“What does it take to get this through your skull? One person doesn’t matter. Have you learned anything? Do you finally get it now? Are you going to do what’s required? ARE YOU WILLING TO PAY THE PRICE?”
The minigun went dry and spun to a stop.
Handon touched his radio. “Sarah, Handon. Your orders are to hold in place until relieved. Or until your team is KIA. Acknowledge and confirm.”
“…Received. And understood.”
* * *
Fick listened in to every word of the exchange.
And he didn’t say a fucking word.
He just stepped to the rampart and checked that both his weapons had full mags, his bayonet was firmly affixed, and his boot laces tied. Then he stood up and watched Handon run the fourth and last can of ammo through the minigun. Only this time he wasn’t carving a cut-out around the helo crash site.
This time he was walking it back in.
He was clearing a channel from the helo to the walls.
Or something like it.
When the gun went dry, he climbed out of the hatch and leapt down, then grabbed an empty ammo can, and opened the driver’s-side door of the Panther. Fick heard him start the engine, pop it in neutral – and then saw him jam the ammo can between the accelerator and the seat. As its 220hp turbocharged engine wound up to an all-consuming roar, he turned and looked Fick in the eye.
“So – you ready to get killed with me, or what?”
Fick shrugged. “Not really doing anything else today.”
Handon turned and jammed the vehicle in gear.
All four fat knobby tires screamed and burned and smoked, tearing at mud and wood – for exactly one second. Then the six-ton truck demolished the rampart behind it and launched off into space, shooting through twenty yards of open air, coming down and then powering through forty yards of undead horde before the front wheels turned in the mud and it spun ninety degrees and kept going, only now rolling end over end, clearing an even wider channel of dead for another forty yards, finally coming to rest – most of the way to the Puma crash site.
Even before it did so, Handon and Fick had leapt down off the wall behind it, side by side, out into peril and death.
Weapons up and firing.
Two old men – trying to avoid getting any older.
One Hell of a Run
London – Elephant & Castle
Charlotte hung on with one hand and raised the other overhead like on a rollercoaster, making a quiet “Wheee” noise, as Juice squealed the Husky around one of the biggest roundabouts in London, G-forces pulling at all of them. She was still sitting with her legs hanging over the back, pulling rear security, keeping to herself. Pred reached forward and high-fived her from behind. He even bumped fists with Jamie, the wounded ex-marauder, who was standing in the bed between them and covering two sectors – nine and three, going back and forth.
The advantage of the huge traffic junction was obvious – lots of room to dodge the living, the dead, and abandoned and crashed cars. The same held true as they straightened out onto the fairly major road that opened up on the other side of it. Sparing a glance at his map, Pred could see it was a straight shot all the way to Wandsworth Common. Back to CentCom.
Back to the Ranch, as they used to say.
They were due a little good luck. For a while, it had looked like they were never going to get out of the City and across the river. They’d written off the first three bridges as impassable, Juice taking them farther and farther away from central London looking for one they could get safely across. Finally, willing to detour no farther, they gambled on Tower Bridge – one of London’s most iconic landmarks, with its ornate Victorian Gothic towers and walkways. Pred had craned his head up and around as they went over. He’d always wanted to see it up close.
It was even still lit up.
But now he faced forward again, got back on his gun, and wired his shit up tighter. The massive bulk of the Husky armored vehicle, or MaxxPro Mini as he liked to call it, plus the minigun, had kept them moving out of the death zone of the City. But all they’d done was loop around the worst of it.
Now they were going back in.
They were also driving back into the lashing storm, with its rain and lightning, and also the blackout zone. The lit streetlights and building lights faded behind them – and the darkness ahead grew wet and windy, fat rain drops pelting the truck, and stinging the faces of the three riding in back as the truck picked up speed. And as Juice accelerated them even faster down the four-lane road, past blacked-out parks, shops, pubs, and four-story blocks of flats, Pred could hear Charlotte sending radio traffic from behind him.
“Dambuster One-One, Wyvern Two-Zero, how copy? Any Dambuster call signs!”
Pred shouted over his shoulder. “Hey, what are you doing?”
“Trying to get us some air!” She stood up, joined him behind the turret, held her radio up in the rain, and tried again.
Pred shook his head. “Dude, nothing’s flying. Not now.”
Charlotte shook her own head, sadly. “Hey, I know people. And in Her Majesty’s Forces, we don’t leave troops in contact without top cover. Anyway, what the hell do you know, Yank? As usual, overpaid, oversexed, and over here…”
Pred recognized the WW2-era phrase, usually used by British men – resentful of the American GIs, with their bigger paychecks, and the nylons and cigarettes those bought, attracting the affections of British women.
He sounded vaguely hurt when he said, “I’m not overpaid…”
But Charlotte pointed over his shoulder urgently, and when he spun to the front he had to drop down electrically as they blasted under a rail trestle lurching out of the dark, with enough clearance for the Husky and its turret – but not the Husky and its turret plus Predator. When he popped back up, he touched his head to reassure himself it was still there.
