Exit Alpha

by Clinton Smith

  The loadie bellowed, ‘Jesus! Back that bastard out.’

  Cain, no genius at reversing articulated vehicles, shouted through the shattered side window. ‘You bloody do it.’

  Bell, the man he’d seen in the TV interview, was flat against the hull with Raul. ‘Leave it there. No time.’

  The loadie moved forward as if functioning on automatic, glanced at the deck and beckoned the vehicle on with both arms. Cain inched it to where he wanted, then depressed the pedal that worked the park brake. He shut down, jumped out and searched around for straps. The engineer checked load-positioning before climbing the flight deck steps.

  The frantic loadie recognised him. ‘Aren’t you Cain?’

  Bell ordered, ‘Shut the arse, lash this thing down and get us out of here.’ He swung around to Raul. ‘They’ll block the skiway next.’

  The loadie trotted back to the ramp, still looking at Cain as if the famed Grade Four would countermand the order.

  ‘Do what he says,’ Cain yelled.

  The man hit buttons on the aft control panel. The door lowered and the ramp moved up. The crewman stumbled back like an automaton, started grabbing for chains, tensioners, strops. Hunt and Cain pitched in, attaching links to anchor points.

  The sound of engines running up. The crack of the sniper’s rifle from the crew door behind them.

  Cain called to the loadie, ‘How many of them?’

  The man tried to think, mind in meltdown, ‘How many shot outside?’

  ‘Two.’

  ‘Still six.’

  They heard the skis being raised to break the seal so that the plane was supported on its wheels. Then the skis were lowered again. The air crew were delaying, doing it strictly by the book.

  With the Hagg semi-secured, Cain glanced around — his first chance to check the terrain.

  Zia helping the pope from the Hagg. The sniper closing the crew door, turning to cover the people in the fuselage. Raul standing by the forward bulkhead, watching the scene with his fixed smile. The wild-eyed Bell buttonholed him, probably asking whether to kill them.

  Raul said something and went up the stairs. The loadie got more straps on the Hagg, yelled at them to sit down, buckle up. People were descending from the flight deck and heading for the troop seats. Zia, with courtly gestures, assisted the pope to a seat and strapped him in.

  They were sliding. At last! The distinctive gritty feel of huge skis moving on packed snow. They turned the big transport slowly — nursing torsional load on the shock struts or still attempting to delay?

  As Cain slumped back against the curtain of red webbing, the sisters, Jane and Eve Rinaldi, entered the bay. Good God, he thought. They’d been hijacked along with the plane?

  Eve mouthed the name she knew him as. ‘Mark?’ Then Bell herded her out of sight on the other side of the Hagg.

  He and Hunt were now flanked by two hard cases. The one on his side was probably under twenty-five, a big man with a coarse face shaded by stubble and an expression as thick as his body. The second man was older, with Slavic looks and inquisitive eyes.

  Both had 9mm Spectre sub-machine-guns. Cain knew the M–4. Its double-action trigger dispensed with safety mechanisms for instant firing. You cocked, then the hammer moved forward to stop near the bolt. Press the trigger and bang. The young oaf, jaw out-thrust, had the gun-muzzle aimed at his ribs.

  Cain glanced at the second man who had a bead on Hunt. Neither of them seemed like culties. Had Bell used his military contacts to hire mercenaries?

  They were running up. This would be seat-of-the-pants. Up here, thin air and soft snow retarded acceleration. You had to pry the heavy plane from the plateau below minimum lift-off speed. A pilot had told him one technique. Start with fifty per cent flaps, pull full back-yoke at 60 knots to clear the nose ski, then lower it back just above the surface and pop flaps to full. He didn’t care how they did it — as long as it happened before the cavalry arrived.

  Stop stalling guys, he begged. Get us up.

  As the JATO kicked in, he jammed his hands over his ears. With eight bottles adding 8000 pounds of thrust, they staggered into the sky.

  He looked across at Hunt who glared back.

  Well.

  At least they were alive.

  MAYDAY

  They finished the climb-out, levelled off. The heavy airframe shuddered in turbulence and wind shear on the huge tail made it yaw. The loadie unzipped a flap in the insulation just forward of the port paratroop door. He pulled handles in one-to-four sequence to unhook the JATO bottles from the air deflector. Then he crossed the deck to do it on the other side.

