Healers

by Munson, Brad

  “So today is the day you take it back?”

  McKendrick set her mouth in a thin, tight line. “Very soon. Yes.”

  Within the hour he met all the Joint Chiefs, first in a group and then individually. Some were carefully friendly; others formal and polite but stolidly uninformative. Everyone acknowledged the vital importance of Omaha and the vaccine; there seemed to be no question about that. But whether they were allies, subordinates, or threats, Mbutu still could not be sure. That remained to be seen.

  Then, rather abruptly, he found himself standing in McCoy’s vast, buzzing Situation Room and looking at a monitor almost as huge as the wall on which it was mounted. There were half a dozen images on it, video feeds from different places, seen through different cameras, broadcast by wildly different means.

  Major Bentley, thin as a rail and white as chalk, was running the Op. He hadn’t been happy about letting an outsider – particularly a civilian – like Mbutu into the Situation Room during such a crucial mission, but Bentley was an Army man, and Army men followed orders. The President had insisted.

  His half-hidden scowl at the African rep from Omaha was a stark contrast to Denise McKendrick’s openness and eagerness to please. Even now, the carefully groomed young woman with the perfect eyebrows and deep blue eyes seemed strangely pleased and excited at the entire operation.

  Mbutu bent to speak softly in her ear. She was barely five-three; he tried not to tower over her. “How do you receive these signals?” he asked, gesturing almost furtively at the huge screen.

  “We have control of a network of commercial communications satellites,” she said, just as softly. They both glanced at Bentley, who was choosing to ignore them for the moment. Twenty-five other soldiers were ranged around the room, each of them in front of monitors of their own, each wearing headphones and whispering into pin-microphones. “More than one network, actually. Even a year after the breakdown, you’d be amazed how many cameras are still working and sending out signals. Solar panels, batteries, who knows what else?”

  “Google Earth? Google at all?”

  “They went down early. Never heard from them again.”

  Mbutu nodded. That was too bad; Google Earth was barely getting off the ground when Morningstar came to America. He could only imagine how valuable it might have been.

  “Assets are nearing the drop point,” one pot-bellied lieutenant called out. “Drop in five.”

  No one said a word, but the tension in the room silently, invisibly soared.

  “We’re a go,” Bentley said, strong and clear. “Give the order.”

  *****

  Stone and Allen were the first ones out of the Lockheed C130 Hercules, the first to pop their chutes. They had both been involved in planning this op since the very beginning, from the moment that Forrest had invited them to join. They’d committed every step of it to memory, every go-no-go point along the way, weeks earlier. Stone himself had hand-picked every soldier in the op who would be under his command.

  Now it was actually happening.

  There was no snow on the ground a thousand feet below them. They’d left snow behind them long ago. This was California, after all, a different, warmer world, even in January, and the brown and beige land below didn’t look cold at all; it looked more like the cheek of an old man seen from a thousand feet up – wrinkled, rough, and slightly concave.

  Stone loved the C-130. the loud, ugly tub that had picked them up hours earlier. He remembered the exact same airship from his time in the Middle East; he knew it had been carrying troops and supplies since the Second World War, with no sign of stopping. Now it was the only thing he trusted in this crazy world. He knew it would take him exactly where he needed to go.

  He glanced sideways at Allen, his oldest living friend and his partner on the mission. The man was ten years younger than Stone himself, but every bit as tough. They had seen far too much together in the last year, much less the decades they’d spent separately in military ops, official and not-so-much, over the course of their lifetimes. And now ...

  The comm unit in his ear buzzed like an angry bee. “The word is go,” his comm officer told him. “Video check,” Comm said. “Light ‘em up.” Every member of the squad tapped a gloved finger against a special inset button on the right side of their helmets. Stone was well aware that these high-definition web cams were barely out of their boxes when America fell apart, and the few remaining tech wizards in the U.S. Army had managed to rig them for video feed during combat operations. There were precious few of them, each more valuable than gold. As he heard the confirmation tone in his earbud, he silently thanked whatever gods there were for the few remaining communications satellites that they still had under their control.

  “Good to go,” Comm said in his ear. He saw the other members of the squad nod and mumble acknowledgments into their pin-microphones just as he did.

  The huge door at the back of the transport growled as it opened, and the howl of the wind drowned out everything but the voices in his ear. “Thirty seconds to drop,” a deeper, darker voice told him. Stone stood up, steadying himself against the wind and the sway of the aircraft with one hand on the webbing that covered the sides of the Hercules. The others stood as well, readying themselves.

  He’d given them the only pep talk they were going to get back at their last refueling stop. Now it was just business. Strict, solemn, bloody business.

  “Let’s take this fucker,” he said to them on their private channel. “It’s ours.”

  He heard the countdown in his ear, but he didn’t need it. Stone was fully dialed in, and he could see from Allen’s swift, cool, concentrated movements than he was entirely in the moment as well.

