“I fucking feel like I am,” I said wearily.
The cargo bay was cramped and crowded. The Army truck had driven right up into it and Lieutenant Sullivan and the divers and the RAAF crew were trying to get it secured, lashing it down with strap-ties, even as people were piling out the back of it. There wasn’t a lot of space with the truck sitting in the middle. A lot of people were wounded, and everyone was sweaty and exhausted and traumatised. There was a lot of shouting, a lot of carry-on. And all the while the Globemaster was taxiing down the runway, picking up speed.
Except… it wasn’t. Nobody else had noticed, but Rahvi had, shouldering his way between people to get to the front of the plane. It was only when I saw him going that I realised what was wrong – we were slowing, not accelerating.
I pushed after him, past a pale-faced sailor trying to bandage his own badly bleeding leg, past a pair of clearance divers weaving cargo straps through the truck’s chassis. Up through the narrow passage that led to the cockpit, where I found Rahvi standing just behind Sergeant Blake, who was engaged in a shouting match with the pilot and co-pilot.
Looking out through the cockpit windshield, I could immediately see why.
The Tiger attack chopper had darted ahead of the Globemaster, down to the end of the runway, and come to rest in our path. Its rotors were still turning at full speed, but it was sitting on the tarmac, blocking our take-off. Trying to make us stop without having to shoot us.
“We’ll rip through it like tinfoil!” Blake said.
“Sorry, mate, are you in the fucking Air Force?” the pilot shouted. “You got the slightest fucking idea how planes work? We’ll rip through it like tinfoil and it’ll rip through us like tinfoil! You can’t fly a plane after smashing into something, we’d be at the bottom of the bay in five fucking minutes!”
“They’re bluffing,” Blake said. “If they weren’t bluffing they would have powered the rotors down. Keep going!”
“Sergeant, you are way out of line!” the pilot said. “Get out of my cockpit!”
I don’t know RAAF insignia, but I assume you have to be an officer to fly a plane. Blake was outranked.
The pilot’s mistake was in assuming that mattered anymore.
Blake drew his Browning and pressed it against the pilot’s head. The co-pilot turned in his seat, reached for his own sidearm, but Rahvi was quicker, raising his M4, staring him down.
“Fucking hell!” the pilot said. “Are you guys out of your fucking minds?”
“Take off,” Sergeant Blake said. “Take off, or I’ll shoot you, and I swear to God, that’ll be kinder than what will happen if New England takes us.”
“You’re insane,” the pilot said. But he was obeying, pushing down on the throttle, the Globemaster’s engines roaring up again, powering down the tarmac. The Tiger sat there, rotors churning, impassive. What were we doing? A hundred kays? A hundred and fifty? A game of chicken between a gargantuan cargo plane carrying a nuclear bomb, and a tiny little attack helicopter. The Globemaster thundered down the runway, and the chopper just sat there.
“Oh, Jesus, we’re gonna die,” I breathed.
“Not on my fucking watch,” Sergeant Blake said, still with his gun pressed against the pilot’s head.
At the last second, the Tiger lifted up, ducked off to the side, vanished beyond the view of the cockpit. The Globemaster lifted its nose, engines roaring, easing its enormous bulk airborne, and the amount of relief I felt was so great that I actually felt my legs wobble and had to grip the cockpit doorframe.
We were away. We were free.
Down from the cargo bay came cheers and applause. In the cockpit, the mood was altogether different. Once the take-off reached a safe altitude, the captain twisted in his seat to confront Blake, who’d holstered his weapon. “You are fucking done, sergeant!” the pilot swore. “When we touch down you’re getting court-martialled! Executed!”
“We’ll see, captain,” Blake said. He looked incredibly tired. “Just, please – just get us back to Wagga.”
He and Rahvi turned and walked back down to the cargo bay. I stayed at the edge of the cockpit for a while, looking out past the pilots at the open sky. We’d banked out over the ruined city and were heading south, now, above an invisible landscape, that brief moment of dusk when the land is dark but the sky is still aflame with red and gold.
