by A P Bateman
“You can say that…” The man was cut short as Rechencovitch chopped him in the throat. He clasped his neck, fell to the ground and started to gag.
“I warned you…” Rechencovitch said coldly. “And perhaps your situational awareness isn’t what it used to be either?”
The man’s two comrades smiled. He did not look in a hurry to get back up. His soup had spilled over him and his expression was sheepish, his cheeks blushing.
The sniper said, “The woman was возбудитель,” he rasped. “Goading us about hunting. She was either situationally unaware, or just provocative.” He rubbed his throat and said, “I suspect she doesn’t know how to back down.”
The Colonel shrugged. “Then we will have to force her hand,” he said. “And the man, too. Drink your soup, change your clothes and we will go and see this man and woman. And we will make them pay for their audacity.” He held out a hand for the man laying on the floor. The man took it and the Colonel pulled him to his feet. He handed him his own carton of soup and said, “We have a job to do. As a team. We have lost a member, and we shall avenge him. They have given us a bloody nose, but we will cut their hearts out and watch them die. We will kill this traitor of the Motherland. We will kill her for taking secrets. And we will kill anybody standing in our way.”
Chapter Sixty-Four
“And you haven’t gone in to see her since?”
“No. The information from Porton Down has hampered us, somewhat,” Ramsay said matter-of-factly. “Be my guest if you want.”
“For god’s sake, Neil,” King said sharply. “She’s got no food, needs a change of clothes and we have to start a debrief. Porton Down have said how this virus works, but we don’t know, have no reason even, to suspect she’s infected.”
“I understand, but…”
“Neil, Alex is right,” Caroline said. “It’s bloody well hell on earth out there. She’s nothing short of a miracle to get that far across the terrain, and being hunted by mercenaries…”
“If we can assume they were mercenaries,” Rashid interrupted. “If they are official Russian forces, then we have to get the hell out of Dodge.”
“With you,” said King. “Any news on this storm?”
“Within the next hour,” Marnie said. She had a weather program running on a monitor. The computer tower sat on the floor amid a bundle of cables and an internet hub. Ramsay had requisitioned it from the reception. Marnie was running everything through a guardian program at GCHQ. “It’s set to last for over twelve hours, before heading east towards
Archangel in Russia.”
“Can we assume this hunter team will come here?” Ramsay asked.
“You can bet on it,” said King. “I’m not sure if those two guys made it, but I suspect there’s more in any case.”
“We will need to hold them off until we can extract,” said Rashid. “What have we got?”
King took out the Walther. “I only have one round for this,” he said. He had the two men’s utility vests. Both were stab-proof and contained a Makarov pistol and two spare magazines as well as a tactical knife and one vest still contained a torch. There were four magazines for the AK74 assault rifle. “These even the field a bit. I’m bagsying a pistol…”
“Bagsy the other!” Rashid said.
“And that’s it? Bagsy? What are you both, ten?” Caroline shook her head.
Rashid smiled. “Then learn to bagsy quicker,” he said to her, then looked at King. “I’ve got four cartridges for the rifle,” Rashid said. “Two inches above for two-hundred-and fifty metres,” he said to King.
King nodded and tossed over the bullet he’d taken from the man’s rifle on the hill. “Point three-oh-eight,” he said. “So now you have a full magazine.”
Caroline snatched a vest off King and took out the Makarov. “I’m overruling your pathetic bagsy with my own,” she said to Rashid. “You’ve got the bloody rifle.”
Rashid frowned and looked at Ramsay. “Is there a precedent in MI5 for an overruled bagsy?”
“Oh, bloody grow up, the pair of you!” he snapped.
King smiled. “I’m convinced somebody on the hotel staff will have a rifle for bears or wolves,” said King. “Ramsay, you can ask. You seem to have an in with whoever you got the computer from.”
“The manager,” he said. “Huss, the owner is a strange one. And he was talking to that man with the hooked nose who we think stole the laptop. Conspiratorially, so.”
