Jameson’s eyes went wide.
“No,” Rebecca said quickly. “Not that. She’s alive. But she was turned away at the gate. Your guards wouldn’t let her in.”
“What the hell?” Jameson exclaimed. “If I’d been there…”
“I’m sure you would have,” Rebecca said.
Jameson reset. “So where is Amarie now?”
“Out in the city. With the rest of her group.”
Jameson called the Tunnelers to mind, along with their cagey leader, Hackworth. That was slightly reassuring – they were a damned tough and resilient group of civilians. But still…
“Is there any chance we can go get them? Bring them back in?”
Rebecca shook her head. “I doubt it. They’re probably halfway to the Wall by now – if they’re even still in London.”
* * *
When Jameson got back to the JOC there were an awful lot of people looking for him. Rebecca and Josie had given him much to think about. But he only had a two-minute walk to ponder it. He’d have to process it all later. Private Simmonds button-holed him at the door. He had a slightly singed captain in a flight suit with him. “Boss,” he said. “This is Group Captain Gibson. He’s a pilot. And he’s alive.”
Jameson pressed his lips together. He could see the man was alive. Then again, the dead did get up and walk around these days, so maybe it wasn’t always so obvious. “Captain,” he said. “What do you fly?”
“Fixed-wing ratings,” he said, sounding somehow jaunty. “Small prop planes, mostly.”
Jameson stared at him. “You’ve got to be kidding.”
“Not at all.”
“Come with me.”
Jameson fast-walked across the JOC, trusting the jaunty English airman to follow, and strode back into the office where Eli and Miller were still hunched over their laptop, surrounded by map sheets and binders.
“This is Group Captain Gibson,” he said to the others. “Captain Gibson – can you fly me and my team to Moscow?”
The man nodded and considered. It looked to Jameson like it was just taking-things-in-stride day around here. Maybe it had to be. “Got an aircraft in mind?”
“I was thinking that last Beechcraft B200 out on the tarmac.”
Gibson thought for a few seconds. “Sure. I just can’t fly you back.”
Jameson smiled. “Oh, yes you can.” The others looked at him like his head was on fire. He told them, in short form, about Charlotte’s Fat Cow – the fuel-glutted Chinook – including its shortcomings. It was slow and, mainly, it wouldn’t hold enough troopers. “But what we can do is fly there in the plane…”
“Which will make the trip three times as fast as the helo,” Gibson added.
“Not to mention hold a team big enough for the job,” Eli said.
Jameson nodded. “We fly in on the Beechcraft, grab this guy – then wait for the helo, which has followed behind, refuel the plane – and extract the hell out of there.”
Sounded perfect. Jameson figured there was absolutely no chance of any of it working. But it sounded perfect.
Eli leaned over the map. “Okay – where the hell do we land the plane?”
“Domodedovo,” Gibson said. “Moscow Airport. Obvious choice.”
Jameson scanned the map on the laptop screen. “Zoom out. No. The airport’s fifty kilometers from the city center – way too far from Red Square.”
“Sod that,” Eli said. “A fifty-klick tab through an urban zone heaving with dead.”
Gibson squinted and looked thoughtful. “You’re going to laugh, but…”
“It’s laugh or cry time,” Jameson said. “By all means let’s hear it.”
Gibson nodded. “In the mid-eighties – eighty-seven, I think. A West German teenager landed a Cessna right in the middle of Red Square – right in front of the Kremlin, in fact. Fancied himself on some kind of anti-Cold War peace mission – breaching the Iron Curtain and whatnot.”
Sergeant Eli shook his head. “Yeah. Definitely no idea whether to laugh or cry.”
But LT Miller was already flipping back and forth from maps to specs. “Won’t work,” he reported after a few seconds. “The Beechcraft requires 2,100 feet to land. Red Square looks to be about… maybe 1,000 feet on its long axis.”
Gibson hmm’d. “Those are the specs – I could compress a landing down to fifteen, sixteen hundred feet at a pinch, slamming it down hard on the deck. But, then again, not down to a thousand.”
