But unfortunately the Z that used to be Durant had also noticed the flash that was Lopez and instantly began to buck and flail against the restraints. The hissing and moaning and clacking of teeth coming from below rose to a crescendo as Lopez—weighted down by a camouflage-clad body held firmly over his shoulders in a fireman’s carry—trudged slowly by.
“Shut the fuck up,” Ari bellowed as the sound of an approaching vehicle helped drown him out. “You guys gonna get me out of here?” he hollered to no one in particular. He craned his stiff neck all around, searching for a friendly face, listening hard for a reply.
“Hang tight,” Hicks called back from his blind side.
Instantly a wave of relief hit Ari as he began to tick off in his mind the names of the passengers and crew that he knew had survived: His flight engineer Hicks, Captain Grayson, Sergeant Lopez, and Secret Service agent Cross. However, the feeling of dread returned when he realized that he hadn’t heard the general’s voice since Cade left to get the truck. So using the logic of deduction, he came to the conclusion that the body Lopez recovered had to be the spook named Tice. Goddamnit. Three dead because of him. The urge to martyr himself alongside Durant returned—only this time, the desire was a hundred times stronger than before. “I’m tired of hanging tight,” he called back to no one in particular. He was about to punch out of the harness holding him when the sound of brakes squealing met his ears. A tick later a pair of black boots entered his side vision. They were quickly joined by two pairs of tan combat boots. He looked up, as difficult and painful a task as it was, and spied Cross, Hicks, and Lopez form up in front of him and begin conversing in hushed tones. The look on their faces told him they were forming a plan to extricate him and somehow find a way to honor his earlier request. They were standing side by side, tallest to shortest. Cross, Hicks, and Lopez—left to right, looking like something out of an old AT&T commercial. Absurdly, the tagline got bars popped into Ari’s head. He embraced it, welcoming anything and everything that would take his mind from the burden he was going to carry with him for the rest of his days.
They stood there for a few seconds and then abruptly separated, each trotting off and following a different point of the compass. When they returned, each man was carrying something different. Cross had someone’s bloody uniform blouse which he placed over Durant’s head and upper body. Before the newly turned Z could brush it aside, Lopez and Hicks each placed a fairly large piece of carbon fiber rotor blade atop the camouflaged ACU top. Lastly, Hicks reached his gloved hand through the metal framework that once held cockpit glass and gave Ari his Cold Steel blade. “However you want to do it ... it’s on you, Warrant Officer Silver,” he said, turning his back and looking away.
***
Three minutes later
Looking at the bodies on the back of the truck was surreal to say the least. Cade consulted his Suunto. Thirty minutes ago, give or take, Tice had been bantering with Lopez and he, Captain Cade Grayson, had delivered his first and last fist bump with a sitting general.
Tice’s slack face showed no signs of the terror he must have endured the last few seconds he was alive. His helmet had been ripped from his head and his neck was broken, the latter a certainty judging by the fact that the man was lying chest down on the truck’s bed and his wide open, glazed-over eyes were peering skyward.
The general on the other hand, Cade noted, had passed from this life with a pain-filled grimace frozen on his face. His brow was furrowed, his lips were pulled back over clenched teeth, and minus his body armor and blouse top the cause of death was wholly evident. Between where his body armor had stopped and his belt line there was a jagged, foot-long gash from which a fair amount of his internal organs were protruding. Flies buzzed and settled. Took a meal and flitted off.
Shifting his gaze from his deceased brothers-in-arms, he did a quick scan of his surroundings. Clear, he thought to himself and was about to verbalize the same to the others when something on the south horizon caught his attention. Soft and hazy. Not quite roiling, but still clearly visible, a gauzy curtain of fine, airborne dust was rising from the ground.
“We’ve got company,” Cade barked. “The Zs are on the gravel feeder road now.”
“Copy that,” said Lopez. “We’re extricating Durant’s body now. Wait one.”
