200 Minutes of Danger

by Jack Heath

  07:05

  Sobbing with fear, Cody ran as fast as he dared, his feet slipping on the metal. But the giant was faster than him. It was catching up. The crane was creaking under its weight.

  And Cody was on a road to nowhere. The arm of the crane was only thirty metres long. Once he reached the end, he would have a choice. Let the monster take him, or step off the edge into the void.

  In the pirate stories Cody read as a kid, the main character was often forced to walk the plank, and choose between the swords behind and the raging sea below. Now he was doing it for real.

  The monster bounded closer and closer, rattling the arm of the crane. Cody looked down, hoping that help was on the way. Maybe someone would be setting up a giant trampoline down below.

  They weren’t. Everyone was just gawking, or taking cover under cross-stacked containers.

  06:50

  But the crane’s hook was directly below him, dangling at the end of a twenty metre cable.

  Cody looked at the hook, then at the end of the crane’s arm, then at the rampaging giant coming his way. The hook looked like the least deadly option.

  He climbed down over the edge of the arm. His feet kicked the air over the lethal drop. His heartbeat was deafening. The climb would have been hard even without the wind buffeting him and the giant shaking the arm as it got closer. But he managed to reach the thick cable which held up the hook.

  06:15

  He had thought he would be able to slide down the cable, like on TV. But he quickly realised that the tightly woven steel fibres would burn the skin off his palms. Instead he wrapped his arms and legs around the cable and lowered himself bit by bit.

  The giant was directly above him, now. It peered down between the bars of the arm, watching. It didn’t look angry anymore. Just puzzled. It seemed smart enough to realise that Cody had been controlling the hook. Maybe it was also smart enough to wonder how he could be dumb enough to try this.

  05:45

  The cable swayed in the breeze. The movement became worse the lower he got. Cody was about halfway to the hook, and it was already hard to hold on. His hands and shoulders burned. If he slipped, he would fall for several seconds and land on the truck parked below, breaking his legs. Or his neck.

  He didn’t know what he would do when he reached the hook. It was too high off the ground to let go. He was just trying to get as far from the giant as possible.

  Clang. The cable quivered in his grip, like a bowstring being released. Cody barely managed to hang on. He was still ten metres above the hook, and about forty above the ground.

  He looked up. Surely the giant wasn’t trying to climb down after him?

  No. It was still perched on the arm. But, as he watched, it slammed a tremendous fist against the arm, rattling the whole crane. The cable shook.

  It was trying to shake him loose. It wanted to see him fall.

  Feeling sick with terror, Cody increased his pace, climbing down at a speed that hurt his hands. Clang. The cable quivered. He was still five metres above the hook. If he didn’t reach it soon, he would—

  05:05

  Clang! Cody lost his grip on the cable. Suddenly he was falling.

  He frantically tried to grab the cable again, but he was already plummeting too fast. When he touched the steel it blistered his fingers, like he’d tried to pick up an oven tray with his bare hands.

  The hook rushed up towards him. Cody tried to catch it. He missed, his hands swiping empty air. He was going to die—

  05:00

  And then something snatched him out of the air. There was a ripping sound, and suddenly Cody was choking. Dangling helplessly, he looked around, and saw that the hook had caught the hood of his raincoat. The hood had half ripped off, but the rest was holding his weight—and throttling him.

  His head filled up with blood like an overinflated soccer ball. It was like being hanged at the gallows. Cody put his hands up and fumbled around until he found the hook. Then he gripped it and pulled, releasing the hood and the pressure on his throat.

  The giant thumped the arm of the crane, frustrated. But Cody didn’t lose his grip on the hook. He hauled himself up and sat astride the cold steel, like it was a horse on a merry-go-round. It swayed gently, halfway between two stacks of containers. Neither was within Cody’s reach, and he was still twenty metres above the ground. Trapped.

  04:40

  The creature growled—a low, powerful sound like the rumbling of the trucks below. Then it reached down and grabbed the cable.

