Arisen, Book Two - Mogadishu of the Dead

by Glynn James

  The Colonel nodded and took a beat to process all of that. “Okay, spread the word. No one else goes inside. You hold here until relieved. Got it?”

  “Roger that.”

  The Colonel took a few precious seconds to survey the shifting lines of the skirmish. He considered touring the perimeter around to the other side. But there was little point, and less time. He turned on his heel and headed for the helo hangars.

  At a flat run.

  * * *

  Captain Charlotte Maidstone, British Army Air Corps, and ranking Apache pilot and gunner, jumped off the couch in the pilots’ ready room when the door crashed open and banged against the wall. The rules for on-call combat pilots were clear: the world could be coming down in great sheets of shit, and she’d still have stay right where she was in the ready room. So there she’d sat, first hearing the earth-shaking explosion, then the shouting – then the firing and the wailing siren. No one had told her anything. Hardly anyone had answered when she tried to ask. She’d just had to sit there and listen to it.

  Now, seeing the Colonel himself blast in behind the rocketing door, she could reasonably hope the moment had come to get her guns into the fight. Whatever the fight was.

  “You fly that dragon?” the Colonel asked, jabbing his thumb over his shoulder at the nearest Apache parked up in the hangar.

  “Affirmative.”

  “It armed and fueled?”

  “Tanks topped – and Hellfires, rockets, and thirty mil topped off, too.”

  “You’re on me,” he said. “Get us airborne.”

  As they ran to the hangar, he asked about the rockets.

  “Hydra 2.75-inch,” she said. “Flechette loads.”

  As Captain Maidstone ran up the APC and began bringing the bird to life, the Colonel climbed into the front seat. When she climbed into the rear, pulling her full-face helmet on, he said to her, “I have full authority for what happens now. You understand me?”

  She didn’t understand, but she nodded her assent and got them taxiing out of the hangar. Fourteen minutes after the Colonel walked in her door, she had them rising and banking over the chaos of Hereford. Below them, they could see smoke rising from several points.

  And bodies running everywhere.

  * * *

  Doc Bryan struggled to master himself now, as the chaos finally subsided all around them. The outbreak was over.

  Though, how they were going to deal with this many casualties was beyond him – never mind without the hospital. He had to struggle mightily to control his emotions – to stay effective and do his job in the midst of all this. The sounds of the most recent explosions, and the whizzing of zipping metal, still echoed in his ears.

  One of the operators, smeared with soot and blood, holding his rifle low, was patiently explaining to him what had just happened.

  “Flechette loads, Doc – 96 darts per warhead. The Colonel fired a spread of flechette rockets down the entire length of the hospital. I can guarantee you anything in there with a head had it skewered with a sharp sliver of metal. But a lot of people holding the perimeter were hit, too. I’ve got several guys with big-ish holes in ’em. Know you won’t mind patching ’em up…”

  Bryan shook his head to try and clear it. The hospital was of course a no-go zone, for the duration. The enlisted mess was out, as it had just been destroyed. The motor pool garage was probably the next biggest structure. He’d start setting up an ad hoc medical facility in there. There would be med supplies in various places – in vehicles, in aircraft, in medics’ rucks. And he’d start medevac’ing everyone he could out to Bristol, Birmingham, or London… civilian hospitals, wherever could take them… He had a million things to do now, and lives hung on the balance of every decision.

  But at least the living would live, or many of them; and the dead would stay dead.

  For now.

  * * *

  The Colonel slumped behind his desk, the adrenaline finally draining out of him. He was on the horn to CentCom. Shit was very far from under control. But at least there was enough structure around him, a lot of ongoing crisis management, that he could pretend to be a commander again. And not some goddamned half-assed aerial rocketeer.

  “It wasn’t just a matter of saving the base, General,” he said tiredly into the phone. “I put to you that this base is also the last best hope for humanity. As goes Hereford, so goes the world. Saving this facility was worth any price short of destroying it.” He listened and nodded for a few seconds more. “Yes, I was up in the helo myself. And, yes, I directed the rocket fire into the center of the outbreak… Copy that, sir. Yes, you’ll get my full report.” He hung up the phone.

