Avenger

They came back to the village to join the two hundred who had not gone to the fields. In the villas and the barracks, the first lights came on. At the far end of the triangle, a white glow revealed where the Serb's mansion was floodlit.

The mechanics on the airfield closed up and took their motorbikes to ride to the villas at the far end of the runway. When all was fenced and locked, the Dobermans were released, the world said farewell to September 6th, and the manhunter prepared to go down the escarpment.

28 The visitor

In a day of peering over the edge of the escarpment, Dexter had realised two things about it that had not showed up on his photographs. One was that it was not steep all the way down. The slope was perfectly climbable until about a hundred feet from the level plain, at which point it dropped sheer. But he had brought more than that length of good climbing rope.

The other was that the nudity of all weeds and shrubs was done through an act of man, not of nature. Someone, preparing the defences, had had teams of men come over the edge of the drop in rope cradles to rip every twig and shrub out of the crevices in the slope, so as to give no leaf cover at all. Where the saplings were slim enough to be entirely ripped out, they had been. But some had had a stem that was simply resistant to the pull of a man on a rope's end. These had been sawn off short, but not short enough. The stumps formed hundreds of hand-and-toe holds for a climber going down or up.

In daylight such a climber would have been instantly visible but not in darkness.

By 10:00 P.M. the moon was up, a sickle moon, just enough to give dim light to the climber, not enough to make him visible against the shale face. Delicacy would be needed not to cause a rockfall. Moving from stump to stump, Dexter began to ease his way down to the airfield below.

When the slope became too steep even for climbing, Dexter used the coiled rope around his shoulders to rappel the rest.

He spent three hours on the airfield. Years earlier another of his "clients" from the Tombs in New York had taught him the gentlemanly art of picking locks, and the set of picks he carried with him had been made by a master. The padlock on the doors of the hangar he left alone. The double doors would have rumbled if they were rolled back. There was a smaller door to one side, with a single Yaletype locking mechanism and it cost him no more than thirty seconds.

It takes a good mechanic to repair a helicopter and an even better one to sabotage it in such a ma

The mechanic the Serb employed to look after his helicopter was good, but Dexter was better. Up close he recognised the bird as an EC 120 Eurocopter, the single-engine version of the twin EC 135. It had a big Perspex bubble at the front end with excellent all-around, up-and-down observation for the pilot and the man beside him, plus room for three more behind them.

Dexter concentrated not on the main rotor mechanism but on the smaller tail rotor. If that malfunctioned, the "chopper" would simply not be fit to fly. By the time he had finished, it was certainly going to malfunction and be very hard to repair.

The door of the Hawker 1000 was open, so he had a chance to inspect the interior and ensure that the executive jet had had no serious internal reconfiguration.

When he locked up the main hangar, he broke into the mechanics' store, took what he wanted, but left no trace. Finally, he jogged gently to the far end of the runway, close to the backs of the residential villas, and spent his last hour there. In the morning one of the mechanics would notice with irritation that someone had borrowed his bicycle from where it leaned against the back fence.

When he had done all he came to do, Dexter found his hanging rope and climbed back to the stout stump where it was tied. Beyond that, he climbed, moving from root to root until he was back in his aerie. He was soaked toathe point where he could have wrung the sweat from his clothes. He consoled himself with the thought that body odour was one thing no one was going to notice in that part of the world. To replace the moisture, he allowed himself a full pint of water, checked the level of the remaining liquid, and slept. The tiny alarm in his watch woke him at six in the morning, just before the iron bar began to clang against the hanging rail far below.

At 7:00, Paul Devereaux raised McBride in his room at the Camino Real Hotel.

"Any news?" asked the man from Washington.

"None," said McBride. "It seems pretty sure he came back masquerading as an Englishman, Henry Nash, resort developer. Then he vaporised. His car has been identified as a rented Ford from Suriname. Moreno is starting a countrywide trawl for it about now. Should have news sometime today."

There was a long pause from the Counterterrorist chief, still sitting in a robe in his breakfast room in Alexandria, Virginia, before leaving for Langley.

"Not good enough," said Devereaux. "I'm going to have to alert our friend. It will not be an easy call. I'll wait till 10:00. If there is any news of a capture, or imminent capture before then, call me at once."

"You got it," said McBride.

There was no such news. At 10:00, Devereaux made his call. It took ten minutes for the Serb to be summoned from the swimming pool to the radio shack, a small room in his basement that, despite its traditional name, was no shack and contained some highly modern and eavesdrop-free communications equipment.

At 10:30, Dexter noticed a flurry of activity on the estate below him. Off-roads streamed from the mansion on the foreland, leaving trails of dust behind them. Below him the EC 120 was wheeled out of the hangar and its main rotors spread and locked into flying mode.

"Someone," he mused, "appears to have hit the alarm."

The helicopter crew arrived from their homes at the end of the runway on two motor scooters. Within minutes they were at the controls, and the big rotors began slowly to turn. The engine kicked into life, and the rotor rate rapidly increased to warm-up speed.

The tail rotor, vital to stop the whole machine from spi

The pilot and observer had been told by the instrument panel that they had a major bearing failure in the tail. They closed down. The main rotors ground to a halt, and the crew climbed back out. A group formed around the tail, staring upward at the damaged prop.

Uniformed guards poured into the village of the absent peons and began to search the cabanas, stores, even the church. Others, on four-wheelers, went off across the estate to spread the word to the gang masters to keep an eye open for any signs of an intruder. There were none. Such signs as there had been eight hours earlier had been too well disguised.

Dexter put the uniformed guards at around one hundred. There was a community of about a dozen on the airfield and the twelve hundred workers. Given more security perso

Just before midday, Paul Devereaux called his man in the storm centre.

"Kevin, you have to go over and visit with our friend. I have spoken to him. He is in a high state of temper. I ca