The Storm (7 page)

There was a man there, only not a man. How could it be? It was too big, its body ballooned to the size of a building, and yet there it was, its mouth the very core of this abomination, the event horizon at the centre of the black hole. Even from this distance, even on the small screen of the television, Brick could feel the force of the thing, the sheer, unrelenting power of it as it dismantled the world piece by piece.

He dropped to his knees, the bottle slipping from his hand, forgotten. And somehow, impossibly, the man in the storm seemed to see him there, cowering in this kitchen, because its dead eyes rolled in their sockets, filling with something that was not laughter, that was not madness, that was not glee but some combination of them. It looked at Brick and it spoke, a voice that was lost in the thunder of the tornado, drowned out by the roar of its fury; a voice speaking in no language Brick could recognise, no language that had any place here on earth; but a voice he could understand as easily as if it had crawled into his ear and breathed its needled words directly into his brain.

You are too late.

Captain Harry Botham’s stomach flipped the way it always did on take-off, but it had settled by the time he banked the chopper round and pulled it out of Portsmouth Naval Base. The Apache’s monstrous Rolls-Royce engine growled, the whump of the blades settling into him like a heartbeat as the ground shrank and the sky opened up.

‘Coordinates locked,’ said Simon Marshall. The gunner was sitting in front and below him, but his voice was fed through Harry’s helmet speakers. ‘North, we should be there in twenty minutes.’

Harry checked the heads-up display then pushed the throttle, taking the bird up to 1,000 feet and 180 miles per hour. Up here sunlight poured into the cockpit like liquid gold, his visor darkening automatically to cut out the glare. Two blips appeared on his radar, moving fast, and a second later a pair of RAF jets screamed overhead. Their contrails were the only blemish against the blue, an absolutely flawless summer’s day. God knew they didn’t get many like this, not even in the middle of summer, and Harry had been sunning himself outside the barracks when he was called up. As much as he loved being airborne, he could have done with another couple of hours R and R. Especially as nobody had told him why the RAF’s entire fleet was being mobilised.

‘It’s the Chinese, I’m telling you,’ said Marshall, reading his mind. ‘They’ve finally decided they want to rule the world.’

Harry snorted.

‘Don’t be an idiot,’ he replied, his voice feeding back into his own ears and making him sound not quite real.

‘What then?’ he said. ‘An exercise?’

‘They told us this wasn’t an exercise,’ Harry replied. His commanding officer had made that very clear, but the man’s hurried briefing hadn’t provided any information other than the fact that something was going down in London. Something big.

‘Probably terrorists,’ he replied with a shrug.

‘Well wait till they get a load of me,’ Marshall said, patting his control panel. Harry smiled. The Apache was fully loaded – a 30-millimetre chain gun under the fuselage, capable of pumping out 625 rounds per minute, and a sweet mix of Hellfires and Hydras mounted on the hardpoints. Whatever was waiting for them, it was about to get blown to kingdom come.

So why was there still a tickle of discomfort in his stomach, one that had nothing to do with the motion of the helicopter? He’d flown on two tours in Afghanistan and hadn’t once felt like this, not even when he’d been clipped by a ground-fired RPG out in Helmand and had to crash-land. Back then the adrenalin had stripped every shred of fear from his system, had turned him into a machine. This was different, he felt way too human, way too vulnerable. Maybe it was because he was flying over home ground, the fields and towns of England floating below like debris on a slow, green river. Maybe it was because he was flying into London, the city he’d once lived in. Maybe. He gulped down more air, suddenly uncomfortable in his seat.

All they had been told for sure was that there had been some kind of attack on the capital. The order to scramble had come from General Stevens himself, which was a good indication how serious it was. That dude didn’t get out of bed for anything less than a world war.

‘Identify and intercept the target,’ he’d said over the comm. And that was that, their orders, five words they had to obey even if it meant life and limb.

‘Ours is not to reason why,’ he said, the only poem he’d ever committed to memory. They all had, everyone in the unit.

