by John Ringo
“The same thing will bring infected into the city from the distance,” Sanskeld said. “There is going to be a continuous stream. And the piles of rotting bodies are, again, a major health hazard.”
“Disposal, period, is going to be an issue,” Ramos said, making another note. “But the concept has merit. Ensign, what would you think of being temporarily grounded?”
“Wouldn’t prefer it, sir,” Sophia said. “And Lieutenant Commander Chen has much more experience at this point on small boat ops, sir. If you’re thinking of sending someone up there to get started, Commander Chen is the man.”
“Thank you so much, Sophia,” Lieutenant Commander Chen said. “And I’d second the notion of using something other than fifty. But that is what is currently loaded. So if you wish us to get started and see how it works, we can do so, sir. I’m more than used to converting ideas on the fly. We’re flexible that way,” he said, shooting a glance at Sanskeld. Chen had already raised the point about gunboats.
“It’s worth a shot,” Ramos said. “Any other suggestions we haven’t already covered? Lieutenant Smith, I note that you’ve been engrossed by your laptop. I take it you’re not watching movies.”
“I was looking at the satellite images, sir,” Faith said. “Currently I’m reading Patton’s biography.”
“No inclusions to the meeting, Lieutenant?” Ramos asked.
“Words, sir,” Faith said. “Not liking talking. Especially around autonegators, sir. And more goal-concept than plans, sir.”
“General order,” Ramos said. “Let the lieutenant talk and don’t insert what-if or other objections until I so direct. Lieutenant, just . . . talk.”
“Sophia beat me to gunboats, sir,” Faith said, looking up. “Maybe we’re stuck in our ways but they work. And if you do it day after day, maybe move around a little, you’re going to get the numbers down. But what the major said is right. There’s the bodies, which are going to be a big problem. And there’s going to be more moving in. Not just attracted in, sir. The infected have territories, sir. They fight over them some. When you take them out, there’s going to be a big movement of territories shifting. Not sure how to use it to our advantage but until you hit the edge of the suburbs in clearance, there’s, yeah, going to be infected infiltrating in for freaking ever.
“So you got to go out and round those up. Then kill ’em. Then dispose of the bodies, sir. Best way to dispose of the bodies is probably burn pits, sir. So you need them in burn pits and you want them as close as possible just for the logistics, sir.
“So . . . The piles from the gunboats you can’t get in burn pits. So you just burn them . . . there. Words. Institute?”
“In situ,” Sophia said, rolling her eyes.
“In situ,” Faith said. “I don’t know how smart it is or anything, but I’m thinking using one of the tankers or a support ship and mounting big flamethrowers on them. Maybe not on them. Maybe a pipe to a ship or a barge that’s the flamethrower ship. Fire up a particular point for a day or two. Bodies start rotting. Come in with the flamethrower rig and just keep burning them till they’re bones or ash or whatever. Probably should bring in some of the fire-fighting boats to keep the buildings around them from burning or whatever. Use pure petroleum, sir. We got a shit ton of it at Statia and we’re not refining it. But it’s a glut compared to diesel or kerosene, which we need. So if that’s an idea we go with, get the petroleum. Hell, it will burn, which is all you need. Sir.
“So then you go ashore and start digging up the Mall . . .”
“The Mall?” Sanskeld said.
“Major?” Ramos said dangerously.
“Shit grows back, Major,” Faith said. “Parris Island was going back to nature when you were there, Major. Shit grows back. Big fucking . . . osteoporosis or something in France, which is all the dead from some big battle in World War Two. Do that in fifty years or whatever. Make a memorial. We can replant or whatever later. Yeah, the Mall. It’s got trees, too. Which we’re gonna need. Send in a combat engineering team during the day and dig trenches, pits or whatever in the Mall. All the grassy areas. Maybe except around the Washington Monument. I get that’s sort of . . . Not around the Washington Monument. But down past the Smithsonian, over on this Ellipse thing . . . Put a bunch of wood in the bottom. Bunch of wood. Cut trees all over wherever we’ve taken, take down busted-up houses, whatever. Bunch of wood. Cover it in petroleum to get it burning nice.
