“Delta Hotel! Delta Hotel!” Sergeant Jones shouted, his voice thick with excitement and jubilation. “Direct Hits.”
“EMPIRE. EMPIRE. BEAGLE TWO is off to the south. Coming back for one more attack before Bingo and RTB. Over.”
“Roger BEAGLE TWO,” the gratitude in Sergeant Jones’ voice was almost pathetic.
The F-16 turned tight over the German countryside and flashed back over the undead with cannon’s blazing. The men behind the Jackals ducked their heads instinctively. The roar of the gunfire and the screaming jet engines shook the very air.
The return strafing run left hundreds more undead broken and shattered in the mud and on the road. Wilder pulled up hard and kicked the rudder, swinging away to the west. He had done all he could.
Looking back over his shoulder, the pilot saw tiny flashes of flame from firing guns as the Welsh Cavalry continued their heroic last stand against inevitable death.
USS IWO JIMA
SEA OF JAPAN
Nathan Power stepped down from the helicopter and stood, dazed and drunk as a prizefighter in the fifteenth round, on the flight deck of the USS Iwo Jima.
His head felt stuffed with cotton wool, his body was stiff with cramp and fatigue. The connecting flights from Mainz had been a waking nightmare of discomfort and numbing noise.
The Sea of Japan was flat as a lake, the breeze blustering from out of the northeast. Power blinked in the dazzling bright light and saw a burly figure striding towards him. The man moved with a confident arrogant stride. He thrust out his hand but didn’t introduce himself.
“Power?”
“Yes.”
The man grunted, making a silent assessment. “Special Forces have been waiting for you. You’ve got an hour to clean up and kit up before we fly into North Korea.”
SITUATION ROOM
THE WHITE HOUSE
Everyone assembled in the situation room stood respectfully when POTUS entered. He waved them all back to their seats. The President was dressed in casual slacks, an open-necked shirt and a blue Chicago Cubs baseball jacket. He looked tired. His hair seemed to have greyed in the past few horrific days. Smudges of bruised fatigue underlined his eyes.
“Has it started?” Patrick Austin asked.
“Special Forces are inbound, sir,” the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs said.
The small room was crammed with people. All the seats around the conference table were filled and others stood against the back wall. Many of the men were in shirtsleeves. Some had discarded their ties. The atmosphere was tense with rising anxiety.
Vice President Hallmeyer had a seat at the table beside Secretary of State Virginia Clayton who had returned from her meetings in Europe only hours earlier. Clayton’s haggard face mirrored the fatigue of the President. Jim Poe was too anxious to sit. He stood near the closed door with his arms folded, beside Walter Ford. The others in the room were members of the government’s security and intelligence services; the Director of National Intelligence, the Deputy National Security Advisor, two of the Joint Chiefs and several departmental aides.
The President took a seat in the corner and stared up at the monitor on the wall that streamed a live feed from the Black Hawks. It was still daylight in North Korea, but there was little to see. The helicopters were flying low over dense woods. In the distance loomed a narrow ribbon of gravel road.
“How much longer before they land at the Chemical plant General Knight?” POTUS asked.
“Six minutes, sir.”
42° 29’ NORTH, 130° 27’ EAST
NORTH KOREA
Nathan Power stole a glance out of the low-flying Black Hawk but could see nothing in the swirling air other than dense woods. The choppers were racing northwest towards the Aoji-ri chemical plant, and with every passing minute the tension aboard the helicopter seemed to ratchet up a notch.
The air through the open doors was bitterly cold. Power shivered and shifted on the narrow bench seat. He sat uncomfortably in the bulky military kit. He felt weighed down, his limbs leaden by the sheer mass of the equipment he carried.
He was flying in the lead helicopter with the other two Black Hawks holding position directly astern. The birds were flying nap-of-the-earth, skimming the treetops with daredevil disregard for the dangers.
