Age of Voodoo Read online

  “Why not situate it at Guantanamo Bay instead? Much closer to the action.”

  “This was thought to be a whole lot more discreet. There’s something to be said for not rubbing your enemies’ noses in the fact that you’re surveilling them. Besides, the government was worried that Cuba would be just the first in a series of dominoes to fall in the Caribbean. They wanted a generic, centrally placed lookout point in the region. Anger Reef ticked all the boxes. As it happened, the building work finished just in time for the Missile Crisis.”

  “That’s handy.”

  “You don’t know the half of it. Anger Reef is credited with picking up signals traffic that the Soviets were secretly constructing missile bases in Cuba capable of launching an intermediate-range nuclear attack. Thereafter the place was used to monitor the US Navy’s blockade of the island, backing up the photoreconnaissance data that spy planes were providing on the approach of supply ships from Russia and other Warsaw Pact nations, as well as pinpointing the whereabouts of Soviet subs. When the supply ships turned back, Anger Reef was the first to report it.”

  “Khrushchev blinked, and Anger Reef saw his eyelids move.”

  “Neat turn of phrase. I’ll be sure to use that myself sometime.”

  “Feel free.”

  “Come Reagan and the end of the Cold War,” Buckler said, resuming his thread, “the installation was decommissioned. It wasn’t required any more. The Russkies were on our side, the world had moved on, and Cuba had become an irrelevance, an anachronism, the land that time forgot. By the early ’nineties, Anger Reef was a relic, an empty shell. The listening equipment had been dismantled and taken away, and the installation itself left to rot. Miles of underground concrete bunker, three deep-buried levels of workspace, recreation and dormitory, home to a staff of nearly a hundred, now abandoned. No use to anyone.”

  “Except...”

  “Except nothing the military owns ever goes to waste. Not if it can be repurposed and refitted and resurrected at a later date. See, there’s this research scientist, goes by the name of Gulliver Seidelmann, and he had a bright idea.”

  “Don’t they always?” said Lex.

  “Yeah. Scientists, right? Full of inspiration. One day they’ll be so inspired, we’ll all vanish in a puff of smoke. But Professor Seidelmann’s this special brainiac genius, beloved by the Pentagon, forever persuading the Joint Chiefs to dig deep and fork over serious bank for some supposedly amazing breakthrough or other. Now, if you ask me, more powerful guns, more effective body armour, more efficient and sensitive electronic gear, anything that makes a grunt’s job safer and easier to do, I’m all for it. Long as our weaponry keeps outperforming the opposition’s, that’s fine by me. But the prof, that isn’t his game at all. He’s a biochemist interested in enhancing the human physiology.”

  “You mean giving us all bigger dicks.”

  “No.”

  “Pity.”

  “Sorry to get your hopes up,” said Buckler.

  “Actually I was thinking of you.”

  “Of course you were. No, Seidelmann’s goal isn’t better equipped soldiers, it’s better soldiers period.”

  “Super-soldiers?”

  “That’s it. Faster, stronger, more durable, less vulnerable—all that Captain America crapola. Men who are more than men. Unbeatable battlefield paladins.” Buckler gave a smile that was as much a sneer as anything. “Once again, I’m getting that ‘you’re shitting me’ vibe off you, Dove. I can only say I wish I was. Welcome to my world.”

  Before Lex could come back with a smart retort, there was a rap at the door. Two members of Team Thirteen, Tartaglione and Sampson, entered the room.

  “LT?” said Tartaglione. “We were just coming to check up on you, make sure you were getting some shuteye too. Wouldn’t have knocked but we heard voices, not snoring.”

  “Aw, that’s sweet of you guys,” said Buckler. “I’ll catch forty winks later. Right now I’m busy bringing Mr Dove up to speed on our situation. You stay. I could do with some moral support. Mr Dove doesn’t seem to believe half what I tell him.”

  “Having a Whisky Tango Foxtrot moment, huh?” said Sampson, elongating himself out on the bed. “I still get those myself every now and again. Been a Thirteener for three years, nine months, and even I have trouble with some of the shit we run up against. Planet’s crazier than you can imagine, underneath it all. Normal on top, insane below. Like a cookie jar with a nest of wasps hidden at the bottom”

  “A nest of mutant wasps,” said Tartaglione.

