‘Jesus!’ T had said it quietly but Barnes had still heard his exclamation. Barnes looked across the road. There was a figure in the doorway of one of the frozen houses. T had let his M249 drop on its sling and was holding his Mk 23 in one hand and pushing the figure back with the other.
‘Earl cover our six, Chavez our twelve, keep shooting footage and eyes out all around,’ Barnes said and, glancing up and down the street to make sure that there was no-one in sight, he quickly crossed the road.
‘Ma’am, you need to go back into the house and lie down,’ T was telling the woman who kept on advancing on him. Barnes’ stomach churned as he caught a good look at her. She was clearly sick, very sick. She was repeating something in Spanish that he didn’t understand but it sounded similar to what they had all heard being chanted.
The woman looked old, but Barnes knew that it could be difficult to judge age in parts of the world where life was hard. She wore a long skirt and a filthy t-shirt. There were seeping growths around her nose, her mouth and her eyes, which were milky and blank. She was obviously blind. The growths looked like externalised tumours to Barnes.
‘Seriously, ma’am, you need to stay back,’ T said. The woman wasn’t listening. She kept on reaching for him as he pushed her back. Barnes saw that she had bleeding holes in her palms. They looked self-inflicted. He glanced down at her feet and saw that they were bloody as well. She was smearing her blood on T. The medic pushed her back hard and then brought his leg up and used that to gently kick her back even further into the house. Then he closed the door as far as he could with the ice covering it and held it there.
‘Did you see her lymph glands?’ T asked. Barnes shook his head. ‘They were swollen. They’d gone hyperbubonic.’
‘Disease?’ Barnes asked, his heart sinking. What the fuck have we been dropped into? Barnes thought, trying to suppress his anger at command.
‘Contagion,’ T said. Barnes could see the medic was fighting to control his fear.
‘Can you do anything for her?’ Barnes asked. The woman tried to wrench the door open. T had to yank it closed again. For someone old and sick she seemed very strong.
‘Give her something for the pain. Put her out of her misery.’
‘She didn’t look like she was miserable or in pain,’ Barnes said as he drew the Mk 23 and began screwing the suppressor on it. T watched him. Both of them knew that the woman would give away their position, compromise the patrol.
‘It is my medical opinion that there is nothing we could do for her and she attacked us,’ T said, letting Barnes know he had his back.
‘This is on me, understand?’ Barnes told the medic. Time to commit a war crime, he thought. ‘Open the door.’
T let go of the door handle and it was wrenched forward. The top of the diseased woman’s head came off as Barnes fired. For a moment both men thought that she wasn’t going to fall over. Finally she swayed and fell back. Barnes stepped into the house and put two rounds into her chest.
‘Watch our six,’ Barnes told T as he slung his M4. He wanted the suppressed pistol in case there were any more. T nodded, but Barnes knew the other man was worried about contact and infection.
‘LT,’ Chavez said over the tac radio. ‘You’re going to need to see this.’ Barnes glanced up and down the dirt track that passed for a street here. He saw a dog cross behind them but nothing else moved. Chavez was lying down by the bend in the road, using one of the ice-encased houses as cover. She was looking around the corner, the DV camera on her M4 shooting footage as she did so. Barnes made his way over to her and glanced around the corner.
‘Shit,’ Barnes said. The ground was broken and had then frozen over where the spire seemed to have pushed up out of the earth. It looked like it had partially destroyed some of the houses as it had risen from the ground. Around the base of the spire were people. Many of them looked like peasant farmers, but others had on the uniform of FARC guerrillas and others were better dressed, or didn’t look Hispanic, suggesting cartel gunmen and mercenaries. All of them showed signs of the external tumorous growths and many of them were bleeding from what Barnes suspected were self-inflicted wounds. They were chanting gibberish and bits of Spanish as they swayed backwards and forwards towards the strange spire. Barnes was beginning to wonder if the spire, which seemed somehow inert to him, was some kind of delivery device for a biological weapon. Though whose, he couldn’t even begin to imagine. Barnes ducked back behind the house.
‘Estimate?’ he asked Chavez.
‘There’s easily more that a thousand people there. They must have come from all over the local area. What’s wrong with them, LT?’
Barnes didn’t answer, instead he took the handset off the sat uplink on Chavez’s back.
‘Venom two-one to Broadsword actual, requesting an immediate medevac and quarantine, we have clear signs of a biological contagion here.’ Chavez turned around to look up him. She looked scared and angry.
‘Negative, Venom two-one. Make contact with the villagers. We need to know what’s happening.’ The voice giving the order was the same that had replaced Major Winterman’s when they’d been re-tasked, except the background noise was different. It was clear that whoever was giving them orders was no longer in the CP. He was obviously transmitting from a helicopter in flight.
‘I don’t think you understand the situation here on the ground, Broadsword actual, I cannot risk further exposure of my people to whatever this is.’
‘Venom two-one, one of the things about being a soldier is sometimes we have to risk death. One of the interesting things about orders, particularly ones like this, that come down from the Joint Chiefs like it had been written on stone by God almighty and handed to Charlton-fucking-Heston himself, is that they are non-fucking negotiable. You don’t do what I am telling you to do and I will not only have you and your men court martialed for disobeying a direct order but for cowardice as well and I will try very hard to make sure that the consequences are just as bad for you as if you’d caught the Black-fucking-Death itself. Do you understand me, soldier?’
Barnes tried to resist the urge to crush the handset.
‘Fucking asshole,’ Chavez muttered, having heard most of the conversation. ‘I think he’s going to have an accident if we get out of here.’
‘I don’t want to hear that, Chavez,’ Barnes told her, though he was having similar thoughts himself.
‘Fucking reluctant soldiers!’ Lockhart spat as he threw the radio handset on the ground. Asher was struggling into his NBC suit in the cramped confines of the Sikorsky S-92, a civilian derivate of the military’s Black Hawk helicopters. There were only two of the CELL military contractors with Lockhart in this chopper, not counting the door gunner. The rest of the personnel in the chopper were Asher’s scientists. The other two S-92s, however, were both carrying full squads of CELL soldiers.
‘How contagious is the virus?’ Lockhart asked Asher. The scientist was sweating heavily, which made it very unpleasant to be in an enclosed space like a helicopter with him. Lockhart was looking forward to Asher being fully encased by the protective NBC suit.
‘Unless they are caught in the initial sporeing they should be fine,’ Asher told him.
‘Then why the suits?’
‘In case this time it’s different. After all, we’ve only seen this once before and the resources to research the virus at the time were very rudimentary indeed.’
Lockhart gave this some thought and then continued putting on his NBC suit.
They had discussed it. Barnes had explained the order. If they just wanted to bug out he would understand and claim that he had given the order to hang back. It wasn’t an unpopular suggestion, he could tell, but they were soldiers.