'I hate surprises,' said Andreas.
Noble was speaking by hand radio to Fitzduane. He put down the radio and fired several single shots into the darkness toward the spread-out line of advancing terrorists. Andreas watched them dive to the ground and then cautiously rise again when they realized that no one had been hit and the opposition was light.
There was an enormous explosion behind them from the direction of the keep. They both looked at the radio, which remained silent. Noble reached out and picked it up. He was about to press the call button when Fitzduane's voice crackled out of it. 'Relax,' it said. 'That's part of the Bear's war, and he's doing just fine. Now get on with the gate.'
Andreas looked at Noble. 'Does he mean what I think he means?'
'It's what we planned,' said Noble. 'He wants us to open the portcullis.' He pressed the switch, wondering if they still had power or if they would have to crank it by hand. The old motor whirred, then caught, and the spiked portcullis began to rise from the ground.
'This is crazy,' said Andreas. 'They'll get in.'
'I think that's the whole idea,' said Noble.
Andreas felt his bowels go liquid. He could hear Noble inserting a fresh magazine into the pistol grip of the Uzi and the click as the weapon was cocked. Noble indicated the Hawk grenade launcher and the bandolier of 40 mm grenades. 'Flechette rounds,' he said, 'then armor-piercing explosive.'
The fighting platform of the keep was the best observation point in the castle. That was fine, except for the fact that it could clearly be seen to be so and as such was likely to attract unwelcome attention.
Apart from the anticipated volume of incoming fire, Fitzduane had been worried about its nature. The top of the keep was a flat, open rectangle with a high crenellated parapet that would tend to concentrate the effect of blast. It could be neutralized with one single mortar round or even a couple of grenades.
Fitzduane's solution led one student to remark that the Fitzduane family motto should be 'Dig and Live' and its coat of arms a crossed pick and shovel on a background of sweat-saturated sandbags. A block and tackle were rigged on the platform, and a seemingly unending succession of sandbags and balks of timber and pieces of corrugated iron was hauled up. Te result was a fair reproduction of a First World War trench dugout in the sky. The roof was designed to be mortarproof – at least for the first couple of blasts (during which time the occupants, if they had any sense, would bug out to the floor below). As it happened, the construction of the dugout roof made all the difference.
The pilots selected for the Powerchutes, two brothers, Husain and Mohsen, were Iranians and followers of a modified version of the teachings of Hasane Sabbah, had founded the sect of the Assassins in the Elburz Mountains north of Teheran in the purity of assassination as a political tool had been tempered by the discovery that the game could work two ways. After an Israeli hit team had whittled their dedicated band of twenty down to just the pair of them, they had added the profit motive to the teachings of Hasane Sabbah. But they still retained enough fanaticism, or were just plain dumb enough, in Kadar's judgment, to be prepared to push their attacks to the absolute limit.
Photographs and drawings of the main features of Fitzduane's castle had been found in several books in the DrakerCollege library, so the brothers had been thoroughly briefed. The plan was for the first Powerchute, flown by Husain, to swoop in and drop a satchel charge on the keep's fighting platform while the second Powerchute, flown by Mohsen, would send its specially weighted charge through the slate roof of the great hall, into the yawning aperture made by the explosion of the weighted satchel charge, thus setting the top floor of the building alight -one guidebook made great reference to ‘the splendor of the carved oak beams dating back from medieval times’ – and rendering it uninhabitable. The pilots would then cut their engines and, using only the steerable ramjet parachutes of the Powerchutes, would land on the cleared fighting platform and hold it while their brethren reinforced them by climbing up from below on ropes.
The entire Powerchute attack, Kadar calculated, could be completed in less than ninety seconds. To check this, a rehearsal was carried out on the mock-Gothic keep of DrakerCollege. Using dummy bombs and in daylight, the two brothers clocked in, on their first attempt, at a creditable ninety-four seconds, including a final sweep of the ‘fighting platform’ with automatic rifle fire as they sailed down. They shaved a further five seconds off with practice.
