Horizons of Deceit, Book 1 Read online

  The soldiers were approaching, their footsteps slow. Enderby eased around the packing crate and bolted out to hide behind a set of steel shelving lined with tins and boxes stamped with Cyrillic. The soldiers were on the other side. He flexed his fingers across the knife’s handle and moved at a crouch down the length of the shelves. The time he’d spent stuck in this godforsaken supply bay had not been wasted, and he knew if he could reach the end a large crate had been strapped down just beside the wall, with enough space to crawl behind until the patrol had moved on. He readied himself to bolt across, held his breath, and moved out.

  There was a click behind him, the solid crack of an oiled bolt-handle nestling home. He froze. Even from the noise he knew the make, one of the newer ones, the .42 Mosin-Nagant. The Russian military, technically, were still testing it. It was hardly a revolutionary design, but then, from this distance it hardly mattered. The barrel was, after all, pressed against the back of Enderby’s head.

  He felt sure they must have known exactly where he was.

  3.

  PELTING OUT INTO the Arizona day, Bedford was blinded by the light. It was as if the tunnel entrance had rushed towards him faster than he approached it. As he suddenly found himself in the air the whole of the world assaulted him with noise and brightness. He took in the situation.

  The Apache warriors that had remained above ground were gathered in a tight semi-circle around the entrance to the cave. Two were hunched forward on their knees while the others stood behind them, rifles held aloft to produce a classic wall of gunfire. To his right, some feet off, two of the horses lay dead. The others were nowhere to be seen, and Bedford suddenly realised he had unconsciously shouldered his shotgun and was already aiming down the barrel. All around the rim of the basin, black figures were darting between outcrops of cover. Bedford tried to count. A dozen? Two? The antlike smatterings of movement were impossible to assess. Once or twice the head of a mounted rider would snake into view before pulling his horse back to safety.

  “Geronimo!” Bly hollered over his shoulder. “Protect Geronimo!” He quickly brought his Winchester up and fired a round.

  Wapi grabbed Geronimo and yanked him unceremoniously back into the mouth of the cave. The old man protested, but weakly, and seconds later Wapi was back with own weapon readied. Boon was at Bedford’s side, cranking the handle of his custom pistol and scanning the overhang with keen, expert eyes.

  “Twenty, at the very least,” he said. “And that’s only the ones up close.”

  “They’re firing down,” added Annabelle, who had dropped uncomfortably onto her prosthetic knee and was cocking her rifle. “Not only are we horribly outnumbered, but they’ve got the tactical jump on us too.”

  “If you weren’t here, darling, I’d be inclined to worry.”

  “Oh, George, you say the sweetest things when we’re about to die.”

  “Not today we’re not, my sweet. Not today.” He trailed his shotgun over the lip of the crater and let out a powerful blast. A scampering silhouette fell, the buckshot hitting him on his left side. Not lethal, Bedford could tell, but enough to put the bandit out of action and make his compatriots think twice about sticking their necks up.

  “Custer’s Last Stand?” opined Boon.

  “Rather an insensitive comparison,” countered Annabelle, not without a smirk, as she let off a round of her own that ricocheted mere inches from one of their shadowy attackers’ heads. “Damn and blast,” she muttered.

  There was no real cover. To retreat into the cave would be a slow suicide; not only would their line of fire be pitifully diminished it would be all too easy for the bandits to crowd down from the sides of the basin and overwhelm them. No. Their only option was to stand their ground.

  Yet these were a ragtag, drunken band of marauders. There was no military training, no finesse—they put too much faith in their sheer force of numbers, that enough men with enough ammunition guaranteed victory. As such they were arbitrary, careless. They took random pot-shots that betrayed the fact they cared more about their own individual skins than their group as a whole. Three, four, were picked off in careful succession by the more measured shots of the braves and their companions. But it was not a tactic that could endure. The Apache Annabelle had noted as Iki was struck with a bullet in his right breast; he fell and gurgled helplessly as the blood began to fill his lungs, the others powerless but to listen to his ghastly death-throes as they fought with their all to survive the onslaught.

