“You are walking a very fine line, Mr. Erdogmus. You do not have authorization to carry out any operations other than those relating to your facilities in North Africa. And if you have recovered any of Dr. Rollins's personal effects, I remind you—”
“Of course. I will send over everything to you personally, as soon as it arrives.” Ufuk finished the last of his espresso. “Thank you for your time.” He reached out to shake the General’s hand. “I’ll have an update on North Africa soon.”
The General watched Ufuk wind his way out of the cafe, then motioned to the waiter. “Filtered coffee, black.”
“How many emergency beacons were there in Italy?” asked Dr. Müller, pulling up a chair next to the General.
“Six that we’ve accounted for, almost forty across southern Europe.”
“Have you located Hargate’s yet?”
“We still don’t know how Hargate got one. I think Mr. Erdogmus is playing a very dangerous game. He had access to equipment such as this?”
Dr. Müller nodded slowly, his eyes narrowing. The waiter arrived again, and he smiled, shaking his head that he didn’t want anything as the cup of coffee was delivered. “I’ve looked into Mr. Erdogmus’s computer systems.”
“And?” The General picked up his cup to take a sip.
“Very difficult. He’s good at what he does.”
“That’s why he’s here, why we give him so much latitude,” the General sighed. “Tell me, you worked with Ben Rollins. Why wasn’t he part of the Sanctuary team?”
“You can thank Mr. Erdogmus for that. Psychological profiling.”
The General’s eyebrows raised.
“As I said, he’s good at what he does. But…” Dr. Müller hesitated. “I found information that Jessica Rollins, Ben’s daughter, was at the Vivas facility just before it was attacked by extremists.”
“Not surprising.”
“More to the point, I also learned that Mr. Erdogmus was in touch with them. Looking for her.”
“That’s a serious accusation.”
“Do you have any teams in the area?”
The General put his coffee down. “They’ve been evacuated.”
“Good. The next Jovian cluster will hit tonight, centered on the Iberian Peninsula.”
“Any big ones?”
“I’ll say this.” Müller signaled to the waiter that he wanted to order something. “It’s not a good night to be outside.”
Jess gripped Giovanni as tightly as she could, pressing Hector in between them. Their snowmobile rocketed into the air coming over a ledge of ice, then crashed into a snowbank. It veered wildly before Giovanni regained control, almost throwing them off. She squeezed her arms around his waist, but she slipped and had to grab onto his shoulder.
“Stop for a break?” she yelled over the roar of the snowmobile’s engine.
He eased off the throttle. “What?”
“Take a break?”
Giovanni looked over his shoulder, trying to find the other snowmobile with Lucca and Raffa. He raised his left arm, his hand balled in a fist, the command for stop. He released the throttle and the engine noise died down to a guttural stutter.
They came to a stop and the snowmobile settled into the pink snow. It stretched in undulating waves into the distance, coated in an inches-thick granular layer. Giovanni said it was like driving in the desert. If you stopped, your vehicle would settle deep into the sand, but keep up a good speed, and the surface layer of crust was enough to keep you from sinking. So he kept them going hard, all day, almost without stopping.
Three hundred yards to their left, the coastal mountains rose straight up from the water; typical for this area of Italy. Beautiful terracotta terraces of vacation homes once lined the palm tree laden hills here, but any evidence of this past life had been erased. The hills now presented a steep, smooth surface of pink ice.
“Are you okay?” Giovanni killed the engine and stepped off the snowmobile. The oval of his parka hood was a white donut ringing the ice-ball of his face, with protruding dark goggles. He pulled his facemask down and shoved the goggles up, his breath shooting white plumes into the air.
“I’m fine, I just…I need a break.”
But she needed more than that.
She couldn’t feel her foot, couldn’t feel her legs, in fact, or her hands. The cold was brutal, made worse by the rush of wind as they burst across the ice and snow at the water’s edge. Every minute of the ride was a struggle to stay upright, her bones rattled by the constant vibration.
Hector shivered violently in her arms, and Giovanni picked him up.
