The south bank of the Thames was utter chaos.
It looked even worse live and close-up than it did on video from low-earth orbit. Or maybe it had gotten worse in the last thirty minutes. Fires flared in Ali’s NVGs from dozens of points – including one actually floating on the river. Panicked drivers desperate to get away crashed into overturned vehicles in the middle of the road, or up on curbs. And bodies ran in all directions, though mostly toward the south, away.
As the Apache took a second pass swooping over the river at barely a hundred feet, Ali banking them around the giant Ferris-wheel shape of the London Eye, more of a hazard with no lights lit, they could see that Westminster Bridge had indeed collapsed into the black flowing waters beneath it. This was actually the only thing like good news – if it had still stood, the flood of refugees from the north would have been even worse in the area around the hospital, the corner of which was at the south end of the bridge.
On the other hand, the dead didn’t give a damn. Hundreds or thousands of them were stumbling over the embankment on the north and pouring into the river. Others were climbing out on the other side. The Thames had never been very fast, and was also tidal, more than twenty feet different in depth from low tide to high tide. And right now the tide looked high.
Small blessings, Ali thought. Though she’d once seen the dead try to fill up the Atlantic, so doubted the Thames even at flood tide would slow them down much.
“And thank goodness for that rooftop helipad,” Homer said into ICS from the front seat, as above and behind him Ali took them up and over the hospital. He was being funny, but Ali didn’t laugh. They could both see perfectly well there was already a helicopter sitting on that helipad. It was a red air ambulance, rotors turning, its position and anti-collision lights lighting up their NVGs – and medical personnel alongside, unloading a casualty from it and onto a gurney.
“You think they’d learn,” was all Ali had to say, looping them around and scanning the area around the building.
“They took an oath,” Homer said. “The end of the world doesn’t change that. So what’s our secondary insertion plan?”
“We barely had time to come up with a primary one.”
“Different section of rooftop, maybe? There’s a lot of it.”
“That would definitely be an amusing way to find out if the roof will support fifteen thousand pounds of weight on three contact points.”
Homer took her point. “It’s either that or try to find or clear an HLZ on the ground.”
“We might get this bird down on the street, but we’ll never get it back up again. Hell, we’ll probably never be able to fight our way back to it.” Lightning flashed in the sky to the north, and Homer knew she was thinking of Chicago when she said, “At least this time you won’t have to disobey orders to follow me down. It’s kind of a tandem jump, in a two-seater helo.”
Homer paused and scanned the scene below as Ali looped them around again. “Not strictly true. You could hover over the roof and let me hop out. One inserted is a lot better than none.”
The silence that came back told Homer everything he needed to know. Yes, she could do that – she just wasn’t going to. It wasn’t even the old spec-ops dictum about redundancy – that two is one and one is none. It was simply that she wasn’t planning to leave him to fight on his own – ever again. He was racking his brains for the words that would somehow convince her of the necessity of doing it anyway…
When suddenly he no longer had to. The air ambulance started to take off again. Ali turned and dropped their nose.
And she took them down.
* * *
The wind and rain tore at Pred and Juice’s uniforms, packs, weapons, and NVGs for one second before they deployed their chutes. And they had arrested and were floating for exactly one second more before everything went to shit again – and once again they had to make a new plan, literally in midair.
“Ah, shit,” Pred said into his throat mic.
“Yeah.” Juice saw it, too.
It was kind of hard to miss from directly above. Finsbury Square, the big open space diagonally across from Armoury House, was no longer a nice open drop zone as it had been on aerial imagery. Somehow, during their prep and flight time, it had turned into a gigantic full-scale set-piece zombie battle – armed soldiers in company strength on one side; the dead, mainly multiple large runner packs, in battalion strength on the other; and uncountable numbers of mindlessly panicked civilians running around in the middle, and on all sides.
