"Good job," I said as I gave him a gentle pat on the back, and extracted from my pocket a piece of chocolate I'd been saving. "You deserve this."
Zhang looked at that piece of chocolate, a precious enough item on Newark but especially so on our current expedition, like I'd handed him a bar of gold. He accepted it in both hands, bowed slightly to me, and wrapped it carefully in a cloth before placing it in a pocket. The other Chinese soldiers said something to him in Mandarin, and he broke into a grin. Apparently, I had just made his day.
I was tempted to climb onto the roof and ride up there, the RV had a roof rack and we'd rigged up a couple places to sit, and an awning to keep rain off. As it was partly sunny that day, the awning had been taken down and stowed. The roof could be chilly, it was also a popular enough place to ride that I'd had to limit people to taking shifts up there, they changed when we changed drivers. Inside the RV was warm and dry, out of the wind, it was also dreary as the RV had few windows. Realizing that if I went on the roof, someone would have to come down, I stayed in the RV, adjusting my seat so I could see out the front windows. One of our SEALs named Taylor took the wheel, as he had the next shift, and Lieutenant Williams stood behind the driver's seat. "Right up there, by that big round rock, that's the top," Williams pointed out. "Make a straight line for it, and when we're over the crest, let it fall off to the left and we'll get back down to our original course."
"Got it," Taylor replied. Williams went back to his seat, strapped in, and we headed off.
All went well at first, Taylor carefully and confidently drove us up to the crest, let the RV naturally turn slightly to the left, and drove a fairly straight line toward a gap between two large rocks. Those two rocks, I remembered from the satellite images, we had planned our route to avoid them, now that I saw them from the surface, they were not a big deal. The gap between them was four or five times wider than the RV, with some smaller stones half buried in the ground, the RV's treads morphed shape to roll over the stones as if they weren't there. After shooting the gap, it was an easy drive back down to the original course we'd planned, parallel to the stream at the bottom of the canyon. Even at the careful rate that Taylor was driving, it would only take us a few minutes to get back down to the intended track, which at that part of the canyon was almost like a shelf notched into the shallow canyon wall. To my eyes, I wondered if the shelf had ever been a road, created millions of years ago by Newark's original inhabitants. That idea was stupid, I knew, no road could have lasted that long, especially not in a canyon carved by the advance and retreat of glaciers, glaciers massing millions of tons. The shelf, and the one on the opposite canyon wall, had been created by the stream in full flood, raging over its banks and carrying stones smashing and scouring the soil of the canyon walls, each year digging the canyon deeper and wider, carrying its soil eventually, grain by grain, down to the sea.
It would take us only a few minutes to get down to the shelf notched into the canyon wall, even though Taylor was being extra careful driving in the soft, muddy soil.
And then, suddenly, it didn't take any time at all. "Whoa!" Taylor shouted a warning from the driver's seat, at the same time we all felt the RV rock side to side, then drop sickeningly.
"What's wrong?" I shouted back, pushing myself up in the seat to see through the window in front of Taylor.
Taylor replied much more calmly than I could have managed. "I didn't do anything, the treads won't- AH!" As he gave the alarm, there was a high-pitched whine from the treads on the right side, the RV lurched to the left and dropped again. And then it rolled. The RV rolled to its left, rocked back to the right, then to the left again, and kept going. Out the driver's window, I saw someone jump off the roof; the RV was rolling over and the people on the roof weren't waiting for an engraved invitation to get the hell off the thing.
It was chaos, sheer chaos. The RV rolled over and over, onto its left side, then the roof, then the right side, paused ever so briefly to rock on the protesting treads, and rolled again. I lost track of how many times it rolled, after counting two complete flips my head was bouncing around too much to be aware of minor details. For some reason, the RV wasn't rolling fast, it was almost a controlled motion, and it didn't seem to be gaining speed. It was chaos inside the RV.
