by Andy Lucas
Happy to comply, he released the dingy and pulled the heavy hatch door closed, sealing them inside the warmth of a large cargo area.
Fiona wasted no time in heading up to the cockpit, where she settled herself into one of the additional crew seats, strapping in.
The pilot was already running through his pre-flight checks. ‘We’ll be away in a couple of minutes,’ he promised.
Back on the shore, Hammond was already helping lift Yucel out of the water. Allowing the mercenary to flop down on the snow, retching and choking out seawater, he leaned a hand back down to Pace. Pace looked at it, with pain in his eyes.
‘We can’t let her leave, Max. You know that.’
‘We’re not going to,’ he promised. ‘We’ll put some bullets into the engines and that will be that.’
‘No. You might trigger an explosion, or a fire. We don’t know where she has the vials. If they get damaged, whatever is in them might pollute this whole stretch of Antarctica.’
‘We don’t know that,’ argued Hammond, seeing his friend’s point of view and not liking where it was heading.
‘Get these people back to Scott Base. I’ve got an idea. If it doesn’t work, I’ll be right behind you. It isn’t too far. I can walk it.’
‘What idea?’
‘See you soon.’ Without another word, he turned around in the water and started out towards the aircraft, just as its engines began to hum into life.
Hammond was about to dive in and stop him when an ominous cracking sound attacked his ears and a thin vein appeared in the ice between his feet, heading quickly back towards the immense weight of the tank.
‘If that goes, everyone dies,’ he shouted down at Yucel, who allowed himself to be yanked to his feet. ‘Are you going to be a problem?’
‘No’ Yucel shot back, his teeth chattering painfully inside his mouth. ‘I’d be dead if not for your friend.’
‘Then you can help me drive that bloody thing off the ice before we all end up at the bottom of the sea!’
‘Okay,’ Yucel nodded vigorously. ‘Come on.’
The two men, who minutes before had been shooting at each other, now worked together. Clambering aboard and dropping back down inside the tank, Hammond snarled at anyone who dared question Yucel’s presence while plunging the enormous vehicle into reverse.
With cracks spreading fast, all around, there was no time to risk turning the tracked monster. Reverse had only a single gear, and would be far slower than top speed going forwards, but at least they were already moving, even if it was at a geriatric pace.
The race was neck and neck, with the ice splintering right in front of the churning tracks for two minutes, before they finally roared off the ice and back up onto solid, ice-encrusted ground.
Panic over, Hammond popped the hatch and climbed back outside. The storm was as fierce as ever. He could not see the plane, or even the water’s edge any longer, but his ears did not fail to register the tell-tale shrieking of jet engines powering a heavy aeroplane into the sky. He listened to the engines receding until he could no longer hear them above the wind.
An hour later, with no sign of James, Hammond turned the tank around and headed back to Scott Base, pulling up directly outside the main habitat.
As he pushed aside his own sadness, and started hurrying the cold scientists back inside, the tank was surrounded by a small group of white-clad, hard-eyed men. Armed to the teeth, they said nothing until one of them stepped forward, pulling down his face scarf.
The brief flicker of fearful resignation that his overwhelmed his mind, at falling into another ARC trap, faded instantly.
‘A First World War tank? How the hell did you guys manage that one?’ Baker asked, incredulous but accepting what his eyes told him.
‘It’s a long story. Help me get everyone in the warm, quickly,’ Hammond said. Baker gave some orders and his team hurried the process along. Soon, they were all inside and steaming mugs of frothy hot chocolate were being doled out to grateful hands.
Leaving his men to secure the base, and the medics to check the scientists and Yucel, Hammond explained everything to Baker, who wore a grim expression at the end.
‘So, we have no idea what he planned, or where he is?’
Hammond shook his head. ‘The only hope is if his plan, whatever it was, came off. He might still be out there, amongst the broken ice pieces, but some of them would have been razor sharp, and very heavy. I don’t think he’d have been able to swim back to the shore, even if he could.’
