Crysis: Escalation (7 page)

‘No ma’am, in my opinion it is untenable to attempt to run special operations under these circumstances.’ He was talking over a secure sat phone to General Pamela Follet, the
commanding officer of United States Special Operations Command at MacDill air force base in Tampa, Florida. ‘It puts every last one of my operators at risk and frankly, I feel it’s an
usurpation of military resources for corporate agendas. I have not taken this decision lightly, but I am tendering the resignation of my commission, effective immediately. I will of course serve
out the remainder of Operation Scarface unless you see fit to replace me, which I would understand.’ Winterman listened to the General’s response. He had spotted the individual he
begrudgingly wanted to speak to. He stopped walking. ‘Frankly, General, the Joint Chiefs can kiss my ass and yes do please put that on record. If any of them have a problem with my conduct
then they are more than welcome to come down here and discuss it with me personally. I should also make you aware that the moment, and I mean the very second, I am relieved of command I am going to
find that so-called-commander-marine-washout-Dominic Lockhart and beat his bitch-ass to death. Yes ma’am, you have a good day as well.’

Having finished murdering his career, the major continued heading towards the UK part of the base as one of their Chinooks came into land. The man he wanted to speak to had noticed his approach
and stood up.

‘Major!’

Winterman turned around. He saw three members of D-squadron’s recce/sniper troop running towards him. He recognised Sergeants Hawker and Cortez and second lieutenant Dunn. It had been Dunn
who shouted.

‘I suspect it’s just mister now,’ Winterman told them. The three of them looked like they had just come off a job. Dunn looked momentarily confused but just launched ahead
anyway.

‘Major, with all due respect, what the fuck is going on? Where is T’s patrol? We get to the CP and they said you’d been relieved of command.’ Winterman looked at the six
foot tall operator. Dunn looked like he’d been carved out of stone. He knew that all three of them went way back with Thomas and Earl. They liked Chavez as well.

‘You ready to get into some trouble?’ Winterman asked. Cortez shrugged, Hawker grinned and nodded.

‘Sure,’ Dunn told him.

‘Follow me.’ Winterman turned on his heel and continued towards the obnoxious SAS “liaison” he’d been saddled with earlier in the operation. ‘Sergeant!’
Winterman shouted.

The squat, shaven-headed SAS trooper looked at Winterman and the three fully armed and still camoed-up operators he had with him.

‘Is this a beating?’ the SAS sergeant asked, wondering if he’d pushed the yank major too hard. ‘Because the boys are right behind me in the tent and I’m not afraid
to scream like a little girl if things turn nasty.’

‘Who the fuck’s this?’ Cortez asked.

‘No sergeant, it’s not a beating,’ Winterman told him.

‘In which case, either call me Sykes or Psycho, guv. You go shouting words like sergeant around and people are likely to think I’m some kind of soldier or something.’

‘I’m sure nobody would make that mistake,’ Dunn told the Brit, smiling.

‘What can I do you septics for?’ Sykes asked.

‘Septics?’ Hawker asked.

‘Septic tanks, yanks, it’s rhyming . . . never mind. This to do with the spot of bother you had this morning?’ he asked Winterman. The Major nodded. ‘What do you
need?’

‘I’m forced to go outside my chain of command. How much pull do you have with 7 Squadron?’ the Major asked.

‘I can ’ave a word if you like.’

Barnes watched the NBC-suited figure approach him. The man carried himself like he was used to command. He had seen most of the other personnel, except the fat one, defer to
him. The NBC-suited figures were packing up the two choppers on the ground and getting ready to leave whilst the other chopper circled them. Barnes had been using his med kit to see to his own
wounds as best he could whilst four of the gunmen guarded him.

The commander reached him and stopped, standing over the lieutenant.

‘You’re not going to take me with you, are you?’ Barnes said, with a degree of resignation.

‘I’m sorry, son.’

Barnes looked up at the man but all he saw was the mask of the protective suit.

‘At least take my people’s bodies with you.’ The commander shook his head. ‘Who are you people?’

‘Do you want some advice, son?’ The commander asked. Barnes didn’t answer. ‘Run, as far and as fast as you can. Head south, but start now.’

