This Green Hell

FORTY-THREE

Tomás pushed open the cabin door. ‘Perdóneme, señora.’ He had brought the doctor a small cup of water. He kneeled beside her cot and saw that her eyes were still open, but she didn’t move or acknowledge him in any way.

He spoke again, this time in English. ‘Excuse me, please.’

Still nothing.

He put the cup down on the floor and touched her shoulder, then shook it gently. The woman’s head turned towards him in a dreamy, slow motion, and an empty syringe clattered to the floor.

A small bell sounded behind him, and he turned towards the source of the chime — a silver case.

The chiming stopped, and he heard the woman whisper one word, a name: Michael. Then Tomás’s world turned white.

‘Stay away from the windows,’ the pilot ordered.

His voice cut out in a blast of white noise as a searing light flooded the cabin through the port and starboard windows.

Aimee put her hand on Sam’s arm, as though to help brace him. Sam patted her hand and smiled, the light from the windows turning his face from X-ray white to a darker reddish glow. Aimee’d wanted him strapped down and immobilised on a makeshift spinal board, but he had protested furiously on the grounds that he’d just been carried through miles of jungle on the back of a galloping, two-legged horse. How much more damage could he sustain from sitting up now? They’d compromised by belting him, in a sitting position, to one of the metal benches in the long fuselage.

The pilot spoke again. ‘Okay, everyone, we’re gonna get a little push shortly, but we’ve got good distance now and a lot of shielding. I’d like a bit more height as the shock wave tends to kick up more debris down low, but then we’d become visible. Not that a megaton of nuke going off is as easy to hide as a firecracker in a letterbox.’ He chuckled. ‘Just take it easy back there folks and enjoy—’ There was a sickening jolt and his laidback tone vanished. ‘Holy fuck. What the … what is that?’

Everyone looked out through the toughened-glass windows.

‘Over here,’ Aimee said at portside, moving so Alex could see. A small mountain was growing out of the jungle a few miles from where the detonation had taken place. It looked like a giant green boil, swelling then starting to split. ‘It’s the gas bed — trillions of cubic feet of natural gas and primitive petrocarbons. The nuke must have ignited it. It’s massive — covers a big part of this country and the next. I doubt we’ll be able to outrun it.’

The mountain burst and a column of orange flame, half a mile wide, shot into the atmosphere. Chunks of jungle — some as big as battleships — sailed into the air, and hung for a second, like enormous tree-covered dirigibles, before falling back to the earth.

This time there would be no little ‘push’. This time they would be smashed.

Aimee couldn’t stop her mouth dropping open. Millions of tons of explosive pressure forced the ignited gas straight up and out of the widening hole. Even at their distance, the occupants of the helicopter had to cover their ears against the deafening cataclysm.

This is what the end of the world will look like, she thought.

Alex could see the brutal wall of blast pressure rushing towards them.

‘Brace!’ he yelled, and grabbed hold of Aimee.

Casey did the same to Saqueo, and Sam wrapped his arms around some cargo netting on the walls. Thirty-five thousand pounds of flying machine was kicked from the rear so violently that it turned sideways and seemed to skid in midair.

The V22’s multi-directional propellers were computer assisted by gyroscopic sensors that allowed the blades literally to bend and contort, so it could stabilise in everything from a hurricane to a force 8 blast shock wave. Every one of these technological capabilities was tested to its limit by the wall of violently moving air.

In the back of the chopper, there was chaos. Bodies were thrown around like tenpins, and Alex and Casey Franks struggled to protect Aimee and Saqueo as they were all bounced from the floor to the ceiling and around the walls. Alex had one arm wrapped around Aimee’s head and face; the other, he stuck out to ward off flying debris and grab on to anything secure. He’d managed to grasp and hold a seat railing when his head connected with Casey Frank’s left boot. The toughened sole, still caked with black mud, left a perfect imprint across his forehead.

The V22 stabilised as the shock wave passed them by and travelled in a circle away from the huge red wound that had broken open in the Paraguayan landscape. Alex rolled onto his back on the cabin floor, and let Aimee do the same, both of them gasping for air.

‘We’re still alive,’ Aimee said, wincing as she sat up. ‘I guess the entire gas chamber didn’t ignite.’

Saqueo pushed free of Franks’s arms and leapt up to press his face against one of the windows, where he pointed and chattered at the devastation to the jungle, and his home.

Sam rolled his shoulders, grimaced, then reached into his pack behind him and pulled free the heavy journal. He dropped it onto the bench, then relaxed back. ‘Never a dull moment in the HAWCs.’

‘Fucking A-right, Uncle,’ Franks said, while she stretched her back.

She offered her hand to Aimee, who took it and got to her feet. She went over to Saqueo and looked out the window. A curtain of flame and black smoke, many miles wide, rose into the upper atmosphere. She shook her head.

The mega blast had creased and ruptured the landscape for miles in every direction, but instead of the colossal plume blowing into the upper atmosphere, the rapidly expanding gases had lifted the skin of the earth, and then dropped it back to sink hundreds of feet into a massive bowl-shaped crater. The gas bed had collapsed in on itself, and, like a cork being forced back into a bottle, had stopped any more of the primitive fuel being fed to the eruption.

‘The gas bed must have collapsed somehow, or sealed itself before the entire chamber went up. Thank God for that.’

The pilot spoke calmly through their earphones. ‘Just relax now, folks. We’re out over open water, and will be landing on the USS Bataan in … exactly twenty-nine minutes. Cocktails will be served,’ he finished with a chuckle.

Alex smiled and ran his hands up through his hair that was still sticky with sap and debris, and wiped them on his trousers. He knew the Bataan: a Commando-class aircraft carrier — one of the new, smaller and faster carriers the US Navy had in operation. It would be a fast trip home.

He rubbed some grit from his eye. It stung like hell.