THE PILOT
She smiles over her shoulder at me as we head for the fence and the water just beyond. That was the smile that got me. Sure, watching her climb over the railing in those tight jean shorts didn’t hurt. But it was that mischievous smile that never let me go. It’s the last thing I think about before the blinding white light and the thought that this is how I’m going to die.
The next thing I’m aware of is a man in a commander’s uniform sitting by my bedside, sipping a cup of tea. Also that it’s really goddamn cold and I appear to be babbling on about how when I was eleven and accidentally glued my fingers to my model Spitfire I’d stayed up all night making.
The commander seems not very amused by my anecdote and the bald man next to him, wearing a thick gray coat and no military piping, has an even more frustrated look on his face.
“Captain Moore, the commander was asking about the radar on your plane. Do you know the estimated range?”
Ah, snap. Now I get it. It’s coming back to me. I was doing a flyover of some tiny speck in the East Siberian Sea because a satellite picked up an infrared flash and we got a weird seismic signal.
At some point I must have got hit—which is really, really hard to do with an SR-71. Fact is, I think I may be the first. Well, crap. Although I don’t remember getting hit—there was some kind of bright light and all my instruments decided to take the night off. After that… I’m not sure when I ejected, but I’m pretty sure my bird was on a trajectory that would have taken her into the Laptev Sea—making her a bit hard for the Ruskies to salvage. I hope.
I can’t remember if I hit water or land, but from how sore everything feels, my money is on that I landed on the sharpest pile of rocks in all of Mother Russia.
The commander says something in Russian a little too quickly for me to understand. I know enough to get by and tell what their pilots are talking about when we pick up their chatter in the air—usually their fat wives in Minsk and their pretty girlfriends in Moscow—but not enough to make sense of rapid-fire conversation.
The bald man adjusts the IV drip and for the first time I notice the room around me. There’s some medical equipment and strange-looking Soviet machinery, but it doesn’t appear to be a hospital. The trusses and restraints remind me of the stuff in Grandpa’s barn where he’d castrate bulls. It’s all lit by gas lanterns—which just reminds me how weird Russia really is.
I glance at the IV and realize that the painkiller has been making me loopy and probably a bit talkative—which was the idea.
“The radar, Captain Moore, what is the operational range?” the bald man asks again. I realize that he’s been speaking in perfect American English—okay, not quite perfect; he’s got a bit of an East Coast affectation about it.
So this is the game: get old Billy here to start spilling his guts about the Blackbird. No, sir. Kelly Johnson himself would come out of retirement and take me to Grandpa’s barn and do worse to me than these commies if I revealed any of her secrets.
“Did I tell you about the time Julie Conner and I decided to go take a skinny-dip in the reservoir?” It’s my go-to happy thought and how I refuse to let them cage me in mentally.
The commander says something I’m pretty sure means, “Take away his painkillers and put him in a…” I think he meant “cell,” but the word sounded a lot like kennel.
* * *
Clang clang… clang
Two clangs, a pause, followed by another clang means the guard with the fur cap is coming, according to the code I’ve worked up with the Chinese pilot at the other end of the metal pipe running through my cell.
They brought him in a few hours after me. He must have been doing an overflight in a JZ-8 and suffered the same malfunction I did.
From the looks of the burned-out light bulbs and the fact that I haven’t seen a single working piece of electronics, I suspect that whatever took us down also affected the whole base—or “Agricultural Resource Institute” as it’s listed on the maps.
Ping, as I’ve come to think of him over the last two days, must have been more banged up than I was. Despite that, he put up a bit of a fight from the commotion I could hear down the hall when they put him into his cell.
From the sound of gunfire I heard go off, it looks like Ping may have gotten hold of an AK-47. But after the beating they gave him, he’d hadn’t made a whisper until I started banging my spoon on the metal pipe, seeing if anyone was at the other end.
I tried for a few hours with no response. Then sometime late at night—I think it was late at night—he responded. I don’t have a watch or a window to tell me when—not that one would help much this far above the Arctic Circle.
The first response was a clang like the one I’d made. I tried tapping out a little Morse code, but evidently they didn’t teach him that in flight school. So we had to get creative.
If you put your ear real close to the pipe you can hear all kinds of sounds: footsteps, squeaking doors, men arguing and even rats scurrying through the walls.
We settled on a very simple code. The first series of taps was an object like a door or a man. The next one was an action.
Two clangs was a man, probably Mr. Fur Cap. After the pause was an action. In this case one clang meant “walking” or “coming.”
A rat was four clangs. We figured that out after we recognized the squeaking sound. If we heard a rat scurrying along, that would be clang clang clang clang… clang.
