by James, Glynn
If he were to move his team in that direction, they could quickly find themselves enveloped. Where they currently stood, holding this ground, they had something to their backs. But heading down the street toward the tenement would mean leaving all sides open – and, worse, it would mean abandoning the streets they had fought so hard to clear, most likely to be overrun again. Then again, CentCom was probably even then pulling the plug on the op, based on his own recommendation.
“CentCom, One Troop, what is this target?”
“The building is under siege,” said the operator. “A group of civilians have taken refuge inside. You will proceed to the target, clear and hold its perimeter, and defend the site until evac of your team and the civilians becomes possible.”
Jameson shook his head.
“If we do that we give up all the ground we’ve taken today.”
“That’s acknowledged. But the quarantine border is now in place. Evacuation of the tenement is your new priority. CAS is inbound. I repeat. Close air support inbound.”
Jameson took a deep breath and exhaled it as a sigh. Something in the distance was causing the air, or perhaps the ground, to thrum all around them. Beside him, Eli gave him an inquiring glance.
What kind of air support? Jameson wondered, but then he felt more than heard the thrumming noise increasing. He stepped backward, and the gap where he had stood in the line closed up almost instantly. He turned and looked up to the sky, and saw three dark shapes approaching over the tops of the buildings.
Helicopters. Apaches – fast, deadly, and absurdly heavily armed.
Jameson was just wondering what the hell they were planning to do with those when the first Hellfire missile burst from the foremost helo, zipped into the ground two hundred yards up the road, and impacted with a devastating roar and explosion of flame.
Whether the Marines were ready for it or not… it looked like hell was indeed being unleashed.
A Speck
Lake Michigan
Five dreamers. Asleep upon the sea.
They had started on this journey with eight. But three had gone now. One to find his family. The others in fulfillment of their duty – giving their last full measure, for their brother warriors, and for the extended family that was humankind. All or none of these three might ever been seen again… in this life, or in the next.
Or in the terrible twilight that lay between.
So five dreamers, then. Nor were they really quite dreamers, for they did not really sleep. But the monotone thrum of the boat’s engines, the ever-cresting, never-breaking shush of the surf against the hull, were like the drone of some dream world. And the unbroken black body of the dark sea around them, and the night sky above, were like the womb. This blackness seemed to wrap tightly around them, though it spread out infinite in every direction.
And it had been a long time since any of them had closed their eyes. This mission, which just went on and on, which heaped horror upon misfortune, continued to take from them, giving little respite or quarter. Affording them no rest. Never letting up.
Then again, all of these five had endured terrible storms many times before. And all had been selected for this unit – as well as for their prior units, the elite Tier-1 special operations forces – mainly for the quality of being totally insuperable, in both body and mind. They were able to keep operating at a razor-edge of performance even in the most appalling circumstances. They never gave up, they never gave in, and they never stopped believing they could prevail.
And they were usually right.
So perhaps no other group of people had the stamina to pull off this mission. The fortitude to live through it. And the resolve to see it through to success.
But, right now, the net effect of the extended pummeling they had taken, and the swaddling of the midnight boat ride, was a kind of twilight somnolence. The five operators now slept on their feet, eyes open, or half-lidded, their slack bodies rolling with the gentle but insistent motion of the boat, as it powered them across the smooth surface of the black lake. The boat drove itself – course laid in, engine on autopilot.
And since dreams were most of what was left them, their thoughts became much like dreams. Also half-lidded, nodding, twisting restlessly at formless fantasies, and at night terrors, and at memories of the simple comforts and pleasures of the world they had all lost.
That lost world was always with them, like a sharp pang of grief, like the gnawing of a phantom limb. It was a grief that they had always to push away, in order to survive in this new nightmare world. To survive, and perhaps to succeed.
Sometimes even to dare to hope.
Most were up top on the boat, sprawled out around the deck of the small craft. But the one woman among them, the one known as Ali, had ceased her vigil on the deck and was now sitting down inside the cabin, keeping an eye on their “precious cargo,” the objective of the mission – the scientist Dr. Simon Park. Ali was trying to stay awake to help keep his spirits up. He was a civilian, and very far out of his element. As the exhaustion that follows terror had descended upon him, his light went out as well, and he now lay sprawled out beside her.
And as she looked down upon his troubled sleep, she smiled.
For an untrained civilian, he had shown remarkable resilience. For him to have survived the ZA this long, all on his own, said a lot about the man whom they all instinctively treated like a crystal bottle filled with the only water left in the world. Ali was surprised he hadn’t gone mad, sitting down in his lonely bunker for two years. Sure, he was jittery and perpetually on edge, but he hadn’t broken yet.
Ali wondered how long he could keep that up.
And so she tried to stay awake whether Park did or not. But she was now going on seventy-plus hours with no sleep, and she was all out of stimulants. They’d had more on their resupply pallet, but that had been lost with their first boat, which had foundered on the dead, and sunk out from under them.
