It was purely primal, all animal instinct.
For just a moment, Jameson was going to let somebody else think rationally. Right now, he was a pure warrior.
And they all fought like fallen gods.
Fury
CentCom – Biosciences
“Holy shit, brother.”
Simon Park took his eye not from a microscope, but rather from where it was stuck in a dense computer display, and smiled over his shoulder. Aliyev had a very odd and striking way of speaking, and he definitely cursed a lot more than Park did. There were a few other substantial contrasts and kinks in their working styles.
But they were getting it done.
“This is it,” Park said. “Seventeen-Q-twelve to Q-twenty-one. It’s standing naked right in front of us.”
Having completely mapped the gene sequence for Hargeisa, the zombie virus, from the sample from Patient Zero, they had now positively identified the range of genes on the chromosome they needed. These genes had the two critical properties required. One – they were all but guaranteed to respond to the RNA interference technique Park had developed, and which was the heart of his vaccine design. And, two – they had never mutated or changed in the slightest, not from the first victim of the plague to the last. Which meant they probably never would. And, more importantly, this meant they would be the same in every strain of the virus out there.
This was the weak link in the mighty pathogen that had taken humanity down.
“Zero polymorphism,” Park said. “It’s totally stable.”
Aliyev cocked his head. “Wait – so would your initial vaccine design have worked? Without the sample from Patient Zero to test it against?”
Park shook his head slowly. “No – it wouldn’t have. Close. No cigar.” He was secretly relieved about this, maybe even pleased. All the peril, sacrifice, loss, and carnage of the Africa mission hadn’t been for nothing. In truth, they would have had to do it no matter what, even if it had turned out that the prototype vaccine already worked. They always needed Patient Zero. They had to be sure.
But this – the fact that the vaccine simply wouldn’t have worked without Patient Zero – felt right, or at least better. Everyone who fell getting it out of Africa died for a very concrete reason – namely saving everyone else left alive. Directly and literally. They had made a working vaccine a reality.
And their ultimate sacrifice had made the ultimate salvation of humanity possible.
“And, also, thank God,” Park said, turning back to the bioinformatics cluster, “the tweaks we need to make are pretty minimal. Absolutely critical – but minimal.” As he started typing, he said over his shoulder, “Do me a favor and call the JOC to update Ali.”
“Why?” Aliyev said. “Let’s just keep working. Finish it.”
Park considered this. Aliyev was obviously a pure lone wolf. He really had no idea what it was like to be part of a team. To depend upon others, and have them depend on you.
And it made Park sad. But it also didn’t matter.
“Make the call,” he said.
* * *
“Major.”
Ali didn’t answer this, for the obvious reason that it wasn’t her rank, and never had been. But she finally looked up from her station when a hand landed on her shoulder. Its owner was a young and attractive female corporal, with bright features and blonde hair tucked up under her beret. Ali vaguely remembered Miller introducing her as Jones.
Beautiful girl, Ali thought, dazedly. She’d been working flat-out, totally focused, and hadn’t slept in a long time. She shook her head to clear it. “What is it, Corporal?”
“Bio on the blower for you, ma’am.”
“Dr. Park?”
“No. That mad Kazakh bloke.”
Ali’s eyebrows slowly levitated. “What mad Kazakh?”
“The one with the zombie-killing pathogen.”
Ali had somehow forgotten. Somewhere in the hundreds of urgent matters that had to be dealt with at once, Miller had in fact briefed her on the pathogen that was being worked on in Bio, the one that might kill the existing dead, and buy them enough time for the vaccine to be completed and take effect.
But the particular nationality of its designer had never been mentioned. Now wheels started turning in Ali’s head, picking up speed fast, and clicking loudly into place.
“Take me to him,” she said, pushing back her chair and standing. “No, never mind – I can find my way.”
She exited the JOC, fast.
* * *
“You,” she said, stalking into the central labs area of the Bio complex like an old west gunfighter closing with an opponent to scare him into shooting wild.
And it was him. Ali would know his face anywhere.
Aliyev didn’t recognize her. He had never laid eyes on her, having escaped the torrent of gunfire and explosions in Somalia, meant for him and his chimera virus, only by seconds – but never glimpsing the deadly wraith who delivered them.
And who had been hunting him.
But Ali had possessed a whole dossier on the infamous Kazakh freelance bioweaponeer, and on his plot with al-Shabaab to infect the de-mining teams working out of Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti. Killing him and destroying his stocks of bioweapons had been her very last tasking with Delta, before being reassigned to Hereford for the North Korea mission. Having reconnected with Zack Altringham in Somalia, she already understood that she had failed to destroy the weapons stocks – a small sample had survived, in a baboon test subject way out in the bush. And it had been that, and Ali’s oversight and failure, that had caused, basically, the end of the world.
Since learning this, that knowledge ate at Ali’s soul.
But, as far as she knew, until this exact second, she had at least killed the man whose baneful, depraved genius had created the viral abomination in the first place, the horrible bio-engineered disease that had laid all humanity low. Now here he stood, or rather sat, directly before her. But in another second, Aliyev was lying on the tile floor, flat on his back, knocked out of his chair – with his nose broken.
