Operation Syria

by William Meikle

  *

  He’d taken too long to get his gloves off and the others had moved some five yards ahead of him. A spider, even larger than the others, dropped from the rooftops and fell into the gap between Banks and the others. It made directly for him, on him before he could get a shot in. He managed to put two in its body but it didn’t slow, barreling onto him and knocking him off his feet. He remembered how Brock’s hands had been taken out of commission and realizing he couldn’t get into position to take another shot, dropped his rifle by his side, reaching for his knife as the twin black fangs lunged for his throat. He threw his weight against the spider and was surprised to find it weighed very little. He easily rolled the thing over and stabbed again and again into the widest part of its belly while dripping wet fangs chattered and clacked right in front of his eyes. If he shifted his weight, even for a second, it would tear his face off. He stabbed and tore with the knife, feeling fluid run over his hand and wrist, a new acrid stench threatening to assault his throat and nose. Finally, the thing fell still.

  He rolled away from it, retrieving his rifle in the same movement and rose, breaking into a run when he saw that the pursuing mass of spiders was only yards from catching him.

  Farther up the alley the other three men were standing, back to back, sending volleys up to the rooftops. They too were covered in dripping gore and stood amid a growing pile of twitching spider bodies but they had cleared most of the beasts from above by the time Banks caught them.

  “Try to keep up, Cap,” Hynd said as they ceased fire. “I thought we’d lost you there.”

  Banks took the lead as they headed off at speed down the alley. The attack from above had been nullified but the swarm at their backs was coming on fast.

  We need to get out of this alley. We’re sitting ducks in here.

  He upped the pace until they were full-out running. The end of the alleyway was in sight twenty yards ahead and he kept his eyes on the gap, trying not to think about the beasts at their back.

  Almost clear.

  A spider as large as a small car scuttled across the open end of the alleyway, totally blocking their escape route. Its rat-a-tat clacking was answered from behind them and from the rooftops in front of the running men, as a score and more of the black-bodied beasts crept over the parapets.

  We’re trapped.

  - 10 -

  Maggie stood in the hallway, fingers plugging her ears as both Davies in the room across from her and Wiggins at the main doorway along the corridor fired volley after volley out into the street. It felt like an age until the shooting stopped and even when she took her fingers out of her ears, the echo of the gunfire rang in her head. She stepped forward to see Davies load another magazine in his rifle.

  “Is it over?”

  “Well, they’ve buggered off for now, if that’s what you mean,” the lanky man said. “I can’t see them anymore. Maybe the corporal knows more.”

  Davies stayed at his post as Maggie went out along the corridor again to the front of the building and the main doorway. Wiggins was likewise reloading. She looked out to see a dozen or more of the spiders lying in scattered pieces and gore in the courtyard.

  “Is it over?” she asked.

  “For now, I think so. But I don’t understand it. There were at least fifty of the fuckers and they had us bang to rights,” Wiggins said. “I was getting ready to retreat back to you and the lad for a last stand, when they all buggered off.”

  Before Maggie could reply, more gunshots echoed across the old town, coming from somewhere to the north, several weapons firing at once.

  “Now, that’s our lads and they’re in trouble,” Wiggins replied.

  He tried his radio.

  “Cap? Come in?”

  All he heard in answer was more gunfire.

  “Stay here,” he said.

  “Bugger that for a game of soldiers, Corporal,” she replied. “Do you have a handgun?”

  Wiggins grinned.

  “I knew we were compatible,” he replied and took a pistol from his hip, handing it over to her. “Safety’s off. Point and shoot and keep shooting until the fuckers go away.”

  “Sounds like a plan to me,” she said and followed Wiggins as he set off at a run across the square in the direction of the gunfire.

  *

  They didn’t have to run far, only across the courtyard and along one alleyway to a smaller yard. It contained the mangled torso of a dead man on the ground and a huge spider, one much larger than the others, facing away from them and blocking the mouth of the route north. Gunfire came from beyond the beast and looking up, Maggie saw a wave of the smaller spiders coming down from the rooftops.

  Wiggins took in the situation immediately and didn’t hesitate. He fired three quick rounds into the large beast’s rear.

  “Three up the arse. How’d you like that, wanker?”

  The spider’s back end crumpled, its rear legs giving way beneath it. But the front was working well enough and it turned at Wiggins’ attack and scuttled forward. Wiggins put three more rounds into its eyes and Maggie fired twice into its body. At the same time, four men came at a run out of the alleyway, all firing into the bulk of the spider which finally collapsed in a heap in the small courtyard, oozing fluids from multiple wounds.

  There was no time for warm welcomes. The smaller spiders swarmed in the alleyway from which the four men had emerged. The squad lined up in the alley mouth and send wave after wave of shots into the squirming mass of legs and bodies, blowing limbs, eyes, fangs, and bodies apart in a spray of viscous gore that smelled as bad as it looked.

  It took less than a minute before nothing was left alive in the tight alley. Maggie looked up to see a dozen more spiders on the parapet but these were already slinking away across the rooftops to the north, seemingly having lost their appetite for a fight.

  “Is that all of these fuckers?” Wiggins said.

