Flying the Storm (32 page)

“We should be right on it,” said Solomon, frustratedly.

“I don’t see anything,” said Fredrick.

Aiden squinted down at the slowly rotating landscape below. Big mountains, green with summer, hunched around the head of a sea loch.
Looked pretty untouched to him. This landscape probably hadn’t seen much change since the last ice age.

“Nothing out here, either,” reported Aiden.
He wasn’t going to admit it, but he was actually enjoying flying over Scotland. He’d never done it before. It was much more beautiful than he remembered.

“No roads,”
Solomon muttered, “nothing.”

It didn’t seem too promising.
It wasn’t the kind of place you would normally expect a warship to be built. No infrastructure, no workforce. Like Solomon said,
nothing
. The place looked pristine. Aiden would have been very surprised to learn that anything of any importance ever happened here.

“What if it’s hidden?” s
aid Vika, on the spare headset.

“It will be hidden,” answered Solomon, as patiently as he could manage. “But you can’t hide everything with a project like this.
There has to be something showing…”

The
Iolaire
’s four passengers sat in silence for a moment, watching the scenery. Aiden was conscious of the fact that they were wasting fuel quite heavily now, making wide circles around the head of the loch. He was sure Fredrick was aware of that as well.

“How
are we for fuel?” Aiden asked.

“Two tonne
s left.”

With two tonnes and an empty hold they could fly several hundred kilometres.
It wasn’t quite time to worry, yet. It was the Scottish price of ‘nol he dreaded. The longer they loitered, the more it would end up costing them. Aiden had long since learned the value of being frugal.

“Try to the south,” suggested Solomon.
Fredrick complied and the
Iolaire
levelled out heading south across the narrow loch. Aiden faced north now. He watched the mountains as they passed by beneath him. The sky was bright blue above him, but a humid haze blurred the mountains on the horizon. Why had there not been more weather like this when he’d lived here?

“Anything?”
asked Fredrick.

“Not a thing,” replied Solomon.
He didn’t sound angry, just disappointed.

Then something caught Aiden’s eye, to the north of the loch, where the layers of hills folded into one another.
A little grey speck, lighter coloured than the rest of the landscape. Could have been nothing: a boulder or a ruined croft or something, but he was too far away to tell.

“I see something back to the north,” he reported.
“Might just be a pile of rocks, though.”

Fredrick banked the
Iolaire
back around. Aiden unbuckled himself from his turret, clambered down into the hold and ran to the cockpit.

He squeezed past Vika at the door
and pointed out of the glass. Fredrick and Solomon followed his finger. Fredrick gave him a thumbs-up and pointed the
Iolaire
at the tiny grey object.

Aiden headed back to his turret.

“It’s an aircraft,” Fredrick said.

Aiden could imagine Solomon sitting forwards in his seat.
Someone got here before you
. He wanted to laugh. It would serve the bastard right for going behind Fredrick’s back with Vika.

Though it would mean the chance of stopping the
Gilgamesh
had slipped away, Aiden might have liked it if the
Enkidu
wasn’t to be found.
Let the bastard taste some disappointment
. But then an uncomfortable thought crept up on him. Was he truly just angry for his friend, or was this still jealousy over Vika?

When he put it like that, he didn’t know.

The
Iolaire
reared and slowed, its engines vectoring upwards. “Bring us down tail-first so I can watch the
bealach
,” said Aiden.

“English, please,” returned Fredrick.
He always enjoyed catching Aiden’s little slips.

“Sorry,” said Aide
n. Maybe it was just something about being back in Scotland. “Bring us down so I can cover the aircraft in the
pass
.”

The
Iolaire
yawed about as it came to a hover, a few hundred metres above the aircraft sitting on the high saddle between two peaks. The
Iolaire
dropped below the level of the peaks then, and slowly, gently lowered itself to the saddle.

Aiden watched the aircraft closely all the way down.
His crosshair did not leave its cockpit. It was a twin-engine transport, smaller than the
Iolaire
, repurposed from an old counter-insurgency strike craft. Aiden vaguely recognised the model. Something unmistakeable, however, was its markings.

“It belongs to the
Gilgamesh
,” he announced.

“I feared as much.” Solomon no longer sounded disappointed, only impatient.
“At least this may mean we have the right place.”

“They know about the
Enkidu
?”

“Well, if I was able to work it out by myself, I’m sure with a big enough team even the bone-headed brass on the
Gilgamesh
could have.”

“But why right
now
?” asked Aiden. Twenty years the
Enkidu
had sat since the war, presumably with nobody uncovering it.

“Well…” started Solomon.
“It may have something to do with a burst communication I sent recently. I had to find a working satellite and repurpose it for the transmission, broadcasting the command regularly as it orbited… status requests using old acceptance codes… but I got a response. A packet of data… telemetry, housekeeping… meaningless really. That wasn’t important. What
was
important was that I could pinpoint its source.
Here
. Within an error of a few kilometres.”

“So you got it to broadcast its location?
To the whole bloody world?”

“Well yes, but… only if you were listening for it.
I
was listening for it.”

