The Squad

by Tom Palmer

  But Lily knew not to stop. If the men chasing them were willing to come into the staff area to pursue them, they’d be more than happy to come into this room and finish the job. So she ran on – Kester too – through to the engine rooms. And now the crew member was after them too.

  Inside, the noise – without earplugs – was appalling. A violent, impossibly loud roaring. Lily held the door for Kester, then, as she turned to go in, she saw the crew member drop to the floor. And behind him was one of the gunmen. They’d shot the engineer. They were ruthless. Ruthless and lethal.

  Lily ran on. She was going so hard now that she felt sick. The racket of the engine room, its violent noise, its flashing sparks, the adrenalin rushing through her body. It was all too much. Once she was halfway through the engine room, she found the staircase that she was looking for. But it was steep, so steep. She descended almost like a fireman down a pole, clinging to the banisters on either side. And Kester did the same.

  The floor above – the one that they’d just run across – was a metal grille. Lily could see through it to the two men above them and that was bad. Because the men could see her too. Through the grille. One of them shouted, his mouth opening and closing, but his voice was drowned out by the riot of noise the engines were producing. Then he pointed the gun down at them.

  This is it, Lily thought, still moving. We’ll be rolled up in a blanket like Katiyana and tossed over the side of the ship with the poor engineer.

  The next thing Lily and Kester saw was a flash and the gunman dropping to his knees above them. A shower of blood poured through the grille floor. He’d fired at them, but missed, the bullet ricocheting off some part of the engine room at him, smashing into his leg.

  A piece of luck.

  A small victory.

  Lily and Kester set off again. To another door. A door with a code. A code Kester remembered too. They’d gained time. Seconds that might help save their lives.

  Lily ran harder now. Up another tight metal staircase. Through a pair of doors. Past three of the crew, who seemed so shocked they let them pass, and outside. The cold again. The dark night again. Next to a ladder that led up to the massive ship’s chimney that was spewing out dark smoke.

  ‘The lifeboat!’ Kester shouted.

  ‘No,’ Lily replied, the wind snatching her breath. ‘Too obvious … ladder up the side of this … Up here …’

  Only when Lily and Kester reached the far side of the chimney – that was letting out fumes and steam from the engines – did they start to breathe properly. Deep breaths, gasping in the smoky air. Neither spoke. They were listening for the second gunman. They waited until they heard him run past, mercifully missing their ladder.

  The night was darkening now, little drops of wetness landing on their arms and faces. Shafts of light from windows and doorways on the ship illuminated tiny flecks of white.

  Snow.

  Kester and Lily sat in silence, their eyes staring into the black water. This was the first chance they’d had to speak properly since they’d seen Katiyana’s body flung off the ship.

  ‘They killed her,’ Lily said eventually.

  Kester nodded. ‘I know.’

  There was a long pause.

  ‘What do we do now?’ Lily asked. ‘Where did those two men come from? We don’t know who’s on Hawk’s side. We don’t know anything or anyone.’

  ‘Should we text Lesh?’

  ‘No. They could intercept it.’

  Kester stared out into the cloud of snow that was gusting along the fjords. Snow, for Kester, had always meant things like Christmas and sledging with his parents. Not this sense of catastrophe.

  He felt desperate. ‘We have to get back to Tromsø.’

  Lily leaned forward. ‘We do,’ she agreed. ‘This whole thing on the boat was to get us out of Tromsø, like they knew about us all along. So that something big can happen. Something we haven’t a clue about – and that the others don’t know about either.’

  Ghosts

  Lily and Kester sat on the top deck of the ship with their backs to the funnel of the ship, a huge black chimney as big as a house. It was a freezing cold night, but the chimney was warm, heating their bodies through their clothes.

  The snow was heavier now, swirling around in the light coming off the ship.

  ‘We’ll stay up here until we reach the next port,’ Kester said, watching his breath twist away in trails as the ship passed through the black water of the night.

  ‘Yes,’ Lily agreed.

