The Lost Island E-Book

Paul Kearney

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

Strange anomalies are ripping holes in the fabric of time, allowing creatures from distant past and far future to roam the modern world. Evolutionary zoologist Nick Cutter and his team must track down and capture these dangerous creatures and try to put them back where they belong. A trawler is torn to pieces by an enormous sea monster off the Irish coast. Meanwhile Connor's anomaly detector is going off the charts: half a dozen rifts in time have appeared, all on one deserted — yet politically contentious — island. Cutter and the team find themselves stranded on a storm-ridden island fighting to survive amidst the terrifying creatures roaming the harsh landscape...

Leseprobe

Also available in the Primeval series:

SHADOW OF THE JAGUAR

By Steven Savile

EXTINCTION EVENT

By Dan Abnett

FIRE AND WATER

By Simon Guerrier

PRIMEVAL

THE LOST ISLAND

PAUL KEARNEY

TITAN BOOKS

Primeval: The Lost Island

ISBN: 9781848568983

Published by

Titan Books

A division of

Titan Publishing Group Ltd

144 Southwark St

London

SE1 0UP

First edition October 2008

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Primeval © 2008 Impossible Pictures.

Cover imagery: A big wave breaks the foam and spray highlighted by the sun © Shutterstock.

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A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group UK Ltd.

To Marie

Contents

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

FOURTEEN

FIFTEEN

SIXTEEN

SEVENTEEN

EIGHTEEN

NINETEEN

TWENTY

TWENTY-ONE

TWENTY-TWO

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ONE

With a cough and a mutter, the engine died. They were 300 nautical miles out into the North Atlantic.

“Damn it, Michael; see to that. Did you clean the plugs?”

“I cleaned the plugs, Da,” Michael replied, shouting to be heard over the din of the storm. “It’s the bloody engine.”

“There’s nothing wrong with that engine, boy.”

“Aye, apart from it being forty years old.”

“Don’t you backchat me now. We’re wallowing. Get down there.”

They stood glaring at each other across the wheelhouse. Michael Mackey, black-haired and six-feet tall in his socks, thumped one broad fist into the binnacle console, then turned and went down the hatch behind them.

His father, James, puffed on his roll-up until the tip glowed yellow in the murky dimness of the dusk. One hand light on the ships wheel, he leaned forward and stared through the salt-streaked glass of the wheelhouse windows. Under him, the big, broad-beamed trawler rose and fell like a toy duck in a bathtub. The Cormorant was sixty-feet long, wooden-built. It had been his father’s boat, and one day it would be Michael’s, unless the Atlantic had its say first.

James rubbed his hand over a grey-stubbled chin, and then thumbed the intercom.

“Kieran, are you awake?”

After a moment the intercom crackled back at him.

“Aye — who wouldn’t be? We’re being thrown about like a baby’s rattle down here.”

“Get down to the engine, give Michael a hand. It’s quit on us again.”

“Jesus, Skipper.”

“Get on with it. And get the rest up. Survival suits, the whole heap. Best be careful.”

“Right-ho. She’s picked a hell of a night to give up on us.”

James lifted his thumb.

“She’s not given up on us yet,” he snarled aloud.

The roar of the gale was deafening, the merciless thunder of the waves. The Cormorant was running for home with the wind on her starboard quarter — just behind James’s left ear. All around her the sea was a vast rolling landscape of broken hills fringed with white foam. That was a twenty-five-foot swell out there, the wave tops higher than the boat’s antenna.

The trawler fought her way up the steep sliding back of each wave, the bow plunging as she came over the crest. The wind struck her stern at the top, so she slewed round a little, and James fought stubbornly, swearing and praying together as he wrenched at the wheel and the boat came sliding and plunging down the far side of the wave. The wind cut off, and the course was running true again. If the wind were to push her broadside-on at the crest of any wave, then the one behind it would swamp her, catch her beam-on and likely capsize her.

“After such a catch, too,” James said bitterly, his cigarette spitting sparks as he sucked on it. The hold was full, good-sized cod and haddock, the best catch they’d taken in months. They were paying for it now, though.

