Alpha Adventures: First Three Novels

by K. T. Tomb

  “You ready? We’ll not get much time to get the recording done; we’re low on fuel as it is.”

  Both journalists gave him the thumbs up. Travis turned back around, accidentally knocking a flare gun out of its position in some webbing on the ceiling. It fell into the foot well by his feet, and spun round several times. Travis flinched and raised his feet out of the way of what he was sure would be an impending fireball. Nothing happened. Dearden laughed loud.

  “Hey lad, that always happens. Crappy netting. Don’t worry, it’s like a grenade, you know? Gotta pull the pin before you can fire it. Just in case things like that happen. The look on your face, though! That was priceless!”

  Travis flipped him the bird, but smiled to show he wasn’t too serious about it. The freighter Novonya was looming larger below them. No wonder it had been such a surprise that this ship had been lost; it was massive. It looked more like an oil tanker than a cargo ship; in fact, with the addition of a few turrets here and there it would have easily passed for an old battleship. The camera-wielding Pavlowski was pointing his lens out of the side window, and his wife was speaking in her reporter’s cadence. He heard her clearly through his headset as she spoke.

  “Despite attempts by elements within Multimetal to keep the press blind to the events off the coast of Magadan, we can exclusively reveal that the Novonya is far from lost. This reporter actually spoke to the captain of the vessel, who confirmed his location for us. We are now in a helicopter circling the grid reference confirmed by the captain. As we have come to understand, the reason for the vessel disappearing from contact has been part of a conspiracy to defraud Multimetal and its shareholders through share price manipulation and the engineering of a hostile takeover by an overseas party, apparently involving high command elements of the Russian coast guard and senior members of the Multimetal management team. As you can see from these pictures, it has all been an elaborate ruse. More details as we receive them, but the important thing to note is that the search is over; we have found the Novonya. Jean Pavlowski, for CNN, over the Sea of Okhotsk.”

  Pavlowski lowered her microphone, and quickly listened to her audio to check that it was broadcast quality. Apparently satisfied, she tapped Dearden on the shoulder.

  “Okay, Steve, let’s get out of here. We have what we need!” she said.

  Before Dearden could reply, the cameraman in the back seat spoke, for the first time in Travis’ presence as far as he could remember.

  “Wait a minute, do you see this?”

  Travis peered through the front window, and could see nothing. The angle the helicopter was such as to allow the cameraman a good shot, but consequently, the nose of the craft was pointing away from the Novonya. The view swung as Dearden adjusted the controls and the helicopter swung sluggishly through the air. The ship appeared bow first, so it was not immediately apparent what the cameraman had seen. As the helicopter rotated counter-clockwise the full length of the freighter crawled past, until they were faced with the stern. Three dark specs were moving around something with a large tarpaulin over it. As they drew it back, Travis recognized the sleek, modern lines of the all-white helicopter he had last seen taking off from the mine, piloted by Monica Chen. One of the people working the tarpaulin had to be her, also. He had expected to see the helicopter, but the idea that if Chen had managed to land it on a moving boat in the middle of a sea, and not even an aircraft carrier, the thought that Chen would do – what? Chase them? Take off? What was her plan? He had not considered this particular move in what seemed like his personal chess game with her.

  “Holy shit, that’s not good,” Dearden said.

  “What’s not good?” Travis said.

  “They’ve got… looks like a Kawasaki OH-1. Military helicopter, that is,” Dearden said.

  “You mean it has weapons? Rockets and things?” said Pavlowski from the back seat.

  “No, nothing like that, it’s a reconnaissance chopper. Faster than us, with a higher ceiling, and a full tank of gas to do it with. We have to go, and we have to go now.”

  Dearden pulled the stick, and the old Russian helicopter wheeled away and headed for land.

  “So what?” Travis said. “If they can’t shoot us, what are they thinking of throwing at us? Bad language?”

  “Oh, aye, laugh it up, mate. If they get above us, they can force us into ditching in the ocean, unless we wanna mangle our rotors on their skids, which might kill them but will definitely kill us. I don’t fancy that, not one bit. We’re off.”

