The Lost Island

by Paul Kearney

  How on earth did Cutter get himself tossed in a cell? Lester wondered, hoping the anger didn’t show on his face.

  “This is the first I’ve heard of it,” he said. Despite himself, he sat down on a nearby stool. His legs had turned to water. His life, his career, all of it flashed before his eyes. What the hell had happened — and why hadn’t Jenny contacted him?

  Oh my God, it’s not Cutter...

  Brooke watched him closely, and his eyes narrowed.

  “You really are out of the loop on this one, aren’t you?”

  “My people on the ground should have informed me, but I’ve heard nothing,” Lester admitted. One didn’t try to cover up a mistake of this magnitude. One took it on the chin, and hoped for clemency.

  “Damned careless of them,” Brooke barked. He looked at Lester a moment as if sizing him up, then crossed to the decanters. He poured two large brandies and handed one of the heavy crystal glasses to Lester. “Drink up, my boy. You look as though you could do with it.”

  Lester smiled wryly.

  “How much can you tell me?” Brooke asked, sipping his brandy with narrowed eyes. “The more I know, the more effectively I can sit on this.”

  “I have a team bound for an island in the North Atlantic where we had a base during the war,” Lester said. His mind turned furiously. “Experiments were carried out at that time on the island, in the late forties and early fifties. Biological experiments.”

  Brooke took a seat, mouth pursed.

  Lester took the plunge.

  “There may be some materials left behind which are now at risk of contaminating the environment. My team has been sent out to neutralise them.” There — he had told the lie, or at least bent the truth. His career was now balanced on a razor’s edge.

  He continued.

  “It is a matter of some urgency, and there is a storm over the entire region at the moment. Helicopter flights are impossible, so my team hired a fishing boat to make their way out to the island with as little loss of time as possible. Their equipment was flown out to Ireland in a diplomatic bag —”

  Here Brooks covered his eyes with his hand. Lester ploughed on doggedly.

  “I believe that must have kicked off the Irish Government’s suspicions. The island itself is a contested territory. We’ve given up our claims on it, and the final decision on its sovereignty is now in the hands of the international courts. Both Ireland and France have laid claim to it.” He cleared his throat. His mouth was dry, despite the brandy. “My Lord, we must not let anyone except my team set foot on the island. It is imperative.”

  Brooke rose again.

  “What a bloody awful little mess you have concocted for us,” he said mildly. He faced the fire and stared into his glass.

  “It can’t be done,” he said at last. “The Irish are already at sea. And once this lands on the Minister’s desk, the French will have to be informed, as well. We cannot keep this an in-house affair, Lester. It’s too late for that.”

  It was over then. The anomalies, the creatures, the ARC — all of it would finally come out in the open. And sitting on top of it all would be the head of James Peregrine Lester, scapegoat-in-chief.

  He was finished.

  “This must not become an international incident,” he said, his mind still turning despite the black despair that was flooding it.

  “It’s too late.”

  “My Lord, if we can bring the Irish and French on board somehow, and make them part of the operation, then perhaps the whole thing could still be kept out of the public eye. It’s not ideal, but it is better than having it splashed across the world’s newspapers.”

  “I’ll agree with you there,” Brooke said coldly. He stood thinking, staring into the fire, while Lester perched on the edge of his seat with an empty glass in his hand, waiting.

  “All right,” Brooke said, “we’ll give it a try. For Christ’s sake, James, get in touch with your people on the ground and apprise them of the situation. If they can get a lid on it before anyone else joins them on this island of yours, then we shall have a chance. I know Jacques Santerre at their foreign ministry — we go back a long way. I’ll talk to him this morning and see what I can do.

  “The thing about the French is that you can’t double-cross them. They find it unforgivable when they have the wool pulled over their eyes. We shall have to lay our cards on the table for them to see, and hope what they see is sense.”

  “I am very grateful, my Lord,” Lester said. A tiny flicker of hope lit up in him.

