SKELETON GOLD: Dark Tide (James Pace Book 4)

by Andy Lucas

  Tearing one of the blankets into strips, he used a small screwdriver that he’d found in the tool cupboard to disassemble a rickety wooden table that stood in the far corner, heaped high with unrecognisable engine parts.

  The screws were stiff but Pace persisted and eventually reduced the table to a small pile of firewood, some of which he loaded into the fire bucket, trimmed with old rags and torn blanket pieces. A single match from a discarded box was all it took to catch the dry material and he had a decent campfire roaring inside the bucket a couple of minutes later, as the flames eagerly began devouring the wood.

  Apart from the friendly light and warmth that the fire brought into the garage, he now had a means to cook his frozen food. All he needed was a saucepan, which he improvised from a fairly clean oil pan that he hammered into shape with a heavy club hammer. It took ten minutes but he was very pleased with his creation by the time he was done. He had no way of adding a handle but found a heavy pair of metal tongs, luckily with wooden handles, that would allow him to place it over the fire without scorching the skin from his newly de-gloved fingers.

  Typically, he found no sign of a can opener and used a screwdriver, hammer and pair of pliers to tear open a can of meat. Sniffing cautiously, he grinned. It smelled fine as he prised the solid, frozen block of reddish meat from the tin, wincing at the brusque clang that signalled its meeting with the metal pan.

  Next, he added a frozen block of evaporated milk and sat back to watch his concoction slowly sizzle into a meal. The milk quickly melted and began to bubble, which sped up the thawing of the corned beef. Needing to ensure it was thoroughly heated meant Pace having to keep pulling the pan off of the heat, stirring the food with his trusty screwdriver.

  One hundred year-old, creamed corned beef was not a dish that he had ever hankered for but the aroma that wafted from the fire quickly set his juices flowing and he was soon tucking into a deliciously hot meal, spooning the soupy mixture into his mouth using a cast iron ladle, also procured from the tool cupboard. Pace had no idea what it was actually meant to be used for, oil or coolant perhaps?

  It wasn’t the best meal of his life but it damned well felt like it and the change in his body was miraculous. While he was returning to life, the only dark cloud was the thought that his friend might still be fighting his way through a merciless blizzard outside.

  What he had no way of knowing was that his emergency broadcast had been received by two opposing forces.

  Initially picked up by the Scott Base radio system, it had caused utter pandemonium as soon as Fiona learned that Pace was still alive. She was so furious that she failed to check with the scientists, or her own people, about the base’s emergency protocols.

  As a civilian outfit, both radio and satellite communication systems were fitted with several safety defaults. The key one was that any emergency signals were automatically boosted and forwarded to the authorities.

  Before anyone at Scott Base realised there was an issue, Pace’s message had been sent to the British joint military command, based at Port Stanley in the Falkland Islands, then immediately pinged over to London. Within thirty seconds of the signal being sent, Doyle McEntire was aware of it. This was a game-changer.

  Baker was informed of the news while he was preparing a team to board one of the company jets, for a long-distance flight down to a covert airstrip at Goose Green, also in the Falklands. From there, he was to have conducted an investigation into the apparent loss of the Sea Otter. Thankfully, that could wait. He was ecstatic to give Sarah such a fantastic update on the search.

  Yet Pace knew nothing of these events. He only knew that his stomach was full and that he needed to get back outside and find his friend.

  As he made a quick, final check on the transmitter, nodding sombrely to himself as he considered the hiss of static, he was just about to leave the room when the set crackled at him. Stopped in his tracks, an initial moment of relief came crashing cruelly to the ground as a familiar voice filled the air.

  ‘I don’t know how you managed to do it, James, but I am now officially very angry that you’re still breathing.’

  Pace picked up the microphone and keyed it, a little too roughly, feeling a flare of anger.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he could not help goading her. ‘All the time in the world, Miss Chambers. An easy target, floating helplessly on the ocean, and you morons still screwed up. Poor old Josephine is going to be pretty pissed at you.’

  As if taken aback by the quick response, there was no immediate come back. Pace waited patiently, knowing it would come. When Fiona spoke again, her voice dripped with venom.

