Quake

by Andy Remic

‘Dum de dum de dum.’ Kade chewed his sweet and strolled - almost happily, certainly calmly - to the front door of the police station, locking it and sliding three thick bars into place. Then he heard a voice shouting from the station’s interior and he moved smoothly to the doorway, standing discreetly to one side.

  Another policeman appeared, carrying a yellow folder. He stopped. His gaze dropped and he gasped. Kade blew his head open. Still chewing, Kade stooped and pulled the policeman’s gun free, checking the magazine.

  ‘Yum yum, cherry flavour,’ said Kade, helping himself to another sweet. More shouting erupted from the interior of the police station and Kade sighed, almost resignedly, hoisting both weapons in his blood-slick grasp.

  He tilted his head, smiling at a cowering prisoner and shaking his head almost in sadness.

  ‘Time to go to work,’ he sighed.

  It had been a hard climb, but at least the two pilots on the roof of the Egyptian Times news building had not been armed. Two punches and two broken cheekbones later, Mongrel had dragged them away from the civilian helicopter and stared in horror at the white flanks of the RT10 with their bright red and yellow stripes. Mongrel danced around, realised he had been caught on some form of CCTV, and decided that standing next to two unconscious men while armed with a sub-machine gun was not going to endear him to the journalistic staff of the building below - nor to the inevitable security and police forces who would follow.

  Mongrel stared at the name etched on the machine’s flanks.

  An RT10 Dandelion.

  ‘An RT10 fucking Dandelion,’ he muttered.

  Mongrel fired up the helicopter, and listened in agony as the rotors began their snail-speed acceleration. There came a curious metallic squeaking sound that made Mongrel shudder.

  From a nearby building Mongrel had watched Carter being beaten up by a mob, and had been just about to open fire with his M24 when five policemen had waded in, driving back the crowd who were armed with sticks, bottles and rifles, and dragging a bloodied Carter into their battered old Land Rover. Thinking that he and Carter needed transport fast, Mongrel had decided to secure the helicopter from the nearest logical source -the news building. But, just after punching the two pilots into oblivion, he had heard the familiar distant report of Carter’s Browning from the police station below - and decided that his best option was to take to the air and monitor events from there ...

  Carter was obviously looking after himself.

  The ‘copter spun into action and Mongrel climbed on board. He hated flying - and admitted to everybody including himself that he was, basically, an awful pilot.

  The RT10 Dandelion helicopter waggled into the air, a dangerous combination of underpowered civilian engines, a worn rudder and a lack of engine oil. Mongrel’s lack of experience and confidence didn’t help. Mongrel watched as men ran onto the roof of the Egyptian Times news building, waving their arms at him. He swooped high over their heads with the metallic noise singing a discordant song in his ears, and headed off to the west in what he considered to be a decoy manoeuvre in case these men wanted to chase him.

  Mongrel came around in a wide arc, noting that crowds seemed to be gathering in the streets below. Many seemed to be armed, and were waving and chanting.

  ‘Not look good,’ mused Mongrel.

  And something else gnawed at him. He tried to place his finger on it. It was something to do with the guards on the rooftop.

  What had it been?

  The helicopter thrummed around again and Mongrel was searching now. Where would Carter emerge from? It would not be the front door - there was a crowd there already, hammering against the old worn wood. The roof, then? It had to be his only way of escape.

  Mongrel prayed that Carter had seen him ...

  He swooped, the engines whining in a strange way that he had never heard before inside a chopper. And then he saw it: on the roof of the police station a door flew open and Carter came into view, firing a gun in each hand. Blood pooled across the floor at his feet and he slammed shut the door, reaching and grasping a bar and sliding it into place through rope hooks.

  Mongrel dropped the helicopter.

  It still nagged at him: what had been wrong with the men on the roof of the newspaper building?

  The helicopter touched down on the police station roof.

  Carter leapt in, and his dark-eyed stare moved over Mongrel arrogantly. Carter was soaked in blood, and for a moment Mongrel thought he was wounded ...

  ‘You OK?’

  ‘You took your fucking time,’ snapped Kade. ‘I’m fucking covered in blood, had to kill sixteen fucking policemen in there - not that that’s a bad thing.’ He flashed a shark smile. ‘All fucking police deserve to die, whatever their nationality.’

