by Glynn James
But in Africa, of course, he grudgingly admitted, I would have died two years ago.
But I would have died warm.
Now, fat dry snowflakes lashed his face, coming in on a driving wind that was like a frozen cat o’ nine tails, stealing his breath and shrinking his eyes to pink slits. A thick and dark, but red-tinted, van Dyke beard covered everything around his mouth, and glasses with thick black plastic frames framed his eyes – he actually looked like an aging Gordon Freeman from the Half-Life video games – though neither the beard nor glasses did much to shield him from the elements.
Better I should wear a Santa Claus beard, and goggles, Aliyev griped to himself, as he began the trudge down the path that had been cut out of the steep slope of the mountainside. After only a few dozen paces, he looked back and found he could barely make out the hulking shape of his Dacha, so quickly and completely had this storm descended.
But there was no way around it. He needed to check the traps. He was nearly out of specimens again. The fact that they were dying so fast was actually a good thing – wonderful really. It meant he was almost there. But it also meant he might die of exposure out here on this cursed mountain.
In his heart, he knew he didn’t have to go out right this second. He had all eternity for his work, after all.
But maybe some part of him wanted to walk out in the storm – and perish there. At the very least, he was playing it close to the bone. He was self-aware enough to know that some part of him wanted to die – in repentance, or out of shame, for all that he had done. And he knew that an even bigger part of him definitely wanted to check out before the inevitable happened – when his supplies ran out, or the dead finally slipped through all his carefully constructed defenses.
One way or another, it was only a matter of time.
If he checked out now, at least it would be with a full belly – and he would be free from the specter of a horrendous afterlife. Though he was sure he deserved it – deserved it more than any of the billions who had already suffered it. Then again, there was still his work on the new pathogen – that was what gave him a reason to get out of bed every morning, and to put one foot in front of another.
It was also what gave him some faint hope of… redemption.
The slope of the trail grew steeper as he traversed the side of the mountain, and began descending toward the nearest anything remotely like civilization – Hoxtolgay Township, 45km to the northwest. He was having to watch his foot placement carefully as the snow began to pile up. And his balance took a hit as he shoved his hands deeper into the pockets of the parka.
If he took a bad fall out here, broke a leg or something, he would be as good as dead. Help wasn’t miles away. It wasn’t anywhere.
He was utterly on his own.
Never mind roads or cell towers, there was hardly even any vegetation up on these slopes – just rock, and hard-packed mud, and the odd bit of moss. It wasn’t that the altitude was so high. It was just that this was such a remote, barren wasteland of a place. And cold. So cold.
Should have gone for the HAWAIIAN Pole of Inaccessibility, he thought bitterly. But, aside from not having one, Hawaii would have been even less convenient than Africa, in terms of proximity to his previous life and pursuits.
As it was, his mountaintop fortress technically sat on the sovereign territory of China – not that borders mattered much up here. But he was also extremely close to that very special ass-end of the world where the borders of four nations met: China, Mongolia, Kazakhstan – and good ole Mother Russia.
Aliyev had been known in his previous life as Tovarysh Doktor (“Comrade Doctor”) Oleg Aliyev, PhD – one of the world’s leading microbiologists, biological warfare experts, and practicing bioweaponeers. Ethnically, and in terms of his loyalties, he was every inch a Kazakh. That identity permeated his flesh and bones.
But it was Russia that had made him what he was.
Or, rather, the Supreme Soviet, before the collapse of the great Communist Empire that started in 1989.
And, more specifically, it had been Biopreparat that had made him – that gargantuan, industrial-scale, and utterly secret Soviet biological warfare program, which had consisted of hundreds of facilities and more than forty secret labs spread across fifteen cities, covering all seven of Russia’s time zones, and lavishly supported with tens of billions of rubles in funding per year.
And, not incidentally, Biopreparat had also employed more than 30,000 scientists, microbiologists, industrial designers, support personnel…
All of whom had suddenly and very unexpectedly found themselves out of work, and in need of new jobs, after the Soviet Union dissolved, and then ceased to exist, in 1991.
Oh, sure, Aliyev had enjoyed a cushy teaching position at Novosibirsk State University. That had been his reward for eighteen months of doing the dirty (and rather dangerous) work of the Committee of State Security – more commonly known as the KGB – by taking on a “fellowship” at that biotechnology company in Dusseldorf. He’d been sent there to spy, of course, though he also did some useful work with transgenic organisms, as well as met some interesting people.
Anyway, the university he’d been set up at afterward was conveniently located a mere 740 kilometers across the border from the spot where he ultimately built his Dacha. And while the university didn’t disappear after the fall of the Soviet Union, as did the bioweapons program… it did stop paying any salaries, for quite a few years in there.
So Aliyev did what an awful lot of other talented bioscientists, genetic engineers, and bioweaponeers did: he went freelance. And he did very well for himself. His particular and painstakingly developed skills, which had been so much in demand during the Cold War, only became more lucrative in the age of terror. But that was a long time ago. Back when money meant something.
And now, coming out of his reverie and back into the age that had ended all ages, Aliyev realized he had reached his traps. The blizzard continued to blow, and visibility was now down to a few meters. But he could already hear that at least one of the traps was not empty.
