Exit Alpha

by Clinton Smith

  Cain glanced at the great shape overhead. The pop-eyed Snodgrass stared down through its hatch.

  The engineer ran over, bobbed behind the ballast bags. ‘What’s happening?’

  ‘They’ve killed Hunt. I’ve scrapped their chopper.’ He scanned the deckhouse. ‘There have to be two more left. Can you take off?’

  ‘Got to. Ship’s losing way and getting into thick stuff. If she rides up on the ice, we lose headwind, could foul.’

  ‘Who’s still down here from your crew?’

  ‘I’m it.’ He barked instructions at the crewmen now cringing at the edge of the pad, then yelled into the handset. Men scurried to uncouple the umbilical cords that still hung from the belly of the craft. The chief pointed to the cable dangling from the hatch. ‘You better get aboard before you’re shot.’

  Cain got astride a hooked-on bag, feeling like a sitting duck, gripped the cable. It tightened as Snodgrass started winching him up.

  It was hard to keep a bead on the deckhouse because the bag revolved as it rose. Where was Zuiden? Still in the radio shack? Feeding his face in the galley? On the can again? Cain, waiting to be knee-capped, felt enormous relief as the motor of the overhead winch pulled him inside the airship’s bay. He got off, shoved the bag to the side and Snodgrass sent the cable back down.

  ‘Flight deck, Chief.’ The engineer’s voice crackled from a speaker on the flimsy wall. ‘Forget the rest. Ship reports thick ice with pressure ridges ahead. Have to slip our cable in five or we’ll be jarred or swing. Got to get off now. They’ll need to back and charge.’

  ‘Flight deck. Have bridge report but not happy with equilibrium.’

  Snodgrass got his mouth to the wall mike. ‘Chief, keel. Ride another bag as you come up.’

  Cain stared down through the hatch, gun ready, as the foreshortened figure of the chief snapped the link onto a bag and sat astride it. A burst of fire. He toppled off the ballast, staring up at them, mouth wide.

  Men climbing on the bags, firing up.

  The aluminium floor beneath the rigger helping Snodgrass became ragged perforations. The rigger made a hissing sound, pitched forward through the hatch.

  As the two surgeons below scattered from beneath the falling body, Cain pumped his last two rounds into one of them, then rolled back and climbed on the one bag in the cargo bay that hadn’t been emptied into a hopper.

  ‘Are our guns still here?’ Cain yelled.

  Snodgrass, flattened against the wall, yelled back, ‘They took them.’ He shouted into the intercom, ‘Skipper, keel. They’ve killed the chief and sparks and they’re trying to hijack the ship. Release clamps now. Get her up.’

  Another burst from below.

  Were they shooting at the gondola?

  ‘Acknowledge, keel. Equilibrium dicey.’

  ‘Bollocks to that. Release clamps. They’re chopping us to bits. Use the motors, flippers, anything. Get her up.’

  Cain had nothing more to fire. It meant the men below would know he was out.

  A klaxon sounded.

  The airship’s shuddering stopped.

  ‘About bloody time,’ Snodgrass swore.

  There were no windows in the bay and it wasn’t safe to be near the hatch so Cain could see nothing. If they hit the ice they were done. At least there was no more firing. And he was certain he knew why.

  They waited long seconds as the stern of the craft rose crazily before the droning engines slowly pulled it down.

  ‘Keel, bridge. What’s hanging?’

  ‘Ballast bag,’ Snodgrass answered.

  ‘Get it up or we could foul on the pack.’

  Cain shook his head. ‘Bad move.’

  The floor tilted as the tail swung down.

  Snodgrass said, ‘Got to do it, laddie.’

  He inched forward, hit the handle of the winch. The cable started to wind back into the overhead reel.

  Cain picked up a pile of cargo webbing, waited.

  Zuiden’s frozen head and the muzzle of his Ingram appeared above the lip of the hatch . . .

  . . . as Cain threw.

  It didn’t stop the surgeon winging Snodgrass but did the job. After that slipstream, that wind chill, Zuiden’s instant reactions were gone.

  The surgeon swung snarling, trying to see through crusted lids.

