by Glynn James
Perhaps the most important job of Army Special Forces was working with and training indigenous forces. And rule number one was not to make promises you couldn’t keep.
That notwithstanding, Juice promised this man that he and his team would personally topple the Taliban – so that his children won’t have died in vain. The man nodded, smiled, and said something else in Dari. It was translated as, “I believe you. You have the beard of an honorable man.”
Juice nodded, tears leaking at the corners of his own eyes by then, and further promised that he would not shave off the beard until this promise was fulfilled.
Juice and his ODA, and a handful of others, did go on to topple the Taliban, only weeks later. But he was also in the country, on another deployment thirteen years later, at the tail end of America’s longest war, when America decided it had sacrificed enough. It chose to come home – with many of Afghanistan’s provinces still under effective control of the Taliban.
So Juice hadn’t had been able to keep his promise in the end. And there was nothing he could do about that.
Except to never shave off the damned beard.
* * *
“You got a bug on you, man,” Raible said. “And it’s blinking.”
Juice snapped back from his reverie to the present. “That’s because it’s charging.”
He looked down to the forearm mount of his micro-UAV. This was a “Gadfly” ornithopter, a nano aerial vehicle with little gossamer wings, a thin wire body, and a micro electro-optical camera for a face.
It was three inches in length, weighed less than an ounce, and could fly 32 feet per minute for almost an hour. It had a digital data link, its camera feed displaying either on a one-inch monitor on its forearm “base station” or else piped directly into Juice’s flip-down monocle. It could hover and stare, fly automated search patterns, or traverse pre-planned routes. It was an excellent force-protection tool for small units, particularly indoors, where it could scope out the “fatal funnel” of doorways leading into unsecured rooms – instead of having it done by soldiers, who could be shot or blown up.
“Guess that’s why they call you Juice,” Raible said.
Juice just grunted in response, then spat tobacco juice over the side. Looking out over the prow, he could see the mouth of Saldanha Bay opening up ahead.
One of the two sailors flashed three fingers at the huddled group of commandos. It was game on.
In three minutes, they would stick their heads into the lion’s mouth, and see if they could get it out again.
And failure would equal death.
Probably for everyone, everywhere.
Belly of the Beast
JFK - Stores
Wesley stood in the middle of the vast open space that was ship’s Stores, pointing his flashlight at the map in his other hand. The lighting down here was very dim, and the flashlight not a hell of a lot better, so he had to squint to focus on the details Dr. Park and Sarah Cameron had scrawled on the tattered sheet. He followed the markings, noting each cross and the tiny scribbles next to them, then glanced at the stack of pallets to his left.
There was a patch of unpleasant gunk on the floor a few feet away. Wesley’s adopted German Shepherd, who they had determined was named Judy, and who had formerly been a working military dog, sniffed at the gunk and growled quietly.
He reached down and patted her thick fur. “Yeah, I don’t like it much either…” He looked up again. “Right here, is my guess,” he said, looking over at Melvin, who stood nearby. The Scotsman held his assault rifle aimed outward as he scanned the darker corners of the cavernous compartment. “This is where Sarah stood on the pallets as the runner went for her.”
Melvin nodded as he regarded the mess on the floor, his nose wrinkling.
Wesley turned to his left and shone his light down the seemingly endless aisle. “Yeah. Definitely here. At least the encounter with the one that ran for her.”
There was slow and careful movement all around him as the rest of his team scoped the area, checking between pallets, in the corners, and behind pipes. Fifty yards away, Browning and Burns were looking down at the deck, at another dubious patch of dark stain.
“What we need to find,” continued Wesley, talking to himself as much as anyone else, “are all the different locations where they encountered the dead, and then work outwards from there.”
Melvin frowned. “Do we have to clean this shit up? Or are we just down here looking for anything still moving?”
Wesley sighed. After being part of the detail that had cleaned the flight deck after the battle at Virginia Beach, he wasn’t in any more of a hurry to be clearing up bits of the dead than the others. But someone had to do it.
