In the Hour Before Midnight (10 page)

He nodded, a slight smile on his face. “ Something else you brought out of this Hole of yours, Stacey?”

“I suppose so.”

“Then it was worth it.” He took out a cigar. “Now go back to the piano like a good boy and play me your mother's favorite piece again.”

The music was absolute perfection and brought her back to me like a living presence. All the sadness of life, all its beauty, caught in an exquisite moment that seemed to go on for ever. When I finished, there were tears on my face.

• • •

When I got back, Hoffer had returned and there was some sort of council of war going on in the lounge. Burke looked completely different. He'd shaved and wore a khaki shirt with epaulets which gave him a certain military air.

But the change went deeper. There was a briskness about him, an authority I had not seen since my return. When I went in, he glanced up from the map and said calmly, “Ah, there you are, Stacey. I've just been going over things with Mr. Hoffer.”

Piet stood in the background, a wad of sticking plaster moulding his left ear, Legrande beside him. The South African simply didn't look at me as I went to the table.

“This is one hell of a good idea,” Hoffer said, rubbing his hands together. “Colonel Burke tells me it's primarily your suggestion.”

Burke's voice was flat and colourless as he cut in. “The trouble is getting to Serafino before he realises we're in the area. His camp, as we understand it, is about four thousand five hundred feet up on the eastern slopes of the mountain. The idea is that we make a night drop on to a plateau about a thousand feet below the summit on the western side.”

“Then you cross over and catch him with his pants down?”

Hoffer's choice of phrase was unfortunate under the circumstances, but Burke nodded. “We should get over the summit at least by dawn. On the other side there's a forest belt about a thousand feet down. Oak, birch, some pine, I understand. Once we reach that we'll have plenty of cover on the final stretch.”

Hoffer seemed genuinely excited as he examined the map. “You know something? For the first time I really believe there's a chance. Let's all have a drink on it.”

“Another time if you don't mind,” I said. “I could do with an early night. It's been a long day.”

He was pleasant enough about it and as no one pressed me to stay, I left them and went up to my room. Not that I could sleep when I did go to bed. I lay there with the French windows open because of the heat and after a while it started to shower. It was round about that time that Rosa arrived.

She took off the silk kimono she was wearing. “Look, no trouser suit.”

When she got in beside me, she was shivering, though from desire or cold was uncertain and whether she was there for herself or Hoffer didn't
really seem to matter. It was nice, lying there in the darkness holding her in the hollow of my arm, listening to the rain, even when she fell asleep on me!

A
S
I
FOUND
out later, Burke didn't go to bed. Instead, he flew to Crete in the Cessna to pick up a few things we were going to need and was back just before eleven on Saturday morning.

Sunday, being the conventional day of rest, seemed as reasonable a time to catch Serafino napping as we were likely to find, which meant going in that night. There was almost a full moon, which didn't please Burke much, but he was impatient to be off now that the ball was rolling again and bustled around, full of energy, checking everything.

We used a small private airstrip not far from the villa, a cow pasture really, with a hangar that was barely large enough to get the Cessna inside.

The plane was the 401 model with eight seats
and we had those out for a start. A particularly good point was the Airstair door amidships which would give us a clear exit, something we badly needed if all four of us were to get out in time to drop in a nice tight group.

The pilot, a man called Nino Verda, was ex Italian air force, about thirty from the look of him and according to Hoffer the best money could buy. He needed to be. To fly that kind of country in the dark, graze a six-thousand-foot mountain and give us an eight-hundred-foot drop over that plateau was going to take genius.

We were using the X type parachute, the kind British paratroopers used before they changed to the new N.A.T.O. one. Burke preferred the X type. It got you down faster and could be guided with greater accuracy. The reserve chutes were of the same type, and identical with those we had used in the Congo.

Our weapons were unconventional by some standards, but proved in combat, the only realistic test. We were using the Chinese A.K. assault rifle, probably the most reliable automatic combat rifle in the world at that time and the new Israeli sub machine gun, the Uzi, which was better than the Sterling in every way.

Two grenades each, a commando knife—the list
seemed endless. Burke even had a kit inspection with each man's camouflaged jump suit laid out together with every item of equipment.

And he went over the operation with the map and a stop-watch so many times that even Piet Jaeger looked sick by late evening. Towards me he seemed no different and I suppose any touch of formality in our relationship could have been put down to the exigencies of the situation.

