by John McNally
Thunder rose from the mountain. She saw Baptiste’s momentary confusion, then – WHAM! – the mountain hit him as a wall of white, a wall of energy, of cascading snow.
“Avalanche!” Finn yelled in her hair. “Hang on!”
But nothing could be heard, nothing could be sensed in the all-encompassing chaos, the liquid totality of it …
BRBRBRRBRRBRRRRRRRRRRRBRBRRBRRBRRRRRRRRRRR …
FEBRUARY 19 15:22 (GMT+2). OBS post South, Carpathian Mountains, Romania
The Tyro lookout sharpened the focus on the Zeiss T-star image-stabilising binoculars. Her pulse quickened.
She zeroed in on the white scree slope on the Kalamatov Ridge. The avalanche was obscuring her view, but she could see at least one figure in the snow. Immediately she hit the hard comms link back to the monastery.
“Trespass alarm! Seven kilometres south-east on Kalamatov!”
BRBRBRRBRRBRRRRRRRRRRRBRBRRBRRBRRRRRRRRRRR …
Carla felt only pain – the shackles biting into her wrists as her unseen captor twisted and turned, then a SNAP of sudden release as the avalanche ran itself out, fading from a roar to a sigh …
She came to a halt, daylight leaking through the snow crystals.
She must be near the surface. For a few moments she lay in the profound silence and whiteness. She was still alive, but …
“You still there?” Carla whispered. Her greatest fear was to lose him. He was annoying, but he was in every sense her blood brother.
Finn opened his eyes in the curled sanctuary of her hair.
“Are you kidding? This stuff is like a bulletproof duvet.”
She let out a “Ha!” in relief.
“Is he still there?” said Finn in turn, hardly daring to hope.
Carla tried to move and got a shock. She still felt the pain of the shackles, but her wrists moved freely through the powder … Nothing at all binding them. She opened her arms … Smooth, delicious nothing. She felt like a princess waking in a fairy tale.
“HA!” Finn yelled when she brought her hands to her face in disbelief. “GET AWAY!”
Powered by euphoria and panic, Carla began to swim up to the surface.
“Careful!” Finn called out as the sun hit her face and she took a deep lungful of free, freezing air.
“Careful …” Finn warned again.
“OK …” Carla whispered. Slowly she wriggled and worked her head above the surface.
Baptiste …
Three feet away.
Head and shoulders out of the snow, stock-still like an Easter Island statue. Except this statue was bleeding and wisps of cloudy breath leaked from its mouth …
Carla held her own.
“Slow, slow, slow …” Finn urged.
Staring intently at the statue, Carla began to inch her way out. First her shoulders, then her arms, her knees … until she was able to take a first high step, a second …
She turned to wade down the slope, heart thumping. Three steps, four, five … She’d not been this far from him in months. The invisible chains that bound her to her captor seemed to be breaking one by one, until—
His eyes snapped open.
“AAAAARRRRRGGGGHHHH!” screamed Carla.
“RUN!” Finn yelled.
Carla ran, kneeing through the deep powder, stumbling as Baptiste exploded from the bank – “WAAAAARRRRRGGGGHHHH!” – avalanching after her, reborn in rage.
Finn shot to the top of her hair and grabbed his favourite long curl, flying free at its end like a mad bungie jumper able to bounce around and see all ways at once.
“RUN RUN RUN!”
Baptiste had pulled a knife from his belt and was closing fast.
Finn had to do something. Finn had to kill the giant. How?
“Arrrggghhhhh!” – Carla cried out suddenly as she ran onto nothingness and dropped a dozen feet before a rocky outcrop, coming to land – WHUMP – in a snowdrift at its base.
Baptiste followed – WHUMP – thumping further down the slope.
Carla instinctively rose to run again, but as she did so she heard Finn warn – “DON’T MOVE!”
She had fallen at the mouth of a cave, smashing aside the snow that concealed it. Now its contents were exposed. She sensed stink and stored heat. She saw fur. A pair of black eyes zooming in. A mother roused from a hibernating huddle.
“BEAR!” yelled Finn unnecessarily. “BROWN BEAR!” Always the naturalist.