Let me tell you something about the SpecOps people. They didn't panic. They all kept their cool, kept situational awareness the whole time, looked for opportunities to do something useful to affect the outcome. Every one of them, I'm sure, knew how many times we rolled. It was chaos, we had no control, we were tumbling down a slope toward a rock-filled, icy, raging stream at the bottom of the canyon, and there was no shouting, no screaming, no panic. I felt almost ashamed of myself, until I managed to follow their example.
It was a damned good thing I had insisted that everyone be strapped into seats any time the RV was moving, or we would have suffered serious injuries from people being tossed around inside the RV. After I don't know how many puzzlingly ponderous, slow rolls, the RV came to rest on its treads, rocked side to side two or three times, then stopped. "Is everyone all right?" I asked stupidly. "Anyone injured?" I asked more intelligently.
"I'm good."
"Ok here, sir."
Everyone sounded off, and other than bruises and bumps, no one was hurt. "Get the door open, let's get out of here before this thing rolls again," I ordered, and made sure I was the last person out the door. Because the door was on the left, downhill side, I ran the hell away from the RV, in case it decided to roll on top of me.
"Holy shit," I exclaimed.
The RV had ended properly on its treads, right on the shelf where we wanted to be! Looking up the slope, I could see all four of the people who had been on the roof were on their feet, waving to us, apparently uninjured. And I could see the source of the problem; the ground had given way beneath the RV up the slope, soil had slipped in a mini landslide of mud and soft dirt. Once the RV rolled the first time, it got momentum started, and kept going down the gentle slope of the canyon wall, until it fell onto the shelf-like notch.
"Ha!" Williams laughed relieved now that he'd seen no one was seriously injured. "Taylor! You didn't need to get us here so fast!"
We all laughed. Laughed, and we couldn't stop. I laughed until I had tears in my eyes, laughed in relief that I wasn't dead, that the RV wasn't upside down in the stream, the RV, somehow, was on its treads, and not even the windows were broken. The door still even worked, it was sticky, sure, I had expected the door to be solidly, impossibly jammed into its frame after such a shock.
"Skippy," I inquired, "how badly is the RV damaged?"
"It's fine, Joe. You took quite a tumble there. Are you Ok?"
"It's fine?" I asked, astonished.
"Yup, the Kristang build these things tough. They're designed to be dropped by parachute. The reason it rolled over so slowly is the gyroscopes counteracted the roll a bit, they're designed to do that. You can get back in and drive it away, no problem. You better fix the roof rack first, it automatically retracted when it sensed the roll, but I can see it's bent in some places. Nobody is hurt?"
"Minor bumps and bruises. Damn, Skippy," I walked around the RV and looked it in amazement, "how it this thing not laying in pieces all over the place? How did the treads not get busted off?"
"The treads and pontoons would have retracted automatically as needed, the onboard computer knew when to extend the treads to stop the roll when it could. Like I said, these things are built tough, Joe. Good thing, too, because the warranty on that RV expired a long time ago. Tell you what, I can get you a sweet deal on rustproof undercoating, I know a guy who knows a guy."
"Thanks, Skippy, but we don't plan on owning this thing long enough for that to matter."
"I'll throw in a set of air fresheners. You got an RV stuffed full of monkeys, air fresheners could come in mighty handy, Joe."
I laughed. "Skippy, if things go according to plan, in a few days, we're going to dump this RV in a lake, or bury it, s
o no one will ever find it. Rustproofing and air fresheners would be counterproductive at that point."
"Damn. Joe, remind me never to let you borrow my car. If I ever have one."
When the people who had been on the roof walked down to us, after picking up things like the awning, jackets and several backpacks that had been flung off the roof on the RV's way down, I got everyone to pose in front of the mud-smeared and only slightly dented RV. Setting my zPhone on a rock, I asked Skippy to take photos of our group, which he did without any snarky comments. Maybe he was genuinely glad that we were alive, or maybe he was too busy repairing the Dutchman to play any pranks on us then. I appreciated it.
When we were done with the photos to commemorate our miraculous survival, I told Taylor to get back in, and check if Skippy was correct about the RV being drivable. Taylor gave me a quizzical look. "You sure you want me driving again, sir?"