  ‘Carter?’

  ‘Hmm?’

  ‘You’re not hurt?’

  ‘Nah, never felt better.’

  A figure appeared on a neighbouring rooftop and opened fire with a sub-machine gun. Bullets kicked up tiny showers of dust and Kade stepped calmly away from the civilian chopper as the rounds ate their way towards his legs. He aimed the Browning and the gun bucked in his fist, firing three bullets that smacked into the Egyptian soldier’s head and dropped him in an instant.

  ‘Now the military is involved. What a bummer! I was enjoying shooting the pigs,’ he chuckled darkly.

  Mongrel lifted the chopper into the sky. He was frowning ... and knew that something was badly wrong with Carter. It did nothing to relieve his misgivings about their situation.

  And now the Egyptian military as well?

  Shit...

  Kade popped another sweet into his mouth. He held out the bag to Mongrel as the chopper wobbled over Cairo, rotors whining above them as crowds of civilians, police and military swarmed through the streets below in an attempt at pursuit.

  ‘You want a sweet?’

  ‘A fucking sweet?’ bellowed Mongrel. ‘We’ve got the fucking Egyptian army fucking after us now, and you ask if I want a fucking sweet? There’ll be fucking military ‘copters here in a few minutes, with fucking heavy machine guns.’

  ‘Yeah? So? It’s only a fucking sweet!’ snapped Kade, frowning. ‘And anyway, what’s wrong with this pile of shit? Couldn’t you find something a little more -’ he searched for a word, licking at his cherry-tinted lips -’exciting?’

  The rotors whined again, and now there was a grinding note in the sound.

  And then Mongrel realised what had been wrong with the guards on the rooftop. They had been waving their arms to him - and yet they’d carried sub-machine guns slung over their shoulders. Their intention hadn’t been to stop him ... but to warn him.

  Why?

  Another grinding sound came.

  ‘I think you’ve picked a dud fucking chopper, my fat friend.’ Kade fired a few bullets into the swarming crowd below, laughing as bodies rolled in the dust.

  ‘What are you doing?’ hissed Mongrel.

  Kade ignored him - then suddenly whirled, pointing down. ‘Over there. Towards the south. There’s a military airfield. Take us there now!’

  Mongrel flew in silence, jaws clamped tightly closed, his mind whirling. He glanced across at Carter - and saw an expression on the man’s face that he had never seen before. Mongrel looked at Carter: the battered and torn clothing, the cuts and bruises, the drying blood, the pieces of brain tissue and fragments of bone in his hair. He was a demon figure, a nightmare horror-show walking the earth, dealing out hot gunfire from his bruised and sliced hands ...

  He feels no pain, Mongrel realised.

  And no remorse ...

  The chopper banked, leaving the surging crowds in the streets behind. It swept down low over buildings, mostly built from sandstone and a few from breeze-block and rusting corrugated metal sheeting. Dogs barked, and women shouted.

  The rotors continued to scream above the two men—

  And then the control-panel dials started to flicker madly as certain pressures dropped.

  Kade
caught Mongrel’s stare. ‘You fucking looking at something?’

  ‘Yeah, something bad,’ snapped Mongrel.

  ‘There.’ Kade pointed. ‘The El Kashem airfield. I don’t think this bag of shit is going to get us anywhere. You see that grey plane over there?’

  ‘You mean the MiG?’

  ‘Aye.’ Kade nodded, smiling slyly, and popped another sweet into his mouth. ‘Land next to it.’

  ‘And what about those guards with those big fucking dogs?’

  Kade slammed a fresh magazine into his Browning. ‘You leave them to me,’ he growled, sucking hard.

  Carter tumbled through darkness, falling for ever. He spun, curled in a ball, round and round and round, wind lashing through his hair. His eyes were clenched shut and he contained the pain. It was an animal raging within him and he cursed Kade; Kade had trapped him, ensnared him within a cage of agony and in fury Carter punched out at the dark invisible veil all around him—

  He heard the gunshots. The yelps of the dogs.

  Carter’s jaw tightened grimly.

  The pain beat in huge tidal waves against the shore of his brain.

  Pulsed, like an evil cancer.

  Smashed him with the eternity of death ...

