The tank’s main gun fired, adding to the chaos. The high-explosive shell plucked a hole in the curtain of smoke and exploded with a muted flash of bright yellow flame. The tank rocked back as the gun recoiled and spat out the spent shell casing. A few seconds later Fox switched his station control to ‘coax’ and pulled the trigger, opening fire with the coaxial machine gun.
The coaxial M240B on the Abrams was slaved to the main gun, meaning that the weapon relied on the same hydraulics and mechanics for elevation, traverse and depression. It was accurate at over a thousand feet and lethal under five hundred. It was all the range Fox needed.
On board the tank had been stored over ten thousand rounds. Fox fired in thirty-round bursts. Through his sights he saw the earth at the edge of the field torn open by a stitched line of tiny eruptions. The swarm of approaching undead ran straight into the hail of fire.
“Fuck yeah!”
Thurlow looked on with open-mouthed horror. The infected bursting through the curtain of smoke were hideous, gruesome apparitions – the monsters of nightmares made real. They were blundering across the ploughed furrows of the field, mindless and unwavering. He watched in disbelief as Fox’s second burst from the coax knocked down half a dozen ghouls, punching them flat onto their backs and inflicting horrendous wounds. Three of the undead got back up, howling and snarling. Thurlow gaped at the faces made large in the lens of his binoculars. Their flesh was grey, their clothes torn and filthy, their eyes wild with madness. They were covered in oozing leprous wounds, many of them disfigured emaciated scarecrows.
Fox fired again and the undead fell in droves. But still they came on, too many to count. They were surging through the broken rubble of the destroyed buildings. Then Thurlow heard a rising scream of panic. It began with a single shrill voice and quickly became a hundred. Then a thousand. He flicked a glance sideways. The refugees had seen the undead and had begun fleeing for their lives. Children stumbled and fell. Elderly people were crushed in the panicked rush. They dropped to their knees and were trampled by those following.
“Fuck!” Thurlow growled. He could see on his BMS that Feguluzzi’s Abrams was backing up. The tank had begun reversing directly away from the charging undead, leaving a gap in the line and the refugees undefended. He cursed the other commander and made a snap decision.
“Nelson? Put us on the highway.”
“What?” Julian Nelson pressed at the side of his helmet to hear more clearly above the chaotic clamor.
“I said put us on the fucking highway!” Thurlow barked. “Now!” He marked the move on the BMS but knew it was pointless. The platoon was breaking apart. Feguluzzi’s tank was still backing away from the fight. His machine gun wasn’t even firing. Thurlow cursed the bastard, overcome with impotent rage and frustration. A moment later the platoon net crackled to life.
“A-One-Five, this is A-One-Six,” the new Lieutenant’s voice was shrill. “What the fuck are you doing? Hold position.”
“A-One-Six, the highway is undefended!” Thurlow hissed. “If I don’t put a tank in the way, the undead will overwhelm the refugees… and we’ll lose our escape route back to the bridge.”
“Where the fuck is Feguluzzi?”
“He’s backing out of the fight,” Thurlow snapped. He broke the connection and got jounced around as his tank suddenly trundled forward and pivoted hard left, presenting itself broadside to the approaching undead. The Abrams began to slither, its tracks churning at the loose earth for purchase. Nelson gunned the engine and at the same time Fox traversed the huge steel turret to bring the coaxial machine gun around to bear on the swarming undead. The closest ghouls were just a few hundred yards away. Fox mowed them down with a long withering fusillade of fire while the Abrams’ steel tracks flung clumps of soil into the air in a mad dash to reach the highway.
Thurlow felt his panic rising. His ears were filled with rattled snatches of comms chatter from tank platoons stationed further to the north. All along the defensive line, the perimeter was being overrun. The battle began breaking down into individual struggles as vehicles became isolated. He scanned the morning sky to the east, searching for the dark specs that would announce the arrival of more British Apaches. He saw nothing to give him hope.