  “The Irish are your problem. I want you on a plane this morning. Phone for a car from here and book something at Brize Norton. Get out there and clean up your mess at that end. I’ll handle Whitehall. Is that clear?”

  “Very clear, my Lord,” Lester said. He stood up. Brooke looked closely at him.

  “You’re not holding anything back on me are you, James? Now would be the time to say.”

  “My Lord, I have told you everything I can.”

  Brooke caught the tiny qualification. He smiled unpleasantly.

  “I’ll just bet you have.”

  It was after dawn that Jenny felt the attitude in the room change. Madden had been called out, and one of his subordinates had continued the questioning in a mechanical, listless way. She picked up the alteration in tone immediately, and tried to cudgel her tired brain into some kind of alertness. The caffeine on an empty stomach had made her both queasy and hyped without contributing to her powers of concentration.

  Without being asked, she took one of Madden’s cigarettes from the pack on the table and lit it, drawing the smoke gratefully into her lungs and enjoying the momentary light headedness it gave her.

  “You can’t smoke in here,” the policeman sitting opposite said to her.

  “Tell that to your boss,” she said, with the sweetest smile she could muster at that hour.

  Before he could retort, Madden came back in. With him were two anonymous, black-suited men with closed faces. They had a soldierly air about them.

  “You have interesting friends, Ms Lewis,” Madden said. He looked as if he was trying to control his temper. “I’m releasing you into the custody of these gentlemen here from the department of the Taoiseach. You are free to go.”

  “Free to go... in their custody,” she corrected him, standing up. “My thanks for the coffee, Inspector — and for the cigarette.”

  “It’s a filthy habit,” he said, watching her.

  “Yes — you should try and quit.” She smiled again. She liked him, and knew that he was burning with curiosity and resentment.

  She walked round the table, knowing the eyes of every man in the room were on her as she moved, and shook Madden’s hand. “Perhaps we’ll meet under better circumstances, another time,” she said as brightly as she could manage.

  “I regret to say that I doubt that. We move in different circles.”

  “Au revoir, Inspector.”

  “Slan go foill,” he said, the Gaelic words unknown to her. She looked him in the eye.

  “Goodbye for now,” he added.

  It was full daylight now, a dreary windswept day in Cork. Looking at her watch, Jenny realised she had been sitting in the interrogation room for the better part of nine hours. More than anything else, she wanted to find herself a bed and crawl into it.

  When she saw Lester waiting for her on the steps of the Garda Station, she knew that it was a vain hope. His face seemed carved out of stone.

  “Thank you gentlemen,” he said politely to Jenny’s companions. They nodded to him wordlessly and then strode away to a large dark car across the street.

  “I think we have time for breakfast,” Lester said, offering her his arm. She took it, but she had never seen him so closed off and contained.

  “I would rather catch some sleep,” she said.

  “I’m afraid that won’t be possible. First, you’re going to tell me how you managed to engineer this immense cock-up, and then you’re going to be put on a
boat,” he said.

  “A boat?”

  “A ship, perhaps. Yes, I think it’s big enough to be called a ship. Named the Aoife, I believe. You’re about to join the Irish Navy.”

  They proceeded along the street, walking together like lovers sharing confidences. Lester unfurled an umbrella against the rain.

  “Guns Island is about to go international. The Irish have insisted on sending a team out to it to solidify their claims upon the damned place, and by later this afternoon, the French will also have been apprised of their actions, and will no doubt be contemplating a similar stunt of their own.”

  “Have you heard from Cutter?” Jenny asked.

  “No. No word. Satellite phones can be unreliable, of course.”

  “This is a disaster,” Jenny said.

  “Yes — my thoughts exactly. Our jobs are, to use a cliché, well and truly on the line. Not to mention the threat of criminal prosecution. The Irish Special Branch have smelled your blood; they have not given up the trail yet.”

  “Why am I going out there?”

