Zombie War: An account of the zombie apocalypse that swept across America

by Nicholas Ryan

  It was the kind of comment that deserved a significant moment of silence, so I kept my mouth shut and made notes. I flipped over to a new page.

  “You were SAFCUR I,” I began, suddenly finding myself looking for a delicate way to pose the question I wanted to ask. “And yet, despite the success of ‘Operation Containment’ under your leadership, later in the war, another General was appointed to lead ‘Operation Conquest’, the second phase. Can you tell me why? Did you fall out of favor with Washington?”

  General Horsham cut across the question brusquely, waving his big hand in the air like he was swatting away my words.

  “Horseshit,” he said, his voice like gravel. I sensed it was a question he had been asked privately more than once, and that it was an issue that irritated him.

  “Son, the military isn’t full of the same ego-driven characters that populate Capital Hill,” he said. His voice leveled out, losing some of its sting. He glanced around him and his eyes fastened on the 49ers helmet. I saw a glint come back into the big man’s eyes. The General smiled thinly.

  “I was picked to run ‘Operation Containment’ because I have a reputation for playing good defense,” he said, slipping into a football analogy. “My job was to hold the line, and I did that. “But a good team is also made up of a strong offense, and special teams. When we transitioned into ‘Operation Conquest’ and ‘Operation Compress’, the President called on men who had reputations for their offense. Make sense?”

  It did. I nodded.

  “And when we finally discovered the whole zombie war was initiated by an Iranian terrorist plot, well… the President decided it was time for the special teams to take the field. One man can’t run every play – each task required the leadership of the best man for each individual job.”

  “Have you ever actually met ‘the architect’, Richard Danvers?”

  “No,” the man’s voice snapped like a whip.

  I changed tack again. Interviewing the man was like walking through a thorn bush.

  “Was there ever a time during those first few weeks when you were pulling together America’s military resources behind the Danvers Defense Line that you were worried?”

  General Raymond Horsham stared at me, and for long seconds he said nothing. The room was deathly silent, and I began to wonder if it was a question he was simply unwilling to answer. Then, slowly, the set features of his face seemed to crumble just a little and I got a brief, haunting glimpse of the man behind the soldier.

  “Every night,” he said, his voice lowered to little more than a whisper, but somehow was made more powerful. “Every single night I worried that the infected would spread north and press against the line before we were prepared.”

  “Because…?”

  “Because we weren’t ready,” he confessed. “We would have been overrun. The scenario haunted me right up until the first major conflict when the undead horde crashed against the line south of Asheville, North Carolina. It was the first time the defense had been tested.”

  “The Battle of Four Seasons, right?”

  Horsham smiled, a drawing back of the lips that was without warmth or humor. “Hendersonville,” he said. “They called it the city of four seasons. That’s where the name came from,” he shrugged.

  “That engagement was the first organized conflict of the zombie war. It must have given you some confidence.”

  The General shook his head. “I always had confidence in the men under my command,” he said. “American soldiers are the best trained in the world, and remember, we were fighting on home soil. They were committed and dedicated… and brave. What troubled me was that I was leading them into war when we were under prepared. I didn’t know how broad the front would be. I didn’t know whether we could hurl the undead back. I didn’t know if the tactics would work because we’d never fought such a primitive and unique enemy before.”

  I seized on the General’s last comment because it was one aspect that had troubled the military in the frantic weeks leading up to those opening battles. I cocked my head to the side and looked quizzically at Horsham.

  “You know, that confuses a lot of people,” I said.

  “What?”

  “That comment you just made about the enemy being so primitive,” I went on. “General Horsham, the common misconception from commentators when the war first began was that the American Army had an enormous technological advantage.”

  Horsham shook his head emphatically. “We did have a huge technological advantage,” he said. “But it was fundamentally useless.” He leaned way back in his chair and then reached into a drawer or a shelf beneath his desk. He tossed a stack of folders onto the polished timber tabletop. They skidded across the surface.

