Exit Alpha (27 page)

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.

He waded toward the huddled figures, some lying in the snow, some on their knees, others standing, their Gore-Tex windproofs a spot of colour in the void.

Already out of breath, he paused, turned back to look at the hulk. Up front the radome was half cracked off and the shredded bodies projecting from the windows showed how fast they’d stopped. The fuselage seemed to be buried halfway up the main landing gear fairing but buckled panels along the snowline explained the illusion. The belly must have collapsed or been ripped off piecemeal on the ice.

From the rump of the broken port wing, JP8 dribbled, its enormous cold tolerance preventing it from freezing. Snow was porous to the fuel, which would go deep and be less likely to ignite. The outboard port engine hung from its spar, the mounting beams severed from their struts, nacelle tilting at the snow. He suspected the starboard wing had ploughed in and broken off.

The great striped tail stood proud and the rear fuselage appeared undamaged. A long skid-mark showed the way they’d come. They’d been climbing slightly on impact so must have matched the plateau’s angle. For a shock spud-in, they’d done well.

He waded over to the gasping survivors who seemed in a fugue of disassociation. Air pressure was lower at the poles. And they had to be at 3000 metres — equivalent to around 4000 metres on Everest. So everyone was functioning on half the normal oxygen supply. It meant shortness of breath, dizziness, confusion, even nausea.

Zia sat in the snow, face contorted, shivering. Beside him was the grey-faced pope who was the worse for altitude sickness.

Cain touched his arm. ‘You okay?’

The old man nodded, gasped, ‘We think . . . the general’s . . . broken his leg.’

‘Pull your balaclava over your face. And always keep the goggles on. UV’s extreme, even in this weather.’

Visibility was reducing. They could have been inside a large grey egg. The breath through his balaclava fogged his goggles and made the plane a blur.

He glanced at the hired heavies with their trigger fingers on their guns. Neither wore goggles and squinted against the glare. At least Zia had the sense to shut his eyes.

The oafish young mercenary had his M–4 trained on Hunt. She crouched beside Eve Rinaldi who lay on her back, unconscious.

He asked Hunt, ‘What’s wrong with her?’

‘Knocked out, I think. We’ve got to get her conscious. Moving.’

She was the only other person here, he realised, who knew these conditions. The others were what they called ‘fingies’ — fucking new guys.

He waved a mitt at the assembly. ‘Okay. First thing. Head-count. Eight here.’ He tapped his windjacket. ‘Nine. Girl’s still in the plane. Makes ten. Everyone to stay close. Easiest place in the world to get lost. If you can’t see the plane, you die.’

Christ it was cold. And if the wind got up it could drop another 30 degrees.

He turned to the mercenaries. ‘Guns won’t help you now.’ He pointed to the big youth’s outer gloves. ‘Two sets of gloves aren’t enough. Drop the iron and get your mitts on. And if you’ve got glare glasses, put them on.’

‘Don’t give them a heads-up,’ Hunt panted. ‘Let them bloody find out.’

Her strategy was right. Except they had two old men, one injured. An unconscious woman. A hysterical kid . . . If they tried a war of attrition, they’d win. But the civilians would die first.

‘Tempting,’ he told her. ‘But we need their manpower now.’

Raul had been facing into the wind. He blinked with difficulty, eyelids frosted. Cain knew that even his meta-pop psychology would be vexed by cold seeping to his bones. He and his stooges looked as comfortable as nudists buried in crushed ice.

Bell turned to his guru. ‘I’m up to here with Karen and this Indian smartarse.’ He wasn’t referring to Zia. ‘I say we take them out now.’

Cain said, ‘Without us, you’ll die in hours. And I’m from Pakistan, if you don’t mind.’ He turned to all of them. ‘If you don’t have glasses or goggles, get back in there and find some. Mitts on, glasses on, hoods on. And cover your face with balaclavas, blizz masks if you have them. Or any way you can. Could save your nose dropping off. Probably save your hands. And face away from the wind whenever you can. And keep moving or your hands and feet’ll shut down.’

It had been quite a speech for this altitude. He puffed to get his breath.

‘He’s right,’ Raul said. ‘It’s mutually assured survival just now.’ His words became frost on the fur of his hood. ‘Our hitchhikers know these conditions so, for the time being, they live.’

‘No one’ll live,’ Cain said, ‘unless you break out the plane’s survival gear.’

‘What’s it got?’ Bell gasped.

‘Tents, cookers, lamps, water, sleeping bags, shovels. And should be a week’s crew rations.’

‘What if the plane goes up?’

‘We’re dead anyway. So risk the plane and get these people in it.’

‘But it’s just as cold in there.’

‘Warmer. No wind-chill.’

Bell glanced at the remaining hired help. ‘Get the old men and the woman in the plane.’

The Slav plodded forward. But the young oaf seemed reluctant and kept the gun on Hunt as if comforted by what he knew.

‘Forget it, Mullins,’ Bell gasped. ‘She can’t go anywhere.’ He turned to Raul again. ‘You’re sure you don’t want to shoot her?’

‘That would be too simple for dear Karen.’

‘Stop fart-arsing,’ Cain puffed. ‘Got about two hours of light.’

Raul attempted a superior look. But in this vastness it just showed his insignificance. Here his adoring millions of followers were reduced to one man — Bell.

‘Get wise, Raul,’ Cain said. ‘You’re between a rock and a hard place.’

A
t that altitude, in that cold, every movement became an act of will. Constricted by their layers of clothing, they moved in the plane’s ruined hulk as ponderously as deep-water divers searching for doubloons.

‘We could pitch tents in here,’ Bell puffed, ‘if we got that vehicle out. The ramp doesn’t seem jammed.’ He looked at Cain. ‘There’s a pump handle for the hydraulics. If we can manually open the back . . .’

‘On a slanting floor? Frig around and you’ll freeze. Gotta pitch the tents outside.’

‘Why not shelter in the vehicle?’

‘Ever tried camping in a Hagg? Death by carbon monoxide. Tents best. Got to get warm.’

‘Tents are warm?’

‘If it’s done right.’

‘Okay. Jakov. Mullins. Help him.’

Raul didn’t condescend to help with the tents. He sheltered in the plane with the infirm, face half-buried in the fur-lined hood of his parka, the butt of an automatic pistol that Bell must have given him protruding from his parka pocket.

The wind was getting up. Fine drift settled on the tent bags, began to search for ways into their clothes and faded anyone a few paces away to a smudge.

Hunt and Cain showed them how to erect the first tent, probing the ground, digging out a square for the floor — the wisest way in this area of katabatic winds. They laid out the 30-kilogram contraption, driving the pegs in on the windward flap and covering it with snow. They attached a rope to the top and let the wind aid the raising of the peak. They packed the valances with snow, secured pegs, tightened ropes. The effort in that cold made them disoriented, exhausted. Each time they exhaled, the frost around their faces built up until their mouths felt wired shut.

They had three polar pyramids — the best tents for a gale. When they’d positioned the floor, he left Hunt to finish the set-up with the Slav. Jakov — was that his name? He wondered if she’d ambush him there and hoped she had sense to delay. He suspected she’d bought his manpower argument because the first thing to do was get warm. She’d show the man how to unpack the sleeping bags, get the stove on, hang the lamp, lug in the food box.