  “To stymie the Irish, if possible. You will contact Cutter as soon as you can, by any means possible. I have a satellite phone here for you to take on board with you. Damage limitation is the name of the game now. We must keep outsiders away from the anomalies, and keep the creatures away from the outsiders. It’s bad enough when our own citizens get eaten — imagine the mess if a bunch of foreign nationals end up as a prehistoric smorgasbord.”

  “Perhaps it’s time it was opened up, made international,” Jenny offered. “We’ve been sitting on this for quite a while now.”

  “And we will continue to do so,” Lester said crisply. “Because that is our job. Ours not to reason why, and all that.”

  “Very well. You’re right.”

  Lester sighed. “Why didn’t you contact me? I had to hear it from Lord Brooke, for God’s sake.”

  “Flat battery.”

  “Ah,” Lester looked almost amused. “for want of a nail, the kingdom was lost. Never mind. What do you fancy for breakfast? Myself, I want a good old English fry-up.

  “Do you suffer from seasickness?”

  TEN

  As they closed in on the breakers ahead, the current took the dinghies and began to sweep them round to the northeast, following the line of the island. All about them in the darkness, white water flashed upon the black fangs of the rocks. The dinghies were sluggish and leaden, overloaded and taking water over their sides.

  On both, the team broke out the paddles and began working furiously to help the sputtering little Seagull outboards.

  “Go left, go left!” Cutter shouted across to Willoby’s dinghy. “There’s rocks here, ten metres to our right. Steer left, for God’s sake!”

  In his boat, Sergeant Fox and the medic, Doody, were paddling like men possessed while Abby and Corporal Farnsworth were baling out the frigid water with cupped hands and anything else they could use. A swell took them and lifted the little craft high in the air, tilting it to one side as it went under them. For a second, the outboard was whirring clear of the water, grinding angrily. Then the swell rolled past them and they were in a trough again.

  All was black about them, until Farnsworth and Doody paused to click on their head-torches. In the other dinghy the soldiers did the same, so that there were two little groups of flickering light-wands, wallowing crazily on the gigantic surface of the sea, whilst above them the cliffs of Guns Island reared up into infinity, like the walls of a giant’s castle.

  Willoby had a large million-candle-power torch in his free hand while he steered his dinghy with the other. He waved the beam around until it chanced across a paleness amid all that black.

  “I see the cove!” he yelled over to Cutter. “Thirty degrees to your left. I see sand. Cutter, follow me in!”

  He gunned the Seagull and the dinghy punched forward through the waves, spray lashing up white in lace fountains along its bow. Stephen and Connor sat to the front of the little craft with their backs to the waves, trying to keep the water out. Stephen put his arm about Connor’s shoulders and held him tightly, but the younger man’s eyes were tight shut. He was shuddering with cold and seemed not to care if the boat sank under him.

  Slowly, painfully, the two dinghies fought against the current and the slow, massive impact of the deep swells, and began to make headway towards the cove Willoby had pointed out. Jutting away from the tiny beach were two long arms of naked rock, and about them the waves broke in furious explosions of spray.

  The dinghies bumped together, and in each their occupants reached across and grabbed the safety lines of the other craft. As these tightened in their fists, so the little boats headed for the beach locked together, bumping and bucking against each other, the outboards struggling noisily.

  “Ten metres,” Cutter called out. In the bow of his boat, Doody broke open a flare and threw it as hard as he could. It landed above the low water mark and burned orange on the sand, a beacon that drew all their eyes in the roaring darkness.

  Something thumped the bottom of Cutter’s boat and it shuddered. Then it snagged, and there was a tearing noise, horrible to hear. The dinghy slewed round, tearing the safety lines out of the hands of Abby and Sergeant Fox. They both yelled out as the nylon ropes scorched their palms and were whipped free. The dinghy sagged in the middle.

  “Christ, we’re holed,” Cutter said. He twisted the throttle of the outboard fully open, but the dinghy seemed to be melting under him, growing soft. Water was flooding aboard. He looked forward, to where Willoby had drawn ahead. “We’re sinking!” he yelled.

