Whispers in the Forest
Copyright© 2025 by Jody Daniel
Chapter 5
Flight in the McDonnell Douglas MD530F.
Without another word, Lena and I hurried out of the lounge — practically jogging, nerves running tight beneath our calm façades. I could feel her eyes flick toward me, questioning, calculating, but she kept pace without argument. Instead of heading toward the front entrance as she expected, I veered left, down the corridor toward my study.
“Now what?” she muttered under her breath, just loud enough for me to hear.
I ignored the tone, already crossing the room to my desk. I pulled open the second drawer — false bottom, of course — and removed a small black cell phone along with an unmarked SIM card. I inserted it with practised ease. Lena’s eyebrows climbed, exactly as I knew they would.
“You keep burner phones?” she asked.
“Emergency purposes,” I replied, powering the device. The SIM registered — activated, but locked out of any network. It could only do one thing: contact emergency numbers. With the right manipulation, anything could be made to look like an emergency.
“Do you know Volkov’s satellite number?”
She gave me a look that said, Of course I do. Why wouldn’t I?
“Obviously. He only uses it when travelling abroad. You think I don’t pay attention?”
“Good, Give me the number.”
She recited it from memory, not missing a beat. I entered it into the phone — not as a contact, but as one of the emergency call slots. Now we could reach him. He would see the origin of the call and the location, but by the time he reaches it, we’ll be long gone.
Neat, clean, slightly traceable – my intention. Lena stared at me, suitably impressed and annoyed in equal measure.
Then I walked to the bookshelf.
She watched me, puzzled, as I slid my fingers along the spines, selecting a particular volume — an old, worn copy of The Art of War. Fitting. I pulled it outward, just a few centimetres, and tapped a concealed keypad behind it. A soft beep. Mechanisms clicked inside the wall.
Lena froze as, with a low rumble of hidden gears, a portion of the bookshelf shuddered and shifted, sliding sideways to reveal darkness.
“What—?” she began.
“Escape tunnel,” I answered simply, grinning.
Her mouth opened, closed, then opened again. “Your house has an escape tunnel?”
“Yes,” I said, already stepping inside. “Come. We have twenty seconds before the entrance seals behind us.”
“No comment ... And don’t you dare quote me on that,” she muttered, but she followed.
We slipped into the narrow passage. I hit a switch along the wall — old-style toggle, brass — and dim yellow lights flickered to life along the corridor, illuminating centuries-old stone. Dust motes floated lazily in the air. Behind us, the panel closed with a soft, final thunk. The shelf slid back into perfect alignment. One more secret swallowed by the château.
Two minutes of brisk walking later, taking a left turn and then climbing a slight flight of stairs beneath the earth, we emerged into cool morning air through a camouflaged opening behind a massive shrub on the château grounds. The scent of damp leaves filled my lungs — fresh, quiet, alive.
We slipped out through a grilled iron gate, keeping to the shadows. Lena cast one last glance at the mansion rising like a sleeping beast behind us.
“KGB v luchshem vide, mister Sekretnyy agent,” she whispered with a smirk. (KGB at its finest, Mister Secret Agent.)
I allowed myself the slightest smile. “This old château is full of hidden passages. You just need to know where to look. AND the FSB replaced the KGB a long time ago. Old senile Vlady’s modern-day KGB kinder garden.”
“I know,” She replied. “But I thought you would like the pun.”
We kept low, skirting along the gravel path at the estate’s edge. Ahead stood an unassuming building — half stable, half storage shed, if one didn’t look closely. The northern section, however, held a secret of its own. I lifted the latch on the wooden doors, revealing inside the shed a sleek, compact, deadly efficient, MD530F helicopter.
The MD530F helicopter gleamed under the morning sunlight. Lena sucked in a breath.
“Wow. She looks good.”
“She flies better than she looks,” I said, already moving to wheel her out. “We have a fifteen-minute flight ahead. Depending on how long you need with Volkov, plus fifteen minutes back ... call it forty or fifty minutes round trip in total. Maybe less if tailwinds are generous.”
