Bernard grabbed the wheel and I saw where we were heading.
A submarine’s stubby grey turret stood just above the water.
On it an armed man shouldered an M80 anti tank rocket launcher.
His body shook violently and I watched in slow motion as the flaming rocket speed towards us.
Bernard leapt overboard a split second before the rocket exploded, right on target.
Doc and I were tossed into the air. As we crashed down into the rock-hard water, I glimpsed the rocket man helping Bernard Hautcret on board the submarine.
I sank deeper and deeper down into the murky depths of the cold river; my mink coat dragging me down, my lungs fit to burst.
And then two, orange, crab-like hands grabbed and clasped me round the chest.
My lungs gave in and filled with water as I was being hauled to the surface and I slipped into unconsciousness.
Seconds later I was being pumped out on the floor of a noisy, vibrating, LifeStar rescue helicopter.
Doc was beside me, his face contorted with pain.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Wingsuit Skydiving Team
http://www.flylikebrick.com/
Précis:
We fly wingsuits. Special suits with inflatable membranes between the arms and legs, which turns the human body into a big wing. No engines, no rigid structures. Just pure human flight.
We grab every chance we get to fly, and can be found on drop zones around Holland, Belgium, France, Germany, and Spain throughout the year. Either flying for fun, training, or busy with load-organising and coaching.
YouTube
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6t0xqNln5RU
Précis:
Human glider Jeb Corliss jumps from a chopper, then flies through a hole in the side of a mountain in China.
CHAPTER TWENTY
As Max waited patiently in Pevek, plotting what to do about Joy, he was surprised by how much he missed Lucille. But his reverie was jolted by the sound of a truck door being slammed shut by a howling wind.
Reality quickly reasserted itself. It was minus 35 degrees centigrade and he was waiting for a shipment from Sofia’s Milan ‘factory’.
He was shocked by how rusty his connection to the netherworld had become. He should have been able to read Joy’s thoughts, he really should have.
“You are very special. You will see the world in a way very few people ever know,” his mother had said to Max as she was putting him to bed on the night of his seventh birthday. She knew that he was struggling to come terms with the strange powers that were surfacing in his young mind. “You will soon discover things which you must tell no-one about, not even your father.”
“Can’t I tell you?”
“Yes, you can tell me,” his Inuit mother replied.
“Because you’re so wise, that’s what the teacher says.” His teacher had also proudly informed the class that his mother’s father, Max’s grandfather, had been a celebrated village chief, famous throughout Nunavut, Canada’s largest federal territory.
“The teacher meant my name, Ahnah, means wise woman,” said his mother. But even Max, at his tender age, knew that was only the half the story and that night he’d asked out loud how she always knew exactly where he was and what he was thinking.
His curiosity came to a head as a result of an incident. Wrapped in a caribou fur coat and booties, and a multi-coloured, woollen hat with flaps to cover his tiny ears, Max had charged off down the boardwalk in the Qaummaarviit Territorial Park. The park was near Iqaluit overlooking Frobisher Bay. It was October so the early winter sea ice was forming. Ahnah watched him run but didn’t follow.
As Max revelled in his apparent freedom he spotted a coiled up bundle of fur in the distance. A furry ball. He charged on, getting ready to give it a merry kick. His mother’s voice rang inside his head. Don’t you dare.
Max turned to query his mother. She was too far away for him to see her but an enormous silver grey wolf wasn’t.
With the its hackles raised and its black tipped tail horizontal and straight, the wolf sprang up onto the wooden planks between Max and the start of the boardwalk.
To Max’s horror it was joined by another, and another and soon a pack of five tundra wolves started to race towards him and the furry ball, a wolf cub.
Before he could cry out his mother’s voice floated into his subconscious.
Stand still like a tree. Be calm. Take five deep breaths. And they’ll run past you.
And he did. One, two, three, four, five enormous breaths as the pack ran past.
