Exit Alpha (25 page)

The bent figure was John, glasses beneath his goggles, the familiar smiling upward twist to the left side of his mouth. It was a shock to see him, engulfed in an overlarge freezer suit, standing out here in the snow. No
sedia gestatoria
now to bear him triumphantly through the crowd. Just an 82-year-old man with swollen ankles and low blood pressure — a man from a working class family who would have liked to have been a journalist. A man of warmth in a frigid hell. A man he loved.

And the other man, also small, but swarthy. Sly, obsequious eyes. Cain confronted his life’s work — the president he’d plucked from power and inadvertently saved from a plane crash. Allah’s little helper had been with EXIT — how long now? Six years. That would make him seventy.

‘Rahib Badar.’ Zia ul-Haq’s smile displayed his huge trademark teeth, not so white now.

‘Greetings,’ Cain replied in Urdu, ‘in the name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful.’ But Allah’s mercy, he remembered, had not been conspicuous in Zia. He’d driven in a gold-plated Rolls and profited from arms sales while his minions jammed chillies into the rectums of his enemies.

‘A brisk day,’ Zia replied. ‘I hope your health remains exceptional.’

‘And yours, Inshallah.’ What had Reich called it? Compulsive, contactless sociability? Zia drew it like a poultice. You couldn’t get the better of the man. Even in this cold, even at this altitude, his manners remained impeccable and his sense of expediency acute. Did he still pomade his hair? Like most Leos he loved his locks.

The third man seemed to be a stranger. Then he recognised the voice.

‘Karen. You can’t escape me.’ The
basso profondo
of Raul.

She stopped short. ‘What is this? The confrontation waltz?’

Behind the notables stood Zuiden and another set-mouthed surgeon. Zuiden said, ‘Everyone in,’ and opened the rear door of the back cab.

Cain assisted the pope, helped get his boot over the sill and down to the well that ran between the side benches.

John settled on the bench and smiled at the dark-skinned president. ‘So you are . . .’

‘Zia of Pakistan.’ The old general would have bowed if the constriction of clothes and space had permitted it. ‘And you, of course, are the Holy Father. I knew they had you. Strange they kept us apart so long, we People of the Book.’

John smiled again, no dupe of political politeness. History had shown how much hardline Muslims revered Christians.

‘Popes and potentates,’ Raul rumbled. ‘Exalted company.’ He got in and sat beside Zia, then glanced across at the mild, lively face of the pope. ‘Al-Ghazali meets Augustine?’

The pope said, ‘Two great men.’

Cain and Hunt got in, next Zuiden and his sidekick who sat either side of the rear door as the engine began its racket. In the front cab you got good views. In the rear it was harder to see out.

The oil pressure built. With a jerk, they were off, tracks squeaking on wind-hardened snow. They passed the generator house, churned past snow-covered surplus piping and stacked sections of wrecked huts, turned to follow the drumline as if heading out toward the strip.

They shivered. The heat converter didn’t work well in the back. Cain glanced across at Hunt, not trusting this. It didn’t look good. Four senior surgeons, counting the two in front. Could they take Zuiden and the other man? He knew it was a dream.

He looked out the back window. It was starting to fog but hadn’t yet been covered by snow kicked up from the tracks. The ramshackle sprawl of Alpha had diminished in the distance and now they were passing two isolated freight containers on linked traversing sledges. Something red had dribbled down to the pivot of one massive runner. And there were drag marks for a distance sidewards. Were there bodies in the containers? Had they massacred people here?

The Hagg stopped, engine idling.

He couldn’t see huts.

‘Now what?’ he asked Zuiden.

‘We wait.’

The sound of multiple turboprops. A Herc coming in.

‘So, my seditious friend,’ Zia said in Urdu. The word ‘seditious’ was a threat. The Koran classed sedition as more grievous than killing, a precept dear to Muslim leaders who seized power. And to Zia, he was a seditionist. The man understandably hated him. ‘My question is,’ he went on, ‘am I about to be killed?’

