. No need for exposure. You kill one obscure member of a large royal family, and you promise that there will be others, each one more important, closer to the head.”

“Both families have a high profile. The Shah loves the bright lights. He’s up at Gstaad right this moment. It would need only a sniper up in the treeline to pick one of his children. His sister Shams is in Mauritius now. As for the King’s family any time you want to drop into the Dorchester you’ll find one of his sons or grandsons sipping coffee in the public lounge. They are soft targets,

and there are plenty of them. You might even have to kill two princelings; or three but secretly the world will feel that they had it coming to them anyway. There will not be oceans wept for men who have themselves held the world to ransom.” Peter’s frown smoothed away,

and he grinned wryly. “Not only do you have to admire it you’ve got to have a sneaking sympathy for the object. A dead brake to the crippling inflation of the world, a slowing of disruptive imbalance in trade.” And Magda’s expression was fierce as he had never seen it before. “That is the trap, Peter. To see the end only, and to harden yourself to the means. That was the trap that Caliph set with the taking of 070. His demands coincided with those of the Western powers,

and they placed additional pressure on the victim. Now, if we are correct and Caliph is pressuring the oil dictators for a moderation of their demands, how much more support can he expect from the Western capitalist powers?”

“You are a capitalist,” Peter pointed out. “If

Caliph succeeds you will be one of the first to benefit.”

“I am capitalist, yes. But before that I am a human being, and a thinking human being. Do you really believe that if Caliph succeeds now that this will be the last we hear of him?”

“Of course not.” Peter spread his hands in resignation.

“Always his demands will be harsher with each success he must become bolder.”

“I think we can have that drink now,” Magda said softly, and turned away from him. The black onyx top of the coffee table slid aside at her touch to reveal the array of bottles and glasses beneath.

“Whisky, isn’t it?” she asked, and poured a single malt Glenlivet into one of the cut glass tumblers. As she handed it to him their fingers touched and he was surprised at how cool and dry her skin felt.

She poured half a flute glass of white wine and filled it with

Perrier water. As she replaced the wine bottle in the ice bucket,

Peter saw the label. It was Le Montrachet 1969.

Probably the greatest white wine in the world, and Peter had to protest at the way in which she had desecrated it.

“Alexander Dumas said it should be drunk only on bended knee and with head reverently bared-“

“ He forgot the mineral water,” Magda purred with throaty laughter. “Anyway you can’t trust a man who employed other people to write his books for him.” She lifted the adulterated wine to him. “Long ago I decided to live my life on my own terms. To hell with Messrs Dumas and Caliph.”

“Shall we drink to that?” Peter asked, and they watched each other over the rims. The level of Magda’s glass had not lowered and she set the glass aside,

moving across to adjust the bowl of hothouse tulips in the chunky free-form crystal bowl.

“If we are right. If this is Caliph at work then it disturbs the instinctive picture I had formed of him.” Peter broke the silence.

“How?” she asked without looking up from the flowers.

“Caliph it’s an Arabic name. He is attacking the leader of the

Arab world.”

“The deviousness of Caliph. Was the name deliberately chosen to confuse the hunters or perhaps there are other demands apart from the oil price perhaps pressure is also being put on Khalid for closer support of the Palestinians, or one of the other extremist

Arab movements. We do not know what else Caliph wants from Saudi

Arabia.”

“But then, the oil price. It is Western orientated. Somehow it has always been accepted that terrorism is a tool of the far left,”

Peter pointed out, shaking his head. “The hijacking of 070 even the kidnapping of your husband were both aimed against the capitalist society.”

“He kidnapped Aaron for the money, and killed him to protect his identity. The attack on the South African Government, the attack on the oil cartel, the choice of name, all point to a person with godlike pretensions.” Magda broke the head off one of the tulips with an abrupt, angry gesture, and crushed it in her fist. She let the petals fall into the deep onyx ashtray. “I feel so helpless, Peter.

We seem to be going round in futile circles.” She came back to him as he stood by the curtained windows. “You said earlier that there was one sure way to flush out Caliph?”

“Yes,” Peter nodded.

“Can you tell me?”

“There was an old trick of the Indian shikari.

When he got tired of following the tiger in thick jungle without a sight of the beast, he used to stake out a goat and wait for the tiger to come to it.”

“A goat?”

“My Zodiacal sign is Capricorn the goat.”

Peter smiled slightly.

“I don’t understand.”

“If I were to put the word out that I was hunting Caliph, he smiled again. “Caliph knows me. The hijacker spoke my name,

clearly, un mistakenly She had been warned. So I believe that Caliph would take me seriously enough to consider it necessary to come after me.” He saw the lingering colour drain dramatically from her high cheeks, and the sudden shadow in the depths of her eyes.

“Peter-“

“That’s the only way I’m going to get close to him.”

“Peter-” She placed her hand on his forearm, but then she could not go on. Instead she stared at him silently and her eyes were green and dark and unfathomable. He saw there was a pulse that throbbed softly in her long graceful neck, just below the ear. Her lips parted, as though she were about to speak. They were delicately sculptured lips,

and she touched them with the pink tip of her tongue, leaving them moist and soft and somehow defenceless. She closed them, without speaking, but the pressure of her fingers on his arm increased, and the carriage of her whole body altered. Her back arched slightly so her lower body swayed towards him and her chin lifted slightly.

“I have been so lonely,” she whispered. “So lonely, for so very long. I only realized how lonely today while I was with you.” Peter felt a choking sensation in his throat, and the prickle of blood behind his eyes.

“I don’t want to be lonely again, ever.” he had let her hair come down. It was very thick and long. It fell in a straight rippling curtain shot through with glowing lights, to her waist.

She had parted it in the centre; a thin straight line of white scalp divided the great black wings and they framed her face, making it appear pale and childlike with eyes too large and vulnerable, and as she came towards where Peter lay the glossy sheets of hair slid silently across the brocade of her gown.

The hem of the gown swept the carpet, and her bare toes peeped out from under it with each step. Narrow finely boned feet, and the nails were trimmed and painted with a colourless lacquer. The sleeves of the gown were wide as batwings and lined internally with sat in, the collar buttoned up in a high Chinese style.

Beside the bed she stopped and her courage and poise seemed to desert her, her shoulders slumped a little and she clasped the long narrow fingers before her in a defensive gesture.

“Peter, I don’t think I am going to be very good at this.” The throaty whisper was barely audible, and her lips trembled with the strength of her appeal. “And I want so badly to be good.” Silently he reached out one hand towards her, palm upwards. The bedclothes covered him to the waist, but his chest and arms were bare, lightly tanned and patterned with dark wiry body hair. As he reached for her the muscle bunched and expanded beneath the skin, and she saw that there was no surplus flesh on his waist, nor on his shoulders and upper arms. He looked lean and hard and tempered, yet leas the lash of a bullwhip, and she did not respond immediately to the invitation, for his masculinity was overpowering.

He folded back the thick down-filled duvet between them, and the sheet was crisp and smoothly ironed in the low rosy light.

“Come,“he ordered gently, but she turned away and with her back to him she undid the buttons of the embroidered gown, beginning at the throat and working downwards.

She slipped the gown from her shoulders, and held it for a moment in the crook of her elbows. The smooth pale flesh gleamed through the fall of dark hair, and she seemed to steel herself like a diver bracing for the plunge into unknown depths.

She let the gown drop with a rustling slide down the full length of her body, and it lay around her ankles in a shallow puddle of peacock colours.

She heard him gasp aloud, and she threw the hair back from her shoulders with a toss of the long, swan-white neck.

