by Adam Baker
‘How do you want to die, Frost? That’s the only latitude we got left. We get to choose. A luxury most folks didn’t have these past months. Think back. Took a lot of guts to get those wings, right? A lot of sweat. The Academy. The graduation salute. LaNitra Frost. Officer of the United States Air Force. Flew these birds for Uncle Sam, and proud of it. Used to mean something. So why not put on war paint one last time? There’s a battle to be fought.’
‘No there isn’t. Remember those Japanese soldiers that hid in the jungle for decades because they didn’t know Hirohito surrendered? That’s us, right now, marooned, fighting a lost fucking cause.’
‘I still believe in you,’ said Hancock. ‘That’s the tragedy. I can see the officer you used to be. Wish I could hold up a mirror, make you understand.’
He drew his pistol, chambered and cocked. He pointed the weapon at Frost’s head, aimed with his one remaining eye.
They stared each other down. Hancock’s unblinking gaze lining the front and rear sights.
‘What the hell are you doing?’ said Frost.
‘Take out your side arm. Do it slow.’
She thought about it, tried to get the measure of the man’s resolve.
He let her see his finger whiten on the trigger.
She pinched the butt of her pistol between thumb and forefinger, and lifted it clear of the holster.
‘Eject the clip.’
She slid the magazine across the deck towards him.
‘And the gun.’
She span it across the floor.
‘Good. Now give me the authorisation code.’
36
Noble clambered across the rockface. He worked north, shuffled ledge to ledge. His arms burned with fatigue. His fingers cramped.
A low sun threw long shadows, turned the crags and boulders rich caramel. He could already see the moon in a darkening sky. A minor boon in a string of catastrophes: at least he would have good visibility tonight.
High above the desert. Could almost see the curvature of the earth.
An hour since he woke. He had spent the day on a plateau, curled in the shadow of a boulder. A febrile semi-sleep. He had an eagle’s eye view of the desert. The centre of the limestone outcrop had been burned black by campfires. The place had almost certainly been used as a vantage point by native Americans. Bet if he kicked around in the dust he would unearth flint arrowheads. If he climbed higher he would find rocks stained with alien, aniconic art. Handprints and swirls. Markers left by aboriginals who climbed to this remote elevation to commune with gods and vultures.
The plan: head north across the mountainside. Sooner or later he would find himself overlooking the aim point, the site targeted for destruction. He guessed he’d know it when he saw it. Must be something out here, some kind of significant installation.
Faint clatter of rocks to his left.
He looked up, studied the crags and ledges above. Trickling dust.
Couldn’t shake the skin-crawling sensation of being watched, the suspicion his steps had been dogged by an unseen presence ever since he reached the Range. He hoped any infected that might be haunting the mountainside wouldn’t develop the smarts to roll a boulder on his head.
A mine entrance. Truck rails. A couple of yards of shaft, then rubble.
He picked a tin DANGER sign from the ground and wiped away dust.
ANACONDA MINING CORP.
A shaft sunk by uranium prospectors looking for a seam. One of the few reasons a person would visit this blighted place.
Adventurers scoured the Panamints. They dynamited the cliffs and sifted scree, looking for a telltale sheen of gold. A fresh wave of chancers chipped samples with a rock hammer, scanned rubble with a Geiger rig, whooped like wildcatters when they struck a pocket of uranium ore. A Faustian deal. Euphoric prospectors would stake a claim with the county recorder, clothes matted with radioactive dust. A few years rolling in big money, then thyroid cancer.
Vague memories of The Conqueror, the god-awful Genghis Khan biopic staring John Wayne. Filmed in the desert downwind of the Upshot-Knothole nuclear tests, the night detonations that had Hughes-era tourists partying around the roof pools of their Vegas hotels, toasting the gamma flash as it lit the horizon like summer lightning. The crew spent a month filming their Mongol turkey. They erected a barbarian camp, marshalled a galloping hoard for the battle scenes, nursed embryonic carcinomas as they breathed dust tainted with lethal isotopes cooked in the radiant millisecond of fission.
