“It cost the lives of my boys,” said the Captain, quietly.
“And probably saved a million more,” Trask told him.
“Really?”
“This thing could have wiped us all out,” Trask said. “And I do mean everyone. Until that ship is on the bottom, it still can.”
“Just tell your pilot to keep that chopper out of the way,” said McKenzie, “and I’ll have my Gunnery Commander take care of that right now.”
“Good,” said Trask. “And then you can have a party ready in NBC suits to wash the chopper down when we land, and we’ll also need access to your decontamination chambers, all six of us and your pilot, too. And…and a large, airtight plastic bag, for the specimen.”
“Roger all that,” said McKenzie.
Following which Trask and his people crowded the Sea King’s windows…
It took but a minute.
The cruise missiles came in low, like purring, short-finned flying fish over the wine-coloured sea. Swift and deadly in the gloom of twilight, of a dull, metallic grey, they carried death in their bellies but nothing so terrible as their target.
In the final seconds before they struck home, just six feet above the Plimsoll line on the Evening Star’s hull, Trask remembered what Ian Goodly had said about “The ship-to-ship missiles going in, the explosions, the stem going up in the air, and the rapid slide backwards off those rocks.”
And as usual the precog had been right, for that’s exactly how it was. The massive, thunderclap explosions that ripped the Star’s hull open, cracked her back, and lifted her stem into the air; twin fireballs going up amid a shower of twisted wreckage; the fires raging within the vessel and all along her decks; and finally the shuddering, slipping, and sliding, as all those tons of metal, that once proud ship, keeled over backwards and began her last short journey to the seabed.
Then there were only the fireballs, rising still, and a few scraps of burning debris drifting over the island, and fires in the sea itself, where fuel had spilled and ignited. And perhaps among those fires a degree of splashing, but that wouldn’t last for too long…
8
First Warning
AFTER SOME WRANGLING WITH THE GREEK authorities, the Minister Responsible had sent a private jet out to the military airport in Kavála on the Greek mainland. It was sitting on the runway, its engines ticking over, when one of Invincible’s helicopters dropped Trask and his agents off a little after midnight. Along with the plane was a British Embassy official and two “specialists” from Porton Down. The former was there to lend substance to E-Branch’s claim to diplomatic immunity if necessary, obviating any last-minute difficulties which might have arisen with the airport staff, namely the Greek military. The Porton Down people were there to take charge of the “specimen.”
Mr. Teale was a small, bald, middle-aged, bespectacled microbiologist of an apparently nervous disposition, and Mr. Kline was his young pimply-faced assistant. Aboard the jet, when the Old Lidesci presented them with a girl’s head in a plastic bag inside a steel pot with a clamp-down lid from HMS Invincible’s galley, Teale came very close to having a heart attack. He had been bursting with questions since first meeting Trask and his people on the runway, none of which had been answered. But now:
“What in God’s name…!” he protested. “I was assured that you people would obtain a living specimen!”
“A person, you mean?” Trask answered him coldly. Obviously Porton Down hadn’t been told everything, or at any rate the people they had sent hadn’t been told everything. Teale and his assistent still seemed to believe they were dealing with a mutant strain of the Chinese plague.
“An infected person, yes,” said Teale, “in a harmless, sedated, or comatose condition. We have with us certain respiratory items and a full-body protective ‘suit,’ in essence a body bag, in which we intended to convey this…this absent specimen.”
Trask wasn’t in the mood for this, and answered, “Well, you see, she wouldn’t come under those or any other conditions. And since she had the will and the power to infect every single one of my team, everyone on HMS Invincible, and eventually everyone on this planet, we decided her head would have to suffice.” And before Teale could reply, “Listen,” Trask went on, as patiently as possible. “Myself and all of my people, we’re sort of tired. I’m sure you know how it is: the last day or so hasn’t been too easy on us. Now, we were told to bring back infected blood, infected flesh, and a little brain tissue, preferably alive. Well, here we have infected blood and likewise infected flesh. As for brain tissue: we’ve brought you an entire head.”
