The Break Line

by James Brabazon

  Five minutes.

  Dead man swimming.

  I emerged into the intensive care unit. Pocahontas hung upside down, the bandages on his ankle stump unraveling into the river water. My chest heaved, eyesight dimmed. I breathed out involuntarily. The last of the air in my lungs bubbled up and along the dead man’s body as I pulled him toward me. Water rushed into my mouth, up my nose. I tore the oxygen mask from his face and pressed it to my own, kicking downward as I did. My left hand reached the valve on the cylinder anchored by his bed as my throat opened and my lungs dragged in a stream of pure, cold oxygen.

  I was alive, but my time was up anyway. As I drew heavily on the sub-aqua lifeline, Ana María would be sealing the blast doors. I breathed deeply through the mask and set off again, propelling myself through the biohazard area.

  Everywhere was darkness. And then up ahead, at the end of the walkway, a single bright light shone out through the window of the last laboratory on the row. I fought my way toward it, a drowning moth plowing toward a sunken moon. I reached it and pressed my face to the glass and drank in the scene before me.

  Bone-dry in his perfectly insulated office, my father stood holding the Perspex block that encased his life’s work. In front of him, the green-lit glass of a thumbprint-sized scanner blinked rhythmically in time with the sound of my heart beating in my ears. I slammed my fist against the window over and over again, but the feeble sound was lost down there, washed away with the running river.

  Carefully he set the seed down next to the scanner and slowly, deliberately, crossed himself. From a drawer under the desk, he produced a hand grenade. I rapped on the glass with my knuckles. And then, in silence, I watched his fingers curl around the detonation lever. I realized then what he was going to do. The blast would obliterate the vector, and the scanner. The Sleepers would be trapped and destroyed along with his life’s work—leaving me the sole inheritor of the project he’d perfected in secret.

  He picked up the seed again and held it close to his chest, tight to the grenade. He straightened up to face me with his eyes closed and with a wince of effort he pulled at the pin.

  “Look at me!” I roared underwater. The sound carried hardly any farther than the bubbles that leached from my mouth.

  He bowed his head, and the detonation lever spun free, his index finger wrapped around the pin. His body jerked. His eyes opened wide in surprise and he saw me.

  “Dia dhuit,” he mouthed in Irish. God be with you. And then bright red blood spilled from between his lips.

  He collapsed to reveal Colonel Proshunin standing behind him—who saw the grenade and lunged forward. He grabbed my father’s right arm by the wrist, and forced his thumb down onto the scanner.

  The colonel looked up at me and sneered. From the ceiling behind him hung the open door to the escape tube he’d scuttled down.

  I closed my eyes, braced for impact.

  But it’s impossible to prepare for devastation like that. And when the blast came, I felt nothing.

  I opened my eyes, but all the light had gone. Instead of a brightly lit beacon, the window was now a dark square, painted red from the inside. My mission had been completed for me, my father hoping all the while that I was completing his for him. I turned and swam, lungs straining for lack of breath, as the vibrations of metal security doors being flung open juddered through the bunker.

  Proshunin had opened the gates of hell.

  31

  I beat my way through the water, stopping at Pocahontas to replenish my lungs, to the well of the lift shaft. I broke the surface of the water to the sound of metal ripping. Mad howls and ululations filled the air. Above, I saw the lift doors begin to open. Level Three was first. Barely distinguishable in the gloom, arms emerged from the forced opening, silhouetted against the security lights. A figure jumped. And then another. They leaped from the lift doors to the car cables and climbed, effortlessly swinging their way up to the exit I’d made for them on the floor above. Dozens of them followed suit.

  Then the doors on the levels below were wrenched apart—less than eight feet above my head. I could hear them in the tunnel right next to me, at the same level the river emptied out into. I dived down hard and clung onto the handholds to keep myself under. The doors came apart, and a rush of cold water was released into the well. Immediately above me the watery outlines of the Sleepers streamed into the lift shaft and scaled the walls to freedom.

