Warhead

by Andy Remic

  Carter stared at the sleek black hull.

  ‘Wow,’ he said, visibly impressed.

  ‘You piloted one of these beasts?’ asked Mongrel, nudging the vehicle with his boot.

  ‘I’ve been in the simulators,’ said Carter softly. ‘They were pretty new, even when Durell was stomping the fuck out of us with his nukes. Just past prototype stage, if I’m not mistaken.’

  ‘You not mistaken.’ Mongrel grinned, scratching at his head. He beamed. ‘I have had honour of piloting one. Just once, mind, and I spill gravy on control dash and blew something up and got us trapped under sea for fifty-five minutes and we nearly ran out of air because air-recyc went titties up. But hey, I still got to drive beast on op beneath oil rig! Is very good machine for missions. Very reliable. Has many fancy function.’

  Carter thought about this, as his eyes ran down the sleek lines of the Viper. ‘You spilled gravy?’ he said at last.

  ‘Is long story.’

  ‘I bet it is.’

  ‘I tell you later. Come on!’ Mongrel threw his packs into the Viper, which rocked only slightly under the weight, then jumped in boots first.

  Carter followed, sliding into one of the well-sculpted pilot seats and grinning suddenly like a little boy. His hands stroked over the smooth synthetic seat-covering. Then he reached forward and switched on the power. The dash lit up in a swathe of bright colours. Carter nodded in satisfaction, hand reaching out to flick on several more switches.

  ‘You got the coordinates for this Submarine Graveyard?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Let’s pay our old friends the Nex a surprise visit, then.’

  ‘Mongrel not argue with that. I just hope this is surprise for the copper-eyed fuckers.’

  Carter smiled coldly. ‘If they are waiting for us ...’ He palmed his battered Browning, and placed it on the seat beside him. ‘Well, we both know what we will have to do.’

  The engine started with a quiet hiss. Carter turned a dial and watched as panels slid neatly all around him and Mongrel, sealing them within the hull of the machine.

  Then the Viper slid silently, gracefully and quickly into the underground lake, with hardly a disturbance of the black waters to indicate its passing.

  CHAPTER 12

  HIGH VOLTAGE

  The Søndre Strømfjord was calm, blue-grey waters lapping quietly against rugged ancient shores. Huge blocks of gleaming glacier ice rocked gently, glowing in the sun.

  A distant whine penetrated the stillness and then the sleek black hull of the Viper ZX broke through the surface, engine rumbling throatily across the freezing fjord as the craft took momentarily to the air, black plates peeling back to shed cascading silver droplets. It crashed back into the water, banked in a shower of spray and then powered out down the fjord towards the open sea. ‘Not bad,’ muttered Mongrel.

  ‘You see any gravy stains?’ snapped Carter, his eyes glowing. He accelerated the boat on a surge of torque, and the black hull crashed rhythmically across the icy fjord.

  ‘It was a particularly tasty meat pie,’ rumbled Mongrel indignantly. ‘It not my fault the microwave overcook damned thing, and it go slippy-slop through Mongrel’s paws.’

  ‘Yeah—but on a mission?’

  ‘A man has to eat,’ snapped the huge tufted squaddie complacently.

  Cold air beat at the two men. Carter veered gently left, avoiding a massive block of ice. He glanced up as they passed in its shadow and could see gleams of sunlight refracting through it.

  Carter increased the boat’s speed again, powering up to 100 knots per hour. They left a wake of foam, and passed several fishing boats from which Inuit fishermen gave friendly waves. Carter frowned, and then revised his first impression: they were not waves of friendship; rather, they were acknowledgements born of fear, directed at a quite obviously military vessel in the hope that the fishermen wouldn’t be machine-gunned on the spot. It’s a shocking world we inhabit, he thought darkly.

  Once more, Carter accelerated, the engine moaning softly as Mongrel hunkered down behind the protective upswept windshield. Wind howled around the two men as the Søndre Strømfjord widened and they leapt out into the sea, bounding from ocean swells and giving a wide berth to groups of rocks that protruded like sharp black teeth. The Davis Strait opened up before them, and Carter powered them across it towards the Labrador Sea ...

