by Holroyd, Tom
Did they say why?
Nope. That’s the great thing about the military they don’t have to explain themselves. I did find out though, by talking to some people who worked in the HQ, that there weren’t enough resources available to re-supply these settlements and the plan was to record their locations as we discovered them and then move on. Apparently, the RAF were already using their UAVs to scan the country trying to track the swarms and had stumbled across a number of settlements. They started to use the swarms to find the settlements; the theory was that you looked for the big swarms and it would be a fair bet that there would be people alive right in the centre of it.
We went on like this for about six months and it was fucking awful. Every time we flew a re-supply run, we would fly over or near a settlement that was under siege and see these people looking up at us or standing with arms raised like they were begging me for help.
Did you ever try to help?
No, no I didn’t, I was never that brave. I heard a story though about this one Chinook pilot who rescued a load of people from a block of flats that was in the process of being overrun. The story goes that he was flying past and saw people crammed onto the roof, trying to keep the access door closed. Apparently, he asked for permission to rescue them, was denied by Command but just said fuck it and went in anyway. He dropped the rear ramp and backed that massive helicopter onto the roof just as the access door was broken open. He saved sixty people that day, he was a hero but when he got back to base he was arrested and put in the stocks in the centre of Exeter. Now normally people in the stocks got pelted but word had got around about what he had done and he wasn’t touched. People would feed him, bring him water and sit with him to pass the time. Pretty soon Command realised that they had made him a hero and let him out. I heard the BBC did a program on him, he was a brave guy and he changed everything.
How?
Well Command very rapidly realised that unless they changed their policy the settlements would fall and the Safe Zones would be inundated with infected from the Grey who would have been kept busy elsewhere. That was when we began to fly re-supply missions to the settlements. At first it wasn’t very much; some bread, salt, seeds anything that we could spare. But as the Safe Zones got back on their feet and the Ministry of Resources got its act together we began to fly out more and more supplies as well as advisory teams.
That was a tough job. Sometimes it was easy, fly in do the inspection and then fly out but sometimes the teams went in for the long haul. Some of the settlements were impossible to land in so supplies were dropped in off the back of the Heli. There were a couple of times when the advisory teams had to fast rope in knowing that they would be there until they were liberated. Balls of steel some of them!
So it was essentially self-preservation that motivated the supply drops?
Well yes and no. I can’t talk for the higher ups but you can see their reasoning. Every infected out there was better than one knocking on the door of the Safe Zones. It may be cold but it bought the rest of us time to get prepared and to go back on the offensive. At least we knew where most of them were and that every winter the people in the settlements would be killing off more and more of them just like we did on the Safe Zone walls.
Look, we’re here.
Josh nudges me as we begin our flight up the Solent and into the mouth of the Estuary. Even though ten years have passed since the end of the war the city is still a remnant of its former self. The massive war time fortifications centre on the dock yards with the outer wall encircling the area within the A35. It is an impressive sight, made even more so by the fact that most of this work was undertaken at a time when Britain was on its knees.
Can you tell me about the operation to re-capture this place?
Sure. As I understand it the big idea was to create a defended supply depot that would act as a re-supply point once we began to take back the country. The whole fortified motorway thing came a bit later when command realised the value of reconnecting the Burghs. The plan was to amass a fleet of container ships off the coast of the Isle of Wight with all the supplies that we would need for the op. From what I heard from the Navy boys that took quite some doing as a lot of those ships were either floating refugee camps or infested with Gs. I can’t imagine what it must have been like for the Royal Marines having to clear those hulks.
Anyway, they eventually got enough of a Merchant Navy back together to ferry all the supplies from Plymouth to the holding point and then they waited for a week while a destroyer sat in the mouth of the Estuary and banged away with its active sonar. It was a bit of an experiment, but the scientists who had been studying the infected, guessed that the sound of the ping would attract a lot of the ones that were wandering around the sea floor or under the docks and draw them away from the landing site. Apparently, it worked really well, as within a few days there was a hell of a crowd under the ship, of course that still left the problem of what to do with all those bastards. Then someone came up with the idea of dropping a depth charge on top of them. I hear they rigged one up with a noise maker and dropped it right in the middle of the crowd before steaming off at full pelt. A mate of mine was flying overhead at the time and he says that he could see this shock wave ripple through the water and then this massive plume erupted into the air. It must have worked like a dream as they are still using the technique today, “Ping and drop” it’s called.
At the same time as all that was going on the pilots were getting our orders and briefings. The plan was that we would fly to Cowes on the Isle of Wight, collect our chalk of soldiers and then “Air Assault” them onto the Eastern Docks at the same time as the first cargo ships docked.
