Plague Bomb (6 page)

The Russian commander who had used those means to rid himself of the problem refugees had first received a promotion and citation from Moscow for a job well done, and then when it had hit the headlines worldwide he’d become an un-person and had disappeared, doubtless to a strict regime labour camp, or medical experimental establishment.

Perhaps the elimination of the pioneers had been such a mistake, the premature use of a weapon being saved for greater things, or perhaps it had been a combat evaluation test that had been unsatisfactory and the Russian scientists had decided against its further employment. Whatever, they’d be there soon, and then they’d find out soon enough.

A red and white striped barrier pole was smashed and flung aside by the raked frontal armour of the Marder as it charged through the unmanned checkpoint. A faded warning notice was splintered beneath the tracks along with a rusted concertina of barbed wire.

They covered another kilometre before they came upon a second and far more substantial roadblock. A huge Faun six-wheeled truck was stopped broadside on across the entire width of the road.

‘Stop here.’
Already having slackened speed considerably in anticipation of the difficulty of negotiating the narrow gap between the tailboard of the truck and the big trees growing right to the road’s edge, Burke had only to touch the brakes lightly to bring the Marder to rest a few yards short of the lane-straddling vehicle.

None of the APCs several automatic air sampling devices had detected anything approaching dangerous levels of pollution outside. Revell would have been surprised if they had. Most chemical agents could persist in their harmful state only a matter of hours after exposure to the atmosphere and the sun’s ultra violet rays at this time of year. Had there been snow on the ground it might have been very different. Nerve agents like Soman, or VX could have been expected to remain lethal for weeks, in freak conditions even longer. But he could take no chances and had the others put on all their protective clothing before having the air conditioning turned to maximum.

He went out through the smallest top hatch, feeling the firm draft of the overpressure gusting past him as he did. Closing it after him he heard it being firmly locked from the inside.

Testing the short range radio link as he went, Revell walked to the truck. Passing its open back he saw that it was filled with drums of decontamination fluid, pumps and sprays, as well as bundles of body bags, a box of identification tags and a heap of unmarked wooden crosses.

Inside the respirator he was very conscious of the sound of his own breathing, and its magnified rasping and whistling filled his ears. He was sweating, and if the discomfort of the droplets trickling down the small of his back was not sufficient evidence, there were crescents of condensation forming at the tops of his lenses.

On the far side of the six-wheeler dark hummocky shapes lay scattered among the tufts of grass and clumps of weeds sprouting from the road surface. None of the bodies were more than a score of paces from the truck. 

Double-checking the reading on the monitor attached to his belt, Revell confirmed its negative reaction with Hyde aboard the Marder before turning over the nearest of the corpses with his foot.

It moved easily, felt so light it seemed it could have no substance at all, only its filled-out shape betraying that there were the remains of a man inside it.

From deep within dark sockets shrivelled eyes glared at him through the clouded lenses of a disintegrating respirator. As though it had waited for precisely that moment the perished rubberized fabric broke apart and an unnatural idiot grin, caused by the dehydrated flesh pulling drum-skin tight over the skull, was fully exposed.

‘No indication of the cause of death.’ Revell kept the transmit switch down on his radio. ‘Until it fell apart it looked like the suit was okay. Nothing suspicious in that, I think it’d just been out in the weather too long.’ He hadn’t really been expecting to be able to determine the exact cause of death; at best he hoped to eliminate some possibilities and ascribe it to a general category. As he went to move away, to inspect another of the bodies he saw something he hadn’t anticipated, something he hadn’t even been looking for. Suddenly he realized why their instruments had failed to detect even a trace of residual contamination.

Reaching for the straps securing his respirator he began to pull it off. There was no point in wearing it any longer, it made no difference. No respirator would ever save him from what had killed these men.

FIVE

Gross had pestered and bullied Father Venables into changing places with him and now lounged forward to hang on the back of the front passenger seat. He let the tips of his pudgy fingers rest on the woman’s shoulders, and occasionally deliberately stray from the quilted surface of her anorak to the bare nape of her neck.