  Slowly, as the defenders started to become conscious of how many bullets remained to them, the attackers advanced. No longer were they antlike and far off; they would skid quickly down dusty hillsides, finding cover in the rocky outcrops on the slopes of the basin. Onward and down they piled, in such a torrent it was impossible to catch them all with rifle-fire. Soon the only option would be retreat into the cave, and after that, certain death.

  The bandits were getting braver now, peeking their heads up for longer, taking more and more shots each time. Bly took a bullet to the knee, keeled over, but momentarily dragged himself back upright and fought on with his teeth so tightly gritted they drew blood. Perhaps seven or eight of the bandits started to crowd toward them across the basin floor. Three were taken out with ease but others, buoyed by their companion’s success, were joining the encroaching ranks. More than twenty of the bandits lay dead or dying, perhaps thirty or more remained.

  Yet all of their attention was directed towards the cave mouth—a fatal mistake for the foremost of the attackers who, with a swoosh of wind like wildfire, stood suddenly bolt upright with the knowledge of death in his eyes and an arrow jutting horizontally through his neck. A split-second later, a second fell the same way. As the bandits turned, stunned by this new threat, three more were dispatched by Boon and Annabelle’s fire.

  “Kai!” wailed Wapi, a terrible trembling in his throat as he saw the girl approach. “Kai!”

  She was thundering down the hillside to the left of their position, her body steady and upright on the back of her stolen horse. With a smooth, practised motion her hand whipped behind her head to pull another arrow from her quiver; quick as a blink the bolt was drawn back and shot, only to miss and thud into the dirt. The braves took full advantage of the distraction, firing into the confusion, but as Kai belted across their line of fire they were powerless to shoot for fear of hitting the girl. Her horse rounded, slowed, and as it did so Wapi leapt towards her.

  The great animal Kai had stolen was so large a target the feckless bandits couldn’t help but aim towards it. As a multitude of cordite booms resounded from the landscape’s bleached and shallow sides Wapi leapt up behind Kai, curled his body around her, and put his back towards the bullets.

  They struck him mercilessly. He fell away. The horse screamed and tumbled, its forelegs buckling into the dirt. Wapi and Kai fell with it, falling cradled in the nest between the dead steed’s legs and belly, bullets thudding into the beast’s back, while Wapi held Kai tightly in his arms as she struggled to get free.

  It had bought them some time, but not much. One or two of the bandits fell, but as they approached the defenders backed imperceptibly towards the darkened cave, where Geronimo knelt muttering a low, strong Apache prayer. More gunfire came, closer, more accurate, and in the dying times Bedford turned to his new wife and reached out to her hand, his eyes pleading how much he loved her, how he would strip the skin from his own bones for it not to end like this, right now.

  And then came the boom of the breech guns.

  The opposite wall of the dip exploded into fragments, chunks of unnaturally pale rock sent to spin like pinwheels in the air. The bodies of the bandits flew with them, some of them falling into tattered shreds of limbs and sinew as they crashed back down to earth.

  A thundering came from above them, and all eyes shot skyward. Slowly sailing into view as its prow breached the cover of the mesa came Sovereign, the strong Arizona light gleaming in bursts from its metalwork, its shadow crawling across the
floor of the basin. Two more retorts sounded from the guns, sending up a shower of gravel and taking more of the bandits to their graves. The rest looked up; a couple even had the wherewithal to shoulder their weapons and fire pointlessly at the pride of the British Fleet. Yet when they turned to discover the rest of their band were fleeing, scrabbling up the slopes over the bodies of their dead, they soon followed. All their horses had bolted when the cannons thundered and they were left to flee on foot, panicking and stumbling across the deadly terrain.

  With the exception of Geronimo, the remaining Apaches were almost as terrified by the aether battleship as the bandits. They had seen them before, of course, lazily drifting through the atmosphere, but the might and majesty of Sovereign up close was an entirely different spectacle. As the belly of Sovereign hovered into view Boon strode forward to calm them. Annabelle threw her rifle to the floor and ran, breathless, to where Kai still struggled in Wapi’s fading grip. She skidded to the floor before them, and only when Annabelle’s face appeared in his diminishing field of vision did he slowly, and with a palpable relief, let the daughter of Yohana go.