Its massive salivating jaws opened – “ROOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAA-RRRRRRRRRRR!”
Carla screamed. The huge female swung round to check its pile of young, then swung back.
Finn, from the flying curl, saw Baptiste rising up the slope with the knife.
“KICK THE BEAR!”
“What?!” said Carla.
“KICK IT AND RUN!” screamed Finn.
Carla kicked at the dirt and ice before her, sending a spray of filth and grit into the bear’s face, enraging her and flipping her from defence mode into attack.
“ROOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRR!”
“GO!” screamed Finn.
As claws and jaws flashed towards Carla, she rose like a rocket and threw herself as far down the slope as she could, straight past the rising Baptiste …
“ARRRRRGGGGGGHHHHHHHH!” Man met mammal.
Carla sensed the force of the blow and heard a gasp of air as the claws of the bear ripped Baptiste clean open. She felt hot blood spray against her, felt life end – and thanked God she couldn’t see it – as the bear’s jaws snapped home round Baptiste’s neck, breaking his spine like a dry stick.
Finn caught a glimpse of it. Saw the crimson arc whiplash across the snow and sky. A final obscenity. But not final for long …
“ROOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRR!”
“RUN!” This was one mad bear.
Carla fell and tumbled and ran and staggered down through the forest as the bear pounded after her.
Carla had seconds.
Moments.
She would be obliterated.
Finn braced himself for the incoming final hit and yelled, uselessly, finally, “NOOOOOOO!”
YAP!
Hope.
Yo-yo galloped through the undergrowth and gave it everything, put every ounce of jelly energy into his spring and sank his teeth into the bear’s hind leg.
ROOOOOAAAAAARARARARARARR!
Yo-yo let go and – using the momentum of the bear’s reeling body – flew like a stone from a slingshot down the steep slope.
ROOOOOAAAAAARARARARARARR!
The bear roared again as it barrelled after the pelting, yelping mongrel, splintering the forest and exploding the snow.
“Run …” Finn managed to say through his astonishment.
TWO
FEBRUARY 19 16:37 (GMT+1). Hull of the Shieldmaiden, Mediterranean Sea
Kaparis reviewed the tapes of the Monte Carlo sting.
He saw Captain Kelly. He saw Delta Salazar. Both were full-sized.
The last time he’d seen them, they were just 11mm tall.
He ground this new information round in his massive mind.
Like Allenby, Kaparis had been able to create a subatomic vortex within which all matter could be reduced, but his was crude, only capable of shrinking machines. Allenby could not only reduce living humans to nano-scale, he had now worked out how to reverse the process and restore them to normal size without killing them … Allenby was not just ahead in the race, he had made a great leap forward. It was like being in an old propeller biplane and watching a jet fighter shoot past.
Given an infinite amount of time, Kaparis could and would deduce the four elusive fractal equations at the heart of the Boldklub process. But he did not have for ever. Yet.
Now everything had changed. There was no contest. The game was up.
FEBRUARY 19 17:48 (GMT+3). Carpathian Mountains, Romania-Ukraine border
As she crested the Kalamatov Ridge, Carla fell to her knees. Just like Baptiste had done, just like many a pilgrim in times past, at
first sight of the Monastery of Mount St Demetrius of Thessaloniki.
Against the brilliant orange of the setting sun, perched on top of a thousand feet of sheer white cliff, was a ruined cluster of ancient buildings, a nest of towers and tiles and a once-golden dome, tipped with the Orthodox cross. It was, in its way, magnificent, a crown of thorns on a snaggletooth of limestone, and only madmen could have built such a place.
“What is that?” asked Finn from the crow’s nest of Carla’s hair. There was not a whiff of smoke or any other sign of life.
“A Holiday Inn?” breathed Carla. “I don’t know, but if we want to get through the night alive, we better check in …”
“You’re not serious! How would you even get up there?” asked Finn.
“We’ve got to get out of this wind. Baptiste may have been a psychopath, but he was heat, body heat, and when we crawled into a snow hole, that’s what kept us alive.”
Yap! Yap!
