The Devil's breath dz-1

by David Gilman

  He craned his neck upwards into the reflected light from the lift shaft. The steps went on forever. He was never going to make it. His heart sank. He’d come so far, he’d found his father and the evidence, but this last effort was going to defeat him. A dull sheen on the rock face wall, a couple of meters ahead of him, had a different texture from the rest of the stairwell. He stared at it, trying to make out what it was, and then felt a hand grip his shoulder.

  Startled, he tried to turn, thinking someone had sneaked up behind him, but then his dad spoke to him quietly. “Son, it’s OK.”

  Max unclasped the belt and turned so he could ease his father into a sitting position, his back against the wall. “Dad, you’re awake.” Max couldn’t keep the relief out of his voice.

  His father nodded, mouth dry from all the drugs, his voice barely a whisper. “I’m gonna be OK … it’ll take time…. Don’t think there’s much of that, though, do you? Where am I?”

  “Behind the lift shaft. Dad, I’ve got to get us out of here, they’re checking on you now.”

  His father nodded weakly. “I don’t know how you did all this, but you’ve got to go and find the evidence. You must, son. Leave me here. It’s in the Land Rover’s …”

  Max smiled. “It’s done. I found your disc; there’s a computer in a huge garage of a place. I got the password and I sent it. It’s all gone-everything. Dad, we’ve just got to hide for a while until help comes.”

  “How did you manage all that? Never mind … tell me later.”

  Max turned his head away, listening to a snuffling, scratching noise somewhere behind him. He closed his eyes in concentration and let his jaw open a little, which would help him hear more clearly. His father, knowing what was happening, stayed silent.

  Max touched his dad’s arm. “Dad, I’ve got to go and find out what’s up there,” he whispered.

  His father nodded. Max plucked a small Maglite torch from the workman’s belt and bounded up the steps, feeling as light as air without his father’s weight on his back. As he reached the darkened patch of rock, he saw it was a natural fissure running through the sheet of rock-and something moved inside it.

  Max looked up the stairs to where they disappeared around a bend. That would take them higher, so it seemed the most obvious way to go. He looked at the gap again. It was wide enough for him to walk into, and cables and air duct pipes were fastened to the ceiling. He took a chance and moved inside. After a few steps, something coiled around his ankle. Max jerked back, his heart thumping, and fumbled for the torch’s switch. A snakelike black mass encircled his ankle: electrical cable, left behind by workmen.

  He swept the torch beam across the narrow passageway. There! Something moved. Something that ran away. He heard snuffling, and what sounded like a dog’s whimper. Now the passage turned a corner and ran straight for another fifty meters. At the end, there appeared to be an opening, the light barely reflecting on the rock’s curved roof. The pipes in the ceiling ran out into what looked like some kind of generator box. Maybe this was part of the electrical system, but it was completely unimportant in that instant because, right at the edge of the passage, was the shape of a jackal.

  It sat, unmoving, facing him, ears erect.

  Max couldn’t see its features. He stood rooted to the spot; neither he nor the jackal moved. But there was some kind of kinetic connection between them-a wordless communication. The figure of a jackal had been with him from the beginning, but this was the closest he had ever been to it.

  He went down on his knees, never taking his eyes off the dark form. Moving on all fours, he edged closer, carefully and slowly, not understanding why, but knowing he must.

  Now he was within arm’s reach. He could see its fur, layered into a thick mass, and the dull moisture of its nose. The jackal had not moved; it looked to be barely breathing. Max could smell its musky odor as his eyes searched its muzzle, exploring its features. There were no scars from old fights, only a gentle brush of gray fur suggesting that it was an older animal.

  He was so close now, he could have moved a couple of centimeters and felt the wet nose on his forehead. The jackal opened its eyes. Max held his breath, not daring to move, mesmerized. The amber eyes drew him in, their gentleness touching something deep inside him. A rich warmth settled in his chest: a sublime sense of joy. He reached out to stroke the animal’s head.

  He gasped-the jackal was gone!

