‘Please, please, I have to save him!’
‘You’re going to get yourself killed,’ he growled, setting me on the ground. He didn’t stop his momentum, his arm around my shoulders like the boom of a sailboat, carrying me forward with impossible strength. ‘I won’t let you do this.’
He shoved me into the harsh fluorescent light of the rec room. I tumbled onto the couch before the huge television set, which seemed to be paused on a video game. This wasn’t me. I didn’t run from the fight. I gripped the couch, turned, tried to get up. Where was my gun? Had I dropped my gun? I needed to find the shooter, to take him down, to save my partner, my brother. To save everyone.
‘Stay here,’ Gabe said from the doorway, miners running past him in the night. ‘The shooting’s stopped. I’ll see what’s going on.’
I couldn’t get air into my lungs. My eyes wandered over the walls; a huge poster of a naked girl lying on her side, one leg up, her hair tumbling down her skinny wrist. Her image marked the territory of the couch corner, the television and gaming console as a Men Only zone. Beside the poster girl, a pair of notebook pages had been taped together and scrawled messily with words beside a column of numbers, the figures crisscrossed, written over and circled triumphantly.
I read the names in a panicked daze.
SergeantKill.
ShooterAce99.
LetTheBodiesHitTheFloor.
HajjiHunter71.
VengeanceIsMine.
I shifted on the couch, and under my hands a plastic case crumpled and cracked. I picked it up. It was for a video game. On the cover, two soldiers crouched in a muddy trench while a mushroom cloud lit up the sunburned horizon.
‘Duty and Honor III,’ I read aloud, turning the case over with trembling fingers. I read the game description in a daze, my eyes flicking now and then to the images at the bottom of the case: a desert landscape, the first person gamer imagined only by the gun he held in front of him. Crosshairs positioned over graphics of bearded men. Women in black shrouds holding the hands of little computerised children, running for cover in some sort of virtual marketplace.
I ripped open the case and found a glossy booklet held together with staples. More of the same images. Bearded men with gaping mouths, blood droplets spraying the screen as they twitched and danced under gunfire. Everywhere, slogans written in spatters of enemy blood.
Protect your base. Weed out the terrorists. Fight for your honor.
‘War is a game,’ I read, my voice trembling.
And the only way to win is to be mentally, physically, and strategically strong. In Duty and Honor III, you won’t just face enemies in the deserts of Afghanistan, the icefields of Russia and the jungles of Africa – you’ll find them inside your own unit!
The hands that lifted the controller from the couch felt like lead. I had to control my shaking, push down hard on the buttons to shift through the menu on the television screen. I went to the game’s leaderboard, where a bulky soldier in sunglasses stood beside a list of names, his arms crossed across his impossibly large chest. The names from the list on the wall were all there.
SergeantKill was on the top of the leaderboard, with a kill score that outdistanced the other players by several digits. I opened the player’s profile and saw a webcam photo of Gabe.
He was all around me suddenly, his huge hands on my arms, lifting me up from the couch.
‘We’ve gotta go, Harry,’ Gabe said, shoving me towards the door. ‘We’ll follow Whitt in the ambulance to town.’
I stumbled out of the rec room in the direction of the van, Gabe’s arm around my shoulders. I was still holding the game booklet. My eyes never left it.
Follow the path of your personalized character right through training and into the field. Serve your commander through a series of tough missions, and earn points toward your overall rank. Conduct missions in which you stalk, hunt and mess with the minds of realistic enemies! Make Commander, and lead your team! The war experience has never been more immersive!
Gabe pushed me into the van, got in, and started driving.
I clung to the windowsill in the dark vehicle, watching the media pack as they passed by us. We were out of the camp before I could utter a word of protest.
Chapter 105
THE VAN TUMBLED along the sand hills, now and then traversing huge dry plains where rocks made the whole vehicle clatter and shiver. The numbness in my limbs was slowly easing, but I didn’t speak. I watched the dark horizon approaching us, a smooth line that marked the distinction between starred dark and empty dark.