  ‘Rest assured, it is not a mistake I will repeat. This time, when we find you, I will kill you myself.’

  ‘I’ll look forward to that dance,’ snapped Pace. ‘You and your boss are murderers and I’m going to make sure that neither of you live to a ripe old age, understand?’

  ‘Then you are just like us,’ argued Fiona, with a vague hint of triumphalism in her voice. ‘You are also a murderer.’

  ‘A killer, perhaps. When I have to be,’ he admitted. ‘Not a murderer, there’s a difference.’

  ‘Semantics,’ Fiona dismissed. ‘Not that it matters. We know where you are and we’re on our way. Be a good boy and just stay where you are. I’d rather not have to chase you through the snow before I break your neck. You, and your friend.’ She paused, as though suddenly realising that Hammond had not joined in the exchange. ‘Where is Hammond, or did he not make it?’

  ‘Wouldn’t you like to know?’ Pace spat. Then he was struck by a thought. ‘In fact,’ he added, whispering into the microphone, ‘I will let you know where Max is. Max made it ashore with me. He and I have now discovered all the secrets of Scorpion and he has taken some the samples we found back to McMurdo.’

  There was silence on the other end, so Pace pushed his luck. ‘He left here hours ago. I’ll bet he’s there already. He’s a very experienced adventurer, as you know, and these conditions are child’s play for him.’

  Pace kept his words crisp and curt, as though angry at having to have sent his friend off alone. It was a ruse that might buy him some time, or at least split any search party in half. He didn’t know if Hammond was anywhere near McMurdo but the chances of anyone finding a lone walker, in a blizzard, were laughable so he wasn’t adding any risk to Hammond’s trek.

  ‘Anyway, fun that this has been, you’re beginning to bore me, sweetheart, so I’ll see you when I see you.’

  If he’d have waited for another couple of minutes, the next voice he would have heard would have been a far more pleasant one than Fiona’s. Linked via satellite to the communication’s centre at Goose Green, Baker had himself patched into the same radio frequency that they had picked Pace’s message up on. Baker called out for him several times, pleading for a response, but received no reply because Pace had already switched the transmitter off, hoping to slow down his pursuers by preventing them getting a fix on his signal.

  Oblivious to the help that was now on the way, he set about having one final examination of the base. He figured the ARC team must be fairly close and they might already have fixed his position, even if Fiona had been lying about knowing his exact location. He guessed that he had an hour, perhaps ninety minutes tops, before he would need to be gone. If Scorpion was here somewhere, he needed to find it quickly.

  Fifty minutes later, just as he’d decided that he’d studied every nook and cranny to death, he happened upon the secret room in a small office. A false door, hidden behind a floor-to-ceiling bookcase, devoid of books, gave up its secret after Pace spotted a set of hinges along its left side where it connected to the wall.

  Pulling hard, he was surprised at how easily it opened, without the faintest of squeals from the ancient, brass hinges. Behind the bookcase, a small corridor led to a narrow laboratory.

  Heart pounding, warm despite the chill of the air, Pace used his emergency light to study the array of vials, glass jars and test tubes.
Exactly the kind of set up that he’d hoped to find, this was where Scorpion would be hiding.

  He wasn’t sure how much longer the light’s batteries would last and he did not relish the idea of being plunged into the insidious darkness that would result when it finally blinked out in this windowless place.

  Pace had little idea of what experiments had taken place there, all those years ago, but he grinned mirthlessly when his light beam struck a fully-stocked pair of metal shelves.

  Dozens of glass bottles, still stoppered, greeted his gaze. Most were filled with clear fluids, in vague shades of yellow or green but a couple were dark red. No name labels but many bore the instantly recognisable skull and crossed bones that indicated a poison.

  ‘Damn. That’s not much help,’ he sighed. ‘Which one of you is the guilty one? Come on, Scorpion, please step forward.’ Clearly, he would have to make his best guess.