  ‘Once we’re off the ship, we can contact the others. I don’t think we’ll achieve anything by taking risks communicating now.’

  ‘Do you think we could have done more to help her?’ Lily asked.

  ‘Katiyana?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Kester shook his head. ‘No,’ he said.

  They both sat in silence. There was nothing else to say. But they were thinking about her. The girl from Canada that they hardly knew.

  The night was strange. It stopped snowing after an hour. They could see for miles in every direction. Miles of sea and mountains and glaciers, a pale, cold light around the rim of the world.

  Lily shivered. But not because she was cold. There was something about being on a ship in this vast world of sea and ice and rock. Something that made her feel like she wasn’t in the real world at all. It was as if all the mountains were ghosts of mountains and the sea was the ghost of a sea. Or that she was a ghost.

  Lily looked at her hands. She’d always imagined that being out in nature like this would be exhilarating. But it was quite the opposite.

  ‘Do you ever think much about the last mission?’ she asked quietly.

  ‘All the time,’ Kester replied.

  ‘So why don’t you talk about it?’

  ‘Mostly we’re with Lesh,’ Kester said. ‘And he’s asked me not to. He hates all the pity he gets.’

  ‘Yes.’ Lily nodded. ‘He’s said the same to me. But he never talks about Jim either. Does he to you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’d think he’d blame Jim. For the accident, I mean. If Jim hadn’t …’ Lily paused.

  ‘… betrayed us?’ Kester finished her sentence.

  ‘Yes. If he’d not been such a … you know what, then we’d not have been in the church and Lesh wouldn’t have fallen and broken his back.’

  Kester was about to reply when a group of people emerged from inside the ship on to the deck. A family. Two children – much younger than Kester and Lily – were laughing and shrieking. Their parents were trying to keep them from the edge. Then, after a few minutes in the cold, they returned inside. To the warmth and light of the cafes and cabins.

  Lily frowned. Seeing families always made her frown, always made her think of her mum and dad. Her dad. He’d have loved it here. He’d have taken to the mountains in his running shoes. And she’d have joined him. She closed her eyes.

  ‘What are we doing here?’ she asked, her eyes still shut.

  ‘Up this chimney?’ Kester smiled wryly.

  ‘You know what I mean. Here – doing all of this.’

  Kester didn’t reply right away. He’s thinking up a good answer, Lily thought. Thinking of something to say that’ll make me feel better, but that’s still true.

  ‘Because we don’t have parents? So we can?’ he suggested.

  ‘Hmmm.’

  ‘Because we don’t have families and because they were taken away from us by people who want to cause havoc in the world and don’t care about a girl like you losing her father and mother …’

  Lily interrupted Kester at this point, ‘… and we do all this to stop that happening again to other children.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Kester said.

  ‘It’s a good enough reason,’ Lily added.

  ‘Except Adnan has the chance to have a family now,’ Kester said.

  ‘He does.’

  ‘I’ve not been able to talk to him about it for a couple of days,’ Kester went on.
‘I think he’s putting it off until after the mission, but I’d say he wants a family.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘That he wanted it,’ Kester said. ‘But also that he’d miss us and what we do.’

  ‘What do you think he’ll do?’

  ‘Well, what would you tell him to do?’ Kester pressed.

  Lily didn’t hesitate. ‘Go back. Be with a family. If he can.’

  As the two children spoke, the Nordlys pushed on through the black waves, heading to the northernmost tip of the European land mass.

  Alongside the ship, a pair of whales moved invisibly with them.

  THURSDAY

  Cold Town

  As the sun came up fully the next morning – its rays reflecting off the blanket of white that covered the Arctic scenery of northern Norway – the Nordlys moved gently into the harbour of a port.

  Hammerfest was a small town. No more than a few hundred houses shivering with cold underneath a pair of mountains and a gigantic glacier wedged between them. The port was a nondescript row of ageing three-storey office blocks. Unremarkable. Empty. Bleak. And around it miles and miles of snow and rock.

  They were now as far north as you could go on mainland Europe.

