by Rees, Kevin
Tork grinned and moved off, leaving the answer to Eddie’s interpretation. No doubt they could use whatever healing he’d witnessed, and the wine to cure everyone if they wanted to. Knowing what he knew so far about this team, it wouldn’t sit well to save an enemy when you could watch the last few moments of their life fade away.
Sam came over and knelt by him. ‘Seems your girlfriend is a bit of a liability, old son,’ he said, grinning. ‘Some of her support is on the drift, and I think the big man is too involved. Perhaps we should think about ourselves and leave them to play soldiers.’
‘If you want to pull out of this, Sam, I wouldn’t blame you, but I’m going with them,’ Eddie said, picking up the discarded bottle. ‘And she’s not my girlfriend. The bitch hates me.’
He pulled Eddie around. ‘Don’t get killed for her is all I’m saying.’ He smiled at the nurse. ‘Suppose I’d better make sure your arse isn’t cancelled, then.’
Eddie returned the smile. He recognised a glint in Sam’s eye — the same one he had many years ago. The thrill of an upcoming mission with overwhelming odds; shite stacked around you and the possibility of being killed. What could be better than that, he pondered?
‘C’mon, mucker, we’re moving.’ Sam gestured to the team gathering for the descent.
The chimney was pitch black and claustrophobic: worse for Lars, who got stuck several times. Worse still, he didn’t know what was waiting down there. Effectively, they were rappelling into a furnace that had been decommissioned a year earlier. Eddie was the second man down. Sam waited up top with the team to help secure the roof. Eddie let the rope slide through the figure of eight descender. He kept hearing bangs and taps that made his palms leak like a thrashing waterfall. He tried looking down but all he could see was an impenetrable darkness below his feet. He let the rope glide through the metal, wishing now his idea had been rejected. Eddie recognised his two greatest fears were both present in this chimney. When he was thirteen, for a prank, some boys from his foster home persuaded him they’d witnessed some local gangsters dropping three sacks down some buried drainage pipes. They told him to go in and find the money. He was scared shitless, but didn’t want to lose face in front of them. He was at the stage of being accepted by some older boys, and there was a girl with them who said she would let him see her naked if he did this for her. He went into the pipe, and they closed the hatch and ran off, leaving him to crawl through a spider-infested tube in the pitch black. When he got to the end he sat and shivered until he was found by a local beat cop and taken back to the foster home. He never got into the gang, or saw the girl again.
His second fear was being burned alive. This came from Iraq, with a blue-on-blue incident. American drones mistook their armoured personnel carriers for enemy vehicles and sent in an A10 Warthog with a chain gun. It took five bursts to kill an entire SAS troop on their way, ironically, to support a SEAL team. Eddie had been talking to one of the troopers sitting opposite him in the APC. The great philosophical debate had been about the merits of Liverpool Football Club as opposed to Everton. As the banter became heated, the man suddenly disappeared in front of Eddie’s eyes. All that was left was a red mist that hung like a curtain of blood in the air before being sucked out of holes punched into the armour. The 30mm rounds of the aircraft’s gun smashed everyone around him, but miraculously he was left unscathed. It was the odour of burning flesh acting as a foul smelling-salt that brought him out of the shock. He was trapped in a steel oven that was fast becoming searingly hot. He punched and kicked at the doors, and pushed desperately on a hatch above his head. The air was starting to burn his lungs. The crackle of flames seemed to be all around him. Through the punched-out holes he could see fire on both sides of the vehicle. As he fought for his life, he speculated on the agony of burning to death.
Eddie screamed for help, knowing none would come if the Warthog had been as efficient as he’d seen on other days. He looked around the vehicle as the heat became blistering. Pieces of his comrades were spread all over the floor. Some had grenades still attached, and one had a door charge. Eddie’s survival instinct helped him ignore the task of pulling the bombs off chunks of flesh unrecognisable as being human any more.