‘Ours is but to do and die,’ Marshall finished. ‘Hell yeah!’

Harry checked the coordinates, nudged the stick a little to bring the bird back on course. They were over Guildford, a minute or two off the M25. The Apache just ate up the miles.

‘Whoa,’ said Marshall. ‘What the . . .’

Harry squinted through the narrow window, past the sweeping colours of his HUD. Something had a hold of the horizon, a fist of black smoke. The chopper rocked in a bout of turbulence and Harry had the sudden idea that the clenched, knuckled hand was shaking the world, trying to rip it free from its mounting. He glanced at their position, still a good twenty miles away from ground zero, surely too far away to get a visual. He felt his guts squirm again, his hand twitching, wanting to bring the bird around one-eighty. He had to force himself to keep moving forward.

‘That thing is . . . It must be huge, Harry.’

‘Base, we have eyes on,’ he said, knowing that the command centre had an open line into the chopper. ‘Looks like some kind of explosion. How should we proceed?’

There was a sharp hiss of static, then the XO’s voice fed through.

‘As ordered, Captain. Investigate and intercept. Maintain a perimeter, five miles. We don’t know how dangerous this thing is.’

‘Roger,’ he said, slowing the Apache down and lifting her to 2,000 feet. Whatever was down there, he wanted to be as high above it as he could get without entering RAF airspace. Nothing would kill him half as fast as a mid-air collision with a jet. ‘Do we go weapons hot?’

Another pause, then, ‘Yes, weapons hot.’

Harry felt his skin go cold and prickly. Any hope that this was an exercise had just been obliterated – there was no way in hell that they’d be given weapons hot status above the biggest city in Europe unless this was real.

The windscreen was gradually filling with smoke, so thick and so dark that it looked like a huge granite mountain sprouting from the city. No, it was more as though somebody had hacked a section out of the sky. Harry’s polarised visor compensated for the dimming light and he found himself craning forward in his seat trying to make sense of what he was seeing.

‘There’s nothing there,’ Marshall said, his voice whispered into Harry’s ear. ‘Oh Jesus, there’s nothing there.’

Of course there’s something there,
Harry thought. There had to be, with all that smoke. Only it wasn’t smoke, he realised as they closed in. It was
things
. It was a spiralling cloud of matter – there were buildings in there, crumbling into pieces as they churned upwards. He could make out glinting shapes that might have been cars, and smaller, darker ones –
not people, those can’t be people
– that twitched and struggled as they rose. The tornado spun relentlessly, maybe five miles across, sucking everything towards . . .

What
was
that? There was a shape in the chaos. Everything spiralled around it, like filthy bathwater circling a drain, sparking off fingers of lightning that were dark instead of bright, which left huge black scars against Harry’s retinas. He didn’t blink. He didn’t dare close his eyes for even a second in case this thing, this impossible nightmare, came for him. He just stared at the figure in the centre of the storm – because that’s what it was, a man. Huge, yes, and deformed, as though his body was a balloon pumped up almost beyond recognition, but still unmistakably human. And the worst thing was its mouth, immense and gaping, breathing in everything with an endless howl that could be heard above the chopper’s engines.

Harry was throwing up before he even knew it, ripping off his mouthpiece just in time, his breakfast hitting the reinforced glass screen that separated him from his gunner. The chopper banked hard, the ground looming up in the right hand window.

‘Christ, Harry,’ Marshall yelled, and Harry realised he’d dropped the stick. He grabbed it, levelled out, bringing the Apache to a standstill and wiping his free hand over his mouth. He spat acid, his whole body drenched in sweat and his stomach cramping hard.

There was a rip of thunder as a jet flew by overhead, the hiss of two sidewinders being launched. The missiles hurtled into the morning night, impacted right in the middle of the storm. An explosion bubbled out of the chaos, the shockwave making the chopper bounce. But the fire didn’t last, sucked into the man’s vast, dark gullet and extinguished. If anything it seemed to make the tornado churn faster, harder, more of the ground peeling away and carried up by the vortex. And the man still hung there, his eyes two pits of boiling pitch, his mouth sucking in everything it could.

