Ice Claw

28

The axe scythed across the space between them. Max couldn’t bring his own axe to bear and block it. He flicked the chain instead, and the slack caught Sharkface’s pick’s serrated point, yanked and the blade dug into the ice a hand’s width from his thigh. It was a vicious attempt to disable him. He rolled, heaved on the chain, pulled Sharkface to him, shouldered his chest and, as he spun and the chain tightened, brought up his own axe.

They slammed blows on each other. Max managed to get both hands on the length of his axe and block a vicious downward strike. He twisted Sharkface’s axe away but couldn’t follow through because of the chain. Sharkface was fast, his recovery instant. He swung left and right, bearing down on Max like a gladiator. The axes thudded and screeched as blade hit blade. Parry, thrust, lunge, strike, kick and shoulder-slam.

This was a fight to the death.

Both boys sucked in air, yelling to give their arms strength. A furious battle that could last no more than a few minutes, so intense was the assault. It was hand-to-hand combat in its most brutal form.

They scuffed backwards and forwards into the icefield. Small crevasses making them turn on a heel, change position quickly, strike and block, a ballet of death. Max stepped inside a curving blow aimed at his back, grabbed Sharkface’s axe shaft, pulled as hard as he could and slammed the bigger boy’s chin with the top of his head. Something crunched and Sharkface spat blood.

As Sharkface fell, he pulled Max down with him. The chain determined that neither could escape. Sharkface bucked and rolled, throwing Max clear. Max felt his feet slip into space. Another crevasse. He slid quickly. Now it was Sharkface who had to bear the weight. The edge crumbled. Max jolted downwards. He gasped. He couldn’t swing his axe and get a grip. It was only the chain holding him. His hand clung to a freezing-cold rock on the rim. Sharkface did not even hesitate. Max saw the look in his eyes as they locked on to Max’s wrist. If he chopped off Max’s hand he would save himself and kill Max. The axe was a blur. It swooped down like an executioner’s blade. Max twisted his arm. The blade struck the rock, severing the chain, and Max slid down the ice wall into darkness.

The last thing he saw was his attacker peering over the edge. His bloodied mouth, like a shark’s having savaged its prey, and above him rolling black clouds torn by lightning.

It was a vision of hell and the devil’s dark angel.

An all-encompassing darkness swallowed him, its cold breath as dank as the deepest grave. After a few meters the ice wall curved into the crevasse, became a slide and scooped Max along. He reversed the ice axe, held the pick close to his armpit, leaned back and heard the grating tear as the blade dug in like an anchor. It was a terrifying, hurtling ride. He might drop into a void a thousand meters deep, or rocks could be lying in wait to mangle him. He pushed his heels together. He was slowing. He was sure of it. The huge black ice slide was flattening out.

Now he was horizontal, his body still skidding but barely moving. He thumped into a wall of ice, grunted with fright and surprise, tucked his knees up and rolled. He lay still for a moment, then gingerly reached out to feel the ground around him. There was no drop. Perhaps he was at the bottom of the small crevasse, or on a ledge. He felt confident enough to stand, pushing his back against the cold wall. Lightning crackled somewhere overhead and, although he couldn’t see the sky, light bounced down. He was in a labyrinth. Dirty-looking ice, contamination from dust and rock, twisted this way and that, as if some great force had ripped it carelessly apart. He was on the bottom, grateful that the drop had been only about fifty meters. His hand touched the ice wall, like someone feeling their way in the dark. There was an almost negligible tremor under his palm. But it was there. A vibration.

Every creak of slow-moving ice, every faint flicker across his eyelids from the ricocheting light, centered his thoughts. He liked the dark and trusted his instincts to guide him through it. Other senses came into play. He heard a slow, regular drip of water somewhere ahead and to the left. Probably ice meeting warm air; possibly an overhang that was melting slowly. The machine hum was far away and the cavernous, twisting walls distorted its source, but there was something else. A smell.

Wolves and bears can smell their prey kilometers away. No human could match this, but now Max’s senses went beyond such limitations. The musky smell of a bear and the tang of wolves reached into his mind and gave him direction. These were animals he already knew. The wolf pack and the polar bear. What was it that allowed their smells to reach him? Some kind of underground cave system, perhaps. Right now it didn’t matter. His senses told him that those animals were back where they belonged, at the mountain, and that there was a way out from down here.

