Zoe Sharp - [Charlie Fox] Read online

  ‘In the absence of light, darkness must prevail.’ - Buddhist adage

  One

  The last time I died they didn’t get a chance to put me in the ground for it. Mind you, back then my apparent demise proved neither long nor durable. A brief but interminable period of nothingness between one stumbling heartbeat and a thousand-volt jumpstart.

  It seemed the gods were determined to make up for that lapse by being unreasonably prompt this time.

  The weird thing was that I remained fully conscious through it all, from the first violent buckling of the earth under my feet to this silent tomb.

  Because it is silent now, and it shouldn’t be.

  The aftershock hit with very few of the warning signs I’d come to recognise. No initial trembling, no gradual increase in tremors as the seismic waves magnified from their distant, buried hypocentre. This one must have had its genesis almost directly beneath us, and not far down. The abrupt assault of released energy was more shocking than bullet or blade.

  As I went down I didn’t have time to offer more than a brief scream. One moment I was on the surface and the next the ground caved in around where I was standing. I smacked myself about quite a bit on the way to hell before I came to rest, lying trapped in utter darkness while the graunching shudders of the planet died away and I wondered if I’d be next to follow.

  “Well, shit,” I said aloud. My voice sounded muffled and very close.

  The first small bubble of panic began to form under my ribcage. It brought with it a swell of nausea that prickled the hair on my scalp and sent a ripple of hot and cold rushing across the surface of my skin. I fought it all back, folded it up until I couldn’t fold it any tighter, and packed it into a very small box hidden at the centre of me.

  Lately that box had been getting overfull.

  I ran through a quick mental checklist. Clearly I could still breathe although the solid weight pressing into my chest restricted how deeply. My left arm was wedged tight to my side. In fact, when I experimented I think it might have been pinned there by something that had pierced both forearm and abdomen and spiked the two together. I could feel an annoying trickle of blood under my shirt.

  I could move my right arm and hand a little. Illogically, I wished I had a weapon in it, even though it would have done me no good. It wasn’t that kind of fight.

  My legs were numb. Best not to worry about what that might mean.

  The normal rules of gravity did not seem to apply down there. With no real idea of my orientation I sucked up a ball of saliva and let it dribble from my lips. It ran diagonally outwards across my right cheek and ended, annoyingly, in my ear. Well, that answered the which-way-is-up question at least.

  Carefully, I screwed my head round maybe half an inch or so to the left, scraping my forehead. My eyes strained for the faintest glimpse of daylight.

  Nothing.

  I might as well have been sealed into a sarcophagus.

  I shut my eyes and diverted all sensory perception to my ears. I tried to tune out the ominous crunch of who knows how many tons of settling masonry and rubble above me and searched instead for anything that might conceivably have a human source.

  It was then I caught the sound of sobbing.

  “Hey!” I croaked, throat raw with dust. “Can you hear me?”

  The sudden outward breath caused a flurry of grit to drop onto my tongue. I coughed and spat for a minute or so then worked my chin until I could nip the edge of my scarf with my teeth. I tugged the thin cotton up over my mouth as a filter before I tried again.

  “Yes, yes, I’m here. Please!” came a distant voice. “Please, I’m bleeding. Help me!”

  You and me both.

  “Just keep calm,” I called back. “They’ll get us out.”

  The answer was laughter - harsh bordering on hysterical. I let them laugh-cry themselves back to speech without trying to hurry them through it. I wasn’t exactly going anywhere. Christ, my left arm might have gone dead but the wound in my side felt as if it was starting to boil.

  “They won’t come for us,” the voice managed eventually. “The last thing they’ll do is get us out of here. Can’t afford to. We know too much, you and I. We could tell too many stories. Stories they want to stay buried with us.”

  I didn’t respond right away. Mainly because there was too much truth in the words to allow for an instant denial.

  And also because the people who might be still up there, on the outside, were the very ones who had most to gain from the unfortunate accidental death of the pair of us.

