SKELETON GOLD: Scorpion (James Pace novels Book 3)

by Andy Lucas

  The dance music had been set to play on a modern, automatic gramophone by unknown hands. It had a built-in repeat function whenever the needle reached the end of black recording disc, which was why it had been merrily pouring out tunes for several hours. Clockwork in design, Pringle already thought that he heard the slight slurring that suggested the machine was winding down. A few minutes later, it juddered to a halt and an eerie, uncomfortable silence replaced the previous joviality.

  A small outbuilding, tacked onto the end of the accommodation block, housed an expensive, state-of-the-art diesel generator and a store filled with an ample supply of fuel, in stacked large drums. There must have been over one hundred, which was enough to keep the machine chugging away for months.

  As the first hints of pink streaked the tops of the sand dunes outside, Pringle completed his search and finally gave in to his need for refreshment. The pantry was large and stacked to the roof with tins, jars and glass bottles of many varieties and sizes.

  A small, revolutionary electric refrigerator sat in one corner and Pringle’s mouth watered as he opened the steel door to be faced with trays of sliced ham and cold sausage, fruit, various cheeses, milk, butter and eggs. Several bottles of beer were also chilled to perfection and he wasted no time in collecting an assortment of goodies, which he carried back into the kitchen. There he found some fresh bread, a porcelain plate and the finest silver cutlery in a drawer by the sink. He also found a bottle opener.

  Cracking a bottle of the cold beer, he tipped his head back and shivered with a mixture of delight and relief as the slightly fizzy liquid flooded down his throat, making his eyes water briefly, so powerful was the explosion on his senses.

  Half an hour later, with a full stomach, and a second beer in his hand, Pringle looked again for any trace of a radio transmitter. He found none. Outside, the sun was beginning to crest the dunes properly. Although still early, the heat rose noticeably inside the building.

  Pringle checked his watch. It read 05:12.

  On his second, even more thorough, search of the accommodation block, Pringle discovered a small cupboard set into the rear wall of the generator room. He had missed it in his earlier haste to check for life but now noticed a small handle, tucked behind a row of empty fuel drums.

  On inspection, he felt his heart lift. Deliberately designed to be unobtrusive, the communications room was small; no larger than a double wardrobe. Inside, it held a military radio transmitter and a single wooden chair. A set of headphones was plugged into the set, although the power was switched off and the glass dial, marked with hundreds of different wavelengths, stood lifeless on the top of the large, black set.

  The other bonus was also a potential life-saver for Pringle. On one wall sat a rack of firearms. A securing chain hung loosely down on one side and most of the brackets were empty but a couple held guns brand new standard-issue Lee Enfield .303 rifles.

  Selecting one, Pringle checked the magazine to find it empty. This was normal procedure and a quick hunt around in the cupboard directly beneath the gun rack rewarded him with a drawer filled with cardboard boxes of ammunition; unopened. Grabbing a couple of boxes, he took a few moments to open one and load the rifle. Slipping the safety catch off, he felt immediately happier. If the enemy came now, at least he had more than his fists to beat them back with.

  Pringle took stock of his situation, which turned out to be far stronger than he could possibly have hoped for. He now had ample food, water, shelter and he was armed but that was where fortune decided to draw the line.

  The radio was dead. It looked in perfect condition from the front but, as he leaned over to check the connections at the back, his heart sank. The wiring had been ripped apart by expert hands.

  The sabotage of the radio set brought clarity and danger flooding back into Pringle’s consciousness. Someone had done this and they had done so with the specific intent of isolating the scientists from help.

  He returned to the main building and set about preparing himself a bag full of supplies. He selected food and water for a couple of days and found a knapsack that he could throw over his shoulder. He added a large kitchen knife to the sack for good measure.

  Tearing up a couple of cotton kitchen cloths to make an impromptu headscarf and mouth guard, he headed out into the heat of the desert morning.

  Pausing to listen, hearing nothing, he hurried across to the windowless building. Not wanting to risk firing a shot, and possibly alerting nearby enemies to his presence, Pringle raised the heavy rifle above his head and brought the solid wooden stock smartly down on the door handle, which snapped off easily.

