SKELETON GOLD: Dark Tide (James Pace Book 4)

by Andy Lucas

  ‘He delivered them to us,’ Yucel explained. ‘Very kind of him, don’t you think?’

  Fiona caught the bag deftly but she scowled at Yucel, putting a snap in her tone. ‘Don’t throw the damned stuff. If you knew what it did, perhaps you’d treat it with more respect.’

  ‘Maybe,’ conceded Yucel, realising that he’d made a mistake. He wasn’t egotistical and apologised.

  ‘Let’s not argue, kids,’ quipped Pace suddenly. ‘Especially not in front of the guests.’ He forced a grin that turned into a sneer and received a smash on the back of the head with a pistol butt for his trouble. Staggering, he went down on one knee before shaking off the dizziness and standing again.

  ‘Remarks are likely to really hurt you,’ explained Fiona, sighing coldly. ‘I would advise you to keep a civil tongue in your head.’

  ‘Why? You’ve already tried to kill me once, so I doubt my life expectancy is going to be that long.’

  ‘So you want to die?’

  ‘Nobody wants to die, unless they’re already beyond help. I don’t have a death wish but I’m not going to play any of your games either. I wouldn’t give you the satisfaction.’

  Fiona regarded him thoughtfully for a moment longer. Something about him did not sit well with her. After years of bodybuilding and martial arts training, she had a body much stronger and physically more impressive than most men. She knew her own strength and had enjoyed beating men in fights several times in the past.

  Pace was taller and naturally rugged but normally she would have felt confident that she could handle him, one on one. But she didn’t, and she could not put her finger on why not, which made her uneasy.

  ‘I am going to have you locked up with the others, for now, while I speak to Josephine about what she wants to do with you. Maybe she’ll decide just to have your eyes gouged out, or castrated. Wouldn’t that be fun?’

  Pace could not stop a laugh bubbling up from within and exploding out of his mouth.

  ‘What is it with you people? ARC has a good reputation and yet it’s operated by a couple of mad women. Murder, kidnapping, stealing ancient chemical weapons to boost your business angle. It’s all nuts, pardon the pun,’ he added with a lop-sided grin.

  A nod to Yucel and Pace suddenly found his arms pinned behind his back. Fiona stepped closer with murder in her eyes.

  ‘You will regret that,’ she promised darkly.

  ‘I have no doubt,’ he agreed. ‘But you are still crazy and I wouldn’t count on being around yourself too long to enjoy whatever you do to me,’ he said. ‘You’re not the only one with friends, and mine are going to make you wish you’d never heard of ARC, let alone taken a job with them.’

  Fiona was all set to start laying into Pace with her balled fists when another mercenary came across from the radio room with a message for her to contact Josephine Roche urgently.

  Feeling the anger drain from her knotted muscles, she gave Pace a harsh glare before turning on her heels and following the mercenary back to the communications room, ordering Yucel to lock Pace up with the scientists as she walked away.

  ‘Lucky man,’ Yucel commented. ‘Let’s go.’

  The enormity of his carelessness was increasingly apparent to Pace, who dismissed the thought of a witty comeback in favour of allowing himself to be led silently to where the base personnel were all being held. A serious depression hung over him as he realised the truth of the mercenary’s words.

  He had delivered Scorpion into the hands of ARC and God only knew what Josephine would do with so many vials of the agent, let alone whatever the hell Dark Tide was.

  Added to that, Max was out on the ice shelf somewhere, alone and trying to find help. He would have been exposed to the ferocious storm too, so could already be dead. Even if he was alive, and somehow came charging over the snow drifts with the cavalry, they had clearly under-estimated ARC’s determination and security resources. The men he’d already seen made the guards at the desalination plant look like Boy Scouts. Hard-eyed and heavily armed, any attempt at rescue would end up in a bloodbath.

  He was shoved inside a large dormitory, lined with single beds along both walls, with the end wall being comprised mainly of a large window that clearly showed the light snow falling outside. Pace did not notice much more than that because his attention was drawn to the small group of people, standing in a huddle a few feet inside the room, watching him with a mixture of curiosity and compassion.

