Undead

by Ryan W. Aslesen

  That means this mission has been sanctioned at the highest levels. That made Max uneasy, as it meant a lot of hands were in the pot on this mission.

  Juno pointed to Koontz and smiled. “You’ll be carrying the bomb.”

  Koontz looked ready to puke up his dinner. Max could almost sympathize. The company always waited until the last minute to spring highly classified surprises on its operatives. Welcome to black ops, kid.

  “Not to belittle Zach,” West said, “but that weapon must weigh a shit ton, miniature or not. Maybe someone a little... larger should be carrying the bomb?”

  “Not an option,” Juno said. “You need to carry your medical kit and your weapons, and the rest of us will be weighed down with as much firepower and ammo as we can carry.”

  “I can do it,” Koontz said, his shaky voice belying his confident words.

  “I have no doubt,” Max said. A lie, but he could tell Koontz needed the assurance. He’s gonna require a bit of babysitting. Max had escorted several CIA tech gurus into the shit during his time. Most didn’t survive, but he would do his damndest to get Koontz to the lowest level so he could arm the bomb. After that, he would be on his own.

  “Regarding the method of insertion,” West said, “that’s a long way inland for a HAHO drop.”

  Max nodded. “Pushing the limit for sure. Especially since we’ll be landing at altitude. How high are we talking, exactly?”

  “About fifty-seven hundred feet,” Juno said.

  “Too high and not enough time to maneuver.”

  “For once we agree, Ahlgren,” Zuckerberg said. “Greenhorn over there will never make it.” She jerked a thumb at Delorn. “And Koontz is gonna drop like a bomb. Pun intended.”

  “There will be time,” Juno said. “If need be we’ll jump from over forty thousand feet. Whatever the case, we’re all getting there. Ideally, we’ll land on the roof as in the practice jump. There are usually two guards up there, and another two down on the ground patrolling. We take out the roof guards, descend the ladder, and eliminate the men on the ground. Then we enter the building and descend to the lowest level to activate the bomb.”

  “You make everything sound so simple,” West said. “That’s why I hate working with you.”

  “Somebody has to be the optimist,” Juno said. “And it’s certainly not Zuckerberg.”

  “I’m optimistic I’ll make it out alive.”

  West pumped a fist. “Spoken like a team player!”

  Max let West and Zuckerberg insult each other for a few more moments before saying, “What’s our plan of extraction?”

  “After arming the bomb, we will proceed to a GPS point on the coast, where a cache is buried on the beach. We unearth it and activate the distress beacon inside.”

  “What happens then? Helo extraction?”

  “I’m not at liberty to say.”

  “That’s a line I hate hearing,” Delorn said.

  “Then maybe you should get another job,” Max said. Like so many other facets of black ops, extraction methods were usually kept vague in case someone was captured and interrogated. A man couldn’t reveal what he didn’t know.

  “The company is all he knows,” West said.

  “Should have been a grunt like you.” Delorn glared at him.

  West shrugged. “Wouldn’t have helped. You’d be here anyway.”

  “Are there any other questions?” Juno asked.

  No one spoke.

  “Then let’s head to the hangar and check out your method of destruction.”

  Juno led them through the door and into the hangar. The gray C-17 they would depart on filled the space. The stooges who’d driven them there had stacked each team member’s gear and arms in separate piles. One of them remained behind, standing guard at port arms over a cylindrical duffle bag constructed of green ballistic nylon.

  Juno dismissed the stooge, then knelt and unzipped the bag to reveal a steel cylinder polished to mirror brilliance. An indentation atop the cylinder housed a numeric keypad, a slot for the arming key, digital readout, and a thumbprint scanner. “As I said, only three of us will have the arming codes, but I need a thumbprint scan from everyone to implement the failsafe.”

  “After me,” Zuckerberg said. “I want to get armed already.” Juno punched a few numbers on the keypad, then motioned Zuckerberg to press her thumb on the scanner.