  ‘Coordinates?’

  ‘At this speed, ECube estimates arrival at surface site in three hours.’

  Carter gritted his teeth. ‘We’d better get a move on, then. Get down low and for the love of God put on a woolly hat. Your ears are already glowing blue with the chill.’

  ‘Mongrel not like hats.’

  ‘This ain’t about what you like or don’t. This is about frostbite. Come on, Mongrel, last thing I need when the shit hits the fan and we’re in the middle of a firefight is you fucking moaning about your chewed-up ears.’

  ‘I not moan,’ moaned Mongrel.

  ‘You’re doing it now.’

  ‘Well, Carter lad, you the one who nag.’

  ‘Nag?’

  ‘You once say I was like having your fucking wife along on a mission. Well, har har, now we have role reversal for sure, and from where I sitting, it look like you the one who is wearing nice flowery dress. By God, you become pedik!’

  Carter frowned. His voice was dangerously low. ‘What’s pedik?’

  ‘Is man who is used as a ... female—usually in jail. It go something like: “Hey fat boy, bend over and pick up the soap!”‘

  Carter slammed the accelerator hard forward. Engines howled. Mongrel was thrown back violently against his seat as the Viper stormed at an astonishing rate across the waves, flying from one crest to the next, as the wind howled savagely around the two men.

  ‘Tetchy,’ observed Mongrel. He set about trying to oil his H&K—not the easiest task when slamming across the sea at nearly 200 knots an hour and with his last fried breakfast rolling around like a greased cannon ball in his belly.

  To begin with, Carter was wholly focused on the task of piloting the Viper ZX. But as the minutes ticked by and he watched the huge black clouds rolling across the heavens, he felt the gentle tug of low-grade mental tension—a jabbing reminder that the clock was ticking. Carter was painfully aware that they were running out of time; that the whole fucking world was running out of time.

  Gradually the sky darkened and Carter manipulated the craft’s digital controls. Several panels rolled up over the two men to create an armoured roof as ice rain started to sheet down from the sky.

  With the flick of a switch, powerful white lights swept in a swathe from the speeding boat. The sea rolled and heaved, and Carter had to reduce their velocity a little for fear of capsizing.

  As they travelled Mongrel serviced both men’s guns and checked that their packs contained everything they could possibly need. Food, hydration pills, UPTs, ammunition, combat knives, spare clothing, wetsuits, compact sachets of HighJ explosive, Babe Grenades with a variety of different explosive fillings and, of course, Carter’s trusty Browning HiPower 9mm and its clips of ammo. ‘You love this gun, eh, Carter?’

  Carter glanced around from the rolling dark sea ahead of him. Foam smashed against the windscreen. ‘Yeah, my Browning is like a brother, a trusted friend. Unlike a lot of men I’ve known, this piece of metal has never let me down. It’s like an extension of my own body—and of my soul.’

  ‘It just a gun, Carter.’

  ‘No, it’s more than that. Mongrel, the only emotional attachments you’ve ever made were with that one-legged whore in Jakarta, and with the large yellow v-bin outside the kebab shop on Portobello Road. You could never truly understand my sentiments.’

  ‘Ha? Crazy talk! Just drive, Carter. Just drive.’

  ‘This ain’t a Ford Cortina, Mongrel.’

  ‘You far too sarcastic for a man on a mission.’

  Carter grinned in the gloom, eyes black and face lit by the glow of the boat’s control pa
nel. ‘Sometimes our fucked-up squaddie humour is all that we’ve got to keep us sane.’

  ‘I raise glass to that, my old drook.’

