Warhead (17 page)

Run? Carter grinned malevolently through his sheen of sweat. He was fast running out of stamina and strength. A man couldn’t run for ever. And when cornered? He’d be forced to fight...

‘Fuck it. Fight I must.’

And then an idea struck Carter. He whirled, staring back down the street to the inverted V of collapsed rubble blocking his path to the Range Rover—and freedom beyond. There were four JCB K5 bulldozers—huge industrial vehicles, crosses between diggers and dozers, working on heavy hydraulics and with 10.5-litre turbo-cooled engines running refined LVA as they charged about. Carter’s eyes narrowed as he watched them, huge hydraulic arms lifting fifty-tonne lumps of collapsed stone and dropping the mammoth chunks into FreightTruks which bobbed on their suspension over eight sets of twin-bubble tyres.

Carter jogged down the rubble-strewn street, past a small huddled group of workmen who were all standing and staring, down into a hole. What is it with workmen and holes? Carter wondered idly. All his life, whenever he’d watched any form of construction job there’d always been a group of workmen huddled around a hole.

‘Perhaps they find them particularly holy?’
quipped Kade.

‘Yeah, ha and ha,’ snapped Carter. Then he stopped beside the teetering remains of a towering wall. The deafening sounds of the JCB K5 bulldozers filled his ears. Carter studied the JCBs, then pushed away from the wall, ducking a little as rubble from above pattered like shrapnel against his head.

He approached one of the vehicles—each wheel that drove the tracks was twice as tall as Carter himself. To the rear of the machine was a narrow recessed ladder leading up to the cabin.

Carter caught a glimpse of movement. The Nex had found him.

He sprinted forward, then threw himself to the left, rolling past the grinding steel tracks which crunched mere inches from his prone frail flesh. He came up into a crouch. There was a moment’s pause, then Carter leapt and caught the vehicle as it edged forward. His hands grasped snow-slick yellow steel and he clambered up, hands slipping against the metal until he reached the entrance to the cab. Inside, the driver—an unmasked JT8—was wearing earmuffs that blocked out the sounds of the thundering engine and hydraulics. Screens flickered in front of him: he gripped a control stick in one fist and operated touch screen controls with his other hand.

Carter opened the hatch, noticing the warning flicker of orange. As the JT8 whirled—allowing the massive bulldozer to suddenly lurch forward out of control—Carter smashed his fist into the man’s face repeatedly. Then a third powerful blow broke the JT8’s nose and left him drooling blood as he sagged unconscious against his safety harness.

Carter reached forward and pulled back on the stick. The bulldozer shuddered to a halt and Carter withdrew the knife from his boot—a long black blade—and sliced through the harness. He turned, hoisting the unconscious man up and dropping him from the rear of the industrial dozer. Then Carter leapt into the seat, turned and locked the hatch behind him.

Below, he felt the JCB shuddering with the vibration of its huge engines. He took control of the stick with his gloved hands and scanned the screens. The Nex were moving slowly, heads swaying from left to right as they came forward. They stepped neatly over blocks of scattered stone and hugged the walls as snow settled on their body-hugging uniforms and balaclavas.

Then Carter saw it—the weaving triangular head of a Sleeper Nex.

No wonder I couldn’t lose them, he thought. They are hunting me ...
scenting
me.

He found the pedals, revved the bulldozer’s mighty 10,500cc engine and heard the whine of quad-turbos. He twisted the stick, flicked a control on the screen and the huge scoop at the front of the vehicle bucked on its hydraulics, and then transformed into a bulldozer’s flat blade. On the screen there were eight shapes to play with—different configurations of bucket or blade, using the latest in steel-fan polymorphing technology.

Carter whirled the vehicle, and wheels spun inside tracks which skittered across loose stones and snow slush. The engine roared and Carter slammed his boot down on the accelerator, sending the bulldozer roaring down the street and towards the strung-out line of Nex. Their heads jerked up and around.

