Toni Harper’s eyes blazed with hostility, but also something else – something so fleeting and elusive that I didn’t recognize it – until it was too late.
“I’m not callous,” she said. The anger that was in her voice lost its way and somehow became sadness. “My mother and father, my kid sister, and my grandmother all lived in Orlando.”
She stalked for the door. I thought the interview was over. Just before she left the room, she turned back. There was a glistening tear on her cheek.
“I’m a professional,” Toni Harper’s voice trembled. “It tore my heart out knowing my family had a chance to be saved, but couldn’t be.”
FORT RILEY, KANSAS:
America has always cherished its heroes, turning them into larger-than-life public personalities – even celebrities. And yet the first real hero to be recognized during the zombie war was perhaps one of the most humble and unassuming men I had ever met.
He was waiting for me patiently in a hangar at Fort Riley, a slight tall man, leaning casually against the canopy of his UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter. Chief Warrant Officer Sam Grear, Bravo Company, 2nd Battalion of the 501st Combat Aviation Brigade shook my hand and smiled with the kind of expression that suggested he was acutely embarrassed by the attention.
He was wearing a ‘pickle suit’, a green one-piece aviation uniform that had been replaced by the Army a few years earlier. Grear had bright blue eyes, and a peculiar far-away gaze. I guessed him to be in his early thirties.
We walked out into the bright sunshine, while all around us mechanics bustled like bees around the huge hulking shapes of 2nd Battalion’s helicopters.
“You’re uncomfortable about this, right?” I asked.
Grear gave me a sideways glance, and nodded his head. “I know you want to interview me about the rescue ops we flew during ‘Operation Containment’,” he said. He was softly spoken man. “I just don’t understand why. A lot of crews have done what me and my crew did.” He shrugged his shoulders. “They deserve attention too.”
I nodded. “But I can’t interview them all, Sam,” I said. “And the Army thinks your exploits deserve to be known and appreciated by everyone. They’ve nominated you and your story as being indicative of the heroism our pilots have shown. In a way, you’re a spokesperson for all the other guys. Think of it that way.”
He put his hands behind his back, clasped them together and kept walking. He was frowning thoughtfully. After a hundred yards of stony silence he stopped suddenly and lifted his face to mine.
“Okay,” he said. “What do you want to know?”
I had some prepared questions, based on the newspaper accounts of Grear’s actions I had read. I flipped open my notebook.
“According to what I have read – and what the Army has so far released – you were flying your Black Hawk helicopter on a reconnaissance and rescue patrol when you spotted several survivors, fleeing from a large swarm of zombies. Is that right?”
Grear made a face. “No,” he said, and shook his head. He took a deep breath. “My copilot, Chief Warrant Officer Mike Tolliver was the one who first sighted the refugees.”
I nodded. “Okay… so tell me what really happened. Let’s set the record straight.”
High overhead helicopters circled in the sky like lethal birds of prey so that the air was alive with the distant pulse of beating rotors.
“2nd Battalion is GSAB – general support. That means we fulfill a range of different functions,” Grear explained. “So when the plan came for a series of sweeps into the dead zones of Georgia, as part of Mission Hawk’s Wing, our unit was one of the first ones mobilized.” The pilot paused for a moment to see if I understood him. I did. He went on.
“We were flying missions throughout the day, concentrating our efforts around Athens and Atlanta – they were our areas of operation. We went in with four Delta snipers aboard –”
I cut him off. “Your crew? How many men?”
“There was me and Mike Tolliver upfront, and we had two crew chiefs, Staff Sergeant Kim Wilson and Staff Sergeant Paul Rolandson in the back of the bird. They were on the miniguns.”
I nodded. “Right,” I scribbled down the men’s names. “And you had four Delta snipers aboard as well.”
“Correct,” Grear nodded. “The cargo door was open on both sides of the bird and the Delta boys were in the opening as we swept over the dreads.”
“Dreads?”
“Undeads,” Grear shrugged. “That’s what we call ‘em.”
I made a note of that. Grear watched me writing everything down, like it was important to him that the record be accurate. I looked up at him, encouraging him to continue.
“It was just after oh-eight hundred, the second week after the Danvers Defense Line had been finalized,” he began. “The defensive line was beginning to fill out with troops from around the country. We still weren’t ready for a major attack, but we were getting there quickly. The orders came down for us to start flying ops looking for refugees that had somehow escaped the apocalypse further south.”
I studied the young man’s face. “How did you feel about that?”
He shrugged his shoulders. “I joined to serve,” he said simply. “I was glad to do my part. My whole crew was. Mike had family in Florida. Most of the men I know were affected in some way or another.”
I nodded, and then remembered something. “You weren’t always a helicopter pilot though, were you?”
Grear looked a little surprised. “How did you know that?”
It was my turn to shrug. “Research,” I said vaguely.
He regarded me carefully for a moment, and then we started walking again. Grear began to talk.
“I was a Marine before I became a pilot,” Grear revealed. “When I was nineteen I went to train in the Marines. I went through Officer Candidates School at Quantico. Every candidate starts out as a sergeant, and I enjoyed the training, but three years later I was injured… and out of the military for two years.”
