WEISENAUER BRIDGE
MAINZ, GERMANY
The refugees at the Weisenauer Bridge were a milling mass of bedraggled humanity. Terrified, starving, and crushed by despair, they shuffled towards the chokepoint in their thousands. Some of the sprawling swarm pushed steel shopping trolleys stacked high with their tattered possessions. Others amongst the throng dragged heavy suitcases. They were sullen and fearful, still on the wrong side of the river, and therefore anxious and vulnerable.
Monitoring the crossing over the Rhine were German troops from the 3rd Commando Company KSK – Kommando Spezialkräfte – an elite special forces unit that was part of Germany’s Rapid Forces Division. They were heavily armed and wary, scrutinizing the flood of refugees as they funnelled through the checkpoint.
Jürgen Potente gave his elderly wife a reassuring smile as he pushed the wheelbarrow towards the barrier. The western side of the bridge had been reinforced with sandbagged machine gun emplacements and barbed wire fences in anticipation of an attack from the undead. One of the Commandos called out suddenly to halt the German couple. Jürgen felt a guilty chill of panic run down his spine.
“Wer ist das?”
“It is my granddaughter,” the old man said. “She is everything left in the world that matters to me.” He had a haggard face with a lank mop of silver hair. The steel spectacles perched on the end of his nose gave him the appearance of a kindly family doctor. Curled up asleep in the bottom of the barrow lay a young girl with a tangle of blonde hair. She slept under a bundle of blankets.
“Where are her parents?”
“Dead,” the old man said.
“What happened to the child?”
“She fell and hurt her leg,” Jürgen’s wife, Elsa, explained nervously. The old woman was distressed and anxious. “She needs urgent medical attention.”
The Commando slung his machine gun over his shoulder and pulled back the blankets. The little girl’s lower leg had been wrapped in bandages of torn linen. Blood had soaked through the strapping.
“Where did this happen?” the soldier asked, raising his voice over the throaty rumble of an American Abrams tank that came lumbering across the bridge. The tank was caked in mud and spattered with blood. The vehicle’s commander gave a weary salute as he passed through the checkpoint.
“On the outskirts of Königstädten,” Jürgen Potente explained. “The infected attacked. We had to flee along the highway. An American tank saved us from the undead. Little Martina fell over in the panic and chaos. She cut her leg on broken glass when she fell in the gutter.”
The Commando grunted. The girl’s face was flushed and feverish. She moaned in her sleep; a strange, guttural sound.
The Commando straightened and re-covered the child. He waved the frail old couple through the barbed wire fence. “There is an aid station one kilometre west from here on the outskirts of the city. French and American military doctors run it. Take the child there immediately. You will find a soup kitchen along the way. Feed the child. She’s nothing but skin and bone.”
Jürgen Potente bobbed his head. Tears of gratitude and relief welled in his rheumy old eyes. He snatched his wife by the hand and together they steered the old wheelbarrow through the crowd.
AOJI-RI CHEMICAL COMPLEX
NORTH KOREA
With Tim Scott dead, another of the A Team captains took command of the mission. He was younger than Scott; a man with pitted acne scars on his cheeks and a stubble of beard. He had a shrapnel cut above his left eye. He staunched the blood with the press of his thumb while he barked orders.
Nathan Power, the K9 team, and four more men were sent to raid the plant’s research facility. The rest of the Special Forces operators remained posted around the perimeter fence. The very real prospect of another attack from the Russians, and the rising risk that thousands more undead would be lured to the location by the violent sounds of the firefight, had every man keyed up and tense. The dead were carried to the shade of a factory building and laid out reverently on the ground, ready for evacuation when the Black Hawks returned.
Power’s team chose the west-facing door to gain entry into the windowless research building. The door was made of steel. It was pockmarked with dints from bullet strikes. One of the operators put his shoulder against the metal and shoved. The door stayed firmly locked. An operator tried the other access door and shook his head. Nathan Power gritted his teeth. There was no time for finesse. At any moment the perimeter fence could be swarming with more undead. He turned, growling.