“That’s about all you’ve got. Pulling around front,” Cade said over the comms. He turned the ignition over, then let the idling engine pull the truck forward. Keeping the same safe distance from the pooled aviation gas, he cut a half-circle around the wreck and pulled abreast of the remainder of his team. He caught Lopez’s eye and mouthed the words: Burn it.
In no time, with Jasper lending a hand, Hicks and Lopez had placed Durant’s lifeless body in the back alongside the bodies of Tice and Gaines.
Having a hell of a time moving around thanks to the continuing numbness in his extremities, not to mention the pounding his body took in the tumble from the seat in the Ghost Hawk, Ari slid his frame gently into the truck’s cab. Riding bitch, he thought, fondly remembering the ribbing Tice had taken so gracefully. Interrupting the moment, Jasper wedged in tight next to him and slammed the door with a resonant bang. The truck jounced, a kind of diagonal shimmy on its suspension, and then the horizon through the windshield dipped slightly as Lopez, Cross, and Hicks, loaded down with their guns and gear, piled in back and settled in amongst the fallen.
Cade heard a loud clang followed by a couple of hand slaps on the sheet metal. He glanced at the mangled and canted side mirror and registered a thumbs up from Lopez, who was sitting on the wheel well and brandishing his M4. “Better hold on,” Cade shouted. “Ride’s going to get bumpy.” He wheeled to the right, zippered the truck between a couple of headstones, and then to complete the haphazard loop through the cemetery, hung a left on the access road. The moment the bucking Chevy passed through the iron gate Cade hit the brakes—a move that caught everyone but Lopez by surprise. Without stating his intentions the stocky operator rose, engaged the 3x magnifier in front of the Eotech 553 holographic sight on his rifle’s monolithic upper rail, spread his feet incrementally, and then snugged the weapon to his shoulder. “Going hot,” Lopez called out to no one in particular.
Literally, Cade mused, a millisecond before the sergeant opened fire. He watched Lopez methodically walk a half dozen rounds from right to left down the length of the matte black fuselage. Nothing. Then Lopez paused for a tick, , leaned in against the recoil, and as rapidly emptied the mag at the point where the chopper met the glimmering fuel.. Sparks flashed as the two dozen 5.56 rounds penetrated the chopper’s skin, leaving a snaking line of dark holes just above the fractured hatch where the port wheel was stowed away when retracted.
The explosion, though intended, was instantaneous and violent. Two things happened simultaneously: Lopez yelled, “Go, go, go,” and was slapped down from the superheated shockwave. Subsequently, heeding the words piped into his ear bud, Cade pinned the accelerator to the floorboard. Meeting Ari’s gaze, the Delta captain offered up a sheepish grin and shrugged a shoulder. “If it gets us rescued, it was worth the risk.”
“Not if a cooked-off stray round finds your head or this piece of crap’s gas tank,” stated Ari. “Where’d you get this thing?”
Reflecting in the rear view, seventy yards away, the fireball had mushroomed, dwarfing the mature trees east of the wreck.
“She’s mine,” Jasper said in response to Ari’s query.
“And who’s this?” Ari said to Cade.
“Jasper,” he said. “While you were unconscious, he nearly incinerated us.”
“How?”
“He was about to shoot Durant to put him out of his misery ...”
“How did you see me from where you were?” asked Jasper, craning his head in order to look Cade in the eye.
“Saw you reflected in Ari’s visor. You’re a big guy ...pretty hard to miss. Thanks for the help. By the way, the guy riding bitch is Ari Silver.”
“Pleas
ure ... I think,” added Jasper.
Noticing the gold wedding band on the man’s ring finger, Cade asked, “Where’s your family?”
“Buried them last week.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” said Cade. “Who were the folks in the back of your truck?”
“Neighbors of mine ... they held out the longest.”
Cade took his eyes from the road. Asked, “You put them down?”
Jasper nodded subtly then looked out his window.
“Do you intend on going back ... to your home?” asked Ari.
Jasper’s hand clenched around the butt of his pistol. Knuckles going white he said, “I was thinking hard about joining them.”
“I’ve had similar thoughts since the crash,” Ari conceded.