  Cain kicked him in the face, grabbed the gun and forced it down until the stub barrel pointed at the ice. Then he jammed his thumb on Zuiden’s trigger-finger, riddling the bag, trying to shoot off the man’s boot. A foot for a foot. Zuiden wasn’t high enough to fight. With his right arm pinned and forced to hang on with the other, he could barely avoid the stream of fire.

  Cain missed the boot but emptied the gun. Sand poured from the shot-up canvas bag.

  The airship was lifting, lifting. A glimpse of the ship, a big toy below. The air washing into the hatch — utterly, unbearably cold.

  Cain staggered back, hit the winch control.

  Zuiden dropped out of sight.

  He stopped the winch when the man hung 30 feet down and 500 feet above the ice.

  As the craft churned through icy gusts, Zuiden freed himself from the net. He could do nothing more, just dangled, options gone, his furious face glaring up.

  Snodgrass was cursing on the floor. It was a shoulder hit and he’d live.

  Cain stared down from the hatch, watching the cable swinging astern, watching the surgeon Grade Three freeze.

  Cain and Disable.

  Now Disable was disabled. If he had another magazine he couldn’t use it because the bag was going slack beneath him, and he needed both hands to hang on.

  Zuiden had two choices — become an iceman or drop and get it over.

  This was for Ron, he thought. For Hunt. For the dentists they’d shafted — an event he had to witness for them all.

  Zuiden stared up, his encrusting face and clothing turning solid.

  Cain remembered when they were young. When Zuiden had left him down a crevasse. Left him to die. Cost him three toes. Remembered Zuiden in the tent — sneering and raising his finger.

  Cain raised a finger, slowly.

  The freezing man grimaced back, then deliberately let go of the cable.

  Cain watched him fall, was forced to smile and shake his head with admiration. Zuiden had assumed the skydiver’s arch position — chest forward, arms back, aerodynamically stable and face down. The big-dick bastard was still proving he was top banana — putting the last touch to his legend. The supreme sensory-overload buzz.

  Cain waited the brief seconds until the star-shape smacked high-speed ice.

  ‘Bet you shat yourself, Jan,’ he said.

  He winched the slack bag up.

  LANDFALL

  With only two of the original crew left, the flight became forced labour. Furious side winds and turbulence obliged them to change height to minimise drift, which meant trading off lift against weight. Once, they descended low enough to trail a hose in the sea and pumped up water for extra ballast.

  When they could, Flynn and Duckworth alternated in the gondola to work the rest of the ship. Cain became apprentice rigger and chief bottle-washer to the experts.

  He spent hours outside the cabin in the half-light of the pitching, rolling envelope, freezing on the narrow catwalk above the spine of the carbon-tubed hull. He climbed high on spidery structures that surrounded the hose-entangled gas cells, wiggled past bracing cables to pass on patches and tools or de-ice valves.

  He was shown how to operate pumps, how to free blocks in toggled hoppers, how to check inboard fuel and oil reservoirs and the exhaust water recovery system. He had to monitor the servo-turned worm gears that operated the huge control surfaces at the stern and check for ice on the outrigger gears that swivelled the propulsion ducts.

  During rewarming time, he acted as steward and tended the bandaged Snodgrass. The bullet had gone through but the concern was infection. He used all the antibiotic powder but the keel officer steadily got worse.

 
; At night he checked the systems in the hull’s dark and lofty tomb, red-eyed, exhausted, unsteadied by the sluggish yaw and pitch, trying not to fall through the flimsy fabric to the wild sea far below.

  They docked at the edge of the Punta Arenas airport in the still air of a pewter-coloured dawn. The tower was a converted mobile crane. There was no winching down. They lowered the rudimentary wheels and a ground crew manned the ropes and outside rails.

  Flynn had offered to take him on the next leg but he knew it would be no way to thank him, would jeopardise the expedition, that he had to get off. Filthy, unshaven, exhausted, the pope’s manuscript safe in his kit, he stepped onto snow-covered grass. His sea legs made the earth rock.

  Snodgrass and the shrouded pope’s body were carried with great fuss to the ambulance while the groggy but elated Flynn and Duckworth were enveloped by media crews. All attention was on the others as he limped toward the huddled spectators.

  He reached the knot of people, too tired to be alert, hoping that EXIT wasn’t there — no fight left in him.

