‘So, commander? Freak weather, perhaps?’
‘I want proof.’
‘You’ll end up with some illiterate monkey with a gun knowing far more than they should. I’m telling you the ice is the by-product of an energy release. They have initialised a piece of their tech here.’
‘And you’ve seen this before?’ Lockhart demanded, knowing the answer. Asher sighed.
‘Nobody alive today has ever seen this before,’ he said, as if explaining something very simple to a particularly stupid child.
‘I’m sending them in.’
Asher just sighed and shook his head.
‘Understood, out.’ Barnes clipped the sat uplink’s hand piece back onto the main unit at the top of Chavez’s pack. ‘We’re to make our way to the village.’
‘We are wearing entirely the wrong sort of fatigues for this bullshit,’ Chavez muttered, looking around at the winter wonderland the rainforest had become. It was freezing here, and the thin tropical fatigues they had on were doing little to keep them warm. There was no snow, just ice. The air was surprisingly dry, as if the moisture in the air had coalesced into the ice that encased the jungle. To Barnes’ mind, when he saw the plants, flowers, fruit and trees in the ice it made him think that a god had chosen to preserve this little bit of rainforest. The ice was like a prism when the sun caught it. Very little of it had started melting yet. It was quite beautiful, if very, very strange.
‘Layer up if you’ve got anything with you,’ Barnes told them. Chavez and T had already put sunglasses on to combat the glare.
‘Earl’s ghillie suit’s going to be worse than useless,’ T told the lieutenant. Barnes nodded.
‘Earl, sorry to cramp your style but fold in with us.’
Two of them kept watch whilst the other layered up. Barnes had a fleece top and a fleece-lined hat with him that he was thankful for. A little while later Earl warned them over the tac radio that he was about to appear and then did so. The tall, rangy sniper’s ghillie suit made him look like a living part of the jungle. Amongst the ice it just made him very conspicuous and he removed it whilst the others kept watch.
‘Okay, we don’t know what the fuck’s going on, so let’s assume the worst,’ Barnes told the other three members of the patrol. ‘Earl, you’re on point but don’t run away from us, T you’re tail.’
‘Rules of engagement?’ T asked.
‘No change but let’s err on the side of caution, yeah?’ Chavez and T agreed, Earl said nothing, which Barnes took as assent.
They advanced though the frozen jungle in a diamond formation with Earl at the point. Every so often the sniper would point at an area that they would use as an initial fall-back point in the event of a contact.
There were few clouds in the bright blue sky above them and the sun was causing them problems with the glare, despite their sunglasses. As it heated the ice they could hear a steady dripping noise as it started to melt.
There was no cover. Barnes had rarely felt so exposed. Anywhere they went in the icescape they stuck out like a sore thumb. This must be Earl’s worst nightmare, Barnes mused. They were on a dirt track. One side of the road was frozen rainforest, on the other side of the road were frozen, cultivated coffea arabica. The small, spiky trees must have been part of the plantation, Barnes guessed. The trees had flowered before they were encased in the ice. All around them now the sun was heating the ice and it was dripping, making the ground more and more treacherous underfoot.
Ahead of them Earl stopped by a bend in the track. He was looking up at something. He gestured to a fall-back point and then moved ahead.
Barnes and the others, weapons at the ready, followed the sniper round the corner. Barnes looked up and froze for a moment. Earl had gone to ground and was covering up the road.
‘Want me to go ahead and check it out LT?’ Earl asked over the tac radio.
‘Negative. We stick together.’ Because this is just getting weirder and weirder, Barnes left unsaid as he looked up at the strange structure towering over the frozen trees ahead of them.
It was some kind of spire but the architecture was all wrong. There was something organic about it. The spire looked like it was made of cracked, blackened, seamed, diseased bone. Circular blade/drill-like mechanisms spotted the body of the strange twisted spire like technological flowers. Barnes swallowed hard. He was aiming the M4 at it almost despite himself. He forced himself to look away from the strange spire.
‘You getting this, Broadsword actual?’ Chavez asked over the sat uplink. She had attached the DV camera to the mounting rails of her M4 carbine and linked it to the sat uplink so she could broadcast back to the CP. ‘They want us to investigate,’ Chavez told the rest of them. I’ll bet, Barnes thought. ‘Gonna tell us what that weird fucking thing is, Broadsword actual?’ Chavez listened. ‘That’s a negatory on actual information,’ she told the rest of the patrol.
‘It looks like some kind of drill machinery,’ T suggested.
‘What are fucking coffee farmers doing with mining machinery?’ Chavez demanded.
‘Maybe FARC are using it?’ T didn’t even sound like he believed what he was saying.
‘Mole people,’ Earl said over the tac radio. Barnes was so surprised that he turned to glance at the sniper. Nobody seemed quite sure if the quiet Missourian was joking or not.
‘Can you hear something?’ Barnes asked. He’d become aware of a low noise coming from the direction of the spire, which according to Barnes’ map was where the village was supposed to be.
‘Chanting,’ Earl said over the tac radio.
‘What are they chanting?’ T asked.
‘I don’t know. I can only swear in Spanish.’
‘This what you were expecting?’ Lockhart asked as he watched the grainy footage of the strange spire.
‘This is so much more,’ Asher said. There was a hunger, or a need, in his voice that made Lockhart very uncomfortable. The fat scientist turned to Lockhart and the commander grimaced as he caught a whiff of the off-milk smell that seemed to accompany the other man everywhere.
‘It seems inert. We need to get in there, full biohazard protocol.’
‘Let’s see what they find first.’
The town was little more than a street lined with a few dilapidated houses. The biggest building, if you ignored the strange spire, appeared to be some kind of combined office, truck yard and police station. The trucks were for transporting the coffee beans, Barnes guessed.
The chanting was louder now. He’d asked Chavez what they had been saying and, after she had angrily pointed out that she’d grown up in New York, she’d tried to interpret.
‘It sounds like gibberish, to be honest. The only words I can make out are “light” and “white flower”.’
‘They’re talking in tongues,’ Earl said.
‘LT?’ T said quietly over the tac radio. The SAW gunner was on the other side of the street between two houses, his weapon aimed up the road towards the spire. Barnes had been similarly concealed between two ice-encrusted houses but covering their back. ‘See the weapons?’ Barnes glanced up the street, where he saw there were a number of weapons, mostly old fashioned assault rifles, just lying in the middle of the road.
Maybe they’ve embraced peace, Barnes mused. The weapons looked like the sort of thing that some of the less well-equipped FARC units would be armed with.
‘I like unarmed people,’ Chavez muttered. Barnes had to agree with her.
They were close to the spire now but still could not see the base of it.
‘Okay, lets move up and get eyes on,’ Barnes told them over the tac radio. He reckoned they would see the base of the spire around the next corner.