“Da,” Vavilov said. He drew on the cigarette and tried to hide himself behind a thick swirling screen of smoke.
“Tell me more about Glavinoski,” I said. “If you are right, he will go down in history as the third Antichrist. What was he like?”
“I was right,” Vavilov said petulantly, as though I was questioning his intelligence. “The CIA had the evidence they needed before they launched the revenge attack on Iran.”
I nodded. “Okay, then tell me about this man.”
Vavilov shrugged his shoulders eloquently. “I have told you,” he insisted. “He was a drunk and a womanizer.”
“And a thief.”
“Da, and that too.”
“What was he like to work with back at the Institute?”
Vavilov chewed his lip for a moment. He took one last deep draw on the end of the cigarette and then stubbed it out in an ashtray that he found behind a pile of books. “He was young then,” he said. “And a firebrand. Do you know that word?”
I nodded. Vavilov looked satisfied. “He would come to the facility with red eyes and smelling of alcohol and women’s cheap perfume. He liked the ladies. And he liked the prestige of being one of the mother country’s elite scientists. He had a big ego,” Vavilov gestured with his hands, drawing a large circle in the air. “He thought he was the brightest of the bright.”
“And was he?”
“Yes,” Vavilov said in a moment of pure candid honesty. “He was a ruthless fucking genius.”
PART 3: ‘OPERATION COMPRESS’
The Interviews…
FORT BENNING, GEORGIA:
FORWARD BASE – NATIONAL UNDEAD CONTAINMENT COMMAND
I felt like I was suffocating – like all the air was being sucked out of the room by the man’s restless energy and overwhelming presence.
SAFCUR III stalked impatiently across the width of his office and then came back behind his desk again. I could sense his brooding resentment of me, but I didn’t believe it was personal. I hadn’t been in the room long enough to piss the man off yet. Rather, instinct told me that it was the imposition of his time he really resented. He had more important things to do than answer a journalist’s questions.
General George Tash thrust his jaw out at me and there was a curl of distain at the corner of his mouth. He balanced on the balls of his feet like he wanted to leap across the desk and choke the life out of me.
He was a tall, spare man with a wavy crop of black hair just starting to sprinkle grey. He had a thin nose and fleshy jowls that made his face look long, and gave him the countenance of an undertaker. He glared at me.
I flipped open the cover of my notebook. “Thanks for your time, General Tash,” I began politely. “As the current active SAFCUR responsible for the containment of the zombie outbreak, when did you take over from SAFCUR II?”
“I took over from Zac Winchester about a month after the Battle of Rock Hill.”
‘Were you surprised by your appointment, especially given the success of that engagement?”
“No.”
“Why?”
“Because I was part of General Winchester’s team that planned that attack, and he has been an important part of my team in planning the assault across the southern states to win them back.”
I frowned. I had no idea the succession of leadership against the zombies had been so overlapping – so cooperative. I had thought each appointment had been quite separate.
“So there was never the possibility that SAFCUR II would maintain his overall command once the decision was made to invade the southern states and push the undead back into Florida?”
“No. It was a matter of horses for courses,” General Tash said. “My experience, and my knowledge of the area we were moving into were critical.” The General folded his arms across his chest and narrowed his eyes warily. “If you’re fishing for some kind of conflict or friction, you can forget about it,” he snapped suddenly. “Commanding our armed forces against the zombies was not some kind of pissing competition, son. It was an unprecedented display of cooperation between every aspect of America’s military from the top, all the way down to the men on the ground that risked their lives. Understand?” He barked the last word like an order hissed on a parade ground.
I got the message. I let the matter rest and changed tack. “Can you tell me about the offensive, then?” I was working hard to keep my tone neutral. The General’s personality was as prickly as a barbed wire fence. I wondered if he had grandchildren. If he did, I was pretty sure he would be the grumpy grandfather…
“Was there a key attack during the operation you think is deserving of mention?”
General Tash shook his head. He still had his arms folded. “No, because the offensive wasn’t made up of a series of battles. Instead, it was all one rolling push right across the line.”
I arched my eyebrows in surprise. “The entire Danvers Defense Line?”
“That’s correct,” the General said. His voice had lost its edge like maybe his mood was slowly thawing. “We put over thirteen hundred tanks into the field – everything that was made of steel and ran on tracks we could mobilize went through the fortifications along the line at the same time. An hour later over a thousand troop carriers and engineering vehicles came behind them, using the same tactic that had been employed at Rock Hill. Above the advance were Black Hawk and Apache helicopters…”
“And before the attack? Did you use artillery?”
“Yes,” the General said. “What we lacked in field artillery we made up for in Air Force and Naval bombardments.”
I took a deep breath. “You turned the states of Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina into a wasteland.”
The General glared at me. “Not my problem.”
“You devastated thousands of hectares of forest.”
“Not my problem.”
