“I am good, very good.”
She knew Giovanni had told him to say it. Just like that. “I’m glad to hear that.” His voice was clearer than Giovanni’s.
“I miss you, Jessica.” He pronounced it Jess-eee-cah. It always made her smile. “And I want tell you something.”
“Yes?” Her hand holding the microphone trembled.
Through the static, she heard voices. Giovanni encouraging the boy.
“I love you, Jessica.”
In her mind, she saw them clearly. Giovanni curled up around Hector, his cheeks ruddy red. Lucca and Raffa quietly watching, keeping close. It had to be dark, just the glow of the radio’s lights. Their tent sagging under the load of snow. And freezing cold. A tiny speck in an ocean of black, a slip of ice with its human cargo.
“Ti voglio bene, Hector,” she wept into the microphone.
“Do not do this.” It was Giovanni, taking the radio back from Hector. His voice a murmur. The signal was getting weaker. Distance. Or batteries. Or both.
“It’s too late,” Jess answered, taking a moment to regain herself.
“If not for me, then for him. Save yourself.”
She stared at the radio. How much she wished she could squeeze herself into its wiring, spread into space and find herself with them on the other side. “I’m sorry. For everything.”
“Don’t be sorry.”
“I don’t know what else to say.”
“I believe…” A long, wheezing cough. “I believe Hector said it all. Hold, on. The radio’s lights are...”
Static hissed.
“Giovanni?”
Nothing.
“Giovanni?” she said, her voice rising, but she realized it was hopeless. She waited a few more seconds before turning the radio off.
Last rites. Last ritual.
She pulled her final ration pack from her jacket pocket and peeled off its wrapper to spread its contents on top of the radio. Her last supper. Crackers and cheese paste. Cashews. A pack of cocoa. She’d saved her favorite for last. The foil package main course read: Chili with beans.
She didn’t have much time. It would be pitch black in an hour.
Blowing on her bloodstained fingers, she tore off the top of the foil pack. She didn’t have the energy to warm it with the flameless heating pack. About to squeeze some of the chili into her mouth, something moved in her peripheral vision. She turned. Eyes watched her from the shadows of the hangar.
She wasn’t alone, after all.
“It’s okay, come.”
The eyes multiplied into four.
Jess’s mouth salivated painfully in anticipation, but she gave up on squeezing some into her own mouth and held out the pack of chili. “Here, take it.” She put it down on the snow next to her.
The dog and his boy solidified from the gloom. The dog darted forward and retreated in advancing circles; the boy came behind. She picked up the parachute, the one she’d recovered from the shore, and put its straps over her shoulders, tightened its buckles. The boy took the chili pack and crackers and beat a hasty retreat to share them with the dog.
The two of them weren’t alone.
And she wasn’t alone, either.
Taking the radio, she left the rest of the ration pack on the crate, and climbed into the Cessna’s pilot seat. She felt better about wearing a parachute, but what would it matter? She waited for the boy and dog to take the rest of the food, smiled at the boy’s grazie, grazie, and waved them back.
Okay.
Her scribbled notes were duct-taped to the dashboard. She turned on her headlamp. White clouds of vapor dissipated on each quick breath.
Altimeter. It registered just under a thousand feet. Her note said to keep it above two thousand five hundred, to make sure she cleared any coastal mountains. Assuming she managed to get airborne. Airspeed. Zero now, but to get airborne she needed to get that above sixty knots. He’d said to try and get as much speed as possible before lifting off. That it would be a fight over the snow.
What else?
Vertical speed indicator. That she didn’t need, not really, but the attitude indicator was critical. She needed to keep it level, once she got up, and that would be hard to tell in the dark. She searched for a knob marked mixture and set it to rich, pulled the choke out and made sure the trim was set to ten degrees.
Enough.
