IMPERIAL VILLA
NASU
JAPAN
The Black Hawk flared and hovered over the front lawn of the Imperial Villa. The assault team commander shouted final instructions through the headsets to his men as the crew chief kicked the fast-rope lines out through the chopper’s open doors.
“We go in hard and fast! Maximum aggression. Sledge, you come with me,” the commander singled out a tobacco-chewing operator with a physique like a wrestler. “The rest of you defend the perimeter.”
The Delta team fast-roped from forty feet, dust and debris swirling through the doors of the chopper as they leaped out. Friction from the three-inch thick nylon ropes burned through the leather of their gloves. They hit the long grass and fanned out to form a perimeter. The team commander landed last. As soon as his feet hit the ground, the helicopter swung violently away, gaining height.
The team moved with the rehearsed orchestrated movements of a well-trained unit, skilled at their craft. The team commander reached the front door of the Villa under the shade of the portico and lashed out hard with the heel of his boot. The lock splintered and the door crashed back on its hinges. Sledge went across the threshold into the gloomy interior, shouting like a wounded bull.
“US Forces! US Forces!” he bellowed the mantra over and over as he cleared the first room. The team commander came in behind him, both men orientating towards a door in the far corner. The room they were in was some kind of reception foyer. The walls were filled with elegant, delicate paintings.
The next room was an office. The team commander went through, violent and aggressive. He was tense, sighting down the barrel of his weapon, his movements fluid, his breathing loud in his ears and his heart pounding in his chest. Sweat trickled down from inside his helmet.
“US Forces! US Forces!”
Working as a team the two men cleared the ground floor of the villa and arrived in a hallway with stairs rising to the top floor and another set descending to a basement. The two operators exchanged an unspoken look and went storming down the steps.
“SITREP,” the team commander spoke across the squad’s net. “What’s happening outside?”
“We’re still clear,” one of the operators defending the perimeter said. “We’ve got some movement in the distance, maybe a few hundred yards to the north in the woods. We’ve got eyes on, but no contact yet.”
“Roger,” the commander said.
At the bottom of the basement stairs stood a solid steel door. Sledge looked bewildered. “What the fuck is that?” his voice sounded like gravel in a mixer. “Did they lock themselves inside a fuckin’ vault?”
“It’s a panic room,” the team commander said. There was no handle. No visible lock. On the wall beside the door was a digital keypad.
“What do we do?”
They tried shouting. Then Sledge used his boot and kicked at the door. Finally, they saw a pinhole in the wall, and the dark dot of a discreet camera lens. The team commander ripped off a Velcro patch on his arm. Underneath was a badge of the American flag. He stood close to the lens for ten seconds and then tried to frame his face.
“We’re US Forces,” he mimed the words to his unseen audience. “We’ve come to rescue you.”
Nothing. For ten more seconds the two Delta operators stood impotent and fretting. Then their comms filled with a garble of urgent voices.
“Contact on at the northeast corner!”
“Shit!” Sledge fumed.
Over the net the two men heard the sudden and violent fury of a firefight outside the villa. More operators added their voices to the chaos of the battle.
The team commander switched nets and spoke directly to the control station aboard the Ronald Reagan.
“Dragon, this is Bear One. We are zero inside the villa. Repeat. No joy. No joy.”
Tony van den Berg’s voice filled his helmet headset. “Roger, Bear One,” he sounded deflated, crushed by disappointment. The air seemed to get sucked from the room.
“I’m calling back the bird,” the team commander made his decision. “We’re evacuating, Dragon. It’s a wash. We’re out of here.”
“Roger, Bear One.”
The two operators turned and went shoulder-to-shoulder back up the stairs. Every step closer to ground level intensified the sound of the battle raging outside the villa. They heard the chatter of automatic fire and the savage ‘crump’ of grenades.
Halfway up the staircase a sudden polite voice made them turn in alarm.
