“She’s a professional. Knows not to ask any questions. Better for all parties this way.”
“Here,” Sophie called back to them as she reached a battered old SUV, rust curling round its edges. She heaved open the wide hatch at the back and moved around to the driver’s-side door, while he and Lester tossed in what little luggage they had brought. Just an overnight change of clothes, the kit for a quick stopover to assess the situation. Not anything like their usual kit.
By the time Danny had got his luggage safely stowed, Lester had already taken the front passenger seat beside Sophie. Danny sighed and folded himself into the back, his long legs stretched behind Lester’s seat, the rest of him behind Sophie. His body protested at being jammed into yet another small space so soon after the flight.
“How long is it to the park?” he asked, already feeling restless and fidgety.
“About two hours,” Lester told him before Sophie could answer.
“Depends how fast we go,” she said. She cranked the car into first gear and soon they were out of the anonymous, concrete world of the airport and speeding through Johannesburg itself.
Danny watched out the window, content to sit back, take in the sights and sounds of this — to him — new country. As in any big city, there was plenty going on. Vast glass and aluminium skyscrapers springing up, garish, barely legible posters announcing concerts and comedy clubs and selling everything from perfume to cars. He smiled, watching the people just going about their lives: carrying shopping bags, holding hands, yammering into mobile phones. Just like at home in London, only different.
Every now and again there was a glimpse of distant mountains, of the huge world beyond the city. Then they were lost, hidden behind yet more urban sprawl.
He tried to spot the legacy of apartheid in the streets themselves, his only real knowledge of the country and its complex politics having come from old TV news. Everything seemed pretty jumbled and as multicultural as it was at home.
It took a moment to recognise the difference between rich and poor, because the poor seemed to take such pride in their appearance. That was something he wouldn’t have seen in London, or in most cities he’d visited; a defiant, hurt-but-healing pride. This was a place of great hope and possibility.
Once he recognised it, he could see the great gulf that existed there, segregation inspired not by colour but by cash. He’d done some reading on the plane, in between his futile attempts to sleep, and the guidebook had warned of a country without welfare — where it was all too easy to fall from grace. And this was a nation with far too many guns.
They stopped at a traffic light — or ‘robot’, as he’d learnt from his book. Sophie pulled up the handbrake and sat back in her seat. Danny peered round, getting his bearings, and watched as a weary old minivan studiously ignored the queue. It drove down to the right of them, well out into the oncoming lane. It was crowded with people, all black, all dressed smartly for work. No one else seemed to notice when the vehicle overstepped the red light and pushed forward into the traffic, streaming left and right, cutting a precarious path through to the other side.
He was certain there was going to be a collision, yet somehow, impossibly, the stream of cars swept round it. No one beeped or shouted. The drivers all seemed to be looking completely the other way. But Danny’s heart was in his mouth.
“Did you see that?” he gasped.
“What?” Lester said. He was busy on his BlackBerry.
“Cab,” said Sophie flatly. “Got their own rules, them.”
“But that was idiotic!” Danny protested. “They could have all been killed.”
“Yeah,” Sophie replied, though her accent made it sound like “Yoh”. “But they weren’t.” She just shrugged.
Then the robot turned green, but unlike in London, no one seemed in any rush to put his or her foot down. The cars in front of them laboured, the drivers releasing their handbrakes and pushing off sedately. Danny had never seen anything like it; it was as if they all just assumed some loon would jump the lights.
In some ways it made for a more relaxed drive than he would have experienced back home. Everyone was better behaved because they expected some nit to do something stupid.
Even so, he sat in a knot of tension as they made their way out of the city. He’d never been a very good passenger, never liked to surrender control to anyone. But this was beyond anything he could have expected.
They climbed the crest of a hill and were suddenly out in the countryside. Danny gasped at the great expanse of scrubby land stretching out in front of them as they headed north.
“It’s so... big.” He gaped. “It’s like the horizon is further away than it is at home.”
Lester tutted, lifting his head from the small screen he had clutched in his hand.
“Really, Quinn. You know that isn’t possible.”
“But he’s right,” Sophie said in a sudden burst of conversation. “Don’t know how you people live in England. So small. An’ always raining.”
“That’s a bit of a cultural cliché,” Lester retorted.
“We were lucky to get off the ground at Heathrow,” Danny reminded him, keen to stick up for Sophie. “Been storms all this past week.”
“That’s a recent development,” Lester muttered, returning to his BlackBerry. “Extremes of weather are an indicator of climate change. I’m sure Sophie’s seen similar changes here.”
“No,” she said. “It’s always like this here. Apart from when it isn’t.”
Danny laughed. But she looked deadly serious.
They drove on in silence, and as they got further from the city he wondered what it might be like to call this vast landscape home, somewhere so untouched by humans that it seemed unlikely that you could ever feel like you really belonged here.
“Is that a mine?” Lester asked, snapping Danny out of his reverie. He looked up to where Lester pointed. A huge, ugly factory squatted in the landscape.
“Platinum,” Sophie explained. “Not so pretty as a gold mine. And a gold mine isn’t pretty.”
