Infestation

by William Meikle

  INFESTATION

  William Meikle

  Copyright 2017 by William Meikle

  www.severedpress.com

  - 1 -

  “This is bollocks, Sarge,” Mac said. “Why are we jumping in the dark? We’re out in the middle of nowhere; it’s not like anybody’s going to see us coming.”

  Captain John Banks smiled. Mac was always the first to complain; you could set your watch by it. It was a small bit of normality on a night where the normal was too far away. They cruised in darkness at fifteen thousand feet, somewhere to the west of Baffin Island, silent running through the Canadian skies. Twelve hours ago, Banks was ready for a spot of leave, even had a ticket booked on a flight to Greece with wife and both kids excited, packed, and raring to go. Instead, he’d driven them to the airport to see them off, before reporting to base at the urgent request of the colonel. Now where he was headed was going to be a tad colder. At least he had his own handpicked men with him, but it had been the only choice he’d been given.

  “There’s a Russian boat out there somewhere where she shouldn’t be, John,” the colonel had said back in Lossiemouth that afternoon. “And we think it’s in trouble, maybe big trouble if the sketchy report we have is to be believed. There might be something worth salvaging though, and it’d be nice to know what they were doing snooping about so deep in Canadian waters. It’s the usual deal for your team; get in quick, have a shufti, and report back. And don’t get dead in the process.”

  So now Banks, his Sergeant Frank Hynd, and the small squad of four men he trusted more than anyone else in the world were out – in the middle of nowhere as Mac put it – getting ready to fall out of the sky into the cold black below.

  All in all, I’d rather be in Greece.

  “Coming up on drop point. Two minutes,” the pilot said over the tannoy.

  “Okay, Sarge,” Banks said. “Line them up.”

  Mac looked like he might grumble again, but Frank Hynd put a stop to that quick enough – one look from the sarge was usually enough. The other three; McCally, Nolan, and Briggs – Tom, Dick, and Harry as the sarge called them – lined up behind Banks as the rear of the plane opened up, showing roaring blackness beyond. Mac and Hynd lumbered forward, shoving the box of their gear ahead of them. Banks counted them down from five and they rolled the box out into the night.

  Seconds later, all six of them flew free in the air, following it down.

  *

  This was Banks’ favorite part of any mission; the leap into the unknown, with butterflies in your belly and wind roaring all around you; it felt like freedom, even despite the bite of the cold and the frost forming at his lips and ears. In those early seconds, it scarcely felt like falling but more as if he skimmed, like a flat stone, across the rim of the world.

  The rest of the men were merely darker shadows in the black but they’d done enough night jumps together to know they’d be in tight formation; and if any of them had a problem, it was too late for him to do much about it now.

  He saw the chute of their gear box below him, counted to five, then pulled his own cord, following the other canopy down. It was a moonless night but also cloudless, the canopy of stars providing enough light for him to see the darker shadow of the island, their drop point, loom up below them. He looked over the shimmering waters of the bay to the north. If there was a Russian spy boat out there, it wasn’t showing any lights.

  But that doesn’t mean they’re not there.

  He stayed almost on top of the gear chute all the way and came in for a perfectly controlled landing twenty yards to the north of the box. He had plenty of time to gather up his chute before the wind could catch it again and drag it away, then made quickly for the box; despite its weight, it was being dragged, albeit slowly, across the rocks, its passage facilitated by the ice underfoot. Hynd landed nearby and hurried to help. By the time they’d got the gear chute disengaged and rolled up, the rest of the team were gathered around the box. All save one and Banks knew who that must be even before he checked the faces.

  “Where’s Nolan?”

  “I think I saw him drifting off west. You know Pat, sir,” Mac said. “Fucking useless at this jumping lark. Could be anywhere by now.”

  Banks sighed.

  “Okay, lads. Get kitted up before you freeze your balls off; five minutes, then we’ll go and look for our lost lamb.”

