Arisen, Book Eight - Empire of the Dead

by Michael Stephen Fuchs

  Had all that also given his psyche a terrible beating?

  He looked up to see that Fick had gone. And Commander Abrams, his executive officer (XO), stood looking down at him.

  “Sir, CIC reports they’ve completely lost comms with the shore team. And both their squad cameras are down now – as is the team leader’s micro-UAV. We’re getting absolutely nothing out of that warehouse.”

  Drake’s eyes went wide. This seemed to be full-on disaster striking. “What the hell happened?”

  “Unknown at this time. Clearly the team is in some kind of contact. But we’re not assuming the worst yet. It might just be a commo outage. Hell, it might be the Russians jamming our radio channels. But the whole team is indoors. So whatever’s going on, our drone can’t see it.”

  Drake opened his mouth, but then closed it again.

  After waiting a respectful beat, Abrams said, “We’re also prepping and cycling our last two F-35s.”

  “What?”

  “The Air Boss called down for instructions. I gave the order in your absence.”

  Drake stood again. “We can’t risk those last two birds.”

  “Sir?”

  Drake looked around the bridge. No one was obviously listening to this exchange. But of course everyone was. “We need them for Africa, for the Somalia mission. For top cover. We can’t risk sending them up.”

  Abrams paused fractionally, steadying himself to make sure he wasn’t reacting emotionally. And then he lowered his voice four notches. “Commander… this is Africa. Right here. Right now. If that shore team doesn’t come back with those supplies, there is no Somalia mission. And if this vessel goes down… then there’s nothing. And those two birds are the only defense we’ve got left.”

  Drake seemed to be trying to process this.

  Abrams tried to help him along. “Of course you’re right that we can’t afford to lose them. But if it becomes them or this ship… well, we’ve got to have them on deck and ready to go. Obviously, the final decision to launch will be yours.”

  Drake nodded. Of course. Of course Abrams was right. They had to have the aircraft on deck and prepped. That Drake hadn’t thought of this himself was another massive blow to his self-belief – to his crumbling sense that he was still in command here.

  Or that he still ought to be.

  Standing up again and looking out the screens, he could see the first sleek aircraft coming up on the giant deck elevator, and flight deck crew backing up a tractor to tow it into position. At least it was getting done.

  The strike group had lost a capable warship when the destroyer Michael Murphy went down. But Drake had gained an invaluable appendage – Abrams. Hell, he’d gained a brain.

  And right now, it may be the only working one I’ve got…

  * * *

  Lieutenant Hailey Wells marched across the deck in her flight suit, side arm and other survival essentials packed tightly around her chest rig, helmet tucked under her arm… and she tried not to feel the eyes on her.

  There were a hell of a lot of them.

  There were the eyes of all the flight deck crew scurrying around her plane… those of the commanders staring down at her from up in the island… the remote video gaze of her fellow pilots watching live from down in the Ready Room. Basically, it was a lot of goddamned eyes. In a very real sense, everyone on the ship was watching her now. And the weight of it was tremendous – heavier even than the gaze of her father, who was always watching her, always judging her… and always finding her lacking.

  As she saw her aircraft reach the level of the flight deck on its elevator, and watched the tractor starting to tow it into position, she adopted an intercept course, aiming at the base of the angle-deck runway. And she tried to keep her gait both straight and steady.

  Hailey was, in truth, still reeling from the loss of Cole and Tomassetti, the carrier air group’s top two officers, who had been shot down less than thirty minutes ago. But this crushing and surreal news had flashed through the Kennedy’s lower decks like a fire – one that incinerated morale. There’d been plenty of death and loss over the last two years – but not in the goddamned air wing, and definitely not among the fighter jocks. They were supposed to be untouchable, up above it all. Gods looking down from their aeries.

  Weren’t they? Hailey swallowed heavily.