  Max tumbled into space. There was a drop of about twenty meters down to the floor of the hangar. He jolted to a halt. One of the cables had snagged his ankle. Instinctively he tucked his chin in to his chest and shielded his head with his arms. His curved back slammed into the rock face and knocked the wind out of him. The agony knifed through his body, his senses swirled as he hung upside down, spread-eagled.

  At the far end of the hangar, half a dozen men had gathered, their raucous voices whooping with pleasure, but he couldn’t make out what it was that held their attention.

  He had to get out. Sooner or later one of those men would walk across the floor and see him swaying helplessly. Max bent his knees and crunched his stomach muscles. Rolling himself upwards, he snatched desperately at the cable. And missed! He fell back. Another thump in his back from the rock. Max held back a grunt of pain. If he made too much erratic movement, he would be noticed.

  He wiped the sweat from his eyes, dried his hands on his shirt, and focused again through the throbbing blood that flooded his head. Taking a deep breath, he exhaled and lunged. His fingers touched the cable. He curled his hand, grasping the lifeline. Then, hand over hand, he heaved himself back over the ledge. Out of sight, he lay still, letting his breathing settle.

  Had his imagination conjured up the jackal? Maybe it had tried to show him the way out and then sat, to stop him falling. He’d been stupid. Trying to reach out and touch it.

  There was no sign of the jackal now, just as on other occasions when he had caught only a fleeting glimpse. But this was different-this was almost contact-creepy. So what?

  So far as he was concerned, it was there. Max was learning not to apply logic to everything that happened. With a silent thank you to whoever was listening, he made his way back to his father.

  Within a couple of minutes Max had secured lengths of the cable around each of them and quietly warned his father about the men at the far side of the hangar. “Can you manage to get down there?” he whispered. His father nodded.

  The gap was wide enough for only one of them to climb through at a time. Max went first, then waited, feet planted firmly against the wall, to make sure his dad could follow.

  With a lot of effort Tom Gordon eased himself next to his son, then together they lowered themselves, feeding out the cable as they walked backwards down the rock face. Four meters from the ground, they heard voices directly below them. They froze. Two men in mechanics’ overalls were manhandling a mobile toolbox. How long would the men stay there? Would they notice the cables? He looked at his father, who didn’t move, holding himself as still as Max, who knew he couldn’t stay like that for much longer. Max was amazed his dad had managed the descent at all, knowing he was operating on sheer willpower.

  The men rumbled the toolbox away. Max waited until they were on the far side of the hangar, then he slithered down quietly. He picked up the slack from his father’s cable and reached up, his hands ready to take his weight. He kept glancing over his shoulder, but the men were out of sight now, since Max and his dad were obscured by the bulk of the Humvees. Tom Gordon was shaking from the exertion and needed time to recover. Max crept forward and put his head over the door of one of the vehicles. The window was down and a small bottle of water nestled in a bottle-carrier between the armrests. As he reached in, he could see through the windscreen that the men were watching a big television screen secured to the wall at the end of the hangar. It sounded as though they were watching a football game because they were shouting and cheering.

  Max let his father drink as they sat, huddled against th
e wall. The cables they had used still hung down from the crevicelike opening, but Max tied them off at the bottom, and to a casual onlooker they would look like any of the other electrical cabling around the place.

  “Dad, I have to leave you here for a bit. I’ve got to try and find a way of jamming the works.”

  His father looked uncertain. “Why?” And then his ravaged memory returned. “Oh yeah. My God, Max, this is crazy. You shouldn’t have come here. I don’t know how you got it all together.”

  “Dad, can you remember anything? Y’know, the message you sent me.”

  “Message? Oh yes. I sent them to Sayid. Tried to warn you. I thought they were going to try to kill you. They thought I’d sent you the evidence.”

  “They did try. That’s why I’m here. It’s a long story, so many things have happened. And I made a good friend, he’s the son of the Bushman who took your notes. He’s great. Anyway, I’ll tell you all about it when we get home.”

  “Still the optimist, Max.”

  “We’ll make it, Dad.”

  “Bloody right we will,” his father said, and smiled bravely. “But I want you to get going, on your own. You’ll have a much better chance.”

