Deception Game (45 page)

Pressing on, Drake began to notice the character of the land changing, the flat dune plains giving way to rocky slopes and rugged foothills. They were in the Nafusa Mountains, a range of craggy hills running roughly from east to west, with the coastal plains to the north and the Sahara to the south. In several places, steep canyons and ancient dried-up river valleys bisected their path, forcing them to veer off course to find a way around.

It was wearying work that served only to lower their spirits, but Drake knew there was little to be done now except get their heads down and power through it. He’d been on more than his share of forced marches in his life, particularly during the arduous selection process for the SAS. Some of those had pushed him close to breaking point, but then that had been the whole idea.

Drake hadn’t been the fittest member of his selection group by any measure. He hadn’t been the biggest or the strongest, but he did possess one quality that had stood him in good stead amongst his comrades – he had been utterly determined to prevail. He’d seen guys who could have given Olympic athletes a run for their money fall behind and drop out, not because they were physically broken but because they simply couldn’t hack it any longer. The lesson had been stark and clear; in a situation where every man was pushed to the point of exhaustion, it was their mental rather than physical reserves that made the difference.

So it was now.

‘And to think, I used to get...pissed off when they made us march through rain and snow,’ Drake gasped, managing a dry laugh. The mere thought of bleak windswept moorland and driving rain sounded like heaven to him at that moment. ‘Give me the Brecon Beacons any day.’

There was no response from his companion. Turning around, Drake was surprised to see McKnight some distance behind. She was slowing down, her head low, shoulders hunched over, plodding forward on leaden feet.

‘Shit,’ he said, backtracking to intercept her. Even this small diversion from his course left him with a pang of regret, knowing he’d have to retread the same ground again, but there was no question of going back. She came first.

‘Sam,’ he called out as he approached.

At last she looked up at him. Her face and arms were already red from exposure, and coated with a fine dusting of sand. Her eyes were focussed on him, but there was a heaviness to them, a sense of great fatigue.

‘I’m fine, don’t wait for me,’ she said, waving him off.

It was a brave gesture, but totally counterproductive. Nobody wanted to be the weak link in the chain, but the moment people started pretending they were fine when they weren’t, things went wrong. Drake had seen it happen too many times to let it happen now.

‘I’m running on empty,’ he said, deciding to give her an opening. It wasn’t exactly a lie either. ‘Why don’t we rest for a few minutes, yeah?’

Either she saw his offer for what it was and decided to let it go, or she was simply too tired to care. Whatever the case, she sank to the ground and lay there with her back against a low boulder, its contours scoured smooth by long years of exposure to wind and sand.

Drake sat down beside her, trying to observe her surreptitiously. She was breathing fast and shallow, as if her lungs were struggling to suck in enough oxygen. With a naturally fair complexion, she was already burned by the sun, despite covering up as much as possible, and that was only going to get worse as the day wore on.

She was staring out across the desert, perhaps contemplating whether it would be the last thing she ever saw. The look of sad, reluctant acceptance in her eyes made his heart ache, particularly since there was nothing he could do about it.

‘You ever think about getting out?’ she asked suddenly.

Drake blinked, his slowing thoughts shifting back to the present with some difficulty. ‘From the Agency?’

‘From everything,’ she corrected. Twisting around, she looked at him with frank honesty. ‘Just pack up and leave it all behind for good. No more Agency, no more Cain, no more Anya. No more risking your life for other people’s bullshit agendas. That’s not such a bad thing, is it?’

‘And what would I do?’ he asked, taken aback by the unexpected emotion in her plea.

‘Live, Ryan. You’d get to live.’ She sighed and leaned back against the boulder, staring up at the flawless blue sky. ‘Find a house on some remote island, somewhere even Cain couldn’t reach you. Live a simple life, do normal things. Forget all of this ever happened.’

A simple life. Normal things. It had been so long since Drake’s life had been anything close to normal, he’d almost forgotten what it could feel like. The very prospect of it, of no longer living with a sword above his head, of waking up each morning without a care in the world, seemed like an impossible dream – something to hope for, to strive for but never to reach.

