The Sacred Vault

They entered the bunker, one of the guards pointing at the elevator platform. Eddie quickly surveyed the surroundings as they stepped on to it. The bunker was octagonal, with a rectangular extension opposite the entrance to accommodate the elevator. Raised metal walkways led up to the windows, which looked out slightly above ground level. A desk was home to a computer and a telephone, a map of the tiger sanctuary and its tunnels on the wall beside it. He took in as much information from the map as he could before a guard operated a control, and the platform rose with a hydraulic whine.

They emerged into sunlight, surrounded by a cage. Nina recognised the clearing where she had watched a tiger be tranquillised a few days earlier. ‘There are cameras all over the place,’ she warned, pointing out a stout metal pole nearby. A black sphere at its top turned to observe their arrival. ‘They’re watching us.’

‘Indeed we are, Dr Wilde,’ said a voice, startling them. Khoil. But not in person; his tone was tinny, coming through a small loudspeaker on the triangular aerial drone. It descended into the clearing, camera pointed at them.

‘I wouldn’t miss this for the world,’ Vanita added.

Khoil spoke again. ‘You may have noticed a new addition to my vimana.’

‘Yeah, I see it,’ said Nina. Where the dart gun had been before, a larger and more deadly weapon was now mounted beneath the compact aircraft’s body: Eddie’s Wildey. She glowered at her husband. ‘You would have to buy another of those stupid things . . .’

‘As you saw with the dart gun, I am a good shot. But Vanita only wants me to use the gun as a last resort. Her tigers prefer live prey.’ The cage lowered into the ground, leaving them standing in the open. The drone pivoted as if gesturing into the surrounding trees. ‘The nearest tiger is forty metres in that direction. Move towards it.’ The gun swung back.

They reluctantly stepped off the platform. ‘What do we do?’ Nina whispered, looking round fearfully.

‘First thing, don’t get eaten,’ Eddie replied, trying to mask his own worry. Without a weapon, they had almost no chance of surviving a tiger attack. ‘Second, bring down that drone and get my gun. Did he say it had a dart gun on it before?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then he’s in for a fucking surprise if he fires it. Okay, stay close and follow my lead.’ They entered the trees, the drone descending under the overhanging branches to follow them.

Eddie peered into the vegetation. Forty metres; about a hundred and thirty feet. If the predator was hunting, they wouldn’t see it until it was almost upon them. With a light breeze blowing through the foliage, the visual confusion of the undergrowth and the dappled sunlight cutting into the shadows made it almost impossible to pick out movement.

He looked back at the drone. It was about ten feet behind, slightly above head height. He needed something heavy enough to knock it off balance . . .

A chunk of broken branch on the ground, mouldering amongst the decomposing leaves. He pretended to stumble, scooping it up as he caught his fall. ‘Stop,’ he whispered. ‘Get ready to run.’

‘Which way?’

‘Any way that isn’t at the tiger!’ Eddie half turned towards the drone, concealing the hunk of wood behind his body. Nina looked nervously into the trees for any telltale flashes of orange.

The drone came to a hover, eight feet away. ‘Keep moving,’ ordered Khoil.

‘Think I’d rather stay here,’ said Eddie. ‘Anyway, how do you even know where the tigers are?’

‘The tigers are all tagged with a GPS—’

Eddie suddenly hurled the piece of wood at the drone, knocking the little aircraft back. ‘Run! ’

He grabbed Nina’s hand, and they turned and charged through the undergrowth, swatting low branches aside. The drone recovered and almost angrily spun to follow. The firing mechanism attached to the gun’s trigger pulled back—

The Wildey fired with a colossal boom, the bullet narrowly missing Nina to blast a fist-sized chunk of bark out of a tree - but the effect of the gun’s recoil on the drone itself was nearly as damaging. It was thrown backwards, spinning wildly into another tree trunk. If its rotor blades had not been shrouded inside impact-resistant plastic its flight would have ended there; as it was, it bounced off and wobbled drunkenly back into a hover.

‘If you’re talking, you’re not reacting,’ Eddie said by way of terse explanation as he and Nina crashed through the bushes. Any animals nearby would certainly be able to hear them, but he hoped the tiger had reacted like the birds that had burst in fright from the trees and fled from the sound of the shot.

‘Where are we going?’ Nina panted.

‘Outer wall - I saw where we were on that map. There might be a way out.’

They emerged from the trees. Ahead was a twenty-foot grey concrete wall: the preserve’s boundary. About sixty feet distant Nina saw a ladder attached to the wall - but its lower section had been raised like that of a fire escape, the lowest rung almost twelve feet up. ‘Eddie, over there.’

‘If I give you a leg up, you can pull it down—’

A rifle cracked above them, the bullet kicking up a small explosion of earth at their feet. Two men with guns ran along the top of the wall, a third aiming another shot. Nina and Eddie bolted as a second round slammed into the dirt.

More gunfire spat from the wall as they ran. ‘Back into the trees!’ Eddie yelled.

‘That’s where the tiger is,’ Nina protested.

‘Tigers don’t have guns!’ He vaulted a fallen log back into the shadows, Nina just behind. The firing stopped. Eddie slowed, getting his bearings - and hunting for any nearby movement. The immediate area seemed tiger-free. ‘Okay, so the wall’s out - we need to get to another one of those bunkers. Next one was, er . . . this way.’

He pointed in what seemed to Nina to be a completely random direction. ‘You sure?’

‘Sure-ish.’ He set off. Nina looked round nervously in case anything striped and clawed was watching from the bushes, then scurried after him.

‘What do we do when we get to the bunker?’ she asked in a near-whisper. ‘We can’t lower the elevator from outside.’

‘If we nobble that drone and get my gun back, I can shoot out a window. There was a phone in that first bunker - if the others’re the same, we can call Mac or Kit. We just have to steer clear of Hobbes and his mates.’

A faint whine caught Nina’s attention. She looked up into the trees, but saw nothing. It had to be close, though; Khoil had boasted that the drone’s rotors were inaudible past six metres. ‘I can hear the plane.’

Eddie stopped. ‘Where?’

‘Up there somewhere.’ She pointed.

‘I can’t hear it.’ He stared intently into the foliage, seeing nothing.

The noise grew louder. ‘It’s definitely there,’ Nina hissed. ‘There, there!’

‘Wait, I hear it—’ Eddie began, only to stop as the drone dropped down through a gap in the branches and hovered ten feet away. It turned slightly, pointing the gun at him . . .

But it didn’t fire.

‘What’s it waiting for?’ he wondered out loud.

Nina tugged frantically at his arm. He turned his head - and saw a bush, no more than fifteen feet away, lazily lean over with a faint crackle of bending branches as something pressed against it.

Something large.

‘Uh . . . tiger,’ Nina whispered. ‘There’s a goddamn tiger behind that bush!’

Eddie was already looking elsewhere. ‘That tree,’ he said, nudging her. Off to one side was a broad saman tree, its thick trunk forking a few feet above the ground, providing a step. ‘Move towards it, slowly.’

He put himself between Nina and the predator, then they sidled towards the tree. The bush became still. ‘I can see it,’ Nina whispered, voice tremulous. A shape had taken on form amongst the slashes of sunlight and shadow, crouching low behind the bent branches. Black lines over white and orange converged around a pair of intense yellow eyes, watching them unblinkingly. She remembered that tigers were lone hunters, silent stalkers that observed their prey carefully before springing into a sudden, deadly strike . . . as this one was doing. Fear squeezed at her chest. ‘Oh, shit, Eddie, I can see it.’

‘Me too.’ Only more five feet to the tree - but the tiger could cover the gap in a single leap. It slowly raised its