Toy Soldiers
2: Aftermath
Devon C Ford
Dedicated to SC.
Defying modern medicine at every turn and thriving on sheer stubbornness.
COPYRIGHT
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. Any names, characters, incidents and locations portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. No affiliation is implied or intended to any organisation or recognisable body mentioned within.
Copyright © DHP Publishing 2018
Devon C Ford asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive and non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on screen or hard copy.
No part of the text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered or stored in or introduced into any information storage or retrieval system, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, known or otherwise yet invented, without the express permission of Devon C Ford and DHP Publishing. It’ll end up being pirated anyway, but I just think that’s really rude so please don’t. K thanks.
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Prologue
“Sir, I have Castlemartin on the horn now,” said the radio operator in a distinctly southern states accent. The way he pronounced the name, Cassulmart’n, was an assault on the ears of Commander Ethan Briggs of Her Majesty’s Royal Navy.
The ‘Sir’ being addressed wasn’t Briggs, he was merely there as liaison to the United States Navy, having been transported by one of the two Sea King helicopters belonging to the American destroyer. It had been sailing back from active service in the Persian Gulf where it had been patrolling as protection for the oil drilling operation, and found itself diverted to a crisis with infinitely further-reaching consequences than petty squabbles over natural resources.
“Okay, apprise them of our situation and request that they monitor this channel for orders,” came the steady, almost flat voice of the ship’s captain.
Briggs, as much as he hated the way they pronounced Castlemartin, breathed a small sigh of relief that nobody had referred to the area by its county of Pembrokeshire. Twice he had been on the inexplicable verge of raging at the American crewman on the radio for saying it as three distinctly clear and separate syllables of Pem-Broke-Shire as though the place was a village in a Tolkien novel.
“Commander Briggs?” the captain asked politely, “how are we set?”
Briggs checked his watch and flicked his eyes back to the pad in front of him before answering.
“Sir, there is no way the convoy can make it back in time without assistance,” he responded, seeing the captain merely nod and keep his eyes facing resolutely forward at the distant shoreline of south western Britain, as if his vision could detect this new and unfathomable enemy.
He turned back to the radio operator again to ask, “Are the air assets a go or not?”
The man looked up from the control panel he was staring at in that curious way people did to hear better.
“Negative, Sir,” he said sternly, making Briggs wonder whether the concept of melodrama had been an entirely American invention, “Harrier strike group still engaged on the continent.”
“Well, shi-it,” the captain said, drawing out the word into two long syllables, “Crewman, send in the tanks.”
Briggs’ eyes met the captain’s.
“Never thought I’d ever give that order,” he said with a rueful smile. The crewman manning the radio nodded once and answered, “Aye, aye, Sir,” before chattering into the microphone.
Briggs felt an overwhelming sense of dread at potentially having to use up that resource, but he saw no other way to ensure the success of the mission.
The swarm was still out of range of their guns, the use of cruise missile strikes had been vetoed at the highest level, despite assurances of their accuracy, and they had no chance of a rescue by helicopter without abandoning almost every man in the convoy and exposing their precious cargo to hazards beyond their control.
That helicopter rescue was still an option, but it was a final straw that wasn’t their call to make.
It was a plan that Briggs didn’t want to consider using, as it would mean the deaths of more than thirty men that his plan had placed in harm’s way.
Damned if they do, Briggs told himself, and damned if they don’t… but I rather suspect we are all damned.
Chapter 1
“Wind right to left, gentle,” said the mound of green and brown brush behind Marine Enfield in a low voice, “distance six-hundred yards.”
“Six-fifteen,” Enfield muttered back, his right eye not leaving the large scope on top of his Accuracy International, or L96a, sniper rifle. His right hand moved on muscle memory, making the finite adjustments as he clicked the dials on the big optic, all the while keeping the target in sight. They were far enough away that the likelihood of being detected by the sound of the impending gunshot was small, but still they couldn’t risk not relocating after taking out a target.
The teamwork displayed by the two marines, Craig Enfield being the shooter and Martin Leigh his spotter, was exceptional and spoke of the many hours they had spent together in uncomfortable silence and danger. They had both missed out, as they saw it, on seeing deployment to the Falklands seven years before, as they’d still been in their first year of training together, but the pair had seen more than enough of the green landscape and streets of Northern Ireland.
Now, instead of their enemy being terrorist bombers or shooters, instead of being the mighty steel boot of the Soviet Union stamping towards Europe, an enemy they had been training for years to combat should the Cold War turn hot, they were now stalking zombies.
Screechers, as the army lot had called them, and it had stuck as a name they used for them, mostly because when the things detected you, they let out a squealing hissing, ripping noise. They didn’t know if it was excitement or, more frighteningly, a call to other zombies to advertise the presence of food, but they did know it was a fucking awful sound that stopped if you stuck a bayonet through their eye.