  Cody braced himself, hugging the hook tighter. But the creature didn’t try to shake him off again. Instead, it started pulling up the cable, hand over hand. Reeling Cody in, like a fish on a line.

  04:30

  Cody looked around, panicking. He couldn’t see a way out. ‘Help!’ he screamed. ‘Someone help me!’

  The wind sucked his words away. There were people down below—but there was nothing they could do. They just stared, helpless and frightened, as Cody got higher and higher.

  He could let go. Maybe he’d survive the drop. Maybe he wouldn’t. Every second he waited, his chances got worse. It was like a nightmare.

  He held on tight as the hook swayed—

  And the movement gave him an idea.

  There was a tower of containers three or four metres to his left. Out of reach. Unless . . .

  04:00

  Holding the cable, Cody kicked his legs and leaned back, like a kid on a swing. The arc got longer and longer. Each sweep of the hook brought it higher.

  The giant snarled above him. Flecks of drool came down like rain. Maybe it was intelligent enough to realise what he was doing, or maybe the movement just annoyed it.

  It kept pulling him up. With each tug, Cody had less cable to swing on. A shorter arc.

  It was now or never.

  ‘Yargh!’ Bellowing like a pirate raider swinging onto a neighbouring ship, he launched himself off the hook. He flew through the air for a moment, legs kicking, arms flailing wildly. For a second he thought he was going to land safely on top of the stack of shipping containers.

  But he didn’t make it.

  03:45

  Cody slammed into the side of the highest container. He flung out a hand and just managed to grab the top. Then he dangled there for a moment, groaning. His body felt like one enormous bruise.

  The creature roared with frustration. Cody wondered why it wouldn’t just leave him alone. Being hit with the hook must have really made it mad. Or maybe it was already mad from being cooped up in the cargo ship.

  02:40

  He started climbing down the side of the container stack, using padlocks and barred windows for handholds. If he could get to the ground he’d be safe. There were a million places to hide around the port.

  He looked up to see if the giant was trying to work out a way to come down after him. It wasn’t. Something else had attracted its attention.

  Cody followed the giant’s gaze, and was startled to see a sniper crouched on top of a nearby stack of crates. Another was perched in the watchtower. Yet another was riding in a helicopter, which Cody hadn’t heard arrive.

  Who were all these people? They didn’t look like police. They wore masks, and black uniforms with a logo shaped like a magnifying glass.

  01:40

  Cody kept climbing down the stack of crates. He had nearly reached the ground now. It didn’t matter who these people were, he told himself. They were here to deal with the giant. As soon as he could get out of sight, it wasn’t his problem any more.

  Gunfire crackled overhead. Cody kept his head down as he descended.

  Five metres up. Three metres. One.

  00:25

  Cody pushed off the stack and landed on the concrete. Finally, solid ground under his feet. He’d never been so happy to touch the oil-stained cement of the docks. He was safe.

  He could see a perfect hiding place a few metres away. A trap door, designed for maintenance of the buried petrol tanks. Even if t
he giant could rip the trapdoor open, it wouldn’t fit through the hole.

  Cody took one last look up at the crane, to see if the giant was watching him—

  Then his eyes widened in astonishment.

  00:00

  The giant had disappeared.

  20:00

  The earpiece was as small as a ladybug, but it had been surgically attached to Kelsey’s eardrum. Mercer’s voice was perfectly clear: ‘Kelsey. You got a second?’

  ‘Not really.’ Kelsey gunned the engine as her motorbike screamed down the highway. She checked the side-mirror. Even at 120 kilometres per hour, the Blackwell drones were catching up to her. They could fly over the trees, instead of having to curve with the road. It was like being chased by a swarm of bees.

  19:45

  The artefact in her backpack was priceless. If her intel was correct, it had washed up on a beach near here two years ago. Researchers from Blackwell Holdings had detected its energy signature, snatched it up and had been secretly studying it ever since.

  SPII had concluded that the artefact was too dangerous to stay in their hands. They had sent Kelsey to take it.

  ‘I need you to get to the docks and deal with a giant,’ Mercer was saying.