‘Will you get your wet paws off me, you fat slug.’ ‘Oh, so sorry.’ Gross withdrew and slumped back into the rear seat. ‘I didn’t realize you had such an abhorrence of physical contact. Those horny cheap porno films you made must have given me the wrong impression, mustn’t they, Sherry. Sherry ... Sherry Kane, that has to be a stage name, doesn’t it. Did you change it to try and get away from your old clients, from when you were a ten dollar call-out model?’

It was Edwards who made the protest, getting in before the woman or the elderly priest, but he complained to the same person they would have, their driver.

Webb caught a glance of the old man in the rear view mirror, saw spittle fly from his misshapen mouth as he appealed for an authoritative voice that would curb the ex-union leader. Already he was tired of them all. They were not the travelling companions he would have chosen, but his KGB control in London had been adamant in guiding his choice. On a train he would have stood in the corridor rather than share a compartment with any of them. Kane with her tarty looks and shallow intellect, Venables with his pious innocence, Edwards with his overbearing air of superiority: and Gross, a physically repulsive man with a matching mind.

In an attempt to fill his thoughts with other things, he paid full attention to the road. Subtle but distinct changes were coming over the countryside through which they were driving. Autumn had not yet set in, but already many of the trees and hedgerows were losing their leaves. Even the needles of the evergreens had a life- leached and discoloured appearance. The grass too had a prematurely win-tery look, with the exception of few hardy weeds that maintained a healthy dark green hue, the turf of gardens and clearings being a sickly yellow shade, like it had been covered and kept from the sun overlong.

Webb noted, but wasn’t alarmed by the unnatural transformation of the flora. This was the second time he’d tried to make this journey and in his previous, lone, attempt he had seen more violent, more ugly changes in the landscape. 

Then he had been stopped by a full scale battle raging in his path. In the event it had proved to be a blessing in disguise. After the initial anger and disappointment he’d begun planning again, and recognizing, after his irate controller had forcibly pointed it out to him, the inherent weakness of acting alone, he’d enlisted the support of this diverse group.

‘It looks pretty weird out there. Does fall come early here?’ Sherry Kane pulled her jacket tight about her as she looked out on the withering foliage. ‘Are you sure it’s safe to come this way?’

‘Are you afraid of catching something that’ll give you a rash and reduce your value between the sheets?’ Gross watched her toss her head and flick at the ends of her hair without retorting. He longed to reach forward, slide his hand over her shoulder and inside her anorak. A good hard tug and he’d pull her tee-shirt from the top of her jeans, then drag the material up over her big breasts. His fingers would creep into the large cups of her bra and he’d squeeze those fat warm mounds hard, roll and twist her nipples until they became firm and jutting, then dig his nails into them until she screamed. Lovely.

In his creased and soiled trousers he felt the coiled dampness of his fleshy penis stir sluggishly, short pulsing movements as it expanded toward full erection. He liked to feel it doing that, knew that soon, if he worked at the thought, it would start to leak. Oh lovely, really lovely, he was going to ... oh it hadn’t done that since he was a schoolboy, when the prefect had played with it in the showers, and afterwards he’d stood on his own in a corner of the locker room and watched the damp patch spread on his worsted shorts ... The sensitive circumcised head of his penis was suddenly sticky, and his pants were wet ... oh lovely.

Years of taking confession had instructed Father Venables in all the vices of man, and woman, and now helped him to disregard the vulgarity, the pettiness, that was displayed around him. Save for making an occasional protest when he heard the Lord’s name being used as an epithet, and took extreme exception, he spent all of his time working on the speech he would make to the world press when they reached the Russian lines.

A balance had to be struck. His words would at once have to be an appeal for Christian love and forgiveness and peace, and a declaration of his faith in the basic honest intent of the Russians. But no matter what form of words he used, he found himself including every time a passage that would convey to his detractors back in Britain that his motives were pure, that he espoused no cause, favoured no side.

