No, what Henno was much more worried about was what the fuck they were doing on this half-arsed Zulu rodeo in the first place. They had a crystal-clear mission objective. And if they couldn’t achieve it here, then they needed to push forward to where they could. His countrymen were falling every minute they messed around here on behalf of some American conventional forces muppet, who would probably shoot them as soon as help them, given half a chance.
But Henno couldn’t run off and complete the mission on his own – at least not yet – so the best thing to do was get this done as fast as possible.
He swept forward through the dark aisles, not really waiting for Handon to keep up. And, once again, he felt the man’s eyes on his back. It didn’t bother him, any more than did Handon’s nominal authority over him. He knew that many times, if not most, authority was to be mistrusted – and it was always to be questioned.
But he also had to be careful to judge things on their merits – and to allow Handon to be right when he was right. Henno couldn’t be fighting him just because they were in a fight, or because Handon had been wrong before.
He was self-aware enough to be wary of his early conditioning. To know that his own upbringing had left him very distrustful of authority – and nearly completely intolerant of bad decision-making.
And he had to make sure he wasn’t letting it own or control him. Especially not his decisions and actions now, when everything was on the line.
He let his mind range back.
* * *
The Selby Coalfields in North Yorkshire covered over a hundred square miles – and were said to hold a hundred million tons of untapped coal, enough to power Britain for a hundred years. Moreover, the Selby fields had opened at the end of the miners’ strikes of the mid-eighties, when Margaret Thatcher’s government tried to smash the miners’ unions and leave the communities that depended on them to rot. Henno had been born in one of those communities.
His father worked down the mines.
The opening of Selby spelled a long-term future, and his dad couldn’t move their family there fast enough. People came from all over the country. There was no housing at Selby, but the miners settled in Castleford, Barnsley, Doncaster – or, in the case of Henno’s family, the down-at-heel village of Kirby Mills, literally on the wrong side of the tracks from the more prosperous Kirkbymoorside – and commuted in to work.
But there was work – which meant life.
Though, just as in earlier times, a miner was never far from danger or death. When there was an accident, it was often catastrophic – because everything was so big and fast. Giant lorries pounded down the roads, the conveyer belts ran at top speed, and everyone was required to work flat out. Thatcher had crushed the power of the unions, so management could do anything they wanted – including putting the workers at risk.
But Henno was too young to be aware of any of that. He grew up tromping around the North York Moors – walking on his own many miles out in the wilds, even before he hit puberty. He was happy out there in the fields and dales, and the severe, dramatic, windswept moors.
But underground it was still a dog-eat-dog world. There was a lot of bravado among coal-workers, and a great sense of camaraderie. But it was all built on sand. The mine owners – greedy for quick profits – started using contractors to drive the headers, instead of their own men. This fired the greed of the men, many of whom went contract for the bonuses and overtime – selling their influence and long-term prospects.
When everyone else is selling out, it becomes costly not to.
Henno’s dad could have been a contractor and made tons – but he refused, maintaining his solidarity with the lads still in the union. It proved to be a very costly decision. Eventually privatization of the coal industry, loss of subsidy, and low prices made the pits unprofitable in 21st-century England.
Selby closed – and everyone was thrown out of work again.
Even young as he was, Henno knew his fool of a father should have left then. There was no longer anything for them there. But he was stubborn – he wouldn’t leave his mates he’d worked the coal face with. So they stayed, the family living off benefits, the father drinking away an increasing share of them. He became an angry, frustrated, domineering drunk – always making bad decisions and losing what little money they had. Soon he was sitting at home all day, with little to do, and growing more bitter, and more ridiculous, by the day.
It was bad decision after bad decision. By the man in authority, the one who was responsible for them, the one who was supposed to know what to do.
So Henno would tramp off into the moors to get away. He would sit alone and just watch the heather-covered hillsides. He discovered the isolated Blakey Ridge, nearly ten miles away, and the Red Lion Inn that sat atop it. He’d do odd jobs there, and they’d give him meals, and tip him out at the bar. That became his home.
But on the day of his sixteenth birthday, with the written permission of his mother, he enlisted in the British Army – as a boy soldier. Though controversial in later years, the army continued its practice since WW1 of recruiting sixteen- and seventeen-year old boys into the forces. It was like an apprenticeship, a form of social mobility for all strata of society. For Henno it was a way out, and it became a place to grow up. For years he sent his pay packet home for his mother and sisters – begging them to keep it and not to tell Dad.
And all the while he grew stronger, smarter, better skilled, and more self-reliant, training course by course, year by year – finally climbing to the elite ranks of the SAS, and becoming one of the best soldiers in the best unit in what had been, for centuries, the best army in the world.
But he’d already had hardwired into him a very low tolerance for bullshit and stupidity – and especially for bad decision-making. And that could be a great asset now. But it had also put him on a collision course with Handon.
And if they collided at full speed, the collateral damage could be spectacular.
* * *
Pred and Juice cleared together through a warren of smaller semi-rigid structures. There was zero tension with these two – and maybe only an inch open air between them. They were closer than brothers. As they methodically moved and cleared, covering their sectors and each other with practiced ease and skill, they talked quietly.
