The Dead Walk The Earth (Book 1)

by Luke Duffy

  “She organised a dinner party with the neighbours and wants me to pick up the wine. I really can’t be arsed with it.”

  Michelle said nothing.

  “I’d rather stable my balls to a race horse at the Grand National,” he continued.

  She sat there, watching him with an impious animalistic look in her eyes that made him feel like she was contemplating ripping him apart. He was more than willing to let her too.

  She was breathing heavily, her chest rising with each intake of air and forcing her perfectly formed breasts to lift and fall, jiggling slightly as they came to rest after each exhalation. She placed her hands on her knees, and then gently began to run her fingers down along her smooth inner thighs.

  All the time, her sultry gaze remained locked on the visibly excited man standing at the foot of the bed, leering over her.

  He grinned ruefully, grabbing his penis and taking a step closer to the bed and dropping his phone to the floor.

  “Fuck dinner parties. Do you mind if I wear your arse as a hat for a while?”

  Three hours later, Matthew pulled up on his driveway, bringing his expensive sport’s car to a halt. As he pulled his keys from the ignition, he stared up at his home.

  He had it all.

  A big house, lots of friends, lavish holidays three times a year, two beautiful kids, Paula and William, and a loving wife.

  Paula was twelve and William was ten, and he knew that he would lose them if his affair was ever uncovered.

  So why am I risking it all for the baser pleasures that my assistant plies me with?

  He paused and thought for a moment, and then his pangs of guilt turned to fiery resentment that seethed from deep within him.

  “If she put out more often, and with a little more enthusiasm, I would never have gone looking elsewhere for it,” he growled to himself through gritted teeth as he opened the door and stepped out into the frosty air.

  “Fucking bitch.”

  Satisfied that he had checked his feelings of shame, he locked his car door and admiringly run his hand along the gun metal coloured paintwork.

  With a smile of satisfaction and contentment, he turned and began to walk up towards his family home, whistling the tune to the Beatles song, Please Please Me.

  His smile grew broader as he sang the lyrics in his head.

  How apt, he mused to himself.

  Halfway to the door, as he fumbled for the keys in his pocket, he stopped, the tune rapidly fading from his lips. He slowly turned around, raising his face up to the stars in the clear night sky and grumbled to himself with annoyance.

  “Bollocks. I forgot the fucking wine.”

  7

  The debriefing had not taken long. The outline of the operation and the summary were given to the Secretary of Defence by Stan, and that had been all the assembled senior officers and politicians had wanted to know. The Top Brass did not seem overly interested in the details, and appeared uncomfortable with being informed of anything at all to do with the mission in the first place.

  They wanted the bare minimum from the gruff and experienced soldier who stood before them.

  As Stan realised that his audience were checking their watches and shifting in their seats, he rounded up his after action report with the conclusion that the task had been accomplished with minimal collateral damage.

  He had wanted to question them about why the helicopter had ventured so far into Syrian airspace, and brief them on the destroyed village and the strange behaviour of the locals, but he knew that he would receive no answers.

  The Defence Secretary, sitting with his legs crossed and a leather folder on his lap cleared his throat in an attempt to command the attention of everyone in the room. He sat upright and adjusted his tie, then swept his grey hair to the side before gently patting it down into place with his perfectly manicured hands.

  “After the mission was, completed,” he began in a patronising voice that held a certain degree of suspicion, “did you consider confirming that the target was dead, and maybe collecting DNA evidence to back it up?”

  Stan felt his blood begin to heat up in his veins. His jaw flexed and the hairs on the back of his neck stood to attention. As usual, he showed no outward emotion, but he locked eyes with the immaculately suited politician, fixing him with a cold stare.

  “I can give you the directions to where it all happened, if you like, Mr Secretary?” Stan replied, his eyes unblinking and remaining fixed on the pompous government official. “You’ll find plenty of DNA splattered all around that grid-square.”

  Gerry, the official commanding officer of Stan’s unit almost choked. The coffee he had been sipping at had been inhaled along with the gasp of air he had taken in as a reaction to the overtly hostile sarcasm that Stan had showed to the Secretary of Defence.

  As he sputtered and attempted to regain his self-control, the eyes of everyone in the room became focussed on him. He patted at his chest as his vision blurred and his eyes began to fill with tears. He raised his hand towards Stan, struggling to speak, and gestured to the door dismissively, ushering him from the room before he could do more damage.

  “That’ll be all for now, Stan, thank you,” he wheezed.

  Stan nodded and turned to leave, relieved that he did not have to stay there any longer and be subjected to more ridiculous questions from people who spent all their time tucked safely behind a desk.

  As he passed by, he caught the eye of the senior military advisor to the Prime Minister, General Thompson. His nickname amongst the troops had always been ‘The Prince of Darkness’, due to his constantly bloodshot eyes and extremely pale skin and gaunt features. Many believed that if he had not joined the army, he would have made a good career for himself playing Dracula.

  The General’s lips curled slightly at the corners, giving a hint of a smile and Stan saw what he interpreted as a glint of an applause in the his eyes for the retort he had thrown at the Secretary of Defence.

