Bloody Passage - Jack Higgins [54]
"You know something, little flower? I'm going to enjoy you." She felt her stomach grow weak, some deep, instinctual response moving inside her as he stood over her, hands on hips. "Yes, definitely an occasion. In fact, a champagne occasion. Wait there. I'll be right back."
He crossed the room, opened a louvred door and disappeared. Simone was on her feet in an instant and went after him. She peered through the slats of the door into a kitchen. Masmoudi opened the door of a large icebox and took out a bottle of champagne. She turned away at once, tiptoed across the room, picked up her handbag and let herself out.
She hurried down the path to the garden gate. It was all quiet now, the soldiers presumably having taken the women to their quarters, but the floodlighting was still on making it impossible to cross the square directly.
She worked her way round, keeping to the shadows, pulling the hood of the burnous close about her face and had barely reached the far side and the shelter of the vehicles parked in the shadows when Masmoudi's front door was flung open and he appeared on the veranda.
"Husseini!" he called at the top of his voice.
Simone darted up a flight of stone steps to a higher level, keeping to the wall. Up there she was in total darkness and when she looked down she saw Sergeant Husseini quite clearly doubling across the square. He was stripped to the waist and had no boots on.
She started to feel her way up another flight of stone steps cautiously and the sounds of activity in the courtyard below increased so that by the time she had reached the next level there were at least two dozen soldiers down there in the courtyard. And then, to her dismay, a voice called out in Arabic somewhere high above her, a torch was switched on and someone started to come down.
She descended the steps as quickly as the darkness allowed, pausing only when she reached the lower level, for to go down into the courtyard was to invite certain capture.
There was an iron rail. She leaned against it, looking about her desperately, aware of the sound of boots descending the steps above her and then she noticed the roof of one of the trucks four or five feet below, projecting from inside some sort of shed.
It was her only hope and as the steps grew nearer, she slipped under the rail, dropped onto the canvas roof, crawled inside the overhang and lay down. She looked at her watch. It was almost ten o'clock. She took the Ceska from her handbag, held it in her left hand, finger on the trigger, and waited, face against the canvas, while they beat the yard for her below.
It was eleven o'clock before they gave up, half-past before she could be sure. She lay there waiting, listening to the silence, trying to satisfy herself as to its totality before finally crawling back outside, reaching up for the railings and pulling herself up onto the landing. She barely hesitated before starting up the next flight of steps.
Time was of the essence now and it occurred to her that Grant and the others, ready and waiting for at least two hours on the beach, could only be imagining the worst.
It started to rain quite heavily as she went up the last few steps to the ramparts of the north wall. She hesitated, keeping to the shadows for a moment. There was a lamp of some sort twenty or thirty yards further on. A soldier stood beside it sheltering in the corner where two walls joined.
There was no sign of the other sentry which was unfortunate, but further delay was impossible so she stepped out of the shadows. As she walked, she unfastened the front of the burnous so that it fell open.
At the sound of her approach, the sentry came to life and moved into the open, his AK assault rifle at the ready. He lowered it just as quickly, his mouth gaping, for now she had moved into the area of light and made a reasonably spectacular figure in the flowing,