McDaniels sighed and rubbed his burning eyes. The news didn’t shock him, but it did leave him feeling somewhat hollow. Those would be the first deaths they had suffered from the dead directly. “How many people did we lose?”
“Four aviators, five Special Forces.”
Jesus. “Do we… do we have names yet?”
Haley shook his head. “Negative, but Reaver One Six was the aircraft that went down. Reaver One Seven is on its way back in. They did not touch down, so we could probably assume all souls aboard are still living.”
McDaniels opened the mission planner on his workstation. He scrolled through the list of names assigned to the helicopter that had gone down.
CW4 Domingo Sanchez
CW3 Ernest Long
SSG Craig Viner
SGT Rolf Kleinau
CPT John McHale
SFC Robert Kelly
SFC Harriman Roberson
SSG Evan Gogol
SFC Henrique Estrada
McDaniels looked at the list and realized those were the troops he had met in the field, the ones who had been ambushed by several of the stenches. How long ago had that been? Weeks? Such a short time later, they were dead.
“Where’s Reaver One Seven?” His voice was steady and strong, nothing like how he felt.
“Inbound now. Should be landing in about five minutes or so,” Haley said, turning to the Air Force controllers.
“Roger that, sir. They had to come around the long way to avoid the strike zones, but they should be wheels on deck in about five or six minutes,” one of them replied.
Haley turned back to McDaniels. “The troops did complete their mission,” he said after a moment. “They did what we needed them to do.”
And they paid the final price. “I’ll be at the assembly area,” McDaniels said, rising from his chair.
***
McDaniels watched from one side of the parking lot as the Black Hawk rotored in from the west, its anti-collision lights blinking in the fading sun. Twilight had successfully assassinated afternoon, and soon it would fall victim to the ravages of nightfall. Joint Task Force SPARTA was preparing for its second night under siege. As he looked around the makeshift airfield, he could see the hard set of determination etched into each soldier’s face. McDaniels would have felt his spirits lift if he didn’t know the stoicism was stretched across a rigid armature of fear.
He very badly wanted to call his wife, and then find his son and hug him tight.
A shape emerged from the gloom and stopped beside him. McDaniels didn’t need to look to know that Gartrell had joined him. The hard-edged NCO had embraced his role as the JTF’s senior enlisted man with as much gusto as anyone could, and he was there to pay his respects to the living and the dead. McDaniels thought back to when one of the Special Forces troops had mentioned the speech McDaniels had given at Fort Bragg on Martin Luther King Day, so many years ago. In that speech, he had said that fealty to the service was an oath of honor to American society, no matter what the individual’s color. The oath was what was important, transcending all else. Under the oath, all men were equal, having sworn themselves and their lives to upholding the heritage of service inherent with the uniform they wore. Doctor King would without a doubt have seen the beauty and righteousness of such duty.
McDaniels had long ago put that speech out of his mind, only to find out years later that at least one man had been stirred by his words.
That man was among the dead.
“It’s not going to get any better,” Gartrell said finally.
“I know,” McDaniels said.
“Maybe next time we should have the Air Force drop a genset or something like that, instead of using our own resources,” Gartrell continued.
McDaniels turned and looked at him, a little stung by the sergeant major’s words and the implied meaning behind them.
Gartrell looked back at McDaniels passively for a moment before realization dawned across his face. “No, sir, I didn’t mean that as criticism. I was informed of the mission as well, and I didn’t object to it. These weren’t inexperienced troops, and that’s why they were selected for the mission. If they thought the risk outweighed the rewards, I’m sure they would have told someone.” Gartrell raised his voice over the approaching helicopter. “But next time, we need to find a way to use assets that aren’t part of our frontline mission. The zoomies should be able to help us out if this works.”
McDaniels nodded. “Roger that, Sarmajor.” He paused for a moment. “Have you been able to get in touch with Laurie?”
“No, sir. No word from my family. How’s your wife doing?”
