by John McNally
Within an instant, it was gone – but the Apache was rocking dangerously on the branch. Kelly and Stubbs leapt up to steady it before it tipped over on to its rotors, just managing to bring it to rest. Kelly killed any further debate.
“We go now and we get the hell out.”
Stubbs and Delta immediately began to prep the Apache weaponry, Kelly the small arms.
Finn blew up.
“WHAT ABOUT ME?”
The three soldiers took him in.
“You wait in the Apache,” said Kelly.
“No way! I could go down with you! You could show me how to fire!”
Kelly raised a hand. “No combat role.”
“You’d be dead already if it wasn’t for me!” said Finn.
“He’s right,” said Stubbs.
“True…” said Delta.
“Those guns are bigger than he is,” said Kelly and, as so often happens with grown-ups and kids, an argument briefly raged about Finn without them apparently noticing that he was standing right there – HELLO??
Kelly admitted he provided excellent intelligence on environmental threat (“Thank you,” said Finn), and that, while he could be taught to fire an M27, it was a world away from combat (“I’ve done it on Xbox like a million times!”), but mainly they mustn’t forget he was Al’s nephew and just a kid.
“Forget Al! This is about me!”
“Hold up,” Delta suddenly held up her hand like she was stopping traffic. She had decided something. “Kelly’s right, you can’t just throw in a noob,” she said.
“Let alone expect one to perform under pressure,” agreed Kelly.
“I’m virtually a teenager!” insisted Finn. “And I am me and I’m good at some stuff – and you’re NOT cutting me out! And, by the way, my name is not Noob!” he added to Delta, who chewed on, unmoved.
Kelly held fast. A deep paternal instinct he didn’t understand was in play. He couldn’t help but like this kid. He squatted down until his massive head was level with Finn’s.
“We all have a role. You do too. You’re the one that has to stay alive.”
There was silence for a beat. Alive? thought Finn. Who said anything about the possibility of dying? Did they really think they were going to lose this thing?
“Life is wasted on old people,” agreed Stubbs. “Hang on to it.”
“Your parents wouldn’t want us to risk this,” added Kelly.
“How do you know? They would have loved this,” said Finn, feeling more certain than he’d ever felt about anything. Kelly fell back on a military protocol.
“I’m your Commanding Officer. And that’s my decision,” he said, and signalled an end to the discussion by going off to check the guns.
“That’s no reason!” Finn shouted after him.
“He’s right, Noob,” Delta tried to mollify him. “I’m… a big sister,” she revealed as if it was some kind of hidden gift (which to her it was), “and no way would I let Carla go. I didn’t even want her to get a pony.”
“Who the heck’s Carla, and what’s she got to do with anything?” said Finn.
The argument would have continued at even greater pitch, but for Kelly’s scream.
“AHHHHHRRGGH!”
Finn turned. Kelly was screaming and scrambling backwards, a crab spider1 locked on to his thigh.
“Stay still!” Finn shouted at the skittering, scrabbling, shrieking SAS man.
Delta froze like there was a gap in the game code all over again and Stubbs threw his mug at the dog-sized beast. This knocked off one of its legs, but it was still attached by its fangs and Kelly was fast disappearing off the branch.
In the open stow hold of the Apache was Delta’s service pistol.2 Finn snatched it up and took aim down the barrel.
“Hold still!”
“YAAAAAARRHH!” Kelly yelled back.
“Depress safety catch with right thumb and squeeze,” advised Stubbs.
“Don’t you d—” started Delta, snapping out of her trance but then…
BANG! Finn felt the pistol buck in his hands and, to his astonishment, the spider blew clean off Kelly’s leg.
Kelly was left clinging by his fingertips to the bark on the far side of the branch. Delta and Stubbs pulled him up. He was grey and shaking.
“My leg… Can’t feel my leg…” he managed.
“You’re lucky you’ve got one,” said Delta, snatching the Beretta back off Finn, whose ears were still ringing.