It was complete and glorious blood-soaked chaos. And it was all taking place not only right in their intended drop zone, but basically across the street from their target site. This evidently was the first problem with having no comms, JOC-side support, or aerial ISR. Both Pred and Juice had a bad feeling it was not going to be the last.
“New DZ,” Pred said, pointing. “Three hundred meters northwest.” There was another open green space there.
“Negative,” Juice said, checking his forearm-mounted mapping GPS (other forearm). “Three-fifty due south.”
Pred looked that way and saw there was indeed an open circle there, but smaller. And not only smaller. “Hey, that one’s farther away. And it’ll put the Zombie Battle of Bunker Hill right between us and the target. Why do it?”
“Just got a better feeling about that one.”
“Seriously?”
“Look, the space to the north is a graveyard, okay?”
Pred didn’t buy this. Not the fact of it being a graveyard – no doubt Juice’s mapping app had that right. No, it was just totally unlike Juice to be superstitious. But the bearded one was already yanking on his riser and coming around, plus jabbing at his other forearm to set new waypoints for the bots, while still in flight – and Pred had little choice but to follow him.
The noise of the battle below receded. A little.
* * *
Ali flared them in fast, hard, and tight, just far enough behind the climbing air ambulance to avoid giving the pilot of that aircraft a heart attack. She also breathed easier as the full weight of the bird settled – and the rooftop held. She didn’t know the exact weight of that little McDonnell-Douglas light utility helo used by the EMS guys, but she was pretty sure it was less than half what the Boeing AH-64 Apache weighed.
Before she even took that next breath, Homer had already poured himself out of the front seat and set solo security on the rooftop, while she killed the bird’s engines and brought its systems offline – or just offline enough. When she grabbed her weapon and followed him down, the sky had finally opened and rain started falling. She could also see the med personnel had cleared off of the roof – she hadn’t even looked until now, that being Homer’s job.
Weapons up, NVGs down, the two Tier-1 operators pushed forward through the slanting rain to the rooftop access structure, moving smooth, fast, and in perfect unison, even as the Apache’s rotors still whumped overhead. Reaching the door, Ali spun and covered their six for the one second it took Homer to push inside. Then she spun around smoothly and followed him in, flipped her NVGs up – it was lit in there, albeit dimly – and pointed her weapon down the stairs, covering them while Homer nailed a bracket on the inside of the door and doorframe, and locked it with their own padlock.
When she felt the squeeze on her shoulder, she took them down, sighing quietly when the stairs ended after one flight – along with their hopes of descending directly to the basement, and skipping the rest of the hospital. But that’s the thing about CQB, she thought, pausing a beat with her hand on the doorknob so Homer could get set. You never know what’s inside, or behind the next door…
When she pushed out of the stairwell and onto the floor beyond, she wished she hadn’t found out.
The interior was self-evidently the scene of a very recent and very bad outbreak. Hell, not even recent – it was in full swing, and they were crashing right into the live event itself. Terrified people in scrubs and hospital gowns ran by screaming, the
dead moaned, and bloody handprints already smeared the walls and floor. Shit, there was even a half-smashed lighting fixture hanging diagonally from the ceiling, blinking. George Romero’s production designer on his best day couldn’t have improved on this.
And it did really look to Ali like nobody ever learned. She guessed they knew enough not to bring obviously infected people inside. It would have started with something like motor vehicle crash victims, who also just happened to be infected. The real hell of it was that, as bad as things were in here, no one dared leave – because shit was even worse outside.
It just had to be a damned hospital, Ali thought. Oh, well. Looks like we’ll end as we began…
She took a quick single instinctive-fire shot on a runner that made the mistake of locking eyes with her, but ignored the rest, instead leading Homer down the light side of the hallway, which was to the right. An elderly woman grabbed onto her arm and pleaded for help. No more roughly than necessary, Ali yanked her arm free, pushed the woman away – and pushed forward.