“How’s it feel to be back in the Horn of Africa?” Pred asked, covering a left-hand corner while Juice swept right.
“Eh. Not bad. I was once shot down in a plane that took off right over there.”
“Oh, yeah? How come you didn’t die?” Pred swung his rifle smoothly up and around, and led them down the next alley.
“Kindness of old friends, mainly.”
“CSAR kind of thing?”
“Yeah – but under fire. More a QRF kind of thing.”
Pred just grunted and spat in response. Then he nodded at a bigger office building they were actually going to need to take seriously while clearing. Pulling open the door and holding it for Juice, he said:
“Hope your old friends made it out of here before the end.”
Now Juice just grunted and spat in response.
Following him in, Pred instinctively reached for his sword – but then remembered he’d replaced it with his aluminum Louisville slugger, and pulled that out from his pack. In seconds the pair had cleared the handful of front rooms. That left only a corridor leading to the back. But they could already hear something stirring down there.
Juice squinted. “May as well let ’em come to us.”
“True.” Predator stood at the end of the hallway and rapped three times on the wall with the baseball bat – loud. Then he turned back to face Juice. His expression grew thoughtful, and he asked: “Don’t you ever let it get you down?”
Juice arched his eyebrows, and leaned his heavily-laden bulk up against a wall. “Let what get me down?”
“The fact that pretty much the whole world has turned into one giant monster trying to eat you. Trying to eat us.”
Juice shook his head. “You got a real cheery outlook, man.” He paused to spit tobacco juice on the floor. “Anyway, believe me, the whole world was trying to eat you before this. We just had good immune systems—” But then he cut himself off and pointed over Pred’s shoulder, where a dead guy was now stumbling down the hall straight toward his back.
Pred glanced behind him but said, “Finish your thought.”
“We just had good immune systems to keep the tiny critters out – and sharp sticks to keep the big ones off. That’s it. Nothing’s really changed. It ’s just gotten worse.”
Pred nodded and put his hand on his chin, looking like this was a pretty interesting thought.
“Uh—” Juice pointed again.
Predator turned as the Zulu got within ten feet of him and stuck his baseball bat into its chest, stopping its forward progress – though it pressed forward and reached around with both arms, hissing quietly. Pred then twisted back at the waist toward Juice and asked, “Hey – does my Zulu look Somali in this?”
Juice leaned in. “Nah, don’t think so. Another North African, I think.”
“Hmm.” Disappointed, Pred removed the bat from the creature’s chest and bopped it once on the head, one-handed – crushing its skull and dropping it to the floor. The only sound was that of quietly crunching skull bone and mushing brain matter. With Pred’s massive reach, extended by the bat, he’d been able to do all this before the thing got anywhere near scratching range of him.
As he leaned over and took another look at it on the ground, a second one appeared down the hall. It was identical in dress and skin pigment, so Pred gave it the same treatment. The skull-crushing with the bat was almost more of a wrist flick. It looked like he was expending no more arm strength than he would to pop the top off a beer bottle.
Pred looked down the hall. Nothing else emerged. “I think that’s it. C’mon.”
Juice followed him down to the single large room at the back.
And when they pushed the door open and stepped in… both just stood silent and still and in awe, gawking all around them.
Juice whistled once – then looked up at Pred.
And then he hit his radio button.
* * *
“Go ahead, Juice,” Handon said, stepping outside into the light, where Henno was already standing, scanning the area, and taking a swig of water from his Camel-bak.
“Yeah, we’ve found something you might want to see.”
“How about you just tell me what it is.”
“Sure. We’ve basically found some kind of trophy room or shrine.”
“Shrine to what?”
“The former garrison of the base, I think.” Juice paused. “It’s a whole room full of patches and ribbons and rank insignia – everything from single stripes to single stars.” That meant buck private to brigadier general. “There’s unit patches – 10th Mountain… 449th Air Expeditionary Group… 3rd ID… Texas Army National Guard… 3rd Marines out of Okinawa… There’s also a shitload of fruit salad: hundreds of meritorious service medals, combat action ribbons, Bronze stars… Iraq, Afghanistan, and Global War on Terror campaign medals, Presidential Unit Citations, sharpshooter badges… also Airborne and Ranger tabs, a couple of long tabs… I could go on.”
“Don’t,” Handon said. “I get the idea. Where’d all these come from?”
“My guess? From the former garrison – every soldier in every tenant command of this base. Everyone who served here. Everything that used to be Velcro’d or pinned onto their uniforms is now collected here.”
“Received, out,” Handon said. He looked at Henno. “You want to come help me try to shake the truth out of that son of a bitch Zorn?”
“Don’t mind if I do.”
The two jogged heavily back toward the rear – making for that southwest guard tower, and both with murder in their eyes.
Lie to Me Again
Camp Lemonnier - Southwest Guard Tower
“CSM Handon!” Noise said cheerily. “Staff Sergeant Henno! How go the zombie wars?” But the volume of his voice dropped off to nothing by the last word, as he saw Handon and Henno charge past him and seize Zorn. Handon picked him up and shoved him against the back wall of the tower. Zorn, a powerful man in his own right, bounced off the wall – and then stiff-armed Handon right back. It looked like a stand-off for a second—
Until Henno walloped him on the side of his jaw with a vicious right hook that caught him blind. Zorn went down – and when he looked up, Henno had his SIG P220 Combat stuck right in his face.
