"Except we're fighting off enemy paratroopers," he went on. "That keeps us awake."
"Ha fucking ha ha, Dinkerman. You'd fucking better keep awake," the voice warned. "It's seventy-five strokes with the blacksnake if I catch you napping."
Really vigorous zero-tolerance policy, Havel thought. I was always in favor of discipline, but flogging? This is ridiculous.
The round target let him signal, by waving it in front of the fire; it would be visible to the others back on the mountainside, and to the men hidden out on the flat prairie behind the creek too. Then he examined the basket that held the fire; it had a solid concave bottom, hinged on one side and with a release catch on the other, presumably for cleaning and removing ash in the daytime.
One more cheer for you, Ellie Strang, he thought. I'm going to see you get a retirement fund out of this, God damn me if I don't.
The rest of the tower top was a flat square thirty feet by thirty, bare save for a keg of water, a slop bucket, and racks of javelins and piles of stones just right for throwing down on anyone trying to get up. The only equipment was a little portable crane, probably used for hauling up firewood; that was on the eastern side. The floor felt solid beneath his boots; the intel was that it was two sets of twelve-by-twelve timbers laid at right angles to each other with a couple of inches of asphalt and roofing shingle in between, the whole held together with massive bolts. The trapdoor was in the center, a slab of the same square timbers, strapped with sheet metal on top and bottom.
There were strong steel bars that slid across it into loops set in the equally massive floor. Havel grinned in the fire-lit night as he pulled them through and dropped in the locking pins. The tower had been designed for defense from the bottom up, each floor a fortress on its own if the one below was taken. Hence the hinges were on this side, and the trapdoor opened upward; or didn't open, with the bars locked home. The story below was only ten feet from floor to ceiling, and its trapdoor wasn't in line with this one.
Good luck to you trying to batter it open when you twig to what's happened, he thought. You'd have to use drills and cutting tools, it'd take hours.
The hang glider came apart easily; he bundled it off to one side. Then there was nothing to do but check the layout; so far their informants had been right all down the line. He looked over the outer, eastern side. The tower face was sheer to the ground; its walls were yard-thick interlocking timbers, smoothly covered with quarter-inch sheet metal in ten-by-ten squares spiked to the wood and then welded at the edges to make a homogenous slab.
Well, Ken was right. Throwing incendiaries at the surface wouldn't work, even if we could get within range. But…
The mound the tower stood on was narrow and steep, sloping right down into a dry moat filled with barbed wire; a staircase went down the inner side to the bailey. Eastward a raised walkway connected the tower with the fighting platform behind the outer palisade; to the right that ran right to the gatehouse.
Not too many men on the wall.
No point; if the Protector's CO here had them well drilled, they could turn out of their barracks and pack it full in far less time than an assault force would need to get going.
But…
His ears caught a flutter of cloven air. He turned, back against the crenellations, mouth firmed to a thin line. Signe was scheduled to come in next. She was also supposed to be a better hang glider than he was; that might be true, but he was certain she hadn't had as much time in the air… or experience at judging distances in the dark, with life for a forfeit if you were wrong. He pulled out one more piece of equipment; a Ping-Pong paddle with one side painted luminescent white.
His heart tried to hammer as he waved it back and forth with the bright side westward, but he seized control by forcing his breath into regularity-slow, steady and deep. Tension unlocked, and he waited with his hands ready, knees bent and weight forward on the balls of his feet. His eyes were dazzled by looking at the fire, and the torches below; the black wing and black-clad flier were invisible until the last moment…
"Too high!" he barked, throwing out his hands and waving the paddle downward. "Too high, damnit, Christ Jesus, girl, too high!"
The wing cut across the stars overhead, a wedge of deeper blackness. Signe seemed to realize her mistake at the last moment, and did what Havel had done: flared the nose upright to let the wing brake itself against the air. She'd cut it far too close, though: it was above him-and the eastern edge of the tower-when it jerked to a near-halt against the air and started to slide downward.
Havel hopped backward, onto the top of one of the crenellations, one foot braced on the arm of the cargo crane. His hand caught something, clamped hard on a guy wire; it would have cut his hand to the bone, like piano wire through a cheese, save for the tough leather of his glove. The weight tried to snatch him forward off the wall, would have if he hadn't had the crane under his foot for leverage. He threw himself backward instead, and it pivoted inward like a weight on the end of a rope. The half-seen length of Signe's body came down half on and half off the wall, with a startled oofff as the edge drove the wind out of her.
Havel released the wingtip, and she started to slide backward; he leapt and grabbed, a black blur in the darkness, and his hands slapped down on the control bar. He heaved again, feeling the muscles of his shoulders crackle with the grunting strain, heedless of the way she knocked against the parapet; the alternative was falling sixty feet straight down into a moat full of sharp angle iron and barbed wire.
"You all right?" he asked.
"No," she wheezed, one hand on her stomach and the other rubbing her knee. "But I'll do."
"That you will," he said, grinning relief, and helped her out of her harness, stripping her section of rope loose from the frame.
By then it was time; after they saw his signal from the tower top the others were supposed to launch at four-minute intervals. He and Signe spread out to the eastern corners of the tower, waving their paddles with the light side westward. This time it was Aylward, and he flared his wing neatly right in the middle of the flat space. He shed his equipment with businesslike speed, then pulled out his longbow and snapped the halves together; the bottom half of the riser was a metal-lined hollow, and the top its mirror image.
"Next," Havel muttered, as the Englishman strung his weapon.
That was Pamela; she came in so low that for a heart-stopping instant he thought she was going to ram the tower's western wall.
"Not quite!" Signe said beside him, with a gasp of relief.
Instead she skimmed it, so close that a corner of the control bar tapped against the corner of a crenellation; the wing went pinwheeling across the surface of the tower, while she threw her hands in front of her face. Despite that there was a bleeding graze across cheek and nose when she rose.
Havel gave her a nod as she came to her feet and collapsed the wing, hauling it aside to clear the landing area.
"One more and we're safe… on top of the tower of an enemy castle," she said.
"Yeah," he replied dryly.
He did a quick check; they all had their tools ready, and a bandolier of rope over a shoulder. The speaking-tube whistled again. Havel pulled out the plug.
"Dinkerman, why the hell have you locked the trapdoor?" Sergeant Harvey barked. "Get it open, now!"
"Can't do that, sergeant," Havel said regretfully. "The enemy paratroopers are landing more men."
"You make me look bad in front of the baron and I'll have your fucking balls for this, Dinkerman!" Harvey shrieked. "And that's a goddamned promise!"