by E. E. Knight
Her six-cylinder nemesis charged, its dazzling headlights stabbing out toward her like horns. Lara loosed the bike. The Kawasaki jumped forward.
The opposing vehicles closed the gap in a flash. Lara downshifted and lifted her front wheel off the pavement just in time for it to hit the oncoming car. She threw her weight forward, and the driving rear wheel climbed the bumper and grille. She launched the bike off the windshield, straightened the Kawasaki in midair by throwing her weight, and landed with a knee-popping bounce of tires.
The Volvo tried to turn but struck the curb and slid into the building instead. Before the occupants could fight their way past the air bags and out the doors, they were looking at a dozen pistols and shotguns. Lara marked the approach of sirens from both directions.
The Volvo, one axle broken, leaked oil onto the sidewalk in front of the Ministry of Justice. Uniformed Peruvians ordered the four men to lie down. Other officers approached her, guns drawn.
Smoothly, Lara retrieved the red plastic case from the back of the bike and turned to meet the arriving officers.
“Señores,” she said in Spanish as they lowered their guns and their faces broke into disbelieving grins, “I believe someone has ordered a pizza.”
PART THREE
20
The gull white seaplane skimmed the choppy South Pacific waters at thirty feet, Capricorn Atoll a blue smudge on the horizon ahead.
From above, Capricorn Atoll looked like a shark rising out of the depths. One side of the atoll was made up of a conical mountain, sheer where it faced the ocean and sloping off to the lagoon in the center. The mountain ridge fell off into two arms embracing the lagoon at the center, which was partially open to the sea on the west side, where just a series of rocky shards, the teeth at the bottom of the shark’s open maw, protected a deep harbor.
The circle of land surrounding the lagoon gave the island its topographic designation: atoll. Its position, precisely on the tropic of Capricorn, gave it its name.
It was dusk on December 21, the summer solstice south of the equator.
The man at the controls, a sun-streaked island-hopper named Shanks, kept checking the sea. His right eye would wince, then his left cheek would twitch, causing his eye to wince again, as though the two sides of his visage were fighting for control of the whole; Shanks was a ragged bundle of nerves everywhere but his hands.
From his forearms down, Shanks was the coldest dead-stick pilot that Lara had ever known.
“Sea’s a little better now that we’re away from the storm,” Shanks said in his rasping New Zealand drawl. They all wore headsets and microphones plugged into the plane so that they could hear each other over the engine noise. “Should be fine in the lagoon. You know about this island, right?”
“I’ve learned about it only recently,” Lara said.
“What about the island?” Borg asked. Like Lara, Borg wore a wet suit and surf shoes.
Lara launched into lecture mode. “Capricorn Atoll used to be the home of a tribe the Fiji Islanders to the north called Muwati. In 1863, investigating the disappearance of the whaler Giron, the French frigate Loire stopped at the island after sighting a set of masts in the lagoon. No one knows what happened during the visit. The emperor Louis Napoleon put all records pertaining to the Loire’s investigation of the Giron and the island under government seal, but when the Loire turned north again, the atoll was uninhabited and the lagoon at the center had been named Blood Bay. Upon the frigate’s return to Fiji, the natives feted the first officer—the captain had died during events on the island—and his crew with such enthusiasm that the French-Fijian babies born nine months later were given noble names and wanted for nothing over the course of their lives.”
“Were they cultists?” Borg asked.
“We’ll never know. Then, in 1926, the National Geographic Society sent an expedition to explore the island over the objections of the French Republic. The explorers, photographers, and naturalists spent only one night at the atoll and returned one man short. According to a couple of lines in National Geographic, they’d picked up a quick-presenting fever on arrival and spent a delirious night before quitting the atoll for a Fiji hospital. The missing naturalist, a Canadian named DuBois, had evidently wandered into the lagoon in his illness and drowned. It wasn’t the sort of article that inspired tourism to the atoll.”
“Enough history,” Shanks said. “You know how to creep a guy out, Lara.”
“We need you to set us down well away from the island,” Lara told him through the headset.
