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Last Plane to Heaven: A Love Story

Written by Jay Lake

Illustrated  by Karl Nordman

Nichols tried to light a cigarette, one of those fucking Paki horseturds. "Know why God made the 'stans?" His palm cupped the flame against the steppe winds. Must've been burning his fingers, but if he didn't care, I sure as hell didn't.

"Hell if I know." The dust out here was like to drive me to tears, Oakley wraparounds or not. That shit got in the cracks of everything. My shoulders ached like a son-of-a-bitch, too, standing around all day with a SAM tube on my shoulder. I shifted the Stinger, listening for that familiar tubercular roar of old Sov-built engines. The Antonov was overdue.

He got his horseturd lit, took a long, coughing drag. "Shit's got to come out somewhere, that's why." A gap-toothed grin, where a couple of Uzbek hash merchants had kicked him hard a few months back. He'd eaten their ears a bit later. "The 'stans are the asshole of the Earth. America, we're the tits. Land of milk and honey."

Tits was right, I thought. But honey? Something chattered out there. I scanned the northeast over the hardpan. Nothing but scattered grass and endless identical miles, while the dust was making a silver-brown hash of the Gobi sky

No sign of the Antonov.

Maybe I'd heard the windsock snapping.

"Ain't you gonna ask?" he said, after another deep drag.

"Ask what?"

"Where the world's pussy is?"

I knew better to walk into that one, so I just returned his grin. I still had all my teeth.

"Aw, fuck it." Nichols pitched the flaring cigarette into the wind. It bounced past the wheel ruts on the desert floor then vanished into dust, leaving a flare on my vision.

"Don't do that shit, man."

"Snipers?" His laugh was as harsh as his cigarettes. "Here? Hiding behind what? The sky, maybe. You're the pussy, Allen. Pussy of the world, right here."

"Snipers my ass." I was less confident than him on that. Not much less, but a careful troopie lived to see chow call. "Only you can prevent forest fires."

"Smokey the fucking Mongolian bear!"

Then the Antonov was overhead, growling out of the dust in a reek of fuel and old metal, the pilot looking for the windsock.

****

Say what you want about Sov technology, the shit they built just keeps working. That old An-17 had probably been flying, badly, when I was playing kill-the-ragheads in the Oregon forests as a kid. It was still flying badly now. As the fly-guys say, any landing you walk away from is a good landing.

The south Gobi is a series of very shallow valleys demarcated by low ridges a half dozen klicks apart. The desert is sort of like prairie gone bad, with stubby, dried grasses, the odd flower, and a hell of a lot of gravel. If you look up and down the valleys, you can see the edge of the world.

The strip here was a windsock stuck in the hard pan. Every now and then someone got tired of the planes bouncing in their wheel ruts and replanted the windsock fifty yards further east. There was an archaeology of occupation and warfare written in the tracks of old landing gear.

Most of the Westerners in the 'stans were like Nichols. Smart enough, and stone killers in a firefight or on a silent op, but pretty much baboons otherwise. A million years ago they would have been the big apes throwing shit from the trees. Now they're out here capping ragheads and steppe weasels. I guess that beats breaking elbows for money back home.

I tried explaining Temujin to Nichols one time as we were burning some idealistic kids out of an eight-hundred year old temple. Blue-faced demons crisped to winter ash while their ammo cooked off in a funeral cantata. He'd just laughed and told me to go back to college if I didn't like it here.

It's a beautiful country, Mongolia. All the 'stans are beautiful in their way. Xin Jiang, too. Nichols was wrong about this being the asshole of the earth. God had made these countries, all right, to remind us all how damned tough the world was. And how beauty could rise from the hard choices and broken lives.

Then God in His infinite wisdom had chosen to people these lands with some of the toughest sons of bitches to ever draw breath. These people could hold a grudge for a thousand years and didn't mind eating bullets to avenge their honor.

Fuck you very much, God, for Your beauty and Your terror. Not to mention Sov aircraft to dust us off to the brothels of Ulaan Baatar every once in a while. Nothing expressed God's love for His world like warm North Korean beer and elderly Chechen hookers.

****

"Yo, Allen, get in here!"