“Four minutes,” the captain of the A Team aboard spoke calmly into the comms. Power heard the voice loud in his helmet. To reinforce the time-check the man held up four gloved fingers and showed them to the troops crowded inside the cramped space. The soldiers were unnaturally calm. Power found their assuredness unnerving. His own stomach was filled with churning butterflies and his mouth felt as dry as the Sahara – yet the men around him showed expressions of casual indifference. They were all big, muscled soldiers with rugged unshaven faces and calm self-assurance. Power glanced back out through the open cabin door as a distraction from his rising trepidation.
The terrain began to slowly change. The trees thinned and the road they were following became a wide stretch of tarmac. Cultivated farm fields began to appear, and then Power saw the first of the undead. It had been a man before the infection had ravaged him. He sat squatting, gnawing at the corpse of another figure lying on the verge of the road. The ghoul lifted its head as the choppers flew past and howled like a wild dog.
In the distance, Power could see more of the undead. They were staggering and swaying down the middle of the road, their clothes drenched in blood, their uplifted faces hideous and snarling.
They seemed to be moving towards the site of the chemical plant.
KÖNIGSTÄDTEN
GERMANY
Sergeant First Class Colin Thurlow stared up at the Abrams tank silhouetted against the dawn sky. Despite the imminent danger of war – he smiled. Her name was ‘Anabelle’ and she was his to command; an angular steel behemoth of the American 2nd Armored Brigade Combat Team.
To Thurlow’s mind, the Abrams remained the finest tank in the world; a combat-proven powerhouse that combined a lethal punch with remarkably nimble speed. She was a beast, and even asleep in the soft half-light before sunrise, she looked intimidating.
“Don’t seem right, does it?” Dale Feguluzzi appeared out of the shadows, sauntering towards where Thurlow sat, carrying an aluminum mess tin in one hand. Feguluzzi was the commander of ‘Alligator’, the next tank in the platoon’s line.
“No, it don’t,” Thurlow said. “Sitting out here in an open field instead of being hull down or dug in?” he shook his head. It wasn’t like any combat situation Thurlow had ever encountered or trained for.
The four Abrams tanks of First Platoon were parked in the middle of a vast open field to the south of a city called Rüsselsheim, with their left flank bordered by a highway that ran east to west through the fertile German countryside. Ahead of them, across a couple of miles of ploughed farmland, was the township of Königstädten. It was from there that Thurlow expected the undead to appear.
The platoon was positioned ten miles east of Mainz, southeast of Frankfurt. Yesterday Frankfurt had been obliterated by artillery and air attacks.
Thurlow knew the undead must be close.
Their mission was to keep the highway open for the endless stream of bedraggled refugees that were pouring east. The Weisenauer Bridge across the Rhine River was one of only three crossing points left standing by the Allies. Soon that too would be destroyed. Until then, First Platoon had the task of protecting evacuees on the highway and allowing them to reach safety. Only at the last minute would they too fall back the ten kilometers to Mainz and retreat to the western bank.
Dale Feguluzzi sipped at his coffee and stared into the sky. Faintly on the horizon he could see a black scar of smoke still rising from the ruins of Frankfurt. He stared for a long moment, the silence between the men fraught and awkward.
Colin Thurlow lit a cigarette and blew a thin feather of blue smoke into the dawn. “Do you reckon the undead are nearby?”
“Yeah,” Feguluzzi said, and then made a face like
he was fighting against himself to say more. Finally everything came out in a pent-up rush of words.
“I’m scared shitless, Thurlow, y’know? I can’t get the fear out of my mind. It’s not like the war we trained for. It’s not like everything we heard about Iraq or the Persian Gulf. This ain’t that kind of fight.”
Thurlow nodded his head and drew deeply on the cigarette. Feguluzzi’s voice sounded unnaturally loud in the quiet of morning.
“The Abrams hasn’t changed, Feguluzzi. It’s still the same tank and we’re still the same crews. Yeah, it’s a different kind of fight but we’re still fighting with the same weapon.”
“But we’re so exposed,” Feguluzzi couldn’t come to terms with the fact. It seemed unnatural not to be concealed, or hull down behind cover.
“You’ll get used to it,” Thurlow said. In truth, he had been wrestling with the same discomfort.
