The Last Gasp, page 31
The theme of One Minute to Midnight, encapsulated in its title, was the utter madness of all-out environmental war, with the superpowers deliberately engineering global catastrophe by means of WCD – Weapons of Climate Degradation. This wanton, reckless tampering with the forces of nature had brought the planet to within sixty seconds – following Chase’s analogy of a hand sweeping around a twelve-hour clock-face – of ultimate disaster. Then he hit them with the killer punch: crazy and criminal as this military strategy was, the planet had beaten the superpowers to it and was already, thanks to man’s two centuries of unchecked industrial growth, on a steep downwards slope, and possibly already past the point of no return.
The factory furnace and the automobile had already accomplished what the military had been seeking to bring about.
The book polarised opinion and was hotly, even aggressively, disputed. It was accused of being ‘paranoid fantasy’. Other critics dismissed it as a piece of trashy sensationalism – panic-mongering at its worst to get a number one spot on the bestseller lists – and the author’s cheap bid to become the ‘ecology guru’ of the twenty-first century. Chase had expected this. He had been less prepared for the abuse and vilification heaped upon his head by many leading scientists.
The success of the book had another unforeseen consequence too – it saved his life.
On his return from New York, there was no shred of doubt in his mind that powerful vested interests were determined to silence him. They had succeeded with Theo Detrick, and Chase had of course been an eye-witness to the threats Cheryl had faced. Precisely who or what these ‘interests’ were remained speculation, though it wasn’t hard to make an educated guess: vast transnational corporations such as JEG were the obvious candidates, based simply on the evidence that they had the most to lose with the book’s revelations. It was a dead-certain fact that the would-be assassin who had stalked him at JFK (Chase had belatedly recognised him as the same man who had threatened Cheryl in Geneva) was in the pay of a company or companies, or a government agency, or a military-intelligence group – tick any box. Or a combination of all three; it was immaterial which one, to Chase at least, because their aim was the same in all cases: to shut him up at all costs.
Dead journalists tell no tales.
For ten months Chase worked solidly on the book, living with Dan in a remote croft near the small town of Dornoch on the east coast of Scotland. There they settled down in the tiny two-room dwelling with its whitewashed walls and red corrugated iron roof, with not a neighbour in view. There was no electricity, patchy phone reception and slow-motion internet; they used oil lamps, a portable generator, a camping gas stove and a log fire for when the long dark nights of the northern winter closed in.
By the spring the book was finished. Prior to the official launch, the political and world affairs publication Sentinel had featured three long excerpts; almost immediately the internet was abuzz with opinion and debate, most of it ill-informed, but keeping the publicity pot boiling furiously. By then it was evident that Chase’s fame – or notoriety, depending on which camp you belonged to – was as good as life insurance. In any event, silencing the author when the material was openly available and the book universally in print would have been closing the stable door after a whole herd of horses had gone galloping off over the horizon.
Gavin Chase looked back on those months in the Scottish croft, just the two of them together, father and seven-year-old son leading a life that was basic, simple, and wholly rewarding, with an aching nostalgia that brought a stab to the heart.
Since the book’s publication two years ago, Chase had spent more and more of his time travelling abroad, much of it in America. It was part and parcel of his professional life now and couldn’t be avoided. The question of Dan’s upbringing and providing a stable background, keeping disruption to a minimum, was a constant worry, which was when Marcus Barrett came up with a solution. His own son, Titus, was enrolled at the Elyot Grange Academy on the outskirts of Sunbury-on-Thames in Surrey. The two boys, just a few months apart in age, had got on well together during a summer vacation spent at Barrett’s villa in Portugal; if Dan liked the look of Elyot Grange, this could provide the perfect answer.
Marcus Barrett had even generously offered to pay the fees. Chase appreciated the gesture, but with his journalism, lecture tours and book royalties, he was now well able to manage. After three terms, Dan had settled in; he was happy, doing well academically and had a host of new friends.
