by Paul Kearney
As they ran something large loomed up out of the fog, and Jenny shrank to Cutter’s side. They had heard the gunfire, the screams, and had no way of knowing if any of the others had made it.
It was a building, slab-walled and ugly, reinforced concrete that was topped with a frosting of ice and disfigured with circling fans of lichen. In the fog it looked almost like a lost temple waiting to be discovered. Deeply inset to one side of the wall, a green-painted steel door stood, massively padlocked.
Cutter eased off his rucksack. In all the excitement, he had never thought to abandon it, but now his shoulder was complaining again, and his head throbbed with pain. He checked the sat-phone in its side pocket, and breathed a silent prayer of thanks that it was still undamaged.
“Looks like we’re here,” he said to Jenny, and handed her his water-bottle. She drank from it, and gave the container a shake. “Is this all you have left?”
“We’re running low on most things, it seems. Including people.”
They both stood there and listened. The shooting and screaming had stopped, and the fog-bound island was as quiet as the grave. Jenny shuddered as the comparison occurred to her, and she wondered if they would ever see Abby, Connor or Stephen again.
“Let’s see about getting inside this place,” Cutter said.
“Nick —” She set a hand on his arm. “I have to tell you. That cover story about the biological agents —”
“Yes?”
“Well... it’s true. The whole thing is true. There really were experiments conducted here in the fifties, and there may well be active agents still inside this place.”
Cutter mulled that over for a minute, then smiled.
“Lester,” he said, half-admiringly. “He really does cover all the angles, doesn’t he?”
“It’s Willoby’s job to secure the bioweapons. It’s why Lester was given so much cooperation from the military. The Captain’s mission is twofold.”
“Well, for all we know, Willoby may be dead.”
“No such luck, Cutter.”
The voice spun them round. He was standing there, not fifteen feet away. There was blood spattered over his face, and his eyes were set and hard as glass. Behind him stood several of the others. Cutter saw the Irishmen, McCann and Brice, and the shaven-headed Joe Bristow.
Something in his heart lurched.
“Is this all?” he asked hoarsely. “Is this all that made it?”
“I don’t know,” Willoby said. He wiped the blood from his face absently. “Farnsworth and Watts are dead; those I saw. The rest could still be scattered anywhere. Both dinosaurs have been killed; we finished off the one you wounded and took out the other one as — as it — anyway, they’re both dead.”
Cutter looked him in the eye. “I’m sorry about your people, Captain.”
He nodded.
“We have to go back. If at all possible, we have to bring them home.” He cleared his throat. “For now, we’ve at least made it to the base. We have to find a way in and then take stock. Once we’ve done that, I’ll head out again to look for the rest of our team. Dead or alive, I mean to find every one of them.”
They stood there a moment as the fog filled the air around them. It was as though they couldn’t quite bring themselves to soldier on. It occurred to Cutter that the silence which now enveloped the island again meant that their friends were either safe, or they were dead. No one was shooting any more.
He walked over to the great, steel, padlocked door set in the side of the wall.
“Let’s get on with this,” he said.
***
A quarter of a mile away, Doody raised his rifle.
“There’s something moving ahead.”
Connor and Abby both froze. The three of them stood in a kind of half-crouch, weapons pointing out into the fog in all directions. As Connor scanned the blankness in front of him, he found himself wondering if any of the others had survived. And he tried to forget the burning panic that had made him take off like a scalded rat. It was sheer luck that he had run in the same direction as Abby and Doody.
Perhaps it was the fog; it seemed to sap his courage somehow. He hated not being able to see what was out there. It made the whole thing into some second-rate horror movie he couldn’t switch off. It made everything somehow dreamlike.
At least I’m with Abby, he thought. That’s something.
A light blinked on in the fog, then off again. Doody began to grin.
“Hoy, who’s that then?”
“The big bad wolf,” the reply came back. Stephen Hart and Calum Fox walked out of the fog, smiling grimly. Abby ran forward and embraced them one after the other.
“We thought you were a creature.”
“Yeah, and I was about to open up on you!” Connor exclaimed, thumping Stephen on the arm. Stephen gently pushed aside the barrel of the 9mm that Connor was waving around in his relief.
“Glad you didn’t. God knows who would have ended up getting shot.”
“Are you alone?” Abby said. When they nodded, she added, “What now?”
“We find the others. Those things didn’t get everybody, I’m sure of it. We move north and look for this base that we were heading for. It’s all we can do.”
“I’ll lead,” Fox said, and he set off at a brisk stride. The rest followed on. Connor trailed after them.
“Guys, wait up.” He trotted hurriedly after Abby.
“Come on Connor!”
“Can you feel it, Abs? Can’t you feel it?”
“What — what am I feeling?”
Connor stopped as a beeping noise came from his pocket. He fished out the hand-held anomaly detector. A light was blinking red and the LED screen was lit up in one corner.
“Oh, no,” he said.
“Connor — I swear to God, if you get left behind, I’m not going back for you.” Abby tugged at his arm.
He stood planted in one spot, his normally cheerful face drawn and sombre. He showed her the detector.
