Drought (35 page)

Once they had eaten, they wrapped Nathan and George and Mina up in their blankets, and then they quietly talked together for a while, before taking turns to go over to the washing pool.

Once he had taken off his clothes and eased himself up to his neck in the cool, slightly mineral-tasting water, Martin's confidence began to return. If the Yuhaviatam had happily lived like this, then he was sure that they could, too – at least until the drought was over. He rinsed out his clothes and then stood up, so that he could wring them out. Although he was mostly in shadow, he could see Saskia sitting cross-legged by the embers of the dying fire, her blanket wrapped only loosely around her so that her cleavage was exposed, staring at him.

Peta had her back turned, talking to Tyler, but Ella saw Saskia looking at him.

Martin remembered what a Marine sergeant had said to him once, when they were talking about losing their nerve during firefights with the Taliban. ‘You can run away from the world as far as you like, Makepeace, but you can never run away from yourself. Wherever you go, there you fucking are.'

He was bone-tired, but Martin couldn't sleep. He lay on his side, watching the sparks in the fire winking out, one after the other, trying to relax his mind and his body.
Calm
, he told himself.
Think of an ocean, lapping on the shore
.
Think of that monotonous rubab music they used to play in Afghanistan.
But every tendon in his body felt as tense as piano wire, and he couldn't help worrying that Joseph Wrack's men might have picked up their trail, and be coming after them even now. One of his Colt Commandos was folded into his blanket next to him, although he didn't relish the idea of firing a sub-machine gun fire in a confined space like this, with innocent women and children all around him.

At last, just as the first faint light was beginning to creep in through the crevice, Martin fell asleep. He didn't dream of anything at all. He just fell into a dark, bottomless well, and kept on falling.

He was woken up by a loud scuffling noise, followed by a piercing scream. Then another scream, and a cry of ‘Mommy!
Momm-eeeeee
!'

He sat up instantly and turned around. By the light from outside and from Santos' flashlight, he saw two large beasts with yellow eyes and flailing tails. Coyotes. One of them was snarling and jumping excitedly from side to side. The other had its teeth in Mina's shoulder and was dragging her across the floor of the cavern, toward the crevice.

Mina was crying and kicking and struggling but the coyote had its jaws firmly locked and kept pulling her further and further along the crevice. It was clearly determined not to let go of her.

Martin's blankets were twisted tightly around his legs but he tugged himself free and clambered to his feet, bending down to pick up his Colt Commando. Everybody else was awake now, and shouting, and George was letting out an ear-splitting shriek of terror that was almost continuous.

‘Shoot it! Shoot it!' Susan was begging.

‘Martin – do something!' said Peta. ‘Make it let her go!'

‘I can't shoot it yet!' Martin told them. ‘We'll get ricochets every which way! I'll end up killing all of us instead!'

The coyote dragged Mina right through the crevice and into the open. Martin followed, with Tyler close behind him. Outside, it was already warm, and the sky was the color of orange juice. What made the morning seem all the more unearthly was that apart from Mina's screaming and Susan's panicky shouting there was another, blood-curdling sound in the air, echoing from one mountain-top to another – the dawn chorus of coyotes howling.

As the coyote jerked Mina across the rough open ground in front of the cavern entrance, Martin hurried after it. Mina was kicking and flailing so violently that he didn't want to risk a shot from anything except point-blank range.

‘
Momm-eeeee
!' she kept on screaming. ‘
Momm-eeeee
!'

Martin caught up with them. The coyote stared up at him balefully and bared its lips but it still kept her teeth firmly embedded in Mina's shoulder. Mina's eyes were rolling with shock and she was panting for breath. Martin slowly and cautiously stretched out his left hand, keeping eye contact with the coyote all the time. If he could seize the scruff of its neck he could hopefully hold the animal still for long enough to force the muzzle of his sub-machine gun into its ribcage and blow its insides out.

Just as he was about to grab a handful of fur and skin, however, the other coyote gave a harsh bark and came running at full pelt toward him. It stopped two or three feet short of him, but it kept barking and snarling and leaping up at him.

