The Devil's Breath (35 page)

“Dad, can you remember anything? Y’know, the message you sent me.”

“Message? Oh yes. I sent them to Sayid. Tried to warn you. I thought they were going to try to kill you. They thought I’d sent you the evidence.”

“They did try. That’s why I’m here. It’s a long story, so many things have happened. And I made a good friend, he’s the son of the Bushman who took your notes. He’s great. Anyway, I’ll tell you all about it when we get home.”

“Still the optimist, Max.”

“We’ll make it, Dad.”

“Bloody right we will,” his father said, and smiled
bravely. “But I want you to get going, on your own. You’ll have a much better chance.”

Max shook his head. “No way. Not after everything that’s happened. You sent for me, you left all the messages in the cave. I came here to help.”

“And you have. And I’m so proud of you. But now you have to get out. Please.”

“No. Drink your water and do as you’re told.”

They smiled at each other, and Max felt great being this close to his dad, a moment of shared happiness amid the danger. There were no keys in any of the trucks, and he still hadn’t figured out how to stop Shaka Chang from triggering the floodgates at the dam.

“What cave?” his father asked.

“What?” Max felt confused. Were the drugs muddling his dad’s brain?

“You said I left a message in a cave. I haven’t been to any caves.”

“You must have. The Bushmen’s sacred mountain. There were drawings in there. Pictures of me, your plane’s insignia, the dove …”

“You found the plane?”

“Yeah. Because of the drawings. Well, partly … you drew a picture showing you’d been wounded, the hidden plane, me, the Bushmen. It was all there.”

“Max, listen to me. My memory’s in pretty bad shape right now, but I can tell you, one hundred percent, that I never went to any cave. Anton Leopold and I met up in the desert. We left his Land Rover and I flew him to Walvis Bay—by then we had a pretty good idea of what was
happening. I gave him a scribbled note to send to you, I flew back, got wounded, hid the plane and made a run for it in the Land Rover. I knew they’d get me in the end—there were too many of them. That’s when I sent my field notes back to Farentino. They were just bits and pieces; no one would be able to make much sense of them. I figured it’d buy me time. But I was in no condition to climb any mountains and paint pictures on cave walls.”

The air in the hangar seemed suddenly oppressive, and something like a shadow crept over Max’s skin. He shuddered. “The prophecy,” he muttered.

He looked at his dad, a strange feeling flooding his mind, as if a door had been opened in a darkened room and shown him a different world. He relived the kaleidoscope of sensations—of death, the flying, the darkness, the raptor’s attack and the presence of the jackal. The
BaKoko
.

The Bushmen had told him about the legend of him coming to their land to help them, but he hadn’t managed that yet, not until Shaka Chang was stopped. And one thing they didn’t mention in their prophecy was how he was going to save his own dad.

His father’s question snapped him back to attention. “What prophecy are you talking about?”

Max shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. But things just got a whole lot crazier. Dad, you stay here, I’m going to do a recce and see if I can find a way of shutting this place down and getting us out of here.”

His father nodded; there was no point in arguing with a boy who had managed so far.

A flurry of sand whipped across the open space of the
hangar. The wind was picking up. If a storm broke, that could give them a chance to escape. Max scurried between the vehicles, then he heard a terrible cry. It was a boy’s voice, terrified and alone—a shriek of fear, forewarning of a terrible event.

It was !Koga, and the name he cried out, that echoed around the hangar’s wall, was Max’s.

The pickup trucks had searched for the Bushman boy all day. Shaka Chang had given the word that the boy had to be brought in, dead or alive, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t have some sport before they bagged him. Their blood was up and they hunted !Koga as they would a wild animal. The men’s cruel intentions were a product of years of war in which violence and destruction were a day-to-day matter. Shaka Chang’s decision, on the other hand, was a more cold-hearted approach. Stop him or kill him. It didn’t matter which.

The men had finally tracked the elusive boy, whose skills were not enough to escape from the number of attackers after him. In the back of each pickup, one of the men held a video camera to film the hunt, and it was this dust-laden, terrifying chase that was beamed back to Skeleton Rock.

Max stared at the screen. The horrifying picture stamped itself into his memory.

