Meyer-Hofmann AG

45

Bremen’s excitement was growing by the minute. The world’s stock markets were in free fall, and James Mountfield, a leading conservative politician in England, was one of many politicians who had quit their parties, claiming their close ties to the banks was immoral. The right screen showed their troops in Iran, and Brandt on his way to the rendezvous point on the coast at Bushehr. It was obviously a hot, dusty drive along poor roads. The cameras mounted on the roof of the trucks and the helmet cameras carried by each commander showed clouds of dust billowing from the back of the vehicles as they ploughed their way along the broken roads. Brandt’s camera was showing the scene looking out of a truck window, and he was shaking around like a pea in a can. The camera intermittently bounced off the truck’s roof, sending blue horizontal lines across the screen.

“Can’t he buckle himself in, the idiot!” Bremen blustered at no one in particular.

Brandt’s arms stretched out to brace himself against the dashboard and seat. Then he dipped down to look out of the driver’s side window, giving them a view of more barren landscape before a bright flash of light filled the picture and the screen in the control room went black.

“Get that fixed!” Bremen barked into the auditorium.

His order led to a feverish hammering of keys from the men sat at the control panels. This was accompanied by intense conversations between the operators, before the picture reappeared of its own accord. The scene it revealed shocked the room, and there were gasps of disbelief. The men at the consoles turned from the screen to Bremen, to see his reaction. Brandt’s camera was steady, but at a forty-five-degree angle to the sky and no longer trapped in the confines of the truck’s shaking walls. Instead, it watched with its monocular eye, as waves of Mil Mi-24 attack helicopters chased one another across the blue-grey Iranian sky.

“What the hell’s happened?”

A moment later, Heinz was staring down past the camera, into his dead commander’s eyes. His head filled the screen. As if knowing what his superiors would want him to do, he disconnected the camera from Brandt’s helmet and started to film their surroundings. The truck in which they had both been sitting just a short time before had totally disintegrated, hit by the first volley of rockets from the Russian-built helicopters. Thrown from the wreckage by the force of the explosion, Brandt’s legs had parted company with the rest of his body, before hitting the ground and leaving a red stripe across the brown desert road.

In the control room, Heinz’s emotionless face now filled the screen. For a moment, he stared into the camera lens, then, placing the camera back on the ground, he turned towards his enemy. His wide khaki-clad back filled the screen. Facing the helicopters, he raised a machine gun and depressed the trigger, the gun fighting his strong arms, kicking and jolting as each round left the smoking barrel. The fight was useless, but this didn’t seem to deter the clone soldier, who continued to fill the air with lead, spraying the bullets in huge arcs across the pale sky. Only when the helicopters detected the threat did the firing stop, as a machine cannon ripped him apart. A red mist of blood and flesh was sent into the afternoon sky, landing like rain, blotting out the camera’s lens and filling the auditorium with a dark red glow.

The left side of the screen didn’t hold any more encouraging news for those watching. The advance team in Iran had dug a small bunker on the top of a hill, two miles from the reactor at Bushehr. They too were being massacred, but this time, by a barrage of mortar shells. Men could be seen scrambling for non-existent cover as shells landed all around them. Their webcams shook as the munitions detonated in the stony desert ground, sending huge plumes of dust, rocks, and soldiers into the hot desert air. Switching to a mounted camera, the room watched the distant horizon as the shapes of men and heavy machinery made their way towards the site. Tanks and armoured vehicles flanked by open-topped trucks filled with troops appeared. As, one by one, the cameras went black, the control room was left stunned.

“What has happened?” Bremen broke the silence.

“We have been betrayed! It is not possible. How, who? Where is Von Klitzing?”

“There is no answer on his mobile, sir, and the airline cannot confirm that he is on the flight from Tel Aviv,” one of the operators shouted up from his control panel, whilst pulling the big headphones from his head.

The room was now loud with conjecture. Opinions and prognoses were being swapped between the puzzled men at their stations. On top of the confusion came the shrill scream of the base alarm.