Cain smiled back, knowing the surgeons were watching, and answered in low Urdu, ‘They’re about to kill us all.’

‘I thought so.’ Zia returned the smile, nodded pleasantly, as if told the weather would stay fine. An accomplished performance. Not even a flicker of strain.

Raul still thought it was an excursion and an opportunity to play to the gallery. He surveyed the pope with a derisory air. ‘A step into the unknown. How to move from time to space? Infinite choices then, you agree?’

John said, ‘What is there to move from?’

Then, drowning the muffled tractor-sound of the Hagg, the roar of the landing plane.

They heard it reverse thrust, taxi. The Hagg moved forward again, twisting around. Its steering system was unusual — two servo-controlled hydraulic cylinders that articulated front and rear cabs around a central point. A curious vehicle, Cain thought, to spend one’s last minutes in. DEATH IS AN ASPECT OF LIFE. But to be gutted by bloody Zuiden . . . Concentrate, he told himself. You’re about to be shot.

They stopped again — and sat for almost an hour. Little was said, as if the impending event had killed speech. Once the pope glanced at him. He knows, Cain thought. Only Raul seemed oblivious to fate.

As they waited, other vehicles approached the still idling plane. They could shut the thing down above minus 40 degrees centigrade but perhaps the temperature was dropping. With just two old transports in the fleet, they tended to mother the hydraulics. Number three engine would still be running.

A loader went by, then a tractor towing a heater.

‘What’s that?’ Raul rumbled.

‘A Herman Nelson heater,’ Zuiden said. ‘You have to heat seals and gaskets or they contract and fluids leak.’

‘I see,’ Raul cut him off with a concrete smile and turned to Zia. ‘What joy to have such well-informed abductors.’

The general refused to share in the derision of a military man. His indulgent smile was perfectly pitched to inform Raul he was the greater fool.

Eventually a tractor-drawn sledge passed them, returning stacked with stores — drums and dark metal boxes that might contain ammunition or explosives. Cain hadn’t seen any people. Was it just a cargo flight?

A buzzer, the intercab phone. Zuiden answered. ‘Right.’ He opened the back door. Cold air poured into the cab. The two surgeons got down and Zuiden called, ‘All out.’

Cain climbed down first with Hunt and looked around. The Herc was 40 metres away, its ramp still lowered. The heater trucks and fuel truck were returning. The flight deck looked crowded. And a man stood at the top of the crew door steps peering at them through binoculars.

Cain waited to help John down but Raul got out next, looked at the Herc, then stared harder, mouth moving as if astounded. Then he did an extraordinary thing — removed his cap and balaclava and waved at the plane with both arms.

The man standing in the crew door stared a moment more, then lowered the binoculars and yelled behind him.

Zuiden missed it. He was around at the front cab where his other troops were climbing out. They now carried buttless Ingrams.

This, Cain knew, was bloody
it
.

Raul was lumbering toward the plane when Zuiden spotted him.

‘You. Come back here,’ he yelled, ripping the Velcro tabs open on his ventiles, going for his gun.

Hunt’s eyes flicked to Cain for a cue.

He yelled to Zia who was half out of the cab. Yelled in Urdu. ‘Stay there. Both of you, down.’

Hunt, on the far side, hadn’t seen the guns but read the diversion as a chance. She launched a roundhouse kick at Zuiden, hoping to drop him before he got to the weapon. But attempting an accurate foot to the face in five layers and a freezer suit was pointless. Her cumbersome felt-lined boot merely grazed his shoulder.

‘Back off, bitch.’ He had his Ingram half-out but was fighting a strap that had fouled itself around the barrel. In this cold, these layers of clothing, everyone was equally clumsy. It was life and death, yet they were stumbling around like drunks.

‘You,’ Zuiden’s sidekick yelled at Raul. ‘Get back here.’

Raul turned, saw the gun, stopped, held out his hands in a stagy way.

