“Sergeant!” the diver at the tiller shouted. “Sergeant, up ahead! What course?”
I swivelled my neck. I’d been so focused on the deadly choppers on our tail, transfixed by their pursuit, that I hadn’t paid attention to what was coming. And once again, I’d forgotten what lay between us and the airport.
The shipping channel. We’d come past it on our first day here, out to the Canberra; now we were going back. That great, long column of trapped or half-sunk ships, locked into the bay when the Abraham Lincoln had sunk and blocked the exit. Container vessels, gas tankers, trawlers, freighters – a long and rusty chain of derelict ships.
The RIB with the nuke was clearly gunning for the shipwrecks, hoping to lose the choppers in the twisting paths of water between the steel giants. “Stay with the group, stay with the group!” Blake yelled.
Our RIB curved in closer. Another missile streaked overhead, taking a chance, but missed and plunged harmlessly into the water. A moment later we were swooping into the channel between two enormous freighters, the sound of our motors suddenly hammering very loudly off the tide-stained hulls just metres away from us on either side.
A chance to elude the choppers – but now we’d been forced into single file, strung out between the ships. Our own RIB was just behind the one with the nuke. There was a louder roar as one of the Tigers swooped overhead, in the sunburnt corridor of dusky sky far above us – and another Tiger was powering on far ahead, hoping to catch us at the other end. We emerged from between the freighters, cutting past a supertrawler, and then through a jumble of multicoloured shipping containers that had spilled from the deck of a capsized cargo ship. The channel was a labyrinth, a flooded maze, and I realised we’d lost another of the RIBs – blown up, or lost, or taking a turn too fast and smashing into a hull?
“This is fucking nuts!” Rickenbacker screamed, as a Tiger fired off another missile from somewhere above us, slamming into the hull of a cargo ship ahead of us and showering us all with flecks of rust. “What the fuck…”
He was cut short when the boat struck something beneath the surface with a terrible shudder, jerking to the right and nearly throwing half of us overboard. I grabbed Rickenbacker, and Rahvi grabbed me. The boat twisted and curved and everybody in it felt that horrible gut-shifting feeling of fighting against centrifugal force, like an amusement park ride or a twisting waterslide, only a million times more terrifying…
Then we were upright again, still zooming along at what felt like a hundred miles an hour, following the wakes of the other RIBs. A stab of panic shot through my chest – the boat with the nuke had vanished, lost from sight, and now we were on our own.
As if on cue one of the Tigers roared suddenly overhead, fighting against its own momentum like Wile E Coyote skidding over a cliff, turning to bring its weapons to bear. This is it, I thought, we’re fucked now…
We were skipping across the waves alongside the edge of an enormous, half-submerged oil tanker, the hull torn with ragged holes, the oil long dissipated but the stench of it still in the air. I looked back at the chopper, which was now behind us, lining its missiles up.
It fired.
It missed. The missile slammed into the hull ahead of us, a sudden burst of shrapnel and pressure, and a clearance diver screamed as something slashed across his head with a splash of red. But we were still there, still cruising along.
So was the chopper. It had plenty more missiles racked up beneath its stubby wings, and I could imagine the pilot now, carefully lining up the reticules with one gloved hand on the joystick…
“Into the tanker!” Blake roared. “Through a hole! Into the hull!”
“Are you insane?”
“Do it!”
The chopper fired another missile. In the split second we had as it screeched towards us, the diver on the tiller yanked us hard to port. The RIB shot through a hole in the tanker’s hull, the missile spearing into the water where we’d been only a second before.
Blind and deaf. It was almost completely dark inside the tanker, the only light the umber sunset coming in through the holes in the hull, the sound of our own engine echoing back at us from every direction. The air reeked of oil. The boat was rocketing towards a hole on the other side, a blurry glow of orange, which looked dangerously smaller than the one we’d entered through.
“We’re not going to fit!” Rickenbacker screamed.
“Keep your fucking head down!” Blake yelled, shoving him down. I ducked down after them, everybody on the boat did, all of us elbowing each other for floorspace.
