Death in the Kingdom

by Andrew Grant

  ‘Carter, Major, 22 SAS.’ The grim-faced man who stepped forward was middle-aged and of average build, dressed in denims and a leather jacket. I recalled him from earlier. We exchanged firm grips. ‘Out of our depth here,’ the major said, nodding at the plastic airlock over the inner door. ‘We were told to protect the box, its contents and Doctor Dixon’s team, and take everything back to the UK. Apparently we now have a biological substance on the loose.’

  ‘I don’t know what I can add, Major,’ I replied.

  ‘Dave,’ he replied.

  ‘Dave,’ I amended. ‘I’m Dan. I just acquired the box on orders. I have no idea what the hell is in it.’ For a moment my mind played the Dave-and-Dan game but I forced myself to let that one go. Having a trilogy of Don Don, Dan Dan and Dave Dave was pushing everything to the limit.

  ‘We gathered from the doctor that the box fell and a quantity of the contents escaped. She called Code Red. Needless to say we have gone for total containment as option one. We have no idea whether or not they are contaminated, or alive or dead on the other side of the wall. Apparently the telephone that was in there up until a few weeks ago was appropriated for another office.’ Carter gave a wry smile. ‘All about timing!’

  ‘Yeah,’ I agreed. The thought that Sylvia, Garston and Helen, the little Welsh flower, might be dead hit me like a truck. I thought maybe they would be sick, but dead! Did Sylvia have an antidote for whatever it was that was in that fucking box? ‘So what can I do?’ I asked Carter.

  ‘Make any relevant suggestions as they come to you,’ replied the SAS officer. ‘God knows we need all the help we can get!’ Shoulder to shoulder the pair of us moved to stand beside the airlock. Heavy, clear plastic sheeting had been used to create the tent around the door. The two technical types working inside had a whole bunch of apparatus with them and I could see a telephone handpiece. The connecting wire came out of the airlock wall through a thick plastering of duct tape. The stuff had been used to join all the plastic sheets and seal the openings.

  ‘Duct tape was the hero on the day,’ I muttered. Carter snorted in agreement. The guys working the drill had removed the large diameter core cutter from the hole in the wall and one was using a screwdriver to extract a disk of metal sheathing from the cutter blade.

  ‘Good or bad, they built that room to withstand a neutron bomb,’ the SAS officer said as the cutter went back into the cavity and started grinding away again. While one of the pair inside the tent worked the drill, the other was preparing a bell-shaped cone of thick plastic. He cut the tip off at the pointed end, passed the phone cord through and connected the handpiece, leaving it in the cone. Once again the duct tape was in play. The man working the drill stopped and pulled it clear to remove another disk which wasn’t metal but appeared to be insulation of some sort.

  The man with the large drill removed the cutter head and put the drill to one side. He picked up a radically different device. ‘Tube drill,’ Carter said, answering my silent question. ‘Same dimension as the cutter head. Battery powered. Just push it straight on through. Designed for just this sort of situation.’

  The man with the tube drill finished attaching the cutting head and carefully positioned the drill in the plastic cone along with the telephone while the second technician held the cone. A glue gun was used to liberally coat the flange around the cone’s open end with a sealant before the cone was carefully positioned over the hole. The flange was pushed flat against the wall and, while it was still supported by one of the technicians, the other did his duct-tape trick, using big slabs of tape to completely surround the flange edge. In less than a minute the cone was well and truly fixed into position.

  The rubberised plastic of the cone was flexible and, after a little juggling, the tube drill was in position and grinding away on the last section of wall. I drew a deep breath. Would Sylvia and the others still be alive? And if alive, would they be infected with whatever the hell it was that was in that damn box? There was a faint clatter and one of the technicians at the hole turned and gave Carter the thumbs up. The drill had gone through. The phone handpiece followed. Carter turned and reached for the duplicate handset that one of his unsmiling juniors handed to him. He motioned me to stand beside him and turned the handset so I could hear better.

  ‘Doctor Dixon?’

  ‘I’m here,’ came the reply. I felt my heart flip.

  ‘Are you infected?’