  Bell came through the bulkhead door, his M–4 dangling from its strap. He steadied himself against the Hagg, stepped over the tie-downs and worked his way back to Zia. He yelled in the general’s ear for a while. Zia looked back once at Cain.

  Then Bell moved forward again to the loadmaster, borrowed his headset, spoke into it, came back to stand in front of Cain. ‘You.’ He jerked his thumb toward the nose.

  Cain unstrapped, went forward on the shuddering deck and climbed the near vertical steps.

  The flight deck was like Grand Central. Riding shotgun over the crew was Raul in a headset and two other heavies with M–4s. The three interlopers crouched in a row, like crows at a feast, on the edge of the bottom bunk. In the top bunk lay a girl who seemed to be mumbling in her sleep.

  Nina.

  Asleep or drugged?

  Drugged, he suspected. The CIA would have told EXIT to knock her out for the flight.

  Raul handed a second headset to Cain. ‘You can hear me?’

  Cain adjusted the mouthpiece, nodded. The plane bucked and he grabbed for the top bunk rail.

  ‘Name, rank and serial number.’ Raul’s trademark smirk.

  ‘Ray Cain. EXIT Department D, Grade Four. Retired.’

  ‘You’re the one who replaced the president, I hear, and a very dangerous man.’

  ‘No more. I’ve been injured.’

  ‘I noticed the limp.’

  ‘EXIT was going to kill me. That’s why I’m here.’

  ‘Does that put you on our side?’

  ‘If it gets me away from here.’

  The fixed empty smile. ‘I wonder. Can you give me one reason not to shoot you?’

  A scream from the top bunk. Nina — up on one elbow staring ahead, disoriented — betrayal on her girl-child’s face.

  One of the heavies rose and yelled, ‘Shut up.’

  She saw his gun and screamed again, kicking out at him with her feet.

  He thrust her back.

  She began to hold her breath.

  ‘What’s going on?’ A new voice in the cans. Cain turned to see the copilot leaning forward to tap instruments in front of him. ‘Ball’s gone mad, my compass is spinning. And the bloody airspeed indicator’s . . .’

  The engineer called, ‘Number two generator out light.’

  The pilot stared at the engine instrument panel. ‘I think two’s flamed out.’

  Nina was still holding her breath, her face going red, her hands fists and the knuckles white.

  ‘Confirmed,’ the engineer said. ‘Windmilling at thirty per cent RPM.’

  The pilot eased the other three throttles forward.

  ‘Engine shutdown procedure, number two engine.’

  They ran through the checklist.

  Christ, Cain thought. Was it the girl?

  ‘Can’t be fuel,’ the engineer said. ‘Tank three shows 2000 pounds. Quantity gauge could be ratshit. Pulling circuit-breaker. Going for cross-feed.’

  The engine roar was now asynchronous, out of phase to the ear.

  Cain looked at the solid pale overcast and the uniform snow below. It seemed to stretch far into the distance. It was technically called poor surface and horizontal definition. It meant a lack of depth perception.

  The more ominous term was whiteout.

  The engineer was reporting again. ‘RPM on three fluxing out of limits. And th
e manifold switching’s gone mad. And the main tank pump switches keep flicking off. Jesus, how can they do that?’

  Cain looked back at the extended cheeks of Nina, wondering whether to knock her out.

  The crew comments were increasing in pitch.

  ‘Nacelle overheat light on three.’

  ‘What the hell?’

  ‘No visible smoke.’

  Raul lurched to his feet, smile gone, ‘If this is some kind of trick . . .’

  It clearly wasn’t. Cain waved at him to stay out of it.

  Nina screamed again and one of the heavies hit her across the mouth. She cringed back in the bunk, eyes bright, hand over her jaw. On the overhead systems control panels, the occasional toggle-switch flicked over without human intervention.

  ‘Engine shutdown procedure — number three engine.’

  The pilot was conserving airspeed, had the thing slightly nose-down.

  Comments and commands became a babble.

  ‘Overheat light still on.’

