He followed the sounds of voices, allowing his feet to lead him to where their tall sniper was dismantling the little rifle they’d taken from a gun shop during the previous winter and explaining the component parts to his understudy. He loitered in the doorway and watched as he ate until a presence around his knees made him glance down. Amber, full of all the confidence a girl approaching four years old possessed, eased herself around his bulk to walk straight up to Peter.
He took his eyes away from the task and smiled at her, lifting her up to sit on his lap even though she wasn’t a whole lot smaller than he was. She stayed quiet, just content to watch what he was doing and to be soaking it all up as she always did.
“Amber!” snapped a woman’s voice from directly behind his head, making Johnson jump and spill a piece of something nondescript into his beard, which he tried to recover with his top lip. He didn’t know what annoyed him more; the shout or the fact that his lack of awareness had let her get so close behind him.
Ellie strode into the room and snatched up her daughter from Peter’s lap. The girl, as was usual for her, said nothing as her mother began berating her for playing with guns and going out of her sight.
“And you should know better,” she snapped at Enfield, “than to let children play with guns.”
“It’s broken dow—,” he offered weakly, meaning that the gun was in pieces.
“Not the point,” Ellie interrupted. She looked pointedly at Peter before walking off, carrying Amber away. Johnson abandoned his position in the doorway, one hand still fishing in his beard for remnants of potato, to save a confrontation over the angry woman’s exit. He walked over to Peter who sat with his brow furrowed, trying to figure out what he’d done to upset Amber’s mother.
“Not your fault, son,” Johnson said kindly. “She’s still a little… a little raw about everything.” Peter nodded, accepting the reassurance easily because it came from a man he thought of as a friend. A man he knew deep down wouldn’t hurt him and who had proven time and again that he would put himself squarely in harm’s way for Peter.
“Starting with the basics, Enfield?” he asked, suddenly once again becoming the sergeant major.
“Is there anywhere else to start?”
“There’s always the deep end,” Johnson said, dropping a meaty paw onto Peter’s head and scruffing up his hair, “but I suspect our little soldier can swim well enough already.”
Peter smiled, angling his head down so the others couldn’t see how pleased he was to be complimented. He’d grown accustomed to not being hit by these adults because they didn’t drink constantly, which seemed only to remind him of just how much his parents must have detested their son; even so, he wasn’t quite ready to show them all of his emotions.
“He can,” Enfield agreed. “Rendered five of the buggers safe today. I’ll be out of a job as soon as he’s tall enough.”
“Five?” Johnson blurted out, calming himself and looking at Peter again with a smile to hide the wave of revulsion he felt that a child had to become a soldier in the ashes of their country. He was saved from forcing any further conversation by the arrival of two more men into the room.
“Charlie, Buffs,” he greeted them, receiving curt nods in return. “Any word?”
Charlie Daniels, once so young and focused, seemed so much older now. He seemed worn down by life far ahead of his years, even more so than the others of their little group of survivors.
“I tried for an hour this morning,” he said, “no joy.” Johnson didn’t need to ask if his man had tried all of the frequencies he knew to use, because the former radio operator knew his job better than the squadron sergeant major did. He rested a comforting, meaty paw on Daniels’ shoulder as he passed.
“You’re doing your best, lad,” he told him reassuringly. There was no hint of his words being patronising, and the support was appreciated by Daniels, who had always looked up to the man. Daniels gave him a brief, sad smile and turned to include sergeant Bufford.
“Buffs wants to call everyone together,” he explained. Johnson turned to the special boat service NCO and raised an eyebrow in question.
“Not me specifically,” Buffs explained. “Mike wants a meeting.”
“When?”
“Soon as,” Buffs told him.
They sat around the table with a few standing. Those not at the heart of the conversation were the ones who voluntarily removed themselves from the decision-making process, either through a lack of confidence or knowledge of military matters. That left Johnson, Bufford, Daniels, Larsen, Duncan, Hampton, Enfield and Kimberley with the tall ship’s captain and his trusted man, Mike Xavier and Jean-Pierre. The other two who had been living in their little enclave prior to the arrival of a state-of-the-art British military armoured fighting vehicle, opted to keep themselves in the background where Ellie hovered with Amber on her hip.
As for the other children, as much as Peter wanted to be invited to sit at the table, his sister kept him back to watch and listen from a safe distance.
“Right,” Xavier said to kick off proceedings, “the way I see it is like this: we can’t stay here forever, and we can’t grab a boat and get out. Not sure if you lot knew, but the yanks are sinking anything trying to leave unless it has their clearance or whatever.”
“This is hardly surprising me,” Larsen said. “It makes sense to enforce the quarantine.”
“So that leaves us with the choices of making this place more viable, finding somewhere safer or escaping somewhere other than west,” Buffs laid out.
“Europe, the mainland at least, is gone,” Hampton said gruffly. “Safe to assume it’s only west or what? Iceland? Greenland?”
“What about Ireland?” Kimberley asked.
“No chance,” Xavier told them with his mouth set in a grim line. “We could see the fires from the Albert Docks.”
