I sensed Camouflage stiffening, shuffling and aggressively re-arranging his posture in front of me. I part turned in my chair, he had cradled his weapon more securely, his eyes were on stalks taking in everything he could information wise and he had started deep breathing. It was like he was having a panic attack, maybe he had a flash back when Pun had mentioned the distance from the facility and that was what set him off.
‘Whoa, calm down mate. Are you okay?’ I asked him. Sue had noticed it too from the way she was looking worried at him.
‘In Helmand, it was always when you thought you were going to be safe when you got hit. Most of the time it was within a mile of the compound that they would hit us.’ He said, not looking at me but through me with a thousand-yard stare. I turned to Pun to ask what he thought when all of a sudden the American comms set on the dashboard burst into un encrypted chatter that we were approaching them at the same time as someone in the Jackal announced they saw a domestic style quad-copter drone in the sky a hundred or so meters ahead. Not being able to satellite control their fearsome raptor drones, they had improvised and used the domestic type you can get from high street stores with a camera on. Good idea but the inferior camera meant they had to fly lower and running the risk of being seen at such a lower altitude.
Pun took no time in his response. ‘Contact! Contact!’ Shouted Pun into the comms. All as one the Paras on the open top land rover and Jackal threw off their ponchos and started scanning for targets with their weapons, I assumed the guys behind did the same, they were pretty well practiced from what I had so far seen. Camouflage was now acting like a wild animal and almost bouncing in anticipation, waiting to be released out of the door.
Sue had gone whiter than snow yet again and I was sure I had a nugget of the brown smelly variety waiting to be released into my pants! Ahead of the Jackal a green, black and brown camouflaged Humvee burst from a secluded gateway. Its gunner on the rotating roof turret already had the M134 mini gun spinning up with its trade mark electric hum as it came into view, then humming like a swarm of angry hornets as it was spitting an obscene number of bullets into the drivers’ seat of the Jackal, turning the driver into soup! The co-pilot of the Jackal put some rounds from the GPMG into the Humvee gunner before he jumped off and the top gunner put two 40mm grenades into it before he caught too many rounds to count and slumped lifelessly to the floor of the vehicle. The guys on the first land rover also hammered the Humvee with 5.62mm from their GPMGs. The Jackal, although now driverless carried on at its pre driverless speed and rammed into the Humvee, forcing it’s now burning wreck back into the driveway from where it came with its superior weight, speed and momentum until it stalled out in a cough of black diesel smoke and a stutter of the big wheels. The guys behind us took out another Humvee before it could even pounce from its hiding place through the hedge to cut us off with GPMG fire and a LAW anti-tank round. The whoosh and resulting explosion that stopped the Humvee in its tracks were fantastic, the frantic and horrifying screams of the dying and burning crew inside it was not.
We were taking rounds from the American soldiers lined up in the hedge row from both sides but the guys in the land rovers were hammering them back good style with the GPMGs, they hadn’t counted on us noticing the ambush seconds before it was sprung and certainly not expecting us to be so well trained, armed and vicious in response. The weight of fire from our side was obviously unexpected by them and the weight of fire we were unleashing at them was overwhelming. We had to get out of the 110 hard top though as it was starting to draw fire and thin aluminium gave as much protection from high velocity bullets as a sheet of toilet paper.
Camouflage was out the door like Usain Bolt from the blocks, firing and manoeuvring with his M4 and two of the paras to the left hedge as the others did the same to the right. One guy got back onto the Jackal and after rotating the turret started dropping 40mm grenades onto the hedge line on both sides. I went around the Land Rover to get Sue, as I reached her rear door to drag her out and take her to safety, what must have been a grenade went off. Was it one of ours or one of theirs? I didn’t know, I just remember passing Pun almost comically at a jaunty angle as I was thrown through the air, but I don’t remember hitting the ground.
I was out for the count for the rest of the firefight but when I came to Camouflage was frantically trying to get my vest off. It was then that I realised that although a grenade had gone off it was a piece of land rover that had hit me and threw me, and I now realised Pun too, to the ground and out for the count. The piece of Land Rover hadn’t gone through my vest luckily but by the feel of it had broken or at least cracked a rib or two. I looked around for Sue but couldn’t see her. I feared the worst.