The actual attack did not work out according to plan except that it accelerated the brothers' path to the goal of all followers of Hasane Sabbah killed in the line of duty: Eternal Paradise. But it was close.
The Powerchutes achieved total surprise. With the noise of their engines drowned by a fusillade from the cordon of terrorists, Husain was able to sweep in undetected and release his satchel charge – a webbing satchel containing plastic explosive, shrapnel, and a three-second fuse – exactly over the target. Unfortunately the light of the half-moon as it shone intermittently through the scurrying clouds made visibility difficult, and he didn't see the dugout that had been constructed on the platform.
The bomb glanced off the dugout and slid down toward the slate roof of the great hall. Exploding in near- perfect imitation of a directional mine, the shrapnel caught the second Powerchute on its approach, which was lower than intended thanks to the fickleness of the Irish wind, in a pattern that would have done credit to a champion skeet shooter.
Mohsen didn't even have time to complain about the Irish climate or to reflect that it might have been a good idea to practice in advance with real explosives or to curse his miscalculating brother seven different ways. He was killed instantly, his body pierced in a dozen places, and his Powerchute carried him across the castle walls to crash minutes later in a ball of flame against the cliffs of the mainland. Inside the dugout, protected by a triple layer of sandbags, the Bear and Murrough were scarcely affected by the explosion except to feel a little sick at the thought that their attackers seemed to have the very weapon they had feared most – a mortar. Expecting a barrage of further rounds now that the gunner had zeroed in on them with the first shot – not so common with a mortar – they headed as one for the circular stairs and took up fresh positions in Fitzduane's bedroom immediately below.
The defenders on the battlements outside scarcely had time to think at all. First a huge black shape sailed by, spraying blood like some vampire celebrating the abolition of garlic, and then automatic weapons fire from the sky made the point that the first vampire wasn't flying about alone.
Etan, crouched in a sandbag cocoon on the inland-facing battlements, was the first to react. The rapid semiautomatic fire of her Mauser caused Husain to take a raincheck on Paradise and to swerve away violently, abandoning any thoughts of dropping the incendiary on this pass. He banked and climbed to prepare for another run. All Etan could see was a black figure almost invisible against the clouds while the moon was obscured.
'What the fuck is that?' asked Henssen, who was wiping something wet off his face and hoping it wasn't what he thought it was or, if it was, that it wasn't his. He couldn't feel any pain, but his heart felt as if it were going to pound its way out of his body.
'I don't know,' said Etan, 'some kind of flying thing, I think. Its' like a balloon, but quick.'
Fitzduane ran up in a crouching run, holding himself easily as if he'd done this kind of thing many time before – which he had. If nothing else, combat taught you very quickly to make yourself small. Fitzduane was an expert. He seemed to have visibly shrunk.
Etan pointed. Fitzduane, squatting well down behind the parapet and the sandbags, raised his SA-80 and examined the area she had indicated with the night sight. He could see nothing at first, given the Kite's limited field of view – one disadvantage of using a telescopic sight instead of wide-angle binoculars – but a quick pan picked up the image of a light metal frame containing a sitting figure with legs outstretched as if driving a go-cart. A checked keffiyeh was wrapped around its head and mouth, the ends streaming close to a giant propeller enclosed in a circular protective guard like that of a swamp boat. For an instant Fitzduane thought that if the keffiyeh would only stream back a couple of centimeters, the problem might solve itself. Then he looked further and saw the familiar outline of a military ramjet cargo parachute. The metal frame turned to head directly toward him, and he could see stabs of flame. He switched the fire selector of the SA-80 to automatic reluctantly, bearing in mind his own strictures on the subject, and opened fire.
The powered parachute was moving deceptively fast – somewhere in excess of forty kilometers per hour at a guess – and it sailed low over the castle before he could fire a second burst. A small black shape left the metal frame as it passed and landed on the opposite battlements, exploding among the zigzagging double line of
