Crysis: Escalation

The Cult

There’s a first time for everything. He remembered his first gunfight. He had been frightened but he had got through it; his training had overcome the fear. What was he trying to prove here? The thought flew through his head. Along with: I should have used the .45.

Cutting a throat isn’t a smooth slice, Barnes knew, you really had to do some sawing. As he’d emerged from the undergrowth the mercenary had started to turn. In the old days the Medellin and Cali cartels had used British, US and Israeli ex-military to train their people. This new breed of cartel used Eastern European mercenaries, many of them ex-Spetsnaz, both to train their own gunmen and to augment their forces.

As Barnes wrapped himself around the man and took him to the ground to control his movement and started to saw at the throat he realised that the man really could fight. The mercenary knew what to do in this situation, how to counter it, and knew that he desperately wanted to live. In short, Barnes’ silent takedown was not going nearly as well as he’d hoped.

Artery, artery, starve the brain of blood, windpipe, stop him crying out. Clamp down tight, stop fingers from getting in the way of the blade. He was all but riding the man around the small clearing overlooking the Ferranto Valley and making enough noise to warn people in Bogotá that somebody was being murdered.

The cartel mercenary stopped moving. Lieutenant Laurence Barnes, 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment-Delta, did not stop sawing, not until he was positive that the mercenary was good and dead. He sagged, covered in sweat, fighting for breath, his right arm coated in blood up to the elbow. It was his second mistake of the day.

The second mercenary moved quietly out of the jungle, assault rifle at the ready. The expression on his face didn’t even change as he took in the scene. The barrel of the mercenary’s rifle swung towards Barnes as he frantically reached for his sidearm. Barnes knew he was not going to be quick enough. The cartel gunman had him cold. The mercenary’s face seemed to distort, crumple in on itself. Then again, as the second near-silent round took him in the face. The hydrostatic shock popped the top of the mercenary’s head off. His ruined face became red and he hit the ground.

Thank you Earl, Barnes thought. He heard what sounded like two coughs from the nearby trees as at least one other cartel gunman died due to suppressed gunfire. He’d told himself that he’d use the knife instead of the suppressed Heckler & Koch Mk 23 .45 automatic because of the chance of the muzzle flash warning other nearby elements of the Antioquia Cartel and their FARC allies’ military forces. If he was honest, an element of using the knife had been because he wanted to bust his knife-kill cherry, and that came from a new lieutenant in Delta Force wanting the respect of his people. Particularly as he’d come from 82nd Airborne and not Special Forces or the Rangers, as was more normal for Delta Force. It was a silly game to play at this level, he admonished himself.

He rolled the mercenary off and got back in the game. He wiped his blade on the corpse and sheathed it. Kneeling down he brought the M4 CQB carbine up, accidentally smearing the blood of his victim on the underslung 40mm M203 grenade launcher. He checked it quickly to make sure it hadn’t been damaged in the struggle, but as far as he could tell it hadn’t.

Chavez appeared out of the treeline. She had her Mk 23 held steady in both hands, the suppressor attached to the barrel. Judging from where she had emerged it had been her shots Barnes had heard. Chavez was probably average size for a woman but to Barnes she looked tiny. She looked too small for her load-out but she never seemed to have any problems keeping up. She was one of the few women in the special forces community. Barnes knew that she would have had to work hard for acceptance, both as a woman and as a USAF combat air-controller. Combat Air Controllers were attached to special forces units like Delta and the Navy’s SEALs to coordinate air support for their operations. In Afghanistan and Iraq there had been grouching from special forces units about whether or not the Combat Air Controllers were trained to their standards and could keep up. Chavez, from what Barnes had seen, was completely accepted by D Squadron’s recce/sniper troop, certainly more so than he was, judging by his current performance.

‘What’s up LT? I think you nearly cut his head off.’ T, short for Thomas, never Tom or Tommy, appeared next to Barnes. Barnes glanced at the sergeant, but there was no reproach or judgement in the SAW gunner/medic’s eyes. Maybe some concern. He was the oldest of the four operators, in theory Barnes’s 2IC, but Barnes was happy to defer to the senior NCO on operational matters whilst he played catch-up. Barnes had found the sergeant both friendly, which was sometimes unusual in the SF community, and a consummate professional. T had originally served with 1st Special Forces before transferring to Delta. He never talked about his mother, but Barnes knew his father still worked for the Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service in Montana’s Oxbow Quadrangle near the Idaho/Canadian border.

‘Chavez and I took down another two in the trees. Earl got that one,’ T nodded at the second dead gunman in the clearing, ‘and he’s covering us on overwatch back there,’ T nodded at some higher ground back in the treeline. Barnes just nodded. T was unscrewing his Mk 23’s suppressor and holstering the weapon. He readied his M249 Special Purpose Weapon, the special forces variant of the army’s M249 Squad Automatic Weapon.

T knelt down by the mercenary that Barnes had killed. He opened the man’s mouth with his gloved fingers and inspected his teeth.

‘Yep, definitely Eastern European, you can tell by the dental work.’ He glanced down at Barnes’s bloodstained arm. ‘You’ll need to wash that off or the flies’ll gather.’

They were on the edge of a steep cliff some four hundred feet up, overlooking the narrow, cliff-lined, Ferranto valley. The whole area was home to the Antioquia Cartel, the heirs of the Medellin Cartel’s territory and violent legacy. They operated in northern Columbia’s Antioquia Department, an area that was largely controlled by FARC guerrillas since their 2011 offensive. This made it difficult for the Columbian government to police the area.

