6517 words (26 minute read)

THE OUTER CORDON

The dim light inside the Hercules C130 plane turned the fuselage into a dungeon. Straps for seats like webs hanging from the sides, with all of the inner workings of the beast on display around them. The constant screaming of the enormous four-engine turboprop propellors blotted out all but thought. Some sat with open eyes, headphones pushed deep into ear canals to force out the engines and to keep in the shred of the metal. The loadmaster sat for most of the journey next to the cockpit with the pilots still and looking forward in the goblin green tactical lighting. Then the engines changed in tone and they could feel their stomachs sink as they felt the descent becoming. The loadmaster stood with the microphone pressed to his lips, and the lights changed to red, bathing the six of them, and the eighty empty seats around them, in blood.

‘Hundred miles out, we won’t be stopping Vince,’ One of the pilots crackled in that calm tone that pilots always offer for potential panic.

‘Roger,’ Vince said, engaged by the book in his hands and the page hanging over his thumb. The book they gave him. He closed it flat without care to record his page and threw it under the seat. Vince looked to the back of the plane and saw the loadmaster with a red torch in his mouth illuminating his face like a devil while he removed the net that held their gear to the floor.

The pilot did as he said and made them exit into a jog off the tailgate while the plane crawled through its taxi. Freddie grabbed the rifle bag and they hopped off into the vacuum hurtling past them. The engine screamed at them with hot breath, pushing them out of its path and towards the hanger before them. The Hercules moved slowly around in a long U turn, dragging its enormous belly to the end of the strip. They left it behind them as they walked through the twenty-foot hanger doors, that were rusted into their open position. Not a soul in sight, no tower, no form of control anywhere. No sign of anything other than the growth of foliage crawling under the tin sides. Vince led them through the door and towards the other end which was a mirror of the other side, but looked out into a car park. The Hercules started sucking in its limitless breath as the propellors disappeared with speed. And along and up it went until the roar left slowly, and none of them turned to see it off and missed the dip of it’s wing to them on the way out. A mechanical salute to the departed.


They stand in the sour-smelling entrance of what most established civilisations would call a derelict airport entrance. The six of them look around at the landscape, trees as far as they could see. A faded sign made from sheet metal they could only assume meant ‘Keep out’ loosely flapped on a chain link fence at the half-open gate, at the entrance to the car park before them. A black minibus that was unrecognisable in make and model from their distance looked as though it was built only for them as it sat static at the back of the carpark. It looked like the last vehicle on earth. They each watched over everything before them, everything plundered of color and life. The concrete laid long ago was cracked beyond repair as foliage underneath had finally forced its way through the once impenetrable surface. Everything was forgotten, banished from restoration and care immediately after construction. An airport built for one flight.

‘Can you smell that?’ Adam said in a quiet breath, as he stood in the cold wind on the step by the hanger entrance.

‘Yeah, awful isn’t it,’ Vince said as he picked up his bergan and shrugged it over his shoulder. He took a deep breath as he smelt the air, ‘The smell of stagnant time,’ he said. Adam looked at him, Vince was not interested in the state of it all, but with the man stood by the minibus with his hands deep in his trench coat pockets.

‘I hope we’re at the wrong place,’ Danny said as he checked his phone, no signal, no data, nothing, ‘We may as well be on Mars.’

They all step off the cracked stairs and into the vast, overgrown carpark towards the strange man by the minibus. Just beyond the perimeter of the car park across some marshlands, the Siberian forest began all around them and never ended. It was evident that there was nowhere else to go, and the well earned ego of being part of a remarkably proficient and admired special forces unit seemed to wash over each of their thoughts, and vulnerability was in its wake.

‘Keep your eyes on the trees,’ Danny said as he rolled his vision across the tree line that seemed to surround them.

‘They want us here mate. If anything is going to happen, it will be where we’re going,’ Vince said as he stepped over a rusted old tractor wheel partially hidden in a clump of ferns that the others would have tripped over if he didn’t spot it.

‘Where are we going?’ Freddie reluctantly inquired, slinging his rifle valise over his shoulder.

‘Wherever the bloke is tasked to take us,’ Vince says.