  Unlike Zuckerberg, the other team members approached the bomb with an awed sense of uneasiness. They’re smart enough to respect the power of such a device.

  Max didn’t like the idea of using a nuke, but they really had no choice. When attempting to destroy the substance, or even its viral derivative, it paid to think big. After entering his thumbprint, Max grabbed the carry handles and tested the bomb’s weight: about 80 pounds. He also remembered Koontz complaining the previous night before the jump about how heavy his rucksack was. Now we know why. And West was correct: the bomb would be a serious burden for Koontz.

  Once Juno finished taking thumbprints, she had Koontz lug the bomb into the briefing room so she could go over the arming procedure with him and Heinz in private.

  The rest of the team turned to equipping for the mission. The CIA had laid out supplies of MREs and energy bars, ammo cans loaded with the special explosive rounds, grenades of various types, comm gear, night-vision optics, the HAHO suits and equipment. In a nearby rack stood their assault rifles—all HK416s or M-4 carbines equipped with sound suppressors and M203 grenade launchers—along with several tactical shotguns. Max usually carried a UMP-40 as a backup weapon but instead chose a sawed-off Remington 870 12 gauge for this mission. The CIA likewise supplied 40mm grapeshot grenades for their launchers, which Max had used to literally blow the guts out of a creature on the spacecraft.

  As Delorn ran through the computer prompts on his flamethrower, Max said to him privately, “If I were you, I’d pay more attention to my jump tonight. Make a shitty landing with that thing and you might rupture the tanks. Miss by a quarter mile again and people will die. You’ll probably be first.”

  Delorn’s mouth hung open.

  Max smiled and clapped him on the shoulder. “Now perhaps you understand the gravity of the situation.”

  When Heinz emerged from the briefing room, Zuckerberg told him, “You’d better hurry up and get ready.” Already fully equipped and armed, she helped him don his gear and prepare his weapons.

  Nothing wrong with helping a buddy gear up, but the sexual relations between SEAL and Ranger troubled Max. Romantic sentiments had no place on the battlefield. Maybe they’re just fuck buddies. You have no idea and no room to talk. He pushed aside thoughts of the woman who had called herself Dr. Alexis Rogers—only to see Juno take her place.

  Finish gearing up and stop pointing fingers.

  * * *

  After getting his gear straight, Max re-entered the briefing room, ostensibly to review images of the compound and his secondary objectives. His ulterior motive stood on the stage facing away from him. She held a katana, the blade painted black but for its razor edge, and had taken a fighting stance.

  “Are you really going to bring that?” Max asked.

  Juno turned and regarded him. “It is an effective weapon in close quarters.”

  Max considered the creatures he’d battled and wondered if it wasn’t a bad idea to bring such a weapon himself. He dismissed the notion. He didn’t like deploying with gear he didn’t train with, and he knew enough that wielding a slashing weapon of that type effectively would take lots of practice.

  “How’s it going out there?” she asked.

  “Not bad. The kids seem rambunctious enough. I think they’re ready.”

  “Stellar.” She started to case the sword in a scabbard attached to her back.

  “Don’t put that away just yet.”

  “Very well.” She drew it again. �
��Are you a swordsman, Max?”

  “Unfortunately not, never had a chance to pick it up. Where did you learn?”

  “I’ve studied Kumdo for about ten years. I don’t call myself a master yet, but I know my way around a sword.”

  She extended the sword hilt-first to Max. Its lightweight construction and perfectly balanced feel immediately impressed him. The long grip, wrapped in a crosshatch pattern of leather stained dark brown by sweat, easily accommodated both of his large hands. Though he hefted it and examined it closely, he took no practice swings with it. He didn’t know how to use it; waving it around would only make him look like a jackass.

  Max handed the katana back to Juno. “Maybe you can show me some basics once this mission is over.”

  “Shouldn’t be hard for you to learn.” Her evil smile emerged from hiding and froze him. “You’re already master of one sword.”

  Don’t get too close. Not now. “I try my damndest, anyway.”