The cartel, however, had overextended itself when it blew up an airliner to kill the new Columbian Minister for Defence. The Minister had been in the pocket of the Norte del Valle cartel and their right-wing AUC guerrilla allies further to the south. The airliner had been American and had been in British airspace, en route to London from Bogotá, when it had exploded. The US and UK governments had exerted pressure on the Columbian government to allow boots on the ground in Northern Columbia to “assist” the Columbian Military’s efforts to deal with the cartel and FARC. Conspiracy theorists were already blaming the CIA for the bombing of the airliner, claiming that they wanted to use it as an excuse to eliminate a left-wing threat on America’s doorstep. Barnes had heard the theory, and felt that the theorists vastly underestimated how much the US government didn’t want to be involved in a South American Vietnam-style fiasco.

Barnes moved towards a small stream on the edge of the clearing to wash the blood off. T grabbed his arm.

‘Someone might see the blood in the water downstream. Use the water in your canteen and then refill it in the stream.’

Barnes nodded and followed T’s suggestion, adding a couple of water purification tablets to his canteen. He also decided that he’d made his last mistake of the day and, if he had his way, the last mistake on Operation Scarface.

Barnes crawled to the cliff edge. Chavez had established contact with the USAF liaison at Joint Special Operations Command in Medellin City. T was watching their back.

‘Do you want to lase and I’ll call it in, LT?’ Chavez asked during a lull in her radio conversation. Barnes nodded. He used the scope on the M4 to look down into the valley at their target. Their target had once been a ranch house. Now it was a heavily fortified compound belonging to Diego Ramiraz, the Antioquia Cartel’s chief enforcer and thought to be the mastermind behind the airliner bombing. He was also believed to be directly or indirectly responsible for the deaths of over five thousand people in gang violence, bombings and assassinations worldwide.

‘This is going to be fun. Just like fucking Afghanistan.’ Chavez was always angry and pretty foul-mouthed. She talked street but Barnes knew that she came from a respectable middle-class family who lived in Harlem. He could, however, see her problem. When Barnes had first looked at maps and satellite imagery of the area he had thought that the Ferranto Valley was a suicidal place for Ramiraz to use as a base. He thought that the cartel enforcer and his people had basically trapped themselves in there. However, the compound was all but built under a rocky outcrop in the valley’s opposite cliff wall. That and the narrowness of the valley meant that it was going to very difficult to hit with airstrikes. It would be even more difficult if the rumours that intel had picked up on, about a bunker complex within the cliff side itself, were true.

Barnes removed the boxy laser designator from his webbing and got ready to “paint” the compound. The compound itself was a hive of activity, with trucks and four-by-fours laden with heavily armed mercenaries coming and going. The Ferranto Valley might have seemed like a trap for Ramiraz but if this didn’t work then the American, British and Columbian forces would have to go in there the hard way, and then it was going to be a vicious fight.

‘Two fast movers inbound,’ Chavez told him. Barnes just nodded. ‘This is Venom two-four to Vulture leader: okay stud, listen to me carefully,’ She was talking to the pilot of the lead FB-22 Wyvern fighter-bombers. New in service, they were derived from F22 Raptor air superiority fighters. ‘You got to come in low and slow, you hear me? Get tight in on the deck or this shit just isn’t going to work, over.’ Barnes couldn’t hear the response but he had heard that a lot of the alpha-male jet jockeys didn’t appreciate Chavez’s style of forward observation. Chavez couldn’t care less. After all, they weren’t down here in the shit with them.

They heard the fighter-bombers before they saw them. The thunder of their approach echoed down the valley. Barnes caught a glimpse of them banking hard and then dropping altitude as they headed down into the valley. He turned his attention back to lasing the compound. The beam from the designator was mostly invisible except for where it touched the compound’s main building

‘Too fast,’ Chavez muttered under her breath. ‘Attack run aborted.’

Barnes turned to look up the valley. He could see the missile contrail against the blue of the sky. Both Wyverns were climbing at ninety degrees. Burning hard, outdistancing the missile easily. It looked like it was raining chaff and countermeasures as the missile detonated far from the two fighters.

‘Stinger?’ Barnes asked. Chavez nodded.

‘Venom two-four to Vulture two. That wasn’t a fucking SAM emplacement, it was a peasant with a tube. Now get fucking back here and finish the fucking job, over.’ Barnes knew that she would get reprimanded for that. He’d do what he could to shield her. ‘Pindago asshole, how fucking difficult is it to deliver smart munitions?’

‘Take it easy, Chavez,’ T said quietly from behind them.

‘I’m going to find this puta and beat his bitch-ass to death with his own joystick.’ She went quiet, listening to incoming comms. She handed Barnes the handset for the sat-uplink. ‘They want to speak to you.’

Barnes took the handset and listened.

‘Venom leader to Broadsword Actual, received and understood.’ He passed the handset back to Chavez and then depressed the send button on his tac radio so that Earl would hear what he had to say as well. ‘Okay, the mission’s scrubbed…’

‘Pussies…’ Chavez muttered. Barnes gave her a look to let her know that was enough. He knew she felt that the air force had let them down but she was going to have to deal quietly.

‘We’ve been re-tasked. We’re exposed here, so we’re heading five klicks in country and I’ll brief you there. Earl, you’re leading the way.’

Barnes took a moment to check the map whilst Chavez and T kept a lookout. He gave Earl a grid reference and the three of them headed into the rainforest. Somewhere ahead of them Earl was leading the way.

Major Harold Winterman was staring at the newcomer like he’d just tracked dog shit into his command post. He turned back to look at the order he had just received from the Joint Chiefs of Staff and looked at that like he was holding dog shit.

Winterman’s people knew him to be a consummate professional. He had to be, to be entrusted with command of all special operations on Operation Scarface. They had never seen their commanding officer so close to losing his temper. They also had the feeling that his temper would be something to behold.

The focus of Winterman’s ire was stood in front of him in some crisply-pressed, new-looking jungle fatigues, but the man carried himself like he was more than capable of handling himself, and the way he’d spoken to Major Winterman suggested he’d better be.

