The Devil’s Noose

by Michael Angel

  “I’ll make sure that we give it a good wipedown,” Navarro promised. “See if you can get Blaine ready to travel. This isn’t going to be a smooth ride.”

  With that, Austen and Navarro ran back to Module E, throwing on facemasks and gloves as they did so. Austen remained inside and rummaged through the cabinets until she found a handheld spray version of the chemical decontaminate for the hardsuits.

  Navarro pushed his way back into the infirmary’s morgue room. He manhandled the stretcher out the door, along the cracked concrete pathway, and back into the mobile lab. Leigh met him in the doorway. Wielding a pair of spray bottles like a pistol slinging gunfighter, she doused the surface with a shiny layer of disinfectant.

  “Less than fifteen minutes,” Navarro said, announcing their return to the C&C. “I’ve got Blaine.”

  Preble stepped away from where he’d finished taping and splinting Blaine’s two broken fingers. He’d also wrapped an extra layer of bandaging around the man’s leg wound. Navarro reached underneath the semi-conscious man, picked him up with both arms, and deposited him gently on the stretcher.

  “That’s all well and good,” Preble said, “but where might I–”

  “Sidesaddle,” Navarro said, and he boosted the older man to sit on the edge of the gurney. The thing threatened to tip, but Austen grabbed hold of the front end and keep it level. “Okay, let’s move out.”

  With a constant squeak of protest from the gurney’s wheels, Navarro and Austen rolled it outside and headed out to the base’s main road.

  At the other end of the base, the Antonov’s engines throbbed like a diesel-powered feline purr. The sound alone warmed October’s heart as he and Redhawk ran up to the jet, threw open the side door, and slipped into the cockpit. The two men put on their aviation headsets and then ran through the takeoff checklist at a speed that would have horrified a safety inspector.

  “Okay,” Redhawk said, “let’s get this baby into takeoff position.”

  October grunted in agreement as they taxied the plane around to align with the least-damaged section of the airstrip. The two men only spared the briefest of glances as the still-smoldering wreckage of the Falcon at the far end of the runway. They had other things on their minds right now.

  “You stay here,” October said, as he got up. “I open rear cargo ramp.”

  The big Russian made his way through the guts of the aircraft, being careful to avoid jostling the bandaged portions of his midsection. He finally arrived at in the cargo bay, grim-faced as he spotted equipment and weapons lockers full of gear for men that would never return.

  He smacked one of the wall-mounted buttons with his palm. The cargo bay brightened as the ramp lowered with a raucous whine. Sour-smelling dust from outside mixed with the interior scents of hydraulic fluid, gun oil, and plastic cases.

  With a sharp tack! the edge of the ramp touched the battered concrete of the airstrip. October peered outside. Directly behind the aircraft lay two rows of buildings that had been converted either to burned-out husks or meter-high piles of rubble. The main road ran ruler-straight between them.

  “Ramp is down,” he reported. “I can see access road.”

  Redhawk’s voice buzzed over the headset. “Good. You spot Navarro and the others yet?”

  October went over to one of the equipment crates and rummaged around. He came up with a pair of binoculars and then lumbered halfway down the ramp before putting them to his eyes.

  He grimaced. “I see them. They bring stretcher with wheels. Very far away still.”

  “Dammit, we’re down to twelve minutes and change! If we don’t get airborne soon, we’ll have no chance of getting outside the blast radius of a quarter-megaton explosion!”

  “Understood.” October paced back and forth for a moment, like a tiger confined in a too-small cage. Then he nodded to himself as he came to a decision. “I have idea.”

  He stalked back up the ramp and threw open one of the weapons lockers, searching for one specific piece of equipment and its ammunition.

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Austen’s hair lay damp across her forehead as she and Navarro continued to struggle with the gurney. Even at their best pace, the journey was nail-bitingly slow. The compound’s main road was smooth enough in spots to maintain a loping run. But potholes and piles of rubble from the shattered buildings made it a hellish obstacle course.

