by Shane Carrow
Jess, the little voice whispered. Yes. I remembered her.
There was a sudden scream of anger from nearby, cutting across Sergeant Blake’s speech, and I turned in time to see a man knocking Draeger to the floor. He was young, Asian, wearing only torn and blood-soaked cargo pants, his torso a mass of scar tissue like the rest of us. He was grabbing Draeger’s head in both hands and slamming it against the concrete floor again and again, screeching in fury. Rahvi and another man dragged him off as Blake advanced, flicking the safety off his Steyr. The Asian guy wasn’t the only one with his hands itching for Draeger’s throat – he’d just been the first to notice that the general was actually there, in our midst, unarmed and helpless. Several other prisoners had been advancing before Blake stepped up to the fray.
“Nobody touches him!” he yelled, levelling his rifle at the Asian guy’s chest.
“This man is a monster,” the Asian guy snarled, his arms still held behind his back by Rahvi and the other man.
Zhou, the little memory whispered. His name is Zhou.
“I know he is,” Blake said sharply. “He’s also our hostage. The guards here are all dead but there are going to be reinforcements coming, and they’re going to be coming soon. We might have to bargain with them for passage. And to do that, we need Draeger alive. Understood? When we’re clear of here, you can do whatever you want to him. Until then he stays breathing.”
“Who are you to be giving us orders?” someone shouted out.
“My name is Anthony Blake, and I’m a sergeant in the SAS,” Blake replied. “I’m giving you orders because I’m the one who’s going to get you out of here. You two – carry Draeger.” He pointed at two men from the crowd, who moved forward hesitantly to carry the general’s body, Zhou having knocked him out cold again. “Everyone else, let’s move out! Cavalli and Khoury take point. Come on, let’s move!”
We started moving. And it was only then, that familiar old feeling – it’s only when you start to run that you really start to panic. There were twenty or thirty of us there, freshly rescued, following after this cool-headed SAS sergeant who some of us knew and some of us didn’t. But among everyone there was that ripple of fear, that gnawing sense of urgency: we had to get out, now, quickly, before they came for us and shoved us back in those cells. The scrambling terror of the hunted animal.
Some of us weren’t in very good shape, of course. Some prisoners were leaning on others for support. Rahvi was helping me along. As we headed down past all the empty cell doors as quickly as we could, Zhou came up on my other side to help me.
“Matt,” he said. “Shit, it is you. I thought you got away! Draeger said he caught you, but I figured he was lying.”
“He has amnesia,” Rahvi said, before I could reply. “Or something like that. He won’t remember you.”
“No,” I said. “I do. His name’s Zhou.”
“James,” he said. “James Zhou. I led a Patriot base. You walked through our back door a few weeks ago, right out of the mine site. And got us raided, actually, but don’t worry, I’m not gonna hold it against you.”
I remembered that, vaguely, but I wasn’t really listening to him. I was looking at the red-headed girl, Jess, hurrying along just ahead of us, dramatically out of place amongst these older men. I remembered her name and her face very well but I was trying to remember why, or from where. She didn’t seem to have been tortured, and she was the only one fully dressed aside from Rahvi and myself, in our pilfered military uniforms. Was she the girl in the photo? No. That girl had brown hair. Did she know me? She hadn’t looked at me once, yet.
We came to the end of the corridor, past the dead guards with their heads torn apart by Blake’s trick. Not a pretty sight. “Explosives in their radios,” I panted to Sergeant Blake, who was just ahead of us. “How the fuck...?”
“They guard the armoury very well,” he replied. “General equipment, not so much.”
The corridor turned, a gloomy stairwell leading up to the next level, and a soldier cradling a shotgun was trotting down it. The point men opened fire on him before he could even register that we were there, and he tumbled the rest of the way down the stairs. One of the other prisoners snatched up his shotgun, stripped him of shirt and jacket, and we ascended.
We’d only been one level below ground – now we were in an airy corridor, tall bright windows, all of us blinking and recoiling, like subterranean animals dragged up into the light. We followed after Blake and the point men. I glanced down side corridors and doorways as we passed, and was surprised to see classrooms.
