Authors: Chris Ryan
Tags: #Juvenile Fiction, #Action & Adventure, #General, #Mysteries & Detective Stories
Desert Pursuit (18 page)
‘
Dios
,’ breathed Paulo, gazing at the thick pall of black smoke that rose into the sky above the installation and drifted eastward on the wind. Beneath the smoke a huge ball of red and black fire boiled from the ground. The comforting glow on the horizon they had been walking towards all night had not been the gas flare at all. The wells were ablaze and the compound was a shattered ruin.
Dios
,’ breathed Paulo, gazing at the thick pall of black smoke that rose into the sky above the installation and drifted eastward on the wind. Beneath the smoke a huge ball of red and black fire boiled from the ground. The comforting glow on the horizon they had been walking towards all night had not been the gas flare at all. The wells were ablaze and the compound was a shattered ruin.
‘What the hell happened here?’ whispered Amber.
Khalid spoke up hesitantly. ‘I think . . . my friends . . . maybe they do this.’
Alpha Force looked at one another, suddenly remembering the sullen boys in the refugee camp. Amber’s uncle must have failed to persuade the news agencies to show the minefield footage Alpha Force had filmed, and the boys had responded with a second, successful attempt to blow up the oil supply pipes.
‘But how did they get past all the guards?’ asked Amber.
‘It’s a big space, Amber,’ said Alex. ‘It’s almost impossible to make a whole section of desert totally secure. If someone is determined to get through, they will.’
‘Yeah, and those Sahawaris, they’re pretty good at sneaking up on you,’ said Amber, remembering how Khalid had scared her at the minefield.
‘What do we do now?’ said Li.
‘We have to keep moving,’ said Alex, looking over his shoulder. ‘I think we should still head over there. There might be people who can help us. A helicopter. Something . . .’
They marched on across the plain as the sun rose higher and the temperature climbed. The closer they got to the installation, the less promising it looked, but they kept going, always keeping upwind of the fires. With the Scorpion on their trail, they had no other option. Finally they reached the high, wire fence that ringed the compound and made their way around to the gates, which were swinging open. Alpha Force stepped inside and looked around for any sign of life. Khalid stood beside them, and Juma and his three followers lined up beside Khalid, wanting to be seen as part of the older group. Sisi helped Kesia to sit down and put a comforting arm around Samir’s shoulders, while Jumoke wandered over into the scant shade of the gatehouse, a tiny wooden hut on short stilts. The little girl leaned against the warm wood and drew patterns in the sand with her sandalled foot while she waited for Alpha Force to decide what to do next.
The oil wells burned a good distance away, beyond the back of the compound, but even where they were standing, at the front of the complex, the heat was intense. The air trembled with it. The Nissen-type huts nearest to the wells were charred skeletons. Steel cargo boxes the size of small houses had been lifted in the air by the initial explosion and thrown across the compound. The Nissen huts closer to the front gates were damaged too. All the windows had been blown out by the blast. Doors hung open on their hinges, swinging in the wind. Whole sections of wall had peeled away from one hut, leaving bedrooms and bathrooms open to the sand and wind.
Hex stared in at a small, neat bedroom, with posters and photographs pinned to the wall and a robe hanging from a peg. He was reminded of photographs of bombed houses in his home city of London during the blitz. There was the same sense of something too personal being exposed for everyone to see.
Paulo looked over to the helipad. It was empty. The company helicopter was lying on its side some way off with the rotors twisted and broken. Next to the helipad a short row of black body bags lay in the sand, each with a flapping white label attached to it. Three of the bodies in the bags looked small and slight next to the others and Paulo’s stomach turned over as he wondered whether they were the three boys from the camp.
‘Hello?’ shouted Amber. Her voice drifted on the wind, a faint and tiny noise swallowed up by the vast rumbling of the oil fire. She closed her mouth again, scared at how small she felt.
‘I think they’ve all been evacuated,’ said Li. ‘The living ones, anyway,’ she added, pointing to the body bags. ‘They must be coming back for those.’
‘Shall we wait here, then?’ asked Hex.