  And he waved in the half dozen people at the door who needed something from him. Outside, the sun was going down; but the real work was just beginning.

  In his last second before the chaos of command washed over him again, he thought:

  This goddamned job was more fun before all the fucking zombies.

  Making terrible decisions that cost men their lives never got any easier. But it seemed to be getting a whole lot more necessary lately…

  LAUNCH

  Several able seamen and a couple of flight deck ratings, plus the small aircrew, pitched in to help load up the plane that sat waiting on the flight deck. But Alpha team did most of the loading themselves.

  This wasn’t because they were overly precious about how their gear was handled. They were just accustomed to rolling up their sleeves and doing whatever needed doing. That they could make a headshot from a mile out, parachute into combat from 40,000 feet wearing SCUBA gear, speak Farsi, and hack computer networks didn’t mean that they were too good to carry their own shit.

  “Get it done,” was one of the most commonly heard phrases in their world, the SOF world. Most often as in, “Right. We’ll get it done.”

  Pallets of kit, ammo boxes, weapons, explosives, radios, parachute rigs, and crates and rucks of God knows what else got carried, rolled, heaved, and power-lifted into the rear half of the C-2A Greyhound. Its top-mounted wings, each with an underslung propeller engine, loomed over the ducking heads of the men. The flight deck was starkly lit with LED and sodium lights in the black middle of the night, shadows looming in every corner, all of it out in the inky blackness of the rolling Atlantic. Ordinarily, pre-Apocalypse, they would have been able to spot the lights of Norfolk and Virginia Beach off in the distance on the coast – at the edge of a mighty continent.

  Now, of course, it was all black.

  Heavy cloud cover also masked the stars and moon above. The wind foretold of a storm coming. The whole eastern half of the United States seemed to be socked in. But it was no good waiting for better weather – even if an accurate forecast could be produced. There was truly no time like the present. Especially when the present may be all you’ve got.

  Two people who did not load shit were Commander Drake and Gunnery Sergeant Fick, the commander of the Marine Special Operations team onboard – who were also the B team and QRF (Quick Reaction Force) in case Alpha got in trouble. They stood with their bare arms folded, in a windy open area between the hulking island and the base of Catapult #3, the one at the starboard waist – or, rather, the Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System (EMALS) that had replaced the traditional steam catapults. When kicked off, it would accelerate the 59,000-pound fully loaded aircraft from 0 to 160mph in two seconds.

  As the loading finished up, and final flight checks were made… and as the seven men and one woman of Alpha team slung themselves coolly and emotionlessly into the front passenger section of the cabin… Captain Ainsley, formerly of SAS Increment, and commander of the team, stepped aside, and strode up to Drake and Fick, for a last word. Both the naval officer and the marine senior NCO instinctively saluted. An habitual gesture, made for those going into harm’s way, by those who have been there.

  “Right. Thanks for the hospitality,” Ainsley said with a serious look, saluting back.

  “It’s been our pleasure,�
� Drake responded. “More where it came from, when you get back.”

  Ainsley’s expression softened slightly at that, almost a smile, as if the idea of them coming back was funny. Then it faded. “You’ll ring us immediately you hear from Hereford?”

  “Absolutely, Captain,” Drake said.

  Ainsley reached out to shake his hand. “Just buggered comms again, no doubt.”

  Drake nodded, taking his hand.

  Fick put out his. “We’ll be on a short tether here. You fly safe.” Ainsley raised his eyebrow but shook the marine’s hand, then turned on his heel.

  Fick looked across to Drake. “They can’t reach Hereford?”

  “Couldn’t,” Drake said. “Actually, we just got through ten minutes ago.”

  The pair were both having to yell now over the roar of the plane’s prop engines, which were revving up to full power. The holdback bar at its rear held the trembling aircraft in place, while green-shirted flight deck crew attached the towbar to the plane’s nose.

  “And?” Fick shouted.

  “It was an outbreak. Bad. They lost nearly 20% of their total strength – dead, wounded, or turned. Their colonel had to get in an Apache and rocket their own goddamned hospital.”