  ‘I don’t think so. We realised what was happening and I think we acted quickly enough to neutralise the release.’

  ‘What’s the next stage?’

  ‘We have to stay isolated for twenty-four hours. Call in the Chemical Response Unit. Organise food, please, and can I speak to Daniel?’

  ‘Roger that. Chem Response is already airborne. Here’s Mr Swann!’

  Carter handed me the headset and went to where Don Don was hovering.

  ‘Hi, Sylvia.’

  ‘Hello, darling ex,’ she replied, sounding tired and strained. ‘That darned flimsy table collapsed and dumped the box on the floor. It landed on a corner and the lead patch you put on it broke free. Some of the contents got out.’

  ‘What the hell is it, Sylvia?’ There was a long pause. I could picture her debating whether or not to answer. I had no doubts that she and her team had been sworn to secrecy and threatened with all sorts of dire consequences. I decided to help her out. ‘Sylvia, this is no fucking time for bloody Whitehall politics. Whatever is in that room is obviously deadly in the extreme. If you don’t make it, what happens then?’

  Despite the crude telephone setup, I heard her catch her breath. I knew she was a brave lady but no one wants to die, especially to some damned bacteria or biological nerve gas. That was generally a really shitty way to go and, in most cases, extremely painful and slow enough to give you plenty of time to enjoy the agony.

  ‘What the fuck is it?’

  ‘It’s an anthrax variant,’ she said at last. Anthrax! A shiver went up my spine. Of all the dirty tricks in the dirty-trick book, that was potentially one of the worst. I’d gained more than a passing respect for it back in spy school.

  ‘That’s not so bad,’ I said, trying to remember all I could about the damned stuff. ‘You’ll have had your shots against it.’

  ‘Yes,’ she replied and then she hesitated long enough for me to think she’d stopped bloody breathing. ‘But this isn’t an ordinary strain, Dan. It’s a hybrid. The vaccine won’t work on it.’

  ‘Shit,’ I muttered, looking for a clutching straw to send her way. ‘After fifty years sitting at the bottom of the ocean surely it’s dead by now?’

  ‘No, Dan. This is as hot as hell,’ Sylvia replied. ‘But I think we’ve managed to neutralise it.’ It was then I knew exactly what they had done in there to kill the bug.

  ‘Water, right?’ I said. I remembered how she had reacted when I’d told her about the release on the boat and the heavy swells that hit us, washing the bug away.

  ‘Very good, Detective Dan. Good old H2O! Water kills it dead. When the box hit the floor and we saw the spores being released we got the fire hose going fast—set it on fine spray and drenched the whole place. Then we filled the hazard case with water and put the box inside.’

  ‘Hope you closed the lid and locked it!’ I muttered.

  Sylvia gave one of her throaty chuckles at that. ‘You can bet on that,’ she said. ‘Now we just have to wait and see if we’re dead or not. Can you organise some dry blankets? It’s cold in here and bloody damp.’

  ‘Definitely,’ I responded. ‘And, Syl?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m glad you made it.’

  ‘So am I, Dan. So am I.’ I handed the phone to one of Sylvia’s technical bods who was hovering, waiting to speak to the boss, then I went to find Carter.

  The SAS man was in the corridor with Don Don and the usual suspects. A trolley laden with plates of sandwiches and large urns of coffee and tea had appeared. How the supplies were going to be passed through in
to the inner sanctum I had no idea. I grabbed a coffee and a sandwich and joined them. One of Sylvia’s crew was in the corridor pulling on a chemical suit, and a couple of Carter’s men were unrolling a fire hose from a reel further down the corridor. A third SAS man was using the point of a wicked-looking stiletto to perforate a length of plastic tubing.

  Now I had an idea of how they were going to get in and out of the bomb shelter without bringing any bugs out with them.

  Don Don, Carter and I stood at the office door with our drinks while one of Sylvia’s team rigged the strip of plastic tubing across the inside of the airlock tent.

  The thin diameter fire hose was a little thicker than a normal garden hose, and with the help of more of the ubiquitous duct tape, the nozzle had been fitted to the open end of the plastic pipe. The other end had been blocked off. The airlock was being turned into a decontamination chamber.

