“We’ve got a mission,” Sallinger said.
“About damn time,” Lt. Green responded.
Sallinger threw an arm around his shoulder. “Sorry, Zach, you’ll have to stay here to watch over the company while I’m gone.”
The younger man nodded, obviously disappointed but too much of a professional to complain.
“Top,” Sallinger said, looking at the master sergeant, “put together a rifle squad, load out for a week of cold weather and go heavy on the ammo. Then tell the fly boys they’re our ride, and bring them back to the CP so we can plan the op.”
“Yes sir,” Cribbs said, trotting ahead to assemble a team.
“Where to, Lee?” Lt. Green asked.
“California, my friend. Swimming pools…movie stars.”
A reclining, forties-style pin-up girl was painted on the fuselage near the nose of the Army Black Hawk, the chopper flying high above the white Sierra Nevada, its side doors closed against the frigid temperatures at this altitude. A pilot and co-pilot sat up front, and a pair of gunners, one of them a woman, sat in swivel seats in the forward part of the troop compartment, positioned beside closed panels that could be rolled back to give them access to their mounted weapons. Sallinger and seven of his men were crammed together on bench seats, stacked packs and weapons at their feet. The captain and Master Sergeant Cribbs sat close together looking at a map, both wearing headsets as they discussed their plan over the roar of the rotor blades.
Honey-One, the helicopter’s call sign, was carrying a drop tank of fuel for extended flight, should the need arise. It cruised at 15,000 feet, roughly six thousand feet above the mountain range’s highest point. Below was a brutal world of sheer rock faces, endless forests of pine, and deep snow. Every man on board was grateful for the heavy, camouflage jackets, wool socks and thermal underwear their lieutenant had found in storage at Reno Base. The stuff smelled vaguely funky from disuse, and the coats bore Air Force markings, but no one cared. The only items the Rangers possessed that could even pass for winter gear – Nomex gloves and the unusual ski-masks they always carried – wouldn’t have been enough to prevent hypothermia and frostbite even in the closed environment of the chopper, much less if they went down in that frigid landscape.
Their flight to Beale AFB, the place where Sallinger and the master sergeant had decided they would start in order to gain intel before moving to the general’s last reported coordinates, would take about an hour. If all went well, the mission would be complete and the team back at Reno Base by midnight.
Not one Ranger aboard expected things to go according to plan.
They never did.
“Look at that!” The shout came from PFC Seth Rooker, a nineteen-year-old from Culleoka, Tennessee. He was seated at the far end of a bench in the Black Hawk’s troop compartment, looking out the window of the aircraft’s port side door. Honey-One was slowing and descending, with Beale Air Force Base below on the left. The young PFC excitedly tapped a gloved finger against the thick plastic. “How many do you think are down there?”
Beside him, Specialist Cole Burke leaned over to look outside. He was the team’s SAW gunner, operating the squad automatic weapon, a light machine gun. He wore yellow-mirrored shooting glasses under the low bill of his camouflage ball cap, and chewed vigorously on a stick of gum. “Couple hundred, I ‘spect.” The man’s drawl was pure Wyoming.
Across from the two soldiers, Captain Sallinger looked out as well. Beale, located just outside Marysville, California, was home to the 9th Reconnaissance Wing. The base’s SR-71 Blackbirds and U2 Dragon Lady air-wings continued to play a vital role in global surveillance. More frequently deployed in recent years was its wing of unmanned drones, flying in every known conflict theater and piloted by men and women at this very base.
Were piloted, Sallinger corrected himself. Past tense. Like the world.
Clear of snow at this lower altitude, several square miles of asphalt, roads and runways stretched out below, all encircled by a high fence. Rows of large, white hangars marched beside the landing strips, not far from clusters of administrative buildings, barracks and an air control tower. A few intact aircraft could be seen down there, as well as a broken and burned U2 Dragon Lady ringed with scorched pavement.
The dead wandered the base like sluggish ants, trapped for the most part behind the perimeter fence and too mindless to find their way out. Most appeared to be in uniform, but there were also a number of civilians.