‘Fire,’ Harry screamed, feeling a creeping tickle of madness in the corner of his mind. He had to destroy this thing – not to save London, but because he understood that if he had to look at it for much longer then his brain was going to short-circuit. ‘Fire goddammit!’

Marshall didn’t hesitate, unleashing the chain gun. A deafening rattle filled the cabin, streaks of tracer fire cutting a path towards the man in the storm. The barrage tore through some of the spiralling debris before finding its target, but the 30-millimetre rounds disappeared into the carnage. There was a soft hiss, the chopper rocking as four missiles blasted outwards. Harry counted the seconds – one, two, three – before they ignited in a ball of rippling gold. Once again the explosion was swallowed up, pulled into the man’s cavernous mouth along with the constant stream of debris. Marshall tried again, emptying the Apache’s payload and turning the sky to fire.

‘It’s not working,’ the gunner said. But Harry wasn’t listening. The smoke was clearing, and more of the world had been erased. It wasn’t just black, the way things disappear in the dark, it was gone. It was utterly empty. Just looking at it made his head hurt, because there was no way he could comprehend what he was seeing. It just didn’t make sense.

‘Harry, get us out of here,’ Marshall shouted. He had turned around, his eyes wide and white. ‘Harry!’

Something popped, like a cannon blast, and the chopper lurched downwards. It took Harry a moment to realise that it was the pressure changing as air was sucked into the storm. They were being pulled towards it, caught in the flow, the chopper’s demented alarm ringing into his headset. Marshall was banging on the window that separated them, but Harry couldn’t pull his gaze from the windscreen. The bird was tilting downwards, giving him a perfect view of the streets below. They were breaking up, dissolving like sand sculptures in the wind. Buildings and cars and people alike burst into powder, sucked up into the tornado.

‘Harry,
please
,’ said Marshall. Harry felt the chopper buck. It turned slowly, the engines whining, but the force that was pulling them was too strong. It was like being in a boat heading for a waterfall. No, it was more like they were in a spaceship being wrenched towards a black hole. There was nothing they could do, he realised. It was over.

‘Ours is not to reason why,’ he said. The Apache shook, so violently that his head smacked against the top of the cockpit. Metal groaned, then the rotors ripped free overhead, spinning off into the darkness. Marshall was shrieking, and Harry tore off his helmet, suddenly drowning in the howl of the storm and that same endless inward breath from the hanging man.

‘Ours is but to do and die,’ he went on, louder now. ‘Ours is not to reason why, ours is but to do and die,’ again and again, like a chant, like a prayer, as the front of the chopper began to come apart, breaking into pieces like a kit model. Then Marshall, his arms and legs and head coming loose, hanging there against a backdrop of boiling black skies. Harry looked down, realising that he was no longer inside the helicopter. Pieces of it floated beside him, suspended in the turbulence a mile above the vanishing ground. He’d dreamed of this as a child, night after night, of being able to fly. That memory blew out the fear, and even though he could see his own flesh begin to unravel, layers of pink then red then white trailing outwards, he found himself smiling.

‘Ours is not to reason why,’ he said through crumbling lips. Then his mind ruptured into white noise and black light, and everything that was Harry Botham was pulled into the abyss.

The worst thing was the noise. It was deafening, literally – he couldn’t hear the people screaming, couldn’t hear the revving engines or the wailing car alarms or the crash of metal as it folded into metal at the intersections, not even the explosions. There was only the storm, an endless roar that made the streets tremble, as if the city was a living thing quaking in terror. It was so loud that Graham hadn’t seen more than a handful of windows still intact on his way across town, glass ripped from frames by the immense, rolling sonic pulse that pounded the streets. It was doing the same to his skull, as though the sound was a solid, living thing seeking the right frequency to split open the bone and let his brains slop out on to the pavement.