“So Iceland or Greenland?” Johnson suggested.
“They’ve got decent enough coastal forces,” Buffs said. Of all of them he’d be the most likely to know. “And best guess is that they’ll be allied with the world leaders in this, which means the Americans.”
The meeting fell into silence as they pondered the implications of reaching a potential safe haven only to find themselves sunk to the bottom of the North Atlantic.
“We could try Scotland again,” Daniels said. Ever since they’d found the others by pure chance, he’d been eager to re-join with the remnants of their original squadron. It was their purpose for travelling to the north west in the first place, only since they’d arrived at the relative safety created by the four others, he’d been unable to reach them.
“There’s no guarantee,” Johnson began, stopping as he was unsure what more to say.
“There’s no guarantee the position wasn’t infected and overrun,” Hampton finished for him, laying it out cold for them all to hear. “That means the rest of our boys,” he gestured at Enfield, meaning the survivors of the small detachment of royal marines, “the Hereford Fairies and your lot in their tin cans, not to mention everyone already up there, are likely out of it by now.”
“You don’t know that for certain,” Daniels began.
“Charlie,” Johnson said, shutting his protest down. “Three weeks and no response? Come on, lad, you know better than that.”
He was right. Daniels knew it, they all knew it; a failed radio wouldn’t last for three weeks on an island occupied by the military. One patrol, one troop of armour, they could suffer a communications failure but the sheer number of radio sets capable of receiving their transmissions on the Isle of Skye was so great that the only logical conclusion was to assume there was nobody left there capable of using one.
Daniels shrank back with a nod of acceptance.
“So that leaves us with our three options,” Johnson said to everybody.
“It is possible,” Larsen said slowly as if unsure of her words, “that my own country is not yet infected.”
“How?” Xavier asked. “No
rway, right? Connected to the European mainland? Next to Russia, which according to you lot got hit with bloody atom bombs.”
“Have you ever been to Norway?” she asked him, seeing the answer in his face. “These men have,” she said, gesturing at the two marines she had wintered with. Buffs raised a finger and nodded, claiming that he had visited Norway also.
“The winter here was harsh, and was slowing down of the Screechers, but in my country this winter was as nothing. In my country the monsters would have been freezing where they are standing. The western edge of my country is very full of the rocks and difficult to reach, and with the heavy snowfall it would be impossible to make a crossing.”
“What are you saying?” Johnson asked.
“I… I am not sure yet,” Larsen said, “I would require the assistance of Corporal Daniels to make contact with my people, but it is possible we could seek refuge there.”
“And be in the same situation in a foreign country under fifty feet of snow and a winter that’ll freeze us where we stand?” Xavier asked with more than a hint of hostility.
Johnson’s breath caught for a second, hoping there wouldn’t be a confrontation over his words because even with the big sailor on his side, the SSM didn’t fancy their combined chances against the Norwegian commando.
“Or, and this I think is the more likely of the outcomes, my own people will be looking to secure safe travel to the uninfected places.”
The room was silent as each person considered the possibility of being transported to safety and finally escaping the nightmare they were living in.
“Okay,” Johnson agreed, “you and Charlie get your heads together and see what you can do. In the meantime, I think we need to be prepared to move as soon as next week.”
FOUR
Agent Fisher sat in the tiny cabin allocated to him onboard the floating fortress that was the aircraft carrier of the United States navy. He walked nervously back and forth the only clear piece of deck, managing only three paces before he was forced to turn on the spot and walk back so that he spent longer turning than he did pacing.
He tried to rehearse his explanation sitting down but the nervousness was too much to contain.
“Unparalleled breakthrough,” he murmured to himself, practising so that he got just the right amount of passionate inflection in the words to seem believable but not so much that he seemed desperate. “Mission-critical… Successful application of the serum, combined with the discovery of the—”
The door banged twice, foiling the air inside with the harsh rapping of knuckles on metal.
“Agent Fisher, I’m here to escort you to your debrief,” said the voice from outside before the hatch was opened and a uniformed sailor stood at parade rest outside. He’d been kept there for two days, with an armed man outside the cabin at all times. He didn’t try to leave, but he was certain of what would happen if he did, so he stayed inside to avoid the expected confrontation that he would inevitably be forced to back down from.
Fisher nodded, shrugging his shoulders into a jacket provided for him after he’d been checked through quarantine along with the few other stragglers to escape the island during the outbreak, and followed. The guard standing outside the cabin reached back to close the hatch, leaving Fisher to follow the man sent for him and sensing the other master at arms falling in behind him.
To anyone watching, it was obvious that he was being escorted, with such a heavy undertone that his compliance made little difference to the outcome; he was going where they were taking him if they had to handcuff him and drag him.
The debrief, as it was being called, was a hastily formed enquiry panel to ascertain if any sanctions should be taken against him for both his action on the island and his subsequent flight to abandon his post and the vast majority of his personnel.
