worry about your men, were I you.”
Dow bobbed his head. “You may joke now but as soon as it is light, you will find little to amuse you.”
Lang shoved Dow against the wall with one hand, handing the rifle to Gurt with the other. Then he removed the bayonet, pressing its point against the colonel’s crotch.
“If we’re here by the time it’s light, you’ll be eligible for the Vienna Boys’ Choir.”
“Surely you don’t think you can threaten-”
Lang pushed a little harder, gratified by Dow’s gasp. “Get your men’s attention. You are to instruct them exactly as I say.”
Dow snorted. “Absurd! You’ll kill me.”
“Actually, I have other plans for you, but they don’t have to include the first part of your sex-change surgery.”
Lang lowered the bayonet and grabbed a handful of the colonel’s crotch through his pants. He raised the cutting edge of the bayonet about a foot above the clump of cloth. “On three you join Eunuchs Anonymous. One, two…”
Dow had apparently experienced a speedy attitude adjustment. Or perhaps a realization Lang wasn’t kidding. “Wait! What is it you require of me?”
Lang told him.
“Absurd! You will never succeed!”
Lang shrugged, a gesture he realized was now visible in the smoky light of predawn. “For your sake, you’d better make sure it does.”
Dow stood against the low wall, cleared his throat and began to speak in a loud voice. Crouched behind him, Gurt and Lang could see the men below cease their frenetic activity and look upward to their commander.
“How do we know he is not telling his men where we are? You do not know Chinese.” Gurt whispered.
“I don’t, but you must admit he has a major incentive to do as I ask. Forget the hearts and minds. When you literally have someone by the balls, they are very likely to agree with you.”
The light had grown sufficiently for Lang to see the skeptical look on her face. “You better be right or…”
The alternative was never spelled out. Below, the men fell into lines forming ranks. At a command from Dow, echoed by a half-dozen subordinate officers, the men crisply did a right face and marched toward the Citadelle’s entrance.
Although they moved too quickly for Lang to count, he noted they moved five to the rank, five files to the group. He guessed he was watching between a hundred and a hundred and ten men march parade-style out of the fortress.
Dow, his face now visible in the light growing in the east, wore the expression of a man whose team is well ahead of the point spread. “I did as you asked, Mr. Reilly. My men will cross the pathway to where the forest begins. No matter what they do, they will be between you and escape.”
“Can he order them to let us through?” Gurt asked.
“A little too risky,” Lang answered. “If he changes his mind… I hope I’ve solved that problem.”
Keeping the rifle pointed at the Chinese officer, Lang gestured with his free hand. “OK, nice and slow, let’s go down and out of here.”
At the entrance, Lang could see the last of the soldiers carefully picking their way single file along the narrow crest that formed the only approach to the fortress. He guessed it would take at least thirty minutes for the last of them to disappear into the forest.
The steep sides of the path were still obscured in shadows, darkness that was retreating with reluctance before the dawn’s probing fingers.
In the latitudes between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, neither sunrise nor sunset is a prolonged event. Dawn comes with a grayness that seeps rapidly across the sky as though spilled from some giant container. It reaches the western horizon just as the tip of a burnished-copper sun seems to squeeze between water and sky in the opposite direction, setting aflame fleecy clouds that have ventured too close. The entire process from night to sunlight unravels in less than fifteen minutes.
“And now?” Gurt wanted to know.
Lang checked his watch. “And now we wait.”
“For what?” she insisted.
“For Miles.”
The surprise was clear on her face. “Miles? Here?”
“As soon as it gets light enough.”
Dow chuckled. “I do not know for whom you wait, Mr. Reilly, but unless they drop from the sky, how will they get here? You have no choice: you cannot get past my men. Surrender and save us all time.”
Lang looked around until he found a reasonably flat rock. He motioned Dow to sit before seating himself so the officer was between him and any potential sniper among the Chinese troops. “I believe your people view patience as a virtue, do they not, Colonel?”
Dow did not reply. Instead, he asked, “May I smoke?”
Lang nodded amiably. “Your lungs. But make sure your hand moves slowly. If I recall, your cigarettes and lighter are in your right breast pocket. I wouldn’t recommend reaching anywhere else.”
The three sat in silence as the light breeze of the morning succumbed to the day’s increasing heat. Mist was rising from the gorge below, soon to give birth to the day’s clouds, which would embrace the old fort in misty arms. Hopefully, after Miles’s arrival. Lang watched his prisoner closely but the man did little other than chain-smoke, lighting one cigarette with another.
At first Lang was conscious only of a sound, a noise he could neither place nor identify as it beat like a bird’s wing against the mountainsides. It was alien to the call of the birds from the forest or the whinny of horses back in the Citadelle, impatient for their morning feed. Slowly the rhythmic whop-whop of rotor blades became distinguishable. As though from a magician’s hat, a black object seemed to pop out of the very ground beneath their feet as a helicopter rose from the gorge below. Someone had been skimming the uneven Haitian terrain to evade radar.
Though it had no markings, Lang recognized the machine as an old Russian Mi-8 “Hip,” an aircraft that had served both as a civilian airborne office and military command post. Over ten thousand had been manufactured, enough sold abroad to make the aircraft’s nationality neutral.
“As you suggested, Colonel, from the sky.” Lang raised his voice to be heard over the racket as he spoke to Gurt. “Keep our friend here covered while I make sure they see us.”
Lang walked away from the sheltering walls of the Citadelle, waving his arms until the helicopter hovered directly above him. The moment it stopped, the crack of a rifle, then another, echoed from mountaintop to gorge and back again. Dow’s troops were not going to stand idly by.
Lang ducked behind a boulder as some sort of heavy weapon from the chopper chattered a reply. His guess was a. 50-caliber mounted along the open port in the ship’s fuselage. Toward the forest, he could see puffs of dust as the gun traced the tree line with lead and rock chips, deadly as bullets, flying through the air. The rifle fire went quiet.
Above him, a rope ladder unfurled to within a foot or so of the ground. The saddle between forest and Citadelle was too narrow for a landing. He turned to motion Gurt. She had already seen what was happening and was prodding Dow toward the hovering aircraft. Rifle at the ready, Lang kept behind a trio of rock protrusions until she and her prisoner disappeared into the helicopter.
As the aircraft dipped its nose preparatory to moving off, Lang dashed for the ladder. He had reached the second rung when he felt it being reeled in.
Once he was inside, a man in a uniform without insignia handed him a headset, which he put on. A nudge at his shoulder caused him to turn. He was standing less than a foot from a smiling Miles.
The grin vanished as he saw Lang’s face. “Shit, Reilly,” the words crackled through the earphones. “What did you shave with this morning, a meat grinder?”
Dominican airspace
Fourteen minutes later
Coffee had never tasted better, even though it was out of a thermos. Thermals, already building in the day’s increasing heat, made a bumpy road of the air at an altitude of only three hundred feet just off a ribbon of golden