Max moved forward, one foot just nudging in front of the other, and then, when the reflected light filtered down from the sky into the underground world, he moved more quickly.

It took over two hours to edge farther along the passageway until he was in such complete darkness that even the lightning could not penetrate. This was rock face now, not ice. He could hear a deep hum, and the vibration was much stronger. He listened, then let his hand follow the wall. It curved; he hugged it, edging along, and then he saw a thread of light. He followed it, more bravely now, confident he was not going to fall. Above him, cut in the side of what must be the mountain’s lower slopes, was a tunnel. It was easily three meters high and the same wide. Max clambered up, using the dim glow from the tunnel’s soft lights to find his way. The air moved down the passageway; it was this that had allowed the barely detectable smells to reach him.

What appeared to be a pipeline ran through the tunnel. Max felt certain that the towers he’d glimpsed lay to his right and the mountain to his left. This was no pipeline carrying fuel; it was the high-energy conduit Tishenko was going to blast his energy source along to smash into whatever contraptions he had installed inside the mountain.

Max heard a soft whine. He saw a steel rail above his head. Someone had to inspect this tunnel-and this was how they did it. Out of the tunnel’s gloom a slow-moving metal chair crept forward. It was double-ended so an observer could use either end, depending on the direction of travel. Max clambered on top of the pipe and, as the ski lift-type chair approached, climbed on board. A toggle stick, like a small gear lever, was set on the side arm. Max pressed it forward and the chair’s speed increased. This tunnel was bound to end at some kind of docking platform in the mountain. He leaned back; this was just like being a driver on the London Underground.

A hard hat was placed strategically in a holder-clearly a necessity for the operator. Max ignored it-he’d live dangerously for once.

A control room looked onto the docking area, and Max saw a white-coated figure sitting inside. As the chair emerged from the tunnel he eased himself, unseen, alongside the humming pipeline.

Max knew there must be at least two vertical shafts that carried the lifts inside the mountain, and the various levels were both above and below him. He hunched and ran for a door marked with a zigzag sign indicating descending stairs, ever watchful of the person in the control room. The white-coated man looked up from what he was doing. Max froze. It is movement that catches the eye. The man looked right at him-and turned away. Max couldn’t believe it, but then realized that the platform was darker than the control room, and that fact, combined with the window’s reflection, would stop anyone from seeing past the glass. But Max was shocked to see the time on the clock above the man’s head: 9:57 a.m. It was as though the storm had swept away the hours. Max had less time than he thought before Tishenko blew the mountain apart at 11:34.

The stairs were like a fire escape: reinforced steel bolted to the rock wall. Above him the tentacles of hundreds of cables snaked into the rock ceiling seventy-odd meters above his head. The crystal Tishenko had shown him must be up above somewhere. He ran down farther-another hundred steps. It was darker, quieter. He could see the hoist at the end of the passage. Two industrial-sized pipes of different thickness were bolted along the rock wall. He touched them. One was warmer than the other, which was ice cold, but without any condensation furring its sides. Both had gauges showing an unchanging pressure.

What was down this end where the darkness led to a single blue glow? If Sayid was on this level, as Sharkface had said, where could he be other than towards the far end of the passage? Max was torn. The hoist would take him down to Farentino and the information about his mother. Who first? He ran down the passage.

“Sayid? Can you hear me? Sayid? Where are you, mate?”

There was no echo to his voice. The walls were closer here, muffling his words. Max listened. No response. He ran on. The air suddenly became freezing cold. He had stepped into the blue glow. He shuddered. It was an ice grotto. Max walked on, gripping the axe in his hand more tightly. Something was wrong here. It felt as though the ice was going to close around him, blocking the way out.

That was when he saw Sayid.

And knew his best friend was dead.

Tishenko had given his final orders. The Citadel was guarded by twenty of his most faithful gunmen and a skeleton staff of scientists monitoring the equipment. Those who stayed awaited, with an almost fanatical zeal, the moment when the surge of power would create life. For many it was the culmination of years of devotion to creating a scientific miracle in an environment far removed from a sneering world. Fedir Tishenko was the chosen one for them.

Tishenko stood alone inside the caged control room at the top of one of the two custom-built forty-meter-high towers that Max had glimpsed from the mountain. Lightning danced and clawed at the structures, but he was perfectly safe. The latticed steelwork crackled with high-voltage energy, but inside the cage lightning could not touch him. It was the only place where the electrical field was zero.