Jameson sighed. “I guess that’s the difference between a tiny Cessna coming from Germany – and a fifty-foot Beechcraft stretching from Blighty. What’s the minimum take-off distance of that thing?”
“About twenty-five hundred. Wait, let me have a look,” Gibson said, swiveling the laptop. “Hmm… there. Tverskaya Street. I believe that’s where they used to have those big stonking military parades with all the missiles and tanks. Fifteen lanes wide if it’s an inch.”
Jameson took a look, checked the scale of the map, then pinched off sections with his fingers. “More importantly, it looks to be over a kilometer long. Wait, how many feet in a kilometer?”
“Over three thousand.”
“Outstanding. So you could both land and take off from there. And, look, the road is pretty much straight for the length of it.”
“What about power lines?” Eli asked.
Gibson shrugged. “How many power lines are still up two years later?”
Jameson didn’t know the answer to that question. But this whole mission plan was so batshit crazy, he figured it probably had about a thousand failure points – and the power lines weren’t even very high on the list.
“Give me a moment alone with this,” he said to the others. They hesitated, but rose and filed out. Jameson exhaled into the dim air, as he savored another few minutes of that rarest of commodities: time to reflect.
* * *
The first thing he knew was: he couldn’t possibly leave. He was in charge of everything here at CentCom – and CentCom was in charge of everything left. All the forces. All the troops and tanks and planes. And whatever was left of the crumbling defense of southern England. His duty was crystal-clear.
He could not leave this post until relieved.
To do so would be dereliction of duty. And to leave the JOC unhelmed would probably turn disaster to catastrophe, likely in very short order. Then again, he seemed to be turning disaster to catastrophe all on his own, trying to stay here and run things and actually fill this role – just at a slightly slower rate. The defense of the south had all but fallen apart, and the remorseless tide of the dead was even now lapping up against the ZPW – at almost all points along it, virtually all the way around London. They were surrounded now, and under siege – the only high ground left in the world-subsuming flood. The fight to keep the dead away from the walls of London had basically been lost.
In a word, Jameson was getting his ass handed to him out there. He was terrible at this job, which he had never remotely been trained to do. And remembering that fact made him realize: this decision was way above his pay grade.
He stepped back out into the JOC, went to Miller’s station, and told him to get the Ministry of Defence back on the blower for him. Miller nodded and hailed. Then he tried ringing on the desk phone. After a couple of minutes and several tries, he shook his head no – then nodded back toward the office. Jameson walked back into it with him.
“Okay,” Jameson said. “Why can’t we reach MoD?”
“Listen, sir,” Miller said. “You won’t have been privy to this. The information is highly classified. But I’ve heard rumors. From people inside, who know.”
“What kind of rumors?”
“About the central government’s planning. For the end. For them, it’s not going to be here.”
“What? What does that mean?”
Miller took a breath. “There’s a fallback position. It’s the Isle of Man, in the Irish Sea. Word is they have the whole island built up as a last-ditch stronghold. They’ve got ever
ything they need there to keep the central government running. And they’re ready to move all the ministers and senior civil servants out by helo. Including the Defence Staff.”
Jameson couldn’t even respond to this. Are they kidding us? The Isle of Man, halfway between Britain and Ireland. Those fuckers were prepared for London to fall – for all of Britain to fall. Hell, they were just waiting for it.
Sons of bitches.
“Give me a second,” Jameson said.
Miller nodded and left again.
Jameson slumped back in his chair in the dimness, his body feeling like it was drowning in clay, but his mind going a hundred miles an hour. This changed things. His duty hadn’t changed – but now it seemed the people he was supposed to be loyal to were completely breaking faith with him, and with everyone they were supposed to serve and protect… and, well, that made his duty seem like a hell of a lot less sacred thing than it did two minutes ago.
And with absolutely no command structure above him now… Jameson was going to have to make the most momentous decision of his life totally in isolation.