  ‘A giant what?’ Kelsey asked.

  ‘Some species that supposedly went extinct 100 000 years ago. One of our researchers has examined the satellite photos. She said the creature looked like a gigantopithecus-megatherium hybrid, although she also noted that this was impossible. Separate evolutionary lines. Does any of that mean anything to you?’

  19:30

  It didn’t. ‘I’m kind of in the middle of something.’

  ‘Well, it’s lucky I trained you to do several things at once.’

  Kelsey gritted her teeth as she zoomed towards a tight turn. She crossed the centre line so the curve was less severe, but then she saw a sixteen-wheel truck coming the other way. Kelsey swerved back into her lane and hit the brakes to avoid hurtling off the road into the forest. The truck blew past, drowning out anything Mercer was trying to say. Needles of rain slashed her face.

  As Kelsey sped up again, one of the drones dive-bombed her, plunging out of the sky like a swooping magpie. Kelsey leaned left, and the drone slammed into the road, disintegrating into matchsticks.

  19:10

  One down, she thought. Twenty to go.

  ‘I usually wouldn’t send such a young agent,’ Mercer said. ‘But it’s time critical, and you’re closest.’

  ‘What’s my mission, exactly?’

  ‘Stop the creature from killing anybody in the next twenty minutes.’

  ‘What happens in twenty minutes?’

  Another drone swooped at Kelsey. She reached up and grabbed its eye-stalk with one hand. It was a quadcopter, about the size of a skateboard. The turbines whined as the drone tried to get back into the air. Kelsey held on tight. She clamped her thighs around the motorbike so the drone couldn’t lift her off her seat.

  18:55

  On the next tight turn she leaned sideways and pushed the drone against the road. The drone made a sound like a coffee grinder as the asphalt scraped off two of its wings. Eventually the chassis broke off and disappeared behind Kelsey, leaving her holding the severed eye-stalk.

  The camera on the end of the stalk looked like it had an infrared lens. Interesting. Kelsey stuffed it into a pocket inside her jacket. Two down.

  18:30

  Her earpiece fizzed as it compressed Mercer’s voice to improve transmission speed. ‘In twenty minutes or less, our snipers will arrive on the scene with tranquillisers. We’re hoping they can subdue the mega-giganto-whatever. Then you can stand down.’

  A sign appeared on the left. DOCKS. NEXT EXIT. 500M.

  ‘Where’s the animal now?’ she asked.

  ‘Just leapt off a cargo ship onto the docks. It weighs fifty tonnes, so you shouldn’t have trouble finding it.’

  He must be exaggerating, Kelsey thought. ‘And the snipers?’

  18:10

  ‘En route in a helicopter,’ Mercer said. ‘Eighteen minutes now.’

  ‘One more question. The things guarding the Blackwell research facility . . .’

  ‘Uh-oh. The attack dogs aren’t after you, are they?’

  ‘Worse. The drones.’ Kelsey checked her mirrors. Another drone was preparing to dive. ‘They use infrared cameras, right?’

  ‘Right. Camouflage won’t fool them, because you’re warmer than the forest and the road around you. You could maybe lose them by going underwater, where it’s cold?’

  17:55

  The exit ramp was coming up. Another sign: THIS EXIT TO DOCKS.

  ‘I have a better idea.’ Kelsey gunned the motor, accelerating to maximum speed. The cloud of drones was close behind her. She stood up on the seat with her arms out to stay balanced, surfing on the bike as it zoomed up the slope. At the top of the ramp, she jumped.

  Kelsey and the bike both went flying into the trees. Kelsey grabbed a branch with her gloved hands and swung around it, up and over like a trapeze artist, before dropping to the ground. The bike hurtled past her and then slammed into another tree further away. There was a deafening KERBLAM as the petrol tank burst into flames. The drones swirled around the fireball, confused and blinded by the heat.

  17:45

  ‘Problem solved.’ Kelsey sprinted up the road towards the docks. ‘I’m on my way.’