And now run back, that’s enough for one day.
Max charged back down to the entrance of the boardwalk past the parked cars, into the warmth of the visitors’ centre, through its well-lit corridors and into the café area where somehow he knew Mum would be. She was smiling as if nothing strange had happened and was holding out a chocolate milkshake.
“You did well.” He took the glass, pursing his lips around a red and white, striped drinking straw and gratefully drank the sweet chocolate.
“I didn’t do anything,” he said. “You did it. You saved me.” Max wanted to burst into tears of relief and frustration. But he also craved the milkshake and he couldn’t cry and suck the thick chocolate at the same time. And so he slurped and calmed down, as his mother knew he would.
“How do you always know what I am doing?”
Ahnah stayed silent and Max drew increasing strength from the comforting drink. “Sometimes I know what you’re thinking,” said Max.
“My darling child, you only know what I let you. To connect when another isn’t helping is very difficult. You have to practise and practise until it becomes instinctive. Are you prepared to do that?”
“Is it like talking to Daddy in Russian and you in English? Because that’s easy.”
“It’s similar. But there’s so much more to it.”
“Like what? Can I make wolves go away?”
“You can do whatever you want, but wanting is not the same as wishing. It’s a very big word. You must learn to only want what you know you can achieve.”
Ahnah had begun to teach Max everything she knew. And more.
But he didn’t know how much until the crash in Moscow, just a mile from his father’s apartment, in the aging blue Lada taxi they’d waved down in the rain.
And as he cradled her in his arms she’d whispered that his powers were unique and that he must use them and guard them with great care.
“Why can’t I use them to help you?”
Tears dropped down her cheek as Ahnah saw his future without her, and she realised she’d never see him or her beloved husband again. “Give my love to your Daddy. You’ll have to look after him now.” And Ahnah’s eyes closed over her tears for the last time.
The telephone bell in his room in the Arctic Haven Hotel in Pevek brought Max back to the present. The handset vibrated on the scratched, wooden side table and he lifted the receiver.
“I am outside.” That was Sasha, Max’s newly acquired driver.
A former, army engineer sergeant who had ended up in Siberia rather than face the music for a drink-driving manslaughter charge. He’d run over an officer while downing vodka to keep warm during a winter storm.
Max, who needed an engineer, had taken him on; gambling that all would be well if Sasha kept away from alcohol He hadn’t touched a drop since the crash.
“On my way.”
Max threw on his full-length, reindeer coat, grabbed his fox-fur hat, dropped down the musty stairs two steps at a time and banged his way through the two doors of the Arctic Haven Hotel.
He strode across the empty, icy road to his new acquisition — an aging army green 6x6 off-road Ural Truck, which had once paraded in Moscow’s Red Square, with a BM-21 ‘Grad’ multiple-launch rocket system on its back.
Now the Ural truck carried a grubby, faded, grey container, air freighted to Pevek by Sofia.
Max climbed up the driver’s-side, cabin steps.<
br />
Sasha moved over. This boss clearly liked taking charge, but Max paid well. A pile of cash, half already delivered, half to follow. Sasha would do almost anything to make sure it did.
As he jolted their way over the icy, rock-strewn roads towards the Gulag, Max was itching to open up Sofia’s shabby-looking container.
Inside, alongside the usual Z5 high tech locating kit, were 50 hibernating bats in special air-conditioned boxes.
Max brought the truck to a halt by the side of a group of yurtas, twenty odd kilometres to the east of the uranium mines. It was a reindeer herders’ village that Max had visited the day before, greasing the palms of the village elder and leaving behind a Vezdekhod, that thirsty, tracked vehicle only the rich and privileged could afford to use in the far north, which now sat by a snow-cleared space.
A tall, tin stack eased up billowing smoke from the centre of the biggest yurta into the windless air. A lull before the storm.
The sooner Sasha and Max set up camp the better.
