The Island of Dragons (Rockpools Book 4)

by Gregg Dunnett

  The Island of Dragons

  Gregg Dunnett

  Part I

  Chapter One

  The snow began at midnight, falling thick and strong through the still air. Where it landed on the ocean it lingered for just a second, before melting away, but in the compound it settled, and the sand was cold and dry enough that it stuck there too. Only a strip of beach remained at the water’s edge, where a whisper of swell pushed a tongue of seawater in and out. Just beyond it stood a figure, shining a flashlight out into the night.

  A million snowflakes were illuminated in the light, dropping in perfect stillness through the windless air. Beyond them, many billions more, but also winks of color – the buoys marking out the prohibited area, flashing red in their steady beat. The figure watched the show for a while, marveling in the beauty, listening to the silence. But not too long, he was diligent, even after twenty years working here. He redirected his light, shining it over the high metal fence, checking, always checking. The reverse side of the signs reflected silver back at him, their painted sides faced outwards, warning that the compound was strictly private, protected by CCTV, alarms, and armed security guards. But the truth was Keith Waterhouse – the senior security guard – had never once had to fire his weapon. He’d only even drawn it once from its holster – years before, when he was unused to the animals that sometimes shuffled in the darkness during his nightly patrols. And because there were so many of them – rabbits, foxes, stoats and even small deer – then the stories he’d heard, about the pollution, about how this place was dangerous… well, he saw no reason to believe them.

  Keith was a big man, but heavy set rather than overweight. He shifted inside his thickly padded jacket and turned back the other way, shining his light now on the dark, silent shapes of the buildings set back from the beach. Their outlines were softened tonight by the covering of snow. There were no lights here, the plant didn’t work twenty-four hours, meaning it was only him and Miguel here, his younger, and much newer colleague. Miguel was back in the well-lit and warm control room, which protocol demanded was manned at all times. Miguel was an immigrant from Mexico – or somewhere down that way – and he didn’t like the cold. Keith smiled at the thought. As he did so his flashlight illuminated the fog of warm air from his breath, sending a flurry of snowflakes billowing in every direction.

  Keith turned and laid a second trail of footprints back up the beach to his truck. He brushed away the snow which had accumulated on his jacket and climbed in, then he clumped his boots together before swinging his legs inside. Then he started the engine and continued his way along where he knew the perimeter road lie, a couple of inches under the snow.

  He kept the headlights dipped. Otherwise they just lit up the universe of fluttering white, but it wasn’t hard going. He could follow the truck’s own tire tracks, made on Miguel’s earlier round when the snow was thinner. They were partially hidden now, but still showed. Even if they disappeared altogether, the road was marked out by wooden posts every fifty yards, painted with reflective paint. He felt quite relaxed, inspired and grateful for the beauty his job sometimes presented him with. He began to whistle.

  A second later, he stopped. Ahead of him, clearly visible in the snow was something that shouldn’t be there. A set of fresh boot prints crossing the road. It took him a moment to make sense of it. Even then, he was slow to react. Dangerously slow.

  “Hey Miguel,” he got on the radio. “Did you get out? By the generating equipment?”

  A delay, a buzz of static, then the slightly accented voice of his colleague. “Get out?”

  “Of the truck. Did you have a walk about? I can see footprints.”

  Another delay. Then, “No.”

  Keith pressed the button to transmit, but then released his finger, thinking. Miguel was a joker. He shouldn’t joke about something like this, but he was young, and unlike Keith, he found the job dull. Chances were, Miguel had laid the tracks, and was now denying it, in order to wind up his older colleague.

  “What kind of footprints?” Miguel’s voice came through the radio now, and there was something in the words that told the story. Hard to pin down, maybe a little too casual. Keith smiled and shook his head.

  “Oh no you don’t amigo.” He said it aloud, but not into the radio. He wondered how Miguel had done it. He must have stopped the truck somewhere to get out, and Keith couldn’t work out where, and how he’d missed it. But then he figured it out.

  He got out again, leaving the engine running this time, with the lights on. Miguel had stopped the truck up ahead, then doubled back here, probably walking along by the perimeter fence to play his trick. Keith shone his flashlight into one of the boot prints. It was smaller than his own size-twelve imprint. Miguel had small feet. Pigeon foot, he’d called it when Keith pointed it out. Smiling, and confident he had it worked out, Keith grabbed the radio again. He would play along a while.

  “We have a single intruder in the compound. Kinda small feet though. Doesn’t look very threatening.”

  He ignored the put-on confused response from his colleague. He would follow the prints from here to where Miguel had stopped the truck. It was a nice excuse to get back out in the gentle snowfall.

  As he walked towards the fence his boots crumped through the fresh snow, his own boot-prints sharper and more defined that those he was following. Though there was enough definition to make out that the two sets of prints were going in opposite directions. Any moment he expected them to turn, where Miguel had moved along the fence. But they didn’t.