  Kai struggled out, got up, turned around. When she saw the extent of Wapi’s injuries, the strength of this precocious warrior failed her. Her whole attitude snapped, her eye widening and her face softening. Where moments before there were battle cries and blood-rage, there only now remained fear and confusion on the face of a little girl.

  “Wapi,” cried Annabelle.

  4.

  HER HANDS QUICKLY felt around his chest and back, assessing the wounds, but they were so disparate and numerous she was at a loss as to where to start. He was slick with blood, pale, his lips trembling as he fought against the weakness overpowering him. Annabelle howled in frustration and rage. Bedford came to her side but she batted him away.

  The brave reached up, his eyes fogged and unfocussed, the pupils wide with death. He could barely keep his arm aloft. Kai crowded in but Annabelle pushed her gently away as she leaned down to Wapi, his blood-soaked arm snaking up to pull her closer.

  “Yohana,” he whispered. It was only now, Annabelle knew, that he displayed how frightened he was. “Kai. Be a mother to her. Your husband…a father. More than I could be.” He choked. “Promise me, Yohana.”

  Before she could reply he was gone.

  Suddenly there was a battering on her side. Kai, a furious tempest, was pummelling her with bunched up fists, pushing ineffectively for Annabelle to move. Stunned by the fact that the boy she once teased scorpions with was gone, she half-moved, half-fell sideways. Kai shot towards Wapi’s lifeless form, his head lolling horribly as the young girl tugged at him with arms that lacked the strength to lift him. Squealing, frustrated, she let his dead weight flop back and screamed his name, battering his chest with a child’s ineffectual smacks. Annabelle, her back to the noise, thought she would soon stop. But she did not.

  She was grey with shock; cold all over. Suddenly it all seemed too much, this paradigm shift of her life. In the space of only these last few paltry days it seemed as if everything had changed. Her own fate, and the fate of those who she loved, Nathaniel, Uncle Cyrus, George…Kai. There was Kai. The name, the concept, just seemed so alien to her among everything else that had happened. She had gained a husband, a daughter, found a long-lost friend only to see him snatched from her once more, only this time forever. She began to shiver, barely able to control herself. George rushed to her side once more and once more she angrily pushed him away. What more was there to do?

  In the faint and still Arizona air, heard by her ears but not registered by her consciousness, came the drone of a cutter, the distant putt-putt of its engines stuttering as it wheeled in to land. Faintly she was aware of Boon’s black-suited form running up to greet it, but he was hazy, indistinct. Kai still wailed behind her. All the strength that Annabelle had accrued through her hardships, her trying days, seemed to seep from her fingers and leach into the pale dirt. She wanted to press her face to it, feel the grit against her cheeks, go to darkness, let the world sleep without her. Even as she thought this, it disgusted her how she could feel so weak, so overcome.

  She knew George still stood by her, powerless, and hated herself for making him watch her unravel.

  Boots, clumping, the stirring up of dust. The flashed blue of naval uniforms and the glint of gun-barrels in the sun. Sand was in her eyes, her unbidden tears failing to clear her vision, and so it was more the movement, the poise that she recognised when she looked to see him run towards her. She screamed his name in her mind, unable to produce the words with the self-loathing that choked her throat.

  She grunted.

  Her arms felt like wet rope but she fought to control them, to haul herself up on all fours. She managed to do so, fell back onto her knees, he head hanging back and her arms lolling behind. The thought of Deerpak’s rancid hands filled her mind and it was this image she fought against, that made her grit her teeth. She fell forward again, grabbed at the earth and pushed out, struck against it and managed to raise herself onto unsure legs. As she did so, Nathaniel Stone skidded to a stop before her.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Illusions of Choice

  1.

  DISARMED, STRIPPED OF equipment, Enderby was led through the hot, dank corridors of Imperator like a prize on parade. He knew the two men that followed, their rifles aimed at his head and his back, would be keeping a steely gaze on his every movement. When he passed open hatchways off-duty Russian sailors would mockingly raise their tin mugs to him, jeering with rotten or knocked out teeth. Those in the corridors would flatten themselves against walls and hiss threats or derision, once or twice yelling feral obscenities an inch from his face, goading him into a reaction that would surely have him shot. As the procession turned corners, Enderby would flick his glance sideways and back, noting what he saw.

