WarGod

by Steven Savile

  The Prince shook his head. Just once. Dismissively. “Symbolism. The sword is an historic symbol of royal authority. News of its discovery would generate a great deal of positive publicity for the crown, and if that came at the right moment...well, David understands this. He’s the one who first brought to light Tony’s quest to find it. It’s all perfectly innocent though. I can’t believe lives are in danger because of this. It’s not like we’re talking gunpowder, treason and plot.”

  Konstantin wondered if Habersham felt the same way.

  The Four Evangelists weren’t just a social club. They weren’t trying to curry favour with a highly placed celebrity for his endorsement. They weren’t goofy or well-meaning or simply bat-shit crazy; whatever they were planning was dangerous and real and serious enough for Six to loose the hounds.

  But where did that leave Denison?

  “Base, are you there? Al?” There was an undercurrent of concern in the voice; the two minutes were up. They’d found Baxter in the control room. There were still too many unanswered questions, but he was out of time.

  “Where’s Habersham now?”

  A look of concern crept over the Prince’s face. “Why?”

  Konstantin felt a rush of frustration; the Prince was stalling. He wanted to reach across the desk, grab the man by his jug ears and pound his head off the desk. But he didn’t need to, sometimes the threat of violence was all a man needed. He’d let the Glock drift down, but with a snarl, he brought it back up and thrust the muzzle at the man across the desk. “Where is he?”

  The Prince blanched. “On the continent. The Netherlands, I think.”

  Konstantin nodded. He lowered the gun and backed to the door. “Some advice. Next time, Highness, choose better friends.”

  And with that, Konstantin pushed open the door and ran.

  9 The Wrong Side

  Saint Albans—2132 UTC

  Frost felt like he’d been fired from a cannon.

  The detonation hammered through his body, punching him off his feet as it drove a spike of sheer blinding black agony through his skull. Sight, sound, smell, they all became one as his senses overloaded. He couldn’t see anything. He had no way of knowing if his eyes were open or shut. Tinnitus rang in his ears; agonizing and intense.

  He couldn’t feel the ground against his body. His arms and legs refused to move.

  Awareness returned in desperate gulps as he heaved down mouthfuls of choked air like a drowning man. But no matter how much he struggled he couldn’t get his head above water.

  I’m alive.

  It was one thought. One sentence. Two words. But it meant everything.

  It wouldn’t stay that way if he didn’t move though.

  “Tony!” He couldn’t hear himself speak. His mouth was full of dry chalk dust. His nasal membranes stung with the residue of high explosives. “Lili!”

  Denison’s voice reached him. “We’re all right.”

  A faint glow appeared less than a metre away; Denison’s keychain light, its tiny pinpoint of light was shredded by the settling cloud of dust.

  “What happened?” The voice was Lili’s. Her words were faintly slurred.

  Frost blinked through the pain in his skull. “They bailed back up to the surface and tossed a grenade down behind them. We got lucky. It rolled back down the tunnel before it blew. Otherwise we’d have been out for the count. The tunnel focused the blast.”

  “Fools,” Lili spat. “They could have collapsed the tunnel.”

  “I think that was the idea.” As if to underscore his supposition, a deep vibration groaned through the rock beneath him. “We’ve got to get out of here.”

  Frost struggled to his feet. He patted himself down, checking for injuries. His fingers found several tender spots, but no open wounds. He’d live.

  Denison moved close enough that Frost could actually see his face in the glow of LED, but everything else remained fogged by the settling dust. “I can’t find the survey map,” he said. “I don’t know which way to go.”

  “Well let’s just start by getting the Hell away from here,” Frost knelt and after a few seconds of fumbling around in the rubble found his Browning. He pulled his mobile phone back out of his pocket, and added its glow to Denison’s light.

  The tunnel groaned again.

  This time he felt something the size and weight of a hailstone glance off his shoulder. Debris. Some larger than his fists put together, rained down behind them. The aftershocks. The grenade had undermined the structural integrity of the barrow. It was caving in.