It was Korunov. His head bobbed out the weathered orange door of the ger which served as our HQ. Ex-KGB counterintel guy. He'd spent a lot of time at the USA-Canada Institute, back when that was still cranking, and spoke with the damndest accent. His voice was part Alabama cornpone and part Ukrainian street hustler, squeaking out of a two-hundred kilo butterball.

Hell, he must have been thin once. Nobody starts out life that kind of fat.

Korunov considered himself a man of the world. He was also the paymaster of our little unit, so when he yo'd, I ho'd.

Nichols and Korunov were crowded into the ger along with Batugan—our Mongolian controller back in UB and the only man to get off the Antonov upon arrival. As always, the pilot remained on board to keep his points hot. Plus Hannaday was there. He was an Agency cowboy I'd last seen on the wrong end of a Glock in Kandahar two years earlier. Whipcord thin, still wearing the same damned Armani suit.

How the fuck had that spook gotten into the camp without me seeing him? My legs still ached whenever it got chilly. I briefly considered firing off my Stinger inside the ger, just punching the warhead into Hannaday's chest, but that would have pretty much toasted us all.

"Stow it," growled Korunov. Two hundred kilos or not, that man could and did snap necks.

"What's he doing here?" I wouldn't meet Hannaday's gaze. "He's worse trouble than the insurgency."

Batugan gave me his oily smile. I don't think he had any other kind, truth be told. "Mr. Hannaday has bought out your contracts."

"My contract wasn't up for sale to him."

Korunov got too close to me. "Sit. Listen."

I laid the Stinger against the tent wall, loosed the holster on my Smitty, then pulled up one of those little orange Mongolian stools. I never took my eyes off Hannaday's hands. "Listening, sir."

"You should be—" Batugan began, but Korunov interrupted. "Not your show any more, Genghis."

The fat man's voice dropped, sympathy or perhaps an attempt at camaraderie, as he turned to me. "Our financial backers have pulled out. Batugan flew here to cut us loose."

Cut us loose here? We were a training cadre. They brought in kids with attitude, we ran them through some high-fatality training, they pulled them back out to go fight the bad guys. There was no way out but by plane. That way the kids wouldn't run off. And no one ever came around asking inconvenient questions about the row of graves on the far side of the ger camp.

You could make it out by truck. Damned long haul, though, and you had to pack along enough water and fuel. Didn't matter anyhow. There weren't any trucks in camp right now, just a couple of old Chinese-surplus BJC jeeps.

Not a lot of landmarks in the south Gobi. Sure as hell no roads.

"So?" I wasn't a decision maker. Why were they telling me?

Korunov chose his words carefully. "Mister Hannaday here is bankrolling airfare back to Los Angeles or Frankfurt, plus a generous kill fee."

I finally met Hannaday's eyes. They gleamed that same eerie blue as back in Kandahar. His smile died there.

"I don't care what he wants. I'd rather walk than take his money."

"That's why we need you, Mister Allen," Hannaday said. "The unit listens to you." There was something wrong with his voice—it grated, almost fading out.

With that clue, even in the shadowed ger, I could make out a scar seaming his throat. It was a glossy trail just above the crisp Windsor knot of his tie. I'd lost my best knife in that throat, the day he shot me.

"You don't talk right, I don't walk right." Which was why I trained instead of killed these days. "I think we've done enough for each other." I stood, grabbed my missile rack.

"Allen." It was Korunov.

I owed him. Lots. I stopped to listen. "Yeah?"

"We don't have seats on the plane. None of us. Not without Mister Hannaday."

I had eleven guys outside who were real good at knocking over airplanes, Nichols chief among them. But I also had eleven guys outside who weren't going to be happy about hiking out of the south Gobi.

"We got return bonds, Sergei," I told Korunov softly.

He shrugged, his face impassive. "If we were elsewhere, we could cash them. Mister Hannaday bought the air transport contract from Batugan before he bought our paper."

I had my Smitty out and two rounds in Batugan, one in each thigh. The Mongolian fell off his stool sobbing, curling to clutch at his legs. Neither Hannaday nor Korunov moved. Neither one drew down on me.

