In Springfield I had an early breakfast, dawdling over coffee until the stores opened. Not wanting to call undue attention to myself, I didn’t want to be the first customer of the day. It was around eleven o’clock before I entered.
The shop specialized in sporting goods. I bought a pair of 7×50 Zeiss binoculars. I looked at a couple of pistols. They had a Luger that balanced in my hand almost as beautifully as Wilhelmina did. I hefted a Winchester 70 with a Browning 2-7x scope that would have been perfect, but I had to discard them both. Hawk’s words of warning were clear in my mind: It has to look like an accident!
I can’t really say that the idea was full grown in my mind. It was just an impulse, I guess, but I’ve learned to trust my impulses. I bought an air gun.
It wasn’t the sort of air rifle kids play around with. It was a Feinwerkbau 300 match rifle that fired .177 calibre pellets. The barrel was of rifled steel, nineteen and a half inches long. In that type of gun the barrel and receiver recoil together, independently of the stock, so that there’s no recoil to feel. You hand cock it by pulling a side lever and, even though it’s a single shot, you can work it pretty fast. The muzzle velocity of that little .177 pellet is 575 feet per second, which isn’t much slower than a .45 calibre pistol. And it’s built for accuracy. The palmswell pistol grip, combined with a Monte Carlo gunstock, makes it fit into your arm and shoulder like a part of you. I guess that’s why you shell out some $200 for one of these weapons.
Before I left town, I gassed up the Volks and picked up a map of the area at the service station. It didn’t give me enough information about the terrain, so I drove out to the airport and picked up an Airman’s Sectional Chart, which pinpoints every hill, road, pond and landmark — and gives you its exact height above sea level.
Then I drove out to the mountain that Julie had told me about.
It took me until almost four in the afternoon to circle my way around by way of Pittsfield and come in from the north. I left the car at the foot of the mountain, hidden in a grove of trees, and started my climb. By five o’clock I was lying prone on a ledge near the crest of the mountain. Almost a mile away was Bradford’s estate. The 7×50 binoculars pulled in every detail.
Julie had been right. There was only one road into the area. Through the glasses I could see that it was patrolled by Massachusetts State Troopers. I remembered the two bogus troopers we’d met yesterday, and I knew that these were more of Bradford’s private army.
Around the perimeter of the estate were two double fences. Each pair of fences consisted of a chain-link fence and a wire mesh fence. The inner pair of fences had another foot and a half of barbed wire on top of them. Between the inner and the outer pair of fences was about thirty feet of space.
The layout was familiar to me. I’d seen it before in the Soviet Union. It’s the kind of set-up they’d copied from the Nazis, who used it to surround many of their concentration camps and all of their stalags — the prisoner of war camps. Which meant that the inner fence was electrified! Then, through the glasses, I spotted the dogs. In five minutes I counted eight of them. They ran free between the fences, which provided a runway for them to roam at will. Doberman pinschers usually run in pairs. They’re fast. Once they hit a man, they’ll take less than two minutes to rip him to death. In the dark no man stands a chance against them.
No one — and I mean, no one at all — could get down that road, past the troopers, climb the first pair of fences and try to get over the second pair of fences without it costing him his life. If he made it over the outer fence, the dogs would tear him to shreds before he reached the inner fence. If they didn’t, he’d just damn well electrocute himself the second he laid a hand on the wire.
The estate itself, the manor house, sat in lonely splendor in the midst of an enormous expanse of closely-clipped lawn. It was 200 yards to the house from the nearest point of entry — 200 yards of wide-open terrain without an inch of cover! It was a safe bet that at night the grounds were crisscrossed with electronic sensor beams.
Alexander Bradford had made sure that no one was going to get at him!
After awhile, I rolled away from the crest of the mountain and went back down to the Volks. I had to think this one out carefully. In spite of Bradford’s precautions, there had to be a way to get at him. I had to find it. Every defense has a built-in flaw. What was his?
I drove away from the area, back toward Pittsfield, stopping at a small diner to eat a sandwich, have a cup of coffee and think this problem over.
One way of looking at it was to assume that Bradford was keeping the world away from him. The opposite point of view was that he was just as much a captive in his own private stalag as any prisoner! If he’d set up so impregnable a defense, I figured he wasn’t going to run away from it before D-Day.
I knew I couldn’t get to him in daylight. For whatever good it would do me, I needed the cover of darkness. Most of all, I needed some way of getting past the bogus troopers, past the dogs and over the fences to the house.
It’s strange where ideas come from. I was sitting in a small booth in the diner, finishing the last of my second cup of coffee and not paying much attention to anyone else. Across the aisle from me was a family of four. Nice, tourist types. The father was in his middle thirties, I guess. His wife held a baby in her arms. The other child was a boy about five. Idly I watched them. The little boy’s father was occupied with folding a paper place mat. When he was finished, he held it up, showed it to the kid and then flipped it into the air.
It swept across the room, soared up in a zoom, circled and came diving down again. A simple delta-wing paper airplane.
There it was. The answer to how I could get past the road patrol, the fences, the dogs and the electronic sensor beams!
Maybe.
If I could find the equipment.
I paid my bill, got into the Volks and set out for the airport at Pittsfield. If what I needed was to be found anywhere, it would be at an airport in the mountain country, because that’s where you find swift air currents and where the sport is most popular.
It’s called “hang-gliding.” You’re suspended by an aluminum framework from a giant delta-wing kite covered in ultra-light nylon fabric. You’d be surprised how far you can hang-glide and how long you can stay aloft. I’ve done it a few times. It’s quite a thrill to soar through the air without a sound, except for the whisper of wind in your ears, and nothing — not even the cockpit of a glider — around you.
I was lucky. At the airport I found a man who sold me his personal kite. He also charged me too damned much for it, but I had the kite. A big son of a gun. Big enough, with the currents you get in the Berkshire mountain country, to lift me and the equipment I needed.
At dusk I was back at the foot of the mountain. Once again I left the Volks in the grove of trees. Once more I climbed up to the peak. According to the airman’s sectional chart, it had an elevation of 1,680 feet. The valley below — Bradford’s private valley — was about 300 feet above sea level. With good air currents, taking off from that height, I could fly several miles. Much more than I needed to get to Bradford’s estate.
I assembled the aluminum and nylon framework of the kite before it got completely dark. Then I made myself comfortable and waited.
While I waited, I mentally reviewed another problem. That damned manor was big! The house had at least sixty rooms. Two L-shaped wings branched off from the main section, which was three stories in height. Assuming I got in, where the devil would I find Bradford? I just couldn’t go roaming down the hallways, asking people where he was!