And in a half-second more, Ali was straddling him, her knife flicking out of its sheath and drawing back, its tip pointed at his throat. But an insistent hand latched onto her arm and tried to keep it from driving forward. It wasn’t going to succeed, but Ali paused her killing stroke long enough to glance over and see who was trying to stop her.
It was Dr. Simon Park.
“No,” he said, his expression equally serious and urgent. “You can’t kill this man.”
Ali squinted at Park. The two had been through enough together that this gave her pause – at least for a second. She looked back down at the terrified and bloodied face of Aliyev, who was trying to melt into the cracks in the tile floor as he beheld the ice-queen death mask that was Ali’s face.
Park actually spun around and straddled Aliyev himself, so he was facing Ali. “Yes, it was him who did it – who caused the whole ZA. It was his virus, and his fault. But he’s also the only one who can fix it – who can kill all the dead. And who can buy us enough time for the vaccine to work.”
Thoughts visibly chased each other across Ali’s face.
The zombie-killing pathogen.
That had to be Aliyev, too. Custom pathogen design was his whole raison d’être. It was beyond maddening, but Ali got it. She sheathed her knife, climbed to her feet, and pulled Aliyev roughly to his. The compact man sniffled and whimpered and tried to staunch his bloody nose with his sleeve.
Ali took a single steadying breath, then spoke calmly and crisply to Aliyev, the man looking like he thought he was going to get hit again at any second. “Get your ass up the JOC,” she said. “You’re going to thoroughly brief me, and we’re going to plan the endgame for this thing. And you’d better do it before it’s too late to save your miserable soul.” She exhaled again and stretched her neck out, then looked at Park. “He’s your responsibility.”
Park nodded.
Turning and sta
lking out, Ali spoke a last time over her shoulder: “And just for the record – if we survive this, I’m going to come find you. And I’m going to put you in the ground this time.”
And with that, she was gone.
* * *
Outside the Bio complex, out in the Common, Ali went around the corner, put her forearms against the exterior wall, stuck her head in them, and tried to breathe.
It only took her five seconds to realize that, of course, it wasn’t Aliyev she was furious with. There had always been profoundly evil men in the world. Hell, her whole career had been about dealing with them, and they generally just needed a bullet in the head. Getting upset about their existence was as useful as getting upset about anything else – which was why Ali almost never did so. She knew that anger – along with regret, recrimination, remorse – was utterly useless, a total waste of mental energy that might be put to good purpose.
And yet… she was still furious at herself.
For having failed. For having dropped the ball in her final mission as a Unit operator – and the whole world going down as a result. Yeah, it could have as easily been some other bioweapons plot, some other virus, some other former Soviet bioweaponeer. But it wasn’t. It had been hers – her evil asshat, her responsibility. The one she had been tasked with stopping, and had believed she’d stopped.
Her damned job.
And as a result of this, her previously gleaming and spotless service record, earned at the highest pinnacles of the entire military world, was now smirched with a black mark not a hundred miles wide – but 25,000 miles, the circumference of the entire Earth. And all of it now, with the exception of one tiny island, painted black – lifeless, cold, and dead. And Ali’s previously untroubled conscience now weighed a ton – or rather six billion trillion tons.
The weight of the whole planet.
But the solid, blooded, unflappable operator core of her soul knew the solution was exactly the same as it always was, as it always had to be. She had to dig down. And she had to use this – use it, somehow, belatedly, to get the job done.
But beneath her anger and guilt and remorse – beneath even the resolve and renewed commitment to fulfilling her duty – there was fear. Fear that it was already too late.
But she had to act as if it wasn’t.
She had to do everything in her power to fix this, even in the eleventh hour. She had to try. And now she was extremely highly motivated. Because she knew that, perhaps more than anyone else left alive, this was all her personal responsibility.
And what she had to do was: Fix it.
She had to get this done.
The Fall
ZPW – In The Gap
But even this is not going to be enough, Jameson thought, sucking wind, and reloading his personal weapon yet again.
It was never going to be enough.
Men and women fighting like gods atop the Wall, doomed young men pushing out into certain death below, or even deadly flying machines raining down chaos and destruction from above. With the help of the Apaches, the Marines and reservists above had gotten the gap in the Wall cleared up. And the pitiable Paras down below had pushed out to cover it again from in front.
But it wasn’t going to last. The dead – thousands, tens of thousands, a million – were coming right back. Their reclamation of the situation, their moment of respite, was barely going to last minutes. Jameson looked up at an Apache roaring overhead, and tried to work out if it was Charlotte’s.
She came back, he thought, wiping a lot of grimy sweat from his brow, profoundly grateful for this. But she’s just come back to watch us die.
At least Charlotte was safe up above it all.
“Good fun while it lasted, eh, Major?” This was Colour Sergeant Croucher, squatting down beside Jameson’s firing position. He was referring to the cessation of heavy ordnance going in from the Apaches. The whole squadron had fired their entire arsenal of Hellfire missiles and 122mm rockets, pouring hate and discontent into the approaching sea of dead, all in minutes. It had been magnificent, and the scale of the destruction breathtaking. But, ultimately, it had been like bailing the ocean with a teaspoon.
