The Devil's breath

20

Shaka Chang grunted with exertion. The man had attacked him from behind, taking Chang by surprise as he dealt with another assault from the front. The first man slashed upwards with a knife, but Chang stepped inside the knife thrust, blocked the man’s arm in a scissor grip, pushed his shoulder hard into the other’s chest and felt his breath expelled. He kept hold of the man’s wrist as he fell, twisting it in a swan-neck grip. The knife dropped, the man yelled in pain and, just as Chang was going to use his considerable strength and kick the man hard to keep him down, the other assailant had run in from the room behind him.

Slye stood in the doorway, frozen by the violence. Hating the brutality of it. He could barely move, in case he was somehow caught up in the assault.

Chang took the blow to the back of his neck and it stunned him momentarily. He sagged, nearly going down on his knees, and then the man had an armlock around his throat. A knee in his back and one arm pressed in just the right place to cause unconsciousness and death. And the attacker was as big and as strong as Chang. Chang hadn’t heard him approach. But that was exactly why he paid these men so much money to be his bodyguards. They were very good at their jobs, but he wanted to be better than the professionals. He wanted to be better than anyone at everything.

Chang rolled, letting the man’s weight carry them, and jabbed him hard with his elbow. It took three or four severe blows, but finally the man succumbed.

The men, now on the floor, groaned, each recovering from the hurt inflicted on him. Shaka Chang rubbed his neck and reached for a towel as he spotted Mr. Slye, nervously waiting to be summoned closer.

These weekly workouts in the fort’s dojo kept Chang in good shape; he was determined that people should never forget that he came from a warrior breed. Chang dabbed the sweat around the jade and Moldavite bracelet, linked by gold. He never took that off. It was his talisman. Jade from his mother’s homeland, China, meant protection, the gold mined from his homeland, its chain forged and crafted so tightly that the bracelet should never break. And the Moldavite droplets held fragments of life-entombed secrets-from before man walked the earth. Legend had it that the green translucent meteoric glass, fragments from a massive impact fifteen million years ago, carried the energies between those of extraterrestrial origin and those inhabiting Earth. He never tired of gazing at the bracelet’s beauty.

Mr. Slye tried not to wrinkle his nose as Chang nodded for him to come closer. There was always the smell of sweat. It was pungent, like a dressing room after a football game, or a stable full of horses after a race.

“Mr. Chang, sir. Might I have a moment?”

Chang rubbed himself down with the towel. “What is it? You speak to Zhernastyn? He get anything yet?”

“Most disappointingly, he has not.”

“We’re only hours away from opening the control gates of the biggest hydroelectric scheme in Africa; tribes have been displaced, billions of dollars have poured in, and people are going to die when I poison their underground sources of water. I will control the complete water supply for southern Africa. I can hold governments to ransom-diamond fields, gold fields, farming, wildlife, tourism-they all need water! And because one man-one man! — knows my plan, all of this is in jeopardy! I will not be stopped!” Chang’s voice had become harder and louder until he was roaring at a quivering Mr. Slye, who stood full in the blast, eyes squinting as if facing a hurricane. Which well described Shaka Chang’s temper.

And then suddenly the eye of the storm settled as Shaka Chang calmed down, the near silence almost more threatening than the tirade. His face was close to that of Slye, who had somehow managed to hold on to his dignity and remain stoically upright. “Listen to me, Mr. Slye. No man’s memory is buried so deeply that it cannot be dug out using crude, painful instruments. I want Tom Gordon’s memory of where he hid the evidence, and I want it served up on a plate-and I don’t care how bloody it becomes. I like my steak rare. You understand?”

Slye nodded. Tom Gordon would have a great deal of pain inflicted on him now.

“Anything else, Mr. Slye?”

“A boy. We’ve spotted a Bushman boy, heading this way. Directly towards Skeleton Rock.”

“Why would a child do that?” Shaka Chang waited a moment, his dark eyes seeming to creep into Slye’s soul. “Unless …,” he said almost tenderly, “he was the boy who was with Gordon’s son. You assured me those boys were dead.” His eyes never left Slye’s face as his arm pointed towards the open window and the desert beyond. “You did make a note in your personal organizer that those boys were dead. Didn’t you?”

