Drought (32 page)

Martin, crouching behind the fender of his Eldorado, felt as if a freezing ocean wave had crashed over him. He was so angry and so shocked that he was shaking. But this wasn't the haphazard rage of post-traumatic stress disorder. This wasn't the blind, illogical fury that had led him to shout at Peta and push her from one side of the room to the other.

This was the same ice-cold anger that he had felt when he was on patrol in Afghanistan, and one of his friends had fallen down right in front of him, hit by a Taliban sniper. You didn't scream and shout and start firing wildly in all directions. You immediately hit the ground and took whatever cover you could find, and even though you were shaking you worked out where the shot had come from, and when you picked out that raghead's position you took extremely precise aim and squeezed the trigger and you blew his fucking face off.

Martin lifted the Colt Commando over the hood of the car and aimed it at the helicopter. It was an AS-50 AStar and he knew exactly where the fuel tank was, under the transmission deck. It was self-sealing and designed to be crashworthy, but even a self-sealing tank wouldn't be able to stand up to a sustained burst of sub-machine gun fire.

The helicopter was slowly rotating anticlockwise, its right flank gradually becoming more exposed, so Martin held back until he could take his best shot. Apart from the helicopter, though, everything else appeared to have become suspended in time. The security guards underneath it were still standing like toy action figures with their weapons raised. The security guard with the bullhorn was still pointing to the spot where Saskia had fallen. Santos still had his arms outstretched, trying to shield his grandchildren. Peta and Tyler were still cowering behind their pickup.

As the helicopter turned side-on, however, the security guard who was standing in its open door caught sight of Martin behind his car. He started to lift his carbine and shouted something to the men on the ground, but they didn't appear to hear him.

Martin fired two three-round bursts at the helicopter, to find his range. He heard Ella behind him scream, ‘
Daddy
!' but he could see the pattern of bullets hitting the dark blue fuselage almost exactly where he wanted them to, just behind the ESS logo, and he ignored her. He switched to automatic and kept on firing until the thirty-round magazine was empty.

The bullets hammered a ragged star-shaped hole in the side of the helicopter, and its gears instantly seized up, with a scream like a tortured beast. With a grating metallic shriek, its rotors stopped, and it started to drop, but before it could hit the ground its fuel tank exploded. Martin ducked down behind his car again as a tsunami of heat overwhelmed him, as scorchingly hot as his anger had been icy cold.

Fragments of helicopter were blasted in every direction, rattling and bouncing up against the walls of the canyon, clattering against their vehicles, and cracking the windshield of Martin's Eldorado. A huge ball of yellow fire rolled into the air before it was swallowed up by a boiling cloud of whitish-gray smoke.

If any of the security guards had cried out, Martin hadn't heard them. When he cautiously stood up he could see why. All that was left of the helicopter was its skids, and its controls, and the blackened framework of its seats. Its crew were still strapped in, but two of them were nothing more than legs and pelvises and ribcages, while another two were still intact, but with their clothes charred into flakes like burned newspaper and their face masks milky-opaque from the heat.

The security guards who had been standing beneath the helicopter had all been incinerated, too, and three of them were lying amongst the boulders, their arms bent in the monkey-like posture of all serious burns victims, their hair and their uniforms still smoking. There was no sign of the fourth guard, the one who been holding the bullhorn, although the bullhorn itself had been blown almost a hundred feet away, into the chaparral. The falling helicopter had probably landed right on top of him, and cremated him.

‘
Mikey
!' wailed Santos, and came hurrying as fast as he could over the boulders. ‘
Mina
!'

Martin's ears were still ringing from firing his sub-machine gun and the blast-pressure from the helicopter's fuel tank blowing up. Saskia was only a few yards away, lying on her side with little Mina next to her, but before Martin stepped out of cover, he ejected the empty magazine from his Colt and clicked in a fresh one. Wherever they were, any remaining crew from the second helicopter must have heard the explosion, and it was possible that they might send more security guards down to the canyon to find out what had happened.