  “I would say you succeeded.” She hopped down from the stage and stood close to him. “You would have done anything for that password, but I wouldn’t have given it to you if you didn’t please me.”

  Bullshit. You need me here. “You’re one heck of a woman. Hell, you can even shoot. I would have slept with you for free, but I’ll take the bonus. And you still owe me the second password.”

  “Fair enough. After the mission it’s yours. I won’t have your eagerness to resolve that issue clouding your brain. You’ll have to wait.”

  “And if you die?”

  She stepped closer, stood on her toes, and kissed him hard on the mouth. It lasted only a couple of seconds but long enough to make her point. “You’d better see to it that doesn’t happen.” She broke away just as arousal punched him in the crotch.

  Hunger for Juno flooded the primal portions of Max’s brain. He got hold of himself in a hurry, however. “I want you to write it down and put it in a safe place in case you die. I didn’t come all this way not to receive that password.”

  “But it is written down. Somewhere. I suppose you’ll get it one day, one way or another, but it would be easiest for me to just tell you after the mission. And I might even give you more than that—much more—should you do me a favor.”

  “Are you kidding me? I think I’ve done quite enough for you already.”

  “But I need you, Max, more than I need anyone out there. It’s hard for me to admit, but I have a personal stake in this mission. It’s not just business as usual.” She paused, looked to the ceiling with wet eyes before continuing. “Dr. Kwang-Soo Park is my estranged father.”

  Shit! Max took a moment to digest the revelation, the idea of it stinking to high heaven as he considered the implications. This wasn’t a dynamic he anticipated, and he knew from painful experience that it was never good to have someone emotionally connected to a mission. “Then he’s more than a secondary objective.”

  “Yes. He is a brilliant geneticist. What he might have discovered had he worked in the free world is anyone’s guess. He’s forced to work in the facility, of course, and has taken a huge risk by supplying his assistant with the information relayed to us. I... I want him to finally be free. He’s not too old yet, only in his fifties. He could still make great contributions to the scientific community.”

  “He’s your father, bottom line. I know what it’s like to lose family.”

  He had no family left whatsoever. Years before, his alcoholic mother had run off with another man, which had driven his father to commit suicide. Max didn’t know if she still lived and didn’t give a damn either way.

  Don’t make that promise. You owe her nothing else—she owes you a password. Remember that.

  As when he’d first agreed to help her at the shooting range, she made no seductive gestures to sway him. She didn’t need to, especially now.

  “We’ll get him out if we can. I can’t promise you, but I’ll try like hell to make it happen.”

  “That’s all I can ask of you.”

  “And this is the last favor I do you in return for that password.”

  “Understood. You’ll get it.” That smile again—the confidence that allured him and assured him that he could trust her.

  She’s turned you into a Yes Man. Maybe you are like your father.

  It didn’t strike him that Juno Rey might resemble his mother.

  “I want katana lessons out of this too.”

  She laughed. “Fear not, there will be much swordplay to come. Now let’s get going. We have a plane to catch.”

  11

  The Globemaster climbed slowly over the moonlit clouds in a barely noticeable ascent to forty-one thousand feet. The team sat on a bench of taut canvas on one side of the aircraft’s frigid hold, currently depressurized, with the rear cargo ramp yawning open on a black sky speckled with twinkling stars that multiplied as they climbed. A thin coating of frost covered everything in the hold, team members included, the shining aura transforming them into a collection of black specters laden with plate carriers, combat harnesses, ammunition pouches. Everyone had applied black face paint to complement their black combat uniforms. Speech was possible only by shouting into the headset microphones of their radios, due to the incessant roar of the jet engines and the oxygen masks they’d donned at fifteen thousand feet.

  At present, hoses connected their masks to the plane’s pure oxygen system; they would transition to bottled oxygen just before the jump. Pre-breathing pure oxygen for at least thirty minutes beforehand was essential to protect the jumpers from contracting hypoxia due to low oxygen pressure in the upper atmosphere.