“Better. The last time we spoke, the stenches were leaving Bragg.”
“I’d say that’s good news, if only they weren’t all heading here.”
“Hang tough, Gartrell. I know you’ve got to be folding up on the inside, but these soldiers need you.”
“I know that, Colonel,” Gartrell said after a long moment. “I’ve never forgotten that.”
The Black Hawk touched down, and the soldiers in the troop compartment dismounted immediately. There was no strut to their walk, only bitter dejection and exhaustion. McDaniels had seen it before over the years, in Iraq and Afghanistan and Africa. When men who you considered to be your brothers were taken down by the enemy, it was as though someone had stabbed your soul.
And not being able to recover the fallen was salt in the wound.
“Let’s do what we have to do,” he told Gartrell.
“We should consider it practice for what might be coming up,” Gartrell said. “At least it’s our own guys this time. Mostly,” he added, perhaps thinking of the aviators who had lost teammates of their own. “We might be able to help them.”
“I hope so. I really hope so.”
The Green Berets saluted when they saw McDaniels. McDaniels returned the salute and looked for the ODA’s executive officer, a chief warrant officer named Waller. He found the short, stocky warrant officer almost immediately, simply because he was so much shorter than the remaining members of the team.
“I’m sorry for what happened to your guys, Chief,” McDaniels told him as he shook Waller’s hand. “But if they helped gather a big enough mass of those things together for the Air Force to service with one weapon, then it might have been worth the price.”
Waller turned back to the Black Hawk spooling down behind him. “Those gutless fucks wouldn’t let us dismount so we could help them fight,” he snapped, his face red. A vein stood out in stark relief on his temple. “We could’ve saved them, but those pussy aviation dilettantes didn’t want to risk anything. They even let their own guys go down!”
“I wouldn’t be so sure that it would have made any difference if you were put on the deck or not,” McDaniels said. “The necromorphs have overwhelming numbers—”
“Yeah, and what do you know about it, Colonel?” Waller said. His face was clouded with rage, which McDaniels understood despite the fact it was misdirected. One of his teammates put a hand on Waller’s shoulder, urging him to calm down. Waller shook it off and glared at McDaniels with fiery eyes. “I’ve heard all about you, Colonel. I know you don’t have a problem leaving troops behind, or letting them fry on high-risk missions. But what the hell do you know about what went down out there, while you were sitting in the TOC?” Waller pointed toward the eastern horizon.
Gartrell started to intervene. “Mister Waller—”
McDaniels grabbed the front of Waller’s body armor and yanked him forward. At the same time, he pulled upward on the soldier’s harness, his biceps bulging beneath his sleeves as he half-lifted Waller off his feet. He leaned down so his face was within inches of the warrant officer’s.
“Waller, you desperately need to reconfigure your attitude immediately, because otherwise we will not be getting along. And as far as what I know about what happened out there, I survived New York City, you short little runty fuck. I was boots on the ground for over twenty-four hours, and the
sergeant major here for almost seventy-two. You want to compare flying in a UH-60 for an hour with that? You want to think that somehow makes you a relative of fucking Copernicus or Plato or Clausewitz, and that now you somehow know everything about fighting the stenches?” He gave Waller a brisk shake, but the warrant officer only glared up at him without speaking. The rest of the Special Forces operators looked at each other, and one of them started to intervene, but McDaniels saw Gartrell stop him with a shake of his head.
“I’m sorry your commander and troops died, Waller. It pains me greatly, and your disparaging remarks about your aviation partners also pain me. Your anger is understandable, and your grief is entirely expected and proper. But you need to pull your shit together, Chief Warrant Officer Three Waller, because we are still neck-deep in trouble, and the rest of your alpha detachment is here for the duration. They need a leader who can keep cool and make the right decisions, and blaming everyone else for your detachment’s misfortune is not a showcase display of stellar leadership skills. But if you really need to blame someone for what went down this afternoon, then you are currently looking right at him. Have anything else you want to get off your chest? Care to assault my character any further?” He shook Waller again. “Is this working out the way you had planned, Chief Waller?”
