Peering out through the dim and dusty air, Handon could see the other group moving smoothly and stealthily down the other side of the main runway. Both teams were covering basically the same ground to start with. This consisted of a lot of flat, sandy, scrubby, medium-brown dirt – much of which had blown onto the paved runway and adjacent taxiways. The landscape between the paved sections was dotted with scrub brush, but it wasn’t much as far as concealment goes, and it wasn’t any kind of cover at all. As they got closer to the main airport complex itself, small outbuildings and maintenance sheds started to spring up, followed by hangars of various sizes.
There were no aircraft visible on the ground.
Yeah, Handon thought. I wouldn’t have left any here either.
Looking behind and around him, he could see all his people had their primary weapons up and out – but their melee weapons close to hand. With a glance, he could make out Henno’s cricket bat, and Homer’s boarding axe, protruding from the tops of their rucks. Ali wasn’t wearing a short sword in its usual spot, side-draw configured in the small of her back, as Handon did. Instead, on this one, she decided it was better to go out loaded for bear: she’d brought her katana, a proper samurai long sword, secured between her back and her ruck, with its long cloth-wound pommel emerging diagonally from over her shoulder, in top-draw configuration.
Gaze shifting, Handon noted the slim profile of the tube attached to the side of Juice’s barrel – terminating at the back in a spiral hose that connected to the air canister cinched to the side of his pack. His pneumatic spike, dubbed the OJ. Now THAT’s force innovation, he thought. He could hardly wait to see it in action.
Beyond Juice was Predator, who had force-innovated himself. He decided he was on to something with his hard pipe-hitting rampage with that iron bar on the flight deck battle, in which he had turned a couple of hundred undead into choice butcher’s cuts – and, not incidentally, saved Handon from certain death or infection. Swinging that bar was basically a way to convert his outrageous upper-body strength into rapid destruction of the dead. So he had dug around the Kennedy’s sports and rec stores until he found himself a nice aluminum baseball bat. Not as big or deadly as the scavenged iron bar, but a lot lighter and easier to pack and hump around.
Now it was cinched to the outside of his pack, just a quick draw away.
But Pred also his had his full-size high-capacity (15+1) FN .45 autoloader, finished in flat-dark-earth, nestling in its chest rig. Pred was one guy who not only didn’t need a more compact pistol – but with his catcher’s-mitt-sized hands, he couldn’t even use one. And, Handon silently hoped, there wouldn’t be another near-infection episode where he had any temptation to turn the weapon on himself.
Handon felt safer just thinking about Pred and his rampages. If the shit really came down, Alpha’s man-mountain and one-man wrecking crew might actually be able to tear a giant hole through the heart of undead Africa… or at least one big enough for the team to escape out of.
But, so far, they had encountered zero Zulus on the tarmac, or in this area at all.
Typical, Handon thought, still moving forward smoothly and monitoring the terrain. We spend our whole deployment trying to stay clear of the dead. Now when we actually want one, there are none to be found.
This was unexpected, but also made a certain amount of sense. The fence around the airport was intact. No one would have been authorized to be out there other than fueling and loading crew, aircraft dispatchers, pushback guys – and they all would have cleared out before the end, probably as soon as the flights ceased. And now there wasn’t really anything to go in there for – nothing worth scavenging for the living, and no living as meals for the dead.
This place was basically secure.
As the main terminal started to loom ahead of them, and the team passed silently around the air traffic control tower, Handon saw another large structure behind and beyond it. An aircraft hangar. He decided to make a quick diversion to recon it. With hand signals alone, he motioned for Juice to come with him – and the others to find cover and go firm.
Henno gave him a look, roughly translatable as: Side trip a good idea, mate? But he complied with the order. And Handon appreciated that.
Because the time might soon be coming when he wouldn’t.
* * *
The hangar looked sealed up as they did a quick circuit of it, finally returning to the human-sized door around the side. Juice drew his breaching tool, but Handon made a Quiet signal, and Juice took out a lock-pick set instead. In ten seconds he had the door open and held it for Handon, who led them in.
It was properly dark inside, nearly pitch-black, and Handon switched on his weapon-mounted tactical light. In another half-minute they had circled the perimeter, cleared the small office in the corner, and emerged back into the dark airy space of the main hangar.
At its center, taking up almost all the available room, was a single big white aircraft, with twin prop engines slung underneath its wings, which were mounted high up on the fuselage. This gave it the feel of a bush plane, but an unusually large one. Handon panned his light from the large T tail, upon which was written “WFP” in light blue letters, all the way to the cockpit, just behind which was written “United Nations Humanitarian Air Service” in the same color.
He recognized the aircraft as a de Havilland Dash 8 – a medium-range turboprop commuter plane that held about thirty passengers. It had no visible damage, which was consistent with the hangar being sealed up. Then again, that was a far cry from being flyable. It had been sitting here for two years with its seals drying out, air filters molding, fluids congealing, and parts rusting. Hell, there were probably rodents living in the air filter box – and they’d probably chewed through all the wiring for good measure.