Even if he did take up her suggestion and walked away, it wouldn’t last. He knew that as surely as he knew the sun would rise in the morning. There was no place on this earth that Marcus Cain couldn’t reach him, given time.

‘It’s not just about me now,’ he said quietly. ‘Even if I walked away, there are others he’d use to get to me. Including you.’ He shook his head. ‘I can’t walk away from that.’

He hadn’t said it, but there was another reason he couldn’t go, another person he couldn’t leave behind. He hadn’t say it, but there was no need. From the look of pain and sadness in her eyes, McKnight sensed what he was thinking.

‘Sometimes I think you’re in the wrong business, Ryan,’ she said. ‘You’re too good a man for this.’

Drake frowned, wondering just how wrong she was about him. But before he could say anything else, the woman took a deep breath and rose unsteadily to her feet once more.

‘I’m ready,’ she said at length, her voice heavy with fatigue. ‘Let’s go.’

The sun waxed and their strength waned as they continued the relentless, gruelling march. The wind began to pick up, lifting and scattering sand in blinding clouds that blasted exposed skin and reduced visibility.

An hour crawled by, and there was no longer even the pretence of maintaining awareness of their surroundings. Half blinded by fatigue and windblown grit, they stumbled along, heads down, seeing nothing but the ground at their feet.

‘Monarch to all units,’ Drake spoke into his radio, barely managing to croak the words out. ‘Can anyone hear me?’

The only response was the pop and hiss of static. He couldn’t tell if the silence was down to their being too far away, or the sandstorms causing interference, or if, worst of all, nobody was around to answer.

He could barely feel the ache in his injured arm now. Dry, crusted blood coated his skin, sticking to his clothes, while the improvised field dressing threatened to come away. At another time he might have worried about infection and even blood loss, but those were the least of his concerns now.

His reactions were slowing, his thoughts growing muddled. Not long ago he had become convinced that they had somehow turned around and were heading in the wrong direction. It had taken him a good five minutes of slow, painful, methodical thinking to work out that he’d been wrong.

It couldn’t be much further to the rendezvous, he tried to tell himself. Assuming they were still making two or three miles an hour, they should be close...

But how long had they been walking? He couldn’t remember. It felt like a lifetime now. Maybe it was further than he thought.

How fast had they been going? He didn’t even know that. There were no landmarks, no signposts, nothing to gauge their progress. He thought it should have been possible to work it out, but it was so much effort just to get the gears of his mind turning.

‘All units, this is—’

So preoccupied was he with retaining his tenuous grip on his mental faculties that he didn’t even see the cliff edge until his right boot went over the edge and disappeared into nothingness. Teetering forward off balance, Drake at last snapped back into awareness as the yawning drop opened up beneath him.

Swaying like a drunkard, he stumbled backwards, scrambling away from the edge and almost knocking over McKnight, who was still trudging on with weary, relentless determination.

‘Sam, we can’t go that way,’ he warned her. ‘It’s a sheer drop.’

She didn’t look up, didn’t even acknowledge him. There was a vacant, uncomprehending look in her eyes.

He reached out and grasped her arm. ‘Sam! Focus on me.’

With what seemed like a great effort, she turned to look at him, and some vague spark of recognition seemed to kindle behind her eyes. ‘Ryan?’ she said, as if seeing him for the first time.

‘That’s right. It’s Ryan.’

‘What’s wrong?’

They had stumbled across a wadi – an ancient dried-up river bed that had once carved a deep channel through the mountainous region in which they found themselves. Millennia ago, this might have been a fast-flowing river, but now it was little more than a deep rocky canyon with steep walls on both sides.

For fit and experienced climbers, such a natural obstacle would have presented little more than a temporary inconvenience, but in their weakened state it might as well have been a mile-deep canyon. Even if they could somehow clamber down this side to reach the valley floor, neither of them possessed the strength or energy to make it up the far bank.

They would have to detour around it, try to find a shallow crossing point.

