During her first mission for The Broker, when she was twenty-one years old, Lazarovich had led a team into the Amazon jungle to recover valuable documents from a crashed plane. Only one of the team had objected to having a young woman as his leader, so Lazarovich made an example of him. She challenged him to a knife fight, during which she cut him badly, then left him to die. Now his bones were picked clean and scattered across the jungle.
No one ever again questioned her ability to lead a successful mission.
As soon as she detected the helicopter slowing down, Lazarovich pocketed the computer, unclipped her safety harness and stood up. The other operatives followed suit, two of them moving to the side doors and pulling them open.
The pilot said one word. ‘Clear.’
Immediately, the operatives dropped two coiled ropes from each side of the aircraft, and rappelled to the grass below. The instant their boots touched the ground, they sprinted across the clearing and disappeared into a large concrete hangar concealed on all sides by thick jungle. The hangar’s roof was camouflaged from the air by a photo-realistic mesh of images blending seamlessly into the trees. Even from the helicopter, close as it was, the hangar was invisible.
Lazarovich was the last to leave the aircraft, and when she had landed safely, the ropes withdrew into the helicopter, the doors slid shut, and the Seahawk turned and headed away from the island at top speed.
Inside the hangar, the operatives hustled over to the two prototype Osprey aircraft waiting with their pilots already prepared for take-off. On the floor, between the seats in the passenger cabin of each of aircraft, sets of kit were laid out in preparation for the team’s arrival. Thermal clothing, Arctic camouflage, combat helmets, snow boots, webbing and state-of-the-art HK 416 A5 Heckler & Koch Carbines. As requested, Lazarovich’s kit also included a XM25 grenade launcher – ‘in case of emergencies’.
As soon as all the operatives were on board, Lazarovich spoke into her headset.
‘Team is green.’
On that order, Land Rovers towed the aircraft out into the clearing and the engines started up. With tremendous noise, the Ospreys rose vertically from the jungle floor, pausing when they were several metres above the canopy of trees. They hovered as they rotated to face south, then the engines tipped forward and they flew out across the sea.
From the moment the Seahawk had arrived, to the moment the Ospreys were out of sight, less than five minutes had passed. A brief disturbance of noise and activity before November Island returned to being an uninhabited spit of land.
Lazarovich and her operatives weren’t even ghosts. It was as if they had never been there at all.
14
OUTPOST ZERO, ANTARCTICA
NOW
Last term, one of the kids in Zak’s school died. It happened on a Saturday, so on Monday they had this big assembly. Mrs Thompson, the head teacher, told the whole school what happened, and lectured them about how they had to be careful when they went to the coast. The sea was dangerous, she said, and when it was cold like that, it could shock you and you’d drown.
Zak already knew all that stuff, everyone did, but Jason Crowley from Year Six must have thought he was indestructible or something, because one Saturday in October when he was messing about on the harbour wall, he got this crazy idea it would be fun to jump in. The cold shocked him, making him take a deep breath – except instead of breathing air, he breathed cold, salty sea water. After that he went under and didn’t come back up. The lifeboat crew found him that evening, but it was way too late for Jason Crowley.
On the way to Mrs Coulson’s maths class after assembly, Krishna Gopal told Zak that when you drown, your whole life flashes in front of you. Properly, he said. Every second of it. In fact, any sudden death was the same according to Kris. He told Zak you see it all in slow motion, playing out like a film.
Zak had never doubted Kris’s words, but as the Spider loomed over him, its pincers lightly touching his hands, Zak’s short life did not flash through his mind. Nu-uh. Not at all. There were no happy visions for Zak Reeves in his dying moments. Instead, he started to drown, but it wasn’t cold sea water that washed over him, it was emotion. Strong and suffocating emotion, flooding like a tidal wave.
Terror, guilt, sadness, joy, jealousy – every emotion he’d ever had.
Then, as suddenly as it had begun, the flood of emotion stopped. The turmoil was replaced by the same queasy, floating feeling he’d had before. He was hanging in the darkness again, and he didn’t dare look down because he knew what he’d see: the seething ocean of a billion insects. And it felt like something was watching his thoughts, feeling his emotions, crawling across his brain. The ache pulsed behind his right eye, throbbing like a fresh bump on the head, and Zak had the strongest sense something was examining what grew there. The ache intensified, then faded as the invader searched deeper into his mind. Zak tried to move, but his body refused to do what he wanted. His arms wouldn’t budge, his legs were frozen in place, his head was filled with white noise and…
It’s trying to tell me something. The thought struck him like a sudden slap in the face. It isn’t attacking me. It’s trying to tell me something important.
No, not something important. This was way beyond important. It was crucial. It was monumental. It was world-changing.
But it didn’t know how to tell him. There were no words; there was just white and black and…
Ice.
Something buried deep inside ice. Something old. Something lost. No; something that was hiding. And it was calling to Zak, not saying his name exactly, not with words, but it was calling to him all the same.
‘— away from him!’ Mum’s shrieking commands cut through the white noise filling his mind. There was a whoosh and a pop as the world came back to him and he opened his eyes to see the Spider still standing where it had been when he last saw it – legs taut, arms ready, body tilted towards the spot where he had been lying.
Everything else in the room had gone crazy. Somewhere behind him, Mum was shouting and hammering at the control tablet. May was yelling at the top of her voice, and Dad was dragging him by the shoulders, pulling him across the floor to the side of the room.
‘I’ve got you. It’s OK. It’s OK,’ Dad kept saying over and over again.
‘Is it alive?’ Zak was breathing hard. ‘What was it doing?’ The unreachable image of something important lost in the ice was fading.
‘No, it’s not alive,’ Dad said. ‘That’s impossible.’
‘It’s not supposed to be.’ May rushed to her brother’s side. ‘But what if it is? And where are the others? Maybe they did something.’
In the centre of the room, the Spider came to life once more, tilting back and swivelling in their direction.
‘What’s it doing?’ Zak got to his feet.
Mum stabbed at the control tablet again. ‘It’s not responding to anything.’
‘This is not cool,’ May said. ‘Literally. We have to get away from it.’ She grabbed Zak’s sleeve and dragged him towards the door. ‘We’re not staying in here.’
‘You’re right,’ Dad agreed. ‘You two go back to The Hub. We’ll try to figure out what’s going on.’
‘Seriously?’ May hit the button and the door slid open. ‘You want to stay in here with that thing? And you want us to go out there on our own? There are two more of those things, remember? They must’ve done something to the people here. And what about Dima? Have you forgotten about him?’