by Chris Ward
The terrible booming stopped. Mark had pulled the plug on their broadcast and he waved Viola back behind the camera, which he zoomed in on the gates. The man hanging beside the projector appeared to be screaming, but his voice was lost over the cacophony of dozens of other TV crews, police sirens, and a couple of helicopters hovering overhead.
The man on the screen lifted a hand. He was wearing black gloves but his fingers appeared crooked as if they’d been broken and not reset. Viola felt a tingle of fear, and suddenly wished they could get into their TV van and head back to Bucharest.
‘Welcome, friends,’ the man said in Romanian with just a hint of an accent. ‘I hope you are watching carefully.’
The screen changed to a view of a thin catwalk stretching between the two tallest towers of Heigel Castle. In the middle was a covered gallery and hanging below it was something that seemed to sway slightly in the breeze. Viola gasped as the camera zoomed in. It was a metal cage filled with people.
‘My birds,’ the voice said, and now the sinister clink of piano music started up like the drip-drip of a leaking tap, echoing across the valley. The man hanging beside the screen began to writhe and buck.
‘That sick bastard,’ Mark said. ‘He’s got that guy wired up to some kind of torture device. Quick, we have to film this.’
Viola grabbed her microphone and got back into position. Mark waved for live recording, even as the voice began to speak again.
‘You have until midday to deliver a governmental decree declaring the district of Heigel to be a designated National Park, otherwise I will set my birds free.’
‘The madman is making his ultimatum,’ Viola added for her viewers. ‘We have no word yet on whether there will be military intervention.’
The view of the cage continued to expand, zooming in on a Romanian man slumped against the near side, his eyes looking down towards the town far below.
Viola gasped. The man was famous throughout Romania, but for his power and wealth, not the defeat in his eyes and the bruises on his face.
Grigore Albescu.
‘Um, what we’re seeing now is quite astonishing,’ Viola said. ‘It appears that one of the hostages is the well-known businessman, Grigore Albescu, owner of Heigel Castle and in the running to be the town’s new mayor. Several weeks ago he disappeared. Now it seems he has been found.’
The view on the screen switched back to the man in the hood. ‘So, now you have proof,’ he said. ‘Albescu’s pretty lady friend, Crina Dobel, took a recent flight. You might find bits of her in the forest at the base of the bluff if you care to look. I’d hurry now, or there might not be much left.’ A cackling laugh came from under the hood. ‘Animals are hungry at this time of year.’
A commotion rose from the assembled police. One or two reached for their radios, while others looked uncertain, unsure what to do and who to ask. Viola understood that the local police chief was dead, and Bucharest was still scrambling to assemble a task force. Rumour had it that army units were being deployed, but it might be some time before they arrived.
‘You have approximately twenty minutes,’ the man said. ‘I really would hurry.’
The view switched back to the cage, this time from a different angle. A number of people were visible inside.
As she lifted up her microphone, she found herself without anything to say. Whatever happened now, Heigel would never be the same. Perhaps, she thought, that was exactly the point.
Captain Georges Mattieu turned to his co-pilot, Lianna Roskovic, and smiled. Don’t worry, he tried to imply. We’ll be back on the ground before you know it, getting those drinks in a bar down in Lipscani, and then perhaps we’ll retire early.
They’d been dating for about a month. For the first time in his ten-year military career, Georges had seriously considered jacking it all in and returning to civilian life. He’d known Lianna six months, but from the minute they’d begun their whirlwind romance, the possibility of getting shipped off to one of the United Nations’ many peacekeeping war zones and put in the line of fire when they could be together watching a movie or making love made him more reluctant than ever. It was good money, but still. It was a ticket to six feet underground waiting to happen.
She turned to him and smiled. ‘Captain, let’s get this crazy bastard up on the display,’ she said, then blew him a kiss that would stay secret from those listening in base headquarters. Romances between pilots were forbidden, as if those at the top thought they’d suddenly park up somewhere for a quickie instead of finishing their mission.
