The vehicle took a wide arc around the plane's tail, circling behind the wreckage, shunting its way through lumps of flaming debris with the impunity of something big, impatient and impervious. I dropped quickly down from my shaky vantage and squirreled into the recess beneath the drooping camber of the cockpit, the first vestiges of panic rising inside. When it drew alongside, the driver would have to be blind not to see me. What precisely was I supposed to do then?
It didn't take a genius to work out what they were up to. A lazy recon around the perimeter to get a good look at the side they couldn't see from their hickledy conning towers. To flush me out into the open, if I turned out to still be alive.
With the sniper on one side and an armoured vehicle on the other, it wouldn't be hard work to catch me out, pick me off like a flaky scab.
I breathed deep, letting the conditioning guide me. Thinking like a machine.
Only viable place to hide now was back in the bloody plane, which I'd just spent half an hour trying to get out of. I considered crawling back. I even tensed, ready to hoist myself out from my pitiful cover and up through the shattered cockpit windows, probably lacerating myself all to hell in the process, but still… It was better than n The bus stopped.
Its brakes squeaked quietly as it drew to a halt beside the knotted cavity of the missing tail segment, far off to my right. I could hear voices arguing inside. A hatch flapped-open near the rear and a robed figure leaned out. I froze.
The man tossed something, underarm, into the plane's tail.
'Go!' He shouted, presumably to the driver.
The hatch slammed shut and the bus moved on.
'Oh fuck…' I whispered.
The tail bulged. The whole wreck shuddered, scraping deeper into the dry grass. Round the corner of my cover, too far out in the open for me to see clearly, flames and tumbling lumps of metal arced high overhead, shattered fragments of blue-painted hull spiralling in orbital contrails of sparks and smoke, to bounce and break on the tarmac.
A few bits and bobs pinged cutely off the bus. It didn't seem to mind.
They thought I was still inside. It didn't much matter much, either way. Inside or out of the wreck, with the 'Cult Of Unfair Destructive Hi-Tech Gadgetry' around I was as good as mince.
Think, think…
The bus cruised gently forwards, cornering the rear of the plane and pausing beside the next gaping rent in its fuselage, a third of the way along its flank. Again, the hatch flipped open, and like some surreally casual picture – a guy in a park pitching a ball to an overeager dog – the goon flipped another grenade into the wreck.
The bus moved on.
This time the detonation blew off an emergency exit door, straight upwards like a rocket, to tumble over and under back down again. More spilled fuel caught fire as the debris mushroomed out, and for the second time I felt a wave of weakness and nausea passing over me. Everything seemed to go grey.
Fuzzy.
Meaningless.
Not now!
Blood loss. Hollow prickles of heat up and down empty veins…
I Don't you fucking give up, soldier!
I brought the rifle up to my shoulder. This time the bus driver would see me. This time they'd be too close. The grenade would blow out the front of the plane, erupt through the cockpit like a great pulsing embolism, crushing and breaking and burning me all at once.
The brakes squealed.
The hatch flipped open.
The goon wasn't looking out, bending back inside to shout at the driver, hands curled snugly around the baseball bomb, ready to throw.
I heard:
'…fucking opinions to yourself, grandpa, and let the real men do the…'
He pulled the pin.
I shot him.
The hatch flipped closed, bloodhaze wafting down and out. The grenade sill inside.
The unseen driver shouted.
I pushed myself deep into the recess and curled into a ball.
The bus's arse blew off like an overfilled balloon, smoke swallowed the sky, pulsing waves of weirdness sent me flopping like a boneless doll with vomit on my chin, and everything faded to white.
CHAPTER FIVE
My first worry was that my eyes weren't working properly.
Okay, so I'd just woken up. No need to panic yet, maybe, but the training and conditioning went deep, and the first thing you learn is be aware.
Know everything.
Cover the angles.
Right.
I had the vague idea I'd passed out from loss of blood. There was something about a… a bus? A plane? What the fuck? Maybe I was still hallucinating.
Maybe this hazy curtain obstructing everything I was seeing was just an effect of my traumatised mind, or something cloudy dripping in my eyes, or… or whatever.
Assume a worst case scenario.
Sir, yes sir, etc etc.
So: Major damage following oxygen starvation to the brain, leading to sensory corruption and an inability to effectively continue.
Solution: Abort mission.
I remembered where I was. I remembered the plane crash and the gunfight and was even starting to piece together the thing with the bus when the biggest puzzle-piece of all dropped into place: I remembered why I'd come here.
The Signal.
'Inability to effectively continue' wasn't an option. 'Abort Mission' could, pardon my French, fuck off.
I mentally nutted the worst-case scenario and tried out a little optimism for a change. When I twisted my head to glance at the floor beneath me – I was lying on my right shoulder, aching from my own weight – the cracked tarmac of the airstrip came into perfect and unobstructed focus. It was only when I looked further afield that my vision became obscured, as if the horizon was playing hard-to-get.
'Stay still,' someone croaked. 'Nearly done. Can't finish-up if you keep moving.'
My skin prickled, and it took a moment or two to realise why. I was half naked. Lying on a mangled runway surrounded by debris and fuel, unable to see anything past a few dozen feet, in nothing but my underwear.
'H-hey…'
'Dammit! Stay still.' A wrinkled hand – dark brown knuckles and a pale palm – dipped briefly into my field of view and gave me a chastising flick on the forehead, not doing much for my sense of security. I felt my whole body rocking a little, as if a dog had got hold of my left sleeve and was tugging it from side to side, though I wasn't wearing anything and consequently had no sleeves.
It was all very odd. There was no pain.
I poked my tongue around my mouth, half testing for the taste of blood, half summoning the strength to speak, and eventually tried: 'What are you… uh…?'
'Sorting you out.' the speaker said. His voice was hard-accented – African-American, New York sharp – with
