Jack Archer (Book 3): Year Zero Page 7

  Standish barreled into the young, spindly pines that lined the track with all the speed he could muster, splintering their trunks and whipping aside branches as he forced the truck through the tight gap. A couple of the trees fought back against the attack, hammering the front of the truck before giving up the struggle, and after just a minute or so the windshield was already cracked in several places. Steam rose from the hood, probably from a busted radiator, and Standish knew he’d have to push on before the engine gave up the ghost.

  Three hundred yards. That’s how far the map had told him he’d need to drive before the old mining trail would come into view on his left, but the closer he came the more he worried he’d never find it. The forest was just too overgrown. There were no gaps in the trees wide enough to force his way through. Hell, maybe the map was wrong. Maybe this hadn’t been the right turnoff after all. Maybe the entrance to the mine was a mile away, on the other side of centuries old forest.

  Wait.

  There it was. Almost invisible, hidden by decades of growth, he could just about make out a path weaving through the forest to a rock face fifty yards to the north. Even from here he could see the old lumber that framed the entrance to the mine, almost petrified by years of exposure to the cold mountain air.

  “Come on come on come on,” he whispered under his breath as he swung the wheel and shifted down a gear, turning the lumbering truck onto the rocky path through the trees. He swore as the truck bounced, struggling for grip on the loose gravel, and he winced at the sound of the missile crashing around the back. He knew it would brush off rough treatment like this – the W80’s casing was designed to survive the violence of a launch without accidental detonation – but still he clenched his teeth at the sound of it sliding from wall to wall.

  The mouth of the mine was just a few dozen yards away now. Through the trees Standish could see the rotting boards hammered across the front, and he turned the truck squarely at the center of the entrance and stepped on the gas. With a silent prayer he took one last look at the sun, and then he let out a determined roar as he plunged into the mine.

  The truck broke through the boards as easily as if they were a mist. With a great crash and the ear splitting screech of steel on rock the truck plowed into the pitch blackness beyond the shaft entrance. Standish kept his foot on the gas, driving blind, desperate to forge ahead as far as he could go. Every yard was priceless. Every extra inch might save another hundred lives.

  Five seconds passed, and then ten. He was still going. He had no idea how deep he was. He could only tell the truck was still moving by the rattling vibrations. There was no frame of reference, not a hint of light in the blackness, and Standish had forgotten to switch on the headlights before he crashed through the entrance.

  All he knew was that he was still moving forward, and the deafening roar of the engine echoing back at him told him that the passage was narrowing ahead of him. The walls were closing in. Through the open window it sounded like they were just inches away, and after a few more seconds the truck hit something immovable. It stopped dead, but Standish didn’t. He jolted forward and slammed his forehead against the windshield before slumping back, dazed, into the sprung seat.

  The captain was struck dumb by the pain. He’d bitten his tongue as he hit the glass, and already he could taste the coppery blood in his mouth. His head swam. He could feel more blood running from his forehead and into his right eye, but his left was still clear. With a searching hand he fumbled blindly across the dash for the headlight switch, and when he finally found it a single bulb cast its light through the dusty darkness ahead.

  It was a solid wall. The shaft stopped dead six inches ahead of the hood. To the left and right it branched off, but both passages were far too narrow for the truck even if he could somehow maneuver it into one of them. This was as far as it would ever go.

  Standish used his sleeve to wipe the blood from his eye, and as he looked out at the wall ahead he was gripped by an overwhelming feeling of relief. He had no idea how deep into the shaft he’d driven. He had no clue if it would change anything, if it was enough to protect a single person from the force of the blast, but he knew he’d given everything he had. He knew he hadn’t wimped out at the last minute. He’d driven until he was stopped by solid rock. Nobody could say he hadn’t done the uniform proud.

  Now, though… now he felt as if he were waking up from a dream. He looked around at the cab of the truck, the cab he’d assumed would be his last resting place, and he suddenly realized it didn’t have to be that way. He was free now. He’d taken the bomb as far as he could. For all he knew it was set on a timer to detonate an hour from now. It could be set to go off a week from now, or maybe there wasn’t a timer at all. There was no reason he had to just sit around and wait for it to explode.

