Death Tide

by Devon C. Ford

  His suggestion silenced the room as the others waited for the logic behind the idea to explain itself. When nobody spoke, Brinklow gave the explanation himself.

  “We know we can reach it with what we’ve got left, and we know there was a lot of fuel there when we left. It’s unlikely that it’s all gone because unless someone went back with a few tankers and emptied it in the last month, then it’s still there. The only downside is that we don’t know how many of the Bitey Bastards are there now. Sirs,” he added weakly to defend his gruff language.

  Palmer turned to the pilots, who in turn looked at each other, then shrugged and looked back at the army captain.

  “Makes sense,” Morris said.

  “We’d need some boys to defend us as we refuelled, obviously,” Barrett added.

  “I’ll ask Lieutenant Lloyd,” Palmer said, “his men should at least be more familiar with the base than my chaps.”

  “And they are the specialist infantry,” Morris added, wincing immediately as he had spoken without thinking, “obviously your men have fought bravel…”

  “I understood your point, Lieutenant,” Palmer interrupted to save time spent having his ego massaged, “I’ll see to it. What time frame?”

  “As soon as possible,” Barrett said, rising from his chair, “we’ll start pre-flight checks now. We’ll start the search at the island and work out from there, assuming we have fuel.”

  Palmer nodded to them and left, remembering as soon as he had moved from the room that the marines officer was deployed and their sergeant currently missing. Grabbing a soldier from his former headquarters troop to first check his current duty and finding it less important than the task he wanted, he sent the man to find any of the marines and ask who their most senior man was on site.

  “I shall be downstairs,” he told the man, “tell them to find me there.” As he spoke, another thought struck him, “And after that, find the SAS Major and request that he speak to me.”

  The man had done his job quickly, resulting in the tall and seemingly bored Royal Marine medic arriving and offering a tired salute to the captain.

  “Corporal Sealey, Sir,” he said in a thickly accented voice that made him sound almost bored.

  “And you are the senior man?” Palmer asked.

  “I think so, Sir, with Mister Lloyd out and about with the other corporal and Sergeant Hampton… not here… then I guess I’m it.”

  Palmer nodded and was saved from saying anything further on the matter as the tall man wearing black walked in and nodded to them both. Marine corporal and army captain returned the nod and Downes turned to face Palmer expectantly, with his eyebrows raised.

  “I’ll get right to it, then,” he said to the two summoned men in the small parlour they occupied, “I want to send out the helicopter with the purpose of finding the other aircraft and giving us some definitive answers about what happened. I also wish to chase up the detachment still at the base. The crew are preparing to leave soon; however, I need a security detail for them as they will need to return to their original station for refuelling. The status of that base is unknown. My thoughts were to send our marines, since they would have knowledge of the base, but I rather fear they have somewhat depleted numbers, given that they are currently out on mission. Corporal Sealey here is the senior man currently.”

  “That said, Sir,” Sealey said, “I’m the team medic,” he explained, pointing out that, whilst a trained and experienced commando, he was not a usual leader of men in action.

  “I’ll take my team, if you wish?” Downes said, knowing that the offer was expected and hoped for. “Saves my chaps getting stagnant,” he added almost jovially. He had stripped off his smock to reveal thick arms with the sleeves of his black top pulled up and bunched above his elbows. Given the size of his forearms, the chance of them slipping back down unintentionally was almost negligible.

  Palmer thanked them both, let Sealey off the hook to return to his duties preparing the house and grounds for defence, and indicated for Downes to stay a while. He walked to the window, looking out over a palatial inner courtyard with enough tended grass to grow crops for half of them, and he let out a sigh of near mental exhaustion.

  “You’re doing a fine job, Julian,” Downes told him gently, “making the best of what we have here.”

  “Thank you, Major,” he said.

  “Clive,” he said, making Palmer realise that he had never actually given the unnervingly quiet Major his first name.

