Infestation

- 1 -

“This is bollocks, Sarge,” Mac said. “Why are we jumping in the dark? We’re out in the middle of nowhere; it’s not like anybody’s going to see us coming.”

Captain John Banks smiled. Mac was always the first to complain; you could set your watch by it. It was a small bit of normality on a night where the normal was too far away. They cruised in darkness at fifteen thousand feet, somewhere to the west of Baffin Island, silent running through the Canadian skies. Twelve hours ago, Banks was ready for a spot of leave, even had a ticket booked on a flight to Greece with wife and both kids excited, packed, and raring to go. Instead, he’d driven them to the airport to see them off, before reporting to base at the urgent request of the colonel. Now where he was headed was going to be a tad colder. At least he had his own handpicked men with him, but it had been the only choice he’d been given.

“There’s a Russian boat out there somewhere where she shouldn’t be, John,” the colonel had said back in Lossiemouth that afternoon. “And we think it’s in trouble, maybe big trouble if the sketchy report we have is to be believed. There might be something worth salvaging though, and it’d be nice to know what they were doing snooping about so deep in Canadian waters. It’s the usual deal for your team; get in quick, have a shufti, and report back. And don’t get dead in the process.”

So now Banks, his Sergeant Frank Hynd, and the small squad of four men he trusted more than anyone else in the world were out – in the middle of nowhere as Mac put it – getting ready to fall out of the sky into the cold black below.

All in all, I’d rather be in Greece.

“Coming up on drop point. Two minutes,” the pilot said over the tannoy.

“Okay, Sarge,” Banks said. “Line them up.”

Mac looked like he might grumble again, but Frank Hynd put a stop to that quick enough – one look from the sarge was usually enough. The other three; McCally, Nolan, and Briggs – Tom, Dick, and Harry as the sarge called them – lined up behind Banks as the rear of the plane opened up, showing roaring blackness beyond. Mac and Hynd lumbered forward, shoving the box of their gear ahead of them. Banks counted them down from five and they rolled the box out into the night.

Seconds later, all six of them flew free in the air, following it down.

This was Banks’ favorite part of any mission; the leap into the unknown, with butterflies in your belly and wind roaring all around you; it felt like freedom, even despite the bite of the cold and the frost forming at his lips and ears. In those early seconds, it scarcely felt like falling but more as if he skimmed, like a flat stone, across the rim of the world.

The rest of the men were merely darker shadows in the black but they’d done enough night jumps together to know they’d be in tight formation; and if any of them had a problem, it was too late for him to do much about it now.

He saw the chute of their gear box below him, counted to five, then pulled his own cord, following the other canopy down. It was a moonless night but also cloudless, the canopy of stars providing enough light for him to see the darker shadow of the island, their drop point, loom up below them. He looked over the shimmering waters of the bay to the north. If there was a Russian spy boat out there, it wasn’t showing any lights.

But that doesn’t mean they’re not there.

He stayed almost on top of the gear chute all the way and came in for a perfectly controlled landing twenty yards to the north of the box. He had plenty of time to gather up his chute before the wind could catch it again and drag it away, then made quickly for the box; despite its weight, it was being dragged, albeit slowly, across the rocks, its passage facilitated by the ice underfoot. Hynd landed nearby and hurried to help. By the time they’d got the gear chute disengaged and rolled up, the rest of the team were gathered around the box. All save one and Banks knew who that must be even before he checked the faces.

“Where’s Nolan?”

“I think I saw him drifting off west. You know Pat, sir,” Mac said. “Fucking useless at this jumping lark. Could be anywhere by now.”

Banks sighed.

“Okay, lads. Get kitted up before you freeze your balls off; five minutes, then we’ll go and look for our lost lamb.”

They were travelling light and fast so kitting up went smoothly; cold weather gear, lined and hooded parkas, balaclava hats, gloves and night vision glasses, each man with a flak jacket and webbing belt of ammo and a small backpack, a rifle and a knife. Banks knew they could all do a steady six miles an hour all night geared up in this terrain; he hoped to hell they didn’t have to.

