Operation Wild Tarpan

by Addison Gunn

  “They’re not here, yet. They’re in Boston, fixing up an abandoned car ferry for their heavy cargo. But a few of them are coming in on pilot boats shortly before daybreak.” Lewis gnawed on his lip. “They’ll be bringing in an EMP device. That should take out the FOB’s electronics, no problem.”

  “EMP weapons and running around dressed like civilians?” Miller muttered under his breath, paging through the file. “We’re acting like terrorists.”

  “One man’s terrorist is another man’s guerrilla, Mr. Miller.” Barrett’s lips flattened to a thin line. “Asymmetric warfare is never entirely above-board.”

  Miller and Lewis shared a glance. ‘Asymmetric warfare’? Black ops shit.

  SO FAR AS private conversations went, Hsiung’s ‘just one word, please?’ with Lewis wasn’t private at all.

  “But why aren’t you in command? You run Cobalt!”

  Lewis replied, voice too low to make out from the opposite end of the breakroom, causing Hsiung to explode with, “But I could run it for you!”

  Miller very deliberately kept his eyes on his work, sticking trays of 5.56 ammunition into the loader, then using the loader, a box of plastic and springs and gears, to force them into his drum magazines, ten rounds with each pull of the loader’s lever.

  “So we’re insurgents, now?” Morland asked, quietly.

  Du Trieux, following Miller’s lead, finished topping up one of her pistol magazines. “Not exactly.”

  Morland stared at Doyle. Doyle didn’t rise to take the bait, even when du Trieux looked up at him, then Miller. They all knew who’d be on the trigger, if it came down to assassinating Stockman.

  Doyle seemed entirely unconcerned. Part of his rifle’s innards lay disassembled on the table, and he calmly applied a silicone lubricant that didn’t provide a fungal growth medium.

  He must still have a drug supply, Miller thought with a brief stab of envy. Doyle kept his addiction under control, even if he’d been expelled from his military career because of it. He’d never been anything but sober on duty.

  Off duty? Entirely different story.

  Whether it was drugs, a stern mind-set, or some kind of archaic upper-crust English thing about viewing everyone else as subhuman animals, on the surface Doyle didn’t seem remotely concerned over killing.

  If it was the drugs, Miller was going to corner Doyle and demand a share of his own.

  “But—”

  “But nothing, Hsiung. You’re working with Miller—this one-sided grudge isn’t relevant. You put it aside, understand?”

  Hsiung shot Miller a razor-edged glare, biting her lip as she sucked down breath. “Fine,” she hissed at Lewis. “I’m putting it aside.”

  Lewis nodded once, sharply. “Good. That’s the end of it. Miller! Your team ready to move?”

  He leaned back, grimacing. “It ain’t even three in the morning.”

  “This isn’t a football game—no time-outs. You ready?”

  “The StratDevCo Rats said their boat’s getting in at five with the device, then it’s taking us over to Manhattan. Unless you think we can swim across the river, we’re cooling our heels until it gets here.”

  “And here I thought you were some kind of bad-ass spec-ops ninja. Hurry it up, Miller, the second that boat’s here, I want you across the river.”

  Miller nodded sharply. “Yes, sir. Understood.”

  Smirking as he shook his head, Lewis turned and left the room, leaving Hsiung standing by herself with a sour expression.

  After a few more moments’ sulking, she marched over and slumped down into a free chair, arms folded. “I should be doing your job,” she announced.

  Warily, Miller looked up. He felt the rest of the team’s eyes on him.

  Hsiung continued to glare.

  “Okay,” he answered her.

  “Okay?” she hissed.

  Du Trieux cleared her throat. “What’s your problem with him, anyway?”

  Hsiung shook her head as if the answer was obvious. “You don’t know?”

  “You want my job, fine, whatever,” Miller said. “Career goals, I get it. But do you think I’m incompetent?”

  Her eyes turned acid. The obvious response, the one he’d steeled himself against—that he was incompetent—didn’t arrive. Instead she grit her teeth, and snapped, “You didn’t earn it.”

  “How you figure that?”

