Johnson nodded. “Our billets?”
The captain handed over a folded piece of paper Johnson assumed bore the information he needed.
“How many teams, sir?”
“Yours and three others,” the captain answered. “All of them under strength.”
The sergeant saluted and turned to leave before the captain spoke again.
“You just keep coming back, don’t you… what’s this, your fifth tour?”
“Sixth, Sir,” Johnson answered flatly. “First tour was with the Two-One. And the job isn't done yet.”
“Carry on, Sergeant,” the captain said after a pause, leaning back in his chair and wondering just what made the man tick.
They claimed their racks, stowed their gear, found the chow hall and ate. The newest member of their team, Lance Corporal Bruno, wore his nervousness like a cape flapping in the wind.
“Sergeant,” he said from across the table, “is it true this is your tenth time here?”
Johnson sighed. He’d heard many rumours about himself but this one didn’t even make sense. He’d joined the US marine corps at eighteen straight out of high school and hadn’t qualified from scout sniper training until seven years ago. There literally wasn’t enough time to have crammed ten tours into his career, even if his first one was with a standard unit.
“Dumbass,” another marine said, throwing a crusty bread roll at the new man in the unit to bounce it off his skull. “You think the sergeant was serving here when he was fifteen?”
I was serving here with an armoured squadron when I was ten, Johnson thought to himself.
“I heard the Sergeant turned down a promotion to Staff Sergeant because he didn’t want to switch units,” another marine said. “That true?”
“That’s true,” Johnson said. “They wanted me to join the teams working in Africa to get the mining operations back up and running.”
“So why didn’t you go?”
Johnson put down his fork and glared at the marine who felt the need to enquire about his personal business in public. The man’s hands went up in mock surrender as if retracting the questions. Johnson thought about it in the silence that followed, deciding to let his team in on his logic.
“The fight’s here,” he told them, tapping his trigger finger on the table twice. “Ground zero. No place else on earth the Echos are.” He stood, taking his tray away and calling back over his shoulder that their briefing was at eight so their morning run would be at six. He ignored the groans that followed, because he knew none of them would risk disappointing him.
He had a reputation for pushing his teams hard, physically and mentally, but he wasn’t ignorant to the fact that he was also seen as a lucky charm. Few others, especially the often-isolated scout snipers, had survived so many consecutive tours without a scratch. Even fewer who had been only one of a few men to return each tour. He was a good luck charm, they said, but he felt the opposite; so many of the marines with him hadn’t come home, and he kept a list in his head of the names of all of them.
Each time he put his eye to the scope of his M-One-Ten rifle he half expected to see a brother in ragged remnants of uniform lurching toward him. One of the men who had trusted him to bring them home.
He stepped outside and put on his cap to protect his shaved head from the light rain that had grown in confidence since they had landed, lit a cigarette and walked towards the armoury to draw ammunition in both nine millimetre and the heavier seven-six-two for his marksman rifle.
He trusted his team to draw what they needed to load their sidearms and primary weapons, along with their allocated shooters drawing the same ammunition for the sniper rifles, and took himself back to the barracks where he lay on his back and pretended to sleep.
He rose before the dawn to dress in the same fatigues and lead his small team on a run around the perimeter of the base in the shadow of the high walls constructed over years to expand the main base in the south of England to its current size.
Outside of those walls, he knew, the army’s engineers had erected tall fences of razor wire designed to slow down the abominations that had long ago learned not to attack the bases. Their victims, however, with all their enhanced strength and physical ability, didn’t know this, so the walls were guarded around the clock by troops.
The sheer scale of the operations for each of the three strongholds required such a demanding supply line that landing large numbers of troops on the shores of the UK mainland was not only suicidal, but totally counterproductive as each casualty in their war became an enemy combatant.
Showering and dressing in a clean set of uniform, he strapped the sidearm to his right thigh but left both his personal defence weapon and marksman rifle stowed on his rack, and he led his team to the briefing.
“Attention on deck!” bawled the officer on the stage, bringing close to six hundred men to order inside the hangar used to deliver the main briefing. An officer, tall and bespectacled, strode onto the stage and turned on the very centre spot to address the men.
“Good morning, Marines,” he yelled, his voice amplified through speakers.
“Good morning, Sir,” the hangar roared back, their conditioning evident and their response instant.
“Now, for those of you who don’t know me, my name is Lieutenant Colonel Callus and I am your battalion commander. For those of you new in-country,” he paused to allow for some shaved heads to be slapped and young men jostled by their comrades, “welcome to hell. For those of you returning to this god-forsaken island… shi-it, ain't you got the good god damned sense to twist an ankle before deployment?”
The massive room filled with laughter, more nervous than genuine, and the colonel went on in a more serious tone.
“As of this afternoon we are deploying east to re-take the outskirts of a place called London. Make no mistake, gentlemen, this place was ground zero twenty-one years ago, and as of last week we are facing record numbers of enemy.” Murmurs ripples around the men as they feared the rumours were about to be confirmed.
“Six days ago, we lost an entire battalion of US army who sought to take the very ground we’re marching on today.” He paused again to let that sink in.