“Here?” Shanks’ voice crackled back. “I thought we’d set down inside the atoll.”
“Sorry, we don’t want our presence announced.”
Shanks tipped the wing and circled. “I don’t like the looks of that chop, Lara. Won’t be an easy landing. Or takeoff, for that matter. And we’ve got typhoons brewing east and west of the Fiji chain. Ocean’s getting all stirred up.”
She knew all that, but none of it made a difference. “You can do it,” she said into the mike.
Her long-haired pilot looked at his controls. “Yeah. Every time I hear from you, Lara, I think, ‘Finally. An easy trip. She’ll just need a shuttle to Raiatéa.’ But it never is. I’ve always got to punch a hurricane and land in the eye of the storm, pick you up, and take off again before my ship gets tossed, or get you off a volcano before the bugger goes Krakatau, or drop you into China somewhere and get out again before I get a SAM sigmoidoscopy.”
Lara chuckled. “You still take my calls. Why?”
“Who wants to die in bed?”
“The sane?”
“Naw! What I want, Lara—what I want is for a bunch of blokes to be sitting round the bar thirty years from now, shooting away, and one of ‘em says: ‘My pa, he knew this bonzo bloke, Shanks Muldoon, pilot, could fly a water heater if you stuck a big enough engine on it. You want to hear what the crazy bastard tried to do?’—and then they tell the story
about how I snuffed it.”
Lara glanced behind her, where Borg, whiter-faced than usual, was checking the fit of his seat belt. “I’ll do my best to keep giving you opportunities to realize your dream,” she said.
“That’s the spirit. Now hang on; I’ll try to set her down. We go ass over, the best way out will be the door in back.”
He worked the flaps and throttle. The wave tops, not that far away to begin with, suddenly looked close enough to touch.
Shanks lifted the boatlike nose of the plane higher than he normally would, and Lara felt the first touch of a wave at the back of the boat. Then it was smack-smack-smack-shushhhhh as the ship cut through the chop and landed.
The seaplane rocked as the short waves hit the floats at the wingtips. Spray washed up on the canopy.
Shanks let the engines idle. “You want me back on the twenty-second, right?”
“It’ll all be over by then, one way or another. I’ll try and radio, but if you don’t hear from me—”
“Come anyway?”
Lara leaned across the seats and kissed his stubbled cheek. “I was going to say ‘use your judgment,’ but that’s playing jazz on a saxophone with a broken reed, isn’t it?”
“The storms are tracking funny. Looks like they’re going to circle this damn island like a couple of ballroom dancers ‘round the glitter ball. I should be able to cut through the tail of the western storm.”
“Christmas toddies will be on me.”
“I’ll be at Tongatapu waiting for your call, Lara. I’ll put an order in while I’m there.”
She squeezed back into the passenger-cargo area and shouldered her lucky backpack, placing her feet carefully and bracing with her hands so she didn’t trip as the plane rocked. She put on her holsters, her guns wrapped in protective plastic bags to keep the ocean spray off. Shanks followed, forced to bend almost double because of his long frame.
They put the inflatable boat out the passenger-cargo door, tied it off, and inflated it. Borg, a little green from the motion,
helped Shanks with the trickiest part, moving the little outboard from the plane to its fixture in the Zodiac. The little boat alternately lunged at the seaplane and fell away in the confused sea.
Lara made the difficult jump into the Zodiac, landed on her knees, and grabbed one of the sidelines. She pulled the Zodiac up tight to the cargo hatch, sea spray already speckling her wraparound sunglasses.
The balky boat jumped again; a wave forced its way between seaplane and Zodiac and hit her full in the face.
“Bollocks!” she spat as Shanks laughed.
“Temper, temper!”
She gauged the motion of the boat and seaplane, gripping a fold-out handle at the cargo door in one hand and the boat with the other, waiting for both to bottom…
“Now, Nils!”
With Shanks letting out the line wrapped around the outboard’s rudder-propeller housing, Borg dropped the engine into the fitting. Lara let go of the plane and shot home the bolts that would secure it.
