Operation Syria

— 3 —

Banks caught up with the squad at the foot of a pile of tumbled stone that had at one time been part of the town’s main defensive wall. The only movement in the night was themselves, no light showed in any of the small windows and there was no sound but the soft pad and scrape of their feet on rock and sand. It was a cool night, with a slight breeze off the river and could have been any such night here for the past thousand years or more, untouched by any concerns of modernity. Banks felt like an interloper from the future as he strode up to join the others.

“Seems all clear, Cap,” Wiggins said. “At least, nobody’s shooting at us yet.”

“Climb up and over the top, Wiggo,” Banks said. “Have a shufti and let us know if it’s safe to go in.”

While Wiggins and Davies clambered up over the rubble, Banks and the others checked the high points for a possible ambush. But Wiggins reached the top of the rock fall without incident and waved them forward with an all-clear signal. Soon all six of them walked up through the gap in the wall to look over an internal square that had obviously been the market area of the old town in some distant past.

Now it was empty and quiet. There was no sign of life but there were numerous indications that there had been a recent firefight. Weapons fire had punched holes in walls, shell casings lay scattered around and blood, black in the night under the stars, was splashed liberally over ground, walls, doorways, and window frames. There were no bodies to be seen.

“That has to be the tidiest fucking gunfight you ever did see,” Wiggins muttered in Banks’ earpiece, then went quiet after being given a sharp glance. Banks sent him west along the wall with Davies, sent the sarge and Brock to the east, and motioned that Wilkins should follow him, walking slowly down the middle of the square. They found more blood, more shell casings, but nobody shot at them and nothing moved in the shadows.

After a few minutes, they reached the south end of the square, where three different exits led into a warren of high sandstone alleyways. The other four men joined them, Hynd and Wiggins both shaking their heads to indicate they’d found nothing untoward. Banks was loath to split the team up in the alleys, so he sent them all forward as one, while he once again brought up the rear.

They crisscrossed their way through the ancient town, finding nothing but darkness and dust and shadow.

They were making their way down another tall, empty, alleyway and Banks was beginning to think they’d been sent on a wild goose chase when Wiggins brought the squad to a halt and motioned Banks forward. Banks walked up to stand at the corporal’s shoulder and looked out of the alleyway and into a courtyard beyond.

They’d found their first sign that the place wasn’t completely empty, although the body that lay in the center in the courtyard was in too many pieces to be alive. Banks left Hynd with the new lads in the alleyway and walked over with Wiggins to investigate. Blood lay in three separate pools around a dismembered torso, the limbs of which looked to have been snipped off by a giant pair of scissors. One arm lay ten feet from the body but of the other arm, the legs, or the head, there was no sign. The scraps of ragged military-grade clothing and leathery skin on the torso told Banks it probably wasn’t one of the archaeologists they were after but beyond that they had no more clues as to the dead man’s identity. If he’d had a weapon, there was none to be found in the immediate area.

Wiggins stepped away, studying something on the ground, then motioned Banks forward. They found more blood and followed a trail of it that led across the courtyard away from them, down another alley to yet another courtyard, and into the doorway of a squat, cubic building that dominated the far quadrant. A radio set, busted as if stomped on by something heavy, lay in pieces at the side of the door, and there was more blood pooled here and more shell casings. They followed the blood trail inside, noting a spatter of droplets on the floor and a red handprint on the wall. The trail led to a narrow hallway, where they lost it in the even darker shadows.

Banks motioned Hynd to bring the others forward.

“You four watch our backs,” he whispered when they were all in the doorway. “Wiggo and I will have a quick look around in here. Keep your eyes peeled. My guts are telling me there’s more to this than we can see.”

Once inside the hallway, Banks felt secure enough to turn on the light on his rifle and let it show him the path of the blood trail. It led them past two doorways that only opened into empty rooms, then stopped completely at a blank wall of stone. He was about to investigate when Hynd spoke in his ear from back at the main door.

“We’ve got movement on the rooftops, Cap, a lot of movement. Too dark to make out how many but I think they’ve got us boxed in.”

“Could we make a run for it?”

“Tricky. They’ve got the high ground and would have us in a gauntlet. The good news is they’re not shooting at us yet.”

“Stay in the doorway. Maybe they don’t know how many of us there are. Don’t shoot first but keep an eye on them.”

“Willco.”

He turned back to see Wiggins looking at where the blood trail stopped at the wall. The corporal whispered.

“There’s a wee gap here. And artificial light coming from under the bottom. I think this is a door, Cap.”

Banks rapped hard on the stone in front of this face with the butt of his rifle, ‘shave and a haircut.’ In reply, he heard a faint yelp of surprise from somewhere beyond, then a voice, a woman, shouting as if in the distance.

“We can’t get it open from this side.”

Banks found the slightest of vertical cracks, marking where the supposed doorway sat in the wall but could see no lock, handles, or mechanism for getting it open. It was going to need brute force. A lot of it.

“Sarge, come in.”

“Right here, Cap.”

“What’s the situation?”

“Still the same. There’s plenty of movement on the rooftops but no clean sight. But it’s not insurgents or rebels, Cap. I don’t think they’re people. Dogs maybe, unless there’s baboons or some such in this area. Whatever they are, they don’t move like men.”

“Can you spare two of the lads? We’ve got some heavy work needing doing. We might have found some folks.”

“They’re on their way.”

The privates, Davies and Brock, arrived alongside Banks and Wiggins seconds later. Banks made one last check of the vertical grooves that marked the door, then shouted, loudly enough that any people inside would hear.

“Stand back, we’re going to give it a try.”

All four of them put their shoulder against the door on the left side. Stone creaked and rasped against stone and the door moved but only by half an inch.

“Harder, lads,” Banks said and put his whole weight into it. The door slid inward another inch, then something gave way and it slid faster, swinging open. Two women and a man, pale but alive, stood in a square chamber on the other side.

“Are you the cavalry?” one of the women said in a Scottish accent.

“If you’re the archaeologists, aye, that’ll be us. But I was told there were ten of you.”

“There were,” the woman said and there was a sob in her voice. She had a story to tell, that much was clear, but there wouldn’t be time to hear it. Hynd came through at Banks’ ear.

“Whatever they are, I think we’ve pissed them off, Cap. We’ve got incoming.”

The shooting started as Banks led the other three men back to the main door.

He only had time to shove in his earplugs before joining Hynd and Wilkins. The two men were in kneeling position, one on either side of the doorway. Banks threw himself flat on the ground between them, leaving as little target area as possible for a sniper but it was already clear nobody was firing back and both Hynd and Wilkins had stopped shooting.

“What’ve we got, Sarge?” he shouted.

“Buggered if I know, Cap. We put something down as it came off the roof; it fell into the alleyway on the right and now everything’s gone quiet again.”

Banks turned.

“Wiggo, with me. The rest of you cover us.”

Banks, with Wiggins at his shoulder, set off at a crouching run across the courtyard, then slowed as they approached the alleyway entrance. Banks switched on his gun light and aimed at a darker shadow on the ground.

It wasn’t a rebel insurgent, or a dog, or a baboon, although it was large enough to have been mistaken for one in the shadows. But no baboon he knew of had red, compound eyes, a squat bulbous body or eight, stocky hairy legs. Whether it had been Hynd or Wilkins that shot it, they’d blown away a chunk of the body but it was clear enough what the thing had been. If he didn’t know better, he’d have identified it as a tarantula but one of enormous proportions.

Spiders. Why does it have to be bloody spiders.