“He’s going into shock. I’ll give him thirty mil of steroid and twenty of morphine,” said Stubbs.
“Crab spider, not fatal,” Finn reassured them. “It just paralyses.”
Delta turned to Finn. “For how long?”
Finn shrugged.
Delta looked west into the afternoon sun.
NINETEEN
Knit one purl one knit one purl one knit one knit one purl one…
“Empty the fjörds, blow the seå mist
love is sö cold like a småll pickled fish…”
Violet Allenby was not happy. Although it would be wrong to say she was the unhappiest person onboard the Princess Hüttigeun – chosen vessel of the 2014 Northern Delights Knitting Cruise. That distinction fell to Eskild, the ship’s young Entertainments Officer, who had just broken up with his girlfriend. He had been listless while calling the bingo, had wept openly on an excursion to the Yärn Bärn in Haugesund, and had treated them so far this afternoon to three hours of improvised love songs played on an out-of-tune guitar and delivered in an affecting Norse monotone. The elderly ladies onboard were very sympathetic, though it hardly made for the advertised ‘party atmosphere’.
“Inge-love linger, plunge ice through må soul
for the forest häaf wolves unt Edvart Bergasol”
Knit one purl one knit one purl one knit one purl one…
But what really got Violet Allenby’s goat as they made their way up the Norwegian coastline, hopping from one picturesque port to the next, was the fact that Al and Finn had not returned a call in the last twenty hours.
All they’d managed was a text from Finn saying he was going to the cinema. A text she’d just followed up with a call, thinking the film must be over by now. But instead of reaching him, she’d heard a snatch of frantic technical discussion interrupted by a well-to-do voice saying, “What the devil?” before being cut off.
Knit one purl one knit one purl one knit one purl one…
Of course there might be a perfectly reasonable explanation. She had obviously phoned up during the film and the voices were on the soundtrack. And yet… She could have sworn it was the same voice. That of the tall, severe gentleman who’d turned up at home the Easter before last wearing a lovely coat. Al disappeared for a fortnight with him, returning exhausted. “Don’t ask,” he’d said, and had slept for two days straight.
She had to respect this; she knew he sometimes did secret work. The following weekend at the last minute he had somehow managed to get the Crown Prince of Japan to open the village fête (a local author had pulled out, ‘feeling fluey’).
“He owes me a favour,” was Al’s only explanation.
The Crown Prince had listened attentively to the plans for the hospice, but was clearly in awe of Al.
“Your son. Very brave man,” he had told Violet.
Brave – the last thing a mother wants to know.
“She is free – she is winter!
a såuna, a splinter…”
Knit one purl one knit one purl one knit one purl one…
If she didn’t know better, she might think Al was somehow involved with this frightening gentleman again and that he’d dragged Finn along and they were now flirting with death in some calamitous situation that would mean misery for everybody who had ever loved them, and nobody loved them like…
She stopped herself before tears of distress sprang into her eyes.
For goodness’ sake, Violet. Pull yourself together. Ridiculous.
Then the Captain had appeared. A
gain. He’d been in mild terror of her the entire trip, anxious to make her stay as comfortable as possible, hanging on her every word – what was happening to the men on this ship?
He gulped and announced, “Ah… as we kommer into port, please refrain from using mobile phone. For the interference with communications… Apologies.” He did a little bow and hurried out.
It had been less than three minutes since she had called Finn. If Violet didn’t know any better, she might smell a rat.
Knit one purl one knit one purl one knit one purl one…
A very big rat called Al, followed by a rat in a lovely coat and the Crown Prince of Japan.
“RIGHT,” she snapped, throwing down her three-colour sweater panel. “Call me a taxi! Someone’s got to get to the bottom of this. And Eskild, please stop that ridiculous racket!”
“Dear lady…?” started the Captain, popping up as she stomped back to her cabin to pack.
“Out of my way! I’m leaving on a jet plane and I don’t know when I’ll be back again.”
TWENTY
“GO!”
