Switchers (18 page)

High above, a satellite had picked up the heat emissions from the battle, and three planes were converging on the spot. But by the time they arrived, Kevin was gone, and their surveillance equipment picked up no signs of life.

But a few hundred miles away, above Greenland, another plane was about to intercept Tess’s path. Her infra-red image had just appeared on the aircraft’s monitor, and a rapid radio communication had put the crew on to the offensive. Wolfe didn’t know what those things were out there, but he wasn’t taking any chances. The first heat-seeking missile was armed and ready to go.

Tess’s flight path was erratic and unpredictable, and the pilot of the bomber wasn’t about to take chances. As soon as he got a clear radar fix, he fired off the missile and swung around out of the area.

Tess had known that the plane was there, but she hadn’t expected that it would be able to detect her. She accepted her dragon ability to see objects by the heat they emitted, but she had no idea that there was an equivalent technology available to the military. So, when she picked up the image of the missile snaking towards her, she was completely off guard. If she had been expecting it she might have dodged, since dragons can perform fantastic aerial manoeuvres which no missile could possibly follow. Instead, instinctively, she changed herself into a swallow. The missile swept past, catching her in its current of air and swirling her around in the blizzard. Then, finding itself without a target, it ploughed blindly on, straight into the snow beneath.

The swallow was well clear of the centre of the explosion, but even so, chunks of snow and ice flew up to where she was recovering her balance high above. She flew upwards and away, but in no time at all the blood of the little bird began to freeze. She listened for a moment, and as soon as she was sure that the plane was not returning she Switched back into the warm and fearless form of the dragon.

The monitor in Mission Control slowly cleared and became blank as the heat from the explosion died away. A great cheer went up. General Wolfe leant back in his chair and clasped his hands behind his head in satisfaction. ‘Whatever it was, we got it,’ he said.

‘Uh oh,’ said a technician behind him. ‘I’m afraid not, sir.’

‘What?’ Wolfe sat up again. There, on the screen, was the hot spot again, as clear as ever. It was heading east with surprising speed. ‘But it disappeared, didn’t it?’

‘It looked like it did,’ said the technician. ‘Maybe the heat from the explosion just masked it somehow. It’s there now, anyhow.’

It was, and racing back through the snowstorms towards Kevin. He had heard Tess’s call and was coming to meet her. From their positions all over the Arctic Circle, the military planes moved in.

It was nearly dark when the two dragons met above the Norwegian Sea, and it was time to call it a day. Their infra-red vision enabled them to see planes overhead, but no kind of vision would enable them to find krools in the dark. Kevin wanted to stay a dragon, but Tess had learnt that they were not as invisible as they had believed, and insisted on the safety of polar bears. Kevin capitulated. They dug in quickly and slept straight away, curled closely together for comfort.

As soon as the sun came up the next morning, the two hot spots were picked up on the monitors of a surveillance plane. They didn’t appear gradually, as a plane does when it starts its engines and warms up, and they neither taxied to a runway nor rose vertically. One moment there was nothing on the infrared screens above, and then there were two large, hot objects flying off at impossible speed in different directions.

This time, Tess and Kevin had a plan. It was a dangerous plan and would require all their courage and all their wits but, if it worked, it would be a brilliant way to get rid of the krools. All they had to do was to find them.

They had decided to fly low, so low that a krool would appear to them as a patch of slowly-rising ground which would then fall away again. In the middle of a blizzard such flying required steel nerves and lightening fast reactions, but the dragon has both, even at the speed of a jet plane.