Feguluzzi shook his head. “There’s something else, man. The infected…” He didn’t need to say anything else. The horror was implied.
Gruesome rumors about the plague had burned like a wildfire through the Army over the past twenty-four hours – dreadful stories of maimed and disfigured ghouls killing mindlessly as they scoured the earth for survivors. They were demoralizing mental images for idle soldiers to dwell on. A creeping tide of panic and quiet despair had swept through NATO’s ranks.
Thurlow had decided – if it came to it – that he would rather put a bullet through his own brain than become another victim of the NK Plague.
They weren’t the thoughts that a platoon sergeant should have in a war zone, he conceded, but there it was. He was human, and if there wasn’t a future for the world he was preparing to fight for, then he was at least going to die on his own terms.
He said nothing to Feguluzzi and for a long moment there stretched more awkward silence between the men. Feguluzzi scuffed his boots in the loose soil, kicking up small clouds of dust. From the corner of his eye he watched Colin Thurlow carefully, looking for signs of the churning fear that was tying tight knots in his own guts. But Thurlow’s face was impassive and unconcerned.
“Do you think I’m a coward?”
“Nope,” Colin Thurlow crushed the butt of his cigarette under his heel. Sunrise was breaking over the distant rooftops of Königstädten, winking through the spire of a small church.
“You don’t?” Feguluzzi sought reassurance. Thurlow got to his feet. The seat of his fatigues were damp, soaked through by layer of night dew. Colin Thurlow sighed.
“Dale, we’re all scared, man. In some way we’re all terrified. This plague has wiped out Asia and is racing towards us. But if we run, Europe falls too. We’re soldiers. This is the work we signed up for. We’re well trained and we’ve got the best tank in the world under us. We’ve got no choice but to fight back.”
“Why?”
“Because they can’t,” Colin Thurlow thrust his finger at the dark column of refugees trudging silent and fearful down the middle of the highway. Some of the survivors were pushing wooden handcarts packed high with meager possessions. Others were limping. “They can’t defend themselves, man. It’s our job.”
Feguluzzi nodded his head jerkily, now ashamed by his fear. He threw the coffee sediment at the bottom of his mess tin into the grass.
“Yeah,” he muttered. He might have said more but ‘Anabelle’s’ gunner, Sergeant E-5 Dan Fox, leaned out of the turret above them, suddenly interrupting the conversation.
“Commander’s makin’ a speech,” Fox announced.
Thurlow and Feguluzzi exchanged bored glances. “What’s it about?”
“He’s giving a pep talk,” Fox said.
“Christ,” Thurlow shook his head. He pulled his collar up, turned back to the eastern skyline – and then sniffed suddenly.
There was something on the air; a foul smell that took him several seconds to identify. He remembered it then, and his mind filled with recollected images of the dead rotting corpses he had helped to pull from the ruins of a collapsed home in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina.
“They’re here,” Colin Thurlow said heavily, his tone fatalistic. “The infected have arrived.”
*
Thurlow sprinted to his tank. Dale Feguluzzi turned on his heel, shouting orders to his crew as he ran. Thurlow clambered down into ‘Anabelle’s’ turret, keeping his head and shoulders out of the cupola. The metalwork was cool. The interior of the tank smelled of unwashed socks and sweat.
“You guys ready?” Thurlow pulled on his helmet and spoke quickly over the tank’s comms. In the Abrams’ driving compartment, Specialist Julian Nelson fired up the huge engine.
“Ready.”
The tanks loader, Specialist Matt Corker, was somewhere in the gloomy interior. In addition to loading the tank’s 120mm main gun and the onboard machine guns, it was Corker’s responsibility to operate and maintain the intercom and radio systems on the tank.
“Corky?” Thurlow called. “Load with HEAT.”
Corker knocked the ammunition door switch with his knee, forcing it to slide open. He heaved out a round of high-explosive anti-tank ammunition and slid it into the breach, working in a cloud of dust.
“Loaded.”