  *

  Once they were safely back in the main doorway, the captain set Brock and Wilkins on guard duty and led her into the empty room beyond where Davies was on watch.

  “I wanted to do this quietly and tell you before the others, as you’re the only one that looks strong enough to take it right now,” Banks said.

  Maggie knew from the look in his eyes it wasn’t good news and couldn’t bring herself to ask, so let him continue.

  “We found the rest of your team down in the town. I’m not sure what got them first but it was the spiders that got them in the end.”

  It was too much information to take in at once.

  “They’re dead? All of them?”

  Banks only nodded.

  “And the bodies?”

  Banks told her the story, from the soldiers’ entry into the town downstream, to their narrow escape on the waterfront. She was left with the one vivid image in her mind, the cocooned corpses floating serenely away down the great river where so many had gone before them in aeons past. She wanted to say something, maybe to thank the man for his efforts, but nothing would come. Banks took note and patted her softly on the shoulder, the only comfort he could offer.

  “And now I need coffee and a smoke,” the captain finished.

  He turned away from her and only then noticed that the door to the chamber was firmly closed against them. Maggie finally found her voice.

  “Reynolds and Kim are in there,” she said. “Jack took fright and locked them in. We haven’t had a moment to try to open it up again.”

  “Aye, well we’ve got one now.” He shouted along the corridor. “Wiggo, Sarge, get your arses through here.”

  In the end, they needed Maggie to put her shoulder to the door alongside them but slowly, creaking rasping millimeter at a time, the door eventually swung inward.

  Maggie noticed two things immediately; the crack in the upper corner where the breeze had come in was now a gaping hole three feet wide. A gray, wispy gauze of fresh webbing covered the area, like a frosted pane of thick glass. The webbing had a scrap of mate
rial in it, a piece of Reynolds’ flannel shirt, red with fresh blood showing against the gray. Kim sat in the far corner of the chamber, as if trying to press herself as small and tight as possible, hands over her head as she sobbed uncontrollably. There was no sign of Reynolds save the scrap of shirt but it didn’t take many smarts to figure out what had happened to him.

  Wiggins stepped up to the new hole and prodded it with his rifle.

  “It’s not thick,” he said. “We can cut through, if you need to, Cap?”

  Banks looked grim.

  “I don’t need to. We’re not going chasing around after lost lambs. Not when there are more predators about. He brought this on himself, the stupid wanker.”

  Maggie didn’t say anything but found she was in agreement with the captain, at least on that point.

  *

  Banks had his men move everything out of the chamber; food, lights, rucksacks, camp stove, and Kim and the squad pulled the door shut as much as they could manage from out in the corridor. They set up a new temporary camp in the main hallway by the front entrance while Banks went through to the quiet empty room along the corridor to call the situation in to his H.Q. The sergeant, Hynd, set to making coffee while Maggie and Wiggins tried to pry Kim out of what looked like catatonic shock.

  “Please, tell me what happened?” Maggie kept saying, softly but Kim had retreated somewhere unreachable and sat in a corner, balled up tight. Her eyes stared straight ahead, gazing in horror at something only she could see.

  After a futile five minutes with no other information forthcoming, Maggie joined Wiggins and Hynd in a smoke with a mug of coffee.

  “How’s your pal?” Wiggins said.

  “She’s stopped crying. That’s a start. But whatever she saw, it’s scared her, bad.”

  “Aye,” Wiggins replied. “I’m not too happy about it myself. I fucking hate spiders.”

  She was starting to get the soldiers clear as individuals in her head now, all apart from the two younger privates, who, as yet, were merged into one fresh-faced, barely out of their teens, quiet blandness. Private Davies she had spoken to, he was the tall black lad from Glasgow. The corporal, Wiggins, was a cheeky, chatty bundle of nervous energy, a cigarette smoking machine, also from Glasgow but with a harder edge, a sense of violence always present under the smile. She didn’t feel uncomfortable in his presence, for she recognized the type; she’d spent long enough fending them off at university discos in her youth. Hynd was different again, maybe ten years older, the experience sitting easy on him. If Wiggins was a flighty sparrow, the sergeant was an owl, a calm center that saw everything around him, a coiled spring ready to unleash but yet content to stay still and ready for as long as it took.

  The captain, on the other hand, to continue the bird analogy, would be an eagle, above everything else, looking down in search of trouble or opportunity and ready for either. She smiled at her own fancy and was smiling when Banks arrived at the doorway.

  “How are you holding up?” he asked.

  It was a question she’d been asking herself. There was only Kim and her left now, two out of the large team that had set off from London last week so full of excitement as to what they might find. She’d had dreams of academic success, maybe even of finds to make a career from. Now all she wanted to do was get out of here in one piece.

  “I’ll survive,” she said in reply to Banks’ question. “You need somebody to take home with you.”

  Banks gave her a thin smile.

  “Aye, this is a fucked up trip all ‘round. But it’ll be over soon. There’s a chopper waiting across the river that we can call on this evening as soon as it gets dark.” He checked his watch. “Nine hours or so. We hunker down here ‘til dusk, then they’ll pick us up somewhere in the open. You’ll be home before you know it.”