‘Who or what the fuck is CELL?’ Winterman demanded.

‘Crynet Enforcement and Local Logistics,’ the tall, brown-haired, well-built man told him, ‘part of Hargreave Rasch.’

‘You’re military contractors?’ Winterman asked, barely containing himself. The man in the new fatigues nodded. ‘Then what. The. Fuck. Are you doing? Coming into my CP and giving me orders?’ Winterman was thinking about having this person shot. Actually, he was thinking about shooting him himself and then having the guards that had let him into his CP shot.

‘I’m not. The Joint Chiefs, that would be your employers, are. They are also commanding you to extend me every possible courtesy. In effect, I am in command here.’

‘I’m not sure that’s my reading of the orders…’ Winterman started angrily.

‘I don’t give a fuck.’ The newcomer snapped. There was a sharp intake of breath from Winterman’s people. Winterman actually took a step forward, as did the Delta operator who had been assigned to him as close protection. ‘You don’t like your orders, remove yourself from the CP and go and have a cry somewhere. We’ve measured cocks, mine’s bigger. Now, are we getting on with the matter at hand or do I have you arrested for disobeying a direct order?’

Winterman was shaking with fury. He badly wanted to hurt this man. Nobody had spoken to him like that since he’d been a junior officer. The vein on his forehead was pulsing with barely controlled rage.

‘I know you, don’t I?’ Winterman managed. He had definitely seen the man somewhere before, probably Iraq at a guess.

‘I’ve got no time for you special forces cowboys, but you’re the best I’ve got for the job in hand. My name is Commander Lockhart. You can call me “Sir’.’ He turned and gestured to a group of civilians who had been standing by the entrance to the CP and gestured for them to enter. The Rangers on guard halted them and then turned to look at Winterman. Reluctantly, the Major nodded and they were allowed in.

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 if 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.

‘I like unarmed people,’ Chavez muttered. Barnes had to agree with her.

They were close to the spire now but still could not see the base of it.

‘Okay, lets move up and get eyes on,’ Barnes told them over the tac radio. He reckoned they would see the base of the spire around the next corner.

‘Jesus!’ T had said it quietly but Barnes had still heard his exclamation. Barnes looked across the road. There was a figure in the doorway of one of the frozen houses. T had let his M249 drop on its sling and was holding his Mk 23 in one hand and pushing the figure back with the other.

‘Earl cover our six, Chavez our twelve, keep shooting footage and eyes out all around,’ Barnes said and, glancing up and down the street to make sure that there was no-one in sight, he quickly crossed the road.

‘Ma’am, you need to go back into the house and lie down,’ T was telling the woman who kept on advancing on him. Barnes’ stomach churned as he caught a good look at her. She was clearly sick, very sick. She was repeating something in Spanish that he didn’t understand but it sounded similar to what they had all heard being chanted.

The woman looked old, but Barnes knew that it could be difficult to judge age in parts of the world where life was hard. She wore a long skirt and a filthy t-shirt. There were seeping growths around her nose, her mouth and her eyes, which were milky and blank. She was obviously blind. The growths looked like externalised tumours to Barnes.

‘Seriously, ma’am, you need to stay back,’ T said. The woman wasn’t listening. She kept on reaching for him as he pushed her back. Barnes saw that she had bleeding holes in her palms. They looked self-inflicted. He glanced down at her feet and saw that they were bloody as well. She was smearing her blood on T. The medic pushed her back hard and then brought his leg up and used that to gently kick her back even further into the house. Then he closed the door as far as he could with the ice covering it and held it there.

‘Did you see her lymph glands?’ T asked. Barnes shook his head. ‘They were swollen. They’d gone hyperbubonic.’

‘Disease?’ Barnes asked, his heart sinking. What the fuck have we been dropped into? Barnes thought, trying to suppress his anger at command.

‘Contagion,’ T said. Barnes could see the medic was fighting to control his fear.

‘Can you do anything for her?’ Barnes asked. The woman tried to wrench the door open. T had to yank it closed again. For someone old and sick she seemed very strong.

‘Give her something for the pain. Put her out of her misery.’

‘She didn’t look like she was miserable or in pain,’ Barnes said as he drew the Mk 23 and began screwing the suppressor on it. T watched him. Both of them knew that the woman would give away their position, compromise the patrol.

‘It is my medical opinion that there is nothing we could do for her and she attacked us,’ T said, letting Barnes know he had his back.

‘This is on me, understand?’ Barnes told the medic. Time to commit a war crime, he thought. ‘Open the door.’

T let go of the door handle and it was wrenched forward. The top of the diseased woman’s head came off as Barnes fired. For a moment both men thought that she wasn’t going to fall over. Finally she swayed and fell back. Barnes stepped into the house and put two rounds into her chest.

‘Watch our six,’ Barnes told T as he slung his M4. He wanted the suppressed pistol in case there were any more. T nodded, but Barnes knew the other man was worried about contact and infection.

‘LT,’ Chavez said over the tac radio. ‘You’re going to need to see this.’ Barnes glanced up and down the dirt track that passed for a street here. He saw a dog cross behind them but nothing else moved. Chavez was lying down by the bend in the road, using one of the ice-encased houses as cover. She was looking around the corner, the DV camera on her M4 shooting footage as she did so. Barnes made his way over to her and glanced around the corner.

