“Oh, you know who,” Henno said. He balled his fists and banged them on the arms of the chair he sat in. “You know it all. Hell, Ali told you as much. Love isn’t compatible with the mission. It’s a fucking luxury, mate. One you can’t afford.”
When Handon opened his eyes, the chair was empty.
He sank into blackness again.
The Way Back
CentCom – Prison, Guest Billets
Private Elliot Walker, sole survivor of 2nd Battalion, the Parachute Regiment (2 PARA), awoke in darkness. He didn’t have the vaguest idea where he was.
He only knew he wasn’t dead.
He knew this not so much because his mind was working, or because he could feel his body pressing down on the thin mattress beneath him – but because he never seemed to die. It was always somebody else’s time. Everyone he cared about, everyone he’d ever served with, everyone he loved, all now dead. He had watched most of them go down, from close by – from right beside them.
And he had been unable to save a single one.
The only thing he’d ever wanted to do, to be there to protect his Para brothers, to save even one of them, had been refused him. In the end, all he’d asked was to die alongside the men in his regiment. And that too had been denied. The only possible explanation was he was being kept alive for some purpose.
He just couldn’t begin to understand what it might be.
And now, once again, he was utterly alone.
He got up in the disorienting blackness, stumbled around until he found a door, and opened it up. Behind it there was some dim illumination – but what it illuminated didn’t inspire much confidence, never mind joy. It was a prison cell block, three stories of steel-grate walkways surrounding an open atrium. The cells looked like they’d been done up as rooms, but that didn’t do much to mitigate the grimness of it all.
He went back in and, mainly out of habit, put on his body armor, vest, and boots. He hung his helmet on his belt, put his Para beret on his head, and finally picked up his sharpshooter rifle. He’d been trained to take that with him everywhere he went. It was a very Gucci piece of kit to be issued as a private, and it was his neck if he lost it.
Then he went out again, and he just started walking, until he found a way out. At least the prison wasn’t locked down. He had no idea how long he’d been asleep, but it must have been some time. He felt far from refreshed, but the bone-deep exhaustion of the long fight in the south, all around the perimeter of London, and at the gap in the Wall, was off him.
He finally emerged into what was clearly a prison yard. Everything out here was equally dark, no lights, but he could make out the twenty-foot wall up ahead in the faint moonlight and starlight leaking through cloud cover. To the right he saw a guard tower. His sharpshooter training and instincts told him to get up high, to take a look at what was going on.
In a few minutes he was across the yard, up the stairs, and inside the room at the top. There was no one in it – but then he heard the faintest chug of a whisper from outside. And he recognized that. Stepping out onto the railing that circled the tower, he found a single figure in a prone shooting position, laid out behind a proper sniper rifle – an Accuracy International.
And from the size and shape… the shooter was a woman.
Betraying no surprise, she looked up at him for two seconds – then put her eye back to her scope. Elliot could now see she was black, with wild curly hair, and wearing an irregular uniform, like a commando or special-forces soldier. Maybe she was. That impression was reinforced when she spoke, in an American accent.
“You must be the Para sharpshooter,” she said.
Elliot had no idea how she’d know who he was. But he was wearing his beret with the Paras’ distinctive winged parachute cap badge, and he did have the rifle. “Yes,” he said. “Walker.”
“Keep your voice down,” she said and didn’t, he noticed, introduce herself. “Why did you come here?”
“Dunno. I just woke up. This looked like the best OP.”
The woman paused, and when she spoke again her voice was gentler. “You may as well set up, then.” Elliot imagined he’d scored a point, or passed some kind of test. Wordlessly, he did so, lying down, snapping out the bipod under his barrel. Then he remembered his rifle was empty – all his mags were. But there was a box of belted 7.62 lying practically beside him, beneath a GPMG, so he unbelted twenty rounds, used them to load up his magazine, and snapped it back in. Finally, he put his eye to his scope and scanned the field out ahead. It wasn’t a night-vision scope, but it was very bright, and the ambient light was just enough for him to shoot by.