  ‘First fire bottle,’ the right seater said.

  ‘Still on.’

  ‘Isolating wing bleed air.’

  ‘Still on.’

  ‘Hell. Is the wing on fire or what?’

  ‘Number four generator out light.’

  ‘Procedure for restarting two?’

  ‘Radalt’s jumping off the peg. Got to climb.’

  ‘Barometrics read twelve thou’ and bloody going up!’

  ‘Radalt two thou’. Dropping.’

  Cain could see nothing beyond the windows but an unrelieved white. The ice could have been 50 feet below or 10,000. What was their position now? Probably 300 kilometres from Alpha and another 1000 metres higher up the plateau. God, if they went down here . . .

  ‘Firing bottle two.’

  ‘Overheat light still on.’

  ‘What’s with the fucking cross-feed?’

  Cain looked at the feathered inboard port engine, then stared beyond it — at something streaming from the dump-mast on the end of the wing.

  He reluctantly added his voice to the yammer. ‘I think we’re dumping fuel.’

  ‘Christ! The switches are . . .’

  ‘Got to turf that Hagg. Load, pilot.’

  ‘Load.’

  ‘No time,’ yelled the navigator who was spotting out the starboard windows. ‘Pull Gs. Pull up. Pull up.’

  The last thing he saw before impact was the pilot hauling on the yoke.

  HELL ON ICE

  The first thing was shuddering, grinding. Then the plane shook itself into a blur. Above the yells in the cans, the sound of tearing metal.

  He fought free of the headset, grabbed a handhold at the side of the cockpit roof, planted a foot against the back of the pilot’s seat, which juddered like a paint mixer. There was no time to do more. The pilot was trying to pull full flaps.

  They lofted once as if bouncing — perhaps launched off a pressure ridge — pancaked with a rattling smash and pounded, forward speed dropping, as lift bled from the big wings.

  He knew the skis would have collapsed. From the sound, they were slithering on the belly. As momentum tried to suck him through the windows he fought lower until he’d wedged his back behind the pilot’s seat.

  The two heavies weren’t so quick. One collected the back of the copilot’s headrest in the chest. The other sailed above the central console. A third shape crashed rag-doll-like into the man skewered on the right-hand seat.

  Nina’s slight body was the last, landing against Cain so hard his vision went red.

  Then the seat they were braced against broke loose, tipped forward. He slid up the back of it and was pressed into a body pile. The shaking was enough to loosen teeth.

  He caught one glimpse, through an eyebrow-window, of the port wing with outboard prop still turning.

  Saw the wing dip.

  Its end shear off.

  Felt the wreck wrenched around.

  The inboard blades bent as they hit snow. The outboard prop carved down to ice, disintegrated.

  Then it was quiet.

  For five seconds.

  He was lying on his back, could see a rolled black blind and a yellow T-bar handle. That put him near the cockpit roof. He moved his arms and legs to try them. No pain. He looked down at himself. Nothing seemed to have impaled him. He touched his face with his glove. No blood.

  He was lying on top of people who were unnaturally still. Somewhere beside him Nina screamed.

  Gingerly he slid off the pile. No pain yet. Everything worked. He couldn’t believe his luck. He turned in the littered space as if dreaming and looked forward.

  The pilots were under it somewhere and had to be dead. They’d been bare-headed and both seats had slid off their rails so the forward instrument panel would be wearing their brains.

  One of the enforcers was half through the forward window, his neck cut and his face hanging from his skull. The other man was coughing blood. The navigator was bent like a contortionist — spine wrapped around the window frame. The face-down body lowest in the pile seemed to be the engineer. He must have undone his seatbelt to check something. The last thing to enter his head had been the throttle control of the feathered number two engine. Its bloodstained stem projected from his shattered mouth.

  That left Raul and Nina. Both, he saw, were alive.

  And in that disoriented moment it occurred to him how typical it was, in this greenhouse of slaughtered bodies, that the two most dangerous people had survived.

  Like him, they had been cushioned by the death of the others, by the wad of corpses that would harden, like meat in a freezer, into a memorial to gear-up landings only a ghoul could love.

