Part 13 (1/2)

For Tess's heart had understood even more clearly than her mind what Lizzie meant by being what isn't. And it had acted before her mind had been able to doubt, and to stop it. In front of the krool's retreating underbelly was a huge and magnificent dragon, and then there were two of them, blasting flame at the hideous eye, which shrivelled and melted and dripped like warm treacle into the snow. The krool reared as high as it could go, a mile into the sky, but the dragons took to the wing and continued their pursuit until it collapsed and doubled back on itself like a monstrous, black pancake.

The two dragons leapt for the skies in a delirium of delight. They were faster, cleverer, more powerful than any creature on earth, and they swooped and soared, chased each other's tails and tumbled in the air in sheer elation. This was the feeling that their premonitions had promised them, the certainty of power beyond human imagination, the sensation of absolute freedom. For all the elements were theirs to enjoy. They were equally at home in water, earth and air, but they were not bound by any of them. They carried the secret of fire within them, and even the great ice wastes all around them could cause them no discomfort. They were the rulers of all they surveyed, and there was no creature on earth that could defeat them.

In the midst of their celebrations, they heard the plane pa.s.sing above them in the clouds. Heard it first, and then saw it, with their infra-red vision.

Just as it saw them. The scanner beeped, warning of a strong signal. Jake sat bolt upright and stared at the screen.

'You got something, Jake?' said Scud.

'Holy G.o.d,' said Jake. 'What the h.e.l.l is that?'

'What is it, Jake, what is it? You got something?'

Hadders sat up and turned around in his seat.

'I've never seen anything like it,' said Jake, his eyes filled with wonder.

'What the h.e.l.l is it, Jake?' Scud yelled.

Jake moved into military mode, sharp and efficient. 'We got hotspots, boys. Two of them. I don't know what they are and I don't know where they came from, but they're like nothing I ever saw before.'

Hadders had left his seat and was standing in the small s.p.a.ce beside Jake, looking over his shoulder at the screen. 'Swing around, Scud,' he said. 'We're losing them.'

'Who's giving the orders around here?' screamed Scud. 'What the h.e.l.l are you doing, standing back there telling me what to do?'

'You should see this, sir. We should get a better look before we go past.'

Scud gritted his teeth and swore, but he dipped his wings and swung around in the tightest circle the plane could handle. 'Come in, base,' he said into the radio mike. 'This is Delta Zero Five, are you reading me?'

General Wolfe was sitting at his desk in Mission Control when one of the technical a.s.sistants called him over to the computer terminal which was receiving Scud Morgan's pictures. 'G.o.d d.a.m.n,' he said. 'What the h.e.l.l is that?'

'd.a.m.ned if I know,' said the aide. 'There's no plane in the world that flies like that.'

The shapes on the screen were descending in rapid circles, leaving a residue of heat in their wake that showed up on the monitor like the tail of a comet. The plane was pa.s.sing above them and moving away again.

'Get on to the guys in that plane,' said Wolfe. 'Tell them to stay above those things and keep sending back pictures.'

'Yes, sir.'

By now there was quite a gathering around the terminal, watching the screens. 'I knew it,' said Wolfe. 'Didn't I tell you, huh? I knew there was something in there.'

CHAPTER NINETEEN.

THE PLANE ABOVE THEIR heads was unsettling, but dragons are not easily intimidated. When they realised that it was not going to go away, they agreed to ignore it and go in search of more krools. They split up, one going east and the other west, flying low enough to be able to see the ground beneath them.

The plane above circled one last time, then followed Kevin. For a while he allowed it to drone along behind him, but then he grew irritated by it, and doubled back on himself, too rapidly for the plane to follow. Then he flew south at top speed for a while, and did not turn back to his original course until he was sure that the skies around him were clear.

Scud Morgan swore. Jake shook his head. Mark Hadders went back to his seat and his book.

A krool in a snowstorm is not easy to find, even for a dragon. Kevin scanned the ground as he flew, but it was only by chance that he came across his second krool. It was sliding southwards across Norway, more slowly now than in the preceding weeks, but still making good progress. It had fed well recently, cutting a great swathe through the forested regions in its path, and had grown to enormous dimensions.

Krools do not reproduce like most of the other creatures of the earth. They don't mate with others of their kind, and they produce neither eggs nor young. When they reach a certain critical ma.s.s, however, they divide, simply split down the middle and become two, like amoebae. Kevin was able to spot this krool from the air because it was in the process of doing just that.

Where it was splitting into two the camouflage of snow was s.h.i.+fting and revealing patches of the glutinous black flesh beneath. Kevin slowed, wheeled round and returned, spitting flame. But by the time he reached it, the krool had become aware of the hot little presence above and glued itself firmly to the ground.

The first krool had been so easy to dispose of that Kevin wasn't prepared for the battle which followed. The krool did nothing, merely sat tight, knowing that as long as it didn't reveal its underneath to the attacker it was almost invulnerable. Almost, but not quite. Kevin came in time after time, throwing flame constantly. Wherever he attacked the krool, it melted into black, oily liquid, but it was so huge that his best efforts made little impression on its bulk.

