Читать книгу Giant Killer - John McNally - Страница 12
ОглавлениеFEBRUARY 19 16:37 (GMT+1). Hull of the Shieldmaiden, Mediterranean Sea
Kaparis reviewed the tapes of the Monte Carlo sting.
He saw Captain Kelly. He saw Delta Salazar. Both were full-sized.
The last time he’d seen them, they were just 11mm tall.
He ground this new information round in his massive mind.
Like Allenby, Kaparis had been able to create a subatomic vortex within which all matter could be reduced, but his was crude, only capable of shrinking machines. Allenby could not only reduce living humans to nano-scale, he had now worked out how to reverse the process and restore them to normal size without killing them … Allenby was not just ahead in the race, he had made a great leap forward. It was like being in an old propeller biplane and watching a jet fighter shoot past.
Given an infinite amount of time, Kaparis could and would deduce the four elusive fractal equations at the heart of the Boldklub process. But he did not have for ever. Yet.
Now everything had changed. There was no contest. The game was up.
FEBRUARY 19 17:48 (GMT+3). Carpathian Mountains, Romania-Ukraine border
As she crested the Kalamatov Ridge, Carla fell to her knees. Just like Baptiste had done, just like many a pilgrim in times past, at first sight of the Monastery of Mount St Demetrius of Thessaloniki.
Against the brilliant orange of the setting sun, perched on top of a thousand feet of sheer white cliff, was a ruined cluster of ancient buildings, a nest of towers and tiles and a once-golden dome, tipped with the Orthodox cross. It was, in its way, magnificent, a crown of thorns on a snaggletooth of limestone, and only madmen could have built such a place.
“What is that?” asked Finn from the crow’s nest of Carla’s hair. There was not a whiff of smoke or any other sign of life.
“A Holiday Inn?” breathed Carla. “I don’t know, but if we want to get through the night alive, we better check in …”
“You’re not serious! How would you even get up there?” asked Finn.
“We’ve got to get out of this wind. Baptiste may have been a psychopath, but he was heat, body heat, and when we crawled into a snow hole, that’s what kept us alive.”
Yap! Yap!
“What was that?” Finn said, and held his breath to better listen through the wind.
Yap!
Carla looked back to the ridge.
“I knew he’d make it!” said Finn.
“YO-YO! HERE! HERE, BOY!” cried Carla.
Yap!
Over the ridge shot a spray of finest pink-sunset snow, a skittering cloud – and at its centre, an effervescent black scribble: a bounding, dishevelled, filthy, injured, exhausted, idiot of a dog.
“YO-YO!” cried Carla.
“YOYOYOYOYO!” yodelled Finn.
Yo-yo danced and circled, fearful of any trace of Baptiste, but Carla laughed and called his name and finally he came to her, yapping and wagging and loving the Finn-ness of her. Where his master had disappeared to nearly a year before was a mystery beyond Yo-yo’s tiny brain, but not beyond his quite brilliant sense of smell.
Carla collapsed in the snow and submitted herself to an assault of licks and kisses. “Good dog. Smelly dog.”
“Warm dog,” Finn said. “You can snuggle up in a snow hole with him. We can make it down the valley in the morning. There must be some kind of settlement serving that place. We’re almost ho—”
He bit back the word “home”. It was too much. The thought of speaking, actually saying something, to Al and Grandma … There was an emotional avalanche banked tight in his chest and this was no time to let it sweep him away.
“…Almost there,” was all he could manage.
But Carla wasn’t listening to Finn. She had noticed something on Yo-yo’s collar.
“Wait a minute – there’s something here.”
Yo-yo’s collar was as filthy as the rest of him, but on one side of it was a lump.
“What is that?” said Finn. He crawled out of the thick of her hair to dangle from the curl at her forehead again as she rubbed away some of the muck. It was some kind of plastic cylinder attached to the collar, the size of a large battery.
“They sent him into the Forbidden City to try and find us! It’s a tracker! It must be!” said Finn.
“Why haven’t they been tracking us then?” said Carla.
She found the catch and took the whole collar off. “Maybe it ran out of power?” she said, examining it more carefully. “Or maybe it’s not a tracker. Maybe it’s some kind of comms device, or—”
But before she got any further …
YAP!
