Philip Kerr - Esau

‘Bingo,’ he chuckled. ‘Give that man a prize.’

He put away the detector and raised his weapon again.

‘We’re on our way.’ He started forward between two rhododendron bushes. ‘Couple of hours and you’ll be out of this icebox and back at the embassy in Khat. Go find me a couple of gals in Thamel and then party.’

Another fifteen minutes of running and crawling brought Boyd to the edge of a long clearing. It looked like someone had been engaged in some serious deforestation. There were scorched bushes and broken trees.

‘Something crashed here, all right,’ he assured himself. Then he saw it.

The satellite looked more like the wreck of a small van than anything that had once orbited the Earth. But for the stars and stripes that were painted on the dirty white fuselage he could easily have mistaken it for some kind of ambulance. And now he could understand exactly why the spy planes had missed it. The bird had crashed through fifty or sixty metres of trees and bushes upon impact, flattening them; but then it had rolled a distance, before coming to rest among some giant-sized bushes and beneath some trees. The Keyhole-Eleven bird couldn’t have looked better hidden from the air if he had tried to camouflage it himself.

Instinctively avoiding the clearing, Boyd started along the tree line toward his objective. Somehow he’d expected a little more opposition. After Jack’s description of a whole group of yetis living in this hidden forest he’d thought he might have to squeeze off a few rounds to defend himself. But so far he hadn’t even heard one of the creatures, let alone seen one. Maybe this was going to take less time than he had thought.

When he reached the bird, Boyd opened the fuselage and looked inside. Upon landing, the satellite computer should have started broadcasting a small signal enabling a remote recovery team to go into action, but this had not happened. It was easy to see why. Two lights on the warning panel, labelled MAIN BUS A UNDERVOLT and MAIN BUS B UNDERVOLT, glowed red. Something had disrupted the flow of power from both the satellite’s small thermonuclear generator and the solar cell panels to all the operation and guidance systems. Bus A was easily accounted for: The solar cells had ripped off upon impact. But the thermonuclear generator feeding through Bus B should have continued functioning. Boyd checked the voltage on the junction and found the needle indicating that it was still producing current. There was a bad connection somewhere. He searched the Bus B junction and found that one of the wires had melted, probably the result of a small fire inside the satellite when Bus A short-circuited. Restoring power was simply a matter of flicking the Bus B switch off for a moment, reconnecting the burned wire, and switching it back on. Bus B was now glowing green.

‘Those dumb bastards,’ he said, trying to imagine the reaction back in Washington when the people at the NRO realized they were online with the Keyhole again.

‘Not for long,’ he chuckled and began to type out the autodestruct code on the computer’s keyboard. He had entered only half the code when the power went off again. Glancing up at the warning panel, he saw the Bus B light glowing red again. There was another loose connection somewhere, but he had run out of time. He would have to use explosives to do the job after all. But at least, back in Washington, they would now know he had found the satellite. And was about to destroy it.

From his pack Boyd took out the polythene-wrapped chunk of C4 plastique. Resembling white putty, C4 was the most versatile of explosives, being easily handled, waterproof, and with the help of a little added Vaseline, able to stick to just about anything. Planting explosives had always been an important part of Boyd’s job and he worked quickly, prying open the panel that protected the satellite’s internal machinery and shaping the C4 around the metal box that housed the radioisotope, for maximum effect. He was searching for a detonator in his pack when he heard a twig break and then a hoot series that announced the arrival of a yeti. Boyd snatched up his gun.

‘Customers,’ he said and fired twice in the direction of some moving bushes, with apparently no result. No scream. No collapsing body. Nothing. Boyd swore. He was losing his touch. Seven shots out of a thirty-shot magazine without a hit. He was going to have to be careful. Without a spare mag he would have to make every shot count now. And if every time he heard a yeti hoot or saw a bush move he fired a shot, he would lose it.

He waited a moment, listening carefully and watching the forest for more signs of movement. He was contemplating going back to the detonator when he heard a footfall, and whistling around, he saw a clump of scorched rhododendrons swaying as if something had walked among them. Boyd raised the telescopic stock of the carbine to his shoulder and thought better of firing.

‘Don’t get spooked,’ he reminded himself. ‘Mark a hard target first.’

He took several steps back, then ducked around the satellite and ran thirty or forty metres through the undergrowth in the opposite direction before turning abruptly to his right, dropping down onto his belly, and crawling quickly back to where he thought he had now placed his quarry.

Back in the States, Boyd often went hunting. In his time he had shot deer, mountain lion, coyote, seal, even a bear, but this was something new. He’d never shot a great ape. Excepting some of the men he’d killed. And hunting an animal no other man had hunted, that would be something. Boyd was beginning to enjoy himself. He crawled back to a spot immediately behind the clump of scorched rhododendrons. Expecting to see the hairy back of some yeti he was surprised to see a mirror image of himself. It was someone else wearing an SCE suit.

He had been followed from ABC.

Boyd cursed Ang Tsering, and then himself for not having done what should have been done. He ought to have killed them all when he had the chance. Just like he’d killed those Chinese.

Whoever it was had the automatic he had given Tsering and was crouched at the edge of the clearing, gun pointed at the satellite. Boyd was too intrigued to fire right away. He wanted to see who had dared to take him on before he killed them.

Swift knelt behind the cover of an enormous Himalayan silver fir, watching the satellite and wondering if Boyd was close by. She held the gun in both hands and kept it pointed in front of her in the way she had seen cops doing on TV.

A minute or so passed and then she lowered the gun. Maybe he hadn’t found it yet. Or maybe he had already been there, set his charge, and gone. But she felt sure that the shots had come from this direction.

She had a second or two to consider the amazing diversity of flowers around her: saxifrages, gentians, geraniums, anemones, cinquefoils, and primulas. If she did manage to get herself killed, she could think of worse places for her body to lie.

Gathering her courage she got to her feet, only to find them kicked away from beneath her and the gun flying out of her hand. She kicked out wildly and then felt the wind being knocked out of her as something struck her hard between the shoulder blades.

It was two or three minutes before she had sucked enough breath back into her bruised body to recognize that it was Boyd who had knocked her with his rifle butt, by which time he had removed her helmet as well as his own.

He was sitting on a tree stump a short distance from her, the carbine dangling loosely from a strap between his thighs like some kind of enormous medallion.

‘I might have known it’d be you,’ he grinned. ‘No one else with the guts, I imagine. Underneath all that ball-breaking science, you’re probably quite a woman, Swifty. Of course I’m only guessing. These suits are warm, but they’re hardly Issey Miyake, now are they?’