The Dark Chronicles (55 page)

To our left was a gate, surrounded on both sides by a fence, the top of which gleamed in the dim light: barbed wire. There was a small hut, no doubt for guards, but they would be more prepared for people trying to come into the base than trying to leave it – if we were fast enough. I reckoned we had a couple of minutes at most before Severn recovered and started coming after us. And, in a place like this, there was no telling how many he might bring with him.

There were several small military vehicles parked on the concrete: Volkswagens. We jumped into the nearest one and I reached under the dashboard, pushing against the panel to free it and quickly locating the two wires. I bridged them and the engine stuttered into life.

‘That’s a clever trick,’ said Sarah, as I grabbed the wheel and headed for the main gate.

‘It can come in useful,’ I agreed. The engine was behind the vehicle’s rear wheels and it felt very lightweight, almost like driving a dune buggy. I told Sarah to duck and then pushed my foot down and steered to the right of the gate, straight for the barbed wire fence, the engine squealing from the strain I was putting it under. There was a screech and crunching of metal and glass as the wheels trampled over the fence and crashed through to the other side, and then the shots started coming from behind us. They went wide, but they had reacted faster than I’d expected, and they wouldn’t go wide for long.

I made to steer onto the main road leading out of the camp, but decided against it at the last moment. That would give them the advantage, as they would know where we were heading and could plan accordingly. So instead I yanked the wheel to the left. I glanced across at Sarah, and saw she had her fists curled up in her lap from the suddenness of the manoeuvre. ‘Sorry!’ I shouted, as we bumped across the ground and through a string of low shrubbery.

Glancing in the rear-view mirror, I saw that there were now several vehicles in pursuit: at least three, but there was a shroud of early morning mist so there might have been more behind them. There was a rough path through the brush straight ahead, but looking to my right I glimpsed a tiny segment of pale blue in the darkness and suddenly realized we were on a bluff overlooking water. There was our chance.

I started slowing the engine and shouted out to Sarah to jump out. She didn’t hear me, so I told her again, screaming it out. She looked at me in terror, but nodded, and on the count of three I
opened my door and leapt to the earth, hoping she was doing the same.

I landed badly, a stream of stones and grit cutting into my hands and face, but I was going very fast and managed to tumble my body for several yards, lessening the impact. Sarah had already got up and was scurrying over to join me: she must have had a better landing. The Volkswagen was already beginning to veer off course, but I reckoned our pursuers wouldn’t realize we had bundled out for another second or two. We needed to get out of their line of fire in that time, and down into the rocks where they couldn’t follow us on wheels.

The surfaces of the stones were ice-cold against the soles of my feet. I started clambering down the slope, taking care not to go too fast. My body was still aching from the beating Barnes had given me, and if I slipped and fell now I wasn’t sure I’d have the strength to get up again. This was Maquis-type country, with the rocks interrupted by stiff brush, gorse and myrtle bushes. I picked out some scrub to step on, but it was spiky and I rapidly switched back to searching for stone surfaces. Sarah was just behind me and I could hear her panting with the effort.

We clawed our way down the bluff, conscious that we might be spotted at any moment. My hands were getting scratched and we were kicking up a lot of dust, which kept getting in my eyes. Above us the noise of engines died away and was replaced by the voices of men. I strained my ears to try to make out whether Severn was among them, but couldn’t hear and didn’t have time to linger. The further down we got before they realized which way we had gone, the harder it would be for them to find us. But they wouldn’t give up easily, I knew. We had to get off the island entirely.

As we approached the bottom of the slope, the water stretched out before us in a small bay, and my heart lifted a little. I couldn’t yet see any boats, but we should be able to swim far enough away to find one, or some other form of transport. But then I turned
and saw Sarah staggering behind me, her chest shivering beneath the thin dress, and the panic rose in me again.

