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  Corey glances in the side-view mirror. The black chopper fills it. He pulls on the controls and the Loach goes up. And up. It’s nearly vertical. Then actually vertical. Then more than vertical.

  All the rubbish that was on the floor hits the roof. They’re upside down, pulling a loop. Spike hangs inside his seatbelt harness.

  The Loach flies over the top - and the black chopper follows.

  All the rubbish that was on the roof hits the floor. Corey reaches under his seat, draws out a flare gun as the Loach levels out.

  ‘Hold on!’ Corey rotates the Loach 180 degrees, aims the flare gun out the open doorway and pulls the trigger.

  Red exhaust follows the flare as it snakes across the sky, slams into the black chopper’s left air duct. Its engine coughs and it spirals to the ground, lands hard, kicks up a wave of dust.

  The dog barks.

  Corey grins his crooked grin. ‘I can’t believe it either!’ He taps his temple. ‘I’m always thinking!’

  The Loach’s turbine coughs. Corey glances in his side-view mirror and loses the grin. White smoke pours from the Loach’s rear hatch and the turbine sounds like rocks in a blender.

  The black chopper rises off the desert. Corey sees it, dismayed. ‘Who are these people?’ He turns, scans the horizon. Dead Men’s Curve is close. He points the spluttering Loach toward it.

  Spike barks.

  Corey’s eyes flick to the side-view mirror. A missile blasts away from the black chopper’s underwing arsenal. ‘Oh, come on!’

  It closes fast. Corey wills the chopper towards the Curve: ‘You can do it, sweetheart.’

  The Loach chunters over the rock formation, disappears behind it. An instant later the missile follows.

  The explosion shakes the desert. An orange fireball tumbles into the aqua sky.

  The black chopper thunders over Dead Men’s Curve, cuts through the cloud of smoke and dust. Below lies a mound of smoking rubble the size of three city buses. The black chopper hovers above it, surveys the destruction.

  **

  Spike growls.

  ‘Shhh!’ Corey holds Spike’s snout closed as he listens to the thump of the black chopper’s rotor blades. They sit in the Loach’s cockpit, in a large cavern within Dead Men’s Curve. Its wide rock roof blocks any view from above.

  The sound of the black chopper recedes. Corey releases the dog’s snout, points to the mouth of the cavern. ‘Keep a lookout.’

  Spike hops out of the cockpit and trots to the cavern mouth. Corey slides out, moves to the Loach’s side hatch and unhappily surveys a fuselage pockmarked with bullet holes and scorch marks. ‘Man, I just painted this.’

  Using its homemade twist lock, he opens the hatch’s door, which is loose on its hinges. ‘Gotta fix that.’ He peers into the engine compartment, locates a hydraulic line. There’s a hole in it the size of a thumbnail. ‘Bugger.’

  He turns to the dog, unhappy. ‘This is gonna take a while to fix —’

  Spike barks.

  ‘What? Why?’

  Corey runs to him, follows the direction of his paw.

  The black chopper has landed on clear ground about a hundred metres away. Two men step out of it, both holding assault rifles.

  Corey studies the men unhappily. ‘Who are these people?’

  They move briskly towards Dead Man’s Curve, then see Corey and Spike and start to run.

  ‘God!’ Corey points at the Loach’s cockpit. ‘In. Now.’

  Spike bounds back into the Loach as Corey sprints to the open hatch and finds the hole in the hydraulic line. He studies it for an unhappy moment then pulls the chewing gum out of his mouth and wraps it around the hole with a hopeful expression. He shuts the hatch and climbs back into the cockpit.

  Spike barks.

  ‘Yes I used gum! There wasn’t time for anything else. I’ve got a plan, don’t worry.’

  Corey grabs the rope attached to the winch, pulls it into the cockpit and groans in frustration. The hook and carabiner at the rope’s end have been shot off. He searches for another hook on the cabin floor. There’re a few. He finds the biggest, threads the rope through the eye in the end of its shank and whispers as he ties a knot: ‘The weasel pops out of the hole and runs around the tree and jumps into - into —’ He stops, has no idea what the weasel jumps into.

  Spike barks.

  Corey examines the half-tied knot. ‘The hole? What hole? There’s no hole.’ Corey wraps the rope around and around and around the shank then tucks it under itself.

  Spike barks.

  ‘It’ll hold.’ Corey cranks the Loach’s turbine. It coughs, then dies. He whispers to the chopper, desperate. ‘Come on, baby.’ He tries again. No joy. ‘Please-baby-please-baby-please.’ He tries again. The turbine grinds and coughs and - screams to life. ‘Yes!’

  The Loach lifts off, hovers to the mouth of the cavern —

  The two men are right there. They raise their weapons.

  ‘Jeez!’ Corey wrenches the controls and the Loach’s shrieking tail rotor sweeps towards them. They dive to the ground as Corey powers up.

  The Loach swoops towards the black chopper. Corey leans out the open doorway, twirls the rope with the hook on its end like it’s a lasso, throws it hard.

