F-16’s and F-18’s joined the campaign. Even F-15E’s based at RAF Lakenheath in the United Kingdom launched air strikes against the approaching undead. In less than twenty-four hours over two thousand sorties were flown.
The British, French and German air forces contributed to the massive effort.
The German Luftwaffe flew missions from bases at Nörvenich and Büchel. The Taktisches Luftwaffengeschwader 31 was a fighter-bomber wing based at Nörvenich. They flew sorties into Poland in Eurofighter Typhoons. From Büchel in the southeast, the Taktisches Luftwaffengeschwader 33 flew strikes as far east as Hungary and Slovakia aboard their Panavia Tornados. French Dassault Rafale twin-engine fighters joined the German strikes so the air over Europe became shredded by the ceaseless sounds of sonic booms, and criss-crossed with contrails.
The RAF flew Typhoon FGR4 strike operations from bases at Coningsby and Lossiemouth, while squadrons of RAF Tornados were moved to mainland Europe to operate out of French airbases. Throughout the day, and into the dark of night, the air attack continued to rage.
But still, relentlessly, the undead swarm crept ever closer to the Rhine.
ODESSA
UKRAINE
Just a week earlier, the city of Odessa in southern Ukraine had been bracing itself for another summer season of tourists. The Black Sea port was renowned for its sun-kissed beaches and its charming nineteenth-century architecture. Such attractions were enticing – but the real lure to worldwide travellers was the fabled beauty of Odessa’s young women.
The visitors came for the beaches and the warm weather… but they returned, year after year, to admire the ladies and to pursue the prospect of romance.
Now however, Odessa had become an escape route away from the approaching plague. Her harbor was crammed with cargo ships and small boats of every shape and design, each vessel overloaded with people who were desperate to flee into the Black Sea. The calm waterways of the port became churned into choppy pieces as panic rose. Rumors swirled around the docks that Istanbul was untouched by the infection, and that maybe there was still a path open to the safety of the Mediterranean Sea. It was the wild speculation of desperate, fearful people, encouraged by black market smugglers who were making a fortune from other people’s craven terror.
When Yuriy Lyachko and Lyudmyla reached Odessa, night had fallen and the city was a scene of wild chaos. The streets were choked with people, some of them wandering aimlessly, others pushing and shoving towards the waterfront. Some people carried their possessions in carts and battered old bags. Others brandished weapons. Gunshots rang out, echoing off the walls of the surrounding buildings. The city’s streetlights flickered as power failed. Fires burned in apartment buildings but the blazes went unattended. There were no police, no firefighters. The Ukrainian soldiers who were stationed around the city had deserted their posts. Odessa was lawless and dangerous. Fear ruled the wild night. Men snarled and shoved each other. Fights broke out between rival gangs. Women screamed as they were chased into dark alleys. Blood trickled into the gutters, and broken glass littered the sidewalks.
People drank themselves into a stupor, staggering into laneways covered in their own vomit. Girls were brutally raped. Churches were broken into and ransacked. It was a holocaustic scene from a medieval painting of Hell, lit by lurid flames and filled with dark running shadows.
Yuriy abandoned the car on the outskirts of the city and seized Lyudmyla’s pale cold hand. He dragged her into the chaos, shoving the crowds aside with his shoulder, his free hand tucked inside the pocket of his coat, fingers wrapped tightly around the pistol.
Bodies lay strewn across the road – some of them dead in dark pools of blood. Yuriy tripped over the corpse of a young woman and swore bitterly. He dragged Lyudmyla into the doorway of a building. It had been a bank. The plate glass windows had been shattered and alarms were wailing. A sign over the door hung askew. Inside the building he could see dark shapes moving behind the waist-high countertops. Lyudmyla shivered. She stood stricken with terror. Her eyes were enormous, her mouth agape at the horror. Yuriy snatched for his cell phone and dialed a number. The line was dead. He tried three times. The network across Ukraine was intermittent. Soon, he knew, the phones and power would fail for good.
