by Dhar, Mainak
The stricken helicopter fell to the ground, and its rotor blades hit nearby trees as it careened into the forest, exploding in a fireball. The remaining helicopter, now realizing that the hunter had suddenly become the hunted, dodged another rocket snaking up towards it, but was not so lucky when a third rocket hit it squarely behind the cockpit, breaking the helicopter into two with the force of the explosion.
Alice was wondering who their saviors were when familiar figures emerged from the trees. Kayla was in front, the tube of a rocket launcher on her shoulder, a dozen of the Night Witches behind her. Kayla came up to the armored car and looked at Alice with a smile.
‘You told me to try and fight for others, and by doing that I’ll now have Zeus hunting us down. Get out of here, and make all of this worth it.’
***
EIGHT
Aaron had never seen his boss quite this drunk at work, nor quite this angry.
It was an open secret among the staff that Sam King drank during office hours, and Aaron thought that was a pretty stupid idea. Not because he had any lofty notions about workplace etiquette—when half the world was a radioactive sludge and the other half was overrun by Biters, having a drink at your desk hardly seemed to be a material issue. It was dumb because Zeus and its masters kept everyone on a tight leash—as head of Sam’s security detail, he knew that most offices were bugged. Supposedly, Sam was exempt, but Aaron suspected that people way over his pay grade had arranged that behind his back.
With his years both inside the system, and working to overthrow it, he knew that the Executive Committee was not just ruthless, they preyed on weakness, sniffing it out like sharks would sniff out blood. For Sam to show such a glaring weakness was pretty stupid of him, but then Aaron had bigger worries than his boss’ career prospects, and if Sam did disappear into some FEMA camp, he would just keep spying on whichever toad next occupied the office.
When Sam called him in to get some files, he saw that Sam was on a video link to the Executive Committee. The Baron was not there, but two old men were on the screen and as Aaron began to close the door on his way out, he heard one of them scream out in exasperation.
‘Alice is in the bloody Homeland. One FEMA camp has fallen, and the escaped inmates are spreading her tales. We’ve had a riot at another camp already. How much longer do you need to get the Snarks ready?’
His heart almost stopped at the words. Alice was in the United States? The same Alice whom General Konrath had written about—the person who had overthrown the Central Committee with little more than ragtag bunch of guerillas? The girl who was half Biter and held out the hope that humans and Biters could co-exist?
He left the door ajar and then continued listening in as Sam replied.
‘We’ve got a map based on Bellman’s interrogation. The problem is that she indicated an underground bunker right in the middle of Biter territory outside Cape Canaveral. It seems she sabotaged the entry from the base, so the only way in is from the secondary overground entry that is teeming with Biters. I can organize a Zeus force to try and get there, but it’ll be bloody business.’
The other old man spoke in a low voice.
‘Losing a few troopers is nothing compared to what happens if we cannot get control over the Deadland. That brings me to another open issue—why did you leave Bellman alive?’
Sam paused, and while Aaron could not see him, he knew from the slightly wavering voice that Sam was struggling to maintain his composure. He suspected that the half-bottle of liquor was not helping matters much.
‘When we found her, she was running a high fever. She gave us all the information we needed, and by the time our boys finished with her, she was as good as dead. We need to focus on getting the Snarks now.’
One of the men raised his voice.
‘It does matter, because Alice now has Bellman, and if she learns what Bellman’s map shows us, then she and her friends will try and get there as well. Need I remind you—she has a slightly better chance of getting through Biters than your men.’
From the pause, Sam had no answer to that.
Aaron was back at his post when Sam called him.
‘Tell the boys to get my car ready. I need to go on a trip, but no big detail. Just you and me.’
Sam heading out with no protective detail was not only unusual, but struck Aaron as a bit suicidal. Thirty minutes later, Sam whispered from the back seat of the Humvee he was driving.
‘How far are we from New Jersey?’
‘About fifty miles or so.’
‘See that old gas station there? Stop there.’
Aaron was intrigued as to what was going on as Sam got out of the armored Humvee and stretched. Motorcycle engines roared and on reflex, Aaron’s hand went to the submachine gun lying on the seat beside him. Sam motioned to him and shouted out.
‘No sudden movements, please. These guys can be trigger happy.’
Aaron looked out the window to see three Harley-Davidsons come into view. He resisted an impulse to grab his gun when he saw who was riding them. The first man was huge, and when he dismounted, Aaron reckoned he must have been at least six and a half feet tall and built like a tank. He was dark-complexioned and had a thick bunch of gold medallions and lockets around his neck and was wearing a robe and black turban of the sort that, in a previous life, Aaron had known Jihadi fighters to favor. A large, curved knife hung from his belt and as he extended a huge hand to shake Sam’s, each of his fingers was topped by a diamond ring.
He turned to look at Aaron, and Aaron found himself looking away. In his time he had seen all kinds of tough guys, but this man, with his huge size and with one eye missing, looked like bad news all around. His companions were similarly dressed, but looked far less intimidating, though with both of them carrying assault rifles and rocket launchers strapped to their backs, Aaron quickly gave up any notion of taking them on in a firefight. What Sam King would want with men like these was beyond him.