  They had killed the lights ten minutes earlier, switching to stealth mode and slowing their speed drastically. Now they cruised across the rolling, heaving black sea. The rain still hammered down, crashing against the Viper’s roof panels, and the storm looked like it had no intention of relenting. Carter and Mongrel pulled on wetsuits and checked all their weapons for a third and final time. They did not intend to actually swim but they were unsure what they would find deep down under the sea in the Submarine Graveyard, and wanted to be prepared for anything.

  Finally, Mongrel called a halt. His ECube glowed briefly and Mongrel nodded to himself, muttering a mixture of some Slavic language and, apparently, German—a rapid-fire string of expletives that Carter could not follow.

  ‘We ready?’ asked Carter. The Viper ZX, using a digital engine-anchor, was rolling on the surging waves of the dark sea.

  Mongrel glanced up. He took a deep breath and gave a single nod.

  ‘Game on,’ he said.

  The Viper dived. Carter and Mongrel left the storm behind, and a new darkness flooded their world as silence enveloped them. The only sound was the steady crooning thrum of the engines, and Carter eased the Viper around in a gentle arc in its sixty-degree descent as Mongrel navigated, using the instrument displays illuminated by the eerie blue glow of his unfolded alloy ECube.

  ‘You ever been down here before?’ asked Mongrel, his voice barely more than a whisper.

  Carter shook his head. ‘No. But I’ve seen the vid footage—from before the time when the Nex took over the complex. It looked awesome.’

  ‘I, too, seen those images. If Sub Graveyard as big as I think, then finding Justus will be like looking for needle in haystack.’

  ‘Yeah, but Justus is our man—he’s Spiral. We have his data encoded: if he is aboard the prison, the torture cell—call it what you will—then the ECube should be able to pinpoint him.’

  ‘If our tech work in the Nex environment.’

  Carter grinned savagely. ‘Yeah, that as well.’

  They moved through the dark depths and to Carter’s mind it seemed like travelling in space. They could quite easily have been piloting a spacecraft through the cold vacuum of some unchartered galaxy.

  As they began their final approach Carter slowed the Viper once more. Its engines hissed into silence and the advanced Kawasaki De-Vib Shock Nulls rattled softly as they neutralised any vibrations that the Viper might otherwise have sent out in its passage through the sea.

  ‘I hope we got right place,’ muttered Mongrel.

  ‘Yeah, or it’s goodbye, world.’

  A distant light came into view. A yellow globe, it was soon joined by others as the Viper crept down and down towards the underwater world of the Submarine Graveyard. Slowly the undersea prison base—once the creation of Spiral and used to house the most dangerous criminals, usually for interrogation purposes—crept into view. The Submarine Graveyard was, as its name suggested, a dumping ground for decommissioned submarines. Originally, the premises for its construction had been a simple one: drop a titanic anchor-weight to the seabed with a cable five metres wide attached which led straight up to the designated anchor point on the surface. To this central pivot could be moored any number of old and crumbling submarines, a natural resting place for them.

  Over the years upwards of two hundred subs had been ‘retired’ to this distant stretch of water where the Labrador Sea and the Atlantic Ocean met. The anchor stone had been dropped and had lodged against the Greenland Shield, an undersea shelf of ancient rock that connected Greenland to Canada. The submarines had duly been moored, a twisting spiral of dark and rotting hulks drifting up out of the gloomy depths, each with its own trailing lead connecting it to the core of the anchor cable.

  Searching for a discreet interrogation centre away from the prying eyes of the military and from interfering national governments, Spiral had, masquerading as one of its major front organisations, signed certain deals with various navies. It had effectively purchased the graveyard and then dropped its own highly advanced core, an inhabitable Titanium II alloy column, a circular tower block which was towed by freight tugs and then made a controlled descent into the cold deep waters.

  Next the Sub-Core was linked to many of the ancient submarines by coiled tubes large enough for men and women to be transferred through. The submarines themselves had become cells for certain dangerous individuals. The Submarine Graveyard was born: a prison-tomb for the dangerous and insane. Now under Nex control, it was a control and torture centre that had long since dropped out of Spiral jurisdiction. Carter and Mongrel had little idea what to expect, little notion of what they would really find. They only knew that Justus was being held there. And they had to get him out.

