‘So why are they out here in the middle of the night?’
‘The man has returned. He was seen by someone out looking for lost sheep yesterday evening. They’ve been riding these hills since, searching for him. There are caves all over this valley. They are perfect for hiding things, because people avoid this area. They think the man may have found out about this from her brother.’
That would explain a lot. Isabel and Susan could have been moved to a cave in this area yesterday. It all sounded right.
Relief rose up inside me. Isabel might be alive. I’d been right to have hope. I closed my eyes, said a prayer.
Let it be true.
I’d imagined her dying horribly, many times, but I’d pushed those thoughts away each time. I looked around. I had to convince these people we weren’t their enemy.
A noise, a soft drone, startled me. I looked up. It was still dark. It had to be the darkest part of the night. The stars were a glittering carpet of lights, the Milky Way visible like a path you could follow. The sound was coming from somewhere over the horizon. It was getting louder. It wasn’t like the sound of that helicopter either. This was something on a much larger scale.
All eyes went to the heavens.
Then we saw them. Dark shadows. It wasn’t just one plane flying over. It was lots of them. Nothing else could make such a noise. I’d heard the rumble of bombers and fighter jets crossing the sky before, at the air force base my dad was stationed at in England. And I knew that exercises with lots of aircraft over population zones was unheard off. There was only one possible explanation.
Why else do lots of planes fly together in the night, if it isn’t for war?
Was this the Israeli Air Force heading away on a
mission?
They had a few hundred F15s and F16s that could raid almost anywhere in the region. But where might they be going? To Iran? To Egypt? Had some General there crossed the border, launched an attack on Israel?
Was this the start of the big regional war that was going to drag us all into World War III?
The wind picked up. It whistled through the low bushes around the camp. It was a throaty howl. It sounded as if a wolf was echoing the thrumming noises fading in the sky.
Then something hissed.
Then hissed again.
There was a smell, as if the fire was spitting. Mark was the first to react. He looked around.
The bullet hit him in the back of the head.
It exploded in a shower of sticky grey matter, blood and spiky bone.
Part of it hit my face like a wet branch slapping into it.
A sense of total disbelief came over me. Something had happened that was more like a dream than reality. Seconds slowed, as if braking.
There was another hiss, a disturbance in the air near me.
‘Down,’ shouted Xena.
She was already at ground level, pressing into the earth. Ariel was leaning up looking the other way, out into the darkness. His jacket was speckled with pieces of Mark’s brain.
The thumping of blood in my ears was loud and insistent.
And then a bullet hit Ariel exploding a large red hole below his shoulder. He slumped forward with hardly a sound. No one could survive that.
Shots rang out from nearby. I heard running feet. There were two more hisses. They were further away this time. I scanned around, turning my head slowly. I couldn’t see who was shooting.
A shriek echoed. The woman who’d been watching over us went running into the darkness, a rifle held in front of her. Her shriek was cut off a few seconds later. I heard a thump as her body hit the dirt.
I was stretched out, my hands near my face. My head was up an inch and I was looking around, and hoping fervently that I wasn’t going to get a hole in my head for not burying myself in the dirt.
Every muscle in my body was tense, from my feet to my neck.
A Palestinian man who’d been nearby, ran crouching, half jumping in the same direction as the woman. A burst of hissing gunfire sent him reeling backwards, then falling face down. After a few twitches his body went still.
My heart was thumping faster. My mouth was paper dry. I inched forward. I could smell dust and blood. I reached for Mark’s arm. I’d seen him twitch a few times after he fell. Was he dead?
More shots rang out from somewhere to our left. A flurry of single shots. Then a groan echoed into the unfeeling sky. It was followed by another long burst of gunfire. The sound of every bullet echoed through my body.
A scream put my nerves onto another level.
And then all the shooting stopped. The sound of my own breathing filled the air.
I looked around. I couldn’t see anyone. Whoever was firing had either killed everyone or had sent them running into the darkness.
I looked around for a weapon. There was nothing nearby.
Whoever had been firing could easily be getting ready to come and see the results of their handiwork. That had to be what you would do after shooting up a camp site.
But was it a rival Palestinian group or some Bedouin doing this? Or was it my evil friend from the church out there?
‘You again,’ said a voice above me. I recognised it with a sickening feeling.
‘Death and you are friends, aren’t they?’
I turned my head, fast.
He was standing over me. How the hell had he done that? He was like a ghost.
I felt cold, then hot, then oddly calm. I stared up at him, assessing my chances. He had a dangerous looking black machine pistol in the crook of his arm. His face was puffed up, bruised, all yellow and purple down one side and at his throat. Then I remembered; that was where I’d punched him, held him.
‘Do not get up,’ he said. His accent was clipped. He pointed his gun at my face.
‘Or you will die like all the others.’
Xena was half on her knees. She didn’t move as he walked quickly towards her, his gun still pointing at me. She looked ready to pounce. He backed away, transferred the gun from his right arm to his left as he walked, then put his right hand to his belt.
A moment later I saw a silver pistol in his right hand.