  Yucel left Pace to meet the other captives, locking the door tightly behind him and making sure that the mercenary standing guard outside the door was aware that this new arrival might be trouble.

  ‘If he plays up, subdue him by all means but do not kill him without my express orders. Is that clear?’

  The guard nodded. ‘I will make sure of it. But,’ he added, ‘he doesn’t look like much. Half frozen and he’s already got the face of a prisoner. No,’ he predicted, ‘I won’t need to do anything to him. He’s another sheep.’

  Yucel regarded the man for a moment, wondering how such a seasoned soldier ever survived this long without being able to read how dangerous, or not, the enemy was. Personally, even if he hadn’t already known all about James Pace’s antics in the Amazon, there was no mistaking the eyes of a survivor. Pace’s burned face might look defeated but his eyes told Yucel a very different tale. In a perverse way, he almost hoped that he would kick off and teach this arrogant fool a much needed lesson.

  ‘We’ll see. Stay alert,’ Yucel ordered gruffly. ‘Call me if there’s any trouble.’

  ‘There won’t be.’

  Then Yucel hurried back to Fiona. His men were now scouring the deserted science base for a second time, having found no trace of the gold that was sure to be nearby. He needed to get back out there himself but they’d only brought along one pilot, who was now dead.

  ‘We could use him,’ Fiona suggested, over a mug of fresh coffee and a microwaved croissant, as they sat in the television lounge of the main habitat. ‘He clearly knows how to fly a Sea King.’

  ‘I don’t trust that he won’t find a way of bumping me off before hightailing it for help.’

  ‘You can control him, I have no doubt,’ Fiona assured him. ‘He could only try McMurdo anyway. We would know he was making a run for the American base long before he got there. All we need is some insurance, in the chopper, and Pace will do whatever we tell him to.’

  Yucel marvelled at yet another person who was completely underestimating James Pace. Although, he thought, she did have a point about the insurance.

  ‘I could wire a bomb, somewhere difficult to get to?’ he decided. ‘A remote trigger mechanism would be easy to rig. Maybe linked to a timetable of communications from me?’

  ‘Exactly. He ferries you and your men to and from that old base until we find what we’re looking for. If he tries to run, you stop him. If he ever manages to actually escape, we blow him out of the sky with the flick of a switch.’

  ‘Using the helicopter would come in handy, especially for transporting the gold.’

  ‘Which we still haven’t found?’

  Yucel shook his head. ‘No sign of it yet. Where was it found in Namibia?’ he asked.

  ‘No clue,’ she sighed. ‘We never got near enough to steal anything before that bloody warship turned up and threatened to sink our ship. It must have been somewhere inside the submarine, that’s all we know. Their salvage ship spent far too much time stationed directly above the wreck, divers going back and forth, for them to have just been mapping the seabed.’

  ‘So, perhaps it’s in the U-Boat?’ he surmised. ‘My men have searched every inch of it though. The German submarine is far smaller than the steam-powered, British K-19. There’s hardly any room that isn’t given over to the crew, engines or torpedoes.’

  ‘That doesn’t help matters.’

  ‘I’m just saying that we will look again. I will lead the search personally but there are very few places that gold could be stashed on board, especially th
e amount that we’re looking for.’

  ‘It may not even be on the submarine,’ Fiona decided, sipping her coffee and opting to leave the remnants of her half-eaten croissant. Soft and chewy was not how Fiona liked them.

  ‘What about Uruguay? I wasn’t involved in the operation but Ms Roche informed me that they had recovered a large number of gold ingots and some vials of the agent. Was there another submarine?’

  Fiona shook her head slowly. ‘No. Small cargo ship, submerged fairly close to shore, inside the shelter of the harbour. It had been identified many years ago as a German munitions freighter. Records show it suffered an engine fire that got out of control and the captain opened her sea cocks; sinking her before the fire could spread to her cargo holds.’

  ‘To avoid an explosion?’

  ‘I suppose. The manifest shows a thousand howitzer shells and two hundred torpedoes.’