He stopped for a while, trying to work out a plan. It was tiring, the way he was acting, and he realised that he was using too much energy. If he became exhausted, he would have to rest, and then feed, and when he thought about feeding his mind became filled with pictures of what dragons best like to eat, which is people. And when he thought of people, he could think of only people that he knew, and he wondered if any Switchers before him had experienced the weird sensation of imagining a slap-up meal consisting of their relatives and friends.

To take his mind off these unpleasant thoughts, he returned to the krool and flew up the gradual contour of its body until he reached the highest point. Then he burned away in one spot, calmly and consistently, until he had produced a hollow full of bubbling black liquid like a cauldron. Still he carried on, until at last the heat melted a hole right through the krool and the liquid flowed away on to the ground beneath it. The beast began to convulse, flapping its skirts and heaving its great body so that the snow which covered it flew up in a thick cloud. Kevin hovered in the air and waited until the krool gave a final shudder and lay still.

High above, a satellite had picked up the heat emissions from the battle, and three planes were converging on the spot. But by the time they arrived, Kevin was gone, and their surveillance equipment picked up no signs of life.

But a few hundred miles away, above Greenland, another plane was about to intercept Tess's path. Her infra-red image had just appeared on the aircraft's monitor, and a rapid radio communication had put the crew on to the offensive. Wolfe didn't know what those things were out there, but he wasn't taking any chances. The first heat-seeking missile was armed and ready to go.

Tess's flight path was erratic and unpredictable, and the pilot of the bomber wasn't about to take chances. As soon as he got a clear radar fix, he fired off the missile and swung around out of the area.

Tess had known that the plane was there, but she hadn't expected that it would be able to detect her. She accepted her dragon ability to see objects by the heat they emitted, but she had no idea that there was an equivalent technology available to the military. So, when she picked up the image of the missile snaking towards her, she was completely off guard. If she had been expecting it she might have dodged, since dragons can perform fantastic aerial manoeuvres which no missile could possibly follow. Instead, instinctively, she changed herself into a swallow. The missile swept past, catching her in its current of air and swirling her around in the blizzard. Then, finding itself without a target, it ploughed blindly on, straight into the snow beneath.

The swallow was well clear of the centre of the explosion, but even so, chunks of snow and ice flew up to where she was recovering her balance high above. She flew upwards and away, but in no time at all the blood of the little bird began to freeze. She listened for a moment, and as soon as she was sure that the plane was not returning she Switched back into the warm and fearless form of the dragon.

The monitor in Mission Control slowly cleared and became blank as the heat from the explosion died away. A great cheer went up. General Wolfe leant back in his chair and clasped his hands behind his head in satisfaction. 'Whatever it was, we got it,' he said.

'Uh oh,' said a technician behind him. 'I'm afraid not, sir.'

'What?' Wolfe sat up again. There, on the screen, was the hot spot again, as clear as ever. It was heading east with surprising speed. 'But it disappeared, didn't it?'

'It looked like it did,' said the technician. 'Maybe the heat from the explosion just masked it somehow. It's there now, anyhow.'

It was, and racing back through the snowstorms towards Kevin. He had heard Tess's call and was coming to meet her. From their positions all over the Arctic Circle, the military planes moved in.

It was nearly dark when the two dragons met above the Norwegian Sea, and it was time to call it a day. Their infra-red vision enabled them to see planes overhead, but no kind of vision would enable them to find krools in the dark. Kevin wanted to stay a dragon, but Tess had learnt that they were not as invisible as they had believed, and insisted on the safety of polar bears. Kevin capitulated. They dug in quickly and slept straight away, curled closely together for comfort.

As soon as the sun came up the next morning, the two hot spots were picked up on the monitors of a surveillance plane. They didn't appear gradually, as a plane does when it starts its engines and warms up, and they neither taxied to a runway nor rose vertically. One moment there was nothing on the infrared screens above, and then there were two large, hot objects flying off at impossible speed in different directions.

This time, Tess and Kevin had a plan. It was a dangerous plan and would require all their courage and all their wits but, if it worked, it would be a brilliant way to get rid of the krools. All they had to do was to find them.

They had decided to fly low, so low that a krool would appear to them as a patch of slowly-rising ground which would then fall away again. In the middle of a blizzard such flying required steel nerves and lightening fast reactions, but the dragon has both, even at the speed of a jet plane.

When they had talked in the early hours of the morning, Tess and Kevin had agreed that there must be a vanguard of krools along the same lat.i.tude as the first ones they had found, to account for the even progress of the blizzards that preceded them. So the dragons flew in straight lines, due east and due west from where they had started. Several times in the first hour, Tess slowed and circled to examine a suspicious slope in the ground, but each time it was a false alarm. Above her the planes criss-crossed continuously, and she had already out-foxed three missiles before she found her first krool. As soon as she was certain of it, she rose some distance into the clouds above and circled steadily, waiting. Before long she saw the tell-tale heat of the approaching plane and heard its engine. As soon as it was within range, it launched its missile. Tess dived at full speed towards the unsuspecting krool. The missile spun after her, coming closer to her tail, until at the last minute, she Switched as she had done before and swung out of the way. It worked. The garnered momentum of the dragon dive flung the little bird out into the blizzard at terrifying speed, and away from the explosion. A few bits of exploded krool reached her as she shot through the air, but she was too busy trying to gain control of her dizzying flight to be concerned about them.

In Mission Control, the observers watched the clearing screen in tense silence. Then someone said: 'We got one this time.'