‘Fire in the hole,’ he said, and put a three-shot burst into the heavy locking mechanism. Dropping his shoulder into the door, he bounced off it.
‘Again,’ said Ford. ‘Can’t hold out forever.’
After another three-shot burst, the shots echoing for several seconds in the still night, Winter forced the door and it swung inwards. Sliding down the side of the hole, Ford and Gallen followed him into the darkness.
Pressing the backlight buttons on their G-Shocks, they walked through anterooms and storage areas that contained the detritus of an abandoned military outpost. Pushing on, they found themselves in the room that obviously sat beneath the spherical dome on the roof, a core of wires and cables descending from the sphere into the centre of the room. Computer screens, radars and comms equipment were arrayed around the core.
‘Listening station?’ suggested Gallen.
Winter had a closer look, and raised his eyes to the ceiling. ‘I think this is a distant early warning facility, what they called the DEW Line.’
‘The what?’ said Ford.
‘Cold War stuff,’ said Gallen, remembering the story. ‘Detect the Ruskies before they flew their bombers over the Arctic. Right, Kenny? ‘
The Aussie snarl came from the darkness. ‘Bingo, boys. Check this out.’
Following Ford’s voice, they walked through a door and into a room that made Gallen’s heart sing: a series of dry stores, then a kitchen with a stove with a stack of wood beside it.
‘There’s a washroom in there,’ said Ford. ‘Shower too. With any luck the stove heats the water.’
‘Mike, get the fire going.’ Gallen moved back to the main door, which he shut against the brutal cold. As he turned, the rooms lit up with an amber glow as the other men found a kerosene lamp and Ford kneeled in front of the stove’s open door.
‘We’re gonna make it, boss,’ said Winter, his hood and balaclava down and showing a rare smile.
‘It’s a start.’ Gallen tried to smile, but felt suddenly very weak.
‘Boss,’ said Winter, dropping the lamp and running to him.
Gallen felt his weight collapsing on Winter’s chest, heard the Canadian calling for Ford and then his head was lolling, his feet dragging.
He knew what it was, but he was beyond speaking. He hadn’t taken a proper breath for five minutes. His lungs had failed.
CHAPTER 25
Gallen opened his eyes, the overhead lights making him wince. His mouth was dry, his lips fat and cracked. He turned his head, realising he was dressed in a body bag made of what looked like aluminium foil. He was naked beneath the bag and his fatigues were hanging up to dry along with Winter’s and Ford’s. The throb of a generator sounded and the electric lights were working.
Leaning over the stove, Ford was also in a foil body bag which he’d taped at the ankles. The BBC World Service played on the radio and Gallen realised what felt strange: for the first time in several days, he was warm.
‘There you are.’ Ford smiled as he turned. ‘Cuppa?’
‘Coffee, black,’ said Gallen, his voice croaking as he tried to sit up, triggering a fireworks display behind his eyeballs.
‘Don’t get up,’ said Ford, coming over. As the Aussie sat down on the bunk, Gallen realised there was a large medical kit open on the floor beside his bed.
He knew he’d passed out and he could remember it was because of the pain in his ribs and inability to get air.
‘What’s up?’
‘Been feeding you paracetamol in your sleep,’ said Ford, fitting a stethoscope to his ears. ‘Trying to get the swelling and fluid down.’
‘Fluid?’
‘Yeah.’ Ford stood and poured coffee into an enamel mug. ‘Been stething you every half-hour. There’s a huge haematoma on your left ribs, but under it is a growing reservoir of fluid. In the pleural cavity of your lungs.’
‘Speak English, you damn Aussie,’ said Gallen, pushing himself onto his elbow and taking the coffee.
‘Pleurisy, mate,’ said Ford, his bedside manner belying the fact he was a trained saboteur and killer. ‘You take an injury to your chest in this kind of cold, and pleurisy is highly likely.’
‘Pleurisy? Like pneumonia?’
Ford looked up as Winter entered the room. ‘The two often go together, but pleurisy is water between the outside and inside lining of the lungs. If we let it go too long, your lung will collapse. It won’t take air.’
‘That’s why I passed out?’
Ford smiled. ‘Amazed you made it that far, frankly. I was sucking up some big ones getting through those drifts.’
‘So?’
‘So I was feeding you paracetamol, to reduce the swelling, but we have to drain that lung.’
‘Drain?’ Gallen sipped at the coffee and felt his ribs pound with the exertion of talking.
‘Take the fluid off and then pump you with antibiotics, which we have right here,’ Ford said, holding a jar of capsules that looked like they’d passed their use-by back when a genuine actor was in the White House.
Gallen looked at Winter as he approached. ‘Hear that, Kenny? Take fluid off?’
‘Thought we’d lost you, boss,’ said Winter. ‘I’ve seen this done before, in the Ghan. It’s no biggie.’
‘How small is no b…?’ said Gallen, the question cut off as he ran out of breath.
‘I put a tube into the cavity,’ said Ford, ‘then draw out as much fluid as I can with a large syringe.’
Gallen looked from one set of eyes to another. ‘You’re serious. You think you’re gonna put a tube into my chest? ‘
‘I did this once in a cave in Helmand,’ said Ford. ‘He was American, too.’
Gallen shook his head. ‘He live to talk about it?’
‘Sure,’ said Ford, deadpan. ‘He lived to tell me that if I ever set foot in the state of Mississippi, he’d hunt me down like a fox.’
The BBC World Service had the disappearance of Harry Durville’s plane at the top of its ‘Americas’ section. The announcer started reading the story of the eccentric, tough oil billionaire as Ford finished his painkiller injections around the side of Gallen’s chest. Hiding the catheter in his fist, Ford lifted it to the rib cage and pushed in hard, the sensation numbed until the spike slipped between two ribs and into Gallen’s lung tissue.
Gasping with the pain, Gallen stayed still, held down by Winter. ‘Shit, Mike. Think you got me?’
‘Hold on, mate. Gimme ten minutes, that’s it.’
Ford sealed the catheter in place with a piece of bandage tape and fitted a clear plastic tube to it. Then, having pushed a large syringe into the base of the tube, Ford pulled out with the plunger, immediately drawing a reddish-amber fluid into the syringe.
‘If you can relax, the fluid will drain faster,’ said Ford, changing syringes for another extraction. He went through seven syringes in the next twelve minutes, taking the fluid off the lung.
As Gallen took the penicillin at the end of the extraction, Winter sat beside him. ‘The radio’s not transmitting. Mike and I have been trying to find the problem but it looks like an antenna malfunction.’
‘Can’t we put a makeshift on it, try some rabbit ears?’ said Gallen, remembering some of the quick fixes they used to do on radios in the field. ‘We just need to get a signal out, even a weak one.’
Ford shook his head. ‘They didn’t want that happening at this facility. It was an early warning base where comms security was pretty important, so the radio system ain’t like the Harrises we trained on.’
‘What is it?’
‘It’s what they used to call a tropospheric scatter wave,’ said Ford. ‘I trained in comms when I was doing my time in the Navy, and we were only ever told about these things — never seen them before.’