Brendan DuBois - Final Winter

‘Victory? Victory for what?’

Pete picked up a checklist, let it fall. For later.

‘Victory for not having to shoot us down,’ he said.

As they descended into their approach, Karen Hollister of AirBox 88 said to her co-pilot Mark LaMontagne, ‘We get through this, want to go to unemployment together tomorrow?’

His voice sounded odd through the oxygen mask: ‘What do you mean?’

She couldn’t believe that she laughed, but what else was there to do? ‘You think AirBox is going to be in business this time next week?’

‘Huh?’

‘Mark, old boy, a bunch of AirBox aircraft have been carrying anthrax for the past few hours. Do you think that’s a keen strategy for keeping our market share?’

Mark coughed. ‘Shit. Hadn’t thought about that.’

‘Plenty of time to do that later. Let’s go.’

And though this was going to be a landing for the record books and news magazines, it ended up being pretty routine. The touchdown was just a tad rough but when they were done, the plane at a halt, the landscape flat and pretty much abandoned, Karen sat back, breathing hard.

‘Not bad, eh?’ she asked.

Mark looked out the side windscreen. ‘Got to hand it to you, Karen. You put us down like you’ve done this before.’

‘Not hardly. Look. Company coming.’

Flashing blue lights ahead of them. Getting closer. Vehicles, of course.

In a couple of minutes, the lights were close enough to make them out.

South Dakota Highway Patrol.

Which made sense, for right now AirBox 88 was smack dab in the middle of a stretch of Interstate 90.

‘Hope you got your license with you,’ she said to her co-pilot as the state troopers came up to them. ‘Hate to be arrested for landing without a license.’

Mark didn’t laugh — which made some sense, for the troopers below them looked odd.

All of them were wearing gas masks.

Air Force Major Terrence Walker was standing out on the flight line, moving clumsily in full MOP gear, gas mask and gas suit, as he and his small staff — all of them wearing the same gear — waited near a Humvee. There was one small building next to the long runway, with satellite dishes and radio antennas on its roof.

Captain Cooper leaned toward him, his voice muffled through the gas mask. ‘Still can’t believe they’re ending up here,’

‘Good a place as any. Look. Here they come.’

Walker looked up as the aircraft — AirBox 12 — started its descent, coming down like a goddamn brick. He hoped they could pull this off because there was nothing here to help them — this small base in Colorado tested weather-monitoring equipment for the Air Force, and didn’t even have a control tower or crash equipment — but it was going to have to work.

Somebody said, ‘C’mon, hoss, ease her on down,’ and so they waited.

Eugene Williams was the co-pilot of AirBox 12, and earlier he had said to his pilot, ‘Alex, I really think I should take her in. I’ve had the experience. You haven’t.’

And AirBox 12’s pilot Alex Hinz had replied in his clipped, accented voice: ‘No more talk, please. Prepare for landing.’

Stupid moron, Eugene thought, as he started reading out the altitude, rate of descent and airspeed of AirBox 12. He had flown F-16s before being RIFed out from the Air Force three years ago, and knew how to put an aircraft thought its paces. But Alex had flown some in the German Air Force and for Lufthansa, before ending up in the States and AirBox. He was a typical European pilot: follow all the rules and procedures, even if it meant killing you. Like the SwissAir flight that had gone down near Nova Scotia some years ago. Bastards had indication of fire somewhere in the plane, and they wasted time getting the passengers ready for landing, picking up meal trays, trying to troubleshoot the problem, following everything nice and procedure-like instead of landing the damn thing, until they—

‘Alex, we’re at five hundred, sinking 1500 and 10 knots slow.’

No reply. Just a grunt.

‘Alex, we’re at four hundred, sinking 1500 and 15 slow!’

No reply

‘We need power!’ Eugene shouted.

From the Humvee, an alarm started going Whoop! Whoop! Whoop!, causing Major Cooper to jump. He shouted out, ‘What the hell is that alarm?’

‘Bio alarm,’ came the voice. ‘It’s detecting anthrax.’

‘Shit, of course it is. We knew that. Shut the damn thing down.’

And he turned back to the approaching aircraft and saw the disaster unfold.

Eugene shouted, ‘Alex, we need power, we need power now!’

He reached over and pushed the throttles full forward to the stops and—

— And the last thing that was heard on the cockpit recording system — the infamous black box — reconstructed months later by the National Transportation Safety Board: ‘Oh, you stupid cocksucker, I told you—’

Major Cooper thought to himself, if I live another hundred years, please don’t let me see anything like this, ever again, as AirBox 12 started to pull out late from its descent at the end of the runway. For a moment it looked like it was going to make it, and then the aircraft’s right wing dropped suddenly, smacked the ground, crumpled, and in a flash, the jet and its crew and its cargo disappeared in a billowing black greasy cloud of smoke and orange flames.

Cooper and his crew ducked behind the Humvee as the roar of the explosion reached them, the ground shaking from the impact. It took long minutes afterwards before anyone was calm enough to use their communications gear and contact Northern Command about what had happened.

Adrianna Scott looked in the mirror of the restroom at the highway rest stop somewhere in Michigan, liked what she saw. She had spent some long minutes in a stall, listening to the nervous chatter of other traveling women and girls. She’d worked quietly and efficiently, doing everything that she had planned to do, all those years ago, all those long years that started in Baghdad when she had gathered up some belongings and valuables and had gone to Jordan. A journey of walking, hitching rides, and fending off the advances of the noble Arab men who had wanted to fuck her as she made her way west.

And from Jordan into Israel, where she had portrayed herself — rightfully! — as a Christian refugee. A small Christian community in Bethlehem had helped her fly to the United States, to Cincinnati, and in those hours and days and weeks of travel she had planned her revenge so carefully that she had somehow known, even back then, that it would end like this.

Before her in the mirror, through her own talents and the help of the nice people at the CIA’s Technical Services Division, a blonde-haired, blue-eyed, fair-skinned woman gazed out confidently. The hair she had trimmed and colored herself. The eye color was from contacts. The skin color was a dye job, and even her fingerprints were no longer hers, through a temporary skin graft job with artificial skin that made her into somebody else.

That somebody else, according to a Michigan driver’s license, was one Dolores Benjamin. Adrianna Scott no longer existed.

And as she walked out of the restroom she knew that somehow, in the next few months, in her new home, Aliyah Fulenz would finally be allowed to live again.

Randy Tuthill was standing next to the General when there seemed to be a sudden intake of breath and a sigh, as one of the AirBox icons, set over Colorado, began flashing red. The ringing of phones reached a crescendo and the General was passed one. He took the message. Randy couldn’t make out the General’s words, but what he saw was enough: Bocks closed his eyes and nodded and seemed to shrink four or five inches in size, right before Randy’s eyes.