  They were travelling light and fast so kitting up went smoothly; cold weather gear, lined and hooded parkas, balaclava hats, gloves and night vision glasses, each man with a flak jacket and webbing belt of ammo and a small backpack, a rifle and a knife. Banks knew they could all do a steady six miles an hour all night geared up in this terrain; he hoped to hell they didn’t have to.

  “Mac – you’re on point, Briggs and McCally, you fetch Nolan’s gear – the stupid wanker is going to be an iced lollipop by the time we get to him and it’ll serve him right. Sarge – move them out.”

  *

  The ground was icy but rough underfoot, slippage kept to a minimum by the deep ridges and treads of their boots. Banks warmed up almost immediately inside the parka but knew better than to unzip it; it was a clear night in late spring, but they were above the Arctic Circle and he couldn’t afford to take any chances with the weather. He followed Mac as the Glaswegian led them quickly west toward where he said he’d last seen Nolan’s chute. They were heading toward the sea; Banks could see it ahead of them, the shimmer clear in his night vision goggles. He could only hope that the Irishman’s cack-handedness with a chute hadn’t brought him down in the water, for if that was the case, he might be dead already.

  Nolan was alive and blue with cold by the time they found him a few minutes’ walk later, but he didn’t seem to notice it; all his attention was on the scene around him. He’d landed on a rocky shoreline, yards from the water. His chute still lay, opened out and spread, behind him, soaked, looking black and glossy in the night glasses. Despite the lack of color, Banks knew from bitter experience what blood looked like in the goggles, and there was a lot of it on the chute.

  Far too much.

  Banks went straight to his man, fearing the worst.

  “Nolan, are you hurt, man?”

  Nolan didn’t reply, even as Banks checked him out for a wound. But the blood wasn’t the Irishman’s and Bank’s noticed it soon enough when he looked at their feet; they both waded in wet slush that was also running red, and when he followed Nolan’s gaze along the shore, he quickly found the cause.

  The beach had been home to a score or more of large basking mammals; walrus by the look of it given the size of the rib cages and the large ivory tusks he saw on the nearest body. They must have made an impressive sight hauled out on the shore, but now all of them were now little more than stripped carcasses. Gleaming bone and chunks of fat looked to be all that was left of the animals – that and the blood washing in and out with the small wavelets in the slush.

  His team fell silent and still. Every man had his weapon in hand, and they’d taken position so that the squad as a whole had three-sixty warning of any attack.

  “What the fuck, Sarge?” Mac said quietly.

  Sergeant Hynd silenced the man with a finger to his lips and motioned that he would go south along the beach, sending Mac away to the north. Briggs and McCally got Nolan out of his chute and handed him his cold weather gear; Banks was glad to see that the Irishman was finally coming round from his shock.

  “I missed the landing again, Cap,” he said as he got himself into his lined parka. “I fucked up. Sorry.”

  Banks clapped the man on the back.

  “Try to follow the rest of us. I’ve told you and told you, look below you, not at the view on the way down. You’ll live longer. But at least you stayed out of the water. A
nd you’re still in one piece, that’s the main thing, unlike these poor beasties.”

  Nolan’s eyes were still wide as he looked around.

  “What could do this, Cap? Polar bear?”

  “Maybe,” Banks replied, “if there were three or four of them. Maybe. Or, if they were closer to the water, I’m thinking a pod of orca might do this much damage.”

  But it didn’t look like any kind of predator feeding Banks had ever seen. The carcasses looked like they’d been stripped and butchered rather than torn apart; it might be bears, but they’d have to be the tidiest bears he’d ever come across.

  He put the thought away; whatever the cause of the carnage, it wasn’t why they were here – he couldn’t see how it had anything to do with their mission. Hynd and Mac returned from opposite ends of the small rocky beach.

  “Anything?” Banks asked.

  Hynd shook his head.

  “Whatever did it, it was around this bit of the shore. And they must have left in the water. There’s no tracks, no blood or spoor over to the south.”

  “Same the other way,” Mac said and repeated his earlier observation. “What the fuck, Sarge?”