‘He could have parked closer,’ Danny mumbled.

They stand before the man who did not look away from them on the awkward hundred metre journey from the entrance to the minibus, which seemed more rickety upon closer inspection. Patches and holes ate away by rust. What stood out as the first indicator of their unpreparedness, was the man’s robes. A reinvented world war two trench coat that was fur lined with a wide collar that rolled over his shoulders into a warm looking hood. A thick wax surface on the material, heavy and stab proof. There wouldn’t be much running in it, but it hung over him like chainmail. His hands buried in his deep pockets in the hips of the jacket, and the only skin visible was his face. Grey eyebrows and grey eyes buried in deep sockets and eyelids that looked rarely used. His skin like an old cracked tyre, dry and hard and it was no effort in determining that he would be in his late thirties. A natural upside down smile. He analysed them slowly, interested in what Vince and the others wore. Jeans and wind stop shell fleeces, smart and comfortable looking walking boots, Scarpas, Salomons. It looked like a fashion sense rather than a dress code for survival. Vince watches him do so then reached out his hand.

‘Captain Vincent Mann, are you expecting us?’ Vince says with a slight nod of the head. The man takes his hand from his pocket and grasps the offer of introduction.

‘Sasha. Are you Christians?’ He says in a thick Russian accent. Vince looks around the others who frowned and smiled.

‘If you like,’ Vince said. Sasha smiled with them and then looked them all over once again.

‘Let’s go,’ Sasha says single nod to the bus.

Vince looks around subtly, at the wheels of the bus and at the tree line in front of them. The first man you meet is not the one to ask the questions. Sasha looks at the bundle of rifles in the strapped up bag in Freddie’s hand. Then he looked at each of their faces, noting how young Freddie appeared in comparison to Vince, but Vince returned the silent scrutiny also. He was done with him before they even stepped through the doors of the hanger. Freddie looks around at the tree line for movement, for the flicker of a lens and bad choices of cover as well as good. Sasha looks at the bag, and then at Freddie. There was an element of threat and they couldn’t help feeling it. This was no way to be greeted for an exercise. At all, in fact.

‘Rifles are in the bag,’ Vince says.

‘Everyone brings them.’ Sasha said as he smiled and walked past them to open the rickety backdoors. Vince and the team slid their bergen’s and the rifles into the space between the back seats and looked into the minibus. The leather seats rotten and the foam that spilled through the tears was orange and ancient. There were holes in the floor, and they could see the axle and the exhaust through some of the significant areas of decay. The roof was just the roof with no insulation, and there were pinholes in some of the welds, and single photon beams shone through. There was something beyond unprofessional about such a vehicle sent for them, or deliberate, they couldn’t decide. Danny stood at the back door, and looked around at every detail inside, at the crucifix that hung from the rearview mirror, the only thing that resembled the remotest personality about whoever drove the hovel.

‘Do you wanna check the oil before we get in?’ Danny says to Vince as he steps away from the back door, he looks to Sasha, apparently unhappy with the state of their introduction.

‘What’s the deal with the bus?’ Danny says.

‘The deal?’ Sasha says

‘Yes, the state of it. What’s the deal with that?’ Danny says a little abruptly. Freddie and Adam stand off to the side smiling at Danny’s uncaged annoyance with not only not wanting to be here in the first place but because he has not stopped for the past three years, and could have done with some time off.

‘There is nothing wrong with the bus, and you should be grateful. I had to walk. But you will forget about it soon enough. Get in.’ Sasha says, the cold, odorless breaths puff from his mouth. Vince was neither concerned with the bus or Sasha, he knew the bus worked, and he did not care about the state of it. His only interest was with the old woman and what she stood for, living way out there in the trees. Everything else was an inconvenience. That mysterious being so few have lived long enough to remember.

