Impact (2 page)

She looked around.

The airport terminal buildings had been abandoned to the infected. She could see deformed figures in the B Gate lounge and control tower. Atlantic arrivals. T-shirt slogans in French and German. Big-ass Nikons slung round their necks. She watched them butt themselves bloody against plate glass as they tried to reach troops milling down below. Some of the blood smeared on the windows was black and crusted. Must have been throwing themselves against the glass day and night for weeks.

Rather than defend the entire airport complex, the garrison had fenced two runways and a couple of hangars, made a temporary home in a bunch of tents and Conex containers.

Beyond that was the Vegas skyline. Burned-out casinos. The onyx pyramid of the Luxor, punctured and smouldering like it took artillery fire.

Frost was joined by Pinback, Guthrie and Early. All of them in Air Force flight suits, backpacks slung over their shoulders.

They watched a couple of grunts park a baggage train loaded with cargo pallets to reinforce the gate.

‘Anyone want to hit the town, play the slots?’ asked Guthrie.

Captain Pinback contemplated the devastated city.

‘Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair!’ He swigged Diet Coke and crunched the can. ‘Or some such.’

The grunt stood beside Frost. He tapped a smoke from a soft pack of Marlboros and sparked a match.

‘Welcome to Vegas.’

A Chinook flew low over the ruins of Vegas.

Hancock was strapped in a payload wall seat. The ramp was open. Fierce rotor roar. Typhoon wind. The tethered tail gunner trained his .50 cal on car-clogged streets below.

Hancock released his harness, stood and gripped cargo webbing. He looked out the porthole.

They cruised five-hundred feet above The Strip.

Wrecked casinos. Judging by school buses and ambulances clustered at each entrance, the casinos had, at some stage of the pandemic, become makeshift hospitals. Vegas residents, tourists unable to get home, all of them headed for refuge centres hoping for evacuation somewhere safe. Bedded down between the slots, the Blackjack tables, waiting for FEMA to truck in food parcels and bottled water. Must have been hell. Battery light. No air con. Dysentery, overflowing toilets, rival family groups battling over floor space and hoarded food. Then infection took hold. Screams in the dark. Panic. Stampede. Cavernous, blacked-out game floors turned to a slaughterhouse.

‘Check this,’ shouted one of the cargo marshalls. He beckoned Hancock to a starboard porthole.

He pointed at Trump International.

‘What?’

‘Look.’

A smashed window, midway up the building. Roped bed sheets, hanging down the facade of the hotel.

‘Tells a story, don’t it?’

Hancock gamed the scenario in his head. What would he have done? How could he have survived the situation?

The hotel overrun by infected residents. Bodies choking the stairwells, the corridors. Blood up the walls. Screaming, eye-gouge mayhem on every floor. And somewhere, up on thirty, some poor bastard barricaded in their room. Tough choice. Stay put in their fortified room and starve, or arm themselves with a table leg, open the door and attempt to fight their way level by level to the atrium.

Brainwave: they unlocked the door of their suite long enough to snatch a laundry cart. Spent a few hours lashing sheets together, testing knots. Then they put a chair through the window and repelled a couple of hundred feet down the exterior of the building to the parking lot.

‘Tenacious motherfucker. Hope they made it.’

Touchdown. Rotor-wash kicked up a dust storm.

Wheels settled and blades wound to a standstill.

Trenchman at the foot of the cargo ramp.

Yellow warning beacon. A vehicle slowly emerged from the dark interior of the chopper. A wide wheelbase platform big as an SUV chassis loaded with something cylindrical under tarp. No driver. Electric motor. The heavy platform slowly rolled down the loading ramp. Hancock walked by its side, operating the control handset.

‘Is that the package?’ asked Trenchman.

Hancock nodded.

‘Take me to the vault.’

They walked across a chevroned slipway towards a building signed: FIRE RESCUE. The heavy wheeled platform hummed beside them, advanced at two miles an hour, balloon tyres crunching grit.

Hancock looked around.

The runway perimeter fence, razor wire draped with shredded shirt fabric and torn flesh.

Terminal buildings, derelict and overrun.

He squinted at the watchtowers. The troops looked strung out. Mismatched fatigues. Scraggy beards.

‘Where’s your flag?’ he asked.

‘You’re shitting me, right?’

‘Military installation, Colonel. Ought to raise a flag.’

‘I’ll get right on it.’

‘Have to say, discipline seems to be an issue round here.’

‘I got forty guys, give or take, from a bunch of different units. Some are Reserve. Shit, some are navy. All of them have seen horrors. All of them have lost family. I got to protect them from infected bastards massing at the wire, and I got to protect them from themselves.’ He gestured to graves dug in the dirt by the runway. Rifle/helmet markers. ‘We average a suicide every couple of days. Know what happened last week? Two perimeter guys didn’t report for duty. Found them in their tent, heads bust open with a golf club. God knows what went down. Brains everywhere. Maybe an argument went bad and somebody flipped. Point is: one of my guys is a double murderer and there’s nothing I can do about it. That’s the kind of bullshit going on round here. Place is a goddam madhouse. Yeah, I let the boys party. Try to keep them alive, try to keep them sane. Want to write me up? Complain to my commanding officer? Good luck with that, Captain.’ He pointed to the eagle tab, the rank insignia stitched to his MARPAT field jacket. ‘In the meantime, I’m CO of this joint and I’ll run it anyway I damn please.’

Trenchman lifted a shutter and led Hancock into the empty fire house.