  Some jiggling in the exposed mechanism with the blade tip of the carving knife finally worked the mechanism and the door lock sprung open. Pulling the door open, gun held at the ready, he moved slowly into the dark, stuffy interior.

  What he saw was as baffling to him as the inner workings of a submarine might have been to a three-year old child. A single corridor led to a large, open-plan laboratory where a flick of a light switch illuminated the impressive, awe-inspiring, reality of hundreds of test tubes, condensers, glass jars, specimen pots and a thousand yards of twisting, turning glass tubing that seemed to link a dozen experiments together, spread out over several long wooden tables.

  He could not fathom what the hell the scientists had been working on but he clearly recognised the warning signs and danger labels on several unknown powders and liquids, held prisoner in jars, seated on shelves within two large, glass-fronted cabinets set against one wall.

  The biggest surprise was one that turned his stomach and threatened to expel his freshly digesting meal. The scientists were not gone. Some, if not all of them, were right there in the laboratory.

  There were three bodies and it was clear they had died at the hands of sadistic men. One of the bodies had been mutilated across the face with some kind of blade. The other bodies showed signs of a brutal beating, arms and legs at unnatural angles, broken by extreme blunt force.

  After the torture, death had come finally from more traditional means. Each body was riddled with half a dozen bullet wounds, staining their white coats with sickening claret that pooled beneath their corpses. The blood, now congealed and cold, stared up at him from the white-tiled order of the laboratory floor.

  Forcing himself to step away from the murder scene, he made a detailed survey of the laboratory. There was no way he could tell if anything was missing because he didn’t know what was there to begin with. All he could do was see if anything obvious was out of place. After twenty minutes of searching, he was no wiser. Whatever the killers had been after, they’d probably already taken it.

  It was clear by now that help was not going to find him here, not in this godforsaken place. The scientists had been dead for several hours. He had heard no gunshots or seen any activity at the site from the moment he’d settled in for the long hours of secret, solitary observation. He was positive that the murders had been committed before he even arrived.

  Pringle was not a fool, he was well aware of his shortcomings. On the ocean, he was a formidable talent; both above and below the waves. But he was not a tracker, nor was he skilled in bush craft. Survival in this environment depended on a great deal more than just being blessed with an ample supply of food and water.

  Remaining in the illusion of safety the base projected would do him no good. The radio was smashed and there was no sign of a vehicle. He knew from his navigation charts aboard the submarine that they were visiting an area of the African coastline so hostile as to be deliberately avoided by any vessel that valued the integrity of its hull.

  The next hour was spent in careful preparation for his trip. Supplies were checked and rechecked against a carefully prepared list. Pringle planned to move at night, when it was cooler. He decided against heading inland, where he might hope to find local tribesman who could help him reach a village, instead settling on a plan that would involve hugging the coastline, heading northwards. That way he would
never get lost, there was always the chance of signalling a ship on the horizon and the horrors of burning, vicious dehydration could be minimised by the occasional dip in the ocean.

  Fate can be cruel, it is true. As if Paul Pringle had not already been through enough, his luck was about to fail him yet again.

  The snake was not large, nor was it venomous, but he didn’t know it at the time it decided to enter the cool shade of the accommodation block through the front door that he had failed to close behind him. Happily slithering out of the blistering heat, the serpent made its way cautiously inside the building until it and the only human occupant met in the middle of a corridor, both creatures terrified by the sight of the other.

  The snake reared in defence and hissed loudly as Pringle stepped out of a room, into the main corridor, barely missing stepping on its tail as he did so. There was a flurry of panic, with Pringle stumbling and overbalancing. The armful of chocolate bars and sweet biscuits that he had been carrying flew up into the warm air like a calorific firework, raining back down upon both snake and human alike a moment later.

  The snake, for its part, beat a rapid retreat back out into the heat of the African sun. It had no stomach to take on a giant.

