“We need to get you sat down,” Mac said in a tone that was probably intended to be soothing but still sounded like a threat to anyone who didn’t know him. He walked the major towards the small gas-bottle heater which was the focal point for so many cold people, and his loud voice cleared a path like Moses.
“Move your arses!” he bawled. “You! Clear out of the way.” This last was aimed at a young man who fled from his choice position in front of the glowing bars radiating heat, just in time before Downes was deposited directly in front of the heater and Palmer arrived to thrust the cup containing hot, sugary liquid into his hands. Before Mac could say or do anything else, a speaker erupted inside the fenced shelter.
“Commanding officers report to quarantine exit. I repeat, commanding officers to quarantine exit.”
Mac looked up, meeting Palmer’s eyes and nodding to convey that the tank captain had to speak for them all. Maxwell, filling the boots of his predecessor perfectly, appeared behind the captain’s right shoulder. Mac’s eyebrows met in the middle, not hiding his response to the other arrival as Palmer Senior turned to find his younger brother had fallen in with them, somehow making his bland boiler suit look like the high fashion he was born to parade.
Captain Palmer, too exhausted to be careful with his words, elected to give his instructions to his younger brother under the guise of speaking to the NCOs. He spoke, fixing his brother with a direct stare that made it obvious he was talking to him.
“Leave the talking to me,” he said quietly. “I rather suspect we aren’t as welcome as one would hope.”
FIVE
Eight days prior
The US Air Force C-130 transport plane banged hard onto the tarmac as the engine shrieked and roared in full reverse, with a juddering running throughout the airframe which threatened to break it apart. The pilot’s warning to brace for a ‘combat landing’ meant nothing to Professor Grewal, serving only to panic him into believing they were dropping down into a war zone. So when the wheels hit the ground hard and bounced the heavy cargo plane back up into the air, to reverse his body’s grip on gravity so suddenly and sickeningly, he cried out in panic, thinking that they were crashing.
His hearth thumped in his chest almost as hard as the screeching tyres did as they hit the tarmac a second time and let out a tortured noise before the plane rose into the air again. The fuselage skewed sideways, like a powerful car would do when the driver floored the throttle from a standing start, only with the sensations being reversed so that forwards was backwards and up was down. It simply overwhelmed him, forcing from him another yell of panic.
On the fourth or fifth impact, punctuated by the tortured, muted sounds of rubber on tarmac, his body tried to tell his mind that they were slowing down even if he wouldn’t believe it. When his brainstem overrode his choice to hold his breath and he gasped in a deep lungful, he finally understood what the pilot meant by the term ‘combat landing’.
The headphones he forgot he was wearing crackled into life and played a short burst of static before the pilot’s muffled voice filled his ears.
“Thank you for flying zombie airways. We know you have no choice, so we don’t really care if you enjoyed your flight. Be sure to take all of your shit with you when you leave.”
The plane turned a slow circle on the spot, so close to the end of the runway, which fortunately Grewal didn’t have a forward view of, as one of the uniformed soldiers nearby unstrapped and stood up to stretch. The man was average height with a stocky build but other than the fearsome beard and a stare that could penetrate steel, he seemed entirely… average. The other men on his team seemed similarly fit, as if they could swim five miles of open ocean before breakfast each day, and all of them were equally as dismissive of the two scientists and their small staff.
They didn’t exactly get off on the right foot when the Brit assumed they were there to carry his research equipment, which had been dumped on the tarmac at the airport near Langley. He hadn’t seen the team come in via chopper from Little Creek, so he’d had no idea who or what they were when he’d given them instructions on carrying the crates onto the plane.
Grewal neither knew nor cared that the US Air Force pilots were acting on behalf of the CIA, nor did he care that the men and women providing their security were part of the US Army’s Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases. He knew that some of the staff attached to what he considered to be his project were with Chambers and had come direct from the CDC, but with so many different people from various places using a whole raft of acronyms and reporting to different admirals or generals or politicians, he’d lost track and managed to confuse a US Navy Seal team with grunts who were there to carry his boxes.
He still hadn’t had the opportunity to make up for his rudeness, not that he ever tried hard to consider the feelings of others, but something about the unsettlingly still man in charge of that team made him feel as though he’d committed a grave error that he needed to rectify soon.
“Come on, Doc,” Agent Fisher said as he moved past towards the ramp and broke the eye contact between the tough soldier and the terrified scientist. Fisher had swapped the Langley camouflage of his grey suit for the more practical black military style clothing, bearing no badges of rank or any insignia at all to denote who or what he was.
He wore a black vest over his anonymous-looking uniform and carried weapons, as did the other two men sporting identical haircuts to accompany their outfits, and Grewal tried to recall their names. Wood? Carter? He shook his head as he realised that he didn’t care anyway.
“At ease, Master Chief,” Fisher said in a tone somewhere between sarcastic and respectful as he passed the staring SEAL. Grewal was forced to follow and pass unnervingly close to the man he was certain hated him; but then again, he had grown accustomed to being hated everywhere he went. Since being rescued by British Special Forces from the London lab which had been the epicentre of the outbreak, he hadn’t been many places other than US military bases. Still, everyone there hated him too, even if he had created the virus only by accident while carrying out the orders of both his and the United States governments.