Eventually I went back down to the cargo bay. The mood there was generally one of happiness and relief – we’d all had a horrifying day, but we were the lucky ones, the ones who’d beaten all the odds and managed to escape. People were slumped against the interior walls or the tyres of the Army truck, sinking into the adrenaline comedown, sweaty and dirty and exhausted. First aid kits were being passed around like candy. I took some alcohol wipes and bandages, and started wiping up the blood and patching up the asphalt burns along my arms and face. Now that the adrenaline had worn off I realised I was freezing, too, and wearing wet clothes. It felt like days ago that we’d been back out on the bay, on the RIBs, getting soaked in water – but it had been less than an hour ago. Someone else was handing out dry clothes, pillaged from the existing supplies aboard the Globemaster. I changed into a fresh pair of pants and a RAAF jacket, and pulled off my boots and socks. I figured I could go barefoot for now, either dry them off on the flight or get a fresh pair at RAAF Base Wagga.
I found my friends near the back of the cargo bay by the loading ramp, exchanging stories of what had happened during the brief time we’d been separated, as Rahvi and I ran through the terminal while the others clung to the truck. I paused for a moment and examined a finger-width bullet hole in the truck’s canvas. It was incredible any of us had made it out of there alive.
And yet I didn’t feel quite right. I felt uneasy. I felt an inexplicable sense of deja vu.
Sergeant Blake was sitting slumped against the wall at the back of the plane, looking exhausted, in quiet conversation with Corporal Rahvi. I was going to go up and crash the conversation, but Rahvi gave me a glance that suggested it was better not to.
That was all right. I felt exhausted myself. I went and found a spare bit of room, laid my back against the wall, tried to close my eyes. The grazes over my arms were stinging with antiseptic, the knock I’d taken to the head had left me with an ache, and I may have changed my pants but my underwear was still damp with Moreton Bay seawater. I was not going to sleep.
I certainly wasn’t going to sleep after what happened next. One of the Army soldiers we’d pulled aboard the RIBs was down by one of the Globemaster’s starboard windows, looking out into the last light of the day. “Ah, guys?” he yelled out. “Everyone? Um – this looks bad!”
There was a sudden rush to go and peer out the starboard windows. I was late to the party and got elbowed away from a few of them, but eventually I managed to squeeze next to Blake and Rahvi, looking over their shoulders, squinting into the sunset. Outside the plane, the cloudy world of the upper altitudes was still emblazoned with sunlight. After a moment, I saw it.
In those towering golden cumulus clouds, a fighter jet had appeared.
“Why can’t this fucking day just end?” Blake said.
“I think it’s about to,” Rahvi said.
The jet looked as though it was just hovering there, completely still, in a gold and scarlet cloudscape. Both planes were moving at hundreds of kilometres an hour, but from here the jet seemed like an unmoving sculpture: motionless, untouched, a frightening work of art.
For so long now, after the collapse of everything mankind had built, I’d been dealing with people scavenging in the ruins. I’d been one of them. It had been tinned food and grubby clothes and chipped knives and bolt-action rifles. When I found out Ellie was pregnant – when I began imagining my future child – I imagined him or her growing up in a world haunted by the technological marvels of their ancestors.
Maybe that had changed a bit, when we found the military. When we were picked up by the HMAS Canberra, when we flew in a Sea King, when we b
oarded this very same Globemaster to fly to Queensland in a matter of hours. The human race wasn’t as down and out as I’d thought.
But it was only now, looking at the fighter jet, that I realised how different this world was from the one I’d lived in back in Eucla: perched at the edge of a freezing desert, counting our cans, looking at a dilapidated cargo ship like mana from the gods. I was staring out a window at a high-tech, multi-million dollar airborne killing machine that had been assembled on the other side of the Pacific Ocean. An aerodynamic triumph of human engineering, a sight to behold even at a weekend air show, let alone six months after the world collapsed into primitive barbarity. It was beautiful.
And it was here to kill us.
“I dreamed this,” I whispered. “This was one of those fucking dreams.”
