“So you were under pressure?”
“Of course!” Murph’s voice rose. “Just before we came on our station in the gun line, the Captain and the Gunnery Officer stopped in ’51 to make sure we were ready. As the Old Man was stepping out through the water tight door, he suddenly thrust his head back in and glared at me.”
I leaned forward a little, watching Murph’s eyes. “What did he say?” I asked, intrigued.
Murph smiled wryly. “The Old Man said, ‘gunner, if we come off our first trip up the gun line with anything other than deck hands in our deep mag, I’m going to be very disappointed in you’. Then he dogged down the hatch and we opened fire.”
“Was the Old Man disappointed afterwards?”
Murph’s smile broadened just a little. “No fear!” he said. “We sent everything we had down range that trip!”
I couldn’t help myself. I smiled. Murph’s enthusiasm and passion for the Navy was almost a tangible thing. He had such a complex personality – talking to him was like experiencing four seasons in a single day. He could drift from moody to sullen, to affable and expressive in a matter of seconds.
“How long did the bombardment last?” I asked.
He glanced up at the low ceiling as though searching his memory, and then his eyes came back to mine. “We fired half that first day, and then came off the line to onload more ammo at sea while another ship took our place. Then we stood down to rest for six hours before coming back on station to start the attack all over again. It was a long week,” Murph admitted, “but I wouldn’t have been anywhere else.”
I went back through my notes. Some of the writing was smudged, the paper I had written on tattered and grimy. But within these pages was a compelling piece of America’s fight against the zombie hordes. I thanked Murph. He got up from the table. On the way back through the maze of narrow steel passageways I had a final question.
“Did it ever bother you, Murph? Firing on the zombies, I mean.”
He stopped suddenly and folded his arms across his chest. He shook his head.
“For fifteen years my home has been a sea bag and a hull number. But my parents retired ten years ago to Ocala, in Florida. I never heard from them after the apocalypse started, and I’ll probably never know what happened to them,” his tone lowered and his voice became softer. “They might have been in those hordes of undead we fired on,” he admitted. “I tell myself sometimes at night that they were. Then, at least I can believe they are now at peace.”
QUINCY, FLORIDA:
WEST OF THE FINAL FLORIDA CONTAINMENT LINE
“You were one of the Army Engineers that worked to create the fortifications of the final Danvers Defense Line, right?”
Sergeant Wally Bunton nodded his head. “That’s right,” he said around a mouthful of gum. “I was in one of the Engineering units assigned to closing off the western side of the Florida border.”
“The new abbreviated border, right?”
“Right,” Bunton said. “The Army drew a line from Panacea, to Tallahassee up to a little town called Havana. That way we liberated the Panhandle from the infection.”
I looked around me. We were sitting in the shade of an Army truck in the rubble and ruins of Quincy. Like every other town south of the original Danvers Defense Line, this little corner of Florida had been laid to waste by endless artillery bombardment. Naval ships stationed in the Gulf had done some of the damage. The Air Force had done the rest.
“What was it like?” I asked the generic question. “It must have been risky as all hell.”
Wally Bunton nodded his head. “I worked on the original Danvers Defense Line, digging the trenches east of Jackson in Tennessee. That was a cake-walk,” he said with a tone like fond reminiscence. “Back then we had time, we had equipment, we had structure. It wasn’t like that digging these trenches let me tell you. Down here, it was like trying to take a shit behind a tree in a crowded park full of people.”
The pen paused on the page of my notebook and I looked up suddenly. Sergeant Bunton wasn’t smiling. He was grim-faced.
“What did you say?”
He cleared his throat and spat the gum out. He repeated the analogy again and watched my face as I arched my eyebrows. “What I mean by that is to say it was an endless butt-pucker,” the man tried to explain. “We were digging furiously, excavators, heavy trucks… every piece of equipment we could beg, borrow or steal to get the trench line dug and the barbed wire laid… and at every moment we were expecting to see fucking zombies fill the skyline. We were trying to work quiet – trying not to make any noise. Like I said, it was like trying to take a shit…”
I nodded. I got it.
“Did you see any zombies? Was there ever a point when you and your men came under attack?”
Bunton shook his head. “We had the Louisiana National Guard protecting us. They had units all along the western Florida flank while we were getting the fortifications ready. They were posted a few miles inside the zombie zone… poor bastards.”
I frowned. “Why do you say that? Were they attacked?”
“I say it because it was the most nerve wracking duty a guy could draw,” he looked at me like maybe I was a visitor from another planet. “They were inside the zombie zone covering our ass while we threw up the fortifications.”
“So they did get attacked?”
Bunton shrugged. “Man, there was contact all along the line from St. Marys on the coast to Monticello. It couldn’t be helped. We were working right on the edge of the infection zone.”
“Deaths?”
Again, Sergeant Bunton shrugged. He rummaged around in his pocket for another stick of gum. He was a broad-shouldered brawny man with tattoos along his muscled forearms and his hair buzzed close to his skull. His uniform was covered in dust and dirt as a testament to his work. Even now, when the defensive line was established, the Army Engineer Corps were still at work maintaining and improving the hastily prepared trenches and earthworks.