The Black Hawk cruised slowly above a road that ran parallel to the base, both lanes choked with abandoned vehicles, many with luggage strapped to roof racks. Attached to the fence and facing the road was a white banner, its corners fluttering in a light breeze. A hand-painted message in tall red letters screamed, STOP DRONE STRIKES!
Sallinger shook his head. Well, they got their wish, didn’t they?
Oscar leaned in close to his captain’s ear. “Looks like the general wasn’t the only one trying to shelter there.” The master sergeant pointed down at the river of unmoving vehicles.
Sallinger nodded, and gestured toward the base’s main gate. Intuitively, the Black Hawk’s pilot approached the entrance and settled into a hover above it. The steel gates were down, and the brick and glass gate house was a crumbled ruin beneath a tipped-over dump truck. A dozen civilian vehicles nearby were riddled with bullet holes, broken glass sparkling on the pavement around them. Just inside the entrance, a knot of sand-colored Humvees and white security vehicles were parked at angles, blocking access. A number of unmoving bodies lay around them.
The dead wandered in and out of the base at will.
PFC Rooker looked at his commanding officer and raised an eyebrow. Sallinger shook his head. “We’re not landing. Nothing for us down there.”
Rooker looked relieved.
Sallinger said to his sergeant, “No wonder the general bugged out.” Then the captain keyed the mic in his headset, speaking to the chopper pilot. “I’ve seen enough. Let’s head for our coordinates.”
The pilot acknowledged, banked right and flew north. Both door gunners slid back their panels and swung in behind their door-mounted machine guns.
The coordinates took them to the small community of Oroville, and the pilot set Honey-One down on a little league baseball diamond near the center of town. Clouds of dirt billowed away as it touched down, shaggy brown grass bending outward in a circle. The Ranger team leaped from both sides of the helicopter, then spread out to form a kneeling perimeter around the bird, all eyes and weapons facing outward. One by one, while the others covered, the men rolled up their heavy coats and tucked them away inside their packs.
Captain Sallinger leaned between the seats and stuck his head into the cockpit, shouting, “You going to hold here?”
The pilot looked around at the empty, fenced baseball field. “Yeah, it doesn’t look bad. We’ll keep security tight and relocate if we need to. Keep in touch.”
The Ranger bumped gloved fists and joined his men, who quickly fell into a single-file line following Master Sergeant Cribbs. Sallinger jogged up beside the older man.
The line slowed as it neared the backstop, where an opening in the fence would allow them to leave the ballpark and cross a tree-lined area to reach the town’s main street. Close to the first base line, a little-leaguer in a blue and white striped uniform had been pinned to the dirt with a four-foot-long crowbar driven down through the center of his back. His legs had been gnawed down to the bone, and his wrists ended in ragged stumps.
The little-leaguer squirmed as the men approached, croaking and trying to lever himself up and off the crowbar.
“That,” said PFC Rooker, the kid from Tennessee, “is the sickest shit I have ever seen.”
Their top sergeant slipped a long-handled, carbon and steel tomahawk from his combat harness, a standard-issue piece of equipment with the official Army designation of forcible entry tool. The Rangers trained with it, though less for door take-downs and more as a forcible cranial entry de
vice, and Cribbs used it as such with a single blow, putting the little-leaguer to rest.
Rooker winced at the wet thump and crunch of bone. “Nope, I was wrong.”
Burke, their SAW gunner, elbowed him from behind. “Better toughen up, kid. Ain’t no big deserts or nice fences between them and us out here.”
Rooker shot him the middle finger.
Master Sergeant Cribbs got their attention, and Sallinger stood before his men. “Some of us have seen some action over there.” He didn’t need to tell them where over there was. “But we’ve been out of action since all this started, and training isn’t the same thing. Unlike Iraqi and Afghan insurgents, the freaks have no fear of us or our weapons.” He pointed to the twice-dead little leaguer. “There’s more where that came from. We heard it on the radio last summer, we’ve collected them in the desert around the base and you saw it from the air at Beale. Engage if you have to, but our mission is to keep moving toward the objective. The coordinates put that at the police station, three blocks that way.” He gestured toward Main Street. “Questions?”
