Blood Sun

by David Gilman

  After three days of living rough and being chased by these hardened soldiers, he ached and shivered whenever he stopped running.

  Now they were almost on him.

  Max squirmed through the mud; if he got up and ran, he could be out of sight for at least two minutes—that was all he needed. He flung his groundsheet across the gorse and secured it by twisting bungees at each corner round the roots, ignoring the wasplike stings of the gorse needles on his hands. Water seeped into his already sodden cargo pants as he crawled under, reached in and dropped his beta light. Its dull glow barely registered, but it would draw the soldiers like moths to a flame.

  He could already hear their labored breathing.

  Max left his kit and leopard-crawled down a sluice. It was an animal track barely as wide as his body, probably a badger or a fox run, and the ferns and gorse offered a low canopy of concealment—provided he stayed down. As he dug knees and elbows into the ground, fear gushed through him. In those few moments, he felt a huge sympathy for animals pursued to their deaths by huntsmen.

  “There he is!” a voice cried.

  Max stopped, holding his breath. Boots crushed the ground to the left, less than a meter from his face, and then to the right. He wriggled forward, almost between the two men, who saw nothing because they were focused on the dull glow up ahead. The wind shook fern and gorse, and another squall whipped rain across their vision.

  “Come on out, boy! It’s over!”

  The voices were behind him now, and the torchlight scanned the area he had drawn them to. Like slimy sewage, animal droppings and fouled water slithered under his clothes; his shins scraped rock, and his arms caught sharp-edged gorse sticks—he ignored it. Time to break cover.

  Shadows loomed.

  They had trapped him!

  The men with the torches were the distraction; like any good hunter group, they had a second ring of men behind the first. They were the outer defense—and they didn’t use torches.

  Max barreled into the dark bulk of one of them. The man cried out, swore, kicked and squirmed and grabbed Max’s ankle. Max couldn’t recover; someone else pinioned him, and his breath got knocked out of him. Something deep inside him exploded, a surge of power; an animal cry echoed through his mind as he gulped air and twisted free, slamming a third man in the chest as he leapt like a wolf.

  Then he was gone into the storm with long, open strides, feet barely touching the ground, carrying him into the darkness.

  “We seem to be out of chocolate biscuits,” Mr. Jackson apologized as he poured hot water into cups. “And it’s only instant, I’m afraid,” he said, handing the scalding mugs of coffee to the two men. He wanted them out of his school as soon as possible and had no intention of making them comfortable. “Now, where’s the sugar? I’m sure these boys sneak in here and help themselves.”

  The two MI5 officers were in no mood for hospitality either. Stanton cursed under his breath as the hot liquid spilled. “We’re hoping Max Gordon can help us with information,” he said testily.

  “I have to say,” Mr. Jackson said quietly, “that I don’t quite understand how the suicide of a former pupil on the London Underground can involve either this country’s Security Service or Max Gordon. Danny Maguire left here when he was eighteen, and that was well over a year ago, closer to two, in fact. He certainly hasn’t been in contact with anyone here, as far as I know.”

  Drew quietly inhaled to ease his impatience. This was supposed to be a straightforward “get in, check the kid and get out” inquiry. And here they were, sitting in overstuffed chairs in front of a blazing log fire in a room crammed with so many books it looked like a country-house library. Fergus Jackson seemed to have a cozy number here, probably whiling away his days until retirement. Soft, cosseted academics. What did they know about the real world?

  “Police agencies in South America picked up a flagged word a few months ago during a regular intel sweep of Internet traffic,” he said.

  “Intel?” Mr. Jackson asked, looking perplexed, knowing full well what the word meant.

  “Intelligence,” Stanton replied. “Look, Mr. Jackson. This is just a routine inquiry. If we could just speak to Max Gordon …”

  “I wish I could help, I really do, but he’s on holiday. Half-term. He’s not here. He went to Italy with a friend and his parents,” Mr. Jackson lied. “But what kind of intelligence?” he asked, trying to momentarily divert interest away from Max.