At dinner, Hoffer was joviality personified. Only the best was good enough although Burke put his foot down as regards alcohol. But the food was excellent. Surprisingly, I found an appetite for it and Rosa was there, wearing her best, looking absolutely magnificent.

Afterwards, Burke took us through the plan again in detail, including the walk-out if everything went well, which he estimated would take eight or nine hours to the point on the Bellona road where we were to be met by Hoffer himself with the necessary transport.

He shook hands with us all solemnly when Burke had finished and made a little speech about how much he appreciated what we were doing and how he hoped before long to have his stepdaughter with him again, God willing, which I thought was pushing it a bit far.

Later, when I was changing in my room, Rosa appeared. She zipped up the front of my camouflaged suit and kissed me on the cheek. “From you or from Hoffer?” I said.

“From me.” She touched my face briefly. “Come back safe.”

She hesitated in the doorway, and looked at me, a strange expression on her face. She wanted to speak, wanted like hell to tell me something and was desperately afraid of the consequences.

I felt a sudden rush of affection for her, shook my head and smiled. “Don't say it, Rosa, not if you're truly afraid of him.”

“But I am,” she said, her face white. “He can be cruel, oh, so cruel, Stacey. You couldn't imagine.”

“Tell me about it when I return, when it doesn't matter any more.” I opened the door and kissed her as a woman should be kissed, moulding her ripeness into me. “I survive all things, Rosa Solazzo, especially the Hoffers of this world.”

After she had gone, I buckled on my belt with the Smith and Wesson in its spring holster and adjusted my beret. The man who stared out at me from the mirror was a stranger, someone from before the Hole. What then was he doing here? It was quite a thought, but the wrong time to be asking questions like that and I left and went down to join the others.

• • •

The cruising speed of the Cessna 401 is up to two hundred and sixty-one miles per hour which meant that we could expect to be over the target in twenty minutes. We delayed take-off for an hour because the night was still too bright for Burke's liking, but the overcast promised by the met forecast didn't materialise and he reluctantly gave the word to go at one
A
.
M
.

Verda had logged an internal flight to Gela with the authorities at Punta Raisi, just in case questions were asked, which meant flying through the great divide anyway. A minor divergence would take him into the area of the drop and within minutes he could be back on course again.

Including the training Burke had given us in the Congo, I had jumped nine times in all, so this would make ten—a nice round number. I had never particularly enjoyed the experience. A paratrooper is a clumsy creature, hampered by the requirements of his calling. The X type parachute weighs twenty-eight pounds and the reserve chute around twenty-four. A fair weight to start with. Add to that a supply bag carrying anything up to a hundred pounds and it's hardly surprising that the only movement possible is downwards.

Even removing the passenger seats from the
interior gave us barely enough room to manoeuvre with all that equipment. Burke had rigged a static line of his own devising and he and Verda had carefully removed the Airstair door which was fine as long as no one fell out before we got there.

A lot of things were going through my head as I squatted on the floor in line as the Cessna lifted smoothly into the air. The die was cast now, we were on our way—no turning back and I still wasn't certain about anything, except that everyone in sight seemed to be lying to me, including Rosa.

For some unaccountable reason that one hurt and when I analysed my feelings, I realised with a shock that I had liked her. Really liked her. She had guts and her own special brand of integrity and I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that her final appearance in my room had been completely personal. She had come to say goodbye because she wanted to and not because Hoffer or anyone else had pressured her.

We were flying at eight thousand feet now and the view was certainly spectacular. Chains of mountains, peaks and ridges, white in the moonlight, the valleys between dark with shadow.

The journey passed completely without incident and was so short that it was something of a shock when the red light Verda had rigged blinked
rapidly several times. When I looked out of the window I could see the jagged peak of Monte Cammarata, the western slope, and then, as we slanted down, the dark, saucer-shaped plateau which was the dropping zone, the waterfall next to it bright in the moonlight, a clear marker.

Verda swung into the wind and turned, coming in so close to the rocky precipice that lifted to the summit about the plateau that the heart moved inside me. We got a brief idea of what it was going to be like and then he swung the Cessna into the void.

As he turned to come in again, Burke, who was the lead man, stood up and slipped on to the static line. Piet followed suit, then Legrande and I brought up the rear. My stomach was hollow, mouth dry and I shuffled forward with the others, caught in a nightmare of suspense.

The red light blinked once, then twice, the Cessna rocked in some kind of turbulence and Burke went out through the door. Piet must have been right on top of him, Legrande hard on his heels.

And then it was my turn. The wind howled past the gaping doorway. Only a madman could venture out there, I told myself, and fell headfirst, somersaulting.