They started erecting two army-style tents, weathered and patched so as not to scream out ‘look at me’.
“Why two?” asked Sasha.
“The large dome tent is to cook, eat and relax in.”
“Relax?”
“I told you it was easy money. Your job is to cook and have the truck and Vezdekhod ready to go twenty-four hours a day. And that won’t take twenty-four hours.”
Sasha’s eyes widened as Max unlocked the shabby container’s outer door and he glimpsed what was inside. Not just what was there but how meticulously it had been stashed, shown up brightly by efficient LED lights. The container’s grubby, faded, grey exterior camouflage had had him fooled.
Max’s snowmobile came out first followed by three wooden crates, which doubled as bedsteads, filled with enough tinned and bagged food for two for a month, sleeping and washing kit — bedrolls, soap, tin water dispensers and basins - and a LCD TV with a built-in personal video recorder loaded with one hundred hours of video.
“For you,” said Max.
Pitching the two tents, insulating them with snow and tying them to the truck for power took an hour, it was still two hours to midnight, and emptied two thirds of the container.
Left inside was a 6000 watt diesel generator that Max told Sasha should be running whenever the Ural truck’s engine was not, spares and emergency kit for the Ural, two 2000 litre diesel tanks and 200 litres of 2-stroke gas for the snowmobile.
“Let’s shove it back in.” Max gripped the front sledges of the snow machine.
Once done Sasha nodded at a door and wall that led to a second section of the container, taking up a third of the available space. “What’s through there?”
“No go for you, or any of them.” Max nodded in the direction the yurtas.
Sasha irritably eyed the door.
The lock was an iris biometric and fingerprint recognition device. No keys even in Siberia.
“Time to go to work.” Max eyed the retinal scanner and touched the biometric lock. The door slid open, swallowing Max, shutting out Sasha.
Max took his seat in what was more a fly-by-wire cockpit than a study - one anchored-down chair facing sideways, in front of it a touch-screen wall. He settled in, aware now of the quite drone of the Ural truck’s diesel engine that was keeping the cold at bay and powering the container. He flicked on the master switch and watched the screen flash on. He was back in touch with the world, with Z5.
On his right, the sliding door that shut out Sasha, on his left the whole front wall of the container. Attached to it were fifty tiny lockers.
Inside each and every one was a hibernating bat.
“Hi Max.” Sofia appeared on one computer screen. “All okay?”
*
Max dragged on his Sorel boots, his reindeer coat, fox-fur hat and emerged from his ridge tent at the crack of dawn to find a spot to pee and grab some snow to freshen up.
Inside the dome tent, it was agreeably snug. Sasha had set up the Mopar Diesel Cabin Heater, which was already boiling water for tea and boil in the bag breakfast. He’d selected ‘Lamb Potatoes and Peas’ for himself.
“The same?” He looked up as Max looked around.
Max shook his head. And chose oatmeal and coffee instead of tea.
“When did you make the water?”
“Last night, you were working.”
Max nodded appreciatively, Sasha might work out better than he expected.
“What next”? Sasha clearly liked to be busy.
“I’ll go and pay my respects to the elder. You fuel up and check out the Vezdekhod and the snow machine.”
The smoke from the tin stack was wafting south. As he strode towards the elders’ yurta Max tightened his leather belt, drawing his reindeer coat close around him to keep his body heat from escaping.
Two large flaps of reindeer skin nailed to the doorframes formed the two doors that kept the arctic cold out. Max choked on the fug as he stepped inside and bowed a smiling hello to the four-generation family of fifteen.
Only the baby ignored him, the rest knew him as a man of wealth who had sprinkled a generous bagful on the village — their expressions demonstrated their appreciation.
The elder gave him a bear hug.
How could they help?
Local knowledge was what Max was after, about anything and everything except the Gulag mines. For the protection of his hosts they were taboo.
