Ice Claw (47 page)

The clouds swirled above his head. Violent lightning tongued through darkness, ghostly images exposing the inside of cloud formations. Max needed a headwind. He pulled open the access doors. It was like being inside a tornado. At this height the air was calmer, the wind pushing against him. But it was the perfect vantage point. Max could see exactly where the two towers stood, an incredible display of lightning crackling between them. Tishenko was drawing nature to him and turning it into dark power.

11:22.
Cut bears claw
.

Strapped tightly into the harness, Max threw the fabric he held bundled in his arms into the storm. Like a dog seizing a rat, the wind snarled and snatched it, tossing him into the
air. Max plunged into a surreal world. Snow and ice below, turbulent black clouds above. Lightning cut across the valley, showing him exactly where to go. He tugged on the paraglider’s risers, spilling air from the canopy. The web of lines connecting him to the wing above his head sizzled with tension. A compass and airspeed indicator were stitched into the harness.

The air bit his skin; pellets of hail stung his hands. He fought the gale to stay on course for the towers. As each lightning flash crashed across the landscape Max saw movement below. Wolves. They shadowed him, perhaps believing it was their master beneath the black wing. And if he fell? They would soon realize that the figure wearing the mask was not Fedir Tishenko. It didn’t matter. He felt as if he was running ahead of the pack. Leading them.

Max pulled down on the risers, collapsing air out of the canopy. The drop was dramatic. Too much. He corrected, shifted his weight, threw a hand up to protect himself as lightning slashed across the veiled rain. This was the wildest ride of his life.

The two towers were in a compound. They looked like watchtowers in a prisoner-of-war camp, but they were only two hundred meters apart. And there were no huts other than a brick-built structure, half underground, that looked like a generator room. It squatted at the perimeter fence. A raised hump of ground went from the base of each tower into this building.

Max was tossed across the sky. A gust had swept around the side of the mountain. This was the wind shear he knew Tishenko had avoided. Now it forced Max to fight for his life.
He pulled this way and that, cascaded down the side of the far reaches of the mountain, turned into a confused wind and spilled even more air. He was going down. Fast. And aiming straight for the compound.

Fire strangled the towers. But then Max realized that what he saw were cables carrying the lightning strikes down into the ground, along those humps in the ground and into the building.

A figure stood in the wire-mesh control box at the top of one tower. Lightning laced itself around the cage, trying to reach him, like a frustrated monster. But as long as Tishenko stayed in the zero field he was safe. One finger outside that safety zone and he would die like an insect flying into a bug zapper. He manipulated the two control levers that guided the ten-meter parabola—like a big satellite television dish. It caught lightning and threw it into the preset dish on the other tower. Sometimes the lightning divided itself and struck both parabolas at the same time, creating an even more powerful electrical charge.

Tishenko neither saw nor heard Max’s approach, but he turned and gazed into the night, his sixth sense as strong as ever. A black-winged creature with the face of a wolf swept out of the sky. Max Gordon had survived and still attacked. So, the boy wore the mask of a wolf man? Then he must be prepared to die as one.

Max knew he was coming in too fast. If he tried to turn now he’d be dragged into that cheese grater of a fence. He let go of everything, covered his head with his arms and tucked his legs back into the paraglider’s seat.
When all else fails—panic!
a voice shouted scornfully in his head.

With no tension on the control lines, the canopy fluffed with air, rose two meters and then stalled. Max dropped less than the height of his dorm table at Dartmoor High.

Unbuckling the harness, he ran into the devil’s furnace. Lightning exploded, tortured wind screamed through the tower’s wire-mesh cage, and in the far distance a rolling ball of fire tumbled down the valley’s sky, parting the clouds like a meteor scars the night sky.

Over the storm’s deafening smash he heard a man scream. Tishenko. Cursing Max Gordon.

11:30.

The inner core of the second tower was a lift. He pressed the button. No doors—an open platform sped him upwards. Max was inside what felt like the biggest exploding firework in the world. A flash blinded him. Black, melting blobs swam in front of his eyes. Tishenko had swept the dish down and thrown a bolt of lightning at Max’s tower. And again. The power slammed the cage where Max now stood. Two gamelike control levers sat on a console panel. Whatever Tishenko had preset was immediately unlocked by Max’s pressing the manual control button. Max heard the hum of power as he tweaked the handles. The dish on his tower responded immediately. There was no time lag between command and response.

As Max swung the dish into the sky he saw the fireball move ever closer. Beyond this valley Lake Geneva sat trapped between two mountain ranges. An anvil blow along this telluric line would shatter the valley’s floor, like tapping an egg against the rim of a frying pan.

11:32.

Two minutes left!

Tishenko struck Max’s tower again with another bolt of lightning. It shook, and for a moment Max felt that it would shudder itself into a crumpled heap. His dish caught a bolt of lightning and threw it against Tishenko’s tower. If it was a game Tishenko wanted, Max was up for it.

The natural phenomenon tearing across the sky now looked like a fiery meteor crashing to earth, but it was the spear tip of a mighty lightning strike. Catastrophe was about to strike, and a scientist-monk had predicted this very disaster. The chain-mail fist of fire was going to pulverize the inside of a mountain in less than …

11:33.
Cut bears claw
.

Tishenko had killed Sayid! Max’s anger burned as brightly as the storm, his concentration blocking out the shattering noise. Tishenko and Max traded blows. Lightning bolts clashed like medieval swords in personal combat across the two-hundred-meter battlefield between the towers.

Tishenko slashed Max’s tower again, an enormous strike that lit the whole area. Max reeled. Tishenko saw the boy stumble, the impact slamming him to the cage floor.