He was on the other side of her now, facing me, ten feet or so beyond her. She had her back to him at this point. Her head turned, as he walked slowly behind her. Her neck extended.
I thought about getting up, making a run for him. I might be able to distract him enough to let Xena escape.
He stepped closer to Xena and said, ‘Traitor.’
The pistol in his right hand fired. Then there was blood pouring from her chest, pumping, all shiny and red and splattering the dust.
‘No!’ I moved to get up, bile rising in my throat.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
Bullets hit the earth in front of me, banging one after the other like giant fists boxing into the ground.
I stopped my rise, looked at their path.
I was going to die.
The iron smell of blood caught in my throat. I could feel splatters of it on my face, taste it on my lips. The ground felt hot under my hands, as if the temperature had gone up.
The bullets stopped.
Xena had jerked upwards, as if she’d been interrupted in getting up. Now she slumped forward soundlessly, her gaze fixed on me, unblinking, her blood flowing, pumping fast into the dirt.
He walked towards me, the hole at the end of his silver pistol pointing right at my eye. I could see the black emptiness of death. A wisp of smoke was coming from the end of the barrel.
‘I will kill you, Sean Ryan. You should not have come here, sticking your nose in once again.’
He moved his gun hand, pointed it down my body, as if deciding what part of me to shoot.
‘How do you know me?’ I said.
‘You disrupted us in London.’ His eyes narrowed. ‘A friend of mine died because of you. I remembered it after we met in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.’
‘You won’t get away with this,’ I said.
&nb
sp; He laughed. ‘But I have. Though unfortunately you will not live to see how true that is. Now turn over!’
I stared up at him. ‘Go to hell.’ If I was going to die it would be while spitting into his face.
His boot struck somewhere on my cheek.
The side of my face blazed with pain.
Then another blow landed on the other side of my head. Darkness engulfed me. The next thing I saw was a face floating in a deep ocean.
It was Isabel’s face. It was floating away from me.
I struggled. But I was far from the surface. My hands and legs wouldn’t move. I had to kick but I couldn’t.
I willed my eyes to open.
They wouldn’t. In the distance, through a fog of pain, I heard a voice.
‘It is time for you to learn your lesson, Sean Ryan.’
The laugh that followed was the laugh of someone who had won.
58
The coffee machine was empty, but its service light wasn’t on. Henry Mowlem shook his head and put his one pound coin into the big confectionary machine instead. A Diet Coke rattled to the bottom exit. He put his hand in.
On his way back to his desk he drank more than half the can. He needed it. He needed to stay awake. He looked at the text and video feeds, then his eye went back to the satellite image. It showed a huge circle of white cloud. It looked benign, but Henry knew what it had done. On its travels down from the Caucasus it had killed five in Armenia and twelve in Syria. There hadn’t been a storm like it in a hundred years, so the Israeli weather service was saying.
And in the middle of all this, an air raid warning had sounded in Tel Aviv. The Israelis were getting twitchy. A rumour had gone around that the storm would be the ideal cover for Israel’s enemies to mount an airborne attack.
Henry looked through the text feed from Mossad. It was sparse, infuriatingly so. The last update had been fifteen minutes ago.
He downed the rest of the Diet Coke. It had been a big mistake letting Mark Headsell do a minimum personnel operation to investigate that Dr Susan Hunter lead. The very least he should have done was order him to wait until an Israeli commando unit was available.
Henry threw the empty Diet Coke can in the bin. It rattled as it went in. It was totally frustrating knowing all he could do now was wait and wait some more.
A sheet of paper slapped onto the desk by his right hand, missing it by an inch.
‘It’s a good thing I came back in,’ said Sergeant Finch.
Henry turned, looked up at her, his eyebrows raised. ‘Your friend, Lord Bidoner,’ Sergeant Finch paused, leaned down towards him, ‘has just been identified as the financial backer of a TV station which has released a news video that’s going viral in twelve Muslim countries.’
Henry looked at the paper on his desk. It was a row of alarming YouTube statistics for a list of countries. He turned and looked up at Sergeant Finch. She had that irritating, superior look on her face. No doubt she would soon claim that keeping an eye on Bidoner had been her idea.
‘A YouTube news video?’ he said.
She leaned further down towards him. ‘Yes, Henry. A video, which further justifies our little leak this afternoon.’ She glanced to her left and right, then leaned closer. He could smell her lemony shampoo.
‘The video claims new evidence has been found to prove that Israel is using this crisis to suppress Islam’s claims on Jerusalem.’
‘What evidence?’
Sergeant Finch straightened up, took a step back.
‘They claim that Israel is behind the murders in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre,’ she said. She looked at the screens on Henry’s desk.
‘Are we on top of the Susan Hunter operation? There are a lot of people trying to stir things up out there.’
‘We were,’ said Henry. ‘Until this bloody storm knocked out our live tracking system. I’ve been trying to get it back online. Let me have another look.’ He turned back to his screen.
‘Frigging hell,’ he said.
59
A splash of water on my face woke me with a start. A burning sensation in my throat made me gag. I tried to sit up. I couldn’t.