  “What were you before?” Palmer asked, “Before your current post, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  “Not at all,” Downes said, “I was the cliché as it happens. Paras, served my first stint with the Regiment as a troop boss,” he said, meaning his own regiment, as all soldiers said of their military family, “and was invited back as a Major. Only one of mine is a Para, the other two are what everyone calls Crap-Hats. I doubt it matters now, but we were in Afghanistan for the last nine months nearly, playing Cold War games with the whole enemy of my enemy thing.”

  The way he spoke showed that his education was at least mostly equal to Palmer’s, perhaps not as expensive as the boarding schools he and his brother had attended but definitely privately funded. He had lost the upper-class edge of that education and accent now, probably because of the company he had kept and by not being insulated from his men, as officers in regular army units would naturally be. He had lived and breathed as one of the men, had forgone any sense of entitlement for himself or servitude from his men, and that bond seemed far stronger than the discipline of Palmer’s own rag-tag squadron.

  “I’d heard of such clandestine missions,” Palmer said, “all very secret squirrel,” he said with a smirk as he used the terminology of his men.

  “Very,” Downes said, “but I honestly felt for our Russian enemies in that hell hole. To be conscripted and barely trained, then sent into the most inhospitable place on God’s green earth, barring the Borneo jungle in the wet season maybe, where your enemy sneaks around in the dark to cut your comrades,” he said this in a Slavic accent and rolled his R’s theatrically, “to pieces so you can hear their screams all night is just barbaric.”

  He trailed off, leaving them both in thoughtful silence before Downes slapped the younger man lightly on the back.

  “Give me a straight-up zombie fight any day,” he said nonchalantly. “We’ll talk when I’m back, Captain. Keep up the good work.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  They gorged themselves, relatively speaking, on the stores of canned food stacked neatly in the house. Without bothering to heat anything, a hardship that didn’t seem the slightest bit important to people who had operated in or trained for war, they took it in turns to spin the handle of the opener and tuck greedily into the contents.

  Johnson peeled back the metal lids of two tins, shoved a fork and a spoon into them without recalling what went in which tin, and walked over to where Kimberley was propped up in the middle of multiple cushions, with her right leg elevated on yet more soft cushions.

  “Thank you, Dean,” she said with a hint of an awkward smile. He held out the can to her, furrowed his brow and switched hands to offer her the other.

  “Fruit salad,” he said, “I’ve got baked beans if you wanted those instead…”

  “No, no,” she said weakly, “fruit salad is fine.”

  “You need the sugar,” Johnson said as he sat beside her as lightly as possible, yet still crushing the settee under his bulk. “Make sure you drink all the syrup; build up your strength.”

  “She needs fluids and rest,” came the unintentionally harsh-sounding voice of Astrid Larsen, “but I suppose that this fruits salad will be good.” Johnson nodded, rising to leave Kimberley in the capable hands of the medic, whilst he stalked away to find a place to sit and eat his cold beans. Dropping himself down on another settee next to the injured Bill Hampton, Johnson froze with his shoulders hunched until the foul stream of hissed swear words finished pouring from the marine’s
mouth. Glancing across at him, he saw the man fixing him with an evil gaze which no doubt would have terrified the young marines under his command.

  Johnson, however, was no twenty-something marine, and returned the look with his own thousand-yard stare. His look didn’t silence a platoon or two of marines, it cut through an entire squadron’s chatter as well as the sounds of their engines, to focus over a hundred minds on his next words. The two men stayed like that for a second, trapped in some approximation of stags locking horns until one backed away to avoid injury.

  “Watch me fucking leg,” Hampton muttered as he looked back down at his own tin of cold food.

  “Sorry, Bill,” Johnson said as he leaned back and stirred the contents of his own tin to realise that he had given himself the fork and Kimberley the spoon for her fruit salad.

  Fuck it, he thought, licking the fork clean and tipping the tin up to his mouth to drink the contents like an especially thick, cold soup. Hampton was wearing boxer shorts, fresh socks from his own kit and a T-shirt which was fractionally too small for him. Still a very fit and strong man, he had run ever so slightly to fat, having spent more time sitting at a desk due to his rank and responsibilities, and the shirt showed up the bits he might not want people seeing. Johnson looked at him and decided that he probably couldn’t care less what anyone thought of him. His swollen right knee was propped up and looked angry where the bruising was already starting to show.