He went over and hunkered down next to Saskia and Mina. As he did so, Mina opened her eyes and sat up. Dazed, she slowly looked around at the bodies and the smoldering wreckage all around her, and then she burst out crying, with a high-pitched piping sound like a fledgling jay. Martin picked her up and held her close to him, and said, ‘Shush now, Mina. Everything's OK now. Everything's fine.'

Santos came hobbling over. ‘Here,' he said. ‘Let me have her. Come to grandpa, Mina. Come on.' He took Mina in his arms and patted her on the back to comfort her, although his face was gray with shock.

‘How's Mikey?' asked Martin.

Santos gave him the smallest shake of his head. ‘See for yourself. They hit him in the chest.'

Martin looked over Santos' shoulder to where Mikey was lying face-down among the rocks. The back of his T-shirt was glistening scarlet with arterial blood.

‘What kind of monsters can kill a child like that?' said Santos, his voice trembling and his eyes flooded with tears. ‘At least you gave them what they deserved.'

Peta and Tyler were coming over to join them. They both looked as shocked as Santos. Peta was holding up her right hand to shield her face like a blinker, so that she wouldn't have to look at all the charred and half-dismembered corpses.

‘Saskia—' said Peta. ‘Is she dead?'

Martin bent over and looked at Saskia. Her eyes were closed and her face was smudged with soot from the helicopter blast. She was dressed all in black so it was difficult to see if she had been hit by any of the security guard's bullets, so he carefully turned her over on to her side.

At that moment she opened her eyes and stared at him, looking just as bewildered as little Mina.

‘My God, Martin,' she croaked. ‘What happened?'

Martin helped her to sit up. ‘Did they hit you?' he asked her.

‘No, no, they didn't,' she said. She looked around her in disbelief. ‘My God. It blew up. My God. Just look at it. Those men, they're all dead.'

‘You're sure you're not hurt?'

‘No, no, I'm not. As soon as they started shooting at me I hit the ground. Is Mina all right? Mina's not hurt, is she? I couldn't help dropping her.'

Santos was still patting Mina's back. She had stopped crying now and was repeatedly sniffing. ‘Mina's OK. It looks like she might have bumped her head, but at least she's alive.'

Martin took Saskia's hand and she climbed back on to her feet. She brushed herself down and then she pressed her fingers to her temples. ‘I have
such
a splitting headache. My God.'

Tyler was standing over Mikey's body, clutching himself as if he were cold. ‘What do we do now, Dad? We're not going to try to go on, are we?'

‘I don't think Saskia and I have a lot of choice,' said Martin. ‘I don't know how the rest of you feel. If you give up and go back to San Berdoo now, there still won't be any water. One way or another, if we don't keep going, I don't think there's much of a future for any of us.'

‘What are we going to do with Mikey?' asked Tyler. Martin could see that Mikey's shooting had badly affected him. Maybe he felt that he should have run out and caught him. He had failed to save Maria from being raped. Now he had failed to save Mikey.

Martin walked over and laid his hand on Tyler's shoulder. Tyler's mouth was puckered up with helplessness and grief.

‘Come on, Tyler. You can't blame yourself. Most of the time in life you just have to stand back and admit to yourself that there's nothing you can do.'

‘
You
always manage to do something. Look – you just blew up their helicopter and killed them all. What did I do? Nothing. I didn't even shout at Mikey to come back.'

‘Tyler, you're in shock. We all are. And for Christ's sake don't take me as some kind of example. Take it from me, you can't solve all of life's problems with a sub-machine gun.'

Just then, they heard the whistling sound of the second helicopter starting up. The roar of its engine grew louder and louder until it eventually appeared over the crest of the promontory. Shading his eyes, Martin could see that the pilot was alone in the cabin. He lifted up his Colt Commando to make sure that the pilot could see it.

The pilot circled around for a few moments, taking a long look down at the burned-out wreckage of the first helicopter below him. Then he veered steeply away, heading west. The roaring quickly dwindled to a distant drone, and then nothing.

Santos said, ‘We will have to leave Mikey here. We cannot take his body with us. Let us find a good place and cover him with stones. The Great Spirit will look over him until we can come back for him, just as we will one day return for his mother.'