The hair hung impenetrably to the small of her back; just above the deep cleft of her lower body it ended in a clean line and her buttocks were round and neat and without blemish, but even as he stared the marble smoothness puckered into a fine rash of gooseflesh as though his eyes had physically caressed her, and she had responded with an appealingly natural awareness that proved how her every sense must be aroused and tingling. At the knowledge Peter felt his heart squeezed.

He wanted to rush to her and sweep her into his arms, but instinct warned him that she must close the last gap herself, and he lay quietly propped on one elbow, feeling the deep ache of wanting spread through his entire body.

She stooped to pick up the gown, and for a moment the long legs were at an awkward coltish angle to each other and the spheres of her buttocks altered shape. No longer perfectly symmetrical, but parted slightly, and in the creamy niche they formed with her thighs there was an instant’s heart-stopping glimpse of a single dense tight curl of hair and the light from beyond tipped the curl with glowing reddish highlights, then she had straightened again, once more lithe and tall,

and she dropped the robe across the low couch and in the same movement turned back to face Peter.

He gasped again and his sense of continuity began to break up into a mosaic of distinct, seemingly unconnected images and sensations.

Her breasts were tiny as those of a pubescent child, but the nipples were startlingly prominent, the colour and texture of ripening young berries, dark wine-red, already fully erect and hard as pebbles.

The pale plain of her belly, with the deep pit of the navel at its centre, that ended at last on the plump darkly furred mound pressed into the deep wedge between her thighs, like a small frightened living creature crouching from the stoop of the falcon.

The feel of her face pressed to his chest, and the tickle of her quick breath stirring his body hair, the almost painful grip of slim powerful arms locked with desperate strength around his waist.

The taste of her mouth as her lips parted slowly, softly, to his and the uncertain flutter of her tongue becoming bolder, velvety on top and slick and slippery on the underside.

The sound of her breathing changing to a deep sonorous pulse in his ears, seeming to keep perfect time with his own.

The smell of her breath, heavy with the aromatic musk of her arousal, and blending with the orangy fragrance of her perfume and the ripe woman smell of her body.

And always the feel of her the warmth and the softness, the hardness of toned muscle and the running ripple of long dark hair about his face and down his body, the crisp electric rasp of tight, tense curls parting to unbearable heat and going on for ever to depths that seemed to reach beyond the frontier of reality and reason.

And then later the stillness of complete peace that reached out from the centre where she lay against his heart and seemed to spread to the farthest corners of his soul.

“I knew that I was lonely,” she whispered. “But I did not realize just how terribly deeply.” And she held him as though she would never relinquish her grip.

Magda woke him in the cold utter darkness three hours before dawn, and it was still dark when they left the chalet. The headlights of the following Mercedes that carried her wolves swept the interior of their saloon through each bend in the steep twisting road down from the mountains.

On take-off from Zurich Magda was in the Lear jet’s left-hand seat, flying as pilot in-command, and she handled the powerful machine with the sedate lack of ostentation which marks the truly competent aviator.

Her personal pilot, a grizzled and taciturn Frenchman, who was flying now as her co-pilot, evidently held her skill in high regard and watched over her with an almost fatherly pride and approval as she cleared Zurich controlled airspace and levelled out at cruise altitude for Paris Orly before she left him to monitor the auto-pilot and came back to the main cabin. Though she sat beside Peter in the black calfskin armchairs, her manner was unchanged from the way it had been during their last flight together in this machine. reserved and polite so that he found it difficult to believe the wonders they had explored together the previous night.

She worked with the two dark-suited secretaries opposite her, speaking her fluent rippling French with the same enchanting trace of accent that marked her English. In the short time since he had joined Narmco, Peter had been forced to make a crash revision of his own French. Now once again he could manage, if not with eclat, at least with competence, in technical and financial discussion. Once or twice Magda turned to him for comment or opinion, and her gaze was serious and remote, seeming as impersonal and efficient as an electronic computer and Peter understood that they were to make no show of their new relationship before employees.

Immediately she proved him wrong, for her co-pilot called her over the cabin speaker.

“We will join the Orly circuit in four minutes, Baroness.” And she turned easily and naturally and kissed Peter’s cheek, still speaking French.

“Pardon me, chill. I will make the landing. I need the flying time in my logbook.” She greased the sleek swift aircraft onto the runway as though she was spreading butter on hot toast. The co-pilot had radioed ahead so that when she parked in the private hangar there were a uniformed immigration poficier and a douanier already waiting.

As they came aboard, they saluted her respectfully and then barely glanced at her red diplomatic passport. They took a little longer with Peter’s blue and gold British passport, and Magda murmured to Peter with a trace of a smile.

“I must get you a little red book. It’s so much easier.” Then to the officials. “It is a cold morning, gentlemen, I hope you will take a glass.” And her white-jacketed steward was hovering already. They left the two Frenchmen removing their kepis and pistol belts, settling down comfortably in the leather armchairs to make a leisurely selection of the cigars and cognac that the steward had produced for their approval.

There were three cars waiting for them, parked in the back of the hangar with drivers and guards. Peter’s lip curled as he saw the Maserati.

“I told you not to drive that thing,” he said gruffly. “It’s like having your name in neon lights.” They had argued about this vehicle while Peter was reorganizing her personal Security, for the Maserati was an electric silver-grey, one of her favourite colours, a shimmering dart of metal. She swayed against him with that husky little chuckle of hers.

“Oh, that is so very nice to have a man being masterful again. It makes me feel like a woman.”

“I have other ways of making you feel like that.” know, he agreed, with a wicked flash of green eyes.

“And I like those even better, but not now please! What in the world would my staff think!” Then seriously, “You take the Maserati, I ordered it for you, anyway. Somebody may as well enjoy it. And please do not be late this evening.

I have especially made it free for us. Try and be at La Pierre Benite by eight o’clock will you please?” By the time Peter had to slow for the traffic along the Pont Neuilly entrance to Paris, he had accustomed himself to the surging power and acceleration of the Maserati, and, as she had suggested, he was enjoying himself. Even in the mad Parisian traffic he used the slick gear box to knife through the merest suspicion of an opening, hulling out of trouble or overtaking with the omnipotent sense of power that control of the magnificent machine bestowed upon its driver.

He knew then why Magda loved it so dearly, and when he parked it at last in the underground garage on the Champs-Elyses side of Concorde he grinned at himself in the mirror.

“Bloody cowboy!” he said, and glanced at his Rolex. He had an hour before his first appointment, and as a sudden thought unclipped the holster of the Cobra and, with the pistol still in it, locked it in the glove compartment of the Maserati. He grinned again as he pondered the in advisability of marching into French Naval Headquarters armed to the teeth.

The drizzle had cleared, and the chestnut trees in the Elys& gardens were popping their first green birds as he came out into Concorde. He used one of the call boxes in the Concorde Metro station to make a call to the British Embassy. He spoke to the Military Attach for two minutes, and when he hung up, he knew the ball was probably already in play. If Caliph had penetrated the Atlas Command eeply enough to know him personally as the commander of Thor then it would not be too long before he knew that the former commander had picked up the spoor. The Military Attache at the Paris Embassy had other more clandestine duties than kissing the ladies” hands at diplomatic cocktail parties.

Peter reached the main gates of the Marine Headquarters on the corner of the rue Royale with a few minutes to spare, but already there was a secretary waiting for him below the billowing Tricolour. He smoothed Peter’s way past the sentries, and led him to the armaments committee room on the third floor overlooking a misty grey view of the Seine and the gilded arches of the Pont Neuf. Two of Peter’s assistants from Narmco were there ahead of him with their briefcases Unpacked and the contents spread upon the polished walnut table.