Waller remained silent. McDaniels released him, and the warrant officer stumbled backward. One of his soldiers grabbed his arm and steadied him. It was the team master sergeant, the senior noncommissioned officer, and he pulled Waller a few steps away.
“Mister Waller, you need to gain control of yourself,” the master sergeant said. He turned toward McDaniels. “And you too, sir. Mister Waller was way out of bounds with everything he said, but you kind of let things get away from you there. In my opinion.”
Gartrell stepped up and looked at the master sergeant. “You need to address that to me,” he said. “You know the rules of the road, Koscialkowski. You keep a leash on your officer; I’ll do the same with mine. But if one of them slips their leash, they run the risk of getting chewed up. Is that in any way unclear?”
The master sergeant looked at Gartrell with a blank expression. “No, Sarmajor.”
McDaniels looked at the remainder of Operational Detachment (Alpha) 034. “Gambit, we are one hundred percent heartbroken by your loss. Any death in the community is of great importance to us, officers and enlisted alike. That we lost a very skilled element of a detachment is a tremendous cost that we will have to account for, but right now, we need everyone straight, sober, and sane.” He looked past the special operators as the aviation crew walked away from the Black Hawk. “Aviators! You hear that?”
“Yes, sir. We heard it,” said the chief warrant officer four who was the aircraft commander. He looked at McDaniels with downtrodden eyes, and his aura of dejection was reflected by the rest of his aircrew.
“Then know we acknowledge your sacrifice and don’t stand of judgment of you for what you did or did not do on the battlefield,” McDaniels said. “If we had lost two Black Hawks and an entire alpha detachment, along with seven or eight highly-trained aviators, then we would be in much worse shape than we are now. All of you need to recognize that. You came back. Your friends didn’t. This is how shit works in war. We had Apaches and a fucking AC-130 overhead firing artillery rounds into the zeds, and it didn’t hold them back long enough for everyone to make it out. But the fallen did their job and completed their mission, so their sacrifice is not in vain. All of you need to get that through your heads. We’re all professionals here, no matter what branch of the service we’re in. Pull yourselves together, because you’re going to have to get back to work.
“That aside, you troops have my highest admiration. And my heartfelt condolences,” he finished, looking at Waller.
The warrant officer turned away.
“Get some rest,” McDaniels said after a moment, then turned to leave.
***
Two hours after the sun had set, one of SPARTA’s RQ-7B Shadow unmanned aerial scouts took off into the night. Weaving its way through the narrow corridor established for it through the bombing area, the small propeller-driven aircraft leisurely climbed to eight thousand feet and accelerated to its maximum speed of 135 miles per hour until it had cleared the bombing range. Once clear, its operators throttled it back to a cruising speed of just over 100 miles per hour. The small plane with the rearward-facing pusher prop bounced along through some light turbulence as its onboard forward-looking infrared turret scanned the ground. After cruising for twenty minutes, it approached its target area and slowly entered into a wide-arcing left-hand turn. Its engine throttled back even further, the small aircraft established its loiter speed of fifty miles per hour.
The images it transmitted back to the tactical operations center clearly showed a huge mass of necromorphs clustered around the single generator. It was difficult to determine the exact number, as the zombies had clambered on top of each other, frantically searching for food in the lighted area, but the estimate was that seventy thousand stenches occupied an area of five square miles, with more zombies attempting to penetrate the area every minute. Even though nine men had died, the gamble had paid off.
The area was a veritable kill zone.
In an hour’s time, a single MC-130H Combat Talon II aircraft—a direct, but unarmed, relative of the AC-130U that had pounded the area with its munitions earlier in the day—took wing from its base in Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico. Call sign OPUS, the heavily modified cargo aircraft cut through the dark night and flew past Joint Task Force SPARTA’s camp and the seemingly never ending pattern of bombers and attack aircraft that orbited it. Normally used as a special operations squadron trainer, the MC-130H and its crew were conducting a real-world contingency operation on U.S. soil.