"So I am worth something to you, you son of a bitch." Careful not to point the weapon at Hannaday, I holstered the pistol. "What the fuck do you want, airplane man?"

"Like you, I'm—"

"You'll never be like me, you fucking Langley suit."

"Please," Hannaday said. One hand stroked the knot of his tie. I hoped like hell the scar ached as bad as my legs. "Fort Meade. And, like you, I'm a contractor now." Without looking, he leaned over slightly and slapped Batugan hard. The Mongolian quieted his blubbering.

That drew a reluctant laugh out of me. "Big spookery all get outsourced to India?"

"Pakistan, actually. In the name of funding and plausible deniability."

"Fuck yeah. What's your point?"

"We're going to bring in a special subject. We need your team to play like Ukrainian mercs for about a week. Ride the subject hard, put them in some real fear, then let them be extracted."

Who was he kidding, extracted? I knew what that signified. "What, Delta Force falls out of the sky and caps us all? No thanks." As if this bunch of multinational nimrods could be Ukrainians. Korunov actually was, the real McCoyovich. After the fat man, Nichols with his Paki cigarettes was the safest and sanest of the bunch. There was a reason our little crowd wasn't out eating snakes on the front line.

"No-risk deal," said Hannaday impassively.

"That deal ain't been written yet."

He folded his hands in his lap, a deliberate gesture straight out of interrogation training. "I'll be sitting here with you the whole time."

Well, I could always cap him when the shit went south. Because a situation like he wanted to set up would without question run for the border before it was all over with.

And it ain't like I was walking out of here.

"Fuck you very much," I told Korunov. "I guess we're playing. I'll go get the boys fired up."

"What are you going to tell them?"

"Just some fucking lies. I got a million of 'em." I grabbed my Stinger rack, waved it at Batugan. "You might want to slap a band-aid on Ming the Merciless over there before he bleeds out."

"Don't need him any more," said Hannaday.

I didn't let the door hit me on the ass. Paymaster and contract man could gas all they wanted. I'd chosen my poison.

****

It took a little while to get a camp meeting together. Beier, the South African, was somewhere sleeping off a three day bender, while the Belgians were off dust-wrestling and greasing each other down. Those two boys didn't much like being interrupted at play, so I sent Nichols after them. I rousted the rest of the crew to find Beier.

We wound up in the kitchen ger. It was too damned windy to talk outside. I didn't want to be near the Antonov—for several reasons—nor near Hannaday and Korunov. The Belgians were madder than hell and Beier was propped up against a stack of North Korean beer beneath a line of curing mutton fatback that kept dripping on him. There was a pot-bellied stove, thankfully cold, stacks of MREs and Chinese canned goods, and us.

I picked my nails with a Bowie knife til everyone quieted down. That was so fucking theatrical it made me want to puke, but this was the kind of shit that worked on these boys. Visible weapons and getting straight to the point.

"Listen up, geniuses. We're stewed and screwed here. Korunov's been forced to accept a transfer of our contracts. We're getting out soon, but there's one more task."

They groaned and cursed in seven languages.

"Yeah," I said. "I know from. We got to run a fake hostage situation with a drop-in, pretend to be Ukrainians." Commonwealth of Independent States political bullshit. My guess was we'd be labeled later as Chechens. The ex-Sovs saw them in every shadow the way Americans saw Arabs. "So if you've got a Slavic accent, start using it. If you don't got, start practicing."

"What happens if we say no?" It was Nichols, speaking quietly for a change. Somehow everyone was suddenly listening.

"You're free to walk home any time."

"We got return bonds." That was Echieverra, the ETA guy for whom all of Europe had gotten too hot. I didn't figure anybody Hannaday swung in here would cop to a Basque accent.

"Yeah. If we can cash 'em. You see an ATM around here, Etchy?"

Nichols again: "So what do we do?"

"Put 'em through the usual course, just don't kill 'em. Scare the hell out of whoever this is. And . . ." I glanced at Beier, who appeared to be snoring. " . . . they keep all their bits and pieces attached and intact."

I figured the marching orders would change between now and then, several times most likely, but I also figured the bits and pieces part would still apply.

"What happens at the end?"

"An extraction."