  Stan left the spacious briefing room, the sound of Gerry’s coughing fading into the background as he closed the large heavy door behind him.

  They were deep below the city of London, the command centre having once been part of Winston Churchill’s bunker during the Second World War. From what he could see, structurally, very little had probably changed since the cigar chomping Prime Minister had occupied the catacombs, conducting the war effort safely out of reach from the bombs of the Luftwaffe. The tunnels and vast collection of chambers were solidly built, but inevitably, due to it being subterranean, a degree of damp made its way through, giving the underground lair a faint musty odour.

  The sound of his footsteps echoed along the dark narrow corridors, but they barely registered. The low voices, squawking radios and ringing telephones of the operation’s staff seemed a million miles away, as he continued to make his way through the rabbit’s warren of the underground command centre, his mind drifting back to the strange events in Syria.

  It had been confirmed through the Syrian government announcements and news reports that the Al-Qaeda terrorist, Ali Hussein Bassim, was dead, and of course, the Syrian army stole all credit for the kill.

  Stan and his men had expected and hoped for that. With the Syrian commanders claiming responsibility, there would be no comebacks to him, his team, or the British government. The operation had been a great success, militarily, and politically.

  However, his confusion continued to grow.

  Seeing massacred towns was nothing new to any of them. Witnessing the toll that the horrors of war, poverty and disease had on local populations, were not likely to cause him to lose any sleep. He had seen it a thousand times, on every continent and in the name of every regime and religion. He was numb to it, but it was not the suffering of the innocent that played on his mind. It was what he had seen in the eyes of the Syrian town’s surviving population. He could not make sense of what he saw, and a feeling of impending doom and foreboding, on an epic scale, pushed down heavily on his shoulders.
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  They had been extracted ahead of schedule, and while they were still deep in Syria. Politically, the government and military high command would never have risked such a move unless it was completely unavoidable. Stan’s experience told him that, if the original concept of operations had been followed and the helicopter had only gone to the planned extraction point, and the team failed to arrive, then they would have been left, written off and covered over, with all knowledge of them denied by their government.

  They were, regardless of their abilities, expendable.

  Instead, the top brass had risked an international crisis by sending one of their aircraft into a country that they were not supposed to be in.

  Something big was on the horizon. Stan could feel it in his bones.

  Gerry came bounding down the corridor behind him, hailing for him to stop and wait. Stan turned and prepared himself to receive an attempted dressing down from the officer.

  “Good work out there,” Gerry smiled as he reached out and shook hands with him. “How are the boys, good I hope?”

  Gerry was a tall and gangly man with elongated, almost rodent like features. His narrowed eyes gave the impression that he was always trying to find an angle, a way through a person’s defences in order to gain a glimpse at any weakness that could be exploited and used at a later date to his own advantage.

  However, his character did not match his appearance.

  On paper, he was listed as the commanding officer for the unit, but in reality, he was nothing more than a front man. An officer that could take the heat for them when things went wrong and alternatively, receive the pat on the back when things went right. He had been a battalion commander in the infantry and had also served a two-year posting with the SAS. Since then, he had held a number of staff positions and now, because of his influence and maturity, acted as the Operation’s Officer for all the problems that the government needed taking care of, secretly.

  The men liked Gerry. He was a caring man and always kept the best interests of the team at heart. Although he knew that he would never be accepted as one of them, he endeavoured to make it perfectly clear to them that he would always support them, no matter what.

  He was never one to interfere with how they run things and he acted more as a Quarter Master than anything else, procuring kit and equipment, providing them with the most up to date intelligence for their tasks and seeing to it that the team’s ability to function was unhindered. Most importantly, he was the one that soaked up all of the flak for them.

  Sometimes, the men took liberties and before he knew it, Gerry would find himself acting as their fixer and even their nursemaid. The day when he arrived at their accommodation for the first time, he was greeted by Bull’s dirty underpants being thrown at him and told to get them washed. Gerry knew that he had to dig his heels in, stand his ground and don his stiff upper lip, which had been an integral part of his higher class breeding.

  It was the team’s way of testing him, and they never failed to get a kick from watching him attempt to pull rank on them or instil discipline.

  “This isn’t the army, Gerry, and you’re lucky if you get a fucking handshake, never mind a salute.”

  In the end, Gerry, a full Colonel in the British Army, realised that the men he was supposedly commanding were a different breed, and as a result, would need to be handled differently. They were not listed on any records. Their regimental numbers no longer existed and they were not subject to military law. Even their Oath of Allegiance to the Queen had been stricken from any database.

  “Listen, if you’re going to get all uptight over that prick in there,” Stan growled and nodded back in the direction they had come, indicating the Secretary of Defence, “then I suggest you take…”

  Gerry was shaking his head and smiling.

  “Not at all, Stan. It was a good way of rounding it all up and gave me an excuse to get you out of there. You looked bored and frustrated and keen to get some down time. Anyway, everyone knows that the secretary is a prick.”

  Stan relaxed and nodded his appreciation.

