David Gilman - The Devil's breath

His father’s question snapped him back to attention. “What prophecy are you talking about?”

Max shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. But things just got a whole lot crazier. Dad, you stay here, I’m going to do a recce and see if I can find a way of shutting this place down and getting us out of here.”

His father nodded; there was no point in arguing with a boy who had managed so far.

A flurry of sand whipped across the open space of the hangar. The wind was picking up. If a storm broke, that could give them a chance to escape. Max scurried between the vehicles, then he heard a terrible cry. It was a boy’s voice, terrified and alone-a shriek of fear, forewarning of a terrible event.

It was!Koga, and the name he cried out, that echoed around the hangar’s wall, was Max’s.

The pickup trucks had searched for the Bushman boy all day. Shaka Chang had given the word that the boy had to be brought in, dead or alive, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t have some sport before they bagged him. Their blood was up and they hunted!Koga as they would a wild animal. The men’s cruel intentions were a product of years of war in which violence and destruction were a day-to-day matter. Shaka Chang’s decision, on the other hand, was a more cold-hearted approach. Stop him or kill him. It didn’t matter which.

The men had finally tracked the elusive boy, whose skills were not enough to escape from the number of attackers after him. In the back of each pickup, one of the men held a video camera to film the hunt, and it was this dust-laden, terrifying chase that was beamed back to Skeleton Rock.

Max stared at the screen. The horrifying picture stamped itself into his memory.

!Koga was crying in fear, legs pounding through the dirt, arms pumping. Max could even hear him gasping for breath as the men ran him to earth. As one of the killers filmed, the other truck would swoop in. One of the men reached out and clubbed him with a stick.!Koga fell, and the men yelled and screamed-scoring points in a game. The trucks’ wheels spun, ready to come around again. They were playing with!Koga’s life, and the men in the hangar, and probably everyone in Skeleton Rock, watched the vicious hunt unfold.

!Koga calling his name had seared into Max. He couldn’t bear to watch, tears stung his eyes, his clenched fists ached and he wanted to scream at the brutality of what they were doing to his friend.!Koga had come back for him, and now they were going to kill him for it.

Max turned; his father stood at his shoulder. He saw what was happening.

“Is that your friend?”

Max could only nod, but he could see the fury in his dad’s eyes. He grabbed his son’s arm, deliberately wrenching him away from his agony. “Help me. Come on, let’s make them pay.”

Despite his weakened condition, Tom Gordon grabbed a couple of jerrycans. Max took his lead. Flipping open the lids, his dad sniffed the contents. “Petrol. Better than diesel for what we need. Check those.” He carried the jerrycans to an inspection pit which was as far as they could go without being seen. Max flinched every time the men roared as the hunt against!Koga continued.

“Max!” his father insisted. “Don’t look. Come on, son, you can’t help him. Not now.”

Max took the half dozen cans down into the inspection pit, opening their lids. His dad switched off the wall plug that held one end of an inspection lamp’s five-meter-long cable. He yanked the cable free and did something to the end of the wires, then dropped the cable down onto the cans. When that wall socket was switched on, it would ignite the petrol. All hell would break loose, and that was when they’d make their escape.

At least, that was the plan.

“Max Gordon is here?”

Shaka Chang stood with Mr. Slye in the medical unit. Slye had looked everywhere for Dr. Zhernastyn, had double-checked the computer’s record of the doctor’s movements and then, with a sinking feeling in his stomach, far more sickening than any rapidly descending lift, went into the room and pulled back the bedding. Zhernastyn’s terrified eyes were a reflection of Mr. Slye’s sense of impending doom. How had Tom Gordon escaped? A more frightening question-had anyone helped him? It was not difficult to put two and two together-they always made four in Mr. Slye’s book, he didn’t care how clever mathematicians could be-but in this case it was one and one. One Bushman boy running back towards Skeleton Rock might well mean the other one was already here.

Two boys.

Both supposed to be dead.

Double trouble.

He had ripped the tape from Zhernastyn’s face, removing another clump of whiskers, and grabbed the gasping doctor by the throat.

“If you know what’s good for both our sakes, you should be extremely careful what you say, Doctor. Was the Gordon boy here?”

Zhernastyn nodded.

“And he used you to go through to the maintenance hangar?”

Zhernastyn nodded again.

Mr. Slye’s grip on Zhernastyn’s throat tightened ever so slightly. “And did he do anything in there he shouldn’t?”

The moment of truth.

If he admitted what had happened, Zhernastyn knew he was definitely for the great cheese grater in the sky, where all sins would be stripped from his evil soul. Like being skinned alive, it was going to hurt. And Slye would not wish to tell Shaka Chang that the boy he assured his master was dead had gained access to a computer, using Zhernastyn’s lovelorn password. And Zhernastyn was definitely not going to mention the DVD the boy had recovered. Oh no. That meant a double failure. That game was over so far as Zhernastyn was concerned. Given a chance, Dr. Zhernastyn would beat a hasty retreat. He needed time. No, he had told Slye, the boy hadn’t done anything, he was looking for a way to escape. And that was when Mr. Slye patted his cheek and gave him that cold-fish stare which meant he had said just the right thing. By the time Slye got round to telling Shaka Chang, Zhernastyn planned to have his own escape route ready. Rats and sinking ships sprang to mind.

Now Shaka Chang threw the wheelchair through a glass window. “I’m not very happy at the moment, Mr. Slye! In case you hadn’t realized.”

“We have no idea how the boy got inside, Mr. Chang.”

“Then we’ll roast head of security!” He glowered at Zhernastyn. “You let a fifteen-year-old boy get the better of you?”

“His father made a remarkable recovery-it took two of them to beat me. I’d like to know how he knocked the maintenance man unconscious, stole his clothes and sneaked up on me. I fought like a lion. I’m not that young anymore, Mr. Chang,” Zhernastyn said.

“And you may not be getting any older,” Chang threatened. He turned on Mr. Slye. “So this is the second time you’ve been wrong. The-boy-is-dead-you-said,” making it sound like the line of a poem.

Slye knew that if he stayed silent, did not twitch at the fury being visited upon him, but stared somewhere beyond Shaka Chang so there was not the faintest possibility of any eye contact which might be misunderstood as some kind of stupid macho-type challenge, then he might be allowed to live.

“If he survived, Mr. Chang, he had help. This is not one boy we are up against, there must be dozens of Bushmen hiding out there, they must have found a secret way in. That’s the only explanation.”

Shaka Chang had never lost his cool before. Pressure was what he thrived on. He had always won, by fair means or foul-mostly the latter. Winning was everything. But these past few weeks, since the Gordon boy had escaped assassination and had just kept on coming like a heat-seeking missile, at a time when Shaka Chang was about to seize control of unimaginable wealth, had rattled him.

In a few hours, the gathering storm that now buffeted the mountains would break loose and sweep across the desert, flash floods would appear from nowhere. They wouldn’t be enough to dissolve the buried drugs and sweep them into the food chain, but this was when he had planned to open the dam gates. All that water gushing beneath the surface, the unstoppable power of nature, aided by Shaka Chang, would secure him everything.