Ping tried to simplify the system by speeding up the clang sounds indicating that a fast series was supposed to be multiplied by itself: clangclang was supposed to be four clangs and clangclang clang was five, clangclangclang was nine, but doing the math made my head hurt. It was enough to keep track of what each number represented.
For really complicated objects that we couldn’t hear in the walls, Ping came through with another clever idea: a way to send pictures…
Ping started by making a series like clang clang clang clangclang clang clang… clang clangclang clangclang clangclang clangclang clangclang… and so on. It was so complicated I had to scratch them into the wall with my spoon just to keep track.
It took me an hour to realize he’d sent me a picture of a stick figure man, kind of like the ones on my nephew’s Atari. That clever Chinaman. If they ever give up that communist nonsense, watch out world.
Two days later we had a series of clangs for men, guns, doors, aircraft and even a map of the prison.
I started etching the words under my mat, so my jailers didn’t find what looked like an escape plan—which it wasn’t, because we were stuck on a tiny little rock covered with Russian special forces in the middle of the Siberian Sea.
This was just a way to entertain ourselves. And since Ping wasn’t much for personal questions or games, building the clang-language was all there was to do between interrogation sessions—which I was getting fewer of since Ping showed up.
Clang clang clang… clang, Ping tapped. That meant men were coming and one of us was going to get worked over by Commander Ratface—Ping’s name for the commander who first interrogated me.
I stared at my door, waiting to see if the boots stopped here or kept walking. I felt bad hoping that they were going to keep moving—because that meant they were going to pay a visit to Ping, and they always seemed to go a little rougher on him.
The key turned in the lock and the bald man, Jennings was his name, stood there with Ratface. Behind them was the short dark-haired sadist named Vostov they used to hold me down.
He walked into my cell, slipped an arm around my neck and put me in a chokehold. I didn’t resist. I knew the routine by now, and so far it wasn’t working out too well for either of us.
They’d ask me a question about my mission, I’d tell them about the color of Julie Conner’s panties the first time she let me catch a glimpse of them and Vostov would squeeze my neck until I passed out.
He’d tried pain points, but discovered since the bailout there wasn’t much more you could inflict on me.
In my five sessions over the last two days, I’ve managed to learn several things—probably more than they’ve learned from me.
These men are not expert torturers. This isn’t even a prison. They probably never expected to have an American pilot here.
Also, I’ve come to realize they appear to be totally cut off from their superiors. On top of the storm that was raging across the region, the EMP that took out my radio also fried theirs.
“Captain Moore, why did your superiors send you to spy?”
“There were little blue flowers,” I reply. “Tiny ones. She was sixteen and all I could think to myself was, did her bra match as well? Was she even wearing one? Of course, I found out when we took that skinny-dip in the resa…”
Lights out.
When I come to I’m on the floor, looking up at Ratface. He’s got a pistol pointed at my balls and is yelling at Jennings to translate something. Of course, if he spoke slower, I could do it myself, but I haven’t let on that I speak any Ruskie.
“What do you know about the other airman?” asks Jennings.
“It was cold that day, but oh boy! It was even colder for Julie. I quickly forgot about those little blue flowers.”
Ratface gun-whips me and I see stars.
“Are you aware of any others like the airman?”
“Lots,” I reply, before reminding myself I need to be antagonizing them. “Lots of guys would have given anything to see Julie like I did that day. Man, oh man.”
Jennings squats down next to me and holds out a hand, motioning Ratface to wait before striking me again.
“I know you think you’re being clever, Captain Moore, but there’s much more at stake than your parochial little geopolitical posturing.”
“Did you defect because there was nobody left who wanted to listen to you?” I tilt my head toward Vostov, standing in the corner. “Comrade, could you choke me out again so I don’t have to listen to this traitorous piece of garbage?”
This gets a reaction from Ratface who yells at Jennings. Clearly the defector has some kind of authority, because he’s able to yell back at the Russian officer.
“Whose balls did you lick?” I say to Jennings.
“Amusing. My reasons for working with the Soviets are more complicated than politics. Suffice to say that I was interested in areas of scientific research that had fallen out of fashion in the West.
“Which brings me to the critical question that will decide if you live another twenty-four hours. What, if anything, do you know about the incident that occurred here?”
“If you thought Julie Conner’s tits were something to look at, touching them was…”
Jennings, who had been the calm one up until now, slaps me across the face and yells to Vostov in Russian, “After we leave, beat him as much as you want.”
Jennings and Ratface get up to leave. Vostov gives me a half smile, unaware that I know what’s going to happen next… or is supposed to happen next.
