Operation Wild Tarpan

by Addison Gunn

  Were they trying to retain their individuality amongst the mob? Keep from being overwhelmed the way that captain had fallen under PFC Klansman’s influence the previous day? Miller couldn’t be sure, but made note of it.

  Putting down the binoculars, he angled the EMP device’s waveguide to focus the beam’s spread across the FOB, and centred it on the trailers. The final piece of the puzzle was the flux compression generator, the part of the device that made it a bomb. And a powerful one.

  Miller wasn’t entirely sure he understood how it worked. He’d only had a very brief introduction from the Rats who’d handed it to him. The flux generator’s core was made up of coiled wire wrapped around explosives. By charging them with capacitors, the blast forced the coil apart, boosting the electric charge so high it dwarfed lightning strikes, and all that power was forced through the device’s antenna. That, with the wave-guide, formed a focussed beam that would burn all electronics to slag, even military hardened gear.

  Miller turned the mechanical timer’s wheels to set it for ten minutes, and pulled the arming pin out of the generator. He’d asked how safe the device was, and had been told it was perfectly safe. The weapon couldn’t hurt you. Unless you were anywhere physically near the thing when it blew itself apart.

  “Doyle, you ready with the mines?” Miller called out the door.

  “Nearly.”

  “Good. We’re live,” Miller announced. He twisted the last arming key on the antenna block, and ran through the checklist one last time as the clockwork timer’s wheels rolled. “Ten minutes and counting. No need to rush this. We leave nice and orderly.”

  Hsiung gave the device a worried glance. “Which exit path do you want?” she asked, holding up her phablet and its latest download from Northwind.

  Miller checked it, high-stepping over the puddles where the three they’d killed had fallen. “Second option. South out. Go the way we came a few blocks, then break east for the river. Unless there’s something I’m not seeing.”

  Hsiung followed, flicking through views, muttering to herself while Morland and Doyle set up an infra-red sensor for their claymores in the corridor and stairwell.

  “Trix?” Miller yelled.

  She joined him in the corridor, a military radio—evidently stripped from one of the corpses—dangling from her hip. The earpiece cable was wrapped through her belt. She had it cupped to her ear, shaking her head. “Listen to this,” she said, holding the earpiece out.

  Miller took it, and came up against a wall of noise. At first he thought the system was jammed, too many channels lain over each other. This wasn’t the mob’s synchronized moaning chorus. These were conversations, words clear in the mess. But Miller could barely pick out individual voices.

  “—the mess tent’s shut up again—” “—can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs—”

  Nothing coherent. He couldn’t tell who was responding to what. He was never all that good at eavesdropping in public, focussing on one conversation out of a dozen. He could just about listen to a friend over a table in a busy restaurant, but this… This wasn’t just bad radio discipline, this was impossible.

  Then, out of the noise he heard a trooper mention patrols near Marcus Garvey Park. Miller shook his head. “Fuck,” he muttered.

  Du Trieux’s eyes narrowed. “Time to go.”

  The team followed Miller down the stairwell. They paused for just a minute near the bottom floor, waiting for Doyle and Morland to finish pasting another IR sensor to the wall and wiring it to a set of claymore mines they wedged into the stairwell corners. They were leaving the device alone for just a few minutes, but Miller wasn’t taking chances.

  Heads down, weapons low and camouflaged against their bodies, they shuffled around a corner a block up and ran directly into a band of troopers.

  There were three soldiers in all: one in the driver’s seat of the Bravo, twisted in his chair, talking to someone behind him, the third perched on the side of the vehicle, ripped fungus spores out of the fuel line.

  Just as the driver’s eyes squinted in confusion at the sight of them, the one at the fuel line shouted, “What were you doing in—?”

  Then the twelfth floor windows blew out behind them.

  In a flash Miller and the rest ducked down an alleyway, sprinting from the echoing shots as the troops’ bullets popped from behind them.

  No time for delay. The last thing they needed was a firefight in the heart of Infected territory.

  Racing down another alley, and cutting across the street at breakneck speed, the group stopped short at an abandoned store front to catch their breath.

  Once satisfied they had shaken the patrol, du Trieux checked her radio. It had fallen almost silent.

  The EMP explosion, on the surface, didn’t seem to have done much. There was no flash of thunder, no electrical sparking, no errors making the phablets crash. The wave guide had focussed the beam across the park alone. But if all had worked according to design, every piece of electronic equipment in the forward operating base, from wrist watches to Bravo control circuits, were now dead.

  The only voices on the military airwaves now were a few scattered patrols screaming bloody murder, demanding to know what had happened, and where everyone had gone.

  Du Trieux yanked the batteries and stuffed the radio into one of her pockets with a satisfied nod.

  Miller fingered his earpiece as he followed the others back into the alley outside the shop. “Northwind, Wild Tarpan primary target burnt.”

  “Understood and congratulations. Return to base and await orders.”

  “En route,” he replied, jogging to catch up.

  Morland, just in front of him, held open a chain fence gate, and Miller ducked through.

  After another block they paused to blend into the background, staring like worried civilians as several Bravos rushed back to Marcus Garvey Park.

