Drought (40 page)

In the early hours of the morning, just before the false dawn began to light up the sky, Martin folded back his blankets and crossed over to the opposite side of the tent, where Peta was sleeping. He carefully eased himself in beside her and put his arms around her, and kissed her cheek. She stirred and said, ‘What? It's not time to get up yet, is it?'

Abruptly, she woke up, and opened her eyes. Martin could see them glistening in the darkness.

‘Ssh,' he said, and touched her lips with his fingertip, then kissed her.

They made love strongly and urgently, and then lay together silently for a long time afterward. Peta stroked the stubble on Martin's chin as if it were Braille, and she was a blind woman trying to discover what he looked like. Gradually the tent began to fill with dim blue light.

Martin returned to his own blankets. He looked across at Peta and she looked back at him, but he had no idea if this meant that they would get back together again. After a while she turned her back on him, and fell asleep again. At least he assumed she was asleep. Maybe, like him, she was just lying there thinking.

The blue light grew brighter. He picked up his wristwatch and peered at the time. Six eleven. It was than that he heard the faraway
whack-whack-whack
of a helicopter; and then another; and they were coming closer.

By the time he saw the white flag waving in the distance, he had already made sure that everybody else was safely inside the cavern. He kept himself shielded behind Santos' Suburban, holding one of his Colt Commandos, and with the other propped up close beside him, with the last of his magazines in it.

This morning seemed even hotter than ever, and he heard persistent thunder from the east, over the Coxcomb Mountains, which were the driest, most craggy and most inhospitable mountains in the whole of the Joshua Tree National Park.

The white flag came nearer. At last he heard a voice calling. ‘Martin! Martin, can you hear me? Martin, this is Saskia!'

Shit,
he thought.
So she
has
betrayed us, after all. Thank you, Saskia, I love you, too.

‘Martin! I just want to talk to you, that's all!' She came out of the bushes and walked across to the center of the open ground, still flapping her white flag from side to side. ‘Can you hear me, Martin! I just want to talk!'

‘What about, Saskia?' he called back. ‘How to rat out the people who saved you?'

‘I'm sorry, Martin! I really am sorry! But you can't go on living like this, out in the desert! Think of the kids!'

Martin said, ‘Are you alone?'

‘There are two men from ESS a little way behind me, in case I need help. But I promise you I've only come to talk.'

Martin stayed where he was, behind the Suburban. No matter what assurances Saskia gave him, there was no way that he was going to step out into anybody's line of fire. If he had been one of Joseph Wracks' men, he would have dropped him as soon as he got the shot.
Efaqa
, they had called it, in Afghanistan. It sounded like Arabic, but it was an acronym for ‘eliminate first, ask questions afterward'.

Saskia walked a few paces further toward the entrance to the cavern. She still couldn't see where he was.

‘I'm over here,' he told her, but when she started to walk toward him, he said, ‘Stay where you are. Don't come any closer. Don't even look at me.'

‘Martin, I'm sorry. But this is insane, hiding out here.'

‘What's it to you?'

‘You have children with you. Nathan and George and Mina. Your own kids, too, Tyler and Ella. How long do you think they're going to last, living off seeds and jackrabbits?'

‘As if you care. You don't give a bent cent for anybody except yourself. Why did you do it, Saskia? If you didn't want to stay here nobody was forcing you. You didn't have to tell Wrack where we were.'

Saskia said, ‘I wanted you, Martin. Don't you understand that? I wanted you from the very moment I first saw you.'

‘Is
that
what this all about? Jealousy? And you're calling
me
insane?'

‘You don't understand. I had to get even, Martin. Not with you. Well, yes, I admit it, maybe with you. But mostly with Halford Smiley. I did a deal with Halford to tell him where the water was.'

‘You're a very sick woman, Saskia. Did anybody ever tell you that?'

Now she turned to face him, and she tossed her white flag on to the ground. ‘How sick is it to want to be happy, Martin? How sick is it to want to forget your past, and all the people you've hurt, and all the mistakes you've made? I killed my own husband, Martin! I strangled him, and I loved him more than you can ever imagine! And then I met you.'