“But alive?” Teale scowled where he sat towards the rear of the jet with Kline, and took up the plastic bag, all bloody and smeared within, from inside the steel container. “The specimen was supposed to be alive—preferably alive—Mr. Trask!”
Now Trask might have lost it, but before he could explode:
“Alive?” the Old Lidesci grunted, taking the bag from Teale and dangling it in front of his face. “So, you think it’s dead, do you? But if I were to take this machete of mine and cut this bag open—and if you should perhaps get a little of this blood in your eyes, mouth, nose, or any other of your body’s openings—then, in three days’ time, you’d probably change your opinion. Anyway, it’s all yours now. But do take care of it, won’t you?” And dropping the bag back into the container, he ambled back to his seat up front with the rest of the team. And:
“If I were you,” said Trask, “I would make sure that lid is clamped down just as tightly as it will go. And I would keep it that way all the way back to Porton Down. For as my friend just told you, it’s all yours now. And believe me we’re very glad to be rid of it.”
Then, without another word, he trailed the Old Lidesci back to his seat near the front of the executive jet, where the rest of the E-Branch team were already falling asleep. And from then on, there was no more conversation with the people from Porton Down…
At Gatwick Airport, Teale and Kline—and the specimen—were whisked away in double-quick time in a police helicopter, while Trask was met and collected by the Minister Responsible himself in another chopper courtesy of the Ministry of Defence. At 2:45 A.M. on a wet, early November morning this was a rare privilege indeed, and when they were under way Trask asked:
“To what do I owe the honour?”
The Minister Responsible looked surprised. “What, no shouting match?” he said. “No cursing, or demanding to know what the hell I think I’m doing? No questions about what’s been going on over here while you’ve been swanning around in the Med?”
“Swanning?” said Trask, beginning to bridle.
“It’s a joke!” the Minister told him. “Though how I managed it at this time in the morning and under these circumstances is a mystery even to me!” And suddenly Trask noticed how drawn the Minister seemed, how pale and hollow-eyed.
“So, I’m not the only one who’s been having a rough time of it,” he said. “Anyway, I’m too tired for shouting matches, cursing, and all that. And as for the latter, I don’t much go along with it. Unless it’s used under considerable stress it’s a sure sign that a man’s vocabulary is on the blink.”
“Really?” said the Minister. “Well, right now I don’t think I’ve ever heard so much silly fucking shit in my entire life!”
Which was more than enough to give Trask pause. And looking at the Minister more closely now, he said, “In your case it has to be considerable stress. So, would you care to tell me what’s up?”
And as the Minister sat there turning it over in his mind—getting his thoughts in order—Trask continued to look him up and down, studying him more closely yet. For already his talent was twitching away, telling him he was about to become privy to certain truths that he could well do without.
The Minister Responsible…a man who usually kept himself to the shadows, who, over the course of Trask’s thirty years in the mindspy business he’d only met face-to-face on half-a-dozen occasions, and always
in emergency situations. Even in the Corridors of Power—where obscurity frequently rules—the Minister’s duties, his “responsibilities,” were obscure. He might be “someone in civil defence.” He was probably “a boffin from the MOD.” He “takes care of things that no one else has time for—I think.” In low whispers in those selfsame Corridors of Power, that was how he’d frequently heard his presence explained away, for except for the Very Top People in successive governments he was literally a man with no name, no precise portfolio. Even to Trask—and likewise to various heads of departments almost as secretive as E-Branch—he was simply the Minister Responsible.
He was in his mid-sixties, small and dapper, his thinning dark hair brushed back and plastered down in a fashion at least forty years out of date. He wore—he had always worn—patent-leather black shoes, a dark blue suit and light blue tie, and a waistcoat with an old-fashioned fob watch. His once round, open face was thinner now and deeply lined, and his forehead creased with the worries of far too many years. His bright blue, penetrating eyes—which was how Trask would always remember them—were a little rheumy; his lips were turned down at the corners, and his shoulders were weighted, slumped and weary. His general aspect was harried.