“Agreed, I saw that too,” said Caroline. “What about staff? How many are left on the premises?”
“I’ll find out,” Ramsay answered. “I’ll see how many paying guests decided to stay as well. Are we recruiting?”
King shook his head. “I’m not sure. It’s a trust issue. We need more equipment to defend ourselves, though,” he paused, sipped some of his tea. “I’ll find out where the maintenance chaps are and whether they have anything in their units. There’ll be a hut or workshop. It’s too remote here to rely on going back to town to buy things or have them mended.”
Marnie looked up from the monitor and said, “There’s more from GCHQ regarding Porton Down’s findings. This virus can’t be caught like a cold. It’s a first-strike weapon. A way to degrade a nation and cause chaos. The only way to become infected, after initial airburst, is for it to spread itself. The degradation of the subject and subsequent hunger issue is one thing, the infected infecting others through primeval instinct. Or, to encounter an infected subject’s blood, saliva or semen. The virus bonds with human DNA to enter phase two. Without phase two, the initial airburst simply disperses. Weaponised, it fires and forgets. The people do the rest. Without their DNA, it can’t incubate and will die.”
Caroline shook her head. She nursed a black coffee. Her colour had returned, but she felt tired, and looked it. “Who thinks of things like this?”
Ramsay didn’t tell her of his knowledge that both Britain and America had been trying for years. He sipped some of his coffee and asked, “So, what first?”
“Call room service and get the poor woman some food and drink,” said King. “I’ll wait outside and take it. I want to talk to her. While I’m doing that, Neil I think you had better
talk to the manager about staff and guests. Get a list or manifest of who they are and the rooms they’re occupying. And I want to know where this chap is you suspect of stealing the laptop. Have a word about a rifle or shotgun for bears. There must be something with people going out into the forest. Maybe it’s time to lay our cards on the table and bring the bombing of the ice hotel into it to persuade him further. Explain who we are and that the person we are protecting is under threat,” he paused, realising he was jumping way ahead of the hierarchy order, but he was the field expert here, not Ramsay. He looked at Rashid and said, “You look for vantage points. Somewhere to spot anybody coming. And exits as it would help if we could leave quickly if we must. Marnie, you’re doing cracking work. Keep a line running with GCHQ and push the Porton Down angle. We need to know more about this virus.” He stood up slowly and reached into his pocket. His ribs were sore, and his actions were both slow and deliberate. He gave her a piece of paper. Caroline had bandaged his knuckles, they were split and bruised from punching through the cracked ice. “And I’d like you to get that sorted for me, as well. You’ll need Director Amherst for that.”
She took the piece of paper and looked at it. She glanced at the others, but they knew enough about intelligence work to operate under their own brief. If King hadn’t shared, then it was probably better not knowing. She slipped it into her pocket and opened an email. She looked back at King. “GCHQ have sent back the photos the asset took. I haven’t told them they were lost, just that we had computer issues.”
“Good thinking,” King said. He hadn’t worked with Marnie before, but he knew she worked with Ramsay and Rashid searching for Caroline last summer, and he liked what he saw in her. “Let’s have a look,” he said.
Caroline and Rashid bunched u
p towards the screen. King stood back to allow them a better view. Ramsay had seen them once and didn’t look keen to see them again. Marnie clicked through, settled on the video. It was unsteady, but they saw enough. The room was quiet for a good while.
Rashid broke the silence first. “I’m glad I bleached myself now.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” said King. “You haven’t got to look at it…”
Caroline smiled. “He’s got a point. I mean, you couldn’t look much worse with blisters, boils and a hunger for flesh.”
“Are humans and apes Halal?” Marnie chimed in.
Rashid shrugged and walked to the door. “Great. I’ll take my chances with minus thirty and Russian mercenaries over you bloody idiots…”
They watched him leave and smiled. Gallows humour. Tougher times ahead.
