by Jean Chapman
He found himself refilling the water bottles first, being careful not to make too much of a disturbance, very aware that he had no idea what lived in such waters, or hunted on its banks.
Walking back to the cabin, Cannon reviewed their situation. Yes, they had released Jonathan – a bigger task now to get him home, to the Beales, to his mother, alive.
He appraised Lucas as he sat slumped in the cabin doorway. The big man looked totally exhausted, but he had already gleaned what looked like small apples, and laid them on the grass by his side and taken biscuits from the rucksack. They must take time to rest and eat something before their next move, though Cannon was still unsure what that should be. Make a litter and carry Jonathan between them? One of them stay while the other went for help? Risk using the messenger – pinpoint their position to overstretched police and Valdes?
‘He’s burning up,’ Lucas said, rising as Cannon reached him, ‘and I don’t like the look of this.’ He lifted the boy’s shirt to reveal a dark rash.
‘An infection,’ Cannon said, then peering closer, saw tiny black spots surrounding some of the open sores. Sepsis? Septicaemia? Blood poisoning? He recalled long gone first aid classes when he was a rookie cop: increased loss of consciousness – fever.
Unsure how aware Jonathan was, he beckoned Lucas outside, taking the messenger Geoff had given him from his pocket.
‘I felt I wouldn’t use this while we were on Valdes’s land. We might be traced through making a call, but …’
‘We might lose Tom Beale his grandson.’ Lucas shook his head, drew his lips down in a fierce denial that such a thing could happen.
‘The hope is they’d send a helicopter.’
‘Yes,’ Lucas endorsed, ‘that’s what’s needed. Do it!’
Cannon pressed the button, sent his text, and waited, but again not for long.
So you have the boy?
Cannon texted back with details of Jonathan’s condition.
Got it, the reply came. You are being located by a search and rescue helicopter.
There was a pause, minutes. Cannon paced about, watching the messenger in his palm. Lucas squatted next to the boy.
Then the next message came: Helicopter north west of you picking up injured climbers, they can pick up another patient, but no room for others.
Cannon looked to Lucas.
‘If they get Jonathan out, we can walk,’ Lucas said, ‘and if we can’t get back to the road, we’ll make for the hunters’ car park.’
OK? the messenger questioned, and, Will do all we can this end.
On receiving Cannon’s Yes, that’s fine. Thanks, Geoff replied, See you all at the Derby then.
‘We hope,’ Lucas stated, ‘but we should mark out the best place for the helicopter to land. If it’s already in the air it may not be long.’
‘The land slopes down to the lake, and as near the cabin as possible would be good,’ Cannon said.
‘We could mark a square with our jackets and shirts.’
‘Perhaps tie them on stakes might—’ Cannon stopped mid-sentence as from the direction of the homesteads and barns came the sound of shots, echoing and reechoing, rapid firing, several bursts of automatic fire.
‘What now?’ Lucas exclaimed as they listened intently. They could just hear the howling of a dog, a distressed screech of an animal badly hurt. There was another burst of firing, and as that reverberated away and away, the silence felt like a vacuum, a hiatus in their hearing.
‘Christ!’ both blasphemed with the same low awed word.
‘If they’ve opened the bins, would they shoot both the men? And why the dog?’ Lucas questioned sharply, then added, ‘Why do I ask, when I know the answers?’
Cannon swallowed hard. ‘Spite and fright’ they used to call senseless gang killings.
‘Let’s get these stakes sorted,’ he said.
By the time they had broken down and stripped the side shoots from four small saplings and got them firmly implanted in a square, they could hear an engine, which grew louder by the minute, and, mere seconds after that, the helicopter appeared over the lip of the waterfall, exactly on the path they had walked. A mechanical anachronism in this beautiful natural place, Cannon thought briefly, then raced to the nearest stake and waved the shirt he had tied to it.
Lucas stood by his side, and they braced themselves as the rotors stirred up a whirlwind around them, flattening the grass as it descended and touched ground.
