by James, Glynn
In and out, clean and smelling fresh.
But Fick had been doing this long enough to know that things didn’t usually go that easily.
He looked around him now, in wonder, at the unfinished aluminum interior of the B-17, and tried to imagine what dramas, what daring feats of arms, what terrifying close calls, had happened right where he sat. Looking out into the peaceful morning sky, he tried to imagine air-burst shells exploding just off the wing tips, Messerschmitt 109s coming in out of the sun, their dual MG 131 machine guns chattering malice and death. The survival rates of bomber crews over occupied Europe had been atrocious.
These bombers had been flown by some brave sons of bitches.
Fick snorted. At least he and his men didn’t have to worry about flak or fighter interceptors anymore.
But Fick, trained in military schools from an early age, knew that the history of mankind was the history of war. Not for five minutes had human beings stopped trying to tear one another to bits. It was no accident that most technological advancement had happened during wartime. Radar, microwaves, X-rays, jet aircraft, the Internet, GPS, satellites, nuclear fission… if it provided any advantage in war, if it furnished new and better ways to kill the enemy, it got discovered or created. And it got adopted.
No, people had never stopped killing each other. And now they were even doing it from beyond the grave. Human conflict just went on and on. Which was why there would always be a need for warriors like Gunny Fick, and his MARSOC Marines.
He paused in these thoughts to steal a look out the window. If he stuck his head out into the bubble, he thought he could make out a spreading patch of blue up ahead. That would be the second of three Great Lakes they would overfly on their long journey. He switched his radio to the air mission net and hit up the two pilots. “Fick here, can I get an update?”
“Yeah, Gunny, we’re still within mission parameters. Approx twenty-five mikes to target.”
“Copy that.”
Fick clicked off and looked down below them again. Now they were starting to overfly some populated – or, okay, previously populated – areas. He checked his map, and guessed maybe he was looking down at the northern suburbs of Detroit. The Midwest – more places he had never got to, and now almost certainly never would. With all those undead sheep down there, no longer needing his protection…
Fick had long considered himself to be one of the sheepdogs.
This was of a trope that had gained currency among military, police, and other first responders and guardians of civilization during the counter-terror wars of the early twenty-first century. The idea was that the great mass of humanity had no malice in them, and were as incapable of any kind of violence as, well, sheep. There was nothing wrong with being a sheep – most of them were good, honorable, productive citizens, who worked hard and took care of their families. And they would be free to simply go on doing it if not for… the wolves. These were the tiny but powerful subset of humanity who lived to threaten, to terrorize, to rip off, and to hurt and kill the sheep. Criminals, psychos, terrorists, violent men of whatever allegiance, or of none.
And the only thing blocking their culling of the sheep was… the sheepdogs.
And if sheepdogs like Fick actually looked a lot like the wolves – fierce, armed, resolved, and dangerous – it was because they had to be as willing and able to use violence as the wolves were. As a result, the sheep were sometimes nearly as scared of the sheepdogs as they were of the wolves – both because they were strange and violent, and because they reminded them of the unpleasant fact that they lived in a dangerous world with wolves in it. And that they could only go about their lives safely under the watchful eyes and guns of the sheepdogs.
But the difference between the wolves and the sheepdogs was stark: while the wolves had no empathy for anyone, the sheepdogs liked people – had in fact pledged their lives to protect them. Even if they sometimes got little in the way of thanks.
Fick monitored the empty suburban houses and yards scrolling by below. A damned sight fewer of them to tend to now, he thought.
But perhaps that only made the survivors more precious.
And maybe it made the work of Fick and his kennel of sheepdogs all the more indispensable.
In WWI, the German soldiers fighting across from the Marines in Belleau Wood had nicknamed them Teufelshunde, or “dogs from hell.” The nickname “Devil Dogs” had stuck, across a hundred years of wars.
Sheepdogs, Devil Dogs, Fick thought absently, settling back into his spot.
Whatever.
* * *
In another fifteen minutes, he hauled himself up, grabbed his rifle, and shouted down the line: “Get your Kevlars on, charge your weapons! We are five mikes from contact!” He then walked down the narrow space, slapping backs and asses, checking straps, fittings, armor, and radios. Everyone was totally squared away.
His was a damned disciplined unit.
He didn’t like to admit it, but he probably had the LT to thank for a lot of that. Most of the team’s original training had been organized and led by him. But, once again, Fick recoiled from memories of his most recent – and probably last ever – commanding officer in the Marine Corps chain of command.
He now took up a position between the flight deck and the belly hatch they would all use to exit the aircraft – after they landed and piled off to storm the airfield, secure it, and defend it. As he leaned against the vibrating steel of the superstructure, he allowed himself the indulgence of a last few seconds of quiet reflection… before the storm that was probably coming.
He took a deep, happy breath and thought: Hell – we’re the lucky ones. Not only are we still breathing air. But we’re still in the fight. Damned few, and damned lucky. But, then again, Master Gunnery Sergeant Fick didn’t believe in luck. He believed in choice.
And he believed in resolve.