‘You go!’ she called out in a hoarse whisper. I shook my head and looked around desperately. The voices were still above us, but they didn’t seem to have figured out which way we had gone yet. A large structure, a circular stone tower, suddenly loomed out of the mist on a plateau not more than a dozen feet away from us. My first thought was that it was another hallucination, but it looked far too real and it triggered something at the back of my mind. Yes, I had seen several of these on my previous trip. I couldn’t remember what they were called, but they had been used by the island’s prehistoric inhabitants, I seemed to recall, for shelter against potential invaders.

Well, we needed shelter now. If they hadn’t seen which way we had come down the slope, we might just be in luck, as they would no longer have the chance to spot us and we’d also be able to catch our breath and perhaps get some strength back. There was, hopefully, simply too much ground for them to cover, and they would have to conclude eventually that we had got away from them. Then again, if they had already seen which way we’d gone, we might be making a fatal mistake by stopping, as they could simply come in and scoop us up.

I couldn’t hear the voices any more, so decided to risk it. I took Sarah by the arm and we headed towards the narrow entrance of the shelter, and into a very dimly lit passageway. I remembered that these places were built from stones simply piled up on top of each other, and suddenly wondered how solid they were.

At the end of the passageway we came to a staircase, which we started to climb. The place was dank and cold, and the only light filtered through a few tiny windows. About halfway up I heard a faint buzzing in the background, which grew to a drone.

A helicopter was coming our way.

I looked through one of the windows. It was a camouflaged Sea
King, or an Italian version of it. I turned to Sarah, who had started shaking, her breaths coming out in sobs.

‘It’s all right,’ I whispered. ‘We’ll be all right.’

But the obvious lie made her even more nervous and she started making more noise. I looked through a slat again – the helicopter had started to descend, and was now hovering a hundred feet or so away, like a giant and sinister wasp.

I took Sarah in my arms, letting her bury her head in my chest, stifling her sounds. ‘You must be quiet,’ I said, and held her as firmly as I could, willing her to stop shaking. The sweat was pouring off me now, and I prayed that the helicopter would leave. We stayed in that position for what seemed like an eternity, but then Sarah suddenly looked up from my chest. There had been a noise downstairs.

Someone had come in.

*

We sat, huddled, hardly daring to breathe, and listened to the footsteps below us. I realized we were on a level circling the exterior of the structure. It might take them a little while to figure that out, too, so perhaps once they started climbing we could cross to the other side, take the stairs back down and slip out. Only… I glanced through the slat again: the helicopter was still there, and would no doubt be equipped with machine-guns. Our only hope, then, was that they wouldn’t realize we were in here, and would leave to check somewhere else. But the footsteps sounded very sure, and were moving closer to us by the moment.

I gestured at Sarah and we started moving away from the sound, to the other side of the floor. But we must have dislodged something as we ran, either a stone or some dust, because there was suddenly a shout from below, and when I next looked up, Barnes was standing in front of me with a machine-pistol in his hands and a murderous look in his eyes.

We raised our hands, and he gestured to the staircase with the weapon.

‘Down.’

*

The helicopter was hovering several feet above the ground, flattening the surrounding shrubbery and kicking up eddies of dust. In the cockpit, headphones over his ears, sat the beak-nosed guard, while standing a few feet in front of it was Severn, his fair hair swept back by the wind from the blades and his eyes locked on us as Barnes marched us towards him. He wiped his hand against the gash on his cheek, and as it came away I saw it was dark with blood.

I looked across at Sarah: she was still shaking, and her back was hunched over. Behind us, I could sense Barnes’ fingers twitching on the trigger of his machine-pistol, and realized that we were probably seconds away from death. But there was no way out. My chest tightened, and I could hear my heart drumming in my head.

‘Here, sir?’ Barnes called out to Severn. He was itching to kill me, to avenge Templeton.

Severn shook his head. ‘Inside.’

A few seconds’ reprieve, then. Probably because he didn’t want the trouble of carrying our corpses aboard.

We were level with Severn now. The spinning of the rotors was deafening, and it was proving difficult to walk. Barnes yelled at us to enter the helicopter, and Sarah started trying to lift herself over the ledge. She fell on the first attempt, and Barnes roughly dragged her up and pushed her up and over with one hand, the other still clutching the machine-pistol. Now? The moment I had the thought the chance was gone: he swivelled back to face me, and gestured I should follow suit.