The French Flag captain had been in Brussels, and on one unforgettable evening he had conducted Peter on a magic carpet tour of the brothels of that city. He greeted him now with cries of Gallic pleasure and addressed him as Itu” and “tai” which all boded very well for the meeting ahead.

At noon precisely, the French captain moved that the meeting adjourn across the street to a private room on the first floor of Maxim’s, blissful in the certainty that Narmco would pick up the tab, if they were really serious about selling the Kestrel rocket motors to the French Navy.

It required all Peter’s tact not to make it obvious that he was taking less than his share of the Clos de Vougeot or of the Rmy Martin, and more than once he found that he had missed part of the discussion which was being conducted at a steadily increasing volume. He found that he was thinking of emerald eyes and small pert bosoms.

From Maxim’s back to the Ministry of Marine, and later it required another major act of diplomacy on Peter’s part when the captain smoothed his mustache and cocked a knowing eye at Peter. “There is a charming little club, very close and wonderfully friendly.” By six o’clock Peter had disentangled himself from the Frenchman’s company, with protestations of friendship and promises to meet again in ten days” time. An hour later Peter left his two sales assistants at the hotel Meurice after a quick but thorough summation of the day’s achievements.

They were, all three, agreed that it was a beginning but a long, long road lay ahead to the ending.

He walked back along Rivoli; despite the frowsiness of a long day of endless talk and the necessity for quick thinking in a language which was still strange on the tongue, despite a slight ache behind the eyes from the wine and cognac and despite the taste of cigar and cigarette smoke he had breathed, he was buoyed by a tingling sense of anticipation, for Magda was waiting, and he stepped out briskly.

As he paused for traffic lights, he caught a glimpse of his own reflection in a shop window. He was smiling without realizing it.

While he waited on the ramp of the parking garage for his turn to pay and enter the traffic stream, with the Maserati engine whispering impatiently, he glanced in the rear view mirror. He had acquired the habit long ago when one of the captured Provo death lists had begun with his name; since then he had learned to look over his shoulder.

He noticed the Citron two back in the line of vehicles because the windshield was cracked and there was a scrape which had dented the mudguard and exposed a bright strip of bare metal.

He noticed the same black Citron still two back as he waited for pedestrian: lights in the Champs-Elys6es, and when he ducked his head slightly to try and get a look at the driver, the headlights switched on as though to frustrate him and at that moment the lights changed and he had to drive on.

Going around the ttoile, the Citroen had fallen back four places in the grey drizzling dusk of early autumn, but he spotted it once again when he was halfway down the Avenue de la Grande Armee, for by now he was actively searching for it. This time it changed lanes and slipped off the main thoroughfare to the left. It was immediately lost in the maze of side streets and Peter should have been able to forget it and concentrate on the pleasure of controlling the Maserati, but there lingered a sense of foreboding and even after he had shot the complicated junction of roads that got him onto the periphery route and eventually out on the road to Versailles and Chartres, he found himself changing lanes and speed while he scanned the road behind in the mirror.

Only when he left Versailles and was on the Rambouillet road did he have a clear view back a mile down the straight avenue of plane trees, and he was certain there was no other vehicle on the road. He relaxed completely and began to prepare himself for the final turn off that would bring him at last to La Pierre BMite.

The shiny wet black python of road uncoiled ahead of him and then humped abruptly. Peter came over the rise at 150 kilometres an hour and instantly started to dance lightly on brake and clutch, avoiding the temptation of tramping down hard and losing adhesion on the slippery uneven tarmac. Ahead of him there was a gendarme in a shiny white plastic cape, wet with rain, brandishing a torch with a red lens; there were reflective warning triangles bright as rubies, a Peugeot in the ditch beside the road with headlights glaring at the sky, a dark blue police Kombi van half blocking the road, and in the stage lit by the Kombi’s headlights two bodies were laid out neatly, and all of it hazed by the soft insistent mantle of falling rain. - a typical roadside accident scene.

Peter had the Maserati well in hand, bringing her neatly down through the gears to a crawl, and as he was lowering the side window, the electric motor whining softly and the icy gust of night air into the heated interior, the gendarme gestured with the flashlight for him to pull over into the narrow gap between hedge and the parked Kombi, and at that moment the unexpected movement caught Peter’s eye.

It was one of the bodies lying in the roadway under the headlights. The movement was the slight arch of the back that a man makes before rising from the prone position.

Peter watched him lift his arm, not more than a few inches, but it was just enough for Peter to realize he had been holding an object concealed down the outside of his thigh, and even in the rain and the night Peter’s trained eye recognized the perforated air-cooled sleeve enclosing the short barrel of a fold-down machine pistol.

Instantly his brain was racing so that everything about him seemed to be taking place in dreamy slow motion.

The Maserati! he thought. They’re after Magda.

The gendarme was coming round to the driver’s side of the Maserati, and he had his right hand under the white plastic cape, at the level of his pistol belt.

Peter went flat on the gas pedal, and the Maserati bellowed like a bull buffalo shot through the heart. The rear wheels broke from the wet surface, and with a light touch Peter encouraged the huge silver machine to swing like a scythe at the gendarme. It should have cut him down, but he was too quick. As he dived for the hedge, Peter saw that he had brought the pistol out from under his cape but was too busy at that moment to use it.

The side of the Maserati touched the hedge with a fluttering rustle of foliage, and Peter lifted his right foot, caught the enraged charge of the machine and swung her the other way. The moment she was lined up he hit the gas again, and the Maserati howled. This time she burned blue rubber smoke off her rear wheels.

There was a driver at the wheel of the blue police Kombi, and he tried to pull across to block the road completely, but he was not fast enough.

The two vehicles touched, with a crackle and scream of metal that jarred Peter’s teeth, but what concerned him was that the two bodies in the headlights were no longer flat.

The nearest was on one knee and he was swinging the short stubby machine pistol it looked like a Stirling or the new Sidewinder, but he was using the fold-down wire butt, wasting vital fractions of a second to get the weapon to his shoulder. He was also blocking the field of fire of the man who crouched behind him with another machine pistol pinned to his hip, pointing with index finger and forearm, ready to trigger with his second finger “That’s the way it should be done.” Peter recognized professional skill, and his brain was running so swiftly that he had time to applaud it.

The Maserati cannoned off the police Kombi, and Peter lifted his right foot to take traction off the rear wheels, and spun the wheel the hard lock to the right. The Maserati swung her tail with a screech of rubber and went into a left side slide towards the two figures in the road, and Peter ducked down below the level of the door. He had deliberately induced the left-hand slide, so that he had some little protection from the engine compartment and body work

As he ducked he heard the familiar sound, like a giant ripping heavyweight canvas, an automatic weapon throwing bullets at a cyclic rate of almost two thousand rounds a minute, and the bullets tore into the side of the Maserati, beating in the metal with an ear-numbing clangor, while glass exploded in upon Peter like the glittering spray as a storm-driven wave strikes a rock. Glass chips pelted across his back, and stung his cheek and the back of his neck.

They sparkled like a diamond tiara in his hair.

Whoever was doing the shooting had certainly emptied the magazine in those few seconds, and now Peter bobbed up in his seat, slitting his eyes against the cloud of glass splinters. He saw a looming nightmare of dark hedges and spun the wheel back to hold the Maserati. She swayed to the limits of her equilibrium and Peter had a glimpse of the two gunmen in the road rolling frantically into the half filled ditch, but at that moment his off-rear wheel hit the lip and he was slammed up short against his safety belt with a force that drove the air from his lungs, and the Maserati reared like a stallion smelling the mare and tail-walked, swinging in short vicious surges back and forth across the road, as he desperately fought for control with gear and brake and wheel. He must have spun full circle, Peter realized, for there was a giddy dazzle of light beams and of running and rolling figures, everything hazy and indistinct in the rain, then the open road ahead again, and he sent the car at it with a great howling lunge, at the same moment glancing up at his mirror.