‘I don’t know,’ said Alex, glancing over towards the bluff. ‘We might run out of time—’
He stopped short as Jumoke gave a high scream. Everyone turned to see the little girl writhing on the ground beside the gatehouse, clutching her foot. Rearing out of the sand above her terrified face, its jaws open wide and its two curved front fangs dripping with venom, was a large, hissing snake.
T
WENTY – TWO
WENTY – TWO
‘Li?’ said Alex, without taking his eyes from the snake.
Li had a vast knowledge of plants and animals, learned from a childhood spent on field trips with her parents. Alex had no doubt that she would be able to identify the snake.
‘Horned viper,’ she said without hesitation, noting the pointed protuberances above the snake’s eyes, the thick body and the sandy coloured skin with darker brown markings. She knew this type of snake had a habit of burying itself in the sand, leaving only its eyes exposed and waiting for its prey to pass by. This one had probably been disturbed by Jumoke’s foot as she drew patterns in the sand.
‘Venomous?’ asked Alex.
‘Highly,’ replied Li.
Alex groaned and took a step towards Jumoke, hoping to pull her out of range. The viper raised its head and rubbed the scales of its back together in a warning rattle.
‘Don’t move,’ ordered Li. ‘Everyone!
Ne vous déplacez pas!
They only strike at moving objects.’
Ne vous déplacez pas!
They only strike at moving objects.’
‘Any chance of it leaving if we stay still?’ asked Alex, watching the snake.
Li started to shake her head, then changed her mind as the snake caught the movement and turned its beady eyes on her. ‘Normally, I’d say yes, but this one looks pretty riled. The unusual ground vibrations from the oil well fires have made it edgy. We need to get Jumoke to stop moving otherwise that viper is going to strike again.’
‘Also, if she lies still, the venom from the first bite will spread more slowly around her body.’
Amber started to talk to Jumoke softly in French, trying to get her to calm down and stay still. Jumoke was too terrified to listen. She continued to thrash back and forth in the sand, clutching her foot. The snake watched her, its wedge-shaped head swinging in time with her movements.
‘We have to do something!’ whispered Hex. ‘That thing is going to bite her again any minute now!’
Slowly, Alex turned his head from side to side, looking for a weapon of some sort. There was nothing but sand all around him. Then he remembered his knife, hanging in a sheath at his belt. It was a single bladed knife with a wooden handle, perfectly balanced and extremely sharp. Alex moved his hand to the sheath and unclipped the top. He slipped the knife from the sheath and slowly, smoothly, went down on one knee.
Alex knew how to throw a knife and this knife was an old friend. With this knife, on a good day, he could throw accurately enough to pin a wasp to a tree.
On a good day.
Alex hefted the knife in his hand and studied the snake’s weaving head and the wooden wall of the hut behind it. He would only have one chance. If he missed, he would anger the snake even further and prompt it to bite Jumoke again.
Alex drew a deep, steadying breath and took aim. The knife flew from his hand so fast, no-one saw it leave. They heard the thunk of metal sinking into wood, and suddenly there was the quivering knife handle, pinning the viper to the gatehouse wall. The blade had hit the snake dead centre, just below the head.
Alex stared at the thrashing snake, then down at his trembling hand. Then he suddenly sat down hard in the sand. His mouth had gone completely dry.
Paulo hurried forward and picked Jumoke up, carrying her well out of the way of the snake. They all gathered around him as he laid Jumoke in the sand, making soothing noises as he straightened out her leg and began to examine her foot. He could see beads and trickles of venom on her skin, mixed in with the sand, so he grabbed the girba and unplugged it. He poured water over Jumoke’s foot to wash the venom and sand away, then he bent forward to remove her sandal and examine the bite.
‘Is it bad?’ asked Amber, her voice quavering as she saw Paulo’s shoulders begin to shake.
‘Very bad,’ he said in a strangled voice.
‘W-will she die?’ quavered Amber.
‘No.’ Paulo raised his head and Amber saw that he was laughing, not crying. ‘But we have a fatally wounded sandal.’
He held up Jumoke’s sandal and pointed to the twin gouges in the thick leather straps that crisscrossed over the front. Jumoke stopped crying and stared at her sandal, then at her unmarked foot with such a comical expression of surprise that everyone started laughing.