It was so exciting, the first proper military thing we had really gotten to do as none of us in Southern Command were involved in the Clearance of Ireland or Op Euston. More importantly for everyone was that it finally felt like we were starting to take back our land, it was a hell of a rush and more than one person over reacted, me included. Op Euston was the operation to move the Northern Defensive Line to a new position along the A69. It was undertaken in the depth of winter to limit zombie attacks with the aim of reclaiming the cattle and sheep pasture lands of Northumberland which would be needed for the coming Restoration.
As we were lifting off from Cowes and getting into formation to fly down the Solent some funny bugger started to hum the Wagner song from Apocalypse Now on the net and pretty soon we were all humming along with big grins on our faces and all the soldiers in the back joining in. It got a bit silly after that as helicopters started to weave and dodge as if they were assaulting a defended beach head. Eventually someone got on the net and told us to stop “fucking around” and we did, right up till the last moment when we came into land and almost every pilot slammed their bird in like it was a proper combat drop and then pulled hard in the take-off, trying to evade all those zombie Anti-Aircraft guns. Still, it got the job done and we put over three hundred soldiers onto the docks in ten minutes just as the ships started to dock and the first tractors rolled off.
It was one hell of a sight. I was ordered to stay on station with a Quick Reaction Force of thirty soldiers so I had a bird’s eye view of the proceedings. The soldiers all spread out and began to sweep the dock of Gs before they formed a perimeter along the outside of the main car park, it took them a long time as the place was a fucking mess. I guess that during the Panic people must have just dumped their cars and run for whichever boat was available. There was scattered luggage, crashed cars and here and there rotting corpses but strangely very few infected. Part of this was probably due to it being late August and it was starting to get colder but I think that it was because they had already killed everything in the city and then buggered off to find something else to eat.
At the same time, the ships were unloading armoured tractors that set to work on the cars and I do mean set to work. They slammed them into piles with bulldozers, piled them onto of each other to form barricades or just pushed them into
the estuary when they ran out of space. Within an hour they had cleared a space for all the supplies to be unloaded, about an hour after that they began building the perimeter wall along the main road using pre-cast concrete wall sections. It was like looking down on an ant’s nest, there was just so much activity all going on at the same time. It should have been chaos but somehow everything seemed to work together.
By the time it got dark they had built the wall and sealed off the peninsular that the docks sit on and I was ordered to land and shut down for the night but to stay near my helicopter in case we were needed. It is embarrassing to say it now but I was having so much fun. I know that doesn’t seem right given how many people died in the Panic and then the Restoration, we are supposed to be all solemn and stoic about it, but I was having the time of my life. I had taken part in an air assault and my first major operation and I felt like a soldier, like I was doing something that mattered. I know that the supply runs were essential but it didn’t feel like I was taking the fight to the enemy. Before this Op we had just been surviving and now we were attacking. I think that helped to keep people going.
Anyway; it was a really quiet night with no attacks on the perimeter and it pretty much stayed that was for about a week, by then the wall was damn near impregnable and we were starting to push out to the airport. My flight had been ordered to stay on and provide a combination of heavy lift and scouting so were working flat out 24 hours a day. I tell you, I have seen some things in my time but one of the most impressive was how fast those docks came to life. Within a week the walls had been built and a fully working base set up, two weeks after that we had built a fortified route to the airport and secured it for the heavy lift aircraft to come in. After that, things just grew and grew, I got rotated out for a few weeks back to Exeter to refit and by the time I flew back the place was twice the size. They had cleared the West Quay and there was an almost constant stream of ships unloading stores, there was an entire section set up for the recycling of anything that could be scavenged from the thousands of containers on the dock and from the city. An entire warehouse district had been converted into a hydroponics farm and another area had been converted into a bio-fuel farm, it was staggering. What I found really reassuring was what one of my fight crew said that “If we can do all this for a supply depot then the Gs ‘ll be shitting themselves when get properly going”.
RESTORATION
Prepare to Move
Ministry of Defence, London
It has taken two days for General Palmerston and I to reach London following his inspection tour of Militia and Army units en route. With the old Ministry of Defence building destroyed in the Great Fire, it was decided that it would be more cost effective to repair, restore and modernise Horse Guards, the Old Admiralty building and Admiralty Arch, all of which had survived the fire reasonably well. Having finally completed the work we are now ensconced in the office of the Chief of the Defence Staff on the first floor of Horse Guards, the former office of the Duke of Wellington. The office itself is beautiful with wide open windows that overlook St James Park and a subtle green colour scheme that seems to draw the parkland into the office. General Palmerston is sitting behind the desk of the Duke of Wellington that miraculously survived the fire.