“We are going to go back there, and we are going to succeed where they did not. Our brothers paid the ultimate price, and I feel the need to remind you all that they are no longer our men. No longer our brothers in arms. No longer are they American servicemen and women. They are now our enemy, and make no mistake, they will have no qualms about killing you unless you kill them first.”
Silence hung in the massive hangar.
“To that end,” the colonel went on, “we will advance in a mass deployment or armoured vehicles, and when the fighting becomes door to door, we will insert teams of scout snipers to cover your advance and provide accurate, real-time intelligence as to the movements of the enemy. Now, Major Stevens will issue your specific orders, but I’ll leave you with this…”
The hangar stayed silent, but an air of pent-up emotion hummed through the assembled marines.
“Who are we?”
“United States Marines, Sir!”
“I can’t fuckin’ hear you!”
“UNITED STATES MARINES, SIR!”
The hangar devolved into roars of oorah, and Sergeant Johnson only joined in for show. He wasn’t drunk on the propaganda like his comrades, hadn’t fallen into the deep hole of self-appointed supremacy, because he knew their enemy better than anyone on the base. He'd grown up with them, or because of them, he wasn’t certain which.
He’d been fighting them since he was nine years old, and back then he’d only had a pitchfork and a double-barrelled sawn-off.
Peter Johnson returned to the barracks, loaded the Kriss Vector which he slung on a single strap to hang down his torso. The gun was ready to be pulled into his shoulder and extended to spit bullets from the suppressed barrel if anything came at him inside the range of his rifle; just as the suppressed pistol on his leg was a tertiary back
up ahead of the combat knife sheathed on his chest for in case things became uncomfortably personal between him and the enemy.
He paraded his team, only five pairs of snipers and spotters when he should have close to twice that number and should technically not even be in command of them, and he gave his orders.
“Small, take Mills,” he said, detailing the shooter and her spotter before naming the three other pairs, then giving himself the new kid.
“Grantham with Ohara, Carter and Rashid, Smith and Cartwright, and Bruno, you’re with me.” Bruno looked momentarily terrified by the implied pressure of spotting for the sergeant, but he dismissed them to their transports before heading to the unit commanders’ briefing with his second in command.
Inside the smaller room where the briefing was less of a rock concert and far more detail, he nodded to the other senior NCOs in charge of the other sniper teams and stood to attention as a senior officer approached with a small entourage, only one of whom was dressed for ground combat and another who wore the insignia of a captain on her flight gear.
Johnson greeted them as expected, waiting to hear what needed to be said without the rank and file hearing it.
“Sergeant Johnson, this here’s Major Blackburn, US army intelligence,” the marine corps captain in combat loadout said. Johnson looked at the army major expectantly, unaware that he made the man shudder inside at how distant his eyes were after a lifetime spent fighting monsters.
“Sergeant, further to the Colonel’s orders, we need intel on this area—” he handed over a small envelope which Johnson placed directly inside his clothing to keep it dry, and tapped a map laid out on the table, “—as it was the last known location of the Ranger Sniper team providing overwatch for the previous mission. We had some intermittent radio transmissions from them after the battalion went silent, but nothing for the last two days. It’s in your AO.”
“Understood, Sir,” Johnson said. “Air support?” he asked, glancing at the pilot officer.
“You’ll have four Super Cobras from the One-Sixty-Seven.”
“The Warriors?” Johnson asked as he shot an appreciative look at the helicopter pilot. “Glad to have you, Captain.”
“Have Guns, Will Travel, Sergeant,” she answered with a smile of sinful but deserved pride in her unit. “We’re only a detachment, and we have support from the army’s third battalion first brigade if we need it.”
“Apaches?” Johnson asked, earning a nod from the marine pilot.
“If we need it, I hope it’s our boys and girls,” another team leader muttered not quite under his breath before the intelligence officer cleared his throat.
“There were a lot of moving pieces on the board, Sergeant,” Blackburn said in a tone of voice that bore an edge of explanation, with heavy inference on avoidance of blame as he brought the subject back to the missing Ranger unit.
“Yes, Sir,” Johnson answered flatly, turning to join his men in the armoured transport preparing to heat east with dozens of others. The captain moved three figurines on the map, detailing each one with the callsigns for the respective teams. Peter watched, taking careful note of where the other teams would be and how they fit into the main battle plan.
His mouth twisted as the words he heard dulled, becoming lost in a memory brought on unexpectedly by the figures used by the officers to explain the plan. He focused on the figure used to denote his team, taking in the green plastic of the kneeling soldier complete with the end of his rifle bent downwards.
The perfectionist in him, the part of his brain that always wanted straight lines and headshots, wanted to reach over and straighten the plastic gun so that it would fire if it were real.
Their orders given, he walked back towards the transports ready to head out to war yet again, as if he’d never left it from the moment his childhood ceased so abruptly and knew it would never end until every last trace of the virus was annihilated.
FROM THE PUBLISHER
Thank you for reading Annihilation, the final of six books in Toy Soldiers.
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Toy Soldiers (Book 6): Annihilation Page 21