  Dearden angled the nose of the helicopter to an acute angle, so it felt to Travis as if he was flying through the air at the edge of a cliff. The sea rushed up to meet them, and he could hear the Pavlowskis in the back struggling to keep all their expensive gear securely fastened and stowed as the helicopter built up speed, then swooped over the sea, throwing the passengers around violently.

  “Sorry about the rough ride guys, we need to pick up some speed.”

  Dearden banked the vehicle, and slowly their flight path changed. Over to the East, just before they angled themselves away, Travis saw a white speck detach itself from the Novonya, and he knew that Chen was on his tail.

  Chapter Eleven

  The huge, lumbering Russian helicopter was not built for a cat and mouse game. Normally Dearden would have had at least a dozen passengers on board, which at least meant his weight was lower than usual, but the light, three-seated Japanese aircraft still outstripped the lumbering behemoth in every aspect of performance. Travis ended up with his head sticking out of the sliding passenger window to try and keep an eye on their pursuer, but it seemed every time he managed to get a fix on the position of the white helicopter, it disappeared into a blind spot behind them or switched to the starboard side. The Pavlowskis, huddled in the first row of seats behind the pilot, did their best to assist but only had tiny portholes from which they could peer. Dearden was slowly gaining altitude, but topped it out at a mere thousand feet.

  “Can’t we get any higher? At least we could make them work for it!” Travis had to yell to be heard over the whining engines.

  “Not on this amount of fuel,” Dearden said. “We’ll have enough to get back to Magadan, plus about ten minutes. I hadn’t anticipated having to put the pedal quite so much to the metal here, you know?”

  The coastline was approaching fast, but Travis couldn’t see the port city at all. Dearden caught his questioning look.

  “Just in case we do end up going down. I didn’t want us to be responsible for dropping this thing on a school or a hospital or something. Best to keep it to the countryside, right?”

  Travis nodded his agreement. It was a noble thing, to contemplate your own death so calmly that Dearden’s first concern was to avoid any unnecessary deaths on the ground. He supposed that was one of the things you had to consider when flying a small house around. Snow-covered hills came into clearer focus, contrasting with the ethereal green depths below them. A whale of some type breached the surface. Any other time, Travis would have been amazed and want to stay and watch the great animal. Currently, his every thought was devoted to thinking of a way out of an impossible situation. He felt useless, a wanton passenger who had risked the lives of three strangers, and for what? It wasn’t out of a sense of duty to Fiona’s memory. He was too much of a pragmatist to fall into such a naïve thought form. Was he above a sense of revenge? The sight of Chen had brought back unwelcome memories; weeks spent in the hospital, months of rehabilitation therapy, the ignominy of having someone wipe his own ass for him because he was too injured to do it himself. It wasn’t just anger at Chen’s reappearance, though. It had to be something else. Maybe, he thought, he was just addicted to danger. Three times now he had put himself on the line to get a result, and it usually blew up in his face. He wanted to win, that’s what he felt spurring his mind on. He just hated the rising bile at the back of the throat that loomed with the shadow of defeat. He hated it, running away like this.

  A loud buzz of rotors to
his left brought him back to reality. He had been neglecting his duties in checking the port side for the approach of their foes, and the white helicopter was now right alongside them. Dearden yelled in alarm, and plunged the nose of their flying machine down in a steep dive. As they pitched, Travis saw Monica Chen clearly through her front window, and as gravity was countermanded by their velocity, the red metal flare gun left the foot well and struck him in the chest. The blow wasn’t heavy, but it reminded Travis of its presence, and formulated an idea in his mind. The helicopter swung like a pendulum as it regained a parallel flight path, although they had dropped at least five hundred feet to do so. Travis could see waves much more clearly defined, but moving underneath him at a much faster rate. The strain on every part of the helicopter made itself suddenly audible, the engines gave a huge cough and every bolt screamed to be set free from its housing.

  “I can’t keep this up much longer, you know; she’s all over me!”