He pushed past a crowd of tourists fleeing in the opposite direction, then turned on to Millbank. For a second it appeared in the gap between buildings, a vast, churning mass of matter that curled and spiralled around a core of darkness. From here, ten miles away, it looked halfway between the cloud from an atom bomb and a storm, the sky impossibly dark, as though a section of night had fallen loose, dropped on to London. But in the gaps between the debris, between the flotsam and jetsam of his city, he saw something worse than darkness. He saw the places where the world had been rubbed away.

Something was happening up there, soft explosions detonating in the middle of the storm. There were jets in the sky, choppers too, being pulled into the hole like toys in a stream. Graham wrenched his head forward, focused on where he was going. It had taken him –
how long?
– nearly four hours to get from his house to Millbank. He’d had to walk. The city was clogged with people trying to escape, nobody going in the same direction. All the main roads were frozen solid by accidents, the trains and the Tube were shut down, which meant everybody was on foot. He felt as if he had battled past each and every one of London’s eight million inhabitants just to get to Thames House. He’d headed over to Whitehall first, to the counterterrorism unit, but Erika Pierce hadn’t been lying, the place had been deserted. MI5 was the next logical destination, but he had the awful feeling that he’d get there to find its rooms empty too.

They’ve all fled, and you should too, because it will eat you, that storm, it will devour you
. And he knew that was the truth, knew that he should turn tail and run. He’d called David three hours ago, told him to go, to head south, get out of the country if he could. With any luck he’d have reached the coast by now, could head over the Channel into France.
Or maybe he went the other
way, maybe he got caught up, carried towards the storm. Maybe now he’s circling the pit, or lost inside it.
And the thought of him pulled into nothingness, snuffed out like a flame, the very essence of him extinguished, made Graham want to die. He could go, call him on the way, meet him in Calais and just survive.
Just go just go just go.

He pushed the words away, turning the corner to see the river dead ahead. Even that was agitated, vibrations herding the water into white-lipped eddies and whirlpools, spitting dirty fountains and filling the air with the stench of sewage. The noise was louder here, echoing off the buildings back and forth over the embankment. It sounded like a vast turbine sucking every last scrap of air into its engine. And yet it sounded like something else, too. It sounded like trumpets, like a million war horns being blown in the skies above his head.

It was the sound of London being eaten alive.

He ran the last hundred yards to Thames House, finding the main doors open and deserted. There was nobody in the lobby, just a snowstorm of papers on the marble floor. At least the lights were on. Luckily the building had its own power source – several, in fact – because from what he could see half of the city was dark.

He ducked into the first elevator, using his counterterrorism keycard to activate the control panel. If there was anybody left, they’d be in the emergency bunker control centre – standard procedure for an attack. He counted down the seconds as the elevator descended, wondering how powerful the storm had to be for him to feel its voice so deep beneath the ground, in the rocking of the elevator, the vibrating whine of the metal cables.

The door slid open to reveal the huge, open-plan room. At first he mistook the constant movement for people, but he soon realised it was just the monitors that lined every wall and sat on every desk, displaying images of the city and the storm. He wiped the sweat from his brow, wondering how the hell he was supposed to handle this alone, when a woman stepped into view. She looked up from a sheaf of documents, frowned, then broke into a huge smile.

‘Graham? Jesus, I thought nobody was coming.’

He recognised her as Sam Holloway, one of the MI5 codebreakers. She’d done some work for him over at the CT unit last year.

‘Sam, it’s good to see you,’ he said, walking into the room. ‘Please tell me you’re not here by yourself.’

‘No, Habib Rahman’s over in comms trying to get a feed on what’s happening. That’s it, the rest of them either jumped ship or are over in Downing Street trying to evac the PM and the Cabinet. That’s Priority One.’

Yeah, save the idiots in government, definitely a priority.