The hard part over, Borg and Shanks passed over the diving gear—she’d purchased some water wings for Borg—bags of equipment, her VADS harness, binoculars, a satellite phone with a solar recharger, food, and fuel. Finally Borg—still in his climbing arms; the Peruvians hadn’t gotten around to forwarding his regular arms from the Madre de Dios canopy tower—tried the difficult transfer.
He fell in, wetting his lower half. A little Pacific never hurt anyone. She helped him into the boat, filled the gas reservoir, and started the motor.
She gave Shanks the thumbs-up. He returned a finger-waggling salute-cum-wave.
The cargo in its netting checked one final time, she let go the line going back to the seaplane and motored off into the chop. The ocean felt like a horse in a buck-trot beneath her, and Borg dry-heaved off the starboard inflatable.
“Got it bad?”
“Strange,” he gasped. “I never get airsickness. But boats do it … urp … every time, even if it’s just a little bit rough.”
She squeezed his ankle, it being the only part she could reach as she worked the motor tiller.
In case of accident they stood by until Shanks lifted off. He gunned the wide-bodied craft, shaped like a white sperm whale with a wing and twin engines mounted high, and blasted through the wave tops until it took somewhat gracelessly to the air.
“A good man,” Borg said.
“Storms or no storms, we’ll see him again. Now let’s get to the island.” She nosed the Zodiac over and opened the throttle wide.
Borg groaned and closed his eyes.
***
They floated along the edge of the Tonga Trench, one of the deepest points in the Pacific.
The easy way to reach the atoll would be to motor through one of the many channels on the west side. But Lara Croft didn’t want to announce her presence on the island. The Prime and his cult had been one step ahead of her since she first began to look into Ajay’s disappearance. It was time for her to steal a march on him.
She pointed the Zodiac straight for the highest point of the island.
Borg sat where she put him, leaned when she told him, as the little boat skipped through the chop toward land. Though it was sunny, distant masses of cloud from the storm systems Shanks had mentioned sent spiraling arms across the skies like the two whales in the Chinese yin-yang symbol.
“You have any plan for action at all?” Borg inquired with a groan.
“Not the slightest.”
“This doesn’t worry you?”
She had to raise her voice above the engine; they were nearing shore, and the chop was turning into surf. “I’m at my best pell-mell. Besides, Sherlock Holmes always said it was a capital mistake to theorize before gathering facts. Experience has taught me to agree. I’ve no idea what we’re going to find here, so how can I make plans?”
***
Volcanic rock, blue-black in the spray, rose above them. Clusters of green iguanas lay on the flatter prominences. Not quite a wall, but only the most charitable would call it a slope. More of a ridge than a peak, the mass before them was the biggest remnant of the volcano that had formed Capricorn Atoll millennia ago.
A line of rocks, occasionally appearing as the surf fell away before smashing into them again, ringed this side of the island. Once inside the ring, Lara and Borg would be relatively safe; there would be only the surf to contest their landing.
Lara turned the Zodiac and motored back out to sea. Either this part of the island had no beaches, or some combination of tide and storm had covered them.
“I’m going to try to get us past the rocks,” she told Borg. “Try to get a piton in, and we’ll tie up.”
Borg nodded, looked in the magazine in his arm that held the pitons, snapped it shut again. “Just say when.”
In response she let the little engine roar. Down a wave, up—
Something poked the bow of the boat from below: a rock. Lara threw her weight to counterbalance, and with the wash of a wave they were beyond the rocks, trapped in a little swirl with a gentle slope rising from the seaweed-coated coral.
“Now, Nils!”
Borg fired his piton, hooked the arm on it immediately and clung to the boat with his other limb. The sea dropped away, and the boat hung sideways. Lara hung on to the side lines until the sea came up again.
“Another piton! Here!” She pointed.
Borg fired again; a piece of coral bounced off her sunglasses.
Lara got a handful of climbing line from the cargo netting, looped it through the boat’s side line. The sea fell away again, and they hung on. Then, when it came up again, Borg looped line around the boat as she fixed it to the pitons.