  After five minutes, he was still undecided when he suddenly noticed a small wooden case, sitting right at the back of a cupboard. A beautifully crafted, highly lacquered example made from rosewood, he gasped as he opened the lid and saw a dozen vials exactly the same as the ones that he had last seen spinning to the bottom of the ocean after his battle with the sharks. Neatly secured inside a red velvet-lining, each vial sat snugly within its own niche, awaiting scientific hands that had never returned to claim them.

  Looking more closely, Pace noted that they were not all the same. Six held an amber fluid. Six others held a dark red fluid. This time, finally, the vials also came clearly labelled which is how Pace knew for sure that he had what he’d been hoping for.

  The half dozen amber vials were labelled with a word that brought both relief, and trepidation. Scorpion. The red vials were also labelled. Dark Tide.

  ‘Dark Tide?’ Pace spoke the neatly pencilled words aloud. ‘Now, what do you do?’

  A quick check turned up no papers, or helpful journals. Whatever these vials contained would just have to be investigated by McEntire’s scientists, who would doubtless be able to discover their properties. Anyway, his time was running out. He needed to vanish.

  Although he was keen to get well clear of the old base before the Fiona arrived, he wasn’t foolish enough to leave unprepared. He packed the tins of food and his improvised can opener into an old duffel bag he’d scrounged up in the garage before heading back down to the crypt, as he now saw it.

  The dead submariners had no need of their weapons any longer but Pace needed to be armed if he was to stand any chance of surviving an encounter with Fiona.

  The skeletons were still there but he paid them no heed. It was a rifle he was after. Some hung over the backs of chairs; others were propped against the walls. Not wanting to spend too much time with the dead, he opted to take the nearest rifle. Propped against the wall, its wooden body had been lovingly cared for and still had a faint sheen to it. The metal bolt and barrel looked like new.

  The rifle was standard issue for the time, namely a Mauser 98, or more accurately the Gewehr 98. Introduced to the German military in the late nineteenth century and refined in time for the start of the First World War, it was considered to be one of the finest bolt-action rifles ever made, if not the best.

  As with the British Sten gun, discovered in the secret haul of a bizarre Scottish hermit, deep in the Amazon basin, and his more recent acquisition of a the Webley, Pace’s love of classic firearms held him in good stead now.

  Not only did he prefer the Mauser to the British Lee Enfield .303, it had always been a personal favourite of his whenever he took part in inter-service, vintage weaponry competitions, representing the RAF. Pace knew exactly how the Mauser 98 operated, fired and handled. Accurate, rugged and fitted with iron sights, it was a superb rifle even by modern standards.

  But this was a very old, trench model. It had been designed with a long barrel to take a bayonet, ready to charge at the enemy. At forty-nine inches, it had proved itself too unwieldy at close quarters so the Second World War variant had been greatly shortened.

  Pace grinned because he wasn’t in the trenches at Flanders, or the Somme. Out in the wilderness, a long barrel offered greater accuracy. After a quick rummage in the belt of a nearby corpse, a beautifully wicked M1998 bayonet snapped on to the end of the barrel, extending the gun by a further twelve inches. The gorgeous, two-piece wooden handle was in complete contrast to its deadly purpose.

  Ammunition wasn’t an issue either. The Mauser 98 took a stripper clip of five 7.92 x 57mm cartridges, fed down through the top of the chamber. The bullets were heavy and Pace knew it was lethal out to a distance of five hundred metres in the right hands. When fitted with a telescopic sight, a killing shot could easily be made at one thousand metres.

  Each dead submariner wore a belt, with a pouch holding three of the stripper clips. Another minute of desecrating the dead, muttering quiet apologies under his breath, and Pace had added twenty clips to his bag. He unloaded and reloaded his rifle, noting the smooth action as he worked the bolt.

  In the battle he hoped was not coming, that gave him one hundred and five shots of the rifle, as well as the six .455 bullets already loaded into his Webley. Fiona would not be expecting any resistance if she did manage to catch him. He had no intention of going down without taking her with him.

  Finally he was ready, with supplies and the precious vials carefully packed, and just about to head back up to the garage area when he froze in his tracks. From up above, the sounds of a door being smashed in echoed faintly down the rocky passageway.