  “You walked into close protection for Gray with your pretty-boy face, then you took Cobalt-2. It all got fucking handed to you. Some of us”—she stabbed a finger into her chest—“put in the work and got fuck-all, because of you. That’s my problem with you.”

  Doyle grinned. “You think he has a pretty face?”

  Hsiung shook her head with a sneer.

  Miller blinked, dumbfounded. “I... I’m sorry.”

  She was right. He had been handed things. Lewis seemed to have a soft spot for him, and after Miller had gotten along so well with Gray’s children, it was hard not to have opportunities fall into his lap.

  And here he was, underqualified and overpromoted into running an operation he’d never been trained for. Of course, neither had she. None of Cobalt were drawn from special forces. Hsiung’s pedigree was strictly in private security and training. The closest the team had to black ops specialists were Doyle, with his ended-before-it-began military career, and du Trieux’s adventures in liberating the Middle East.

  Miller looked back at Hsiung as she angrily shuffled her arms across her chest, guilt gnawing at him. “Hsiung?” he said.

  “What?”

  “Thanks for helping us out. We could use someone like you on Cobalt-2.”

  There wasn’t much less hate in her gaze, but the fire cooled, a little. She raised an eyebrow. “Flattery? Really? You think I can be swayed that easily?”

  Miller shrugged. “It was worth a shot.”

  Hsiung rolled her eyes.

  Sensing the worst had passed, Miller pushed the loader, empty drum magazines, and boxed ammunition across the table. “Here. Go ahead and do my job. Frees me up to get thirty minutes’ shut-eye.”

  The table was silent, bar Doyle’s amused snort.

  “Oh, and don’t forget to go down to quarantine processing to pick up our refugee clothes,” Miller added, standing and stretching. “I got a few of the staffers to delouse a couple of boxes for us.”

  He felt the weight of Hsiung’s glare as he drifted out of the room. After a moment, he heard her softly chuckle.

  At least it was a start towards cooperation, Miller told himself. Before the famines, she’d have slugged him for pulling that.

  4

  “PEACEFUL, ALMOST,” DU Trieux said from the railing.

  Miller wanted to agree with her, but the boat crossing the East River felt more vulnerable than anything else. The sun wasn’t quite up yet, but the eastern horizon was painted in blood and gold, a smattering of silver in the clouds. He thought he’d seen something churning around in the water under the Astoria compound’s docks, like an oversized eel, and he wondered what the Archaeobiome had in store by way of marine life. The thought wasn’t doing him any good. Neither was worrying about drones spotting the boat, alone on the water.

  The pilot boat wasn’t particularly big, a little like a converted tugboat, but it was more than big enough for a dozen crates of the Rats’ gear, shipped down the coast from Boston. The captain had been happy to move Cobalt across the river before making the return trip home. It turned out that through a byzantine tangle of financial alliances, Schaeffer-Yeager owned a controlling stake in the port authority he worked for. Not that he knew who Cobalt were, or what they were up to. With their guns wrapped up in rags, the EMP parts hidden in backpacks and satchels slung over their shoulders, and wearing the stinking clothes that had been stripped off refugees during quarantine, for all the captain knew they were just another group of refugees heading out to look for their families.

  ONCE THE NEW Cobalt-2 team—Miller, du Trieux, Morland, Doyle, and Hsiung
—had disembarked back onto land, Miller eyed the NYC skyline. It lacked the character of pre-dawn Manhattan, and wasn’t at all what he remembered.

  The new wildlife had settled in and taken ownership. The city’s towers and skyscrapers shaded the streets to night black at this hour, a dark forest compared to the relatively open skies of Queens bordering the Astoria Compound.

  They hiked further into the city, huddling under high apartment blocks. The city’s natural sounds—the blares of impatient taxi cab horns, the roar of constant foot traffic on the sidewalks—were missing everywhere they went, replaced by distant animal cries and the hiss of the wind.

  It was like a wasteland.

  With Morland and du Trieux on point, scouting corners before the others reached them, Hsiung and Doyle followed Miller, who checked every angle around him and covered the two in front with his M27. Miller’s immediate concern wasn’t military ambush, but being hunted by New York’s wildlife.

