Survival

by Joe Craig

  “Hello?” Jimmy shouted into the phone. A response crackled back, so Jimmy continued. “The actinium is buried in a lead-lined suitcase, exactly 13,765 metres due east of the eastern corner of the perimeter fence of the Mutam-ul-it mine compound.” He glanced up at Stovorsky. “OK?” he asked.

  Stovorsky shrugged and pulled the phone away, studying the screen. “We’ll see.”

  Jimmy turned to the controls of the helicopter. The on-board computer was ready. The multi-function display was spread across two LCD screens. Everything seemed to be fine. Jimmy still felt a rush of wonder at the fact that he understood all of this. Every digit, chart and dial threw up meaning, but always on the edge of Jimmy’s consciousness, like a memory he didn’t know he had.

  He glanced sideways at Stovorsky. The man was still focused on the screen of his phone and he’d turned slightly so Jimmy could see it too. It was a live satellite feed from the hazmat team, on board their helicopter in the Sahara. The image was jerky, but Jimmy could at least make out that they were all in total insulation suits. It gave their bodies a weird, alien shape. For a second Jimmy seethed with frustration – if only he’d worn one of those himself.

  Now his eyes jumped back to the helicopter’s controls – straight to the push-button ignition. The button that would start his escape from France. The button that would start his journey home.

  “What about the list of doctors?” Jimmy shouted, still staring at the controls. His fingers were trembling, impatient to get moving.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Stovorsky replied, not taking his eyes from the screen. The hazmat team had just landed. The blades of their chopper were creating a mini sandstorm.

  Jimmy gulped. He knew he’d never get to see that list of doctors. It’s OK, he told himself, trying to stay calm.

  “I’ll flash it to your on-board system when you’re in the air,” Stovorsky went on, totally engrossed in what was going on in the desert, 1500 km away. “As soon as the radar boys have determined your route.”

  Anybody can find a doctor, Jimmy reassured himself. They’re not wizards.

  He glanced at Stovorsky’s screen. Three men were operating hand-held sand-diggers, with a spinning wheel that scooped out litres of sand with every revolution. In seconds they were half a metre down. Time to go, Jimmy thought.

  He plunged his thumb on to the ignition button. Stovorsky whipped round to watch him, his eyes wide with surprise. Jimmy was dumbfounded too – because nothing had happened. No engine roar, no whip of the rotors. The helicopter remained motionless.

  Jimmy prodded the button again. Still nothing. He felt panic swirling in his lungs. Was he not doing this right? He searched for guidance, trying to draw up his programming from deep inside – but it was already there, telling him to try the ignition, then telling him this chopper was never going to leave the ground.

  “Why won’t this start?” Jimmy demanded.

  Stovorsky held up his hand. He was staring at his phone display again. Jimmy saw the men pull the suitcase from the sand.

  “I need a chopper that works!” Jimmy yelled.

  The desert sand blew off the suitcase in the gusts from the hazmat helicopter. One of the team turned to the camera and gave a thumbs up.

  “Come on!” Jimmy cried. He slapped his hands against the control panel. Still Stovorsky ignored him. Jimmy felt his programming throbbing up his neck, whipping round his skull like a tornado. He looked all around him. There was nowhere to run. The helicopter was perfectly placed – right in the middle of an empty acre of asphalt. The terminal building was 500 metres away. The same distance in the other direction was the control tower. Snipers, Jimmy heard in his head.

  He knew instantly he would never make it if he ran. When he looked harder he made out the shadows of DGSE agents posted at every possible escape route. He was trapped. He punched his thumb into the ignition button again and again, harder and harder. Eventually the plastic covering cracked and fell off, so Jimmy punched the control panel instead.

  “Let me go!” he shouted.

  Stovorsky moved closer to him, still watching the screen, but looming over Jimmy. There was excitement all over his face. This was the most animated Jimmy had ever seen him. The glow from the phone’s screen lit up his teeth as he bit his bottom lip in anticipation.

  On the screen, the hazmat team hauled the suitcase to the surface. They dumped it on its back. Its weight lodged it in the sand. Two of them crouched over it, while the others stood back, some of them holding Geiger counters or other pieces of kit. Jimmy had no choice but to watch. He’d lost. Stovorsky had fooled him with a trick as simple as a dummy helicopter.