Thurlow grunted. He flicked his eyes left and right and saw the tanks on either side of him burbling dark diesel exhaust. The fourth tank in the unit was the Platoon Leader’s, parked on the extreme right of the line, two hundred yards further south. Thurlow couldn’t see the Abrams.
The Company Commander’s voice came back across the net, crackling in Thurlow’s headphones and sounding like it originated from the far side of the moon. “First Platoon, this is Alpha Six. Confirm enemy in sight east of your position. Prepare to engage.”
Thurlow confirmed and heard the other tanks in the platoon do likewise. Overhead, six dark shapes swept out of the dawn, racing west. They were Apache Attack helicopters, flying line abreast, just a few hundred feet above the ground. Thurlow watched them swoop past and then unleash white streaking missiles into the buildings directly ahead of where First platoon sat parked.
“Jesus!” Thurlow gaped. The Apaches were from the British Army Air Corps. They released their combined lethal firepower in a fury of explosions and towering fireballs, then dashed away to the north. Seconds later more Apaches appeared to take their place. The roar of the awesome fusillade unleashed by the helicopters made the ground tremble.
The platoon’s comms net came alive again. It was the Platoon Leader on the right flank. He had only arrived in-country three weeks earlier having recently graduated from Armor Officers Basic Course.
“Heads up, First Platoon!” Thurlow could hear the infectious enthusiasm in the new lieutenant’s squeaking voice. “Hold formation and hold your ground.”
Colin Thurlow shook his head and cynically rolled his eyes.
*
“I have no targets!” gunner Dan Fox shouted, his voice brittle with the first traces of panic.
“Calm down,” Thurlow snapped. He dropped down in his cupola and snatched for a pair of binoculars that had been slung by a strap from the cradle of the tank’s coaxial machine gun.
Fox had his eyes pressed to the tank’s sights, hunting the distant line of fires and explosions. “I have no targets!” he said again.
Thurlow took a deep breath to fight off the first creeping tentacles of panic and panned the binoculars across the skyline. The sun had begun cresting the horizon, painting the world in the last moments of eerie half-light before full morning broke. The town to their west was on fire, obliterated by the British attack helicopters. Roiling black towers of smoke rose into the sky, draping the fringe of the housing estate behind a hazy veil. The ground seemed to be ablaze, catching trees alight and spewing more smoke until everything became blurred and confused.
Thurlow dropped down into the turret and checked the tank’s BMS. The Battlefield Management System was the US Army’s FBCB2, colloquially known as Blue Force Tracker – 21st century technolog
y to cut down on the chaotic fog of war by digitally displaying the positions of all friendly forces and mapping the approach of enemy elements as they appeared.
On the monitor he could see that all four Abrams of First Platoon were stationary in a line. Superimposed on the map was the surrounding terrain, showing a two-mile square patch of ground with the tanks in the middle. Behind their position stretched another few hundred yards of field bordered by a fringe of dense woods.
Six fast-moving markers on the top left edge of the BMS screen showed the British helicopters, swinging north. After another moment they had disappeared from the BMS monitor entirely.
Thurlow heaved himself up until his upper body was back out of the hatch. He spoke to Dan Fox over the comms.
“Fire.”
“I have no targets!” Fox shouted.
“Fire anyhow,” Thurlow insisted. “Fire at the buildings right in front of us and then get your ass behind the coax.”
The battlefield became confused with noise and smoke.
On the platoon net, the new Lieutenant was shouting. “Engage! Engage!”
Through the tank’s own comm’s system, Thurlow’s driver, Julian Nelson, began revving the Abrams’ big turbine engine impatiently, like he was on the starting line at a Grand Prix. He sat peering through his viewing prisms watching wide-eyed as shapes began to emerge from the smoke line. They were running, flailing their arms as they moved, their legs somehow uncoordinated so they lurched like drunks.
“Fuck… fuck… fuck!” Nelson yelled, his voice rising in Thurlow’s headset. “They’re coming. The infected are coming. They’re pouring out of the smoke dead ahead.”
Dead Storm: The Global Zombie Apocalypse Page 55