They board the bus and set off through the gates that had fallen off in some Siberian winter storm, and lay rusted next to the road held to the floor by an entanglement of foliage. The road was long and ran parallel with walls of endless forest either side. Dunes of brown rotten leaves sat in the way like chevrons and Sasha meanders around them as if it was common practice. Small dirt tracks peel away off the road into the forest to old cabins and makeshift houses. Dusk was approaching, and the light was slowly sliding away. It all looked uninhabited until they saw an old man stood on the corner with an axe in his hand watching the road. Vince gazed at him through the cold rattling window. He studied his clothes and the state of his health. A thin man with a torn fleece jacket, and old jeans with layers upon layers of crusty stains of oil and god knows what else caked around his thighs. What was his daily routine? Why does he live here? Math tried to keep track of their whereabouts as he checked his map as they passed. He watched the man gesture the trinity in the looming fog in the tree line, touching his forehead, abdomen and shoulders and Sasha passed him leaving him alone on the side of the road like a lonely hitchhiker. The map was pure green, the road they were on was the only man made feature on the sheet, the rest was hideous, tightly spaced contours displayed as red lines reflecting the high hills and valleys that rose and fell, near and far all around them.The climate so unkind, such a forbidding part of the world where human survival is statically impossible. A cold feeling washed over them all as the rattling bus trundled onwards to where, they did not know, not even Vince. But that is where Vince found the journey interesting and of worth, and it was also why those who worked under him had to prepare themselves for his behaviour. How many from established civilisations had ventured here to this abysmal territory. Another man with an axe passed by, and Adam turned in his seat and watched him disappear into the tundra, and vice versa. But that man held the axe very comfortably, and it looked weightless in his skinny witch like hands.

They pushed deeper into the desolate wilderness. Unfamiliarity was giving way to the first degradation of the self. An old woman in the forest at first seemed to be an innocuous excursion for a remarkably well trained special forces team, until they laid eyes on the airport and Sasha. Vince sat in the front watching the road turn from macadam to patches of flattened mud, and the looming arcade of tall bare trees leaned over the road shielding it from the grey sun sinking on the horizon. Nature was bent over to see them in, because even nature itself didn’t quite understand where they were going. Vince turned and looked at Sasha without expression, the strange Russian was leaned back in his seat with the thin steering wheel between his cold and thick hands. Vince looked into the side door to see a wood chopper axe half disguised by a piece of oily rag. He looked back up to Sasha’s eyes until he returned the glare.

‘You are closer to death than you are aware of. If there is a situation waiting for us down this road, you go first,’ Vince says, the silence in the back as the others pay attention to the words of warning. Sasha looks straight on to the trundling road as if he was deaf to the threat.

‘We are on the same side Captain. You will learn,’ Sasha says as he pulled off the road and follows a dirt track between some tighter trees and as they thinned, the most depressing residence formed before them. A square, single story cabin with blue window frames and closed wooden shutters. A small, rusted metal chimney stuck to the top of the house pours out woodsmoke that hangs over the house. A perimeter of a wooden picket fence surrounded the house, twisted and fallen in places, everything rarely maintained. On the front of the door, a large crucifix hung that took up nearly half of the front panel as if it was fending something off. The team looks through the kaleidoscopic windows as the rain thrashes off the glass.

‘Are you hungry?’ Sasha says.

‘They sell food here?’ Danny comments as he leans over the seat to Vince and whispers in his ear, ‘Are you gonna get on the sat phone?’

Vince looks up and down at the strange house, at the garden with some old and sad corn bowing over in a plot of turned over soil.

‘I see six to his one,’ Vince looks at Danny, ‘This is part of it, to spook us. Don’t let it fool you.’

They climb out of the bus and stand in the mud looking around the perimeter of the building with the thin rain dusting them. Freddie goes to the back of the bus, and before he could reach for the bundle of weapons, Vince turns to him and shakes his head.

‘You sure?’ Freddie says

‘Not yet,’ Vince says, ‘We’re alright.’

