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He hit Enter.

  THIRD AND SEVENTH DIGITS

  OF PERSONNEL CODE

  He keyed:

  8 1

  The screen cleared. Winking cursor.

  He glanced around at dunes lit by weak flame light, checked for any sign Early was watching from the shadows.

  Nothing but darkness.

  He wondered what the deranged airman might be doing at that moment. Stumbling among the dunes. Or sitting in the moonlight, rocking back and forth, head full of phantasmagoric torment. Or lying dead in the sand.

  Hancock turned back to the screen and typed. Same message he’d typed a dozen times:

  USAF MT66 VEGAS

  REQUEST URGENT ASSISTANCE

  MISSION FAIL

  DECLARE IKARUS

  PACKAGE INTACT AND SECURE

  BEACONS ACTIVE

  PERSONNEL IN NEED OF MEDEVAC

  2 KIA

  1 MIA

  3 IMMEDIATE EXTRACTION

  PLEASE EXPEDITE

  ACKNOWLEDGE AND ETA

  He hit Send. Then he shut down the terminal, folded the antenna, and began to drag the case back towards the plane.

  Hancock hefted the trunk onto his shoulder and heaved it up the ladderway, onto the flight deck.

  He climbed the ladder and sat on the trunk a while to catch his breath.

  He lifted a blast screen. A glance out the flight-deck windows. The signal fire.

  Strange sight:

  Two figures lit by weak flame light.

  He hurriedly leaned across the pilot seat, tried to wipe dust from the windows with the sleeve of his flight suit for a clearer view.

  The figures were gone.

  ‘Noble?’ he shouted. ‘You still down there?’

  Noble, from the lower cabin:

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Were you outside just now?’

  ‘Been right here.’

  Hancock wondered how much he could trust his own vision. One eye. No depth perception.

  ‘Stay sharp down there, you hear? Don’t nod out on me.’

  He flipped latches and threw open the lid of the trunk.

  The antenna packed in foam. He lifted it free. Tripod extended. Segmented aluminium petals fanned into a dish.

  He stood on the trunk, reached up to the roof and tore back the insulation blanket masking the gunner’s vacant ejection hatch. He pushed the antenna out onto the roof and adjusted alignment.

  The terminal. Coaxial cable jacked into a side-socket.

  Boot up. Scrolling BIOS. Flickering loading bars.

  Comsec sign-in:

  AUTHENTICATE

  He keyed:

  VERMILLION

  He hit Enter.

  SECOND AND NINTH DIGITS

  OF PERSONNEL CODE

  He keyed:

  7 3

  He hit Enter.

  The ticking clock glyph of signal acquisition.

  Clatter of boots on ladder rungs.

  Noble climbed up onto the flight deck. He stood beside Hancock and looked at the screen, the endless sweep of the clock.

  ‘Nothing left, is there? Nothing coherent. The Joint Chiefs are probably down a bunker someplace. Maps. Time-zone clocks. Yelling into their war-phones, issuing orders to units that no longer exist.’

  ‘We played our part,’ said Hancock. ‘Did our duty. Reason to be proud.’

  Noble shook his head.

  ‘We should have made for Canada while we had the chance. Hit the coast, found a boat, headed for Vancouver Island. You can bet a few other folks had the same idea. The last of humanity. That’s where they will be.’

  Frost, from down below:

  ‘Guys, you better come outside.’

  They went outside. They stood beneath the starlit sky. Breath fogged the night air.

  Frost held up the sand-dusted flag.

  She trained her flashlight on a depression in the sand.

  ‘Captain Pinback is gone.’

  20

  Survival, Evasion and Escape exercise, Thompson Falls.

  The forest at night.

  Incessant rain.

  Frost shared body heat with her instructor, Major Coplin, as they huddled beneath a brushwood lean-shelter.

  She shivered. No allocation beyond the standard flight suit and survival gear she would have if she had punched out and parachuted into thick tree cover.

  Coplin held out his hand and caught raindrops in his palm.

  ‘You got lucky. Rain will throw off the dogs. Wash away your scent. Downside: plenty of mud. You’ll leave tracks when you move out tomorrow. Take a lot of ingenuity not to leave a trail.’

