Impact (21 page)

She pressed Resend.

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Frost climbed into the crawlway. She sucked pipe hanging from the water tank, drew liquid and refilled her canteen.

Someone tapped her leg. She craned around. Noble. She squirmed from the crawlspace.

‘What?’

He mimed hush and beckoned her outside.

Noble took a folded photograph from his pocket. He handed it to Frost. She rubbed her eyes, let them adjust to sudden sunlight.

She studied the picture.

‘What am I looking at?’

‘The target site. Bunch of pictures in Hancock’s dossier. This is the only photograph that shows any activity on the ground.’

Criss-cross tyre tracks. Black SUVs.

‘What are those? Couple of house trailers?’

‘Looks like,’ said Noble.

‘Hardly seems worth a bomb.’

‘I suspect they are a preliminary outpost. The start of something bigger. Look at the vehicles. Four-by-fours. What do you reckon? Suburbans?’

‘Hard to say.’

‘What if they are still there? Could be our ticket out of this mess.’

‘Shit, yeah.’

‘Let’s face facts. You got a bust leg, and Hancock’s got a split skull. Neither of you in much shape to travel. But I could make the journey. I can move real fast on my own.’

‘Got to admit, it makes sense.’

‘Hancock won’t like it.’

‘Fuck Hancock. Get your shit together. Leave at sundown. I’ll explain the situation after you’ve gone.’

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Hancock hit Break and cleared the screen. He leant forward, used the black glass as a mirror.

He tried to lift the bandage wrapped round his head. Gummed by fresh blood. He peeled it loose. He glimpsed inflamed flesh. Rot stink. He pulled the bandage back in place.

Hand to his forehead. Running a fever.

He lectured his reflection:

‘We’re all in fucked-up shape. No use whining about it.’

He dragged the trauma kit closer, unzipped internal pockets and popped tablets from a strip of Tylenol into his palm.

He looked around. His canteen rested on the flight controls.

He got to his feet, eased himself into the pilot seat and swigged back the pills.

He had, in his previous life been stationed at Bagram and charged with providing preliminary intel assessments of captured insurgents. Despite the belligerence broadcast by the morale patches on his sleeve, ‘DON’T TREAD ON ME’ and ‘PORK EATING INFIDEL’, he had thumbed through a Qur’an while drowsing in his bunk late at night and developed a furtive admiration for the Taliban and their Spartan ideology. He was particularly struck by the injunction to avoid intoxicants. Couldn’t help feeling nostalgic for the sun-blasted purity of the Hindu Kush once he found himself back in the Birmingham suburbs surrounded by purposeless folk smothering ennui with Prozac, Adderall and bourbon.

He lifted the blast screen and sat back, gazed at the sandscape with a half-closed eye.

Brief glimpse through blurred vision. Three figures standing on a distant dune, backlit by the glare of the afternoon sun.

He sat bolt upright.

His uncapped canteen hit the floor and spilt water across the deck plate. He snatched it up and secured the cap.

He leant forwards and stared out the window, blinked and struggled to focus. He shielded his remaining eye, tried to mask sun-glare.

Three silent sentinels.

Looked like they were wearing flight suits.

Hancock ran from the plane out into harsh sunlight. He ran for the dunes in front of the plane.

He stumbled and fell face down. He got to his feet spitting sand. He waded the steep slope, struggled to chamber his pistol.

He crested the dune, came to a panting halt, Beretta raised.

Nothing. Empty terrain.

He lowered the pistol. He wiped his brow with the sleeve of his flight suit.

Frost’s distant voice:

‘What’s going on?’

He hauled himself upright and slowly headed back to the aircraft.

‘What’s up, boss?’ asked Frost, as he walked past.

He didn’t reply. He returned to the fetid cave-dark of the flight deck.

The payload bay.

The missile bathed in blood red light.

Frost ran her hand across the million-dollar weapon’s hardened steel hull, intake to radome.

She coughed.

During the past couple of days she had grown used to the vastness of the desert, the way it drew power from her words, rendering her voice thin and small. But the tight confines of the bomb bay rendered every sound, every breath and footfall, oppressively loud.

She sat cross-legged on the floor. She set the camcorder on a horizontal wall girder and pressed REC.

‘It’s late afternoon. Losing track of time. The days, the nights, last for ever out here. Honestly not sure if this is my second or third day marooned in the desert.

‘It’s grim. A killer sandstorm replaced by merciless heat. And later tonight, we’ll freeze. Fucking place is utterly hostile to life.

‘We’re pretty strung out. Morale is low. Each of us trapped in our own misery, getting weaker by the hour.

‘Remember that plane crash in the Andes years back? The one where survivors turned cannibal, had to eat the bodies of their friends? I read a book about it. Those guys froze on a mountainside a whole month before a couple of them got their shit together and walked to fetch help. I couldn’t understand it. Why wait a whole month? I wanted to shout at the pages:
Move. Act. Save yourselves.
But now, here I am, marooned and dying of thirst. I understand the trauma, the debilitating shock. One of the reasons I’m talking to a camera. Trying to organise my thoughts.’

She swigged from her canteen.

‘Hancock wants to drag the bomb to the aim point. Happy to let him plot and scheme. He isn’t going anywhere. His head wound smells bad. Septicaemia. Hate to say it, but if he doesn’t get help soon, he’ll die.

‘Noble is holding up well. Sure, he’s feeling the pressure. Lost it for a while. Thought he could hear choppers. But he’s in good physical shape. He intends to walk out of here tonight. Take some water, some food. Our lives are in his hands.

