by F. G. Cottam
Brennan nodded slowly after Blake had finished speaking. He looked at Troy. Then to Blake he said, ‘How do you guys communicate on patrol?’
‘Short-waves,’ Blake said. ‘We use walkie-talkies. They’re a bit sensitive to atmospherics, obviously. But cellular phones are completely useless here. Why are you asking me this stuff?’
Troy answered him. He said, ‘We’re supposed to rely on a hi-spec digital system. It’s a very fancy set-up technologically and on paper, has bags of transmission power. But it seems to be completely fucking useless. We’re dependant for signal strength on a mast outside Inverness. I’m talking third-gen DAB here, but all we’re getting is silence.’
It wasn’t Blake’s field. But he wasn’t totally clueless on the subject. He said, ‘Can’t you get on the FM spectrum? There are millions of tons of shipping in these waters completely reliant on it. You must have some analogue backup, surely?’
‘We do,’ Brennan said. ‘We’ve got quite a strong analogue signal, in theory. But there’s some sort of interference on the waveband. Listen to this.’
He reached over and flicked a switch and a power light glowed green on one of the consoles. Then he twisted a tuning dial delicately as the three of them strained to hear anything except screeches of static. In the relative quiet, Blake had time to appreciate again just how good the build quality of the command centre was. It was in sad contrast with his own Alpine frame tent. That had collapsed twice on him now, in the ferocity of the gale ripping through the Island in the small hours.
He heard something clarify on the analogue set. A sound he could make sense of was emerging from the speaker. It caused him to shake his head and suppress a shudder he didn’t want the other two to see. The sound was an ordeal to listen to and he was grateful after about a minute when Brennan flicked the switch that killed the power and abruptly cut it off.
‘What is that?’ Brennan asked.
‘You’re the expert.’
‘I’m asking you.’
‘They call it squelch, don’t they?’ Blake said. ‘It’s signal echo or localised feedback or rogue interference or something.’
‘What do you think it sounds like?’ Troy said.
Blake shrugged. ‘Like radio distortion.’
‘It sounds human to me,’ Brennan said. ‘I know it can’t be. But that’s what it sounds like. It’s fucking unbearable. It sounds like a child, screaming.’
‘I have to apologise for my colleague,’ Troy said to Blake. ‘It’s this place, if I’m honest. We’re used to catastrophe and rapid deployment and a shitload of corruption meaning bribes to pay if we ever want to get anything built in time to save lives in the locations to which we’re usually sent. My lads are not used to creepy. Not when creepy seems to be intrinsic to the place.’
‘You think the island a sinister location?’
‘It has a pretty sinister history,’ Brennan said.
Troy said, ‘It’s the outdoor equivalent of things that go bump in the night, if you get my drift, Captain Blake. I’ve had the feeling of being watched since I’ve been here. Not at night, because I’m asleep at night, so much as in the daytime. Three or four of my boys have commented on it. And these are guys who’ve worked in some pretty hostile environments, all over the world.’
‘The bogeyman is not going to get you, Mr Troy,’ Blake said. ‘My guys are here to prevent that kind of shit from ever occurring.’
He had decided to butch it out. These people were not his friends. If anything, he felt about them only their innate sense of superiority over him. They were specifically tasked and trusted with about half a million quid’s worth of hi-tech hardware. They’d arrived aboard a brace of Chinooks, not some bilge filled tub of a fishing charter. They’d built a command centre and accommodation units that were substantial and comfortable. He was a has-been heading up a team of five washed-up losers. He was occupying a tent you could probably buy on offer in any high street branch of Millets.
He had his dignity, though. He would not buy verbally into their suspicions about the island. He shared their misgivings. Sinister was New Hope’s default mode, in the language used by these people. They knew it and so did he.
But to confide that fact would be to betray weakness and undermine his position as the guy tasked to maintain the territorial integrity of the rock they happened currently to be calling home. At Troy’s invitation, he cracked a comradely beer with them. Then he bade them goodnight and wandered back into the shit-storm of Hebridean weather beyond their base.
He knew his way around the island. They all did. Even the Seasick Four could by now orientate reasonably efficiently, so long as they could see well enough to locate the landmarks he and Napier had painstakingly pointed out to them. He knew the place like the back of his hand and treacherous though its conditions could be, he considered himself the island’s master, in the current situation.
The construction-stroke-logistics guys would fly out in a day or two. But even if the weather kept them on New Hope, they didn’t really threaten his authority. They were too blinkered, too task-specific in their mission. His mission was much more free-handed.
He walked through the gale. The driven rain needled into his face, under the hood of his storm jacket. His progress was steady. He was comfortable with the terrain. His thoughts were on how well it would play with McIntyre’s people when he nailed the island’s intruder. It would play pretty well with McIntyre too, wouldn’t it? It might just be the achievement needed to secure a permanent place on Alexander McIntyre’s staff.
He was overqualified for the sort of jobs his expertise had been earning him. He craved more responsibility and better financial reward. In fact, he was indignantly convinced that he was a man who fully deserved those things.
