Asura

by R P L Johnson

  As usual it was the quiet ones he had to worry about. The politician chap complained loudly about a variety of bumps and bruises, but Keyes managed to settle him down, eventually giving up his own oxygen bottle for Garrett’s exclusive use. The clear plastic mask had shut him up as effectively as giving a dummy to a bawling child.

  Talking of children, there was one amongst the survivors. She was so quiet that Keyes had grown quite worried about her, until her father had explained that she had always been a quiet child. Keyes was still worried about the possible after affects of the traumatic crash, and all the death that the child would have witnessed, so he made a mental note to keep an eye on her until she could receive some proper counselling.

  The injured climber, Philippe Morcellet, was obviously in a great deal of pain, and was dehydrated, but even he had been made as comfortable as could be expected. His legs had been stabilised by aluminium splints from the old luggage racks, and one open wound on his shin where the ragged edge of his shattered tibia had torn through the flesh had been elevated and padded with gauze before being dressed.

  ‘Whoever did this knew their first aid,’ Keyes said cheerfully as he carefully inspected the dressing.

  Philippe winced even at the doctor’s gentle touch. He had been given morphine from the plane’s first aid kit, but despite that he must have been in great pain. He nodded towards a woman in a black parka with stately features framed by the brown fur that trimmed her hood.

  ‘Madamme Carver was quite efficient,’ Philippe said. ‘Even when I swore I would kill her if she touched me again.’ He turned towards her. ‘Desolé, Madamme,’ he said.

  Keyes looked at the woman. She was quite-a good deal younger than Keyes himself, anyway-but she was definitely a Maddamme, not a Mademoiselle.

  ‘Well, you owe Ms. Carver a debt of gratitude. She has probably saved your leg. Ms. Carver, are you a nurse, by any chance?’

  The austere young woman shook her head. ‘Just an ex girl scout, Doctor,’ she said.

  Keyes looked at her for about a half-second longer than was strictly necessary before turning back to his work. Some girl scout, he thought. He didn’t know many girl scouts that could have done what she had, not to mention putting up with death threats to boot.

  Keyes looked over his shoulder to see Nurse Gibbons fitting Mister Khamas with an oxygen bottle. Instead of bothering her, he turned towards the young girl.

  ‘Excuse me my dear, do you understand English?’

  She nodded quickly, her eyes on her father.

  ‘Inside my pack—’ Keyes continued, ‘—there is an orange plastic box with a green cross on the lid. Would you find it for me?’

  The young girl untangled her gangly limbs from her crouch against the wall, and dug out the box from Keyes’s pack that lay on the floor of the cabin behind him. She held it out to him as if she was hand-feeding a tiger. Keyes smiled what he hoped was a reassuring smile. ‘There’s some chocolate in there too, if you can find it.’ At least she was responsive, he thought. Maybe she was just quiet, and not in shock after all.

  Just then, Marinucci stuck his head around the blankets that screened the rear of the plane. ‘Doctor, can we move anyone to the shelter yet? We need the Supacat for a little while.’

  Keyes looked wistfully at Garrett who had started to complain again, between deep draughts from the oxygen mask. It would be nice to send him away, but he disliked the idea of palming him off on Nurse Gibbons.

  ‘I need a little more time with our Gallic friend here before we can move him,’ he said. ‘But if you’d be so kind as to drop Nurse Gibbons and Mister Khamas off, we can wait a half-hour or so.’

  Nurse Gibbons nodded and helped Khamas to his feet.

  ‘Hang on!’ Garrett put in. ‘What about me?’

  ‘Next time, Mister Garrett,’ Keyes said with an authoritative snap in his voice. Being a military man as well as a physician had lent him an air of authority that was hard to contradict. He nodded to Marinucci, settling the matter, and Nurse Gibbons led and her patient out through the rear of the plane. Khamas’s daughter followed her father towards the exit, but Keyes caught her attention.

  ‘I seem to be short of a nurse,’ he said. ‘You wouldn’t mind filling in for her, would you?’

  The young girl looked nervously towards her father. Khamas nodded weakly. ‘Stay. Help. I will be fine,’ he said.

