'Roger,' said Fitzduane. 'Tell Andreas to check his grenade bandolier and look for M433 HEDP rounds.'
There was a pause. Judith turned to Fitzduane. 'I'm keeping their heads down,' she said, 'but I don't have the ammunition to keep this up for long.' She held up two magazines. 'Just these and three in the weapon.' She fired again and inserted the next-to-last clip.
'We've found four,' said Murrough, 'and then the four HEDP.'
There was another pause, and then Murrough answered: 'Done.'
A figure, grenade in hand, made run from the tunnel. Now reloaded, Fitzduane and Judith both fired. The figure buckled but with a last effort threw the grenade. Helpless, they watched it land in the greenhouse. A cascade of brown liquid shot up into the air and rained downward.
'Shit,' said Murrough. 'It landed in some kind of liquid fertilizer tank. We're covered in the stuff.'
'That'll teach you,' said Fitzduane. 'Only a moron would pick a greenhouse to hide out in.'
'Get a move on,' said Judith.
Fitzduane grinned at her. She had a Swiss sense of humor. She shot like a Swiss, too. 'Murrough,' he said, 'at my command, put the 397s into the tunnel and then put the next four rounds into the tank – and if it works, run like hell to the front. We'll join you there.'
'And if it doesn't?' Murrough muttered to himself.
'Ready?' Fitzduane asked Judith.
'Ready.'
'Fire!' Fitzduane's automatic Browning boomed repeatedly, and Judith emptied her last magazine in a series of three-round bursts. Fitzduane could see movement in the greenhouse, where Murrough was firing the SA-80 on full automatic.
The fire from the tunnel slackened as the terrorists withered under this surge in the opposition's firepower. Andreas broke cover with the bulky Hawk grenade launcher in his hands. His covering fire slowed as Judith ran out of ammunition and Fitzduane reloaded. The terrorists in the tunnel raised their heads.
Andreas fired the first two grenades from the Hawk into the entrance. The grenades impacted on the floor, and a small charge in each one flung the projectile back into the air to chest height, where it exploded. Shrapnel raked the confined space, and the sound of screaming echoed out. He turned the Hawk toward the fuel tank and fired the four M433 high-explosive dual-purpose grenades in two seconds, then ran with all his might away from the line of the entrance, with Murrough sprinting behind him.
The first two grenades – capable of penetrating two inches of armor – were partially smothered by the concrete and sand safety cover that was itself blown apart in the process. The third and fourth grenades, their way now cleared, exploded inside the two-thousand-gallon tank, rupturing the container but not immediately setting fire to the contents.
Fuel poured into the tunnel and then blew when it encountered a red-hot grenade fragment. A fireball shot out of the entrance, engulfing the greenhouse that had so recently sheltered Andreas and Murrough.
There was silence from the tunnel mouth except for the crackling of flames. Black smoke billowed upward and stained the sky. At the bottom of the tunnel, and standing well to one side, Kadar felt the touch of a dragon's breath on his face. The men inside were dead, but most of the others had been withdrawn before the explosion.
The lead climbers were approaching the last stage of the ascent to the top of the cliff.
The
Island Road
– 1825 hours
The pilot of the Islander took his eyes off the group of students running toward him. They were now spread out in an irregular field more than a hundred yards long. He calculated that he could bring the aircraft to a halt about a quarter of a mile ahead of the leading runners, allowing plenty of time for the Phantom Air team to deplane and set up blocking positions.
The pilot felt his wheels touch the ground in a near-perfect landing. Ahead of him he saw the runners break to left and right and a Volvo station wagon accelerate from their midst and head straight toward him. Frantically he applied the brakes; the Volvo, bouncing and vibrating at high speed, he eaten up his runway margin in less than seven seconds. The pilot tried to imagine the effect of a head-on crash at a combined speed of more than a hundred miles an hour. He knew that whatever the outcome, after it was over, the respective occupants would be unlikely to take much interest in the matter.
He looked at the patch of bright green boggy ground that bordered the road to his left and then back at the Volvo, now only seconds away from impact. His resolve faltered. Better chicken than dead, he decided, and slid the plane off the road into the bright green grass. A mere fraction of a second later the Volvo skidded to a tire-burning halt on the other side of the road.
'A draw!' the terrorist pilot said to himself, feeling pleased that the Volvo driver's nerve had cracked only a split second after his. But the pilot's glee didn't last long. The bright green grass was, in fact, algae, he noted, and his aircraft, complete with the entire Phantom Air Unit, sank in twelve feet of scummy brown water.
'Fuck that for a caper,' said Fitzduane as he stood on the verge and watched air bubbles make patterns on the green surface. 'It's always easier to play a match on your home ground.'
Runners streamed past him, and he waved them on toward the castle. De Guevain and Henssen puffed to a halt beside the Volvo.
'You're absolutely crazy,' said de Guevain, shaking his head. Sweat streamed off him.
'Crazy but effective,' corrected Henssen.
Fitzduane grinned, then opened the tailgate of the Volvo. 'You old people,' he offered, 'need a lift?'
Fitzduane's Island – 1845 hours
The castle portcullis crashed into place as the first of the terrorists reached the top of the cliff. Farther down the road there was a series of scummy plops as the two surviving members of Phantom Air who had escaped from the aircraft pulled themselves out of the algae and started to walk back to the college. Neither was looking forward to Kadar's reception, but there was nowhere else to go.
27
Ranger Headquarters, Dublin – 1945 hours
The director general of the Irish Tourist Board was an urbane-looking silver-haired political appointee in his early fifties. His main operational tools – whatever the issue – were his smile, his connections, and his ability to say virtually nothing endlessly until the opposition was worn down.
In this case the issue was the proposed detention of a group of Middle Eastern travel agents by the Rangers. His aides had assured him that arresting visiting travel agents was unlikely to advance the cause of Irish tourism – and it would look and sound really lousy on television.
'Lousy on television' – the director general reacted to such stimuli like a dog to Pavlov's bell. He salivated, nearly panicked, and demanded an immediate crisis meeting with the commander of the Rangers.
It took Kilmara ninety minutes to get rid of the idiot and his supporting cast. Only then did he return to his desk to find that the informal two-hourly radio check he had agreed upon with Fitzduane during their last call had not been made and that the telephone line seemed to be out of order. A call to the security detail at DrakerCollege proved to be equally abortive, which was not surprising since all the phones on the island ran off the same cable. He put a call in to the police station at Ballyvonane, the nearest village on the mainland. He knew the station itself would be closed at this time of the evening, but the normal routine was for calls to be transferred to the duty policeman at his home.
