Solstice

by David Hewson

'It's private,' Mo said. 'You'll see on the way out how secure it is. One road in, with a locked guard post, the sea on the other side, and mountains everywhere else. Do astronomers need privacy?'

  'Everybody needs privacy,' he said.

  'Oh yeah,' Annie said, laughing. He could hear something tense in her voice and, for the life of him, couldn't understand what put it there.

  'And it's not just here,' Mo said. 'Why do you think they've got two helicopters? There's some kind of place up in the mountains… they never talk about it when any of the locals are around. Or to anyone low on the food chain like me.'

  'Maybe,' said Annie, 'they're all a bunch of spies!'

  'Could be,' he said, trying to sound conspiratorial.

  They both laughed then. It made Mo look a lot nicer, he thought — attractive, in a strained, skinny kind of way.

  She stopped by the low stone wall that marked the boundary of the cliff top. The sea was a good hundred feet below, straight onto rock, no beach here, just the angry, relentless churning of the ocean.

  But it was Mo he was looking at.

  Just then she was close to beautiful, her long straight hair moving softly in the hot Mediterranean sea breeze. She looked like something precious that had been twisted and marked by some pain he could only guess at, something hard and strong and damaging, but still not cruel enough to take away everything that was attractive about her.

  'Nice view,' she said, staring out at the ocean.

  'Yeah,' he said, and looked. It was quite a sight. From the cliff edge you could see how perfectly La Finca had been positioned. The main house sat four-square, glowing golden in the bright morning sun, its plain rectangular lines broken now by the points of the cypresses lining the drives, and the smaller trees that marked paths into some adjoining ornamental gardens. A thin winding road led off from beyond the house, inland, rising gently into nothingness.

  'That's the way in and the way out,' Mo said, watching him stare down the road. 'The only one, by car, anyway. There's no footpath except from the cove at San Vicente three miles off to the north, and that takes you through some pretty treacherous ground. Apparently it was mined during the Civil War in the thirties. Go south and you'd need to cling to the mountain for a good twenty miles before you ran into Soller. And don't even think about coming in by boat. There's no jetty down there, nothing. You see what I mean about privacy?'

  'Idyllic, if you like that kind of thing.'

  'Idyllic is the word, all right. Can you imagine how that banking family must have felt, having to leave all this?'

  Lieberman let the question hang there, brooding on other losses.

  It was Annie who finally broke the silence. 'Let's go into town,' she said.

  Two minutes later they were sailing along the narrow private road in the Suzuki, the hot wind in their hair. A dour Spanish guardsman came out of his sentry box and opened an electronic green iron gate topped with spikes, a remote TV camera too. Then they were out of La Finca, driving slowly along a winding road, a dried-up rocky riverbed to the right and some low olive fields to the left. Finally, civilization appeared, with more and more country villas — big houses for the tourists and the rich weekend folk from Barcelona and Madrid.

  They popped out of the mountains, crossed the narrow main road, and were in the town. Mo drove knowledgeably through a warren of narrow white-walled streets, parked in a space the size of a pocket handkerchief, then they climbed out of the car, Lieberman lugging the rucksack he'd brought with him. Annie took him by the hand, led him through two dark alleyways, before coming out in a large, open square, with a hulking church in the same golden stone as La Finca.

  'We have money,' Mo announced.

  'Their money.' Annie grinned.

  Lieberman sat down on a battered metal chair, beside an even more battered tin table, and announced, 'Beer, ice cream, tapas. Let's party.'

  'One beer,' Mo cautioned. 'Then I want some exercise.' 'Good,' he said, and looked for the waiter. Fifteen minutes later, they were out of the square, walking past the church and a cluster of ecclesiastical-looking buildings. The heat was so oppressive it felt tangible. Lieberman's checked shirt clung to his chest, and he could feel the sweat running in hot salty rivulets down his face.

  They turned a corner, and stretching in front of them was a straight paved climb up a small hill to what looked like a chapel at the top.

