Fortress of the Dead

by Chris Roberson

  “You heard the man, kid,” the sergeant said, nodding towards the gate. “We did the job, now let’s get out of here before anything else starts dropping out of the sky on us.”

  As Jun and the sergeant raced back to the gate that was already cranking open to allow them in, she couldn’t help but moan. In all of the commotion and confusion of the preceding minutes that they’d spent clearing the inner zone of the Dead and removing the breech from the fence, she hadn’t had the chance to give a moment’s thought to their impending mission, but the sergeant’s statement about things falling out of the sky brought it rushing back to her.

  Just as the ground would soon be rushing up towards her, Jun thought, and suppressed a shudder.

  ###

  A SHORT WHILE later, pulling straw out of her hair and struggling to catch her breath, Jun revised her earlier opinion somewhat. Jumping out of a plane wasn’t just terrifying. It was also really, really annoying.

  Or at least, attempting to learn the skills involved had proved to be so.

  “A good attempt,” Hector was saying, his tone more cheery and encouraging that the bruises on Jun’s arms and legs seemed to merit, “but you need to bend those legs and roll when you hit or you’ll have trouble walking away. Now back up the ladder and give it another shot, the lot of you.”

  They were in a wooden structure that had been a barn for a family farm before the Dead War and the mass evacuation of the region. When the Resistance had set up their basecamp in the area, they had converted the farm’s fields into a makeshift runway for the small fleet of aircraft that flew in and out of the camp, and used the barn as a sort of hangar. At the rear of the structure there was a platform high overhead that had once been a hayloft, and after the Vickers Wellington twin-engine bomber that had been housed in the hangar was pushed out onto the runway for servicing by a small ground crew, parachuting rigging had been strung up from the rafters above a collection of hay bales and mattresses that were arranged on the floor.

  For the last hour, ever since they had come back inside the stockade after clearing the breech in the perimeter fence, Jun and the others had been climbing a ladder up onto the platform, strapping themselves into the parachute harnesses, and then following Hector’s step-by-step instructions as they approached the edge of the platform, got into the correct positions, and then jumped down onto the pile of hay bales and mattresses below.

  Hector’s instructions had focused on three main areas: how to properly strap into the harnesses, how and when to pull the ripcord after jumping out of the plane, and how to arrange their bodies to lessen the impact of landing as much as possible. So far, Jun and the others had managed to grasp the essentials of getting into the harnesses in short order, and were beginning to get a better sense of how to manage the ripcord, but as to hitting the ground? The learning curve was a steep one and they still had a considerable amount of climbing left to do.

  Or falling, Jun thought, as the case may be.

  The five members of the squad had reached the top of the ladder and the sergeant was in the process of strapping into the practice harness when from outside they could hear a sound like distant thunder, steady and unbroken and gradually growing louder.

  On the floor below the platform, Hector brightened and clapped his hands together once, smiling in anticipation.

  “Let’s break there, chaps!” he called up to the squad.

  The sound like distant thunder was growing even louder, and was joined by another thrum coming along behind, quiet at first but growing louder by the moment.

  “Bang on the dot,” Hector said with a glance at his wristwatch. He had turned and was walking towards the open doors of the barn/hangar.

  Josiah was shrugging out of the practice harness with a slightly annoyed expression on his face. “We just supposed to wait up here, then?”

  “Of course not,” Hector called back over his shoulder, cheerily. “You’ll want to hear what they have to say, I’m sure.”

  Jun and the others exchanged a confused glance, then dutifully climbed back down the ladder. At least they wouldn’t have to jump the twenty feet to the ground again this time around.

  By the time the five of them had all reached the bottom and crossed the floor to the open door, Hector had already made his way out to the edge of the makeshift airfield that ran alongside the rear of the camp. It was a short runway, by necessity, enclosed entirely inside the stockade fence that bisected the former farm fields on either side, and it seemed to Jun that it would take expert flying to take off or land on such a relatively small strip of land.