  Carter’s eyes focused on the dim silver Sub-Core, a huge upright tube glittering with thousands of tiny portholes. From this central structure spun many drifting umbilicals, twisting away into the darkness and connecting the ‘trunk’ of the undersea base to its dead-submarine ‘branches’.

  Everything was moving: the tube walkways, the distant submarines still linked by huge black chains to their original ancient anchor cable. The Sub-Core itself swayed, only a subtle movement in the undersea currents but it played tricks with Carter’s mind as he sat there, attempting to take in the enormity of what lay before him.

  ‘I not realise it so big,’ said Mongrel at last.

  ‘It’s fucking huge. You’re right. Needle in a haystack, mate. A microscopic needle and a titanic haystack.’

  And then eerie sounds drifted to the two Spiral agents through the water. A distant groaning, metal against metal: the long-drawn-out moans of slowly rotting, settling submarines as they jerked and tugged at their barnacle-crusted chain leashes, then relaxed again and let those chains clank and fold down in huge dark loops before dragging them taut once more.

  The Viper cruised on, its speed shaved now by an apprehensive Carter. The sounds grew louder and Carter felt goose bumps creeping up his arms and spine.

  ‘They sound like they in pain,’ muttered Mongrel.

  ‘They sound like they’re dying,’ agreed Carter.

  ‘This remind me too much of damned Kamus.’

  The Kamus was an old Spiral base in the Austrian Alps: a maze of tunnels and redoubts that led deep down under the mountains themselves. This mountain fortress had been the scene of a series of bizarre murders and had become something of a dark legend: a deserted Spiral stronghold where evil had invaded, seeping from the mountains themselves to take a hold on the minds of the people working within. In total, forty-six people had died—men, women, children. It was said that the Kamus was cursed and, even now—decades after it had been abandoned—haunted, some versions of the story told of the denizens of Hell walking the deep dark corridors. One version said that Spiral had intruded on an ancient lair of the Devil himself.

  Mongrel nodded. ‘It definitely remind me of Kamus.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘Same creepy feeling. Like you know something bad going to happen.’

  Carter smiled grimly. ‘Something bad is going to happen. I’ve just fucking arrived.’

  Mongrel stared hard at Carter. ‘What your thoughts on infiltration?’

  Carter considered this. He had, of course, been giving it a lot of thought. Removing his own battered black alloy ECube, he spun it in his hand as he stroked out several patterns. It reconstructed itself in his palm, and a tiny red-laser projection appeared in the air above it, spinning as Carter spoke, linked to his words and tagging his meanings by the use of simple RI algorithms. ‘Stealth is an option, but there are many fail-safes built into the Submarine Graveyard. After all, it was developed as a prison, and because the cells are actual submarines that are situated away from the main Sub-Core, they present easy targets for anybody with their mind set on a prison break.’

&
nbsp; ‘If you have right undersea equipment.’

  ‘Yes. And if you can actually find the damned place. Consequently, there are automated defences—Sonic Cannons, mounted Granite Lasers and NeedleHarpoon emplacements—mainly situated in and around the Sub-Core but with the ability to scan, fire on and destroy any of the submarines in the locality—or any approaching craft.’

  ‘That make it tricky.’ Mongrel rubbed at his stubble. ‘Did Priest have any ideas when he send us on this mad-fool errand?’

  ‘Yes, but I won’t repeat them,’ said Carter darkly. ‘They mainly involved the central premise of protection—by God, of course—and putting our complete faith in Him. Not exactly what I would describe as guaranteed entry strategies. Anyway, for us to get the Viper in close enough, even to a submarine—that’s assuming Justus is being kept in a submarine and not in the Sub-Core itself-we would have to pass before the all-seeing eyes of the defence systems. Not good.’

  ‘Alternatives?’

  Carter smiled. ‘The Sub-Core drains a lot of power. Enough to power a huge city, in fact. Where does it get its power from?’