  Lieberman sighed and started to climb. Mo slowed to keep pace with him, always watching Annie, who raced ahead, never quite letting her go. As they reached the summit, he got the point. The sights were astonishing on all four sides. They gazed down into the town with a bird's-eye view. To the northeast was the broad sweeping bay of Pollensa, and, in the opposite direction, the long line of mountains that hid La Finca from the world.

  Annie was seated on a stone bench underneath a scraggy cypress, trying to stay out of the sun. They joined her and she looked at Lieberman, smiled, and said, 'Your turn now.'

  'Okay. We keep this short. Then you two can carry me back down that hill, since I doubt I can walk.'

  'Wimp,' Annie said.

  'I'm old,' he countered.

  'Not that much.'

  'Enough to know you should be wearing something on your head. Take this.'

  He pushed the Lone Wolf baseball cap onto Annie's head and vowed to stand, as much as he could, in the shade of the cypress tree for the next half hour or as long as it took to bring this brief and — even to him — puzzling situation into the light.

  The ground around the chapel was empty. No one else was dumb enough, he guessed, to brave the airless midday cauldron that had enveloped the island. He had his little notebook computer with the presentation notes on and a small portable telescope with an equatorial fork mount. Lieberman took out the scope, attached the fork mount to the body, then fitted the screen of the projector to the frame so that the image came straight out of the eyepiece and fell there, damn near perfect, and visible for everyone to see. They were watching him screw the thing together, and there was genuine interest there, in what he had to tell them, and maybe even in him too. They were curious, which he found both refreshing and satisfying.

  He flashed a quick smile, stared at the nearly complete telescope in front of him, rolled in the last screw, stood up, and began.

  CHAPTER 7

  Descending

  Central Siberia, 0458 UTC

  The cockpit door opened and Ali Fitzgerald walked into the cabin. Both men were busy: Seabright, who'd failed to raise Air Force One on the radio, was now peering through the screen; Mulligan was hunched nervously over the panels. Seabright thought he'd detected the shadow of the big 747 with the crest on its side somewhere over to their right. Then it had disappeared.

  Finally, he broke away from staring at the bright, featureless horizon and asked Ali, 'How is it?'

  'The German died,' she said softly. 'There was nothing I could do.'

  Seabright looked at his first officer. Mulligan knew what his responsibilities were: Watch the lights flicker and glimmer on the panel, follow every movement of the digital dials on the one working engine. But his preoccupation didn't stop the news from affecting him. In another set of circumstances, he would have stood up and embraced her, tried to share some strength, but this was not the time or place.

  'Ali'

  It was Seabright who spoke, and as he did he noticed some fire in his colleague's eyes, some blame aimed — where? At himself? Or at Seabright, for taking this initiative, which was surely the right thing, the proper thing here, in this flying tin tube, just struggling through the air at 8,000 feet above the hot, inhospitable land, limping along at close to 150 miles per hour below its normal cruise, with thirty miles still to run to the field and the possibility of safety?

  "They need you back there,' Seabright said, not looking at her, though there was precious little to occupy his attention outside the window now. The aircraft was flying straight and level, as if it knew the way to go.

  'No, they d
on't,' she said abruptly, knowing he was wrong, knowing he just wanted her out of there. People are not stupid. They knew what was happening. They were strapped into their seats, trying not to anticipate this unknown thing called the future, feeling powerless, feeling weak. There was nothing she could do for them, nothing she could do for anyone, even herself.

  She pulled down the jump seat from the back of the door, let herself slump into it. There was so much pain in the back of her legs, in her shoulders, it felt as if she'd been carrying around some huge weight on her back for hours. She was twenty-eight years old, and she felt more tired, more weary than she'd ever felt in her life.

  The radio barked out of nowhere, so loud and sudden it startled them all.

  'Dragon 92. We have you on track for a straight-in approach. Twenty-three miles to run. How are things?'

  The man had a Russian accent. He sounded worried, maybe a little scared.

