Spandau Phoenix (69 page)

Stanton grinned. "There's always the pretty new Fraulein, of course, our own Aryan princess.

Horn's solitary eye burned into Stanton's face. "You will keep your distance from Frau Apfel, Robert," he said sharply. "Is that absolutely clear?"

"Wouldn't dream of it, old boy. Not my type at all." The young Englishman tried to look nonchalant, but he could not remain cool under the smoking gaze of Horn's security chief. "Would you mind terribly not doing that, Smuts?" he said irritably. "Gives me the galloping creeps."

Smuts continued to stare like a wolf at the edge of a dying fire.

After several moments, Horn said, "It won't be long now, Robert, and everything will be back to normal. I have some business to take care of first, that is all. It's a matter of security."

Security, Stanton thought contemptuously. In two days you're going to find out about bloody security. He slipped on a pair of Wayfarer sunglasses to hide his eyes while he considered his remarkable position.

Three months ago, two very powerful people had decided they wanted Alfred Horn dead.

One was a ruthless Colombian drug baron who wanted access to Phoenix's European drug markets. His motivegreed-Stanton clearly understood. The other was a rather terrifying gentleman from London named Sir Neville Shaw.

Stanton knew nothing about his motive. All he knew was that both Shaw and the Colombian had asked him to assassinate Alfred Horn. With his own hands! Stanton had refused, of course. He didn't want to murder the old man.

Horn had made him rich-something his worthless title had never done. But the terrible pressure to kill the old man had not relented. The Colombian had threatened Stanton's life, a threat Stanton could afford to ignore as long as he lived under Horn's protection. Sir Neville Shaw had also begun with threats. I'll bury your title under a mountain of dirt and blood, he'd said. Stanton had laughed. He didn't give two shits about his title. Even as a child he had sensed that the name Granville was held in quiet, profound contempt among most of the British peerage. That was one reason he'd turned to the life he had, and also why, upon his father's death, he had accepted the aid and protection of Alfred Horn.

But then Shaw had changed tactics. Kill Horn, he'd said, and the Crown will allow you to keep the companies you own and operate under Horn's supervision. Stanton had paused at,that. Because the time was long past for Alfred Horn to pass on his empire to a younger man. For five years Stanton had been the majority stockholder of Phoenix AG, yet not one decision regarding the administration of the giant conglomerate had been made by him. His father had played a similar role before him, but his father had been allowed to make decisions-his father had been trusted. Robert was a mere figurehead, almost a joke. Yes, the time for change had come. Yet Stanton could not do the dirty work himself; even if he succeeded in killing Horn, Pieter Smuts would tear him limb from bloody limb. No, the old man would have to be killed in such a way that Smuts and his security force died with him. Stanton had pondered this problem for a week, after which time he had hit upon a rather brilliant plan. He would simply bring together the two parties who shared a common goal. On a day trip to London he had communicated his plan to Shaw, then left the devious mI-5 chief to work out the details.

Thus the present plan; thus the ship. All that remained now was the execution.

"Drunk already, are you?" Smuts goaded in his flat voice.

For once Stanton looked the Afrikaner dead in the eye.

"Just thinking," he said. "You should try it sometime, old

sport."

Ilse Apfel stood on a gentle swell of grass and stared across the vast highveld. She had fled Horn House after the nightmare in the X-ray room, running as far and as fast as she could. No one had stopped her, but Linah had followed at a respectful distance, pausing whenever Ilse did, keeping pace like a distant shadow. After Ilse's panic had carried her nearly two miles from the house, she'd calmed smoothed out a place in the rough grass to rest.

Alfred Horn had spoken the truth at dinner, si On this empty plateau there was simply nowhere to. Not without a map, a gun, and a good supply Far to her left, scrawny, humped cattle grazed. Beyond them a pair of reddish horses pranced in the sun. A black haze hung low in the distance, touching the brown horizo& Though Ilse did not know it, the black smoke rose from the coal-fueled cookstoves of a small native kraal, or village.

