Impact (5 page)

She reached down and unlaced. A swollen foot prised from her boot. Gym sock peeled away, fraction at a time, teeth clenched against the pain.

She gently rolled the right leg of her flight suit. Her foot and calf were swollen, skin livid and stretched tight. She caressed her shin, traced her tibia with the tip of an index finger, gently probed for some kind of subcutaneous ridge that might indicate splintered bone. Nothing. Maybe her leg had suffered a hairline fracture rather than an emphatic break. Or maybe her leg was intact. Maybe she had suffered some kind of catastrophic sprain that would subside in a couple of days.

She gripped her ankle and checked for a tibial pulse. She flexed her toes. Still got circulation. Still got feeling.

She eased the sock back over her foot. She slid her foot into the boot, barked with pain as she pulled laces taut.

A plastic oar. She broke it over her good knee, and tossed the paddle.

She snapped the shaft in two.

Nylon cord ran around the lip of the raft. A handhold to help a downed airman pull himself into the boat.

She sliced the cord with her knife.

An improvised splint: oar sections either side of her injured shin, lashed in place with nylon cord. Snorts of discomfort turned to a thin, growling scream by the time she tied the final knot.

She punched the vinyl floor of the boat, lay and tried to get her breathing under control.

Fuck self-pity. Injured leg. Fleeting. Inconsequential.

She closed her eyes and stroked the Ranger emblem stamped on the leather sheath of her knife.

Injured leg. An inconvenience, nothing more.

She limped across dunes. She paused for a compass bearing. Flipped the lid of the lensatic, watched the liquid-damped needle swing and settle. Maintaining steady progress north. She snapped the case shut.

Backward glance. A trail of footprints. The raft was a distant dot.

Maybe if she covered a few miles she could raise someone on the CSEL. If she couldn’t bounce a signal off a satellite, if the MILSTAR network were down, NCASEC and TACAMO off air, she would have to coax an unboosted analogue transmission across the mountains to habitation. Tough job. Distant crags were marbled with uranium ore radiating magnetic anomalies that could potentially jam a radio signal.

She kept walking. Each jolting step made her leg burn like she was hung over a fire rotating on a spit, but if she stopped to rest, she might not be able to get moving again.

Nagging doubt: hard to know where the parachute brought her down. Maybe she was walking deeper into the wilderness, walking further from help.

Her father had been a Ranger. If he were here, keeping pace as she trudged through the desert, he would say:
over-deliberation fucks you up. A samurai will reflect for seven breaths then commit to a decision. So roll the dice and God bless you.

A monotonous landscape.

She glanced at a map before the flight. Geodetic data tacked to a noticeboard in the briefing room. A USGS chart: California/Nevada border. Blank terrain. Terra incognita. Mile upon mile of jack shit.

She couldn’t recall topographic detail, but she remembered names. Memorials to early settlers that headed west in covered wagons and found hell on earth.

Furnace Creek.

Dante’s View.

The Funeral Mountains.

A glint in the periphery of her vision. She stopped, turned and shielded her eyes.

Something metallic at the tip of a high dune. Probably a fragment of fuselage. Couldn’t be much else.

Hard to estimate distance. Rough guess: quarter of a mile. She couldn’t discern shape. Too much glare.

Quarter of a mile. A lot of energy, a lot of sweat, to reach a hunk of scrap metal. Her leg hurt so much she wanted to fall to the ground and puke. But a scrap of wreckage might provide a little shade, a spot to rest until nightfall.

She limped towards the distant object. Each step was teeth-jarring torment. She absented herself from her body, put herself on a wooded hillside, enjoyed the cool hush of the forest floor and let the pain and exertion happen somewhere else.

The top of a dune cratered like a volcano. An ejector seat sitting upright, bedded in sand.

Someone strapped to the chair. An arm hung limp. The sand-dusted sleeve of a flight suit. A gloved hand.

‘Hey.’

No response.

Frost climbed the dune on hands and knees. She caught her breath, rested in the shade. Then she gripped the back of the chair and pulled herself upright.

A dust-matted body strapped in the seat.

She brushed sand from the name strip: GUTHRIE.

Legs askew, head slumped on his chest. His face was veiled by a helmet visor and oxygen mask.

Frost checked the seat restraints. Jammed.

The guy had been killed by some kind of release failure.

The moment Guthrie, the route navigator, reached between his legs and wrenched the yellow egress handle a roof hatch would have blown. He would have been propelled up and out the plane, hitting 12g in half a second. A mortar cartridge behind the headrest would have immediately fired and deployed a drogue to stabilise the seat as it fell. Guthrie would have remained strapped in the chair, breathing bottled oxygen during freefall. At twelve thousand feet a barometric trigger should have unlatched the chair harness and released his main chute. The seat should have fallen away, letting Guthrie float to earth unencumbered.

Instead he remained shackled to his chair, achieving a terminal velocity of over two hundred miles an hour before he slammed into the ground.

Dead on impact.

Frost crossed herself. She wasn’t religious, but she half-remembered Guthrie pocketing a rosary as they suited up.

It should have been possible to hit a manual release to ditch the seat. He should have pulled a shoulder-mounted rip to deploy the chute. Maybe air-pressure and g-force pinned him to the heavy steel frame as it fell to earth at sickening speed.

Or maybe his oxygen supply failed and he lost consciousness. Succumbed to hypoxia. Desperately slapped and clawed at harness buckles as his vision narrowed and his mind began to fog.

Or maybe he chose to die. A dark supposition: Guthrie watched mesmerised as the ground rushed to meet him and became gripped by the same strange throw-yourself-on-the-track death wish that tugs at subway commuters as their train emerges from a tunnel and pulls into the station. The world in ruins, everyone he knew and loved dead or worse. Maybe he couldn’t find the will to grip the parachute cord and save himself.

