Age of Voodoo (28 page)

“I don’t like where you’re going with this,” said Morgenstern.

“Me neither,” said Lex. “Do we have confirmation that they’re dead? We don’t. What is ‘dead’ in this context anyway?”

“It was a ten-man unit,” said Buckler.

“So potentially we could be looking at sixty zuvembies in all. Ten of them with advanced combat skills and weapons.”

“Which they can still utilise even as zuvembies,” said Morgenstern. “Gonzalez fought like a motherfucker, and you and I both saw him going for his gun.”

“I’m liking the whole situation less and less,” said Tartaglione. “Anyone else in favour of a tactical get-the-fuck-out-of-here?”

“Can the Cowardly Lion bullshit, Tartag,” Buckler snapped. “We’ve faced worse odds.”

“Have we? Where?”

“Sarajevo, for one.”

“I wasn’t at Sarajevo. Before my time. In fact, wasn’t Sarajevo where...?” Tartaglione trailed off.

A darkness seemed to settle over Buckler. Something bleak and lost flitted behind his eyes. “Yeah,” he said hollowly. “It was. And it was way worse than this shit, believe you me. I made it through that. You all will make it through this. Now.” Some of his habitual swagger reasserted itself. “In the light of Dove’s deductions, which I happen to think are valid, we stick together from now on. Safety in numbers. Pearce? You recovered? Feel able to go on?”

“Spiffy.”

“Then let’s up and at ’em. We still haven’t checked out the communications hub. That was next on the agenda when the shooting started. We’ll give it the once-over, then head down to Level Two.”

A
S THEY VENTURED
along the passage in a line, single file, Lex tapped Morgenstern’s shoulder.

“Sarajevo?” he said, softly so that Buckler wouldn’t overhear.

“Don’t,” she said. “Don’t go there.”

“But what happened?”

“I mean it. Subject’s off-limits.”

“Were you there?”

“No. None of us was. Only the lieutenant. And the previous Team Thirteen.”

“You mean there was one before this one.”

“Did you not get that from ‘previous’? Some Sherlock Holmes you are.”

“And he’s the only one left from that team.”

“That brain of yours is really working overtime, Dove.”

“The only survivor. What did it? What wiped the rest of them out?”

“We don’t talk about it,” said Morgenstern. “We don’t talk about it because the lieutenant doesn’t talk about it. Ask him and he’ll probably punch your lights out. Let’s just say he went through hell, and leave it at that.”

“And by hell you mean...”

“Literally that. Hell.”

TWENTY-SIX

SUPPLY CLOSET

T
HE COMMUNICATIONS HUB
was a large chamber crammed with top-spec hardware: computers, plasma screens, phone units, and the rack-mounted amplifiers, antenna controllers and power control system units needed to sustain a high-bandwidth satellite uplink.

None of it remained intact.

Everything had been shattered, smashed, crushed, eviscerated. Even the functional tables and chairs had been broken up, reduced to smithereens. The damage was so extensive, so thorough, that it seemed orchestrated. The room had been systematically vandalised. Whoever was responsible had wanted to make sure there was no way any of the equipment could be reassembled and used again. To that end, circuit boards had been wrenched from their busses and snapped in two. Monitors had been stamped on repeatedly until their front glass plates were white like ice. Cables hadn’t simply been torn out of their sockets but shredded to pieces, so that the floor was a snake’s nest of rubber insulation and bare copper wire and fibre-optic filament.

“Anyone else think it’s not supposed to look like this?” said Sampson.

“Ah, it’s not so bad,” said Tartaglione. “Bit of duct tape, some superglue, we could have it up and running again in no time, good as new.”

“I’m guessing Papa Couleuvre’s behind this,” said Buckler. “What’s been happening here is nothing less than a
coup d’état
. Once he got started with his takeover of the installation, severing communications links would have been his first priority, so that no one could send out a distress signal.”

“Surely he’d have known the Pentagon would fly troops in as soon as Anger Reef went off the grid,” said Morgenstern.

“But he bought himself some time. And since there was no way anybody in Washington could gain a clear idea of what was going on, the initial response from there would be low-key at best. Which it was. Ten Marines, when, if they’d had intel from someone on site, they’d have known that what was really needed was an army.”

“So why’s it just the five of us now?” said Tartaglione. “Couldn’t we have brought an army as backup?”

“The difference is we’re pros,” replied Buckler. “We know what we’re doing. This sort of shit is our meat and drink.”

“Couleuvre strikes me as a shrewd bastard,” Sampson observed.

“That’d be my assessment too. What’s still unclear is what part Professor Seidelmann has played in the whole deal. He’s the big unknown in the equation. He and Couleuvre started out collaborating. It was his show. Are they still in cahoots? Or did Couleuvre turn on him? Enquiring minds need to know.”

“Creepy scientist tries to make voodoo super-soldiers and it blows up in his face,” said Tartaglione. “Who saw
that
coming?”

“That’s the trouble with scientists,” said Sampson. “They think just because you can’t lab-test to prove the existence of karma, it doesn’t—”

“Sshhh!” said Lex.

“Huh?”

“All of you. Pipe down.”

Team Thirteen and Albertine looked at him.

“I heard something.”

Immediately weapons were raised, cocking levers pulled, fingers curled around triggers.