Adam looks at the garden, the vegetable patch well watered with spouting cabbages and a cow wallows in mud and old hay in the corner, laying down looking over its shoulder at Adam. It’s empty black eyes watch them and the steam of its hot breath bellows from its snout. It moves its tail once and then turns away and looks back into the forest, at nothing, with no thought at all. The thick and rich smell of woodsmoke in the air was rivalled by the smell of rotten vegetables and manure. They watch Sasha open the front door, and a waft of warmth welcomes them in. Vince looks around at every corner, every exit, every oddity a log cabin in the middle of a strange lost town possessed. The other houses were buried in the forest away from each other, living as if they have never met. Two coats hung up on the wall by the door, both indistinguishable in sexual preference. There was no style in sight, it was tidy, but there was nothing to tidy. It was just wood, wooden shelves, misshapen windows, a single photo hung by a crucifix on the back wall next to the blackened fireplace. A picture of a pair of retarded looking tramps, a child and an old man with digging tools in their hands. Both grim and strained of happiness and humour from ceaseless toil. A fireplace with a slowly extinguishing fire. In the middle of the room were some metal school chairs, square and faded. A door that led to the kitchen at the back of the room with stains around the frame and the noise of jostling pots behind. Maths closed the door behind him quietly as the last man and wanted to take a look at the map, but then decided against it at the smell of the food.

‘Sit by the fire, get warm,’ Sasha says.

The team pulls out the chairs and plot next to the fire. Danny looks around while Vince unfolds his flick knife in his pocket with one hand, dulling the click of the blade lock with a gentle release of his grip. His eyes were all over the doors. Sasha sits down at the end, taking off his trench coat and laying it over the back. Underneath he was wearing a jumper with a plain and simple emblem embroidered into the pectoral region of the fabric, and his strength underneath was visible and they could see it in his square shoulders and his baguette size traps. Vince studied him while the others registered the jumper. It intrigued them. A military jumper denoting a belonging to a particular club. Danny never sat down, and instead looked at Vince, and saw him nod. Danny walked across the room, past the photos and followed the smell to the kitchen door. He pushed it open hard with his knife in his hand and saw a middle-aged woman stood by a cauldron on a log burner oven, stirring with a metal ladle. Vegetables strewed over a chopping board next to a bucket of rotten potatoes skins.

‘Okay! theres just a woman back here.’ Danny said.

Vince closes the knife in his pocket and looks at the white crucifix on the jumper, small and tightly sewn. Underneath the cross was a motto curling perfectly around the base and it drew the team eyes, a slogan that made them look into Sashas eyes, No Beast so Fierce.

‘You excited about seeing her?’ Sasha said, rolling his cold palms together.

‘Yes, is she well?’ Vince said.

Sasha smiles and reveals his teeth for the first time like a shark coming in for its first and final strike. They had been removed and replaced with an entirely silver set of dentures. There was no original tooth remaining as far as they could see, and Freddie nearly laughed in his face at the idea of some gangster anecdote surrounding his history and the absurdity of it, but he was saved by some almighty strength that he didn’t know he possessed.

‘I don’t know, no one does. You are brought in and sent, the word is that she’s dying,’

‘I see. How many of them are waiting for us down that road?’ Vince said

‘That’s not your concern. It’s not who, but what,’ Sasha’s teeth rolled away under his lips again. He stands and goes to a small cupboard and slides out a jingling tray with five shot glasses stacked in a pyramid, and a dusty bottle of vodka precariously balanced to the side. His footsteps massage the creaks out of the wood, and the floor sounded solid. He sat down with the tray in his lap and took the bottle and unscrews the lid with one hand while unstacking the glasses with the other. Danny still in the kitchen doorway staring at the woman trying to figure her out.

‘Is it just you here?’ Danny says, looking at her filthy wellington boots, her headscarf around her head and her sunken and tired eyes looking back at him expressionless. She didn’t respond. Around her neck hung a large wooden crucifix that was filthy as though it had been clasped in dirty hands for the last hundred years. The pot throbbed with thick bubbles of some hearty looking stew, it smelt good. He stepped back through the door and closed it softly behind him then walked back to his chair and joined the collective stare at Sasha.

‘One outback,’ Danny advised them.

Vince leaned back and crossed his legs.

‘You will have no trouble here,’ Sasha says calmly as if the silent room clearance was a mirage that he was expecting. Vince nods slowly.

‘The last team I picked was American, they looked promising,’ Sasha says as he finishes pouring the vodka, he was careful with the bottle, and each shot he filled perfectly. The perfection of his pour hypnotised Adam, and he looked up at Sasha who was not even looking at the glass while pouring but organising the other shots in line with the other hand.

