Instinct (2010) (43 page)

MEROS was now one of those shapes: a white triangle, for the next fifteen minutes, at least.

There was nobody else within eight flights of Laura. Her thighs pumped like pistons, eating up the stairs in leaps and jumps. Much of her climb was in darkness, but she could just make out where she was going from the dying flares that Jacobs, Mills and Madison had left on their way down.

It had been almost thirty-six hours since she had entered the complex, twice that since Andrew had gone missing, but it felt like weeks. Even before the Heath wasps had escaped she had doubted she would ever be able to return home, but oddly enough the disaster that had followed was what had made it possible.

Perspiration poured down her front and back while the inside of her mouth was dust-dry. How many more steps could there be? How much time was left? She prayed nothing had happened to Madison, and climbed faster still.

Near the summit the steps curved in a different direction with shorter flights and she felt the first whisper of cool air from outside. It was joined by a faint haze of natural light that showed the stairs to be a dark blue rather than the black they had seemed as they passed beneath her feet. As she made her way up the last steps she heard voices from above. It was
impossible to know who was talking but she could understand the tone, a minor disagreement between a high voice and a low one.

‘They should be here by now.’

‘They on their goddamn way! Now chill! Listen!’

Taj was interrupted by the faint clang of Laura’s boots on the metal stairs. Andrew immediately tried to run into the staircase, but Taj held him back.

‘Leave room. They all got to get out.’

The clangs became louder until it was obvious they were coming from the final steps.

Andrew broke free from Taj with a fierce kick.

‘Andrew, Andrew, Andrew,’ was all Laura could say as she buried her face in his neck and hugged him so hard his ribs ached.

She had lost him twice in the last three days and both times she thought it was for ever. As she held him again, she resolved to remember everything about this moment: his scruffy brown hair, his shining eyes and the way he held her like he would never let go again.

When at last they separated Laura saw Taj looking awkward.

‘Thank you for looking after him …’

‘Taj.’

‘Taj, of course.’

‘Must have been plenty, uh, I mean to say you must have been through a lot, Dr Trent.’

Laura looked at Andrew and rubbed the back of his neck as he smiled up at her, squinting at the sun streaming in behind her head.

‘Yes … it’s been quite …’

Just when she thought that no words could do the experience justice, Webster came through the hatch, closely followed by Madison.

‘Sorry, but we have to get to the plane now,’ Webster said. ‘There’s a minute left on Jacobs’s clock.’

They ploughed through the trees: Madison running ahead, and Webster, Laura, Andrew and Taj tight on his heels.

The way through the jungle was not easy: ripples of earth, thick with trees and creepers, undulated down the steep slope.

Leading the way, Madison caught his foot on a tendon of root and went flying. Landing hard, he somersaulted down past stumps and trunks, twice missing concussion by the width of a finger.

Trailing his hand behind him, he managed to grasp a tight mess of vines. The momentum wrenched at his knuckles but he finally came to a stop just before a row of rocks that would have split his head like a pineapple.

Webster caught him up. ‘You OK?’ Madison didn’t even reply. He just got back up and bolted through the bushes.

A hundred more yards of flat jungle and they were at the clearing. Thumping boots swished through the foliage and on to the grass.

Madison was already jumping through the Spartan’s side doors and grabbing his headphones.

‘Thirty seconds!’ warned Webster, looking at his
watch as the others took their seats. ‘Paine had better be late.’

They all took seats by the windows and watched the jungle for the arrival of the others.

‘Come on … come on …’ whispered Webster.

Madison gunned the ignition and the twin turboprop engines swept into life. They were already at the end of the two-thousand-foot runway, so Madison did not need to manoeuvre the plane into position.

‘Come on!’ snapped Webster.

Suddenly the cockpit alarm blared in Madison’s ears.

‘Shit! I have incoming, north-north-east, approaching at low altitude and high speed. This looks like the one, Major. I can try to taxi slowly, but we can’t really wait any more.’

‘Hang on, Madison!’

One by one, the others appeared from the trees: George, Susan, Mike and Jacobs limped and staggered across the clearing. Webster ran out to help them along and they were soon up the steps and into the plane’s side door, gasping hard and sweating harder.

