Operation Syria

by William Meikle

  “I don’t think it’s trying to get in to help us. Do you?”

  Reynolds looked like that was a thought he hadn’t considered and it was enough to keep his mouth shut, for now. After a few minutes, quiet had descended again.

  “Rebels,” Kim whispered. “It has to be. Jim said it was rebels.”

  “Does that sound like fucking rebels?” Reynolds replied and laughed bitterly until the scratching started again, driving them all to silence once more.

  Now all they could do was wait and hope. At least they had air, which was flowing freely, a breeze coming in through a crack in the wall high up in one corner. But the bread was gone, as was the meat. All they had left was about a gallon of water and some cheese.

  Even at that, White needed most of the water in an attempt to keep his fever from becoming a raging fire. The wound in his leg was suppurating, far beyond what might be expected in the time since he’d been hurt. At first, Maggie had thought it was a bullet wound but it looked more like a slashing cut from a rough-edged knife and now the lips of flesh were blackening, parting to show the flesh inside all the way down to the bone.

  “We should bandage that,” Kim said.

  “We don’t have anything clean enough,” Maggie replied. “We might be doing more harm than good.”

  She didn’t say what they were all thinking; a bandage wasn’t going to conceal the fact that they shared an enclosed chamber—a cell—with a man who was likely to be dead before he took too many more breaths.

  *

  The scratching came every time one or the other of them so much as moved. While Kim took her turn sitting by White, Maggie sat on the lip of the dig, looking down at where they’d been working. Their excitement seemed so long ago now but at least the mosaic would be there after this was over. The chamber they were digging in had long been known to be a Roman military temple to their god Mithras but it had been thought that its treasure had all been looted. That was until the team had gone down into the floor and found the colors that had lain there hidden for centuries. So far, they’d only uncovered a quarter of it but White had hoped that it extended underfoot the whole length and width of the chamber. The bit they had uncovered so far looked complete, unbroken and protected through the centuries by the impacted sand above it. It would be a major find and as supervisor of the dig, the bulk of the credit would be going to White.

  It’s a pity he won’t live to see it.

  As if in reply to her thought, the sick man moaned loudly and that brought a fresh bout of scratching at the door.

  If anybody’s coming, please hurry.

  - 3 -

  Banks caught up with the squad at the foot of a pile of tumbled stone that had at one time been part of the town’s main defensive wall. The only movement in the night was themselves, no light showed in any of the small windows and there was no sound but the soft pad and scrape of their feet on rock and sand. It was a cool night, with a slight breeze off the river and could have been any such night here for the past thousand years or more, untouched by any concerns of modernity. Banks felt like an interloper from the future as he strode up to join the others.

  “Seems all clear, Cap,” Wiggins said. “At least, nobody’s shooting at us yet.”

  “Climb up and over the top, Wiggo,” Banks said. “Have a shufti and let us know if it’s safe to go in.”

  While Wiggins and Davies clambered up over the rubble, Banks and the others checked the high points for a possible ambush. But Wiggins reached the top of the rock fall without incident and waved them forward with an all-clear signal. Soon all six of them walked up through the gap in the wall to look over an internal square that had obviously been the market area of the old town in some distant past.

  Now it was empty and quiet. There was no sign of life but there were numerous indications that there had been a recent firefight. Weapons fire had punched holes in walls, shell casings lay scattered around and blood, black in the night under the stars, was splashed liberally over ground, walls, doorways, and window frames. There were no bodies to be seen.

  “That has to be the tidiest fucking gunfight you ever did see,” Wiggins muttered in Banks’ earpiece, then went quiet after being given a sharp glance. Banks sent him west along the wall with Davies, sent the sarge and Brock to the east, and motioned that Wilkins should follow him, walking slowly down the middle of the square. They found more blood, more shell casings, but nobody shot at them and nothing moved in the shadows.

