“He gives the orders?”
Timble nodded. Dunjee turned to the big man with the rubbery face who sometimes liked to call himself Arnold. “You’ve done this kind of thing before?” Dunjee said.
“Once or twice,” Keeling said.
“Just curious.”
“I don’t blame you.” He turned to the others. “All right. I’ll go up first. Then Dunjee, then Jack, then Leland. Reese, you bring up the rear.”
Nobody argued. Keeling stepped up onto the first narrow ledge and then went smoothly on up to the top. Dunjee followed. It was easier than he had thought it would be. When he reached the final step, he stopped and slowly poked his head up over the lip of the cliff.
Keeling was almost flat on the ground. He turned his head back toward Dunjee. “See that?” he said.
Dunjee looked. There was a low stone wall some ten yards away. It was crumbling through age and neglect. In some places it was only a foot high; in others two feet; there was even one section which had managed to retain its original three-foot height. The wall ran for twenty feet on either side of Keeling and then seemed to give up. It simply dribbled away into small piles of stones.
“That’s where we set up,” Keeling said. “At the wall. Pass it back.”
Dunjee passed it back to Spiceman and then began crawling on his belly and knees and elbows toward the wall. He cradled the M-16 in his arms as he crawled.
When he reached the wall, Keeling was already peering over it. “Take a look,” he said.
Dunjee smeared some dirt on his forehead before raising the top of his head slowly above the wall until he could see what lay on the other side. It was the farmhouse. It seemed to be some forty yards away. The house was a square flat-roofed one-story structure, simply built of round stones. There was a solid enough looking door, which was closed. On either side of the door were two windows. They were shuttered. Through the cracks in the shutters came some soft light. Dunjee looked for power lines, but could find none, and assumed that the light came from either oil-or battery-powered lamps. Or even candles.
“It’s a fort,” Dunjee said.
Keeling grunted. “If we can’t get in, I guess we’ll have to get them to come out.”
Keeling turned and watched as the other three men crawled toward them. After each of them had taken a quick peek over the top of the wall, Keeling looked at Reese and said, “Remember that time I was telling you about in Luanda?”
Reese nodded. “Want me to try it?”
“Why not?”
Reese picked up the bullhorn. “I’m going to try to talk them out.”
He put the bullhorn up to his lips. “You, inside the house!”
Reese’s bass voice seemed to thunder out of the bullhorn. “This is the U.S. government. You are surrounded. If you throw out your arms and come out with your hands up, you will not be harmed. I repeat. Throw out your arms and come out with your hands up. You have three minutes.”
Halfway through Reese’s invitation the lights in the farmhouse went out. They were thick candles stuck into saucers and it was Ko Yoshikawa who blew them out. “Can you see anything?” he said.
Bernt Diringshoffen was already kneeling at a shuttered window, peering through the cracks. In his left hand was a Kalashnikov assault rifle. “Nothing,” he said.
“I told you,” Françoise Leget whispered fiercely into the dark. “I told you it was a trap. Now they’re going to kill us. I dreamed it night before last. I told you then what was going to happen.”
“Shut up, Françoise,” Ko said wearily.
“They’re not going to kill me,” she said. “No. Not me. I’m not going to let them kill me like they killed Felix.”
There was a thump. Ko looked around. There was no light. He used a disposable cigarette lighter to see what Francoise was doing.
The thump had come from the lid of the suitcase that she had thrown back against a wall. She was pawing through the suitcase, looking for something. Her rifle lay discarded on the floor beside her.
“What the hell are you doing, Françoise?” Ko said, the weariness in his tone overlaid by disgust.
“They’re not going to kill me. I don’t want to die. I can’t die. I’m going out. Don’t try to stop me. I’m going out and then I’ll explain everything to them. They will understand.”
“Let her go,” Diringshoffen said from the window. “She’s crazy.”
“I’m not crazy. You’re the crazies. You can stay here and get killed. I’m going to live. That’s important — to live.”
She stood up. Even in almost total darkness, Ko could see the white blouse she held in her hand. It was her flag of surrender.
“I will explain everything,” she said. “They will understand.”
“They’ll kill you,” Ko said.
“No. Not me. I will surrender and then explain everything and they will understand. And I will live.”
She started toward the door. “So long, Françoise,” Ko said.
Dunjee watched as the farmhouse door swung open. Something white was being waved.
Reese put the bullhorn back to his lips. “We see your white flag. We will respect it. Just come out slowly with your hands high in the air.”
Jack Spiceman put his M-16 up to his cheek and took careful aim at the doorway.
“You think it’s a trick?” Dunjee said.
“Who knows?”
All five men watched as Françoise Leget stepped slowly through the farmhouse door, her arms straight up above her head. In her left hand was the white blouse.
She walked slowly toward the stone wall. When she was twenty yards away, Jack Spiceman shot her in the left knee. Francoise Leget crumpled to the ground. Then the screams began.
32
After Françoise Leget’s screams had gone on without interruption for nearly five minutes, Dunjee asked Franklin Keeling, “Why don’t you finish her off?”
“That’s what you’d do, isn’t it?” Keeling said.
“I don’t know,” Dunjee said.
“Well, the reason I don’t have Spiceman finish her off is because in about two minutes, they’re going to do something stupid.”
“Like kill their hostages?”
Keeling shook his head as he peered over the top of the stone wall. Next to him Spiceman had removed one of the stones after working it loose. It afforded him a perfect loophole through which he aimed his rifle.
“Tell him, Jack,” Keeling said.
Spiceman didn’t take his eyes from the sights of his rifle, which were aimed at the farmhouse door. He barely moved his lips when he spoke. “They’re not going to kill their hostages now. The hostages are their only way off this rock. But by shooting the woman, we shook ’em up. They’re confused. And because they’re confused, they’ll probably do something stupid.” Spiceman was silent for a moment until he added, “Of course, maybe they’ve already filled their stupidity quota for the day. Maybe they’ve already killed McKay and his girl friend. Before we got here.”
Keeling shook his head. “No way. If they’d already killed ’em, they wouldn’t still be here.” He looked at his watch. “She’s sure a screamer, isn’t she?”
Inside the farmhouse, Bernt Diringshoffen looked through one of the shuttered windows. “If you could keep their heads down for five seconds, perhaps six, I could get her.”
“No,” Ko Yoshikawa said.
“Five seconds, no more.”
“No.”
“It would work,” Diringshoffen insisted. “Two seconds out, three seconds back. I could drag her with my left arm, fire with my right. That’d help keep their heads down.”
“No.”
They listened to Françoise Leget scream. Diringshoffen turned to look at the dark shape of Ko kneeling by the other window. “It’s over, isn’t it?”