University personnel, Blake had said on the radio. I remembered something, vaguely, about a university – the University of New England. Some kind of command headquarters. The cell block must have been specially constructed, or converted.
Our misshapen crew headed up the corridor, through an exterior door, out onto a pathway outside the university library, a multi-storey building with ivy creeping up the brick walls. Ahead of us was a sloping lawn dotted with pine trees, and through that I could see a view of a walled town: houses and streets, distant people moving like ants, a stream of woodsmoke from every chimney. Armidale, New England, my memory whispered. “Greatest city in the world.” Somebody had said that to me, but I couldn’t remember who.
“This way!” Blake yelled, leading us around the side of the library. “Keep moving!”
It was bizarre. It felt like a normal university campus – well-tended gardens, signs directing pedestrians to different departments, parked vans marked with the university logo – and yet parked on the lawn was a six-wheeled APC in green and olive camouflage, and dotted here and there were corpses in Army fatigues. More casualties of Blake’s radio trick, most of were missing the majority of their heads. Others hadn’t been holding their radios to their faces at the time, and the explosives had merely gone off while the radio was clipped to their belt. Their stomachs were blown open, organs spilling out into the sunlight. I saw one man who had managed to crawl several metres, trailing his intestines behind him, before dying or slipping into a coma.
Blake couldn’t have used much C4, if he’d managed to get it inside a handheld radio. Maybe a piece the size of a stick of chewing gum for each one. Not much. But enough.
And now the campus was eerily silent. I expected at any second for somebody to open fire on us from a window or rooftop. But there was nothing.
“This is his headquarters,” Zhou said. “It can’t be this quiet. Everybody can’t be dead.”
“All the soldiers will be,” Rahvi said. “Civilians left, maybe. But they won’t attack us. They’ll be calling for help and hiding.”
And sure enough, as we moved through the university, we occasionally caught glimpses of people – peering out of windows, or ducking out of sight, running down different paths. Maybe some of them were armed. But the explosions must have been a shock, the sudden death of the entire security team, and nobody was brave or collected enough to engage with two dozen scarred prisoners brandishing weapons.
Blake still had his radio (his own one, which he’d naturally kept explosive-free) and as he led us down the innumerable shady paths and tree-lined roads of the campus he kept fiddling with it, scanning the frequencies, holding it up to his ear. “Shit,” he said after a moment.
“What?” Rahvi asked.
“There’s a chopper on the way. There’ll be ground forces not far behind. Come on people, move your asses!”
We picked up a faster pace, some of us jogging, others limping. The path opened up onto the edge of the university. A carpark, fringed by cyclone fencing. There was a multitude of vehicles: four-wheel drives, sedans, motorcycles, Army trucks, even a Greyhound bus.
In the distance, there was a dull thumping noise. An approaching helicopter. And as we entered the carpark, somebody on the other side opened fire on us.
Bullets cracked above my head. The windows of the car next to me shattered. One of the men nearby dropped to the ground with his brains slopping out w
etly onto the asphalt. There were screams and shouts – I had the wind knocked out of me as Rahvi pushed me down to safety behind a sedan. “Stay behind the wheel!” he yelled, and I obligingly curled up behind the safety of the rear tyre as Rahvi poked his head up and returned fire with his Steyr.
Our group had scattered for cover, taking shelter behind dozens of different vehicles. One guy was running across the carpark for the fence, making a desperate dash for freedom. I expected him to get cut down, but no – he jumped, scrambled to the top, hauled himself over and disappeared into the buildings beyond. Good for him, I guess.
In the tinted windows of the Greyhound I could see the reflection of the other side of the carpark, where the gunfire was coming from. Five or six men. Not soldiers. They had semi-automatic pistols. Peering at the dim reflection, I realised that the cars they were taking cover behind had red and blue lights on top. They were police. I had no idea if they’d already been here or if they’d arrived after Blake’s attack on the guards, but only managed to think about that for a second or two before it was driven out of my mind by a much larger issue: the arrival of a helicopter, thundering into view from the opposite side of the carpark.
Suddenly we were all exposed.