  Then again, the earlier deaths of two other fighter jocks, Delacey and O’Neill, in the flight deck battle, should have woken her up to their mortality. Jesus, her own mid-air collision and ejection over the ocean ought to have done that. But the CAG (Commander, Air Group) and Assistant CAG were like Zeus and Apollo. The two of them going down, falling off Olympus, was simply unthinkable.

  But it had happened. Which was exactly why Hailey was here now, climbing into her cockpit again. That roster of F-35 pilots had gotten so short that she was actually almost at the top of it again. In fact, among those still breathing air, and not laid up in the hospital, it was down to her and one other – the one who would be her wingman today.

  Or, rather, she would be his.

  And the air wing was also down to its last two of these irreplaceable planes. The problem used to be too many pilots and not enough planes.

  Now the problem was everything.

  As soon as her ride was secured to the deck in its launch position, Hailey climbed the ladder, poured herself into the cockpit, and started going through her checks. She did all of this mechanically – like a zombie, staring dully down at the controls and the checklist. The weight of responsibility was compressing her into something like an emotional diamond – or perhaps a lump of coal.

  She could hardly move in the claustrophobic cockpit. And she could barely breathe. She was being suffocated by her doubts that she was really up to this. If the two top pilots in the air wing had been blown out of the sky trying to attack the Russian ship… what the hell kind of chance did she have, a benchwarmer, a third-rate fighter jockey – and one who evidently couldn’t even obey simple orders?

  Not a week earlier, she had somehow lost an entire $220M aircraft – while displaying gross insubordination, disobeying an urgent recall order, to provide close-air support to some random civilians on the ground. That they survived, and that some of them turned out to be Kennedy security forces, didn’t make her action any more defensible.

  And for what she’d done, the CAG, the Air Boss, and Commander Drake himself had, at various times, all torn her various new ones. Hailey was pretty sure she would not be in this cockpit now, if command had any other options.

  Hailey’s father, the Admiral, had long ago made it clear to her that she, and her career, were not up to standards. She just seemed to have some kind of cussed rebellious streak, one that always surfaced at exactly the wrong time, to get her in trouble.

  Nonetheless, now here she sat.

  And as soon as she was launch-ready, she would remain there, on cockpit standby, waiting for the order that would send her on the most important mission of her life. Now she and just one other pilot were all that stood between everyone on the JFK – and the Admiral Nakhimov, that weapons-bristling Russian battlecruiser, which probably had a hundred times the firepower needed to blow the carrier out of the water.

  And, by proxy, that meant they would be all that stood between humanity and its final destruction.

  Hailey exhaled slowly. Thank God it was the other guy who would be the senior pilot on the mission. At least this was a tiny bit of weight off her. If everything went to shit, the hammer would fall on him first.

  She looked out her cockpit glass now toward that aft starboard aircraft elevator. It should really be bringing up the second bird by now. But it resolutely remained just a giant cut-out in the surface of the flight deck.

  Where the hell was her wingman?

  Blast Damage

  JFK – Bridge

  Drake heard a ringing phone – which was possible now that the bridge had settled down to be more like an office and less like a lunatic asylum – but
realized it wasn’t his when Abrams picked up his own handset.

  “Bridge, go. Yeah. Yeah? Jesus. All received. Keep us updated. Bridge out.”

  Drake looked across and waited for his XO to brief him – trying not to wonder why he’d been bypassed.

  “There’s a problem with one of the aircraft elevators,” Abrams said.

  “Yeah? What?”

  “It’s stuck.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  Abrams held his gaze. “After the pummeling this ship has taken, I’m amazed the stairs work.”

  “Good point,” Drake admitted. “And good thing we’ve got three elevators. Trust the other two are in working order?”

  Abrams’s expression darkened. “It’s not that simple.”

  Drake just exhaled and waited for it. When Abrams explained the details of this latest debacle, Drake decided he’d better go down there and look at it himself.

  Three minutes later, he was standing on the flight deck, staring down at the elevator platform, stopped about thirty feet below him. There was an F-35 sitting on it. There was also a small army of flight deck personnel, hangar deck guys, aircraft handlers, and engineers, all swarming over the various levels and trying to remedy the situation.