“You’ve got to exploit the potential of your resources,” Lester replied in clipped tones. “Encourage the entrepreneurs. It’s good for the economy.”
“Whose economy?” Sophie snapped. “The mine by the game park is British.”
So, Danny thought, this was where their cover story came into play. He and Lester were in South Africa to look into the strange deaths at the game park, but they were doing so under the pretence of being concerned about the British-run oil mine that loomed just next door. Rather than being seen as hunters, they were assessors of health and safety, insurance men, that sort of thing. What better excuse to be sniffing around, asking tricky questions, than to say that they were protecting large sums of money?
Like all the best lies, the story contained a fair amount of truth. Lester’s superiors were keen that the oil operation should not be compromised by an anomaly. The mine might just play a major part in solving Britain’s energy needs, they said, presumably with many more mines to follow.
Danny suspected that Lester was hoping to impress certain high-ranking officials by sorting all this out. That was why he was here in person, on safari in a rusting old SUV. For something to get him out from behind his comfortable desk, there would have to be the potential to score some serious brownie points, perhaps even a promotion.
“The consortium,” Lester replied smoothly, word-perfect on his brief, “is an equal mix of British and South African interests. The day-to-day grunt work is mostly done by a British team, but profits are split fifty-fifty. Otherwise, do you think your government would let us be here at all?”
“They’ll do anything you tell ‘em if you say you’ll make them rich,” Sophie replied hotly, refusing to give in to Lester’s cold logic.
“To be fair,” Danny put in, the contents of the brief coming back to him, “it’s more like seventy-thirty in your favour. We covered the costs of set-up, and that eats into our share.”
“Ye
s, thank you, Quinn,” Lester said, and he sighed wearily, ungrateful for the back-up. “I’m sure our hostess doesn’t need to hear your opinions.”
Danny bristled at this, but tried to convince himself it was just Lester being in character. The idea was to have them slightly at odds, to make them seem less of a team, and thus less of a threat. Not that Lester could ever exactly be described as a team player.
Though on the ARC team for a relatively short time, Danny had observed how Abby and Connor worked when investigating creature sightings. They weren’t like policemen, all formal and in control. They bickered and goofed around, and didn’t wear anything like a recognisable uniform. On a police beat civilians always wanted someone official to take charge. But if you’d just seen a T-rex ransacking your bins, you wouldn’t say so on the record — not unless you wanted to be carted away to the asylum. So by not wearing a uniform, being a bit clumsy, they seemed to help witnesses to come forward and say, “It sounds crazy, but —”
Danny liked to think that Abby and Connor might have planned it that way, but suspected it was just a happy accident. This new game he was playing was all about lucky chances.
For as long as their luck holds out anyway, he thought ruefully. Our luck, he corrected.
He himself had only just filled a dead man’s shoes. Since Nick Cutter had died — and Stephen Hart before him — there was a sense at the ARC that they all lived on borrowed time. He remembered Jenny’s warning as she’d walked away from it all, not two weeks earlier. People died doing this job.
He looked up to see Lester scowling at him in the rearview mirror. Sophie seemed to have noticed the scowl, too. Danny realised it must have looked like he was biting his tongue, holding back on telling Lester where he could stick his advice.
“What?” he said irritably, playing it up.
Then he went back to gazing out of the window, drinking in the incredible landscape. The pale road snaked between huge, blocky rock formations like a series of ancient weathered castles. Danny knew there was probably a simple scientific reason for these things and yet that didn’t explain their inherent majesty, how they seemed to speak of such vast scale and time. They effortlessly dwarfed such puny things as all of human history.
When he glanced back into the car, he caught the reflection of Sophie’s eyes flicking away from him again. He pretended he hadn’t seen her watching, and bent forward to admire the view from her side of the car. But his grin wasn’t all about the majestic land before them.
Gotcha, he thought.
He decided to push his luck.
“So you think our mining operation caused what happened in the park?” he asked her.
The car swerved as Sophie twisted her head round to look at him, her expression seeming to register shock.
Lester’s sharp intake of breath made her turn back around, take firm hold of the steering wheel, and lurch them back into their lane.
“What do you mean?” she said now, and she seemed to be trying to sound casual.
“I, uh,” Danny said, stalling for time. He wasn’t sure what he meant. How to pursue this without blowing their cover, or bringing up the topic of prehistoric creatures?
God, this wasn’t in the briefing!
“I’ve seen it on the television,” he said quickly. “Animals are more sensitive to what’s happening around them, aren’t they? Stuff people don’t hear or see. So maybe the lions hear the noise of the mining, and it makes them go wild.” He hoped he didn’t sound like an idiot.
She concentrated on the driving, but he could see that her cheeks were flushed. Was she cross with him, he wondered, or with herself for letting slip her guard?
“You don’t agree?” he persisted.
She snorted. “That the mine made the lions go wild?”
“They’re already wild animals,” Lester said with exaggerated patience. “What Mr Quinn was trying to say, in his own clumsy way, is that it might have prompted them to strike out.”
“Yeah,” said Danny, riled by this. “That’s what I meant. I’m not stupid.”
“Nor am I,” Sophie countered. “And you know as well as I do, lions didn’t do this.”
Her words hung in the air for a little too long.