“Best speed, Nelson!” Thurlow barked. The tank slowed as the tracks bogged for an instant, then burst free. They were a hundred yards from the highway, racing past the position that Feguluzzi had abandoned just moments before.
“Load, Corky!”
“Up!”
From between the rubble of two bomb-shattered buildings at the eastern end of the highway Thurlow could see a dark mass of marauding undead hunting towards the stragglers of the refugee column. He shouted over the stuttering roar of the coaxial to get Dan Fox’s attention.
“Right, one o’clock! Stop firing the coax and put a shell between those two buildings.”
“Got it!” Fox’s voice was unnaturally calm in Thurlow’s headset. He switched his station controls back from ‘coax’ to allow him to operate the main gun, then cried out, “Identified!”
The turret turned.
“Fire!”
“On the way!”
The sound of the point-blank shot drowned out everything else on the battlefield. The nearest of the two buildings erupted in flying concrete fragments and grey swirling smoke.
The tank charged on without slowing.
“Reload!”
“Up!” Matt ‘Corky’ Corker cried.
Thurlow took a final glance at the BMS monitor that tracked all friendly troops and vehicles nearby. Feguluzzi’s Abrams was now in full retreat. It had reached the edge of the woods to their west while the other two tanks were edging backwards, still holding relative position to each other but crabbing slowly north towards the highway that was their lifeline back to the bridge. They had done all they could to slow the surge of the undead. In a matter of minutes it would be time to abandon their position. But until then, the road and the refugees had to be shielded for as long as possible.
AOJI-RI CHEMICAL COMPLEX
NORTH KOREA
The three Black Hawks touched down inside the chain wire perimeter of the chemical complex, rotors kicking up clouds of swirling dust. The thirty Special Forces operators sprang from the helicopters and fanned out to secure the area. The gates to the plant were wide open. The men were wound up with tension, tight as coiled springs. Nathan Power stayed close to the lead chopper. Beside him, A Team senior captain, Tim Scott, ran a critical eye over his men’s deployment and grunted, satisfied.
The helicopters were on the ground for twenty-five seconds. They lifted off in unison, noses down, and sped away to the east, flying low over the treetops, headed for a standby location five kilometers away where they would circle until recalled.
Scott watched the birds lift off, and waited until the helicopters had disappeared out of sight before he turned his attention to the mission.
The team included a Special Forces K9 team and a Raven tactical drone specialist. The K9 team consisted of a handler and a Belgian Malinois dog named ‘Spike’. To the uninitiated, the Malinois looked a lot like a German Shepherd. The dog was highly trained, wrapped a black harness that was secured by girth and chest straps. K9’s were a regular part of Special Forces missions that involved searches. ‘Spike’ stayed obediently beside his handler, alert for instructions while Tim Scott spoke to the drone specialist.
“Get her in the air, Shorty,” the captain said. “And let me know what we’re dealing with.”
The Raven RQ-11 was a hand-launched tactical drone with a wingspan of about three feet. It broke apart for transportation. Shorty Gill dropped to one knee and began assembling the fuselage and wings. Scott watched on for a few seconds while around the perimeter of the plant his men settled themselves into defensive positions.
The Raven was operated through a GCS. The Ground Control System looked like the console of a modern-day video game. Once in the air, the live feed from the drone would be
relayed to a laptop screen that would show a color image of the surrounds. One of the other operators flung the drone into the air to launch it, and Gill snatched for the GCS. In flight its buzzing motor sounded like a high revving lawn mower. On the laptop, an overhead view of the chemical plant appeared. Across the center of the screen were the words ‘Mission not set’, and around the edges were readouts of data, and a crude compass display to show the drone’s bearings. Satisfied, Scott turned his attention to his surroundings.