  “We have the most advanced weaponry in the world,” the General grumbled. “We have the kind of technology that out thinks, and can out smart every other major military force on the planet. But it’s useless when your enemy has no technology at all. You’re not countering their capabilities.”

  I shook my head. I didn’t understand. I went to flip open the cover of the top folder, but the General slapped it closed with a thump of his fist like it was full of state secrets. The sound of his hand was like a hammer. I flinched.

  “Those reports are not for you to read,” he barked. “They were merely to indicate the huge amounts of intelligence we were able to generate in the first weeks of the conflict – satellite images and the like. All of it useless.”

  I was still shaking my head. “I don’t follow.”

  The General sighed. “Smart bombs, missiles… even artillery was no direct match for the undead, because the only way to kill them was to destroy the brain,” he grunted. “Sure, you might get a few kills from missiles or shrapnel, but you’re laying the entire southern part of America to ruin for no real advantage – turning it into the kind of wastelands we saw in World War I between the trenches.” General Horsham made a tight fist with his hand and his words suddenly shook with passion. “This was a dirty war – a close range conflict that we hadn’t fought for a hundred years. There was no remote control killing, no combat fought beyond the horizons… it all came down to our men on the ground with rifles and automatic weapons face-to-face with a relentless, mindless enemy.”

  I had filled the rest of my notebook, but I sensed there was more here to be discovered if I could only ask the right questions.

  “You mentioned tactics just a few minutes ago,” I said thoughtfully. “Do you mean the tactics you employed leading up to the Battle of Four Seasons?”

  The General nodded. “Hendersonville was the location of one of our forts, straddling the I26 south,” he explained. “But further south of that fortification, I also had armored convoys – light mobile units of Humvee’s that were scouting the terrain, and Black Hawks flying constant reconnaissance patrols. They were our whiskers.”

  “Whispers?”

  “No,” he shook his head. “Whiskers – like a cat. We used them to ‘feel’ for the enemy. At the time we were frantically pulling troops into the defensive line, but I wanted eyes in the dead ground, sensitive to the spread of the infected, and also capable of rescuing any refugees that were fleeing the carnage. The Humvee patrols had strict orders not to engage – they were merely scouts, tasked with rescue. When the zombies began coming into contact with these units, we knew we had run out of time.”

  I was puzzled. “Couldn’t you get that intelligence information from satellites?”

  The general tried to smile, and then decided it just wasn’t worth the effort. “Sure,” he conceded, “but apart from the real-time delays between when the information is gathered, and when it was passed through to SAFCUR Command, have you ever seen a satellite rescue a refugee?”

  I got the point.

  The general shook his head. “Satellite imagery was helpful, but not telling,” he said. “Sure, we’ve got a sky full of birds and I could have tasked every one of their cameras to scour Alabama and Georgia as the plague sw
ept north. But satellites are just photos. They can tell you the ‘what’ but they can’t tell you the ‘why’. They can’t tell you about the on-ground factors. Even the live-feed drones that relayed images back were barely useful because there was nothing vital they could tell us. HUMINT was more precious to me.”

  “HUMINT?” The military has a profound fascination for acronyms.

  “Human intelligence,” the General explained. He looked at me as if it was a term I should have known. “Eyes, ears… men on the ground. It was risky work for those men in the Humvees, but it was essential. And the Black Hawks crews took great risks too, probing deep towards Columbia, Atlanta and Birmingham in the search for survivors.”

  General Horsham looked pointedly down at his wristwatch and then at the closed door of his office, as though he was expecting to be interrupted at any moment. I sensed my time with the man was running short. I started to close my notebook, and then tossed out my last question like it was a hail Mary pass that I hoped he would catch and run with.”

  “Why didn’t we base our response to the zombie outbreak on CONOP 8888?” I asked.

  Silence.

  Not the amiable silence you experience when two old friends have run out of things to talk about and are happy just to sit and reminisce – this was one of those ominous silences that precedes a thunder storm. The atmosphere in the office suddenly became charged.

