'No,' said Fitzduane. 'No crawling around corners yet. Use the Molotov cocktails. I'm sending Judith along to help.'
There was the explosion of a grenade from behind the battlement sandbags facing Fitzduane, followed by a burst of AK-47 fire. There was a pause of about thirty seconds, and the routing was repeated.
'I think out visitor is coming my way,' said Henssen into the radio. 'He's grenading each zig and zag as he comes.'
'Give ground,' said Fitzduane.
'Why do you think we're still alive?' cried Henssen. 'But it's slow pulling Etan. If he rushes us, we're fucked.'
'If he rushes you, blow his head off.'
'Hugo,' said Murrough, 'I'm within a whisper of a clear shot. When he next raises his head, I'll get him.'
'Jesus,' said Fitzduane, 'where the hell are you?'
'Top of the keep,' said Murrough. 'Top of the dugout, in fact.'
Judith slipped in beside Henssen, smelling of poteen and gasoline from the bag of Molotov cocktails she carried. 'Get her out of here,' she said to Henssen, who hesitated. 'Now!' she whispered urgently. Henssen did as he was told. He crawled away, dragging the unconscious Etan along the gritty stone behind him.
Judith lit two of the Molotov cocktails and tossed them over the angled wall of sandbags, where they burst further down the battlements. She lit two more and threw them. A line of flame lit up the night, exposing two attackers who were climbing through the crenellations behind where the terrorist was concealed.
Fitzduane and Murrough fired instantly, hitting the same man. Already dead, he collapsed forward into the burning gasoline. The second climber died a second later when Judith took his head off with a burst from her Uzi. The original terrorist, his keffiyeh and camouflage a mass of flame, ran screaming along the battlements toward Judith a fighting knife in his hand and all caution driven from his body by the intense pain.
There was a double stab of flame from a shotgun, and the burning terrorist was hurled back against the sandbags, his lower body a bloody, wet mass. Katia Maurer reloaded the shotgun and went back to tending Etan. Judith replaced the empty magazine on her Uzi and tried to stop shaking.
Henssen took the lighter from her trembling hands and lit a succession of Molotov cocktails and sent them hurtling down to the base of the battlements. There were screams and cries from below. Trough a firing slit figures could be seen retreating into the darkness. One dropped after Murrough fired from the dugout roof. Judith crawled along the battlements and swung two Molotov cocktails tied to a length of electrical wire through the windows of the outhouse below, turning the remaining terrorist's hiding place into a furnace. Seconds passed, and then, with a cry, a burning figure ran out into the combined gunfire of Fitzduane and Judith.
Suddenly, as if by agreement between two opposing forces, the shooting stopped, and there was an almost complete silence. Fitzduane became aware of the sound of the sea and of the wind as it blew across the battlements, and he could hear the hiss as the flames encountered the wetness of body tissue and blood. He could hear the cries of the wounded outside the castle. By the light of the nearly spent Molotov cocktails he could see bodies littering the bawn below, where the Bear and Christian de Guevain had emerged form their sandbag emplacement and were already halfway through loading the cannon.
He became aware of something else, a voice repeating something again and again. It seemed to make no sense; there was no one there. He sat down and shook his head. The voice continued. He could see himself as if her were detached from his body and floating in the darkness. He looked down, and he could see the castle spread out below and the fires burning inside it and outside the walls.
Slowly he felt himself being drawn back into the castle, and then the Bear was shaking him gently by the shoulder and talking into the radio, and he could hear the faint sound of suppressed aircraft engines overhead.
Above Fitzduane's Island – 2305 hours
'I don't believe it,' said the pilot. 'It's nearly the end of the twentieth century, and there is a siege going on that's straight from the Middle Ages.'
'Not exactly the Middle Ages,' said Kilmara. Two lines of heavy-caliber tracer curved out of the darkness and converged on the castle.
'Green tracer, 12.7-millimeter,' said the pilot. He had flown forward air control in Vietnam. 'Kind of makes me feel nostalgic. We're out of range at this height, thought a few thousand feet lower it'll be no day at the beach. I wonder what else they've got.'
'I expect we'll find out,' said Kilmara. 'Get Ranger HQ on the radio.'
The transport twins and their cargoes of Rangers had been left to circle out of sight and earshot over the mainland while the Optica went ahead to do what it was good at: observe. They were flying at five thousand feet above the island for a preliminary reconnaissance while Kilmara tried to establish radio contact with Fitzduane below. And to determine the scale and location of what he was up against.
Already he realized that he had underestimated the opposition. The sight of the Sabine offshore told him how the Hangman's main force had arrived, and that suggested very strongly that the Dublin operation was a bluff.
The Rangers had nearly been caught off guard completely. As it was, most of his force was more than two hours away even if it was released immediately – which he doubted would happen.
Fitzduane's Castle – 2307 hours
Sheltered in the storeroom off the main tunnel, the surviving students felt more than heard the initial noises of combat above and around them. The subsequent sound of cannon fire almost directly overhead was more immediate and menacing. It brought home the unpleasant thought that they were not out of danger yet – and that the defenders of the castle might lose. The prospect of being held hostage again by people as ruthless as these terrorists accelerated the process of selecting volunteers to join in the fighting.
There had at first been some resentment at Fitzduane's decision to kept them unarmed and away from the firing line, but the logic of his reasoning soon won out. They had to face the unpalatable fact that the initial threat had come from their own student body – and there was not guarantee that one or two or more Sacrificers might not be left. The discussion of how to resolve this dilemma had begin enthusiastically but not very productively. Things changed when the Swede, Sig Bengtquist, a mathematician and a distant relative of the Nobel family, started to speak. Up to now he had been silent, but the notepad he seemed never to be without, even when dragged unwillingly into some sporting activity, was covered with neat jottings in his microscopic handwriting.
'There is no foolproof way of ensuring that we do not select a Sacrificer by accident,' he said. 'But I think we can establish some orderly criteria to improve our chances of choosing the right people.'
'You've worked out a mathematical formula,' said a voice.
'Yes,' said another. 'We're going to draw the lucky winners out of a hat or roll dice to see who gets a chance to be shot at.'
There was strained laughter. They had decidedly mixed feelings about experiencing any further the lethal realities of combat. Some were terrified at the thought. Others were itching for a chance to hit back and be players and not merely pawns in this game of life and death. What they had seen earlier in the day – the slaughter in the college – had left them with no illusions about glory or the supposed glamour of war.
'Go on, Sig,' said the deep baritone voice of Osman Ba, a Sudanese from the northern part of the country and the Swede's best friend. From the contrast in their coloring they were known as “Day and Night.” There were nods of agreement from the others. There were about fifty students in the room – representing half as many nationalities – and since there weren't enough chairs, most were sitting on boxes or on rugs on the floor. Empty sandwich plates and glasses were piled next to the door. Several of the students, worn out by the excitement of the day and the post-stress reaction, had fallen asleep. The others all looked tired, but what they were trying to do held their interest, and their eyes, though mostly red-rimmed from strain and fatigue, were keen and alert.
'I have drawn up a matrix,' said Sig, 'a spread sheet if you're accountancy-minded, cross-referencing all who have volunteered to fight with the criteria. As it happens, this approach produces sixteen names, so we still have to
