Age of Voodoo (32 page)

“But Anger Reef doesn’t,” said Seidelmann. “I’d know if it did. I’d have been told, surely.”

“Would you, prof? The place spent ages out of action. It’s been sitting here doing nothing for a generation or more. I doubt there’s many people alive who were present when it was built, and in any case only a select few would have known there was a nuclear device on the premises. It would have been installed under conditions of utmost secrecy, and it wouldn’t be on any of the official blueprints. Somewhere buried in some archive there’ll be a record of its existence, but I’d be surprised if anyone in the current administration even knows about it. It’s an old secret, and old secrets get forgotten.”

“You’re saying you think this bomb thing might be true, chief?” said Morgenstern.

“It’s just conceivable.” Beneath his moustache, Buckler’s mouth was set in a grim line. “Anger Reef was, in its day, a highly sensitive site. It was slap bang in the middle of a Cold War flashpoint zone. They were paranoid times. Nobody’d want somewhere like this to fall into enemy hands if it could possibly be avoided. If that looked like happening, simplest course of action would be nuke the place, give the Soviets a pile of glowing rubble to sift through.”

“Be that as it may,” said Seidelmann, “even supposing there
was
a bomb once, it wouldn’t still be here. It would have been dismantled and removed as part of the decommissioning process.”

“Couleuvre seems to believe otherwise.”

“And he’s such a reliable source.”

“You worked with him, prof. You had a high opinion of him, ’til he turned you over and fucked you in the ass. You think he’s the type to go chasing after something that doesn’t exist?”

Seidelmann blustered but didn’t have an adequate answer.

“But what does he want with a nuke?” Morgenstern asked.

“What does anyone?” said Lex. “Terrorism. Blackmail. Something to sell on the black market. Delete where applicable.”

“Power,” said Albertine.

“Yes, that pretty much sums it up: power. With a nuke, Couleuvre’s no longer just any old bokor. He’s the biggest, baddest bokor of all time.”

“The sorcerer supreme,” said Sampson.

“He would have death in his hands, too,” said Albertine. “The ability to kill on a widespread scale. That would curry great favour with Baron Samedi. He could offer the Baron thousands and thousands of souls. The ultimate act of worship, a mass sacrifice.”

Everyone exchanged looks. The temperature in the room, already low, seemed to drop a few degrees more.

“He really has to be stopped,” Lex said. “Now, before it can go any further.”

“You heard the man, Thirteeners,” said Buckler. “Lock and load. Mission just hit critical. There’s a madman with his eye on a thermonuclear prize. Let’s go ruin his day.”

TWENTY-NINE

COLD WAR LEGACY NIGHTMARE

P
ROFESSOR
S
IEDELMANN HAD
described seeing Papa Couleuvre searching for something on Sublevel 3. It stood to reason that the nuclear device, if there was one, would be located there. The purpose of any bomb would be to obliterate Anger Reef entirely, and that could be best achieved by detonating it at the deepest point available. The force of the explosion would be channelled upwards through the installation, undermining even as it was cremated. A sun-hot fireball would erupt below ground but little if any of the blast would escape to the surface. The entire island would collapse neatly in on itself, sinking beneath the waves. Anger Reef would vanish in an instant, as if it had never been, like a poor man’s Atlantis.

The more Lex considered it, the more plausible the presence of a bomb on site seemed. It was a scorched earth policy typical of the Cold War era, when both power blocs on either side of the Iron Curtain were desperate not to give their opponent an inch. Should the Russians have rumbled the presence of a listening post on Anger Reef, and perhaps made an aggressive move against it, the Americans were in a position to dispose of it literally at the touch of a button. All personnel would evacuated, and then ka-boom.
Ha ha, Ivan. Installation? What installation?
Gone would be all that high-tech radar and sonar equipment, far more sophisticated than anything the Russians possessed and therefore of great interest to their scientists and engineers. Gone without a trace. Every last scrap of evidence flushed away. A Pyrrhic victory maybe, but a victory nonetheless. In Cold War logic a loss could still be counted as a win, so long as it meant the other superpower did not win either.

It had been an insane age, geopolitically. Was the world any saner now? Not much, Lex thought. Nor much safer.

And if Couleuvre was on the money and Anger Reef did come fitted with a nuclear failsafe, the levels of global danger were in no way going to be diminished. This was yet another of those Cold War legacy nightmares, like the nukes that disappeared on a regular basis from airbases and naval yards belonging to the former Soviet Union and wound up in the hands of very insalubrious regimes and organisations. Lex had personal experience on that front, having once gatecrashed just such a transaction in a mountain pass in the higher reaches of the Hindu Kush, on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. A renegade Ukrainian colonel had been attempting to sell a single eighteen-megaton warhead from an R-36 missile to a jihadist group. Before the briefcase containing five million dollars in bearer bonds could change hands, however, a rocket-propelled grenade landed in the middle of the gathering and put paid to their dreams, whether ideological or financial. Clean shots from an L115A3 sniper rifle picked off the injured and dying, after which Lex called in a covert US Explosive Ordnance Disposal Team to retrieve the warhead, render it safe and whisk it off to the Pantex facility in Amarillo, Texas, for disassembly. He wouldn’t forget in a hurry the looks on the faces of all the participants, seen through the reticle crosshairs of the RPG launcher: the sheer avarice in everyone’s eyes, while a weapon of mass destruction lay snug in the back of a nearby Land Cruiser, poised to become an atrocity.

