Both Palmer and Johnson deflated as one, the latter even letting a small groan of disappointment escape his lips. The Colonel noticed them at that point and stepped towards them beaming a smile. He walked with a curious gait, looking to pause on the ball of each foot before lifting the limb quickly, as though to catch up and make good the time lost from the hesitation. His face seemed genuinely happy to see them, but had an air of falsehood to it, as though he were on display for the film crews in some backwater country, giving out fake smiles to support the foreign interests of UK PLC.
“Colonel Tim Munro, Royal Scots,” he introduced himself with the same broad smile and no hint of a Scottish accent. Both men swelled to attention and offered salutes; Johnson with his right hand to his eyebrow and Palmer with his sub-machine gun held vertically in his left hand against his body and performing his salute with his right hand held against the weapon.
“At ease, chaps,” he said, “and you are?”
“Captain Palmer, Sir, Household Cavalry.”
Colonel Tim nodded affably and muttered, “Splendid, splendid,” then looked expectantly to Johnson.
“Squadron Sergeant Major Johnson, Sir,” he said woodenly, “C Squadron Yeomanry.”
“Splendid,” Colonel Tim said again, then seemed to grow bored with their company and turned away only to swing back and offer a mutter of advice to Palmer.
“Captain, perhaps you’d prefer to shave and change before we meet again? Show a better example for the men, eh? Good lad.”
“Yes Sir,” Palmer said, “sorry, Sir, won’t happen again.”
The two men sank again as the kindly old fool walked away.
“Well, bugger me,” Palmer said in a low breath as his hands ran over the scratchy stubble on his chin.
“Rather not, Sir,” Johnson said automatically, “but I suspect we’ve just crapped in our own mess tin getting that shower of shit land on us.”
“Mess Tim,” Palmer responded drily.
And the two of them finally realised the double blow their command structure had just dealt them. The intelligence corps major was too junior to be a wrinkle to the army personnel, let alone the Royal Marines, but the combination of the meticulous major and the blustering buffoon of a full Colonel was a true fait accompli; one made the suggestions but the other gave the orders. The major could be circumvented, given his status with the men and the Colonel could be ‘handled’ but the combination of them rendered the forces already on the ground powerless.
Palmer, as exhausted as he was, led the seven vehicles of his expedition across the road bridge within an hour of the arrival of their new commanding officer and his staff. He took Two Troop under the command of Sergeant Rod Sinclair. Johnson had flatly refused to allow Maxwell’s assault troop to go for two reasons; firstly, that their Spartans needed maintenance, and secondly that Maxwell had been in the vanguard of almost every mission they had run since the whole lunacy began. For a similar reason he left Strauss’ troop off the menu, as they hadn’t had a chance to fully recover from losing a man on their last venture outside the safety of the island. That left his two other Sabre troops, and of those, Sinclair’s was deemed the steadiest. Three Troop was a mixture of troopers moulded into one team of twelve that hadn’t yet obtained that kind of fighting unit cohesion they needed, at least not in Johnson’s opinion anyway, and that was what mattered.
He had relented and borrowed a reliable man from both Maxwell’s and Strauss’ troops to drive the two Saxons and taxi the eight Royal Marines under the leadership of their sergeant, Bill Hampton. In each of those armoured personnel carriers were four marines and a single nuclear engineer from America. The suggestion to split the precious cargo was a sensible precaution, as each of the skilled men was effectively protected by his own ‘brick’, or four-man patrol. Sticking to that template made it more likely that at least one of them would remain unharmed and capable of preventing the power station going boom.
The last vehicle, sitting in the middle between the Saxons with two Foxes fore and aft, was the Sultan vehicle that Johnson wished he had been in. He had lent him his radio operator, Corporal Daniels, as the man had been left looking for work after his ejection from the headquarters building.
Johnson watched them out of sight, not knowing that they would face nothing of the resistance they expected.
SEVENTEEN
Major Clive Downes stayed on one knee and looked over the iron sights and fat, suppressed barrel of the brand new MP5SD he had been issued along with his men. They were all familiar with the weapons, having used them extensively when their squadron rotated onto the ‘Black’ team, but the sudden change felt slightly alien.
They had just spent seven months living in the caves and villages with the Mujahedeen, as unsavoury as the experience was, and had been carrying the plentiful AK47s that flooded half of the world. There was no need for heavy calibre penetration with this strange new enemy, and their distance needs were catered for by one of his men who carried the rarest of possessions in the western military; that of the Soviet VAL 9mm silenced sniper rifle.
That weapon had been one of the reasons that US and UK special forces had been in Afghanistan, as the Soviet technological advances with an active war for testing, had been astronomical. Consequently, samples of new weapons were highly sought after to enable them to produce effective countermeasures, should the Cold War turn hot. That captured rifle had never made it into the hands of the civilian masters, however, and would now be employed against the dead instead of being rigorously tested and reverse-engineered.
The arms race had become the new space race, with each side of the globe working tirelessly to develop new weaponry to beat the defences of their potential opposition.
With their rapid-firing suppressed machine guns and their silenced sniper rifle, their doomsday options were strapped to the backs of two of them in the forms of shotguns; fully automatic shotguns, for when they had no option but to go loud.