For Chase – and Cheryl too – the boy’s contentment with his new life had been a relief and a blessing. It meant they’d been able to focus their energies and commit fully to the online climate research network they had created, based on the outskirts of Pittsburgh. The name chosen, Midnite-Net, was a homage and hat-tip to the book – though the link to Midnight was never acknowledged or even hinted at, and none of their online webcast audience ever made the connection.
6
At 26,000 feet, the Hilgard Depths is one of the deepest trenches in the Pacific Ocean. Precisely why, Cheryl Detrick knew, her father Theo had chosen this remote location as the base for his almost quarter of a century of research into phytoplankton. Here, just below the equator, the upwelling of colder water brought this rich soup of micro-organisms from the ocean depths in their countless billions – until a lethal combination of pollutants and an increase in median temperatures had triggered a sharp decline.
And with the decline of these tiny free-floating plants, there’d been a sharp reduction in the supply of oxygen to replenish the world’s ravenous demand.
It had taken Cheryl four days to get here from the States. The final leg had been a two-thousand-mile jaunt from Hawaii to the Phoenix Islands. The field trip had been part-sponsored by the UN Climate Agency with the object of assessing the distribution and extent of agri-chemical run-off thousands of miles from any sizeable land mass. When planning the six-week expedition, Cheryl had been thrilled to discover that her itinerary would bring her within the neighbourhood – a trifling 140 miles away from Canton Island, the very spot where Theo had lived alone for so many years.
It was too good an opportunity to miss. She had seen photos her father had taken of the island, the lagoon he swam twice round every morning before breakfast, the clear placid water, the white beach and pink and magenta coral, the conical hill rising to the island’s highest point of three metres, the few scattered palm trees and meagre vegetation of scrub and thorny bush. Would there be any trace of him left behind? One of his old pipe tobacco pouches, abandoned sunglasses with cracked lenses, maybe a pair of discarded leather sandals with broken straps?
From her stopover on Phoenix Island itself, she had hired a small fishing vessel to make the twelve-hour journey to Canton Island. The weatherbeaten captain, Jonny Royle, had decent charts of the region, and more importantly, a GPS scanner. He was the first to admit he hadn’t sailed there in years. But he seemed capable, and confident enough. Visibility on the morning they arrived was excellent, the ocean a gentle rolling swell. Sitting on the prow, Cheryl scanned the horizon through binoculars, her eyes shielded under a broad straw hat. It reminded her of the time she’d spent on the Marine Research vessel Melville as a post-grad student at Scripps.
In the wheelhouse, Jonny had the charts spread out and was keeping track with the scanner. Cheryl could hear the beeps getting more frequent as they neared the set co-ordinates. She called, ‘What’ve you got, Jonny? Give me an approx reading. 1000 yards? 1500?’
‘Not even close, Missus.’ Jonny stuck his head through the hatch window. ‘This is it. Under your nose.’ The beeps became more insistent, almost an unbroken sound. ‘Bang on the button.’
‘Here?’ Cheryl said, scrambling to her feet and looking in every direction. ‘Where?’
‘We’s on top of it,’ Jonny said. ‘The machine don’t lie.’
The GPS, Cheryl well knew, was accurate to within half the length of a football field. Yet there was nothing: not a single palm tree or patch of thorny scrub or hint of coral reef. Jonny Royle was wrong, or the scanner was faulty – except Jonny Royle was right: there was something there after all, which Cheryl had seen and not noticed. It had looked like a tangle of brushwood floating on the surface, wafting to and fro with the current, but in fact, it was the peak of the conical hill: the highest point of Canton Island, now a majestic half-metre above the waves as the melting Antarctic ice-sheet at the bottom of the planet raised the levels of all the world’s oceans.
Cheryl peered down through the water to what had been the white sand beach her father had walked on. Her hopes and expectations of what she had longed to find down there were so stupidly ridiculous she began to laugh. And then she began to cry.
3
1
The crack of the rifle rolled across the valley and was heard as a distant reverberation among the wrinkled folds of scrub and rock that girdled Mount Grafton like a piece of old brown sackcloth.