Without propulsion, there was little they could do but set the trawler before the wind and hope to ride out the gale until Michael got the engines started again. The gale was hammering them off course, south and east, towards the Bay of Biscay. It was damn near as bad as the Atlantic for storms.

Kieran Fitzsimon lurched into the wheeldeck, hauling himself up the companionway. He was grinning, his freckled face white under a shock of ginger hair.

“It’s fifty knots out there, or I’m a Dutchman,” he shouted. “You ever been out in one like this before, Skipper?”

James smiled unwillingly. Kieran’s simple-headed enthusiasm was impossible to resist. “Too many. I’m too old now to see the funny side of it.”

“Ah, sure, where’s your sense of adventure? You were right, so you were, about the cod run. We hit them right where you thought. When we get home we’ll be rich.”

“Rich,” James said dubiously. He grunted, tugging on the wheel, resisting the battery of sea and wave as the trawler rose up another crest to be slammed by the full force of the storm. The boat tilted to port thirty degrees. An empty coffee mug flew off the console and shattered on the deck.

Kieran, bright red hair in a bright orange survival suit, went tumbling into the bulkhead, landing with a dull thud, and clung there looking even more dazed than usual. James stood like a planted stone, teeth bared, his cigarette champed in two. Profanities hissed through his teeth as he fought with the wheel.

The ship slewed round, then back again, like a car skidding on an oily road, only thirty tons heavier. Then they were in the calm of the leeward side, with the bow pointed down into a dark abyss of raging water, the trough of the wave.

James stared into it with the sweat beading on his face, and for a second he could have sworn that he saw a light there, deep in the dark heart of the water. Just a momentary glitter.

He wiped his eyes, breathing heavily.

“Kieran, you all right?”

“Fine Skipper.” He was rubbing the side of his face ruefully.

“Get down below and see how Michael’s getting on. Tell him we need power soon, or we’re —” He paused. “Just tell him.”

“I will.” Shaking his head like a boxer who’d received a shrewd blow, Kieran navigated the companionway aft.

James Mackey spat out the mangled remains of his roll-up. He longed to light another, but there was no letting go of the wheel now, not for a second. He swore under his breath, cursing his bitch of a ship, yet praising her, and cajoling her as though she were a woman he was trying to seduce.

Outside, the North Atlantic widow-maker raged on. He glanced to the side, at the bright, flickering screen of the weather map. There was a great, whirling white funnel west of Ireland; he was standing in the middle of it, like a bug caught in the gyrations of a washing machine.

“We’re too far out,” he whispered. The Cormorant wasn’t made for these seas. She’d been built for the coastal fishing grounds to the west of Bantry Bay. James had deliberately set out to try the further grounds. The East Thulean Rise was an undersea shelf that rose up some four hundred miles west of Cork. The cod had been there, in the slightly shallower waters of the shelf where there was an abundance of food for them. The Cormorant had filled her hold in a matter of hours, and had been motoring back at full speed when the storm hit. The system had been too big to skirt around, so James had plunged his boat and her crew into the middle of it, trusting to his skill, to luck, and the well-made timbers of his father’s vessel.

There was a thumping growl from below aft as the diesels began to churn for a minute, sounding like bad-tempered beasts. Then they stopped again, followed by a distant curse and the clang of metal thumping on metal. Michael was a wizard with anything mechanical, but he had his mother’s temper.

Never again, James thought to himself as the cold sweat slimed his spine. Never again. It’s inshore work for me from now on. I’m too old for this.

As the boat shuddered under his feet, bucking up and then crashing down again, James thought for an instant he had seen something in the arc of the bridge lights, something which wasn’t water or the explosive spray of the great waves. It seemed to roll over in the sea to his front, a momentary glistening glimpse of some huge shape. He clenched shut his tired eyes for a few seconds, and the light spangled red behind his eyelids.

When he opened them again there was just the black and white fury of the sea, the bow of the trawler rising and falling before him, crashing through it, the water flooding aft as though seeking to bury her.

God, I’m tired, James thought. Tiredness does things to you.