  The man answered patiently, humoring Jackson, not wishing to appear too eager to get to Max Gordon. “We think Danny Maguire might have been involved in drug smuggling.”

  “Rubbish!” Mr. Jackson couldn’t hold back his incredulity. “Maguire? The boy barely took a headache pill when he was here.”

  “I didn’t say he was taking drugs but that he might have been trafficking them. So, if we could at least have a look at Gordon’s room?”

  “Of course. What a shocking business. We will endeavor to assist your inquiries as far as possible. Drug smuggling. Who’d have thought it?”

  The men stood in anticipation, pleased at last to get past this dithering idiot of a headmaster. The phone rang. Mr. Jackson raised a hand to settle them back down again. He pressed a button. “Yes?”

  “It’s Khalif, sir,” Sayid’s voice said into the room.

  “I’m very busy on important business, boy. I don’t want to be disturbed. What is it?”

  “Matron says that Harry Clark has cut his foot on broken glass.”

  “Well, tell her to deal with it. I’m not a doctor. It’s what we pay her for,” Mr. Jackson said, convincingly grumpy.

  “She said you might have to call an ambulance.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake! Very well, I’ll be right there.”

  Mr. Jackson ended the call. “This’ll take only a minute,” he said apologetically. “There are some macaroons in that jar. Do help yourselves.”

  Moments later he lifted the phone receiver in the staff room and patted Sayid’s shoulder as the boy reported back. “Nothing for Max in the mailroom, sir.”

  “Well done. Go and check his room. Make sure there’s no recent mail there. If there is, hide it in your room. And take his laptop as well. Be quick.”

  Sayid closed the door behind him as Mr. Jackson dialed a number. The soft voice of a pupil’s father responded.

  “Ridgeway.”

  “Bob, it’s Fergus. I need your help.”

  Robert Ridgeway was a senior man in Britain’s Security Service, and his youngest son excelled at just about everything at Dartmoor High. He knew the value of Fergus Jackson’s care for his charges, and a phone call from him was not something to be taken lightly. He listened to Jackson’s requests, asked him to wait a moment and in less than a minute came back with definitive answers.

  There was no known investigation into the death of the Maguire boy by MI5 and no record of any intel on his Internet traffic. As Fergus already knew, officers often dressed scruffily if they were working undercover, so the men’s appearance hadn’t aroused any suspicion, but there were no field operatives by the name of Stanton or Drew. Even if they had been what they’d said, MI5 officers did not have any personal choice of handguns, certainly not the kind of heavy-caliber chromed weapons Fergus had described. And the tattooed name, Velvollisuus? Ridgeway had never heard of it, but it sounded Eastern European, possibly Russian. He would check. In the meantime, he would alert the local police firearms unit to get to the school. These two men were clearly impostors.

  “No, don’t do that, Bob. I don’t want armed police here; that might escalate the situation. I’ll get rid of these people. I’ll get their number plate and pass that on so you can check it,” Jackson said.

  “As you wish. And what about Max Gordon? Is he in danger?”

  * * *

  Like a huge firework, the mortar flare rocketed into the sky. It burst with a fluttering crackle, and despite the gusting conditions, it would be seen for miles, which was the intention.


  Max watched. The road—a curved snake of wet tarmac that led to the soldiers’ assembly point—was clear. Half a dozen army lorries and a hot-food wagon were parked as forty or so soldiers stamped their feet, pleased the whole thing was over as they lined up for hot stew and a mug of tea. Mobile arc lamps flooded light across the men.

  He was so close to them he could hear their banter, the crackle of their radios and their slurping of tea.

  A good hunter would stalk his prey as near as he could, and Max had wanted this final hour to test himself. How close could he get to the men who had hunted him for the past three days without being seen? Max had broken the outline of his body by snapping off gorse and fern, jamming it into his shirt and belt and the tops of his boots. With stealth and patience, he crawled ever closer, past soldiers who moved across the perimeter, around men whose legs were so close he could have reached out and touched them.