She turned the ignition switch, and the instrument panel lit up. The engine whined, and the propeller turned, once, twice, pop, pop, and then in staccato bursts the motor roared to life. The Cessna jerked forward, but then stuck fast in the snow. She turned the running lights on to illuminate a carpet of snow ending in gray mist. This was no time for half measures. She gritted her teeth and turned the throttle to maximum.
The engine’s noise was almost deafening. The aircraft surged forward, the wooden skis Raffa had strapped around the wheels cresting over the hard pack and rattling against chunks of ice. Wind whistled past the cockpit. All she could see was a patch of snow, maybe a hundred feet in front of her. The plane accelerated. Twenty knots. Thirty. Thirty-five. She held the yoke, kept it pressed slightly down as Roger had instructed.
The Cessna crashed into a snowdrift, sending up an explosion of snow fragments. It bounced to one side but righted itself, slowing back down to thirty knots. In the gray distance, a smudge appeared. The buildings at the end of the runway.
Forty knots. Fifty. The buildings loomed larger. Sixty. The plane thumped up and down through the snow, but each bounce it seemed lighter. Sixty-five. She pulled back on the yoke, but not too far. The plane bounced once more and sailed upward. The buildings disappeared.
Seventy. Eighty. She turned the throttle down.
She was airborne. Jess hadn’t noticed, but she’d been holding her breath. It came out in a single gush and she gulped in a lungful of air. Her hands shook violently, but she held the yoke as steady as she could and watched the attitude indicator. Not more than ten degrees.
Below her, a hazy impression of the wrecked town spread out in the last of the light. Carefully, carefully, she turned the yoke counterclockwise and felt the plane bank. Gentle. Ever so gentle. Not more than ten degrees. The plane buffeted up and down in the wind. She turned toward the sea, and for a moment, let the nose guide her to the water.
Saying a small prayer to a god she wasn’t sure she believed in, she turned the yoke further, banking around more.
As the black of night wrapped itself around her, she turned the propeller of the airplane inland. Her headlamp illuminated the bobbling compass in the middle of the dash. Taped next to it was the heading she needed.
Two thousand five hundred feet. Keep it level.
30
EXCRUCIATING PAIN FLASHED up through Roger’s left arm each time the snowmobile dipped in the snow or veered left. He did his best to keep his weight off his much-abused left hand and steer with his right, but this was the hand that controlled the throttle as well. His left was duct-taped to the handlebar, a makeshift splint reinforcing the connection. Like everything now, a kludge as things fell apart—the world, their bodies, their minds.
At least he was going back. Completing his mission. Of a sort.
What had he done? What did it matter? The world was destroyed. But somehow it still mattered. He hadn’t meant to hurt Jess; all he’d been trying to do was protect her. At least, that’s what he’d started out trying to do, but it had all become a mess.
At the start, back in New York more than two years ago when he had been approached by a mysterious man in a clean-pressed suit and asked if he loved his country. It had been a job. A way of making some extra money and doing something patriotic, he’d been told, but he’d fallen hard for Jess, and was about to tell her everything when she took off for Europe. Since then, he’d been trying to find her. And he did. But then everything went from bad to worse. This was his chance, if anything meant anything, to try and feel good about himself again. It had been a long time since he had, and if he was going to di
e, he wanted to just feel…clean.
That’s all he wanted.
On the back of the snowmobile, behind him, Massarra lolled back and forth, semi-conscious. She was bound hand and foot.
Ink-black night surrounded them, his world just the hundred-foot patch of snow his headlight illuminated, the growl and whine of the engine, the up-and-down pounding of the snow. Mercifully, it hadn’t snowed again, and after cresting the ridge coming from the sea in the last of the light, he’d followed his compass heading directly inland. Soon after, he found tracks in the snow. Not footprints, but other snowmobiles. There weren’t many options for whose they could be. The tracks were fresh, straight along the road inland. He raced along it fast over the underlying fresh snow.
He knew he didn’t need to find them.
They would find him. He was the returning hero, and they needed him.