“So you want to be back before he reaches Oudtshoorn,” she concluded.
“Exactly. Strap in. Headset on.”
We moved quickly, each falling into practised rhythm. Lena climbed into the right seat — then paused, eyebrow arched.
“You do know MD 500 series helicopters are flown from the left seat, yes?” I said and shot her a sideways look.
“I’m aware, thank you. I’m not a total idiot, Mister High Almightiness,” she snapped back, buckling herself in. “We have three of these back home. Used to shuttle palace staff.”
“Noted.”
Engine start-up, rotor spin, gauges green. Seven minutes later, we were airborne — skimming into the sunlight like two ghosts fleeing history itself.
And ahead of us waited answers. Or trouble.
Probably both.
The MD530F didn’t just climb; she scrambled — light, eager, responsive, like a mountain goat suddenly finding open rock. Ruan pulled the collective and the helicopter surged upward from the valley floor, skids clearing treetops by meters as the emerald canopy of the Knysna forest peeled away beneath them like a receding tide of green. Mist curled between the trunks, ghost-like, torn apart by the rotor downwash as they angled toward higher ground.
They skimmed along the flanks of the Outeniqua Mountains, tracing the ragged seam where rainforest ended and rock began. Here, ancient yellowwoods stood like old sentries — straight-backed and solemn — until, almost without warning, they gave way to the low-lying cloves of mountain fynbos, hardy and wind-battered, clinging to the slopes with the stubbornness of survivors. The mountains ahead jutted into the sky like broken teeth — sharp, grey and snow-dust white at their tips, forever cloaked in a restless tablecloth of cloud.
Ruan’s voice crackled through the intercom.
“Hold on — we’re punching through.”
The rotors beat harder, the helicopter angled up, and in seconds they were swallowed by mist. Visibility collapsed into nothing. For a suspended moment, there was no world — just the whine of turbine, blade-slap of the rotors and the tremor of metal beneath their feet.
Then, like curtains parting, they burst through the top of the cloud.
The ground fell away beneath them — steep, sudden, dramatic — and the world shifted. Colour drained, then returned in an entirely new palette. The lush coastal green behind them was replaced by bronze and rust, by ochre sands and fractured stone. The Little Karoo spread out like an ancient seabed fossilised in time — wide, desolate, magnificent.
Lena inhaled, sharp and involuntary. Her eyes widened, fixed to the horizon as if afraid to blink and lose it.
Below, the terrain stretched to forever — great unbroken flats of red and clay-brown earth, cracked like old parchment. Thorn scrub stood in sparse clusters, every leaf a declaration of war against drought. Aloes thrust upward like spears, their flowers burning orange against the endless soil. Dry riverbeds carved pale scars across the land, twisting through the valleys like faded memories of water long gone. Sunlight glinted off quartz-laden stones, dazzling and harsh.
Heat shimmered already, though morning still clung to the day. The air itself looked thirsty.
“It looks...” Lena leaned forward against her harness as if she could fall into the vastness. “Burned.”
Ruan banked the MD530F northward, the machine responding like a creature that knew the way home.
“Not burned. Thirsty,” he corrected. “Welcome to the rain shadow, Princess. Ten miles behind us — rainforest. Here? This is hard country for hard people.”
Lena continued to stare, spellbound — her first encounter with the Karoo a collision of raw beauty and quiet severity. There was no softness here. No shade of mercy. Only endurance baked into the land itself.
The helicopter dipped lower, following the cracked earth toward the open basin ahead. Behind them, the ocean disappeared. Ahead, the semi-desert swallowed the horizon whole. And the Karoo — vast, ancient, indifferent, magnificent in its majesty — watched them come.
