“Mr. President, the war against the infected goes badly for us.” There was no other way of stating the facts. “The six nuclear strikes you authorized have been a setback to the undead advance into Russia. Millions of infected were vaporized in the blasts – but the plague-ridden now number into the billions. They are moving north, still.”
“Yes,” Fokin nodded. “I have seen the satellite imagery.”
“Forgive me, Kolya,” Interior looked decidedly uncomfortable. He shifted his weight and crossed his legs, twisting the cigarette he held between his fingers. “But you appear to be untroubled by this news.”
Fokin smiled – a leprous, reptilian smirk that drew his thin lips apart. It was an expression that carried its own hint of menace. His eyes glittered, seeming to turn black as coal.
“I am untroubled,” Fokin said lightly.
“But Mr. President, the army has disintegrated,” Defense admitted, confessing his own failure as he said the words. “The troops we sent to fight the invasion have been routed, and many thousands of soldiers across the rest of the country have deserted their barracks and fled. Moscow is practically lawless. Riots and fighting and protests have broken out…”
“These things I already know,” Fokin’s mood veered. He restrained himself. The time for retribution would come later. Now all that mattered was his survival plan. “But there must be some units still loyal and in good order. Who are they? Who are the best men we have?”
Even though it was the Defense Minister’s domain, he was an administrator, not a former soldier. His rise through the political ranks had come from prudent alliances and careful power games.
The Chief of General Staff answered.
“Spetsnaz – the 45th Guards Independent Special Purpose Regiment. They are based outside the capital.”
President Fokin arched his eyebrows with interest. “They are combat ready?”
“Always.”
“And are they loyal to me and the government?”
“Yes,” the Chief of General Staff answered. “They are elite troops, Mr. President. They are soldiers. They serve the will of the government and the President of Russia.”
“Good,” Fokin seemed satisfied. “I have a secret mission they must undertake. It must be actioned immediately, and there must be no mistakes. All our fates,” he looked at each man in turn, “depends on their success.”
“I know the Colonel personally. He is an old friend,” the Chief of General Staff said. “Do you want him summoned?”
“Yes. Immediately. Have him helicoptered here. I will explain the mission personally. In the meantime, I will share with you my secret, and my plan to save us all.”
*
After the phone call to the 45th Spetsnaz Brigade headquarters at Kubinka had been made, the four men settled back in their seats. The base was situated sixty kilometres west of Moscow. The Chief of General Staff checked his watch. “Colonel Stovsky will arrive in thirty minutes.”
Fokin nodded. “Then it is time to reveal my secret and my plan,” he said building anticipation with the skills of a born storyteller. The three men on the sofa all sat forward.
The President stood up and began to pace the room. Suddenly he was brimming with energy. He strode towards the locked door, head bowed, then turned on his heel and came back across the plush carpet.
“For the past eight years, our intelligence services have been running a spy inside the American Embassy. Her codename is SIREN. Only I, and the Director of the Federal Security Service – the FSB – know her identity. Such strict security has been necessary to protect her and the steady stream of high-level intelligence she has been providing. As you know, the Americans have now evacuated their embassy and fled to Germany. But in the chaos of the past few days several interesting pieces of information were revealed,” President Fokin delivered his words like a lecturing professor to a class of dim-witted students. “The most interesting is this; the Americans are planning a secret military mission into North Korea. Their plan is to raid the chemical plant from where the NK Plague was developed. The Americans have struck upon the idea of searching the facility, looking for a possible antidote.”
The three men sitting on the sofa made audible gasps of surprise. Shock registered on their faces – and then the slow dawning of understanding.
“I want an immediate raid launched on the North Korean facility,” Fokin demanded. “I want our Spetsnaz troops to get to the plant before the Americans – and I want every record confiscated and returned to Russia. With this information, we can formulate a remedy, or at the very least, hold a powerful bargaining tool over the heads of western governments. The antidote to the plague is the golden ticket to our survival and prosperity. With it we are wealthy, free men. Without it, we are all dead and Russia destroyed.”