  ‘Your father is in good hands, I assure you. He just needs oxygen and plenty of rest. Now, hand me that bandage, please.’

  He thought that the young girl might make a bolt for the exit, but eventually she decided against it and handed him the bandage. She still looked like she would rather be petting a cobra, but she did it.

  ◆◆◆

  Marinucci and Tej swung past the shelter to drop off their passengers, swinging wide around the black flags that Rose had planted to mark the edges of the crevasse.

  The ice between the shelter and the tail section was solid and before long they reached the wreckage of the Fairchild’s tail.

  The fuselage had fractured along the line of the rear door to the cabin, just forward of the bulkhead that separated the passenger cabin from the instruments inside the tail itself. It looked as if the tail had separated fairly early in the crash; it had come down with its own debris trail and had ploughed its own furrow through the loose snow on top of the glacier, gouging a path right down to the cracked, blue ice.

  Marinucci jumped down from the Supacat and examined the wreckage. He looked at the mountain of snow piled up in front of the rear bulkhead. He checked his tracking device, making sure that the ELT transponder was still inside the tail cone, and gave a satisfied grunt when the needle on the tracker’s dial nearly jumped off the scale. They were right on top of it.

  The ‘Black Box’ was actually three separate pieces of equipment. The emergency location transmitter or ELT allowed the wreckage to be found by homing in on a distinct transponder signal. There was also the flight data recorder which stored instrument readout and control inputs and the Cockpit Voice Recorder that monitored all noises in the cockpit, from the commands of the pilot, to any mechanical noises that would have been audible to the crew.

  The various data recorders and ELT were stored in the tail cone of aircraft, as this area was usually the least damaged in most crash scenarios. It was furthest away from the point of impact, and also removed from the wings, and the fuel tanks contained inside. The Fairchild was true to the textbooks, and although the rudder and elevators had been ripped off, the tail cone and its horizontal and vertical stabilisers were largely intact.

  ‘Looks like I’m going to have to cut it,’ he said.

  He tramped back to the sled behind the ‘cat and heaved out a piece of equipment that looked like the bastard offspring of a climbing backpack and a V8 engine. He slipped his arms through the shoulder straps and hefted the weight onto his back.

  ‘Okay. Rip it!’ he said. Tej pulled the starter chord and the portable compressor roared to life.

  He unhooked the hydraulic jaws of the combined cutting and spreading unit so that he looked like an extra from the movie Ghostbusters, with the chainsaw-sized cutting unit attached to the backpack by two thick pneumatic hoses.

  The two-stroke engine on his back popped and chugged as it idled, roaring into life like a leaf-blower when he squeezed down on a trigger the size of a motorcycle’s clutch. The noise drowned out the whine of the jaws as their chisel-sharp noses came together.

  ‘Okay, go ahead,’ he said to Tej who was standing next to the tail cone with a hammer and chisel. Tej nodded and punched a hole in the middle of one of the fuselage panels, well away from the lines of rivets that marked the supporting ribs underneath. Marinucci jammed the spreader into the little hole and the two stroke motor roared again as it forced the jaws apart. He had to lean into his work to make sure the jaws stayed in the hole, but their serrated backs soon bit into the aluminium and as they opened further, they tore a hole in the fuselage as wide as M
arinucci’s spread palm. Then it was the turn of the blades on the inside of the jaws to bite, and—working outwards from the hole he had created—Marinucci started to cut the fuselage open like a can of tuna.

  CHAPTER 8

  Rebecca McCarthy hugged the silver, thermal blanket around her shoulders and trudged through the snow away from the crash site. It was no longer her responsibility. Whatever happened now would happen with or without her. She no longer had even the token role of leader of the survivors; they didn’t need her anymore.

  And what did she need? She wasn’t sure. Now that the rescuers had arrived, and the question of whether or not she was actually going to make it off the mountain had been answered, she wasn’t sure what was bothering her. She should be ecstatic; she had lived through a devastating crash in one of the most remote parts of the world. She should be jumping up and down with joy, but she wasn’t.