  “We have to move,” he repeated.

  Frost took charge. He spread his arms out, as if to gather the others under his wings, and began moving them up the passage as quickly as they dared in the cramped confines of the dark. Frost had lived with one genuine fear all of his life: being buried alive. He felt his skin going clammy. His heartbeat quickened. He tried not to think about the weight of earth pressing down on his head. He just wanted to get out of there. Fear was the enemy.

  He pushed them on.

  They rounded a bend in the tunnel and after a few more metres the air began to clear. Their lights revealed the extent of the blast damage.

  A standard M67 fragmentation grenade with 200 grams of high explosives was more than enough to ruin anyone’s day, especially when coupled with a deadly spray of steel shrapnel driven at ballistic velocities by the blast. But while the passage had shielded them from the worst effects of the grenade, the unique geology of the warren—riddled with natural and man-made void spaces—had transmitted the shock wave like the hollow body of a kettledrum. And as the ground under Holywell Hill shuddered around the initial blast, some of those cracks had widened and pieces of stone that had sat unmovable for centuries began to shift like the grains of sand in an hourglass.

  They hurried passed more funerary niches, barely noticing the shadowy pockmarks in their haste. Several had collapsed and were spilling bones and rubble into the passage.

  Frost had expected the after effects of the blast to diminish the further they moved away from the immediate blast zone, but even two more curves on, well out of the immediate damage radius the ruin verged on catastrophic.

  As if reading his mind, Lili said: “The passage is a spiral. We are circling around again and again, moving above the place where the grenade detonated.”

  “We’re going up?” Frost hadn’t noticed that, but in the unfamiliar and cramped environs of the tunnel, made all the more chaotic by slabs of fallen stone partially blocking the way and canted at bizarre angles, it was impossible to stay oriented unless you were a walking GPS.

  No one replied to the question, but as they continued along the tunnel, the truth of Lili’s observation became apparent. The grinding groans of shifting rock and collapsing timbers increased and then ebbed as their course brought them around again and again, higher up the hill.

  As they approached another rubble-strewn section of passage, Lili disappeared.

  One second she was there. The next she wasn’t.

  Frost caught a glimpse of her throwing her arms up, but she was gone before he could reach out to grab her. She screamed.

  Beside him, Denison also fell.

  He didn’t vanish as Lili had, but instead landed hard on his arse and began scrabbling with his one hand trying to find purchase.

  Frost redirected his outstretched hand and clutched at Denison’s shirt. He felt the man’s weight shifting away, dragging him down. Only then did Frost see the fissure that jagged across the passage floor and ceiling; a deep crevice that went up several twists above them.

  Denison felt impossibly heavy in his grasp, but he wasn’t letting go.

  It was all Frost could do to brace himself and keep his own footing as he attempted to haul the other man back from the brink.

  Every muscle in his body burned.

  His grip was slipping.

  Gritting his teeth, Frost heaved again, and the stone beneath Denison crumbled away.

 
He dropped quickly into a prone position, spreading himself wide to lower his centre of gravity, and grabbed Dennison with a second hand, pulling him back.

  Denison scooted away from the edge of the crevice, grunting and gasping as he moved. Frost realised why the other man felt so incredibly heavy; Denison had succeeded where he had failed, catching hold of Lili’s arm as she had fallen.

  Once both men were firmly on solid ground, Lili’s rescue took only a few seconds. There was no congratulations or thanks. It was all they could do to lie flat gasping until they’d caught their breath. Frost’s heart was still pounding.

  Lili took the light from Denison’s hand and began studying the rubble that lay strewn around them. “The stones...” she said, disbelieving. “They have been cut.”

  “Cut?” Denison asked.

  “Look.” She held up a square chunk of rock. “The break is not natural. See?”

  “We’re in a manmade cavern,” Denison pointed out.

