Powder Burn (Burn with Sam Blackett #1)

by Chisnell, Mark

  “I thought you were all for nonviolent solutions,” he said.

  “That was before that asshole threatened to lock us up and throw away the key,” she replied, as he handed over the rifle. “It’s one of yours, an old British Army Lee-Enfield,” she added. “My father’s best friend used to hunt with one of these.” She slid the bolt back to check the chamber was clear – it was. Then she unclipped the magazine; it felt light, probably held just one stripper clip, five of the maximum ten rounds. She replaced it and shouldered the rifle, and they hurried after Jortse. There was no one guarding the cell when they got back to it.

  “Let’s hope our luck holds,” muttered Lens, as they grabbed their packs.

  Jortse had shrugged off the formal robes and was back in the long-sleeved black sheepskin coat. The bedroll was slung over one shoulder, the sword over the other. He put the wide-brimmed hat back on. “Everyone ready for this?” he said.

  “Yep,” replied Sam.

  Jortse picked a second torch from its holder on the wall. “Then let’s get out of here.” He led the way down the gloomy corridors, back towards the main entrance, the occasional torch flickering as they swept past in a tight group. Sam checked each turn with what she remembered – they couldn’t afford to waste time getting lost. The corridors were empty, and it seemed that Jortse was right, every available man had been pulled into the main chamber to stop him killing Detsen. Sam reckoned they were just one final left turn and fifty-one paces from the entrance when Jortse came to a halt.

  “They won’t have left the entrance unguarded,” he whispered. “How well do you shoot?”

  “Pretty good,” replied Sam.

  “Can you keep their heads down, while I rush them?”

  “Sure, but I think I only have five rounds, and it’s about fifty yards, so you’ll need to make it snappy or I’ll be empty before you get there,” she said.

  “‘You can’t get five aimed shots off in the time it’ll take me to run fifty yards,” said Jortse, as he drew the sword.

  “Let’s see, shall we,” she replied, dropping to her belly. She slowly eased her head around the corner to get a look. There were four of them, two just inside the door and two a couple of paces outside – that made it harder. She didn’t want to kill anyone, but she didn’t want to get locked inside the chambers either. She quietly worked the bolt, eased the safety forward and settled into her prone shooting position, rifle tightly wrapped into her shoulder.

  “OK?” asked Jortse, leaning over her.

  “On three,” said Sam, “go down the left-hand wall to stay out of my line of fire. Three.”

  Jortse swung round the corner and started to run. He’d covered ten yards before anyone even saw him. Sam put a round into the rock, about two feet above the head of the first man to react. The report crashed around the confined space and he froze like a deer in the headlights. The rifle was shooting low and to the right. She worked the bolt without taking her cheek off the stock, just like her father had taught her. The next round was chambered in a little more than a second.

  The second man inside the door had got his rifle off his shoulder. She put a shot into the wood a foot to the right of his chest. He dropped the rifle, turned and ran to join the two outside the cave, who were now pushing the huge door closed as fast as they could go. Jortse was still twenty yards away. She flicked the bolt for the third round and realized she had no choice. She breathed out, took a moment longer to aim and then put a bullet into the leg of the one man she could see that was pushing the door. He crumpled with a scream, falling into the corridor. A second later Jortse had the tip of the sword at his throat, yelling at him in a language she didn’t understand. It worked – the other two men appeared from behind the door with their hands up.

  “Shit, I hope I didn’t get the artery,” swore Sam, as she rose and ran forward with Pete and Lens. By the time she got to the man on the floor, Jortse had herded all four of them together inside the chambers. She quickly checked the wound and exhaled a massive sigh of relief. She’d clipped the outside of the thigh. It was bleeding, but not badly and the bone looked intact. Pete handed her his fleece hat and she jammed it over the wound.

  “Hold it,” she instructed one of the other guards. “Jortse, tell him to hold it on tight.”

  Jortse saw what she wanted and spat out the instructions. The man knelt down beside his fallen comrade and placed his hand on the makeshift pressure pad. Sam tried to smile reassuringly, and put her hand on top of his to show him how firm he’d have to press it. Something else her father had taught her. A heartbeat later, a bullet ricocheted off the rock behind and buried itself in the door above her head.