  Once the boat had docked, two electronic ramps dropped down. The larger one was to allow a truck to leave the ship, chains attached to its tyres to help it grip the roads. The smaller ramp was lowered to let the crew and a few passengers on to the harbourside. Some of those passengers stood holding up their cameras, capturing the spectacular scenery, stamping their feet in the fresh snow. Others were met by locals. But it was early. There were really very few people about and those who were disappeared quickly, climbing into cars and vans to escape the bitter cold.

  Two other people – at the back of this group – moved purposefully off the ship, wrapped up in coats, hoods up, heads down, looking like they knew exactly where they were going. They moved past a crane that was lifting wooden boxes on to the back of the ship, then round the back of a painted wooden building, out of sight of the great ship.

  Lily and Kester stopped and pulled their hoods away from their faces.

  ‘Shall we contact the others now?’ Lily asked.

  ‘Let’s wait until the ship goes,’ Kester replied. ‘In case anyone could intercept us.’

  Lily frowned and wished the boat would hurry up and leave so that they could warn Lesh, Hatty and Adnan. Warn them that it was the American who was causing trouble – not the Russian – and that they were sure something was going to happen in Tromsø. Soon.

  They both kept watch on the boat from behind the wooden building. No one had disembarked after them. Certainly not Hawk. Everyone else who’d left the boat had returned up the ramp. The only other thing that had disembarked was the truck – and that was long gone. Eventually, the ship sounded its horn. More deep booms echoing off the mountains, announcing its departure. Then it began to move away, slowly at first, churning its great propeller to reverse a little before heading out into the fjord.

  Lily looked from the boat to the small town they’d arrived at. She knew about it because she’d read up about every town in the area on the plane coming into Norway, as well as the transport links between those towns. And, because of that, she knew that the main way of getting in and out of Hammerfest was by the Hurtigruten, even more so now as winter approached. Once the snow set in, many of the roads in the area became impassable, often for the whole of the winter.

  The boat had almost gone round the corner of the fjord now. The pair walked to the front of the wooden building to watch it disappear behind the headland, a wind coming off the water.

  ‘I thought there’d be a police car or something,’ Lily said.

  ‘Me too.’

  ‘I mean, don’t you think they found the injured crew member – or did they miss the gunshots?’

  ‘It was noisy in the engine room. Perhaps they concealed the body. If they killed him.’

  ‘Let’s text Lesh,’ Lily said, feeling suddenly uneasy, like she wanted to be away from this town, even though they’d only been there minutes. ‘It’s safe to now.’

  ‘Not as safe as you’d like to think,’ said a third voice. An American voice.

  Kester and Lily turned in horror to see the silhouettes of two men behind them. They’d emerged from where Lily and Kester had just come from. It was two men they knew well. Frank Hawk and one of Katiyana’s killers from the night before. Both holding rifles.

  For a few seconds neither of the Americans spoke. Hawk was smiling. Almost laughing. He was watching them, waiting for them to make the next move.

  Lily took the time to glance around her. There was neither sight nor sound of anyone else. She wondered if this was an inhabited town at all. It looked more like a set of concrete boxes that people had abandoned, left empty for the entire winter. Perhaps forever.

  The situation was stark. They were alone. They were unarmed. So they had no option but to do what they were told by the Americans.

  ‘Move,’ the second American said eventually, pointing to the far end of the harbour.

  Lily and Kester glanced at each other, sharing a sense of hopelessness rather than fear. They walked along the edge of the harbour on to a path that led round the side of a huge rock. Lily placed her feet carefully as the snow was fresh. Then she wondered why she was bothering. What did it matter if she slipped and fell? Weren’t they being taken away from the buildings to be killed? Just like Katiyana had been. She kept her mind alive and alert for any chance to escape this situation. She knew Kester would be doing the same.

  Never surrender.

  They walked for fifteen minutes, even passing reindeer eating vegetation, unworried by this small group of people walking by.

  ‘You’re not terribly effective spies, are you, kids?’

