by Glynn James
And, now, Juice couldn’t help but remember the one night that prophecy had come closest to being fulfilled. The scene around him went out of focus now as he gazed off into memory. And what he saw, as vivid and terrifying as if for the first time, was a dense black forest canopy racing at him at plane-wreck speed…
* * *
He could hear the small aircraft’s Missile Warning Receiver shrieking, still going ape-shit despite the fact that it was too late for anyone to do anything about it. Whatever had been launched at them had already impacted – and taken off most of the tail, including the vertical and horizontal stabilizers.
There could no longer be any question of the plane staying in the air. And they had been flying pretty damned low to start with. So this was all going to be over in seconds.
The aircraft was a little Pilatus PC-12 single-prop passenger plane, which both the Agency and the Activity had favored back then for quiet insertions, and in particular for ISR missions. The planes were flown by super-skilled and dedicated aircrew from the Air Force Special Operations Command (AFSOC). These guys were so absurdly good at what they did that one thing Juice normally never had to worry about was the plane staying in the air.
What he did worry about was the ISR component. He was on board with a shitload of signals intelligence (SIGINT) hardware, his puffy headphones on, fingers massaging the radio dials and laptop keyboard. He was charged that night with triangulating in on a certain Islamist warlord, one closely aligned with al-Shabaab, the major al-Qaeda franchise in Somalia.
Juice was in the Horn of Africa heading up a team that tapped and traced every conceivable communication from this high-value target (HVT) – from cell phone calls to wireless internet to pagers to broadband carrier pigeons, if that’s what he was reduced to.
Anything he sent up, they were going to get.
But tonight, one of the warlord’s soldiers on the ground had just made the single luckiest shoulder-launched missile shot of all time – being as Juice and his guys only flew in the dark, usually on overcast or moonless nights, and only at low altitude, which meant they were gone before anyone below could realistically take aim.
It was either the luckiest shot of all time – or else the shooter had night-vision goggles and some type of man-portable heat-seeking missile system. The latter was Juice’s guess. The bad guys were getting more sophisticated and dangerous all the time.
And military technology was only getting cheaper.
So now Juice watched through his little side port window as the slightly darker darkness of the forest raced up at them from out of the black, cold, hostile night. The airframe shook violently all around him, and there was a terrible roaring and shrieking that sounded like approaching death. He could hear the pilot and co-pilot calmly radioing their status back to Camp Lemonnier, but there was little to be calm about. Juice couldn’t see anything underneath them – like even a place to crash-land maybe.
No, they were pretty much just going to crash.
But at the last possible second, the looming forest fell away to either side, and something glinted below them. It was a stream or river. Somehow the pilot had found and gotten them to the only anything remotely like a flat and tree-free surface.
The water may or may not have done anything to soften their impact, but Juice blacked out completely anyway as they slammed in, and when he woke up, he was half embedded in a sandy stream bank, a couple dozen yards away from where most of the fuselage of the plane sat smoking, somehow more or less intact.
Feeling himself up, he was amazed to find he could stand – not yet knowing he’d suffered multiple spinal fractures and compressed vertebrae. He staggered over and did a quick survey of the wreckage. Both the pilot and co-pilot were dead – the nature and severity of their injuries left little doubt about that.
Juice said a quick prayer, mainly for their families. He’d flown with these guys before, and knew them both to be young, smart, and super-patriotic. Now they’d paid the ultimate price – though that paid by their families would be heavier still. At least the airmen went quickly. Not to mention that they’d died saving Juice’s life.
The fourth passenger on the flight was an Agency dude, and Juice found him alive – barely. He managed to locate an aid kit, and was doing his best to stop the man’s hemorrhaging and manage his airway – when someone started shooting at them.
Rounds plinked noisily into the steel of the plane’s skin, and others more quietly into the leather seats inside. Juice had somehow forgotten the most important rule of battlefield medicine: first, win the goddamned firefight. He just hadn’t thought the al-Shabaab guys would be so quick to find the crash site. But here they were.
And they didn’t seem to lack for ammo.
Ignoring the incoming fire, still half-dazed, Juice rummaged around until he managed to find an M4 and a tactical vest full of mags. And then he proceeded to put up a one-man defense of the crash site – for the next two and a half hours. When his relief finally showed up, he had taken additional shrapnel wounds from exploding RPGs.
And he was down to pistol rounds.
But, just when he was looking at the end, resigned to going down shooting and dying in a pile of his own brass… suddenly the volume of fire ramped up in the black forest around him, except now in 5.56 rather than 7.62. And as the new force swept forward, there’d come a shout: “Friendlies! Comin‘ in!”
Juice placed his pistol gently in his lap and just leaned back. He was exhausted – from blood loss, from the shock of the crash, from the unsustainable floods of adrenaline during the hours-long shoot-out. Because it was four in the morning. Because of dehydration, delirium, because of his injuries.
Because he’d been fighting on his own all night.
