There was no response. Fitzduane checked the bathroom closet and behind the laundry basket, half-expecting to see a small, blond-headed three-year-old crouched down and shaking with barely suppressed giggles.
Nothing.
He felt mildly concerned. The castle in which they lived, Fitzduane's ancestral home on a remote island off the West of Ireland, was not large as such places go, but it had stone stairs and battlements and a high wall around the courtyard, and there were many locations where a child could come to harm. From the point of view of a nervous parent, Duncleeve was not the ideal place to bring up a child.
Frankly, Fitzduane was surprised that any of his ancestors had made it to maturity. An accidental long drop onto the rocks below or into the freezing waters of the Atlantic seemed much more likely. But the Fitzduanes had tended to be a resolute and hardy lot, and they had survived.
He opened the bathroom door and looked around the dressing room. Still nothing.
The dressing room door-handle began to turn very slowly.
"Boots!" called Fitzduane. "Come here, you little monster."
There was silence. A sudden chill swept over Fitzduane, as disbelief battled intuition. He had feared the threat for so long, but never seriously believed in it. Now, perhaps, it had become reality.
He stepped back into the bathroom, picked up the Sig, slid it out of its holster, and removed the safety catch. A round was already in the chamber.
His mind ran through the available options. The windows of both the bathroom and dressing room had twentieth-century double glazing but had been designed as firing slits by the original Norman architect. No way in and certainly no way out for Fitzduane's six-foot-two frame.
The dressing-room door-handle began to turn slowly. Then it slid back noisily, as if suddenly released.
Fitzduane didn't think; he reacted at the potential threat to the person he loved most in the world. He flung the door open, his weapon traversing an arc of fire that took in the whole corridor. There was nothing. He looked down. The muddiest little person he had ever seen stood there, dripping. It didn't look much like anyone he knew, though the boots and body language seemed familiar.
"Daddy!" said the mud boy indignantly.
Fitzduane felt weak with relief. He slipped the safety catch back on the Sig and looked at the mud boy. "Who are you?" he said sternly.
"DADDY!" shouted the mud boy. "I'm PeterFizz…" He paused, a look of concentration on his face, to assess the situation. He had a problem with the Fitzduane part of his name. He brightened. "I'm BOOTS," he shouted.
Fitzduane swept him up and kissed him. Small muddy arms encircled his neck. A small muddy face was pressed to his. Fitzduane had never associated Irish mud with absolute happiness, but at that moment he was as happy and content as a human being can ever be.
He hosed down Boots in the shower, and when a recognizable three-year-old had emerged, they both went for a soak in the big Victorian bath. As Fitzduane lay back in the soothing water, eyes closed, Boots lay in his arms for the first few minutes. Then the normal mischievous nature of PeterFitzduane took over. He slid from his father's body and went to play in the water.
Minutes passed. Fitzduane, eyes closed, was practically asleep. Playing with taps was forbidden, and the hot faucet had been made too stiff to turn, but small hands wrestled with the large brass cold outlet and very quietly half filled a jug. The boy stood up, protected from falling by an unconscious reflex action of his father's legs. He held the jug over Fitzduane and started to giggle.
Fitzduane opened his eyes just as the icy water hit him. His shout of indignation could be heard through the double doors and echoed through the stone passageways beyond. It was immediately followed by the sound of Boots in an advanced fit of the giggles and then Fitzduane's laughter.
* * * * *
Colonel — to be General in two days' time, despite the opposition of more conservative military figures and countless politicians and civil servants he had crossed over the years — Shane Kilmara flipped back the cover of his watch and began to check the time.
Just as he focused, the plane lurched again and his stomach surged toward the top of his skull. He still felt nauseated, despite the motion-sickness pills, but had been saved the indignity of actually throwing up. Low-level combat flying was an effective way to penetrate airspace undetected, but in a special-forces-modified Lockheed C130 Combat Talon — where functionality was awarded a decidedly higher priority than comfort — you tended to have a hard ride this close to the ground, or the sea, or whatever terrain you happened to be over.
The Irish Rangers had initially been set up as an antiterrorist unit in the mid-seventies, following the assassination of the British Ambassador by a culvert bomb. The political establishment felt they could also end up in the firing line unless they took some precautions, and that gave the founder of the new organization some extra leverage. Kilmara, who had served in a special-forces capacity with other national forces for many years after a falling-out with the Irish authorities, had emerged as the most suitable candidate to head up the new unit.
The entire Irish army, cooks and mascots included, was tiny — at around 13,000 personnel smaller than on U.S. Army division — and was chronically underequipped and underfunded. Accordingly, Kilmara, whose own special-forces unit was actually quite well-equipped, thanks to special supplementary funding, had become a world-class expert in the art of scrounging. It helped that he was something of a legend in the Western special forces community, and that said community was a small, highly personal world which tended to transcend national boundaries under the banner of a motto aptly propounded by David Stirling, founder of the SAS: "If you need something, do not be put off by bureaucracy — find a way to take it."
Kilmara hadn't taken the Lockheed Combat Talon — it actually belonged to the U.S. Air Force — he had merely borrowed it and its highly skilled crew in a complex arrangement with Delta. He had a tendency toward elegantly complex barter deals, because then, in his experience, no bureaucrat could ever possibly unravel them. A much-simplified interpretation of this particular arrangement was that the Irish were given access to the Combat Talon and certain other goodies in exchange for Delta being allowed to train in Ireland, and in particular with the new high-speed, heavily armed FAV — Fast Attack Vehicle — know as the Guntrack.
None of this, needless to say, had been arranged through official channels. However, all of it was supported by appropriate paperwork. Kilmara had operated in this outrageous manner for years. He got away with it because he was very good at what he did. And he was consummate at working the system.
The Guntrack was a Rangers innovation and had been inspired by Fitzduane. The primary purpose of the exercise was to test the dramatic-looking, black, tracked vehicle under simulated combat conditions. The C130 would infiltrate the ‘enemy’ airspace of Fitzduane's island, flying little higher than the roof of a suburban house, and then drop down to the approximate level of the top of the front door. The rear door s of the Lockheed would be open. At a precise point, a cargo parachute attached to the palleted Guntrack would activate ad the vehicle would be pulled sharply out of the rear doors and fall only a few feet onto the ground — hopefully in one piece.
The technique was know as LAPES — low-altitude parachute extraction system — and provided the pilot didn't sneeze while flying a bulky cargo plane at 120 mile an hour five feet above the ground at night in new terrain. LAPES was considered a safer way to put cargo on the ground than by actually dropping things from a height. It was regularly used by airborne troops, even for substantial items like armored vehicles.