Divine Madness (34 page)

‘So?’ Lauren said. ‘What good does that do us?’

Rat smiled. ‘The truck comes in twice a week and pumps our sewage and waste water out of the tank. It backs up to a metal hatch on the
 
outside
 
and they attach a pipe to suck it out. You see the hatch when we do our morning run. It’s just past the fourth turret.’

‘I think I know the one you mean,’ said James. ‘It’s easily big enough to climb through.’

‘Hang on,’ Lauren said, raising her hands. ‘We’re talking about a sewer here, right? We’re talking about escaping by wading through the stuff that gets flushed down the toilet?’

James shrugged. ‘Lauren, there’s two sets of people with guns and we’re stuck between them. If there’s really a way out, I’m taking it.’

‘Well … I suppose,’ Lauren said uneasily.

‘What’s better?’ James asked. ‘Doing something gross or getting a bullet through your head?’

The three kids turned towards the door as a key clattered in the lock.

‘What are you three plotting?’ Georgie asked sarcastically, as she plunged a fat finger up her nose and slumped in a chair.

*

Dana got a fright as she stepped out of the bathroom. Nina was right outside the door.

‘Are you OK?’ Nina asked. ‘I keep hearing you moving around.’

Dana put a hand over her stomach. ‘Nervous tummy.’

Nina nodded. ‘What’s with the cord?’

This really put Dana on the spot. She considered laying Nina out, but her plan worked best if she had Barry’s gun in her hands before showing her true colours.

‘It fell out of the cupboard when we hit that big wave,’ Dana said, convinced she was giving the crappest excuse in history. ‘I thought I’d stick it in one of the cupboards in the mess so that no one trips over it.’

‘Right,’ Nina said. She clearly found this explanation odd. Fortunately her desire to pee was greater than her curiosity and she hurried into the bathroom.

Dana rushed out, cutting through the galley and the luxurious mess room. A blast of noise and sea air hit her as she slid open the glass door at the back of the mess and stepped on to the rear deck. There was light coming from inside, but it was still a fiddle getting the key into the lock and turning it. Eve and Nina would be able to climb out through one of the windows if they got suspicious, but the locked door would slow them down.

Dana headed briskly up a flight of stairs, ditching the bundle of cord at the top of the staircase before stepping on to the bridge. The small space was as luxurious as the rest of the boat, with leather seating along three sides and a chrome steering wheel set in the control panel at the front. The main lights were off and Barry stood in silhouette, bathed in the blue light coming off the instruments.

‘Hiya,’ Barry said cheerfully. ‘Come to pay me a visit?’

Dana smiled. ‘You don’t mind do you? I’m too wound up to sleep.’

‘Not much to see up here at night,’ Barry said. ‘You set the coordinates on the GPS and this baby finds its own way. You just have to keep an eye on the radar screen to make sure you don’t hit anything.’

‘It’s a fantastic boat,’ Dana said, as she stepped up to the steeply raked front screen and stared at the spray ripping up around the two hulls.

Barry shrugged. ‘It’s a good tool for our mission, but to be honest I find this kind of thing repulsive.’

‘Really?’

‘A media big shot owned this boat. Spent millions building it. After a few years he got a better one and sold it on. Now, anyone with ten thousand bucks in their pocket can hire it for a day. Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, there’s a little continent called Africa where millions of people die every year because they can’t get a few cents’ worth of medicine.’

‘I guess …’ Dana said, eyeing the gun tucked into Barry’s shorts and trying to think up the best way to get close. ‘I kept thinking about those two cops in the car earlier. I know they’re only devils, but they were just doing their job … You know?’

‘That’s the trouble with the world we live in, Dana. It’s full of people
 
just doing their job
 
and ignoring what’s really going on. Care about the rainforest until they get a couple of kids and enough money for a gas guzzling car, or some fancy hardwood dining furniture. Watch all those wildlife programmes and coo over the furry animals, but still eat meat and poultry that was raised in conditions of unbelievable cruelty. I’m sorry, but we live in a relatively free society. The facts are available, but people choose to ignore them. As far as I’m concerned, any educated person who works for the government or a big oil company is guilty through their own selective ignorance.’