  It catches hold of one of black chopper’s rotor blades. Corey throttles the Loach and it rises fast. The rotor blade bends, then bends some more, is about to snap.

  The knot unravels, the hook drops off the rope and plonks harmlessly to the desert. ‘Oh come on!’

  Spike barks.

  ‘There was no hole!’ Corey glances in the side-view mirror.

  The men find their feet, swing their weapons towards the Loach, open fire.

  The little chopper’s too quick. It passes over the Curve and out of sight.

  Corey takes a breath, doesn’t look at the dog. ‘Not a word.’

  Spike barks anyway.

  ‘Yes, coming out here was a bad idea.’

  The Loach arcs away from Dead Men’s Curve and thumps towards the heat-soaked horizon.

  **

  19

  Tail down and cargo-bay doors open, Atlantis orbits 150 miles above Earth.

  Rhonda stares at the view but doesn’t see it. The sense of powerlessness she felt after the launch has now morphed into a white-hot anger. She’s furious at being strapped into this chair, at being hand-fed energy bars by her double-crossing ex-best friend, at having to urinate into a funnel held in place by that same ex-friend. She’s furious at it all.

  There is a way out of this situation, she knows it. She just can’t work out what it is. She wishes she could speak to Judd, seek his counsel. He always had a unique way of looking at things, always gave her a fresh perspective.

  God, she hopes he’s okay. The last time she saw him he was standing at the end of the White Room with a gun in his hand. A gun. How in hell did he end up with a gun?

  She has thought about him a lot during the twenty hours since the launch - random moments, like how, on their first date, she was sure the mole on his cheek was a dirty smudge and tried to rub it off, or how he put a bottle of Fiji water beside her bed every night, or how he lowered the blinds in the morning so it wasn’t too bright, or how the coffee machine was always ready to go if she had an early start. She loved how he always made sure their home was ‘just right’.

  She had trouble resolving that side of him, the man who had her best interests at heart, who was funny and irreverent and insightful, with the emotionally needy guy he frequently became.

  When he was first recruited to NASA he’d been a breath of fresh air compared to the crushingly earnest guys in the program. He was dashing, confident, charismatic. She fell for him quickly and things between them had been great for a long time. Then Columbia broke apart and gradually everything changed. Judd’s confidence diminished and was replaced by doubt and fear. She watched him wrestle with them, watched as they came to inform everything he did
and, eventually, undermine his career.

  The less confident he felt, the more he sought reassurance from her. She disliked that neediness and pulled away from him, hoped he’d get the hint and snap out of it. He didn’t, and the distance between them grew. Judd took that distance to mean she was having an affair with Thompkins. Then, when he came to Thompkins’ home she used it as an excuse to leave. The truth was she left because she didn’t have the energy to deal with his insecurities any longer. But now she wonders if she couldn’t have been kinder, supported him more. After all, he had always supported her. He’d given her years of unwavering professional assistance and created a home she could leave to do great things, safe in the knowledge she had a loving place to return to, a place that was ‘just right’.

  ‘Cosmos.’

  Rhonda hears the word buried within the conversation the Frenchman and the Italian are currently holding. Seated in front of her they speak quietly, the cockpit’s white noise making it difficult to hear them clearly.

  Cosmos. Rhonda wonders if they’re having a philosophical discussion about the universe.

  The Frenchman and the Italian had flown the shuttle to low Earth orbit with surprising finesse, had performed almost as well as a couple of genuine shuttle pilots she had worked with. It was not unexpected considering they’d surely had access to a raft of classified training information through Martie.

  Cosmos. Rhonda knows there’s another reason she should remember that word, she just can’t recall what it is. Judd would have known, he always remembered that kind of stuff. She’s about to query the Frenchman about it then stops herself. If she’s going to ask him a question it should be something she actually wants answered. ‘What’s this about? Why are we here?’

  The Frenchman turns to her. ‘I was wondering how long it would take before you asked me that.’ He glances at his watch. ‘Longer than I expected, I must say.’

  ‘Well, I’m happy to disappoint you.’

  He studies her. She meets his gaze. ‘You going to answer the question or what?’

  He takes a moment, then nods. ‘You’ll find out soon enough anyway. A decade ago my group received a call for a job. It was a big one, paid more than anything we’d earned before.’

  ‘Your group earned doing what?’

  ‘Tasks others find - unpalatable.’

  ‘And that is, what?’

  ‘Coups, assassinations, hostage retrieval.’

  ‘You’re mercenaries.’

  His head tilts slightly. ‘I prefer to say we provide a necessary service and fill a large gap in the market.’

  ‘You’re mercenaries. Were you paid to steal my shuttle?’

  He ignores her. ‘This particular job was badly organised from the start. Not as slipshod as some of the African coups we’d worked on, but not much better. The people who’d contracted us were poor communicators, sent mixed signals and changed plans at the last moment with little or no warning. We’d be set to do something and then it’d be called off. It was worse than the left hand not knowing what the right hand was doing. It was like the left hand didn’t know there was a right hand —’

  ‘Are you anywhere near a point?’