He peered at the radar, but it was a fuzzy mess: fish, currents of warm and cold water, even containers washed off the decks of cargo ships. The sea was full of life, the depths of it as populated as any city that man had made, and, at the same time, it was more of a wilderness than the most remote icecap. There were vast swathes of the seabed around the world that had never been sounded or mapped, where man had never gone and would never go. James remembered his own father telling him that, at home by the peat fire while a widow-maker like this one had lashed the thatch of the house around their heads.

“The sea will give up its riches freely,” he had said. “But it always exacts payment for them in the end.”

The engines farted, muttered, and then began a full-throated snarling. There was a halloo from down below, a shout of triumph. Even up here, James could hear Kieran’s chortled laughter. He grinned and hit the throttles.

Under him, the Cormorant came to life again. She began to power forward into the waves, no longer a bathtub duck, but a thing with force and strength in her. The hull creaked and groaned as James tilted the spokes of the wheel to starboard, fighting to get back on course.

The waves seemed to resent this impertinence. They slammed into the trawler like angry monsters, and cannoned up the ship’s side in white explosions of spray, drenching the foredeck and streaming along the wheelhouse windows. Grimly, James fought the wheel, feeling the rudder bite astern, feeling the thrum of the overworked engines as they cranked around the propeller shaft.

A clanking on the deck, and Michael was back at his side, pale face smeared with grease, hands black with it. He stank of diesel and old seawater and his hair was dripping into his eyes.

“The seams are opening. I’ve got the bilge pumps at full blast, but the water’s pouring in. She won’t take this course. The engine won’t either. Da, we have to ride this one out.”

“The hell we do,” James grunted. “This thing could blow us all the way to France. If we don’t fight it, we’ll be a week at sea, and the fish’ll be rotten.”

“Better the fish than us.”

“I know what I’m doing Mike. Leave me to it. You just keep that bloody engine running.”

A huge impact slammed the ship aside. Down below they could hear the three other crewmen cursing and shouting. Michael and his father clung to the binnacle as the Cormorant seemed to stop in her tracks for a moment, before swinging round to port. She was near the crest of a wave, and for a few moments her rudder was out of the water and the wheel circled freely whilst the engines whined at the prop shaft.

Then she came down again, hammering into the trough of the wave like a toy boat dropped by a bored child. The bow went under, green water foaming up six-feet deep to the very wheelhouse windows. The ship groaned around them, her timbers screaming, bending, the sea pummelling them. The wheelhouse door burst open and in came the North Atlantic, foaming and hungry. In a second they were knee-deep.

“She’s going!” Michael yelled, his face a mask of white terror.

“No she won’t,” his father bellowed, and he stood at the wheel again. He yanked back on the throttle, gunning the engines to bursting point. “Close that bloody door!”

The trawler whirled round in the broken fury of the waves. Michael charged the door and managed to push it shut on the hungry water. He turned the bolt and hung on to it as the Cormorant bucked like an angry horse and his father stood fixed at the wheel, almost a part of the ship itself.

The bow rose slowly, slowly, tons of water streaming aft. They were going up the back of the next wave.

They were afloat.

They were alive.

“What the hell was that?” Michael rasped. “It felt like a collision.” From below, the rest of the crew were shouting at one another. The intercom crackled. “Skipper, we’ve a hull-timber stove-in and half cracked. What in the world hit us?”

“The sea hit us,” James Mackey said through grinding teeth. “The sea and all that’s in it. Michael, rig the spare pumps, and see what can be done to plug her side. Quickly now.”

“Maybe it was a submarine,” Michael offered. “I’ve heard of things like that happening.” He hauled himself to the radio, and clicked it on again. At once, the hiss of static filled the wheelhouse.

“You think there’s a sub on the surface, on a night like this? I don’t know what it was, a drifting container most likely. We were lucky.” He glanced at his son. “For God’s sake stop twiddling with that thing. We must have damaged the aerial. I already tried, and got nothing out of it at all.”

“The aerial’s fine; I checked not ten minutes ago. Maybe it’s the storm, the waves.”