  I don’t have to die. I can survive this.

  With a rush of exhilaration he reached over to the door and pushed it open. At first it didn’t want to budge – the crash had buckled the frame – but when he put his shoulder to it he managed to force just enough of a gap to slide out, emptying his lungs to squeeze painfully through the narrow opening.

  The stale air of the mine caught at the back of his throat. His arrival had kicked up the thick layer of dust that had settled over a century of silent darkness, and now it stung at his eyes. He could barely breathe. In the near darkness through scratchy, tear filled eyes he could barely see, but he didn’t let it slow him down. He picked his way along the narrow gap between the truck and the stone wall, and when he finally reached the tailgate he saw a dim shaft of sunlight picked out in the floating dust, maybe thirty yards behind the truck.

  “Shit,” he cursed under his breath, feeling his way along the shaft back towards the surface. He’d hoped he’d made it further than thirty yards. It felt as if he'd driven much deeper, but he felt no shame. He’d taken it as far as he could.

  Standish stumbled painfully over rocks as he picked his way through the half light. With each step the blackness was banished a little more, but it still wasn't enough to guide the way. All the dim light did was cast an edge to the darkness. He saw the outlines of the rock face but still the jagged edges poked at his legs, and loose spoil still threatened to turn his ankles.

  He climbed for what felt like hours, though he knew it was only a couple of minutes. Time seemed to pass more slowly in the terrifying blackness, and by the time he made it back to the entrance he felt as if he hadn’t taken a full breath in an eternity. His lungs felt parched, his throat choked with dust, and he scrambled on hands and knees half expecting to collapse just out of reach of the sunlight.

  But no. With a joyous cry he finally broke into the shaft of light. He laughed, clambering more quickly across the shattered boards at the entrance, and with a triumphant yell he tumbled back into the bright daylight. He coughed, spitting out a mouthful of dust and blinking away tears, and finally he managed to drink down a deep breath of fresh, crisp pine-scented air.

  For a long moment Standish stayed at the entrance on hands and knees, greedily sucking down breaths of the clean air. He knew time may not be on his side but he needed to gather himself. For a moment he needed to simply exist, to realize that he was there, alive, in the light of God’s creation.

  And then he broke into a run.

  Standish knew the bomb was small, at least in relation to most in the nuclear arsenal. It was a tactical weapon set with a yield of just five kilotons, even less than the destructive force of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. This wasn’t a city killer. It was survivable. The fireball would only reach a few hundred meters from the blast, and if he could make it a mile he’d probably avoid serious burns. Two miles from the blast and if he was lucky he might even get away with only minor injuries.

  The dirt track stretched out ahead of him, leading him back to the road where he could turn south. He’d be able to sprint once he reached the asphalt. On level ground he could cover a couple of miles in… what, fifteen minutes? He could make it. He
just wished he’d grabbed his radio from the seat before he’d left the truck. It would be much easier if he could—

  He didn’t get the chance to finish the thought.

  For a brief instant the mountainside blurred. As the bomb detonated beneath a few dozen yards of solid rock the earth fought back for a moment, mounting a vain defense against the power of the blast, and the forest trembled before it was overwhelmed. A moment later it vanished, vaporized, and the collapsing mountainside was lost in the blinding light of the fireball.

  The shock wave raced out across the landscape, flattening pines in their tens of thousands in an expanding circle that reached a mile from the epicenter in just a couple of seconds. Beyond that the trees bent so low that their tops almost touched the ground, but as the wave passed they bounced back with the deafening sound of a million gunshots.

