Operation: Yukon

- 9 -

The track was easy enough to follow. The sheriff drove the truck as if it came easy to her, the wind had dropped completely and the snow falling now was more of the big, soft flakes stuff. Watkins, however, wasn’t taking the journey well. He sat in the middle up front; I’d taken the door seat in case the man tried to make a hasty exit but he had withdrawn almost as much as Jennings and when he took a smoke from me his hands trembled although it was quite warm there in the cab with the heating on.

“This is the worst bloody daft idea in the history of daft ideas,” he said. “You know that, right?”

“Daft it might be,” I replied, “but orders are orders. We do what we’re telt.”

“Your man Jennings didn’t get the memo?”

“It’s his first time out with us. He’s used to facing down kids with petrol bombs at riots, doing drive-rounds in occupied territories, that kind of routine. Meeting a monster in real life can be a wee bit of a shock. Some can’t handle it.”

“But you can?”

“I telt you earlier; we were in Siberia. And not just there. We’re fucking monster magnets. Buy me a beer when this is all over and I’ll tell you some stories that’ll turn your hair white.”

It was the sheriff who answered me.

“I’m still on for that. But why not start early? We’ve got an hour or so of a drive ahead of us at a guess. Tell us a story to pass the time? Your captain told me about Siberia, but he was a bit short on detail. What was it really like?”

“A full on fucking clusterfuck is what it was…”

It took a while in the telling, dire wolves, cave lions, woolly mammoths, big fucking thunderbirds and the rest. When I got to the bit about the bone flute and the hairy ape-things we’d been told were Alma, Watkins sucked at his teeth. I paused to see if he had something to add but he just waved for me to continue. He had me wondering again though, wondering about what, apart from giant fuck-off wolves, might be waiting for us ahead.

The sheriff took her eyes off the road just long enough to turn to me when I reached the end and finished off the tale with the rescue on the airfield.

“You’re not pulling my chain, are you? All of that really happened?”

“Every word of it, cross my heart and hope to be an Englishman.”

Watkins was deep in thought when I handed him a fresh smoke.

“I’d heard it had gone bad,” he said, almost to himself. “I didn’t know how bad though.”

“And here we are with a whole new clusterfuck,” I said. “You’d think we’d learn a lesson or two somewhere along the line.”

“You’re too old to be that naive,” the sheriff said, and I could only agree with her.

The trail to the research station wended always upward, through thin woodland as the sky lightened and dawn came. There was no sign there had been any other traffic; we drove through maybe a foot of virgin snow, sometimes up to two feet in drifts. The truck made easy work of it although the going was slow. We rounded a corner after another climb and got a clear view of a group of buildings perched on a rocky outcrop amid woodland on the side of another hill, a mile ahead at a guess.

“Home sweet home,” Watkins muttered, and sucked hard on his cigarette through clenched teeth.

I noticed smoke rising from the site as we got closer, wispy stuff that was getting dispersed quickly in the breeze but it was a sign that all was not well up ahead. The main security gate lay open off its hinges and there was blood splashed across the outer wall of the squat cube that served as the gatehouse. There were still no tracks in the snow except those we left as we drew up into a forecourt in front of the main building. There were four vehicles in the parking bays on the edge already but none that would be of any use to us; three were burnt-out SUVs and the fourth was a Skidoo, or rather had been at one time; it was now just a tangled mass of plastic and chains and metal.

We saw the source of the smoke up close now; the roof of the building was partially collapsed and charred and the smoke came from the north end where the walls had caved in on themselves leaving only a ruin of burned timber and ashes. A cluster of smaller buildings beyond that showed more signs of burning although at least these ones had intact roofs.

We pulled up tight to the main doorway to allow the cap to bring the other truck up behind us. I turned to Watkins.

“Stay here and keep the door locked. If any of the big hairy bastards turn up, hit the horn hard. We’ll come running.”

He didn’t disagree. The cap likewise left Jennings locked in the cab in the rear of the second truck.

