The man watched the abandoned craft pick up pace as it neared the dock. It slammed hard against a piling, and the guard noticed it was riding low, its deck sloshed with sea-water. The boat was obviously sinking. He would have to contact headquarters for further instructions. His hand started for the walkie-talkie pinned to his belt.
Windsplitter hurled his knife through the crack in the cabin door.
The blade split the guard’s chest up to the hilt. He stood transfixed for an instant before tumbling down onto the deck.
Blaine stripped the tarp away. Immediately Windsplitter yanked the blade from the guard’s chest and returned it to the sheath on his belt. Then Blaine undid the buttons and snaps on the dead man’s heavy winter coat. If the guard’s killing had been witnessed by any of his fellows, the area would be crawling in seconds with Wells’s men. If not, and if they worked fast enough, Blaine’s plan might work.
He finally managed to tear the bulky jacket from the corpse and held it open for Sandy. She slid her arms through it and let him buckle it up for her. The final touch was to fasten the hood tightly in place, so from a distance in the blizzard she would appear to be the guard on duty on the dock. Less than a minute after Windsplitter’s blade had jammed home, she was standing on the snow-covered dock with a heavy rifle in her gloved hands, glancing down with a shudder at the dark splotch on her chest.
“All you have to do is stand here,” Blaine told her. “If they call you on the walkie-talkie, don’t answer. Better yet, talk with your hand over the mouthpiece and say you can’t hear them.”
The boatman would remain behind as well to make whatever repairs were needed to keep the craft seaworthy. The one-legged Nightbird, meanwhile, would take up a position away from the dock to cover their return from the fortress after completing their mission. Blaine knew the Indian would have fared much better in the guard’s role than Sandy, but his handicap would make the substitution too obvious. He gazed around. The pier jutted out twenty yards from the shore into the water. After that came thirty yards of snow-covered beach and then the woods that would take them to the fortress.
“Let’s go,” said Blaine.
With Wareagle in the lead, they moved quickly away from the waterfront and found a trail at the entrance to the woods.
“You figure there’ll be any electronic traps?” Blaine whispered to Wareagle. “Trip wires or something?”
“Doubtful, Blainey. Too many small animals around to trigger false alarms.”
A few silent minutes later the small group reached a clearing and stopped at its edge. From where they stood, the mansion was visible through the falling snow, along with a number of guards perched atop the tall stucco wall enclosing it.
“They’re going to be a problem,” Blaine said softly. “More than we expected. I count seven.”
“Eight,” said Wareagle.
A branch snapped not far off, forcing them to silent stillness. A pair of boots approached, crunching snow and closing on their position. Wareagle motioned to Thunder Cloud, the Indian whose specialty was a long chain with a steel ball attached to its end, a variation on the ancient bolo. Thunder Cloud freed his weapon from his belt and quickly unwound it as he glided to the front of the clearing.
The approaching guard was still six feet away when Thunder Cloud crouched and whipped his bolo forward. It swished through the air and twisted around the man’s throat, the chain propelled by the heavy ball, until it shut off his air. His hands groped desperately for the chain, his frame reeling backward as Thunder Cloud took up the slack and the gnarled steel tore through the flesh of his throat. The scream he was forming died in the blood and pain. Thunder Cloud yanked his writhing body into the clearing as he started to fall.
“There will be others patrolling the immediate grounds,” Wareagle cautioned. “The spirits tell me six, perhaps seven between us and the wall.” He nodded to Running Deer, Windsplitter, and Thunder Cloud, who had just finished untangling his weapon from the dead guard’s throat. Together the three Indians fanned out ready, with their silent weapons of death, to clear their approach to the mansion’s wall.
“There are still the wall guards to worry about,” Blaine reminded Wareagle. “We’ll have to scale the wall to get to the mansion.”
He stripped the M-16 rifle and rocket launcher from his shoulder. Wareagle grabbed its barrel and held it.
“Bullets bring with them a noisy message, Blainey. There is another way.”
And McCracken watched the giant Indian and his two remaining soldiers, Swift Colt and Cold Eyes, lift their bows nimbly from their backs and ready their arrows.
In the woods beyond, soft sounds reached them through the storm. A grunt, a groan, a whistle through the air, a thud — all of these were repeated several times and each indicated to Wareagle that another of the enemy had fallen at the hands of his troops. But there was no time to relish the success of his tactics. The dead guards would have reports to make and checkpoints to pass. Soon too much would seem wrong to the men on duty inside the mansion.
“We must move now, Blainey,” Wareagle whispered. “The spirits command it.”
Blaine nodded and followed Johnny from the clearing. Cold Eyes and Swift Colt were right behind with bows ready.
Inside the mansion Wells had returned to his perch in the communications room. The closed circuit monitors had him totally frustrated, and squinting his good eye to make sense of their pictures had done him no good at all. Wells stripped back the shades from the windows overlooking the courtyard, but he could make out only the closest shapes at their posts.
The nagging feeling in his gut increased, the icy fingers of foreboding tightening their grasp. Nothing could possibly be wrong. And yet he felt something was. There had been no reports of anything strange or suspicious from his patrols beyond the walls, and surely no assault could come without at least some of them being alerted.
Wells was nonetheless restless. None of the logical assurances could override his feeling of dread. His nerves were getting to him. Maybe his repeated failure to eliminate McCracken had something to do with it. Failure was something Wells seldom experienced. But McCracken had finally been killed in Arkansas. If there was someone here on the island, it wasn’t McCracken.
“Get me the guard on duty at the dock,” he called to the man monitoring the communications console.
Wareagle stopped.
“What’s wrong?” Blaine whispered.
“More men inside the courtyard,” Johnny told him. “If we shoot down the wall guards but do nothing about the men in the courtyard, our presence will be given away to those inside.”
“The element of surprise is all we have. We can’t lose that.” McCracken thought quickly. “We’ve got to attack the men inside the courtyard at the same time we take out the guards patrolling the wall.”
The three Indians Wareagle had dispatched arrived within seconds of one another. Blaine didn’t bother asking how they had located their leader. They behaved like homing pigeons.
Pigeons … Trees …
Blaine glanced up through the falling snow. Trees surrounded the wall, some of them hanging over or close to it. The right men up there with the right weapons could take care of the courtyard and the wall. He explained the plan briefly to Wareagle.
“Can your boys get up in those without being seen, Indian?” he asked finally.
“They can get anywhere without being seen, Blainey, until circumstances force them to appear. Once in the courtyard, their presence will not be secret long from those inside the mansion.”
“Just get me to the front door, Indian,” Blaine told him. “I’ll take care of the rest.”