NEAR GÖTTINGEN
GERMANY
“It’s no use, sergeant,” Lance Corporal Leuan Rhys-Davies slid out from beneath the Jackal, a spanner in his hand and his face smeared with grease and sweat. “The bitch is dead. There’s nothing I can do.”
“Don’t give me that bullshit, boyo,” Sergeant Owain Jones snapped. “Because if you don’t get the vehicle running, son, we’re all fucking dead. Do you understand that? In ten minutes from now this shithole is going to be crawling with infected.”
There were four armored Jackals in the squad. Three of them were parked across the road facing west, offering cover for the vehicle that had blown its engine an hour earlier. The men and machines were British Army, from C Squadron, 1st The Queen’s Dragoon Guards – better known as the Welsh Cavalry. The unit had been based in Poland as part of NATO’s Enhanced Forward Presence until the NK Plague had swept into Europe and the order had come for all troops to retreat west of the Rhine.
The past twenty-four hours had been a nightmare of rutted muddy side-roads, jammed highways and slow rising panic.
The four vehicles were stranded halfway across Germany in a village outside Göttingen, eighty kilometers south of Hanover. With them, sitting sullen and separate on the shoulder of the road, were eighteen men from a Polish company of engineers who had become separated from their battalion in the suburbs of Berlin. The Poles were unwanted baggage. Without them, Sergeant Jones would have simply abandoned the broken down Jackal by the side of the road and pushed on westward. With them, he had no choice. The three remaining 4x4’s could not hope to carry the spare crew and the Polish soldiers on their overloaded backs.
The Jackal was an ungainly box-shaped 4x4 built for the British Army, armed with a machine gun, with a crew of four. It was an all-terrain vehicle capable of speeds up to one hundred and thirty kilometers per hour, built specifically for reconnaissance. They were sturdy, robust vehicles – when they weren’t broken down…
“Take another look,” the Welsh Sergeant insisted.
The Jackal’s driver scrambled underneath the vehicle to hand Lance Corporal Rhys-Davies a pair of pliers.
“C’mon, Leuan, there must be something we can do, lad,” the driver’s whispered voice betrayed his own growing alarm.
“She’s fucked, Jimmy!” Rhys-Davies said. He gave the undercarriage an almighty whack with a hammer. Nothing happened.
Sergeant Jones cursed under his breath and strode away towards the other three Jackals, his boots slippery in the roadside mud. The 4x4’s were line-abreast to barricade the road, machine gunners poised and alert behind their weapons. The atmosphere was tense and strained. The vehicles had a five hundred yard clear field of fire ahead of them across open mist-shrouded fields. The sun’s light was pale and watery, the air unnaturally still.
Jones marched between the Jackals and strode back along the road towards the small village they had passed through an hour earlier. His eyes were narrowed and his brow frowned. His instincts were on high alert. He sensed danger nearby, somewhere behind the veil of fog.
He was resigned to death. There simply seemed no way that anyone could survive the spread of the plague. Whether he died he
re on a muddy road outside a god-forsaken village in Germany, or whether he died on the other side of the Rhine – didn’t seem to matter.
He forced himself to stand quite still. The air around him seemed to vibrate with something that wasn’t yet a sound. It was a sense of looming menace, of dark foreboding. He knew that hidden behind the mist, the undead were approaching.
Sergeant Jones had seen the television reports and had heard the panicked radio chatter of other units along the front being overwhelmed by infected hordes. Death seemed inevitable. His only desire now was to die bravely.
Which was why he had marched down the road to stand in the face of the approaching danger rather than remain behind the steel wall of the Jackals where the men worked and swore and labored to fix a vehicle that seemed beyond repair.
He felt he had to set an example – to prove himself.
The troops huddled around the 4x4’s were terrified, fighting a constant battle with their fear. Panic frayed men’s nerves, and made them short tempered. Sergeant Jones felt his duty was to show nonchalant indifference. It would calm the men, give them confidence.
Very soon, they would be in a firefight for their lives. The undead would surely come, and in the heat of the battle the men would all look to him for stoic resolve. They could never know that he was racked with his own gut-churning fear, or that his hands trembled. He had to remain a beacon of calm composure and confidence.
