Burning Angels

82

Jaeger shoulder-barged the last of the doors with all of the force of his cumulative rage. It was coursing through his veins like burning acid.

He stopped for an instant, the cumbersome space suit snagging on the door frame, and then he was through, his torch beam sweeping the darkened interior, his weapon doing likewise. The light reflected off shelves of gleaming scientific equipment, most of which Jaeger couldn’t begin to recognise.

The lab was deserted.

Not a soul anywhere.

Just as they’d discovered with the rest of the complex.

No guard force. No boffins. All he and his team had used their guns on were the disease-ravaged monkeys.

Finding this place so deserted was utterly eerie; chilling. And Jaeger felt cruelly cheated. Against all odds they’d found Kammler’s lair. But Kammler – and his people – had flown the nest before justice and retribution could be visited upon them.

But mostly Jaeger felt tortured by the emptiness – the lack of life – where it hit him most personally: there was no sign of Ruth and Luke anywhere.

He stepped forward, and the last man in closed the door behind him. It was a precaution to prevent contamination spreading from one room to another.

As the door clicked shut, Jaeger heard a sharp, deafening hiss. It had come from just above the door frame, and it had sounded like a truck letting off its air brakes. Like a compressed-air explosion.

At the same instant he felt a wave of tiny pinpricks pierce his skin. His head and neck seemed fine, protected as they were by the thick rubber of the FM54 mask, and the tough filter unit seemed to have shielded his back.

But his legs and arms were on fire.

He glanced down at his suit. The tiny puncture holes were clearly visible. He’d been hit by some kind of booby-trapped device, which had pierced the fabric of the Trellchem. He had to presume the rest of the team were likewise hit.

‘Tape up!’ he screamed. ‘Tape up vents! Every man help the other!’

In a flurry of near-panic, he turned to Raff and began ripping off lengths of gaffer tape to seal up the tiny holes torn in the big Maori’s suit. Once he was finished, Raff did the same for him.

Jaeger had kept monitoring his suit pressure the entire time. It had remained positive – the filter pack automatically blowing in clean air, which would have kept flowing out through the tears in the fabric. That outward pressure should have kept any contamination at bay.

‘Sitrep,’ Jaeger demanded.

One by one his team reported in. All their suits were compromised, but they had been resealed effectively. Positive air pressure seemed to have been maintained by all, thanks to their powered-air units.

But still Jaeger could feel a tingling sensation where whatever it was that had been blasted through his suit had cut into his skin. He didn’t doubt that it was time to get out of there. They had to head back to the wet decon line at the beach and do a damage inspection.

He was just about to issue the order when the utterly unexpected happened.

There was a faint hum, and the electric power came to life in the complex, bathing the lab in blinding halogen light. At one end of the room a giant flat-screen terminal flickered into life, and a figure appeared on what had to be some kind of live link.

It was unmistakable.

Hank Kammler.

‘Gentlemen, leaving so soon?’ His voice echoed around the laboratory, as he spread his arms in an expansive gesture. ‘Welcome… welcome to my world. Before you do anything rash, let me explain. That was a compressed air bomb. It fired tiny glass pellets. No explosives. You will feel a slight tingling on your skin. That is where the pellets cut into you. The human skin is a great barrier to infection: one of the best. But not when it is punctured.

‘The lack of any explosives means the agent – the dry virus – remained unharmed and viable. As the glass entered your skin – driven in there by four-hundred-bar pressure – it carried the inert agent with it. In short, you have all been infected, and I don’t think I need to tell you with what type of pathogen.’

Kammler laughed. ‘Congratulations. You are some of my first victims. Now, I’d like you to fully appreciate your delicious predicament. You might decide it best to remain trapped on this island. You see, if you go out into the world, you will be mass murderers. You are infected. Already, you are plague bombs. So you might argue that you have no option but to stay and die, and to that end you will find the premises well stocked with food.

‘Of course, the Gottvirus has already been released,’ Kammler continued. ‘Or should I say unleashed. Even now it is making its way into the four corners of the world. So alternatively, you can help me. The more carriers the merrier, as it were. You can opt to go out into the world and help spread the virus. The choice is yours. But just for a moment, make yourselves comfortable while I tell you a story.’

Wherever Kammler was speaking from, he was seemed to be enjoying himself immensely. ‘Once upon a time, two SS scientists found a frozen corpse. She was perfectly preserved, even down to her long golden hair. My father, SS General Hans Kammler, gave her a name, that of an ancient Nordic god: Var, the Beloved. Var was the five-thousand-year-old ancestor of the Aryan people. Sadly, she had fallen ill before she died. She had been infected by a mystery pathogen.

‘At the Deutsche Ahnenerbe, in Berlin, they unfroze her and began to clean her up, in an effort to make her presentable to the Führer. But the corpse started to collapse from the inside out. Her organs – liver, kidneys, lungs – seemed to have rotted and died, even as the outer being still lived. Her brain had been transformed into a mush; a soup. In short, she had been something close to a zombie as she’d stumbled into the icy crevasse and perished.

‘The men tasked to make her perfect – a perfect Aryan ancestor – didn’t know what to do. Then one, an archaeologist and pseudo-scientist called Herman Wirth, tripped while carrying out his work. He reached out to save himself, but in doing so he cut both himself and his Deutsche Ahnenerbe colleague – a myth-hunter called Otto Rahn – with a small glass inspection slide. No one thought too much about it, until both men sickened and died.’

Kammler raised his eyes to his long-distance audience, and a terrible darkness seemed to have filled them. ‘They died voiding thick, black, putrid blood from every orifice, and with terrible, zombified expressions on their features. No one needed to carry out a post-mortem to know what had happened. A five-thousand-year-old killer disease had survived, deep-frozen in the Arctic ice, and now it had come back to life. Var had claimed her first victims.

‘The Führer named this pathogen the Gottvirus, because nothing like it had ever been seen. It was clearly the mother of all viruses. That was in 1943. The Führer’s people spent the next two years perfecting the Gottvirus, fully intending to use it to repel the Allied hordes. In that, sadly, they failed. Time was against us… But not any more. Now, today, as I speak to you, time is very much on our side.’

Kammler smiled. ‘So, gentlemen – and one lady, I believe – now you know exactly how you are going to die. And you know what choice you have before you. Stay on that island and die quietly, or help spread my gift – my virus – to the world. You see, you British never understood: you cannot defeat the Reich. The Aryan. It has taken seven decades, but we are back. And we have survived to conquer. Jedem das Seine, my friends. Everyone gets what they deserve.’

As he reached out to cut the live link, Kammler paused.

‘Ah! I almost forgot… One last thing. William Jaeger – presumably you were expecting to find your wife and child on my island, were you not? Well, you can relax: they are indeed there. They have been enjoying my hospitality for quite some time. And it’s high time you were reunited with them.

‘Like you, of course, they are also infected. Unharmed, but infected all the same. We injected them several weeks ago. This is so you will be able to watch them die. I mean, I didn’t want you to die as one happy family. No, they must go first, so you can witness it at first hand. You’ll find them in a bamboo cage, tethered in the jungle. And feeling more than a little sick already, I believe.’

Kammler shrugged. ‘That’s it. Auf Wiedersehen, my friends. It only leaves me to say a final Wir sind die Zukunft.’

His teeth gleamed in a perfect smile. ‘We – my kind – we really are the future.’