“You know better than that. We’re on our own Michael, no one can hear us out here, and there’s only ourselves to pull us through it. Get below now, and keep this bitch afloat for me.”

“Da,” Michael said. He looked very young now, washed out and frightened. “Da, do you think —”

“Get below son. We’ll be all right. It’ll be dawn soon. This thing’ll blow itself out, you’ll see.”

Michael left the wheelhouse. His father stared out at the sea before him, that pathless wilderness. He flicked on every exterior light the boat possessed, but all they illuminated was a wrack of broken, foaming water, and the slate-grey backs of the immense waves as they coursed endlessly before the wind. There was nothing out there, nothing but the angry Atlantic.

And in the lurching wheelhouse of the boat, the useless crackle of the radio went on and on.

TWO

“Why don’t you leave it alone?” Abby asked, her voice exasperated. She ran a hand through her spiky bob of platinum-blonde hair. She looked, Connor thought, like an angry dandelion. The thought made him grin. Lying on the steel-plated floor, he pushed further into the casing of the anomaly detector so she wouldn’t see, and blinked as the forest of wires came scratching round his face.

“I can do it; just leave me to it. It won’t be long.”

“We’re offline, Connor. Lester will go through the roof, to say nothing of Cutter.” She folded her arms, tapping her foot impatiently, but he didn’t reply. There was a grunt, then the sound of wires being snipped.

“Connor?”

“Hand me the soldering iron will you, Abby? I’m nearly done, promise.”

Deep in the bowels of the machine he had created, Connor extended his hand out, opened wide in fingerless gloves. The soldering iron slapped into his palm.

“Ah, thanks Abs.”

“You’re welcome,” a man’s voice said in a low Scottish brogue.

Connor froze, blinked, then extricated himself from the wiring compartment, with his best sheepish grin on his face.

“Professor, I didn’t know you were —” but the older man didn’t give him a chance.

“Connor, what the hell are you doing?” Cutter snapped. He and Abby stood under the harsh lights of the Anomaly Research Centre, both in exactly the same pose; arms folded, heads down, eyes glaring at Connor as he lay there with fragments of circuit boards and snips of multicoloured wire surrounding him, and a smell of burning as the forgotten soldering iron scorched a hole in his waistcoat.

Connor stood up hurriedly, yelped as the soldering iron stung his fingers, and slapped at the thin line of smoke proceeding from his clothes.

“I have a theory,” he said quickly, glancing at the hole in his vest and brushing away smoldering fragments of cloth. “It’s like this —”

“How long has it been offline?” Cutter asked Abby, pointedly ignoring Connor’s protests.

“About an hour.”

Cutter stared at her.

“An hour and a half,” she admitted.

“This had best be a very quick theory, Connor,” Cutter said.

“You see, I think I can improve the accuracy, periodically, temporarily,” Connor said, tripping over the words. His hands were extended towards Cutter, like those of a supplicant. His absurd porkpie hat was planted firmly on his head, and below it his stringy black hair looked in need of a wash.

“Go on, quick now,” Cutter pressed him.

“I’ve redirected a few of the console energy sources, the ones which are just jam really; they make the lights blink and whatnot. I can pulse the mainframe for short bursts and —” He hesitated. “Well, I won’t really know if it’ll make much difference until I try it. But in theory —”

“This is not a Meccano set, Connor,” Cutter said. “This thing is important.”

“But it’ll work, I know it will. I’m nearly done here, Professor. A few more minutes and I can give the mainframe a pulse. Just one shot — that’s all I ask.”

“This pulse of augmented energy —”

“Well, it’s not just juice. I’ve rewritten the basic code to compensate for it, electronically. Simple, really. You just —”

“You’ve rewritten the basic software of the detector?” Cutter’s ginger eyebrows shot up his forehead.

“Well, just a little,” he admitted awkwardly.

Cutter turned away, and stared back at the great plate-glass windows that surrounded the well in which the anomaly detector rested. The detector itself looked like the most desirable home-cinema system ever invented, married to a block of grey steel cupboards which concealed the thing’s innards. No one in the surrounding offices was looking their way; no one had yet noticed that the usually blue flickering screens of the detector were now black.