He placed the grenades quickly around the door and stacked the flesh of his comrades around them to try and direct the blast. He took the pin out of one grenade and set the door charge then threw himself onto the floor of the APC and felt the metal burn his hands. The explosion shook the vehicle like a monstrous child’s rattle. It was followed by a blast of air, which the flames fed on greedily. Eddie felt his body rise up and walk calmly out of the carrier, replacing the heat of the chewed metal with the heat of the desert. Around him, the scene was like some Hieronymus Bosch hell. Men were crying out to gods and mothers as blood leaked from their mutilated bodies into the thirsty sand. The American SEAL team was there and tried desperately to atone for their pilot’s mistake.
Eddie felt completely detached by everything going on around him. One of the Americans gently guided him over to a makeshift triage area. Precious water was poured over the skin that had contact with the searing metal. The prevailing smell he took away that hung pall-like over the few men on the ground was of pork roasting.
‘Eddie, move yourself, man,’ Lars whispered urgently.
Thankfully, Lars’s hissed order pulled him back out of the past. Eddie swiped away cold sweat from his eyes. He had been gripping the rope tightly, stopping any downward progress and holding up the rest of the troop above him. Eddie wanted to punch himself for leaving them exposed to the enemy. He let go of the descender and plunged down the rest of the black tube. His ankles took the impact of his fast rappel as he hit the metal grate of the floor. He winced, wanting to feel something in return for his stupidity.
‘All right, Eddie?’ Lars knew his descent had been much too fast, and he didn’t want to have another casualty to deal with.
‘Yeah, I’m fine,’ Eddie said. ‘How do we get out?’
‘Tork will place another of his devices on the door,’ Lars said. He noticed, in the pitch black of the furnace, a fine tremble in the nurse’s hand, and sweat was dripping off his face. If Eddie had his eyes, he would have seen the look of concern on the Swede’s face. ‘Tork, come down next.’
The mic clicked once, indicating Tork was on his way. The sound of a zipper being pulled down quickly echoed in the black chimney. Tork’s feet dangled for a moment above their heads as he lowered himself the last few feet gently onto the floor. He unhitched the rope, which whispered up the chimney for the next man.
‘How’s Maya?’ Lars asked.
‘Fine,’ Tork said. ‘She’s next.’
Tork set to work moulding his explosives onto the hinges. Eddie could only hear the man work quickly in the dark; it just wasn’t quick enough for him. Eddie clenched and unclenched his fists and tried to focus on his breathing. Lars reached out and placed a hand on his shoulder. The feeling of comradeship was enough to counter-balance the panic. His breath came fully and deeply. Eddie suddenly felt a bond with a man who, in all senses, was an alien to him. Up until three hours ago, he didn’t know of his existence, or that a race of super-beings was at war with savage creatures that fed on his kind. His “kind”. It really did sound complete bollocks, but he’d seen all the proof he needed to see.
18
Father was waiting impatiently in the tunnel for the battle to break out in the mortuary to cover his escape. But the sounds that reached him were muted and distant. Something wasn’t right. The gunfire had stopped suddenly, leaving only silence to fill the unanswered questions.
‘Come on, Tomar, take the attack to the Bashalx,’ he hissed. He knew Felton’s squad wouldn’t give up, and it was unlikely his turned First Bloods had killed them so easily.
The woman was on the floor at his feet. She was annoying him, more with her frailty than her moans of pain. Her inability to stand the cold without synthetic coverings to hide her pathetic carcass was reason enough
to wipe out all First Bloods. They spewed themselves onto the Earth like a disease. Copulating with impunity, and increasing their numbers, only to end up performing endless, mind-numbing tasks that only served to make them docile. He’d witnessed it for himself with all the recreational toys they possessed. Electronic gadgets that demanded worship and in return sucked the very life out of them. That was their mythical vampire. Only they were too stupid to realise it. They saw nothing, felt nothing. Heads bowed in reverence to small screens of data and continual vacuous communication. They needed to be enslaved again just to give them a purpose. They could provide meat and blood for his men, women and children, who should naturally dominate this world. Out of the three races, it was his that could see the future more clearly than Felton and Aquino, who, he prescribed, were the architects of their own failure. The vaccine was an example of the length the Higher’s would go to eradicate any competition that threatened their intention to dominate this planet. This plan didn’t come from an assembly of people gratifying themselves in the pretence they held all the power. This came from another mind. He long ago suspected there were others living in darker shadows than both their species. Those “others” sanctioned paths the Thirds — and his people — took without any suspicion they were being manipulated. It took him over a century to even germinate the idea, and then decades more to gather proof of what he suspected. All of it didn’t matter if he couldn’t prevent the vaccine program from going ahead. If he failed, his people would emerge worse than a half-dead First Blood. He would become human.