‘Shit,’ Barnes said. The ground was broken and had then frozen over where the spire seemed to have pushed up out of the earth. It looked like it had partially destroyed some of the houses as it had risen from the ground. Around the base of the spire were people. Many of them looked like peasant farmers, but others had on the uniform of FARC guerrillas and others were better dressed, or didn’t look Hispanic, suggesting cartel gunmen and mercenaries. All of them showed signs of the external tumorous growths and many of them were bleeding from what Barnes suspected were self-inflicted wounds. They were chanting gibberish and bits of Spanish as they swayed backwards and forwards towards the strange spire. Barnes was beginning to wonder if the spire, which seemed somehow inert to him, was some kind of delivery device for a biological weapon. Though whose, he couldn’t even begin to imagine. Barnes ducked back behind the house.

‘Estimate?’ he asked Chavez.

‘There’s easily more that a thousand people there. They must have come from all over the local area. What’s wrong with them, LT?’

Barnes didn’t answer, instead he took the handset off the sat uplink on Chavez’s back.

‘Venom two-one to Broadsword actual, requesting an immediate medevac and quarantine, we have clear signs of a biological contagion here.’ Chavez turned around to look up him. She looked scared and angry.

‘Negative, Venom two-one. Make contact with the villagers. We need to know what’s happening.’ The voice giving the order was the same that had replaced Major Winterman’s when they’d been re-tasked, except the background noise was different. It was clear that whoever was giving them orders was no longer in the CP. He was obviously transmitting from a helicopter in flight.

‘I don’t think you understand the situation here on the ground, Broadsword actual, I cannot risk further exposure of my people to whatever this is.’

‘Venom two-one, one of the things about being a soldier is sometimes we have to risk death. One of the interesting things about orders, particularly ones like this, that come down from the Joint Chiefs like it had been written on stone by God almighty and handed to Charlton-fucking-Heston himself, is that they are non-fucking negotiable. You don’t do what I am telling you to do and I will not only have you and your men court martialed for disobeying a direct order but for cowardice as well and I will try very hard to make sure that the consequences are just as bad for you as if you’d caught the Black-fucking-Death itself. Do you understand me, soldier?’

Barnes tried to resist the urge to crush the handset.

‘Fucking asshole,’ Chavez muttered, having heard most of the conversation. ‘I think he’s going to have an accident if we get out of here.’

‘I don’t want to hear that, Chavez,’ Barnes told her, though he was having similar thoughts himself.

‘Fucking reluctant soldiers!’ Lockhart spat as he threw the radio handset on the ground. Asher was struggling into his NBC suit in the cramped confines of the Sikorsky S-92, a civilian derivate of the military’s Black Hawk helicopters. There were only two of the CELL military contractors with Lockhart in this chopper, not counting the door gunner. The rest of the personnel in the chopper were Asher’s scientists. The other two S-92s, however, were both carrying full squads of CELL soldiers.

‘How contagious is the virus?’ Lockhart asked Asher. The scientist was sweating heavily, which made it very unpleasant to be in an enclosed space like a helicopter with him. Lockhart was looking forward to Asher being fully encased by the protective NBC suit.

‘Unless they are caught in the initial sporeing they should be fine,’ Asher told him.

‘Then why the suits?’

‘In case this time it’s different. After all, we’ve only seen this once before and the resources to research the virus at the time were very rudimentary indeed.’

Lockhart gave this some thought and then continued putting on his NBC suit.

They had discussed it. Barnes had explained the order. If they just wanted to bug out he would understand and claim that he had given the order to hang back. It wasn’t an unpopular suggestion, he could tell, but they were soldiers.

Barnes had told them that he was prepared to try and make contact with the infected on his own.

T had told them that if the virus was airborne then they were all already infected. If not and it was from contact then he was probably infected, so it would be best if he made contact with them. Also he had the best medical training out of the four of them. The cowardly part of Barnes had wanted to let T do it.

Chavez had said that she was filming it anyway and command seemed to want intel. She had sworn a lot more, but that had been the crux of what she had said.

Earl had said nothing, just waiting for the others to make their decision.

That was how Barnes had found himself, flanked by Chavez and T, walking down the middle of the street trying not to slip on the now wet ice. They were walking towards a very large group of very sick people who seemed to be worshipping the strange spire. Earl was nowhere to be seen. He was watching over them through the scope on his M14. Barnes felt envy for the sniper, but conceded that Earl was where he could do the most good.

Barnes and T had their weapons slung diagonally across their front. They had their hands on them but weren’t pointing them at the sick people. Chavez’s M4 was pointed at them but only, she told herself, because of the camera.

Barnes had no real idea what he was supposed to be doing. T was looking all around but all the people seemed to be at the spire. The sick people were ignoring them. The closer they got the more they could see the horrible, seeping, tumorous growths. They were concentrated around orifices but some of the people were obviously more heavily infected and the growths covered a lot more of their visible skin. Many of the people present were also suffering from self-inflicted wounds. Often the wounds were on palms, feet or in the victim’s side. Barnes guessed they were supposed to represent stigmata.

‘What’ve we got, Earl?’ Barnes asked over the tac radio.

‘If there’s anyone else out here, I can’t see them,’ the sniper told him. It wasn’t the most reassuring way to phrase it, Barnes decided.

They were less than a hundred feet away from the mass of people. They had beatific expressions on their face. They were staring at the spire with unbridled religious adoration and awe. They couldn’t fail to notice the three soldiers stood out in the open, but were ignoring them.

‘Erm, excuse me?’ Barnes tried quietly. Chavez turned to look at him. It had been weak and he knew it. ‘Can I have your attention please? We are United States soldiers, we are here to help you! Is anyone in charge? Is there a doctor amongst you?’

A few of them turned around but then went back to worshipping the tower, though to Barnes their worship looked a little like gibbering and drooling.

‘Okay, now that we’ve tried to make contact can we leave?’ Chavez asked.

Good idea, Barnes thought.

‘Not until we get some intel,’ Barnes said. What fucking intel? he wondered angrily, these people are sick and mad. Chavez looked like she wanted to object but kept quiet. After all, she had agreed to come with them.

