Extinction (16 page)

Anderson’s orders were clear: the targets were to be shot on sight.

‘We’ve got to get out of here!’ Alyssa shouted at Jack over the sound of the siren, clicking frantically with the computer mouse, downloading any page she came across.

‘We?’ Jack asked. ‘Why have I got to go anywhere? I haven’t done anything!’

That was true enough, Alyssa thought. ‘Then
I’ve
got to get out of here. Is there another way out of this room?’

‘After what you’ve done? Why should I—’

The glass wall shattered behind them, a high-powered handgun round blasting through Jack’s computer monitor.

Alyssa instinctively dropped down behind the cubicle, noticing that Jack did the same.

‘Why the hell are they shooting at me?’ Jack shouted across to her.

‘They think you’re helping me!’ Alyssa shouted back, grabbing the flash drive from the computer and stuffing it into an inside pocket. She risked a glance over the desk but whipped her head straight back down as she saw the guard level his pistol at her. The next bullet tore across the room, destroying the next cubicle, showering her and Jack with glass shards.

‘Well, thanks,’ Jack spat. ‘I guess I’ll have to help now!’

Alyssa managed a grateful smile as Jack pointed back towards the rear wall, ushering her towards it. Another way out? She really hoped so, knowing the guard would be upon them at any moment.

On her hands and knees, she started to crawl across the broken glass.

The guard snaked his way through the cubicles, angry that he’d missed that first shot. But when he’d seen the two of them sitting across from one another, he’d just raised his pistol and fired.

It was the smoked glass wall which had thrown his aim off, deflecting the path of his bullet just enough for it to miss Jack. And now they knew he was there, which would only make things harder.

Still, he figured, they would be panicked, scared and, most importantly, unarmed. What was more, they had nowhere to run. Reinforcements were already on their way, but if he played this right, all that would be left for Anderson and his men would be bodies.

Broken glass crunched under his feet as he turned past one more cubicle, his gun aimed down at the ground. But there was nothing there, just bloodstained shards of glass.

They must have crawled off, he realized, cutting their hands and knees as they went. Well, it didn’t matter; they were only prolonging the inevitable.

‘Son of a bitch!’ Jack whispered, pain shooting through his hands and knees as they continued crawling.

They had made it undetected to the storage cupboard on the far side of the room. Jack had ushered Alyssa inside and then pulled out a rear panel to reveal a duct for electric cabling. It was small, but there was enough room to crawl in. Once inside, Jack had reattached the panel and gestured for Alyssa to keep moving forward.

Jack’s curse drew Alyssa’s attention to her own cuts. The pain made pulling herself through the cramped service space decidedly unpleasant. But it was infinitely preferable to being shot at, and so she just gritted her teeth and ploughed on. She hoped the security guard wouldn’t be able to follow the trail of blood.

The cabling duct angled off in two directions, and behind her she felt Jack tap her right ankle. She veered off right, wondering why Jack knew so much about the ducts. Maybe she would ask him sometime, if they managed to survive the night.

‘So where are they?’ Anderson’s voice boomed across the computer room.

‘I . . . I don’t know, sir,’ the security guard stammered, unable to understand how the pair could have got away.

Anderson spent just seconds scanning the scene before he saw the spots of blood. There was quite a bit to start with, but then it petered out. He could see why the guard had failed to spot it, but Anderson was a whole different animal; to him, it was as plain as day.

He followed the trail to the cupboard and wrenched open the door. He was disappointed but not overly surprised to find it empty.

He saw the panel at the back instants later, observing how it hung at a very slight angle, as if someone had unsuccessfully tried pulling it back into place from the other side.

He reached forward and pulled it away, leaning through with his gun into the small, dark space. ‘Where does this go?’ he demanded.

When nobody answered him, he keyed his radio, contacting the chief analyst back in the underground chamber. ‘The cabling ducts from the computer room,’ he said without preamble. ‘Where do they lead?’

