I shook my head.
“No. Come. Come with me. You and me, together. Please. We can talk later, but we need to leave now.” I spoke softly, cautiously. I thought of the girl in the cave, and the disconnect between his nighttime ceremonies and the absolute devastation his creations unleashed. And I thought of Raven Hill, too, under my command, and the specter of controlling an ever-expanding army of perfected, indestructible Sleepers.
“No, son, my time is done. Use my warriors. But remember, they are not monsters, Max. They are men. Never forget that. There is only one monster, and it is time he bade you farewell.” I stood and watched him as he walked to the open doorway of the hut. He turned to face me, smiling in the flame light, hand raised in farewell.
“Make wars cease to the ends of the earth, Max. Break the bow and shatter the spear. Burn shields with fire! Who creates the warrior controls the warrior!”
He let his hand drop, pulled the Cyclops mask back over his face and vanished into the darkness.
28
I found her where I last saw her.
She was asleep in the first antechamber of the cave, balled up, head on her hands, as I had been when last she’d seen me. A makeshift palm-oil lamp threw a weak yellow light across her. The tiny coiled wick held the smallest of flames, just enough to pick out Roberts’s bead bracelet tied around her wrist.
I shed the hyena skin and shook her awake gently, keeping at arm’s length. She woke slowly, awareness flooding back to her as it had done to me an hour earlier. Wary, but not scared, she sat up and blinked at me.
“Aw di bodi?” I asked.
She stretched and shrugged her shoulders and then pointed to the wound at the base of my neck.
“Mi bodi fayn,” I said. She looked nonplussed. I gave her the thumbs-up and smiled. “OK,” I said. She smiled, too. There was no sign of the stick man, but the torch I’d given her was on the ground next to her. I picked it up, switched it on and handed it to her. As she swished the beam around the cave, I blew out the lantern and removed and coiled the wick. I hoped it would do. “Let’s go.”
She led me first to the muddy patch under the river. We paused. She retraced her footprints so as not to leave more, and then I followed on behind her. The navigation marks I’d cut in the walls were enough to guide me, but she knew the caves even in the darkness. She was the best guide I could have hoped for. She moved fast, too, unencumbered by height in the low passages. Within an hour we’d reached the point where I’d dropped down into the base, and where, crucially, I’d left my bag. It was still there, untouched. I picked it up and fished out a couple of hard biscuits. Both ravenous, we stood and ate them on the spot, washing them down with gulps from the water bottle. When we’d finished, I plucked a fentanyl lozenge out of the medical kit and ran it around my gumline. The painkiller kicked in immediately, but the rush was disorienting, like slamming half a dozen shots of tequila. I steadied myself against the wall. She put her hand out, thinking it was a sweet. I shook my head.
“Medicine.” I slung the bag over my shoulder. “OK,” I said, “let’s go,” and made to leave by the way we’d come. She shrugged her shoulders and raised her eyebrows. “Yeah, go.” She looked at me and shook her head. In disbelief, not refusal. “Trust me,” I said. “I know what I’m doing.” She shrugged again and in reverse marching order we began the long trudge back through the cave complex.
We stopped where the floor grew muddy. I pointed to the ceiling.
“Riva?” She nodded and sat down, exhausted. We’d been walking through the tunnels for over two hours. I gave her the water bottle and went to work quickly.
I took the day bag off and fished out the detonation cord. It was enough to bring down a forest tree. Whether it would be enough to crack open the cave ceiling was another matter entirely. Designed as an explosive fuse to detonate other explosives with, det cord could also be used as a primary device in its own right. The SBS used heavy cord to cut through harbor piers underwater. I’d used it to blow the handles off locked doors. It looked like a length of washing line and was endlessly versatile.
It might just work. All I needed to do was open the bedrock a fraction. If the fault ran along the break line in the roof of the tunnel, the weight of the water would do the rest. Carefully I packed a double strand of the cord into the fissure in the rock above me, taping it in place as I went along with gaffer tape from the day bag. It was hard going. With my arms fully extended, I could just touch the ceiling. Reaching up pulled my ribs apart, but the fentanyl masked the worst of it.
The blast needed to be tamped upward. It was no use if the force of the blast was dissipated into the empty space of the cave below. It doesn’t take much to direct an explosion. I rummaged through the bag. Folded up inside was the Awoko newspaper that Ezra had shown me in Freetown. I flattened it out and then folded it again, this time into a vertical strip. I put a crease along the length of it, filled it with mulch and dirt from the tunnel floor, and taped it up hard over the cord, leaving the detonator fuse exposed at one end. Finally, I unwound the oily wick that had lit the girl’s lamp. I tied it in a slipknot over the fuse, and carefully let it hang down into the cave.
In the side pocket of the day bag, I found a crumpled packet of Marlboros and my lighter. I thought about lighting a cigarette but looked at the girl and thought twice. Instead, I just lit the fuse. Palm oil burned hot and slow. I had no idea how long the wick would take to burn down. Long enough, I hoped.
The girl looked at me. I pointed to the ceiling.