In the headlights he saw the burned blue clouds of smoke and steam thrown up by his own tyres, and through it the figure of the second gunman obscured from the waist by the ditch. He had the machine pistol at his waist, and the muzzle flash bloomed about him.

Peter heard the first burst hit the Maserati and he could not duck again, for there was a bend ahead in the rain, coming up at dazzling speed and he clenched his jaws waiting for it.

The next burst hit the car, like the sound of hail on a tin roof, and he felt the rude tugging, numbing jerk in his upper body.

“Tagged!” he realized. There was no mistaking it, he had been hit before. The first time when he led a patrol into an ambush a very long time ago, and at the same moment he was evaluating the hit calmly finding he still had use of both hands and all his senses. Either it was a ricochet, or the bullet had spent most of its force in penetrating the rear windshield and seat back.

The Maserati tracked neatly into the bend, and only then he felt the engine surge and falter. Almost immediately the sharp stink of gasoline filled the cab of the Maserati.

“Fuel line,” he told himself, and there was the warm, uncomfortable spread of his own blood down his back and side, and he placed his wound low in the left shoulder. If it had penetrated it would be a lung hit, and he waited for the coppery salt taste of blood in his throat or the bubbling froth of escaping air in his chest cavity.

The engine beat checked again, surged and checked, as it starved for fuel. That first traversing burst of automatic fire must have ripped through the engine compartment, and Peter thought wryly that in the movies the Maserati would have immediately erupted in spectacular pyrotechnics like a miniature Vesuvius though in reality it didn’t happen like that, still gasoline from the severed lead would be spraying over plugs and points.

One last glance backwards, before the bend hid it and he saw three men running for the police van three men and the driver, that was lousy odds. They would be after him immediately, and the crippled machine made a final brave leap forward that carried them five hundred yards more, and then it died.

Ahead of him, at the limits of the headlight beam, Peter saw the white gates of La Pierre Benite. They had set the ambush at the point where they could screen out most extraneous traffic, and gather only the silver Maserati in their net.

He cast his mind back swiftly, recalling the lie of the land beyond the main gates of the estate. He had been here only once before, and it had been dark then also but he had the soldier’s eye for ground, and he remembered thick forest on both sides of the road, down to a low bridge over a narrow fast flowing stream with steep banks, a hard left hander and a climb up to the house. The house was half a mile beyond the gates, a long way to go with a body hit and at least four armed men following, and no guarantee that he would be safe there either.

The Maserati was coasting down the slight incline towards the gates, slowing as it ran out of momentum, and now there was the hot smell of oil and burning rubber. The paintwork of the engine hood began to blister and disco lour

Peter switched off the ignition to stop the electric pump spraying more fuel onto the burning engine and he slipped his hand into his jacket. He found the wound where he had expected it low and left. It was beginning to sting and his hand came away sticky and slick with blood. He wiped it on his thigh.

Behind him was the reflected glow of headlights in the rain, a halo of light growing stronger. At any moment they would come through the bend, and he opened the glove compartment.

The 9 men. Cobra gave some little comfort as he slipped it from its holster and thrust it into the front of his belt.

There was no spare magazine and the breech was empty, a safety consideration which he now regretted, for it left him with only nine rounds in the magazine one more might make a lot of difference.

Pretty little fingers of bright flame were waving at him from under the bonnet of the engine compartment, finding the hinge and joint, probing the ventilation slot on the top surface. Peter released his seat belt, held open the door and steered with his other hand for the verge. Here the road was banked and dropped away steeply.

He flicked the wheel back the opposite way and let the change of direction eject him neatly, throwing him clear, while the Maserati swerved back into the centre of the road and rolled away, slowing gradually.

He landed as though from a parachute drop, feet and knees together cushioning the impact and then rolled into it. Pain flared in his -shoulder and he felt something tear.

He came up in a crouch and ran doubled over for the edge of the woods, and the burning auto lit the dark trees with flickering orange light.

The fingers of his left hand felt swollen and numb as he pumped a round into the chamber of the Cobra, and at that moment the headlights beyond the bend flared with shocking brilliance and Peter had the illusion of being caught in front stage centre of the Palladium. He went down hard on his belly in the soft rain-sodden earth, but still his wound jarred and he felt the warm trickle of running blood under his shirt as he crawled desperately for the tree line.

The police van roared down the stretch of road. Peter flattened and pressed his face to the earth, and it smelled of leaf mould and fungus. The van roared past where he lay.

Three hundred yards down the road the Maserati had coasted to a halt, two wheels still on the road, the offside wheels over the verge so she stood at an abandoned angle, burning merrily.

The van pulled up at a respectful distance from it, aware of the danger of explosion, and a single figure, the gendarme in his plastic cape, ran forward, took one look into the cab and shouted something. The language sounded like French, but the flames were beginning to drum fiercely and the range too long to hear clearly.

The van locked into a U-turn, bumped over the verge, and then started back slowly. The two erstwhile accident victims, still carrying their machine pistols, running ahead like hounds on leash, one on each side of the road, heads down as they searched for signs in the soft shoulders of the road. The white-caped gendarme rode on the running-board of the van, calling encouragement to the hunters.

Peter was up again, doubled over, heading for the edge of the forest, and he ran into the barbed wire fence at full stretch. It brought him down heavily. He felt the slash of steel through the cloth of his trousers, and as he gathered himself again, he thought bitterly.

One hundred and seventy guineas. The suit had been tailored in Savile Row. He crawled between the strands of armed wire, and there was a shout behind him. They had picked up his spoor, and as he dodged across the last few yards of open ground, another sharper, more jubilant shout.

They had spotted him in the towering firelight of the blazing Maserati, and again there was the tearing rip of automatic fire; but it was extreme range for the short barrel and low velocity ammunition. Peter heard passing shot like a whisper of bats” wings in the darkness above him and then he reached the first trees and ducked behind one of them.

He found he was breathing deeply, but with a good easy rhythm. The wound wasn’t handicapping him yet, and he was into the cold reasoning rage that combat always instilled in him.

The range to the barbed wire fence was fifty metres, he judged, it was one of his best distances International pistol standard out-of-hand with a 50-men. X circle but there were no judges out here and he took a double-handed grip, and let them run into the fence just as he had done.

It brought two of them down, and the cries of angry distress were definitely in French; as they struggled to their feet again they were precisely back-lit by the flames, and the Cobra had a luminous foresight. Peter went for the midsection of one of the machine gunners.

The 9 men. had a vicious whip-crack report, and punched into flesh and bone with 385 foot-pounds of energy. The strike of the bullet sounded like a watermelon hit with the full swing of a baseball bat. It lifted the man off his feet, and threw him backwards, and Peter swung onto the next target, but they were pros. Even though the fire from the edge of the woods had come as a complete surprise, they reacted instantly, and disappeared flat against the dark earth. They gave him no target, and Peter was too low on ammunition to throw down holding fire.

One of them fired a burst of automatic and it tore bark and wood and leaves along the edge of the trees. Peter fired at the muzzle flash only once as a warning and then ducked away and, keeping his head down to avoid lucky random fire, sprinted back into the woods.

They would be held up for two or three minutes by the fence and by the threat of coming under fire again, and Peter wanted to open some ground between them during that time.