  Two men in padded windjackets fell in either side of him. He recognised the soft face and sharp eyes of Harry Frost, the CIA physiologist he’d met on the mountain-top in New Zealand. The other man had a thin head with large ears and sucked an unlit pipe. Half a dozen blank-faced men now moved with them, distrustful eyes on the crowd.

  ‘Good morning,’ Frost smiled.

  ‘Hi.’ He just wanted to sleep.

  ‘Meet Julian Wilson. One of our senior people.’

  The man with the pipe nodded. He looked like Special Group.

  Cain said, ‘Better you than them.’

  Wilson’s thoughtful expression didn’t alter.

  ‘We need a word,’ Frost said. ‘Got you booked into our hotel. Chance to rest, clean up.’

  ‘Get me there.’

  The trip into town was circuitous. Again they weren’t taking chances. The four-car convoy detoured through slushy dirt roads past tin shanties with colourful roofs and stove-pipe chimneys, rusting cars and mangy dogs. The inner city’s elegant square was surrounded by impressive stone buildings. Machine-gun-toting carabineros stood conspicuously on street corners. Frost pointed out features. ‘Was an important place before the canal.’ He could have done without the city tour.

  They reached a hotel with an air of refined decay and escorted him to a room. It had a spa-bath, hot rail and could have been on 56th in New York.

  They gave him an hour to fix himself up. He emerged a clean shaved shadow of his former self and the heavies outside his door escorted him to another suite.

  ‘So,’ Frost handed him coffee, ‘we have the pope. Now we’re interested in Stern, the sisters, Nina.’

  He took the cup, hand shaking, eyes gritty with tiredness. ‘So you knew about Stern and John?’

  ‘We do now.’ Wilson tamped his bowl-blackened pipe. ‘You two-timers.’

  ‘I just worked there.’

  ‘So who’s still alive at Alpha?’

  Frost said, ‘We need to know what’s happened, Ray. Then you can sleep.’

  Sleep deprivation was one of the most insidious tortures known. He had no reason to put himself through that, no reason to deceive. So he told them what he knew, which became an outline of the destruction of EXIT, and the two attentive faces became grim. He expected they were recording him but it hardly mattered now.

  It took two hours. At the end of it, the part of him still awake was tripping on caffeine.

  Frost cleaned his half-frames. ‘A great pity about Nina.’

  ‘But Stern’s the money-shot for us,’ Wilson said. ‘Think carefully. Is there a chance he could be alive?’

  ‘Pretty slim.’ His eyes kept shutting. ‘Look, I’m a threatened species, I’m whacked and I’ve told you all I know. Now can you guys give me a head start? Or some kind of steer on all this?’

  ‘We’re not authorised to assist EXIT personnel. I need hardly tell you that.’ Wilson’s pipe had gone out a fourth time. He probed it with a match. ‘But, if it’s any joy, we’re flying back via Santiago. I can stretch a point and drop you off. Let you catch a commercial flight from there.’

  ‘Appreciate that.’

  ‘As for advice,’ Wilson sucked his teeth, ‘you’re now Vanqua’s favourite target. But if you’re still alive in a month, you can kiss his arse goodbye.’

  ‘How come?’

  The man deliberated how to put it. The lines of his frown seemed to draw the sides of his skull together while his ears appeared ready to take wing. ‘Let’s just say he’s had his run — but he doesn’t know it yet.’

  EXPECTED GUESTS

  Cain didn’t understand it. Nothing happened. Nothing at all. His credit cards and fake passports were still accepted everywhere. Santiago airport appeared free of surgeons. He was back in the world of posturing businessmen, agitated mothers, sullen shoppers, mortality-conscious suburbanites and the triumph of TV over tradition.

  He flew Easter Island, Tahiti, Auckland, then switched airlines for the Sydney leg. He went first class, craving comfort and faked consideration — much as the hopeless or rejected would gamble, overeat or drink. He sat beside a concert pianist and, on the last leg, the Malaysian foreign minister. He didn’t fraternise and comforted himself by studying John’s book.

  ‘Aquinas said that, at the deepest level, all things fade into mystery. At a certain level, life brings a wave that communicates joy — to be absorbed then radiated. When you feel that, have that, you are living in supernature — God. It means you deeply existentially are. But how to be? There’s no approach because concepts kill it. It’s organic — to do with energy-flow — an am-ness defying analysis.’

