Warhead (26 page)

The Sleeper reared, whirling as Mo was flung free. Rogowski charged, his gun yammering hot fire. The Sleeper, snarling, strings of blood and saliva pooling from its maw as it chittered, lurched towards Mo. Even as it thrashed in its death throes, its claws came up to zip through his throat and windpipe, tearing off his head and sending it rolling and bouncing across The Grey Church’s rubble-strewn floor.

Rogowski, stunned by the sudden death of his friend, blinked and then continued to fire at the already dying Sleeper. With a great deflating sigh, the Sleeper Nex sank down over Mo’s headless twitching corpse.

Mongrel and Roxi took on the other two massive beasts, charging together at them, firing as they ran. They rolled apart at the last moment and the Sleepers spun in a tight circle, bullets whining as they ricocheted from the armoured hides. Roxi, with incredible athleticism, leapt towards the wall and kicked off from the stone, somersaulting onto the rim of the circular pulpit on its small dais. As the Sleepers rounded on Mongrel, Roxi started to fire down from her elevated position at the creatures.

‘Son of a buggering bugger!’ muttered Mongrel as his gun suddenly jammed. He shook the weapon uselessly and went white as the Sleepers growled menacingly and crept towards him.

And then The Priest was there. The two Sleepers were caught in a sustained, coolly aimed crossfire as The Priest and Roxi pumped round after round into their writhing bodies.

Then everything went quiet. The reek of cordite filled the church. Rekalavich slumped to the ground, uttering a foul Russian curse, both hands clamped over the deep wound in his stomach. It wasn’t enough to stop a crimson puddle forming slowly in his lap.

‘Why it always my bloody gun that jam?’ moaned Mongrel, kicking one of the Sleeper Nex corpses. ‘Mongrel cursed with dodgy weaponry! Bad God want him dead!’

‘We have to get out of here,’ snapped The Priest. His face and beard were speckled with blood. He had sheathed his blood-slick knife. In one hand he held his Bible, and with the other hand he was nudging at his rosary beads with the barrel of his Glock. ‘I assume by the arrival of these—’ he spat on the ground—‘these
unholy
vermin that the GRID is terminally compromised?’

Roxi had placed a thick pad of cotton against Rekalavich’s stomach and had helped the Russian to his feet. He was pale from blood loss, and leant heavily on the slim woman for support. She grunted tinder his weight.

‘No,’ he managed to mutter, rubbing at his face and leaving smears of blood against his stubbled skin. ‘They have cracked the codes; they can use it, they can decode it—but so can we. They haven’t cut off our escape route just yet.’

‘Let’s get moving,’ growled Simmo. Despite the fight and the broken cheekbone, he had still found time to relight his cigar, which was all squashed and deformed like a length of twisted tree root. He rubbed tenderly at his forehead where a huge bruise had blossomed. ‘The Nex are at the front door—and they’re planting a bomb.’

‘You sure?’ asked Mongrel.

‘I can
smell
the HighJ.’

The battered group moved to the SpiralGRID’s portal which crackled into existence, a SpiderCAR formation becoming visible at the call from The Priest’s ECube.

The Spiral team had watched this portal spit forth the enemy and disgorge the Sleeper Nex. Now the whine of injectors filled the air as the GRID charged itself for another sideways shift. Then there came a soft
click
of detonation—and the group watched in sudden wide-eyed horror as the church door became a rapid raging inferno, a terrifying expanding ball of gas and fire and shrapnel rushing towards them. But then they were gone. Swallowed ... into the GRID.

The Sikorsky Comanche RAH-NV was an old Spiral model, taken over by Durell after the great global collapse. Powered by a twin-turboshaft T800 LHT-950 plant, it carried twin stowable three-barrelled 20mm turreted Gatling nose guns, capable of firing 2,000 rounds a minute. It had a fully retractable missile armament I-RAMS system and the ability to carry a full payload of fifty-two standard 78mm rockets, twenty-two Stinger air-to-air missiles and eighteen Hellfire anti-tank missiles.

As they landed on the roof of the WarFactory and Carter climbed down from the small black Nex helicopter, he eyed the Comanche with a mixture of careful consideration, awe and respect.