“Mac – you’re on point, Briggs and McCally, you fetch Nolan’s gear – the stupid wanker is going to be an iced lollipop by the time we get to him and it’ll serve him right. Sarge – move them out.”

The ground was icy but rough underfoot, slippage kept to a minimum by the deep ridges and treads of their boots. Banks warmed up almost immediately inside the parka but knew better than to unzip it; it was a clear night in late spring, but they were above the Arctic Circle and he couldn’t afford to take any chances with the weather. He followed Mac as the Glaswegian led them quickly west toward where he said he’d last seen Nolan’s chute. They were heading toward the sea; Banks could see it ahead of them, the shimmer clear in his night vision goggles. He could only hope that the Irishman’s cack-handedness with a chute hadn’t brought him down in the water, for if that was the case, he might be dead already.

Nolan was alive and blue with cold by the time they found him a few minutes’ walk later, but he didn’t seem to notice it; all his attention was on the scene around him. He’d landed on a rocky shoreline, yards from the water. His chute still lay, opened out and spread, behind him, soaked, looking black and glossy in the night glasses. Despite the lack of color, Banks knew from bitter experience what blood looked like in the goggles, and there was a lot of it on the chute.

Far too much.

Banks went straight to his man, fearing the worst.

“Nolan, are you hurt, man?”

Nolan didn’t reply, even as Banks checked him out for a wound. But the blood wasn’t the Irishman’s and Bank’s noticed it soon enough when he looked at their feet; they both waded in wet slush that was also running red, and when he followed Nolan’s gaze along the shore, he quickly found the cause.

The beach had been home to a score or more of large basking mammals; walrus by the look of it given the size of the rib cages and the large ivory tusks he saw on the nearest body. They must have made an impressive sight hauled out on the shore, but now all of them were now little more than stripped carcasses. Gleaming bone and chunks of fat looked to be all that was left of the animals – that and the blood washing in and out with the small wavelets in the slush.

His team fell silent and still. Every man had his weapon in hand, and they’d taken position so that the squad as a whole had three-sixty warning of any attack.

“What the fuck, Sarge?” Mac said quietly.

Sergeant Hynd silenced the man with a finger to his lips and motioned that he would go south along the beach, sending Mac away to the north. Briggs and McCally got Nolan out of his chute and handed him his cold weather gear; Banks was glad to see that the Irishman was finally coming round from his shock.

“I missed the landing again, Cap,” he said as he got himself into his lined parka. “I fucked up. Sorry.”

Banks clapped the man on the back.

“Try to follow the rest of us. I’ve told you and told you, look below you, not at the view on the way down. You’ll live longer. But at least you stayed out of the water. And you’re still in one piece, that’s the main thing, unlike these poor beasties.”

Nolan’s eyes were still wide as he looked around.

“What could do this, Cap? Polar bear?”

“Maybe,” Banks replied, “if there were three or four of them. Maybe. Or, if they were closer to the water, I’m thinking a pod of orca might do this much damage.”

But it didn’t look like any kind of predator feeding Banks had ever seen. The carcasses looked like they’d been stripped and butchered rather than torn apart; it might be bears, but they’d have to be the tidiest bears he’d ever come across.

He put the thought away; whatever the cause of the carnage, it wasn’t why they were here – he couldn’t see how it had anything to do with their mission. Hynd and Mac returned from opposite ends of the small rocky beach.

“Anything?” Banks asked.

Hynd shook his head.

“Whatever did it, it was around this bit of the shore. And they must have left in the water. There’s no tracks, no blood or spoor over to the south.”

“Same the other way,” Mac said and repeated his earlier observation. “What the fuck, Sarge?”

Hynd spoke dryly.

“I know one thing, Mac. It wasn’t the fucking Russians; there’s no empty vodka bottles.”

