Solomon's Keepers Read Free Page A

idea.
    ‘The priority is to get you out in one piece, my friend. And I kid you not – however good you are, Murphy will fuck you too if you give him an opportunity as good as this. This is close enough.’ He’s already pulling the radio handset from his pack.
    You watch Tyler’s eyes.
    ‘It’s confirmed. No, they’d moved it. About five clicks east. We can see the weather dish and they’ve already dropped the rear jacks. Can’t hear any pumps but they could get it off any time. We’ve got the mother of a storm coming here that’ll close us for sparkle but Rees can…’ He looks at you. ‘Yes sir. I got that. Yes, he is…No sir.’ Tyler leans back as though pushed. ‘Yes, I do. Roger abso-fucking-lutely. Loud and clear. Uh huh. Yes. I’d say level four or five. Cans? Yes. Light and smoke. Yes.’
    You draw a finger across your throat.
    ‘No way in this.’ Tyler says. There’s another silence.
    Tyler mouths at you. ‘Wait for it.’
    His face freezes. His eyes are locked on yours. ‘I read you. That’s correct. You already…’ Tyler’s hand is freelancing as a propeller. Sometimes it all comes down to a few words, a silence. Then he says it.
    ‘Roger, twenty minutes, at zero, three thirty. I will hold them until then. Extraction at zero five hundred. Out’
    He flips off the radio. ‘Looks like you’re off the hook, kid. Get your ass back into cover and wait for me. Did you hear it? They’ll extract at five hundred hours.’
    You are shaking your head. ‘Come on, Tyler. Smoke and flares – are you kidding?’
    ‘Not an idea I’m crazy about myself. But believe me I will be out of there by the time they have their heads out their asses – so you’d better be ready.’
    ‘I can tag them in one minute and they won’t know I’ve been there. I can give Harper’s flyboys a full approach viewpoint straight into the heads up – otherwise you’re wasting time fat-fingering at both ends. Probably drop on us.’
    He puts a forefinger against your chest. ‘Keep the fuck out of it, Rees – is the message. That’s it. Watch my back.’
    Now he’s reaching into one of his packs and pulling out the flash canisters to stuff one at a time into pockets where they won’t clink together. He takes a look at you, pulls the night visor over a last gurn and is gone.
    You watch him moving, not quite at a jog and stepping catlike despite his bulges and bulk. He’s in shadow and his desert camo is working for him. Now he’s just a wavering detail under a vast black sky. Had you been taking his steps they could have had all the details first hand – the divided hill as a control point on the horizon, the shape of the complex, all the approach run calculations encoded in an instant. They’d also have had your viewpoint, breath by measured breath – a billion dollar replay of these precious seconds, the rain in your neck, dirt turning to mud under your feet, your quickening heartbeat at close foreign voices – everything up to the split-second, split-everything carnage – even the smoke sculpture that hangs in the silence when it’s over. Instead of this.
    He crosses wide behind crumbling prefabs and waits for a deeper squall of rain before skipping through a courtyard with a storm-doused fire, several tables and strewn chairs. Close to one bare wall a set of goal posts has been improvised with poles and a rope crossbar. You wait. Above a tumbledown tiled roof there is now a torchlight playing over a column of reptilian green camo paint, the Stonebreaker winching to its launch angle.
    Tyler is whispering on the link.
    ‘Rees, you there?’
    ‘Yup. You see what I see?’ You picture him hunched in darkness working up an old-fashioned nine-line to peck in – with his GPS co-ordinates, clichéd terrain description and the rest of the crap that they’ll have to re-key at the other end.
    ‘It’s nearly up. They’re getting ready to start the pumps. Two guys in bio suits. What do you make of that? My