  The system worked, and within minutes the prisoners in the secure room were being fed and watered. Blankets were being fetched. Now all Sylvia and her team had to do was sit and wait for twenty-four hours to see if they lived or died. I needed a cigarette and headed for the wide-open spaces up above. I was surprised to find Carter sitting on bench out in the dawn sun. He was smoking and that, too, surprised me. He waved me over and I accepted the cigarette and light he offered.

  ‘Stress smoker,’ he said by way of apology or something.

  ‘Goes with the job,’ I replied.

  ‘Tell me,’ he said after we had been sitting in silence for a couple of ‘minutes, ‘were you ever in the squadron?’

  ‘Never even in the army,’ I replied, shaking my head. ‘I had a different upbringing, but I did spend some time down in Herefordshire with your mob.’ In fact, I once thought of trying out for 22 SAS but I didn’t like the idea of jumping out of a perfectly good aeroplane. I also wasn’t big on marching for mile after boring gut-busting mile, lugging an overloaded Bergen containing three times my body weight in ammunition and kit. All of which was par for the course with the boys from 22 squadron.

  ‘Should have joined,’ the SAS officer said. ‘You’d have enjoyed it. Comradeship, good friends, lot of laughs at times. I would imagine what you are involved in is a pretty lonely existence.’

  ‘How much do you know about what I’m involved in?’

  ‘I’ve read the file,’ came the reply. ‘You’re good, one of the very best, but one day that luck will run out. It does to us all, but at least in the squadron we’ve got people watching our backs. In your line of business there’s no one there when you whistle.’

  Carter stood and ground out his cigarette. I had nothing to say because he was absolutely right. He clapped a hand on my shoulder, turned and went back to the bowels of the embassy while I sat and pondered my bleak existence.

  22

  Bernard, why was the British Government giving the fucking Japanese something like this when we were at war with them?’

  Bernard was silent. The time for the truth, or some of it, had come and it was totally against the nature of Sir Bernard Randolph Sinclair to dabble in the truth. Eventually he answered, but it wasn’t the answer I wanted to hear.

  ‘We’ll discuss this when you return,’ came the prim reply when he eventually found his voice. ‘Let us just say that there was a very good reason, and it is not up to you or I to presume at this point in time. You have accomplished what you were sent to do. Render what assistance you can to the people on the ground. Goodbye.’

  The phone went dead in my ear. I flicked it off and dropped it into my jacket pocket. The implications of what Bernard had not said were absolutely fucking off the wall. Our side had developed some sort of super anthrax strain during the war, and in the latter months, as the fighting in Europe was drawing to its inevitable conclusion, our lot had been in the process of handing the Japs a very potent weapon. It had been just dumb bad luck that the fucking sub had been bombed. Had the super bacteria been promised to the Japs to provide them with their one last shot at the Americans?

  A cold finger ran down my spine. Maybe this was supposed to have been the great out-of-the-lab experiment, like the fucking ‘A’ bomb the Yanks dropped. They didn’t have to drop it when they did. History has shown that clearly. The war was all but over. They simply wanted to see just how their new toy worked on living human flesh, and not just on shop dummies, cadavers, cattle and sheep. Maybe the Japs had been planning to use the bacteria to commit mass hara-kiri? Maybe this? Maybe fucking that?

  I’d made the call to Bernard from one of the outside offices on the second floor. I turned, my mind churning over the ramifications of what I’d just learned as I went back down to the basement to check on Sylvia and the others. It was now 14:09. They were getting close to the twelve-hour mark. If something was going to show, it had to show soon.

  There was no sign that any of the prisoners in the vault had been infected, but they still had to sit out the full incubation period. While we waited for the all clear, I took advantage of Sylvia’s state of mind. Her relief at not being infected had put her in a near-euphoric mood. She agreed to give me a full briefing on the bug. I wanted to be fully armed with all the facts on the nasty little beast when I went head to head with Sir Bernard.