Banks saw that the men were spooked by the extent of the slaughter around them; standing amid bloody ruin never did anybody any good, whether it was animal parts or human ones. He had to get the squad moving, before they all got the heebie-jeebies.

“Focus, lads,” he said. “We’re here for a boat full of Russian spies. If you see a polar bear, you have my permission to blow its nuts off, but we need to move and we need to move now. Nolan, you ready, son?”

The Irishman gave Banks the thumbs up.

“Okay, move out. Mac, you’re still on point; Sarge, you watch our backs. If we dropped where we should have, there’s an Inuit settlement two miles to the north; that’s our first stop.”

In the short briefing he’d had back at base before leaving, the colonel had told Banks they’d intercepted a garbled message from a remote settlement off Baffin Island, telling of a Russian boat in trouble in the bay to the north of them.

“The diplomatic boys have been on the phone all morning; we’ve asked for first crack at it and, subject to a few deal sweeteners to keep the politicos happy, you’ve got permission to go in for a look.

“We’ve got no idea how many Ruskies there are on board, or what degree of armaments they might or might not have, so sneaking up on them is the order of the day.

“The Canuck Air Force will be your backup,” his superior said. “You’ve got twenty-four hours after the drop to get a report back here; if you don’t, they’ll send in the heavy mob.”

It wasn’t a particularly strange mission; Banks and the squad had worked similar jobs with tighter deadlines in worse conditions but the torn and bloody walrus remains had set a chill in his spine. His normally reliable hunch told him things might not be as straightforward as either the colonel had implied, or he had hoped.

The men were thinking much the same. They kept up a stream of low-voiced chat, all of it about the bloody mess they’d left behind them on the shore. Nolan, in particular, talked incessantly about the scene he’d landed in.

“I thought I’d crash landed, died, and gone to Hell,” he said after describing his landing for the fourth time in as many minutes. “It was like a fecking horror film.”

“Away and shite, ya big girl’s blouse,” McCally replied. “I’ve seen worse in Inverness on a Saturday night.”

“Aye,” Nolan replied deadpan. “Your mother always was a messy eater.”

Briggs, McCally, and Nolan’s laughter carried clear across the cold night, earning them an admonishment from the sarge.

“Keep it down, lads,” Hynd said from their backs. “If the cap’s right, we’ll be coming up on the settlement soon.”

That was enough to get quiet and they walked in silence for another half a mile. The terrain was easy going, hard-packed snow only occasionally punctuated with icy rocks they easily navigated and they made good time. Banks brought the others to a stop when Mac signaled from ten yards ahead of them; trouble ahead.

Banks left Nolan, McCally, and Briggs at the rear while he and Sergeant Hynd quickly moved up to Mac’s position and joined him, lying flat on a frozen rocky outcrop, oblivious to the cold as they took in the scene below them.

An Inuit settlement sat around a sheltered bay at the foot of the slope below them – or rather, what was left of it sat there. The community had been made up of twenty or so buildings along the shoreline; six of those buildings were now little more than torn and shattered timber frames and many of the others showed signs of attack. Multiple smears, black in the night vision glasses but again all too obviously blood, showed on the track running along between the buildings and the water’s edge. Two small fishing boats sat moored in the tiny harbor, one of which was listing badly, holed at the port side; the other was almost completely sunk, only the wheel house showing above the water. Out in the bay, several hundred yards offshore, a larger boat sat at anchor; it was too dark to see any identification and there were no lights on the vessel itself.

“Our Russian pals?” Hynd asked in a whisper.

“I guess so,” Banks replied.

He turned his glasses up to full zoom and tried to make out more detail of the vessel but it was too far off in the night. He turned his attention to the harbor and checked the whole length of the settlement. There were no signs of any bodies.

But there’s an awful lot of blood.

When Mac spoke, neither he, nor Hynd had an answer for him.

“What the fuck, Sarge?”