Oudtshoorn slid beneath us in a flash of tin rooftops, dust roads and morning haze—here, then gone, swallowed in the blur of rotor wash and altitude. For a heartbeat it felt like flying over a memory. Behind it, the world widened again, the Great Karoo unfurling like an endless rust-red ocean—flat, ancient, shimmering with heat even though the day was still young.
To the south, the Swartberg Mountains rose—dark, jagged, immovable—a fortress of stone stretching from horizon to horizon. Their shadow cut a stark line across the earth, as if the land itself remembered where green ended and thirst began.
That was the boundary between worlds. Beyond lay silence and dust.
“There,” I said.
A single plume of ochre dust curled up from a lonely dirt track far below—thin at first, then widening like smoke from a slow-burning fire. As we descended, the shape at the base took form: a massive cattle truck, stacked high with bales of hay and crammed with bleating sheep. It crawled its way north toward Prince Albert, stubborn as a ship against the tide.
“That’s our courier.”
I eased the cyclic and the MD530F banked downward in a tightening spiral, the horizon rolling like a film reel around us. The ground rushed up—scrub bushes sharp as needles, dry riverbeds like pale lightning scars, sandstone glinting under the sun like broken glass. The smell of dust reached even through the cockpit vents.
“Get the phone ready,” I told Lena. “Dial the number. Don’t speak until I say.”
Her hands moved carefully—too carefully. She wasn’t trembling much, just enough to betray adrenaline beneath the veneer. The burner phone beeped to life. She pressed call.
I levelled the helicopter, dropping into the pocket behind the truck where its cab couldn’t see us. We skimmed forward—fifty feet above the rattling trailer. Sheep jostled and bleated, agitated by the unnatural wind and the angry wasp-snarl of the rotor blades overhead.
“Speaker,” I said. “Let him hear the noise. Let him think you’re on the road.”
She tapped the screen.
One ring.
Two.
Three.
Click.
“Volkov.”
Just the one word — cold, sharp, instantly awake. The man didn’t waste syllables.
Lena inhaled, steadying herself. She didn’t look at me — her eyes stayed on the landscape, as if drawing strength from the emptiness around us. The Karoo stretched out forever: red earth, grey thorn-bush, long lines of nothing. A place where people vanished and stayed vanished.
“Colonel,” she said, voice like winter iron. “Stop chasing me.”
Silence on the line — no background noise, no heavy breathing. Just Volkov, calculating.
“Your Highness,” he replied, smooth but taut like a wire about to snap, “we were concerned. Where are you?”
“I am where I choose to be,” she lied flawlessly. “Visiting an old friend of my grandmother’s. I need space. A week. If anyone follows — if I see one black SUV — I disappear. Permanently. Am I clear?”
“This region is dangerous,” he countered. “The Karoo is—”
“Beautiful,” she cut in. “And empty. Leave me alone, Viktor. Or the British press will hear from me instead of you.”
I sliced a hand through the air. End it.
She didn’t hang up. Instead, she met my eyes — a silent question. I pointed to the open side window.
Understanding dawned.
Lena unlatched the window and leaned into the slipstream, hair whipping wildly around her headset. Below us, the cattle truck lumbered on like a patient beast.
“Goodbye, Colonel,” she whispered.
The phone slipped from her fingers — spinning, tumbling, falling like a coin dropped into fate. It hit a bale of hay squarely and slipped and vanished between two bales.
Just like that, Volkov would be heading north — hours, maybe days behind a ghost.
I pulled hard on the cyclic and the MD530F kicked skyward, climbing away from the road in a steep arc. The truck shrank to a toy in the distance, just a dot trailing a line of red dust across the ancient floor of the Karoo.
“Bullseye!” I shouted over the rising turbine scream.
Lena sagged back into her seat, exhaustion catching up with her at last. Yet she was smiling — slowly, wickedly.
“He’s going to be so furious.” Giggle. “And I am starting to enjoy this...”
“Good,” I grinned. “As long as he’s furious in Prince Albert.”
Below us, the horizon swallowed the truck entirely. The Karoo stretched open again, limitless and blazing under the sun.