The Chemical plant was not a single building, but rather a complex of factory-like structures spread across several hundred yards of dusty compound. The two main factory buildings stood fifty yards away. Behind them stood a smaller building without windows, and a two-story brick office block. The only other notable structures were the guardhouse by the open gates, and a squat drab barracks building beside a dustbowl of a parade ground. The barracks was connected to the complex by a wide path that had been worn into the ground by hundreds of stomping boots. Each building had been identified during the briefing aboard the Iwo Jima, and satellite images had been studied. The target for the mission was the small windowless structure, which had been recognized as the base research facility.
Scott turned and studied the small building. He could see two doors. The building had a flat roof and a row of small porthole-sized ventilation outlets along one wall. He was about to order his team cautiously forward when a single shot rang out from behind him and forced him to pause.
“Stay here!” the captain warned Power.
The shot had come from the direction of the main gates. Scott saw three of his men lying prone in the dirt, covering the entrance. The heavy wire gates had been broken open by violent impact and now hung sagging and buckled from their hinges. Scott guessed that a truck must have crashed through the gates to do the kind of damage he could see. There was no way they could be closed – which meant there was no chance to secure the plant’s perimeter from approaching undead while the complex was being searched.
“What’s happening?” Scott dropped to one knee beside the closest operator.
The man pointed over the sights of his M4 to a fringe of woods a hundred yards ahead. “Undead. They’re in the forest.”
“How many?”
“Hundreds. They’re all along the tree line.”
“Fuck.” Scott triggered his comms and called four more men closer to the open gates. He had two ten-man teams to defend the perimeter and a single team to raid the plant’s buildings. He worried that condensing his defense around the gates might leave other sections of the high wire fence undefended, but he had no other choice.
“Jesus,” one of the operators gagged and spat in disgust at the sudden smell that came drifting on the breeze. It was a rancid stench of corruption and decay that wafted across the dead ground. The operators wrinkled their noses at the rotted smell.
Scott spent fifteen long seconds surveying the scene. It appeared a picture of complete desolate innocence. Doubtless the undead had been lured by the sound of the helicopters. They would be massing in the woods. He imagined the infected as emaciated ravaged ghouls, and he wondered what they were waiting for. All the intelligence suggested the undead were made mindless by their infection. They were frenzied savages without fear, driven insane by an unquenchable blood-lust. The waiting made him anxious. He cast a glance over his shoulder. The men of his own team were crouched in the dirt around the LZ. He could see Nathan Power in the midst of them. The operators all had eyes on the buildings, weapons raised, in anticipation of a surprise undead attack from within the plant’s perimeter.
The seconds ticked by, fraying Scott’s nerves. It was never the action that unsettled him; instinct and training took over in the heat of battle. It was the waiting – just as it had always been in every war since the dawn of time. The quiet moments before combat were the true test of a soldier’s mettle. Scott drew a deep breath and clenched his jaw.
“Shorty?” Scott called the drone specialist through his comms.
“Sir?”
“Are you seeing anything around the rest of the perimeter? Any signs of approaching undead from a direction other than the woods beyond the main gates?”
“It’s all clear.”
“What about along the road we followed in?”
“I’ll need thirty seconds to relocate the bird and get some altitude…”
Scott frowned. “Wait!” he told himself. “Be patient. Be sure the perimeter is secure before committing to the search.”
Then someone shouted, and the waiting was over.
Suddenly the tree line sprouted a horde of infected; a long line of ghouls who broke from the cover of the woods and came rushing across the dead ground beyond the fence. They were ragged, tattered figures, grey and grimy, their faces dreadful hideous masks as they howled with madness. They kicked up clouds of dust as they ran, and the sound of their voices was like the mad music from Hell.
“Open fire!” Scott barked the order.
Mentally Scott tried to estimate the strength of the attack. He broke the horde into six sections and then multiplied the result. He figured there was over a thousand undead, and the realization appalled him.
Several of the infected raced ahead of the horde, sprinting towards the yawning gap of the broken gates. M4 fire hammered the air and the ghouls began to fall. They dropped in the dirt, flung back by the punching force of each bullet strike. Tiny puffs of dust sprang from their ragged clothes as the bullets punched great holes in the rotting corpses.