Born to rule and sacrifice, he thought bitterly.
Middle-Aged Mutant Warrior Turtles
JFK - Flight Deck
No matter how many times Wesley set foot up top on the supercarrier flight deck, it never ceased to amaze him. What a magnificent race of creatures, he thought, that could build an airport on top of a sailing ship. But what a wretched one that mainly used it to bomb one another back into the Stone Age…
This march out onto the flight deck was different from any he had ever done before. Just for starters, he’d never been so tooled up with weapons and ammo – nor as encapsulated as he was in the riot gear/zombie armor suit. He felt like a damned turtle, and at least as helpless as one on its back. Right now, it seemed to him that he could barely walk – and he ardently hoped he wasn’t going to have to run, as he had no idea how he was going to manage that.
What is my smoking, lethargic, middle-aged arse doing under a load that would make an eighteen-year-old squaddie groan…?
Much worse for his mental state was the fact that he’d absolutely never undertaken anything remotely like this: leading a motley and underqualified shore team – two NSF sailors, a former Stores crewman, a civilian survivor, and a former cop – out on a do-or-die mission to retrieve a DNA sequencer from deep in a Saudi Arabian city of 300,000, all now dead.
And he himself, so recently just a corporal in the UK Security Services, had somehow been made ground commander of this whole operation!
Shaking his head in continued disbelief, and taking a deep breath to steady himself, Wesley took a look over his own shoulder – and was at least reassured to see his team had followed him this far. It occurred to him he might be better off not looking back and checking all the time. His own lack of confidence would hardly inspire theirs in him. He took a look up at the sun in the sky. It was still a fair way above the horizon, but after they got where they were going, there wasn’t going to be a whole heck of a lot of daylight left. Still, it had been decided today was better – as tomorrow might be too late.
Turning his helmeted head forward again, up ahead Wesley could see the carrier’s last working helicopter, the big gray Seahawk, being pre-flight checked and fueled via a huge hose snaking across the deck, with flight deck crew – and what he guessed were the helo’s crew – moving around it.
A few meters off the aircraft was Sergeant Lovell, along with another Marine, finishing the inflation of their CRRC – the combat rubber raiding craft. As Wesley stepped up to them, he noticed Lovell was no longer just wearing his MARPAT fatigues – but was kitted up with body armor, tactical vest, and ammo. For a second Wesley’s heart leapt with hope.
“You’re going to lead the mission after all?” he asked.
Lovell smiled but shook his head. “Sorry – it’s just my shift as leader of the QRF for the Somalia mission. I’m on five-minute alert.”
Wesley sagged. He was actually going to have to do this after all.
But then his spirits rose again when a furry mouth licked his gloved hand. “Judy!” Looking down, he saw that, sure enough, his adopted German Shepherd had magically appeared out on the flight deck with them. He squatted down, removed a glove, and scratched behind her ears.
“What are you doing up here?” How a creature with no hands managed to open up hatches and make her way half the length of the ship was beyond him. “You really are a ghost dog aren’t you?”
Another voice drew his gaze up: “Hey, you’re not bringing her – are you?”
Looking up, Wesley could see Sarah and Burns, variously armored and tooled up, standing over him. “Why shouldn’t I bring her?” he asked Sarah.
“Dogs bark,” she said.
“This one won’t,” Wesley said, defensive. “She’s highly trained. She’s got more military training than most of us.”
Sarah looked skeptical. In her experience, even well-trained police dogs barked. And barking could get them all killed. Plus, she was always suspicious of other women.
Judy nuzzled Wesley’s hand again. Now that she was with them, he could see how totally suitable it was that she come along. She’d been invaluable on their lower deck sweeps – smelling zombie gunk a mile away and protecting his team from the risk of infection. And Wesley knew she responded to his carefully practiced verbal commands. They were a team. But before he could speak to further defend her, Burns did it for him.
“That dog also survived on her own, out on the ground among the dead, for two years.” He adjusted his grip on his rifle. “I figure she can handle herself.”