‘
Via con Dios
, brother.’

Pat down. She unzipped sleeve and thigh pockets.

A Spyderco lock-knife. She tossed it. She would stick with her old K-Bar survival blade.

Morphine shots. She stuffed them in her pocket.

She searched his vest. She took water, batteries, matches and flares. Felt like grave-robbing, but the guy would understand. He would want her to live.

She tried his radio in case her own were defective.

‘This is Lieutenant Frost, US-B-52
Liberty Bell
, any one copy, over?’

No response.

‘Mayday, Mayday. This is an emergency. Airmen in need of rescue. Does anyone copy this transmission, over? Any one at all?’

NO COMMS.

She dropped the radio in the sand.

She ejected the mag from Guthrie’s Beretta and stashed the clip in her survival vest.

His head jerked and trembled.

‘Jesus. Guthrie?’

She leant close, examined his chest for the rise and fall of respiration.

He slowly raised an arm. His gloved hand gently pawed her shoulder.

She knelt in front of him. She squeezed his hand.

‘Hold on, dude.’

She unlatched his oxygen mask. Shattered teeth. He drooled blood.

She gently lifted his head, and raised the smoked visor.

‘Oh Christ.’

She jumped backwards, stumbled and fell on her ass.

Guthrie’s upper face was a mess of suppurating flesh. Metallic spines anchored in bone, protruded through rotted skin like a cluster of fine needles.

‘So they got you too.’

He wretched and convulsed. He reached for her, clawed the air, constrained by his seat harness.

Jet black eyeballs. Guthrie, his mind and memories, replaced by a cruel insect intelligence.

He raged with frustrated bloodlust.

Frost struggled to her feet. She watched him thrash in his seat. She contemplated his onyx eyes, his livid, bruise-mottled skin.

A choking, inhuman howl. He spritzed blood and teeth.

She unholstered her pistol and shook it from its protective bag. She racked the slide and took aim, anxious to silence the guttural vocalisations, the imbecilic aks, das and blorts of a friend succumbed to dementia.

‘Sorry, Guss. Best I can do.’

Point blank through the right eye. Whiplash. He slumped broken doll, wept blood from an empty socket.

Sudden silence.

She blew the chamber cool then reholstered.

She sat in the sand beside the dead man.

She contemplated the view.

The desert. Harsh purity, endless dunes and the widest sky. The kind of place a person might come to confront an indifferent God. Like Buzz Aldrin said, standing in the Sea of Tranquillity, looking out at an airless wasteland:
magnificent desolation.

Good place to die. Better than a hospital bed.

A water sachet. She sucked it dry and crumpled the plastic envelope.

A morphine syrette. She bit the cap and injected her thigh.

She limped east, leaving Guthrie dead on his throne, marooned in vast solitude.

Sunrise.

Hancock lay sprawled in the sand. He got dragged a quarter mile through dunes before he regained consciousness and released the chute harness.

He knelt in the sand at the crest of a steep rise, concussed by the explosive force of egress.

He reached up with a gloved hand, fumbled a latch and unhooked his oxygen mask.

Cough.

Spit.

Phlegm wet the dust. A string of saliva tinted pink with blood.

He released the chin-strap and eased the helmet clear. It rolled down the side of the dune kicking up dust in its wake.

Head shake. Blurred vision.

He held up a gloved hand and tried to focus. He moved the hand back and forth.

Blind in his right eye.

He pulled off gloves and gently touched his face. He flexed his jaw. Unbroken. Fingers crept up his right cheek delicately exploring skin swollen tight.

Flaccid eyelids. A vacant socket. Pulped flesh. His right eyeball was gone.

He fell forwards, crouched on hands and knees a long while, trying not to puke.

Enough. Get your act together.

He sang:

He sang because, despite his injury, despite the pain, he was still, defiantly, James Hancock.

Maimed. He’d lost part of his body. Grieve for it later.

He straightened up, returned to a kneel. He shrugged off his life preserver and survival vest.

His bicep pocket. Three morphine auto-injectors which could render him numb in an instant.

He examined the hypodermics. A moment away from opiate bliss:

Bite the cap.

Stab.

Press.

Warm wash of analgesia.

Throw the depleted hypo aside.

Instead he returned the unopened syrette to his sleeve pocket.

No point fleeing pain like a bitch. Got to keep an unclouded mind.

A signal mirror the size of a playing card tucked in a zip-pouch of his vest. He held up the tab of polished metal like it was a powder compact and examined his face.

He’d taken a massive blow to the head. The right side of his face was bloody and swollen. Ripped forehead, ripped cheek. Barely recognised himself. He gently lifted his right eyelid. Wet muscle. Severed optic nerve. Giddy realisation: he was peering deep inside his own head.

Careful scalp examination. A classic aviator’s flat-top buzz-cut matted with blood. He ran fingers through his hair. Split skin. Possible skull fracture.

He unzipped his flight suit. The force of ejection had ripped the hook-and-loop patches from his sleeve and chest. The stars and stripes, Second Bomb Wing insignia, and Pork Eating Infidel emblem were gone. His name strip had survived: HANCOCK, J.

He tied sleeves round his waist.

The CSEL. He held it up to his good eye, squinted as he tried to discern function buttons.

‘Mayday, Mayday. Pilot down, anyone copy, over?’

Dead channel hiss.

‘Mayday, Mayday. Anyone copy on SAR? Air Force personnel in need of assistance, come in.’

Nothing.

The CSEL should have been unaffected by atmospherics. It should have been unaffected by nearby mountains. But if the USSTRATCOM net were down, if the military had become so degraded Tactical Air communication hubs had been abandoned and satellites were floating dead in orbit, if all AWACs were grounded, then he was truly on his own.