  They ran to the end of the ramp and jumped at the same moment. He popped his black ‘chute at precisely the right second as they fell, and he saw the dark blossom of Allen’s ‘chute against the cerulean sky out of the corner of his eye, just a heartbeat later.

  It was ten minutes before dawn in the California desert. The entire eight-man squad would be on the ground and approaching the perimeter before the sun came up. The timing of the op had been chosen very carefully; the rising temperatures from the morning sunlight should confuse any heat-sensors that the RSA might be using inside Edwards; the northern approach should keep them from being silhouetted against the sky. The landing zone was equally strategic: their approach used natural arroyos and dry creek beds frequented by the local fauna, so whatever activity the Edwards’ monitors might see at sunrise might be mistaken for normal wildlife movement. Stone was no fool; he knew it was a small advantage at best, but they needed every break they could get. The success of the entire mission was based in no small part on his insertion squad going undetected for as long as possible. The old-fashioned element of surprise, he thought as he guided his chute to the LZ and braced for impact.

  *****

  “Right on time,” Finnegan said, smiling grimly at the video feed from Edwards. “Just as expected.”

  The Chairman was glowering at the same feed on his desk console. “So,” he grumbled. “At least your precious source on the inside did something right.”

  Finnegan chose to say nothing. It wasn’t the right time for another argument with the CIC. He just lowered he head and concentrated on the video monitor.

  Finnegan wasn’t surprised the Feds were trying to re-take Edwards. After Mount Weather, it was the single most important asset of the RSA, and he had a good sense of just how desperately the Feds needed it – just like the RSA needed it.

  Still, it made him burn with frustration. The RSA should be on the offense, damn it, not the defense. But right now, at this moment, they didn’t have the men or the matériel to make a real run at McCoy or even Omaha again. Not now. Not yet, he told himself. At this moment, the best they could manage was a holding action. As long as they kept Edwards and Mount Weather and their half-a-dozen othe
r core installations, they could still win this thing. He was sure of it.

  Seriously. They could.

  The commander on the ground at Edwards was named Chandler. He’d been a colonel before Morningstar, stalled out in a go-nowhere administrative position because of a lackluster career and a drinking problem too many people knew about. He had jumped at the chance to join the RSA, and he’d been instrumental at acquiring the passcodes and protocols that handed them control of the satellites, and this was his reward: control of the base. Finnegan was painfully aware that they really hadn’t had much choice. They didn’t have all that many senior officers still alive and even fewer they could trust, and getting them from Mount Weather in Virginia all the way to Edwards in California was a huge task. Better to go with the known devil, they’d decided, at least for the moment. Now Chandler’s real test had come. Was he truly capable of command?

  Finnegan checked his gut. He didn’t like the way he was feeling.

  “Chandler,” The Chairman said into his headset’s microphone, “you stop them before they breach the perimeter, yes? No mistakes.”

  “No mistakes,” Chandler said in Finnegan’s ear. Once again, Finn didn’t like the nervous edge he heard there, but he said nothing.

  There really wasn’t any choice. Chandler was all they had.

  *****

  Barry Chandler wiped the sweat off his high, damp forehead and tried to breathe. He wasn’t doing a very good job of it.

  They don’t know, he told himself as he muted his link to Mount Weather. The just don’t get it.

  And how could they? Chandler had been lying to them since the day he had given them Edwards.

  He remembered the moment with perfect clarity. It was when he had first spoken with The Chairman over this very same video link, when they had first laid out the offer in plain English – to be part of the RSA, to be a hero, to remake the future. He had accepted the offer immediately, even happily. This was his chance, his last-in-a-lifetime opportunity to be someone, and he wasn’t going to let it pass.

  He had the codes. He had no opposition. Just hours earlier, he had seen the infected take down the base commander and all his best people. He’d seen them rip the bodies to bloody tatters. There was no one else left. So Chandler had seized control, run the clean-up operations based entirely on the step-by-step orders that his dead superiors had left behind, and sent out a general distress call. The Chairman and the RSA had been the first to answer, by mere minutes.

  Now the base was his.

  It had been The Chairman himself who had asked the question. “So clean-up went well. Good. And security has been restored?”

  “Yes,” he had said. That much had been true. Then the real question had come: “Did you suffer serious losses?”

  It took him no time at all to answer. “No,” he had lied. “Just a few ground troops. We’re good. Ninety-five percent.” That was the moment – the instant he chose not to tell that almost a third of the base had been overrun before they had locked it down and driven back the sprinters and shamblers. He didn’t have over three hundred soldiers, armed and ready. In fact, he had slightly less than a hundred, and some of them were badly wounded. The technicians and sat com personnel were safe and behind three sets of barricaded doors, sure, but the soldiers ...

  He had known, in that moment, that if he told The Chairman and his people the ugly truth they would never have given him his own command. He would lose his last chance. He also knew they had no way to verify it, not in those chaotic first weeks after the breakdown. And he was sure he could replace those missing troops with … others, from somewhere. Refugees, survivors from other bases, someone.