He shuffled along behind the agent, eager to be off the plane which had so recently tried to kill him, and eager too to get away from the malevolence hiding behind the beard that still tracked his movements like a predator.
“Are you Fisher?” a man wearing British army camouflage uniform asked confidently as he and a small entourage approached the rear ramp of the plane. They had disgorged from a pair of dull, green military vehicles parked nearby, and from their physiques and bearing, all had the obvious look of fighting men.
“That’s me,” the CIA man said, stepping up to greet the speaker.
“Colonel Kelly,” the man said, offering a handshake and half crushing the agent’s hand with enough force to push a vein out in the side of his own neck. Grewal shot a quick look at Fisher, who still maintained the poker face he wore permanently, even if one eyelid did flicker a tiny bit. The Colonel offered no other information, and Grewal guessed that was either because the agent knew who he was or else the man just enjoyed secrecy. He turned, pacing away and expecting to be followed as he continued to talk.
“We’ve arranged a facility for you to use,” he explained. “It’s basic, hardly the standard I imagine you’re accustomed to, but needs must.” Fisher ignored the jibe at him needing a five star hotel.
“Have the requirements been met?”
“Isolated location, secure perimeter, given that three sides of it are the Atlantic, and a power supply,” Kelly responded. “Like I said, it’s basic.” He reached the driver’s side of the vehicle he’d arrived in and opened it, pausing before climbing back in and peering down the short runway towards the sight of three transport trucks lumbering towards them.
“You’ll be taken directly there,” he told the visitors. “I have a small force in place to ensure you aren’t disturbed.” Something about the way he narrowed his eyes when he
said that made Fisher think he meant that they weren’t to leave their basic facility. “And other than that, I expect you to conduct all of your experiments without affecting the population here.” He climbed behind the wheel without another word, the three other soldiers doing the same before the engine barked into life. It rattled away under the kind of acceleration a person might use when the maintenance of the vehicle wasn’t his or her personal concern. This left the gaggle of Americans alone and waiting for their convoy to arrive.
“I think we can safely assume they aren’t exactly pleased to see us,” Fisher opined to the others, his gaze resting finally on Professor Grewal, who was transfixed by the look that implied he was solely responsible for that, too. Movement directly beside him made him jump and move away, to find that the leader of the US Navy SEAL team had appeared at his side without Grewal being aware in the slightest of his approach.
“Master Chief,” Fisher said, “I trust you and your team can be ready for an excursion by sixteen hundred?” The man nodded, still not saying a word, and turned to requisition one of the approaching trucks for his team and their gear.
Grewal walked back to the plane, hurrying with his hands out in front of him saying, “No, no, no!” as he rushed to stop one of the uniformed US Army soldiers from handling a piece of equipment too roughly. The man from the MRIID put it down carefully and stepped back, leaving Grewal to protect the sensitive centrifuge and oversee the rest of the equipment getting loaded onto the transport.
“Bloody ham-fisted buffoo—”
“Everything okay, Doc?” Fisher’s voice startled him and elicited a small yelp from him as he clutched the lab equipment tighter to his chest.
“Yes, yes, I err…” Fisher slapped him on the back a little too hard to be entirely friendly.
“Relax,” he told him. “A broken test tube ain’t exactly the worst thing that could happen, if you catch my drift…”
The term basic, was something of an understatement. Their facility, such as it was, was a farm and outbuildings which had been hastily repurposed, and the previous occupants displaced to God only knew where. It was chosen for location, not that Grewal understood that. Situated on the south-western tip of the craggy, mountainous island they now inhabited, the narrow approach to what was now their base could be cut off by a small force to minimise the risk of anything getting loose. When that was explained to him, he nodded sagely and offered his opinion.
“Like Leonidas’ defence of Thermopylae?”
“Interesting that you choose a reference where all the good guys died,” Fisher said, a mirthful smirk adorning his face.
The rooms of the main house and other buildings were portioned out, with the main, high-ceilinged shed being the main attraction. Judging by the smell, it had previously housed livestock, but the hint of recent blacksmithing hung in the air to mingle with the residual aroma of shit. That metalwork had been the construction of a series of small, steel mesh cubes, evidently the holding cages for what would be their test subjects.
Test subjects, he thought sourly, huffing to himself and earning a mild look of query from Fisher. He shook his head to deflect any questions, and instead began organising where he wanted the equipment unpacked.
“When can you start collecting specimens?” Chambers asked, standing near to Grewal but wearing an expression of distaste to make it clear that their being on the same side wasn’t by choice on his part.
“This evening,” Fisher answered simply. “You’ll have something to work with tomorrow. The MRIID guys will run the security side of this facility and they have orders to put down anything not under direct and total control. That understood?”
The two scientists caught each other’s eye for a fleeting second, then both nodded, sharing an understanding in that moment that they were on the threshold of something either very important or else very dangerous.