The atomic desert. An implacably lethal environment.
Noble allowed himself a sip of water. His canteen was half empty. Another day, two at the most, and he would enter the terminal stages of dehydration. At which point he might as well eat a bullet, or swan-dive from a high crag.
He didn’t feel scared. He’d bet his life on a roll of the dice, the gamble he would find salvation at the target site. It might be a vain hope. He might die out here in the barren wastes. But at least he would uncover the object of their mission, the reason they flew a cataclysmic payload into the desert.
Something on the ground near the mine entrance. Some kind of wrapper. He picked it up, squinted in the failing light.
An energy bar. Same brand Guthrie grabbed from the Vegas food store before the flight.
He examined the wrapper under the beam of his flashlight. Pristine. No accumulated dust.
Someone from the 2nd Bomb Wing must have spent the day in this mine entrance very recently. Someone from the limo.
He stepped outside and cupped his hands.
‘Hello,’ he shouted. ‘Hello, anyone?’
His voice echoed back at him from surrounding crags and crevices. Hello, anyone?
‘Anyone out there?
Anyone out there?
‘Hey.’
Hey.
No reply.
He sat a while and listened to the night wind.
Noble stood on a high ledge and looked out over moonlit desert.
An installation on the desert floor beneath him. A wire-ringed compound. Hard to make out details. Vehicles, trailers, geodesic tents. The place looked pretty smashed up.
He descended the mountain wall. He dropped ledge-to-ledge, slid down steep accumulations of scree kicking up a dust cloud.
Concrete pylons staked in the sand supported a nine-foot razor wire fence hung with volt-zag danger signs.
The main gates hung off their hinges.
Noble walked into the compound, stood in tyre-rutted sand and looked around. Spectral ruination. Moonlight and deep shadow. Wrecked accommodation units. Burned-out vehicles.
No movement. Deathly silence.
A shot-up guard booth near the gate. Ballistic glass frosted by bullet strikes, splattered with blood. A phone hung off the hook. Casings scattered underfoot. Looked like someone ran to the guard booth to summon for help, got mown down before the call could connect.
He shone his flashlight into an adjacent tent. A diesel generator. A 2500 kVA CAT, big as a van. Gunfire dings, but it seemed to be intact. The fuel level hung a couple of notches above zero.
Key Turn.
Screen menu: AUTO.
Green button: START.
The generator coughed smoke and fired up.
He backed out of the tent to escape exhaust fumes.
The compound floodlights buzzed and glowed with restored current. They lit the installation harsh white.
Some kind of Agency black site. Half a mile square, with a helipad at the centre. A bunch of bunkhouse cabins. Accommodation for about a hundred guys.
The place was a battle zone.
A bulldozer, presumably brought to the location to level and compact the ground prior to construction, had been used to trash dormitory huts and offices. The dozer had crushed the row of blockhouses flat. Splintered wood, flutter insulation, torn roof felt. Scattered mattresses and blankets matted with dust.
Four SUVs had flipped and burned like someone tossed grenades.
A bunch of airstream
trailers riddled with bullet holes, methodically strafed by .50 cal.
A toppled flagpole lying across the chalk H of the helipad.
Pop and crackle from a bunch of pole-mounted tannoy horns, as if restored power had trigger a PA system. Faint hiss, then ‘Surfin’ USA’. Beach tunes echoing over war-torn desolation.
Noble followed tannoy cable snaking in the dust, hoping to find the installation main office and shut off the music.
One of the PA poles had been toppled by a chopper. The charred remains of a JetRanger lying on its side. The fuselage had been ripped open by an internal detonation. The doors were cratered by bullet strikes. It seemed like someone made a methodical attempt to wipe out the camp. Tossed grenades, destroyed every vehicle, every building, made sure no one could leave.
He sniffed the air.
The smell of incineration hung over the site. Burned synthetics. And behind it, the sweet stink of cooked flesh. He’d yet to see a single body but somewhere, close by, there was a corpse-pyre.
