Out of the Fight
Outside London – Kent Downs
"You’re sure to receive a Victoria Cross for this one, mate!”
"But only if we keep the Queen alive long enough to drape it on you! Ha ha ha!”
Sergeant Major Pradup Sun just grit his teeth, kept firing, and kept his eye on his section. B Company, 2 Royal Gurkha Rifles, had just successfully moved across two miles of overrun Kent – fighting and laughing the whole way. Much of the Gurkhas’ reputation as fearsome fighters was because they always seemed to laugh at death, however bloody the fight or hopeless the odds. What people didn’t realize, Sun smiled to consider, was that the Nepalese people generally laughed at everything. There was a simple art to happiness, and they were blessed with it, as their birthright.
Even now, as the company was hunkered down in all-round defense, having secured a suitable HLZ for the incoming flight of Chinooks, they were still laughing and clowning around. They were also having to defend this ground for the interminable two minutes until the helos actually arrived. And that defense was getting seriously and uncomfortably bloody.
Sun was down on one knee, firing and reloading his rifle, but very aware of the khukuri close at hand on his belt. There had already been breakthroughs of the lines, a pack of runners moving fast, two Foxtrots, and men had gone down. Not in his sector, at least not so far… but hand-to-hand fighting was by no means out of the question.
Beside him, laid out prone on the ground, was his section’s two-man machine-gun crew, banging away. They were probably why there had been no breakthroughs here. Pausing to reload again, Sun scanned the skies behind him – and, sure enough, there they were, six big and ungainly Chinooks, flaring in right in the center of their perimeter. The firing had been so heavy he hadn’t heard the approaching engine or rotor noise, but now the air whipped around their heads. This was it.
And then the MG went down. Glancing across and down, Sun could see it had merely gone empty, the crew having run through its current belt. But the lull was badly timed, and protracted enough for a pack of a dozen runners to smash into their lines, which crumbled and broke.
And just like that it was a smash-mouth fight.
This was happening even as the Chinooks settled into the mud behind them – so they were somehow going to have to hold, fight, displace, and load up, basically all at once. There was little choice. Sun actually laughed out loud at the absurdity of this as he fired point-blank into a mouth with blackened teeth, stretched out on its neck trying to close the distance to his own exposed throat. The back of its head blew out, spraying diseased brain matter – close to another Gurkha behind him, but Sun had taken care with the angles, so it was okay. Barely.
He pivoted to fire again, but two runners were closer than the length of his barrel, so he gripped the weapon with both hands, braced his back leg, and shoved them away and down to the ground with all his force, stepping forward and kicking one face, then the other. Like most Nepalese, he was a small man, only about five four, so this was all about leg strength and leverage. The contents of heads splattered darkly across the grass. Even as he kicked, claw-like hands latched onto him from behind, but a pistol shot rang out by his ear, and more brain matter flew by – inches from his face, this time, but not hitting him. His buddy had also taken care with the angles.
Sun would live. At least a little longer.
Others weren’t so lucky. Casting around, he could see the whole formation collapsing back to the helos, fighting hand-to-hand as they went. But it wasn’t a desperate fight, or the living weren’t acting desperate, anyway. It was just the fight it was, and they were fighting as they always had – staying together, covering one another, calm. They were taking losses. But they never stopped being effective.
Or, it turned out, happy.
The MG crew had just packed up to withdraw, and Sun felt a thump on his arm. It was the gunner, handing him something big and heavy. Looking down, Sun could see it was the machine-gun tripod, presumably for him to use fighting the dead hand-to-hand.
“Very funny,” Sun said. They just never let that one go.
He shoved the tripod away from him, covering the section as they turned and hauled ass toward the lowered ramp of the nearest Chinook, firing, reloading, occasionally stabbing or swinging with his barrel as he retreated, quick-stepping backward. In another few seconds he was on board, defending the ramp even as it lifted up, and the big transport helo around lifted as well, dead hands clinging to the lip, Sun and others kicking them away.
And with this, he realized he had basically been last man out – and theirs was the last helo to lift off. As he safetied his weapon and caught his breath, smiling in satisfaction that they had pulled this off, he looked over into the face of the man next to him – and it didn’t look too good. He was sweating and pale, his eyes unfocused and growing cloudy even as Sun watched.
Sun’s smile melted away. This is a problem, he thought, muscling his way through the thick knots of bodies filling the narrow cabin until he reached one of the round windows in the fuselage. He squinted out across the racing open air at the next aircraft over. There was some kind of blurring motion going by behind their own porthole glass.
And then suddenly that aircraft started flying erratically.
And Sun realized they hadn’t pulled this off at all. They’d been too closely engaged when they loaded up. It had all happened too fast – too fast to deal with men who had gotten infected in the close-quarters fighting.
And now they were all in big trouble.
* * *
For Captain Gunn and the other men of the London Regiment, already deep inside London, everything was happening far too slowly. They were jammed up in the flood of refugees, on foot and in vehicles, trying to get across Westminster Bridge.
