by Dave Lund
Sarah was still trying to convince Erin to help teach the rifle class; she was just too good with one not to help, but Erin really didn’t like the idea. She didn’t like people anymore and would rather stand alone and be ready to fight. Jason had been talking to her more, and she didn’t mind him so much, but everyone else really annoyed her.
The low pops of pistol fire sounded in a random cadence, all at similar times, but at different rates. Erin set her binoculars down and sprawled out on the cold metal roof, lying prone next to her big rifle. Another volley of pistol fire echoed in muffled pops just as the air was ripped apart with a hard boom. Erin fired her rifle, the sharp crack of the big 50-caliber round passing over the pistol shooters’ heads, causing some of them to duck. Almost six hundred yards down the dirt road, a reanimate’s skull vaporized into a red and black mist, the body collapsing to the ground.
Some of the members of the class clapped, some of them looked shocked, and two of them looked annoyed and were already facing the targets again, ready to train. Jessie watched the class reactions carefully.
Those two, those two want to be here, they want to bring the fight to the dead. These other five, they’re here because it’s something different, but they’ll be content to live out their days cowering underground. There will have to be a test to be accepted into the rifle class for now, there are just too many people to train to be bothered with window shoppers. Jessie took a few notes down in a small Field Notes notebook and put it back in her pants pocket. She would have to organize a social for the class; that’s how she’d get her read of them, that’s what Bexar would do. No, Bexar would pass out beer, pour drinks, and light a campfire. He believes you learn more about a person after a few drinks around a fire than any other way. Jessie looked around and saw nothing in the way of trees, firewood, or liquor stores. She would have to make do her own way.
Coronado, CA
Hammer and Snow were yelling at each other; it wasn’t really yelling but what the gunny in Aymond’s first Force Recon platoon would call “recon yelling,” which was more like an angry whisper. They deeply believed each of them was right, but they weren’t willing to compromise OPSEC and give away their position by being loud. Although it was sort of humorous to watch, Aymond finally had had enough.
“Gentlemen, really it doesn’t fucking matter because we don’t actually have that boat anymore. The Zodiac is tied up across the bay. If, and that’s a big if, the PLA haven’t found it. I’ve written it off as a combat loss, so move on.”
Both of the men immediately stopped their argument, each involving a better use for the Zodiac than the other. The Chinese patrols had slowed down the day before yesterday; now the Marines had observed the PLA settling into what appeared to be a routine. They were ready for another operation. The question was this: Would it be the last operation or could they come back to their makeshift FOB and do another. Aymond thought this to be the last and they would have to relocate; Kirk and Davis thought they could roll the dice again, and the rest really didn’t care as long as they got to “blow some more shit up.”
“We’ve crippled their ability to offload containers, we’ve disabled the runways at Halsey, and we’ve blocked major access to the harbor. That leaves one airfield available that we know they’re using. We’ve seen that they have heavy lift operations. Do we try to disable the runway or just create havoc and strife before moving on?”
The team sat silent after Aymond’s question.
“Wow, great help, guys. OK, first, what would it take to assault the air field and destroy the runway?”
“A battalion and an airstrike.”
Aymond looked at Gonzo and was about to respond to his smart-ass remark, but Gonzo cut him off.
“Seriously Chief, think about it. We got lucky and pulled off one crazy operation, but we had a huge distraction to help. We don’t have that anymore. We do this the old-fashioned way. First let’s agree that our time at our brother SEALs’ facility is over. We gather what we can for gear and we load to move out when we’re done. Second, we cache our rides and set up for some old school psychological operations. Start snatching people out of their Jeeps while on patrol. Take their uniforms, and then do it again. Kill them, let them turn, and send them back as a Zed surprise. Maybe put down some leadership in the spirit of Carlos Hathcock: sneak in, get close, kill the general, and turn into a ghost.”
“Anyone else?”
Simmons spoke up. “I like it, but do we even know where the leadership is? Where is their command post?”
Aymond agreed. “The corporal has a point.”
“We scout it out, Chief, send out two scout/sniper pairs. The rest work the PSYOPS, body snatching and the like. Have a rendezvous time and date; if you’re still alive you show up, if not you don’t.”
“That’s great, Hammer, but I’m not really keen on losing any more of you.”
“Well, I’m not really keen on becoming a fucking Zed either, Chief.”
Aymond looked at his watch. The sun was setting; it was already too late in the day to launch any real night operations. “How far of a swim would it be from the closest end of Halsey to Shelter Island?”
“Couldn’t be more than about a half-mile, Chief.”
Aymond nodded, trusting Chuck to know; he was their best diver.
“How long to move in concealment from Shelter Island to the Recruit Depot, Chuck?”
“Moving only at night, including the swim, probably two days to get all the way around undetected.”
