She turned and moved unsteadily along the wooden wall, but there seemed to be no way through it. She had been told she could climb the fence from this side because of the horizontal braces nailed to the upright pickets, but the fence was nearly twice as tall as she, and it didn’t seem possible. Behind her, she heard footsteps in the loose gravelly soil.
Claudia ran on another fifty yards and stopped to catch her breath. Her feet were cut and she could feel blood oozing into her panty hose. Her black knit dress was snagged in several places, and her face and arms were scratched and bruised. She felt rivulets of warm perspiration running down her body.
Suddenly two flashlight beams sliced through the dark air.
Claudia lowered herself quickly into a crouch behind a small bush. The light beams were searching systematically over the length of the fence and through the laurel behind her. She waited until they passed by, then stood, stepped back for a running start, and ran at the fence. Her feet and hands scrambled and searched for a hold, but the first horizontal brace was too high, and she slipped down, cedar splinters sliding into her skin.
“There you are.” The footsteps approached.
Claudia felt tears forming in her eyes and salty sweat burning her lips. She called out, “I’ve got a gun.”
The footsteps slowed and the lights went out. One of the men said to the other, “Easy now. Circle around.”
Claudia stared up at the fence again. It looked like one of those stockade walls in the cowboy movies. This brought to mind a lasso… She quickly slipped off her panty hose and groped along the ground until she found a good-sized stone. She dropped the stone into the toe of one of the legs, knotted it so it wouldn’t slip out, and clenched the other foot of the hose. She stood, twirled the panty hose above her head, then cast it up at the fence. On the second attempt the stone-weighted toe fell between two pickets and she pulled on it to wedge it tighter, then began her ascent, hand over hand up the nylon rope, her bare feet planted on the fence. The nylon stretched tauter until there was no more slack in it and she feared it would snap.
Her feet found the first cross-brace; she rested a moment, then continued and reached the second brace.
The flashlights went on again; a beam found her and rested on her face. A man shouted, “Stop, or we’ll shoot.” She heard that awful metallic noise of a gun cocking in the night air.
With a last burst of energy, born of fear, she hoisted herself up to the pickets, feeling them dig into her chest and abdomen.
From two different directions she heard the wheezy coughs of silenced guns, followed by the sounds of bullets smacking and splintering the wood below her. The whole fence swayed from the impact. She let out a terrified cry, then closed her eyes and rolled gently over the pickets. Before she was even aware of a sense of falling, she felt the abrupt shock of the earth slapping against her face and chest, knocking the wind from her.
She lay still for some seconds, then sucked the air back into her lungs. She heard noises on the fence and realized she hadn’t pulled the panty hose over with her, and they were using it.
She jumped to her feet and began running. Across the strip of partly cleared right-of-way, a patch of moonlight illuminated the dark low outline of the stone wall that bordered the Russian property. She heard the two men behind her and tried to run faster, heedless of the pain in her feet or the aches in her legs. Her clinging knit dress constricted the movement of her legs and she slowed long enough to pull the dress up and tuck the hem in her belt, then put on a burst of speed.
Pembroke’s two men were gaining, but they were not shooting, calling, or using their flashlights; nor would they, she knew, this close to the Russian property. The stone wall lay twenty feet ahead, then ten, then it was on her suddenly. She thrust her hands out to meet its capstone and vaulted over, hardly breaking stride.
Claudia plunged headlong into the bush beyond the wall. The pace of running footsteps behind her slowed, then halted at the wall. She slowed her own pace and began picking her way more carefully through the rising terrain.
Suddenly, lights blazed on all sides of her and she heard a voice bark in harshly accented English, “Stop! Stop, we shoot!”
She froze.
“Hands on head!”
She did as she was told.
“Kneel!”
She knelt, feeling her bare knees settle on the damp, rotting vegetation. The lights hurt her eyes and she shut them, thinking to herself that perhaps they had orders to shoot her on the spot.
An unnaturally long time passed, then Claudia heard the sound of a revolver cocking.
Pembroke’s two men, Cameron and Davis, stood quietly at the low stone wall. Davis raised a twenty-power Starlight scope and scanned the wooden terrain to his front. The thin light of the cloud-obscured moon and stars was electronically amplified to give a green-tinted picture. Davis adjusted the resolution and focus knobs. “There. They’ve intercepted her… but I can’t make out what’s happening.”
Cameron said, “Let’s go back.” They turned from the stone wall and made their way through the no-man’s-land toward the stockade fence. About five yards from the fence, they circled around a thick stand of boxwood and knelt.
Tony Abrams, also kneeling on one knee, regarded them in the dim light. Unlike conventional soldiers, he thought, whose uniforms and equipment had to serve in many terrains and circumstances, these men were very specifically outfitted for one thing: a short, quick night raid. Their clothing and equipment were patchworked shades of black and gray, their faces dark and inscrutable.
Cameron turned toward Abrams, “Bugs?”
Abrams glanced at the microphone detector on the ground. “No indication.”
Cameron nodded.
Katherine, crouched beside Abrams, whispered to Cameron, “What happened?”
Cameron shrugged. “They grabbed her.”
Davis added, “I couldn’t tell how she was received.”
Abrams said, “I hope they don’t guess we’ve used the chase as a cover to get into position.”
Katherine asked, “When do we cross over?”
Cameron glanced at his watch. “Very soon.”
Davis spoke. “I saw at least five of them. If two escort her back to the house, then we’ve improved our odds a bit.”
Abrams thought that three Russians were three Russians more than he’d care to meet tonight. He regarded Cameron and Davis. Even this close they were nearly invisible, but they exuded menace into the night. Professionally, their equipment impressed him: black hoods and bulletproof vests, first-rate and lightweight survival gear, and everything silenced and blackened.
Abrams glanced at Katherine beside him, similarly clad and equipped, her long blond hair tucked under the raised, hooded mask. She leaned over and whispered in his ear, “I feel confident. These are good men. We’ll be fine.”
Abrams smiled. “I’m sure we will be.”
She kissed him on the cheek.
Cameron pulled a Very flare pistol from his belt and fired into the air. The flare exploded at a hundred feet into an incandescent burst of blue-white. Cameron said to Abrams and Katherine, “That’s the signal that Claudia has crossed over. Van Dorn’s pyro people should acknowledge and cover that flare with more of the same.” As he spoke, a salvo of Very flares burst above them.
Davis said, “Fireworks are a good cover for signal flares. The noise gives us a bit of cover as well.”