I pull myself to a seated position on my mattress while Vostov shuts the door behind him. He’s become so used to my not putting up a fight the poor bastard thinks he has the upper hand.
What he doesn’t realize is that I took this mission prepared to die. I even had a suicide capsule in my flight suit. To other guys it was a joke. Not to me.
Every time I strapped on my pressure suit and squeezed into that tiny cockpit I knew there was a chance it was a one-way mission. I also knew that if I got caught behind enemy lines, my one and only duty was to make sure secrets that could cost American lives didn’t fall into enemy hands.
Some guys struggle with this. Not me. I was ready to lay down my life without hesitation. I knew that back when I took that skinny-dip with Julie Conner. Billy, I said to myself, this is the best day of your life. Everything that comes after is just an afterthought.
Vostov cracks his ape-like knuckles and strides toward me.
He doesn’t notice that my hands are in the space between the mattress and the wall where I keep the spoon I’d used to carve the code Ping and I created—the spoon I’d took the bowl off, so I could use it like a sharp pick to etch into the concrete.
Vostov holds my head against the wall, getting ready to punch me. As his arm rears back, I throw out my own fist, clenching my shiv, and hit him right in the kidney.
His eyes bug out as he tries to process what just happened. I stab him under the jaw in his neck and he stumbles backwards. The spoon handle is yanked from my fist as he falls against the other wall.
Warm blood starts gushing out over his fingers as he tries to close the wound.
I get to my feet, too filled with adrenaline to notice my own pain. Vostov makes flailing motions as he tries to stop me from rifling through his pockets for the key.
A blood-soaked hand clenches my face, but I swat it away. His heart just can’t pump hard enough to keep him going.
My chances of escape are somewhere between zero and nonexistent—but it’s not the plan. My plan is suicide—death by Russian Army.
* * *
When they put my star and no name on that memorial marker at CIA headquarters, I want it to be because I died trying to escape, not because I froze to death or spilled my guts so they would trade me back for some Soviet spy.
I find the key to the lock and get ready to burst into the hallway and fight the first man I see, maybe even getting his AK like Ping did and take out a few of them on the way.
Ping… would he want to get in on this suicide mission? Maybe he thinks his masters back in Beijing are willing to trade for him and it’s not worth the risk. Should I even ask? Why not?
I tap a series of clangs, the one I use for me and the one for him, followed by “door” and “move.”
There’s a long pause—probably only five seconds, but it feels like a day. Then: clangclang.
Yes.
Then it gets weird. Ping taps something that seems to mean if I get him out, his friends will come get us.
Which doesn’t make any sense, because the Chinese aren’t about to invade Russia on the account of us.
But whatever. We’d both rather die on our feet than in here.
* * *
I head into the hallway, looking for a weapon—a spare AK-47, a pistol, anything—but all I can find is a wooden chair.
I take it and go down the flight of stairs to the level below me. There’s a big elevator, but I’m sure it’s been dead since the blackout.
At the bottom of the steps I spot a guard sitting in front of a gas lantern, his rifle by his side and his back to the wall near a massive door.
Since he’s the only other person in this wing, I assume this is Ping’s cell.
“I bring chair,” I say in Russian so bad the soldier just stares at me, trying to figure out if I’m mildly retarded.
He doesn’t know if I’m supposed to be in my cell or outside running errands. It doesn’t matter after I grab the top rail and swing the edge of the seat into his face.
His nose shatters in a spray of blood and he falls out of his seat. Before I remove the massive metal beam holding Ping’s door shut, I have to slide the unconscious man out of the way.
I sling his rifle over my shoulder then open the door to Ping’s dark cell. The first thing that greets me is a pungent, almost acidic smell.
It’s a big chamber and the light from the lantern barely makes it past the door frame. I pick it up and move closer.
“Ping? Um, Clang? You in there, pal?”
Clangclang
Yes.
My light falls onto some medical carts and equipment. There’s a whole rack of scalpels covered in a yellowish fluid.
I push them out of the way and go toward the sound in the back of the room. “What the hell are they doing to you in here?”
There’s a kneeling man with a hood over his head, his arms bound in chains, stretching from one side of the room to the other.
Even though he’s on his knees, I can tell he’s a big boy.
“How the hell did they fit you into a cockpit?”
He pulls at a chain attached to the metal pipe and clangs out a message: Big plane.
It must not have been a JZ-8. I set the lantern down on a cart and reach for Ping’s hood.
“Sweet Mother of God!” I blurt out when I see his face. “You’re not Chinese!”
It’s like every creature I ever pulled out of the creek, all smashed into one nightmare. I’m too shocked to be frightened.
