Blood Sun (2 page)

No foreign accent here. British. Southeast England.

“Really? I see. Well, perhaps we should go through to my study,” Mr. Jackson said. He stepped to one side, aiming his arm toward the left-hand side of the corridor that ran each side of the main staircase. A couple of boys pounded down the stairs. Mr. Jackson shouted, “Boys! Come here!”

Obediently they slowed their exuberant descent. “Just because you are here during term break does not give you the right to behave as if you were at home.” He took one of the boys by a shoulder and turned him to face the two men. “Morris, take these two gentlemen to my study, and put a log on the fire while you’re at it.”

Mr. Jackson smiled apologetically at the two men. “I have to speak to this other boy while I have him at my mercy. Morris here will show you the way, and I’ll be right behind you. Just a minute or so. Off you go, Morris.”

The two men were momentarily caught off guard, but there was no reason for them to be suspicious, so they followed the boy. As they stepped away, they heard Mr. Jackson raise his voice as he castigated the younger boy. “I have told you, time and time again, that this kind of behavior will not be tolerated at Dartmoor High. You are going to learn one way or the other, or I will speak to your mother!”

A heavy door closed behind the men as Morris took them farther down the corridor. Mr. Jackson immediately lowered his voice and held Sayid Khalif’s shoulders squarely.

“Sayid, listen to me. In five minutes I want you to phone my study from Matron’s office. Say one of the boys has cut himself and that Matron wants me to have a look. Got it?”

Sayid nodded.

“I’ll put you on speaker phone so they can hear. And get down to the mailroom and see if there’s anything waiting for Max. If there is—hide it!”

With that final command, Mr. Jackson turned and walked quickly toward his study. Sayid knew Mr. Jackson must have
a very good reason to make such a strange request. Something was wrong, and his best mate, Max Gordon, was in trouble. Again.

Torchlight cut through the darkness of the moor. Soldiers. A hunter group was after Max. Wind-whipped rain would help his escape, but now he lay absolutely still. The men were barely visible in the darkness; camouflage-pattern clothing broke up their silhouettes, and the mist and rain that swirled in and out of the gullies made them half-seen specters. But now they were getting closer, quartering the ground—a methodical search pattern. Max had watched them for the latter part of the day, saw them start wide a kilometer away and gradually tighten the search zone until it was barely a two-hundred-meter semicircle. The net was closing.

Max shivered. He’d give anything for a hot drink right now. That would improve his energy, take the cramp from his aching muscles and boost his morale. He had barely slept for two days. Always on the move, aware that others had already been trapped and caught, he had slithered his way through gorse, heather and mud, keeping a low profile, remembering tips his father had given him over the years:
If you’re being hunted, stay below the skyline. Move at night. No fires, no torches. The tiniest speck of light can be seen for miles. And if you want the best chance to stay undetected, crawl into the biggest thornbush or the dirtiest, smelliest place you can find
.

Well, Max hadn’t found a thornbush, but on the first night, he had come across a sheepfold scooped out of the ground, high on the moor. It was a bitterly cold night, exposed
to the northwest wind that howled in from the coast. The small, half-walled stone shelter was virtually invisible to the naked eye. It stank of sheep droppings, which the rain had turned into slurry. Max had secured one edge of a groundsheet under the wall’s top stone, laid rocks on the other, laid a smaller sheet in the sludge underneath, then crawled into this shelter inside his lightweight sleeping bag. The place reeked of sheep urine, but he felt sure that if the hunter group had tracker dogs, this stench would throw them off his scent.

He hadn’t cooked a meal since he’d escaped from the army truck when this whole thing started, but had lived off dried fruit and water. Hunger would play a role in his survival, and he needed to keep the gnawing pangs at bay. If you knew where to look,
Lathyrus linifolius
—known locally as heath pea—would be invaluable. Max had gone straight to a shaded area of moss and heather, where the small tubers grew about ten centimeters belowground, and scrabbled beneath the thin surface of turf. He ate the tubers raw. They tasted bitter and smelled of licorice, but they were an appetite suppressant, which would halt his body’s craving for food.

