The Devil's Breath (41 page)

“Yes, sir. I understand.”

“OK. We’re flying back to England tonight. The government has laid on a plane and a doctor. You, me and Sayid, with your dad. He needs specialist care now.”

Sayid gave an encouraging smile to Max, ready to leave.

“Sayid, thanks for everything.”

“I didn’t do anything.”

“I bet you did.”

Sayid nodded. There’d be time enough later for talking the whole thing through.

“Anyway. Thanks for being here. For being my mate,” Max said.

Max stood for a couple of minutes, watching his father. There were so many things he wanted to tell him, but perhaps that didn’t matter too much right now. They had shared such intense moments these past few days, each of them had told the other how they felt. There was no more awkward father-son thing. They had come through, and they were both alive.

Max went into the room and sat next to his father. His eyes opened and he smiled, his hand reaching out to touch Max. “Hey,” he whispered.

“They said you’re gonna be all right, Dad,” Max said.

“Oh yes.” He frowned slightly. “Thing is, my brain’s a bit like scrambled eggs. I know there’re a lot of pieces missing. Lots I can’t remember.” His dad smiled. “I remember you, though.”

Everything was drawing to a close. The sun was retreating and Max hovered, uncertain how to say his goodbyes. His dad was loaded into the plane, Sayid had got aboard and Max waited with Mr. Peterson as Kallie pushed !Koga out in a wheelchair.

What was it about Africa that seeped into your blood, like the sunset caressing the sand? Whatever it was, he envied the people staying behind. There was no place on earth like it.

“What happened at the dam?” he asked.

“We’re not sure. Shaka Chang died there, we know that
much. He didn’t have time to open the floodgates fully,” Mr. Peterson said.

“When I was in the chopper, with Dad, just before I blacked out, I thought I heard someone say that the storm had stopped the soldiers getting there.”

“That’s right. The rainfall was torrential. It cleared over the dam briefly, but it stopped the ground and air assault. He’d have poisoned thousands. He had no idea you were alive and had got the message out.”

They watched the darkening sky as Kallie and !Koga got closer. Mr. Peterson shrugged. “Strange place, Africa. Things happen. Things you can’t explain. Shaka Chang’s pilot had landed the helicopter at the dam site; he was waiting for Chang to come back, then they were going to fly out to an airstrip, an hour away, to link up with his private jet. That’s disappeared somewhere. Anyway, he said he saw a hawk, well, he insisted it was a peregrine; he seemed to know what he was talking about. Said it came out of the sky and attacked Chang. He tried to fight it off, but it clawed at him and he lost his footing. They’ll never find his body.”

Kallie and !Koga had reached them. “OK, Max, five minutes and we’re off. Bye, Kallie, thanks for everything. You too, !Koga. You’re two of the bravest kids I’ve ever known.”

“And Max?” Kallie said.

“He’s the bravest, just don’t tell him I said that or I’ll never get him to do homework again.”

Mr. Peterson walked off towards the waiting aircraft.

“I’ll stay in touch, Kallie, if that’s OK?” Max said.

“Sure. Whatever. Hey, I might be coming to Europe.

Dad’s agreed to let me go to college—tourism degree or some such. Thinks I need educating. It’ll help the business. I’ll look you up.”

“I’d like that.” And she knew he meant it.

He looked at the Bushman boy who had not only saved his life but also shown him a different way of living it. “You be careful, !Koga. I will think of you and I will seek out the morning star—the Dawn’s Heart—and always remember.”

The boy nodded. “Remember, Max, this is all a dream.”

He embraced them again and turned away. Kallie called after him. “Max! I almost forgot!”

She pulled out a folded envelope and emptied its contents. “Your watch. You gave it to !Koga, remember? The police gave it back to me. I said I’d make sure you got it.”

His dad’s watch. In his heart he wanted !Koga to keep it, but he knew with equal certainty that the wild and free boy had no need for the confines of time.