Nonetheless, he and Juice relocked the door on their way out. As they made their way back to the team, Henno, out at the front of the formation, spoke quietly on the squad net.
“In your own time.”
Handon clenched his jaw. They were operational now, no one was more mission focused than him, and he certainly wasn’t out here for his own goddamned amusement. As soon as they got back within visual range of the others – though you had to know where to look for them – he made that same hand signal again he’d made for Juice.
Fucking noise discipline.
Same signal – slightly different emphasis.
* * *
Ten minutes later, the team reached the inner wire, the edge of Camp Lemonnier itself, at the point they had picked for their infiltration. The Marines were out of sight now, having circled around to the western edge of the base for their own infil. Silently, Juice moved up to cut in to the fence. But he froze and instead motioned Handon forward.
When he got there, and looked where Juice was pointing, he saw it. Someone had already cut into the wire at this exact point. And then, using cable ties, that mysterious someone had sealed it up behind them again.
Alpha might or might not be here alone.
But they were definitely not here first.
Primus Inter Pares
Camp Lemonnier - Inside the South Wire
Henno took point as Alpha flowed into the camp.
No one told him to, and nobody said he could. He was leaning forward, so he gravitated to it – the pointy end of the spear. Anyway, this kind of fluidity was par for the spec-ops course, particularly in CQB, when they flowed through targets and structures like a self-organizing organism.
They operated under principles, not rules.
Still, Henno could see this made Handon nervous. As did anything that suggested erosion of his authority. But was Henno bothered? Not in the least. He was here to do a job. And authority among operators came from ability, and from trust. It wasn’t granted, it was seldom conferred, and it definitely couldn’t be demanded.
From Henno’s first step through the wire, which Juice had cut open in the same spot like an incision through a healed-up scar, he had felt Handon’s e
yes on his back. As far as he knew, there had never been any scientific verification of this fact, but he knew people could feel eyes on them, even from directly behind, and generally turned around to look. This was why smart snipers refrained from looking at their targets until they were ready to take the shot.
It didn’t make sense. But you trusted what you’d experienced.
As he stepped smoothly heel-toe, rifle panning mechanically, Henno slowly became aware there was another set of eyes on him. Not Handon’s, and not those of anyone else on the team. No, this was new. And whoever it might be was properly eye-fucking them.
Henno scanned over his rifle sight through all angles and planes, trying to work out where from. He was leading the team around the perimeter of the camp, just inside the outside wire and behind buildings – stopping to peer out through the gaps as they passed each of them. Now Henno stopped at a corner, took a knee, and inhaled a steadying breath. The others, dispersed behind him at wide enough intervals that they didn’t make one fat target, paused and crouched down as well.
Henno exhaled. It could have been his imagination.
But he didn’t think so.
He looked down at the smooth dirt beneath his boots, then up at the building to his right. There were bullet holes in most of the camp structures around them, as well as scorch marks.
But there were no shell casings on the ground. Not one.
Something big and nasty had gone down here. But some time afterward, someone had gone around and policed up all the brass.
A few of the visible structures had been damaged beyond reasonable repair. But even the debris from those had been tidied away. There wasn’t so much as scraps of trash blowing on the ground. Henno squinted deeply. They had come to East Africa, ground zero for the fall of man.
And it was like the ZA had never hit here at all.
Well, aside from the place being totally depopulated.
Which led to the most striking feature of all… there were no dead. No active ones standing or moving around. And no destroyed ones on the ground.
So far Alpha hadn’t ventured into the center of the sprawling camp, instead keeping the wire on their left elbow. But looking out through the gaps, they’d now seen a fair bit of the installation. And, aside from being without a garrison, it looked like this place was ship-shape and squared away – to rigorous military standards.
Had someone come in and cleared the joint? Henno wondered. Maybe the same people who cut that hole in the wire. He didn’t know.
But he didn’t like it.
* * *
Handon wasn’t enormously pleased by all this, either. Their mission plan had them quickly bagging up a Zulu in American uniform, which would have locked in some gains. Then they would know they had a much earlier-stage victim than any Doc Park had seen before. But once again, the first time their mission was to find the dead was also the first time they weren’t swarmed by hundreds or thousands of them.
Now it seemed like they couldn’t buy a dead guy.
But Handon pushed that thought away and got back into his “three-foot world.” This was a notion he’d picked up from Homer – a mindset that reminded you to focus on what you could affect, the stuff directly in front of your face and within reach, and to let the rest go. It was not only liberating, it was also a short-cut to winning. Because it was usually executing the fundamentals well, and not losing focus on your objective, that were the keys to success.
Bitching or worrying about the unchangeable was a ticket to fail.
Handon had to continually remind himself of this – another price of excellence was teaching yourself the same damned lessons over and over again – but more so since he took command of Alpha. Since then, worry had tried to settle on him like a suffocating and scratchy blanket, virtually every morning he woke up. And that blanket would tangle him up if he let it.