I released the supply bag I had been clutching tightly in my arms and it fell to swing twenty feet below on the end of a line clipped to my waist. And I was swinging, too, beneath the dark khaki umbrella, the most beautiful sight in the world at that moment.

When you jump at eight hundred feet, it takes exactly thirty seconds to hit the deck which doesn't give you long to sort yourself out. That close to the rock face there were down-draughts and I started to oscillate. As usual, once you were out in the open, the light didn't seem anything like as good. I caught a brief glimpse of one chute then another like dark thistle-down, drifting into the shadows beside the waterfall and then I was moving in fast myself.

The trouble with a night-drop is that usually you can't see the ground which accounts for the high proportion of broken limbs on that type of operation, people being caught by surprise and landing too stiffly.

That was one thing I liked about the supply bag dangling down there at the end of a twenty foot line. Unless you are oscillating alarmingly, the bag hits the deck first with a solid thump, warning you to get ready.

I just made it in time. The supply bag thudded
into the ground and I followed a split second later, rolling into a patch of surprisingly springy turf. I rolled again and came to rest, a shoulder of rock nudging me in the ribs.

I lay there, winded, and someone came close and leaned over me. There was the gleam of steel and I got my hand up just in time, the Smith and Wesson ready.

“I was only going to cut your line,” Piet Jaeger said.

“Are you sure it wasn't my throat you were aiming for?”

“Another time,” he said. “When you aren't so useful. When we don't need you any more.”

He sounded as if he meant it and sliced through my belt line and pulled my supply bag clear. I struggled out of my harness and got rid of the chute. Now that I was down, the light seemed much better and I could see Burke and Legrande approaching carrying their chutes and supply bags. The Frenchman was limping, but it turned out to be nothing serious. In his case, his oscillation had been so great that he had hit the ground before his supply bag when unprepared. He'd obviously had a bad shaking, but he made light of it as we unpacked.

The supply bags held the commando rucksacks
containing food and water, our weapons and extra ammunition, and when they were empty, went into a convenient crevasse together with the parachutes.

We squatted in the shelter of the rocks and Burke passed round a flask of brandy. I took a long pull and found myself smiling, grateful to be alive, two feet on solid earth again as the warmth spread through me.

“There's no point in hanging about,” he said. “Straight up to the top from here. We've got to get over and into those trees while it's still dark.”

Which didn't give us long because dawn was officially at ten past four and we moved out at once in single file. I took the lead because, in theory at least, I knew more about the terrain than anyone else and followed a route which took us straight up the side of the waterfall.

It was a marvellous night, the moon almost full, a tracer or two of cloud aroused, stars glittering everywhere. The mountains marched into the distance, ridge after ridge of them, and far to the east moonlight glittered on Etna's snowy peak.

The valleys were dark, but four thousand feet below and a couple of miles to the right in the general direction of Bellona, a single light gleamed. I wondered if it could be Cerda sitting up and wondering how we were making out, for
nothing was more certain than that my grandfather would have kept him fully informed.

A good actor, Cerda, one had to admit that. Even the gun behind his back had all been part of the show. He had behaved in a way it was reasonable to suppose I would expect him to—very clever. His one flaw had been his apparent ignorance of the presence of Joanna Truscott in the mountains. Hardly likely in a man who knew everything else there was to know about Serafino.

Still, an excellent performance with Marco keeping out of the way in the back room. You really couldn't trust anyone in this affair, or so it seemed to me then.

 

It was just after three when we made the summit and I dropped into a hollow between rocks and waited for the others. I was tired and I suppose the truth was that I wasn't really fit enough for this kind of game yet. On the other hand, the others didn't look too good either, Legrande particularly, and Burke seemed to be having difficulty with his breathing.

He passed the brandy round again, probably as an excuse to have one himself. “So far so good. We've got just under an hour to get down a thousand feet or so. If we can do that I think we'll have it made.”

He nodded to me. “All right, Stacey.”

So I was still leading the way
. I stood up and moved out, more conscious than ever that he was at the back of me.

 

It wasn't easy going at all. The ground was rough and treacherous and with the moon almost down, the light on that side of the mountain was very bad indeed. In places there were great aprons of shale that were as treacherous underfoot as ice, sliding like water at the slightest movement.

I paused after half an hour on a small plateau and waited for them. In the east, there was already a perceptible lightening of the sky on the rim of the world and I knew we were not going to make it unless the going changed completely.