‘When?’ Adam says.

‘Maybe a year ago. It used to be less so, perhaps every six months,’

‘Gold Squadron by any chance?’ Vince said

‘Yes, seals,’ Sasha says, lifting the tray and standing up. He walks to each of them, and they all take a glass each. Freddie thanked him quietly. Vince held the shot between his fingers and rested it on his knee. There was trust. Vince took the man for his word because Sasha had clocked it very early on in his first glance at them stood by the bus. If he lied to them, they would know and they would tie him to a tree in the forest with barbed wire and slash his eyeballs for breaching such a code of conduct. The moment Sasha saw Vince, he was excited, there wasn’t many from the UK. It’s a small country, but there is a particular grit with those who come from there. Adam studied the shot in his had, looking for abnormalities in the liquid, thickness, separation, colour, spiraling debris. He sniffed it as discretely as he could. Scentless. Sasha looks at them smiling again, that unsettling smile like some deranged version of a soviet rapper. Danny looks at Vince for some hint, if Vince looked uneasy about anything then there was real crisis around the corner, but he didn’t seem troubled, and Danny couldn’t tell if that bothered him or not.

‘Are we getting into some jam here Sasha?’ Danny says. Seals, here, in some outback demented village of the Siberian Taiga. There were no missions here, no threat, no resources and no need for Seals to be operating in such a place, at least no reason they had ever heard of until now, when it was too late.

‘I have never stopped here with candidates. Today is the first. But I wish to tell you before you get there, that there is no way to prepare for this, and the silence is necessary. It is a thing you simply have to see and do for yourselves, and I hope you come to understand.’

‘Any tips?’ Vince said

Sasha thought for a moment, twirling the shot glass in his fingers.

‘Get there quickly and be ready to fight for your life in the pitch black,’

The kitchen door opens, and the woman steps through the door using her elbow to open it with both hands holding a wooden tray with five bowls steaming. Adam and Freddie watch her limp into the room and place the tray on the floor between them and then as she stood up she threw her headscarf back over her shoulder and walked back to the door, touching her forehead, shoulders and then her abdomen as the door closed behind her. She was praying. Sasha leans forward and hands a bowl and a wooden spoon to each of them, and they take in turn. Then he leans back and rolls up his sleeves and looks at them. The bowls in their hands, steaming goulash with a wedge of brown bread dipped in the juice.

‘This is the age of the antichrist. It is in all our interest that I wish you Godspeed,’ Sasha says as he lifts his shot before his face, looking at them through the liquid scope. They all look on with perplexity and each offer up their toast, after watching Sasha throw it back and place the glass on the floor soundlessly, they all follow suit. The vodka was intense, and there was a single muffled cough from Adam, as it rolled down like lava, he didn’t drink often.

‘Find your faith quickly and make her show you. Eat now. Waste nothing. Like a man lost in the desert who washed his hands when water was in abundance, you will reflect on everything you have ever wasted,’ Sasha says as he takes his spoon and ladles out a chunk of potato with the skin still on, and a slither of grey meat and passed it into his silver jaws. Vince stirs his bowl and looks at the goulash, then takes his bread and uses it like a sponge in the pot. He tears off the sour and tasteless dough with his teeth. There was no salt in the meal, and it tasted earthy and dull. Freddie was still stirring while the others were eating and before he took his first mouthful, he looked at Sasha.

‘What happened to the seals?’

Sasha, looks at him,

‘You’ll see them on the way in, but pay no attention to them. I never saw any of them again,’

‘Are they dead?’ Danny said

‘Something like that,’ Sasha said, spooning a chunk of carrot into his silver lined jaws. Danny couldn’t help but look at Vince while he ate and could feel some anger welling inside him as he could tell Vince wasn’t listening to Sasha, almost completely absent of interest.

‘Something like that! What does that fucking mean! Something like that? Did you bring them back?’ Danny rocked back in his chair with a perplexed smile, looking around at others.

‘Finish your food, we don’t have long. No one comes back here, my friend, this is the end.’

