Lost Worlds

by Andrew Lane

  CHAPTER

  sixteen

  They had to abandon the van just over two hours after leaving the village.

  The ground had mainly sloped upward all the way, but the Delica’s four-wheel drive had managed admirably, and its heavy-duty tyres had bitten into the ground and pulled them onward with barely any sign of strain in the engine noise. The road they had taken from the village had petered out into a track after a while, then into a path, then into a slightly different-coloured line in the long grass. Gravel scattered across the ground became small stones, then larger stones, then boulders. Presumably, Tara thought, the next step would be the mountains themselves.

  Naively, Tara had expected the ground to just head up and up and up until they arrived at the mountains, but there were unexpected dips on the way – areas of ground out of sight until they crested the tops of the ridges that hid them, large enough in which to hide entire villages. Not that they had found any villages on the way. Ruspiri seemed to be the last outpost of civilization.

  ARLENE had kept up with no problems. For the first hour or so Tara had been paranoid about checking that the robot hadn’t fallen over and been left behind, or that the supplies and luggage hadn’t fallen off it, and about monitoring its power levels and vital signs using the software on her tablet, but after an hour had passed with no accidents she had relaxed. It really was an autonomous system. Now the robot’s presence was just something in the corner of her eye, something reassuring on which she didn’t feel she had to keep tabs.

  They had crossed several streams along the way. The first two had been little more than shallow trickles of ice-cold water heading down from the mountains that hardly got the underside of the van wet, but the third had been wider and deeper, and Rhino had decided that the risk of flooding the engine was greater than the risk that they wouldn’t be able to find a ford or a bridge if they turned off the path, and so he drove along the side of the river for a while until he found an area where they could cross. Tara had been pretty sure that she could have got ARLENE to cross the stream, picking its way carefully over, and got it to wait for them to find their way back to it, but Rhino had insisted that the robot stay with them.

  Rhino had driven all the way, concentrating on the route and on making sure that the van’s tyres didn’t get bogged down anywhere. Gecko was in the back with a map and a compass, trying to make sure that they knew where they were. Tara was in the passenger seat with a tablet computer on her lap. It was her job to liaise with Calum back in London, who was watching the map displays on his ten-screen computer and tracking the progress of the Almast with Natalie’s mobile phone in its pocket. Or, Tara was beginning to think, the rabbit whose neck the Almast had tied the mobile round and then set running in a different direction. She supposed it depended on how intelligent the Almast was, and whether or not it had discovered the mobile yet and wondered what it was.

  The Almast had maintained a reasonably straight route towards the mountains after leaving the village. It had wandered back and forth a little bit, presumably taking advantage of areas of flatter terrain, but it had gone straight across all the streams. On an open road the van would have been able to catch up with no problems, but on rolling terrain littered with rocks and crossed by the occasional stream the Almast was actually making better time. The only way the expedition was keeping up was because the Almast had taken a break for a while, resting and perhaps eating some of the grain it had stolen to keep its energy up. Or maybe it had been busy catching that rabbit and tying Natalie’s mobile round its neck.

  ‘Where do you think it’s heading?’ Tara asked the absent Calum after a while.

  ‘Not sure,’ his voice said over the headband loudspeakers. ‘I’ve tried extrapolating the line it’s been taking further into the mountains on Google Earth, but I can’t see any signs of habitation – no villages, no buildings, nothing. I just hope it isn’t heading through a mountain pass and across to the other side of the Caucasus. That would be annoying.’

  ‘Very,’ she agreed. ‘Look on the bright side – maybe the Almasti live in caves.’

  ‘Let’s hope,’ Calum said darkly.

  Tara had found herself captivated by the scenery as they drove. She was a city girl, used to having buildings huddled around her, and the vast open spaces were making her dizzy. The mountain peaks were a jagged line high above them, like the sharp edge of a carving knife: not as rough as other mountain ranges she had seen in photographs, like the Alps or the Himalayas, but still impressive. The sky behind the peaks was the deepest blue, and the wisps of cloud that were blown past by the wind seemed to catch on the mountain tops, like chiffon scarves, and flutter gently.