The glow of the burning Maserati kept him well orientated and he moved quickly towards the river; however, before he had covered two yards he was starting to shiver uncontrollably. His two-piece city suit was soaked by the persistent drizzle and by the shower from each bush he brushed against. His shoes were light calf leather with leather soles and he had stepped in puddles of mud, and the knee-high grass, was sodden. The cold struck through his clothing; he could feel his wound stiffening agonizingly and the first nauseating grip of shock tightened his belly, but he paused every fifty yards or so and listened for sounds of pursuit. Once he heard the sound of a car engine from the direction of the road, passing traffic probably, and he wondered what they would make of the abandoned police vehicle and the blazing Maserati. Even if it was reported to the real police, it would be all over before a patrol arrived and Peter discounted the chance of assistance from that quarter.

He was beginning now to be puzzled by the total lack of any sign of further pursuit, and he looked for and found a good stance in which to wait for it. There was a fallen oak tree and he wriggled in under the trunk, with a clear avenue of retreat, good cover and a low position from which any pursuer would be silhouetted against the sky glow of the burning Maserati. There were only three pursuers now, and seven cartridges in the Cobra. If it were not for the cold and the demoralizing ache through his upper body, he might have felt more confident, but the nagging terror of the hunted animal was still on him.

He waited five minutes, lying completely still, every sense tuned to its finest, the Cobra held out in extended double grip, ready to roll left or right and take the shot as it came. There was no sound but the drip and plop of the rain-soaked woods.

Another ten minutes passed before it occurred to him suddenly that the pursuers must now realize that the wrong quarry had sprung their trap. They were setting for Magda Altmann, and it must be clear to them that they had a man, and an armed one at that. He pondered their reaction.

Almost certainly they would pull out now, or had already done so.

Instead of a lady worth twenty or thirty million dollars in ransom money, they must realize they had one of her employees, probably an armed bodyguard, who was driving the Maserati either as a decoy or merely as delivery driver.

Yes, he decided, they would pull out take their casualty and melt away, and Peter was sure they would leave no clues to their identity. He would have enjoyed the opportunity to question one of them, he thought, and grimaced at a new lance of pain in the shoulder.

He waited another ten minutes, utterly still and alert, controlling the spasms of cold and reaction that shook him, then he rose quietly and moved back towards the river. The Maserati must have burned out completely now for the sky was black again and he had to rely on his own sense of direction to keep orientated. Even though he knew he was alone, he paused every fifty yards to listen and look.

He heard the river at last. It was directly ahead and very close.

He moved a little faster and almost walked off the bank in the dark. He squatted to rest for a moment, for the shoulder was very painful now, and the cold was draining his energy.

The prospect of wading the river was particularly uninviting The rain had fallen without a break for days now, and the water sounded powerful and swift it would certainly be icy cold, and probably shoulder deep rather than waist deep. The bridge must be only a few hundred yards downstream, and he stood up and moved along the bank.

Cold and pain can sap concentration very swiftly, and Peter had to make a conscious effort to keep himself alert, and he felt for every foothold before transferring his weight forward. He held the Cobra hanging at full stretch of his right arm, but ready for instant use, and he blinked his eyes clear of the fine drizzle of rain and the cold sweat of pain and fear.

Yet it was his sense of smell that alerted him. The rank smell of stale Turkish tobacco smoke on a human body, it was a smell that had always offended him, and now he picked it up instantly, even though it was just one faint whiff.

Peter froze in mid stride while his brain raced to adjust to the unexpected. He had almost convinced himself that he was alone.

Now he remembered the sound of a car engine on the main road, and he realized that men who had set up such an elaborate decoy the faked motor accident, the police van and uniform would certainly have taken the trouble to plot and study the ground between the ambush point and the victim’s intended destination.

They would know better than Peter himself the layout of woods and river and bridge, and would have realized immediately they had taken their first casualty that futility of blundering pursuit through the dark. It was the smart thing to circle back and wait again, and they would choose the river bank or the bridge itself.

The only thing that troubled Peter was their persistence.

They must know it was not Magda Altmann, and then even in this tense moment of discovery he remembered the Citroin that had followed him down the Champs-Elyses nothing was what it appeared to be, and slowly he completed the step in which he had frozen.

He stood utterly still, poised every muscle and every nerve screwed to its finest pitch, but the night was black and the rush of the river covered all sound. Peter waited.

The other man will always move if you wait long enough, and he waited with the patience of the stalking leopard, although the cold struck through to his bones and the rain slid down his cheeks and neck.

The man moved at last. The squelch of mud and the unmistakeable brush of undergrowth against cloth, then silence. He was very close, within ten feet, but there was no glimmer of light, and Peter shifted his weight carefully to face the direction of the sound. The old trick was to fire one shot at the sound and use the muzzle flash to light the target for a second shot which followed it in almost the same instant of time but there were three of them and at ten feet that machine pistol could cut a man in half. Peter waited.

Then from upstream there was the sound of a car engine again, still faint but fast approaching. Immediately somebody whistled faintly, a rising double note in the night up towards the bridge, clearly some prearranged signal. A car door banged shut, much closer than the sound of the approaching engine and a starter whirred, another harsher engine roared into life, headlights flared through the rain, and Peter blinked as the whole scene ahead of him lit up.

A hundred yards ahead the bridge crossed the stream, the surface of the water was shiny and black as new-mined coal as it flowed about the supporting piles.

The blue van had parked on the threshold of the bridge, obviously to wait for Peter, but now it was pulling out, probably alarmed by -the approach of the other more powerful engine from the direction of La Pierre Benite. The driver was heading back towards the main road, the phoney gendarme scrambling alongside with his cape flapping as he tried to scramble through the open offside door and out of the darkness, close to Peter, a voice cried out with alarm.

“Attender!” The third man had no desire to be left by his companions, and he ran forward, abandoning all attempt at concealment. He had his back to Peter now, waving the machine pistol frantically, clearly outlined by the headlights of the van, and the range was under ten feet. It was a dead shot, and Peter went for it instinctively and only at the very instant of trigger pressure that would have sent a 95 gram bullet between his shoulder blades was Peter able to check himself.

The man’s back was turned and the range would make it murder; Peter’s training should have cured him of such nice gentlemanly distinctions. However, what really held his trigger finger was the need to know. Peter had to know who these people were and who had sent them, and what they had been sent to do, who they were after.

Now that the man was being deserted, he had abandoned all stealth and was running as though he were chasing a bus, and Peter saw the chance to take him. Roles had been exchanged completely, and Peter darted forward, transferring the Cobra to his injured left hand.

He caught the man in four paces, keeping low to avoid his peripheral vision, and he whipped his good right arm around the throat, going for the half nelson and the spin that would disorientate the man before he slammed the barrel of the Cobra against the temple.

The man was quick as a cat, something warned him perhaps the squelch of Peter’s sodden shoes, and he ducked his chin onto his chest rolling his shoulders and beginning to turn back into the line of Peter’s attack.

Peter missed the throat and caught him high, the crook of his elbow locking about the man’s mouth, and the unexpected turn had thrown him slightly off balance. If he had had full use of his left arm, he could still have spun his victim, but in an intuitive flash he realized that he had lost the advantage, already the man was twisting his head out of the arm lock bulking his shoulders, and by the feel of him, Peter knew instantly that he was steel-hard with muscle.

The barrel of the machine pistol was short enough to enable him to press the muzzle into Peter’s body just as soon as he completed his turn; it would tear Peter to pieces like a chain saw.

Peter changed his grip slightly, no longer opposing the man’s turn, but throwing all his weight and the strength of his right arm into the same direction; they spun together like a pair of waltzing dancers, but Peter knew that the moment they broke apart the man would have the killing advantage again.

The river was his one chance, he realized that instinctively, and before the advantage passed back from him to his adversary, he hurled himself backwards, keeping his grip on the man’s head.