  Larsen sat with Kimberley, checking that she was still making sense after the bang to her head sustained in the crash had left her unconscious for almost a day. When she had come around, screaming terribly as her last memory was that of being in a helicopter dropping unexpectedly from the sky, Astrid had calmed her, filled her in on what had happened, and taken her away to the bathroom where she cut away her clothes and washed her, tending to each injury as she discovered it. They hadn’t noticed throughout the remainder of the night or the first part of the day as they carried her because she was wearing black denim jeans, but she had sustained a nasty cut to the inside of her thigh which refused to stop opening up and bleeding if she moved.

  Muffled cries could be heard by the men downstairs as she sat still and bit down on a towel as Astrid put three stitches in the wound before cleaning the rest of her. That injured leg was now elevated on cushions to keep the blood from pooling around the injury and putting pressure on the stitches. She was flushed pink after being scrubbed clean with the last of the hot water, and dressed in oversized jogging bottoms and a sweatshirt, both emblazoned with some American university logo and name.

  As Johnson sat beside Hampton, both eating their cold meal in grumpy silence, Bufford returned to the large, open-plan living area after coming down the stairs.

  “Your man is keeping watch,” he said to Hampton, meaning Enfield, the marine sniper, “not that there’s much to see, but he insists. I’ve given him another can of scran and told him to get washed up because he’s honkin’. The water’s icers now, but he’s not bothered. He could do with his slug because he looks ready to cream in.”

  Hampton nodded sagely and chewed before swallowing and opening his mouth to respond to the SBS man in front of him, but then he put a finger to his lips and burped around it, before wincing and hitting himself in the chest lightly to somehow ease the heartburn and indigestion he was feeling.

  “Yeah, we’re all chinstraps, mate, but his oppo got zapped in the crash. Inseparable those two were. Leigh and Enfield; spotter and sniper. Couldn’t fucking write it,” he paused for them to chuckle, “but they were A1, mate. Gen.”

  It was Bufford’s turn to nod sagely then, sparing a thought for the other marines who hadn’t made it out, before Hampton changed the subject again.

  “Mate of mine went SB in ’83. Steve Priest?” Hampton asked hopefully.

  “C Squadron,” Bufford answered immediately with a straight face, “good guy.”

  “Yeah,” Hampton laughed lightly, “fucker for biting though. Always easy to get a wind up on him.”

  Buffs smiled at his memory, saying, “I’ll spell him upstairs, make sure he hits his grot soon,” and walked away leaving Johnson and Hampton alone again.

  Johnson finished his tin of beans, using the pointless fork to scrape the rest of the juice towards the edge where he slurped it into his mouth. Wiping his face with his hand he turned to Hampton and asked, “Is that why your training takes so damned long?”

  “What you on about?” Hampton asked back, suspecting that he was being set up for an inter-military jibe.

  “You have to learn a new language when you go on your long, romantic walks, camping in Devon. English is just fine for everyone, you know?”

  “Fuck off, pongo,” Hampton responded with a smirk.

  “Seriously though, is Enfield going to be alright?”

  “He’ll manage,” Hampton answered sincerely, “no idea what he’ll be like when the job’s done, but he’ll manage for now.”

  “When the job’s done?” Johnson nearly scoffed. “When’s that going to be?”

  “Fuck knows,” Hampton said, his tongue protruding from one side of his mouth as he spun his can spanner, which had appeared from a pouch on his kit resting beside him, and he attacked another can, this time ravioli.

  The two men sat in silence just as the two women in the same large room sat in quiet conversation. Footfalls above them denoted where Bufford and Enfield traded places for one to stand guard whilst the other washed, and shortly afterwards the sniper made his way down the stairs wearing some ill-fitting shirt and loose trousers over his slim frame. He nodded to both his sergeant and the army sergeant major, and laid out a towel on the low coffee table before resting first his salvaged L85 on the cloth to strip and clean it. Then he rebuilt it and checked the action to load a magazine, ready to go to work. The big sniper rifle came next, the big bolt being drawn back, and the breech cleaned almost with a tenderness.