“Take a seat,” the big man sitting at the centre of a three-man panel said. Fisher sat, recognising Jacobs but not the other two who both seemed senior through age if nothing else. He doubted they would be from outside of the agency, but he didn’t rule out the chance of one being a special prosecutor or other legal advisor appointed by the politicians at Langley.
“This debrief,” Jacobs went on without looking up from the papers in front of him, “is to establish the facts leading up to and immediately after the outbreak at the facility under your direct management. Losses of personnel known at this time are the entire science team including the two leading scientists tasked with the creation of a counter-viral serum vital to the efforts to win this war and reclaim territory.”
“Add to that, the staff on loan from the CDC, not to mention the MRIID containment unit, and four additional CIA personnel assigned to your command,” added the man to his right, eyeballing Fisher directly as if daring him to argue.
“In your own words, Fisher, how did this outbreak happen?”
“I was not present in the facility at the time of the outbreak,” Fisher began, eager to put distance between himself and whatever mistakes those people listed had made in his absence. “So, I cannot confirm or add commentary as to the reasons for the outbreak. What I will say, and with a degree of confidence as I witnessed it first-hand, was that the US Army personnel ran a tight ship in the facility. As to how the outbreak occurred I cannot, with any degree of confidence, offer conjecture.”
“To confirm,” the guy who hadn’t spoken yet said as he scribbled notes on a pad, “you weren’t directly supervising the operation at the time of the incident?”
“No, I was not,” Fisher said. Jacobs cleared his throat and shifted position in his seat.
“Describe to us the situation the last time you were there.”
“Professors Grewal and Chambers had requested a specific of the SEAL team that they capture a live specimen of an enhanced infected,” he said, making sure to stick to the mental map he was following. He knew the people ‘debriefing’ him would have gathered relevant intelligence from the recovery team if they had survived, which he assumed they had without any knowledge otherwise, and to leave out that fact early on would be to undermine the rest of his carefully crafted account.
“And was that specimen recovered?”
“It was captured by the SEALs, brought back, and – err – subsequently dispatched prior to testing.”
“Meaning what, Fisher?” Jacobs said. “Be clear in what you’re saying.”
“Meaning they got one of the enhanced infected, but it didn’t play nice with others, so it was killed.”
“So the science team did not, in fact, obtain a live specimen of an enhanced infected for serum testing?”
“As I understand it, the team went out and got another.”
“And then what?” This from the note taker, still writing furiously.
“I cannot comment as I wasn’t there,” Fisher answered. He also knew the SEALs weren’t there either, so saying absolutely nothing about the events that led to an outbreak meant that there would be insufficient evidence to prove that he was in any way responsible. It was a low blow but leaving the implied blame at the feet of dead men was a tried and tested method.
“Allow me to fill you in on what happened after that,” Jacobs said, shifting in his seat again as though either the chair or the subject were uncomfortable for him.
“Two aircraft made it off the island, one of them being the one that transported you here. We received some radio transmissions from personnel still on station, but they went dark soon thereafter. We have yet to receive clearance to deploy ground troops to conduct any forensic analysis of the facility.”
“What about aerial surveillance?” Fisher asked, turning the tables on his ‘debriefers’. Jacobs looked left and right, seeing no support from either man and making the decision himself.
“We’ve authorised fly-overs, but they’ve revealed little more than what appears to be defensive actions by troops no longer visible or attempting to make contact. So far as we know… so far as we can tell, there are no survivors on the island.”
<
br /> “What about at night?” Fisher asked. “Night optics might show another—”
“What were the opinions of Professors Grewal and Chambers on the deployment of the serum at the test site?” the note taker asked, still not looking up.
“I do not know.”
“You don’t know their opinions? Surely they offered one prior to the test being carried out?”
“Both men agreed that the serum yielded positive results,” Fisher said, unable to keep the edge out of his voice that made it clear he was intentionally not saying something.
“And?” Jacobs asked.
“And nothing.”
“If they both agreed that the serum worked, why did they want a further test subject? The, what were we calling them? Enhanced infected?”
Fisher was half tempted to say that the man should jump on a boat and go ask them if he was so damn interested but decided not to come across as hostile.
“Conjecture,” he answered.
“Give me your best guess,” Jacobs said, leaning forward with his elbows on the desk.
“My best guess is that they wanted to be thorough, but I got the distinct impression it was some sort of competition between them.”
There it is, the lie that can’t be disproven and the seed of overwhelming doubt.
Note taker looked up for the first time, eyebrows turned in on the bridge of his nose. “Explain.”
Fisher squirmed in his chair like Jacobs had, appearing to the three men to be battling his conscience about speaking ill of the dead when his plan all along had been to do just that.
“I didn’t understand the science behind their argument,” Fisher said, “but the two of them had different ideas about why the few infected weren’t slow as almost every other one is. Given how the two argued—I mean, we all know what happened when we first put them together—I think they wanted to settle a score over who was right.”
“I see,” the other guy said, handing a piece of paper to Jacobs who took it and eyeballed Fisher before speaking again.
Toy Soldiers (Book 6): Annihilation Page 3