A truck lying on its side. Looked like it jackknifed and rolled.
A freight container had spilled from the trailer. It sat on its roof, doors ajar.
Noble pulled one of the doors wide and peered into the darkness of the container. Foul stink. He switched on a flashlight. Blood-smeared walls.
He stepped inside. Ceiling beneath his feet, floor above his head. Manacles hung down, swung and clinked. The place reeked of shit, desperation and death.
He crouched. Discarded blister packs. Vet tranquillisers.
A message scratched on the container wall:
Fig 1.
37
Frost spoke slow and clear, super-calm, placating a madman.
‘I haven’t got the code.’
Hancock lowered the pistol and took aim like he was about to put a bullet in Frost’s good foot.
‘Seriously, I swear I haven’t got the code.’
‘I think we’ve already established, by your willingness to disregard the oaths you took when you put on that uniform, your word isn’t worth a damn.’
Frost cautiously reached up, unzipped her flight suit and pulled at her shirt to demonstrate nothing hung round her neck.
‘Where is it?’
‘I burned it.’
‘Bullshit.’
‘Check outside. The signal fire. You’ll find the clasp somewhere in the ashes.’
‘The code. The paper slip. You watched it burn?’
‘To a crisp.’
‘But you read it. You read the code before you set it alight.’
‘No.’
Hancock smiled and shook his head.
‘You’re lying. You looked at the digits.’
‘No.’
‘The authorisation slip was sealed in a heavy plastic tag. In order to destroy the code you must have cracked open the tag and unfolded the paper. Only way to ensure the slip got totally incinerated. Which means, as you flicked open your Zippo and sparked a flame, you looked at the digits. You saw the code sequence, an instant before it burned. And now it’s in your head. Just got to wheedle it out.’
‘And how do you intend to do that? Hypnosis?’
Frost deploying a standard bar brawl distraction technique. The urge to completion.
Throw your glass in the air. Your opponent will watch its trajectory, wait for it to hit the floor and smash. Use the pause as an opportunity to aim a jab at their throat.
Or ask your opponent a question. What the fuck did you call me? Wait till they start to speak, then crush the bridge of their nose with the heel of your palm.
‘I’m sure, given a big enough incentive, you can …’
Frost snatched up her crutch and lashed the pistol from his hand. The Beretta hit the wall and fell to the floor.
She drove the crutch into his face. Roar of pain and anger. Hancock snatched the crutch from her hand.
She lunged for the pistol. Hancock was crippled by pain, but managed to throw himself forwards and pin the weapon beneath his body, putting it out of her reach.
Frost scrambled for the ladderwell.
She pushed the barricade aside. Tumbling equipment cases. She stumbled into the sun, momentarily overwhelmed by heat and light.
She couldn’t outrun Hancock. Too lame. Her only chance of safety: ambush the guy as he tried to hunt her down.
She quickly limped towards the ridgeline, then hurriedly retraced her path, matching her footprints like she was jumping stepping stones across a stream.
She reached the wing tip. She reached up, gripped the lips of the aerofoil and hauled herself onto the wing surface. She hobbled back towards the body of the plane, boots scuffing dusted metal.
The flight deck.
Hancock curled foetal and clutched his head. His hands were smeared red. He could feel his scalp wound through the chute-fabric bandage. Sutures binding torn flesh had ripped open. Fresh blood leaked from the improvised dressing.
He rolled onto his side and retrieved the pistol. He crawled to the ladderwell and part-climbed, part-fell to the cabin below.
He leant against the ragged metal of the wall fissure, shielded his eyes against the sun.
Footprints led across sand to the crest of the ridgeline.
He adjusted his grasp of the Beretta. His palm was gummed to the polymer butt-grip by blood. He stepped from the plane, but immediately brought himself to a halt.
Frost was smart. She wouldn’t run into the desert leaving a follow-me trail of prints.
Stark shadows on the ground around him. The curve of the wing. The flag pole. His own silhouette, stretching across the sand ahead of him.
