The Henchmen's Book Club (22 page)

The first appeared with a ping and the
seven of us crammed ourselves in. Probably a bit stupid to be honest, but like
I said, when you’re this close to the end of an action, it’s so hard to stay
focussed.

We glided up several hundred feet and
emerged into a cold and blustery Greenland morning. The Omega Guards just
outside the elevators went down with a short burst a piece and we fanned out
across the helipad as their fellow Omega brothers ran to engage us.

It was winter in Greenland and the snow
was piled high in dirty mounds at the edges of the helipad from where the dozer
had scraped it back. Most of us were still in our white and black ops gear from
the skyjacking and difficult to pick out as we dashed between the snow and
rocks of the exposed mountain slopes, but unfortunately the Tech Chief still
bought it as he moved on one of the Westlands. I saw him drop like a marionette
who’d had his wires cut and he hit the cold hard tarmac probably not even
realising he’d been killed.

As disheartening as this was, the Tech
Chief was the only one of us they got, for despite being evenly matched in
terms of numbers, we had one thing going for us that the Omega troops didn’t.

Namely, we weren’t wearing red against
snow.

I hugged the black rocks on the Eastern
side of the helipad and picked off colourful tunic after colourful tunic,
painting the snow around them with short bursts until the entire Omega
detachment were finally camouflaged – against their own blood.

“FSOs on me,” Mr Smith shouted after the
fight, so we drew back and took up defensive positions to watch over the
elevators as Mr Deveraux checked out the Westlands.

“The birds are good; keys and full tanks
in two of them. Enough to get us to Paamuit, maybe even Nuuk.”

“That’s it then, let’s roll!” Mr Smith
ordered, covering me and the rest of the lads as we piled on to the nearest
chopper before joining us himself.

It was only then that we discovered the
flaw in our otherwise flawless plan.

“Er… does anyone know how to fly one of
these things?” Mr Smith asked, when he saw that we’d all jumped in the back.
“Mr Deveraux?”

“What?”

“Can’t you fly a helicopter?”

“No.”

“But you just checked them out?” Mr
Vasiliev reminded him.

“No, I just looked to see if they had the
keys and full tanks of gas. It doesn’t take a pilot’s licence to do that.”

“Jesus!”

“But you all flew the Chariots,” Mr
Capone said, who’d been the FSOs’ gofer on the Tupolev.

“That’s different; different controls
completely,” I said.

“But if you can fly a Chariot, then
presumably you can fly a helicopter too,” Mr Capone insisted.

“That’s right. And if you can program a
washing machine then presumably you can hack the Pentagon’s super-computer
too,” Mr Jean chipped in.

“I don’t believe this,” Mr Smith sighed.

“Well what about Captain Collett?” Mr
Vasiliev finally said, which wasn’t a bad idea at all. He’d had almost a dozen
men under his command when we’d rolled on through, so it was feasible that one
of them might be able to fly a helicopter. It was worth a shot.

“Let’s do it.”

We tried him on the internal phone
system, calling the snowmobile dock from the elevator phone, but no one picked
up at the other end.

We whipped a digi-headset off one of the
dead Omega troopers but still couldn’t elicit a response from anyone at the
snowmobile dock.

“Dunbar,” Mr Smith said.

“Yeah,” I remembered. He’d been fighting
near the Command Centre and must’ve have taken out the uplink equipment or the
server lines.

“It’s no good, one of us is going to have
to go down there,” Mr Smith said.

“One of us?” I said, not liking the sound
of this.

“There’s no point in all of us going.
Some of us have to stay back to guard the chopper,” he argued, which was a fair
point but even so, I could feel the fates closing in around me.

“Okay, who goes?” I cautiously agreed.

The short answer was me, decided by a
hastily convened game of rocks, scissors and paper that whittled us down until
I was left despairingly trying to cut Mr Deveraux’s fist in half with my
fingers.

“Now if the Comm link is down, we won’t
be able to talk to you, so just bring them up here, okay?” Mr Smith said.