The video screen built into the helicopter’s dash flickered on and an image of a shadowy man in a hood appeared.
‘I warn you, do not attempt to enter the castle,’ he said, in Romanian that Georges knew from the accent was learned, but was still impressive. ‘I will tolerate no attempts to disrupt my plans. Keep your distance or I will strike. You have been warned.’
‘Does he have any weapons down there?’ Lianna asked. ‘Let’s have a look.’
They were a mile from the castle, coming in from the west. Georges groaned as he saw a couple of TV helicopters hovering near the castle gates. ‘Like goddamn flies,’ he muttered before he could think to cover the mike. Oh well, too late now. Not like there’s anyone at HQ who wouldn’t agree with me.
Lianna had changed the view back to a heat sensor map of the castle. She enlarged the view until red shapes signifying people appeared, most of them in one group between the two towers, but a few others scattered across the building.
‘Nothing down there except a cold lump of stone,’ she said, switching the view back to regular and zooming in again. ‘Although that guy down there appears to be pointing a Medieval cannon at us.’
Georges felt a bead of sweat dribble down his neck. ‘Don’t worry, if it works at all it won’t have the range, not pointed up at the sky like that. We’ll go a little higher though, just in case.’
He started to pull the helicopter up a little more. After all, their mission was just to observe. The attack, if and when it came, would be from over the walls. At the moment they were just trying to sound this guy out, to see if he was serious.
The flare of light followed a fraction of a second later by a boom was nothing a regular cannon could have made. As the helicopter shuddered under the impact, a sudden wind filled the cab as the tail broke away, and then the bite of igniting fuel kissed Georges’s face. He closed his eyes, not wanting to see Lianna’s beautiful eyes burn, as what remained of the helicopter rolled and thundered into freefall, dropping like a stone God had hurled at the ground.
As the missile struck the military helicopter and its burning wreckage plummeted out of sight into the forest, a stunned silence fell over the assembled police and TV reporters. Engines still hummed, police sirens still wailed, and the mournful piano clink still filled the air, but none of the people spoke or moved. Almost as one they stared in the direction of the fallen helicopter and then turned back towards the castle.
If there had been any doubt before, there was none now. This anonymous man was deadly serious.
40
Attempts at rescue
Naotoshi heard the sound of what only a fool might describe as music, and felt a sudden urgency as he pushed his old legs onwards up the staircase, following in Nozomi’s wake. With the crossbow held in his arms he was near his strength’s end, but somewhere up ahead were people who needed help. He didn’t know why or how he could help them, but they had seen no other birdmen, which meant the creatures had assembled somewhere. Over the top of the awful sounds came an amplified voice too. He assumed the language was Romanian. While he couldn’t guess at its meaning, he understood its significance.
The other tourists were in trouble.
Nozomi was several steps above him, making gun motions with her fire extinguisher like an assassin in training. While Naotoshi plodded after her, with each step feeling less and less the former monster hunter and more and more the retired old man, she would dance on ahead
, make a few air gunshots, then wait for him to catch up. He wondered at what point this had become a game for her, but his own youth was so long ago that he could barely remember what it felt like to see the world through glasses tinted with fantasy. He had made—and later lost—his name searching for the likes of Nessie and Bigfoot, but his background had been as a simple historian.
He stopped to catch his breath as a huge explosion boomed in the sky above them. Up ahead, Nozomi had rushed up to the next landing and was leaning out of a glassless window, peering up at the sky.
‘Wow!’ she shouted. ‘Look at that! They shot it down!’
Naotoshi didn’t try to rush to the window to see. He pushed himself onwards, taking the stairs one slow step at a time until he came up to where the girl was waiting, the last breath seemingly squeezed out of his body.
‘What happened?’ he wheezed.
‘They shot it down. A helicopter. Boom! They just shot it out of the sky.’
‘That’s not good.’
He leaned out of the window and quickly flinched back. The opening in the wall looked out onto a patchwork of countryside far below. A trail of smoke rose out of the forest between a gap in the canopy where something had smashed through.
