“Maynard, please shut up!” Tahereh was losing all patience.
“Watch it, baby.” Chalk liked her spirit, but there was a limit. He chuckled. He knew she was taut as piano wire, wondering how her fate would play out in the next few minutes. He was not offended that she hadn’t fully bought in to his vision of sharing world dominion. There would be time for convincing later on.
The airplane’s engine sounds changed as the pilot adjusted power and altered the pitch of the props. The plane was now lined up for a long final approach to a murk-shrouded runway. A runway that none of the welcoming party had yet seen. Suddenly, the plane’s landing lights blazed out in clouded beams. Farron had not donned his NVGs. He was saving the batteries for the work to come later that night. Smart move.
The strange tendrils of fog were thickening, wreathing over the ground. The mist had crept in and enveloped the entire airstrip waist-high while they’d been staring upward at the plane’s approach. Chalk found it both weird and disconcerting to be so suddenly enswathed. The eerie vapor chilled his skin.
When the plane was only fifty feet above the ground, the white runway lights suddenly blinked on. Chalk watched as the pilot made minor corrections in the plane’s glide slope.
It was Slagget who first signaled the catastrophe to come. “Shit. Damn!”
Chalk caught Slagget’s alarm and looked where his lieutenant was pointing at the runway. The problem was invisible to the approaching pilot through the mist. Small islets of runway edge light revealed the truth only to the three confederates waiting on the ground.
The runway was a disaster area.
To Chalk, it looked like whole trees lay felled across it. And the strip’s entire useable length was pocked with craters, heaps of dirt, slabs of pavement and other debris. The rusted hulk of an old truck lay spang in the middle, very Third World. All that was missing were the chickens, potbellied brats, and Sally Struthers cadging for handouts.
Chalk uttered a low, “No.”
Then he dashed toward the middle of the runway directly in the plane’s path. Waved his hands like a madman.
He screamed, “Go around! No! Go around! Abort! Break it off!”
Still the plane came down. Farron MacDonald was oblivious. Seen from the air in the poor weather, the runway lights created only small pools of light. They indicated the runway’s position well enough, but gave no hint of its condition. The runway lights baited an invisible deathtrap luring Farron in. The plane’s landing lights were not helping either. They were reflected back into the pilot’s eyes by the strange obscuring ground cloud.
Roaring in frustration, Chalk crouched low as the plane’s landing gear swooped over his head missing him by inches. The inevitable became grotesque reality.
The mist swirled up and away behind the plane’s wingtips, twin curlicue apparitions of moisture, ghost-rats departing the doomed aircraft. The plane’s nose rose up slightly as the pilot flared for touching down.
With a flash of sparks, the plane struck a mound of dirt with its left main gear. Gave a sudden lurch to the right as if shoved by a giant hand. The nose slewed left as the shriek of metal tore at Chalk’s eardrums and set his teeth on edge like a thousand fingernails on a chalkboard.
The wings canted to the right. With sick fascination Chalk watched the descending wingtip gouge a furrow into the strip. Then the entire right wing wrenched free of the body. With the propeller still turning at full power, it flipped over and over, trailing a blaze of oily orange flame.
With the right wing gone, the left wing was now alone making lift, and it rose into the air levering the fuselage onto its side. The nose skewed further to the left. The right tail stabilizer tore free as it was buried in the ground.
Then the plane inverted completely. The tips of the left propeller hacked into the old runway. The left wing could not bear this new strain. It ripped free and spun away, spewing a gout of burning fuel across the plane’s body, now a rolling fireball. It bounced and ricocheted down the runway from one obstruction to the next.
At last the ruptured silence of the night healed over. All movement ceased, except for the flames. Chalk was rooted in place. His trio’s volition to move or speak was completely vitiated by what they’d just witnessed. Instead of reinforcements, only the soft, distant roar of burning fuel came down the runway to where they stood.
“God damn all Blackshaws!” Chalk roared, teeth flashing, nostrils flared. “God shove them all straight up the Devil’s ass!”
After a moment’s paralysis, Chalk began to trot toward the burning wreck. Slagget and Tahereh followed, passing among logs of driftwood, heaps of torn-up asphalt, and the craters from which the chunks had been dug. All the destruction lay fully in view before them. The thick, low fog was dissipating as if sentient, knowing its destructive work was done.
Chalk grumbled and barked as he double-timed down the field. “Bastards! They tore up their own airstrip! In case I wanted to use it! On the damn off-chance! Jesus Christ in a tutu, Dick’s crazier than I thought.”
Dodging amongst burning sections of the wings, Tahereh and Slagget followed Chalk. They all felt the fire’s heat as they ran deeper into the debris field. The flames threw clouds of black smoke into the air. The breeze blew it back in their faces. Eyes and noses running, they got as close as they could to the fuselage. It was a blackened, battered ruin.
The rear of the plane, which had been closed off with a clamshell cargo ramp and door, was mangled. A human body lay half-in and half-out. No movement.
Then the screaming. Chalk was comfortably numb to all expressions of human suffering, but this was a new horror. It was the sound of a man regaining consciousness just in time to witness his own immolation. The desperate paean of a condemned soul departing for hell. Or worse, for oblivion. The sound took too long to end, though it lasted only moments.
The burning man’s final scream faded. The flames’ roar was joined by a pounding against the metal insides of the plane. It came from forward by the cockpit. As Chalk’s team approached, they noticed a small door. It bowed outward from impacts from the inside.
A muffled, choking voice called, “Dammit! Open the damn door, dude!”
A moment of reason must have followed this outburst. The emergency release mechanism was tripped. The entire door popped off its hinges and fell to the ground with a clang. It was immediately followed by a human being. His black tactical suit trailed plumes of smoke. The plane was now coffin and crematorium in one.
Without a word, Slagget grabbed the smoldering man under his armpits, and dragged him clear of the worst heat. Chalk disappeared, wriggling inside the door from which the survivor had just leapt.
Within seconds Slagget was back at the fuselage. He yanked the semi-conscious form of a second man out of the plane as Chalk shoved from behind. This was not risking all for comrades. Not heroics. They were desperate for more boots on the ground. More soldiers equaled a fortune.
The team’s ammunition on the aircraft began to cook off in the blaze. The bangs started singly. Then they grew faster, like killer Jiffy-Pop. Bullet holes randomly pocked the sides of the fuselage, as rounds zinged and buzzed past Tahereh. That first screaming man had not gone to hell. He had left it. And Chalk was still inside.
Twice more, Chalk and Slagget rescued dazed men from the wreck. Then Chalk hurled himself out the escape hatch to the ground. Coughing like a three-pack-a-day man, he staggered over to the survivors Tahereh was treating with water from their canteens.
Chalk gasped, “No more,” between coughs. He wasn’t clear whether this meant there were no more survivors, or that he had enough men and was no longer willing to risk his hide.