Burning Angels (38 page)

The tape would be their first line of defence.

Jaeger twisted a switch, changing his respirator kit on to active powered-air mode. There was a faint whir as the electric motors began to blow in clean, filtered air, billowing out his suit until the toughened rubber skin went rigid. Already it felt hot, unwieldy and constricting, plus it proved noisy whenever he tried to move.

Kamishi helped Raff suit up, and it wasn’t long before they were ready to step into the jungle.

For a moment Raff hesitated. He glanced at Jaeger from behind his visor. Inside, his face was enclosed within his FM54 mask, as was Jaeger’s. That way, they had a double line of defence.

Jaeger saw Raff’s lips move. The words reverberated in his earpiece, sounding muffled and distant.

‘She’s right. Narov. There’s no one here. I can sense it. This island – it’s deserted.’

‘You don’t know that,’ Jaeger countered. He had to raise his voice to make himself heard above the throb of the air flow.

‘There’s no one here,’ Raff repeated. ‘When we came in to land, did you see a single light? A glimmer? Movement? Anything?’

‘We still have to clear the place. First the airstrip. Then Kammler’s labs. Every step of the way.’

‘Yeah, I know. But trust me – there’s no one here.’

Jaeger eyed him through the barrier of their visors. ‘If you’re right, what does that signify? What does it mean?’

Raff shook his head. ‘Dunno, but it can’t be good news.’

Jaeger sensed the same, but there was something else eating at his mind – something that made him feel physically sick.

If this island was deserted, where had Kammler taken Ruth and Luke?

They moved out, lumbering towards the dark wall of forest like astronauts, but without the benefit of comparative weightlessness to ease their way. As they stepped awkwardly into the waiting jungle, each had his stubby MP7 sub-machine gun slung across his front.

As soon as they were beneath the canopy, the darkness was upon them. The tree cover cut out all ambient light. Jaeger flicked the switch on the torch attached to his MP7, a beam of illumination piercing the gloom as he swept the way ahead.

Before him was an almost impenetrable wall of brooding vegetation, the jungle thick with creepers, plus giant fan-like palm leaves and vines as thick as a man’s thigh. Thank God they only had a few hundred yards of this to fight their way through to make the airstrip.

Jaeger had taken a few ungainly paces under the dark canopy when he sensed movement above him. A bunched, alien form darted at him from out of the shadowed tree limbs, springing with an impossibly acrobatic and lithe sure-footedness. Jaeger raised his bulky gloved right hand to block the movement, and punched with his left, going for the creature’s throat in a typical Krav Maga thrust.

In hand-to-hand combat you had to hit instantly and hard, landing repeated blows on your adversary’s areas of greatest vulnerability – the foremost of which was the neck. But whatever this beast might be, it proved too agile; or maybe Jaeger’s movements were just too constricted by the suit. He felt as if he were mired in a thick sludge.

His assailant dodged the first blows, and an instant later he felt something powerful snake its way around his suited neck. Whatever had gripped him began to squeeze.

The strength of the thing – for its size – was unbelievable. Jaeger felt adrenalin surge around his system as his suit puckered and buckled, four powerful limbs closing around his head. He fought with his hands to tear them free, but then – suddenly and shockingly – a face appeared before him, red-eyed, rabid and snarling, and the creature struck with its canines, the long yellow fangs slashing at his visor.

For whatever reason, primates find humans encased in space suits even more terrifying and provocative than they do in the flesh. And as Jaeger had been warned in the Falkenhagen briefings, a primate – even one as small as this – could make for a fearsome adversary.

Doubly so when its brain was fried with a mind-altering viral infection.

Jaeger groped for its eyes, one of the most vulnerable points of the body. His gloved fingers made contact, and he drove his thumbs in, gouging deep – a classic Krav Maga move, and one that didn’t require particular agility or speed.

His fingers slid and slewed on a slick, greasy wetness: he could feel it even through the gloves. The animal was leaking liquid – blood – from its eye sockets.

He forced his thumbs deeper, hooking out one living eyeball. Finally the monkey relented, dropping off him in screaming, agonised rage. It let go last with its tail, the limb that had snaked around Jaeger’s neck in a stranglehold.

It made a desperate leap for cover, wounded and hopelessly sick though it was. Jaeger raised his MP7 and fired: one shot that took it down.