We made it. Just barely. The boat’s radio aerial snapped clean off the back, and Dresner, who’d been holding his rifle a little too high, found it violently knocked out of his hands and into the water. But we’d made it, and we were back out again in the open air. Alive.
But the Tiger was still there, circling above us. We were totally separated from the other boats, now – presumably the other choppers were off hassling them. Our own tormentor was looming behind us once more, still with plenty of missiles in its arsenal, and we were once again cutting through the labyrinth of stranded ships.
Rickenbacker, Lomax and Dresner were taking pot shots at it with their rifles and sidearms. Rahvi and Blake were kneeling down over the injured clearance diver, who had a badly bleeding head wound. His M4 was lying askance across his legs. Neither of the SAS noticed as I took it. My own Steyr was still strapped to my back, but I wasn’t interested in adding more small arms fire. I had my eyes on Sergeant Blake’s hip pouch, on the 40mm grenades in his combat webbing.
I reached forward and took one. Blake was too preoccupied to notice. He’d trained us in this himself, anyway, back in those sessions in the Snowy Mountains. Not actually firing a real one – we didn’t have them to waste – but he’d shown us the principle, he’d taught us how to load them. I slotted one into the chamber, raised the rifle, braced myself against the gunwale and took aim. There was a thud of recoil into my shoulder, and I swore I could see the grenade go, spiralling out of there, or was it just my imagination?
I missed. Just like Blake had. Not the easiest thing in the world, to hit a moving target from another moving target.
But the pilot must have noticed it, because he was dropping back again, being cautious, worried about exposing himself. From that more distant range he fired another missile, but the diver piloting the boat cut us down another narrow path beside a crippled supertanker, and the missile exploded somewhere in the sunken debris behind us.
There was one grenade left. As we cut out into the open again, along the edge of the shipping channel, I started firing the M4’s bullets, burning through the magazine, trying to lure the pilot back. Trying to make him think this was all we had, just a few desperate shots from some rifles. “Come on, you fucking prick,” I said. The privates were still shooting; Blake was performing CPR on the wounded diver; and the masts of the fishing trawlers around us were disappearing, as we reached the southern end of the shipping channel and the maze of derelicts, back out on the open bay once again. My eyes were locked on the chopper, a high-tech killing machine lit up with the last rays of the westering sun.
It edged closer. Thirty, maybe forty metres up and back. Almost directly behind us. I pressed the butt of the M4 against my shoulder, slotted another grenade into the canister and squeezed the trigger.
The effect was instantaneous. An explosion square on the nose, an exhilarating burst of sound and fury, the cockpit spiderwebbing and the Tiger lurching off to the side almost immediately. I don’t know if I damaged some critical system or injured the pilot or simply knocked him against his own controls – but within seconds, the chopper was spinning out of control, yawing and pitching, tumbling down and ploughing into the water in a tremendous cascade of splashes and foaming seawater, disappearing behind us. And now the air above us was free and clear.
“Holy shit,” I breathed, lowering the rifle. I couldn’t believe I’d done it.
Rahvi looked up from the wounde
d clearance diver, startled. “What the hell?” he said. “What just happened?”
“We shot it down!” Dresner yelled excitedly.
“Jesus! Nice!”
“Oi!” the diver at the tiller yelled. “We’re not clear yet!”
We’d all been looking behind us – he was the only one looking forward.
We were in open water again, away from the shipwrecks, much closer to the mainland than before. Brisbane was only half a kilometre ahead of us, sandy beaches strewn with rubbish and scattered with trudging zombies, abandoned waterfront homes, the sun sinking down below the skyscrapers of the distant CBD and throwing their long shadows out to meet us.
The other RIBs were ahead of us, almost at the shoreline. But we were nowhere near the airport. The shipping channel had thrown us off, and we’d emerged too far north. To make matters worse, the boats of New England had caught up to us – or rather, with the other RIBs. They must have gone around the shipping channel, while we’d been winding our way through the wrecks. They were in between us and the other RIBs, hot in pursuit, and the remaining two Tigers were flying above them.
