The Descent Read online

  Branch moved laterally for vantage and trained the lights on ground zero. Zulu Four lay not far ahead, nestled among stark spears of killed forest.

  “There it is,” Chambers said.

  You had to know what to look for. It was a large pit, open and flooded with rainwater. Sticks floated on top of the pool. Bones, Branch knew instinctively.

  “Can we get any more magnification?” Chambers asked.

  Branch held his position while specialists fiddled with the image back at camp. There beyond his Plexiglas lay the apocalypse: Pestilence, Death, War. All but that final horseman, Famine. What in creation are you doing here, Elias?

  “Not good enough,” Chambers complained over his headset. “All we’re doing is magnifying the distortion.”

  She was going to repeat her request, Branch knew. It was the logical next step. But she never got the chance.

  “There again, sir,” the master sergeant reported over the radio. “I’m counting three, correction, four thermal shapes, Echo Tango. Very distinct. Very alive. Still nothing on your end? Over.”

  “Nothing. What kind of shapes, Base? Over.”

  “They look to be human-sized. Otherwise, no detail. The KH-12 just doesn’t have the resolution. Repeat. We’re imaging multiple shapes, in motion at or in the site. Beyond that, no definition.”

  Branch sat there with the cyclic shoving at his hand.

  At or in? Branch slipped right, searching for better vantage, sideways, then higher, not venturing one inch closer. Ramada toggled the light, hunting. They rose high above the dead trees.

  “Hold it,” Ramada said.

  From above, the water’s surface was clearly agitated. It was not a wild agitation. But neither was it the kind of smooth rippling caused by falling leaves, say. The pattern was too arrhythmic. Too animate.

  “We’re observing some kind of movement down there,” Branch radioed. “Are you picking any of this up on our camera, Base? Over.”

  “Very mixed results, Major. Nothing definite. You’re too far away.”

  Branch scowled at the pool of water. He tried to fashion a logical explanation. Nothing above ground clarified the phenomenon. No people, no wolves, no scavengers. Except for the motion breaking the water’s surface, the area was lifeless.

  Whatever was causing the disturbance had to be in the water. Fish? It was not impossible, with the overflowing rivers and creeks reaching through the forest. Catfish, maybe? Eels? Bottom feeders, whatever they were? And large enough to show up on a satellite infrared.

  There was not a need to know. No more so than, say, the need to unravel a good mystery novel. It would have been reason enough for Branch, if he were alone. He yearned to get close and wrestle the answer out of that water. But he was not free to obey his impulses. He had men under his command. He had a new father in the backseat. As he was trained to do, Branch let his curiosity wither in obedience to duty.

  Abruptly the grave reached out to him.

  A man reared up from the water.

  “Jesus,” Ramada hissed.

  The Apache shied with Branch’s startle reflex. He steadied the chopper even as he watched the unearthly sight.

  “Echo Tango One?” The corporal was shaken.

  The man had been dead for many months. To the waist, what was left of him slowly lifted above the surface, head back, wrists wired together. For a moment he seemed to stare up at the helicopter. At Branch himself.

  Even from their distance, Branch could tell a story about the man. He was dressed like a schoolteacher or an accountant, definitely not a soldier. The baling wire around his wrists they’d seen on other prisoners from the Serbs’ holding camp at Kalejsia. The bullet’s exit cavity gaped prominently at the left rear of his skull.

  For maybe twenty seconds the human carrion bobbed in place, a ridiculous mannequin. Then the fabrication twisted to one side and dropped heavily onto the bank of the grave pit, half in, half out. It was almost as if a prop were being discarded, its shock effect spent.

  “Elias?” Ramada wondered in a whisper.

  Branch did not respond. You asked for it, he was thinking to himself. You got it.

  Rule Six echoed. I will permit no atrocity to occur in my presence. The atrocity had already occurred, the killing, the mass burial. All in the past tense. But this—this desecration—was in his presence. His present presence.

  “Ram?” he asked.

  Ramada knew his meaning. “Absolutely,” he answered.

  And still Branch did not enter. He was a careful man. There were a few last details.

