But looking down, he found he actually could make out a lot beneath him.
And he didn’t like the look of it.
The flat-top was now floating in a sea of dead. They surged up around the prow, a giant, squirming hill of formerly human bodies. Many more surrounded the boat at the water line – but only in front did they pile up to the level of the flight deck. Fick didn’t like to think of how many crushed dead fuckers it took to make a pile from the seabed, 130-some feet up to the edge of the deck.
But it was a lot of dead fuckers.
He could also make out the beleaguered defenders fighting out on the edge of it. They seemed to be firing full out, their muzzle flashes shining brightly in the near darkness of the storm, albeit almost silent from this distance. The grenade blasts were another matter – bigger flashes, and bangs that were audible, even at this range, and even through the sound of the wind and thunder.
And wait – was that a drone buzzing around over the battle? Well, that made sense. Fick didn’t know for sure that they’d ceased manned flight ops. But he could take a guess. The flight deck was just too damned precarious a place right now to try something crazy like launching full-size aircraft, ones with people in them.
Twisting his neck in the other direction, he found he could also make out the destroyer from where he floated – it was a good chunk of water to the aft of the carrier, and a bit off its starboard side – and as hoped and planned for, Fick was closer to it than to the flat-top. He should have no problem splashing down nearby to it, then signaling for recovery. Hell, they’d have to be pretty damned distracted not to see his canopy float by right from the goddamned bridge. And presumably they were forewarned and looking out for him.
He then did a double-take as he realized the two boats were connected by what looked like a huge span of anchor chain. Were they trying to tow the carrier off the sandbar? He didn’t know. But that would make sense, too. While he’d been off fighting his own desperate battles, God knows what the people here had been doing to try and salvage their situation.
But what Fick did know was that the two boats were now battling for their lives. He could visually make out the destroyer’s fire lanes – they were actually hard to miss, not least because they made a huge, brilliant wall of death between Fick and the carrier. He thought: Well, one good thing – at least we’re on the right side of all THAT.
The Murph’s 5-inch deck gun continuously pummeled the shore – or rather, the great sprawling mass of dead that were in the shallows leading up to the carrier. Fick didn’t know for sure how deep the water was in front of the flat-top. But he knew he couldn’t stand in it. He’d tried, when he led the security team for the damage party after the beaching.
But the undead were piled up well above the surface. They had at this point filled the shallows. They were filling the whole goddamned ocean. And leading up to the prow of the ship, their shape described a slope – a positive slope of the dead, arcing up to the edge of the deck. They surged up around the prow, and around both sides of the flight deck out to about 15 meters, lapping at it and then receding. Thousands of them scampered up over the backs of others, and tried to tumble over the gunwale – or rather what looked like some kind of improvised rampart wall – but were shot, blown up, shoved, hacked, or otherwise thrown back into the sea.
Fick actually wasn’t a hundred percent sure why, with that many dead piled up to the deck, they weren’t overflowing it, rampart or no, and washing its defenders away like the Biblical flood. But then he followed the destroyer’s fire lanes to their terminus – and realized why. The 5-inch gun was firing into the base of the pile, knocking it down at intervals. And their heavy machine guns were sweeping and pummeling the ranks of boarders as they tried to scramble up and over the top. These close-in weapons systems weren’t at an ideal angle or firing solution, but it hardly mattered with guns like that. And they were targeted in tighter than the 5-inch could safely shoot.
Fick could now see the Phalanx CIWS Gatling gun that perched over the Murph’s stern, and one of its Bushmaster autocannons, on the starboard side, hammering away. They fired into the top of the half-pyramidal horde non-stop. And Fick could see the mountain of dead erode under this crushing, withering, sandblasting fire. The defenders on the flight deck mainly had to deal with the relatively few survivors of this onslaught – those particularly badass or just lucky ones who came out the other end of the meat grinder.
But, nonetheless, the ranks of attackers were being replenished as quickly as they got sluiced away. Like the endless stinging drops of rain that the howling winds lashed across Fick’s long-suffering face.
Fick couldn’t see the carrier’s CIWS on the port side, but got the impression it wasn’t firing – either because it couldn’t engage at its oblique angle, or maybe because it was out of ammo at this point. He didn’t know.
Without warning, the destroyer now launched a salvo of missiles from its rear cells, which covered the back part of the deck in a big grid like a chessboard. They burst from their individual cells into the sky just like Roman Candles, creating an amazing light show, and trailing worms of thick gray smoke. The flames from their rocket engines cast glare and deep shadows all over the destroyer, and the ocean around it, for hundreds of yards.
Fick couldn’t identify the missile types; but they accelerated straight up into the sky, fell over on their sides, and screamed down into the herd racing through the shallows up to the carrier. The half dozen explosions turned tens of thousands of dead bodies into millions of pounds of ground beef. It looked maybe like the strike was aimed to be just far enough out to avoid any risk of splash damage to the flat-top – not to mention to its defenders on deck.
Fick hauled on his steering lines, turning himself away from the Kennedy – and focused on getting closer in to that destroyer.