  “It’s not just a job to them.” I tried to push conviction into my tone and heard only a raw desperation. “It’s a vocation. It’s who they are. They will not abandon us.”

  They can’t.

  “Of course they will - in a heartbeat,” my tomb partner insisted. “You think they have a choice?”

  My suddenly arid mouth was a good excuse not to answer. In reality I was straining my ears, stretching out my senses as if they could be persuaded to catch the faintest sounds somewhere up there on the surface.

  Sounds of a rescue team searching for us, digging for us, doing their best to keep us alive for long enough to bring us out to safety.

  I heard nothing but silence.

  And I saw nothing but the particular darkness that comes with a total absence of light.

  Two

  It was only a few days earlier that I got my first taste of what life was like in a major earthquake zone. People behaved differently, I found, as if to survive having their world quite literally turned upside down brought about a radical change in attitude.

  The first sign was a certain ambivalence to the concept of danger. Perhaps that explained why the ex-Israeli Air Force pilot who nosedived us towards the half-destroyed runway laughed like a loon all the way down.

  At the last moment he pulled back sharply to float the Lockheed C-130 Hercules into an approximate landing attitude and dumped the old heavy transport onto the ground from about six feet up, hard enough to make the airframe shudder. The pallets of netted-down cargo levitated briefly in the hold. I made sure to keep my feet well clear when they thumped down again.

  The plane performed a couple of giant bounces that wouldn’t have been out of place in a rodeo. Then the pilot yanked on the brakes as if hoping we’d all shoot forward to join him in the cockpit so we could congratulate him on his aviation prowess.

  By the time we’d taxied off the flight-line my stomach was more or less back where nature intended. When I boarded the Hercules outside New York early that morning I hadn’t expected comfort and amenities, which was fortunate. Our in-flight refreshment was a matter of helping yourself from the coffee urns strapped into the tail section.

  Eventually we lurched to a stop and the four huge turboprops spooled down. After so many hours in the air, even wearing ear defenders, the relief was immense.

  “There you go, guys,” the pilot said, jumping down from the elevated cockpit and threading his way aft past the cargo as we unbuckled and stretched. “Perfect demonstration of the Khe Sanh Approach.”

  “Very impressive, Ari,” I agreed. “Except we weren’t trying to avoid groundfire on the way in.”

  He grinned. “Works just as good for short runways.”

  “At least he remembered to stop instead of just opening the ramp at the back and kicking us all out,” said the guy next to me. “Had that happen a time or two.”

  He was a redheaded Scot called Wilson who came from one of the dodgier areas of Glasgow. An ex-Para now working for Strathclyde Police and currently on some kind of cultural exchange with the NYPD. He’d explained how a group of US officers had volunteered to help with the relief efforts and, fo
r want of anything better, he’d stuck his hand up too.

  Wilson had been fascinated by the idea of my work in close protection, envious of the pay and what he perceived as the glamour of travelling the world by private jet in the company of rock stars.

  “Yeah,” I told him, indicating the interior of the Herc. “Tell me about it.”

  He had a fund of war stories from his present and previous careers that had helped alleviate the boredom of a long flight with no creature comforts.

  Even back in the military I’d never got used to the loo on a Hercules. It involved perching on a caravan-style construction built into high step at one side of the fuselage with a flimsy curtain pulled around you and very little to hold onto. Good job nobody had been attempting to use it during that final approach.

  Transport aircraft pilots, in my experience, were different from jet jockeys in that they were mostly normal. Just my luck to end up with a lunatic who’d insisted on showing us how things were done during the Vietnam War. I was pretty sure Ari wasn’t old enough to have seen action in that particular theatre, even if the venerable old aid-agency Herc he was flying might well have done.

  We grabbed our kit bags and jogged down the lowered ramp which had already begun to swarm with ground crew off-loading supplies. I skipped sideways to avoid a forklift truck being driven with more gusto than expertise and stuck close to Wilson as we exited. At least he was a big enough target for them to avoid.

