You’ll find corpses—
Something terrible must have happened. Ye guessed where the other two might be found. Ma Mak slept, with his parents and his brothers and sisters, in the ruin of a half-demolished house on the edge of the estate. The family shared a single room, while Hui Xiao-Tong lived alone in a cave-like shed nearby. That was where he would find them.
He staggered out into the harsh light, narrowed his eyes and ran across the vacant lot to his motorbike.
Inside the warehouse it was gloomy, a vast space, the ceiling somewhere between twenty and thirty metres high, riveted walls, steel joists. Huge racks suggested that cast steel had been stored here in the past.
Shots rang out behind them. Their echo was thrown back by walls and ceilings, acoustic ricochets.
‘Oi, watch where you’re flying,’ shouted Yoyo.
Jericho turned his head and saw the blond-haired guy catching up with him.
‘Dive!’
Their pursuer approached. Shots whipped through the hall again. Turbine wailing, they raced between the racks towards the rear wall of the warehouse, another door there, ceiling height, which was fortunately open. On the other side yawned a space even darker than this one.
Something that looked like a crane emerged from the darkness.
‘Careful!’
‘If you don’t keep your trap shut—’
‘Higher! Higher!’
Jericho obeyed. The airbike skipped away over the crane in a breakneck parabola. Suddenly it was too near the ceiling. At the last minute he swivelled the jets in the opposite direction. The machine turned at an angle, darted downwards and started spinning on its axis at fantastic speed. Circling madly they wheeled into the next hall. Jericho caught a glimpse of their pursuer, saw him just passing under the lintel and going into a controlled nosedive, then the blond guy steered his bike into theirs and rammed them from the side, but what was intended to throw them off course had the opposite effect. As if by a miracle the bike stabilised itself. Suddenly they were flying straight ahead once more, worryingly close to the wall. Jericho narrowed his eyes. This factory space seemed even bigger and higher than the one before. A line of rollers, in their hundreds, ran along the floor, clearly a kind of conveyor belt leading to a tall, looming structure. Massive and gloomy, it looked like a printing press, except that this one would have been producing books for giants.
A rolling mill, it occurred to Jericho. It was the frame for a roller, to crush iron ingots into sheets. The things you know!
Again the blond guy came down, trying to squash them against the wall. Jericho looked across at him. A triumphant grin flashed in the man’s blood-spattered face.
At that he saw red.
‘Yoyo?’
‘What?’
‘Hold on tight!’
As soon as she pressed against him, he threw the handlebars around and gave the attacking bike a mighty thump with the back of his own. Yoyo screamed. Splinters of exploding windscreen sprayed in all directions. The hitman’s bike was slung aside, his gun disappeared into the darkness. Jericho didn’t give him time to breathe, he rammed his bike again, as they hurtled side by side towards the rolling-mill.
‘And with my very warmest wishes,’ he yelled, ‘have a bit of this!’
The third blow rammed the blond guy’s rear. His bike somersaulted in the air, whirled towards the rolling mill. Jericho drew past him, saw the hitman struggling for control and balance, arms flailing, and settled into the curve. They flew just past the colossus, but instead of the ugly noise of a bike’s fatal impact they heard a sequence of loud gunshots. Somehow the guy had managed to avoid a collision and lower his bike to the floor. Like a stone on the surface of the water, it skipped over the rollers of the conveyor belt, tipped over and threw its rider off.
The next gaping portal opened up in front of them.
‘Yoyo,’ he called back. ‘How the hell do we get back out of here?’
‘We don’t.’ Her outstretched arm pointed past him into the darkness. ‘Once you’re through there, you go straight to hell.’
Xin didn’t bother about the individual biker who was helplessly trying to follow them. The guy was ridiculous. Huge, clumsy, a joke. Let him empty his magazine into the air. In time he’d wish he’d never been born.
He kept a lookout for the airbikes.
They’d disappeared.
Perplexed, he wheeled above the plant, but it was as if the sky had swallowed up the two machines. The last he had seen of them was when they flew around a complex of factory buildings behind which a single big chimney loomed.
It was there that he had lost track of them.
The grouchy whine of the bike reached him from below. He toyed with the idea of raining a few grenades down on the giant’s bald head. His index finger tapped against a spot to the side of the instrument panel, and a cover immediately slid aside just above his right knee. Behind it lay a considerable arsenal of weapons. Xin inspected the contents of the compartment on the other side. All there, hand grenades, sub-machine-gun. Gingerly, almost tenderly, his fingers slipped over the butt of the M-79 launcher with the incendiary rounds. All three airbikes were equipped with the same weapons.
Including Jericho’s.
He shoved the thought aside and glanced at the altitude gauge: 188 metres above sea level. He continued his search with reduced thrust. The sky couldn’t swallow anyone as quickly as that.
If part of the roof hadn’t been open, it would have been pitch-dark. But as it was, spears of white daylight jabbed in at an angle, carving weird details from the walls, casting lattices over walkways, steps, balconies, terraces, pipes, cables, segmented and riveted armour, massive, open bulkheads.
Jericho slowed his bike in the beam of light. Hissing softly, it hovered in the air, which was impregnated with iron, rust and the smell of rancid grease.
He threw back his head.
‘Forget it,’ called Yoyo. Her voice bounced across walls and ceilings, and was caught between the constructions. ‘It’s barred up there. We won’t get through.’
Jericho cursed and looked round. He couldn’t really tell whether this room was any bigger than the one they had flown through before, but at any rate it looked monumental, almost Wagnerian in its dimensions, a Nibelheim of the industrial age. Steel joists a metre thick ran along the ceiling; open baskets hung from them, anchored to massive hinges, so big that he could have fitted his Toyota inside any one of them. A pipe about three metres in diameter grew from the darkness of the vaulted ceiling, led downwards at an angle and finished halfway up the hall. More of the basket-like formations were distributed across the floor, and containers were stacked along the walls.
Yoyo was right. There was something hellish about the whole thing. A chilly hell. Still startled by his unexpected knowledge of the rolling mill, Jericho tried to remember the purpose of this place. Steel was heated here, in colossal containers called converters. Right in front of them gaped their skewed, round mouths, hatches leading to the heart of the volcano, great maws that would normally have glowed red and yellow with molten ore. Now they lay there, black and mysterious, three in all.