The Extinction Code (21 page)

‘It was a devastating blow to life,’ Arando agreed, ‘and the lava from the Deccan Traps covered most of what we now call Asia. Very little life survived on the surface or in the oceans, which were poisoned by the chemicals falling out of the sky.’

Ethan turned to Lopez.

‘If this fungus feeds on living cells, it would have a tough time surviving the wake of an impact like that,’ he said. ‘That asteroid might also have been responsible for bringing to an end an extinction level event, rather than just creating one.’

Arando shook his head, uncertain. ‘Many species did survive,’ he pointed out, ‘and even thrived in the wake of the impact. They would have been surrounded by debris and carcasses, highly exposed to any surviving examples of the infection. No, it couldn’t have happened like that, but…’

‘But what?’ Lopez pressed.

‘But it could have brought the disease down with it,’ he replied.

Ethan thought again, about what he knew about panspermia and tardigrades and the knowledge that some forms of life could remain locked up inside comets and asteroids for millions, perhaps billions of years, just waiting for that perfect moment to burst into life on a new world and replicate.

‘If it did, then it could have infected some species that survived the impact,’ Ethan speculated, ‘which then died out before the infection took hold due to the devastation around them in the wake of the impact.’

Arando nodded.

‘It couldn’t spread far and eventually vanished again, until your man Channing discovered those bones in Montana. If he recognized the fossil to have been infected by something, perhaps something that might have survived the fossilization process, it might have been enough to scare him into quarantining himself.’

‘And that act might have cost him his life,’ Ethan went on.

‘Somebody extracts the infection from the fossilized bones,’ Lopez figured, ‘re–animates it or whatever, and then starts testing it out.’

Ethan looked at the mess before them and suddenly he knew that what he was looking at was not a natural act, the evolution of some new and lethal weapon of disease. This was something ancient, primal, captured by men and released on the island to wreak its havoc on species that had no natural defense against it.

‘Somebody put this here,’ he said finally.

‘You’re saying that somebody killed this forest on purpose?’ Arando said in horror. ‘Why?’

‘To test it,’ Ethan guessed. ‘And now they won’t want it to spread too far and get out of control.’

‘It’s too late for that!’ Arando wailed in horror. ‘It’s out, they can’t stop this now!’

Ethan was about to reply when he heard a distant sound, like a horn echoing in from the mountain peaks. The echoing, indistinct sound grew stronger with each passing moment, and with a near–clairvoyant certainty Ethan knew that this part of the forest was about to become an inferno.

‘Move, now!’ he yelled. ‘Get back to the river!’

Ethan bolted from the scene and crashed through the undergrowth, Lopez following right behind him and Arando bringing up the rear and calling out to Ethan.

‘What the hell is going on?!’

‘Your site is about to disappear for good!’ Ethan yelled as they ran, stumbling in the heavy suits across fallen trees and dense foliage. ‘Keep moving!’

Ethan heard the noise more clearly now above the sound of his own laboured breathing inside the oven–like mask, a distinctive whine of a jet engine that rocketed through the valleys nearby. He couldn’t see anything in the sky above them through the mask and the dense canopy, but he knew the jet was coming around toward them by the sound of its engine.

‘They must have followed us!’ Lopez gasped as she ran behind Ethan toward the river. ‘They’ll see the smoke from the landing zone!’

Ethan did not reply as he ran, focusing on moving as fast as he could though the dense undergrowth. The sound of the jet engine became much louder, howling toward the site from what sounded like directly ahead as Ethan burst from the treeline onto a shore of wet, dark sand and looked up to see a small jet fighter soar overhead, a faint trail of smoke from its engines as it vanished over their heads. Ethan tore off his mask and ripped off the suit as he cried out.

‘Get down!’

Ethan shouted the warning as he hurled himself into the water, Lopez crashing in alongside him as Arando turned and looked back into the forest.

The blast thundered as though a storm had broken directly overhead, a shockwave of pressured air radiating outward at supersonic speed, crashing through the forest and flattening trees in its path. The blast hit Arando with the force of a freight train, the Hazmat suit disintegrating as the explosion tore his body apart to hurl what remained far out across the river in a hail of debris that crashed into the water around Ethan.