“Head shots!” Scott demanded.
Such accuracy from automatic weapons was impossible at over a hundred yards against running targets, but the Special Forces operators were the world’s elite soldiers. They fired in short disciplined bursts, working with calm deliberation. Quickly the bodies of the undead began to fall in broken piles.
Two operators armed with SAW’s added their savagery to the firefight, and the sound of the battle reached a new frenetic height. The 249’s turned the tide of the conflict. Firing over seven hundred rounds per minute, the machine guns tore into the swarming undead and chewed the attack to pieces. At just a hundred yards, and with their enemy in the open, the operator’s couldn’t miss. The undead fell in swathes and the M4’s picked off any ghoul that dared to rise again from the slaughter.
Captain Scott stole another glance over his shoulder. He was torn between leading the raid on the buildings, and maintaining watch over the perimeter. Vital seconds were being wasted. He got to his feet and turned back towards the LZ. But something nagged him. Some instinct – a sixth sense – warned that a greater danger still lurked somewhere unseen beyond the steel fence. The feeling twisted in his guts. He gritted his teeth. It was a premonition he couldn’t ignore; an obstinate certainty that the threat to the mission was still not nullified.
He thumbed his comms button.
“Power?” he had to raise his voice above the rattle of machine gun fire.
“Captain Scott.”
The two men could look at each other. They were barely fifty yards apart, separated by nothing more than the dusty ground. Power could see the Captain’s lips moving as the man’s words sounded loudly in his helmet speaker.
“Take Charlie Team and the K9. Commence the raid on the buildings.”
“You’re not leading?”
“No. You are.”
Scott cut the contact and turned his back on the plant, directing all his attention to the defense of the open gate. He searched the far tree line, looking past the gruesome tangle of bodies that were strewn in the dust, searching for new threats. He could see nothing, yet still the menace of a larger looming danger hung over him. He felt his guts cramp. Was he wrong? Was he losing his nerve? Apart from the seven men around him who were engaged in the battle to defend the gate, none of the other operators spread along the perimeter had fired a single shot. He stared fixedly at the woods for another five seconds.
Nothing.
The battle against
the swarming horde of undead was reaching its conclusion. The SAW’s still spat brutal death, but the targets were now few and far between. Between the gates and the trees, over a thousand undead lay, broken and mutilated. An M4 coughed a short burst at a writhing figure amidst the carnage, then fell suddenly quiet.
The sound of silence after the deafening clamor of combat rang as an echo in Scott’s ears. It was an ominous emptiness that wasn’t quite true silence. There was another noise on the air, distant and muted, that had – up until this moment – been masked by the firefight. Scott cocked his head to one side and frowned as he listened. He suspected he was hearing the drone as it continued to circle the plant, searching for approaching threats. But the sound was deeper…
Helicopters!
Scott clamped his lips together in bitter frustration. The Black Hawks were returning too soon. He could hear the distinct thwack of rotors now, beating the heavy air. He glanced up and searched the eastern skyline, reaching at the same time for his comms key to call the landing off.
He could see nothing. He turned, puzzled, and tried to pinpoint the direction of their approach.
Then suddenly he spotted them; three ominous dark shapes low in the sky, appearing from behind a mountain range to the northeast.
“Fuck!” Scott swore. It was not the Black Hawks. These helicopters were big bulky Mi-8 military transports, painted in combat camouflage. They were Russian.
The fight to secure the chemical plant had not ended. It had only just begun.
Scott bunched his fists and dashed for the two operators hunched over the SAWs.
“Come with me! Both of you!”
He began to run.
*
“Fuck!” Colonel Igor Stovsky swore bitterly as the three Mi-8’s flashed over the rooftops of the chemical plant. He could see soldiers around the perimeter. He knew instinctively they were Americans.
He gritted his teeth and growled at the lead helicopter pilot through the intercom. “Abort the landing! Abort the landing! Set us down a kilometre to the south.”
Dead Storm: The Global Zombie Apocalypse Page 56