  “Jesus Christ’s nuts on a hotplate. You’re not gonna tell Alpha?”

  “Negative,” Drake said, shaking his head slowly. “There’s not a blessed thing they can do about it from here. And the last thing these guys need is one more damned thing to worry about.” He crossed his arms and squinted into the dazzling lights. “On top of saving the world.”

  With that, the catapult officer (or “shooter”) did his final checks from the control pod, approved the pressure, and fired the release. The holdback bar dropped, the towbar yanked forward remorselessly – and the plane, and everyone packed into it, shrieked down half the length of the flight deck like, well, something shot out of a catapult. The bird dropped off the edge of the deck, briefly disappeared from sight, then reappeared, whining as it gained altitude.

  And then its landing lights all went dark. After that, there was only a fading buzzing sound, heading for the greater darkness of land – for the very middle of the land of the dead.

  And perhaps the last hope for the living.

  FLIGHT

  “Hey, wait a minute,” growled Predator, the team’s enormous and unkillable assaulter, in that voice that always reminded Ali of a professional wrestler doing a beef jerky commercial. “I saw exactly one of these cargo planes. So how do the marines come bail our asses out if this one gets taken down…?”

  Sergeant Major Handon, former Delta shooter, team’s ranking NCO, and 2IC to Captain Ainsley, leaned back in the darkness of the cabin. Aside from a couple of low-level red combat lights, the plane was totally blacked out. He knitted his fingers together behind his head. For some reason, he was never so relaxed as in the hours and minutes before a combat jump, or combat insertion by helo. Any kind of flying leap into probable death and destruction seemed to soothe his nerves.

  “Sea Hawks,” he said, referring to the Navy UH-60-variant helos that lived on the deck of the destroyer, the USS Michael Murphy, which had sailed along with the Kennedy. “Big fuel bladders inside… and a one-way trip. It was all in the MARSOC briefing.”

  “What the hell kind of a rescue is that? One way?”

  Pope looked up from a paperback volume of Dostoevsky he’d scored from the carrier’s library, around which he was curled in a dark corner of the cramped cabin. “Escape and evade, big guy. It all goes south, we presume you’ll hijack a monster car-crushing truck and drive us all to the coast.”

  Predator looked mollified. “Okay. That could work.”

  Juice, the team’s signals and tech genius, bearded and puffy, formerly of the secretive spec-ops intelligence unit known as "The Activity," looked thoughtful. “I guess Mexico’s out. Heh. Should have listened to the goddamned Republicans and locked down the border when we still had a chance to…”

  Pope went back to his book.

  Handon closed his eyes and dozed off.

  * * *

  Homer and Ali sat face to face in the row behind.

  At this point, they both pretty much knew everyone else knew about the two of them. Somehow they didn’t feel like going through any more contortions to conceal it. Maybe it was that their chances of survival had gone from slim, in their normal duties, to none, on this mission. And if they did somehow survive, well, everyone could just go on pretending.

  Ali figured that even if they achieved their target and found the data on the vaccine, which seemed just about doable… well, after that, fighting their way through downtown Chicago to their extraction point was a whole other proposition. Three million Zulus (and Romeos, the runners – and maybe Foxtrots, the insanely lethal ones…) in a blighted and constricted urban space were going to make Black Hawk Down and the Battle of Mogadishu look like a sorority house pillow fight.

  Ali, for her part, didn’t know if it might not be better this way. Her whole life had been about trying to do something useful. And you didn’t get to the Tier-1 level in spec-ops if you weren’t totally ready to get killed doing it. She knew what Predator would say, about the looming spectre of the team’s death, if she were brave enough to raise it with him: “Today’s as good a day as any. Let’s finish it right.” Juice would probably make some noises about being smarter, not braver. But in the end he would stand and fight with Pred, and with all of them. Both Handon and Ainsley, despite their differences, would do their jobs until their last breaths. And probably a few seconds beyond that.

