“He’ll guess the plot and be as quiet as a mouse.” Giordino answered with certainty. He shoved her roughly into the underbrush beside the path. “Get in there and stay low till the guards pass by.”
Inexorably, the unswerving single beam of light grew larger as it approached. After having walked their circuit a hundred times in the past four months without seeing so much as a strange footprint, the two-man patrol should have been lax and careless. Routine inaction leads to boredom and indifference. They should have walked right on past, seeing only the same rocks, the same bends in the path, hearing the same faint beat of the surf pounding the rocks far below. But these men were highly trained and highly paid. Bored, yes, lethargic, no.
Giordino’s pulse jumped at seeing that the guards were studying every inch of the path as they walked. He could not have known that Dorsett paid a twenty-five thousand’ dollar bonus for the severed hand of every diamond smuggler that was caught. What became of the rest of the body was never known, much less discussed. These men took their work seriously. They spied something and stopped directly in front of Maeve and Giordino.
“Hello, here’s something the last patrol missed, or wasn’t here an hour ago.”
“What do you see?” asked his partner.
“Looks like a grappling hook off a boat.” The first guard dropped to one knee and brushed away the hurried camouflage. “Well, well, it’s attached to a line that drops down the cliff.”
“The first attempt to enter the island from the bluffs since that party of Canadian smugglers we caught three years ago.” Afraid to stand too close to the edge, the guard beamed his light down the cliff face, but saw nothing.
The other guard pulled out a knife and made ready to cut the line. “If any are waiting to come up from below, they’re about to be awfully disappointed.”
Maeve sucked in her breath as Giordino stepped out of the bushes onto the path. “Don’t you characters have anything better to do than wander around at night?”
The first guard froze, his knife hand raised in the air. The second guard spun around and leveled his Bushmaster M-16 assault rifle at Giordino. “Freeze in your position or I’ll fire.”
Giordino did as he was told, but tensed his legs in preparation to spring. Fear and temporary shock gripped him at realizing it was only a matter of seconds before Pitt would be hurtling toward the sea and rocks below. But the guard’s face went blank and he lowered his weapon.
His partner looked at him. “What’s wrong with you?”
He broke off, peered behind Giordino and saw a woman step into the beam of light. There was no fear in her expression, rather it was one of anger. “Put away your silly guns and behave as you were trained!” she snapped.
The guard with the flashlight beamed it at Maeve. He stood in silent surprise, peering intently into her face before finally mumbling, “Miss Dorsett?”
“Fletcher,” she corrected him. “Maeve Fletcher.”
“I ... we were told you drowned.”
“Do I look like I’ve been floating in the sea?” Maeve, in her ragged blouse and shorts, wasn’t sure how she appeared to the guards. But she knew without doubt that she didn’t look like the daughter of a billionaire diamond tycoon.
“May I ask what you’re doing here this time of the morning?” the guard asked politely but firmly.
“My friend and I decided to take a walk.”
The guard with the knife wasn’t buying it. “You’ll excuse me,” he said, grabbing the line in his free hand in readiness to slice it with his left, “but there is something very wrong here.”
Maeve stepped over and abruptly slapped the man with the leveled rifle across the cheek. The startling display of supremacy surprised both guards, and they hesitated. Swift as a coiled rattler, Giordino sprang at the nearer guard, brushing away the assault rifle and smashing his head into the man’s stomach. The guard grunted in a violent convulsion before crashing to the ground on his back. Giordino, losing his footing, toppled across the fallen guard.
In the same instant, Maeve threw herself at the guard poised to cut Pitt’s lifeline, but he swung a vicious backhand that caught her on the side of the head and stopped her in her tracks. Then he dropped the knife and threw up his assault rifle, the index finger of his right hand sliding against the trigger as he aimed the barrel at Giordino’s chest.
Giordino knew he was dead. Entangled with the offset guard, he had no time for any defensive move. He knew it was impossible to reach the guard before he saw the flash from the muzzle. He could do nothing but stiffen his body in expectation of the bullet’s impact.
But no shot rang out and no bullet struck Giordino’s flesh.
Unnoticed, a hand with an arm attached snaked over the edge of the cliff, reached up and snatched the ripe, jerking it out of the guard’s hands. Before the guard drew another breath, he was yanked into space. His final scream of terror echoed throughout the black void until it became muffled and died as if covered by a funeral shroud.
Then Pitt’s head, lit by the flashlight on the ground, raised above the cliff’s edge. The eyes blinked in the glare of the light and then the lips turned up in a slight grin.
“I believe that’s what you call flying in the face of adverse opinion.”
Maeve hugged Pitt. “You couldn’t have arrived at a more opportune moment.”
“How come you didn’t blast away with your little pop gun?” asked Giordino.
Pitt pulled the tiny automatic out of his back pocket and held it in the palm of his hand. “After the guard with the flashlight failed to find me hiding in a crevasse, I waited a minute and then pulled myself up to the edge of the cliff to see what was happening. When, I saw you were within an instant of being shot, there was no time to draw and aim. So I did the next best thing.”
“Lucky he did,” Maeve said to Giordino, “or you wouldn’t be here.”
Giordino was not one to display maudlin sentiment “Next chance I get, I’ll carry out his trash.” He glanced down at the guard who was writhing on the ground in the fetal position, clutching his abdomen. He picked up the M-16 and checked the ammo clip. “A nice addition to our arsenal.”
“What do we do with him?” asked Maeve. “Chuck him over the cliff?”
“Nothing so drastic,” answered Pitt. Instinctively, he glanced in both directions along the path leading along the ledge. “He can’t hurt us now. Better to gag and tie him up and leave him for his buddies to find. When he and his partner don’t show up to check in at the next guard station, they’re certain to come searching for them.”
“The next patrol won’t show up for another fifty minutes,” said Giordino, rapidly pulling the nylon line over the cliff’s edge onto the path. “Time enough for a good head start.”
Minutes later the guard, his eyes wide with fright and clothed only in his underwear, hung in space from the grappling hook, ten meters below the rim of the cliff top. The nylon line was wrapped around his body tightly, like a cocoon.
With Maeve as a guide, they set off along the cliff path. Giordino packed the diminutive automatic pistol, while Pitt, now clad in the guard’s uniform, carried the Bushmaster M-16. They no longer felt exposed and helpless. Irrational, Pitt knew, for there must have been no less than a hundred other security guards standing watch over the mines and the island’s shoreline. That wasn’t the worst of their problems. Now that there was no returning to the Marvelous Maeve, they would have to seek other means of transport, a plan Pitt had always held in the back of his mind without the foggiest notion of how to carry it out. That wasn’t a primary concern just yet. What mattered now was finding Maeve’s boys and stealing them out of the hands of their crazy grandfather.
After traveling about five hundred meters, Maeve held up a hand and gestured into the thick underbrush. “We’ll cross the island here,” she informed them. “A road curves to within thirty meters of where we stand. If we’re careful and remain out of sight of any traffic, we can follow the road into the central housing area for Dorsett employees.”
“Where are we in relation to the volcanoes that anchor each end of the island?” asked Pitt.
“We’re about half way between and opposite the lagoon.”
“Where do you think your boys might be held?” Giordino put to her.
“I wish I knew,” she said distantly. “My first guess is the manor house, but I wouldn’t put it past my father to keep them under guard, in the security compound, or worse, they’re kept by Jack Ferguson.”
“Not a good idea to wander around like tourists looking for a restaurant,” said Pitt.