When he looked up again, what he saw was: the pointy-faced visage of a commando wearing night-vision goggles; a unit patch on his chest featuring two sharks and two swords, as well as the words Triple Nickel; and, finally, as the newcomer stepped up into Juice’s perch inside the plane, his pants leg came up away from his desert boot top and revealed… a sleek prosthetic leg.
The man flipped up his NVGs onto his helmet, removed his hand from his rifle receiver, took off his glove, and held out the bare hand.
Juice reached up and took it.
Nice to see old friends, he thought.
* * *
And that had been it – his last mission in Africa, and his last in the old world before it fell. After he’d physically recovered from those injuries, including three months of rehab and physical therapy, he’d flown to Hereford in the UK to begin training and staging for the North Korea op. And that was the last thing he’d done before the fall.
Now he snapped back to the present, and to his location out on the front of the flight deck. Something had startled him from his reverie. Turning around, he realized what it was: everyone was gone. The last of the sailors working there had slipped away, without him noticing.
And he was all alone.
It was just like in his dream, the re-imagination of the battle, where they were all preparing to die. Where he could feel the inevitability of his teammates falling away from either side of him – and leaving him utterly alone. He had been having that same dream every night. It didn’t change, and it wasn’t going away. It wouldn’t let him sleep in peace.
Turning to face forward one last time, Juice could still see the very edge of Africa, hazy like a dream. And he thought: Yeah. This would be an excellent mission to buy it on.
Maybe it had always been his destiny to come back here and be buried. Or perhaps not be buried.
He turned around, showing his back to what was one vision of his destiny, and he headed below again.
Doomed or not, he still had work to do.
* * *
The Alpha team room hatch banged open again, and Handon’s head and shoulders came through it.
“Where are we?” he asked.
“All squared away,” Ali said.
“Pani
c over,” Henno added.
“Yeah, I know that. Where are we for Somalia?”
Ali nodded down at her tablet. “We’re there.”
Mission planning and prep was always a fractal process – you could keep zooming in on details forever, at finer and finer grain. But at some point you had to stop planning and launch the damned mission. Good enough was generally what they ended up going out with. And everyone felt they were to that point with planning for the Somalia mission.
“Good,” Handon said. “Where’s Juice?”
Ali opened her mouth to complain about having to know where Juice was and what he was doing. But at that moment he appeared in the doorway. “Right here, top.”
Handon nodded. “You just got your own command. Grab your shit. You’re on me.”
Broken City
London - Covent Garden
Hackworth sighed heavily and looked around at his rag-tag group of survivors from the Channel Tunnel. The situation was ridiculous. For the second day running – after having escaped the immolation of Canterbury, walked themselves across half of Kent, and finally arrived in London – they were still queuing outside the relocation center, waiting to hear where they were to be sent next. He’d tried reason, he’d tried getting angry and shouting at the staff – but quickly found himself escorted from the place by two not-particularly-burly security guards.
His friend Colley, the huge Moroccan man, had been on the verge of kicking off at that point, but Hackworth, even with his own temper rising, had calmed him. It was no good, and would have achieved nothing. The authorities here were overwhelmed. And they simply had to accept that they would be waiting a lot longer than they’d originally been told. The promised hour had turned to two, and then to eight. After that, they’d huddled in a large bus shelter down the road, next to some empty-looking flats.
And the rain poured down all around them.
Those flats look empty, yet they don’t put anyone in them, Hackworth thought. Maybe we should just move in.
But it wasn’t like they were the only ones with nowhere to go. The streets were filled with refugees, hundreds and thousands of them, many apparently from the outbreak zone in the south, all of whom had abandoned their homes to flee the rising tide of the dead. As crazy as it seemed, Hackworth was beginning to wonder if they hadn’t been better off in the Channel Tunnel.
No, he thought. Even the damn tuna fish would have run out eventually.
He sat there mulling over their options, beginning to think they should just strike out on their own, maybe even get out of the city and head north into the countryside, try to find some place that had been abandoned. As he became lost in these thoughts, the rain unexpectedly stopped and a weak sun almost became visible in the overcast sky, for the first time in what seemed like days.
Rain, boy he’d missed the rain when they were in the tunnel. Hell, he’d missed everything about the outside while they were stuck in the dark, but watching the legions of homeless and desperate people milling around was a stark reminder that it wasn’t necessarily better out in the light.
All around were the signs of a dead civilization, or at least a dying one. Groups of people huddled in the doorways of buildings that had once been vibrant, busy shops. Rubbish was stacked in piles as tall as a man, or just lay scattered across the ground. The night before, when the darkness had been nearly total, Hackworth had noted that most of the street lights no longer worked. Only light spilling from a few windows lessened the gloom. And it was only the presence of other refugees, camping out and jostling for spots to sleep out of the rain, that kept the area from feeling utterly creepy.
And the darkness and scattered rubbish had hardly been the worst of it. Several times during the night, Hackworth had heard shouts, and gunfire, and on two occasions distant screams. There were people being killed or hurt out there, he knew, and they weren’t being killed by the dead. London had become the last bastion of hope, but it also now represented the worst of human desperation.