“Like you had with the diver that got hurt?” Rahvi said. “So what happens next, then?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “It didn’t show me. Where are we? Are we over the ocean? Like when we flew up here?”
Rahvi shook his head. “No. Didn’t have the fuel. We’re going directly south. We’re, uh… we’re over New England right now, actually.”
Blake had already disappeared, back up to the cockpit, trying to figure out what to do.
“It’s not going to shoot us,” Lieutenant Sullivan said loudly, addressing the whole cargo bay, trying to calm the atmosphere. “You saw what happened back in Brisbane! We have the nuke. They’re not going to shoot us, they’re not going to risk setting that off. They’re just following us.”
It was true – the fighter jet was still just sitting out there, lurking. It hadn’t moved to attack us yet.
“But why didn’t they shoot us in the bay?” Lomax muttered to us. “Because they didn’t want to risk it? Or because they knew they had this fucking thing in reserve, worst case scenario?”
I went and sat down by the truck, exhausted. For the first time all day I felt completely hopeless. There was nothing we could do but keep flying and hope it was an empty show of force. On the boats, we could shoot at the choppers. On the tarmac, we could shoot at the APC. But now? Nothing.
Blake came back down from the cockpit, and I grabbed his arm. “Hey,” I said. “What the fuck are we going to do?”
“Well, the pilot just made radio contact,” Blake said. “Ordered us to put down at an airfield at Armidale – that’s what they’re calling the capital of New England, these days. Said he’d shoot us down if we didn’t comply.”
“So what are we going to do?”
“We’re sure as hell not going to Armidale, for a start,” Blake said. “No. We have to hope this is a bluff and keep on course.”
“And if it’s not a bluff?” I said. “What if they shoot us?”
“There are procedures. We have flares. We can take evasive action.”
Not things you really want to hear aboard a cargo plane, with a fighter jet out the window, above enemy territory. I had a mental image of a wolf stalking a big fat cow.
“Can’t we…” I said. “I don’t know, doesn’t this thing have any fucking defences? Can’t we fight it?”
“Matt, we’re supposed to be on the same side,” Blake said tersely. He’d come to one of the cargo bay’s storage bins, and was rummaging through it. “Globemasters carry cargo. Hornets shoot things down. They’re bluffing. We hope. But if not – put this on.”
He shoved something into my hands, out of the storage bin. It was a little beige package, a bit like a backpack but with a bunch of extra straps.
It took me a moment to realise it was a parachute.
“Oh, no,” I said. “No fucking way.”
“Shut up,” Blake said. “It’s a precaution. Put it on. And where the fuck are your shoes?”
“They were wet…” I said – but Blake was already off. He was handing parachutes out to others in the cargo bay, bellowing out a speech as he did. “Listen up! You’ve all seen the fighter jet. If we’re forced into a landing, and New England gets their hands on the nuclear warhead, we have to make sure they don’t get the codebook as well.”
I looked around for my wet boots, then decided I should prioritise getting the parachute on, and began figuring out the straps.
Blake took the little blue booklet from his breast pocket, holding it up in the air to show them. “That bomb does not work without this codebook. Got it? They’re vital to each other. We need to get both of them back south. But failing that, we cannot let somebody like General Draeger get hold of them. So if they’re going to force us to land, some of us may need to parachute out. We can go in groups, and scatter, and one of us will have the codebook and they won’t know who. Do not destroy it. Hide it. You all know how much blood and sweat went into retrieving this bomb. You all know why we need it. Because if the worst comes to pass, and we’re forced down, we might still be able to retrieve them both, one way or another…”
He kept talking, running the group through hasty emergency plans even as they pulled their parachutes on. There was no rhyme or reason to who Blake had given them out to – some were RAAF crew, some were clearance divers, some were soldiers. Lieutenant Sullivan was looking on disapprovingly – I guess he thought he should be giving this speech, or maybe he’d heard about Blake’s stunt in the cockpit. But the fact was that Blake was the one there, in front of the truck with the warhead, holding the codebook in his hand, instructing the assorted jumble of servicemen about what was going to happen next.