In the rear-view mirror, the mine shrank to a handful of gold sparkles, and then was gone.
I held the booklet in my hands and looked at Gabe. He was focused on the road. Though I’d watched his handsome, gentle profile from beside him as he slept, he seemed an unfamiliar figure now. He looked pointed. A man on a mission. He glanced at the booklet, and then my eyes.
‘So you’ve figured it all out, then,’ he said.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘But I’m not feeling good. Tell me I’m wrong, Gabe. Tell me this isn’t . . . This isn’t you.’
I turned the booklet, showed him the picture of a virtual soldier spraying machine-gun fire on cowering digital civilians, their mouths a little too big, their eyes a little too white.
It made sense. Gabe never left the mine. He’d told me himself that living a lie, a fantasy, forgetting about the real world was the only way he got through life here. The only way he could possibly have gotten the score he did on the video game, the kill figures that stretched sickly across the screen, was by spending hours upon hours inside the game.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said.
I gripped my seat as the realisation of what he really was shuddered through me. I felt sick. When had I lost my ability to see monsters behind the masks they wore, of friendly, harmless men? My instincts were failing me, terribly. I’d lain beside a vicious killer, given up my secrets to him, laughed and held him in the moonlight, trailed my fingers over his murderous body. If I could be so completely dazzled by Gabe’s lies, did this mean that I was wrong about my brother, too? What the hell was wrong with me?
Gabe glanced at me with empty eyes as I sat wrestling with my thoughts.
I said nothing. He gave me some time, his face taut in the dim light from the dials in the console before us.
‘I think that night, when I told you about my wife, I was trying to explain it,’ he said. ‘How this place – it’s like another world. An escape world. A place where you come to mark out your own horizons, and you sort of say, “Alright. This is it. Everything outside, it’s gone now.” ’
I looked at the desert before us. The repeated patterns of spinifex, dry grass, rocky ridges running under our tyres. Something bolted out in front of us, rocketing away from the light. A rabbit?
‘I can control things here,’ Gabe said, pointing towards the windscreen. ‘In the game, and in the Never Never. You have to understand how great that is. I mean, you’re all about control, right, Harry? I knew that the first time I looked at you.’
‘Do you actually have any kids?’ I asked. ‘Your room. I should have noticed. No photos of kids.’ My voice was hollow. Why was that my first question?
‘Kids? What? No, no no,’ he said. ‘It’s all part of the game. I was creating myself. My profile. I knew a vulnerable divorcee would speak to you. Someone who wanted desperately to be with his kids, but who never could be. The family shattered. You know? Strategy.’ He looked embarrassed. ‘All strategy.’
‘Why are you doing this?’ I asked. ‘How have you kept this secret from me?’
‘The game is bleeding,’ he said, his voice thin, almost panicked. ‘It’s been hard to see the edges sometimes. It’s like ink leaking out. At night I have dreams from inside the game, and when I wake up, it’s like I have to try to remember who I am. Am I SergeantKill? Or Gabe Carter?’
He ran a hand through his sweaty hair, almost laughed.
‘Who d
o I want to be? Who gives me more purpose? Who makes me feel more real?’
‘Gabe, I –’
‘Who’s playing a role, and who isn’t?’ He gestured helplessly to his reflection in the windscreen. ‘I can’t tell the difference anymore.’
We were a long way from the mine. He stopped the van and looked at me, his eyes wider than they should have been. He reached for me, and I jolted in my seat.
‘Do you get it?’ he asked. He reached out and knocked against the inside of the windscreen, the glass making a loud tonking sound under his huge fist. ‘I mean, are we in here, or are we out there?’
‘We’re out there,’ I said, my voice trembling. ‘This isn’t a mission. This isn’t a game. You’ve killed real people, Gabe. You’ve murdered real men and women. Edward Whittacker is a real man. He might be dead. I’m a real person.’
‘Yeah, maybe.’ Gabe looked sceptically at the windscreen, the edges of it, cast his eyes through it towards the blackened horizon. ‘Maybe. Maybe. Listen, jump out, would you? We’re on the clock here.’