Somehow, the ravenous sons of bitches could always sense him coming.
Thank God For The Walking Dead
48°59'31" 87°40'17" - Altai Mountains, Asia
With a shudder of relief, Oleg Aliyev saw that his herding implement was right where he left it, on his most recent trip out, when the traps had proved empty. This consisted of a six-foot length of hollow PVC pipe, with a sort of curved pommel guard at the end – and a thick section of nylon rope, which emerged as a noose at the guarded end, and a knotted length at the other.
Thank God for The Walking Dead, Aliyev thought, as he often did, giving credit where it was due for the original idea. Those guys paved the way for the rest of us. Employed carefully, the noose on the end could be gotten over the head of one of them, tightened around its neck by pulling on the rope, and then the subject herded back to the lab with minimal fuss – and minimal danger.
Though it definitely paid not to get complacent.
And, anyway, first he had to get the damned things out of the traps. As the scene resolved through the haze of falling snow, he could see that the first one had made short but messy work of the baby Siberian ibex he had put inside as bait. He had a whole different trap to catch the ibexes, placed on a different slope of the mountain.
There had been a lot of wildlife native to this range at one time – including, reportedly, snow leopards. Those had been hunted nearly to extinction, though there had been reported sightings as recently as right before the fall. Aliyev had never seen one himself, but he wasn’t ruling it out. As to whether he relished the thrill of seeing such a majestic and deadly creature, or of being taken down by one and released from his purgatory, was another question.
At any rate, the remains of the baby ibex – a wonderful mountain goat species with great curving horns – were a mess, and so was the undead creature that had eaten it. The trap itself was an extra-large, heavy-gauge wire ca
ge-trap, which he had bought on Amazon and then transported up here himself, along with every other damned thing he’d needed, at great effort and expense.
But it turned out it paid almost unbelievably well to be a skilled engineer of designer bioweapons, and it was this fabulous post-Soviet income that had made all kinds of things possible for Aliyev – like the flats in Kensington and on the Left Bank, the upper-class flights on Virgin Atlantic, the bespoke suits from Savile Row…
But, much more importantly, it had funded construction of the Dacha itself, with its attached lab – as well as the personal helicopter, and the flying lessons. Because the same skills that made Aliyev uniquely valuable also made him a target.
Now, he positioned himself at the head of the first trap – an 8’x3’x3’ wire-mesh cage, with an end that could be propped open, but which slammed shut when something entered. All three of these were chained to spikes driven into the rock of the mountainside, though that probably hadn’t been necessary. Everyone who might steal them was dead, and there had never been anybody up here in the first place.
The dead guy in the first one, as always, had needed to crawl in to get his meal. But they never seemed to mind that. Perhaps they appreciate the lie-down, Aliyev thought, after climbing all the way up here from Hoxtolgay. Then again, these sons of bitches were nothing if not tireless.
Hoxtolgay was a Mongol village in the Uygur Autonomous Region of China, an administrative catchment that spanned over 1.6 million kilometers – and without a trace of Western or modern civilization in any of it. It did have thin scatterings of villages populated by Uyghurs and Mongols (as well as even fewer Han, Kazakhs, Tajiks, and Kyrgyz), and this guy in the first trap looked the part – flat nose (what was left of it), bits of sparse beard; probably Mongol with a little Uyghur blood.
The ex-Mongol woman in the second cage was much the same, and likely from the same village. For all Aliyev knew, they were a married couple, wandering the Altai Mountains together for eternity – until they fell foul of Aliyev and his dark designs.
The third trap, on the far side, was empty. Well, not empty – the baby ibex he’d put in there seemed to have succumbed to exposure, or thirst. Just another one of Aliyev’s uncountable victims, to be tossed on a pile far too high to even see the top of now.
Within a few seconds, out of long practice, he had one end of the nearest trap open, and the head of its occupant snared with his herding device. He carefully led the snarling bastard out onto the mountain ledge on all fours, then guided it up to a standing position.
Holding it at a safe distance, Aliyev shivered violently, then looked balefully over at the second trap. On any other day, he would make two trips to get them both back to the lab. But right now he was fucking freezing, and he was also tired – so tired, way down deep in his bones, and at the very bottom of his soul, or lack thereof.
He decided he could get both back in one trip.
This was hardly his first mistake, but it was very nearly his last – in a life consisting of more missteps than he could even count or remember.
* * *
The trudge back to the Dacha was uneventful. Even getting them through the narrow vestibule went fine. It had all gone wrong at the very last stage, when he tried to get the second one into the glass enclosure reserved for it at the end of the lab.
And it was also because of the goddamned white tile floor, which Aliyev had installed for the lab, for no better reason than as a nod to convention. It was supposed to be non-skid, but that was with lab slippers or regular shoes – and definitely not hiking boots caked with snow and ice from an unexpected blizzard. Maybe it was the damned mountain that was to blame.
Maybe it was his own death wish.