  ‘Bacillus anthracis in its normal form is nasty, but it’s not the great hazard most people think. Not with today’s vaccines, especially if you’re prepared,’ Sylvia was saying. ‘You’ve got three ways of catching it: through the skin, as in cuts and abrasions, inhaling it or ingesting it through the gut. Inhalation is regarded as the most dangerous method of contamination, with the highest probability of death running at about ninety-five percent.’

  ‘Shit, that high?’

  ‘That high,’ she repeated. ‘Air burst, aerosol sprays, crop dusters, those types of delivery systems are the most logical and easiest for both terrorist strikes and the military for that matter.’ I had visions of Ranch Hand, the Agent Orange spray campaign carried out in Vietnam, but instead of those chemicals, these aircraft were spraying anthrax. It wasn’t a settling image.

  ‘The thing about this particular variation is that it can lie dormant in a vacuum, apparently for some time. Normal anthrax can live in the soil for years but, seemingly, this one is a sleeper. It simply shuts itself down and wakes only when exposed to oxygen,’ Sylvia continued. ‘There are four phials of the spore in the box. We must assume that the head of the spear gun broke one. Whether or not the salt water cleaned it out completely we can’t know, but it seems likely that the hot lead might have fractured at least one more of them.’

  ‘I hope it did in the whole lot,’ I exclaimed. ‘We don’t need this crap.’

  ‘I agree but we have it, Daniel, and I have to help deal with it.’ The quality of the phone connection and thickness of her mask couldn’t hide the resolve in her voice. ‘What makes this hybrid so much more dangerous is its size. The spores are much smaller than the normal strain, which means that they disperse in the air that much more easily and over a wider area. Plus, they devour oxygen molecules as nutrition and multiply faster than rabbits.’

  ‘Very nasty!’ I replied. I really did need to know as much as I could about this bloody bacteria before I met up with Bernard back in London. I had the feeling that the old queen was jammed up and when he decided to take a shit, it was going to be in my direction. Knowledge was power and I needed that in spades. But more than anything else, I needed to know what Sylvia had on the history of this bug, what was behind it and why, at the end of the day, it was so special that a whole bunch of people had died to get it. I decided to fish a bit further.

  ‘How much do you know about what I’m involved in?’

  ‘Darling, if you remember that’s one of the things that screwed us. I don’t know what you’re doing or why or where. I was just told that you would be waiting for us with a sealed package containing the hybrid anthrax, which you didn’t even know you had.’

  ‘Okay.’ I lapsed into silence for a moment. ‘I’m one of
the good guys, Sylvia,’ I said, detecting a snort of disbelief at the other end of the line. I chose to ignore it. ‘My job was to fetch and carry that damn stuff and make sure no one stopped me.’

  ‘Did they try?’

  ‘Oh yes, they tried,’ I replied.

  ‘Did people die?’

  ‘A lot.’

  ‘I knew that I wouldn’t like what you did, Dan. That’s one of the reasons I couldn’t stay the course.’

  ‘The thought of me killing people?’

  ‘No idiot. The thought of you being killed! It wasn’t the screwing around, Dan. Believe me, I would have cured you of that if we’d had a normal relationship.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I muttered. ‘Change the subject. What do you know about the history of this bloody stuff? The who, why, where and how the hell it ended up here.’

  Before Sylvia could answer, Don Don appeared in the doorway and with him was a whole set of new faces—tired faces belonging to people who had just flown a very long way.

  ‘Chem Response have arrived,’ I told Sylvia. ‘I imagine things will get a little hectic. Can we continue this later?’

  ‘I don’t see why not, Dan. If you’ve got 007 to kill, you’ve obviously got security clearance to the moon and back.’ She wasn’t laughing and she wasn’t joking. There was more than an edge of bitterness in her voice, along with fatigue.

  ‘Later,’ I said, handing the telephone handpiece to the newcomer standing at Don Don’s shoulder. He nodded his thanks and got straight down to business. It was time for me to exit stage left. My presence most certainly was no longer required at Ground Zero. Don Don fell in step with me.

  ‘You staying around for a while?’ he asked.