Lost Worlds (28 page)

Natalie couldn’t help but notice that, when they got to the sensor systems round the border of the village, four of the men opened up what looked like blankets of thin metallic foil. With
a man on each side, they manoeuvred the blankets so that they formed a tunnel between two of the sensors. The remaining men took Natalie out between the blankets without, presumably, triggering any
reaction.

A quarter of a mile or so from Ruspiri, the men pushed her towards a clump of trees and scrubby bushes that were big enough to hide a couple of elephants. The men didn’t have any elephants
– or, if they did, they were hidden somewhere else – but they did have three Humvees – wide, squat, four-wheeled vehicles that looked like a cross between an SUV and a
Transformer. Natalie recognized them: the vehicles were something of a fashion accessory around Los Angeles. These three were painted a matt black, and bristled with antennae of various types.

The blond-haired man steered Natalie towards the passenger side of the lead Humvee. He held the door open while she entered and then, slamming her door, moved round to the driver’s side
and got in.

He stared at her for a few long moments with his pale blue eyes.

‘What am I doing here?’ she snapped as angrily as she could manage. ‘I know this is a foreign country, but I am an American citizen and the US embassy will be very concerned to
know that I have been kidnapped.’

‘Let’s dispense with the theatrics,’ the man said. ‘You must know that we won’t be scared by mention of the US embassy, and you must know that there is no task
force ready to set out and rescue you. You are on your own, and your safety and survival depend
only
on the decisions that you make. Clear? Now, there are certain things I want to know. They
include the commitment of your various friends to this expedition they are on, the nature of the supplies you have brought with you and whether Captain Gillis and your guide, Levan Ketsbaia, are
armed.’

‘I’m not going to tell you anything.’ Natalie folded her arms defiantly and looked away, but her heart was beating fast.

‘You will,’ he said calmly. ‘I deplore the use of unnecessary violence, although I will countenance it if required, but there are easier ways to get the information I need. I
could tie your hands together, attach them to a long leash, fix the leash to the rear bumper of this Humvee and drive off, leaving you to either keep up or tell me what I want to know. I understand
you are a long-distance runner, back in the USA. You might be able to keep up for a while, but one misstep would lead to you being dragged along the ground, scraping the flesh from your legs and
arms and back. But that is a crude, unpleasant way of getting information. My preference is for a drug that, within a few moments, will cause you to feel unbearable thirst. I have a can of soda
here with me, fresh from the cool box. I will hold it up in front of your eyes, with the condensation misting on its surface, and you will tell me everything and anything I want, just to get hold
of it. I have seen experienced soldiers break down within ten minutes just to get a sip from the can. You will not be a challenge. Now, it should be obvious to you that you will tell me everything.
The only choice you have is whether you do so quickly, without pain and suffering, or slowly.’

Natalie sighed, and closed her eyes momentarily. This was a nightmare, but she wasn’t waking up.

‘Who
are
you?’ she asked quietly.

‘My name is Craig Roxton,’ he said, in exactly the same tone of voice that he had used to terrify her, ‘and I work for a company named Nemor Incorporated. Now that we have
introduced ourselves, let us begin . . .’

T
hey had to abandon the van just over two hours after leaving the village.

The ground had mainly sloped upward all the way, but the Delica’s four-wheel drive had managed admirably, and its heavy-duty tyres had bitten into the ground and pulled them onward with
barely any sign of strain in the engine noise. The road they had taken from the village had petered out into a track after a while, then into a path, then into a slightly different-coloured line in
the long grass. Gravel scattered across the ground became small stones, then larger stones, then boulders. Presumably, Tara thought, the next step would be the mountains themselves.

Naively, Tara had expected the ground to just head up and up and up until they arrived at the mountains, but there were unexpected dips on the way – areas of ground out of sight until they
crested the tops of the ridges that hid them, large enough in which to hide entire villages. Not that they had found any villages on the way. Ruspiri seemed to be the last outpost of
civilization.

ARLENE had kept up with no problems. For the first hour or so Tara had been paranoid about checking that the robot hadn’t fallen over and been left behind, or that the supplies and luggage
hadn’t fallen off it, and about monitoring its power levels and vital signs using the software on her tablet, but after an hour had passed with no accidents she had relaxed. It really was an
autonomous system. Now the robot’s presence was just something in the corner of her eye, something reassuring on which she didn’t feel she had to keep tabs.