‘Maybe one day someone will find this recording and play it back. A messed-up flygirl recounting her dying days.

‘This is a pitiless place. We’re parched, exhausted, pretty much at the end of the line. Looks like I got to make some hard decisions.

‘Just remember: you got no right to judge.’

She reached forward and pressed Off.

Trenchman and Akingbola sprinted across the sand. They scrambled up dunes, tumbled down gradients in a cascade of dust. Exhausted. Dehydrated. Cooked by merciless sun.

They looked around as they ran, regarded the featureless sandscape with terror.

Akingbola stumbled and fell to his knees. He panted with fatigue. Trenchman grabbed his arm and pulled him to his feet.

‘Don’t stop. For God’s sake keep moving.’

‘I can’t.’

Trenchman cuffed him round the head.

‘Move your ass.’

They stumbled onwards. The limestone peaks of the Panamint Range emerged from the heat haze up ahead, ghost-crags taking solid form.

‘There,’ pointed Trenchman. The nearest outcrop was half a mile away. ‘Firm ground.’

They sprinted, fast as they could, burned last reserves of strength as they made for the rocks.

They reached boulders projecting from the sand. Jumped, gripped, hauled themselves up onto sun-baked rock. They climbed higher, anxious to be away from the dunes. They turned, sat and looked back at the silicone ocean.

Wordless exhaustion.

Trenchman looked around. He pointed to an overhang.

‘Shade,’ he croaked.

They crawled on hands and knees, dragged themselves to shadow.

Akingbola cracked a Coke, sucked froth, and shared the can.

Ochre rocks. Oxidised iron salts stained boulders the colour of rust.

‘I’d say we were moderately fucked.’

‘I will not allow fortune to pass sentence on myself,’ said Trenchman.

‘Pershing?’

‘Seneca.’

‘Want to rest here?’ asked Akingbola. ‘Sleep out the day?’

Trenchman shook his head.

‘We ought to get further from the desert. A mile at least. Then we can rest. Take turns to keep watch.’

They slowly got to their feet and began to haul themselves upwards. One plateau after another. Rocks marbled with mica, manganese and iron salts. Pinks, yellows and purples. They scrabbled for hand-holds. They helped each other climb ledge to ledge.

‘Watch out for Diamondbacks.’

They reached a pinnacle. Trenchman threw his head back and basked in a gentle breeze.

‘Man, that’s sweet.’

Akingbola checked out the view.

‘Dude. Better take a look at this.’

A steep gradient leading down to dunes. They hadn’t reached the mountains. They were sitting on an island of rock. Another hundred yards of desert before they reached the comparative safety of the Panamint Range.

‘A short sprint,’ said Akingbola.

‘Yeah.’

‘Cross it in a few seconds.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Can’t imagine any those infected fucks followed us all the way out here. Crazy to think they’d be lurking in the dust like freakin’ piranhas.’

Trenchman nodded.

‘We ought to rest a moment, get our strength back. Then make the run.’

They sat a while and relished the parched desert breeze.

Trenchman looked up at the sky.

‘I’ve been trying to make sense of it. Infected burrowing beneath the sand. Must be hiding from the sun. I mean, lizards and snakes burrow to escape the desert heat, right? Maybe these bastards are trying to prolong their lives. Wouldn’t last a day or two in the open. Their bodies would putrefy, their brains would cook in their skulls. So they head below ground.’

‘Hard to credit them with that kind of intelligence.’

‘Maybe the virus is thinking on their behalf. Maybe it has a game plan.’

Akingbola shook his head.

‘It’s a disease, no better than gonorrhoea. It doesn’t follow any grand strategy.’

They stood and stretched, shook out tired limbs.

‘Ready?’

‘Yeah. Fuck it.’

Akingbola got fifty yards before an emaciated hand erupted from the sand, gripped his leg and began to haul him below ground.

‘It’s got me. It’s fucking got me.’

Trenchman doubled back. He fired into the sand. He grabbed Akingbola’s arms and pulled.

Akingbola’s leg jerked free, minus a boot. He got to his feet. He slapped Trenchman on the back:

‘Go. Just go.’

Trenchman ran. He covered the last fifty yards tensed like a sprint across a minefield: each footfall a coin-flip with death.

He headed for a vertiginous cliff face, the point where jagged limestone crags rose from the desert dust.

He covered the last few feet convinced he would, at any moment, be snatched beneath the sand.

He gripped a boulder, hauled himself up onto its grit-dusted surface. He scrambled one-eighty, intending to offer Akingbola a hand, but the guy wasn’t there. He was a hundred yards away, sitting on the outcrop they just fled.

Trenchman cupped his hands.

‘What the hell are you doing?’

Akingbola pointed to his torn and bloodied pant leg.

‘I got bit,’ he shouted.

Trenchman sat head in hands. Tired, defeated.

‘Sorry I dragged you out here. Didn’t have the right.’

‘No sweat,’ shouted Akingbola. ‘It’s a fucked-up world. Nobody’s fault. Just the way it is.’

They sat, looking at each other, separated by a hundred yards of sand.

‘You better get going,’ shouted Akingbola. He gestured to the rock face. ‘Sunset. You don’t want to climb that thing in the dark.’

Trenchman nodded.

Akingbola pulled a miniature bottle of rum from his pack and twisted the cap with a gloved hand. He stood at the jagged peak of the atoll and raised the bottle in salute.

‘Take it easy, bro.’

‘And you.’

Trenchman stood, turned and started to climb.