  The hazmat agent opened the suitcase. He paused for a second. Whoever was holding the camera-phone hurried towards him. The other agent spun the suitcase round.

  It was empty.

  30 MESSAGE FROM A CONDIMENT

  Stovorsky and Jimmy stared at each other. Stovorsky’s face was white again. He squinted against the wind and the corner of his eye twitched rapidly.

  “Where is it?” he bellowed. He held up the phone, thrusting it towards Jimmy’s face. “Where’s the actinium?”

  Jimmy couldn’t help smiling. “Where’s my helicopter?” he countered firmly.

  “OK,” Stovorsky announced. “New game. It’s called: tell me where the actinium is or I send the order to kill your family.”

  He mashed the buttons on his phone and put it to his ear. Jimmy’s heart stabbed into his chest. Was the man bluffing? Could Jimmy risk not taking him seriously?

  “Get a message to Zafi,” Stovorsky shouted.

  Jimmy glared at him, wishing poison would somehow pour from his eyes into Stovorsky’s blood.

  “Don’t make me a killer, Jimmy,” said the DGSE man.

  “You already are one!” Jimmy screamed at the top of his lungs. He held up his hand and wiggled the tips of his fingers. “You sent me into that mine unprotected. You knew what you were doing. You even hoped it would kill me to protect Zafi’s cover!”

  Stovorsky ignored him and yelled, “Where’s the actinium?”

  “I tell you and you’ll shoot me,” Jimmy replied, suddenly wishing he could trust the man enough to reveal to him the location of the mineral without being shot immediately.

  “You listening?” Stovorsky said into the phone, his determination showing in his jaw. “The message is this…” He hesitated, staring at Jimmy, his eyes wide. Was that fear that Jimmy saw? Or was it pride? “Make them dark,” Stovorsky ordered and snapped the phone shut.

  Jimmy felt a cold sweat break out all over him, but he couldn’t understand what was happening. His head couldn’t catch up with his body. It was as if his brain had deliberately obscured all the information it received. Yet his hands still trembled and his eyes were hot with dread.

  “You’ve no idea what you’re putting me through,” Stovorsky whispered, his words barely carrying to Jimmy in the wind. “You think if you tell me where the actinium is I’ll shoot you? Well, try this…” With his good hand, he flicked the tail of his jacket away and pulled a gun from his hip. “Your family’s as good as gone.” He levelled the gun at the base of Jimmy’s neck. “Tell me where it is or you’re gone too.”

  Jimmy felt tears creeping to his eyes. He tensed every muscle as hard as concrete. I’m gone anyway, he told himself. The silence was too long for Stovorsky.

  “WHERE IS IT!?” he screamed. His voice tore through the wind, blustering round the whole airfield. If Jimmy told Stovorsky now, he might still have a chance – to stop his family being killed and even to find a doctor who would save him. But at the same time he braced himself for the bullet. Finally he opened his mouth to give the answer – the honest answer, he insisted to himself.

  Before he could form the words, another voice carried across the tarmac.

  “It is here!” came a shout.

  Jimmy looked past Stovorsky. It was Marla. He thrilled at the sight of her, but could see the effects of her illness had got worse.
Her colouring was less intense and her hair, which flew around her face like a lion’s mane, looked much thinner. She moved slowly towards them. Her arm was stretched out in front of her and in her hand she grasped the top of a black linen bag. A soft blue light glowed through the linen.

  Stovorsky spun round as if the wind had knocked him off-balance.

  “Do you want me to bring it closer?” Marla shouted, taking another step forward.

  “NO!” Stovorsky jumped backwards and aimed his gun at Marla.

  “You know you cannot shoot at me,” she explained calmly. “Do you realise how unstable this is?” She gently waved the bag backwards and forwards. “And how poisonous?” She jumped forwards another sudden step. Stovorsky lurched back again and dropped his gun to the ground. “OK, OK,” he panted. “Just stay back.”