“And this,” she said, spilling out a jade and gold bracelet. “You were holding this when they pulled you out of the chopper. You wouldn’t let go for ages.”

Max turned the jade and Moldavite in his fingers. “This is Shaka Chang’s,” he told her.

She looked puzzled. “How did you get it?”

“I don’t know. Maybe I picked it up in the hangar when we went in with the soldiers. I’m not sure.”

The quickening sun warmed the gold bracelet and touched the Moldavite pearls, reflecting infinite years of trapped light.

And from within the bracelet Max thought he saw a
fleeting image of Shaka Chang’s hand clawing at the sky, as a pair of talons raked his wrist.

The plane lifted off just as the edge of the world turned red. Max gazed back at the darkening ground and saw a shadow move into the last ray of broken light.

The creature looked over its shoulder at the departing plane.

And then the jackal loped away into the night.

Acknowledgments

A number of people helped me with the writing of this book. Keith Chiazzari, pilot and adventurer, has flown the world from the frozen north to the Namibian wilderness, and he guided me through the critical stages of flying in this story. My good friend James McFarlane, who has an eagle eye for details about all things African (and much more besides), made invaluable suggestions for the manuscript.

A huge thank-you to Beverly Horowitz and Wendy Loggia and everyone at Delacorte Press for their enthusiastic welcome to Max Gordon’s Danger Zone.

Thanks to Conrad Williams, my film agent, for his ever-present encouragement, and to my tireless, wise and wonderful book agent, Isobel Dixon, who deserves more than a special word of gratitude.

Most of all, my love and appreciation go to my wife, Suzy, without whose encouragement and support the adventure would never have begun.

* * *

The Bushmen’s plight is real, and if anyone wishes to learn more, an excellent place to start is Survival International’s Web site:
www.survival-international.org
.

About the Author

For the past six years, David Gilman has been the principal writer on the UK television show A
Touch of Frost
. David has worked as a firefighter, a professional photographer, and a marketing manager, and served in the British Army’s Parachute Regiment Reconnaissance Platoon. He lives in England and has traveled the world, gathering inspiration for the Danger Zone books along the way.

Continue reading for a sneak peek at
David Gilman’s second book in
the Danger Zone series …

Excerpt copyright © 2010 David Gilman
Published in Canada by Doubleday Canada, a division of
Random House of Canada Limited.

It was too beautiful a day to die.

Max Gordon gazed up at the mountaintops that scarred the crystal-clear sky. A whisper of mist soared up the valley beyond them, twisted briefly and escaped across the peaks. Flurries of snow scattered from the rocks like a flock of white butterflies disturbed from a meadow. But this was no gentle English summer landscape. Max was two thousand freezing meters high in unpredictable weather, and no one knew that he and his best friend, Sayid Khalif, were there.

A massive blanket of snow clung precariously to the rock face a hundred meters above him. One shudder from the breeze, a single tremor from the overladen trees, and a thousand tons of snow would avalanche down and crush him and his injured friend to death.

Fifty meters away Sayid lay twisted in pain and fear. Max had to reach him and get him off the mountainside. There wasn’t much time. A sliver of the loosely packed snow crunched down, tumbling beyond Sayid.

“Don’t move!” Max shouted, an arm extended towards the boy in warning as he trod carefully, using his upended snowboard to probe the snow.

Max’s breath steamed from his exertion as he slumped to his knees next to Sayid. Using his teeth, he pulled off his ski glove and tenderly cradled his friend’s leg.

Sayid cried out. His eyes scrunched up, then widened at the pain.

“Sorry, mate,” Max said, keeping one eye on the threatening field of loose snow above them.

“It’s broken,” Sayid mumbled.

“Your leg’s all right. Probably just a twisted ankle.”

“You think so?”

“Yeah,” Max lied. “Serves you right, going off-trail. The whole idea was to stay on safe slopes.” He eased Sayid into a sitting position, straightened the crooked leg and wiped snow from the boy’s face.

