He watched on as the eight men leapfrogged each other, as if he were overseeing a training exercise; only he hoped that their eyes would be far more alert than if they were just training. The obstruction that they’d been sent to clear was a cluster of crashed cars. Defile drill was what they did all the time, as most of their work was to patrol the areas where it was unsafe to be walking around. Defile drill allowed for an obstruction to be checked for roadside bombs and other dangers, whilst the rest of the troop could bring to bear the full might of their vehicles’ weapons. Johnson was running this by the book, and his boys were performing just how they were supposed to.
And that was just it. They were doing exactly what was expected of them in warfare.
Only this wasn’t warfare. This was something else entirely.
“Trooper, recall the men,” he snapped at his radio operator.
“Sir?” he answered, his voice rising half an octave to betray his lack of experience and youth.
“Do it now,” Johnson said, fighting down the sudden anger he felt at having to repeat himself to a green boy. To his credit, the trooper offered no further opportunity to have his head removed by the squadron commander, and he gave the orders. No sooner had he overcome one person double-checking his decisions than the radio sparked to life and Lieutenant Palmer’s shrill voice cut the air through Johnson’s headphones.
“Sergeant Major,” his unhurried voice said, seeming to have a direct connection to Johnson’s eyebrows until he managed to control his face, “is there a problem?”
Johnson made eye contact with the radio operator and made a cutting motion with his left hand past his throat. The trooper understood.
“Standby, Sir,” he said formally.
Johnson returned his gaze to the front, as the eight soldiers jogged back to their armour and climbed inside. Transmitting to the whole group himself, he called out their new orders.
“All troops, Green Snake, I repeat, Green Snake unless otherwise instructed. All troops acknowledge.”
He waited as the few acknowledgements came back, satisfied that he had made the right decision. Just as the acknowledgements had finished, assault troop reported that they were ready to move, so he gave the order.
Green Snake meant that instead of approaching any potential threat area or obstruction carefully and dismounting to check for dangers, they were now under orders to force their way through and not stop or leave the safety of their vehicles. He cursed himself in his head that he hadn’t thought to abandon conventional protocols when their world had apparently abandoned the conventional overnight. Now, powering through the crashed and abandoned cars blocking their way with their far heavier mounts and more powerful engines, they approached the outskirts of the big town where the county hospital lay just off the main road.
Peeling away from the wider carriageways, Johnson’s decision to switch tactics was instantly rewarded. The lead Spartan turned slightly towards the nearside hedge to bump an abandoned Ford Escort off the road and provide clear sight and movement for the remaining vehicles, and just as the upturned front edge of their wedge-shaped tracked vehicle made contact, so did the hedgerow come alive. Johnson counted five, six, then a dozen people who moved just like the one he had seen at the fence at their camp the previous day. Each face that his mind took a mental snap-shot of registered something different from the last; exposed teeth through a ragged hole torn in a cheek, a face masked in blood from a badly torn scalp, a missing arm just above the elbow.
The only two things they had in common were their milky, soulless eyes and their evident intent on getting to the troopers.
“Close down, close down, close down!” Johnson barked into the radio, then dropped his body vertically downwards to lift the heavy, circular hatch lid closed above his head. Their views would be limited now to the thin strips which they had trained to use for so many hours and days. It did not hamper their ability to perform their tasks and carry out their orders. In fact, it made it easier to carry out those orders, as the drivers sealed inside their armour and masked under the noise of their roaring engines couldn’t hear the squelches and popping crunches of bodies going under their tracks. They couldn’t see this happening, given that their viewports offered a restricted view directly before their wagons, but the feedback from the controls told the story well enough.
Johnson’s own vehicle, one of their two Sultan mobile command cars, was effectively the same platform as the Spartans of the assault troop, only his had more room inside to accommodate the large map wall and additional radio operator who relayed his orders. Raising his own seat and opening his hatch again, he took up a firing position with the armaments for the vehicle, the single belt-fed GMPG, and lined up the sights on the approaching bodies as they stumbled into view. He alone of all the armoured column was outside of a sealed reconnaissance tank, as the Fox and Spartan cars could operate their guns from inside, unlike his vehicle, which basically had it mounted on the pintle outside.
His vision of these new enemies was jolting and fleeting at times, but each small visual clue left him with a growing sense of dread and revulsion. New flashes of horrific and bloody injuries seared his eyeballs as his mind lost valuable thinking capacity through imagining how those wounds could have been inflicted. His reverie was snapped back to the present by a request from the rearmost car to open fire on the Screechers.
“Tell him no,” Johnson said loudly to the radio operator. “Save the ammo.”
As they pushed deeper into the outskirts of the town, the pillar of black smoke became more and more visible from the direction of the hospital, which sat atop a small rise. Calling out the change of destination for it to be relayed, he steered his column away from that area and towards the centre of the town. Pushing slowly through the tighter streets, and nudging cars and vans clear of the road every few hundred yards, their progress had slowed through a combination of shorter sight ranges and more obstructions than there had been on the wider roads outside of the built-up area.