  After a few minutes, they reached the south end of the square, where three different exits led into a warren of high sandstone alleyways. The other four men joined them, Hynd and Wiggins both shaking their heads to indicate they’d found nothing untoward. Banks was loath to split the team up in the alleys, so he sent them all forward as one, while he once again brought up the rear.

  They crisscrossed their way through the ancient town, finding nothing but darkness and dust and shadow.

  *

  They were making their way down another tall, empty, alleyway and Banks was beginning to think they’d been sent on a wild goose chase when Wiggins brought the squad to a halt and motioned Banks forward. Banks walked up to stand at the corporal’s shoulder and looked out of the alleyway and into a courtyard beyond.

  They’d found their first sign that the place wasn’t completely empty, although the body that lay in the center in the courtyard was in too many pieces to be alive. Banks left Hynd with the new lads in the alleyway and walked over with Wiggins to investigate. Blood lay in three separate pools around a dismembered torso, the limbs of which looked to have been snipped off by a giant pair of scissors. One arm lay ten feet from the body but of the other arm, the legs, or the head, there was no sign. The scraps of ragged military-grade clothing and leathery skin on the torso told Banks it probably wasn’t one of the archaeologists they were after but beyond that they had no more clues as to the dead man’s identity. If he’d had a weapon, there was none to be found in the immediate area.

  Wiggins stepped away, studying something on the ground, then motioned Banks forward. They found more blood and followed a trail of it that led across the courtyard away from them, down another alley to yet another courtyard, and into the doorway of a squat, cubic building that dominated the far quadrant. A radio set, busted as if stomped on by something heavy, lay in pieces at the side of the door, and there was more blood pooled here and more shell casings. They followed the blood trail inside, noting a spatter of droplets on the floor and a red handprint on the wall. The trail led to a narrow hallway, where they lost it in the even darker shadows.

  Banks motioned Hynd to bring the others forward.

  “You four watch our backs,” he whispered when they were all in the doorway. “Wiggo and I will have a quick look around in here. Keep your eyes peeled. My guts are telling me there’s more to this than we can see.”

  *

  Once inside the hallway, Banks felt secure enough to turn on the light on his rifle and let it show him the path of the blood trail. It led them past two doorways that only opened into empty rooms, then stopped completely at a blank wall of stone. He was about to investigate when Hynd spoke in his ear from back at the main door.

  “We’ve got movement on the rooftops, Cap, a lot of movement. Too dark to make out how many but I think they’ve got us boxed in.”

  “Could we make a run for it?”

  “Tricky. They’ve got the high ground and would have us in a gauntlet. The good news is they’re not shooting at us yet.”

  “Stay in the doorway. Maybe they don’t know how many of us there are. Don’t shoot first but keep an eye on them.”

  “Willco.”

  He turned back to see Wiggins looking at where the blood trail stopped at the wall. The corporal whispered.

  “There’s a wee gap here. And artificial light coming from under the bottom. I think this is a door, Cap.”

  Banks rapped hard on the stone in front of this face with the butt of his rifle, ‘shave and a hairc
ut.’ In reply, he heard a faint yelp of surprise from somewhere beyond, then a voice, a woman, shouting as if in the distance.

  “We can’t get it open from this side.”

  Banks found the slightest of vertical cracks, marking where the supposed doorway sat in the wall but could see no lock, handles, or mechanism for getting it open. It was going to need brute force. A lot of it.

  “Sarge, come in.”

  “Right here, Cap.”

  “What’s the situation?”

  “Still the same. There’s plenty of movement on the rooftops but no clean sight. But it’s not insurgents or rebels, Cap. I don’t think they’re people. Dogs maybe, unless there’s baboons or some such in this area. Whatever they are, they don’t move like men.”

  “Can you spare two of the lads? We’ve got some heavy work needing doing. We might have found some folks.”

  “They’re on their way.”