  There was no backlog, no holdup. They were getting out. Ana María couldn’t have sealed the hatch. I only hoped she’d got clear before they emerged into the world above.

  Five minutes. Twenty, fifty, a hundred of them had poured out of their cells and headed to the surface. My lungs heaved in my chest. Carefully I put my lips above water. My face broke the meniscus, and I gasped. Above me the silhouette of a Sleeper spread out, arms and legs akimbo, plummeting toward me. He screamed as he fell, a wild tearing shriek that peeled and bounced off the walls as he accelerated through the air.

  I pulled myself under just before he hit the water. Two hundred and twenty pounds of what had once been a Russian squaddie plowed through the red water next to me. As his face passed mine, his hands shot out toward me. I pressed myself flat against the wall as his flailing arm swiped at and missed my stomach. I’d already lost half my ear to one of these monsters. I didn’t intend to lose my guts, too.

  As his descent slowed, I grasped the Makarov concealed behind my back, bringing it round at the last moment as he surged toward me. His arms reached up to me and I kicked myself toward him, pistol outstretched. As he grasped for my hand, I fired at point-blank range into his face. The life went out of him instantly, and he fell back to the bottom of the well, obscured by a thick bloom of his own blood.

  But the shot had betrayed me.

  I surfaced again to see the Sleepers were no longer climbing. They had stopped still, peering into the steadily rising water below them. The pistol had recocked. I fired at the heads of the nearest three, towering over me now less than a body’s length away. The rounds opened up their skulls, and they fell into the water next to me, spent.

  The howling stopped. The creatures looked at one another. And then from the top of the lift shaft, I saw one of them let go of the cables and jump toward me. I dived furiously to the bottom. By the time he hit the water, six others had jumped with him, plunging down in pursuit.

  In the seconds it took them to steady themselves, I clawed through the gap I’d prized open in the submerged lift doors, pulling the pin on a hand grenade as I squeezed through and letting it fall behind me. Four seconds to get clear. I fought my way along the corridor as they dived down to find me with speed and determination. The little Russian bomb went off as the leader tried and failed to force his way through the narrow aperture in the lift shaft behind me.

  This time I felt it.

  The doors took the brunt of the explosion, as did the floor of the well, which bounced the blast back up at them and away from me. The water boiled, and the concussion wave rolled over me, punching into my lungs. Blood seeped from my nose, ears. I spat out air and spun head over heels.

  The blast wave ripped through the Sleepers, compressing the gases in their altered bodies—rupturing lungs, shredding internal tissue. All that they could withstand, but what they could not survive were the massive brain hemorrhages the blast inflicted. They sank, defeated. Obliterated.

  I swam back into the shaft through the slick of blood and body parts that clogged the doorway, coughing and spluttering to the surface. The last of them were out of their cells, climbing the cables and using the handgrips to pull themselves up. The water was halfway up the entrance to Level Four, where I’d originally come in down the cave tunnel, and where the river was pouring in.

  More of the monsters looked down at me. I took the last grenade from my pocket and held it fast. In the absence of a plan, rank hubris and repeating the trap I’d jus
t sprung was all I could manage.

  I was out of the game.

  “Come on, you bastards!” I yelled at them. “No retreat! No fucking surrender!”

  One after another, they dropped down the shaft, whooping as they fell.

  And then the earth moved.

  A huge, body-racking tremor rattled not just the lift shaft but the whole of the old mine complex. Next to me the bodies of the Sleepers bombed into the water. But I didn’t dive. The surface rippled and swelled, and through the half-submerged, half-opened doors next to me, a deep bass rumble erupted into a deafening rush of water and splitting rock. As the hands of the underwater warriors grasped at my legs, the dark void of the passage beside us filled and burst with a solid wall of surging water.

  The granite bedrock had given way completely. The Mong River was cascading freely into the base. Funneled into the lift shaft, water exploded upward, rolling and tumbling me in the midst of a gigantic waterspout toward the top of the base. It was useless to hold on. As the water rose, it engulfed everything in its path. The Sleepers were ripped from their cables, footholds. Bodies washed out of the corridors. Papers, uniforms, hands, faces, flashed past me in the washing-machine ride to the surface. I oriented myself in time to see the bottom of the lift car stuck at Level One approaching rapidly. I got my head above water, took a last gulp of air and kicked ferociously to the edge.