Guns blasted but Carter lifted the JCB’s mighty blade and the bullets flattened against it and spun off harmlessly. The Nex scattered but Carter’s foot was already pressed to the floor, and the vehicle ploughed into the running figures and the bulk of the Sleeper Nex—all were smashed against the side of a building which acted as an anvil, and then itself gave way. The bulldozer shuddered to a halt inside the teetering building, and the stench of hot oil drifted up to Carter from the darkness of his sudden entombment. Pebbles of stone thudded onto the cab above him, pattering like delicate rainfall.

Carter revved the engine, then slowly reversed through the hole where smears of Nex decorated the crumbled sides. Chunks of debris rolled down the cab and the windscreen, and a moment later the whole building collapsed with a massive roar and a billowing of dust.

Carter whirled the bulldozer round. All his screens were now blank, thanks to the swirling dust outside. Licking dry lips, he pulled free his Browning and turned, staring at the hatch—a masked face suddenly appeared and Carter placed a bullet neatly between the Nex’s copper eyes before slamming the JCB into gear and powering the huge machine through the grey swirls of chaos he had so recently created.

The JCB’s engine rose to an insane roar, and he collided with something within the fog of dust. The impact threw him across the cab. When the shock of sudden impact wore off and Carter’s vision returned, he was lying upside down. One of his boots had smashed a touchscreen—which in turn had leaked some form of black, sticky chemical across his footwear and was even, as he watched, burning holes through the tough leather of his soles.

With a yelp, Carter rolled upright and pulled off the melting boots. Bullets rattled against the cab and he ducked involuntarily, grabbing for the JCB’s stick and sending it into a frenzied spin, its engine screaming, the hot-oil smell getting stronger and stronger. He had the distinct and horrible impression that something was
not right...

What the fuck did I hit? he thought.

And then he saw it—in the rear screen. He had hit another bulldozer.

You
stupid
motherf— He hit another of the machines in the fog of billowing dust, this time head on, crushing a sprinting Nex between the two massive blades in the process. The dust started to clear as Carter righted his JCB for the second time and spat out a broken splinter of tooth. He shook his head, dribbling a little blood and groaning to himself as he scanned his once again active screens with his mind spinning.

Outside, the snow still swirled. Carter’s gaze followed the retreating Nex, coming to rest on the— ‘Shit. A tank.’

The Shilka ZSU 88-4tt—which was not technically a tank, but a self-propelled anti-aircraft gun—could be devastating in the right circumstances against ground targets. It ran on tracks in a similar fashion to a tank, shared similar chassis components with several Soviet models, and sported four vertically mounted 23mm liquid-cooled automatic cannons with a firing rate of between 2,000 and 3,000 rounds per minute. These guns could fire either blast, fragmentation or incendiary shells. The Shilka was good for taking out lightly armoured ground vehicles and personnel, buildings, mounted machine guns—and was much more manoeuvrable than a tank of similar size. It had excellent protection against NBC warfare and incredible radar technologies that included GUN DISH, which emitted VHF narrow beams to help track high-speed aircraft whilst itself being difficult to detect or evade.

Carter stared at the Shilka. One track started to move as the mobile gun oriented itself. ‘Fucking tanks. I
hate
fucking tanks.’

Carter tugged the stick of the JCB hard back in order to reverse, and was deafened by squeals of grinding metal. He glanced at the screen and saw—to his horror—that his bulldozer had become entangled during the crash. With a deafening noise of ripping, groaning steel, he dragged the other bulldozer across the street, leaving huge gouges in the snow-mushed road. The Shilka opened fire ...

Rounds slammed into the two bulldozers but Carter was already running, leaping from the cab and sprinting up the huge pile of collapsed rubble.

Behind him the two bulldozers, their engines screaming, suddenly erupted into a raging inferno which roared up into the sky, spitting blackened panels of steel. A wash of billowing flame spread across the road, blanketing the ground and surging against the stone mound up which Carter ran.

Fire licked at the heels of his bloodied feet.