They went out into black space, falling together in a short gut-swooping drop with Peter underneath. If there was rock below the steep bank of the river, he realized he would be crushed by the other’s weight.

They struck the surface of the fast water, and freezing cold struck like a club so that Peter almost released the air from his lungs as a reflex.

The shock of cold water seemed to have stunned the man in his grip momentarily, and Peter felt the whoosh of air from his lungs as he let go. Peter changed his grip, wedging his elbow under the chin, but not quite able to get at the throat immediately the man began the wild panic stricken struggles of somebody held under icy water with empty lungs.

He had lost the machine pistol, for he was tearing at Peter’s arms and face with both hands as the water swirled them both end over end down towards the bridge.

Peter had to keep him from getting air, and as he held his own precious single breath, he tried to get on top and stay there.

Fingers hooked at his closed eyes, and then into his mouth as the man reached back desperately over his own shoulders. Peter opened his mouth slightly and the other man thrust his fingers deeply in, trying to tear at his tongue.

Immediately Peter locked his teeth into the fingers with a force that made his jaw ache at the hinges, and his mouth filled with the sickening warm spurt of the other man’s blood.

Fighting his own revulsion, he hung on desperately with teeth and arms. He had lost his own weapon, dropping it into the black flood from numbed and crippled fingers, and the man was fighting now with the animal strength of his starved lungs and mutilated fingers; every time he tried to yank his hand out of Peter’s mouth the flesh tore audibly in Peter’s ears and fresh blood made him gag and choke.

They came out on the surface and through streaming eyes Peter had one glimpse of the bridge looming above him. The blue van had disappeared, but Magda Altmann’s Mercedes limousine was parked in the centre of the bridge, and in the wash of its headlights he recognized her two bodyguards. They were leaning far out over the guardrail, and Peter had a moment’s dread that one of them might try a shot then they were flung into the concrete piles of the bridge with such force that they lost the death lock they had upon each other.

The back eddy beyond the bridge swung them in towards the bank. Gasping and swallowing with cold and exhaustion and pain, Peter fought for footing on gravel and rock. The machine-gunner had found bottom also and was stumbling desperately towards the bank. In the headlights of the limousine Peter saw Magda’s two bodyguards racing back across the bridge to head him off.

Peter realized that he would not be able to catch the man before he reached the bank.

“Carl!” he screamed at the bodyguard who was leading.

“Stop him. Don’t let him get away.”

The bodyguard vaulted over the guardrail, landing cat like in complete balance, with the pistol double-handed at the level of his navel.

Below him the machine-gunner dragged himself waist deep towards the bank. It was only then that Peter realized what was going to happen.

“No!” He choked on blood and water. “Take him alive.

Don’t kill him, Carl!” The bodyguard had not heard, or had not understood.

The muzzle blast seemed to join him and the wallowing figure in the river below him, a blood-orange rope of flame and thunderous explosion. The bullets smacked into the machine-gunner’s chest and belly like an axe man cutting down a tree.

“No!” Peter yelled helplessly. “Oh Jesus, no! No!” Peter lunged forward and caught the corpse before it slid below the black water, and he dragged it by one arm to the bank. The bodyguards took it from him and hauled it up, the head lolling like an idiot’s, and the blood diluted to pale pink in the reflected headlights.

Peter made three attempts to climb the bank, each time slithering back tiredly into the water, then Carl reached down and gripped his wrist.

Peter knelt on the muddy bank, still choking with the water and blood he had swallowed, and he retched weakly.

“Peter!” Magda’s voice rang with concern, and he looked up and wiped his mouth on the back of his forearm. She had slipped out of the back door of the limousine and was running back along the bridge, long-legged in black boots and ski-pants, her face dead white with concern and her eyes frantic with worry.

Peter pushed himself onto his feet and swayed drunkenly.

She reached him and caught him, steadying him as he teetered.

“Peter, Oh God, darling. What happened-“

“This beauty and some of his friends wanted to take you for a ride and they got the wrong address.” They stared down at the corpse. Carl had used a .357 magnum and the damage was massive. Magda turned her head away.

“Nice work,” Peter told the bodyguard bitterly. “He’s not going to answer any questions now, is he?”

“You said to stop him.” Carl growled as he reloaded the pistol.

“I wonder what you would have done if I’d said to really clobber him.” Peter began to turn away with disgust, and pain checked him. He gasped.

“You’re hurt.” Magda’s “concern returned in full strength.

“Take his other arm,” she ordered Carl, and they helped him over the parapet to the limousine.

Peter stripped off the torn and sodden remains of his clothing and Magda wrapped him in the Angora wool travel rug before examining his wound under the interior light of the cab.

The bullet hole was a perfect little blue puncture in the smooth skin, already surrounded by a halo of inflammation, and the bullet was trapped between his ribs and the sheet of flat, hard trapezium muscles.

She could see the outline of it quite clearly, the size of a ripe acorn in his flesh, swollen out angry purple.

“Thank God-” she whispered, and unwound the jean Patou scarf from her long pale throat. She bound the wound carefully. “We’ll take you directly to the hospital at Versailles. Drive fast, Carl.” She opened the walnut-fronted cocktail cabinet in the body work beside her and poured half a tumbler of whisky from the crystal decanter.

It washed the taste of blood from Peter’s mouth and then went warmly all the way down his throat to soothe the cramps of cold and shock in his belly.

“What made you come?” he asked, his voice still rough with the fierce spirit, the timely arrival nagged at his sense of rightness.

“a report a car smash they knew the Maserati, and the inspector rang La Pierre Benite immediately. I guessed something bad-” At that moment they reached the gates at the main road. The remains of the Maserati lay smouldering on the side of the road; around it like boy scouts around a camp fire were half a dozen gendarmes in their white plastic capes and pillbox kepis. They seemed uncertain of what they should do next.

Carl slowed the limousine and Magda spoke tersely through the window to a sergeant, who treated her with immense respect. “Oui, madame la Baronne, d’accord. Tout d fait vrai-” She dismissed him with a final nod, and he and his men saluted the departing limousine.

“They will find the body at the bridge-“

“There may be another one on the edge of the forest there-“

“You are very good, aren’t you?” She slanted her eyes at him.

“The really good ones don’t get hit,” he said, and smiled at her. The whisky had taken some of the sting and stiffness out of the wound and unknotted his guts. It was good to still be alive, he started to appreciate that again.

“You were right about the Maserati then they were waiting for it.”

“That’s why I burned it,” he told her, but she did not answer his smile.

“Oh, Peter. You’ll never know how I felt. The police told me that the driver of the Maserati was still in it and had been burned. I thought I felt as though part of me had been destroyed. It was the most terrifying feeling-” She shivered. “I nearly did not come, I didn’t want to see it. I nearly sent my wolves, but then I had to know. Carl saw you in the river as we turned onto the bridge. He said it was you, I just couldn’t believe it-” She stopped herself and shuddered at the memory. “Tell me what happened, tell me all of it,” she demanded and poured more whisky into his tumbler.

For some reason that he was not sure of himself, Peter did not mention the Citroin that had followed him out of Paris. He told himself that it could not have been relevant.

It must have been a coincidence, for if the driver of the Citron had been one of them he would have been able to telephone ahead and warn the others that Baroness Magda Altmann was not in the Maserati, so that would have meant that they were not after her but after him, Peter Stride, and that didn’t make sense because he had only set himself up as bait that very morning, and they would not have had time yet. He stopped the giddy carousel of thoughts shock and whisky, he told himself. There would be time later to think it all out more carefully. Now he would simply believe that they were waiting for Magda, and he had run into their net. He told it that way, beginning from the moment that he had seen the police van parked in the road. Magda listened with complete attention, the huge eyes clinging to his face, and she touched him every few moments as if to reassure herself.

