Warhead (39 page)

‘Hell,’ thought Mongrel sourly, watching Carter disappear. He licked at his flattened lips, tongue probing at battered broken teeth. ‘It do remind me of Hell; and of Kamus. Which is one and same.’ He shivered, shouldering his weapon. The freezing steel of the ladder numbed his fingers and his boots scrabbled for purchase on rungs polished by decades of use. Cursing softly, Mongrel followed Carter into the submarine prison’s oppressive metal bowels.

The submarine constantly creaked, groaned and moaned. The floor rocked continuously. Mongrel, stare fixed on the ECube, followed closely behind Carter.

‘Up ahead. Five metres, on the left.’

Carter halted outside the hatch and worked at the rusting bolts. Then he glanced at Mongrel. ‘I hope to God this poor fucker is still alive.’

‘We severely fucked up nether pipes if he not,’ replied Mongrel.

Carter kicked open the heavy steel portal, blinking as his eyes adjusted to the gloomy interior. He held his Browning ready. For a moment he thought the improvised cell was empty and felt his heart sink. But then he made out a figure hanging from chains wrapped around thick ceiling-mounted pipes. ‘Justus?’

There was no answer. With Mongrel covering his back, Carter crept forward. He realised that the huge black man was naked except for a pair of tattered shorts. His ankles were secured by chains which had been tossed over ceiling pipes, and his knuckles dragged against the riveted deck.

‘Justus.’ Carter reached out to touch the man’s freezing flesh. He could feel wounds there, razor-slices and burns. He stepped in close and, grunting, lifted the massive weight of the man as Mongrel reached up and untangled the restraining chains. Carter lowered Justus to the deck and checked for a pulse.

‘He dead?’

‘No. His pulse is erratic. Pass me my pack.’

Carter gave the unconscious man several injections, antibiotics, a K7 stimulant, vitamin enhancers and morphine in two-milligram stages. When Justus awoke, Carter wanted to kill his pain, not push the man back into unconsciousness. Morphine had a terrible habit of rendering its subjects cheerfully immobile.

Suddenly, Justus’s dark eyes fluttered open. He stared up in confusion and his mouth opened in a silent scream. His body jerked, tensed, spasmed, and Carter swayed back as a fist the size of a shovel whirred past his face. He placed his hand against Justus’s lacerated chest. ‘Shhh, Justus mate, it’s me—Carter. I’ve come to get you out. Rescue you. Take you out of this shite-hole.’

‘Carter?’ He felt the big black guy relax under his hands, body trembling with pain and fatigue. Justus levered himself up onto his elbows, glancing around the cell before fixing his gaze on Carter and Mongrel. He shuddered.

‘You OK?’ rumbled Mongrel.

Justus nodded, then patted Carter on the shoulder. ‘Papa Carter, you old dog.’ He coughed, a heavy cough filled with phlegm. Then he smiled, showing several broken teeth. ‘Am I
fucking
glad to see you.’ He got to his knees, then stood, taking several deep breaths and swaying dangerously. He looked down at himself, his battered body covered in his own vomit, urine and blood. He rolled his neck gently, and pulled a dislocated finger back into line with a disquieting crunch.

‘Keep still. I’ll give you another two mgs.’ The needle slid back into Justus’s vein, and as Carter pulled away the black man began to cough savagely again.

‘Can you walk?’

‘From this place, Carter? I can fucking
sprint
.’ Justus sighed then, closing his eyes as he swayed again and nearly fell. ‘I am a long way from home, Papa. I am a long way from my beloved Kenya.’

‘Come on. We need to move.’

Justus’s face hardened. ‘Have you got a weapon for me?’ Mongrel handed him a Beretta 92 and a fist full of magazines. Justus weighed them thoughtfully, then gave a pain-filled grin. He exhaled softly. ‘I have a few scores to settle with those bastard Nex—that for sure. Not for all the gold in Africa would I let this humiliation fade away ...’

Carter moved to the doorway.

‘Did you tell them anything?’ asked Mongrel.

‘Mongrel, you dick!’