There was smoke all around me. My skin prickled hot. A taste of burnt wood filled my mouth. Something was cutting into my chest and my outstretched arms, as I tried to rise. I turned my head.
I knew what he’d done.
I was on the wooden cart, tied down. There was smoke rising all around the sides of the cart. He had pushed it over the fire. It would burn in the next few minutes and so would I.
The pain from the heat coming through the wood was making my body twist. Smoke was in my lungs, and swirling demonically above me.
I was on a bed of pain. I hadn’t long left to live. As soon as the wood caught fire I was cooked.
I heard a laugh.
I tried to rise again, pushing against my bindings. It was no good. He had tied me down with wire. All I could do was arch my back away from the hot wood, move my knees from it.
I heard a voice.
‘You will die slowly, Sean Ryan. And when you are roasted I will slice you open.’
‘Go to hell,’ I shouted. ‘That’s where you come from.’ I coughed. I wasn’t going to scream with pain and give him that victory.
‘I’m not from hell.’ The bastard laughed. ‘Your one true God burns those who displease him.’
Pain flowed through me.
Suddenly I needed to urinate. I let the water pass out. I didn’t want it boiling inside me. A cloud of acidic smoke rose up around me.
‘Your lungs will liquefy soon,’ said the voice. ‘You will cough them up before you die. You cannot be saved. You should not have interfered.’
My chest hurt, felt constricted, as if his prediction was beginning. The pain in my wrists was biting at me. I twisted them. They were bent at a weird angle now and hurt excruciatingly. But I had no choice. I had to test how far I could move them.
And still I didn’t scream.
I tried to shake, to move the cart under me, but all that did was dig the wires into my skin. And they were getting hot, transferring the heat from below the cart as if conducting electricity. And still I didn’t scream.
But in that moment I knew that hope was gone.
Time slowed.
Every sense was overwhelmed by crackling, the thick smoke, the carbon taste of it, the rising waves of heat on my skin, the terrifying knowledge that I would die soon.
I closed my eyes. I may be dead, but Isabel still had a chance. Maybe my death would help save her, give the Palestinians time to come and get this bastard.
It was a small hope as the heat rose around me. And at least his mocking voice was gone.
And then a great shuddering whoosh sounded all around me.
The smoke cleared for a wonderful second and a huge wind blew beautiful, wonderful cold air against my skin, as if the wings of an angel were beating down on me.
Was this a trick of my mind?
Was this the approach of death?
But it wasn’t. Shouts echoed. And I was coughing as the smoke swirled violently. And then I felt myself moving.
I was off the fire and something was at my wrists and ankles whilst someone was screaming something in Hebrew in my ear.
I recognised one word. ‘Medic!’
I was still coughing as they peeled me off the cart. I expected I would leave half my skin on it, could almost feel it happening, but aside from my clothes being charred all down my back and my hands being red and raw from burns I was lucky.
Every part of my body was brown from the smoke or pink from heat, puckered in places and sore, but I was lightly barbecued, not blackened.
The Israeli Air Force helicopter that had dropped onto the camp had scattered the fire and smoke from underneath me.
I had been at the burning gate of death and it had opened to take me, but I was still here.
Intense elation and relief ran through me like ice roaring through my veins.
&nb
sp; ‘Was there anyone else in your party?’ someone kept saying. She was a female Israeli commando, dressed all in black, and attractive, with curly black hair and shiny brown skin.
Where was Isabel?
‘Was there anyone else in your party?’
I didn’t understand what she was saying. I was alive. I had a future again. I’d cheated death.
Seconds later they had stood me up, my smouldering clothes were gone, and they’d put me in a navy blue jumpsuit made from some strange elasticated nylon. It felt as if it had thick greasy cream on the inside. I didn’t care. It was cooling my skin like water.
‘Lie down,’ someone shouted. I bent down, staggered, sat down by a stretcher, overcome with a series of shudders that passed through me, as my muscles reacted to the tension they’d been through.
‘Was there anyone else with you?’
Finally, I understood. ‘Isabel. She’s still out there.’
I pointed out at the rocky valley.
I tried to get up. Another shudder passed through me. I sat down. I would stand again once it had passed. The helicopter was near. Its blades were rotating slowly. They were sending the nearby bushes flailing.
‘Where?’ she said. She was on her knees beside me.
I felt a great surge of hope.
‘How did you find me?’
She looked up. There was another Israeli. He looked like an officer. He was wearing a cap with a red badge. His epaulettes had pale blue bars on them. His face was sun beaten.
He stared down at me.
‘Our reconnaissance team was looking for your group. They spotted a fire.’
Ariel must have warned his superiors where he was going. A real dread for most senior Israeli officers was that they would be responsible for one of their soldiers getting kidnapped.
‘Did you see anyone?’ I asked.
‘There was someone here when we started our descent, but they were long gone when we pulled you off that fire,’ he said.
He’d run away.
‘Do you know where your friend is?’ She was leaning towards me. She sounded exasperated, as if she’d been asking me over and over and I hadn’t replied.
I pushed myself up with my hand. I was halfway to my feet before she reacted.
The Jerusalem Puzzle Page 28