  “I need some clarification, Base,” he radioed. “My turbine breathes air. Can it breathe this nitrogen atmosphere?”

  “Sorry, Echo Tango,” Jefferson said, “I have no information on that.”

  Chambers came on the air, excited. “I might be able to help answer that. Just a sec, I’ll consult one of our people.”

  Your people? thought Branch with annoyance. Things were slipping out of order. She had no place whatsoever in this decision. A minute later she returned. “You might as well get it straight from the horse’s mouth, Elias. This is Cox, forensic chemistry, Stanford.”

  A new voice came on. “Heard your question,” the Stanford man said. “Will an air-breather breathe your adulterated concentrate?”

  “Something like that,” Branch said.

  “Ah hmm,” Stanford said. “I’m looking at the chemical spectrograph downloaded from the Predator drone five minutes ago. That’s as close to current as we’re going to get. The plume is showing eighty-nine percent nitrogen. Your oxygen’s down to thirteen percent, nowhere close to normal. Looks like your hydrogen quota took the biggest hit. Big deal. So here’s your answer, okay?”

  He paused. Branch said, “We’re all ears.”

  Stanford said, “Yes.”

  “Yes, what?” said Branch.

  “Yes. You can go in. You don’t want to breathe this mix, but your turbine can. Nema problema.”

  The universal shrug had entered Serbo-Croatian, too. “Tell me one thing,” Branch said. “If there’s no problem, how come I don’t want to breathe this mix?”

  “Because,” said the forensic chemist, “that probably wouldn’t be, ah, circumspect.”

  “My meter’s running, Mr. Cox,” Branch said. Fuck circumspect.

  He could hear the Stanford hotshot swallow. “Look, don’t mistake me,” the man said. “Nitrogen’s very good stuff. Most of what we breathe is nitrogen. Life wouldn’t exist without it. Out in California, people pay big bucks to enhance it. Ever hear of blue-green algae? The idea is to bond nitrogen organically. Supposed to make your memory last forever.”

  Branch stopped him. “Is it safe?”

  “I wouldn’t land, sir. Don’t touch down, definitely. I mean unless you’ve been immunized against cholera and all the hepatitises and probably bubonic plague. The biohazard’s got to be off the scale down there, with all that sepsis in the water. The whole helicopter would have to be quarantined.”

  “Bottom line,” Branch tried again, voice pinched tight. “Will my machine fly in there?”

  “Bottom line,” the chemist finally summarized, “yes.”

  The pit of fetid water curdled beneath them. Bones rocked on the surface. Bubbles breached like primordial boil. Like a thousand pairs of lungs exhaling. Telling tales.

  Branch decided.

  “Sergeant Jefferson?” he radioed. “Do you have your handgun?”

  “Yes sir, of course, sir,” she said. They were required to carry a firearm at all times on base.

  “You will chamber one round, Sergeant.”

  “Sir?” They were also required never to load a weapon on base unless under direct attack.

  Branch didn’t drag his joke out any longer. “The man who was just on the radio,” he said. “If he proves wrong, Sergeant, I want you to shoot him.”

  Over the airwaves, Branch heard McDaniels snort his approval.

  “Leg or head, sir?” He liked that.
r />   Branch took a minute to get the other gunships positioned at the edges of the gas cloud, and to double-check his armament and snug his oxygen mask hard and tight.

  “All right, then,” he said. “Let’s get some answers.”

  0425

  He entered from on high with his faithful navigator at his back, meaning to descend at his own pace. To go slowly. To winnow out the perils one by one. With his three gunships poised at the rear like wrathful archangels, Branch meant to own this blighted real estate from the top down.

  But the Stanford forensic chemistry specialist was wrong.

  Apaches did not breathe this gaseous broth.

  He was no more than ten seconds in when the acid haze began sparking furiously. The sparks killed the pilot flame already burning in the turbine, then, sparking more, relit the engine with a small explosion beneath the rotors. The exhaust-gas temperature gauge went into the red. The pilot flame became a two-foot wildfire.