‘Did you hit it?’ Steve Fazioli pushed back his grey Stetson with his thumb and leaned forward, dark hairy forearms draped over the steering wheel of the Jeep.
‘Bastard was too quick.’ Chuck Brant ejected the spent cartridge and kicked it viciously in a spinning arc. He was beginning to suspect that he and his brother-in-law had chosen just about the worst part of Nevada for their hunting trip. It was just too damn dry and bleak. That pathetic damp patch below them – the so-called White River – wouldn’t bring the game down from the hills. They should have tried further north, up near Sacramento Pass, near the old copper mines.
‘That’s the first buck we’ve seen all day,’ Chuck complained. He slid the large-bore hunting rifle into its sheath, dropped into the passenger seat and reached behind into the insulated box and pulled out a can of Schlitz. ‘Want one?’ He tossed the can to Steve and got another for himself.
Steve tipped his head back and let the cold amber liquid gurgle into his mouth. Drops sparkled on his black moustache. ‘What else can you expect? In a coupla years there won’t be a fucking gopher left, never mind anything big enough to shoot at.’
Chuck wiped the dust from his visor with his neckerchief. ‘Let’s get rolling, for chrissakes!’
Three miles on they came to another trail, wider than the one they were on, which led steeply up in the general direction of Mount Grafton, whose highest point was about seven miles away.
Chuck studied the deep tracks in the compacted soil and frowned. ‘We’re not on military property, are we?’ he asked, scratching a damp armpit.
‘I didn’t see nothing posted. No fences or nothing. The Nellis Missile Range is a good thirty miles from here. That’s the only government property I know of in this part of the state. Which way?’
Chuck jerked his thumb towards the mountain and Steve rammed the shift into first. The ride was rough, the trail considerably steeper than they had expected, winding upwards in a series of perilous S-bends. They passed overgrown trails disappearing into shadowy gullies, with indications here and there that they led to disused mine workings.
After twenty minutes of hard climbing the Jeep rounded a bend between two massive shoulders of rock. The trail levelled out on to a small enclosed plateau of baked red earth. At first sight it led nowhere. Dead end. Yet the tracks carried on, and as Steve swung the Jeep around to face the way they had come, both men saw an imposing barrier of timber, tall as a house, inset with solid oak gates twenty feet high.
It might have been an army stockade, complete with horizontal slit-holes for observation, except there were no military insignia anywhere; no signboards, no flags; in fact nothing to indicate what it might be.
‘This is screwy,’ Chuck Brant said as he gazed around. ‘Hey, look – what the hell is that?’
Some of the boulders, either side of the stockade-structure, had dark scorch marks on them. Steve switched off the engine. He got his phone out and took a picture of the smoke-streaked rocks and then swivelled round to take a couple of the stockade. Nothing moved. The silence was unnerving.
‘Wait a sec now.’ Chuck’s forehead was creased in concentration. ‘Could it be a storage facility up here? Or a dump, say, for old equipment maybe?’
‘Oh, sure,’ Steve said caustically. He didn’t regard his wife’s brother as the greatest intellect since Einstein. ‘They drove loaded trucks three miles straight up a narrow track to dump stuff two thousand feet high on the side of a mountain. Yeah, sure, that makes a whole lot of sense.’ His expressive gestures showed his Italian ancestry.
‘So you tell me, Dick-Brain, what the fuck does?’ Chuck said, flushing.
‘How the hell should I know? A new site for Disneyland.’
Chuck twisted around in his seat and got himself another beer; he didn’t offer to get Steve one. His face had gone sullen. Steve didn’t notice; he was staring at the ground, still puzzling over the tracks and the scorch marks.
The spidery bushes that grew from the cracks in the rocks were perfectly still, the thin covering of dust on their leaves undisturbed. There wasn’t a breath of wind.
Into the silence intruded a sound, hard and metallic, like a hollow musical note.
Chuck heard it and finished his beer in two gulping swallows. He crumpled the can in his fist and tossed it away. He glanced over his shoulder towards the stockade. ‘Let’s get out of here,’ he said in a low voice.
