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.
35
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.
He drowsed, slowed his breathing, kept still as he could. A tear of sweat ran from his bandaged scalp, down his temple into beard stubble. He ignored it.
Cruising at the edge of sleep. Each time his head nodded forwards he heard phantom engine alerts, stall warnings. He smelled smoke, the sulphurous stink of shorting fuse banks. He felt the judder and shake of the plane shaking itself apart.
He jerked awake and grabbed the yoke.
Frost lay on the deck of the lower cabin.
She tried to think her way cooler.
She opened her mouth wide and exhaled, visualising each breath as a rippling jet of expelled body heat. Sweltering discomfort purged from her lungs leaving her cool and rested.
She let her imagination transport her from the desert.
The Sierras.
Kayaking down a wooded valley. A double-blade paddle. Gentle oar splash, left and right. Ponderosa pines on either bank. Trout darting beneath the boat. Osprey wheeling in the sky. Each bend in the river, each serpentine twist, revealed fresh scenes of verdant wilderness to explore.
She opened her eyes and sat up.
She needed a piss.
Frost crouched, flight suit unzipped, pistol in her hand.
Urine splashed and frothed in the dust. Almost instant evaporation. Dark, wet sand dried pristine white in seconds.
A person dead-set on survival would, she supposed, store urine. Squat over a mess tin then decant liquid into a bottle. But no matter what happened she couldn’t put a stale, part-fermented bottle of piss to her lips and drink. Rather eat a bullet than let herself be dehumanised by the futile struggle to survive an extra couple hours.
She stood and zipped her suit.
Cruel heat baked the plane metal, baked the sand.
She and Hancock would run out of water in a few days. They would lie in the shattered aircraft wracked by fierce kidney pain and shivering chills, visited by dead friends, relatives, lovers. A bunch of wailing, leering apparitions spitting accusations and reproach. The madness would last for a couple of hours. Then, without being aware, they would slide into a merciful coma and death.
Maybe, once she had shaken the last drops of water from her canteen, she should take a walk among the dunes to speed her demise. Kick off her boots, shrug off the warrior carapace of flight suit and equipment yoke, and walk naked into the sun.
She stepped out of shadow into merciless light, flinched as searing radiation hit her face.
She climbed a high ridge, shielded her eyes with her Beretta and surveyed the terrain for any sign of Noble. She wanted to see a 4x4 heading her way, lurching over dunes. A SUV kicking up a dust plume. Hum of a distant engine. Glint of sunlight on glass and chromium trim.
Nothing.
The distant horizon merged with rippling fata morganas that shimmered silver-wet like distant ocean.