Beneath the Ice (39 page)

The American smiled at the British penchant for eccentricity. ‘Yeah, that’s right. Pinkies,’ he repeated. ‘Anyway, we still got the VHF up and running, so you should be able to radio in if the first bit’s too much.’

‘Got it,’ Bates said, nodding. ‘I’ll call this into Langley myself as soon as I get a signal. I’m guessing that’ll be a few hours from now, or I can do it when I arrive in Cape Town.’

‘Just call it in as soon as you can,’ the commander replied. ‘You know that technically no one moves without
their
say so. But I’ll let you go as long as she’s strapped down and sedated. You need me to send someone with you? Real fighter this one.’

‘She’s already out cold. Drugged her myself. And don’t worry, your man’s already given me the contact for the hospital. I’m all set.’

Taking a hooded, windproof jacket off one of the pegs by the door, Bates shoved his arms through the sleeves before pulling a handkerchief from his pocket. It was spotted, the ends tied into small knots. The American’s smile returned at the thought of an Englishman actually carrying such an item of clothing, and he looked on as Bates secured it across his mouth like a highwayman to protect himself against the dust.

‘Take it easy out there,’ the commander called. Bates nodded as he grabbed a rucksack off the floor and stepped outside.

Sand hit the metal bodywork of the van in a constant, driving gale. With the windscreen wipers on full, Bates peered over the top of the steering wheel, trying to decipher the edge of the dirt road. Every so often, the right side of the car would dip down as they veered a little too close to the drainage chute, before he quickly corrected their course.

In the passenger seat beside him, Bear was slowly getting dressed. Only a mile out from the farm, Bates had stopped and undone the strapping on the stretcher, allowing her to climb through to the front. Now, she shuffled silently from side to side on her seat, pulling a pair of trousers on under the hospital gown, followed by a sand-coloured shirt that was a few sizes too large.

The whole process required effort, and Bear felt weaker than ever. Every few seconds she was forced to lean against the window for support while a sick line of perspiration welled out across her forehead. Then, just as she was pulling a grey hooded top over her head, the vehicle dipped down into a rut, causing a spike of pain to shoot up from her stomach. Bear groaned, reaching down to support her sides, before finally shutting her eyes and curling up in the seat.

‘You OK?’ Bates asked, but there was no response.

Reaching his hand into a rucksack that was sitting between them, he dug out a sandwich, followed by a can of Coke.

‘I thought you might be hungry.’

Bear took the food without a word, slowly chewing on the thick wad of cheese and the dense bread, her dry throat bulging with the effort. She then drained almost the entire can of Coke, grateful for the sugar and caffeine as the treacly mixture went down.

‘I got you some painkillers,’ he added, folding his fingers into his trouser pocket and retrieving a plastic sleeve. ‘They’re strong, but they won’t make you drowsy.’

There was silence as Bear stared at the proffered drugs.

‘Go on, take them. It’s OK.’

‘It’s not OK, you fucking piece of shit!’ she snapped. It was the first time she had spoken in the entire journey and the sudden aggression took Bates by surprise. ‘All you’ve done is set me up,’ Bear continued. ‘So what’s next? You taking me over to the British now?’

He didn’t respond but instead let his eyes settle back on the road. After a long pause, he nodded.

‘You’re right. I did set you up. And Luca too. But that’s over now.’

At the mention of Luca’s name, Bear turned towards Bates. Despite her utter hatred of this man, she was desperate for some news. ‘Have you heard from him yet?’

‘The last plane left Antarctica yesterday. Luca wasn’t on it. When the main crew got back to Cape Town, they said that the British team hadn’t come back in from the field.’

As he said the words, Bear slowly turned her head to gaze out of the window. She stared blankly at the sand whipping furiously across the glass, her face so close that she could feel the minute drafts of air against her cheek. Her jaw clenched as she tried to fight back the sweeping sense of grief that welled up within her. Could life really have turned so cruel as to take her lover from her, along with her unborn child?

‘Reviens, chéri. S’il te plaît, reviens,’
she muttered, her breath misting across the pane.

‘He will make it back,’ Bates replied as if the words were intended for him. ‘If anyone’s got a chance of surviving out there, it’s Luca.’