  ‘Damn it,’ he cursed, kicking himself. He had misjudged how much time he had and now he was cut off. ‘All dressed up and nowhere to go,’ he muttered ruefully, forcing himself to stay calm and think through his options. Clearly, he had two. Set up a firing point and shoot it out in the confines of the base or get out the same way that he had got in.

  If the assault team had gas canisters, or grenades, he knew he would be quickly overpowered. His only chance was to swim for it. Heading back down to the underground cavern, he traversed the icy ledge without incident and made it safely back onto the submerged upper deck of the U-boat.

  A quick glance down at the dark, icy water gave him another setback to overcome. The water was still moving into the cavern, as it had been when the current swept him inside. He would stand no chance swimming against it and he dreaded to think what might lie beyond the cavern, as the water moved deeper below the ice.

  He knew Fiona’s men would already be working their way through the upper rooms. They would very quickly find their way down to the submarine. There was little time to prepare so he just made sure that the bag was tightly secured at the neck and looped it over his shoulder firmly, Detaching the bayonet from the Mauser, he re-zipped his yellow survival suit up to the neck and slipped back over the side of the vessel, swimming hard against the pull of the current, pushing off from the cold metal hull as he did so.

  Sticking close to the U-boat, the drag from the current was bearable but he needed to swim up the channel now, against the flow. Without any safety ropes, his only chance was to hug the ice-encrusted rock wall to his right and use the bayonet to pull his body towards the exit. Stabbing the sharp blade into the ice, and heaving against the solid handhold it provided, worked better than expected but he only had one bayonet so had to quickly master the art of pulling it free and stabbing it into a new position a foot or so further along the wall before the current swept him back.

  He toyed with the idea of going back and getting a second bayonet but discounted it immediately. His hunters were probably already in the lower areas. No, he thought grimly, you will just have to do the best you can.

  The first thirty feet were fine but the energy from his meal soon began to fade at the sheer physical exertion needed to keep hauling himself along the ice wall. Also, as he drew closer to the exit, the height of the waves began to lift and his head was often swamped by freezing, choking waves that threatened to drown him. Still he persevered. Hand-over-hand,
stab, heave and pull.

  Beneath the immersion suit, he was pouring with sweat and his breath soon came in rasping heaves. Minutes seemed like hours but Pace fought on with single-minded determination.

  The proverbial light at the end of the tunnel became a literal one after he had being battling the flow for over an hour. Exhausted, barely able to move his arms, the exit presented itself as a small chink of light another one hundred feet further ahead.

  Inch by painful inch, the exit drew nearer until Pace could hear the crash of the waves breaking against the ice shore outside.

  Barely ten feet from safety, his trusty blade bit into the ice once more. Heaving himself forwards, it held momentarily before breaking free along a hidden fault in the ice.

  A huge wave crashed over his head, disorienting him and spinning him around beneath the surface like a top. His face smashed painfully against the ice-free, underwater rock face.

  Stunned, blinded and choking, Pace fought for his life once again as the tide gleefully pushed him back down the tunnel.

  11

  Deborah Miles had screamed for many hours over the past few days. Her throat was dry and sore from repeated shouting and a lack of air conditioning in the stifling heat of her improvised prison cell. Her hair had been shaved off and her jailers kept her completely naked to help break her spirit.

  Starving and dehydrated from days of only being given a meagre amount of dry bread and water, Deborah’s once-trim figure was covered in bruises, running the entire gamete from aging yellow to fresh purple. Untreated cuts and sores, caused by beatings and by having to sleep on the concrete floor, without a blanket, filled in any gaps between the bruises.

  She knew that her body was beginning to fail. The cell was airless and windowless, barely ten feet long and three feet wide. White-painted bricks and a complete absence of furniture offered no solace for her mind, hour after hour.

  Sleep rarely came because the fierce fluorescent lights stayed on all the time and she dared not tamper with them for fear of attracting an additional beating. For what it was worth, which wasn’t much, sanitation consisted of a large plastic bucket in one corner.