Impact (25 page)

High above the desert. Could almost see the curvature of the earth.

An hour since he woke. He had spent the day on a plateau, curled in the shadow of a boulder. A febrile semi-sleep. He had an eagle’s eye view of the desert. The centre of the limestone outcrop had been burned black by campfires. The place had almost certainly been used as a vantage point by native Americans. Bet if he kicked around in the dust he would unearth flint arrowheads. If he climbed higher he would find rocks stained with alien, aniconic art. Handprints and swirls. Markers left by aboriginals who climbed to this remote elevation to commune with gods and vultures.

The plan: head north across the mountainside. Sooner or later he would find himself overlooking the aim point, the site targeted for destruction. He guessed he’d know it when he saw it. Must be something out here, some kind of significant installation.

Faint clatter of rocks to his left.

He looked up, studied the crags and ledges above. Trickling dust.

Couldn’t shake the skin-crawling sensation of being watched, the suspicion his steps had been dogged by an unseen presence ever since he reached the Range. He hoped any infected that might be haunting the mountainside wouldn’t develop the smarts to roll a boulder on his head.

A mine entrance. Truck rails. A couple of yards of shaft, then rubble.

He picked a tin DANGER sign from the ground and wiped away dust.

ANACONDA MINING CORP.

A shaft sunk by uranium prospectors looking for a seam. One of the few reasons a person would visit this blighted place.

Adventurers scoured the Panamints. They dynamited the cliffs and sifted scree, looking for a telltale sheen of gold. A fresh wave of chancers chipped samples with a rock hammer, scanned rubble with a Geiger rig, whooped like wildcatters when they struck a pocket of uranium ore. A Faustian deal. Euphoric prospectors would stake a claim with the county recorder, clothes matted with radioactive dust. A few years rolling in big money, then thyroid cancer.

Vague memories of
The Conqueror
, the god-awful Genghis Khan biopic staring John Wayne. Filmed in the desert downwind of the Upshot-Knothole nuclear tests, the night detonations that had Hughes-era tourists partying around the roof pools of their Vegas hotels, toasting the gamma flash as it lit the horizon like summer lightning. The crew spent a month filming their Mongol turkey. They erected a barbarian camp, marshalled a galloping hoard for the battle scenes, nursed embryonic carcinomas as they breathed dust tainted with lethal isotopes cooked in the radiant millisecond of fission.

The atomic desert. An implacably lethal environment.

Noble allowed himself a sip of water. His canteen was half empty. Another day, two at the most, and he would enter the terminal stages of dehydration. At which point he might as well eat a bullet, or swan-dive from a high crag.

He didn’t feel scared. He’d bet his life on a roll of the dice, the gamble he would find salvation at the target site. It might be a vain hope. He might die out here in the barren wastes. But at least he would uncover the object of their mission, the reason they flew a cataclysmic payload into the desert.

Something on the ground near the mine entrance. Some kind of wrapper. He picked it up, squinted in the failing light.

An energy bar. Same brand Guthrie grabbed from the Vegas food store before the flight.

He examined the wrapper under the beam of his flashlight. Pristine. No accumulated dust.

Someone from the 2nd Bomb Wing must have spent the day in this mine entrance very recently. Someone from the limo.

He stepped outside and cupped his hands.

‘Hello,’ he shouted. ‘Hello, anyone?’

His voice echoed back at him from surrounding crags and crevices.
Hello, anyone?

‘Anyone out there?

Anyone out there?

‘Hey.’

Hey.

No reply.

He sat a while and listened to the night wind.

Noble stood on a high ledge and looked out over moonlit desert.

An installation on the desert floor beneath him. A wire-ringed compound. Hard to make out details. Vehicles, trailers, geodesic tents. The place looked pretty smashed up.

He descended the mountain wall. He dropped ledge-to-ledge, slid down steep accumulations of scree kicking up a dust cloud.

Concrete pylons staked in the sand supported a nine-foot razor wire fence hung with volt-zag danger signs.

The main gates hung off their hinges.

Noble walked into the compound, stood in tyre-rutted sand and looked around. Spectral ruination. Moonlight and deep shadow. Wrecked accommodation units. Burned-out vehicles.

No movement. Deathly silence.

A shot-up guard booth near the gate. Ballistic glass frosted by bullet strikes, splattered with blood. A phone hung off the hook. Casings scattered underfoot. Looked like someone ran to the guard booth to summon for help, got mown down before the call could connect.

He shone his flashlight into an adjacent tent. A diesel generator. A 2500 kVA CAT, big as a van. Gunfire dings, but it seemed to be intact. The fuel level hung a couple of notches above zero.

Key Turn.

Screen menu: AUTO.

Green button: START.

The generator coughed smoke and fired up.

He backed out of the tent to escape exhaust fumes.

The compound floodlights buzzed and glowed with restored current. They lit the installation harsh white.

Some kind of Agency black site. Half a mile square, with a helipad at the centre. A bunch of bunkhouse cabins. Accommodation for about a hundred guys.

The place was a battle zone.

A bulldozer, presumably brought to the location to level and compact the ground prior to construction, had been used to trash dormitory huts and offices. The dozer had crushed the row of blockhouses flat. Splintered wood, flutter insulation, torn roof felt. Scattered mattresses and blankets matted with dust.

Four SUVs had flipped and burned like someone tossed grenades.

A bunch of airstream trailers riddled with bullet holes, methodically strafed by .50 cal.