“We camp here for the night.” He waved at Lucca and Raffa, signaling to pull up next to them.
“We can go…go…farther.” Jess stuttered. She squinted into the distance. The sharp hillsides stacked up one after the other before disappearing into the mist.
The sky was the same flat gray as it’d been for the past three hours since they left. They’d raced through the town and away from the black smudge of a fire she’d lit in the hangar. Her ring had stopped tapping by the time they made it onto the edge of sea ice. By now their attackers had to have found the bodies. They’d have no reason to chase them anymore.
“This is enough for today,” Giovanni said firmly.
Jess reached up to knock a chunk of snow from his cheek, but it wouldn’t come free. Giovanni pulled off one mitten. With his bare hand, he felt his face and rubbed the white spot. He did his best to smile. “My old friend frostbite. No worry, it is just a small one.”
“Sorry,” Jess muttered. She did her best to make sure his face was covered when they inspected each other. He took the brunt of the wind.
She still felt ill, as if her veins were filled with paste, but Hector, shivering in her lap just a second ago, burbled with excitement seeing Raffa and Lucca getting off their snowmobile, twenty feet to their right. He trundled through the snow, almost as deep as he was high, to greet them. Raffa hadn't spoken much since they'd left. He had gone about his tasks quietly, forcing weary smiles when either his brother or Hector spoke to him, but otherwise keeping to himself.
“I’ll heat up some water,” Giovanni said. “See what I can do for food. Why don’t you dig?”
He’d been taught basic polar survival on his expeditions. Dig a hole in the snow to pitch tents, cover the floor with anything that might insulate it, then cover the top of the tent with a layer of snow. A rudimentary, but effective, igloo. With some body heat, it would warm up inside, above freezing, even if it was forty below outside. And tonight was going to be cold. Snow lightening flashed over distant mountaintops inland.
“We made good distance today,” Giovanni said as he followed Hector to the other snowmobile. “Maybe a hundred kilometers. Two or three days and we’ll be in Sicily. I’ve heard it’s nice this time of the year.”
Jess snorted and shook her head. “Something to look forward to.”
She wiggled her toes in her boot. Still no feeling. It was going to be painful when they defrosted tonight. If they defrosted. Doing her best to hop-step through the snow, she made her way to the sled, attached by a ten-foot cord, to the back of the snowmobile. She unstrapped the cover and pulled it back.
Massarra and Roger stared up at her, tied together.
She couldn’t kill them, but she couldn’t release them, either. So Giovanni and Raffa had dragged two corpses, one man and one woman, from a house at the edge of the airfield. Jess set them alight. Nobody would have a forensics kit to sample their DNA. The simplest explanation would prevail.
Maybe there was something worse than death for these two, anyway. Jess almost cracked a smile, seeing them huddled together in blankets like lovers. They hated each other, and even that didn’t sum up the vitriol she sensed oozing between them.
“Fuck you, Jess,” Roger croaked, seeing her face.
“Not much chance of that anymore,” she muttered, and then louder: “Massarra, are you okay?”
“You could unt
ie me from this pig.” The woman’s face creased in disgust.
“Only if you promise not to kill him.”
“I make no promises.”
Jess knelt and untied their feet, and unbound Massarra’s hands. Giovanni wouldn’t approve, but he was fifty feet away, already busy throwing shovelfuls of snow over his shoulder.
“You two, get up and walk around a bit. Get some circulation going.” At least they had to be warmer than she was. She pulled out the canister of kerosene and the stove, along with the small bag of what was left of their food.
Massarra climbed out of the sled, but Roger didn’t budge.
The bag of food had exactly one soggy box of soda crackers and twelve ration packs, each a thousand calories. Enough food for six people for a day. Jess remembered reading stories of the siege of Leningrad, when people started boiling boot leather. Looked like tonight’s supper would be soda cracker soup. Her stomach knotted, thinking of food.
Something squawked overhead, a high, thin shriek. A seagull. It swooped low and fluttered to land in the snow in front of Jess. It was emaciated, its feathers matted.
