Vortex

Chapter Twenty-one

'We know you're there!' the soldier's voice called up from the ground.

Silence.

'You've got two options. Climb down quietly, or have us shoot you down, like birds.'

Ben and Annie glanced at each other, and each of them shook their head. If the soldiers wanted them, they'd have to come and get them.

'I'm going to count to five,' the soldier shouted. 'If you're not down by then, we open fire. One.'

Ben gripped onto the bark of the tree. It hurt his hand he was holding on so hard.

'Two.'

Annie looked frightened. Ben didn't blame her: he was frightened too.

'Three.'

There was a barely audible click from below as the soldier readied his weapon. Ben bit his lip, desperately trying to think of a plan.

But they never heard him say 'Four', because suddenly there was an immense explosion. It was in the distance, clearly, but it was loud enough to make startled birds rise out of the trees in great flocks, squawking with alarm.

'What was that?' one of the soldiers shouted. Even as he spoke, however, Ben and Annie looked sharply at each other and whispered one word.

'Joseph.'

From their vantage point at the top of the tree, they looked back towards the bunker. A huge black pall of smoke was hovering above it, and the whole place was a scene of devastation. Ben squinted his eyes — he thought he could see figures running away from the area. Somehow he knew, without quite understanding how, that neither Lucian nor Joseph would be one of those figures.

Below them, the soldiers had started to talk heatedly.

'The bunker — it's blown!'

'We have to get away from here. This place is going to be crawling with people before we know it.'

'No,' another voice said harshly. 'Those kids know about Vortex. If they tell anyone…'

'Then what? Vortex has been destroyed. So has the bunker. There's no evidence it ever existed. Let's just get out of here before any of our colleagues ask us what we're doing. We can forget about our money, if that's what's worrying you.'

'I agree,' said a third voice.

'Listen, I'm the ranking officer here. I'm giving you an order.'

'You can give us as many orders as you like. What are you going to do, court martial us? We're getting out of here.'

As he spoke, a mobile phone rang. The ranking officer answered, then listened silently to whoever was at the other end of the phone. 'Get back to barracks,' he instructed. 'Now.' He clicked the phone shut. 'Lucian,' he said to the others. 'He was in the bunker when it blew. He's dead.'

There was a brief pause, then one of the other soldiers spoke. 'We really have got to get out of here then. There are going to be questions, and we don't want to have to answer them.'

A moment later, through the treetops, Ben saw the three soldiers leaving. They ran back to the waiting trucks, and drove off out of sight. Half of him wanted to breathe a sigh of relief, but he couldn't bring himself to do so. Instead he found his eyes fixed on the cloud of smoke drifting away from the bunker.

'There was a room of explosives down there,' he said numbly. 'Joseph must have found it and…' His voice trailed away. In the past couple of days he had gone from fearing Joseph to respecting him; he couldn't bear to think of the old man meeting his final moments in that hated underground bunker.

'Maybe he wasn't down there,' Annie said quietly. 'Maybe he escaped.'

'Yeah,' Ben replied. 'Maybe.' Deep down he knew the truth.

They fell silent and continued to watch the smoke as it drifted across the wild Spadeadam landscape.

How long they sat there, uncomfortable among the upper branches of the tree, Ben didn't know. He was too busy thinking about Joseph. Had it really only been a couple of days ago that they first saw him, alone and haunting on the bridge of the railway station? He had seemed so mysterious then, mysterious and scary. And that hadn't really changed, Ben realized as he thought about it. All that had changed was that they had started to understand him a bit better. Maybe that was why the old man had seemed to trust them. For fifty years, nobody had taken him seriously; for fifty years his ramblings had been dismissed as the paranoia of a madman.

If only it hadn't ended like this.

'He shouldn't have done that,' Annie interrupted his thoughts.

'What?'

'Joseph. He killed his brother. There must have been another way. There's always another way.' Her voice sounded tearful as she spoke, and Ben couldn't tell if she was angry with the old man, or sad for him.

'Yes,' Ben muttered. 'Yes, I suppose you're right.' But in his heart he wasn't so sure. It was unavoidable, what Joseph had done; and it was true that innocent people could have been hurt in the explosion. But what if Lucian had rebuilt Vortex? What then?

Sometimes, he realized, things were not black and white. They were shades of grey.

And what was it Lucian had said was the motto of Spadeadam? Si vis pacem, para bellum. If you wish for peace, prepare for war. He continued to stare at the scene of destruction. Joseph, he finally understood, had been fighting a war in his mind for most of his life. What they had just witnessed was the final battle; only now was he at peace.

Ben took a deep breath, and turned his attention back to Annie.

'What that soldier just said was right,' he told her. 'It won't be long before this place is crawling with RAF. If they catch us, we're going to have some pretty awkward explaining to do.'

'Like what?' Annie asked.

'Like what we were doing wrecking one of their tanks. Like what we were doing blowing up one of their trucks.' He glanced back towards the bunker. 'Like what we had to do with what's going on over there. Listen, Annie, I don't think we're out of trouble yet. Any evidence to do with Vortex has been destroyed; the people involved will deny all knowledge of it. If we try and tell the authorities, they'll never believe us — they'll think that we're just making it all up, that we're trying to wriggle out of what we've been up to here. We're compromised, Annie. We're in a corner. Even your dad wouldn't be able to get us out of this.'