Chapter 106
‘WE’RE NOT ON any clock,’ I said as he wrenched open my door. ‘Gabe, look at me. Look at my eyes. You can trust me, OK? You can trust what I’m saying.’
‘That’s what they all say,’ Gabe smirked, grabbing my wrist. ‘You can trust me. I’m one of the team. I’m one of the good guys. Yeah. Yeah. And they all turn against us in the end, don’t they? I mean, Danny – he spent more time out there with the EarthSoldiers than he did on camp. I should have known by the way he performed in the missions. Fucking backstabber. Fucking glory hog.’
Gabe locked the van and walked around to the back doors, flung them open, annoyed.
I stood in the sand, holding the game booklet, numb. ‘Killer. Dark. Hunter. Vengeance,’ I murmured. ‘The names in his notebook. He was trying to pick a game name.’
‘VengeanceIsMine,’ Gabe snorted, rummaging in the back of the van. ‘Really? Wow.’
‘But he wasn’t your first.’
‘No.’
‘Hon,’ I said. ‘He was your first victim. You’d been out here alone in the desert, stalking the EarthSoldiers, but you couldn’t get near them because of the cameras. You were fantasising about the mine being an army base. The EarthSoldiers being insurgents. The enemy. When Hon allowed them to raid the food stores, he was betraying you. Betraying the mine.’
‘You’re very good, Harry,’ Gabe said, a little sadly.
‘Hon mustn’t have given you what you wanted. A challenge. A proper fight. Danny was next,’ I said. ‘Hon you hunted in the tunnels. But Danny you took out into the desert.’
‘He’d been in the game,’ Gabe sighed, looking at the stars. ‘We’d fought together, in the desert, in Afghanistan. We’d cleared villages together. I thought he’d be in his fucking element out here. But he was a coward. An idiot. That Shamma girl ruined him. Made him soft. Same with Tori. She had spunk. I thought she might have put up a good fight. But she was a dulled blade. Back and forth to the enemy camp all the time, hungry for weed. I should have known.’
‘Gabe.’ I grabbed at him. ‘Gabe, listen to me. This is the real world. The camp is not a base. It’s a fucking uranium mine. You hear me? I’m not your enemy. I’m not. I’m not.’
Tears were welling in my eyes. But I could not show weakness now. It might be the difference between living and dying. He seemed to want to shake away an anger that kept rising. Adrenaline for the start of the hunt was beginning to leak into his veins. Maybe if I could just keep him calm, I’d have a chance.
‘Gabe, listen to me, you don’t have to do this.’
‘Look, Harry, I might have time to get a hold of things eventually, get some downtime and figure out exactly who I can trust. But not right now.’
I tightened my hands on his arms, tried to hold on, but with his brute strength he brushed me off like a fly.
‘You’re good,’ he said. ‘But you’re not that good. You were a special mission from the start, Detective Blue. You were always going to take extra planning. Extra strategy. Lure, subdue, capture and gather intel. Those were the objectives for you. I thought you were out of my league for a while there. But I got you in the end. And now we reach the final challenge. I’m sorry it has to be this way.’
He lifted a pair of black goggles onto the top of his head, a complicated band of instruments encased in rubber. Only when he flicked the night-vision lenses down over his eyes did I realise what the headset was.
‘On a bearing of zero-five-one, at a distance of one-point-nine-one kilometres, your weapon is waiting,’ he said coldly. He pointed over my shoulder, the green glass over his eyes making him look like an alien visitor. He swivelled, and pointed to the north-west. ‘On a bearing of three-two-eight, at a distance of one-point-eight-seven kilometres, my weapon is waiting. The camp lies at true north.’
‘Gabe,’ I begged. ‘Please.’
For a moment he seemed to break from his robotic ritual, his green alien eyes turning down towards me. At the corners of his lips, a pleasurable smile twitched.
‘Because you’re a special mission, Harry, I’m going to have to even the odds a little. I didn’t do this for the others. But you’re no ordinary case.’