Yo-yo was off his haunches, nose high in the frozen air, stump of a tail curled like a tongue in concentration.
“Bear …?” asked Carla, fear returning.
“No,” said Finn, hearing a distant buzz. “Machines …? PEOPLE!”
Carla shoved the dog collar into her top and scrambled down the steep snowfield, Yo-yo bounding ahead of her, crossing the tree line and disappearing into the forest.
“BE CAREFUL!” yelled Finn.
“Yo-yo, come back here!” ordered Carla and the dog yapped back, already lost.
She ran into the forest after him, the last rays of the setting sun needling through the pines to light the dog’s progress through the snow. The further Carla ran, the darker it got, but the more they could hear the noise – engines, definitely the sound of engines, somewhere ahead.
Yap!
“Yo-yo!” said Carla, changing direction, heading for the bark, till …
“ARRRGGHHHH!” – the ground fell away. Nothingness. She shot out a hand and grabbed a sapling, then clung on hard and closed her eyes and felt the tiny tree take her weight, its roots clinging to the earth.
She gasped. Her eyes adjusted and she saw she’d just saved herself from running straight off a steep drop.
Yo-yo appeared and yapped at her, as if she was an idiot.
“No more short cuts,” said Finn at her ear, then before she’d had time to catch her breath, he shouted: “Look!”
There beneath them, headlamps slicing through the darkness, three snowmobiles slaloming through the trees, tacking their way up the slope.
“HERE! OVER HERE!” Carla cried.
“They’re climbing this way,” said Finn. “They must have seen us on the pass.”
Finn looked across at the silhouette of the ruined monastery through the trees. Surely it was the only spot they could have been seen from? As Carla pulled herself back up, he looked down at the snowmobiles again. It was hard to tell in the fading light, but all three carried a driver and a passenger, and slung across the back of each passenger … an automatic rifle with a distinctive curved magazine.
“AKs …” said Finn.
“UP HERE!” yelled Carla.
“OWOWOWW!” howled Yo-yo, to help her out.
“SHUT UP!” said Finn. “They’re carrying AK47s!”
“What?”
“The only place anybody could have seen us from is the monastery. Who would live there? Who would hide there? Who would send out men with guns?”
“Hunters?”
“You don’t shoot bunnies with AKs,” said Finn.
Carla looked back down at the whizzing skidoos. “That would be cruel …”
“Baptiste fell to his knees when he saw it,” said Finn. “Kaparis has headquarters all over the world …”
“You think it’s where he’s been headed all this time?”
“Want to find out?”
Carla answered by turning to run in the opposite direction down through the forest.
Finn could hear the skidoos climbing towards them, beams of light starting to flick through the trees.
“They’re coming!” said Finn, lashing himself into place in the hair just above her forehead, poking out like a tiny tank commander.
Carla slogged on, but the skidoos were cutting through the forest like a wind, engines raging, lights strobing. In a flash of white light, they were spotted—
“DA! ESTE!” went up a foreign cry. Carla dived out of the beam.
“ACOLO, ESTE!”
Again she ran, but all three were closing in. Before she could be spotted again, Finn’s yell matched her instinct: “HIDE!”
She dived forward and buried herself in the snow, clutching Yo-yo to her.
VROOM! VROOM! VROOM!
The three skidoos overshot.
“Stay down!” said Finn.
Carla hugged the panting dog closer and he licked her face.
The skidoos stopped. Finn and Carla could hear voices.
“Don’t come back … Don’t come back …” begged Finn.
Then – DRDRDRDRDDRDRTT! – muzzle flash lit the iced canopy as shots tore high through the trees in an attempt to flush them out – DRTRRTRTRT!
Yo-yo took violent fright, bursting out of Carla’s arms to bite back. YAP YAP YAP YAP!
“ACOLO!” went up the cry. Yo-yo barked and, as headlights wheeled once more, Carla launched herself into the darkness, running without hope or direction, running into …
Nothing.
Suddenly she found herself falling like Alice – but not like Alice, as she hit (and hard) a slide of ice and flew down it, a toboggan run of hellish thumps and spins and whacks that sent her winded and flying – WHAM! – into a blue-black final darkness …