He tried again in despair and breathed a sigh of relief when he heard a dial tone. He called a number and waited. From somewhere in the darkness he heard a woman scream, followed by two gunshots.
“What do you want?” the voice that answered Yuriy’s call sounded churlish.
“Stanislav?”
“Who is this?” the man on the end of the line demanded.
“It’s Yuriy Lyachko.”
“Jesus, man! Where are you?” the voice changed to incredulous surprise.
“I’m on the outskirts of Odessa. I need your help. I need to get on a ship and away from Ukraine.”
“Fuck…” the man named Stanislav said.
“Can you help me?”
There was a tight pause. “Yes,” the man answered, burdened and tortured by a sense of loyalty. “If you can get to the harbor, I can help you.”
The two men spoke for another thirty frantic seconds. The caller gave Yuriy directions to a dock. Then the line went suddenly dead.
Yuriy grabbed Lyudmyla’s hand and they waded back out into the crush of bodies.
“We must walk the last two miles,” Yuriy snapped. The crowd was so tightly packed and unruly that he was forced to go ahead of the girl to clear a path for them. People were firing guns into the air, their crazed wild faces lit by firelight.
“This way! This way!” They went left, away from the nearest burning building, following a path of secondary streets, and moving obliquely towards the waterfront. But the going was faster in the laneways. The crowds were choking the main arteries. Yuriy could hear a fury of voices coming from the center of the city and sensed the madness in the air. They turned left and then right. The mouth of a narrow lane loomed dark ahead of them. Yuriy sensed menace, but still pressed forward, crushing down on his fear, focused only on reaching the harbor.
A shout rang out, sounding like a drunken challenge. Yuriy’s step faltered. From the shadows of the alley emerged the dark shapes of three men. Two of them were holding weapons; they looked to Yuriy like iron bars or wooden clubs. On the ground at their feet lay a woman. She was naked, stretched out in the filth of a trash pile.
“Turn around and leave,” one of the men warned. His voice was guttural and rasping. Yuriy froze. He heard Lyudmyla give a timid whimper of fear.
“I’m going that way,” Yuriy said defiantly. “I need to get to the harbor.”
“No,” one of the men took a step closer.
Yuriy drew the pistol and calmly shot all three men. The sound of the gun’s retort smashed against the low clouded sky and rang like bells off the surrounding walls. The first man was flung backwards. The second sagged to his knees, clutching at his chest. The third man spun in a pirouette, his arms flailing at the air. He had been hit in the shoulder. He slumped against the alley wall. Still holding the gun out in front of him, Yuriy went forward, covering the three men until he was past them. Lyudmyla saw the woman on the ground. She was bleeding, her eyes puffy and closed, her lips swollen. She had been bitten and brutally beaten until her will to resist had been broken. Now she was a battered mess of livid flesh and bruises.
“We should help her!” Lyudmyla pleaded to Yuriy, tugging at his hand. The girl rolled her head to the side.
“No. Fuck her,” Yuriy said hotly. “She’s not my problem.”
They reached the end of the alley and emerged into an open area of the city wreathed in grey choking smoke. Yuriy could smell the salt water of the sea somewhere nearby. He ran forward, dragging Lyudmyla behind him. Her legs were rubbery. She stumbled on a concrete sidewalk and cried out in sudden pain. Yuriy stopped and propped, but did not go back to her. The girl went down on her knees, clutching at her ankle. There was pain and a silent plea in her eyes. She couldn�
��t walk.
Yuriy shrugged his shoulders – and then turned and disappeared into the night, callously abandoning Lyudmyla to a cruel fate.
Yuriy pushed his way through another crowd of bodies. Hands clutched at him. Behind him someone shouted a challenge. A man reared up in front of Yuriy, clawed at his arm, and Yuriy used the butt of the pistol to hammer the man away. Ahead he could see a set of high wire gates and then the stench of oil and of burning chemicals overwhelmed him. He covered his mouth. His eyes ran with streaming tears. He kicked out at a woman in front of him and she fell forward into other bodies so they toppled like dominos. Yuriy clambered over the fallen woman. He was as crazed and frantic as an animal. He could feel the insane frenzy of desperation possess him. He fired a shot into the air, the sound so loud that people cringed in startled fear.
