‘Barometrics read twelve thou’ and bloody going up!’
‘Radalt two thou’. Dropping.’
Cain could see nothing beyond the windows but an unrelieved white. The ice could have been 50 feet below or 10,000. What was their position now? Probably 300 kilometres from Alpha and another 1000 metres higher up the plateau. God, if they went down here…
‘Firing bottle two.’
‘Overheat light still on.’
‘What’s with the fucking cross-feed?’
Cain looked at the feathered inboard port engine, then stared beyond it — at something streaming from the dump-mast on the end of the wing.
He reluctantly added his voice to the yammer. ‘I think we’re dumping fuel.’
‘Christ! The switches are…’
‘Got to turf that Hagg. Load, pilot.’
‘Load.’
‘No time,’ yelled the navigator who was spotting out the starboard windows. ‘Pull Gs. Pull up. Pull up.’
The last thing he saw before impact was the pilot hauling on the yoke.
41
HELL ON ICE
The first thing was shuddering, grinding. Then the plane shook itself into a blur. Above the yells in the cans, the sound of tearing metal.
He fought free of the headset, grabbed a handhold at the side of the cockpit roof, planted a foot against the back of the pilot’s seat, which juddered like a paint mixer. There was no time to do more. The pilot was trying to pull full flaps.
They lofted once as if bouncing — perhaps launched off a pressure ridge — pancaked with a rattling smash and pounded, forward speed dropping, as lift bled from the big wings.
He knew the skis would have collapsed. From the sound, they were slithering on the belly. As momentum tried to suck him through the windows he fought lower until he’d wedged his back behind the pilot’s seat.
The two heavies weren’t so quick. One collected the back of the copilot’s headrest in the chest. The other sailed above the central console. A third shape crashed rag-doll-like into the man skewered on the right-hand seat.
Nina’s slight body was the last, landing against Cain so hard his vision went red.
Then the seat they were braced against broke loose, tipped forward. He slid up the back of it and was pressed into a body pile. The shaking was enough to loosen teeth.
He caught one glimpse, through an eyebrow-window, of the port wing with outboard prop still turning.
Saw the wing dip.
Its end shear off.
Felt the wreck wrenched around.
The inboard blades bent as they hit snow. The outboard prop carved down to ice, disintegrated.
Then it was quiet.
For five seconds.
He was lying on his back, could see a rolled black blind and a yellow T-bar handle. That put him near the cockpit roof. He moved his arms and legs to try them. No pain. He looked down at himself. Nothing seemed to have impaled him. He touched his face with his glove. No blood.
He was lying on top of people who were unnaturally still. Somewhere beside him Nina screamed.
Gingerly he slid off the pile. No pain yet. Everything worked. He couldn’t believe his luck. He turned in the littered space as if dreaming and looked forward.
The pilots were under it somewhere and had to be dead. They’d been bare-headed and both seats had slid off their rails so the forward instrument panel would be wearing their brains.
One of the enforcers was half through the forward window, his neck cut and his face hanging from his skull. The other man was coughing blood. The navigator was bent like a contortionist — spine wrapped around the window frame. The face-down body lowest in the pile seemed to be the engineer. He must have undone his seatbelt to check something. The last thing to enter his head had been the throttle control of the feathered number two engine. Its bloodstained stem projected from his shattered mouth.
That left Raul and Nina. Both, he saw, were alive.
And in that disoriented moment it occurred to him how typical it was, in this greenhouse of slaughtered bodies, that the two most dangerous people had survived.
Like him, they had been cushioned by the death of the others, by the wad of corpses that would harden, like meat in a freezer, into a memorial to gear-up landings only a ghoul could love.
Bitter air spilled through the shattered windows. Nina crouched whimpering on the floor, which now had a steep starboard list.
He looked around for the guns. Raul was ahead of him, had the one still visible weapon in his hands. The other he couldn’t see.
Then Bell staggered up the steps. He wheezed, ‘Gustave. Gustave…’ His drawn face changed to elation as he saw his imperator alive.
Raul had ignored the man behind him with rib-shattered lungs. He spread his arms with ecce homo bravura, gun in one hand, grinning.
‘You’re alive,’ Bell panted. ‘What happened?’
‘I think the technical term’s “pilot error”.’
Cain looked at him with disgust, thought, when the cold gets you, you won’t be chirpy.
Bell stared at the pile of bodies. His expression said it all.
‘How bad is it back there?’ Raul puffed.
‘Two dead, two injured. We’ve got to get you out. It could blow up.’
‘Couldn’t it just catch fire? I’m freezing.’ He eased himself down the stairs. ‘Hard to breathe.’
Bell placed his M–4 muzzle against the back of the coughing man’s head and fired.
The coughing stopped.
He followed his leader down.
‘Don’t leave me,’ Nina howled and clutched at Cain’s leg.
‘This is your stuff-up, kiddo. You put the spanner in the spokes. You’ve killed us all.’
She started to sob.
Yelling at ferals changed nothing. Should he try to find the other gun? Why bother? Any fight he’d had in him had gone. They were definitely higher on the plateau. Even less oxygen than before. Every movement made him gasp for air. They’d all almost certainly die. He pointed a gloved finger at her. ‘Put your hood on. And zip that parka.’
Her hands were clenching. She couldn’t do it.
He adjusted her clothes like a parent, worked the hood around her. The perfect skin, up-tilted nose, sunbleached corn hair. She was jail-bait all right, more dangerous than bloody Zuiden. So where were his sun-goggles? He searched around and found a pair, wondering why he bothered. But snow-blindness wasn’t fun.
He left her choking on sobs and went down.
The first thing he noticed was glare flooding in behind the front bulkhead. The nose of the Hagg had broken loose and peeled back part of the fuselage like a giant can-opener. The gash was where troop seats had been. Between its front tracks and the damage were the dead.
Jane was one — her face fixed in the agony her crushed body must have brought her at the end. The other body, the loadmaster’s, hung through the rent as if frozen in a back somersault — which it soon would be. The red mess of a torn stump didn’t explain where the missing leg had gone. Perhaps the disintegrating prop had sliced it. On the port side of the hull, shafts of light showed where blades had sheared through the guard skin doubler.
The main cargo deck was unbreached but he doubted much was left beneath it. The emergency exit hatches were untouched, the port paratroop door open. He could smell electrical wiring, aviation fuel. Cold was getting to him now.
He looked behind him. Nina hadn’t followed. Bugger her, he thought. He stumbled along the listing floor past the bulk of the Hagg into the glare. No need to jump. The snow was almost level with the door.
He sank in up to his knees. Indistinguishable grey on grey. Just the sheet of low cloud and the plateau of frozen hope — the bleakest place on the driest, highest continent of all. This was the terrible interior — an ice pack up to 3 miles deep — where no one could survive without machinery, technology and luck. The wind seemed less than force 3 but wouldn’t stay that way.