  Then he saw Folkard.

  The captain, still dressed in his Russian uniform, was standing chatting with a pair of soldiers like they were old chums reminiscing at the bar. All three figures turned to watch Enderby pass, and as they did his eyes locked onto Folkard’s. The captain’s mouth tightened, his jovial chat interrupted, and for a moment the two men simply stared. Then Folkard nudged his compatriot, nodded towards Enderby and made a low comment in Russian. The three laughed bawdily, and as Enderby was marched out of view the mocking hoots followed him.

  For over an hour he was marched around the ship. Everyone, it seemed, from cabin-boy to captain, had to take a look. Not that he was brought anywhere of importance, of course—they didn’t even approach the engine room or the bridge—but surely that was half the point. This was all about humiliation, but no matter. Enderby’s mind was still his, and though he knew now was not the time for action, he began to look for the possibilities of a plan.

  After his forced march through endless grimy corridors, the kitchens and the comm bay, he was at last taken down to the hangar where the cutters sat in rows like coffins. Enderby had learnt much from his tour; far more, he assumed, than the Russians assumed he would. The other side of the coin being, naturally, that he could learn as much as he wished in what little time remained to him. The knowledge, ultimately, would do him little good. He had no illusions that they were to kill him soon, but it wouldn’t happen just yet. He knew the way these barbarians worked, and something else was planned—something dictated by a power far greater than the boy soldier with a barrel to his back.

  Enderby was shoved roughly into one of the Russian’s cramped cutters. There were no windows and the benches were made of tin plate; one had to shuffle to even attempt comfort thanks to the hexagonal rivets that stuck up from the seat. On one side sat the captive, on the other four surly, distrustful Russians that passed a foul smelling cigarette between them. The smoke choked the air and the ceiling was too low; it stank of oil and rough construction. With a jolt that nearly punted Enderby from his pew the cutter took to the skies.

  The soldier directly opposite Enderby looked him straig
ht in the eye. He took one last, deep lungful of his dry, powdery tobacco smoke and threw the nub to the floor without even bothering to extinguish it. Still holding Enderby’s bold gaze the Russian—the largest of the quartet by far—reached behind him and produced a hessian sack with a rough hemp rope threaded into the opening. Grinning slavishly, he leaned forward and dumped the sack down heavily over Enderby’s head. When he tightened the cord he did it with a heavy-handed sadism until the brute was sure the rope was cutting into Enderby’s neck. He could barely breathe.

  The Russian chuckled to his comrades as he sat back down. Enderby listened for a moment. There was no more noise.

  2.

  SHE WAS BEATING his chest, pleading with him, she remembered that. She remembered him holding her shoulders firmly, trying to look into her eyes as she shook her head to dodge his gaze. How can I leave now, she was screaming. Not now, I can’t! George was there at her side. She felt the irritation of the Navy boys, a demeanour she had come to know so well, anxious to set sail. Their work in this wasteland was done. Nathaniel’s head bobbed as he tried to look at her, Annabelle resisting, Geronimo looking on sadly from the sidelines.

  Shi ma, came a voice. It was small but strong. Shi ma. The Apache word for mother.

  I’ll find them, she remembered hearing, that small voice still strong. Me and Shiwoye, we’ll find these men and we’ll find each other again.

  She had felt Geronimo’s old hands, strong and gnarled as an oak, turn her round from her daughter so George could wrap his arms about her shoulder and lead her towards the cutter, Sovereign hovering placidly above. She had looked back, seen the strong, small girl and her wise old protector, the defiance in the eyes, the hope that her mother would travel to the stars and right a greater wrong; to unseat a more desperate demon. She kissed her hand and waved it to her daughter; the daughter kissed her own and waved back. The old man smiled. All three, as the door to the cutter slammed shut and the naval slang was yelled back from port to starboard, knew she would return.