  ‘Time to stop,’ Rhino said regretfully as the Delica had climbed slowly up a particularly sharp slope. ‘If I push this thing any further, I’ll risk overheating the engine, or stripping the gearbox.’ He brought the van to a halt and turned the engine off. Tara started to type instructions into her tablet to bring ARLENE to a halt, but the robot had already detected that the van had stopped and had come to a halt itself, like a patient donkey.

  Gecko slid open the side door and jumped to the ground. He glanced around. ‘Everyone, make sure you remember where we parked,’ he said, grinning.

  ‘We’re on a schedule,’ Rhino pointed out. ‘Let’s get the supplies out of the van and load ARLENE up.’

  ‘It could have carried them all the way from Ruspiri,’ Tara pointed out. ‘I said so back there. We didn’t need to load the van up, only to unload it again now.’

  ‘I wanted to make sure that ARLENE could keep up unloaded,’ Rhino said. ‘I didn’t want to put too much weight on it to start off with. Standard military technique – do things incrementally, rather than all at once, just in case there’s a problem.’ He opened up the back of the van and began to haul out cases and boxes.

  ‘Speaking of problems,’ Gecko said, looking around, ‘I need to . . . you know. Go to the bathroom.’

  ‘Just walk round to the other side of the van and go,’ Rhino said. ‘We’re not going to find a washroom out here anywhere.’

  Gecko looked as if he was going to argue, but shrugged instead and walked round the corner of the Delica.

  ‘I hadn’t thought about that,’ Tara said loudly to cover any sounds that might be coming from behind the van. She started pulling the boxes across to ARLENE. ‘If I had, I would have brought some chemical toilets with us, and a small tent. ARLENE could have carried them all.’

  ‘Let me tell you something,’ Rhino said, hauling a particularly large box out of the back of the van. ‘A few years ago I was on a reconnaissance mission in Afghanistan. I spent three days lying on a hilltop observing a Taliban encampment. There were guards all around the camp, and if I’d moved I would have been seen. Do you want to know what I did as far as toilet breaks were concerned?’

  ‘Don’t tell me – you just didn’t drink anything so you became dehydrated and didn’t need to go?’ Tara replied brightly.

  ‘No, I—’

  ‘I said don’t tell me,’ she protested, hands raised. ‘I really don’t want to know, and I’m trying not to work it out myself.’

  Gecko arrived back a few minutes later. He was moving fast, and glancing back over his shoulder.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ Tara asked.

  ‘I was . . . you know . . . doing my business . . .’

  ‘OK, thanks – move on quickly.’

  ‘And I suddenly realized I was being watched.’

  ‘Not by me,’ Tara said.

  ‘No – by something else. I thought it might be the Almast! I looked around and I couldn’t see anything at first, but after a few minutes I realized that there was something lying in a dip in the ground about a hundred metres away. When it realized that I had seen it, it stood up. It looked like a dog, an Alsatian, but its pelt was white and grey, and its eyes were a pale blue. It kept on looking at me for a while longer, then it just trotted off.’

  ‘Wolf,’ Rhino said s
uccinctly.

  ‘Wolf? Really? Not just a large wild dog?’

  ‘No,’ Rhino confirmed, ‘it was a wolf. The mountains around here are full of them.’

  ‘Great,’ Gecko said. ‘I take it you’re armed?’

  Rhino shrugged. ‘On the one hand, I obviously wasn’t able to get any weapons through customs, and I didn’t want to risk getting in contact with any of the rather more criminal elements in Tbilisi to get my hands on one. On the other hand, you might assume that there were lots of old rifles in Ruspiri, and that I might just have slipped one of the villagers some money and taken one.’

  ‘Well done,’ Gecko said in a heartfelt tone of voice.

  Tara noticed that he was wiggling his fingers uncomfortably. ‘Something wrong?’ she asked.

  ‘Got any wet-wipes? Years of my mother telling me to wash my hands are now coming back to haunt me.’