“And if none of them can fly
helicopters?” I pointed out.

“Well…” Mr Smith pondered. “I guess we’ll
have to find another way out,” he reckoned.

“Right, and I’ll just sneak past a couple
of wars, Griffin Marvel, Rip Dunbar, all those Omega wankers and come back and
tell you about it then shall I?” I said, adding; “all the way back from the
snowmobile dock?” to underline my alternatives.

Mr Smith accepted the unreasonableness of
what he’d asked, so he sorted me out with a couple of distress flares and told
me to fire one off if I left on a snowmobile.

At that moment the elevator phone rang so
we picked it up and said hello.

“Help? Help us, anyone!” screamed a voice
I didn’t recognise. “Anyone, we’re under…” the line went dead with a crackle.

Mr Smith looked at me.

“Don’t be long,” he suggested, pressing
the button to take me back down into the mayhem.

25.
A CRYSTALLINE KISS OF SLEEP

I fired off a burst of automatic fire as the elevator doors opened, just in
case there’d been anyone waiting for me, but there hadn’t. The place was quiet.
Explosions and fire echoed from deep within the base but all human sounds had ceased.
Smoke and the acrid smell of cordite hung in the air to indicate that this
place had seen a fight, but those that had fought here were now silent.

The monorail train was also gone, so I
hugged the wall and peered down the tunnel.

Nothing.

I really didn’t fancy this but what
choice did I have? We were in Greenland, a thousand miles from anywhere and
fast approaching winter. We needed a ride out of this place. Anything less was
suicide.

I said a quick prayer and moved off into
the darkness.

Most of the lighting was down, just a few
red emergency bulbs lit from the back-up generator pierced the blackness and
after a hundred yards or so I looked out onto the main aircraft hanger.

Dunbar was gone too. As were the troops
he’d been fighting.

Also the Command Centre. Nothing was left
of it. A smoking mass of twisted metal burned at the end of the hanger where it
had once stood and most of the planes around it were either on fire or soon to
be. Thankfully the bay doors at the far end were open, so most of the heat and
smoke was escaping out into the arctic but even so, it was still close to
unbearable in the cavern, even from where I was sliding along the wall.

Very little could have survived this
hell.

But I took care all the same.

I ran at a crouch, following the monorail
track around the hanger until I was within a sprint of the next tunnel and made
it with seconds to spare. Two hundred yards behind me, the Tupolev finally
succumbed to its wounds and blew to smithereens with a blinding flash. I threw
myself into the tunnel mouth as a thousand gallons of burning aviation fuel
splashed the back of the hanger and ran blindly until I’d escaped the searing
black smoke.

The next cavern was in much the same
state. The mainframe computers were crackling in a way that suggested it was
going take more than a call to Apple to retrieve Marvel’s emails for him.
What’s more, there were several charges attached to the housings I didn’t like
the look of so I quickly moved off, into the next monorail tunnel and towards
the snowmobile dock.

On foot, the base was bigger than I’d
realised and where I’d happily trundled around in comfort on the monorail
before, I now inched and stumbled my way through the cramped tunnels in near
total blackness. Several times I caught my head on the bare rocks above,
scraping my scalp and bloodying my hairline until all I could fantasise about
were hard hats and TCP but finally I reached the end of the tunnel and peered
out across the snowmobile dock.

The place was empty.

I pulled back and searched my brain for
ideas, but none presented themselves, so I swore under my breath and stepped
out into the open.

Once again I kept low, hugging the
monorail track until I came to within thirty feet of a pyramid of crates. Only
then did I take to my toes. I dashed the short open space between cover,
wincing at the expectation of pain and winding myself when I slammed into the
crates.

This was where I found Captain Collett.

I hadn’t been able to see him from the
monorail track, but just around the corner he was stood straight and true
against another stack of crates, looking like one of those ramrod sentries you
got outside Buckingham Palace who weren’t allowed to move, smile or jangle
their change.

Captain Collett didn’t move, smile or
jangle his change either, but that was because he was stone dead.