Mr. Slye’s Adam’s apple made a jerking motion, like a chicken about to cluck. “The odds I calculated, based on the extreme conditions-the temperature alone was fifty degrees; even a scorpion would think twice about venturing out-indicated certain death. Then there was their lack of food and water, their inability to contend with attacks from wild animals and their complete lack of knowledge of who we are and where we are. All of this, Mr. Chang, sir, determined that they died more than three days ago.”

“But?”

“But … Bushmen are … Bushmen.”

“So they could have survived?”

“The Bushman boy, perhaps. Max Gordon, definitely not. Otherwise, why is the Bushman boy coming towards us on his own?”

Shaka Chang smiled at his factotum. The perfect white teeth glistened like freshly painted tombstones. “Why? Perhaps because Max Gordon is near here. Because he is alive. Because he has learned the secret we have been so determined to find. Perhaps you have underestimated everything, Mr. Slye.”

Slye, a trifle indignant at being insulted by the suggestion of incompetence, was silent.

“Check the boy’s father, tell Zhernastyn there are no holds barred, and capture that Bushman boy. If necessary, bring me his body. I want to see it for myself this time.”

Shaka Chang threw his towel across Slye’s face. Slye nearly fainted from the suffocating, sweaty stench.

Max stepped between the pieces of Land Rover, an ever-increasing sense of panic working away in his stomach, threatening to rise up and take complete control. There was just no way Shaka Chang’s men would have missed the evidence, whatever it was, after they’d done this. Maybe his father’s memory was completely shot. What if he only thought he’d hidden the evidence here? It was hopeless.

A small bird fluttered in and landed at the edge of the dismantled Land Rover. The radiator, bonnet and headlights, neatly separated from each other, were propped against the wall. Like a disembodied skull, the gaping holes in the Land Rover’s front bodywork, and the yawning space where the radiator would have been, stared blindly back at him. The bird chirped, flew up and found a perch next to the burlap water bag, hanging from its original position on the front of the Land Rover. This was what kept water cool in the crippling heat, condensing the seepage from the bag and allowing a fine layer of moisture to form on its rough skin. The bird took some drops in its beak, had its fill and flew back outside.

Max was rooted to the spot, remembering the water bag on van Reenen’s Land Rover that Kallie had given him; the attack and the loss of the water bag and the fear that came with the prospect of thirst in the wilderness. Water Proof. Waterproof. Proof in the water?

He picked his way through the Land Rover’s remains and lifted the bag from the hook. It was heavy, a belly of water that pressed tightly against the sacking. He twisted open the bag’s mouth and sniffed. No smell of anything untoward, so he sipped the cold water. That was what it was: cool, refreshing, life-saving water. But there had to be more than that. He squeezed and felt the bag, and his fingers touched something with an edge to it. He upended the bag to let the water gush out, a silly memory of emptying a hot-water bottle after a freezing night at Dartmoor High intruding into his concentration. When the bag was empty, he could definitely feel a square of something, but there was no way it could have been pushed inside the bag through the narrow neck. He searched along the seam. Underneath the sack, someone had cut the burlap and restitched it. The water had stretched the material so there was no likelihood of it leaking.

Max quickly found a knife on a workbench and slit the stitching. Shoving his hand inside, he felt the flat box, cold to the touch and wrapped in something smooth. He eased it out. It was a DVD case, bound in duct tape to make it watertight.

He wiped the box dry. The tape’s adhesive had congealed and it resisted the efforts of his fingernail to cut along the lid. He quickly found a craft knife on the workbench, slid out the blade and slit the tape open. A black marker’s indelible ink had scrawled three words on the DVD’s shiny surface-Shaka Chang Evidence. Max held the disc as if it were the Holy Grail. The secrets of life and death lay captured just below its surface.

Jumbled thoughts fought for his attention. He had to get the evidence out, at any moment he ran the risk of being captured, and he’d just destroyed the best hiding place ever for the disc. He had to rescue his father and get the disc to the authorities. He couldn’t count on the cavalry riding to the rescue, not in time anyway, if at all. !Koga, Kallie, Sayid. Help me. Come on, someone. Anyone. Give me an idea.

Sayid!

