World War Moo (32 page)

“It doesn't make any sense. As soon as those missiles go up, they'll think they're nuclear. They'll launch everything they've got at the U.K.”

“That's what I said. This is a last-ditch measure. Tony was trying to find another way, but when he read your story I think it made him believe he doesn't have anything to lose.”

Lesley gripped the edge of the hatch so hard that her fingers ached. The pressure was the only thing holding her up. As a direct result of her actions, the virus was going to get out into the world. From Europe, it would spread everywhere: to New York, where Terry would soon be feeling hope again, and to Kenya, where her mother and father were living out their last years in peace. Her jinx had been globalized and would wipe out half of humanity. All she needed now was a big cloak and a scythe.

“Can't you persuade him not to do it?” she said. “My story might make a difference. People will protest, won't they?”

“This isn't some campaign to stop Israel and Palestine knocking lumps out of each other. People know this country is a real and direct threat to their lives.”

“I don't believe that,” Lesley said, more to convince herself than because she disagreed with the woman.

“It doesn't matter what you believe. It matters what Tony believes. He's the man with his finger on the button.”

“How do you know what he believes?”

“I'm not really a BBC journalist. I'm his spin doctor.” Fanny shot her a sharp look, and she held up her hands. “Hey, I think this is as wrong as it's possible to be.”

“What do you want me to do with this information?”

“Write a story. Tell the UN. Get them to bomb the submarine before it leaves Faslane. I don't want this on my conscience.”

“And I don't want it on mine. You tell the bloody world about the bloody missile. I just want to be left alone.”

“You don't have that luxury. You're Lesley McBrien, global expert on the infection.”

“I'm not an expert!” Lesley shouted. “I'm a useless, jammy fuckwit who spouts her gob off on TV about things she doesn't really understand.”

“And that,” the spin doctor said, “is the very definition of an expert.”

*   *   *

Once the woman had gone, they all gathered around the table on the pier for an emergency meeting.

“So, what do we do?” Fanny said.

Lesley had by now calmed down. She knew that as much as she would like to curl up into a ball and quietly decompose, she didn't have that luxury. Too many lives depended on what they did next. “This is my fault. If I hadn't written that story, they wouldn't be about to fire the missile off. We have to do what she says.”

“No,” Scholzy said. “If anybody outside of Britain gets a whiff of this, the entire island will be burnt to a crisp instantly, us included.”

“And if we say nothing, the entire world is fucked,” Lesley said. “You have people you care about, I assume?” Scholzy nodded. “All dead. Or turned.”

Fanny had a faraway look in her eye and, unbelievably, a slight smile on her lips. “You know,” she said, “I've always wanted to stop Trident.”

“What are you suggesting?” Lesley said.

“Faslane isn't too far from here.”

“And?”

“We attack the base.”

“Have you lost your bloody marbles?” Scholzy said. “It'll be crawling with soldiers. You'll all die. Badly.”

“They won't be expecting an attack from land. And we have you. Look, do you think all of this is a coincidence, that you came here, and Lesley came here, and this woman came here to tell us, probably the only people who could do anything about it?”

Scholzy snorted. “You think this is fate?”

“Maybe. Maybe not. What I do know is that it's the only real option on the table that won't see mass slaughter here or in the rest of the world.”

“No way,” Scholzy said. “It's suicide.”

“Don't you want to fight for a cause just once?” Geldof said.

“We always fight for a cause. Not necessarily a just one, mind you. And we're used to being paid for it.”

“I'll give you another million,” Geldof said. “If we succeed, you'll all be rich men. If we do nothing, there won't be a world for you to go back to anyway.”

“You're not in a position to be promising more money,” Scholzy said.

“I'm in,” James said. When Scholzy stared at him, he just shrugged. “He's right. I don't want to live like this for the rest of my life. I want to go home.”

“I'm in, too,” said Mick, giving Fanny a lingering look. “I've always wanted to see if the Brits are as good in a barney as they claim.”

