Warhead (27 page)

Carter waited for the heavy punch. But below, in the snow, the Blocks whirled on powerful motors. In the blink of an eye they targeted and locked—but held their fire. Carter squinted through the falling snow as the Comanche’s warning system screamed proximity alerts at him and the HIDSS illuminated multiple targets. Carter’s fingers hovered over the firing buttons ... and he was tempted. God, how sorely he was tempted ...

Carter dropped the helicopter low over the city. Then he brought it around in a huge arc and landed in the middle of a street, the roar of the rotors sending civilians sprinting for cover and attracting a huge encircling ring of Nex soldiers and weaponry.

Carter had decided to land only a few streets from a military installation, a forward post for the London WarFac. He slipped the HIDSS from his head, ran a hand through his sweat-drenched hair, then punched the button that prompted the Comanche’s advanced hydraulics to fold back the cockpit. Shouldering the MicroNuke, Carter hefted his M24 carbine and climbed down the recessed ladder set into the Comanche’s flank.

Sub-machine guns swivelled to target him. Once more Carter waited with dry mouth and hammering heart for the first bullet to strike—he knew it would be over fast, a hot hard drilling through his skull. But the metal punch never came and Carter turned to survey the Nex.

They watched him impassively. Carter took a step forward, and spat into the nearest Nex’s face. Its eyes blinked in reflex. But there was no other reaction.

‘Hmm,’ said Carter. ‘Interesting.’

One of the Nex approached. And it saluted. ‘We have transport awaiting you. Sir.’

Carter stared in disbelief. His eyes narrowed. His M24 wavered, and finally, licking at his dehydrated lips, he growled, ‘Don’t call me “sir”, you cockroach motherfucker. Just get out of my fucking way before I decide to shove this MicroNuke up your fucking arse. You understand, maggot?’

The Nex—still showing no emotion—merely stepped back and allowed the irate Carter access to the snowbound streets of London beyond the cordon.

Carter walked. Flakes tumbled around him and he took deep, steadying breaths, calming his mind and composing himself for what he had to do. The annihilation of Spiral ... the extermination of his friends ... and the destruction of everything he had ever worked for.

‘
Your boy will become just another casualty of war
,’ said Kade softly. ‘
You think they will let him go when you destroy Spiral? When
you
are the last remaining Spiral man? No, Carter ... they will kill him
and
you. They cannot let him live
—
because to let him live will be to plant a seed, a seed of revolution and future revenge so strong it could one day bring down Durell. And the man knows this. The
Nex
know this.
‘

‘You’re sounding very philosophical,’ muttered Carter.

‘Hey, it’s this fresh London air. Much more pure now they’ve saturated the radiation with chemicals.’

Carter walked for nearly two hours, his mind whirling, contemplating different scenarios and then rejecting them.

Horrified, he realised that he could not do this alone. He could not extricate himself from the tangle of events. It’s a fucking terrible mess, he realised, and I’m caught right in the middle of it. Shit.

Carter passed three Nex outposts: checkpoints set at intervals to intercept Spiral terrorists and REBS and to monitor the civilian population of the city. Not once was he stopped or even verbally challenged. They knew he was coming, and for this mission Carter had an all-zones passport which allowed him a freedom that only Durell could have engineered.

Carter smiled with chilled lips, ducking right down a narrow side street. The MicroNuke was heavy on his back now, the weight of the bomb digging into his shoulder and cramping the muscles of his neck. He walked with care, brow furrowed, hair laced with a brushing of snow which made him look older than he was. His walk slowed as he counted the shopfronts, and he stopped finally at a derelict clothes shop. The window still had cracked and battered plastic dummies in it, some sporting clothes, some naked and stained yellow.

The door was propped shut with sacks of rubble. Carter leant his shoulder against the warped wood with its flaking off-white paint, and pushed gently.

The door scraped open and Carter stepped inside. In the gloom he could just make out the black eyes of a quad-barrelled heavy machine gun, with chains of ammunition coiling on the floor. Carter halted, stare fixed on the gun—and on the dark hooded shadow behind the weapon.