  Rhino indicated one of the boxes. ‘In there. Just make sure you seal the box up again afterwards.’

  ‘OK.’

  It took them twenty minutes to load ARLENE up with all the stuff that had been in the van. Now the robot had things strapped to its back and hanging off both sides, but it didn’t seem to be particularly inconvenienced. In fact, Tara was reminded of a game she’d been given one Christmas, where you had to load plastic buckets on the side of a spring-loaded toy donkey, trying not to trigger the spring mechanism. Once or twice, while they had been attaching things, ARLENE had moved its feet wider to maintain stability. Tara had jumped whenever it did so. Any act of apparent intelligence by the robot spooked her.

  ‘Calum – still there?’ Rhino asked, slamming the back door closed. He used the remote key to lock the van. Tara wondered against whom he was protecting it, then realized that it was probably more force of habit than anything else.

  ‘Yes, I’m here,’ Calum’s voice replied from the air. ‘I’m not going anywhere.’

  ‘We’re going to set off on foot now.’

  ‘Agreed.’

  Rhino pointed to two rucksacks on the ground. He was already wearing one, Tara noticed. ‘Pick those up and put them on.’

  ‘I thought ARLENE was meant to be carrying all the supplies,’ she protested.

  ‘And if ARLENE falls off the side of a mountain path and we lose everything, what are you going to eat and what are you going to sleep on?’

  ‘Good point, well made,’ she muttered, bending and picking up the rucksack. It was heavy. She slipped it on to her protesting shoulders.

  ‘OK,’ Rhino said grimly. ‘Let’s go find us an Almast.’

  Natalie had run out of things to tell Craig Roxton. In silence she stared out of the passenger window at the passing countryside while he drove and three of his men – his troops, she thought – sat in the back and glowered.

  The landscape they were driving through was probably the most depressingly flat and boring she had ever seen, and she had lived in El Paso for a while when her mother was working with – never for, as she kept pointing out – the US Department of Defence. It consisted entirely of swathes of rocky ground interrupted every now and then by a scraggly bush or a misshaped tree. Life seemed to be just about hanging on in the foothills of the Caucasus Mountains, and it didn’t seem too happy about it either.

  As the three Humvees had set off from their hiding place and driven off after her friends, Craig Roxton had patiently and politely asked a series of questions that cut right to the heart of what the expedition was doing there, what its plans were and how it was equipped. He seemed to know many of the answers already, and Natalie assumed that he was testing her by asking her things that he already knew. She tried telling him a couple of lies and exaggerations, but he spotted each one and threw it back at her. He didn’t seem to mind that she was trying to deceive him – in fact, he almost seemed to be expecting it, and smiled each time he caught her pulling the wool over his eyes. He really was the most exasperatingly patient man she had ever met.

  And the scariest. She was pretty sure that he was capable of killing her and leaving her lying in a ditch. The only reason he kept her with him was that she was useful. So she had to keep on being useful.

  Inside, Natalie could feel a fluttering sensation, as if butterflies were congregating around her heart like moths around a lamp. She could feel a trembling in her hands. She tried to suppress it – no way was she going to let these gorillas know that she was scared – but the more she suppressed the trembling the more it came out as occasional jerky motions of her hands or arms. Every time she jerked she tried to turn it into a deliberate action, like smoothing her hair down or scratching her nose, but she knew that Roxton realised what she was doing, and was amused by it.

  He was very interested in Calum Challenger, she discovered. He kept coming back to questions about him – what was wrong with him, what did he expect to achieve if his expedition found the Almasti, why hadn’t he come out to Georgia himself, what was his website actually for? He seemed to think that there was a big conspiracy going on somewhere, and that Calum was covering something up – some motive or reason for arranging the expedition. Natalie tried to convince him that Calum was just a teenager exploring his own obsessions with a lot of money behind him, but he obviously didn’t believe her.

  The other men in the Humvee remained silent and almost immobile, like robots, or statues. They didn’t seem to be listening to Roxton and Natalie talking, or looking around them, or doing anything that someone normal would have done. Natalie suspected that they just came alive when Roxton needed them and settled back into suspended animation when he didn’t. In a strange way, there were only two personalities in the car.