  The convoy from safe zone Delta stretched five miles from end to end. Those at its head saw the shock wave pass by as a ripple spreading out across the world, a rolling wave that shook the trees and lifted the trucks on their suspension coils for a moment. The trucks at the rear, on the other hand…

  The roaring gale from the epicenter tossed two dozen trucks into the air like toys, tumbling them end on end, hurling their passengers out to fall to the ground below. Just a few hundred meters further along the convoy the trucks barely trembled, but the cruel hand of fate picked out two hundred or more men, women and children. It chose the last of the evacuees, those who'd lingered when the evacuation was called, and it punished their tardiness with death.

  As the shock wave passed the tail end of the convoy, far above it fate turned its attention to the Huey…

  ΅

  CHAPTER NINE

  A LEAF ON THE WIND

  NOBODY ABOARD THE chopper saw the explosion. They were already facing back towards Beale by the time the flash appeared on the horizon, but there was no mistaking what was happening. The flash flooded through every window, replacing the world outside with a blinding, terrifying light. For a moment the engine roar and the cockpit alarms seemed to fade into the background, replaced by the cloying, expectant silence before the sound of the blast reached them.

  Karen knew what was coming. She’d been here before, and in the few seconds of eerie calm that passed between the flash and the shock wave she convinced herself that she was prepared for its violence. She told herself that the second time wouldn’t be quite so bad, stripped of the element of surprise. She’d survived this once before, and she could do it again.

  She wrapped her arm tighter into the webbing, and with her other arm she squeezed Emily so tight she could feel her ribs flex. So tight that the little girl gasped with pain, but Karen knew she couldn’t loosen her grip.

  “Brace!”

  Karen looked around the cabin, eyes wide with terror, and for a moment time seemed to stop. The blinding flash seemed to freeze the world in a terrifying tableau vivant. In the cockpit the pilot gripped the yoke for dear life, steeling himself for a shock that would toss the Huey as easily as a dandelion seed in a gale, clinging to the stick as if he could possibly keep the craft under control in its wake. Valerie and Ramos clutched each other arm in arm, eyes tightly closed and heads bowed in the brace position. Krasinski pressed his face against the window, staring down in horror as the first of the trucks were lifted from the ground and torn apart. When the wave finally hit he was halfway through crossing himself, his mouth open in prayer.

  It only took a second for Karen to realize she was wrong. The second time was no easier. The terror was sharper now because she knew what was coming. She knew exactly how much it would hurt, and she knew the chances of surviving a second blast were vanishingly small. She clenched her teeth and waited for the end to come.

  The violent turbulence of the shock wave spun the chopper end on end, the G force tearing Karen away from the webbing and trying to steal Emily from her arms. She wanted to scream, but she couldn’t make a sound as the helicopter locked into its wild spin. She couldn’t even take a breath, the weight on her chest was so heavy. The deafening roar of the blast felt like a physical presence squeezing her skull, but she couldn’t free her hands to cover her ears.

  “We’re going down!” The pilot’s panicked voice was almost silent as he called over the deafening roar, and a cloud of thick black smoke billowed from the rotor. Somewhere above them something snapped. Karen couldn’t hear it, but she felt the jolt through her body, a jolt that told her that something very important had gone badly wrong. The chopper shivered in mid air, and seconds later a steel panel buckled and collapsed from the ceiling. A shower of greasy oil sprayed down from a severed hose, and in the blink of an eye the smoke was in the cabin, choking her. Blinding her. The smell of burning plastic and searing oil caught in her throat, stealing what little breath she had.

  Now Karen could barely hear the pilot over the screaming alarms in the cockpit, but she saw the fear in his eyes as he hollered into the radio. “Mayday, mayday, mayday! Alpha Foxtrot seven five one nine two! Engine failure, executing a controlled descent from eleven hundred feet at…” he looked out the window with a terrified expression. “Two miles south of Spaulding Lake!”

  With a tremendous effort he hauled at the stick, fighting the G force that tried to squeeze him against the window, and somehow he managed to pull the Huey out of its spin. The invisible hand that pressed Karen against the bulkhead suddenly released its grip. She tumbled to the ground, and as she untangled her arm from the webbing she desperately hauled Emily back into her seat.