Without him saying anything, without even having to look back, Ali could feel exactly what was going through Homer’s mind. He was having to block out all the chaos, terror – and the human suffering. He had to push aside his own deeply ingrained Christian instinct to stop and help these people. Ali was blessed with less of a hardwired humanitarian impulse, so had less to resist. Then again, Homer also knew exactly what he had to do, and that they couldn’t afford to stop, and Ali knew he knew it.
As usual, nothing had to be said between them.
She heard his weapon chug twice. In the rear position, he’d be facing forward as he moved, but turning to the rear to check behind them every twenty feet or five seconds. She just pushed on and let him get on with it.
And she led them forward, covering her own sectors.
* * *
Juice’s non-graveyard drop zone was not only not all that spacious, it also turned out to be not particularly clear – most of the area consisted of big gnarly trees, pointy and leafless in early December, ringing the periphery. Then again, both Pred and Juice had jumped into smaller spaces in worse conditions, including while being shot at, so they had little trouble hitting some nice soft wet grass in the center of the circle. Like practice rounds in the bulls-eye of a paper target.
Or JDAMs, Pred thought with a laugh, getting up off his third point of contact – his ass, which was now soaked – and shrugging out of his harness, not bothering to gather up the chute. He took a knee in the rain to pull security while Juice plotted a new infil route, but he evidently already had it worked out, simply raising his rifle and heading out of the circle to the west. Their tandem tactical movement was as practiced and nearly as smooth as Ali and Homer’s, just a lot bigger. A short stretch of access road led them to a larger north–south road beyond it: Moorgate.
Both paused there to flip up their NVGs, as streetlights were still providing good ambient light, illuminating individual rain drops falling into the canyons of the city.
But after dashing across the road, Juice only took them a quarter-block north before ducking into an alley on the opposite side of the street, the left, and Pred didn’t have to ask why. One, the major north–south road would be too popular. Two, he was no doubt going to loop them around to the west and north, getting them to Armoury House without getting lit up by the redcoats to the southeast of the target at Bunker Hill. The whole name of this game, as always in patrolling from insertion point to target site, was stealth, keeping a low profile – and, most of all, not getting bogged down or decisively engaged.
They’d only reached the end of the alley, however, when Juice stuck his helmet up to Pred’s and whispered, “Quick security halt.”
“What? What have you got?”
“Hang tight. Be right back.” Then he slithered out of the alley and off to the right. Sticking his head out, Pred could see it was some kind of commercial street – smaller than Moorgate, but bigger than the alley. He didn’t like it, but seemed to have no choice other than to cool his heels. So he pulled back ten feet into the darker shadows of the unlit alley, which also had the virtue of being sheltered from the rain, checked his six, then faced forward again and squatted down.
After ten seconds, his gimpy right leg started bothering him so he stretched it out in front of him, essentially doing a one-legged squat. Chicago wasn’t really all that far behind them. At least now he didn’t have undersized underwear crawling up his ass-crack. He was still free-balling it, after ditching his skivvies on the flight back.
Guess this is Baghdad, he thought. Starting to look like it, actually…
But no sooner had he gotten comfortable than he heard the approach of whispered voices. And then, ten feet away and large as life, there appeared a whole happy group of civilians, crouching and creeping, moving from right to left across the mouth of the alley. Unarmed civilians were certainly better than jumpy armed soldiers, and both were better than the dead. But stealth meant avoiding any kind of attention or possible hang-ups, and living civilians generally drew the dead, so Pred didn’t move as the group crept by. He started breathing again when the tail end appeared, and none of them had looked in his direction.
Whoops – breathed too soon.
Because the train stopped with its caboose right on the edge of the alley. And Pred could plainly see that caboose was an adolescent girl, maybe twelve or thirteen. This was obvious not least because she was wearing some kind of skater-girl outfit – leggings, flannel shirt, and New York Yankees ballcap, which at least kept the rain off her head.
And then she turned and looked right at him.
She opened her mouth, evidently intending to scream.
Pred had zero idea what to do about that, but also had zero time to make a decision, so for some reason just put his index finger up to his lips.