Her fists were clenched and there were tears running down her cheeks. She stood there, incapable of saying any more.

Martin glanced quickly up the valley. He could see one of the ESS security guards standing about two hundred feet away, next to a teddy bear cholla. He was armed with a carbine with a telescopic sight. He couldn't see the second guard.

He knew that his position was hopeless. He had only sixty rounds of ammunition left, but even if he had a whole arsenal of weapons he wouldn't be able to hold out against ESS. Not only that, ESS security guards obviously had no compunction about shooting children. He was quite sure that if he tried to put up a fight, they would all be killed, all of them, and their bodies buried here, and who would ever know?

‘What's the deal?' he asked Saskia.

Saskia took a moment to smear the tears away from her eyes. Then she said, ‘Wrack only wants you, Martin. He doesn't want to hurt you, he just wants to see you handed over to the police, because of all the damage you've done.'

‘And I'm supposed to believe that?'

‘Martin, whatever I think about you, I wouldn't have come here if I thought that he was going to do you any harm. I'll admit that he's a very vengeful man, and he wants to see you punished, but he's not going to break the law to see that happen.'

‘And everybody else here, he won't touch any of them?'

‘It's only you he wants, Martin. If you give yourself up, that's it. It's all over. Everybody else here can do anything they want. Stay here, go back to the city, whatever. Wrack came here today in person. He's up at the head of the valley, in his helicopter. He can give you his promise face to face.'

‘He came here himself? Jesus. He
must
be mad at me.'

‘He is. You cost him nine men and a very expensive helicopter, and a whole lot of prestige, too.'

Martin stayed where he was for over a minute, weighing up the odds, although in truth he knew there was nothing more to think about. He didn't trust Saskia and he trusted Joseph Wrack even less, but what alternatives did he have?

He carefully propped his sub-machine gun next to the second one, and stepped out from behind the Suburban with his hands held up.

As he came up to her, Saskia said, ‘I'm so sorry, Martin. Really.' But even though her mascara was streaked from crying, he could see a look in her eyes that was almost triumphant, and she was actually starting to smile.
Think you could reject me, did you? Think that I was nothing but a sadomasochistic slut
?
Well,
now
look at you.

Her nostrils flared and he wouldn't have been surprised if she told him to get down on his knees.

A shot cracked out. A bullet sang past his head and ricocheted off the rock face thirty feet behind him. Immediately, he lunged forward, seized hold of Saskia and pulled her roughly in front of him.

‘
Martin
!' she screamed.

Over her shoulder, he could see both security guards standing amongst the cactus, their carbines raised and pointing in their direction. Gripping both of Saskia's arms, he started to heave her back toward the Suburban.

‘
What are you doing
?' she shrilled, trying to twist away from him.

He heard a second shot, and this was so close that it shattered one of the Suburban's rear windows, showering them with fragments of glass. Then, just as he reached the back of the truck, where his sub-machine guns were propped up, there was a third shot, and he felt Saskia jolt against him as if she had been punched very hard in the chest.

Her knees gave way, and she slowly sagged to the ground. He managed to drag her out of the line of fire, but when he gently laid her down he saw that the front of her black silk blouse was wet with blood.

Her face was white and she was staring up at him with unfocused eyes. ‘
David
?' she whispered, and a runnel of blood slid out of the side of her mouth. ‘
David, is that you
?'

Martin grabbed one of his sub-machine guns and quickly ducked his head around the back of the Suburban. The two ESS security guards clearly thought that they had hit both Saskia and Martin, because they were emerging from the bushes at a leisurely pace with their carbines lowered. One of them was talking on a two-way radio, and although Martin couldn't hear what he was saying, he could guess.
Targets down.

He waited until they had made their way between the tents and were halfway across the open ground. Then, stepping out from behind the truck, he opened fire, one quick automatic burst for each of them. For a split-second, each of them danced like two life-size marionettes and then they pitched to the ground, dropping their carbines, and lay still.