  Roxton was mad. Natalie had spotted it straight away. His faded blue eyes were open too wide and didn’t blink, and he could talk calmly about hurting and killing people as if they were nothing more than rabbits or sheep or pigs. There was something deeply wrong with him. Natalie was very, very scared.

  There was a device attached to the dashboard of their Humvee. It was something like a large satnav, but as well as showing where they were it also showed the position of something ahead of them. Natalie suspected that it was the van with Rhino, Tara and Gecko inside.

  Roxton caught her looking at it. ‘You’re wondering how I can be following your friends,’ he said in a genial tone. ‘You assume I have placed a tracking device somewhere on them? In fact, no. I have a much cleverer solution.’ He smiled. ‘Now,’ he continued conversationally, ‘let us talk about ARLENE.’

  ‘Arlene?’ Natalie replied. ‘I don’t think I’ve met her.’

  ‘I’m talking about that very clever robot that Captain Gillis is using to transport his equipment. But I think you knew that already. So – tell me all about it.’ He paused for a moment, then added quietly, ‘You know what will happen if you don’t.’

  Calum stared at the ten screens of his computer, and swore.

  They weren’t telling him anything that he wanted to know. Yes, they were full of information, but they didn’t contain a single fact that would help him do what he most needed to do – locate Natalie Livingstone.

  He slammed his fist on the computer desk. The pile of pizza boxes stacked on the edge fell off, scattering crusts and splattering puttanesca sauce across the floor. He felt so helpless. He knew where Rhino, Gecko and Tara were. He knew where the scavenging Almast was, pretty much. But he didn’t have a clue where Natalie was.

  If only she had kept her mobile phone on her, he could have tracked her. But then, if she had kept her mobile phone on her, he wouldn’t be able to track the Almast, and the whole expedition would have ground to a halt. She’d done something really clever and quick-witted, but the implications of that act were going to come back to haunt her. And him.

  How could he tell her mother that he had lost her?

  He scanned the screens again, just in case he had missed something. Three of the screens were showing the views from the cameras on the headbands of Rhino, Tara and Gecko. The fourth screen was blank – r
eserved for the headband camera that Natalie had been wearing but which had disappeared. The fifth screen showed what ARLENE was looking at, while the rest were showing a mixture of maps, Google Earth and various search engines that he’d been using.

  Not for the first time, Calum wished he had the computer skills and the nerve to hack into the American reconnaissance-satellite network. The US recon satellites had telescopes so powerful that they could read the headline on a newspaper left on a park bench. The trouble was that none of them were pointed at Georgia, as far as he knew, and he would be risking a lengthy spell in an American prison if he even tried to retask one for his own purposes.

  Ironic, he thought. Tara has the skill to do it, Gecko has the nerve and I have the equipment. Between the three of us we make a pretty competent human being.

  Or between the four of them, if he included Natalie.

  As if prompted by the confusion of his thoughts, Rhino Gillis’s voice suddenly spoke in the headphones he was wearing. ‘Any news on Natalie, Calum?’

  ‘Nothing yet,’ he said as calmly as he could manage.

  He typed some instructions into the keyboard. ‘Rhino, I’ve isolated our channel from the others. Tara and Gecko can’t hear me – can they hear you?’

  ‘Not if I’m quiet,’ Rhino responded. His breath was audible on the loudspeakers as he walked uphill into the Caucasus Mountains. ‘They’re about six or seven metres in front of me – you can probably see them on my headband camera.’

  ‘OK. Look, I’m worried about her.’

  ‘You and me both, kid.’

  ‘I’ve been racking my brains, trying to work out what might have happened to her, and I’ve come up with nothing.’ He paused. ‘Actually, that’s not true. I’ve come up with everything from her falling down an abandoned mine shaft to being kidnapped by aliens from space. The trouble is that there’s no evidence for any of them.’

  ‘I’ve been thinking as well,’ Rhino said. ‘You want to know my three top theories, in reverse order?’