Operation: Yukon

- 10 -

Gunfire joined the sound of the horn before we reached the cabin door. We headed at a run for the forecourt and arrived just as Wilko and Davies put down a big gray wolf that had been sitting on the hood of the truck trying to get in at Watkins. There were plenty for all of us; the pack had made its way back from town; all of them by the look of things, and they were all focussed on the young privates as they stood at the doorway of the main building. Watkins sat up high in the cab of the first truck, his face pale, his eyes wide. I had enough time to notice that Jennings was nowhere to be seen, then we were in the middle of a frenzied battle and there was little time for thought.

They attacked as a single unit, pushed forward by a howling roar that came from somewhere outside the perimeter; if the big one Watkins had mentioned was around, it wasn’t joining the fight, but we had more than enough to occupy us as it was. The air filled with the sound of gunfire; I hadn’t put my plugs in and the roar turned to a deafening ringing as if huge bells were going off in my head. I kept aiming, kept pulling the trigger.

Five of us firing volley-fire laid down a wall of death that the wolves ran into as if unaware of the consequences of doing so. They fell before us, but as each one tumbled away the one behind managed to get closer to us and we were forced to retreat, slow step by slow step, even after putting half a dozen of them down. They were close enough for me to smell their fetid breath as they roared flecks of bloody spittle in our faces. A gray shadow came over the mound of bodies having leapt like a show horse over the top. I put two rounds in its belly but its momentum kept it coming and its weight took both young Davies and the cap down to the ground and momentarily out of the fight. That reduction in our firepower gave the pack an opening. There was maybe a dozen of them left, and they surged forward, a wall of howling rage, their bloodlust in full flow.

I had to throw myself backward. Jaws closed on my left foot and I was, not for the first time, thankful for the stout boots. I kicked out with my right even as I was turning to aim. My right boot caught the wolf’s snout, it raised its head and snarled and I put three rounds between its eyes, feeling hot bits of bone and brain and blood spatter all across my upper body and face.

“Stay down,” the cap shouted somewhere behind me, his call coming faintly above the ringing. I didn’t know if it was directed at me but I stayed down anyway, rolling onto my belly, feeling cold seep into me even as I aimed and fired, aimed and fired while more shots whistled over my head.

The mound of bodies steamed, we kept firing, the wolves kept dying, then, as if distantly in a wind, I heard the howling turn to a bark and as quickly as they had come the pack melted away. I counted six of them as they left; the rest lay dead in a pile at the front of the building.

The cap wasted no time.

“I saw some gas canisters out back earlier,” he said to me, having to shout for me to hear him. “Fetch them round. The brass said ‘sanitise’. It’s time we got started. Let’s burn these fuckers.”

Wilko came with me and by the time we returned, each lugging two ten-litre cans of gas, the cap and the sheriff had moved the dead wolves to the far end of the forecourt away from the buildings. Watkins stood with Davies while the private watched for any fresh attack. They’d got our kit out of the trucks and it was piled on the ground at Jennings’ feet; the corporal was still not with us, lost in a thousand-mile stare that wasn’t seeing much of anything. He had his rifle slung over his shoulder but it was going to be as much use to us as a wet match in the Glasgow rain.

We burned the wolves, everything going up in a conflagration that even despite the cold had us standing back as far as the fire trucks to avoid it. The remaining wolves kept away although we heard them as soon as the smoke plume went up from their dead brethren, the same high, choral wail echoing across the hillside.

“Is that it?” Watkins asked expectantly. He was already inching towards the closest fire truck door. The cap blocked his path.

“Nope. That’s far from ‘it’,” he said. “We’re going to play a wee game of show and tell. I’m going to show you something, you’re going to tell me everything you know.”

“And if I don’t?”

“If you don’t, you’re going to be the next fucker I set on fire.”

