It was three o’clock by the time Sergeant Blake came to fetch us and told us to assemble down at the well dock. The warhead was free of its six-month airtight confinement, and one of the dive teams was now manoeuvring it through the Lincoln – a slow but simple job. That meant the other dive team was free, and on their way back to the ship.
Of course, it also meant they had to get out of their dive kit – tanks, wetsuits, the whole shebang – and into their land-based combat gear, in which they were more or less indistinguishable from Blake and Rahvi in their SAS uniforms, give or take a few arm patches and insignias. So that was another half hour. But eventually they came down and joined us, ten of them, armed with M4s and led by Lieutenant Sullivan.
I’d subconsciously assumed Blake would be in charge, but it looked like Sullivan was running the show. I guess he’s the officer, after all. We’d all been briefed separately, but as we stood in the clamour and bustle of the well deck, Sullivan reminded us all of one critical mission parameter. “Do not fire unless fired upon,” he said. “We all know what this guy did. We all know he’s a murderer. But he might have critical information about the whereabouts of the PAL codes. So no eye-for-an-eye shit. And if you do have to shoot, go for the limbs.”
The clearance divers all assented, though they clearly weren’t happy about it. If somebody had strolled into Jagungal and cut Jonas and Simon and Andy’s throats, and got away with it, I’d be pretty fucking angry too.
A moment later we were cutting across the waves towards the island, in three separate RIBs, passing the pontoon with its jury-rigged little crane ready to winch the nuke up. Even now, somewhere below us, in the murky green maze of the Lincoln, the other clearance divers were extracting the warhead. And here we were, up on the sparkling surface in subtropical sunlight, motoring off to fetch the codebook. It was a pleasing symmetry, and I was excited enough to easily ignore the thought of what would happen if we searched through the American captain’s bunker from top to bottom and found nothing.
The RIBs cut south, parallel to the island’s western shore, past the rusty shipwrecks, past the cluster of zombie corpses where Sullivan’s men had cut down my undead pursuers just the other morning, and past the ferry terminal where I’d holed up that night. I’d given my best estimate of how far I’d gone up the beach before reaching the terminal, and it was there that we pulled up onto the sand, disembarked from the boats, and moved up the seaweed-scattered tideline towards the trees.
It was eerily quiet. Just the waves lapping against the shore and the wind in the trees, and the flapping wings of a big old pelican hurrying away from the beach where we’d disturbed it.
“Keep your eyes and ears peeled,” Sergeant Blake remarked. “Step carefully – we know this guy’s set traps.”
The squad fell into position, some of the clearance divers going ahead on point, others moving out to flank us. I was at the core, alongside Blake and Rahvi and the privates. In the daylight, in good weather, the forest was less intimidating than it had been at night, and felt a lot less overgrown. I suppose in the pitch dark I’d been stumbling into a lot of bushes, whereas now I could see where I was going and stick to the rabbit trails. The visibility was better than further north up the island, anyway – I could see the clearance divers ahead, and off to our sides, moving quietly through the trees with rifles pointed at the ground.
“I feel like the Prime Minister here,” I muttered.
“Fucking tell me about it,” Lomax said. Not for the first time, it occurred to me how out of their depth the three privates must have felt – just ordinary infantry, and only a few years older than me, going on a mission with a bunch of special forces guys with anywhere from ten to twenty years of experience. It was a funny old road that had led us all here.
“Anything looking familiar, Matt?” Blake said, as we gave a wide berth to a carpet python dangling from a tree branch.
“Nothing yet,” I said. What, did he think I was going to spot a particularly memorable tree?
“Keep looking.”
“Yeah, that’s the plan,” I muttered under my breath.
The truth was, I was realising I might have overstated my ability to retrace my steps. I felt as lost as everyone else.
A moment later we encountered our first zombie, everybody’s hearts jumping into their throats when a gunshot came from the left flankers. One of the clearance divers had spotted it coming towards him, and put it down with a single shot from his M4. “Stay quiet,” Sullivan called out. “Listen for them.”