  Neither Lily nor Kester answered.

  ‘I mean,’ Hawk went on, ‘it almost seems a shame to do this to you. We’ve led you all the way. This trip, for instance. You followed us because you thought we were heading out to trigger a nuclear device. Didn’t you?’

  No reply.

  ‘You did. You listened in on the bug in my hat. The hat I left on the top of the cable car mountain. You put all your resources into investigating some Russian ecologist who wouldn’t know a spy from a skylark.’ The American laughed. ‘Because of some papers we left in his hotel room. But do you know how we knew who you were?’

  Lily, like Kester, remained quiet.

  ‘Go silent to your graves if you like,’ Hawk said in a darker voice, ‘but I’ll tell you anyway. When you were in my room that night, when I came back in up a secret way I know. Well, I needed to know who you were, but not for you to know I knew. So I sprayed you – as you hid behind that sofa – with a chemical that showed up on your clothes when I saw you in the bar. I shone a laser on you and knew immediately you were the ones.’

  ‘The ones we had to kill,’ the second American said.

  ‘I liked you two,’ Hawk said, ignoring his colleague, and he looked genuinely disappointed. ‘But needs must.’

  ‘Needs must what?’ Lily asked, speaking at last, her voice hard. She was shivering now, because they’d stopped walking. But Hawk wasn’t listening. He was staring up at the mountains above Hammerfest.

  ‘Look at that,’ he said. ‘A beautiful wilderness. Doesn’t it look beautiful to you, kids?’

  Lily said nothing. She just stared at the unforgiving emptiness of rock and snow and ice. It looked anything but beautiful at this moment. It looked desolate. It looked dead.

  ‘Do you know, that whole business with that Canadian girl, it troubled me,’ Hawk said. ‘Because … because it was too easy. Bang bang, she’s dead. It just doesn’t seem fair. You wouldn’t do that with one of these reindeer, would you? You’d chase it a bit, give it a chance, or at least make it think it had a chance. And, deep down, not know for sure you were going to catch it. Hunting. That’s what I’m talking about. So, kids, I’m going to g
ive you a sporting chance.’ Hawk suddenly dropped his rifle at his side. ‘You have half an hour.’

  Lily and Kester couldn’t believe what they were hearing. Hawk was telling them that they could go. And that he was hunting them.

  It was sick.

  It was terrifying.

  But it meant they had a chance.

  Human Prey

  To conserve energy, Lily and Kester ran at a steady pace, putting some distance between them and the two Americans. They just hoped he’d stick to his word and give them half an hour.

  At first, escaping was simple. The snow on the lower ground was less than two centimetres deep and covering only soft grass or earth. Easy running, if a little slippery. But, as they climbed higher up the steep, sloping sides of the fjord, the snow became deeper. Five centimetres. Ten centimetres. More.

  Deeper snow would not have been a problem, except that the terrain underfoot was not flat earth or grass. Now it was scree: small- and medium-sized pieces of rock scattered on the sides of the mountains. The pair moved carefully, keeping on all fours to avoid a fall that might lead to an injury that would slow them down disastrously. Neither of them was wearing gloves and soon they felt the same kind of cold burning sensation you feel after you’ve been snowballing with bare hands.

  Neither Lily nor Kester spoke as they ran. What they needed to do was simple: get away from Hawk as quickly as possible. They’d seen what his accomplices had done to Katiyana. They both knew the form without speaking about it.

  If you were being pursued up a hill, you didn’t just run up the side. If you did, you could be tracked from a single point. That is why they were running around the hill at the same time as ascending. That meant they could use the side of the mountain as cover.

  After ten minutes of climbing, Kester stopped by an outcrop of rocks. ‘Just give me a minute,’ he said. ‘And … and we need to work out what to do.’

  ‘Get away,’ Lily said. ‘That’s it. Come on.’

  ‘But where to?’

  ‘Away,’ Lily said anxiously. But she knew she had to be careful. Kester was not used to running up hills in ice and snow. And she was.