As Madison powered up the engine, Taj called out from the back row.‘Hey, Jacobs. Looks like your calculations were a little off. My watch is at zero.’ There was a smattering of relieved laughter.

‘Glad to be wrong, Taj.’

‘OK, we ready to get the fuck out of here?’ called Madison. Webster counted them off then looked around again.

‘We’re missing two.’

Madison got out of his seat and appeared at the door to the cockpit. ‘I’m sorry, guys. Garrett bought it on the way up. I didn’t see any point in saying until we got out of there but she made it very clear she wants us to live, so let’s talk about it after I get us safe.’

He returned to the cockpit, leaving a stunned silence behind him.

Webster couldn’t believe what he had heard, but right now he had to push his grief aside. Who else was … ?

‘Bishop,’ said Mike sourly.

‘We can’t leave without him,’ said Webster.

‘Major, pretty soon I’m going to have no choice,’ called Madison.

‘How long?’ replied Webster.

‘ETA of two minutes. That gives us thirty seconds before I have to lift off, but I’ll gun the engine as hard as I can.’

‘Come on, Bishop,’ said Webster through gritted teeth.

‘Hey, I say we leave the asshole. You really want to risk this, Major?’ asked Mike.

‘You really want to leave a man to die?’ Webster shot back.

A second later, Bishop was out of the jungle and into the clearing. Webster frantically waved him towards the plane.

But he wasn’t running. He ambled on to the flat grass and looked ruefully at the plane. Then he gave the smallest of waves and walked back towards the white building.

Webster wanted to stop him but he knew they had no time to wait for that. There was something in Bishop’s eyes that seemed impossibly empty, as if they were transparent. It didn’t feel right to leave him in that state, but on this occasion they couldn’t do anything else.

‘Take her up,’ he shouted to Madison, sadness in his voice. If anyone had been standing close enough to Bishop, they’d have heard him talking:

‘It’s OK. The blast will be a half-mile underground. There’ll be no danger. I just can’t leave my post. And I’ll be in touch. When we’ve sorted this place out and we can get MEROS functioning again somewhere else, I’ll get hold of you all and we can continue what made this place great, continue the work, continue our valuable contribution to …’

Either he realized nobody was listening or he didn’t know how the sentence was going to end. He turned back to the Spartan again and waved at no one in particular, as if they were all his good friends, moving on after their final year of college.

With a melancholy smile on his face, he looked back to the entrance of MEROS.

Behind him, the Spartan was accelerating down the runway.

Three miles to the north-east, the F-35 was coming in low. Captain Fox tapped the cursor on his screen and the B61 Mod 11 was on its way.

The Spartan had covered half of the runway, and was nearing take-off speed.

‘OK, everyone,’ yelled Madison. ‘I’m picking up
something else. Smaller, coming in faster. Brace yourselves. I’m going to do my best to avoid it, but I’ve got to get airborne first.’

As he spoke, the Spartan’s wheels lifted off the concrete and into the air.

Fox was gaining altitude so he could come back round and check that the bomb had hit its target. As soon as his nose lurched upwards, the Spartan appeared on his radar as a hostile craft.

‘What the hell?’ he said to himself, then switched on the mike in his oxygen mask.

‘Candyman to base. Candyman to base.’

‘This is base, copy Candyman.’

‘I’ve got a rogue hawk approx one K from target, please advise, over.’

‘We see it, Candyman. Hold fire until instructed otherwise.’

The bomb was heading straight for the Spartan. Madison could see it coming but didn’t have enough lift to bank out of the way.

He was yanking the control stick back and right as hard as he could, sending the plane into a steep climb. The elevators on the tail were fully tilted, and the pedal was pushed into the floor.

They were a hundred yards apart now, and closing at a thousand miles an hour.

The plane kept banking and climbing.

The bomb kept burning through the air.

At the moment of impact the Spartan lifted another inch. As it rose, the bomb’s tail fins scored the back
wheel of the plane, puncturing the tyre, then passing on.

Everyone felt it: a wavy bump that flicked the tail out again, sending the plane upwards at a perilous angle.