  “Mutant flesh-eating wasps.”

  “Mutant flesh-eating wasps with lethal neurotoxin stings.”

  “I take it that’s something else you’ve had to deal with,” said Lex. “Killer wasps.”

  “Hell, no,” said Sampson.

  “Not yet,” said Tartaglione.

  “But it’s probably only a matter of time.”

  “Yeah. Give it a week.” Tartaglione leaned against the wardrobe. The SEALs now formed a triangle with Lex as its central locus. He was conscious of being surrounded, outnumbered, in a confined space. He swiftly worked out trajectories, lines of attack, a sequence of target elimination, should the three of them decide to rush him. They were allies, he had no reason not to trust them, but old habits died hard.

  “Now where was I?” said Buckler. “Oh, yeah. Super-soldiers. Prof Seidelmann seems to think he’s created something that can turn ordinary enlisted men into unstoppable fighting machines. I’ve got a clip of him pitching his case to the Joint Chiefs arms procurement committee. It’s grabbed from a teleconference call between him at home in Maryland and the committee in Washington. Here we go.”

  Professor Gulliver Seidelmann was a weak-chinned man in his early fifties with thin rimless spectacles and a greying widow’s peak. He had sharp, beady eyes and a habit of gesticulating with both hands at once, in symmetry, like a college lecturer or a TV presenter. He was in what appeared to be his private study, a shelf full of scholarly-looking books behind him, at his elbow a Newton’s cradle and an opened bag of mixed nuts and seeds. Framed diplomas were visible on the wall, along with a photo of Seidelmann shaking hands with the previous incumbent of the White House.

  “Gentlemen,” he said, “what I’m offering is a fusion of two biotechnologies, one cutting-edge, the other old, possibly ancient. It’s something that to my knowledge has never been tried before—taking pharmacological knowhow that has existed for generations and bringing it bang up to date. I’m convinced that the results will be more than to your liking. You’ll have read my preliminary paper, in which I set out the experiments I have already performed privately under laboratory conditions and the successes I have achieved with them so far. Mice treated with my process have shown themselves to be impervious to pain and to exhibit a level of durability that’s increased by a factor of at least ten. Their need for sleep or any kind of rest is profoundly reduced and they are capable of withstanding stress situations—extreme heat or cold, wind turbulence, high-decibel sonic assault—for approximately seven times longer than the control subjects. That’s just mice. Imagine the same level of augmentation applied to human beings.”

  There was a pause as the professor listened to a question, inaudible on the clip soundtrack.

  “In case you’re wondering, the voices of the committee members have been redacted,” said Buckler.

  “Heaven forfend that I might recognise one of them,” said Lex.

  “Quite.”

  Seidelmann resumed his side of the conversation. “In addition to various hand-picked lab technicians, I would be working in collaboration with one other person,” he said. “I have yet to determine whom, but I have a shortlist of candidates, all experts in their chosen practice—or perhaps I should call it ‘craft.’ With that person’s aid I’m sure I will be able to refine the process to the stage where tests on human subjects would be viable. In the meantime, however, I will require isolation and seclusion. This is sensitive work, and there is
the matter of a certain delicacy of feeling amongst my peers.”

  Another question or comment from the procurement committee.

  “Precisely that,” said Professor Seidelmann, with a slight wince. “I think ‘laughing-stock’ is overstating it somewhat, but I undoubtedly would prefer not to be open to scrutiny, not until the work is complete. There are some very closed-minded individuals in the world of scientific research, and I’m sure you can easily imagine what the reaction would be if it got out that I was delving into this, rather... esoteric area of research. I’d be accused of dabbling in witchcraft, abandoning empirical rigour in favour of superstition, almost literally consorting with the devil. Just as it was heresy in Galileo’s day to say that the earth orbited around the sun, so it is heresy these days, of a different kind, to stray from the narrow paths of scientific orthodoxy. At best I’d be shunned; at worst, I would be publicly ridiculed in all the important journals and online forums. My career might never recover. My reputation definitely would not. Hence absolute discretion is called for, at least until I have proven my theories in practical terms beyond a shadow of a doubt. After that, no stigma will attach to me: my accomplishments will speak for themselves.”