And it was probably only going to get worse. Perhaps a lot worse.
“I don’t think they know what to do with us,” Hackworth finally said, after a long interval of silence.
Colley, sitting next to him on the curb at the end of the bus shelter, looked up bleary-eyed and nodded, giving his friend a smile that took some effort. The big man had stayed awake most of the night, keeping a constant vigil over the group, watching the streets and the people around them for signs of trouble. Hackworth had also barely slept, but had nodded off long enough at one point to at least keep his exhaustion at bay.
Hackworth considered for a moment, looking at his band of weary travelers huddled inside the shelter, which they had unilaterally commandeered for themselves and turned into a tiny makeshift camp.
“You know, I’m starting to think we should head out and find our own way,” he said finally, looking to Colley. “Just get the hell out of here.”
Colley nodded. “I was wondering such myself last night. Must be hundreds or thousands of empty places around. If we go far enough out.”
“Not much here, though, apart from maybe these,” said Hackworth, gesturing at the rows of flats. “You heard the noises last night?”
Colley nodded.
“This place isn’t fucking safe. Not safe at all. Sure, the dead aren’t here.” Though they were yesterday, he mentally amended, remembering the lone dead man who had arisen from the back of that truck. “But for how long? And how bad will it be in these cramped streets when they do get here? I think we need to get out of London.”
“Outside the wall?” asked Colley, looking concerned.
“Sure,” said Hackworth. “I don’t mean south, where the dead are. But if we head north, and keep on going, eventually we’ll get to Scotland, and the Highlands.”
Colley seemed to consider this. “I’ve never been to Scotland.”
Hackworth chuckled. “You’ve never been to most places around here. Look, there’s so much open space up there that even if all the dead coming this way took over, you know, wiped out London, they’d be unlikely to wander so far into the wilderness. Not in any great numbers. When I was a kid, my folks took me to Loch…” He paused, trying to recall. “Nope, can’t remember the name of the place exactly, but it was vast and empty, with hardly a building or town or anything for miles.”
“You think we can hide up there?” asked Colley, his expression doubtful. “Can we make it that far?”
Hackworth hadn’t even convinced himself yet, and he shrugged. “Maybe.”
A third voice spoke up now, a woman’s, gently accented. “Except that if all of London falls, all the survivors will head that way.” Hackworth turned to see that it was Amarie. He hadn’t noticed her sitting quietly a few feet away. She had Josie, her little girl, pressed against her and breathing in her ear. But she had been listening, paying close attention.
“What do you mean?” asked Colley, motioning her closer.
Amarie shuffled awkwardly over, still managing not to wake the child.
She also looks exhausted, thought Hackworth.
She spoke quietly. “I mean there are supposed to be fifty million people in Britain, ten million in London alone. If the zombies come, many will run wherever they can run to, and that means north, doesn’t it? I mean, wouldn’t we just be going to some place that all the others would reach eventually?”
The scenario played through Hackworth’s mind, and he saw what she meant. If the wall fell, a great exodus would begin, with untold millions rushing away from the tide of the dead – and at the same time drawing that tide with them, until it flooded the north of the country, too.
“Yeah,” said Hackworth. “Okay, so maybe that’s a shitty idea.”
“I don’t think it’s shitty,” said Amarie. “It’s a better idea than staying here, but it might not help us a few months from now.” She looked down at Josie. “But maybe that’s all any of us have left anyway, now. Putting off the end a little longer.”
Hackworth breathed deeply. No way was he going to let these two die in a few months, or even a few years. We’re in this for the long haul. We’re survivors.
“We need to think of something,” he said. “None of us believe that the wall we saw is going to make a difference. Not when enough dead surround the city. Even if they never got in, if they held siege for years, that’s still ten million people inside with no access to the fields outside, or any supplies. A month of that, and we’ll be fighting off enemies of an entirely different kind.”
Amarie shuddered, holding Josie closer, and Hackworth immediately regretted putting that thought into her head. It would probably give her nightmares.
“Okay, so we need a different plan,” he said. “We all agree on that?”
Amarie nodded, and Hackworth noticed several other members of the group were now gathering around. He gave the rest of them a minute to join them, not wanting anyone to miss out or not have a voice in the discussion. Even though he knew most of them would trust and follow whatever he and Colley decided.
He missed McHeath and Randall. Colley was always a voice of reason, but having the two other men around had helped a great deal when it came to making decisions. Even if Randall had often argued against him, the man was only ever thinking of the group, and not himself. His voice had been one of loyal opposition, and Hackworth bitterly regretted that they’d lost him in the tenement building.
It had happened when the carpet-bombing of the town destabilized the structure, and Randall had fallen nearly the full length of the building down into a writhing pile of— but Hackworth tried to cut the thought off there. Though the sounds of Randall’s screams were impossible to unhear.
