The Omega Command (37 page)

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.”

Sandy heard her walkie-talkie squawk and nearly jumped out of shock. She hesitated, hoping the call was meant for someone else.

“Water guard one, do you read me,” the voice repeated.

She lifted the walkie-talkie from her belt and covered the plastic mouthpiece with her gloved hand just as Blaine had instructed. Taking a deep breath, she began to speak in a deepened voice.

“I can … hardly … hear … you.”

“Say again, water guard one.”

“You’re broken up. I can’t hear you clearly.”

A different voice came on. “Water guard one, you missed your last report. Is everything all right?”

“Yes. I tried to report but I couldn’t make this thing work.” Sandy tightened a portion of her glove over the mouthpiece. “Could you send someone with a replacement?”

“No need, water guard one,” said the second voice. “Just stay alert.”

Wells yanked the headpiece from his ears and turned to a befuddled communications officer. “What was that about, sir? Water guard one wasn’t scheduled to make a report.”

“I know,” said Wells. “Now get me one of the field guards on the radio immediately.”

“Which one?”

“Any! All! It doesn’t matter!”

The radioman made the call, waited, then repeated it. After the third repetition he turned back to Wells.

“They’re not … responding, sir.”

Wells was already moving fast for the door. “Signal an alert!”

The radioman hit the red button on his console.

Chapter 30

IT WAS TWENTY-TWO MINUTES
to eight when Wareagle’s men had finally achieved their positions in the trees. Windsplitter and his knives were in one, Running Deer and his tomahawks in another, and Cold Eyes with his crossbow in a third. Blaine gazed up at the trees and honestly couldn’t see them, so complete was their camouflage. They had scaled the branches so adroitly that they barely disturbed the pilings of snow.

Johnny had kept Swift Colt, wielder of the second long bow, with him, and now they separated to find clearer sightlines to their designated targets on the wall. Blaine went with Thunder Cloud to the base of the wall and watched him fasten gnarled lengths of chain to the ends of a pair of ropes. There was a ridge protruding close to the top of the wall, and assuming there was a similar ridge on the inner side, the gnarled chain once tossed over would hook on it. The Indian handed one of the completed climbing ropes to Blaine and kept the other for himself. They’d climb the wall together and drop into the courtyard, with Wareagle and Swift Colt soon to follow if all went according to plan. The others would drop down from their tree perches a bit later. Taking the courtyard guards by surprise should overcome the advantage of their superior weapons.

The sound of an owl hooting came. It was time.

Wareagle and Swift Colt shot the guards closest to them on the wall and had their second arrows loaded before the next closest pair had even noticed their two fellows plunging to the ground. There were six guards patrolling the inner courtyard, and before they could respond, a series of weapons hurtled on target toward their chests or heads. A pair of Windsplitter’s knives found their marks neatly, along with one of Running Deer’s tomahawks and three whistling crossbow arrows courtesy of Cold Eyes.

Blaine and Thunder Cloud had reached the top of the wall just as the last of the guards atop it fell to Wareagle’s and Swift Colt’s arrows. They had just dropped into the courtyard when the alarm bell sounded.

Suddenly the courtyard was ablaze with light that made the snowflakes seem to dance in its beams. The front doors of the mansion crashed open and a horde of men surged out, machine guns already flashing.

McCracken rolled and fired a burst, taking out a few men of the first rush, and then slid back the catch on his grenade launcher. He pulled the secondary trigger and felt the recoil slam him backward. The grenade blasted into the front of the mansion and sent rocks and wood splinters flying everywhere. Running Deer and Windsplitter dropped into the courtyard, Cold Eyes staying at his perch to provide cover with his crossbow.

McCracken ran along the far edge of the wall, firing at the guards rushing forward and trying to angle himself for a dash into the mansion. Wareagle and Swift Colt, still on top of the wall, released a constant barrage of arrows at the troops charging from the hole blasted in the front of the mansion. The one-handed Running Deer managed to take out two others who’d escaped the arrows. Then, down to his last tomahawk, he raised it wildly over his head and hooted a war cry as he charged into a pack of Krayman’s men. He killed a final one before a bullet spilled his blood onto the snow.

Blaine kept firing until his clip was exhausted, then ducked behind the cover of a Land-Rover to snap a new one home. Krayman’s men controlled the courtyard now. There seemed to be hundreds of them, though dozens would have been enough and was probably more accurate. He felt for the thermolite charges in his pocket and wondered if the time had come to make use of them.

He had just fitted his second clip in when one of Krayman’s guards lunged behind the Land-Rover and aimed down at him with a rifle. Blaine started to spin away, aware it was too late, when a whistle split the air and Thunder Cloud’s ball and chain wrapped around the man’s throat. The Indian yanked viciously back, and blood spurted from the guard’s throat as a spray of machine-gun fire cut Thunder Cloud’s torso in half. He fell to the snow with a silent scream drawn over his lips.

McCracken grabbed the dead guard’s automatic rifle and tossed it up to Wareagle, who had just exhausted his supply of arrows.

“Cover me!” Blaine screamed, ripping a pair of thermolite bombs from his jacket and tearing the ring from one. Still running, he hurled it at the largest cluster of Krayman’s men. It had barely landed, when he tossed the second toward another group. The blasts came almost together, coughing up hundreds of pounds of blood-drenched snow into the air. Dashing through the white tunnel of his own creation, McCracken readied a third bomb.

He reached the front steps as the firing began again, and more troops charged through the entrance only to be met by fire from his M-16. They sought refuge down a hallway, and Blaine hurled his third bomb in their direction. A spray of fire from the opposite side stung him with its closeness, and he turned the grenade launcher that way and fired. The thermolite explosion had already sounded, shaking the walls, and with the grenade blast the whole structure seemed to tremble.

Blaine sprinted toward the main stairway. Johnny had three men left and alone they couldn’t hope to overcome all of Krayman’s guards. The best Blaine could hope for was a distraction that would give him enough time to reach the computer that controlled Omega. He stole a glance at his watch. Barely sixteen minutes to get the job done.

He started running up the stairs, taking them two and three at a time.

Wells sealed the steel-reinforced door to the command center behind him. The eyes of all the men at their stations turned toward him, the room silent save for a few beeps coming from computer terminals. Verasco waved a hand, signaling them to return to their work. On the monitor board, the satellite was just reaching Asia.

“What’s going on out there?” Dolorman demanded, his face a mask.

“We’re under attack,” the scarred man reported breathlessly. “I don’t know how many men there are, but they’re damned good.” Wells paused. “It’s McCracken. I can feel it. …”

Dolorman’s eyes shifted to the heavy door Wells had just closed behind him. “For God’s sake, Wells, find him!”

Outside, the firing seemed to be letting up.

“I’ll find him,” Wells said.

McCracken dashed down the second floor hallway. The desperate pounding of feet above and below made it impossible to tell if anyone was giving chase. He assumed he had been seen entering the mansion and could only hope that confusion would remain his ally long enough for him to avoid capture. He didn’t know exactly what he was looking for, only that he would know when he found it. He opened four doors on the floor and found nothing.