This attempt to comfort her had the reverse effect. Bear’s head snapped back and she glared at Bates.

‘But now we’ll have to wait ten months to find out!’ she roared, spitting the words out. ‘Ten months, before the winter ends. Just to find out if he froze to death or not!’

She raised her arm, but her abdomen immediately buckled in pain. Grabbing on to her side, her mouth hung open as she tried to steady herself. Bates watched, wincing with concern.

‘Please,’ he said, crinkling back the plastic cover of the painkillers. ‘They’ll help.’

He gently placed the packet between them. Grabbing hold of it, Bear pushed four pills from their protective sleeve and washed them down with the last of the Coke.

‘Why are you helping me now?’ she said. ‘You fucked me over before, so what’s changed?’

Bates’ gaze switched back from the road and towards her dark brown eyes, wondering if she would believe the truth even if he told her. Something had snapped in him when the American had said she was dying. He had stayed awake the entire night, trying to decide what to do. As a murky dawn had broken over the Karoo Desert, he had been certain of only one thing – he couldn’t just sit by and watch her rot in the American rendition programme. When the storm hit, he had seized his opportunity.

‘You can either trust me or not,’ he replied evenly. ‘It doesn’t matter.’ He gestured towards the rucksack. ‘You’ll find eight thousand rand in the bag, plus a clean mobile phone. With your skill, I’d have thought that would be more than enough to give you a head start.’

Bear ignored the compliment and instead rummaged through the bag, pulling out the contents one by one. ‘How do I know the phone’s clean and that you’re not tracking me again?’

‘You don’t. But it doesn’t make sense for me to be busting you out of the farm like this if so. Don’t kid yourself. The Americans would have got the information out of you eventually and found that flashcard.’

Bear looked across at him, a flash of genuine fear passing across her eyes. She had already reached rock bottom in that terrifying room and would have told that interrogator anything he wanted to hear, but then events had overtaken them and instead she had passed out. Now the mere mention of the farm made the muscles of her back go rigid. She knew that she would do anything to avoid being dragged back into that room. There was nothing but despair to be found there.

She continued rifling through the bag. There were some more clothes, mostly man-sized T-shirts, a charger for the phone, and a small, razor-sharp knife in a leather pouch. She weighed up the contents and, despite Bates’ assurances, wondered if this would be enough to get her beyond the reaches of the Americans. The storm would only last so long. Soon, as the satellite communications came back up again, they would know that she had escaped.

The painkillers were starting to take effect and Bear eased herself back in the seat. The release from continual pain allowed her to contemplate other things and she wondered where she could go. There was really only one place – the Congo. Although the Americans might anticipate she would return to her home country, the very lawlessness of the Congo meant she had a better chance of disappearing without trace there. It was the one place on earth where she might be able to tilt the playing field against them.

For the longest time, they continued travelling in silence. There was only the bouncing of the van as it rolled on and on along the dirt road. With each kilometre that passed the storm gradually abated until they reached the outer limits of the Karoo Desert and eventually turned on to a tarmac road. At the junction, Bates swung the vehicle round and parked at a desolate farm stall, manned by a charming Afrikaans couple in their late-seventies. They were horrified that anyone should be attempting to drive in such conditions and repeatedly pressed them to stay until the worst of the storm had passed. Both Bates and Bear smiled awkwardly before managing to excuse themselves and leave, this time armed with more provisions and diesel.

Six hours later they came down the winding turns of Sir Lowry’s Pass and on to the N2 motorway heading past Somerset West. Ahead of them was Cape Town itself, with the wide expanse of Table Mountain spread across the horizon, for once free from its habitual cloud. As they kept to the speed limit along the last stretch, Bates turned in his seat.

‘I’ll take you into the bus terminal in the centre of town. After that you can connect to where you need to go. I’m afraid I couldn’t get you a passport. Even with my connections, they’d piece it together too soon.’

Bear stared at him, still unsure whether or not to trust him. Could this be a trick, the whole escape part of an elaborate scheme to get her to lead them to the flashcard? But as she stared back at the man before her, she realised that Bates was risking everything to break her out of the farm. And if the Americans found out, they would hunt him down with equal zeal.