  “You’re good with that,” Johnson said blandly, unsure himself if it was a question or a statement.

  “I’m alright,” Enfield said, “I’m just lucky that it makes sense to me when it doesn’t for others. On the sniper course the staff hated me because I just understood how things worked; wind, distance, elevation, relative elevation between shooter and target, air density, humidity, rainfall, curvature of the earth; all things that people had to learn the hard way, but they just make sense to me. So yeah, I’m alright with it, but I’ll only be alright with it another forty-six times, if you get my meaning.”

  Johnson did.

  “And with the other one?” he asked, pointing at the new bullpup rifle.

  “Less so,” Enfield said after regarding it for a time, “but I have a hundred chances more with that than this,” he said nodding between the guns as he packed up the cleaning kit and rolled it tight to fit back into his pouches.

  “Speaking of that,” Johnson said as he groaned and creaked his way to standing up, “Miss Larsen, could I borrow you?”

  Astrid patted Kimberley’s leg as she stood and walked towards the kitchen and Johnson’s direction, carrying the empty food tins.

  “Sergeant Major?” she asked, her accent making the enquiry sound formal.

  “I was hoping you could give me a run-down on stripping this?” he asked, holding up the suppressed MP5 she had given him, “I’m assuming it needs cleaning...”

  Astrid picked up her own identical weapon and sat at the white kitchen table. Johnson searched the drawers under the granite worktop and located what he wanted on the third attempt, selecting two tea towels and laying one down as a kind of placement, whilst offering the other to the hard, blonde woman. She took it silently, laying out the cloth just as he had. Johnson sat beside her, better placed to mimic her movements without his brain trying to switch the left and the right.

  “Charging handle back, verify empty chamber, remove rear stock pin, remove folding stock,” she said with an air of robotics as though she was literally translating the manual in her head
into English, “hinge down the lower mechanism and slide back charging handle, remove bolt and carrier assembly,” she went on, performing one task at a time and waiting for him to copy the actions, “rotate bolt head, locking piece, firing pin and spring all come out. There it is,” she said, opening her hands to demonstrate just how simple it was. Johnson rebuilt the gun, making the same movements in reverse until it was whole again, before stripping it down a second time as Astrid watched. She only had to correct him once, and after that he had the task down and began to clean the working parts. She had stripped, cleaned and oiled her weapon before he had finished, but stayed to watch. Of the four magazines he had for the weapon, Johnson found only two of them to be fully stocked, so he stripped the bullets from the spare magazines for his Sterling, which had been lost in the crash. Discarding the old magazines as they had none of those weapons left, he stored the handful of spare rounds in a pouch, ready to refill the magazines, and returned his webbing and weapon to where they rested against the stairs along with the others.

  Clean, fed and resting, the six battered survivors from the second helicopter lapsed into uncertain silence.

  Amber cried. She hadn’t cried since Peter had first found her, but now she buried her small face into his only slightly larger chest and sobbed quietly. He didn’t know what upset her most; it could’ve been the fear of having to rush out so suddenly after waking or, more likely he guessed, she was upset that the cat had not come with them.

  They had fled in plenty of time to avoid the people, and Peter didn’t dare close the curtains overlooking their former squat now, for fear that anyone there would notice the change. As a result, they were forced to live at the back of the house and avoid the front rooms, which meant that they were limited to existing in the kitchen downstairs and the bathroom and a small bedroom upstairs. He considered leaving the village again, just packing up whatever they could carry and running out of the back, but that would take them back in the direction they had first come from and that felt too much like defeat. He would go in a different direction, but the careful glances he stole at their old house showed the figure of a man watching through the partially open curtains. Any flight out the rear of the house would no doubt be noticed, and he wanted to avoid these people at any cost.