“Breacher up!”
One of the operators in the team was an engineer, loaded down with the additional weight of a backpack of breaching tools that ranged from a portable rescue saw and manual breaching tools to a thermal cutting torch and water impulse charges. US Special Forces operators were masters of breach entries.
“Get us inside and make it fast!” Power snapped. Every man in the small group felt the tension. The engineer stared at the door like he was sizing it up for a fight. He snatched the portable rescue saw out of the backpack and braced himself. The saw was a hand-held device with a circular saw blade. The engineer set it against the door lock and sparks flew. The air filled with the distinct smell of burning metal and the lock glowed hot then suddenly broke open. The engineer took a step back and planted the heel of his boot against the door. It slammed back on its hinges.
The air inside the building was stale. The operators stood on the threshold for long seconds, weapons raised, breathing hard with their fingers tense on their triggers. The interior of the building was eerily silent, gloomy as an old church. Nathan Power forced his way into the entrance and stood, making a quick assessment.
The space had been divided into a row of four small glass-walled offices along one side, with the rest of the floor area given over to sterile white work stations, lit by banks of fluorescent lights that hung from the ceiling on chains. Against the far wall stood a steel staircase that connected the ground floor to the story above. There was no natural light. Power flicked a switch on the wall and nothing happened. He took half a dozen steps into the room. Dust motes floated in the air. The ground beneath his boots was solid concrete.
“Is this where they created the plague?” one of the operators asked from the safety of the door, his voice hushed by superstitious dread. Every man carried a hazmat suit and respirator in their assault pack and Special Forces troops trained extensively in the bulky gear.
Power shook his head. “No. This is where they conducted their research. The experiments would have been done somewhere else. The two factory buildings would be where the biological strain was formulated and fitted to the missiles. There’s nothing in here apart from filing cabinets and computers.”
“Are you sure?”
The Special Forces operators were the bravest of the brave who valiantly risked their lives in the most desperate of situations to keep America safe. But they were practical men. They were most comfortable when they had an objective and something to shoot with. No enemy that they could target in their sights scared them. But the NK Plague was something else; an airborne infection they could not see and could not fight. The soldiers were instinctively wary.
One of the operators coughed and his partner in the doorway shrank back in superstitious alarm.
“It’s a research facility,” Nathan Power snapped. “There’s nothing to fear. Get your butts in here and start searching.”
The operators entered reluctantly, weapons still at the ready. They went up the stairs like they were clearing a building of insurgents and came back down from the first floor a little more relaxed.
“All clear.”
Power strode into the first office and rifled through the filing cabinets, taking armfuls of papers and stuffing them into a canvas duffle bag. There was a computer on every desk. Operators carried them out of the building and laid them on the ground near their fallen comrades where a man with an electric screwdriver dismantled the casings to remove the hard drive
s.
The gathering of classified material in the military is called Sensitive Site Exploitation – the careful and systematic collection of material found during the course of a mission. There were procedures to be followed. Nathan Power disregarded every rule in the book. As an exercise in SSE, the raid on the research facility was closer to a bar-room brawl than a systematic sweep of the building. Power ransacked the site in a frantic race against the ticking clock in his head, expecting every moment to be punctured by a roar of automatic gunfire that would signal a fresh undead attack.
When the ground floor had been thoroughly searched, Power went to the first floor, taking the steps two-at-a-time. The upstairs room was arranged like a 1950’s American classroom. There were rows of small wooden desks and a blackboard on the far wall between two North Korean flags. Each desk had a drawer. Power searched them all but found nothing.
The K9 handler let Spike off his leash and the dog began quartering the ground floor, sniffing like a bloodhound. The handler followed two paces behind. The dog moved through all the offices and then stopped suddenly beneath the staircase. The Malinois started barking. The handler immediately became alert. He dropped to his haunches and inspected the flat ground where the dog growled and scratched.