The door was already open and two men jumped out, the second passing a stretcher out to the first and bringing a medical bag with him.
‘Where’s the patient?’ he yelled, once out from under the range of the rotors.
In minutes, he was kneeling by Jonathan, had taken a hypodermic syringe out of the bag and administered an injection. ‘We’ll set up a drip as soon as we have him aboard. You were right to send for us.’
Jonathan groaned a little as they moved him on to the stretcher and secured him, but he never opened his eyes.
‘Keep clear as we take off,’ the medic said as he picked up his bag. ‘You’re walking, is that right? I’ll push out a few supplies.’
Cannon waved his thanks for the bag and two emergency foil blanket packs, pushed out as the helicopter rose, but then stood listening. Was it an echo, or was there another aircraft in the area?
‘Does Valdes have a helicopter?’ he asked.
‘Like most of the big men,’ Lucas answered and also stood listening. ‘We should get out of sight.’
‘But where?’
‘I know,’ Lucas said, and ran to snatch up the nearest stakes.
Cannon took the other two. ‘They’ll know by the flattened grass.’
‘Can’t do anything about that, but we’ll need these,’ Lucas said as he reclaimed their shirts and jackets before hurling the stakes into the undergrowth.
Cannon picked up the bags. ‘So where do we head?’ he asked.
‘It’s back the way we came, and we should hurry,’ Lucas said, ‘sounds as if he’s circling.’
Cannon could neither see nor remember anywhere they might hide in this direction, but he trusted Lucas. By the time they reached the lip of the waterfall, he was quite sure the noise of the cascade was being augmented by another sound, an engine.
‘Come on, this is where it gets difficult. Put your feet where I put mine,’ Lucas ordered as instead of taking the direct route in the middle of the stream, he led the way over to the side where there was great overhanging bluff. He paused here. ‘Pass me the bags when I tell you. I can drop them down when I get over the top. Then when I wave, you come down backwards. I’ll guide your feet.’
Before Cannon had time either to question what they were about to attempt, Lucas had lain down on the top of the bluff and feet first, lowered himself down. Just before he passed out of sight, he signalled for the bags to be passed, and with one free hand dropped them, one by one, out of sight. Then without pause, he too dropped out of sight, but as Cannon realized the other helicopter was definitely coming their way, Lucas’s hand reappeared above the bluff, calling him on.
Cannon closed his mouth to try to swallow, but lost no time lying down in the same manner Lucas had done and cautiously edged out over the rock, until he felt his ankles grasped.
‘Keep coming,’ Lucas shouted, and each time as he lowered himself further out, Cannon felt his foot pressed firmly into a crevice and held there until he took the weight on it, then the other foot was placed lower, and so on until he was pulled in and onto the narrow ledge where Lucas and the bags were balanced.
‘Now, we edge along until we are under the waterfall,’ Lucas raised his voice above the sound of the water.
Flattening himself to the rock and following Lucas centimetre by centimetre, Cannon found himself in a small cave behind the waterfall.
‘I found this when I was a boy,’ Lucas said, ‘it seemed a lot bigger then!’
Before Cannon could recover his breath to make any kind of answer, the sound
of an engine came again, louder, louder. They both clamped their hands over their ears and crouched, backs to the rock, a sheet of water in front, and saw the dark shadow of another helicopter as it passed very close overhead. Minutes later, they realized it had landed. Then there was silence.
They waited and listened. After a while, they heard men shouting to each other – another more prolonged silence, then the helicopter was restarted and once more, its dark shadow passed over their hiding place.
‘We must still be careful,’ Cannon warned, ‘they might have left men behind.’
‘I’ll climb out, have a cautious look around,’ Lucas offered.
‘OK,’ Cannon agreed, but as the minutes passed, and he took stock of where he was, wished he had added, ‘don’t be long.’
The child Lucas would no doubt have found this a large and magical place, a cave that was really no more than a crevice, sparkling sunlight filtering through green and white water. There was a poem he half remembered – something about if you could see the world through the eyes of a contented child, that was exactly how a perfect world should be. Lucas must have found this here, coming with his father to visit an old boy happily living alone, and very contented with his lot.