Ahead Bear could see the smoke trails of a heavy 747 jet coming in to land at Cape Town International. She watched as the plane’s landing gear unfurled from its bulbous undercarriage and the pilots flared the nose before touching down. On the other side of the motorway, just past the offices of Interjet, she spotted the first line of ramshackle shacks.

There was Nyanga. She could feel her pulse begin to quicken.

‘Pull up here,’ she whispered. Bates looked confused before suddenly twisting round in his seat to look at her.

‘What?’ he asked incredulously. ‘You’re going back?’

‘Slow the car,’ Bear ordered, trying to keep her voice from wavering. ‘Do it!’

He released his foot from the accelerator and as he drifted across the lanes, the car gradually slowed to a halt. Before the wheels had even stopped moving, he had turned fully to face her.

‘This is madness!’ he protested. ‘You nearly died in there, for Christ’s sake! You can’t be thinking about going back in.’

Bear stared past him towards the sea of iron roofs. She tried to steady her breathing, but her heart was pounding in her chest.

‘Bear,’ Bates said. ‘Listen to me. You’re in no state to go in there and I can’t come and rescue you again. If you walk out of this car, there’s no going back.’

‘I’ve got to get the flashcard. The only way this means anything is if that bastard Pearl goes down.’

‘You go back in and they’ll kill you. I can’t protect you any more.’

‘Then we’ve got nothing left to talk about,’ she replied, grabbing hold of the rucksack he’d given her. Just as she clicked open the car door and the noise of the traffic suddenly filled the interior, Bates grabbed her arm. Bear went rigid at the contact.

‘Take this,’ he said, reaching under the seat and pulling out his Glock 9mm pistol. He handed it to her, followed by a spare magazine. Bear hesitated for a second before reaching forward and taking the weapon, the dulled black metal weighing heavily in her hands.

‘Goodbye,’ she said, the word flat with finality. Checking back across the stream of traffic, she limped across the dead area on the opposite side of the motorway before slipping through the line of broken concrete pillars that marked the boundary of the township.

Bates watched her go, knowing that whatever happened from now on, he would never see Beatrice Makuru again.

LUCA STARED THROUGH
the opening in the hatch, eyes narrowed against the gloom. Somewhere below them, Vidar Stang was silently searching the base.

‘Close it,’ Dedov warned, his voice no more than a low hiss. Luca looked up briefly before wiping the sweat from his eyes. He inched the hatch down, but left it unlocked so that there was a thin crack through which he could make out a stretch of the corridor below.

His gaze switched between the three other men in the darkness. Next to Dedov was Katz and slightly set back from them both was Joel’s wiry frame. Their faces dipped in and out of the shadows as a weak light filtered down from the glass porthole directly above. For want of any other hiding place, they had all clambered up into the attic space that Hiroko had inhabited and now lay on top of the piles of meticulously folded plastic bags, their limbs cramping in the confines of the narrow room.

Dedov had his hand firmly clamped across Joel’s mouth. The injured man was now conscious, but struggling to understand what was happening. The sudden move and hushed whispering had done little to relieve his sense of confusion and he stared from one person to the next, squinting without his glasses.

Beside him, Katz was seated with his arms folded across his chest. Despite having already been told about Stang and the generator house, he was still insistent that there was a better alternative to hiding.

‘Look,’ he whispered, ‘there are four of us, right? So I say, we go down there and reason with him. It’s not like before. We were sleeping then and he was able to sneak around.’

Dedov’s gaze remained fixed on the hatch. ‘The man down there is not here to reason or to talk. He is here to silence us.’

‘But we could overpower him,’ Katz persisted. ‘I mean, it’s four to one.’

‘He is a monster of a man. And last time I saw him on barrier, he carried rifle over his shoulder. This is not a man who can easily be overpowered. He is a trained hunter.’

The news was greeted by silence, with Luca checking down through the crack in the hatch once more. When they had first climbed up into the attic, he had taken a light bulb off the wall and carefully cracked it under his boot. He had then spread the glass across the narrow corridor, hoping that if anyone tried to sneak up on them, they would hear him first.