We could hear their faint moans and shuffles on the breeze. Over the next ten minutes or so, as we moved carefully along through the forest, the divers shot another dozen. I wasn’t really concerned about them so much as I was about the gunfire. What if the American heard us? What if we tipped him off?
More alarming than the first zombie was the first trap. One of the point men walked into it, tripping a wire in a bank of ferns. There was a snap, a sound of breaking wood, and then a log came swinging down from the trees towards them.
They dived out of the way, and all of them were fast enough except the guy who’d tripped the wire – it caught him a glancing blow to the shoulder and knocked him to the ground. Blake and Sullivan darted forward to grab the log and slow it before it could swing back for another blow, while the others checked on the diver who’d been hit. He’d had the wind knocked out of him but was fine – if he’d been a little slower, it might have fractured his skull.
“Jesus,” Rickenbacker said. “Who the fuck sets something like that up?”
“Who do you think?” I said.
We kept moving, more slowly now, everybody watching every single step they took. We came across a few more traps – a snare that we avoided, and a stake pit that had collapsed when a tree branch had fallen on it, probably in the storm the other night. In a sense, it was reassuring. It meant we were on the right track.
Then we started coming across the heads.
In the darkness of the night and the storm, I’d barely been able to make them out. In the daylight, they were quite a sight to behold: rotting lumps of flesh, stakes driven up through the jaw and the skull, some mouths closed, some hanging open with revolting grins. Many of them were swarming with maggots, and the air was humming with the sound of blowflies feasting on the flesh.
“What a charmer,” Rahvi said, prodding one of the skulls with the tip of his M4.
“Fucking hell, I think I’m going to throw up,” Lomax gagged.
I almost thought I would, too. In the thunderstorm, with the rain, I hadn’t noticed it. But on a still, warm day, the stench was overpowering.
There were dozens of them. We moved our way carefully through them, not far from the bunker now. Some of them weren’t just skulls – they had ragged bits of the torso still attached, a neck, a clavicle, a shoulder and half a bicep. One of them still had enough of his rags hanging down to reveal a camouflage pattern, and a nametag which read DOYLE. “Hey, this guy was military,” I said.
Sergeant Blake frowned. “Must be from a while ago. No-one’s gone missing from the Canberra, except the sentries he killed. Everyone who came over here that night with you got back safe.”
“What about the airport?” I said.
“No. They never said anything about Moreton Island. It must be from back near the start. January.”
“It doesn’t look that old,” I said. Doyle – whether he’d been a private or a general, no way of telling – had had his eyeballs eaten away and his lips peeled back, but there was still plenty of decaying skin on his face, and even hair on the scalp. A lot of the other heads were little more than skulls.
“No,” Blake said. “It doesn’t. Come on.”
It was troubling him. And it troubled me.
We moved on through the stake field, through the blowflies and the stench of rotting flesh. The sun was low in the sky, casting long shadows across the dead leaves of the forest floor. It was still warm and muggy, sweat collecting in my armpits a
nd sticking my shirt to my back.
I was feeling cautiously optimistic. The American captain might be able to sense us coming, but we outnumbered him sixteen to one, and we were heavily armed. He’d probably run or hide rather than take us head-on. He was crazy, but he’d shown the night he swam out to the HMAS Canberra that he could still think tactically, somewhere inside that broken mind. So I didn’t expect we were in danger.
Which made it all the more alarming when there was a burst of gunfire and bullets splintered through the tree bark off to my left.
The whole group threw themselves to the ground. Rahvi grabbed me by the arm and dragged me deeper into a depression behind a fallen tree. There were shouts and yells and more gunfire. I’d flicked the safety off my Steyr and was peering out through the gap between the earth and the dead tree when I realised that whatever was happening, it was already over.
Rahvi and I scrambled out from behind the tree and ran forward, joining the others, even as the clearance divers fanned out to watch our flanks. Sergeant Blake and Lieutenant Sullivan were standing over a body, a middle-aged man wearing combat fatigues, a Steyr Aug lying on the dead leaves beside him. They were beside a small concrete structure with rickety metal doors, and I suddenly realised we were here: right outside the bunker.