‘Are you the prophet?’ the question was asked in good, if slurred and heavily accented, English. The man wore hard-wearing jeans and work boots but the dog collar gave him away as a priest. The man’s throat looked swollen and there were growths all around his mouth, which explained the slurring, and the drooling. He had cuts all around his head. Barnes guessed it was supposed to suggest a crown of thorns.

‘What?’ Barnes was taken aback by the question. ‘No sir, I’m a United States soldier. We’re here to find out what’s happening and then report back so your government — with our help — can better respond to the situation here.’ Barnes cursed himself for mentioning their government. This area was controlled by FARC and there were FARC guerrillas amongst the congregation here.

‘I think you are the prophet,’ the priest said.

Well, this never happened in Iraq, Barnes thought.

‘Have they converted to Islam?’ Chavez asked.

‘Yes, that’s a Muslim mining drill they’re worshipping,’ T answered. The tension was apparently turning him sarcastic.

The priest started moving towards them. Other members of the strange congregation were starting to notice the three soldiers.

‘Father, what’s happening here?’ Barnes asked. ‘What is that thing?’

‘It is a herald,’ the priest told them. He was still advancing. Barnes found himself taking a step back and he noticed Chavez and T did the same thing. T slipped a little on the wet ice.

‘A herald of what?’ Barnes asked.

‘The god who brings the white flower. The winged serpent, Quetzalcoatl,’ the father told them. Barnes glanced at Chavez. She just shrugged.

‘I think it was one of the words they were chanting,’ she told him.

More of the strange congregation were getting up now and moving to join the priest.

‘Maybe the cartel is testing drugs on them?’ T suggested as his mind desperately grabbed for rational explanations. The priest, and now more of the congregation, were advancing on the three of them.

‘Okay Father, I need you and the rest of your people to stay back. You could be contagious,’ Barnes told them.

‘Just say the word,’ Earl all but whispered over the tac radio.

‘What we got, Earl?’ Barnes asked.

‘Clear behind, all X-rays are in front of you.’

‘I think you are the prophet. There is light in your flesh. We must follow the light.’ The priest was becoming more intense. Some of the people advancing on them were starting to gibber in tongues. Others were just repeating the word profeta over and over again.

‘Sir, I’m going to have to ask you and the others to stay back!’ Barnes repeated, putting every ounce of authority that had been drilled into him by military service into his voice. They kept coming.

‘Just say the word,’ Earl repeated.

‘Yes, you are the prophet and the light and the flesh is the way to Quetzalcoatl.’

‘Okay, get back now!’ Barnes lifted the M4 and pointed it at the priest. T brought his weapon to bear as well. ‘If you do not stop moving then we will fire!’

‘I have a clear shot on the priest,’ Earl told him. Barnes felt beads of sweat appear and then freeze on his forehead.

‘The flesh and the light of the prophet is a sacrament and must be consumed it is the way to…’

‘Now,’ Barnes whispered over the tac radio. Barnes actually felt the bullet go past. The priest’s face collapsed in on itself and turned red. The priest remained standing for a moment and then toppled to the ground. ‘Weapons free,’ Barnes told the others.

The diseased congregation charged. Barnes had a moment to register a moving wall of people running at him. He opened fire, long bursts, the muzzle flash flickering at the end of the M4’s barrel. They started going down, but not nearly enough of them. Those hit were carried along in the press of the charge or fell to the floor, tripping over others coming from behind them, but always another person took their place.

T was firing long bursts as well, playing them across the press of the diseased people who were charging the three soldiers. The M249 SAW was designed for suppressing crowds, but that didn’t work when the people you were trying to suppress had no sense of self-preservation, when all they wanted to do was turn you into one of them.

Earl was killing with every shot from his concealed position, but there were still too many of them.

Chavez emptied the clip from her M4 then turned and ran to the next fall-back point.

‘Reloading,’ she cried over the tac radio as she ejected the empty clip, rammed another one home, racked the slide, charged the weapon and then grabbed a grenade from her webbing.

Barnes’s M4 ran dry.

‘Danger close!’ He reached forward and squeezed the trigger on the underslung M203 grenade launcher, aiming it straight into the charging crowd that was nearly on him. He fired the grenade launcher but didn’t stop to see the effects of the grenade. Barnes turned and sprinted towards the fall-back point. Earl was trying to say something over the tac radio as the fragmentation grenade exploded in the crowd. Bodies and limbs flew about the street. More of the diseased people went down as fragments flew through limbs and bodies at velocity. Barnes staggered as something sharp tore into his upper arm. Something wet hit his head, tearing his fleece hat off.

‘Say again!’ Barnes shouted as he sprinted, reloading the M4 and sliding another forty-millimetre grenade, a beehive round, into the grenade launcher.

‘Grenade!’ Chavez shouted as she threw a fragmentation grenade into the right flank of the charging diseased people, away from T on the left.

‘They’re flanking you, running behind the houses parallel with the street on both sides,’ Earl shouted over the tac radio.

Chavez’s grenade exploded amongst them, sending more flying, sending limbs spinning and cutting more of them down. Those that had been hit but not killed by fragments and bullets kept coming, limping, crawling or just pulling themselves along with their remaining fingers as others trampled them.

Barnes skidded to a halt by Chavez, turned and started firing. He saw T as he turned to run but they were on him, grabbing and tearing at him. He tried to break free but there were too many of them. Then those closest to T started dying. The top of the head of one came off. Another spun round as he got hit in the chest. Another went down, and then another, as Earl shot them from cover.

More of them were still running at Barnes and Chavez.

T broke free.

‘Reloading,’ Earl said over the tac radio. It sounded like a death sentence to Barnes. He reached forwards again and fired the M203. The beehive round filled the air with buckshot as if he’d just fired an enormous shotgun. A line of people directly in front of Barnes went down in a spray of red. He was trying to buy time for T.