And he could see the girl’s big eyes, made to look bigger by a lot of make-up, blink once in the reflected streetlight. And then she closed her mouth again, scream swallowed. She squinted at Pred in the shadows, perhaps seeing his weapons and military gear for the first time – and she smiled and flashed him a two-finger V for victory sign, like a pint-sized Churchill.
And with that, Pred could see, underneath her open flannel button-down, that she was wearing a Nirvana t-shirt – the old smiley face with X’s for eyes – and, despite thinking how Cobain had been cold and dead many years before this girl was even born, he made a twirling pom-pom motion with both hands, then flashed her the heavy-metal horns. Her face lit up, smile spreading further across her face – and then she disappeared, pulled along by her group, all of them dissolving into the night.
“Who was that?” Juice asked, ducking back into the alley. Either his timing was perfect or, more likely, he’d been waiting for them to clear out before coming back in.
“Nobody,” Pred said. “What the hell were you doing?”
“Nothing,” Juice said. “Must have been my imagination.”
“Really.” As far as Pred was aware, Juice still didn’t have an imagination, any more than he was superstitious.
But Juice was already head down in forearm. “It’s fine,” he said. “Bots are still maneuvering, anyway. Come on.”
He led them out. Pred spat once, and followed.
Fucking a Dumpster
CentCom – North Prison Yard
Fick and Wesley had only been back in command of CentCom for ten minutes, and weren’t even back to their CP from the launch of the two missions, when Miller hailed them on the radio, summoning them to the JOC.
“What is it?” Fick said, stopping the two of them in the dark of the yard, beside the chunky Panther armored vehicle that had been parked a little inside the front gate, and near the foot of the big dirt ramp that led up to the walls, left there by the incoming USOC contingent.
While he took the call, Wesley reached into the back of his waistband and pulled out the .45 the two USOC guys had given him. Maybe it was some kind of symbol of command, and he
knew all the operators swore by them. But he wasn’t an operator, he was used to his 9mm, and the thing was damned uncomfortable wedged in his belt and under his body armor. So he just laid it down on the hood of the truck, where it was nearly invisible in the dark. Still, maybe someone would find it who could use it. Wes smiled. Like that pack of cigarettes I left tucked in the railing on the fantail deck of the Kennedy.
“Fine, we’re on our way,” Fick said, dropping his hand from his radio. He nodded at the pistol. “What’s that?”
“Anonymous good deed.”
Fick just grunted, turned, and marched off.
Ten minutes later they were back in the JOC. “What is it?” Fick said marching into the dimly glowing room.
“It’s the dead, isn’t it?” Wesley asked from behind him. “They’re back.”
“No,” Miller said, straightening up from a station. Charlotte was standing there with him.
“What,” Fick said again, clearly as enthusiastic as always to be repeating himself.
“Come,” Miller said, grabbing a pair of night-vision binoculars and leading them all up the stairs and out onto the roof again. “There,” he said, lowering the binos and pointing up to the sky, and off to the southeast.
Without night vision, the others could hear it before they saw anything. Maybe the pilots were just really switched on – or, more likely, they’d made radio contact with Miller and gotten instructions – but both aircraft were totally blacked out as they flared into the Common, and only visually resolved in the last few seconds.
It was two Chinooks, flying in tight formation.
As the two big ungainly twin-rotor aircraft settled down on the helipad by the remains of the aircraft hangar, Wesley muttered, “Those are some crazy-ass helicopters.”
“Yeah,” Fick grunted. “I once heard a Black Hawk pilot say they look like two palm trees fucking a dumpster.”
Charlotte shot him a look, but also looked like she was working hard not to laugh.
“There,” Miller said. The others turned to see him facing the opposite direction, looking down and out on the ground to the north through the binos again. Wesley took them and looked for himself, and in turn had them snatched by Fick. Both could more easily see it than believe it, and just shook their heads as Charlotte took her turn.
ARISEN, Book Fourteen - ENDGAME Page 23