“What was that?” Finn said, and held his breath to better listen through the wind.
Yap!
Carla looked back to the ridge.
“I knew he’d make it!” said Finn.
“YO-YO! HERE! HERE, BOY!” cried Carla.
Yap!
Over the ridge shot a spray of finest pink-sunset snow, a skittering cloud – and at its centre, an effervescent black scribble: a bounding, dishevelled, filthy, injured, exhausted, idiot of a dog.
“YO-YO!” cried Carla.
“YOYOYOYOYO!” yodelled Finn.
Yo-yo danced and circled, fearful of any trace of Baptiste, but Carla laughed and called his name and finally he came to her, yapping and wagging and loving the Finn-ness of her. Where his master had disappeared to nearly a year before was a mystery beyond Yo-yo’s tiny brain, but not beyond his quite brilliant sense of smell.
Carla collapsed in the snow and submitted herself to an assault of licks and kisses. “Good dog. Smelly dog.”
“Warm dog,” Finn said. “You can snuggle up in a snow hole with him. We can make it down the valley in the morning. There must be some kind of settlement serving that place. We’re almost ho—”
He bit back the word “home”. It was too much. The thought of speaking, actually saying something, to Al and Grandma … There was an emotional avalanche banked tight in his chest and this was no time to let it sweep him away.
“…Almost there,” was all he could manage.
But Carla wasn’t listening to Finn. She had noticed something on Yo-yo’s collar.
“Wait a minute – there’s something here.”
Yo-yo’s collar was as filthy as the rest of him, but on one side of it was a lump.
“What is that?” said Finn. He crawled out of the thick of her hair to dangle from the curl at her forehead again as she rubbed away some of the muck. It was some kind of plastic cylinder attached to the collar, the size of a large battery.
“They sent him into the Forbidden City to try and find us! It’s a tracker! It must be!” said Finn.
“Why haven’t they been tracking us then?” said Carla.
She found the catch and took the whole collar off. “Maybe it ran out of power?” she said, examining it more carefully. “Or maybe it’s not a tracker. Maybe it’s some kind of comms device, or—”
But before she got any further …
YAP!
Yo-yo was off his haunches, nose high in the frozen air, stump of a tail curled like a tongue in concentration.
“Bear …?” asked Carla, fear returning.
“No,” said Finn, hearing a distant buzz. “Machines …? PEOPLE!”
Carla shoved the dog collar into her top and scrambled down the steep snowfield, Yo-yo bounding ahead of her, crossing the tree line and disappearing into the forest.
“BE CAREFUL!” yelled Finn.
“Yo-yo, come back here!” ordered Carla and the dog yapped back, already lost.
She ran into the forest after him, the last rays of the setting sun needling through the pines to light the dog’s progress through the snow. The further Carla ran, the darker it got, but the more they could hear the noise – engines, definitely the sound of engines, somewhere ahead.
Yap!
“Yo-yo!” said Carla, changing direction, heading for the bark, till …
“ARRRGGHHHH!” – the ground fell away. Nothingness. She shot out a hand and grabbed a sapling, then clung on hard and closed her eyes and felt the tiny tree take her weight, its roots clinging to the earth.
She gasped. Her eyes adjusted and she saw she’d just saved herself from running straight off a steep drop.
Yo-yo appeared and yapped at her, as if she was an idiot.
“No more short cuts,” said Finn at her ear, then before she’d had time to catch her breath, he shouted: “Look!”
There beneath them, headlamps slicing through the darkness, three snowmobiles slaloming through the trees, tacking their way up the slope.
“HERE! OVER HERE!” Carla cried.
“They’re climbing this way,” said Finn. “They must have seen us on the pass.”
Finn looked across at the silhouette of the ruined monastery through the trees. Surely it was the only spot they could have been seen from? As Carla pulled herself back up, he looked down at the snowmobiles again. It was hard to tell in the fading light, but all three carried a driver and a passenger, and slung across the back of each passenger … an automatic rifle with a distinctive curved magazine.
“AKs …” said Finn.
“UP HERE!” yelled Carla.
“OWOWOWW!” howled Yo-yo, to help her out.