They brought T down. The M249 was still firing and a few rounds impacted close to Barnes. Barnes shifted the M4 and started firing single shot at those around T. T was fighting like a demon. Barnes was horrified to see them trying to bite him, claw at him. He saw one of the diseased people, an old man covered in tumorous growths, tear T’s cheek open with his teeth. The medic was trying to crawl out from under them. The last Barnes saw of him T was reaching towards them, then he was dragged back and disappeared amongst the diseased crazies.

One of the diseased people hit the ground, sliding across the ice, almost colliding with Barnes. He’d been shot by Earl. Barnes shifted aim and started firing as he backed away — they were almost on him again. He heard Chavez screaming. Barnes glanced to his right. They’d come pouring out of an alley between two of the houses. They had her and were tearing at her face, her arms, her legs, anywhere that wasn’t armoured. She was already turning red. Her cries were cut off as her throat was torn open.

Barnes shifted aim, trying to help Chavez, knowing it was too late. He fired. It was a tracer round, warning him that he only had two more rounds in the magazine. He fired those and ran. He had no choice. She was dead already. He would just keep telling himself that.

Barnes pulled a fragmentation grenade off his webbing, pulled the pin, let the spoon flip off and then threw it over his shoulder in a way that he really hadn’t been trained to do. He ejected the empty clip and tried to reload whilst sprinting but dropped the magazine.

Ahead of him he saw Earl move out onto the street, firing his M14 rifle quickly. Barnes was aware of bullets passing him. He heard people fall and others collide with them and go down, but there were always more.

He saw Earl’s head jerk to the left. One of them came sprinting out of a gap between two houses. The diseased woman was practically on top of the sniper.

The grenade exploded behind Barnes and the pressure wave hit him, almost knocking him down. He felt fragments impact his Kevlar but he managed to keep running.

He watched as Earl grabbed his knife and moved to the side, ramming it into the diseased woman’s throat. She ran past him a few steps and then sprawled out on the ice, turning it red. Earl drew his Mk 23 and began firing rapidly into the alley between the houses. Diseased people were collapsing to the ground as they tried to reach the sniper. Earl kept backing away, firing the pistol.

Barnes felt someone grab the back of his webbing. Then another hand grabbed him, and another. He was yanked back. He slipped on the ice and was taken to the ground.

They were all around him, hands reaching for him. They threw themselves onto the ground next to him, on top of him. His vision was filled with beatific faces, tumorous growths and teeth. As they clawed at him he heard disturbing ecstatic moans.

‘Run! Run!’ he screamed at Earl.

He kicked, punched, tried pushing himself away from them. Somehow he had his knife in his hand. There was blood. He felt teeth and ragged nails against his skin and there was more blood.

He heard a sound like a buzzsaw. Diseased people started going down close to him. Hydrostatic shock blew limbs off sick bodies and sent them spinning into the air as a frightening amount of bullets rained down on the street.

Barnes renewed his fighting. There was no room for the advanced hand-to-hand combat techniques he’d been taught at Fort Bragg. He was kicking out with his feet, punching out with his left fist and every time he felt someone break skin he tried to stab them, a lot.

There was now the constant buzzsaw noise of minigun fire. Someone was cutting down the diseased like a scythe through wheat. Barnes kicked one of the diseased people in the face, a little girl. A man got Barnes’ knife in the face. Barnes found that he had enough room to draw his pistol. He started firing the Mk 23 rapidly, trying to clear himself room. Firing one-handed he pushed himself to his feet. Someone grabbed at him. Their face caved in as Barnes shot him at point-blank range. The muzzle flash set the man’s beard on fire. Barnes practically hurdled him as he broke free of the diseased people and ran.

He felt them grab at him again but he was free and ahead of the mass, but then there were more of them ahead of him. He fired at them on the run. One fell, but now his pistol was empty. As he ran he reloaded the Mk 23, trying not to drop the magazine again.

A civilian Blackhawk hove into view over him. It was flying sideways. Barnes had a moment to register that the door gunner was wearing a protective NBC suit. The door gunner’s rotary minigun started firing. The muzzle flash was a constant as the buzzsaw noise started again and the diseased people chasing him started falling.

With it clear behind him, Barnes stopped running and started firing at the four ahead of him. He couldn’t see Earl anywhere. He took the four sick people ahead of him down and then swung around. One of the diseased people had managed to avoid the minigun’s onslaught. Barnes shot him twice in the head. The slide on the pistol came back, the magazine empty. Barnes ejected it and replaced it rapidly. His M4 had been torn away in the fight.

He was gasping for breath. There were three of the helos. He could see that now. All of them were pouring fire down into the village. One of them was firing into the rainforest. Bullets from the minigun cut swathes through the frozen trees, shattering them like crystal.

He looked around for more of the sick people. All he saw was a sea of corpses.

They circled the village looking for more of the infected to kill. Lockhart looked down at the patrol leader stood in the middle of the street, holding a smoking pistol, looking for more targets, his people gone. Lockhart felt sorry for the man.

‘It’s very exciting this,’ Asher said. Lockhart wished that his orders had allowed him to ride in a different helo. ‘Is it safe for us to go down?’ Lockhart just gave the scientist a look of contempt.

The commander listened as he received a message through the headset he was wearing.

‘Well?’ Asher demanded. Lockhart took a deep breath.

‘The Joint Chiefs have agreed with the boards’ recommendation. The Firestorm protocol is enabled. The bird’s already in the air.’

Asher nodded. ‘Typical tiny military minds. We’ll have to act quickly, then.’

‘What about Lieutenant Barnes?’

‘What about him?’

Barnes watched as armed men fast-roped out of two of the choppers, whilst the third chopper covered them. They were wearing NBC suits with body armour over the top.

