Eye of the Storm (13 page)

The temperature of the water was perfect. Cool enough to be refreshing, yet warm enough not to take her breath away. As she broke the surface, she stroked her hair back out of her eyes. It felt
a guilty pleasure. Leaping high and curling into a ball, Carrie bombed into the water beside her with a tremendous splash for her size.

‘You’re a maniac!’ Niamh gasped as Carrie surfaced. ‘You couldn’t have got much closer.’

Carrie just grinned and pushed off into an easy crawl stroke to the deep end of the pool where she paused, holding on to the edge. ‘Race?’ she asked.

It felt frivolous and wrong to even contemplate having fun while the boys were lost and her dad was being held by the police for a crime Niamh knew he hadn’t committed, but it did not look
as if Carrie was going to let her get back to the search without letting off some steam. Niamh paused a moment before answering. Perhaps if she raced, that would be enough.

‘You’re on,’ she agreed. ‘How far?’

‘Four lengths OK?’

‘Sounds good to me.’

Niamh swam to the deep end using a gentle breaststroke. No sooner had her hands touched the end than Carrie said, ‘Ready set go!’ as fast as she could, and pushed off.

Taken by surprise, Niamh took a split second to react and follow.
Cheat!
she thought instinctively. Then she mentally laughed at her reaction, realising that she would probably have tried
something similar if she’d known Carrie a little better.

Concentrating, Niamh powered forward, digging hard with her cupped hands and kicking as fast as she could. Without goggles, it was hard to see much. She squinted, trying to assess if the water
was going to be deep enough at the shallow end for a tumble turn. It was and she flipped, pushing away hard from the wall and giving several strong dolphin kicks before breaking the surface
again.

She could feel that she had pulled alongside Carrie, but it was hard to tell if the American girl was aware of her yet. The pool was not long. She barely took a handful more strokes before she
flipped again. Although Carrie wasn’t using tumble turns, she was knifing through the water at an impressive pace. As Niamh flipped through the final turn, she could tell she had the edge,
but without her superior turning technique, it would have been much tighter.

Touching first, Niamh looked up to see Carrie make her final stroke and touch. The sound of clapping made her look round. Tony was standing on the side with a broad smile on his face. He was
wearing a pair of Bermuda shorts with a tropical beach pattern. They suited his golden skin and bleach-blond hair perfectly.

‘Nice win!’ he said. ‘There’s not many girls around here that can beat Carrie in the water. You swim well.’

‘I like swimming. It’s one of the few sports that I get on with.’

‘It shows,’ Carrie panted, placing a friendly hand on Niamh’s shoulder. ‘Great swim! You’d give Tony a good race. I never beat him, but I think you’d have a
chance.’

‘If you think I’m good, you should see my brother,’ Niamh replied. ‘He’s far better than me. In fact, he’s irritatingly good at most sports.’

‘Good-looking?’ Carrie asked, tilting her head slightly to one side and giving a suggestive smile.

‘He’s my brother! How do I answer that? If I say he’s drop-dead gorgeous, will it help you stay focused on looking for him?’

Carrie laughed. ‘Of course!’ she said.

‘In that case he’s drop-dead gorgeous and a sucker for a blonde with an American accent.’

‘Now you’ve got her attention!’ Tony laughed.

He jumped into the pool to join them, and for the next twenty minutes the three of them played a variety of games that involved either chasing a ball, or each other, around the pool. All were
noisy.

Despite Niamh’s strong initial desire to get straight back to the search, she found the laughter and enthusiasm of the Dales infectious. It was not long before she was drawn fully into the
games and laughing along with them, especially whenever she and Carrie ganged up on Tony to beat him. He pretended to look hurt at times, but he was clearly play-acting. Indeed, it was such fun
that she stayed in the pool far longer than she intended and with all the noise they were making, none of them noticed the front doorbell ring.