“OK, this is our last operation. We pack to leave and we’re heading east when we go. We saw San Diego. The PLA ended up here. I think they’ve screwed up, if not and they’ve established a strong beachhead at one of the other big ports, it’s going to take more than just us to assault those positions. If the big ports are already claimed by the PLA, destroying one lone airfield where we’ve already shut down the bay won’t matter. The operation launches in twenty-four hours. Take note, gentlemen, these are the assignments …”
St. George, Utah
Bexar wasn’t feeling much pain; perhaps Doc was right about the homebrew. They sat outside in the cold, crisp air, high on the hilltop; the beer tasted good and the fire felt great. If not for the moans of the dead in the distance and the cast on his arm and leg, this could have been a typical camping night before the fall of man.
Most of the rest of the prepper group was around, except for the two that were holding listening posts to sound the alarm if any of the dead or the other unfriendly locals came up to the compound. This group of preppers was all over the map. Guillermo and Angel made sense in that they were a family and this was their home, but how they’d all met and banded together was quite unlikely. From the stories it sounded like it had been a combination of groups overlapping between people, and more than a few nights around this fire pit with beers in hand. The original plan had been implemented after the group sent out the bugout signal to get to the compound.
The setup impressed the hell out of Bexar. Angel, concerned about an EMP much as Malachi had been, had designed his home with that in mind. Bexar couldn’t imagine how much it cost to do all of that prep work during construction, but really, compared to the rest of the compound, it was probably the lowest cost item of the bunch. They had massive underground tanks of water and treated fuel for the backup generators; the water was fed by a well, which was an illegal well when it was dug, like that mattered now. The eight-foot-tall wrought-iron fence running the property line wasn’t cheap fencing to look good, it was solid and ringed by steel pillions concreted into the ground, each camouflaged as large planters, with native plants growing in them. The wrought-iron fence was ringed with razor wire. The pillion planters would stop a vehicle, and the fence would stop the dead, even though they hadn’t planned on the dead. The whole thing looked like a hardened Columbian drug lord’s compound straight out of a movie.
Solar power panels and wind power kept the battery banks charged, and backup systems were in p
lace for repair and eventual failures. The food, supply, ammo, and gear storage was staggering, and they also had large lockers stocked with personal gear and food. John told Bexar that the most perishable goods were going first—hence the homebrewed beer—but they were set for being there nearly indefinitely. Stocked with medical supplies and extremely stable food stores like wheat berries, these guys made Bexar feel like a complete amateur when it came to his group’s prepping.
To be fair, the combined income of my group doesn’t even come close to touching the single household income of Guillermo and Angel. We did the best we could … which wasn’t fucking enough.
Bexar let out a heavy sigh as he listened to the wood crackle and watched the fire dance. John took the opportunity to refill the nice stainless insulated pint glass in Bexar’s hand.
“Bexar, I can’t imagine being out on the road like that. How did you drive all the way across Texas, all the way to Colorado and now to here? We’ve been here since Day one. We have everything we need and have no intention of leaving.”
Bexar looked at his pint of dark beer. I’m not drunk enough for this bullshit; if he wants to know what it’s like then he should take a trip, see the country, and fight some goddamned bikers or a cult …
“John, thank you for the beer, it’s excellent, but I’m already bushed and should probably lie down … with the crutches and all, I can’t really carry the cup with me.”
“Don’t worry about it, we’re just happy you’re on the mend; do you want any help getting back in the house?”
“No, thank you, I think I’ll manage.”
John poured Bexar’s beer into his empty cup and sat down to watch the fire, wondering how their two guests could have lived through so much. He didn’t understand that by living, they’d died a little every day.
Groom Lake, NV
“Major, I’m trying, but a lot of the bands that would be the easiest for people to make contact with, things like CB and FRS, those little walkie talkies you buy at sporting goods stores to take hunting, they just don’t fall into the right frequency to work over the horizon. Hell, they’re not even good for more than a couple of miles.”
“Bill, that’s if you follow the rules. The rules are over, they may not be able to talk back, but could you broadcast on the CB frequencies at a high enough power to reach fifty miles? How about a hundred, or across the state?”
“Power, yes, but that’s not how it all works; those frequency ranges physically don’t work well over long distances. Blame God, blame Marconi, hell, blame Al Gore, but it doesn’t work.”
“What does work that we’re not doing? What could be possible that we’re missing? Have you talked with the survivors trickling in every day? Each of them says that every extra day spent out there with the dead is another day they would probably die. Hell, instead of cases of MREs they should have stored cases of Xanax; all of them are strung out from the intensity of this new life. So if there’s some other way to reach survivors, some way we can help them get here, we need to do it.”
“I don’t know, Major, maybe a comprehensive advertising campaign, billboards, magazine ads and such?”
Wright glared at Bill.
“You’re right, I’m sorry, Major, it’s just that I’m running out of ideas too. If telegraph still existed then it would be simple to just tap out messages, dots and dashes … CW across the airwaves … that could work.”
“See-W telegraph?”
“No, C-W, continuous wave. If we have any survivors with any sort of skill or knowledge they might make a spark gap radio!”
Wright still glared at Bill; he knew satellites, high-end technological communications methods, but radio history and design was one subject he’d slept through happily.
