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  Hancock struggled to his feet.

  ‘Show me. I need to see for myself.’

  The dying light of day.

  Hancock staggered across the sand. He stumbled and fell. Frost reluctantly left the plane, gripped his arm and helped him upright.

  She kept her pistol drawn, fearful of the gathering gloom.

  ‘Where were they?’

  ‘Over there. The ridgeline. Moving east, like they were on some kind of patrol.’

  ‘Sure it was Pinback and the guys?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Where’s Noble? Did he see any of this?’

  ‘He’s gone.’

  ‘The fuck?’

  ‘He went for help.’

  ‘Dammit. We got a job. A mission.’

  ‘He’s headed for the target site. Figured he might be able to find something of use. A truck. A radio that actually works.’

  They stood by the wing, weapons drawn, surveying shadows which seemed to lengthen and reach for them.

  ‘This is fucked up,’ murmured Hancock. ‘We’re through the looking glass. We’re into nightmares.’

  ‘Keep your eyes peeled.’

  ‘I’m not even going to blink.’

  They circled the wing, crouched and shone their flashlights into deep darkness.

  They inspected the engine, examined the intake turbine and exhausts.

  ‘You think they were fucking with the plane?’ asked Frost.

  ‘They got to be somewhere close by. Maybe they’ve built themselves a nest.’

  They climbed onto the wing and peered into tears in the aluminium skin, inspected internal spars, control lines and fuel tanks looking for a telltale smear of blood.

  ‘Look,’ said Frost. She crouched and trained her flashlight on the wing surface. ‘See?’

  Footprints.

  They slid from the wing and dropped to the sand below.

  They walked the length of the wrecked aircraft.

  Hancock examined tears in the buckled hull.

  Frost kept her flashlight trained on the roof of the plane in case they got jumped.

  The broken tail section. Buckled support struts and fluttering insulation foil.

  Frost shone her flashlight over surrounding dunes.

  ‘Hey. Look.’

  Prints trailed across the sand. The tracks terminated in a small depression.

  ‘Looks like they went below ground,’ said Hancock.

  The lower cabin.

  They shunted equipment trunks against the wall fissure once more to create a barricade.

  They leant against the ladder, wiped sweat and shared sips from a canteen.

  ‘Ought to check the bomb bay,’ said Frost. ‘Make sure the package is secure.’

  Hancock switched on his flashlight and climbed into the crawlway. He inched along on his hands and knees until he reached the payload door.

  He pulled back the hatch and peered inside. His flashlight played over the ribbed walls of the compartment, the massive rotary launcher, the missile.

  ‘Are we cool?’ called Frost.

  Hancock didn’t reply. He climbed from the crawlspace and stood in the stifling cave-dark.

  He flicked the light switch. Red night-mission lamps.

  He cautiously crept the length of the compartment, murmuring.

  He checked the launch apparatus, checked wall stanchions and roof girders.

  ‘You all right in there?’ called Frost.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Hancock. ‘Yeah, we’re clear.’

  The flight deck.

  They sat facing each other.

  ‘Let’s think it through,’ said Hancock. ‘Guthrie was infected for sure, right?’

  ‘Yeah. Advanced stages of infection. The rot, the spines. Must have been pretty far gone when he climbed aboard the plane. Looking back, he had his suit zipped to his neck and gloves on his hands during the briefing. Didn’t think much of it at the time.’

  ‘You shot him in the head.’

  ‘Yeah. Took a pretty big chunk of skull and brain. But maybe not enough to take him out the game. Plenty of frontal lobe damage, but it’s not like these bastards need much higher brain function. His cortex might be intact. Basic motor skills. Enough to keep him animated.’

  ‘So he could be walking around out there.’

  ‘There’s a chance.’

  ‘Pinback. You saw him die, right? Crash injuries.’

  ‘His spine was shattered. Guess he died of organ failure. The internal haemorrhaging and tissue cavitation associated with a massive impact. But his body might have been fresh enough to host the virus, if he were infected soon after death. Maybe Guthrie got to him, brought him back to some kind of life.’

  ‘And we got no idea what happened to Early. So we got at least three potential prowlers out there.’