Max pushed Zhernastyn in front of the diagnostic system. It all looked so bewildering. Max was OK with games consoles and his computer, but this had a different, a more formidable look to it. Then he reasoned that every computer worked on the same principle: it had to be switched on somewhere. He found a scooped button big enough for the convenience of switching the machine on without thought. He pressed it, and the screens came to life.

A blue screen twisted and twirled, ran a montage of Shaka Chang industries, then two spears plunged by invisible hands formed an X. In each quadrant of the X was a blinking cursor. Blazoned across the top of the spears were eight letters: PASSWORD.

Sayid was worth his weight in gold at times like this, but he wasn’t there, was he? He was probably sitting, glued to his own computer, playing some game that he always won. Max bent down to Zhernastyn, and caught the edge of the duct tape that was stuck to his face.

“I can either tear this off slowly or rip it off quickly-slow pain, fast pain-either way, you’re going to lose most of that beard and mustache. You decide.”

Zhernastyn muttered a muffled plea for mercy.

Max waited. “Nod for slow, shake your head for fast.”

Zhernastyn squeezed his eyes shut, then, in anticipation of what was to come, shook his head. Max ripped the tape free and heard the rasping tear of whiskers separating from half of Zhernastyn’s face. His mouth opened to yell, but Max smothered it with a grubby hand. “You say a word and I’ll send you and your wheelchair down there,” he said, nodding towards the railed slipway that swept down to the river and the crocodiles. “If anyone hears you cry out, it’ll be too late. Understand?”

Zhernastyn nodded vigorously.

Max eased his hand away. “I’ll give you one chance, and only one.”

“Listen, my young friend, you are so out of your depth you cannot even comprehend it.” Zhernastyn indicated the DVD in Max’s hand. “If that is what we have been seeking, you are too late. You understand? You would be wise to consider your position. You cannot save the thousands of people who will die. You have no comprehension of what Shaka Chang has done.” Zhernastyn enjoyed the status that having access to secrets often gave people. “You can never escape from this place, you know that.”

“Can you access this computer system?”

“Yes. It’s an open system, providing you have the password.”

“And do you have a password?”

Zhernastyn hesitated for a second. Max scowled at him. The not-so-good doctor was caught in a deadly dilemma. If he didn’t give Max the password, he would be fed to the crocodiles. If he did, and Chang discovered what he’d done, then Chang would definitely feed him to the crocodiles.

Would this boy really do that? Could he? He looked at Max. Dirt-streaked, no sign of any teenage fat, no pimples, burnished by the sun, nails broken and dirty, as sinewy as coiled rope, and blue eyes that were unflinchingly crystal clear beneath the scruffy mop of sun-bleached hair.

Only a boy. But he looked more than capable, and Zhernastyn had tortured his father. No question about it, Max had the look. He would do it. Better the devil you know. “Aleyssia Petrovna,” he said.

“Aleyssia Petrovna?”

“A woman I loved once. You wouldn’t understand.”

“Spell it!”

Zhernastyn spelled out his lost love’s name as Max typed in the letters. He hit the Return button-and he was in.

“One day, when you are older, you will meet such a woman, she will beguile you with her-”

Max wrapped more tape across Zhernastyn’s mouth.

“I really don’t want to hear about your sad, pathetic love life, Doctor.”

Frantically he searched for a disc drawer. There wasn’t one, but a cable led to a sleek, snake-mouthed box, a curved, toothless grin that beckoned to be fed. Max slid in the DVD and prayed it wasn’t corrupted.

The computer had blitzing power. Images, data charts, photographs, statistics, pictures of dead Bushmen, samples of water with crude, handwritten field data beneath each one, all flashed rapidly across the screen. Snatches of information bombarded his brain: drug companies and money, millions, and his father’s face, talking on camera. More pictures of dead Bushmen, twenty or thirty bodies, men, women and children. And then Max’s dad filming himself again. Telling his secret.

“Everything I have compiled here is the most damning evidence of multinational companies’ corruption and one man’s intention to murder thousands of people in his quest for power.”