The minibus sounded like it was falling apart at every pothole when the road became abandoned. The huge trees everywhere and the mud road covered with decaying leaves passed them by. Vince in the front saw the faint outline of one set of tyre tracks that must of been this bus before it picked them up. So bleak with the dislocation of depth and size, the feeling of in-depth exploration without a choice. Propelling into a wormhole. They passed one small house on the right that was almost psychopathic in isolation. Vince looked over Sasha’s shoulders as he drove. He looked into the cone of the headlights to see a man who looked as though he was lost on his way home after a decade in a concentration camp. His small figure grew quickly as the lights drew him in. Vince pitied him, he could deal with most trauma. Seeing men in such a way is where he couldn’t bare to watch. No one should look like that, and no one should let it happen. He was the thinnest man he had ever seen. His skeletal eyes like an owl, with a bush of a beard. They had never seen such malnutrition, the mans gaunt skull wrapped in thin and filthy skin, hands like claws wrapped around an axe and a roll of thin tinder wood. Vince suppressed a degree of anger over the idea that if this was part of Sasha’s dealings, he will let himself into their ranks and rip through their units guts like a ravaging parasite. The filthy man stood motionless in the headlights as Sasha slowed the bus. Vince leans back into the chair and cranes his head into a more strategic viewing position while he takes out his lock knife. The bus chugs and stops and the rattling finally extinguished. Sasha winds down the driver’s window with small squeaks and with his other hand takes a loaf of sour bread from a sack and puts it in his lap. The mans face leaked out white breaths in the light reflecting from a considerable puddle next to the bus. His vacuum packed skin shrunk around his features. He was filthy and soaked. His hair long and tied back behind his stick neck. His cloths a patchwork of a repair conundrum and his old parker jacket torn at the cuffs, with the inner down protruding through holes, the forearms and elbows. On his back was an old military bergan, bulging with its flea ridden contents. He held a sense of stoicism like he wanted to be here. He stood up straight and carried himself well for what he was. Sasha leans out the window and embraces the man in a firm hug and the team looked on and saw the quiet camaraderie between them. They whispered, and then let each other go and Sasha hung out the loaf of bread. The man took it with dignity and looked above, and then smiled at the team in the back. His smile died and his gaunt face slid back into sorrow as if it was a mistake. Sasha put the bus in gear and pulls slowly off, and Vince watches the man through the window as he spelled out the trinity over his body, Lord Jesus Christ have mercy us. No, Vince thought, No mercy.

He almost immediately forgot about him as it called forward the sorrowful image of his own son, when he stopped eating and drinking after the last of the toxic treatment. He thought of his small chest rising and falling slowly, the ribs quivering under his soft skin with each shallow and struggling breath, and his alien head looking up at him from the white bed as he held his small hand. He didn’t know if his small eyes could see him, but Vince was there whenever they opened. To be there quick and always. These thoughts were for him and for when he was alone, and he built a bastion of rage around them. The only thing he could do for him, for what did he know. He closed his eyes quickly to wipe away the thought.

‘What’s he doing here like that?’ Vince said more out of an effort to physically reintroduce himself to the now.

‘He’s a pilgrim. There are others out there wandering around the Taiga. They’re harmless, waiting for the rapture. I’ve only ever made this journey four times in seven years, and he has always been there.’

The road grew more narrow, and soon there was nothing to see. A tree had fallen across the road, and it must have been recent as Sasha made a small tut with his lips as it came into the headlights and he manoeuvred around it. Before they were driven to a point where radio silence would have to be broken on the sat phone back to Hereford, a track came into vision and peeled into the headlights, winding off the road and into a widening part of the forest. Moonlight came again with the parting of the trees, great strips of silver light fluorescent in the black mouth of madness. Sasha began to slow, and Vince and Danny looked around more than they were before. A dread sunk into the others stomachs at the pointlessness of stopping. Vince turns to them behind him, Adam, Freddie, and Maths sat at the rear. Devon casually asleep resting his head against the window and Freddie nudged him. They looked so far away without the light in the back of the bus, only their eyes twinkled with stray light from Maths with his Map out and a small button torch clicked on and holding it close, shaking from side to side with the rocking suspension. The bus slowed and stopped in the middle of the road, there almost certainly would be no other vehicles to contest that decision.