‘What’s the current situation?’ he asked, walking to the director’s desk. On the monitor there more of the city was being sucked into the throat of the storm.

‘The Air Force have sent in an attack force, but . . .’

She didn’t need to finish, he’d seen it for himself.

‘Any idea what it is?’

‘No,’ Sam replied. ‘But it’s big. Everything from Edgware in the north down to Fortune Green is gone.’

‘Gone?’

‘Yeah, gone. It just isn’t there any more.’ There was a tremor in her voice, nothing to do with the roar of the storm. ‘This footage is from a US Black Hawk, positioned five miles from ground zero.’

Five miles, but the picture was sharp enough to make out the vast gulf that had opened up beneath the tornado. It looked bottomless. More than bottomless. Graham got the idea that if you were to step off the edge of it, you would simply cease to exist.

‘Any other eyes on?’ he asked.

Sam nodded, running her hands across the touchscreen monitor until the view changed.

‘From a Sentinel,’ she said.

This shot was higher, making the storm look more like a tornado than ever, a looping coil of shadow that towered over the city, maybe three miles wide now. Even as he watched, Graham saw a chunk of land snap free from the earth, rising slowly, almost gracefully, into the maelstrom where it began to break apart. The entire room shook, dust raining down from the ceiling and several of the computer screens shutting off before rebooting. It was as though he was back in the Gulf, bunkered up inside a cave while enemy RPGs pounded his hideout. That island of land had to have been five hundred metres across.
How many people?
he asked himself as it crumbled, caught in the howling spiral of the vortex, pulled towards the mouth of the storm.
How many more just died?

‘Theories?’ he coughed the word out.

‘None,’ Sam said. ‘No radioactive signature, no indication of a biological threat. But . . .’

He looked at her, at the way the colour drained from her face, and felt a million icy fingers run up his back.

‘But what?’

‘Ground zero,’ she started. ‘The epicentre of the storm. There was something there when all this started.’

‘A bomb?’

‘No, a man. A dead man.’ She chewed her bottom lip, loading another piece of footage on to her monitor. It showed a morgue table, one of the ones upstairs in this very building, he thought. Lying on it was the body of a man, pulled open by a coroner’s tools to reveal the empty box of his torso. And yet even sitting here, watching it on a screen, it was obvious that there was some kind of life there, in the man’s pale, quickening eyes, and in his endless, inward breath.
Oh Jesus it’s the same noise,
he realised.
It’s the same sound as the storm
. ‘He came in on Friday, from Scotland Yard.’

‘Why wasn’t I told?’ Graham asked.

‘It was stonewalled, no communication in or out. The plan was to get the . . . get
it
to Northwood, get it secure, then bring people in. But they never made it. Something happened on the way, we only found out when it became visible.’

Graham wiped his mouth, staring at the screen, at the living corpse that lay there. That was the figure he had seen in the tornado, the shape that hung in the centre of the chaos.
The man in the storm,
he thought, the words appearing from nowhere. And suddenly the overwhelming unreality of it hit him like a punch to the gut, a high-pitched whine popping in his eardrums. He leant forward, hands on his knees, wondering if he was about to puke, swallowing the acid back down with noisy, gasping gulps.

He straightened, cleared the mess of his throat, spoke in a grating whisper: ‘So what do we know for sure?’

‘That it’s expanding fast,’ said Sam. ‘That’s why this place is deserted. We’re a good ten miles from the centre of the attack –’
It’s not an attack,
Graham thought,
it’s something more than that, something so much worse
– ‘but at the rate that thing is growing we’ll have to be out of here soon. Other than that, we don’t know anything.’

‘We need satellites, Sam,’ he said.

‘I’m attempting to task one now, but the only one close enough is a NSA bird, and the Yanks are being cagey.’

‘Do whatever you have to,’ he said, pushing himself to his feet. ‘Hack it if you can.’ He walked around a bank of screens to see Habib at his desk. He didn’t know him personally, but the guy was pretty famous for writing unbreakable cyphers for the army. ‘Habib, anything from the General?’