  Hynd spoke dryly.

  “I know one thing, Mac. It wasn’t the fucking Russians; there’s no empty vodka bottles.”

  Banks saw that the men were spooked by the extent of the slaughter around them; standing amid bloody ruin never did anybody any good, whether it was animal parts or human ones. He had to get the squad moving, before they all got the heebie-jeebies.

  “Focus, lads,” he said. “We’re here for a boat full of Russian spies. If you see a polar bear, you have my permission to blow its nuts off, but we need to move and we need to move now. Nolan, you ready, son?”

  The Irishman gave Banks the thumbs up.

  “Okay, move out. Mac, you’re still on point; Sarge, you watch our backs. If we dropped where we should have, there’s an Inuit settlement two miles to the north; that’s our first stop.”

  *

  In the short briefing he’d had back at base before leaving, the colonel had told Banks they’d intercepted a garbled message from a remote settlement off Baffin Island, telling of a Russian boat in trouble in the bay to the north of them.

  “The diplomatic boys have been on the phone all morning; we’ve asked for first crack at it and, subject to a few deal sweeteners to keep the politicos happy, you’ve got permission to go in for a look.

  “We’ve got no idea how many Ruskies there are on board, or what degree of armaments they might or might not have, so sneaking up on them is the order of the day.

  “The Canuck Air Force will be your backup,” his superior said. “You’ve got twenty-four hours after the drop to get a report back here; if you don’t, they’ll send in the heavy mob.”

  It wasn’t a particularly strange mission; Banks and the squad had worked similar jobs with tighter deadlines in worse conditions but the torn and bloody walrus remains had set a chill in his spine. His normally reliable hunch told him things might not be as straightforward as either the colonel had implied, or he had hoped.

  The men were thinking much the same. They kept up a stream of low-voiced chat, all of it about the bloody mess they’d left behind them on the shore. Nolan, in particular, talked incessantly about the scene he’d landed in.

  “I thought I’d crash landed, died, and gone to Hell,” he said after describing his landing for the fourth time in as many minutes. “It was like a fecking horror film.”

  “Away and shite, ya big girl’s blouse,” McCally replied. “I’ve seen worse in Inverness on a Saturday night.”

  “Aye,” Nolan replied deadpan. “Your mother always was a messy eater.”

  Briggs, McCally, and Nolan’s laughter carried clear across the cold night, earning them an admonishment from the sarge.

  “Keep it down, lads,” Hynd said from their backs. “If the cap’s right, we’ll be coming up on the settlement soon.”

  That was enough to get quiet and they walked in silence for another half a mile. The terrain was easy going, hard-packed snow only occasionally punctuated with icy rocks they easily navigated and they made good time. Banks brought the others to a stop when Mac signaled from ten yards ahead of them; trouble ahead.

  Banks left Nolan, McCally, and Briggs at the rear while he and Sergeant Hynd quickly moved up to Mac’s position and joined him, lying flat on a frozen rocky outcrop, oblivious to the cold as they took in the scene below them.

  An Inuit settlement sat around a sheltered bay at the foot of the slope below them – or rather, what was left of it sat there. The community had been made up of twenty or so buildings along the shoreline; six of those buildings were now little more than torn and shattered timber frames and many of the others showed signs of attack. Multiple smears, black in the night vision glasses but again all too obviously blood, showed on the track running along between the buildings and the water’s edge. Two small fishing boats sat moored in the tiny harbor, one of which was listing badly, holed at the port side; the other was almost completely sunk, only the wheel house showing above the water. Out in the bay, several hundred yards offshore, a larger boat sat at anchor; it was too dark to see any identification and there were no lights on the vessel itself.

  “Our Russian pals?” Hynd asked in a whisper.

  “I guess so,” Banks replied.

  He turned his glasses up to full zoom and tried to make out more detail of the vessel but it was too far off in the night. He turned his attention to the harbor and checked the whole length of the settlement. There were no signs of any bodies.