He heard sudden footsteps behind him. The sound broke his train of wallowing self-reflection.
“I imagine it’s going to be a nice sunny day once this fog lifts.” Sergeant David McCraigh arrived at Jones’ shoulder like a man on a Sunday stroll.
Jones felt his breath catch in his throat. McCraigh’s tone of blithe disregard for their situation only made him feel more inferior – until he turned and saw the nervous twitch at the corner of the other man’s eye and heard the tight gasp of his breathing.
“Yes,” Jones said, “though I suspect there’ll be a spit of rain about later today.” He paused for a moment and then spoke again with a sudden rush of passion. “I do bloody hate Poland and Germany, you know.”
“Really?” It was all David McCraigh could think to say. Jones’ sudden outburst had surprised him.
“It’s the bloody weather,” Jones complained. “Rain and fog, snow and wind. I’m utterly sick of it.”
McCraigh looked bemused. “You’re keen to get back to England?”
The Welsh Cavalry were based in Norfolk at Robertson Barracks, Swanton Morley. McCraigh could see no difference between the weather in either place. They were both eternally wet, windy and miserable.
“It’s the air,” Jones said vaguely. “The air at home is cleaner, fresher. Here in Europe,” he sniffed, “it stinks. It smells of something rotten, something foul that leaves an aftertaste in the back of your throat.”
“You can smell the difference in the air?”
“Of course!” Jones said passionately. “Try it, David. Breathe deep and tell me what you smell.”
McCraigh dutifully obliged, and as he drew a deep lungful of breath – the undead suddenly attacked through the fog.
*
The infected stormed through the shroud of mist, filling the fields directly ahead of the Jackals. They slipped and stumbled in the soft ploughed mud. They charged through the narrow main street of the little village and came on at a run. They roared with the mad insanity of their infection, incensed by the presence of the British soldiers and filled with a murderous blood-lust.
The two sergeants, standing isolated before the swarming horde, turned and sprinted for the safety of the Jackals.
“Open fire!” Sergeant Jones shouted. “Open fire!”
The men hunched behind the Jackals machine guns cut the undead down with well-aimed stuttering bursts. Idle crewmen threw down their cigarettes and snatched up weapons, adding their firepower to the fusillade. The Polish engineers unslung their rifles and joined the battle. For a time the undead seemed to falter, dropping to the ground in clumps of tangled shattered limbs and blood-curdling howls.
Then the solid hail of gunfire began to fracture as machine guns paused for fresh ammunition belts. Inexorably, the undead drew closer, falling in their hundreds but creeping forward like a relentless tide in the face of a gale of bullets.
Sergeant Jones sensed the end was near. There was just one small chance of salvation left. He threw himself aboard the broken down Jackal and snatched for the radio.
*
Captain Joe ‘Wildman’ Wilder pulled back on the throttle of his F-16 and let the nose of the aircraft slide a few degrees towards the ground. The patchwork green and brown quilt of German farmland rose up to meet him.
“All Players. All Players. This is SNAPSHOT calling for Emergency Close Air Support. All CAS-capable flights report. Emergency CAS in progress. Report your availability on Domino Four Five.”
Wilder frowned and flicked through the folder of mission material he wore strapped to his knee, filled with maps, call signs and a comms card of every frequency.
The pilot checked his fuel status in the center of his Heads Up Display and then keyed his radio. He had just finished a bombing mission against the undead along the German-Poland border and was on his way back to base, flying solo because the other ship in his fight had bugged out with a weapons-status fault just ten minutes after take off.
“SNAPSHOT this is BEAGLE TWO…”
A British reconnaissance unit was on the brink of being overwhelmed outside a small village south of Hanover. SNAPSHOT put the F-16 pilot in direct comms with the Welsh Cavalry, call sign EMPIRE.
Wilder threw the F-16 into a tight turn to the southwest on an intercept course and keyed his mic.
“EMPIRE, EMPIRE, this is BEAGLE TWO. I am one by Fox One Six with a thousand rounds of 20mm and fifteen minutes of playtime. Over.”
