“Not… not good…”
Jacobs stared at him for a second longer than was comfortable, took a slow breath in through his nose, then spoke low and fast.
“Commander, I need choppers in the air now. I need them equipped with camcorders and night optics, and I need them to fly over the test site until they bring back footage.” The commander nodded. “And I want AWACS to refuel and stay on station.”
He turned to walk out but stopped as the door to the operations room opened and Fisher walked in, freezing under the wide-eyed glare of Jacobs.
“With me, Fisher,” he growled. “We need to wake up someone at Langley to get ahead of this.”
“Ahead of what?” Fisher asked, almost adding an instinctive ‘sir’ in response to Jacobs’ commanding tone.
“Ahead of the fact that your magic serum just upped their goddamned game, and I for one would like to have answers ready before the White House ask questions. Commander?” he shouted back over his shoulder. The officer looked up. “I’d be obliged if you could send someone to fetch Chief Miller to my office.”
The head navy SEAL was doing what any self-respecting operator would be doing after breakfast with nothing on the team’s agenda. The double thump on the metal bulkhead beside his cot woke him in an instant to see the kid step smartly back out of arm’s reach—a sensible move when waking a trained killer who’d seen more than his fair share of war.
“Spooks want you,” Wilson reported. Miller sat up with a groan, cricked his neck from side to side and pulled a face of annoyance that it didn’t issue a noise as he moved, and slid out of the small bed to put his feet straight into his boots and bend down to lace them up.
“Did the spooks say what they wanted?” Wilson shrugged.
“They sent some baby Lieutenant for you. We sent him back to his mom.”
Miller hid a smile. Even if he was the kid, the baby of the team, he was still a hardened operator and probably ten years older than a junior grade lieutenant.
“Stow your gear and be ready to deploy,” Miller said as he left their cabin, knowing that if the shady agents wanted him, it meant they had shady business they wanted his team to complete.
TWELVE
The helicopters vibrated as they flew low over the constantly changing topography of Skye. Deep troughs filled with jagged rocks gave way to flat hilltops. Small clusters of buildings, looking as though they’d settled there generations before, and refused to relinquish their tentative hold on the inhospitable land, were few and the evidence of humanity was sparse to say the least.
Four helicopters had been sent out—far less than the American fleet could spare but four more than the admiral had wanted to deploy—and one of those was the ponderous twin-bladed helicopter which had been employed for the first tests of the lure and the serum.
Spotters leaned out of open doors, and in the case of the larger aircraft, the crew chief, strapped safely to the fuselage, hung on and leaned out over the open rear ramp to watch the ground whipping below.
The sun was almost fully up in the sky, not that it made the area brightly lit as the low cloud killed visibility so much, and that low cloud forced the pilots of the three Sikorsky Seahawks and the single, twin-bladed Sea Knight to fly slower and lower than usual.
“Stand by,” the pilot of one Seahawk said into the crew radio. “Movement south west, single vehicle, turning.” The helicopter banked a second after the warning came through the crew’s headsets, tipping the fuselage halfway over to the right side before levelling out and dropping lower.
“Jesus H,” the co-pilot muttered, “You see that?”
“Door gunner, targets in the open. Four hundred metres starboard side. Clear to engage.”
The door gunner, perched half out of the sliding door on the right of the fuselage, smiled despite being dragged out of his cot to brave the shitty conditions. He confirmed the directions to target, stretched out the gloved fingers of his right hand and reached along the right side of the door-mounted M60 machine gun to pull back on the charging handle and wait the few seconds for something to fill the circular sights that he could obliterate to make the day pass a little quicker.
The van bucked and juddered like the driver had suddenly forgotten how to use the clutch to change gear. The effect was so amplified in the empty rear section that the four people travelling in there unrestrained were thrown around, forcing them all to go nearly flat to stay stable.
“What the bloody hell’s going on?” Cooper yelled, hoping his voice would cut through the thin metal to the driver’s cab.