‘I have to kill the lights because it’ll blind them, don’t be alarmed,’ Sasha says as he reaches to the dial switch next to the steering wheel and clicks off the lights. Darkness enveloped them instantly.

’Just some well-wishers,’ Sasha said.

The moonlight became all they had in the way of vision aid, and after a few moments of cold silence, Freddie noticed some black figures coming from the left side of the bus.

‘Eyes left,’ Freddie says

Vince wiped the steam from the window to see the extraterrestrial black figures with glowing green eyes emerge out of the wood line and into the moonlight. The shapes got closer, and the lead figure at the apex of the formation reached to its face and lifted something from its eyes. A man, wearing a helmet with night vision monocles mounted to the front. They could see his eyes in the green glow of his night vision, wired from many nights of travel. More stepped out of the tree line on their flanks and approached the bus like disciples flocking to a prophet. Some stood between the trees and waited like the bus had interrupted some ceremony. They stood still and breathless, watching.

‘Freddie get the bundle unrolled,’ Danny says as he peers through the window.

‘Wait,’ Vince whispers over his shoulder

The green faced man comes to the passenger window and looks in over the front seat of the bus. His eyes were not local, blue and foreign and before he spoke, Vince knew he was American by the squareness of his jaw shaped by some form of growth hormone course, it was hid behind the ginger beard and his traps grew out from the top of his neck like baguettes. He was wearing a headset attached to the helmet, and faint traffic whispered out. He moved his mouthpiece to the side, and Vince could see his fingerless gloves and the hands on his watch face glowing. No one on either side moved.

‘Men will live as long as God wants,’ The man says in a croaky, seemingly well educated Texan accent. Vince gets his small fingernail torch that hung off his zip and clicked it on in the man’s face. The man did not flinch, and his eyes did not flicker from the blinding light. Vince looks him in the eye and imagined he was Delta or a Marine Raider. They were special forces, advanced and well kitted out with ballistic helmets and grass blade mics that screwed into the earpiece. The monocular night vision folded up on a bracket on the front of the helmet. His long ginger hair was hanging out of the sides in thick curls, and his hand held the butt of a spray-painted rifle that hung over his chest. A HK416 rifle that glistened in the rain, the same weapons that were in the bundle. Vince measured him, seeing when he would look away, when he would show him some micro expression, but there was no such thing, and the man was stone cold.

‘Yes, they will,’ Vince says as he clicks off his torch.

Adam snorts a laugh, and the man leans back away. Danny smiles and casually leans back in his chair and opens the window. Vince looked around at them, sets of green hovering eyes in the darkness on both sides of the road.

‘Let’s go,’ Vince says to Sasha. The patrol stood outside like solitary statues waiting for them to move on.

‘What are they doing here?’ Freddie says from the back putting his knife away. Sasha turns his head around as he puts the bus in first gear. The tribe of hunters melt back into the black tree line and Sasha twists the light switch and lights up the road.

‘This is the outer cordon,’ He says as he lifts the clutch and they slowly pull away. Adam turns to Freddie who sits calmly looking out the window trying to spot the faces or silhouettes. The headlight glances across two of them stepping back into he forest. Adam wipes the condensation from the window quickly and peers closer at them and sees they were not carrying rifles, but camouflage chainsaws held across their waists.

‘The fucking outer cordon?’ Freddie said.

Adam looks at the sky dipping into the window, looking up at the iron-grey moonlight from behind. He casts his eyes to the back of Vince’s head looking straight on. He wanted Vince to ask more questions, but his silence was the warning order.

‘Looks like their out on a bit of a hunt,’ Maths said

He puts away his map. It made no sense. No roads, no prominent features and nothing man-made in sight. Nothing at all was on the map, and they were in the middle of it. He stared into the forest hunting for signs of movement, for anything at all. As the lead scout of this team being led into the unknown by a complete stranger, he dared not convey to Vince that he did not know where they were on the map.