Where the auxiliary propane dump was located.
Banks opened his mouth to join in the shouting. But even as he did so, the major fired a short, measured burst…and Banks’s world ended in a universe of flame.
53
AS THE HELICOPTER blades whipped overhead, cutting through the night, Nora sat against the webbing, Tappan to one side and Toth to the other. Toth was whimpering slightly, her shoulders heaving. One soldier had tied a rude tourniquet above her knee before pushing her into the chopper, but now she sat unaided as blood soaked through bandages that had been hastily wrapped around her calf.
Nora struggled against an overwhelming conviction that this had to be a dream: a terrible, nonsensical dream. Everything had happened so quickly. One minute they were on the threshold of a mind-blowing discovery…and then, seconds later, helicopters had descended like the chariots of malignant gods; Vigil was murdered in cold blood; and now she was a captive, flying through the dark to an unknown fate.
Nothing made sense…save the pain in her wrists from the zip ties, pulled cruelly tight, that kept insisting this was, in fact, no dream.
To her right, Tappan was silent. He was bleeding as well, from the gash in his forehead where he’d been pistol-whipped, but already the flow was ebbing. After exchanging glances with her when the chopper first rose into the air, he’d stared straight ahead, looking stonily at the figure across from them in the belly of the aircraft.
Nora stared, too. He was evidently a captain—the bars on his uniform indicated as much—but beyond that, she could discern nothing. He was dressed in combat uniform, but she didn’t recognize the light gray color. There were small, unfamiliar badges where the breast bar would normally be.
The man stared back at them expressionlessly, forearms on his knees, SIG service pistol held loosely in his right hand—the same weapon with which he’d callously killed Vigil and wounded Cecilia.
Her brooding was interrupted by an unmistakable sensation: they were descending, and quickly. She looked out the chopper window: still nothing but the blackness of the high desert. But no: now she could make out something. Four lights, small and red, had come on, forming a square below them, winking slowly as they revolved. From inside the helicopter, it was impossible to determine how far below they were, or how large an area they circumscribed.
But as the chopper continued to descend—vertically now—it quickly became clear the lights were illuminating a landing pad.
A minute later, their wheels touched ground. It seemed to Nora they’d only been airborne five, perhaps ten minutes, but in her confusion she couldn’t be sure. A door was opened from outside, and more soldiers with automatic weapons appeared. The captain leapt out, and then Nora and Tappan were led—none too gently—out of the craft and onto the pad. Another soldier helped the wounded Toth.
Nora looked around. In the darkness, she could make out very little. They appeared to be on a plain amid low dark hills, near a range of mountains, below a vast sea of stars. To her left was a large, low building that at one time perhaps served as a hangar, but the roof had partially fallen in, exposing metal struts like ribs. Beside it were the black silhouettes of additional buildings, equally decrepit, that resembled barracks. A broken water tower on the other side completed the picture of ruin. And that was all. Even the landing zone they were standing on seemed bare earth, its covering of sand stirred into strange whorls by the blades of the chopper.
The captain barked an order, and the soldiers, gesturing with the barrels of their weapons, lined the captives up again. Mute, still in shock, they complied, a soldier holding up Toth. Another barked order, unintelligible, cut through the night. For a moment of horror, Nora thought that they were about to be shot.
But no shot came. Instead, a green light appeared in the seemingly moribund water tower, winking on and off. Then she felt a sudden movement under her feet, and heard a deep, throbbing noise. Dreamlike unreality rose within her again. But then, to her shock, she realized they were descending. Chopper, soldiers, landing lights, and sandy desert floor were all on a platform, disappearing below the earth. They were standing on the equivalent of an aircraft carrier’s giant elevator. They descended almost a hundred feet before coming to rest in a dark hangar bay, illuminated in reddish light.
Now, at a nod from the captain, another group of soldiers approached Nora and Tappan and—gesturing once again with their weapons—prodded them off the landing pad, the helicopter’s blades still spinning down lazily. As they began to walk away, Nora saw out of the corner of her eye more workers approach, rearranging the soil and adding fresh sand, as the improvised pad and its chopper were made ready to rise once again to the surface.