Through the Killing Glass (6 page)

He had been
rehabilitated just six months later and re-instated with all honors, to be sent
to the new base at Ladakh where the Red Guards kept a watch on the community
called Wonderland. It had been nothing more than glorified sentry duty and he
had begun to wonder why he had been spared. Then the stealthy black helicopter
he had just seen land had arrived and started going out on sorties to the
Deadland. Its crew and passengers had been flown in from Shanghai and even
though he was the base commander, Chen had not been allowed any access to them.
They stayed in their own quarters behind a walled complex, and did not report
to him.

He wondered
what the old men in the Central Committee were up to now, but knew that
whatever it was, the cost in blood would be paid by the young conscripts he was
now supposed to lead.

***

The dust was
swirling around her and Alice had the hood on her sweatshirt pulled up around
her face. She had grown up in the Deadland, but just a few months of living in
the relative comfort of Wonderland told her just how brutal and uncompromising
life in the Deadland could be in comparison. When she had lived there with her
family in their settlement, conventional wisdom was that no human could survive
in the Deadland unless they were in a large, organized group. The Deadland was
teeming with predators, Biter and human alike, and now Satish and Alice would
have to contend with them on their own if they were to try and solve the
mystery of the Biter attacks. Alice knew that Bunny Ears, Hatter and her other
Biters would be close at hand through their network of hidden underground
tunnels, but there was no way for her to contact them, and depending on them to
show up when she needed help was hardly a good survival strategy.

‘Alice, my boys
told me that this was the only sector they did not patrol yesterday. If the
attackers came into Wonderland from the outside, then it must have been through
here.’

It was now
getting dark, and Satish suggested that they rest. Alice was not going to get
tired from walking, and Satish was a professional soldier who could keep going
for some hours yet. However, they did not want to take the chance of bumping
into unwelcome company in the darkness.

Alice hid the
bike in the bushes and then called out, ‘Up the trees.’

Satish looked
at Alice incredulously.

‘Come on, are
you serious? Do we have to hang from branches like Tarzan?’

That puzzled
Alice; she came from a time after cartoons had ceased to exist, and she had no
idea who or what Tarzan was.

‘No, because
Biters cannot climb trees, and we’ll see bandits while they’re far away.’

Satish grunted
at the wisdom and clambered up a tree. Taking the adjoining tree, Alice
whispered, ‘Take a nap. I’ll keep watch.’

About two hours
later, Alice heard a rustling noise nearby. She raised her rifle, looking
through the night vision scope to see three men walking towards them. They were
armed, though it looked like they carried a motley collection of homemade
pistols and an antique looking shotgun; the hallmarks of Deadland bandits. But
despite the nature of the weapons, Alice knew that men such as these could be
deadly.

As the men sat
down and proceeded to take some food out, Alice relaxed. They had no idea Alice
and Satish were sitting just a few feet above them, and they would soon
hopefully be on their way.

Then she saw
something that made her take a closer look. One of the bandits was taking
something out of a bag. Only it was not just any bag. It was a child’s bag,
cobbled together from old clothes, patched together by a loving mother,
embellished with cartoon characters that the child must have heard of in tales
told by the adults who had experienced them on screen and in books before The
Rising. There was only one place in the Deadland where such a bag could be
found now: in Wonderland. And it was likely that this had been made as a school
bag for a child who had been murdered just two days ago.

Something
snapped inside Alice, and she took a signal flare from her backpack and threw
it to the ground, blinding the three men. Before they could gather their wits,
Alice was in front of them, her rifle pointed at them.

‘Where did you
get that bag?’

One of the men
made the fatal mistake of thinking they were faced with a mere girl, and he
brought up his pistol. Alice snapped off a three round burst, hitting him in
the chest and slamming him against the tree behind him. The noise had awakened
Satish and he whistled to let the men below him know that he was just above
them. The hood had fallen from around Alice’s head and now the remaining men
saw her face in the fading glow of the flare.