  'We have one fatality on board,' Seabright said into the mike. 'Some sick people too. Cardiac cases, possibly. Can you cover that?'

  There was a pause.

  'We'll see what we can do,' the voice said after a while. 'Other traffic in your vicinity. No height, no precise position. Transponder not working. You see it?'

  'Shit,' Seabright muttered, frantically scanning the sky. 'Negative.'

  The radio went quiet.

  'Captain?'

  Ali's voice seemed to come from a long way away. Seabright's head hurt; there was pressure getting hard and painful somewhere behind his face. It wouldn't surprise him if he joined the nosebleed club soon, though he'd hardly ever had one in his life outside the rugby field.

  'Not now, Ali. We need to deal with this… situation.' He wished she'd go away. If it came to it, he'd order her to get out of the cabin, pick her up bodily and put her back behind the bulkhead, out of sight.

  She blinked back the tears, and they weren't just because of the way he spoke, which was so unlike him.

  'Captain,' she said again, slowly and deliberately. 'There is something on the aircraft. On it.'

  These were all familiar words but both Seabright and Jimmy Mulligan never thought, in their lives, that they'd hear them in this particular order. Or would have believed how cold they might feel when they were spoken, so quietly, in a voice one of them was slowly coming to regard as something essential, something vital in his life.

  'There is something on the roof of the plane,' she said. Seabright looked at Mulligan, tried to read his expression, was ready to force her out of there himself, any way he could. Then both men turned round and whatever words were forming in their throats just died there, dry on their lips. There was something on the plane, clinging to its upper skin. And it was getting bigger all the time.

  Ali was the first to see it for an obvious reason. She was sitting in the jump seat, behind Seabright and Mulligan, and this gave her an uninterrupted view of the entire cockpit area, right to the top of the big deep windows that ran past the pilots' heads, beyond the normal range of their upper vision.

  From here, it appeared as a thin blue electric line, not quite transparent, like a brush stroke of vivid paint an inch or two thick along the top of the screen. It looked, for all the world, as if someone had poured some bright blue screen wash onto the roof of the airliner, then let it spread slowly, gently down the sides, running over the fuselage, then down to the cockpit windows.

  The blue light had been almost stationary for a few seconds, though within its body there was movement: some of it rapid, like the coursing of sparking currents through some viscous medium… some slower, more liquid, like the gentle undulation of a tidal water flow.

  'It looks like lightning,' Mulligan said, his head arched back to see the thin line of light.

  Then it moved again, visibly, drew forward, fell a good four inches down the window, well within their line of vision now, no need to stretch their necks.

  'You can hear it,' she said, and didn't even want to think about what this meant.

  There was a sound, low but distinct, coming through the skin of the aircraft. It was like the fizzing of some chemical preparation or a power line that had been shorn through, and was now snaking and spitting wildly at anything it saw.

  Seabright pressed the mike and said, 'Dragon 92, immediate forced landing, we have some form of electrical discharge on the aircraft.'

  Then listened, not wanting to hear the response, just needing to know. The radio was dead. The antenna was on the roof. It would be one of the first things to go.

  He stared out of the left-side window and thought his heart might stop beating. Moving in a parallel path slightly above them, a mere four hundred yards away, was the familiar white shape of a 747, looking equally stricken. Its entire hull was covered in a bright, shifting veil of blue electricity. The crest on the main door and the tail was only just recognizable through the flimsy, unearthly veil of energy.

  'Gentle glide, Jimmy,' Seabright said. 'I don't want to see any more than eight hundred feet per minute all the way down unless I say so.'

  They would not collide, he told himself, not if they kept their present course.

  'Sir…'

  Mulligan wanted to get this thing out of the sky as quickly and as efficiently as possible, and Seabright read his thoughts, had been there, gone through that point before his first officer had even reached it.

  'I can put her into an emergency descent, sir.'

  Seabright looked at the man. He was scared, and they didn't have the time for that.