‘I can’t … fucking hold … it,’ grunted Madison, gripping the control stick like he was on a rollercoaster.

Behind them, 400 kilotons of bomb plunged through Bishop’s spine and into the doors of the white building.

The explosion was instantaneous. Thousands of tons of earth flew upwards as if wrenched by a giant earthquake. The jungle, clearing and runway seemed to jump in the air as the violent shockwave whipped through them.

The Spartan, still yawing perilously to the left, took another hit of pressure. The explosion of dirt flew up around it, rattling the tail and sending a plume of dust around the back windows. The plane lurched again, throwing Susan and Mike out of their seats.

‘Hold on … everybody!’ grunted Madison.

It was his will against the force of the nuclear explosion. The Spartan was gaining distance, but it was heading into a flat spin that could easily send it diving back into the jungle.

Laura and Andrew gripped their seats as cargo crashed and flipped around them. George took a fierce knock to the head from a flying toolkit, drawing a trickle of blood from his temple.

The roar of the engine was so loud it invaded their
ears like a white-hot sledgehammer, driving out the ability to think, but expanding the fear.

‘AAAAARRRRGGGGGHHHHHHH!’ screamed Madison.

With that scream, the plane seemed to reach a peak. Surrounded by dust and pointing upwards at sixty degrees with a noise of tortured metal, it dropped ever so slightly.

The sound calmed a little and they began to escape the dirt.

Blood returned to white knuckles, and teeth that were clamped tight slowly loosened and separated.

They could hear Madison breathing hard, but slower.

‘OK, everybody. I think we’re going to make it.’

The F-35 banked round over MEROS. Flying directly back over his approach route, Captain Fox watched a little pocket of Venezuelan jungle transform from verdant foliage to a blinding flash of brilliant white in the blink of an eye.

‘Candyman to base, the toad is in the hole, repeat, the toad is in the hole, over.’

‘Base to Candyman, we copy. Return to base immediately.’

‘Roger that, base. I still have the rogue hawk in my sights. Should I engage, over?’

‘Negative, Candyman. Return to base as instructed. Over and out.’

Captain Fox was happy to obey orders, but he didn’t think it would hurt to let the Spartan know he was there.

He switched to supersonic and blew past the larger plane at a distance of ten metres before heading north-east to his base.

‘Jesus, what the fuck was that?’ yelled Madison as the F-35 shot past. It was one last ripple that had to be dealt with. Like a storm wave hitting a fishing trawler, the turbulence sent the Spartan tossing from side to side.

‘Asshole!’ Madison screamed at the disappearing bomber. A little more attention to the control stick and the plane settled down.

‘OK, folks, I think that’s it. I got nothing on my radar, so we should be looking at a flight time of approximately four hours to the land of no fucking bugs, but many, many mojitos.’

Laura looked out at the jungle. She had only arrived yesterday – or was it the day before? She checked her watch. Its face had been shattered somewhere along the way. It was the only thing her husband had left her, and she wondered if there was a point when it might have been broken saving her from a set of grinding jaws or an intent stinger.

On the plane, there was a shellshocked silence. There was nothing to say beyond looks and gestures as several of the passengers collapsed with exhaustion and sank into a treacly sleep.

Looking across, Webster caught Laura’s eye. He slipped out of his seat and came over to where she and Andrew were sitting.

‘Hi,’ he said, just loud enough to be heard above the sound of the thundering engine.

‘Hi,’ replied Laura.

There was an awkward pause while Webster tried to articulate a million thoughts. In the end, Laura spoke first.

‘So what happens now?’

‘We’re going to head to the base in Costa Rica. It’s not a hardcore military operation and we’ve got friends there who’ll make sure we can all go on to
where we want to be. I assume for you that’s England.’

‘Definitely,’ said Andrew, just in case his mum was thinking of anything else. Laura put her arm round him.

‘And what about you?’

‘Me? I don’t know. MEROS has been the closest thing I’ve had to home for a long time. Got no roots elsewhere, so I might hang in Costa Rica for a while until something comes up. I hear there’s good fishing there this time of year.’

There was another pause as they both avoided being the one to speak next and willed the other to do it instead.