There was a pause, the man obviously calling up the building blueprints on his computer. ‘They terminate in an external access point, halfway down the building’s north side, about five metres from the rear access doors.’

Anderson keyed the radio once more and directed his men to converge on the access hatch.

Alyssa and Jack were already in the shadows of a copse of trees fifty yards away from the command centre when a whole squad of soldiers descended on the access hatch they had left only minutes earlier.

‘Well, we’re out,’ Jack breathed. ‘But now what? The whole base is surrounded by a twelve-foot perimeter fence. If we get past that, we’re still in the middle of nowhere.’

Alyssa tried hard to still her hammering heartbeat. Jack was right; they’d escaped the building and the immediate danger, but now what? They had to get out of the base somehow. She sank to her knees, thinking. There had to be a way; there always was.

Suddenly, kneeling there bleeding on to the crisp, fresh snow, she had a memory flash. HIRP Community Newsletter number 324, second page. Karl’s notice about the Adventure Club.

‘Jack,’ she said, ‘where’s the glider hangar?’

‘So do you know how to fly one of these things?’ Jack asked her as they stared at the sleek silver glider inside the large metal hangar they’d just broken into.

The hangar was not far beyond the trees; luckily, the search hadn’t extended this far yet. They’d seen two soldiers pass by, but used the cover of the trees to avoid them. The hangar was barely protected at all; theft probably wasn’t a big problem around here.

‘No,’ she answered simply.

‘Well, what a superb idea!’ Jack shot back. ‘So what do we do with it now?’

Alyssa stared at it for some time, and the specially rigged tractor next to it. ‘It’s not a fighter plane, Jack,’ she said, approaching it, figuring out how it might work. ‘I mean, how hard can it be?’

‘They’re what?’ Anderson exploded, already running towards the hangar.

The reply came back exactly the same as before: nearby security personnel had seen a tractor burst out of the hangar, dragging the glider behind it. What the hell were they thinking?

‘Open fire!’ Anderson commanded, and was gratified to hear the sound of automatic rifle shots just moments later.

This probably wasn’t the best idea she’d ever had, Alyssa admitted to herself as she drove the high-speed tractor towards the northern perimeter, pulling the lightweight glider behind her, a terrified Jack at the controls. But all he had to do was hold it straight; she was going to have to do the real work.

Jack had told her that just a few hundred metres ahead, the northern edge of the base fell away down a sheer cliff face to the forest below; it was unclimbable, by all accounts, so much so that Anderson didn’t even post security patrols there. But it offered everything she needed, and she accelerated towards it with every horsepower the tractor could muster.

She heard the sound of gunshots then, and felt the impact of rounds hitting the vehicle. She hoped the thin skin of the glider wouldn’t be damaged, but there was nothing she could do about that now. And then suddenly they were there, at the edge of the cliff.

As the tractor started to tilt over the edge, she was seized by a feeling of absolute horror, a sensation of deep-seated, all-encompassing dread that chilled her to the bone. The view out across the moonlit, rocky terrain, the snow-covered landscape, the feel of the chill wind on her face – for several terrifying, panic-inducing seconds, she was back on the chair lift cable watching her eight-year-old daughter plunge helplessly to her death.

‘Jump!’ she heard Jack yell. ‘Alyssa, jump!’

She snapped back to reality and started scrambling back through the tractor even as it fell from the top of the cliff, its weight pulling it inexorably downwards. With a last surge, she came out from the rear of the tractor, unhooked the towline from its attachment in one smooth movement and grabbed hold of the cable with both hands, gripping on for dear life as the tractor plummeted to the valley floor below. Momentum pulled the glider forward off the cliff until it soared out across the open sky, with Alyssa dangling beneath, swaying in the wind.

Anderson watched the glider as it pitched and yawed across the sky and emptied his magazine after it, ignoring the futility of such an action.

His men did the same, firing their weapons in a continuous barrage until there was no ammunition left. He watched in disbelief as the woman pulled herself up the towline and into the glider, marvelling at how strong she must be. How fearless.

