Toy Soldiers Box Set | Books 1-6

by Ford, Devon C.

  “I saw it,” Downes told him, saying nothing more as he didn’t like to share his darker thoughts.

  Downes, in spite of being intimately acquainted with hardship and twin concepts of cold and wet, was shivering uncontrollably by the time their boat docked on the picturesque Isle of Skye.

  Low cloud shrouded the towering rock crags to their left, obscuring the true height of the cliff face, but to their front the small port was anything but idyllic.

  Soldiers in full NBC suits, Noddy suits as his men called them, stared anonymously at them as the circular holes showed only their eyes inside their respirators. It was less the way they looked at the bedraggled men and women arriving and more the emplaced gun positions that caused the greatest concern. The dock had evidently been prepared to perform the task of quarantine admission, given that metal mesh grids had been hastily welded together to form a sealed walkway for them to pass through. The men from the island piloting the boats remained onboard, staying to the upper decks where they didn’t come into contact with anyone representing a potential infection risk.

  “All weapons and equipment into the buckets,” shouted a voice muffled by a respirator and dulled by repetitive boredom. “Keep moving forwards… All weapons and equipment into the buckets…”

  Recovered from the impacts during their brief crossing, Dezzy stiffened beside his officer.

  “Are these Green Army muppets?” he grumbled, worrying that their more exotic arsenal would be seen as novelty toys by men unaccustomed to more than a few weapons.

  “Not all of them,” Mac answered from behind them. “Look at the rooftops.” Both Downes and Dezzy looked up, spotting the shape of a rifle held by one man and recognising it as a Colt. “Got to be our lot mixed in among them.”

  “Classic, aashi—” Smiffy said, gasping in pain as he put too much weight on his injured ankle. The shouted instructions continued to be repeated as they dutifully shuffled forwards. When it came to their turn at the cut-out section of heavy mesh to deposit their trade tools into what looked like hastily repurposed plastic fish tubs, the man calling out the orders stopped to stare as the four men spent longer than everyone else removing everything from their persons that could be classed as lethal. Smiffy hesitated, the liberated Soviet rifle clutched in both hands as he fought with every fibre of his body, not wanting to let it go.

  “Put it down,” Mac said unkindly. “It’s just a gun.”

  “It’s bloody not!” Smiffy protested. “It’s mine, an—”

  He stopped talking as Downes’ bearded face spun to fix his eyes with a shadowed look. Wordlessly, he placed the VAL into the bucket as though laying a beloved pet to rest, before standing tall and limping onwards without a second glance.

  They deposited next to no spare ammunition for any of their weapons, having expended most of their rounds since getting back to the UK so long ago and starting the rollercoaster ride they’d been on ever since.

  “One at a time,” came the next shouted orders, “step through and remove all items of clothing…” the enclosed walkway split into two lanes, both intermittently opening up and sealing again as solid metal sheets slid open and closed to admit one person at a time.

  The backlog of civilians, understandably hesitant about that phase, though unconcerned about relinquishing their weapons—the reversal of the soldiers’ concerns— passed more slowly, as the military personnel were oddly more accustomed to getting naked in front of strangers.

  The enclosed sections were lit by bright yellow lamps which forced Downes to shield his eyes as he went through to receive more instructions from another suited soldier.

  “All your clothes off,” he said with as little effort as was required, “into the bag.”

  Downes stripped, feeling the soreness of wet clothes already so uncomfortable through travel and sweat. He still shivered and his skin was cold to the touch, which caused him concern; he was well trained enough and experienced enough to recognise the early signs of exposure and hypothermia, but explaining that right then would have delayed the process so he kept his mouth shut. He was struggling to take his boots off, so the soldier passed him a short-bladed knife to cut the laces. His feet were in shit state. Pale, translucent skin peeled off in large patches to expose the sore pink beneath. No deployment he’d ever been on had left so little time to maintain himself.

  “Arms up,” the speaker waited until Downes had complied. “Spin around.” Again a pause. “Okay, put this on and keep moving through.”

