fredbassett | Fic, Whispering Island, Part 5 of 8, Stephen/Ryan, 15

Title : Whispering Island, Part 5 of 8
Author : fredbassett
Fandoms : Primeval & Enid Blyton’s Famous Five books
Rating : 15
Characters : Stephen/Ryan, the Kirrin family and dog
Disclaimer : Not mine, no money made, don’t sue.
Word Count : 17,620. This part 2,202.
Spoilers : None
Summary : Stephen and Ryan get the chance to spend a weekend on a private island off the south coast.
A/N : 1) For full author’s note see Part 1 2) Links to previous parts Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4.

“We are not leaving.” George had his hands on his hips and his feet planted firmly apart. His whole body was bristling with barely-suppressed anger.

“We need to return to the mainland and let the appropriate authorities deal with this,” said Ryan, doing his best to keep his tone neutral and not betray the irritation he was feeling at George’s stubborn resistance to taking the sensible course of action.

George’s hands balled into fists and he took a step forward.

“Stop it, all of you!” Anne stepped between them, a determined expression on her face. “This is getting silly; you’re acting like squabbling children.” At her side, Timmy gave a low whine. “And you’re upsetting Timmy!”

From where Ryan was standing, the dog looked more defensive than angry.

“You’re also all forgetting something,” Dick drawled, from his position leaning against one of the stone lions in the entrance to the courtyard. “None of us are going anywhere for several hours, much as anyone might want to.”

Ryan turned to look at him, the same feeling scratching at the edge of his mind that he had come across Dick somewhere else, somewhere connected to his job…

“Why not?” Stephen demanded.

“Didn’t Wilf warn you? You can’t row back to the mainland on an ebb tide. The current past the island is too strong and it’ll sweep you out onto the rocks.”

Ryan cursed mentally. Wilf Layman had warned him about that, which is why they had been intending to leave very early on Monday morning, to catch the tide on the turn, but he’d managed to forget that inconvenient fact. For a moment he thought about disobeying Wilf’s advice, but the whispering of the trees around the castle changed his mind before the thought was even fully-formed.

‘Shooey, shooey, shooey…’

The wind was blowing briskly from the direction of the mainland and would hamper any attempt to row against the tide. The sing-song voices of the trees seemed to mock his frustration. Whether Ryan liked it or not, they were all stuck on Whispering Island at least until early the following morning and, with a non-existent mobile phone signal, he had no means of calling this one in.

“Where on earth have the animals come from?” Anne asked.

“They’ve been dumped from a private zoo,” Stephen replied, repeating Ryan’s earlier attempt at an explanation for the benefit of the others.

As barefaced lies went it was probably better than nothing, and it was all Ryan had been able to think up on the spur of the moment, but it wasn’t up to Claudia’s standards. No doubt by now she would have laid the blame somewhere and made the story stick, rather than being on the receiving end of disbelieving looks from the others.

A slow hand-clap from Julian silenced any response that George had been about to make.

“Nice try and I must admit I’ve heard worse cover stories. I’d award that one seven out of ten.” Julian’s amused words could have come straight out of Lester’s mouth. “Does James Lester have a stock of ready-made ones, or do you just make them up as you go along?”

At the use of Lester’s name, Ryan’s eyes narrowed. Their mutual friend, Wilf Layman, was a mate from way back, but Ryan had never discussed his current assignment with his old friend, so Julian couldn’t have made the connection via any indiscreet comments from that direction. That left the possibility of inside knowledge from a different direct, maybe in the city or…

“Who do you really work for?” Ryan demanded.

“The same government that pays your wages,” Julian said with a slight smile on his face. “Shall we just leave it at that?”

“No.” Ryan wanted to know who he was dealing with. He also wanted to know where the hell he knew Dick from. His memory for faces was normally more reliable than this. “I don’t think we can leave it at that. In what context do you know Lester?”