The high steel bow of a ship loomed in the distance, lit up against the night sky by an arcing red flare. Yuriy shoved his way towards it.
Inside the perimeter gates of the harbor, the panic seemed even worse than on the untamed streets. Here the desperation was more urgent, the screams and shouts more frantic. The fear that hung in the air was almost palpable; a sickly coppery taste in the back of Yuriy’s throat.
He fired another shot into the air and the crowd ahead of him parted. He brandished the weapon, threatening the truculent faces that pressed close. Someone swung a punch in his direction. Yuriy ducked under the arc of the blow and shoulder charged the man.
“Get back!” he waved the gun, pressing it into the wide-eyed horrified face of a blonde girl. “Everyone get back!”
A man tried to lunge for him. Yuriy shot him between the eyes. Blood sprayed into the air and splattered the ground. The man fell, and the girl screamed. Yuriy clamped his hand over her mouth. Using the woman like a human shield, he pushed his way deeper into the crowd.
*
There were a dozen ships still moored at the docks. The harbor was a scene of unimaginable chaos. Out on the water there were boats and small cruisers trying desperately to get clear, weaving dangerously through white churning wakes of panic. Ship’s horns sounded and more red flares lit up the sky. Yuriy ran along the pier.
“Stanislav! Stanislav!”
On the dock in front of every ship stood high steel barricades and long queues of people waiting to board. Men in overalls wielding automatic weapons patrolled the barriers. They were members of crime gangs, selling berths aboard each vessel to the highest bidders.
“Stanislav!”
“Yuriy!”
Yuriy saw his contact standing in front of a canvas-covered fence that had been topped by barbed wire. The big man who had hailed him carried a rubber baton. He swung the weapon savagely at the pressing crowds until they cleaved apart.
“I didn’t think you would make it, man. The ship is about to leave.” He was a huge, hulking figure with a shaved, scarred head and a body so swollen with muscles that he seemed to have no neck. “You’ll have to hurry if you want to live.”
*
The Nove Kakhovka was an exhausted freighter that had plied the Black Sea cargo routes for almost forty years. She was rust-streaked, with the unlovely lines of a barge. She stank of rotted fish and oil. Her tired engines rumbled deep within her creaking hull as the ship gained steerage speed and nudged its way out into the choppy churned water of the bay.
Yuriy stood at the port rail near the bow. The deck was crowded, and below decks the crush of bodies was even worse. The ship was dangerously overloaded. She wallowed in the water, barely responding to her rudder.
At last Yuriy felt the first loosening of the tight tension that had gripped him since he had fled south from Kiev. He had escaped the clutches of the dreaded Ukraine security services, and also evaded the approaching spread of the NK Plague. The steel bar of tension across his chest began to lift. He drew a deep breath and then another. The air was foul with smoke from the burning waterfront and the sea smelled of briny salt.
A seagull flew overhead, the sound of its cry somehow haunting. Then another flare burned across the night sky. The Nove Kakhovka was being followed out of port by a flotilla of small boats that were using the phosphorescent wake of the freighter to guide their own course. The water was oily black, hissing below the bow, while the deck under his feet vibrated from the rumble of the engines.
The other ship appeared out of the darkness like a sudden avalanche of steel, her bow hanging over the Nove Kakhovka like a black executioner’s blade. For a long moment Yuriy did not understand what was happening. It seemed that the night sky had simply been blotted out. Then he heard a cry of voices raised in wild panic and he saw the outline of the approaching ship, bearing down upon the freighter at speed.
The ship came around the Vorontsovsky lighthouse that was perched at the end of the Roadstead break wall. It ploughed towards the shoreline like an unstoppable freight train. The Nove Kakhovka lay in the other ship’s path, wallowing drunkenly under the massive weight of all those aboard. The bow of the other ship plunged up and down as it loomed closer.