  “And make sure your gunmen know they cannot shoot also. A bullet at the wrong angle, in the wrong place…” again she waved the bag, almost taunting “…and the whole of this airfield becomes a cloud. Probably all of Paris too.”

  Stovorsky raised his hands high in the air and turned full circle, waving to every corner of the airfield and giving the signal to lower every weapon. “How did you get here?” he asked, astounded. “There’s a cordon of my men. This whole place is locked down!”

  “Perhaps I have the key,” Marla replied, a huge grin on her face. “And it glows, no?”

  Jimmy loved the image of Marla skipping past a ring of DGSE agents, threatening them with her deadly, radioactive bag. She and Jimmy were the only people who had nothing more to fear from it.

  “Come, Jimmy,” Marla ordered. “There is a helicopter waiting over there.” She pointed towards the other side of the airstrip. “Perhaps one that works.”

  Jimmy didn’t need asking twice. He jumped out of the chopper and raced over to Marla. Together they backed away from Stovorsky, towards a waiting helicopter.

  “Don’t go to London, Jimmy,” Stovorsky pleaded. “It’s no good. You can’t save your family. You can’t stop the war. All you’ll do is make it easier for Britain to win.”

  Jimmy could feel a seething passion inside him. Keep going, he told himself. Keep control.

  “You’re only exposing Zafi,” Stovorsky went on, his arms still raised. “Do you really want to give NJ7 that advantage?” He shouted at the top of his voice now, shrinking smaller and smaller as Jimmy and Marla edged further and further away, leaving the man alone in the middle of the concrete desert. “It’s Britain or France, Jimmy!” he yelled. “Don’t you want to help France?”

  “I’m going off France,” Jimmy muttered.

  At last they turned and ran, moving together silently. In seconds they were in the cockpit of a new chopper – a Tiger Hellfire IV. It was a much smaller vehicle, with only two cramped seats in the cockpit and no other cabin space, but the rotors were spinning and the drone of the engine sounded like music to Jimmy.

  “Do you know how to…?” Marla started to ask, but she didn’t finish. Her answer was in the speed and confidence of Jimmy’s movements.

  A cushion of air drew them upwards, perfectly stable. Jimmy held the chopper level about twenty metres up, ran his eyes over every centimetre of the two control and display units to double-check the readings, then leaned on the flight stick to send them soaring forwards.

  They flew directly over Stovorsky. They were easily close enough to make out the purple rage bursting from every pore in his face, but they couldn’t make out his words over the whine of the chopper.

  The second they passed directly over Stovorsky’s head, Marla threw the bag out of the open door of the cockpit.

  “Wait!” Jimmy shouted. But he was too late. “What did you…?” He stared across at Marla, but her enigmatic smile revealed nothing.

  The black linen bag dropped like a tiny bomb from the helicopter – and with lethal accuracy.

  “NO!” Stovorsky screamed. He flapped at the bag with his one good arm, swatting it away as if it were a wasp. It bounced off his elbow and crashed to the concrete half a metre away.

  Stovorsky instinctively raised an arm to shield himself from the radiation, even though he knew that was useless. But now he lowered his arm and stood straighter. He stared at the bag. It wasn’t glowing.

  Tentatively he shuffled towards it. Then he grew bolder. If he was poisoned already, looking inside the bag could hardly make things much worse. He picked up the bag, slowly opened the top and peered in.

  It took him a second to work out what he was looking at, but then he realised: the broken pieces of an old mobile phone. The glow of its screen had died as soon as it had hit the ground.

  Stovorsky erupted into a fit of frantic laughter. For a full five seconds he hopped around in a jig of relief. A moment before he’d been facing an agonising death sentence. Now he knew that was a lie. An act. A clever charade by a devious girl from Western Sahara.

  As suddenly as it had appeared, the smile on Stovorsky’s face vanished. I don’t have the actinium, he thought. But neither do they. In a frenzy, he pulled out his own phone again and dialled two keys.

  “Shoot him down!” Stovorsky bellowed in French. “He’s on his way to London. Get two jets in the air and BRING HIM DOWN NOW!”

  Felix had been disappointed to wake up and find that Zafi had disappeared. He puzzled over it all day at school – she’d said she’d come to protect them, then just left. Didn’t they need protecting any more?