After talking to the men for fifteen minutes and handing over a folder to them, Sam got back in the Humvee. His mood seemed to have brightened considerably and he was mumbling some nonsense rhyme about a Jabberwock. Aaron’s curiosity got the better of him and he turned to his boss.
‘Sir, you seem to be in a better mood.’
Sam had poured himself a drink from the small bar in the back and he began talking.
‘My boy, some things you cannot do within the system, you need to get your hands a bit dirty. This Biter bitch Alice thinks she can rain on my parade in my own backyard. Jabber and his men will cut her head off and stick it on a pole for her supporters to see.’
Aaron didn’t press further, but he knew that Alice was in danger, and from an unexpected quarter. Whoever these men were, they would not be riding into battle in Zeus uniforms and helicopters. The General and Alice had to be warned, and fast.
***
‘So this Snark is a missile?’
Alice had just come out of a debriefing with Bellman, who was still half delirious and slipping in and out of consciousness, but was at least able to talk after an IV drip and some antibiotics. The doctor who had attended to her was not very clear what infection she had picked up, but malnutrition and torture had not helped. However, what little she had been able to say had suddenly made things clearer.
Konrath had joined up with Alice and her companions at a safehouse just outside what remained of the city of Topeka. While Alice had been fighting her way out of the camp, Konrath had making his own perilous journey through forests infested with Biters and bandits, with Zeus troopers on his heels. He had suffered two wounds from bullets and shrapnel, but neither was life-threatening. However, he looked pale and weak and Bellman’s news had not helped matters.
Alice sat down next to him. She barely comprehended the technology behind it all, but knowing that the Executive Committee had more rockets that could obliterate a large city in one strike terrified her. What Bellman had told them made it clear that they had a very narrow win
dow of opportunity, but they risked running out of time.
Vince, with his military background, weighed in.
‘It’s amazing just how much lack of information handicaps us. Fifteen years ago, we could have gone on the Net and found out a lot more with far less trouble. Now a simple Google search is replaced by getting into and fighting our way out of a bloody FEMA camp.’
Alice had no idea who or what Google was, so she just motioned for Vince to get on with explaining what this Snark was.
‘From what Bellman is able to tell us, the Snark is an old nuclear missile that the US had used way back in the 1960s. It wasn’t very fast or accurate, but didn’t use fancy computers or satellites to fly it to its target, instead using celestial navigation—in other words its path was calibrated to the stars. In today’s age with limited satellite coverage, it’s the one weapon they could hope to use to hit targets so far away with a nuclear payload. They got some working nukes, but they couldn’t use them. However, then they found Bellman, who was a missile scientist before The Rising. She helped the Executive Committee work on salvaging a few Snark missiles found at Cape Canaveral, thinking she was doing it to help fight the Biters. When she realized that the plan was to use the missile against the heavily populated city of Shanghai, she tried to sabotage it. She only partially succeeded in burying some of the missiles in a bunker outside the base in an area overrun by Biters but barely escaped alive as Zeus closed in on her.’
‘What is this Boojum?’
Vince’s face took on an even more grim expression.
‘The Boojum was an upgraded version of the Snark, much faster and more accurate. The bad news is that the remaining missiles in the bunker are all Boojums. With those, the Executive Committee could wipe out Wonderland, and have enough to spare to destroy the resistance here.’
Konrath stood up.
‘They wouldn’t use nukes on our own soil!’
Vince put a hand on Konrath’s shoulder. ‘General, Bellman says that the Exec Committee people see some areas as rebel-held areas and will ask you to surrender otherwise they will nuke them.’
Konrath took a deep breath and slammed his fist on the table next to him. Alice’s mind was racing. They had very little time, and if they had any chance to getting there, she would have to take the lead.
‘Vince, can you fly us to this place where the missiles are kept?’
‘I can get a chopper fueled and ready at one of our airstrips near Oklahoma City tomorrow, but we won’t have the numbers or firepower needed to get through.’
‘You’re thinking like a human!’
At that comment, everyone paused to look at Alice, and a couple of them laughed.
‘That place is full of Biters. Zeus will have to organize a large force to fight their way through. We don’t need numbers—I can try and control those Biters and get in there. Zeus will likely show up with a much larger force than anything we can pull together, but we can move with much greater speed.’
***
Aaron was sweating despite the chill in the air. This was the first time in all his years of operating behind enemy lines that he was going to break the strict operational protocols they had followed so far.
General Konrath knew that the electronic warfare and communications capabilities of Zeus far surpassed those of the resistance, so he had insisted on Aaron passing on intelligence the old-fashioned way. Aaron had begun his career in a CIA that relied heavily, and almost exclusively, on electronic surveillance and intelligence, but after the attacks of 9/11, a more concerted approach towards human intelligence had begun, and as someone on the frontline of fighting Islamist terror as a young officer, Aaron had honed the skills that he had used so successfully now to pass on intelligence to Konrath.
