I walked along the edge of the barricade, feeling like a Mongol considering how to make it over the Great Wall and into China. I finally found what Vanilla suggested. A tree that grew with limbs close to the wall.
But not that close.
Kincaid and Collins kept the limbs pretty well trimmed off their side. I’d have to climb the tree and jump to the wall, and then drop down on the other side. The trick then, according to Vanilla, was to move along a certain line of trees, and then onto a long open veranda. All of this was in a blind spot for the camera. Then I had to snip a certain wire in a certain hidden place just inside the foyer, and then I had to get in, all of this without the dogs or the guards or the camera seeing me. Then I had to kill two of what she said were the greatest assassins alive, and once that was done, all that was left was to sneak out and go over the wall without being shot by the guards or having being torn apart by the dogs. Piece of cake.
I turned off my headlight, slipped the machete in a scabbard on my belt, started up the tree, which was a kind of sickly pine coated in a light casing of ice that crackled as I went. Snow drifted down on me, both from the sky and from where it had gathered on limbs. With me in my heavy coat and with the shotgun strapped on my back, I kept getting hung up, and I kept slipping on the ice, but finally I made it without falling, nestled on a limb, and gathered myself.
I was high enough up I could see over the wall. There were lights there, most of them closer to the house. There was a huge brick estate with a long veranda and a sloping roof nestled in the center of some open land. There was a line of thick-limbed trees that ran from the wall toward the house, but ended some thirty or forty feet before they got there. Everything was covered in snow.
I began to think Vanilla was way right. I was in over my head. I was having a hard enough time getting over the wall, let alone going into the house and killing Devil Red-the both of them.
Finally, I felt rested enough to scoot out to the edge of the limb, and just as I was trying to get up on it to jump, it broke, and I fell.
I lay on the ground for a long time. I had landed with the shotgun strapped to my back, so that didn’t help matters either. I felt as if it had been driven into my back. The fall knocked the breath out of me and I lay there trying to get it back. I felt like the Oz Scarecrow with the stuffing pulled out. Only colder.
I was off to an excellent start, if I was a comedian.
Eventually, I felt strong enough to stand. I looked up at the tree. The limb had been my best access, and now it was gone. I went down the fence row again, this time in the direction closer to the shrubs, looking for a new way over, and finally came upon a sweet gum tree with a limb that projected just over the wall and hadn’t been recently trimmed.
The problem was there were few limbs until you got up about ten feet, so I had to climb using the pressure of my palms and the soles of my shoes. The tree was damp and it was no easy business. By the time I got to the first limb I could reach, I felt on the verge of a rupture. I got hold of the limb, swung up, and sat on it for a moment. I was much closer to the line of shrubs here. I could see them through the cluttered boughs of the leaf-stripped, snow-coated tree.
I had too much stuff on me, and that was making it hard to move along, so with reluctance, I removed the machete and dropped it on the ground. I crawled out on the limb. It dipped slightly, like a horse nodding for me to get off. The wall was festooned with barbed wire and sharp pieces of metal and broken glass that had been imbedded in the cement when it was drying. Vanilla said there was a camera, but the trees had grown large and bushy and would hide someone from sight if they came over the wall in line with them.
I was in line with them.
I eased out farther on the limb, near to its thinning tip, and that made me nervous. It was long enough that with my weight on it, it dipped over the wall. I grabbed hold of the limb and swung out, catching my pants on the glass in the wall, but only slightly. I dropped to the ground inside the compound and went down on one knee, giving things a look. The wet ice and snow came through my pants and made my knees numb.
I went at a crouch along the line of trees, and if Vanilla was right, out of camera shot. My back ached from the fall. I felt a little light-headed. Either not enough food. Too much activity. Being scared. Or a combination of all three. Fortunately, I didn’t have to go number two, so I had that going for me.