Exit Alpha (41 page)

Hunt was down. But she’d drilled the surgeon who’d done it. He lay gut-smacked on the deck, but alive. His second burst sang off the secured-back metal door near Cain’s head.

Cain shrank back, held the gun around the edge and sprayed the deck.

A groan let him know it had worked.

He sprang out wide, finished the man, knelt beside the shot-up Hunt. She gazed up, couldn’t speak but tried to smile. Her eyes said ‘Thanks, brother’ before her head fell to the side.

He blanked the pain out. Any distraction now and he died. And that couldn’t happen until more of them had paid for this.

He reached the glare at the end hatch. Hoses snaking across the chopper pad were being reeled in. The frowning airship’s engineer was directing operations, a two-way to his mouth. The racket of the craft’s idling motors and a compressor had drowned any noise they’d made.

He peered around the door-frame. Two surgeons covering the crewmen.

He fired.

Both went down. Frantic crewmen scattered and the engineer hit the deck with fright.

He was in overdrive now, had all the time in the world — total coordination and focus, like a machine.

He wanted Zuiden, whispered, ‘Coming for you, bastard.’

He switched mags and edged out on the pad, squinting, saw the movement above him in time — a surprised man with an unsilenced gun leaning over the railing above the hangars.

As he flattened against the frosted shutter, a burst chipped ice from the deck at his feet.

He’d have to expose himself to fire back.

Yes or no?

He instinctively knew it was right because it was desperately wrong. He ran out on the pad, firing up. The range was considerable for an Uzi-sized weapon but he’d always been good at this. And he now felt unassailable.

The two above hadn’t thought he’d dare. One shrank back as the second pitched forward to hang over the railing like washing.

Then Cain, still firing, was backing through the disoriented crewmen. He dived over the bags, lay flat.

The tattoo of 9mm rounds.

But the sandbags buried them dead.

Through a gap between the bags he spotted the attacker in the open second hangar, crouching behind cylinders and hardware.

The man saw movement and the second burst came so fast that flying sand stung his face and a slug almost took off his ear. It might have done more. What was going on here? They were cleared to disable him but not to take him out?

Next time he looked, the scene was different. The surgeon in the hangar was face down on the deck. A crewman stood above him holding a wrench.

A bare catwalk above the hangars. For now, the coast was clear.

Terrified crew getting up from the deck and bolting for the safety of the housing. The chief crouching near a hangar door.

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.

W
ith 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.