‘I’m going to assume for a moment that you’re not a complete idiot,’ Amanda told Asher. ‘That the body of your head of security lying right here hasn’t escaped your notice. And that this is the second corpse on your watch…’
‘On Sub-commander Walters’ watch…’ Asher began. Pass that buck, Amanda thought.
‘You don’t give a fuck about how I’m dressed. It’s a power play. It’s about establishing control. Let’s just skip it. You do your job, I do mine and we both try to piss each other off as little as possible.’
Asher stared at the woman. Once again he was at a loss trying to work out why these semi-literate grunts would even bother speaking, when all that was required of them was to do as their intellectual superiors told them to.
‘Oh dear,’ Dr Asher said, with mock sadness. ‘There seems to be some confusion. I will try and explain the situation in as simple terms as I can manage. You do what I tell you to do when I tell you to do it, and you do it without question.’
Amanda looked up at him. There was no anger in her expression, just weariness.
‘No,’ she told him simply. Asher started turning a funny red colour. Amanda guessed that he wasn’t used to being told no by his subordinates. ‘Look, I tried the career thing in this fucked-up job, it didn’t work out for me. You’ve got nothing to threaten me with. You don’t like me? Send me packing, or even better have me fired, you pathetic little pig of a man.’ The bucktoothed member of Asher’s security detail endeared himself to Amanda by trying to suppress a grin. Asher was turning puce now, but he managed to get control of himself.
‘You have family in New York, don’t you, Miss Cross?’ Asher said, smiling.
‘I did until CELL had them evicted for whatever it is they’re doing there. Imagine how popular that will make me at Thanksgiving.’ Amanda didn’t like how this was going. She could not for the life of her understand why Congress had handed control of the ruined city over to CELL after the mess they had made during the quarantine.
‘I believe that they are in a refugee camp just outside of Sleepy Hollow. I can make life very difficult for them, as well as for the members of your team.’
Amanda stared at him. She felt the same cold rage that she always felt when someone threatened people that she cared about. Don’t blow, she told herself, bide your time.
‘Boss,’ Alan said returning. Amanda was grateful for the interruption. She’d been worried that she was going to say or do something really dumb and possibly quite violent. ‘I’ve got three bullets imbedded in the wall. They were tightly grouped. The other two rounds I can’t account for. I reckon they got shot down the tunnel deeper into the cave complex. I can go look for them.’ Amanda was already shaking her head.
‘No way. We go out, we go mob-handed.’ Alan looked relieved. ‘You said two.’ Alan held something up. ‘Seriously, what did I tell you about handling the evidence?’ Amanda asked, pained. Mikey was grinning. Alan looked embarrassed. Amanda took the object off him and examined it.
‘Impacted six-point-eight millimetre full metal jacket from the Grendel. Standard issue because CELL doesn’t know enough to issue low-impact rounds to the half-trained fuckwits they employ as grunts. It hit the cave wall,’ but even as she said it she knew something wasn’t right.
‘Thing is, boss, I found it right in the middle of the tunnel entrance,’ Alan told her.
‘Walters the kind of guy to panic?’ Amanda asked.
‘No, he was solid,’ Safiya said in English. Her accent was a mix of French and Algerian. ‘He wasn’t in New York but he’d helped clear out a few Ceph nests and he’d been on the sharp end in Sri Lanka with your 10th Infantry.’
‘Which ties with the tight grouping. So why didn’t he hit what he was aiming at?’ She pointed at the tunnel entrance. ‘So something comes at him. He gets off two three-round bursts. He hits it but no blood?’ she looked at Alan. Alan shook his head. ‘It closes in the face of automatic weapon fire and not only overpowers a trained ex-soldier but twists his head round.’
‘So Ceph, right?’ the bucktoothed guy said.
Amanda glanced at Asher.
‘Anything you want to share, doctor?’ Amanda asked. Asher had a good poker face.
‘You thinking Stalker?’ Mikey asked.
‘No plasma burns, no shard wounds. Stalker would be my guess.’ She stood up. ‘Alan, how many of the detail down here?’
‘Now? Ten, including you.’
‘And from the old team, other than the three of you here?’
‘Daniels, Schmidt and Okobe. O’Donnel got crippled in a bar fight in northern Finland…’
‘Yeah, I heard about that, shame, good people when she could control her temper.’
‘Marceau got fired after that shit in Manchester. Couldn’t get work, couldn’t get welfare, he ate his own gun…’
‘Shit. I didn’t know about that. And Harrison bought it in Nigeria?’ Alan nodded. ‘Then three new guys?’
‘Including this bucktoothed motherfucker here,’ Alan said nodding at the fourth member of the security detail present.
‘Hello, bucktoothed motherfucker,’ Amanda said to him warmly. New Guy smiled and nodded. ‘I like him, particularly the way he just won’t shut up.’
‘Everyone calls me Hank, ma’am,’ the bucktoothed contractor told her.
‘Alabama?’ Amanda asked.
‘Hell no! Southern Georgia.’
‘You got problems with us coloured folks?’ Amanda asked.
‘Ignoring your racial profiling of me as poor whisky tango, only in front of friends and family back home.’
Amanda had to smile at this.
‘You in off the street or did you serve?’ Amanda asked, standing up and brushing herself down.
‘1st Marine. Caught the tail end of Sri Lanka. We were in New York trying to evacuate civilians. Under Colonel Barclay.’
‘He’s good people,’ Mikey assured her.
‘Miss Cross,’ Asher began irritably. ‘My time is very valuable and you have work to do.’
‘Okay, I’m through playing detective. Standard operating procedure is you pull everyone out of here and you call in spec ops. They hunt and kill this thing and then you can go back to work.’
‘No, I don’t think so,’ Dr Asher said.
‘It’s the SOP,’ Amanda said, feeling her heart drop. Asher wouldn’t want to shut down the operation and call in spec ops because it would mean a loss of productivity and a loss of control. In short, it wouldn’t help him crawl back up to the corporate trough.
‘There’s ten of you and one of these things…’
‘And we have to keep the dig secure and hunt this thing and possibly sleep as well. There are hundreds of miles of tunnel down here, not to mention that this could be the tip of the iceberg. My experience is that if there’s one, there’s probably more.’
‘I’ve read your record. Military police Special Response Team and then you transferred to the Defence Criminal Investigation Service. You have the skills to deal with this situation. In fact, you were a very promising young CELL officer until you disgraced yourself by disobeying direct orders and abandoning your post in New York.’
Amanda clenched her jaw but did not rise to the provocation.
‘Fine. Shut down sites B through E…’
‘No. In fact, as soon as we’re finished here have the body cleared away, because I’m bringing another team in. The fact that it killed here suggests that this site may be more important than we initially thought. Just find this thing and kill it.’