World War Moo (37 page)

Fanny grabbed her hand and hauled her to a sitting position. She then began patting Ruan's body, looking for wounds. “Are you okay?”

“My shoulder's killing me, but I think that's it. How's everyone else?”

In answer, Fanny looked to her left. Ruan followed her gaze and saw Scholzy on his knees, bent over the still forms of Peter and James. Blood was oozing out from beneath them, coating the sides of a discarded rocket launcher.

“I'm sorry,” she said.

Scholzy looked around. His face held a rigid lack of expression, his facial muscles fluttering as he fought to keep them in check. “It's been a long time coming,” he said, his voice barely above a whisper. “Funny thing is, I never really expected it to happen. None of us did, or we wouldn't have been doing this.”

As he brushed his friends' eyes closed with gentle fingers, the radio came alive.

“The sub's moving,” Geldof said.

Scholzy kept his head lowered for another few seconds and then got to his feet. “We've still got a job to do. Tom, Scott, take their weapons. Ruan, you take the charges.”

Ruan focused on James's chest, all too aware that his face was a bloody ruin, as she pulled the two explosive devices they'd kept in reserve out of his webbing.

“We're going to have to sprint for it. Everybody follow me and Ruan. Give us cover if there's any more engagement,” Scholzy said.

He opened communications with Geldof again. “How do we get to the sub?”

“Straight across the car park, between the two hangars, toward the crane. Turn left at the water and straight down. You can't miss it.”

“Any enemy in the way?”

“Not that I can see.”

Scholzy and Ruan pulled ahead as the group ran. When they hit the foot of the towering crane, a floodlit section of the dockside came into view. The sub was already away from its berth, churning water in its wake and fading into the blackness. Scholzy snatched the charges from Ruan, dropping the radio over the edge of the dock in the process, and lobbed them after the departing sub. They splashed into the water well short of the target, but Scholzy activated the remote control detonator anyway. A flash of light illuminated the water, followed by a spray of foam and a dull crump. The sub continued, undamaged. Tom, Nayapal, Scott, and Andy caught up with them, and they stood together, watching the dark silhouette meld with the darkness around it until all they could see was the blinking red light from the conning tower.

“We're done here,” Scholzy said. “Time to bug out.”

“Aren't you going to tell Geldof to make the call?” Ruan asked.

“Unless you want to dive in and get the radio, then no. There's no point anyway. By the time they get the message the sub will be underwater. Only depth charges will do the job, if they could find it. Anyway, they'd never get a warship close enough before the missile went off.”

“So everybody's going to be infected,” Ruan said.

“Looks that way. If it's any consolation, I doubt we're going to be around to see it. The bombs will be flying soon enough.”

Now that the battle was over and her mind was able to look more than a few seconds into the future, Ruan realized she was more scared than she'd ever been. In all of her time scrabbling for survival, even during the overwhelming chaos of the assault on the base, she at least had something in front of her she could fight, some measure of influence over her destiny. What she felt now was the helpless terror that came with lack of control, like that of a nervous flyer relying on the skill of a pilot and a flimsy belt buckle while lightning crackled through the clouds around the bucking plane.

“But I don't want to die,” she said, her voice that of a frightened little girl.

“Join the fucking club,” Scholzy said.

 

33

Lesley brought up the rear of the running group, trying to focus on the job she'd been given. The barrel of her gun was up, ready to swing in the direction of any movement from the peripheries, but it was shaking so much she doubted she would be able to hit anything save through blind luck. Again it was her fault they were here at all. Again people were dying all around her while she hadn't suffered so much as a scratch. And despite the sacrifices, they were going to fail. The missile would go up, the virus would come down, and her hand of doom would erase the lives of billions of people. The black cloud drifting over the base was nothing compared to the evil miasma of death that must be billowing invisibly around her.

Still, when something flickered in the corner of her eye she jerked her gun in the direction of the movement. She didn't have time to fire, but she recognized the man who was disappearing into a building. She stopped dead, her hands suddenly steady. Perhaps it wasn't too late after all. She cut away from the group and headed toward the door. A hand fell on her shoulder. She whirled round to see Fanny.

“You're not going to call the UN are you?” Fanny said. “We're not done here yet.”

“I just saw Tony Campbell go into that building. You know what they say about cutting off the head of the snake.”

“I'm coming with you.”

They entered the building, weapons at the ready, and crept up a narrow flight of stairs leading to a doorway. Lesley stuck her head around to look in to an open area filled with computer terminals. At the far end, Tony and another man were bent over a monitor atop a table cluttered with other equipment, including a radio. As she tried to figure out what they were doing, a boom rattled the windows. Tony ducked beneath the table. The other man didn't flinch. For a moment Lesley's spirits soared, taking the weight of all the lives that would be lost with them. The explosion must have been Scholzy taking out the sub. As the top half of Tony's head appeared above the table, the other man walked over to the window and cupped his hands against the pane.

“It's okay,” he said. “The sub's still intact.”

Lesley ducked back in as he turned, feeling sick to her stomach. A few seconds later, she heard the man speak again. “How long until you're in a position to fire?”

“Ten minutes,” somebody replied through the radio speakers.

“They missed it,” she whispered into Fanny's ear. “We have to kill them.”

“It won't make any difference. They've clearly already given the order to fire. You need to convince Tony to call it off.”

“And how am I going to do that? Last time we talked he threatened to kill me.”

“You're the wordsmith. So smith some words and persuade him.”

“I can't,” Lesley said, close to hyperventilating. “I don't know what to say.”

Fanny grabbed her shoulders and leaned in so their eyes were inches apart. “I never told you this, but I always admired you. You're a strong woman, Lesley. You can do it. You have to do it.”