  “That plan was a load of shit,” Horsham exploded. “A useless piece of marketing trash that made no strategic or tactical sense. Christ, it was supposed to have been a Pentagon document, but I tell you, no one I came across even knew it existed until the media got hold of it.”

  On April 30th 2011, the US Strategic Command drew up a document that outlined the way the American military should deal with an undead apocalypse, entitled CONOP 8888. The plan was also known as ‘Counter-Zombie Dominance’. The document came to light in 2014 and was featured on hundreds of online blogs, with commentators going to great lengths to point out the glaring inadequacies of the policies outlined.

  “It was a joke,” Horsham's tone was almost offended. “Some hair-brained idiot’s idea of a way to fictionalize preparedness for a raft of real world threats. We looked at that plan for five seconds and threw it in the trash.”

  “Like that promotion the CDC came out with at the same time?” I asked. “That Preparedness 101 for Zombies?”

  “No,” Horsham shook his head. “Not like that at all.” The big man was bristling with frustration and temper. He got up from his chair and leaned across his desk, planting his big hands on the tabletop and thrusting out his jaw. “The CDC plan was actually useful. It alerted people to natural disaster preparedness by using a fictional zombie apocalypse as a way to attract interest from the public. It served a very valuable purpose. CONOP 8888 was the opposite. It was a destructive divisive load of rubbish that should never have been written, and never seen the light of day.”

  BARKSDALE AIR FORCE BASE, LOUISIANA:

  608th AIR OPERATIONS CENTER

  Lieutenant Colonel Greg Pike wanted to make one thing clear.

  “The Air Force didn’t bomb every bridge along the Mississippi River,” he explained to me patiently as we stood outside the Air Operations Center at Barksdale. “The Air Tasking Order we worked off specified seventy-two bridge structures. They’re the ones we bombed.”

  “How many B-52 aircraft were involved in the mission?” I asked. I had my notebook ready, pen poised.

  “Nine,” Pike said easily. “The 8th Air Force was tasked with the mission and the job fell to the 2nd Bomber Wing here at Barksdale, and elements of the 5th Bomber Wing, stationed at Minot Air Force Base, North Dakota. They were responsible for the most northern bridges across the river.”

  “Only nine B-52’s? That doesn’t seem like a lot of aircraft for such an extensive operation?”

  Pike gave me the kind of special look I imagined he reserved for journalists and politicians. “The ordnance we dropped were JDAM Mk 84 bombs,” he explained brusquely. “They’re two-thousand pound bombs. We allocated two weapons for each bridge and each of the aircraft carried sixteen bombs. Do the math.”

  I did, and then asked another question quickly.

  “Can you tell me how long the actual procedure took, from start to finish?”

  The Lieutenant Colonel smiled amiably enough. He grabbed at his nose and tugged at it, then stared up into the sky for a moment as if he could hear an aircraft overhead. “We flew the missions over two consecutive days, right at the very outset of the infection,” the man said. “This would have been around the same time the President approved the plan for the Danvers line. We had the job of securing the west flank of the perimeter. Most of the work was done on the first day of the operation. On the following day a three-ship cell went back over the targets to re-strike any bridge still standing.”

  There were over two hundred and twenty bridges along the Mississippi River. Seventy-two accounted for roughly a third of those. I stared at the Air Force Lieutenant Colonel and made a face to express my confusion.

  “What happened to the rest of the bridges?” I asked.

  Pike was a tall man, and when he smiled, it reached all the way to his eyes and left little dimples in his cheeks. He was immaculately dressed in uniform, his regulation-length hair neatly parted on the side and just beginning to turn from black to grey. His eyes were bright, and he had that peculiar far-away gaze I had seen in other pilots – the look of a man who was accustomed to staring at far away distances. He had a high forehead and perfect white teeth.

  He smiled again, as if to show them off to me.