  Drake had only been staring at all this for about ten seconds when Master Chief Shields came scuttling up to brief him.

  “It’s wedged good, Commander.”

  Drake blinked heavily. “What caused this?”

  The Master Chief shrugged. “Better to ask what didn’t. We’ve had magazine explosions, construction disasters, incoming artillery fires from the destroyer, Hellfires targeting the flight deck – and that was before the two Russian missiles hit us.”

  “Okay, I take your point.”

  “Basically, it’s some kind of structural warping. From blast damage. It looks like the elevator shaft is totally fused.”

  “Fine,” Drake said. “Get my plane off it, and onto one of the other ones.”

  “Not that easy, sir. I’m afraid your plane weighs over 38,000 pounds. The only crane we had that could safely lift that kind of weight went over the side in that botched job trying to patch the hull.”

  “Fuck. What about the self-driving cranes?”

  “Out of the question. They’d just pull themselves over. Anyway, right now, I’m trying to safeguard the damned thing – make sure it doesn’t come crashing down to the hangar deck, and take out more irreplaceable ratings and equipment. We’ve absolutely got to do that first.”

  Drake clenched his jaw. “I’m just about out of fighter/bomber aircraft, Chief. When do I get this one back?”

  Shields took a breath. “I wish I could give you a good estimate. But it’s yet another job we’ve never done, and never imagined we’d have to. Once I’ve made the platform safe and stable, then it’s gonna be a matter of coring out the shaft. And that’s some serious industrial metalwork.”

  “Chief.”

  Shields sighed. “Between four and twelve hours. Sir.”

  Drake’s phone went. It was Campbell in CIC. Drake took the call, stepping away from the construction melee, moving aft along the deck edge, where he could watch the action while he talked. He could also see the water way down beneath them, which was strangely soothing.

  “Go ahead, LT.”

  “Commander, we need to get that one prepped bird off the deck, and into the air – NOW.”

  Drake bristled. “LT, I’m not sending our most junior pilot out, alone and unescorted. Hell, I’m not sending either of our last two attack aircraft out, except in the direst extremity.”

  “It may be too late then. And let me tell you why.”

  “I’m listening,” Drake said.

  But the tumult around the elevator had swollen in volume, and he needed to back further away to hear. But as he started to move away, his eye was caught by one of the aircraft mechanics doing something to the one F-35 on deck. The man wore a grimy jumpsuit and stood in one-quarter profile, but when he turned to leave, he half faced Drake.

  And Drake froze dead.

  It was Stan – who was famously, and far and away, their best aircraft maintenance tech, always called in for thorny or urgent problems, on every type of aircraft they flew. He seemed to have a preternatural ability to keep them all flying.

  He was also dead.

  * * *

  Drake reeled, staring, his chin slack on his chest.

  It had been reported to him in no uncertain terms that Stan had been standing so close to a massive explosion in the airfield fight on Beaver Island that there had literally been nothing to bring home, or to bury. He’d been vaporized.

  As Drake stared and blinked heavily at him now, waiting for this sick illusion to go away like the earlier one had, he was vaguely aware of Campbell talking in his ear: “…ffective range of the Shipwreck is two hundred kilometers. But those S-four—” But her voice faded out again, as the ringing Drake had been hearing on and off dialed back up again – good and loud. It drowned out everything.

  As the figure beside the plane steadfastly refused to stop being a dead man, finally Drake tore his eyes away. His gaze went instead over the edge of the ship, down to the ocean surface below.

  And he froze again – as he was able to make out two bodies floating in the water, just a few meters off their starboard side. His mouth opened, then closed. It was a long way down, but Drake somehow recognized them, one man and one woman. They were the two suicides that had been reported to him a few days earlier.

  One of them, the woman, looked up and mouthed something inaudible. But Drake could read her lips. She said: I’m done here. Drake’s phone dropped out of his hand and fell to the deck with a clatter. It almost went over the side.