  Max shook his head. “No way. Not after everything that’s happened. You sent for me, you left all the messages in the cave. I came here to help.”

  “And you have. And I’m so proud of you. But now you have to get out. Please.”

  “No. Drink your water and do as you’re told.”

  They smiled at each other, and Max felt great being this close to his dad, a moment of shared happiness amid the danger. There were no keys in any of the trucks, and he still hadn’t figured out how to stop Shaka Chang from triggering the floodgates at the dam.

  “What cave?” his father asked.

  “What?” Max felt confused. Were the drugs muddling his dad’s brain?

  “You said I left a message in a cave. I haven’t been to any caves.”

  “You must have. The Bushmen’s sacred mountain. There were drawings in there. Pictures of me, your plane’s insignia, the dove …”

  “You found the plane?”

  “Yeah. Because of the drawings. Well, partly … you drew a picture showing you’d been wounded, the hidden plane, me, the Bushmen. It was all there.”

  “Max, listen to me. My memory’s in pretty bad shape right now, but I can tell you, one hundred percent, that I never went to any cave. Anton Leopold and I met up in the desert. We left his Land Rover and I flew him to Walvis Bay-by then we had a pretty good idea of what was happening. I gave him a scribbled note to send to you, I flew back, got wounded, hid the plane and made a run for it in the Land Rover. I knew they’d get me in the end-there were too many of them. That’s when I sent my field notes back to Farentino. They were just bits and pieces; no one would be able to make much sense of them. I figured it’d buy me time. But I was in no condition to climb any mountains and paint pictures on cave walls.”

  The air in the hangar seemed suddenly oppressive, and something like a shadow crept over Max’s skin. He shuddered. “The prophecy,” he muttered.

  He looked at his dad, a strange feeling flooding his mind, as if a door had been opened in a darkened room and shown him a different world. He relived the kaleidoscope of sensations-of death, the flying, the darkness, the raptor’s attack and the presence of the jackal. The BaKoko.

  The Bushmen had told him about the legend of him coming to their land to help them, but he hadn’t managed that yet, not until Shaka Chang was stopped. And one thing they didn’t mention in their prophecy was how he was going to save his own dad.

  His father’s question snapped him back to attention. “What prophecy are you talking about?”

  Max shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. But things just got a whole lot crazier. Dad, you stay here, I’m going to do a recce and see if I can find a way of shutting this place down and getting us out of here.”

  His father nodded; there was no point in arguing with a boy who had managed so far.

  A flurry of sand whipped across the open space of the hangar. The wind was picking up. If a storm broke, that could give them a chance to escape. Max scurried between the vehicles, then he heard a terrible cry. It was a boy’s voice, terrified and alone-a shriek of fear, forewarning of a terrible event.

  It was!Koga, and the name he cried out, that echoed around the hangar’s wall, was Max’s.

  The pickup trucks had searched for the Bushman boy all day. Shaka Chang had given the word that the boy had to be brought in, dead or alive, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t have some sport before they bagged him. Their blood was up and they hunted!Koga as they would a wild animal. The men’s cruel intentions were a product of years of war in which violence and destruction were a day-to-day matter. Shaka Chang’s decision, on the other hand, was a more cold-hearted approach. Stop him or kill him. It didn’t matter which.

  The men had finally tracked the elusive boy, whose skills were not enough to escape from the number of attackers after him. In the back of each pickup, one of the men held a video camera to film the hunt, and it was this dust-laden, terrifying chase that was beamed back to Skeleton Rock.

  Max stared at the screen. The horrifying picture stamped itself into his memory.

  !Koga was crying in fear, legs pounding through the dirt, arms pumping. Max could even hear him gasping for breath as the men ran him to earth. As one of the killers filmed, the other truck would swoop in. One of the men reached out and clubbed him with a stick.!Koga fell, and the men yelled and screamed-scoring points in a game. The trucks’ wheels spun, ready to come around again. They were playing with!Koga’s life, and the men in the hangar, and probably everyone in Skeleton Rock, watched the vicious hunt unfold.