  ‘It’s coming. As it turned out we were working for a government. Not a big deal, we’d been contracted by governments many times before. But this was different. It was the first time we had been contracted by someone within your government.’

  Rhonda shrugs. ‘So what?’

  ‘The job was in Pennsylvania. Shanksville, Pennsylvania.’

  The name rings a bell. She knows it from somewhere but can’t - she remembers. ‘Shanksville? You - you can’t be serious.’ She searches his eyes for the crazy, or something that resembles it, anything that will tell her this guy is not playing with the full deck. ‘You’re talking about Flight 93? United 93?’ It’s so ludicrous she half laughs as she says it.

  ‘Yes, we hijacked the plane and staged the Pennsylvania crash on 9/11, put on a light and sound show so everyone in the country thought it crashed there.’

  ‘Bullshit.’

  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘What happened to the plane if it didn’t crash in Shanksville?’

  ‘It landed in Cleveland.’

  ‘Come on. It crashed in Shanksville.’

  ‘And you think that because - why? You saw wreckage? You heard an eyewitness account of the accident?’

  ‘Yes. Both.’

  ‘Then we did our job well, for you at least. Many people do not believe it.’

  ‘If it didn’t crash then what happened to the passengers?’

  ‘The passengers were led into a disused hangar in Cleveland Hopkins Airport and executed, by my team, after which the bodies were loaded into a van, driven to an industrial furnace just outside the city and burned. And your government paid me $40 million to do it.’

  She blinks away the absurdity of the statement. ‘You’re saying that you were responsible for 9/11?’

  ‘No. Just Flight 93. And we didn’t know your government was our contractor until almost two years later.’

  She shakes her head. ‘Doesn’t make sense. Why wouldn’t they just crash the plane and be done with it?’

  ‘They needed to be assured of at least one positive, uplifting story from that day that they could control.’

  ‘What? What’s uplifting about that?’

  ‘Think about it. After 9/11, the passengers on board Flight 93 were heralded as the embodiment of American bravery in the face of Islamic tyranny. They were the “flight that fought back”. Everything they did, from their stoic cellphone calls to loved ones through to “let’s roll”, their call to arms before they attempted to subdue the hijackers - all faked by my people, by the way - created a heroic legacy that was regularly conscripted over the following years to help justify the war on terror and its countless breaches of civil liberties.’

  ‘You’re delusional.’

  ‘Why would I lie to you?’

  ‘You don’t think you’re lying. I’m sure you believe every word of it because you’re delusional.’

  He studies her for a long moment. ‘Do you think Lee Harvey Oswald shot JFK?’

  ‘What does that have to do with anything?’

  ‘Do you?’

  She looks at him, takes a moment to answer. ‘No.’

  ‘When did you realise this?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Think about it. When?’

  She shrugs. ‘I - the nineties. Early nineties. When that movie came out.’

  He nods. ‘JFK. So, thirty years after the fact. But ten years after, if you’d said Oswald was innocent, everyone would have thought you were crazy. Nowadays, if you think he’s guilty, everyone thinks you’re crazy. Well, in twenty years no one will believe al-Qaeda had anything to do with 9/11 either. But by then, who will care? It will be like the truth about JFK, another distant curiosity lost in a sea of tabloid nonsense.’

  ‘It’s just bullshit. Sorry, but it is.’

  ‘The money we were paid was laundered twice before it reached us. As I said, it took two years to trace, but the trail ended inside your government.’

  She shakes her head, not buying a word of it. He regards her for a moment. ‘There’s other supporting evidence, of course. No senior government figures flew on domestic airlines that day. The Twin Towers collapsed too smoothly to be the result of aircraft impacts. No aircraft wreckage was found at the Pentagon because it was hit by a cruise missile, which even the secretary of defense at the time accidentally referred to. When bin Laden was uncovered in Pakistan they promptly murdered him so he couldn’t tell the world he had nothing to do with 9/11. It goes on.’

  ‘That’s just crazy conspiracy-theory shit.’

  ‘Not every conspiracy’s a theory, Ms Jacolby.’ The Frenchman turns back to the controls.

  Rhonda tries to process what she’s heard. Does she believe any of it? 9/11 as a false flag operation? H
er late father, a military-history buff, had explained the idea of false-flag ops to her when she was a kid and it had stuck in her mind, if only because of its name.

  A false-flag operation is a covert government mission designed to deceive the public so that the mission appeared to have been carried out by an enemy, thus clearing a path to war with that enemy. The Department of Defense had considered such an operation in the early 1960s during the Cuban missile crisis. It planned to hijack a US passenger jet then blame it on the Cubans as a prelude to invasion. Operation Northwoods was only cancelled at the last moment by President Kennedy. Many people, including Rhonda’s dad, also believed the Gulf War had been a false-flag operation, the US government giving Saddam Hussein the green light to invade Kuwait through back channels, then using his aggression as an excuse to start the war so they could destroy his newly built military.