Okay, a bucket, maybe. But still.
Now the swooping Apaches were down to autocannon fire. And even that was starting to peter out. The first attack helos were going Winchester – completely out of ammo. Jameson laughed and shook his head as he remembered the origin of the expression: WWI pilots running out of bombs and machine gun rounds, and so sticking their trusty Winchester revolvers out their open cockpits to engage German flying barons that way. Jameson happened to know Charlotte had an MP7 machine pistol strapped to her.
But he sure wasn’t expecting her to use it.
His head snapped to the right as he heard a shout of alarm – just in time to see a builder, who had been running along the edge carrying a bag of cement, trip over a length of rope, which was tied bailing-style to a big stone that had just been hauled up there. He tried to stop himself as he flailed toward the edge, but it was scrabbly and unstable and he lost his footing entirely and went sliding off the lip and out into open space, screaming.
His buddy, right behind him, ran to the edge and looked over, his face a mask of horror. Jameson looked around – there were stones and debris all over the place, and the outside edge of the gap was damned unstable and uneven. The whole place was a fucking hazard. He looked away again as the horrified friend turned and raced away down the ladder behind them, his expression twisted up with grief.
Jameson had bigger problems. When the dead reached the level of the gap again, it was going to be worse than a hazard. He checked the skies over the battle. The last Apache in Charlotte’s squadron had stopped firing, presumably empty – and the last of them was peeling off to fly out of the battlespace.
All except one.
* * *
Charlotte carefully shepherded her last autocannon rounds, triggering off two- and three-round bursts with light strokes of her index finger. But then even that came to an end.
She too was empty.
She also wasn’t far from bingo fuel, she realized with a quick look at her fuel gauge. But she wasn’t leaving. If aerial ISR and moral support were all she could provide, then she was damned well going to stay and provide it. Still, it scraped her soul to not be able to protect the men on the ground. She could see the remaining Paras had re-formed their paper-thin line. But they were already under heavy attack. And there was nothing she could do. The sense of helplessness, of being unable to aid them, was for her the worst feeling in the world.
She decided she’d better at least update Jameson.
“One Troop Actual, Wyvern Two Zero, be advised: 663 Squadron is gone – and not coming back. We just got word that Wattisham is overrun. They can’t rearm or refuel there.”
“Copy that, Wyvern. What are they going to do?”
“Try to get to RAF Cosford, up in Wolverhampton.”
“You need to go, too, Charlotte. You’re no help to anyone if you run out of fuel and crash.”
Charlotte blinked and wheeled around, facing the resurging dead sea out ahead. She wasn’t so sure.
Actually, if I crash into just the right place…
* * *
This is it, then, Elliot thought, firing his stolen rifle, and reloading from the pouches of another dead man. His section was gone – the last of them had fallen, supporting his charge to secure the area in front of the gap. If he could go back and do it again, he honestly didn’t know if he’d make the same decision or another one. But it didn’t matter. It was done.
And it had made no real difference.
The sea of dead was back upon them from three directions at once – and it was swelling up into waves, taller than a man, and it was going to submerge them.
It was nearly over.
Together, 2 PARA had done more than could be asked of anyone, more than should be asked. They had moved worlds, fought like ancient kings, sacrificed everything, every minut
e and breath that was left to any of them – all to try to protect their countrymen behind them, to give London, and humanity, a little more time.
But now it was over.
And now they were all going to die together. That was something at least.
And a great sense of peace came over Elliot.
No more loss and pain.
* * *
Amarie looked up from her magazine-loading at the sound of urgent shouts, very nearby. Despite herself, she lifted the rear flap of the truck… and she could see one of the jump-suited workmen struggling with a soldier, finally knocking him to the ground. They both stood in front of the smaller person-sized gate on the inside of the Wall.
And now the builder, whose movements were frantic, desperate, tore down the barricade, worked the locks, and he pulled the gate open – and ran out of it. Amarie watched open-mouthed and wide-eyed as a slow-moving zombie stumbled through in the other direction, just walking inside casually then looking around into the open and previously secure area of the rear. She looked down to the pistol on the truck bed beside her.
She picked it up.
And she started climbing out the back.
“Où, en Dieu, allez-vous?” Cherie asked.
“I’m going to shut the gate,” Amarie answered numbly.
When she hit the ground, a second zombie had already wandered in, followed by a third. She raised the pistol and fired, wincing from the sharp and unfamiliar recoil, walking slowly and woodenly forward as she did. She couldn’t tell if she was hitting anything, but just kept shooting and advancing.
Tears leaked from the corners of her eyes.
She didn’t care if she lived or died.
* * *
Up top, Jameson had just buttonholed Hackworth, and ordered the Tunnelers to the rear. The dead had hemmed in both sides of the gap, and risen almost back up to it in both places, with breathtaking speed. And the battle had ramped back up to a full-throated roar. Without the Apaches holding back the tide, it was going to be over in minutes. Every cell in Jameson’s body told him to retreat, that there was no point now.
ARISEN_Book Thirteen_The Siege Page 17