“But you must have wondered what the hell was going on back here?” he began. “What with this Porton Down thing, conflicting or very ambiguous orders, and Old Uncle Tom Cobley and all trying to get into the act? You must have thought that I’d let you down?”
“I considered it,” Trask admitted. “But then I gave you the benefit of the doubt. Actually, I was coming around to the same conclusion myself.”
“Conclusion?”
“That perhaps we should get in some help with this thing,” Trask explained. “That while in the past we’ve somehow muddled through, perhaps those times are past, and what we really need is some new blood—if you’ll pardon the expression—coming in on this. Someone or some outfit with new ideas, a new perspective. Instead of trying to kill the disease at source, maybe we’d do better seeking a cure. And if that were the case, then who better than the Porton Down crowd? They have always understood the secrecy thing, the security aspect, and they’ve had many marvellous successes. So if they could beat AIDS and come up with a jab against the new bubonic, why not this, too?”
“Very understanding of you,” said the Minister Responsible. “But I think I should tell you that I’ve always been more than satisfied with your work, Ben. It may not have seemed that way at the time, but—”
“—But, we did get results,” said Trask, taken aback by the ‘Ben’ thing. (It had to be something big, for the Minister Responsible to be calling him Ben.)
“Indeed you did,” said the other. “And personally I would be perfectly happy to let you go on getting results, but…something’s come up, and it’s something that could take this entire thing right out of my hands and make me just another player. In fact I’ve got a meeting with—well, all sorts of people: heads of the National Health Service, Security, Civil Defence; chiefs of the Army, Navy, Air Force; the police, you name it—in just half an hour. So since we’re only fifteen minutes from E-Branch HQ, where I’ll be dropping you off, I’d better get on with it.”
“I’m all ears,” said Trask, and shivered. Because right out of nowhere he had gooseflesh. He (or his talent) knew that this was going to be very bad.
“You’ll still be our main man, of course,” the Minister continued. “The man who knows it all—who has done it all—the man with all the field experience. You and all your people. But from now on there’ll be a great many more people involved. Yes, we’ll keep as tight a lid on it as we can, but sooner or later, and probably sooner, the public will want answers. Oh, we’ll do as we have always done: lie to them. But unless we get to grips with it, our lies will eventually catch up with us. That is, of course, if it’s what we think it is.”
Trask was beginning to feel frustrated now. “Fine,” he said trying not to snap, “but as yet I’ve no idea what you’ll be lying about! Okay, I can tell you’re not really stalling…so what are you doing? Why don’t you get to the point?”
“I was giving you the background,” said the Minister, “letting you see that we haven’t been sitting on our backsides doing nothing since this thing broke, since the first couple of cases were reported…”
“Cases”: that was the catchword. And Trask repeated it:
“Cases? Something has happened while we’ve been gone? What, in the last twenty-four hours? Cases of what?”
“Even before you’d gone,” the Minister answered. “There was a handful three days ago, another half dozen leading up to your leaving, and ten that we know of while you’ve been away. But at first it didn’t connect…I mean I didn’t tie it in with your work, with what you’d told me about that thing under London…”
At which the truth hit Trask like a hammer blow! For “that thing under London” could only refer to Szwart, the destruction of his lethal fungus garden in an unknown, abyssal Roman temple deep under the city. But before he could voice his suspicions:
“We’ve given it a name, of course,” said the Minister. “The symptoms suggested it. We’ve also ascribed a cause; we borrowed it from the American experience in New York in the fall of ninety-nine, right on the turn of the millennium.”
Grey-faced, Trask nodded. “I think I remember that. The hot summer and rains brought up a swarm of so-called killer mosquitoes out of the sewers and underground systems. They carried a bug that invaded the brain, and several New Yorkers died of it. And we’ve had the same problem this past summer with mosquitoes here in London.”