With these two new revelations out in the open, Cade’s gaze ran the bases, going from the road to the pistol in Jasper’s lap up to Ari’s face and then back to the road. The round trip took three seconds at most but left him only half of a heartbeat to mash the brakes and slew the truck sideways, an unexpected but lifesaving maneuver that nearly pitched the rest of the team onto the road.
“Oh my God,” stammered Jasper. “I’ve never seen so many of them in one place.”
Save for the moaning wall of dead in front of them and the low rumble from the roiling fire behind them, inside the cab it was deathly silent.
Looking past Ari at the local, Cade blurted, “Which way?”
After a second Jasper said over the rattle clatter of the Detroit V8, “Draper is to the right if you can get us to the road.”
Cade made a face. Flicked his gaze over his shoulder and registered a snapshot in time. Sitting, back against the wheel well, legs across Durant and his rifle propped between them, Hicks was looking neither at the conflagration that used to be their ride, nor the monsters spread out across the road and sallow fields to the left and right of it. Instead, he had a thousand-yard stare fixed on the dead he was sharing space with. Cross, however, stared back at Cade stoically, a calm look parked on his broad features. And Lopez was looking at the rearview mirror and spinning his finger in a lazy circle pointing towards the heavens—his way of saying: Captain, we need to be Oscar Mike—on the move—now.
***
Twelve miles away, north by east, Lieutenant Ben Dover nudged the lumbering Hercules into a gradual left hand turn. With the first leg of the search pattern completed, the new heading would have them skirt south along the same route but five miles to the west so the crew in back could effectively scan the new ground below for any sign of Jedi One-One or her crew.
In his headset, Dover overheard the radio chatter as Captain Jensen back at the TOC instructed Major Ripley in One-Two to swing wide to the southwest side of the base and land her Osprey on the far western edge of the tarmac when she arrived. Presumably, the unorthodox landing pattern was to keep the passengers from seeing the layout of the base and he guessed the final landing spot had been chosen to keep her cargo away from prying eyes—civilian and base personnel alike. Then, he figured, some kind of vehicle would be waiting to immediately whisk them away on the final leg of their journey, their ultimate destination no doubt more Gitmo than Club Med. And taking the earlier terrorist attack on the base into consideration, Dover agreed wholeheartedly with whoever made those decisions. However, in the hours since he’d attended the pre-mission briefing, he’d been wondering how the Canadian citizens aboard the Osprey were going to handle being shanghaied by their big brothers to the south. And if he were in their shoes, he’d want to be given a goddamn good reason why he shouldn’t be demanding and then receiving an immediate return to Winnipeg. Real flower leis would be a good start, he thought to himself. Maybe some cold Molsons and a smoking fifty-five gallon drum full of BBQ beef brisket. Anything but being greeted by grim-faced soldiers on a hot tarmac and then the mandatory fourteen-hour stay in solitary confinement that was sure to follow. No way to endear yourselves to the folks who might have the skills to replicate the antiserum, he thought. No way indeed.
As soon as Dover brought the Hercules out of the turn and back to level flight, he spied a wispy finger of black snaking up from a copse of trees far off in the distance. “I have a visual on the ground. Smoke plume at one o’clock, approximately ten to twelve miles,” he said, informing his co-pilot Second Lieutenant Norman Meredith as well as the folks monitoring the search and rescue operation from the TOC back at Schriever. “Taking us closer to investigate,” Dover stated. Next, he rattled off his new heading, current altitude and airspeed for whoever was keeping tabs on him in the TOC, then, tempering any kind of expectation, gently nudged the stick forward, keeping his eyes on the drifting gray smudge on the horizon. And given the fact that on every mission of the dozens he’d flown out of Schriever, every single one—without fail—included the sighting of at least one out-of-control structure fire—sometimes dozens—he doubted the smoke on the horizon had anything to do with the missing helicopter.
***
A handful of minutes passed and nothing he saw was working to change his mind. Probably a gas stove left on had finally touched off. Or a faulty water heater. Or maybe someone was burning their dead; all plausible explanations.