But now his back was cramped and he was cold, all he wanted was to see Lucas come safely back. He was preparing to try to follow when he heard a piece of rock fall and rattle down the overhang, and to his relief, minutes later, Lucas edged his way in behind the water.
‘The bastards.’ The low whisper more telling than any shouted outburst.
‘What have they done?’
‘I can’t …’ The man sounded as if tears thickened his throat. ‘You’ll see,’ he added shortly as he took up the bags and led the way.
It was the smell that hit Cannon first, a cross between aviation fuel and wood, drifting across the lake, and there was a cloud of smoke beyond.
Then he realized. They had fired the log cabin and as he topped the lip of the waterfall, he could see it was ablaze from end to end.
‘All they can do is destroy!’ Lucas said. ‘Crush and smash, torment and kill!’
‘Their time is coming,’ Cannon promised grimly. He’d flown the Atlantic to see justice done.
‘What harm was an old cabin doing?’ Lucas said very quietly.
CHAPTER 23
‘Is there any point in going back? Don’t we have to go this way?’ Cannon indicated the waterfall, as Lucas set off in the direction of the fire. ‘We’ve got everything with us!’ he called.
‘They’ve got men and guns out that way,’ Lucas said. ‘There is another trail.’
Something else from his childhood, Cannon thought, following on.
When they neared the cabin, the heat was intense and Lucas went close, too close, staring, sparks shooting up, showering him until Cannon realized he could smell Lucas’s hair singeing – and he would not be pulled back.
Cannon was reminded of his godson, John Paul. The toddler had so wanted to be part of a magical television programme he had pressed himself tight against the screen, yelled when pulled away. Lucas was risking burns to remain part of his dream, his childhood, his visits with his father. He was watching part of his past being destroyed.
The bags all lay at their feet, Cannon now hooked the haversack on Lucas’s shoulder.
‘We’ve people waiting for us, there’s Tom Beale and your dog to think about. Lola will be pining for you.’ Naming the dog seemed to bring focus back to the there and then.
Lucas caught the haversack as it began to slip from his shoulder, and with his free hand brushed away the brown frizzled ends of his hair, and finally moved further away from the cabin. He took one last look, then walked over to where they had thrown the marker-stakes aside. He picked out two and pulling out his knife, shortened them to two custom-sized thumb-sticks.
‘We’ll be glad of these in a little.’ He raised an arm in the direction of the next line of hills and the mountains beyond.
‘We won’t be mountaineering?’ Cannon asked.
‘Not quite, not if I hit the right trail.’ Lucas opened the haversack and put the compact survival blankets in it, leaving Cannon with just the strapped bag of supplies to carry.
‘So this is a way you came with your father?’ Cannon asked as they walked into the first thickets of cane and hazel trees.
‘No. It’s a way my father drew pictures of, told me stories about, the history of how these places and roads came to be.’
‘But he’d …’ Cannon began.
‘Yeah, as a boy before Zachariah Valdes was ever heard of around here, and y’know …’ Lucas seemed to stride out faster as he went on. ‘It’s strange but I sort of sense my pa here, telling me this is the way we should go.’
Cannon did not waste time or breath trying to contradict that instinctive feeling, and said no more until an hour brought them to the shoulder of a great hill and here, where a small bank over a hollow of soil made a natural seat, they stopped to rest and open the bag from the helicopter. They drank a high energy orange juice between them and ate energy bars, satisfying in a way, but very quickly consumed.
‘So you remember the pictures your father drew,’ Cannon gestured around them, ‘of this area.’
Lucas nodded thoughtfully and leaning forward, began to trace outlines in the soil, the reach of the pole the limit of his canvas.
‘I’ve heard of Indian villages and burial mounds,’ Cannon said, but what Lucas was tracing – starting, as a landmark, was a crude cabin with swirling lines rising from it – was neither of these. Then he saw scratched out a succession of peaks, with skeletal fir trees at intervals, and last of all, and horizontally around the peaks, Lucas scored a deep continuous line.