Steve started up the Jeep. He didn’t care to admit it, certainly not to his dumb brother-in-law, but this place gave him the creeps.
He pushed the stick into first and was about to drive off when he saw something that made his hands tighten clammily on the wheel. The figure of a young man, dressed in black, white shirt, thin black tie, erect and motionless on a rock. He was cradling a slim metal cylinder under his left arm. From it came a tube, looping to the young man’s right hand, in which he was holding some kind of jet nozzle with a trigger attachment, which must have been the source of the metallic sound as it bumped against the cylinder. The young man raised his hand and sighted along a straight arm, as if aiming.
He was positioned, Steve realised, directly above the point where the trail sloped down, in-between the two shoulders of rock standing there like guardians. But guardians of what exactly? Jesus, there was more than one! Steve flinched as he spotted another figure, dressed the same, and then three more appeared, moving into position on either side of the trail. Each of them carried a cylinder. They raised their arms and pointed.
In that same moment the image of the scorch marks on the rocks popped into Steve’s head and he knew without the least inkling of doubt what they meant, and what the black-clad figures intended; after that he didn’t bother thinking any more, he was too busy pumping the accelerator. Dirt spurted from under the tyres as the Jeep lunged forward. Chuck grabbed the metal frame of the windshield for support and hung on.
Foot flat to the floor, Steve was aware of the figures on either side pointing, arms extended; he tried his best to ignore them and mentally push them aside as he drove straight for the gap between the rocks. But he couldn’t ignore what happened next. It was like a scene from a Biblical epic as converging tongues of fire shot out and consumed the vehicle in a fireball of highly inflammable propane gas.
This was Steve’s last conscious thought.
Taking the shortest and fastest route down the mountain, the Jeep sailed through the air like a fiery comet, bits of flaming debris scattering off it. The two brothers-in-law were flung out like blazing rag dolls before it hit bottom.
An arc of oily black smoke hung lazily in the warm still air. From their vantage point high above, the figures in black looked down on their handiwork. They began to dissemble their equipment and purge the jet nozzle vents, as per the manual, ready for the next time.
Turning away, one of them said, ‘That’s a first, Karl.’
‘What’s a first?’ Karl said. He stood out from the others, taller, with cropped blond hair, while they were dark-haired.
The first one choked a little as he sniggered, ‘Them two achieving ascendancy by rapidly descending.’ He mimed the Jeep flying on its death trajectory to the canyon floor. ‘Ker-Pow!’
It wasn’t much of a joke, though the others snorted; Karl stayed stony-faced.
‘I guess they shouldn’t have taken photos,’ somebody remarked.
‘That makes no difference,’ Karl said. ‘We had to ascend them. We had no choice. They had no right being here and seeing what they saw. We gotta protect Mothership, no matter what.’
The Messengers of God carried their cylinders across the compound and in through the side door carved into the canyon wall.
2
The tables buzzed with the news of the day’s event: two foolish intruders had achieved ascendant status – in a very spectacular manner! The joke about ‘achieving ascendancy by rapidly descending’ rocked the dining hall, Owen taking the credit for the off-the-cuff quip.
Karl listened to the excited chatter in the mess hall but didn’t get involved. Such frivolous behaviour was degrading, in his view, to the spirit and aims of the group. How could one attain proper Fitness for Mission without iron discipline and rigid self-control? What he observed around him was not ‘the right stuff’ at all.
Karl had been fifteen when he first came to the Mothership, two years ago. Then he had been Harry Turlington, shy and withdrawn, given to dark moods. Everyone on induction was assigned the name of an astronaut – American, Russian, Chinese – who had completed a mission. Harry’s was Karl Henize, a crew-member of 1967 NASA Group Six. The afternoon’s jokester was named after Owen Garriott, 1965 NASA Group Four. Karl didn’t know his real name; no one, whether inside or outside the stockade, ever divulged them.
