The five civilians were looking around for a place to set up their equipment but every inch of the CP seemed busy and in use and none of the military personal were very interested in helping out the newcomers.
Winterman, slowly mastering his anger, leant against one of the desks.
‘You’ve just scrubbed a mission that could have significantly aided our operation, not to mention the fact that you’ve wasted a lot of man-hours and resources and spoiled the air force’s opportunity to actually contribute.’ Winterman glanced angrily at the air force liaison officer, who looked away quickly. ‘This had better be good.’
‘I don’t give a fuck about Operation Scarface, and neither does anybody else in this room until I say otherwise. Venom got a camera with them?’
‘Yes,’ Winterman said through gritted teeth.
One of the civilians, a sweaty, balding, piggy-like man with glasses, whose very presence in his CP offended Winterman, gave Lockhart a piece of paper and handed him a tablet. Lockhart studied the tablet, looking less than pleased, shook his head and handed it back to the piggy-looking man. Lockhart handed the CP’s communications officer the piece of paper.
‘Task Venom to head to these coordinates. I want them to shoot footage and transmit it to me and me only. The freqs are on the paper. Understood?’ The communications officer turned to look at Winterman. Lockhart did the same.
‘I want to know what you’re doing with my men,’ the Major told the military contractor.
‘No, actually, you don’t.’ He seemed to be giving the situation some thought. He glanced down at the comms officer and then back to Winterman. ‘I will have you arrested if you do not follow my order. You will be court martialed for disobeying a direct order from the Joint Chiefs of Staff. That is assuming that you are still a serving officer in the United States Army.’
Winterman’s face was a mask of barely controlled rage as he turned to the communications officer and gave her the nod.
‘Ooo, hark at the pair on this one,’ a decidedly not-American voice said. Lockhart peered into the corner of the tent where the voice had come from. He saw a squat, heavily-built man with a shaved head leaning back on a chair, his combat boots up on a folding table. Lockhart looked at the Major. Winterman just shrugged. Along with a reluctant USAF, the British liaison had been Winterman’s biggest pain in the arse. The Major was reasonably sure that the SAS had inflicted the obnoxious cockney on him out of spite. They seemed to take a particular pleasure in winding up US special forces personnel. At least this time they weren’t rolling homemade bombs made from cola bottles into tents and showering the sleeping operators with soda.
‘Name and rank, soldier,’ Lockhart commanded. The British soldier shook his head apologetically.
‘I’m sorry mate, that’s classified and, unlike your man here,’ he pointed at the Major, ‘I’m not under the command of your Joint Chiefs of Staff.’
Winterman was gratified that the SAS trooper was even-handed with his obnoxiousness. Lockhart glared at the British soldier. The British soldier met the glare and just smiled.
‘Get the fuck out of my CP,’ Lockhart growled.
‘’Fraid I can’t do that either. See, my orders has me here, and I’m a good boy.’
Lockhart took a deep breath. Now it was his turn to try and control his anger. He turned to the ranking NCO of the Ranger security detail that was guarding the tent.
‘Have this man escorted out of the CP. If he resists shoot him.’
The British soldier just laughed. The Ranger sergeant didn’t seem particularly interested in escorting the SAS trooper anywhere. He looked over at the Major.
‘I tell you what, why don’t I escort me-self out. Save anyone getting hurt straining themselves. I’ll go back and tell my boss-man that I’ve failed in my mission, God knows what he’ll say. I’ll probably get a proper bollocking. Mebbe even get “court martialed”.’ There was some laughter from around the CP. Even Winterman had to suppress a smile.
The British soldier got up and headed towards the tent’s entrance. He paused right in front of Lockhart.
‘You should bring your toy soldiers and come over and visit us. Try your cock measuring bullshit there, see how far you get.’ Lockhart said nothing; he just stared down at the smaller man, his nostrils flaring in anger. The British soldier turned and headed out of the CP, nodding to Winterman on the way out. Well, it’s as close as any of that lot ever get to a salute I suppose, the Major thought.