Four of them advanced on him, covering him with their carbines.

‘Lieutenant Barnes. I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to relinquish your weapon.’

‘Are you fucking kidding me?! We’re on the same side!’ For one moment he thought that maybe they worked for the cartel, or FARC, except they had called him by his name. He handed over his Mk 23 and then sat down hard.

It was then he started to realise how badly hurt he was. He was covered in cuts, abrasions and bite marks. Some of them were deep and bleeding quite badly. He’d taken a through-and-through in his right upper arm, probably fragmentation from one of his own grenades. He had another graze on his forehead, either from another fragment or a bullet. Judging from how hard he was finding it to breathe he reckoned he had at least one broken rib, probably due to a stray round, at a guess from the minigun. It had only grazed his body armour. Frankly, he was lucky to be alive. He noticed that none of the people in the NBC suits were rushing to offer him medical aid. They had supplied him with a number of armed guards, however.

Then he started to think about T, and Chavez, and wonder where the fuck Earl was.

Then he remembered them all around him, reaching for him, teeth in his flesh. He started to shake uncontrollably.

The folding table had a number of scientific instruments on it. Asher was pouring over an instrument that Lockhart took to be some kind of microscope. Lockhart glimpsed the stopwatch on the table, checked the countdown, and then turned to look at the strange tower. Three members of Asher’s team were using a plasma cutter in an attempt to remove part of it. Their attempt was working but it looked to be taking a lot longer than he would expect for a plasma torch to cut through anything.

‘What happened here?’ Lockhart asked the scientist. Asher sighed so theatrically that Lockhart was able to make it out through the heavy NBC suit.

‘At a guess it was an incursion that didn’t fully initialise. Probably due to a lack of energy.’

‘And the virus?’

This time Lockhart heard the theatrical sigh over the radio link. The commander started grinding his teeth.

‘Commander, I’m working in the most appalling conditions, under ridiculous time restraints and trying to do science through these preposterous suits, which is a bit like trying to play tennis whilst zipped into a body bag…’

‘Just answer the fucking question,’ Lockhart snapped.

Asher stared at the commander. The effect was wasted due to neither of them being able to see very much as a result of the suits’ masks.

‘The answer to the fucking question, commander, is yes, according to my preliminary, and I emphasise the word preliminary, findings, this is very similar to the Tunguska strain.’

‘Is it contagious?’

‘In your terms that,’ Asher pointed at the spire, ‘is basically a big landmine crossed with a fungus.’

‘An area denial weapon?’

‘Whenever it breaches the surface it spores and, as far as we know, only those infected with the spores come down with the virus. The spores themselves become inert after an amount of time we have yet to determine.’

‘So he’s going to be fine?’ Lockhart asked, nodding towards where four of his men were guarding Barnes. ‘Even with the amount of contact he’s had?’

‘As far as I’m aware he’ll be perfectly fine. Fit as a badly-beaten fiddle, right up to the moment that this area is sanitised.’

‘And you have enough samples?’ Lockhart asked. Asher didn’t answer immediately. Instead he just looked around at the carpet of corpses on the ground.

‘I think so,’ the scientist finally said, sarcastically.

‘Good. Get that sample of the spire and get your people back on the helo.’ Lockhart turned and started walking towards Barnes.

‘Commander, I do hope you’re not forgetting your instructions,’ Asher said. Lockhart swung around to face the piggy little scientist.

‘They’re called orders, and I don’t need a stinking little pig of a man to remind me of my duty, do you understand me?’ Without waiting for an answer he turned back and strode towards the battered Delta Force officer.

Major Winterman strode across the playing field the US and UK forces were using as an airfield for their helicopters. He was heading towards the British quarter.

‘No ma’am, in my opinion it is untenable to attempt to run special operations under these circumstances.’ He was talking over a secure sat phone to General Pamela Follet, the commanding officer of United States Special Operations Command at MacDill air force base in Tampa, Florida. ‘It puts every last one of my operators at risk and frankly, I feel it’s an usurpation of military resources for corporate agendas. I have not taken this decision lightly, but I am tendering the resignation of my commission, effective immediately. I will of course serve out the remainder of Operation Scarface unless you see fit to replace me, which I would understand.’ Winterman listened to the General’s response. He had spotted the individual he begrudgingly wanted to speak to. He stopped walking. ‘Frankly, General, the Joint Chiefs can kiss my ass and yes do please put that on record. If any of them have a problem with my conduct then they are more than welcome to come down here and discuss it with me personally. I should also make you aware that the moment, and I mean the very second, I am relieved of command I am going to find that so-called-commander-marine-washout-Dominic Lockhart and beat his bitch-ass to death. Yes ma’am, you have a good day as well.’

Having finished murdering his career, the major continued heading towards the UK part of the base as one of their Chinooks came into land. The man he wanted to speak to had noticed his approach and stood up.

‘Major!’

Winterman turned around. He saw three members of D-squadron’s recce/sniper troop running towards him. He recognised Sergeants Hawker and Cortez and second lieutenant Dunn. It had been Dunn who shouted.

‘I suspect it’s just mister now,’ Winterman told them. The three of them looked like they had just come off a job. Dunn looked momentarily confused but just launched ahead anyway.

‘Major, with all due respect, what the fuck is going on? Where is T’s patrol? We get to the CP and they said you’d been relieved of command.’ Winterman looked at the six foot tall operator. Dunn looked like he’d been carved out of stone. He knew that all three of them went way back with Thomas and Earl. They liked Chavez as well.

‘You ready to get into some trouble?’ Winterman asked. Cortez shrugged, Hawker grinned and nodded.

‘Sure,’ Dunn told him.