  He tried to snatch a minute with Georgie to talk about it, but it was impossible. They were being watched every minute, either on the school security cameras or by certain ‘teachers’ who weren’t trying very hard to disguise the fact that they were NJ7 agents. Felix knew anything he said within the school walls was being monitored.

  Now he was at home and his mood was swinging violently. There was joy that maybe Zafi had left because she’d found out something about his parents, there was misery about pretty much everything else and there were a thousand emotions in between.

  He stalked from room to room, desperate for a distraction from the mess of his thoughts. He had already consumed four slices of cheese on toast, so now he whipped up a plate of salami and anchovy mush – one of his specialities. He took his time over it and squeezed the last dribble from the ketchup bottle with a little too much enthusiasm. It spattered across the kitchen counter and on to the floor. Eat first, clear up later, he told himself. Maybe.

  Georgie had stayed at school for football practice. She and Helen wouldn’t be home for hours, so there was no reason to keep the place tidy. Felix threw himself on to the sofa and flicked on the TV. What he saw ruined the first bite of his snack. Instead of a distraction, he got what felt like a slap in the face.

  On the screen was a grainy close-up of an old school photo of Jimmy. It was the same image that the news programmes had been recycling for weeks now, but it still froze Felix’s muscles and stole the flavour from his salami mush. He found he couldn’t change the channel.

  The camera zoomed in on Jimmy’s eyes, bright, almost laughing. Felix remembered the day when that photo was taken. He’d spent all morning trying to draw a face on Jimmy’s tie without him noticing. Now he wanted to be sick. He was mesmerised by the screen, which seemed to linger on the image of Jimmy’s face forever.

  At last the programme switched to showing two grey-faced old blokes in suits, stuck in a studio somewhere discussing Britain’s “security challenges”. They were supposedly experts and they were rattling on – something about how NJ7 had successfully tracked down the psychotic boy who had assassinated the old Prime Minister.

  Felix was finally able to flick over. He found a cookery show. A man with a shiny head was slicing through a mushroom with rapid, heavy chops. Felix let the images wash over him, trying to steady his breathing. Suddenly more tired than he could imagine, he lifted his feet and plonked them on to the coffee table, right in the middle of the Monopoly set.

  He was still there a couple of hours later, breadcrumbs and bits of
salami all down his front. He couldn’t even remember what he’d watched on TV. He didn’t care about the programmes – just the feeling of numbness that watching gave him. The way it dulled all of his thoughts.

  Then he heard a crash. Something smashing on the floor of the kitchen. His body shook with an eruption of adrenaline. He slowly got to his feet and edged towards the kitchen. Who was in there? His imagination burned with the possibilities – an NJ7 assassin come to kill him, or just a regular robbery? Viggo coming to make contact at last, or Jimmy? His mum or his dad? He couldn’t hold himself back. Despite the danger, he shoved the kitchen door open.

  The room was empty. Felix blinked hard and looked again. Still empty.

  The floor was covered in the shards of a broken plate and underneath the pieces was a dull, red smear. Ketchup. The smell was unmistakable. But Felix wasn’t worrying about clearing it up. He was staring at what was smudged into it. He crouched to move the pieces of plate out of the way to reveal a message. It was written in large finger-writing through the ketchup, across the kitchen floor.

  Felix’s throat seized up in shock. At first he just stared at the letters:

  FLAT NOT SAFE. GET OUT. 40 SECONDS.

  It was signed with a loopy Z, followed by a curly heart.

  Felix felt an intense chill stab right through him. It was chased by a thrilling tingle. Zafi had been back. Felix jumped over the message to the kitchen window and pressed his face to the glass. Was she out there? He couldn’t see anything in the darkness. Then he realised the window was still locked. How had she got in? And how long had she been in the flat?

  Felix’s mind was racing. She could have broken into a different room, he thought, and crept past me to get to the kitchen. He couldn’t believe it was possible and yet here was the evidence. And how had she got out? She is so cool.

  His heart was thumping so hard he thought he was going to collapse. Finally the words of the message sank in: 40 seconds. Felix felt a jolt of horror. How long have I been standing here?