Stick the Landing

It was around 9:45am, when the sweat had already formed dark rivers in his shirt that surged down from his armpits to his belt, that he realised he might not have planned this thoroughly enough. Wiping his glasses, he checked the weather app on his phone. 95 degrees. Give it a few more hours, and it was showing 104. Not showing any cloud cover either. He looked up squinting at the sky to see if the phone was lying. Bright, untainted blue, the kind you’d get in a child’s landscape painting, stretching out over miles and miles of dust and sand. No dice. The machine wins this round. He put it back in one of the many pockets of his camo shorts and took a sip of water from one of the big plastic bottles he had bought at the supermarket on the way here. There had been at least another two hours of driving from there, along mostly empty straight road, and he’d been really gunning it, so that would make it…shit. He couldn’t ever work out the conversions. 100 miles? That sounded like too much. Either way, it was too far to head back for more supplies. Timing was critical. 

            He had looked up aerial photographs of the area before showing up so that he could pick the best vantage point, a demonstration of preparedness that had not extended to checking the temperature in advance. Moore’s Landing had been a small desert town built to house the families of staff working at the nearby Moore Airforce Base, but when the base was shuttered and the staff reassigned the town was swiftly abandoned. Decades of neglect were taking their toll but for the most part the structure of the town had held, the shells of buildings left standing like discarded carapaces. The main drag, barely even 100 metres long, was situated in a slight trough, surrounded on both sides by squat bungalows lining steep, stony side streets snaking up the mountainous terrain. The small assortment of shops and offices had all been vandalised at some point; smashed windows peppered with holes from hurled chunks of rock, graffiti splashed across business names, splintered doors hanging loose off busted hinges. Dust swirled limply in the weak breeze around piles of garbage. The only vehicle besides the hire car he’d tried to stash discretely between two of the abandoned homes was a boxy, burned-out truck, front two wheels up on the kerb and the back two missing. On the rusting hood, a local artist signing themselves as ‘Headsh0t’ had drawn an incredibly detailed penis. 

            This was the only thoroughfare in town. If you wanted to pass through Moore’s Landing (which, for nearly 100 percent of people, was the only reason to be there), this was the route. No other choice. It was, if one was so inclined, the ideal location for an ambush; lower elevation than the rest of the surrounding, simple enough to create chokepoints at either end of the road, etc. He read a lot of military history and thought he would’ve made an excellent general, if given the right opportunity. He didn’t think the word ‘ambush’ was a fair one though. It sounded too sneaky, too underhand. He preferred ‘pre-emptive tactical assault.’ Or ‘advantageous use of preparedness.’ Maybe ‘knowledge-based intercept?’ He had time to come up with something catchy and definitive as a replacement over the next couple of hours, anyway. 

            From his earlier at-home reconnaissance, he had determined that the best position to wait for the target from was a disused open-air swimming pool on the north-east side of Moore’s Landing. It had sat out the back of one of the larger bungalows on one of the highest dirt tracks in the area, and aside from patches of thin scrub offered a mostly unimpeded view down the whole main street. He had measured the distance away online, too – 350 metres as the crow flies, give or take a few. Leave as few variables for error as possible. ‘He who is prudent and lies in wait for an enemy who is not, will be victorious.’ He'd liked that one so much he’d written it down. What Sun Tzu hadn’t covered in The Art of War, though, was what to do when you were stuck in position outside for hours on end on the hottest day of the year so far with no shade cover. Or if he had, it hadn’t been in the edition of the book that he’d skimmed through. 

            The main issue he had been focusing on was giving himself away. He was a good distance away, but this was the dusty-ass middle of nowhere – anyone coming out here was bound to be a little jumpy. Jumpy meant heads swivelling, and he had to combat that with inconspicuousness. The key was to have as little evidence of his presence visible as possible, and he wasn’t taking any chances. No temporary shelter, no mounted umbrella on his flimsy green camping chair, not even a baseball cap. He figured the lip would stand out against the sky if his head was turned at the wrong angle. He had placed the camp chair nearer the deep end of the empty pool so that from a straight-back sitting position his eyeline was just above the rim. Minimum exposure. The sun might glint a little off his glasses, but that was a necessary risk. He’d packed his standard sunglasses in his kit bag rather than the prescription ones, but he wasn’t beating himself up about it. This was a stressful assignment he was carrying out; if he was expected to do it with zero errors then that was just an unreasonable expectation. 

