by Gary Gibson
‘Why?’ I asked.
‘Rozalia told me you had proof that the Patriots recruited Casey, right?’ I nodded. ‘Well,’ Howes continued, ‘you’re going to need Mayer to get that evidence to the right people. And since my own men aren’t around, that means you’re going to have to take Mayer, as well as that evidence, back to the Authority yourselves.’
TWENTY-ONE
‘Where is everybody?’ asked Yuichi, looking around the reception area of Government House when we walked in some twenty minutes later.
There was no sign of the half-dozen men and women who normally staffed the building where Bramnik and Mayer usually kept their offices. Doors stood open around us, and I saw signs of disarray that suggested a scuffle. The Patriots had undoubtedly been here.
‘I’m guessing they’re holed up in their rooms in the Hotel Miranda,’ I said. ‘Or they were ordered to stay there.’ The Miranda had been appropriated by the Authority to house their staff.
‘Yeah. I guess.’ Yuichi looked around. ‘Which way from here?’
‘Down there,’ said Rozalia, pointing towards a door. ‘Howes said the armoury was in the basement.’
We had split into two teams. Four of us – myself, Yuichi, Oskar and Rozalia – were going after Casey. The others – Winifred, Randall, Chloe and Selwyn – were going to return to the base with Howes to try and release Mayer. Then, if all went well, they’d either cross over to the Authority’s alternate via the main stage or, if they couldn’t get to it, hightail it to the wrecked trawler and make use of Casey’s stage.
First, our team was going to grab whatever weapons we could, so we’d at least be able to defend ourselves.
I tried to ignore the churning in my belly every time I thought of Chloe walking into danger. She was smart and capable, and her presence here on the island told me everything I needed to know about just how much shit she could take and still walk out smiling. Even so, I had to work hard not to show my dismay when she decided to take part in Mayer’s rescue operation.
‘I know what you’re thinking,’ she had said, leaning in close to me. ‘And I know you’re not that guy.’
‘What guy?’ I had asked, the smell of her hair intoxicating me.
‘You know,’ she said. ‘The overprotective guy.’
‘I’m not that guy. I know you can handle yourself.’
‘Yeah. I hear that. But that’s not what your face is saying.’
Even so, she had leaned up and kissed me, ignoring the snickers and muttered comments before I headed for the armoury with the others.
Yuichi led the way, and we followed him down a narrow staircase to a low-ceilinged basement half-filled with cardboard boxes and discarded computers. Yuichi stepped towards a steel door at the far end, punching the sequence of numbers scrawled on his hand into a number pad mounted on the wall.
I heard a soft beep, followed by a clunk, and the door swung open to reveal a rack of assault rifles and a considerable number of small black snub-nosed pistols.
Yuichi grabbed a rifle, stuffing two of the pistols into the pockets of his trousers, before kneeling to scoop up an armful of boxed ammunition from a tray on the floor.
‘Me next,’ said Oskar, stepping eagerly forward, while Rozalia and I waited our turn.
We exited Government House as cautiously as we had entered it. The preferred option by far was to avoid any confrontation whatsoever. According to Howes, there were at most a few dozen Patriot agents on the entire island; even so, the chances were high that they’d be better armed than us, and able to call on reinforcements.
The more I thought about it, and about all the things that could or probably would go wrong, the more I didn’t want to think about any of it at all. I looked at the grim faces of my compatriots and decided they were all thinking the same thing.
‘All right,’ said Yuichi, looking around us. ‘I guess we’re good to go.’
We headed back up to the reception area, and I opened a large canvas gardening sack that Yuichi had dug out of a closet in the Mauna Loa. I waited as everyone put their rifles and ammunition inside the sack, until Oskar came before me, his arms full of deadly weaponry.
‘This is fucking madness,’ he exclaimed. ‘If we run into any Pat—’
‘If we run into any Patriots,’ I interrupted him, ‘I’d much prefer to look like a confused and concerned Pathfinder desperately trying to find out what’s going on, instead of a heavily armed maniac.’ I shook the bag, and the rifles inside clanked against each other. ‘These guns are just as a last resort,’ I reminded him, ‘so hurry the hell up. We don’t have all day.’