Such smoke marked most native dwellings from Capetown to the Bantustan of Venda. In winter it was worse. Then the dark palls hung perpetually over the settlements, blocking out the sun. In South Africa electricity is a selectively p@, vided commodity.

Ilse looked down at the sun-baked earth. What hope had she here, so far from Germany? What chance did her childm have? Hans was on his way here now, if Horn could be believed . And from Smuts's questions in the X-ray session, shorn thought there was a chance Hans's father might be coming too. She hoped so. Even from Hans's rare comments about Dieter Hauer, Ilse had gleaned that he was a highly respected, even feared, police officer. But what could he do against men like Pieter Smuts?

Again!

Jiirgen Luhr, who had slashed a helpless policeman before her eyes?

She thought of Alfred Horn. Lord Grenville was right about one thing-the old man had taken to her. Ilse had enough experience with men to recognize infatuation, and Horn had definitely fallen for her. And here, she realized, his infatuation might be the key to very survival.

And to her child's survival. She wonder what madness the old man had planned for tonight. From what Stanton had told her of Horn's business dealings, meetings could augur no good for anyone. Still. she c not very well refuse to attend-not if she wanted ate herself further with Horn. And she might le@ thing that could help her escape.

Pulling a long blade of grass from the ground and started back toward the house. She had wandered afield than she'd thought. Linah was no longer in sig before Ilse had covered fifty meters, she confronted thing she had not seen on her way out: a shimmering stretch of hot asphalt running off through the grass and scrub. A @? Her heart quickened with hope. Then she saw the plane. Three hundred meters to her right, on a round asphalt runway, Horn's sleek Lear-31A. Ilse sighed hopelessly, and continued west.

a long rise, she caught sight of Horn House about away. She gasped.

Fleeing the house earlier, she had not looked back. But now she saw the whole estate laid out before her like a postcard photograph, stark and stunning in its originality. She had never seen anything like it, not in .)magazines, not even on television. Horn House-a building #kat from inside gave the impression of a classical manor Med with ornate rooms and endless hallways-was actually an equilateral triangle. A triad of vast legs surrounded a central tower that rose like a castle keep above the three outer legs. Crowning this tower was a.glittering copper-plated dome. The observatory, Ilse remembered. Hexagonal turrets ked each vertex of the great triangle. She half expected to see archers rise up from behind the tessellated parapets.

With a sudden shiver, she realized that Horn House was exactly what it appeared to be-a fortress. On the seemingly ureless plain, the massive citadel stood ofi a hill set in center of a shallow, circular bowl created by gradually rig slopes on all its sides. Anyone approaching it would have to cross this naked expanse of ground beneath the gaze of the central tower.

Ilse pressed down her apprehension and set off across the asphalt, using the observatory dome as her homeward beacon.

She was quickly brought up short by a deep, dry gully. She d crossing a shallow defile earlier, but nothing s. She must have crossed it at another point on her from the house. Easing herself down over the rim, carefully into the dusty ravine.

Smuts had christened this dry creek bed "the wash and it served as the first barrier in an impregnable security screen which the Afrikaner had constructed around his master's isolated redoubt. If Ilse had known what lay been her and Horn House, she would have hunkered down he Wash and refused to take another step. The Afrikaner used all his experience to turn the grassy bowl between the Wash and his master's fortress into a killing zone from which no intruder could escape alive.

Every square meter of the circular depression was protected by Claymore mines, explosive devices containing hundreds of steel balls that, when remotely detonated, blasted outward at an angle and cut any living creature to pieces in a millisecond. Concrete bunkers, each armed with an M-60 machine gun, studded the inner lip of the huge bowl.

Each was connected to the central tower by a network of underground tunnels, providing a secure means of directing fire and reinforcing the bunkers in the event of casualties. But the linchpin of Horn House's defenses was the "observatory." The nerve center of the entire security complex, the great copper dome housed closed-circuit television monitors, radar screens, satellite communications gear, and the pride of Smuts's arsenal-a painstakingly machined copy of the American Vulcan mini-gun, a rotary cannon capable of pouring 6,600 armor-piercing rounds per minute down onto the open ground surrounding Horn House.