“Is this him?” Blake demanded of me. “The American?”
I looked down at the corpse. Somebody had caught him in the head with a burst of gunfire, practically scalping him, but leaving his lower face intact.
“No,” I said, stunned. “I’ve never seen this guy in my life.”
“Everybody get down!” Blake hissed. “Take cover, stay quiet!”
I wasn’t sure why – things were happening too fast for me to understand. The others scrambled for cover behind trees, in bushes, in dips in the earth. Two of the divers grabbed the dead man’s body and dragged it away, leaving a smeary trail of blood across the leaf litter. I wound up squatting with Dresner and Lomax in the enormous buttressed roots of a fig tree, a stone’s throw away from the bunker doors. Apart from the buzzing of the blowflies and the distant call of songbirds, the forest was silent.
A moment later the doors creaked open and another soldier stepped out carefully. “Sarge?” he called. “We heard shots. You got zombies?”
Sergeant Blake jumped down from the mossy concrete roof, landing right on top of him, pinning his back to the ground and yanking the rifle away from him. The soldier squawked out in shock but Blake had flipped him over and clapped a hand over his mouth, as some of the divers emerged from the scrub to help pin him down. They dragged him over towards the fig tree, out of sight of the bunker doors, and Sullivan and Blake squatted down beside him with the barrel of Blake’s sidearm pressed against his head.
“I’m going to take my hand off your mouth,” Blake whispered. “If you scream I will kill you. Understood?”
The soldier nodded, eyes wide, sweating with fear. He was only a few years older than me.
Blake removed his hand. “Who are you?”
“Dave,” the soldier said. “Private David Glynn.”
“That’s not what he meant,” Sullivan said. “Where are you from?”
Private Glynn swallowed nervously, and said: “New England.”
“Oh, shit,” I whispered. Murmurs ran through the group, and Blake swore under his breath.
“How many of you down there?” Sullivan demanded. “In the bunker?”
“I…”Glynn had been about to say something, then stopped. “Thirty,” he said.
“If that’s true, we’re just going to chuck our grenades down there,” Blake said. “Tell us the real number and maybe some of your friends will make it out alive.”
“Seven,” Glynn admitted. “Including me. And the sergeant, he stayed on guard up here…”
“Yeah, we met him,” Sullivan muttered. He stood up. “Lomax, Dresner, Rickenbacker, you stay here with the prisoner. Everybody else, form up. Flashbangs first. Shoot if necessary. Let’s go!”
The divers by the doors pulled them open as quietly as they could and moved down into the bunker, the others close on their heels. I was about to follow – after all, the lieutenant had only ordered the privates to stay here – but Sergeant Blake clapped a hand on my shoulder. “Guess again,” he growled. “You stay up here.” Then he was after them – Rahvi shrugged at me, and followed close behind, hefting his M4.
And then I was alone, apart from Lomax and Dresner and Rickenbacker, sitting by the shell-shocked prisoner.
“Matt, get away from there,” Dresner called. I was still standing by the bunker doors, peering down in the darkness. I glanced back over my shoulder; Lomax and Rickenbacker were squatting down by Private Glynn, asking him questions, trying to extract information.
A few sudden, explosive bangs came from down the bunker corridor, flashes of light bursting out into the late afternoon shadow of the forest. Then I heard the gunfire. “Ah, fuck this,” I said, flicking the safety off my rifle and ducking down into the corridor even as Lomax yelled at me to stop.
The rest of the team had moved fast, and were well ahead of me. After fucking around a few tight corners, moving slowly so I didn’t smash my head on a wall in the gloom, I came back to parts of the bunker that seemed vaguely familiar – the directions stencilled on the walls, the junk piled up on the floor, candles flickering in the corners. I caught up with the rest of the team just as the combat was over, bodies on the ground, the smell of gunpowder thick in the air. “Clear, five down!” one of the divers yelled. Flashlights bounced across the walls and the divers went from room to room, sweeping their rifles across, making sure the whole place was secure.