Peter said something unintelligible behind his mask.

Scholzy's fingers drummed on the table as he looked around the set faces. “So you all want to be heroes, heh? Fine. Let's just try to make sure we're not dead heroes.”

Lesley looked around the table, scarcely able to believe what she was hearing. This was a risk she wasn't prepared to take: not because she was afraid of dying, but because she knew they would fail. And when they failed, those missiles would shower infected blood over the continent. She couldn't let that happen. She pushed off the table, intending to go straight to the hangar and send an e-mail.

“Where are you going?” Scholzy said.

“To do what's right and tell the UN.”

James barred her way. “No, you're not. This is the only shot we've got at surviving. You don't get to make this decision for the rest of us.”

“And you don't get to gamble with the lives of all those people out there just so we can survive,” Lesley said.

When she tried to push past, James wrapped his arms around her waist and lifted her off her feet. Her legs kicked fruitlessly as he addressed Fanny, “Where can we lock her up?”

“There's no need for that,” Fanny said. “Lesley, I promise you that if we fail we'll tell the UN and let them do what they have to. At least give us a chance to keep the bloodshed to a minimum.”

“And who's going to tell them if it doesn't work? We'll all be dead.”

“We'll hold one person back with the satphone to make the call.”

Lesley stopped kicking. “Do you give your word?”

“You have my word.”

“Then let's do it quickly.”

Fanny nodded and James dropped Lesley. She sat back down at the table.

“Now,” Scholzy said, “we get to the difficult bit. Does anybody have any ideas on how we're going to actually get into a heavily defended military base, never mind find a way to destroy these missiles?”

“Isn't that your speciality?” Geldof said.

“Hey, I'm trying to be collaborative here.” Nobody piped up with any suggestions. “How about we all go away for a few hours and come back with ideas to brainstorm?”

There was a murmur of assent. As they got up, Fanny looked along the length of the table. “Has anybody seen Rory?”

“Not since this morning,” Tom said. “He said he was going for a walk.”

“Well, we don't have time to worry about him right now,” Fanny said. “I'm sure he'll turn up soon enough. Now let's see if we can come up with a plan.”

 

28

As everybody drifted away in groups of twos and threes, Ruan and Geldof gravitated together. This was the point where it would have been permissible for Geldof to suggest they have wild, life-affirming sex to laugh in the face of Death, who, judging from the plethora of ways to die he was strewing in their path, seemed grimly intent on reaping them. After all, from the exhausted and drawn look on Mick's face and the corresponding look of satisfaction on his mum's this morning, others were clearly thumbing their noses at old Mort. He'd thought he would feel angry if his mum gave in to Mick, but when he saw how relaxed she looked he couldn't hold it against her. His dad had been dead for seven months now, and in such difficult circumstances all that mattered was that she found some fleeting happiness. While the thought to suggest similar activity did cross Geldof's mind, it was in a vague, theoretical way—more as a nod to the books and movies he'd devoured in Croatia that detailed such situations. He did find Ruan attractive, but as he had no chance it was a waste of mental and emotional resources to entertain the notion. He'd been there and bought the T-shirt, cap, and souvenir snow globe on that one with his crush on Mary.

He sensed no particular attraction from Ruan's side, although he could count the number of girls who'd fancied him on a fingerless hand and so had no idea what signals they gave off on such occasions. He'd often thought that life would be much easier if women's nipples swelled in the same proportions as penises when their dander was up. Even he wouldn't be able to miss the signal of long nipple fingers pointing him out as the object of desire. Anyway, when he held Ruan's hand it hadn't been an advance on his part. She'd looked so small and lost as she related her story that it felt like a natural response, the kind of gesture a friend or brother would make. And that, he realized with a start, was how he felt toward her. Before puberty smacked him upside the head with its big hormone stick, he had female friends. After, his scrambled brain only allowed him to speak to girls in mortified mumbles. With Ruan, the initial awkward bumping of heads over her name aside, he'd been relating to her as he would with any boy he liked. A female friend. Of all the crazy events that had swamped his life, this one surprised him most.