Realising his mistake, Johnson called a full stop and ordered them all to cut their engines.
Sitting near to the main square of the town, its origins going back hundreds and hundreds of years to a time when the town walls kept out the invading Vikings, the sudden silence felt oppressive in the surroundings. High-sided buildings of cut stone and cobbled side streets held the last echoes of their big engines for so long that he thought he was imagining it, until it finally dissipated and left him feeling almost alone. He wasn’t, he knew, he had close to forty men with him, and they were all safely ensconced behind thick armour plating and looking down the barrels of heavy machine guns and some even larger weapons to their rear. But still, despite the logical facts of being safe and protected, he still felt very much alone.
Perhaps that isolation was more about the burden of command than about the physical aspects of being lonely.
The silence he heard, or more that he felt, wasn’t a true silence. There were still the ticking and clanging noises of the ten engines cooling down, as well as the echoing ambience of a town thrown into sudden silence by the absence of normal daily life; but other sounds began to creep into his consciousness.
A bird call, raucous even at a long distance away. A building alarm, an insistent bell ringing, from somewhere indeterminate due to the confusing sounds that bounced between the rows of tall stone buildings. A shout, high pitched and pleading, from somewhere up ahead. Or behind. Johnson’s head whipped back and forth to try and locate the sound and not be tricked by the echo. He heard it again; a woman’s voice, shouting at the top of her voice and dragging the word out excruciatingly.
It said, help. More precisely, it swore.
Poking his own head out of the hatch on the other spacious − or at least spacious by light tank standards − Sultan armoured car behind, Palmer’s eyebrows almost met in the middle as he watched Johnson snatch off his helmet and headset and fling his head wildly from side to side.
“What the de
vil…?” he muttered to himself, just as the radio burst into life and he could read the lips of the man speaking.
“One troop, form a rear guard at this position. Assault troop, advance one hundred metres and cut engines; listen for survivors,” he snapped, looking in the direction of the troops he was talking to as he gave the orders. All around them, big engines barked into life and belched clouds of black smoke into the air. The four smaller tracked vehicles bucked and reared as they drove ahead, and Johnson gave a rapid order to his driver to follow, meaning to halt his small section of two vehicles at the mid-point between the Fox cars and the Spartans. Hating being a spectator again, Johnson was forced to listen to the action unfold as the light tanks blocked his view.
“Female, second floor window. Stand by,” came Maxwell’s clipped voice over the radio. “She’s indicating something to us… contact, enemy front, wait out.”
Johnson, unknown to him but watched intently by his radio operator, pressed down gently on the topmost bullet in the spare magazine on his webbing. The rough, hardened skin of his right thumb rubbed the exposed brass smooth as he repeated the gesture over and over. He knew there was no point in demanding an update from them, even less sense in driving up to them and losing visual contact with the other half of his current fighting strength, so he had to supress the urge once more to push his way to the front of the queue and get his bayonet wet. The seconds ticked by, then the radio sparked to life again, only it wasn’t what he was expecting to hear.
“Foxtrot-Three-Three-Alpha this is Foxtrot-One-Zero, contact rear,” the voice rabbited, giving the information in a single word with barely a pause in between.
Momentarily torn, Johnson’s logical brain kicked in to ask the question into the mic before he even knew he had decided on it.
“Foxtrot-One-Zero, stand by. Foxtrot-Five-Zero what is your situation?” He said, telling the panicking voice behind them to hold on until he knew what Maxwell was doing.
The rearguard was sealed up tight behind armour, whereas his vanguard had civilians in the open and would have to open their doors or put lives at risk.
“Twenty plus approaching, civilians preparing to come out. Enemy not responding to warnings,” came Maxwell’s terse reply. Behind that report were the sounds of various troopers going through the motions of their training and following the rules of engagement.
They had these rules of engagement drummed into them over and over. They could not use any more force than the minimum necessary, as ambiguous as that was, and they were told time and again to fire only aimed shots, that automatic fire could only be used against identified targets, and that a verbal warning should be given whenever possible.
Johnson knew how impractical those rules could be, even with an enemy who could hear and respond, but he also knew that his men found comfort in the repetition of training and that comfort allowed the rest of their actions to flow smoothly. Like training the cupola on a target, like calling out their firing arc and reporting ready, like asking for permission to open fire.
“Automatic fire,” Maxwell announced, “go on.”
The gunners, as inhumane as it would have seemed to the uninitiated, smiled as thumbs pressed down on controls and the four GPMGs sparked into boisterous life to cut down the approaching waves of shambling and screeching enemy.
The bullets these guns fired, even though they were the smallest armament their armoured column carried, unleashed their destructive power on the gathering crowd. A single GPMG, with a thousand rounds of belt-fed 7.62, could bring down a small house. Four of them, vehicle-mounted and interlocking their arcs of fire where every other bullet streaked a fiery-red line towards their enemy, wreaked savage and unholy devastation on the slow-moving forty or so blood-streaked people stumbling at them, their mouths open and returning their own salvo of spine-numbing shrieks and hisses.