  But whoever was at the sticks of the two Spitfires coming in for landing clearly seemed to be experts, given how gracefully they were approaching the landing zone.

  Jun and the others fell into line behind Hector, who was yet again checking over a clipboard as he had been that morning. Jun realized that the planes that were landing must be the same ones whose take-off had woken her that morning. They had to be the dawn patrol returning from their maneuvers.

  The first of the Spitfires had already touched down and was taxiing across the makeshift landing strip towards the far end of the enclosure as the second Spitfire made its final approach. As Jun watched, the second of the two was wheels down and well into its deceleration run as it gradually slowed to taxiing speed. It seemed to Jun that there was hardly any margin of error at all, and yet both planes had been brought safely to ground without any apparent difficult at all, seemingly effortless to her untrained eye.

  Hector’s expert eyes, however, had apparently caught sight of some aspects of the landing where there was room for improvement.

  The first of the Spitfires had been brought to a halt on the far end of the field, near the spot where the ground crews had been servicing the Vickers Wellington twin-engine bomber, and the pilot was climbing down out of the cockpit to the ground below. The Spitfire pilot was wearing a flight jacket with a fur-lined collar, goggles, and a long scarf wrapped around his neck and the lower half of his face. As he crossed the makeshift airfield towards the spot where Hector waited with his clipboard, the Spitfire pilot unwound the scarf from around his face, so that instead of covering his mouth and chin it was draped around his neck. With the goggles pushed up on his forehead, the scarf flowing behind him in the midday breeze, and a cocky smile on his face, he looked for all the world like the image of an old-fashioned flying ace from the days of the First World War.

  “You’re still waiting too long to pull back on the stick, Monty,” Hector said, glancing up from his clipboard. “I’ve warned you about it before. You’re going to end up pranging that kite of yours one of these days if you don’t keep a better eye on your air speed on final approach.”

  The Spitfire pilot flashed a rakish grin before responding. “You’re just too used to flying that lumbering boat of yours, Hector old boy. You’ve forgotten just what you can do behind the stick of something with a bit more maneuverability.”

  The second of the Spitfires had taxied to a stop at the far end of the field, and its pilot was jumping down out of the cockpit. She was dressed a little less flamboyantly than her fellow Spitfire pilots, wearing a leather jacket over a pair of coveralls, googles already pushed up onto her forehead, and an old-fashioned looking leather flight helmet. As she crossed the field towards them, she pulled off the googles and the flight helmet, revealing tight black curls cropped close to the scalp, and grinned broadly, her teeth striking white in contrast to her dark skin.

  “Here to give me my daily grades, eh, Captain Hector, sir?” the second Spitfire pilot called over to Hector as she drew near. Jun could hear a playful edge to her words.

  “You didn’t touch bottom in another one of my birds, Ndidi,” Hector replied, “so it’s still better than your worst to date.”

  “One time!” the woman named Ndidi replied in mock outrage, holding an index finger up and wagging it in Hector’s face. “One time I come in too hot, and I never hear the end of it.”

  �
��Don’t take it personally, love,” the man called Monty called over to her as he headed in the direction of the mess tent at the center of the camp. “He keeps giving me a hard time about my landings and I haven’t cracked up on landing even the once.”

  Ndidi followed in Monty’s footsteps, heading towards the former barn.

  “Well?” Hector said impatiently as he trailed along behind the two pilots, gesturing with his clipboard. Jun and the rest of the squad followed him. “Did you find it?”

  “Oh, we found it all right,” Monty said, glancing back over his shoulder in their direction. “Just where we thought it’d be.”

  “I am just glad that it is to be you who goes back there,” Ndidi added, pointing with one long finger in Hector’s direction. “Because I would much rather not.”

  “So,” Sergeant Josiah said as he glanced over at Hector, “we getting back to learning how to hurl ourselves outta planes or what?” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder in the direction of the barn where they’d spent the morning training.