“What shall I do?” said Caroline. “Before you say anything; I’m not sitting this out.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” said King. “You wouldn’t listen anyway. Go with Neil and find out who this character is that could have stolen the laptop. I don’t buy that it was a casual theft. If he took it, then he’s a player. And if he’s a player, then he has what we have and that’s not good. Find out who he is and if he poses a threat, put him down.”
Chapter Sixty-Five
“You did well to make it,” King said. “It’s an extremely hostile environment.”
Natalia nodded. “There were times when I didn’t think that I would make it,” she paused. “Times when I wished I hadn’t seen what I had seen.”
Natalia was perched on the end of the bed. King took up the chair next to the window. The gloom outside was lifting, daybreak only an hour away. Sunset three hours after that. Natalia nursed a steaming cup of coffee, discarded dishes from the hotel’s room service menu lay strewn on the table. The ubiquitous club sandwich and fries with a six-euro surcharge to carry a tray one floor and thirty paces further than the restaurant.
“And what are your thoughts on that?”
“What? The secret bunker with unspeakable crimes against humanity?”
“Yes.”
“What do you think?”
“I’m asking the questions.”
“Dumb question.”
“Dumb answer,” King paused. “At the moment, we have a phone and a USB. We have thousands of square miles of snow and ice and the worst storm on record heading this way. Not to mention a team of security contractors with military weapons hunting you down. There are no written contracts here, no guarantee of your safety. Want to know the best way for my team to avoid bloodshed?” She said nothing but shrugged. “Leave your ass on the steps outside,” King paused and sipped from his cup of tea. The room courtesy tray was better stocked than the restaurant for his choice of brew. “Now, I’m a man of my word, and I took on a job to meet you and hand you over to my government. I’ll try my utmost to do that, but if I feel you’re not worth it, I’ll put my team before my orders. Every time.”
“Okay, I get it.”
“Good. So, let me rephrase that. Did you suspect something like this was going on there?”
“No.”
“Does anything make sense of your work and the location now that you know there was more to the facility than hydroelectricity?”
She shrugged. “I guess so. I mean, some people disappeared without trace. Not a word on social media. Two of them were in the cells in the bunker…” she trailed off, a distant look in her eyes.
King nodded. “And the security?”
“I suppose, now that I think of it, they were heavily armed and patrolled constantly. I mean, we convert the flow of water to electricity.
Short of copper piping and wiring, the machinery itself, there’s nothing worth taking.
Nothing that requires four men and Kalashnikovs on rotating shifts. They were all ex-military as well.”
“And no visitors?”
“Sami tribespeople trying to sell reindeer meat and skins. Our cook did deals for fresh meat.”
“But only occasionally?”
“When they pass through. Twice a year. Maybe a couple of tribes.”
“Who runs the plant?”
“A director. He’s a Swede named Ben Jorgenson. He is a hydroelectric specialist and has worked all over the world. Then the rest of the top tier. A woman called Casey Daniels. She’s Canadian. The other two are Russian men. Mikhail Soltanovich and Gregor Vavilov.”
“And they would know?”
“I can’t see how they could not.”
“But conversely, someone tipped you off.”
“Yes.”
“Were you worried it was a set-up.”
“Completely. I was paranoid for months.”
“And how did you contact London?”
She smiled. “I wasn’t aware it was London until now. I knew it was an intelligence agency. I hoped British,” she shrugged. “Everybody wants to come to Britain, don’t they?”
“So, how did you make contact?” King asked, undeterred.
“Letter drops. The first was in my bed. It creeped me out. Over the months I studied the rotas, the shift patterns to see if there was a pattern. Like holidays, night shifts, that sort of thing.”
“And?”
“No connection that I could make. Other than the orders from outside always happened on a resupply. I figured it came via a sailor or sailors in merchant vessels. The supplies come South from the Arctic shipping route. But I always thought it would have to be one of the top tier who made initial contact. And to pass the communications on, for sure.”