They took their time descending to the village, alert for any sound, any sign of attack, and taking care not to show themselves on the skyline. But no attack came. Nothing moved in the settlement below them save small wavelets lapping on the pebbled shore. The only sound was the crisp crunch of their feet on the snow and Mac’s muttered curses when he slipped and almost fell.

Banks kept his eyes on the settlement, but the closer they got, the more obvious it was the people here had suffered a catastrophic attack to match the one visited on the walruses they’d found earlier.

A well-worn narrow path of small stones and gravel took them from the top of the ridge in a slow-winding meander all the way down to the waterline at the southern end of the bay.

The house at this bottom end of town had suffered less damage than some of the others had but when they walked off the slope and onto the shore-side track, they saw the main door of the property was smashed inward. It was as if a small car had gone straight through it, knocking the door in and splintering the timbers of the frame and surrounding porch. Blood smears, three of them, each a yard wide in the room before merging in the doorway, led from the house out across the path and into the sea, only stopping at the water’s edge. A child’s boot sat there, bobbing half in, half out of the slush, which was stained pink for six inches all around.

Banks, not wanting to ask his men to look at anything he wouldn’t look at himself, stepped up onto the front porch of the house and approached the torn and shattered doorway.

“Hello?” he called out, then immediately felt stupid for doing so, as it was obvious there was no one home. The room was sprayed with blood, as if a mad artist had been at work with a pot of red paint, splashing it across walls, furniture, and carpets with abandonment. The power was out but Banks didn’t need extra lights, he could see enough in his goggles. There were indeed no bodies here, just the blood and the smears but that alone was enough to tell him that no one had survived. Two of the blood streaks originated at a large leather sofa facing the television; the floor there was darker still and the sofa had been torn to shreds in places, as if by knives, or talons. The third lot of blood, which looked narrower than the other two, led from an overturned cot in the corner.

Their child’s cot.

He could recreate the whole scene in his mind, apart from being able to picture what manner of beast might have been capable of this amount of bloody violence without leaving a trace of itself behind.

“Bloody neat bears,” he muttered to himself as he went back out to join his men.

Hynd and Mac were already investigating the next house up but it too had suffered the same fate. There was more evidence of a full frontal assault and smears, two this time, leading back to the water’s edge, where some torn scraps of bloody clothing were all what remained of whoever had been dragged off. Hynd looked back at Banks and shook his head. He didn’t have to say anything; there was no chance of finding anyone alive here either.

“Cap? What is this bollocks?” Nolan said and Banks heard the tremor in the man’s voice. He’d seen Pat Nolan stand up alone to a frontal attack of a score of murderous mountain men in Afghanistan without a flinch, yet here he was, pale and trembling like a frightened boy.

“I know, lad,” Banks said softly. “This is a bad one. But it’s an animal attack of some kind, has to be.” He patted Nolan’s rifle. “Just point this at anything that shows up and fire until it goes away.”

Nolan managed a wan smile as Hynd and Mac came back to join them.

“What the fuck’s going on here?” Hynd asked but Banks didn’t have an answer, beyond the obvious.

“First a Russian boat in trouble, then all out fucking carnage? I don’t know. I thought at first the walruses were victims of a random animal attack. But I don’t believe in coincidences. Eyes open, lads. This could be a rough ride.”

The next two houses up the shore were much the same as the first; broken doors, no power, and bloody smears the only clues as to what might have happened. They found no signs of any weapons fire and although Banks checked the ground for tracks, looking in particular for Russian Army issue boots, he only found confusing scratches and scrapes, some almost bird-like, others more like gouges that might have been caused by claws. He had almost ruled out animal attack in favor of a Russian black-ops mission gone wrong but seeing those tracks, he wasn’t so sure of himself again.

By the time they reached the fifth house, it was obvious the whole settlement had suffered much the same fate, although here there were signs of gunfire but from inside the house itself. The homeowner had a shotgun, a big one judging by the spray pattern of shot. But if he’d hit anything, there was no sign of any spilled blood other than his own. And this time, Banks got plenty of evidence to consider, although he still couldn’t make sense of it.