They all got real quiet.

"Staged, boys. And we'll know they're coming."

"I fire no blanks," said one of the Belgians. Everybody laughed except me.

"Think about it. Unless you can grow a truck under you or sprout wings and fly, we're pretty much stuck."

"Knock over the Antonov right now," said Nichols. "And split."

"Nope." I pointed the knife at him. "First off, a couple of stray rounds and that plane's toast. You know what a piece of shit it is. Second off, they don't keep no fucking maps on that thing. Three or four of us know enough to get it flying. None of us know the terrain. Something happens to the pilot, you want to navigate the Gobi from the air by eyeball and dead reckoning? Third, I'd bet money Hannaday's got surprises inside that plane right now, just in case any one of us is a smartass."

"Hannaday?" Nichols didn't miss much, and he 'd heard a lot of my stories.

"Yep. Mr. Congeniality himself."

"And you're going for this?"

Hell no, I wanted to say. What I did say was, "You got a better idea?"

No one had an answer for that question. After a full minute of silence, I put my knife away.

****

An hour later Hannaday had me and Nichols on the plane trolling for new fish from five hundred feet.

Antonov 17's a funny bird. Looks almost like a kid's drawing of an aircraft, twin props, high wing. Not that big, and a slow fucker to boot, but they really did keep flying forever. The seats had been designed for Chinese grandmothers, not American mercs with incipient butt spread. Tiny aluminum rails with webbing between, idiot cousin to the common lawn chair. Air Munchkin. How the hell a Sov platoon in full kit ever fit inside these cans I couldn't imagine.

I didn't bother with the seatbelt.

Hannaday hadn't relieved me of my Smitty, though the Stinger rack was back at camp. Nichols was sucking down another of those Paki horseturds as he fondled the barrel of his Mossberg jungle gun—a 40mm automatic shotgun that should have had Hannaday sweating.

The Gobi lumbered along outside the oval windows, low and slow. The pilot was looking for something.

Someone.

Curiosity finally got the better of my common sense. "We're doing a pick-up out here?"

"Special delivery," said Hannaday, surprising me. He wasn't much given to sharing information.

"We're a thousand klicks from anything."

"And that, my gimpy friend, is precisely why we're here." His eyes narrowed to steel-gray slits. There was another reason he was here, as opposed to somewhere else. Hannaday thought he could run me. He'd done it before.

He was doing it now.

Fuck him. I didn't want to die of old age walking out of the south Gobi, but fuck him.

Then the intercom crackled to life. The pilot said something fast and tonal—Cantonese, I thought, not that I could follow it. The Antonov banked hard and picked up speed as the engines coughed a bloom of black smoke.

Whatever it was we were looking for, we'd found it.

Hannaday just smiled. "Ready for some ladder work?"

Ladder work? Out here?

****

And damn me if we didn't bounce to a landing somewhere not much different from anywhere else. There were cloud shadows on the ground, and a small herd of yaks in the distance. That meant Mongolians somewhere—their animals had a wide range, but they weren't left completely unattended.

"Out," said Hannaday. "Open the cargo bay."

Nichols popped the door seals in a wash of fuel reek, then dropped the aluminum boarding ladder. I made my way carefully after him, one step at a time on my bad legs.

It stank outside, of fire and something nasty-chemical. Hydrazine? Nichols was banging on the cargo hatch as I bent to look under the plane, scanning for the source of the reek.

I found it. "Holy fuck."

Nichols was distracted. "What?"

Hannaday dropped down between us and knelt. "Nice."

The thing was half-rounded, like a stubby bullet, and blackened all to hell. It sat on the flat side. Smoke curled off, dancing in the dry grass around the . . . the . . .

"Soyuz TMA-3 landing capsule," said Hannaday. "Get the ladder. And stay the hell away from the bottom. There's a gamma-ray emitter down there that will fry your nuts."

Nichols had found this weird folding ladder, sort of halfway between a painter's stepladder and a scaffold. He shouldered the Mossberg and dragged the ladder toward the Soyuz with that shiny-eyed focus I normally associated with an impending massacre.