The operator saw a thin seam between two concrete panels and leaped back, alert.
Using hand signals, he motioned urgently for two other operators. They came at a sudden and stealthy rush. The dog’s handler pointed. “We’ve got a trapdoor!” he hissed.
Nathan Power came down the stairs. He saw the operators standing with their weapons raised and knew instinctively there was danger. The K9 handler drew Spike away from the corner and pointed. Power inspected the carefully concealed seam and saw the outline of a panel, about two feet square, and knew immediately what it represented.
Beneath North Korea lay a vast sprawling network of tunnels. In 1974, South Korean authorities had found a tunnel under the border that stretched for over three kilometers. The walls had been reinforced with concrete slabs. The tunnel had the ability to move thousands of North Korean invasion troops and was even equipped with a narrow-gauge railway and lit by lamps. It was just the first of many similar tunnels that would be discovered in the years that followed, including tunnels wide enough to move tanks and artillery. A retired South Korean General once claimed there were as many as eighty tunnels beneath the border. Kim’s regime had also built a tunnel network beneath his Pyongyang headquarters, and had burrowed military installations deep into the sides of mountains.
Whether what lay beneath the floor of the chemical plant building was a bunker or the beginning of a network tunnel was unknown. There was only one way to find out.
“We’re going in,” Power declared. The Special Forces operators exchanged grim looks. Tunnel fighting was the most nerve-racking, tense challenge of all combat scenarios. Americans had experienced the horrors first hand during the Korean and Vietnam wars, and more recently during the conflict in Afghanistan. The operators steeled themselves and checked their weapons. Power held up his hand.
“We’re just exploring. You can’t use grenades to clear the area. Scientists manned this facility. If it’s a bunker, they might have more records stored underground. I need that information intact.”
To clear a room in a war zone, standard doctrine called for a grenade to be lobbed through the doorway to neutralize the interior before the troops burst across the threshold, taking advantage of the noise and confusion to target hostiles that remained a threat. Leaping down into a dark hole without first suppressing the area was almost suicidal.
“Send Spike down,” one of the men grunted. K9 harnesses could be fitted with a camera that allowed the handler to monitor an unsafe location without risking his own life. “Or drop a flash-bang first.”
Power hesitated. The clock inside his head was ticking. Every second of delay increased the likelihood of another undead attack. He could feel the pressure and urgency like a weight across his shoulders.
“I’ll go,” one of the operators cut across Power’s thoughts. He was a slim, wiry man. Power didn’t know his name. His face was caked in dirt and streaked with runnels of sweat.
“Yes. Do it. Go! Go! Go!”
Tools from the portable breaching kit were used to heave the cement slab aside while two operators stood over the trapdoor, weapons raised and aimed into the deepening crack of darkness as it was revealed. When the concrete panel had been pushed aside, the operator stripped off his bulky kit and took three deep breaths like a diver preparing to plunge into the depths. The only weapon in his hand was his M9 Beretta.
“You sure you’re up for this Stan?” one of the operators covering the pit growled.
The man nodded with a jerk of his head. He went to the lip of the pit. The two operators standing either side of the hole activated the scout lights fitted to the rail of their weapons. Light flashed into the darkness. The passage was about ten feet deep. The soldier tensed himself for the jump – then reeled back like he had lost his balance. A pale, blinking face appeared out of the gloom – a man with dark hair and Asian features, holding his hands above his head.
“Ssoji mala! Don’t shoot!”
“Christ!” an operator swung his M4 to aim. “There are people down there!”
Three terrified men stepped into the glare of torchlight.
*
The Black Hawks were inbound to the chemical plant when Nathan Power got on the net to the group Tactical Operations Center, aboard the Iwo Jima.
“Quarterback, this is Punter. Over.”
“Reading you Lima Charlie, Punter.”