His attention was drawn by an irregularity in the wing shadow. A slight prominence, as if something were resting on the upper surface.
Hancock trained his pistol on the lip of the wing. He swayed. He leant against the fuselage to restore his aim.
He kept his attention trained on the wing while his left hand groped for the radio tucked in a chest pouch. He raised the handset to his mouth and keyed Transmit:
‘Where are you, Frost?’
Frost lay on the starboard wing. Baking metal. Drops of sweat ran down her face, dripped from her nose, splashed on the dust-matted aluminium in front of her.
She gripped her knife. Palm-sweat greased the leather grip. Seven-inch blade poised to stab.
Crude plan: listen out for Hancock. The guy was messed up, struggling to stand. Laboured breathing, dragging steps. He couldn’t move around without making a racket. She would wait until she heard him beneath the wing, then jump his ass.
Rustle of flight-suit fabric. Muffled cough. Hancock had emerged from the plane and was standing close by.
She listened hard, tried to gauge his location.
Silence.
Had he moved away? Was he creeping around the wreck site, trying to hunt her down? Or was he standing still, stifling his breath, waiting for her to make a move?
Faint crackle. Her radio. The static squelch that preceded an incoming transmission. She quickly rolled onto her chest-pouch to smother the sound.
Muffled radio voice mixing with Hancock’s voice from down below:
‘Where are you, Frost?’
She lay still as she could.
‘Here kitty, kitty.’
She lay flat, pressed herself against hot aluminium, willed her body to merge with the wing.
Her POV: a vista of rivet-seamed metal rippling heat.
She waited. Long minutes.
She thought she could smell Hancock, just for a moment. The sour stink of flesh-rot carried on the breeze.
Did she actually want to kill him? The guy pulled a gun. But he was sick, clearly not thinking straight. Succumbing to fever and delirium. He needed help.
Never the less, she might have to cut Hancock in order to subdue him. She resolved to aim for muscle, if she could. Avoid major organs, major blood vessels.
Insidious voice in her head: If you tussle over a gun, you may have no option but to ki
ll him. And then you could keep all the remaining water for yourself.
She lifted her head.
Slow commando crawl to the lip of the wing, sliding on sand-dusted metal. She psyched, prepped to launch and stab.
She reared up, knife raised above her head, then froze. Hancock was gone. A disturbance in the sand like he stepped from the plane, walked a couple of yards, then turned and headed back inside.
Voice from above:
‘Be obliged if you dropped the knife.’
She looked up.
Hancock standing on the roof of the aircraft. The sun was behind him, his body fringed by a brilliant halo.
He must have returned to the flight deck and climbed through one of the vacant escape hatches.
Frost slowly got to her feet. She shielded her eyes.
‘How about we call time-out?’ said Frost. ‘This bullshit is escalating way too fast. Maybe we should hit Pause, talk it through.’
‘Drop the knife.’
‘Really want to shoot me?’
‘I need you alive and conscious. Rest is up to you.’
‘These wings are full of kerosene vapour. Bullet might send us both to hell.’
Gunshot. A 9mm round punched a neat hole in the aluminium panel between Frost’s feet. Wisp of smoke.
He took aim a second time.
‘Ever played Russian Roulette?’ said Hancock. Gunshot. Frost flinched. A second smouldering hole punched in the wing metal at her feet. ‘Want to see how far our luck will hold?’
She threw the knife aside. It fell and stabbed deep into sand.
38
Hancock lashed Frost’s wrists with wire. Gun to her back. He forced her to climb the ladder to the flight deck. They sat facing each other. Sullen silence.
Time passed slow.
‘What do you hope to achieve by all this shit?’ she asked.
‘Encourage a little cooperation.’
She curled and pretended to doze.
She waited until Hancock’s eyelid drooped closed and the pistol slackened in his hand. Finger light on the trigger, barrel angled at the floor.
She leaned forwards and reached for the gun. He shifted in his sleep. Brief hesitation. She abandoned her attempt to snatch the Beretta. She slid down the ladder and fled the plane once again.