‘These ways were created perhaps thousands of years before the Red Indians, or the white man, came here,’ he said, running the stick along this line again. ‘Buffalo made these, hundreds of thousands of buffalo moving from pasture to pasture, finding the quickest and easiest way to food, and water. The Indians followed much later and used the same ways to find easy hunting around the salt lakes the buffalo headed for, after the minerals, the natural salt licks, they found there. Later they were used for war parties to raid the early pioneers.’
‘Will we still be able to see these trails,’ Cannon asked, ‘after so long?’
‘Tomorrow morning, dawn,’ Lucas said with certainty.
‘So we rest here for the night?’
The bank was grassy and the two of them were exhausted. They shared long-life biscuits and a can of stew, which self heated when the air was let in. The foil blankets built up their body warmth and they slept. Cannon had thought he would worry about snakes, or larger animals, coming to share their warmth – or even them – but nothing woke either of them until the chorus of birds greeted the dawn.
Later, as they trekked on, each step altered the perspective of hills and mountains, the light made prisms of morning dew as the mist cleared in the growing power of the sun. As they climbed to avoid a thick patch of cane, Lucas exclaimed, stopped, and pointed to the next hill that had come into view.
‘That’s just as my pa told me,’ he said, ‘and there’s the trail! He said it was as straight as a band around a bowler hat.’
‘A green bowler hat,’ Cannon agreed, ‘what a perfect description. A green hat with a brown band.’
They walked on with added enthusiasm, but what Cannon had not expected was to find how deep those long gone buffalo had scored this trail. The path often lay a metre or so below the natural ground level, and as they rounded the shoulder of the bowler hat, Lucas pointed over to the right.
‘That’s the way we go, down, along the shore of one of the largest salt lakes in the area.’ Lucas stood facing the morning sun, looking all aglow. ‘I remember every word Pa said about all this.’
‘What those we love say, and the stories they tell us, affect us long after they have gone,’ Cannon said quietly. ‘I know that’s true.’
‘I
could be almost glad we had to come this way,’ Lucas said as they set off again. ‘I’ve always felt … his body must be out here, somewhere on Valdes’s land.’
‘You and your mother have had no closure,’ Cannon said, he well knew how apt that phrase was to those who had lost loved ones. ‘No closure,’ he repeated.
Near lunchtime, after they had scrambled and slid down to the lake shore, trekked along that, and were pushing uphill again, through a dense patch of laurels, they heard the unmistakable heavy blows of low helicopter blades. No sooner had that passed than a second went over.
‘Who were they, I wonder?’ Cannon asked grimly as they waited in the bushes for this to pass.
‘As well to be careful, but probably nothing to do with us. A week before Derby Day there’s gonna be lots of people flying in: owners; trainers; jockeys; then the grooms, and the public.’
Cannon thought of Austin. In the middle of this major world racing event, he was helping launch a major gang round-up, and as Spracks’s security manager, he and Lucas had done him no favours by incapacitating Topknot, his spy in the Valdes camp.
‘Keep going,’ Lucas encouraged, ‘if we can keep up this pace, we should be out by tonight.’
From the salt lake valley, the going had became more and more arduous. It was not strength, nor fitness, that kept Cannon going now, but sheer willpower. He was determined not to let Lucas down, or fail to see this business through to the end but he blessed those long gone buffalo herds as they reached another old trail around the shoulder of these hills.
‘This is as high as we have to go,’ Lucas said, ‘there should be enough light left for us to make it.’
Their eyes grew used to the dusk as the light faded, so on the last leg of their trek, Cannon could just make out the three great darker clumps of firs on the slopes down to the car park. What he could not see was any lights, or signs, that anyone was still around. He anticipated another night wrapped in a foil blanket, but as they walked through the last area of firs some fifty metres from the hard standing for vehicles, he thought there was a blacker shape, against the blackness under the trees.
