by Glynn James
All that moved in this scene was Juice, the Marines under his temporary command, the boat that ferried them across – and, achingly slowly, the rising sun. Almost no sound was made by any of them.
As was also usually the case at port facilities, there were no boats tied up. They’d all been taken during the fall, as the dwindling living tried to escape the swelling legions of dead on the land. Few of them lasted long at sea; but they lasted a few days or hours longer than they would have otherwise.
The naval base’s long double pier jutted straight out from the wooden dock, and the JFK’s launch headed for the end point of the left one. Because the dockside had been built up from the water’s edge, and the launch was down on its surface, they couldn’t see much past it to the base itself. All they had to tell them what was waiting for them was the drone video – which, happily, was being beamed into the monocle attached to Juice’s helmet in front of his left eye.
The pilot of their Navy shore launch cut the engines forty meters out, causing the boat to coast in and practically kiss the edge of the pier. The second crewman sprang up onto the wooden slats and started tying them off. At the same time, Juice, Raible, and Lovell powered themselves silently up and over – each carrying over sixty pounds of weapons, ammo, armor, and equipment – and took up security positions, while their men disembarked.
Juice counted off the six Marines as they slithered by, though there was little chance they’d lost someone overboard already. But the first job of a combat leader was keeping track of his men, and it was long-accustomed habit. Also, Juice knew the names, faces, ranks, and roles of each of them, having memorized that section of the mission planning doc, along with much of the rest of it, overnight.
In seconds, the nine men were weapons up, advancing smartly off the pier, past the docks – and into God only knew what was waiting for them, in the sprawling complex of buildings beyond.
Hopefully some decent food, Juice thought as he picked up speed, passed each of the Marines, and took up the only position from which real warriors lead.
The front.
* * *
Tucked up in CIC, back in his comfy chair, Drake leaned back and watched the multiple views on the battle overhead, including the team leader’s shoulder cam. The Alpha operator was out front now. Things seemed in hand.
That’ll probably change, Drake thought mordantly.
Eyes flicking across the blinking and beeping room, the acting strike group commander saw LT Campbell pacing around her domain like a mother tiger, wearing a wireless headset. Formidable as always.
He glanced at the overhead displays again. The team was still advancing unopposed, which was the expected state of affairs, and the desired one.
As he watched the reality TV drama getting going, he also began to indulge in second-guessing himself. His head had been all over the place since that grenade had gone off practically right next to it, and a fog or gauze had seemed to descend over his thoughts with some regularity. He knew he couldn’t afford a single bad decision. Because he was in a position where just one of those might get everyone on this ship killed.
And if that happened, then he’d probably be getting everyone everywhere killed.
And now, suddenly, the decision to spare that battlecruiser, to keep their planes on the deck, seemed like madness. The Russians had done their damnedest to send the Kennedy and everyone aboard her straight to the bottom. And he had chosen to leave that missile-bristling battlecruiser floating around out there, just over the horizon. Which made their operational environment exponentially more complex.
So what the hell had he been thinking?
Now he wondered, agonized, about whether he had made the decision for the wrong reason: because he just hadn’t been willing to sink an entire dreadnought full of living people – immolating half in a fiery inferno, and sending the other half to a watery grave. Not when there were so few of them left now. It seemed like there had to be some chance of accommodation. So many had died already.
Drake shook his head. Why was it we so often knew the reasons for our decisions only after we’ve made them? Or was it that we just manufactured rationales, sensible-sounding explanations, for having done what we wanted to do, for purely emotional reasons – or for reasons that were a mystery even to ourselves?
He also remembered, though, that Handon had been one hundred percent behind the decision. And Handon was not, so far as Drake knew, prone to fuzzy or sentimental thinking. Abrams was behind him, too. He had to trust that the support of those two meant he was making the right calls.
He snapped back to the room as several people stood up at their stations. All of them were leaning and craning at the overhead monitors. Something was happening on the ground.
On the screen, people were running.
* * *
Juice spat a big wodge of dark brown liquid – but, for the first time in a while, into dirt. He didn’t, for now, spare a look behind him. He had to trust that his two fire teams would be maneuvering right on his ass. He needed all his attention for the terrain ahead.
Rifle up to his shoulder, but angled down at the low ready position, eye casting out over the top of his EOTech holo-sight, beard slightly compressed on the stock, Juice threaded through a pair of small wooden buildings that backed the pier, and then out onto a grassy concourse, now badly overgrown, which led to the main part of the complex. The sun was still well behind the buildings, but there was enough light to see.
Most immediately obvious was that this was a whole complex – big and sprawling, with dozens of structures, ranging in size from shacks to what looked like storage warehouses. There were also a lot of what seemed to be office, barracks, and mess buildings – but these were of less interest. It was stores they needed. Anything the South Africans had left behind when they abandoned the depot.
Or died inside it.
Juice paused at the back corner of one of the waterfront buildings, took a knee, and covered the open area ahead of him. He then used hand signals to direct his two teams forward. The first one traversed the north edge of the open square, and the other the south. They were keeping close to cover, to avoid drawing undue attention from any former South African naval personnel.
