The Lost Island

by Paul Kearney

  “Got it.” The big Irishman sidled off with surprising stealth.

  The party crept past the heap of sleeping animals. The largest were four or five metres long. Some were standing, asleep on their feet, and others had curled up on the ground.

  “Polacanthus, I reckon,” Connor whispered out of the corner of his mouth, and Stephen nodded. He was white-faced with pain, and sweating heavily despite the cool night air. It was chillier up here on the hilltops than it had been down in the plain, and drier. Thankfully, the pine needles underfoot muffled their progress, and the team was able to sneak past the sleeping dinosaurs without incident.

  They reached the highest crest of the ridge just as the sun was coming up, and halted there to catch their breath and watch the silent majesty of the dawn as it broke open over this vast, wild world.

  On one side, the plains rolled on for miles, stretching out like a sea of ferns that was lined with watercourses and dotted with woods. On the other, the proto-Atlantic shimmered and caught the light out to the edge of infinity. There were islands out there, wooded and green, and beyond them, the guess of another large landmass at the edge of sight.

  At the shore there stretched lines of rock reaching out into the water, and low cliffs. Upon these, the team could see Pterosaurs sunning themselves, stretching out their wings like cormorants to catch the warmth of the rising light. Down on the rocks, creatures which might have been huge crocodiles lay in rows, squabbling and crashing off into the waves. It was a world that the sun brought to life, a theatre of giants.

  “It’s beautiful,” Jenny said, joining Cutter as he stood silent and rapt upon the hilltop. “I had an idea it would be terrible, frightening, and it is. But it’s beautiful too.”

  “A world we haven’t touched,” Cutter told her. “Look at the horizon; it’s clear and clean. In our time there would be a purple haze there, the smog of the combustion engine. Our world, our time, is choked half to death. We’ve filled the sea with plastic and gutted the rainforests. Here, it’s all fresh and untouched. I begin to understand —”

  He stopped.

  “Understand what?” Jenny asked him.

  “I begin to understand why Helen has lost herself in the anomalies. For the last eight years, she’s been travelling worlds like this one, alone, shifting from epoch to epoch, using these phenomena the way some people will catch a bus. I don’t know how she does it, but right now, right here, I can begin to see why.”

  “Would you like to do it, Cutter — lose yourself in a world like this one? See the object of your life’s work not as some fossilised bones, but as living, breathing animals?”

  There was a long silence. Finally Cutter looked at her. His mouth curved into a self-mocking smile.

  “Nah, I’m not enough of a boy scout for that.” Then he tensed. “What’s that smell?”

  They rejoined the others. Doody had lit a small fire and was piling dead sticks upon it. The fragrance of wood smoke rose in the air.

  “I’m still not sure a fire is a good idea —” Cutter began.

  “Your pal isn’t in great shape. He needs to be warmed up,” Willoby interrupted curtly, nodding in Stephen’s direction. “Besides, we should have a hot meal, all of us, and a cup of tea. Try and maintain some civilisation in the wilderness. If we eat the meat we found, it’ll save the last of the ration-packs, so we might as well make the most of it.”

  Stephen was shivering and wheezing for breath as he lay on a bed of bracken which Connor and Abby had gathered for him. They had opened a sleeping bag and crammed him half into it. His teeth chattered as Cutter bent over him.

  “What’s this?” Cutter asked gently. “Wimping out again?”

  “You know me,” Stephen grated. “Just one big party-pooper.”

  “Stay with us, Stephen,” Cutter said. “I need another grown-up around.”

  “Jenny will do just fine for that,” Stephen replied, trying to smile.

  “Is it the ribs?”

  “Ah, I just need a bit of a rest. A cup of hot tea — now that really would work wonders.”

  “Hang in there, mate,” Cutter said in a voice so low he wasn’t even sure Stephen had heard.

  The soldiers were cooking the meat on improvised spits, and boiling mess tins of bubbling water. Cutter took Doody aside.

  “What’s wrong with him — he’s getting worse.”