  ‘Reckon so.’

  ‘Think they’re toying with us? Fucking with our heads?’

  ‘Not dealing with people any more. Dealing with a virus. Can’t attribute human motivations. No telling what it’s got in mind.’

  Hancock lifted a blast screen and stared out into the night.

  ‘Why don’t they attack?’ he murmured. ‘Perfect opportunity to take us out.’

  ‘Maybe they went after Noble. He’s out there alone. Easy prey.’

  34

  Noble skidded down the lee side of a dune in an avalanche of dust.

  The white Humvee limo.

  Under his breath:

  ‘What the fuck?’

  He circled the vehicle. It was smashed up. A couple of windows were broken. Need a tow truck to get it moving.

  He ran a finger along a rubber window seal. Thick accumulation of dust. The limo had been sitting in the desert a while.

  The driver’s door was open. Noble peered inside. A dead guy slumped on the passenger seat.

  Heart stopping thrill as he glimpsed Diet Coke in the door pocket. Anger when he lifted the can and found it drained dry. He scrunched the can and threw it aside.

  He climbed inside the vehicle.

  He checked the steering column. No ignition key.

  He checked out the dead guy. Mismatched fatigues. Desert boots, G-Shock, pocket vest, ballistic wraparounds. One of Trenchman’s rag-tag contingent.

  Noble pulled on gloves and searched the body. Pat down: SOG multitool in a belt pouch, couple of cigars in a breast pocket, pistol but no ammo.

  Dog tags:

  OSBORNE.

  O NEG.

  The guy had been shot in the back where he sat. A bullet had ripped a big exit wound in his belly and hit the dash, punching a hole in the facia of the Bose five-point surround.

  Noble reached across and released the passenger door. He kicked the corpse out the car into the dust.

  Sunlight through the sunroof, the side windows. Daybreak. The temperature was already beginning to climb. Better use this unexpected refuge, this gift of shade, before moving on at nightfall.

  He climbed over the driver partition into the rear.

  Dead plasmas. Bent stripper pole. Empty mini-bar.

  He swept a coach seat free of dust and empty vodka miniatures. He sat down, unlaced his boots and massaged sore feet.

  He took The Little Prince from his backpack and tenderly turned pages.

  To Malcolm, Have a very happy birthday, All my love, Dad.

  He lay down and positioned his backpack for a pillow.

  Motes of dust swirled and swarmed in the heavy air of the passenger compartment.

  He hugged the book to his chest and closed his eyes. If he slowed his breathing, imposed stillness on a restless body, perhaps he would sleep until darkness fell.

  Nightfall.

  Noble trudged across the moonlit sandscape. He tried to estimate ground covered the previous night. He had kept a steady pace for hours. Ten miles? Twenty? Easy to overestimate distance. Delude himself a moderate stroll had been an epic trek.

  He swung his arms, blew fingers to warm his hands.

  Knees
and ankles fatigued from the exertion of wading through dust.

  He set up a rhythm. Inhale: three paces. Exhale: three paces. He tried to shorten his strides to minimise muscular effort.

  Getting close to the Panamint Range. Crags and mesas blotted the stars.

  The horizon up ahead was sharply delineated by the scintillating starfields of the Milky Way. Jagged peaks. But behind him, the southern sky was a soft blur. He glanced back once in a while to make sure the haze was not an approaching weather front: one of the desert’s rare downpours. But the fog remained constant. Maybe Vegas was burning. A vast atomic plume that would darken the sky for months.

  Daylight.

  Wind blew across the dustscape. Dunes fumed like banks of smouldering coals.

  Noble strode across infernal, brimstone terrain.

  Curling vortices of sand. He needed water, but didn’t dare uncap his canteen in case it filled with dust.

  The desert used to be a seabed. There were small shell fragments among the quartz particles, the shifting mineral powder. He was wading through primordial silt. The granular remains of bones and carapaces, detritus of the old ocean floor.

  Vertiginous sense of geologic time.