            Pushing strands of damp hair back from his forehead, he reached down for another sip of water. Almost empty already. That wasn’t ideal. He took a quick look over at the shallow end of the pool where the rest of his supplies were stashed. One more large bottle of water, one small stainless steel reusable water bottle (empty, drunk on the drive over), one thermos of hot coffee, two homemade BLT sandwiches, and three energy bars. The consumables were loose next to the duffel bag with the remainder of his equipment, all in shade for now. He wanted everything closer but the sun was already mercilessly pointed directly at him and, while there was shade on the other side of him at the deep end, that was a no go. His guess was that kids came up here at night to drink or smoke and do whatever they didn’t want their parents to know about, and that they’d been doing it for years, because it was a dump. Broken bottles, discarded vapes, rotting food, plastic packaging, possible faeces, torn clothing. A couple of wingmirrors stacked on top of small, unidentifiable bones. The tiles underneath weren’t even visible, and the trash was stacked almost a foot high in places. He was pretty certain he could see mushrooms growing out of one of the piles. The smell wafting off it had a kind of rancid sweetness that he knew was going to make him gag once that sun came further round and started to cook it, boiling juices and dead matter on a wretched daily cycle. 

            A hawk screeched somewhere overhead, a lonely noise that bounced off the walls of the pool in morning quiet. That’s one to tick off for Desert Bingo, he thought. Spotting a tumbleweed’s gonna be a big one, but no sign of those yet. He checked his phone again for the time. 9:57am. Christ, he could’ve sworn it had been longer than that. He had to be careful out here if was going to avoid heatstroke. Sweat was trickling into his eyes and he blinked it out, wincing in irritation. Get a grip, he thought. You have a job to do. Sure, it’s hot, and getting warmer all the time. But mankind had gone up for centuries against the sun. Humans are endurance personified. We overcome, we outlast. It was only a few hours more, he could do this. It wasn’t so bad.

            This was so bad. He checked the time on his phone, panting. 11:13am. What had happened to the passage of time? Were minutes longer in extreme heat? No, get it together, that was idiotic. The temperature was unbearable – everything around him had taken on a suffocating blanket of heat haze. The whole town was shimmering, and with the sweat pouring into his eyes it looked like he was overlooking the site of a relentless, sensationless earthquake, shaking Moore’s Landing to its foundations but doing no damage. The flies buzzing around his face and arms were endlessly persistent; swat at one, and two more had landed on the swatting arm before he’d even brought it back to rest. The rims of the expensive binoculars he’d packed were too hot to hold against his skin so he squinted through them at a distance instead, the main street distorting and swimming at strange magnitudes. How could it still be more than hour until the target was due to get here? There’d been no sign of a single goddamn thing since he arrived, except for nine lizards. He thought they’d all been different, but there could be at least one double count in there. Small, scrawny things, skittering over the pool tiles and disappearing quickly out of sight, sometimes into the festering trash pile. He knew he was supposed to be focusing on watching for the target but his head was pounding and every flash of movement out of the corner of his eye had him snapping around to look, he couldn’t help it. All the buildings on the main drag were starting to look identical and he kept losing his handle on the geography.

            Supplies had dwindled significantly. He was down both sandwiches, one of the energy bars, half the coffee, and half the final bottle of water. He’d considered the merits of taking off his shirt and tying it around his head instead for protection, but decided against it. He’d held out so far on not wearing a cap – why cave for a more ridiculous option? Instead, he poured a not-insignificant amount of his remaining water over his throbbing skull, gasping when the water ran down his red cheeks and inside his collar. The relief was short-lived, and he already felt like that had been a bad move. 

            What was the hottest he’d ever been before now? He tried to think but plucking thoughts out of his brain right now was like fumbling in the dark for a light switch in an unfamiliar room. He’d once spent too long in the sauna at the gym and when he stumbled out into the cool changing room he’d had to lean against a bank of lockers until the black around the edges of his vision receded, but that had still felt different. His eyes were bulging in his skull. His tongue felt thick and dry, lying flat and stupid in his coarse mouth. The back of his neck was on fire, already cracked and painful to touch. He took another look through the binoculars. Nothing. He bit his chapped lip, deliberating. His phone read 12:43pm – the target was late now, which meant they could be here any minute. He’d chugged the remainder of the coffee half an hour ago and was now busting for a piss. Wasn’t the human body supposed to want to conserve liquid at a time like this? This didn’t feel very well-adapted. He looked again, squeezing his legs together. Still nothing. Ok, he’d be quick. The day was bad enough already without choosing to wet himself.