That had been a job he would have done for free, if asked. And he was beginning to feel the same way about the present mission. All at once, there was more at stake than the threat posed by a regiment of zuvembies. Far more. Papa Couleuvre had morphed from bogeyman to potential mass-murdering monster, and Lex had dealt with enough of those to know that they deserved no mercy, no quarter, nothing but the same primal revulsion and loathing you felt for a hornet or a scorpion. They needed to be swatted, stamped on, crushed, before they could do more harm.

The door to the staircase beckoned. Tartaglione, at the head of the group, was just a few metres from it.

Then Lex heard shuffling. The sound of feet clumsily dragging. From behind him.

He turned. They all turned.

Zuvembies.

A good dozen of them.

They were marching down the passage, three abreast. Their pale dull eyes were fixed on the group of living beings. Interlopers, as they saw them. The enemy. They moved with deadly purpose, stiff-jointed but determined, their menace unmistakable.

The merest moment of panic. An involuntary pause for shock, for taking stock.

Then Buckler cried, “Hostiles! Move! Move!”

Lex, Albertine, Seidelmann and the Thirteeners scrambled away from the oncoming zuvembies, making for the door.

Which opened.

To reveal more zuvembies.

THIRTY

TRIPLE-PRONGED ASSAULT

I
T WAS ALMOST
, but not quite, a pincer movement. Had the staircase zuvembies emerged a couple of seconds sooner, they and their passage counterparts would have successfully trapped their quarry between them. Lex and company would have been bookended by the two contingents, boxed in with no room for manoeuvre, and would have been besieged on two fronts at once.

As it was, Tartaglione had drawn level with the door when it opened, and his reactions were quick. He shot the frontmost zuvembie in the chest with his CAR-15. The zuvembie staggered backwards under the impact, colliding with another zuvembie behind. Without hesitating, Tartaglione grabbed the door and slammed it shut. He grasped the handle and held it level, at the same time shouting, “Go! Go! Go!”

Everyone else hurried past while Tartaglione kept a tight grip on the handle. The zuvembie on the other side was pushing down on it. The undead creature was visible through the window slit inset into the door, straining and thrusting, teeth bared. Blood oozed from a neat hole in its sternum.

“Fucker’s strong!” Tartaglione said, grimacing with effort. It was all he could do to keep the handle horizontal. “Can’t hold it... much...”

Then a fist smashed through the safety glass. The hand, belonging to another zuvembie, grabbed Tartaglione’s collar. It yanked him towards the door. His head jammed into the broken window slit.

Sampson ran to his side and began pulling his free arm. Tartaglione, yelling, frantic, was the rope in a bizarre tug of war.

Meanwhile the first set of zuvembies was closing in.

Morgenstern shouldered her carbine and started firing at them. Hunks of flesh flew away, but the zuvembies didn’t falter. They lumbered on, remorseless. One of Morgenstern’s bullets severed a spinal column. The zuvembie collapsed on the spot, but its comrades just booted it aside and carried on. The semi-paralysed zuvembie didn’t give up either but clawed its way along the floor, useless legs trailing.

Sampson and Tartaglione were both doing their utmost to resist the zuvembie’s grip on Tartaglione’s collar, but even their combined strength was no match for its unholy might. They were losing the battle. Tartaglione was being dragged head-first through the window, even as he still struggled to keep the door shut.

“Give me a second,” Sampson said. “I’m letting go.”

“You’re what now?” Tartaglione exclaimed. “Don’t you do that. Don’t you fucking dare.”

“Chill. I’ve got a plan.”

“It better be a fucking good one.”

Sampson unhitched the KA-BAR knife from his belt and brandished it point down. “Get your stinking paws off my buddy, asshole,” he roared, and plunged the blade into the zuvembie’s wrist. Sawing and levering, he swiftly separated hand from arm. Blood glugged from the stump in sticky rivulets. Tartaglione sprang free, the zuvembie’s fist still clamped to his clothing. His head was bleeding freely from gashes inflicted by the broken window glass.

“Fall back!” Buckler yelled to both men, and Tartaglione and Sampson reeled away from the door just as the first set of zuvembies reached them. They bundled down the passage, ducking under the suppressing fire that Morgenstern was continuing to lay down. Tartaglione was dazed and bleeding. Sampson was supporting him, half-carrying him.

“But those are people,” Albertine protested as they ran. “We shouldn’t be shooting them.”

“
Were
people,” Buckler corrected her. “They’re dead. They just don’t act like it. And as long as they’re going balls-out to kill us, yes, we should be shooting at them.”

Pearce, ahead, skidded to a halt. “Motherfucking...”

Yet more zuvembies had come into view. They tramped along the passage, an assortment of civilians, some in casual dress, a couple in lab coats, one in a chef’s uniform, another in a janitor’s coveralls. The chef was carrying a meat cleaver, the janitor a broken-off broom handle with a sheared, splintered tip. Their mouths hung slack but their eyes had the same yellow cast and the same bleak fixity as those of the zuvembies at the other end of the passage.