Jockey tittered behind his hand. “Of course they have! The Holy Enchanter has given his word not to distribute the hallowed text within these borders.”
The sentence had scarcely left his lips when the lights began to flicker.
“Oh, the Ismus is such a rascally swizzler!” he giggled. “His promises are spun of the most brittle, sugary strands. Now I am charged to fetch the Creeper. You are to be taken to the whirlycopter. There are some surprises and japes in store for you, Martin Baxter. What a thrilling Christmas you’ll have in this tedious sleep world this year.”
“Wait,” Martin called as the Jockey brushed past him. “I just want to know… is there anything of the Barry Milligan I worked with for over twenty-five years still left inside you? Was that only an act before? Is there no trace of that rugger-loving sod anywhere?”
The Jockey stared at him in puzzled amusement. “We are the Aces,” he explained slowly, as though to a simpleton. “We do not have to pretend to be who we are not, in these shabby dreams. I am, and forever was, the Jockey. The man you thought you knew as Barry Milligan was but a pretence of my invention because the jest suited me. No more than that. There was never a drunken headmaster, there was never a school nor a mirthless place called Felixstowe – there is only Mooncaster. That is the one reality. How pitiful it must be to be an aberrant and not know this plainest of truths.”
Martin looked away and the Jockey scampered out of the room.
In the tunnels, the lights were exploding and panic and chaos had started. Harrowing cries were echoing through the passageways. The Jockey clambered into a jeep, his pinching caramel outfit squeaking and creaking. Then he was driven off, towards the medical centre.
The Captain and two soldiers who had brought Martin here marched him in the direction of the helipad. Gunfire crackled in the distance. Martin hung his head. It was over. Dancing Jax had finally conquered everything.
EUN-MI WONDERED WHAT was keeping the reinforcements she had sent her sister to find. It had been too long. Where had Nabi gone? What was she doing? Had she betrayed the Republic in favour of her new Western friends after all?
The young English refugees didn’t dare move or utter a word. They couldn’t take their eyes off the barrel of the gun that continuously switched aim from face to frightened face.
“Do you want to shoot us?” Gerald asked quietly. “Is that it? You want to punish us? What crime do you think we’re guilty of?”
“You steal People’s Army weapons!” Eun-mi reminded him.
“That’s not the reason,” he answered. “That’s the excuse. Your hatred goes back much further. You just don’t like us, it’s as basic as that – xenophobia. How very sad in one so young to be so completely brainwashed into despising and persecuting the unlike. But then that’s why we’re here, isn’t it? Because my young friends and I are different. The rest of the world has the Ismus to tell them that; you have your Supreme Leader. Pogrom is pogrom, no matter who’s behind it.”
“I shoot you first!” the girl threatened, aiming between his eyes.
“Human nature really is so depressing,” he replied. “I could almost wish you would.”
“Gerald!” Maggie exclaimed anxiously. “Don’t say that.”
The old man gave her a gentle smile. “And then,” he said, “I remember that there are people like my dear friend Maggie here. Lovely, joyous souls with open hearts, brimming with kindness and affection, and I know we’re not so bad after all. But then you wouldn’t understand that, would you, Miss Chung? I don’t suppose your life has been a particularly happy one.”
Without taking her eyes off the Westerners, Eun-mi leaned back, into the corridor. It was deathly quiet. Scowling with impatience, she called for her sister. Where was Nabi?
“Of course,” Gerald continued fearlessly, “what you loathe most of all is yourself, isn’t it?”
Eun-mi’s face didn’t betray the fact that his remark hit home. If he was trying to provoke her, to get her to release them, it wasn’t going to work. Her self-control was impervious to his clumsy psychology. She prided herself on her detachment.
“I shoot,” she repeated implacably.
“That won’t make your father love you,” he told her. “The great General Chung – just what is it makes him so… indifferent towards you? You might as well be part of the furniture as far as he’s concerned.”
“No more talk.”
“Why is he so cold to you, but lights up whenever he’s with little Nabi? Why does he cherish and adore her, but treats you like something he’s trodden in? What did you do?”
Eun-mi pulled the trigger.
The air exploded. The teenagers shrieked and covered their ears. Most of them dived to the floor. The gunshot seemed to shake the room and Eun-mi’s nostrils flared with exhilaration as she kept the pistol level.
Gerald let out a staggering breath. For all his bravado, that had shocked and frightened him. Looking at the solemn-faced girl with the gun, he knew she had missed deliberately.
“Next time I kill,” she said coldly, the ghost of a smile pulling the corners of her mouth. “Next time you dead.”
Overhead the refectory lights crackled. Everyone glanced upwards. The fluorescent strips were flickering. Out in the corridor it was the same. The lights there were dying. A fizzle of sparks ran along the cables like a firework. Then the passage was engulfed in the supreme darkness that is only found underground.
The refugees murmured dismally and Eun-mi looked annoyed. She believed the generators were breaking down again. Too much of the machinery and equipment here was out of date. Too many elements had been repaired and jury-rigged far too often. It was infuriating that the power should fail at this critical moment.
Suddenly there was a snap of electricity from the wiring above their heads and the refectory was tipped into darkness too. The only light was an infernal orange-red glow from the grill of the wood-burning stove. It threw ominous black shadows around the room, leaping up the walls like tormented souls.
“I don’t like this,” one of the younger girls whimpered.
“Don’t be scared,” Maggie reassured her, trying to sound as if they weren’t being held at gunpoint, deep inside a mountain in North Korea, where the lights had gone out. “It’s just a glitch. They’ve probably not paid their leccy bill.”
“Be silent!” Eun-mi commanded. “People’s Army engineers will fix.”
“That wasn’t a surge or a blown fuse,” Gerald told her. “Something else is happening here, can’t you feel it?”
“It’s getting colder,” Nicholas said, huddling up to Esther.
“Nobody move!” Eun-mi demanded. Then she too shivered and the gun trembled in her hands.
A blast of freezing air had squalled in from the corridor. They heard a door slam, followed by echoing footsteps.
“It’s just the door to the terrace,” Maggie said, although it sounded nothing like that door.
Even Eun-mi held her breath as they waited and the steady, measured footfalls drew closer. There was a predatory menace to those steps.
“Who’s out there?” Sally asked fretfully.
Eun-mi wanted to twist round and look, but she felt the threat of that approach and the hairs on the back of her neck lifted as gooseflesh spread up her spine. For the first time since the death of her mother, she felt afraid and didn’t know what to do.
Then, very softly, in the corridor, a voice began to chant.