He saw a line of parked armored vehicles 100 meters out – and, beyond that, something very strange. It was a long hill or berm, twenty feet high. But when he focused in on it, he realized it was built of… bodies. Jesus. Then he saw a Zulu climb up from behind it, but before he could sight in, its head disappeared and it fell down again. But the noise of it, either moaning or just the falling, must have drawn another.
But this one was a runner.
It leapt over the crest of the hill and started barreling down.
“Engage that target.”
Elliot looked over to the woman. She was holding her fire. He guessed this was his second test. Runners were damned hard to hit, of course, but he had been doing virtually nothing but practicing that skill day and night recently at the Battle of the Gap. He looked back through his sight. The runner was halfway to the walls.
“Take the shot,” the woman said.
He did. The runner dropped. Done in one.
When he looked over at her again, she was looking back at him, dark eyes shining, expression neutral. “Can you hit Foxtrots?” she asked.
“I’ve done it,” he said. “Once.”
“Time to get better,” she said.
Elliot almost smiled. He had a strange feeling he’d come to the right place to do so, to take his skills to the next level.
But too late to save any of my friends.
However, he pushed that thought aside. Not only because he couldn’t bear it. But because his obsessive thinking about that was getting him nowhere. Maybe thinking about this, getting mentored in shooting by someone really good, would take his mind off his losses, his failures.
Maybe it would be some kind of a way back.
* * *
Lieutenant Wesley was about halfway through his latest circuit of the home guard on the walls, just checking the men’s positions, squeezing shoulders, exchanging a few words. Letting them know they weren’t forgotten, and that their work and discomfort were appreciated. And, mainly, just letting them see their commander among them. Yet again, no one had ever told Wesley this was important. He just sensed it.
He had just moved on from one of the few smaller and flimsier guard towers out on the extended walls, when his radio went. “Wesley, JOC, message, over.” It was Miller.
“Wesley here, send message.”
“The new commander wants a word.”
Wesley certainly couldn’t have missed the American cavalry arriving, on their giant armored steeds. And now he’d also heard about the USOC Colonel who had taken over. Mainly, he’d heard he was from Texas, which somehow told him more than he wanted to know. But another thing about being in the military was you didn’t get to choose who you worked for.
“On my way.”
He went ahead and got down off the walls. He needed to be in the Common to get to SHQ anyway, and didn’t mind covering more of that ground on his way there. The more he saw of the base, its current state, and its defenses, the better he felt. It was very dark, and he was alone, but Fick had given the all-clear. And he, like most of them, was heavily armed. He wondered if he should ditch his rifle at some point, and just carry his side arm. He didn’t seem to recall Patton or Montgomery splashing ashore or reviewing the troops with a rifle strapped to them.
Then again, even the darkest days of World War Two had never seen Britain so beleaguered as sh
e was now in the end days of the ZA, and even the Waffen-SS occasionally surrendered…
He saw the faint glow of the glass-fronted SHQ lobby ahead, lit by that emergency floor-strip lighting. He pushed open the doors and made for the stairs, smiling and shooting a look at that couch where he’d found Rebecca Ainsley, her two boys, and the little girl who had proved to belong to Amar—
And he did a double-take.
There was another woman with two children sitting on it. It was like he was in Groundhog Day, or they had some secret CentCom underground lab for churning out young families. Shaking his head, he went over.
“Hello,” he said, then repeated his line from before. “Are you all right?”
“Yes, I think so,” the woman said. This mother was younger, with blonde chin-length hair. The two kids were smaller, as well, a little boy maybe four and a girl perhaps two. The girl was asleep in the young woman’s lap. Wesley refrained from asking them how long they’d been here. He probably still didn’t want to know. But he was curious about one thing.
“How did you get here?”