Lightning coursed down through superconducting coils entwined about the towers. Each coil was made up of nine thousand filaments, each one-tenth the thickness of a human hair. Supercharged energy slammed its power into the underground acceleration chamber cut into the base of the mountain. The energy charges built up a huge source of millions and millions of volts, jamming particles together like nose-to-tail traffic on a packed motorway. When the massive power of cosmic high-energy particles seethed through the storm, delivering a lightning strike into his waiting hands, he would slam it into the particle accelerator like a high-speed van plowing into a traffic jam.

The big bang.

Sayid was suspended in a block of ice, as if he were floating in a deep sea. His eyes were closed, his lips slightly parted. A look of anguish creased his face. Perhaps there had been a moment before he slipped into unconsciousness when he tried to push away those constricting walls of ice.

This chamber must be where Tishenko froze the animals. Cryogenic gas for deep-freezing was used to keep powerful heat conductors for the particle accelerator at manageable levels. Sayid had been slowly frozen to death.

Max pressed his face against the ice. He’d failed to save his friend. It was all his fault. He could trace back every inch of their journey and chastised himself for allowing Sayid to tag along.

A surge of violent, uncontrollable anger erupted. Max hacked the axe again and again into the ice. He stopped himself. It was a useless waste of energy. Sayid was embedded too deeply. Max swore at his own childish tantrum. Anger had blinded him to his friend’s intelligence and courage. Sayid had believed in him right until the end. Sayid’s hands pressed against the ice, and Max saw the unmistakable message written on his left palm. It was slightly blurred because of the ice, but it could be seen by its thick black lettering-an indelible-ink pen:

CUT BEARD CLAW

Cut bears claw? Max said it over and over in his head. He knew that Sayid had cracked the code, that the piece of paper with the magic square decoded the numbers on the crystal. Sayid had both. And in those last minutes before he died he had believed that Max would find him.

“Well done, mate. You’re a bloody genius. And I’m not leaving you in there. I’m gonna get you home to your mum. I promise,” Max muttered.

Bear’s claw? Where? How? Polar bear? Frozen bear? It defied understanding, but if this was Zabala’s coded message, then it was vital. Max clambered up behind the ice cage that held Sayid, his hand seeking out the fat warm pipe. He turned off the valve; the pressure gauge dropped. Balancing his feet against lower pipe work and his back against the rock face, he swung the ice axe as hard as he could.

Water spurted from the gash, power-washing over the ice. Max had ruptured the pipe carrying geothermal water from deep below the ground. Its heat dissipated on the ice, steam filling the room.

Max heard echoes of gunfire and small rapid explosions. The lights went out. For a few seconds it was pitch-black, and then a dull glow tried to lessen the darkness as an emergency generator kicked into life.

There was an attack going on inside the mountain. Max watched the ice melt away slowly, but it would still take time to release Sayid’s body. Something rumbled above his head. It sounded like automatic doors being closed and then the final thump as they locked. Soft, deceptive gunfire carried down the hoist shaft. That meant the fight had moved farther away. If demolitions were being used and created any major malfunctioning of Tishenko’s equipment everything could blow up inside the mountain anyway-without Tishenko’s lightning surge.

This place could end up as a tomb for both Sayid and Max.

Max was dripping wet; steam soaked through his clothing. Sayid’s body had not moved as the hot water continued to gush over the ice block. The water flooded the passageway, spilling down the hoist shaft. Max heard someone crying for help. Farentino.

The hoist still worked, and as it slowed its descent into the caged area, Max jumped clear. Farentino was at the front of his cage shouting, his arms jammed through the bars. Fumes and smoke from damaged machinery were beginning to fill the cavern.

“Max! Thank God! Get me out of here! Hurry. There’s shooting. Someone is attacking.”

Max looked around the area carved from the rock face. There was still a tunnel-boring machine; maybe he could cut through the wall of rock. No, that’d take too long. Max felt as though the whole mountain were on top of his head. Any serious flooding or damage and it would shatter. The tunnels and caves cut into it over the last twenty years would have weakened the inherent structure.

“My mother!” Max demanded.

“I’ll tell you everything, but we have to get away, Max. You see that, don’t you? There is no time.”

Max grabbed Farentino’s wrist and tore free the Rolex.