There were none.
Then he pointed to one of the two young black men. “Moore, you’re on point. Burke is backup with the SAW, Bracco’s our tail, RTO on me.”
The other black soldier, their radio-telephone operator carrying his equipment on his back, unfolded a long whip antenna and fell in beside his captain. Sallinger nodded to Cribbs, who called, “Move out,” and tucked himself into line behind the SAW gunner, not far from the point.
PFC Moore led them out of the park and headed east through the line of trees alongside Main Street.
TWO
“Contact!” Corporal Bracco shouted, squeezing off single rounds out the window. He was in a long, narrow office filled with desks and cubicle partition walls. The street outside was rapidly filling with shuffling, rotting corpses in summer clothes. His bullets found the mark – most of the time – and the figures dropped to the pavement. More took their place.
“Contact!” Another voice echoed through the tiled corridors of the one-story building, this time from PFC Seth Rooker. His rifle cracked from his position covering the north side of the building.
More rifles fired, their hollow pops reverberating through the halls as the Rangers engaged from each side of Oroville’s police station. The building had only been a few blocks from the little league field where they’d left the Black Hawk, but the team had been forced to fight their way into town. Oroville was crawling with the dead, and the wind and sound of the landing helicopter had roused them from their lethargy. Now they were converging on the place where their prey had taken shelter.
At the station’s entrance – double glass doors set in a glass wall – a young Ranger from Kansas with the unoriginal nickname of “Corn,” standing alongside Master Sergeant Cribbs, was firing into an undead crowd surging toward them through a parking lot. The only vehicles out there were a police department Ford Explorer burned black, and an olive-green Hummer with U.S.A.F. stenciled on the door, its hood propped open. Corn dropped to a kneeling position beside Cribbs, keeping one of the glass doors open with a boot as they fired. Spent brass clattered across the tile.
In the lot, a balding man wearing a golf shirt, his face chewed away and turned black, took two 5.56mm hits to the chest before a third found his forehead. Beside him, a dead woman in a supermarket smock caught a round in the throat without flinching, then went down as another punched through her skull. Dozens more flowed in from the street and down the narrow spaces between neighboring houses. Moans filled the air, accompanied by the scrape of dragging feet, all of it background noise to the cracking rifles.
“Changing mags,” the master sergeant called, letting an empty drop to the floor and inserting a full one. A moment later, Corn called out the same, then swore. “Last mag!”
The master sergeant bared his teeth and shot down a teenage boy whose ribs were jutting through a green-edged chest wound. “Slow your fire,” he ordered the young private beside him. “Make your rounds count.”
Corn did as instructed, and his aim was better as a result. The decrease in fire, however, allowed the crowd to gain ground. Master Sergeant Cribbs handed a full magazine to the private and stepped back from the doorway, keying the radio handset clipped to his combat webbing. “All positions, give me a sitrep and ammo status.”
The deep, Newark Italian voice of Cpl. Bracco came back at once. “Two or three dozen skinnies closing from the east.” A pause. “Three mags left.”
“Thirty-plus skinnies to the north,” came Rooker’s Tennessee twang. “They’re almost on the lawn. One mag left, plus my forty-millimeters.”
From the west side, PFC Dwayne Moore reported only a dozen corpses trudging toward the police station, and that he had four magazines remaining. Burke the SAW gunner reported that he had cleared out a trio of skinnies at the rear of the building, was no longer in contact, and was still heavy with belted ammunition.
“Cole, get up front with the SAW,” Cribbs ordered over the radio. He looked at Corn. “When he gets here, take his position at the rear.”
“Copy that.”
The master sergeant stepped back to the open doorway and began firing at the dead once more.
Airman Pintero was dying.