But then he, and the other two in back, were all forced to hang on for dear life as Juice started swerving the big vehicle more violently – they’d just entered a tighter, more built-up area. Shortly after that, he was forced to slow their speed – and then Pred, Charlotte, and Jamie had to start defending their one-vehicle convoy from the dead again. Predictably, this area wasn’t just more built-up – it was more overrun. A lot more.
Things were thickening up – fast.
Behind him, Pred could hear the other two taking shots at regular intervals. He didn’t have to look to know what that was – they were going slow enough now that runners were able to keep up. He scanned the skies for Foxtrots.
Speed was life, and they were losing it.
The road ahead split around a clock tower, and a large looming wedge of tall trees in the middle, after which a dark section of park went by on the right – and as quickly as they’d entered the high street, they exited. But the dead weren’t thinning. They were getting worse, lumbering and running out of the darkness and falling rain. Pred put a couple of short bursts into thick concentrations in the road ahead, but mostly let the cattle-catcher and angled anti-IED armor underneath take it. The Husky crashed through and bumped over bodies, too heavy to bounce, and Pred and the others ducked out of the way of flying meat.
Finally, Wandsworth Common and CentCom started to come into view, walls and trees looming in the darkness and mist. They were approaching from the side, the east, but it hardly mattered. They could already see the walled compound was the center of a gigantic heaving singularity – stretching in all directions, and much farther out than they could see from ground level. As they approached, Pred whistled to realize the extended walls on the south and east sides didn’t even appear to be defended – the horde had piled up there and was spilling right over.
That doesn’t look good.
“That doesn’t look good,” Juice shouted out of the cab.
“Yeah. No.”
“How you figure we’re going to get in?”
“Well, we’ve got a minigun and a MaxxPro Mini. Guess we’ll make it work.”
> “Hey diddle diddle,” Juice said.
Pred got the minigun up. Behind him, he could hear Charlotte, still hailing on her radio.
They started bashing their way in – straight up the middle.
* * *
Up on the walls now, everyone was forced to fight like gods.
Soon it would only be the immortal – and the dead.
The Marines had their bayonets fixed – and were using them. The USOC guys were still operating coolly and effectively – half now shooting, the other half protecting the shooters, defending their position the hard way, with short swords. The Gurkhas were still laughing, having spread out to cover the spot in the center where there was now not only no armored vehicle with a minigun – but also no longer any rampart in front of the walkway. The Tunnelers were still in among them, some quailing and praying, Colley switching to his axe – because he knew it better, because ammo was getting scarce, and mainly because the dead were right on them. But everyone was fighting, through what was now a slashing rain. The tide of dead was nearly up to the ramparts.
The proverbial wolf was at the door.
If the wolf was a million zombies. And the door was every inch of the exterior of your house.
The channel Handon had masterfully cleared with his minigun and armored-vehicle cannon had filled back in almost as quickly as he cleared it, the waters unparting behind him and Fick as they leapt ten feet down to the body pile at the foot of the walls and disappeared out into it.
They were on their own. But they weren’t alone.
The Gurkhas saw them go out – Sergeant Major Sun sure did. Hell, pretty much everyone did. With the wall-mounted spots, it was pretty hard to miss an armored vehicle launching off the walls, even with all the other chaos going on. Eyes drawn to the center, Marines, USOC operators, Gurkhas, tankers, even the Tunnelers, all saw Handon and Fick’s two-man assault across what was not so much no-man’s land as some special level of Hell even Dante had failed to imagine.
“Pour it in, boys!” Sun shouted. And they did. None of the Gurkhas needed reminding that everyone else up there had done it for them – back when it had been sixty of them going out into that, not just two. And the tankers had just finished crushing most of the local dead down to compost. Then again, it was because of the tanks that the Gurkhas had been able to leave the walls in the first place. Now they couldn’t afford to. Even as Sun went up and down the lines patting backs, he saw their .50-gunner meet a bad end: a Foxtrot leapt up – it could have come from anywhere at this point – grabbed onto his head with both hands and hauled him over the edge, along with his MG.
Sun hauled ass to that spot and jumped up on the rampart. He couldn’t see his man – already gone, buried. But he could see the machine gun, which evidently held little interest for the dead. Not bothering to engage, he simply hopped down the ten feet to the body pile and hauled it out, including the ammo belt dangling from its receiver. As dead ran and jumped at his face, he knocked them away with the heavy weapon for a couple of seconds – then pointed the barrel skyward. As he knew they would, all of his men who could reach it grabbed on and pulled. Now he just hung onto the twin spade handles with both hands as he was hauled back up top, kicking at the odd gnashing mouth or grasping hand as he went.
“Cheers, lads,” he said, turning, hefting the weapon up onto the splashing rampart, and searching for the two running and fighting figures out there in the spotlights – then thunk-thunk burning through the rest of the belt clearing to one side of them, then the other, the giant .50 BMG rounds taking apart dead bodies even as they ran. When he turned around, he stopped the loader before he could say it. “Screw you, jerk-face. There’s one more belt right behind you. Give it here.”
The loader handed it up to him.
* * *
Handon suddenly badly missed his own wakizashi.
