Vecchio and had positioned himself in the underbrush twenty feet from the edge.
Several hundred yards below, he had seen the glow of a cigarette. The road was being guarded; he had waited. He had to.
If Scofield was coming he would use that road; it had been the dawn of the fourth day. The American had said that if Corsica was all that was left, he'd be there in three or four days.
By three in the afternoon there had been no sign of him, and an hour later Vasili knew he could wait no longer. Men had sped down the road toward the burgeoning port resort. Their mission had been clear: the in- truder had eluded the road block. Find him, kill him.
Search parties had begun fanning though the woods; two Corsicans slashing the overgrowth with mountain machetes had come within thirty feet of him; soon the patrols would become more concentrated, the search more thorough. He could not wait for Scofield; there was no guarantee that Beowulf Agate had even escaped from the net being spread for him in his own country, much less on his way to Corsica.
Vasili bad spent the hours until sundown creating his own assaults on those who would trap him. Like a swamp fox, his trail appeared one moment heading in this direction, his appearance sighted over there; broken limbs and trampled reeds were proof that he was cornered in a stretch of marshland that fronted an unclimbable wall of schist, and as men closed in, his figure could be seen racing through a field a mile to the west.
He was a yellow jacket on the wind, visually stinging in a dozen different places at once.
When darkness had come, Taleniekov had begun the strategy that led him to where he was at the moment, bidden in a cluster of fir trees below the crown of a high bill, waiting for a man carrying a flashlight to approach. The plan was simple, carried out in three stages, each phase logically evolved from the previous one. First came the diversion, drawing off the largest number of the attack pack as possible; then the exposure to the few left behind, pulling them farther away from the many; finally the separation of those few and the trapping of one. The third phase was about to be concluded as the fires raged a mile and a half below to the east.
He had made his way through the woods, descending in the direction of Porto Vecchio, traveling on the right side of the dirt road. He had gathered together dried branches and leaves, breaking several Graz-Burya shells, sprinkling the powder inside the pile of debris. He had ignited his pyre in the forest, waited until it had erupted and he had heard the shouts of the converging Corsicans. He had raced northward, across the road, into a denser, drier section of the wooded hill and repeated the action, lighting a larger pile of dried foliage next to a dead chestnut tree. It had spread like a fire bomb, the flames leaping upward through the tree, promising to leap again, laterally into the surrounding forest.
He had run once more to the north and had set his last and largest fire, choosing a beech tree long since destroyed by insects. Within a half-hour the hills were blazing in three distinct areas, the hunters racing from one to another, containment and the search vying for priority. Fire.
Always fire.
He had crossed diagonally back to the southwest, climbing through the woods to the road that fronted the inn. He had emerged within sight of the window through which he had escaped the night before. He had walked out on the road, seeing several men with rifles standing, talking anxiously among themselves. The rear guard, confused by the chaos below, unsure whether they should remain where they were, as instructed by superiors, or go to the aid of their island brothers.
The irony of coincidence had not been lost on Vasili as he had struck the match. The striking of a match had started it all so many days ago on Washington's Nebraska Avenue; it was the sign of a trap. It signified another in the hills of Corsica.
"Ecco!" "11 fiammifero." "E M!" The chase had begun; it was now coming to an end. The man with the flashlight was within a stone's lob from him; he would climb up into the cluster of wild fir before the next thirty seconds elapsed. Below, on the slope of the