When they had talked in the early hours of the morning, Tess and Kevin had agreed that there must be a vanguard of krools along the same latitude as the first ones they had found, to account for the even progress of the blizzards that preceded them. So the dragons flew in straight lines, due east and due west from where they had started. Several times in the first hour, Tess slowed and circled to examine a suspicious slope in the ground, but each time it was a false alarm. Above her the planes criss-crossed continuously, and she had already out-foxed three missiles before she found her first krool. As soon as she was certain of it, she rose some distance into the clouds above and circled steadily, waiting. Before long she saw the tell-tale heat of the approaching plane and heard its engine. As soon as it was within range, it launched its missile. Tess dived at full speed towards the unsuspecting krool. The missile spun after her, coming closer to her tail, until at the last minute, she Switched as she had done before and swung out of the way. It worked. The garnered momentum of the dragon dive flung the little bird out into the blizzard at terrifying speed, and away from the explosion. A few bits of exploded krool reached her as she shot through the air, but she was too busy trying to gain control of her dizzying flight to be concerned about them.

In Mission Control, the observers watched the clearing screen in tense silence. Then someone said: ‘We got one this time.’

There was no cheer. This had happened before. ‘Don’t count your chickens,’ said Wolfe, then groaned as the hot spot reappeared and resumed its eastward flight.

On the other side of Greenland, heading west, Kevin was playing the same game, with slightly more success. He had discovered a better way of finding his prey.

A krool crossing land leaves a distinct trail behind it where it has cut a mile-wide path through the vegetation and left nothing but a clean sweep of powdered snow, ice and rock. Kevin happened to notice this when he found his first krool of the day, and after that he stopped looking for their convex forms and searched instead for abrupt tree-lines or abnormally smooth stretches of snow. The method served him well. He found krool after krool, and each time he hovered above them and waited until the military arrived.

As the day wore on, General Wolfe grew increasingly exasperated. The events of the day were beginning to send shivers down his spine. It was becoming clearer all the time that whatever those things were, they were playing games with him. The phone was ringing from Washington a little too often and the questions were becoming embarrassing.

But the strangest thing of all was that whatever was happening out there was having the desired effect on the weather. Already the blizzards were dying out and clouds were disappearing from large areas that had previously been covered. In southern England and Ireland, he was told, the sun was shining and the snow was beginning to melt.

It was just in time for Lizzie. For the first few days of the blizzards, Mr Quigley had been extremely helpful. He had come every day with whatever supplies Lizzie needed, and he and his daughter had shovelled the snow away from her door and made paths to Nancy’s shed and the henhouse. But then, one day, he had come and told her that he had sold all his stock and managed to get a passage for himself and his family on a ferry to Cyprus, and he could not let the opportunity pass. He had brought her provisions for a fortnight and a hundredweight of rock salt to help against the snow, but beyond that he could do nothing more for her.

When the daily digging became too much for her, Lizzie brought Nancy and the hens into the house and let them have the use of the scullery. The mains water had long since frozen tight, so she filled the bath and the sink and a few old milk churns with snow. Then she brought in as many logs as she could stack in the hall, and closed the doors. She was dug in like an Arctic creature in her little snow-hole of a cottage, and was forgotten by the world.

The drifts rose until they covered the downstairs windows, and, since the power lines were down over half the country, Lizzie moved around in the dim light of the fire, saving her candles for emergencies. The first thing to run out was the oats she fed to Nancy and the chickens, and she had to start sharing her own rations with them. Then water began to get scarce. The plug in the bath had proved useless, and the snow which Lizzie had gathered so laboriously ran away as soon as it melted. She was reduced to scraping snow from the insides of the drifts outside the windows and melting it over the fire, and anyone who has ever tried this will know that it is a lot of work for very little return. By the time the sun appeared, Lizzie was exhausted, dispirited, and almost down to the last of her provisions.

If it hadn’t been for the cats, she would probably not have known the snow had stopped until the next day. Her kitchen was as dark as a basement with the windows all covered in drifts, but it was too cold to sit upstairs where there was still light. The cats, however, went up and down quite often during the day to use the litter tray that Lizzie had set up in the spare room for them as soon as they could no longer get out.

