by Dan Abnett
“Can I help you, Miss Croft?” he asked.
Frink was wearing trousers and deck shoes, but no shirt or socks. His torso looked as if it had been chiseled out of a solid block of alabaster. If he was on guard, security wasn’t tight. Fife was clearly confident that Lara wouldn’t try to leave the villa, that she really did want to help him. Or perhaps he simply believed that she had nowhere to run to, that the villa was too isolated for her to dare to make an attempt at escaping.
Lara faked a yawn and smiled.
“I just needed a glass of water. Is that OK?” she asked.
“Let me help you, Miss Croft.”
Lara followed him into the kitchen.
“Thank you, Mr. Frink,” she said.
Lara returned to her room and waited. She didn’t want to go too soon and risk being intercepted by Frink. She was convinced that if she betrayed Fife, the actor’s rage would know no bounds. He’d have her killed, and Frink would do the killing.
Lara made her move a couple of hours before sunrise. The house was quiet. She dressed, and tried the door onto the veranda. It was open. She stepped through it, barefoot, and closed it. That was the beauty of having the best of everything; nothing rattled or clunked; everything worked effortlessly. The door barely made a sound at all, whispering on its hinge with hardly a click as the handle engaged.
She was fifty yards from the house when she put her boots on and began to walk down the dirt track that they had driven up to reach the villa. She cast a glance over her shoulder, but the villa was in darkness.
Then, a light came on, blazing in the darkness.
Lara ducked low on the track and watched for a moment. It took no longer than that for her to see torch beams swinging back and forth in the darkness. She’d been found out.
Lara got off the track and into the low brush. She couldn’t make a run for it. She was too exposed, and Fife’s henchmen carried guns.
Lara had been outside for a minute or two and her eyes had adjusted to the low light levels. She could see enough to know that the land fell away steeply to the left. Anafi was a mountainous island. The steep slopes, the rocks and rugged landscape were her best means of escape.
Lara heard a shout and saw a shaft of light swinging in her direction. The torches were good, but she was out of the range of their beams.
She scrambled down a steep cliff, bringing rocks down with her. They rumbled past, and more loosened beneath her feet. She gained momentum that she didn’t want, and thought that she was going to fall. She grabbed at the brush, dug her heels in, and managed to halt her progress.
Lara took a deep breath and rolled her body so that she was facing into the cliff. She found better handholds and then carefully moved her right foot until she found a firm toehold. She did the same with her left. She climbed down the cliff onto a smooth, flat rock.
She bent down and felt its surface with the palms of her hands, looking for edges and another route down. She stopped.
This isn’t natural, she thought. This is hewn stone.
Lara looked around, taking a step to the left, and examined the rock as best she could by the moonlight, painfully aware of the seconds ticking by. She reached out to a stone to the left a little below her position and ran her palm over it. It too had the feel of a stone that had been chiseled.
Suddenly, a beam of light began to play on the rocks above Lara and to the right. It could fall on her at any moment.
Lara swung across onto the second hewn rock, and then down between it and the first. She rested one foot on a ledge at the base of the second stone and eased her body into the gap.
If I’m right… she thought. I hope I’m right.
The torch beam fell on Lara’s right arm and hand, the last of her to disappear through the hidden portal between the dressed stones.
The passage was narrow, wider than the opening into it, but still only half a metre across and pitch black. Lara shuffled along it, testing each step, her hands against the smooth walls. It couldn’t be a natural feature, the texture of the walls proved that.
The exit from the passage at the other end was angled, blocking light from any source.
It gave into a larger chamber where once more there was visibility. Lara could not understand at first where the light was coming from.
“There!” said Peasley pointing into the beam of light at Lara’s hand as it disappeared into what looked like a solid cliff face. “That’s her hand. There must be a cave.”
Frink cast his torch along the rocky face of the cliff. Loose stones were still falling. The drop was long and steep, broken by jutting ledges of hard stone. A fall could prove fatal.
“We should go down after her,” he said.
Both men were bigger than Lara. Frink was athletic and agile, but Peasley was of a substantially bigger build. He looked at Frink.
“How do we do that, Mr. Frink?” he asked.
Frink glared at him.
“You look after Mr. Fife,” he said. “I’ll do this. He should never have trusted her.”
He turned off his torch and pushed it into his belt. “Hold the torch so I can see my way down.”
Mr. Peasley held his torch for Mr. Frink, keeping a steady beam of light on his path down the cliff. When he saw his colleague disappear into the side of the cliff, Mr. Peasley turned and walked back to the villa to be with Christian Fife.
As Lara’s eyes became accustomed to the low light levels, she noticed that there were narrow fissures in the walls and ceiling around her. Some light must be leaking into the room, but it was dark outside. There was only the moonlight. Then she realised that more light was being produced by some sort of luminescent organic material growing on some of the surfaces.
She was in a kind of vaulted room with smooth curved and arched walls and ceiling. She realised that some of the fissures were slots in the walls, man-made.