“There were no deaths amongst my men,” he said. “And none that I heard about from the National Guard guys protecting us. But further east… well you hear all kinds of rumors,” he said and eyed me speculatively, as though inviting me to probe for details.
I did. It was my job. “What rumors did you hear?”
Bunton got to his feet and stretched. The sun was hot. He mopped his brow. Even in the shade the heat was sweltering. My shirt stuck to my back and I could feel beads of sweat popping up across my brow.
Bunton glanced over his shoulder. Two soldiers were repairing another truck. I could hear the clank of tools and the soft curses of their frustration. He jerked his head. “Let’s take a walk,” he said.
We couldn’t see the western trench line from here – it was a few miles further to the east. Around us were heavy vehicles and some tanks. In the distance I could see the trail of dust kicked up by trucks carrying troops.
When we were away from the vehicles, standing in a pile of grey rubble, Bunton stopped and squinted up at the sun. “I heard that a whole Company of National Guard boys from Kentucky got overwhelmed by zombies further to the east,” he said. “But the Army has kept it quiet.”
I frowned. “Where further east?” I asked.
Bunton glanced at me. “Around Jasper,” he said.
“Are you sure?”
Bunton looked away warily for a moment, as though he had suddenly heard a sound carried on the air. When he turned back to me his eyes were narrowed. “That’s what I heard,” he said. “At first the rumor was that the blanket of artillery fire we were laying down close to the border had taken out the Company. But a day later I heard that it wasn’t artillery fire at all. The zombies had attacked the line and run into the National Guard. What I heard was that thousands of the undead came out of the night and overran the perimeter. They got to the trenches and were held up by the barbed wire just long enough for reserves to be called up.”
I didn’t write any of this down, but I paid careful at
tention. “Who told you this?” I asked.
Bunton shook his head and gave me a ‘do you think I am that dumb’ kind of look. “Check it out,” he said.
“How?” I asked. “I can’t check it out if you won’t give me your source?”
Sergeant Bunton clamped his lips tightly shut and shrugged his shoulders one final time. “Then I guess it will remain a rumor,” he muttered. “And a mystery.”
CIA HEADQUARTERS:
LANGLEY, VIRGINIA
The Director of the Central Intelligence Agency sat hunched over his desk, hands clasped together and eyes closed like he was in the attitude of prayer.
Calvin Maitland was a short, solid city-bred man who looked like an accountant. His hair was cut short and swept across his forehead to disguise a receding hairline, and his skin was darkly tanned. As I spoke the man’s face changed, his features animated as he followed every word of the question. He frowned deeply, and then a moment later he smiled.
“Good question,” he said as his eyes came slowly open and he fixed me with his gaze. “And I’m glad you asked it.”
“Do you have an answer?”
Maitland’s smile clung precariously to his mouth as he started to speak. “Gathering intelligence is a complex proposition at the best of times. The United States has a highly sophisticated network of satellites as well as human resources and other more oblique resources. That’s how we piece together what is happening in the world, and where threats might come from.”
I wrote everything down, and then looked up. The man was still smiling – a relaxed expression, like he was toying with me and doing it easily.
“Thank you,” I said politely. “Now would you answer the question I asked?”
The smile faded. “I just did.”
I shook my head. “No, sir, you didn’t,” I kept my tone respectful but firm. “I asked you specifically what lead the CIA to draw the conclusion that Iran was behind the zombie apocalypse. I asked you for the actual evidence you gathered to support your claim that the Iranian government perpetrated this act of international terrorism.”
The Director leaned back in his chair and set his hands on the armrest. He crossed his legs and narrowed his eyes. “I think the answer I gave you will be suitable for your interview,” he muttered the words carefully.
I shook my head again. “Sir, your answer sounded like something you would dish up at a press conference, but this isn’t one of those. I was told you would be fully co-operative.”
Maitland said nothing. I tried again.
“I happen to think the work the CIA did to follow the trail of terrorism back to Iran was quite brilliant. I’d like the opportunity to portray that to my readers. You sandbagging me this way is just going to come off as arrogance. I don’t want arrogance. I want reality. You’re giving me filtered fiction.”
The Director’s eyes flicked down to a single piece of paper on his desk. It could have been a Presidential directive, or it could have been a shopping list. He scanned it, his eyes moving in his motionless head, and then he looked up at me again and gave the kind of heavy sigh that sounded like a child blowing out birthday candles.
“HUMINT and OSINT were critical to following the trail back to the Iranians,” Director Maitland revealed at last. “Everyone thinks the majority of espionage work these days is done through satellites. They are important, but they don’t tell you anything more than what is in a picture. They can’t tell you the ‘why’… and that’s often critical when an organization like this one is analyzing data.”
Better. I wrote furiously. Maitland was talking quickly, as though he was keen to be done with the explanation and it took all my concentration just to keep up. When he paused for a breath my hand was aching.