He swung the Colt Commando around and squeezed the trigger. Nothing happened, only a complicated click. He tried to eject the round in the chamber but it was jammed tight. There was no time to work out what had gone wrong with it. Faulty ammunition, broken extractor spring, it could have been anything. All he could do was grab the Commando's barrel and try to club the coyote with it. It was futile. The coyote kept dancing and dodging around him, still snarling, but making sure that it stayed well out of his reach.

Mina screamed again, because she was being dragged even further toward the bushes. Martin tried two or three times more to hit the other coyote, but each time it sprang back, and he missed it. In the end he hurled the gun at it as hard as he could. The coyote bounded to one side, and the gun clattered uselessly on to the ground.

‘
Mommeeeeee
!' screamed Mina.

Martin had once been told by an Army dog handler how to tackle a pit bull when it goes berserk. He had never tried it, and he had no idea if it really worked or not, but he didn't know now what else he could do. Turning away from the second coyote, he ran back over to the one who was pulling Mina away. He came around behind it, and even though it tried to twist itself away from him, he managed to throw one leg over it and straddle its back. He sat down on its spine with all of his weight, clenching its body tightly between his knees. It struggled and thrashed with all of its strength, and it was stronger than any man he had ever wrestled with. What amazed him was that it still wouldn't open its jaws and release its grip on Mina's shoulder. It was going to keep hold of its prey at any price.

He bent forward, catching hold of both of its upper front legs and then gripping them as tightly as he could, even though it was furiously scrabbling to break free. But just as he was about to deliver his
coup de grâce
, the second coyote came running up again and launched itself on top of him, snarling and biting and scratching and tearing at his shirt. He heard a crunch as it bit into his right biceps, and instantly he felt a searing red-hot pain, as if somebody had branded him.

‘
Yaaaah
!' he shouted, as the coyote went for him again. ‘Get off me, you monster!
Yaaaah
!'

The coyote tried to tear at his face, and its front teeth collided with his right cheekbone, as hard as a punch with a knuckleduster. He ducked his head down and lifted up his shoulder in a bid to protect himself, but then he felt it tearing into his ear. He thought at that moment that he would have to release his hold on the first coyote's legs, just to stop the second coyote from ripping half his face off.

Suddenly, though, he heard a dull, heavy thud. The second coyote yelped and leapt away from him, keening in pain. As it circled away from him, he saw that Tyler was standing only a few feet away from it, holding a large granite rock in his hand. Tyler pivoted his foot in the classic pitcher's move that Martin had taught him when he was only five years old, and threw a knuckleball, hitting the second coyote in the flank.

Martin didn't hesitate. With all of his strength, he wrenched the first coyote's front legs sideways and upward, as far as they would go. He heard muscles and tendons and connective tissue ripping apart, and the coyote dropped flat to the ground underneath him, as promptly as if he had hit it on the head with a baseball bat.
Pull the dog's front
legs wide apart and you'll have a good chance of stopping its heart
, the Army dog handler had told him, and he thanked God that it had worked on this coyote.

Tyler pitched another rock at the second coyote, and it barked and whined and ran off into the bushes.

Martin carefully pried open the dead coyote's jaws and lifted out Mina's shoulder. Mina was still conscious but she was deeply shocked and whimpering and her lips were blue. He gently picked her up and carried her over to Susan, who had her arms outstretched already. Her cheeks were glistening with tears, and all she could do was say, ‘Thank you. Thank you. Both of you. Thank you.'

‘Let's just get her inside and wrap her up and give her something to drink,' said Martin.

As they all started to make their way back into the cavern, Saskia came up to him and gently touched his bloodstained shirtsleeve with her fingertips. ‘You're hurt, Martin. We should clean that up for you.'

‘Nah, it's nothing. Just a coyote bite. I've had worse bites than that, believe me.'

Saskia lowered her eyelashes and then gave him a long, suggestive smile. ‘Really?' she said. ‘What could bite you worse than that?'