  She pictured restless German Shepherds pulling at a taut leash chain, waiting for handlers to unclip their collars and send them darting into undergrowth.

  ‘Has anyone made the full eight days?’

  ‘Five. That’s the record. Cajun kid. Inbred, banjo-strumming runt. Worked in a chicken plant before he signed. Plucking, beheading. Should have seen him with a knife. He could gut a kill in seconds, make music with that thing. Lad could barely write his name but, damn, he was whip-smart. Know how he beat the dogs? He climbed a tree. Moved branch-to-branch while the hounds scoured the forest floor below him. Got two miles down the hill without setting foot on the ground.’

  ‘Outstanding.’

  ‘Managed two days in the Red Room before he gave up his key word. Most guys tap out after a couple of hours. Stubborn motherfucker. He broke hard.’

  ‘So who are the capture team?’

  ‘Ex-Delta. Real snake-eaters.’

  ‘And you?’

  Coplin smiled. He pulled up the sleeve of his camo coat to expose his forearm. A faded Hemingway quote:

  There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter.

  ‘Tell the truth, you’ve done well to make it a third day,’ he said. ‘Most guys panic. They run through the woods, no plan, no direction. Don’t think to climb in the stream to mask their scent. Get chased down by a German Shepherd soon as their lead time expires. Back in the truck by lunchtime.’

  ‘Do the capture team use infrared?’

  ‘They’ve got all kinds of shit. All you got are eyes. Still ought to move at night, though. Best way to see in shadow? Don’t look directly at your target. Look to the side. Probably told you this before, but it’s worth repeating. Centre of a person’s sight is good for colour and focus during the day. At night, peripheral vision is sharpest for shape and movement. Remember that. Might save your ass.’

  Frost put up a star shell. Desert lit cold white.

  She stood at the top of a dune, survival blanket drawn over her head and shoulders like a shawl.

  Hancock joined her. He checked his pistol. Loaded. Chambered.

  ‘How many of those flares we got left?’ he asked.

  ‘Plenty.’

  They looked out over the Arctic landscape. A three-sixty survey.

  ‘There should be night-vision gear aboard Liberty Bell, right?’ said Hancock. ‘Standard kit. Monoculars, somewhere on the flight deck.’

  Frost shook her head.

  ‘You saw the plane, saw the state she was in. An antique. Pretty much out of commission. Probably flew Arc Light missions back in the day, bombed the crap out of some Hanoi railyards. She was mothballed. A reserve. Hadn’t been in the air for months. Sitting in an Alaskan hangar collecting dust and webs. Final flight would have taken her to an Arizona boneyard to be chopped. Turned into washing machines or some shit.

  ‘She’s got no standard inventory. Most of the lockers are empty. Nothing but a bunch of Arctic survival gear.’

  Frost contemplated the featureless landscape. Scalloped dunes. Flare light transformed the desert to a vista of rippling dream-forms.

  ‘No tracks,’ she said. ‘Not a single footprint.’

  ‘My first thought? Vultures. Wolves. Pinback got snatched while our backs were turned. Something big, with a taste for
carrion.’

  ‘He weighed over two hundred pounds in flight gear,’ said Frost.

  ‘Just running through the possibilities.’

  ‘Said you saw two guys standing by the fire. Two. If one of them was Early, who the hell was the other guy?’

  ‘Not sure what I saw,’ said Hancock. ‘I got one eye. Can’t see too clear. Might have been nothing. Nothing at all.’

  ‘Maybe there are preppers out here. Kind of remote location a survivalist might build a refuge for himself and his family. Cache weapons and cans during the good times.’

  ‘But why take Pinback?’

  ‘Running low on food.’

  ‘Perhaps he was infected. Dead, but not dead.’

  ‘Maybe. Maybe he got up and walked. By like I said: no tracks.’

  The star shell fell to earth and died. Dark dunes and a starlit sky.

  ‘Bullshit aside,’ said Hancock. ‘Someone’s out there for sure, watching us, determined to fuck with our heads.’

  The lower cabin.

  Frost unclipped an insulation pad from the wall, exposing cable runs and pipe work.

  She examined pipes. She wanted a section of tubing thick enough, strong enough, to support her weight.