‘You two made it hundreds of miles on the open sea, most of it floating on your backs,’ Baker retorted quietly. ‘Let’s not write James of just yet. I’ll send a team out to begin searching. The storm looks like it’s beginning to ease which means we should be able to find him, if he’s out there.’
‘Let’s hope so.’
‘Brave thing, he did,’ added Baker.
‘Not brave,’ countered Hammond testily. ‘Idiotic. He should be here, now, with us.’
Baker stood up and patted him on the shoulder, in a fatherly manner. ‘Bravery and idiocy are often very similar. It’s only the outcome that decides whether someone was brave, or daft.’ Then he withdrew to give the relevant orders to his men.
Finishing his drink, steeling himself and swallowing back his emotions, Hammond borrowed Baker’s encrypted satellite phone and punched in Doyle McEntire’s number.
It was answered on the first ring.
26
Pace already regretted his rashness before he reached the plane. The engines were running up to temperature as he reached his target; the large float that supported the starboard wing when the aircraft landed on water.
It resembled a large nacelle, protruding vertically from beneath the wing on a rigid steel support. Although the aircraft itself was classed as a flying boat because the fuselage sat in the water rather than above it, it had one of these massive stabiliser floats beneath each wing, giving it additional strength in high waves.
Pace knew his idea was crazy but the thought of Josephine Roche getting her hands on another supply of Scorpion, and whatever Dark Tide was, was unthinkable. He had to try and stick with it and take any opportunity that might come along to grab it. The reassuring weight of the Webley .455 inside his survival suit pocket gave him a slim chance but he knew it was impossible to get aboard the plane in the conventional way.
Reaching the float, he examined it hastily and was delighted to see a maintenance flap on the top, well above the waterline. He did not know a great deal about these kinds of planes but he’d taken a guess that the float was large enough to need regular checking for cracks and faults, as some of it was hollow.
Pulling himself up onto the float with great difficulty, the engines rose in pitch again and the plane began to move out to sea, ready to make its take-off run. He didn’t have much time.
Pace pressed the latch button and the cover popped open easily, revealing a small crawl space just large enough to hold a person. As he rolled into it, landing with a thud on his inflated back, staring up at the underside of the broad wing, he knew he had reached the rubicon; there was no turning back from this point.
As the aircraft accelerated smoothly across the water and climbed steeply into the blunt teeth of a fading blizzard, he reached up and pulled the cover down, clicking it back into place, plunging him into darkness. The situation was becoming all too familiar.
Pace was taking a huge gamble with his life, he knew. The plane was bound to fly above ten thousand feet, at a service ceiling probably double that, where the air was too thin to breathe. True, he had trapped a decent amount of oxygen inside the float by closing the cover and his survival suit should be able to keep him alive in the sub-zero temperatures at high altitude, but the air in the float would soon turn stale.
His plan was straightforward. The compressed air that he had so recently used to re-inflate his suit was now expanded and trapped within the material. The suit carried a rubber mouth piece, on the e
nd of a tube, so that the wearer could top up any lost air by blowing it up by mouth. With a few alterations, he was banking that he would be able to draw the oxygen out instead of blowing anything back in.
Using the survival suit as his own private air supply, he might be able to survive a fairly lengthy flight, which he knew he had just signed up for. He had no doubt that Fiona would want to get the vials back to Josephine as soon as she could, so it was likely that their next stop would be back to the blistering heat of the stark, barren Skeleton Coast of Namibia.
As though already locked inside his own coffin, Pace could only try to keep his mind occupied. Although the darkness lightened a little, it was still completely dark. Eventually he made out internal rivets and joins in the construction. The one thought he did dispel immediately was whether or not the float would support his weight, or suddenly snap off in mid-air and send him spinning down thousands of feet to his doom. His rational mind knew that such a heavy-duty pontoon would have been designed to bear very high stress and load levels but his humanity remained a little sceptical.