            He got up, careful not to kick over the heavy scoped rifle he’d propped up against the pool wall next to him, and shuffled down to the deep end, kicking aside detritus until he was right in front one of the largest heaps. His body felt so heavy, but the relief was immense. He tried to crane over the side mid-flow so as to not feel like he was neglecting his duty, but couldn’t see much, even on tiptoes. If he hadn’t been such a consummate professional, he might have looked down and seen the movement in the pile he was now drenching.

The sky was somehow more cloudless than it was before. The sheer unbroken blue of it seemed to be sapping all the water from the air, drawing in moisture and breath and rivers and lakes and expanding, stretching out further and further to make room for more sun and to cook him faster. He had been weighing up the pros and cons of calling his contact and asking for help, but though the oppressive weather was robbing him off most of his faculties, it still hadn’t affected his pride. To call now would be admitting he wasn’t up for the job. To fail. That’s why Sun Tzu said to never pick up the phone. He was very dizzy. It was an hour and a half beyond the target’s expected time now and there’d been fuck all, just the same four walls of this goddamn pool and the sun and the sand and the sun and now it was shining in his eyes too? He’d planned for this, he thought. The sun rises in the east, sets in the west. Everyone knows that. And in between, it would be…south? His calculations were fine, he was sure of that, but there must be some metal sheets or panelling or something in the town that it’s bouncing off because now it was shining directly at him and what were the odds of that? He had to know that when the time came, it would still work. He leant over to pick up the rifle, intending to set it up on the pool rim and check through the scope to for glare, but that’s when he felt the snake. 

The rattlesnake that had slithered discreetly away from its deep end sanctuary when the man had rudely disturbed it had been keeping to itself. As the sun moved, though, so did the shade, and the snake with it. Thin slivers of cool were harder to come by as the day went on, and the snake eventually made its way over to the long, cool object, safely out of direct sunlight, and curled its long body silently around the barrel. This was not something the man had prepared for. 

Reaching down, his hand closed not around metal, but around scales and muscle. He didn’t know much about snake species generally, but the telltale sound it started to make certainly put him in the right ballpark. 

“Oh fu-argh!”

The rattlesnake darted at his grasping arm, sinking both fangs deep into his wrist. He screamed again and tried to jump up, stumbling backwards and knocking the camp chair over, barely staying on his own feet. The snake was thrashing around now and managed to bite him again, this time in the soft fat of his right side, just above the waistline. He spun around in pain and flung the reptile as hard as he could, meaning to toss it well over the edge of the pool and instead thudding it heavily into the far side. He yelled out again, a primal bellow that tore at his parched throat. Blood was leaking slowly from his punctured wrist and he squeezed his other hand over it to staunch the flow. He couldn’t see the snake. It can’t have gotten far. The sun felt even brighter now, and was shooting flares in jagged lines across his vision. The target might be here any minute, but he had to lie down. Just for a minute, that would be alright. The tiles were surprisingly cool. He was flat on his back, gasping up at the blue. Everything felt a bit cooler down here. He just needed a moment.

            Moore’s Landing was bathed in golden-hour rays. A slight breeze started to kick up the dust on the main street again. The air was already losing its thickness. The absurd quiet of the day gave way to a rising natural sound; cicadas buzzing, toads croaking. A lone coyote, nosing around a crumbling store front, trotted away unsatisfied. In the abandoned pool high above the rest of town, a writhing, persistent troop of ants swarmed over an energy bar, trying to find a way in. 

            In one of the many pockets of a pair of camo shorts that had been put on for the final time that morning, a phone buzzed with an incoming message. The vibration did nothing to alert its owner (at this point, nothing would), but the message was from an unsaved number that they had been communicating back and forth with for weeks, planning and ironing out details. The message read: ‘Just checking in. All set for tomorrow?’