It had to be the helicopter.
‘Look! There are some people!’
Naotoshi gasped. Nozomi had crawled up onto the window ledge and was leaning out over the gap, keening her head to see to the left, where the rest of the castle opened out.
‘Get back in!’
‘Two of them,’ she said, ignoring him. ‘They’re hanging from the wall.’
‘What are they hanging from the wall for? Are they abseiling or something? This is hardly the time—’
The girl tugged on his hand. ‘Oh, it looks like Uncle Jun.’
‘Who’s Uncle Jun?’
‘Uncle Jun!’ the girl screamed, leaning out so far Naotoshi was afraid the tiniest gust of wind would blow her off. He reached out to pull her back, so close to the edge himself that he was too scared to close his eyes, and he finally saw what she was looking at.
Hanging by their arms from the battlements of the keep above them, on a buttress that protruded from the main wall, were a man and a woman. They were facing Nozomi and Naotoshi but looking up over their heads towards something that was out of sight.
Naotoshi stared. ‘I don’t believe it. Of all the people….’
He had no idea who the young man was, but the girl still left a bitter taste in his mouth.
Jennie Nakamura, the tour guide.
Perhaps I was a little hard on her, he thought. She might have been terrible at her job, but she doesn’t deserve this.
‘We have to save them!’
‘How?’
‘We can pull them back up.’
Naotoshi climbed in from the window ledge and pulled the girl back with him. He closed his eyes and made a few estimations based on what he could remember of the castle from guidebooks and TV. To get to where the two young people were hanging they would have to backtrack down a couple of levels, take a corridor under the main keep and then climb back up to the roof.
The rest of the tourists were above him somewhere, in the King’s and Queen’s Towers. His monster hunter intuition told him that this time he would find the creature at the end of the rainbow if he only kept on moving forward. They were close, but he was so, so tired.
There was no way he could make it back to rescue Jennie Nakamura and Nozomi’s uncle Jun, then get back here to save the others.
He crouched down and pulled the girl close. ‘We have to split up,’ he said. ‘I have to keep going, to save my friends. You have to go back to save your uncle and the girl.’
Using the tip of one of the crossbow quarrels, he scratched a crude map on the stone steps. The girl nodded as he explained what she had to do. ‘And if you see anyone, get out of sight,’ he said. ‘Your safety is more important than anything. You are useless to them if you get hurt or captured. Do you understand me?’
Nozomi nodded. ‘Okay,’ she said, turning to go.
‘Wait!’
Nozomi turned back. ‘What?’
Naotoshi stuck out a gnarled old hand. He had a feeling he would never see the girl again. ‘Young lady, it’s been a pleasure hunting monsters with you,’ he said. ‘I wish you all the luck in the world.’
Nozomi smiled. ‘Thank you, Mr. Waribe. You too.’
With the briefest of tugs on his hand she was gone, skipping off into the shadows of the stairwell below them. Naotoshi watched until she was out of sight, then took a deep breath and picked up the crossbow. Feeling like all the long, weary journeys of his life were finally converging, he started up the stairs towards his destiny.
Jennie was crying and there was nothing Jun could do. Seeing the helicopter go down had sucked the last resolve out of both of them, and all that was left was to watch whatever theatre Crow was planning to play out with in the cage hanging in the sky between the two towers.
Jun’s whole upper body was numb. He could barely twist around, but he could lift his head enough to see that the birdmen who had been standing on the battlements above them had gone, perhaps to man the weapons which had just shot a Romanian military helicopter out of the sky. If only there was some way he could turn around and get a foothold on the wall, perhaps there was a chance—
‘Uncle Jun?’
The voice came out of the sky like a mirage. Of all the people, it couldn’t be—
‘It’s me, Nozomi. Are you all right?’
He craned his neck to look up, and there she was, Ken and Karin’s seven-year-old daughter, peering over the top of the battlements, her hair falling down around a face framed against the backdrop of a grey sky.
