Now, despite his previous experience and time spent as a special forces soldier, he was still referred to as The Matelot. Alex Bufford, Sergeant Special Boat Service, preferred to be called Buffs. He was tall, fit and strong as one would expect from a former marine, but found that the majority of his fellow special forces soldiers were often short and wiry, in contrast to his big shoulders and thick arms. His strength was overt, whereas others seemed more like tough goats or ants that seemed able to lift ten times their own body weight.
Buffs, a newly-minted Sergeant through exceptionally hard work, led his team of four in two rigid inflatable boats up the filthy Thames river, which was thick with floating corpses that bobbed on the surface, bloated and rotting. Their engines were only turning at less than half their capacity for two reasons; keeping a lower noise profile and to allow them to avoid the worst concentrations of dead bastards. On more than one occasion they were forced to power up and then lift their propellers from the water to bump over the bodies without blending them.
With two men in each boat they were well below capacity, but the likelihood was that they were their own ‘exfil’ and a rescue was about as possible as finding a decent bar open in the city.
They found the small pier they wanted by the GPS co-ordinates and cut their engines in unison to float the rest of the way in silence. Tying off their crafts, they slipped onto dry land and stalked effectively forwards as their guns came up to cover all angles.
Straight ahead, third right, second left, first right, first right, he repeated to himself, going over the map in his head which correlated to the one in his leg pocket. The map was totally unmarked and folded to its original lines so as not to even betray the area they were operating in, in case they were captured. Operational habits of basic mission secrecy were so deeply ingrained in them that even the inability of their enemy to read a map would not encourage procedure to be abandoned.
They made the turns on his lead, taking each turn as they had in training and real-life, until they reached the innocuous double doors of their target location.
A bird noise, piercing and subtle yet alien to the environment, sounded to their right. It came from a fire-damaged corner of a building on the first floor, where the partly destroyed glass offered a wide view of the street below. Buffs stopped and dropped to one knee, looking up at the window not at anything he could see, but at the place where he would have placed his own team if he had arrived first.
“One-Two,” he said softly, waiting for a response.
“One-One, coming down,” came the reply, before the slightest shirt in the shadows moved behind the damaged glass. Moments later four men emerged dressed and equipped similarly to them, with the addition of beards that only served to make their eyes seem brighter, as they were framed by unruly darkness.
The man at their point nodded to him in a curt but efficient greeting, then stopped to take a knee beside him.
“Downes, Hereford” he introduced himself.
“Bufford, Poole,” Buffs responded.
Pleasantries exchanged, they stepped through the double doors and slowly descended the steps towards the underground lab that nobody knew was there, let alone responsible for the end of days. They clicked on the bright torches attached to their weapons to illuminate the pitch black where sunlight could not penetrate, and found the outer door of the lab.
The MP5 had no bayonet, so dispatching the single lurching corpse who stood resting its face against the thick security glass of that door could not be done at distance unless with a bullet. Given that even suppressed shots make noises, especially in cavernous underground areas, Buffs dropped his weapon to hang on its strap and held up a hand to signal the other seven men not to fire. Just as the zombie turned in response to the approaching lights and footfalls to leave part of its face glued to the glass and expose bright white bone on its forehead, Buffs slipped the small pioneer axe from the belt loop on his right hip and swung the small weapon to bury the pointed end downwards into the skull of the creature to crumple it down to the ground.
Downes watched with evident respect for the display and the weapon, using his weapon-mounted torch to regard the short-handled weapon to see a brightly polished head smeared with dark gore. The axe had clearly been a display piece somewhere, but questions about it would have to wait. He stepped forwards and tapped repeatedly on the glass until a suspicious pair of wild eyes set in a dishevelled face appeared.
“Open. The fucking. Door,” Downes said slowly, with a visible finger pointed downwards to the lock, carefully mouthing each word until the unmoving man inside finally snapped into reality and turned a ship-style handle inside to unseal it.
The eight men stepped inside, weapons up and scanning as they fanned out to search the collection of rooms, which stank beyond compare. It was not enough to assume that the lab was made safe just because someone else was in there, they had to see for themselves.
“Professor Grewal?” Downes asked, placing a hand on the shoulder of the man and crouching slightly to try and force eye contact, “Professor Sunil Grewal?” he tried again, with a shake as Buffs closed the door behind them.
“Sunny,” Grewal said, as he seemed to fade back into consciousness. Downes winced at the man’s breath.
“Okay, Sunny, we’re getting you out of here. Do you have the samples?” he asked.
Grewal nodded and pointed to a large specialist case. Downes nodded to one of his troopers, who picked the case up with evident difficulty.
“Mac?” he said, hearing the response from behind him, “find the computers.”
Mac did, tipping over the heavy desktop units and smashing open their cases and prising out the huge internal drives. Dezzy was collecting all of the 3 ½ inch floppy discs and stuffing them into a black bag indiscriminately while Smiffy began to pour acrid smelling fuel onto key things such as paperwork. Meanwhile, two of Buffs’ team assisted by piling things into easier piles.
