INCARNATION

by Daniel Easterman

  The walks were Maddie’s idea. Calum didn’t really want to know, but he went with her to keep her placid and in sight. The thought of long walks in the fresh air made him feel distinctly uneasy. It wasn’t that he was a stranger to physical exercise: in his days in the Parachute Regiment he’d gone on more long hikes than a Stuart tartan. It was just that he thought he’d left all that behind him, and now here was a girl with green eyes drawing him back to it again.

  He pretended to himself that the walks were really an excuse to get away from the house, where daytime television competed with Auntie Charlene’s record collection as the sole distraction from mind-numbing tedium. Charlene’s taste in music was appalling enough to drive anyone outdoors: twenty or more Smurf s’ albums, enough Tom Jones ballads to drive Glasgow insane, and every cover version ever made of "Jolene". It was an excuse, of course, and a good one, and he made what he could of it.

  Maddie loved the walks. He was giving her less of the drug now, keeping her malleable but awake. She knew she needed him now, knew he held the only supply in heather-covered miles of what she craved. That didn’t worry her for the moment: Calum was always ready and willing to dole it out as necessary.

  After a while, he started enjoying the walks for their own sake. It wasn’t that he was falling in love with her - he’d never have done a thing like that, it wasn’t on his agenda. He had never really been with a woman like her before. From the age of thirteen, when he’d had his first sexual experience, his encounters with the opposite sex had been casual, his relationships strictly limited to short episodes of intercourse with few preliminaries and no afterthoughts whatever.

  Maddie wasn’t like that. He could always have used force, of course, only he reckoned that might put her off him in the end. But he was finding her more and more attractive, not just physically, but - as one of his old girlfriends had once put it - "as a person". He’d catch her gazing out over the lake, or watching a butterfly, or holding her breath while a rabbit passed through the undergrowth, and he’d find himself unable to take his eyes away. Once, she’d caught him looking at her like that, and she’d smiled briefly, then gone back to whatever it was.

  At night he gave her a slightly higher dose, to make sure she slept soundly. He didn’t want her sneaking off while he was in the land of Nod. She knew all about the ransom scheme now, and he didn’t want her having second thoughts or feelings of sympathy for her creep of a mother. Sometimes he’d come into the bedroom to watch her sleep. He’d unbutton her nightdress and put his hand on a soft breast and pretend they were lovers playing a game of sleepers and wakers. Or that she was a sleeping vampire whom he’d come to pacify.

  He’d sorted out the trick of getting the money safely into his hands long before the police turned up. He didn’t doubt for a moment that Farrar had brought in Special Branch or whoever handled this sort of business the moment he’d set eyes on the original ransom note.

  On his way up, he’d opened a bank account at a biggish branch of the Bank of Scotland in Stirling. The name he used was Anthony Farrar. If all went according to plan, Elizabeth would pay the ransom into that account (for which she’d be given just the number). In the meantime, Calum had obtained details of Elizabeth’s bank account from Maddie, and had found out the account number by ringing and asking what it was.

  There was a branch of his own bank in Inverness. He’d already spoken with the manager at length, alerting him to the possibility that Stirling would shortly be transmitting substantial funds from his account there to Inverness, and that he would require payment in cash straight away. He had everything set up, and very proud he was of it. Now it was just a matter of making sure that Maddie’s nearest and dearest paid up in time. Otherwise he reckoned he’d have to rework Maddie’s face a bit.

  ‘How long can we stay here?’ Maddie asked. She was sitting beside Calum on a stretch of grass that ran down to the loch. It was utterly deserted. Nobody came to sail on the lake or hike past it. A cry for help would have been long drowned in the silence before it ever reached human ear.

  ‘Half an hour, likesays.’

  ‘Don’t be so stupid. I mean, do we have to leave once you get your dirty little mitts on Mummy’s loot, or can we stay on?’

  ‘Ah hadnae thought.’

  Her face lit up.