“Then send ashore heavy armored platoons like we already do, sir. That’s going to be a big logistics thing. Fuel, repairs, recovery, support . . . Going to have to look at how many amtracks and such we can stand up and support, sir. And get there. I’m talking about more than you can fit on a LHD. Send them in night and day. Night more than day. Maybe an M88 in the lead. HERCULES can run over cars just like Abrams and they can stay buttoned up. Once the cars are crunched, amtracks can roll over the crunched cars most of the time. Follow with an Abrams. They can pull amtracks out that get stuck and the HERCULES can pull out the Abrams. Infected might be able to swarm HERCULES. That’s what forty mike mike is made for. If a Herc gets stuck or breaks down, send a Herc from a nearby team. Combined arms teams with a wrecker ’cause we’re gonna get stuck and getting out of a scrum when you’ve got a stuck armored vehicle sucks, sir.
“But don’t shoot up the infected. We’ve only got so much ammo. I mean, we got a lot, but only so much, sir, no planned resupply and a big world to clear. We’ll need a secure point, big one, in artillery range of the Mall. Preferably somewhere we can roll on and off with ammo. When you lead in a pied piper, fire it up with artillery. Then bring in the bulldozers, at some point, bulldoze them into the pits and you’re done. Fire up the pits probably in the evening. Fill with more wood in the morning. Do it all over again that night. Keep doing that till the whole area’s clear. Minimum use of bullets, lots of arty, but we’ve got that sitting around. And artillery kills better than bullets, from what I’ve heard.
“Rolling offshore every day will be an issue. We may have to set up some sort of secure area to roll to. Maybe where the artillery is. But it should have the back-door of being able to roll offshore in case shit hits the fan. So, close to the water.
“We’re going to need five times the amtracks you’d normally use for a MEU, one HERCULES and one Abrams for each three to five amtracks and a shitload of speakers. We don’t have to use the psyops ones all the time. Any big ass speaker will do. Drive around doing that until all the infected are toast, sir. Take some time but we can really clear all the way out to . . .”
She looked at the map.
“There’s this ring road, right? 495? We can probably clear everything inside that ring road in, say, four weeks? Not yellow, but low orange. Yellow inside the D.C. city limits. Maybe put up some definite barriers inside there and get it down to greenish in a certain area. By then we’d have moved out from the Mall to other areas to use as mass graves, sir. And probably have the arty sitting in the Mall to support it.
“That’s not so much a plan, sir, as concept, you understand,” Faith said. “I don’t know how many arty troops we got or what it takes to fix their gear up to standard. Don’t know if that’s all doable, sir. Probably the thing about the amtracks and Abrams isn’t. I don’t think we have five times as much or can get that many up and going in that time even if we did. But the more we use, the faster it goes, sir. That’s all I got, sir.”
“So, to dial it down a bit,” Ramos said. “One team of an M88, three to five tracks and an Abrams rolls through D.C. When it has a fair following it heads to an area of the Mall that has been pre-selected. As it passes through that area, it is fired up by one-five-five using variable time fuse. The infected are killed by the VT fire and the unit continues on. End of the day, bulldozers push the infected bodies into pits pre-laid with wood, start the fires and let them burn. Do it again the next day.”
“That’s the general idea, sir,” Faith said. “Probably roll out hot and fast, then slow down on the w
ay back in. We may be able to build up maps that can see where the roads are clear and where they’re not. That’s where the helos are going to come in handy. Also . . . if a team gets totally stuck, they can probably be pulled out by helos direct from their tracks. More Soph’s thing than mine but Gunhawks for cover and Dragons for extract. We could probably STABO out most of the team. Or something. Not my asteroid, sir.
“Then when we come back in, refuel, rearm if we need it, then roll back out. Do that over and over again. When we’ve gotten to the point we’re not getting many takers in the middle, move out to other areas and set up the same sort of central kill and disposal point.