  “Bloody hell, they’ve broken loose!” yelled Pete.

  She looked up, five men were rushing them, others providing covering fire. “Outside! Now!” she shouted. They threw themselves out of the entrance, and Jortse and Pete immediately started to push the door shut. Sam dropped to her knee as she turned and pulled the rifle to her shoulder. A bullet cracked into the rock at her feet, and she felt the shrapnel hit her cheek. She breathed out, took aim and squeezed. The leader of the charge went down twenty yards from them. The rest of the rushers threw themselves to the floor. A second later the door slammed shut and Pete pushed the huge wooden latch into place. There was the rattle of gunfire from inside, and the door shivered under the impact.

  “We’ve bought some time, but not much, let’s move,” said Pete. He looked at Sam. “You OK?” he asked.

  She swallowed, and nodded. “Yeah, yeah, I think I got his legs again, lead the way,” she said. “Go, Lens!”

  Pete turned and started to run east, and Lens needed no more encouragement to follow. Jortse started off behind him and Sam brought up the rear, trying to clear her mind of the image of the falling man. Then Pete was waving, yelling, and she remembered. She shoved the rifle between Jortse’s running legs. He crashed to the floor, releasing the sword as he tried to break his tumble onto the rocks. She dropped the rifle, swooped and grabbed up the sword in one smooth motion.

  “Got it,” she shouted, “I’ve got it.”

  Lens kept running without even a glance behind, but Pete was waiting for her.

  “Run hard, don’t look back,” he yelled, grabbing her free hand and accelerating beside her. She saw the landscape fall away from her ahead. She started to slow. It had sounded like a good idea back in the cell. Now she wasn’t so sure.

  “Trust me ...” said Pete, tugging her hand.

  She looked him in the eyes, and could see her fear reflected in his face.

  “Don’t think, just jump, and try to land on the backpack,” he said.

  Then Lens suddenly lurched to a halt, five yards ahead of them.

  “Holy crap!” he screamed.

  Pete dropped his shoulder and clipped him as he went past. Lens tottered, thrashing unsuccessfully for balance. She was half a pace behind Pete, and although he had a firm grip of her hand, there was still a moment when she might have been able to pull back. But she was a believer. She tucked the handle of the sword into her belly and jumped off the cliff. If she had thought to yell or scream on the way down, the clutch of fear at her throat and the sharp intake of breath as gravity ripped her into free-fall snuffed out the notion. Then the backpack hit. It was a glancing blow as she bounced gently off a near-vertical ice crust. It pushed her into a slight rotation and slapped her heels against the surface. Then the pack touched down again as the slope came up to meet it, and she started to slide.

  She dug her heels in to brake, but it was a mistake; her right foot found some grip before the left and started her rotating. On the icy surface there was nothing much to slow her up and she accelerated into a dizzying whirl. Sliding – or was she still falling? – and definitely spinning, she flew down the mountain in a blizzard of ice. Then her heels broke through the crust, into deep, soft snow. It flicked her into a somersault, a giddying double rotation that would’ve scored nothing for elegance. She tumbled onwards, t
rying to relax into the fall, holding the blade of the sword clear from her body, waiting for everything to go quiet. When it did, she lay staring up at the little piece of sky torn out of the white sheet above her.

  Some of her senses were convinced that she was still moving, while others begged to differ. The result was a wave of nausea. She clenched her teeth, pursed her lips and swallowed. The bile in the back of her throat slid back down. She wriggled toes, feet, legs, fingers, arms, body and head. Everything seemed to be working.

  “He’s not jumped, he’s not jumped!” It was Lens’s excited voice, getting closer. “He’ll fight rifles with a sword but won’t jump, just goes to show you how irrational risk assessment is,” he babbled on, “you’ve got much more chance of drowning in your bath than you have of being killed in a terrorist attack, but which are people more scared of –”

  “Lens, Lens!” she spluttered, as soon as she could clear her mouth and nose of enough snow to stop his adrenaline-fueled prattling. She sat up.

  He stopped.

