Operation Caspian Tiger

by Addison Gunn

  The path ahead was one long alley of high fencing on the other side, open to the sky, a straight shot with none of the twists of the refugee runs, but there were no security personnel in sight. Not on their feet, anyway.

  Four from security team Bayonet were down, but Miller couldn’t cycle through to a command clear channel to report it.

  Du Trieux crouched by the first body, then skipped ahead and checked the second while Miller searched the sky and the refugee sectors on either side of the fence, but he saw no obvious threat.

  “Small calibre,” du Trieux said. “They were shot with handguns from behind, I think.” She lifted one of their heads, twisting it to show Miller the surprisingly neat hole in the back of the neck. No real exit wound.

  Someone had ambushed them—from inside the compound.

  Miller crouched down and gestured Hsiung over to cover him while he got out his phone and flicked through the communications channel lists. The earbud was shit for cycling through channels, but if his phone could load the menu he could just select a channel straight to Northwind and—

  Something happened; Miller didn’t understand what. He had been holding his phone and it was gone. His hand was empty. He was on the ground. The asphalt. Something was hot. His face was hot. He touched it, fumbling to his feet. There was blood. His blood. He’d scraped open his nose. How?

  He looked up, confused, vision blurry. There were flames. His head hurt. His chest hurt. Everything hurt. He’d fallen. How had that happened?

  The fences behind the team were now crushed flat, torn apart. Pieces of them lay on the ground. They’d been blown to literal shreds. A twenty-foot section of the compound wall had been blown out, one of the weak sections that was just a skin of sheet metal.

  Miller could see the city outside. The shanties behind the fence were gone, or on fire.

  A bomb?

  Miller didn’t remember a bomb. He didn’t remember anything.

  He struggled onto his hands and knees, then his feet, and immediately fell back onto his hands, scraping them on the asphalt. He puked. Acidic glop. No blood in it he could make out. Not until his bleeding nose started to drip into the puddle. He struggled to breathe until he felt arms come in under his shoulders and lift him up. Du Trieux sounded very far away as she shouted at him, but he heard her.

  “Are you hurt?”

  He tried to speak, but his throat was raw. He’d had the wind knocked out of him, that was all. He wheezed down a breath and tried again. “Artillery?” he croaked.

  Du Trieux shook her head. “Satchel charge. Doyle—”

  “Doyle!” Miller spun round, struggling. Doyle had been behind the team, Doyle had—

  She grabbed his shoulders hard before he stumbled off his feet. “Doyle’s fine!”

  “He was behind us!”

  “He’s chasing the attacker, he’s fine!”

  Miller swayed on his feet. Morland and Hsiung approached from the far side. He palmed blood off his face and stared at the blood on his hand. “What attacker?”

  “Someone threw a satchel charge at you over the fence from the refugee sector while you were trying to contact Northwind. We all got clear—it detonated while you were still running. Are you hurt?”

  “Phone,” Miller mumbled. “Was holding my phone...”

  “I don’t know where it is.” She held up her fingers. “Miller! Alex. How many fingers?”

  His vision was blurry, but not doubled. “Two,” he murmured. “I’m fine, got to warn command—contact Northwind, attackers in the compound—” He couldn’t stop wheezing. He took one step from du Trieux and doubled up, hands on his knees, retching, but nothing came up.

  “What’s wrong with him?” Hsiung asked, while Morland swung his gun at the gap in the wall.

  “Concussion,” du Trieux answered.

  “I’m fine,” Miller croaked, taking a step unaided. A second, unsteadily. He was relieved when the ringing in his ears turned out to be the emergency response alarms blaring away. He got to the nearest section of fence, still upright. He must have gotten pretty damn far on his feet before the detonation. “Don’t leave Doyle alone!” he snapped. “Hsiung, Morland. Go. Me and Trix will be fine.”

  Morland backed up a step uncertainly, then followed Hsiung as she accepted her orders with a professional nod. They jogged over the collapsed fence and into the refugee sector, while Miller struggled to breathe.

  “Miller?”

  He looked up at du Trieux unsteadily. “Am I hurt?”

  “Eh?” She looked him over worriedly. “No. No pieces of fence sticking out of you.”