  Willoby looked back, but shook his head, the beam from his head-torch waving back and forth. He couldn’t turn back. The sea was powering them up towards the beach now. If he tried to turn, the boat would be swamped.

  “Oh God,” Abby said, shocked as the freezing water came up over her legs, then her waist. The outboard died as the seawater drowned it. The dinghy sank under them, and they were in the icy cold sea, their life jackets popping open around their collarbones, their equipment sunk into the blackness beneath them.

  Cutter reached out and grabbed Abby’s life jacket.

  “S-swim for it,” he mouthed to her. The cold was making him hyperventilate. He was whooping for air, the breath sawing into his lungs. He tried to fight the panic, to fix his eyes on the orange light of the flare.

  Thirty feet away.

  “Come on Abby, come on lass — start swimming or the current’ll carry us out again.”

  They laboured there in the rise and fall of the waves, the five of them splashing and thrashing with clumsy determination. But they couldn’t make any headway. The current was taking them away from the beach, and the cold was numbing their minds and limbs. Cutter fought the drowsiness that seemed to be creeping up on him, the fog that clogged his thinking. He was swallowing salt water, his mouth foul with it, and his struggles were growing weaker.

  Abby drifted away from him, her head-torch pointed at the sky, a lonely, tiny beacon.

  This is it, Cutter thought. This is what it’s like to die.

  Then there was the high-pitched whine of an outboard close by, and a bright light shining in his face. A hand grasped him by the scruff of the neck. Another took his fist and banged it hard against the side of the dinghy. “Grab this rope — get a hold of it and hang on!”

  His numb hands managed to curl into fists around the safety line that surrounded the side of the dinghy. He held on there and was pulled through the water, legs trailing. Someone else’s legs tangled with his own for a moment, and a skull smashed into his mouth, drawing blood but causing very little pain. He was too far gone to feel pain.

  His feet touched bottom. He tried to move his legs and stand, but couldn’t get a grip. He fell free of the dinghy, his lifeless hands releasing the rope. Someone grabbed him — there were two pairs of hands on him. He was manhandled by others who were standing in the water, tugging him into the shallows, then dropped in eight
inches of seawater and he crawled the rest of the way, sinking to his wrists in the soft, grainy sand, until he was on land again, finally, and the waves were at his feet.

  He lay breathing harshly, trying to make himself think again.

  A torch was shone in his face.

  “Nick — wake up Nick!” It was Stephen’s voice. “He’s in hypothermia — so’s Abby. Get out the sleeping bags. Help me get this stuff off him. We have to try and get them dry.”

  When Cutter woke, it was daylight.

  He lay blinking, utterly confused, not knowing where he was. He could hear the breakers roaring on the shore, the ever-present battling sea, but that wasn’t it. He was lying with Abby in his arms, and as far as he could tell neither of them was wearing much of anything. Her skin was warm against him, and he could smell her hair: salt water and diesel, and a last vestige of whatever shampoo she used.

  The two of them were cocooned in a single sleeping bag, their flesh pressed close and gaining heat from each other. Abby murmured in his embrace, and nuzzled his chest.

  Cutter was entirely bewildered.

  A shadow fell across him. It was Stephen, and he was smiling. He turned and spoke to someone, amusement in his voice.

  “The sleeping beauties are opening their eyes, Captain.”

  With that, Abby woke up. She looked up at Cutter’s face, six inches from her own, and mumbled sleepily. Then Cutter felt her body go taut as wire against him, and her eyes opened wide.

  “Cutter!”

  “Don’t look at me,” he said. “I had nothing to do with it.”

  Another shadow. It was Willoby.

  “You’re lucky to be alive, the pair of you. Another five minutes in that water and you’d have been a couple of little bobbing icebergs.”

  Abby was trying to struggle free of the sleeping bag. Her knee caught Cutter in a tender spot and he winced.

  “Sorry, Professor.”