“We have jackpot, Quarterback. Repeat we have jackpot.”
“Roger, Punter. Casualties?”
The US military used a brevity code to denote all KIA’s and WIA’s, and every man wore a roster number velcroed on their sleeve that matched a list at command. Power said somberly, “Six Eagles Kilo, one Eagle Whiskey.”
“Repeat last, Punter.”
“Six Eagles Kilo, one Eagle Whiskey,” Power said again. “One of the six Eagles was roster X-ray Zero Eight,” Power gave Captain Tim Scott’s patch number and then relayed the number for every other operator who had died in the battle. “X-ray Zero Eight was killed in the engagement with the Russians. The plant has now been searched. We have gathered all data,” he deliberately saved the most critical news for last, “and we are also inbound with three captured North Korean scientists who worked at the plant.”
RED CROSS AID STATION
MAINZ, GERMANY
“What seems to be the problem?” the Army doctor asked the elderly couple.
The makeshift aid station and hospital had been set up on the grounds of a Mainz school, with the administration building converted for attending to military casualties, and the gymnasium used to treat the public. Scattered across the lush green lawns of the schoolyard were a dozen more large canvas tents, all emblazoned with the Red Cross emblem.
Cradling his granddaughter in his arms, Jürgen Potente stood in the doorway of the gymnasium. The doctor was a man in his thirties, clean-shaven with a care-worn face, wearing military fatigues. He had a stethoscope hanging around his neck.
“It is the little girl,” the old man said. “She is my grandchild. She fell on the road on the outskirts of Königstädten. Her leg is badly cut.”
The girl looked to be four or five years old, the doctor guessed. She was bundled up in thick blankets. He saw she had a tangle of blonde sweat-damp hair and a face as pale as wax. Her eyes were closed, her lips dry and flaky.
“Put her on the examination table,” the doctor said. In typical military fashion, the gymnasium had been laid out in rigid-straight lines of beds with crisp white sheets and temporary lights, powered by generators. There were a dozen doctors working the vast room. Half the beds were occupied. Many of the patients were elderly people with heart conditions, their faces covered by oxygen masks. Nurses moved between the beds, harried and overworked,
but still smiling brightly despite the strain.
Jürgen carefully laid the girl out on the table and stepped back. The doctor swung a bright light over the child and gave her a cursory examination. Her heart rate was perilously low, her pupils dilated. He could tell without the aid of a thermometer that she was running a high fever. She moaned softly in delirium. The doctor leaned close to the girl and smelt the fetid stench of her hot breath.
He unwrapped the blankets around her legs and exclaimed in sudden shock and alarm.
The girl’s lower leg had been swathed in makeshift bandages that were soaked bloody. Above the knee, her skin had turned grey and puckered. Her foot had swollen and turned black. The doctor snipped the bandages away carefully. A sudden foul stench of corruption filled his nostrils. A nurse drifted past, then stopped suddenly. She looked at the child and covered her mouth in horror.
“Jesus!” the doctor gasped.
The girl’s leg was a mangle of bloody flesh. The skin looked like it had been attacked with a saw. Loose slivers of her shin hung in tatters from a series of jagged wounds that looked like… like bite marks.
“Fuck!” the doctor exclaimed when he suddenly understood. The girl had not cut her leg – she had been bitten by one of the infected. He leaped back from the table. The nurse began to scream. Jürgen and Elsa Potente stood softly weeping.
“Get the soldiers!” the doctor cried out in panic. “The girl is infected! Everybody stand back!”
“No!” Jürgen ran to the examination table and shielded the girl with his body. He was weeping, shaking, his heart broken. “This child is my whole world. Please! I beg of you!”
Somewhere in the background an alarm began ringing. Doctors, nurses and some patients started to flee in terror for the gymnasium doors. Jürgen heard stomping heavy boots and the strident shouts of soldiers.
Dead Storm: The Global Zombie Apocalypse Page 59