Steyr TMPs opened fire, and Carter felt rather than heard the zip and whizz of bullets. Mouth a grim line, face blackened and eyes filled with tears from the smoke and dust, he forced himself to the top of the rise with lungs burning and bursting, and dived over the summit—

As a rising wall of fire—the result of the ignition of six thousand gallons of industrial LVA—followed him and burst overhead as he lay on his back, panting. Then it was gone, suddenly sucking back and disappearing.

Carter allowed the snow to settle on his face. It felt nice there. Calm, and the cool caress of the flakes was a welcome respite from adrenalin and fire and action ...

On the other side of the rubble, Carter heard engines revving. And the clack of stone on stone. He groaned, rolled onto his belly and, limping on battered feet, lurched down the slope and away into the falling snow, searching for his Range Rover.

‘Close,’
observed Kade haughtily.

‘I’d like to see you do it any fucking
neater.’
Carter slung the M24 over his back. He stopped at a corner, taking deep breaths, then pulled free his Browning and checked the weapon. Definitely the more discreet option when traversing Nex-infested London Streets.

Within ten minutes he had located the Range Rover. He dropped his fire-damaged pack onto the passenger seat and with a screeching handbrake turn in the snow roared off in a spray of ice slurry.

Behind, the Nex watched him go. One smoothed open a bastard ECube channel, looked into the pale face and copper eyes of a Nex thousands of miles away, and said, ‘He has gone. He escaped us this time.’

Alexis smiled softly. ‘Do not concern yourself. He will come to us. I can sense it.’

‘How can you be so sure?’

‘Because we have his child,’ said Alexis sweetly.

The Manta dropped from the white cliffs of Dover, twisting and flashing, then levelling as it skimmed low over the waves of the English Channel, creating a sonic boom as it went.

Carter wore an intense frown. Now that he had time to think, the peril of his situation was eating at him and he felt the need to get back to Cyprus. The need burned him like a brand.

It looked so obvious. An assassination with only one possible outcome: the wrecking of Spiral. In other words, a betrayal.

Carter chewed his lip. How could that be so? How could Nicky, his friend, a woman who had stood by him most of his life,
betray
him with such cold calculation?

Carter shook his head. It just could not be so. But more worryingly, what about his boy? His Joseph? His sweet and only child? The one remaining link he had with the woman he had loved, and who had been murdered as a result of the Nex filth seeking world domination ...

Fear wormed into Carter’s heart then, and there was no amount of mental strength, conditioning or calming that would work to exercise his fear.

As Carter sped over the cold churning waters cloaked by darkness he flipped open the ECube. But—as it had been back in London—the machine was dead. Powerless. Nothing more than a useless alloy block. Carter snorted in frustration ... he had never known an ECube to fail—except through outside intervention. They were built to withstand a hell of a lot of punishment—they had to be, for so often a Spiral operative’s life out in the field depended on the tiny alloy device. But this ECube was useless for communications ...

Unless ... The SpiralGRID and Spiral itself had been compromised.

Carter flew on, frustration and disbelief bringing him out in a cold, clammy sweat. How could Nicky do this to him? How could she betray him, betray Joseph, betray Spiral? It would be to betray everything that she loved, everything she truly believed in. It would make a mockery of Jam’s death. It would make a mockery of her very existence. Round and round the thoughts chased each other.

Carter pushed the howling Manta to its limits; warning sirens kept sounding in the confines of the cockpit and Carter would ease back, carefully watching the dials as needles retreated from the red—and then he’d slowly ease more power through the screaming engines again until he was sure they could take no more.

Eventually his thoughts focused on two simple decisions.

If she has harmed Joseph, she will die.

If she has betrayed Spiral, she will die.

‘But you are the tool!’
mocked Kade. ‘
You were the finger on the trigger, the bullet in the gun. You killed Jahlsen. You gave Durell the SpiralGRID. You condemned your friends, fucker...
’

And Carter caught himself, snapping from the brink of sleep to see the waves looming close in the darkness, white crests of foam mocking him with their closeness—and he felt sick, deeply sick, and the nausea spread until he was sure he could not possibly take any more.