The first two days saw him cover the most distance in avoiding the patrols, but then, as others were captured—a flare lit the sky every time one was taken—more troops came into the area to hunt for survivors. Max had covered more than fifteen kilometers over difficult terrain the previous day, and that night he saw a light flicker far across a valley. Another boy had succumbed and risked a hot meal. Max waited, lying shivering in the wet. Sure enough, the smell of food drifted across the valley. He watched, unmoving, staring intently into the darkness, searching out every sway of grass
and heather, certain he could see shadows emerging from the deep gorse. Max’s instincts felt as though they sat on his skin—an animal waiting for the least vibration to alert him to danger.

And then a shout and a parachute flare shot into the blustery sky—it swung crazily in the wind, drunk with success.

How many of those being pursued like Max were left out there? He didn’t care. He was going to survive. After the sheepfold hideout, he set off before dawn and jogged along animal tracks, scars in the heather—uneven underfoot, but a good way to put distance between himself and those giving chase. The gorse needles covered the tracks at shin height, and they pierced his lightweight cotton trousers, pricking his skin, but they also stopped anyone seeing his footprints. Now, at the end of the third day, he ran on a bearing, zigzagging across the open moor, using his compass.

Dartmoor was notorious for its rainfall. Bogs and mires dotted the landscape. Water squelched underfoot, seeping down a grassy hillside. There was a crawl space beneath a slab of granite resting on a smaller rock, like a smaller cist—one of the ancient boxlike burial chambers that dotted prehistoric settlements on the moor.

Five hundred meters up the hill behind him was a cairn and a trig point. With the absence of any prominent structures, such as church towers, on the open moor, Ordnance Survey trigonometric stations were built, short concrete pillars used as map references. Max didn’t need his compass for that one. When dawn came, he would have a clear line of sight toward Dartmoor High and would find the most concealed route home.

After three days of living rough and being chased by these hardened soldiers, he ached and shivered whenever he stopped running.

Now they were almost on him.

Max squirmed through the mud; if he got up and ran, he could be out of sight for at least two minutes—that was all he needed. He flung his groundsheet across the gorse and secured it by twisting bungees at each corner round the roots, ignoring the wasplike stings of the gorse needles on his hands. Water seeped into his already sodden cargo pants as he crawled under, reached in and dropped his beta light. Its dull glow barely registered, but it would draw the soldiers like moths to a flame.

He could already hear their labored breathing.

Max left his kit and leopard-crawled down a sluice. It was an animal track barely as wide as his body, probably a badger or a fox run, and the ferns and gorse offered a low canopy of concealment—provided he stayed down. As he dug knees and elbows into the ground, fear gushed through him. In those few moments, he felt a huge sympathy for animals pursued to their deaths by huntsmen.

“There he is!” a voice cried.

Max stopped, holding his breath. Boots crushed the ground to the left, less than a meter from his face, and then to the right. He wriggled forward, almost between the two men, who saw nothing because they were focused on the dull glow up ahead. The wind shook fern and gorse, and another squall whipped rain across their vision.

“Come on out, boy! It’s over!”

The voices were behind him now, and the torchlight
scanned the area he had drawn them to. Like slimy sewage, animal droppings and fouled water slithered under his clothes; his shins scraped rock, and his arms caught sharp-edged gorse sticks—he ignored it. Time to break cover.

Shadows loomed.

They had trapped him!

The men with the torches were the distraction; like any good hunter group, they had a second ring of men behind the first. They were the outer defense—and they didn’t use torches.

Max barreled into the dark bulk of one of them. The man cried out, swore, kicked and squirmed and grabbed Max’s ankle. Max couldn’t recover; someone else pinioned him, and his breath got knocked out of him. Something deep inside him exploded, a surge of power; an animal cry echoed through his mind as he gulped air and twisted free, slamming a third man in the chest as he leapt like a wolf.