  ‘Then let’s stay. If we go to some town or try to leave the country, they’ll find us a lot more quickly.’

  ‘Who said anything aboot “us”? Ah could plug ye full o’ bullets an’ drop ye in the loch, nae bother. Ah could be ootay here an’ on a plane tae Mexico wi’ the stash.’

  ‘Would you do that? Shoot me, I mean. Drop me in the lake.’

  He got to his feet, troubled by her insistence. She’d got inside him, that was the trouble. He knew he’d shoot her or drown her if he had to - knife her most probably: there was a fair choice of blades in Charlene’s kitchen. No way was he going to let a bird stand between him and a cool million.

  The truth was, he didn’t have a clue what to do with her. If he took her with him, they’d think he’d double-crossed them and that he’d be demanding yet more money within six months. No way they’d ease off then - he and the doll would be the most wanted pair in the country, like Bonnie and Clyde, their mugshots plastered over every post office from John o’Groats to Land’s End.

  If he killed her, on the other hand, every murder squad between Stornoway and Dover would be on his trail. All in all, maybe it would be best to leave her, let her find her own way back to civilization. But he didn’t think she’d be left all that easily.

  She walked down to the lochside with him. He held her hand in an almost unconscious gesture, and she let him hold it. The longer this went on, he thought, the more difficult it became. A golden eagle swooped from a great height, where it had been circling vigilantly on a current of warm air. It lifted with a rabbit in its talons, its wings beating hard to regain height and buoyancy as it swept towards the wooded slopes of Sgurr a’Chaorachain.

  ‘You’ve never been kissed properly,’ she said. ‘Have you?’

  ‘Kissed?’ he said, as if hearing the word for the first time. He felt suddenly embarrassed. Women didn’t speak to him like this. They knew their place and did what they were told.

  ‘You know,’ she said. ‘Kissed on the lips. Slowly. With due care and attention.’

  ‘Attention?’

  ‘Here,’ she said, bending towards him. ‘Like this.’

  Neither looked round. They were growing too engrossed in one another. Neither noticed the faint movement of foliage five hundred yards away, where Lookout Seven observed them through high-powered binoculars. There were no boats on the lake, and the sky above was empty of aircraft; but the undergrowth from the lake to the house was thick with silent watchers.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-NINE

  By the second day, David had started to worry that they had missed the tombs. The dunes were growing higher all round them, some rising now to dizzying heights of a thousand feet and more, real mountains. One morning, very early, as the sun rose without heat above them, David looked up and saw mist wreathe the heads of all the mountains within sight.

  He used his binoculars constantly, scouring their trail back and forwards each time a dune was crossed or rounded. But he could never detect the least trace of ruins or tracks. If they were out there, they must be completely buried in the sand by now. And if they were buried, would not Karakhoto be buried also?

  One of the camels fell, breaking its leg and crushing two water barrels. Nabila wanted to shoot it, but David pointed out the risk of using firearms this near to the complex: one shot echoing out here where nothing moved would surely bring the search helicopters right down their necks. David put it out of its misery by cutting its throat.

  They saw helicopters several times, making passes to the south. After that, they started coming by night as well.

  ‘They’re equipped with night-vision pods,’ said David.

  Nabila laughed.

 
; ‘Back at the hospital, we’d have brewed those up and given them to short-sighted cats.’

  ‘Not these ones, you wouldn’t. They’re massive things that fit on small struts on the helicopter’s side. The one I was trained with is called a LANTIRN: Low Altitude Navigation and Targeting Infra-Red for Night. It uses two pods, one for navigation, using a wide-field infra-red sensor and a radar that can map out the terrain you’re flying over, and a second pod for targeting. It uses a narrow-field infra-red and a laser designator. Both the ...’

  ‘Cut it out, David. You sound like an arms salesman at some dreadful weapons fair. I think I prefer my pods. They never had anything as complicated inside them. Just seeds.’