This place was a dwelling, she thought. They built their homes into the cliff face. It was fascinating. Various levels cut into the rock showed where the inhabitants had gathered to sit or possibly sleep, and there were niches and shelves carved higher in the walls for lanterns or candles, or perhaps for storage.
Lara wished that she had time to explore, and promised herself that she’d come back to examine the rooms more closely, but right now she had to get as far away from Fife and his henchmen as she could.
She cast her eyes along the walls, moving deeper into the room. A narrow archway took her into another space. She was disoriented and didn’t know whether she was moving deeper into the cliff or along it. Then, she heard movement. She had been followed.
There was a gap, low in one wall. Lara didn’t think twice. She heaved herself into the hole, and pulled and kicked her way through it. She emerged into a space that was constricted and darker than the previous rooms. It was also low so that she had to keep her head bent. There was a broad ledge at waist height in front of her, covered with a narrow slab of stone. Again, the stone was hewn.
Lara could hear the echo of footsteps in the rooms behind her. She put the heels of her hands under the edge of the slab and pushed. It was small enough for her to move, and it slid away with a grinding sound, revealing a hole beneath. Lara thought it resembled some sort of well.
The footsteps sounded as if they were coming closer, and there was nowhere to hide in the small space, so Lara took a deep breath and climbed into the hole, feeling for toeholds as she went.
She had to shift her body and twist to find them, but they were there. Lara reached up and pulled the slab back into place over her head, plunging herself into darkness.
She waited for a second or two.
The sounds were muffled, but she could still hear footsteps. She didn’t dare to wait to be found. Lara lowered herself further into the shaft, wondering how deep it went and where it was taking her.
She
judged from the distance between the toeholds and by counting them as she descended, that she climbed down five metres in total darkness.
When she emerged at the bottom, she heard the scrape of the stone slab above her being moved out of the way as Frink found her hiding place.
Lara was relieved to find light at the bottom of the shaft with more luminescent organic material hugging the stone. She reached out a hand to feel the texture of the stone. She was no longer in a manmade environment. This was natural rock.
Lara looked around.
The environment was irregular. There was no room to stand, but there were crawl spaces between the rocks, fissures, passages and slopes. She decided to head down. She had no way to know which direction she was going in, but if she followed a downward path at least she would be heading for somewhere on the island coast, away from Fife’s villa.
Lara crouched and moved through a large space to her left. It seemed to offer the best visibility and gentle progress downwards. It didn’t last. She soon found herself faced with a long, steep drop, and the rocks were slimy. A drip echoed from somewhere.
She thought about going back, but Frink was close on her heels and she had no choice but to go on.
Lara turned and entered the drop feet first on her back, hugging her rucksack to her chest. She tried to stay relaxed, keeping her knees soft, so that the impact didn’t jar her too badly or cause any injuries.
She landed and huffed out a breath. The space was wide enough for Lara to shoulder her rucksack once more, and she tightened the straps so that it couldn’t get caught on anything. The rocks were jagged and irregular, and she was fearful of getting caught up on them.
Lara heard someone swear above her, and she knew that Frink was getting closer. She looked left and right. She knew that she was close to the cliff edge, and didn’t want to bury herself in the mountain, so she opted for working downwards in as straight a line as possible. She took the next gap to the right, a passage with a high ceiling and what appeared to be a level floor. She almost fell when it stepped down suddenly, and she was unable to see her feet, because of a jutting rock close to her knees. She cried out.
Stupid, Lara, she told herself. If he didn’t know where you were before, he does now!
She went more carefully after that, and the passage proved to be uneven. Lara had to negotiate several steps up and down before she reached its end.
Lara wanted to move to the left at the next opportunity, but the space she was in was small and the only route was parallel to the passage she had come down. It was also vertical. She couldn’t double back the way she had come, so she turned in the space and climbed through the gap.
She had to remember that left was right and right was left until she could reorient herself.
She heard Frink swear again. He had stumbled in the same place she had. He must be right on her tail.
The shaft wasn’t difficult to manoeuvre down. It was as if a child’s building blocks had been crudely stacked, with jutting edges sticking out for toe- and handholds. All Lara had to do was reach out with her hands and feet and find the corners and edges to progress downwards, using them like a ladder.
But the stones were slick with moisture, and it was dark once more. Frink was right on top of her, getting closer all the time.
The bottom of the shaft looked like a dead end.
The space Lara was standing in was about two metres square and just tall enough for her to stand up in, but she could see no exit.
She couldn’t see back up the shaft, but she could hear Frink’s breathing. He was close.
Lara put her hands on the slabs of rock, searching for a way out. To her right, at about shoulder height, she finally found what she was looking for. She had missed the opening because it was above a jutting stone. The rock stuck out about thirty centimetres, and Lara would have to haul her body over it to enter the channel above the stone.