I frowned. “You didn’t go off and find a new career?”
Grear shook his head. “I wanted to serve,” he said again, and I could hear the commitment and passion in his voice. “So I eventually joined the Army to be a pilot, signing on as a specialist at basic training and a sergeant at Warrant Officer Candidate School. After graduation I went to flight training school.”
I was impressed. The man had been dedicated. “Any regrets?” I asked.
Grear shook his head and smiled humbly. “No,” he said. “I love flying.”
We walked for a little ways in silence. One of the circling Black Hawks came in to land, and for several minutes the roaring sound of the chopper made conversation impossible. As the big helicopter’s turbines and rotors slowly wound down, I flicked back to my list of prepared questions.
“Tell me about that operation in more detail,” I encouraged. “What happened when Chief Warrant Officer Tolliver saw the refugees?”
Grear nodded his head. “There were six of them,” he began, “running along the road. We were operating a few miles north of Atlanta. There were burned out and abandoned cars choking the highway. We were flying low, maybe a hundred feet of altitude, certainly no more than that. Mike saw movement and when I looked down through the helicopter’s chin bubble I saw a couple of kids and four adults. The adults were running, dragging the children by the hand, almost pulling them off their feet. I could see the panic in everyone’s faces, even from a hundred feet. One of the men in the group stopped suddenly.”
“He just stopped and did what?”
“Nothing,” Grear said. “The guy just stopped running and stood in the middle of the blacktop for a few seconds. Then he collapsed.”
“And that’s when you decided to land in a nearby parking lot, right?”
“No,” Grear shook his head. “There was a parking lot but we couldn’t land there – or anywhere nearby,” he said. “There were simply too many power poles, lines… strike zones that we traditionally stay cle
ar of.”
“So what did you do?”
“There was a field about a click away,” Grear said. “We started to circle around towards it, but then one of the crew chiefs saw a swarm of dreads, about five hundred yards behind our refugees. They were coming on fast – too fast.”
“You hadn’t seen the ghouls before that moment?”
“No,” Grear said. “We thought the refugees had seen our ship and were simply running towards us. We didn’t realize they were being chased.”
“So what happened next?”
Grear’s eyes became kind of vacant, and his voice changed completely, it was bleak and flat, lacking any timber or resonance, as though he was deliberately trying to sanitize his account of all emotion and simply recall the facts.
“I threw the bird into a tight turn and told the crew chiefs we were weapons free, and then swung the Black Hawk broadside to the road. The guns were 7.62mm miniguns. They fire up to four thousand rounds per minute.”
“And so your men opened fire.”
“No,” Grear said. “They waited until I had put the helicopter between the zombies and the refugees. I dropped to just twenty or thirty feet. We were hovering right across the road. Staff Sergeant Kim Wilson opened fire, and so did the Delta Snipers.”
“You took a great risk,” I said. “I imagine there was no margin for error.”
“There wasn’t,” Grear admitted. “And breaking discipline – dropping that low in an area filled with potential strike zones –was something that frightens the hell out of the best pilots. But at the time I didn’t see any alternative.”
I wrote all this down as quickly as I could. The sun was starting to sink towards the horizon and two more of the helicopters that had been circling high overhead dropped down out of the sky to land. Grear suddenly turned on his heel, and we started back towards the big hangar.
“What happened when your crew chief opened fire?” I asked.
“All hell broke loose,” Sam Grear said, and for the first time I saw a wry smile on the serious young man’s lips. “The minigun tore into the dreads and flung them back like they had hit a wall. It ripped them into pieces and left them spread and spattered across the highway.”
“But they weren’t dead, of course.”
“No,” Grear said. “Some of them went down and stayed down. Some of them were so badly torn apart that they no longer posed an immediate threat. But it wasn’t the end of it.”
“What happened…?” I prompted.
“I swooped along the road and set the helicopter down in the middle of the freeway. It was tight. An eighteen-wheeler had overturned and spilled its cargo of boxes across the pavement. I sat the helicopter down in front of the truck, about two hundred yards ahead of the refugees.”
I had to ask the question. “Were you calm?”
Grear shook his head. “No,” he said. “I was scared. So was Mike, but we were well trained, and in moments like that you fall back on your training. It’s what gets you through. I wasn’t really frightened until later on when I thought about the risks I had taken… but by then we were back at base being debriefed.”
“What happened once you set the Black Hawk on the ground?”
Grear frowned, like suddenly he had to think hard. “Everything happened very quickly,” he confessed. “Like it was a blur. The Delta boys took up firing positions on either side of the road and crew chief Staff Sergeant Rolandson jumped down onto the blacktop and started running towards the refugees.”
I shook my head. I could imagine the bravery of this man and the rest of his crew. I doubted whether I would have been so courageous in similar circumstances.
“What happened?”