  Hector didn’t answer right away, but kept watching the two Spitfire pilots as they entered the mess tent, shaking his head a little ruefully. He turned and walked in the direction they’d gone, motioning for the sergeant and the rest of the squad to follow him.

  “Your parachute training will have to wait, I’m afraid, but best come along with me,” he said, sounding a little weary. “Their debriefing can serve as your part of the briefing for your operation, so might as well kill two birds with one stone, eh?”

  Jun glanced over at Sergeant Josiah and the rest of the squad as they fell into line and trooped along behind Hector. She wasn’t sure who were the birds in that formulation and who the stone, and wasn’t at all certain that she wanted to find out.

  Chapter 15

  WHEN THE SQUAD and Hector reached the mess tent, the two pilots had obtained cups of steaming-hot tea and plates of lukewarm hash, and had taken up residence at one of the central tables in the dining area.

  “So these are the poor bastards who you’re planning to drop down into that muck?” Monty said around a mouthful of food as the squad approached the table, addressing Hector but nodding in the direction of Jun and the others.

  “Look here, now,” Sergeant Josiah began, bristling somewhat, but Hector held up a hand and motioned for a moment’s pause as he hastened to intervene.

  “These are those lucky sods, indeed,” Hector replied to Monty, then turned towards the squad to explain. “When we got word from Major Wilkins that you lot needed ferrying up into the Alps, I sent Monty and Ndidi here on a recon flight to scout the area and see whether they could locate this mountaintop fortress you’re looking for.”

  He turned his attention back the two pilots at the table. Monty was still shoveling food from his plate into his mouth like it would evaporate if left sitting too long, but Ndidi had pushed her own plate to one side and was in the process of pulling maps and charts out of zippered pockets in her leather jacket and coveralls, and unfolding and spreading them out on the table in front of them.

  “So, what’s the verdict, you two?” Hector asked the two pilots, his hands on his hips. “Am I going to have any trouble getting these nice people to their destination in one piece?”

  The two Spitfire pilots exchanged a glance before answering.

  “It could well be a might tricky,” Monty replied, guardedly.

  “And it could well be that you will find it tricky getting back yourself, eh?” Ndidi added, wagging a finger in Hector’s direction.

  Hector was rubbing his chin with one hand, looking thoughtful. “Bags of flak, I take it?”

  Ndidi shook her head, blinking slowly. “No, I spotted emplacements… many of them, in fact… but we didn’t take any fire.”

  “Did they not spot you?” Hector asked.

  “Maybe?” Monty shrugged. “We were hedge-hopping as best we could, keeping the peaks between us and a clear line of sight from the enemy’s position as much as possible, but that was part and parcel with the problem, wasn’t it? Played silly buggers with my kite’s attitude controls and I near as damn it went for a Burton without the bally bastards firing a shot.”

  Jun could see that Hector wasn’t catching their precise meaning, and didn’t feel so bad that it was entirely escaping her as well. She could see that the other members of her squad were similarly struggling to parse his meaning.

  “Can we have that again,” Curtis chimed in, “in English this time?”

  Monty sighed and shook his head.

  “Crosswinds, right?” Monty held his arms up crossed at the wrists in the shape of an X. “With air as thin as it is up there you think it’d be only fair if the winds took it a little easy on you, right? But no, it played holy hell with us as we tried to get through those narrow passes.”

  “And if you put some angels between you and the ground…?” Hector began.

  Jun and Sibyl met each other’s gaze, and the Englishwoman mouthed “Angels?” silently in reply to Jun’s wordless shrug.

  Ndidi shook her head, taking a sip of tea before answering. “Less turbulence at higher altitude, greater danger of flying into the line of enemy fire. As I say, there are a considerable number of defensive emplacements, and those are just the ones I spotted on a few quick passes. Whoever designed that place made certain that it could defend itself easily against an aerial approach.”

