INCARNATION (56 page)

I’m sorry?’

‘A gentleman.’

‘I’d certainly like to think so. It’s not for me to say so, of course.’

Calum thought for a few moments longer.

‘All right then, you’ve got a deal. Ah’ll take the money an’ the car. You can keep the burd. You’ll no’ be disappointed, she’s a great screw. Maybe all your wee friends here can have a go as well. Make it worth their while comin’ all the way oot here. But first, Ah’d like tae see your weapons on the floor.’

Farrar nodded. The HRU did as they were told, locking on their safety buttons and dropping everything they carried.

Calum hopped into his trousers, holding his pistol in one hand as he did so. It was trickier pulling his T-shirt over his head. Whatever way he did it, there was no avoiding that brief moment when his head went through the neck.

That was when they took him.

The man on the far left had his SMG up and firing in less time than it took Calum to squeeze his head through the ring of cloth. He fired several rounds, all directed at the centre of Calum’s chest. The gun had not yet fallen from Calum’s hand, nor his eyes quite stopped blinking before the other members of the unit finished the job.

Calum became a shooting-bag, an inert target of flesh and bone into which hundreds of rounds were pumped. His body erupted in bursts of red, spilling blood over Maddie until she was covered from head to foot in the stuff.

That was when she screamed. Her voice drowned out whatever echoes remained of the shooting, bringing people running from all directions. Elizabeth was there, one of the first. She staggered into the room, took one look at Maddie, and fainted clean away.

Farrar went to Maddie and tossed a blanket round her. It had been handed to him by a paramedic who’d accompanied the unit.

He put the blanket round her, and held her by the shoulders, and whispered in her ear. She was still shuddering with shock, and trying to shut out her horror and her fear. What he whispered was simple and to the point. ‘Listen, Maddie, if you don’t pull yourself together, your mother and I will have you bloody well certified and locked up somewhere from which you’ll never resurface. Think about it very hard.’

He turned to the HRU men still in the room.

‘Right, I want him taken out and dumped somewhere. Somebody get this place cleaned up. I’ll take the girl upstairs.’

‘What time are you planning to return to London, sir?’

Farrar looked surprised.

‘London? You can take Lizzie back if you like. See she understands what happened. I’ll speak to her later.’

‘Very good, sir. What about the girl?’

‘Maddie? She’s staying here for a while longer. With me.’

He tightened the blanket round her shoulders and smiled. Maddie did not smile back. She was quiet, but inside she was still screaming.

I
t was Nabila who came up with a method for locating water. Despite the heat of the sun’s rays that baked the sand above them, the wells they had found previously had always contained cool water, and she reasoned that there might be a discernible difference between the area over a well and the surrounding desert.

She was proved right almost straight away. David used the infra-red scope to scan an area ahead of them and noticed a cool patch about twenty yards further along. Up close, it revealed the tell-tale salt crust of a small well. The brackish water was no use to them, but the experiment had opened up the possibility of their finding artesian wells, and perhaps wells whose water was still supplied by mountain streams to the north of the desert rim.

In the meantime, their own water was going down more quickly than they had anticipated. Carrying the weights they now did, each grew thirsty at a faster rate than usual. Daytime temperatures were still well above all that was reasonable or bearable, even for a desert, and they were baked hour after hour against the red sand as if they were joints of meat in the centre of a large oven.

The helicopters continued their daily passes, never quite close enough to make visual contact. Once, a green-painted chopper landed half a mile away from them.

David and Nabila watched, crouched behind the summit of a dune they had just climbed. A man got out and walked around for a while, then clambered back into the tiny craft and was whisked skywards again. They went to the spot afterwards, and found a dead gazelle and the pilot’s footprints. It was a bit like being Robinson Crusoe and finding that solitary print by the water’s edge.

Soon after that, David found his first proper well. It showed up on the scanner quite clearly, and when they scraped the sand away they found a circular stone cap bearing an inscription in Chinese characters. According to the inscription, this was well number seven in a series connecting the towns of the northern desert corridor. A hole about two inches in diameter and maybe a foot deep had been cut into the stone, and in it sat a length of broken wood, gnarled and twisted by the winds and sands of many centuries.