  As I stepped down onto the concrete the warmth of the time and place finally hit me. I shrugged out of the jacket I’d worn for most of the flight. Like I said, a stripped-out transport plane doesn’t even rival cattle-class on the most downmarket of budget airlines.

  We headed towards what was left of the main terminal building. The control tower was still standing but the far end of the terminal itself had collapsed. It was my first glimpse of the damage a major earthquake leaves behind, this careless swatting of man’s best construction efforts.

  When I looked back I saw the reason for Ari the pilot’s heroics with our landing. About two thirds of the way along, the runway had a diagonal line chopped across it as neatly as if someone had used a giant rotary saw. The concrete had split apart and heaved. One side of the small crevasse now stood a good two feet higher than the other.

  “That’s not going to be a cheap fix,” I murmured.

  Wilson slid me a quick smile. “Aye, an eight-point-six will do that to a city,” he said. He hefted his bag onto his shoulder. “I assume you already know the roads between here and just about anywhere are out, by the way?” He nodded in the direction of a gleaming Eurocopter sporting the full-dress livery of the national police force. “That’s my lift, by the looks of it, but I could probably get the local LEOs to drop you somewhere if you need it. Where you headed?”

  The local Law Enforcement Officers he mentioned were standing around the helo all wearing combat-style uniforms along with equally uniform aviator sunglasses and moustaches. They had the look of men who would only be too delighted to drop me somewhere, providing it was a long way down.

  “I’m fine, I think,” I said. “I’m supposed to have a lift waiting but - ”

  “Coo-ee!”

  The banshee cry was enough to make just about everyone in the vicinity turn and stare. A small bow-legged guy was ambling towards us. He had his hands in the pockets of his dusty combat pants and his booted feet scuffled the ground like he couldn’t be bothered to lift them.

  Above the combats he wore a multi-pocketed waistcoat of the kind favoured by fishermen and photographers, with no shirt underneath. Perhaps this was to show off the complexity of scars across his torso. From the tight irregularity of his skin I guessed he’d been badly burned at a time when the level of cosmetic surgery available had been a lot more rudimentary. So either he was proud of this visual history of his suffering or he simply didn’t care.

  I’d time to study his approach because he was completely focused on the guy standing next to me. I took in the newcomer’s apparently relaxed face, deeply lined and tanned. It was completely at odds with the wariness I saw in his eyes.

  “Charlie Fox, right?” he said to Wilson, sticking a hand out. “G’day, mate.” His initial cry was suddenly explained by the strong if not slightly exaggerated Australian accent.

  Wilson studied him for a beat, frowning, as if he’d seen the discrepancy between the face and eyes too and was working out what it might mean.

  “Not me, pal,” he said then, and jerked his head in my direction. “I think your lift has arrived.” He took in the little Aussie’s obvious consternation and gave me a slap on the shoulder. “See you round, Charlie. Our paths are bound to cross somewhere. And don’t forget to mention me to your boss, next time he’s recruiting, eh?”

  “OK. Will do,” I agreed, surprised he’d meant it serious enough to ask twice. “And good luck.”

  As Wilson strode away the Aussie said incredulously, “You’re Charlie bloody Fox?”

  “I’ve been called worse.”

  “But we asked for a security advisor, and you’re …”

  “Cheap, available, and here,” I said cheerfully. “You’re with Rescue & Recovery International, I take it?”

  “R&R.” His mouth corrected automatically while his brain was still playing catch-up. “Folks just call us R&R.”

  “And what do I call you that I can repeat in public?”

  He shook his head although if he was hoping to shake some sense into it. I doubted it had much effect.

  “Riley,” he said then, and shook his head again.

