Charles Stross - The Fuller Memorandum

Epping is one stop down the line from Barking, which is what the neighbors would think of him if they could see him now, wearing the black cloak of a member of a very different Order, and carrying a gun that fires something more substantial than paint pellets.

Grigori, in contrast, is not mild-mannered at all. Grigori is a violently aggressive young thug from the slums of Nizhny Novgorod, born in the year of the collapse of the Soviet Union and raised half-feral amidst the wreckage of the timber and steel industries. Conscripted into the Russian army at eighteen and subjected to twelve months of brutal training, he showed a remarkable aptitude for butchering Wahhabi guerillas in the hills of the Kadar zone during the Dagestan war. Already tapped for promotion to sergeant he was instead inducted into Spetsgruppa V, “Vympel,” the FSB’s special operations unit, where he was taught German, Arabic, and sixteen different ways to strangle a man in his own intestines.

Grigori does not play paintball; Grigori kills people.

Here comes Grigori, crawling silently through the bushes, taking care not to place hand or foot on any twig that might snap, nor to disturb leafy shrubs that might whisper in the darkness. He pauses regularly, glancing sidelong to maintain situational awareness and positioning relative to his comrades, neither too far ahead nor lagging behind the line of advance. They use no radio; the occasional flicker of a red LED torch or the hoot of a tawny owl are more than sufficient. Grigori pauses before the open apron of the parking lot in front of the chapel, waiting for the sentry to complete his round. While he pauses, he double-checks his crossbow. The body is made of black resin and the bow sports a profusion of pulleys. It’s a hunting bow, fine-tuned for hunting the kind of game that shoots back on full auto; it’s totally silent and it throws a cyanide-tipped bolt that can slice through five centimeters of Kevlar armor.

Here comes Benjamin, pacing quietly around the side of the chapel. Benjamin is a good sentry. He’s been bushwhacked by rival paintball players often enough to be ambush-savvy, scanning the darkness with nervous, night-adjusted eyes. He is well-equipped, his cloak concealing a small fortune in camouflaged body armor; to his belt is clipped a small pager. It vibrates every ten seconds, and if he fails to press a button on it within another ten seconds a siren will sound, loud enough to wake the dead. And he’s cranked up on a cocktail of provigil and crystal meth, sleepless and compulsively alert. All-Highest has briefed the Security Team carefully. The threat of a hostile intrusion is very real tonight, and Benjamin holds his AA-12 assault shotgun at the ready, his index finger tense beside the trigger guard.

Grigori and Benjamin are not as mismatched as a superficial comparison might suggest. Grigori’s lieutenant has meticulously planned a seek-and-destroy raid on a nest of cultists defended by vicious but amateurish killers. And Iris’s security chief has briefed the sentries to be on the alert for an infiltration attempt by an elite unit of special forces troops attached to a secret interior ministry department.

But as Grigori and Benjamin are about to discover, they’ve both been briefed for the wrong mission.

Benjamin pauses in the shadow of an ornamental buttress at one corner of the chapel, and scans the darkness beyond. There are low shrubs, and a row of lichen-encrusted gravestones, some of them leaning towards a low dip in the ground where a willow tree holds court over a circle of beeches. He sniffs. There’s something in the air tonight-something beyond the efflorescences of pollen spurting from the wildly rutting vegetation, something beyond the tang of mold spores drifting from the cut ends of the lawn over by the road. His eyes narrow. Something about the bushes is wrong.

His pager vibrates. He peers into the gloom, tensing and raising the heavy shotgun, and tries to move his right foot forward into a shooter’s stance.

His boot is stuck…

Grigori crouches in the darkness behind a drunkenly leaning gravestone. His nostrils flare. The ground here smells bad, in a way that reminds him of a mass grave outside a nameless village near Rakhata in the mountains above Botlikh. Damp ground, rainy hills, and a season of death had soured the very earth, making the nauseous soil threaten to regurgitate its charges. After a week on duty there he’d had to indent for a new pair of boots: no matter how he scrubbed and polished he couldn’t get the stench of death out of his old ones.

Grigori frowns, and raises his bow, sighting on the buttress to the right of the chapel, where he is sure the sentry will appear in a few seconds. His view is partially obstructed by the gravestone, so he tries to move his left foot sideways a few centimeters.

His boot refuses to shift.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the chapel wall, Benjamin slaps his pager into silence then tries to lift his right foot again, freeing it from the root or wire or whatever he’s caught on. His left knee nearly buckles. Something has caught on his right ankle. Cursing silently, he glances down.

Grigori’s nostrils widen as he smells rottenness, mold, and mildew. He shifts his stance slightly as the ground softens beneath his right foot. There’s a faint vibration underfoot. Do they have earthquakes in England? It was once like this in the mountains near Botlikh-but the vibration is getting stronger. He glances aside, and sees the ground rippling.

Oddly, none of the bells are sounding-not in this chapel, nor in any of the others.

Benjamin sees something moving in the loose soil underfoot. Adrenal glands squirt, and his pulse spikes: he unslings his gun and turns it, slamming it butt-first on the white and crawling thing below, thinking snake-

A second hand, less fully skeletonized than the first, pushes through the soil and grabs the shotgun’s dangling tactical sling.

Grigori’s nerves jangle as he sees the ripples of ground spread silently out around the chapel: he is not superstitious but he belongs to the company of Spetsgruppa “V” assigned to KGB support operations, and this is a fucking graveyard at fucking midnight. He lowers the crossbow, raising his left hand to the matrioshka charm dangling at his throat just as the earth beneath him heaves and a bony claw punches up through the grass beneath him and reaches for his neck.

THE OCCULUS TRUCK ROARS ALONG THE M3 MOTORWAY, DRIVING south in darkness.

Major Barnes has a mobile phone glued to his ear. He’s nodding unconsciously. Then he turns, looking at Angleton and Mo in the back of the cab. “Dr. Angleton, Dr. O’Brien, we have a fix.”

Mo sits up instantly. “Yes?”

“That was Jameson at headquarters-DVLA have coughed up the registration details on Iris Carpenter’s car. Highways Agency say it came this way earlier this evening and turned off onto the A322 at junction three. The ANPR cameras on that stretch are down, but looking at this map-what does Brookwood cemetery suggest to you?”

“Brookwood.” Angleton raises an eyebrow. “Yes. Continue.”

“I’m waiting for-” The major’s phone rings again. “Excuse me.” He flicks it open. “Yes?” He nods vigorously. “Yes, yes… I concur. Yes. I want you to get onto the Surrey Police control center and ask if the ASU can provide top cover. Get them to send a car with a downlink receiver round to the main entrance on Cemetery Pales, we don’t have a police downlink-no, no, but if the armed response unit is on duty get them up there. Yes, I’m authorizing that.” Barnes blinks at Angleton, who inclines his head. “I’m in the OCCULUS with Howe’s brick; get the rest of third platoon moving immediately, I think we’re going to need all the support we can get. Is there any SCORPION SCARE coverage-all right, that was too much to hope for. We should be at the gates in another fifteen minutes. Get the police to block all the roads in and out-The Gardens, Avenue de Cagny, yes, and the rest-tell them it’s a terrorism incident.”