‘Have I got it? The virus or whatever the fuck that nasty shit was.’

The commander shook his head.

‘Am I a carrier? Will I be contagious?’

‘No.’

Barnes looked up at the commander’s mask.

‘I’m going to find out what happened here, you understand me?’

‘You need to get going, son, now.’

Tiredly Barnes stood up, got his bearings and, with every muscle in his battered and wounded body protesting, he started to run.

Lockhart watched him go and then turned and climbed onto the last chopper as it took off.

A Spirit B2 belonging to the 509th Bomb Wing out of Whiteman Air Force Base, Missouri, dropped the smart bomb from over ten miles away at a height of forty thousand feet. The
bomb tracked the transponder left by Commander Lockhart at the base of the spire in the village unerringly. As it approached the spire a conventional explosive within the bomb was detonated,
scattering the nanofuel over the surrounding area. That fuel then auto-ignited.

Barnes heard the explosion first. Then he was aware of a rushing noise as a powerful wind seemed to suck the oxygen out of the air. He had taken as many of the painkillers as he
had dared from the med kit, but sprinting through a frozen jungle was still agony and he spent a lot of time slipping over and sliding into trees. Then the blast wave hit. The frozen trees
exploded. Ice fragments filled the air. Barnes was torn off his feet and flung across a narrow gulley. He had just about enough time to realise that he was in real trouble.

The RAF 7 Squadron pilot had brought the HC3 Chinook to a hover. Major Winterman, Dunn and Psycho were all crowded into the helicopter’s cockpit hatchway. They, along with
the pilot and co-pilot, were staring at what looked like a solid wall of fire hundreds of feet high. It bathed the inside of the chopper in a hellish red light.

Lockhart leant out of the lead helicopter, looking behind him. They had just got clear of the fuel-air bomb’s extended blast wave. It looked like the air itself had
caught fire.

Below them was devastation. More than two square miles of rainforest had just ceased to exist. It was steaming, blackened ground now. Beyond that, many of the trees had been
knocked over by the pressure wave and parts of the forest were burning.

‘Psycho, what have you got us into?’ the Chinook pilot demanded as he circled the area.

‘Jimmy . . . I’d no idea,’ Psycho said apologetically. ‘Cool though, aye?’ Dunn and Winterman turned to stare at the SAS trooper, appalled. ‘I’m just
saying,’ Psycho said defensively.

‘I’ve got smoke on our five,’ Cortez said from the helicopter’s main cargo area. Winterman and Dunn headed back to look.

‘No shit, the jungle’s on fire,’ Psycho said as the pilot swung the Chinook around.

‘I see it,’ the co-pilot said, pointing at a thin plume of yellow smoke.

Barnes dropped the smoke canister he’d set off when he’d heard the chopper and collapsed to the ground and mercifully passed out.

He came to moments later to see the twin rotors of a Chinook overhead. Time skipped a beat. He came to again to see a squat, powerfully built, shaven-headed soldier holding a General Purpose
Machine Gun standing over him.

‘You’re all fucked up, mate,’ the soldier said in a broad London accent.

2 Days Later

‘Yes sir, one of the Delta Force operators survived and another is missing.’ Lockhart said into the secure sat phone. ‘Yes, sir, I am aware of Dr Asher’s
recommendation but it is my belief that a sanction will just draw more attention to the situation and frankly Asher is a horse’s ass. That soldier fought hard and deserved to live.’
Lockhart listened intently to what was being said on the other end of the line. ‘I still have reservations about the whole program, but frankly I think Lieutenant Barnes would be an excellent
choice if you’re still intent on going ahead with it.’ Lockhart listened again. ‘Thank you, Mr Hargreave.’

Lockhart folded the sat phone away and took another sip of his Bourbon as he glanced out the window of the corporate jet heading north. On the table in front of him was a folder labelled Raptor
Team.

Schism

New York State, 2023

‘They call me Prophet. Remember me.’

The barrel of the M12 automatic felt cool against his head. He hadn’t had cause to fire it at CELL or Ceph recently. Pressure on the trigger. Heat. Almost too hot for there to be pain.
There was the weirdest sensation of something moving behind his eyes, inside his head, but just for a moment. He remembered sinking to his knees. He was dead then, but his brain was still receiving
information. Nobody ever talked about this because nobody ever came back. The ground tipped towards him but everything went black before he face-planted.

