Operation Syria

— 13 —

After the woman left the doorway, Banks sent Wiggins to check on the younger privates.

“See how they’re holding up, Wiggo. And remind them to conserve ammo. No shooting unless I order it.”

“Will do, Cap,” Wiggins replied. “Do you think there’s anything to yon story about tunnels? Could we slip away unnoticed?”

“Only if we’re lucky. And that’s not been working too well for us this trip so far.”

“What we need is a fucking huge rolled up newspaper. The fuckers would never ken what hit them.”

“Do you have one up your arse?” Hynd said. “No? Then stop talking bollocks and see to your men. The captain gave you an order. Fuck off and obey it, there’s a good corporal.”

Wiggins smiled and gave a sarcastic salute but left in a hurry.

The sarge lit another smoke from the butt of the last but Banks refused one when it was offered and went back to keeping a close watch on the roof. If Maggie was right and these things had a lair in underground tunnels, it didn’t prevent them being out and about for long periods in blazing sunshine.

Which might mean the tunnels are our best bet. If the beasties are up here, they’re not down in the dark.

The information had given something that had been in short supply in the past few hours: hope.

It remained quiet for another twenty minutes and Banks was starting to think they might make it through to dusk without a shooting match. Then he saw a shadow move out of the corner of his eye and turned, looking east across the courtyard. A spider as big as the one they’d killed in the alley to the north, a creature the size of a small car, climbed slowly down off the roof and began to weave a web across one of the three alley entrances off the yard.

His first instinct was to shoot it but he fought down the urge.

“Cap?” Hynd said quietly at his side. “Do we take the fucker out?”

“We can’t afford to get into a firefight. It’s too long until our pickup. If we provoke them and they decide to attack, we don’t have the firepower to hold them off for long enough.”

“And what if they cover all our escape routes with the buggering web?”

“Then we’ll have to find another escape route,” Banks replied. “But as long as it’s spinning its pretty patterns, it’s not over here trying to eat our faces. So we leave it be, let it get on with whatever the fuck it’s doing.”

“Setting a trap is what it’s fucking doing,” Hynd replied but didn’t push it, merely went back to sucking at his cigarette.

Over the next hour, they watched as the huge spider filled all three of the visible alleyways with a thick tangle of webbing, gray walls that Banks knew from earlier experience could be cut through but not without a lot of hard work and time they might not have.

“Sarge,” he said, thinking out loud. “Do you think that web stuff burns?”

“Well, I remember as a lad putting a lighter to a spider’s nest in my auld granddad’s hut and it went up like a rocket, so I’m thinking, aye, it’ll burn.”

“My thoughts too. We’re going to need some fuel to get us out of here. Go tell Wiggo to stop making coffee. We have to conserve what’s left in those wee gas tanks.”

They swapped watch shifts mid-afternoon, with Wiggins and Brock taking the door, Wilkins and Davies watching the windows of the rooms inside, and Banks and Hynd taking the chance to get some hot field rations inside them in the main chamber.

Banks also took the opportunity for the first time to have a good look at the mosaic in the dug-out section of the floor. Seen anywhere else, it might have been taken as a remarkable feat of imagination but Banks had now seen the spiders and was pretty sure the artist responsible for the mosaic had been working from real life experience. The attention to detail was equally remarkable and despite it being worked in tiny pieces of polished stone, it was possible to make out fine details of weapons and armor on the soldiers attacking the spider in the center. But something else caught his attention, activity around the opening in the hillside that was the origin of the spiders.

“Can you map this against the current topography of the town?” he asked and Maggie rose from beside Kim to join him.

“Given how the skyline is depicted, we think the cave is outside the main wall, somewhere on the north side of the escarpment, facing the river. Why do you ask?”

He pointed at a group of three men, not armed but pouring something from barrels down into the cavern mouth.

“What’s this, do you think?”

“Kim thought it might be hot oil, or maybe tar?”

“Aye, that’s what it looks like to me too. There’s nowt in the historical record about spiders, right?”

“Right.”

“Which means these folk that made the mosaic succeeded in getting them under control, maybe even wiping them out for a while. It wasn’t big beasties that drove the Roman’s out, was it?”

“Nope, it was Persians, at least that’s what everything in the historical record says.”

“And these Persians didn’t mention spiders either?”

“Not as far as we know.”

“Then they can be stopped. And if the Romans could do it with the limited tech they had back then, I’m sure we can do even better.”

He allowed himself a smile. He was starting to develop a plan.

Banks was pondering some ideas when his thought processes were interrupted by a shout from out in the hall. It came from Wilkins.

“Sir, you need to see this.”

Banks followed the shout through to where Wilkins stood guard at the window.

The body of the dead man, White, had been propped, sitting in a corner of the smallest room several hours previously. Only now it wasn’t so much a body as a collapsed sack of skin that looked to be held together only by the clothing. His head had dropped forward onto his chest, which was a blessing; given what the rest of him looked like, his face would have been too terrible to behold. From a not-too-close inspection, Banks believed that every bone in the man’s body had turned liquid, remolding his internal structure to little more than an amorphous blob. He remembered the spider’s sucking mouth and realized what they were built to suck. He had to fight down a sudden gag reflex.

That wasn’t even the worst thing. The reason Banks didn’t get too close was the stench, a sickly odor of corruption he knew too well from the aftermath of old battles. The smell came, not so much from the body but from a spreading pool of gray and green fluid, a puddle into which what was left of the body was slowly sinking.

“How long has it been like this?” Banks asked.

“The smell’s been bad for a wee while, sir,” young Wilkins said. “But I’ve been standing by the window and didn’t pay that much attention until I turned round to see… that.”

“Aye, well, it can’t stay here, that’s for sure.”

He didn’t notice that Maggie had come in behind him and was at his shoulder, her eyes wide with horror as she looked down at the body.

“We should take him home,” she whispered. “His family… ”

“…don’t want to see him in this state. Trust me on that.”

He looked down at the body again. The leaking fluids were definitely spreading and the smell was getting worse. He turned to Hynd.

“Sarge? We got any tarpaulin?”

“No can do, Cap.”

Maggie whispered again, “We’ve got the rucksacks. We could… ”

She couldn’t finish the sentence. Banks could hardly blame her. The man had been her colleague, maybe even friend. Pouring his remains into a nylon rucksack wasn’t something worth thinking about.

He put a hand on Maggie’s shoulder.

“We’ll deal with it,” he said. “It comes with the job.”

He looked over her shoulder and met Hynd’s gaze. The sarge nodded and went to fetch the rucksacks.

In the end, they needed to use a spade from the dig and scooped the man’s remains, like so much wet cement, into the bag of one of the rucksacks, sealing that as tight as they could, then tying the first rucksack inside the second. What had been a man was now a wet ball of skin and pus no larger than a football, wrapped inside two nylon bags. They kicked dust and sand over the puddle of fluid until the stench abated, although there was a malodorous whiff coming from the rucksacks.

They took the bundle out to the main doorway and set it against the wall outside.

“We should at least bury him,” Maggie said, having followed them through.

“Cremation might be preferable,” Banks said softly. “But I can’t spare the fuel. If we get a chance, we’ll do better by him, I promise.”

“We can’t leave him lying against the wall.”

Wiggins spoke, quietly and softly, “Lassie, there is not him, not anymore. Your friend is gone.”

The woman looked like she might argue but was given no time. Across the square, movement on the rooftops signaled that the impasse had been broken.