As the RIBs reached the shore they seemed to disappear. Peering ahead, I realised it was a canal. One of those Queensland suburbs built out on reclaimed land, linked together with bridges over winding and meandering waterways. Venice-on-Moreton; tie your boat up in your own backyard. The RIBs had fled into those canals, seeking safety, and we had to follow.
“Hold your fire as we approach!” Blake said. Beside him, Rahvi was trying to resuscitate the wounded diver. “They spot us before we get too close, the choppers’ll take us out easy. If we get close enough to their own boats, they can’t risk it, just like with the nuke. Don’t shoot till I say!”
I fumbled at the waist of the dying clearance diver, pulling out spare magazines for his M4, even as Rahvi administered chest pumps with bloodied hands and arms. He looked at me, but didn’t disapprove.
“If you’re taking his, gimme your Steyr!” Dresner yelled.
“Try to take better care of it than you did yours,” I said, unshouldering it.
We hit the canals. They were shallow but wide, curving constantly, choked here and there with rubbish slicks. Once this would have been a wealthy suburb: beachside mansions of glass and marble, palm trees and private jetties. Now, like everything else, it was derelict: overgrown lawns, glimpses of long-forgotten violence and devastation, boarded-up windows and SOS messages painted on rooftops.
Tracking the New England boats proved difficult. The canals were more of a maze than the wrecks in the shipping channel had been, twisting and turning constantly, that beloved design of the modern urban planner. Fortunately the clearance diver at the tiller was good at spotting the idle remnants of a wake, and so it wasn’t long before we caught a glimpse of the tail ends of New England’s boats.
We were only about twenty metres behind them now. Still we didn’t fire. The choppers were hovering further ahead, menacing our own unseen RIBs. We were so close. I gripped the M4, waiting for the order, heart pounding and adrenaline flaring. I’d already picked a target, the pilot of one of the nearer boats, a bulky man in an olive uniform with rolled-up sleeves and a shaved head, completely oblivious to what was coming up behind him…
“Fire!” Blake shouted. But before I could squeeze the trigger, something knocked into me from the side.
The diver Rahvi had been trying to resuscitate had died. The corporal was struggling with him on the floor of the boat, rolling into me, knocking me off my knees. The diver, like any fresh zombie, looked almost alive – but for the blood-stained face and vacant eyes and horrible, snarling hiss. From my knocked-down position I managed to stick an arm out, put pressure down on the dead man’s neck – he had both hands around Rahvi’s throat, trying to drag him towards his teeth. Blake and the others were ahead of us on the boat, firing at the New Englanders, not realising what was going on. “Sergeant!” I yelled out – but the gunfire was deafening, my words whipped away on the wind. Only the diver at the tiller could see us, unable to abandon his piloting, but pulling out his sidearm and holding it in one gloved hand, desperately looking for a clean opening.
Rahvi thrashed, twisted and rolled so that he was on top of the zombie. I got caught up in it. I got my other arm loose, managed to bring it around and try to yank one dead claw away from Rahvi’s throat. Somehow, now, my own legs were crushed under both of them, the arm I had around his neck feeling like it was going to snap under pressure. It was the world’s least fun game of Twister, taking place on a boat speeding through curving canals, gunfire cracking through the air above us. “Sergeant!” I screamed again.
Hands entered my field of view; one on the zombie’s neck, pushing its head to the side, the other firmly driving a combat knife into its ear. Sergeant Blake had heard us. “Jesus Christ,” Rahvi yelled, panting for breath, as Blake dragged the body off us. “Fastest I’ve ever seen someone come back!”
“You all right?” Blake yelled. “Not bit?”
Rahvi gave him a thumbs up. “We’re good, we’re good!”
A chopper roared above us. I looked ahead of the RIB. We’d dropped a little back from the New England boats, but bullets were still zipping through the air around us, the privates still taking potshots at them. The New England boats had caught up with the other RIBs and were now exchanging gunfire themselves. It was a loud, confusing, violent battle, playing out at high speed through the canals of Brisbane’s suburbs. The chopper pilots must have been frustrated as hell – we were all mixed up now, no chance of a clear shot. But there were only three New England boats, now, whereas before there’d been five or six. Even as I watched, one of the divers on the RIB with the nuke took a good shot, wiping out the pilot of one of the enemy boats, sending it drifting off sideways and suddenly, powerfully crumpling into the concrete pillar of a bridge.