But, whatever the cause for the untimely slip, now Aliyev lay on that white tile floor, his face smushed down into it, thick-framed eyeglasses askew, one foot pressing frantically on the plexiglas-and-steel door of the enclosure – which was the only thing keeping the second dead Mongol’s head pinned half inside of it and half out. Meanwhile, it wheezed and gargled and clawed frantically at Aliyev’s leg, which luckily was covered in a ripstop technical fabric. (Thank you REI.com…)
As for the pistol, he had sent that skittering across the floor when he fumbled his initial attempt to pull it out of the belt-slide holster where it had sat untouched for so long. Fortuitously – and this was probably all that was going to save him, if anything did – it had bounced off a lab bench and come skittering right back across the floor toward him.
Just not quite far enough – to almost within reach of the grasping fingers of his outstretched right hand.
And Aliyev thought again about how utterly alone he was up here, and how he would die alone, and how there was no one who would care, and certainly no one who would come to help him. And how no one would even get the satisfaction of seeing him fall prey to the very chimera virus – that horrifying, ungodly combination of smallpox and myelin toxin that had come to be known to a dying world as Hargeisa, or just the zombie virus – and which he himself had genetically engineered, and then delivered to an Islamist militia in Somalia in return for a half-million dollars in hard currency. And which had then, with incredible efficiency and an absolute and utter lack of humanity or mercy, brought the entire fucking world to an end.
Oh, fuck it, Aliyev thought.
He tensed his leg, kicked off once, and lunged across the floor for the gun.
Snatching it up, he rolled onto his back and raised his head to aim the weapon with outstretched arms at the animated incarnation of death scrabbling manically across the floor toward him.
He fired rapidly, five times, then turned the side of the gun toward himself and regarded it. It was a gorgeous Fabrique Nationale Five-seveN, two-tone with a flat-dark-earth finish on the body and a black slide. It had cost him over $2,000, black market, and before today had been used exactly once, at an indoor shooting range in Moscow. It fired tiny little 5.7mm bullets – but, then again, they were armor-piercing rounds, and the gun held 30 of them.
This meant there were now 25 left in the mag.
Aliyev exhaled while considering this.
And while he’d somehow mustered the courage and strength needed to shoot the man who was already dead, but still animated… now he found that, for perhaps the hundredth time, he didn’t have the courage to turn the weapon on himself – to finally put down the man who had actually become Death…
The destroyer of worlds.
He sighed and let the handgun fall into his lap. The whole world had died because of what he had done.
But Oleg Aliyev would live another day.
Briefback
JFK - MARSOC Team Room [Ass O’Clock]
Somewhat before first thing next morning, Sergeant Lovell and Corporal Raible stood at the front of the MARSOC team room, tag-teaming on the commander’s briefback. This was the last milestone before they launched the scavenging mission to the South African naval base at Saldanha Bay.
The briefback was generally where the guys who had done the planning, and who would actually be conducting the mission, ran through all the details so the commander could make sure that, 1) it was going to accomplish what he wanted it to; and, 2) it wasn’t going to get everyone fucking killed.
The role of the commander today was played by Drake. And it was Lovell and Raible giving the briefing because, of the two fire teams of four MARSOC Marines each assigned to this op, they were the most senior. Everyone superior to them was either dead, or being kept in reserve for Somalia.
The other main audience for this briefback was Juice – who was now hearing it for the first time, despite having just been assigned to lead the mission, and after his all-nighter reading the mission profile document. Also present was Handon; LT Campbell, who would be quarterbacking from CIC; and the balance of the two MARSOC fire teams, six Marines, who would be going out.
Handon, arms crossed before his powerful chest, his strong back holding up a rear wall, gave Juice a quic
k look to try and take his emotional temperature. Just before the two of them had left the Alpha team room, Henno had called Handon aside and volunteered to lead the mission himself. Handon had turned him down – which made Juice a little self-conscious as to why.
Handon’s thinking had been that what he needed for Somalia was tough, mean, indomitable hard men – more than he needed guys with super tech skills. Africa had basically been living in the Bronze Age since before the fall, so tech was probably going to be a minor factor. Plus, they were going to be deep in the jungle, very much on their own – so comms weren’t going to matter as much. There really wasn’t going to be anyone they could call for help.
Juice’s thinking was: Guess I’m most expendable now.
But of course he’d put that aside, Rangered up, and just said to Handon: “I’ll get it done.”
Now Lovell and Raible cued up a Powerpoint deck at the front. Lovell was a solid and well-respected operator, and Raible an up-and-comer. Both had earned a lot of respect for holding the hole in the ship during the battle, despite horrendous losses.
But they both knew mission accomplishment almost always came before force protection. At least it did in this most desperate of wars. It certainly would today. First the mission, then the men.
“Go,” Drake said.
* * *
“We’re calling this one Op Biltong,” Raible said, bringing up the first slide. Getting to name your missions whatever you wanted was one perk of being a special operator.
The format of the briefing turned out to be, unsurprisingly to anyone there, a heavily customized version of the never-popular MDMP, the military decision-making process. Officers and team leaders were known to go around with USB drives on lanyards around their necks – with their own modified, tailored, and annotated mission planning documents, from previous tours and ops.