“You destroyed every town, city and community across the entire south of America.”
“Not my problem!” The General was simmering with growing resentment. His eyes became black. “My only task was to win,” Tash’s tone was like acid. “And to do so with the least amount of risk to the men under my command. That’s what I did, so don’t give me that fucking tree-hugger bleeding heart shit about the goddamned environment, son! I don’t give a fuck about trees, or buildings. I care about my men. Their lives were in my hands.” He stabbed his finger at me like he wished it were a weapon. “That was where my responsibility began and ended.”
I sat back. The room seemed filled with electrical static the way the air crackles before a thunderstorm. I had pushed the General’s buttons deliberately because I wanted to see what kind of a man had led our troops into the most epic military assault in America’s history.
I didn’t like him.
But I respected him.
He was a cold bastard – a confrontational man with an imposing presence and a fierce temper. But I accepted too, that he wasn’t given the burden of SAFCUR III because he was a media darling. He got the mission because he was capable of doing the job. I decided I had seen enough. I backed off, softening the tone of my voice and letting the tension melt from my body.
“General, can you talk me through the assault? I’d like to try to understand how you were able to orchestrate such a massive drive into zombie territory, and how your units were able to defeat literally millions of zombies.”
George Tash let out a long breath, but his eyes still smoldered. He remained standing. He went to the window of his office and stood staring out through the glass for several seconds, his hands clasped tightly behind his back.
“Every fort along the Danvers Defense Line was an FOB for our troops,” he said, talking with his back to me, his shoulders stiff and his voice remote. “At zero hour, when the assault began, the tanks poured into enemy territory and formed up into line at their designated LD.”
“You mean one long line that stretched all the way from the coast across to the Arkansas border?”
I scribbled notes. My cheeks were burning. The man’s lack of tact was pissing me off.
“The tanks formed into lines, each one up to a hundred vehicles wide, in exactly the same way they had at Rock Hill,” he went on to explain.”
“But the zombies… weren’t you worried that too many would escape through the gaps between tank formations? Was that a consideration?”
“Of course,” Tash growled. “But after more than seven days of non-stop artillery bombardment and air attacks, with the skies thick with helicopters, the risk was minimal. Most of the undead that were marauding near the Defensive line were obliterated or made redundant by the barrage and the choppers.”
“Redundant?”
“Incapacitated. No longer a viable threat. Dismembered…”
“What about as the tanks rolled further south?”
The General turned around at last and I could see the altered set of his face. His expression had softened, the darkness had gone from his eyes. He wasn’t smiling, but he was no longer snarling either.
“You don’t seem to have a clear picture of exactly what we were facing,” Tash said bluntly. He dropped into the chair behind his desk and rested his bunched fists on the table like two hammers. “First, the largest mass of zombies we encountered during the early days of the assault was estimated at just a few thousand. And second, those undead we did fight had largely been rendered useless by the artillery and air support.”
“Just a few thousand? I thought there would be millions…”
“There was,” Tash said. “There still are. But they’re not all swarming over Alabama and Georgia,” he said like the notion was utterly ridiculous, and naïve. “The majority of the undead are still in Florida – never left. They never spread far enough north to be a threat. The only undead we ever had to fight were the ones who came out of Florida, or were infected in the states from Mississippi across to South Carolina. We didn’t have to kill them all. We only had to destroy the ones we encountered.”
I made a note of the General’s comments and then underlined the words. It was critical, and a point that many people had probably never considered.
Me included…
“So as the assault struck deeper south, did the numbers of zombies increase?”
“Considerably,” SAFCUR III nodded his head. He swung his chair around until I was staring at him in profile, as if he was sitting for a portrait painting. “The first seven days of the assault were the most challenging because we were operating across a broad front, but as compensation, the undead numbers were less and the artillery and air attacks had been concentrated over many days. But as we moved further south, we were gradually able to compress the line. The offset to this was that the number of zombies we were fighting increased as we neared the border, and we were also unable to be as thorough with our rolling artillery barrage and air assaults. We had to keep the assault moving – that was a critical element.”
“Why?” I honestly didn’t understand. “Surely you couldn’t run tanks as big as the Abrams and even the Bradleys twenty-four hours a day. You would run out of fuel, and there would be mechanical problems, even if there were no zombies to contend with.”
General Tash straightened and swung the chair round to face me once more. “That is correct,” he said. “But I never said we ran the tanks continuously. I said the assault was continuous.” He got up from the chair and started pacing again. The restless energy that had lain dormant suddenly came back and he sparked back into perpetual movement. “We used the tanks in carefully planned stages,” the General explained, “with units moving forward and then halting once each new objective was reached. They were then overlapped and replaced by another wave of vehicles while the first tanks were repaired and refueled, and the crews rested. It was at those points that new outpost fortifications were constructed.”
“You built more forts? Where? Across Georgia and Alabama?”