* * *
Handon too found himself alone in a storm-tossed sky. There was no one to be seen anywhere in the nearly black cloud landscape that spread out around and above him. But that didn’t mean the sky was empty. Lightning flashed, and rain actually blew up at him… a second after which he realized that he was caught in a powerful updraft, and no longer descending but rising through the lashing rain and wind.
A second later, an even more powerful downdraft came out of nowhere and launched him down toward the ocean surface. Holy shit, he thought, as his stomach tried to crawl out of his eye sockets. With meteorological chaos like this, Handon knew they must be right at the seam between a high-pressure system and a low-pressure one. But knowing this gave him no satisfaction. Because he knew the wild winds, on top of that tumbling exit from the dying bomber, on what was only an estimated heading… all of this meant his team’s drop was almost certainly scattered to the four winds.
And looking below him now, he could only hope the others had ended up far from where he had. Because not only was he a hell of a lot closer to the carrier than the destroyer, but somehow he’d ended up on the wrong side of the destroyer’s fire lanes. And now a wall of death blazed between Handon and the ship he needed to reach.
He tried to mentally work out the geometry of how it had happened. The plane had been moving on a rough east-to-west heading. But it hadn’t been exact, and the bomber had been in distress – and must have crossed through that lane a second time before Handon was able to get out. He thought: I guess with only two working engines, both on one side, and the pilot trying to keep us at jump altitude, maintaining heading was the least of his problems…
Also, Handon remembered, the man had given his life so that others would have a chance to get out. There was almost no possibility he had punched out of that roll.
However the hell it had happened, now a withering wall of tracer rounds (not to mention all the invisible regular rounds in between the tracers) poured from the rear and side of the destroyer into the teeth of the herd rolling up on the flat-top. This wall of death separated Handon from the destroyer itself, or certainly would once he descended a little
further. “Big sky, little bullet” as they said, sure – but they weren’t so little that one of them hadn’t taken out the bomber. And the last thing he wanted to do was to parachute through that.
Uh oh – now there were also missile launches, from the rear cells, and those lofted up a hell of a lot higher than the auto-cannons – higher in fact than Handon’s current altitude.
He, and every member of both teams, needed to get clear of the carrier and get to safety on the destroyer. But, then again, they weren’t going to be any good for an Africa mission, or for anything, if they got the shit murdered out of them by 30mm Gatling guns, 25mm Bushmasters, and surface-to-surface missiles.
Handon looked down again. He couldn’t make out much on the surface of the ocean behind and beside the Kennedy. But with hundreds of thousands of dead piled up in front of it, he didn’t imagine the sea anywhere in the vicinity would be a very healthy environment. He imagined himself floating around in that, waiting and hoping to be scooped out of the water by living people – before he was pulled under by dead ones.
Fuck. He twisted his head once in frustration. There was only one place to go where he had a fighting chance.
He keyed his mic and hailed his team through the noise of the wind and rain. Unsurprisingly, with the storm, and with everyone God knew where, he got no response. But he transmitted anyway. Maybe they would receive it. “Handon to Alpha. My drop is busted, and I cannot make the Lima Zulu. Repeat, busted drop. I’m going to try and set down on the Kennedy flight deck. Repeat, dropping onto the carrier. You are ordered to make for the destroyer if at all possible. Repeat, proceed to the destroyer. Out.”
He hauled on his risers to line up his approach. From this position, he could probably take his pick of landing points on the rain-lashed five-acre flight deck. But, given the way things were looking up front, a little further back seemed a lot more appealing. Then again, if he was going into the fight, he may as well get ready to make himself useful. So he steered a course a little ahead of the boat’s waist. That would give him a chance to get settled, work out what was going on, and then link in with the defenders.
Handon took a deep breath. He also stole a glance down at his HK416 assault rifle, strapped across his body. And he said a silent prayer of gratitude that he’d hung on to it.
He only wished he’d managed to keep more than a single magazine of ammo.
The battle on the flight deck raced toward his boot soles.
* * *
As Fick descended on the buffeting and bucking winds and gusts of rain, even after turning toward the destroyer, he still had a view of the carrier flight deck – and at his lower altitude could also now make out just what he had expected to see: his Marines out front, leading the defense.
And he hesitated.
He remembered very clearly what he and Handon had agreed, about the necessity of jumping to the destroyer. But hauling his steering lines away from that fight on the carrier was one of the toughest things he’d ever done. Luckily, if that was luck, the fire lanes of the destroyer were between him and the flat-top. Trying to steer that way would probably only get him sliced into jarhead cheese.
He tried hailing his guys on his team radio, for a sitrep. They should be close enough – and they were. Their responses came straight back.
“Fick, Brady. I’m stylin’ – no problem reaching the destroyer.”
Reyes and Graybeard echoed that.
Fick looked all around him – he should be visual with them by now. But some of the storm clouds were low, though broken up, and visibility was weird.