  Finally he stood up from the gorse cover, barely five meters from the officer in charge, who carried a clipboard and had a radio operator at his side. Max’s body was covered in slime, his clothing was sodden and his hair matted with something disgusting. His eyes were red-rimmed from lack of sleep and flecks of dirt. And he stank.

  The officer was momentarily taken by surprise at the apparition that emerged from the bogland. Then he smiled. “Lads! He’s here!”

  The soldiers jeered and cheered, shouted insults and encouragement—all meant to welcome the boy as he pulled the bits of camouflage free.

  “You took your time!”

  “Don’t stand upwind, mate!”

  “We almost had you.”

  “Look what the cat dragged in.”

  “The Creature from the Black Lagoon.”

  “You’re not coming in my lorry smelling like that!”

  The flare had been the signal that the exercise had ended. Escape and Evasion, the paras and special forces called it. Cast adrift out on the moor without any means of shelter, food, money or weapons and issued with the most basic clothing, potential recruits were dropped off to be hunted down and captured. Then they would face another two days of intense physical and mental interrogation. Thankfully they didn’t do that with the schoolboys and girls who had passed the tests to get on to this exercise. And they allowed them basic rations and groundsheets for shelter. Only five schools in the country could compete, and Dartmoor High had always had an entrant. All schools wanting to participate had to have competed in the annual Ten Tors competition, administered by the army, where four hundred teams of six teenagers would face the grueling task of marching for two days, anything up to seventy kilometers between the ten nominated Tors. Those teenagers had to be determined and self-sufficient. Backup teams of the army, Royal Navy and Royal Air Force were always on hand to help.

  But despite the Escape and Evasion exercise taking place in a demarcated area, this challenge was tougher. You were treated as the enemy and hunted down. And the colder it got and the more exhausted the competitors became, the more real it seemed. On the run, in enemy territory. Even hardened soldiers had died out here on the moor, and it was a huge risk for youngsters—they were on their own, no one else in a group to help if they got injured or lost. On the third night, at 2100 hours, the survivors had to report to this assembly point.

  That was what the mortar flare meant. ENDEX—end of exercise. If anyone was left out there and didn’t report, then a major search and rescue would be undertaken within the hour. But so far all had been captured. Only one boy came in under his own steam.

  The last survivor.

  Max Gordon.

  Stanton and Drew looked through Max’s room while Mr. Jackson stood in the doorway. They made little fuss and barely disturbed anything. The room was small. There was a bed, a small table that doubled as a desk, a bookshelf and a small trunk for bits and pieces. On the shelf were a few artifacts Max’s explorer-scientist father had sent him over the years. A Cook Island figurine, a rock crystal from the Himalayas, an amber teardrop from Russia that was a hundred million years old.

  “Do you know where he’d keep his computer?” Drew asked, breaking Mr. Jackson’s thoughts of faraway lands.

  “He would have taken it on holiday with him. You said you have already checked Maguire’s emails—is there any evidence that he sent any to Gordon?” Jackson asked.

  “No,” Drew said, and gave a reassuring smile. “We just wanted to double-check. We think Maguire might have sent him something in the post.”

  “In the post? That’s a bit unusual for his generation. Text, email and network sites are what they all use nowadays. Must say I can’t quite get the hang of it myself.”

  “Still, if he had received something in the post, it’d be here, right?” Stanton asked.

  “Absolutely. The boy’s been away for a few days, so anything delivered would be on his table or his bed. When might it have been sent, do you think? The last few days? Before, or even on the day of Maguire’s death?”

  “Yeah. Probably,” Stanton said.

  “Is it a letter you’re looking for? You never said,” Jackson asked.

  “A letter? Have you seen one?” Drew queried.

  Jackson shook his head. “No, but if poor Maguire took his own life, I was wondering if it might have been a suicide note. Something to explain why he did what he did. Danny Maguire was such an articulate and positive-minded boy—if he was so distressed as to take his own life, I feel sure he would have explained himself. His death really is a shocking mystery.”