“What are you doing?”

Max snapped the expensive watch onto his own arm. It was 10:46. Just under one hour to get Sayid’s body out of the mountain and stop Tishenko.

“In five seconds I’m smashing the bolt free from that polar bear’s cage. You won’t be going anywhere, Farentino, you scum. I want to know how my mother died.”

“All right, all right. She was in the jungle. Something went horribly wrong.”

“What went wrong?” Max yelled.

“I don’t know. Please, Max, get me out.”

“Tell me! What happened?”

Farentino’s tone changed. The defeated man’s face looked defiant in its anger. “You want to know the ugly truth? All right! Your father abandoned her. She was sick, she was dying and he ran!”

“Liar!”

Farentino sensed he had the upper hand. He had an emotional hold over Max that no one had ever had before. “She died alone, Max, because your father saved himself!”

“My father wouldn’t do that! Not my dad!”

“He did it and he can’t live with the shame! Why do you think he stuck you away in that boarding school? Why do you see so little of him? Why? Because he knows he killed your mother!”

His words struck Max like an assassin’s knife ripping into his chest.

“Why should I believe you? You’ve betrayed everyone who ever trusted you!”

Farentino lowered his voice. “Because I loved her. I loved your mother with all my heart. But she would not leave your father for me.”

Max didn’t move. He couldn’t. Farentino gently touched his arm and spoke quietly. “Get me out, Max, and I will tell you everything. Please. I promise.”

Max had to break through the crippling numbness that gripped him. Gunfire rattled on one of the levels above. It was close. The smell of gunsmoke and cordite clung to the air, stinging eyes and throat. It snapped Max back. He felt cold, but it wasn’t the temperature. It was his heart.

He turned to the machinery against the wall, pulled a heavy-linked iron drag chain from one of them and passed it through the cage’s bars. Then he jammed a metal rod through the end of the chain to hold it fast.

Feeding out the links, he heaved its weight to the hoist. The handheld control switch dangled in the air. Max pressed the Up button and the platform rose. He stopped it when it reached head height, then snagged the chain beneath the hoist’s structure. He pressed the Up button again and the platform rose slowly, taking the chain’s strain.

“Stand back!” he shouted to Farentino as metal screeched and strained. The chain wrenched the cage apart. He lowered the hoist to head height again. Farentino staggered from his cage, but Max wasn’t interested in helping him. He saw no reason why a trapped polar bear should die down here. He ran to the cage where he had escaped the angry bear, pushed back the bolt and saw the bear rise up from its icy pool.

“Come on! Picnic time! Plenty of bad people to eat out here!”

The sound of his voice had an immediate effect, and the bear began to climb through the ice wall’s hole between the two cages.

Farentino had already climbed onto the hoist’s platform. Max jumped, with the bear fifteen meters behind him. He grabbed the control buttons and lifted them up to the next level.

“I need help with my friend,” Max said to Farentino, dragging him off the platform and into the flowing water.

Gunfire, loud now. Explosions. Grenades. Men crying in pain.

Farentino cringed in fear and offered no resistance as Max bullied him along the passage. Max had sent the platform down to where the bear could clamber up. He had done all he could.

CUT BEARD CLAW

It meant nothing! He grabbed Farentino’s arm and pulled him into the darkened tunnel.

It looked as though Sayid lay sprawled backwards across an ice bench. Everything had melted except for one block at the bottom. The hot water still gushed but had cooled.

Max cupped Sayid’s face in his hands-there was no neck pulse. He slipped his hand under Sayid’s jacket and shirt; his chest was ice cold and there was no heartbeat.

“He’s dead,” Farentino said matter-of-factly. “We should get out.”

Max gripped Farentino’s arm. Saw the pain register on the man’s face.

“The entrance is too narrow. I can’t carry him on my own. Take his legs.”

An explosion somewhere nearby-the fighting was almost upon them. Farentino grabbed Sayid’s legs as Max took most of his friend’s weight. They shuffled past the hoist and into the open area.

Max laid Sayid’s body down gently.

Two alien-looking creatures dressed in black, with rubber faces and bulging eyes and carrying machine pistols, ran out of the cavern’s gloom. Pencil-thin laser beams from their gunsights cut through the near darkness and settled on Farentino’s chest.

“Don’t shoot!” Farentino cried.