Yuriy saw everything in brief flashes. He heard shrill screams. He saw people trying to turn and flee. From the other ship he heard maniacal wailing – a sound that was inhuman and chillingly terrifying. He smelled the sickening stench of death and decay, hanging like a cloud over the night sky. Then he felt the Nove Kakhovka shudder as the captain threw the engines into full reverse. He clutched for the railing and was thrown violently forward. The blonde girl screamed in terror.
The out of control ship struck the Nove Kakhovka broadside. Its huge blade of a bow cleaved through the forward section of the freighter like a blunt knife. The overloaded ship went down bow first, driven beneath the surface by the plunging weight of the collision. The sound was a dreadful deafening grind of metal against metal. Hundreds were thrown overboard into the frigid waters of the Black Sea before the freighter rolled onto its back and capsized.
Yuriy Lyachko died instantly, but the rogue ship continued it’s out of control course until it crashed into the harborside docks.
The plague had reached Ukraine.
MAINZ-FINTHEN AIRPORT
MAINZ, GERMANY
The three hundred and forty seven American citizens from the Moscow Embassy were evacuated west in two hastily arranged charter flights, charged at extortionate rates.
The aircraft were forced to circle Mainz-Finthen airport for ninety minutes before finally being cleared to land.
The airport was located three miles southwest of the city and had once been a World War Two Luftwaffe airfield operated by the Nazis. Mainz-Finthen was not an international airport; the American Air Force had taken over emergency control of the facility and prioritized traffic for diplomatic and military purposes, diverting all major commercial flights further west.
Nathan Power deplaned the aircraft as part of the entourage of dark-suited aides who accompanied the US Ambassador. The two men stopped and shook hands on the hot sunbaked tarmac.
A limousine stood waiting for the Ambassador.
A helicopter awaited Nathan Power.
“This way, sir,” an Army Lieutenant appeared at Power’s shoulder and saluted. “We have a Black Hawk standing by. It will fly you to Ramstein Air Base, and from there a transport plane will carry you on to your destination.”
Chapter 17:
NOVO-OGARYOVO
NEAR MOSCOW
The Chief of General Staff, the Minister for Defense, and the Minister for Interior all arrived separately in limousines, ten minutes apart, at the gates of the private Presidential residence.
Set on a lush, forested estate in the Odintsovsky District outside Moscow, the Novo-Ogaryovo residence was surrounded by twenty-foot high stone walls, and heavily protected by armed soldiers of the SBP Presidential Security Service.
Russian President Nikolay Fokin stood on the front steps and greeted each man warmly as their cars swept along the wide paved driveway, through a veil of tall green trees, and stopped at the front entra
nce.
Nearby, partially hidden by more trees, the President’s modified Mi-8 helicopter sat hunched on a concrete helipad.
Inside, the residence was lavishly appointed. But it was much more than a luxury home; from here the President could run the government, conduct meetings with staff, and monitor communications from inside a reinforced bunker deep below the ground.
Playing the genial host, Fokin escorted the three men into a room off the main hall, decorated as a comfortable living room, with a fireplace, heavy green curtains, thick grey carpet and antique furniture. He steered them to a long leather sofa and seated himself in a chair opposite.
The three men were instinctively suspicious. Fokin played on their anxieties, lingering over the choice of a wine with a household staff member and then giving his attention to a question from an aide. When the four men were finally alone, Fokin closed the door – and locked it.
Defense and Interior exchanged wary, suspicious glances. The President’s volatile temper was the stuff of Russian legend. The two men became anxious. Fokin let them sweat. The use of fear and veiled menace had both been legitimate commonplace political tactics since the time of the Soviet Union; a means to coerce the weak and subjugate the unwilling. Old instincts died hard. The Russian president had risen from the ranks of the Soviet Union’s security services. He was still the same cruel thug he had once been, only now he dressed in much more expensive suits.
The Chief of General Staff was a man who could not be frightened. He had fought in too many battles, bled through too many wars to be intimidated. He was gruff and bull-like – another throwback to the old Soviet style of leadership. He sat forward on the edge of the sofa.
Dead Storm: The Global Zombie Apocalypse Page 53
