David Gilman - The Devil's breath

He was so close now, he could have moved a couple of centimeters and felt the wet nose on his forehead. The jackal opened its eyes. Max held his breath, not daring to move, mesmerized. The amber eyes drew him in, their gentleness touching something deep inside him. A rich warmth settled in his chest: a sublime sense of joy. He reached out to stroke the animal’s head.

He gasped-the jackal was gone!

Max tumbled into space. There was a drop of about twenty meters down to the floor of the hangar. He jolted to a halt. One of the cables had snagged his ankle. Instinctively he tucked his chin in to his chest and shielded his head with his arms. His curved back slammed into the rock face and knocked the wind out of him. The agony knifed through his body, his senses swirled as he hung upside down, spread-eagled.

At the far end of the hangar, half a dozen men had gathered, their raucous voices whooping with pleasure, but he couldn’t make out what it was that held their attention.

He had to get out. Sooner or later one of those men would walk across the floor and see him swaying helplessly. Max bent his knees and crunched his stomach muscles. Rolling himself upwards, he snatched desperately at the cable. And missed! He fell back. Another thump in his back from the rock. Max held back a grunt of pain. If he made too much erratic movement, he would be noticed.

He wiped the sweat from his eyes, dried his hands on his shirt, and focused again through the throbbing blood that flooded his head. Taking a deep breath, he exhaled and lunged. His fingers touched the cable. He curled his hand, grasping the lifeline. Then, hand over hand, he heaved himself back over the ledge. Out of sight, he lay still, letting his breathing settle.

Had his imagination conjured up the jackal? Maybe it had tried to show him the way out and then sat, to stop him falling. He’d been stupid. Trying to reach out and touch it.

There was no sign of the jackal now, just as on other occasions when he had caught only a fleeting glimpse. But this was different-this was almost contact-creepy. So what?

So far as he was concerned, it was there. Max was learning not to apply logic to everything that happened. With a silent thank you to whoever was listening, he made his way back to his father.

Within a couple of minutes Max had secured lengths of the cable around each of them and quietly warned his father about the men at the far side of the hangar. “Can you manage to get down there?” he whispered. His father nodded.

The gap was wide enough for only one of them to climb through at a time. Max went first, then waited, feet planted firmly against the wall, to make sure his dad could follow.

With a lot of effort Tom Gordon eased himself next to his son, then together they lowered themselves, feeding out the cable as they walked backwards down the rock face. Four meters from the ground, they heard voices directly below them. They froze. Two men in mechanics’ overalls were manhandling a mobile toolbox. How long would the men stay there? Would they notice the cables? He looked at his father, who didn’t move, holding himself as still as Max, who knew he couldn’t stay like that for much longer. Max was amazed his dad had managed the descent at all, knowing he was operating on sheer willpower.

The men rumbled the toolbox away. Max waited until they were on the far side of the hangar, then he slithered down quietly. He picked up the slack from his father’s cable and reached up, his hands ready to take his weight. He kept glancing over his shoulder, but the men were out of sight now, since Max and his dad were obscured by the bulk of the Humvees. Tom Gordon was shaking from the exertion and needed time to recover. Max crept forward and put his head over the door of one of the vehicles. The window was down and a small bottle of water nestled in a bottle-carrier between the armrests. As he reached in, he could see through the windscreen that the men were watching a big television screen secured to the wall at the end of the hangar. It sounded as though they were watching a football game because they were shouting and cheering.

Max let his father drink as they sat, huddled against the wall. The cables they had used still hung down from the crevicelike opening, but Max tied them off at the bottom, and to a casual onlooker they would look like any of the other electrical cabling around the place.

“Dad, I have to leave you here for a bit. I’ve got to try and find a way of jamming the works.”

His father looked uncertain. “Why?” And then his ravaged memory returned. “Oh yeah. My God, Max, this is crazy. You shouldn’t have come here. I don’t know how you got it all together.”

“Dad, can you remember anything? Y’know, the message you sent me.”

“Message? Oh yes. I sent them to Sayid. Tried to warn you. I thought they were going to try to kill you. They thought I’d sent you the evidence.”

“They did try. That’s why I’m here. It’s a long story, so many things have happened. And I made a good friend, he’s the son of the Bushman who took your notes. He’s great. Anyway, I’ll tell you all about it when we get home.”

“Still the optimist, Max.”

“We’ll make it, Dad.”

“Bloody right we will,” his father said, and smiled bravely. “But I want you to get going, on your own. You’ll have a much better chance.”

Max shook his head. “No way. Not after everything that’s happened. You sent for me, you left all the messages in the cave. I came here to help.”

“And you have. And I’m so proud of you. But now you have to get out. Please.”

“No. Drink your water and do as you’re told.”

They smiled at each other, and Max felt great being this close to his dad, a moment of shared happiness amid the danger. There were no keys in any of the trucks, and he still hadn’t figured out how to stop Shaka Chang from triggering the floodgates at the dam.

“What cave?” his father asked.

“What?” Max felt confused. Were the drugs muddling his dad’s brain?

“You said I left a message in a cave. I haven’t been to any caves.”

“You must have. The Bushmen’s sacred mountain. There were drawings in there. Pictures of me, your plane’s insignia, the dove …”

“You found the plane?”

“Yeah. Because of the drawings. Well, partly … you drew a picture showing you’d been wounded, the hidden plane, me, the Bushmen. It was all there.”

“Max, listen to me. My memory’s in pretty bad shape right now, but I can tell you, one hundred percent, that I never went to any cave. Anton Leopold and I met up in the desert. We left his Land Rover and I flew him to Walvis Bay-by then we had a pretty good idea of what was happening. I gave him a scribbled note to send to you, I flew back, got wounded, hid the plane and made a run for it in the Land Rover. I knew they’d get me in the end-there were too many of them. That’s when I sent my field notes back to Farentino. They were just bits and pieces; no one would be able to make much sense of them. I figured it’d buy me time. But I was in no condition to climb any mountains and paint pictures on cave walls.”

The air in the hangar seemed suddenly oppressive, and something like a shadow crept over Max’s skin. He shuddered. “The prophecy,” he muttered.

He looked at his dad, a strange feeling flooding his mind, as if a door had been opened in a darkened room and shown him a different world. He relived the kaleidoscope of sensations-of death, the flying, the darkness, the raptor’s attack and the presence of the jackal. The BaKoko .

The Bushmen had told him about the legend of him coming to their land to help them, but he hadn’t managed that yet, not until Shaka Chang was stopped. And one thing they didn’t mention in their prophecy was how he was going to save his own dad.