I approached him gingerly, half-expecting
his shocked wide eyes to flicker in my direction, but the eight-inch
engineering spike that had skewered him through the forehead had grabbed his
whole attention.

All around his feet were spent .38 shell
casings and the bodies of his men. I conducted a quick count and found they
were all present and correct.

Damn.

I wasn’t sure what had happened here;
either Marvel’s Omega troops had done this or Rip Dunbar had blundered through
with his finger super-glued to the trigger. Not that it really mattered either
way; the whos and what-the-fucks could wait for another day, but for now, my
most pressing concern was getting the hell out of here before Dunbar called on
his NASA buddies to delete this whole place from the map.

I grabbed a few essential supplies such
as radio, GPS and winter survival kit then grabbed a cold-weather coat and
threw myself at the nearest snowmobile.

The engine revved first time and I ploughed
towards the dock doors, but the auto-door mechanism must’ve been shot out,
because the doors stayed right where they were, so I slammed on the brakes,
circled around in a big loop and approached them again. This time I popped the
missile lock off the handle-grip and fired two mini rockets at the doors,
obliterating them in a flash of steel so that I was able to jump through the
hole and out into vast snow-covered wilderness beyond.

I held the throttle open until I’d put a
good mile between myself and the base and only then did I slow to take a look
over my shoulder.

Columns of smoke rose from dirty black
scars in the mountainside, staining the crystal sky and advertising the base’s
whereabouts to anyone within fifty miles.

I looked towards the ridge but couldn’t
see the helipad from this distance. I couldn’t even be sure the others were
still up there, but I’d promised to signal if I wasn’t coming back, so I shook
off my gloves, pointed a flare at the sky and pulled the rip-cord. A halo of
blinding red streaked across the morning’s sky and fell away somewhere to the
east, leaving a fluffy white smoke trail in its wake. This smoking trail might
as well have had a big “You Are Here” arrow at my end because all at once the
snow around my feet started kicking in all directions as multiple machine guns
opened up on my position.

“Holy shit!” I freaked, twisting the
throttle to launch myself down the nearest slope and into the gully beyond.

Several rounds dinked my snowmobile and
my own bodywork fared little better with a chunk knocked out my right calf to
poleaxe me headfirst into a snowdrift. I rolled around in the snow, howling,
hollering and clawing at my wound, but had precious time for little else as the
six dots motoring towards me on the horizon compelled me to my feet. I hopped
and stumbled thirty yards or so until I found my snowmobile overturned against
a boulder and managed to haul it back onto its tracks with a little huffing and
puffing.

I didn’t know who the dots were or why
they were shooting at me but after the sort of day I’d had why wouldn’t they?

I got my snowmobile going once again and
took off for the gully just as mini-rockets started obliterating my tracks. The
dots formed up behind me like a pack of hungry wolves and I knew I’d have problems
shaking them. Most of the weapons on this machine were front facing, though I
did have a couple of mines proved utterly useless. All six of my pursuers
steered wide, suggesting they were probably using their snowmobiles’ mine
sweeping radar to avoid my nasties.

They opened up on me with the fixed guns
again so I slalomed around their hails, throwing my snowmobile down the slopes
with almost suicidal abandon. It wouldn’t be long before they hit me again, and
when they did, I couldn’t see my luck holding out for a second scratch next
time.

I turned a crest and dumped my last two
mines in their path, but every single one of them took the bend wide to avoid
my explosives.

That was my last shot. I had nowhere left
to go.

I ploughed on regardless, down the crisp
white slopes and into the
wilds
below but my chips were cooked.

At least, they were until another chef
entered the fray and this one wasn’t as hygienic as the rest of us. An enormous
explosion signalled rockets and mines meeting as one and from out of the
fireball jumped a burning snowmobile to chase down the wolf pack.

It couldn’t be!