‘He’s been alerted to the attack,’ he replied, shrugging. ‘Northwood has been evacuated, but he has given us full use of any tactical units, and is happy to discuss other options.’

Other options?
There were no options, not that Graham could see. They didn’t even know what this thing was. Part of him wanted to believe it was a nuke, a big one. Yes, it would be awful. Yes, parts of the city would be destroyed, would be radioactive for decades, and hundreds of thousands would perish. But a nuke was still a nuke, a fission warhead, a neutron striking a concentrated mass of Uranium 235 and starting a chain reaction of energy release. He
understood
a nuke, it was one of the first things they had taught him. The scenario was right at the top of the nightmare list –
what if somebody detonates an atomic weapon in a major British city
– and they had procedures to deal with it. Hell, during the Olympics they’d done nothing but prepare for a strike like this. No, he could handle a nuke.

This was different.
Because it isn’t science. Whatever that thing is, it doesn’t obey the rules of the universe, it destroys them
. And that’s what was truly terrifying, because there were no instruction manuals dealing with this, no computer simulations, no emergency drills. This was unknowable.

He pressed the heels of his palms into his eye sockets, wishing he was back in bed, that this really was a nightmare. How many times had he had dreams like this? The
Bad Things
dreams, nothing more than stress or too much port and cheese before bed. Why couldn’t he wake up?

‘Sir, you need to take a look at this as well.’

He opened his eyes, a solar storm of flashes filling the room. Sam was standing next to her desk, both hands clamped in her short hair. On her screen was a bulletin report from district command. He squinted, reading the message twice and still not quite believing it.

‘Another attack?’ he said. ‘Where exactly?’

‘On the coast,’ said Sam. She sat, typing instructions into the console. The images on screen disappeared to be replaced by a crude photograph. For a moment Graham couldn’t quite make out what he was looking at; a beach, an angry grey sky. There was something wrong with it that he couldn’t put his finger on.

‘What is that?’ he said.

‘It’s a wave.’

He saw it even as she gave her answer. Only it wasn’t a wave. It wasn’t the right shape. This huge mass of water was scrunched into a fist, as if a vast explosion had been set off beneath the ocean. It hung above the horizon, and Graham only realised the sheer scale of the image when he noticed a town there – tower blocks and houses and cars and tiny specs of people dwarfed by the great dappled shadow of the water.

‘Oh my God,’ he said, slumping into his chair. ‘When was this taken?’

‘Half an hour ago,’ Sam said. ‘In Norfolk. Yarmouth.’

‘Half an hour?’ he said. ‘Why are we just finding out?’

‘It got logged by the local law enforcement, but everything’s tied up with that,’ she said, nodding at Graham’s screen where the storm still raged. ‘There’s not enough of us here, I only just picked it up in the hourlies.’

Graham swore, once again feeling the urge to get up and run.

‘The city – or town, really – it got wiped out. There’s nothing left.’

‘What caused it?’ he asked, rubbing his eyes again. Sam shook her head.

‘We don’t know. It’s related to another attack last night, in the same area. An explosion – at least we think it was an explosion – destroyed a town called Hemmingway. Nothing there, nothing worth attacking anyway. But for some reason it was hit.’

‘Meteor strike?’ he said.
Wishful thinking.

‘Uh-uh. The radar station up in Holmont recorded no meteor activity. Nothing has come in from the skies.’

Which ruled out missile strikes too. That was one good thing, it meant that someone like Iran or North Korea hadn’t decided to lob a bunch of nukes at them. He took a deep breath, trying to shut out the white noise of fear, trying to arrange his thoughts into neat, logical patterns. One thing at a time, establish a clear chain of events.

‘Is there any footage from the attack last night?’ he asked. Sam fiddled with her touchscreen, loading up a video feed.

‘There’s this,’ she said. ‘Came in just now with the report. From local LE, Norfolk Constab.’