  “Did you read my report?”

  “Yeah, I did,” Gerry nodded, a little too enthusiastically for Stan’s taste.

  They both turned and began to walk along the gloomy passage.

  “I know you have questions, but at the moment, I have no answers for you. Something is going on, and that is about all I know. The Op’s Room has been a hive of activity for the last forty-eight hours and there’s something big on the horizon. That’s why they pulled you all out and risked such a stunt.”

  Stan nodded, accepting that Gerry was either in the dark, or being evasive for the sake of operational security.

  “Did you read the bit about the village? Something wasn’t right and personally, I don’t think it was anything to do with rebels or Syrian soldiers. They were fucked!”

  Gerry’s expression changed and his eyes glanced to his left and right, as though he was about to reveal a dark and deadly secret.

  “When I presented your report to the Prince of Darkness, his face went pale, more than it usually is. Almost transparent, even. After reading that, the head-shed didn’t care about the Bassim part of the op. They were more interested in the village, even though it was just a tiny paragraph of your report.”

  Stan bit his lip and nodded, his mind ticking over.

  “Anyway,” Gerry continued, his words taking on a more cheerful tone, “where’s the men, they all okay? I have their pay and new identities in my office. A good bottle of whisky too, so if you give me a minute, I will tag along with you and show my face to the guys. I’m sure they would appreciate my gifts.”

  The accommodation for the team was not the average army barracks. Of course, they referred to it as ‘the barrack block’ out of habit, but it was anything but. It was actually an entire floor of luxury flats on the eighteenth storey of a high-class apartment building in the heart of London, courtesy of the Ministry of Defence.

  The team had their leader, Stan, to thank for their lavish surroundings. After they had come back from the Brussels job, they had all suddenly been moved out from the three bedroomed flat on the outskirts of Peckham that they were crammed into, and elevated to the higher echelons of society, literally.

  As Stan handed them their envelopes containing money and fresh identities, Gerry poured the whisky and continued with his over excited tirade about how good it was to see them back, safe and sound, after a job well done.

  Every month, the men were paid handsomely, and in cash. They had no bank accounts in the UK, their money being secretly dropped into deposit boxes and then transferred to foreign banks.

  As with their operations, their pay was also kept off the books.

  There was no trace of them with the MoD. They never wore military issued clothing or equipment and dressed as they pleased. Everything that they used, including radios, night vision and navigation equipment, was available on any black market, and even through the internet. Serial numbers were meticulously removed, leaving no traceable link between the men, their equipment, and their origins.

  Weapons were different and more difficult to arrange, but with the contacts that Gerry and the men had throughout the world, they were always able to purchase something locally to suit their needs.

  Back in England, they came across more as being anything but soldiers, living in comfort and always flush with money. Being accommodated in the apartments suited them because they did not draw any attention. Everybody else that lived in the building was rich and lived with a degree of discretion, so the eight burly men, coming and going on a regular basis, did not turn many heads.

  There was always one exception to the rule though.

  A couple of floors above them lived an extravagant hell-raiser named Roland. He had been a bit of a gangster at one point, so the story went, but now owned a chain of magazines and newspapers, and had a tendency to upset politicians and celebrities with complete indiscrimination. If he had dirt on someone,
he rarely hesitated to dish it out. He had a lot of highly situated friends and just as many enemies, equally as important.

  The team had become very friendly with Roland, attending many of his parties and enjoying the delights on offer. He was no fool and he knew that the mysterious men that lived below him were a surreptitious part of the British military. To Roland, with his ever watchful eyes, it was obvious and he laughed when Bobby introduced himself for the first time, claiming to be a rock and roll music producer.

  Bull especially indulged in the wild goings on due to the fact that there was always an abundance of beautiful women, ready to do anything necessary to become a part of Roland’s inner circle of friends. Naturally, Bull was always ready to pick them off, like a shark prowling through the aftermath of a shipwreck.

  As they counted their money, the men of the team sat back and began to sip at the whisky that Gerry had provided. It had been their first drink in a long time, and many savoured the warm smooth taste of the expensive brand. Everyone except Brian that is, who slugged his drink back in one gulp and demanded a refill.

  He raised his glass and in his thick Belfast accent, proposed his toast.

  “Here’s to Ali Hussein Bassim. Gone to Paradise in a million pieces and I hope his seventy-two virgins can’t find his dick.”

  Brian, having grown up in Northern Ireland during the height of the troubles, was as tough as they came. His words were spoken with aggression and every sentence contained at least four or five profanities.

  His shaved head and staring eyes, coupled with his overtly hostile speech and body language made him appear like a football hooligan. He could never hold his tongue, and if he had an opinion on something, he gave it without thinking through on the consequences. He considered this to be a good trait of his, but his four ex-wives begged to differ.

  Next, they all turned their attention to the envelopes containing their new identities and documents. Each month, new passports, driver’s licences, credit cards and even gym memberships were produced for them. Their photographs matched and even their personal details and records were changed on the international databases. For instance, if any of them were ever arrested, their fingerprints would match perfectly to the name and description on the police system.