SNAFU: Hunters

“Sir, we’re still several clicks from the hypocenter.”

“I’m aware of that, Sergeant. Now pull over.”

Blake knew not to argue, although looking out through the cabin’s toughened-glass ports he was damned if he could make out the reason for it. The dust storm still raged. He couldn’t see more than twenty feet in any direction but what he could see was just Arizona scrub. The readings on the spectrometer hadn’t spiked and the shallow valley between sand dunes they were traversing had been an unremarkable shithole even before the detonation.

“We’re going out,” Burrows said. “Ready the airlock.”

Burrows sealed his suit and pulled the bulky mask down over his face before pulling the hood of his JSLIST suit tight around it. His old companion was already suited up and standing at the rear door with that equally ancient elephant gun.

Blake gave the order and the collapsible airlock – little more than a thick rubber tent that folded out from the Stryker’s rear hatch – was erected. The two men entered and closed the armored hatch behind them before unzipping the outer door and stepping out into the dust storm.

Blake followed them on the video camera built into a hardened pod on the outside of the hull, panning it around with a tiny joystick built into the console until he had them both in frame.

“What the fuck are they doing out there?” Blake muttered.

Carroll, the old man, was easily recognizable as he towered above his much slighter CIA handler. The man took something out of the thigh pocket of his suit – it looked like a metal snake. When Carroll unwrapped it, Blake saw that it was a long length of motorcycle chain, the sort of thing greasers used to beat the crap out of each other back in the sixties. The chain was crimped together at its ends so that it made a circle. Carroll spun it around and then cast it into the dirt with a flick of his wrist so that its rotation pulled the heavy chain out into a perfect circle.

When it landed in the dirt, Carroll took a second to sprinkle it with some water from his canteen before sitting inside the circle, cross-legged like some goddam Indian guru. He pulled some more objects from his pocket and laid those out against the perimeter of the circle in front of him.

The dust storm and the camera’s shitty resolution meant Blake couldn’t make out any of the objects. He did notice that Carroll kept that big rifle close at all times.

“Williams, you reading anything?” Blake asked.

PFC DeShawn Williams manning the spectrometer shrugged. “I’m reading plenty,” he said, “but it’s all the same shit I’ve been seeing for the last five miles.”

What the hell were they doing? They had pin-pointed the center of the explosion seconds after the bomb had detonated. They knew exactly where it was and even in the storm, they knew exactly where they were in relation to it. If there was anything to find, any tell-tale concentration of residual elements that might give some clue as to the origin of the bomb then their best chance of finding it was miles away.

This was needless exposure, and as for the old man singing Kumbayah in the dirt, Blake started to wonder if they hadn’t all had more of a radiation dose than they thought.

“Okay Sergeant, we’re done here,” said Burrows over the com. Even at such short range, his voice sounded distant and scratchy.

“Roger that, sir. Readying the decontamination shower now.”

“No need for that, Sergeant.”

“Sir, I can’t let you back in without decontamination. The dust on your suit would contaminate the whole vehicle.”

“I know that, Sergeant. We’re going to hitch a ride on the outside. I need you to continue toward the hypocenter.”

They continued across the desert, stopping half a dozen times for the old man to throw his chain in the dust and rest his old bones inside the circle. Sometimes, after performing their little ritual, Blake got new orders: either a new direction to take or an instruction to take readings on the mass spectrometer. Blake tracked their progress on his map, it was painfully slow. Their path picked a meandering line in a rough direction about two points west of the center of the explosion. At this rate they would be testing the limits of their air reserves before they even reached their goal.

The rest of the team was growing impatient too. They all knew theirs was a one-way mission. They had to feel like it meant something; that their sacrifice wasn’t going to be in vain.

Blake did his best to keep them focused. “Williams, get on the periscope,” he ordered. “Keep an eye out for any survivors.”

“Survivors? For real?”

“We’re still outside the kill zone, Private.”

“Sergeant’s right, DeShawn,” said Lyons from the driver’s seat. “At Hiroshima they found survivors just a few hundred meters from the hypocenter.”

“This wasn’t no fuckin’ airburst, man. This was a bad-ass truck bomb. Anyone inside a few hundred meters would have been atomized. We’re probably driving through a cloud of your ‘survivors’ right now.”

“Contact right!” shouted Lyons.