  !Koga calling his name had seared into Max. He couldn’t bear to watch, tears stung his eyes, his clenched fists ached and he wanted to scream at the brutality of what they were doing to his friend.!Koga had come back for him, and now they were going to kill him for it.

  Max turned; his father stood at his shoulder. He saw what was happening.

  “Is that your friend?”

  Max could only nod, but he could see the fury in his dad’s eyes. He grabbed his son’s arm, deliberately wrenching him away from his agony. “Help me. Come on, let’s make them pay.”

  Despite his weakened condition, Tom Gordon grabbed a couple of jerrycans. Max took his lead. Flipping open the lids, his dad sniffed the contents. “Petrol. Better than diesel for what we need. Check those.” He carried the jerrycans to an inspection pit which was as far as they could go without being seen. Max flinched every time the men roared as the hunt against!Koga continued.

  “Max!” his father insisted. “Don’t look. Come on, son, you can’t help him. Not now.”

  Max took the half dozen cans down into the inspection pit, opening their lids. His dad switched off the wall plug that held one end of an inspection lamp’s five-meter-long cable. He yanked the cable free and did something to the end of the wires, then dropped the cable down onto the cans. When that wall socket was switched on, it would ignite the petrol. All hell would break loose, and that was when they’d make their escape.

  At least, that was the plan.

  “Max Gordon is here?”

  Shaka Chang stood with Mr. Slye in the medical unit. Slye had looked everywhere for Dr. Zhernastyn, had double-checked the computer’s record of the doctor’s movements and then, with a sinking feeling in his stomach, far more sickening than any rapidly descending lift, went into the room and pulled back the bedding. Zhernastyn’s terrified eyes were a reflection of Mr. Slye’s sense of impending doom. How had Tom Gordon escaped? A more frightening question-had anyone helped him? It was not difficult to put two and two together-they always made four in Mr. Slye’s book, he didn’t care how clever mathematicians could be-but in this case it was one and one. One Bushman boy running back towards Skeleton Rock might well mean the other one was already here.

  Two boys. />
  Both supposed to be dead.

  Double trouble.

  He had ripped the tape from Zhernastyn’s face, removing another clump of whiskers, and grabbed the gasping doctor by the throat.

  “If you know what’s good for both our sakes, you should be extremely careful what you say, Doctor. Was the Gordon boy here?”

  Zhernastyn nodded.

  “And he used you to go through to the maintenance hangar?”

  Zhernastyn nodded again.

  Mr. Slye’s grip on Zhernastyn’s throat tightened ever so slightly. “And did he do anything in there he shouldn’t?”

  The moment of truth.

  If he admitted what had happened, Zhernastyn knew he was definitely for the great cheese grater in the sky, where all sins would be stripped from his evil soul. Like being skinned alive, it was going to hurt. And Slye would not wish to tell Shaka Chang that the boy he assured his master was dead had gained access to a computer, using Zhernastyn’s lovelorn password. And Zhernastyn was definitely not going to mention the DVD the boy had recovered. Oh no. That meant a double failure. That game was over so far as Zhernastyn was concerned. Given a chance, Dr. Zhernastyn would beat a hasty retreat. He needed time. No, he had told Slye, the boy hadn’t done anything, he was looking for a way to escape. And that was when Mr. Slye patted his cheek and gave him that cold-fish stare which meant he had said just the right thing. By the time Slye got round to telling Shaka Chang, Zhernastyn planned to have his own escape route ready. Rats and sinking ships sprang to mind.

  Now Shaka Chang threw the wheelchair through a glass window. “I’m not very happy at the moment, Mr. Slye! In case you hadn’t realized.”

  “We have no idea how the boy got inside, Mr. Chang.”

  “Then we’ll roast head of security!” He glowered at Zhernastyn. “You let a fifteen-year-old boy get the better of you?”

  “His father made a remarkable recovery-it took two of them to beat me. I’d like to know how he knocked the maintenance man unconscious, stole his clothes and sneaked up on me. I fought like a lion. I’m not that young anymore, Mr. Chang,” Zhernastyn said.