Why haven’t they shot us? Cain wondered. Then he knew. Noise carried in this land like a shout across a glassy lake. So they took their victims to the strip and shot them during takeoffs when full thrust and the JATO drowned fire.

The surgeons were staring at the plane — at a man in khaki gear who was staggering down its ramp as if shoved. The man waved a desperate warning.

Gunfire.

His body tumbled into snow.

The sound galvanised Zuiden. ‘Who was that?’

‘Looked like Bowman,’ his sidekick said, ‘a loadie. Must’ve shot him from inside the hold.’

‘What the . . . ?’

The man at the crew door, who’d briefly disappeared, was now aiming a rifle with a scope.

The yellow ventiles of the Hagg driver blushed darker with a laser dot.

Zuiden shoved him — but too late.

A single crack — high velocity.

The driver pitched back, hit the snow.

‘Take cover,’ Zuiden yelled.

Hunt and Cain, four paces behind the vehicle and exposed like bunnies on a rug, dropped flat.

She shouted across to him, ‘What’s going on? Who are they?’

‘God knows. Stay down.’

The three remaining surgeons huddled behind the tracks of the Hagg. One let off a burst toward the plane.

Zuiden yelled, ‘Fuck. Not at the plane.’

‘But some mob’s hijacked it,’ the shooter complained.

‘Tough. You fuck our planes, we die here. Who’ll fucking come and get us?’

Cain knew he was right. Without the planes, all at Alpha would die. No one, on or off the continent, would dare lift a finger to help.

The sniper in the plane waited. Cain was exposed enough to be shot, but assumed the man was after armed troopers — the perceived threat to Raul.

Raul, halfway between the two camps, sank to his knees, lay flat, then looked back with a strictured smile. Headcase, Cain thought.

More engine noises joined the racket as two quads shot down the ramp. The ramp extensions weren’t in place so the converted four-wheel ag-bikes bucked and slewed as they kissed snow. Cain didn’t believe it. A man with a burp gun sat behind each driver.

The surgeons were shocked. They scurried as one of the fast, erratic quads circled wide to attack their rear.

Zuiden’s men were now fighting on two fronts with cover only from one side. The Hagg sat lower than a snow-cat, with a towing point at the back of the rear cab, hydraulic steering linkage the other end, so there was no way, in bulky gear, to wriggle between the tracks.

Bullets pinged off wheels and splintered cold-hardened rubber as the circling bike strafed them. Then the second bike attacked from the plane side, its overlarge soft tyres mashing the snow-crust, kicking up crystalline white cloud.

Cain craned to look back at the open rear door of the cab — saw the dark head of the old general and the pale face of the pope peering just above the sill like startled cats.

The air sang with firing. Zuiden was pinned every way. The sharpshooter from the plane still methodically targeted movement. And he was good.

A cry.

One surgeon down.

Zuiden used the body as a bunker.

Cain called to Hunt, ‘You set?’

The quad that had gone around the back did a 360, spraying snow, flipped. Zuiden had shot the driver and both riders were rolling in snow.

The two remaining surgeons now concentrated fire on the quad and took out the man with the gun.

Zuiden dragged out a two-way, was calling the base.

‘Go.’ Cain was up and running along the plane-side of the Hagg. He wrenched the driver’s door open, leaped into the seat, felt under the dash, pulled the release catch on the park brake.

As the vehicle jerked ahead, it left the two surviving surgeons totally exposed. In the external rear-view mirror he saw Zuiden’s last man, one knee up and firing, pitch over.

Zuiden lunged for the upended bike, took cover behind it, aimed.

Cain ducked as the right-hand side window filled with spider patterns, disintegrated. He dragged the wheel around, glad the thing was left-hand-drive.

A flapping rear nearside door. Hunt behind him on the floor.

The remaining quad was ahead of them, racing for the plane. Two men still on it. But the man with the gun was gone. Shot? He’d been replaced by Raul. The driver had picked him up.

Hunt, now leaning on the engine cover next to him, yelled, ‘What are you
doing?
’

‘You want to stay and play tag with Alpha?’