  He chose Sydney rather than Lahore because the politics of a country that had spent half its years under military rule never ceased to depress him. He went to the shack at Bundanoon because wherever he went, they’d find him. And because in a box under its floorboards were weapons he’d need.

  The big block of natural bush was unchanged but there was mould on the front verandah. He got the keys back from the neighbour on the other side of the hill and thanked him for watching the place. He switched on power and water. The dusty, musty rooms were as he’d left them.

  He selected weapons, cleaned and loaded them. They wouldn’t kill him — until they had their information. That gave him an edge. He waited. And he read.

  ‘. . . and the Holy Ghost is always being sent. The greatest force in the world and we simply don’t feel it, receive it. It’s we who cut ourselves off — deprive ourselves of the Good.’

  He remembered something John had said on the plateau days ago. ‘The horizontal — life. The vertical — eternity.’ He’d slowly made the sign of the cross. ‘Our place is where they meet. Don’t forget. We need to live both in time and in the space, expansion of the present. The denying force is as real as the affirming.’

  ‘But if God’s everything . . .’

  ‘Yes.’ The pope had joined his hands. ‘In the expansion of manifestation, God becomes the devil. That means his force becomes increasingly automatic. But we’re offered choice. To either drift . . . or fight back against the stream like salmon.’

  ‘Fight God to rejoin God? Jacob’s ladder?’

  ‘If you wish.’

  They came at four on a grey afternoon. None of his detectors went off. He wondered later if they’d monitored him on MDR. The transmitter could detect people through doors, concrete and brick walls.

  He’d been in the shed, getting the ladder to clean leaves out of the guttering. Then he saw, through the cobwebbed window, the wrong end of a grenade launcher.

  He ducked, turned. Silhouetted in the open garage door, a man holding a contraption with four splayed barrels capped by pods.

  Before he could react, he was covered by the sticky net and disabled by the high-voltage pulse.

  He hit the concrete, yelling with pain.

  ‘Foam gun’s better,’ the man remarked, ‘except the crud takes hou
rs to remove.’

  ‘Baby oil,’ someone else said. ‘Comes off with baby oil.’

  ‘Non-lethals. Pain in the arse,’ a third man said. ‘Fucking rubber-pellet grenades. I signed on to kill. Not frig around.’

  Cain remembered them stripping off his shirt.

  ‘Fuck. Look at that. Get it off him.’

  They took the breast-cannon and the underarm reverse-holstered pistols from him.

  They stripped him to his underpants and taped him to a kitchen chair, then he was lifted like a parcel and put in the living room. They’d taped black plastic over the windows until the place was cellar-dark, then shone a lamp in his eyes.

  ‘Now,’ the big one said, ‘we wait.’

  Cain tried to see beyond the light. Four shapes. The biggest, bearded with curly hair, hulking body movement, pinned back ears.

  ‘Know me?’ the man asked. ‘I’ll clue you. I’ve had a bit of a make-over.’

  ‘Murchison?’

  ‘Got it in one.’ He chuckled. ‘We stuffed you lot good.’

  A car bouncing up the potholed drive.

  The men fell back as a fifth man entered the room. Vanqua’s smooth face within the circle of the light — flushed with rage. ‘Your turn, Cain.’

  ‘So it seems.’

  ‘Files have been doctored. Identities substituted. And funding for your absent department continues.’

  ‘Encouraging news.’

  ‘I’ve been sold a pup and don’t like it. And you’re going to tell me what you know.’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘We’ll see. You were close to Rhonda. Talk, or we remove parts of you — slowly.’

  ‘It was need-to-know with her. She left me out of the loop — never said anything vital. Now I see why.’

  ‘Not good enough. But if it’s true, you’re going to wish she had.’

  Murchison added, ‘You’re not our friend, Ray.’ He unfurled a pouch on the floor beside Cain’s chair. The tools in it were surgical steel. But antisepsis and anaesthetic were not part of the coming procedure. He selected a pair of serrated pliers with inturned, precision-ground tips. It seemed that his nails were to be withdrawn before his fingers were crushed. The cutters in the pouch implied that it went on from there.