  There was a lengthy interlude before the professor’s next statement.

  “That,” he said, “sounds highly satisfactory. A tad remote, I would submit, but I did ask for isolation and seclusion, and where better to find that than an island a hundred kilometres from the nearest major landmass? If the existing infrastructure can be brought up to an acceptable working standard, then I can foresee no problem establishing a facility there. Perhaps I shall even manage to obtain a suntan. We scientists are usually such a pasty, indoorsy lot, aren’t we?”

  With this rather feeble stab at witty repartee, the clip ended.

  “That was last December,” said Buckler. “In the months since, Prof Seidelmann has been nose to the grindstone at Anger Reef, in close collusion with this man.”

  He pulled up a police mugshot of a West Indian of similar age to Seidelmann, perhaps a shade younger, with a plethora of piercings, a smattering of tattoos, and a Mohawk stripe of bleached-blonde hair. The sclera of his eyes was yellow and full of broken capillaries, and one pupil was clouded by what appeared to be a cataract or optic scarring. He glowered at the camera, or at whoever was taking the photo, and from the resentful set of his jaw there was no question that this was an angry, unpredictable individual, someone who harboured a severe grudge against the world.

  “Nice,” said Lex. “Just the type of bloke you’d like your daughter to bring home.”

  Sampson chuckled. “Yeah, a regular contributor to society.”

  “He was christened François Deslorges,” said Buckler. “A native of Haiti, mid-thirties, with a spotty employment record and a rap sheet as long as your arm. Busted mostly for drug dealing—marijuana, the odd class-A substance—but he doesn’t appear to have spent a single day in jail. Either the Haitian cops can’t make the charges stick or he knows whose palms to grease to keep him out of the courts—and I know which of those I’d lay money on. His principal source of income, outside of peddling dope, is voodoo.”

  “Vodou,” said Lex.

  “Sorry?”

  “It’s vodou, not voodoo. Apparently. So I’ve been told.”

  “Tomayto, tomahto,” said Buckler dismissively. “This guy, anyway, he’s a professional houngan, a male voodoo priest.” The emphasis on the word voodoo was light but pointed. “He runs a temple at his house in downtown Port-au-Prince and it’s said his regular worshippers, or clients maybe, number in the hundreds. An influential figure. There are also rumours that Deslorges is a bokor, which is a houngan who leans towards the dark side of voodoo.”

  “You’d never think it to look at him,” said Lex.

  “He’s your go-to guy if you want to turn your neighbour into a frog or have your ex-wife fall down a well—like I wish mine would. I jest,” Buckler added. “But a bokor isn’t someone you want to mess with. Voodoo is serious shit. If used incorrectly or with harmful intent, it can cause real damage.”

  Lex flashbacked to the Garfish’s henchman and his suddenly shattered leg. Had that been an incorrect use of voodoo on Albertine’s part? He didn’t think so. It had been a prime example of justified self-defence if ever there was one. But assuming that was ‘good’ voodoo, he shuddered to imagine what dark voodoo could do.

  “I’ll second that,” said Sampson. “I’m from New Orleans, born and raised. We got voodoo there in the Big Easy—sometimes call it hoodoo—and man, you don’t want to get on the wrong side of some of the motherfuckers who play around with that stuff. One time I remember, this guy I knew, friend of a friend, he started going out with this chick, a voodoo priestess with her own store on North Rampart Street, right across from Louis Armstrong Park. Some piece of tail she was, and she claimed she could trace her lineage all the way back to the Witch Queen of New Orleans herself, Marie Laveau. Anyways, the guy made the mistake of cheating on her with another girl. She found out and put a curse on him. Next thing you know, his dog gets run over by a car, he loses his job, and his house burns down in an unexplained fire. I mean, it’d be funny if it wasn’t so tragic.”

  “Maybe she did it herself, the priestess,” Lex said. “Drove the car that killed the dog, set the fire, somehow fixed it so her man got the sack.”

