by Matt Rogers
She sensed Noah stir beside her. He got to his feet but she paid it no attention. She couldn’t tear her eyes away from the shimmering light.
For a moment, she thought they might be getting abducted by aliens.
But it turned out to be a whole lot worse than that.
The light split apart as it drew closer, diverging into four sets of headlights. The pick-up trucks screamed to a halt in front of the Jiaohe ruins and shadowy silhouettes leapt from the rear trays, their faces wrapped in scarves and coarse sandbag-like material. In Samantha’s vision they twisted and writhed and morphed into grotesque, terrifying creatures — she knew the visions weren’t real, but the underlying threat was certainly there.
A sharp pain seared through her chest, and for a terrifying moment she feared she might have a heart attack.
Noah surged forward, trying to intercept the newcomers before they reached the ruins. Possibly a valiant attempt to protect her. But it achieved nothing. He stumbled around like a functioning alcoholic, no doubt deep in visions of his own, and met the new arrivals without a clue as to what he was doing.
One of the burly men at the front of the procession wrenched some kind of pistol out of his clothing and slammed the butt into the side of Noah’s head. A sharp crack resonated off the boy’s temple, and he collapsed in a grotesque heap amidst the ruins, his legs simply giving out and folding underneath him.
A concussion at the peak of an acid trip.
Somewhere in the back of Samantha’s mind, she wondered briefly what the consequences of that might be.
Then the pack of men reached her and hurled her into the dirt, binding her hands tight behind her back with rudimentary cable ties. A huge boot pressed down against her spine, crushing her, compressing her, restricting her breathing.
She opened her mouth to scream but found no sound.
The world morphed around her, a dazzling array of everything associated with fear.
Sweat pouring, heart pounding, vision spinning, she moaned silently for help, falling on the deaf ears of a desolate autonomous region. The hallucinogens swirling around her mind seized hold of the terror and amplified it, spiralling her down into the toxic depths of the human mind.
She moaned again.
The boot crushed down harder.
She gasped.
Choked.
Fought against panic.
Failed.
No-one was here to help them.
Not a soul.
She regretted ever listening to Noah Powell.
4
30,000 feet over the desert
Five days later…
The only thing more uncomfortable than a High-Altitude, Low-Opening skydive into hostile territory was doing it with a hangover.
Will Slater had enough experiences with HALO jumps to quash the natural feelings of panic induced by crouching in the freezing fuselage of a cargo plane thirty thousand feet above the earth. But you couldn’t quash a pounding headache so easily. That was biology.
The grooves in the steel floor rattled under the soles of his boots, shaking his calves and knees, making him wholly unstable.
He adjusted his face mask and fought the urge to vomit.
The entire fuselage had plunged into a deep shade of red a few minutes ago, indicating they were close to go time.
“They”, he thought, and smirked behind the foggy glass of his breathing apparatus.
It was never “they”.
It was only him.
He touched the side of the helmet and an earpiece activated deep in his canal. He heard his handler, Lars Crawford, loud and clear.
‘Will?’
Slater said, ‘Yeah.’
‘You don’t sound happy to hear from me.’
‘You know where I was. What I was doing.’
‘What you get up to in your downtime is your own business. But this is your own fault. You know you’re always on call. Part of the contract you signed in the beginning.’
The remnants of hard liquor in Slater’s stomach speared violently up his throat, threatening to come out in a projectile stream.
He fought it back down again.
He said, ‘You should have used one of the other operatives.’
‘We felt this situation called for someone with your talents. It’s not our fault you drunk yourself into a coma twelve hours before we came for you.’
‘We? I haven’t seen you.’
‘I’m in Washington. Where I need to be.’
‘I never see you anymore.’
‘Black Force has … proved its worth. So there’s meetings and … look, are you sure now’s the right time to be talking about this?’
Slater twisted on the spot to look over one shoulder, and made eye contact through a mask of sweat with the co-pilot.
The man raised two fingers.
‘I’ve got two minutes,’ Slater said. ‘Plenty of time. Talk to me.’
‘We’re doing exceptional, Slater,’ Lars said. ‘Beyond exceptional. The Hill loves us. They love everything we stand for. They love everything about the process we use to recruit operatives. It was the missing piece of the puzzle.’
‘I’m glad to hear it.’
‘You don’t sound thrilled.’
‘You’re not the one in the middle of this shit right now.’
‘I know. But I don’t get paid like I’m in it, either.’
Slater soaked in the thousands of pounds of steel all around him, and sensed the incomprehensible drop to mainland China far below. His stomach churned. His pulse pounded. It seemed as if every stress chemical in his system activated at once.
He gulped, tried to control the hangover sweats, and prepared for the drop into the murky darkness.
‘I think I’d rather be at a desk,’ he muttered.
‘You have the intel?’ Lars said.
Slater wheeled on the spot, more for dramatic effect than anything else. He cursed, eyes wide. ‘They told me bits and pieces. They said you’d brief me.’