He had chosen to put himself in the line of fire. That was the controlling decision that had dictated the contours of his life. It was a life where he sacrificed much, but where he always had the consolation of being first to fight. These days, in the ZA, everyone sacrificed. But, as before, a few still did the bulk of the fighting. It was that choice, which he and his men had all made, plus Fick’s resolve to keep them all alive, that were to thank for their survival, and their success.
Luck didn’t have too much to do with it.
It was resolve, and it was the choices they had made.
Which was not to say that some of their choices hadn’t been damned painful. Even as he resisted it, Fick’s memory now flashed back to that disastrous scavenging mission in Darwin, Australia, when two catastrophes had overtaken the team almost at once. First, a building had collapsed, cutting off their primary exfiltration route. Then the military barracks, which had been filled with many hundreds of dead (former forward-deployed American military personnel), turned out to be not so sealed off after all. As a result, his team had been cut off, surrounded, and very nearly overrun. In the end, they had faced a nightmarish run across two clicks of difficult terrain, with nearly a thousand zombies swarming in their rear, and more converging on them from both sides.
The only way they were going to cover that ground and get back to the landing boat alive, was if someone performed a rear-guard action at the choke point – laying down a hellacious base of fire, to slow down the horde just enough for the others to scramble out of there.
Now, maybe that man should have been Fick.
But it hadn’t been. It had been the Lieutenant.
The LT had volunteered to do it. And Fick had let him. He hadn’t had to let him – he was older, bigger, and meaner than the young unit commander. And Fick could have grabbed him by the scruff of his neck, shoved him down that gangway, and taken the rear position himself.
But that’s not what he did. Instead, he saluted – and took off running.
What tortured his mind now, and what had assailed him every minute since then, was the question of his motives for do
ing it. Deep down, some part of him knew he had let the LT die saving the team, instead of taking his place, because… because he believed himself more fit to lead the men than their commander. And he believed that the men who survived that day would be better off with him around, than with the LT. And that it was thus for the greater good.
But Fick could never say that out loud; and he never had, and never would. Because that kind of hubris in a senior non-commissioned officer was very bad news. A platoon sergeant works for the officer who commands the platoon, just as Fick had worked for the LT. But, on that one dark day, when it had really counted… he hadn’t acted like it. He had failed to step forward, and had made a decision that was beneath his honor. Because of this he had lived, and the LT had died, and now Fick had to live with that every day.
And the only thing he could think to do to make the decision a less shameful one was to make its premise more true. Now, and every day, Fick had to prove he’d made the right choice: that he was the best possible leader for the men, better than the LT would have been. He had to keep his men alive – unless completing the mission made that impossible.
And then he had to sell their lives as dearly as fucking possible.
Maybe he would run into the LT again one day, and tell him that his guys were all okay. Given the likely manner of that reunion, though, Fick guessed it was probably better not.
* * *
He checked his watch, then looked out through the cockpit glass at the enormous stretch of blue spread out beneath them. Up ahead, coming up quickly, was a pretty damned big island, in the middle of this big damned lake. The bomber’s propeller pitch changed, and Fick’s ears popped, as Chuckie started descending in earnest.
Within seconds, they had left the lake behind, blasted over nearly five miles of lightly forested island, turned nominally to the west, and lined up on the single long runway that spread out ahead of them. Their landing pattern would take them practically right alongside the single control tower, which now began to rise up on the right. And looking at the runway and area around it, Fick didn’t see a single thing moving. Certainly nothing shambling.
He smiled, figuring maybe at least the first phase of this op, capturing the airstrip, was going to go smoothly.
And then a large shearing hole, about four inches by one, appeared in the aluminum skin of the plane, above Fick’s head and to the right – coming into existence with a pinging metallic sound, admitting both a slash of light and the violent exterior wind. Fick squinted at this hole, perplexed, and then heard a shout from the rear. Looking back down the fuselage, he could see his men scrambling away from the right side of the aircraft – where another slash of light had been admitted.
A third one tore open near it, before his eyes, with another plinking sound.
Fick shouted three words up into the flight deck, which caused both the pilot and co-pilot to swivel their heads and look back at him, completely confused. And then a horrible crunching noise in front snapped their heads back forward – a large, circular, ragged hole had appeared in the “bulletproof” cockpit glass, at the same time as something behind the co-pilot’s head exploded with a shower of sparks.
“I said,” Fick repeated, even louder this time, “‘WE’RE TAKING FIRE!’ Evade, evade!!”
Hot LZ
Over Beaver Island
“What do you mean this thing doesn’t have any goddamned rockets?” Fick thundered at the pilots. “How am I supposed to insert into a denied area in the teeth of accurate ground fire without rockets?”
This outburst came only a few seconds after Fick had bodily pulled Stan the mechanic out of his way, stormed the cramped flight deck – and then instantly had his heavily laden body knocked to the deck as the ancient plane pulled up from its descent and twisted violently away to the left.
As he went down, Fick caught a flash, really just a single frame, of the control tower out of the right-side cockpit glass, before they banked away. He could see nothing but darkness inside of it. But he could also see that the big window glass of the top level had been shot or blown out, which fact he considered pretty goddamned evocative, and maybe relevant to their tactical situation.