  “But you’ll need the higher altitude to give our friends here a chance to get their chutes open,” Monty chimed in, scooping up another forkful of hash from his plate. “As it is they’ll have a devil of a time putting down exactly where they want to land.”

  Hector was silent for a long moment, eyes narrowed, deep in thought. Then he leaned forward and rested his hands on the edge of the table, and nodded in the direction of the maps and charts that Ndidi had spread out on the table’s surface. “Show me.”

  Ndidi had a last sip from her cup of tea, and then stood up and moved across the table from Hector, with the map spread between them. She leaned down and pointed to a spot that she’d marked with penciled notations.

  “It was right where we thought it would be,” she said, “on the highest peak directly north-northeast of that village identified in the intel provided by those noncombatants we questioned last night. And as far as I was able to determine the rest of their account squares with the facts, as well.”

  Jun realized that the “noncombatants” Ndidi was talking about must be the refugee villagers that she and the squad had escorted down out of the foothills. And that Major Wilkins must have had the pilots interview them directly after hearing Werner’s report the night before. Which only stood to reason, as that way they’d be getting information about the location direct from the primary sources and not filtered through Werner’s interrogation of the group en masse out in the ruined village. And now, it appeared that not only had the pilots confirmed the existence of the Alpine Fortress in the first place, but they had reconnoitered its defensive advantages and offensive capacities. Which, granted, had clearly been the pilots’ mission objective. Still, Jun couldn’t help feeling that as a result the pilots now knew a great deal more about the squad’s intended target than Jun or any of the rest of her squadmates did, but as yet the focus of the discussion had centered largely around aerial concerns, with very little about the practical realities of her squad actually carrying out their own mission.

  Even being a stickler for hierarchy and chain of command as she was, Jun was tempted to give voice to her concern, even though the squad had not been officially invited to provide questions or commentary to what was to all appearances an official debriefing of the two pilots on the part of Hector, their commanding officer. Curtis had already chimed in, of course, but then the young American was hardly one for observing the appropriate chain of command.

  But then Jun could breathe easier when Sergeant Josiah stepped forward, arms crossed over his chest and chin jutting forward, and gave voice to exactly the same concerns th
at were gnawing at her.

  “This is all fascinating, I’m sure,” Josiah said, “but how about y’all start talking to us about just what it is we’re jumping into here? What kind of trouble are we looking at, anyway?”

  Hector turned to look in the sergeant’s direction for a long moment, blinking a few times and looking like he’d lost his place in a prepared statement and struggling to remember what to say next. Then he shook his head abruptly, as though knocking the thoughts themselves loose in his cranium, and gave the sergeant a wan smile.

  “Too right, sorry about that, friends,” Hector replied apologetically. “It’s one of the immutable laws of aviation: put two pilots in close proximity and we’ll talk shop with the same speed and in the same direction until operated on by an unbalanced force. Like conversational inertia, eh?”

  Hector paused as if giving time for his listeners to laugh, but when his quip failed to generate so much as a faint chuckle he turned back to Ndidi and Monty and gestured for them to continue.

  “Go on, then,” Hector said, “just what are we looking at with this so-called Fortress, anti-aircraft defenses aside?”

  “It comes by the name, honestly, I can give that much with confidence,” Monty replied. “I went in thinking that maybe we’d find some sort of bunker or even just a tarted-up chalet, but no… ‘Fortress’ fits the bill perfectly. It’s like a bloody great castle plopped right on the top of a mountain range.”

  Ndidi had pulled a stub of a pencil out of an inner pocket of her jacket, and after grabbing one of the charts that she had spread on the table she flipped it over and started sketching on the back.

  “It looks to be at least partially built into the side of the mountain itself,” Ndidi explained as she continued to sketch out both an elevation of the fortress as seen straight on and a bird’s eye view of the layout from above. Though simple and lacking any flourishes, there was sufficient clarity and detail to get the basic ideas across. “There’s a small landing pad on the north-west corner of the facility, undoubtedly for helicopters to land, but no indication that there are any on sight.”