Their sidearms, as with many special forces teams, were a mixture as they had access to a choice of weapons to suit their individual preferences. The regular troops, what the men of the Special Air Service referred to as the Green Army, would never be allowed to pick their weapons or show individual flavours as they did. Two of them carried the Browning Hi-Power, one carried the American Colt .45 and their Major preferred the Sig-Sauer P228.
Those four men, with their weapon-based idiosyncrasies, possessed enough firepower and lethal training to perform as an entire platoon of regular soldiers. Now, kneeling in a rough circle facing outwards, they listened as the sounds of the helicopter blades faded away into silence.
As if the four men had evolved to become streamlined instruments of warfare, even their names were mostly single-syllable. Their officer, nominally in charge but in their arena at the peak of their chosen profession every man had a say, was known simply as Boss or The Boss to the men. The men, a corporal and two troopers, were similarly named Mac, Desmond or ‘Dezzy’ and Smiffy. He introduced himself as Smiffy with two fs, in his cheeky south London accent. Desmond wasn’t Dezzy’s real name, but it was a joke at his expense from his parent unit, who said they would see him soon and dubbed him Desmond Tutu, as in Two-Two for 22 SAS, when he left for Hereford on selection. The joke backfired, as he passed selection on his first attempt and retained the nickname in celebration.
To outsiders, their curious tight-knit nature seemed unnatural and very un-army-like. But outsiders didn’t understand them. Other than their Major, who retained his rank when passing selection, when ordinarily he would have been forced to rotate out after two or three years, as he had done when he’d served his first stint in the regiment as a captain. The enlisted men lost whatever rank they held in their parent units and often went from sergeants or corporals back to being troopers. The fact that the major had been invited back for a second stint spoke volumes about his competency.
The sound of rotor blades faded into silence and Mac’s soft Scottish voice drifte
d to the others from behind them as they covered their own sectors of fire.
“Three, slow movers, one hundred yards,” he muttered.
“Smiffy,” the major said, “on you.”
Trooper Smith said nothing but turned and lay flat, pointing towards the direction Mac was facing. He slipped the long rifle from his shoulder and settled into the stock, pausing a few heartbeats before the three whistling coughs barked from the gun. All three zombies fell, and the Major called the move.
They stepped towards the big power plant in bounds; two men covering and two men moving. The main access door was opened with a swipe card which had been coded and provided by their colonial cousins. The door opened with a tiny metallic buzz and Mac held the handle of the door as he glanced back to see the other three stacked up in tight formation with their MP5s up and ready.
They went in, clearing the building section by section and finding only a dozen people inside the compound after three hours of thorough searching. Not people specifically, but undead, lurching creatures who had been, up until fairly recently, people.
“Call it in,” Downes said to Mac, who was carrying their radio, and watched as he snaked out the antenna on the ground.
“Zero, this is Charlie-One-One. Zero, Charlie-One-One, over,” he said in low, robotic tones.
“One-One, Zero, send,” came the female voice from the other end of the ether.
“One-One, target secure. ETA on convoy?”
“Stand by, one,” came the operator’s voice before a brief pause, “ETA one-nine minutes, over.”
Mac glanced at the Boss, who nodded back. Nineteen minutes until the engineers arrived with their armoured escort to stop the plant from going critical. Mac acknowledged the information and signed off to pack up the radio gear. Nineteen minutes came and went in relative quiet, other than the two shambling callers at the gate. The four men still maintained cover and situational awareness, ingrained habits they were unable to switch off after a life of considering incoming enemy fire. They had yet to see a zombie with the ability to bring a weapon to bear, but carelessness, as Mac liked to say, often led to a mild case of death.
The two callers were allowed to come close, then both took single rounds in the skull as they coughed from Dezzy’s MP5 at a distance of twenty feet. They had learned to be economical with their shots, unless faced with one of the rare faster ones that usually denoted a sizeable force of zombies would soon follow. This experience had been earned shortly after their return from the sub to the surface of the water, when told they would be employed for precision missions and would be inserted far behind enemy lines, such as they were. Downes requested a day in theatre for training, as the intelligence briefs held no mention or description of how to fight them.
The powers that be allowed the request after a day of deliberation, evidently deciding that their small team was replaceable should they not return, and the intelligence they could bring back would be worthwhile.
Given that they had already been told that sound attracted them, and that a tiny percentage of them acted differently and were more dangerous, Downes requested the suppressed MP5s. They flew by helicopter to a sparsely-populated region of northern France and spent six hours developing tactics which they reported back to command. Their rules were simple:
small groups, low noise profile,
use suppressed weapons whenever possible,
avoid large concentrations of enemy and drop the faster ones at distance as soon identification made,
then clear out before arrival of their faithful followers.
Their tactics were under the radar, invisible, and quiet. The rest of the time was waited out in silence, until the whistling and squeaking of moving armour tickled the edges of their hearing. Nobody said anything, because they didn’t have to. An armoured convoy was the exact opposite of the warfare that they practised, and although impressive and able to bring a staggering and devastating amount of firepower to bear, they also attracted every shuffling corpse inside of a mile radius just by driving along the road, even before they fired a shot.