He hung his head on his chest as the glider moved further and further away. He would just have to hope they would crash.

‘We’re going to crash!’ Jack announced as soon as Alyssa pulled herself, agonized and breathless, into the cabin and settled into the second seat in the tiny aircraft. ‘I’ve got no idea what I’m doing!’

‘It’s OK,’ she said between ragged breaths. ‘You’re doing fine.’ The most important thing, of course, was that they were leaving the base far behind them. Other than that, she didn’t really have any more idea than Jack.

‘How do we land one of these things?’ Jack asked, handing over control of the stick to Alyssa.

‘I’ve got no idea,’ Alyssa admitted.

It was dark outside and despite the moonlight, she struggled to make out what was in front of them. Or, she realized, where the ground was. It was white below her, but they could be at any height at all.

‘Are those branches?’ Jack asked as he looked out of the side window. Before Alyssa could turn her head, the first impact made the glider lurch hard in the air.

‘Yes!’ Alyssa coughed as they were hit again, harder this time. ‘We’re landing already. In the trees.’

She just had time to assume the crash position before another impact jolted the glider up and over itself, the tail now the highest point, the nose aimed straight down at the forest floor below. The light aircraft bounced down between the tree trunks to the snow-covered ground, and the world went black as Alyssa passed out.

One hour later, General Tomkin put the telephone down and poured himself a drink from the cabinet behind his desk.

He tried not to get angry, but it was a struggle. He drank the amber liquid down in one and poured himself another, feeling a little better already.

The day had started off well, with news of the successful first full test of Spectrum Nine, but the phone call he’d just had from Colonel Anderson had soured his mood considerably.

To his utter disbelief, it seemed that the woman who had avoided being killed at the amusement park was a journalist. And not only that, she had also managed to infiltrate the base –
while the test was being carried out
– and access information from the computer files. She had then escaped from the base with a senior staff member, in a
glider
, of all things! Apparently the glider had crash-landed out in the forest, but when Anderson and his men had arrived, the pair were long gone.

Anderson still had search parties out after them but Tomkin wasn’t holding out much hope. He would have to assume they would escape, and that they would use the information they had. What he therefore had to do was damage control.

What could the woman have found out? Jack Murray was a senior computer technician and had access to most of the information kept at HIRP, including full technical details of the weapon. He didn’t have direct access but those details were on file, and if the pair knew what they were looking for, it was conceivable they would have found something dangerously revealing.

Tomkin sighed as he wondered what to do. Should he alert all the agencies, label them terrorists and have them picked up? The trouble there, of course, was that they would have the chance to talk to too many people before Tomkin’s own trusted aides could get to them, and whatever information they had would be out in the open.

Tomkin studied Alyssa Durham’s file, trying to assess what she would do. Assuming she had physical evidence with her of Spectrum Nine, would she just run to the nearest internet café and put it all on the web?

His instinct told him that she wouldn’t; people published things on the internet all the time, and most of it was all but ignored. People only trusted information if it came from a reputable source, and that meant the mainstream media. Alyssa Durham would almost certainly contact James Rushton and convince him to publish a full report in the newspaper. She was a professional, after all, Tomkin reasoned. He would still order an instant block on all her email accounts, as well as her website and blog, just in case she did decide to post anything, and he would do the same for Murray too. But Rushton was the key.

Tomkin picked up the phone again to order round-the-clock surveillance on the newspaper editor and his assistants, including twenty-four-hour monitoring of all communications into and out of the
Post
building.

Satisfied that he had done what he could, he relaxed back in his chair and stared at his own computer, thinking about the additional information it contained.

At least
, he thought,
they didn’t break in here
.

A
LYSSA LOOKED AT
the man over the small desk, hoping he wouldn’t notice the state she was in.

She had replaced her old clothes, which had been soaked through and muddy, but she hadn’t been able to completely rid her face of the dirt which covered it, nor disguise the two-inch gash on her forehead from the crash landing, not to mention the numerous small scabs which now crossed her hands and knees from the broken glass.