Every week, he would go to a pre-designated ‘dead drop’, where he would find a small metal tube with a paper inside containing instructions and locations of the next drop. He would destroy the paper on reading it and insert a paper of his own containing whatever information he wanted relayed back to the resistance. Everything was in code, breakable only by a cipher that Aaron had in a small diary back in his room. It was all very low-tech, but he left no electronic signature that could betray him. Today, he was going to break that rule.
He had done his homework and asked around among his sources and when he learned the danger Alice was going to be in, he knew he could not wait for the next designated drop. He logged into a message board that the resistance used under a fictional ID, and began typing. The message would likely be traced back to his tablet and he would be compromised, but he could not wait.
If Aaron had not been so hasty, he would have realized that he might be compromised not only by his electronic signature, but also the fact that he had reached out so widely to his informants. He was still typing when the lights went out. He cursed loudly and got up to check the generator, but stopped when he heard what sounded like the jingling of jewelry.
What the hell was going on? A guttural voice laughed in the darkness, and he felt at his belt for his gun. He cursed as he realized that he had left his gun on the desk. Aaron sensed movement in front of him. He had been discovered. He had not succeeded in his mission, but Aaron Campbell would not go down without a fight.
He steadied himself as the shadow came closer. Light glinted as a large hunting knife swung up towards him. Aaron stumbled back and fell to the ground. Then came a low growl.
‘Come to the Jabberwock.’
***
Two days after he had killed Aaron, Jabber Ali Hasan rode his Harley down the highway, followed by ten of his handpicked men. Each man had an RPG launcher and an AK-47 slung across their backs. Jabber himself had an AK, but he always preferred to do his work up close, with his knife.
As he passed the ruins of some American city, he spat at it. How the infidels had fallen! Jabber knew that his own homeland in Saudi Arabia was nothing more than radioactive ruins, but all that sacrifice and loss was surely worth it to see the Americans reduced to this. And in the middle of all this devastation, Jabber and his men had seeded what he knew would one day destroy Sam King and the others who thought they were using Jabber, and achieve the dream that Jabber’s mentors in Al Qaeda had once seen.
Before The Rising, Jabber had been a young warrior who had been blooded in the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan. Then came the betrayal by a local informant and capture by the Americans. He had spent two years at Guantánamo, where the Americans broke his body, but never his spirit. He and a dozen others had been brought to New York to stand trial in a military tribunal when The Rising took place.
The world that emerged after The Rising afforded unique opportunities for someone of Jabber’s talents. He and his men had killed and looted at will, laying waste to the infidels around them, and within a few years, Jabber had an army of several hundred and a large swathe of land. With their air power, Zeus could destroy him, but with his expertise in guerrilla warfare, he could make them pay dearly. As the resistance emerged under Konrath, Sam King had reached out to him to make an accommodation. Jabber would be left unmolested, but in return he and his men would occasionally be called upon to do special missions for Sam. Missions like this one.
Resistance or Zeus, Jabber took equal pleasure in killing them all, and his power and reputation would grow once he killed this Biter witch held in such awe by the Americans. Trust the weak infidels to raise a freak girl to such a pedestal. Then would come the day when Jabber would make his move. He had watched Zeus and the resistance fight it out, weakening themselves, and his men had also procured anti-aircraft missiles from arms smugglers who seemed to thrive in any conflict. Soon, very soon, Jabber Ali Hasan would raise the black flag of Al Qaeda in the heart of the enemy.
He spat again as he recalled the name that Sam King had given him.
Jabberwock.
He would make sure Sam regretted mocking his name, right before he cut off his head. Jabber tried to put those pleasant thoughts out of his mind. He neede
d to focus on the coming battle. Thanks to one of the faithful whom his men had reached out to, they would have the advantage of surprise. Jabber would make the most of that, and then this witch called Alice would get closely acquainted with Jabber’s blade.
***
Larry had lived, but only barely, and was still unconscious when Alice and the others set out. Vince had radioed ahead to confirm that their helicopter was fueled and ready at a resistance airstrip near Oklahoma City. They were now in two Jeeps speeding towards the airstrip. The first Jeep had four resistance fighters and a driver, Jamal, a local used as a messenger by the resistance who had promised them a short cut. The second Jeep was driven by Josh, with Alice and Bunny Ears sitting in the front with him. In the back were packed Vince, Satish, Cynthia, John and Tom, along with three large duffel bags containing extra ammunition and supplies.
Alice had told them that she did not want them all to risk their lives on this mission and that she, Bunny Ears and Satish could go ahead with Vince. Cynthia had spoken for all her comrades. ‘Girl, whether you like it or not, this is now our battle as well. We can’t sit back while they prepare nukes against your people and ours. So, you’ll have the Baker, Broker and Barrister for company.’
It had been an uneventful hour of driving when Alice thought she heard something. Unlike the Americans who had lived in a world where cars and bikes were still common, Alice had grown up in the Deadland where the only vehicles were armored cars or helicopters operated by Zeus.
Satish saw her sit up straight in the seat. ‘What’s up?’
Alice sat back. Perhaps her mind was just playing tricks on her. Perhaps heading into what might well be the most crucial battle of her life was making her edgy.