They had crossed several streams along the way. The first two had been little more than shallow trickles of ice-cold water heading down from the mountains that hardly got the underside of the
van wet, but the third had been wider and deeper, and Rhino had decided that the risk of flooding the engine was greater than the risk that they wouldn’t be able to find a ford or a bridge if
they turned off the path, and so he drove along the side of the river for a while until he found an area where they could cross. Tara had been pretty sure that she could have got ARLENE to cross
the stream, picking its way carefully over, and got it to wait for them to find their way back to it, but Rhino had insisted that the robot stay with them.

Rhino had driven all the way, concentrating on the route and on making sure that the van’s tyres didn’t get bogged down anywhere. Gecko was in the back with a map and a compass,
trying to make sure that they knew where they were. Tara was in the passenger seat with a tablet computer on her lap. It was her job to liaise with Calum back in London, who was watching the map
displays on his ten-screen computer and tracking the progress of the Almast with Natalie’s mobile phone in its pocket. Or, Tara was beginning to think, the rabbit whose neck the Almast had
tied the mobile round and then set running in a different direction. She supposed it depended on how intelligent the Almast was, and whether or not it had discovered the mobile yet and wondered
what it was.

The Almast had maintained a reasonably straight route towards the mountains after leaving the village. It had wandered back and forth a little bit, presumably taking advantage of areas of
flatter terrain, but it had gone straight across all the streams. On an open road the van would have been able to catch up with no problems, but on rolling terrain littered with rocks and crossed
by the occasional stream the Almast was actually making better time. The only way the expedition was keeping up was because the Almast had taken a break for a while, resting and perhaps eating some
of the grain it had stolen to keep its energy up. Or maybe it had been busy catching that rabbit and tying Natalie’s mobile round its neck.

‘Where do you think it’s heading?’ Tara asked the absent Calum after a while.

‘Not sure,’ his voice said over the headband loudspeakers. ‘I’ve tried extrapolating the line it’s been taking further into the mountains on Google Earth, but I
can’t see any signs of habitation – no villages, no buildings, nothing. I just hope it isn’t heading through a mountain pass and across to the other side of the Caucasus. That
would be annoying.’

‘Very,’ she agreed. ‘Look on the bright side – maybe the Almasti live in caves.’

‘Let’s hope,’ Calum said darkly.

Tara had found herself captivated by the scenery as they drove. She was a city girl, used to having buildings huddled around her, and the vast open spaces were making her dizzy. The mountain
peaks were a jagged line high above them, like the sharp edge of a carving knife: not as rough as other mountain ranges she had seen in photographs, like the Alps or the Himalayas, but still
impressive. The sky behind the peaks was the deepest blue, and the wisps of cloud that were blown past by the wind seemed to catch on the mountain tops, like chiffon scarves, and flutter
gently.

‘Time to stop,’ Rhino said regretfully as the Delica had climbed slowly up a particularly sharp slope. ‘If I push this thing any further, I’ll risk overheating the
engine, or stripping the gearbox.’ He brought the van to a halt and turned the engine off. Tara started to type instructions into her tablet to bring ARLENE to a halt, but the robot had
already detected that the van had stopped and had come to a halt itself, like a patient donkey.

Gecko slid open the side door and jumped to the ground. He glanced around. ‘Everyone, make sure you remember where we parked,’ he said, grinning.

‘We’re on a schedule,’ Rhino pointed out. ‘Let’s get the supplies out of the van and load ARLENE up.’

‘It could have carried them all the way from Ruspiri,’ Tara pointed out. ‘I said so back there. We didn’t need to load the van up, only to unload it again now.’

‘I wanted to make sure that ARLENE could keep up unloaded,’ Rhino said. ‘I didn’t want to put too much weight on it to start off with. Standard military technique –
do things incrementally, rather than all at once, just in case there’s a problem.’ He opened up the back of the van and began to haul out cases and boxes.