Sarah shrugged and relented.
As Wesley started to turn back toward the helicopter, an unfamiliar sailor dashed out of the island – one Wesley thought he vaguely recognized as one of the CIC staff – and started affixing a little Go-Pro camera to the shoulder of Sarah’s tactical vest.
“Don’t move,” he said.
When he finished securing the shoulder cam, he shoved a small radio device into one of the empty pouches on her vest.
“There,” he said. “Now we see what you see.”
He then stepped over to Wesley, grabbed his left arm and slid something sleek and high-tech onto it. “Mapping GPS for you,” he said. “Got area topo maps and all your GPS waypoints loaded up. All you gotta do is follow the flashing arrow.”
Finally, he produced a small plastic and rubber device. It looked like maybe a keychain flashlight. “Infrared beacon,” he said. “If you call in any air support – and I’m not saying you’ll get any air support – but if you do, make sure and click this on. It’ll be visible on thermal or NVGs, so we’ll know where you are – and can avoid bombing your ass.”
He attached it to Wesley’s vest with a mini-carabiner, then trotted off again.
Wesley nodded, then looked up at the sound of the helo engines firing up – and the broad whoop-whoop as the rotors slowly began spinning. He could see the crew was already onboard. And he figured he and his people had better do likewise. This was it.
As he waited and watched his team clamber onboard, he felt a hand knock on one of the hard plates on the back of his riot suit. Turning around he could see it was Lovell – and, beyond him, the other Marine checking the rope line that attached the now-inflated boat to the bottom of the helo.
Much weirder, Lovell seemed to be handing him a sheathed sword. It was curved and had a full hand guard, like something from the Crimean War. “Any idea how to use one of these?” Lovell shouted, over the crescendoing roar of the idling Seahawk.
“None!”
“Well, you probably don’t know how to use that knife either – and the sword’s a lot longer!”
“Yeah,” Wesley said. “I was just thinking that.” He withdrew the blade two inches and felt the edge. It was razor-sharp. “I thought these were ceremonial.”
“Yeah, they were – ’til two years ago. Then you can bet they got sharp fast.”
Wesl
ey pushed the blade back in. “Thank you.”
“No problem.” Lovell reached down and started threading a loop of leather from the scabbard through Wesley’s duty belt, talking as he did so. “Just make sure if you come back alive, you bring this with you. And if Fick comes back alive, don’t tell him I gave it to you.”
“Wilco, Sergeant.”
Lovell checked the fastening and straightened up. “All right. Now go slay that dragon!”
Wesley had no idea what he meant by that. But he was out of time.
He climbed onto the helo, Judy leaping in behind him – and seconds later it was powering off the deck and accelerating, nose down, out across the Gulf of Aden.
Next stop, Wesley thought: Arabia.
Duty
CentCom Strategic HQ - JOC
Sitting alone in the dim and bombed-out commander’s office, Major Jameson tried to break it all down for himself, all the factors in the decision he now faced.
If he left CentCom and his command of the JOC, the defense of London might fall even faster than it already was. But, basically, things were already pretty much fucked here. Nothing he was doing was helping – and it increasingly looked like nothing was going to help. There scarcely was any defense of the south anymore – and to the extent that there was, the commanders in the field were making their own decisions, as a matter of both necessity and urgency.
Now it was going to be down to fighting the dead from the ramparts. And that was if they didn’t just flood in through the collapsed section of Wall in the north.
Either way, it could only go on so long. The flood waters were rising fast – and they were going to sweep away what was left of humanity. In the end, the high-water mark of the undead ocean would be way above their heads, and the last of the living would drown beneath it. It was only a matter of time now.
And Jameson was already starting to believe that the only thing that was going to save Britain, or even London… was some masterstroke, a goal from midfield, a trump card that totally changed the dynamic of the game. Something radical to pull their collective asses out of the fire.
And maybe this Zulu-killing pathogen was it.
The Flood Page 10