He’d already clocked the electrical fire burning high on the back wall of the flight deck, while climbing back to his feet, and calmly unclipped the fire extinguisher from the wall and put it out.
God love whoever remembered to add THAT to the manifest, Fick thought, letting off the dispenser handles and dropping the extinguisher where he stood. Swirling white powder filled the air, but was also quickly sucked out the ragged hole in the plane’s skin, which was still admitting light and whistling from the rushing air outside.
“No rockets!” the co-pilot shouted now over the engine and wind noise. “This is a World War Two bomber, you dumb jarhead! But there’s the twin 50-cal in the tail turret!”
Fick nodded, ignoring the insult. Of course he already knew about the machine gun – but hadn’t quite considered it in the context of suppressing the ground fire they had inexplicably started taking.
His eye followed the chemical powder being sucked out of the plane, and he surveyed the gash in its skin. He couldn’t be sure, but he was starting to develop an opinion about what type of round would make an enormous hole in steel like that. If he was right, there were only a couple of types of weapon that fired it. And there were only a few likely spots to emplace such a weapon below.
Fick noted that the pilot and co-pilot weren’t panicking – they were seasoned naval aviators, and had probably been on the receiving end of ground fire before – but neither were they kicking back and whistling Dixie. He put his hands on their shoulders and stuck his head down close to theirs. Ahead, out the cockpit glass, he could see the world and the horizon coming level again as they came out of their crazy-ass evasion maneuvers. The blue of Lake Michigan spread out beneath them again, as the island receded behind.
He said, “Okay, guys, here’s what I need from you…”
Twenty seconds and one furious argument later, the grimacing pilot grudgingly brought Chuckie around 180 degrees. Within a few seconds he had flown them back to the island, banked around to the right, and now was zooming straight back in over the runway – from the opposite direction as before, and at low altitude. The white pillar of the control tower loomed at them ahead on the left.
They were going to give the tower a low, slow, and provocatively close fly-by, like something at a military air show – with the express purpose of trying to draw fire and thus locate the shooter. Fick could almost hear the pilots gritting their teeth. He clapped the lead pilot on his upper arm. “Hey, don’t worry – B-17s have taken a hell of a lot worse punishment than this! We’ll be fine.”
With that, he turned and exited the flight deck, raced half the length of the plane, bodily pulled the enormous frame of Brady out of the left-side machine gun blister, and took up that position. He didn’t use a rifle scope – it would all be going by too quickly.
The control tower flashed into view, the black maw of its flight control deck yawning.
Crack. There it was. Fick just caught the muzzle flash.
And another gigantic .50 BMG round sheared into the wing inches below where he sat.
Fick stood up again, smiling, and grabbed the team’s youngest guy by a vest strap and hauled him around. “Chesney!” he barked.
“Yes, sir.”
“Get your ass back to the tail gunner turret.”
“Sir?”
“And get your ass in it. I’ll meet you there.”
With that, he left the bewildered Marine behind him as he leapt toward the flight deck again. He knew the Kid was the only one of them who would fit in the turret with all his battle rattle on.
When he hit the flight deck, he had another furious discussion with the pilots, mostly about occupational health and safety. He wasn’t sure if he only won the argument due to being much more heavily armed than them.
But he didn’t give a shit either wa
y.
They were going back in.
* * *
Fick reached down into the turret bubble and clapped Chesney on the shoulder. The poor guy was wedged in there, practically bent over double, his gloved hands gripping the two “spade handle” grips on the back of the twin .50-caliber machine guns, his tan assault boots resting on the control pedals.
“Just relax,” Fick shouted. “Breathe.”
“Will this damned museum piece even fire, Gunny?” the Kid asked, looking back over his own shoulder, wide-eyed.
“It’ll fire,” said Reyes, who was crouching beside Fick. “We cleaned and lubed it before we took off. And we’ve got a lot better lubricants than they did in World War Two.”
“Clear your guns,” Fick instructed him, the term for firing a test burst.
Chesney depressed the V-shaped “butterfly” trigger with both thumbs, and the ancient beast shuddered and issued a mighty roar, lasting a full second. The gun worked.
They’d determined this none too soon. Everyone could feel the plane losing altitude rapidly and slowing – as they dove at the back side of the control tower, its blind side, then skimmed along over the tops of the trees.
“Those were fifty-cal rounds hitting us in mid-air,” Fick said in the last moment. “Now you pay that sonofabitch back!”
And with that, stomachs suddenly tried to fall out of asses, as Chuckie climbed to swoop over the tower – and then just as quickly attempted to climb out of mouths, as they dropped down again on the other side. “Now!” Fick shouted, as the control deck of the tower came into view behind them, the bomber showing its tail as it flew away, straight over the runway at treetop level.
The Kid put the aiming site in the center of the control room and jabbed at the trigger with both thumbs. The gun roared to life, juddering and screaming – and didn’t let off again until the tower was almost completely out of sight, which was nearly eight seconds later. The pilots were following to the letter Fick’s instruction to show the bomber’s ass directly to the target and not to deviate course.