  Much of it had migrated into the city after the dust storm. Big animals, some Miller recognised and some he didn’t. They’d scavenged on the dead left behind the storm, pacing along a few days behind its trailing edge, growing to monstrous size. They’d found safe haven within the city. And food. It didn’t matter how many people the city had bled from famine, how many had fled Manhattan, there were always more hiding on some stockpiles of food, crowding the safer parts of the Bronx or Brooklyn, staying put and waiting in hopes that the aid trucks would come through. At night, anyone alone tended to wind up prey for the ancient predators trying their luck in the streets.

  Biologists with any understanding of the Archaeobiome were in short supply, or at least outside of Miller’s easy reach, but he knew enough to get the others to shine flashlights down alleys they approached, to keep weapons ready, if held low and close to the body to make sure that they weren’t obviously armed at a glance.

  They found a pile of discarded bones, probably human, around a cracked storm drain. They left it alone, though there was the temptation to roll a grenade—a gift for the rats-things—into the dark gap.

  Central Park was a no-go area altogether, both to avoid military spotters and because of the shroud fungus steadily colonizing it. Wildlife in the park was doubtful. The stench of the fungus and its suffocating spores were obvious from three blocks away.

  They needed to head north, into Harlem, but Lexington and 3rd Avenue were no good. Infected military patrols were taking the avenues south.

  Near Park Avenue, du Trieux signalled she’d spotted a patrol, and they bunched up on the next corner.

  Doyle tugged two pins from his rifle’s frame, causing the whole blocky thing to fold near in half before he tucked it under his armpit.

  They ducked their heads and shuffled across the road in single file, like the meek refugees they obviously were. The moment they were across the street, Miller swallowed the lump in his throat and pulled the rag-wrapped M27 up from beside his leg, ducking into a niche beside an abandoned news stand.

  The team fell silent as the patrol Bravo hissed past, pressing themselves in against the walls, waiting... waiting.

  But they’d faded into the background of the city. They were just civilians, at a glance.

  Not that Miller wanted to risk more than a glance’s exposure. Once certain the Bravo had no plans to double back, they continued on their way to the designated EMP detonation location, following the GPS Hsiung had tucked in her sleeve.

  After thirty more minutes of fence-hopping and alley-shuffling, they arrived at a towering building near the outskirts of Marcus Garvey Park.

  Breaking in was easy. Windows everywhere were smashed, and the smell of burnt bird shit was overpowering. Titan-birds were clearly using the building as a nest. They’d broken into rooms on the upper floors, and pale streaks of their droppings marred the facade. But someone, the military maybe, had made an attempt to burn the birds out with a flamethrower or something. The ash still smouldered in places, and the higher they climbed the building’s stairwells, the more obvious the damage was. The army had cleared the upper floors with some kind of explosive shell. Metal splinters had chewed the walls to shreds.

  As they neared the roof, du Trieux and Doyle held up their hands, signalling for silence.

  Halting, Miller could dimly hear the creak of shoe-leather ahead.

  It was too much to hope that the building was empty, but there weren’t that many places that offered total overwatch of the park. It was natural that the military would have moved in first, after evicting the wildlife.

  Silently, Doyle pulled a knife from within his ragged clothes, and du Trieux followed suit. Miller held a finger to his lips, and gestured Hsiung and Morland into covering positions. He slung his M27 over his back, and very cautiously unsheathed the combat knife he’d picked up from inventory.

  He’d expected to use it for opening cans.

  Du Trieux edged along the corridor and up against a doorframe, her knife gripped ice-pick fashion in her right hand, pistol in her left. Doyle was beside her, his rifle left leaning against the wall while he cautiously passed his slender dagger from hand to hand, thumb lightly against the flat of the blade.

  Christ.

  It was all moving too fast. Miller hadn’t ever killed anyone, not like this. On the previous day, that had... that had been an accident. He couldn’t picture attacking someone with a knife, slitting their throat—

  He didn’t have to picture it, in the end.

  A soldier passed within striking distance of the door, along with two of his friends. The one closest shouted, “Hey!” and raised his rifle.

