Jay Lake - Last Plane to Heaven

That drew a reluctant laugh out of me. “Big spookery all get outsourced to India?”

“Pakistan, actually. In the name of funding and plausible deniability.”

“Fuck yeah. What’s your point?”

“We’re going to bring in a special subject. We need your team to play like Ukrainian mercs for about a week. Ride the subject hard, put them in some real fear, then let them be extracted.”

Who was he kidding, extracted ? I knew what that signified. “What, Delta Force falls out of the sky and caps us all? No thanks.” As if this bunch of multinational nimrods could be Ukrainians. Korunov actually was, the real McCoyovich. After the fat man, Nichols with his Paki cigarettes was the safest and sanest of the bunch. There was a reason our little crowd wasn’t out eating snakes on the front line.

“No-risk deal,” said Hannaday impassively.

“That deal ain’t been written yet.”

He folded his hands in his lap, a deliberate gesture straight out of interrogation training. “I’ll be sitting here with you the whole time.”

Well, I could always cap him when the shit went south. Because a situation like he wanted to set up would without question run for the border before it was all over with.

And it ain’t like I was walking out of here.

“Fuck you very much,” I told Korunov. “I guess we’re playing. I’ll go get the boys fired up.”

“What are you going to tell them?”

“Just some fucking lies. I got a million of ’em.” I grabbed my Stinger rack, waved it at Batugan. “You might want to slap a Band-Aid on Ming the Merciless over there before he bleeds out.”

“Don’t need him anymore,” said Hannaday.

I didn’t let the door hit me on the ass. Paymaster and contract man could gas all they wanted. I’d chosen my poison.

It took a little while to get a camp meeting together. Beier, the South African, was somewhere sleeping off a three-day bender, while the Belgians were off dust-wrestling and greasing each other down. Those two boys didn’t much like being interrupted at play, so I sent Nichols after them. I rousted the rest of the crew to find Beier.

We wound up in the kitchen ger . It was too damned windy to talk outside. I didn’t want to be near the Antonov—for several reasons—nor near Hannaday and Korunov. The Belgians were madder than hell and Beier was propped up against a stack of North Korean beer beneath a line of curing mutton fatback that kept dripping on him. There was a potbellied stove, thankfully cold, stacks of MREs and Chinese canned goods, and us.

I picked my nails with a Bowie knife till everyone quieted down. That was so fucking theatrical it made me want to puke, but this was the kind of shit that worked on these boys. Visible weapons and getting straight to the point.

“Listen up, geniuses. We’re stewed and screwed here. Korunov’s been forced to accept a transfer of our contracts. We’re getting out soon, but there’s one more task.”

They groaned and cursed in seven languages.

“Yeah,” I said. “I know. We got to run a fake hostage situation with a drop-in, pretend to be Ukrainians.” Commonwealth of Independent States political bullshit. My guess was we’d be labeled later as Chechens. The ex-Sovs saw them in every shadow the way Americans saw Arabs. “So if you’ve got a Slavic accent, start using it. If you don’t got one, start practicing.”

“What happens if we say no?” It was Nichols, speaking quietly for a change. Somehow everyone was suddenly listening.

“You’re free to walk home any time.”

“We got return bonds.” That was Echeverria, the ETA guy for whom all of Europe had gotten too hot. I didn’t figure anybody Hannaday swung in here would cop to a Basque accent.

“Yeah. If we can cash ’em. You see an ATM around here, Etchy?”

Nichols again: “So what do we do?”

“Put ’em through the usual course, just don’t kill ’em. Scare the hell out of whoever this is. And…” I glanced at Beier, who appeared to be snoring. “… they keep all their bits and pieces attached and intact.”

I figured the marching orders would change between now and then, several times most likely, but I also figured the bits and pieces part would still apply.

“What happens at the end?”

“An extraction.”

They all got real quiet.

“Staged, boys. And we’ll know they’re coming.”

“I fire no blanks,” said one of the Belgians. Everybody laughed except me.

“Think about it. Unless you can grow a truck under you or sprout wings and fly, we’re pretty much stuck.”

“Knock over the Antonov right now,” said Nichols. “And split.”

“Nope.” I pointed the knife at him. “First off, a couple of stray rounds and that plane’s toast. You know what a piece of shit it is. Second off, they don’t keep no fucking maps on that thing. Three or four of us know enough to get it flying. None of us know the terrain. Something happens to the pilot, you want to navigate the Gobi from the air by eyeball and dead reckoning? Third, I’d bet money Hannaday’s got surprises inside that plane right now, just in case any one of us is a smartass.”

“Hannaday?” Nichols didn’t miss much, and he’d heard a lot of my stories.

“Yep. Mr. Congeniality himself.”

“And you’re going for this?”

Hell no, I wanted to say. What I did say was, “You got a better idea?”

No one had an answer for that question. After a full minute of silence, I put my knife away.

An hour later Hannaday had me and Nichols on the plane trolling for new fish from five hundred feet.

Antonov 17’s a funny bird. Looks almost like a kid’s drawing of an aircraft, twin props, high wing. Not that big, and a slow fucker to boot, but they really did keep flying forever. The seats had been designed for Chinese grandmothers, not American mercs with incipient butt spread. Tiny aluminum rails with webbing between, idiot cousin to the common lawn chair. Air Munchkin. How the hell a Sov platoon in full kit ever fit inside these cans I couldn’t imagine.

I didn’t bother with the seat belt.

Hannaday hadn’t relieved me of my Smitty, though the Stinger rack was back at camp. Nichols was sucking down another of those Paki horse turds as he fondled the barrel of his Mossberg jungle gun—a 40mm automatic shotgun that should have had Hannaday sweating.

The Gobi lumbered along outside the oval windows, low and slow. The pilot was looking for something.

Someone.

Curiosity finally got the better of my common sense. “We’re doing a pickup out here ?”

“Special delivery,” said Hannaday, surprising me. He wasn’t much given to sharing information.

“We’re a thousand klicks from anything .”

“And that, my gimpy friend, is precisely why we’re here.” His eyes narrowed to steel-gray slits. There was another reason he was here, as opposed to somewhere else. Hannaday thought he could run me. He’d done it before.

He was doing it now.

Fuck him. I didn’t want to die of old age walking out of the south Gobi, but fuck him.

Then the intercom crackled to life. The pilot said something fast and tonal—Cantonese, I thought, not that I could follow it. The Antonov banked hard and picked up speed as the engines coughed a bloom of black smoke.

Whatever it was we were looking for, we’d found it.

Hannaday just smiled. “Ready for some ladder work?”

Ladder work? Out here?

And damn me if we didn’t bounce to a landing somewhere not much different from anywhere else. There were cloud shadows on the ground, and a small herd of yaks in the distance. That meant Mongolians somewhere—their animals had a wide range, but they weren’t left completely unattended.