Which it should have been in the first goddamned place.
Beside him, Fick just shook his head and muttered, “Cocky motherfuckers.”
There followed a few seconds of heavy silence – or, rather, of engine noise and wind. But then Henno, who had been in the back, pushed his way through to the front. He looked coolly around him before speaking.
“I hate to always have to be the one-man Department of the Bleeding Obvious. But what you two military geniuses have neglected is redundancy. If we’re definitely going to need one team for the next mission… then we’d better fucking well plan on hanging on to two. Hadn’t we?”
That observation hung in the air for about one second, before Handon shook his head and said: “Henno’s right.” Of course he was right.
Handon instantly realized that, for all his feeling superior to Fick for letting bravado cloud his view of operational requirements, he had basically been guilty of the same thing. He had let it become, in his mind, some kind of dick-measuring contest about which team was more willing to jump into the fire. Rather than simply a matter of making sure the job got done.
But having critical tactical details pointed out by guys not in charge was the oldest story in the spec-ops book. Particularly in Handon’s old unit, Delta, it had been an ironclad rule that the guys undertaking the mission were the ones who planned it. And their planning sessions virtually always took the form of a “Chinese parliament” – in which every member of the team pitched in, and everyone had his say. All of them had something to contribute, or they wouldn’t have been there in the first place. It had been much the same in Henno’s SAS.
Professionalism was always job one; or at the very least ought to be.
“Ah hell, he’s right,” Fick agreed. “Two is one, one is none.”
No one contradicted this – and no one could usefully improve upon it.
“Okay,” Handon said, with finality – and also realizing it was much easier this way. “We all jump for the destroyer. We’re going to take both teams out, rearm, refit, and be ready for the final push. That’s the op order. And that’s the end of it.”
He squatted down to the deck and unfolded a map.
“This is going to be a water landing, with surface recovery by rotary-wing assets. Let’s huddle up and work out a jump plan, timings, conditions, comms, and contingencies. You all know the drill…”
* * *
Fifteen minutes later, Handon sat alone back in the nose of the plane, staring silently out the plexiglas bubble. From where they were now, two things could be seen outside. First, the weather was turning – there was a front moving in from the northeast, darkening the sky. Handon could even make out distant lightning flashes. A hellacious storm was exactly what they had jumped into, to start this whole sonofabitching mission.
But Handon was too tired to curse fate, even if he’d been inclined to.
The second unmissable feature of the landscape was the dark stain that covered the ground ahead of them and to the south. It was still distant, and the coastline itself only just visible. They were cruising at 10,000 feet, so the coast, just visible on the horizon, would be about 120 miles away. That also jibed with their flight plan – of arriving over the two warships in about thirty minutes.
It was still too far to make out the carrier, and visibility was shrinking anyway. But Handon knew the floating city was out there somewhere, straight ahead of them. But the herd – that could be seen just fine. The bomber was coming in on the coast from the northwest, and the Zulu horde from the southwest – which put them on a collision course. Handon couldn’t make out any details in the thing. It was just an ugly stain, or some nightmare county-wide carpeting of black ants.
But he could see that its forward edge was already at the coastline.
And we’re headed right for it.
Handon shook his head. He was used to being the very pointiest end of the spear, and intentionally taking his team to the most dangerous places in the world. But this was kind of pushing it to the limit. They were flying straight into the very biggest herd of dead that had ever been recorded. It was just a force of nature now, caring no more for what it rolled over than a black hole cared about the planets it devoured.
Even Tier-1 guys might check their sanity at that point.
On the other hand, the only way they were getting home was by going through that.
And they also had the significant consolation of going over and past it, and jumping to the ship that would not be in close contact with the herd. It was only dumb luck that their teams were indispensable for the next mission, and thus were being sent to the rear.
Peering out the window toward the ocean, Handon wondered what was going to happen to Drake, and the Marines aboard the Kennedy. Not to mention all the other sailors and aviators on that great ship, which was about the last evidence of humanity’s genius for creation, and for large-scale destruction…
All those brave men and women, whom Handon also knew were essentially sacrificing their lives, if it came to that, just to get the eight operators of Alpha team in position to insert for their target objective – and to be there to retrieve them when they came out again. It would be a hell of a sacrifice, and a terrible price to pay. Handon sure hoped it didn’t play out that way. Not least because he didn’t feel particularly great about ducking out, going to the rear, and leaving them to their fate.
But this wasn’t his fight now. Bad feeling or no, he needed to get his head together and focus on his own mission: which was getting these two teams over their jump point, out of the plane, into the water – and then safely back out of it again and onto the destroyer.
He couldn’t do anything about all the other stuff right now.
* * *
Ali caught Emily looking out the corner of her eye at Fick again. Suddenly, the burns on his face were really visible – the ones he had suffered when he saved the bomber from being blown up by a flaming fuel hose, back on Beaver Island. So Ali dug around in the aid kit beside her, found two packets of burn cream, and held them out to Emily. She looked over, hesitated – then took them, rose, and padded over to where Fick was field stripping his side arm on a cloth laid out before him.
