Mission Jaguar Page 3

  “Whatever you say, Ric,” she murmured, and finished off her fish and guacamole.

  After lunch it was back into the limo, back onto the streets — and not back to the hotel. That was when the worry began to settle in for her.

  “Just a few more details to take care of …” Ric said, answering the question on her face as they pulled up in front of an office block. “You and Silvio wait here.”

  And 4pm was approaching — the time specified in her secret text message. She felt the first faint tingles of doubt. If she missed this, she might not ever get as good a chance. It had to happen while she was in the city. They were all due to go back to Jaguar in the morning …

  She shifted in her seat, getting an amused smirk from Silvio.

  “Patience, baby doll.”

  She pulled out her phone — the official phone, the one Ric knew about — and looked up the company on the front of the building. As far as she could see they dealt with electronics exports and imports. That wouldn’t surprise anyone. Everyone knew Ric kept Jaguar Studios fitted out with the latest tech, and anyone who stopped to think about it would realise most of it came from the United States, so had to be imported.

  But did he have to choose today to do business face to face?

  The phone’s clock clicked over, digit by digit, getting ever closer to four p.m., and she felt her hands get a little clammy with sweat.

  Her one chance to escape, to get away from Ric and Silvio and everything that controlled her life, and she was about to lose it …

  Chapter Nine

  She almost yelped with relief when she saw Ric coming back across the forecourt. He dropped into his seat and gave one word to the driver over the intercom.

  “Hotel.”

  Forty-five minutes to go …

  … and more than thirty of them were used up crawling through the city’s traffic. One thing Ric couldn’t do for all his money was clear the roads ahead of him.

  The car pulled up in front of the hotel at five minutes to four, and she almost leaped out. But the one thing she didn’t want to do at this point was show energy.

  She sat back in her seat and tenderly rubbed her forehead.

  “My head’s killing me,” she announced. “I think I need a lie-down.”

  The two men gazed at her quizzically.

  “So where did this come from?” Ric asked. She faked a stab of pain across her face.

  “It’s the aircon in the malls. It dries you out. I probably didn’t drink enough water.” She smiled weakly. “Sorry, Ric. I’ll try to make it to dinner.”

  Ric loved to have her on display in public. He would have made a fuss if there was a chance she wouldn’t make dinner. But her promise put him in a good mood. He waved a hand nonchalantly.

  “Of course you will. See you then.”

  And she was free.

  Silvio had to unload the car and Ric wanted to talk to the manager, so she could get into a lift ahead of them.

  She didn’t bother going up to her suite. No time, and she had already resigned herself to travelling just in what she was wearing. She had her passport in her bag and Kim had made all the other arrangements.

  So she just pressed the button for one floor up, got out when it stopped, and ran to the stairs down back to the foyer. At the bottom she peered carefully through the small window in the fire door and spied the backs of Ric and Silvio waiting for their own lift. She forced herself to wait until not only had the doors slid shut but the floor indicator showed the lift was moving.

  Then she stepped out, walked breezily across the foyer, gave a friendly nod to the doorman and emerged at precisely four p.m.

  It couldn’t have gone better. A yellow taxi, number 2338 painted on its sides, drew up and she got in. It started to drive.

  She was away. Her journey had begun.

  Chapter Ten

  For a few minutes she just sat, twisted round, watching the hotel recede. She had actually done it! Kim had come through.

  Kim wasn’t here in person now, because Ric had his spies and would know if she even entered the country. But she had friends and she had been able to pull strings from abroad. She had arranged all of this.

  The phone buzzed again, and this time it was Kim sending a string of instructions and ticket booking numbers. She said the taxi driver had been paid and would take her to the heliport, where a helicopter would take her to San José on the coast. She couldn’t fly out via La Aurora, Guatemala City’s international airport, because it would be the first place Ric would look. She had to get to another airport that also had flights to the States.

  Ten minutes later they were at the heliport. She tipped the driver with a 100 quetzal note and hurried into the terminal.

  Everything was electronic. She just had to show the number on her phone and she was booked in. The helicopter was a specially chartered flight, poised on its skids outside with its rotors ready to go. It was a small six-seater Bell but the only seats were taken by her and the pilot. He helped her strap in to her seat at the back of the small cabin, and passed her a headset. The interior of a helicopter in flight is a noisy place and she would need the phones to hear anything he said.

  Five minutes after arriving at the terminal, she was lifting up into the air. The terminal fell away. She could see the taxi she had come in. She raised her eyes and watched the spread of Guatemala City come into view, and then start to recede.

  It was the most amazing sight she had ever seen.

  I’m doing it. I’m actually doing it …

  The helicopter circled and turned to face the south-west. The coast was about eighty kilometres away, which meant maybe thirty minutes flying, taking them over the band of volcanoes and beyond.

  She scooted herself over to the right hand seat of the helicopter’s small cabin so that she could watch the volcanoes approach, silhouetted against the lowering sun. As the helicopter flew near, the cones rose slowly above layers of cloud and mist, their craters the dark mouths of giant worms buried beneath the surface of the earth.