  It was Branch’s job to be ready for all emergencies. Part of your training as a pilot involved hubris, and part of it involved preparing for your own downfall. This particular mechanical bankruptcy had never happened to him before, but he had reflexes for it anyway.

  When the rotors surged, he corrected for it. When the machine started into failure and instruments shorted out, he did not panic. The power cut out on him.

  “I’ve got a hot start,” Branch declared calmly. Fed by an oxygen surge, the bushing above their heads held a fiery bluish globe, like St. Elmo’s fire.

  “Autorote,” he announced next when the machine—logically—failed altogether.

  Autorotation was a state of mechanical paralysis.

  “Going down,” he announced. No emotion. No blame. Here was here.

  “Are you hit, Major?” Count on Mac. The Avenger.

  “Negative,” Branch reassured. “No contact. Our turbine’s blown.”

  Autorotation, Branch could handle. It was one of his oldest instincts, to shove the collective down and find that long, steep, safe glide that imitated flight. Even with the engine dead, the rotor blades would continue spinning with the centrifugal force, allowing for a short, steep forced landing. That was the theory. At a plunging speed of 1,700 feet per minute, it all translated into thirty seconds of alternative.

  Branch had practiced autorotations a thousand times, but never in the middle of night, in the middle of a toxic forest. With the power cut, his headlights died. The darkness leaped out at him. He was startled by its quickness. There was no time for his eyes to adjust. No time to flip on the monocle’s artificial night vision. Damn instruments. That was his downfall. Should have been relying on his own eyes. For the first time he felt fear.

  “I’m blind,” Branch reported in a monotone.

  He fought away the image of trees waiting to gut them. He reached for the faith of his wings. Hold the pitch flat, the rotors will spin.

  The dead forest rushed at his imagination like switchblades in an alley. He knew better than to think the trees might cushion them. He wanted to apologize to Ramada, the father who was young enough to be his son. Where have I brought us?

  Only now did he admit his loss of control. “Mayday,” he reported.

  They entered the treeline with a metallic shriek, limbs raking the aluminum, breaking the skids, reaching to skin their souls out of the machine.

  For a few seconds more their descent was more glide than plummet.

  The blades sheared treetops, then the trees sheared his blades.

  The forest caught them.

  The Apache braked in a mangle.

  The noise quit.

  Wrapped nose-down against a tree, the machine rocked gently like a cradle in rain. Branch lifted his fists from the controls. He let go. It was done.

  Despite himself, he passed out.

  He woke gagging. His mask was filled with vomit. In darkness and smoke, he clawed at the straps, freed the facepiece, dragged hard at the air.

  Instantly he tasted and smelled the poison reach into his lungs and blood. It seared his throat. He felt diseased, anciently diseased, plagued into his very bones. Mask, he thought with alarm.

  One arm would not work. It dangled before him. With his good hand he fumbled to find the mask again. He emptied the mess, pressed the rubber to his face.

  The oxygen burned cold across the nitrogen wounds in his throat.

  “Ram?” he croaked.

  No answer.

  “Ram?”

  He could feel the emptiness behind him.

  Strapped facedown, bones broken, wings clipped, Branch did the only other thing he was able to do, the one thing he had come to do. He had entered this dark forest to witness great evil. And so he made himself see. He refused delirium. He looked. He watched. He waited.

  The darkness eased.

  It was not dawn arriving. Rather, it was his own vision binding with the blackness. Shapes surfaced. A horizon of gray tones.

  He noticed now a strange, taut lightning flickering on the far side of his Plexiglas. At first he thought it was the storm igniting thin strands of gas. The hits of light penciled in various objects on the forest floor, less with actual illumination than through brief flashes of silhouette.

  Branch struggled to make sense of the clues spread all around him, but apprehended only that he had fallen from the sky.

  “Mac,” he called on his radio. He traced the communications cord to his helmet, and it was severed. He was alone.

  His instrument panel still showed aspects of vitality. Various green and red lights twinkled, fed by batteries here and there. They signified only that the ship was still dying.