None of these precautions was visible, of course; Pieter Smuts knew his job. The Claymore mines-designed to be spiked onto the ground surface-had been waterproofed and hidden beneath small mounds of earth.

The bunkers had sheets of sun-scorched sod laid over their outward faces.

Even the Vulcan gun slept silently behind the retractable 'lllescope cover" of the "observatory," waiting to be aimed not at the heavens, but at the earth.

Oblivious to the matrix of death that surrounded her, Ilse fought her way up and over'the far rim of the Wash, brushed herself off, and continued toward the still distant house.

With a soft buzz Alfred Horn turned his wheelchair away from his security chief and gazed across the veld. Ilse had just topped the rim of the bowl to the northeast. With her blond hair dancing in the sun, she looked as carefree as a Jungfrau picnicking in the Grunewald.

Without taking his eyes from her, Horn asked, "Is the helicopter available, Pieter?"

"Yes, sir."

Horn watched Ilse make her way across the long, shallow depression and climb the hill to the house. It took several minutes. When Ilse spied the Ahikaner, she started to avoid the table, but Horn motioned her over. She stepped tentatively up to his wheelchair.

"Is there any news of my husband?" she asked diffidently.

"Not yet, my dear. But there soon will be, I'm sure." Horin turned to Smuts. "Pieter, have one of the office girls order some clothes for Frau Apfel. They can fly them out in the helicopter. And make sure there's something conservative."

He cast a surreptitious glance at Lord Granville. "For tonight."

The young Englishman stared into his drink.

"Take Frau Apfel with you, Pieter," Horn suggested. "She can provide her sizes." He turned to Ilse with a smile.

"Would you, my dear?"

Ilse hesitated a moment, then she silently followed Smuts.

She didn't know what to make of Alfred Horn's eccentricities, but she remembered the Afrikaner's warning against disobeying him. She would do anything to keep her unborn child off the torture table that waited in the X-ray ROOMHom watched her walk into the house, a look of rapture on his face. Stanton observed him with growing disgust. The oldfool's past it, he thought. There's no stopping things now.

You never learned the natural law, Alfred You pass the torrh to the young or you die. As Stanton drained the dregs of his Bloody Mary, he made a silent toast to Sir Neville Shaw.

3.30 P.M. Mozambique Channel, Indian Ocean

Sixty-five miles off the wooded coastline of southern Mozambique, the MV

Casilda hove to in the 370-mile-wide stretch of water that separates the old Portuguese colony from the island of Madagascar. A medium-sized freighter of Panamanian registry, her holds were full of denim fabric bound for Dares Salaam on the Tanzanian coast to the north. After unloading this cargo Casilda would sail to Beira, the great railhead and port on the Mozambique coast, where she would take on a consignment of asbestos bound for Uruguay. But just now she had other business.

Strapped to the aft deck of the freighter like giant insects pinned to a display board were two Bell JetRanger HI helicopters scheduled for delivery to RENAMO, the antiMarxist guerrillas in Mozambique-Although the choppers would eventually be delivered to their official buyers, they had a job to do first-a slight detour to take. Supplied by a very wealthy gentleman in South America, the JetRangers were configured as commercial aircraft-with the papers required for legal transfer all in order-but a military man might I e quick to notice that they could be easily modified for combat duty in a pinch.

The sun-blistered man who surveyed the two helos from the shadow of the wheelhouse awning was just such a man.

An Englishman, and the only white man on the entire ship, his name was Alan Burton. During the entire five-week voyage, Burton had watched over the helicopters as if they were his own. In the next two days he would have to entrust his life to them, and as he did not particularly trust any of the men he would be working with, he felt that the most he could do was be sure of the choppers. They were his lifeline.

His way in-his way out.

Casilda had been lucky so far. At no port of call had any customs officials conducted more than a cursory search of her holds. If they had, they would almost certainly have discovered the two large crates secreted in the stacks of bolted denim, which contained a rather amateurish assortment of assault rifles, ammunition, and grenades.