Five minutes later we were all back inside the cabin, all of us looking at the vault door. The cap had made us bring the kit… and Jennings. Davies had led him across the site as if helping a sleepy kid to bed and once we were in the room the corporal retreated into a corner and just stood there, still staring blindly ahead. Watkins too was staring, at the huge steel vault door on the other side of the room.

“You don’t want to be here,” he said.

“Tell me about it,” I answered. “But seeing as how we came all this way, why don’t you open it up and show us what you keep in there?”

My hearing was only now beginning to recover from the pounding it had taken and I didn’t quite catch what he said next and had to get him to repeat it, although I feared I’d already guessed.

“You already know,” he said. “You were in Siberia. You already know.”

He lifted the same bone flute that the cap had lifted earlier, put it to his lips and blew.

Somewhere below us a bellow rose in reply. It didn’t sound wolf-like, it didn’t sound musical. I knew exactly what it sounded like.

It was an Alma in a rage.

“How many?” the cap asked grimly.

“Three,” Watkins replied. “Two males and a female, all nearly full grown.”

“How can that be?” I asked.

“Tell me,” the cap added.

Watkins sighed and seemed to come to a decision.

“Okay… I’ll tell you what I know. Can I barter it for coffee and a smoke? It’s going to take a while.”

While Wilko got out the stove and got a brew going, I went to check on Jennings. He was still in the corner, still almost catatonic. I’d seen it before of course, any soldier who’s been in more than one firefight has probably seen it at least once. Part of me wanted to chew him out for deserting the squad when we needed him and another part of me felt nothing but sadness and pity for the mess that must be going round in the lad’s head. Getting him sorted out was going to take time. That, and peace and quiet, and I had a feeling we were going to be short of all three for a wee while longer yet. I left him where he stood and went to join the others round the table when the smell of fresh coffee could no longer be ignored.

Watkins took another of my smokes and started up almost straight away.

“Yes they’re Alma, and yes, we got the embryos from Siberia at the same time we got the wolves. I didn’t tell you earlier because I thought you had enough on your plate with the pack.”

“And you thought we’d let you fuck off in the chopper with the townsfolk and you wouldn’t have to deal with it,” I said.

I got a thin smile in return and a nod of the head in confirmation.

“I thought, hoped, that you wouldn’t find them, that the vault would stay shut and they’d just starve and rot away down there in the cells. It’s probably the safest way to deal with them, even now. Leave it locked and walk away.”

“No can do,” the cap said. “It wouldn’t look good on my report. And so far, you’ve told us nothing. Come on…”

Watkins took a lungful of smoke then continued.

“As I said, we had the embryos. We grew them,” he said. “Same way we grew the wolves, and with the help of the growth hormones and modified DNA strands they came to near maturity very rapidly. I believe the guys in Whitehall were hoping for some kind of programmable super-soldiers. But where we were able to train the wolves at least to some extent with the implants, the Alma proved to be intractable. For one thing, they’re almost always angry.”

“Angry? If it was me, I’d be fucking furious,” I said but had to go quiet when the cap gave me one of those looks. Watkins continued.

“At first we had them in big pens up the back at the edge of the woods, but it soon became clear we’d need more secure accommodation for them and, besides, they seem to prefer being in the deep dark; a race memory of cave dwelling was the prevalent theory.

“As with the wolves, I had nothing to do with the day-to-day maintenance of the beasts…out of sight, out of mind for the most part. But there were rumors, of keepers being mauled and of ritualistic, almost cult-like practices being performed by the beasts themselves.”

“Don’t tell me, let me guess. Cannibalism?”

Watkins nodded.

“There used to be six of them. After that they were kept segregated but it was already too late. The female had been with the males when they reached puberty.”

“She’s pregnant?” the sheriff said, understanding the import of the remark before any of the rest of us.

Watkins nodded again.

“And due any day now. For God’s sake, do as I ask. Leave that door shut and just walk away.”