It was a Black Hawk, big and loud and powerful, soldiers with their feet sticking out the sides raising their rifles and opening fire at us from the air as the chopper circled the carpark. The air was alive with bullets, shattering glass, screaming and shouting. I saw more prisoners get cut down, more men dying in front of me, and I curled up behind the tyre and tried to make myself as small a target as possible. I saw Jess curled up against the edge of the Greyhound, terrified, screaming, and it was only then that I realised I was screaming too.
And then the gunfire stopped.
I poked my head about the car boot. Rahvi was reloading his Steyr, aiming at the Black Hawk, which was hovering above us. The soldiers aboard were still squinting down the scopes of their rifles at us – but they’d stopped shooting. Apart from the roar of the helicopter rotors there was no other sound. Nobody moved.
Sergeant Blake was standing out in the open with General Draeger forced down on his knees. In one hand he held a pistol pressed firmly against the back of Draeger’s head. In the other, he had his radio. “Land the chopper!” he screamed. “Land the chopper now or I will kill him! And the police – put your weapons on the ground and come towards us slowly with your hands up! I am not fucking joking! Now!”
The chopper wavered slightly in the air. Somebody, maybe present, maybe on the other end of a radio line, was making a decision. After a moment the Black Hawk slowly descended onto an empty patch of asphalt.
The soldiers piled out, about nine or ten of them, still gripping their rifles and aiming for us. They were already instinctively fanning out, trying to flank us, even if they couldn’t shoot yet. I ducked back down behind the sedan. Our motley crew of prisoners were scattered out around us, still taking cover behind cars, gripping their rifles and shotguns and pistols, every sight trained on the approaching soldiers.
“Drop the weapons!” Blake yelled. “Drop the weapons now! On the ground!” He had his back to me, and Draeger was kneeling in front of him. I couldn’t see if the general was lucid, or only semi-conscious. If he was trying to communicate with his men at all.
The soldiers slowly lowered their rifles to the ground. Their leader, a man with lieutenant’s stripes, was looking Blake in the eyes, facing his palms out as if to calm him. “Listen!” he shouted. “We can work out a deal here!”
“Tell the pilots to turn the engine back on!” Blake yelled. “We’re getting on that chopper!”
The lieutenant stared at him for a moment, then turned and signalled to the pilots. The engines, which had been disengaged, began to whine again as the rotors picked up their flagging momentum from a few seconds’ downtime. In the corner of my eye, I saw the police officers who had been shooting at us slowly approaching with their hands in the air, their guns holstered, carefully watched by our own men.
“Car boots!” Blake shouted. “Everybody, come on, let’s move! Smash windows, unlock the doors, open the boots, stick ‘em in! Move it!”
“Fuck that, let’s just kill them!” one of the prisoners spat.
“We’re not killing them. Car boots! Stop wasting time!”
Around us, the prisoners started moving forward, picking their own captives from the helpless soldiers and police officers. The sound of breaking glass could just barely be heard over the chopper’s rotors as they moved out across the carpark, popping boots open and shoving the soldiers inside. Another brief memory flickered across my brain – somebody had done that to me, once, not so long ago.
The redheaded girl was standing nearby, watching it all alongside me. “Jess?” I said. “It is Jess, right?”
She scowled at me. “Are you fucking kidding me? After what you did? You don’t even remember my name?”
“I don’t…” I said. “There’s a lot I don’t remember. When they tortured me. I forgot. I don’t know where I am, I don’t know what the fuck’s going on. But I remember you…”
I’d thought maybe there’d been something between us. I felt kindly towards her. But she looked at me with a dull hate in her eyes, and turned away.
The police and soldiers had been confined, stripped of their weapons, shoved into an array of car boots. Now we were moving towards the Black Hawk, a ticket to freedom, eager to escape.
As I passed Sergeant Blake he held out the hand with the radio in it, flat against my chest, stopping me in my tracks. The other hand still had a gun to the general’s head. “No,” he said.
“What? Why not?”
“We’re not taking the chopper,” he said.