Oskar shook his head in exasperation, and dropped a rifle and a couple of boxes of ammo into the sack. ‘But I can keep this, right?’ he asked, opening his jacket to indicate a pistol lodged in his waistband.
‘I guess. Just make sure it’s well out of sight.’ I glanced at the others. ‘Same goes for the rest of you.’
We stepped back out onto the street, but there was no sound or sign of movement. I hauled the sack over one shoulder, struggling under the weight, and wondered if maybe Oskar didn’t have a point after all. More than likely any Patriot agents who decided to treat us with suspicion would want a look inside the bag.
I felt my stomach sink half a block later at the sound of an approaching engine. I looked sideways at Yuichi, seeing his alarm. Rozalia was walking up ahead of us, and she paused at the corner before looking back and mouthing Patriots at us.
Oskar hurried up behind me, grabbing hold of the rear of the sack. Together we carried it over to a dense patch of weeds growing around a tree which provided the perfect concealment.
A jeep drove past, slowing when the two Patriot agents inside it saw us. Both of them were conspicuously armed.
‘Hey,’ said one of them as he climbed out of the jeep. ‘Why are you out during the curfew?’
‘What curfew?’ asked Rozalia, sounding genuinely puzzled.
‘You’re supposed to be inside,’ said the other agent, stepping out of the jeep to join his buddy.
I stepped forward, putting myself between them and the patch of weeds. ‘Nobody’s heard anything about a curfew,’ I said truthfully. I tried to look scared and confused; it wasn’t hard. ‘We just went to Government House to try and find out what’s going on, but there’s nobody there.’
‘You need to go home,’ said the second Patriot, his rifle held pointing to the ground, but angled so he could bring it back up in a moment. ‘And stay there.’
‘Absolutely,’ said Rozalia, nodding intently. ‘We’ll do that right away.’
‘You can’t tell us what’s going on?’ asked Oskar, with more than a touch of belligerence. ‘The way I see it, you people owe us an explanation. Or do you just drive around with those big guns of yours for fun?’
I fought down the urge to turn and scream at him to shut up. If he screwed this up for us, the chances were that people were going to get killed.
The Patriot’s expression hardened, and I saw his hands tighten around his rifle. ‘Get the hell out of here,’ he snarled. ‘And if I see any of you out in the streets again, you go in a goddam cell and stay there until someone maybe feels like letting you out. Do you understand me?’
‘Absolutely,’ I said, smiling and nodding as obsequiously as I could. ‘No problem, sir.’ I gave him a cheery wave which, in retrospect, might have been overkill.
The two agents glanced at each other and shook their heads, then got back in their jeep and drove off. Once they were out of sight I sat hard on the ground, my legs feeling like jelly.
‘We could have taken them on,’ Oskar grumbled. ‘We had the guns. What the hell were you doing, kowtowing to them like some damn—’
‘Shut the fuck up,’ Rozalia snapped. ‘You nearly got us all killed.’
‘I said we could have taken them,’ said Oskar, visibly bristling. ‘There’s four of us, we’re carrying enough guns and ammunition to—’
Yuichi stepped up to Oskar and pu
nched him hard in the gut. Oskar doubled over immediately, staggering back before he slumped to the ground, struggling to draw breath.
‘Don’t ever do something that fucking stupid again, man,’ Yuichi shouted. ‘Or you can go the fuck home and sweat it out there while the rest of us get on with this. Your choice.’
Oskar glared balefully at him. I sighed and pushed myself upright, then went over to help him back up. However right Yuichi was, the fact remained that we needed all the help we could get.
‘We’re all under a lot of strain,’ I told him, after he let me help him up. ‘I understand you’re spoiling for a fight. But that’s just what we’ve got to avoid until we find Casey. Okay?’
Oskar scowled at me, and I wondered if I’d made a mistake, and he was in fact an even bigger asshole than I thought.