Corentin and Thierry pulled the night-vision goggles from their faces.

“Max!” Corentin said. “Is this the boy?”

“Corentin! How the …?”

“It was Sophie,” Thierry said as he knelt next to Corentin, who was already checking Sayid. Thierry slipped a backpack from his shoulders. “There’s a small army of French and Swiss support troops outside. They’re too late, as usual. We did the business in here.”

“Wolf men! Puppies more like,” Corentin said.

Corentin cut Sayid’s clothes with a wicked-looking combat knife. Thierry took a battlefield medical kit from his backpack. Both men worked silently, no longer determined professional soldiers but field-trained medics. Thierry prepared a hypodermic.

“Epinephrine,” he said to Max’s worried look.

“Save him, Corentin,” Max pleaded.

Corentin placed small spoon-sized paddles from a mobile cardiac resuscitation unit on each side of Sayid’s rib cage. Thierry plunged the needle into Sayid’s heart. There was still no pulse.

“Clear,” Corentin said.

He triggered the unit and Sayid’s body jolted.

“Come on, Sayid! Come on!” Max begged.

“The boy is dead. You waste your time,” Farentino said.

Corentin’s look could rip out your stomach. “This boy’s ice cold. He’s not dead until he’s warm and dead.”

Corentin and Thierry tried the procedure three more times, then Corentin looked at Max and shook his head.

“There’s a casevac chopper outside. We’ll take you boys out of here now. C’mon, this place is secure. And there’s a hell of a storm waiting to explode out there. Choppers won’t fly much longer.”

Max gazed down at the lifeless body of his best friend. Where were the tears and the throat-closing sobs? Why didn’t he feel anything except this animal desire to pursue his prey?

“Kid, you’re exhausted. Let’s go,” Thierry said as Corentin lifted Sayid into his arms.

Max looked at the watch: 10:59.

“I can’t. Tishenko’s going to blow this place sky high in less than forty minutes. He’s in a tower a couple of kilometers down the valley. There’s an underground rail system-”

Thierry interrupted him. “That tunnel was booby-trapped. It’s caved in. The pipe’s still there but there’s no way out. Best maybe we forget the crazy man, eh?”

“No one’s going down that valley, Max. It is too much to ask. The lightning is everywhere,” Corentin said quietly.

Max shook his head. “Get him to hospital, please, Corentin.”

Sayid’s limp arm flopped. Max tucked it back and stroked his friend’s face. Now he felt tears in his eyes. But there was a shadow part of Max Gordon that pulled him away. He turned his back and ran as fast as he could for Tishenko’s private lift.

He pressed the button. It wasn’t an express lift any longer, but there must have been an emergency capacitor that held an energy store specifically for it, because seconds later he stepped into the room where Tishenko had bragged of his plans for immortality. The wall panels were open, the crystal hummed and glowed-power was still surging into it. That meant that underground pipeline Max had traveled along was the vein of energy-the particle accelerator that would reach the speed of light in … He checked Farentino’s watch-11:15. Nineteen minutes to go. Cut bears claw.

Sixty meters of living accommodation ran along the rock face. Two huge doors waited at the end. Max hauled one open and was blown off his feet as the storm surged in. This was Tishenko’s viewing platform, which was now battered by cloud and rain. Max rolled clear as the storm forced its way in and vandalized Tishenko’s quarters. Then he saw the wolf mask draped on a bronze bust of Tishenko. Max snatched it from the cold metal. Its fur soft, its cutout eyes creepy. The hunter’s mask. Max slipped it over his face. It felt as though he were inside the wild animal’s skin. A mirror reflected the creature that stared back at him. A shudder. Muscle rippled. His heart raced. A deep-seated urge to attack swept through him. Then he remembered-there was another platform, from which Tishenko had launched the paraglider. And that was Max’s only chance.

The lift dropped rapidly.

11:20.

Lightning struck the side of the mountain, shattering huge flakes of rock. It clawed, just like Tishenko’s logo. Max stepped into a cave big enough to house a small aircraft. But instead it housed at least a dozen paragliders hanging from the ceiling. It was a drying room for the canopies. They hovered like vampire bats, shivering in the drafts that forced their way through the doors from the storm outside.