  They would jump in the order they sat: Heinz, Juno, Zuckerberg, West, Delorn, Koontz, and finally Max, who would stick close to Koontz and attempt to help him if he ran into trouble, a definite possibility with the heavy bomb weighing him down. Max didn’t enjoy being the babysitter, but someone had to do it. Better it’s left up to me than Zuckerberg. He believed in doing a job right, no matter how far beneath his skills it might be.

  That Juno had been able to secure such destructive firepower still amazed Max, though it probably shouldn’t have. This was a crucial mission, and he figured everyone from the president on down had their grubby fingers stuck in the pie.

  Max tried not to judge the men he would fight alongside until he’d seen them under fire, yet it was impossible not to anticipate how each operative would perform in combat. Heinz seemed the most locked-on and reliable of the group. Max understood his enmity toward him. The man was a senior chief petty officer at thirty. He’s used to being in charge. But Heinz also believed in military discipline and command structure, and Max didn’t expect to issue him many orders. His experience is invaluable. He can run on autopilot.

  Despite her confidence in their success, Juno worried him. She had been very vague when he’d inquired of her combat experience during a lull in training. He didn’t doubt she had some chops—she appeared to be a rising star in the Agency—but had she ever taken on something this daunting? How would her father impact her judgement? And if she makes some bad calls, will she listen to reason? He couldn’t be sure. Remember, it’s her show. Don’t undermine her authority unless you have to.

  Max read Koontz and Delorn like open books. At least Delorn appeared somewhat chastened since his failed jump. Koontz did not inspire confidence in any form, and while Max admired his stoic attitude and dedication to carrying out the mission, Max still considered him the weak link in the chain, the man who might hold them back and get someone killed.

  But none of them gnawed at his sense of foreboding quite like Zuckerberg. The loose cannon, the cowgirl, the super-shrew with something to prove. The most annoying thing about her was she never stopped trying to prove it, always nattering about her expert marksmanship or how she had outrun every male Ranger in her old squad. She could certainly shoot; Max gave her credit where due.

  But
that attitude... He could deal with cowboy crazy—he’d suffered the antics of Gable and Red for years—but Zuckerberg’s brand was liberally spiced with an unhealthy dose of megalomania. The Reaper generally followed such personalities into combat; then he usually feasted upon their buddies. Good news for Zuckerberg. But it sucks to be the rest of us, at least in her mind.

  Two yellow lights on either side of the cargo hold illuminated. They’d nearly reached the drop point over the Sea of Japan and would jump in two minutes. Max wiggled his toes inside his black Salomon hiking boots, trying to get some circulation back into his feet. He conducted a final check of his equipment, ensuring his harness was snug and rifle was secure. He took a deep breath, disconnected the oxygen hose from the plane’s system and connected it to his oxygen bottle. He exhaled hard into the mask to purge the air from his oxygen hose. At this altitude, taking even a single breath of atmospheric air could dangerously elevate blood nitrogen levels. After connecting to his bottle, Max looked over at Koontz and gave him a thumbs-up which Koontz returned, a signal he’d safely switched over to bottled oxygen. The team donned NVGs after the changeover, and the dim yellow lights magnified to a greenish daytime brilliance.

  “I think my balls are frozen together,” Delorn shouted, barely audible over the intense whine of engines and wind.

  Max could relate. The heavy polypropylene underwear they wore kept them from contracting frostbite but didn’t keep anyone particularly warm.

  “TMI,” Juno said.

  Zuckerberg added, “No one cares about your little problems.”

  “Cut the shit. Get ready.” Heinz stood and moved to the open cargo ramp. The rest of the team followed suit. “Three second interval, keep tight!” None of it really needed to be said, just a reminder to Delorn and Koontz.

  A green light switched on by the cargo door. Heinz took three awkward steps, his heavy rucksack swinging between his legs, and jumped from the plane. They all waited the required three seconds before jumping after the man in front of them, though Koontz moved a little slower with the bomb in his sack.