“Roger BEAGLE TWO. We are four AFV’s, five hundred yards west of village Four Alpha. We are a platoon size unit under direct undead assault. I want 20mm along the road east of our position. I am popping smoke now. You are cleared hot.”
Wilder felt his adrenalin levels surge. It was standard procedure during a CAS operation for the ground force to issue a 9-line sitrep of their position followed by confirmation from JTAC before ordinance could be dropped. That five minute ‘handshake’ procedure ensured the pilots knew exactly where the enemy were located to avoid kills from friendly fire. By circumventing the procedure, Wilder understood that EMPIRE was in real trouble. The fact that EMPIRE was less concerned with the procedural handshake than possible hits from friendly fire emphasized the desperation of their circumstances.
Wilder saw a small billow of red smoke suddenly appear in the distance. He keyed his radio mic. “EMIPRE, BEAGLE TWO. I need coordinates of your location and unit details.”
Sergeant Jones rattled off map coordinates in a hurry. “We are British recce unit of four Jackals. You are cleared hot! Hurry up, BEAGLE TWO!” Sergeant Owain Jones barked from the driver’s seat of the broken down Jackal. “We’re in a damned sticky situation. We’re being overrun.”
Wilder dropped down below six thousand feet and scanned the landscape ahead as it flashed beneath the nose of the Viper. Keeping his voice dispassionate and detached he called clearly.
“EMPIRE, confirm your position, over.”
The reply from Sergeant Jones was immediate. “We are five hundred yards west of the village. Repeat five hundred yards. Popping more smoke now.”
“Confirm no friendlies on the road east of your location. Repeat. Confirm no friendlies east of you.”
“Affirmative!”
Five miles from the target the F-16 dropped to three thousand feet, flying at four hundred and sixty knots, still descending. The radio burst to life again.
“BEAGLE TWO, hurry!” In the background Wilder could hear the frantic staccato of machine gun fire and the sounds of screaming, shouting voices. Wilder fanned his speed brakes to slow the speed of the Vipe
r as it plunged through two thousand feet.
“EMPIRE, you are in sight. Repeat, you are in sight. Three miles out. Standby. Coming in hot from the northeast.”
Wilder leveled the fighter out at a thousand feet and closed the Viper’s speed brakes again to hold the plane’s speed steady at four hundred knots.
The landscape came into focus quickly. Wilder saw the small village. One of the buildings was on fire. The surrounding fields were brown mud, littered with hundreds of dark bundles he guessed were shot undead. West of the village, the road ran straight as an arrow, leading his eye to a cluster of four camouflaged vehicles. The road and fields between the village and the vehicles was choked with swarming undead. They were like a vast crowd of outdoor festival fans, covered in mud and grime. It reminded him of old photos he had seen of Woodstock and Glastonbury. They were swarming around the four British vehicles like it was a stage. He called up the gun symbology on his display and shoved the throttle and the fighter’s nose forward.
The F-16 dropped to five hundred feet and kept dropping at a twenty-degree straf angle. At two hundred feet his left hand reached instinctively for the MASTER ARM switch. Staring through the HUD, he lined up on the undead mass, approaching from due north.
“BEAGLE TWO, for Christ’s sake hurry!” Sergeant Jones’ voice blurted through the radio. He was breathless, his voice made ragged by exhaustion and fear. Joe Wilder shut out the distraction and concentrated.
The F-16 dropped to one hundred feet, seeming to scrape the earth as it flashed towards the road.
The fighter’s aiming circle through the Heads Up Display wriggled across the screen then settled in the center of the massed bodies. Wilder curled his right forefinger around the trigger and squeezed.
The sound of the jet’s Gatling gun spitting out hundreds of 20mm shells was a cacophony of roaring violent noise. The fighter seemed to rock sideways. In a flash he was past, leaving hundreds of undead scattered and smashed in his wake. He pulled the nose of the F-16 up, hanging the jet on its right wing in a sharp turn.
Dead Storm: The Global Zombie Apocalypse Page 54