  The privates, Davies and Brock, arrived alongside Banks and Wiggins seconds later. Banks made one last check of the vertical grooves that marked the door, then shouted, loudly enough that any people inside would hear.

  “Stand back, we’re going to give it a try.”

  All four of them put their shoulder against the door on the left side. Stone creaked and rasped against stone and the door moved but only by half an inch.

  “Harder, lads,” Banks said and put his whole weight into it. The door slid inward another inch, then something gave way and it slid faster, swinging open. Two women and a man, pale but alive, stood in a square chamber on the other side.

  “Are you the cavalry?” one of the women said in a Scottish accent.

  “If you’re the archaeologists, aye, that’ll be us. But I was told there were ten of you.”

  “There were,” the woman said and there was a sob in her voice. She had a story to tell, that much was clear, but there wouldn’t be time to hear it. Hynd came through at Banks’ ear.

  “Whatever they are, I think we’ve pissed them off, Cap. We’ve got incoming.”

  The shooting started as Banks led the other three men back to the main door.

  *

  He only had time to shove in his earplugs before joining Hynd and Wilkins. The two men were in kneeling position, one on either side of the doorway. Banks threw himself flat on the ground between them, leaving as little target area as possible for a sniper but it was already clear nobody was firing back and both Hynd and Wilkins had stopped shooting.

  “What’ve we got, Sarge?” he shouted.

  “Buggered if I know, Cap. We put something down as it came off the roof; it fell into the alleyway on the right and now everything’s gone quiet again.”

  Banks turned.

  “Wiggo, with me. The rest of you cover us.”

  Banks, with Wiggins at his shoulder, set off at a crouching run across the courtyard, then slowed as they approached the alleyway entrance. Banks switched on his gun light and aimed at a darker shadow on the ground.

  It wasn’t a rebel insurgent, or a dog, or a baboon, although it was large enough to have been mistaken for one in the shadows. But no baboon he knew of had red, compound eyes, a squat bulbous body or eight, stocky hairy legs. Whether it had been Hynd or Wilkins that shot it, they’d blown away a chunk of the body but it was clear enough what the thing had been. If he didn’t know better, he’d have identified it as a tarantula but one of enormous proportions.

  Spiders. Why does it have to be bloody spiders.

  - 4 -

  The archaeologists stood in the chamber, watching the open door. Silence had fallen outside after the initial volley of shots. The soldiers had arrived, then left again so suddenly that Maggie wasn’t completely sure she hadn’t imagined them through sheer force of hope.

  “What are we supposed to do now?” Kim said. “Do we follow them?”

  “It might not be safe to go out yet. I vote we close the door again, to be sure,” Jack Reynolds replied.

  “No,” Maggie said. “Leave it be. It might have been luck they got it open the last time. I’ve spent enough time in this tomb as it is. I need some fresher air.”

  Before the others could stop her, she stepped out into the hallway. It was full dark outside the chamber but she remembered the way to the main entrance well enough to be able to feel her way along the corridor. A strange odor hung in the air, acrid, like burning plastic, stronger the closer to the entrance she got. She saw a slightly lighter patch ahead and headed for it, arriving at the doorway as two of the soldiers dragged something across the courtyard to drop it at the feet of the others.

  She let of a yelp of surprise when she stepped forward and looked down at the broken remains of a spider the size of a large dog.

  “What the bloody hell is that?” she said.

  The man who’d spoken to her earlier looked over the top of the dead thing and smiled thinly.

  “We were kind of hoping you could tell us.”

  *

  “I’m Maggie Boyd,” she said once they were back in the chamber, making the introductions.

  “Are you in charge, miss?” the obvious leader of the men said.

  “No, that would be Jim,” she replied, pointing to the sick man on the makeshift bed. “Can you do anything for him?”

  The captain—he’d introduced himself as Banks—sent the tall black private, Davies, to seeing if anything could be done about the sick man, then turned to the other men.

  “See what you can do about getting these people fed and watered. Get a brew on. They look like they need it.”