“Spark gap, it’s old school, like original old school radio communications from the nineteenth century, but depending on how someone built their rig it could be transmitting in the medium frequency range, Top Band … even as low as AM broadcast radio. It’s hard to propagate over long distances, especially in the summer, but if I had nothing this might be something I would do. You could build it with goddamned car parts!”
Bill turned away from Wright and called over two of the airmen to help as Bill began to draw what he needed to build it. Just as well, the more they fought to get survivors safely inside their doors, the more problems they were having keeping the doors open and working. Jake told him he was working on a topside solution, Wright made a mental note to check in with The Mayor and see what that solution was and how it was going. He walked over to a small group of airmen he had working on their own communications problem.
“Well gentlemen, any luck tracking our birds?”
“Major, the ephemerides from the calculated projections we’ve been able to work out seem to be correct. We have tracking, the satellites seem to exist, but take the GPS constellation for example: they all exist, they all appear to be there, but the signal isn’t reaching the ground, at least it isn’t reaching us. Something is broadcasting on the L1 and L2 frequencies. We don’t have the equipment here to work this out correctly, but we think the signal is being jammed.”
“The Chinese?”
“I guess, but Major, we have no way to tell. If we were back at The Springs and all our gear was operational, we could, but we’re really limited with what we’ve got here.”
“What about SATCOM?”
“They seem to exist as well, so does MILSTAR and AEHF, but we’re just not getting anything on those frequencies. We’re not sure if the downlinks are being blocked, the uplinks are being jammed or what; none of the diagnostics we can do here are working. We can’t even get a radio unit to lock onto signal, which makes me think that the downlink is being jammed.”
“Then what about everything else? The Keyholes? What about the stealth satellites the National Reconnaissance Office swear don’t exist?”
“For the stealth birds at this point, Major, it would do you well to go stand in the middle of the lake bed with a telescope. Our imaging satellites are gone, probably disabled or destroyed by China’s hunter/killer satellites, but once again we don’t have the gear here to track that fully. We have some radar tracking that would imply it, but we’re still not one hundred percent.”
Wright frowned. They were under attack, that much was certain; their ability to control and use their assets in space were systematically being shut down or blocked by someone. This wasn’t some kid with a laptop at a coffee shop in Kiev, this was bigger. The lights and the computers in the room went dark again. Goddamnit, they couldn’t even keep the lights on and Wright was getting mad.
First the satellites, then the systems here … the connected systems here …
The emergency lights shone in the darkness from above the door, but the facility lights still hadn’t come back on. “Have we found all the computer systems for the facility?”
“We think so, Major, but we don’t know, I’m not sure we could ever know for sure.”
“If someone is fucking with our ability to use our assets in space, it would stand to reason that they have also gained access to our secure network and could be causing the system failures by way of the computers controlling them.”
“Yes sir, it would, but I’m not sure how connected this facility is with the others.”
“Whenever we’re back up, try sending a message to Texas again and ask. Get me the answer.”
“Will do, Major.”
CHAPTER 18
Coronado, CA
March 22, Year 1
“Chief, we’ll put in here.” Chuck pointed to the undated aerial photograph of Halsey Field someone had found on the wall in one of the offices. “That’s also right by the fuel farm, four large aboveground tanks. Hammer and I want to rig them to blow about a half hour after swim.”
“Why?”
“Give the Chinese something to focus on, give us a diversion.”
“That’ll bring patrols this way from the mainland.”
“I h
ope it does, Chief. You have Snow and Gonzo rig the Coronado Bridge and use the handful of remote detonators we found.”
Aymond thought about the proposal for a moment. “Snow, how much would you need to drop the bridge?”
“You want the whole bridge gone or just a section?”
“Just a section, call it two of the concrete supports, maybe they’ll think the bridge just failed by accident.”
“Not as much as you would think, Chief, but it’s going to take us some time to rig it. We have to do it from the water, so we’ll have to swim out to it or find a canoe or something if you want to destroy the highest sections.”
“What if you just rigged the first support on land this side of the bridge?”
“Less than five minutes to set it, plus insertion and extract time.”
Aymond nodded. The plan was coming together; these were “extracurricular” activities that would help confuse the enemy and he liked them. The hills and parks near the California Tower were nearly in a perfect spot, a little close to the operational edge of the enemy, but they were the most heavily wooded and hilly section of the area near the airport that also had a quick exit to the east. The final preparations were being made; Simmons and Jones had the trucks ready and all the team could do was check their gear and take a nap until sunset, for once night was upon them the show would start.
St. George, Utah
The sun glared through the window, the defiant glow of mid-morning chastising Bexar for sleeping so late. Rolling to his side, Bexar was happy to be in a comfortable bed, in a warm home, even if he had two casts. He stared through the window at the gallows, a body swinging in the breeze. Bexar wasn’t sure why the body hadn’t turned, why it wasn’t a reanimated corpse writhing against the sharp rope. The dark hood and the man’s shirt were stained with blood. It took Bexar a few moments, but memories of crime scenes and past training came back, like a forgotten dream from a past life.