Slater heard the unmistakable sound of bureaucratic panic in his ear — hushed whispers, papers shuffling, people swearing under their breath.
‘Fuck,’ Lars said. ‘Sorry, Will. We only found out about this situation hours before you did.’
‘Is that why I was dragged out of bed so aggressively?’
‘We can’t take no for an answer. You know this.’
‘I seriously doubt my skills apply to this situation.’
‘And why would you doubt that?’
‘You want me to get anything done as a black man in China? Not exactly covert…’
‘You’re dropping into Xinjiang. It’s an autonomous region in central China. Horrendously complicated politically, but you don’t need to worry about any of that. We lost three young adults in the Taklamakan Desert four days ago. We believe they were taken by radical ETIM soldiers and transported to one of their training camps in the Tian Shan mountain range, either to be used as future hostages against our government or as slave labour for one of the camps.’
‘ETIM?’
‘The East Turkestan Islamic Movement.’
‘They operate in China?’
‘In the desolate stretches of Central Asia, yes. And there’s a lot of those.’
‘I’m sorry, Lars, but this is—’
From the cockpit, the co-pilot screamed, ‘Thirty seconds!’
Slater twisted on the spot and screamed back, ‘No!’
Lars said, ‘What?’
‘Not you, Lars. Shut up for a second.’ Slater turned back to the cockpit. ‘Do another pass over!’
‘What?!’ the co-pilot hissed. ‘We don’t have time for—’
‘Make time. I’m not ready.’
‘Thought you were a professional. You need to go. We’re not designed to be at this altitude for long.’
The co-pilot started to disappear from sight, ducking back into his seat.
Slater yelled, ‘If that rear ramp goes down I’ll kill both of you. D
o another pass around.’
Silence from the cockpit.
The rear ramp stayed firmly sealed shut.
‘Okay,’ Slater said, turning his attention back to the earpiece, fighting for calm. ‘Go.’
‘What more do you want?’
‘Are you being serious?’
‘I can brief you on the ground, Will. Get out of the aircraft.’
‘Then I’m trapped down there for as long as you want me to be.’
‘That’s not true. If you really wanted to you could fight your way out and forget about the entire operation. But that’s not who you are. And if you even considered doing something like that, I’d kill you myself.’
‘You wouldn’t touch me,’ Slater hissed.
‘Look,’ Lars said. ‘I get it. You’re hungover. You’ve probably got the mother of all headaches. You’d rather be anywhere else. But there’s three petrified kids down there in some extremist camp and they need you, because no-one else is going to get to them in time and you know it. It’s got to be you.’
‘You should have sent King.’
‘King’s in the middle of an operation.’
‘You should have pulled him out.’
‘That’s not how this works.’
‘You should have sent anyone else. How am I supposed to survive when I can barely keep my food down?’
‘Vomit, then,’ Lars said, with absolute sincerity. ‘Christ, Will. Get yourself together. You understand the stakes here, don’t you?’
‘There’s always stakes like this. But I need more information or I won’t jump. I need to know what I’m getting into.’
‘I just told you.’
‘That was nothing. That was barebones.’
‘Make. The. Jump.’
‘If I get killed down there,’ Slater said. ‘It’s on you.’
With gravity in his tone, Lars said, ‘It’s always on me. Always.’
Slater said, ‘Okay.’
He yelled his approval to the co-pilot, and the rear ramp came down, and he broke into a jog and tumbled out of the plane into the dead of night.
5
He fell with no concept of falling.
He couldn’t see anything through the face mask. He knew what he was falling toward — an empty, endless desert. He saw a sea of blackness in all directions, and if there were no clouds, he would see the same sea of blackness stretching out endlessly.
He regulated his breathing, and checked his altimeter. There was no use panicking. He didn’t panic anymore.
Or maybe he did — maybe he was now so used to the feeling that it had become his new normal. His new baseline.
Maybe that was it.
He fell toward a hostile environment, surrounded by cold air whipping his frame, and he felt his mind shift gears into operational mode.
At ease amidst chaos.
The man who sleeps in a storm.
Thanks to the wonders of modern technology, and the frequency with which Slater had become accustomed to HALO jumps, he could still maintain a relatively normal conversation with Lars Crawford through his earpiece as he fell.
He said, ‘I’m out of the plane.’
‘How’s it looking?’
‘Same as always. It’s dark.’
‘How’s the hangover?’
‘Adrenalin’s keeping it at bay.’
‘As I knew it would.’
‘That was never the problem, Lars.’
‘I know.’
‘Well, now that you’re out of the plane, I can tell you we have a slight problem.’
‘Music to my ears.’
‘We don’t know whether there are two or three hostages.’
‘What?’
‘You heard me.’
‘Explain.’