Just then, the telephone on the wall rang a shrill chirping noise. Grewal giggled to himself, as though the telephone being real was a sudden shock to him, and Buffs picked it up.
A short conversation ensued, during which pertinent questions were asked.
“How big? …Location? …Direction? …How long? …Understood.”
Just as he replaced the handset and opened his mouth, a shout came from the door they had come through.
“Company,” was all it said, and company didn’t come close to accurately describing what was out there.
“How many?” Buffs asked in a low voice, considering whether the two teams could cover the mile through the city to their boats and get out ahead of the leading edge of the wave. Eight men and one civilian who would probably need carrying, he imagined, along with the heavy sample case.
Left, left, second right, third left, straight ahead to the boats, he thought to himself as he mapped the return journey in his mind. Just as the answer told him that making a run for it was out of the question.
“Err, all of the fuckers, I think,” came the bleak response.
Because the swarm was already in the city.
Chapter 20
The AWACS patrolling the area had been diverted towards Poland, where the Soviets were apparently performing heavy carpet bombing of the whole eastern edge of the country to create a no-man’s-land of death and rubble in a desperate bid to prevent the disease from walking into the motherland. The bombing, the incessant mortar and artillery fire, had served only to attract every hungry dead person on the European continent towards them, and it was becoming a question of what would run out first; the enemy or the ordnance.
While that report was fed back to the US via their carrier fleet just outside the English Channel, the early-warning aeroplane had its eyes off the mainland UK.
The mission to recover the virus research from London had come via joint command but was a direct order from the US forces, and moreover came from people who did not give their name with an order; simply where they worked.
In this instance ‘Century House’ gave the orders, meaning that British foreign intelligence was calling the shots, despite its UK headquarters seemingly overrun and abandoned.
It was simply beyond the paygrade of any one of the military personnel involved to know the truth that the outbreak was as a direct result of poor containment protocols, after the US and UK governments collaborated to produce a biological weapon to use as a doomsday option and an alternative to nuclear bombardment in the Cold War against the socialist states in the east.
Had that AWACS been watching the south east of England, they would undoubtedly have seen the gathering swarm moving fast back toward the city for no explicable reason, along with another massing in Bristol. The swarming seemed to be cyclical and unpredictable, but there weren’t enough eyes and too many things to watch.
The information came again too late from the American satellite images, but the real-time information told a far more worrying story.
Out in the Channel the response to the swarms started too late, and the desperate rush to recall the teams on the ground failed to make contact. The next plan was to send in a rescue, and that was where the control team on the ground was employed.
~
“Palmer!” Major Hadlington shouted as he jogged awkwardly towards the returning convoy waving a piece of paper that the captain suspected was a signed order, “Palmer!”
“What on earth does this buffoon want?” Palmer asked himself out loud as the hatless intelligence officer stomped to a halt beside his wagon.
“Palmer, you need to turn around!” he yelled, somewhat inappropriately in Captain Palmer’s opinion.
Palmer climbed down and stood beside the major, wearing a look of annoyed confusion.
“Captain,” Hadlington said intensely, “we need to deploy to London immediately, in force.”
Palmer, ignoring the we part and deciding that he had the right to know why, turned to the officer, “Major, I’m sure there is a perfectly good reason, which I must ask…”
“Because there is an eight-man special forces team stuck in an underground laboratory with a scientist who may be able to shed light on the virus that’s fucking up our country,” he hissed angrily through gritted before getting himself under control, “because there is another swarm coming for them, because we have been ordered to, because we have to. Don’t you understand, man? This could be a cure!”
Palmer stared at him for a beat, then turned and fired off a string of orders.
“Sergeant Sinclair,” he bawled with confidence and alacrity, “your troop to remain here as guard with Three Troop. Send runners for Mister Johnson and the troop sergeants immediately. Sergeant Swift?”
“Captain?” came the reply from the building used as the gatehouse.
“Can I trouble you to get on the radio and have the re-supp fuel wagon here right away?” he said, giving the order politely and making Swift feel as though he was doing the young officer a personal favour.
“Sinclair? Unload all your spare seven-six-two ready for the outgoing troops. Sir?” he said as he wheeled back to the surprised, moustached man in spectacles, “Where precisely are we going?”
~
Maxwell was recruited by Johnson for support and the two of them entered the Royal with more trepidation than they had going out into the apocalypse. They gave their name and rank to the landlord, who was keeping a full tab of the army’s expenses for later reimbursement in the hopeful wish that the world would get back to normal one day.
The men gave their thanks for their pint of mild bitter and joined two women who were waving politely to them.
Johnson gave Maxwell a sideways look, suspecting an ambush, as one of the women was Maxwell’s wife. They took the two spare stools at the round wooden table, the offered greetings were exchanged, and Kimberley Perkins brushed her hair down across her face as she always did when speaking to people.
“I’m so sorry, I forgot to ask, how is your chap who got hurt?” she said to the two soldiers.
“He’s on the mend, thank you,” Maxwell said, “but it’s not us responsible, is it, my love?” he said to his wife with a genuine warm smile.