  “My face?”

  “Your face is a mess.”

  He winced. “Am I ugly?”

  She laughed, soothing despite the fear, and she upended her water bottle over him. He spluttered through the liquid, but the lukewarm splash helped him feel human. She poked and prodded at his nose and cheek about as professionally as anyone could. “Grazed. Doubt it’ll scar—probably done worse to yourself shaving with that straight edge.”

  “I’m careful with the straight edge,” he muttered unsteadily, clinging to the fence. “Thanks.”

  He couldn’t have been out long. He gave himself another thirty seconds to feel sorry for himself, then had du Trieux lead him through into the refugee sector after the rest of his team.

  As they jogged, more detonations exploded across the compound, inside and outside the wall. None of them were artillery shells, Miller noted—no airbursts, and no direct strikes. The bombs left smoke coiling over the compound, blocking out the light for minutes at a time as they searched.

  Miller had no idea where his phone was. He resorted to tapping at his earbud, following du Trieux, listening to chaotic radio chatter until he thought to check his pocket—the first place he would’ve put his phone. And there it was, an unexpected gift. He connected to the Northwind channels he had on file, but those were all jammed with requests for support, overwatch, everything. Northwind was fully aware there were attackers inside the compound, at least. Whether this was the food riot Miller knew had been brewing for days or not, they knew. He didn’t have to report shit.

  He switched back to Cobalt’s private channel in time to hear Doyle murmur, “He’s gone round the back there. Yes. Stop there.”

  Step-by-step, under Doyle’s direction, they converged on an alley filled with shanty huts built from plyboard and corrugated iron torn from roofs. Dark, miserable. Crowded. Doyle had line-of-sight on the far end. Hsiung and Morland waited at the edges. Miller and du Trieux found their way to the near end, shuffling along an old building’s wall until it gave way to the improvised construction leaning against it. Another step, and Miller looked down the alley. It was dark, and damp, and full of people.

  For an instant, just an instant, he thought he was looking at a commune. But the frightened people gathered up in clusters and inside their overcrowded homes weren’t moving with the coordination of the Infected, but with mutual fear as gunfire continued to crackle nearby. Too many people. Too many targets. And too many of them moving to get away.

  The first who reached Hsiung at the far end got shouted down to their knees—far enough that Miller heard her challenge as echoing tones, not words—and a half-dozen approached Miller and du Trieux’s end.

  “Who’s the attacker?” he quietly asked over the private channel.

  “Mid-twenties male, messenger bag, black tank top, dirty jeans, yellow-soled trainers,” Doyle responded instantly.

  Miller spotted the attacker the moment Doyle finished the description. The guy had a weary expression. Tired, set in stone. Something like the thousand-yard stare Miller had seen in older veterans, but it was a gaze born from fear and determination.

  The bomber looked like everyone else. A little scruffy—there weren’t a lot of showers to go around, not much hot water—but reasonably clean. He’d shaven more recently than Miller had, looked thinner. He had bags under his eyes, and probably hadn’t slept much lately. Who cou
ld, carrying around a bomb big enough to hole the wall?

  “Trix?”

  “Oui?”

  “Cover me while I do something stupid,” Miller said, and stepped out into the alleyway.

  He locked eyes with the bomber immediately. The bomber had nowhere else to look, and an armed man was pretty damn obvious amongst panicked civilians. Miller held his M27 out to the side by the barrel, and dropped it. The bomber watched it topple and fall, his eyes wide.

  The nearest refugees backed away into their hovels, turned straight around and made way the other end of the alley.

  “Easy!” Miller yelled. “Easy, pal. You ain’t going anywhere, you’re trapped. But we can talk about this.”

  The refugees around the bomber scattered, halting and falling to their knees as du Trieux hung behind him, weapon up. The bomber himself stood still, frozen, half-tensed to run, but they all knew that wasn’t going to happen.

  The bomber relaxed. Staring at Miller as if he were looking at a piece of furniture. He tilted his head, slowly, and looked down at the messenger bag hanging under his arm.

  That’s when Miller realized he’d made a mistake. The guy had another bomb.