  Sweat was dripping from Dearden’s face as he screamed his words in staccato beats. The Scotsman was pink in the face, eyes bulging with stress. It was unthinkable that the chase could go on. Travis looked at the flare gun in his lap. It was surely suicide. He looked back at the two journalists behind him. Jean Pavlowski was throwing up violently into her hands while her husband tried his best to keep her from falling out of her seat despite the harness keeping her in.

  “Dearden! How far does this thing fire?” Travis waved the flare gun at the pilot.

  “What? Oh, like, a thousand feet or so, but it’s not accurate. Whatever you’re thinking won’t bloody work!”

  The helicopter wobbled as once again Dearden fought to keep Chen from getting on top of him, which would slowly force him to ditch into the sea. The white helicopter appeared to the starboard side, which meant that they couldn’t see what Travis was doing on the port side, for the moment at least. The two aircraft raced over a rocky beachhead and over land again. The fuel gauge showed they were running on vapors and dumb luck. Travis unbuckled himself from his seat, and after considering taking aim through the small window to his left, realized he would have to open the door to get a clear aim. He turned to Dearden.

  “Get her on this side, and get me as close as possible when you do!” Without waiting for a reply, he popped the lock on the door and swung it out, bracing it open with his right leg while turning sideways in his chair. Icy wind lashed his face, instantly blinding him; it was a temporary sensation, although tears ran down his cheeks and began to turn to ice crystals. Dearden dropped the helicopter lower and moved hard to starboard and Travis saw the skids of the white helicopter pass over their heads. Chen dropped altitude herself, and moved right alongside Travis’s open door, where he waited, flare gun in hand. He saw Sergei, the coast guard captain in the rear seat under the canopy and the dark, wickedly intelligent eyes of Monica Chen glaring at him.

  “Keep it steady, Dearden!” Travis yelled, but before he had a good aim, Chen yanked her aircraft out of the firing line. Moments later, Jean Pavlowski yelled from behind him. “This side! This side! They’re trying to take the tail!”

  “Dearden, get that window open!” Travis said.

  The pilot complied, and rotated the helicopter clockwise, and at a slight upward angle. Chen was out-foxed by the maneuver and too late, she tried to match the angle of Dearden’s flight path. For a brief second, Travis had a chance at getting his shot away. He pulled the safety pin on the flare gun, and saw the look of horror on Chen’s face as he pulled the trigger. The flare burst into life, flying straight over Dearden's arms as he grappled with his flight stick, out the open window and smashed through the canopy of the white helicopter, into the figure occupying the rear seat behind Monica Chen. The flare burned brightly, spewing out heat and red smoke as the dying coast guard captain flailed at the ruin of his face, thrashing about madly. Chen, in a panic, had no option but to crash land on the iron-hard ground. Her aircraft was in a slight spin as she touched it down, which flipped the helicopter on the ground filling the air with a horrendous wrenching noise as rotor blades snapped off and skids buckled and glass smashed. Dearden whooped his pleasure, cheering out of relief as much as victory. The Pavlowskis both burst into tears, thankful for their lives as the Scottish pilot set his cumbersome craft down on the ground, half a kilometer away from the crashed helicopter of Monica Chen.

  The four of them dismounted from their faithful and battered old mount, as the flare burning inside the face of the coast guard captain finally ignited fuel from the ruptured tank and fuel lines, sending a leaping explosion high into the air in a mighty conflagration that warmed their faces against the arctic wind even from such a great distance. Travis watched it burn. He watched it for so long, in fact, that a rescue team from Magadan, comprised of a fire engine and a police car bearing Bianca, Andrei and Thyri, had all arrived while he was still staring at the ruin; black smoke having now replaced the red.