Kat moaned in the darkness, slipping in and out of consciousness every few minutes only to wake up and find it wasn’t a bad dream. She was aware of a throbbing pain in her leg that matched every constriction of her heart. The last few hours had weakened her to a point of not caring if both stopped. It would at least end the locked away memories of her childhood escaping into this dark space. Her mother had always dismissed her nightmares, usually with a slap across her face. She was always too drunk to really care about a hysterical four-year-old who screamed of seeing a man in her window staring in at her. Every night, the same cruel face, a younger version of the beast who held her in this hole.
‘Your leg is bleeding — fix it.’ Father tossed a small box at her, which fell open.
Kat wanted to draw him into conversation. She’d seen advice like that on television, about making yourself human to your captor. Except, this man wasn’t human. Kat touched her left temple and felt crusted blood flake away between her fingers as she tried to imagine the damage. Then she remembered his fingers, and the sensation of long, cold bones forcing themselves inside her. She shuddered and tried purging the memory. Kat considered, opening up her wound and bleeding out quickly. There were a pair of scissors somewhere on the floor; a quick cut to open up her femoral artery and it would be over.
‘Here, girl.’ Father tossed a torch over to where she was crouched.
Kat felt it hit her side and roll on the ground. She groped blindly along the damp floor. Her fingers found the metal cylinder and closed around it awkwardly. A crushing pressure suddenly came down on her hand, forcing it into the mud and jagged stones. Her little finger snapped like a matchstick. Father ground the sole of his boot harder, enjoying the girl’s pathetic airless whimpering.
‘Give me the scissors.’ Father leaned forward, pressing down harder.
Kat’s right hand scrambled frantically on the ground, searching for the scissors. ‘Please...stop! I won’t try to run away.’ She felt cold metal run below her fingers and found the pointed ends. Kat closed her eyes and whispered a small prayer. She raised her hand and brought the scissors down with everything she had left in her body onto his boot. The scream of pain was almost physical. The dank air moved with his rage as Kat collapsed back, knowing there was nothing more she could give in this life. There was no point bracing for the blow; it was inevitable and, she hoped, final. Poor Eddie, she thought. How long would he mourn her before moving onto someone else?
Father’s retaliation didn’t come. His screams turned to curses in a language barely human. Kat dragged her hand back to her side, trying not to scream herself as her crushed finger brushed against the uneven floor. Whatever reflex was working had kept her fist closed over the torch. She transferred it to her good hand. The loose seam of the blanket he’d draped around her was wide enough to hide the torch.
‘You fucking bitch!’ Father screamed. He limped back to her. ‘I’m going to eat your eyes.’
‘You kill me then, bastard,’ she screamed. ‘Go on...kill me. Because I know you, don’t I? The Massacre of Prijedor? It was you there. It was your face staring at me through my bedroom window. You have the face of a beast.’ Kat manoeuvred herself painfully to sit up and look into the darkness towards his voice. ‘You came every night...you watched me. What kind of pervert are you, eh? Do you molest little children? Is that how you get your kicks? Or are you something else? Vampir?’
His deep resonating laugh echoed around the cramped tunnel. Kat felt his fetid breath crawl up her nose and knew if she reached out her hand she would touch something old and primitively evil. ‘What is it you are?’
‘Complex.’
‘I saw you earlier, a curled up old man staring blindly ahead. Then I felt your strength in the cubicle, and your lips sucking my blood. Now I see someone from my past.’
‘You see what I want you to see. You are so easily blinded as your species has been for millennia by the higher breed. You don’t even know what goes on around you, do you, child?’ Father sat down opposite her. The scissors were still sticking out of his boot. He pulled them out with a curse lost in the darkness. ‘I may have been your nightmare. There were thousands like you. Children and women...mostly women.’