The diversionary tactic from the American Apache pilot should have helped, as he flew over fifty miles east before destroying a large road bridge to stem the flow of corpses and contain them. This also served to make a lot of noise and attract anything heading in the direction of the power station away towards the fast-flowing river and the sea beyond where the bridge had collapsed.
As the seven vehicles stormed in and had the gates pushed closed behind them, the four men jogged in to the entrance where the convoy formed a semi-circle and faced their guns outwards. A man wearing a captain’s insignia stepped down from a tracked light tank and met the four men as they arrived.
“Captain Palmer,” he said to the men, who weren’t in the slightest bit breathless after their quarter-mile run from the gate, “Household Cavalry.”
“Captain,” acknowledged Mac as the first man to have arrived, giving Palmer the incorrect assumption that he was the officer leading the group. Downes stayed back from the conversation, waiting to hear what transpired.
“I presume you’ve been inside?” Palmer asked, guessing that the four men with wild beards and piercing eyes were clearly what his men would call sneaky-beaky, and probably wouldn’t have felt it necessary to wait for half a squad of marines to check out an abandoned building.
“It’s clear,” Mac said simply, “you’ve brought the engineers?”
In answer, two men were escorted towards the doors, with four marines surrounding each one.
“We’ll take it from here,” Downes said, stepping forward and speaking for the first time. Palmer’s eyebrows rose slightly, indicating that his trained ear had picked up on the educated voice and had clearly misunderstood who the officer was. Given the man’s age, Palmer also correctly surmised in an eye-blink that the man was his senior and responded accordingly.
“Of course, Sir,” he answered, “I shall set the perimeter and wait for instructions.”
Downes nodded his thanks to him and turned to indicate that the two engineers should follow. The six men disappeared inside after the door was swiped open, leaving Palmer with that cold sense of having been bypassed by some ghostly spirit and unsure of what he had experienced.
“Sinclair? Hampton?” Palmer said loudly, waiting for the army and marine sergeants to report to him.
“The Sultan is to remain here,” he said, indicating a strong point by the doors, “with two Foxes. Take the other two to the gate and switch off the engines. Hampton? Perimeter patrols in opposing directions, if you please.”
The sergeants acknowledged their orders, gave their own to make it happen, and Palmer waited.
“There and there,” said one engineer, his accent alien in the English countryside, “we need to access that panel and recalibrate, then reset the coolant flow from up there,” he finished, pointing to a glass bubble on the walkway level above their heads.
The four men of the SAS patrol listened, but in honesty cared little for the technicalities as they wouldn’t be asked to perform the task and thought it better to keep to their areas of expertise. They kept their weapons ready as the two Americans went about their work, draining the coolant and powering down the output to a more manageable level. The mostly-depleted coolant had drained away and the large pipes whooshed as more water pumped in. The two men worked for almost forty minutes, far less time than Downes expected, before declaring that they were done.
“That’s it?” he asked them.
“Sure, all we had to do was drain the system, power it down as much as possible and top off the tanks,” he replied, “This place is only kicking out about thirty percent of normal, but it’s good for almost a year before we have to do anything to it. It ain’t like there are a lot of folks around here using their microwaves, right?” he finished with a laugh.
“Nah, mate,” Smiffy said acidly, “because most people in our fuckin’ country are dead, so show a bit of respect.”
&
nbsp; The man shut his mouth, packed up his tools, and waited to be led back outside.
“Captain?” Downes said as he looked up to where Palmer was sprouting out of the hatch on the Sultan.
“Sir?”
“Is your man linked to your base?” Downes asked, wanting to know if they had open radio communication.
“He is,” Palmer told him.
“Could you trouble them for our transport to be sent?” Downes enquired politely.
Palmer frowned, “Of course, but,” he said hesitantly, “aren’t you hitching a ride back with us?”
“They are,” Downes said as he gestured to the engineers, “we’re not.”
He said nothing else, telling Palmer that the subject was, at least as far as the irregular soldiers of the special forces were concerned, closed. Palmer instructed his radio man to make the call and received his own orders to return to the island. Palmer offered to remain until such time as the helicopter arrived for the four-man team, but Downes quietly embarrassed him by pointing out that anything following the noise trail would be after them and not the aircraft it would never find. He didn’t embarrass himself further by enquiring where they were going but wished the men well as he recalled his convoy to prepare to depart.
“Don’t worry, Captain,” Downes said with a chilling smile that was probably meant to seem reassuring, “something tells me we’ll be meeting again soon.”
Long before the convoy returned, Johnson found himself summoned by the new commander of their island to deal with a civilian matter. He entered the room to find Colonel Tim looking remarkably flustered and the three men of his entourage seemingly powerless to assist.
“Thank God for that,” said a young woman who appeared to be the spokesperson for the three civilians sitting at the table, “someone with some sense at last. Mister Johnson, would you please explain to this man that we aren’t soldiers and that the army doesn’t own us?”
Toy Soldiers Box Set | Books 1-6 Page 35