But suddenly he realized he could no longer see or hear the firing on the flat-top – because it had mostly stopped. Looking down, he saw what he didn’t want to see: the surging horde at the prow had piled up too high. It was like a wave of squirming limbs and teeth, like the Blob from the 50s, like some million-man monster in a shock horror film – and it was now crashing onto the deck. The defenders had started falling back, running for it, while only a few put down covering fire. Fick saw one at the very front, one of his Marines, firing full out. He then looked over his shoulder and shouted an order.
And then the wave took him.
It wasn’t even that he went down under it – he was pulled into it.
Fick twisted up his face. “Oh, fuck this all to hell.” He simply couldn’t do it – he couldn’t run away from the fight, not with his Marines in trouble. He hauled on his left steering line and yanked for all he was worth. The prevailing winds were onshore, for the moment, and he might just be able to make it to the carrier before he splashed down.
That was if he wasn’t fragged into meat by the destroyer’s guns.
He pressed his radio transmit bar. “Fick to Fire Team One. Carry on to your drop zone. Get to the destroyer. How copy?”
The team copied. And as Fick looked behind him, he thought he could make out one or two of their canopies. They were within sight now. Pretty quickly the tracer fire from the destroyer was so thick and close below him he felt like he could walk across it, and get to the carrier that way. But so far he – and, just as importantly, his chute – remained unperforated.
Long may that last, he thought, gritting his teeth. Just another few seconds…
Ahead of him, as well as below and to the left, the carrier, half-covered with the dead, softened by the haze of falling rain, loomed up at him. The flight deck was coming up fast, really fast – but so was the entire huge stern of the ship, its big flat steel ass.
And he was going to hit one or the other in the next few seconds.
The General Militia of CVN-79
200 Feet Above the JFK Flight Deck
Once again, Command Sergeant Major Handon marvelled at how quickly and completely things could go to utter shit in combat. Start with the usual profusion of mistakes, miscommunication, and simple bad rolls of the dice that are common to all human enterprise… then add in the Murphy-esque tendency of these things to pile up at one place and time, and cascade into bigger and worse crises… and finally make it all played for life-or-death stakes, with both panic and heroism epidemic across the battlespace.
That was combat.
There was a reason special operators were selected for resilience, adaptability, and resolve. If they waited for shit to go right to get the job done, they’d all be dead and the rest of us would be living under some foreign power or theocracy. Plus dead.
Handon hauled on his steering lines for everything he was worth, frantically trying to flare. The deck raced at him at train-wreck speed – and so did a rampaging shit-ton of riled-up Zulus racing around upon that deck.
Thirty seconds earlier, everything had looked like Christmas morning, albeit Christmas in atrocious weather. Once he’d committed to giving up on the destroyer and going for the carrier, he’d been able to get a clear reading on the shape of the battle below, pick out a nice spot amidships and behind the lines, and then begin leisurely floating back to earth.
And then two things, or rather everything, had changed, all in a heartbeat.
First the front line of the defenders on the carrier had buckled, then broken. Handon could tell from a quarter-mile up that most of the people fighting were not real infantry – and that they were being held together by the Marines leading them. But panic races through a fighting force like a virus; it’s actually one of the main things soldiers are trained against – to resist panicking, breaking ranks, and running for it. But these people hadn’t been trained, or not been trained enough.
And something bad had happened on the front line, though Handon couldn’t see what, and the defense started to collapse, in seconds. Some tried to hold, but others were running, and soon all were retreating, splashing through the nightmare rout at varying rates of speed.
As the ranks broke and holes appeared in the line, shrieking and grasping dead swarmed in their rear within seconds – meaning the front lines were suddenly everywhere and nowhere. Handon could see the Marines shouting and trying to re-form
the ranks. But for the moment the entire front of the flight deck was nearly complete chaos.
But it was also in that exact moment – just when Handon faced a serious tactical requirement to change his LZ and touch down somewhere safer, further to the rear – that the storm decided to hit him with a homicidal downdraft, which seized him and his parachute and rocketed him down toward the deck. After a couple of seconds of acceleration, it was almost like he was burning in – as if he didn’t have an open parachute at all.
And so now Handon had somehow to slow his rate of descent – while also preparing to defend himself instantly upon touching down, in the desperate and confusing and extremely deadly melee below.
The more appealing option of steering himself out of trouble was off the menu – not enough control, not enough sky, and definitely not enough time.
* * *
With one second to impact, and still falling way too fast, Handon looked down and realized he had a whole new problem. He was on course to come down directly on top of a group of five or six Zulus, who had knocked down a sailor and were now elbowing one another in the face for the privilege of scooping out handfuls of his guts. It was a perfect little circle of maximal horror, and Handon was hurtling toward the exact center of it, with not enough positive control to divert.
Jesus Christ, he thought, in the last instant he had to think, still flaring, or trying to. Which was worse? If he hit the non-skid surface of the steel deck at this speed, he’d almost certainly break his legs – and then would be killed or turned shortly after. If he landed on the group of Zulus instead, it would be a much softer landing, on rotted and tenderized flesh – but of course he would almost certainly be killed or turned shortly after.
Fuck it, he was out of time, out of room to maneuver, out of options…
Arisen, Book Five - EXODUS Page 19