  Maybe some future tectonic upheaval would drain the Pacific and flood the mainland. Ruined cities, submerged apartments and office buildings, would become home to darting fish and colonies of crustaceans. The sunless depths of the Mariana Trench would be transformed to a sun-baked, bone-dry canyon.

  The wind tore away his face mask. He chased the scrap of chute fabric, dove to retrieve it. He spat, purged a mouthful of dust, then tied the mask back in place.

  He looked around. The wind had erased his footprints.

  He looked up. Orange twilight. Hard to locate the sun.

  No way to navigate. No way to strike out without potentially retracing his steps and undoing the effort of the last few hours.

  He sat cross-legged in the sand. He took a survival blanket from the pocket of his flight suit and flapped it open. He wrestled against the wind, pulled the blanket over his head and shoulders, and cocooned himself in Mylar.

  He crouched within his foil shroud. He battled claustrophobia. A silver, storm-lashed effigy perched on the side of a dune, lost in vast nothing.

  35

  Frost leaned from the fissure in the cabin wall and looked out into the desert.

  She scanned the dunes for any sign of movement. She crouched and peered beneath the starboard wing.

  Silence. Stillness.

  She had improvised trip flares: marine pyros lashed to a couple of plastic rulers with duct tape. She staked them in the sand. Monofilament fishing line tied to the ring-pulls, unreeled, pulled taut. Any prowlers approaching the nose of the aircraft would trigger a series of concussions like canon fire.

  Best seal the plane. Shut out any potential intruders.

  She shunted equipment trunks against the fissure and blocked merciless light.

  The payload bay.

  Red night-mission lights. Trapped heat.

  Hancock inspected the missile. He pulled a bandana from his pocket. He dabbed sweat from his face and towelled his hands.

  Tools laid out on the ALCM hull like a row of surgical instruments.

  He had released a tubular section of casing, fully exposed the physics package and surrounding control electronics.

  Brief pause before he began the delicate procedure of disconnecting the core from the weapon’s redundant guidance system. The GPS gear and TERCOM terrain correlator had to be cut in sequence to avoid tripping a tamper cut-out.

  ‘How’s it going?’ called Frost. She was in the lower cabin, peering down twenty feet of crawlway.

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Still messing with that warhead?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Radiation?’

  ‘Negligible.’

  ‘There are lock-outs, aren’t there? Screw up, and the bomb will disarm itself.’

  ‘There’s a kill-switch. Stops the device falling into enemy hands in the event of a crash landing on foreign soil. Pull. Turn. The firing circuits fry themselves. The weapon instantly transformed into a giant paperweight.’

  ‘Don’t suppose you’d care to show me that switch?’

  ‘Can’t say I would.’

  Boredom.

  Hancock sat in the pilot seat. Windows blacked out by blast screens like he was flying a night patrol.

  He drowsed, slowed his breathing, kept still as he could. A tear of sweat ran from his bandaged scalp, down his temple into beard stubble. He ignored it.

  Cruising at the edge of sleep. Each time his head nodded forwards he heard phantom engine alerts, stall warnings. He smelled smoke, the sulphurous stink of shorting fuse banks. He felt the judder and shake of the plane shaking itself apart.

  He jerked awake and grabbed the yoke.

  Frost lay on the deck of the lower cabin.

  She tried to think her way cooler.

  She opened her mouth wide and exhaled, visualising each breath as a rippling jet of expelled body heat. Sweltering discomfort purged from her lungs leaving her cool and rested.

  She let her imagination transport her from the desert.

  The Sierras.

  Kayaking down a wooded valley. A double-blade paddle. Gentle oar splash, left and right. Ponderosa pines on either bank. Trout darting beneath the boat. Osprey wheeling in the sky. Each bend in the river, each serpentine twist, revealed fresh scenes of verdant wilderness to explore.

  She opened her eyes and sat up.

  She needed a piss.

  Frost crouched, flight suit unzipped, pistol in her hand.

  Urine splashed and frothed in the dust. Almost instant evaporation. Dark, wet sand dried pristine white in seconds.

  A person dead-set on survival would, she supposed, store urine. Squat over a mess tin then decant liquid into a bottle. But no matter what happened she couldn’t put a stale, part-fermented bottle of piss to her lips and drink. Rather eat a bullet than let herself be dehumanised by the futile struggle to survive an extra couple hours.

