City of the Lost

I

The bus had creaked. Asena was sure of it. There was someone inside it. In which case they needed to be dealt with now, before they could launch a counter-attack. She reloaded her magazine then removed her silencer and stowed it in her pack, for there was no need for it down here, and it was cumbersome. She knelt carefully upon the bonnet. The windscreen had been smashed in. She counted to three, then moved with controlled speed, pointing her torch and Kilinç down simultaneously, her finger trembling on the trigger.

A second passed. Another. ‘What’s down there?’ asked Emre.

His question brought her back from her mild daze, staring down at the grim ossuary below. ‘Nothing,’ she said.

‘Nothing?’ he asked, coming to look for himself.

‘Stay back,’ she ordered, half-raising her gun.

He spread his arms out wide. ‘Okay,’ he said, looking at her like she’d gone crazy. ‘It’s nothing.’

She gestured vaguely at the expanse of main chamber. ‘Get to work,’ she said. ‘This place won’t clear itself, you know.’

‘What do we do with anyone we find?’

‘What do you think?’

She waited till he was gone, issuing orders to the others, then looked back down inside the bus. When she’d set out with the Lion on this hard course, it had been a matter of honour for her, of fighting the gross injustice perpetrated against her father and his fellow officers. Her targets had been traitors or liars or at least legitimate combatants. But wars weren’t clean; their borders blurred, collateral damage became inevitable. And violence abraded you; you grew inured. So one day you found yourself parking a truck bomb outside a Daphne hotel and murdering over thirty innocent people. And all that kept you going then was the belief that your end justified your means, because at least you’d had right on your side when you’d started.

The bus creaked again. Maybe it was merely settling after earlier intrusions. Or maybe Black or one of his friends were laying low, hoping that the sight of the killing field beneath would spook her off. If so, they didn’t know her very well. She reached her right foot down upon the steering wheel. From there she stepped down onto the back of the driver’s seat. The metal groaned softly. She could smell sweat. She didn’t feel afraid so much as heightened, her every sense working at its peak. She shone her torch down the aisle, then above and below the parallel lines of bench seats. Uncut diamonds of windscreen glass glittered amid the skulls and bones beneath, like some gruesome pirate treasure. But she could see no sign of anyone hiding. She lowered herself carefully onto the back-rest of the topmost passenger seat, knelt upon it, risked a glance over its back at the space between it and the seat beneath. It was large enough to hide a man, but it was empty, as was its companion across the aisle.

Gunfire erupted in the main chamber; hoots of triumph. ‘Got one,’ shouted out Emre, for her benefit.

Her heart began to clatter. These seats were awkward, an invitation to ambush. She knew how rash it was to take it on alone, but she owed it to the Lion not to let these others see his shame. She took hold of the luggage rack to steady herself. She reached a foot across the aisle, then bestrode it. She crouched to check under the seats she was standing on. All clear. She made her way methodically down the bus in this way, seat by seat, until she was almost down to the bones. The frame of the next seat had buckled and wouldn’t take her weight. And was it her imagination playing tricks, or was that breathing she could hear, pregnant with fear, beneath her right foot? She remembered the speed with which Black had surprised her in the desert, a snake striking.

Never again.

The seats had metal frames but their backs were of toughened plastic. Enough to slow but not to stop a 9mm round. She shone her torch about her, hoping to get a better fix on him, but the reflections were all too indistinct. She shifted her right foot out of the way then aimed down. Without the silencer, the noise of the triple discharge in such a confined space half-deafened her. But the real shock was Iain Black erupting from beneath her left foot. She turned her gun on him and pulled the trigger again but too late, he was too fast for her, he seized her wrist and wrested the gun from her. She cried out and tried to clamber away from him but he grabbed her by her ankle and pulled her down so hard that she tumbled into the bones beneath, and something about it terrified her and she screamed with primal fear, as if the demons of hell itself were clawing at her and dragging her in.

No sympathy from Black. He put his foot square on her face then sprang from seat to seat up the aisle to the windscreen and out. She followed him a little groggily, arriving up top to find him already engaging her Grey Wolves. One against seven. It should have been no contest. And, to her great dismay, no contest was exactly what it proved. A trained soldier against thugs with guns: the difference between them was shocking to her. The way he moved, with such pace, precision and purpose, while her own men seemed glued by fear to their defensive positions, or tried to hide behind each other, or gave themselves away with torches and panicked bursts of wasteful gunfire, as if unable quite to come to terms with the notion of a target with the effrontery to shoot back. She saw Emre fall first, then Tolgay, Ali and Uğur, Black taking their guns to use against the rapidly dwindling survivors when the Kilinç’s own magazine ran out, until finally the shooting stopped and silence returned.

Torches lay at haphazard angles on the floor, rolling back and forth in search of their angles of repose. By their confused light, Asena saw Emre lying motionless a few metres away, his gun by his hand. She crept over the rubble for it but Black was too sharp for her, he picked it up and aimed it at her, but calmly, to subdue rather than kill. She knelt and raised her arms above her head, sensing that he wasn’t the kind to execute a surrendered woman, willing to bide her time in case the tables should turn once again.