  “Don’t,” Miller said, slow and reasonable.

  The bomber hesitated, straightening up. He bit his lip, taking a slow, hard breath, gazing cautiously at Miller—like a cat unexpectedly caught with a mouse in its mouth.

  “Just put it down. We can work this out, get you anything you need. Better food rations, clothes, safe passage to Boston. Whatever.” Miller took one cautious step forward, another. “We know the refugees have problems, terrorism isn’t the way to fix them, we can talk.”

  The bomber cocked his head to the other side, almost reptilian. “Those aren’t my problems,” he said, and thrust his hand into the satchel.

  Miller snatched the Gallican from his hip and fired.

  He’d heard people talk about time slowing. It wasn’t like that when he fired his weapon. More like everything sped up. It went too fast for Miller to comprehend.

  Fumbling his Gallican up, the warmth of the steel in his hand, thumbing off the safety, pulling the trigger almost before he’d drawn it out, the way it jerked in his hand, forcing it in both hands in front of him as the second shot, the recoil and sound, reached him... he was slow, and everything else was fast, and he knew he’d made the decision to kill the bomber, or some other human being, long before now. Maybe days before, maybe years, long before he’d even known he’d have to kill anyone, and his body was finally going through the motions, late.

  Blood fanned behind the bomber’s head onto the asphalt, his body limp.

  The satchel was smoking, a smouldering plume of smoke, and one of the nearest refugees was crying.

  Miller fell to his knees, having covered the gap without realizing he’d taken the steps, and pulled open the satchel.

  A piece of fuse cord sizzled down towards something that might have been a detonator. Fleshy looking blocks of some kind of plastic explosive, and a fuse cord that burnt about an inch a second. There was a loop of cord from the improvised friction striker—a matchbook stapled around the fuse cord—to the detonator.

  In theory, Miller had a minute or so to deal with the problem. It wasn’t a complicated bomb. He could take his time, be calm.

  In reality, he tore the fuse cord out so fast he burnt his fingers on it, stripping it away from the bomb and stamping on the sizzling length like a dead snake.

  By the time du Trieux came up behind him, Hsiung and Morland corralling the crowd in front of them as they approached, his shoulders shook and his breath came in uncontrolled gasps. Her hand, on his shoulder, was strangely solid and warm.

  “You got it. It’s out.”

  Miller shook his head, and found he couldn’t stand up. In the end, he needed du Trieux’s help just to stumble away.

  6

  DU TRIEUX SANK down awkwardly onto the couch across from Miller. “I don’t think this is healthy,” she said, putting a mug of tepid water down on the table, and pushing it toward him.

  The sunlight danced strangely on the bottom of the mug, a shaking, twisting oval pulled out of shape by the water’s surface. Miller picked it up, and held his hand out to Doyle. “Give,” he said.

  Doyle tore a strip out of the sheet of thick paper, and placed it into Miller’s palm. “He’s right. Possibly. There were studies on treating PTSD with immediate drug use.”

  Du Trieux glared at him. “I doubt they used whatever the hell you’ve got.”

  “It was some antidepressant or other.” Doyle shrugged. “Close as.”

  Miller’s hands shook as he swallowed down the scrap of paper. The filthy stuff left his mouth bitter and coated in a chemical tang. He gulped the water down to force it into his system and clear his mouth.

  He didn’t know why he was shaking. Not for sure. Was it from killing someone? He’d done that, he’d killed. Was it from nearly getting blown to shreds? He’d come close to death, too. The past months had been a real learning experience. Maybe he was shaking because there was something wrong with him, because he wasn’t cut out for this kind of work, never had been. Maybe—

  “The other thing they used to do,” Doyle said, “was talk about it afterward. Debriefing. With people who understand what it’s like.”

  Du Trieux’s expression softened, a little. “That sounds a little more sensible.”

  “Everyone gets nerves,” Doyle said, voice slow, reassuring. “Everyone. You know I do. You know du Trieux does.”

  Miller shrank in on himself. His head went down, his shoulders up. Hands trembling, he gripped the mug against his face. “I lead.”

  “So?”

  “I can’t talk about it with you. It’d erode authority.”

