Bodies flipped to the sand, torn wide open. Heads popped. Jaws were smashed from faces. Bullets chewed flesh and Kade swept his dark gaze without emotion across the men who died screaming and scrabbling at his feet...
The noise slowly died down.
Camels were barking with nostrils flared at the scent of blood and at the noise of the guns. They stamped on the sand, tethered and nervous.
Two men were groaning, lying prostrate on the desert floor.
Not a single Arab had fired a shot.
‘Carter!’
Kade’s head snapped left. The other Spiral men were bound, and Kade grinned at them savagely and said, ‘Just give me a moment to provide an encore, gentlemen.’
Kade picked up another sub-machine gun and moved to the two groaning men. He knelt beside the first, looked into the dark cruel eyes, then smashed the butt of the gun against his forehead several times, cracking open the skull.
‘Carter, man, what the fuck are you doing?’
Kade lifted the gun and pointed it at the group of captured Spiral agents.
‘You got a fucking problem?’ he screamed, insanity dancing in his eyes, across his twisted face. ‘I’ll fucking kill you all, I’ll fucking smear your blood on my face and—’
He glanced down.
Shot the last Egyptian in the face. Emptied the magazine until there was nothing left of the man’s head, just a dark purple pulp with shards of bone splintered obscenely on top of a bullet-torn neck stump strung with skeins of twitching muscle and ligament.
The body jerked spasmodically, a last pulsing of its blood staining the sand.
Kade climbed to his feet, staring around at the twenty dead bodies. He realised that he was breathing hard and he dropped the gun to the ground and started to laugh. ‘Welcome to Egypt,’ he screamed as the other Spiral operatives looked on in horror. ‘Yeah, welcome to fucking Cairo as well!’
And instead of this being the end of the horror, it was, in fact, just the beginning.
Carter awoke, shivering. The whisky bottle was by his side, drained, and his head was pounding. Weak light crept from behind the shutters. A diseased rat had crawled into his mouth and died.
Cairo7.
He shivered again, horrified at the dream - at the reliving of Kade’s first bout of true insanity, on show for others to appreciate.
Before Cairo7 Carter had always retained some semblance of control. But in the desert that night, Kade had pushed Carter into a deep mental recess and locked the door. Kade had mocked him. Kade had punished him. Kade had fucked him very severely.
Carter still remembered, as they made a cross-desert dash for friendly lines, the fear emanating from his own men, the other Spiral agents whom Kade had reluctantly released. They sat near him only so not to antagonise him further. They shared their water only so that he would not shoot them in the face.
Not Slater.
Slater had watched him with a dark intelligence.
Slater had shown no fear.
It was as if Slater had understood.
Carter heard their comments as they made camp without fire in wadis, hunkering under outcroppings of rock or in shallow caves. They had whispered among themselves.
‘Did you see him move?’
‘He was so fucking fast...
’
‘Like a fucking demon ...
’
‘He killed twenty armed men single-handed
—’
‘They couldn’t even fucking touch him!’
‘And what about when he unloaded a full clip into that poor bastard’s face?’
‘He was fucking insane ... did you see it? In his eyes? He was
possessed ...’
Carter rolled from the bed and stood, naked, scratching his belly. He moved to the sink and poured himself a glass of water, downing it in one. His door burst open and Mongrel stood there, fully kitted and ready to move.
‘Carter?’
‘Hmm?’
‘The Priest is a couple of miles away. The ECube comm says he’ll be fifteen minutes. Get your shit together.’
Carter smiled at Mongrel. ‘I told you not to let me drink the whole fucking bottle.’
‘Hey.’ Mongrel spread his hands, gaze fixed on Carter’s face. ‘You looked like you needed it, mate. I’ll meet you out front in five.’ He stared, frowning, at Carter’s dangling penis, his nakedness, realising Carter would need time to dress. ‘Better make that ten. And don’t forget to put your fucking pants on!’
Then he was gone, leaving the door wide open and a cool breeze invading Carter’s privacy.
‘You’re an animal,’ muttered Carter, searching, eyes bloodshot, for his clothes.
Carter and Mongrel sat in the dawn sunshine, looking down over the steep winding trail and waiting for The Priest.
Carter sipped at his steaming coffee.
‘You feeling bad?’ muttered Mongrel with a smirk.
‘I’ve felt better,’
‘Did you speak with Roxi last night?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did you fuck her?’
‘Mongrel! Natasha is dying and my only thought is of saving her life ... do you really rank me so low in the scheme of things? Lower than a fucking reptile?’
‘I
would have.’
‘She’s pretty,’ acknowledged Carter, ‘but I think my energies are best put to other uses. And my bastard ribs are cracked, I swear it. That bastard Jam didn’t half give me a kicking ...’
‘Have you thought any more about him? And that ex-Spiral fucker Gol?’
Carter downed his coffee and refilled his mug from the jug, tipping in plenty of sugar and milk. He sighed, shaking his head. ‘Hey, Mongrel, as far as I’m concerned the whole world has gone mad. We’ve got earthquakes ripping up various countries, Jam transformed into God only knows what sort of experimental entity by Durell, Gol back from the dead, and now I’ve got Roxi drifting into my life from a past I had practically forgotten - a past where I tried to murder her. I can’t really say that anything else could possibly surprise me.’
‘Well, let’s see what The Priest has to say.’
‘It better be pretty fucking damn important,’ growled Carter, ‘because he’s wasting my time right now.’
‘You soon ask him,’ rumbled Mongrel, gesturing at the trail.
The Priest laboured up the path.
His grey robes flapped around his titanic frame, his bushy beard swayed in out-of-synch rhythm with his rosary beads, and his sandals trod the rocky sand trail with an awkward step. He carried his Bible in both outstretched hands, like a magic talisman, a totem of power.