When Carl parked under the portico of the emergency entrance of the hospital, the police had radioed ahead and there were an intern and two nurses waiting for Peter with a theatre trolley.

Before she opened the door to let them take Peter, Magda leaned to him and kissed him full on the lips.

“I’m so very glad to have you still,” she whispered, and then with her lips still very close to his ear she went on. “It was Caliph again, wasn’t it?” He shrugged slightly, grimaced at the stab of pain, and answered, “I can’t think of anyone else offhand that would do such a professional job.” Magda walked beside the trolley as far as the theatre doors, and she was beside his bed in the curtained cubic leas he struggled up through the deadening, suffocating false death of the anaesthetic.

The French doctor was with her, and he produced the gruesome blood-clotted souvenir with a magician’s flourish.

“I did not have to cut,” he told Peter proudly. “Probe only.” The bullet had mushroomed impressively, had certainly lost much of its velocity in penetrating the body work of the Maserati. “You are a very lucky man,” the doctor went on. “You are in fine condition, muscles like a racehorse that stopped the bullet going deep. You will be well again very soon.”

“I have promised to look after you, so he is letting you come home now.” Magda hovered over him also. “Aren’t you, doctor?” “You will have one of the world’s most beautiful nurses.” The doctor bowed gallantly towards Magda with a certain wistfulness in his expression.

The doctor was right, the bullet wound gave him less discomfort than the tears in his thighs from the barbed wire, but Magda Altmann behaved as though he were suffering from an irreversible and terminal disease.

When she did have to go up to her office suite in the Boulevard des Capucines the next day, she telephoned three times for no other reason than to make sure he was still alive and to ask for his size in shoes and clothing. The cavalcade of automobiles carrying her and her entourage were back at La Pierre Brute while it was still daylight.

“You are keeping civil service hours,” he accused when she came directly to the main guest suite overlooking the terraced lawns and the artificial lake.

“I knew you were missing me,” she explained, and kissed him before beginning to scold him. “Roberto tells me you have been wandering around in the rain. The doctor said you were to stay in bed. Tomorrow I will have to stay here to take care of you myself.” “Is that a threat?” he grinned at her. “For that sort of punishment I would let Caliph shoot another hole-” Swiftly she laid her fingers on his lips. “Peter, cuM, don’t joke like that.” And the shadow that passed across her eyes was touched with fear, then immediately she was smiling again. “Look what I have bought you.” Peter’s valise had been in the trunk of the Maserati, and she had replaced it with one in black crocodile from Hennes. To fill it she must have started at the top end of the Faubourg St. Honore and worked her way down to the Place Vendeme.

“I had forgotten how much fun it is to buy presents for one who you-” She did not finish the sentence, but held up a brocade silk dressing-gown. ” Everybody in St. Laurent knew what I was thinking when I chose this.” She had forgotten nothing. Shaving gear, silk handkerchiefs and underwear, a blue blazer, slacks and shoes from Gucci, even cufflinks in plain gold, each set with a small sapphire.

“You have such blue eyes,” she explained. “Now I will go and make myself respectable for dinner. I told Roberto we would eat here, for there are no other guests tonight.” She had changed from the gunmetal business suit and turban into floating cloud-light layers of gossamer silk, and her hair was down to her waist, more lustrous than the cloth.

“I will open the champagne,” she said. “It needs two hands.” He wore the brocade gown, with his left arm still in a sling, and they stood and admired each other over the top of the champagne glasses.

“I was right.” She nodded comfortably. “Blue is your colour. You must wear it more often.” And he had to smile at the quaint compliment, and touched her glass with his.

The crystal pinged musically and they saluted each other before they drank. Immediately she set the glass aside, and her expression became serious.

“I spoke with my friends in the Sorete. They agree that it was a kidnap attempt against me, and because I asked it, they will not trouble you to make a statement until you feel better. I told them to send a man tomorrow to speak to you.

There was no sign of the second man you shot at on the edge of the woods, he must have been able to walk or been carried by his friends.” “And the other man?” Peter asked. “The dead one.”

“They know him well.

He had a very ugly past. Algeria with the par as The mutiny.” She spread her hands eloquently. “My friends were very surprised that he had not killed you when he tried to do so. I did not say too much about your own past. It is better, I think?”

“It’s better,” Peter agreed.

“When I am with you like this, I forget that you also are a very dangerous man.” She stopped and examined his face carefully. “Or is it part of the reason I find you so-” she searched for the word ” so compelling? You have such a gentle manner, Peter. Your voice is so soft and-” She shrugged. “But there is something in the way you smile sometimes, and in certain light your eyes are so blue and hard and cruel. Then I remember that you have killed many men. Do you think that is what attracts me?”

“I hope it is not.”

“Some women are excited by blood and violence the bullfight, the prize ring, there are always as many women as men at these, and I have watched their faces. I have thought about myself, and still I do not know it all. I know only that I am attracted by strong men, powerful men.

Aaron was such a man. I have not found many others since then.”

“Cruelty is not strength,” Peter told her.

“No, a truly strong man has that streak of gentleness and compassion. You are so strong, and yet when you make love to me it is with extreme gentleness, though I can always feel the strength and cruelty there, held in hate, like the falcon under the hood.” She moved away across the room furnished in cream and chocolate and gold, and she tugged the embroidered bell-pull that dangled from the corruced ceiling with its hand-painted panels, pastoral scenes of the type that Marie Antoinette had so admired. Peter knew that much of the furnishing of La Pierre Brute had been purchased at the auction sales with which the revolutionary committee dispersed the accumulated treasures of the House of Bourbon. With the other treasures there were flowers, wherever Magda Altmann went there were flowers.

She came back to him as Roberto, the Italian butler, supervised the entry of the dinner trolley, and then Roberto filled the wine glasses himself, handling the bottles with white gloves as though they were part of the sacrament, and stationed himself ready to serve the meal, but Magda dismissed him with a curt gesture and he bowed himself out silently.

There was a presentation-wrapped parcel at Peter’s place setting, tissue paper and an elaborately tied red ribbon. He looked up at her inquiringly as she served the soup into fragile Limoges bowls.

“Once I began buying presents, I could not stop myself,” she explained. “Besides, I kept thinking that bullet might have been in my back.” Then she was impatient. “Are you not going to open it?” He did so carefully, and then was silent.

“Africa, it is your speciality, is it not?” she asked anxiously. “Nineteenth-century Africa?” He nodded, and reverently opened the cover of the volume in its bed of tissue paper. It was fully bound in maroon leather, and the state of preservation was quite extraordinary, only the dedication on the flyleaf in the author’s handwriting was faded yellow.

“Where on earth did you find this?” he demanded. “It was at Sotheby’s in 1971. I bid on it then.” He had dropped out of the bidding at five thousand pounds.

“You do not have a first edition of Cornwallis Harris?” she asked again anxiously, and he shook his head, examining one of the perfectly preserved colour plates of African big game.

“No, I do not. But how did you know that?”

“Oh, I know as much about you as you do yourself,” she laughed. “Do you like it?”

“It is magnificent. I am speechless.” The gift was too extravagant, even for someone of her fortune. It troubled him, and he was reminded of the comedy situation of the husband who brings home flowers unexpectedly and is immediately accused by his wife. “Why do you have a guilty conscience?”

“Do you truly like it? I know so little about books.”

“It is the one edition I need to complete my major works,” he said. “And it is probably the finest specimen left outside the British Museum.” “I’m so glad.” She was genuinely relieved. “I was truly worried.” And she put down the silver soup ladle and lifted both arms to welcome his embrace.