Max froze the image on the screen and sat for a moment, transfixed by the man he remembered as his father. That strong, softly spoken man looked him directly in the eye, his voice firm and convincing, the words chosen carefully. It was not the emaciated, shuffling man he had held in his arms, minutes before. He released the image on the screen and listened as his father reported, like a war correspondent telling a news camera everything he had discovered. How, for many years, Western pharmaceutical companies had been obliged by law to dispose of all their unwanted drugs. The cost was huge, the quantity enormous, massive beyond belief. And governments still gave the companies millions in tax breaks to dispose of these often toxic drugs in a legal manner.

Max muttered under his breath, “So how does Chang fit into this?” And, as if in answer, his father’s voice continued.

“For years, ever since the dam project first started, Shaka Chang has offered these companies a means of disposal. He buries these vast quantities of lethal drugs by the shipload. As far as the drug companies are concerned, they have delivered the unwanted drugs to someone who can take the problem off their hands. Shaka Chang has fooled the southern African governments. They think he’s shipping in materials for the dam project, and corrupt customs officers and government officials are helping him, but they don’t know the consequences of their complicity. My field assistant, Anton Leopold, and I discovered his shipping route into Walvis Bay. Chang then has the containers taken to a vast underground site that everyone thinks is part of the dam project. The drug companies pay him more money than it cost to build the dam. Everyone is happy.”

Max’s father appeared to be under pressure, he kept stopping and moving away from the camera, then coming back into frame. The next time he appeared, he was more hurried. “They’re looking for me. I left Anton in Walvis Bay to see if he can get more evidence, after we found out why the Bushmen were dying. I don’t know what’s happened to him, but we do know some of the drugs have seeped into the underground water system and when Chang opens the floodgates it will flush the chemicals through every watercourse in southern Africa. The only clean water will be controlled by him. Everyone, governments and industry, will be at his mercy. But worse than that, he will kill everything that drinks from these natural watercourses, including wildlife and thousands of people. I’ll do what I can to get this information out …”

Max’s father suddenly stopped, ducking in a defensive position. Max saw him reach for an automatic pistol in his waistband, and then he noticed for the first time that he had a roughly tied bandage around his leg. The video must have been filmed after they attacked his plane. His father didn’t look at the lens again, his eyes scanning somewhere off-camera. His hand reached out and grabbed it, the picture wobbled, feet running, sky, ground-blackness.

The silent, blank screen sat waiting for a response from Max.

The chill he felt was not fear but an ice-cold anger. He was in the belly of the beast all right, he was right there with the murderer, Shaka Chang. And everything that needed to be done to stop this catastrophe rested on Max’s shoulders. This time he didn’t ask when he ripped the tape off Zhernastyn’s face.

Zhernastyn cried out.

“Is there still time for me to stop Chang?”

Zhernastyn smiled, a macabre sneer on his swollen, half-whiskered face. “It’s tomorrow, my young friend. He’s opening the floodgates tomorrow.”

“When?”

Zhernastyn shook his head. That was the key to Chang’s success and if Chang ever discovered …

Max snarled at him and heaved the wheelchair towards the ramp. It ran free like a runaway pram, and Zhernastyn screamed. Max had thrown caution to the wind, the threat of Zhernastyn’s terror being heard was a risk he had to take.

“AllrightallrightallrightALLRIGHT!” Zhernastyn screamed.

Max grabbed the wheelchair’s handles and dug in his heels to stop it tipping down the ramp, barely a couple of meters away.

“Yes, yes, yes!” Zhernastyn gasped. “Tomorrow at sunset, sunset, that’s when he’ll open the floodgates…. It’s a week earlier than planned … before everyone arrives for the grand opening ceremony.”

Zhernastyn looked desperately at Max. He was teetering on the edge of that slope. If Max had a mean streak in him, Zhernastyn would be torn apart in a few seconds.

“Don’t worry, Doctor, I need you for a little while longer. I have to get back through security to get to my father. If you had thought that through, you could have kept quiet.”

Max hauled him back to the computer console and tweaked the mouse, found the email page, knowing that Shaka Chang would have the fastest-ever satellite broadband at his disposal. He typed in Sayid’s address and a few words to accompany the contents of his father’s DVD: I’ve found Dad, he’s been tortured. Skeleton Rock. Need help. Dam gates opened sunset, local time tomorrow. Max.

He clicked on the Send button.

It was gone in a flash. He just prayed Sayid was waiting as he had promised. Now all Max had to do was rescue his father, stop the dam gates being opened and escape.

That was all.