Hours passed. He could not afford to doze off. He had to stay awake to take the occasional gulp of oxygen from his suit reservoir. If he fell asleep, he would not wake up again. It was hard to keep his eyes open for most of the flight, in the darkness, but being regularly jolted and shaken around by turbulence proved a great help. Just as he was fading, a sudden jolt would snap him back to reality again, with a surge of palpitating adrenaline.
Time crept by and he was beginning to grow very worried at the dwindling air supply in his suit when he felt the plane begin to descend. Taking a long, steady approach to the sun-baked coastline, the plane shed height at a leisurely five hundred feet per minute, gliding down gracefully with its three occupants completely unaware that they were carrying a stowaway.
When he thought enough descent time had passed, Pace took the risk of working the cover latch open from the inside. Keeping a tight hold the latch, so the cover would not blow completely open, he cracked it open and was relieved to feel a rush of warm air, instantly drawing out the fetid contents of the float. The brilliant sunshine and powder blue sky hurt his eyes and he turned his head away from it quickly.
Giving the float another few seconds to air fully, Pace closed the cover back down. Alert and needing to steel himself for what was to come, he began stretching out his cramped leg and arm muscles as best he could in the tight space.
‘Now,’ he croaked to himself, realising how thirsty he was. ‘What’s the plan?’ He’d had the idea of trying to slip overboard while the plane taxied in towards its mooring. Pace knew they were at the desalination facility, which he also knew was heavily guarded. The chances of him sneaking off the plane undetected were slim but had to try.
Feeling the rush of speed as the plane came in for a perfect landing, Pace waited. The pilot was excellent and the large plane barely seemed to kiss the glittering water before wallowing beautifully to a coasting halt, helped by the engines being thrown into reverse. They were down...and it was time.
Sucking in a final lungful of dark air, he opened the latch again and managed to slide himself up from out of the recess, rolling off the float as the cover slammed down and latched itself as though it had never had to endure the indignity of a freeloader.
Falling into warm, clear water, he managed to hook an arm around the end of the float, hoping he had not been seen from shore.
Shaking spray from his face, he saw that the plane was moving in towards a buoy, set up a few metres from the same dock where he, Hammond and Sarah had alighted from the ARC launch, on their visit to the facility a few weeks before.
Fate chose to kick him in the crotch at this point. The plane taxied in towards the buoy, swinging around to its starboard side, exposing his float to a group of half a dozen guards, waiting to greet Fiona upon her arrival.
With his aching muscles still stiff and rigid from so long inside the float, Pace was too slow to react. Before he could release the float and duck beneath the water, his bright survival suit gave him away.
One of the guards spotted him and shouted, whereupon a couple of warning bullets kicked up water fountains next to his head.
‘The next one goes between your eyes,’ one of them shouted out to him nastily. ‘Stay hanging on to the plane,’ the guard then warned. ‘Try to let go and I will shoot you.’
‘Damn,’ Pace spat out a mouthful of seawater angrily.
To say that Fiona was stunned was the understatement of the decade. As she stepped out of the hatch, down into a vintage, polished wooden motorboat for the brief ride to the dock, she wondered why so many guards were milling about, staring down into the water. Following their gaze, she recoiled in shock to see James Pace staring back up at her from the water, where he was hanging onto a wing float. He looked exhausted but the look of hatred he summoned for her was enough to snap her from her surprise.
As a guard helped her onto the dock, she was tempted to give the order to shoot him. Let the sharks have him, and be done with it, she thought. Before she could open her mouth to give the instruction, another thought closed her lips. Did anyone else know he was here? Was anyone else with him? She had to be sure.
‘Get him out, clean him up, then bring him to me,’ she commanded. ‘I will be with Ms Roche.’
‘You have a terrible habit to surviving, Mr Pace. We will have to do something about that,’ she warned him.
‘Try changing the tape, lady,’ he snorted back, summoning his last dregs of sarcasm. ‘I’ve heard this one before.’