Delta dropped the Apache out of the woodland evening air and hovered a few centimetres above the ivy-clad undergrowth.
“Touchdown!” called Kelly as he hit the ground. Finn was already leaping out of the port door, the weight of the M27 strap biting into his shoulder on impact.
They kept their heads down as Delta took off again and a fierce rotor wash tore at them. The moment it eased they were up again, Finn propping up the hopping Kelly, who was still getting used to his semi-paralysed leg.
They were three macro-metres downwind of the target, just outside the ring of dead animals, which were like a row of buildings at their scale. Their immediate task: to run 1,500 nano-metres in under five minutes, so they could reach the nest and establish a fire position, before Delta’s first attack run. Then open fire.
Not easy even under normal circumstances, but helping a man laden with an M27 and multiple magazines of ammo and a limp while watching out for both deadly aerial attack and nuisance ground attack was another thing altogether.
But Kelly soon got the hang of his injury, his dead leg thumping out the rhythm.
Thud thud thud thud…
Finn struggled to take the weight, but didn’t want to show weakness. He craned his head up when he could to scan the sky. Nothing. The ivy gave good cover. Grubs and ants, alarmed by their movement, were scattering out of the way as they progressed.
“Four minutes to go!” called Kelly. Thud thud thud thud…
Finn was panting and sweating. This was combat and Kelly was in another zone, all steel and determination. Finn tried to match him, but his lungs were bursting. He tried to focus on Scarlatti. He tried to find the steel.
For a moment Finn’s legs gave way and he collapsed. Kelly hauled him to his feet again, let him recover for exactly three breaths, before dragging him on again.
“Go! Go! Three minutes!”
Thud thud thud thud…
They ran past the stiff, extended foot of the dead cat. The smell of the putrefying badger was beginning to hit them.
As they rounded the giant head of the cat, they got their first sight of the nest. The dead badger’s pockmarked body was covered in writhing, burrowing nymphs – each a vile maggot nearly twice their size.
“Visual!” Kelly yelled and they hit the ground, desperate not to attract an attack before Delta’s first bomb run.
They had left the cover of the ivy and now lay panting in flattened mud and grasses. Finn thought he would throw up and his shoulder ached where he had been supporting Kelly.
“There! You see it?” Kelly pointed through the grasses.
There among the nymphs, darker than the Beta they had been tracking and lacking the distinctive white stripe of the nano-transmitter, among the putrefying guts, tending, feeding and bullying its young, was the Alpha Scarlatti… the size of an army truck to them, brutally assembled, and evil in intent.
Finn checked his watch. “Forty-five seconds.”
Kelly propped himself up and aimed his M27 through a gap in the grasses. “Now where the hell is your twin brother?” he asked. The Beta Scarlatti was nowhere to be seen. “Fifteen seconds. You ready?”
“Ready,” said Finn, bracing the M27 against his shoulder and looking through the sight.
“Short bursts.”
“Uh-huh.”
They waited, watching the Alpha tending its nymphs and then… something made it stop… some hint of something on the air… the faintest quantum vibration.
It raised its head and tasted the air with its whip-long, wriggling antennae. It tasted… danger.
Wwkzzkzkwkwkwkzzzwkzzkzkwkwkwkzzzwkzzkzkwkwkwkzzz
The Alpha shook itself free of the badger’s guts, and its young, and took off, heading straight for Kelly and Finn.
At that very moment the Apache shot past, low overhead, and let loose every one of its rockets at the badger, describing a line of fire and hell along the bottom edge of its belly. The guts lit up and the whole mass jolted, the body almost lifting off the ground.
BOOOOOOM!
* * *
DAY TWO 17:33 (BST). Siberia
An alarm sounded in the communications wing of the Siberian bunker. Motion-detector software registering sudden movement in Willard’s Copse.
Kaparis’s eyes swivelled towards a monitoring screen.
* * *
The blastwave snapped through the Beta Scarlatti’s body.