!Koga was crying in fear, legs pounding through the dirt, arms pumping. Max could even hear him gasping for breath as the men ran him to earth. As one of the killers filmed, the
other truck would swoop in. One of the men reached out and clubbed him with a stick. !Koga fell, and the men yelled and screamed—scoring points in a game. The trucks’ wheels spun, ready to come around again. They were playing with !Koga’s life, and the men in the hangar, and probably everyone in Skeleton Rock, watched the vicious hunt unfold.

!Koga calling his name had seared into Max. He couldn’t bear to watch, tears stung his eyes, his clenched fists ached and he wanted to scream at the brutality of what they were doing to his friend. !Koga had come back for him, and now they were going to kill him for it.

Max turned; his father stood at his shoulder. He saw what was happening.

“Is that your friend?”

Max could only nod, but he could see the fury in his dad’s eyes. He grabbed his son’s arm, deliberately wrenching him away from his agony. “Help me. Come on, let’s make them pay.”

Despite his weakened condition, Tom Gordon grabbed a couple of jerrycans. Max took his lead. Flipping open the lids, his dad sniffed the contents. “Petrol. Better than diesel for what we need. Check those.” He carried the jerrycans to an inspection pit which was as far as they could go without being seen. Max flinched every time the men roared as the hunt against !Koga continued.

“Max!” his father insisted. “Don’t look. Come on, son, you can’t help him. Not now.”

Max took the half dozen cans down into the inspection pit, opening their lids. His dad switched off the wall plug
that held one end of an inspection lamp’s five-meter-long cable. He yanked the cable free and did something to the end of the wires, then dropped the cable down onto the cans. When that wall socket was switched on, it would ignite the petrol. All hell would break loose, and that was when they’d make their escape.

At least, that was the plan.

“Max Gordon is here?”

Shaka Chang stood with Mr. Slye in the medical unit. Slye had looked everywhere for Dr. Zhernastyn, had double-checked the computer’s record of the doctor’s movements and then, with a sinking feeling in his stomach, far more sickening than any rapidly descending lift, went into the room and pulled back the bedding. Zhernastyn’s terrified eyes were a reflection of Mr. Slye’s sense of impending doom. How had Tom Gordon escaped? A more frightening question—had anyone helped him? It was not difficult to put two and two together—they always made four in Mr. Slye’s book, he didn’t care how clever mathematicians could be—but in this case it was one and one. One Bushman boy running back towards Skeleton Rock might well mean the other one was already here.

Two boys.

Both supposed to be dead.

Double trouble.

He had ripped the tape from Zhernastyn’s face, removing another clump of whiskers, and grabbed the gasping doctor by the throat.

“If you know what’s good for both our sakes, you should be extremely careful what you say, Doctor. Was the Gordon boy here?”

Zhernastyn nodded.

“And he used you to go through to the maintenance hangar?”

Zhernastyn nodded again.

Mr. Slye’s grip on Zhernastyn’s throat tightened ever so slightly. “And did he do anything in there he shouldn’t?”

The moment of truth.

If he admitted what had happened, Zhernastyn knew he was definitely for the great cheese grater in the sky, where all sins would be stripped from his evil soul. Like being skinned alive, it was going to hurt. And Slye would not wish to tell Shaka Chang that the boy he assured his master was dead had gained access to a computer, using Zhernastyn’s lovelorn password. And Zhernastyn was definitely not going to mention the DVD the boy had recovered. Oh no. That meant a double failure. That game was over so far as Zhernastyn was concerned. Given a chance, Dr. Zhernastyn would beat a hasty retreat. He needed time. No, he had told Slye, the boy hadn’t done anything, he was looking for a way to escape. And that was when Mr. Slye patted his cheek and gave him that cold-fish stare which meant he had said just the right thing. By the time Slye got round to telling Shaka Chang, Zhernastyn planned to have his own escape route ready. Rats and sinking ships sprang to mind.

Now Shaka Chang threw the wheelchair through a glass window. “I’m not very happy at the moment, Mr. Slye! In case you hadn’t realized.”

“We have no idea how the boy got inside, Mr. Chang.”

“Then we’ll roast head of security!” He glowered at Zhernastyn. “You let a fifteen-year-old boy get the better of you?”