He remembered speaking to Hargreave. He remembered being interrogated some time later. No, that wasn’t him. He was dead. He remembered putting the bullet through his head. It was either
that or he would have slowly turned into a Ceph, his body eaten by tumours and alien DNA, becoming an alien killing machine.

If he was dead then why was he running across the wasteland, a darkened New York behind him, the damaged skyline reaching up like so many broken fingers? His hands had been bloody before.
He’d been little more than a boy, a junior officer, the first time he’d killed. It’d happened in Iraq. It’d happened very quickly and he’d done it over a distance of
seventy feet. The first time up close and personal, the first time he’d felt warm blood on his hands, had been in Columbia. Now he had blood on his hands again, and this time he
couldn’t feel the warmth through the nanosuit. The blood steamed a bit in the cold air. Information on its chemical makeup scrolled down his vision from the suit’s Heads-Up Display. He
knew everything there was to know about this blood except whose it was and how they’d died. Though Prophet knew they must have died at his hands.

Bright light stabbed down onto the broken concrete and scrubby plants. One helicopter gunship and then another hove into view. Information on the model of the gunships, their capabilities and
armaments, played down the HUD. He could heard the pilots’ conversations with their control. They were CELL military contractors playing at being soldiers and getting paid more than real
troops for their troubles. They were searching for an escaped nanosuit. Someone called Alcatraz.
Who the fuck is Alcatraz?
he wondered. Then he remembered the kid he’d pulled from
the river. The wreckage of the USS Nautilus. The cold feel of the metal of the M12 against his head.

‘Shit. I’m dead,’ Laurence Barnes, who they called Prophet, said to himself, but he didn’t stop running. He activated the stealth mode and the lensing field bent light
around him. To all intents and purposes he disappeared as the harsh blue light of one of the gunship’s searchlights swept across where he’d been.

He became a ghost.

‘Okay, I’m gone now.’

‘I think we both know that’s not going to happen.’

‘I have a life . . . a family.’

The CSIRA Black Body Council interrogator glanced at the file.

‘Not much of one, not from what you were saying.’

‘You think you know me now, Roger?’

Prophet froze the footage that the suit was showing him. He could see how it was going to play out. He was lying down in a sewer trying to mask his heat signature from the thermographics that
the pilots in the CELL gunships overhead would be using.

He now knew who he’d killed. Roger, the interrogator. The guy that CSIRA or CELL or whoever had sent to debrief him in the wake of the clusterfuck that had been his recent operation in New
York.

He remembered the disease, the quarantine. He remembered CELL being called in as a military contractor to enforce martial law in the city. He remembered how they had hunted him. And he
remembered the Ceph. The same aliens he’d first encountered in the Pacific on Lingshan. Cephalopod-like aliens clothed in hi-tech war machines far in advance of humanity’s best military
efforts. He remembered the suit melding with their technology. It hadn’t been the last time.

He had been in control for some of it, or some mix of him and Alcatraz had been, but now the memories were fragmented. The events played like two pieces of film of the same events running just
slightly out of synch with each other, one superimposed over the top of the other.

It was worse than that. It didn’t stop the further back he went. He remembered Lingshan, but somehow he was also doing SERE training at Brunswick in Maine. He remembered Columbia, but he
was ditching school and hanging with his friends. He remembered Iraq and at the same time reading comics, riding his bike, breaking into some kind of Sea World-style attraction. He remembered basic
training and he remembered his Mom instilling the fear of god into him. The problem was that the mother he remembered, now superimposed on the hell of basic training, was white. Mrs Barnes had most
decidedly not been.

There had been other signs as well. The fear as he’d lain down in the black water of the sewer – where had that come from? And Prophet’s skull felt fit to burst. The pain was a
burning white light behind his eyes. He was sure there was blood trickling out of his ears under the suit, but then corpses don’t bleed.
Maybe it’s the suit growing into my head to
fix the problem
, he thought. The suit should have been able to tell him what was going on, what was causing the pain, but the medical outputs seemed conflicted.