“And so was the bloody
Gilgamesh
, by the look of it!” Aiden was going to lose his temper. This was not good. The
Gilgamesh
knew where the
Enkidu
was. They’d sent a team to find it.

The
Iolaire
stopped descending. It hovered perfectly still, twenty metres or so above the wash-blasted grass.

“Do I land or not?” asked Fredrick.

“I don’t know,” answered Aiden. “There could be bloody marines around here for all we know. And if they’re within five klicks, they’ll have heard us coming.”

“Land and let me out,” said Solomon then.
“I don’t expect anybody to come with me.”

Fredrick lowered the
Iolaire
the last little distance to the ground. The landing gear sank into the soft grass. Thankfully the wheels were oversized for just this kind of landing. The rotors started to spin down as Fredrick tested the surface, making sure the
Iolaire
didn’t sink in too far.

“How long do you reckon it’s been here?” Aiden asked as the engines stared to quieten.
His gun still pointed at the aircraft a hundred metres across the saddle from them.

“Hard to say,” replied Solomon.
“I don’t think they’ll have much of a head start on us… a week at most.”

“A week?”
A week was a bloody long time. The
Enkidu
could be gone, off south to join the
Gilgamesh
. The consequences of that were hard to comprehend.

“Yes,
I received the transmission not much longer than a week ago.”

“Well this just gets better and better.
”

The cargo ramp opened, and Solomon went out.
Vika followed behind him. They headed across the pass towards the other aircraft.

“I’m going with them,”
said Aiden, standing at the door to the cockpit.

Fredrick looked at him then.
He nodded finally. “I will stay with the
Iolaire
,” he said. He handed Aiden the portable radio. “Call if you need me.”

Aiden
nodded to his friend, turned and left the cockpit. Into one pocket he stuffed the radio, switched off, and into the other he stuffed the silver pistol. He couldn’t say why he was going, exactly. Nobody would have blamed him if he stayed at the
Iolaire
. In fact, it would have been the sensible thing to do. Something in him, though, told him that he needed to see this thing through. He needed to finish this. He had to see if this
Enkidu
really existed. He had to know if it could really stop the
Gilgamesh
.

He caught the other two as they reached the
Gilgamesh
’s aircraft.

A crew hatch was open.
Solomon poked his head inside and looked around, his large-calibre pistol in his hand. Vika stood with her own pistol out and ready. Aiden noted how she held it. Down and straight, probably just like her father had taught her.

Together,
she and Aiden watched the surrounding slopes. They were strewn with boulders and scree: marines could have hidden anywhere. Aiden felt very exposed out on the pass.

A cool breeze was blowing up from the sea-loch side.
Out to sea, dark clouds had formed on the horizon. The hazy, humid weather was brewing a storm out there, but above him the sky was blue and clear. He wished that he could have relaxed and appreciated the scenery just for a few minutes.

That would have been bloody nice
.

“I don’t think it’
s been here for very long,” said Solomon at last, ducking back out of the crew hatch.

Aiden just
nodded, his eyes still on the slopes.

“Where is the crew?” asked Vika.

To that Solomon had no answer.

Aiden looked across the
saddle to the opposite mountain. There were some truly massive boulders just where the saddle met the slope. A deer trail led its winding way across the saddle towards them.

It’s as good a bet as any
.

“That way,” he said, pointing with his pistol.
Solomon looked at the deer trail and the boulders then. They set off towards the rocks.

The rocks were larger close up.
Some were bigger even than the
Iolaire
, wing tip to wing tip, Aiden reckoned. The deer trail ended at the base of one of the largest, where the rock seemed to overhang the slope a little. He squinted at it. Something about it didn’t look right.

Closer, he saw it. In at the back of the cave
was a door. A bloody door in the mountain.

“I think I’ve found it,” he announced.

“Jesus Christ,” whispered Solomon when he saw. Vika grinned widely. She squeezed Aiden’s shoulders tightly. It felt good. Despite everything, it felt really good.

S
olomon went first into the cave, ducking under the lip of the boulder so that his rucksack scraped against the rock. Vika went next, with Aiden last. He turned a final time before going under the rock, and took the radio from his pocket.

“We’ve found a bloody door,” he said.

“Wow,” replied Fredrick. “Maybe this isn’t all bullshit then.”

Inside, the ground dropped slightly so that Aiden could more or less stand up straight beneath the boulder.
Solomon had prised the little door open and was shining a torch into the gloom beyond. It was a long, narrow corridor, cut straight into the rock. The torchlight didn’t show what lay at the end. They stepped into the darkness, following Solomon’s lead.

It took an unexpectedly long time to reach the other end, picking their way along the tunnel.
When they did, Solomon fiddled with a keypad by a huge steel door. The door slid open quietly, and the trio went into the dark chamber beyond.

Suddenly there were lights: blue and only just bright enough to make out the layout of the chamber.
It was tall and long, with many doors leading off to the sides and one at the far end; all closed. As if he knew where he was going, Solomon set off at a stride across the concrete floor. He put away his torch, but the big pistol stayed firmly in his hand. Aiden felt his own pistol, just to make sure it was still there.

By the faraway door, a dim monitor glowed in the wall.
As they drew close, Aiden could read the message it was flashing.