“Huh,” Fisher answered, not bothering to explain his views any further.
“I thought that, perhaps, you could develop something that could deliver this frequency somehow,” Grewal tried hopefully.
“What?” Fisher said, seeming to reconnect with the conversation suddenly and recall the few words he’d missed. “Oh, we, er… we actually have something already for that. Just needs a few minor adjustments, I reckon.”
It was Grewal’s turn to look confused, which seemed to delight Fisher, who sat upright and glanced over the Professor’s shoulder towards the partially open door of the room he’d commandeered as his office. This he’d achieved by summarily ordering the two US army personnel resting there to find somewhere else to be.
“This is classified,” he began, then shrugged as though it didn’t really matter if he divulged the secret, as the enemy it had been designed to be deployed against no longer existed. “You’ve heard the term ‘Psy-Ops’?”
“Psychological warfare?” Grewal asked, his mind racing ahead to the conclusion but not saying it out loud in case he deflated the CIA man too much, given how excited he seemed to be by divulging state secrets.
‘Uh huh. See, we had this idea way back—like Vietnam way back—and we’d developed a battlefield sound emitter designed to degrade an entrenched enemy and force them to surrender or abandon a position that would otherwise be too costly in servicemen’s lives to take conventionally.” Grewal sat back and casually raised one knee over the other. He did it naturally, seeing nothing wrong with the gesture, but Fisher was distracted by it as he found it unnervingly effeminate. He shook his head slightly and carried on.
“It’s like a bomb,” he explained, moving his hands through the air as they described the smooth shape of the projectile. “Only there’s no warhead—no explosive charge—instead, this thing hits the dirt after being dropped from pretty much any altitude and cracks open like a nut. When the housing comes off… pow! The device inside activates and gives you eighteen to twenty-four hours of the worst high-pitched screaming and white noise you could imagine.”
“Why don’t they just blow it up?”
“What?”
“The device,” Grewal asked. “Why wouldn’t the enemy just destroy it?”
Fisher hesitated. “It, er… it should be too painful to get near for starters. Like, agony, to be anywhere near it.”
“Irrelevant,” Grewal said half to himself. “The infected subjects would just try to eat it, I imagine. So, how soon can we have a few and how quickly can they be retrofitted to emit the low frequency sound?”
“Hold up there, Doc,” Fisher said defensively and leaned away as though warding off his enthusiasm. “I mean, there are channels to go through here. I can’t just call up Langley and say, “Hey, remember those weapons we have mothballed in the basement? The ones that were probably war crimes waiting to happen? Yeah, I’ll take four to go. With mustard. Can you deliver?”
Grewal stared back at him, not finding the sarcasm amusing in the slightest. Fisher deflated, his shoulders sagging as his fingertips rubbed the skin at his temples to distort the shape of his eyes.
“I’ll place a call,” he said, “see if I still have any sway back home.” He nodded his chin to the doorway, which Grewal took, with awkward grace, as his dismissal. Fisher stooped to pick up a heavy plastic case from the threadbare carpet and set it on the small desk in the room as Grewal stepped outside, pausing at the top of the stairs to peer back through the gap and eavesdrop on the one-sided conversation.
Fisher went through the laborious process of setting up the satellite phone and dialling the correct sequence of digits to reach his superiors at Langley. The call bounced around through a couple of extensions until the right people were located, and a glance at his watch made him curse his own stupidity as he realised he’d called the Pentagon at a little before eight a.m. their time.
“Hellard here,” came the gruff, almost fatherly voice from the other side of the Atlantic.
“Sir, it’s Fisher. With the science team sent to Scotl—”
“I’m well aware of who and where you are, Agent Fisher,” the older man interrupted, belying the kindly tone he usually employed to be his professional front. “Have you found a cure to the ‘problem’ yet?”
“We’re working on that, Sir,” Fisher stammered quickly before getting directly to the point of his call. “Sir, we’ve made a discovery here that would make a number of options more viable if it worked…”
“Well, spit it out, Son!”