Dana looked solemnly at the floor. ‘I guess I’m scared about what’s gonna happen.’

Barry turned towards Dana, one side of his face lit up blue by the control panel. ‘You’re going to do a fantastic thing in a couple of hours. Help Earth is fighting a war to help make the world a better place and you and the Survivors are part of that. You should be proud.’

As Barry said this, he stepped forwards and pulled Dana into a hug. It was
 
perfect
. Dana could feel the gun pressing into her waist as Barry’s hairy hand gently massaged her shoulderblade. She reached around to the back pocket of her shorts, slid out the aerosol and felt for the little dimple on the nozzle to make sure it was going to spray in the right direction.

The instant the hug broke apart, Dana whipped out the can and began squirting it in Barry’s face. Oven cleaner contains sodium hydroxide – a highly caustic substance that burns human skin as effectively as it dissolves the grease inside your oven.

As Barry staggered backwards with the bitter tasting foam bubbling around his eyes and mouth, Dana used her free hand to snatch his gun and expertly clicked off the safety.

‘On your knees, prick,’ Dana demanded. ‘Quickly.’

‘You’re
 
dead
,’ Barry shouted, as he desperately tried to scoop the burning foam out of his eyes.

‘That’s not how it looks from here,’ Dana said, as she turned the gun on its side and used it to punch Barry in the face. His nose burst and blood spattered Dana’s T-shirt as he splayed out over the leather cushions. She stood over him, pressed his head against the cockpit window and took two more slugs with the gun to knock him cold.

Barry’s face was pulped. Maybe the last punch had been one too many, but with adrenalin flowing and dozens of lives at stake, Dana figured it was better to be safe than sorry.

The hardest part of the job was done, but there was no time for self-congratulation. Dana ran out of the door at the back of the bridge and grabbed the bundle of nylon cord she’d dumped at the top of the stairs.

Back inside, she put the gun down on the cushion and dragged the unconscious body off the sofa on to the floor. As she knelt on Barry’s back, binding his wrists behind his back, the boat tilted violently and she slipped off.

It had been five years since Dana learned knot-tying in basic training and she struggled to remember. When she was done, Barry’s wrists and ankles were bound and she’d trussed the two sets of ropes together, but the result didn’t look much like the neatly tied outline in the CHERUB training manual.

As Dana stood up, she realised that the catamaran was skimming the water at a hundred kph with nobody at the helm. She grabbed the throttle to cut the engines. As the turbines slowed down to idle and the boat became eerily quiet, the door at the back of the bridge slid open. It was Nina, brandishing an evil look and a bread knife.

‘Traitor,’ Nina snarled. ‘I thought you were up to something with that cord.’

Dana spun around to grab the gun off the cushion beside her, but the wave had knocked it across the floor. Nina saw Dana eyeing the weapon and both women lunged.

Dana was closer and got a hand on the barrel, but Nina came crashing down on her outstretched arm as she swung at Dana’s head with the knife. The blade skimmed Dana’s shoulder and plunged into one of the leather cushions. Despite having Nina’s entire bodyweight crushing her arm, Dana tightened her grip on the gun and managed to lock her free arm around Nina’s neck, making a chokehold.

Nina fought for breath as both women tried getting control over the gun. As fingers tangled around the trigger a wave knocked the boat to one side and the knife dropped out of the cushion, hitting the deck with a clang. The blade was now within easy reach, but Dana let it be, sensing that her opponent was rapidly losing the fight for air.

On the edge of unconsciousness, Nina finally managed to wrest Dana’s fingers off the trigger. She was pinned and couldn’t raise the gun off the deck, but she managed to turn it around and fire a shot.

The blast echoed in the cramped space and Dana felt a tearing sensation, as if her foot had just been ripped off. But she managed to keep up the stranglehold for a few more seconds, until Nina’s body went limp.

As she freed her trapped arm, Dana rolled on to her back and moaned at the searing pain in her ankle.