  ‘The point is, they can track us down by the traces of heat we give out. We and the camels. What makes it worse is the speed with which the sand loses its heat once the sun goes down. When it’s dark, we’re the only warm things in the desert.’

  ‘How come they haven’t spotted us yet?’

  ‘I think the high dunes are foxing them. We always camp in the lee of a dune, which means the sensors can only pick up the dead zone all round us. Added to which, a great deal depends on the skill of the operators.’

  ‘So, provided we stick close in to the dunes ...’

  ‘Provided nothing. As long as we’re out here, they’ll get us in the end. Even a bad operator can get results if he’s patient. He only has to turn a corner and catch a glimpse of something that shouldn’t be there. Between the camels and ourselves we’re presenting a very visible heat trail.’

  Nabila said nothing more. She wrapped her scarf about her face and retreated to the rear of the caravan, urging the last six camels on. The dune they were climbing was very steep, and there was a constant risk that another of the animals would lose its footing and crash to the ground.

  The thought of the heat-seeking devices high in the air above them made Nabila’s flesh crawl. She felt horribly exposed. The sky seemed less an open space than a lens for a giant, roving eye. As they reached the crest, she almost recoiled from the sense of openness. If a helicopter passed near them now, how could it miss them-or the string of beasts they carried in their trail?

  They camped three miles further on, getting everything in place before darkness fell. David suggested it might be safer if they didn’t light a fire. It meant shivering in the dark and eating cold food, but neither regretted it. Once, towards midnight, they heard a chopper in the air above, a mile or two away to the south. David said nothing, but he had almost given up hope. He knew his enemy too well. The Guojia Anchuanbu would not let up until it had him and Nabila firmly within its grasp. He went to sleep, shivering. It felt like the coldest night he had ever known. The tent hemmed him in with walls of ice.

  When he next woke, it was an hour before dawn. His dreams had left him limp and trembling, and he rummaged in his mind for the twigs and dust of reality, piecing them together until he had the strength to open his eyes. Nabila was not in her sleeping bag. Was that why he had woken? he wondered. He waited for a few minutes, but she did not return. The delay grew, and he became anxious that something might have happened to her. No sounds reached him from outside. It was as if reality had less of a hold out here.

  The tent flap was still untied. He pushed it back and stepped into the bitter pre-dawn air. Above him, stars loomed like grapes, bulging with light.

  He swung the beam of his torch in a wide arc. Something was wrong, but he could not take it in at first. Next to his feet, one of the camels lay curiously slumped. He stepped up to it, and this time he could see it was dead. Bending down, he examined it: a long, ragged gash glistened in its neck.

  He stood, doing his best not to panic. His entire body had started to go into overdrive. Chemicals were flooding his system, making it hard for him to think or act clearly. He stumbled forward and found a second camel, its throat cut wide open in the same manner.

  ‘Nabila!’ he shouted, not caring who heard him, only wanting to find her, to know she was alive. The desert made no answer. A couple of yards further, he stumbled on a third camel, its head lolling lifelessly in a pool of blood and sand. He bent down, pressing his palm on to the blood: it was barely warm.

  Suddenly, he heard a sound. He’d never heard anything like it in his life. His first thought was that another camel was being slaughtered, that it was bellowing against the knife. But the cry continued, rising and falling, moving in an almost rhythmic pattern from low murmurings to high banshee shrieks, and he realized it was not an animal but a human being.

  He snapped the torch up and round, turning it in every direction, trying to locate the sound. And then he saw.

  Nabila stood several yards away, beside the last camel left alive. Two other dead camels lay on the ground behind her. She was naked, and her hair fell around her shoulders like a veil, and she was drenched in blood. As he watched in limitless horror, she stooped and placed a long knife against the beast’s neck, and it cried out in sudden fear until she bent close and whispered in its ear, whereupon it fell quiet.