Her expression darkened as she looked off at something in memory, something disturbing. Wesley could guess – they all had disturbing memories now. She seemed to push past that, and answered the question more literally. “A huge soldier put us here. He was very nice. Though he seemed to think my name is Cali.”
Wesley squinted at that. He was pretty sure he knew who the nice giant was. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s get you out of this lobby.”
“Where are you taking us?”
“Erm, fourth floor – family area kind of thing.” With a terrible shock, Wes realized he hadn’t checked on Amarie or the kids. Even worse, he hadn’t arranged for any comforts for them. Just then, two RMPs came down the stairs, bantering.
“Lance Corporal,” he said.
“Sir,” one said, both of them stopping.
“Evening, sir,” the other added.
“Listen, you two busy?”
“Just on our rest time, sir.”
“Do me a favor. Can you scavenge some food and drinks, and some blankets and pillows, and bring them up to the fourth floor? We’ve got women and kids who are sitting on the floor and hungry.”
The expressions of both RMPs warmed. “Right away, sir. They’ve set up a kind of field canteen outside food stores, and there’ll be pillows and blankets in the guest billets.”
“Good men. Off you go.”
Wesley picked up the boy, while the woman rose with the little girl, still sleeping, and they turned to face the stairs.
“Fourth floor?” the woman asked. “Is there a lift?”
Wesley squinted. “You know, I don’t actually know. Hang about.” Still carrying the boy, he went to the far end of the lobby and peeked around the corner. Sure enough, there was one. Knowing that would have saved his old legs a lot of pain. Maybe it was a military thing – pain was intentional.
He went back and got the other two and in two minutes they were all up to the top floor, down the hall, and inside the room with Amarie, Josie, Aiden, and Luke – right where he left them, all of them sleeping or just lying on the floor. The boys seemed glad to see him, so he mussed their hair and mucked in a little. It was a new side to Wesley – maybe being in command made him paternal.
And this time Amarie moved to kiss him – on the lips. She was holding Josie, and the little girl reached out and touched Wesley’s face with her tiny fingers.
He couldn’t stop smiling as he left.
* * *
Juice sat on the floor of the CentCom Engineering Shack with his legs crossed. He had his old Tuffbook in his lap again, tapping on the keyboard, with a wide serial cable snaking out the back of it. What it snaked into was even more striking than the high-tech bearded commando who sat before it, as if paying obeisance to some hulking steel idol.
It turned out that neither Wheeler nor Savard had been right about the robots in the back of the Colonel’s MRAP. What Pred and Juice had in fact found there, on their special recovery mission outside the walls, was not two little tracked Talon robots with the attached weapons kits of SWORDS (Special Weapons Observation Reconnaissance Detection System) – but two rather Qinetic MAARS units (Modular Advanced Armed Robotic System).
Bigger, meaner, with better electronics, and designed with the weapons in mind, MAARS was the armed-robot successor to SWORDS. These had onboard day and night cameras, motion detectors, acoustic microphones, a hostile-fire detection system, and a loudspeaker with siren, and had been specifically commissioned by SOCOM, the US Special Operations Command, shortly before the fall.
More strikingly, the one sitting regally before Juice had a six-barreled 40mm grenade launcher, and an M240B 7.62mm medium machine gun, the two weapons systems mounted to either side of a bulbous sensor dome with two cameras inside it.
Juice looked up as the second tracked robot came in the door – being carried by Predator. “Jesus Christ,” Pred grumbled. “You could have checked the charge state on these things before we pulled them out.”
“Quit your griping,” Juice said, looking back down to his keyboard. “It only died in the last fifty feet. And it doesn’t even have ammo, so it barely weighs three hundred pounds.” But he looked up again when he realized Pred wasn’t alone. “Oh, hey, Baxter. How’s it hanging.”
“Soggy and to the left.”