The old Marine looked up as she arrived and looked down wide-eyed upon him, hand on hip. Then she sat down, crossed her legs, tore open one of the packets, and leaned in toward him. “Come here,” she said. Fick laid his pistol slide down on the cloth and leaned in. “Closer,” she said. He stretched his neck out toward her, obediently.
She squeezed some of the cream on to her fingertips and began to daub it gently around the angry red skin on Fick’s forehead, cheek, ear, and jaw. When she’d finished that, she examined both sides of his hands, tore open the other packet, and salved them as well.
Gunny Fick just sat quietly, and obediently, and let her minister to him.
And he found it made some of the pain go away.
Madness in the Method
JFK, Deck Four – Stores
The cacophony of scratching and banging echoed through the huge space and the mountains of stores as the dead pummeled the hull of the carrier. In the near darkness, Kate, Dooley, and Rob, along with a dozen other shanghaied crew members who just happened to cross the Captain’s path as he wandered the lower decks, breathed heavily as they pushed carts laden with canisters of fire retardant along the dusty track at the center of the deck.
When they arrived at the service tank – a small compartment in an adjoining passageway that served as both the heart of the fire-defense systems for the ship, and the water-pump room – the pile of canisters was already stacking up. Rob pulled his truck up just short of the hatch and watched, leaning on the bulkhead and getting his breath back, as two sailors quickly emptied the pallet and moved the dusty cylinders into the room beyond. Inside, Rob could see another guy attaching canisters to valves, flicking switches, and checking gauges. He hadn’t a clue how the wash-down system worked, or how this was going to help the situati
on, but he had faith in the Captain, and hoped to hell the man knew what he was doing.
He also hoped they hadn’t all fallen into the clutches of a madman. But the eagle pinned to his collar said they had to do what he said, either way. Anything else would be mutiny.
As they headed back to the other side of the sprawling deck, Rob heard the roar of engines and glanced back. The front of stores was lit by the same low-powered strip lights, and although it was still pretty dark, he could see another mass of activity. A forklift truck, an old one that had been decommissioned and put aside for parts, was driving onto the elevator ramp, and behind that three other vehicles were lining up. A deck cleaner that Rob knew no longer worked, its pump system split and unrepairable, a portable generator station with a fuzed contacts, and a digger missing its hydraulic system – all decommissioned and useless except for spare parts, but all still mobile.
A pang of doubt hit him. What the hell were these for? But he shrugged it off. There had to be a method in all of this, otherwise they would all be up on deck with the militia instead of down in the belly of the ship. And he probably preferred it down here, all things considered.
Halfway across the deck, they passed the Captain and an engineering rating with a terrified expression. Rob didn’t catch the whole conversation, but it seemed tense, and the engineer was scratching his head as the Captain chattered at him.
“I am aware of your concerns, but we have no time to discuss this, and it isn’t a request. We have an hour or less and those ballast tanks have to be emptied.”
“Yes, sir. I understand, sir, but straight out of the valves without control? The system isn’t built to just jet the water out at full pressure. We’re supposed to use low-pressure controlling pumps. If we bypass that and just open the valve, it could…”
Rob pushed on, and even though the Captain’s voice went up a notch as they headed deeper into the stores, he didn’t catch the rest of the exchange. Instead, he concentrated on keeping his breathing steady. He hadn’t had this much exercise in months.
Rob was about to speak himself when the banging started. It was distant at first, and definitely not the noises of the dead. It was the sound of metal on metal, and soon grew loud enough that it could have been right next to them. All three jumped, startled at the intensity of the noise.
Over at the far end of the deck, Rob could see a half-dozen people, split into two groups and slowly moving along the two curves of the hull, walking backwards. Each held a large wrench or a tire iron – evidently any heavy, metal object that would make a loud noise – and they were banging on the hull, pounding it as hard as they could. Rob shook his head, not even trying to fathom why they would be doing this – but then, today, there were a lot of people following the bizarre orders of the newly re-emerged Captain, and Rob didn’t really understand a lot of the reasoning. He only knew to do what he was told.
“This is nuts,” said Kate, as she pushed another cart alongside him. “Where did all these people come from? I thought most of them should be up top with the militia.”
Rob laughed. “What, like us? The old boy must have grabbed every hand he passed. It’s not been like this since we raided that weapons cache in Singapore. You think we’re busy now, you should have seen the place then. We loaded four hundred metrics in a single day, helos coming in every five minutes. Forty-second Street was quieter that day…”
Rob broke off, and was silent for a moment, off in his own head. Forty-second Street really had been quiet on that day, as far as cars and living people went, and it was hard to forget sometimes. He remembered trips in to Manhattan as a child, his parents holding one of his hands each, sometimes a little too tightly… and he recalled how awestruck he always was at just how many people and cars could be crammed onto one street.
“What’s the ballast?” asked Dooley, tearing Rob away from his own little world of memory.
Rob glanced back. The kid was doing his best to keep up, panting like a dog as he jogged along behind them. Thank you, kid, for drawing me away from that dark place.