‘The Quee—’

A bullet
crashed just inches from his foot, cutting his sentence short.

‘I asked you a
simple question. Where did you get that bag?’

The men were
now shrinking back in fear. Before The Rising they had been convicts on death
row, and both men were well accustomed to violence and crime; talents that had
served them well in the Deadland. But for all that, they knew that they were no
match for this half-Biter girl who could not be killed. They had heard tales of
her and what she had done to the Red Guards, and they had given her settlement
at Wonderland a wide berth, only now to be faced with her in the middle of the
Deadland.

One of them
gathered up the courage to speak. ‘We saw a group of Biters in the Deadland a
day ago. One of them dropped this.’

Alice thought
back to the strange Biters she had seen at the scene of the latest attack.

‘Where were
these Biters going? Were they going towards the Reservation?’

The man who had
spoken now looked at her curiously.

‘No, that was
the weird thing. We thought all the Biters around here followed you, but not
these. These ones were different.’

Satish had now
climbed down, but he kept his gun pointed at the two men.

‘Why do you
think these Biters were different?’

‘They were
picked up by a black helicopter.’

The next
morning, Alice and Satish had the two bandits lead them to the location where
they had seen the helicopter take off. Satish took a look around the area.

‘Alice, if they
come back, this is where they will come. They’ve flattened the ground to create
some sort of a landing pad, and they’ve sandbagged those two hills to create
guard towers.’

Satish got on
his radio to call his recon teams. They checked in one by one, but not one of
them had seen or heard a helicopter approach the area. Then again, if a black
helicopter had flown in low at night, it was possible to pull off such an
attack. Why and how someone would bring Biters in to launch such attacks was,
however, beyond Satish.

Alice kicked
the dust at her feet, thinking of the dead children back at Wonderland.

‘Then we will
wait here, and when they come back, we will kill them all.’

***

‘It’s an attack
helicopter.’

Alice heard
Satish’s warning and looked up to see the black, predatory shape hover in the
distance. They had been waiting for close to a day, and were about to give up
hope and try their luck elsewhere. A makeshift bunker near the landing zone had
been their regufe. They had been expecting a troop carrier, of the sort the
bandit had described, and with the advantage of surprise, Alice was fairly
confident that she and Satish could have handled whoever was being flown in on
these deadly missions into Wonderland. However, they most certainly did not
have the firepower to deal with an attack helicopter.

‘How far away
are your boys?’

Satish grinned.
 ‘One of them has that chopper in his sights right now. If we order it, a
SAM will be going up that chopper’s tailpipe. Should we fire?’

Alice shook her
head emphatically. ‘No. If we show our hand now, they will not go through with
their landing. Let’s wait.’

But it soon
became apparent this helicopter did not mean to land. It swept over the area
several times, and then one of Satish’s teams radioed in.

‘White Rook, I
can see two Red Guard APCs and two jeeps filled with Red Guards coming. Still
four kilometers from your location, but they are closing in fast. Wait, they
just stopped, and it looks like an officer is scanning the area with
binoculars.’

Alice asked,
‘What’s going on?’

Satish
responded, ‘They seem to be on a search mission more than an attack. I have no
idea what or who they might be looking for. Coming this close to Wonderland on
land is a big risk for them to take, especially in broad daylight, so it must be
someone important.’

Alice thought
back to what she had heard in the Looking Glass. ‘Could it be those Americans
who had supposedly escaped?’

Satish had his
own binoculars trained on the horizon and replied without shifting his gaze. ‘I
don’t see how two escaped prisoners would warrant such a search attempt.’

Then he froze.

‘Alice, look,
there! At two o’clock, maybe a kilometer out, near that large Banyan tree.’