A toppled flagpole lying across the chalk H of the helipad.

Pop and crackle from a bunch of pole-mounted tannoy horns, as if restored power had trigger a PA system. Faint hiss, then ‘Surfin’ USA’. Beach tunes echoing over war-torn desolation.

Noble followed tannoy cable snaking in the dust, hoping to find the installation main office and shut off the music.

One of the PA poles had been toppled by a chopper. The charred remains of a JetRanger lying on its side. The fuselage had been ripped open by an internal detonation. The doors were cratered by bullet strikes. It seemed like someone made a methodical attempt to wipe out the camp. Tossed grenades, destroyed every vehicle, every building, made sure no one could leave.

He sniffed the air.

The smell of incineration hung over the site. Burned synthetics. And behind it, the sweet stink of cooked flesh. He’d yet to see a single body but somewhere, close by, there was a corpse-pyre.

A truck lying on its side. Looked like it jackknifed and rolled.

A freight container had spilled from the trailer. It sat on its roof, doors ajar.

Noble pulled one of the doors wide and peered into the darkness of the container. Foul stink. He switched on a flashlight. Blood-smeared walls.

He stepped inside. Ceiling beneath his feet, floor above his head. Manacles hung down, swung and clinked. The place reeked of shit, desperation and death.

He crouched. Discarded blister packs. Vet tranquillisers.

A message scratched on the container wall:

Fig 1.

Frost spoke slow and clear, super-calm, placating a madman.

‘I haven’t got the code.’

Hancock lowered the pistol and took aim like he was about to put a bullet in Frost’s good foot.

‘Seriously, I swear I haven’t got the code.’

‘I think we’ve already established, by your willingness to disregard the oaths you took when you put on that uniform, your word isn’t worth a damn.’

Frost cautiously reached up, unzipped her flight suit and pulled at her shirt to demonstrate nothing hung round her neck.

‘Where is it?’

‘I burned it.’

‘Bullshit.’

‘Check outside. The signal fire. You’ll find the clasp somewhere in the ashes.’

‘The code. The paper slip. You watched it burn?’

‘To a crisp.’

‘But you read it. You read the code before you set it alight.’

‘No.’

Hancock smiled and shook his head.

‘You’re lying. You looked at the digits.’

‘No.’

‘The authorisation slip was sealed in a heavy plastic tag. In order to destroy the code you must have cracked open the tag and unfolded the paper. Only way to ensure the slip got totally incinerated. Which means, as you flicked open your Zippo and sparked a flame, you looked at the digits. You saw the code sequence, an instant before it burned. And now it’s in your head. Just got to wheedle it out.’

‘And how do you intend to do that? Hypnosis?’

Frost deploying a standard bar brawl distraction technique. The urge to completion.

Throw your glass in the air. Your opponent will watch its trajectory, wait for it to hit the floor and smash. Use the pause as an opportunity to aim a jab at their throat.

Or ask your opponent a question.
What the fuck did you call me?
Wait till they start to speak, then crush the bridge of their nose with the heel of your palm.

‘I’m sure, given a big enough incentive, you can …’

Frost snatched up her crutch and lashed the pistol from his hand. The Beretta hit the wall and fell to the floor.

She drove the crutch into his face. Roar of pain and anger. Hancock snatched the crutch from her hand.

She lunged for the pistol. Hancock was crippled by pain, but managed to throw himself forwards and pin the weapon beneath his body, putting it out of her reach.

Frost scrambled for the ladderwell.

She pushed the barricade aside. Tumbling equipment cases. She stumbled into the sun, momentarily overwhelmed by heat and light.

She couldn’t outrun Hancock. Too lame. Her only chance of safety: ambush the guy as he tried to hunt her down.

She quickly limped towards the ridgeline, then hurriedly retraced her path, matching her footprints like she was jumping stepping stones across a stream.

She reached the wing tip. She reached up, gripped the lips of the aerofoil and hauled herself onto the wing surface. She hobbled back towards the body of the plane, boots scuffing dusted metal.

The flight deck.

Hancock curled foetal and clutched his head. His hands were smeared red. He could feel his scalp wound through the chute-fabric bandage. Sutures binding torn flesh had ripped open. Fresh blood leaked from the improvised dressing.

He rolled onto his side and retrieved the pistol. He crawled to the ladderwell and part-climbed, part-fell to the cabin below.

He leant against the ragged metal of the wall fissure, shielded his eyes against the sun.

Footprints led across sand to the crest of the ridgeline.

He adjusted his grasp of the Beretta. His palm was gummed to the polymer butt-grip by blood. He stepped from the plane, but immediately brought himself to a halt.

Frost was smart. She wouldn’t run into the desert leaving a follow-me trail of prints.

Stark shadows on the ground around him. The curve of the wing. The flag pole. His own silhouette, stretching across the sand ahead of him.

His attention was drawn by an irregularity in the wing shadow. A slight prominence, as if something were resting on the upper surface.

Hancock trained his pistol on the lip of the wing. He swayed. He leant against the fuselage to restore his aim.

He kept his attention trained on the wing while his left hand groped for the radio tucked in a chest pouch. He raised the handset to his mouth and keyed Transmit:

‘Where are you, Frost?’

Frost lay on the starboard wing. Baking metal. Drops of sweat ran down her face, dripped from her nose, splashed on the dust-matted aluminium in front of her.

She gripped her knife. Palm-sweat greased the leather grip. Seven-inch blade poised to stab.