  The docks were about two kilometres away. Like all graduates from SPII—the School for Pupils of International Intelligence—Kelsey could run that distance in six minutes flat. With her backpack, it might take more like seven.

  She couldn’t ditch the backpack. It contained her wipe-goggles, her grappling hook, her whistle, her battery pod and the mysterious artefact she had risked her life to steal. The SPII technicians were desperate to study it.

  13:20

  Kelsey could see the docks on the horizon. Cranes loomed amongst towers of shipping containers. Her eyes widened as she saw something climbing up the side of one of the cranes. Something huge. Something impossible. Mercer hadn’t been kidding—it was a monster from 100 000 years ago. An ape-like thing the size of a small plane.

  SPII had given Kelsey some crazy missions in the past. But how was she supposed to contain this?

  As she ran closer, she saw the crane’s operator, a young man—maybe even a kid—crouched on top of the control pod. He looked terrified. If the giant shook the crane too much, the teenager would fall to his death. Kelsey had to get in there, now.

  11:20

  Soon she reached the main gates. They were unguarded, but locked and topped with coils of razor wire. Kelsey’s gloves might protect her hands, but the wire would shred the rest of her clothes and the skin beneath. She needed another way around.

  She briefly considered using the artefact to get past somehow. But this was untested technology of unknown origin. Too risky.

  Instead, she ran to the left. The fence blocked off the road and extended about a metre over the sea to stop anyone from climbing around it. Kelsey could dive off the edge, fall five metres down to the water, swim further past the fenced-off area, find a ladder, climb up onto the wharf . . .

  10:50

  She looked up at the crane. There was no time for any of that. Now the giant was on top of the control pod, and the teenage boy was balanced further along the beam. He was running out of room to escape.

  Digging through her backpack, Kelsey found her grappling hook attached to the end of a nylon rope with a carbon nanotube core. It had cost SPII almost $20 000 and was strong enough to lift a tank. Mercer would be horrified to hear she was wasting it on this.

  She ran towards the edge of the road. At the last second, she snagged the grappling hook onto the fence and jumped. Gripping the rope with both hands, she flew out over the water, swung around the side of the fence, and landed on the other side. She was in.

  10:05

  No time to untangle the $20 000 climbing rope. Leaving it behind, Kelsey ra
n through the maze of shipping containers towards the base of the crane.

  When she rounded a corner, she saw a man in a hard hat and a high-vis vest coming the other way.

  09:25

  ‘You can’t go this way, Miss!’ he shouted as he approached. ‘There’s some kind of enormous—’

  Kelsey swerved sideways and jumped, running along the wall instead of the ground to avoid his arms. She landed behind the man and kept running.

  ‘Get that gate open so people can escape,’ she told him, without slowing down. Technically she was supposed to use wipe-goggles to erase the memory of anyone who saw her, but this guy wouldn’t have gotten a good look.

  Soon she found herself beneath the crane. Now the kid was climbing down the crane’s cable towards the dangling hook. Pretty resourceful, but he would be cornered before reinforcements arrived.

  Kelsey dug a whistle out of her backpack. She had used it to get past the attack dogs guarding the Blackwell building. Hopefully it would work on other animals, too.

  08:40

  She took a deep breath, and blew as hard as she could.

  The pitch was too high for human ears. The boy up above didn’t seem to notice it. But the giant reacted immediately. It clamped its hands over its ears, snarling and spitting.

  Kelsey blew again, stalling for time. The giant roared with frenzied rage, and slammed its fists against the arm of the crane.

  Whoops. The arm shook, and the kid’s grip on the cable slipped. Kelsey watched in horror as he fell—

  07:55

  And then caught the hook with the hood of his raincoat.

  Lucky. But Kelsey couldn’t try that again. Where were the SPII snipers?

  A truck was parked underneath the beam of the crane. A shipping container rested on the tray. Kelsey’s ear implant also boosted environmental sounds on cue, and she thought she heard shuffling noises inside.

  Oh no, she thought. She pulled the drone’s eye-stalk out of her jacket, hooked up the broken end to the battery pod in her backpack, and pulled out her phone.