It was when Moppet failed to return from one of these visits that Lizzie went upstairs to investigate and found him curled up on the windowsill in the sunshine. For the first time since Tess and Kevin had left her house, Lizzie’s stiff old back straightened up. She went to the window, prised it open, and called out to the sky: ‘You did it, you little horrors! You made it!’

B
ACK AT THE EDGE
of the Arctic Circle, the dragons were still at work. Tess had eventually discovered Kevin’s method of detection for herself, and was making up for lost time.

In Mission Control, General Wolfe was getting fed up with throwing missiles at infra-red ghosts, but he had discovered that there was little else he could do. He had found volunteers to go in for close combat in fighter planes armed with machine guns and close-range missiles, but they had flown back bewildered. As soon as they came anywhere near to visual range, their targets disappeared. Simply vanished without trace.

Wolfe called them back. With outward confidence and inward despair, he continued with the missile attacks.

Tess and Kevin were in a mood of high exhilaration. They were living by the skin of their teeth, dodging death one minute and tempting it the next. As a result, life had never seemed better or more precious.

And they were winning. Their phenomenal speed had taken them around the globe to meet again on the other side above Canada, where they played aerial tag and leapfrog together for a few minutes before turning round and starting back the way they had come, to pick off the krools they had missed.

Wolfe followed their progress on radar and infrared. He now knew that he was playing into their hands in some way, but he also knew that the snowstorms were abating. He didn’t know how he was going to explain it, but he was sure of one thing. He was going to take all the credit that was on offer when the time came.

The one in the west was circling again. ‘Let him have it,’ he said.

Fast as the dragons were, they couldn’t make it back around the globe before nightfall. They could call to each other, though, and they did, before they came to land and settled as polar bears into their separate dug-outs for the night.

Tess slept fitfully, dreaming bear dreams and dragon dreams, and terrible dreams of Kevin trapped in the form of some awful creature for the rest of his life. A single bear produces very much less heat than two curled up together, and she woke before dawn, stiff and sore with the cold. She knew that the only way to get warm was to get moving, so she crawled out of the tunnel and was amazed to find herself standing in the middle of clearly visible snowfields, stretching away in all directions, glowing in the light of the stars which shone out of a cloudless sky.

A plane passed low over her head, blinking a single, white light. Tess shook her damp coat and began to trot northward.

In Mission Control, General Wolfe was popping caffeine pills to keep himself awake. The meteorological satellites were beaming down gratifying pictures of the cloud formations. A few isolated blizzards were still stretching southward like thick fingers, but otherwise the area below the line of seventy degrees latitude was clear.

But Wolfe knew that those things, whatever they were, would return in the daylight. He had spent most of the night in a fury of injured pride, and he wasn’t about to give up. There were all kinds of theories buzzing around. Some said the hot spots were Iraqi war machines, developed for the purpose of freezing out the Northern Hemisphere and crippling the American and European economies. Others said they were UFOs making a bid to colonise the planet. Wolfe was willing to believe that they came from outer space, but nothing that had happened had succeeded in convincing him that they were not living beings of some kind. He hadn’t forgotten those two tapes.

As Tess warmed up she began to make plans. The blizzards had died down, she knew, because of the krools she and Kevin had killed, but there would surely be others closer to the Pole which would need her attention. Even in the dark, however, she was reluctant to become a dragon now that the cover of clouds had gone, just in case some low-flying plane might get a sight of her in the starlight. So she Switched instead to a Canadian goose, and began to fly steadily north.

She was right about the krools. What she didn’t know, however, was that they were no longer a danger. Apart from the unknown enemy in the skies, they were under increasing threat from their greatest enemy, the sun. Only in large numbers can krools be certain of producing sufficient freezing clouds to keep them covered and safe. A single krool cloud can be dispersed by warm winds and leave its maker helpless, melting in the sun. Already the second and third line of them were in rapid retreat, and the rearguard had retraced their tracks and slithered back into their icy beds.

Kevin woke at dawn, and the first thing he knew was that it was the day before his birthday. He had one more day and one more night.