  The escapees had widened the crack I’d forced between the doors, making it easier to pass through. The pressure of the rising river banged me hard against the top of the opening, which grated against my spine, tearing the pistol free of my belt. I pulled my legs up under me and kicked on. The flood rolled me along the corridor faster than I could have hoped to swim. I twisted and turned, enmeshed with the arms and legs of dead soldiers and live Sleepers, until I found myself at the stairs. The water rose fast, scraping me up the steps that Proshunin had marched me down, hooded, not long before.

  The color of the water changed from red to dark brown to light brown as the security lamps gave way to the pale glow of daybreak. The power of the surge ebbed, and there, not far above me, the outer blast door yawned open. My mouth found fresh air. I breathed hard and deep, tearing myself out of the water, pushing my legs up the final flight of stairs, two at a time. I let the grenade sink into the abyss below as outstretched hands clutched at my ankles.

  As the blast ripped through my pursuers, the heavy hatch slammed down. I rolled aside, out of the little thatched rondel and onto the stamped earth of the ceremonial ground. The sun was just clearing the ridge, raking everything with the long shadows of dawn.

  I struggled to my feet and ran a few steps, blinking into the blinding light of a perfect African morning. As my eyes adjusted, one thing became crystal clear: I was still surrounded.

  The Sleepers had fanned out into the trees ringing the square of flat earth between the two huts. Rocking back and forth, they sniffed the air and locked their eyes on me. Here and there soldiers and medical staff stood or lay between them. Some were injured, others just exhausted. Most were armed.

  They all had one target.

  I looked around for Ana María, but she was nowhere to be seen. As one, the Sleepers stepped forward, naked and wild-eyed, muscles straining. A low growl rose from their ranks—deep and resonant, like the throbbing of the generators I’d destroyed below me. Meter by meter, the circle tightened. The Spetsnaz fighters stayed back, rifles up. I raised my hands, slowly. I had no weapons, nothing to fight with, nowhere to run.

  After they killed me, a hundred monster men would stream into the bush. They would infect others to swell their ranks. Within weeks cities could fall. And then whole countries. It had taken less than a thousand rebels to overthrow Charles Taylor’s government in Liberia. The fighters massed around me would alone be enough to bring West Africa to its knees. As far as mission failure went, it was catastrophic.

  Mixed with the low groan of the advancing Sleepers came the dirt-dance shuffle of their feet on the move. I knew what was coming. I looked down and stared at the curved patterns my father’s deliberate dance steps had carved into the ground. My boot came to rest on a little mound. As the Sleepers’ feet slid nearer, I dropped into a crouch to scoop a handful of the rust brown earth into my palm.

  Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return.

  But as well as dirt, my fingers found steel. There, half-buried, lay my father’s ceremonial cutlass—dropped the night before, when he’d set me free.

  I seized the hilt and stood up, holding the rusty blade aloft. The Spetsnaz men kept their eyes on me, but the Sleepers looked up in unison.

  “Stop!” I yelled. “I order you to stop!”

  Eyes fixed resolutely on the blade, they continued their death march, moving ever closer. If I’d reached out then, I could almost have touched them, the circle so tight that I was engulfed by a crowd of the Africans and Europeans, the metal of whose souls my father had smelted into the gold of his ambition.

  A fail-safe. There had to be a fail-safe, a means of controlling them. But there was no fingerprint scanner here, no mask, no hardware except the cutlass.

  Control.

  Roberts had said that only the looking-ground man could control the dyinyinga. Hands reached out. Fingers grasped at me. They would tear me limb from limb. Then I understood my father’s final message: Who creates the warrior controls the warrior.

  He’d quoted from the Bible.

  Psalm 46: “Break the bow and shatter the spear.”

  I was out of options, and struggled for the words.