Tessa could hear squeals of laughter and splashing noises coming from the Dales’ pool. She rang the bell again, but knew she was wasting her time. Tony and Carrie would
never hear it above the racket. Was it just the two of them making all that noise? She couldn’t tell. Still angry with Tony for abandoning her in Key West yesterday, she turned to leave.

‘Damn you, Tony!’ she muttered. ‘Why do I keep chasing you? You’re not that much of a catch. I can do better than you.’

Tessa strode away from the front door determined to leave, but she only got halfway down the driveway when she paused. Where else would she go today? Annoyed as she was with Tony, she itched to
join him and Carrie in the pool. She was wearing a bikini under her clothes. Surely it wouldn’t hurt to slip around the house and join them? Hesitating a moment longer, she made her
decision.

Doing her best to paste a friendly smile on her lips, she turned and marched back up the driveway and round the side of the house.

The eyes were racing towards them through the darkness. Sam raised his rifle, gritting his teeth and feeling for the safety catch.

‘Don’t shoot!’

The voice in the darkness was Nathan’s and the two raptors speeding along the passageway towards the beleaguered party were Edison and Crick. A red-filtered torch rounded a corner and
danced along behind them. Sam heaved a sigh of relief and lowered his rifle, his heart pounding.

‘Nathan?’ Claire shouted between firing controlled bursts down the passageway ahead. ‘Give me some good news. We can’t go this way.’

A sudden flash of bright orange light flared along the subterranean corridor behind them and a deafening
BOOM
echoed in its wake. A sudden blast of dust and small debris driven by the
shock wave blew through the party. Sam barely managed to keep his feet under him. Others were not so fortunate. Sherri tumbled backward, colliding with David and Callum and taking all three of them
down to form a shadowy heap. As he reeled, Sam shook his head to try to clear the ringing in his ears from the shock of the explosion, while a glowing after-image of the flash moved wherever he
looked. With their extra bulk and low centres of gravity, all of the raptors held their balance.

‘I’m sorry, Claire, but I lost Watson,’ Nathan gasped, staggering to a halt about ten paces away. ‘There was nothing we could do to save him. There were too many of them.
That blast should’ve slowed ’em. With any luck, the charge will have collapsed the passage and trapped them on the other side.’

‘Damn it, Nathan!’ Claire cursed. She fired a longer burst that spoke volumes about her frustration. ‘You should have been more careful! You were supposed to be investigating
the alarms, not engaging in firefights. Not only that, but you’ve just sealed our only way out of here.’

‘No,’ he replied. ‘The ancillary southern loop should still be open. I blew the tunnel beyond the entrance. Follow me, but be ready in case any of them were quick enough to
make it through.’

‘OK. In that case, you take the lead. Me ’n’ Alex’ll hold this lot off,’ she ordered.

Everyone was back on their feet again and they began to move. But even with Sherri and Nathan shining their filtered torches, it was hard to see more than a few metres through the dust that now
filled the passageway in the direction of the blast. Sam held his arm across his mouth and nose, using the sleeve of his shirt as a filter. Although it made a difference, there was no avoiding the
dust. His eyes streamed tears and he blinked and squinted in an effort to see what was happening.

Within seconds, everyone was coughing, including the raptors. The sound they made was short and sharp, sounding more like a bark than a human cough. Between the noisy, sporadic gunfire, all the
coughing and the oppressive, dust-filled darkness, Sam began to imagine the walls of the tunnel squeezing in on him.

It was horrible. The more he coughed, the more he wanted to cough. He heard someone retch, though he couldn’t tell who it was. Following the dim light of Nathan’s torch through the
murk, he stumbled forward. They moved slowly. Cautiously. And it was well that they did.

Without warning, a dark shadow leapt towards Nathan’s torch. It was unclear how Nipper anticipated the attack, but somehow he did. Exploding forward in an astonishing dive past Nathan, the
raptor intercepted the attacker in mid-flight, deflecting its charge into the wall. The impact was brutal and both went down in a dark, rolling mass of teeth and claws. Sam did not see how Nipper
dispatched his opponent, but whatever he did was quick and effective.