The main light was still off. Dana felt queasy as she crawled to the control console and flipped a light switch. With no idea what state her leg was going to be in, she was scared to look down. Her heart was flat out, over two hundred beats per minute, and she was close to collapsing in shock.

When she finally braved a glance, it was a relief. Her leg looked OK, but there was blood seeping from a bullet hole at the tip of her trainer. Oddly, her toes didn’t hurt as much as the tendons at the bottom of her leg. She recalled a badly twisted ankle that had caused a similar pain a couple of years earlier and after a second’s thought it made sense: the joint must have been torn out of position by the huge force of the bullet smashing into her foot.

There wasn’t time for Dana to feel sorry for herself because there was still Eve to deal with. She tucked her gun into the waistband of her shorts – realising that she’d have been in a lot less pain if she’d taken a couple of seconds to do that when she was tying up Barry – then grabbed the bundle of nylon cord and crawled across to Nina. After checking she was still breathing, Dana rolled the woman on to her belly and trussed her up the same way she’d done with Barry.

Dana was reduced to crawling or hopping, but she had the gun and didn’t believe that Eve posed much of a threat. She had no way to get down the steps to the rear deck in her present condition so she figured that her priority was to send out an emergency call. She crawled across the floor and pulled herself up using the arm of the captain’s chair.

There was a microphone attached to the console, but the radio looked confusing and Dana knew nothing about maritime communication. Was there an emergency SOS frequency she should use? Maybe it was already set on the channel, or maybe she’d have to spend ages twiddling knobs until she found someone else to talk to. As all these thoughts spun around, she was massively relieved to discover a satellite phone on the opposite side of the console.

Using the control console as a prop, she hobbled across the bridge, grabbed the handset and dialled the UK code, followed by the number for CHERUB campus.

The female voice came back with a reassuringly Geordie accent. ‘Unicorn Tyre Repair.’

‘Agent eleven-sixty-two,’ Dana yelled anxiously. ‘Can you patch me through to John Jones?’

‘Dana Smith?’

‘Yeah.’

‘OK, I’m trying to get John’s mobile in Darwin. It’s bloody good to hear from you, pet. We’ve had full-scale missing agent alert on you. Where are you?’

‘Have you ever heard of the Arafura Sea?’

‘Can’t say I have.’

‘Nor me, until about five hours ago. I seem to be in the middle of it, halfway between Australia and Indonesia.’

‘OK, I’m patching you through to John right now.’

As Dana heard a beep from the campus switchboard, she looked out towards the rear deck of the boat and gasped in shock: the lights over the rear deck had been turned on and the dinghy had disappeared from the back.

John’s voice came through the earpiece. ‘Dana?’ he said, sounding hugely relieved. ‘Thank Christ, can you hear me?’

‘Yeah,’ Dana said, totally stunned. ‘I’m here – just.’

As she spoke to John she stared incredulously towards the empty space at the rear of the boat. The dinghy hadn’t fallen off, because the tarp that had been covering it lay across the deck.

Dana had no idea if the dinghy could last in the open sea, or if there was enough fuel onboard to reach the coast of Indonesia, but she did know one thing: Eve was a fanatical Survivor who’d do everything she could to take out the oil terminal on her own.

The nursery wasn’t big enough for James, Lauren and Rat to talk while Georgie sat in her canvas director’s chair by the door. They spread cushions over the floor and tried to rest, but the evening’s events had left them way too tense. At five to midnight, The Spider put another announcement over the Tannoy:

‘I’m sorry to have to announce that the forces of the Devil are swelling around the Ark’s perimeter. Soon, they will have men and weapons enough to overwhelm us. Since the discovery of my father’s murder, I have been praying for guidance. I have also been studying his writings. He taught us that when the dark time came, we must gather at the core of the Ark, in the strong rooms beneath our Holy Church. We must go there now to pray and await our instructions from God. When we emerge, be that in days, months, or years, it will be into another world. Our task will either be to rebuild this world, or face judgement in the next.’