Images floated in the periphery of the darkness. Ben’s face, accusing him. His mother, her face sad. Flashes of home, of the leafy suburb in Brooklyn where he grew up. If he was hallucinating, at least he was still aware enough to know that. All he had to do was follow the tracks. Stay on the heading.
How long now? Hours. Had to be hours.
Another searing flash of pain.
What he would give for some Vicodin. Morphine. Anything. And now he actually was in pain.
Dots of lights danced in his peripheral vision. More hallucinations? He blinked and tried to force them away, and yet they grew brighter. Then louder. He eased off the throttle. The first part of the plan: they would find him.
“And they say there are no more heroes.” The Englishman smiled, his teeth gleaming in the bright overhead LED lamps. “I’m bringing her in,” he laughed, imitating Roger’s gruff voice over the radio. “You’re like some American action hero. Amazing.”
Roger stood in front of him, barely able to keep his legs from buckling.
A thickset man in a black ballistic vest held him up. Two more of them held Massarra tight in their grip, one to each side. After being surrounded on the snowy plain leading up to Vivas, they’d been searched—his rifle taken away—and loaded onto sleds and brought here.
Armed guards surrounded them in the ten-by-ten fabric tent. Roger assumed this was headquarters, but for what exactly he didn’t know. Why hadn’t they taken them to Vivas? Even in his delirium, he’d seen the lights of the central villa shining again, and the glitter of the shantytown around it. The edge of this ramshackle camp was hundreds of yards away.
Roger fought to raise his head to focus and look around.
So this was the feared Vivas team. The man looked like an English dandy, his blond hair swept back to one side, his arms clasped behind his back. His men, dressed in matching black uniforms with brown armbands, nonetheless looked haggard, tired. Scared. Perhaps beaten. “Where’s Salman?” Roger asked.
“Thought it best that we talk first, as you suggested.”
“Good.”
“Why don’t you tell me who this is?”
One of the men holding Massarra lifted her chin. She scowled and spat in the direction of the Englishman.
“One of the terrorists that attacked Vivas. She admitted bombing the Vatican.”
“I did not,” Massarra growled.
“How did you find this woman?”
“She’s a member of the Levantines. They were told to go to Rome and find Jessica Rollins.”
The Englishman’s eyes widened. “How interesting.”
“Morphine,” grunted Roger. He held up his bandaged left hand, a club of bloody rags held together with duct tape.
“I heard of your…needs. I also heard from Salman’s daughter, Rita, of your friend Giovanni sticking you like a squealing pig. That does look painful.” The Englishman frowned, then whispered to a blond haired boy beside him. The boy nodded and exited the tent through a back flap. “We will get you what you want.”
“Good.”
“But first, tell me about this special information, from our dearly departed Jessica Rollins?”
“I told you, only to my handler, from Sanctuary.”
“Sanctuary?” The Englishman’s face feigned surprise. “Is this a place? I’ve never—”
“Spare me.”
The mock surprise melted away. The Englishman planted his feet in a wide stance. “We’ve searched your snowmobile, torn it apart bolt by bolt, but we haven’t found any electronic devices. No laptops, no hard drives, no memory keys…”
“You think I’m stupid? I hid it. Away from here. With someone who’ll sing to the world over the radio if I don’t get back to them by tomorrow morning.”
“I think you’re bluffing.”
Roger shrugged. “I’m somewhere beyond caring. They sent me out here on a mission. I’m doing my job. I just want to get back, alive. I’ve paid my dues. Now where’s my morphine?” He held up his club hand again.
The Englishman seemed to listen to something. He pressed his hand to his left ear, then smiled at Roger. “You may be getting your wish, Mr. Hargate.” A thin whine warbled. The Englishman frowned and held up one hand, asking everyone to remain still. The whine grew louder. “What in God’s name is that?”
For half an hour, Jess had flown in total darkness, the wind pummeling the plane. She fought to keep it level and on the compass heading. More than two thousand five hundred feet, but not more than three thousand. Too high and she’d be engulfed in the perpetual cloud layer and wouldn’t be able to see anything.