The urge to reproduce had been quick to kick in, the taste of the Alpha starting the flow of hormones that would transform it into a reproductive machine, and it had crawled to the opposite side of the sow badger to start laying, to ensure the developing older nymphs would not consume its eggs.
Now the blast, still ringing through its nervous system, halted everything.
And something else.
A scent.
Attack… commanded its instincts. Kill.
Finn’s gun was blown out of his hands as the shockwave hit him. He gasped for air.
Kelly simply withstood the blast and fired and fired and fired.
DRRRRRRT! DRRRRRRT! DRRRRRT! DRRRRRRT! DRRRRRT!
The Alpha Scarlatti wheeled out of its trajectory and roared back towards the conflagration, where its writhing nymphs were fleeing or being consumed by flames.
DRRRRRRRRT! DRRRRRRRRRT! DRRRRRRRRRT!
Kelly’s bullets ripped up at the Alpha, their trace red-gold in the early evening light, most of them bouncing off its extraordinary armoured exoskeleton. Only its wings were vulnerable, taking multiple hits and losing traction against the air.
But nothing could dent its rage as it turned back towards them.
“Finn!”
Finn snapped out of his shock and braced the M27 against his shoulder and began to fire as the Scarlatti flew at them.
DRRRRRRRT! DRRRRRRT! DRRRRRRRT!
The force of recoil was incredible, but Finn leant into it as he’d been briefly instructed up in the tree. The bullets hurtled out of the barrel and arced up to the Scarlatti – giving Finn an incredible feeling of a mad, uncontainable power – but apparently doing nothing to slow the beast’s progress.
The Alpha Scarlatti turned into a dive, powering towards the earth, stings first, massive tail whipping. Kelly and Finn abandoned the short controlled bursts mantra and let rip with everything they had –
DRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRTT!
At the same time the second Apache attack run swung in and Delta let loose the full batch of Hellfire missiles.
BAAA-BOOOOOOOOOOOOOMM!
The blast ripped through the riddled corpse, obliterating more of the vile nymphs within, the shockwave knocking the Alp
ha Scarlatti out of its dive and sending it slamming into the dirt, centimetres away from Kelly and Finn – who were also sent reeling.
From its new position, the Scarlatti’s thousand-celled eye was able to zero in on Kelly and Finn. Again, Finn felt the massive evil eyes boring into his brain.
They fired again as the beast roused itself –
DRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRTT!
And again the bullets bounced off the armoured core – but the wings at least were suffering, shredding. The beast tried desperately to fly the short distance to them, but its wings were reduced to furious, impotent, buzzing stubs.
Finn and Kelly carried on firing as the monster found its feet and began to crawl, massive and still deadly, across the dirt towards them in writhing, angry agony.
“Run!” Kelly screamed, blasting away at its remaining legs.
Finn grabbed him and they started to scramble away as fast as they could.
But the Alpha was buzzing and writhing and whipping itself ever nearer, a wounded, lethal foe, its nymphs aflame or in flight around it. It flicked a last stub of wing against the ground and was almost upon them.
Kelly dropped free of Finn, lay prone and fired.
DRRRRRTRRRRRRRRTTRRRRRRRTTT!
Finn backed away and fired too.
DRRRRRT! DRRRRRT! – into the stubs of its wings, into what he thought might be the soft parts of its abdomen, into the remaining creeping, crawling legs.
They were destroying it…
Until suddenly, with an absurd and desperate flick of its tail, it fell upon them – slamming into Finn like a giant mattress, the bulging surface covered in barbed and beaded hairs, sending Finn sprawling backwards… knocking his gun well clear.
For a moment, as Finn lay on his back in the dirt, blinking back to consciousness, he thought it was all over, that the beast had died… but, as his senses returned, he could tell there was life in it yet. He heard Kelly’s muffled screams from beneath the crippled beast. It tried to buzz its useless wing stubs, it tried to curl and whip its tail, but life was draining from it, the bullets were finally taking effect.