He had arrived at his destination. He looked up, slightly surprised at where he found himself, in front of the cottage built from stone by the crofter David Shanks in the first half of the previous century. He had walked back to the southern tip of the island when his actual destination was the ragged little camp they had built on their arrival in the shelter of a rise behind the island’s makeshift harbour.
How had he fetched up here? He nodded to himself. He thought it was probably because of an affinity with Shanks, the war hero and loner, the traveller and intellectual who had tried to make this place his home.
Blake had read a little about Shanks. He had distinguished himself on the Western Front in the greatest infantry conflict ever fought. He had been a nonchalant sort of a hero, cool and laconic and rather understated. They would have got on, the two of them. There would have been a natural affinity.
That was probably why he was spending so much time here. There was more to it than just the paradox of leadership; the needing to be at once a brother to, yet separate from the men under your command. It was not just that he sought seclusion and craved a degree of privacy. It was the bond between brave fighting men, stretching across the decades. It was as though Shanks had offered his hand in friendship from the past and the only man on the island worthy of the gesture, he had gladly taken it.
Blake stood there in the rain, in the lee of the cottage, listening to the waves hitting the shingle on the beach beyond, their somnolent pounding a rhythm he thought would probably lull a man into restful sleep till morning.
He took a deep breath, thinking once more about the happy parallels between himself and Shanks. They shared the same defining characteristics of modestly and ruthlessness. They were similarly tough and self-reliant and essentially private men.
And then he heard something from within the cottage itself. It sounded like a snicker of secret laughter. He froze and the hairs bristled on his forearms and the back of his neck and he strained, listening intently. He was only a foot from the door, which stood slightly ajar. But it still masked the cottage interior from the scant ambient light there in the night at the edge of the sea.
He heard another noise. He swallowed. This one was unmistakeable because he
recognised it. It had become familiar to him. He had made it so himself, during his cottage interludes. It was the creak Shanks’s old rocking chair groaned out when its occupant tilted it back and forth.
Was the wind propelling the chair? Blake didn’t think so. He was certain when he heard that snicker of suppressed mirth again from the cottage interior, sly and gleeful. And then there was the familiar wooden sigh of the weight of someone rising from the chair within, to stand.
He wished he was armed. The knurled stock of a 12mill Sig-Sauer automatic; its cold and solid weight in the grip of his right hand; he would have given anything at that moment for that reassurance. But he didn’t have a pistol. He didn’t even have a knife. He stepped forward and pushed open the cottage door. He didn’t have a choice. He was the man responsible for the Island’s security and he was not a coward and had never run from anyone in his entire life.
It was a little girl. She looked waiflike, standing there, with a shawl around her scrawny shoulders, wrapped in the embrace of her own thin arms. She was smiling at him and her eyes glimmered blackly. There was some weird trickery of light and shade going on in the cottage that made it look to Blake like the little girl’s feet did not quite rest on the flagged stone floor. They looked a good few inches above it, as though she floated or hung there. The top half of her seemed to drift back and forth, almost as if in the play of the wind, but the cottage walls stilled the air within, so that was impossible. Wasn’t it?
‘You shouldn’t be here,’ Blake said. His throat was dry and he felt in the grip of something between despondency and dread. It delivered a sort of paralysis. He could not properly move. He could not even blink.
‘I like company,’ the little girl said, the voice gravelly and dragged out of her, like something only half-remembered from a long time ago.
Chapter Five
Napier slept with a bayonet under his pillow. Old habits died hard and he had done it whenever he kipped outdoors since an attempt to kill him as he slept in Bosnia 15 years earlier. He’d awoken then because he couldn’t breathe, to discover a man straddling his chest and making a fairly good job of garrotting him. He still remembered how hard it had been to wrestle his way out of that predicament; to overpower and kill a strong and determined enemy in the confinement of a one-man tent with no weapon to hand.
His abiding memory of the incident was of the reek of Diesel coming off the man’s clothes once he was safely dead and Napier was able to breathe properly again. His attempted killer was one of the warlord Arkan’s bandit assassins and had spilled the fuel on his jeans siphoning it from one of the British military vehicles into a jerry can earlier in the day.
He’d been a thief as well as a murderer and Napier had felt no compunction at all about killing him. He just remembered afterwards the stink of Diesel and how long it took to accomplish a death inflicted with your hands alone. Thus the bayonet, whenever he slept under canvas, from that unpleasant evening on. He sharpened its edges on a whetting stone with the same unthinking regularity that he brushed his teeth before bed.
When he was rudely awoken on the island, he very nearly claimed another life. He had gripped the collar of the figure looming above him with the fingers of his left hand and held the bayonet in his right, about to draw it across the man’s throat. But in the glow from a dropped flashlight, he recognised the face of Malone, the least clueless of the Seasick Four, and stopped himself before the cut was made and Malone’s life bled away in an arterial eruption of gore.
It was some moments before Malone was capable of speech. The pause while he recovered from the shock enabled Napier to get dressed. Malone hadn’t woken him for nothing. This was far from a routine event, whatever it signified. He laced on his boots and exited his tent aware of the percussive drumming of rain on taut canvas and the howl of the wind as it scoured their rag-tag camp.
Malone stood, shivering.