“Boom!” I mimed with my arms the cascade of water that I hoped would follow. She looked up, wide-eyed, at the little yellow flame eating its way slowly toward the rock roof.
“Dyinyinga,” I said, while mimicking washing my hands and flicking my fingers toward the floor. “Finish.”
She looked up and down and smiled, and together we walked out into the night.
I gave her the remains of the MRE, took a moment to get my bearings and then pointed her due east toward the small town of Bindi. It was about five klicks as the crow flies—the same distance from the cave as it was due west to the entrance to the huts that masked the base’s entrance. I made a sign for walking legs with my index and middle fingers. She turned around and said nothing. I gave her the thumbs-up, but she looked down and wouldn’t meet my eye. I squatted down on my haunches and held her shoulders lightly.
“I can’t help you,” I said. “You have to go. You’ll be OK. Everything will be OK.” I turned her around to face the direction she’d have to walk in and patted her back. Her cheeks were wet with tears. “Please,” I said. “Go.”
She walked off into shadows, carefully threading her way through the trees toward Bindi. I had no idea if the town had been sacked or not, but she stood a better chance there than she did staying with me—that was for sure.
When her silhouette disappeared from view, I headed off in the opposite direction, keeping under the trees, moving as fast as the terrain and the darkness would allow. The moon was dropping now, but its brightness was a godsend. Without it, I would have been blind. Dawn was not far off, and when the sun rose, I would be painfully exposed. But for a while longer I could remain hidden and move unseen through the silver shadows of the ragged savannah woodland.
I kept up a steady jog, all the time waiting for the noise of the earth giving way and the deluge that would follow it. I hoped that at least the bottom level would be wiped out and the science to replicate my father’s experiments with it.
I stopped and listened. Half an hour had passed since I’d left the cave, but all was silent.
Up ahead the two thatched rondels were clearly visible. I had no weapon, not even a knife this time. But I didn’t need one. I crouched beneath an ackee tree at the edge of the clearing and took out of the bag the emergency beacon that Ezra had given me. It was a civilian-specification personal locator beacon. It was my only fail-safe.
If the bomb in the passage didn’t work, this might. I pulled out the aerial, lifted the anti-tamper seal, rested my thumb on the on button—and stopped.
If I pressed it, I might never know for sure whether my father was a Russian agent, a double agent or simply a madman. But one thing was for sure: my mission was wide open from the start. The Russians had known I’d been on the ground almost immediately, and my father knew Sonny Boy was one of my men. Kristóf King, David Mason, Frank Knight: who wanted my father dead, who wanted me dead and who wanted my blood?
There was something else I knew, too. My father died in a plane crash in Angola. Whatever he or my mother had once been or later became, they had both died for me, then and there. My mother was not his puppet. That masked madman was not my parent.
And yet he was.
“Fuck it.”
I pressed the button.
Nothing around me changed, but Ezra was right: the powerful satellite signal it sent up notifying urgent need of emergency rescue would be visible to anyone and everyone. It was as if I had painted the entrance to the base—and everything and everyone inside—in bright white light. The location of their secret base was now public knowledge.
I covered the unit under a pile of rotting ackee fruit skins by the base of the tree. It was just eight kilometers northwest to the airstrip at Soron and the possibility of hijacking a plane to Guinea, or at least walking north across the border.
I paused and then stepped away from the base and back into the trees. As I did so, a voice in Russian barked at me.
“Ostanovis!”
I stopped as commanded and turned around slowly with my hands spread open. I peered into the darkness and found myself squinting across the top of a raised pistol and into the unsmiling face of Colonel Proshunin.
29
“Sergeant, take him down.” Proshunin barked orders in Russian. Boots kicked the backs of both my knees. I crumpled, twisting onto my side as I fell to protect the broken ribs I thought were going to get a beating. Half a dozen AKs were trained on me. “Alive,” Proshunin ordered. “Inside.”
At first they hesitated. And then one of them searched me. I lay prone. No weapons to find, they cut the backpack off my shoulders and emptied it in front of me.
“OK,” one of the men said in Russian. “Clear.”
They picked up the empty bag and forced it over my head. What little light there had been was extinguished, one shade of darkness replaced by another. Hands grabbed my arms and hauled me up. My wrists were bound with my own gaffer tape. A rifle muzzle jabbed into my spine.
“Davai, davai,” the soldier grunted. I moved forward tentatively only to be shoved onward. “Skoreye!” I walked faster.
It was hard to hear clearly under the makeshift hood, but it didn’t sound like they’d found the beacon. I was hot, breathing hard. Sweat ran into my eyes, which I strained for any glimpse of detail through the fabric of the bag.
Nothing.
Was this what it had been like when I was . . . what, unconscious? I had no memory of it at all, except a vague recollection of thick, gray fog. I remembered that I couldn’t remember. That was all. If I had done anything, killed anyone like the other Sleepers had, it was lost to me. In the couple of hours or so since my father had set me free, the pain in my head had faded—though whether that was due to the virus losing out to the antidote or due to the fentanyl was impossible to tell.