The flash of light held the valley in its glare. Max stared at the looming black monster of a mountain. It rose up into the heavens, forcing aside the clouds, its peak like a bear’s head, its jagged ridges grasping the valley floor—clawlike.
Cut bears claw
.

Max’s mind did not reason, his thoughts did not question.

11:34.

The cosmic lightning struck.

Max twisted the controls. The fiery bolt seared from the dish and severed the bony ridge of mountain that looked, in that instant, like a bear’s claws.

Every moment of Fedir Tishenko’s existence encapsulated itself in a microsecond. He was the fire god who would destroy and create life. Touched by the power from the sky when a child, he could not be harmed again. So he was baffled at the searing pain that shafted through his chest and thrust him against the cage’s mesh wall. The eye of the storm recognized its long-lost son, reached out with a cruel stiletto lightning strike and took him home.

Time moved in slow motion for Max. His tower was collapsing; the mountainside exploded and Sharkface stood in the firelit snow, next to a motocross bike, his arm still extended, having loosed the arrow from Tishenko’s hunting bow. The shaft had pierced Tishenko’s chest and then thrust its steel tip through the cage wall, offering itself, and its victim, to the lightning.

Max’s tower collapsed slowly, crumpling as wearily as an armor-clad knight beaten into submission. He clung to the control box, heard tearing metal as the structure flattened the perimeter fence and then the tower’s death rattle: its steel groaning in final surrender.

The earth trembled, wind snared the clouds and within one hour the crystal-clear night settled a frost across the land and Max’s crumpled body.

Then the wolves came.

Silence can be bought; events can be explained with half truths and scientific explanations. There were more than a dozen deaths from the battle inside the mountain that Corentin and Thierry fought alone. Official reports stated that seven of these men were members of a climbing team stranded on the notorious north face of the Citadel. Inexperienced climbers, they were caught by the minor earthquake that shook the region that night, and five rescue workers died trying to bring them off the mountain. It was a tragedy.

There was considerable damage to one of the lower-lying villages but, thankfully, there were no fatalities. An undisclosed number of scientists monitoring seismic activity in the Citadel research center had been rescued, which explained the presence of Swiss and French forces in the area that night—a wonderful example of cross-border cooperation, a government spokesperson said. The truth was that Tishenko’s scientists were held in undisclosed secure centers, where their psychiatric health would be examined over a number of years.

Climate change and a phenomenal weather pattern were blamed for everything.

“Wake up, boy,” Corentin said roughly.

He shook Max, brushing frost and snow from his body, slapping him gently until Max awoke.

“OK, I’m OK … Corentin … what happened?” Max said.

The big man hauled him to his feet.

“The cavalry came, late as usual, but they’ll take all the glory,” Thierry said. “They always do.”

Max remembered Tishenko’s death. “Where’s Sharkface?”

“Who?” Corentin asked.

“There was a boy here. He killed Tishenko.”

“Give the kid a medal,” Thierry said. “There was no one here except you and the wolves.”

“A pack of wolves?” Max asked.

“That’s right. A polar bear was on the loose. He was very interested in having you for breakfast,” Corentin told him.

“I don’t understand,” Max said.

“The wolves, they were in a circle around you, one big wolf—”

“One big bad wolf,” Thierry laughed, interrupting his partner as they helped Max to the Audi.

“He would not let anyone near you—and the pack, well, it was not something I have seen before, but they kept that polar bear away from you.”

“You didn’t kill the wolves?” Max asked, suddenly alarmed.

“A few shots in the air. The alpha male, he stood his ground to the end, but Corentin here talked to him like he was a poodle, and he left you alone.”

Corentin opened the Audi’s front door and eased Max into the passenger seat.

And as Corentin wheeled the car away from the devastation, the studded tires crimping the snow, Max fell into a deep sleep. He woke up sixteen hours later in a Swiss private clinic.

The beauty of Switzerland is in not only its magnificent country side but also its secrecy laws. Everything was hushed
up. Anyone connected with Max’s ordeal was taken into safety, nursed, cared for and debriefed by government agencies and scientists.

Scientists explained that the slab of mountainside Max had exploded crashed down into the fissures and crevasses beneath the valley floor and stopped whatever shock wave there was from cleaving Lake Geneva, devastating the CERN research facility and destroying the environment and countless lives. How had he known to do that? they wanted to know.

“Zabala. He did it,” Max told them.

“The discredited scientist?” they scoffed.

There was no proof Max could offer. The pendant stone had disintegrated with Tishenko. Perhaps it was enough that Max knew the truth. What Max did know was that it was good to be alive and breathe this high mountain air without fear lurking behind every rock.

Sharkface had escaped that night. There was no sign of Tishenko’s wolf mask that Max had worn. The killer must have thought Max dead and taken it before the wolves arrived. Who knew? Maybe it was enough for the outcast boy to have killed Tishenko and taken the mantle of the
vucari
.

“What happened to the huge crystal in the mountain?” Max asked Corentin.

The rough-looking man shrugged. He was just an ex-Legionnaire being paid to save a couple of kids. Not that Max had needed their help.

It was a great compliment from the fighting man, but Max knew his DNA had been mixed with a predator’s and stored in that crystal. Where was it? The doctors and scientists he had questioned denied any knowledge of it.

It was a closed matter. None of it had ever happened—officially. It didn’t matter; that was what governments did. Max just felt lucky everything had worked out the way it had. Did he believe in luck? Or was that just superstition? He didn’t care—luck was essential.

Three other figures lay on wooden loungers in the late-winter sun, their injured legs propped up. Sophie Fauvre had had the best orthopedic surgeon in Switzerland work on her damaged knee. She had beamed when Max arrived, but she saw his weariness. Battle fatigue, Corentin told her. Max had been through something huge. Probably something he wouldn’t be able to talk about for a long time.