“I—we—need as many of the prototype TSE devices and some engineers to re-tune them as you can muster. Long story real short, Sir, we think we can attract them into forming large groups which, as I said, will make more than one of our tactical solutions much simpler and more effective.”
“Wait a minute,” Bob Hellard, deputy director of the CIA, said coldly. “The United States is currently expending significant energy and resources in monitoring the behaviour of those infected in the UK.” His words sounded as though he was standing before a closed meeting of the senate asking for budgetary increases. “And now you want to use a prototype device to intentionally draw them into herds or whatever?”
“Sir,” Fisher said flatly, as if he was dropping the bullshit. “If this project doesn’t work out, then I don’t need to explain it to you that having them concentrated in the major cities will make it much easier to wipe the slate clean again so we can repopulate.”
There was a long pause on the other end of the line, during which Fisher didn’t speak. He barely even breathed. In his mind, the next person to speak and fill the void in the conversation was the one to lose, and his career was staked on the mission being a success. Many had simply wanted to nuke Britain and seal off Europe, especially now that the news out of their west coast was just as bleak. He knew their maritime forces were stretched thin enough maintaining constant coastal patrols, not to mention the concerns of many that a horde would walk over the frozen expanses from Russia to Canada with the next winter. But if he could provide the solution to controlling the movements of the infected until they could be purged, either by napalm or whatever artificial virus-killing virus the scientist was cooking up, then the people of America could sleep soundly thanks to him.
That was why his explanation featured the word ‘we’ so heavily.
“You’ll get your toys, Fisher,” Hellard said finally. “And an air crew to deliver them. But I expect results by the end of the week.” The connection was cut before Fisher could respond, but the abruptness of the call ending did nothing to stifle his sense of achievement.
Outside the door, still and silent, Professor Grewal fought down the urge to storm back into the room and demand an explanation for the terms, ‘wipe the slate clean’ and ‘repopulate’. Instead, he melted away, returning to his foul-smelling cow shed lab to continue working on one of the few things on the planet he could actually affect.
The transport plane arrived the following morning, banging down onto the runway in a similarly uncomfortable and reckless fashion as the one which had brought the science team and their minders. Three crates were unloaded with a forklift truck and placed on the back of the dull green trucks the British military favoured so much, before being driven a short distance to where the helicopters operated on a makeshift patch of flattened land adjacent to the main runway.
That rotary wing staging area, filled with very bored personnel, including one royal navy Sea King crew, was stirred into activity when the recognisable noise of incoming helicopters thrummed the mist-filled air and set them all to looking around to be the first to detect and correctly identify the aircraft.
“Sounds big,” Lieutenant Commander Barrett opined as he craned his neck upwards and shielded his face with his left hand to block out the meagre light of the sun behind the dense clouds. His right hand cupped a tin mug and the fingers of that hand sprouted a cigarette, a habit he had been drawn back into through long days of inacti
vity.
“More than one,” James Morris, Barrett’s younger co-pilot answered. For once he didn’t add a vague reference of either song lyrics or a film quote, which Barrett usually failed to recognise.
“Twin rotary,” Gary Brinklow, the crew’s loadmaster said confidently, without looking up from the dog-eared Jilly Cooper he was reading. He’d served in the Royal Navy longer than either officer, and had enjoyed a relaxed position of authority even before the world had ended.
“Chinook!” Morris exclaimed as he pointed west at a dark shape surging through the low-lying cloud cover.
“Almost,” Brinklow corrected him nonchalantly. “That’s a CH-Forty-Six. It’s just closer.”
The two pilots stared at the approaching helicopter, seeing that their NCO was absolutely right and this bulbous, unnatural-looking flying machine was indeed much smaller than the larger Chinook helicopters designed and built by the same company.
“Well,” Barrett exclaimed with a chuckle, “that didn’t make it across the Atlantic all by itself, did it now?”