For so very long he had worked for disarmament, had spoken, marched, written, campaigned. He had borne the criticisms, said nothing when he had been called a tool of the communists, a dupe, a self-deceiving innocent, even when he had been labelled the Red Priest. At each accusation he had agonized, examined his position, his conscience, but each time he had come to the same conclusion. He simply could not believe that the communist leaders in the Soviet Union could truly be the totally evil men their reported actions indicated. There was good in all, they had only to be given the chance to show it and they would, he devoutly believed that… but still in all his public utterances there ran that thread of persistent apology. No, he must wipe it from his mind, what he was doing was right. He had prayed so hard for an opportunity such as this, he must make the most of it. There was some good in all men, there had to be...

Under its previous chief, Department A had been allowed to slide, become slack and inefficient, but it had not slipped so far, become so lax that its staff were unaware who the new man was to be. Rozenkov knew that his reputation would have gone before him. From the heads of sections down to the lowest filing clerk everyone would be waiting, poised to launch themselves into a make-believe of frenetic activity at the warning of his approach. To get more than cosmetic results from the staff he had to do more than just walk in and take over.

For lasting improvements in the department’s performance he would have to create an impression that even the dullest would understand as a clear warning that things were not going to be the same.
The security guard on the little used side door was half asleep over a crossword puzzle when the colonel entered, a state from which he was abruptly shaken when the legs of his chair were kicked away.

‘You know who I am?’ Rozenkov stood over the soldier. ‘Yes, yes Comrade Colonel.’ He attempted to get up, but the officer stood on his fingers.
‘Good. In precisely fifteen minutes you will report to the duty officer, and tell him you are under close arrest for a list of charges that will be supplied by me, later. Remember, fifteen minutes, if before then you move from here or do anything that might alert the rest of the building I shall personally take a hand in your punishment by returning and breaking many of the bones in your body.’

As the door to a service stairway swung shut behind the colonel, the guard began to puke, violently and repeatedly. When all his stomach contents were used he went on heaving. He tried to pull himself up, but the racking spasms grew worse until he collapsed in writhing agony, the muscles of his stomach strained and ruptured.

Rozenkov’s reign of terror had claimed a first victim.

The corridor serving the top floor was deep pile carpeted, and the suites of offices leading off exuded an air of luxury from their half open doors.

There was none of the usual tinny clatter from ill-made, worse maintained and worn out typewriters so typical of Moscow government offices; instead there was the muted chatter of near new Adlers and 3Ms. A computer terminal ‘tinged’ an apologetic warning before smoothly disgorging a print-out.

Barging into the first room he happened upon, ignoring the indignantly imperious bleats from a plump breasted secretary, Rozenkov went to each highly polished desk in turn and swept every paper onto the floor. He treated four more offices in the same fashion, before coming to one even more opulent than the rest, that intuition told him had been prepared for his arrival.

Expensive, mostly western manufactured desk furniture shoved into a velvet covered waste paper basket, and after the hall-marked silver ink stands and onyx ashtrays went a pair of signed water colours of the Kremlin and Red Square from the wall behind the desk, and a group of bronzes from the top of a book case. As he might a bucket of swill, he hurled basket and contents into the corridor where they bounced from and made dents in the Hessian covered panels on the wall.

The initial commotion caused by his violent arrival had brought many people from the sanctuary of their offices, but as confusion and surprise had been replaced by the shock of recognition, they’d disappeared faster than they’d materialized. Rozenkov let the ensuing silence hang for a long moment, before hitting every button on the intercom simultaneously.

‘I want every head of section in here now.’ He could imagine, but did not concern himself with the panic that simple announcement would have produced.

Those with an interest in who won, or lost, the race, extended far beyond the handful of individuals immediately concerned. All of the KGB staff in the department were career men, and all were aware, suddenly well aware, that their future could as easily be spent going rapidly down as steadily up. How they progressed in the service depended as much on the performance of their whole section as their individual performance and achievements. The section’s results were principally judged by how well the section head operated, so there were many who waited in the lower levels of the building for first details to filter back down.