“Oh? You didn’t tell me you were on the payroll, Denise?”
Maxwell’s wife shrugged and smiled self-effacingly, “We all have to do our bit,” she said, then shook her packet of cigarettes and slid two out to offer one to Kimberley without checking to see if she even wanted one. That subtle gesture told Johnson that the two women knew each other far better than they were letting on. Maxwell, saying nothing about not being offered one of his wife’s cigarettes, simply helped himself to the packet and frowned to find it empty. The two women shared a single flame from a lighter and Denise Maxwell’s eyes showed amusement at her husband.
Maxwell tutted with an exaggerated eye roll and produced a packet of rolling tobacco and papers.
“Have a tailor-made,” Kimberley said with a smile and slipped a packet out of her handbag, which hung on the side of the chair she occupied. Maxwell thanked her, put one in his mouth and thumbed another up for Johnson. He declined, not feeling the urge for a smoke as he would surely be getting enough of the smell and taste from the three others.
“So, Mister Johnson,” Kimberley said as she looked at him sideways, “what is happening in the wider world?”
“It’s Dean,” he said awkwardly as he invited her to use his first name to signify both that he considered himself off-duty and that he held no domain over the young civilian woman.
Maxwell smiled but was careful to keep that from his boss, who he had never called by his first name. Only a handful of times had Johnson had called him by his first name, and the two were simply satisfied with the army’s habit of surnames. They were as close as any of the senior men in the squadron could be, and were friends within the confines of their working restrictions.
“Well, Miss Perkins,” Johnson began, “the Am…”
“Kimberley, please,” she said, mirroring his own acceptance of informality with a smile that he was forced to mirror.
“Kimberley,” he began again, almost bashful, “the Americans are in the Channel, the cloak and dagger brigade are up to their usual tricks, and we aren’t going die from a nuclear power station breaking down. Other than that, I’m a mushroom,” he finished with a depreciative shrug as he took a gulp of his beer.
Denise chuckled and leant towards Kimberley, “Mushroom,” she explained, “means that he…”
“That he’s being kept in the dark,” Kimberley finished, intentionally leaving out the part about the bullshit.
They giggled at the men’s reactions to the non-military woman’s knowledge which the others attributed to the time she had spent around the men and families.
“Dean, I understand you aren’t married?” Kimberley asked innocently.
Johnson almost spat his beer at the suddenness and the personal nature of the question. He wanted to counter with the questions about what had happened to her face, about the scars she tried to cover and where the hint of steel and tenacity in her character came from, but he didn’t. Instead he coughed and shook his head in weak answer.
The conversation bounced around with a little less awkwardness after the ice breaker, until Denise gave their excuses and the two women went to the toilets together. On the way, they took up a conversation they’d been having before the men had joined them. Mostly it was speculation about where the Royal Family might be, and what had happened to them. More specifically, they were intrigued by Sarah Ferguson and Prince Andrew, their new baby girl and the state of their marriage.
Back in the bar, Johnson took another long pull on his beer, taking it past the halfway point and threatening to taste too good to stop after just one, then turned to Maxwell who was similarly enjoying his pint.
“Is this your idea, or Denise’s,” he asked quietly with a hint of warning in his voice.
“Kimberley’s,” he responded with a smirk as he stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray
and raised his open hands in mock surrender, “we’re just conscripts.”
“You’re taking the piss, right?” Johnson asked incredulously.
“Hand on heart, Guv.”
Johnson stared at him. The girl had to be almost twenty years younger than him and he couldn’t comprehend why she would have any interest in the old bull that he saw himself as. Just as the two women re-emerged he was saved from being driven off the field of battle by the main door of the pub bursting inwards.
All eyes turned to the young trooper, red-faced and out of breath as he stood there panting. Johnson didn’t press the man, didn’t add fear of himself to the panic the trooper obviously already felt.
“Report to troops,” he called into the pub, “senior NCOs to the bridge.”
With that he ran from the door, clearly needing to make his other calls at billets to rouse the men.
Johnson and Maxwell exchanged a look, mixed adrenaline and dread, and on Johnson’s part, a hint of relief; going to work was safer than the situation he had been dropped into. They finished their pints with synchronised actions and offered brief apologies before they headed back down the hill at a steady jog via Johnson’s billet where they had left their weapons and webbing. Arriving at the threshold of the bridge, they were met by running engines, running men, and an efficient looking Captain Palmer at the centre of everything.
“Ah, Johnson,” he said as he saw the SSM approaching, not using the honorary ‘Mister’ in recognition of his warranted officer status and betraying that time was so short that even the impeccably-mannered Captain Palmer didn’t have time to observe the proprietaries.
“And Maxwell,” he added to the sergeant, “how many of your wagons are fit to go?”
“Three, Sir,” he answered quickly, leaving out the irrelevant facts as to why one of the squadron’s four Spartans was out of commission due to its gearbox being in the process of being rebuilt. Palmer nodded, turning back to Johnson.
Toy Soldiers (Book 2): Aftermath Page 17