“SHUT UP!” said Finn. “They’re carrying AK47s!”
“What?”
“The only place anybody could have seen us from is the monastery. Who would live there? Who would hide there? Who would send out men with guns?”
“Hunters?”
“You don’t shoot bunnies with AKs,” said Finn.
Carla looked back down at the whizzing skidoos. “That would be cruel …”
“Baptiste fell to his knees when he saw it,” said Finn. “Kaparis has headquarters all over the world …”
“You think it’s where he’s been headed all this time?”
“Want to find out?”
Carla answered by turning to run in the opposite direction down through the forest.
Finn could hear the skidoos climbing towards them, beams of light starting to flick through the trees.
“They’re coming!” said Finn, lashing himself into place in the hair just above her forehead, poking out like a tiny tank commander.
Carla slogged on, but the skidoos were cutting through the forest like a wind, engines raging, lights strobing. In a flash of white light, they were spotted—
“DA! ESTE!” went up a foreign cry. Carla dived out of the beam.
“ACOLO, ESTE!”
Again she ran, but all three were closing in. Before she could be spotted again, Finn’s yell matched her instinct: “HIDE!”
She dived forward and buried herself in the snow, clutching Yo-yo to her.
VROOM! VROOM! VROOM!
The three skidoos overshot.
“Stay down!” said Finn.
Carla hugged the panting dog closer and he licked her face.
The skidoos stopped. Finn and Carla could hear voices.
“Don’t come back … Don’t come back …” begged Finn.
Then – DRDRDRDRDDRDRTT! – muzzle flash lit the iced canopy as shots tore high through the trees in an attempt to flush them out – DRTRRTRTRT!
Yo-yo took violent fright, bursting out of Carla’s arms to bite back. YAP YAP YAP YAP!
“ACOLO!” went up the cry. Yo-yo barked and, as headlights wheeled once more, Carla launched herself into the darkness, running without hope or direction, running into …
Nothing.
Suddenly she found herself falling like Alice – but not like Alice, as she hit (and hard) a slide of ice and flew down it, a toboggan run of hellish thum
ps and spins and whacks that sent her winded and flying – WHAM! – into a blue-black final darkness …
THREE
FEBRUARY 20 00:00 (GMT+3). Carpathian Mountains, Romania-Ukraine border
Is she dead?
Finn woke upside down, still lashed into her hair.
Is she dead?
He struggled and turned himself round. Saw stars in a slice of night sky above, saw fast-moving clouds, heard the wind. Where the hell were they?
Is she dead?
She couldn’t die. She had carried him through hell, they had come too far … He untied himself and dropped to her scalp. At once he could feel her pulse beneath his feet, feel her warmth. Alive …
What a girl, Finn thought, and not for the first time.
How long had he been out of it? Hours? Minutes? He pushed through to examine her scalp. There seemed to be no blood, no great crush of her skull.
Had they fallen down the cliff? He looked up. The slice of night sky was sandwiched between slabs of blackness. Were they inside the mountain? Inside some kind of split in the rock?
The skidoos had gone. So had Yo-yo …
“CARLA!” Finn yelled, as much to force back his tears as to rouse her.
“WAKE UP!”
Then from above – movement – a scratch – a thump.
Chunks of dislodged snow and ice fell towards them.
Wolves? A bear?
“CARLA!”
WHAP! – with a slap, the end of a heavy wet rope nearly knocked Finn clean off his perch. He clung on and looked up as a huge leg appeared over the edge of the crevasse, then another, then a squat muscular figure slid straight down the rope.
Every hair on Finn’s tiny body stood on end as the figure blotted out the last slice of sky. He braced himself.
The figure stopped dead. Grunted. Struck a match.
Light stung the darkness and a figure from a nightmare squinted at Carla. A boy, medieval in dress and form, with a huntsman’s bow across his back, dark face scarred and twisted, a misshapen thing. His bulging eyes looked at Carla and absorbed her.
Carla, as if in response, briefly opened her own, beautiful eyes.
They widened in momentary shock then lapsed back into unconsciousness.
“Esti …?” the boy started to say, and tried to shake her a little.