‘Fine,’ he said at length, to my considerable relief. He stabbed a finger towards Yuichi. ‘But if you ever – ever – pull a stunt like that again, I won’t need a gun to rip your fucking head from your shoulders.’
Yuichi gave him a look as if to say he was welcome to try. All the laid-back hippie attitude seemed to have faded in an instant, replaced by something much harder.
Rozalia started hauling the sack of rifles back out of the weeds. ‘How about you all stop showing each other your dicks and give me a hand,’ she suggested, ‘before they change their mind and come back to use us for target practice.’
Ten minutes later we were back at the Hotel du Mauna Loa. Randall was keeping watch from the main entrance, and he pulled the door all the way open as we came towards him.
Rozalia dropped the sack on the floor and started passing out the rifles and ammunition. I saw that Randall had been busy, cutting away part of Howes’ uniform and wrapping his wounded shoulder in gauze sourced from the bar’s first-aid kit.
‘We all ready to go?’ I asked, looking around.
People nodded, and I turned to Howes. ‘Are you sure you’re up to this? You lost some blood on the way here, and nobody’d blame you for sitting this out.’
‘I’ll be fine,’ he replied.
‘What exactly are you planning to do when you get there?’ Yuichi asked the Major.
Howes’ mouth curled up on one side. ‘I’m going to surrender.’
I wondered if I had misheard him. ‘Excuse me?’
‘I’m going to walk up to whoever’s in charge of the base, surrender, and tell them any damn pack of lies I can come up with to keep them all occupied long enough for your friends to sneak in and, with luck, spring Kip Mayer.’
I remembered to close my mouth. ‘And that’s actually going to work?’
‘I don’t know,’ Howes replied. ‘But if they’re as dumb as I think they are, the Patriots are all going to be too busy following orders – either looking for Vishnevsky, or guarding the transfer stages. I don’t think they’re expecting anyone to try and rescue Mayer, especially not if they’re sure he can’t get off the island any other way.’
‘Sounds dangerous,’ I hazarded.
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘That’s why you’ve all got guns.’
I nodded, embarrassed.
Howes stood carefully. He was steady on his feet despite his injury. ‘Anyone with a desperate need to take a shit, do it now,’ he announced. ‘Otherwise, I think it’s time we got moving.’
TWENTY-TWO
I’d been trying hard to think of some way we could maybe drive up to the shipwreck without running into any more trouble, but I kept coming up blank, particularly since everything with four wheels had been appropriated by the Patriots. That seemed to leave the four of us little choice but to walk the whole damn way across the island and take our chances, regardless of how long it took, or the danger of being spotted by another Patriot patrol. I explained my concerns to Rozalia as we all hustled back out of the Mauna Loa.
‘Why don’t we just go by boat?’ she suggested, once Howes and the others had slipped off in the direction of the compound.
I came to a halt, wondering how I could have been so dumb as not to think of anything so obvious. We were on an island, after all, and our destination was just a few kilometres up the coast. It wasn’t even as if I lacked sailing experience of my own.
Yuichi and Oskar became excited at the prospect.
‘Sounds great,’ I said, ‘but where the hell are we going to find a working boat?’ All I’d seen were a few dilapidated rowing boats down by the harbour that looked as if they’d disintegrate the moment they hit the water.
‘There’s an old Chilean Navy Coast Guard station at the harbour’s edge,’ Rozalia explained. ‘There’s a search-and-rescue dinghy in there that’s easily big enough for all of us, and it’s in good condition as well. There’s also a slipway leading straight into the water, and nobody’ll be able to see us while we’re working inside the station.’
‘Shit, yes,’ said Yuichi. ‘You were fixing that boat up with Nadia, said you were going to take some of us out in it some time.’
‘Well, it looks like this is the time,’ she said.
Rozalia, it turned out, was something of a sailing enthusiast, having grown up on the Florida coast. We kept our eyes open for trouble, but we reached the lifeboat station without incident.
It proved to be a dilapidated wooden structure, with a sloping concrete slipway leading straight into the sea. We followed her inside, where I saw a twelve-foot orange and grey dinghy with an outboard motor and a pennant reading ARMADE DE CHILE. Rozalia regarded it with undisguised pride.