  “Maybe, or maybe she got the spirits to arrange it all for her, or maybe the guy just had a run of bad luck. Either way, there’s a connection. He got her mad, she hexed him, bad shit happened. You can’t prove that voodoo played a part, but neither can you disprove it. So it’s safer to assume that voodoo works than that it doesn’t.”

  An hour ago, Lex would have argued the point. That was before he’d seen a wanga fetish used offensively.

  “So this bokor, Deslorges...” he began.

  “Papa Couleuvre, as he prefers to be known,” said Buckler. “It’s his official title, or stage name, alter ego, whatever.”

  “Yeah, him. How are he and Seidelmann collaborating? What can a voodoo priest bring to a project to create super-soldiers?”

  “The answer is, no one’s sure, not even the Pentagon. Seidelmann’s notes are vague on the subject. What we do know is that Seidelmann’s own area of expertise is pharmaceuticals and their use in boosting the human metabolism in order to improve performance. Up until recently he was developing drugs tailored to enable soldiers to function for extended periods under duress. Now, air force pilots have been known to pop amphetamines from time to time to counteract fatigue during long flights, and infantrymen on watch shifts too. But we’re talking something far more sophisticated—cocktails of steroid, stimulant, analgesic and sedative, balanced just right so you’re operating at peak efficiency and not hampered by fear or pain.”

  “To me that sounds plain crazy,” said Sampson. “Fear is the soldier’s friend. It kicks your ass when you’re under fire and keeps you frosty when you’re out on patrol. Cut out fear and you’re cutting out part of our basic survival mechanism.”

  “Agreed,” said Buckler. “But the brass don’t think that way. They like the idea of human robots who can go for hours, even days on end, without stopping, unemotional, unflappable. Men who are half GI, half Terminator. That’s why they’ve been chucking money at Seidelmann by the fistful. This super-soldier project of his is just the latest in a long line of schemes he’s come up with, and is probably the most ambitious and looniest yet.”

  “But what is it?” said Lex. “What have he and—Papa Couleuvre, yes?—what have they been cooking up together?”

  “If you want my opinion,” said Buckler, “based on the evidence to hand... it’s zombies.”

  FIFTEEN

  ZUVEMBIE

  “YEAH, RIGHT,” SAID Lex.

  “I’m totally serious,” said Buckler.

  “I know, and I’m totally sceptical.”

  “Still?” Buckler adopted a patient expression. “Okay, so what is it you think of
when you think of zombies?”

  “Hordes of the undead roaming the land. Eating people. Groaning a lot. Looking all green and decayed. I’ve seen the movies.”

  “And it’s fair to say that such creatures do crop up from time to time. We had to put a bunch of them down in Pátzcuaro in the Mexican Western Central Highlands, year before last.”

  “Fuck, yeah,” said Tartaglione. “It was October thirty-first, Halloween, el Dia de los Muertos. There was an outbreak at a smalltown cemetery, corpses busting out of their graves and lurching through the streets. Nearby pesticide factory had been polluting the groundwater for over a decade, dumping raw waste product in the aquifers rather than processing it properly, organophosphates and some other genetically engineered shit. It seeped into the cemetery soil, somehow brought the dead back to life, and man, were they in a feisty mood. All these Mexicans in costumes chowing down on candy skulls, and a bunch of reanimated corpses in their midst trying to chow down on their skulls.”

  “Head shot,” said Sampson, making a pistol out of his fingers and aiming at the bridge of Lex’s nose. “Ka-pow. Destroy the brain stem. It’s the only way.”

  “Local media reported it as a Halloween stunt gone wrong,” said Tartaglione. “Some of the revellers got drunk and took the role-playing a little too far.”

  “Plausible, too,” said Sampson. “Nobody does Halloween like Mexicans do Halloween. Everyone downing tequila until they could hardly see straight, let alone tell the difference between a real zombie and a guy in a suit. Firecrackers going off everywhere, so many that our gunshots were barely noticed. We could have done the op wearing pink tutus and carrying a sign saying ZOMBIES THIS WAY, and probably no one would’ve turned a hair.”

  “That’s one kind of zombie,” said Buckler. “But there’s another. The old-school kind. Which is what I think may be on the loose at Anger Reef.”