"Taylor," I said, "it wasn't your fault. Besides, what are the odds that will happen to you twice?"
Skippy chimed in. "Was that a question for me, Joe? Truly, I don't have enough data to calculate the odds. I'd need ground-penetrating radar to examine the soil-"
"That was a rhetorical question, Skippy, no number crunching needed."
"Good. Because without further data, my estimate of the odds would only be accurate within sixty five per-"
"Thank you, Skippy, we've got it from here. Taylor, do your thing."
The RV drove just fine, Taylor went forward a hundred meters, then backed up to us. If the soil of the shelf was saturated with water and unstable, running the RV back and forth over it should have caused it to shift. Smythe and I walked the tracks the RV had made, there were no cracks in the soil, no signs of the ground shifting at all. Satisfied that we were as safe as we could be, we fixed the roof rack as best we could, loaded up the RV, and drove off again. This may not be a fun-filled family vacation, but it sure was turning out to be memorable. Smythe was looking at the photos I had forwarded to everyone's zPhone. "Bishop," he slipped for a moment, "Colonel," he was smart enough not to call attention to his mistake, "in Afghanistan, I was in a helicopter that went down, we were high up in the mountains, and the trailing rotor blade stalled or some bloody thing like that. We only fell fifty meters, onto snow, it could have been worse, the helo slid down the mountain and lodged against a rock before it would have fallen over a cliff. We had some broken bones, nothing serious," he said in a nonchalant SAS manner. "Before the rescue helo arrived, we posed for a photo in front of the busted bird." He pressed a few buttons on his zPhone and pulled up that photo. "That's me on the left."
The photo didn't look any different than he did now, it must have recent. When was the SAS in Afghanistan? "When was this, oh, never mind. You shouldn't tell, me, and I don't care." If I'd cared, the details were in his service record.
"Ha!" Smythe laughed. " As if that matters now, sir. We know the only bloody secret that matters now, about Skippy playing games with wormholes. What I was going to say, sir, is until today, that pic of the downed helo was my favorite. But now, a photo of us having survived rolling down a canyon, in a stolen alien RV, on a planet thousands of lightyears from Earth? That beats all, in my opinion."
CHAPTER TWENTY TWO
The second and third river crossings were close together, we'd swim the RV across them in the same day. We reached the second river in late afternoon, and unlike the first river, where we'd had to hack a ramp down to the water, we expected this one to be an easy drive down into the river for the RV. That's how it appeared from the satellite image. That was not the reality we saw on the ground. The river banks on both sides had places where the land led straight down into the water on a fairly gentle grade, easy for the RV's treads. What was not easy was that in those places, the ground at the water's edge was slippery, thick mud. Skippy advised that even our RV's miraculous treads might get stuck. We got out and scouted up and down the river to find a better place to cross, there wasn't one. Our best option seemed to be to hack another road down to the water, in a place that wasn't too muddy. On the far bank, we'd need to get the RV to climb the bank as high as it could, then tie a line around a rock and use the RV's winch to pull itself up. It was growing dark by the time we got the road hacked out manually with picks and shovels, I decided against attempting a crossing in the growing darkness, and ordered a camp set up for the night. It was a decent evening, dry, warm for Newark, and the following day's forecast was for high winds and torrential rains. People needed a break. To stretch our legs that had grown stiff from sitting in the RV all day, most of us hiked up a hill above the river and watched the sun set. It was only the second time during our entire stay on Newark that I'd seen the local star set over the horizon, most days there were clouds in the way, or it was solid clouds and rain. Seeing a sunset was a treat, I took it as a good omen.
Crossing the second river was uneventful, we all complained what a pain in the ass it was to get the big RV up over the far river bank. Honestly, every single one of us loved seeing the RV winch itself up, carving a big gouge in the river bank. The treads got completely, hopelessly clogged with giant clods of sticky, gooey mud, and, darn it, we all had to stand in the drizzling rain and watch as the driver, an Indian paratrooper lieutenant named Patel, gunned the throttle and spun the treads clean, flinging mud everywhere as the RV fishtailed up away from the river. We all laughed and clapped heartily, Patel had such a huge grin that I thought it might crack his face wide open. Damn it, why had I not pulled rank and taken the driver seat?