‘Are you Vampir?’
He laughed humourlessly. ‘My people are not vampires. Human made up stories that live in your head to scare you. You eat meat. And does not meat contain blood? Then to the cow, are you not the vampire? To us, you are simply the cow.’
‘What are you?’
‘I have lived a very long life. So long, I am beginning to forget parts of it. I watched the Conquistadors ravage the Americas taking everything, while promising the natives a new God to replace the many they worshipped. They marched and looted many lands, thinking they were so superior. That is until my people decided they made better soup than our native cattle. Before the Spanish and Portuguese, we discovered our cousins living in peace and harmony with the natives.’ He spat on the floor and chuckled. ‘Or so the natives thought. The fools didn’t even know they were just as enslaved as our cattle.’
‘Bialowieza? A man shouted it when you were brought in,’ Kat said. ‘My grandfather was in that camp. Were you?’
‘Bialowieza.’ Father sighed deeply, rolling the word around his tongue as if savouring the memory. ‘My children fed well that night.’
‘You were Nazi?’ Kat pressed him.
He laughed again. The humour appeared genuine at her assumption. ‘Nazis. We gave them a puppet whose lust for power blinded him to the obvious. No, I wasn’t a Nazi; I was just someone passing through that pathetic conflict. Bialowieza was just a place to hide away from the bombs and bullets. I took the identity of a scientist and was taken there. My family tracked me all the way, and when the time was right I signalled and they came and fed.’
Kat began to sob quietly. ‘Why there?’
‘Treasure,’ Father said, leaning towards her. ‘Treasure the Nazis, never knew they had.’
19
Sixsmith was showing mild irritation at the boy’s inane, tuneless singing, and his equally annoying drumming with a pen. Cole had his feet on the desk, hand down his trousers and wore a cap with its peak shading an ear. Why Felton insisted on rescuing these strays when they could be expendable bait was beyond his reasoning — especially this one. Granted, he was gifted in communications, but so were a dozen people he could call upon.
Cole glanced over and saw Sixsmith staring
through him as if his mind were chasing a more complex problem. He wiggled a hand in front of the Colonel’s face and made a gesture that asked if he wanted a cup of tea. For a second the man didn’t respond until the fixed smile took over the lower half of his face and he shook his head. Cole took off his earphones and ambled over to a vending machine that was still working. Blood trickled down the front from the torn off limbs piled on top of it. Cole seemed oblivious and punched in the code for hot chocolate. The machine refused to give up the beverage and flashed a request for a pound coin to be inserted into its slot. He felt in his pockets and came up short.
‘Here, you may have this,’ Sixsmith said softly in the boy’s ear, making him jump.
‘Jesus, Colonel! I could have done you some serious damage.’
‘I am sure your amazing reflexes would have stopped you before contact was made.’ Sixsmith held out the coin. ‘Would you like me to place it into the slot?’ Sixsmith leant over the boy and inserted the coin, inviting Cole to punch in the code.
He selected hot chocolate again. This time, the cup fell into place and was instantly filled with boiling water that sent a plasticky chocolate aroma out with the vapour. Cole took the cup and manoeuvred it between his fingers. ‘Ahh, jeez... hot! Thanks, Colonel.’
‘My pleasure, Mr Paulette,’ Sixsmith said. He took the boy by the elbow and led him back to the radio. Cole offered no resistance as Sixsmith had calculated. Why would he? The nice Colonel had just bought him a drink. ‘Tell me, what do you think the next move should be?’
The question caught Cole off guard. It seemed innocent on the surface, but there was a subtext beneath the carefully chosen words. Cole was no fool and he instantly resented Sixsmith trying to take him as one. Karl was right to reserve no trust in him. When he’d spoken with men who served under the Colonel, Karl wanted to pull the team back to their main base immediately and leave the UK. It took the President to persuade him otherwise, and to try a little diplomacy, which Aquino held out little hope, knowing how volatile Karl could be.