  They then crossed the avenues towards the river.

  Before they reached the shoreline a shooting star appeared in the midmorning sky, searing white as it streaked by. It exploded in a black spear of fire-dappled smoke, and another star appeared. A third, a fourth, all tumbling overhead and to the east, towards the Astoria Peninsula. They all blew apart, the blast-echoes reaching the team moments later.

  “What the…” Hsiung shaded her eyes.

  Morland stared gormlessly up like a child watching fireworks. Doyle knew what it was, so did du Trieux—it was up to Miller to break the news, as artillery shells tracked fire across the sky.

  “Antiballistic DEW-CIWS.” He said it the way his father, an Air Force man before retirement, always had. Dewsie-Whiz. Directed energy weapon/close in weapon system. Miller shut his eyes, and saw white spots dancing, burnt into his retina. “Defence lasers. They’re burning artillery shells out of the air. Stockman’s shelling the compound.”

  “But that’s okay, right?” Morland gaped. “They’re knocking them out of the air?”

  “We only see what’s the lasers are hitting. Not what gets through,” Miller said, pointing at the horizon.

  Dirty smoke rose from the direction of home.

  5

  IT WAS IMPOSSIBLE to get through to anyone at Northwind or the compound. They weren’t burnt off the air like the Army, just not answering. Busy, Miller hoped.

  They counted four out of the compound’s six attack helicopters twisting into the air and slanting toward the barrage’s source. Rotors twirling, side-mounted fanjet engines screaming for every last sliver of speed, the choppers chewed the air to pieces in their desperate sprint toward the attack.

  And still the shells slipped through the defensive laser-web, hammering the compound below.

  Northwind might not have been answering, but the Cobalt access codes gave them the feeds off the drones circling the skies over the compound.

  They watched their phablets with mounting horror. The scene was pandemonium.

  Within minutes, three breaches had been torn open in the compound w
all. The northern sections, where engineers had already started concrete reinforcement, held up, but towards the south, near where Miller had stood at barricade six, sections had collapsed into rubble. Infected mobs, civilian and military both, poured through the gaps like medieval besiegers, running down side streets and into the sectioned-off refugee shanties before the heavies could arrive in their exoskeletons and hold the breach.

  On infra-red, it looked like one man approaching the gates was wreathed in rat-things tearing him apart, but a second, longer look showed he wasn’t under attack. The swarm was following him in, rushing past him like attack dogs, chasing a fleeing trooper down ahead.

  Large sections of the compound had been walled off from one another in case of just such an attack, to help contain the damage. Members of the Rats moved in with flamethrowers, licking the streets with tongues of fire that caused as much destruction to home territory as the enemy did, but the Infected didn’t dare advance, giving the civilians a chance to flee deeper into the compound’s depths.

  Shells continued to rain down, the Rats’ DEW-CIWS systems only able to shield the most heavily populated parts of the peninsula. But even where the laser web was concentrated, artillery slipped through.

  Miller watched in muted dread, chewing the inside of his cheek until he tasted copper. He watched as shells struck buildings he knew held civilians, refugees, and employees. Tiny dots scrambled on the phablet screen. People were running for their lives, trapped like fish in a barrel.

  It seemed to go on forever, but eventually the air attack silenced Stockman’s artillery. It had only been twenty minutes, but the damage was extensive.

  Miller found an open relay channel and heard the cheers, but it was more than a minute before the shells already in flight finished landing on the peninsula.

  Taking the opportunity, Miller and his team made it back overland, taking the footbridge over to Wards Island, and the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge back to Queens and the Astoria compound.

  BY THE TIME they arrived, the worst of the attack was over; but the city surrounding the compound had been reduced to smoking ruins, obliterated where the DEW-CIWS had simply let the shells fall.

  Miller and the others pushed through the rubble. Climbing over fallen walls and hopping over piles of brick and concrete, they inched toward the compound too stunned to speak. The damage was immeasurable, the city unrecognizable.

  And irreparable. S-Y hardly had the resources to reconstruct the damage to the wall and the infrastructure inside the compound, much less the surrounding areas outside the Astoria Peninsula. Manhattan was a ruin, and likely to stay that way.

  As Miller ambled around a crater in the middle of 27th Street a surprisingly profound grief flooded him. To his mind, the heart of New York had just stopped beating. He kept his eyes ahead, looking directly at the compound gate a block away, trying not to see the details, but they were impossible to miss.

  As he fought to gain control of his emotions, he heard the roar of a crowd.

  On his left, a mob of Infected rushed in a screaming horde directly at them.

  Civilian men and women in tattered clothes and in various stages of starvation shrieked and clawed the air on both flanks. Men in military uniforms ran at the centre of the mobs, armed and firing at Miller and the others.

  Jarred into action, Cobalt-2 sprinted toward the gate with every ounce of strength they had left.

  What was left of Switchblade guarded the entry. They exited the confines of the walls and maintained access to their entry point, randomly shooting to provide cover, but it was all for nothing.

  Once the Infected had mobbed on the left, another approached on the right and Cobalt-2 were soon surrounded. They had no choice but to fight hand-to-hand and inch their way through the swarm.