I followed Sergeant Blake’s voice and found him and Lieutenant Sullivan in the same room I’d been held captive in – I recognised the patterns of junk, and the rusted bracket fixtures on the wall. The two of them were crouched over a prone body, speaking quietly, even as the divers still moved down the corridor outside yelling combat codewords at each other. Sullivan glanced up at me and motioned for me to stop.
The man on the ground was the American captain. I’d paused just outside his field of vision.
He was hurt. For a moment I’d thought that he must somehow be in cahoots with the New Englanders, that the divers had shot him. Then I saw the ropes around his wrists, the blood on his face. The other soldiers had been torturing him, and he was dying.
“Captain, I’m Sergeant Blake. We’re with the Australian special forces. Can you hear me?”
Blake had the man’s hands clasped in his own. The American was groaning, mumbling, blood bubbling between his lips.
“The men who did this to you – they’re with a rogue group,” Blake said urgently. “Traitors. Deserters. They want to steal a nuclear warhead from the Abraham Lincoln.”
Conveniently ignoring that we were also trying to steal one. Well, not steal – we had the permission of the US Navy, or what was left of it. Or some parts of what was left of it, anyway.
The American gurgled something.
A note of desperation crept into Blake’s voice. “Captain? Please – we need the PAL codebook. That’s what they’re looking for, that’s what we need to stop them finding. If they can take a warhead and take the codebook, they’ll be a threat to both our nations.”
Well. One of our nations. Not that both our nations weren’t already in ruin.
The American – the captain, I guess Blake had decided he must be after all – mumbled something unintelligible. Blake and Sullivan leaned in closer. I tried to stay out of his sight, but found myself craning my neck closer as well.
“Sarah,” the captain whispered. “Sarah, I lost my ship.”
Then he stopped breathing, and his eyes glazed over.
Sullivan kneeled there a moment longer. Blake stood up, nodding to himself for a moment, then violently swore – “Fuck! Fucking hell!”
He turned to the dive team, some of whom – having secured the bunker – had come into the room. “Tear this pla
ce apart,” Blake ordered. “Find that fucking codebook!” Then he unholstered his sidearm and put a bullet through the dead captain’s head, the shot echoing around the room, leaving my ears ringing.
And so I found myself with all the others, rummaging through piles of trash, looking for a PAL codebook. Through all the junk: milk crates, mouldy papers, plastic cups, buckets, numberplates, flowerpots, aluminium cans, shreds of tyre, a motorcycle helmet, half a surfboard… here and there, occasionally, something from the Lincoln itself. A water-damaged folder reading ENGINEERING DEPARTMENT, full of mouldy, mushy paper. A yellow vest with reflective stripes and FLIGHT DIRECTOR stencilled on it. A chipped white coffee mug with a logo for the Seattle Seahawks.
All of it, useless. “What the fuck are we doing?” I said. “This is a needle in a haystack, we’re not going to find it. We don’t even know that he had them.”
“The guys from New England seemed to think so,” Rahvi said.
“How did they even get here?” I said. “What are they doing here?”
Which was precisely what Lieutenant Sullivan and Sergeant Blake had gone back up to the surface for – to ask more questions of the prisoner. It wasn’t long before Sergeant Blake was back down in the gloom, whistling for attention. “Listen up!” He had a grim look on his face. “We aren’t done with him yet, but we squeezed some numbers out of him. New England’s here in force. We don’t know where - somewhere in the bay area. They’ve got a hundred men and some air support – attack choppers.”
“The Canberra can handle a couple of attack choppers,” one of the clearance divers said, though he still sounded uneasy. It was one thing to hear radio broadcasts and second-hand stories about General Draeger and New England. Actually coming across his men, in the flesh, right here in Moreton Bay – that was entirely different.
End Times (Book 4): Destroyer of Worlds Page 21