‘It’s okay, Papa Carter,’ said Justus placidly. Then he fixed Mongrel with a dark unreadable stare. ‘No, I did not tell the Nex anything. Because, my friend, the Nex did not ask me any questions. They did this purely for sport. For entertainment.’

‘Now I see why you sore.’

‘Sore, my friend? I would bathe the world in blood. I would snap every Nex pencil neck with my own bare hands.’

‘Let’s move,’ snapped Carter, and with a gun in each hand he led the way. Mongrel took Justus’s arm across his own huge shoulders and supported the big black man as he hobbled on naked feet down the cold metal walkway. It took both Carter and Mongrel to get Justus’s huge bulk up the ladder, and they stood panting for a few moments before setting off once more towards the umbilical tunnel and the distant Sub-Core beyond.

And then the bullets came. They ripped along the tunnel, and Carter and Mongrel retreated, returning three-round bursts. They squatted behind a steel bulkhead and Mongrel flipped free his ECube. He cursed.

Carter fired a few more shots. Return fire followed, ricocheting dangerously around the three men.

‘What is it?’

‘You not like answer to question. There are Nex. Lots of them.’

‘How many?’ snapped Carter.

‘Thirty—no, forty. They tracked us after the detonations! They blocking tunnel, Carter. And that our escape route. What the fuck we going to do, lad?’

Carter pulled shut the heavy portal door to cut off the tunnel as more ricochets made him duck and flinch. He sat back on his haunches. ‘Shit.’ His face creased into a sour frown.

‘We need a plan, Carter.’

‘You think the engines on this old sub work?’

‘No, it nuke-powered. Long ago decommissioned with core removed. That not an option.’

‘Right, then.’

Carter placed his weapon on the ground and pulled free a blue-wrapped pack of HighJ. He primed the detonator as Mongrel looked on in horror, mouth agape, the half-conscious Justus lolling against him. ‘What you doing, Carter?’

‘Watch.’

‘No no no. You tell Uncle Mongrel first—that look suspiciously like bomb you got in sweaty paws there. That dangerous, that is. What you planning in mad bad head?’

Carter grabbed his H&K. He took a deep breath. ‘Be ready.’

‘For what?’ screeched Mongrel.

Carter opened the heavy steel portal, then sprinted forward into the plastic umbilical with his H&K blasting, bullets slamming down the translucent tunnel and making the slowly advancing Nex pause briefly before returning fire. With bullets zipping around him, Carter hurled the package of HighJ at the Nex, turned and sprinted for the cover of thick portal steel.

The HighJ package exploded with a fury of purple and green fire, annihilating the Nex and destroying the plastic umbilical which connected the ancient submarine to the Sub-Core.

Carter leapt through the submarine portal and slammed shut the heavy door behind him. He spun the wheel and threw the heavy rusted bolts with shaking hands as behind him a wall of fire slammed against the heavy steel door.

‘What have you done?’ whispered Mongrel, horrified.

The fire washed over the hull of the submarine, and the pressure waves of the explosion sent the vessel spinning slowly, yanking against its thick, rusted tethering chain—which groaned like a huge animal in pain and parted easily with a crumbling of corroded links.

The plastic tunnel was gone—melted, vaporised—and with no restraint to hold the defunct war machine in place it whirled for a moment on the energies and wild eddies of the explosion. Then it bucked violently and its nose slowly dipped towards the far-distant ocean floor. The dead submarine began a long, slow, spiralling descent into blackness ...

J
am watched with slitted copper eyes as The Priest’s Comanche leapt into the air and slewed sideways through the falling snow. He breathed slowly, feeling the power in his huge armoured chest, and he flexed his talons and lifted his face to the spinning flakes. Jam liked the cold. All Nex liked the cold; it sharpened and speeded up their reactions. The heat slowed them down, made them lethargic, made them easy targets.

But I am not Nex, Jam thought. Not in my mind; only in my body.
But what about your soul?
whispered a voice in his mind.
They have eaten your soul. When you die, there will be no Heaven for you; no human Heaven, nor Nex Heaven ... not even Hell awaits you. You are an abomination; you are mongrel-breed; you are an in-between, a deviation deformo that should never have existed...