‘The way ahead’s blocked,’ he explained, pointing to the sheer drop that lay just a few yards in front of them. ‘We have to go around.’

Lifting her gaze, McKnight stared out across the wadi, taking in the wide expanse of ancient sediment below and the imposing rock walls in the distance.

That was it for her. Her shoulders sagged, her legs seemed to give way and with a faint, defeated sob she sank to her knees. Her expression was one of absolute, crushing despair.

‘Sam, we can’t stay here,’ he warned, kneeling down and pulling her close so that her face was only a few inches from his. ‘You have to get up. Do you understand? You have to get up now!’

‘I can’t,’ she whispered, shaking her head. ‘I can’t go any further.’

He couldn’t afford to let such thoughts take hold. He had to get her up and moving now, or she would never leave this place. ‘Yes, you can! You can, Sam! You’ve been a pain in my arse this whole time, you’re not going to fucking give up on me now! Not when there’s still breath in your lungs, now get up.’ Reaching out, he gripped her shoulders hard. ‘Get up now!’

She looked at him again, her eyes more alert now. He saw a flicker of anger and defiance in them. Good – anger was better than blind indifference. Anger could mean the difference between living and dying.

Planting one foot in front of her, she pushed herself upward from the ground, muscles trembling, teeth gritted with the effort. And for a moment, it seemed like she might regain her footing.

A moment, and then it was gone. The brief fire of strength died away, and she slumped back onto the dusty earth.

She was finished. She’d given it everything she had, but the sight of the impassable natural barrier before them had finally broken her will. Now she had nothing left to give.

He should have seen this coming, he thought in a moment of bitter self-recrimination. He shouldn’t have pushed her so hard, forced her to keep going when she was already beyond her limits. He should have stopped her from coming here in the first place.

Drake looked away for a moment, unable to face her. She was going to die here.

‘No,’ he said, the thought of losing her kindling a spark of defiance in him. ‘Not here.’

He was deathly tired and hurting, but desperation drove him on. Shoving one hand beneath her legs and the other across her shoulders, Drake took a deep breath and tensed up, trying to force more blood into his weary muscles.

‘Come on, then. Off we go.’

Then, with every ounce of strength left in his body, he lifted her up off the ground, staggered for a moment, then rallied his last reserves of flagging energy and started to walk. Too weary to protest, she merely clung to him.

Samantha was of average height for a woman, with the trim, compact build that came from regular aerobic exercise. She probably weighed no more than 130 pounds. An easy weight for him to manage under normal circumstances.

But not today.

Every step he took was agony. His chest heaved, his heart pounded and his vision grew hazy, yet still he battled on, one laboured footstep after another. Their pace had slowed to a pathetic crawl as he stumbled along near the edge of the wadi in a vain search for a crossing point, hoping against hope that there was still a way out of this.

He couldn’t rightly say how long he managed to carry her, how much ground he covered, because all such concepts had ceased to mean anything to him. His grip on the woman in his arms was growing weaker. His arms trembled with the effort of holding her.

‘Not...far now,’ he gasped, trying to focus his eyes on the ground ahead.

Plodding along as he was, at the limits of his endurance, it was only a matter of time until something finally brought him down. He felt his foot come down awkwardly on a rounded stone, felt it slip out from beneath him, felt his tenuous balance start to fail him.

With a breathless cry, he pitched forward, his desperate grip on Samantha slipping so that she tumbled to the ground in a dusty heap beside him, letting out an agonized groan as her weakened body absorbed the rough impact.

‘No more,’ she rasped, tears carving glistening tracks down her sand-covered cheeks, her voice raw with overwhelming fatigue and emotion. ‘No more, Ryan. Please.’

Drake stared at her, at the young woman who had willingly faced so many challenges with him. So much had happened in the short time they had known each other, he almost couldn’t remember life without her.

She was as exhausted as he was, her skin reddened by long exposure to the sun and marked by grime, sweat and dust. Her face was drawn and sunken, her normally thick dark hair hanging limp. Only her eyes still held some vestige of life, though they were filled with the same grief and defeat that he imagined she saw in him.