‘Get over it,’ Napier said. ‘You’re not dead. You’d know if you were. What’s up?’
‘I heard a scream,’ Malone said. ‘I was patrolling the perimeter and I heard it over on the west shore, near the ruined cottage. I was heading for the cottage, for a break and a fag. And I heard a scream.’
Breaks and fags were very much what you had when you weren’t patrolling. Whatever Malone had heard had scared him into honesty. Napier was still sceptical, though. He said, ‘Could have been a gull or a seal. Could even have been a whale, in these waters.’
‘It was human and it was terrified,’ Malone said. ‘And when I looked there was no one around to do the screaming. And when I went to report it to Captain Blake just now, his sleeping bag was empty and cold.’
It wasn’t just blowing a gale. It was pissing down with rain. Malone’s pal Jarvis was somewhere to the north of where they stood, still patrolling. The rump of the Seasick Four, Smith and Cartwright, were fast asleep in their tents.
‘Who else knows?’
‘Nobody knows. I tried radioing Jarve for backup, but couldn’t get a signal. I came to tell Blake and he was gone. Then you nearly killed me.’
‘Stay here,’ Napier said. ‘Wake the others.’ He handed Malone his bayonet. ‘Sit tight. If anyone you don’t know approaches, if you’re attacked, use that. Do it. Don’t hesitate.’
‘Where are you going?’
‘I’ll wake up Troy and his team. They need to be warned and we need their help in searching for Blake.’
‘What do you think it is? What made Blake scream? Where is he?’
‘What do you think I am, Malone, the oracle of all fucking knowledge?’
‘I know who you are. We all do. I read about you in the paper after the thing in Afghanistan.’
‘Get Cartwright and Smith on their feet. Stick close and stay put. I’ll be back as soon as I can.’
Alert to movement and sound, covering the distance to the project command centre, Napier refused to speculate in his own mind about what it was that was going on. He had no way of knowing. He didn’t think a clay pipe smoking phantom could have crooned Blake into a state of terror with an old folk song and he only had Malone’s word for it that the scream had been human.
Blake could have fallen badly somewhere or blundered into a bog or been swept out to sea by a freak wave. They were in a pretty elemental part of the world, all told. Speculation was pointless without some lead or clue. Waking Troy and his men was the imperative; doing that and then proceeding coolly and methodically.
Troy, once roused, fetched Brennan. The two of them told Napier about their earlier encounter with Blake. They told him Blake had drunk just the one can of lager prior to leaving them, sober and in good spirits, slightly preoccupied perhaps, but only with what his duties necessitated there on the island, if Troy was any judge.
‘Do you have any weapons?’
Troy and Brennan exchanged a look.
‘Level with me, boys.’
‘A couple of hunting rifles,’ Troy said, ‘bolt-action, small-bore, not exactly private army specification.’
‘Scopes?’
‘Night scopes on both,’ he said.
‘Good. Load both of them and give one your lads here. Tell them to be vigilant. We’ll take the other one.’
‘Where are we going?’ Troy said.
‘We’re going back for Malone. Then you and me and Malone and Brennan here are going to go and take a look at that crofter’s cottage on the other side of the island. Then if necessary, we’re going to come back here and Brennan is going to establish radio contact with McIntyre’s people and we’re going to call this in.’
Brennan and Troy just stared at him and nodded.
‘Anyone have a problem with my taking charge over this?’
‘No,’ they said, together.
Lucy met Jane Chambers after her testosterone soaked encounter with the archaeologist Jesse Kale. Kale insisted on meeting her at the city boy boxing gym in Holborn he habitually used. He sipped at a high protein shake and teased the protective wraps from his han
ds and sweat smouldered off him photogenically. It was all a bit tragic, really, Lucy thought, since she hadn’t been accompanied as she might have in the old Fleet Street days by a photographer.
Kale was polite enough but not really engaging. Like most celebrity academics, he clearly felt as secured in his own myth as his hands were in the lint bandages protecting them from bruising harm when he threw his punches at the heavy bag. She couldn’t get past the wrapping to the flesh.
She thought Jane Chambers would be a relief. Not light relief, because she was an intellectually astute woman and hardly a lightweight as a personality. Her enthusiasms extended well beyond girly pastimes like gossip and shopping. But she had not been interested in emphasising her own credentials on the phone during their first conversation. She had been concerned only to try to provide a plausible scientific answer to the mystery of New Hope Island.
She had a history with Karl Cooper, but Lucy would not broach that subject. She would listen, was what she would do. She had an intuition that she and Jane might become friends, or at least allies on the New Hope expedition. They would be living in a compound as a community in a barren and remote location. Carrick, Cooper and Kale; they sounded like an old variety hall act. But what they actually were was a trio of alpha males. They could not help but attention-seek and compete. Their career success, to her mind, however bright they might be, was a function of driven personalities.
It could become unbearable, particularly if the island was slow and reluctant in surrendering its secrets. Carrick was her immediate boss and she was stuck with the hierarchy unless he did something really stupid and Marsden fired him and promoted her. That was an unlikely eventuality. Carrick was not an original thinker, but he was a shrewd and skilful corporate survivor. Professionally, he just never seemed to put a foot wrong.