“Big tactical problem is that you get more infected following you at night. Do day runs, then night. Turn the thing about the fires around. Fire them up in the morning and let them cook during the day. Then the tracks roll out again at dusk. In the morning, the tracks make sure the area is cleared for the bulldozer crews, bulldoze them in all at once. That way we can be sure there’s not a friendly-fire incident. Is it going to take a lot of logistics? Yes, sir. Way lot of logistics and support. I mean, if we do it big. We can do it smaller and it will just take more time, sir. I’m not sure what we can really support, sir. Way above my paygrade, sir.”
“Major Sanskeld?” Ramos said.
“Do a thorough air reconnaissance, first, sir,” Sanskeld said. “And build the map to which the lieutenant referred. Possibly some SAR but mostly build the map. Video, where possible, of every road. Even if it is hand-held as long as we can figure out what we’re looking at. Build up a map of which roads are passable and impassable and use that to determine routes that avoid, unless necessary, running over the cars. My objection to that, sir, is less the mess than that you’d have fuel on the streets which combined with weapons and sparks from the passing tracks would cause fires. Which would kill survivors and you can’t actually drive your tracks through it.”
“Noted,” Ramos said.
“But those are details, sir,” Sanskeld said. “In general . . . I begin to see the logic. Very complex operation that will require a good deal of intelligence and initiative on the part of the team leaders, sir. That is another issue.”
“And they’ll need to be able to figure out where they are and where they’re going,” Sophia said. “Which leaves Faith out.”
“Bite me,” Faith said. “Car GPS saves the day, there.”
“That is a point,” Ramos said. “We can build the map to note blocked routes. And use standard GPS where possible. It’s easier to reprogram that than in BFT.”
Faith nudged the captain next to her.
“BFT?” she whispered.
“Blue Force Tracker,” the captain replied.
“Secure point for artillery and fall back?” Ramos said.
“Pentagon?” Lieutenant Colonel Hamilton said. He had taken over as the MEU S-3. “Fenced and gated. We may need to do some clearance on the Arlington side, first. The infected can swarm the fences if they are in enough density and a camp that size will attract them from miles around. But the artillery would be in easy range of the Mall. Close to the water. No direct access but, well, that’s what bulldozers and C4 is for. Possibly Reagan National. More area. Also fenced and gated. Better over-water access. Issue. We have stood up no artillery at all. All artillery MOS personnel were transferred to infantry duties.”
“That’s a matter for the G-1 to unfuck if we decide to do this,” Colonel Ramos said. “I take it Captain Smith will have no objections to the Marines having organic artillery at least. Lieutenant Commander Chen.”
“Sir?” Chen said.
“Gather up all the gunboat squadrons and head up to D.C.,” Ramos said. “Start the music. We’ll bring up the MEU later. Start on the Pentagon side. Try to find a good spot away from what we’re going to use, which means the Pentagon or possibly Reagan. But start the music. Keep going until we get there or until you’re not getting much on the Arlington side of the Potomac. Then switch to D.C. We’ll see about alternate weapons to the fifties on the fly as you said. Clear?”
“Aye, aye, sir,” Chen said.
“Colonel Hamilton, I want a more detailed look at this overall plan,” Ramos said. “It sounds like to hold either the Pentagon or Reagan we’ll need to do some ground-level clearance on the Arlington side, first. Look at where to set the kill zone. Arlington National Cemetery is off the list.”
“Absolutely, sir,” Hamilton said. “But, bad news, sir.”
“Which is?” Ramos asked.
“Best alternate impact area and burn pit zone is probably the Army-Navy Club golf course, sir,” Hamilton said.
“Ouch,” Ramos said to a series of grimaces around the table. “That was a damned good course, too. Was. Past tense.”
“Aye, aye, sir,” Hamilton said, grinning. “Army’s never going to let us live it down, sir. I mean not in a hundred years, sir.”
“They will if we can get enough free to stand them back up,” Ramos said. “I want the Phase One plan complete by seventeen hundred tomorrow so we can look at what we need for Phase Two and Three planning. Looks like a concept, though. Lieutenant Smith.”
“Sir?” Faith said, looking up from her computer.
“Your idea,” Ramos said. “You are going to have the honor of first landing in the AO. Rack them up, Lieutenant.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
* * *
“Jesus,” Sophia breathed as the Seahawk circled over Arlington. “I thought London was bad . . .”