With the Imperium raptor dead, Nipper got to his feet slowly and raised his hands in case one of the humans with guns mistook him for the attacker in the poor light.

Nathan gave a grunt that Sam guessed was ‘Thanks’ in raptor language, and he took the lead again. This time, Nipper took up position next to Nathan and they moved forward a little
faster.

They pressed on into the dusty darkness to the previous bend. At the corner, Nathan stopped and Sam could just see the red glow of his torch playing across the tunnel wall. There was a scraping
sound and a whispered order to follow on.

The branch passage that Nathan led them into was so narrow that it forced the party to switch to moving in single file. Sam had never been afraid of the dark, or of enclosed spaces, but he could
feel the tension building in his body and mind. He wanted to get out of the tunnels soon. It seemed likely that if they were forced to keep fighting running battles in these dark underground
walkways, Watson would not be their last casualty. He didn’t want to think about who might be next.

‘Where are we going, Sherri?’ he whispered. ‘Or are we running blind?’

‘We’ve got a secondary HQ hidden a good distance away from the city,’ she answered, keeping her voice equally as quiet. ‘The facilities there are basic, but it’s
well concealed. Don’t panic, Sam. Claire and Nathan know what they’re doing. The Imperium have been trying to catch them for years and never come close. They’ll get us out of
here. You’ll see.’

‘I’m not panicking.’

It was true. He wasn’t panicking. But he knew it would not take much to tip him over the edge. He felt coiled tight, as if he was ready to explode at any second. Sam could not imagine the
Imperium raptors taking kindly to the losses they had sustained today. If by kidnapping David last night they had stirred the hornets’ nest, today’s events would make the Imperium
hierarchy more determined than ever to catch the rebels.

He heard the scraping sound again. It came from behind him this time. Had the entrance to this passage been concealed? He wasn’t sure. However, the sound of Claire’s shooting had
ceased and by unspoken agreement, everyone was now trying to move as silently as possible. It seemed likely that they were in a section of the underground labyrinth that the Imperium raptors might
not know how to access. Surely it would not take them long to find the entrance? It could not have been far from where Nathan had set his charges. The raptors that Claire had been holding at bay
with her gunfire would soon realise that their quarry was gone and that there had to be another exit from the tunnel.

Nathan led the way at speed. No one spoke again for a long time, though there were still some stifled and muffled coughs. Minutes stretched as they pressed into the silent darkness and Sam lost
all sense of how far they had travelled and how long it had taken them. The urgency of their pace did not let up, but the longer they pushed on into the darkness, the more Sam felt as if they
weren’t going anywhere. It was as if they were on a gigantic treadmill in the dark. The only thing that gave any sense of progress was an occasional bend, most of which seemed to be to the
right. There did not seem to be any interconnecting passageways.

‘Pick it up, Nathan,’ Claire called suddenly from the back of the group. ‘I think we’ve got company inbound again.’

‘I’ll do my best,’ he replied.

The next thing Sam knew, he was jogging . . . and then running to keep up. The passageway kinked to the right again, but this time he was going so fast that he didn’t see the bend coming.
Grazing his left arm on the wall, Sam spun round, barely keeping his feet as he did so. He cursed. The skin burned where he had scraped it.

‘This is fun!’ Callum panted from behind. ‘Remind me . . . to write . . . a suggestion . . . email . . . to Disney . . . when I get home. Something . . . like this . . . would
make . . . a great . . . ride . . . at Disneyworld.’

Despite the fear that gnawed in his belly and the pain emanating from his upper arm, Sam found himself smiling as he ran. Callum could find humour in any situation.

‘They’re closing!’ Claire’s warning was followed by a short burst of deafening weapons fire. The shocking staccato stabs of sound set Sam’s heart pounding again. In
the confined space of the narrow passageway, the noise assaulted his ears.