Part 24 (1/2)

He drove quietly and slowly past the depot buildings, not wanting to awaken those sleeping inside, but when he hit the firhts and gunned the engine

He cut across the sand dunes at the entrance to the bay, and swung northwards on to the beach The headlights threw solid white beahost wings before the rush of the Land-Rover

The tide was out and the exposed beach was hard and shi+ny wet, smooth as a tarmac road He drove fast, and the white beach crabs were blinded by the headlights and crunched crisply beneath the tyres

The dawn caainst the red sky

Once he startled a strand wolf, one of the brown hyenas which scavenged this bleak littoral It galloped, hunchshouldered, in hideous panic for the safety of the dunes

Even in his urgency Johnny felt a stir of revulsion for the loathsome creature

The cold damp rush of the wind into his face refreshed Johnny It cooled the gritty feeling of his eyes, and eased the throb of sleeplessness in his temples

The sun burst over the horizon, and lit the Red Gods five lowed golden red in the dawn, a procession of huge halfhuman shapes that marched into the sea

As Johnny drove towards theht and shadow played over the cliffs and he saw a hundred-foot tall figure of Neptune stooping to dip his flowing red beard into the sea, while a monstrous hunchback with the head of a wolf pranced beside hi robes of red rock jostled with the throng of weird and fantastic shapes It was eerie and disquieting Johnny curbed his fancy and turned his attention to the beaches at the foot of the cliffs

What he saw started his skin tingling again, and he pressed the accelerator flat against the floorboards, racing across the wet sand to where a white cloud of seabirds circled and dived and hopped about soe

As he drove towards the ribbon of soulped at it greedily in flight Its crop was distended and engorged with food

The seabirds scattered raucously and indignantly as the Land-Rover approached, leaving a hu in the centre of an area of sand that was dappled by the prints of their webbed feet, and fouled with dropped feathers and excrete

Johnny braked the Land-Rover and ju look at the body, then turned quickly away and braced hie rose in a hot flood of nausea, and he gagged it back

The body was nude but for a few sodden tatters of clothing and a sea boot still laced on to one foot The birds had attacked every inch of exposed flesh - except for the scalp The face was unrecognizable

The nose was gone, the eye sockets were e teeth

Above this ruined face the shock of colourless albino hair looked like a wig placed there as an obscene and tasteless joke

Hugo Krae from Thunderbolt and Suicide to the Red Gods

Johnny took the canvas ground sheet fro his eyes from the task, he wrapped the corpse carefully, tied the whole bundle with lengths of rope cut froed it up the beach well above the highwater mark

The thick canvas would keep off the birds, but to make doubly certain Johnny collected the drift-wood and planking that was scattered thickly along the high-water line and piled it over the corpse

So was freshly broken and the paint on it was still bright and new Johnny guessed this was part of the wreckage of Wild Goose

He went back to the Land-Rover, and drove on towards the Red Gods which lay only a mile ahead

The sun ell up by now, and already its heat was uncoled out of the sheepskin jacket without interrupting his search of the beach ahead

He was looking for another gathering of seagulls, but instead he saw a large black object stranded in the angle formed by the red stone cliffs

He was fifty yards from it before he realized what it was

He felt his stomach jar violently and then clench at the shock

It was a black rubber inflatable life raft - and it had been dragged up the beach above the high-water line

As he cli beneath hih he had just climbed a mountain The hard knotted sensation in his chest shortened his breathing

He went slowly towards the raft, and there was a story to read in the soft sand

The s mark of the raft, and the two sets of footprints

One set made by bare feet; broad, stubby-toed and with flattened arches, the prints of a man who habitually went barefooted

These tracks had been made by one of the coloured crew of Wild Goose, Johnny decided, dismissed them and turned his whole attention to the other set of footprints

Shod feet, long and narrow, s new shoes little worn, the length of the stride and the depth of prints were those of a tall heavily built man

Johnny realized withnow, and even his lips quivered He was like aIt was Benedict van der Byl He kneith complete and utter certainty Benedict had survived the maelstrom of Thunderbolt and Suicide

Johnny balled his fists, squeezing hard and he thrust out his jaw, tightening his lips Still the hatred washed over his mind in dark hot waves

”Thank God,”he whispered ”Thank God Now I can kill him myself” The footprints had churned the sand all about the raft

Beside the which had been used as a lever to rip the eency water container and the food locker from the floor-boards of the raft

The food locker had been ransacked and abandoned

They would be carrying the packets of iron rations in their pockets to save weight, but the water container was gone

The two sets of prints struck out straight for the dunes

Johnny followed the wind-blown sands of the first dune

Johnny was undismayed The dunes persisted for only a thousand yards or so, then gave way inland to the plains and salt flats of the interior

He ran back to the Land-Rover He had his eain His hatred was reduced to a hard indigestible lump below his ribs, and he conte the e Bay

Inspector Stander had the police helicopter parked on the landing-strip behind the depot buildings He could be here in thirty minutes An hour later they would have Benedict van der Byl

Johnny dismissed the idea Officially Benedict was dead, drowned