“It’s a violent, unrelenting world,” Giordino sighed. “Absolutely worthless without a good challenge now and then.”
“There speaks the backbone of America,” Pitt said with a smile. He stared up at the moon as if appraising it. “I figure we have just enough light to do the job.”
“You still haven’t explained how we’re going to come ashore unobserved by Daddy’s security guards,” said Maeve.
“First, tell me about the cliffs surrounding Gladiator Island.”
She looked at him queerly for a moment, then shrugged. “Not much to tell. The cliffs encircle the whole landmass except for the lagoon. The western shore is pounded by huge waves. The eastern side is calmer but gill dangerous.”
“Are there any small inlets on the eastern shore with a sandy beach and natural rock chimneys cut into the cliffs?”
“There are two that I remember. One has a good entrance but a tiny beach. The other is more narrow but with a broader stretch of sand. If you’re thinking of landing at either one, you can forget it. Their bluffs rise steeply for a good hundred meters. A first-rate professional rock climber using all the latest techniques and equipment wouldn’t think of attempting that climb in the dead of night.”
“Can you guide us into the narrow channel with the roomy beach?” asked Pitt.
“Didn’t you hear me?” Maeve said flatly. “You might as well climb Mount Everest with an ice pick. And then there are the security guards. They patrol the bluffs every hour.”
“At night too?”
“Daddy leaves no door open for diamond smugglers,” she said as if explaining to a schoolchild.
“How large is the patrol?”
“Two men, who make one complete circuit of the island during their shift. They’re followed by another patrol on the hour.”
“Is it possible for them to see the beach from the edge of the bluff?” Pitt grilled her.
“No. The cliff is too steep to see straight down.” She looked at Pitt, her eyes in the moonlight wide and questioning. “Why all the interrogation about the backside of the island? The lagoon is the only way in.”
He exchanged scheming looks with Giordino. “She has the luscious body of a woman but the mind of a skeptic.”
“Don’t feel bad,” Giordino said, yawning. “Women never believe me either.”
Pitt gazed on the rocks that had had a long roll of fatalities, rocks where the shipwrecked men who survived wished they had drowned rather than suffer untold miseries as slaves in the Dorsett diamond mines. For a long time, as the cliffs of Gladiator Island loomed up out of the darkness, no one on the Marvelous Maeve moved or spoke. Pitt saw Maeve’s back as she lay in the bow, acting as lookout for any offshore rocks. He glanced at Giordino and caught the white blur of his friend’s face and the slow nod as he stood poised to start the outboard motor.
The light from the half-moon was more than he dared hope for. It was enough to illuminate the steeply angled palisades, but sufficiently meager to prevent the Marvelous Maeve from being observed by probing eyes on the bluffs. As if the partial moon wasn’t blessing enough, the sea cooperated with a fairly smooth surface of low, passive swells, and there was a following wind. Without an easterly breeze, Pitt’s best laid plans for infiltrating the island would go down the drain. He turned the trimaran on a course parallel to the island’s shoreline. At seventy meters a white horizontal blur, trimmed with phosphorescence, grew out of the darkness, accompanied by the low drumming of seas rolling against the cliffs.
Until they sailed around the tip of the island, and the back of the volcano shielded the little boat from the sweeping beam of the Gladiator lighthouse, Pitt felt like a convict in an old prison movie, trying to escape over a wall with searchlights playing all around. Strangely, all conversation dropped to hushed tones as if they could be heard over the soft boom of the surf.
“How far to the inlet?” he called to Maeve softly.
“I think it’s about a kilometer up the shore from the lighthouse,” she answered without turning.
The boat had lost considerable way after swinging east to north along the shoreline, and Pitt was finding it difficult to maintain a steady course. He raised a hand as a signal to Giordino to start the outboard motor. Three heartbeats slowed and then suddenly increased as Giordino pulled on the starter rope, ten, twenty, thirty times without success.
Giordino paused, massaged his tiring arm, stared menacingly at the ancient motor and began talking to it. “You don’t start on the next pull, I will attack and unnecessarily mutilate every bolt in your crankcase.” Then he took a firm grip on the pull handle and gave a mighty heave. The motor snorted and its exhaust puffed a few moments before settling down to a steady snarl. Giordino wiped the sweat from his face and looked pleased. “One more manifestation of Giordino’s law,” he said, catching his breath. “Deep down, every mechanical contrivance has a fear of being junked.”
Now that Giordino steered the craft with the outboard, Pitt lowered the sails and removed his kite from the deckhouse. He deftly looped a coil of thin line on the deck of the boat. Then he tied a small grappling hook, found at York’s campsite, to the line slightly below where it attached to the kite. Then he sat and waited, knowing in his heart of hearts that what he had in mind had only one chance of succeeding out of too many to count.
“Steer port,” warned Maeve, gesturing to her left. “There is a pinnacle of rocks about fifty meters dead ahead.”
“Turning to port,” Giordino acknowledged as he pulled the steering handle of the outboard toward him, swinging the bows around on a twenty-degree angle toward shore. He kept a cautious eye on the white water swirling around several black rocks that rose above the surface until they were safely astern.
“Maeve, see anything yet?” asked Pitt.
“I can’t be certain. I never had to find the bloody inlet in the dark before,” she replied testily.
Pitt studied the swells. They were growing steeper and closer together. “The bottom is coming up. Another thirty meters and we’ll have to turn for open water.”
“No, no,” Maeve said in an excited voice. “I think I see a break in the cliffs. I’m sure of it. That’s the inlet that leads to the largest beach.”
“How far?” Pitt demanded.
“Sixty or seventy meters,” she answered, rising to her knees and pointing toward the cliffs.
Then Pitt had it too. A vertical opening in the face of the palisades that ran dark in the shadows out of the moonlight. Pitt wetted his finger and tested the wind. It held steady out of the east. “Ten minutes,” he begged under his breath. “All I need is ten minutes.” He turned to Giordino. “Al, can you hold us in a steady position about twenty meters from the entrance?”
“It won’t be easy in the surge.”
“Do your best.” He turned to Maeve. “Take the tiller and aim the bow head-on into the swells. Combine your efforts with Al’s on the outboard to keep the boat from swinging broadside.”
Pitt unfolded the struts on his homemade kite. When extended, the Dacron surface measured nearly two and a half meters high. He held it up over the side of the boat, pleased to see it leap up out of his hands as the breeze struck its bowed surface. He payed out the line as the kite rose and dipped in the predawn sky.
Maeve suddenly saw the genius behind Pitt’s mad plan. “The grappling hook,” she blurted. “You’re trying to snag it on the top of the bluffs and use the line to climb the cliffs.”
“That’s the idea,” he replied as he focused his gaze on the obscure shape of the kite, just slightly visible under the half-light from the moon.
Adroitly jockeying the throttle of the outboard and the Forward/Reverse lever, Giordino performed a masterful job of keeping the boat in one spot. He neither spoke nor took his eyes off the sea to observe Pitt’s actions.
Pitt had prayed for a steady wind, but he got more than he bargained for. The onshore breeze, meeting resistance from the rising palisades, curved and rushed up their steep face before sweeping over the summit. The big kite was nearly pulled from his grip. He used a sleeve of his battered leather jacket as a protective glove, holding it around the line to keep the friction from burning his hands. The immense drag was nearly pulling his arms out of their sockets. He clamped his teeth together and hung on, mentally plagued by any number of things that could go wrong, any one of which would end their undertaking a sudden shift in the wind smashing the kite against