The monkey fell dead on the forest floor.

He bent to inspect it, sweeping his torch beam across its motionless form. Beneath its sparse hair, the primate’s skin was covered in swollen red blotches. And where the bullet had torn apart its torso, Jaeger could see a river of blood pooling.

But this wasn’t anything like normal blood.

It was black, putrid and stringy.

A deadly viral soup.

The air roared in Jaeger’s ears like an express train steaming down a long, dark tunnel. What must it be like to live with that virus? he wondered.

Dying, but with no idea what was killing you.

Your brain a fried mush of fever and rage.

Your organs dissolving inside your skin.

Jaeger shuddered. This place was evil.

‘You okay, kid?’ Raff queried, via the radio.

Jaeger nodded darkly, then signalled the way ahead.They pressed onwards.

The monkeys and the humans on this cursed island were close cousins, their shared lineage stretching back countless millennia. Now they would have to fight to the death. Yet a much older life force – a primeval one – was stalking both of them.

It was tiny and invisible, but far more powerful than them all.

80

Donal Brice peered through the bars into the nearest cage. He scratched his beard nervously. A big, lumbering lump of a guy, he’d only recently got the job at Washington Dulles airport’s quarantine house, and he still wasn’t entirely certain how the whole darned system worked.

As the new guy, he’d landed more than his share of night shifts. He figured that was fair enough, and in truth he was glad of the work. It hadn’t been easy finding this job. Painfully unsure of himself, Brice tended to cover up his insecurities with bursts of booming, deafening laughter.

It didn’t tend to go down too well at job interviews – especially as he tended to laugh at all the wrong things. In short, he was glad to have a job at the monkey house, and he was determined to do well.

But Brice figured that what he saw before him now was not good news. One of the monkeys looked real sick. Crook.

It was nearing the end of his shift, and he’d entered the monkey house to administer their early-morning feed. His last duty before clocking off and heading home.

The recently arrived animals were making a horrendous racket, banging on the wire mesh, leaping around their cages and screaming:
we’re hungry.

But not this little guy.

Brice sank to his haunches and studied the vervet monkey closely. It was crouched at the rear of the cage, its arms wrapped around itself, an odd, glazed expression on its otherwise cute features. The poor little critter’s nose was running. No doubt about it, this guy wasn’t well.

Brice racked his brains to remember the procedure for when they had a sick animal. That individual was to be removed from the main facility and placed in isolation, to prevent the illness from spreading.

Brice was a hopeless lover of animals. He still lived with his parents, and they had all kinds of pets at home. He felt strangely ambivalent about the nature of his work here. He liked being close to the monkeys, that was for sure, but he didn’t much like the fact that they were here for medical testing.

He sloped off to the storeroom and grabbed the kit required for moving a sick animal. It consisted of a long pole with a syringe attached to one end. He charged the syringe, returned to the cage, poked the stick inside and, as gently as he could, stuck the monkey with the needle.

It was too sick even to react much. He pushed the lever at his end, and the shot of drugs was injected into the animal. A minute or so later, Brice was able to unlatch the cage – which had the exporter’s name, Katavi Reserve Primates, stamped across it – and reach inside to retrieve the unconscious animal.

He carried it to the isolation unit. He’d pulled on a pair of surgical gloves in order to move the primate, but he wasn’t using any extra protection, and certainly not the suits and masks piled in one corner of the storeroom. No sickness had yet been reported in the monkey house, so there was no reason to do so.

He laid the comatose animal in an isolation cage and was about to close the door when he remembered something one of the friendlier workers had told him. If an animal was sick, you could usually smell it on its breath.

He wondered if he should give it a try. Maybe he could earn some brownie points with his boss that way. Remembering how his colleague had said to do it, he leant into the cage and used his hand to waft the monkey’s breath across his nostrils, inhaling deeply a couple of times. But there was nothing distinctive that he could detect, above the faint smell of stale urine and food in the cage.

Shrugging, he shut and bolted the door, and glanced at his watch. He was a few minutes overdue his shift changeover. And in truth, Brice was in a hurry. Today was Saturday – the big day at the Awesome Con comic convention in downtown. He’d forked out some serious money for tickets to the ‘Geekend’, and to get access to the Power Rangers 4-Pack VIP event.