  'If we set her up in that attitude, Jimmy, think what happens if the controls lock again or we lose the engine. Or both. So be a good chap, now. Watch the engine. Watch the panel. Let's get out of here.'

  There was nothing for Mulligan to say right then. He just nodded. And watched the screens. Something was happening there already and it was impossible to judge what it meant. Before, when the panel had gone down, it was as if it had actually died, had felt the lifeblood run out of its circuits, spill out into the atmosphere, and leave nothing behind. This seemed like the opposite. Everything was racing. Every gauge, every dial was coming to life, glowing, winking, brightly, furiously in front of him.

  He felt like laughing, in between the anger, in between the red rage that ran around his head. There was something so ironic here. They'd survived being starved of electricity. Now it looked as if they'd be drowned by the stuff, dripping in from outside, down the windows, into the aircraft, into the wings, the control systems, every electronic nerve in its being.

  And the fuel tanks too, Mulligan thought. Never forget the fuel tanks.

  He watched what was flitting across the panels, not listening to what Seabright was saying, not even letting the words — and they were angry, getting angrier all the time — come close to his head, which hurt, which felt as if it were ready to explode. Because this was something new, this was something you never saw in the books. This was an entire aircraft being swallowed whole by some unknown, shapeless entity that fell from the sky, something blue and hissing, like a venomous electric serpent hooked to the biggest power grid in the world. You didn't read about these things in the books. Nothing prepared you for this, ever.

  He felt something on his shoulder, looked, and it was Seabright's hand, shaking him roughly, trying to get him back into line.

  Outside, beyond the wing, the 747 was closer now, moving slowly toward them, as if drawn by some gigantic magnet.

  Jimmy Mulligan was, above all, a practical man. He took one last look at the gauges, closed his eyes for a second, tried to still his thoughts. His hands weren't shaking when he took off his harness. He felt calm, extraordinarily calm, felt that something inside his head was measuring these seconds as they ticked away so relentlessly.

  Ian Seabright, still locked on the yoke, watched the blue fall farther, fall until it was halfway down the screen, far enough for the passengers to see through the cabin windows. Out of nothing more than habit, he wondered what was happening beyond the bulkhead. The aircra
ft flew on, steady as a rock. He stared out the window. The 747 was still closer. Only two hundred yards. And by the tail a new shape was growing, yellow and fiery.

  Ali Fitzgerald had her eyes shut, cradled her head in her hands.

  Mulligan knelt down in front of her, took her fingers, and she looked at him. She wasn't crying. In some way she wasn't even afraid.

  Then she stood up, her back to the cockpit door. He rose too, felt her arms go around him, felt his face in her hair, against her cheek, soft and warm, damp with sweat, so real, so human it made him want to cry with rage.

  She didn't kiss him. They didn't need that, clinging together like this, in some tiny tin cabin, held aloft in the atmosphere by nothing but the whim of the air outside. She just let her mouth brush against his neck, felt the way his did the same against her skin, and both thought, in a single image, of another time, two pale bodies twisting against cotton sheets in an anonymous hotel in an anonymous Japanese suburb, such physical delight passing between them it seemed impossible they could ever grow old or vanish from the face of the earth.

  He leaned forward, gripping her more tightly, heard the sound from behind, unlatched the door, let it fall open, feeling these precious seconds slip away from them, seep out through the fabric of the aircraft, disappear like motes of light dispelled by some greater, all-consuming luminance.

  It was like the hot breath of a dragon, so bright and yellow through the pale brown skein of her hair, half-obstructing his vision. The fireball rolled ponderously down the length of the cabin toward them, a perfect golden sphere, roaring as it came, so loud that he could hear no screams above it, with such deadly certainty that he could believe, perhaps, there were none.

  Then the dragon breathed in his face, with a heat and searing proximity that took from his head the physical presence of Ali, the faint perfume of her skin, the whispering of her hair, the warmth of her touch, left nothing in its place but the temporary electrochemical stain on the cerebellum that went under the name of memory. And in a second even that was gone.