The clouds swirled above his head. Violent lightning tongued through darkness, ghostly images exposing the inside of cloud formations. Max needed a headwind. He pulled open the access doors. It was like being inside a tornado. At this height the air was calmer, the wind pushing against him. But it was the perfect vantage point. Max could see exactly where the two towers stood, an incredible display of lightning crackling between them. Tishenko was drawing nature to him and turning it into dark power.

11:22. Cut bears claw.

Strapped tightly into the harness, Max threw the fabric he held bundled in his arms into the storm. Like a dog seizing a rat, the wind snarled and snatched it, tossing him into the air. Max plunged into a surreal world. Snow and ice below, turbulent black clouds above. Lightning cut across the valley, showing him exactly where to go. He tugged on the paraglider’s risers, spilling air from the canopy. The web of lines connecting him to the wing above his head sizzled with tension. A compass and airspeed indicator were stitched into the harness.

The air bit his skin; pellets of hail stung his hands. He fought the gale to stay on course for the towers. As each lightning flash crashed across the landscape Max saw movement below. Wolves. They shadowed him, perhaps believing it was their master beneath the black wing. And if he fell? They would soon realize that the figure wearing the mask was not Fedir Tishenko. It didn’t matter. He felt as if he was running ahead of the pack. Leading them.

Max pulled down on the risers, collapsing air out of the canopy. The drop was dramatic. Too much. He corrected, shifted his weight, threw a hand up to protect himself as lightning slashed across the veiled rain. This was the wildest ride of his life.

The two towers were in a compound. They looked like watchtowers in a prisoner-of-war camp, but they were only two hundred meters apart. And there were no huts other than a brick-built structure, half underground, that looked like a generator room. It squatted at the perimeter fence. A raised hump of ground went from the base of each tower into this building.

Max was tossed across the sky. A gust had swept around the side of the mountain. This was the wind shear he knew Tishenko had avoided. Now it forced Max to fight for his life. He pulled this way and that, cascaded down the side of the far reaches of the mountain, turned into a confused wind and spilled even more air. He was going down. Fast. And aiming straight for the compound.

Fire strangled the towers. But then Max realized that what he saw were cables carrying the lightning strikes down into the ground, along those humps in the ground and into the building.

A figure stood in the wire-mesh control box at the top of one tower. Lightning laced itself around the cage, trying to reach him, like a frustrated monster. But as long as Tishenko stayed in the zero field he was safe. One finger outside that safety zone and he would die like an insect flying into a bug zapper. He manipulated the two control levers that guided the ten-meter parabola-like a big satellite television dish. It caught lightning and threw it into the preset dish on the other tower. Sometimes the lightning divided itself and struck both parabolas at the same time, creating an even more powerful electrical charge.

Tishenko neither saw nor heard Max’s approach, but he turned and gazed into the night, his sixth sense as strong as ever. A black-winged creature with the face of a wolf swept out of the sky. Max Gordon had survived and still attacked. So, the boy wore the mask of a wolf man? Then he must be prepared to die as one.

Max knew he was coming in too fast. If he tried to turn now he’d be dragged into that cheese grater of a fence. He let go of everything, covered his head with his arms and tucked his legs back into the paraglider’s seat. When all else fails-panic! a voice shouted scornfully in his head.

With no tension on the control lines, the canopy fluffed with air, rose two meters and then stalled. Max dropped less than the height of his dorm table at Dartmoor High.

Unbuckling the harness, he ran into the devil’s furnace. Lightning exploded, tortured wind screamed through the tower’s wire-mesh cage, and in the far distance a rolling ball of fire tumbled down the valley’s sky, parting the clouds like a meteor scars the night sky.

Over the storm’s deafening smash he heard a man scream. Tishenko. Cursing Max Gordon.

11:30.

The inner core of the second tower was a lift. He pressed the button. No doors-an open platform sped him upwards. Max was inside what felt like the biggest exploding firework in the world. A flash blinded him. Black, melting blobs swam in front of his eyes. Tishenko had swept the dish down and thrown a bolt of lightning at Max’s tower. And again. The power slammed the cage where Max now stood. Two gamelike control levers sat on a console panel. Whatever Tishenko had preset was immediately unlocked by Max’s pressing the manual control button. Max heard the hum of power as he tweaked the handles. The dish on his tower responded immediately. There was no time lag between command and response.

As Max swung the dish into the sky he saw the fireball move ever closer. Beyond this valley Lake Geneva sat trapped between two mountain ranges. An anvil blow along this telluric line would shatter the valley’s floor, like tapping an egg against the rim of a frying pan.