‘One of yours,’ said Durell, standing next to him on the concrete roof. They were surrounded by armed Nex, and Carter could still taste blood and the sour, bitter tang of his mission.

They want me to kill Simmo and The Priest, he thought. And Roxi.

And Mongrel...

Carter’s vision blurred. He turned away from the Comanche and allowed himself to be guided by the surprisingly gentle hand of Alexis. They moved across the roof, past a hundred more helicopters—many of them new and gleaming black under the dull evening light. They walked down long corridors wide enough to accommodate tanks and aircraft, down more ramps, then up wide steep iron steps, footsteps clanking, until they came to some form of control centre which was a hive of activity. Many Nex sat at glowing work-stations, along with human programmers and military coordinators. A few glanced up briefly as Durell, Alexis, Carter and their contingent of armed Nex entered.

On a bench to one side sat a silver box, half a metre long, narrow and vented. Carter found his gaze drawn to the MicroNuke as hackles rose on the back of his neck. If the bomb, small though it was, were to explode then it wouldn’t just take out the WarFactory. Half the damn city would be destroyed.

‘That it?’

‘This is a Grade 3 plutonium device,’ said Alexis, moving to place her hand gently—almost reverently—against the nuclear bomb. The MicroNuke—what Jam had once fondly called Armageddon in a suitcase.

Jam, thought Carter.

It had been a long time. Jam, Carter’s oldest friend and one of Spiral’s best operatives during their hectic antiterrorist days, had been captured while on a mission in Slovenia. Beaten and abused, he had undergone a transformation into a new breed of Nex that Durell was developing, a breed named the ScorpNex which involved such complicated genetic modifications that most subjects died before leaving the laboratory slab. With Jam, however, the transformation had been successful—changing the cheerful cockney into a monster, a horrific blend of human and cockroach and
scorpion ...
Jam had become an awesome warrior, a terrible killer.

Carter had found himself face to face with his oldest friend—a new creature that could not be beaten—only to find that the power of the genetic Nex-hold had not been strong enough. During an epic struggle Jam had helped Carter and had undone the original betrayal. In doing so he had destroyed Durell’s plans to rule the world through the use of a machine capable of wreaking earthquakes on a global scale ...

However, Spiral and other agencies had not realised that the quakes had been merely the first step in Durell’s advance. As they beat back the Nex armies, thinking that they were overcoming a terrible enemy, Durell was simply putting the next stages of his plan into operation—striking not just on one front but on three. With the power of the earthquakes weakening global infrastructure, and with the combined power of biological weapons and the awesome might of tactical nuclear strikes at his disposal, Durell had proved himself unstoppable. All these advances had been coordinated by the tactical prowess of the QIV military processor, a sentient machine capable of awesome destruction—a simple and yet infinitely versatile chip willing to play at God. And bring about Armageddon.

Carter stared at the MicroNuke, his mind swimming.

‘
You have to do it,’
whispered Kade.
‘You have to kill them
...
if you want to live. If you want to save your baby.
‘

‘Yeah, like you care.’

‘I care, Carter. I care lots.
‘

Carter focused on Durell, who was handing out some documents. Alexis lowered the MicroNuke carefully into a Gore-Tex pack as Carter reached out for his set.

‘Here are your coordinates—you can access the SpiralGRID through this outpost. There will be armed Spiral men there—but hell, you are Carter. They should recognise you. You shouldn’t need
our
help to get you past the Spiral perimeter guards.’

‘And if they don’t recognise me? If they shoot first and ask my corpse questions later?’

‘Then it’s game over,’ said Durell. ‘For you
and
for your boy.’

‘So I infiltrate Spiral. Then what?’

‘Get the nuke inside, and you will be contacted by somebody already there who will give you details of the next step. An old friend, you might say, who has decided to join us. Decided our way is absolutely the
right
choice.’

‘You’re beginning to sound like one of your fucking TV campaigns.’

‘Of course I do. I wrote them. Now, take the MicroNuke—the Comanche outside is fully fuelled with LVA; you’ve enough to reach London in one direct flight.’