In seconds, the rippling gunfire that appeared visually like a series of lasers ceased as there were suddenly no more bodies to convert from living to dead. Johnson watched on as Maxwell organised the recovery, just as the radio sparked to life again.
“Permission to engage?” came the request in a tone of sheer panic. Panic, in Johnson’s opinion, was more dangerous to his troops than enemy fire could be.
Fire could serve to rally his men against their foe.
Fire could be ineffectual, and the inaccuracy of incoming rounds could serve to raise the morale of his men.
Panic, however, did not miss. It was one hundred percent accurate, one hundred percent of the time.
They were trained for chemical warfare, as every soldier was, given the tensions with Russia. Any man or woman in uniform on the western side of the Berlin wall was on a moment’s notice to pull on their thick, rubbery protection suits. They were trained to seal themselves up inside their armour to escape nuclear fallout and other such horrors of modern warfare, but the only thing that could penetrate that armour was panic.
Panic and fear, Johnson corrected himself, but fear wasn’t an immediate danger.
“Negative,” he responded coolly, “report.”
“They’re coming from bloody everywhere!” came the cry of response, “all around us,” Johnson heard the irregular pounding of meaty hands on the outer hulls of the armoured car where the transmission originated, along with the mechanical whine of the car’s turret rotating. Closing his eyes and holding his breath momentarily, Johnson resisted the urge to enquire as to the height of the radio operator and to opine that he was unaware shit could be stacked that tall. Instead he gave his orders very simply and calmly.
“Foxtrot-One-Zero, advance through the enemy one hundred metres and hold fast. Acknowledge?”
A pause on the other end, then, “Foxtrot-One-Zero, roger. Advance through enemy lines one hundred metres and hold,” came the response of Maxwell’s voice, much more calmly than whoever had spoken before. Then he heard the sound of the Jaguar engines roaring up their revs to power away. Johnson didn’t want to, didn’t need to look to know that the four heavy wheels of each vehicle would be crushing the bloody bodies of the attackers. Pushing the thought away, Johnson turned his attention back to the front. He knew that the sixteen men now moving through the town would be safe inside their vehicles, not only safe but actually offering yet more protection to the rest of the column by attracting the Screechers through the noise they would be generating,
Maxwell, in Johnson’s opinion one of the very best combat leaders in the squadron, had organised one crew to dismount and source alternative transport for the civilians. Watching as the window to a van was broken, Johnson saw a trooper lift the locking pin and pull himself up behind the wheel, which he wrenched hard to snap the steering lock, then shout something at the rest of his crew, who began to push the vehicle. Johnson knew what he would be doing; handbrake off, clutch down and gearstick into second. As soon as the momentum was enough, he dropped the clutch out and the engine sparked to life.
SIXTEEN
Kimberley Perkins leaned out of the second-floor window of the bank she worked in to shout at the very top of her lungs. Over and over she called for help after the stone canyons of the town centre echoed loudly with the reverberating barks of engines. From the second she heard the noise, like a squeaking, rolling thunder. Having worked for the last four years in the bank where they now sought refuge, she knew that it was more than the regular noise of everyday vehicles.
Hollering until her voice gave out, she was finally rewarded when the four green wedges shot towards her on their tracks. Turning to the almost fifteen people trapped inside with her, she smiled with a confidence she didn’t truly feel, but needed to display to calm them down.
She had never been able to endure people’s inabilities to adapt and had always faced any situation with an almost implacable strength of character. When the screams had started, Kimberley was the only cashier working, as half the bank staff hadn’t even turned up for work. She, like everyone she knew, had been following as much as she could of the e
merging situation in London, but was as clueless as the others about what it meant for her. Having been born in London and initially raised there before fate conspired to move her west along the southern coast of England, she recognised some of the streets and landmarks in the background of the news reels, and a small stab of homesickness pricked at her heart every time. When the horrific realisation of the TV blackout hit her, it was already too late.
Living in the centre of town anyway, and it being only a short walk to work, Kimberley’s world was, geographically speaking anyway, incredibly small. She noticed nothing on her short walk to the bank, not even the absence of the regular amount of foot traffic, but the first hour of the day made her skin tingle with a slight feeling of dread, as the anticipated morning rush never came. After that came the sounds of sirens. In itself, the sound of a siren wasn’t unexpected as the bank was in the town centre where the ambulance station, fire station and police station were all a short walk away. She didn’t even hear the sirens any more, not really, since her apartment was in the same location and she had long since become accustomed to the noise.
But today was different, because the sound of sirens had been constant for ten minutes straight, and then faded to nothing. Not nothing, precisely, but a void. A vacuum. A hollow space that seemed both absent of any real information, but similarly full of noise that confused her. That vacuum soon filled with noises which were discernible from the general cacophony, and the eyes of the non-staff of the bank began to fix on each other’s as screams sounded in the town. When half a dozen people bundled in, pushing and shoving each other as they ran, and begged for help, then she finally knew it was happening.
Toy Soldiers Box Set | Books 1-6 Page 12