Lara pulled herself up on the ledge, on her elbows, her feet dangling, but there was no room for her head, because the ceiling was so low. She couldn’t see into the gap with her neck distended and her face pushed against the ceiling. She could hear Frink’s footsteps on the slick stone ladder of the shaft above her.
Lara stopped what she was doing. She felt along the adjacent wall at waist height until she found a lip of rock. She grasped it and swung one leg up until she found the ledge with the gap above it. She secured her foot in the gap and, balancing her weight, she lifted her other leg up and brought her feet together. Then, she began to push herself into the gap, feet first. Working her hands up the wall, she managed to post herself into the fissure.
The channel was less than a metre long, and there was a steep drop on the other side. Lara found herself with her legs hanging in midair and her head still in the small chamber, her chin resting on the ledge, watching Frink descend into the space.
He did not bend at the neck or waist. He bent at the knees, looking right at her. He reached for her.
Lara pushed herself away from him. More of her body dangled over the precipice. She had no choice. She took a breath and let herself go, falling into the unknown.
It was better than dying underground in a cave system on a tiny Greek island at the hands of a movie star’s henchman. Lara had betrayed Christian Fife, and she believed she knew the price that Frink would exact for that betrayal.
Lara fell blindly through the air.
She did not know what she might hit on the way down. She could break bones as she fell against jutting angles and corners of hard stone. She might even die. She seemed to fall forever.
She fell so far that she began to turn in the air. She could not maintain an upright position. She knew that she would land on her back instead of on her feet. She knew that if she fell much further she might land on her head.
Lara landed hard with a cold shock, and then she kept falling.
It took her a moment to realise what had happened, a moment that filled her nose and mouth with cold, clean, salty water.
Lara began to pound her arms and legs, and she was soon rising through the water. She broke the surface, coughing and spluttering, and choking on the water that she had inhaled.
Lara looked around for a safe haven, for somewhere to swim to. Then she thought better of it.
Frink was right behind her, and she had the better of him. Frink didn’t know that he was about to fall into water, but Lara knew.
He was strong and fast and athletic. She knew he would land in water, and she knew where. She could use it to her advantage.
Lara cast a glance around at the natural grotto that she had landed in and marvelled at its beauty. Then, she positioned herself a metre or two from where she had entered the pool, and she waited.
Frink’s cry did not sound so much like fear as rage.
He entered the water on his back, helpless, creating a huge splash. Lara dived in on top of him, determined to keep him down for as long as she was able.
Frink’s instincts kicked in, and he paddled his arms and legs to get to the surface. Lara took a deep breath and bore down on him, but his arms were strong, swinging hard from the shoulders. When he felt her weight on his body, he began to fight. Lara took a hard blow to the chest and a cuff to the side of the head.
The water impeded the impact of Frink’s blows, but they struck home nonetheless, and fueled by his growing panic, he struck out with increasing intensity.
As Lara tried to hold the man under water, two more blows almost dislodged her grip. Then, Frink stopped swinging and grabbed hold of Lara. His right hand fixed firmly on her upper arm, and his left grabbed at her throat.
Lara had been underwater for several seconds, and the physical exertion meant that she couldn’t hold her breath for long. Frink never stopped paddling his legs, and his upward momentum through the water was strong.
Finally, they broke the surface
. Frink coughed and spluttered, and Lara managed to punch him hard with her right arm. She caught him a solid blow to the nose, and water sprayed from it as his head reeled.
Frink let go of Lara’s throat, and she threw another punch. Her left arm was still pinned, and she was still treading water. Their legs became entangled, and they dropped below the surface of the water once more.
Lara was able to take a breath, but Frink was reeling from her second punch and hadn’t recovered from his first dousing. His hold on her left arm slackened, and Lara was able to shrug him off. She kicked his legs away and paddled hard with her arms.
Lara rose out of the water. She brought both of her hands down on the top of his head, and with a huge effort she pushed down hard, holding Frink’s head below the surface of the water for as long as she could.
Frink tried to fight back, but he had never fully recovered from his initial fall into the water. He soon stopped flailing beneath Lara’s weight, and went limp.
Lara didn’t know if Fife’s henchman was dead, and she didn’t care. All she cared about was getting away from him.
She held his head down for another ten seconds, until she, too, was exhausted.
When Lara finally took her hands off the top of Frink’s head, his body drifted easily to the surface of the pool. His skin was pale, and his bright blue eyes were open. He lay on his back on the top of the water, arms and legs outstretched.
Lara looked at him for a moment, catching her breath. Then, she cast her glance around.
The pool was surrounded by what appeared to be natural columns of rock. It was utterly beautiful and quite open. It was a large space buried in the cliff, but Lara reasoned that she must be at sea level. The water was salty. She must be on the coast, and there must be a way out of the grotto through some natural cave system.
She remembered what Kennard had said about the harbour that had been excavated and the saltwater lagoon, and felt reassured that she knew where she was.
Lara swam to the nearest ledge and sat on it for several seconds.