He broke the surface and shielded his head as burning debris plummeted out of the sky all around them and plunged into the water. Lopez burst from the river alongside him, her long black hair snaking down her shoulders and streaming with water as she shielded her face from the onslaught and shouted to Ethan.

‘We’ve gotta get out of here!’

‘The Icon’s down there!’ Ethan pointed.

The aircraft remained where it was, shielded from the blast by the steep banks alongside the river. Lopez kicked out and began swimming for the aircraft as Ethan heard the jet coming around for another pass, this time in the opposite direction. Already he could see towering flames roaring through the rainforest, thick black smoke coiling up into the gray sky above as the napalm bombs being dropped by the aircraft incinerated the forest below.

Ethan swam to the Icon’s port side and dragged himself up onto the shore as Lopez yanked the mooring line away from the tree. They hauled open the canopy together and climbed into the cockpit as Ethan glanced up into the sky and saw the jet wheeling around for another pass.

‘They’re coming back,’ Lopez said.

Ethan leaped into his seat as Lopez kicked off the shore with one boot and the Icon slid backwards into the green water. She jumped in alongside him and pulled the canopy down as Ethan fired up the engine and turned the little aircraft around with a healthy stab of rudder and throttle.

‘He’s lining us up!’ Lopez shouted as she saw the jet fighter rocketing in toward them.

Ethan slammed the throttle wide open and the Icon surged away from the shore as he saw a tiny speck drop from the jet fighter’s wings and it pulled up sharply, vapor trails spiralling from its wingtips.

‘Incoming!’

The Icon accelerated across the water and away from the shore, and Ethan glimpsed the slender projectile rocket across the sky behind them and plunge into the forest barely a hundred yards from their position.

‘He’s still hitting the forest!’ Lopez said. ‘We need to get out of here while we can!’

The dense jungle nearby was ripped apart by a blossoming fireball that burst from the banks of the river and soared above the water, and the Icon was hurled sideways as the shockwave hit them.

***

XXV

Ethan pushed the control column all the way to the right in an attempt to stop the aircraft’s wings from flipping over under the blow and the Icon skittered this way and that on the water rushing beneath its wings. Burning debris rained down across the water around them and clattered against the canopy as the Icon reached full power, billowing streams of flame flickering across the sky as the tiny aircraft blasted clear of the explosion.

‘We’re at full power!’ Ethan shouted above the engine noise. ‘She won’t lift off!’

Lopez craned her neck around and searched the sky for any sign of the fighter jet as the clouds of smoke and tongues of flame receded behind them.

‘I can’t see him!’ she shouted.

‘He’ll be there,’ Ethan replied grimly as he looked ahead and saw the river arcing around in a bend to the right.

He knew that there was no way that they could take the bend at full power, and so he eased back on the throttle and the Icon settled down more heavily into the water.

‘You’re slowing down!’

Ethan eased the aircraft around the bend in the river, affording Lopez a better view aft.

‘Jesus,’ she uttered, ‘they virtually nuked the place.’

Ethan glimpsed walls of flame and smoke as the forest burned fiercely in the wake of the attack. There was no way that whoever cultivated this particularly horrible form of life would want it to get out of control, and the only way to achieve that was to utterly destroy it once the experiment had been completed.
Fire will destroy it
, Arando had confirmed before he too had been obliterated in the attack.

The river twisted back around to the left and as Ethan turned he saw in the far distance a line of white foam, the river churning its way over a series of rapids.

‘Er, we’ve got a problem,’ he said.

‘Yeah,’ Lopez replied, ‘and it’s right behind us.’

Ethan looked over his shoulder and saw the jet fighter sweeping around in a turn low over the forest, banking steeply as it turned toward them, vapor trails twisting from its sharply raked wings again like white streamers rippling against dark gray clouds in the distance.

Ethan knew that the Icon’s white fuselage and wings would be an easy spot for a fighter pilot against all this green water and forest. He looked at the distant rapids.

‘We’ll never make it into the air before we get there,’ Lopez said. ‘There’s nothing we can do.’

‘We’re too heavy,’ Ethan agreed, then looked at her. ‘Would you mind jumping out?’

Lopez shot him an appalled look, then scowled as the saw the humor in Ethan’s eyes.