Cutter turned back, his jaw set, the ever-present lines under his eyes accentuated by the harsh lighting.

“Connor, I don’t suppose you’ve ever heard of the saying, ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’?” Cutter asked.

“Aw Professor, how can we make progress if we don’t tinker with things, see what they’re capable of? Where would the fun be?”

Cutter looked back at the detector. It appeared as though a fair tranche of its guts had been yanked out, chopped up, and scattered over the floor in fragments of copper wiring, discarded transistors, and brightly coloured rubber insulation.

“God Almighty, Connor, if you’ve broken this thing, Lester will have you banged up for life.”

Thus encouraged, Connor dropped to his knees, one hand scrabbling for the smoking soldering iron.

“Ten minutes, Professor — fifteen at most. And then I’ll have her up and running again. Honest.”

“Get on with it,” Cutter said with an unwilling smile, and when Connor grinned up at him, he snapped, “Well, go on!”

Connor disappeared back into the belly of the machine. Abby shook her head.

“Can’t we just put him in a room with some Lego?”

“He built it,” Cutter replied, his voice low, careful not to let the younger man hear him. “He knows what it can do.”

The wind had dropped a little, James thought, and there was a grey light in the sky that hadn’t been there a half hour before. Dawn wasn’t far off.

“Long night,” his son said, braced against the wheelhouse door with water still swirling ankle-deep about him. He had donned his orange survival suit, as had all of the crew. Kieran liked to joke that it went with his hair, while the two Murnahan brothers were too small to properly fill theirs out.

“Long night,” James agreed. His eyes were stinging with salt and tiredness. “Light me up one, will you Michael?”

His son extracted a bruised roll-up from the tin on the binnacle and lit it with a plastic lighter, puffing blue smoke and grimacing.

“These things’ll kill you,” he said to his father as he set it between the older man’s lips.

“Not today they won’t,” James Mackey answered, sucking down the smoke gratefully.

Under them, the Cormorant was moving more like a rational thing now. The waves she rode upon were still monsters, but the wind no longer threatened to broach them every time they came up upon the crests. It was still pulling thirty knots, but that was nothing sensational for the North Atlantic at this time of year. The shriek of it, the roar of the sea, now competed with the snarling rattle of the engines and the dull thud of the bilge pumps working nonstop.

The ship was alive. She was fighting the water and the wind with a valour that warmed James Mackey’s heart.

Kieran came up the companionway, splashing through the water.

“We’re holding our own,” he said. He no longer had to shout so loud to be heard. “The extra pumps did the trick, though Liam and Sean are about to have their arms drop off with the pumping.”

“What do we have?” James asked him.

“There’s a foot still in her down there, but we’re keeping pace with it. What’s our position, Skipper?”

James nodded to Michael. But he didn’t take his eyes off the great swells breaking before him, the bow powering up them as though the ship were climbing the black, shining back of some vast beast. His son bent over the GPS screen, tapping it with an impatient forefinger.

“We’re 240 miles out, south-southwest of Bantry.” He checked the weather on the other screen; the meteorological station at Cork Coastguard updated it every few minutes. “Guns Island is twenty-five miles to the northwest of us.”

“Thank God we missed that,” James said, puffing. “I’ve heard tell of ships than ran full tilt upon it with a northeaster at their backs. It’s so black you can’t see it at night.”

“I thought it had a beacon,” Kieran said.

“It did, but it’s been out of commission for months now. They’re arguing over who owns it, us or the French, so no one’s allowed to go out and fix it until it’s settled in Brussels. So I hear anyway.”

“I heard the Brits took it during the war, and made a secret base on it,” Michael said.

“Don’t believe all you hear. There’s nothing on it now but about a million gannets, and it has thousand-foot cliffs all around. Whoever wants it can have it, as far as I’m concerned.”

“Two forty miles,” Kieran said. “What speed are we pulling, Skipper?”

“Twenty knots.”

“Will we make it in before the catch spoils?”