‘I am Spiral,’ said Carter softly.

‘I know you are,’ came a smooth voice. ‘Took your time coming home.’

Carter smiled wryly. ‘Can you take me to Mongrel?’

‘Were you followed?’

‘No.’

‘Then I will call Mongrel to come for you. You
look
like Carter but we can’t be too sure these days—the city is awash with vermin. And the world is in, shall we say, a shit state.’

The shadowy figure produced an ECube and Carter watched the gentle movements of message transmission. Shortly the ECube gave a tiny blip. Carter caught the flicker of blue light.

‘Follow me.’ The man led Carter down long musty corridors that stank of damp and neglect. Part of the wall at the rear of the building had been knocked through into another building—an old newsagent’s, still containing shelves with rusted cans on them. They moved out through a battered archway. Within the shops of this London street Spiral had created a labyrinthine warren. A rat-run for humans.

Finally, they reached a flight of steps, and the hooded man stopped. Carter glanced at him, and beneath the hood he glimpsed a terrible array of facial scars: a twisted and deformed nose together with healed diagonal lacerations that had ruined the skin, slashed across the man’s lips, and turned one eye a milky white.

‘I carry my scars on my face,’ the man said quietly. ‘But I know you carry yours in your heart. Be brave, Carter. Be strong. Be true to Spiral.’

‘What happened to you?’

‘A tank exploded. I was in it.’ He laughed. ‘Hey, this is nothing. You should see the rest of my body.’

‘And still you fight?’

‘Is there any other way? Mongrel is down there.’ He gestured at the steep stone steps leading down into darkness. ‘He’s waiting for you. I hope you bring us good news—things are not going well and we could use a little ray of sunshine.’

Carter said nothing. He stared down the stone stairway. It could be a trap ... it was possible that Spiral knew of his involvement with Durell, and that they were waiting down there to kill him. An ambush, to neutralise the MicroNuke and its bearer before detonation finally made Spiral a thing of the past.

A ray of sunshine?

I carry more than that; I carry the heart of the sun, Carter thought. With his head held high, Carter stepped slowly down the stone steps, his loud footsteps announcing his arrival.

‘Carter, you old
pizda!’

Mongrel loomed from the shadows, making Carter jump, and threw his arms around him, hugging him tight and making him grunt in pain. Still, Carter could not help but give a wide grin.

‘How’s it going, you fat old goat? You still in love with those Stilton ladies?’

‘Har! I love a woman with a whiff of Cheddar about her. It like ... like ... like fine old wine! Only with more of stink! Ha har! How you doing, you dog? You lost a bit of weight, but poor old Mongrel ...’ He cupped his protruding belly in one huge paw. ‘Ahh, the beer and the sausage make a mockery of him.’ Mongrel took a step back, holding onto Carter’s arms. Then he hugged his old friend once more, crushing him again.

‘Nice place you have here,’ said Carter, glancing around at the single broken chair, the table propped up in one corner on piles of mouldering books and at the bare stone walls riddled with huge patches of black fungus and damp.

‘I see wicked sense of humour never leave the Carter boy! Welcome back, Carter, welcome back! There so many people who be glad to see you, there Simmo just as fat and stubborn as ever, there Rogowski who make coffee like no man alive and there that insane religious
svolok—
The Priest—torturing us all with country music about large-breasted women, the old God-bothering madman. Not that Mongrel have anything
against
large-breasted women, of course, because we all know it large-breasted women that make the world go round!’

Mongrel grinned a lunatic grin filled with missing teeth.

Carter laughed then. He felt as if a pressure valve had been released in his skull, allowing the pent-up steam of frustration to evaporate. He slammed Mongrel on the back and the two men just stared at each other. They had been through shit together, served many, many missions—and witnessed the beginning of the fall of the world. It had been a long time ...

Too long, Carter realised sadly.