  Doody’s face was sombre.

  “Last might’s march — he shouldn’t have made it. I think one of his ribs has got itself poked into a lung. He’s been coughing up blood for the last hour.”

  Cutter swore viciously.

  “What’s the prognosis?”

  “He has to rest, propped up. His lung may be filling up with blood and fluid. I’m not sure. If that happens, I’ll have to drain it.” Doody licked his lips. “I’ve never done that before.”

  “There’s no chance it’ll come right on its own?”

  “Not much. It’s more likely he’ll start to drown in his own blood.”

  “Be ready, Doody,” Cutter said.

  “I’ll try. It’ll help to have hot water on hand, too, so the fire’s not a bad idea.”

  “Very well. Let me know if — if he —”

  “I will,” Doody said.

  The fire, the hot food, and perhaps more than anything else, the tin mugs brimming with hot, brown tea, cheered them all. It was like a tincture of normality. As they sat under the pines and spruce which towered above them, and looked out upon the sea, they might have been having a picnic in the Scottish Highlands. Except that the sounds which completed the picture had more in common with an African game reserve.

  Through binoculars they watched the Iguanodon herd return to the plain below and begin feeding as though yesterday’s attack had never happened. The Iguanodon were joined by a large group of Polacanthus, like those they had chanced across in the night. These two great masses of animals mingled in apparent amity and spread out across the low-lying lands below, clustering at waterholes.

  The team slept, or tried to. After walking all night, they were ex-hausted. Cutter took first stag. Weary though he was, he couldn’t drop off with the sound of Stephen’s racked, laboured coughing echoing over the campsite. He sat down beside his former pupil with an M-4 on his knee, and talked quietly of this and that, of the different strains of duckbilled dinosaurs, of herd behaviour, of the K/T event theory. Anything which kept both their minds off Stephen’s ebbing battle for survival.

  “I’m sorry about Helen, about what happened,” Stephen rasped. “I suppose I was flattered. And it didn’t seem as if you two were ever getting back together. I thought all that was over.”

  “Bar the shouting,” Cutter said. Then he added, “She was still my wife.”

  “In name only, Nick.” He bent over and coughed harshly, whooping for breath. Cutter took a handful of bracken and wiped blood from the corner of his mouth.

  “Anyway,” Stephen went on when he caught his breath again, “it was wrong, what I did. I was wrong.”

  “Don’t beat yourself up about it, not here, not now,” Cutter said, looking off into the distance. “It wasn’t entirely your fault anyway.” He sighed heavily. “What Helen wants, Helen gets. She was always that way. In the beginning, it was why I loved her — that ambition, that drive. But it all went sour. She’s a brilliant woman —”

  “And a complete egomaniac,” Stephen interrupted with a wan smile on his face.

  “That’s putting it mildly. Anyway, after eight years of wandering the timelines, she’s become a monster.”

  “Oh, come on,” Stephen protested.

  “I don’t think she’d stop at anything now to get what she wants. I sometimes wonder if she was behind —” Cutter looked across the camp-fire to where Jenny lay sleeping. “Behind the changes that happened after I last came through an anomaly.”

  “That’s quite an accusation.”

  “Yes, it is. The Chinese have a saying: ‘May you live in interesting times.’ Except
it’s not a blessing, but a curse. I prefer the Spanish proverb: ‘May no new thing arise.’”

  Stephen coughed and laughed at the same time, and Cutter had to support him as he leaned forward to spit a globule of gore into the ferns. When he caught his breath he said, “You picked the wrong line of work for that one, Nick.”

  “So it seems.”

  EIGHTEEN

  The Puma helicopter swung and lurched under the battery of the wind. It approached the French frigate from astern, keeping at some 200 feet, and drifted forward in a careful hover as the warship rose up and down in the heavy swells, white foam breaking over her sides.