  David was still too horrified for movement or speech, and he watched as she manipulated the blade to suit the camel’s neck, then tore a ragged line across its soft, beseeching neck. It tried to stand, but the strength had already ebbed from its body, like water from a pool that the tide has left behind, so that it merely rocked and slumped and was still. Nabila caressed it, then drew away, letting the knife fall and standing back, her naked skin glistening with wet blood.

  ‘Nabila …’ He went up to her, bewildered and out of his depth. ‘Nabila ...'

  She seemed not to recognize him. Her eyes were filled with something he had not seen in them before. It suddenly struck him that he knew her very little indeed, that she was a stranger to him in most matters.

  ‘Nabila …’

  Her eyes seemed glazed, focused perhaps on something he could not see or guess at. He came up close and took her by the shoulders, shaking her. She seemed to have no volition, like a puppet suddenly cut free of its strings. Her face and limbs were slack.

  ‘What made you do this?’ he shouted. ‘Why did you kill them? Come on, answer me! You know this will kill us as well, don’t you? Or didn’t you think about that? Look at me, for God’s sake. Do you understand what you’ve just done? They were our only way out of here.’

  He stopped speaking, suddenly aware that there was no point in going on. Nabila had closed in on herself, and no amount of shouting or coaxing would bring her out again easily.

  He managed to get her back to the tent, half guiding, half pulling her. It wasn’t that she was reluctant: she just didn’t seem to care. But he wanted to get her inside, out of the cold, before she came to harm.

  Once inside, he wrapped her in her sleeping bag and threw his own over her. She was shivering horribly, and he knew there was no time to be lost in getting some kind of heat back into her body. Leaving her staring at the roof of the tent, he went outside and, with the help of the torch, found a bundle of tamarisk wood they had stashed away a couple of days before. It took only a minute or so for him to pass from camel to camel, confirming his original fear, that none had survived. It was still utterly beyond his comprehension that Nabila could have done what she had done.

  He lit a fire outside the entrance to the tent, and fed it with dry twigs and thicker branches until it crackled and blazed. It didn’t matter now that the heat might show up on some Chinese pilot’s tracking equipment. At the moment, all he cared about was getting Nabila properly warm. In spite of what she had just done, he still loved her with a passion that lifted him beyond all this pettiness, this sand and blood and incurable desperation.

  When the fire was well settled, he carried her out, still wrapped in the sleeping bag, and sat her in front of it. He heated water in a pan and, unzipping the bag, slowly washed the sticky blood from her skin, bending low from time to time to kiss her cheek or forehead or mouth, and to whisper words of reassurance. When she was clean, he helped her dress, then took he
r back inside, where she curled up inside the sleeping bag like a child. Exhausted, he went outside and sat by the fire, feeding it fresh wood every time it died down, and waited for morning.

  Dawn was a cortege of red and gold and silver that danced for long minutes on the summit of the high dune opposite before turning to a faint tinsel glow. The world re-emerged from darkness like a snake shedding an old skin. David woke, bleary-eyed, and surveyed the campsite. The humped bodies of the dead camels announced the death of all he had come here for.

  There was a rustle behind him. He turned and saw Nabila, tousle-haired, emerging from the tent.

  ‘David … What happened? I must have blacked out or something. My sleeping bag’s covered in blood, there’s blood on my clothes. Are you all right?’

  He got up quickly and caught her before she could catch a glimpse of the dead animals. She pushed against him, but her strength had not fully returned, and he drew her back inside the tent and closed the flap.

  ‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘You’re not hurt, nor am I.’

  ‘But this blood

  ‘You don’t remember?’

  ‘Remember what? When I woke up I couldn’t remember going to bed. There was dinner, then we talked -I’m not sure what about. I remember a dream about the camels, that I was slaughtering them. And then … this.’

  ‘Listen to me, Nabila. Listen very carefully.’

  He explained what he had found on leaving the tent the night before. Horror-struck, she listened, scarcely believing a word of what he said, yet unable to deny any of it. It seemed that what she remembered had not been a dream after all.

  She did not move for a long time. Outside, the light grew, sending a warm, opalescent glow into the tent.