Barnes was sure it was CIA. The re-tasking the mission, shooting footage and transmitting it, encrypted, to new freqs stank of them, as did the paper-thin mission brief and distinct lack of intel.
The three of them were deep in the rainforest now, in theory far away from anywhere useful, in a bid to avoid cartel gunmen and FARC guerrilla fighters. Chavez and T were keeping a watch out. Earl was still hidden. Barnes was studying the map.
‘That it?’ T asked despite himself. Barnes felt like apologising to the rest of the patrol, the briefing had been so light.
‘Uh huh,’ Barnes mumbled quietly. Both of them were too professional to call bullshit on their new orders.
‘This is bullshit,’ Chavez muttered. ‘Is there even anything there?’
‘A plantation and a small village. I guess they work the plantation.’
‘Coca?’ T asked.
‘No,’ Barnes muttered. ‘That’s the weird thing, according to intel it’s one of the few remaining coffee plantations in the area.’
‘Maybe the administration is finally getting tough on caffeine?’ Chavez suggested. T chuckled.
‘Okay that’s enough, Chavez,’ T told the combat aircraft controller. ‘FARC?’
‘In theory they control the area but there’s nothing there for them. Maybe a cache, arms or drugs, but it’s not a good place. The transport links are for shit,’ Barnes told the sergeant. He could tell the more experienced operator was having serious misgivings about this mission.
‘It’ll be a walk into nothing, T, you know that. We’re just chasing ghosts for the Company,’ Chavez told the sergeant.
‘Earl, you know where we’re going?’ T asked over the tac radio.
‘Sure.’ Even with just the one word over the tac radio it was easy to pick up the laconic sniper’s thick Missouri accent. The sniper came from rural folks who when the double dip hit and the bottom fell out of farming turned to cooking crystal meth. Earl had chosen to join the Rangers instead. T had told Barnes that Earl was such a good sniper because he made every shot like his next meal was relying on it.
T looked at Barnes. It was a courtesy, nothing more. Barnes nodded.
‘Okay Earl, lead us out of here. We don’t want to see you.’ The Missouri sniper didn’t answer. T and Earl had been working together for a long time now. They waited for a couple of minutes and then Barnes took point, Chavez the tail, as the three of them headed into the jungle trusting that Earl was in there ahead of them.
Lockhart didn’t like being this close to Dr Asher. As an ex-marine he was disgusted that anyone could let themselves go physically as much as the other man had. He also thought that the scientist smelled of milk gone off and the hotter the clime, the worse he smelled. Lockhart was at a loss to explain the stench. His disgust had been further magnified when he’d seen Asher’s personnel file and read about some of the fat man’s proclivities. Unfortunately, the doctor had made himself indispensible to Hargreave-Rasch Biomedical, CELL’s parent company. A microbiologist by training, Asher had cross-trained in enough disciplines to become very useful to the biomedical multi-national when it came to situations like this one.
Lockhart was looking over the scientist’s shoulder at satellite thermographic imagery of the suspected incursion area. There was a surprising amount of blue on the laptop screen for a plantation in the middle of a rainforest, even at this elevation.
‘I don’t like that we’re not using CELL personnel for the reconnaissance,’ Asher said. He had a pronounced and educated
English accent that Lockhart thought sounded whiny.
‘You’ve noticed there’s a full scale military operation underway here?’ he muttered. He hated explaining the intricacies of military thinking to dumb-ass civilians. ‘We didn’t have time to get clearance for that kind of operation but it’s being worked on at the highest levels at the moment. Had we gone in now, we would have ended up getting shot at by both sides.’ Lockhart left unsaid that the Delta team would be better at this than CELL personnel. As much as he was loath to admit it, the CELL special operations team weren’t capable of operating at this level. Yet. ‘If they find anything then we’ll be putting boots on the ground.’
‘Oh, they’ll find something,’ Asher said, somehow managing to sound patronising and whiny at the same time. ‘Even a man of your limited “education” must realise that those heat readings aren’t right, not to mention the tectonic activity we’ve seen.’
Lockhart turned from the laptop’s screen to stare at the scientist. Asher was oblivious to Lockhart’s look of utter hatred. He had no idea how close he had come to having his neck snapped.
