Adam Baker - Impact

West Montana. A forest clearing. Frost huddled beneath rain-lashed tarpaulin. Water dripped from leaves and branches. The ground turned to mud.

She shivered and rocked. Exhaustion put her in a weird, dissociative state. She looked down at her hands. They seemed to belong to someone else.

Major Coplin crouched over a brushwood fire and brewed nettle tea. He folded leaves into a mess tin and stirred with a knife.

A week-long SERE exercise: Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape.

Major Doug Coplin, her instructor. SEMPER PARATUS on his forearm, and a three-day beard. Taciturn loner. She wanted to ask him about the fingers missing from his left hand, but his manner didn’t invite conversation.

‘Got to adapt your thinking to your environment,’ he said, watching water simmer and steam. ‘That’s the key. Example. People habituated to arid terrain can sniff out water. They become alert to the scent of oasis vegetation. Yucca, cacti, carried on the desert air. So use your nose. Use every sense you got. And above all, use you head.’

Rippling heat haze. Endless desert.

Frost limped through dunes leaving a meandering trail of step-drag footprints in the sand.

She stopped and sniffed the air. An unplaceable scent carried on the breeze.

Brief, olfactory misattribution. Flowers. The heart-tugging hope of a verdant, tree-fringed oasis.

The aroma soured and grew strong. Burning plastic. Spilt aviation fuel. Ruin and incineration.

A column of black smoke unfurled behind a distant rise.

A steep gradient. The last of her strength. Crawling on hands and knees, weak with thirst and exhaustion.

She reached the summit, lay face down and regained her breath.

She slowly lifted her head, face dusted with sand.

The plane:

Liberty Bell . The massive, shark-grey B-52H lying crooked on the sand.

Heat rippled from the long, windowless fuselage, the sweeping, vulpine wingspan.

A deep gouge behind the plane. An impact trench wide as a six-lane highway.

An uncontrolled descent would have resulted in a nose-dive. Nothing left of the plane but an unrecognisable ball of super-compacted metal at the bottom of a deep impact crater. But the fuselage was largely intact.

Pinback’s roof ejector port was still in place. Maybe his seat failed. Had to bail through the lower cabin floor. Or maybe he stayed at his station. Fought for control as the plane fell out of the sky, two remaining turbofans locked at maximum thrust. Jammed the throttle quadrant, wrenched the control column, pulled the plane out of a stall and brought it level enough to achieve a rough crash-landing. Nose slam, then a long, shuddering belly-skid. Three-hundred-ton airframe scything a succession of dunes before coming to rest.

Frost struggled to her feet and surveyed the wrecked war machine below her.

The tail had torn off.

Three of the four propulsion pods had been ripped from the wings. One of the detached engines lay half-buried to the east of the crash site. Flames licked between turbine blades. Acrid smoke.

The wing tanks had burst. JP8 aviation fuel leaked from split panels, leeched into the sand, stained it black.

Cupped hands:

‘Hello?’

No sound but the steady pop and crackle of the burning engine.

‘Anyone?’

Her shout turned to a cough. Parched throat. She fumbled a water sachet from her vest, tore and drank. She squeezed the plastic envelope dry and threw it aside.

She slid down the dune in an avalanche of dust and limped towards the plane.

She hobbled across the sand towards the gargantuan, sand-matted hulk.

She threw herself down in the shadow of the nose, lay beneath sortie decals and caught her breath.

Merciful shade. The intense, skin-searing pain of direct sunlight suddenly, blissfully, withdrawn.

She lay a while, fighting sleep. Lame, exhausted, dehydrated. All she wanted to do was rest.

Coplin turned a couple of rabbits on a twig-spit. Cooking flesh sweated grease. Flame-licked fat popped and boiled.

‘Gonna be a cold night. Tempting to throw on a couple more logs. But like the man said, white folks build a big fire and sit away from it. Indians build a small fire and sit close. Conserves effort. Conserves wood.’

He probed the meat with the tip of his knife.

Frost drowsed in her poncho, lulled by the steady drum of rain on tarpaulin. She chewed a twig to dull hunger pangs.

‘Ain’t nodding out on me, are you?’

She shook herself alert and rubbed her eyes.

‘Adrenalin is a drug like any other. Person builds a tolerance. You got to keep your shit together, girl. Wire-tight, until the mission is done.’

She got to her feet.

Headrush. An uncontrollable shiver. One-twenty in the shade, and she had the chills. Onset of heatstroke messing with her ability to regulate internal temperature. She made it to the plane just in time. Another couple of hours spent stumbling across open desert would have meant delirium and death.

Lengthening dune-shadows. Heading into afternoon.

She looked up. The flight deck fifteen feet above her head. A couple of the polycarbonate windows smashed from their frame, leaving skull-socket vacancy.

‘Hey. Hello?’

Pause.

‘Anyone up there?’

Deathly silence broken by a gunshot.

She threw herself against the plane, turned, and snatched the pistol from her shoulder rig.

Trembling hands. She scanned the dunescape, tried to locate hostiles.

Pop and spark from the burning engine. Components within the turbine stack combusting like firecrackers. Each retort puffed flame through titanium blades.

She reholstered the Beretta.

She began to walk the length of the plane, nose to stern.

No way to get inside the aircraft. Under normal circumstances the crew would enter the plane via a ladder-hatch in the underbelly, forward of the landing gear. But the crash had put the hatch out of reach.

She ducked beneath the massive port wing. Fetid cave-dark. Hand clamped over her mouth and nose. Aviation fuel dripped from fractured wing plates. Metal already streaked with oxidisation. Overwhelming stench of JP8.

Out into daylight. She straightened up. A backwards glance. The mid-wing spoiler panels were raised. Air-brakes deployed to create maximum drag. Someone had tried to slow the plane at the moment of impact.

She reached the rear of the aircraft. Ripped and ragged metal where the tail had been torn away.

Twisted spars. Trailing cable. Fluttering foil insulation. Central crawlway crushed flat.

A crash trench behind the plane. An avenue of raked sand flecked with wreckage.

The foreground: an undercarriage quad bogie ripped from a wheel well. Four huge balloon tyres on aluminium hubs. The stumps of piston actuators. Frayed hydraulic line.‘Anyone?’

Oppressive silence.

Maybe she was the sole survivor. Maybe the rest of the crew died on impact, or expired as they wandered, lost, through the desert.

Sudden, gut-punch anxiety. A child’s pre-verbal fear of abandonment. What if the rescue team had already come and gone? Picked up survivors and returned to base, leaving her marooned in the desert.

Frost, LaNitra. Written up MIA presumed KIA.

Shrill note of panic in her voice:

‘Can anyone hear me?’

Dear God, don’t let me die here alone.

…above all, use you head.

She thought it through.

No footprints.

The dunes surrounding the plane were pristine. The rotor-wash of a heavy rescue chopper would have churned a shitload of sand, left a visible LZ.

And the body of the plane was pretty much intact. If a TRAP team had touched down at the crash site, they would have cut open the central fuselage to retrieve the warhead.

Liberty Bell had sat neglected, silent and still, since the moment she hit the ground and came skidding to a halt.