Carter hefted the Gore-Tex pack carefully—it was very heavy. But then, it should have been: it carried a low-yield nuclear bomb. He lifted his head, turning slightly as Alexis tossed him his 9mm Browning HiPower. He cradled the weapon, then glanced sideways at the surrounding Nex ...

‘
We could
—’ began Kade.

‘No, we fucking couldn’t,’ Carter answered silently. ‘I’m weak, battered ... and they outnumber us a thousand to one. How fucking insane are you?’ Kade did not reply.

Alexis smiled at Carter then, her copper eyes glowing. ‘We have taken the liberty of filling the Comanche with weapons; Armalite XII and Steyr 80 sub-machine guns, HPGs. You’ll even find a small case containing a MercG—a Spiral-issue garrotte containing your very own augmented digital signature.’

Carter slid the Browning into his pocket, shouldered the pack with a grunt and a wince at some internal pain or other and moved towards the ramp. Durell followed him, armour crackling, and Carter stopped at the metal doorway.

‘Who is it that I must meet?’ he asked, his voice barely more than a whisper. ‘Who betrayed Spiral?’

‘You will see soon enough,’ said Durell, his tiny dark tongue wetting his hardened silver-veined lips.

Carter said nothing more. He turned and was gone.

Alexis glanced at Durell. ‘Do you think he will succeed? In bringing down Spiral?’

‘Yes,’ said Durell, nodding and making his twisted spine crackle. ‘Carter is
our
boy now. He is one of us. We control him, we direct him, we fucking
own
him. Just like it used to be.’

The Comanche’s mechanisms hummed around Carter as he skimmed low across the Atlantic Ocean. Night had fallen, and below him the dark waters churned.

Flying without lights, Carter saw the world below him as a very dark place. His HIDSS pilot’s helmet showed different slices of image, using different forms of night vision—infra-red, Green-eye and Ttii-BlueScale—and flickered with constant data updates from the Comanche’s electronic brain. Carter was kept active during this low-level night flight; there was plenty to see and do, plenty to control and plan ...

Yet still—

Turn back. Turn back and kill them and take your boy ...

You have a Comanche ...
fucking use it.

For once, Kade remained silent, a toad under a stone. And Carter tried to justify his actions to himself—to convince himself that this was the only way. Durell had an army—a fucking
army
that had overthrown Spiral. Carter was not destroying Spiral; they were already broken. He was merely severing the head ... killing the broken snake in order to save his son.

‘You cannot do this,’ came the soft voice of Natasha. And he saw her; saw her face floating white—a ghostly image before him, superimposed over the humming HIDSS display. ‘I understand—understand your need to save our boy, but you cannot do this to Spiral ... you cannot destroy the one hope for mankind ...’

‘I will do what I have to do.’

‘You are a different man, then, to the one I loved.’

‘I will do what I have to do,’ replied Carter, his voice a low growl. And God, how he needed the whisky now, needed it more than ever before. Just a small shot; just a single sip of the old Lagavulin to soothe his burning throat and his fevered brain. ‘
Yeah, brother, and then the long dark fucking fall into whisky oblivion. I think you would
welcome
the fucking release
...’

The snow was falling heavily again, from Bristol to London, as Carter powered the Comanche through a blizzard. The thump of the helicopter’s powerful rotors played a lullaby to Carter as he gazed from within the precision HIDSS helmet at the white, undulating world below him.

The snowscape below Carter looked ... he searched for a word.
Normal,
he finally decided.

Reaching the outskirts of London, Carter held his breath as he passed the first Nex outpost—containing a cluster of eight SAM-7 surface-to-air missiles. Deployed from Mini-SAM7.8 Blocks in III/TV and IVa configurations, the SAM-7s employed electronic countermeasures in the form of mono-pulse send/receivers for semi-active III-TR radar terminal guidance and inertial mid-course guidance. Launched from the SAM7.8VLS (Vertical Launching Systems) the SAM-7s were perfect for both low—and high-altitude threat interceptions and could infiltrate past enemy aircraft’s ECM-6, Lockheed 52 and Sikorsky 2212 ASAM aerial electronic countermeasures.