Martin turned to Tyler, and laid his left arm around his shoulders. ‘Think you earned your stripes there, soldier. That was real quick thinking. Not to mention some very impressive pitching. Knuckleball's the hardest there is, especially with a rock. You probably saved little Mina's life there, and my life, too.'

Tyler nodded and said, ‘I did, didn't I?'

Martin scruffed his hair and slapped him on the back. He knew for himself that there are few feelings in life more uplifting them redemption.

Back inside the cavern, in the gloom, Susan washed little Mina's bites and dressed her in a clean pink dress. She gave her a drink of lake water and wrapped her up tightly in her blankets, so that she could sleep to get over the shock of her attack.

Peta said, ‘I should clean your bites, too, Martin. You don't know what you can catch from coyotes.'

Santos, who was standing close by, said, ‘Coyote is the demon of bad luck. He is the demon of everything going wrong. If you kill his running-dogs, then you risk all kinds of misfortune.'

‘Oh, thanks, Santos,' said Martin. ‘But there you go. Shit happens.'

T
hey ate a scrappy breakfast of cold hot dogs, dry Cap'n Crunch cereal and half-melted Ding Dongs. Then they lifted the tents out of Peta's Hilux and began to set up a camp on the flat ground outside the cavern. By ten, the morning was roastingly hot, with another cloudless sky, and although the high walls of the canyon gave them plenty of shade, there was no breeze at all. The greatest relief as they worked was to go back inside the crevice and kneel by the lake to take a drink of water and splash themselves.

Peta had brought their three Wenzel lightweight tents, two four-man and one two-man. They pitched them at angles to each other and when they had pitched them they covered them thickly in heaps of bursage and creosote bushes so that they would be camouflaged from any passing helicopter.

Mina was already looking much better. She was sitting on a rock in her bright pink dress, playing with two of her Barbie dolls and singing to herself.

‘My God,' said Saskia. ‘I wish I was that resilient.'

Nathan and George had caught a collared lizard. They had put it into a cardboard box with two plastic GIs and were pretending it was a dinosaur. George was talking in a low growl which was what he obviously thought dinosaurs sounded like, when they spoke.

Martin and Tyler dragged the body of the dead coyote deep into the bushes and built a cairn over it, because the ground was far too hard to dig a shallow grave and bury it.

‘I've seen stories about that on the news, coyotes making off with children,' said Tyler, as they stacked on the last few rocks. ‘Never thought I'd ever see it in real life.'

‘Coyotes, they'll eat anything,' Martin told him. ‘They like cats, especially. Friend of mine, when we were training, a coyote came into his tent and ate his tennis shoe.'

‘Jesus,' said Tyler.

‘I'll have to find out why that gun jammed,' said Martin. ‘We have a spare, and there's no question that you're a world-class pitcher, but next time there could be a whole pack of them.'

They made their way through the cactus and the chaparral back to the camp. Tyler went across to help Ella, who was trying to hammer in a tent peg, while Martin edged his way back through the crevice to find his Colt Commando.

As he entered the main cavern, he suddenly felt chilled, and he gave a violent, involuntary shudder. He stopped, and blinked. He felt freezing cold, but at the same time he was sweating profusely. He could feel his shirt clinging wetly to his back and when he blinked the perspiration stung his eyes.

Santos was standing on the opposite side of the ledge, with his unlit stogie in his mouth, folding up blankets. He looked across at Martin and said, ‘Martin? Are you OK?'

Martin took two steps forward, and then stopped again. Santos' voice had echoed as if he were calling to him down a long empty sewer pipe, and the ledge beneath his feet felt as if it were tilting sideways. The interior of the cavern began to grow darker and darker, and even colder.

‘I'm – I feel kind of—'

He sank slowly to his knees, reaching out with one hand to steady himself, because the ground was rising and falling underneath him and he didn't want to lose his balance and fall over sideways.

Santos came across and bent over him, frowning. ‘You look sick, Martin. Wait – let me get my flashlight. Open your eyes wide, let me look at your pupils.'

Martin was shaking now, and he felt an agonizing pain all the way up his spine. Santos shone his flashlight into his eyes, left and then right. ‘Very dilated. You are sick. Stick out your tongue.'