Neither of his companions answered. The fact that there was at least one aircraft carrier out in deeper water beyond their sight and reach made them feel even more trapped as they were forced to sit and watch their own helicopter gather dust without the fuel allocation to operate it. The realisation dawned on them all at the same time that if the Americans—it could only be them operating such a large machine off their coast—could keep a large twin-rotor machine in the air, then they could surely spare a tank of aviation fuel to allow them to retrieve more survivors.
The large beast banked to loop their small heliport once, before levelling out to set its wheels onto the flattened area. Immediately, the screaming sound of its engines being cut lowered the noise level and the three men of the Sea King that had seen so much action already watched as the rear ramp lowered to reveal an empty cargo hold and the exiting flight crew. There were six of them, indicating that they had sent a maintenance team to accompany the aircraft, and their path would lead them past the British crew to reach the buildings.
“Welcome to Skye,” Barrett said, smiling and extending a hand to the pilot in the lead. The man took it suspiciously, not offering his own name in response to Barrett’s introductions, but smiled weakly as though to end the conversation without confrontation. Then he just walked away.
“What the hell was that all about?” Morris asked the senior pilot quietly.
“Not sure,” Barret answered as he lifted a hand to point at an arriving convoy of Bedford trucks coming from the direction of the newly arrived cargo plane. “But it’s more than likely got something to do with that.”
FOURTEEN
The argument that flared briefly around the stationary hulk of the Sultan burned out slowly like a dying flare. The strenuous protestations of Duncan were met with blank faces of refusal at best, and a threat of bloody violence from the one member of their party he least expected it from.
The girl, Jessica, pulled a blade from her right boot, and held it low beside her, which seemed to signify her potential use of it wasn’t a mere threat. Duncan held up his hands and backed up a pace.
“Whoa, hold on a minute,” he laughed, hoping to lower the temperature by lightening the mood. Daniels flicked out a hand to clip Jessica’s right sleeve, which caught her attention enough to see his head shake. Sighing, she replaced the blade in her boot but kept her look of target analysis fixed firmly on the man she didn’t know.
One of the men, she corrected herself as one of the newcomers spoke. He made words like any other person, only to her ears the sound came with a quiet force to them, like the man didn’t need to raise his voice. She was already wary of him from the way he moved, seemingly without making a sound, but his words added a gravity in support of her own wants, which raised his standing with the girl.
“We go back for them,” he said simply. No justification. No swaying argument or impassioned speech about why; merely a statement of fact as though any other path simply wasn’t an option.
“Agreed,” Daniels said, glancing at Ellie, who had her face buried in her hands as her body was racked with sobs she tried her hardest to keep silent. “But we don’t have an up-to-date location, bearing or RV point set up…” The two marines glanced at one another to convey a silent opinion about the lack of operational awareness. The taller of them, the man who had simply identified himself as Enfield, reached into the door pocket of the passenger side and produced a map, which he proceeded to spread out on the front of their ugly car.
“What do we know?” the heavier-set marine, sergeant Hampton, asked.
“We know they were down on the coast and heading north west towards the house,” Daniels explained. “We know they saw the swarm travelling north and they intersected their path. They holed up on a farm somewhere overnight.”
“A farm somewhere,” Hampton repeated matter-of-factly, looking again at the quiet man cradling the rifle. “Shouldn’t be too hard to find around here.” He glanced with theatrical exaggeration over both shoulders to take in the open, rolling landscape dotted with a few farms as far as the eye could see.
“Point taken,” Daniels said, “but that doesn’t explain why they aren’t answering their radio.”
“No,” Hampton mused distractedly as he ran a thick, sausage-like finger over the map to trace the major roads. Silence hung for a while until Daniels leaned in to look at the map to circle his pointed finger in the air before stabbing it down.
“That’s where we were,” he said, snaking the finger north to tap on a vague area, “and this is where we are now.” The finger lifted up again to hover until it traced the red line indicating a wider road. “Best guess is that they were heading this way—no sense in using the smaller roads when there wasn’t enough traffic around here to block the main roads—and the swarm would’ve come though… here… ish.”