Grear narrowed his eyes and frowned. He wasn’t looking at me – he was staring off into empty space. “The noise was chaotic,” the young pilot said quietly. He shook his head as if the horror of that clamor was still reverberating in his ears. “The helicopter, the screaming of the refugees, the sniper fire coming from either side of the bird – everything was a roar of confusion. I could see the dreads through the side window of the chopper. They were gathering themselves around a couple of burned out cars just down the road. The distance was hazed with swirling smoke. The dreads started forward – started to run at us, and I could see the terror on the faces of the children. The sound of the dreads got louder – I could see their bodies were twisted with the madness of their infection. Then, one of the kids fell over. She lay there in a crumpled heap and then got up again, limping and crying. There was blood spilling down her leg. One of the women tried to scoop the child up in her arms but she must have been too heavy to carry. Mike was thumping at his harness, just about to get out of the chopper and run forward to help. I stopped him. Through the coms I told crew chief Wilson to ready the minigun.”
“But you were on the ground, right, and the refugees were running towards the helicopter?”
Grear nodded. “I was prepared to take off, hover just above the road to give the miniguns a clear field of fire over the heads of the civilians if it came to that. We knew we had other birds in the area, and that if we could hold the swarm of dreads at bay long enough, another ship might be able to drop down and pick the refugees up.”
I could see the scene playing out in all of its gruesome horror in my imagination. I could visualize the sheer terrified desperation of the fleeing civilians, and the dreadful fear that must have gripped them as the snarling zombie horde began to spring forward to hunt them down. “But it didn’t come to that?”
“No, thankfully,” Grear said with a sigh. “The little girl got up and took a few staggering steps. Then one of the Delta guys ran forward under the cover of the other snipers. He snatched the child up one handed like she was a sack of rags,” Grear shook his head. “He was still firing from the hip, running back towards the helicopter with the kid tucked under one arm like it was nothing.”
“You got them all?” I asked.
Grear nodded. “Three women, a man and two young girls. We got them all to safety before the dreads were able to regroup and reach the helicopter. Crew chief Rolandson carried the civilian who had collapsed over two hundred yards on his shoulder. That was heroic.”
We walked the rest of the way back to the hangar in silence. There seemed to be nothing left to say. Sam Grear’s modest, humble recollection of his bravery and that of the men with him on that fateful flight had said it all.
I shook the man’s hand and looked him in the eye. “Thank you,” I said, like the words had more meaning than merely my thanks for his time. He looked at me, and then smiled slowly.
“Are you going to interview any of the civilians – the people my crew risked their lives to save?”
I shook my head. “No,” I said. “I’m just trying to record America’s military response in these interviews.”
There was a brief moment of silence while Grear considered me. Finally he leaned closer, his voice still soft and serene. “Make an exception,” he said. “Talk to one of those people we saved. Because if you don’t at least mention the human aspect of this whole damned horrible war… then what were we fighting for?”
He leaned back, his gaze steady and implacable. “I joined the Army to defend America. Those people are what we’re all fighting for. Let them have a say.”
I thought about that. Grear had a point. But there was a problem.
“I… I wouldn’t even know where to find them?” I gestured.
Grear smiled again, so that for a moment, he almost looked at ease. “They’re less than an hour’s drive away,” he said. “They’re in a temporary refugee camp outside of a little town called Blue Rapids.”
‘CAMP K14’, OUTSIDE OF BLUE RAPIDS, KANSAS:
39°40′55″N 96°39′33″W
‘K14’ was not the kind of refugee camp I was expecting. There were no high wire fences and no armed guards. The camp was made up of maybe a hundred large canvas tents, set out in the kind of precise lines that only the military could hav
e managed.
‘K14’ was spread out across open grassy fields just beyond the limits of a picturesque little town named Blue Rapids in the north eastern corner of Kansas. It reminded me of a massive summer camp. Here were the temporarily homeless and the dislocated – the people who had been fortunate enough to flee from the zombie horde, or, like Gloria Kingsman, been fortunate enough to have been rescued by helicopter pilots like Sam Grear.
There was a family, communal atmosphere. Groups of young children ran through the tented areas, crying out and laughing, while mothers pegged ragged clothes from the guy ropes. There were a couple of trucks parked by the side of a nearby road, and soldiers in green fatigues were unloading food and water supplies onto hand carts. In the middle of each tented line, huge bonfires burned in drums as the afternoon light gradually turned to the radiant colors of sunset. Here and there, I could see the muted glow of lamps burning behind thin canvas walls.
Gloria Kingsman was a woman in her thirties who looked a decade older. She had been living in the camp with her two daughters for over a year since that fateful day on the highway north of Atlanta. The time had not been kind to her. She looked thin, and there were dark shadows of fatigue smudged below her eyes. Her face was pinched with stress. She sat on the edge of the canvas chair with her legs crossed and her hands fidgeting in her lap. She stared at me, and I had the impression there was something hollow about her – as though all the energy and vitality had somehow been drained away.
“You want to talk about the men who rescued us, right?” she made it sound like a question, but it wasn’t. The camp personnel had already told her about my planned visit the evening before.
I nodded anyhow. “That’s right,” I tried a friendly smile. “I just wanted a few minutes of your time to check some details.”
“You’ve spoken to the pilot, Sam?”
“Yes. He suggested I talk to you.”
“Why?”
Zombie War: An account of the zombie apocalypse that swept across America Page 9