He had to hurry.

An hour later, he’d made it to the Walter E. Washington Convention Centre, having done a quick stopover at home to change out of his work clothes and grab his costume. His parents had objected that he had to be tired after his night shift, but he’d promised them he’d get some proper rest that evening.

He parked up and headed inside, the roar of the massive air-conditioning units adding a reassuring baseline hum to the chatter and laughter that filled the cavernous convention centre’s interior. Already it was buzzing.

He made a beeline for the breakfast hall. He was starving. Once fed and watered, he headed into a changing booth, emerging minutes later as a . . .
superhero
.

Kids flocked to the Hulk. They pressed close, wanting to have their photo taken with their all-powerful comic idol – especially as the Hulk seemed to be far more smiley and fun in the flesh than he ever appeared in the movies.

Donal Brice – aka the Hulk – would spend the weekend doing what he loved most: laughing his booming, heroic laugh in a place where everyone seemed to like it, and no one ever held it against him. He’d spend the day laughing and breathing, and breathing and laughing, as the vast air-conditioning system recycled his exhalations . . .

Mixing them with those of ten thousand other unsuspecting human souls.

81

‘We maybe got something,’ Harry Peterson, the director of the CIA’s Division of Asymmetric Threat Analysis – DATA – announced via the IntelCom link.

‘Tell me,’ Kammler commanded.

His voice sounded oddly echoing. He was sitting in a room carved out of one of the many caves situated close to the BV222 – his beloved warplane. The surroundings were spartan, but remarkably well equipped for somewhere positioned within immense rock walls deep beneath Burning Angels mountain.

It was both an impregnable fortress and a technologically sophisticated nerve centre. The perfect kind of place to sit out what was coming.

‘Okay, so a guy named Chucks Bello sent an email,’ Peterson explained. ‘DATA picked it up using keywords based on name-check combinations. There’s more than one Chucks Bello active on the internet, but this one grabbed our attention. There are several districts in the Nairobi slums. One – Mathare – lit up with this Chucks Bello’s comms.’

‘Which means?’ Kammler demanded impatiently.

‘We’re ninety-nine per cent certain this is your guy. Chucks Bello sent an email to one Julius Mburu, who runs something called the Mburu Foundation. It’s a social-action kind of charity that works in the Mathare slum. With kids. A lot of them are orphans. I’ll forward you the email. We’re sure this is your guy.’

‘So d’you have a fix? A location?’

‘We do. The email was generated from a commercial address: [email protected]. There is an Amani Beach Retreat approximately four hundred miles south of Nairobi. It’s a high-end, exclusive resort set on the Indian Ocean.’

‘Great. Forward me the comms chain. And keep digging. I want to be absolutely one hundred per cent certain this is our guy.’

‘Understood, sir.’

Kammler cut the IntelCom link. He punched the words ‘Amani Beach Resort’ into the Google search engine, then clicked on the website. It showed images of a pristine white crescent of sand, washed with stunning turquoise waters. A glimmering, crystal-clear swimming pool situated on the very fringes of the beach, complete with a discreet bar service and shaded sunloungers. Locals in traditional-looking batique dress serving fine food to the elegant foreign guests.

No slum kid ever went to a place like this.

If the kid was at Amani Beach, someone must have taken him there. It could only be Jaeger and his group, and they could only have done so for one reason: to hide him. And if they were shielding him, maybe they
had
realised the impossible hope that a penniless kid from the African slums might offer humankind.

Kammler checked his email. He clicked on the message from Peterson, running his eye down Simon Chucks Bello’s email.

This Dale guy gave me
maganji
. Spending money – like real
maganji
. Like, Jules man, I’m gonna pay you back. All I owe you. And you know what I’ll do next, man? I’m gonna hire a jumbo jet with a casino and a swimming pool and dancing girls from all over – London, Paris, Brazil and Russia and China and Planet Mars and even America; yeah – Miss USA by the busload – and you’ll all be invited ’cause you’re my
brothers
and we’ll zoom above the city dropping empty beer bottles ’n’ stuff so that everyone will know what a cool party we’re having, and behind that jumbo we’ll drag a banner announcing: MOTO’S JUMBO BIRTHDAY PARTY – BY INVITATION ONLY!