One of the wolves blew to smithereens as
rockets ripped his snowmobile to pieces while another was cut in half under a
hail of cannon-fire. The remaining wolves scattered to meet this new threat but
he already had the drop on them, strafing one into a bottomless crevice with
his front-mounted guns while leaping over another to take his head clean off
with his snow tracks. By the time the remaining wolves knew what was happening
it was too late. Rip Dunbar was in amongst them and he was “pissed”.

Seizing the lifeline I left them all to
it and went all out to get myself off this mountain. I sped down a near
vertical slope, picking up speed and putting as much distance between myself
and that mad Coloradan but all at once he was the least of my problems. The sky
shook as a squadron of Stealth bombers ripped through the blue and I barely had
time to swear when they fired a volley of missiles that streaked above our heads
and into the smoking remnants of our base.

They exploded like popcorn, blowing
everything within in a half-mile radius of the mountaintop to atoms and shaking
several thousand tons of snow to tumble on after us.

“Oh shit!” I finally got around to
swearing, twisting my throttle the last few millimetres to race for the safety
of shallower slopes.

I had no chance.

A solid, fifty-foot tall wall of death
roared after us, blotting out the horizon and shaking the ground beneath our
tracks. Dunbar and the last remaining wolf put their differences aside and
tried fleeing for themselves, but Mother Nature had lost all semblance of
patience and was determined to show them who was boss. She raced down the
mountainside faster than we could fall, deleting everything that dared stand up
to her and roaring with indignation.

I had a few hundred yards on the others
and got to preview my own death as the wolf’s snowmobile was swamped in an
instant, disappearing from view in less time than it took to blink.

Dunbar too, was rapidly running out of
mountainside but the instant before he was swallowed up, he leapt off his
snowmobile and was encased by an enormous rubber balloon that suddenly wrapped
around him from behind. It came out of nowhere, gobbling him up like Pac Man, and
Dunbar rolled on in a big padded ball, shielded from death by injustice and the
cheating miracle of American ingenuity.

“You bastard!” I shouted but this was
lost against the thunderous crash of ice.

The whole weight of the avalanche was
being funnelled directly after me by the contours of this gully, so I figured
if I could make it across one of the ridges, I might just about be able to lose
some of the snows on the crest. This meant steering straight across its path
rather than simply trying to flee it, but I only had seconds to live either
way, so I figured it was worth a shot.

I twisted my handlebars right, hanging
over the left hand side of the snowmobile as it cut a sweep through the snow,
and gunned the engine one final time for the safety of higher ground.

If I’d had a moment to think I might’ve
turned left instead of right, because that was the side on which I had no
vision, which would have spared the terrifying spectacle of that frozen tsunami
closing in on me with merciless grace. I tried to ignore it but fifty thousand
tons of snow has a way of distracting a man from his objectives and before long
I was caught in two minds and swept off the face of the mountain.
 

I don’t think I ever really knew what hit
me. One minute I was hurtling around a snow-covered crag towards the crest of
the rise, the next I was sideswiped out of my seat by a million frozen razor
blades. I gulped down one last shocked breath, but was instantly smothered by
an insurmountable swell of ice which turned me upside down, smashed me through
a million more razor blades and turned my day into night.

I can’t remember my last thought. I think
it had something to do with Linda; how she’d react when she found out I’d died.
How she’d remember me.

That was when I realised she wouldn’t
find out. No one would.

I was a thousand miles from nowhere, on
the slopes of a deserted mountain in Greenland, and tumbling under thirty feet
of snow – and snow that never thawed at that.

I was as lost as it was ever possible to
be lost. Like one of those icemen that are uncovered from time to time in the
Alps. Archaeologists would perhaps find me in a hundred thousand years time and
wonder who I’d been. How I’d come to be here. And how I’d died.

They’d probably deduce I’d been a
soldier, chased by an enemy, wounded in dozens of conflicts and finally buried
under a winter’s avalanche for posterity. But that wouldn’t tell the whole
story.

That wouldn’t even tell a tenth of it.

All the events that had conspired to
bring me to this point. All the people I’d met. All the operations I’d seen.

It’s a shame because it was an amazing
story, even if I do say so myself, so it would have been nice to tell it to
someone.