Sile Rook didn’t waste a single heartbeat looking at the unconscious saboteur lying groaning against the belfry pier.
He scrambled across the frost-glazed cathead platform on hands and knees. He reached into the heavy timber derrick chest where Master Rigger Kael had stored the reserve naval rescue gear. His calloused fingers seized a coiled four-part hemp tackle, fitted with a forged Swedish iron snatch-block and a heavy swivel snap-hook wrapped in lead wire.
The lead wire gave the hook casting weight. Without weight, a steel hook dropped into a forty-knot crosswind at four hundred feet would stream horizontally like a weathercock, impossible to guide.
“Tomas! Below!” Sile bellowed, leaning over the stone coping of the low roof wall.
He swung the leaded hook in a two-foot underhand swinging weight arc, timing the swing against the rhythmic lurch of the Spire. On the third backswing, he released the coil.
The weighted hook plunged through the freezing air like a diving hawk, paying out two-inch oiled naval hemp behind it. It sliced clean through the roaring updraft. It dropped twenty feet straight down along the western face of the marble cut stone.
The heavy iron hook clattered against the stone within six inches of Tomas’s face.