“We also were fortunate that some of the men and women involved in this investigation were ‘blue skyers’,” Maitland said.
I looked up from the notebook. “Blue skyers?”
The CIA Director nodded. He steepled his fingers together as if he was trying a different kind of prayer position. “Yes,” he said. “Men and women who go above and beyond the normal means of investigation – they’re people that don’t follow a trail. Instead they see a situation and ask ‘what if’. Those folks were the ones within the team that made the biggest breakthrough.”
I was intrigued. Fascinated. I had come to this interview at Langley with little expectation. Now my journalistic instincts were screaming. This was a thread of conversation I knew I needed to unravel. I also knew instinctively that I needed to be patient.
“What exactly is HUMINT and OSINT?” I asked.
“HUMINT is short for human intelligence – it’s the information that might be gathered from traditional spy sources.”
I cut in quickly. “You mean spies on the ground in Iran?”
The Director inclined his head. He rested his hands palm-down on the desktop. Clearly he had given up praying I would go away quietly. “That’s right,” he said.
“And OSINT?”
“That is an abbreviation for Open Source Intelligence,” Director Maitland explained. “It’s something that the average man in the street might not think about much, but over the past twenty years it has become a valuable form of intelligence gathering… without the James Bond glamor.” He smiled then, amused by his own comment.
I shifted my weight in the chair, arched my back as I sat up straight. “Can you explain the kind of OSINT you are referring to?”
Maitland glanced past my shoulder. I knew behind me was his office door and a wall lined with books. He hesitated for a moment and then brought his eyes back to mine.
“You have to understand that I am reluctant to divulge every source of intelligence our Agency uses…”
“I do understand,” I said. “And if Iran was still functioning with a government and an Army, I would understand it even more. But since that’s no longer the case…”
Maitland’s expression became pinched with a flicker of annoyance. He shifted his gaze back down to that single piece of paper on his desk. His eyes were moving like he wanted to look anywhere except directly at me… so I stared at him.
He capitulated with one final sigh. “Open Source intelligence is the gathering of material that is readily available to everyone,” the CIA Director began to explain. “In the old days it might be things like newspaper clippings, footage of foreign events broadcast on television… you understand?”
I nodded.
“In the last twenty years that has grown to include the kind of information that is transmitted through cell phone communications, and social media.”
“Facebook?”
The Director nodded. “It includes all forms of social media,” he confirmed.
“And Facebook gave you clues about Iran’s involvement in the zombie terrorism attack?” If I sounded incredulous, I was. I felt certain the Director was still playing his games.
“Yes,” Maitland said with conviction. “Facebook actually provided some of the early clues that ultimately led us to confirm that the zombie outbreak was an Iranian terrorism plot.”
I wrote all this down, but I wasn’t sure why. I had the feeling that at any moment, the CIA Director was going to break out into a bullroar of laughter, amused by my gullibility.
“Sir, are you serious?”
“Yes.”
I raised a questioning eyebrow and sat back in disbelieving silence. Maitland’s expression never altered. His features were set and rigid, almost as though this conversation was painful for him.
“I need more details,” I said.
Maitland nodded his head. “The Open Source Center is based in Reston, Virginia,” Maitland began. “Ironically it is the least understood intelligence discipline. That’s probably because the information gathered there doesn’t need to be stolen. The Center employs a large number of staff, and some of those staff operate social media accounts. Not all of those accounts are genuine. Do you understand where I am leading?”
I sh
ook my head. I didn’t. “You’re talking about people at the Open Source Center operating fake accounts on social media?”
“I am,” Maitland said. “And not all of those fake accounts are created with American profiles. Understand?”
I shook my head again. The CIA Director was trying to lead me somewhere and I didn’t know where. I was getting frustrated.
“Can you just tell me where this is going, sir,” I asked. “I’m really not good at quizzes or puzzles.”
Maitland looked disappointed. Perhaps it had been his last attempt to answer my questions without actually having to directly say the words. He shook his head like a disappointed father when his son drops a high ball.
“We had people based at the Open Source Center and they operated social media accounts in the names of Middle East citizens,” he said softly. “They created profiles as Iranian students, or young adults and they interacted over social media networks with genuine Iranian citizens.”
“Like friends?”
“Online friends,” Maitland said. “They would log onto the accounts at times that corresponded with mornings and evenings in the Middle East, and they would assume their fictitious identities to engage in conversation with students, doctors… the youth of Iran.”
I was baffled and confused. “Just like that?”
“No,” Maitland shook his head. “Some of the accounts we operated have been established for several years. It wasn’t something that we just did overnight, and it’s not something that we operated only in Iran. We had fictional social media accounts created for various people right across the Middle East.”
“Had?”
“Have… had… Draw your own conclusions, Mr. Culver.”
I had stopped writing. Maitland and I spent a few seconds eyeballing each other, like we were locked in a staring competition.
Zombie War: An account of the zombie apocalypse that swept across America Page 27