He had to choose not to.
Up ahead, Henno got up and got moving again, and the team followed at a slow and deliberate pace, everyone methodically covering their sectors and checking their corners. The famous “Don’t run to your death” rule definitely still applied, after being cemented into the heads of the Tier-1 guys in Iraq and Afghanistan. It was still relevant in zombie warfare, plus today they arguably faced a higher risk of encountering opponents with brains and guns.
Certainly the dust-up with the Russian Spetsnaz teams, and the various bloody noses they took in that one, had reawakened them to this risk.
Handon stayed in the number-two position behind Henno. When they reached the first guard tower, still on the south fence but closer to the southeast corner, they finally turned to head in toward the interior. They’d dipped their toes in, and seen enough to tip the odds in their favor.
Instead of staying on point, Henno took a knee beneath the tower and strong-pointed while the others filed by. Handon didn’t know what his thinking was, but he decided to trust it and go with it – and he stayed back with him, taking a supporting position.
As Juice filed by, Handon traded a look with him – both of them remembering the dead that had littered the ground at Saldanha Naval Base, their brainstems cleaved by the sharpened shovels of those Spetsnaz guys. Handon had seen it on drone video, and Juice had seen it up close. And there was none of that here. No dead destroyed by any method.
But as Handon knelt there in the dirt, he took one hand from his rifle, reached down, and picked up a handful of dry soil, crumbling it in the palm of his shooting glove. It was faintly dark on the surface – and when he dug deeper, it got sticky and tar-like, fouled by the black blood of the dead. Some had been spilt in this spot.
But then someone had come through and raked over the dirt.
Someone had not only cleared this place. They had cleaned it.
Handon briefly wondered if it was possible that a group of tightly wired civilian survivors had re-secured and occupied the camp. If so, they all needed to watch their six. And they had all better have their weapons in condition one.
But Handon already knew everyone there had brass-checked their weapons at the water’s edge. This wasn’t a group of twenty-year-old enlisted infantry, and they didn’t need to be coached. They didn’t even really need to be led, or commanded – just let off the chain. And Handon’s role was really only primus inter pares – first among equals. Even if Henno disagreed.
As the last of the team slithered by, Handon decided this level of tidiness looked more like the work of soldiers than civilians – and a particular type of soldier. It showed a level of attention to surface matters that was somewhat rare in spec-ops. But which was very common in the conventional forces.
Handon nodded at Henno, then rose and moved out, trusting him to follow.
As he fell in behind the others, he noted that the mottled air was still lightening around them – but there was still no sound from any direction. No birds. No creatures of the forest. No wind. Nothing. It was like moving through a vacuum, or an alien planet, or some weird dreamscape.
But then, just as suddenly, something did make a noise. Whatever it was had been too faint for Handon to identify it – or even to swear he heard it at all. But instinct drove him to stop and spin in place, raising his rifle.
As he did so, Henno spoke a single word over the squad net: “Disperse.”
As he finished whirling, Handon could see that Henno had moved no more than twenty meters away from the guard tower – and had already turned back to face it, even before Handon did. He had his weapon elevated, aimed up top at the firing platform and the railing before it.
As Handon raised his weapon to cover the same spot, he could now see, mounted on the lip of the railing, just protruding over the edge, the six barrels of a minigun. It hadn’t been visible on their approach toward the tower from the west. A minigun was an unusual weapon to emplace in a guard tower – but not unheard of.
No, the red light was: it was facing inward. Toward the camp.
He could sense more than hear the rest of the t
eam behind him scattering, spreading out silently toward the nearest hard cover, while automatically coordinating to cover every sector – all 360 degrees around the team’s now strung-out position.
And while both Handon and Henno held their aim on that spot, they also began to silently side-step away from each other, to be less of a clumped-up target. But they were still both caught out in the open. Actually, there was little point in going for cover now. Everything in sight was made of wood or cement blocks, and would be chewed through by a minigun in seconds if it started going off.
As they did this, Handon had to squint to make out motion up in the tower – and just above the weapon. What he saw was the top of a head. First, the tiniest sliver of salt-and-pepper buzz-cut hair… and then a deeply lined forehead… and finally a single eye, peering through the top-mounted Lead Computing Optical Sight System (LCOSS). This device was actually designed to compute firing solutions at long ranges and high speeds – usually from fixed-wing or rotary-wing aircraft.
But the range between this weapon and the men on the ground could be measured in feet. And now nobody was moving so much as an inch. So Handon didn’t figure this guy was going to need the sight, if he intended to use that thing.
And as he thought this, he saw a bright red dot appear – instantly, perfectly dead-center on the minigunner’s forehead. Henno had flipped on the visible laser on the PEQ15 mounted on his barrel rail. And it told him what he already knew – that his aim was perfect.
Arisen, Book Nine - Cataclysm Page 9