Hellfire

by Richard Turner

  Wright opened his eyes, took a couple of deep breaths to clear his aching head and with a weak smile looked over and said that he’d really messed up this time. Unlike Hetherington, Wright was not as badly injured and was able, after a time, to crawl out from his damaged seat. “Are you alright?” Wright asked his friend.

  Hetherington weakly smiled back, but did not say a word.

  Wright bit his lip, he knew Hetherington was hurt, he just would not admit it. After making sure that his friend as comfortable as possible, Wright took a blanket and covered the broken windshield, hoping to stop the snow from falling down onto his trapped comrade. He looked back through the shattered fuselage and realized that their plane was resting at a steep angle and that he would have to climb up through the wreckage to get out. Wright bit his lip when he saw that their radio set was smashed beyond repair. After a couple of minutes digging through the cabin, he found a couple of cans of food, but no flares, or anything else he could have used to signal for help.

  Their inexperience was coming back to haunt them. They’d never bothered to see if the plane was properly provisioned with emergency supplies before leaving their ship.

  They quickly discussed their dire predicament. Hetherington insisted that Wright, for both of their sakes, had to try to make for the coast. Perhaps he could somehow flag down their ship as it sailed by. When they didn’t return, both men knew that Captain Williams, master of the ship, the Commodore, would surely come looking for them.

  Wright reluctantly agreed, left his friend with half of their meager supply of food, and crawled his way out through a hole torn open in the back of the plane. On the surface of the desolate glacier, Wright stood all alone, shivering from the cold. He looked around. His heart ached when he realized that he couldn’t see far in any direction. The island was shrouded in a thick, gray fog.

  The falling snow didn’t help, either.

  He felt low. Wright did not fear for his own life, not while his dearest and oldest friend lay trapped inside their wrecked plane. If help wasn’t found soon, he knew that Hetherington would not last long in the cold with a severed spine. He tried to get his bearings in the fog; however, it proved impossible. Wright dug out a coin from his pocket and flipped it in the air. It landed heads up. He turned to his right, slipped his hands in his pockets, and began to walk.

  As he trudged over the ice, he prayed that he would reach the shore and that before too long their ship would find him. Instead of heading due west towards the only beach accessible from the sea, Wright began to walk south.

  Before too long, the falling snow and cold fog began to make him shiver from his head to his toes.

  His teeth soon began to chatter. “Well, old boy, you’ve truly gone and mucked it up this time,” Wright muttered to himself.

  The temperature wasn’t below freezing; however, Wright was slowly becoming hypothermic. The smartest thing he could have done was turn around and head back to the plane. Instead, his loyalty to his injured friend drove him on. After walking blindly in the fog for several hours, Wright stopped next to a tall ice ridge and sat down for a moment to rest his tired and aching feet. He pulled his damp jacket tight around his neck, trying to keep the snow from falling down the back of his neck.

  Wright felt himself suddenly become very tired. Although he was shivering, his body felt unbelievably warm. He undid his jacket to let his body heat escape. Next, he pulled off his gloves to let his hands feel the cool air.

  He sat back and closed his eyes.

  Wright decided that he needed to take a short nap before continuing his walk to find help. With his body’s core temperature rapidly dropping, Wright died half an hour later from exposure, frozen to the glacier.

  The falling snow soon covered his body.

  Back inside the crushed remains of their plane, Hetherington was fading in and out of consciousness. He looked down at his watch and saw that his colleague had been gone for close to six hours. Outside, the world was beginning to darken. With a silent prayer on his lips that Wright would make it, he knew that his end was coming soon. With his one good hand, he dug around in his jacket and pulled out a picture of his fiancée Anne. She was wearing a long dress and a hat with a tall feather protruding from the side. Anne was standing in front of her parents’ home in Lancashire with a warm smile on her slender face. He brought the picture up to his lips and kissed her good-bye. With the photo held tightly in his hand, Hetherington let the creeping fatigue in his body take hold. Sometime during the night, he too also succumbed to the effects of hypothermia.

  When their plane failed to return, Captain Williams began a methodical search for the missing men. The ship’s radio operator didn’t leave his post for days while they searched for Wright and Hetherington, hoping to catch a call from the lost plane. Although they sailed within several kilometers of the island, Williams did not feel that they would have tried to land a seaplane on an ice-covered island. After three days steaming around the cold, dark waters of the South Atlantic, Williams called off the search and headed for the nearest port in Argentina to report the loss.

  People soon reported seeing the plane floating on the waters off Antarctica or trapped on the pack ice, the men living off seals and fish while they waited for rescue. One person even wrote a letter to Anne claiming that her fiancé was living in Chile under an assumed name. Anne, however, refused to believe any of the stories. She knew in her heart that her fiancé was dead. All she wanted was to bring his remains home so he could be buried.

  A year after they had gone missing, Anne outfitted an expedition to search for the missing men’s remains. Unlike Captain Williams, she insisted that they land on the desolate shores of Bouvet Island. With a crew of experienced men, Anne struggled up onto the glacier and spent several days fruitlessly searching for any sign of the plane and its occupants. By a cruel trick of fate, they came within a hundred meters of the crevice concealing the crashed plane. However, with a storm brewing out to sea and visibility fading fast, she was persuaded by the leader of the search party to call off the search. With a heavy heart, she reluctantly sailed for home, never to learn the fate of her fiancé and his close friend.