‘Where is Sue?’ I asked Camouflage. He was flecked in blood all over his face and hands. Was it his blood? Her blood? My blood?
‘They got her mate.’
‘Dead?’ I asked, almost ready to cry.
‘Not dead, they have her. Taken her. When she saw you and Pun go down in the explosion she panicked, got out of the Landy without her weapon and ran like fuck through us and through that gap.’ He pointed to the grenade ravaged hole in the hedge line. ‘And they got hold of her the other side. We took most of them down but couldn’t risk hitting her with the last two that took her.’ I tried to get up, got as far as my knees and threw up, wobbled around and then hit the floor. I felt like tenderised meat. ‘You won’t be going anywhere for a few hours mate. We’ve had some losses too so Pun will need to sort his shit out and then we go from there.’
‘We have to go after her, we can’t lose her.’ I protested.
‘We won’t lose her mate.’ Promised Camouflage. ‘The Americans comms you had from the Helicopter back home, that they don’t know that we have has already given out their location and it seems they knew it was a woman called Sue that they had to lift. How the fuck did they find that out? We never mentioned whether the carrier was male, or female let alone their bloody name for fucks sake!’
My head hurt like a bastard; I was going to be sick again. I had no idea either. Then it hit me. We never mentioned it to Bristol on the secure comms, but I did mention Sue wouldn’t go on her own to Sarah on the School set this morning! Fucking cock-womble! They must have been listening in to that and worked it out that way. Bollocks! I didn’t let on to Camouflage that it was me, we needed to get Sue back and to the facility and then I could fess up.
The guys had taken out all but two of the Americans blokes and equipment during this engagement. Only thing was Sue was now in their hands and we had lost four Paras, the big diesel turbo engine on the Jackal ran sweet but the controls were shot to shit and a Land Rover was missing most of its right side from grenade damage. We now had one WMIK Land Rover and one 110 hard top Land Rover, six Para Pathfinders, Camouflage and me. We loaded up all the ammunition, weapons and anything useful into the two land rovers. One of the guys checked out the M134 mini gun on the Humvee but it had been blown to buggery by the M40 grenades, which was a huge shame, that thing was obscene and if we hadn’t had the heads up from the captured radio and sharp eyed sighting of the drone it would have blended us all to soup!
We all went around the corpses of our four dead and their fallen men and gave them all a blade through the temple to ensure they wouldn’t turn. We couldn’t bury them, not with the limited time we had, so we bundled them onto the stripped out and damaged WMIK 110. Two of the guys pulled the pin on two white Phosphorous grenades and threw them into the bundle of bodies. They may have been enemy, today at least, soldiers but they didn’t deserve to be feasted on whilst they were still warm by a passing hoard, so they burnt with our guys. And burn they did, the Phosphorous was ferocious and soon had the Land rover burning too, its aluminium panels disappearing in the heat as we watched.
We were lucky, being this remote meant that we only had to fight the living so far. The sound of the fight would soon draw the undead out, so we had to mount up and move. Pun wanted to get on to Bristol and let
them know what had happened, but his men disagreed. They wanted to get Sue back and finish the job. If Bristol found out they would call them back and it would all have been a wasted day out. I liked this Chinese Parliament thing they had, meant that you went with the majority, not one person’s opinion. Pun wasn’t put out by the result, far from it, it was how they worked and that was that. We got on the radio to Whittington and just told them that we were delayed for approximately twelve hours. They never questioned it as we were the guys on the ground and knew the situation best, they just said they would see us early morning.
Chapter 9
From the maps on board the 110 we could see their location was just six miles away and appeared to be an abandoned lorry distribution depot. How abandoned or secure we wouldn’t know until we had given it a look over with what all the guys seemed to be calling the mark one eyeball. We had night vision capabilities so would take full advantage of the dark in the coming few hours, but so would the Americans.