One of the earliest to arrive, Karl had been among scores of young people who started out on the pilgrimage, in his case from Kettering, near Dayton, Ohio. He had been six weeks on the road, sleeping rough, begging for food, when he met up with three other guys in a Buick Century that was falling apart at the seams. Two of the guys had decided – even before they reached the state line – that the Messengers of God wasn’t for them. Very few of those who embarked on the trek to Nevada, disillusioned with modern life and inspired by a dream, actually made it . . .
The factory furnace and the automobile had already accomplished what the military had been seeking to bring about.
The book polarised opinion and was hotly, even aggressively, disputed. It was accused of being ‘paranoid fantasy’. Other critics dismissed it as a piece of trashy sensationalism – panic-mongering at its worst to get a number one spot on the bestseller lists – and the author’s cheap bid to become the ‘ecology guru’ of the twenty-first century. Chase had expected this. He had been less prepared for the abuse and vilification heaped upon his head by many leading scientists.
The success of the book had another unforeseen consequence too – it saved his life.
On his return from New York, there was no shred of doubt in his mind that powerful vested interests were determined to silence him. They had succeeded with Theo Detrick, and Chase had of course been an eye-witness to the threats Cheryl had faced. Precisely who or what these ‘interests’ were remained speculation, though it wasn’t hard to make an educated guess: vast transnational corporations such as JEG were the obvious candidates, based simply on the evidence that they had the most to lose with the book’s revelations. It was a dead-certain fact that the would-be assassin who had stalked him at JFK (Chase had belatedly recognised him as the same man who had threatened Cheryl in Geneva) was in the pay of a company or companies, or a government agency, or a military-intelligence group – tick any box. Or a combination of all three; it was immaterial which one, to Chase at least, because their aim was the same in all cases: to shut him up at all costs.
Dead journalists tell no tales.
For ten months Chase worked solidly on the book, living with Dan in a remote croft near the small town of Dornoch on the east coast of Scotland. There they settled down in the tiny two-room dwelling with its whitewashed walls and red corrugated iron roof, with not a neighbour in view. There was no electricity, patchy phone reception and slow-motion internet; they used oil lamps, a portable generator, a camping gas stove and a log fire for when the long dark nights of the northern winter closed in.
By the spring the book was finished. Prior to the official launch, the political and world affairs publication Sentinel had featured three long excerpts; almost immediately the internet was abuzz with opinion and debate, most of it ill-informed, but keeping the publicity pot boiling furiously. By then it was evident that Chase’s fame – or notoriety, depending on which camp you belonged to – was as good as life insurance. In any event, silencing the author when the material was openly available and the book universally in print would have been closing the stable door after a whole herd of horses had gone galloping off over the horizon.
Gavin Chase looked back on those months in the Scottish croft, just the two of them together, father and seven-year-old son leading a life that was basic, simple, and wholly rewarding, with an aching nostalgia that brought a stab to the heart.
Since the book’s publication two years ago, Chase had spent more and more of his time travelling abroad, much of it in America. It was part and parcel of his professional life now and couldn’t be avoided. The question of Dan’s upbringing and providing a stable background, keeping disruption to a minimum, was a constant worry, which was when Marcus Barrett came up with a solution. His own son, Titus, was enrolled at the Elyot Grange Academy on the outskirts of Sunbury-on-Thames in Surrey. The two boys, just a few months apart in age, had got on well together during a summer vacation spent at Barrett’s villa in Portugal; if Dan liked the look of Elyot Grange, this could provide the perfect answer.
Marcus Barrett had even generously offered to pay the fees. Chase appreciated the gesture, but with his journalism, lecture tours and book royalties, he was now well able to manage. After three terms, Dan had settled in; he was happy, doing well academically and had a host of new friends.
For Chase – and Cheryl too – the boy’s contentment with his new life had been a relief and a blessing. It meant they’d been able to focus their energies and commit fully to the online climate research network they had created, based on the outskirts of Pittsburgh. The name chosen, Midnite-Net, was a homage and hat-tip to the book – though the link to Midnight was never acknowledged or even hinted at, and none of their online webcast audience ever made the connection.