“Sorry, buddy, got nothing for you.”
It made a tentative step toward the bag with the ration tins. Jess was about to shoe it away when another thought floated into her brain: seagull soup. The bird must have seen the gleam in her eye. It backed up, squawking even louder, and jumped into the air. Hector saw the bird and squealed in delight. Giovanni had already raised rifle to take aim.
“Leave it,” Jess said. “I’ve had enough of death for now.”
The saved soul flapped to the ground in front of Hector, who jumped through the snow to chase it. Giovanni gave Jess a look, but shrugged and put the rifle down to pick up his shovel.
“We’re going to die out here, you know that, right?” It was Roger, his eyes glassy, still huddled in the bottom of the sled.
Jess balanced the stove on a compacted wedge of snow. “Don’t thank me yet,” she muttered, clicking the lighter in her hand. A small flame burst to life, and the ground around her lit up in a yellow glow.
At first she thought it was the lighter, but the glow brightened and shifted into orange. Was it the sun setting? She looked straight ahead, west, but the light was coming from overhead. She swiveled her head to face it, but the sun moved. Sank. The glowing ball fell straight into the horizon, and a flash of light momentarily blinded her.
Then silence.
The brilliance faded, the afterimage of a flash bulb, but there was no sound. Just the seagull cawing. And Hector laughing as he chased it.
One breath. Two.
The fireball on the horizon glowed bright. Then another bright streak of light in the sky, following the first. Meteors.
“Get him!” Jess yelled at Giovanni.
She pointed to Hector, at least fifty feet farther out on the ice from Giovanni.
A low rumbling shook the snow. Ice crystals danced across its surface. Jess grabbed the bag of food and the stove and threw them on top of Roger, who still had no idea what was going on.
“Get in the sled,” Jess yelled at Massarra, who stood transfixed, staring at the horizon.
Jumping onto the snowmobile, Jess tried the ignition, but nothing sparked. From the corner of her eye, she saw Giovanni hopping through the snow. He yelled at Hector, telling him to come, but his screams had frozen the child in fear. She flipped out the kick-starter and tried to start the engine again, but her foot slipped off. Giovanni reached Hector and had him in his arms.
Behind him, the horizon shifted. Grew. The rumbling roar grew louder.
“Goddamn it!” She snapped down hard on the kick-starter again.
An engine growled to life, but it wasn’t hers. Raffa sped forward on the other snowmobile, Lucca holding onto him, snow spraying out behind them. He spun around and gunned it toward Giovanni, but the machine tipped onto its side.
A wall of ice towered into the sky behind them. It seemed to rise in slow motion, but the wave crashed through the last hundred yards in seconds. For an instant, Giovanni and Hector hovered in space, a hundred feet above her…
The ice erupted. She felt herself accelerate, thrown into the ground. A deafening blast of heated air thundered over her. And then free fall.
To her right, the wall of ice and water swept away and climbed as it crashed into the hillside. She rolled to her left, grabbing the overturned snowmobile, the ice shifting at a sickening angle, and strained to see Giovanni. There. A black dot on the white. The other snowmobile. But a dark rift had opened in the ice between them.
A flood of freezing water drenched her and she accelerated up into space again, spinning, churning. Jess hung onto the snowmobile. The return wave grabbed the ice sheet, cracked and carried it out. She kept staring at the chunk of white she thought was Giovanni’s. It boiled up into the air. Another wave crashed into Jess’s ice floe, tumbling the snowmobile on top of her.
NOVEMBER 11th
Eighteen Days A.N.
26
“EAT. YOU MUST eat.” Massarra held out a dented tin cup of steaming liquid.
Jess turned away, rolled deeper into the pile of sleeping bags that still smelled of Giovanni and Hector. Her sled had all the food, what scraps remained. They had nothing to eat, her boys.
If they were even still alive.
Maybe they were already at the bottom of the ocean, blue-faced, their unseeing eyes staring into endless darkness. Like her brother, so many years ago. Drowned under the ice. How many more loved ones would she kill? Ice. Water. Death. These seemed to follow her everywhere, even in her dreams.