“With a little luck, and if —”

Suddenly a massive concussion knocked them all off their feet. The ship shuddered, and groaned like a living thing, slewing round in the water. From below, the voices of the Murnahan brothers sounded out in fear and pain.

“What the hell?” Michael yelled, splashing around in the flooded wheelhouse on his hands and knees.

Another crash, this time deep in the hull. It was as though something was butting against the timbers of the ship, like a bull charging a gate. The Cormorant was shoved side-on through the water, and the angry waves she rode upon fountained up in explosive geysers of spray as the keel smashed through them.

The trawler canted to starboard, and in the wheelhouse James, Michael and Kieran tumbled over each other like sacks, cannoning into the bulkhead. James’s head struck a stanchion hard, and it was opened up in a red flower of blood, a spray that painted his son’s face scarlet in a second.

“Da!” Michael screamed.

Another crash, this time on the bows. The stern of the ship rose out of the water and foaming green seas swallowed up her bow. Above the chaotic bellow of the storm another sound arose — an animal roar.

The windows of the wheelhouse were smashed in and the sea rushed through, a white fury of surging water. In seconds the wheelhouse was waist-deep, then chest-deep. The water poured down the companionway and flooded the lower compartments, the engine room. It filled the ship, killing the diesels, drowning the batteries.

The lights went out. The Cormorant, groaning in protest, tilted further to starboard, like a tired animal laying down its head.

Michael Mackey reared his head up above the water.

“Da! Kieran!” A body in a survival suit was floating face down before him in the dim grey light of the shattered wheelhouse. He grabbed at it, but then something huge and dark came crashing clear through the bulkhead, smashing through the nine-inch timbers as though they were kindling; something like a black missile. With it came a noisome smell, like that of ancient, rotting seaweed, or fish left in the sun.

Michael saw teeth like spearheads, a glimpse of a red maw, and then it withdrew again. He stared, frozen in shock, and the water rose up to cover his head.

The Cormorant rolled over with a long, rending groan of laboured timber, capsizing as the hundreds of tons of water within her finally dragged her down. A great wave washed over her upturned hull, and the hole which had been smashed through it.

As the ship went down, Michael scrambled out of the broken wheelhouse, lungs bursting, mind white and empty with the shock of it all. The survival suit lifted him, and his life jacket inflated about his shoulders, drawing him upwards, away from the wrecked carcass of the doomed trawler. He gave a great whoop as he broke surface, sucking in air and spray, coughing as the salt water fouled his mouth.

He bobbed there in the grim grey light of the hour before dawn, the strobe on his life jacket blinking, the cold of the Atlantic penetrating even the rubber confines of his suit.

“Da!” he screamed to the racing sky. “Kieran!” But there was no answer.

And then something broke the surface beside him. So vast was it that for a second he thought the trawler was coming up again. A sleek black shape, forty, fifty — perhaps sixty feet long, black as a submarine. Michael stared wide-eyed and frozen at it in the spray-lashed morning. Even as he watched, it submerged again. He caught a glimpse of a blunt tail. There were no flukes on it — this was not a whale — and then it was gone.

He floated alone again in the middle of the desolate Atlantic, the cold water slowly taking him to his death, his mind as numb as his freezing limbs. Why wouldn’t the radio work?

It was the last conscious thought of his life.

THREE

“Do I have to ask what’s going on, or is someone going to be good enough to tell me?” James Lester demanded. He stood twiddling the signet ring on his little finger, his Dunhill suit hanging impeccably from his shoulders.

“I see the cleaners have been doing their usual bang-up job,” he added, peering at the jumble of wire and plastic circuit boards that littered the floor.

“We’ve been adjusting the anomaly detector,” Cutter told him. “Just some fine-tuning. Everything’s fine.”

“Fine,” Connor repeated, grinning nervously.

Lester looked at the blue screens of the detector, pursing his lips.

“What a meaningless word that is. Everything’s fine nowadays, when it’s not okay. Yet it looks to me — a layman — like our little programmer here has been playing with a toy which doesn’t belong to him...”