J
oseph Wrack was hunched on the black leather corner couch in his office eating a take-out
chirashi zushi
, Japanese vinegared rice with fish. It had been delivered from Seattle Best Teriyaki on East Hospitality Lane, which had not yet had its water supply cut off, and would probably escape the ‘rotational hiatus' because of all the four-star hotels in the area.

He was watching a news update on the nationwide effects of the drought. The President had announced this morning that ‘we are now looking at a situation that is considerably more serious than we had first envisaged.' The TV report showed billions of acres of devastation, especially in the Midwest. In Iowa, soybean and corn crops had withered and dried up; wheat fields in Kansas had been blackened for lack of rain; and potatoes in Idaho and Wisconsin and Colorado were far too shriveled to be worth digging up. Apple trees in Oregon had failed even to blossom this year, and in California, broccoli was turning yellow even before it was harvested, and the wetlands in the Sacramento Valley which produced most of the nation's rice looked like sun-cracked deserts.

Joseph Wrack was not watching the news to be told something that he didn't know already. In fact he knew that the drought was at least twice as serious as the President was trying to make out. Governor Smiley had been regularly keeping him informed on the confidential reports that he had been receiving from various agricultural associations like the Visalia citrus growers and the Napa Valley wine growers. Orange groves had produced seventy-two percent less marketable fruit than two years ago; and in Napa, Chardonnay grapes were drying into raisins while they were still on the vine.

Joseph Wrack's interest in the news was to see how many lies and half-truths the President could get away with, just to keep the nation calm. His entire career in security had been devoted to catching people out when they were lying, and he liked to think that he could tell when somebody was being evasive or mendacious simply by their tone of voice, or the way they swept their hair back, or suddenly beamed when they imagined that their audience had actually believed them.

He was chasing a small shred of fish around his bowl with his needle-pointed Japanese chopsticks when there was a knock at the door and Jim Broader barged in. Jim Broader's blood pressure must have been high, because his swarthy complexion was even darker than usual, as if his head were going to burst. One of his shirt tails was hanging out, and he was wheezing.

‘Boss!' he gasped, and leaned against Joseph Wrack's desk while he tried to get his breath back. ‘Boss!'

‘For Christ's sake, Jim. This is my first break all day. I'm
trying
to enjoy a very late lunch?'

‘Sorry, boss. It's Martin Makepeace and Saskia Vane.'

Joseph Wrack set down his bowl on the coffee table in front of him. ‘We've
caught
them?' he said, hoarsely. ‘Don't tell me we've caught them!'

Jim Broader shook his head. ‘No, boss. I just received a message from Eye-Sky Five. They located them all right, in the Big Morongo Canyon Preserve.'

Joseph Wrack stood up, and triumphantly punched his right fist into the open palm of his left hand.

‘What did I say? What did I tell you? I
said
they weren't going to head north, didn't I? I
said
they weren't going to Vegas. They must have stopped someplace in the mountains overnight, because of the kids!

He paused, and then he said, ‘So where are they now? If we didn't catch them,
why
didn't we catch them?'

‘We don't know where they are, exactly. Eye-Sky Three eyeballed them first. They had them cornered, by the sound of it, although the terrain wasn't suitable for touchdown. Eye-Sky Five landed as near as they could and their snatch team went down on foot.'

Joseph Wrack circled around the end of the coffee table and slowly approached Jim Broader as if he were a black panther walking up to a fear-paralyzed bullock.

‘What happened, Jim? Tell me.'

‘We don't know, exactly. It must have been Makepeace. You know that he's armed with a sub-machine gun.'

‘What happened, Jim?' Joseph Wrack's voice was lowered to a rasping whisper, so that he was almost inaudible.

‘Eye-Sky Three went down, boss. Robbins said that it was totaled. Looked like the fuel tank went up.'

‘Casualties?'

Jim Broader was so nervous that he was spitting. Joseph Wrack wiped his saliva from his cheek with the back of his hand, but stayed unflinchingly face to face with him.