Lost Temple

Twenty-three

They set off. It was slow going: the forest was thick and tangled, the ground soft. Marina, in particular, struggled with her high-heeled shoes. Eventually, she took them off, removed her stockings and walked barefoot on the carpet of pine needles. All of them were tensed, listening out for any sign they were being followed. The rain had stopped, though they hardly knew it with the steady drip of water from the trees.

'At least with Sourcelles dead, we don't have to worry about him telling the Russkis what he knows.' Jackson pushed past a low-hanging branch. It snapped back, showering Reed with a spray of water drops. Grant, ahead of Jackson, looked back in disgust. 'What? Don't look at me like some Boy Scout. You've played the game. It's not just what you know; it's what they don't know.'

'I never thought killing civilians was the best way to achieve that.'

'No? What about those Yid commandos you were busy selling guns to?' He raised an eyebrow. 'Muir told me all about your dirty little past. You know what they did at the King David Hotel? Ninety-one dead. Do you think they give a damn about civilians?'

'They're fighting a war.'

'So are we.' Jackson looked as though he might have gone on at length. But Grant was no longer paying attention. He stopped and stared at the sky, his head tilted, listening for something. A moment later Jackson heard it too. The thrum of aircraft engines, high overhead.

'Is that ours? Could it've got here already?'

Grant shook his head grimly. 'That's not a Dakota.'

'You sure?'

Grant didn't bother to answer. He'd lost count of the times he'd spent crouched in foxholes or behind boulders, straining his ears for the sound that would spell relief. 'I think we can assume your man didn't manage to call off the bombers.'

'Shit.'

A crack that had nothing to do with wood shattered the stillness of the forest. Grant spun round. The trees were as thick and dark as ever — he could barely tell the way they'd come. But someone was out there.

'Was there supposed to be a ground assault as well?'

Jackson looked as alarmed as the rest of them. 'No.'

'Then they're after us.'

'What do we do?'

'We run. And hope the bombs don't get us.'

Reed had never known the sheer physical terror of being a fugitive in hostile country. His war had been fought with paper and pencil in the huts at Bletchley Park. It hadn't been easy: some nights, when the U-boat packs were hunting, the pressure had been immense, too much for some men. But for Reed the stillness of the codes had always been a place of calm, the one corner of the war where battle was decided rationally. The torrent of numbers they battled every day could frustrate, baffle and deceive — but there was a fundamental order behind them, however well the Enigma machines tried to chew it up. And, like the ancient Greeks, Reed had never feared the rational.

But this — this was chaos. This was all the animal forces the Greeks had tried to consign to myth: the harpies, furies, gorgons and bacchantes that had haunted their imaginations let loose. Reed felt he was in a dream, clutching the tablet like a talisman. If he dropped it, he was sure, the chasing pack would be on him in an instant. And so he ran.

The poetry thumped in his heart. He was aware of others around him — Grant, Muir, perhaps Jackson — breaking their stride to pause and return fire, but he carried on relentless. He had never run so far, so hard. His legs were like jelly. When the forest thinned into a bare clearing of rock and scrub he tried to run faster to get back into the safety of the trees, but couldn't.

Grant turned and squeezed off a few rounds from the Sten. It felt like some lethal fairy tale, being chased through dark woods by a shapeless malevolence. Perhaps they should have made a stand — at least that would have solved the risk of getting a bullet in his back. But the forest stretched away in every direction and their pursuers almost certainly had them outgunned. Probably outnumbered, too.

He reached the edge of some open ground, where a landslide seemed to have carried away the trees. Ahead, he could see Reed flailing frantically between the boulders. Grant fired a short burst into the trees. That might give them pause for thought, give him time to cross the clearing.

The blood was pumping in his ears — but for all that, it was a strangely silent battle. The shots were sporadic, quickly swallowed in the damp silence. So although the bomber was high overhead, he heard the buzz of its engines loud and clear. Despite the danger all around he looked up.

