Richmond grinned at Blackbeard and jabbed a thumb toward the bedrooms. He reached down and patted himself on the crotch of his baggy trousers: an unmistakably soiled, ugly, obscene gesture.
Enough was enough.
Lessing stepped back where he was safe from flying glass, aimed for Blackbeard, and put a half dozen rounds from his Riga-71 through the pantry window. He snapped off a quick shot at Richmond as well but didn’t dare fire a longer burst into the living room.
Jameela and Helga Bauer were in the bedroom behind its far wall; that, he knew, consisted of no more than two sheets of fibreboard. Bullets would go right through it
Blackbeard leaped straight up, then went down, arms windmilling. Slugs from his submachine gun ripped splinters and plaster from the ceiling.
The commander in the kitchen screamed something. His pistol barrel poked out around the comer of the archway. Lessing was prepared: he rolled across to the left side of the pantry window, and the officer’s shots whined harmlessly off into the night. The man now committed the mistake Lessing had almost made: he mistook the flimsy partition for solid cover. Lessing’s gun yammered. The officer came tumbling out from behind the riddled doorjamb, his eyes wide as he gaped at the ruin half a magazine of steel-jacketed lead had made of his natty tunic.
There were times when one had to appreciate substandard building practices.
Noise erupted from the kitchen. Either a second man was already there, or else a sentry had just entered through the back door. Stitch-gun explosions peppered the woodwork beside Lessing’s head. He let off only one shot in return. His magazine must be nearly empty, and he had no more.
The third man began to squall for help. Lessing cast about, found a chunk of wood from the shattered window sash, and lobbed it around the comer into the kitchen. At the same time he yelled as though to friends behind him, “Down, you guys! Grenade’.”
The refrigerator door slammed as his opponent dived behind it. Lessing leaped in through the pantry window, crouched, skidded, and rose up from behind the serving bar. He rattled off his last shots into the figure he glimpsed cowering on the kitchen floor.
“Sorry, no grenade,” Lessing panted at him. “Fresh out!” The man shrieked and jackknifed over.
In a single motion Lessing fell to his knees, twisted, and came up with Blackboard’s pretty, little submachine gun. He performed a land-based barrel roll and ended covering the living room.
Richmond wasn’t there.
The room was empty. The front door hung ajar.
Footsteps pounded along the verandah outside.
Glass crashed at the far end of the house, followed by a crescendo of sharp pistol shots. Lessing heard screams. Women’s screams.
Oh, God….
His thigh muscles cramped as he staggered to his feet. He was getting too old for this kind of thing!
Then he was at the bedroom door. Once, twice, he slammed his shoulder into the panel, unaware of any pain. It sprang open, and he staggered through.
In the spotlight’s reflected glare he saw Helga Bauer crouching by the bed. She was dead, her limbs outflung, her eyes wide open, like china marbles. Her heavy breasts were suffused with dark blood.
On the floor, by the window, lay a sprawl of silver and ice-blue.
Jameela had been struggling to open the sash when Richmond had come running around the comer of the verandah. He must have seen the women through the window and fired at them, out of sheer malice.
Lessing knelt beside his wife, turned her over, cradled her head, felt the seeping wetness among her tangled tresses. There was blood everywhere. He didn’t know how to stanch it, what to do. The Club doctor? Mallon? Abu Talib? Mrs. Delacroix? He even thought of surrendering, yelling for the opfoes to send in a medic.
Useless.
Years of combat experience told him that. He let Jameela down again, as gently as he could.
Shock numbed him. Sour vomit and bitter bile choked in his throat. His fingers trembled and clenched upon his wife’s dark-sticky, silver nightdress.
Blazing rage. Cold fury. Black hatred.
He ought to be feeling those things. But he didn’t.
What he felt was something else, something neither hot nor cold, red nor black, sweet nor bitter: an orgasm, a climax, a rush like a shot of 150-proof Cuban rum, a pop of heroin, and a big snuffle of happy dust, all at once.
Lessing knew the need to murder.
He got to his feet. Shouts sounded from upslope, behind the house, and others answered from the swimming beach. Opfoes were coming. He eased himself out through the bedroom window.
Richmond.
He would find Richmond. He would kill Richmond.
A black spot caught his eye: a smear of glistening blood upon the verandah railing. He must have nicked him — or the bastard had cut himself on the broken glass from the window. Richmond would leave a trail.
Lessing permitted himself a smile.
A landscaped terrace extended out some six meters from this side of the manager’s house. Beyond lay an undergrowth-choked ravine that separated Lcssing’s grounds from the knoll occupied by the communications complex. The latter was an inferno, dying now, and shrouded in a pall of smoke. Man-made lights flickered there, and figures moved like satanic puppets amidst the red-limned smoke. The opfoes were probably using the place as a beacon, a regrouping center for their troops. Lessing thought to hear the whuff-whuff of helicopter blades above the hiss and crackle of the fire.
Richmond would head in that direction. What the kikibird might not know was that the far side of the ravine was steep and the underbrush too dense to penetrate without a machete.
Lessing crossed the terrace and dropped down into the tangled bushes below. The damp vegetation had the claustrophobic feel of a rabbit warren, a troll’s tunnel down to Hell. He noted a second blood smear on the trunk of a sapling. He bared his teeth again; Richmond had passed this way.
When Richmond discovered he couldn’t get up the opposite bank he would turn left, down the ravine, toward the shore. Then he would try to follow the beach around the rocky headland to the communications jetty.
He’d pick his way with extra caution. The two fragile flasks he carried were more deadly than the Serpent’s apple in the Garden of Eden.
Branches rustled and snapped. Somebody ahead was panting, wheezing in fatigue and panic. Lessing froze to check Blackboard’s submachine gun. The magazine still held five cartridges. Wonder of wonders, the weapon was made to hold two magazines at once, and the second one was both present and full!
“Richmond,” he called softly. “Hey, Richmond. I’m coming.”
Patience, the prime virtue for both pursuer and pursued, was hard, but he forced himself to stay still. At last a tiny splash echoed up from below. He could see nothing, black upon black, ebon crepe upon sable. Lessing began to creep on his belly toward the water. Slimy-feeling wet leaves caressed his cheeks, and the stench of warm decay clogged his nostrils. Another time he might have worried about snakes, leeches, and insects; now they didn’t matter.
Sharp wedges of light slashed the brush behind him: powerful electric lanterns. Richmond’s friends were here.
Somebody yelled, “This way!” A second voice questioned, “Zay hul” A third snarled, “How the hell should I know?” and launched into a disgruntled diatribe in Hebrew. Branches crunched, twigs rattled, and someone more nervous than the rest let off a shot, followed by a grunted obscenity.
There was little time. The opfoes would thumb him. He had to kill Richmond first. Life held no other purpose.
Soft splashing sounded again farther off to the right. Lessing found himself amidst logs and driftwood, bare and ghostly white, like the bleached skeletons of prehistoric animals. He almost fell headlong into a tidal pool, and little nocturnal sea creatures scuttled away in terror.