“And South Carolina and Mississippi,” General Tash added. He cracked his knuckles and then flexed his fingers like a strangler about to do murder. “The outposts were not forts,” he explained. “We didn’t have the time. Behind the troop carriers were Army engineer units. As a strategic point was seized – such as a hill or a vital intersection – the tanks were posted, the troops in the M113’s formed a perimeter… and the engineers built small fenced installations that would house troops and vehicles if the assault faltered or failed. We needed outposts – safe places for the men if our line was breached, or if the weather set in and delayed the attack.”
How big were these outposts?”
The General shrugged. “It depended on the environment,” he admitted, “and it depended on what was available to the men on the ground. Often materials were flown to the location by helicopters. If there was an abandoned airfield nearby, then we would airlift heavy equipment.”
“Were these outposts ever required?” I leaned forward suddenly. “I mean, was there ever an instance…?”
“No… not a situation where the attack was ever in danger of faltering or failing. However there were two occasions where individual elements were forced to make use of the defenses until they could be rescued by Black Hawks.”
“What instances?”
The General made a face like he was deciding whether he should share the details. He took a long time. Finally he sighed. “We lost several men who were operating out of M113’s,” he said at last. “They were mopping up in an area south of where Athens, Georgia once stood. Our satellite images of the artillery bombardment had shown the city devastated, but you can never obliterate an entire city – you can never really flatten it and remove all threats. The men were head-shooting zombies that had been crippled by the artillery and the rolling wave of armor. One of them got bitten…”
“And he turned?”
The General nodded his head. “He was working with a team in the rubble. He attacked several of the other men nearby, and we had multiple losses.”
Multiple losses… the clinical term sounded like the kind of antiseptic expression a man used when he didn’t want to admit the reality.
“You mean several soldiers turned into zombies and then attacked others that were working in nearby vehicles?”
“Yes.”
I frowned, and picked my next words carefully. “How many men were infected with the zombie virus, sir?”
General Tash pressed his lips into a thin stubborn line. “I’m not at liberty to reveal the number of casualties.”
I sat back in the chair and shook my head. I had a feeling the interview was about to turn hostile once more. I shrugged my shoulders. “Well if you won’t tell me, should I make up the number? Should I say over a thousand men were killed when an infected zombie attacked a group of brave soldiers who were mopping up behind the advance? Should I say it was more than two thousand…?”
Tash glared at me and I glared right back. “It wasn’t anything like those numbers,” he snapped. “And to print that kind of bullshit is inflammatory and irresponsible.”
I shrugged my shoulders again, this time in an off-handed way, but said nothing. Tash narrowed his eyes. “Sixty-two,” he said grudgingly. “They were Marines who had been called in to work with the troops assigned to the M113’s.
“Sixty-two?”
“That’s right. By the time the men were able to react and retreat to the protection of the vehicles, they were being over-run. The surviving Marines opened fire from the cover of the troop carriers and were eventually able to reach one of the outposts that the engineers had built the day before just a few miles to the east. Black Hawks later extracted the men. One of the rescued Marines died later in a field hospital from gun shot wounds.”
“A zombie shot him?”
Tash shook his head. “He was wounded in t
he battle – the fog of war…” the General’s voice lowered. He clenched his hands together. “It can happen…”
I set down my notebook and rubbed my forehead. Tash and I lapsed into a respectful, but uncomfortable silence for a few minutes. I was thinking about the Marines who had become infected – their bravery and the tragic circumstances that had overwhelmed them. I was thinking about their families, and the men who were their comrades being suddenly forced to open fire on guys they knew to save their own lives.
I looked up. “What was the other incident?” I asked.
Tash looked deliberately bewildered for just an instant. Perhaps he was hoping I would forget to ask. He went back to the office window. Outside, the sun was beginning to set. “We lost a small number of men from the Arkansas National Guard… and quite a few engineers.”
“How?” I didn’t ask about the number of casualties. I wanted to know the circumstances of the incident first, in case the General tried to stonewall me for details again.
“They were men from the 1st Battalion 153rd Infantry Regiment based in Malvern. They were mopping up undead on the west flank of the front in Mississippi,” SAFCUR III said in a careful measured tone. “They were a team of soldiers in an M113. One of the men went down injured – bleeding. No one apparently saw what happened. The soldiers evacuated the man to a fortification that was being built along the I55 about fifty miles north of Jackson.”
“Had the wounded soldier been infected with the zombie virus?” I asked with a slow dawning sense of horror.
Tash nodded his head. “The M113 reached the fortification just as the man was turning. He infected everyone within the defense.”
“Everyone?”
Tash’s expression was grave. “Several more men from the 1st Battalion and almost one hundred engineers that were completing the fortification.”
“My God…” I breathed softly. “How did… how did you contain the outbreak?”
Zombie War: An account of the zombie apocalypse that swept across America Page 23