11:32.

Two minutes left!

Tishenko struck Max’s tower again with another bolt of lightning. It shook, and for a moment Max felt that it would shudder itself into a crumpled heap. His dish caught a bolt of lightning and threw it against Tishenko’s tower. If it was a game Tishenko wanted, Max was up for it.

The natural phenomenon tearing across the sky now looked like a fiery meteor crashing to earth, but it was the spear tip of a mighty lightning strike. Catastrophe was about to strike, and a scientist-monk had predicted this very disaster. The chain-mail fist of fire was going to pulverize the inside of a mountain in less than …

11:33. Cut bears claw.

Tishenko had killed Sayid! Max’s anger burned as brightly as the storm, his concentration blocking out the shattering noise. Tishenko and Max traded blows. Lightning bolts clashed like medieval swords in personal combat across the two-hundred-meter battlefield between the towers.

Tishenko slashed Max’s tower again, an enormous strike that lit the whole area. Max reeled. Tishenko saw the boy stumble, the impact slamming him to the cage floor.

The flash of light held the valley in its glare. Max stared at the looming black monster of a mountain. It rose up into the heavens, forcing aside the clouds, its peak like a bear’s head, its jagged ridges grasping the valley floor-clawlike. Cut bears claw.

Max’s mind did not reason, his thoughts did not question.

11:34.

The cosmic lightning struck.

Max twisted the controls. The fiery bolt seared from the dish and severed the bony ridge of mountain that looked, in that instant, like a bear’s claws.

Every moment of Fedir Tishenko’s existence encapsulated itself in a microsecond. He was the fire god who would destroy and create life. Touched by the power from the sky when a child, he could not be harmed again. So he was baffled at the searing pain that shafted through his chest and thrust him against the cage’s mesh wall. The eye of the storm recognized its long-lost son, reached out with a cruel stiletto lightning strike and took him home.

Time moved in slow motion for Max. His tower was collapsing; the mountainside exploded and Sharkface stood in the firelit snow, next to a motocross bike, his arm still extended, having loosed the arrow from Tishenko’s hunting bow. The shaft had pierced Tishenko’s chest and then thrust its steel tip through the cage wall, offering itself, and its victim, to the lightning.

Max’s tower collapsed slowly, crumpling as wearily as an armor-clad knight beaten into submission. He clung to the control box, heard tearing metal as the structure flattened the perimeter fence and then the tower’s death rattle: its steel groaning in final surrender.

The earth trembled, wind snared the clouds and within one hour the crystal-clear night settled a frost across the land and Max’s crumpled body.

Then the wolves came.

Silence can be bought; events can be explained with half truths and scientific explanations. There were more than a dozen deaths from the battle inside the mountain that Corentin and Thierry fought alone. Official reports stated that seven of these men were members of a climbing team stranded on the notorious north face of the Citadel. Inexperienced climbers, they were caught by the minor earthquake that shook the region that night, and five rescue workers died trying to bring them off the mountain. It was a tragedy.

There was considerable damage to one of the lower-lying villages but, thankfully, there were no fatalities. An undisclosed number of scientists monitoring seismic activity in the Citadel research center had been rescued, which explained the presence of Swiss and French forces in the area that night-a wonderful example of cross-border cooperation, a government spokesperson said. The truth was that Tishenko’s scientists were held in undisclosed secure centers, where their psychiatric health would be examined over a number of years.

Climate change and a phenomenal weather pattern were blamed for everything.

“Wake up, boy,” Corentin said roughly.

He shook Max, brushing frost and snow from his body, slapping him gently until Max awoke.

“OK, I’m OK … Corentin … what happened?” Max said.

The big man hauled him to his feet.

“The cavalry came, late as usual, but they’ll take all the glory,” Thierry said. “They always do.”

Max remembered Tishenko’s death. “Where’s Sharkface?”

“Who?” Corentin asked.

“There was a boy here. He killed Tishenko.”

“Give the kid a medal,” Thierry said. “There was no one here except you and the wolves.”

“A pack of wolves?” Max asked.

“That’s right. A polar bear was on the loose. He was very interested in having you for breakfast,” Corentin told him.

“I don’t understand,” Max said.