They call it the Restoration now, but at the time all I could call it was a bloody great mistake. It was in May, a few weeks after Op Euston, when Sir Richard told us the good news. He had just come back from a meeting with the Prince Regent and the Royal Council and he gathered all the senior staff together and told us that the decision had been made to go on the offensive and re-claim our country.
What was the reaction?
I was bloody stunned and so were a lot of the other officers in the room. There was a moment of silence before everyone started blurting out questions. It took Sir Richard three attempts to quiet the room before he had to resort to slamming his cane on the table and yelling for silence. “The order has been given and we will carry it out to the best of our ability” and that was that.
Why did the decision cause such distress?
I wouldn’t say that distress is the right word; surprise and concern but not distress.
Why the concern then?
Well the majority of the senior staff didn’t think the country was anywhere near ready to support such a massive operation. The orders called for a spring offensive which only gave us ten months to get everything in place and that was nowhere near enough time. We had soldiers to train, equipment to manufacture and God knows how many bullets we would need to produce. Most arm chair generals who think they know something about waging war believe that it is all about putting troops in the field to defeat the enemy. Anyone with half a brain will tell you tell it is all about logistics; the ability to keep your men feed, armed and warm. It is not cool and it is not sexy but it is absolutely vital. In World War Two it required the mass industrialisation of Great Britain and the US to defeat the Nazis but here we were with a country that was only just beginning to get back on its feet, a limited industrial capability and no prospect of support from our allies.
On top of all that, we were facing a deadly and determined enemy that would need to be cleared from every inch of land, had no concept of fear and could not be starved or beaten into submission. We had to be thorough in our work since it would only take one infected to start the whole cycle again.
Let me tell you a little secret about how you win a war. In every single conflict that man has ever fought in the objective has never been to totally destroy your enemy. The trick is to apply enough force to make the enemy roll over and surrender. It is a tried and tested formula that has work for every battle in history; Cannae, Hastings, Normandy.
But that approach doesn’t work against the infected; they have no fear, no moral component; there are no civilian infected to protest the war and make a government change their policy. They cannot be demoralised, bribed or reasoned with, every single one of them is a self-contained war machine whose sole purpose is to kill and devour us. All this meant that everything I had ever learnt about offensive military action was now obsolete. That was the situation facing us when the decision was made and that was what concerned me.
Did you raise your concerns?
Right after Sir Richard had made the announcement, I walked into his office and told him that I thought this was a mistake, that we were not ready, there was no plan, there were not enough bullets; anything I could think of to try and dissuade him from what I thought was a suicidal course of action.
Of course he was ready for me and very calmly asked if I thought that he had not raised every single one of those points with the Prince? He sat me down and very gently explained that whether we were ready or not the country needed to attack.
What did he mean by that?
You remember the situation back in the spring of the third year, how things were starting to look up? For the first time we had a surplice of food, our industrial base was just beginning to swing into full production, the operation in Ireland has been a success and we had just moved the Northern Defensive Line. To many people it looked like we were starting to take the first steps on the road to recovery and that was having a tangible effect on the population of the Safe Zones; suicide rates were down, as were the overall death rates. People seemed to be genuinely much happier.
Imagine what would have happened to that if we had decided to just sit behind our walls and wait for the infected to rot away, you could already see it happening to some of the very early ones. It would have had a devastating effect on morale not to mention the national psyche. Don’t forget that in the British mind we were still the country that had won an empire, defeated fascism and endured the Blitz. As a people we had survived all that and still been able to hold our heads up and say that we fought for every second of every day. “Blitz Mentality” it was known as, I called it British bloody mindedness.
Now imagine that we had just hunkered down and left all those people in the Grey to their f
ate; how would we be able to look at ourselves in the mirror, more importantly how would we be able to look our children in the eye ever again?
No the Prince was right. We needed to go on the offensive and we needed to win.
What was the military situation at that time?
Let me show you.
General Richard produces a worn map of the British Isles and spreads it on the desk.
The red areas represent territory under our control, so Ireland, everything north of Newcastle and Carlisle and everything west of Exeter. These little red dots scattered across the country are the Burghs and all the settlements that we have been able to locate and re-supply. Everything else is the Grey, infected territory and generally hostile to us.
From a military point of view, we were actually very secure. We were safe behind our high walls, our casualties had been surprisingly light in the past year and we were beginning the process of training the next generation of soldiers. We could have quite happily sat back and conducted our winter sweeps along the front of the walls and let the infected rot. It would not have been grand or courageous but it would have saved lives and cost us very little. However, that all changed when we went on a war footing. We had to ramp up the training and change it from defensive to offensive tactics, it also meant a huge amount of re-equipping needed to be done.