  Light flooded in, as if somebody had torn a hole in the canvas of darkness surrounding him. Carter pushed away the pain, felt it slide between him and Kade as Kade fought him with claws of steel. He dropped to his knees, spittle drooling from his mouth and the desert sun scorching his eyes, lancing directly into his tortured cerebellum ...

  Carter coughed.

  The Browning felt solid in his throbbing fist.

  He glanced up - at the airfield, at the sand under him, at the corpses of Egyptian soldiers - and four dead Alsatian dogs, their heads twisted back, long canine tongues protruding and their blood staining the desert.

  Carter breathed deeply, cursing, as Kade’s laughter drifted into a haunting nothingness. He glanced back at Mongrel, who was staring at him with disgust.

  Carter climbed to his feet.

  ‘I’m back,’ he said softly.

  ‘What’s that fucking supposed to mean?’ snarled Mongrel.

  Carter approached the large man, weariness suddenly hitting him with an incredible intensity, sucking away his will to go on. He reached out and placed his blood-caked hand against Mongrel’s tattered Nex clothing.

  ‘I am sorry, Mongrel. That was not me.’

  Mongrel’s eyes glittered. ‘What you mean, Carter? I don’t like what I fucking see here.’

  Sirens wailed from the distance. Carter stared down at the eight dead Egyptian soldiers, their faces and bodies blown apart by the wrath of the Browning. He felt something go cold inside and he made a promise to himself - when this was all over he would find a way to kill Kade. He would burn that fucker in the furnace of his mind.

  ‘Those men did not deserve this,’ said Carter softly.

  ‘What?’ snapped Mongrel. ‘I seen bad things in my time, and you one of them, Carter.’ And Carter caught it, the big man was afraid.

  And Carter felt shame.

  A deep shame that burned him.

  The sirens were getting louder. Across the airfield jeeps sped into view, displaying the red flashing lights of military police. Carter stooped under the grey belly of the big Russian MiG 8-40 MFI - Mnogofunktsionalny Frontovoi Istrebitel - and kicked out the wooden block from behind the front wheel. He moved under the wings, kicking out the rear blocks as Mongrel heaved himself up the narrow ladder to the cockpit and climbed into the co-pilot’s seat.

  Carter followed him up. He stopped for a moment, glancing over at Cairo. The sights and scents of the city had filled him with an awe that he would never forget. But he knew that he was cursed in this place, hated and reviled, condemned to die. He could never again witness its wonders without risking a bullet in the back.

  Carter breathed deeply, dropped into the cockpit and pushed the ladder into its housing. He stared at the controls in front of him, reached out, and flicked on the power. Powering-up whines came from the aircraft’s batteries and Carter touched the control screen, which sprang to life with a display of Russian and subtitled Arabic.

  ‘Hmm.’

  ‘You know how to fly this, Carter?’

  ‘Aye.’

  The sirens were getting uncomfortably close. Carter started the engines, which roared into life with the awesome, deafening thunder of quad Saturn/Lyulka A184-F turbofans and the reined-in energies of 200,000 pounds of thrust. Grasping the controls, Carter eased the MiG 8-40 around in a circle to face the long expanse of sand-blown tarmac. The runway stretched into the distance, meeting the horizon through a shimmer of desert heat.

  Excitement welled in Carter’s breast - excitement at such awesome and mind-blowing power, mixed with his fear of flying and falling and heights. He also had the terrible certainty that if he fucked up then he would be dog meat, pulped in a battered can, within about thirty seconds flat...

  Machine guns rattled from the jeeps.

  Bullets zipped over the wings ...

  Carter hit the burners. The MiG 8-40 MFI’s engine note rose to a scream and the fighter juddered around the two men. It screeched down the runway, leaving trails of rubber on the dusty tarmac, lifted its nose towards the sky and the orange sun - and soared smoothly up into the heavens ...

  Sunlight gleamed along the fighter’s grey flanks.

  The wheels lifted neatly into the machine’s underbelly with tiny and precise clicks.

  And the MiG 8-40 banked, wings gleaming, and headed towards the south and west.

  ‘We’re going in the wrong direction.’

  ‘No, we’re going to pick up the Comanche.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘All our equipment is there. And our explosives. Everything we could need.’

  Mongrel frowned. ‘How long will it take?’