  “I’ve got the sword,” she said, as he dumped his backpack down and started to undo his snowboard – still attached after the descent, but only by a single strap.

  “Do you think he’ll want it enough to come after it?” They both looked back up to the top of the cliff. There was no sign of Jortse.

  “Let’s not hang around and find out,” she said. “Where’s Pete?” she added, suddenly concerned.

  “Over there.” Lens pointed. “He may be a half-crazed adrenaline junkie, but he called that one beautifully.” He held out his arms and looked down. “Not a scratch.”

  “You all right?” called Pete, starting to struggle towards them. “Let’s get the hell out of here. Everything else all right?”

  “Fine, a couple of friction holes in my bag, but nothing big enough to worry about,” she replied, fastening the sword to the straps on the backpack. “Not sure what state my toothpaste will be in though.” She looked up and smiled. “Incredible, I would never have believed it was possible to survive that jump.”

  “I thought we were going to have to go down that way so I had a pretty good look when I was there before we got caught,” he said, pulling his snowboard off his pack. “Sometimes, you’ve just got to go for it.”

  “Yes, I suppose you do,” she said, looking into his eyes. Then there was a bloodcurdling yell. They all looked up; this time Jortse was on the edge of the cliff.

  “Holy crapola,” said Lens, “maybe he is going to do it.”

  They watched in frozen horror as Jortse jumped.

  “Let’s go,” said Pete, flipping his board flat on the snow. Jortse glanced off the ice and slid towards them. She shrugged back into her backpack straps as Jortse came to a halt forty yards away. They gained a couple of precious seconds as he scrambled for his scattered wits, then there was an angry yell as he started to move. She glanced up. Pete was tightening his bindings.

  “Go, Lens,” said Pete. “We’re right behind you. Come on, Sam, feet in the same place as before.”

  She grabbed hold of him and carefully positioned her feet. If she pulled him over now they were finished. She heard an anguished, desperate yell from behind as Pete flicked the board downhill and they started to slide. She didn’t look back.

  Chapter 25

  Sam was propped against the trunk of a mountain ash, sitting on her pack because the grass was wet and muddy. A light breeze rippled the big leaves, flashing the white undersides and flowers against the otherwise grey foliage. Pete was standing above her, leaning against the same tree for support, staring back up the mountain through the binoculars. She shut her eyes, but immediately she had a vision of the charging guard crashing down in front of her. She opened them again. Stay in the moment, she told herself, at least until you’re safe.

  They had lost a lot of altitude in a spectacularly short time – thanks to the snowboards – and after a subsequent struggle through a half mile of broken rock, they were well below the snow line and into the lower vegetated slopes of the valley. She was still coming to terms with breathing thick, warm air for the first time in weeks, and had stripped down to a thermal shirt. It felt good, rejuvenating, like a second – or maybe third or fourth – wind, although she could have done without the mud.

  Lens stumbled up to them. There was a thud as his pack hit the dirt, and then another, as Lens sagged onto it. He looked awful, dark lines under his eyes, harsh against the pale skin that had been protected by the goggles. There were red blotches on his exposed cheeks where the wind and sun had got to them. Patches of beard and deepened lines from squinting made him look old and tired. Good thing I don’t have a mirror, she thought. She felt a lot worse than he looked. In contrast, Pete had acquired an even, golden tan and rugged stubble that made him look like a Greek demigod just back from a rough day killing Trojans.

  Pete lowered the binoculars. “I think I might have a couple of those granola bars left,” he said. He started to search the top section of his backpack.

  “Where’s Jortse?” she asked, watching Pete, her mouth already watering.

  “Still coming, he’s not yet at the snow line,” he replied, glancing at his watch. “So he’s more than an hour behind us.”

  “What about Detsen’s men?” she asked.

  “I haven’t seen any of them. I don’t think they jumped, they must have doubled back.”

  “So they could be hours behind.”

  “Yup – here you go, we’re in luck, three left.” He handed out the bars. “All I’ve got now is freeze-dried.” He sat down beside her.

  “I’ve got a bag of trail mix I’ve been hoarding, but it’s right at the bottom of my pack,” she admitted.

  Pete looked at her quizzically.