“Excuse me,” it was a young Japanese man in an immaculate black suit and tie, wearing wire-framed spectacles. He stood, leaning out through the open steel door. “I think we are who you are looking for.”
“Who the fuck are you?” Sledge was keyed up. He spat a thick wad of tobacco juice on the ground by his boot.
“My name is Haruma Yamazaki. I am the private secretary to the Emperor.”
“Is he with you?” the two men came urgently back down the steps. “Is Akihito in that room?”
“Yes,” the delicate young secretary seemed intimidated by the offensive hulking aggression of the Delta man. He looked close to fearful tears.
The panic room was the size of a bedroom. There were two cots in one corner and a high shelf packed with tins of food and bottled water. Against the opposite wall stood a black-box radio and a wooden bookcase.
Perched stiffly on a straight-backed chair in the middle of the floor sat a frail, elderly man with a shock of grey hair and heavy, stricken eyes. He lifted his chin, proud and noble. The team leader opened the flap of his wrist-mounted cheat card. Beneath a clear plastic window was a printed photo of the Emperor and several verification questions that Kate Greer had supplied during the briefing.
“Thank you for coming to our rescue. I am Emperor Akihito,” the elderly man spoke accented English, his voice dignified and formal.
“Who tutored you in Western manners and the English language?”
“Elizabeth Gray Vining. She was an American author. She wrote a book for children.”
“What date did you accede to the throne?”
“January 7th, 1989,” the old man responded calmly. “It was the day that Emperor Hirohito died.”
“Good enough,” the team commander grunted. “Sir, it’s a pleasure to meet you,” he said, and then seized the old man by the arm.
*
“Dragon! Dragon this is Bear One. We have the package. On our way for extraction.”
With Sledge in the lead, the group stormed out through the front door of the villa and into the mayhem of a raging battle. The eight operators were in cover around the portico, sheltered by the brickwork of the structure. They had become surrounded by infected. The undead charged from the tree line in solid waves of snarling frenzy. They were remorseless. The operators cut down the attack with a hail of carefully disciplined fire, but it was only a matter of time before their ammunition was exhausted.
The team commander hid the Emperor and his secretary inside the shelter of the open front door and gave Sledge the task of protecting them.
“Big Bird, we need you, man!” the commander keyed his mic and spoke directly to the Black Hawk pilot. “Southeast corner of the villa – pronto!”
Undead bodies were scattered across the lawn. Some had been headshot. They lay very still, leaking grey custard-like gore from their shattered skulls. Others had been flung down with gruesome chest and torso wounds. They clawed at the dirt with their gnarled hands, still howling as they dragged themselves towards the villa. Suddenly a fresh wave of ghouls burst from the trees.
They charged in a ragged line; a brutal and primitive phalanx of filthy wretched bodies packed together like a horde of ancient barbarians. They were hideously scarred, their clothes in tatters, their flesh rotting off their bones. The air became a choking miasma of corruption and nauseating decomposition. The commander puked up his lunch, then opened fire.
The infected ran into a concentrated lead wall of resistance. The team co
mmander shot a young girl in the face from so close that the bullet tore through the zombie’s shattered skull and knocked a second infected man flat on its back with the force of a swung baseball bat. He heard the sickening meaty sock of the impact, then turned and shot two more ghouls that were crawling across the lawn on shattered stumps.
“Where the fuck are you, Big Bird?”
“ETA twenty seconds.”
The team commander threw two grenades into the howling melee and then crouched down beside two operators firing along the driveway.
“The bird is on its way,” he began unpacking spare magazines and laying them down on the ground. “You two guys are going to hold off the attack until we get the target safely aboard. Understand?”
The men nodded, grim faced, uncomplaining – but aware that they had just been handed their death sentences.
*
The helicopter appeared from over the rooftop, the noise from the huge rotors deafening. It touched down like a fractious horse, the wheels barely kissing the grass, eager to be up and away again.