“Talk,” he said.
Zorn ignored the pistol, picked himself up, and wiped the blood from the corner of his lip. “Go fuck yourself, Tommy Trooper. I don’t know what your knickers are in a twist about.”
Handon squared up to him again. “About the former garrison of this base. You said they just wandered off. But our guys just found all of their unit patches, rank insignia, and ribbons. Did they happen to pull those off for you before they left?”
Zorn wiped his face again, and sat down on the bench seat on the inside of the tower railing. “Oh. You found those.”
“Yeah. We found those. Now you want to stop fucking with me? Because I don’t have the time, and I can’t accept the risk.”
“Okay.” Zorn nodded. “Yeah. I lied.”
“What happened to the base garrison, Zorn?”
The man looked up sullenly. “I killed them – all right? I destroyed them.”
Handon pulled up. “What, all of them?”
“Yeah. All of them. One or two at a time.”
“And what the hell did you do with the bodies?”
“They’re buried. Mass grave, out back.”
“Can you be a little more specific?”
“In a field on the grounds of the airport.”
Henno got sick of pointing his gun at the man’s head and put it away. He looked at Handon. Now what?
Handon acknowledged his look, but then turned back to Zorn. “Why?”
Zorn shrugged. “They were my soldiers. Every one of ’em. They deserved a decent burial. Not to mention a real death.”
Handon exhaled. He couldn’t argue with that. “Why’d you lie about it?”
“It’s not a very nice thing to have to do. Is it?”
Handon looked back to Henno. He could see the Brit still didn’t trust Zorn. He had never trusted him in the first place. And Handon was coming around to his way of thinking. But, then again, his people were already committed – out there in the overrun section of the base, clearing it, and already more than half done. Still, he thought about pulling them out.
Zorn read the look on his face. “A deal’s still a deal. You pull out now, you say goodbye to transport, and you say goodbye to me helping you.”
Handon stepped up and got in his face. “Lie to me again and I’ll kill you.” He turned to Noise. “Do not take your eye off this man.”
“Wilco,” Noise said, looking sobered.
Not looking at Zorn again, Handon turned and headed out, Henno following him down.
* * *
By the time they got back to the front, which had continued pushing out in their absence, the second of the three fenced-off sections had been cleared, and it was time to push out into the third. All five two-man teams spontaneously met up at the chain-link gate that led to the last area.
Handon touched his radio. “Noise, Handon.”
“Go ahead.”
“Have Zorn open the barrier to the last section.”
“Wilco.”
With only a second’s delay, the little motor near the ground spun to life, and wound up the chain that pulled the section of fence back. All ten operators moved through the gap. Handon didn’t bother telling Noise to close it. He knew they were visible from the tower, he’d see them move inside, and he’d take care of it. The teams automatically fanned out to their five sectors.
And the last section of camp to clear.
* * *
Homer
had received Ali’s message with zero distortion.
So as soon as they were out of sight of the others, he peeled off to go entertain himself. He figured he could do worse than push out to the outer wire. He could be a long-range recon element for the ground the others had to cover – and he’d get an advance look at what was waiting for them outside.
And, as usual, he didn’t mind being alone.
He paused at the corner of a building to tune into the environment – and also to get into the shade and wipe the sweat from his brow. They day was already getting seriously warm, but that was equatorial Africa for you. Even with a few weeks to go until the start of summer in the southern hemisphere, the temperature might hit 90. And with all of the team’s gear and combat load – and depending on how much humping, patrolling, and fighting they had to do – that could mean heat casualties.
This was one reason no one went into combat without checking the forecast.
For his part, Homer liked the heat. It took him back to Coronado, near San Diego, with its brilliant sunshine baking him into a leathery but surprisingly comfortable lizard basking on the rocks.
But he worried about the others, including their fitness levels. Being able to run on the flight deck on the carrier helped – though, generally, on a carrier with an active air wing, running on the flight deck was a no-go most of the time. Then again, they’d had their own causes to be kept off it: mutiny, outbreak, running aground, exploding Russian anti-ship missiles…
Even before the period on the Kennedy, the operators hadn’t gotten as much gym time or road work as they would have liked. Once again, with the world dying around them, it was rational to discount the future. They had to perform now – not three months from now, when it all might be over.
But there was no point in lamenting that now.
Homer reminded himself: Three-foot world. It was a notion he’d picked up very early in his SEAL career – just out of BUDS, still in SQT (SEAL Qualification Training), and still very much an FNG. He’d been lead-climbing on a mountain-warfare training exercise, gotten in trouble, and started freaking out. The instructor, seeing perfectly well that Homer’s mind was in all the wrong places, free-climbed up to him like Spider-Man without the suit, and told him to get the hell back in his three-foot world. Only by engaging with the rock in front of his face was he going to get out of the jam he’d gotten into.
Arisen, Book Nine - Cataclysm Page 19