Two boats left. One of them, a RIB only the size of ours, veered suddenly starboard to ram into us – and one of the soldiers leapt onto our boat. Maddened with fear and rage, maybe, the tables inexplicably turning on them. I caught a quick glimpse of his face – his blue eyes, his scruffy hair and thick stubble, screaming something at us – but as soon as he came onto the boat Blake punched him into the gut, flipped him over his back and deposited him gracefully into the water. It was over in less than a second – I almost thought I’d imagined it. Rifle fire from the privates took out the driver, and the enemy RIB spun off and ran aground on some dead millionaire’s boat ramp.
Up ahead, the airport was coming into view – a distant glimpse of fences and the control tower, beyond the palm trees and decaying mansions closer to hand. I could have cheered. As we drew closer, the canals petering out, giving way to the mouth of the river, I could even make out the form of a truck, and a few figures around it. The RAAF boys, ready and waiting for us. But there was still one New England boat left, not a military boat but a repurposed sports cruiser with powerful twin engines on the back, and half a dozen men in fatigues shooting ahead at the RIBs.
My M4 was jammed. As we came alongside, I struggled with the pin, trying to clear the blockage. As it turned out, I needn’t have bothered. We were still twenty metres away when Blake unclipped a hand grenade from his belt and, with an overarm throw worthy of a baggy green, pitched it perfectly into the boat’s wheelhouse.
There was a muffled explosion. Nothing spectacular happened – the boat merely slowed and stopped, the pilot dead, the soldiers out on the deck left bewildered. We took a few shots and winged them as we soared past; by the time they could get moving again, if the boat was even still in working order, we’d be long gone.
We cut across the estuary, coming up alongside the surviving RIBs, the two helicopters still hovering above us like angry wasps. They still couldn’t shoot us without destroying the nuke.
But how far were they prepared to let this go? What were their orders? Would General Draeger have told them to destroy the nuke, as a last resort, rather than let it fall into an
ybody else’s hands?
It turned out I didn’t need to worry about that, either. A puff of white smoke spiralled through the air above us and slammed into one of the Tigers.
The chopper was right above us. At the speed we were going it was left behind immediately, but for a moment the air above us was filled with an apocalyptic explosion of billowing fire, screeching metal, burning shrapnel, a terrible sense of pressure and heat and a quick whiff of burning chemicals. I caught a glimpse of a dislodged rotor, whirling through the air behind us, sloughing down into the muddy water.
Further ahead, one of the RAAF men at the water’s edge – now only a few hundred metres away – lowered a shoulder-mounted missile launcher and quickly began reloading.
The other Tiger wasn’t sticking around. It dropped another bundle of flares, like a premature ejaculation, even as it suddenly tilted its nose backwards and lurched higher into the sky, backing off, the last man standing and keen to keep it that way.
We reached the seawall. My mind was too addled to know if this was the same place we’d left from, on that day we’d first arrived; I didn’t think so, because it had a boat ramp, not just a rickety old pier. We ground the noses of the RIBs up onto the concrete and splashed out into knee-deep estuarine water, the clearance divers scrambling to unload the nuke. Now, up close, I got my first glimpse of the carnage that had been wreaked on the other boats. My own RIB had only lost one man; the others had been harder hit, and bodies lay motionless on their floors, awash with water-mixed blood.
Lieutenant Sullivan was still alive, barking orders at his surviving divers, overseeing the unloading of the nuke. The Tiger was still hovering above the bay, probably half a kilometre away now, but still watching us. Up by the truck, the RAAF man with the missile launcher – Flying Officer Kemeny, I realised, the CO here – kept it on his shoulder, the reticule over his eye, just daring the chopper to venture back within range.
End Times (Book 4): Destroyer of Worlds Page 23