  “The smaller bridges were left in the hands of the Army Corps of Engineers,” Pike explained. “They were demolished at the same time, and the ferries that operate on the Mississippi as far north as Memphis were all moved to the west bank and placed under the control of elements of the Arkansas and Louisiana National Guard.”

  “Do you know why?” I asked.

  “Why do you think?” The Lieutenant Colonel fixed me with a stare. He folded his arms across his chest.

  “To prevent opportunists from operating the ferries during the outbreak?”

  Pike smiled, and nodded his head. “Exactly,” he said. He glanced pointedly at his wristwatch. “Are we done here?”

  “Not quite,” I said quickly. Pike sighed and shuffled his feet. “Look, I was told this would be quick,” he said, and there was a grumble of aggravation in his voice. He didn’t want to do this interview.

  “Can you tell me what it was like to fly those missions?” I asked. I wanted to know how they were different from other similar tasks the B-52’s might have been called upon to perform in overseas theaters of war.

  The Lieutenant Colonel suddenly became more serious, as though this question was at least deserving of his attention.

  “It was surreal,” he said, like he was confiding something personal. “It was the most poignant mission I have ever been a part of.”

  “Poignant?” I frowned. It was such a powerful word, and so unexpected. “In what way?”

  Pike unfolded his arms and wrung his hands. “It was on home soil,” he said. “That was the first thing. In my life I never thought I would see the day when war came to America… when we were fighting to defend our own nation, rather than protect another.” He shook his head. “It really hit home – flying over those bridges and knowing we were destroying history and infrastructure because war had come to the USA. It still gets me…” his voice trailed away and for a moment he was silent and lost in a rising tide of his own emotions.

  “And in other ways also?” I prodded gently.

  He nodded. “The B-52 is the mother of all killing machines,” he said with a pilot’s passion. “For over fifty years those BUFF’s have been the backbone of America’s strategic bombing capabilities. Hell, during Desert Storm a flight of B-52’s flew from here to Iraq, bombed targets, and then flew home again,” Pike said proudly. “We were in the air for
thirty-five hours and flew fourteen thousand miles non-stop. Now, suddenly, we were flying short hop operations and hitting targets just over the horizon.”

  I began to understand the impact the bridge-bombing missions along the Mississippi had had on this man. For the first time, perhaps, warfare was incredibly personal.

  “You called the planes BUFF’s a moment ago. What does that mean?”

  “Big Ugly Fat Fucker,” Pike seemed to take some delight in sharing the term of affection. “Or if you prefer the sanitized version, Big Ugly Fat Fellow.” He smiled then, but I wasn’t sure if it was because he was pleased, or because the joke was on me.

  “Did it feel like other bombing missions at all?”

  “No,” Pike admitted. “Not to me, anyhow. It was devoid of every stimuli.”

  What the?

  I looked at the pilot, puzzled. “Um… what?” I tried to be delicate.

  “Flying those missions was almost like operating a simulator,” he explained. “There were no nerves, and there was no sense of flying into danger like every other combat mission. No one was firing at us. No one was trying to defend the bridge. No enemy fighters were hunting us. There was nothing. It was so antiseptic, and yet at the same time incredibly harrowing, because of the significance of what we were doing.”

  I had imagined high altitude bombing would create a sense of distance and remoteness for these pilots – something I thought I would be less likely to find in the soldiers who fought so close to the enemy. I was wrong. Distance did not diminish the wrench of a man’s patriotism, nor the anguish of the duty they were called on to perform.

  It was a somber, sobering moment for me.

  “Dropping bombs on a target from high altitude must be fraught with its own perils,” I said slowly. “Things like accuracy, for instance…”

  The Lieutenant Colonel shook his head. “It’s not like what you imagine,” he said. A little bit of color came back into his face, as though he had brought his emotions back under control. “In World War II, high altitude bombers were happy if they landed ordnance within three thousand feet of their target. Today, we’re accurate to forty feet because of the GPS power of the JDAM attachments.”