“What makes you say that?” Lester asked pleasantly. “Surely there’s no reason to think otherwise, is there?”
“Ha!” Sophie said. “I know it isn’t the lions. I’ve seen what happened to the bodies. I’ve seen the tracks in the ground. Sure, someone’s tried covering it up. Telling us it’s nothing to worry about. But you two didn’t come all the way from London just ‘cause a lion has killed some tourists.”
“So what do you think jumped on these people?” Danny asked.
Lester cleared his throat.
“Hmm,” Sophie began. “Tracks made me think it was an ostrich or something,” she said. “But it’d have to be a big one. Runs on two feet, anyhow. Big. Quick. And a carnivore.”
“And is there an animal like that in the park?” Danny asked.
“Nah,” Sophie said. “Only...”
“Only?” Danny pressed, leaning forward. He could see that look in her eye, that need to share her reading of the facts, no matter how ridiculous or impossible. The same look he saw in everyone else he’d ever met who’d come into contact with the anomalies’ creatures.
“Only,” she continued, “maybe some kind of giant lizard. Like they got on Komodo. Don’t think the Komodo ones run on two legs, though. Should probably check that out.”
Good, Danny thought. She was keeping it within the realm of the conceivable. Which made it easier for him to support her.
“And you think whatever it is has been introduced to the park recently?”
“Yeah,” she said. “And you two think it’s a risk to your precious mine. Puts your insurance up or something. Or you think someone’s trying to mess things up on purpose.” Lester and Danny said nothing, which Sophie took as confirmation. “Whatever it is,” she added, “it’s got to be pretty tough.”
“The autopsies didn’t make for much fun reading,” Danny agreed. He was more familiar with bullet and knife wounds than with maimed and eaten corpses.
“It’s not that,” Sophie said. “That’s what you expect when an animal gets you. But what about the other animals, eh? This thing is on their turf. Why don’t they scare it off, or just kill it outright? If it’s on its own that shouldn’t be too hard.”
“You’ve not found the remains of any animals who have tried?” Lester asked, peering imperiously out of the car, not bothering to make eye contact.
“Not yet,” Sophie said carefully. “Park’s a big place. Chances are we’d only see bodies if they were near the road. If this thing kills them, they’ll be dragged off somewhere out of sight, so it can eat them in peace. And if they’re wounded, they’ll go find somewhere quiet anyway. To lick their wounds or die.”
“So you wouldn’t know?” Lester said, his voice vaguely accusing.
“We’d know eventually,” she told him. “Tracking takes time. This thing sticks around though — goes on unopposed — all the territories will change. We’ll just watch the other animals and see which areas they avoid.”
“How long will that take?” Danny asked, feeling his heart sink. He’d hoped the park rangers would have already isolated the creature, so he and Lester would just need to neutralise it, and send it back to its own epoch. But it sounded as if they might be in South Africa for at least a few days. He’d not brought enough underwear for any longer.
Sophie shrugged.
“Spring’s the breeding season. All the boys get hot-blooded, so they’re more likely to fight for their favourite spaces. And you want to take down or steer clear of an aggressor if you’re raising young.”
“Spring,” Danny said, his heart sinking. “But over here that’s not for another five months.”
THREE
Velociraptors, noted Captain Becker, really do hate the rain just as much as human beings.
From his safe vantage point in the living room of a flat above a newsagent, he watched six of them sheltering underneath the bus stop across the street. They were a little shorter than humans, skinny, vicious and grey, and had made short work of the bloody pork loins he’d got his men to hang there. Becker watched the raptors shove and bite and kick each other. They were cross that they’d run out of food and because they didn’t all fit under the shelter.
It didn’t help that floodwater kept surging over their feet and ankles.
“Think we should put them out of their misery?” he said — and he didn’t get a horrified response. Becker looked round, and found no Connor. A couple of soldiers loitered in the doorway of the small living room. Lieutenant Jamie Weavers sat slumped in an armchair, his black uniform and body armour making a strange contrast to the issue of Heat magazine in his hands. A small child — the son of the woman whose home this was — sat to one side of him, gawping at Weavers’ various guns.
A tray of tea things sat on the low table to one side. The plate that had earlier overflowed with Jaffa Cakes and Bourbons now lay empty but for a few crumbs. Which explained, Becker thought, where Connor had disappeared off to. Both Connor and Abby were sulking because this was his plan, not theirs. But as Becker had explained to them — while they rolled their eyes and pulled faces — this was all about tactics.
So far it had been raining for three days. At times it would die down to a drizzle with a grey wetness clogging the air. Most of the time, though, it came clattering down, thick, consistent, and bruising. The drains in many parts of the country couldn’t cope with the volume of water and their roads were now fast-flowing rivers.
Stinking black and brown water surged through Maidenhead’s suburbs and shopping centres, smashing walls and windows as it went. And then, as if the damage hadn’t caused trouble enough already, an anomaly had opened up right in the midst of it. The late Professor Cutter had suggested that bad weather might exacerbate the anomalies — though they’d never found any concrete proof. To Becker, it was just an example of the old army principle: It never rained, but it poured.
Fire and Water Page 2