“I built this — I made — I mean, I wasn’t doing anything wrong.” Connor started out indignant, but at the look on Lester’s face, he subsided to a mutter.

“So long as it’s working,” Lester said with a touch of weariness edging his voice. “Is this all you brought me down here for, to look at the litter on the floor?”

“We’re about to try something,” Cutter said. “We thought you should be here. Clau...” He paused for an instant. “Jenny and Stephen are on their way.”

Lester caught the verbal slip, and stared at Cutter, his pale face intent for a moment.

“I trust you’re feeling well, Cutter? No mindstorms, no little lapses of rationality?”

“I’m fine — perfectly in the pink,” Cutter responded with a snarl in his voice.

“Glad to hear it.” Turning away, Lester beckoned over a white-clad technician who had been hovering in the background, clipboard at the ready. “Make yourself useful, man. Bring me a coffee. Black, no sugar.” And when he hesitated, Lester snapped, “Run along now. I pay your wages you know.”

The man sped off.

“Well, I send in appropriations at any rate,” Lester said with a shrug. Then he smiled a little. He had a gift for it, smiling without humour. He leaned forward and stared at the cluster of flat, flickering screens that were the displays of the anomaly detector. Upon them, maps of the United Kingdom wheeled back and forth, and tables of figures and graphs of undulating frequencies came and went. “It looks just the same as always to me.”

“There’s a new button on the console,” Connor volunteered. “The red one, just there — but don’t touch it!”

“I have no intention of doing so,” Lester said, straightening. “Civil servants and red buttons do not go well together. I shall be perfectly happy to leave it to you.” He looked at his watch. “But not for much longer. Cutter, I’m a busy man —”

The clack of heels on concrete made him turn his head. Jenny Lewis came walking down the reinforced ramp which led to the central well of the ARC. She was wearing a short skirt, an ivory-coloured blouse and a string of pearls. Her dark hair was tied up in a bun and she strode down the ramp as though it were a catwalk, head held high, eyes flashing. All three men standing around the detector paused to watch her, their gaze travelling from her legs to her face and back again.

Abby rolled her eyes.

“I was in a meeting,” Jenny said. “What’s so all-fired important?” Behind her Stephen Hart jogged down the ramp, t-shirt sticking to his lean torso, sweat shining his smooth, clean-shaven face. His eyes were bright beneath dark brows.

“And I was out for a run,” he said. Behind him, at the top of the ramp, the technician reappeared.

“You carry your mobile when you’re running?” Abby asked him.

He held it up, breathing heavily.

“Of course. You never know when some enthusiastic person is going to call you and tell you to drop everything,” he said tartly. “So what’s the rush? There’s no alarm is there?”

“We’re here to watch Connor press a red button,” Lester said dryly. He accepted his coffee, waved the technician away without thanks, and grimaced as he tasted it. “All right Professor, we’re all here, so dazzle us.”

Cutter looked at Connor and raised an eyebrow.

“She’s your baby,” he said, not sounding entirely confident.

“Try not to electrocute yourself,” Abby said.

“Very funny,” Connor retorted. He licked his lips and set a finger on the red button. “Now what’s going to happen here is that —”

“Just do it, Connor,” Cutter snapped.

Connor pressed the button.

And around them, all hell broke loose.

The Sea King bulled its way through the storm like an angry dragon. Painted a bright red-pink, the helicopter belonged to the Irish Coast Guard, and was on the last leg of its search box, snarling its way across the North Atlantic at 200 feet, the pilot swearing as he fought to keep the aircraft straight and level.

“Eleven minutes to PONR,” the copilot’s voice crackled, and the pilot nodded, scalp sweating under the heavy helmet, his flying gloves soaking up more perspiration as they grasped the cyclic and collective. He turned his wrist a little, and the massive Rolls Royce Gnome turbines roared harder as the throttle was opened. The wind was trying to force the helicopter’s nose up, and the pilot was continually inching the cyclic down to maintain forward flight.

“Windspeed fifty-six knots,” the copilot said.

“I need a beer,” Jeff, the pilot, told him, grinning weakly while his eyes were fixed out of the rain-lashed windows.