Lockhart straightened up and turned around, eager to be away from the repellent little man. He turned around to find Major Winterman staring at him. Lockhart couldn’t make out the expression on the JCOS commander’s face.
‘Well, hell.’ Earl’s accent made ‘hell’ sound like ‘hail’ in the earpiece of Barnes’ tac radio. Barnes signalled for them to halt. The three of them went to cover, making sure they could see as much of the surrounding area in all directions as the thick rainforest would allow them. Barnes noticed that it had gotten cold. Despite the altitude he was still surprised to see his own breath mist.
‘What you got, Earl?’ T asked over the tac radio. The experienced Delta operator was perturbed to hear the normally emotionless sniper express surprise.
‘Ice,’ Earl said. Barnes assumed he’d misheard, or it was an acronym he was unfamiliar with.
‘Say again, over,’ T instructed over the tac net.
‘Naw, you heard me right T.’
‘LT?’ This time T was genuinely looking to Barnes for guidance.
‘Earl, we’re moving up to check it out, find a position to overwatch us.’ The sniper didn’t answer. Barnes glanced over at Chavez and T. T had his game face back on but Chavez was looking unsure. It wasn’t an expression he was used to seeing amongst operators.
He had known what to expect. He had been briefed on it, but it had still come as a surprise to him. They were receiving grainy footage over the satellite uplink shot by Senior Airman Chavez. Asher was looking at Lockhart with a smug impression on his face. The rainforest was frozen. Everything was encased in ice.
‘So, commander? Freak weather, perhaps?’
‘I want proof.’
‘You’ll end up with some illiterate monkey with a gun knowing far more than they should. I’m telling you the ice is the by-product of an energy release. They have initialised a piece of their tech here.’
‘And you’ve seen this before?’ Lockhart demanded, knowing the answer. Asher sighed.
‘Nobody alive today has ever seen this before,’ he said, as if explaining something very simple to a particularly stupid child.
‘I’m sending them in.’
Asher just sighed and shook his head.
‘Understood, out.’ Barnes clipped the sat uplink’s hand piece back onto the main unit at the top of Chavez’s pack. ‘We’re to make our way to the village.’
‘We are wearing entirely the wrong sort of fatigues for this bullshit,’ Chavez muttered, looking around at the winter wonderland the rainforest had become. It was freezing here, and the thin tropical fatigues they had on were doing little to keep them warm. There was no snow, just ice. The air was surprisingly dry, as if the moisture in the air had coalesced into the ice that encased the jungle. To Barnes’ mind, when he saw the plants, flowers, fruit and trees in the ice it made him think that a god had chosen to preserve this little bit of rainforest. The ice was like a prism when the sun caught it. Very little of it had started melting yet. It was quite beautiful, if very, very strange.
‘Layer up if you’ve got anything with you,’ Barnes told them. Chavez and T had already put sunglasses on to combat the glare.
‘Earl’s ghillie suit’s going to be worse than useless,’ T told the lieutenant. Barnes nodded.
‘Earl, sorry to cramp your style but fold in with us.’
Two of them kept watch whilst the other layered up. Barnes had a fleece top and a fleece-lined hat with him that he was thankful for. A little while later Earl warned them over the tac radio that he was about to appear and then did so. The tall, rangy sniper’s ghillie suit made him look like a living part of the jungle. Amongst the ice it just made him very conspicuous and he removed it whilst the others kept watch.
‘Okay, we don’t know what the fuck’s going on, so let’s assume the worst,’ Barnes told the other three members of the patrol. ‘Earl, you’re on point but don’t run away from us, T you’re tail.’
‘Rules of engagement?’ T asked.
‘No change but let’s err on the side of caution, yeah?’ Chavez and T agreed, Earl said nothing, which Barnes took as assent.
They advanced though the frozen jungle in a diamond formation with Earl at the point. Every so often the sniper would point at an area that they would use as an initial fall-back point in the event of a contact.
There were few clouds in the bright blue sky above them and the sun was causing them problems with the glare, despite their sunglasses. As it heated the ice they could hear a steady dripping noise as it started to melt.