King had jotted down the names. He did not know why, but he had circled the Canadian woman’s name. He circled the Swede’s name too. Now he drew a line connecting them. The boy in him wanted to finish it as an aerial view of a Mexican pissing in a bucket. Despite his life, the seriousness of the situations he found himself in, or even perhaps because of that, part of him had never grown up.
“Tell me about the people in the cells,” he said. “What did they seem like to you?”
“You haven’t seen the footage?”
King had. They all had. But the image was shaky, and the woman would be the first to
say that it felt ten times worse for real. People always did in a crisis. “I have,” he said. “But how did it feel?”
She shuddered. “Like hell,” she said quietly. “The smell, fetid and inhumane. Like they had become beasts. Caged beasts, uncared for and abused.”
“You had a helmet on, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“And you could smell through that?”
She thought about it for a moment. There was a particle filter fitted. Could she really have smelled the cells, or was it her imagination? She shrugged. “I’m sure I could,” she said.
King scribbled underneath the two Mexican’s. He would research particle filters. He had worn an NBC suit once, couldn’t remember if he could smell with it fitted over his head and face or not. He looked at her, hesitated for a moment then said, “I don’t really want to use the word, but…”
“Zombies?” she asked. “Yes. Like the living hell of the walking dead. Like those horror movies and shows. The worst parts. It’s all I’ve been able to think about since.”
King thought about it. He wondered whether Ramsay had been right about Britain and America wanting such a weapon as this hideous virus. But it didn’t take much thinking about. He already knew the answer.
“I can’t really get my head around the fantastical nature of it,” he said. He was a man
who had dealt with the cold, hard truth of death. People died. They died in all manners. Some brave, some sobbing, all with the same outcome. Organic matter devoid of life. They died, rotted, the end. He did not believe in an afterlife, in ghosts or the paranormal. He certainly didn’t see the walking dead. But he reminded himself that this virus created symptoms. These people would die all the same. There would be no beheading, no destruction of the brain. They were not already dead; merely
people rendered in an enhanced comatose-state. Their primal instincts searching only for food. Everything else was secondary. People infected with this would be sick. Nothing more sinister. Still, he never thought he’d see the like. “What about the animals?”
She shuddered. “They were just angry,” she said. “And the gorilla just wanted to attack me. It was obvious. But it severed its hand getting out of its tether, didn’t seem to feel the pain or realise what had happened.”
King said nothing, but he knew that the fact that the creature had not felt pain was significant. If the people infected with the virus felt no pain, then they would not be easily destroyed, and certainly not effectively restrained to be treated. Perhaps there was some stock in the fantastical version after all.
“So, who’s hunting you?”
“My guess is the security guards.”
“My colleague killed one when he met you. So, three more?”
“I imagine. There were four full-time guards on that shift. More off shift and more on leave.”
“And you feel in good health?”
“I do,” she lied. “Never better.”
Chapter Sixty-Six
Rashid had dressed in his thermal snowsuit and walked the perimeter of the hotel. The ice hotel took up a substantial area, being a single-story construction. Against any attack, this was the weak spot. The grenade blast had destroyed the roof of two rooms and blown out the glass doors to the room occupied by the unfortunate couple. Now boarded with planks to stop the cold penetrating the main body of the hotel, the deserted structure would be easy for attackers to breach and get through. Any attack would be won or lost in the lobby.
He made mental notes as he walked the area. During his time with the SAS he had worked on close protection and security advance details for visiting dignitaries. He knew how to order and write a threat assessment, and he knew how to approach a target from an attacker’s perspective as well. Which was why he was having the most uneasy feeling that the building was nigh-impossible to defend.
The rifle was slung over his shoulder in a ski bag he had found in the utility room where snowsuits for the guests and the hotel’s equipment was stored for guests who did not have their own. Since the departure of the guests on the coach, the hotel had taken on a deserted