Adam Baker - Impact

‘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.’

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.

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.