Seconds later, the laughter died into a shocked silence as a man’s voice snapped out an order directly behind them. At the same instant Alex, Hex and Paulo all froze as they felt the cold touch of steel on the nape of their necks. Alex tried to stand but the rifle muzzle jabbed into his neck, forcing him down. The man’s voice snapped again, speaking in Arabic.
‘He say to kneel,’ said Khalid, in a trembling voice. ‘Kneel slow and put hands so.’ Khalid demonstrated by putting both hands on the top of his head, then he repeated the order in French to make sure everyone in the group understood.
Paulo and Alex were already down in the sand. Slowly, Hex knelt beside them with the cold rifle muzzle never leaving the back of his neck. Carefully he raised his hands to his head as Li and Amber kneeled down on either side of him, their eyes big with fear. The children all followed their lead, apart from Jumoke, who remained sprawled in the sand, too frightened to move.
Once everyone was down on their knees, the man who had barked the orders moved round to stand in front of them, with two of his men. Alex saw that all three were carrying high-powered semi-automatic rifles. With the three rifles that were still digging into the backs of their necks, that made six weapons, and his only weapon was stuck in the wall of the gatehouse. The rifle muzzle against his head made it hard to think straight, but Alex forced himself to stay calm and assess the danger.
The rifles the men were carrying were old AK-47s, with a wooden breech and handle, but Alex could see they had been well cared for. Besides, AK-47s might be ugly looking, but they lasted well and could withstand a lot of dirt and neglect. They were designed for fast, close-quarter combat, being short and easy to handle. The magazine carried thirty rounds and the pistol grip meant that they could be fired from the hip, or even one-handed in the hands of an expert – and Alex could see that these men were experts by the way they handled their weapons. Alex abandoned any hope of fighting his way out of this one.
Hex also studied the three men in front of him. Even though he was sweating with fear, his photographic memory seemed to be working on automatic pilot and was insisting on feeding him all sorts of stored information from the research he had done before they came out to the Sahara. The men were all wearing a sort of combined turban and veil in a dark blue material. That was a sure sign that they were Tuareg, members of a race of nomads who pre-dated the Arab civilization in the Sahara. They were a war-like people, who had never managed to repel the invading Arabs and Turks or, later, the French, because they were too busy feuding amongst themselves. Looking at the fierce, dark eyes that glared out at him from the swathes of indigo material, Hex could see that these men would think nothing of killing him. He felt a cold snail-trail of sweat slip down his back.
The leader of the Tuareg glared at them all for a few seconds, then he squatted down in the sand and lifted Jumoke to her feet. He turned her gently this way and that, checking her for injuries, and Amber suddenly understood what he was thinking.
‘Oh!’ she gasped. ‘They think we were torturing Jumoke! Imagine how it must’ve looked to them – her screaming on the ground and us all huddled around her. Khalid, quickly, explain to them what really happened.’
Khalid nodded, then let fly a stream of Arabic, gesturing to Jumoke and the pinioned snake on the gatehouse wall as he spoke. Slowly, the men’s eyes became less fierce as they listened to Khalid and then bent to inspect the still-twitching viper. Finally the leader lowered his veil, revealing a thin, lined, hook-nosed face, and his men followed suit. He looked at Alex and said something in Arabic.
‘He say, good aim,’ translated Khalid.
Alex nodded and smiled tentatively at the men. They might have dropped their veils, which he took as a good sign, but their AK-47s were still trained on the kneeling group.
The leader gave more orders in Arabic. Three of his men peeled off, running towards the Nissen huts. They were carrying large hessian sacks. The other two stepped forward and, talking casually to one another, began to search the group.
‘What’s going on?’ demanded Li, as the watch and opal ring she had only recently claimed back from Amber were expertly removed.
‘They’re here to loot,’ said Hex grimly, as his own watch disappeared into the robes of one of the men. He nodded over at the three who were going through the abandoned Nissen huts, taking anything of value. ‘There’s a long tradition of banditry amongst some Tuareg tribes.’
Paulo gasped. ‘These men are bandits?’
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