“I’ve got it,” Enfield said, in a cool murmur as the reticule of his scope hovered just above and to the left of the head of the Screecher.
“Zero, this is Whisky,” Leigh said softly into his radio, “we have a Lima in sight, over.”
~
Limas. The military’s pathological need to provide a nickname or a phonetic tag for something ran deeper than the coded letter and number designations they gave to all of their weapons and equipment. Lima meant a fast one, the Leaders as they had been dubbed. Until the Marines had landed in their helicopter on the small island a fraction off the south coast, they hadn’t encountered one of these before.
Studies of their new and unexpected enemy had shown that they operated some kind of biologically determined rank structure of their own, and each Leader would somehow gather up to a hundred Screechers who followed them around like ducklings. The Leaders weren’t just faster, they were smarter too. Some reckoned they could open doors, and there was even an emerging theory among the joint army, navy and marine forces that they had some way to give orders to their followers.
Those followers were deadly in numbers, but on their own weren’t too difficult to kill. A heavy blow to the head, one strong enough to crack the skull, would usually render them inert, but that kind of swing burned a lot of energy and anyone trying to survive out there using a sledgehammer would find themselves tiring too quickly, and probably being eaten. The careful application of b
ayonet to brain was far more civilised, but a bullet would do the trick just as easily. The problem with bullets, especially the heavy ammunition that the RMPs 7.62mm SLRs or Self-Loading Rifles fired, was that they tended to be accompanied by lots of noise.
Noise, especially gunfire, carried a long way and noise was what attracted the Screechers like flies to shit.
Another theory about the Screechers was that they were blind, or at least had very poor eyesight, because anyone who had seen one up close reported the dead look in their cloudy eyes.
But noise was what got people killed. It was what attracted them to group together, as one stumbling zombie would knock into something and attract another nearby zombie to the noise. Those small noises they made would keep them clumped into a group, and each group of any more than a dozen of them almost always had a Lima in the middle of them, ready to break out and run at anything still living. The reverse characteristic of that strange attraction they had was that when the Lima got taken out, the Screechers tended to bumble around until other noises caught their attention and they simply wandered off to find more groups or get stuck somewhere on their own.
Three times there had been reports of mass-gatherings, or swarms as they had been called. The early warning plane that the Americans had been flying over the UK at an altitude so high that it couldn’t be detected by the naked eye or ear, had watched these swarms gather, reporting that on two occasions those massed crowds had simply dissipated, as though the Screechers had lost interest or the noise they made collectively was simply too confusing and overwhelming to hold their attention.
The third swarm, luckily as they had later discovered, was the smallest by far, and it had gathered and massed in their direction as the sound of an armoured convoy had attracted them after more than one rolling battle. The small cannons and heavy machine guns of the Yeomanry had taken a devastating toll on the army of the dead, but they had made too much noise in doing so, and brought every infected corpse within a fifty-mile radius directly to their doorway.
The marines of 40 Commando, deployed to protect the assets of 3 Commando Brigade Air Squadron who flew the attack helicopters, had been splintered off from their main group and hastily ordered into two Sea Kings from the naval airbase they were defending.
Their most senior command, seemingly being run from the huge flagship aircraft carrier floating in the channel, had issued the squad of marines, some of which had been volunteered for the ground convoy bringing supplies and fuel for the two helicopters, with orders to reinforce the light tanks and await further orders. Apparently, command had decided that the only intact armour squadron on mainland Britain deserved a sprinkling of Royal Marines to add flavour and diversity, not to mention adding some firepower to complement the aircraft.
Of the suspected inter-services rivalry, there had been precisely none. No man in his right mind would think to raise an objection at being given an order by an Admiral instead of a General, given their current and unprecedented situation, nor would marines on the ground show disobedience to the officers and NCOs of the army unit.
The only rivalry, the only source of inter-forces discontent, had come from within. The only elements of the army that were regulars, in that they were full-time soldiers and not reservists, were the two tank crews led by the unsmiling and permanently unamused Sergeant Horton, and the charismatic and effective Captain Palmer. The main downside to Palmer was his entitled and condescending younger brother who, by some cruel twist of fate, was the only officer of their Yeomanry squadron to have made it when they were called. In contrast to the quick mind and tactical instincts of Julian Simpkins-Palmer, to use their full family name, Oliver Simpkins-Palmer was a spoilt boy with little or no sense of self-preservation and an abundance of aristocratic arrogance.
Those tank crews singled themselves out, refusing to mix with the reservists and billeting themselves separately, despite the efficient Sergeant Croft who ran the administrative troop providing them with barracks space in a building closer to their posts. Rumour was rife among the Yeomanry that they’d even been heard referring to them as toy soldiers, although the Squadron Sergeant Major had yet to hear that himself. They ignored overtures from the reservists who approached them, flatly refused to allow them inside their big Chieftain tanks, and generally behaved in such a way that a wall had been erected between men with everything in common but for the one thing that a few of them thought important.