6
At 26,000 feet, the Hilgard Depths is one of the deepest trenches in the Pacific Ocean. Precisely why, Cheryl Detrick knew, her father Theo had chosen this remote location as the base for his almost quarter of a century of research into phytoplankton. Here, just below the equator, the upwelling of colder water brought this rich soup of micro-organisms from the ocean depths in their countless billions – until a lethal combination of pollutants and an increase in median temperatures had triggered a sharp decline.
And with the decline of these tiny free-floating plants, there’d been a sharp reduction in the supply of oxygen to replenish the world’s ravenous demand.
It had taken Cheryl four days to get here from the States. The final leg had been a two-thousand-mile jaunt from Hawaii to the Phoenix Islands. The field trip had been part-sponsored by the UN Climate Agency with the object of assessing the distribution and extent of agri-chemical run-off thousands of miles from any sizeable land mass. When planning the six-week expedition, Cheryl had been thrilled to discover that her itinerary would bring her within the neighbourhood – a trifling 140 miles away from Canton Island, the very spot where Theo had lived alone for so many years.
It was too good an opportunity to miss. She had seen photos her father had taken of the island, the lagoon he swam twice round every morning before breakfast, the clear placid water, the white beach and pink and magenta coral, the conical hill rising to the island’s highest point of three metres, the few scattered palm trees and meagre vegetation of scrub and thorny bush. Would there be any trace of him left behind? One of his old pipe tobacco pouches, abandoned sunglasses with cracked lenses, maybe a pair of discarded leather sandals with broken straps?
From her stopover on Phoenix Island itself, she had hired a small fishing vessel to make the twelve-hour journey to Canton Island. The weatherbeaten captain, Jonny Royle, had decent charts of the region, and more importantly, a GPS scanner. He was the first to admit he hadn’t sailed there in years. But he seemed capable, and confident enough. Visibility on the morning they arrived was excellent, the ocean a gentle rolling swell. Sitting on the prow, Cheryl scanned the horizon through binoculars, her eyes shielded under a broad straw hat. It reminded her of the time she’d spent on the Marine Research vessel Melville as a post-grad student at Scripps.
In the wheelhouse, Jonny had the charts spread out and was keeping track with the scanner. Cheryl could hear the beeps getting more frequent as they neared the set co-ordinates. She called, ‘What’ve you got, Jonny? Give me an approx reading. 1000 yards? 1500?’
‘Not even close, Missus.’ Jonny stuck his head through the hatch window. ‘This is it. Under your nose.’ The beeps became more insistent, almost an unbroken sound. ‘Bang on the button.’
‘Here?’ Cheryl said, scrambling to her feet and looking in every direction. ‘Where?’
‘We’s on top of it,’ Jonny said. ‘The machine don’t lie.’
The GPS, Cheryl well knew, was accurate to within half the length of a football field. Yet there was nothing: not a single palm tree or patch of thorny scrub or hint of coral reef. Jonny Royle was wrong, or the scanner was faulty – except Jonny Royle was right: there was something there after all, which Cheryl had seen and not noticed. It had looked like a tangle of brushwood floating on the surface, wafting to and fro with the current, but in fact, it was the peak of the conical hill: the highest point of Canton Island, now a majestic half-metre above the waves as the melting Antarctic ice-sheet at the bottom of the planet raised the levels of all the world’s oceans.
Cheryl peered down through the water to what had been the white sand beach her father had walked on. Her hopes and expectations of what she had longed to find down there were so stupidly ridiculous she began to laugh. And then she began to cry.
3
1
The crack of the rifle rolled across the valley and was heard as a distant reverberation among the wrinkled folds of scrub and rock that girdled Mount Grafton like a piece of old brown sackcloth.
‘Did you hit it?’ Steve Fazioli pushed back his grey Stetson with his thumb and leaned forward, dark hairy forearms draped over the steering wheel of the Jeep.