There was no cover. Barnes had rarely felt so exposed. Anywhere they went in the icescape they stuck out like a sore thumb. This must be Earl’s worst nightmare, Barnes mused. They were on a dirt track. One side of the road was frozen rainforest, on the other side of the road were frozen, cultivated coffea arabica. The small, spiky trees must have been part of the plantation, Barnes guessed. The trees had flowered before they were encased in the ice. All around them now the sun was heating the ice and it was dripping, making the ground more and more treacherous underfoot.
Ahead of them Earl stopped by a bend in the track. He was looking up at something. He gestured to a fall-back point and then moved ahead.
Barnes and the others, weapons at the ready, followed the sniper round the corner. Barnes looked up and froze for a moment. Earl had gone to ground and was covering up the road.
‘Want me to go ahead and check it out LT?’ Earl asked over the tac radio.
‘Negative. We stick together.’ Because this is just getting weirder and weirder, Barnes left unsaid as he looked up at the strange structure towering over the frozen trees ahead of them.
It was some kind of spire but the architecture was all wrong. There was something organic about it. The spire looked like it was made of cracked, blackened, seamed, diseased bone. Circular blade/drill-like mechanisms spotted the body of the strange twisted spire like technological flowers. Barnes swallowed hard. He was aiming the M4 at it almost despite himself. He forced himself to look away from the strange spire.
‘You getting this, Broadsword actual?’ Chavez asked over the sat uplink. She had attached the DV camera to the mounting rails of her M4 carbine and linked it to the sat uplink so she could broadcast back to the CP. ‘They want us to investigate,’ Chavez told the rest of them. I’ll bet, Barnes thought. ‘Gonna tell us what that weird fucking thing is, Broadsword actual?’ Chavez listened. ‘That’s a negatory on actual information,’ she told the rest of the patrol.
‘It looks like some kind of drill machinery,’ T suggested.
‘What are fucking coffee farmers doing with mining machinery?’ Chavez demanded.
‘Maybe FARC are using it?’ T didn’t even sound like he believed what he was saying.
‘Mole people,’ Earl said over the tac radio. Barnes was so surprised that he turned to glance at the sniper. Nobody seemed quite sure i
f the quiet Missourian was joking or not.
‘Can you hear something?’ Barnes asked. He’d become aware of a low noise coming from the direction of the spire, which according to Barnes’ map was where the village was supposed to be.
‘Chanting,’ Earl said over the tac radio.
‘What are they chanting?’ T asked.
‘I don’t know. I can only swear in Spanish.’
‘This what you were expecting?’ Lockhart asked as he watched the grainy footage of the strange spire.
‘This is so much more,’ Asher said. There was a hunger, or a need, in his voice that made Lockhart very uncomfortable. The fat scientist turned to Lockhart and the commander grimaced as he caught a whiff of the off-milk smell that seemed to accompany the other man everywhere.
‘It seems inert. We need to get in there, full biohazard protocol.’
‘Let’s see what they find first.’
The town was little more than a street lined with a few dilapidated houses. The biggest building, if you ignored the strange spire, appeared to be some kind of combined office, truck yard and police station. The trucks were for transporting the coffee beans, Barnes guessed.
The chanting was louder now. He’d asked Chavez what they had been saying and, after she had angrily pointed out that she’d grown up in New York, she’d tried to interpret.
‘It sounds like gibberish, to be honest. The only words I can make out are “light” and “white flower”.’
‘They’re talking in tongues,’ Earl said.
‘LT?’ T said quietly over the tac radio. The SAW gunner was on the other side of the street between two houses, his weapon aimed up the road towards the spire. Barnes had been similarly concealed between two ice-encrusted houses but covering their back. ‘See the weapons?’ Barnes glanced up the street, where he saw there were a number of weapons, mostly old fashioned assault rifles, just lying in the middle of the road.
Maybe they’ve embraced peace, Barnes mused. The weapons looked like the sort of thing that some of the less well-equipped FARC units would be armed with.
Crysis: Escalation Page 3