  She stood and zipped her suit.

  Cruel heat baked the plane metal, baked the sand.

  She and Hancock would run out of water in a few days. They would lie in the shattered aircraft wracked by fierce kidney pain and shivering chills, visited by dead friends, relatives, lovers. A bunch of wailing, leering apparitions spitting accusations and reproach. The madness would last for a couple of hours. Then, without being aware, they would slide into a merciful coma and death.

  Maybe, once she had shaken the last drops of water from her canteen, she should take a walk among the dunes to speed her demise. Kick off her boots, shrug off the warrior carapace of flight suit and equipment yoke, and walk naked into the sun.

  She stepped out of shadow into merciless light, flinched as searing radiation hit her face.

  She climbed a high ridge, shielded her eyes with her Beretta and surveyed the terrain for any sign of Noble. She wanted to see a 4x4 heading her way, lurching over dunes. A SUV kicking up a dust plume. Hum of a distant engine. Glint of sunlight on glass and chromium trim.

  Nothing.

  The distant horizon merged with rippling fata morganas that shimmered silver-wet like distant ocean.

  They rebuilt the barricade and climbed to the flight deck.

  They sat opposite sides of the cabin, backs to the wall.

  Hancock: the improvised bandaged wrapped round his head was stained with pus and blood. Stubble turning to beard.

  Frost: crazy, sand-dusted hair, peeling skin, cracked lips.

  ‘Long fucking day,’ said Hancock.

  Frost nodded.

  Her eye was drawn to the trauma kit. A clear bag of saline protruded from a zippered pouch. The liquid sparkled as it refracted sunlight, like the surface of a lake inviting her to dive and swim. Tempted to pierce the bag with the tip of her knife and suck on it like a tit, guzzle salted water until the bag crumpled dry. She blink
ed to dispel the reverie.

  ‘Looks like we’re fucked,’ said Hancock. ‘Noble should have reached the target site by now. If there were serviceable vehicles to be found, he would be back already.’

  Frost ignored him. Hancock seemed to revel in their predicament, seemed anxious to discuss every catastrophic possibility. She just wanted to rest.

  ‘How’s your head?’ she asked. The side of Hancock’s face was dark and swollen. She could smell rot. He didn’t seem to be infected by the virus. He was succumbing to septicaemia. They needed to make it to a pharmacy, find some antibiotics. ‘Want me to take a look at that wound?’

  ‘Can’t see the use.’

  They sat a while.

  ‘So how long do you intend to wait?’ asked Hancock.

  ‘For Noble? A while yet. He’s got a long way to walk. Lot of rough ground. Might take him a few days. Can’t give up on the guy just yet.’

  ‘How much water has he got?’

  ‘Some.’

  ‘And if he doesn’t show up? What then? Given any thought?’

  ‘Walk.’

  ‘What the use?’ asked Hancock. ‘You’re lame. Those fucks hiding in the dunes would attack before you got a mile from here.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘They’ll be back for sure, once the sun goes down.’

  ‘And we’ll be waiting.’

  Hancock shifted position, tried to get comfortable.

  ‘We still got a mission,’ he said. ‘We still got something to achieve.’

  ‘Don’t start with that shit.’

  ‘We could make it to the target. You and me. Cover each other’s back. We could hold off those fuckers long enough to deliver the bomb.’

  ‘This whole kamikaze deal is turning into some kind of freakin’ monomania. You’re fucked up. You fall on your ass every couple of steps. You aren’t going anywhere. Let it go.’

  ‘I’m still AC. Remember that.’

  ‘Come on. Chain-of-command doesn’t mean a thing out here. The badge on your sleeve isn’t worth a damn. You’re like some shipwrecked guy on a desert island, driven mad by solitude. Crowns himself emperor of all he surveys. Sits on his bamboo throne, all regal and ragged. Lord of the Coconuts. King of the Crabs. I mean look around you, Jim. Aircraft Commander? There’s no aircraft to command. Just a pile of half-buried scrap.’