body.
And then they turned away.
“Bobby!” Sayid screamed into the night.
Sullen faces turned towards him. Sharkface and his men ran back towards the vans. Sayid was thrown into the surfer’s van. The door slammed closed. The thugs were back in charge.
The van rumbled across the verge, rolling Sayid against the walls. Fear coiled around him-a snake squeezing the life from his lungs.
What was it? What didn’t fit? What had he seen?
The car’s lights-whipping out of control.
The gut-churning impact.
The crash-slow motion.
Bobby lying dead or injured. Sharkface shouting to the others. Everyone running back to the vans. The gang running back to the vans … the gang running … the gang and Peaches running back to the van.
And that was when Sayid knew what was so terribly wrong.
21
The sandstorm’s ferocity was not as violent at this time of year, so it did not scour the soul of anyone caught unaware. The dust swirled, bending heads, covering eyes, a shield behind which enemies could hide. And Max Gordon’s enemies were close.
Dark-eyed, blue-skinned men who lived in the wilderness, whose ancestors fought vicious and brutal battles and who still lived by these skills, crept closer to the town’s walls. There were still places a 4?4 could not go as easily as a horse, and as the sand buffeted the town’s walls, half a dozen of these desert warriors threw covers across their horses’ eyes and muzzles. Their own turbans, several meters of blue gauze wound across their faces, not only kept the sand from penetrating their mouth and nostrils but also, according to their beliefs, kept evil spirits from entering their body.
Their grappling hooks snared the walls. While two men held the horses’ reins, four of the blue-skinned warriors began to climb.
Fauvre’s concern lay not only with the fever-stricken boy but also with Aladfar, who had been forgotten in the turmoil and was still caged. As he turned his wheelchair onto the ramp that would take him down to the tiger’s pit, he saw the dust clouds take the edge off the stars as the first wave of sand spilled over the town walls.
Out of the blurred night, ropes dropped down; the wind caught the intruders’ billowing robes. Fauvre knew these assassins would have struggled to scale the height of the walls, and their intense determination meant they were here to kill.
The big cat was already on its feet as Fauvre hurriedly unlocked Aladfar’s pen. He took the length of chain hanging on a hook and whispered a soothing murmur to the tiger. Clipping the snap-hook to Aladfar’s collar, he turned the wheelchair and urged the beast on.
The tiger’s sharpened senses picked up on his old master’s urgency. It was as Fauvre hoped-the loping tiger could easily pull him along faster than he could move under his own power.
“On, Aladfar, on. You can save us all.
The distant figures separated, quartering the town-searching. Fauvre saw they were armed, some with rifles, others with AK-47s. They stopped, knelt down in the sand and each pulled something that looked like a short pole from its place on his back. A moment later small flames licked the end of these sticks-tar-soaked rags, which then burned fiercely. These flames would offer some protection against Fauvre’s wild animals.
By now Fauvre and Aladfar had reached the wall of the building where he had treated Max. His fingers scrambled for the wall switch’s cover, but Aladfar’s strength tipped him from his wheelchair. The tiger was pulling him away from the alarm button.
He let the chain’s leather handle go, saw Aladfar lope into the night and crawled towards the wall. Arms outstretched, he managed to reach the windowsill, his back and arm muscles powering his lower body upwards, and in a desperate lunge reached for the switch.
The side of his fist hit the knurled red button, and a slow moaning wail began to fill the night air. Within seconds the old air-raid alarm siren howled at full volume.
Max sat bolt upright. Released from the deepest of sleeps, he felt as if he’d been given an intravenous drip from a bottomless well of nature’s energy.
Canvas flapped, a gritty scuttering of dirt rasped across the roof, and somewhere in the night a tiger roared. Max instinctively raised his hands to his throat. The pendant was missing. Max saw the frayed rope on his wrists-he had been tied, but someone had cut him free and sliced through the pendant’s cord.
As the siren wailed Max was already out of the tent. A veil of sand swept away from the starlit sky, the swirling dust shifting as quickly as it had arrived. Fire singed the darkness-he counted three, no, four men with burning torches. Men with blue turbans wrapped around their faces. An orange blur, the perfect camouflage, streaked across the shadows. Aladfar! Was that why the siren’s cacophony deafened him, because the tiger was loose? No! Those Arabs were armed. This was an attack.
Max ran hard across the compound towards Fauvre’s quarters. The intruders searched buildings quickly and thoroughly, one of them headed for the tents. Straight towards Max. The man’s strength was apparent, and Max would be hard-pressed to fight on the warrior’s terms. He sidestepped, ran across the edge of a parapet, the pack of Ethiopian wolves swirling below in the pit’s shadows like piranhas in a dark river. The man followed him, matching his sure-footedness pace for pace. He tossed the flaming torch into the wolves’ enclosure, scaring them into a frenzy, perhaps hoping to unnerve the boy a few meters ahead of him, who now kicked dust, leapt onto a two-meter-high concrete drainage pipe, ran to its end and jumped onto a steel girder that lay across old rusted cars.
Max heard the powerful man pounding across the dirt behind him. He had deliberately slowed, as if faltering, wanting the man’s thundering energy to help defeat him. The warrior couldn’t help but let out a cry of victory as he lunged right behind Max, the sword making a lethal whisper through the air. Max spun, leapt for one of the rusting girders, felt the coarse metal under his grip and swung his body to one side. The man’s downward slash tipped him off balance and, as he fell forward, the sword smashed into the old car. As steel met steel, the warrior’s blade snapped. His shoulder took the brunt of the impact as he fell, and for a moment he lay stunned.
Max wasted no time. Using the girder as a back brace, he kicked a nearby oil drum onto the man. He heard a grunt, saw the man slump but then get quickly to his knees.
And all Max could see were his eyes, wild with hatred and anger. The slap of flesh against metal was audible as the warrior pulled the AK-47 into his hands. Max dived, full length, away from the man, into the dirt on the other side of the wrecked car, as a roar of gunfire shattered through the sound of the siren. Clanging ricochets screeched as bullets slammed into the steel beam where Max had been seconds earlier.
As Max hit the ground, he took the impact on the palms of his hands, curled his body, tucked in his neck and rolled into the dirt, twisting and squirming as fast as he could towards another wrecked car that stood on blocks. He caught a glimpse of the warrior holding the gun above his head and firing wildly over the top of the car that momentarily stopped him from chasing Max. But then he saw the man clamber across the hood.
Max was boxed in. With no other option, he dived headfirst into the car, knowing the man would spray it with gunfire. Mind blurred, ears ringing from the gunfire and siren, he felt himself fall into the carcass. There was no escape now.
A chattering thunder shattered metal, punching holes into the old car, the bullets’ mushrooming impact scattering lethal shards as the bodywork punctured. The man kept on coming, kept on firing, a stalking assault to murder the boy.
