Part 13 (2/2)

There was no cheer. This had happened before. 'Don't count your chickens,' said Wolfe, then groaned as the hot spot reappeared and resumed its eastward flight.

On the other side of Greenland, heading west, Kevin was playing the same game, with slightly more success. He had discovered a better way of finding his prey.

A krool crossing land leaves a distinct trail behind it where it has cut a mile-wide path through the vegetation and left nothing but a clean sweep of powdered snow, ice and rock. Kevin happened to notice this when he found his first krool of the day, and after that he stopped looking for their convex forms and searched instead for abrupt tree-lines or abnormally smooth stretches of snow. The method served him well. He found krool after krool, and each time he hovered above them and waited until the military arrived.

As the day wore on, General Wolfe grew increasingly exasperated. The events of the day were beginning to send s.h.i.+vers down his spine. It was becoming clearer all the time that whatever those things were, they were playing games with him. The phone was ringing from Was.h.i.+ngton a little too often and the questions were becoming embarra.s.sing.

But the strangest thing of all was that whatever was happening out there was having the desired effect on the weather. Already the blizzards were dying out and clouds were disappearing from large areas that had previously been covered. In southern England and Ireland, he was told, the sun was s.h.i.+ning and the snow was beginning to melt.

It was just in time for Lizzie. For the first few days of the blizzards, Mr Quigley had been extremely helpful. He had come every day with whatever supplies Lizzie needed, and he and his daughter had shovelled the snow away from her door and made paths to Nancy's shed and the henhouse. But then, one day, he had come and told her that he had sold all his stock and managed to get a pa.s.sage for himself and his family on a ferry to Cyprus, and he could not let the opportunity pa.s.s. He had brought her provisions for a fortnight and a hundredweight of rock salt to help against the snow, but beyond that he could do nothing more for her.

When the daily digging became too much for her, Lizzie brought Nancy and the hens into the house and let them have the use of the scullery. The mains water had long since frozen tight, so she filled the bath and the sink and a few old milk churns with snow. Then she brought in as many logs as she could stack in the hall, and closed the doors. She was dug in like an Arctic creature in her little snow-hole of a cottage, and was forgotten by the world.

The drifts rose until they covered the downstairs windows, and, since the power lines were down over half the country, Lizzie moved around in the dim light of the fire, saving her candles for emergencies. The first thing to run out was the oats she fed to Nancy and the chickens, and she had to start sharing her own rations with them. Then water began to get scarce. The plug in the bath had proved useless, and the snow which Lizzie had gathered so laboriously ran away as soon as it melted. She was reduced to sc.r.a.ping snow from the insides of the drifts outside the windows and melting it over the fire, and anyone who has ever tried this will know that it is a lot of work for very little return. By the time the sun appeared, Lizzie was exhausted, dispirited, and almost down to the last of her provisions.

If it hadn't been for the cats, she would probably not have known the snow had stopped until the next day. Her kitchen was as dark as a bas.e.m.e.nt with the windows all covered in drifts, but it was too cold to sit upstairs where there was still light. The cats, however, went up and down quite often during the day to use the litter tray that Lizzie had set up in the spare room for them as soon as they could no longer get out.

It was when Moppet failed to return from one of these visits that Lizzie went upstairs to investigate and found him curled up on the windowsill in the suns.h.i.+ne. For the first time since Tess and Kevin had left her house, Lizzie's stiff old back straightened up. She went to the window, prised it open, and called out to the sky: 'You did it, you little horrors! You made it!'

CHAPTER TWENTY.

BACK AT THE EDGE of the Arctic Circle, the dragons were still at work. Tess had eventually discovered Kevin's method of detection for herself, and was making up for lost time.

In Mission Control, General Wolfe was getting fed up with throwing missiles at infra-red ghosts, but he had discovered that there was little else he could do. He had found volunteers to go in for close combat in fighter planes armed with machine guns and close-range missiles, but they had flown back bewildered. As soon as they came anywhere near to visual range, their targets disappeared. Simply vanished without trace.

Wolfe called them back. With outward confidence and inward despair, he continued with the missile attacks.

Tess and Kevin were in a mood of high exhilaration. They were living by the skin of their teeth, dodging death one minute and tempting it the next. As a result, life had never seemed better or more precious.

And they were winning. Their phenomenal speed had taken them around the globe to meet again on the other side above Canada, where they played aerial tag and leapfrog together for a few minutes before turning round and starting back the way they had come, to pick off the krools they had missed.

Wolfe followed their progress on radar and infrared. He now knew that he was playing into their hands in some way, but he also knew that the snowstorms were abating. He didn't know how he was going to explain it, but he was sure of one thing. He was going to take all the credit that was on offer when the time came.

The one in the west was circling again. 'Let him have it,' he said.

Fast as the dragons were, they couldn't make it back around the globe before nightfall. They could call to each other, though, and they did, before they came to land and settled as polar bears into their separate dug-outs for the night.

Tess slept fitfully, dreaming bear dreams and dragon dreams, and terrible dreams of Kevin trapped in the form of some awful creature for the rest of his life. A single bear produces very much less heat than two curled up together, and she woke before dawn, stiff and sore with the cold. She knew that the only way to get warm was to get moving, so she crawled out of the tunnel and was amazed to find herself standing in the middle of clearly visible snowfields, stretching away in all directions, glowing in the light of the stars which shone out of a cloudless sky.