“It’s not me!” came the yelled reply filled with panic. The van continued to buck and judder before it gave out completely to leave the eerie silence of the tyres rolling over the uneven road surface.
Nobody spoke but their eyes met one another’s in the gloom; wide with fear. They expected to feel the impact and the crunch of the van crashing off the road, but instead they heard the heavy, percussive clatter of a heavy machine gun.
Cooper looked to Wolff, both men’s mouths open in surprise, when the expected sudden stop of their hijacked transport happened.
The nose of the van dipped down off the narrow road as the driver lost concentration trying to start the engine again. In typical Scottish fashion, the shallow ditch they ran into was occupied by a large lump of impenetrable rock just cresting the surface of the earth like an iceberg would in freezing seas. That rock, comfortably situated for thousands of years before the invention of the internal combustion engine, didn’t budge as the van slammed into it to stop dead.
Cooper’s brain raced, thinking that the gunfire had been aimed at them for some reason and that the driver had been perforated by heavy bullets which led to their crash.
“We can't stay in here,” he yelled, missing the security of the armoured wagons he’d spent so much of his life safely inside. “Everyone out!”
The doors opened with Cooper leading the exodus from the rear, but instead of facing fire from above, he saw the bright lances of tracer rounds slashing downwards from a helicopter similar to the two they’d once possessed in the form of the Royal Navy’s Sea Kings. The man in the side door was relentless, pouring fire into the ground behind a small rise that prevented Cooper from seeing their target. Switching his aim from the helicopter to the road he shouted for the others to run, to get down the road and away from whatever danger approached.
“Go!” he roared again until the thump of boots on tarmac faded away fast due to the hovering helicopter sapping the sound from the area.
The gunfire stopped, and instead of the expected pause when a heavy gun was reloaded he watched in awe as the helicopter simply spun on the spot to allow the door gunner hidden from the enemy’s view to come into play and open up with the same heavy cracking and lancing tracer rounds spewing down at the hidden enemy.
A second aircraft swooped in, the characteristic whop-whop of the twin rotors keeping the CH-46 Sea Knight in the air blasting their eardrums and whipping the coarse grass flat against the wet ground as it hovered and dropped to settle on the road ahead of them. A uniformed man gestured desperately for them to run towards the lowered ramp. Wolff turned to Cooper, grabbed his arm and had to shout to be heard over the noise of gunfire to be heard.
“Come on,” he bawled, “we must leave this pla—”
Cooper went to run towards the helicopter and the escape from the last weeks of hell it represented but Wolff held him firm. Cooper turned back, shocked, until his eyes followed the direction of Wolff’s stare to rest on his upper arm and the evident fresh blood seeping around the tear in his shirt.
After the adrenaline, after the fear and the cold and the pain, his mind finally connected with his body and he felt the stinging sensation on his skin. Deeper still he felt the immense heat radiating from the wound and spreading throughout his body so much that the wind didn’t cut through to his skin any longer.
“It’s not bad,” Cooper reasoned. “I’m sure it’s not serious.”<
br />
“This is not the best time for taking the risks, my friend,” Wolff answered, adding a little more pressure to his grip to prevent Cooper from breaking free and heading for their rescue. “I am sorry,” he added,
Cooper’s face fell and his body relaxed. The two men, one officer and one NCO from different parts of the same continent who, only so recently as the time of their fathers would have been sworn enemies based solely on the country of their birth, locked eyes in silent compatriotism. Wordlessly, Cooper took the spare magazines for his weapon and handed them to the German tank captain who accepted them with a nod and another sad smile.
“Leave me this one,” Cooper said, patting the magazine loaded into his sterling. “Give me a chance to go out doing something worthwhile?”
“Of course,” Wolff said, reaching out his hand again to squeeze his uninjured arm with genuine tenderness. “I will tell everyone of your sacrifice, on this you can trust in me.”
Cooper took his turn to offer a sad smile.