  Closer still, and she could see the fields of blasted, grey-brown ash. It had to be like Mars down there, she thought — barren and desolate. But, unlike Mars, also very active. Streams of red hot lava trickled slowly down one of the cones like glowing worms crawling to freedom, a stark contrast to the verdant green of the jungle below. The helicopter wasn’t airtight so she could feel the heat blowing up, smell the sulphur in the air. All the tourist trekkers would have gone home for the day by now. There would be nothing alive down there …

  The helicopter lurched. For a moment she thought it must have just been an air pocket, but then there was no doubt about it. They were dropping.

  “Hey, what’s happening?” she asked over the microphone. The pilot showed no reaction. She leaned forward to tap him on the shoulder and repeated the question.

  “Landing,” he said, his voice crackly in her ears through the phones.

  “Landing? Why?” She shot a glance at the instruments. Not that she was an expert, but nothing was pushing into the red. No alarms were sounding. The helicopter seemed to be working. “Why are we …”

  And then there was an alarm, but only she could hear it buzzing in her head.

  “Oh no.” She sat back in her seat, gazing dead ahead without seeing. Her jaw dropped as the suspicion began to worm its way towards certainty. “Oh no, oh no …”

  By the time they landed, she knew.

  Kim hadn’t planned this bit. She knew her stepmother too well. No, this had Ric written all over it. Ric had somehow found out about the plan and he had led her along to this point. Then he had stepped in and changed it, right at the point she thought she was getting away with it, just so that she would feel the final disappointment all the more.

  The helicopter touched down below the summit of the volcano on a roughly level patch of ground. The downwash from the rotors kicked dirt and dust up into the air so that the helicopter sat at the centre of its own personal whirlwind.
r />   The pilot turned around without expression and passed her an envelope.

  “You take this and you get out.”

  She looked out at the dead lava fields. Nothing else alive out there …

  “And if I don’t?” she whispered.

  “Then I throw you out anyway.”

  “I guess you’ve been pre-hired, so to speak,” she said dully.

  “Loyal to the boss,” he replied wryly.

  She snatched the letter from him, opened it, though she could already guess the content and the tone, if not the exact words.

  ‘I figured you would need to cool off. Although maybe I was wrong and you need to warm up instead. R’

  He had known. He had known every step of the way.

  “Stand back when I take off, or the blast could blow you off this damned volcano,” the pilot warned impatiently.

  “Gee, thanks for the kind advice.”

  There was nothing else she could do. He was bigger and stronger. She had her personal alarm, but what good would that do? No other humans for miles around. She had no choice.

  She opened the door, climbed down, retreated to a safe distance and crouched down. The engine roared and she ducked her head from the swirling blast of hot air and chips of lava.

  The storm subsided, the helicopter was a receding light in the sky, and suddenly she was all alone on the flanks of an active volcano.

  This had not been in her plan.

  Chapter Eleven

  “I’m going to survive this, Ric!”

  She shouted it out loud, not that she expected anyone to hear it, but it helped her bolster her own courage.

  “I don’t know how this ends, but I’m not giving up here!”

  Brave words, she told herself, for someone stranded in a place where a step in the wrong direction could kill her. Now time for some brave actions.

  What did he want?

  What would satisfy him most would be to come back and find her where he left her, scared, broken, sobbing, promising to obey him from now on.

  Not going to happen. Time to start walking.

  He wouldn’t have had her dropped anywhere that she was likely to bump into someone else, so chances were she would have to go some serious distance before she found help. So she started walking, picking her way across the lava field in the direction of Guatemala City.

  The smell of the volcano was ten times stronger now that she was out in the open. Fumes and gases from the earth’s interior belched out into the clean, life-sustaining air of the surface. She was all too aware that carbon monoxide or sulphur, invisible to the human eye, could kill her, suffocating her in a second if she found herself in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  The ground she was walking on had once been molten rock, and she could still feel the heat coming up through it. She was walking on a solid crust above stuff so hot that it that could flow like hot toffee. She had to stick to the solid looking bits, but that was just a matter of guesswork and judgement. With every footstep, she had no idea if this could be the time her foot broke through into something that would scorch the flesh off all the way down to the bone.

  The crust had cooled into curved, twisted shapes that looked from a distance like they had been carved and polished. Up close you could see that wasn’t so. The surface was ridged in patterns like giant fingerprints, and the ridges were razor sharp so she could feel them pressing through her soles. She was only wearing casual city shoes — the most she had expected to do with her feet that day had been to wander around a couple of malls — and unless she walked with great care, an hour’s walking would reduce them to tatters. First the shoes, then her actual feet. She needed proper, tough, hiking footwear — but there was no point in yearning for what she didn’t have. To survive you have to make the most of what you have. She knew that much.

  The pain grew slowly. She was expecting it and at first she told herself to ignore it. It grew more and more insistent until every step seemed to make something inside her flare up.

