Operation Syria

— 6 —

Jim White died sometime between four and five in the morning; no one noticed until Maggie went to check on him.

“Jim?”

His eyes were closed and he wasn’t breathing, whereas the last time she’d looked his chest had been rising and falling in steady breathing. She thought him to be asleep, put under by the morphine, but when she put a hand on his ribs there was no movement and, where he’d been hot to the touch before, now he felt quite cool, chilled.

“Private Davies,” she called out and the man was at her side in seconds, having heard the panic in her voice,

The lanky private worked hard on the dead man with CPR and mouth to mouth but after a few minutes, it was obvious they weren’t getting him back. Davies looked up at Maggie.

“He’s gone. I’m sorry.”

“Aye, me too,” she replied. “The poor bastard probably saved our lives taking a chance on making the radio call. And this is his reward?”

Davies put a hand on her shoulder.

“This isn’t on you,” he said. “It was one of those bloody spiders. If you need to hate anything, hate them.”

“They’re dumb beasts, doing what dumb beasts do.”

“Same as it ever was,” Davies replied, then looked back at the body. Black sepsis had seeped through the earlier bandaging and the smell of it rose from the body.

“Give me a hand here,” he said. “We’ll put him in one of the other rooms; you don’t need to be looking at, or smelling, a dead man for the rest of the night.”

Maggie took the legs, expecting to struggle, but White looked to have lost half his body mass in the time he’d been lying on the rucksacks. What was left of him was skeletally thin and wasted like a famine victim. It was as if they carried a bag of dried skin stuffed with wood and it held about as much semblance of life. She had tears in her eyes for the colleague she’d lost but couldn’t recognize the man he had been in the dead thing in her hands. She was thankful when they reached the second room down the corridor and Davies spoke quietly.

“Thank you, miss. You can put him down now, I’ll take it from here.”

She returned to the chamber. Kim had her head down, sobbing, and Reynolds refused to meet her gaze. She busied herself in making three mugs of coffee and took one out to where Davies now stood at the window in the first room across the corridor. He smiled sadly.

“Thank you, miss.”

“The name’s Maggie,” she replied. “I stopped thinking of myself as a miss a long time ago.”

“And I’m Joe. I stopped thinking of myself as Joshua after a few weeks on the Easterhouse estate.”

She managed a smile at that.

“Thanks for what you did for Jim.”

“I wish it could have been more,” he said and returned to his watch at the window as Maggie took the other two cups through to the main doorway where Corporal Wiggins stood guard. He took the mug carefully, then went to light a smoke.

“Can I have one of those?” Maggie asked on a sudden impulse.

“I didn’t have you pegged as a puffer,” he said.

“Five years stopped,” she said, taking a light and inhaling deeply. “But if I ever needed an excuse to start again, this is it.”

“You’re an Edinburgh lass, aren’t you?”

“Dunbar,” she replied. “And you’re a Weegie, like Davies through the back.”

“Guilty as charged. So what’s a nice lassie like you doing in a place like this?”

She nearly laughed.

“Don’t give me any of your Glesga patter,” she said. “This isn’t the Barrowland Ballroom and I’m not in the mood.”

Wiggins laughed.

“Maybe later then,” he said, then saw she was serious.

“Sorry, lass, it’s just my way. How’s your friend doing?”

“He’s not,” she said bluntly.

“Oh fuck. Then I’m really sorry,” Wiggins replied, then went quiet.

Maggie looked out over the courtyard as she smoked and drank the coffee. Everything looked still and quiet, as it had when they’d first arrived.

Shit, was it only a week ago? It feels like months.

She thought for the first time in a while about the others, the six they hadn’t seen since the rebel attack and wondered now whether it was rebels that had taken them, or whether it had been the same beasts that did for Jim White.

Wiggins had been silent for several minutes. She had the impression that might be something of a record for the man and was proved right when he spoke up again.

“So what’s the deal with these big fucking spiders?” Wiggins asked.

“Sorry, no idea. That one you shot was the first we’d seen of them. If it was them that got Jim White, we didn’t see it.”

She looked out the doorway again; somebody had moved the spider carcass outside and off to one side. It lay in the shadows, a broken thing, all twisted legs and strangely deflated body.

“Spiders don’t grow that big,” she said.

Wiggins laughed.

“I guess they do now.”

“No, I mean they can’t grow that big. The circulatory and respiratory systems aren’t built for it. Once they get past a certain size, about the size of your hand, they can’t get enough oxygen inside them fast enough to drive their functions.”

Wiggins laughed again.

“That one was coming for us fast enough. And the shadows on the roofs are faster again. They’re still up there, watching us right now I’ll bet. I don’t think they know they have a problem.”

“I don’t understand anything that’s going on here.”

“Don’t let it bother you,” Wiggins replied. “It happens to me all the time.”

When she returned to the chamber, Kim was down in the trench, working on the mosaic with a soft brush and a trowel.

“There’s not enough light for that kind of work,” Maggie said.

“I tried to tell her,” Jack Reynolds replied dully, “but she’s not talking. Leave her be; she needs something to take her mind off the rest of this shit.”

“I know how she feels.”

Maggie sat on the floor, watching Kim scrape layers of dry dirt from the mosaic. Reynolds was first to break the silence.

“That corporal at the door… he’s got the sat-phone, hasn’t he? Did you persuade him to make the call, to get us the fuck out of here?”

“He’s waiting for the others to come back.”

“If they ever come back. This is fucked up. We should never have come here.”

“We’re archaeologists. It’s our job to save this kind of thing.”

“Sure. But nobody told me I’d have to be Indiana Fucking Jones as well.”

Kim hadn’t spoken but was now working faster, furiously, sweeping dirt aside from directly over the mosaic. Maggie looked down. She’d already cleared a large patch, depicting Roman centurions both on foot and in chariots, all with weapons facing inwards to a central point in the design. The central area was now under Kim’s brush as she swept and cleared ever more frantically.

Maggie stood and fetched a light, taking it over to see more clearly but Kim was bent over, brushing, obscuring the two-foot circle that was the central motif as it was finally fully revealed. It was only when Kim sat back and let out a long gasp that became a wail when they saw what was there.

A fat dark spider lay directly in the middle of the mosaic, surrounded by Romans stabbing at it or spearing it with lances. Dead men lay under its legs, which spread far out into the mosaic itself. Maggie now realized that the whole thing was cunningly depicted as a single huge web. The face of the spider was the worst thing. It smiled, an evil grin under compound eyes as it sucked the life from a man it held in its mouth. The man was dwarfed by the bulk of the body, which, if the proportions of the thing were to be believed, was at least ten feet from head to rear.