“Tell ‘em I went down fighting like a mad bastard,” he asked, “give me that, at least?”
“Feldwebel Cooper,” Wolff said formally, clicking the heels of his boots together and standing tall before the injured man. “It has been my most sincerest of honours to serve with you.”
Cooper drew himself to attention, albeit a little shakily, and issued a salute.
“And mine, Captain,” he said, a tear rolling from each eye as he spoke and his chin quivering. “Now get the hell out of here, sir.” Cooper pushed him away, cuffing at his face as he set off back up the road to where the smaller helicopter was still laying down fire.
He set himself up in cover behind a moss-covered rock, feeling the wetness of the ground seep through his clothing to his skin and tried not to concentrate on the sound of the helicopter’s engines powering up the twin rotors to lift the heavy helicopter off the ground and away.
Five. Five out of sixteen. But he knew the butcher’s bill was much higher than that. The men of his squadron. The royal marines. The prima donnas from Hereford. Every last man of Wolff’s Panzer group. The people from the town. All gone. Turned or killed.
He looked up, tears rolling freely down his face which he attributed to the sharp wind hitting his face which no longer felt the cold. His whole body burned up now and he fought the urge to stand and strip off the layers of clothing he wore. Layers which weren’t sufficient to prevent the force of a bite delivered on the fly by a zombie at full sprint hitting him like a Tongan rugby player intent on testing the laws regarding a high tackle.
He sat there, panting a little with a racing heart and a temperature running so high he was in danger of being the first person in history to sunbathe on the Inner Hebrides, readied his weapon and waited.
The sound of the helicopters thumping away into the distance to leave him all alone in silence.
He watched the slight crest in the road, waiting for an army of undead to appear. He saw nothing for so long that he feared he’d have to take matters into his own hands and lose the chance to take out any more of the bastard Screechers. Then he remembered that there weren’t any more of them; only the Limas and their new bosses.
He dropped the magazine from his weapon on an impulse, thumbing out the top round and depositing it in the top pocket of his shirt for safekeeping. He vowed to do as many of the bastards as he could before he went, and he promised himself that the last round would make certain that he never took another life so long as he didn’t live.
Standing up from his cover, abandoning it as irrelevant seeing as he was halfway to the other side already, he staggered to the crest in the road and saw the advancing enemy jogging drunkenly towards him along the deserted road.
He walked towards them unafraid, lifting the rifle to his shoulder as he walked onwards.
“Mornin’, fuckers!” he called out, lifting the weapon to his shoulder and squeezing off single shots to crack open skulls and drop them where they stood. Six of them came at him, each of them falling to the wet road as he ended their lives for a second time. His hands shook and his breath rasped in his throat as he started to lose cognitive control of his fingers.
He walked past the dead bodies of the recently turned, trying not to look at the faces but recognising two of them from their uniforms, all the same.
These were men he’d fought shoulder to shoulder with. Spent time closed up inside their wagons with. Crossed the country with in the hope of finding some kind of sanctuary.
When he’d walked clear through their lines, he finally laid eyes on the enemy commander.
Recognising the man from his clothing first, he saw the bald head and upright stance of the SAS man he’d seen the officers go off with when they first arrived. He walked straight up to him with the sterling pulled tightly into his shoulder and lined up the sights perfectly on the pale skull.
He pulled the trigger, and nothing happened.
Laughing, he pulled out the empty magazine and fished out the final bullet he’d kept back for himself. Twirling it in the weak sunlight he thumbed it into the magazine and reloaded the gun, pulling back on the handle to charge it and lament his lack of forethought to keep two bullets back instead of one.
“Sir,” he said informally, “you or me, eh?”
The bald monstrosity cocked its head at him, seeming to contemplate his words before Cooper made a decision and shoved the barrel under the chin of the new type of bastard. The super Lima.
“Fuck you, sir,” he said, pulling the trigger to blow the top of the skull away and fountain the grey mush of its brains out over the wet ground.