By the time we reached the third river, the drizzle had become a steady rain, not yet the gusty downpour we expected from Skippy's weather forecast. Skippy was testy about that, assuring me that just to the north of us was a near hurricane-force storm; high winds straight out of the north, and rain coming down in sheets. We paused the RV to get out and evaluate the river, there was a gentle grassy slope right down into the water, same on the other side. To the north, the sky was so dark it looked like night was approaching from that direction, and it was only mid-afternoon. The river was rushing fast, icy cold black water, big standing waves piling up over submerged rocks, to my eyes it appeared the water level was rising as we stood there. Chunks of ice floated by, bobbing on and ducking under the surface as the river bounced them violently. Satellite images showed the long tongue of a retreating glacier jutted out into the river not more than ten kilometers north of us, out of sight around a bend in the river, ice was continually breaking off as the river ate away at the base of the glacier. Getting into and out of the river was going to be simple for the RV, the tricky part was going to be avoiding submerged rocks and floating ice chunks.
"Let's go," I decided. A sudden chilly gust of wind almost made me stagger on the bank of the river, reinforcing my decision. We need to get across before that wind hits us full force." I didn't want the bulky RV acting like a sail in the wind, while we were trying to get across the river.
"Yes, sir," Smythe agreed. "Up in those hills," he pointed across the river, "are several good spots we could wait out the storm overnight."
We got back in the RV, shed our wet jackets, and started down the bank toward the river. Our driver was Patel again, he'd taken a break after driving us across the second river, I wanted an experienced person at the controls for this last major river crossing. Patel flashed us a confident thumbs up before the nose of the RV hit the water, then he focused completely on the task of getting us safely across. The RV bobbed alarmingly once it was fully afloat, the current was so strong that Patel had to point the RV's nose partly upriver in order to hold a straight course. A straight course wasn't going to work, the river bed was cluttered with rocks we could see and rocks we couldn't see, the RV was a technological wonder but for some reason, the Kristang hadn't fitted it with sonar to detect underwater obstacles. We had to guess where rocks were hidden under the surface by watching waves and ripples, something many of us, including me, knew from canoeing or kayaking. A canoe or kayak drew so little water
that it could glide over obstacles that were covered by very little water, that was not true of the RV, its bottom was a meter or more below the surface, and with the pontoons plunging up and down in the increasingly angry waves, at times the bottom of the RV was considerably more than a meter deep. We hadn't gone fifty meters before there was a bump, and the RV ground its way over a submerged rock, a rock too deep to create a standing wave, but deep enough for the RV to bottom out. "Sorry," Patel said from the driver's seat. The RV was only hung up on the rock a moment, it popped up and rode over the rock, then Patel needed to swing the RV downstream to avoid another rock. In the seat to the right of Patel was SAS Lieutenant Crispin, scouting for Patel to find a path across the river that avoids underwater obstacles. Smythe suggested Crispin was well suited to that task, he had gone to the Olympic Trails for the British kayaking team.
"Not his fault, sir," Crispin defended Patel, "these rocks are damned hard to see. And this bloody caravan draws too much water. Right, right," he shouted.
Patel swung the RV to the right again, and the RV plunged downstream, rocking and rolling on the rough water. For the next ten minutes, Crispin and Patel tried to get the RV into the middle of the river, where we hoped deeper water would allow us to avoid hitting rocks, at that point we had already bumped and scraped over three unseen objects. Patel got the RV turned directly upstream and held it in place, while Crispin looked for a way out of the box the RV was in. There were large rocks sticking out of the water to the right, left and downstream. Upstream was an underwater rock we'd already hit once, we didn't want to run over it again. Skippy said the RV was tough, and had an extra tough skid plate on the bottom to protect against the hull getting a hole punched in it from running over rocks. How tough that skid plate was, if we hit a sharp rock, was something I didn't want to test.
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