Lex padded across the floor, doing his best to avoid treading on the piles of high-tech debris. The sound had been muffled, coming from the far side of the room. He checked every place someone might hide, until at least he reached the door to a supply closet. If there
had
been a sound—if it wasn’t a stray echo, or just his ears playing tricks—then it could only have originated here. He had eliminated all other possible locations.

He listened hard. Nothing. Not a peep.

He was beginning to think it had been a false alarm, when—there. He heard it again. A faint, choked sob.

He looked back at the others and pointed at the door.

Buckler made a
go
gesture, and Sampson and Tartaglione moved stealthily into position beside Lex.

Lex reached out and tried the door handle. It turned but the door did not give. Locked, or the catch mechanism had been disabled from the inside.

Now there was only silence from the closet—but it was the silence of someone keeping utterly still, not daring to move or even breathe. Lex could almost sense the person’s presence by the absoluteness of the hush on the other side of the door.

Another zuvembie, lying in wait? Hoping to sucker them the way Gonzalez had?

Sampson produced a sock of C-4 and broke off a small lump of the plastic explosive. He kneaded it into a thin sausage and tamped it around the handle plate in a C-shape. Then he invited everyone to take a few steps back, drew his MK23, took aim, shielded his face, and fired.

The
bang
was immense. The door whipped inwards, missing a large chunk where the handle had been. Some of the frame had been blown out too.

Lex leapt in front of the doorway, SIG at the ready. There was smoke, and darkness. But he glimpsed a figure near the back of the closet, lurching forwards. A pre-emptive shot to the knee seemed like a good plan.

“No! Please! Don’t!”

The figure staggered out into the light, hands raised in submission.

“Don’t shoot! I’m not one of them! I’m normal! I’m me!”

The face was familiar. It just took Lex a moment to place it.

“Professor Seidelmann?” he said.

P
ROFESSOR
G
ULLIVER
S
EIDELMANN
was not the dignified, distinguished academic Lex had seen on the screen of Buckler’s laptop, smoothly delivering his pitch for project funding to a group of Washington bigwigs. The man in front of him now was a dishevelled, ravaged version of that Seidelmann, and looked malnourished and completely terrified. His clothes were soiled and he reeked of body odour and human waste. The interior of the closet was commensurately squalid. Empty food packaging lay scattered about, and one corner bore evidence of having been used as a toilet.

As Seidelmann staggered into the room, he blinked around himself, dazzled by the lighting, for all that it was dim. His disorientation was such that he collided with Tartaglione, who caught and steadied him. Seidelmann gave the SEAL a look that was almost pathetically grateful. It seemed to be dawning on him, gradually, that he had not fallen into enemy hands. Whoever these people were, they weren’t here to kill him. They might even be his salvation.

“Oh God,” he moaned. “Oh God, tell me you’re a rescue party. Tell me the nightmare’s over.”

Buckler stepped forward. “Professor Seidelmann? Lieutenant Tom Buckler, SEAL Team Thirteen. I have to know, sir, are you in full command of your faculties?”

“Am I sane, you mean?” A brittle laugh. “After the wretched time I’ve had, it’s debatable.”

“No, I mean are you a zuvembie? I realise it’s an absurd question but I have to ask.”

Seidelmann straightened up a little. He smoothed his ruffled hair flat and resettled his rimless glasses on his nose. “No, I am most definitely not. But only by the skin of my teeth.”

“You’re in no way infected, or transmogrified, or whatever the hell the verb is for a person getting turned into one of those things?”

“Artificially augmented,” Seidelmann said. “And of course I’m not. I wouldn’t be talking like this if I was. I wouldn’t be able to converse with you at all. In fact, I’d most likely be trying to kill you.”

The professor spoke with some asperity. All the signs pointed to him having undergone an ordeal, a prolonged period of terror and deprivation. Yet he was already recovering from it and regaining his confidence. Not just confidence, either. The man in the video clip had shown a sleek self-assurance that verged on arrogance. Lex could see that trait returning to him now at a rapidly accelerating rate, rising as his levels of relief rose. The more Seidelmann understood that he might just be making it out of Anger Reef alive after all, the more like himself he became.

“I’m famished,” he announced. “I managed to scrounge a few scraps of food before I shut myself away in there, but not as much as I would have liked, or needed. I don’t suppose any of you has got something to eat.”

“Tartag?” said Buckler. “Give the man a candy bar and an MRE.”

Seidelmann fell on the chocolate as though it was manna from heaven. He tore off the wrapper and gulped and guzzled with shameless abandon. Then he turned to the Meal Ready-to-Eat, ripping the pack open and separating the items that didn’t need to be heated for consumption from the ones that did. He squeezed cheese spread onto crackers, chasing this down with a raspberry-flavour HOOAH! energy bar.

Buckler waited patiently until he was finished, then resumed his interrogation.

“How long have you been in the closet?”

Tartaglione sniggered. “In the closet. That’s funny.”

Buckler glared at him. Professor Seidelmann just ignored him.

“I’m not sure. What’s today?”

“Sunday.”

“Six days, then. Since Monday. It feels far longer. Every moment in there was torture, an agony of darkness and despair, but I couldn’t think of what else to do. It was the only place I could be safe. I didn’t dare venture out, not once. I didn’t even dare open the door to look out. In case one of
them
was lurking, waiting for me.”

“A zuvembie.”

“Yes,” said Seidelmann. “That’s what Deslorges likes to call them, so I suppose, for want of a better word, that’s what they are. But they’re a travesty of my work. Not what I intended at all.”