Then again, she couldn’t see anything.
She had the running lights off, the instrument lights off, just her headlamp with its red LED glowing. At least the cockpit heater was on, but she feared her foot coming back to life, so she kept it turned low.
The warmth brought with it the smell of metal and oil, and blood, but the heady stench of jet fuel overpowered it all. She had to keep the window open to keep from passing out from the smell of it.
Blackness.
Her Cessna rushed headlong into the dark, the wind whistling off the airframe, but Jess had the strange sensation she wasn’t moving at all. Her cockpit was a tiny refuge, dimly lit red by her headlamp, floating alone in an endless dark space. She had to fight the feeling she wasn’t moving at all, keep an image in her mind of what she was trying to do, of where she was headed.
The wind rocked the plane.
And the wind was the problem.
The magnetic center of the compass on the dash bobbled in its liquid-filled enclosure. Each bounce and thrust of wind shook it. Sometimes it stuck and she had to tap it to set the magnet free. But more or less, she could follow her set heading. The bigger problem: how strong was the crosswind?
She had to cover about a hundred and fifty kilometers. At a hundred knots of airspeed, that was fifty minutes. That’s what she’d scribbled onto her notes taped to the instrument panel. Of course, the head or tailwind could change that by quite a lot. Thirty knots either way could add or subtract fifteen minutes of travel time.
Before leaving, she watched the windsock at the side of the runway. Roger had found one in the hangar and hung it on a post. It was marked off by orange and white stripes. Each stripe the wind inflated meant ten knots, and gave the wind’s direction. Last she saw, about ten knots, a steady wind, but not too strong, straight in the direction she was set to fly.
Problem was, Roger had told her, wind at altitude tended to shift direction, often by up to ninety degrees, and could get much stronger. By keeping as low as she could, but still high enough to avoid crashing into a mountaintop, she’d avoid some of this problem, but she would also be subject to more turbulence kicked up by whatever was on the ground. That was fine. She could handle that. But what she didn’t know was how much crosswind she’d be getting.
Fifty minutes of flying with a thirty-knot crosswind would push her more than fifty kilometers off her target, but she’d have no way of confirming that. No visual references. No way to see anything on the ground to check if she was drifting left or
right. Outside, all was blackness. This was so disorienting. She didn’t even have any way to know what way was up or down, except for gravity pinning her ass into the Cessna’s seat. Even this wasn’t convincing enough to overcome a growing sense of vertigo.
She checked her watch.
Forty minutes of coasting into the unknown. She scanned outside, looking through the front, the side windows, the back. Nothing. Just pitch black.
Was Vivas even intact? Roger said it was, when he talked to them.
A lot was riding on Roger.
Her traitor.
Now her double agent.
Forty-five minutes. She’d been trying to keep calm, but her heart raced. If she passed it, there was no hope.
In the distance, a bleary smudge of white, off to her left. She took a deep breath, tried to calm her heart from banging out of her chest, and eased the yoke over. The Cessna banked toward the light.
Night flying was dangerous. Extremely dangerous.
That was what Roger had said, over and over again. In this wrecked world, there weren’t any street lamps to follow, no towns glowing bright, no airstrips lit up with neat rows of lights. Night flying was mostly dangerous, though, due to one thing: landing. Find a place to land, and judging where exactly the ground began, was almost impossible in the dark.
Jess looked over her shoulder.
A motley collection of canisters, anything they could find to hold jet fuel, thumped and clanked together. The backseat and stowage of the Cessna was jammed with as much of it as Roger reasonably assumed the plane could manage to take off with. Night flying was dangerous because landing was dangerous, but Jess didn’t plan to land it.
This was a flying bomb.
The cone of light from the villa over Vivas grew brighter. Jess allowed herself a grin for the first time in longer than she could remember. Now she’d give the bastards a surprise they wouldn’t see coming.
31
BASTARDI.
Sanctuary (Nomad Book 2) Page 22