He gestured a wider track with two fingers to show a roughly south to north direction that passed very close by their residence of yesterday.
“Meaning they’ll still be on that side of the line and not answering us,” Hampton said. “Anyone want to state the obvious?”
“They were in a Warrior with a full armament,” Daniels said firmly, refusing to accept that they had been overwhelmed by unarmed zombies. Thousands of zombies, granted, but still none that could bite through armour.
“And two of them are ninjas,” Enfield chimed in helpfully.
“And two of them are Special Forces,” Hampton agreed without breaking verbal stride. “What was the plan?” he asked Daniels.
“The plan?”
“Yes,” the marine sergeant asked him with exaggerated slow speech. “What was the plan for when you met up?”
“Erm, head to the north west coast of Scotland where the others went… We didn’t set an RV because we were in radio contact.”
“So, assuming we don’t find them and can’t raise them, would they go there under their own steam?” Enfield asked. Daniels shrugged, admitting the obvious logic.
“No,” snapped Ellie as she advanced on the huddled men. “No way. We’re not leaving. Not if Amber and Peter are with them.” She shouldered her way in between them, dwarfed by their height and size, to stab her own slender digit onto the map. The gesture was intended to make her point but instead it served only to draw the attention of the three soldiers to where her fingertip landed, which was about forty miles away from the places they had been discussing.
“I’m not suggesting we do that,” Hampton said angrily. “These people are… these people are our friends. We’ve spent a god-awful winter with them and both of us were prepared to…” he sucked in a calming breath and closed his eyes briefly before speaking more calmly. “Both of us stayed behind so they could get away.” That piece of information silenced the small, fierce woman and her face softened. Hampton took his gaze away from hers to regard Johnson’s former radio man.
“We move from here to their last known position. Ke
ep trying the radio and we’ll follow in the turd-mobile.” He nodded back to the tired-looking ride they’d turned up in, unable to keep the derision from his face as he regarded the Ford Sierra. The vehicle had adopted no fewer than three different shades of metallic brown, despite being only six years old, going by the ‘B’ registration on the plate.
“Look alive!” Duncan shouted from his position half out of the Sultan’s hatch. As one, they all moved with purpose, Enfield spinning to bring the rifle scope up to his eye to scan the road in the direction they had come from.
“How many?” he asked loudly, eye still glued to the optic and guessing correctly that the elevated position afforded a better view of the threat.
“Dozen,” Duncan shot back. “Maybe more.”
“Any fast fuckers?” Hampton growled as he limped fast for the driver’s door of the Sierra.
“Well… oh shi—” His curse was interrupted by a coughing twang which Hampton knew was his marine rendering something safe. A second and third shot sounded, both at even intervals, which told the sergeant that the threat was imminent, if Enfield was picking them off at a steady rate.
“Too many,” Daniels called out from atop the Sultan. “Grab your gear and squeeze in here.” Hampton hesitated for a second and a half before swearing foully at the awkward lever to tip the front seat forwards and retrieve their bags. All the while, Enfield took steady, measured shots at the heads appearing over the low rise until a noise behind and above him paused the rhythm. The noise was Duncan pulling back the cocking handle on the big machine gun in preparation to fire.
“Don’t,” Enfield shouted up, “you’ll just bring more our way.” Hampton emerged from the car, still muttering as he manhandled two large packs and his own weapon.
“And the boot, Sarge,” Enfield chided his NCO in between two shots.
“Crap,” Hampton cursed, stomping back to fight with the keys and open the boot. “I fully expect you to keep the bastards off me, Enfield,” he reminded the marine in a conversational tone. “If you don’t, rest assured that I’ll make it my afterlife’s work to personally eat you, should I become the enemy.” He spoke as though there weren’t murderous former humans bearing down on his exposed back, as he retrieved a cardboard box with a few holes stabbed through it. The box shook in his hands and he muttered to it as he limped towards the Sultan and handed it up with a warning not to open the lid.
Toy Soldiers Box Set | Books 1-6 Page 92