‘Bastard was too quick.’ Chuck Brant ejected the spent cartridge and kicked it viciously in a spinning arc. He was beginning to suspect that he and his brother-in-law had chosen just about the worst part of Nevada for their hunting trip. It was just too damn dry and bleak. That pathetic damp patch below them – the so-called White River – wouldn’t bring the game down from the hills. They should have tried further north, up near Sacramento Pass, near the old copper mines.
‘That’s the first buck we’ve seen all day,’ Chuck complained. He slid the large-bore hunting rifle into its sheath, dropped into the passenger seat and reached behind into the insulated box and pulled out a can of Schlitz. ‘Want one?’ He tossed the can to Steve and got another for himself.
Steve tipped his head back and let the cold amber liquid gurgle into his mouth. Drops sparkled on his black moustache. ‘What else can you expect? In a coupla years there won’t be a fucking gopher left, never mind anything big enough to shoot at.’
Chuck wiped the dust from his visor with his neckerchief. ‘Let’s get rolling, for chrissakes!’
Three miles on they came to another trail, wider than the one they were on, which led steeply up in the general direction of Mount Grafton, whose highest point was about seven miles away.
Chuck studied the deep tracks in the compacted soil and frowned. ‘We’re not on military property, are we?’ he asked, scratching a damp armpit.
‘I didn’t see nothing posted. No fences or nothing. The Nellis Missile Range is a good thirty miles from here. That’s the only government property I know of in this part of the state. Which way?’
Chuck jerked his thumb towards the mountain and Steve rammed the shift into first. The ride was rough, the trail considerably steeper than they had expected, winding upwards in a series of perilous S-bends. They passed overgrown trails disappearing into shadowy gullies, with indications here and there that they led to disused mine workings.
After twenty minutes of hard climbing the Jeep rounded a bend between two massive shoulders of rock. The trail levelled out on to a small enclosed plateau of baked red earth. At first sight it led nowhere. Dead end. Yet the tracks carried on, and as Steve swung the Jeep around to face the way they had come, both men saw an imposing barrier of timber, tall as a house, inset with solid oak gates twenty feet high.
It might have been an army stockade, complete with horizontal slit-holes for observation, except there were no military insignia anywhere; no signboards, no flags; in fact nothing to indicate what it might be.
‘This is screwy,’ Chuck Brant said as he gazed around. ‘Hey, look – what the hell is that?’
Some of the boulders, either side of the stockade-structure, had dark scorch marks on them. Steve switched off the engine. He got his phone out and took a picture of the smoke-streaked rocks and then swivelled round to take a couple of the stockade. Nothing moved. The silence was unnerving.
‘Wait a sec now.’ Chuck’s forehead was creased in concentration. ‘Could it be a storage facility up here? Or a dump, say, for old equipment maybe?’
‘Oh, sure,’ Steve said caustically. He didn’t regard his wife’s brother as the greatest intellect since Einstein. ‘They drove loaded trucks three miles straight up a narrow track to dump stuff two thousand feet high on the side of a mountain. Yeah, sure, that makes a whole lot of sense.’ His expressive gestures showed his Italian ancestry.
‘So you tell me, Dick-Brain, what the fuck does?’ Chuck said, flushing.
‘How the hell should I know? A new site for Disneyland.’
Chuck twisted around in his seat and got himself another beer; he didn’t offer to get Steve one. His face had gone sullen. Steve didn’t notice; he was staring at the ground, still puzzling over the tracks and the scorch marks.
The spidery bushes that grew from the cracks in the rocks were perfectly still, the thin covering of dust on their leaves undisturbed. There wasn’t a breath of wind.
Into the silence intruded a sound, hard and metallic, like a hollow musical note.
Chuck heard it and finished his beer in two gulping swallows. He crumpled the can in his fist and tossed it away. He glanced over his shoulder towards the stockade. ‘Let’s get out of here,’ he said in a low voice.
Steve started up the Jeep. He didn’t care to admit it, certainly not to his dumb brother-in-law, but this place gave him the creeps.
