Operation Syria

— 5 —

Banks led them out, with Brock and Wilkins behind and the sarge watching their backs. His nerves had settled; now there was a definite goal in sight, although the dead spider preyed on his mind. It was the wild card on the equation, the thing he couldn’t control so he compartmentalized it, put it away for later. As they left the building into the courtyard, he checked the roofs but if anything was up there, it wasn’t inclined to attack and they were able to make their way back through the quiet city without any interference.

He trusted Wiggins to keep everyone in the building safe. The squad’s main job now was to rescue the others. He focused all his intent on that as they trotted at double time, out of the city to the east and down a winding path that led off the escarpment. They moved quickly away from the walled city and down towards the river where the lights of a town twinkled in the distance on the south bank.

By his watch, it was three hours ‘til dawn. More than half an hour of that would be spent getting down there without being seen.

That doesn’t give us long to reconnoiter, get in, and get out.

But it was all the time they had, so it would have to do.

They stayed on the narrow track as long as they could then, as they approached the outskirts of the town, moved off twenty yards to one side and away from lighting, entering the town itself via one of the rickety wooden docks on the riverside. Given that it was the early hours of the morning, Banks didn’t expect anyone to be up and about but he did expect it to feel like a town, as if there was at least someone alive. This place felt as old and dead and still as the ancient ruins upon the escarpment.

The lights are on but nobody’s home.

They moved quickly away from the river and entered a long narrow roadway, tall sandstone buildings looming like a ravine on either side. He sent Hynd and Brock to the left and took the right with Wilkins.

“Watch the rooftops, mind your lines of sight, and don’t wait for an order to shoot if you need to take anybody out. Remember that there are civilians here somewhere. Let’s get them home.”

There was enough light from the stars to show their way, but the harsh street lighting in the narrow roadway only threw the scene that met them in even sharper relief. The same gray, fibrous material they’d seen in the well on their arrival hung everywhere they looked, fashioned in intricate webs that stretched across doorways and windows and, farther along the roadway, had been spun across their path between two lampposts. Something bulbous hung there in a cocoon, too small to be an adult person but whether it was a child or a dog, Banks didn’t feel like stopping for a closer look.

He noticed that Wilkins had come to a halt, unable to take his gaze from the webbing.

“Keep moving,” he said softly in his headset. “Remember the mission.”

Across the road, he saw Hynd and Brock making their way past the open awning of a shop that had been completely enmeshed in more of the web, a mass of fiber that ran across the whole face of the building, covering the windows even on the second story.

How many of these fuckers does it take to do that?

He wasn’t sure he wanted to know the answer.

They reached the end of the road where it opened out into a wide market square beyond and he realized there had to be even more of the fuckers than he had imagined. The gray web blanketed everything; stalls, carts, camels, ponies, and people… a great many people, all dead. Some of the bodies were in pieces like the one they’d found up in the city, others were cocooned and wrapped up tight, hanging, suspended in web, between buildings and light fittings.

Young Wilkins threw up noisily beside the torn, dismembered body of a child. Banks put a finger to his lips for silence but in truth, he didn’t blame the lad; he felt gorge rise in his own throat at the sight.

“Eyes up here, lad,” he said, putting his face close to Wilkins’. “Remember we’re on a rescue mission. There might be someone alive to tell us what the fuck happened here.”

At first, that was a forlorn hope. A circumnavigation of the square found no one alive, no signs of life either in the bodies on the ground or in the suspended cocoons. Hynd drew Banks’ attention to a squat building in the north corner. A military jeep was parked outside, one that had a large-caliber gun mounted on the back.

“First sign of non-civilian activity, Cap,” he said. “Worth checking inside?”

Banks nodded and waved Hynd forward to investigate. The sarge motioned Banks over to join him ten seconds later, standing at the doorway of the squat building. Banks had seen Hynd stand up to some rough situations in the past but he’d rarely seen him look green around the gills.

“It’s bad, Cap,” the sergeant said as Banks reached him. “Maybe keep the younger lads away. It’s nothing they’ll want to see.”

Banks walked past him and headed inside. He had thought he’d seen carnage in the square but the scene inside the building was far worse. Bodies and body parts lay strewn across the floor, tables, and bar of what had obviously been a café. A head, only the head, sat on top of an electric hob, cooked and still cooking, burned into a black ball, eyes popped and running down scorched cheeks. Banks turned off the hob and covered the head with an upturned cooking pan but he knew it was a sight and a smell that would be revisiting him in his dreams.

There had been plenty of shooting in the cramped area. The bodies mostly wore military-style clothing, webbing and flak jackets and discarded weapons. Those, along with a scattering of shell casings on the floor, told Banks they been firing at something, not only each other. He suspected more of the spider-things, whatever they might be, but the only dead present were the men who’d been doing the shooting.

The bodies all felt cold to the touch, the blood congealed, dried, and gone dark; Banks guessed, from bitter experience, that whatever had happened had gone down at least a day ago, maybe even longer. With Hynd at his side, they picked their way through pools of blood and gore, breathing shallowly through their mouths.

Banks headed for a darkened doorway at the rear. His gut instinct, honed from too many such situations over the years, told him they were in the right place, that the hostages were here somewhere. It also told him that they were too late for any rescue attempt.

The hallway at the rear of the café was lit with a flickering neon strip but was dim and dark due to the now recognizable gray web hanging in sheets from the ceiling. Banks and Hynd managed to part it carefully with the barrels of their weapons, neither of them in any hurry to get any of the stuff on their hands.

They found their hostages in a cramped room, little more than a large walk-in larder, at the rear of the property.

There were six bodies, packed standing upright, and all had been cocooned and wrapped like the ones hanging between the buildings outside. Hynd had to work hard using his knife to cut the web away from their faces; they didn’t look like locals and further cutting revealed western T-shirts, jeans, work boots, and one passport in a jacket pocket; Tim Woods, from Chislehurst, Kent.

Banks gave up all pretense of maintaining silence.

“Sarge, take Wilkins and see if you can get that vehicle going. Send Brock in to me. We’ll pile these poor buggers in the back of the jeep and get them back up the hill. The least we can do for them is see they get home.”

“What about these fucking spiders, Cap?” Hynd said. “There must be dozens of the fuckers if they did all this. If so, where the fuck are they now?”

“I don’t have a Scooby, Sarge,” Banks said. “And as long as they stay out of our way, I don’t care. Let’s get back up the hill so I can call in an evac order and get us the flock out of here.”

Banks and Brock cut the dead free from as much of the web as they were able to remove. Three of the bodies bore slashing wounds similar to the one he’d seen on the sick man earlier; the others had broken necks and bite marks at their throats so deep that their heads lolled alarmingly, making the blackened wounds gape wide. Brock looked green around the gills.

“If you’re going to spew, lad, take it outside. The smell’s rank enough as it is without you adding to it.”

To the young private’s credit, he stood his ground, helping Banks free the bodies and drag them out into the hallway outside the larder. Hynd came back a few minutes later.

“We got the jeep running, Cap. There’s not much fuel in her,” he said, “but she’ll get us back up the hill okay.”

“Let’s get to it then,” Banks replied. “We’ve left Wiggo alone with those women long enough. Knowing his patter, he’ll have got at least one slap by now.”