With the maelstrom still boiling around them, Massarra had taken charge and staked two tents, end to end, into the middle of the sodden ice-sheet that had become their lifeboat. She’d emptied the sled and pushed it into the tents, offering some protection from water still sleeting over the surface in waves. Thundersnow clouds swept into the bay, quick on the heels of the meteor impact. Cold lightening crackled between dark clouds. A blizzard engulfed them. A foot of snow covered the tents.
The kerosene stove hissed, its flickering yellow flame the only source of light and heat. The ground pitched back and forth on the motion of the waves. Outside the wind howled, driving the snow in torrents against the mad fluttering of the tent walls.
Massarra had done her best to strip Jess out of her wet clothes and into something dry, but everything was damp. The temperature dropped quickly as night fell, dousing them in pitch-blackness. The soaked snow still sticking to the ice had already hardened into something resembling frozen playdough.
“It is for them that you must eat.” Massarra proffered the steaming tin again. “Perhaps they are not yet in Allah’s arms. It is God’s will, a test—”
“Stop it!” Jess bolted upright. Pain shot through her leg stump. Fire burned in her toes as they thawed. “Is your God happy killing billions of people? I don’t want your God.”
“You love them, yes? Hector? Giovanni?”
Jess forced back tears. Of course she did. She loved all of them. All of the departed.
“Then eat. They may yet need your strength.”
A wet cackle erupted from the corner of the tent. It was Roger. Massarra hadn’t bothered to try and strip him down. He was curled up in a soaking corner, scraps of cardboard and anything else he could pull around him. Jess had no strength to try and help him, and no desire. She couldn’t even help herself.
“Drink this,” Massarra pressed the cup into Jess’s hand.
She felt its warmth seep into her palm.
How many others were out there, just like her, struggling for survival right now? Struggling even harder, perhaps, to find some meaning in just the idea of surviving. Why? So many dead, so much destruction—it numbed the mind and senses. But each death was a unique story of love lost, dreams shattered, families never to see each other again.
“If not for you, then for them,” Massarra said, her voice low and soothing.
Taking a deep
breath, Jess took a sip. A thin soup of chicken soup mix, but the sweetness passing Jess’s cracked lips seemed to her the best thing she’d ever tasted. Its heat slid down her throat. When had she last eaten? She couldn’t remember. Couldn’t even remember eating. All that remained was the pain in her stomach.
“What do we have left?”
“Some soup, five ration kits.”
Five thousand calories, that’s the external energy they had left to fuel themselves. Plus whatever fat remained on their scrawny frames. Roger burbled in the corner, and Jess forced herself not to think of other options.
“What else do we have?”
“Everything that was in the sled. I think.”
The wind moaned, a thousand tiny fingers of driven snow beating against the tent fabric. Jess downed the rest of the soup and handed the tin back to Massarra. She sat up and clicked on her headlamp to rummage through the jumble of bags beside the sled. And there it was. She undid the sealed plastic skin of the digital radio’s bag, lifted it up and turned it around before setting it down. It glowed to life when she clicked the power button.
One thing at a time.
She could still contact people, even if she had no idea where she was. And people on the outside thought she was dead. Somebody in Sanctuary seemed to want her dead, so if she revealed herself, would that be enough to lure them out here, wherever here was? Of course they’d be coming to kill her, but—
One thing at a time.
And Roger, they must think he was dead by now. And she had the memory key, for whatever that may be worth. If what Roger had said was true, then Sanctuary must have all the modern, sophisticated technologies of the old world. They could locate her if they wanted to, if she wanted them to find her. But how to talk to the right person? Was Ufuk Erdogmus the one hunting her?
Her father had said to find him, yet she’d almost been killed in Vivas when she mentioned his name. If Massarra was telling the truth, then this someone was from Sanctuary, if Massarra wasn’t just another layer of deception.
Sanctuary (Nomad Book 2) Page 19