  As she had watched the rescue team deal with the other survivors, the only thing she had been sure of was that-after being cooped up inside the wrecked plane for two days-she just wanted to be alone. And so she had walked off into the virgin snow without even a backward glance.

  Duty was a funny thing. Even in the midst of the most monstrous failure to live up to her responsibilities, even when she had dragged the bodies of her own passengers out into the snow and buried them, passengers who had put their lives in her butter-fingered hands, she still clutched the frayed tatters of her duty around her even tighter than the silver foil of the blanket. It was a sick and twisted relationship. The more she failed in her duty, the more it demanded of her. Now even that was gone.

  An icy wind blew her blanket up around her shoulders and she gathered it in again. This was crazy. What was she going to do? Just walk off into the snow and never come back. Who did she think she was, Captain Oates?

  The urge to survive gripped her with unexpected force. It welled up from some primitive root of her brain, some reptilian remnant of her primeval past, unconcerned with such modern niceties as consciousness and emotion.

  Get out of the fucking wind, it told her.

  She looked up. The green dome of the rescue team’s tent was only a few hundred yards away and she started to walk towards it. Whatever happened would still happen, but at least she’d be warm.

  ◆◆◆

  Rose finished his survey of the ice around the crash site. He had already marked out a safe working zone and found a stable route between the crash site and the shelter farther down the slope, but there were still many faults that could swallow up an unwary climber. By probing the snow with a long rod he had found the edges of the main fissure as well as a smaller crevasse that ran at an slight angle to it on the other side of the crashed plane the intersection of the crevasses to the west was marked by a wind-sculpted serac: the block of ice reared up through the surface snow like a natural monument to mark the site of those who had lost their lives in the crash.

  The crevasses were huge, up to fifteen feet across at their widest, but the ice between them was dense and un-faulted. Rose marked the edges of the crevasses with black flags. Even the slight effort of tramping up and down the glacier’s shallow slope had him gasping in the thin air and he took a few deep breaths from his oxygen bottle before heading back to see King.

  King was supervising three of the Scottish mountain rescue team as they went about the unpleasant task of cataloguing the dead. Alan Frazier had returned from his trip to the head of the glacier and had hooked the Supacat up to a set of batteries that would keep the engine warm until the powerful little vehicle was needed again. The luggage from the makeshift rear wall of the plane had been laid out neatly on the snow and Frazier was going through it, checking each piece carefully and logging it into a tablet, even going so far as to open the bags and rummage through their contents. Several locked bags lay broken-open at his side, their locks smashed or pried open with an ice axe. As Rose approached Frazier flicked out a wickedly serrated knife and slit open a canvas hold all from end to end. He began pulling the contents out onto the snow.

  ‘Hey, that's still private property!' Rose warned.

  'He is just carrying out my instructions, Captain,' King said. 'We must confirm the identity of the passengers. There may be travel documents, address books and so on that could prove useful. I'm sure the relatives of the deceased would not object to this task being carried out expeditiously.'

  Rose watched Frazier as he worked. For all his vigor he didn't seem to have found many documents. It was almost as if he was looking for something else, something bigger. After quickly checking each bag he dumped it and moved on to the next.

  Rose noticed that Campbell and Patterson were doing the same thing with the bodies: extricating the frozen corpses from the frozen mass of the burial pile. Dislocated and broken limbs were twisted into positions no contortionist could match. They crackled like dry timber as Campbell wrenched them from their frozen embrace. The clothes of the dead were fused together where blood and bodily fluids had pooled until Campbell was forced to hack at the stiff fabric with a knife in order to separate them.

  As each was extricated from the burial mound, they were quickly frisked and photographed before being laid out in a grisly row away from the plane. Limbs stiff from rigor mortis and the cold stuck out as if their owners were signaling for help.

  They were certainly thorough. It was almost as if they cared more for the dead than they did for the survivors.

  King interrupted his train of thought. 'Did you have something to report, Captain?'

  ‘The ice seems stable enough for now,’ Rose said. ‘I’ve marked out an area large enough for a landing site. With your permission I’d like to bring one of the choppers up here and start evacuating the survivors.’

