‘Right,’ said van Rensberg. ‘They will have to be recalled to barracks and checked on sight by their squad commanders. May I go to the radio shack and issue the orders?’
Zilic nodded dismissively.
It took an hour. Outside the windows the sun set across the chain of crests. The tropical plunge to darkness began. Van Rensberg came back.
‘Every one accounted for at the barracks. All eighty attested to by their junior officers. And he’s still out there somewhere.’
‘Or inside the wall,’ suggested McBride. ‘Your fifth squad is the one patrolling this mansion.’
Zilic turned to his security chief.
‘You ordered twenty of them in here without identity checks?’ he asked icily.
‘Certainly not, sir. They are the elite squad. They are commanded by Janni Duplessis. One strange face and he would have seen immediately.’
‘Have him report here,’ ordered the Serb.
The young South African appeared at the library door several minutes later, smartly to attention.
‘Lieutenant Duplessis, in response to my order you chose twenty men including yourself, and brought them here by truck two hours ago?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘You know every one of them by sight?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Forgive me, but when you jogged through the gate, what was your formation of march?’ asked McBride.
‘I was at the head. Sergeant Gray behind me. Then the men, three abreast, six per column. Eighteen men.’
‘Nineteen,’ said McBride. ‘You forgot the tail ender.’
In the silence the mantelpiece clock seemed intrusively loud.
‘What tail ender?’ whispered van Rensberg.
‘Hey, don’t get me wrong, guys. I could have been mistaken. I thought a nineteenth man came round the corner of the truck and jogged through at the rear. Same uniform. I thought nothing of it.’
At that moment the clock struck six and the first bomb went off.
They were no bigger than golf balls and completely harmless, more like bird scarers than weapons of war. They had eight-hour-delay timers and the Avenger h
ad hurled all ten of them over the wall around 10 a.m. He knew exactly where the thickest shrubbery dotted the parkland round the house, from the aerial photographs, and in his teenage years he had been quite a good pitcher. The crackers did nevertheless make a sound on detonation remarkably similar to the whack-whump of a high-powered rifle shot.
In the library someone shouted, ‘Cover,’ and all five veterans hit the floor. Kulac, rolled, came up and stood over his master with his gun out. Then the first guard outside, believing he had spotted the gunman, fired back.
Two more bomblets detonated and the exchange of rifle fire intensified. A window shattered. Kulac fired back towards the darkness outside.
The Serb had had enough. He ran at a crouch through the door at the back of the library, along the corridor and down the steps to the basement. McBride followed suit, with Kulac bringing up the rear, facing backwards.
The radio room was off the lower corridor. The duty operator, when his employer burst in, was white-faced in the neon light, trying to cope with a welter of shouts and yells on the waveband of the guards’ breast-pocket communicators.
‘Speaker, identify. Where are you? What is going on?’ he shouted. No one listened as the firefight in the darkness intensified. Zilic reached forward to his console and threw a switch. Silence descended.
‘Raise the airfield. All pilots, all ground staff. I want my helicopter and I want it now.’
‘It’s not serviceable, sir. Ready tomorrow. They’ve been working on it for two days.’