by Holroyd, Tom
As I said before, we had made the decision to take it nice and slow and clear every single building no matter how long it took and it did take a long time. Despite having drawn in a lot of the mobile ones in the first phase, there were still all those trapped in buildings or locked in a basement by a well-meaning relative. It must have been bloody nerve wrecking for the soldiers on the ground, pushing open a door and not knowing what was on the other side. We realised very quickly that the biggest danger we faced wasn’t the infected, it was the fear and mental damage that this kind of fighting created.
Within weeks we saw a spike in the number of suicide shootings, now that wasn’t unusual in this sort of fight as a lot of soldiers who were bitten took their own lives if they couldn’t make it back to an aid post in time for the euthanasia injection. But this was different, healthy soldiers were taking their own lives in increasing numbers and that was very worrying. We decided to rotate the units through the front, a week fighting and then two weeks at the rear relaxing and more importantly seeing the head doctors if they needed to. It slowed us down but we saw the number of deaths drop off dramatically.
By mid-November the decision was made to push the Engineers forward to get started on the Inner Wall around the North and South Circular in preparation for the spring thaw. They got to work just as it started to get really cold. The poor buggers were out there in knee deep snow building the inner wall in one of the worst winters of the war but God love them they worked their arse's off and managed to get the work done by early February. All of which meant the troops had a solid objective to work towards and that really helped to improve their mental states.
By March the troops had caught up with the Engineers and we decided to call a halt to proceedings to give everyone a break. So for a month all the troops stood down and we treated them to some of the best food we could find, music shows and comedy acts. It was great fun and I think it really helped to relax some of the soldiers. We got some stick from the bean counters and arm chair generals but we were vindicated when the shrinks reported that in the months after the stand down the number of suicides was down dramatically.
We got back on the offensive in April and again it was a very slow, steady and methodical advance but it ate up the miles and as the troops got closer to the centre of the city things sped up as more troops became available. By November we were nearing the end of the road, we were about two miles from Westminster but then the politicians got involved and decided they needed to make it a big event. We were ordered to halt and form a circle two miles from Westminster Bridge. It was all a big media event, they wanted us to advance together and have a big photo op as the first soldiers met on the bridge. It was a pain and a waste of time but I can understand why they wanted it. A big photo finish to be an icon of the war like the Iwo Jima Marines or the Russians raising the flag over the Reichstag in World War Two. Anyway, we did what the politicians asked, it took a couple of days to get everyone organised and cause no end of grumbling from the troops. What made it even more difficult was that we were still getting attacked from the infected left inside the cordon.
Anyway, it took two days but we were eventually ready to go, along with a veritable horde of journalists, politicians and other notables to watch and take part. Despite all my grumbling it was a huge success, I am sure you have seen the images. The footage as the Scots Guards liberated Buckingham Palace and that Sergeant met up with the leader of the survivors. The picture of the Prime Minister in the deserted House of Commons standing at the dispatch box and the most iconic one of the two soldiers meeting on Westminster Bridge and shaking hands with Big Ben in the background. It was a great day made even more so when the PM declared Victory in Britain.
Of course, that was not the end of the war though. There was still a silent war going on underground and that showed no sign of ending anywhere near as quickly as the politicians would have liked.
Silent war
Westminster, London
Mike Hodgson and I have left the pub and are heading towards Westminster tube station. He is determined to show me the terrain that he fought through during the liberation of London.
For most of the war I was part of the Royal Scouts. I’m sure you’ve hear the sort of things we got up to. Finding the swarms and them leading them on a bloody goose chase round half the countryside before we pulled them onto the guns of the Army. It was fucking scary work let me tell you, a small team of us, some dogs and a few silenced weapons playing pied fucking piper with some moaning bastards. But that was nothing compared to the work we were given when we hit the major cities.
Clearing the surface of a city was a piece of piss compared to trying to clear the bowels of one. God knows what people were thinking during the Panic but hundreds of them fled underground to try and escape the hordes and you know what, the infected just followed them straight down. The end result was thousands of the bastards wandering round in the dark beneath the cities and all of them had to be cleared out.
The first few subways that the Generals tried to clear were a fucking disaster. They tried to use regular troops, half of who had only joined the Army some six months before and here they were being shoved down a hole in the ground and being told to operating in tight claustrophobic conditions, pitch black with only your rifle’s torch to light your way. Poor bastards must have been shitting themselves. The first Op in Newcastle when they tried to clear the Metro was a mess, they sent a Battalion into the tunnels and only third of them came out. Poor bastards were ripped to pieces and those that escaped were so traumatised they point blank refused to go back in.