Rahvi, meanwhile, had noticed I was one of the people with a parachute. He had one on as well, and came over to help me. “Jesus Christ, why would you think this goes here?” he said, rearranging my straps.
“Oh, jeez, sorry,” I said. “I guess they cut parachuting from the high school curriculum last year. You’ve done this before?”
“Only a hundred fucking times,” Rahvi said, fiddling with my waist strap. “Why did you twist this around? OK, there. Now look – main cord’s here, but if that fails, use the emergency one, over here. Got it? Main one fails more often than you’d think, on these old models.”
“Great,” I said. “Our taxpayer dollars at work.”
“You were in high school when this started, you’ve never paid tax in your life,” Rahvi said, not looking at me. He was staring out a window, trying to see the fighter jet.
“Still out there?”
“Yeah[ME1] .”
I peered out the window with him. The last light of the sun had slipped away, and the sky was dark. Up above, the stars were coming out. The fighter jet was still visible with blinking red running lights, just like any other plane – after all, why bother with stealth? We posed no threat to it.
“These fucking bastards,” Rahvi muttered. “I don’t know what the hell’s happening down there that makes them do this.”
“I do,” I said.
“No,” Rahvi said. “I know what happened to you in Kalgoorlie. That’s one thing. That was civilians. They’re allowed to be scared, they’re allowed to turn on each other. Turning on the Army? Turning on Defence? No. This isn’t supposed to happen. No matter what.”
And yet it was. The fighter jet cruised along behind us, keeping pace, unhurried. I wondered – was it getting orders from the ground? Was it General Draeger himself, sitting with his staff by a radio, instructing the pilot exactly what to do?
It had been fifteen minutes since we’d first spotted it. No time at all on an ordinary day; an agonising amount of time on a day like today. Blake was still giving his pep talk to the cargo bay, holding the PAL codebook in his hand. “We absolutely cannot let this fall into the hands of somebody like General Draeger,” he said. “But we can’t destroy it, either – not lightly. Without this, we can’t destroy the machine base in Ballarat! Without this, everybody on the Canberra died for nothing! Without this…”
There was no warning when it came. One moment we were all standing in the lights of the cargo bay, Sergeant Blake in front of the Army truck, loudly exhorting the crowd. The next momen
t, something slammed into the back of the plane and every one of us was thrown off our feet.
My head hit something hard. I think I lost consciousness for a moment – just a few seconds. I heard screaming, heard screeching metal, smelled smoke and burnt plastic.
I grabbed a piece of cargo webbing to steady myself as I tried to stand up, and it was a good thing I did, because a missile had hit the back of the Globemaster and torn off a chunk of the closed loading ramp, and even as I gathered my wits more pieces of metal were being torn away from stress and the hole was growing larger and then, before my eyes, people were sucked right out of the plane – sailors, divers, soldiers, civilians, I don’t know, but they were gone. One moment they were in the cargo bay with us, the next moment they were pinwheeling down to a cold and lonely high-impact death.
I curled my arm around the cargo webbing even further, trying to stand up, finding my feet. Alarm klaxons were wailing, emergency lights bathing the cargo bay in red and yellow. People were screaming and yelling, clinging on to whatever was at hand. One of the cords tying the truck down to the deck had come loose and was whipping about like an angry snake. The plane itself was damaged, listing, banking down to starboard. Loose objects were flying around the cargo bay, whipped up by the exposed wind, and even as I watched another chunk of the loading ramp tore away and vanished into the dark night.
I staggered to my feet, still holding onto the truck for balance. Suddenly the Globemaster lurched further and another cable-tie snapped and the whole truck was tipping, flipping over onto its side in the new inverted gravity of a pitching plane, and I heard the screams and cries of the people who found themselves trapped underneath. I lost my balance and dropped onto the floor, scrabbling for a new grip.
My brain was addled. I couldn’t grasp what was going on. The fighter jet had fired something at us, it must have - but we were still here, no mid-air explosion but rather a crippled descent to a crash-landing, maybe that was their aim - what the hell were we going to do?
End Times (Book 4): Destroyer of Worlds Page 25