  Chapter Twelve

  Anatoly Zeitsev, Chief Executive Officer of Multimetal Corporation was understandably distraught at the idea that his company had been targeted for a hostile takeover. Travis couldn’t see any duplicity in the old man’s flint colored eyes, but then, he hadn’t had the best of luck detecting treachery of late. Effusive in his thanks to the two remaining adventurers, Zeitsev had insisted on writing a check for a preposterous sum, which Thyri accepted without thanks or comment. She was grieving heavily for Fiona, the responsibility for her death weighing like a millstone around her neck. Travis was unsure if she would ever recover her full confidence again. The meeting with Zeitsev was thankfully short, and, despite the incredible events of the helicopter chase and crash the previous day, the CNN team had graciously kept the involvement of Alpha Adventurers Inc. out of their news bulletins. Yuri, the wounded local executive had been taken to the hospital under police guard and had confessed everything to Bianca, who had wasted no time in revealing her true identity as an FSB agent to the coast guard unit at Magadan and instructing their new acting captain to guide the Novonya back into the harbor. The captain of the ship, two crewmen and Mr. Korusaki of the Himiko Corporation came along quietly enough, once they realized the game was up. Korusaki was quickly loaded into Bianca’s imposing 4x4, and was driven away, Travis did not know to where. Bianca left with him without a word.

  Travis cared little for the whole affair. Once the fire of the helicopter crash had been doused by several strong men pumping the ancient fire engine’s hose by hand, using the waters of the Okhotsk itself, they had found the charred remains of Sergei in the rear seat, but nothing in the pilot’s chair at all. It appeared that Monica Chen had disappeared entirely. The local police scoured the surrounding steppe for what they were sure must be her remains, but none were found. Travis knew they would find nothing. Chen was a ghost, barely even a dream if she wanted to be. By now she would be moving on, to a new job, a new contract. A new life. No such luck for Fiona. Her body was flown back to the UK that morning, Thyri at her side to try and somehow break the news to her family. At Magadan airport, Travis and Thyri said their goodbyes.

  “I can’t do this anymore, Travis,” she had said.

  “Adventuring?” Travis replied. “It’s a tough gig. I am sorry about Fiona.”

  “I still want to do it, but I can’t lead us. I’m good at logistics and finance. I should have handed this over straight away, but after missing out in Japan I thought I could do it as well as you and Savannah had. I fucked it up, and now Fiona is dead. I need you to come back to the team, Travis. Properly. I need you to lead them. It’s what you were made for.”

  Travis said he’d think about it, but knew the answer as Thyri boarded the plane to Moscow, from where she would fly to London. Travis lounged around the sole coffee shop at Magadan airport, drinking the thick tar that passed for caffeinated drink here without thinking about it, without tasting it. He was still wearing the thick winter gear he had bought en route to this bleak place. He wished it was summer, and that he was back in Atlanta.r />
  His thoughts were interrupted by a newcomer to the shop. He didn’t look at him, but he caught the motion out of the corner of his eye.

  “Hey, Travis.”

  “Dearden. What’s new?” Travis said, raising his head.

  “Not much man, you know. Contract is over with the press here, could go back to Scotland and that, but winter there is almost as bad as it is here, ken?”

  “Yeah, I’ve been to Edinburgh once. In summer, mind you. It rained a lot.” Travis really didn’t feel like making small talk, which Dearden, to his credit, picked up on instantly.

  “I’ll get to the point, man: you look like there’s a lot on your mind. You guys, right, you ‘adventurers’; you solve mysteries and that, yeah? Scooby Doo and them, right?”

  Dearden tried a smile, but it was shut down by Travis’ glare.

  “Yeah, just like Scooby fucking Doo, but with more death and helicopter explosions. What do you want?” Travis said.

  “Aye, yeah. Sorry. I liked Fiona, she was cool. She didn’t deserve… anyway. Yeah, I work for a lot of folk, flying helicopters about. Helps fund the Greenpeace volunteering, you know? Anyway, I think I know a guy that needs your help. Here’s his number, ok? If you might fancy it.”

  He scribbled an email address and a contact number with what looked like a western European dialing code, but Travis couldn’t be one hundred percent sure. Dearden made to put the cap back on his pen, then thought better of it and wrote another number down.

  “The one at the bottom is my number, if you find yourself in need of a ride, you know?” he said. “The one at the top and the email address, that’s the guy. He deals in like, crystals and that. Swear-off-skees. Or whatever. It's not really my thing, ken? Figure you might look at it though, the guy is loaded. Anyway man, I gotta go get paid by CNN. Catch you around, cool?”