“You know I can’t do that,” the cap answered. “Ultimately we both answer to the same people, and they’ve called for full sanitation. I’m going to have to go down there. I need you to open this door.”

Watkins shook his head.

“I can’t do that.”

“It wasn’t a question,” the cap said.

“No, I mean I can’t. It’s secured. I don’t know the code.”

I went over with the cap to study the door. It had one of yon standard numeric keypad entry locks fitted to one side of the big metal wheel.

“Davies, Wilko, you lads figured out that radio business sweetly enough. Can you do anything with this?”

“It might take an hour?” Wilko said, and I saw he wasn’t fully confident.

“Do what you can, lads,” the cap added. “Unless anybody’s got an oxyacetylene unit handy you are our only chance.”

As the lads got to work the sheriff went to the cabin door, opened it and looked out over the still-burning remains outside. I joined her for a smoke.

“I don’t know what I expected to find up here,” she said. “But I didn’t expect it to be quite so banal. It’s almost factory-like.”

“It’s British,” I replied. “There’s a lot of this kind of shite about. But something’s got you thinking, hasn’t it? Come on, out with it. It might be important.”

“That it might,” she said quietly. “But at the time I thought it was just the ramblings of a drunk. Old Tommy Goldfarb has been coming out this way to hunt and drink… mostly the latter… for near on fifty years. He’s always been one for stories, bogles in the woods, fairy-folk in the hills, you know the kind of stuff. One night last year I got called out to the local dive for a disturbance and found Tommy had got into a fight with some young-uns… and it was over one of his stories.

“I got it out of him over a pot of strong coffee back at the station. To cut a long, and surely embellished story short, he was adamant that he’d had a close encounter, not with an alien, but with a Bigfoot. Said he was close enough to see the white of its eyes, and admitted that he’d shat himself in fright, a detail I didn’t really need to have heard. Of course I put it down to the drink at the time but now, knowing about the wolf pack and this place, I’m wondering…”

“Wonder whether the wolves weren’t the only things that have escaped?”

“Exactly. Do you trust that man Watkins to be telling us the truth?”

“You already ken the answer to that one.”

“I suppose I do. Is your captain a man to leave a job half-done?”

“You’ve seen enough of him to know the answer to that one too.”

“I suppose I have. I need this place and everything they’ve birthed here… what’s the word you use… sanitised. I can’t have people coming back to town if there’s still any danger.”

“We’re all on the same page here… well apart from Watkins… and our man Jennings. He’s on another fucking planet.”

“Poor fella. Had a friend went like that in the Afghan Foothills. We had to ship him home… ten years ago now and he’s still in a sanitorium.”

I could only nod in reply. I’d been harboring hopes that my corporal would just snap out of it and come back to us but with every passing minute it looked less likely.

There was still no sign of any wolf activity outside and the only sound was the crack of timbers as they smouldered in the ruin of the main building. Thin smoke was dispersed by a breeze and the air had turned decidedly chilly under a clearing blue sky. The sheriff and I smoked two cigarettes each in the doorway before the cold drove us back inside.

Jennings still stood in his corner, Watkins sat in the opposite corner, head down and back against the wall, and the cap was with the privates, doing something with a laptop at the keypad. I went over to see if they were making any progress.

“We’re getting there, Sarge,” Davies said. “Twenty more minutes and we should have it cracked.”

Computers and me don’t mix; to me they’re wee magic number boxes whose secrets will always elude me. That was a young man’s game these days, and I was starting to feel my age. I left the lads to it and went over to Jennings. When I looked in his eyes he looked away, lowered his gaze as if in shame. It wasn’t much but I took it as an improvement on the faraway stare; maybe there was a chance yet that he’d come back to us. I clapped him on the shoulder.

“Hang in there, lad. We’ll get you hame.”

An answer came in the form of a fresh, blood-curdling howl from outside, not too close, but not too far either. The wolves had regrouped, and I didn’t think they were in the mood for reconciliation.