  “Be still!” I shouted. Their hands lay upon me, unstopped. My left arm, my throat, were clutched hard. Fingers crushed into my flesh. I brandished the cutlass and roared in Irish with everything my lungs had left.

  “Éistigí!”

  The hands stayed their grip and then fell away. I looked them in the face, these men who would be like you and me if only they could have conjured the thought of it. Their eyes rolled. Their bodies swayed and rocked. And to a man they sniffed the air around them, picking up my scent like a pack of hunting dogs.

  I pushed through them toward the rifles of the Russian soldiers.

  “Ubey yego!” shouted an unseen trooper. Kill him.

  As the squaddie facing me adjusted his aim, the front rank of Sleepers sprinted past me, over me. The burst went straight into them. Bullets hammered into bone and muscle. Over it rose the battle song of their ululations. The trooper vanished into a haze of red mist. His limbs scattered; skin sloughed; intestine popped. Before anyone could react, there was nothing but a bloody mess where the young man had stood.

  The other soldiers backed off, weapons up, fingers tensed on trigger steel. In front of me the Russian Sleeper who’d absorbed a dozen rounds to his chest brandished the head of the eviscerated soldier and shrieked a gut-wrenching call to arms.

  “When I sharpen my flashing sword and my hand grasps it in judgment, I will take vengeance on my enemies,” I bellowed in Irish, pointing into the Russian lines with the cutlass, “and repay those who hate me!”

  The Sleeper, barking a peal of victory howls, tossed the severed head into the ranks of uniformed men facing him. In response, the Spetsnaz operators opened fire to a man. A phalanx of Sleepers formed a shield around me as assault rifles and machine guns emptied into them. From every direction hot metal erupted into the living wall of muscle. Green tracer whipped through them. Grenade shrapnel tore ligaments, shattered bone. Smoke, heat, light, filled the air in a burning rush of cordite fog. The earth lifted beneath our feet and rained down on us from above. A ricochet grazed my neck. An explosion knocked me to the ground and the sword from my grip.

  Fizzing with adrenaline and understanding, I stood and exhorted them in Irish.

  “Fúmsa an díoltas!” I roared. Vengeance is mine.

  32

  The sleepers pulsed like a conc
ussion wave, expanding into the ranks of Russian Special Forces that surrounded us, sweeping them into the trees, catching them in a tidal wave of single-minded destruction. I saw it then, the genius of it. The pure, unadulterated power of what my father had created. I saw, too, what King had seen in Sonny Boy and why he also craved an army of men like that.

  But Sonny Boy was just one man—unique, possibly. This was more than a weapon, more than an army, even: it was a force. Individually they were brutal curiosities; as a unit they were unstoppable by anything other than massive explosive firepower; as a totality they were practically invincible.

  Some of them fell lifeless, shot through the head. Others were cut in half, or floored by severed legs. But they were the tiny minority. Those of them mortally wounded by normal standards stayed in the fight. My father had made sure that the dead no longer saw the end of war.

  They were fast, precise and ruthlessly efficient. No man could outrun them. And once they had your scent, you could not hide from them. Synchronized by instinct, the entire group coordinated without the need for spoken language. They were perfect hunter-killers. Scavenging rifles from the dead they left behind, they armed themselves as they went, although the only weapon they needed that morning was their own brute strength. I stood still and watched them fan out, reducing the remnants of the conventional army they’d once supported to bloody pulp.

  Perhaps that is what Gatling and Nobel and Oppenheimer felt: awe at the power of their inventions surpassed only by disgust at their creations. Maybe that—what, remorse?—was what my father had felt, too, when he gave me the means both to create and to destroy the work that consumed him. At least, I hoped it was. It’s one thing to build a bomb, quite another to reengineer people into weapons. My father had crossed the line from inquiry to obscenity. And there I was, protected by it and profiting from it. What had repulsed me in Kabala rescued me in Karabunda.

  I bent over, and my guts heaved. I was dehydrated, faint from lack of food, riddled with virus and physically broken.