  Doyle squinted. “What authority? We’re your friends, or the closest thing that’s left.”

  “He does lead,” du Trieux said, eyes all ablaze again. “He has authority.”

  “Cut it out, Trix.” Miller set the mug down, and held his face. “You don’t have to protect me from Hsiung. She isn’t fighting for my job quite so hard anymore.”

  “That’s not the point...”

  “There’s authority,” Doyle said, “Lewis-style authority-with-a-capital-A, and that’s what isn’t happening here. Miller’s not that kind of authority. You don’t think you’re his kind of authority, do you?”

  Miller managed to shake his head. He wasn’t much of anything, to tell the truth.

  Raising his hands peaceably at du Trieux, to forestall another interruption, Doyle plunged on. “Miller’s down in the trenches with us. He keeps us on course, he makes the calls, he leads. Saying this erodes his authority is absolutely absurd. He’s one of us.” He leaned forward, ducking his head to make eye contact with Miller. “Authority isn’t the point. Trust is.” Doyle seemed entirely serious.

  “How the hell do you figure that?” Miller asked.

  “Don’t know. You got put in charge because you’re the best at being in charge, not because you’ve got a badge on your shoulder. That’s all.”

  “You could show... deference,” du Trieux hissed.

  “I could? What about you? You’re closer to him than I am, been that—”

  Morland slammed open the door, pale, frightened. He seemed too big to act like a scared child, but there it was. “Have you heard? Have you heard?”

  There was too much news. Too much rushing through Miller’s head. The attack was over. There had been a total of seven bombs. Most had originated inside the compound. Someone had attacked an incoming food truck, the compound’s security teams were pulled thin responding to both. They’d had to let the attackers escape with the truck in order to protect the breaches while some very large predators were nosing around and trying to get in. Thugs that earned the name of behemoth, eight and nine feet high at the shoulder. Bigger than rhinos, now.

  “What now?” Miller asked, clutching his head.

  “They did an autopsy on the b
omber. The guy you shot? He’s Infected. He’s also full of Firbenzol—and he was still Infected. The parasite’s immune to anti-parasitic drugs. Firbenzol doesn’t work anymore.”

  THAT ONE PIECE of information knocked a ton of weight off Miller’s shoulders, and he felt like a bastard for it.

  The suicide bomber was Infected—wasn’t human. Oh, he looked human, would have been human if the refugee population had been given some other anti-parasitic drug, but the concentration of parasites in his hastily-autopsied brain proved it. He wasn’t human, he was Infected, and just like that all thought of the bomber as someone with the right to a life vanished from Miller’s mind.

  He didn’t like the change the news had brought about in him, but he felt relieved.

  Sure, there might have been another history with the Infected if the slaughters—both that first one with the helicopter and the Charismatic killings—had never happened. If Harris had never tested NAPA-33 on an unwilling population, or if the company hadn’t pressured the population into taking anti-parasitic drugs. Maybe with some alternate history of cooperation there could have been peace.

  Maybe.

  But those things had happened, and none of it was really his fault. Miller told himself that, instead of listening to the briefing that took place at the far end of the boardroom table.

  “They knew,” Harris growled down the length of the table. “Someone’s feeding the Infected intel on our every move. They have attacked prime strategic targets!”

  Miller pawed at a glass of water unsteadily, and dragged it over the table toward him. Across from where he sat, one of the guys in charge of Shank—some volunteer named Hannesy—stared disapprovingly. Miller didn’t care.

  The heads and upper staff of all remaining security teams—Cobalt, Bayonet, Stiletto, Dagger and Shank—had been dragged into a room along with representatives from the StratDevCo Rats and the Blue Bolts emergency relief teams, to listen to Harris rant. Lewis sat beside him, stony-faced. So much for Lewis’s words from God. They apparently didn’t allow him to interrupt.

  But Miller, of course, had driven God’s kids around. He sipped unsteadily and croaked up the table, “How the hell is food a prime strategic target? They’re just hungry, everyone’s fucking hungry...” He still wasn’t sure that this whole mess wasn’t somehow because of the food situation. Some kind of food riot? Maybe refugees were working with the Infected.