Carter and Mongrel watched the barrel-chested man’s long haul up the mountain.
It gave them some small pleasure to see him sweat like a pig.
The Priest finally arrived on the plateau and smiled down from his great height, sweat streaming from his forehead and great patches of it staining the cloth under his arms. ‘Behold, my children!’
‘At last, the prodigal returns,’ said Carter through a veil of smoke. ‘Coffee?’
‘Yes. Six sugars.’
‘Six?’
‘A growing lad like me needs to keep up his strength. Now, down to business.’ From within his robes he brought out two ECubes and passed one to Carter, one to Mongrel.
‘Updated?’ asked Carter.
‘More than an update, my son,’ said The Priest. ‘These are new revisions, running V5.0 ICARUS op systems, now up to 18GHz dual-RISC processors and 1024 gig of Optical-RAM. The whole network has been revised after many recent breaches by the Nex - the whole encryption stage has been revamped, and if you key in your DSquad code then you can see the schematics and check out all the new functions. There are a few new little tricks. The Lord would be proud of such innovation.’
Carter and Mongrel handed over their old units. The Priest took his coffee and sat cross-legged on the grass. The sea crashed distantly, and a cool breeze ruffled his beard and cooled the sweat on his brow.
‘I have answers,’ he said, simply.
‘What is going on?’
‘Since we sunk the Spiral_mobile battleship just over a year ago, we have become complacent. We thought the Nex were on the decline. The SAD teams were doing their job, exterminating what Nex filth they could ferret out in small pitched battles. But we have all been wrong. The Nex soldiers that the SAD teams were taking out were
rejects -
the weak and the lame. Apparently, when a Nex is created there can be many problems with the DNA coding and restructuring - the blending, as Durell would call it. For the past year we have been fed these mewling weaklings as decoys while Durell built an army.’
‘An army?’ rumbled Mongrel. ‘You mean ...’
‘We estimate that Durell has a quarter of a million Nex soldiers, although he could have more. He has also enlisted many thousands of mercenaries to do his bidding. It would seem that his company - Leviathan Fuels -has provided him with the funding he needs.’
‘LVA?’ said Carter. ‘So Durell owns the fuel company?’
‘More than that,’ said Durell softly. ‘I have encoded documents - the code took us many hours to crack and I risked my own life and limb to retrieve the items concerned. They show a machine - a machine, built to a very specific and strange design, that can control
earthquakes.
Now, there seem to be strategic points around the globe where Durell drops a shaft, mainly under the pretence of mining LVA, when really the LVA is a
catalyst.
In every shaft he plants a machine - which he calls a QuakeEngine, or Foundation Stone - and when networked through a “QuakeHub”, a central unit devised to focus all this power and allow networked command globally, our enemies can force earthquakes at quite specific locations.’
‘Why would he want to do this?’ rumbled Mongrel.
Carter sighed. ‘Durell believes that Spiral has grown weak and fat on the spoils of war. He believes that he and his happy band of Nex can do a fucking superior job. But first he has to persuade everybody that he’s the boss. If he can target cities, even whole countries with earthquakes -fuck, combined with quarter of million Nex soldiers in support he can hold the world to ransom. What he failed to bring about with the QIII processor, it would seem he now seeks to achieve with brute force.’
‘His Achilles heel is that the network is not fully functional,’ said The Priest. ‘For whatever reason, events are accelerating beyond his control and his QuakeHub network is not quite fully operational. Governments have received encrypted messages outlining how the quakes that recently ripped through London, LA, Moscow, Paris ... they are just warning shots. Jabs to the nose. Tasters. But when the network is complete then he can truly play God. His sacrilege will be complete and he will be ready to administer a smiting from Heaven.
‘You did an excellent job in Slovenia. Spiral have instructed Simmo and the TankSquads to hunt out the LVA pumps and destroy them - if we move quickly then Durell will not be able to get his QuakeHub network fully functional, and even though he can control the quakes it will be as nothing to the power he could unleash if all the sites are linked and uploaded. Spiral is working with world governments even as we speak, and if we move with enough speed we can destroy his sites quicker than he can build them ... we can halt Durell and his army before they begin to march. All it needs is the cooperation of the international powers.’
‘You could have told us all this via ECube,’ growled Mongrel. ‘Why you drag us from our mission? Why waste our time sitting here on dumb arses getting fat and frustrated?’
‘The whole network is compromised,’ said The Priest sombrely. ‘Hence the new ECube machines ...’ He glanced then at Carter, and the Spiral operative felt suddenly, deeply uneasy.
Cold.
Kade’s words came back to haunt him.
‘The Priest will be here in a few hours - at dawn. You need to make your decision and make it now ... if you meet with him you won’t like what he has to say. It will be a threat to Natasha’s life ... and fuck only knows you’ve moaned about that dying bitch for long enough ...
’
Carter fixed his stare on The Priest. Smoothly, under the table and out of view from the cross-legged Spiral man, he eased free his Browning and it rested bulky in his palm like an old friend. Something was not right, Carter realised. This whole meeting was
wrong.
‘What is on your mind?’ said Carter softly.
The Priest bowed his head for a moment. One hand touched his rosary beads, as if for reassurance. Then he met Carter’s glare with his piercing gold-flecked eyes and there was strength there, an inhuman strength that could only belong to the head of the Spiral secret police.
‘You must abandon your mission,’ said The Priest.
‘What mission?’ said Carter easily. He flicked free the safety catch.
‘You seek the machine that creates the Nex. You seek to use the machine for its original purposes - that of healing. You wish to bring Natasha and your unborn child back from the brink of death. All these things I know to be true. All these things I understand.’ The Priest was calm, and perfectly collected. He did not blink. ‘But you must still abandon this mission.’
‘Why?’