He had no idea where it might have ended up. If Misha got it, he hoped he choked on it. But perhaps the two main points of being an operator were being deadly with every weapon known to man, and working with what you had. And it was like Ali said: Always the violinist, never the violin.
Right now, Handon had a perfectly good rifle, so he shot it.
In fact, he was shooting like never before – weapon pulled in tight, cheek down, both eyes open, pivoting from side to side across thirty degrees to their front, firing four aimed single shots each second, 3.8 of them ending up as killing headshots, taking a half-second out of every eight to drop an empty mag and feed in a new one.
None of the dead even got near him.
And he did all of this while running flat out – over some pretty rough terrain, in a slashing rain. His nerve-damaged leg was still wooden, but he made it do what he needed. The surgical wound and sewn-up artery in his back hadn’t begun to heal, but he couldn’t even feel that. He’d bulled through much worse, for far longer.
But that wasn’t even what this was.
This was him kicking over on all cylinders, getting “in state,” one of perfect focus and control, leveraging abilities honed over a lifetime of relentless training and the crucible of endless operational experience – all for one last crowning performance, a single moment of radiant, all-killing perfection.
Fick was right beside him, keeping up well enough – just being a little more pragmatic with his tactics, which involved less flawless high-speed shooting and more stabbing, battering, shoving, and foul language. Every Marine was a rifleman first, but nobody put in the range time or shoot-house hours, shot the estimated million training rounds over a career, that Unit guys did.
Handon moved and shot like the angel of death.
And he could equally hear and sense the 200-some shooters on the walls behind them firing in support, keeping their sides clear, which was excellent, because they definitely didn’t have time to worry about their flanks themselves. The thickest mob and worst problem was to their front – and, as they approached the crash site, their problem alone. If the guys on the walls shot there, they risked hitting the helo.
At least Handon hoped they weren’t going to risk it.
But he could sense they were getting that right, too. No one in the center or left of the line behind them was shooting to their front – into the shrinking space between their two aging, hurtling, perfectly operating bodies and the half-destroyed helicopter. But those on the right were. Many of the USOC operators had also put in that training time, and could make those shots, and were doing so – shooting around both the helo and its relief force, to keep them on their feet, right up to the foot of their target.
Handon could effortlessly perceive this – just as he could sense everything in every direction in the battlespace around him, all with a razor vividness he’d never truly known or experienced, his senses jacked up to drug-trip levels, but in the service of operating on a razor-edge of precision, everything happening on a rail, tolerances of microseconds and millimeters, moving perfectly and shooting even better.
It was what he had to do. What maybe only he could do.
This was what he’d come back from the dead for.
To get his people back. And complete the mission together.
His eighth and last rifle mag going empty, he let the rifle fall, drew the found .45 with his right hand, and emptied the first mag of that, even as he reached around behind him for another one.
They were seconds from reaching the crash site.
* * *
Homer came back to consciousness in the Puma cockpit first.
Ali was out – but alive, both her breathing and pulse strong.
The rain sheeting down the cockpit glass obscured the view, but distant lights from the walls provided just enough illumination inside to see. Bracing himself, he undid the straps holding him in the seat, up in the air really, and lowered himself halfway down the cockpit. As he did so, every part of him hurt, particularly his head, but he had to block all that out for now. Instead, he crawled back into the cargo area.
The noises back the
re made it his first priority.
No one had ever closed the cargo door. Luckily they had come to rest with it facing down – but dead had still crawled in through a two-foot gap. The first had just gotten to Aliyev, strapped into a jump-seat, also unconscious, flat on his back on what was now the floor, the dead man grabbing and biting the Kazakh’s arm. Homer knifed it in the head before it could rip a mouthful out, then destroyed the other one half inside the hole. There was no way he could get the sliding hatch closed, but the destroyed body should keep the others out – for now.
There was a great deal of moaning, hissing, and particularly banging on all sides of the aircraft around them – including the top – and Homer knew it wasn’t going to get any better. They were going to have to get the hell out of there. It was a problem that they had two casualties and only one shooter, but Homer would deal with it one thing at a time.
When he went back to Aliyev, he found he was alive as well – but looked like hammered shit, face bruised and abraded and half buried underneath a body in a PVC bag. And while Aliyev had obeyed instructions and strapped himself in, whoever this bagged-up dead man was hadn’t. And it looked like, flying around the interior of the cabin as the helo crashed and tumbled, it had just pummeled the crap out of Aliyev. In fact, there were two body bags in there, the other wedged in the far corner.
Homer got this one off Aliyev and pulled down the zipper a few inches, surprised to find it was Zack Altringham – the CIA analyst from Somalia. How the heck he got in here – or how he died, for that matter – wasn’t something Homer had time to wonder about. What he had to do now was gather weapons and ammo, since both he and Ali had been black when they jumped into this thing. Pulling the zip farther, he found an M9 on Zack’s body, full, with two spare mags. He pulled them out. But before he could check the other bodybag, he heard banging from the cockpit.
Only with this did he realize that, contrary to his expectations, the moaning and banging around the airframe had in fact gotten better – had almost gone away entirely in fact. And this new banging was punctuated with speech.
ARISEN, Book Fourteen - ENDGAME Page 47