Auribus tenere lupum, he thought, betraying his public-school education with the Latin phrase. It meant: I hold a wolf by the ears – i.e they were in a dangerous situation, and it was one entirely of his own making. It was he who had decided to open the damned bridge to let the civilians get safely across.
And now he was hoist by his own petard.
His 300 reserve soldiers, men and women, and their half-dozen Snatch Land Rovers, which included his command vehicle, were stopped dead – straining against the thousands of civilians on foot, and dozens of civilian vehicles, all in one horrendous logjam, which filled both lanes and both sidewalks of the bridge. Now the reservists could neither go forward nor go back. And, short of throwing the civilians into the river, there was nothing they could do to clear it. It was simply a matter of having tactical patience, not panicking, and waiting for the mob to clear out and exit the other end of the bridge.
And then… and then the tarmac shifted under Captain Gunn’s feet. And some type of low-frequency groaning or grinding sounded from below. Eyes widening, he scanned around him. He had never seen Westminster Bridge this thronged, even on the worst tourist days. Their own military vehicles were not light. The base of the bridge was now home to the massive steel barrier, which never used to be there. And Gunn knew that civil engineering and maintenance of infrastructure had not been one of London’s major priorities over the last two years.
Finally, for no reason that he could think of, he also remembered that the current incarnation of Westminster Bridge dated to the mid-Victorian period, having opened in the 1860s, if he remembered correctly. It was the oldest road bridge across the Thames still in use in central London – and the groaning sound it made was now rising to a shriek.
They had to get the hell off it.
* * *
Back outside the Walls, to the southwest, Royal Hussars Sergeant Ashear had to stop himself from whooping out loud. Their Challenger 2 main battle tank was still moving at nearly 40kph – but now they were churning through a sea of dead bodies, hurling the palsied undead to either side or into the air, or crushing them into meat pudding beneath their treads.
They were meat-surfing.
A
nd the feeling of speed and invulnerability was intoxicating. THIS is why I love being a tanker, Ashear thought. He was a little worried about the integrity of their treads, and also the air intakes – both for the engine and what his crew were actually breathing. But it was hard to imagine the dead could get that thick or deep, up over the level of their turret. And they were close to the southwest gate in the ZPW now, only a few minutes out, even if their pace kept slowing.
“Sergeant, take a look at this,” his driver said over the crew communications system. Ashear dropped down out of the turret, and eyed the video display at the driver’s station. He could now see the towering gate in the Wall. But it wasn’t directly ahead of them. It was at least thirty degrees off to their right. His brow furrowed, and he checked navigation.
Sure enough, the damned GPS was acting up again, the remaining satellites getting squiffy, their fix weak. Moreover, it was wrong. They’d have to switch to dead reckoning. But this was absolutely fine. They could already see their destination, and needed only point their nose at it.
But then Ashear’s eyes narrowed as he remembered… the damned defensive trenches. The route he was leading their column on was designed to thread through the deep and wide anti-Zulu ditches and fighting holes that had been dug all around the outskirts of the Wall. As far as he knew, they’d all been abandoned and overrun.
But they were still serious holes in the ground.
And now they were surrounded by millions of pounds of moving meat. That wasn’t one manageable hazard – it was two, and they compounded each other, and in ways Ashear hadn’t properly considered. Nor had Captain Windsor, their OC, as far as he knew. His eye went back to his own station, where he started to call up a map of the defensive fortifications, the trench lines. But that was the wrong order. He needed to slow, or even halt, the column first. He quickly twiddled his radio channel selector to the squadron command net, which would link him with all tank commanders, as well as Captain Windsor himself.
But then all the air was knocked out of his lungs as he was bodily slammed forward and hammered into his own station, the tank around him pitching forward and crashing to a halt.
His consciousness winked away as he passed out.
Breach
ZPW – Southwest Gate
Corporal Abigail “Abs” Webster sat at her station in the ops room monitoring live footage from CCTV cameras mounted on the outside of the tower, which held the southwest gate, as well as those on adjacent sections of ZPW. She could have walked over to a window, or indeed gone up on the ramparts, a hundred feet above everything, and gotten a direct view of the situation outside. But it was a lot easier to sit in her chair tucked up inside, which was where she was expected to be for her watch anyway.
And the scene outside never changed.
The camera she monitored showed the same view it had for the past day: tens of thousands of dead, simply flowing right around the Wall toward the north. Circling London. Circling toward the mouth of the drain, the gap in the Wall, rushing to flood inside. The city was totally hemmed in. But this sector was strangely peaceful.
At least for now.
Webster looked around the control room and realized it was just her in there. With the dead not piling up against the Wall in this sector, but instead just flowing by, there was no fighting to be done – and no reason to rile them up – so they were down to a skeleton crew. Her relief was due any moment, so she settled down to kill a little more time. But then the radio on her desk went. It was her section leader, Lieutenant Forster, and the acting station commander. “Webster, be advised: the Royal Hussars are coming back in.”
She boggled slightly at this. How the hell were they going to get through the ring of dead? Then again, they were tankers. If anyone could make a hole, they could. She just answered. “Understood.”
“I’m coming to take over the ops room. I’ll need you up top to get eyes on. We’re going to have to make a cold-blooded decision about whether we can open the gate.”