The Greater D.C. Metropolitan area had a larger number of wooden based buildings than London and that had been a major issue. Also, during the summer it dried out a good bit and was very arboreal. What had swept across Arlington was as much a forest fire as house fires. The result was that about half of Arlington and D.C. had burned. And while undoubtedly many infected were killed by the fires, anyone trapped in a home or other building by the infected had definitely perished.
It was spotty, though. In this case, spots of unscorched ground were often entirely surrounded by devastation. And there were survivors. She could see them on rooftops, signaling for pick-up. In some of the balcony high-rise buildings the survivors were using ropes on the exterior to move around. In others they’d apparently cleared the interiors or the infected had died off.
They passed over a killzone of one of Chen’s gunboats and she shook her head. The pile was . . . huge. Massive. Sick. Piles of twisted and probably rotting bodies, most of them in pieces from .50 caliber fire. By her experienced count, over a thousand, probably over two. She was glad she couldn’t smell it from up here.
And the infected were still swarming on it. The gunboat division, which had backed away from the pile for the day to get some sleep away from the smell, would be back in the morning to make more carrion. Probably half their rounds at this point were just chewing up corpses. If she’d been in charge, she’d have them move.
“That is . . . sick,” Lieutenant Simms said. The former F-18 pilot was still a newbie at helos even compared to Sophia. Despite that, both had already rotated to Mayport as IPs.
“We built up some kills in the Canaries,” Sophia said. “Thought those were something. Was I ever wrong.
“Okay,” she said, looking at the civilian GPS strapped to the flight panel. “What’s next?”
“25th Street South,” Simms said.
“Port. 25th Street South at my order,” Sophia said, bringing the bird around to the target street. “Begin film . . .”
“Starting, aye,” Olga said. “And the answer is: 700 block: blocked and charred and blocked again.”
“Seven Hundred: Bravo comma Charlie, aye,” Simms said, making a note on his iPad.
“Mark it as mostly bypassable,” Sophia said.
“Marked,” Simms said. “You sure?”
“The road’s blocked. The houses are burned flat and mostly slab. The amtracks can move through the rubble.”
“Hell of a thing,” Simms said. “I lived in Auro
ra when I was stationed here.”
“Sorry for your loss, sir,” Sophia said automatically. “26th Street, south . . .”
CHAPTER 25
“Let the bodies hit the floor,” Faith sang, drawing her USP. “Let the bodies hit the floor. Let the bodies, let the bodies . . .”
Infected had inhabited Reagan National. It was accessible due to busted gates and all the broken glass on the front and it kept them out of the weather. Despite all the gunboat clearance in the area, the place was still fairly populated. Not bad; the platoon wasn’t going to get into a scrum with this density. But quite a few.
Trixie was parked outside baggage claim. Technically, Faith should be either an infantry or armor platoon leader. But while her specialty was infantry, the very few suggestions that Trixie be taken away had been met with cold, blank stares from not only Wolf Marines but pretty much all the senior officers. So when the infantry unassed, she popped out of the tank and slid down the glacis to go have fun in the sun.
Or the baggage claim as the case may be.
About half the platoon was newbies from PI fleshed out by Wolf Marines and trained jarheads from Lejeune. The boots and Lejeune Marines heard the tales from the “Wolves” as the scattered Wolf Squadron Marines were called. But this was their first experience of fighting with “The Skipper.” Seeing it was a different deal.
* * *
“Does the Skipper ever miss?” Private First Class Bryant Fisher asked as he changed mags. The former PI boot had been fast-tracked to PFC as one of the few who could think beyond direct orders. He wasn’t freaked out by the fight. He’d spent about half the time since being released from the horrors of extended boot camp clearing liners. Clearing liners was a picnic compared to a ten month boot camp at PI.
“Oh, yeah,” Curran said as Faith switched to her first pistol. Twelve rounds and twelve infected were on the floor bleeding out. She holstered the pistol and drew another. “Everybody misses a shot once in a while. I’ve seen her miss . . . twice, I think? And her sister’s better at over a hundred meters. Just stay on target . . .”