Fraser shook his head.
“When the first helicopter pilot flew over Chernobyl, his superiors hadn’t told him how dangerous it would be. He was actually assured it wouldn’t be dangerous. All the pilots had their suspicions, though. They’d seen what happened to the first responders, heard the stories. There was little choice—they needed to drop sand on the reactor, slow the meltdown. They understood the mission was far more important than their own lives. In order to succeed, they needed to fully understand where they could fly and where they couldn’t. They weren’t given any type of radiation meter. Radiation is invisible. They had nothing to go on, so they worked out a simple system. Each pilot agreed to repeat the alphabet over an open channel as he flew over the hot zone. On the ground, other pilots charted their progress. If their superiors were telling them the truth, nobody would be the wiser. If something happened, the other pilots hoped to use the data when determining future routes. They all knew they’d be flying into that fallout zone sometime soon. Most likely, repeatedly. The very first pilot, he drifted a little too close to the blown reactor, his voice started to falter, he started skipping letters, then went down. It all played out in a few seconds. He managed to get to the letter R. Cory, when he flew over the horde to try and evac those teams, he only got to G. He struggled through those last couple letters. I could hear the pain in his voice. He tried, sir. He did his best.”
“I’m sure he did.”
The pilot continued, “When I went in for you, I got a few letters past that, but I gotta be honest, sir. Another twenty seconds and I might have ended up on the ground, too. I’ve got no memory of turning us around. I snapped back a little before you probably woke up. Muscle memory flew us out of there, not me.”
“Your skill got us out of there.”
The pilot reached over and flicked several switches on a panel to the right of his seat. “The men in back, me, the ones we just lost—we all understand the importance of this mission. We knew going in not everyone would make it back. I’m only telling you all this so you understand our limitations, my limitations in particular. If I fly us back into that thing, and I have no doubt I’ll need to do that, I may not be able to get us back out if we’re there beyond the letter J. And for this mission to succeed, I need to get us out of there. I need to get us back to base, future cargo intact.”
He eased the stick slightly to the right, maneuvered a pedal, and the Chinook turned slowly as it hovered in the air. Two miles off in the distance, the horde came back into view, swinging in from left to right across the windshield as they turned. The sheer size of the mass was jaw-dropping. The fast-moving group stretched for nearly half a mile, a black stain on the earth. Dark dust loomed above and behind, this giant rooster tail so thick, visibility was probably nonexistent behind them.
“Can this chopper fly in that?”
“The dust?”
Fraser nodded.
“A Chinook can fly in damn near anything, sir.”
He had an idea.
Chapter Seventy
Fraser
Fraser told the pilot to circle to the far end and come in on the tail side of the horde. He did so with an incredibly wide arc. The decibel meters were useless inside the loud Chinook, but that didn’t really matter. They could all feel the horde, the now familiar pressure on the inner ear that grew to inscrutable pain as they drew near. The pilot maneuvered the chopper in such a way to test those external limits: slowly drifting closer until both he and Fraser felt the slightest tickle in their ears, then moving in closer still, in short hops, plotting out distances and their corresponding pain levels. Because of the fast-moving nature of the horde, this has proven impossible while on the ground—nobody had gotten close enough and escaped the pull of the group—but the helicopter provided a unique vantage. They learned even with their modified headphones, the call of the horde began to affect them at about a half mile out. At a quarter mile, they could still tolerate the pain, probably a seven on a scale from one to ten, equatable to a severe migraine, but any closer than that and things got dicey. That was a problem, because they obviously needed to get much closer.
“What about autopilot?” Fraser asked. “Can you program in a route that takes us down and over the horde, holds above there for maybe thirty seconds or a minute, then pulls back out to a safe distance?”