‘Follow me.’ Winterman turned on his heel and continued towards the obnoxious SAS “liaison” he’d been saddled with earlier in the operation. ‘Sergeant!’ Winterman shouted.

The squat, shaven-headed SAS trooper looked at Winterman and the three fully armed and still camoed-up operators he had with him.

‘Is this a beating?’ the SAS sergeant asked, wondering if he’d pushed the yank major too hard. ‘Because the boys are right behind me in the tent and I’m not afraid to scream like a little girl if things turn nasty.’

‘Who the fuck’s this?’ Cortez asked.

‘No sergeant, it’s not a beating,’ Winterman told him.

‘In which case, either call me Sykes or Psycho, guv. You go shouting words like sergeant around and people are likely to think I’m some kind of soldier or something.’

‘I’m sure nobody would make that mistake,’ Dunn told the Brit, smiling.

‘What can I do you septics for?’ Sykes asked.

‘Septics?’ Hawker asked.

‘Septic tanks, yanks, it’s rhyming… never mind. This to do with the spot of bother you had this morning?’ he asked Winterman. The Major nodded. ‘What do you need?’

‘I’m forced to go outside my chain of command. How much pull do you have with 7 Squadron?’ the Major asked.

‘I can ’ave a word if you like.’

Barnes watched the NBC-suited figure approach him. The man carried himself like he was used to command. He had seen most of the other personnel, except the fat one, defer to him. The NBC-suited figures were packing up the two choppers on the ground and getting ready to leave whilst the other chopper circled them. Barnes had been using his med kit to see to his own wounds as best he could whilst four of the gunmen guarded him.

The commander reached him and stopped, standing over the lieutenant.

‘You’re not going to take me with you, are you?’ Barnes said, with a degree of resignation.

‘I’m sorry, son.’

Barnes looked up at the man but all he saw was the mask of the protective suit.

‘At least take my people’s bodies with you.’ The commander shook his head. ‘Who are you people?’

‘Do you want some advice, son?’ The commander asked. Barnes didn’t answer. ‘Run, as far and as fast as you can. Head south, but start now.’

‘Have I got it? The virus or whatever the fuck that nasty shit was.’

The commander shook his head.

‘Am I a carrier? Will I be contagious?’

‘No.’

Barnes looked up at the commander’s mask.

‘I’m going to find out what happened here, you understand me?’

‘You need to get going, son, now.’

Tiredly Barnes stood up, got his bearings and, with every muscle in his battered and wounded body protesting, he started to run.

Lockhart watched him go and then turned and climbed onto the last chopper as it took off.

A Spirit B2 belonging to the 509th Bomb Wing out of Whiteman Air Force Base, Missouri, dropped the smart bomb from over ten miles away at a height of forty thousand feet. The bomb tracked the transponder left by Commander Lockhart at the base of the spire in the village unerringly. As it approached the spire a conventional explosive within the bomb was detonated, scattering the nanofuel over the surrounding area. That fuel then auto-ignited.

Barnes heard the explosion first. Then he was aware of a rushing noise as a powerful wind seemed to suck the oxygen out of the air. He had taken as many of the painkillers as he had dared from the med kit, but sprinting through a frozen jungle was still agony and he spent a lot of time slipping over and sliding into trees. Then the blast wave hit. The frozen trees exploded. Ice fragments filled the air. Barnes was torn off his feet and flung across a narrow gulley. He had just about enough time to realise that he was in real trouble.

The RAF 7 Squadron pilot had brought the HC3 Chinook to a hover. Major Winterman, Dunn and Psycho were all crowded into the helicopter’s cockpit hatchway. They, along with the pilot and co-pilot, were staring at what looked like a solid wall of fire hundreds of feet high. It bathed the inside of the chopper in a hellish red light.

Lockhart leant out of the lead helicopter, looking behind him. They had just got clear of the fuel-air bomb’s extended blast wave. It looked like the air itself had caught fire.

Below them was devastation. More than two square miles of rainforest had just ceased to exist. It was steaming, blackened ground now. Beyond that, many of the trees had been knocked over by the pressure wave and parts of the forest were burning.

‘Psycho, what have you got us into?’ the Chinook pilot demanded as he circled the area.

‘Jimmy… I’d no idea,’ Psycho said apologetically. ‘Cool though, aye?’ Dunn and Winterman turned to stare at the SAS trooper, appalled. ‘I’m just saying,’ Psycho said defensively.

‘I’ve got smoke on our five,’ Cortez said from the helicopter’s main cargo area. Winterman and Dunn headed back to look.

‘No shit, the jungle’s on fire,’ Psycho said as the pilot swung the Chinook around.

‘I see it,’ the co-pilot said, pointing at a thin plume of yellow smoke.

Barnes dropped the smoke canister he’d set off when he’d heard the chopper and collapsed to the ground and mercifully passed out.

He came to moments later to see the twin rotors of a Chinook overhead. Time skipped a beat. He came to again to see a squat, powerfully built, shaven-headed soldier holding a General Purpose Machine Gun standing over him.

‘You’re all fucked up, mate,’ the soldier said in a broad London accent.

‘Yes sir, one of the Delta Force operators survived and another is missing.’ Lockhart said into the secure sat phone. ‘Yes, sir, I am aware of Dr Asher’s recommendation but it is my belief that a sanction will just draw more attention to the situation and frankly Asher is a horse’s ass. That soldier fought hard and deserved to live.’ Lockhart listened intently to what was being said on the other end of the line. ‘I still have reservations about the whole program, but frankly I think Lieutenant Barnes would be an excellent choice if you’re still intent on going ahead with it.’ Lockhart listened again. ‘Thank you, Mr Hargreave.’

Lockhart folded the sat phone away and took another sip of his Bourbon as he glanced out the window of the corporate jet heading north. On the table in front of him was a folder labelled Raptor Team.