  Pringle would have cleared out just as fast, if he had not fallen badly and landed, twisting, with a sickening crunch that told him his leg had broken at the same moment that a massive wave of excruciating, white-hot agony crashed down over him, snatching away his breath and plunging him into the welcome void of temporary unconsciousness.

  Coming around, several minutes later, he was immediately reminded of the accident by the unwelcome grip of searing pain sheathing his right leg, just below the knee. Pausing to gather himself, he sucked in a controlled breath and raised himself gingerly into a sitting position. Once upright, his worst fears were realised.

  Looking down, his left leg lay straight and true in front of him. His right leg had twisted beneath him as he fell, breaking the shinbone and puncturing the white, shattered bone through the skin and material of his trousers. It was a dreadful compound fracture, which was bleeding profusely. Pringle grimaced. He was a thousand miles away from the hands of the nearest surgeon.

  Fury bubbled up, fuelled by a sense of damnable injustice, and led to a five-minute rant against life, filled with curses, threats and frustrated yells. If the enemy had been nearby, they would have heard him clearly.

  There was no way out now. In fact, he thought to himself as he watched his own blood start to drip down onto the floor, if you don’t fix your leg and stop the bleeding quickly, you will not even last the day.

  Dragging himself into one of the nearby bedrooms, he tore one of the bed sheets into shreds to make bandages until he had a decent sized pile on the floor in front of him.

  Knowing what was coming, he gritted his teeth and filled his mind with images of a fluttering union flag and notes from the national anthem. Taking a firm grip on his lower leg, he twisted pulled and pushed down in one swift, dreadful, bitter movement. He knew the pain would make him pass out again; he just hoped he would wake up in time to stop the bleeding before he lost too much blood.

  It actually took over a quarter of an hour before his eyelids flickered open again, blearily focusing on the ceiling above his head. His head ached and his eyes felt heavy. All he wanted was to close them again and drift away but he knew that death waited for him along that path, so forced himself into a sitting position and spent ten minutes carefully bandaging the leg. With the shattered bone set back within the flesh, he at least had a chance to avoid infection if he kept the wound free from exposure to the air.

  As the veil of night settled softly across the arid, virtually featureless desert, Pringle settled in to his new home. It was likely the Admiralty would send a ship to investigate the loss of communication with the base but that might take several weeks, so he had to survive until then. He even harboured a faint hope that Barrett would suddenly stagger into the base and they could pass the time together, drinking whiskey and playing cards.

  But as the days passed, and nobody came, he knew Barrett was gone. He shrugged off a growing melancholy and considered his injury again. The leg was beginning to heal but the process was slow, even with a proper splint that he had discovered in a medical cupboard, now firmly bandaged around it. He’d done his best but he had not managed to perfectly align the broken bones.

  His rifle never left his side. Even when he was fashioning crude crutches out of some hollow steel piping that he found in one of the store cupboards, the weapon remained slung over his shoulder. As days blended monotonously into a full week, no sign of the enemy ever appeared but he was prepared to shoot the first human being that put in an appearance who did not bear a striking resemblance to a British serviceman.

  It was ten days after arriving at the base that Paul Pringle suddenly realised he could no longer feel the toes on his right foot. Upon investigation, his stomach lurched sickeningly. He had bandaged his bare foot up as well as the lower leg; determined that the air would be completely kept away from the wound. As he carefully unwound the bandage, a putrid stench of rotting flesh suddenly assaulted his nostrils and tickled the base of his throat with a nauseating finger.

  The toes were black and oozing. The constant pain in his leg was not, after all, he realised just caused by the broken bone and rent flesh of the fracture. The blood supply to his foot had been partially compromised by his amateur repair of the limb. Blood flow had been reduced by pressure placed upon the vessels by the poorly set bone. Not enough to cause instant necrosis, but slowly the flesh on his feet had been starved of enough blood and oxygen to start a process that had struck terror into the hearts of even the bravest souls of across the ages. Gangrene.

  ‘That’s damned me,’ he sighed, with resignation. ‘I shall never see fair England again.’ Amputation was never a solo task, he knew ruefully.