  She shook her head then directed the light up, into the open space of the fissure that bisected the passage. “This is Roman brick, from the ruins of the old city of Verulamium. Such bricks were used in the construction of the original abbey. I think we’re under the cathedral.”

  Frost peered up into the void. “Turn off the light,” he urged.

  She did, and after an initial moment of near total darkness, Frost saw a faint glow no more than twenty metres above them. “She’s right.”

  The sides of the fissure were nearly vertical, but the stone hadn’t fractured cleanly. It was instead marred with jagged pockmarks and strange bulbous protrusions; a near-perfect stepladder for their ascent out of the abyss. Frost edged around the end of the broken passage and started looking for a route. The crevice was about five metres across at the point where it fractured the tunnel and a little wider overhead, but just a few metres to the left it narrowed to the extent that Frost could brace his back against the wall on the far side and make the climb as though walking up a chimney stack.

  It only took a few minutes.

  Even before he reached the upper limit of the fissure, he saw that Lili was right.

  After passing a chalky stratus, there was evidence of the old Norman era architecture, which had in turn employed building materials that dated back nearly two thousand years. Frost hauled himself above the level of the fissure and into a dimly lit room.

  The crypt.

  He saw immediately that the damage had torn open a fissure in the ceiling above—the floor of the church. He stood on a sarcophagus, assuming the dead man wouldn’t mind, and boosted himself up. When the fissure had opened across the floor, it had damaged one of the ornate arches, creating a cascade of stone and masonry.

  Frost took a moment to survey the enclosure, noting the tile floor and mostly unadorned white walls. A few steps away, on an elevated platform, he saw several rows of straight backed wooden chairs were lined up with military precision, and beyond that, he saw an altar situated near the far wall, directly below an enormous circular window. He could only see the decorative stained-glass panes because of the moon. It was an eerie effect.

  Opposite the altar was an open area and beyond that, more rows of chairs, along with racks containing prayer books and scripture. At the far end he could just make out a balcony that ran beneath five long vertical windows. Each window was topped in an elaborate gothic arch. Although the area was vast, with a high vaulted ceiling, the seating area seemed quite small, so they’d most likely broken through into one of the chapels not the cathedral proper.

  He cut short his recce to help Lili up into the chapel.

  As he took her hand, a voice echoed in the spacious enclosure. “What are you doing in here?”

  Frost whirled defensively, going for the Browning, but before he could draw the weapon, he saw the man behind the voice—a middle-aged man wearing khakis and a souvenir T-shirt. He was on the stairs that led from the far balcony, staring down the length of the room in horror at the damaged arch. One of the cathedral caretakers, Frost guessed, no doubt drawn by the sound of the collapse.

  Frost eased his hand away from the pistol and beckoned the man closer. “The floor gave way. My friends are down there.”

  The newcomer’s brows creased in irritation but he did not repeat his question as he hastened over to lend a hand. Frost finished hauling Lili up and got his first good look at her since their flight from the gunmen had begun; she was almost unrecognizable beneath a coating of dust and sweat. Given the circumstances she looked like a refugee from Hell itself. He probably didn’t look much better.

  While Frost and the other man helped Denison up out of the fissure, Lili looked around and immediately recognised where they were. “This is the north transept, the oldest part of the abbey to survive, built almost a thousand years ago.” She turned to Denison as he crawled out of the barrow and sprawled out on the tiled floor. “The original Benedictine abbey must have been situated above the entrance to the burial site.”

  Their anonymous benefactor looked askance at her. “I see you’re familiar with the history of the abbey church. Now, perhaps you can explain what you’re doing here. And how this happened?” His gesture swept from the fallen arch to the crevice.

  Frost would have been content to let Denison and Lili come up with a suitable lie, but before anyone could speak, a loud bang echoed through the hall and a moment later, two men rushed out of the shadows along the west side of the transepts.

  Frost recognised one of them: he’d pounded him into the pavement outside the Royal Garden.

  Both men ran with handguns out. The vaulted ceiling had amplified the single wild shot until it sounded like another grenade going off.