  The ground crew waved the aircraft in or waved it away as the pilot fought to position it dead centre over the bucking bullseye of the helipad. Even Lester, looking on from the rear hangar, felt a prickle of fear run down his spine as the ship rose up to meet the descent of the Puma, and one of the aircraft’s wheels smashed into the steel deck with a creak of overburdened metal. The tyre blew with a dull pneumatic bang, and the helicopter rose up again.

  “Mon Dieu,” Captain Palliere said grimly beside him.

  The Puma came in again, the down-blast of its rotor sending water rippling out across the deck. Lester shielded his eyes as it flared just before the pilot made his decision and committed himself.

  The helicopter hit the pad with a crash that sent vibrations right through the hull of the ship. It tilted slightly to one side on its blown tyre, and the turbines were shut off. The ground crew ran out at once to lash the machine down; the wind was already making it shake and lurch upon the pad. Then the crew climbed out, one by one, and the sailors around Lester gave them a scattered round of applause.

  Oh, for goodness sake, Lester thought, but he joined in. Even he thought the pilot had earned it.

  The helicopter crew walked somewhat shakily into the hangar while behind them men swarmed over their aircraft. Captain Palliere shook the pilot’s hand and spoke in a rapid flurry of French. Then he turned to Lester.

  “We will begin the debriefing at once. Is your French good enough to follow, or shall I have it typed up for you in English, Lester?”

  “Oh, don’t worry about me,” Lester said with a thin smile. “I’ll muddle along somehow. Allons-y!”

  At Lester’s insistent request, the only people present at the debriefing were Palliere and his executive officer, a wiry Provençal called Dutourd. The pilot was given a fragrant cup of hot coffee, which he downed in one scalding gulp, and then he began to tell them of his reconnaissance.

  The Puma had made two sweeps of the island, from south to north. The updraft at the southern approach had almost flipped the machine on its side, but they had managed to maintain height and ride it out. That, the pilot said, was probably what had happened to the Irish helicopter. The Scout was a much smaller, lighter craft than the Puma, and the updraft would have simply thrown it through the air like a kite.

  “Did you see the crash site?” Lester asked impatiently, leaning forward.

  “Mais oui,” the pilot answered. He looked at his captain, who motioned him to proceed.

  The Westland Scout lay towards the north headland of the island, not far from the British outpost. There were no bodies in the wreck, he was pretty sure of that.

  Lester leaned back again. That confirmed what he already knew, but it was good to have it substantiated.

  The French pilot had seen other things across the island, strange things. He thought he had seen the carcass of a large animal, but could not be positive. There was debris scattered here and there, as if left by a landing party, and a trio of strange lights had been sighted, close to the north end of the island. These were tall, inexplicable flickering phenomena, unlike anything else he had ever seen in his flying career, and he could not account for them.

  Here, all the Frenchmen present turned and looked at Lester. He kept a poker face and motioned the pilot to go on.

  The main door to the British outpost seemed to be lying open, and the mud around it was badly churned up, as though a rugby scrum had ploughed its way across it. That was it. In both passes, the helicopter crew had seen no living person.

  The pilot was dismissed. More of the superb coffee was poured, and Dutourd left to take up station on the bridge. Lester and Palliere sat looking first into their coffee cups, and then at each other.

  “I would say this was very strange, n’est pas?” Palliere said mildly.

  Lester did not reply. It had been far too long since his last communication with Cutter, and despite the lack of bodies at the crash-site, he was fully prepared for the worst. He had a contingency plan for that, one which his superiors had approved with massive reluctance, because it entailed confiding in a foreign armed service. Something they preferred to do as little as possible.

  “The Captain of the Aoife has officially turned over the rescue mission to La Gloire,” Palliere went on. “His government approves. Lester, unless you have other information which you are withholding from me, then I am bound to inform you that I am taking command of all operations concerning Guns Island from this moment on.”

  “What do you intend to do?” Lester asked sharply.

  “As soon as the Puma is airworthy again, I mean to drop a team of marines on the island, and as soon as sea conditions are suitable, I will be sending more in by boat. It might therefore be wise of you to let me know what exactly my men are going to encounter, should they make landfall successfully.”