‘I wonder how they found them in the first place,’ said David as he pushed and pulled in an effort to dislodge the cap.

‘By some form of dowsing, I expect,’ suggested Nabila. ‘I had a patient a few years ago, a farmer who used bent sticks to track down underground water on his farm and the farms of friends. Apparently he was very good at it. He was in great demand.’

‘But out here?’ He straightened for a moment.

'They’d come in winter, probably. Once they had one well, they could afford to take their time to find the next, then another one in the opposite direction.’

David bent again and tried to get the cap moving. It made a slight grinding noise, but still refused to budge. It had been perhaps two thousand years since it was last touched.

‘Let me,’ said Nabila.

David stood aside, still wincing from his efforts. Nabila stood astride the cap, bent down, and twisted it off in a single motion. David stared at her in disbelief.

‘How did you do that?’

She shrugged.

‘Girls’ secrets,’ she said.

They lowered a cup inside on a rope. When it came up, it was filled with the sweetest water they’d ever tasted. They drank and drank, then filled their water containers with as much as they would take. David replaced the stone cap and took a careful record of the well’s position. Even if it were buried beneath ten feet of sand now, it would always be possible to dig straight down to it.

‘What do you think the wooden post was for?’ asked David.

‘I don’t think it was a post. I’d bet it was twenty or thirty feet high and that it had a flag on the top.’

‘So travellers could find it.’

‘Absolutely. What would be the point otherwise?’

The inscription said that the next wells lay ten miles to the east and fifteen to the west. Acting on the assumption that the wells must lie more or less in a straight line, and that the line must lead to a town, as shown on the map, they filled their water containers and headed due east.

‘Ever get the feeling the ancient Chinese knew substantially more than we do even today?’ David asked. He brushed more sweat from his forehead. His hair was matted to his scalp. He’d liked to have had it cut, but they’d forgotten to bring any scissors.

‘You can bet the hard work was done by Uighurs.’

‘Nonsense, you weren’t even around then.’

‘There is that.’

They walked more easily, knowing some sort of end was in sight. Shortly before sunset, in a moment of long shadows, they came to a valley with sharply pitched walls of sand.

‘Do you want to go down?’ asked David, ‘or shall we wait until morning?’

‘Better we go down and get ourselves out of sight somewhere. It’s not worth checking for water, is it? We’re not likely to find fresh so soon.’

‘Not too likely, no. I’d rather use the energy to keep on towards the next well.’

The long descent was punishing, wracking every muscle in their legs and backs as they tried not to fall forward. David found himself pulling back constantly, using his bergen as a counterbalance to the force of gravity. Suddenly, about halfway down, the pull of the descent became too much for him. Just as he was about to fall forwards, Nabila caught his bergen and yanked him backwards. He sat for several moments, recovering his breath.

As he did so, he became aware of a regularity in the wall of the valley below that could not easily be explained as the work of the wind, chiselling the sand into shape. He looked round. The sun was getting close to the horizon, but there was still considerable heat in the sand. On an impulse, he reached into the bergen and pulled out his infra-red scanner.

Seconds later, he was looking at a wholly different place.

‘What’s wrong?’ asked Nabila, coming up to him from below.

He just put out a hand, as though to brush her aside, to get her out of his field of vision.

‘I don’t believe this,’ he said.

‘What can you see?’

He handed the scope to her and pointed towards the dune opposite.

'Take a look at the dune. Can you see the way the sand falls quite naturally from its top down? Then it gets to a spot about halfway down where it slopes more steeply. Run the scope along that section.’

She did as he said, and moments later let out an excited yell.

‘What do you see?’

'I don’t know what it is. Long sections of cool, quite regular, horizontals mostly, with some perpendicular. Like ... like building blocks.’

‘That’s exactly what they are. I’ll bet anything those are stones. They don’t hold the heat as well as the sand, so they show up as cooler areas. Those are houses, Nabila. We’ve found one of our cities.’ They hurried down to the bottom. ‘We can’t possibly hope to dig through this,’ said David. ‘But if we can get a fix on it, maybe we can get a message through. It could be a vital discovery.’