Soyuz. We were dusting off a fucking spaceman. "Somebody's looking for this." I glanced at the sky for the fleet of Russian Hinds that must surely be in the air.

Hannaday laughed again. "Yeah, a couple of thousand klicks from here. Get the camo netting out of the hold, Allen."

I got the camo netting.

****

Up close the capsule had that brutal precision so typical of Sov high tech. It could have been whittled from stone, then ground off. Re-entry had done the thing no favors either. The surface was covered with burned streaks and pits. A round hatch stood open near the nose from which lines of a parachute stretched out some few dozen yards across the grass. The smoking ground testified to the retro rockets that had soft-landed the capsule.

At that range the smell was worse, hydrazine and baked metal and some weird ozone thing. It made me wish for a breather mask. I dropped the mound of camo netting and sat on it.

Hannaday took the ladder and set it up against the blunt cone. The scaffold part fit across the top. Of course it did, I thought. He went straight for a little opening, pulled out something I would swear was a key, and went to work on the nose.

"Help me out, boys," he said as he wrestled open a hatch.

Of course I didn't shoot him. The Antonov pilot would have taken off without us.

Spy guy fished out a real live astronaut, someone small in a jumpsuit who couldn't stand on their own feet. Nichols and I got the guy down the ladder, then Nichols took off for the Antonov with the space traveler in a fireman's carry while Hannaday and I spread out the netting and covered the capsule. He didn't bother to retrieve his ladder.

"Nice one." I coughed through the reek. "You're running a scam of epic proportions. I assume we're nixing satellite surveillance here."

Hannaday grinned around the curve of the capsule. "Everybody's got to make a living, Allen."

When I pulled myself back up the Antonov's ladder, I found Nichols up front by the locked pilot's door, staring back down the narrow aisle. He was pale and sweating.

"What?" I said. "You find Elvis there?"

"She's a girl."

I went and looked. Our spaceman was a girl, not more than fifteen, eyes bloodshot from re-entry gees, barely moving even as she stared at us. Blue-black skin, shaved head.

A girl.

Who'd dropped out of the Central Asian sky in a Russian spaceship.

Kids on the International Space Station? Not fucking likely. Not in this lifetime.

"Hannaday," I breathed, "who the fuck is she?"

****

The Antonov lumbered back to camp. Nichols sat in the back of the plane with his shotgun, watching the kid and cursing in an extended monotone, mostly Russian. I perched in a chair at the front of the cabin opposite Hannaday.

"Who is she?"

He had the familiar old Hannaday-I'm-in-charge-here smile. "No one you'll ever know, Allen."

"Bullshit. We're supposed to run her through live fire countersecurity drills for week? We'll know her happy ass before we're through."

It was an unfortunate choice of words. Hannaday's smile just tightened a little. "Don't break off no bits and pieces. Not any of her bits."

We were both thinking of Beier then, the man who would do anything to anyone.

"That's not what I'm talking about and you know it."

He shrugged. "Speak Russian for a week, push her around, scare her, then let her be dusted off. Don't put any bullets or body parts into her, you'll be fine. What could be easier?"

My legs ached where he had shot me. "Who is she?"

"Ah-ah." I swear to God he wagged his finger at me. "That would be telling."

****

On landing Nichols bolted the plane like he had the Tehran trots. That meant the girl's presence would be known to everyone in five minutes, tops. As if I could control that anyway.

Hannaday looked at me. "I don't guess you're going to carry her down the ladder are you?"

"Got these old war wounds in my legs.

He smiled, gathered the girl close to his chest, and made it down the ladder himself. Looking down from the door I seriously considered popping a cap in his crown, just as a public service. But then he'd drop that poor kid and where would we be?

Within moments there was a swirl of mercs, mostly barking in Russian or English with Peter Ustinov accents. Hannaday gave up the girl to them, shouting back in Russian about security and escape, then returned to the plane as I made it to the ground.

"Be good," he told me.

"Fuck you."

"Whatever gets you through the night." He set his hands on the boarding ladder, then stopped. "Oh . . . Allen . . . ?"

My hand strayed to the Smitty. "Yeah?"

"Do take good care of her."

"Right."

****

They poured Evian water and Mongolian vodka down that poor kid until