Doctor Who_ The King of Terror - Keith Topping [93]
His good mood rapidly crumbled, however, when he saw the amused look on the Doctor’s face. ‘Good gracious no, Brigadier. If anything the Canavitchi are worse than the Jex. They were a thuggish race of bug-eyed lunatics who stomped around space like hooligans. The Jex did to them what the Romans did to the French and the Germans. Organised them. The Canavitchi grew powerful enough to overthrow the occupying force and since then they have made it their business to undo everything the Jex get their hands on. They don’t conquer worlds where there are traces of the Jex any more. They destroy them.’
The elevator arrived on the top floor with a clank and the doors opened.
The Doctor and the Brigadier stepped out to face their destiny.
The relief on Paynter’s face as he picked up the telephone at the garage was matched only by his exhaustion. Finally, he felt able to reveal to Tegan just how much pain he was actually in. But first he sat down, heavily, clutching the receiver to his ear with both hands as though some magic might take it from him.
Not without a fight, it wouldn’t.
Tegan sat with him. She had cried when she saw Dave Milligan’s body again, which horrified her as she’d only cried once when Adric died. Today seemed to have been a nonstop exhibition of the kind of emotion she had spent most of her life trying to smother. But Paynter had been encouraged 178
because there were footprints all around, indicating that the rescue team had been here once. They would, therefore, be able to return again.
‘Come on sweetheart, answer the phone,’ he muttered, having dialled Natalie Wooldridge’s mobile. There was an agonising wait before the telephone spluttered into life.
‘Captain Paynter, reporting for duty back from the dead,’ he said quickly.
Even from three feet away Tegan could hear the scream at the other end of the line.
‘You’re alive!’ shouted Natalie.
This is just unreal, Tegan told herself. I’ll wake up in a minute.
‘Evidently,’ Paynter told Wooldridge sarcastically. ‘We’re back at the garage site. We’ve been chased halfway across the desert by a pair of hitmen. Who are now toast, by the way. I’ve taken a bullet in the leg, and poor Tegan’s nearly out on her feet . . . ’ He shot Tegan a reassuring look, to which she returned a scowl. ‘We’d appreciate a bit of a rescue, if that’s possible, ’cos frankly we’re knackered!’
‘Stay right where you are,’ Natalie told him. ‘We’ll have a chopper from Vegas there in five minutes.’
‘You’re a tresh babe,’ replied Paynter happily, popping the phone back on its cradle. ‘So,’ he told Tegan. ‘The cavalry’s on its way.’
Tegan couldn’t think of anything to say except. ‘Good.’ But after a moment she found herself asking Paynter a question that had been at the back of her mind since they had left the shack. ‘Were you scared?’
Paynter was busy cleaning his leg wound, wincing as he removed the cloth covering from the red-raw and angry flesh. ‘Sorry?’ he asked.
‘Back in that grotty hovel. Facing death. Were you bricking it?’
Tegan wasn’t sure what answer she expected from Paynter: bluff throwaway macho indifference or an honest, heartfelt admission of terror. She ended up with neither.
‘Sort of,’ he said. ‘I was scared that you were going to scream the place down and give my secret plan away.’
‘Oh really?’ asked Tegan as the distant sound of helicopter rotor blades began to draw towards them. ‘So it was all part of the plan, was it?’
‘Yep,’ said Paynter, removing his boots, shaking the sand from them and then putting them back on. ‘Lure them in and shoot them down. I don’t say it was an original plan, but I had it all worked out.’ He stood, putting his weight gingerly on his wounded leg. The pain was obviously intense, judging by the grimace on his face.
Tegan looked at herself in the dark glass of the garage-shop doorway. She was dishevelled and felt