  3

  Mare Crisium, the Moon

  July 21st, 1969

  On the desolate, rocky surface of the Moon in the cold vacuum of space sat the Luna 15 probe. Launched eight days earlier from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in the Soviet Union, the probe was the third Soviet probe sent to the Moon on a mission to gather and return samples of dirt and rock to the Earth. The first two missions had both ended in abject failure. The initial attempt never archived escape velocity and burned up in Earth’s atmosphere, while the second had flown straight past the Moon and out into the cold depths of space. However, after completing fifty-two orbits of the Moon to ensure it was still operational after its 385,000-kilometer flight, the decision was made to land the probe.

  A signal was sent to the craft for it to begin its descent. After firing its retrorockets, the probe slowly made its way down towards the barren, rocky surface. When it was twenty meters from the surface, its rockets stopped and the landing jets took over, slowing the fall of the large, 5,600-kilogram probe. At two meters from the surface, the jets automatically turned off and the probe deftly landed.

  With a loud cheer in the packed, cigarette smoke-filled control center, the mission technicians enthusiastically patted each other on the back and proclaimed that successfully landing the probe on the Moon was a great victory for the Soviet Union.

  It was, however, a hollow one.

  The race for the Moon had already been won, not by the Soviet Union, but by the United States. With a manned landing only hours earlier, the Space Race, as it was dubbed in the Western press, was all but over. Still, the Soviet Union hoped to gain some glory by having Luna 15 land on the Moon and return with samples of dirt and rocks before the Americans returned home.

  After checking that everything from the television camera to the radiation and temperature moni
tors were still working, the probe deployed its extendable arm and awaited the order to drill into a nearby rock.

  A hushed silence gripped the technicians as they watched the grainy, black-and-white images sent back to them by Luna 15’s camera. No one seemed to notice the blue cloud of stale cigarette smoke hanging like a thick London fog in the room.

  In the back of the cramped office sat a bitter-looking Communist Party official, wearing an old, rumpled suit and scuffed shoes. Like a hawk, he silently watched everything that happened in the room. He had only one job: to inform his superiors in Moscow the instant they had their soil sample, and that it was safely on its way back to earth. Without taking his eyes off the screens, he reached down, picked up his packet of cheap Turkish cigarettes, tapped out his tenth cigarette this hour, and lit it. Inhaling the harsh tobacco into his lungs, he coughed loudly. A veteran of the Great Patriotic War with Germany, the official lamented his place in life. He had always seen himself rising to be a party official with a new car, a young mistress, and dacha in the Crimea. Instead, he had been relegated to the Soviet Space mission as a mere observer. Still, it could be worse, he thought to himself. I could be on an isolated border post with China.

  On the lunar surface, the extendable arm reached out and waited for another signal from Earth to begin. The technicians hurriedly selected a nearby flat piece of rock on the edge of an impact crater as their target. A few minutes later, the probe lowered its arm and began to drill into the rock. It quickly penetrated to a depth of ten centimeters before striking a much harder surface. With time slipping away, the decision was made to bring up the sample they already had via a slender suction tube attached to the side of the drill. After placing the sample into a special airtight container built into the probe’s return vehicle, the countdown began. The total time from the probe’s landing on the Moon’s surface until the time the return vehicle’s return rockets fired was just over two hours.

  A wave of relief swept through the room when the return vehicle leapt up into space to begin the return trip to its programmed landing site in Kazakhstan. To date, the Soviet lunar return program had met with failure. After today, the scientists at the Baikonur Cosmodrome could justifiably brag that they had pulled off a miracle of Soviet engineering.

  In the back of the room, the party official stood up unnoticed and made his way to a nearby office to place his call. However, within a few hours, the celebration was over. The technicians supervising the probe were ordered by state security agents to turn off all of the instruments on Luna 15 and to go home. Each man was pulled into a side room and bluntly told by State Security agents to never discuss the mission with anyone, not even their families. Any thought of beating the Americans home with a sample from the Moon was to be forgotten.

  Later that evening, it was announced to the world on Soviet state-run television that in a sign of friendship with the Americans the Luna 15 space probe had been deliberately crash-landed to avoid hitting the U.S. spacecraft as it orbited the Moon.

  In a matter of hours, dozens of state officials and KGB agents descended upon the launch site and confiscated every file they could find relating to the Luna 15 mission. Within days, the true story behind the landing was erased from the history of the Soviet Union. The ‘official’ story was accepted as gospel.

  What the world did not know was that inside the return vehicle was something that had the ability to affect the life of every living person on the planet. Years later, someone would want it and would do anything to possess it.

  4

  Burma

  Present Day

  Like an enraged swarm of hellish fireflies, a long burst of machine-gun fire cut through the air, barely missing its target, a stolen Hummer speeding down a narrow jungle road.