“I thought about that, but we need to get too close to the ground. May need to execute precise maneuvers when we’re there. We’ve got trees everywhere, and the horde itself is moving. There are too many factors, too many variables. What if we still have men on the ground when the autopilot is programmed to pull back out? If we needed to execute a maneuver at altitude, maybe autopilot would work, but I wouldn’t trust it with such a low ceiling.” The pilot’s eyes were fixed on the horde. “I need to do this. Get us in, hover long enough for you to capture your cargo, then get us back out. I don’t see any other way.”
Fraser had his binoculars out. “The tail end is our best bet. The crowd is thinner in the back. Those people are slower, weak, injured. I’d be willing to bet the noise is weaker there, too. We come in from the back and the horde will be running away from us, too. They’ll clear out even if we can’t.”
“Or they turn tail and run toward us like they did with the first three teams. They were willing to cross the water to get to them. They may come after us, too. When they sense us close.”
Fraser knew he was right. They’d tripped over each other, some died trying to get to his teams. They were like sharks to blood.
“I could program in an auto evac on a trip-switch,” the pilot thought aloud.
“Explain.”
“Never mind.” He was shaking his head. “It wouldn’t work. Somebody would need to be conscious enough to hit the switch.”
“Tell me anyway.”
The pilot pointed to a bank of switches to the left of the throttle. “I program the autopilot with an altitude and coordinates away from the horde. We use one of these buttons to engage it. Push the button, the chopper goes up and high, then maneuvers to that waypoint and hovers. We treat it like an ejector seat in a jet, a last resort. But like I said, someone would need to be conscious enough to punch it, and you saw what happens when we get too close.”
What Fraser saw was that they didn’t have a choice.
Together, they hashed out a plan, and Fraser hoped to God it would work.
Chapter Seventy-One
Fraser
Both side doors on the Chinook were open. Of the nine soldiers, four crouched at the edge of each opening. The men on the port side had their G2 X-Caliber pneumatic dart guns at the ready, the men aft were holding all eight net guns, one in each hand. Each net was secured by a cord to one of the rafters in the ceiling of the chopper. Although thin, these lines were designed to hold nearly a thousand pounds each. They’d spaced them out as best they could, wary of getting caught up in them.
Several of the soldiers had wrapped their heads and headphones with thick strips cut from cargo blankets and secured everything with duct tape, the pilot included. Whether the added protection would help was yet to be seen. It certainly couldn’t hurt. The ninth soldier was in the copilot’s seat, not because he knew how to fly the chopper, but for the sole purpose of keeping a finger on the evac switch programmed by the pilot. If one of the two men saw the other pass out or become incapacitated, the other was to immediately hit that switch.
Fraser stood in the center of the cargo area between both sets of men, his dart gun in one hand and his fingers twisted into the netting on the ceiling for balance. “On my mark.”
“Copy,” the pilot replied. He had the Chinook at a right angle to the back of the horde a half mile away, visible through the open port-side door.
The dust and debris kicked up by the large crowd was so thick, the people themselves weren’t visible. On some level, Fraser was thankful for that. “Go!”
Without hesitation, the Chinook shot toward the horde, moving sideways on its doub
le blades as swiftly as if it were flying dead-on. Fraser felt the pressure from the noise almost immediately.
The pilot began rattling off the alphabet. “A…B…C…”
The dust hit them first. Fraser pulled a pair of goggles down over his eyes and covered his mouth with the neck of his shirt.
The lack of sound created by the headphones was very disorienting. He knew exactly how loud the Chinook was. He’d been in his share, and he imagined the engines were screaming right now, but he couldn’t hear the helicopter at all. Nor could he hear his own breathing. There were only the subtle noises picked up by the soldiers’ bone-induction microphones, the pilot speaking, and the quickly escalating sound of the horde’s noise. That sound was somehow loud enough to cut through the thickest silence.
“D!”
Although the sun wouldn’t complete its descent for at least another thirty minutes, the dust and grime in the air turned twilight into the deepest witching hour. Directional floodlights flicked on, beating back against the dark from the outer shell of the chopper, but they did little good, like using your high beams in a heavy fog.