  The wheeled stretcher threatened to tip several times as they made their way around one blockage and then another. Blaine faded in and out of consciousness, sometimes coming to with a yelp of pain as they went over a bump. Preble had cast aside his cane so that he could grip the side of their makeshift vehicle with both hands to avoid being thrown off.

  “Time,” she gasped, as she fought to get the front wheels over a badly crumbled section of road. “How much…time?”

  Navarro glanced at his watch and did his best to tamp down a wave of despair.

  “Less than eleven minutes,” he said, between breaths. “At this rate…we should just about make it to the plane…when the hammer drops.”

  “Might I suggest something?” Preble said quietly. “Leave this contraption behind. You and Leigh might make it if you head out on your own.”

  Navarro stared at him, even as he helped lift the wheels over to the next clear section of road. “We can’t…just…”

  “Believe me, I’m not looking forward to my end, no matter how clean it is. Yet I dislike adding two more to the death toll for no good reason.”

  The man’s words struck at Navarro’s core. He had never sent his men into harm’s way without a clear objective and good reason. Nor had he ever sacrificed anyone to the enemy, even for the best of reasons.

  But the moment of wavering passed. He’d never left someone behind, either. Navarro had seen what the ‘spot of black’ had done to Leigh. How it had come back and forced her to take this mission in the first place. Any way you looked at it, abandoning Preble and Blaine was a bad trade for his conscience.

  He wasn’t going anywhere.

  “No deal,” he grunted.

  “Please,” Preble pleaded. “Why won’t you two see reason?”

  Austen cursed under her breath. “Dammit, Ted, stop trying to be so noble!”

  Suddenly, they heard a distant mechanical coughing sound from up ahead. That was followed by flashes of light and a series of explosions. Navarro brought the gurney to a halt, drew the Makarov, and came around front to take point.

  “Stay down. Find cover,” he ordered. “Maybe Chelovik left some more people behind.”

  Preble jumped down from the stretcher. Austen helped him behind a nearby pile of rubble. Blaine remained unconscious atop the gurney, but they didn’t dare try and move him.

  Up ahead, the last two-story ramshackle houses had their upper floors blown to pieces with a resounding BWAM! Cinder blocks crumbled and fell in on themselves, sending up fresh plumes of smoke and dust. Navarro raised his pistol and squinted through the murk, looking for targets.

  The rumble of explosions died away. A throbbing whine of jet engines filled the air in its place. Navarro lowered his weapon and stared in amazement.

  The rear end of the Antonov An-74 appeared through the haze. The jet’s oddball over-the-wing engines cleared the destroyed houses as it backed down the street towards them. Below the high curve of the plane’s tail, the cargo ramp had been set in the half-down position.

  October sat on the end of the ramp, legs dangling mere inches over the broken pavement. His massive arms cradled an M32 multi-shot grenade launcher. Wisps of smoke curled from the weapon’s foot-long barrel as he grinned at them.

  “If you cannot come to us,” he called to them, “then we come to you!”

  Navarro couldn’t help but grin back.

  “Come on!” he cried. “Our ride’s here!”

  Preble got back to riding sidesaddle while Navarro and Austen resumed their pushing and pulling with a renewed effort. October got up and returned to the carg
o ramp controls. With a quick call to the cockpit, the plane stopped, and he lowered the ramp the rest of the way. Even as the gurney’s rear wheels were aboard, he hit the button to raise the ramp and seal the cargo bay for good.

  “They’re aboard!” October shouted into his headset. “Back to runway, now!”

  Austen and Navarro collapsed on the cold cargo deck, panting. Preble jumped off before the stretcher could overturn. His wobbly legs took him as far as a nearby crate before they gave out. Blaine mumbled something about cocktails and peanuts before drifting off again.

  Navarro coughed as he got to his feet. He clapped October on the shoulder.

  “That was fast thinking,” he said. “High explosive grenades to knock down the second-story buildings. Then the high wing clearance on this plane allowed you to roll it down the street towards us.”

  October beamed. “Is good, then.”

  “Is very good,” Navarro said, before glancing at his watch. “Now, you have seven minutes to get us out of here. You have any more rabbits to pull out of that hat of yours?”

  “I go to cockpit. I see if we have any.”