  The wrench. She unbolted a four-foot section of inch-thick hydraulic line. She unscrewed restraining brackets and lifted it clear. Residual hydraulic fluid dripped and pooled on the floor.

  She measured the pipe against her body, wedged it beneath her armpit, tested it as a crutch.

  A good fit.

  She sat in the nav seat, unsheathed her knife and began to slit the insulation pad.

  Noble joined her.

  He shook sand from his hair, slapped dust from his clothes. He looked around the lower cabin, assessed its potential as a defensible redoubt.

  He nodded approval.

  ‘This is good. This is secure. One way in or out. We ought to barricade this opening, though. Block it with a couple of equipment cases.’

  He picked up a canteen. He rubbed the cool canister across his face and neck, and set it down unopened.

  He gestured to the upper cabin.

  ‘Not much we can do to block the flight deck windows. The blast curtains could deter snipers, I guess. Deny a target.’

  Noble stood at the ragged fissure in the fuselage wall and stared out into darkness.

  ‘Why don’t they attack? Couple of determined guys could take us out anytime they want. Wouldn’t break a sweat.’

  His hand strayed to his shoulder holster. He stroked the polymer grip.

  ‘Must be toying with us. Psy-ops. Some kind of mindfuck.’

  Frost padded the crutch with insulation fabric, and lashed it with cable cut from the sixty miles of wiring that snaked through the conduits and cavities of the plane.

  ‘Got to keep a little perspective. Easy to go nuts in a place like this. The space. The silence. Easy to fill it with our fears.’

  ‘Pinback is gone. That’s real enough. And whatever took his body snatched it quick and clean. Didn’t make a noise, didn’t leave a trace. Sure as hell wasn’t Early. Not without help.’

  ‘I suppose.’

  ‘What if we have to walk out of here? Think about it. We’ve got precious little water. You and Hancock are hobbled by major injuries. We’d struggle to cover ten miles a night. And if we had hostiles dogging our steps? Bastards intent on taking us out one by one? We wouldn’t stand a chance. We’d be easy prey.’

  Frost tested the crutch. She walked back and forth. She glanced at Noble. He looked exhausted, strung out.

  ‘Take a moment. Get your head together. We’re armed. We’ve got plenty of ammunition. We’re badder than anything cat-stepping around those dunes, all right? Just got to watch our backs until daybreak. If anyone is out there, messing with our heads, they won’t try anything after sunrise. Too much exposure.’

  Hancock, called from outside:

  ‘Guys. Better get out here.’

  ‘My turn to bring bad news.’

  Hancock held up his CSEL.

  A voice, heard through crackling interference. Male, stern:

  ‘… cabinet officers … terms of The 1947 Presidential Succession Act, I have assumed that grave respons …’

  ‘Is this the BBC?’ asked Frost. ‘Is this a live transmission?’

  Hancock mimed hush.

  ‘… unthinkable, only to be countenanced as an absolute last resort. But, I have to tell you now, at five o’clock, eastern standard time, I gave that terrible order. Our courageous armed forces, both at home and abroad, did their duty …’

  The voice swamped by static. Hancock held the radio above his head to regain signal.

  ‘… San Antonio, Dallas and Detroit. And I ask anyone who can hear this broadcast, whether you are a citizen of the United States or not, to pray for their souls …’

  ‘What’s the guy talking about?’ asked Noble.

  ‘Evergreen,’ said Hancock. ‘He’s talking about Evergreen. I heard rumours. Didn’t think they’d go through with it.’

  ‘Evergreen?’

  ‘OPLAN eight-oh-eight. The final roll of the dice. If they couldn’t stop the virus, if major cities become hot-beds of infection, they could invoke a doomsday option.’

  ‘Jesus,’ said Frost, catching the obvious implication. ‘You can’t be serious.’

  Hancock nodded confirmation.

  ‘Nuclear strike. Incinerate every substantial metropolitan area.’

  ‘… both Berlin and Munich … still no world from our French correspondents … lit the northern sky … no further communication from Paris …’

  ‘Dear God.’