‘Speaking of problems,’ Gecko said, looking around, ‘I need to . . . you know. Go to the bathroom.’

‘Just walk round to the other side of the van and go,’ Rhino said. ‘We’re not going to find a washroom out here anywhere.’

Gecko looked as if he was going to argue, but shrugged instead and walked round the corner of the Delica.

‘I hadn’t thought about that,’ Tara said loudly to cover any sounds that might be coming from behind the van. She started pulling the boxes across to ARLENE. ‘If I had, I
would have brought some chemical toilets with us, and a small tent. ARLENE could have carried them all.’

‘Let me tell you something,’ Rhino said, hauling a particularly large box out of the back of the van. ‘A few years ago I was on a reconnaissance mission in Afghanistan. I spent
three days lying on a hilltop observing a Taliban encampment. There were guards all around the camp, and if I’d moved I would have been seen. Do you want to know what I did as far as toilet
breaks were concerned?’

‘Don’t tell me – you just didn’t drink anything so you became dehydrated and didn’t need to go?’ Tara replied brightly.

‘No, I—’

‘I said don’t tell me,’ she protested, hands raised. ‘I really don’t want to know, and I’m trying not to work it out myself.’

Gecko arrived back a few minutes later. He was moving fast, and glancing back over his shoulder.

‘What’s the matter?’ Tara asked.

‘I was . . . you know . . . doing my business . . .’

‘OK, thanks – move on quickly.’

‘And I suddenly realized I was being watched.’

‘Not by me,’ Tara said.

‘No – by something else. I thought it might be the Almast! I looked around and I couldn’t see anything at first, but after a few minutes I realized that there was something
lying in a dip in the ground about a hundred metres away. When it realized that I had seen it, it stood up. It looked like a dog, an Alsatian, but its pelt was white and grey, and its eyes were a
pale blue. It kept on looking at me for a while longer, then it just trotted off.’

‘Wolf,’ Rhino said succinctly.

‘Wolf? Really? Not just a large wild dog?’

‘No,’ Rhino confirmed, ‘it was a wolf. The mountains around here are full of them.’

‘Great,’ Gecko said. ‘I take it you’re armed?’

Rhino shrugged. ‘On the one hand, I obviously wasn’t able to get any weapons through customs, and I didn’t want to risk getting in contact with any of the rather more criminal
elements in Tbilisi to get my hands on one. On the other hand, you might assume that there were lots of old rifles in Ruspiri, and that I might just have slipped one of the villagers some money and
taken one.’

‘Well done,’ Gecko said in a heartfelt tone of voice.

Tara noticed that he was wiggling his fingers uncomfortably. ‘Something wrong?’ she asked.

‘Got any wet-wipes? Years of my mother telling me to wash my hands are now coming back to haunt me.’

Rhino indicated one of the boxes. ‘In there. Just make sure you seal the box up again afterwards.’

‘OK.’

It took them twenty minutes to load ARLENE up with all the stuff that had been in the van. Now the robot had things strapped to its back and hanging off both sides, but it
didn’t seem to be particularly inconvenienced. In fact, Tara was reminded of a game she’d been given one Christmas, where you had to load plastic buckets on the side of a spring-loaded
toy donkey, trying not to trigger the spring mechanism. Once or twice, while they had been attaching things, ARLENE had moved its feet wider to maintain stability. Tara had jumped whenever it did
so. Any act of apparent intelligence by the robot spooked her.

‘Calum – still there?’ Rhino asked, slamming the back door closed. He used the remote key to lock the van. Tara wondered against whom he was protecting it, then realized that
it was probably more force of habit than anything else.

‘Yes, I’m here,’ Calum’s voice replied from the air. ‘I’m not going anywhere.’

‘We’re going to set off on foot now.’

‘Agreed.’

Rhino pointed to two rucksacks on the ground. He was already wearing one, Tara noticed. ‘Pick those up and put them on.’

‘I thought ARLENE was meant to be carrying all the supplies,’ she protested.

‘And if ARLENE falls off the side of a mountain path and we lose everything, what are you going to eat and what are you going to sleep on?’

‘Good point, well made,’ she muttered, bending and picking up the rucksack. It was heavy. She slipped it on to her protesting shoulders.