During the meal she was gay and talkative, and only when Roberto had wheeled away the trolley and they settled side by side on the down-filled couch before the fire did her mood change again.

“Peter, today I have been unable to think of anything but this business you and me and Caliph. I have been afraid, and I am still afraid. I keep thinking of Aaron, what they did to him and then I think of you and what nearly happened.” They were silent, staring into the flames and sipping

“JAVA

coffee from the demi-tosses, then suddenly she had changed direction again. He was growing accustomed to these mercurial switches in thought.

“I have an island not one island, but nine little islands and in the cintre of them is a lagoon nine kilometres wide. The water is so clear you can see the fish fifty feet down. There is an airstrip on the main atoll. just under two hours” flying time to Tahiti. Nobody would ever know we were there. We could swim all day, walk in the sand, make love under the stars. You would be king of the islands, and I would be your queen. No more Altmann Industries I would find somebody as good or better than myself to run it. No more danger. No more fear. No more Caliph no more-” She stopped abruptly, as though she had been about to commit herself too far, but she went on quickly.

“Let’s go there, Peter. Let’s forget all this. Let’s just run away and be happy together, for ever.”

“It’s a pretty thought.” He turned to her, feeling deep and genuine regret.

“It would work for us. We would make it work.” And he said nothing, just watching her eyes, until she looked away and sighed.

“No.” She mirrored his regret. “You are right. Neither of us could ever give up living like that. We have to go on but, Peter, I am so afraid. I am afraid of what I know about you and of what I do not know. I am afraid of what you do not know about me, and what I never can tell you but we must go on. You are right. We have to find Caliph, and then destroy him. But, oh God, I pray we do not destroy ourselves, what we have found together I pray we will be able to keep that intact.”

“The best way to conjure up emotional disaster is to talk about it.”

“All right, let’s play riddles instead. My turn first. What is the most miserable experience known to the human female?”

“I

give up.”

“Sleeping alone on a winter’s night.”

“Salvation is at hand, “he promised her.

“But what about your poor shoulder?”

“If we combine our vast talents and wisdom, I am sure we will manage something.”

“I think you are right,” she purred and nestled against him like a sleek and silken cat. “As always.” There is always a delightfully decadent feeling about buying underwear for a beautiful woman, and Peter was amused by the knowing air of the middle-aged sales lady. She clearly had her own ideas about the relationship, and slyly produced a tray filled with filmy lace and iniquitously expensive wisps of silk.

“Yes,” Melissa Jane approved rapturously. “Those are exactly-” She held one of them to her cheek, and the sales lady preened at her own foresight. Peter hated to disillusion her, and he played the role of sugar-daddy a few moments longer as he glanced up at the mirror behind her head.

The tail was still there, a nondescript figure in a grey overcoat, browsing through a display of brassieres across the hall with the avid interest and knowledgeable air of a closet queen.

“I don’t really think your mother will approve, darling,” Peter said, and the sales woman looked startled.

“Oh, please, Daddy. I will be fourteen next month.” They had had a tail on him since he had arrived at Heathrow the previous afternoon, and Peter could not decide who they were. He began to regret he had not yet replaced the Cobra he had lost in the river.

“I think we’d better play it safe-” Peter told his daughter, and both Melissa-Jane and the sales lady looked crestfallen.

“Not bloomers!” Melissa-Jane wailed. “Not elastic legs.”

“Feb.

4”Compromise,” Peter suggested. “No elastic legs but no lace, not until you’re sixteen. I think painted fingernails is enough for right now.”

“Daddy, you can be so medieval, honestly!” He glanced at the mirror again, and they were changing the guard across the sales hall. The man in the shabby grey overcoat and checked woollen scarf drifted away and disappeared into one of the lifts. It would take some little time for Peter to spot his replacement and then he grinned to himself-, no it would not. Here he came now. He wore a tweed sports jacket in a frantic hounds tooth pattern, above Royal Stewart tartan trews and a grin like an amiable toad.

“Son of a gun. This is a surprise.” He came up behind Peter and hit him an open-handed blow between the shoulder blades that made Peter wince. At least he knew who they were at last.

“Colin.” He turned and took the massive paw with its covering of wiry black hair across the back. “Yes, it is a surprise. I’ve been falling over your gorillas since yesterday.” oafs” Colin Noble agreed amiably. “All of them, oafs!” And turned to seize Melissa-Jane. “You’re beautiful, he told her and kissed her with more than avuncular enthusiasm.

“Uncle Colin. You come straight from heaven.” Melissa Jane broke from the embrace and displayed the transparent panties. “What do you think of these?”

“It’s you, honey. You’ve just got to have them.” “Tell my father, won’t you?” Colin looked around the Dorchester suite and grunted. “This is really living. You don’t get it this good in this man’s army.”

“Daddy is truly becoming a bloated plutocrat just like Uncle Steven, “Melissa-jane agreed.

“I notice that you and Vanessa and the other comrades all wear lace panties,” Peter counter-attacked his daughter.

“That’s different.” Melissa-Jane backtracked swiftly, and hugged the green Harrod’s package defensively. “You can have a social conscience without dressing like a peasant, you know.”

“Sounds like a good life.” Peter threw his overcoat across the couch and crossed to the liquor cabinet. “Bourbon?”

“On the rocks,” said Colin.

“Is there a sweet sherry?” Melissa-Jane asked.

“There is Coke,” Peter answered. “And you can take it through to your own room, young lady.”

“Oh Daddy, I haven’t seen Uncle Colin for ages.”

“Scat, said Peter, and when she had gone, sweet sherry, forsooth.”

“It’s a crying bastard when they start growing up and they look like that.” Colin took the glass from Peter and rattled the ice cubes together as he lay back in the armchair.

“Aren’t you going to congratulate me?”

“With pleasure.” Peter took his own glass and stood at the windows, against the backdrop of bare branches and grey misty skies over Hyde Park. “What did you do?”

“Come on, Pete! Thor they gave me your job, after you walked out.”

“Before they fired me.”

“After you walked out,” Colin repeated firmly. He took a sip of the Bourbon and gargled it loudly. “There are a lot of things we don’t understand “Ours not to reason why, ours but to do and die.” Shakespeare.” He was still playing the buffoon, but the small eyes were as honey bright and calculating as those of a brand new teddy bear on Christmas morning. Now he waved his glass around the suite.

“This is great. Really it’s great. You were wasted in Thor everybody knew that. You must be pulling down more than all the joint-chiefs put together now.”

“Seven gets you five that you’ve already seen a Xeroxed copy of my contract of employment with Narmco.” “Narmco!” Colin whistled. “Is that who you’re working for? No kidding, Pete baby, that’s terrific!” And Peter had to laugh, it was a form of capitulation.

He came across and took the seat opposite Colin.

“Who sent you, Colin?”

“That’s a lousy question-“

“That’s just an opener.”

“Why should somebody have sent me? Couldn’t I just want to chew the fat with an old buddy?”

“He sent you because he worked it out that I might bust the jaw of anybody else.”

“Sure now and everybody knows we love each other like brothers.”

“What’s the message, Colin?” “Congratulations, Peter baby, I am here to tell you that you have just won yourself a return ticket to the Big Apple.” He placed one hand across his heart and sang with a surprisingly mellow baritone. “New York, New York, it’s a won erful town.” Peter sat staring impassively at Colin, but he was thinking swiftly. He knew he had to go. Somehow he was certain that something was surfacing through muddied waters, the parts were beginning to click together. This was the sort of thing he had hoped for when he put the word on the wind.

“When?”

“There is an airforce jet at Croydon right now.” “Melissa-Jane?”

“I’ve got a driver downstairs to take her home.”

“She’s going to hate you.”