  ‘In this?’ said Carter, gazing out over the rapidly undulating desert. ‘Well, we’re currently cruising at 2,000 kilometres an hour - so a little over ten minutes. Now that’s pretty fucking fast.’

  The MiG 8-40 MFI was a multi-functional front-line fighter. It was built primarily for air-to-air combat but it also carried payloads both in its belly and on pylons beneath its wings for tactical air-to-air surface strikes. Built by MiG - the Mikoyan & Gurevich aviation, scientific and production complex of the MAPO military-industrial corporation of the Northern Russian Confederacy - the war machine had quad Saturn/Lyulka A184-F engines with turbofans and Needle_injectors capable of upwards of 200,000 pounds of thrust when using afterburners. It had System5 thrust vectoring channels to allow the fighter to make extremely sharp turns. The jet could supercruise at an awesome 2,600 km/h, had a top thrust speed of 3,245 km/h and a flight ceiling of a little over 27,500 metres. The plane was a cranked delta-wing, with triple tail fins, and it had intakes under the nose. It measured twenty-two metres in length and had a wingspan of sixteen metres. It sported Phazotron Plasma TW-35 phased-array fire-control radar, rearward-facing N-018 radar and Global PK18 TSAM control radar. It also carried the latest generation of plasma-cloud stealth systems - known as PCSS-5s - for the simple beauty of undetected infiltration.

  After scanning the machine’s systems and struggling through the Russian and Arabic instructions, Carter could see that this machine packed quad 30mm canons, and carried eight R-80 AA-e Aphid air-to-air missiles, and twelve KH-68 AS-13 Kilter tactical air-to-surface missiles, each 4.98 metres long.

  Carter grinned to himself sombrely.

  Fucker must be worth a few million, he mused.

  One could say that airfield security had been lax.

  And somebody was going to lose his job, and then his balls.

  There was silence for a while, interrupted only by the noise of the engines as they cruised at low altitude. Carter knew that he wasn’t a fighter pilot and despite arming the PCSS-5s he still felt nervous. He didn’t want to engage in air-to-air combat with pilots sporting thousands of hours of traini
ng.

  ‘Mongrel, we need to talk.’

  ‘So talk.’

  ‘That wasn’t me back there.’

  ‘Who was it, the fucking Queen? I didn’t realise she was so fond of shooting dogs with a Browning.’

  ‘Mongrel, listen to me. There is a demon inside my head. Sometimes I go a little — insane. I try to control it, really I do. But sometimes, when I am weak, or I’ve been beaten up or shot - sometimes the demon takes control.’

  Mongrel was silent. The engines hissed behind the two men. Below, the desert flowed like golden mercury. Rocks flowed past and the distant landscape lay cratered like the moon.

  ‘I find that hard to accept.’

  Carter took a deep breath. ‘You have heard Natasha -and I - mention the name of Kade? I know you have. It is me name of the demon in my soul, the dark brother I have to carry like a seed. And yes, he is evil, and yes, I wish him dead. But I cannot banish him, Mongrel, I cannot get rid of him without terminating my own fucking existence. And I want to, believe me, I want him to die ... but he lives, inside me, in my brain, and sometimes he breaks free ...’

  For decades Carter had carried this secret.

  And he realised that he was talking as much to himself as to Mongrel. And now he was exorcising his secret, the words flowed with ease, like fine sand in an hourglass.

  Carter realised that there were tears staining his cheeks.

  ‘Sometimes I do really bad things,’ he whispered. ‘But it is not always me in control. Sometimes I have no say in my actions. Sometimes Kade holds me in his fist -trapped behind the bars of his strength - and there is nothing I can do.’

  Mongrel leaned forward and tapped Carter on the shoulder. Carter turned, savagely wiping away his tears. Mongrel smiled at him, his dark eyes glistening.

  ‘I accept this for now, but later we must talk. When this - this Kade is out, he have real attitude problem. I considered putting bullet in him with M24. He real fuck-wit.’

  ‘Yeah.’ Carter laughed. ‘Fucking tell me about it. I have to listen to his voice 24/7. It drives a man a little mad.’

  ‘So what the plan now?’

  ‘I’ll drop you by the Comanche ... shit, you can fly it, can’t you?’