“E!”
Fraser pinched his eyes shut for a moment, tried to will the noise away, but it only grew louder. The now familiar low hum was joined by this high-pitched wail, a keening, thousands of people crying out in horrible pain. He pinched his eyes shut tighter, tried to bury those voices beneath the black, but one by one their faces came to him, materializing from the shadows, racing forward toward him, bulging eyes wide and mouths agape—faces he knew—the people he left behind at Zigzag. The soldiers he just lost in the other helicopter. Soldiers he lost in past missions. In his mind’s eye, his father ran toward him, arms stiff at his side, legs pumping like pistons, his screams joining the others.
“F!”
Fraser’s eyes snapped open, and he realized he was screaming, too. Not just him, but some of the others, their voices picked up by their bone-induction microphones and mixed with those of the horde. He forced himself to stop even though the rest of his body welcomed it, craved the relief it brought. He wanted to move. Wanted to run. Every muscle in his bulky frame needed to flex as if he’d been sitting still for hours and finally had the opportunity to stand and stretch. He looked out the open door of the Chinook, surprised by just how close to the horde they now were, and fought back at the urge to jump. Oh, how wonderful it would be to leave the confines of this metal death trap for the open fields below, to run with all the others, to run for—
Anna Shim.
The name came to him, a whisper among all the screaming voices, and for a moment he wasn’t sure if he actually heard the name or simply recalled it from the debriefs with that little girl they’d picked up on the mountain. That was when he heard it again and the voice that spoke that name sounded so calm, so serene, so…welcoming. A warm blanket on the coldest of nights. A beautiful woman smiling from across the room. A siren’s song—and when that particular thought popped into Fraser’s head, he also saw the image of an old ship. He thought it might be a schooner, turning toward a rocky shore, cracking against the stone and taking on water, all while the men looked on in stunned silence at a woman perched upon those rocks smiling back at them, beckoning them, come to Anna Shim.
“G!”
They were directly over the back end of the horde now, barely visible through the haze. The floodlights trying to cut through but only offering glimpses. Fraser watched as one of the soldiers jumped from the open door and fell from view. This quick moment played out like a scene from a movie, and for that brief instant, Fraser wasn’t sure he actually saw it happen. Then his mind snapped into the present, and he realized there were only three men holding dart guns and four others behind him with the net weapons. He wanted nothing more than to go out the door behind that man, and that’s when he realized all the soldiers were probably having similar thoughts, that was why they were easing toward the openings. He began to hit them. He didn’t know what else to do. He worked his way through them as fast as he could, slapping some, punching others in their backs below their Kevlar, where they’d feel it. He jolted each of them out of their reveries, and in his headphones he heard their screams drop away from the noise, he heard each of them come back, regain control.
“Fire! All of you, fire!” Fraser shouted. “Fire now!”
They did.
He watched as white gas expelled from the dart guns, the adrenaline pumping through his body with such intensity all time seemed to slow. He saw the darts leave the guns soundlessly, saw them sail down toward the runners. As he went to the door, he watched several of those runners stumble and slow, try to regain their footing as other runners pushed past them, ran over them.
“H!” This came from the pilot in one long, drawn-out gasp, aaaaytch, and Fraser knew they didn’t have much time.
The Chinook drifted forward over the horde, and the men with the net guns opened fire, too. He hoped they were aiming for the stragglers, those embedded with darts, but there was no way for him to be sure. He wasn’t certain they could even see well enough to make that determination.
“I!”
As the nets deployed, several of the attached cords went taut. A cord near the back of the helicopter snapped tight against the shoulder of one of the men firing darts—the impact threw the man out the open door to the ground below. They weren’t more than twenty feet up, but Fraser knew he was lost. If the fall didn’t kill him, the stampeding feet around him surely would, and that end would be about as merciful as any.
