island. Six Rangers had jumped before the missile, traveling at one and a half times the speed of sound, hit the port engine. The high-explosive head ignited on contact, blasting the engine and wing off the aircraft and setting fire to the fuel tanks. The sky lit up, and the flaming mass, raining debris, knifed its way through the night air and exploded against the hillside, mercifully cutting short the agonies of the pilot and copilot and the remaining two Rangers still aboard. One more Ranger was killed by a piece of red-hot engine cowling as he swung from his parachute.
Five Rangers, including both members of the Milan missile team, reached the ground alive. When they linked up with Lieutenant Harty, the unit commander, checked in by radio with Kilmara. Then he spoke into his helmet microphone. 'Let's do it, lads,' he said. 'Time for them to pay the bill.'
Spread out in combat formation, faces blackened, heavily laden with weapons, ammunition, and equipment, the unit moved toward the action. The sound of firing, the crump of grenades, the arcing of tracers, and a burning glow indicated with brutal simplicity the location of the battleground.
Fitzduane's Castle – 2338 hours
Andreas loaded his last two high-explosive grenades. The noise inside the gatehouse was deafening. Beside him, Harry Noble, reinforced now by the Bear and de Guevain, fired burst after burst at the elusive, threatening figures outside. The terrorists had learned from their earlier casualty rate and now made use of every scrap of cover, including the lumbering shape of the tank. Their fire had increased in accuracy and was backed by the heavy machine guns, which made accurate defense nearly impossible even when a clear target could be made out.
The tank was less than twenty meters away – it was now obvious that the boom with the explosive charge was inside some sort of protective metal casing – when Andreas released his very last grenade. The tank lurched as if it were human. The right wheel and steering rods had been blown away completely. Already veering to the right of the gate before the final grenade hit, the tank now slewed off the road completely and tottered over on its side. Andreas and Noble gave a cheer.
'Down!' shouted the Bear, pushing Andreas to the floor. The entire building rocked as the boom charge exploded. The blast funneled through firing slits and murder holes, throwing Noble, who had reacted a shade too slowly, against the portcullis winding mechanism. The main gear wheel tore open his body in a dozen places, killing him instantly. The Bear glanced through a murder hole. The main force of the blast had been dissipated against the thick walls of the bawn. The portcullis, though twisted and bent and bearing the scars of the earlier RPG-7 assault, was still intact. He checked the castle approach, where the wrecked tank, now reduced to twisted mass of hot metal, lay to one side. As he watched, thick smoke, billowing from a row of smoke grenades, began to obscure the access road to the portcullis. The temporary lull in the firing from the terrorists in front of the castle ceased, and yet again automatic fire thudded off the castle walls and whine through the firing slits.
A roaring shape, a Land Rover, shot out of the smoke and smashed into the portcullis. The Bear glimpsed a figure jumping from it just before impact, and again he flung Andreas to the floor.
This time the force of the explosion was truly horrific in its immediacy and intensity. The floor heaved and ripped open, revealing the mangled remains of the portcullis below. It was no longer an effective barrier. Dazed and breathless from the blast and unable to respond, the Bear watched helplessly as figures ran through the open gateway.
He heard running footsteps on the stairs outside, and a hand grenade was thrown into the room. The small black object bounced across the floor before the Bear's eyes, coming to a halt less than two meters from him. It seemed to pause before toppling over through the crack in the floor and exploding a spit second later.
A camouflage-clad figure, the keffiyeh around his neck wet with blood from a long slash on his right cheek, burst into the room, firing an AK-47. Lying on the floor just behind him and out of sight, de Guevain, who had been reloading, grabbed a cavalry saber and slashed the terrorist across the back of the knees. The terrorist pitched forward, his automatic rifle dropping from his hands. Andreas, also sprawled on the floor, extended his SA-80 with one hand and pressed the muzzle against the terrorist's neck. The three-round burst exploded the man's head and filled the room with a red mist.
A second grenade was lobbed into the room, but in his excitement the terrorist in the doorway had forgotten to pull the pin. The Bear, still shaken but forced into action by the desperate need to survive, seized it, pulled the pin, and threw it back through the doorway.
The terrorist concealed there couldn’t run for cover down the narrow circular stairs because of the men behind him. There wasn't time to throw the grenade back into the room. He chose the only option he could think of and dived into the room away from the grenade, rolled, and came up firing. Rounds pumped into Harry Noble's dead body. The grenade exploded at the top of the circular staircase, temporarily blocking access to the room. Andreas shot the terrorist in the stomach before he had time to change his point of aim.
De Guevain ran to the concealed door that led to the tunnel and swung it open. Andreas and the Bear grabbed what extra weapons and ammunition they could and, with a last glance at Harry Noble's body, ran for safety. De Guevain followed, pulling the massive door behind him and ramming home the series of bolts and securing bars. They had bought some time at the cost of yet another life – but the Hangman's forces were now inside the castle.
Above Fitzduane's Castle – 2351 hours
The Sabine had moved to within five hundred meters of the shore and then had opened fire on the keep with a pair of heavy machine guns. Murrough had been swept off the dugout roof by this concentration of fire from an unexpected quarter, and his body now lay outside the castle walls.
Circling high above the battlefield, his ammunition low, Kilmara had expended the last of his ordnance on this new threat. In two low-level attacks he had put the heavy machine guns out of action and holed the ship below the waterline. The cattle boat, essentially a series of open ramp-linked decks with the engine and crew quarters at the stern, had no bulkheads, and seawater had rushed in through the holes. The Sabine was sinking.
The few surviving crew had headed toward land in an inflatable. With the Optica's external weaponry out of ammunition, Kilmara instructed the pilot to fly low. He killed the remaining three survivors with his automatic rifle, using the Kite night sight and shooting through a firing port in the door.
The SAM-7 missile was out of commission, and there was no sign that the terrorists had brought more than one unit, so the Optica was now operating as it had been built to – as a combined observation aircraft and command post. Kilmara's eyes were fixed mainly on the IR viewer screen, with intermittent glances at the flames and tracers and other graphic signs of the intense combat below. Keeping above the effective range of the surviving land-based heavy machine guns, the Optica circled the combat zone, monitoring developments, providing precise enemy position locations for the advancing Rangers, and keeping in touch with Fitzduane, Dublin, and the remaining Ranger transport, which was still circling, ready to drop its force as soon as the heavy machine guns were silenced.
As commander, Kilmara found that the hardest part of any combat situation was the necessity of remaining aloof from the main action while his men fought and, all too often, died. He had a near-overwhelming desire to parachute from his transparent bubble in the sky, but he kept it suppressed and concentrated on what the modern military termed ‘C3I’: command, control, communications, and intelligence. Or, as he had once termed it: 'Fucking around with a fiddle while Rome burns.'
If only the Rangers on the ground could clear the heavy machine guns out of the way, then he could bring the balance of his force into action. 'If only' – a pretty useless phrase in the real world.
Kilmara pressed the radio transmit button to call the Rangers on the ground but after a moment released it without speaking. His men knew full well what to do.
Ironically, considering the arrival of the Rangers on the island and the recent news that regular army reinforcements were at last on the way – although they would not arrive for several hours – the situation on the ground had never looked worse. The terrorists were now inside the castle. They had taken the gatehouse and