“So, you've got a million dollars lying around in pocket change,” Ruan said.

“Absolutely. I wipe my bum with tenners.”

“Only tenners? That's not very extravagant.”

“They're brown, so it seems to fit best.”

“Nasty!”

They laughed harder than the joke warranted. Geldof's amusement came from the sense of liberation at being able to say whatever he wanted without feeling he would scupper his chances of a snog. He could be himself. Which was why, halfway through a particularly large chortle, he sat down heavily and addressed the elephant that was rampaging around the room, knocking over furniture, trumpeting, and generally making itself very hard to ignore.

“I'm scared,” he said. “I'm pretty certain I'm shortly going to die a horribly painful death.”

“Hey, we're going to be heroes,” Ruan said. “How many people get the chance to save the world?”

“Don't heroes usually have some kind of fighting skill? You've got your gun and sword, Mum's got her bow, Scott's got his big stick, and the mercenaries have got enough hardware strapped onto those bikes to cause a mass extinction event. Even Andy has his eggs, although I still think that's plain weird. What am I going to do when we go in? Let them eat me and hope they're fatally allergic to gingers? Squirt my contact lens solution at them? Challenge them to a Sudoku death match, loser blows his brains out?”

“You could stay here,” Ruan said. “Nobody would think any less of you.”

“I can't do that while the people I care about go off to fight.”

“Then we'll figure out something for you to do. First, though, we'd better come up with some kind of plan.”

“A plan. Let me draw on my extensive knowledge of storming army bases and knock something up.”

“Come on, you're a boy. Didn't you play shooting games?”

“I prefer puzzles.”

“There you are. You must have developed some strategic thinking.”

“I suppose. It would be easier if we had schematics of the base.”

“And where are we going to get those?”

“Maybe they have a gift shop. Plastic mushroom cloud replicas, Trident-branded mugs, pens in the shape of nukes, and detailed plans of the base, £4.99 a pop. We could nip down and buy one.” Geldof got up and chucked a stone in frustration. It sailed through the sky and pinged off the satellite dish. He stared at it and slapped his forehead. “Of course. How stupid am I?”

“What?”

“We don't have schematics, but we've got the next best thing. Google Earth.”

*   *   *

An hour later they'd collected armfuls of aerial views of the base, from a bird's-eye image showing all approach roads to sections at maximum resolution. They didn't have any kind of plan, since they didn't know which building was which or how a submarine base operated. Still, it was something. The mercenaries would surely be able to make sense of the images and figure out how to approach it; they must have chalked up more assaults than a psychopathic skinhead at a gay pride march. Geldof and Ruan went outside with their bounty and headed back toward where a few people had already gathered. As they approached, Geldof looked out across the water.

“What's that?” he said, pointing.

Ruan shielded her eyes and peered. “Looks like boats. Coming this way. It's the Noels.”

“Eh?”

“The people from Arrochar. They all look like Noel Edmonds.”

“Maybe it's the start of a new infection. The people they bite turn into Noel Edmonds, too. Can you imagine the horror?”

“This isn't something to joke about,” Ruan said, chewing at her lower lip. “Last time we met, a mob of them tried to kill me.”

“We'd better find my mum.”

Fanny was sitting cross-legged with Scott, Eva, and Tom in the living room of one of the houses and passing round some of the sweet-smelling weed as a creative aid when Geldof and Ruan burst in. As the others giggled, Scott was laying out a plan that involved weaving a giant net in the shape of a vagina and lowering it into position over the missile tube from a hot air balloon.

“How much have you had to smoke?” Geldof said.

“He's right, it's ridiculous,” Eva said. “The balloon would never carry the weight. We'd need a helicopter.”

Fanny put her hand on Geldof's arm as the others laughed. “Just some light relief. We really are trying to come up with a plan.”