Code Red 06 - Battleground by Chris Ryan

Author:Chris Ryan
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: RHCB Digital
Published: 2011-02-17T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fourteen

‘AARYA!’ Ben yelled. ‘AARYA! GET OUT OF THERE! GET OUT—’

And then he hugged the earth.

He had never known a noise like it – almost as though he himself was part of the explosion. There was heat too: the air around him became furnace-like. It burned, singeing his skin and his hair. The earth shook. Not a slight tremor, but a sickening shudder as though someone had picked up the ground and thrown it about.

Ben stayed crouched on the earth, head in hands. The air around him was solid with dust. He tried to breathe in. Bad move: his lungs rejected the filthy air, forcing him to cough, splutter and spit. The noise of the blast ebbed, echoing away across the desert, but his ears were still full of sound: tiny stones, a hailstorm of them, raining down on him. They pelted his back, hard and fast. Nearby, Ben was conscious of a much bigger piece of rubble thumping down onto the ground. A few inches closer and he’d have been pulverized. He tucked his head down further and steeled his body against the showering debris.

For thirty seconds it continued. Thirty seconds of intense, painful battering. By the time the rubble had all fallen back to the ground, Ben felt as if he had taken a hundred brutal kicks to the back. He tried to straighten himself up, wincing with the pain. And then he opened his eyes.

For a moment he thought he had gone blind. He was surrounded by a sandy mist so thick he couldn’t see his hand in front of him. Then his eyes smarted and started to sting and water, so he shut them again. Realizing he was still holding his breath, he pulled his T-shirt up over his nose, then gingerly breathed in. The air stank of dust and cordite, but he managed to get some oxygen into his lungs before trying to look into the cloud of dust again.

It was a little less thick now, but Ben’s visibility was still no more than a metre. He staggered, totally disorientated, not knowing which way was which. ‘Aarya!’ He shouted her name, then dissolved into a fit of hacking coughs that bent him double.

Stay where you are, he told himself once the coughing had subsided. Wait till you can see where you’re going. Wait till . . .

He blinked, then rubbed the gritty moisture away from his eyes. The cloud was thinning faster now and he could see something emerging in the distance. It looked ghostly, like a dream, bathed in the sandy tones of the dust cloud. The entrance to the cave. At least, what used to be the entrance to the cave. Now it was just a thick, tumbledown wall of boulders. Half the mountain looked like it had been blown away.

Ben stared at the destruction in disbelief. And as he stared, two thoughts went through his head. Firstly, nobody who was still in the cave at the time the bomb hit was ever going to get out, even if they were still alive.

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