“We’ll build a fire, get things cooking . . . then we can have a swim.”
“Right.”
They were still walking. It seemed to Alex that they had left the beach a long way behind them. He could still hear the music—but it was so distant that the notes seemed to have broken up and he couldn’t make out any tune.
“See if you can find any dead wood. It burns better.” Alex trained his flashlight on the forest floor. There were broken branches everywhere, and he wondered why they had come so far to collect them. But there was no point arguing. He reached down and gathered a few pieces, then a few more. It didn’t take him long to build up a pile . . . any more and it would be too heavy to carry.
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S N A K E H E A D
Clutching the wood to his chest, he straightened up and looked around for Scooter.
That was when he realized that he was on his own.
“Scooter?” He called out the name. There was no reply. Nor was there any sign of the SAS man’s flashlight. Alex wasn’t worried. It was likely that Scooter had already collected his first bundle and was making his way back to the beach. Alex listened for the sound of the guitar. But it had stopped.
Now he felt the first prickle of doubt. He had been so busy collecting the branches, he had lost his sense of direction. He was in the middle of the woods, surrounded on all sides. Which way was the beach?
Ahead of him, he saw a blink of white. A flashlight.
Scooter was there after all. Alex called out his name a second time, but there was no reply. It didn’t matter. He had definitely seen the light and, as if to reassure him, it flashed again. He headed toward it anxiously.
It was only when he had taken twenty or thirty paces that he realized that he was nowhere near the beach, that he had in fact been drawn even farther into the woods. It was almost as if it had been done on purpose. He was the moth, and they had shown him the candle. But just then the light vanished. Even the moon was invisible. Annoyed with himself, Alex dropped the wood. He could always pick more up later. All he wanted to do right now was to find his way back.
Ten more steps and abruptly the trees fell away. But he
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wasn’t at the beach. Alex’s flashlight showed him a wide, barren clearing with little hillocks of sand and grass. The wood circled all around him. There was no sign at all of Scooter or the second, flickering flashlight that had brought him here.
Now what? Was Scooter playing a prank on him?
Alex decided to go back the way he had come. He might be able to pick up his own footprints. The pile of wood that he had dropped couldn’t be too far away. He was about to turn when something—some animal instinct—made him hesitate. About two seconds later, the whole world stopped.
He knew it was going to happen before it actually did.
Alex had been in danger so many times that he had developed a sense, a sort of telepathy, that forewarned him.
Animals have it—the awareness that makes their hackles rise and sends them running before there is any obvious reason. Alex was already throwing himself to the ground even before the missile fell out of the sky, smashing the trees into matchsticks, scooping up a ton of earth and throwing it into the sky, shattering the silence of the night and turning darkness into brilliant, blinding day.
The explosion was enormous. Alex had never felt anything like it. The very air had been turned into a giant fist, a boxing glove that pounded into him—hot and violent—
and for a moment he thought he must have broken a dozen bones. He couldn’t hear. He couldn’t see. The inside of his head was boiling. Perhaps he was unconscious
S N A K E H E A D
for a few seconds, but the next thing he knew, he was lying on the ground with his face pressed into a clump of wild grass and sand in his hair and eyes. His shirt was torn and there was a throbbing in his ears, but otherwise he seemed to be unhurt. How close had the missile fallen?
Where had it come from? Even as Alex asked himself these two questions, a third, more unpleasant one entered his mind. Were there going to be any more?
There was no time to work out what was going on.
Alex spat out sand and dragged himself to his knees. At the same time, something burst out in the sky: a white flame that hung there, suspended high above the trees.
Alex had tensed himself, expecting another blast, but he quickly recognized it for what it was: a battle flare light, a lump of burning phosphorus, designed to illuminate the area for miles around. He was still kneeling. Almost too late, he realized that he had turned himself into a target, a black cutout against the brilliant, artificial glare. He threw himself forward onto his stomach one second before a cascade of machine-gun bullets came fanning out of nowhere, pulverizing branches and ripping up the leaves. There was a second explosion, smaller than the first, this one starting at ground level and sending a column of flame shooting up. Alex covered his head with his hands. Earth and sand splattered all around him.
He was in a war zone. It was beyond anything he had ever experienced. But common sense told him that no war had broken out in Western Australia. This was a
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training exercise and somehow—insanely—he had stumbled into the heart of it.
He heard the blast of a whistle and two more explosions followed. The ground underneath him trembled, and suddenly he found that he could no longer breathe.