Fiona turned on her heels and walked over to a waiting Grand Cherokee jeep, followed by the equally amazed pilots. As they were driven away to facility, and the boat chugged across to retrieve him, Pace knew that the game was well and truly up.
27
Pace was treated roughly by the disgruntled guards, getting the odd elbow in the face and shove in the back as they got him into a second jeep, but generally he’d expected far worse. His recent experiences in the jungles of the Amazon, at the hands of Cathera and his pet assassin, Wolf, had steeled him to expect the worst.
Upon arriving back at the familiar building, he was frog-marched into the elevator and thrown inside Deborah’s old cell, although he had no idea about its previous occupant. The guards ordered him to strip off his survival suit, which he did, turning it inside out as he did so, allowing the full, fetid stink of days of old sweat permeate the small room. Underneath, his own clothes were crumpled and stained.
‘Jesus, he stinks,’ complained one of the guards, stepping back outside in to the corridor beyond to get away from the odour. His colleague followed suit.
‘Now, get out here and don’t try anything stupid,’ one of them said to Pace. As both wore holstered pistols and looked alert for trouble, he knew it would be a wasted effort to resist.
‘Where are we going?’ he ventured. ‘To see Miss Roche?’
‘Not smelling like that,’ the guard snarled.
Pushing him along the corridor in front of them, they walked for about a minute, twisting and turning down several passages until they stopped outside a door clearly marked with the symbol of a spraying shower head.
‘You’ll find soap, shampoo and towels in there. There are no windows so you can’t get away. You’ll also see a chair. On it, there’s a hospital gown. After you’re clean, put it on.’
‘I hope it doesn’t have too big a split up the back,’ Pace shot back.
‘We could always come in and make sure you wash properly,’ warned the guard, catching the sarcasm and resisting the urge to throw a right hook.
‘Thank you but I’ll be fine on my own.’ Not wanting to push their buttons any more, Pace entered a small shower room, making sure he locked the door behind him.
There was a toilet and a small sink, complimenting a simple, glass-encased shower cubicle. A range of pre-packed toiletries sat on the sink, in a similar fashion to a reasonably-priced hotel room. Soap, shaving foam, disposabl
e razor and a couple of small bottles of shampoo and conditioner awaited him. Plain white towels hung invitingly on a wall rack. True to their word, on a chair, sat a hospital gown.
‘Great,’ he muttered, glad to step out of his stinking clothes and under a piping hot waterfall of fresh water. He took his time, making the most of the luxury of scented soap and shampoo, watching the puddles of black water sloshing around his feet before draining away down the plug hole.
Ten minutes later, he was out, staring at his reflection in a simple, circular mirror screwed to the wall above the sink. He was surprised he did not look worse. His cheeks were sunken, as were his eyes, and he carried black bags underneath them from lack of sleep. The main problem was the scraggly growth of stubble, which he set about removing with the razor.
After another five minutes, he was ready to go. Fortunately, the gown had buttons all the way up the back so his modesty was protected as he unlocked the door and rejoined the guards, making sure to waft the stink from his clothes in their direction; now held under one arm.
‘You can keep that stuff in your room,’ sneered one of the guards. ‘There isn’t much fresh air in there so you can live with your own stink. Might stop you running your mouth off.’
Pace had hoped for this exact reaction. He needed his clothing to stay in the cell, especially the survival suit. Neither guard had seemed interested in coming anywhere near it, which was hardly surprising. After fishing him out of the sea, they had completely ignored the chance that he might have a weapon. All they had seen was a half-dead, filthy intruder zipped inside a survival suit that already smelled sour, despite the fresh air of the dock. Nobody had frisked him and, consequently, the Webley .455 still sat inside one of the inner pockets, seemingly protected from discovery by the power of the stale sweat.
Pace was led back to the cell, where he was ordered to throw his soiled clothing down on the floor, as there was still no bed. Then he was led back to the elevator, where he repeated the journey he’d taken before, down the plush corridors until he was hustled into the conference room.