And they did, quicker than she’d dared hope. For Bulent, God bless him, must have witnessed it all from up top, and he began to haul the rope ladder upwards at that moment, stranding the lot of them down here inside.

II

Michel Bejjani was on his tenth game of solitaire when he glanced out the port window at the distant shoreline. Despite her sophisticated systems, the Dido had obviously shifted orientation in the last minute or two, for he could see headlights on a stretch of seafront that previously had been—

He felt sick suddenly. He got to his feet, traded his iPad for a pair of field-glasses, took them out on deck, brought them into focus. A long line of vehicles was heading south along the old Varosha promenade. It surely had to be the convoy that had been gathering in the army base. It was one thing to overlook some ambiguous traffic police chatter. There could be no excuse for ignoring this. He hurried back inside, tried the radio. His brother didn’t answer. He tried again and kept on trying, so frantic now that he only noticed the roar of helicopter blades when they turned to thunder above him. He ran back out on deck. Instantly the boat was flooded in brilliant white light, the beams so dazzling that they virtually blinded him, leaving him with only the haziest impression of soldiers abseiling down onto deck as he fumbled his way back into the bridge and pawed at the radio, shouting useless warnings into the ether. Someone yelled at him to stop. He cried out one last time. But then something clumped him unbelievably hard on the back of his head and he collapsed in blackness face first upon the floor.

III

The convoy slowed down and spread further apart as it headed along the road towards the square. Great care was needed here. And no one knew that better than Yilmaz himself. They’d driven in close order and at pace on his last visit. The road had been good, the area deserted, they’d had forward positions to establish. He’d noticed a slight spongy feeling beneath his tracks as he’d driven across the square, though he’d made it safely enough. But the combined weight of all the tanks and buses behind him had proved too much for it. A splintering thunderclap that he’d heard even above his engine. He’d looked around to see a great black void where part of the car park had simply collapsed, obscured a moment later by an almost volcanic eruption of dust and debris. Instantly, it had been every driver for himself. Some had tried to reverse away. Others had spurted forwards or to the side. In such unbelievable chaos, a blessing that there’d only been the one collision. Unfortunately, that one collision had involved a tank driving into a bus, crushing its rear end beneath one of its tracks. The prisoners on the bus had understandably panicked; they’d poured out of its ruptured doors. Several of his men, perhaps unnerved by the collapsed car park, had mistaken this self-preservation for an opportunistic mass escape, and so had opened fire. The prisoners had tried to scatter, but all the roads out of the square had been blocked by tanks and troops. And the tensions of the day, the lifelong loathing of Greek Cypriots sharpened by weeks of propaganda, had led to a bloodbath in which all his men had participated. Even he had become infected by the madness. He’d gone back intending to stop it, but had found himself drawing his pistol and taking part in it instead. The red mist, he’d heard it called; and it described it sweetly. There was something both compulsive and cathartic about it, exacerbated by the knowledge that this would be your one chance to unleash the animal within, to do the stuff of nightmares, to rub raw against nature herself. It had felt righteous. It had felt beautiful. But eventually there had been no one left in the square to kill, and the fervour had drained away, leaving only corpses.

Not all the prisoners had tried to run. A few, mostly women and children, had stayed terror-stricken on the buses. His men had hauled them out. No one had ordered them to kneel, but they’d knelt all the same, ululating with grief and the faint hope of mercy. The most difficult decision of his life by far, but they’d been witnesses, he’d had no choice. And he could comfort himself that at least he’d had the courage to do it himself.

Afterwards, they’d needed to get rid of the evidence. The new sink-hole in the square had offered the obvious solution. They’d piled the bodies into the part-crushed bus, had pushed it backwards down the hole. It had somehow wedged itself between the newly fallen rubble and an old wall. Driven by an odd mix of propriety and shame, he’d ordered sand fetched from the beach and poured down through a chute taken from the building site. Baykam had gone below to guide it, which was when he’d discovered the litter of artefacts. He’d begged an hour to pillage the place, but reinforcements had already been on their way, they’d had no time to spare. While some of his men had sluiced down the square of blood and bullets, others had looted a builders’ merchant for girders, scaffolding poles, doors, planks, fencing and the like that they’d lashed together into a giant raft to lay across the shaft mouth as a base on which to pour newly mixed cement. An improvised solution, sure, yet it had lasted forty years, and would surely have lasted longer had Baykam not got greedy. But now that it was open again, it was only a matter of time before someone else found it and he was ruined. For while it was considered a fine and necessary thing for a statesman to issue orders that would inevitably lead to the deaths of ordinary people, either directly or as collateral damage, it was another matter altogether to pull the trigger yourself.

That way lay disgrace. That way lay The Hague and a war-crimes trial.

He was here to make sure that could never, ever happen.