This was all Osborne needed. “Don’t worry, son,” he said, “we’ll be out of here soon.” He turned to Hana. “You’re coming with us.”
Hana was wearing pants and a dark jacket, but didn’t have a gun.
Osborne aimed his .38 at her beautiful, savage face. “You’re coming with us. Now.”
“Not before we blow up the site,” she said calmly. “It’s all ready. All that’s left to be done is press the detonator. The engineers have mined the foundations. The detonator is connected in series. There are only two people guarding the explosives. Help me. Afterwards we can do whatever you want.”
Hana was speaking softly in order not to alarm the boy, who was following this verbal sparring with great concentration from a distance of a few paces. Osborne hesitated for a moment. Hana must have sensed the hesitation.
“The earth doesn’t belong to us, we belong to it,” she went on. “I thought you understood, Paul. The earth is tapu, sacred. It’s our balance, our mana.” Her beautiful eyes glittered in the light of the oil lamp.
“It won’t bring back your grandmother back,” he said.
Hana grimaced with anger. She wanted to slap him, but he was smiling at her, with those damned yellow eyes of his. She slapped him anyway.
Mark shrank back, but stayed close to Osborne, who hadn’t flinched.
With this deadweight on their hands, they had even less chance of getting out of this rattrap alive. Without Hana’s help, they had none at all.
Osborne placed the barrel of the .38 against her pretty, distorted head. “I haven’t come all this way to leave again without you, he said in a toneless voice.
“All I want is to blow up this fucking site.”
Hana wouldn’t give up. There was no more time to prevaricate.
“How many people are out there?”
“About thirty keeping an eye on the site,” she replied, “plus as many again in the ceremony.”
“I’m fed up with this!” It was Mark, who was shaking like a leaf now.
All at once, the door of the hut flew open. Osborne threw the boy to the floor. Two men rushed in, spraying the walls and everything in front of them with bullets. Hana was projected against the table. The man who had fired first died a fraction of a second later, his face carried away by the hydrostatic shock. Osborne had thrown himself against the bench, his gun in his hand. A new burst of gunfire raked the metal shelves, pulverizing both the shelves and the oil lamp. Two bullets from Osborne, fired one after the other, full in the chest, and the second man staggered back, blood gushing, and collapsed on the floor.
“I’m fed up with this! I’m fed up!”
Mark was still alive.
Osborne leaped to his feet. A bullet had grazed his shoulder but he had stopped feeling anything. It was dark in the hut, there was a smell of powder, and his heart was pounding fit to burst. He helped the boy to his feet. Terrified by the sight of the two men shot down in front of his eyes, the poor kid was muttering incomprehensibly. Then Osborne saw the figure slipping outside under cover of the darkness.
Hana.
He grabbed Mark by the skin of his neck. “Come with me, you!”
The boy was still staring down at the bodies on the floor. Osborne flung him out into the open air. Mark almost tripped over the body lying just outside the door, but regained his balance at the last moment. Osborne looked around—no trace of Hana. He turned to Mark and took him by the shoulders.
“Now run to the beach, sit down by the water and wait without moving, understand?” He shook him hard. “Understand?”
As Mark didn’t react, he gripped him by the collar of his shirt and pushed him with all his might.
“Now get out of here, fuck it!”
The boy stumbled under the impetus, then started running.
The shooting had alerted the Maoris, who had come running from the hill. Osborne took refuge behind a tall pile of bricks, and looked for Hana in the half-light of the site, but couldn’t see her. Shit, where had she gotten to now? He had seen her fall, but she was still alive. She would try to get to the explosives store. Which hut was it in? There were at least a dozen of them, spread all over the site. From the corner where he had taken shelter, Osborne was peering around when shots rang out in the distance.
They came from the dirt road.
Culhane.
The special forces.
Everything was turning upside down.
He went around to the other side of the pile of bricks, evading the two armed men rushing toward it, and finally spotted Hana. She was staggering between the huts and the pallets, holding her stomach as if afraid it would escape her. She was wounded.
There was a feeling of unreality about the scene: bursts of gunfire from the forest, torches burning at the foot of the hill, guards scattering over the site, the bare-chested initiates continuing with the ceremony, Nepia still intoning crazily. The kupapa, Timu the traitor who had eaten from the hands of the rich and powerful and was now shaking like a puppet, was dragged forward, his head pressed down onto the block. The others were trembling with fear. There was no time to lose. Melrose was pulled toward the block. On the other side of the site, a police vehicle roared to a halt. Armed figures were running across the foundations and taking up position at the edge of the forest. The special forces were advancing, but the defense was organizing itself.
Taking advantage of the confusion, Hana had dragged herself to Wheaton’s chalet and was urging the guards to leave their post. In all the panic, the men hesitated. Should they go and support the others or carry on guarding the stock of explosives? Without waiting for a response, Hana entered the hut. The bullet had gone through her stomach without touching the spine, but she was thirsty and was having difficulty breathing.
The two guards stood there uncertainly, looking for a target in the darkness without knowing that they themselves were the targets. Osborne brought the first one down with a bullet in the chest, the second one at point-blank range in the abdomen as he stepped forward.
He kicked the door open and rushed into the hut. Hana was sitting on the floor, doubled over with pain. She could barely look at him. With her bloodstained hands, she was trying to connect the wires to the detonator, the one that would blow up the site. But her hands were shaking too much. Osborne grabbed the wires from her and lifted her tunic: the wound looked pretty bad, but she could still pull through.
“Can you walk?” he said.
“Yes.”
Outside, the shots were coming thicker and faster. Osborne pocketed the detonator, took Hana in his arms and held her upright. She was grimacing, and her eyes were bloodshot, but she still had the same smell, the same heartbreaking jade eyes. She tried to say something but he stopped her.