  There was food, coffee, and a feeling of safety to be had for the first time in days. The corporal, Wiggins, left with food and drink for the three others who were on watch at the main doorway and the windows of the two rooms in the corridor outside the chamber.

  “We need to get Jim to a hospital,” Maggie said. “He’s got a raging fever for one thing.”

  “I can see that,” Banks replied. “But first I need to be sure you’re the only four who survived. Do you know what happened to the others?”

  She pointed to where Davies was working on the wounded man.

  “Jim was the only one who saw anything and he didn’t stay awake long enough to tell us. The rest of the team was out in the city somewhere when it went down. But we heard shots and none of us carried arms. There were definitely rebels around.”

  Banks nodded.

  “Aye. We found one of them earlier but none of your team. If they’re alive, there’s a possibility they’ve been kidnapped for ransom. I need to call this in, see if they’ve heard anything back home.”

  The captain left her in the chamber to make his call. Kim and Reynolds were eating and catching up on their coffee, so Maggie went over to see if she could help Davies with the sick man.

  The tall private had finished bandaging up the wounded leg. He looked grave.

  “He’ll lose that leg for sure,” he said, his Glaswegian accent coming through strong. “It’s not gangrene though, although it looks like it. Venom at a guess.”

  “You think it was a spider, like the one you killed?”

  “If you pressed me for an answer that fits, aye, I do think that.”

  “But he’ll live?”

  Davies didn’t reply at first, then said softly, “I think that’s in the lap of the gods. I’ve given him morphine, so he should at least be comfortable for a while. But you were right, he should be in a hospital.”

  *

  Captain Banks returned five minutes later and he too looked grave as he addressed Maggie.

  “It’s what I feared. There’s been a video online; a group of rebel insurgents have the rest of your team held hostage. The brass doesn’t know where but can only say it’s somewhere within ten miles of here. And they can’t risk sending a chopper in for us in case the rebels see it as provocation and kill your people.”

  “Surely there’s something you can do?”

  “There is,” Banks said. “Trouble is dawn’s coming up fast so we migh
t not have enough time to search. I’m leaving two men here with you, Davis to look after your man, and Corporal Wiggins. They’ll keep watch and stop anything getting to you.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “There’s a town three miles down the riverbank that’s our best bet as to where they’re holding the hostages. That’s where we’re going. And we’re going right now. If we’re not back by dawn, Corporal Wiggins is in charge. Our helmet radios won’t work at that range, so I’ve given him the sat-phone. He’s a good man. If we don’t make it back, he’ll get you home.”

  - 5 -

  Banks led them out, with Brock and Wilkins behind and the sarge watching their backs. His nerves had settled; now there was a definite goal in sight, although the dead spider preyed on his mind. It was the wild card on the equation, the thing he couldn’t control so he compartmentalized it, put it away for later. As they left the building into the courtyard, he checked the roofs but if anything was up there, it wasn’t inclined to attack and they were able to make their way back through the quiet city without any interference.

  He trusted Wiggins to keep everyone in the building safe. The squad’s main job now was to rescue the others. He focused all his intent on that as they trotted at double time, out of the city to the east and down a winding path that led off the escarpment. They moved quickly away from the walled city and down towards the river where the lights of a town twinkled in the distance on the south bank.

  By his watch, it was three hours ‘til dawn. More than half an hour of that would be spent getting down there without being seen.

  That doesn’t give us long to reconnoiter, get in, and get out.

  But it was all the time they had, so it would have to do.

  *

  They stayed on the narrow track as long as they could then, as they approached the outskirts of the town, moved off twenty yards to one side and away from lighting, entering the town itself via one of the rickety wooden docks on the riverside. Given that it was the early hours of the morning, Banks didn’t expect anyone to be up and about but he did expect it to feel like a town, as if there was at least someone alive. This place felt as old and dead and still as the ancient ruins upon the escarpment.