After that Command realised they needed a specialist units to clear beneath the cities, and that is where we came in. They looked at the Royal Scouts and realised that all the ingredients were there already and they just needed a bit of re-organisation. The Scouts had been formed from all of the Special Forces regiments and some of the other specialist units in the Army, and Command just cherry picked from all of them. The core of the unit was made up of lads from the SAS, made sense when you think about it, we were already trained to work in small teams in difficult environments, trained to use night vision goggles and silenced weapons, plus we had the mental strength to handle the stress of fighting in a tube line or a service tunnel. They attached some specialist troops, you know, dogs and their handlers, some engineers and when we needed them, some wreck divers from the SBS. God they were some hard bastards. There is no way you could have gotten me down some flooded tunnel in the pitch black with only a spear gun and a shark suit for protection. No fucking way. Hats off to those lads, they were nuts and every single one of them deserves a VC for what they did.
Anyway, Command pulled us all together gave us the best equipment they could find, things like night vision goggles, IR torches to light our way, the best Comms we could dig up and silenced weapons so we wouldn't give ourselves away when we came across some Gs. We had about six weeks of training and then we were off.
Our first op was in Newcastle, thankfully they didn't have a massive underground network so it was a fairly simple task. We rolled up in our trucks and our new kit, feeling very sexy indeed. The Army had been ordered to hold at the entrance to each of the stations and had cleared out all those Gs that had tried to get out to them, but the rest, those deeper into the station and tunnels that was our job.
I was in charge of my team of six; four shooters including me, an engineer and a dog handler and his Jack Russell. That dog was a fucking miracle. It had been trained to sniff out the infected and then go stiff like a pointer. It was brilliant, saved our arses more times than I can remember by letting us know there was a G nearby or around the next corner. We were tasked with clearing the Haymarket station down to Gray Street station, while other teams were clearing other parts of the Metro and sewers.
We headed down the escalator with the shooters leading and as we got further down it got darker and darker as we lost the natural light coming from the street. By the time we hit the bot
tom and the main station concourse, it was dark as hell and I couldn't see more than five meters in front of me. We switched to NVGs and turned on the IR head lamps that lit up the scene. It was pretty grim down there with piles of bodies that had tumbled down the stairs. These were clearly the infected that had been trying to get out and had been gunned down by the soldiers at the top but as we got further in there were older bodies some of them facing into the station. We guessed that theses must have been the poor bastards who tried to escape down here during the panic and been killed in the crush.
We split into pairs and began to sweep the station. It took a while but thankfully turned out to be clear. We then formed up by the line that ran towards Grey Street and set off. That was when we started to get a bit twitchy. The IR light only stretched so far and beyond that the NVGs just couldn’t reach. Looking back though, those tunnels were easy as hell compared to the shit we came across later, they were smooth concrete with very few service tunnels or alcoves which meant very few places to hide. Every now and then a G would appear out of the darkness and head straight for us. We would take it down quickly before it could call too many of its mates but we realised there was a bit of a flaw in the plan; you couldn't sneak up on a zombie. They could smell you or hear you or however the fuck they do it, well before we found them. Still we managed to clear the line in about an hour with few mishaps and then turned around and cleared the tunnel going back the other way. By the time we emerged from Haymarket, three hours had passed but we had a much better understanding of how we were going to fight this war.
What happened after that Op?
After that it was just straight into it for the entire war. We would roll from one city to another, clear it, write up what lessons we could learn, adjust our tactics and then move on to the next. By the time we hit London we had the process down to a fine art.
How did it work?
Well the Army would clear the surface and every time they came across a sub-surface entrance they would cordon it off and shot any Gs that tried to get out. It was a good start as it cleared the first few sections of the underground before we even arrived. Problem was we always turned up quite a while after the Army because we were tied up somewhere else. There were never enough of us to go around so we had a hell of a back log to clear. It was a bit demoralising because we would turn up in our nice shiny trucks with our suits of armour and relive a bunch of bored soldiers who just heckled us for being late. It was a pain but you just put your head down and got on with it.
Can you tell me about the armour, it was quite specialist wasn't it?
It was a great bit of kit, the closest thing to Imperial Stormtrooper Armour I have ever seen outside of a video game. It consisted of a tight black body suit that had built in temperature control. It would keep your core at the optimum temperature even if you were standing in a sauna and doing yoga. I don't think I broke a sweat once. That suit was covered by a flexible suit of segmented armour plates, it looked a lot like those suits of armour you see on Roman Legionaries, except ours was made of some Kevlar, thermo-plastic material that was really light but incredibly strong. The whole thing weighed less than 20 kg and could stop a Rottweiler from crushing your arm. It covered the whole body and all the vulnerable areas; forearms, shoulders, chest, legs and around the neck. The whole thing came with a full faced helmet, like a motor-cycle helmet. It had a built-in air-filter so you wouldn't choke on any gas build ups or methane deposits. There was a night vision function on the visor with an IR torch, it had a built in Comms system that used high powered signals that allowed teams to coordinate through concrete and the sector commander to triangulate your position. It was incredible and probably fucking expensive. God knows where they found them, built them or stole them from but thank fuck they did because they saved my arse more times than I can remember.