One more swell of the sea and they’d turn the Zodiac into an improvised shelf suspended from the pitons.
They didn’t get it.
The next time the boat fell away from the wall, Lara saw a flash of flying limbs, and then Borg hit the churning green water, the splash lost in the roar of surf hitting the breakers and the mountainside.
She snaked a line around her wrist and dove into the surf after him. Bubbles and stirred-up ocean obscured her vision. She caught a flash of a leg and went after it.
Borg struck the volcanic rock bottom, tried to right himself, but was caught in the undertow. Lara shot after him, ran out of line, abandoned her tether. She got an arm around him just as another wave lifted them both—air!—and threw them against the cliff wall as they went down again, Borg kicking madly but trying to not interfere with her grip. She had the rhythm of the waves now, and the second time the ocean pushed them up she used the thrust to bodysurf back toward the Zodiac, now hanging inverted by a single line.
The ocean flung them against the lava wall with a smack, and Lara felt the skin on her knee tear. She grabbed on to the bow of the Zodiac, and this time, when the surf receded, the water didn’t take them with it. They both gasped, catching up on oxygen for a moment. Lara looked at the last piton; it was holding well enough, but they’d lost some of the gear.
They hung on through one more wave, this time using the Zodiac as a fender. Then Borg shot another piton into the rock, and they pulled themselves out of the surf, clinging to the rock like lizards.
“Sorry, Lara,” Borg panted. “I let go to fix a knot—”
“We’re both alive. That’s enough.”
Borg climbed to an outcropping, sending a startled crested iguana scrambling away, and Lara, a line fixed to her, negotiated the Zodiac and surf to pass up what was left of the gear. She still had her lucky pack, guns, and VADS gear—she’d done everything but handcuff those essentials to the Zodiac—but they’d lost the heavy oxygen gear, climbing supplies, food, and the portable radio-satellite phone.
She tossed up the netting bag holding the flippers and masks anyway, and joined him on the rock. The surf was beautiful again, instead of a deadly menace.
Borg looked at the slope. “This is no worse than the Jungfrau. We don’t need gear, except perhaps near the very top, and there’s enough line for
us to support each other.”
On the next rock over, a feud broke out among a heap of crested iguanas. They bobbed their heads and opened their jaws at one another.
“Let’s get to it,” Lara said, helping Borg into his pack.
On the way up the two-hundred-meter slope, she kept reminding herself that the mountain only looked big. Set this volcanic heap against even the lesser peaks of the Alps, and it would shrink to insignificance. Here and there they were able to walk up the side, but most of the ascent was a four-limbed clamber over sharp rocks that made her grateful for her tough reef walkers and leather gloves.
“Does this ridge have a name?” Borg asked as they paused to suck air and water.
“The Nuku Hava.” Lara couldn’t say if she had even pronounced it properly.
“What’s that mean?”
“I don’t know and didn’t have time to find out. Getting the Polynesians to say anything about this island is one flat down from impossible.”
They chatted over the route for the next fifty meters, then started up again. Near the top, the cliff became sheer, with spots that would require an inverted climb if they didn’t choose another route. Borg, who had a feel for mountains that rivaled a sailor’s instinct for weather, found a chimney. He led Lara up it, climbing expertly and efficiently with his artificial limbs. Being at the other end of the line was like having a mountain goat on a lead.
Lara shrugged to herself. Nils Bjorkstrom’s love for Alison was the only obstacle he couldn’t seem to get over.
21
There is no good way to knock at a tent. Alex Frys settled for clearing his throat.
“Yes?” Heather Rourke called from inside.
“I’ve brought some dinner. I haven’t seen you all day.”
She unzipped the tent and let him in. The little nylon-floored household consisted of a cot, a bag of clothes, and some magazines scattered on the floor.
Heather took a pair of kiwis off the tray, sat primly on her field cot. “Last night’s beach party was a bit much for me. Gassim is dying from the wounds Lara gave him at the canopy tower.”