Being fairly rural in this area meant that we could avoid the roads and take fields and green lanes to the depot and being standard sized land rovers instead of Humvees or Jackals, we could make the off-road journey down these small, overgrown and constricted lanes with little fuss, bother or noise. They would expect us, if of course they were expecting us, to come via the roads and would no doubt have those areas covered. We parked up in a field under cover of hedges and trees about four hundred meters shy of the rear fence line of the depot. Any closer and we ran the risk of our engines being heard. We all had our areas of fence to creep up on and observe as much as possible before darkness fell. Being a civvie, or crap hat as one of the guys called me, I had to stay back with the vehicles whilst they did their thing. It’s exactly what the Pathfinders were trained for, to stay in the shadows and observe and report on the goings on of such places, then relaying all the info to the rescue teams or strike aircraft to attack whilst they got away un-noticed.
During October of 2000 a group of them were secretly inserted into the Sierra Leone jungle and for several days kept watch on a camp that had several hundred West Side Boys in who had taken six Irish Rangers captive. These guys stayed still and undiscovered in snake, spider and insect infested jungle just mere yards away watching and reporting on their movements and several cruel mock executions before allowing the Paras and SAS to attack the camp and rescue them. For days, locals reported bullet riddled bodies of the West Side Boys to be found floating in the rivers around and downstream from their lair. It was Called operation Barras but known by the guys about to go into battle as Operation Certain Death. The Paras and the SAS were massively outnumbered, and the West Side Boys were notoriously fearless (mostly on drugs and voodoo magic) but with Speed, Surprise and aggression they annihilated them. If there were any guys that could get in and get Sue out then these guys had faced worse odds.
I had none of that training, so I was the valet parking for the day whilst they went off and did the real work. My M4 was in reach should I need it, but I was under strict instructions to use non attention-grabbing ways to defend myself should we have any undead attention. It wasn’t long before I had just that.
Across the field I could see a group of five zombies heading my way. They were pretty stretched out so I was fairly confident I could take them all. I had already found a pretty straight and sturdy five-foot-long branch that I had sharpened one end of, so I picked that up along with one of the medieval looking maces we had made in the garage and walked out twenty or more yards to meet them. The first two I took down by swinging the stick at their heads. The thick end of the stick connecting nice and solidly with the sides of their heads, getting a nice crack noise and splatter from their skulls. Once on the ground to be doubly sure that they were permanently down and out I did a swift jab through the temple with the pointed end, giving the stick a bit of a wiggle for good measure as I did so. The third one was in American military clothing, the digital desert camo type, that looked like a close-up picture from a newspaper in the early eighties, though no belt or webbing and was missing his lower jaw bone. The stringy flesh hanging from his upper teeth and missing top lip glistened with pretty fresh blood showing that he did have one until fairly recently at least.
His chest had two bullet holes in its centre mass and multiple bites on his fore arms, right down to the bones on his left wrist. I planted the branch into the ground spike first and took out the mace that was wedged down the waist band of my trousers, got my stance at shoulder width apart, gave it a few side to side and circular swings like Bruce Lee and his famous Nun-Chukka movie scene and lunged… and bloody well missed! Embarrassed more than anything even though no one was around to see my cock up I took a step back, readjusted my stance and swung again, this time swinging the heavy mass of welded spikes forward and crashing into his fore head. It kept going under its considerable weight until buried inside his skull. Bruce Lee like it certainly was not but it did the job. He dropped to the ground with just a foot and a half of heavy chain visible hanging from the front of his head. He looked like a bad interpretation of the Elephant Man made in the medium of Blood, Bone and steel. Still, I reckon I could have won a Turner Prize if I had entered him!
Number four was an older female, dragging her jaunty angled leg as she walked and drooled heavily towards me. It always seems to be the older ladies that drool after me. She got the stick treatment to the side of the head like the first two and the end snapped off as she went down, never mind, as she was on the ground I pulled out my Gerber sheath knife and finished her off with that.