In the plane’s cargo hold was a single GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast bomb, the notorious MOAB—the “mother of all bombs,” the successor to the equally notorious BLU-82 “Daisy Cutter” munition that had become famous during the Vietnam War for its ability to turn a heavily-forested area in a landing zone capable of handling helicopter operations. Weighing over twenty thousand pounds, of which over eighteen thousand were pure high explosive, the MOAB was the most powerful conventional weapon in the U.S. military inventory. For pure explosive effect, there was nothing more potent, aside from nuclear weapons. With a yield of eleven tons, the MOAB could flatten an area almost a quarter-mile across and, hopefully, decimate any necromorphs within the blast radius at the same time.
The MC-130H lumbered through the night, descending to an altitude of twelve thousand feet. From there, it would fly into the target area, open its cargo ramp, and deliver the bomb.
***
In the TOC, McDaniels and the rest of the senior staff paid only fleeting attention to the OPUS bombing mission. The stenches were massing around the camp in far greater numbers, and the WILD FIRE runs to secure the camp were in full swing. Most of the necromorph presence was in the east, but they were slowly encircling the camp. Snipers were continually engaging zeds coming in from the south and west, and Haley recommended sending some Ranger units to the outer wire to ensure they weren’t breached.
“The snipers can’t keep the pace up forever,” he told McDaniels. “Eventually, the Rangers and the rest of the shooters are going to have to get involved.”
“I get that, but I don’t want our soldiers exposed unless it’s absolutely necessary. We’re going to need every swinging Johnson when the hammer comes down,” McDaniels said. “I don’t want to come up short at the wrong moment.”
Haley pulled his chair closer. “Cord, listen. We lost some guys today. That’s how it happens. And we’ll probably lose some more tomorrow, or the day after that. Next time, it’ll probably be some of my guys. But this is what we do—”
“I’m not freaked out about losing the men, Bull.” McDaniels looked at Haley calmly, confidently. “I know how these things work, I’m not some young kid who’s having his first ti
me at bat. I absolutely loathe losing good people to those things out there, but I know it’s going to happen, and I know it’s going to happen sooner rather than later. What happened today was just a taste of what’s to come. I know that. I get it. But I’m in no hurry to rush it along.”
Haley nodded. “Very well. But we should still amp up our defensive posture.”
“We will, Bull. Just not now.” McDaniels pointed to the monitors. “We have pretty much every surveillance technology known to man, so we can keep an eye on the perimeter. Right now, we have a few dead stenches in the outer wire—so what? So long as the Air Force keeps bombing the shit out of them, I can take a few of them getting close enough for a sniper to tap. It’s a pretty fair trade.”
Haley sighed, but nodded. He retreated back to his workspace and went back to overseeing the engagements. McDaniels got up from his desk and walked to the small pantry at the far end of the TOC. He brewed himself another strong cup of extra bold joe. He drank it black, no sugar.
Just like me, he mused tiredly.
“Colonel?” Chase stood in the main bullpen. “OPUS is approaching the target. We have live feeds from our own assets as well as an active satellite downlink.”
McDaniels went back to his desk. “Okay, put it up. Let’s see how this works out.” One of the seventy-inch monitors flickered on, but he couldn’t get very excited about it. After all, it was mostly just a test run to determine if they could exploit the rather low intelligence the necromorphs displayed.
“Wow, look at that,” Gartrell said when the drone picture came up. The black and white FLIR footage revealed the mass of bodies surrounding the generator. The lights were flickering, either because the generator had been damaged by the press of bodies against it or because the post’s plug was being jiggled in its socket. Either way, it didn’t seem to matter to the stenches. They clustered around the generator a thousand deep, each trying to crawl over the other.
The Rising Horde, Volume Two (Sequel to The Gathering Dead ) Page 13