The plan was simple. They would take samples from infected hosts and run the same tests that they had against the pure viral strain back in the labs on the other side of the Atlantic. Those updated samples, or ‘real world’ samples as Grewal called them, could throw up any number of complications to spoil their perfect world lab results. Numerous factors could affect the viability or severity of the infection, making it more or less resilient to any possible ‘cure’ they could devise. As if reading his thoughts, Fisher asked them both a question.
“Don’t give me long answers,” he warned them, “but can you make a cure we can use?” Chambers and Grewal looked at one another
‘Cure’ was a subjective word, given that those infected would be killed off, but technically speaking it could cure the rest of the world by killing the infection in the hosts. Chambers sucked in a breath and pursed his lips, radiating anger that his years of experience and research were treated like everything was a yes or no answer when it came to anyone from the military or the government. Grewal adopted a different approach.
“If our compounds work the same in the field as they did in the lab, then yes,” he told the agent simply, having gone over this very subject with the man more than once already.
“If,” Fisher answered. “Lot of ifs involved with things nowadays…”
“Well,” Grewal said in a tone of voice designed to end the conversation, “if we don’t get any test subjects, there will be some definite nos.”
SIX
Johnson was more comfortable driving the Warrior than he expected to be. It was a vast improvement on the previous generation of fighting vehicles he’d driven before, and combined all of the things he liked and added a whole raft of new tricks and gadgetry. He still had that unavoidable fifteen metres of limited vision when he drove closed-down, with the hatches sealed to protect them from anything outside that felt like biting them. He mused that they—the developers of such mighty war machines—would only solve that problem when they gave the drivers television sets with externally mounted cameras, so that they could play the most expensive of arcade games.
“Left at the next T-junction,” came Bufford’s voice through his earphones. “Left, left.”
The repetition was something so familiar to the military men; men who could ill-afford a mistake when half hearing words with a subtle difference such as ‘no’ and ‘go’. Johnson acknowledged the instructions, grateful for them, because he couldn’t make out the road signs clearly after such a short time without the routine cutting back of trees and hedges. Even after the bitter winter had forced so much life to retreat in the exceptionally low temperatures, nature was rapidly reclaiming the land.
Another voice cut through to him, this one female and curious in accent and inflection, but the tone of it made things clear to Johnson that the speaker was suffering.
“We have to stop,” Astrid Larsen said, her voice sounding thicker and more sluggish than usual.
“Is everything okay back there?” he asked, concerned that something was wrong in the rear troop-carrying section of the armoured beast he was nursing along the relatively smooth roads.
“The fuel tank,” Larsen said with evident difficulty. “It is moving and making us all sick.”
Immediately Johnson eased up on the controls, more like those of an aeroplane rather than a conventional car, to slow their ride and hopefully reduce the effects they were feeling. He cursed himself for not recalling the rumour around the base when these new vehicles arrived for testing; that their transparent fuel bladder caused seasickness to those sitting next to it in the back.
He paused at the junction, seeing a pub on the opposite side of the road with an almost empty car park and he decided that it was more than open enough to offer them a chance to rest. He called it out to Bufford sitting behind and above him in the commander’s position, waiting as the man assessed the ground through his viewport before he agreed.
The Warrior rolled in, turning almost on the spot instead of looping a wide arc to swing around like a car would, and came to a stop in the middle of the open tarmac.
“Is it
clear?” Larsen’s voice came over the radio. Johnson peered out of his own limited view, seeing nothing to cause him any worry, and waited for the SBS man to give the word.
“Looks good,” Bufford declared. “Let’s take ten minutes.”
Hatches open, rear doors wide, the armoured fighting vehicle looked oddly out of place in the semi-idyllic setting of the country drinking hole. The two abandoned cars sitting on flat tyres, and the overgrown, neglected feel of the building and beer garden spoiled it somewhat, but those in the back didn’t seem to care for those small things as they spilled out to steady themselves and gratefully suck in long breaths of chill air.
Johnson and Bufford, both with weapons in hand and eyes constantly roving for threats, didn’t ask them such stupid questions like enquiring if they were okay; merely allowed them the time to settle their stomachs after sitting beside a huge, sloshing fuel tank for the past hour. Peter, clambering down the dappled green hull, jogged to Amber and knelt down to her. He asked if she felt sick, but the girl just smirked and shrugged one shoulder up to her ear as if to say that she was fine and couldn’t understand why Astrid and Kimberley were so affected.
The sight of the two children interacting, still a welcome novelty that made the adults both happy and at the same time tragically sad to watch, was interrupted by the sound of glass breaking.
It wasn’t a smash, not a shattering blow of a window imploding under force, but was more of a ringing, snapping sound, as if someone had leaned on a single pane too hard. All heads whipped towards the source of the noise and saw nothing coming from the building to indicate an immediate threat, but still they readied their weapons as Peter ushered Amber back towards the safety of the vehicle.
Toy Soldiers (Book 5): Adaptation Page 4