Through the pain, confusion, and screaming in his head, Fraser shouted for everyone to reload and fire again—darts, nets, all of it. Several of the cords, tight like razor wire, dragged against the open doors, weighted down by whatever the nets had managed to grab. He caught a glimpse of at least two people wrapped up in the netting below, their arms and legs flailing wildly as they tried to escape.
He waited for the pilot to shout out the letter J, but that never came. He fell to the floor and rolled hard against one of the benches as the Chinook shot straight up into the air, then banked hard to the right.
Someone had pressed the emergency evac button.
Chapter Seventy-Two
Martha
Martha shifted her weight on the metal bench and watched as Tennant ate her third helping of macaroni and cheese, second hot dog, and took another bite from a brownie before pausing only long enough to wash everything down with a swig from another can of Coke. The girl inhaled the food as if she hadn’t eaten in a week. For all Martha knew, that might not be too far off from the truth.
Harbin lowered himself onto the bench beside her and handed the girl an apple from his tray. “When we find your parents, I at least want to be able to tell them we attempted to feed you well while you were in our care.”
Tennant picked up the apple, rubbed it on her shirt, then took a large bite before setting it down and returning to the mac and cheese. “We’re not gonna find my parents. You don’t have to lie to me.”
“I prefer to believe we will,” Harbin replied, spooning out a bit of tomato soup.
Martha had the iPad sitting between them on the table. A live video feed of Sophie’s room filled the screen. A moment ago, she’d been pacing the outer walls, circling the space again and again at a fast clip. Now she was standing still in the center of the room, her eyes on the ground and her head cocked slightly to the side.
“Your sister looks much better,” Martha said.
Tennant glanced up at her but said nothing.
“She’s still running a temperature and her blood pressure is high for her age, but otherwise her vitals are normal. I think she might be out of the woods.”
Tennant’s hand hovered over her tray for a moment, then swept down and scooped up a dinner roll. “She’s got the devil in her. Ain’t no amount of medicine gonna drive him out.” She pushed the entire roll into her mouth with the tip of her finger, chewed twice, and swallowed.
Harbin took the roll off
his tray and gave it to her. “What makes you say that?”
Tennant snorted like this was the stupidest question she’d ever heard. “What else could it be?”
Martha was about ready to agree with her.
She’d tested for everything else, why not the devil?
She and Fitch had spent the last two and a half hours running every test imaginable on both girls, everything came back negative. Nothing in their blood. Nothing visible on full-body CT scans or MRIs. Even the fMRI, the system Fitch had been certain would provide an answer, didn’t pick up anything abnormal.
Her temporal lobe—the part responsible for understanding language, behavior, memory, and hearing—appeared slightly more active than baseline said it should be, but that would hardly account for her behavior. It certainly wouldn’t explain her increased speed or strength. Sophie’s cognitive functions seemed to be improving, but because she hadn’t known either of these girls before, understanding what their normal might be was total guesswork. Although Tennant’s language sometimes appeared clumsy, it was obvious to both Martha and Harbin she was intelligent. Tennant had told them different members of their village “schooled them” in different subjects, pulling from their own education and experiences before leaving what Tennant called the rushed world for a simpler life in the mountains. She had a solid handle on advanced mathematics, physics, even medicine.
When Fitch had been going over the results of Sophie’s blood work, Tennant had pointed to Sophie’s white blood cell count and sighed. “Not an infection. This would be elevated, right?” He and Martha must have looked shocked, because Tennant added, “Dr. Baggins was with us for almost ten years. He said I had the makings of a doctor, so he’d been teaching me. He moved from Los Angeles after twenty years of practice in oncology. People think just ’cause we live in the mountains we’re dumb. Ask me and I think anyone payin’ thousands of dollars each month for rent, payin’ for a car they gotta pay to park, payin’ taxes, payin’ for electric when God gives us solar for nothing, living off bottled water, they’re the stupid ones. Our village might be the most beautiful place on earth, and living there is free but for some hard work and a little sacrifice.”
The Noise Page 23