“The ship uses water tanks all over, for stability,” Rob answered. “As well, there are some solid ore-mix tanks down in the belly, which are basically to counterbalance the ship’s uneven weight. It’s to stop it leaning the wrong way. Older carriers had a list to starboard, but with this baby they found it was also listing at the back, because of the extra decks they added there. The ship is… heavy on the ass, should we say.”
“Right,” said Dooley.
Rob grinned. Nothing like being an old-timer for knowing shit that baffled the young ones. “Look, kid. We’re stuck on a sandbar. Right?”
“Yes.”
“So, if they empty the aft ballast tanks, the front of the ship will rise. Though I don’t think it’ll be enough. It’ll lift it quite a way, but we’re pretty jammed up, and they can’t do nothing about the solid ballast. That stuff is buried deep and it ain’t going nowhere.”
“Oh,” said Dooley.
Rob was pleased to have some better idea of what they were all doing down here. But he still felt as if he knew too little, and also too much, both at the same time, and it felt to him like memory’s long march was now coming to an end.
…And They Have a Plan
MH-60 Seahawk Helo, Airborne Between the JFK and the Murphy
Captain Abrams watched the ruffled sea spool out fifty feet below them – the wind was picking up, and some weather coming in – but he didn’t get to watch it for long. This was a one-minute helicopter ride, from take-off on the destroyer to landing on the carrier. Still, the fresh air of the ocean and the white noise of the rotors were a welcome change from the human-scented air and non-stop chatter of his bridge.
It was always nice to get out of the office.
He twisted at the waist to look behind him and around the cabin. The MH-60 Seahawk was the Navy’s multi-mission helicopter of choice, and was based on the Army’s venerable UH-60 Black Hawk – but grayer, and with a hinged tail to stow away better on ships. The R (or Romeo) variant, like the two that lived on the Murphy, was next-to-last-generation, and considered “Sierra Hotel” (shit hot) by the pilots and crews that flew them. They had ballistically tolerant rotor blades, self-healing fuel tanks, transmissions with fail-safe lubrication, triple-redundant hydraulic and electrical systems, and protective seating for all crew members.
Basically, they were very hard to knock out of the sky.
The four-man crew on this one, call sign Firehawk One, consisted of a pilot, a co-pilot/ATO (airborne tactical officer), a sensor operator, and a crew chief/door gunner. And they and their aircraft were extremely capable of carrying out a wide array of missions, including combat search and rescue (CSAR), anti-submarine warfare (ASW), medical evacuation, close air support, and even special operations. With its four AGM-114 Hellfire missiles and GAU-16/A minigun mounted in the door, plus its ability to insert Marines quickly and precisely into denied areas, it was rather better optimized for zombie warfare than the warship that housed her.
Abrams was damned proud of them, and damned glad they were his.
As their flight approached the stern of the supercarrier, Abrams could see an F-35 blasting off from the angle deck. But their timing must have been good, because they didn’t go into a holding hover to wait for a break in the air ops cycle, but instead just flared straight down toward the angle-deck runway, right beside the island.
In the last few seconds before their altitude bled away, Abrams scanned out across the flight deck and found that he could make out, well, a hell of a lot more going on than he could really make out. Men, machinery, and equipment sprawled and crawled everywhere – and he’d never seen so many warm bodies, never mind heavily armed ones, all drilling on the flight deck at once. Most were forming up around the prow. As the Seahawk’s flight path brought them in from the stern, Abrams figured maybe he was lucky not to see whatever was in the ocean out in front.
The big helo kissed the deck on three fat tires
then settled, as its big side door slid open and Abrams hopped onto the deck, alone. Ordinarily, he’d be arriving with some staff – and, ordinarily, there’d be someone to greet another vessel’s captain coming aboard. Abrams sighed. He guessed it just wasn’t the kind of day for naval protocol.
Anyway, he knew the way to the Flag Bridge, and took the steps two at a time.
* * *
When he pushed open the door to the briefing room at back, it was standing room only. Every seat at the small table was taken, and several officers and senior enlisted men held up walls around the periphery. Abrams saw a lot of faces he knew – Drake, the CAG (commander, air group – a good-looking senior pilot whose name escaped him), the Air Boss (name also forgotten), one of the senior Marines who wasn’t Gunny Fick (a Gunnery Sergeant whose name patch said Blane), Master Chief Shields from Engineering… and a few others that he couldn’t quite place.
Oh – and as he’d been simultaneously excited and terrified would be the case, also present was the CIC officer who had drawn him to this whole strike group in the first place… but now, in the service of maintaining his professionalism, that was the one face he struggled to keep his gaze from falling upon. He didn’t think he’d be able to keep up his poker face if they locked eyes.
Abrams also realized, slightly belatedly, there was actually one seat unoccupied. It had clearly been reserved for him. Uh oh… Drake nodded at him and Abrams sat, while a man he’d never seen before spoke – in an English accent. Now that Abrams looked at him, he was also wearing a British forces uniform.
“…I suppose what I don’t understand is why we can’t just seal the hatches leading to all the compartments that are adjacent to the hole. This being a ship, every compartment and passage ought to be watertight, right? If we can’t seal it off on the outside, do it on the inside.”
Arisen, Book Five - EXODUS Page 13