  Bitter air spilled through the shattered windows. Nina crouched whimpering on the floor, which now had a steep starboard list.

  He looked around for the guns. Raul was ahead of him, had the one still visible weapon in his hands. The other he couldn’t see.

  Then Bell staggered up the steps. He wheezed, ‘Gustave. Gustave . . .’ His drawn face changed to elation as he saw his imperator alive.

  Raul had ignored the man behind him with rib-shattered lungs. He spread his arms with ecce homo bravura, gun in one hand, grinning.

  ‘You’re alive,’ Bell panted. ‘What happened?’

  ‘I think the technical term’s “pilot error”.’

  Cain looked at him with disgust, thought, when the cold gets you, you won’t be chirpy.

  Bell stared at the pile of bodies. His expression said it all.

  ‘How bad is it back there?’ Raul puffed.

  ‘Two dead, two injured. We’ve got to get you out. It could blow up.’

  ‘Couldn’t it just catch fire? I’m freezing.’ He eased himself down the stairs. ‘Hard to breathe.’

  Bell placed his M–4 muzzle against the back of the coughing man’s head and fired.

  The coughing stopped.

  He followed his leader down.

  ‘Don’t leave me,’ Nina howled and clutched at Cain’s leg.

  ‘This is your stuff-up, kiddo. You put the spanner in the spokes. You’ve killed us all.’

  She started to sob.

  Yelling at ferals changed nothing. Should he try to find the other gun? Why bother? Any fight he’d had in him had gone. They were definitely higher on the plateau. Even less oxygen than before. Every movement made him gasp for air. They’d all almost certainly die. He pointed a gloved finger at her. ‘Put your hood on. And zip that parka.’

  Her hands were clenching. She couldn’t do it.

  He adjusted her clothes like a parent, worked the hood around her. The perfect skin, up-tilted nose, sunbleached corn hair. She was jail-bait all right, more dangerous than bloody Zuiden. So where were his sun-goggles? He searched around and found a pair, wondering why he bothered. But snow-blindness wasn’t fun.

  He left her choking on sobs and went down.

  The first thing he noticed was glare flooding in behind the front bulkhead. The nose of th
e Hagg had broken loose and peeled back part of the fuselage like a giant can-opener. The gash was where troop seats had been. Between its front tracks and the damage were the dead.

  Jane was one — her face fixed in the agony her crushed body must have brought her at the end. The other body, the loadmaster’s, hung through the rent as if frozen in a back somersault — which it soon would be. The red mess of a torn stump didn’t explain where the missing leg had gone. Perhaps the disintegrating prop had sliced it. On the port side of the hull, shafts of light showed where blades had sheared through the guard skin doubler.

  The main cargo deck was unbreached but he doubted much was left beneath it. The emergency exit hatches were untouched, the port paratroop door open. He could smell electrical wiring, aviation fuel. Cold was getting to him now.

  He looked behind him. Nina hadn’t followed. Bugger her, he thought. He stumbled along the listing floor past the bulk of the Hagg into the glare. No need to jump. The snow was almost level with the door.

  He sank in up to his knees. Indistinguishable grey on grey. Just the sheet of low cloud and the plateau of frozen hope — the bleakest place on the driest, highest continent of all. This was the terrible interior — an ice pack up to 3 miles deep — where no one could survive without machinery, technology and luck. The wind seemed less than force 3 but wouldn’t stay that way.

  He waded toward the huddled figures, some lying in the snow, some on their knees, others standing, their Gore-Tex windproofs a spot of colour in the void.

  Already out of breath, he paused, turned back to look at the hulk. Up front the radome was half cracked off and the shredded bodies projecting from the windows showed how fast they’d stopped. The fuselage seemed to be buried halfway up the main landing gear fairing but buckled panels along the snowline explained the illusion. The belly must have collapsed or been ripped off piecemeal on the ice.

  From the rump of the broken port wing, JP8 dribbled, its enormous cold tolerance preventing it from freezing. Snow was porous to the fuel, which would go deep and be less likely to ignite. The outboard port engine hung from its spar, the mounting beams severed from their struts, nacelle tilting at the snow. He suspected the starboard wing had ploughed in and broken off.