The storm had passed and a cool wind was pulling the clouds apart. Grant could see pale-blue sky through the shreds of grey — and, passing in front of it, a dark shadow like a fly or a bird. As Grant watched, it split in two. Part of it seemed to break away, plummeting to the earth, while the other glided serenely on.

'Run!'

The others were already well across the clearing. There was no one to hear Grant's words but himself. He launched himself towards them, vaulting round the boulders and hurdling the roots and stumps that tried to grab him. Whoever was following them must have reached the edge of the forest: he heard shots, saw one of the rocks throw up a puff of white dust as a bullet struck it only a few feet away. His erratic course, zigzagging between the debris, made him a hard target to hit, but not impossible. The edge of the clearing was agonisingly close, twenty yards distant, but he couldn't chance it. He slid down into a pocket behind two boulders and peered through the crack between them.

For a second he saw them clearly: seven of them, all in green combat fatigues. They were spread out in a line along the edge of the forest, all with guns at their shoulders. Grant raised the Sten, wondering how many bullets he had left. Behind them, over the trees, a black comet crashed into the woods.

The world seemed to melt into flames. A pillar of fire rose up out of the forest, three times as high as the trees, which turned to tinder in the inferno. It was like no explosion Grant had ever seen. Instead of rolling away, the noise grew, swelling like a train rushing through a tunnel. A high wind blasted through the clearing; Grant was thrown against the boulder as the hungry fire sucked in all the air it could grasp. The wind swept his pursuers off their feet, picking them up like dolls and hurling them into the burning forest.

Black smoke crawled up the wall of flame and swallowed it. The wind subsided, drifting back over Grant like a wave running down a beach. He ran with it, scrambling over the broken ground to the line where the trees resumed. The others were waiting for him there.

'What the hell is that?' Grant's lungs felt as if they were struggling against a ten-ton boulder on his chest.

'Napalm.' Jackson held a red spotted handkerchief against his mouth. 'We use it for smoking out the Reds.'

'Well, we're going to be served on toast if we don't get out fast.' The far side of the clearing was completely ablaze and the fire had already started licking round its flanks.

'Did you see Belzig in there?'

'I didn't have time to look.' Grant glanced back. A black figure ran screaming into the clearing. His head was bald, burned clean, and fiery shapes clung to his back like demons. Three bullets from Jackson's Colt ended his misery. Then they ran.

Black clouds hid the sky again, but this time they were clouds of fire, not water. Tendrils of smoke reached between the trees, chasing after them. Reed could only think of the Hydra, a slithery ball of sinuous necks and snapping heads. The fire seemed to have receded a bit, but every time he glanced over his shoulder it was still there, a dull orange glow behind the trees.

They reached an outcrop on the shoulder of the mountain, a rocky place, high and very exposed. From there, they could look down into the steep valleys that defined the mountain, and across to the slopes and summits on the far side. The valleys were dark and thickly wooded, with occasional flecks of white where a fast-flowing river showed through.

Muir pushed past Reed to the edge of the outcrop. 'So where's the fucking airstrip, then?'

Grant pointed to the low saddle between the valleys, almost directly beneath them. The mountains on either side pressed close against it and the ridge itself looked barely wide enough for a goat track.

'We'll never land a plane there.'

'I've done it before.'

The metallic click of a bolt shuttling home cut through the open space like a gunshot. They turned. There was no point even trying to raise their guns. A dozen men were standing round them in a rough horseshoe, all armed. More could be seen in the trees and bushes beyond.

One of them stepped forward. He was a scrawny man, far too small for the gun he carried. He wore an expression of earnest concentration. As he turned to share something with one of his subordinates, he showed a red star sewn on the sleeve of his shirt, like the one Grant had seen on the man at Sourcelles's house. When he looked back, a strange smile had spread across his face.

'Sam Grant,' he said in heavily accented English. 'We meet again.'

Grant holstered the Webley and returned the smile with an uneasy grin. 'Hello, Panos.'