“Go! Go! Go!” the team commander clapped Sledge on the back. The big hulking man picked up the Emperor like a handbag and carried him bodily to the open door of the helicopter. The secretary ran in their trail like a startled gazelle. They reached the open door of the Black Hawk and strong hands heaved the two Japanese men aboard. Sledge turned, took a knee, and opened fire on the infected. The door gunner inside the chopper jumped behind the M-240H machine gun and cut a swathe through the horde. Empty shells fell like glittering hail across the helicopter’s cabin deck.
Three more men broke from cover and ran for the helicopter. The undead were enraged by the sudden fury of noise. It drove them to maniacal frenzy. They surged towards the chopper – and into a fusillade from Sledge and the mounted machine gun inside the Black Hawk.
The team commander led the rest of the squad in a sprint to safety while the two covering men opened fire. The infected swarmed towards the helicopter. The pilot lifted off, hovering fifteen feet above the grass. The sound of the rotors and the furious flailing roar of the weapons was a chaos of deafening noise.
The team commander barked into his mic. “We’ve got two men still down there!”
The helicopter turned on its axis, opening up a field of fire for the door gunner. Three more operators thrust their weapons out the door, firing into the milling mass of infected ghouls. At the edge of the portico they could see their two team members on the verge of being overwhelmed. They dropped grenades into the writhing mass of bodies. The vicious explosive eruptions ripped through the horde like scythes. The helicopter touched down again, fifty yards further away from the villa.
“Make a run for it!” the team commander shouted over the squad net.
The last two operators broke from cover and ran through the blood and gore of the grenade-shattered undead. The grass was slick with rotted flesh and oozing entrails. The lawn looked like the floor of a medieval slaughterhouse. The grenades had butchered everything within twenty yards. The men ran like sprinters in the race for their lives, burdened by their heavy kit, their arms pumping, the helicopter and safety just sixty yards away.
The team leader clung to the side of the chopper’s door and hung out his arm like a giant claw.
“Faster! Faster!”
The undead converged to cut them off. One of the ghouls dismembered in the grenade explosions still writhed like a snake on the ground, both its legs blown away, one arm shattered. It lashed out at the boots of one of the men but missed.
“Come on!” the rest of the operators shouted.
“You can make it!”
The team crowded in the open doorway, their fists clenched, urging the two men to superhuman effort. The door gunner fired a withering burst of bullets at a tight knot of undead and then the M-240H seized in a jam. Sledge crouched in the doorway and opened fire.
“Come on you weak bastards!” he snarled, his voice like the boom of an artillery piece.
The first operator reached the chopper and threw himself head-first through the opening. Strong hands heaved him to safety. The pilot began to lift off. The wheels came a foot off the grass and kept rising. Another surging wave of undead came from the tree line, still a hundred yards away but howling with furious frenzy. Then more ghouls emerged on the road that lead to the villa. They swarmed closer, roaring like berserkers.
“Come on!”
“Run!”
The last operator’s face wrenched tight with the agony of effort. His legs felt like rubber, his boots seemed filled with lead. He had his head thrown back, his mouth wide open gasping for breath. His lungs burned like they were on fire.
“Push yourself!”
“Come on, dude!”
“You can make it!”
The helicopter began to lift into the air. The pilot screamed over the net in rising panic. The snarling rotting corpses of the undead surrounded them.
“We’ve got to go! We’ve got to go now! I’m getting us out of here,” the pilot shouted.
“Come on!” Sledge screamed at the running man.
He lunged for the helicopter at the same instant the Black Hawk shot into the air. The commander’s hand was dangling out the door like a huge bunch of brown bananas. The operator dived for it and clung on. The commander felt his shoulder wrenched out of its socket by the sudden violent weight. He screamed out in agony – but he held on. He heaved the operator aboard like a giant landed fish. The exhausted man rolled onto his back, his chest heaving. He sobbed soft fat tears of terror and relief.