  I shifted my kit bag from one shoulder to the other. “Look, I’ve just had a very long, very uncomfortable trip with a pilot in desperate need of a nice white coat with sleeves that knot at the back,” I said with tired calm. “I know damn well that your outfit’s lead doctor is a woman and you’ve other female staff, so it’s not like you’ve never seen anyone with lumps down the front of their shirt before. What’s your problem with me?”

  He finally gave me the same big friendly grin he’d broken out for Wilson, but this time with a sheepish tint to it.

  “Jeez, sweetheart, it’s nothing personal,” he said, reaching for my bag. I swapped it to my furthest hand and kept a firm grip on the straps. “It’s just that we’ve been having trouble with the locals. Supply chain’s all to shit and natives have been getting a mite antsy. I was hoping for someone the size of your mate back there so I could hide behind ‘em, y’know? I mean, you’re practically as small as I am. Didn’t eat your Wheaties as a kid, eh?”

  “I know,” I said, “but if it makes you feel better I move quick and I’ve got a very bad temper.”

  For a second he rocked back on his heels and regarded me, head on one side. “I’ll bet,” he said at last. “Y’know, Charlie, I get the feeling I’m gonna like you after all. C’mon then, the old bus is over by what’s left of the hangar there, and light’s a’wasting.”

  Three

  Riley’s “old bus” turned out to be a Bell 212 - the civilian version of the twin-engined UH-1 Huey that’s been a staple of battlefields the world over since the late sixties.

  Not that this helicopter looked quite that old - or particularly civilian. It had been painted some kind of matt-finish sludge khaki colour with ‘R&R’ stencilled not quite straight on the tail.

  The passenger compartment, which could hold up to fourteen seats, had been stripped down to the minimum to leave room for cargo. It was currently half filled with a cling-wrapped pallet of what looked to be medical supplies. I wedged my kitbag alongside it and clipped a safety line through the straps just to be sure.

  I climbed into the co-pilot’s seat, dragged on a set of headphones held together with duct tape, and fastened my belts. As I did so I noticed the butt of an old Ruger .357 Magnum sitting upside down in a canvas pocket slung alongside the pilot’s seat.

  “You expecting elephants?” I asked as Riley hauled himself in.

  He grinned at me. “Wouldn
’t be the first time.”

  He let out a galumph of breath and rubbed both hands vigorously over his stubbled face. It reminded me of a long-distance truck driver who’s already been on the road all night and still has too far to go.

  Oh great. I survive being killed at the hands of a mad Israeli only to die at the hands of an equally mad Aussie.

  “Been flying these things long?” I asked over the whine of the Pratt & Whitneys going through start-up.

  “Got my licence about three months ago.” Riley threw me a laconic smile as he juggled the controls and the Bell made an initial half-hearted attempt to get off the ground. “Well, to be fair, I should say I got it back three months ago. Here we go then!”

  And with that he rammed the aircraft upward like an express elevator. We yawed drunkenly sideways as we rose, our downdraft flattening the wide grass runoff that bordered the service road. That was probably one of the reasons it was there.

  Riley caught me gripping the bottom of my seat in reflex and didn’t so much laugh as guffaw. The action that brought on a fit of coughing that made the Bell twitch in response to his hands.

  “Relax, Charlie,” he said when he could speak again. “It’s like riding a bike. You don’t really forget how to do it.”

  “Easy for you to say,” I shot back. “Last time I was up in one of these damn things, we crashed.”

  “Hey, me too!” he said. “How about that?”

  I was beginning to get the creeping sensation I was being taken for a ride in more ways than one but I didn’t call him on it. I’d been through worse hazing, that was for sure. Better to let him have his fun and get it over with early.

  Instead I adjusted the boom mic from my headset and asked, “So when did you R&R guys get in?”

  “We set down inside about eight hours of the initial quake. Been working round the clock since then, more or less. She’s a monster.”

  From the way he was slouched in his seat I realised he’d long ago adapted his wiry frame to the most comfortable position so he could keep to the schedule. Either that or all the scar tissue was twisting his body out of shape.