  Navarro helped Austen transfer Blaine from the gurney to a medical stretcher mounted firmly to the plane’s inside cabin wall. Preble made his way from the cargo crate to a seat next to the unconscious man. He checked Blaine’s pulse and respiratory rate, and then nodded his satisfaction.

  The plane jounced along as it made its way back up the ruined street. Finally, it reached the airstrip proper and the engine’s whine ratcheted up as Redhawk and October opened the throttle and extended the wing flaps. Navarro ignored the noise as he secured Blaine’s body with a trio of wide belts that ran across the medical stretcher.

  “He’s not the only one who needs to be strapped in,” Austen said to Preble. The older man nodded as she buckled him into the seat. “I’d better do the same.”

  “Leigh, over here,” Navarro said, as the plane began to accelerate down the runway.

  He motioned to a pair of seats opposite Blaine and Preble. She joined him. He buckled her into the web of safety straps with a quick, practiced ease.

  Austen looked over his shoulder and out the porthole-shaped window as he did so. The pitted concrete turned into a blur and then fell away with a stomach-turning jolt. They flew through the smoke that rose from the glowing wreck of the Falcon below.

  The Karakul mining compound came into view as they continued their ascent.

  Goodbye and good riddance, Austen thought. The place looked more than ever like a scar across the landscape. The wrecked buildings made the place look like a mass of broken and rotted teeth.

  Navarro finished belting himself in. He’d just turned to look out the window when it happened.

  High overhead, something strange happened to the sky. The scene was so bizarre that the eye at first refused to accept what it saw.

  The blue vault that made up the heavens rippled.

  Something descended as a bright, red-hot blur. A stroke of heat lightning, perhaps. The wink of a lighthouse beacon. The bolt of Zeus cast down from Olympus.

  It passed overhead with a faint sizzle of ozone as it left an ionized trail behind. As quickly as it appeared, it vanished into the rolling foothills to the north of the Karakul.

  “The flash!” Navarro shouted. “Eyes closed!”

  On the opposite side of the plane, Preble looked away. Austen did the same, holding her forearm up to cover her eyes. Navarro squeezed his lids shut and leaned away from the window.

  The horizon lit up with the glare of a thousand dying suns.

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  Colonel Aleksey Chelovik was finally having a good day.

  The masks he’d been forced to wear over the past weeks had finally been cast aside. No more incompetent Kazakh generals to pretend to serve. No more Westerners to play dumb around. Granted, he would miss the Frenchwoman’s ministrations, but sacrifices had to be made.

  And he could now speak in Kazakh again. While he’d known Russian from his childhood and English from his schooling, they were pale imitations of his people’s tongue. And in time, the Ozrabek dialect would be the default of all the countries for hundreds and thousands of miles around.

  As the Daichin Tengri willed it, he was sure.

  The truck convoy had slowed to a walking pace. The road ahead curved back and forth as it ascended into the foothills. Already, the dry smells of soil and dead grass were fading away. The raw scents of pine and the chill of the oncoming winter began to fill the air.

  He rolled down the truck’s passenger side window, lit a cigarette, and took a drag. The tobacco smoke made a bluish spiral into the air as he exhaled. Next to him, the driver frowned and stared intently at the vehicle’s side mirror.

  “What are you doing?” he asked, annoyed. “You are slowing down!”

  “Apologies, Commander,” the man said. “I see something in the distance. An aircraft, I think.”

  Chelovik considered. If it was a fighter jet or combat helicopter, he’d have to notify the anti-aircraft battery in the rear of the convoy to get ready. He pulled on his headset.

  “All trucks, come to a stop,” he ordered.

  As one, the vehicles grumbled to a halt. Chelovik unbuckled his seatbelt, opened the door, and stood on the truck’s running board. He turned to face towards the now-distant Karakul compound.

  A streak of white exhaust attracted his eye. The Westerner’s cargo jet rose into the sky, heading directly away from the convoy. He gave a self-satisfied snort.