‘How can you joke at a time like this?!’

‘Who said I was joking?’

‘
You
get out before I throw you out!’

Ethan smiled as a new idea crossed his mind and he looked down at the controls. He saw what he needed and flipped a switch.

‘Here goes nothing,’ he said, and opened the throttles wide once more.

The Icon accelerated gamely across the smooth water, racing toward the rapids ahead, churning white water tumbling into an abyss beyond and likely laced with black rock that would shatter the Icon’s fragile hull in an instant.

‘I hope to hell you know what you’re doing!’ Lopez said as she gripped the edges of her seat and began to try to push herself backwards into it, as though she could somehow escape their fate.

Ethan focused in on the airspeed indicator as he selected half flaps, the throttle pushed to the firewall and the Rotax engine screaming close behind him. The other gauge he watched closely was the fuel gauge, and suddenly Lopez realized what he had done.

‘You’re dumping gas?!’

‘It’s no good to us if we’re dead,’ Ethan shot back, ‘and it’s a short flight home.’

Lopez craned her neck back once again and almost screamed. ‘He’s right on us!’

Ethan risked a glance back behind them and he saw the fighter sweep in low over the trees, following their path down the river as it screamed toward them, and he saw the fighter’s nose suddenly vanish behind flickering lights.

‘He’s firing!’

Ethan saw the water to one side of the Icon suddenly churned by a blaze of twenty millimetre rounds that smashed into the river and swept in toward him as the fighter pilot dragged his line of fire onto the Icon.

‘Hold on!’ Ethan yelled.

The rapids loomed before them and Ethan saw a gap between ragged chunks of damp, black rock. He nudged the rudder to the right and aimed for the gap as the cannon fire ripped into the water just feet from the Icon’s fuselage, and then the aircraft’s nose hit the rapids and Ethan hauled back on the stick and shut off the fuel dump valve.

The Icon soared off the surface of the water and the airspeed plunged as she clawed her way briefly into the air. The cannon fire shot ahead of them, the fighter pilot taken unawares by the Icon’s sudden loss of airspeed, and the jet roared overhead and shot away over the jungle as Ethan pushed hard on the control column and the Icon’s nose fell away.

The aircraft plunged toward the turbulent rapids below, her engine still at full throttle as Ethan retracted the flaps and let the airspeed build in the shallow dive. The swirling green and white water loomed up toward them, but freed from the surface friction of the river the Icon’s airspeed rocketed and at the last moment Ethan gently eased back on the control column and the aircraft levelled out barely three feet above the churning river and began to climb slowly into the misty air.

‘Jesus,’ Lopez uttered, her heart hammering in her chest.

The Icon climbed away from the river, the engine labouring to lift the aircraft in the dense and humid air, but as they climbed so the temperature began to drop. Ethan knew that the lower temperature meant denser air, and as if by magic the Icon’s rate of climb increased.

‘Where is he?’ Ethan asked as they climbed out above the jungle.

Lopez looked around them but she could see nothing. ‘I lost him in the mist.’

Ethan nodded and headed for the nearest cloud bank he could find.

‘We’ll do the same, ‘cause we won’t stand a chance against his guns.’

Lopez shook her head. ‘He’ll wait for us, we can’t make it all the way back to the coast.’ Ethan guided the Icon toward the clouds. ‘I wouldn’t be so sure. He’ll run out of fuel before we will, so he can’t stay out here forever. Besides I recognized the aircraft type, a MiG–17 Fresco that must belong to the Madagascan Air Force.’

‘They’re in on this?!’ Lopez uttered in shock.

‘The government likely isn’t,’ Ethan cautioned, ‘but in an out–of–the–way country like this I don’t suppose it’s hard to bribe a few personnel.’

Lopez kept searching the skies but she couldn’t see the enemy jet anywhere.

‘Maybe he’s gone.’

Ethan was about to take the chance that she might be right when something appeared from the clouds dead ahead and a stream of tracer fire rocketed past the Icon’s wings.

‘Incoming!’

Ethan banked hard right and the Icon veered away from the onrushing gunfire as the MiG shot past at high speed. G–Force pushed them down into their seats as the Icon turned tightly, and then Ethan levelled out and looked back over his shoulder.