“His father made a remarkable recovery—it took two of them to beat me. I’d like to know how he knocked the maintenance man unconscious, stole his clothes and sneaked up on me. I fought like a lion. I’m not that young anymore, Mr. Chang,” Zhernastyn said.

“And you may not be getting any older,” Chang threatened. He turned on Mr. Slye. “So this is the second time you’ve been wrong. The-boy-is-dead-you-said,” making it sound like the line of a poem.

Slye knew that if he stayed silent, did not twitch at the fury being visited upon him, but stared somewhere beyond Shaka Chang so there was not the faintest possibility of any eye contact which might be misunderstood as some kind of stupid macho-type challenge, then he might be allowed to live.

“If he survived, Mr. Chang, he had help. This is not one boy we are up against, there must be dozens of Bushmen hiding out there, they must have found a secret way in. That’s the only explanation.”

Shaka Chang had never lost his cool before. Pressure was what he thrived on. He had always won, by fair means or foul—mostly the latter. Winning was everything. But these past few weeks, since the Gordon boy had escaped
assassination and had just kept on coming like a heat-seeking missile, at a time when Shaka Chang was about to seize control of unimaginable wealth, had rattled him.

In a few hours, the gathering storm that now buffeted the mountains would break loose and sweep across the desert, flash floods would appear from nowhere. They wouldn’t be enough to dissolve the buried drugs and sweep them into the food chain, but this was when he had planned to open the dam gates. All that water gushing beneath the surface, the unstoppable power of nature, aided by Shaka Chang, would secure him everything.

It was only a few hours away. It demanded patience and a cool head.

“Find them,” he told Slye.

A very simple command; a very definite threat.

Max’s dad had told him it made no sense to try to knock out any of Shaka Chang’s communications, they would be too sophisticated. He just hoped, if any information had reached the outside world, that they could respond in time. If Chang was going to open the floodgates, he could do it with a phone call, though Tom Gordon guessed he would want to be at the dam itself to witness the moment when he became one of the most powerful men on earth. He and Max had laid the booby trap which might buy them a few minutes. But now his dad lay exhausted, sweat glistening on his face and his body trembling. The exertion had taken its toll.

Max bore his father’s weight and helped him towards the second hangar area. If they could find keys for a quad bike or
a pickup, they could make a run for it. The boat at the top of the ramp would still be useless, so it would have to be across the desert.

They made it to the passageway leading to the next hangar. Almost there. But they needed a breather. Max heaved a sigh of relief at this small victory, but a nagging guilt plagued him, wondering if !Koga had survived. His father kept an insistent dialogue going, urging Max to stay alert; to believe that !Koga could still make it; that they had to get out and keep moving in order to give themselves the best chance of survival. That was their responsibility—to survive.

The wind outside was increasing, and Max realized that if too much sand and dirt penetrated these hangars, the men would close the doors and then he and his dad would never get out. He got to his feet and began pulling his dad up, but his father shook his head and pointed. One of the men had moved to a work area; if Max tried to get through, they would be spotted.

It was now or never. He pulled open the door to one of the heavyweight Humvees. There was a key in the ignition. He eased it free and crept out of the cab, turning back to where he had left his father slumped against the wall.

And stopped in his tracks.

Dr. Zhernastyn. His face looked sore and the odd residual clump of whiskers made him look silly. Beyond the unsmiling Russian, a man in black stepped out of the shadows, the same man he had seen coming down in the lift. The long, sour-looking face gazed at him with dark, bloodshot eyes, like someone who never slept.

Max instinctively grabbed a hefty wrench from a workbench. He’d fight his way clear if he had to, and these two didn’t look as though they could stop him.

But you could drop a steel girder on the third man who appeared, and it would probably have no effect.

Shaka Chang smiled. “So, you’re Max Gordon. You just won’t die, will you?”

Max stood his ground, fist clutching the wrench at shoulder height like a battleaxe.

Zhernastyn and the other man had taken a couple of steps back. Chang moved unhurriedly, touching this and that on the workbench, as if seeing things for the first time, and occasionally glancing at the fight-ready Max, who shifted his weight, turning slightly each time Shaka Chang moved, ready for an attack.