“Yes,” said the Minister. “So we’ve blamed them. And we’ve called it a kind of sleeping sickness, encephalitis lethargica. But that’s a lie, too, or we think it is, though we’d rather it was the truth. For the fact is we can’t be sure what it is. But you and I, we can take a pretty good stab at it, right?”
Trask’s thoughts were flying. He thought of Millie Cleary, and of Jake—Jake’s debriefing after he’d rescued Millie from Szwart’s subterranean lair—and felt his blood cooling in his veins as he recalled the final part of Jake’s story:
“I was barely in time,” (Jake had said.) “Szwart had opened a flue to the surface—some kind of natural conduit for a wind blowing up from hell—and that nightmarish mushroom garden was about to spawn. One by one, the black-capped domes of the mushrooms were flattening out, their gills opening, and their first red-coloured spores beginning to drift free. By the time Szwart showed up a stream of red spores was floating in his direction, carried on a draft of that foul, stinking air. But after I tore down that wall and let the methane in—and after I’d lobbed my grenade—well, obviously I couldn’t hang around waiting to see what happened next…”
Then the Minister was looking at Trask, asking him, “What’s on your mind?”
“Jake’s report,” said Trask faintly, almost to himself.
The Minister nodded. “And remember, I’ve read that report, too. So when I heard about these cases—would you believe, in the bloody newspapers, midday yesterday?—and when I’d checked their locations, how they were all clustered close to old underground railway stations, then I saw the connection.
“After that, well, I wasn’t taking any chances. I couldn’t afford to simply wait and see—the responsibility was just too great even for a Minister Responsible. An epidemic is one thing, Ben, and even a plague. But a plague of vampires? So you see, I had no choice but to advise and then to seek advice. Since when I’ve been on the move nonstop. Or to use an old Army expression, my feet haven’t touched the ground.”
“What are the symptoms?” said Trask, his head full of pictures of Millie stumbling about in a dark cavern, breathing red, vampiric spores. “How does it affect its…its victims?” God, let it be something else!
“They sleep,” the Minister shrugged. “They can’t be got out of bed, or barely. They’re sluggish, slow-moving, tired. Sleeping sickness, Ben. That’s what it’s lik
e.”
“But for how long? And then what?”
“That remains to be seen. It will either stay, go away, or change into…something else. And meanwhile, we have them in isolation wards.”
“But who takes care of them?” Trask gripped the Minister’s arm. “Are they in close contact with their nurses?”
“They’re in isolation wards, Ben!” the other said again. “I mean, I’m no doctor, but I’ve been given to understand it’s all rubber gloves and face masks and…and isolation, for goodness sake!”
“Lord, I hope so!” Trask muttered, biting his top lip. “But is that it? Nothing else? No other symptoms? Maybe we’re simply starting at shadows.”
“Shadows?” said the Minister, himself starting, and giving himself a shuddery shake. “Ah, yes—stupid of me! Huh! Maybe I could do with a good night’s sleep myself!” And his eyes seemed more deeply sunken yet, as he nodded and said, “Yes, there are other symptoms. For one, they don’t much care for daylight.”
“And?” Trask prompted him.
“And they very quickly go off their food…”
Trask licked his lips. His mouth felt bone dry, desiccated. “But their doctors must have examined them?” he said. “What was their prognosis, before you’d voiced your own theory, that is?”
“Flu,” said the Minister. “Sleeping sickness, malaise, malingering.”
“And then, after you’d spoken up? I mean, what did you tell them to look for?”
“What did I tell them to—?” Snorting, the Minister slumped back into his seat. When his wry chuckle came it was barely audible and more than a little hysterical. “Ben, now tell me: just how big is one of these bloody spores? Does it invade the lungs or some other organ? When it’s in the host body, does it infect the blood first, then the brain, or both simultaneously? How do we detect a metamorphic organism that can fuse with human flesh and blood? How long does this metamorphosis or mutation take? We don’t have any answers, Ben—and you want to know what I told them to look for?”