Looking back at the screens, only the stock markets were calm. Normally so keen to pass on bad news, they remained unchanged, the shares’ downward spiral showing no sign of abating. The right-hand screen was now only a static storm of broken connections, whilst the centre screen showed pictures of blood and destruction. By this time, the camps in Syria, Lebanon, and Egypt had erupted into battles between the clones and their hosts. The Arab soldiers turned on their guests with Kalashnikovs and Simonov self-loading carbines. Vastly outnumbered, the clone soldiers and their mercenary support was no match for the Arabs, and they too met their deaths.

“Sir, there are reports of an attack at the south boundary,” another operator shouted up to the gallery.

“What? An attack by whom?” The man looked down, listening intensely into his headset that he pressed hard against his right ear.

“Military, sir, Austrian Military. They have breached the boundary and are attacking the main building.”

On the fields of Ellmau, soldiers raced across the open land towards the small white concrete building that housed the entrance to the Meyer-Hofmann control centre. The small red-and-white circular insignia of the Austrian armed forces on the arm of their uniforms.

Back in the control room, Bremen made up his mind and, drawing his weapon, he left the control room just as the dull thud of an explosion could be heard above them. Moving quickly down the small corridors of the complex, He was joined by a small team of four second-generation clones, who took up position in front and behind him. Leaving the main corridor via white steel doors halfway down the bare hallway, they entered service tunnels that ran for over a mile down to the main road to Kitzbühel. There was always a contingency plan, and escape tunnels built into all Meyer-Hofmann buildings. As the doors clanged shut behind them, two of the guards pounded the door’s handles with the butts of their rifles, sealing them tight. Machine gun fire could now be heard in the complex, and it was clear that there was not much time.

“Come on, get a move on!” Bremen barked.

The march down the dark, damp halls took a little under seven minutes. Bremen reached the steps to his escape out of breath and fighting for air. They could hear the distant echo of the steel doors behind them being pummelled by the chasing troops. A flight of stairs was now the only thing between them and freedom. It led to more steel doors, but this time, they were directly above their heads. The clone guards nodded to one another and put their backs into the doors, pushing them up and to the side, leaving a clear exit to the fields above them.

The sun was blinding, and as the men emerged in the light of day, the clones took cover, pulling Bremen to the ground with them. Three cars had taken up position on the road just a hundred metres to the right. Waiting for the group, their drivers were standing beside the vehicles, each accompanied by a clone soldier. Both the drivers and the clones held their hands above their heads. Two Apache helicopters hovered above them and behind the cars as a loudspeaker boomed out orders.

“Put your weapons on the ground and your hands above your heads!”

There was no use in fighting. Bremen immediately complied, returning to his feet, hands above his head. The clones adopted another policy, opening fire on the helicopters, their colleagues and drivers immediately following suit. As the last two clones escaped the confines of the base, they put their submissive commander to the ground with a rugby tackle. The Apaches backed up, dodging the hail of bullets from the clones’ semi-automatic weapons before opening fire themselves. The M230 chain gun mounted under the helicopter’s nose sprayed the field with 625 rounds of thirty-millimetre ammunition per minute. Bursting through the waiting cars and then churning the soft turf and grass of the field, the steady stream of death worked its unerring path in the direction of the small group of men.

“You idiots!” Bremen screamed, spinning around and trying to get back to the exit of the base.

Five bullets hit him almost simultaneously, lifting him off his feet like a puppet, before dumping him down the waiting stairwell. He landed at the foot of the stairs, nearly colliding with the Austrian troops who had arrived at the base’s exit. Dead eyes stared up at them, a body twisted and broken at their feet. In the field, the clones had fared no better, having been hit by a hail of fire with no chance of escape. The certainty of their demise left them without choices, and they found themselves waiting for the impact of the bullets. They watched as the ground in front of them heaved and spat dirt into the air. That spectacle and the drumming in their ears as the bullets battered the soil could hardly prepare them for the force that would hit, and they were not to be disappointed by the violence of their deaths. Knocked onto their backs in the grass, they watched each other’s bodies dance to the music of the machine guns. Small fountains of blood and flesh sprayed into the air blocking their view. The white puffy Austrian clouds slowly rolled across the light blue sky, as they submitted to their fate. The rumble and crack of weapons fire ceased, and quiet fell on the meadow. A single Admiral butterfly fluttered past one clone’s face, hovering as if to assess his injuries before disappearing from view as his heavy chest rose and fell for the last time.