Standing over the body of the dead creature he sobbed, dropping the gun and pulling the bayonet from his belt. His hands shook as he gritted his teeth and placed the tip of the blade between his nose and right eye socket.
He sobbed, lowering the bayonet as tears ran down his flushed cheeks and wondered if he had the courage to do it. Steadying himself with three rapid, deep breaths, he closed his eyes and put the tip of the blade back to his eye.
Letting out another sob of, “Fuck you,” he collapsed his body weight flat to the ground face first with the last of his ebbing strength to ensure he never killed a living person.
THIRTEEN
“I don’t care if he’s having tea with the fucking Queen of England,” Jacobs snarled, “you tell that damn pilot if he’s not up in the air in the next five minutes, he can swim home and I’ll have someone brought out here who can do the job. I need eyes on that island now. And what’s the ETA on that AWACS?”
The commander in charge of the ops room scowled at the CIA man but said nothing. In truth, he was annoyed that the flight crew of the E-2C Hawkeye weren’t ready at short notice when it was literally their job to be so, but he was torn between agreeing with the man and interjecting to maintain control of his staff.
“Where the hell is that damn frogman?” Jacobs barked out, not expecting the rhetoric to be answered by Miller himself.
“Right here, assuming you meant me?” Jacobs glared at him, waiting for a ‘sir’ to be added as was the way with military types being given orders by suits; when there was no badge of rank and those people were giving orders, it was always safe to assume they were at ‘sir’ level.
“I did, where the hell were you?”
“My team’s on stand down right now,” Miller answered calmly, infuriating the red-faced man who was evidently so flustered he’d forgotten that he was already smoking a cigarette because he thumbed another from a pack with his right hand and looked confused for a second when he saw the smouldering tip of the lit one in his left. He put the pack away in his shirt pocket and coughed as if to reset the conversation.
“I need your team ready to dust off immediately and recover a new specimen,” Jacobs ordered.
“No,” Miller answered, still without a mirroring trace of hostility in his words.
“No? Need I remind you that your team has been loaned to the authority of the CIA for the d
uration of the mission?”
“That mission, respectfully, is over,” Miller told him. “I’ve completed my orders from special operations command, and I’ve yet to receive new ones.”
“Here’s your new orders, Miller,” Jacobs snarled as he pointed the hand still holding the cigarette at the SEAL’s face. “I need your team ready to dust off immediately and recover a new goddamn specimen, understood?”
“I’m afraid I need new orders from command,” Miller insisted, digging his heels in. Had the request been for a rescue op or even a direct hit on anyone or anything, if the mission had been to save lives, then he would likely have agreed on the spot. As the orders were vague, given by a man he didn’t know and who looked on the verge of losing control, and mostly because they sounded like a quick way to get his entire team dead, he declined as politely but as forcefully as he could.
Jacobs didn’t take his eyes off the SEAL but snapped his fingers to someone beside him and demanded, “Get me Langley on the horn.”
Miller stood patiently, waiting as the man explained the reason for his call, then smiled politely when the phone was hung up as the authority to order the team into action obviously came from somewhere higher up the chain.
“You’ll get your orders,” Jacobs said to him after taking a step closer so the rest of the room couldn’t hear, “or else I’ll send in every US marine we have put here and tell them what a bunch of pussies you are.”
“If that’s all?” Miller answered, refusing to drop the polite smile even though he desperately wanted to throat punch the guy who looked like a college football linebacker run to a little fat after a few years behind a desk and approaching forty. He left the ops room, intending to grab one of the navy staff and press them for intel.
Stepping out into the corridor, he heard the familiar commotion of servicemen running down a narrow passage and shouting for everyone else to clear the way for them. Miller flattened himself against the bulkhead and watched as the men rushed by, two of them holding medical bags, and he decided to do a little detective work himself.
Toy Soldiers (Book 6): Annihilation Page 8