‘I hate boats,’ Oskar grumbled. ‘Unless you’re fishing or actually going somewhere, what’s the fucking point?’
I watched Rozalia check the outboard motor. ‘Aren’t we going to attract the wrong kind of attention with all the noise from the engine?’
‘I figure the best thing is not to use it at first,’ she said, looking back at me. ‘We’ll start out with the oars, then turn the engine on once we’re far enough from the shore that we won’t be heard.’ She chuckled. ‘I’ll bet you anything it’s never occurred to those assholes to even look out to sea.’
Oskar looked horrified. ‘Did you say we were going to row there?’
‘Part of the way.’ Rozalia nodded at two pairs of long wooden oars mounted on racks. ‘The water today doesn’t look too choppy, so we’ll have a relatively easy time of it.’ She looked at us. ‘So who’s going to help me get them down?’
Oskar and Yuichi stepped forward and helped get the oars down. I leaned my rifle against a wall, then made my way down towards the prow, near where the slipway led down to the water’s edge. The dinghy looked to have been kept in good condition.
We all followed Rozalia’s directions, gathering around either side of the dinghy, before pushing and dragging it down towards the waves. I was panting slightly from the effort by the time it hit the water. Rozalia raced after it down the slipway, then threw herself forward and inside the dinghy, letting out a whoop as she pulled herself the rest of the way in.
The rest of us followed suit, splashing and cursing as we grabbed hold of the lip of the dinghy before it got away from us. I managed to throw myself forward and inside before clambering onto one of its hard wooden benches. Rozalia lifted one of the oars up, expertly sliding it into a rowlock before dipping its blade into the water.
I did the same, along with Yuichi and Oskar but, it must be said, with considerably less grace than Rozalia. Soon, however, all four oars were fitted to their rowlocks, and we sat facing back towards the harbour, the dinghy falling and rising beneath us with the tide. I could see no sign of movement beyond the harbour wall. The farther we got, the less likely we were to be seen.
‘All ready?’ asked Rozalia, looking around and clearly struggling to hide the fact she was having the time of her life. ‘Then let’s go.’
I had multiple opportunities over the next half-hour to regret my initial enthusiasm. My back ached, my butt was in agony from sitting on that hard wooden bench, and I had incipient blisters on the palms of my h
ands. But at least I kept my discomfort to myself, unlike Oskar, who cursed and muttered the whole damn way, until I had serious thoughts of tossing him overboard.
After a while, though, I got into the rhythm of the rowing and the steady beat of the oarblades as they rose and dipped, rose and dipped. Every now and then a particularly large wave lifted us up high, before sending us crashing back down with enough force to give me butterflies in my stomach.
Rozalia, by contrast, was in her element. She was sweating, but looked happy for the first time since Nadia’s demise.
‘Okay,’ Rozalia finally gasped, pulling her oar back in after what felt like a century of rowing. ‘Stop.’
Oskar let out a long groan, dragging his oar across his lap before reaching up to wipe the sweat from his neck and face.
‘How far out are we?’ I asked, staring back towards the harbour. It didn’t look like we’d covered that much distance.
‘Farther than you think,’ she replied. ‘Wind’s blowing out to sea. The noise from the outboard won’t carry back to shore so much.’
She made her way to the rearmost bench to fiddle with the outboard engine until it let out a muted roar, its blades cutting into the ocean waters. We began to pick up speed, cutting with ease through the water. Rozalia peered ahead, one hand on the tiller, slowly swinging the dinghy around until we were sailing parallel to the coast. First we would sail around the northern tip of the island, and then make our way along the east coast.
The sun tracked its way across the sky towards late afternoon. I started to feel tired, the constant rocking motion lulling me. It had been a long, hard couple of days, with barely a moment to rest. Rozalia’s hand remained steady on the tiller, her eyes fixed either directly ahead or on the coast.
The harbour passed out of sight once we had rounded the sea cliffs that formed one slope of Rano Kau. I felt myself relax a little; we were out of sight of any unwanted observers.