Anyway, we would turn up at a station or utilities centre and clear an area down to the most defensible location. Often this was the station platform or something similar and then we would set up an operations centre. The bodies were cleared out, heavy lighting brought in, security, supplies and a command staff. Then we went to work, teams spreading out through the tunnels and network and clearing the underground world section by section.
The radios were a God send as they meant that the officers who were running the whole thing could track our progress and map the tunnels as we went. I have no idea how they worked but they were brilliant. It meant that no one ever got lost and as soon as a team got a little too far ahead and started to lose Comms the officers would set up another forward command location which had these cool radio boosters and meant we could push further and further forward.
By the time we finished in London there was a whole network of command stations and re-supply bases down there. You could live down there if you wanted to and we pretty much did. The war on the surface took what two years? I lived in those tunnels for pretty much three and a half years only coming up every three months to see what the fucking sun looked like. By the time we were finished I looked like a G myself, all white skin and blood shot eyes. If I had kids I would have scared the shit out of them.
What was the fighting in the tunnels like?
Well it went in fits and starts. One moment you would be patrolling down a tube line or service tunnel all quiet and eerie then all of a sudden, a swarm of the bastards would just appear out of nowhere and we would be fighting for our lives. Sometimes it was long range and we had time to take them down before they got near us but most of the time they were on us before we could get a shot off and then it was all pistols, knives, trench axes and headbutts. Thank fuck for the armour, I am not joking when I say that that stuff saved my life more times than I can count. If I ever meet the guys who made it, I will kiss every one of them and then buy them a drink. The armour plates were brilliant, you could jam your forearm in a Gs gob and it fixed them in place long enough to either blow its head off with your pistol or stab it in the brain. There were a couple of times when I got dragged to the ground and the neck plates and armour stopped me getting torn to pieces.
But that was how it went, moments of quiet with seconds of blind, slashing, biting, adrenaline fuelled terror. Day on, day off, with us only stopping to either set up a new forward base or be cycled back to the surface every three months for a week of rest.
What was the worst part of it?
There were two bits that I really hated. The first was sleeping. Whenever we needed to stop for sleep we had to find a secure place in the tunnels and just go firm and try to sleep. We couldn't go back to the closest supply base as it meant too much time lost going backward and forward, so we slept where we could. We would find some hole in the tunnel or a service closet, barricade ourselves in as best as we could and then try to get as much sleep as possible. We would rotate sentry duty but with only six people in a team it meant a lot of broken sleep. Every now and then a G would stumble on our position and the sentry would take them down. The first couple of times you woke up so fast only to realise that the guy on sentry had it all in hand. After a while it became so routine that you slept through it all.
The second bit I hated was any time we hit a flooded section. If it was only partially flooded we would just crack on, hoping to Christ that nothing was going to grab you from below. If it was fully flooded, then we called in the divers. Those guys were all heroes. We called them Clankers because they always turned up on those hand powered carriages that you see in the old Western movies and they made a hell of a racket. Every time they turned up, we would be attacked by a shit load of Gs who had heard them. Always made things interesting.
Anyway, these guys would show up, kit up and then just jump straight into the flooded section. Just like that no goodbye or anything, just popped straight in and off they went with a shark suit and a spear gun. I hated the waiting you know, sitting there with your thumb up your arse not knowing if they were going to come out or if a G had got them. It was shit and you felt totally helpless. It wasn’t l
ike they were trying to clear the whole section by hand most of the time they were just trying to locate the pumping system and get it unblocked or whatever.
Did you know that the entire central part of the London Underground is so deep that it is well below the water table and it takes a huge series of pumps just to keep the place dry. Of course as soon as The Panic started the power died and the whole place flooded, trapping God knows how many poor bastards down there. One of the Clankers told me that he found this dry section in the Jubilee Line that was full of bodies, all of them whole but dry and desiccated like mummies. He thought that they must have been fleeing the rising water and been trapped before running out of air. Shit way to die.
Most of the time they would get the pipes clear or a fuse changed and then the water level would start to fall. Then it was really a race against time for the Clankers. They had to get out before the water dropped too low and the Gs were able to chase them. Most of the time they made it but sometimes they wouldn't and the next time we would see them was when we found what was left.
The worse ones were when they made it part of the way out to only get pulled back in. One time we were helping to pull a Clanker out of the drink and I had him by the hand, about to yank him out when he suddenly fell back in. I thought he had just slipped and I called him a silly wanker but then I saw the fear in his eyes and realised he had been grabbed. I pulled as hard as I could but I couldn’t get a good grip on the shark suit and he just slipped through my fingers an inch at a time, all of us pulling on one end and god knows how many Gs on the other pulling him back. As he disappeared under the water the last thing I saw was his pleading eyes through the mask so I pulled out my pistol and emptied the clip into where I hoped his head was.