  “Strap her in!” she yelled to Valerie, but just as she got a grip on Emily’s belt a new alarm began to sound from the cockpit, joining the cacophony. The engine let out a high pitched whine that grew more urgent by the second until it sounded as if something were about to explode, but just as the whine felt set to peak there was a cough, a sputter, and the engine died.

  The Huey began to fall from the sky.

  Karen’s stomach flipped over as she was lifted back towards the ceiling. Her feet left the ground, but she refused to release her grip on the seatbelt. Valerie held one hand across Emily’s chest, pinning her to her seat as Karen desperately fumbled with the belt. In the cockpit the pilot let out a primal roar, pulling back with all his strength on the stick, and Karen screamed as the chopper swooped out of its dive, sending her crashing back down to the floor.

  She ignored the pain. She didn’t have time to worry about it. She grabbed the belt once more, struggling to mate the ends in the chaos, and finally she felt it click into place just as the Huey plunged down once again. Emily reached up for her mom’s hand as Karen was torn away, but she couldn’t reach it.

  Karen slammed face first against the side door. She couldn’t see a thing, but somehow she managed to find a section of webbing with blindly searching hands, and she clung on for dear life as she blinked away the tears.

  Now she could see out the window. She didn’t want to. The last thing she wanted to remember was that they were high in the air without an engine, but she had no choice. Her face was pressed against the glass, and with her eyes wide with terror she was forced to look down at the ground below. The convoy was in disarray. Dozens of trucks were overturned. A few more were in pieces, the flaming debris scattered across the elevated highway and into the forest beneath it.

  The Huey was only a few hundred feet above the ground now, and it was clear the pilot was trying to guide the stricken craft towards the black ribbon of asphalt. It looked like the only landing site for miles around, the only level ground within reach, but even as the chopper descended toward it Karen could see that it wouldn’t be easy. The road wasn’t clear. Hundreds of cars and trucks still crowded the asphalt and now, with the immense mushroom cloud climbing into the sky behind them, hundreds of passengers had climbed out from their ruined vehicles to watch the spectacle, or flee from it. The road was teeming with people, vehicles and debris, and the pilot clearly didn’t have the control needed for a precision landing.

&
nbsp; “We’re coming in!” he yelled, gritting his teeth as the road loomed up beneath them. Just a hundred feet now, close enough to see the faces of the people. Seventy feet, and the crowds on the highway began to scatter in all directions, fleeing the chopper as it tumbled from the sky. Fifty, then forty, thirty, twenty, and now the chaos was complete. One of the drivers in the convoy tried to gun his canvas-topped troop truck past the stalled line. He veered out into the road and stepped on the gas, sounding his horn to clear a path as the vehicle straddled the shoulder and scraped along the concrete barrier.

  The pilot tried to react, but it was too late. The controls were sluggish in his hands. All he could do was slow their descent, but he couldn’t alter their direction. The Huey was coming down directly into the path of the truck, and it seemed the driver hadn’t noticed them at all.

  “Hold on to something!” the pilot yelled out, unnecessarily. Through the window Karen saw the truck suddenly swerve as the driver finally caught sight of the chopper looming above him. He turned into another truck, scraping against its side, and one of the Huey’s landing skids caught the edge of the canvas roof.

  The pilot tugged back on the yoke and sent the chopper reeling back away from the highway, tearing the roof from the truck as the Huey careened backwards. A dozen terrified passengers looked up through the torn roof, falling to the floor as the edge of the rotor caught on the steel frame. The Huey span, thrown away from the truck by the glancing blow, and Karen clenched her teeth and squeezed closed her eyes as the skids crashed down onto the concrete crash barrier beside the road.

  For a moment nobody dared to breathe. Nobody dared move. Nobody spoke.

  The landing skids of the Huey were resting on the four foot high concrete crash barrier at the edge of the elevated highway. The rotor was still lazily spinning, tilting the chopper back and forth as it tried to find its balance. It was as if gravity was still making up its mind in which direction to push the craft. Forward to a soft landing on the asphalt, or backwards to the forest floor far below.