  Downes accepted a plastic packet containing a dark blue boiler suit with a chunky zip so awkward for his numb fingers to operate that it smacked of a government bulk buy from the lowest bidder. The boiler suit was accessorised with a pair of wellington boots after he had been asked his size.

  “T…Ten…” he stammered through chattering teeth.

  He was handed a pair with a large ‘12’ stamped on the sole but he didn’t care.

  The separation ahead of him slid back, forcing him to squint again from the harsh daylight obscured by the clouds, and he shuffled forwards keeping his hands wrapped around himself.

  The next station in the conveyor system where he was instructed to stop required him to place a thermometer under his tongue and wait in silence until the hands of a cheap, plastic clock ticked around and a thickly gloved hand reached out to take the instrument and inspect it. Satisfied that he wasn’t running a fever—as would have been evident to anyone bothering to look at how close to hypothermia he was—he was waved through the final obstacle of a heavy, rubber curtain and into a tented area where the noise of so many people talking at once assaulted his senses like a flashbang.

  His nose directed him through the crowd of civilians and squadron men and marines to where he detected the origin of the coffee aroma, but his uncontrollably shaking hands couldn’t manage to manipulate the tap on the urn. Panic rose inside him, so uncommon for a man who had fought through lethal warzones for the last year of his life, not to mention all of the trials he had faced before.

  The simple fact that he couldn’t manage to pour himself a cup of coffee threatened such a debilitating wave of anxiety that he almost dropped the mug as his knees gave out on him.

  Before he could hit the ground, strong hands grasped his upper arms and held him up to pull him back to his feet.

  “Allow me, Major,” captain Palmer’s impeccably mannered and cultured voice sounded softly in his ear. The cup was taken from his unresisting hand as the major fought a wave of dizziness which forced him to grip the edge of the flimsy trestle table for balance.

  “Sugar? Milk?” Palmer enquired.

  “He’ll take both,” Mac’s gruff voice announced as the Scottish sergeant shouldered his way through the crowd to appraise his officer with a practised eye.

  “Grab a couple, if you don’t mind, Captain,” Mac told him, still not taking his eyes off Downes before grabbing the nearest civilian by the sleeve and pulling him towards him. “You, go get me three blankets.” The man nodded, his eyes wide, and disappeared to comply.

  “We need to get you sat down,” Mac said in a tone that was probably intended to be soothing but still sounded like a threat to anyone who didn’t know him. He walked the major towards the small gas-bottle heater which was the focal point for so many cold people, and his loud voice cleared a path like Moses.

  “Move your arses!” he bawled. “You! Clear out of the way.” This last was aimed at a young man who fled from his choice position in front of the glowing bars radiating heat, just in time before Downes was deposited directly in front of the heater and Palmer arrived to thrust the cup containing hot, sugary liquid into his hands. Before Mac could say or do anything else, a speaker erupted inside the fenced shelter.

  “Commanding officers report to quarantine exit. I repeat, commanding officers to quarantine exit.”

  Mac looked up, meeting Palmer’s eyes and nodding to convey that the tank captain had to speak for them all. Maxwell, filling the boots of his predecesso
r perfectly, appeared behind the captain’s right shoulder. Mac’s eyebrows met in the middle, not hiding his response to the other arrival as Palmer Senior turned to find his younger brother had fallen in with them, somehow making his bland boiler suit look like the high fashion he was born to parade.

  Captain Palmer, too exhausted to be careful with his words, elected to give his instructions to his younger brother under the guise of speaking to the NCOs. He spoke, fixing his brother with a direct stare that made it obvious he was talking to him.

  “Leave the talking to me,” he said quietly. “I rather suspect we aren’t as welcome as one would hope.”