The attackers hadn’t dragged this victim away; the big man lay in the doorway, scraps of clothing and flesh scattered like a blanket under him. There was nothing left of his legs but bone and fatty tissue – it likes its meat red – his groin and belly gaped open, ribs splayed as if forcibly burst apart, guts and heart and lungs stripped as neatly as the muscles from the thighs, with almost surgical precision. All the attack had left him was his face, mouth gaping in a never-ending scream. Eyes, blood red, almost popped from their sockets.

Banks bent to examine the wounds more closely, wishing now he’d taken time to do so back with the walruses. The long bones of the thighs were scratched, scraped almost, as if the flesh had been scoured off roughly. And now he saw it clearly, he knew what it reminded him of – bodies he’d seen in the Himalayas, of priests left out in sky burials for the crows and vultures. The butchered body below him had much the same look to what was left; a scavenger had been at him, or rather, several scavengers.

“My local knowledge is admittedly sketchy, Cap,” Hynd said softly, “but I don’t remember any wildlife around here that attacks, or feeds, like that.”

Banks stood, careful to avoid stepping in any gore. He shook his head.

“Me neither. But whatever it is, we can’t spend time looking for it; we’re on the clock here. Let’s make for the Russian boat and see what’s to be seen over there.”

The small harbor at the center of town was as quiet as the rest of the settlement and neither of the two boats moored at the short quay were going anywhere except down; both were holed at the waterline, their timbers split, as if pulled open from the outside.

Banks looked over the dark stretch of water between them and the Russian boat. The distance could be swum, if they were in the Med; here it would be suicide, a certain death within minutes in the freezing water.

“Plan B,” Banks said. “This is a fishing community; there’ll be other boats or dinghies somewhere around here. We need to find one and we need to find one fast. Two teams; Sarge, you take McCally and Briggs and sweep ‘round the backs of the buildings we passed; check sheds, backs of trucks, trailers – anywhere there might be a boat or inflatable. Nolan, you’re with Mac and me. We meet up back here in twenty.”

“And what if we don’t find a boat?” Mac said.

Banks smiled grimly.

“Then we’ll hollow out yon belly of yours and use you as a fucking canoe.”

Banks moved quickly north with Nolan and Mac right behind him. The first building they investigated sat directly opposite the quay across the shore track; the local post office. Unlike the houses, it looked to have survived any attacks; Banks spotted it had concrete underpinnings and brick walls, along with a main door that was built to last; metal and glass at least half an inch thick. Whatever had attacked the settlement had obviously chosen the easier pickings to be had in the timber houses on either side.

He rapped hard on the locked door but everything was still and dark inside. Like the rest of the buildings, if there was power, it wasn’t switched on. Either the locals hadn’t thought to seek refuge there or, more probable given what they’d seen so far, the people hadn’t been given the time. Whatever the case, a post office wasn’t the right place to be looking for a boat.

They circled the building anyway, with Mac taking the lead this time. A small paved area at the rear had three Skidoos parked in a neat line. He made a mental note; the vehicles might be handy if they needed to make an overland getaway at some point… but as Banks had suspected, there were no signs of a boat.

Banks saw the other three men down to their south in the backyard of one of the houses; they didn’t appear to be having much luck either. He led Nolan and Mac around to the front of the building to continue northward. Time was passing them by fast; if they didn’t find transport across to the Russian vessel soon, he might have to call in an abort; a first for him and his squad and a step he wasn’t ready to take.

“Step it up, lads,” he said and jogged, almost ran to the next house up the shore. This one looked more promising, a larger property set back a bit from the shore with a double garage to one side that might, if they were lucky, prove to be a boat shed. But when they turned off the shore track onto the short driveway, Banks’ hopes were dashed immediately; one of the garage doors had been pulled open and laid, a crumpled heap, to one side. There had been a boat inside, a fifteen-foot Zodiac dinghy. Like the boats in the harbor, this one was going nowhere; the rubber flayed, torn and tattered into ribbons with scraps of it laying over two more bodies; a woman and a child she had obviously been trying to protect. The woman’s back was flayed open, her spine clearly showing. The girl below her had suffered less wounding, but her legs were similarly stripped clean of flesh, the bone showing too white in Banks’ night vision. Nolan retched behind him and Banks turned to tell the lad to take it outside but never got to say it.