  ‘Why was it not searched before?

  ‘Why?’ asked Fiona. ‘Who, in their right mind, would bother tampering with a sunken ship crammed with decaying explosives? She was at a safe depth, well away from the main entrance channel. I think it had always been thought that it was best left alone.’

  ‘Until recently?’

  ‘New information,’ she replied vaguely. ‘It seemed like a worthwhile risk to actually swim down and take a look. The divers found the vials and boxes of gold within thirty minutes.’

  ‘Which brings us right back to that U-Boat,’ said Yucel. ‘They were clearly using different transportation methods but the good news is that the gold seems to have remained aboard both the K-19 and the ammunition ship. That makes the U-Boat the likeliest place to find it although I have no idea what we’ve missed.’

  ‘You need to look again, and quickly,’ she grumbled. Fiona wanted to get back to sunnier climes as soon as possible. She also needed to be at Josephine’s side as she recuperated from her imminent surgery.

  ‘I will, don’t worry,’ said Yucel. ‘There aren’t any records of that particular U-Boat either. It isn’t liveried and all the typical marking plates and recognition panels have been removed, ground flat or simply left blank.’

  ‘And the Germans were fastidious about record-keeping. So, this was a secret boat?’ she guessed. ‘Built with a purpose completely separate from all the others.’

  ‘The same as the K-19? It seems that this British operation was not as secret as they had hoped.’ Yucel frowned. ‘That may mean that the gold is long gone, perhaps even the same time that the base was abandoned and those poor German submariners were left to die?’

  Fiona nodded, and then cocked an eyebrow. ‘Why did they die?’ she asked him suddenly. ‘All those young men, still armed, and with a working U-Boat?’

  ‘As far as we know, it was working,’ Yucel corrected. ‘Maybe it had mechanical problems, or had expended its fuel?’

  ‘It still doesn’t make any sense,’ she argued. ‘They had food, water, communications equipment. Someone must have known where they had gone. They could have waited for a rescue team.’ She had visited the base the day before, after it had been safely swept and Pace was found to have gone. Although well used to seeing death, an entire room full of skeletons had struck her as an oddity, especially when the door were not locked and they would have had free movement around the base, including escaping out on to the ice sheet, as a last resort.

  Yucel decided that they weren’t going to find the answers sat at Scott Base. He needed to get back to the British base and hunt for the missing gold himself. He did not need to worry about Scorpion any longer, as Pace had brought it with him. There were a couple of tracked vehicles in the Scott Base garage but flying would be far quicker and avoid the risk of being swallowed up by a hidden crevasse.

  ‘I will rig a device in the Sea King,’ he decided, ‘but Pace has no reason to help us. He will need some persuasion.’

  ‘He will help, or I will kill him.’

  Yucel sighed and noted her blank look. ‘He won’t care,’ he explained. ‘He’s ex-military and he’s been through hell and back in recent months. Death has been a constant companion for him. Fear of dying won’t be enough to get him to betray his friends, and his girlfriend, by helping us.’

  ‘Then,’ Fiona warned, her tone dark and throaty, ‘I will give him an extra incentive.’

  ‘Like what?’

  She laughed, sensing the delicious warmth of an impending kill rise into her chest. ‘Easy. Bring me Pace and a couple of the scientists. One that we can afford to lose. Oh,’ she added slyly, ‘and make the second scientist a woman. A young one.’

  Nodding in understanding, Yucel put down his drink and headed back to the dormitory.

  15

  Max Hammond had been facing his own nightmare since deciding to slip away from Scott Base and try to make it to McMurdo Station, the large American base a few miles along the same stretch of coastal ice shelf.

  The blizzard had quickly turned into a white-out that had left him with no choice but to seek shelter. With very few soft snow drifts around, his only option had been to scrape away a shallow indentation in the few centimetres of workable surface ice. He only managed to dig down six inches but he used the scrapings to build a low rampart around the edge of the scrape, banking it up and compressing it between his gloved hands.

  This gave him about ten inches of depth, which allowed him to lie flat in his hollow and be protected from the worst of the increasingly vicious wind. Turning his head to one side allowed him to keep the snow out of his eyes.