She was smiling.
‘Are you all right? How can I pull you up?’
It took him a moment to gather the strength to answer. ‘Is there any more rope?’
‘Hang on, I’ll check.’
Jennie was staring at him. ‘Who is she?’
‘She’s my best friend’s daughter. Why she’s here I can’t imagine. I don’t want to imagine.’
A rope sling fell against the wall to Jun’s right. He shifted a foot and put his weight on it, gasping as the pressure was taken off his shoulders for the first time in what felt like days. For a few seconds he could only take short, sharp breaths as the circulation returned to his arms.
‘Can you pull yourself up?’ Nozomi asked. ‘That’s all I could find. I tied it to a hook on the inside wall.’
‘Thanks. I’ll try.’
Jun let the sling take his weight until his arms began to loosen. He couldn’t glance at Jennie, still hanging to his left, just too far away to get her feet into the sling. He’d rescue her as quickly as he could, but if he tried too soon and slipped, they’d both be dead.
‘Okay. I’m going to pull myself up a few inches. As you feel the slack, loop the rope again so it’s a little higher. Are you ready?’
The girl nodded. ‘I’ve got it.’
‘Good. Okay … now!’
Jun pulled himself up as far as he could, bending his knees at the same time. When he relaxed them, he found the rope had moved up a little. Letting it take his weight, he wrapped his bonds around his arms, until he was only a couple of feet below the battlements.
‘Great!’ he said. ‘Once more should do it. Ready?’
‘Ready.’
They repeated the process, and this time when Jun straightened out his legs, he was able to get a handhold on the top of the battlements. Lifting his feet one more time, Nozomi wrapped the spare rope around his wrist and he was able to pull himself over. Gasping for breath, he waited while Nozomi removed his bonds. He frowned at the deep red score marks that had almost broken through the skin.
‘Jun!’
‘I’m coming, Jennie!’
Jennie weighed much less than Jun, so with Nozomi’s help he was able to pull her up over the battlements. She sat back against the rock wall
and groaned as she rubbed her shoulders. Jun gave Nozomi a hug.
‘I don’t know what you’re doing here, but thank you. You’ve saved our lives.’
Nozomi just shrugged. ‘You’re welcome. But we have to go. They’ve got Mummy.’
Karin, Jun thought with a jolt of regret. So, she had been sucked into this because Ken had. All because I was too stupid to cover my tracks. If anything happens to them it’s all on me.
‘Where are they?’
Nozomi pointed up at the cage. ‘There.’
Jun had seen the people being loaded into the cage, but at this distance it had been impossible to make out their features. Jennie had guessed from the build that some of them were her tourists, but there were a couple of taller men who had to be Romanian. They had heard the sinister music and the distant mumble of Crow’s ultimatum to whomever he might be addressing, but it had been too muffled for Jennie to decipher his words.
‘Hurry,’ Nozomi said. ‘We have to help Mr. Waribe.’
It was Jennie’s turn to look surprised. ‘Naotoshi? He’s not in there with the rest of them?’
Nozomi shook her head. ‘He saved me. In the forest. Then we got trapped in here.’
‘Where is he?’
‘He’s gone up there. He’s gone up to fight the birds.’
Jun looked from one to the other. ‘Who’s Naotoshi Waribe?’
Jennie smiled. ‘Come on, Jun, didn’t you see the reruns as a kid? He’s the Monster Hunter.’
Jun stared at her. The situation was so absurd that for a moment he almost laughed. ‘Are you fucking serious? The Naotoshi Waribe? That TV clown?’
Jennie gave a wry smile. ‘The very same. He’s been the thorn in the side of my tour party since day one.’
‘He saved me,’ Nozomi repeated.
‘And he’s gone up against Crow? Alone?’ Jun stood up. ‘Come on, we have to hurry. Crow is no monster, despite how he might appear. He’s a man. But he’s dangerous. He’s more dangerous than you can possibly imagine.’