The skills he'd learned as a boy came to him as easily as a flick of his hair or a scratch of his nose. He'd moved swiftly in the darkness… approaching the twenty-foot-high perimeter wall where he knew the guards were at their weakest. He used the grappling hook to scale the wall, clambering up like a cockroach on a black curtain and slipped silently over the top. He'd crouched in the darkness, feeling the cool of the night attack his eyes through the hood over his head. From his very brief reconnaissance, he knew that the British prisoners, poor wretches that they were, were kept in a wing on the far side of the compound. To complete his mission, he would have to cross some wide open spaces and negotiate the rest of the outbuildings if he wanted to reach the Englishman. The first few hund