He pushed the stick into first and was about to drive off when he saw something that made his hands tighten clammily on the wheel. The figure of a young man, dressed in black, white shirt, thin black tie, erect and motionless on a rock. He was cradling a slim metal cylinder under his left arm. From it came a tube, looping to the young man’s right hand, in which he was holding some kind of jet nozzle with a trigger attachment, which must have been the source of the metallic sound as it bumped against the cylinder. The young man raised his hand and sighted along a straight arm, as if aiming.
He was positioned, Steve realised, directly above the point where the trail sloped down, in-between the two shoulders of rock standing there like guardians. But guardians of what exactly? Jesus, there was more than one! Steve flinched as he spotted another figure, dressed the same, and then three more appeared, moving into position on either side of the trail. Each of them carried a cylinder. They raised their arms and pointed.
In that same moment the image of the scorch marks on the rocks popped into Steve’s head and he knew without the least inkling of doubt what they meant, and what the black-clad figures intended; after that he didn’t bother thinking any more, he was too busy pumping the accelerator. Dirt spurted from under the tyres as the Jeep lunged forward. Chuck grabbed the metal frame of the windshield for support and hung on.
Foot flat to the floor, Steve was aware of the figures on either side pointing, arms extended; he tried his best to ignore them and mentally push them aside as he drove straight for the gap between the rocks. But he couldn’t ignore what happened next. It was like a scene from a Biblical epic as converging tongues of fire shot out and consumed the vehicle in a fireball of highly inflammable propane gas.
This was Steve’s last conscious thought.
Taking the shortest and fastest route down the mountain, the Jeep sailed through the air like a fiery comet, bits of flaming debris scattering off it. The two brothers-in-law were flung out like blazing rag dolls before it hit bottom.
An arc of oily black smoke hung lazily in the warm still air. From their vantage point high above, the figures in black looked down on their handiwork. They began to dissemble their equipment and purge the jet nozzle vents, as per the manual, ready for the next time.
Turning away, one of them said, ‘That’s a first, Karl.’
‘What’s a first?’ Karl said. He stood out from the others, taller, with cropped blond hair, while they were dark-haired.
The first one choked a little as he sniggered, ‘Them two achieving ascendancy by rapidly descending.’ He mimed the Jeep flying on its death trajectory to the canyon floor. ‘Ker-Pow!’
It wasn’t much of a joke, though the others snorted; Karl stayed stony-faced.
‘I guess they shouldn’t have taken photos,’ somebody remarked.
‘That makes no difference,’ Karl said. ‘We had to ascend them. We had no choice. They had no right being here and seeing what they saw. We gotta protect Mothership, no matter what.’
The Messengers of God carried their cylinders across the compound and in through the side door carved into the canyon wall.
2
The tables buzzed with the news of the day’s event: two foolish intruders had achieved ascendant status – in a very spectacular manner! The joke about ‘achieving ascendancy by rapidly descending’ rocked the dining hall, Owen taking the credit for the off-the-cuff quip.
Karl listened to the excited chatter in the mess hall but didn’t get involved. Such frivolous behaviour was degrading, in his view, to the spirit and aims of the group. How could one attain proper Fitness for Mission without iron discipline and rigid self-control? What he observed around him was not ‘the right stuff’ at all.
Karl had been fifteen when he first came to the Mothership, two years ago. Then he had been Harry Turlington, shy and withdrawn, given to dark moods. Everyone on induction was assigned the name of an astronaut – American, Russian, Chinese – who had completed a mission. Harry’s was Karl Henize, a crew-member of 1967 NASA Group Six. The afternoon’s jokester was named after Owen Garriott, 1965 NASA Group Four. Karl didn’t know his real name; no one, whether inside or outside the stockade, ever divulged them.
One of the earliest to arrive, Karl had been among scores of young people who started out on the pilgrimage, in his case from Kettering, near Dayton, Ohio. He had been six weeks on the road, sleeping rough, begging for food, when he met up with three other guys in a Buick Century that was falling apart at the seams. Two of the guys had decided – even before they reached the state line – that the Messengers of God wasn’t for them. Very few of those who embarked on the trek to Nevada, disillusioned with modern life and inspired by a dream, actually made it . . .