Earlier, Mongrel had mentioned Nicky’s name. Before, when Jam had been wholly human, Nicky had been his lover, his partner, and his friend; his future wife-to-be. But, as Jam’s mission in Slovenia went horribly wrong, and he had endured torture inflicted by Mace—Durell’s finest Nex surgeon—so every footstep had taken him further and further away from his life, from his woman; from his love.

Jam had fought a war inside himself. And had won. His humanity had been stronger than the Nex side that had been blended with it. And yet he still carried the Nex stain in his blood. He appeared as an armoured monstrosity, a huge and powerful cross-blend of human and genetically spiralled insect. Things could never be the same for him again ...

Jam stared into the falling snow. The Priest, he thought. A good man; the best of men. Sometimes, though, he was too fanatical in the Spiral cause. With The Priest there were no greys, no in-between shades. Only black and white. And if you crossed to the wrong side ... well, then you were dead.

Their first meeting, after Jam had gradually worked his way through the REB ranks, building their strength, gaining Spiral trust with every Nex killing, gaining respect with every rescue of innocent men, women and children, had been a tense and fraught affair. And it had taken much to persuade The Priest that Jam was his own true Spiral self-his
old
Spiral self... But the earlier divisions between the two factions no longer mattered. Both Spiral and the REBS, despite their historical differences, had been forced to join ranks against the might of Durell in these last few days of conflict. It was to be a fight to the death.

Jam turned as his squad emerged into the snow, and he saw the glint of fear in their eyes. Not at the mission to come—but at the entity they had to risk their lives alongside ... No matter how often he proved himself in battle, Jam was a twisted and deformed horror—to them—and would always provoke an immediate reaction of fear, mistrust, loathing. They were not only scared of his power, his insect blood. They were faced with their own mortality. They were horrified that, one day, if things went brutally sour, then they might end up like Jam. Sadness flooded through him.

A great sadness that could never die.

‘Follow me.’ Jam’s voice was deep, rumbling, powerful. His team consisted of Spiral personnel and REBS; their mission was to locate the K-Labs rumoured to be buried under an old nuclear power station, infiltrate, hack the computer systems, discover what they could—and then blow Durell’s stash of poison to Kingdom Come.

Jam analysed his team in his mind as he led them to the Chinook’s K5 transport helicopter. Sonia J was the first to follow him. She was an expert on HIVE Media computer systems; having been integral to the growth of Durell’s media company in London and New York, she carried with her top-level access codes and the ability to worm her way into many of the medial giant’s digital cells.

Next came Baze, huge and bear-like, with hands like shovels. Oz, tall and gangly, a chain-smoker with shaved head and battered, pock-marked features, and Rekalavich, the tough old Russian with bitter memories and a nasty grudge against the Nex. These were what Jam termed his Heavy Squad, able to bring massive amounts of firepower into play when so required.

Baze carried the MG. Oz, who doubled as a sniper, carried his trusted Swiss SSG550 rifle strapped tightly across his back; this weapon was his love, and he had been known to break people’s cheekbones for leaving so much as a thumbprint on the polished stock.

Haggis, or Whisky Haggis as he was sometimes known, was the explosives expert on this mission. Finally, their pilot was Fenny, still sporting long curling locks, still wearing a cheeky—if weary—grin and still harbouring a love of pouring beer into the laps of his friends: a pastime that had earned him many a well-deserved punch on the nose.

Fenny had the Chinook CH-58’s rotors turning slowly, warming the engines, and he waved as Jam led the ragtag band towards the chopper. A freezing wind howled down from the Scottish mountains and the group lowered their heads, throwing packs through the open cargo doors and climbing onto the low corrugated alloy platform. Rekalavich moved instantly to the mounted MG, checked the ammunition belts, wiped the snow-melt from the gun’s barrel, and lit Bogatiri
papirosi
cigarette. Haggis started to complain about the smell of the smoke and Sonia moved across the massive deck—stacked with several crates bearing stencilled Arabic letters—and poked her head through to the cockpit.

‘Where are we going?’ she asked, her face drawn and weary. She felt completely out of place with this group. A motley crew of soldiers, killers, and one genetically modified Spiral Nex. How crazy can life get? she thought, her mind in a whirl.