  Of course those someones had never arrived. Edwards was isolated in the high California desert, and the town itself, all of civilization outside the gate, had fallen early, under the first wave of infected. The few human refugees who had shown up later were crazed with fear and hunger and frequently diseased. Chandler couldn’t take any chances with them. They all died at the gate. And now …

  Now was the moment of truth. Quite literally.

  He opened the channel to one of his few reliable squad leaders. “Del Gado,” he said, “they’re on the ground. Coming in from the northwest. You—”

  “I have them,” Del Gado said. “We’re on it.”

  “Good. Go.”

  We can do this, he told himself. Del Gado may have been new, a jumped-up NCO just like Chandler himself, but he was okay. And now he knew exactly where the invaders were, and he and his men had all the guns and ammunition and vehicles they could wish for. Besides, the intel from Mount Weather said it was just one little squad. As long as there are no surprises, he told himself as he wiped his brow again, as long as we keep it simple, it’ll be fine. Just fine.

  *****

  Adan Forrest, five miles to the northeast and ten thousand feet in the air, sat in the co-pilot’s seat of the only other Lockheed C130 that was in the air over California that day – the one no one but he, Stone, and the Veep knew about. He had to stop himself from asking the same question he’d wanted to ask for the last two hours.

  His pilot rolled his eyes. He already knew what Forrest wanted so desperately to ask. “Fifteen minutes,” he said. “I promise. No weather problems, no turbulence, no headwinds. Fifteen minutes.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  Forrest looked over his shoulder at their deadly cargo. The entire huge, rear compartment of the transport had been reconfigured by a team out of McChord that had no idea what they were up to, but did what they were told and did it beautifully. Forrest had supervised it personally, from a distance, while he and Stone had put together the initial assault team and trained them up.

  “They’ll never know what hit ‘em,” he said.

  “Let’s hope,” the pilot said, and settled himself to his task. “Me, I’m just the delivery boy.”

  Yeah, Forrest added silently. The most important delivery boy in modern history.

  *****

  Stone squinted against the lifting darkness. He was not surprised that Edwards had adopted the same double-perimeter fence structure that Omaha and most other post-Morningstar installations were using. He just wasn’t happy about it. It meant they would have to get through two separate chain-link barriers rather than one, with two sets of cameras and potential guards attached to each.

  They were still in shadow. The nearby foothills and low-lying winter sun was giving them an unexpected advantage, making forward movement easier than they had anticipated.

  Lester, his signals guy, was right beside him. “Clear?” Stone asked.

  “Not finding any cams or mics,” the wild-haired teen told him. Lester had been scanning every channel he could think of since the minute they’d touched down, looking for security feeds that could give them away. Stone nodded and pointed another two of his men, the ones with the wire-cutters, at the places in the fence that he wanted to breach. They were located in a nice little dip in the ground, and an easy belly-crawl would take them inside if they just opened the bottom three feet and peeled it up like a tiny garage door.

  Eight tiny clip-clip-clip sounds, and it was done. No one spoke. No one needed to. As the cutters backed away, Stone gestured and the pointmen, Barker and Ali, crawled forward and rolled through. Then the next two went. Then Lester and the cutters, and finally Stone and Allen, bringing up the rear. It took only three minutes to get the entire squad safely inside the first perimeter.

  The second fence, better lit than the first – damn it! – was fifty yards farther south. The flat two-story Administrative Center, the building where the satellite techs were supposed to be housed, was a dimly glowing hump a quarter mile beyond that second barrier. “Okay,” Stone said, so quietly his men would hear it more clearly on their comms than in the cool morning air, “Cutters first. Find your spot. All others h
old—”

  He felt the first shot before he heard it. It zipped past him, an inch from his ear. He turned in the dim morning light and saw Lester the instant after the bullet pierced the soldier’s neck. It nicked the carotid and set a thick spray of blood down the nineteen-year-old’s throat and across his shoulders. The boy was dead before his head hit the ground.

  Too soon, was Stone’s only thought. Way too soon.

  Stone threw himself to the ground so fast and hard it almost knocked the breath out of him. Every other member of his squad did the same, instantaneously, as bullets stitched the ground around them.

  He could feel it: The shots were coming from the west. He risked turning his head, adjusting his arms, and returned fire from flat on the ground, even before he could see –

  Shit, he thought. Right there.

  The morons who were trying to defend Edwards Air Force Base were coming at them from the west. The west, with the increasing glow of sunrise directly behind them.

  Silhouetting them.

  They were keeping low as they crept cross the nearly flat terrain, but low didn’t matter with the light behind them. Every single member of Stone’s own squad could see them coming. See them exactly.

  Five shots. Two went down. Return gunfire splattered across the cold, dry grass. Ali, ahead of him, off to his right, cried out. “Shit!” he said. Then, after a long moment. “Shoulder!”

  Wounded, Stone thought, but alive.

  There had been seven defenders, by Stone’s count. A strange number, but what the hell. The strange random non-pattern of their fire made him think they didn’t have night vision, or didn’t know how to use it properly. Otherwise half his men would have been dead already.