“Dragon. This is Bear One,” the team commander’s voice croaked. “We are jackpot. Repeat. Jackpot! We have the Japanese Emperor safe on board. We’re returning to the carrier.”
*
In the gloomy space aboard the USS Ronald Reagan, Tony van den Berg threw down his headset and punched the air. Pig Arvidson smiled and gave him a high-five. Then the drone Intel team began quietly and methodically breaking down the equipment for transport off the carrier.
The job was done.
Chapter 8:
FUXIN CITY
JINZHOU-TONGLIAO DEFENSIVE LINE
NORTHEAST CHINA
General Guo Lingfeng had aged in the last few days. The flesh around his cheeks had sagged in pallid pouches, and his eyes appeared dull and haunted in the small mirror. His hair had frosted with thick streaks of grey, seemingly overnight. He stared at the reflection of himself and barely recognized the face.
He turned away and lit a cigarette. On the table was rice wine. His hand trembled when he took a final sip from the delicate little cup. A drop broke from the corner of his mouth and dribbled down his chin. He smudged it away with his thumb.
Outside his command trailer, the General’s aids waited in the warm afternoon sun. They stiffened and snapped salutes.
“Report on the status of the defenses,” General Guo forced the undercurrent of despair from his voice. His subordinates had been at his side during the humiliating route at Dandong. Their faces reflected their own secret fears.
“We have almost one hundred kilometers of razor wire laid, General,” a tall man said. He wore the uniform of a Colonel.
“Only one hundred kilometers?” General Guo’s head snapped sharply. “The perimeter is three hundred kilometers long.”
“Yes, General,” the Colonel admitted. “The engineers proceed as quickly as they can, and we have sought to use the natural elements of the terrain as part of the defense… but we are still unprepared.”
“Then go faster!” General Guo barked. The plan he had presented to the Minister of Defense had been built around a solid wire barricade between Jinzhou in the south and Tongliao in the north, supported by trenches and massed artillery batteries. Fuxin was in the center of that line, close to a point where the barrier dog-legged to follow secondary roads. The city was the hinge-point in the line, and thus the most fragile part of the fortifications. It was for that reason Guo had chosen this place for h
is headquarters.
“Where is the enemy?”
“They are steadily closing on our position, General,” another subordinate Colonel answered. He was the operations officer. “Our reconnaissance helicopters have spotted advance elements of the horde seventy kilometers to the east.”
“Great Mao’s ghost!” Guo felt a quail of secret fear. He kept his expression impassive and stony. “They will be upon us within another two days – and we are not ready…”
“Good!” he said aloud and forced a foxy cunning smile for the benefit of his men’s morale. “Then we do not have long to wait to extract our revenge and to restore our honor. And what of Shenyang?”
“The city has fallen, General.”
There was no surprise in the news; it was inevitable. Undefended and without the support of an organized military counter-strike, the city had been virtually surrendered to the undead hordes. Over eight million Chinese lives had been sacrificed to buy the precious time Guo needed to prepare a determined line of resistance that could stop the infected.
“We have reports from our helicopters that the city is on fire. There have been many explosions.”
Guo grunted. “And what of our defenses here around Fuxin?”
“They are nearing completion, General,” the operations officer said, relieved to be the bearer of some good news at last. “We have a perimeter of barbed wire established to the east of the city’s outskirts, and we have incorporated the vast trenches of the nearby open coal mines into our defenses.”
The afternoon was eerily quiet; Fuxin was a ghost city. In recent days the entire population of almost two million had been driven from their homes by the Army and forced to flee west in a massive exodus of diesel-belching trucks.
“I want to inspect the work.” General Guo led his staff to where a Type 90 command vehicle was parked on a low rise of ground outside the city’s railway station.
The command-post vehicle sprouted several high whippy radio masts. Inside, the walls of the interior were crowded with radio communication equipment. The general took his seat and his most senior officers clambered into the tight spaces around him.
Dead Storm: The Global Zombie Apocalypse Page 26