  FIVE

  Eight days prior

  The US Air Force C-130 transport plane banged hard onto the tarmac as the engine shrieked and roared in full reverse, with a juddering running throughout the airframe which threatened to break it apart. The pilot’s warning to brace for a ‘combat landing’ meant nothing to Professor Grewal, serving only to panic him into believing they were dropping down into a war zone. So when the wheels hit the ground hard and bounced the heavy cargo plane back up into the air, to reverse his body’s grip on gravity so suddenly and sickeningly, he cried out in panic, thinking that they were crashing.

  His hearth thumped in his chest almost as hard as the screeching tyres did as they hit the tarmac a second time and let out a tortured noise before the plane rose into the air again. The fuselage skewed sideways, like a powerful car would do when the driver floored the throttle from a standing start, only with the sensations being reversed so that forwards was backwards and up was down. It simply overwhelmed him, forcing from him another yell of panic.

  On the fourth or fifth impact, punctuated by the tortured, muted sounds of rubber on tarmac, his body tried to tell his mind that they were slowing down even if he wouldn’t believe it. When his brainstem overrode his choice to hold his breath and he gasped in a deep lungful, he finally understood what the pilot meant by the term ‘combat landing’.

  The headphones he forgot he was wearing crackled into life and played a short burst of static before the pilot’s muffled voice filled his ears.

  “Thank you for flying zombie airways. We know you have no choice, so we don’t really care if you enjoyed your flight. Be sure to take all of your shit with you when you leave.”

  The plane turned a slow circle on the spot, so close to the end of the runway, which fortunately Grewal didn’t have a forward view of, as one of the uniformed soldiers nearby unstrapped and stood up to stretch. The man was average height with a stocky build but other than the fearsome beard and a stare that could penetrate steel, he seemed entirely… average. The other men on his team seemed similarly fit, as if they could swim five miles of open ocean before breakfast each day, and all of them were equally as dismissive of the two scientists and their small staff.

  They didn’t exactly get off on the right foot when the Brit assumed they were there to carry his research equipment, which had been dumped on the tarmac at the airport near Langley. He hadn’t seen the team come in via chopper from Little Creek, so he’d had no idea who or what they were when he’d given them instructions on carrying the crates onto the plane.

  Grewal neither knew nor cared that the US Air Force pilots were acting on behalf of the CIA, nor did he care that the men and women providing their security were part of the US Army’s Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases. He knew that some of the staff attached to what he considered to be his project were with Chambers and had come direct from the CDC, but with so many different people from various places using a whole raft of acronyms and reporting to different admirals or generals or politicians, he’d lost track and managed to confuse a US Navy Seal team with grunts who were there to carry his boxes.

  He still hadn’t had the opportunity to make up for his rudeness, not that he ever tried hard to consider the feelings of others, but something about the unsettlingly still man in charge of that team made him feel as though he’d committed a grave error that he needed to rectify soon.

  “Come on, Doc,” Agent Fisher said as he moved past towards the ramp and broke the eye contact between the tough soldier and the terrified scientist. Fisher had swapped the Langley camouflage of his grey suit for the more practical black military style clothing, bearing no badges of rank or any insignia at all to denote who or what he was.

  He wore a black vest over his anonymous-looking uniform and carried weapons, as did the other two men sporting identical haircuts to accompany their outfits, and Grewal tried to recall their names. Wood? Carter? He shook his head as he realised that he didn’t care anyway.

  “At ease, Master Chief,” Fisher said in a tone somewhere between sarcastic and respectful as he passed the staring SEAL. Grewal was forced to follow and pass unnervingly close to the man he was certain hated him; but then again, he had grown accustomed to being hated everywhere he went. Since being rescued by British Special Forces from the London lab which had been the epicentre of the outbreak, he hadn’t been many places other than US military bases. Still, everyone there hated him too, even if he had created the virus only by accident while carrying out the orders of both his and the United States governments.

  He shuffled along behind the agent, eager to be off the plane which had so recently tried to kill him, and eager too to get away from the malevolence hiding behind the beard that still tracked his movements like a predator.