He leveled Oil Can Five-Five out at one thousand feet, keeping the rising column of black smoke slightly off the plane’s nose on the starboard side, throttled the engines back somewhat, and then began a final gradual descent to five hundred feet.
Chapter 15
Two minutes later Lieutenant Dover contacted Schriever. “Preparing for our first pass. Maintaining five hundred feet AGL,” he stated, holding the bird on a straight heading that would take them within an eighth of a mile of the target. Close enough to get a good idea of the source yet still a big enough buffer in order to avoid the swelling cloud. To his right Meredith trained a pair of binoculars on the ground and after a couple of seconds described the white church in detail. He panned the binoculars left and mentioned the cemetery littered with dozens of presumably Omega-infected bodies.
“Do you have eyes on any kind of wreckage?” asked captain Jensen who had been maintaining constant contact with Oil Can from the TOC back at Schriever.
“Negative,” replied the co-pilot.
Someone’s burning bodies, thought Dover.
“Wait one,” Meredith said excitedly as the plane’s right wing dipped a few degrees to starboard. “Affirmative,” he said. “I can see an impact zone and an extended debris field. The tail boom has separated and is partially intact. I see the tail rotor disc and the forward swept horizontal canards. I can say with high confidence that what I’m seeing was Jedi One-One—”
Captain Jensen cut in. “Are there survivors?” she asked.
Dover banked the Hercules sharply and began a tight orbit of the crash site.
Startled by the loud engine noise, the flock of birds still feeding on the corpses took flight and the sky over the graveyard went dark but soon cleared as the raptors dissipated and then lit on the fallow fields bordering a nearby road.
“Negative,” replied Meredith as soon as the sky had cleared. “The helo is fully engulfed and I am seeing secondary explosions on the ground. How copy?”
“Solid copy, Oil Can,” Jensen intoned. “Zero survivors and ongoing secondary explosions,” she repeated, presumably for the benefit of Nash and whoever else was following the ongoing rescue efforts back at the TOC.
“Captain Jensen, we’ve got a full tank,” Dover said. “I want to stay on station for a little while longer just in case.”
“Wait one,” replied Jensen.
In his mind’s eye, Dover imagined the paper-pilots and desk jet-jockeys who made most of the decisions back at Schriever consulting their actuarial tables and weighing the expenditure of JP-8 over the value of human life. Always the pessimist when it came to higher ups making the right decision, he held his breath and waited for a response.
***
Schriever TOC.
Glued to the largest monitor in the b
uilding, Nash bellowed, “Where’s my sat feed?”
“In 5 ... 4 ... 3 ... 2 ... feed coming online.”
“Thank you, Captain Jensen,” replied Nash, who appeared to be calming down a bit.
Jensen said, “Zooming in,” and the specialist next to her hit the appropriate key strokes and made it happen.
There was no steady pan or video game-like drama or silly clicking sounds as an image grew larger in steps before finally filling up the screen. This was instantaneous. A snap of color and the screen was dominated by flames and the wreckage of what no one in the TOC doubted was the Ghost Hawk—or rather what remained of it. Nothing but a melted lump of exotic black fiber and pooling molten alloy.
The TOC went deathly quiet.
“Pan out,” said Nash. “I’ve seen enough.” The screen quickly snapped out so far the downed chopper was lost in the ground clutter.
Nash looked over at Shrill who remained seated. He mouthed, “I’m sorry,” and buried his face in his hands.
“Major Nash,” said the TOC controller Captain Jensen. “What are your orders for Oil Can Five-Five?”
Nash said nothing. With a look of utter dejection on her face she simply shook her head side-to-side.
***
Oil Can Five-Five.
After a long, uneasy minute of silence the radio crackled back to life. “Negative,” Captain Jensen replied with a flat affect. “You are to RTB at once.”
“Copy that,” said Dover. “Returning to base.” He looked over at Meredith and mouthed, “Bullshit.” Then muted his microphone and said aloud, “We owe it to them to go around one more time. Someone might have been thrown clear or maybe survived the impact and crawled away.”
Mortal: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse Page 7