And speaking of the dead, that was the second thing that grabbed Juice – there weren’t any. None moving, or even standing around. He, as well as his Marines, had been prepared to silently dispatch any quiescent ones before they woke up, or to put down any that locked onto them. But this place was starting to look like one of two things. Either it was like NAS Oceana in Virginia Beach, where all the dead had somehow been swept up into a swelling hurricane of millions of them, far away, but coming in fast…
Or else someone had already cleared this place.
Juice moved out, overtook his Marines, and angled them toward a group of much larger buildings to their north-east. Those looked most promising.
And that’s when they finally started coming upon them: destroyed dead on the ground.
The first few looked as if they had been dead a long time, but recently destroyed. Juice knelt down by one that lay at the base of a tree. Like all the others he could see, it wore the South African Navy working uniform. It didn’t show any bullet or blast trauma. It lay face down, and as Juice moved to examine the brainstem, he saw that the upper base of the spinal cord had been severed by a single stroke – a deep cut, perfectly placed, but looking as if it hadn’t been made by a particularly sharp implement. It was crosswise, not a stab like a bayonet strike. A sword slash would most likely have taken the head off, so it wasn’t that.
This had been produced by something like a garden spade or hoe maybe. Civilians? Juice wondered. All the other ones he checked in the vicinity were the same. And they still hadn’t encountered any active ones.
Juice said a silent prayer: Long may that last.
Close With and Destroy
SAS Saldanha
Still keeping perfect noise discipline, using hand signals only, Juic
e directed the two teams closer to the group of big warehouse-looking buildings. So far, he had an excellent impression of the Marines, who seemed extremely tactically proficient. They also kept their problems to themselves, and their minds on their jobs.
He watched the eight tooled-up figures in digital urban camo, all carrying tan SCAR assault rifles, slither forward in the thin early-morning light, switching seamlessly between bounding overwatch and standard patrol formations, as the terrain dictated. They showed very solid small-unit patrolling tactics – and Juice had no doubt their reaction drills to enemy contact would be equally sharp.
As he waited for the two columns to stretch out a bit farther – no bunching up – he considered that these guys had presumably been equally proficient in the flight-deck battle. There’d just been no time to notice it. And most of that force had been the militia of barely trained sailors, which had contributed to the general air of chaos.
But this was a proper operational team, and a serious patrol.
The other thing that came through was their barely restrained intensity. This was obviously an aggressive force, and Juice remembered that Marines had always been aggressive, always pushing out. They understood that their fundamental job was to close with and destroy the enemy. Juice made a mental note that, depending how things played out, he might need to work to channel, or even to restrain, that aggression.
Which was probably why he’d gotten the job.
Clocking the layout of the hulking structures ahead, he made an on-the-fly decision to clear the one out at the edge of the base first. This was closest to town, and so probably the riskiest – and also the one where silence was most important. By getting it out of the way now, and clearing in from there, they’d tilt the odds of things not having gone noisy when they were closest to the population center. Finally, this would have them finishing with the largest one and – absent any other intel – presumably the most promising.
Four minutes later they had maneuvered around to within a dozen yards of the perimeter, a fourteen-foot chain-link fence topped with razor wire. It looked intact, and Juice said a silent prayer of thanks for that.
He spat, stood, and moved to the door of the outside-most structure. His first fire team stacked up behind him, the stack running down the outside wall. They had absolutely no idea what was inside. But that was pretty much the whole problem of close-quarters battle, or CQB: buildings were of an unknown layout, containing unknown hazards, with totally unknown numbers and disposition of enemy, and possibly innocent civilians as well. That was why those who did it practiced CQB endlessly – so they could react instantly to absolutely anything, and still get it exactly right.
Juice took a last look at the men he was about to lead inside. As commander, he knew he had to balance mission accomplishment against the lives of the men. But, as usual lately, he also knew he had to heavily privilege the mission. Because the lives of everyone on the planet hung on its success. If he had to spend these men’s lives, he’d spend them.
It would help that he didn’t know them very well.
He put his ear to the door and listened for five seconds. Nothing.
Well, he thought, taking a couple of deep breaths. This is what we came here for. He put his gloved left hand on the door handle.
And he began to slowly turn it.
* * *
Back up on the bridge, Abrams walked over again to the station with the Predator video and radar feeds. The Russian warship was sitting right where they had left it. It was still holding position, at stand-off distance, and seemed rather like a chastened dog, sniffing around from a distance, waiting to see what scraps the Americans were going to leave.
Abrams had to assume they had some drone coverage up themselves – and also knew right where the Kennedy was, and what it was doing.
Which was, currently, sticking its snout into what had probably been, until very recently, the Russians’ honey jar, the naval depot. Abrams shook his head. There were a lot of moving parts right now, and he hoped everyone knew what the hell they were doing.