Number five though was quite a big unit, with braces holding up his once smart, once charcoal coloured suit trousers as his already once big and now death-gas bloated belly spilt over them and the broken fly button and zip. He even waddled as a zombie. One on one out here in this field he would be no trouble but in a tight corridor he would have been a bugger to drop. I used the now slightly shorter than I would have liked stick and chopped away at his left knee. It made a cracking and then sucking noise as the knee came apart from the upper and lower leg and he fell forward to the ground as he still tried to step towards me, I put my booted foot on his head to keep him there and then stabbed him through the back of the head with the Gerber, giving it a little twizzle to scramble his brain from his spinal cord.
I walked back to the vehicles, left the stick propped against the windshield and climbed up on the 110’s bonnet and then roof, it was all still quiet. I couldn’t see the depot from here even from standing on the roof due to the thick hedge rows and trees between us. The rest of the field looked devoid of anymore zombie activity thankfully. I had nothing to do, I couldn’t even scan the American comms as Pun took it, using an ear, piece with them. I studied the local maps from here to the Medical Facility until it got dark and then not wanting to use a torch, giving away our position or just buggering my now acquired night vision I just sat there twiddling my thumbs. About three hours after dark the comms in the Land Rover double clicked. That was the sign to say they were coming back to me, so I didn’t freak out and start firing at them. We all met at the bonnet and everyone got out what information that they had to collate it.
The consensus was that they were not prepared for any human or anyone with any rational thought processes to break in. They had concentrated on zombie blocking techniques such as fences, trenches, obstacles, locked doors, four hidden (from zombies at least) guards and the ‘Create no attraction, receive no attention’ approach. From experience back at my house I knew that approach would only last so long but the fact that they were only concentrating on zombie attacks and that we had depleted their numbers and equipment stood us in good stead. They had no lights on visible from the outside, but people could be seen moving around past windows. A maximum of twenty-five people inside was guesstimated and agreed upon. The place was indeed an old lorry distribution centre and it was agreed that they had stuck to the office area as no movement could be seen or heard coming from the warehouse and only four
Humvees and two cars were parked next to a fire escape side door out of view from the main road.
There was a helicopter landing area painted on the tarmac outside the warehouse with refuelling and other service equipment but no helicopter. We must have taken down their only one. I did ask if another could be inside the warehouse, but they explained the warehouse had raised lorry bays, the type you could drive in and out of the lorry from and the only one on ground level was several hundred yards around the other side of the building. It made no sense to keep it back there and the pad out the front so we could be assured of no helicopter pursuit if it all went tits up.
Plan time… and straight away it was clear that it didn’t include me! Fucked if I was having that! They planned on two of them going in with just knives and side arms, finding her, getting the fuck out and to the fence line where the WMIK, now fitted with the 40mm grenade launcher on the top ring and the others using the two Land Rover bonnets as firing platforms for the GMPGs and .50Cal would be waiting to beat back any following trouble.
I took Camouflage to one side. ‘Mate, I can’t be having this, I’ve been in on this since day one. I may not have your training, but I’m not useless. She found me to reveal what she had found; I should be there to rescue her.’
‘You aren’t useless, I’ve seen you fight and clear the camp the other night, but this is an entirely different level. Me and Pun could be in and out, we have pretty much the same training and know what and how to think in that situation. Me and you just wouldn’t cut it I’m afraid.’
‘What about me you and Pun?’ I asked.
‘He won’t go for it. I’m telling you it’ll be easier for us.’
I started to walk away, then turned back, I had a cunning idea. ‘Give me five minutes.’ And stomped off past the guys gathered around the land rovers out into the field. I found the soldier zombie and took off his top and trousers, put them on over mine, it didn’t stink too bad, went to the back of the 110 and took out one of the vests and belt kit we had taken from the dead soldiers at the helicopter ambush and put it on. It covered pretty much all of the blood from the drool and chest wound, not only that but in the dark you couldn’t see much more than the uniform being American and the name tape ‘Salkin’. I walked back to Camouflage saluted and said in an American accent. ‘How are my chances now?’
The Reanimated Dead (Book 2): The Answer Page 8