A stupid bet: Sayid on skis against Max on his snowboard—who’d get to the bottom first? But Sayid had veered off several hundred meters back and dipped into this dangerous cleft. It was a deceptive snowfield promising fast skiing, and Max’s warnings had been ignored. When Sayid hit the fallen tree trunk lying just below the surface, he’d tumbled forwards for another ten meters. He was lucky he hadn’t snapped his neck.

Max busied himself with the broken ski. Pulling the tie cord from Sayid’s ski jacket, he strapped the good ski across the snapped piece, forming a cross.

“You making a splint?” Sayid said.

Max shook his head. “You don’t deserve one, you idiot. This is your way out of here.”

“Are you kidding? I’m in agony. I need a helicopter.”

Max finished the binding. “You won’t need anything if that slips off the mountain,” he said, nodding towards the snowfield.

An ominous crunch reinforced his warning as a huge chunk of snow gave way. It growled down the far side of the slope, a frightening display of weight and power.

“Max! What do we do?”

“If we don’t get out of here in a hurry, panic would be a good idea. We’ve gotta move, Sayid. Grab the crosspiece.” Max clamped Sayid’s hands onto the broken ski, which now
served as a handlebar. “Sit on the good ski, hold on tight, and aim for down there.”

Sayid scrambled for something in his pocket. “Wait. Hang on!” He pulled out a string of small black beads, spun them round his fist, kissed them and nodded nervously at Max. “OK. Go!” he said.

Sayid’s fear for his life overcame the stabbing pain in his foot as Max shoved him away. Looking like a child on a tricycle whose feet had come off the pedals, Sayid sliced through the snow, the rush of wind carrying his yelps of fear back towards Max.

Max had just clamped his boots onto the snowboard when the mountainside fell. The scale of the huge block of snow mesmerized him. It dropped in slow motion, a fragment of time during which he knew he could not outrun anything that powerful or fast. A shudder came up through the ground. Max bent his knees, lunging away as the blurred power smashed the trees two hundred meters to his right. Swirling powder smothered him and the gust of wind from the avalanche pummeled his back. He threw his weight forward and curved away as fast as he could. The avalanche ran parallel to him for more than a hundred meters, growling destruction, like a frustrated carnivore hunting its prey.

A surge of adrenaline pumped through Max’s veins. The lethal risk of riding the edge of this terrifying wave was forgotten as a wild excitement overtook him. He laughed out loud.
Come on! Come on! I can beat you. I can win!

A boulder-sized chunk of snow broke loose from the main fall and careered towards him. A sudden reality check. Max arched his back, veered inside the block of snow and felt the swirling edge of the avalanche smother his knees.
Don’t fall! Not now!

And then it was suddenly over. The monster snowfall smashed only meters away from him onto compacted snow, rocks and the tree line.

Spraying crisp, white powder, Max turned the board side-on and stopped. Looking back, he saw that where he and Sayid had been only moments earlier was now unrecognizable.

The silence was almost as frightening as the short-lived roar of the avalanche. Sayid had skimmed beneath snow-laden branches and gone through to the other side. He was well out of harm’s way. Max gulped the cold air. The voice inside his head was still laughing with victory, but Max was under no illusion. If that avalanche had veered his way, he’d have been buried alive and crushed to death.

In the ski village of Mont la Croix the small emergency clinic was used for immobilizing broken limbs and stabilizing patients before they were sent to a city hospital. It was usually adults, crying in agony, who were admitted, people who thought that skiing could be tackled without getting fit or practicing, or that any idiot could do it. Any idiot could—they were often the ones with the broken legs.

Max watched as Sayid was wheeled out of the emergency room, an inflatable splint covering his leg from his foot to his knee—a specialist dressing that kept the limb immobile and cushioned against any ill effects from being moved.

“I told you it was broken,” Sayid moaned.