‘Yeah? Then what else have I got to lose?’ he said, squaring his shoulders across the table.
For the first time that afternoon a smile of genuine pleasure crossed Zhu’s face. He uncoiled himself from the chair and stepped over to the bolted metal door. He knocked twice and it swung back on its hinges.
‘Everyone has something more to lose, Mr Falkus,’ he said, and walked out into the corridor beyond.
Rene sat waiting in the dank cell, unable to make out the curt orders Zhu was giving outside. Sweat gathered on his upper lip and with a sweep of his tongue he licked it off. As Zhu’s footsteps softly receded down the hallway, a new silence fell. Despite the fact that he was craving a cigarette, something prevented Rene from leaning forward and taking one from the open packet that had been left on the table. Instead, he just sat there, listening to the hum of the fluorescent lighting.
A moment later the door burst open and three burly soldiers dressed in military fatigues rushed in. They shunted the table to one side, grabbing hold of Rene by his shirt collar and lifting him bodily from the chair. It happened so fast that he barely had time to shout out before one of the soldiers had kicked the chair from under him, sending it spinning to the far corner of the room.
They half-carried, half-dragged him down the corridor, his feet skidding along the smooth concrete floor.
‘Get your hands off me, you bastards…’ he started and one of the soldiers elbowed him right across his jaw. Rene howled in pain. The soldier raised his arm to strike again.
They pulled and shoved him down another corridor, and then another. Finally, with a fierce yank on his hair, they pulled him to an abrupt halt. One of the soldiers pointed to some wire mesh set at waist-height in the wall in front of him.
The mesh area was about the same size as a brick and Rene had to stoop to peer in. Through the cross- hatching of wire he could see a cell identical to the one he had just been in. A table stood in the centre and, to the left, two figures in profile.
Rene could feel his breath quicken and his heart start to beat faster.
Please God, no. Anything but that.
One of the figures was hunched over the table, her dark hair obscuring most of her face. Her gangly legs were clamped together at the knees and her upper half had been stripped bare. With only her crossed arms, she tried to cover her small, adolescent breasts. Even through the wire mesh, Rene could see that Anu’s hands were shaking.
The man next to her was a soldier. Rene didn’t recognise him, but he was wearing the same fatigues as the three who had just dragged him from the cell. He had a broad back which stretched the fabric of his military-issue shirt, and his hair had been shaved almost to the skin of his squat head.
As Rene stared in disbelief, one of the man’s coarse hands reached down to unbuckle his belt, while the other moved across and grabbed Anu’s slender leg. She flinched violently, her large brown eyes fixed on some unseen part of the floor.
‘Oh, God,’ repeated Rene in a whisper, feeling his stomach contract and the bile rise in his throat. ‘Please. No.’
Despite the hair spilling across her face, Rene could still see the line of tears on Anu’s cheeks. The soldier moved closer still, leaning his whole body forward so that his face was only an inch from hers. His right hand had begun kneading the inside of her thigh, moving deliberately higher with each turn.
Rene’s mouth went dry. He stumbled back. He reached out to steady himself on the wall behind when the soldier to his right shunted him off balance, sending him sprawling to the ground. Rene hit the stone floor hard, knocking the wind out of himself and gasping for air. Clambering to his knees, he reached out his arms to steady himself and the soldiers descended on him again. They hoisted him up in one movement and pushed him forward along the corridor.
Then came Anu’s scream, a high-pitch sound that wavered and abruptly ended.
Rene squeezed his eyes shut, imaging the soldier’s beefy hand being clamped over her mouth. Zhu would be waiting for him in the interrogation room. He turned back towards it, all the strength drained from his legs.
The same sentence kept drumming over and over in his head: ‘Everyone has something more to lose’.
God help him, so did little Anu.
Chapter 28
Wind scorched across the mountainside, whipping the loose fabric of the tent’s fly-sheet into a frenzy of movement that clattered like gunfire. Shara and Bill sat huddled together, rocking backwards and forwards in a vain effort to stay warm. They had draped the sleeping bags over their thighs. Snow collected in the folds like piles of icing sugar.
‘Come on, Luca. Come on,’ Bill muttered under his breath. The wind buffeted against his hunched shoulders, slowly stripping away the last vestiges of warmth. By his side, Shara’s whole body convulsed from cold. Her lips looked waxy, with a bruised tinge to them, and her eyes were squeezed tight against the blowing snow.
Bill reached up, pulling the fly-sheet a little higher above her shoulders. He knew there was precious little time left before she became fully hypothermic. The misgivings he had been feeling about her were suspended, replaced by an urge to protect her from the terrible cold.
‘He’s not coming back, is he?’
The words sounded slurred, dropping out of Shara’s numb lips.
‘He’ll be back.’
As she closed her eyes again, Bill twisted his neck round in the direction Luca had taken. The horizon was just a blur of streaming snow, with no distinction between ground and sky.
‘Please God, let him come back,’ he murmured, fighting to stop his own body from shaking.
At first, Shara barely registered the arm lifting her off the ground. Then she tried to stand but her legs buckled underneath her and Luca had to force her arm over his shoulder and take her full weight.
‘Let’s go,’ he yelled across at Bill, who uncurled himself and staggered to his feet.
With his other hand, Luca grabbed Shara’s canvas bag and began half-pushing, half-dragging her through the snow. They trudged off in the direction he had come, heads held low against the storm. Every few steps Shara’s knees would give way and Luca grunted from the effort of keeping her off the ground. A little further on, he stopped. Taking his GPS from his pocket, he peered down at the small, grey screen, damp from snow. Then, a few seconds later, they were on the move again, following a slightly different bearing.
Shara was beginning to slip from Luca’s grasp, her body a dead weight on his shoulder, when a huge wall of rock suddenly loomed over them. Luca followed its course, running his gloved hand along the side before stopping twenty paces later and swinging off his rucksack. Bending low, he pushed it under an overhang of rock.
Checking that Bill could see him, he flattened himself against the ground and slithered underneath, pulling Shara down with him by one arm.
Inside, it was dark and perfectly quiet.
After the incredible noise of the blizzard, the sheer absence of sound felt disorientating, as if he had just lost one of his senses. From inside his jacket pocket, Luca pulled out a small, plastic lighter and with numb fingers, managed to spark the flint and hold his thumb down on the gas.
A bubble of light swelled inside the cave.
It was much bigger than he had thought, almost high enough to stand up in. A strong, acrid smell hung in the air. Wriggling forward, he made space for Shara and half-dragged her through the opening. Pulling her deeper into the cave, he propped her up against the side and wiped some of the snow off her face. She was trembling violently, her cheeks ghostly pale.
‘I can’t… I can’t…’
‘It’s OK,’ said Luca. ‘We’re safe. Everything’s going to be OK.’
Tears trembled on her lashes but didn’t spill. Shara just stared ahead with a stunned expression as Luca reached into the top section of his rucksack and pulled out a miniature Petzel head-torch. He squeezed the elastic band over his forehead and thumbed the switch across, filling the cave with the white light from the high-powered LEDs. He then pulled out his own sleeping bag, tucking it around her legs.
‘I’m going to get the stove going,’ he said, just as a rucksack was flung through the gap and came crashing