“The wolves, they were in a circle around you, one big wolf-”

“One big bad wolf,” Thierry laughed, interrupting his partner as they helped Max to the Audi.

“He would not let anyone near you-and the pack, well, it was not something I have seen before, but they kept that polar bear away from you.”

“You didn’t kill the wolves?” Max asked, suddenly alarmed.

“A few shots in the air. The alpha male, he stood his ground to the end, but Corentin here talked to him like he was a poodle, and he left you alone.”

Corentin opened the Audi’s front door and eased Max into the passenger seat.

And as Corentin wheeled the car away from the devastation, the studded tires crimping the snow, Max fell into a deep sleep. He woke up sixteen hours later in a Swiss private clinic.

The beauty of Switzerland is in not only its magnificent country side but also its secrecy laws. Everything was hushed up. Anyone connected with Max’s ordeal was taken into safety, nursed, cared for and debriefed by government agencies and scientists.

Scientists explained that the slab of mountainside Max had exploded crashed down into the fissures and crevasses beneath the valley floor and stopped whatever shock wave there was from cleaving Lake Geneva, devastating the CERN research facility and destroying the environment and countless lives. How had he known to do that? they wanted to know.

“Zabala. He did it,” Max told them.

“The discredited scientist?” they scoffed.

There was no proof Max could offer. The pendant stone had disintegrated with Tishenko. Perhaps it was enough that Max knew the truth. What Max did know was that it was good to be alive and breathe this high mountain air without fear lurking behind every rock.

Sharkface had escaped that night. There was no sign of Tishenko’s wolf mask that Max had worn. The killer must have thought Max dead and taken it before the wolves arrived. Who knew? Maybe it was enough for the outcast boy to have killed Tishenko and taken the mantle of the vucari.

“What happened to the huge crystal in the mountain?” Max asked Corentin.

The rough-looking man shrugged. He was just an ex-Legionnaire being paid to save a couple of kids. Not that Max had needed their help.

It was a great compliment from the fighting man, but Max knew his DNA had been mixed with a predator’s and stored in that crystal. Where was it? The doctors and scientists he had questioned denied any knowledge of it.

It was a closed matter. None of it had ever happened-officially. It didn’t matter; that was what governments did. Max just felt lucky everything had worked out the way it had. Did he believe in luck? Or was that just superstition? He didn’t care-luck was essential.

Three other figures lay on wooden loungers in the late-winter sun, their injured legs propped up. Sophie Fauvre had had the best orthopedic surgeon in Switzerland work on her damaged knee. She had beamed when Max arrived, but she saw his weariness. Battle fatigue, Corentin told her. Max had been through something huge. Probably something he wouldn’t be able to talk about for a long time.

Sophie understood. She would go back to her father and help with the endangered species. She hoped Max would return home and find a way of talking to his dad.

She had hugged Max. “Hey?”

“Yeah. It’s cool,” he had said, smiling.

Bobby Morrell had been brought to the clinic from a French hospital. His broken arm, leg and ribs would heal in time, but the pain he felt over his grandmother’s death would take much longer.

But as far as Max was concerned luck had been the most generous to Sayid. Not since a Japanese man had recovered from being frozen on a mountaintop some years earlier had anyone survived such intense cold. The doctors agreed-Sayid had fallen into a hypothermic state similar to hibernation. His brain and organ functions had been locked away as if in a cyberspace retrieval system, and had been protected without being damaged. He’d made a complete recovery.

They all sat wrapped in blankets, gazing out across the clinic’s gardens towards the snow-capped mountains.

“I don’t know how you found me,” Sayid said to Max, knowing Max would tell him the whole story one day.

“I heard you snoring,” Max replied.

The others laughed, but Max soon fell silent, letting them talk and shout each other down as they excitedly told how each had survived their own experience.

Farentino had disappeared in the confusion of the rescue operation by the Swiss and French forces, but his words were as sharp and hurtful as when they were first spoken. What had really happened to Max’s mother? Did his dad know about Farentino’s love for her? An uncertain future faced Max. He had to find the truth behind his mother’s death.

And discover whether his father had lied to him.

Max heard the distant, echoing roar of a bear, and the answering howl of a big wolf. It made him shiver. It was as if they called out to him.

“Did you hear that?” he asked the others.

“Hear what?” they said.

Max shook his head and gazed back into the mountains.

“Nothing.” Max smiled. “It must be my imagination.”