‘Come on,’ said Mongrel. ‘We walk and talk, faster that way, too much shit gone down to just be here chatting and not planning! This way.’ Mongrel led Carter to the back of the damp stone room, and they ducked down low—Mongrel had to crawl on his hands and knees—under a low arch of smashed rubble. Then they were in a room with what looked like a bank vault’s doors, two feet thick and hung on hinges that could have supported a tower block. Mongrel punched in several digits, attached his ECube, then spun the wheel and heaved on the mammoth portal. It swung open silently, and Mongrel ushered Carter through into a dimly lit alloy corridor, narrow and with a low ceiling. Every thirty feet or so a bare bulb hung from a reel of cable, giving off flickering illumination. As Carter stepped over the threshold, nostrils twitching at the smell of distant sewage, Mongrel heaved the huge door closed behind them.

‘Down here, boy.’

They walked, Mongrel in front and Carter behind, until they reached a square section of floor, a poorly defined flicker of silver that signified the SpiralGRID. ‘I thought that this had been compromised?’ said Carter softly.

‘How you know that?’ Mongrel tilted his head, giving Carter a strange look.

‘I know, because it was my fault.’

‘It was? I think we have lot to talk about, Carter. Come on—it is still usable, but we have to be careful; we think Durell is tracking our every move ... lying in wait like fat snake in the grass, just waiting to strike and sink in poisonous fangs.’

Carter wanted to say,
Yes, you are right. You
are
being tracked, and very soon you are going to be dead ...

But he said nothing. And, with the MicroNuke in his pack, he followed Mongrel towards the heart of Spiral.

The warehouse down at the Old Docks on the banks of the Thames was a cold stone structure. The building itself was very old, and had once been a mill of some kind. Now it was deserted, filled partly with massive sections of steel machinery—engineering presses and banks of dead computers ranked around the perimeter walls. Due to the size of the building, the cold was intense. Carter warmed his hands over the flames of the brazier and watched as Rogowski changed the sterile pads on the wound in Rekalavich’s stomach.

‘You get that fighting a Sleeper Nex?’ asked Carter softly.

Rekalavich nodded, drawing deeply on his stinking Bogatiri
papirosi
cigarette. ‘How you know that?’

‘I can tell by the serrations along the edge of the skin. It’s their claws. They do that.’

‘They tough bastards to kill, yes?’ said Rek, smiling sardonically.

Carter nodded, shifting his gaze around the group in the warehouse. There were perhaps forty men and women, some of whom he knew, some of whom he had heard about, and a few who were new recruits from after the time when Carter had exiled himself to Cyprus. But all had heard of Carter; all knew of his past; and all seemed happy to see him. Another old soldier, ready to unload his sub-machine gun at the enemy ... But Carter knew the truth, and the Spiral men and women knew it too.

They were trying to block a breach in a dam with a pebble. They were trying to bail out a sinking warship with a teaspoon. And they believed that one more old soldier could make very little difference ...

Carter waited for Mongrel to return and lit a cigarette. The smoke tasted sour and he did not enjoy the experience. Tossing the butt into the burner he watched Mongrel as the big man entered and moved across the warehouse, stopping to talk to the distant hulking figure of The Priest. Mongrel had a woman with him. Carter groaned.

All I fucking need, he thought, shaking his head. Roxi sticking her—admittedly beautiful—nose into the proceedings. She trailed Mongrel warily as the huge battered man returned to Carter, carrying a large pan of soup. ‘You want to eat? Is vegetable. Is good,’ he rumbled. But Carter’s gaze had bypassed him to rest on the lithe athletic figure of Roxi.

She halted, her green piercing eyes unreadable in a beautiful oval face framed by fine shoulder-length brown hair. Her head tilted as she watched Carter, then she pulled free a cigarette, lit it slowly, and took a long drag.

‘Hello, Carter,’ she said, her voice husky.

‘Roxi. You are looking ...’

‘Tired? Worn out? Frustrated?
Exhausted
? It’s fucking good of you to join us—at last.’

‘I have had—different priorities.’

‘Yeah, so I heard.’ Her stance was aggressive, and Mongrel had slid silently to one side, still holding his pan of steaming soup. He opened his mouth to speak, then thought better of it and closed it again. He muttered something about being needed somewhere urgently; about needing to see a man about a pig. Then he left.