'Dead men,' Smuts replied from the gun cage.
Hans Apfel could not move. He lay in the absolute darkness of a cell
one hundred meters below the earth. This was the same cell in which
Jiirgen Luhr had spent his first night in South Africa. Hans was bound
to a heavy cot with rope and gagged with a thick strip of cloth.
He could only breathe through his nose. No sound had reached his ears
for hours, save the occasional sibilant hiss of a ventilator blowing air
into his cell.
Suddenly, a deep, buzzing alarm blasted through the basement complex.
Every muscle in Hans's body contracted in shock. What was happening? A
fire? For the hundredth time he expelled every ounce of air from his
lungs and tried to shift his body on the cot. It was no use. He had
never felt so
'
helpless in his life. Yet despite his fear for Ilse, one desperate hope
flickered in his brain: Is it my father?
'I've almost got it,' Stern grunted, working feverishly at the lock on
the bedroom door. By intertwining the tines of Ilse's stolen forks and
snapping off several, he'd managed to fashion the dinner fork into a
serviceable lock pick.
'Hurry!' Ilse urged. 'I don't think we have much time.'
'Did Horn seem upset?' Stern asked, still working. 'Surprised?
Frightened?'
'Not really. Please, hurry. We must find Hans!'
At that moment the clouds opened. The rain lashed the roof of Horn
House in great sheets, then settled into a steady torrent that would
soon turn the surrounding gullies into raging rivers.
'Got it!' Stern cried. He cracked the door slightly, then flung it
wide.
Ilse darted into the hall. 'Where should we start?'
'Beat on every locked door you can find. If Hans is here, he'll be
behind one.'
'Aren't you coming?'
'You don't need me to find your husband. I've got something else to
do.'
'What?'
'After what you told me, you ask me that? Move girl!'
Stern spun Ilse around, put a hand between her shoulder blades and
shoved her down the hall. She hesitated a moment; then, seeing that the
Israeli meant what he said, she started slowly up the corridor.
Stern clenched the broken fork tightly in his fist and set out in the
opposite direction.
The JetRanger helicopters skimmed across the veld like great steel
dragonflies. In the distance Burton could just make out the copper dome
of Horn's 'observatory' glinting through the heavy rain. He flattened
his palm and dropped it close.to his thigh, indicating that Diaz should
fly still closer to the earth. The Cuban muttered something in Spanish,
but the scrub brush rose up into the Plexiglas windshield until Burton
felt he was tearing across the veld on a horse gone mad. Even the few
stunted trees they passed rose higher than the chopper's rotors.
'See it?' Burton yelled, pointing.
The Cuban nodded.
'We should see an airstrip soon. That's our objective.
Set right down on it!'
Burton poked his head back into the crowded cabin and gave the
Colombians a thumbs-up signal. Most of them looked airsick, but
Alberto-the guerilla observer-grinned back, his square white teeth
flashing in the shadows.
Forty seconds later, Diaz wheeled the JetRanger in a wide circle and
settled onto the freshly laid asphalt fifty meters from Horn's Leadet.
Burton punched open the Plexiglas door and jumped to the ground. Just
as they had practiced a dozen times on the Casilda's afterdeck, the
Colombians poured out of the chopper one after another, looking, for all
their amateurishness, like a squad of marines securing a hot LZ. A
quick glance across the tarmac told Burton that the men on the other
chopper were doing the same. 'See you after the party!' he shouted to
Diaz.
The Cuban shook his head. 'English loco, he muttered, twirling his
forefinger beside his temple.
The Colombians crouched at the edge of the rotor blast, waiting for
Burton to take the lead. The mercenary jumped to the ground and
immediately started toward the distant dome at an easy trot. The
Colombians, twenty-two in all, followed closely.
Thirty seconds' running brought them up short at the rim of the Wash.
Burton stared angrily into the ravine. He'd been told to expect a
shallow trench, no more than a thirtysecond delay. But the summer
cloudburst had turned this steep-sided gully into a treacherous river
that would take minutes, not seconds, to cross. Three feet of muddy
runoff churned through the undergrowth near the bottom, and the water
was rising fast, 'Move!' Burton shouted, and leaped over the lip of the
ravine. He half-fell, half-slid toward the torrent below.
Looking back, he saw the Colombians skidding down behind him. Two
minutes later they all stood en the opposite rim of the Wash, huddling
against the rain. Burton started slogging westward again without a
word. For a few minutes he saw nothing ahead but rain. Then, like a
mirage, the whole stunning specter of Horn house appeared out of the
downpour.
Burton's blood ran cold. One glance told him that his 'inside' informer
didn't know his ass from his elbow. The 'soft' objective he had been
briefed to expect stood like a medieval fortress on a hill at the center
of a huge expanse of open ground. Ten men armed with medium machine
guns could defend,that house indefinitely against a force the size he
had brought.
His ragtag outfit had only one hopesurprise.
The Colombians had not yet picked up on the alarming deterioration of
their situation, and Burton didn't intend for them to. 'All right,
lads!' he barked. 'Change of plan! I'd intended to use the mortar to
soften the target for you'Burton paused while a bilingual Colombian
interpreted'but this open ground changes everything. If I open up
