South by South East by Anthony Horowitz

on us?
    Take a bus north out of Amsterdam and after a while you’ll come to the Flavoland. When you look for a view and find you haven’t got one, that’s when you’ll know you’re there. The Flavoland used to be the bottom of the sea until someone had the bright idea of taking the water away. What was left was a great, flat, wide, empty nothing. Dutch farmers use it to grow their crops in, and that’s all there is: fields of corn, wheat, barley and maize stretching out to a horizon as regular as a plate. There isn’t one hill in the Flavoland. There are no trees. And the birds are too bored to whistle.
    There was only one bus stop in the area and it was right next to the crossroads that Charlotte had described. The bus-driver tried to stop us getting out – he must have thought we were crazy – but we insisted.
    “When does the next bus arrive?” I asked.
    “Tomorrow,” he replied.
    And then it was gone, kicking up a cloud of dust, and we were alone with the wind and the wheat.
    Really alone.
    I looked behind me. Nothing. I looked ahead. Nothing. The road was just two lines that ran together and the bus was already a speck at the far end. The wheat rippled gently in the breeze. It was a hot day. The sun was beating down and with no hills and no trees there were no shadows. We were in the middle of a giant frying pan. And there was no sign of Charlotte.
    Tim looked at his watch. “She’s late.”
    I could hear a faint droning. At first I thought it was a wasp. Out of the corner of my eye I saw something small passing in front of the sun. But it wasn’t an insect. It was a plane, spraying the crops about two or three kilometres to the south. I watched as it flew in a straight line, parallel to the horizon. I could see it more clearly now, an old wooden propeller plane with two sets of wings on each side, like something out of the First World War. It was leaving a silvery cloud behind it, thin drops of pesticide or something drifting down onto…
    “That’s funny,” I said.
    “What’s that?” Tim asked.
    “That plane’s dusting crops where there ain’t no crops.”
    The plane turned sharply and began to fly towards us. I could hear the propeller chopping at the air. The engine sounded angry. For a long time I just stood there watching it. Maybe it was the heat. Maybe I was tired. I didn’t realize I was watching my own death.
    But then the plane swooped down and before my brain had time to tell me what was going on my legs were hurling me out of the way as the whole thing sliced through the air millimetres above where my head had just been. Tim shrieked and threw himself in the other direction. For a moment everything went dark as the plane blotted out the sun. The propeller whipped up the surface of the road, stinging my eyes. And then it was gone, climbing upwards and at the same time turning for the next attack.
    Tim got to his knees, coughing and blinking. I don’t think he’d quite understood what was happening. “Low flying…” he muttered.
    I nodded. “Any lower and it wouldn’t need wings.”
    “Do you think…?”
    But even Tim had worked out what I was thinking. It was Charon. Somehow he had found out about our meeting with Charlotte.
    I remembered now how scared she’d been on the telephone. Maybe she’d been followed. Maybe she was already dead.
    Charon was up there. And we had nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. Because that was exactly where we were. Nowhere.
    I was still wondering which way to run when the plane swept down again. And this time there was an even more unpleasant surprise. Two of its wings were fitted with machine-guns. I saw the sparks of red and heard the chatter of the bullets. A section of the road leaped up at me, the tarmac shattering. Tim dived to one side and I tried to follow him but then something punched me hard on the shoulder and I was thrown on my back. The plane rushed past, the wind battering and blinding me. I knew I had been hit but I didn’t know