  And Homer… well, Homer would be happy enough to go when God said it was his time. She didn’t believe that meant anything, of course. Except in that it made him happy. That was real. She looked up into his eyes, glinting in the darkness. She reached out for his hand.

  “Suppose,” she said, quietly and carefully, “that you actually do loop through your whole life in the last second before you die. That it all flashes by. And then you wink out. How different is that, really, from looping through that one second over and over for eternity?”

  Homer nodded and took this in. “Are you saying the soulless are replaying their lives over and over?” He thought immediately of Job, his Existential Zulu, standing forlorn on his Dover clifftop. Standing guard by his friend.

  Ali shook her head slightly. “…I don’t know. I always feel like I can see something in there. Behind their eyes.”

  Homer squeezed her hand. “Sister… just don’t you ever find out.”

  She realized with embarrassment that a tear was forming at the corner of her eye. Homer had his God for comfort. And she had Homer.

  And for that she would always be profoundly grateful.

  * * *

  For his part, Homer did not want to look away from her. But he did, out the window, and down, toward the endless continent that now loomed beneath them. He was also looking to the north. Little Creek, Virginia would be out there, maybe only 75 or 100 miles distant.

  Which meant that his family would also be down there, somewhere. In some state, his family would be there.

  When the reality of that fact hit home, it was all he could do not to grab his parachute rig, pop the door, and dive. To be so close, and to not know, to do nothing… all of it was insane.

  Part of him also wanted to pull his hand away from Ali’s.

  Instead, he tightened his grip.

  Wherever his wife and daughter and son were… they would be clinging to whatever they had left. Whether it was each other, or to the bosom of the Almighty.

  If it pleases God to let me pass through this one last storm, he thought… I swear on my immortal soul that I will go and find them. One way or another, whatever the outcome… I will come for them.

  * * *

  Henno, the other Brit and SAS man, and a fierce Yorkshireman, slept through almost the whole flight. Operators spend a lot of time on long-haul aircraft, and have a well-honed ability to rack out quickly, anywh
ere. But Henno had taken kipping to an art form. It was his favorite pastime.

  He came awake calmly and completely when the red cabin lights flashed the 15-minute warning. He yawned, grabbed his gear and rifle, and smiled out loud.

  He’d been dreaming of a big fry-up, sausage and mushrooms and beans on toast, in his native North Yorkshire. He wondered if he’d ever see the beautiful North York Moors again.

  Yeah, no danger, he thought. He always thought that way. With a childlike faith.

  Ainsley clapped him on the shoulder, as they all stood and began to get rigged up for the jump. This included switching over to their oxygen bottles, and checking one another for signs of hypoxia. Also, every rig and connection needed to be triple-checked. The plane tilted and the engines screamed as the pilot coaxed it to its service ceiling of 33,500 feet.

  The ammo cache pallet got shoved out the door first, into the screaming wind and rain.

  After that, everything moved very, very quickly.

  ON THE AIR

  Thousands of miles back to the east, Alice Grisham nodded at the cameraman and then at the bedraggled man standing next to her, then raised the microphone. The wind was blasting across the field as her hair flailed around her, and she wished she had tied it back that morning. But they had been in a hurry. As one of only three television news crews still functioning, they had to move fast to get a drop on anything new, to get there before it was all over. And getting down to Folkestone as soon as possible that morning had been more important than good grooming.

  “Are we on air?” she said, trying to focus on the wavering camera.

  “Yes, we’re go.”

  “Hello and welcome to Midland Central News. This morning I’m in Folkestone, where the most astounding story has been uncovered overnight. I’m here with Mr. Alderney, who is originally from Paris, but until recently has been a resident of none other than the Channel Tunnel. For the last two years, nearly forty people have been fighting for their lives inside the tunnel itself, and in the early hours of this morning troops from the barracks here in Folkestone initiated an astounding operation to clear out a zombie infestation threatening to break out of the tunnel and onto our streets. But what they were to discover inside was far more profound than zombies. No fewere than thirty-eight survivors have so far been recovered, including a young child who was in fact born inside. Mr. Alderney, how does it feel to be out of the tunnel?”