Baxter looked like he wanted to help Pred with the robot, but there was nothing he could do. Almost nobody could hold up half a 300-pound robot. Unfortunately for Pred, he could lift all of it, so had to do it alone. Five feet inside the door, he lowered it to the floor, showing perfect squat-lifting form.
Juice said, “Well, come in and dry that bad boy out.”
Baxter did so. Juice knew what a good kid he was, how keen he was to learn, and how much he liked hanging out with him and the other operators. Moreover, he’d done his job and kept his shit together, even when they were under assault by Spetsnaz commandos at that helo crash site in Somalia – guys who had killed better men than Juice, and knew how it was done. Baxter squatted down beside Juice and his Tuffbook, which he had seen before, when Juice had used it to hijack their drone back from the Russians.
“What’s all this?” he asked, squinting at the screen.
“Kind of a force multiplier, I hope.”
“Huh.” Pred snorted, his grunt tinged with skepticism.
Baxter looked from one of them back to the other.
Still typing, Juice elaborated. “It’s some software I was helping with, working with the developers back at Hereford. An upgrade to the existing system.”
“Are you actually writing code?”
“Not really. It was pretty much finished at that point. We just never got a chance to turn it on and test it.”
“What’s it do?” Baxter asked.
“Makes these bad boys autonomous.”
“So, what, they move around on their own?”
“Yeah, that. Plus they only shoot the dead.”
“What? How the hell do they recognize the dead?”
“Gait analysis, mainly. The dead don’t move like the living.”
Baxter whistled. “Is that safe?”
“Safe-ish. Anyway, we’re pretty short-handed right now. May need all the help we can get.”
Pred snorted again.
Not looking up from his typing, Juice said, “Hey, I thought I told you these things needed ammo.”
“Goddammit.” Pred left it at that, and went out again.
“What’s with the welding equipment?” Baxter asked, nodding at the torch, tank, and mask sitting nearby, along with what looked like some scrap steel.
“I’m not happy with the ammo capacity of these things. They only hold four hundred and fifty MG rounds, off the shelf.”
“Can I help?”
“I don’t know. You know how to weld?”
“A little.” Jake had taught him, back at Camp Price in Somalia. And Jake had been trained up by Todd
.
“Mask up, then.”
Baxter smiled. More boys’ own adventures.
* * *
“I don’t give a goddamned horse-cock sandwich how busy anyone is, at any sonofabitching duty station. I want regular goddamn progress reports, you read me, John Bull?”
Wesley stopped in the middle of the JOC. The Colonel, their new commander, didn’t fail to live up to advance intel on his leadership style. Wesley could see him in Ali’s old office, chewing out a small knot of cowed British junior officers and senior enlisted inside. More to the point, he couldn’t fail to hear him.
Nor could, evidently, the other ops staff out here. A few feet away, Wesley could hear two of the men at adjacent stations muttering. “The fastest we could complete the set of tasks that guy ordered is seventy-two hours – and that’s if everyone was running up and down the corridors with a big lighter in each hand, setting their hair on fire…”
Wesley sighed. At least he didn’t have to live in here with the new commander right on top of him. Looking up again to the office, he could see the Colonel also didn’t seem like he was slowing down, or winding up. And Wesley was suddenly in no hurry to report to him, and also didn’t particularly feel like waiting outside his office like an errant schoolboy. Since he was close, he decided to instead spend a few minutes up on the roof. He liked the God-like views on CentCom and its defenses.
When he’d climbed the stairs and emerged onto the roof, which glistened with standing rainwater, but was no longer being pelted, he found it unoccupied – except for a single figure. The lone man was out at the north edge of the roof, facing over the walls and back toward London.
More strikingly, he was down on his knees.
Wes was loath to interrupt him, but the man must have heard him come up, because he stood, turned, and nodded at him. Wesley recognized Homer, and went over to join him.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to disturb you,” Wesley said.
“It’s fine,” Homer said. “I was done, anyway.”
“Were you praying?”
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