He clapped the ensign at the monitoring station on his shoulder, and moved across the bridge to the rear screens. Way down below on the deck, he could see their pair of F-35s hunched down, waiting, tow-bars already hooked into their noses, and locked with the two electromagnetic catapults buried in the deck. Both of them could be in the air in seconds. So the Kennedy was by no means helpless.
They’d just lowered their guard for a minute.
Hopefully, they wouldn’t get sucker-punched.
* * *
Barely thirty minutes after entering the first large structure, Juice led the way out the back of the second-to-last one. That was all the time it had taken to clear three of the four. And they’d quickly learned two things.
One, all of these buildings had already been totally cleared out of supplies, if they’d ever held any. And, two, they’d also been cleared of the dead. The only former humans inside were just like the others they’d found outside – South African sailors, face down on the deck, dispatched with precision strikes to the brainstem.
It was nice that Juice and his Marines didn’t have to do any fighting. But it was a lot less nice that they hadn’t found any of the goddamned supplies they desperately needed, and which were the whole point of being here.
It was starting to look like the Russians – or someone – had done a real smash-and-grab job on this joint, leaving nothing of any value behind. And Juice keenly felt the weight of his responsibility here – the knowledge that bringing back all his people counted little against bringing back the critical supplies they needed. Frankly, at this point, he might be happy to trade a few people for a few crates of ammo, and maybe a barrel of jet fuel.
Only one warehouse remained. It was also the biggest. So it was probably that or nothing.
He put his helmet up against Raible’s and quietly instructed him to choose two men to pull external security. Raible – sweating and leg-sore from padding around with sixty pounds of gear, and from the tension of room-clearing – chose himself. To keep him company, he picked his fire team’s youngest Marine: Lance Corporal Jenkins.
Juice slapped Raible lightly on the side of the helmet. Then he smoothly pulled open the last door and led the remaining six Marines inside. All of them disappeared into the near darkness, a smooth and nearly silent snake of men and rifles.
* * *
As the door floated closed behind them, Corporal Raible pulled his weapon into his shoulder, put his back up against the outside of the building, and took a deep breath.
He winked over at Jenkins, who looked keyed up. As a lance corporal, he was by far the most junior man left in the Kennedy’s MARSOC teams. There were no privates in Marine Special Operations – and not many lance corporals, at least not out of training.
Speaking of being junior, there was one thing Raible hadn’t gone out of his way to tell Juice: that this was actually his first mission as fire team leader. Prior to now, he’d been assistant team leader under Lovell. But the losses in the battle of had resulted in his rapid promotion. And he keenly felt the responsibility of his new role – equal parts excited and apprehensive. He wanted to do well. But he really wanted to not screw up.
So far, somehow, the patrol had remained resolutely unfucked. And Raible had been trained well, and had terrific examples in small-unit leadership. Now Jenkins smiled back at Raible’s wink, but the smile was quickly subsumed back into his game-day face, and he pointed over Raible’s shoulder. The senior man spun in place, bringing his rifle up, and immediately saw what Jenkins had.
A shambling dead woman – wearing the tatters of a stained uniform, with her previously tucked-away hair now a huge and somewhat comical halo of Afro – had tottered out into the open, from behind a nearby two-story building. It hadn’t clocked them yet, and showed no inclination to look in their direction. If the two Marines stayed still, it would probably just walk on by.
Then again, it might become a haz
ard later. Raible did a quick assessment of whether it would be safer to leave it, or to put it down – and came down on the side of action. Plus, Jenkins clearly wanted to get in the fight. And he needed the experience.
Raible signaled him to take it.
The young and extremely fit Marine took off in his tan assault boots, sweeping silently around behind the lone Zulu. Accelerating the last few yards, he smoothly drew his K-Bar knife from its upside-down sheath on his vest and ran the Zulu straight through its brainstem, his momentum driving the blade unerringly home. He even caught the body as it fell, lowering it smoothly and silently to the ground. He wiped his blade on its shirt, and was back in position beside Raible ten seconds later.
He pressed his helmet up against his team leader’s head and whispered: “So – Zombie Kill of the Week, or what?”
Raible worked to stifle his laughter. “Dude,” he whispered back, “I love that movie. ‘Fuck this clown!’”
“Ha,” Jenkins snorted, obviously struggling to keep his own mirth in check. “‘Rule number one for surviving Zombieland?’”
“‘Cardio!’”
Obsessively quoting favorite movies was a much-loved sport among deployed Marines – even if this wasn’t exactly the time or place for it. Neither of them suspected that their own cardio was going to be seriously tested very soon – at least not until the door of the warehouse opened again, and both fire teams slithered back out. They seemed more out of breath, more alert – and a lot more spooked – than they had been when they went in.
The last man, Sergeant Lovell, pressed the door closed behind him.
Raible’s forehead creased, as he realized something was wrong. Finally, he worked out what it was.
Juice.
He wasn’t with them.
Plotting a Murder
JFK - Bridge
“Sir! Commander!”
Abrams jumped as the ensign shouted, presenting with something a little too much like panic. Maybe this was payback, Abrams figured, not having left the poor man alone all morning.