“I'm not a strong woman. I'm a walking disaster area.”

“That's not true. When it came to the crunch, you shot Brown, didn't you? You saved my son's life. Now you can save a lot more lives.”

In lieu of a brown paper bag, Lesley cupped her hands over her mouth and took several deep breaths. It didn't do much to calm her, but it would have to do.

“Tony!” she shouted.

“Who's that?”

“It's Lesley McBrien,” she said, sure he would fly round the corner and attack them.

“What're you doing here?”

“I just want to talk.”

“Right. That's why all those bombs were going off.”

“What did you expect? What you're going to do is wrong.”

“I thought you'd decided killing us wasn't such a good idea after all. Seems I was wrong. You're just like every other journalist. Anything for a good story, right?”

“I don't know what you mean. This isn't about a story. It's about what's right.”

“Right for who? You're going to kill everybody I care about. This is the only way to stop that happening. You're making me do this.”

“Nobody's making you do anything. If you fire that missile, it'll be your decision, nobody else's.”

“And the alternative is what? I just stand back and let the bombs drop? This is war. We didn't start it. But we're going to finish it.”

“By infecting the whole world?”

“We'll have peace when everybody has the virus.”

“That's your solution? I'm sure it's very peaceful in the grave. Shame the dead are too busy decomposing to enjoy the lovely silence. Don't you get it? This is the virus talking. You're angry, so you're not thinking clearly. Billions of people are going to die if you do this.”

“Not my family. That's all that matters. Nothing you can say will change my mind, so you may as well send your soldier friends up to finish the job.”

Lesley slumped against the wall and clutched her hair.

“I don't know what to say,” she told Fanny.

“Don't give up,” Fanny said. “We've still got a few minutes.”

Lesley stared at her mutely. She'd spoken to Tony for less than a minute but already knew she didn't have the words to talk him down, mainly because she didn't blame him. She blamed herself. In a few minutes the missile would slide out of its tube and she would have killed half the world. She shook her head and looked at the floor. Fanny nudged her out of the way and edged toward the door.

“Unless your family is more than seven billion people, you can't do it,” Fanny shouted. “Don't you get it? The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.”

“What did you say?” Tony said, his voice hoarse.

“I said the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. Do you think you're the only one with a wife and child? Are you really going to kill millions of families just to save your own?”

The only sound from the control room was heavy breathing and the soft tick of a wall clock. As the silence stretched on, Lesley halted her slide down the wall. She grabbed Fanny's forearm.

“I didn't know you were a
Star Trek
fan,” she whispered, not wanting to interrupt whatever thoughts were running through Tony's mind.

Fanny shot her a puzzled look. “I'm not.”

“Never mind. I think you might have gotten through to him.”

*   *   *

Tony stood by the radio, stunned into stillness by the words of Spock coming out of the unknown woman's mouth. Always he'd conjured up the Vulcan, but only in relation to the small things, as a way of quelling his anger. He'd never applied Spock's logic to the big picture. Every decision he made had been driven by the sickening rage conjured up at the thought of those he loved being killed. He hadn't allowed Spock to come because he didn't want to see the truth. Now he breathed deeply and, for the first time, properly asked himself what Spock would do. It wasn't a question that needed any thought, since Fanny had already given him the answer. He saw Spock in the reactor core, his face bearing the scars of radiation poisoning as he slid down the glass pane and said farewell to Kirk after making the ultimate sacrifice. From a purely logical point of view, it was a question of numbers. Billions versus two, or millions if you counted all of the others in Britain. Spock wouldn't do this, he knew. But it went far beyond logic, as Spock's human side would know only too well.

Yes, Tony had been furious when he told Glen to fire the missile and so didn't think further about the consequences. But he'd paved the way for that split-second decision in all of his thoughts over the previous weeks. All along he'd been doing what he vilified the international community for doing: dehumanizing the people he would kill, trying to dismiss them as statistics. This was the kind of decision world leaders took every time they went to war. They gave commands, people died, and geopolitical influence changed as if it were just a big game of Risk. He'd never seen himself as one of those people. He took up politics as an ideal, not a career. He'd been a leftie, a backer of an ideology that protected the masses from the excesses of the few. Many others started out the same way. In order to rise to the top they gradually compromised and chipped away at their ideals until, like a statue carved by a sculptor too heavy on the hammer, all that remained was a shrivelled lump of rock. He'd vowed this would never happen to him. All those years he'd kept quiet as the party moved to the right, telling himself he was staying in the system so he could eventually change it. Yet he'd never actually done or said anything, supposedly waiting for the right moment as he rose and rose. He'd compromised himself through inaction and silence. And now here he was, as bad as those leaders who would destroy his country without thought for the loss of life.

For the first time, he allowed himself to see the gravity of his actions. There were millions of Vanessas out there, each tucked up in their own bed, each with a father and mother who would do anything to protect them. He realized that he hadn't really tried to picture them, how they would scream and bleed and plead for their mummies and daddies when the infected came for them. He would never see the bodies, but that didn't mean they wouldn't be there. He let the memory of the journey back from the hotel engulf him, this time transplanting the endless vista of broken and battered corpses onto the streets of Paris, Berlin, Istanbul, Moscow, New York, New Delhi, Buenos Aires, Johannesburg, and the other cities he'd visited and thus could visualize. That is what he would be unleashing upon the world. Each one of those deaths would be a tragedy, overwhelming when stacked up in their millions. When it had occurred to him that firing the missile would make him the same as Archangel, he talked himself out of his comparison by considering motivation. But his motivation wouldn't matter to the dead. Wrong was wrong. If he did this, he would never be able to look Margot or Vanessa in the eye again, knowing he'd bought their lives with the deaths of so many others.