And so Ali could no longer hold her eyes open. The curtain finally went down on even her stage. And when the stage lights came up on her private dream theater, starring in the show was… her sister, Amina. Like so much that had been lost to them, Amina was now gone forever. She had surely been among the very first to die in the fall of civilization, back in their native Somalia – where the whole planet-wide nightmare had first begun.
But Amina had been lost to Ali long before that: shuffled into an arranged marriage by their father, and given up to a lifetime of subservience, servitude – and neglect if she were lucky, abuse if not. Ali had learned and read too much by then to accept that fate for herself. So she had fled to the West, where she continued to educate herself, and then took up a life of service in the military. And had finally climbed to the greatest heights in the military world – the U.S. Army’s premier Tier-1 special operations force.
People always reacted with the same stark disbelief when they learned her previous unit of service. “There were no women in Delta,” she heard, over and over again. First of all, that was just wrong – it was a matter of historical record that for years Delta ran something they called “the Funny Platoon”. This was Delta’s classified intel section, which used its female personnel to infiltrate under husband-and-wife cover, or as flight attendants, etc. In the early 80s, they secretly experimented with bringing women in as operators. Four made it through a slightly modified selection and assessment course. And in 2013, the Pentagon officially opened combat roles to women. This included special operations units – and while not many women could hack it there, not many men could either.
And, in any case, what did these people, who had never been in it, think they knew about what Delta did or did not do? It was a black spec-ops unit! It got under her skin a little, or as much as anything did.
And Ali’s situation had been unique, with her being the first woman ever to complete the regular Delta selection – widely believed to be the most brutal and lowest-pass-rate special-forces selection course in the world. She had sta
rted her Army career as a helicopter pilot, completing the rigorous training required to fly the Apache helicopter gunship – perhaps the most deadly and complex fighting machine in military history. She was shot down twice, once each in Iraq and Afghanistan, walking away both times. Later, when the Army needed a female Somali speaker for a secret mission in the Horn of Africa, she said she’d do it – if JSOC (the Joint Special Operations Command) guaranteed her a spot in Delta selection.
They agreed, never thinking she’d pass in a million years. But they obviously hadn’t read her service record very carefully.
Ali had never failed at anything.
She’d originally joined up to do something for the world, to give back, after the priceless gifts she’d received as an immigrant to America. But she must have joined up too late, or done too little, because the world didn’t make it, not in the end. And neither did Ali’s sister. In fact, Ali had last seen Amina alive on that final mission back to Somalia, only a few months before the plague started… She had failed to rescue her sister, and she and Zack had evidently failed to save the world, and now she had to bear the guilt of that.
But now… now maybe all of it could be redeemed. They had the scientist, they had his research and preliminary vaccine designs, and they were close, so close, to making it out of there. And as Ali slept, angels and demons battled through her dreams, fighting over the soul of her sister, who was perched on a perilously narrow ledge, as Ali looked on, unable to help, and unable to scream.
Beneath them, the whole world hung in the balance.
* * *
There was one amongst the five survivors of Alpha team who did not let sleep overtake him. Only their leader, Command Sergeant Major Handon, stayed alert. He did it so the others wouldn’t have to battle the weight of their own eyelids. He stood upright, a rock, a statue for a not-yet-fallen soldier, silently monitoring the wide lake ahead as they rolled up its watery miles beneath them.
But by now everything had become very dreamlike to him, too.
So when a dark speck on the horizon grew from nothing, to something, swelling out of the barely perceptible lightness of the coming dawn, Handon simply assumed that was a dream, too. He had been dreaming awake, or perhaps only thinking, of the one team member who had left for his family – and whether he might yet come back to them.
Probably not, had been his pitiless verdict. Most likely Homer would never come home. The odds of him surviving an overland journey across a third of a continent heaving with dead were too slender and diaphanous even to measure – and much too fragile to try to hang any hope on. Deep down, Handon knew that Homer hadn’t gone off to save his family.
He had merely gone to join them.
But what really scraped at Handon’s soul was what this departure said about the fate of the rest of them. Homer had been the most professional, unflappable, and good-natured of all the members of Alpha team – which was already made up of the best special operators who had ever drawn breath. And what this told Handon was that professionalism simply wasn’t enough anymore – not enough to sustain the levels of soul-wracking, year-in-and-out, hopeless battling that was required of them, and all of it against such a terrible and endless tide.
No. This late in the day, it had to be about something deeper, something personal – Handon recognized that now.
It had all become personal for him back on the shores of Lake Michigan, in their time with Sarah Cameron and her family. It was there that Handon had been confronted with feelings he’d never expected to have again. And it was because of those that he’d had his revelation: that it wasn’t enough for them to survive, nor even enough to succeed. Because if they didn’t also safeguard their essential humanity, then there was nothing left for them to even battle back to – and they were as good as dead already.
Would the people on his team have their own revelations? Find their own inner motivations, their personal reasons for going on, so far past the normal limits of human endurance? And could anything Handon might do help them, with what was such a profoundly personal and interior struggle?
He simply didn’t know.
What he did know was this wasn’t a military operation any more. It was no longer about professionalism, or the chain of command, or duty to unit or country or humanity. Now it was, it had to be, personal.