That tension snapped inside of two weeks, when a soldier from a Sabre troop who drove one of the Fox wagons, threw a punch at the gunner of Horton’s tank. The punch barely connected, but it served to erupt into a ten-man brawl which required the intervention of the Squadron Sergeant Major to halt the proceedings.
“What in the name of Christ is going on here?” SSM Dean Johnson’s voice boomed out inside the pub and silenced the building, along with the surrounding streets. Men froze, bloodied knuckles on taught fists stopping in mid-air. Johnson’s eye glowered as he scanned the rom, fixing each man with a direct look until he found the two who would not meet his gaze.
“Nevin,” he said in an acidic growl, “and you,” he added as he pointed at the gunner on Horton’s crew, “outside. The rest of you wastes of good oxygen, clean this place up. I want it gleaming.”
With that, he turned and walked out of the heavy wood and glass doors without even a backward glance to see if the two men he had singled out were following. He knew they would, or else whatever punishment they hoped to avoid would triple in intensity, if the SSM had more time to dream up something elaborate. Turning, he saw the two battered men marching towards him and both stamped to attention in unison, as though crisp drill would lessen the consequences of their actions. The two men, Nevin and a short-legged bull of a Lance Corporal named Millward, both wore blank expressions, but Johnson knew that both would be wondering how he knew that they were responsible for starting the fight.
In truth, the SSM had been fetched from the nearby hall that had been adopted as the temporary head of operations for the island’s forces, and that man had quietly whispered the names of the guilty parties.
But then again, a Sergeant Major would not reveal that he did not have the power to read the minds of his subordinates.
“You pair of stupid,” he began slowly in a low voice, “dim-witted, bloody imbeciles,” he paused to look at them in turn before continuing in a voice that grew in both volume and intensity, “you fucking moronic, useless flaps of gristle can both consider yourselves on a charge.” He turned to Millward, not fully confident that ripping a man a new arsehole under a Captain’s command and not his own would be viewed kindly.
“Confine yourselves to barracks when you are not under orders and I will deal with you another time,” he ordered him. The man half-turned to his right, stamped his boot loudly and marched away, demonstrating parade-ground drill precision. Johnson turned back to his own man, who shrank slightly.
“Trooper Nevin,” Johnson said in a voice scarce above a whisper, “I can only assume, having never met the man, that your father wished you had been a wank. You, trooper Nevin, are a five-foot-six walking advert for condoms!”
Nevin said nothing, but swallowed nervously. The insults had been designed to prompt a laugh from him, daring him to smirk when lined up in the SSM’s sights, but the man clearly had some love for life left in him, so he kept very quiet.
“Stand at ease,” he told him, seeing the man relax, “you are also confined to barracks until such time as I decide exactly how angry I am with you; because at the moment it would be inhumane to do half of what I’m thinking.” He stepped back and drew himself up formally.
“Detail,” he snapped, prompting the ingrained habit of any soldier to tense in anticipation of the next order, “atteeeeenSHUN!” Johnson ordered. Just as Nevin’s right leg rose to a ninety-degree angle and stopped to stamp back down to the street, Johnson’s large right fist shot out and upwards, burying itself deep in Nevin’s diaphragm and doubling him over to leave
him gasping on the ground to draw in enough breath to vomit the single pint of bitter he had been permitted.
“Dismissed,” Johnson said casually as he walked back towards the command post.
From the shadows a short distance away, two marines with an intrinsic understanding of one another smiled as they watched the trooper writhing about in pain. They were a pair, a duo, inseparable since they had joined on the same intake to undergo one of the hardest military selection processes imaginable, and their bond of friendship had grown even more unbreakable when they had attended the marksman training course where the shooter and his spotter were hardened into a devilishly sharp weapon to be used against the enemies of Her Majesty.
~
“Permission to engage the Lima?” asked Leigh into the radio, then waited as he listened to the response, before slowly moving the strong binoculars back up to his eyes.
“All yours,” he said quietly to his shooter, who lay just ahead of him and to his left, “fire when rea…”
A booming report erupted from just ahead of him, making him reacquire the Lima in his binoculars in time to see it lie flat on its back. It was all but headless. Taking his eyes away, he saw the slow and controlled movements of Enfield as his right hand carefully lifted and drew back the bolt of the rifle to eject the spent brass and collect it smoothly with his index and middle fingers. Racking the bolt quickly would eject the casing to spin it out away from the breech to twinkle in the light, and that might reveal their position to an enemy sniper or, more appropriately in their current setting, attract the attention of a hungry walking corpse. The sniper’s natural inclination towards silence and invisibility was a skill that couldn’t be taught, but it could be honed.
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