The soldiers pushed me on. I felt a change in the atmosphere. Stripped from the waist up, my skin had to guide me now that my eyes couldn’t. We’d stepped inside one of the huts and started to descend. This was it, then. No escape now. If the charge was going to blow, it would blow at any moment. Just like Sonny Boy, I’d be trapped on the wrong side of the break line, after all. I tensed at the memory of lighting the fuse and then exhaled.
Of all the ways to go, I thought, I didn’t see this coming.
The air cooled as waves of air-conditioning wafted up to us. We dropped three flights of stairs before passing through another doorway and emerging into a corridor. From my memory of the site map on the wall belowdecks, we were on Level One. Proshunin told his men to take everything they found in the bag to the laboratory.
“Crack the phones. I want the information now.”
“Sir, yes, sir. And the prisoner, sir?”
“Level Two. The observation room.”
The group split. Half a dozen men stayed with me, Proshunin included. His boot step was short, his breathing heavy. I couldn’t see him, but I could sense him. We dropped another two flights and wheeled sharply to the right. The pressure changed again. And with it, permeating my senses as the hood was removed, came a sharp tang of peppermint.
Blinding light. The room was lined entirely with white plastic sheets. Dead center sat an examination chair, complete with sprung metal head, arm and leg restraints. On a metal trolley next to it, a woman in a lab coat was laying out swabs and syringes. Dental drill bits and a bone saw had already been removed from their sterile wrappers. This was going to get rough.
“Bit high-tech for you, isn’t it, Colonel?” I said in Russian. “I was looking forward to a good punch-up.”
“On the contrary,” he replied in heavily accented English. “There is nothing high-tech about Captain Tarasova’s methods. By the time she has finished with you, not even your own mother would recognize you.”
My eyes adjusted properly to the room. Twenty feet square. Low ceiling. One entrance, behind me. Four of Proshunin’s men had come in with us: two that I could see, two that I could hear adjusting their rifles.
“One last thing, if I may. Please do not trouble us with your name and rank. We already know them.”
“Is that a fact, Colonel Proshunin?”
“Yes, that is a fact, Major McLean.” It wasn’t Proshunin who answered. Captain Tarasova unwrapped the last of the torture implements and pivoted sharply on her heels. She’d already washed all the dye out of her hair, and the lab-coat uniform bit hard into her identity. But she was unmistakable.
“Don’t you know,” I said, “that gentlemen prefer blondes?”
“Mudak!” she sighed.
It was her all right. Ana María had got out of Caracas.
Two of Proshunin’s men came from behind me and pushed me toward the chair. As they spun me around and then cut the tape from my wrists, I saw the other two aiming their AKs directly at me. To have resisted would have been to die then and there. I’ve always been suspicious of anyone who says they want to go out fighting. Once you’re out, you’re out. I was planning on staying in the game as long as possible.
While my limbs and head were bound to the examination chair, Ana María busied herself with what were apparently the tools of her trade. She was just at the edge of my vision, and I saw her as a blur in the corner of my eye. It was, frankly, hard to know what to say. Had she known who I was in Caracas? I certainly had no idea who she was, whom she worked for, or even if she had escaped or Frank had let her get away. Suddenly David Mason and General King didn’t look like the prime candidates for fouling my mission—whatever it was, or whatever they thought it was. My father had said it depended on who’d sent me.
Other people might have ordered it. But Frank sent me.
“You know my name,” I said. “What’s yours?”
Nothing.
“You’re going to kill me anyway. Or if you don’t, he will.” I strained my head in the direction of Proshunin, who was now out of sight, but my head was held tight. “That’s not asking much, is it? To know your name.”
She spoke then, but to the colonel, not to me.
“Permission to begin, Commandant?” Her Russian was hard and fast. A native speaker for sure.
“Da, carry on, Captain Tarasova.”
She moved closer to inspect me and leaned down into my face. As she did so, the two guards who’d covered me stepp
ed forward so I could see them, too. Their rifles were still trained on me.
“I’m not fucking Houdini,” I muttered under my breath. She shone a light into both of my eyes, examining them as she did so. I remembered the fuse and imagined her floating underground in the flood that I was powerless to stop. A wave of claustrophobia choked me.
“Ana María,” I murmured, trying not to let Proshunin see or hear what I was saying. “If we stay here, we die,” I said in Spanish. “Trust me. We have to get out.”
In one movement Ana María brought her left fist down into my groin. It was a perfectly executed punch that connected fully with my genitals. My testes expanded against my pelvic bone under her knuckles. I blacked out momentarily, coming back around as a wave of nausea rolled up my gut. My stomach muscles went into spasm, forcing the biscuit I’d eaten earlier back up into my gullet. I was caught in the perfect body shock of total pain. Of all the methods devised over the centuries to incapacitate a man, hitting him in the balls remains the purest and simplest way of causing undiluted agony.
“My name is Captain Ana María Tarasova,” she said, cracking the wide, sad smile that had disarmed me in Caracas. “I am a medical doctor, so you can be confident that you will die exactly when Colonel Proshunin wishes it.” She scooped my bruised testes into her palm. “Which will not,” she continued, “be soon.”
The Break Line Page 24