City of the Lost

I

Yilmaz and Asena watched the whole débâcle live on the tablet. The journalist and her shrieks leading to the botched initial assault, the ensuing confusion and gun battle, their hopes reviving briefly on talk of the Prime Minister’s death, only for the man himself to dash them with his angry refutation. Then the whispers started. Reporters relaying rumours of an attempted coup involving one of Turkey’s most admired men. His own name hinted at then finally spoken aloud. Suggestions of an old atrocity. And, apparently, the whole business exposed by a journalist tweeting live from somewhere beneath Varosha itself.

Rage coursed through him, a rage so intense and sweet that it was almost a pleasure in itself. He turned on his heel and marched back towards the square. Perhaps Asena guessed his purpose for she grabbed his arm and tried to hold him back, but he shook her off so violently that she stumbled and fell. He strode across the broken, pitted concrete and glared down the shaft mouth at the fast-rising lake of slurry below. Everything he’d worked and planned for. All the sacrifices he’d made. To have it end like this, brought down by Black and those others, those little people, these insects… Drowning was too good for them. He suddenly wanted them pulped beneath his feet. He wanted them crushed.

The trucks, tankers and mixers were parked prudently on the approach roads and around the perimeter of the square. But he had no more use for prudence. He waved the drivers into their trucks, tankers and mixers, had them start their engines and trundle forwards. Not realizing what he planned, they drove trustingly out onto the square, increasing massively the strain on the ancient pillars below. He felt the ground begin to give under his feet, he turned and hurried away. A terrible splintering noise and half the square simply sheared off and plunged several metres down before juddering to such a violent stop that the shock wave threw him tumbling, while a great geyser of cement spurted up through the shaft high into the sky, the grey lava spattering all around him like something from the End of Days.

II

Iain was working with Georges to strengthen their dam when it happened, an earthquake, everything he’d ever imagined an earthquake to be, the world itself a thunderclap. The roof above the banqueting hall must have been brought down, either by accumulated stress or by sabotage. Countless tons of earth crashed onto the Olympic swimming pool of slurry, slamming it into every available nook and cavity. Their puny barrier swelled out towards them. Cracks turned to crevices, liquid cement squirting through. Then it was simply swept away altogether.

No need to tell Georges to run. They were already fleeing together down the passage, bumping into walls, tripping over steps. The concrete, fortunately, had thickened enough to slow it, while the numerous side-chambers acted as release valves. Yet still it came after them, like some remorseless monster from the movies, the collapsed ceiling pressing down upon it like a massive plunger. They reached the top of the ramp, yelled warning to Karin, Butros and Andreas. Their headroom shrank, they got down onto elbows and knees, spilling into the antechamber in a confusion of torchlight.

The bronze doors were still closed. The look on Karin’s face tore at his heart; no time to explain or even say goodbye, he took her in his arms and held her tight and then the slurry was upon them, swallowing them up, the pressure building and building, unbelievable, unbearable. He thought he was gone when he felt something snap and the bronze doors burst and they spilled out into the open space beyond, tumbling down steps as the glutinous grey liquid splashed and bubbled around them like some giant geothermal pool.

It took Iain several moments to recover his senses. The only light was a soft glow from a torch three-quarters submerged in the cool lava. He grabbed it and wiped its bulb, gave them light to crawl exhausted up a step in the floor then turn panting onto their backs, coated head to foot in the sludge like so many casts of Pompeii victims come back to life. He turned the torch on the broken bronze doors, through which the slurry was still oozing. Then he shone the torch on the walls and ceiling of this new chamber.

There was silence, except for their strained breathing. ‘For fuck’s sake,’ said Andreas at last. ‘What is this place?’

But no one had an answer.

III

The storm of slurry quickly rained itself out. Yilmaz walked cautiously forwards to the edge of the collapsed section of square, looked down. Remarkably, its surface was still largely intact, albeit riven with massive cracks and fissures, and tilted at an angle so that all the tankers and trucks were now sliding towards its low point, like balls on a wonky pool table. Grey slurry bubbling up from beneath was already forming a shallow pool that the dazed surviving drivers had to wade through to reach the pit’s ragged walls, which they now began scrambling up.

Something creaked and then groaned behind Yilmaz. He whirled around to see the rear wall of an old hotel simply collapse like a dropped sheet before smashing into shrapnel upon the ground then tumbling in a waterfall over the edge of the new sink-hole, battering his men even as they struggled to safety.

The rage passed, as it always did. He felt small and cold. While some of his men ran forwards to help their comrades, others stared at him with open loathing. The unwritten army contract: your men would die for you, but they wouldn’t be killed by you. He was trying to think of some way to win them back when he heard noise above, the clatter of rotor-blades. Spotlights sprang on, dancing over the square like the build-up to some much-hyped sporting event. Colonel Ünal’s helicopters had a new assignment. His men instinctively scrambled to take up defensive positions, but all he could manage himself was a forearm up to shield his eyes, his feet pinned to the spot by age and an oddly obstinate sense of dignity.

Asena appeared at his side, her hair blowing wildly from the copter’s downdraught. The expression on her face was charged with understanding and shared pain, a mother at the bedside of her terminally sick child. It felt like the sharpest imaginable knife being slid between his ribs. ‘This isn’t over,’ he insisted, having to shout to make himself heard. ‘We have the Fourth Army camped around Istanbul and Ankara. We have units outside all the key buildings. I’ll get onto Hüseyin. We’ll make arrests of our own. We’ll seize the television stations and Parliament. If we can hold out till morning, we can create a stand-off and then who knows.’

She reached up to stroke his cheek. ‘My darling,’ she said.

He felt his shoulders sag, his gut. Their plan had been to decapitate the regime then use the ensuing chaos to seize and consolidate power. But the regime hadn’t been decapitated and there was no ensuing chaos. To carry on now, therefore, would be to spill unnecessary blood, and yet still lose. They’d always vowed never to become those kind of people. It took him several seconds to accept this, to realize the implications of it, to see the only path that remained open. He took out his pistol, stared balefully down at it. Oddly, it wasn’t the prospect of pain or oblivion that bothered him at that moment quite as much as the inevitable disfigurement of it all. Vanity had ever been his great weakness. ‘I can’t do it,’ he told her. ‘You’ll have to do it for me.’

‘For both of us,’ she assured him.

He nodded and kissed her forehead. Tears prickled his eyes, regret for what might have been, for the terrible things they’d now write about him. How narrow the gap between patriot and monster. ‘The Lion and the Wolf,’ he said.

She pressed the muzzle against his temple. ‘The Lion and the Wolf,’ she agreed.