Dougie Dundas stared wide-eyed at the ceiling but he would never see it again. Between his cracked and darkened lips, the point of his tongue protruded far enough to show that it was swollen with cherry-dark sores. The skin on his yellow, black-jowled face was sickly yellow except that the bridge of his nose, cheekbone and forehead on the right side were more darkly discoloured. His chest was uncovered, and the light, antiseptic bandage did little to hide the open sores and blisters on his chest. His hands had been folded but the bandages had leaked a little so that fluid from the splits in the skin on his fingers formed a pool at the base of his still breastbone. He had lost weight in the days of his illness and, slim to begin with, now looked skeletal.
‘Still no idea?’ asked Richard.
‘No idea at all,’ admitted Asha wearily. ‘But whatever it was, he never stood a chance.’
‘He’d a wife and child in Glasgow,’ said Tom Snell quietly. ‘They’re his next of kin. There’s no record about parents.’
The four of them stood in silence, looking through the glass wall section into the clinical brightness of the isolation room. ‘What are we going to do now?’ asked Peter. ‘We can’t just leave him there, can we?’
‘No,’ said Asha. ‘He’ll have to be bagged up and go down into cold storage with the other three.’
‘I’ll look for some volunteers…’ Peter’s doubtful tone said it all. He could look. He wouldn’t find any.
‘No,’ said Tom quietly. ‘If you bag him, Asha, I’ll move him.’
‘I’ll help,’ said Richard. ‘It’ll take two to do it properly, even if we wheel him down on a stretcher. Asha, will the bag be germ proof?’
‘Yes. Wait here. I won’t be long.’ She opened a door leading into the vestibule of the isolation room, climbed into her protective clothing, pulled on a new pair of gloves and a mask and went in.
‘It’s incredible,’ said Richard quietly. ‘I’ve never seen anything like it. What on earth could it be?’
The other two shook their heads in sad incomprehension, then they turned away until Asha had completed the task of washing the corpse in disinfectant and placing it expertly in a bag of yellow plastic which was so thick as to be almost opaque. She wheeled the corpse into the little vestibule and closed the door into the isolation room. She pulled off her protective clothing, binned it and opened the door.
‘That’s it,’ she said. ‘The best I can do. I really can’t think of an organism which could break out of the regime we’ve had in place over the last few days. And, in any case, no one else has shown any symptoms. Unless exhaustion is a symptom,’ she added. ‘Plenty of people are exhibiting that one.’
‘When Tom and I have put Sergeant Dundas safely away,’ said Richard gently, ‘we’ll give you a lift back to Niobe and John. You’ll feel better after a good night’s sleep.’
Asha gave him a grin of thanks, but shook her head. ‘No, thanks, Richard love. I’d better kip down here. I have to run checks on the rest of Psyche’s crew for the next few days in case anyone shows symptoms like poor Dougie’s there. If we do have any kind of infection spread, then I’ll want to know at the earliest moment. And I’ll have to keep monitoring you, Tom. It might conceivably have been something in the ice cave itself, some organism, infection… The ice is, what, twenty thousand years old. There could be anything in there. I know it sounds fanciful, but face it: four men went in there together and you’re the only one left alive.’
Nobody spoke during the ride down with the late Dougie Dundas. Asha seemed to have come to the end of her tether; she looked at the floor as she followed the two quiet men wheeling the stretcher along the corridors from the medical rooms to the cold storage which was a clinically isolated section of the galley’s main cold storage facility. They positioned the trolley carefully between the tables which now carried more yellow plastic body bags than even the most accident-prone voyage usually supplied.
Dougie slid off the trolley with a weary sigh, as though the plastic wrapping was speaking for him. With Richard at his head and Tom at his feet, the sergeant, his body as light as that of a child, settled onto the table top beside the body of the mysterious blonde woman who was only marginally more skeletal than himself. They placed him tenderly, reverently in place, but even so, as though still wanting the last word even now, Dougie settled further after they had laid him down. Romantic to the last, he shifted slightly towards the supine woman he shared the table with and seemed in this slightest of movements to nudge her. The yellow plastic which had been wrapped round her parted, showing rough edges where it had been half cut, half sawn open. Out of the wound, her white hair tumbled, matted, thick and stinking. It had weight enough to jerk her head round after it and, from her neck, something clattered onto the floor.
Richard, who was nearest, automatically bent and picked it up, holding it up to the light, wondering in shocked surprise how the corpse of a woman discovered on an iceberg at the top of the world could be wearing an ornament which seemed to be made of ebony wood and feathers.
But then Tom Snell was standing by his side speaking in a low, tense monotone. ‘We’d better warn Captain Walcott to tighten up security in here. We don’t want any more of that superstitious filth. And I don’t want it coming anywhere near my men.’
He snatched it out of Richard’s fingers and showed it to Asha, explaining in a voice shaking with rage, ‘Just look at this, would you? It’s a juju charm. Some kind of magic against the dead!’ He swung round to face the stunned pair still standing, looking as though they didn’t understand a word that he was saying. ‘Juju!’ he repeated fiercely, crushing the black trinket in his massive fist. ‘Voodoo! Black magic! Christ! You’d think we were in the middle of the fucking jungle already!’
Chapter Seventeen
The sight of the tank, coming on top of all the other sights to which she had been subject that day, should have finished Ann Cable but it did not. She should have fainted dead away on the spot as she had already done earlier. She should have run away screaming, as she had been so close to doing at the very moment when she saw it, but she did not. The new crisis, in spite of introducing an air of unreality into the situation, sobered her up like a slap in the face is said to do with an hysteric. There was no doubt that the tank was real, though. No doubt of that at all. It sat there, squatting silently as the sound of the last falling tree echoed across the wide dry river bed of the Blood until it whispered away into the forest shadows of Congo Libre on the far bank. Its grey sides glittered all too solidly in the gleam of the jungle moon. A scent of hot metal seemed to come from it, of oil and cordite and burning, though these may have been the smells from the burned out wreckage of Harry Parkinson’s askari truck. What came from it most clearly, unmistakably, was the sharp mechanical whine as the turrent swung round to bring the gun to bear on them.
The sound, carrying clear and sinister on the still African air, galvanised them all into action at once. Three people with but one mind, they ran for the Land Rover and leaped into its stuffy interior. Harry released the brake, hit the motor and, because they were facing the dry river bed, drove straight down into it at breakneck speed. The bank fell away steeply, but the wreckage of the askaris’ burned out truck had carved a slope for them; they got down because of that and also by the grace of God. They made so much noise and kicked up so much dust that it took Ann a moment to realise when she looked back that the tank had fired a round to land exactly where they had been standing when they first saw it. ‘Quick!’ she screamed. ‘They’ve opened fire!’