  It would be the contingency plan after all, then. Lester rubbed his eyes. He had had a feeling it would come to this from the moment he had been ordered to join the French frigate.

  Before he could speak, though, the French Captain continued.

  “Lieutenant La Hire is a good man. When he says he sees three tall, flickering lights on the island, I believe him. I understand that your government has something to hide on Guns Island, and I can sympathise with your predicament, but the fact is that men’s lives are at risk, and for me, that is the important point.”

  Lester studied the frigate Captain closely for a second.

  “Palliere, are you not ambitious?”

  The Frenchman sipped his coffee.

  “Would I hold this rank if I were not?” he said.

  “Then believe me when I tell you that your handling of this affair will be the making or the breaking of your career.”

  Palliere leaned closer. “And of yours too, I take it.”

  “Well, yes, of course.”

  Palliere gave a very French shrug, a simple movement of his shoulders.

  “Ambition is all very well in its way — what professional does not want to excel in his field? But I tell you this, Lester, I have not, and I will never, purchase my advancement with other men’s blood. Not in peacetime. In time of war, I will sacrifice my men to protect my country. But we are not at war, and a government’s embarrassment is not worth that sacrifice.”

  “Noble sentiments,” Lester said wryly. “A little out of place in the modern world, would you not agree?”

  Again, the tiny shrug.

  “That is the man who sits here with you drinking coffee. I cannot change who he is.”

  Lester drew a deep breath, then released it.

  “Very well, Captain, in that case I have two requests to make of you.”

  “Allez.”

  “I am going to tell you something you will find impossible to believe, but you must believe it. And I must be with the first of your men when they arrive on the island.”

  Stephen’s cough grew worse as the day drew on. He sounded as though he were gargling blood, trying to force air through a flooded pipe.

  “I can’t leave it any longer,” Doody said eventually. “I have to drain the fluid out of the lungs or he’ll drown, right in front of us.”

  “If it has to be done, then let’s do it,” Cutter said, with as calm a face as he could muster. “What do you need?”

  “It’ll hurt like hell, and I don’t even have a local anaestheti
c, so I’ll need people to hold him down and manhandle him. I still have a few sterile dressings, so that’s not a problem.”

  “Get to it, Dave,” Willoby said, setting a hand on the medic’s shoulder. “While there’s still enough light to see by.”

  “If I go in the wrong place, I could pierce his heart, or liver, or a kidney. It would kill him,” Doody said.

  “He’s dying anyway,” Willoby told him. “You’ve no choice. Set it up.”

  They stripped Stephen to the waist and laid him out on a karrimat. He couldn’t speak, but as Doody explained what he was going to do, he nodded, fighting for air. The medic broke open his denuded medkit while Cutter, Willoby, Fox and Abby held the patient down, one on each limb.

  “Don’t move, no matter how bad the pain gets,” Doody said. “If you move and the needle slips, it’ll — it’ll be bad.”

  Again Stephen nodded. “Get on with it,” he managed to croak.

  Doody took out a large syringe, and fixed to it the widest-bore needle he possessed. He pursed his lips, breathing quickly, but utterly focused. Then he stabbed it deep into Stephen’s torso.

  Stephen tensed like strung wire. The others held him down. He clenched his teeth and uttered a horrible, animal moaning as Doody slowly drew back the plunger on the massive syringe, and it filled with dark blood. When it was full, he withdrew it and squirted the liquid away into the trees.

  “Here we go again,” he said, and stabbed the needle into Stephen’s other side.

  It went on and on, until Cutter had to look away. In his grasp, Stephen’s arm was slick with foul sweat and his own limbs ached from holding it down. The smell of blood seemed to pervade the campsite, along with the rank stink of human pain. He had evacuated himself with the very first thrust.

  Doody sucked out measure after measure of cloudy blood from Stephen’s lungs so that the injured man had a series of bleeding holes all along the lower line of his ribs and back. He looked as though he had been stabbed by an eccentric psycho with an ice pick.

  At last it was over.