concerned, the only American to fill one of the precious seats would be Cam. They’d explained that Cam knew Freedman and some nanotech, but Deborah extended this half-truth to herself. I’ve been
Alekseev believed the chopper’s load allowance would permit six people. It would be tight, but they needed everyone they could fit. There must be a large Chinese guard at the labs. Their best hope might be a sudden blitz. When their pilot returned with the chopper, Alekseev’s troops loaded it with one person’s equivalent weight of rocket-propelled grenades and other weaponry. That left five slots — just four, after the pilot, an unfortunately heavyset man called Obruch.
They were saved from an even tougher decision. In the smoke, Alekseev had sent three men to investigate the plane. These soldiers reported no trace of Tanya Huff or Lewis Bornmann. If they’d survived the crash, which seemed unlikely, they must have been killed in the missile strike.
Like Foshtomi, Huff had been a part of saving Cam and Deborah. Huff’s death made her feel small and humble and yet unspeakably proud. She would carry on for them as far as possible.
Deborah expected to die with these strangers. Their entire strike force consisted of herself, Cam, Medrano, Colonel Alekseev, and Sergeant Obruch — and the chopper’s tanks were only two-thirds full. That meant their maximum range was 160 miles. They would need to find an airfield and refuel in order to leave L.A.
She was glad she had one friend. Jammed together in back, Cam worked to familiarize himself with a Russian AK-47 as Medrano inspected an RPG. Deborah merely rested her shoulder. She watched the sun and the land below. Impossibly, she was at peace.
Deborah Reece was a good soldier.
They were still a hundred miles from San Bernadino when their chopper hit the ash like a solid membrane. The aircraft rocked. Even the beat of the rotors changed. The
One thing Deborah didn’t worry about was radiation. The booster nanotech would protect them from all but the worst dosage. In any case, she didn’t expect to live long enough to get sick.
She stared into the darkness. Dust ticked and clattered against the Plexiglas.
There were layers in the clouds. Sometimes she couldn’t see anything but the swirls of gray and black. Other times, the haze opened up and she could see the ground, which was mostly blackened desert. Occasionally there was a road or fences or a line of blown-down telephone poles.
They knew the Chinese had taken over the U.S. military bases in the Mojave. Medrano thought these targets must have been hit, too. The earth was empty and burned, which didn’t make their job any easier. They’d lost their maps and electronics in the plane crash. That meant they’d also lost their sporadic satellite connection. They’d memorized the GPS coordinates for Saint Bernadine Hospital, but the News 12 chopper had had its global positioning system torn out long ago to support the Russian war effort.
Working with Medrano, Alekseev thought he’d pinpointed the right spot on a map of his own. By using compass headings, some landmarks in the terrain and dead reckoning, they believed they could find the general neighborhood. Fortunately, San Bernadino lay on Interstate 40 on the south side of a narrow pass between the San Gabriel and San Bernadino Mountains, which formed the eastern border of the Los Angeles sprawl. Those peaks would be tough to miss. A few of the highest nubs actually poked above ten thousand feet, and the Interstate should act like a red carpet, creating a long, distinct ribbon in the terrain.
Four times they saw Chinese aircraft in the murk. The fighters’ jetwash cut through the ash like bullets, dragging the soot into straight lines. One plane flew very close, nearly flipping the chopper as Obruch cursed and fought the controls.
Alekseev had already answered two radio challenges in Mandarin. After their near miss, there was a third. Deborah waited for a missile — would they even feel it? — but death never came. Alekseev’s codes were MSS, he said, and he posed as a high-level officer, even rebuking Chinese air traffic control for contacting him again. He wanted radio silence.
Eventually they were clattering alongside the San Gabriel Mountains. Obruch also had a railroad track and the dry, broken channel of an aqueduct to follow, both of which led to 1-40 and then into the pass.
The land transformed. Gas stations and truck lots appeared first. Warehouses. A car dealership. A quarry. There were homes, too, and freeway billboards and an endless row of great metal trusses supporting electrical lines. Everything looked as if it had been lifted and thrown. The buildings sagged. Even the freeway was buckled and split. Ash covered the world, robbing it of any color.
The destruction grew worse as they thundered through the pass. There were vast residential areas — thousands of homes in neat, boxy patterns on the hills. Street after street had been built on terraces like broad steps down the mountain slope, spotted with larger structures like apartment buildings and shopping centers. From the air, even now, the order that had been imposed was impressive. These roads and foundations might last for eons, although the lighter elements had been torn away. The roofs of the houses were gone. Many of those square little buildings had collapsed. The larger apartments and malls were often missing their tops, too, or had lost one or more walls. Even brick and concrete hadn’t survived. Not a single window looked intact. All of that material had ava lanched into the streets as it was lifted by the blast waves, creating drifts and dunes that covered earlier disasters. Long before the missiles fell, San Bernadino had been wracked by quakes and flash floods. It didn’t rain here often — but when it did, the insect-ravaged yards and hills had melted away, clogging the streets with erosion and debris. Deborah could still see unintended riverways carved through some neighborhoods, spilling down the mountainside.
A small percentage of the debris was bones. Hundreds of thousands of people had died here in the first plague. Their skulls and rib cages mixed with the furniture and other household possessions strewn among the shattered lumber, drywall, doors, shingling, and insulation. Signs were down. Trees and cars had overturned. It didn’t seem possible that anyone could have survived, but Deborah did her part, staring into the ruins for any clue. They were about two hundred feet up. Visibility was no more than a few hundred yards. Even the mountains had faded into the gloom. Everything looked the same. All that stood were broken walls — the endless, straight-edged fins of broken walls.
Beside her, Medrano compared notes with Alekseev in the cockpit, trying to make sense of the holocaust. Up front, the two Russians murmured together in their own language until Alekseev turned and said, “We are overshooting our mark. We must turn back north.”
“I’ve been counting streets,” Medrano said.
“As have we,” Alekseev said. “The hospital is behind us.”
“Look,” Cam said. “What’s that?” He rapped on his window and Deborah straightened against Medrano, wanting to see past him, which became easier when Obruch banked in a slow glide to Cam’s side.
There were people sprawled in the rubble — fresh, whole people, not skeletons. Deborah guessed there were at least ten. They were ash-colored like everything else, but they’d fallen on top of the debris. That meant they’d come after the bombing.
The helicopter had been descending but Obruch adjusted his elevation, rising again and then banking away to keep from passing over the kill zone. Deborah tried to glance back at the corpses through her window. The angle was too sharp.
“What do you think happened to them?” Medrano said, and Deborah thought, They weren’t shot. They
Limbs and heads had come away from some of the bodies.
“It must have been recent,” Cam said. “There are no bugs. No ants. The way those people were chewed up —”
That was Deborah’s side, and she glanced through the broken shapes of the city. She felt both hope and trepidation, because she knew exactly what Cam was thinking.
Those men looked like
“There are more bodies to the north,” Alekseev said.
“So we have a trail,” Medrano said. “But in which direction? Which group was killed first?”