I didn’t react. I knew he would shoot us as soon as we were both on board. Once the chopper was safely over the water, they would throw our bodies out. Barnes took me by the collar of my shirt
and shoved me up and in, using the machine-pistol as a prod. As I collapsed at Sarah’s feet, Barnes leapt aboard, and Severn after him, and I soaked in the smell and atmosphere of the cramped space, taking in the beak-nosed guard up front, the bank of equipment he was operating, and the fact that we had already started to take off. I glanced up and saw Barnes looking over at Severn, who nodded.

‘Dark first,’ he shouted, pointing at me, and Barnes grabbed me by the collar again and hauled me around until I was kneeling by the door, facing out and looking down at the ground as we rose up from it and away, now already above water, my heart in my lungs and vomit rising in my throat.

This was it. This was the end. I could hear Sarah sobbing behind me, begging Severn not to kill us. She was interrupted by a loud burst of noise, static from a transmitter, and for a fraction of a second Barnes moved to register it and without even thinking I reached back and grabbed Sarah by the wrist, then pitched forward, diving blindly into the sky. The wind yanked me down, and I lost contact with Sarah and went spinning through the air, my guts in my eyeballs and my brain in my toes and a choir of gunshots ringing in my ears, and then there was a smack and a deep boom, and the water was cold, freezing, salty, and I was plummeting further and further into it…

It took a few moments to catch up with what had happened: my head was dizzy from the fall, my chest burning from the impact, and every injury on my body was suddenly seared by the salt in the water. But my mind was singing, because I knew I was alive.

I clawed my way up to the surface for air, but the moment I broke through machine-gun fire split the water around me, bursts of green and orange flame kicking up through the waves. I grabbed a breath before submerging again, and saw that Sarah was just a few feet away, and seemingly in trouble, her limbs flailing about. My mind stopped singing. There was a helicopter with machine guns right above us, and we were sitting ducks. I squinted through the bluey-green world and saw a formation of jagged grey rocks in front of me: the coastline.

About halfway down the wall of rocks was a large hole: it looked like some sort of passage. I swam frantically towards Sarah and managed to twist her round so that she was lying atop my back, and then kicked as hard as I could towards the cavern. It was large, and I swam through, feeling ripples from fish and sea-creatures around me as I did.

I came up for air a few seconds later and deposited Sarah next to me on a large cold slab of stone. She spluttered out water and wheezed, her body racked from the experience. I looked up – had they seen us? Apparently not. Directly above our heads was a large overhanging rock formation, and just a few feet away its twin.
Between the two overhangs stretched a patch of pale pink sky. The hole was much larger than I would have liked: if the helicopter happened to fly over it, we were fish in a barrel. But if we had come up anywhere else, they would have already shot us.

The vital thing now was not to move and attract their attention. I explained the situation to Sarah, and we sat there, listening to the shuddering roar of the helicopter as it hovered over the area, circling back and forth, looking for us. With every increase in volume, my heart clenched, then subsided as the sound receded, only to clench again moments later. After a few minutes, the effort of staying still was starting to cramp my muscles, and I was worried that I wasn’t going to be able to hold out much longer. If I fainted now, it could be fatal. Sarah was in the same position as I was, her muscles tensed and her stomach heaving. I suddenly noticed a line of small dark dots in the corner of the window of sky. Had they spotted us? But the dots weren’t moving. My brain rearranged the perspective and I realized with a start that there was another overhanging rock between the sky and us, and that the dots clinging to it were, in fact, the heads of birds: vultures.

I squinted, and managed to make out a few of the individual heads. They were staring intently at us, and I knew why. We weren’t moving: they were starting to wonder if we might be carrion.

Keep calm.

I looked beyond them at the patch of sky. No helicopter in it, but the noise was still there, so they hadn’t given up yet, and were no doubt using binoculars to examine every possible hiding place we could have disappeared into. If we made any movement at all, they might catch it and then we would be finished. But if we
didn’t
move, the vultures might decide we were worth investigating further.