It almost didn’t matter what had come before – all their victories, and medals, and elite unit patches, and spotless service records, from both before and after the end of the world.
Because the dead made no allowances for past achievements. And this cold, dead world would crush them with as little hesitation or remorse as a falling pallet of bricks – or as would the cold, dead universe that had always surrounded and menaced them. It surrounded the rest of us, too – all of us huddling together in our tiny, fragile cocoon of life, which now flickered like a candle in a hurricane.
Alpha’s losses had awoken them to their mortality.
And, eventually, as they all knew, their loss would be total.
But maybe they’d leave something behind.
* * *
When Handon finally decided the swelling speck on the horizon was not a dream, nor an optical illusion, but another vessel, he pulled his broad frame up to its full height, put his hands to the boat’s controls, and began to bring the throttle down. The change in engine pitch brought the others awake by degrees, drifting back in from their dreamworlds – back to this crapsack real one they all shared.
But which at least they shared together.
Ali was first up, instantly crisp, emerging from down below. “What’s up, top?” she asked. “Top” was the traditional term of address for the top-ranking sergeant in an Army company – though Handon was actually the top-ranking enlisted man in any surviving military. He answered in his rich but unemotional baritone, while still staring ahead through narrowed ice-blue eyes.
“Unidentified vessel, eleven o’clock, range about twelve hundred.”
Ali raised her designated marksman rifle in a smooth motion and pulled the night-vision-enhanced scope to her eye. “Got it. Civilian, big cabin cruiser, maybe a hundred and ten feet. Range eleven-twenty.” She lowered her rifle and scope, which had an embedded laser rangefinder in it. “And static. Probably anchored or adrift.”
“Or dead in the water.” Handon continued to bring the throttle down. Their boat, which was called the Three Brothers, slowed to a heavy churn through the otherwise still water of the lake, which was blanketed with thin patches of mist, and which still spread inkily around them, all the way out to the dark horizon.
The unknown vessel continued to grow larger, but more slowly now.
Henno, the sole surviving Brit in Alpha, spoke from over Handon’s shoulder. Handon hadn’t seen him get there, but that was common enough. “And why are we slowing, then? Just give it a wide berth and crack on.” His voice suggested that he didn’t know why he was even having to ask this.
Handon nodded in acknowledgement. He motioned to Ali and took her rifle from her. She always had the best optics. He dialed in and took a look for himself. “Definitely not moving. And I can’t see anyone on deck.” He handed the rifle back.
Henno leaned his head in closer. Handon had the impression he wanted to call him outside for a word. But there was nowhere to go. “Seriously, Sarge?” he asked in a near-whisper. “We’re what? Twenty miles from the island? Then a mile tab overland to our extraction point? We’re nearly shot of this place.”
In the glow of the instrumentation panel, Handon checked the nautical chart Sarah had left him. “Yeah. Looks like this thing’s in one of the recreational boating lanes. And also very nearly in our path.”
Henno didn’t respond to this. They both knew Handon was ignoring his question. Finally, he said, “You know it’s going to be nought but the dead on that boat – at best.”
Of course Henno was right. They had absolutely no business here, poking around in some ghost ship in the middle of Lake Michigan. But still Handon
continued to squint into the distance. Something was tugging at him… when he turned it over, he decided it might be Sarah Cameron’s husband, and particularly her son. How he had failed to save them. And how terribly they had died – so close to help and to safety.
Only steps away.
And, deeper down, Handon was torn by something more fundamental. He knew full well that they had a job to do – and that the job was literally saving the world. But coming into conflict with that now was the other mission he’d so recently come to understand: that of saving their own souls.
Handon exhaled into the near-dark. He brought the throttle back up fractionally, and adjusted their heading minutely. “We’ll give it a narrow berth. And just take a quick look.” Then he raised his voice to be heard by the others. “Close target recce. ETI two mikes.” He didn’t need to instruct them further.
Predator and Juice, who both lay draped across the deck nearer the prow, the latter nursing his broken leg, now looked at each other wordlessly. In the glow of the boat’s running lights, and the faint ambient light from the breaking dawn, they swapped weapons – Predator taking Juice’s beloved SIG assault rifle, and handing off the Mossberg Tactical shotgun he’d salvaged from the wreckage of the Cameron family. Then Predator, staying basically where he lay, rolled over onto his belly facing the port side, while Juice pulled a loose tarpaulin over him.
Dr. Park, emerging now from the cabin, watched this operation with perplexity. He guessed maybe they were hiding Predator to keep the wounded man out of danger. But this huge warrior, like a wounded lion, had hardly seemed shy of danger so far. If anything, the injury seemed to make him more dangerous to anyone who got in his way. Park knew there was a lot about these soldiers that would never make sense to him.
And, as he thought that, Ali touched his elbow, and nodded toward the hatch which he’d just come out of. As usual, he thought, I get tucked away for safekeeping. He let her lead him below, and took a seat back on the single bench seat, still clutching his laptop bag. That, at least, was his responsibility, his to keep safe. Something he could participate in.