  Instead they ran right up to the fence. And beyond. And the fence, instead of being the secure barrier that Keith had seen night after night for so many years, now bore a large hole. The snow around it was trampled and messed up. The moment made him dizzy. Hyper-aware, but also confused, his mind pulled in all directions at once. The protocols he’d written and practiced for a compound breach swam into his mind, but they seemed distant, unreal paper exercises. He felt disbelief, a part of his brain still clinging to the idea this was part of Miguel’s joke. And then the anxiety kicked in. He was suddenly aware of the hood he wore, and how it restricted his vision to just the world right in front of his face. He turned, swinging the light behind him, back towards his truck and the dark buildings beyond, but there was no-one there. Just two trails of footprints. His own, brand new, leading out to the fence, and the other smaller set, heading into the compound. But as he looked he had to turn his back to the fence, and he felt its threatening darkness. He swung the light back, illuminating the cut steel of the hole.

  The words of his protocols finally prompted action. He got on the radio, keeping his voice low, and using the codewords he insisted that all security personnel learned for just such an occasion as this. But Miguel didn’t know them, or refused to believe him. He had to resort to swearing at the man.

  “Check all the camera feeds. There’s a six-foot hole in the fucking fence! Oh and call the cops. Tell them to get someone out here right now.” He slipped the radio into his pocket, and for the second time in his security career, he drew out his gun.

  He may not have ever fired the weapon – a Glock semi-automatic pistol – within the compound, but he practiced with it every month, and the familiar weight of it felt comforting. But the grip of it felt wrong, through the wool of his gloves, and he ripped them off, discarding them into the snow without even realizing it. His mind was tunneling now, the shock and fear he’d felt falling away, leaving only anger and a need for action. A growing rage that his domain had been violated. He moved fast back towards his truck, careless of obliterating his own tracks, but avoiding those of the unknown intruder, as if that might
alert them to his presence, whoever they were.

  When he reached his truck he hesitated. A moment of decision.

  Keith had long told his wife that his job was not dangerous. There was nothing worth stealing within the compound, and he was a visible deterrent, required by over-the-top environmental regulations. And his employers had made clear that if anyone did break in, they expected him to alert the police and monitor the situation from the safety of the secure control room. There were insurance considerations. Nobody wanted heroics.

  And yet, his many years of service had left him emotionally attached to the place. So now it came to it, there was no real question he would act to defend it. He barely paused at all, just long enough to clamp his flashlight shakily alongside the barrel of the Glock so that he could fire into the pool of yellow light. Little white clouds of his own breath obscured his view. The snow no longer looked beautiful, it looked threatening, giving cover to an unknown adversary. He tightened his grip on the gun. He followed the footprints towards the buildings.

  The prints came to a wall, and then split, going both ways. For a second he couldn’t make sense of it, then he worked out the intruder must have gone one way, and then changed their mind, coming back and going the other. Meaning they were either to his left or his right. He looked down, trying to read the tracks, but he was no God-damn Indian. He guessed right, towards the entrance to the main building. His hands shook – the cold, he thought as the Glock rattled against the flashlight. Ten steps on and he saw something, not a man, but smaller. He swung around, checking the area around him to be sure no one was sneaking up on his blindside. Nothing. He turned back. What was that thing? A backpack? He came closer.

  Keith felt the blood rush around his body. It was almost thrilling. His feet seemed to float over the snow. It was a backpack, placed in the doorway of the generator room, which had a kind of open porch, so that there was less snow here. Even so it had a fair covering, and he reached down to brush it off, surprising himself by how cold it was. Where the hell were his gloves?

  Twice a year the firm sent him on courses where they ran scenarios – the protocol for a protest beyond the fence, what to do in the event of power outage, an incursion by boat into the buoyed-off area – that one happened often enough in the summer when the tourists were around. But what to do if someone cut through the fence and left their backpack against the generator room door? They hadn’t done that one, which meant Keith was left to make his own decision. But by then, unknown to the big security guard, there was no right decision. By then he was being watched. A figure had rounded the corner forty feet away, cloaked by the darkness, as the big man played his light over the bag. He went to pick it up, finding it heavy. The security guard hesitated now, he pulled out his radio again.

  Away in the darkness, the other figure raised a hand. The screen of a mobile phone lit up softly, its brightness set to the lowest setting.

  “Miguel. There’s a package here of some sort, by the generator room. I can’t see what it is.” The security guard struggled to open the top of the backpack, and then abruptly stepped back, his last action before his final words.

  “Oh Christ. I think it’s a bomb.”

  In the next second the detonation ripped through him. A huge flash of orange yellow lit up the whole compound, turning the snow to gold, but it was a sight that Keith would never see. His heavy outer jacket, offering such good protection against the cold, was useless against the vicious flying metal. It tore into his torso, removed his arms, flayed his legs, and clove his head into two separate parts.

  And as the light flared away, there was just enough time – had anyone been looking – to see the blood lying crimson and dirty across the pure white snow.