“Now,” I added, banking south toward home, “let’s go wake up some clock-tower ghosts.”
She blinked. “Prince Albert? That’s where that truck is headed?”
“Seventy-one kilometres from Oudtshoorn,” I said, rolling the helicopter into smooth forward flight. “Two hundred and twenty-eight from the château.”
The land blurred beneath us again — red earth, black rock, eternity.
“Plenty of room to hide a lie.”
And the MD530F carried us home.
The flight back was quieter than I expected — too quiet. The rush we’d carried into the sky after the phone drop ebbed like tidewater retreating from rock. No exhilaration now, just focus. Steel. The hum of the turbine faded, rotors slowing from a screaming frenzy to a lazy, heavy wump-wump-wump, the sound vibrating up through my boots as if the machine were sighing, spent from the deception we’d just flown into being.
When the final rotation clacked into stillness, the silence felt loud.
We pushed her into the carriage house, blades tied, cowling cooling with soft metallic ticks. Lena wiped the plexi canopy with a rag, careful strokes, her breath still shaky, though she tried to hide it. She handed me the chocks, jaw squared like a boxer waiting for the bell.
When everything was stowed and strapped down, I shut the hangar doors and the echo rolled across the courtyard like a drawn breath before a plunge.
In the next storeroom I opened some lockers and retrieved the abseiling gear we would be needing for our assault on the tower.
“Ready?” I asked, pulling a coil of rope and two harnesses from the old equipment locker — canvas faded, buckles scarred from use.
She turned to me slowly. Not afraid. Determined. Her voice was steady, low.
“I’m ready.”
We crossed the now dry lawn toward the West Wing tower. Seen from afar, it was romantic — ivy-draped stone against a pale morning sky. Up close, it was a wound.
Pitted granite. Mortar crumbling like burnt biscuit. Ivy choking the lower windows until they were nothing but black, yawning mouths. Wind moaned through unseen cracks — an old, lonely sound.
“Internal stairs are suicide,” I said, handing her the harness. “Rotten timbers, forty feet of fresh air underneath. We climb outside instead.”
I pointed to the tower’s corner where the stone remained rough-hewn and honest — no plaster, no lies. Just unforgiving, ancient granite. The kind that didn’t care if you fell.
Her gaze climbed the height. Eighty feet of vertical past and history.
“It looks ... high.”
“Eighty feet to the belfry,” I confirmed, helping her tighten the straps. “But the rock is good. I’ve been up before, clearing gutters, replacing tiles. Trust the granite — not the ivy.”
I clipped a carabiner to her chest loop; the metal clicked like a trigger being cocked.
“I lead. I place anchors. You wait for my signal before moving. If you slip, the rope takes you. Trust the gear. Trust the pilot.”
She looked up, then at me. Wind brushed strands of hair across her face. Her pupils were blown wide, adrenaline and something else behind them.
“I trust you, Ruan. I never attempted anything like this. I trust you and will follow you...”
It landed heavier than the harness.
No joke. No sarcasm.
Just truth.
“You can stay here on the ground if you want.”
“No! I go up with you. Besides, I have the key to the secret...”
“Good,” I said. “Let’s go wake the ghosts.”
I chalked my hands, the powder a small cloud in the cold air. The stone bit instantly — granular, wet with morning dew, sharp enough to scrape skin. I reached, tested, pulled. Boots found footing, muscles remembered.
Reach. Test. Pull. Step.
A rhythm. A heartbeat.
Below me, Lena climbed. Not like a soldier battering upward — no brute force. She moved like water, like instinct, like muscle-memory choreography. Ballet, she’d said once? I believed her now. She didn’t fight gravity; she negotiated with it.
Halfway up the tower we traversed the ridge of slate roofing to the base of the clock-tower itself. Wind knifed across the height, tugging at clothes, howling in the eaves. Tiles flexed and creaked beneath us like old bones shifting.
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