As Sallinger crouched beside the mortally wounded S.P., or security policeman, the captain was amazed the kid had lasted this long. The airman was propped in a sitting position against a wall in the hallway outside the police station’s emptied armory. Discarded food wrappers, water bottles and empty morphine surettes were scattered around him, and a nine-millimeter pistol rested on the tiles near one of the boy’s hands. Sallinger had checked the magazine. It had one bullet in it.
“Pintero,” Sallinger said, snapping his fingers. The kid was starting to fade. Behind the captain, the RTO glanced at the damaged boy briefly and then went back to watching the hall. “Pintero. Airman!”
The S.P. blinked and looked at the officer crouching beside him. He smiled weakly. “Almost fell asleep,” he said.
“You were telling me what happened,” the Ranger leader prompted.
“Right.” Pintero’s eyelids were heavy. His Air Force uniform was stained the color of old rust, and his left arm was fractured, held close to his body in a makeshift sling. The entire left side of his face was a swollen, purple bruise, and he couldn’t open the eye on that side. “I was running to catch up to the Hummer,” he said slowly. “A civvie crashed the gate. He hit me with his car.” The boy’s head began to droop, but he lifted it with a jerk. “Cutler pulled me into the Hummer…or it might have been Josh…don’t remember.” His words were beginning to slur.
Internal bleeding. Won’t be long now. Sallinger shook his uninjured shoulder gently, trying to bring him back. The airman had told him a jumbled tale about the airbase at Beale being compromised, a group of them managing to hide there for several months, and then once the increasing numbers of the dead made the position untenable, a small unit trying to break out with an Army general. The protective unit had been an S.P. team of four men and women, and they’d made a run upstate to Oroville, trying to bunker here in the police station. The team made radio calls in the blind, hoping to find help. Sallinger decided it had been one of these calls that had caught the right atmospheric bounce and made it to Reno Base.
Pintero was slipping backward into his story now, mumbling about ghouls and terrified civilians storming the front gates of Beale. His injuries were severe, and the Ranger knew that the only thing keeping him from screaming was the morphine with which he’d been self-medicating. How he hadn’t managed to put himself to sleep forever with the stuff was a wonder.
“What was I saying?” the airman asked.
“You got hit by a car.”
A chuckle. “Yeah, fucked me up good, didn’t it? Oh…sorry, sir.” A thin line of blood ran from the corner of his mouth.
“It sure did, Airman,” Sallinger said tightly.
“The Hummer shit t
he bed,” Pintero mumbled. “Skinnies coming, had to go. Was okay when they could drive me, but the lieutenant said they had to go on foot. Couldn’t carry me. Said I’d slow them down too much. They had to…save the general.” Pintero tried to shift position on the floor, but stopped and made a hissing sound through clenched teeth. “Said I understood.” His chin started to drop. “Left me a pistol…and some…dope…”
Another gentle shake, and Sallinger got the boy to look up at him. He wanted to let the boy go to sleep, but he had a few more questions. “When did they bug out?” He wasn’t entirely sure the kid still had a concept of time.
Pintero chewed his lip. “Two…three days ago? I’m not sure.” He blinked at the officer. “Sir, will you call my mom…tell her not to worry…?”
Sallinger gave him a smile. “Sure thing. I’ll talk to her myself.”
That made the airman smile.
“Pintero, did your lieutenant say where they were going?”
More blinking, and then a slow nod. “Chico. He talked about an airport. Went to Chico.”
Sallinger rested a hand on the boy’s sagging head. Part of him was furious that an officer had left a wounded man behind rather than do whatever it took to bring him along. The more pragmatic side of him – the officer part, and the side of himself that Sallinger often didn’t much care for – said the boy was beyond saving, and put the mission at risk. Maybe the general had even ordered it. Hard choices. He hoped the decision hadn’t been easy for either officer. Salinger knew he would have brought the boy along regardless of his condition, without a word of protest from the men, and that they all would have gone down fighting to protect him. It was part of being a Ranger.
“Can I go to sleep now, sir?” Pintero’s head was resting on his chest, his remaining eye closed and his words a whisper.
Sallinger stroked the boy’s hair. “As you were, Airman.”
Omega Days (Book 5): The Feral Road Page 2