Then he was gone into the storm with long, open strides, feet barely touching the ground, carrying him into the darkness.

“We seem to be out of chocolate biscuits,” Mr. Jackson apologized as he poured hot water into cups. “And it’s only instant, I’m afraid,” he said, handing the scalding mugs of coffee to the two men. He wanted them out of his school as soon as possible and had no intention of making them comfortable. “Now, where’s the sugar? I’m sure these boys sneak in here and help themselves.”

The two MI5 officers were in no mood for hospitality either. Stanton cursed under his breath as the hot liquid spilled. “We’re hoping Max Gordon can help us with information,” he said testily.

“I have to say,” Mr. Jackson said quietly, “that I don’t quite understand how the suicide of a former pupil on the London Underground can involve either this country’s Security Service or Max Gordon. Danny Maguire left here when he was eighteen, and that was well over a year ago, closer to
two, in fact. He certainly hasn’t been in contact with anyone here, as far as I know.”

Drew quietly inhaled to ease his impatience. This was supposed to be a straightforward “get in, check the kid and get out” inquiry. And here they were, sitting in overstuffed chairs in front of a blazing log fire in a room crammed with so many books it looked like a country-house library. Fergus Jackson seemed to have a cozy number here, probably whiling away his days until retirement. Soft, cosseted academics. What did they know about the real world?

“Police agencies in South America picked up a flagged word a few months ago during a regular intel sweep of Internet traffic,” he said.

“Intel?” Mr. Jackson asked, looking perplexed, knowing full well what the word meant.

“Intelligence,” Stanton replied. “Look, Mr. Jackson. This is just a routine inquiry. If we could just speak to Max Gordon …”

“I wish I could help, I really do, but he’s on holiday. Half-term. He’s not here. He went to Italy with a friend and his parents,” Mr. Jackson lied. “But what kind of intelligence?” he asked, trying to momentarily divert interest away from Max.

The man answered patiently, humoring Jackson, not wishing to appear too eager to get to Max Gordon. “We think Danny Maguire might have been involved in drug smuggling.”

“Rubbish!” Mr. Jackson couldn’t hold back his incredulity. “Maguire? The boy barely took a headache pill when he was here.”

“I didn’t say he was taking drugs but that he might have been trafficking them. So, if we could at least have a look at Gordon’s room?”

“Of course. What a shocking business. We will endeavor to assist your inquiries as far as possible. Drug smuggling. Who’d have thought it?”

The men stood in anticipation, pleased at last to get past this dithering idiot of a headmaster. The phone rang. Mr. Jackson raised a hand to settle them back down again. He pressed a button. “Yes?”

“It’s Khalif, sir,” Sayid’s voice said into the room.

“I’m very busy on important business, boy. I don’t want to be disturbed. What is it?”

“Matron says that Harry Clark has cut his foot on broken glass.”

“Well, tell her to deal with it. I’m not a doctor. It’s what we pay her for,” Mr. Jackson said, convincingly grumpy.

“She said you might have to call an ambulance.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake! Very well, I’ll be right there.”

Mr. Jackson ended the call. “This’ll take only a minute,” he said apologetically. “There are some macaroons in that jar. Do help yourselves.”

Moments later he lifted the phone receiver in the staff room and patted Sayid’s shoulder as the boy reported back. “Nothing for Max in the mailroom, sir.”

“Well done. Go and check his room. Make sure there’s no recent mail there. If there is, hide it in your room. And take his laptop as well. Be quick.”

Sayid closed the door behind him as Mr. Jackson dialed a number. The soft voice of a pupil’s father responded.

“Ridgeway.”

“Bob, it’s Fergus. I need your help.”

Robert Ridgeway was a senior man in Britain’s Security Service, and his youngest son excelled at just about everything at Dartmoor High. He knew the value of Fergus Jackson’s care for his charges, and a phone call from him was not something to be taken lightly. He listened to Jackson’s requests, asked him to wait a moment and in less than a minute came back with definitive answers.