  He knew he could survive anything the storm threw at him as long as he stayed flat and wasn’t hit by flying ice, which was unlikely. His survival suit would keep him warm and the snow was too cold to melt so would pile on top of him to provide a strangely insulating blanket.

  Hammond forced aside a sense of panic and frustration, at not being able to keep walking towards McMurdo, with practised ease. He’d spent enough time adventuring across all the continents to know that patience always paid off in the end. Some of his adventures had been down to his genuine love of nature and wildlife while others, it was true, had been elaborate smokescreens to hide work he had undertaken for Doyle McEntire.

  Until very recently, however, even his fieldwork had been mainly about surveillance and organising McEntire operations on the ground. Still, his weekly practise sessions on the shooting range, deep within the bowels of the McEntire HQ’s lower levels, meant he was very handy with a gun. He had always been skilled with his hands, so was possibly one of the most lethal accountants on the planet. But that still wouldn’t stop him from dying out on the ice shelf if he made any stupid mistakes.

  The plan was to wait out the storm. Hammond knew that any kind of weather was actually rare the closer you moved to the pole but the coastal edges were plagued by seasonal storms. He also knew that some of these storms lasted for weeks at a time, which he fervently hoped would not be the case this time.

  All he could do was wait. Exhausted from his ocean trials, snug and warm in his waterproof suit, the best thing for him to do was to grab some sleep if he could. There was no fear of falling asleep and never waking up again, as was often the case in such freezing conditions. Pulling his hood tighter, so that only the tips of his nostrils sampled the air, he closed his eyes and started to run through his options.

  Apart from safely getting to McMurdo and calling McEntire for an assault team, he still needed to find Pace and somehow find the abandoned science outpost, lost for a hundred years. Oh, he thought to himself, and then you’ve got to find some more of those damned vials of Scorpion then track down another shipment of gold, and finally hope to make sense of everything that ARC was doing. No small feat.

  Hammond sorely wished that his friend was by his side. Already proven to be solid, reliable and tough in a fight, Pace would have helped pass the time with light-hearted banter and a stiff resolve to survive. He could only hope that out there, somewhere, Pace had found help and managed to get out of the storm.

 
; With snow already beginning to cover his body with a thick crust, beneath the white blanket Hammond dozed off. Within minutes, he slipped into a deep sleep as the storm grew in ferocity and howled all around him. Oblivious, and snoring softly, he began to dream of pizza and beer.

  He awoke hours later, barely able to breathe with the sheer weight of fresh snow that had completely buried him. Using his arms to force the snow to the edges, he saw that the storm was still raging all around, driving ice crystals painfully into his eyes as he turned his head heavenwards for a moment.

  Still tired, Hammond spend a few minutes turning the newly fallen snow into an even higher wall around his hollow, until it was over a foot high all around. This kept all of the wind out when he lay back down again, deciding to return to sleep while he could. Trying to move anywhere would be lethal in such conditions.

  Sleep was elusive this time but eventually he managed a half fitful doze that killed another couple of hours, although he was aware of the banshee-like scream of the blizzard all around him.

  At last, an hour after waking and staying awake, the wind began to ease. Almost as swiftly as it had erupted across the ice shelf, the wind died; leaving behind a light sprinkling of falling snow. In moments, visibility leaped from zero to a thousand feet, although the sky remained sombre grey and threatening a renewed blizzard at any moment.

  Happily climbing to his feet, in the strengthening daylight, he used his suit compass to set a northerly course that would eventually take him back to the water, and the safety of McMurdo Station.

  With the Antarctic summer nearly on top of the continent, and with months of twenty-four hour daylight only a few days away, he might even see a supply ship or a ski-wheeled cargo plane coming in.

  Now that he could see again, he noted how broken and hilly the terrain was, which made spotting the sea impossible despite his close proximity to it.

  ‘Get on with it,’ he told himself, ‘and make sure you don’t wander into Scott Base by mistake.’ That thought was enough to steel his resolve. He had to get to McMurdo quickly.