Jay Lake: Last Plane to Heaven

Four days later something overflew us very, very high. It left a contrail like a string of butt beads.

“Aurora,” Nichols said.

The biggest, baddest, blackest spy plane in the world. I knew who they were looking for.

Two hours after that an F-117 screamed past. In the middle of the Gobi, no less. He had to have scrambled out of Almaty. I didn’t have my Stinger rack handy, and it wouldn’t have gotten a lock on that fucker anyway, but I loosed a few Smitty rounds after it. Not that the flyboy would ever give a shit.

Nichols laughed. “Damn, I wish we had some real SAMs.”

“Pretty soon you’re going to wish we had some spetsnaz troopers. Wait till his friends come back.”

We got spacegirl in the kitchen ger, surrounded by all eleven of us armed to the teeth and beyond, except Korunov who was standing by her with water and a first-aid kit. If we had to start shooting, though, we were already lost.

She just fell asleep with that little smile on her face.

The first Blackhawk helicopter arrived at dawn the next day. It roared about a hundred yards overhead, then arrowed on across the Gobi. When it crashed near the horizon, I stepped inside the ger to check on spacegirl.

She was still asleep, but her smile was so wide she was practically grinning.

The Blackhawk’s course had never changed once it had passed us.

Jesus, I realized, spacegirl could have killed us all.

Three more followed minutes later, juking and sweeping like they expected hostile fire. I had my Stinger rack out and ready, but I wasn’t feeling like much of an optimist. They shot right past the camp, heading for an imaginary LZ a kilometer east. Two of the choppers got tangled coming in. The third one belly-flopped.

I didn’t want to see her face this time. Even though those troopies out there would have killed us all, this was too much.

We settled in to wait for Hannaday. He was smart enough not to keep throwing hardware at us. He’d come in.

But he took his sweet time.

“Get up. Now.” It was Becque, looking scared.

“You don’t need him, Anangu,” I said. I grabbed my Stinger rack and stepped outside into the blazing stars of the Dreamtime. Becque was already gone.

Okay, clear enough. She’d handled Delta Force, but this was up to me. Hannaday was my demon.

Fine. I had some fucking sense of the rules now. Even in Dreamtime my legs ached. I owed him here as much as anywhere in real life.

The Antonov lumbered past at tree-trimming altitude. The helicopters still burned in the distance. Nice trick that, after all these hours. I trotted toward the windsock where Hannaday’s pilot would put it down.

The Antonov flopped in like a child’s nightmare of flight, bouncing hard on the ruts. First I put my Stinger into the starboard engine. She was already taxiing when the missile hit, but the nacelle exploded, taking that landing gear with it. The noise was horrendous.

I kept walking through the reek of rocket fuel and airplane fire.

Hannaday was out in seconds, his Armani coat torn at the seams, an Uzi in his hand. “Allen, you crazy fucker!”

Smitty got him in the right kneecap.

He went down, Uzi braced.

“Water,” I told the night in the voice of a thousand flowers.

Then I walked into the damp spray of his trigger pull.

“What the…?” Hannaday threw the Uzi at me. I swatted it away, knelt down next to him.

“Hey, fucker.” I put my pistol at the back of his left knee and shot him again. “How’s it feel?”

Hannaday was sobbing now, begging in words that came so lumpy I couldn’t understand anything but the tone.

I tugged his chin up toward me. “It’s only a dream, friend,” I told him. “But I can make you hurt until you die of the pain.” Not true, exactly, but she certainly could.

He got some coherent words out. “She’s not yours!”

“So now you own the night mind?” I set the Smitty against his temple.

“No! You don’t understand!”

“Listen.” I leaned in close, practically kissing his ear. “You’re snow leopard bait in here. She can make every sleeping moment of your life screaming hell, until you pull the trigger yourself to get out of it. And then you’ll just wake up screaming again, over and over and over and fucking over. So what I want is the God damned plane and a safe conduct out of here. You call off your dogs, we all go away, including her, and that’s it. Done.”

“It’ll never happen,” he gasped, gritting his teeth. Hannaday smelled like a corpse already, shit and old meat. “Thing is, she dropped out of orbit. But she never went up in the first place, Allen. She came from up there.”

I shot him in the temple, then said, “Wake up,” in the voices of a dozen screaming GIs in a burning helicopter.

There was no Becque this time, but the camp was empty. I nosed into a couple of gers . Everybody’s gear was here, just not their personal selves.

The Antonov was parked by the windsock, both engines intact.

It was daylight. I couldn’t check the stars, but I didn’t really need to. This was real life, whatever that meant these days. I took my Stinger rack and headed out toward the plane.

Spacegirl sat on the lowest rung of the ladder, huddled in her Russian flight suit.

“It’s true, isn’t it?” I asked.

She shrugged.

“You’ll own us all.”

Another shrug.

“You’re the weirdest alien invasion in history. What do you want ?”

She glanced up at the sky, her eyes flashing the brightness of the sun for one moment.

“Can’t help you there,” I said. “But if you’re tired of being a weapon, I can help you with that.”

Spacegirl smiled. A real smile this time, not her killing smile.

“Go to sleep,” I told my fellow mercs, the pilot, Hannaday, anyone left alive within miles of us, in the voices of a million brilliant suns.

We hid the BJC jeep under a tarp I’d taken from the camp’s fuel dump. The vehicle had gotten us into the mountains far to the south before running out of gas. The camp wasn’t visible to the naked eye from here, but I’d spotted the Antonov beating its way into the morning sky, then northeast toward Ulan Bator.

Perhaps an hour later, a massive flight of helicopters came to salvage the American dead. While the big boys dusted off wreckage and bodies, Blackhawks chewed up a huge patch of desert where the camp must have been.

By noon, nothing remained but smoke, the spacegirl, and me.

We walked farther into the mountains, until my legs couldn’t take it anymore. I found a hollow in one of the canyons and pitched a little tent.

“Come in with me,” I told her, “and let’s dream of your home. We won’t come back this time.”

She smiled.

The grenades I wired for our pillows were lumpy. Still fell asleep, her tight in my arms as any lover I’d ever had.

Somehow, I could smell Nichols’s Paki horse turds even as spacegirl took my hand and led me across the clouds of a distant, brilliant heaven.

I smell lamb’s blood. Walking the dusty streets, sword in hand, I hear only silence. High, silver clouds sweep the moon’s brightness like the linen wrapping a lover’s face. These clouds are mine, the silence my shroud. There are tasks no one should be forced to do, not even by the loving hand of He Is Who He Is.