‘This is where they kept rescue vehicles. You want a weapon vault? This is the best we can do.’

Hancock looked around the empty chamber.

‘How many exits?’

‘There’s a side door. Chained shut. Fire escape at the back. We chained that, too.’

‘I have a couple of equipment trunks aboard the chopper. I need them brought here.’

‘Okay.’

‘I’ll need light. Any food and bedding you can muster.’

‘All right.’

‘And I need two guards outside the door at all times. No one comes in here but me, understood? Make this clear from the outset: anyone sets foot in this room without my permission, I’ll shoot them in the fucking head.’

‘Hey. I’m installation commander. I’ll provide all the assistance you need. But anything happens to my boys, you’re going to be answerable.’

‘You got orders. I got mine. Anyone fucks with the weapon, anyone fucks with the mission, I will put a bullet in their skull. Tell your men. Make it clear.’

Trenchman showed the aircrew to their quarters. A freight container.

TRANSPACIFIC LOGISTICS.

Three bunks and a couple of chairs. Flak jackets, magazines, cross held to the wall by chewing gum.

‘Where are the previous occupants?’ asked Frost. She checked out an oil drum washstand. Basin. Mirror. Old toothbrush.

‘Dead.’

‘How?’

‘Does it matter?’

‘There aren’t enough bunks,’ said Guthrie.

‘You won’t be staying long. This is just a place to drop your bags and freshen up. We got MREs, if you’re hungry.’

‘Like a fucking oven in here.’

‘We got plenty of bottled water.’

‘Anything refrigerated?’

Trenchman gestured around him.

‘This entire camp is for your benefit. Remember that. None of us chose to be here. We annexed the airport, secured this section of runway so you folks could complete your mission. You ought to be flying from Nellis, but it’s out of action. Don’t know why. Biggest Air Force base in the region. But some major shit went down, place is overrun, so instead we got to hold this shitty runway so you folks have the distance to take off.’

He checked his watch.

‘Sundown. We aim to get you in the air before morning. Soon as you return, we pack our shit and haul ass out of here. Let those infected fucks take the compound. Welcome to it.’

‘Where will you go?’

Trenchman shrugged.

‘The war is over. We lost. Earth belongs to the virus. Personally, I aim to find somewhere remote and hold out as long as I can. You folks do as you please.’

Sundown.

They crossed a slipway to hangar seven.

Trenchman fired up a diesel generator wired to an external junction box.

‘We keep the hangar doors closed,’ he explained. ‘Try to stay out of sight much as possible. Don’t want to agitate prowlers out there beyond the wire.’

He opened a side door and let them inside.

Cavernous dark. Pungent stink of aviation fuel.

‘Hold on,’ said Trenchman. His voice echoed.

He threw a wall-mounted knife switch. Arc lights bolted to high roof girders flared to life.

A gargantuan plane filled the hangar. A slate grey B-52. Hulking airframe, wide wingspan, almost as big as a 747.

‘
Liberty Bell
. Flown down from Alaska. Spent her twilight years flying stand-off patrols, edge of Russian airspace.’

‘What happened to the original crew?’

‘They went over the wire a couple of weeks back. Happens now and again. Couple of guys get together, figure they stand a better chance on their own. Desertion, I guess. Not that anyone gives a shit. If a bunch of them walk out the front gate, what am I going to do? Shoot them in the back?’

Captain Pinback gestured to the plane:

‘What kind of condition is she in?’

‘We got a Crew Chief. Used to maintain AWACS. Says she’s not in great shape, but it’s not like you’re taking her on a long-haul flight. All she has to do is stay airborne long enough to deliver the package.’

Pinback walked across the hangar. Echoing bootfalls. He approached the nose of the plane, looked up at the flight deck windows. He patted the hull.

‘How long to get her ready?’ asked Trenchman.

Pinback shrugged.

‘Couple of hours for a walk-around. Check her out, kick the tyres. Hour to finish fuelling. Hour or two to load and secure the missile. I’d say wheels up some time around two a.m.’

Pre-flight inspection. Frost and Pinback watched the Chief and his team conduct a nose-to-tail survey.

The names of absent airmen stencilled beneath the cockpit windows:

EMERSON

BLAIR

WALTON

KHODCHENKOVA

TRAINOR

It made Frost feel sorry for the abandoned plane, as if the half-billion dollar war machine had been orphaned.

A three-cable hitch to a power car supplied 205v AC/24v DC.

A fuel truck parked by the wing, hose hitched to a roof valve set in the fuselage spine, just back from the flight deck. Salute and wave for grunts pumping JP8 into the tanks.

The main gear bogies: four balloon tyres on white aluminium hubs, chocked, supporting thick hydraulic actuators.

The Chief knelt and checked tyre pressure.

He moved on and worked through his checklist:

Hydraulic reservoirs.

Accumulator pressure.

Moisture drains.

Pitot survey.

Shuttle valves.

Wing surfaces.

Engine intake/duct plugs removed.

All panels and doors closed and secure.

Frost glanced up into a gear well. She reached up and ran a finger across the hatch. Fingertip black with dust and grime.

‘She’s dying of neglect, sir. Hasn’t been serviced in a long while.’

‘Airworthy?’

‘Barely. A junker. There are wrecks lined up in Arizona boneyards in better condition than this.’

Pinback shrugged.

‘Single sortie. There and back. That’s all she has to do.’

They walked beneath the port wing. Huge engine nacelles, each containing two Pratt & Whitney turbofans. Wide intakes. Fanned turbine blades.

Frost traced a rivet seam with her finger.