  “If the spiders let us go.”

  He smiled thinly.

  “One way or another, we’re going,” he said. “We’ll kill every bloody one of them if we have to and trample on what’s left.”

  - 11 -

  Banks took his sergeant out along the hallway to the main doorway for a smoke and brought him up to speed with the news of the proposed rescue.

  “Nine hours? That’s a long time to spend waiting,” Hynd said. “We could sweep the area, clean out these fucking things completely?”

  “We don’t have enough ammo,” Banks replied. “Not if there’s even more of them hiding somewhere.”

  “Spiders as big as horses? It’s not fucking natural, Cap.”

  “Tell me about it. But it’s about par for the course for us these days. Maybe Wiggo is right. Maybe we are fucking monster magnets.”

  Hynd patted his rifle.

  “These ones seem to go down quickly enough though, so there’s that to be grateful for.”

  “Aye, speaking of that, take an inventory. We did a shitload of shooting out there today. See if anybody’s running low and make sure everybody’s got a full mag. I aim to lie low and not look for trouble but I said that earlier too and look where that got us.”

  He turned to the two younger men at either side of the doorway.

  “I bet you’re glad you got transferred to the squad now, eh, lads?”

  Wilkins grinned.

  “It’s not every day I get cut free from a giant spider web, is it? That story should be worth a few pints back in the mess if nothing else.”

  Brock too grinned.

  “I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else, sir. Well, maybe down the pub with fitba on the telly but apart from that…”

  Spirits were as high as could be expected. Banks wished his gut would settle; it was grumbling at him again, although he knew even without his early warning system that more trouble wasn’t too far off.

  *

  Back in the hallway, Wiggins was passing out ration packs and Banks’ stomach stopped growling for long enough to get something hot besides coffee inside him, although it was spoiled somewhat by the lingering stench of the gore he’d got on his hands and wrists while stabbing the spider. He’d tried washing it off with bottled water but it was ingrained deep. So he took another smoke when Wiggins offered; at least the harshness of the cheap tobacco did much to mask the smell.

  The woman, Maggie, knelt on the floor again beside the quiet one, Kim, who wasn’t talking. Banks wasn’t sure she’d be able to tell them more than they’d already guessed; a huge fucking spider got in and carried the missing man off. When Banks had called in to the colonel back home, he’d asked for permission to go out into the city and look for the man but his superior had been adamant.

  “You’re to stay where you are, Captain. We can’t lose anybody else. Understand?”

  He’d understood more than enough. As a rescue mission, they weren’t doing well and the colonel needed a win to sell to the top brass on their return. Banks main job now was to make sure he got the two women and his squad, home safe. Everything else was secondary to that.

  What he hadn’t told anyone yet and what had him worried, was that the chopper would need a largish open area to come down in. The market square they’d come through on their way in was the obvious spot but if the spiders were intent on controlling the town, as appeared to be the case, then getting to the spot might not be easy.

  It might not even be possible.

  Standing at the doorway looking out over the mangled, shot-up remains of giant spiders wasn’t helping him clear his thoughts enough to come up with a solution. He went back inside to see how the sarge was getting on with the inventory.

  *

  “It’s not great news, Cap,” Hynd said when Banks found him checking on Davies. “We’ve hardly got a mag each left for the rifles. We’ve got the handguns of course but I doubt if they’ve got the stopping power if one of the big fuckers comes along.”

  “Let’s hope we gave them enough to think about earlier and they leave us alone,” Banks replied.

  “We’ll need a plan B if they do come, that’s for sure. We’ve got five mi
nutes of firefight left in us; after that, we’re toast.”

  “We need somewhere they can’t get to,” Banks replied. “The chamber here’s out, as we can hardly lock ourselves in.”

  “There’s more ammo out on the hill, where we left it. I could take Wiggo and…”

  “Nope. Too risky. And the colonel’s orders are to sit tight and wait.”

  “So we wait.”

  “Aye. We wait. But not here. There are too many windows and doors to defend easily. We need one room, one entrance to funnel the fuckers towards if need be. Take Wiggo and do a reccy of this courtyard. Find us a spot we can defend without using all our ammo up at once.”

  Banks stood at the doorway with a knot in his stomach as Hynd and Wiggins left to circle the yard. Every time one or the other was out of sight inside a building, the knot tightened. Standing by watching men being put in danger on his orders never got any easier but the day it did, it would be the day he walked away from the life.

  It took the two men ten minutes to check out the courtyard and on their return Banks knew from their faces that the search had been futile.

  “There’s a lot of dead bodies, cocooned like the ones down in the town by the river,” Hynd said. “And not a defensible spot to be had…at least none any better than we’ve got here.”

  It made his decision an easy one.

  “That settles it. We stay right where we are. And if they come for us, we fall back to the chamber, shut the door enough to keep them out, and then we wait for nightfall.”

  Hynd didn’t say it but the question was clear in his face.

  And then?

  *

  Once they got the heavy door open again, Banks had the others move all the gear back through to the mosaic chamber and ordered Davies to stand guard.