  Not hesitating, du Trieux pushed the barrel aside with her handgun and stabbed him twice through the face. Once in the cheek, then again in the eye.

  The soldier beside him probably never knew Doyle was there.

  Pushing at the back of his head, Doyle glided the tip of that knife up the back of his neck and in before savagely twisting it left and right.

  The third solider rounded the bend with wide eyes and ran smack into Miller.

  Raising his knife, Miller slashed the air across and to the left, hoping to make contact with the soldier’s throat, but he miscalculated the distance by millimetres, grazing the flesh and leaving a thin scratch.

  The soldier grasped at Miller’s hands, grabbing the hilt of the blade. The two of them struggled, fighting for control of the weapon and sliding deeper into the hallway, toward Hsiung and Morland.

  Wrenching his wrists, Miller aimed the blade outward, at the soldier’s soft underside to his chin, only to have his balance shift as the solider shifted his weight, and he lost the advantage.

  The tip of the knife poked at Miller’s cheek, drawing blood. He could smell the stench of the soldier’s breath as he gritted his teeth and dug deep for added leverage.

  There was a shot, and the pressure released.

  The soldier’s body flew back, then collapsed.

  Miller, propped up only by the wall of the hallway behind him, gasped for a breath and looked behind him for an explanation.

  Hsiung holstered her sidearm and frowned.

  Doyle swore. “If they didn’t know we were here before, they do now.”

  Morland stepped past them all and entered the room, flinging his satchel off his shoulder, and removing part of the EMP from the sack. “Better make this quick, then.”

  Still in shock, Miller eyed the bloody carnage surrounding them.

  The soldiers took longer to die than he ever would have expected, gurgling where they’d dropped, shuddering. Du Trieux’s victim spasmed against the floor while she pulled her knife free with a grunt and crunch of bone.

  Doyle wiped the blood from his blade on his victim’s pant leg.

  Lying in front of him, the soldier who had fought Miller had a blast hole the side of a fist out one side of his skull.

  Miller looked lamely at the knife in his hand. He pushed the back of his wrist against his mouth, forcing down another breath, and pointed at the
bodies. “Get them away from the door,” he managed to say.

  Doyle looked up from his post-mortem examination of a flourishing rash on one of the dead men, a lurid, flaking yellow, and nodded. “Here. Hsiung, get the legs, would you?”

  While the rest of his team moved the bodies, Miller knelt down and helped Morland unpack the device.

  The EMP weapon came in three parts: the antenna, the wave-guide, and the explosively pumped flux compression generator.

  The antenna was a plastic-covered brick that plugged into the rest of the system with inch-thick cables. The waveguide needed to be set up around it, like a satellite dish, and set up on a tripod. Miller edged up to the nearest window, and glanced out at Marcus Garvey Park.

  On the drone images, the Infected base hadn’t seemed so busy, but upon further inspection, the place teemed with activity.

  The park was the highest natural point in Manhattan, though some of the buildings around it were far taller than the central rocky hill. A baseball field beneath the hill had sprouted dozens of command tents. An outdoor pool had two or three hydrogen-crackers set up and pulling the pool water through their reactors to produce fuel for the Bravos lined up nearby. Two-man tents were strung up among the fungus-blighted remnants of trees, and rows of antenna-covered trailers occupied the summit of the hill, crowded together on the stone-tiled plaza.

  Those were the key target, the electronic warfare and communications unit. There was a watchtower up there, too—something antique, an original part of the park—and it hosted a pair of snipers.

  The military encampment had spilled out onto the surrounding streets, a pair of tanks waiting for repair while another was in the process of disassembly by a work-crew of Infected soldiers and civilians caught up in the ride. In truth, they seemed to be doing more to destroy the vehicle than repair it, frantically picking it apart piece by piece.

  Bringing up his binoculars, Miller swept the park, searching for officers. Some were difficult to pick out of the groups wandering the FOB, but others were surrounded by guards. It looked like some of them were forcing their fellow soldiers away, using their guards to keep an area around them clear for thirty or forty feet. Those were easy to spot once Miller saw the pattern, like bubbles on top of boiling water, clear circles in the chaos.