  ‘Excellent. Check with Doctor Keyes and start as soon as you can.’

  King paused as Campbell jogged over from the burial mound. The big Scot handed something to King: it looked like a passport. King immediately flipped it open to the identification page.

  ‘Left the U.K. a week ago,’ Campbell explained. ‘Passed through the Ukraine, but there’s no Russian stamp. They must have traveled over land into Kazakhstan illegally.’

  ‘Where did this come from?’ King asked.

  Campbell led him back to the burial mound. The latest body to be extracted was laid out on its back. The corpse was short and slightly built: probably a woman, Rose thought, although confirming that would take an autopsy. The body had been horribly burned during the crash. The face and scalp had been burned back to the bone. Even the torso looked odd, misshapen and melted. What remained of the corpse’s clothes hung in tatters from its shoulders and the exposed flesh that hadn’t been burned was black from the cold.

  Aviation fuel burns like napalm. Rose hoped that the unfortunate passenger had been dead before feeling the touch of the fire.

  Rose called Doctor Keyes on the radio clipped to his pack’s shoulder strap but there was no reply. He checked the battery and tried again: still no response. The frequency was awash with static.

  ‘What’s the problem?’ King asked.

  ‘I’m not sure. The radios were working fine earlier.’

  King spoke into his own unit. ‘King to Doctor Keyes, over... King to all receiving stations, radio check, over.’ No answer.

  King and Campbell looked at each other for a second as they shared some unreadable thought.

  ‘I’ll check on the Doctor,’ Rose said but King was ignoring him.

  Rose caught a glimpse of something at King’s throat: a webbing choker studded with a couple of black plastic sensors. It was a throat microphone. The sensitive sensors picked up vibrations through the voice box, amplified and transmitted them allowing almost silent communication. They were generally used by Special Forces units or SWAT teams: certainly not standard issue for a mountain rescue team.

  Whatever radio King’s microphone was connected to was still working. Instantly the three members of the Scottish team stopped what they were doing
. Alan Frazier scanned the surrounding mountains with a pair of high powered binoculars while Campbell and Patterson unloaded one of the plastic crates from the Supacat’s trailer.

  The white crate was stencilled with a red cross, but when Campbell ripped the lid off it contained not medical supplies, but weapons!

  Campbell tossed a short-barrelled assault rifle to King and another to Alan Frazier who immediately slammed a magazine into the receiver and chambered a round.

  King was shouting orders. ‘Get that chopper up here now. I want that body and as much of the unchecked luggage on board as possible. You have five minutes gentlemen!’

  Rose scanned the distant mountains, trying to see what Frazier had been looking for, but could find no clue. What the hell was going on?

  ◆◆◆

  ‘Do you hear something?’ Nurse Gibbons asked her patient. The Svenska shelter was quiet except for the steady background thrum of the hot air fans that kept the it warm and inflated, but behind that regular reassuring noise lay something else: a higher pitched whine that Gibbons first took to mean there was something wrong with the pump.

  She looked nervously at the walls of the shelter, as if expecting them to start deflating around her. As the noise grew louder she recognised it for what it was, the whine of a helicopter’s engine. Soon it was joined by the quickening thrump… thrump of the rotors as they accelerated up to speed.

  ‘Just hang on a second,’ she said, and her patient, Muhammad Khamas, nodded behind his oxygen mask.

  Donning the thick jacket she had removed after entering the warm shelter, she made here way out through the igloo-like porch on the front of the shelter that served as a kind of airlock: keeping the warm air inside and the pressure relatively constant. As soon as she slipped between the elasticated sheets of the outer door, she was assaulted by wind-blown snow. The ice crystals whipped up by the big helicopter’s wash swirled around the camp, spinning off the tips of the rotors spinning away like miniature cyclones of cold air and stinging ice. Before Gibbons could get to the chopper, it took off. After rising thirty feet into the air, it dipped its nose towards a patch of orange smoke that drifted across the glacier from the crash site. The helicopter roared over her, the tough fabric of the shelter billowing in its wake like sailcloth and almost knocking Yvonne off her feet. She checked her radio, but there was nothing on any of the channels except static.