‘Samantha DiBiase and Ethan Turner are confirmed missing. They’re college dropouts — ordinary Americans with a reckless streak. They came to China with a third guy — Noah Powell — but only Samantha and Ethan were sighted on the Silk Road yesterday, accompanied by what we believe from surveillance photos are ETIM soldiers. There was no sign of Noah, and we have very little information to work with. None of their friends or families knew what they were planning to do. They appeared to have made it to the Gaochang ruins — that was the last confirmed sighting of the three of them alive. That’s all the intel we’ve been able to put together. It’s a notoriously difficult region to round up answers in. We don’t know whether Noah is alive or dead, or if he was even with them when they were captured. You’ll need to make sure you don’t leave him behind when you retrieve Samantha and Ethan.’
Halfway through Lars’ info dump, Slater reached back and wrenched his pilot chute out of the pack. It caught the wind and ripped the main parachute free, and he slowed rapidly three thousand feet above the desert. As he suspected, the landscape sprawled out forever, inseparable from the night sky at the edges of his vision.
In his black clothes, under a black chute, Slater listened to the parachute flapping over his head as he drifted down to the desert floor.
He reached up and snatched the toggles.
And anger flooded his veins all at once.
‘So I’m babysitting now?’ he said. ‘That’s what this is? Three idiots who didn’t know any better went into an autonomous region and paid the price? You couldn’t put me to better use?’
‘You didn’t make mistakes when you were younger?’
‘I joined Black Force,’ Slater said. ‘That seems like the biggest mistake of all right about now.’
‘They’re dumb kids, but they’re ours. This is why we began. To protect our own.’
‘Yeah,’ Slater grumbled. ‘I know. But I’m risking my life out here.’
‘When aren’t you?’
‘It’s usually for something more important than this.’
‘If you were a young dumb kid in the clutches of a radical terror organisation in the Chinese desert, would you want the man who’d been tasked with pulling you out of hell to speak like that? Or would you wish he genuinely wanted to help you? And if you need another reason, here you go. If ETIM tortures and slaughters three American citizens, they’ll laud it over everyone on the Dark Web. Soon every terror organisation across the globe will see how effortless it is to pluck unsuspecting backpackers away from their friends and have their way with them. We’ll be seen as weak. Is that good enough for you?’
Slater forced back the incessant headache and said, ‘Got it.’
‘But you shouldn’t be doing it because of that. You should be doing it because those kids need help, and they’ll likely die some of the worst deaths imaginable if we do nothing. The political bullshit shouldn’t make a difference.’
‘You said they were college dropouts?’
‘They would be third years.’
‘So I’m only a few years older than them myself,’ Slater said. ‘Stop calling them kids. They’re grown-ups who made grown-up decisions.’
‘No-one has made the life choices you have, Will,’ Lars said. ‘That’s why you’re up here and they’re down there.’
‘I don’t even know where I’m landing.’
‘Near the Gaochang ruins. That was the last place they were sighted. We have a tentative relationship with a civilian on the ground. She was the one who saw them. She’s agreed to meet you in thirty minutes in the ruins.’
‘Okay.’
‘A word of warning — she didn’t sound too happy to be communicating with us.’
‘Then why is she?’
‘We paid her off.’
‘And you think she’ll be reliable?’
‘It’s all we have to work with. You’ve done more with less information before.’
‘Okay.’
‘Best of luck.’
‘I’ll get in touch if I need you. Otherwise, see you on the other side.’
‘I just wanted to reassure you that we have all our satellites scouring the desert for anything that might help us. We’re doing everything we ca
n. You’re not on your own down there.’
‘You’re doing that from an office, Lars,’ Slater said.
The ground rushed up to meet him.
He said, ‘Got to go.’
Lars began to say something, but Slater reached up with a gloved hand and jabbed a small button on the side of his helmet. It depressed a mechanical plunger into his ear and cut off the call, ending Lars’ spiel mid-sentence.
Slater had heard enough.
He flared the parachute and touched down effortlessly on the sand. Instead of running to a halt and risking a sprained ankle in the loose ground underfoot, he sat down on his rear as he landed and yanked one of the toggles down, collapsing the chute in an instant. Then he bundled it up and heaped sand over the top of the chute and empty container until they were akin to buried treasure. He dusted himself off, adjusted the tactical pack over his shoulders, and set off climbing to the top of the nearest embankment to get a better view of his surroundings.
He was all alone.
As alone as it was possible to be.
A ghost in the night.
6
He expected nothing but hostility from the informant.
Whoever she was, Slater didn’t blame her. He figured she’d glimpsed the Americans in the Gaochang ruins some time before they’d been taken prisoner, and they probably hadn’t been the most accommodating tourists.
If they were dumb enough to barrel into the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region without understanding the need for safety, they were also dumb enough to offend anyone and everyone with brash, loud-mouthed antics.
At least, that was what he envisioned.
For all he knew, they were Mormons.
Despite having cut off communication with Lars, the sound of his handler’s voice returned a moment later. ‘Will.’
‘I thought I told you I had this covered.’
‘You don’t. You’ll need us on the line when you speak to the civilian. We have a translator ready, because she’ll be speaking in Uyghur.’
‘Got it.’
‘Do you know where you are?’