Julian sighed. “Don’t make me break any confidences, Captain Ryan. Let’s just say that if James Lester hadn’t pulled quite so many strings to get your current building assigned to his pet project, I might just have been sitting in the office James is now occupying. Plus, you are all rather notorious now in the higher echelons of the so-called corridors of power. Your Professor Cutter is something of a bull in a china shop, isn’t he?”

Julian’s blue eyes met Ryan’s gaze and didn’t back down. From what Ryan knew of the politics surrounding their acquisition of their headquarters, Lester had had to engage in a major pissing contest with both security services to secure the premises, so that at least narrowed it down slightly. Looking at the man now, Ryan didn’t find it hard to believe that he was a spook of some sort. He had the quiet, watchful air that Ryan had learned to associate with those who had spent their working lives inhabiting some of the murkier waters both at home and abroad.

“In which case, you’ll understand me when I say that this isn’t a circumstance in which I want to be concerned with the safety of civilians,” Ryan said. “I suggest that everyone remains within this courtyard or even one of the towers if they’re safe for occupation, then when the tide turns, we can all return to the mainland and I’ll arrange for the creatures to be dealt with.”

“No bloody way!” George interrupted. “I’m not letting you just kill them.”

Oh yes, the resemblance to Abby was very pronounced. Ryan shook his head but he knew George didn’t believe him.

“We’ve no intention of killing them,” Stephen intervened. “But they can’t stay here. You saw how emaciated they looked, and the one with the injured leg needs treatment if it’s going to survive.”

“And it’s my job to make sure that none of you are injured in the process,” Ryan said.

“He’s right, Ju,” Dick said, to Ryan’s surprise. “Captain Ryan and Dr Hart clearly have more experience of this sort of thing than we do.”

“What sort of thing?” George demanded. “Ju, Dick, what’s going on? Stop being so bloody cryptic.”

A slow smile spread across Dick’s face. “We’re about to have some fun, George, that’s what’s going on. We haven’t had an adventure for a while, have we? Well, it looks like one has just landed right in our laps. Now all we need to do is convince Captain Ryan that we’re not quite the helpless bystanders that he’s used to dealing with.” The smile quirked into a knowing grin. “Or should I say Ryan, Captain, 25010643.”

The use of his name, rank and number opened the floodgates of memory in Ryan’s mind and in that instant he knew exactly from where he recognised Dick’s voice. The man currently staring at him with a very amused look on his face had been one of the interrogators on the SERE course that Ryan had undertaken as part of the selection process for UK Special Forces. Survive. Evade. Resist. Extract. The core elements of a four week course that had seen Ryan becoming even more intimately acquainted with the most desolate and miserable stretches of the Brecon Beacons. Dick had played a part in the Tactical Questioning stage of the course, providing a deceptively sympathetic respite from three days and nights of relentless questioning.

The identity of the interrogators was not usually disclosed and Ryan had never had cause to meet any of the men again until now.

“I believe you have the advantage, sir,” Ryan said. He’d added the ‘sir’ as a matter of politeness only as a number of the trainers on the SERE courses were often senior NCOs and below his rank.

“Kirrin. Major, retired. 24695373.” He held out his hand to Ryan. “You were an obstinate bugger, Ryan.”

Ryan shook his hand. “Thanks. You came closer to cracking me than anyone.”

The memory of the sudden feeling of relief he’d experienced all those years ago when a friendly voice had announced that the exercise was over and that Ryan had passed the test was so vivid that it could have been yesterday. Ryan had been cold, hungry and very, very exhausted. The relief that the interrogation was over had come very close to overwhelming rational thought, but then he’d remembered that at the beginning of the exercise, four long weeks ago, he’d been given a code word that would be used to signal the end of the tests, and the man who had congratulated him so warmly hadn’t used that word.

“Everyone else in your group fell for that one.”

Ryan wasn’t surprised. When he’d steadfastly refused to rise to the bait, Kirrin had used a variant of the code word. Close enough that his exhausted brain had longed to give in and simply trust that he hadn’t misheard. It had only been a missing s, after all. But Ryan had stuck to his guns.