“Then what the hell else are we doing?” I said. The other prisoners were piling inside, strapping themselves in. Jess was already there, a pair of men helping her up. I was confused as hell. We had a chopper, we had some pilots, we had Draeger as a hostage. What was to stop us getting in now and getting the fuck out before the place was crawling with reinforcements?
Blake glanced over at me, the wind from the rotors blades ruffling his hair. “You’ve really lost your memory?” he yelled out.
“Yes!”
“So you don’t know where the codebook is?”
“I don’t even know what it is!”
“Then we’re going to have to lay low till you do.”
“But why aren’t we going with them?”
Blake stared at the chopper. “They’re the diversion,” he said.
A cold feeling in my stomach. Suddenly I was marching forward, keeping my head low below the rotor blades, the noise deafening, ignoring Blake’s shouts. I came to the chopper, the others helping me aboard, assuming I was coming with them. I found Jess, unbuckled her seatbelt, pulled the headset off, started pulling her out. “What the fuck!” she screamed at me. “What are you doing? Get off me!”
“You need to stay with us!” I yelled. “Trust me!”
“Trust you! I don’t fucking trust you, let go of me…”
Some of the other men shifted to help her – but the chopper was jam-packed, full to capacity, and there were other prisoners outside eager to scramble in and take her place. I pulled her out past grasping hands, back down onto the asphalt, back towards Sergeant Blake. Still she yanked against me. “I want to go on the helicopter!” she screamed. “I want to get out of here!”
I stopped, grabbed her shoulders, looked her in the eyes. “I know you don’t trust me!” I yelled over the roar of the rotors. “But if you stay on that chopper, you will die!”
She must have seen something in my eyes. She pushed me away, looking furious, tears in her eyes. But she didn’t try to head back to the chopper.
We came back to Sergeant Blake’s position, amid the bullet-riddled cars. He had a look of cold fury on his face and was about to say something when Rahvi came up. “Got ourselves a vehicle, sarge! Weapons stowed and ready to go! Cavalli’s beh
ind the wheel!”
“You, me, Cavalli, Matt, and apparently the girl,” Blake shouted. The Black Hawk was still sitting in the carpark, roaring away. “Opinion?”
“We already grabbed two extra blokes,” Rahvi yelled, pressing the slouch hat to his head with one hand to prevent it from being blown off in the vortex of wind. “Cavalli wanted to bring Jones along, and I grabbed Zhou, the Asian guy! Says he was a guerilla fighter! We could do with someone who knows the area!”
Blake nodded. “All right! We’ll be right behind you!”
The chopper was almost full, now. The carpark, strewn with broken glass and fragments of metal and the occasional body, was empty. One last prisoner was standing by, another military man, waiting for order confirmation from Blake.
“Petty Officer Khoury!” Blake shouted. “You’re the ranking officer! Utilise the civilians – don’t let them get underfoot but don’t ignore them either! Head as far south as you can – RAAF Base Wagga if you can make it, but if not, head for Wollemi National Park. We’ve got reports the Globemaster survivors with the nuke might be in that vicinity – with any luck you can meet up with them. I’m sorry we can’t give you any more help.”
“Not at all, sergeant!” Khoury shouted. He reached forward and grabbed for Draeger’s shoulder, clearly expecting to take him onboard the Black Hawk.
Blake shook his head. “The prisoner stays with us.”
Khoury stared at him for a moment, narrowing his eyes. “How are we supposed to coerce the pilots?”
“Guns against their heads should do just fine!” Blake said. “Godspeed, soldier!”
With pursed lips, Khoury gave him a wordless salute, which Blake returned. Then he ran and climbed into the Black Hawk, the last man aboard, squeezing into a sardine can. A moment later, it lifted into the sky again, powering over the university buildings, heading south.
Silence returned to the carpark. The only noise was the wind ruffling the trees beyond the fence, the distant wail of sirens in Armidale, and a persistent ringing in my ears. Blake kicked Draeger in the back. “Get up,” he barked, and the man staggered up onto his bare feet. He glanced over at me and Jess. “She’s your responsibility, Matt. Keep her close.” He turned and started marching Draeger towards the Greyhound bus.