Avenger

"So, this is where they caught him," said Van Rensberg.

The handler, still puzzled by the behaviour of his pack, scooped up the bloodstained cotton blouse and held it to his nose. Then he jerked his face away.

"Bloody man!" he screamed. "Chilli powder, fine-ground green chilli powder. It's stiff with the stuff. No wonder the poor bastards are screaming. That's not excitement; they're in pain."

"When will their muzzles work again?"

"Well, not today, boss, maybe not tomorrow."

They found the cotton pants, also impregnated with chilli powder, and the straw hat, even the canvas espadrilles. But no body, no bones, nothing but the stains on the shirt.

"What did he do here?" Van Rensberg asked the handler.

"He cut himself, that's what the swine did. He cut himself with a knife, then bled over the shirt. He knew that would drive the dogs crazy. Man blood always does when they're on a kill patrol. So they would smell the blood, and inhale the chilli."

Van Rensberg counted up the items of clothing.

"He also stripped down," he said. "We're looking for someone stark naked."

"Maybe not," said McBride.

The South African had outfitted his force along military lines. They all wore the same uniform. Into canvas, midcalf combat boots, they tucked khaki drill trousers. Each had a broad leather belt with a buckle. Above the waist each man had a shirt in the pale African-bush camouflage known as "leopard." Sleeves were cut at the midforearm, then rolled up to the bicep and ironed flat.

One or two inverted chevrons indicated corporal or sergeant, while the four junior officers had cloth "pips" on the epaulettes of their shirts.

What McBride had discovered, snagged on a thorn near the path where evidently a struggle must have taken place, was an epaulette, ripped off a shirt. It had no pips.

"I don't think our man is naked at all," said McBride. "I think he's wearing a camouflage shirt, minus one epaulette, khaki drill pants, and combat boots. Not to mention a bush hat like yours, Major."

Van Rensberg was the colour of raw terra-cotta. But the evidence told its own story. Two scars along the grit showed where a pair of heels had apparently been dragged through the long grass. At the end of the trail was the stream.

"Throw a body in there," muttered the major, "it'll be over the cliff edge by now."

*And we all know how you love your sharks*, thought McBride, but said nothing.

The full enormity of his predicament sank into Van Rensberg's mind. Somewhere, on a sixthousandacre estate, with access to weapons and a four-wheeler, face shaded by a broad-brimmed bush hat, was a professional mercenary contracted, so he presumed, to blow his employer's head off.

He said something in Afrikaans, and it was not nice. Then he got on the radio. "I want twenty extra and fresh guards to the mansion. Other than them, let no one in but me. I want them fully armed, scattered immediately throughout the grounds around the house. And I want it now." They drove back, crosscountry, to the walled mansion on the foreland. It was 3:45.

31 The sting

After the searing heat of the sun on bare skin, the water of the stream was like balm. But it was dangerous water, for its speed was slowly increasing as it rushed between concrete banks to the sea.

At the point where he entered the water, it would still have been possible for Dexter to climb out the other side. But he was too far from the point he needed to be, and he heard the dogs far away. Also, he had seen the tree from his mountaintop and even earlier in the aerial photographs.

His last piece of unused equipment was a small, folding grappling hook and a twenty-foot twine lanyard. As he swept between the banks, along a twisting course, he unfolded the three prongs, locked them rigid and slipped the loop of the lanyard around his right wrist.

He came around a corner in the torrent and saw the tree ahead. It grew on the bank, at the airfield side of the water, and two heavy branches leaned over the stream. As he approached, he reared out of the water, swung his arm, and hurled the grappling hook high above him.

He heard the crash as the metal slammed into the tangle of branches, swept under the tree, felt the pain in his right arm socket as the hooks caught and the rush downriver stopped abruptly.

Hauling himself back on the twine, he crabbed his way to the bank and pulled his torso out. The water pressure eased, confined to his legs. With his free hand digging into the earth and grass, he dragged the rest of his body onto terra firma.

The grappling hook was lost in the branches. He simply reached as high as he could, sliced the lanyard with his knife and let it flutter above the water. He knew he was a hundred yards from the airfield wire that he had cut forty hours earlier. There was nothing for it but to crawl. He put the nearest hounds at still a mile away and across the stream. They would find the bridges but not just yet.

When he was lying in the darkness by the airfield's chain-link fence two nights earlier, he had cut a vertical and horizontal slice, to create two sides of a triangle, but left one thread intact to maintain the tension. The bolt cutters he had pushed under the wire into the long grass, and that was where he found them.

The two cuts had been retied with thin, green plastic-coated gardener's wire. It took not a minute to unlace the cuts; he heard a dull twang as the tension wire was sliced, and he crawled through. Still on his belly, he turned and laced it up again. From only ten yards the cuts became invisible.

On the farmland side, the peons cut hay for forage on spare tracts of grassland, but on each side of the runway it grew a foot long. Dexter found the bicycle and the other things he had stolen, dressed himself so as not to burn in the sun, and lay motionless to wait. A mile away, through the wire, he heard the hounds find the bloodied clothes.

By the time Major Van Rensberg, at the wheel of his Land Rover, reached the mansion gate, the fresh guards he had ordered were already there. A truck was stopped outside and the men jumped down, heavily armed and clutching M-16 assault carbines. The young officer lined them up in columns as the oaken gates swung apart. The column of men jogged through and quickly dispersed across the parkland. Van Rensberg followed, and the gates closed.

The steps McBride had mounted to the pool terrace when he arrived were ahead of them, but the South African pulled to the right, around the terrace to the side. McBride saw doorways at the lower level and the electrically operated gates of three underground garages.

The butler was waiting. He ushered them inside, and they followed him down a passage, past doors leading to the garages, up a flight of stairs, and into the main living area.

The Serb was in the library. Although the late afternoon was balmy, he had chosen discretion over valour. He sat at a conference table with a cup of black coffee and gestured his two guests to sit down. His bodyguard, Kulac, loomed in the background, back against a wall of unread first editions, watchful.

"Report," said Zilic, without ceremony.

Van Rensberg had to make his humiliating confession that someone, acting alone, had slipped into his fortress; gained access to the farmland by posing as a labourer; and escaped death by the dogs by killing a guard, dressing in his uniform, and tossing the body into the fast-flowing stream.

"So where is he now?"

"Between the wall around this park and the chain link protecting the village and airfield, sir."

"And what do you intend to do?"

"Every single man under my command, every man who wears that uniform, will be called up by radio and checked for identity."

"*Quis custodiet ipsos custodes*?' asked McBride. The other two looked at him blankly. "Sorry. Who guards the guardians themselves? In other words, who checks the checkers? How do you know the voice on the radio isn't lying?"