  “That is the last we shall see of the Westerners,” he told the driver. “They must have gotten past the guards we left. No matter. We have everything that we–”

  High overhead, the sky rippled as if a stone had been cast into a cerulean pond. The heavens grew bright as a scarlet tongue of flame arrowed its way towards the earth.

  “That flame!” the driver gasped. “It must be the Mongol God of Victory, giving us a sign!”

  But Chelovik knew better. The Colonel remained outside, looking up at his doom.

  “No,” he said. “It is Daichin Tengri. The God of Death has come to claim us.”

  The Hammer launched by the distant satellite impacted just south of the convoy. A hundred thousand tons of earth erupted skyward from the blast with a titanic KATHOOM. Yet this ring of destruction was slow to arrive, by the standards of such events.

  A wall of thermal radiation as hot as the surface of the sun proceeded the mass of molten rock and pulverized earth. It converted anything in its path to glowing gas milliseconds before the crushing forces of the blast wave.

  Chelovik only had time to rue his fate with a single, last thought.

  Only the strongest shall survive.

  Then he, the trucks, his men, and the samples of Nostocales strain G240 vaporized into formless wisps of carbon.

  The effects from Thor’s Hammer continued to radiate outwards. It rapidly decreased in strength as the majority of the energy was released into the atmosphere or absorbed by the earth’s bedrock. The thermal radiation wasn’t quite strong enough anymore to vaporize the ravaged mining compound. But it shattered bricks, melted glass, and heated metal far beyond the sterilizing temperatures found in a hospital’s autoclave.

  The blast wave then annihilated the remaining buildings. It buried both Navarro’s dead and the deceased Ozrabek rebels under fifty feet of debris. It crushed the lightweight mobile field lab modules like a six-pack of empty beer cans and flung them down into the Karakul.

  An avalanche of industrial equipment, chunks of houses, and thousands of tons of rock cascaded down the open shaft. One side of the mine’s main shaft collapsed, ripping down the ore lift with the jumbled twang of broken steel. When the dust settled, the mile-deep depression wasn’t close to being filled.

  But the tunnel leading to the Nostocales colony had definitively closed, as if a divine stamp had been put on the matter.

  Miles further away and a few thousand feet in the air, the ther
mal shock made a foul-smelling hiss as it blistered the Antonov’s paint. Navarro felt the air in his lungs expand as things grew instantly hot in the aircraft’s cargo bay. Austen let out a gasp as the metal buckles in her seatbelt grew hot enough to feel through her clothes.

  Then the blast wave arrived.

  The Antonov’s engines made an unholy screech as the rush of superheated air tried to wrench the wings from the fuselage. The airframe emitted a horrendous din of creaking metal as it threatened to tear apart. October fought desperately with the controls. All he could do was try and keep the plane upright and its nose up.

  Finally, the wave passed.

  The jet lurched as it tried to cope with the unstable air left in its wake. A rattling cough came from the right engine as its turbine threatened to flame out. Redhawk fed more fuel to the struggling engine, coaxing it back to life.

  The coughing went away. The Antonov’s paint had been ruined, half its windows cracked, and enough bolts loosened to make teeth rattle from the vibration.

  But it remained airborne.

  “I can’t believe it,” Redhawk gasped. “We made it through the blast.”

  “Of course we did,” October said. “Is like I told Mister Fancy-Suit: Antonov An-74 is not fast. But has good bones. Very strong.”

  Back in the cargo hold, a snore rose from Blaine’s lips. Austen released her safety belt. Now that the plane’s flight was smoother, she got up and checked the man over.

  “He’s all right,” she said. “Looks like Ian missed the whole thing.”

  “Just his luck,” Navarro chuckled. He unbuckled himself, found the cargo bay’s internal intercom, and pressed the button. “Gentlemen, that was some damned good flying.”

  October’s voice was tinny-sounding as he replied. “Is nothing.”

  “Nothing except as scary as hell,” Redhawk put in. “Friendly skies, my ass.”

  “We’ve got to be pretty banged up after that blast,” Navarro said. “How long can you keep us in the air? I want to get to some kind of major airport. We’ve got people who need some serious medical attention. And we’ve got lots to report to people high up on the food chain.”