‘Don’t you think you could be making a mistake? If this is a town, how come the buildings are all under one dune?’

‘Well, of course they aren’t. They’ll be under several dunes.’

‘But why isn’t anything showing on the surface between the dunes?’

‘There could be low buildings. We don’t know where the real ground level is. Anything would be covered with sand. Or if they were made from wood, they’d have rotted away.’

They looked round. It wasn’t easy to form an impression of a city out here in the sands. ‘Let’s find a place to camp,’ said Nabila. The light was beginning to fade from the sky, and she wanted to choose a safe place before darkness set in.

Suddenly, she became aware of a sound, the chop, chop, chop of a helicopter’s blade a little distance away. She looked up, and David raised his head too, but there was nothing to see. The engine noise faded as the copter moved away, then grew again until it was louder than before.

‘Look, David - quickly!’

Nabila pointed along the valley to where a speck of colour had appeared just over the horizon. Even as they watched, it grew in size.

'It’s coming in this direction,’ shouted David. ‘Let’s get the hell out of here.’

‘Wait. What’s that?’ She pointed back along the valley at the approaching aircraft.

David lifted the binoculars that he now carried round his neck. The helicopter sprang into sight, its outline softened by the deepening twilight.

‘He’s using searchlights,’ he said. ‘One on either side.’

They watched like rabbits on a dark road as the little craft drew nearer, two long pencils of light stabbing left and right through the deepening shadows.

‘The bastard’s got us trapped,’ said David.

‘He hasn’t seen us yet. If we can get round the corner of this dune we’ll make it. But we have to run.’

They started sprinting, and it seemed as though their feet bogged down in the deep sand at every step, and their legs felt like rubber. Nabila thought of jettisoning her bergen, but realized it would be a huge mistake to do so. Without water and basic provisions, they would quickly die.

The copter headed straight down the valley towards them, pausing every so often to allow the pilot to look more carefully at the ground beneath him. He’ll be fully alert, thought David; there’ll be a fat reward waiting for whoever brings us in.

Suddenly, he saw the terrain open up about a hundred yards on his left, revealing a broad opening where the dune ended.

‘There,’ he shouted. ‘It’s just up ahead.’

They dashed for the opening, desperately trying to get round to the other side of the dune. But it was already too late. The helicopter was on top of them, and before they could outrun it, one of the searchlights had them firmly in its grip.

The pilot could not stop all at once, but went on several hundred yards, then, with a graceful dip, danced and turned, then drove down hard to the gap. The searchlight swung round again, recapturing its prey and pinpointing them harshly against the sand. The pilot executed a slow turn until he was facing them, with the twin lights bright in their faces, forcing them to shut their eyes.

David regretted not having taken the pistol from his pack earlier. It was a Heckler & Koch P7, and at this range he could at least have put the lights out of action, maybe even done some real damage to the helicopter.

As if to mock him, the pilot opened up with a light machine-gun, peppering the ground right in front of them and sending huge plumes of sand like coloured smoke into the air.

‘Keep running back!’ shouted David. He looked over his shoulder and almost fell. It was very nearly dark now, but the searchlights made visible what might have remained hidden had night fallen completely.

The dune did not slope down as it should have done. Instead, it ended abruptly in a high stone wall, a wall that towered fifty or sixty feet above their heads. It was carved and chiselled and ornamented, and in it was set a high door, gaping open and only partly filled with sand.

‘Nabila! Up there!’

They ran together up the ramp leading to the opening, while bullets danced behind them. The helicopter bucked as the pilot attempted to keep them in sight and to fire accurately.

Exhausted, they flung themselves through the opening, not knowing and not caring what was on the other side. The firing continued, and the chopping of the rotors. The helicopter sank lower and lower, and the pilot began to fire wildly into the opening. If he could just pin them down long enough to radio for reinforcements, he’d be sure of his reward without actually taking too many risks.