  Trouble had once more found them.

  “Down!” Frost yelled.

  He drew the Browning even as he took his own advice, but the unnamed man, still struggling to understand the appearance of the three visitors and the inexplicable destruction of holy property, instinctively turned to meet the new arrivals. “What’s the meaning of this?” He shouted, still not understanding. Frost reached out to pull the man to the ground, but in that instant, something warm and wet erupted from the man’s torso. The thunder of gunfire filled the cathedral.

  The man pitched backward, a volley of rounds sizzling through the air above Frost and the others, gouging enormous craters in the masonry walls.

  Frost rolled away from the dead man and returned fire from a prone position.

  His heart slowed. He was deathly calm. There was no fear now. This was his world: a world he understood.

  He triggered four rounds, and all of them found their target. The gunman he’d recognised jerked and twisted as Frost’s shots stitched his groin and abdomen, making him dance as he died. The last bullet ripped through the man’s neck, arterial blood fountaining from the wound.

  Frost had already moved on.

  He rolled again, seeking cover behind the rows of pews as bullets began hammering into the floor where he had been lying.

  Frost high-crawled up the centre aisle, scrambling furiously on knees and elbows to remove himself from the remaining gunman’s line of sight. He was trying to draw his attention away from Denison and Lili. Individual pews alongside him splintered as bullets struck the upright wooden backs like tiny hammers. The air was suddenly alive with a swarm of flying splinters. The pews offered little real protection and no real concealment; when he moved or turned his head he had the impression of being able to see through them to see his attacker’s feet moving.

  The man was turning away...

  Going after the others....

  “Bollocks,” Frost grunted, and sprang to his feet. He fired two shots in the vicinity of where he guessed the man ought to be, but the shooter had anticipated the move. As Frost felt the Hi-power buck in his hands, he saw his opponent’s muzzle flash. It was less than twenty metres away. It was harder to miss, even with the blood pumping and adrenalin driving the body. He twisted away, hurling himself into the pews—
it was absolute agony as his side between hip and ribcage slammed down onto the hard edge of the pew backs—but even as he dove forward he felt something bite into his upper left arm.

  The flash of pain was quickly replaced by a cold numbness.

  He’d taken a hit.

  He didn’t have time to think about it.

  He fell hard, sprawling across the cold tiles.

  And was on the move immediately: crawling toward the south wall.

  He crabbed forward, trying to catch a glimpse of the gunman through the maze of pew legs. Several of the benches had been knocked over blocking his view, but just past one of these, he caught a flicker of movement.

  Frost was a quick learner. Instead of popping up for a clear shot, he stayed prone and aimed through the tangle of pew legs.

  The gunman took another step and Frost pulled the trigger.

  There was an explosion of smoke and noise in the confined space, and Frost felt the sting of cordite in his eyes, but through the ringing echoes of the Browning’s report, he heard the gunman curse. Given the fact they were in a cathedral Frost couldn’t help but hope the blasphemous string of cries brought on a divine smackdown. It didn’t have to be showy. Just a little help from on high.

  Frost crabbed forward, keeping his head down, and in a few seconds reached the north aisle.

  When he was clear of the pews, he placed his palms flat and sprang up into a low crouch...or rather, that was his intent. As he shifted his weight onto his arms, his left arm gave out, and he buckled and went down, face first into the floor.

  Pain tore through his arm.

  He couldn’t surrender to it.

  He rolled onto his good arm and levered himself up, and then duck-walked quickly down the aisle. As he moved, he realised that, while the curses and howls of pain from his foe had continued, there had been no further shots.

  He edged around the last of the pews between them and saw the gunman sitting on the floor near the centre aisle, back up pressed up against the side of a pew. The man was clutching his knee, futilely trying to stem the flow of blood streaming through his fingers. When he saw Frost, he let go of the wound, releasing a pulse of blood, thick and sickly red-black. He reached out desperately for his pistol.