  “So I can’t get at it. If I hadn’t put it there, it would be gone by now,” she told him.

  Pete smiled briefly, then his expression hardened. “So Jortse jumping wasn’t part of the plan. What the hell are we going to do with this sword?”

  “I say we hide it here and head for the border,” said Lens, his mouth still full.

  “And then what do we do if he catches us?” asked Pete. “If we’ve hidden it, he’ll try to drag us back here to get it. And he’s not going to give up chasing us when we get to the border. How long are we going to have to keep running? Are you up for that? You look pretty out of it to me, Lens.”

  “We’ll go to the authorities,” said Lens.

  “And tell them what?” retorted Sam. “That you bumped into a guy who declared he was going to start a rebellion in Shibde against the Demagistan army, so you thought it wise to disarm him and report the matter?”

  “If we have the sword they might believe us,” said Pete.

  “They might, and if we take it with us, then we can negotiate if he catches us. And anyway, we all agreed that we have to keep the sword out of his hands, so we can’t leave it for him to find. Hiding it is like the worst of both worlds – we lose control of it, and he won’t stop chasing us because he still thinks we’ve got it.”

  “So who’s to say he’ll let us go even if we gave him the sword?” replied Lens. “Now he knows that we don’t support his little rebellion, he’ll hardly be keen to let us get back to the outside world and have you write it up for the New York Times.”

  “Bloody hell,” said Pete, shaking his head. “Whatever, we can’t sit around here all day making our minds up.”

  “Maybe we can slow him up and get him caught by Detsen’s men,” said Sam. “If we can find somewhere to hide, then once he realizes that he’s lost touch with us he’ll have to double back, and with a bit of luck, while he’s screwing around looking for us, they’ll nab him.”

  “Or maybe he’ll find us first,” said Lens.

  “Got a better idea?” said Sam. She waved at the forest. “And there’s got to be somewhere in there that we can hide.”

  “It’s going to be easy to track us in this.” Pete stamped his foot in the mud.

  “The riv
er,” said Lens, after a moment’s silence, “like in all those chase movies, they always head for the river, where there are rocks and water and you don’t leave tracks.”

  “OK, so we head down to the river and then follow it,” said Pete. “We know it goes to the border. We’ll give it till nightfall to find somewhere to hole up, and if we haven’t found anywhere by then ... I guess we make another plan when it happens?”

  Sam nodded. “It’s all we can do.”

  Lens sighed, but said nothing.

  “OK, saddle up, let’s head out,” said Pete.

  “This is it,” said Sam, dropping her pack with a thump that barely made itself heard over the crash of water. She started to pull off the stinking, sweat-soaked shirt. Pete looked at her, more than a little bemused.

  “We don’t have time to wash,” he said, as Lens pulled up beside them.

  Sam was already wrestling with a boot. “I’m not washing. There could be somewhere to hide behind the waterfall.” She hopped to keep her balance as she pointed. They had reached the river forty minutes earlier, after more than an hour of picking their way through a dense forest of silver fir and mountain ash, threaded with tall rhododendrons. Once at the river they had kept to the rocky side-shore wherever possible, even climbing down the cliff beside the waterfall rather than return to the mud. But, although there was no sign of Jortse, no one believed they had lost him.

  Now they stood in a small clearing around the plunge pool. Sam tore off a sock and stuffed it into the top of her boot before steadying herself with a hand on Pete’s shoulder to take off the second. “It’s overhanging, look at the cliff line,” she told them. “There’s a good chance that there’ll be space behind the water. If there is, it’s the perfect place to hide.” She unzipped her trousers.

  “Holy cow!” Lens winced as he tried the temperature of the water with a couple of fingers. He splashed his face nonetheless. “You’re going to check it out and let us know, right?”

  “You poor thing,” she said, as she stuffed the clothes into the top of her pack. Admittedly, she was shivering slightly – but pleased to discover that the sports bra and panties she had on were black by design and not just circumstance. It had been a while since she’d seen her underwear, never mind changed it. It was gross. “Bring that with you if I don’t come back,” she said to Pete, nodding at the pack as she stepped gingerly towards the edge of the crashing screen of water.