  The lava ridges tenderising her feet were leaving multiple, thin lines of bruising across her soles. The strain of staying upright as she picked her way downhill was stretching every muscle she had, so that there was an intense knot of pain in the small of her back and her legs felt like hot metal rods had been inserted to replace the bones.

  Every step seemed to jar.

  She tried to think through why going down was hurting so much.

  Every step I take downhill makes me drop a little, so I’m absorbing more of an impact than if I was walking straight. Answer: crouch down. Keep the centre of gravity low. Make it so that I have less to drop.

  And so she switched her posture, hunching herself over as she went. And sure enough, it helped. Back and legs still ached but she had taken the main strain off them and it wasn’t hard to push the remaining pain into the background.

  But that was only one kind of hurting. Her tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth, her eyes stung and she could feel the strength draining from her like the last charge of a dead battery. She was wiped. When had she last had a drink of water? Of anything? Lunchtime? That had been hours ago. Down below, the humidity meant you couldn’t sweat properly. Up here you had the opposite problem — the thin, cool air was so dry and arid that it sucked the moisture out of you. She was dehydrating — and fast.

  She had no idea what reserves of water the average human body carries, but she knew she couldn’t go on like this forever. It would only be a few hours before she passed out and if no one found her, then she would never wake up again …

  Chapter Twelve

  After a while she was off the cooled rock and onto an older, gentler surface that solved one problem but brought along a whole new one.

  The ankle-catching, foot slashing ridges were gone but now she walked on smaller, finer grains of ash and pumice. Every step kicked up a dry cloud of particles that settled onto her shoes — her open, utterly unsuitable shoes — and worked its way into the cracks, then ground against her skin.

  She could feel the rough ash grinding away, every step slowly turning her feet a little bit more raw. And now it didn’t matter how low she crouched, the fact was that her whole weight ultimately came down to her feet, and every step made the stuff grind further into her flesh.

  But she wasn’t going to stop. She would wear both her feet into raw, bleeding stumps if she had to. She would keep going. Apart from the sheer principle of beating Ric’s expectations, there was a more practical matter. Sure, she could stop any time, but then what? She had no food, no drink, no shelter, and no ability to get any of them. After a night on the volcano, she could be so weakened by hunger, thirst and exposure that any kind of rescue would come too late.

  On the basic grounds that she didn’t know anything about surviving out in the wild, the only thing she could do was press ahead, conquer any sign of weakness, until she was safe with someone else who could supply what she needed.

  And the first thing she would do, she vowed, next time she was anywhere near civilisation, would be to learn some proper survival skills. Now that she had identified this gap in her knowledge — a gap she had never expected to be a problem — she would never allow herself to be in this kind of situation again.

  The jungle might have been getting closer, but she couldn’t tell. Twilight had come down and the world was being reduced to shades of grey, the darkest of all being the ground beneath her hobbling feet. The only sounds were her footsteps and the rattling of pumice fragments and the rush of wind moving across rock.

  Apart from that, there was not one single animal noise or human sound. The sheer silence seemed to roar in compensation.

  Something tall loomed ahead and resolved into a pine tree — a single, solitary specimen, self-rooted in the ash. Did that mean she was getting close? Or did pines just grow naturally up at this altitude? She didn’t know. It didn’t have any noticeable fruit — nothing moist and juicy to soak into her dry mouth.

  But it was a plant, so
it must be getting water from somewhere … mustn’t it? She studied it carefully, walking all the way around, but there was nothing. No sign of any stream or even a puddle fed by rain. Her mouth felt like dry leather and she would have settled for anything wet. She guessed it got its moisture out of the air itself, from rain and when the clouds hung low over the peak.

  She turned her face downhill again and pressed on.

  But then her nightmare came true and she was almost too tired to notice it happening.

  And despite everything, all her determination and resolve, she found herself almost crying when the white beam blazed down from above, picking her out in a circle of light, and the roaring morphed into the sound of a helicopter’s engine.

  The chopper settled onto the ground ahead of her, down the slope, and a figure climbed out of the front to wait with crossed arms, leaning against the fuselage.

  As she drew nearer she saw it was Silvio.

  “Lesson learnt?” he shouted over the noise of the rotors. She didn’t reply — part sullen silence, and part because her mouth was too dry to frame words. He held his hand out to her and shouted: “Phone.”

  It took a moment to realise what he meant. Then she silently handed her phone over.“In.”

  There was a two litre bottle of water waiting for her, and the moment she was strapped in she gulped half of it down almost without taking a breath.

  She wasn’t going to ask Silvio for help, so she took what remained of her shoes off, and her socks, and poured water over her feet, wiping away the ash with a scarf from her bag. They were red and bleeding from a score of tiny cuts and scratches, but they probably felt worse than they were, and should heal up with rest.

  By the time she was finished they were high up enough that only dark air surrounded them. There was no sign of the volcano behind, just the first glimmer of city lights ahead.