  Grimly, quietly, he made detailed entries to his journal and waited to die.

  9

  The sun blazed down on top of his head, as it had done nearly a century before to Paul Pringle. The stark, desolate horizon of flat, scorched yellow sand remained the same. The dead submariner would have recognised it in a heartbeat.

  For Pace, it was his first look at this fabled coastline, viewed sedately from the comfort of the Sea Otter. Sipping a chilled orange juice, sporting a pair of brief, black swimming shorts and glistening from a freshly applied layer of sun cream, he did not feel at all threatened. He was wise enough, however, to realise that he was casting his gaze over a dangerous landscape

  Soft hands pressed against the centre of his back and then stroked their way languidly upwards until they reached the nape of his neck.

  Resisting the temptation to coil oily fingers in the thick, dark brown hair, they parted and made their way outwards across his broad, tanned shoulders until they finally moved down onto the muscular solidity of Pace’s faintly haired chest. Once there, a familiar warmth pressed against the side of his head, pausing briefly to plant a delicate kiss behind his left ear.

  ‘Should I be worried?’ she murmured huskily. ‘Here I am, laid out for you in all my glory, and you seem to prefer staring at an empty desert.’

  ‘Looks can be deceptive,’ Pace replied charmingly. ‘And beauty comes in many forms,’ he added, with an inflated tone of feigned pomposity.

  ‘Well, I will give you three seconds to make your choice. After that, this beauty will be off the menu,’ Sarah grumbled good-naturedly.

  Turning, he cast an appreciative eye over his lover. Indeed, she was gorgeous, he had to admit. Her skin was already turning a rich, nutty bronze from exposure to a mixture of sea air, hot sun, and the liberal use of an expensive, high factor sun cream, enriched with a fake tanning agent. Her long, dark hair was clipped up at the back and expensively austere, lightweight sunglasses added to the simplistic vision that stood before him. Today, her bikini was vivid red.

  It was ten o’clock in the morning and they had not long
finished breakfast. Despite having spent a passionate night together and managing a quick repeat performance in their shared, morning shower, he still felt stirrings in his lower abdomen as his eyes beheld her.

  ‘Sorry, honey, duty calls. I spoke to the captain a few minutes ago and he tells me that we will soon be entering the area we think roughly matches the last known position of K-45.’

  Sarah was as keen as he was to solve the puzzle of the missing submarine and its purported cargo of bullion. Walking over to the railings, she stared out over the side, down into the azure, clear water; almost believing her eyes could penetrate the depths and spot their prize, just waiting to be found. In her mind’s eye, the gold would still be neatly boxed up, the gleaming bars beckoning enticingly.

  Sarah McEntire did not need the money, she knew that. Millions of pounds already sat in her bank accounts and the McEntire Corporation would come to her one day, as a billion-dollar inheritance. It wasn’t the allure of money that attracted her, it was the thrill of adventure. An added bonus was that she got to spend time with James, aboard a magnificent boat. It was idyllic, she decided, and just what they needed after the nightmare of the Amazon.

  ‘Where do we begin looking?’ she asked, returning to his side. He shot her a crooked grin, followed up with a shrug of his broad shoulders.

  ‘No idea,’ he admitted readily. ‘I’m not a salvage expert and my diving skills rank well below amateur.’ Pace did not seem too bothered that he seemed to have no hope of locating the wreck of the doomed submarine, which confused her.

  ‘So what are we going to do? You must have a plan?’ She added the last bit with a hopeful air and was relieved by his response.

  ‘Of course. Typically, there would be no way we could ever find the K-45 without using a specialised marine salvage ship. For a search and recovery operation this big, there’s only half a dozen of those vessels in the world that could do the job and they tend to be booked up years in advance. Even if we could get hold of one, it would attract attention and our brief, as always,’ he sighed, ‘is to find her quietly and recover the gold if we can. Remember, she lies in waters that belong to another government and the British exchequer would be unimpressed if the locals got wind of what we were up to, especially if a foreign power ended up stealing the loot.’