  But there’s an awful lot of blood.

  When Mac spoke, neither he, nor Hynd had an answer for him.

  “What the fuck, Sarge?”

  *

  They took their time descending to the village, alert for any sound, any sign of attack, and taking care not to show themselves on the skyline. But no attack came. Nothing moved in the settlement below them save small wavelets lapping on the pebbled shore. The only sound was the crisp crunch of their feet on the snow and Mac’s muttered curses when he slipped and almost fell.

  Banks kept his eyes on the settlement, but the closer they got, the more obvious it was the people here had suffered a catastrophic attack to match the one visited on the walruses they’d found earlier.

  A well-worn narrow path of small stones and gravel took them from the top of the ridge in a slow-winding meander all the way down to the waterline at the southern end of the bay.

  The house at this bottom end of town had suffered less damage than some of the others had but when they walked off the slope and onto the shore-side track, they saw the main door of the property was smashed inward. It was as if a small car had gone straight through it, knocking the door in and splintering the timbers of the frame and surrounding porch. Blood smears, three of them, each a yard wide in the room before merging in the doorway, led from the house out across the path and into the sea, only stopping at the water’s edge. A child’s boot sat there, bobbing half in, half out of the slush, which was stained pink for six inches all around.

  Banks, not wanting to ask his men to look at anything he wouldn’t look at himself, stepped up onto the front porch of the house and approached the torn and shattered doorway.

  “Hello?” he called out, then immediately felt stupid for doing so, as it was obvious there was no one home. The room was sprayed with blood, as if a mad artist had been at work with a pot of red paint, splashing it across walls, furniture, and carpets with abandonment. The power was out but Banks didn’t need extra lights, he could see enough in his goggles. There were indeed no bodies here, just the blood and the smears but that alone was enough to tell him that no one had survived. Two of the blood streaks originated at a large leather sofa facing the television; the floor there was darker still and the sofa had been torn to shreds in places, as if by knives, or talons. The third lot of blood, which looked narrower than the other two, led from an overturned cot in
the corner.

  Their child’s cot.

  He could recreate the whole scene in his mind, apart from being able to picture what manner of beast might have been capable of this amount of bloody violence without leaving a trace of itself behind.

  “Bloody neat bears,” he muttered to himself as he went back out to join his men.

  Hynd and Mac were already investigating the next house up but it too had suffered the same fate. There was more evidence of a full frontal assault and smears, two this time, leading back to the water’s edge, where some torn scraps of bloody clothing were all what remained of whoever had been dragged off. Hynd looked back at Banks and shook his head. He didn’t have to say anything; there was no chance of finding anyone alive here either.

  “Cap? What is this bollocks?” Nolan said and Banks heard the tremor in the man’s voice. He’d seen Pat Nolan stand up alone to a frontal attack of a score of murderous mountain men in Afghanistan without a flinch, yet here he was, pale and trembling like a frightened boy.

  “I know, lad,” Banks said softly. “This is a bad one. But it’s an animal attack of some kind, has to be.” He patted Nolan’s rifle. “Just point this at anything that shows up and fire until it goes away.”

  Nolan managed a wan smile as Hynd and Mac came back to join them.

  “What the fuck’s going on here?” Hynd asked but Banks didn’t have an answer, beyond the obvious.

  “First a Russian boat in trouble, then all out fucking carnage? I don’t know. I thought at first the walruses were victims of a random animal attack. But I don’t believe in coincidences. Eyes open, lads. This could be a rough ride.”

  *

  The next two houses up the shore were much the same as the first; broken doors, no power, and bloody smears the only clues as to what might have happened. They found no signs of any weapons fire and although Banks checked the ground for tracks, looking in particular for Russian Army issue boots, he only found confusing scratches and scrapes, some almost bird-like, others more like gouges that might have been caused by claws. He had almost ruled out animal attack in favor of a Russian black-ops mission gone wrong but seeing those tracks, he wasn’t so sure of himself again.