“I was going to ask you,” he told her, “if you could feel the wind.” He raised his head and the sound of it rose around them, sweeping over the crags and sere grass of the island, shredding the fog moment by moment, broadening out their world.
“The eye of the storm is past, Abby,” he said. “The anomalies are back.”
FOURTEEN
Even in the concrete-roofed shelter of the northern base, they could hear it. Joe Bristow, standing guard at the doorway, came halfway down the steps.
“Boss, it’s starting to blow up a storm outside again,” he called, raising his voice to be heard over the strengthening wind.
Willoby grimaced.
“It’ll clear the fog, at least.” He coughed. “There’s a well in here somewhere. Hard to believe this island actually has a water table. From the schematics we were shown, the bunker has several levels to it. This is admin. Level two is living, and below that the labs, I think.”
“Nice to be well informed,” Cutter said. He massaged his sore shoulder. “All right, we’re in. Now let’s get back out there and find our people.”
“We left gear behind, too, and the dead have weapons and ammo we badly need,” Willoby told him. “We have to —”
“Boss!” Bristow shouted, but this time his voice was filled with sheer delight. “Boss, them hairy-arsed bastards is walking right up to the bloody front door!”
The occupants of the room piled over to the doorway to find Stephen, Fox, Abby, Connor and Doody standing there with big grins on their faces. There was a flurry of back-slapping and the odd hug or two. Cutter stood before Stephen as the latter lowered the heavy sniper rifle from his shoulder with a groan.
“Glad you made it,” he said.
“You know me, never one to leave a party early,” Stephen told him. They shook hands. “Shall we —?” Stephen asked, opening his arms.
“Nah, leave that for the girls,” Cutter told him. “You’re too ugly to hug.”
The wind was back to roari
ng like a freight train overhead, and brought with it a torrent of sleet and snow.
The team rolled out their karrimats and sleeping bags and laid them on the floor of the concrete cube that was the base’s hallway. There they took stock of their fragile economy while the redoubtable Joe Bristow manned the Minimi at the doorway, peering out through slitted eyes at the blizzard which had replaced the fog. It was uncanny how the island had gone from one extreme to another in the space of an hour, Jenny noted.
“This really is a weird place,” she said, shaking her head as she retied the sling on Sean Brice’s broken arm.
“From what I hear, our government is arguing with the French over it,” Brice said. “As far as I’m concerned, the bloody French are welcome to it. Thanks, miss.”
“It’s Jenny,” she told him. “I think the time for formalities is long gone, Lieutenant.”
“My apologies for the landing. The updraft took us by surprise. I’ve never encountered one that strong before. Les, now, he was more experienced. He would have —”
Brice stopped. He blinked furiously.
“He has a fine wife, and a daughter. They should know what happened to him.”
Jenny sat down on the dusty concrete beside him.
“Yes they should. He died doing his job well and bravely.” She hesitated, searching for the words. “You’ve seen incredible things on this island, Lieutenant, impossible things. I hope you do realise that your government is unaware of them, that all this is top secret — in the most serious and non-James Bond way possible. You must never speak to anyone of the things you have seen and will see on Guns Island.”
Brice studied her carefully, and she wondered what might be going through his mind. His life — the way he sees the world around him — it’s all changed, she mused, and the thought was tinged with a familiar regret.
“You’re way too pretty to be doing such a dirty job,” he said. After a moment he added, “Well, I’d best see what I can do to help.” Then he rose and joined John McCann, his countryman, who was seated on the other side of the room cleaning his rifle.
There was a series of clangs as Willoby beat the padlock off another door with the butt of his rifle.
“The old SLR was better for this sort of crap,” he said, grunting as he struck home. Finally the rusting padlock fell free, and he yanked open the steel-plate door, grinding it back on its hinges. He coughed and stepped back from the darkness he had uncovered, setting a hand over his mouth.
“Old air,” he said, and clicked on his head-torch. “At least I hope that’s all it is.”
Cutter stared for a moment, then followed him into the darkness. It was musty-smelling, but as dry as a pharaoh’s tomb.
“They built this place well,” he said to Willoby. “Fifty years, and there’s not a drop of damp. This facility was sealed up tight as a balloon.”
“Bio bullshit,” Willoby said. “They didn’t have any other option, did they? Unless they wanted to see three-legged gannets breeding on the island.”
“It was real, all of it. I know that now,” Cutter said. “Jenny told me, Willoby.”
“I had a feeling she might. You get to this stage in an op, and all the secrets crawl out of their holes. But it doesn’t matter. We have the here and now in front of us, life and death. That’s what’s important.”
“And the mission,” Cutter said.
“And the mission,” Willoby agreed. He scanned the room, his torchlight flicking from wall to wall as he turned his head.
“You and I are much alike, Cutter. From what I’ve been told —”
“From your brief, you mean,” Cutter interrupted.
“All right then. From the file I was given on you, it seems you’re your own man, who keeps chasing what he wants until he gets it. I can relate to that.”
“What are we doing now, Captain? Bonding?”