  ‘Enhanced radiation weapons. Tritium/deuterium nukes. Sandmans. Way more lethal that the tac we’ve got in our hold. The blast itself is pretty low yield, but they pulse intense gamma radiation at the moment of detonation. No hiding place. Cuts through concrete and steel. Any mammal within a ten-mile radius; human, whatever, will sicken and die in hours.

  ‘The blast itself will spread cobalt-sixty and a bunch of other isotopes over the surrounding area. Lethal contamination. Long half-life. Even if we make it out of here, we will have to keep away from cities. They’ll be dead zones. No cats, no dogs, no birds. Centuries before a person could walk the streets.’

  ‘Jesus fucking Christ.’

  ‘What else could they do? Only way to purge the virus. Destroy the world in order to save it.’

  ‘God in heaven.’

  Frost looked towards the starlit horizon.

  ‘So what do we do? America is a wasteland. Even if we make it out of this desert, where on earth can we go?’

  21

  Frost, Hancock and Noble climbed to the top of the ridgeline and watched the sky lighten with the first trace of dawn. They were cotton-mouthed with thirst, each determined not to be the first to break resolve and gulp their morning ration from the canteen.

  ‘Twenty-four hours since the crash,’ said Noble. Dry cough. ‘Feels like a month.’

  ‘We need a plan,’ said Frost. ‘An actual plan. We’ve spun our wheels twenty-four hours. Time to face reality. No one is coming for us. So we better decide, here and now, how we intend to get back to the world.’

  They sat in the sand and looked out over the crash site. The eastern sky turned fine azure. One by one, stars faded into oncoming day. The sun would break the horizon within the hour. Nightmare light. It would quickly cook the desert like a blowtorch flame, turning the dunes to a heat-rippling hellscape by mid morning.

  ‘I saw a flash last night,’ said Noble. ‘A pulse of light to the west. Flickering white, like summer lightning. Didn’t pay it any mind.’

  ‘Must have been Los Angeles going up.’

  ‘And one to the east, a couple of minutes later.’

  ‘Evergreen,’ murmured Hancock.

  ‘I suppose we’re part of it,’ said Noble, gesturing to the saurian hulk of the B-52. ‘We got the last tac nuke in the arsenal. Last one they could lay their hands
on, at any rate. Something out in the desert they wanted vaporised with all the rest. Not sure I want to be involved.’

  Frost paced the crest of the dune. She kicked at sand. She tried to picture the atomic devastation that lay beyond the horizon.

  New York in ruins. The broken skyline of Manhattan. Toppled skyscrapers, avenues clogged with rubble.

  Los Angeles. Gridlocked freeways seared by a nuclear firestorm. Automobile bodywork scorched down to base metal, seats reduced to frame-springs, tyres melted to bubbling tar.

  Atlanta. Scoured by uncontrolled block-fires, street grid razed, ten kiloton airburst repeating the destruction wrought by the Confederacy before they ceded the city to Sherman.

  Had Europeans bombed their major conurbations? The Russians?

  Maybe astronauts marooned on the International Space Station were looking down on Europe and the United States at that moment, watching the smoke of burning cities taint the stratosphere, filthy soot plumes carried on prevailing winds.

  Nuclear Winter. How long before a radiotoxic haze encircled the earth, and darkened the world to a grey twilight which would last centuries?

  Maybe snow would fall on the desert. Flakes grey with ash.

  Maybe, as she and her companions trekked across the sand, day would be overtaken by premature dusk. The temperature would plummet. Shimmering heat would give way to a fierce blizzard. They would trudge onwards, leaning into a driving snowstorm, until they succumbed to hypothermia and dropped dead among the dunes, bodies feathered with ice.

  ‘So,’ said Noble, calling her back from her reverie. ‘Canada or Mexico?’

  Frost thought it over. She opened her mouth, intending to say Canada, but Hancock cut her off:

  ‘We find the nearest functioning military unit and report for duty.’

  ‘The war is over, sir,’ said Frost. ‘The virus won.’ She lifted the dog tags from around her neck, disentangled them from the code lanyard, and toyed with the tin tabs. ‘Rank. Insignia. Flag. Not sure they mean a great deal any more. Just souvenirs.’ She tossed the dog tags onto the sand beside her. ‘Feel like secession troops after the surrender. Ragged losers. Column of Johnny Rebs trudging home.’