“Your corporal’s sleeping this shift out,” he said sardonically when I asked and I didn’t enquire any more than that; the sheriff made a more than adequate substitute and at least I knew she’d watch my back.

I led Davies and Wilko into the building with the cap and the sheriff bringing up the rear.

There was no sign of a firefight, just a fire. The lights were out but enough dim light made its way in through the windows to show us that devastation had been wrought in the building. There was blood, plenty of it, but no bodies, at least not here in the rooms close to the main doorway. The first I looked in was an office of some kind; filing cabinets, desk and swivel chairs, a laptop lying broken on the floor, the big window at the front smashed inwards judging by the glass on the carpet and a fresh dusting of snow, white among the red. At the rear of the office a door opened into a server-room for the place’s computers but the fire had reached it and it was now no more than a mass of melted plastic and cabling. I backed out fast away from the too familiar smells of panic and death.

On the other side of the corridor, an open door showed that a second office had suffered the same fate. I considered calling out, to alert possible survivors of a rescue, but the place felt too dead, too quiet to me. I was already pretty sure we weren’t going to find anyone alive and I saw by the set of the cap’s face that he’d come to the same conclusion. The farther we went inside, the more certain I was.

The back end of this building was the main source of the fire; what had been a small mess area was completely burned out and fallen in; something had burned under there although whether it had been man or wolf it was too far gone to tell without a closer look than I was going to give it. On the other side of the main corridor was the billet, three rows of twin beds, all empty but with enough blood splashed around to show it hadn’t always been that way. The wolves killed messily, but it appeared they tidied up after themselves, hauling their meals away for the feasting. It didn’t take more than a couple of minutes for us to make sure there was no one here to save.

The cap turned to Davies.

“You and Wilko get Watkins in here; get him to look through the offices, see if there’s anything worth salvaging. We’ll head out back and check the outbuildings and meet back here in ten. If we’re not back, come look for us.”

The sheriff, cap and I walked around the collapsed debris of the mess and out the back to the rear. I guessed this was where the science happened; four squat cabins, all with the now tell-tale busted in doors and broken windows; the wolf pack hadn’t done anything by halves. Three of the four buildings were much the same as the scenes in the main building; plenty of blood and mayhem but still no bodies, only here there were smashed phials and retorts, bloodied equipment and overturned tables and several more laptops in various states of brokenness. The fourth building overlooked a large penned area with an electric fence that had been toppled over in several places where, I guessed again, the pack had made their bid for freedom. I saw more buildings up the slope inside the pen that were probably kennels but for now my attention was on the fourth, unsearched, building. The door was still intact in this one, as were the windows, as if it had been deliberately left alone. If there were survivors, this was the only place left where we’d find them.

I approached the door gingerly. I felt rather than saw the cap and the sheriff stiffen and fix their concentration at my back. I turned the handle and pushed gently. The door swung open smoothly without a creak and I stepped inside as soon as I was sure nobody was in there ready to shoot at me.

I was in a mostly empty room save for two trestle-tables and a couple of chairs. There were bits and pieces of stuff on the tables, but that wasn’t what got my concentration. Three sides of the room were the same basic cabin walls I expected, but it was the fourth that got my adrenaline going. Where there should be wood there was metal, a lot of it, and a large vault door that would have been more at home in a bank than out here in the wilds of the Yukon. I was glad it was shut for I wasn’t sure I wanted to know what was on the other side.

The cap and the sheriff came in behind me.

“What are we into now, Cap?” I said.

The captain took one look at the door, then at the stuff on the tables. He sucked at his teeth and swore under his breath. He lifted something off the table and showed it to me.

“Look familiar?”

It was a primitive bone flute; the last time I’d seen anything like it was back in Siberia, and it hadn’t belonged to a wolf.

“We need Watkins up here, right now,” the cap said.

As if in reply, the sound of a truck horn pierced the air, insistent and frantic.