  When he picked it up again, Campbell was saying, “—mander, I say again – DO YOU UNDERSTAND?”

  Drake finally remembered to take a breath. And then he spoke: “Yes, affirmative, all received.” In fact, he’d received very little of it. But he couldn’t bring himself to admit it. His facade of still being competent to command was thin enough.

  So instead he turned off the phone, put it in his pocket with trembling fingers – and, without another word, marched back to the island and took the stairs back up, the Master Chief’s words echoing in his ears:

  Blast damage.

  He had to get out of there. Mainly, he had to get to somewhere he could be alone, even just for a few minutes – before someone worked out that he was losing his fucking mind. All he needed was just a few minutes to breathe, and to pull himself together.

  And as he woodenly climbed the stairs, he took deep sucking breaths, telling himself over and over again:

  I’m fine. I’m fine. I’m fine.

  He had to be fine. Because there was no one else who could do this job. Abrams was a great executive officer, but he’d been on board the Kennedy less than a week. And none of Drake’s other senior leaders knew everything that was going on now, much less all that had come before. It was Drake who had saved the ship, over and over again – from the mutiny, from the outbreak, from the storm of ten million dead.

  And it was he who had to finish this.

  He just had to hold it together a little longer.

  Never Go South of the River

  London - Waterloo Bridge

  Rebecca Ainsley felt a rising wave of fear, nerves bubbling up from down in her stomach and trickling outward into her limbs, as she realized the sun was now just inches from the horizon. Night would be here soon, and she was out of doors and far from her flat – the only place she considered safe, if any place in this world could be. She had no illusions that the dingy lodgings had been impregnable, but at least she could lock the doors and pretend it would keep the dangers of the outside world away from her boys.

  Now she was somewhere she would never have even considered going at this time of day, holding on tightly to the hands of her sons as they walked on either side of her.

  Her only source of comfort was that she h
ad somehow managed to join forces with the group of survivors from the Channel Tunnel – having promised them she would try to get them into CentCom headquarters, where they had agreed to escort her, across a London that was falling into utter chaos.

  She looked around at the scruffy group of travelers in whose midst she now walked. Each of them had survived two years of darkness in the tunnel, scraping out a living eating tinned tuna fish left in an abandoned train carriage. And, trapped down in that half-flooded underworld, they’d had to fight off the dead every day.

  And all in nearly complete darkness.

  Rebecca spotted the young woman, Amarie, carrying her child against her, gripping the tiny and fragile girl, never putting her down even for a moment. This woman had not only survived those two years of darkness and filth – she had given birth there. And, after miraculously escaping the nightmare of their subterranean prison, this group had somehow gone on to survive more disasters in Canterbury, escaping from the very center of the outbreak there, followed by the carpet-bombing, finally walking out on foot.

  Even though Rebecca didn’t know these people, she was warming to them. They weren’t as harsh or aggressive as she had imagined they might be – would have to be to survive as they had for so long. And they were organized to an extent that made some military units seem chaotic – always keeping together, guarding their flanks as they moved in a tight group through the hostile streets of London, in what might be its last days. The bigger, stronger, and better-armed ones stayed out front, or on the perimeter, eyeing up anyone who looked like a threat, or who came too close.

  The group now stopped, twenty yards out onto Waterloo Bridge, and huddled along one side, many of them staring out across the River Thames, while the leaders – Hackworth, Colley, and a few others – conferred near the front, occasionally pointing across the bridge or down to the opposite bank.

  Rebecca hadn’t been to this part of the city since the end of normal life, and she was amazed as well as shocked at what she saw. Once, this bridge had been a busy thoroughfare of briskly moving vehicles, zipping in both directions over the river, but now it was devoid of traffic. There was little fuel left for civilian vehicles, so cars had become nearly worthless, and many had been abandoned by the roadside. This even extended out onto the bridges that spanned the Thames.