“Copy that. Standing by.”
She looked back to her station, tilted the camera up and zoomed in. But she couldn’t make out anything other than the sea of dead. She also couldn’t stop herself smiling slightly.
Because if the Hussars were coming back in, that meant she might get a chance to see Sergeant Ashear. It was odd that she had formed a close friendship with a tank commander in the Armored Corps. But his squadron had been posted to their sector a few weeks ago, and since then they had come in and out of this gate with some regularity – and, moreover, kept having to cycle through the attached small quarantine facility. She’d bumped into him there once – and kept finding excuses to be down there when his unit came in.
She looked up now at the NLAW rocket (Next-generation Light Anti-tank Weapon) hanging by its strap from a hook on the wall, which had been a slightly bizarre gift from him. He’d said that since they were just about the last main battle tanks left in the world, keeping it around was a danger only to themselves. But she knew he was really worried about her, and her safety, since learning their tower was undermanned.
Remembering all this made her smile. He often did.
What they had between them wasn’t anything like a romance, although they were definitely flirty, plus both single. More like a human connection, something they were exploring, and which gave them both comfort. A little flame of life and warmth in the middle of all this coldness and death. They would sit around, just talking, for hours – and it turned out they had much in common, including both being raised by foster families. Moreover, Ashear had a deep kindness, and fundamental goodness, which she could sense very clearly, and always saw in his eyes. She thought it must have been born out of suffering. But he was always coy when she asked about where he came from, what he went through in the Syrian civil war, just laughing it off.
Like he wanted to find joy, and not let the sadness back in.
“Abs – we’ve got it. Up top.” This was Lt Forster, and another female soldier in their section, Lance Sergeant Tharp.
Webster looked up, nodded, rose – and left.
* * *
She’d only just stepped out into the open air of the highest level of ramparts when she instantly realized something was wrong. First, she could hear the distant chatter of machine guns firing – but, worse, she could see smoke drifting down below, and out to the southwest. It was well inside the ring of dead. But she couldn’t make out any details, and had stupidly forgotten to bring binoculars with her. She was just about to go back in to grab some—
When her phone went. Not her radio.
There was still decent mobile service in London. When she checked the screen, it read: Sgt Ashear. And when she answered the call, she could barely understand him. He was talking around heaving breaths, sounding as if panic squeezed his lungs and throat.
And all of that was around unceasing gunfire.
Then, even as she turned and ran back inside, suddenly she could hear it popping in the distance, not through the phone, and distinct from the more distant machine-gun fire. Live.
And much closer.
* * *
“Keep moving!” Ashear shouted to his three crewmen, slapping a new magazine into the L22 carbine that all tankers were issued for out-of-vehicle action. It had never seriously occurred to him that he’d have to use it.
That any of them would.
But now all four men from the tank crew were shooting nonstop as they ran. And they were at least a mile from their vehicle, and unmistakably outside of it. And even despite the crowds of heaving, horrible, rotted dead bodies that hissed and lurched at them, being out in the open space made Ashear feel agoraphobic. One minute they had been buttoned up tight in their 27-foot, 62-ton vehicle, tearing across the terrain at 40kph, powerful and invulnerable and safe. And then…
And then, in less than minutes, half the squadron had been jammed up, wedged in the combination of deep trenches and millions of pounds of crushing meat – and the half that wa
s still mobile had circled around, trying to defend the others. Ashear’s crew had been way out in front, and had it worst initially. But then the dead had fixated on the firing of the others, clearing the way for his crew to escape.
Which was a good thing, because not only had they had clogged air intakes, but somehow something had shorted, resulting in a small electrical fire, filling the inside of the tank with smoke – not thick, but still choking. And with the air intakes clogged, the fans couldn’t clear it. They’d had no choice but to go extra-vehicular, and when they’d emerged, there’d been no hope of getting back to the rest of the squadron – they were too far, and the dead way too thick in that direction.
But there had been an opening.
As the dead moved away from the Wall toward the squadron of sixteen tanks, they thinned out just enough, maybe, for a small group on foot to slip through, or fight through. And so Ashear had decided. But it was really the fear that had made the decision for him. They had to get back inside, to some kind of safety.
They had to get back behind the Wall.
And now they were out in the maelstrom, their vulnerability scraping like fingernails on Ashear’s soul. It was like the barrel-bombs and cluster-munitions falling out of the sky over Aleppo all over again – no place was safe, and absolutely nowhere to hide. Worst of all, he knew the gates, both the big vehicle one and the smaller one for dismounts, were sealed up tight. And without the squadron to clear an area in front, it was guaranteed to stay that way.
He could only think of one possible way in.
So he shouted into his phone with one hand, as he ran and fired with the other.
* * *
“Lieutenant, what’s happening?” Webster asked, leaping down stairs. She had her radio in one hand and phone in the other, two channels open and two conversations going.
“The tankers are jammed up. The area in front of the gate is nothing like clear, so it’s staying shut. Get back here and we’ll reassess.”
“On my way,” she said, gulping air. But the phone was still yelping at her.
ARISEN_Book Thirteen_The Siege Page 20