  Chapter Two

  The cellphone, vibrating on her bedside table, woke Jessica West from her dream, but though it was still sloughing off her as she reached for the device, she’d already forgotten what it had been about. Neither did she care. The light from the little screen was so bright it hurt her eyes, but she made out the name of the caller: Black.

  “What?” she managed, still sleepy.

  “There’s been another one.”

  She sat up a little in the bed, but not much, it was cold out there.

  “Another what?”

  “Another attack.”

  The remnants of the dream hit her now, something about throwing a stick for a dog, though weirdly, inside an empty shopping mall. Even weirder, she didn’t own a dog.

  “Can’t it wait till the morning?” The two of them had been assigned to work the string of attacks on local chemical and power plants. Domestic terrorism in theory, but in practice such low level stuff that it didn’t warrant a call in the middle of the night.

  “Not this one. They’ve gone and killed someone.”

  West’s eyes jerked a bit more open. She sat up more, suddenly alert.

  “Who?”

  “Security guard. Guess he was there at the wrong time.”

  “Shit. He’s dead?”

  “All seven hundred pieces of him.”

  She swore again, then: “Where?”

  “You might just like that bit, but I’ll tell you about it on the way to the airfield.”

  “The airfield? Where are you?”

  “I’m right outside your apartment. But wrap up warm, it’s cold as hell.”

  The call went dead and West blinked into the darkness for a moment. Then she rolled out of bed, and fumbled about, finding some clothes. As she did so, she remembered what her partner had said, and added more.

  Outside the street was silent, and appeared deserted, until Black flashed the lights in the black SUV. It was cold, she thought, as she crossed the road, but the forecast snow hadn’t materialized.

  “Why are they giving us a plane? They cost thousands of dollars an hour.” West asked as she got in. She noticed the readout of the digital clock on the dash. Three twenty-seven. The temperature, thirty-two degrees. Freezing. She adjusted the heater, turning it higher, while Black started the engine.

  “Because they don’t have a boat I suppose. Though don’t get excited. It’s not going to be a Learjet.”

  West ignored the comment. “How do we know it’s the same guy?”

  “Same MO. Small chemical plant, same curved pieces of stainless steel. Bomb packed in a backpack. It all matches.”

  “Except this time he killed someone.”

  Black made his hand into the shape of a gun and pretended to fire it at her. “All except that.”

  West ignored that as well. “So where is it we’re flying to?”

  “Ah-ha, it’s someplace you’re going to find familiar I think.” Black grinned at having information she did not, but he didn’t hold on to it for long. That wasn’t wise.

  “Remember Lornea Island? You told me how you worked a murder case there, before you switched to the Agency?”

  “Lornea Island?” West was silent for a moment, as the details came back to her. “Yeah.”

  “Well that’s where it happened. Ain’t it just your lucky night?”

  The car pulled away from the curb.

  Black was right about the plane. When they arrived at the airfield used by the Agency, they were let straight in and directed onto the apron where a propeller plane was waiting for them, its lights on and door open. Two pilots were aboard, making their pre-flight checks. They waited ten minutes aboard until two other agents joined them – also bound for Lornea Island but a different case, the Agency had to stretch its resources after all – then the door was closed and the aircraft taxied to the end of the runway.

  The flight wasn’t long, but dawn was already coming as they descended towards a wintry looking Lornea Island. West, who didn’t fly too happily, was concerned about the possibility of ice or snow on the runway, but said nothing, not wanting to embarrass herself in front of her colleagues. She was still in her first year after graduating from the academy at Quantico, although with her time as a detective she had conside
rably more actual investigative experience than her fellow newly minted special agents. So instead she simply watched out the window as the aircraft side-slipped down, lower and lower towards the hopefully-cleared runway.

  “I hope they fitted this with sleds” Black said as they got down to less than twenty feet up and the little Lornea airfield still hadn’t appeared out of the side windows. But then the runway lights flashed beneath them, and a narrow strip of concrete appeared on both sides, snow heaped up on either side – the plows that had shoved it there must have started early. They bounced twice before the props changed angles and bit backwards into the air, roaring in protest as they slowed the plane down.

  Out of the plane they found a car waiting, and West was first to grab the keys.

  Chapter Three

  By the time they arrived at the site, a thirty minute drive to the northern end of the island, the site was busy with local law enforcement. West wondered if she would remember any of the faces, but though the uniforms looked familiar, there was no one she actually recognized.

  “What have we got?” she asked the lieutenant in charge, a man named Jim Smith. She flipped her ID and Black did the same.

  Smith inspected them both carefully before replying. “Security guard blown to pieces. Local man. A good man.” He shook his head, and West was reminded of the slightly slower pace of life on the island, she could imagine the lieutenant with a toothpick in his mouth, one that he kept there the whole day.

  “Mind if we take a look?”

  A hesitation. Then a nod, and he led the way, through snow that was messed up from a hundred footprints from the parking lot of the compound, towards the buildings.

  “They tell me there’s been a string of these?” the Lieutenant asked.

  “This’ll be the seventh,” Black replied. “If it’s our guy.”