They all heard it at the same time, a scratching, scuttling noise, coming from the far corner on the other side of the dinghy. Mac and Nolan moved without having to be told, Mac circling ‘round toward the far side of the boat while Nolan joined Banks in heading directly for the source of the sound.

The first thing Banks saw was a prone man’s leg jerking as if in death throes.

We’ve got somebody alive here.

Then he stepped forward and saw what was feeding on the body and causing the leg to spasm.

Three of them; at first, Banks thought they were, surreally, armadillos, for they had the same armored look to them but these beasts were flatter, more oval in shape and definitely more crustacean than mammalian, with broad flat tails slapping on the garage floor as they fed. The more he looked the more they reminded him of the common woodlice that had infested his childhood home. But he wasn’t going to be able to pinch these between thumb and forefinger; the beasts feeding on the dead man’s guts in the corner were each almost two feet in length. They moved with great efficiency, the talon-like hooks on their feet tearing flesh in strips then fed it up along their length to an eager mouth that tore again, before passing into a maw. They chewed with sounds all too close to disgusting delight.

Banks saw Mac arrive on the far side of the body from him, weapon raised. He waved his finger – no shooting ­– he didn’t want their presence here given away. But Nolan at Banks’ side either didn’t see the signal or was too caught up in his disgust to obey. He raised his rifle and put three rapid rounds into the body of the beast nearest him, the shots almost deafening in the confines of the garage. And as if it was a signal, all three of the creatures, even the one Nolan had so clearly hit, turned and as one launched directly at the Irishman.

Nolan danced backward, his weapon still raised, but the things were too fast for him and were at his ankles, clambering over his legs before he could move. He screamed as ribbons of material, then flesh, were torn from his shins.

“Stand back, Cap,” Mac shouted and stepped forward. He kicked one of the beasts against the wall, where Banks was able to put it down; not easily, as it took three bursts – nine rounds – before it finally lay still. He turned to see Nolan trying to hold one of remaining two away from his face, even while its legs tore at his flak vest under his parka, trying to get at the soft parts.

Mac dispatched the second with three bursts of fire of his own, then both he and Banks were at Nolan’s side, trying to tear the third off the Irishman. The beast flew into frenzy, legs tearing and ripping, Nolan screaming in terror, material flying in scraps of duck down and nylon. Finally, Banks and Mac got a clean grip on it, although Mac took a sliced cut across the back of his glove in the process.

“On three, into the corner,” Banks shouted and on the count, they heaved the beast away from them. It immediately tried to come right back but by then all three men had their weapons up and ready. The creature blew apart in a deafening flurry of weapons fire, leaving behind only a smear on the wall and a ringing in Banks’ ears that was going to take a long time to fade.

Blood streamed under the torn fragments of Nolan’s trousers and the Irishman was pale, almost ashen but his voice was strong enough when he struggled to his feet and spoke.

“Going to need a hand here, Cap,” he said.

“I’ve got dressings in my pack,” Mac said but wasn’t given time to do anything about it. More rapid fire carried in to them from outside.

“I’m right with you,” Nolan said, all three of them left the garage at a run.

They only got as far as the shoreline track when they met the others running up from the south toward them.

“We need to find cover, Cap, and fast,” Hynd said.

Over the man’s left shoulder, Banks saw why; the shoreline heaved, as if the rocks themselves were alive, then they surged up and out of the water; the same kind of beasts they’d killed, scores of them, swarming up out of the slush.

“The post office,” Banks shouted. “It’s our only chance.”

They retreated in the face of the rapidly advancing swarm.