Alice had her
rifle up at her shoulder and looked through the scope. It was a sunny day and
there was excellent visibility, but she did not notice what Satish had seen
until he pointed it out again. During her own training in the Deadland, her
instructors had taught her the art of escape and evasion, but she had never
really been trained to look for a concealed enemy, simply because Biter hordes
were not exactly proponents of stealth and concealment. However, in the house
to house fighting against the Red Guards that had followed, it had become a
critical skill, one she had learnt from Satish and Arjun, and from her own
combat experience.

Satish gave an
appreciative whistle. ‘That man sure has guts, that much is for sure. He’s got
an attack helicopter on top of him and perhaps fifty Red Guards on land, and he
hasn’t lost his nerve and made a run for it.’

Now that Alice
had spotted him, she saw that there was a bit of an arm visible beneath the
undergrowth. It was not going to be visible from the air, but once the Red
Guard vehicles got there, it was only a matter of time before they discovered
the fugitives.

Alice put her
rifle aside.

‘Satish, how
many men do you have covering the chopper?’

‘Just a two-man
SAM crew and two riflemen. With the element of surprise, I have no doubt they
could take the chopper down, but they cannot hold off all those Red Guards. I
have two more teams with RPGs headed here, but they won’t make it for the next
thirty minutes.’

The buzzing
sound of a large caliber automatic gun firing made Alice swivel her head
around. The attack helicopter had seen something and was firing from its chin
mounted turret, the rounds kicking up dust and rocks on the ground below. Alice
looked through her scope and saw a frail old man stumbling along the ground.
Another man was trying to pull him back under cover, but the older man had
clearly lost his nerve. It was hard to be sure from this distance, but their
complexion and features suggested that these were indeed the two Americans who
had escaped.

She turned to
look at Satish, and he just looked back, an eyebrow raised, silently asking her
the question.

‘Bring it
down!’

As Satish
relayed the order to his men, a trail of white smoke rose from the ground to
Alice’s left and snaked up towards the helicopter. The pilot had been so busy
in trying to target the fleeing fugitives that he never had a chance to react.
The missile slammed into the mid-section of the helicopter, consuming it in a
giant fireball.

Alice could now
see the Red Guard vehicles fast approaching the two men. She mounted the bike,
with Satish behind her, and they sped towards the scene.

Alice was more
than five hundred meters away when the lead Red Guard APC opened fire with its
machine gun. Alice swerved her bike to the right and dove off the seat, rolling
and coming up behind the cover of a large tree. Satish was concealed behind
another tree. Satish’s men were about a hundred meters to their left, but they
too were holding their fire. Assault rifles would do little damage to the APCs.

‘Over here!’

The two men
heard Alice’s shout and scrambled to her. Alice did not have much time to
register their appearances, but they were clearly white, one a reed-thin old
man whose ribs showed prominently through a dirty vest, and the other a younger
man, perhaps the same age as Arjun, wearing a tattered leather jacket. The
younger man’s eyes widened a bit as he saw Alice, and he started to back up,
when Alice pushed him down.

‘Stay here and
you may just live.’

The Red Guard
APCs were now advancing steadily, and they had guessed correctly that the
absence of any resistance must have meant that they were not up against enemies
with heavy missiles or firepower that could threaten their vehicles. The two
jeeps stayed behind, and as Alice looked, an officer was standing up in the
back of one of the jeeps, speaking on a radio.

‘Satish, those
APCs will be on us in a couple of minutes. I have a plan.’

Before Satish
could say anything, Alice had reached into her backpack and taken out two
fragmentation grenades and raced to her bike.

‘Distract one
of them!’

Satish peered
out from behind cover and started firing at one of the APCs, and his men
started unloading their weapons on it from the other direction. Caught in the
crossfire, the commander manning the heavy machine gun on the turret was forced
inside, as the other APC came towards it to deal with the sudden threat. Just
then Alice’s bike roared to life and she sped towards the second APC, the
grenades in her hands. Distracted by Satish’s men, the commander in the APC’s
turret did not see Alice until it was too late.