A plane pa.s.sed low over her head, blinking a single, white light. Tess shook her damp coat and began to trot northward.

In Mission Control, General Wolfe was popping caffeine pills to keep himself awake. The meteorological satellites were beaming down gratifying pictures of the cloud formations. A few isolated blizzards were still stretching southward like thick fingers, but otherwise the area below the line of seventy degrees lat.i.tude was clear.

But Wolfe knew that those things, whatever they were, would return in the daylight. He had spent most of the night in a fury of injured pride, and he wasn't about to give up. There were all kinds of theories buzzing around. Some said the hot spots were Iraqi war machines, developed for the purpose of freezing out the Northern Hemisphere and crippling the American and European economies. Others said they were UFOs making a bid to colonise the planet. Wolfe was willing to believe that they came from outer s.p.a.ce, but nothing that had happened had succeeded in convincing him that they were not living beings of some kind. He hadn't forgotten those two tapes.

As Tess warmed up she began to make plans. The blizzards had died down, she knew, because of the krools she and Kevin had killed, but there would surely be others closer to the Pole which would need her attention. Even in the dark, however, she was reluctant to become a dragon now that the cover of clouds had gone, just in case some low-flying plane might get a sight of her in the starlight. So she Switched instead to a Canadian goose, and began to fly steadily north.

She was right about the krools. What she didn't know, however, was that they were no longer a danger. Apart from the unknown enemy in the skies, they were under increasing threat from their greatest enemy, the sun. Only in large numbers can krools be certain of producing sufficient freezing clouds to keep them covered and safe. A single krool cloud can be dispersed by warm winds and leave its maker helpless, melting in the sun. Already the second and third line of them were in rapid retreat, and the rearguard had retraced their tracks and slithered back into their icy beds.

Kevin woke at dawn, and the first thing he knew was that it was the day before his birthday. He had one more day and one more night.

He emerged from his den and stretched. It was still snowing, but the snow was softer that it had been, and kinder. He was feeling fresh, and ready for another day's action, but before that he wanted to have a look around, and he knew exactly how he was going to do it. In the blink of an eye he was a dragon again, moving rapidly up towards the top of the clouds.

The air force was waiting for him, and a pa.s.sing plane let off a missile as he rose towards it, but he Switched and dodged it easily. It exploded beneath him, not far from his snow-hole. When he recovered his equilibrium, he Switched again, and set off at high speed towards the Pole. He flew so fast that he soon outdistanced the planes behind him, and by doubling and zig-zagging as he went, he was able to confuse the controllers on the ground until at last he found that he had a clear sky above him. Rapidly, he dropped a couple of hundred feet so that he could give himself the momentum he needed, then he launched himself like a rocket, straight up through the clouds and into the air above them.

It was similar to the way a spaniel will jump up above the long gra.s.s to get a look around, except that Kevin went up almost as far as the stratosphere. From there he could clearly see the pattern of clouds beneath, which told him the exact locations of the outlying krools. It took him scarcely a second to take it all in, and then he was dropping again, like a monstrous hawk plummeting down through the sky.

In front of the monitors in Mission Control, a dozen mouths dropped open in disbelief as radar relayed the astonis.h.i.+ng feat.

'What the h.e.l.l,' said General Wolfe, 'are we dealing with?'

Just across the Arctic Circle from Kevin, Tess had reached the safety of clouds and Switched. Kevin had been calling periodically throughout the morning and was delighted at last to get a reply. He called again, relaying his information about the whereabouts of the krools, and the two dragons set about finis.h.i.+ng them off.

It was easy now. All they had to do was to sweep down along the fingers of cloud until they found the krools. After a while, Mission Control began to understand the pattern, and quite often the dragons found that the planes were already in position even before they arrived.

By late afternoon, Tess and Kevin had located every krool that lay outside the line of seventy degrees lat.i.tude. They met directly above the North Pole, where night had already fallen, to celebrate and discuss tactics. Kevin was full of the joys of victory, and was in favour of carrying on, but Tess wanted to stop and talk to him. She was as excited as he was, but for a different reason. For a while they argued in the air, until they became angry and began to burn each other's noses and ears with jets of flame, which sobered them up a bit. In the end, Kevin relented and they sprinted away from the planes gathering above them until they had left them behind. Then they geared down to geese in order to put the enemy off their tracks and flew on for a while. Finally, when the skies were clear of planes, they landed in a strange amphitheatre of ice in the middle of the Greenland Sea.

'Phew,' said Kevin, when they stood face to face at last. 'It's cold.'

'Yes,' said Tess. 'So we have to talk fast.'

'What's so important, anyway?'

'This,' said Tess. 'We've got the krools on the run, right?'

'Well, we've knocked most of them out, anyway.'

'Right. And I knocked out two today up in Northern Greenland that were definitely going backwards.'

'Did you?'

'Yes. Going at a h.e.l.l of a speed, too. So listen. Maybe the job is finished, you know? And even if it isn't, I could always finish it off on my own if I had to.'

'But why should you?'

'Because maybe you can still have the chance to be what you want to be.'

'But there's not much choice up here, is there? Anyway, I quite like being a dragon.'

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