  Firing at will, throwing punches, Miller ran and shot, twisting on his feet, running a few metres, then smacking a civilian out of his path, only to come face-to-face with an Infected officer. Without hesitation he lifted his Gallican and put a bullet straight through the officer’s eyes.

  With a surge, the Infected civilians surrounding that officer spilled out and away, into the street in scattered formation. Miller watched them recede and shouted to the others on the top of his lungs, “Take out the officers!”

  Bullets pierced the air from all sides. With awful precision, Cobalt-2 and Switchblade drilled the soldiers to the ground. Most of the Infected civilians spilled away, but others did not, and those left behind, still trying to further the attack toward Miller and Cobalt, were soon mowed down.

  Miller and his team killed, again and again, without respite.

  It was a bloodbath.

  Eventually, Cobalt linked up with the team from Switchblade at the gate, and fought through together. Once the entrance was closed behind them, Cobalt were ushered away from the front lines.

  Miller heard the Switchblade commander order his troops to kill anyone in the vicinity of the compound wearing anything other than an S-Y security uniform. He was sickened with himself when he subconsciously nodded in agreement.

  Just as he turned to count the heads of his team, three attack helicopters zoomed overhead. Miller understood now: with air support, the Infected assault would likely be fought back down to a siege and eventually stopped. The remains of Stockman’s assault would slink back into the rubble of Manhattan like cockroaches and Miller would live to see another day.

  He tried to be relieved.

  IN THE AFTERMATH, and on the faltering bandwidth keeping the White House alive on the internet, the President addressed the nation and the world on a backdrop of S-Y workers picking through the wreckage of the refugee shanties.

  “We are, today, a wounded nation. A broken nation. No matter what tribulations we face, our hearts bleed for our families, our friends, our countrymen in New York City today.” Huxley Fredericks gazed down the camera lens with all the majesty a dozen sessions with Gray’s plastic surgeons could bring. “This tragedy, this violence striking at the heart of us all has one origin behind it. The Archaean Parasite.

  “But we cannot blame the Parasite alone. For those who wilfully pursue infection, who attack those trying to cure the sick, their own sickness cannot, will not, be a shield for them to cower behind. They are criminals.

  “Major-General Stockman, and regretfully the entirety of the 11th Infantry Division, are criminals. Criminals against humanity, war criminals, for we are now at a time of war. Not only for survival, against climate change, ecological catastrophe, and famine, but against ourselves. This is a civil war against our country, and our enemy is within.” The President stiffened, leaning in towards the camera. “As we all know, we are at a low tide, but American will and strength of heart are as strong as they’ve ever been. So I call on you all, servicemen and women, citizens, our allies within NATO and our other friends internationally, to come to America’s aid.

  “The Archaeans must be stopped.”

  OPERATION WILD TARPAN was on hold, pending nightfall or a secured perimeter. Besides, they couldn’t go after Stockman until Northwind had time to track him down. Right now, all drones were buzzing over the compound to monitor possible security breeches.

  No time for a shower, this go around. Out of the refugee rags and poured back into combat gear, a plastic-wrapped mealpak and some water each, Cobalt were kicked out of the personnel halls and onto the walls, whether they were ready or not.

  Doyle stood, body erect and face tired, rifle at his shoulder, shooting Infected who tried to swim around the wall’s side and climb back onto shore.

  Miller watched him at work, almost numb to the repetitive bang, slap, the bodies in the river, the gouts of blood and water.

  He tried taking out one of his earpieces, but the rifle’s blast hurt his ears, so he set it back in place and tried to understand why the Infected continued to doggy-paddle out into the river, one after another. There was a string of corpses floating in the muck. In fact, some were already being gnawed by black eel-like creatu
res downstream. You’d think that would have been clue enough that they should stop. But they didn’t.

  Miller didn’t get it.

  How could that kind of horde mentality be stopped? What was it even for?

  Miller preferred trying to understand the Infected rather than trying to understand Doyle, who paused for a sip of water, then latched a fresh magazine into his weapon’s stock and began killing over again.

  Miller had lost count of the people he’d killed that day. Not because of the extent of the number—it couldn’t have been more than six, including the fight through to the compound and the solider in the Marcus Garvey Park building—but because he didn’t want to remember their faces. Didn’t want to remember the sound and feel of his knife cutting into flesh and bone.

  He wiped sweat from his face, and got up behind one of the sniper screens of heavily layered gauze across an armoured slit in the compound wall’s upper lip. It was possible, just, to focus his binoculars through the rough weave to get a darkened picture of the streets below.

  With their forward operating base trashed, the 11th Division were having trouble with Northwind’s drones. The drones had been loaded with electronics jamming packages that could, now that the FOB’s electronic warfare section was down, intercept and block almost all military communications within the city at will.

  Trouble was, the Infected weren’t stupid. They weren’t using the radios anymore, even though each transmission tied down a helicopter sent out to drop a missile on them. But they were sending wretches out into the water for Doyle and the other snipers on the walls to hit, over and over.

  Why?

  Were the swimmers laying down a pheromone trail, like ants, and the Infected were helplessly chasing it to their doom?