ground and held his breath. Behind him, to his left, he could see the beam of another flashlight. Instantly he snapped off his own.
'Hey, mon, where are you? Contact, please. You went off your pattern. Or I did.'
Contact, please... Off your pattern. The terms of an agent, not the language of a carrier. The man was MI5. Past tense. Was. Now Dunstone, Limited.
The Dunstone team had separated, each man assigned an area... a pattern. That could only mean they were in radio contact.
Six men in radio contact. Oh, Jesus!
The beam of light came nearer, dancing, flickering through the impossible foliage.
'Here, mon!' whispered Alex gutturally, hoping against reasonable hope that the rain and the whisper would not raise an alarm in the Dunstone ear.
Put on your light, please, mon.'
'Trying to, mon.' No more, thought McAuliff. Nothing. The dancing beam reflected off a thousand shining, tiny mirrors in the darkness, splintering the light into hypnotically flickering shafts. Closer.
Alex rolled silently off the path into the mass of wet earth and soft growth, the rifle under him cutting into his thighs. The beam of light was nearly above him, its shaft almost clear of interference. In the spill he could see the upper body of the man. Across his chest were two wide straps: One was connected to an encased radio, the other to the stock of a rifle, its thick barrel silhouetted over his shoulder. The flashlight was in the left hand; in the right was a large, ominous-looking pistol.
The MI5 defector was a cautious agent. His instincts had been aroused.
McAuliff knew he had to get the pistol; he could not allow the man to fire. He did not know how near the others were, how close the other patterns.
Now!'
He lashed his right hand up, directly on to the barrel of the pistol, jammming his thumb into the curvature of the trigger housing, smashing his shoulder into the man's head, crashing his left knee up under the man's legs into his testicles. With the impact, the man buckled and expunged a tortured gasp; his hand went momentarily limp, and Alex ripped the pistol from it, propelling the weapon into the darkness.
From his crouched agony the Jamaican looked up, his left hand still holding the flashlight, its beam directed nowhere at the earth, his face contorted... about to take the necessary breath to scream.
McAuliff found himself thrusting his fingers into the man's mouth, tearing downward with all his strength. The man lurched forward, bringing the hard metal of the flashlight crashing into Alex's head, breaking the skin. Still McAuliff ripped at the black's mouth, feeling the teeth puncturing his flesh, sensing the screams.
They fell, twisting in midair, into the overgrowth. The Jamaican kept smashing the flashlight into McAuliff's temple; Alex kept tearing grotesquely, viciously, at the mouth that could sound the alarm he could not allow.
They rolled over into a patch of sheer jungle mud. McAuliff felt a rock, he tore his left hand loose, ripped the rock up from the ground, and brought it crashing into the black mouth, over his own fingers. The man's teeth shattered; he choked on his own saliva. Alex whipped out his bleeding hand and instantly grabbed the matted hair, twisting the entire head into the soft slime of the mud. There were the muffled sounds of expulsion beneath the surface. A series of miniature filmy domes burst silently out of the soggy earth in the spill of the fallen flashlight.
And then there was nothing.
The man was dead.
And no alarms had been sent.
Alexander reached over, picked up the light, and looked at the fingers of his right hand. The skin was slashed, there were teeth marks, but the cuts were not deep; he could move his hand freely, and that was all he cared about.
His left temple was bleeding, and the pain terrible, but not immobilizing. Both would stop... sufficiently.
He looked over at the dead Jamaican and he felt like being sick. There was no time. He crawled back to the path and started once again the painstaking task of following it. And he tried to focus his eyes into the jungle. Twice, in the not-too-distant denseness, he saw sharp beams of flashlights. The Dunstone team was continuing its sweep. It was zeroing in.
There was not an instant to waste in thought.
Eight minutes later he reached the clearing. He felt the accelerated pounding in his chest; there was less than a mile to go. The easiest leg of the terrible journey.
He looked at his watch. It was