Martin went over to them, keeping them covered, and keeping half an eye up the valley in case there were more security agents concealed in the bushes. His ears were singing and he didn't hear Santos coming up behind him, so that when he touched Martin's arm, Martin spun around and pointed his sub-machine gun at him.

Santos lifted both hands and said, ‘This is bad, Wasicu! This is very bad! They will send more!'

‘What?' said Martin ‘I can't hear you!'

‘I said, this is very bad!' Santos shouted. ‘They will send more men and they will kill us!'

‘It's pretty clear that they were intending to do that anyhow,' Martin told him. He bent over and examined each of the security guards closely. They were both dead. One of them had been shot in the neck and a large bubble of blood swelled out of his throat and quietly popped.

‘So what can we do?' asked Santos. ‘There is nowhere for us to run to.'

Martin went back over to Saskia. Her eyes were still open and she was staring at the morning sky but she was dead, too.
My God, Saskia
, he thought.
You brought this on
yourself, didn't you
? He gently closed her eyelids with his finger and thumb.

‘I thought that if I gave myself up they wouldn't harm you and Peta and the kids,' said Martin. ‘But now I don't believe that they're going to let any of us get out of here alive. If they could shoot Mikey in cold blood like that, they're not going to have any qualms about the rest of us, are they?'

Santos looked across at the bodies of the two security agents, and then back at Saskia. ‘You are right, Wasicu. And it is not just revenge that they are looking for.'

‘What do you mean?'

‘Think about it. Because of this dark-shadow woman, they now know of the existence of Lost Girl Lake. Can you think how much profit they will hope to make out of it, in the middle of this drought? They will not want anybody to tell the world how they found it. They killed our women and children to take our land. They will not hesitate to do the same to take our water.'

‘In that case, I guess there's nothing else we can do. It's the Alamo, all over again.'

They edged their way through the crevice into the cavern. Peta and Tyler and Ella and the children were all standing clustered together, their faces pale with fright.

‘What was all that shooting?' said Peta. ‘We thought they might have killed you.'

‘They damn nearly did,' Martin told her. ‘They sent Saskia down with a white flag of truce, to persuade me to give myself up. As soon as I broke cover, they took a potshot at me. Saskia's dead, I'm sorry to say, as well as two of their men.' He paused, and then he said, ‘There's no easy way to say this, but we're pretty sure that they intend to kill all of us. I don't have much ammo left, so we can't hold out for very long, but I'm going to do what I can. There's only one way into this cavern, and that's through the crevice, so it's not too difficult to defend. I think all we can do now is hope and pray.'

George and Mina both silently started to cry, their mouths turned down and tears rolling down their cheeks. Nathan pressed his hand over his mouth and squeezed his eyes tight shut. Susan put her arms around them and said, ‘They can't kill the children. They
can't
.'

‘I'm sorry, Susan. They're very hard-hearted people, who don't value anybody's life. Probably not even their own. But I'm going to do everything I can to protect you.'

Tyler said, ‘What can I do, Dad?'

‘Not too much, really. If it comes to fighting them at close quarters, I guess you could always use that camping mallet. Santos, you have a knife, don't you? I wish I knew where that hand grenade disappeared to. That would have been pretty useful, right about now.'

He ushered Peta and Susan and the children over to the washing pool. There was a hollow behind the pool, and if they kept themselves crouched down inside it, there would be less likelihood of them being hit by stray bullets.

Peta was holding Ella's hand. She looked up at him and said, ‘Supposing we all just gave ourselves up? They wouldn't just kill us in cold blood, would they?'

‘I'll try, but I don't hold out much hope.'

There was nothing they could do now but sit and wait for Joseph Wrack's men to try to come in after them. The batteries in Martin's and Santos' flashlights were slowly dying, so that their bulbs glowed dull orange; and apart from that the only illumination was the sunshine reflected through the crevice from the rock wall outside.