  “That was too damn close for comfort,” muttered Ryan Mitchell to himself as he ejected the empty magazine from his M4 carbine. His left hand was sticky with blood from a cut on his wrist, caused by a grenade fragment that had dug a deep gash through his skin. Dressed in filthy, multi-cam fatigues with a darkened face, Mitchell hurriedly slapped home a full magazine and charged the weapon, loading a fresh round into the chamber.

  Sitting in the driver’s seat beside Mitchell was Nate Jackson. A powerfully built African-American, Jackson cursed everything under the sun as he fought to keep the vehicle, a stolen Burmese army Hummer, from sliding off the slick dirt trail that snaked through the tree-covered hills. Combat driving using night-vision goggles was challenging enough without the added misery of a heavy downpour that fell from the dark night sky. The world, a mix of dark- and light-green hues in Jackson’s eyepieces, sped past as he tried to lose their pursuer.

  Another burst of automatic gunfire tore past the Hummer. This time the long line of tracers flew right overhead, making both Mitchell and Jackson duck down to avoid the incoming fire.

  “Jesus, Ryan, will you do something about that?” yelled Jackson as he swerved from side to side on the path, trying to throw off their attacker’s aim.

  Mitchell reached over and grabbed hold of Nate’s weapon of choice, the M203 grenade launcher. After checking that it was loaded, he turned around in his seat and got up on one knee. He was about to bring up the weapon to his to his shoulder, when he suddenly felt the vehicle turn hard to the right. Mitchell had to reach out and grab hold of his seat when Jackson took a sharp corner much too quickly, sending the Hummer sliding through the mud towards the edge of the road. Mitchell’s heart skipped a beat when, through his night-vision gear, he saw a steep fall to the valley floor two hundred meters below come racing towards them.

  At the last second, the vehicle’s tires found a dry spot and dug in. Like a charging rhinoceros, the Hummer took off once more down the narrow jungle trail.

  “Damn it, Nate, warn me next time,” said Mitchell to his friend. “I could have been thrown over the side of the jeep.”

  “Sorry, didn’t see the turn until it was too late,” replied Jackson.

  Mitchell brought up his weapon and looked through the M203’s sights. He waited for the vehicle chasing them to take the sharp bend. A second later, the Burmese army Jeep came sliding around the muddy corner. Mitchell held his breath, aimed his weapon’s laser indicator, a bright-red dot, at the center of the Jeep, and pulled back on the trigger. With a loud whoosh, the 40mm high-explosive grenade flew straight at the pursuing vehicle.

  The front of the vehicle exploded in a brilliant fireball. The driver, killed in the blast, let go of the Jeep’s steering wheel. Consumed in flames, the Jeep slid off the road and smashed headlong into a tall tree.

  “Good shot,” said a woman’s voice from the backseat of the Hummer.

  “How’s he doing, Sam?” asked Mitchell to the woman hunched over another body in the backseat of the Hummer.

  “Ryan, I’ve got an IV in him. But if he doesn’t get real medical care soon, I’m not sure if he’s going to make it,” answered Sam, the team’s medic. “It looks like he’s been tortured and, if that wasn’t bad enough, he has a bad case of malaria.”

  Hired to rescue an Indian businessman being held for ransom in a Burmese hellhole, the mission had, at first, gone well enough. They had been able to whisk him away from a warlord’s poorly guarded camp. However, when Mitchell’s people were on their way to their planned extraction point, they ran headfirst into a patrol of corrupt Burmese soldiers. Within seconds, a firefight broke out, and they had to improvise a completely new escape plan. Now, with time racing against them, they were speeding to their extraction point, a clearing less than five kilometers away.

  Mitchell sat back down in his seat, picked up his radio. “Gord, this is Ryan; please tell me things are good to go at the extraction point, over.”

  Five kilometers away, Gordon Cardinal lifted his camouflage veil and bit his lip as he looked through his sniper scope at the growing crowd of soldiers and thugs barely one hundred meters away. Keying his throat-mic, Cardinal said, “Sorry, boss, the place is crawling with beaucoup bad guys.
I count at least thirty. Looks like they picked our extraction point as a place to get themselves organized before coming after you. I can see two Burmese army officers giving orders to the mob. I recommend you proceed to the alternate extraction point.”

  Mitchell looked over his shoulder at Sam; she’d heard the conversation and shook her head. He thought about their predicament for less than a second before he made up his mind. Mitchell spoke into the radio. “Gord, the package won’t last that long. I want you to stir up the hornet’s nest and then get the hell out of there; we’re going with Plan B.”

  “Can do,” answered Cardinal.

  “Head for the coast, Nate,” said Mitchell to Jackson.

  Jackson groaned at the news. However, he knew that Mitchell was right; the businessman needed medical care, and fast. The only problem was that the path to their alternate extraction point was hard to find. At night, driving at over seventy kilometers an hour while wearing NVGs, it would take a miracle to find the right trail.

  Jackson drove past a couple of breaks in the jungle before turning the vehicle’s wheel hard over. The Hummer slid off the muddy road and onto a narrow path. A second later, they were speeding down a game path that was barely wide enough for the Hummer. Driving from memory, Jackson knew that the trail they were on came out near a small stream, where Cardinal had stashed a boat for them.