  He saw that the crash had cast him among a tangle of fallen trees close to Zulu Four. He peered through Plexiglas sprayed with a fine spiderweb. A gracile crucifix loomed in the near distance. It was a vast, fragile icon, and he wondered—hoped—that some Serb warrior might have erected it as penance for this mass grave. But then Branch saw that it was one of his broken rotor blades caught at a right angle in a tree.

  Bits of wreckage smoldered on the floor of soaked needles and leaves. The soak could be rain. Rather late, it came to him that the soak could also be his own spilled fuel.

  What alarmed him was how sluggish his alarm was. From far away, it seemed, he registered that the fuel could ignite and that he should extricate himself and his partner—dead or alive—and get away from his ship. It was imperative, but did not feel so. He wanted to sleep. No.

  He hyperventilated with the oxygen. He tried to steel himself to the pain about to come, jock stuff mostly, when the going gets tough …

  He reared up, shouldering high against the side canopy, and bones grated upon bones. The dislocated knee popped in, then out again. He roared.

  Branch sank down into his seat, shocked alive by the crescendo of nerve endings. Everything hurt. He laid his head back, found the mask.

  The canopy flapped up, gently.

  He drew hard at the oxygen, as if it might make him forget how much more pain was left to come. But the oxygen only made him more lucid. In the back of his mind, the names of broken bones flooded in helpfully. Horribly. Strange, this diagnosis. His wounds were eloquent. Each wanted to announce itself precisely, all at the same time. The pain was thunderous.

  He raised a wild stare at the bygone sky. No stars up there. No sky. Clouds upon clouds. A ceiling without end. He felt claustrophobic. Get out.

  He took a final lungful, let go of the mask, shed his useless helmet.

  With his one good arm, Branch grappled himself free of the cockpit. He fell upon the earth. Gravity despised him. He felt crushed smaller and smaller into himself.

  Within the pain, a distant ecstasy opened its strange flower. The dislocated knee popped back into place, and the relief was almost sexual. “God,” he groaned. “Thank God.”

  He rested, panting rapidly, cheek upon the mud. He focused on the ecstasy. It was tiny among all the other savage sensations. He imagined a doorway. If only he could en
ter, all the pain would end.

  After a few minutes, Branch felt stronger. The good news was that his limbs were numbing from the gas saturation in his bloodstream. The bad news was the gas. The nitrogen reeked. It tasted like aftermath.

  “… Tango One …” he heard.

  Branch looked up at the caved-in hull of his Apache. The electronic voice was coming from the backseat. “Echo … read me …”

  He stood away from the earth’s flat seduction. It was beyond his comprehension that he could function at all. But he had to tend to Ramada. And they had to know the dangers.

  He climbed to a standing position against the chill aluminum body. The ship lay tilted upon one side, more ravaged than he had realized. Hanging on to a handhold, Branch looked into the rear cavity. He braced for the worst.

  But the backseat was empty.

  Ramada’s helmet lay on the seat. The voice came again, tiny, now distinct. “Echo Tango One …”

  Branch lifted the helmet and pulled it onto his own head. He remembered that there was a photograph of the newborn son in its crown.

  “This is Echo Tango One,” he said. His voice sounded ridiculous in his own ears, elastic and high, cartoonish.

  “Ramada?” It was Mac, angry in his relief. “Quit screwing around and report. Are you guys okay? Over.”

  “Branch here,” Elias identified with his absurd voice. He was concussed. The crash had messed up his hearing.

  “Major? Is that you?” Mac’s voice practically reached for him. “This is Echo Tango Two. What is your condition, please? Over.”

  “Ramada is missing,” Branch said. “The ship is totaled.”

  Mac took a half-minute to absorb the information. He came back on, all business. “We’ve got a fix on you on the thermal scan, Major. Right beside your bird. Just hold your position. We’re coming in to provide assistance. Over.”

  “No,” Branch quacked with his bird voice. “Negative. Do you read me?”

  Mac and the other gunships did not respond.

  “Do not, repeat, do not attempt approach. Your engines will not breathe this air.”

  They accepted his explanation reluctantly. “Ah, roger that,” Schulbe said.

  Mac came on. “Major. What is your condition, please?”