  “Are you Fisher?” a man wearing British army camouflage uniform asked confidently as he and a small entourage approached the rear ramp of the plane. They had disgorged from a pair of dull, green military vehicles parked nearby, and from their physiques and bearing, all had the obvious look of fighting men.

  “That’s me,” the CIA man said, stepping up to greet the speaker.

  “Colonel Kelly,” the man said, offering a handshake and half crushing the agent’s hand with enough force to push a vein out in the side of his own neck. Grewal shot a quick look at Fisher, who still maintained the poker face he wore permanently, even if one eyelid did flicker a tiny bit. The Colonel offered no other information, and Grewal guessed that was either because the agent knew who he was or else the man just enjoyed secrecy. He turned, pacing away and expecting to be followed as he continued to talk.

  “We’ve arranged a facility for you to use,” he explained. “It’s basic, hardly the standard I imagine you’re accustomed to, but needs must.” Fisher ignored the jibe at him needing a five star hotel.

  “Have the requirements been met?”

  “Isolated location, secure perimeter, given that three sides of it are the Atlantic, and a power supply,” Kelly responded. “Like I said, it’s basic.” He reached the driver’s side of the vehicle he’d arrived in and opened it, pausing before climbing back in and peering down the short runway towards the sight of three transport trucks lumbering towards them.

  “You’ll be taken directly there,” he told the visitors. “I have a small force in place to ensure you aren’t disturbed.” Something about the way he narrowed his eyes when he said that made Fisher think he meant that they weren’t to leave their basic facility. “And other than that, I expect you to conduct all of your experiments without affecting the population here.” He climbed behind the wheel without another word, the three other soldiers doing the same before the engine barked into life. It rattled away under the kind of acceleration a person might use when the maintenance of the vehicle wasn’t his or her personal concern. This left the gaggle of Americans alone and waiting for their convoy to arrive.

  “I think we can safely assume they aren’t exactly pleased to see us,” Fisher opined to the others, his gaze resting finally on Professor Grewal, who was transfixed by the look that implied he was solely responsible for that, too. Movement directly beside him made him jump and move away, to find that the leader of the US Navy SEAL team had appeared at his side without Grewal being aware in the slightest of his approach.

  “Master Chief,” Fisher said, “I trust you and your
team can be ready for an excursion by sixteen hundred?” The man nodded, still not saying a word, and turned to requisition one of the approaching trucks for his team and their gear.

  Grewal walked back to the plane, hurrying with his hands out in front of him saying, “No, no, no!” as he rushed to stop one of the uniformed US Army soldiers from handling a piece of equipment too roughly. The man from the MRIID put it down carefully and stepped back, leaving Grewal to protect the sensitive centrifuge and oversee the rest of the equipment getting loaded onto the transport.

  “Bloody ham-fisted buffoo—”

  “Everything okay, Doc?” Fisher’s voice startled him and elicited a small yelp from him as he clutched the lab equipment tighter to his chest.

  “Yes, yes, I err…” Fisher slapped him on the back a little too hard to be entirely friendly.

  “Relax,” he told him. “A broken test tube ain’t exactly the worst thing that could happen, if you catch my drift…”

  The term basic, was something of an understatement. Their facility, such as it was, was a farm and outbuildings which had been hastily repurposed, and the previous occupants displaced to God only knew where. It was chosen for location, not that Grewal understood that. Situated on the south-western tip of the craggy, mountainous island they now inhabited, the narrow approach to what was now their base could be cut off by a small force to minimise the risk of anything getting loose. When that was explained to him, he nodded sagely and offered his opinion.

  “Like Leonidas’ defence of Thermopylae?”

  “Interesting that you choose a reference where all the good guys died,” Fisher said, a mirthful smirk adorning his face.

  The rooms of the main house and other buildings were portioned out, with the main, high-ceilinged shed being the main attraction. Judging by the smell, it had previously housed livestock, but the hint of recent blacksmithing hung in the air to mingle with the residual aroma of shit. That metalwork had been the construction of a series of small, steel mesh cubes, evidently the holding cages for what would be their test subjects.