Willoby shrugged. “At least we’re both at the sharp end, not like the people who sent us out here. We’re both expendable, Cutter — in their eyes, at least.”
“Well, I won’t argue with you on that one,” Cutter admitted.
They peered into the dimly lit darkness, but all they saw was empty shelves and barren countertops, the occasional bit of refuse interrupting an otherwise deserted space. Whatever had been here, it had been taken away long ago.
A beam of light illuminated them both.
“Professor?” Connor’s voice asked. Cutter shaded his eyes.
“Over here. What’s up, Connor?”
The younger man walked across to them, his feet stirring up a thin patina of dust from the concrete of the floor.
“Take a look at this,” he said.
His hand-held anomaly detector was blinking.
“They’re back,” Cutter said. “Along with the storm.”
“It’s more than that, Professor. The detector isn’t picking up the anomalies outside — it’s found one very close by. Look at the signal — we’re practically standing on top of it.”
“That’s impossible,” Cutter said. But he knew it wasn’t. If anomalies could appear in the London Tube, then there was nothing to stop them from materialising here.
“Take a look at the readings, Professor. The detector is working perfectly, and the bearings it gives are on this location.”
Cutter and Willoby looked first at each other, and then at the locked doors that led out of the black room they were standing in.
One of those doors had letters painted on it, proclaiming ‘Security Clearance Required’, and the paint was flaking away. Another said ‘Admin’, and a third was entitled ‘Systems’.
“There are two levels below us, you said?” Cutter asked Willoby.
“And those are the ones whose existence they admit to,” the SAS officer replied. “Who knows what’s really down there.”
They stood for a second, the implications working in their heads.
“No, it’s got to be a coincidence,” Willoby said at last.
“But bioweapons,” Cutter said. “That term covers a lot of ground.”
“If it were true, they’d never have abandoned this place, or they’d at least have kept it quarantined, kept the birdwatchers away.”
“What?” Connor asked, shivering. “Professor, what are you two talking about?”
“If there’s an anomaly in the base — actually inside of it, then it might indicate something we’d never before considered,” Cutter said. “If the construction of the base is somehow linked to the existence of anomalies on this island, then it might mean these things aren’t a recent phenomenon. This place hasn’t been operational for fifty years, for God’s sake.”
“Like I said, it’s probably a coincidence,” Willoby told him. “Got to be.”
“I want to see those lower levels,” Cutter said firmly.
“I’m afraid that’s impossible.”
“You’re lying, Willoby. Your job was to come here and secure the site. You can’t do that effectively if you don’t have some means of accessing every level.”
“So long as the seals are in place, my job is done,” Willoby snapped. “You said it yourself, they built this place well; it’s still bloody airtight. That means my mission is over. The biological agents remain contained. Whatever is below us can stay there and rot. We’re not going to delve any further into these black rooms.
“Case closed, Cutter.”
Cutter shrugged.
“All right — fair enough. You can’t blame me for being curious. It’s my line of work after all.”
“My secondary mission,” Willoby continued with a humourless smile, “was to keep your team members alive. To do that, we need to find water, and make this place secure against attack.”
“Then I guess I vote for the door marked ‘Admin’,” Cutter said softly.
“My third objective,” Willoby ground on, “is to retrieve the bodies of the dead and the equipment they were carrying.”
“You go out there now, and you’re a dead man,”
Cutter warned him.
The soldier turned away, but not before Cutter had seen the deep bone-weariness in his face.
“I’m not that easy to kill,” he said.
As the bad air cleared out of the anteroom, so the team moved into it.
The outer hall, which they now called the first room, was already acquiring a widening pool of rainwater and melted sleet that the storm was flinging in through the open doorway. No one suggested that the door should be closed. It seemed unlikely that the Eotyrannus would be able to find it in the storm, and apart from the airtight seal around it, shutting it would have left them in utter blackness. The base had been built to withstand air bombardment and had no windows. The roof was several feet thick, and though there were ventilation grilles set along the walls, their louvered coverings were all shut.
“They made this place proof against pretty much everything,” Calum Fox said, darting his torch here and there about the walls. “Not just explosives — it’s set up to survive nerve agents and all sorts of weapons. Thank God the Cold War’s over, I say.”
“Tell that to Watts and Pete Farnsworth,” Bristow grunted. Doody had relieved him of the Minimi, and now he was towelling the melted ice off his face and neck. “When you’re dead you’re dead, whether it’s in a nuclear winter or —” He looked out at the angry weather beyond the far doorway, where Doody lay shivering under a poncho, the butt of the Minimi in his shoulder. “Or torn to pieces by something that shouldn’t exist. Maybe something that was created here, for all we know. bioweapons! Who knows what they were at in this godforsaken place, or what they cooked up in their test tubes.”
Stephen re-entered the base, dripping wet, snow in his hair. He was carrying half a dozen hard plastic water bottles.
“Not much use; the wind blows the snow across them. There’s maybe a half litre in each — better than nothing.”
He handed out the water and the team clustered around him to drink greedily. The salt air had left them all parched.