'But we've done a good thing, Ben. We've… we've saved lives, haven't we?'

'I know, Annie. And I know it bites, but we're just going to have to keep it to ourselves.'

Annie's eyes widened as the truth of Ben's words struck her. 'So what do we do?' she breathed.

'There's only one thing we can do. Try and get out of here without being caught. Nobody knows our names; if we can get back to the youth hostel without being collared, nobody will be any the wiser.'

'Do you think we should go now, before the RAF get here?' But as she spoke, there was another noise in the background that answered their question. They peered out from the foliage to see two helicopters approaching. 'They're the same choppers that chased us earlier,' Annie murmured. They landed at a safe distance from the burning bunker, and as their doors opened, a swarm of armed RAF men jumped out. Suddenly there were trucks everywhere, driving up the road to examine the burning vehicle and erecting a human perimeter around the area of devastation.

'I guess that's a no,' Annie whispered.

'We'll have to wait till dark,' Ben said. 'It's our only chance of sneaking out unseen.'

Annie nodded. 'Makes sense,' she said. 'But we've got a long time to wait.' She re-manoeuvred her body against the harsh bark of the tree. 'And this isn't the place I'd choose to be hanging around.'

The day passed unbearably slowly. Ben and Annie kept watch on the movement of the RAF and the emergency services who were swarming around the site — half to distract them from how uncomfortable they were, half because they wanted to keep tabs on where everyone was before they tried to make their escape.

Morning turned to afternoon, and afternoon to evening. They tried not to think about how long it had been since they had eaten, and their lips seemed to stick together with thirst. As the light began to fail, Ben grew increasingly anxious, and he could tell that the same was true for Annie. Helicopters and trucks were still all over the place, their powerful lights beaming out into the countryside. Ben had the distinct impression that they were looking for something — or someone. Anyone.

'They probably think it's a terrorist attack,' he whispered.

Annie nodded mutely.

'Still, we can't stay up here for days. I reckon we've got another twenty minutes of light. As soon as it's dark, we go, OK?'

'OK.'

The day might have been slow, but the next twenty minutes passed more quickly than Ben would have liked. Almost before he knew it, it was fully dark and they were preparing to leave. Ben descended first, stepping over the gun that was still lying at the foot of the tree — that was the last time he wanted to see a weapon of any kind for a long time — then waited for Annie to join him. Then, treading carefully in the treacherous dark, they started trekking deeper into the forest, away from the focal point of activity. It seemed strange, walking in the opposite direction from where they had left Joseph, almost as though they were deserting him; but Joseph had chosen his own path, and there was nothing they could do about that now.

They walked blindly in the silence and the dark, their hands held in front of them to stop themselves from bumping into trees. Neither Ben nor Annie had any idea where they were going, and soon they were wildly disorientated.

The sounds were strange in the forest. The sounds of night. Wild animals called to each other, and there was mysterious shuffling all around them. All they could do was ignore it and press on, hoping that they would come out of the forest on the other side and find some way of orientating themselves. They held hands in order to stop themselves from getting separated; more than once, one of them tripped and had to be held up by the other. It was a frightening journey.

Gradually, however, they became aware that the trees were starting to thin. Desperate to be out of the forest, they upped their pace; in the end they practically ran, hand in hand, out of the woods and onto the grassland beyond. Ben blinked. The moon was startlingly bright — so bright, in fact, that it cast shadows on the ground as sharp and distinct as if it were a summer's day. They stood for a moment, breathing heavily with relief, only now admitting to themselves how scared they had been in the woods. Once they had calmed down, Ben started to look around.

'Over there,' he said, pointing away from them. 'The boundary fence.'

Instinctively, they started running towards it. But they had only moved a few metres when Annie called to him.

'Ben! Stop!'

His heart jumped. 'What is it?'

He turned to look at Annie, expecting the worst.

But his cousin's face had a mysterious smile as she pointed up into the sky. There, silhouetted against the fat, silvery moon, they could see the shadow of a bird, swooping gracefully in the night sky. Time seemed to stand still as they watched it, solitary and magnificent, unaware that it was being admired, and unworried, for the moment at least, by the presence of humans.

'What is it?' Ben whispered.

'I don't know,' Annie replied. 'An owl of some kind. But whatever it is, it's beautiful.'

And so it was. The two cousins continued to watch it until suddenly, without warning, it drifted away on some unseen eddy of wind, leaving Ben and Annie alone once more.

They stood together in a kind of respectful silence, aware that they had been privileged to share that moment with the mysterious, phantom-like bird. Ben found himself wondering if Annie, too, was thinking about Joseph, and how he had entered briefly into their lives and then, like the bird, disappeared, never to be seen again.

He didn't ask her. Instead he took her by the hand.

'Come on,' he said quietly. 'Let's get home.'

And hand in hand, they tramped out of Spadeadam and along the boundary fence. They did not look back until they reached the warmth and safety of the youth hostel, where they slept more deeply than they had ever slept before.