Before I could speak, he swung his fist back and then forward, sinking it deep into my stomach. I doubled and fell to the sand even before the pain had a chance to swell through me, stealing the breath from my lungs.
‘We’re greenlit, soldier,’ Gabe said from above me. ‘Move out!’
Chapter 107
WAKE UP, TIGER!
I gripped the sand with my fists, tried to suck air into my lungs. Both felt flattened against my back, the punch having destroyed everything between my lower ribs, hollowing me out. When I did finally gasp, I got a lungful of sand for my troubles. It was a good hit. But I’d taken worse.
Get up! Pops was there with me, roaring, spitting with rage and exhilaration, kicking at my side as I rolled on the mat. This is round fucking two!
I glanced at the stars and tried to steady myself against the rocking, spinning world. I stumbled, staggered, then fell into a hunched run. I didn’t know where I was going. But I was getting the hell out of here.
Hands up. Head down. Breathe, Tiger. Remember to breathe.
I looked at the stars as I ran, and their secrets began to speak, single stars emerging from the mess of lights. I remembered Gabe holding my hand, pointing towards them, linking them together, a huge black map stretched over the Earth.
That’s Venus. That’s Saturn. And that one is the Square of Pegasus.
I put my head down and sprinted through the dark.
Chapter 108
GABE TROTTED STIFFLY across the rocky plains, rising and falling skilfully over the landscape. His boots thudded between sharp desert plants, avoiding long cracks in the earth. These were his hunting grounds. He knew them intimately, as was his duty. The rifle wavered in front of him, bobbing back and forth with his steps, a rhythm he’d become accustomed to over the long months as his body shifted from fat, muscle and bone to killing machine.
It had been a long journey. There had been plenty of failures out here in the dark. He should never have buried Danny. It was laziness, cockiness – a short cut he’d taken after a long night on the mission that had almost cut his game short.
There would always be failures, but what was important was that he kept levelling up, kept learning and getting stronger. He had to do his research. He had to weed out the traitors. Complete the special missions and outsmart the idiots who currently had command.
One day soon, he knew, he’d be ready for the final campaign – the eradication of the EarthSoldier camp. He didn’t have the power yet, but when he did, he’d rain hell on them. His reconnaissance missions told him that they were the only ones out here with the training and equipment to challenge him. They had the resources to destroy his base, and they’d threatened his people more than once. They’d shown their mental and physical st
rength just by surviving the dust storms, the dry heat, the sun-scorched land. Their cause never wavered.
The EarthSoldiers couldn’t be underestimated. They were cunning as foxes, and it would take a well-planned attack to wipe them out.
He drew a deep breath and let it out slowly as he headed up over a ridge. He mustn’t get ahead of himself, lose himself in dreams. He needed to be strong. Grounded. Only one thing stood in his way, and she was just coming into sight now, a tiny figure moving on the horizon.
Harriet Blue was the ultimate test of his loyalty, his commitment to the mission. In another life, he might have liked to be with a woman like Harry. Like the EarthSoldiers, she was resilient. She didn’t bend to the winds of trouble, but stood strong and tall like a tree. But wasn’t that just the key to it all, exactly what made her so dangerous? She was like the EarthSoldiers. She was powerful, and resourceful, like them.
She was the enemy. Gabe couldn’t afford to be sucked in.
The Soldier watched Harriet running along the bottom of a shallow valley towards the gun he’d left for her, propped upright against a round rock. The moonlight lit up the weapon like a torch.
He stopped running and settled into a crouch, watched the bright green shape of her slow briefly before snatching up the weapon and turning slightly on her path.
Gabe frowned. He lifted the rifle and set the lens of his night-vision goggles against the scope. And watched Harriet bolting with all her strength southward, in entirely the wrong direction.
She was heading out into the desert. Away from the camp.
Chapter 109
MY BREATH CAME in loud, harsh yelps. Every step rocked pain up through my hips, into my stomach. The rifle was enormous. I carried it in both hands, stumbling and almost falling now and then as my boots fell crookedly upon the desert sand.