“Did they do this to you?” I ask, trying to comprehend how a man could have such a horror show for a face. Then I look around at his body and realize that everything is wrong. His skin has a sickly greenish-white hue. The musculature is all off and his hands aren’t anything that evolved on God’s green earth.
And those eyes—those tiny yellow-silver balls—they’re just… alien.
Other pilots have told stories about picking up strange radar reflections at altitudes too high for planes. I’ve even heard of accounts of pursuits after phantoms. But those were just… stories.
Worry about the present, Billy.
I realize that battery acid smell is coming from him. I spot several oozing wounds with a greenish-yellow liquid dripping from them. It’s not pus or infected—it’s the kind of thing an eight-foot tall spider would leak if you poked it.
“Ping?” I say again.
Clangclang
Yes.
I grab my rifle and contemplate running for my life. Then I realize it isn’t really worth much right now. And besides, a promise is a promise.
I fumble through Vostov’s bloody keys and go over to the lock holding Ping to one wall.
“You’re uh, not planning to invade us, are you?”
Ping just watches me. I’m not sure if he grasps the question.
I unlock his wrists and he stands upright.
Jesus.
My neck hurts staring up at him. He’s at least seven foot tall. Definitely not Chinese.
His webbed fingers reach out and grab the AK-47. Moving almost too fast for me to see, he field-strips the gun, inspects the parts then puts it back together and pushes it into my chest, clearly not impressed.
He moves through the room, searching through the carts, then reaches up and yanks down the light fixture from the ceiling and begins to take it apart. I put on the guard’s uniform and boots because I’m freezing my ass off. Ping doesn’t seem to care.
“You making a ray gun or something?” I ask, looking at what he’s doing, terrified of what it could be.
Ping creases the metal on the floor and bends the casing into something that looks like a huge machete.
He inspects the blade in the lantern light. It’s crude but deadly.
“So how do you think we should go about this…” I start to ask, but Ping is already moving toward the door.
Fast.
Real fast.
I chase after him, doing my best to keep up, but he’s already halfway down the upper hallway by the time I exit the steps.
Ping comes to a stop at the locked door that leads to the soldier barracks. I throw him the key ring.
He unlocks it then bursts into the other room before I can tell him to wait up and let the AK help us out.
It doesn’t make a difference. By the time I’m in the barracks there are bodies everywhere. The soldiers who managed to get to their weapons fired indiscriminately, killing their own.
Ping is using a limp body as a shield and flinging cots left and right. I squeeze off a few rounds at men trying to shoot at Ping from a shielded position—hesitating only slightly at the thought that I’m firing on my own race. Yeah, well, they never should have asked Vostov to beat me to death.
Ping grabs a man and flings him across the room, his neck snapping as he slams into a concrete wall.
Blood and broken bodies litter the floor. And silence.
I survey the massacre. At least twenty men are dead—all in under two minutes.
Ping’s blade is bent and covered in gore.
Footsteps come from the other hallway. I rush to the door, aim my AK down the corridor and start picking off soldiers as they race to the barracks to see what the commotion was about.
Catching them off guard, I manage to drop six of them before they return fire and I have to go back into the barracks.
Bullets streak through the door as I hear someone scream for reinforcements.
When I look back into the room for Ping, he’s gone.
What the hell?
Something grabs me by the neck and I’m lifted off the ground.
It takes me a moment to realize that Ping has managed to climb into an airshaft—a miracle given his size—and pulled me inside.
He’s already racing through the conduit like a greyhound by the time I orientate myself.
I give chase and find even more momentum when the tunnel starts to get barraged by automatic weapon fire.
A hole emerges inches from my knees and I spot a terrified soldier staring up at the shaft. He knows what just got loose. I’m not sure if I do, but I’m starting to get an idea.
I don’t stop to tell him that he’s not shooting at the monster.
The monster… or as the Russians would say: monstr. Same thing.
There’s a cold blast of air as Ping kicks open a vent. He found a way out and is already running across the snow toward the edge of the facility.
A group of unfortunate soldiers come running around the corner from the opposite direction and Ping slashes through them, sending one man’s head rolling across the snow.
Christ Almighty.
I try to step over a massive puddle of blood, keeping up with Ping.
* * *
There are lights coming from a rise just beyond us. Generators hum over the night air. They must have been able to scrounge enough parts to get them working.
Ping has finally stopped his locomotive pace and is lying on the edge of a hill looking down below.
I crawl on my belly until I’m next to him. I try not to stare. But it’s hard.
Below us, Jennings and Commander Ratface are standing in a huge crater barking orders to men with welding torches and various tools as they try to disassemble the thing that’s in the middle.