The depth of the frozen rivers, the run of the snow, the strength of the wind, the likelihood of a storm, these were the topics that took up the couple of hours that started with thick milky tea and ended with their stomachs filled and satisfied, giving out the heat that keeps the body alive.
Max hurried back to the dome tent.
“What next?” asked Sasha who had strapped the snowmobile to the Vezdekhod presuming, rightly, that they’d go to the Gulag in one vehicle, that Max would stay, and he’d return.
“Bide our time ’til the storm,” replied Max who went straight to the container’s biometric door.
Sasha didn’t need telling that storms wipe out tracks — he hoped he’d bring the Vezdekhod back.
The storm hit as dusk fell. A back-pack full of emergency kit, bedding and food had been stashed on the snowmobile sledge and piled into the Vezdekhod alongside a satellite base station and fifty tagged bats — all somewhat bewildered as they emerged from hibernation.
All had tracking devices, ten had cameras.
Less than an hour after they started out from the reindeer herders’ temporary village Max and Sasha arrived at the Gulag mines in a blinding storm. They had followed the GPS track Max had plotted when he’d recced the area, in a similar storm, just a couple of days before,
As the storm raged Max and Sasha unloaded the snowmobile and backpacks, bats and satellite base station and wrestled their way against the merciless wind to a freezing, abandoned building that Max had settled on a couple of days before.
Nearly a century earlier, this had been built as a ventilation shaft for the giant Gulag’s mines. A job it was doing again.
That night the shaft would double as an entrance for the bats.
With the heavy work done and the storm still raging, Sasha set out on his return journey. He used a blowtorch to clear the windscreen of ice as he steered the Vezdekhod back to the relative shelter of the herdsmen’s village. On the way he dropped off the snowmobile at a pre-arranged spot for Max to pick up that night, the next day, whenever, or, in the worst case, never.
Max sensed their presence hadn’t been registered.
Or perhaps I’m too rusty to tell?
While the violent, cacophonous storm persisted Max felt relatively safe. He set about preparing the bats for their new home, checking and logging- in all fifty tags along with the tiny cameras that the strongest ten carried. Once done he secured, camouflaged, and finally threw the switch of the solar-powered, satellite base station.
Sofia, as always, had achieved exactly what she
promised and more. The base station radioed its encrypted data to her secure server at her Milan based Aquarium. From there, the data was transmitted to a select number of ‘need to know’ terminals.
Max’s Z5 phone now registered the whereabouts of fifty bats.
An hour later the storm subsided. Dead silence. At the herder’s village the smoke from the chief’s yurta stretched straight up into the cold cloudless, star-filled sky. Sasha was in his tent and dry.
Max feared every sound he made became an instant scream just waiting to be picked up.
But, from the mines, where thousands laboured in the intense heat, there was silence.
One by one he coaxed the bats out of their torpor.
Ten by ten he wrapped them to his chest like grenades on a soldier’s vest.
Five times he edged his way, head first and on his back, along the ventilator shaft, hewn by malnourished prisoners who had been shipped here to die. Hewn out of the permafrost which, for the first five hundred metres covered the shaft with what could be mistaken as a bulging layer of frozen, dirty, vanilla ice-cream.
And then as they approached the mines and the heat fought its way upward the ice cream disappeared, uncovering the rocky walls. Max could have released the bats at this point, but instinct told him to keep going until the shaft’s end.
Once there he released the bats, talking, stroking and coaxing them, giving each one a bite of rich bug-mix. Ten bats at a time, encouraged to scatter throughout the mine on a full stomach.
Eight bats Max and Sofia could track and two carrying tiny, cent-sized cameras that became their eyes into the mine.
Ten bats at a time, fifty bats released in all.
And by the time the fiftieth bat had been released, Max didn’t need his phone to track their whereabouts. He could sense them. His rusty connection to the netherworld was being oiled with practice.
Eternity's Sunrise (A New Doc Palfrey Thriller) Page 12