Much as he had been doing for the last few minutes. But even he had to admit that keeping secrets when faced with someone who was almost certainly highly placed in one or other of the security services and his brother, a man who had been something of a legend in the Regiment in Ryan’s early days in Hereford, seemed somewhat pointless.

Both men could undoubtedly look after themselves, and George, he of the combative glint in his eyes, no doubt came into the same category. So that just left Anne to worry about.

“Anne’s pretty tough for a girl,” Dick said, as though he’d read Ryan’s thoughts.

Anne punched him on the arm but didn’t seem annoyed.

“She once went hand over hand down the rope in the well,” Dick added. “And George is as good as a boy any day.”

The thump he got from George was considerably harder.

As Dick’s words sunk in, Ryan looked at George with fresh eyes, noticing for the first time the slight swell that the baggy khaki shirt didn’t quite hide. Yes, there were definitely breasts under that shirt. The annoyance on George’s face was tempered by pleasure at the fact that both Ryan and Stephen had obviously been wholly convinced that she was a man.

“So since we’re stuck here until the tide turns, we may as well take a look at what your latest rip in time has disgorged.” Julian’s serious expression had been replaced by one of almost boyish enthusiasm.

George and Anne looked at him with an astonished expression. It was clear that whatever they had been expecting, it hadn’t been anything like that. Dick Kirrin, on the other hand, didn’t look in the slightest bit surprised.

Ryan looked at Stephen and shrugged. They were just going to have to go with the flow on this occasion. The Kirrin brothers clearly knew about the anomaly project and provided Ryan didn’t give away any secrets, his conscience would be clear and it would be up to Lester to ensure that neither George nor Anne talked out of turn.

Stephen caught Ryan’s eyes and said quietly, “Those creatures have been here for a while by the look of them, maybe even a month or more. Why wasn’t this picked up?”

Ryan shrugged. There were any number of reasons, ranging from a fault with Connor’s ADD to non-existent mobile phone network and patchy satellite coverage. The animals had had time to dig a burrow under the rock outcrop and were clearly managing to obtain enough food and water to remain alive, but not enough to prosper. He didn’t think it would be difficult to trap them once they got the appropriate back-up over from the ARC. The lure of food and a large net would be enough. But he couldn’t discount the prospect of an adult having come through the anomaly that had brought the youngsters here as well. He certainly didn’t fancy their chances against one of them unarmed.

As George demanded an explanation from her cousin, Ryan turned the nature of the problem over in his mind. They had hungry animals on their hands. The creature might be no bigger than Timmy, but he wouldn’t want to come up against even a friendly creature like the large mongrel if he hadn’t eaten properly in weeks, maybe even months.

“How much spare food have we got?” he asked.

“There’s a couple of packs of bacon and a tin of ham back at our camp,” Stephen said. “And the ginger cake.”

“They’re not bloody well having that!” Ryan might have been an animal lover – or at least he was when they weren’t trying to rip his throat out – but he wasn’t that altruistic.

“I think we can do better than that,” Anne said with a smile. “I can’t see my dear family being willing to sacrifice ginger cake, either, and one tin of ham isn’t going to go very far between three hungry animals. Tim has one to himself for tea. I think it’s time we made a trip down to the dungeons.”

Ryan stared at her in amazement. His day had just got that little bit stranger.

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From:

freddiejoey.livejournal.com

Fabulous something to read just before I have to trudge off to work.

Love the Ryan and Dick backstory. *wonders if that sounds quite right........probably not*

"Ryan wasn’t surprised. When he’d steadfastly refused to rise to the bait, Kirrin had used a variant of the code word. Close enough that his exhausted brain had longed to give in and simply trust that he hadn’t misheard. It had only been a missing s, after all. But Ryan had stuck to his guns."

*wonders excitedly what's going to happen in the dungeons*

From:

Fic, Whispering Island, Part 5 of 8, Stephen/Ryan, 15

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