A goddamn spaceship—at least part of one. The other half looks smashed up.
There’s a bunch of tarps strewn over the top so our satellites can’t see what’s underneath.
“I’m not rocket scientist, but I’m pretty sure that bird ain’t going to fly again.”
Ping grabs me by the back of the head and aims my nose toward the generator at the edge of the crater, points a terrifying finger at it, then at me.
“Want me to take out the generator?”
For the first time I hear him make a sound. It’s a click… actually two of them. Clickclick.
Yes.
So, my newfound pal wants me to march down to the middle of the crater that’s filled with all of the rest of the soldiers from the base and try to take out the generator?
I asked for a suicide mission, but I wasn’t counting on it being actual suicide…
Then I remember that I’m wearing the uniform I stole from the guard back at the base. At least I’ll be shot in the back as I flee, and not the front as I approach.
I slide down the hill and make my way to a gap at the farthest end from the spaceship.
At any moment, I assume some survivor from the base is going to come running here, telling them what happened. While it would seem logical that the Red Army soldiers here would then race back to help their comrades, I gather Commander Ratface and Jennings would decide it more important to protect the spacecraft.
I enter the caldera and get a better glimpse of the ship. What looks like the cockpit is almost completely smashed.
I have no idea how Ping could have survived that— unless he wasn’t inside.
Wait? Is Ping like our demolition boys who make sure our airplanes and boats don’t fall into the wrong hands?
I stop halfway to the generator. That would mean Ping intends to blow this whole thing up.
Something tells me anything capable of destroying that huge craft is going to leave a crater a lot larger than the one I’m standing inside.
How do I feel about that?
Hell, if it comes between the Russians getting ahold of this tech or not, then this suicide mission got a lot more purposeful.
“Captain Moore!” Jennings yells from across the crater.
I look up from the generator and see fifty commies staring back at me. I’d been trying to find an off switch with no luck.
“Put down your weapon!” Jennings screams as he runs toward me.
Guns are trained on my body from every direction.
I hold my AK-47 in front of me and act as if I’m going to set it on the ground. Instead, I squeeze the trigger, blasting rounds into the generator, and dive toward the frozen dirt.
The lights go out.
There are screams.
Lots of screams.
Bullets whiz through the air and bodies fall. Something hits me in the side, but that part of my body is already numb.
I don’t move, deciding it’s best to let Ping do his thing.
Suddenly there’s a greenish glow from what remains of the cockpit and the silhouette of Ping—then he vanishes.
Dead soldiers are everywhere.
Two heads come rolling toward me: Jennings and Commander Ratface.
Ping has one hell of a sense of humor.
A big hand grabs me by the neck like a kitten and yanks me to my feet.
Ping is on the move away from the ship.
We enter the frozen tundra and my lungs are screaming from the freezing air. Ping doesn’t stop moving.
“We’re going to run out of island, pretty soon, pal.”
Ping isn’t deterred. I get a sense it’s going to be a very big explosion.
We reach the edge of the small bay that looked like an ancient meteor crater from the surveillance photos.
I drop to my knees, exhausted. That’s when I feel my own blood trickling out my side.
The commies got me.
“Ping, it was a good run,” I say through halting breaths before falling on my back and staring up at the stars.
My vision begins to fade and I hear a splash.
“Swim for it, man. Never stop.”
The last thing I see is the Aurora Borealis glowing like neon overhead. It’s a beautiful thing. So much brighter than I’ve ever seen it.
Still not as beautiful as…
* * *
I remember lying there for an eternity, expecting to die. At some point I think I woke up again. There was a loud explosion—louder than anything I could even imagine.
Then I passed out again.
Strange smells.
Even stranger sounds.
And now I’m floating in the water. The stars are overhead again. Crickets are chirping and I can hear frogs croaking.
It’s a beautiful symphony, just like the one we heard back in the reservoir—the day I found true love and I promised Julie Conner I’d marry her one day.
I raise my hand up and look at the wedding band, reminding myself that part wasn’t a dream.
I tell myself I could lay here in perfect bliss, but my back starts to hurt. I roll over and realize I’m on the bank, only half in the water.
Ping is nowhere to be found. In fact, everything is different than I remember…
I get to my feet and look around me.
The chain-link fence.
The no trespassing signs.
My elation is quickly usurped by my frustration.
I’m thousands of miles away from my base—half a world away from where I ditched out of my plane.
And I’m standing in the middle of the backwoods of Alabama wearing a Russian Army uniform.
What am I going to tell my superiors?
Hell, what am I going to tell my wife?