  The two men didn’t answer right away. Jackson had asked the most obvious question. “No,” Stanton said, “we don’t think it would be a suicide note.”

  “But one wasn’t found?”

  “No.”

  “Nothing on his body?”

  “No, we made sure.”

  “You were there, then? You examined his body yourself? Or would that have been the police who checked for that? So what is it you’re looking for?”

  Stanton hesitated. Jackson had gleaned quite a bit of information without their realizing it at first. He had learned that in all probability, they had had Maguire under observation; otherwise, how would they have identified the fact that he had something to post? They had also admitted to scanning his emails. They might well have been close to the boy at or soon after the time of his death, because had there been a suicide note, they would have found it. Maybe Jackson wasn’t as dithering as the men had thought.

  “We’re not sure—maybe a small package,” Stanton said.

  “Then it would have been put in here, and as you can see, there’s nothing. But why don’t we go and check the mailroom to make sure?” Mr. Jackson said helpfully.

  From his room, Sayid watched Mr. Jackson escort them downstairs.

  They moved lightly, their bodies trained for fast reactions. Sayid had seen men like them before and they scared him.

  A medic wrapped a space blanket around Max, and an army cook shoved a mess tin full of stew into his hands. Max suddenly realized just how chilled he was. Blowing briefly on each spoonful, he shoveled the food into his mouth as fast as he could. The warmth seeped down to his frozen toes as if someone had turned on a hot-water tap inside his body.

  “We need to check your feet, Max, make sure there’s no trench foot,” the officer said. “Then we’ll get you back to Dartmoor High.”

  “I know how to look after my feet, sir,” he spluttered through the stew.

  “I’m sure you do. But we’re going to check anyway.” The major nodded to the medic, and Max sat down obediently on a haybox, used for keeping food hot in the field, and allowed the medic to haul off his boots.

  “They’re a bit mank,” Max apologized for the squelching, black-water-soaked socks.

  “Mank? We could use these as a secret weapon, son.” The medic smiled.

  A soldier shouted in the background. “Can you go around us, mate? Unless you don’t want to get mud on your nice car!”

  Soldiers laughed. Max and the others turned. A
black Range Rover had come down the tarmac strip and was unable to negotiate the army vehicles that were reversing and forming up for the return to barracks.

  Drew grimaced as he watched the narrow gap Stanton was edging them through. “What the hell is this? Army maneuvers are the last thing we need. They’re not supposed to be in this area,” he said.

  Stanton weaved the big 4×4 through the obstructing lorries, Land Rovers and trailers. “Relax, they don’t have weapons. This is something else.”

  Max saw the men in the Range Rover give a thumbs-up and nod to the gathered soldiers; then the driver turned the steering wheel and went effortlessly off-road.

  “Let him through,” the officer instructed the pockets of men as the beast of a vehicle edged toward them. It passed within a couple of meters.

  Stanton concentrated on avoiding the paraphernalia but caught sight of a bog-soaked kid wrapped in a space blanket. He looked as though he’d been pulled out of a sludge pit. Shivering, barefoot and clutching a mess tin of food, the boy looked wretched in the glaring floodlights. Except for his eyes. They seemed to bore straight through him.

  “Must have been some kind of rescue operation,” Drew said. “These kids are so dumb. They have no idea how dangerous places like this are.”

  Stanton got a clear run, then gunned the V8 engine, and the black beast made short work of the difficult ground.

  Max watched it power away across the moor and then disappear from view. It was unusual to see anyone out here at this time of night. They weren’t tourists; that was for sure. Maybe they were bonus-heavy stock traders from London on their way to a shooting weekend, but the way the driver had handled the heavy 4×4 showed a subtle skill. Most city people had no idea how to drive off-road. So, who were they? And what were they doing all the way out here? Max’s natural curiosity teased him. Maybe he should stop being suspicious of anything that seemed out of place, he told himself. But maybe recognizing the out-of-place is what survival is all about, his thoughts answered.

  * * *