“I think we gotta do both, mate.”
Melvin nodded again. “Well, I’m dibs on the mop.”
Wesley’s team had grown significantly in the last few days, and with it, it seemed, his responsibilities. He was far from thrilled about this. But the commanders had ordered firmer security across all areas of the ship, and had Wesley put together a team that would be ready to move anywhere, quickly, in case an infected crew member was discovered, or one of the already dead had managed to get itself stuck somewhere out of sight.
On a ship the size of the JFK, there were a million places something human-sized could hide or be overlooked, especially if it was trapped. And with crew numbers at an all-time low, and nearly everyone working double shifts just to complete critical shipboard tasks, Wesley and his bunch of misfits were the obvious choice for this work.
Now he had more bodies to throw at the problem – but also more people to be responsible for. The civilian survivors from Virginia Beach, Burns and the rest of the group Wesley had rescued, had been first to sign up. This was unsurprising, given they were told to either get busy doing something useful, or else get ready to be dropped off the next time the ship saw landfall. With Africa being closest, and not looking like an appealing destination, Burns and three of his people were sworn in and on duty in under an hour.
Additionally, a few sailors from other departments had also been assigned to him – Dooley, Kate, Rob, Jenson, and Morgan, folks previously attached to Stores. Wesley’s small NSF outfit had grown into a more formidable force. He still found it bizarre being in charge, but was getting used to it.
“Hey boss,” came the voice of Jenson over the radio. He was the man who had stood directly behind Wesley during the flight deck battle, helping wield the bucking hose as they pushed back the endless waves of the dead. When Wesley had been given a list of potential names for his team, he had spotted Jenson’s – and liked the thought of having his height, physical strength, and loyalty. But people always instinctively trusted those they had fought with before.
Now Jenson was outside, in the short corridor near the stairs, with another squad.
“Go for it,” said Wesley.
“I’ve got two patches of crap on the floor out here, in two different locations. Looks like the one the doctor fought, and the one they trapped. So I’d say where they marked on the map was pretty accurate.”
“Good. I take it there’s no body there?”
“No body. Somebody must have disposed of the dead one.”
Wesley considered. “Probably the Marines. Okay, do a sweep of the corridor, the stairs, and whatever lets off that area. Identify any other doors or corridors but make sure they’re sealed up. If we have any of them still down here, we want to keep them isolated. So check a room, shut the door again, and mark it. Stay together and avoid contact if you do run into anything. And keep me updated.”
“Yes, sir.”
Damn, I’m even starting to sound like I know what I’m doing, thought Wesley. But this ‘sir’ business is still bollocks.
Beside him, Judy sniffed again at the gunk on the ground, and then sneezed. The dog was becoming increasingly attached to him, seemingly disinclined to leave his side for long, and becoming uncomfortable if forced to. Although Wesley had little experie
nce of dog handling, it didn’t seem necessary in this case. Judy handled herself just fine. She’d had some trouble the first couple of days, probably just getting used to being around people again. But she’d settled in soon enough, and had become something of a celebrity on the ship. Everyone liked a friendly dog.
Wesley looked down and smiled. “Let’s see if we can do this, shall we?”
Judy looked up and cocked her head to one side, a gesture that was quickly becoming her trademark. It was a questioning look, almost like the dog was asking, “What do you have in mind?”
Wesley pointed down at the nasty gunk that the dog had been investigating.
“Building search,” he said, and then stood waiting for something magical to happen. This was the first chance he’d had to try any of the commands Derwin had taught him when he took Judy to meet him in the hospital.
He’d gone there to check on how Derwin was healing up. He would be up and about pretty soon, though only for light duty. The bullet wound was healing well, but it would be a while before he would be back to full strength. He’d seemed pleased to see both Wesley and Judy, and even more pleased when he found out the dog was military trained.
Now, Judy sniffed at the patch again, moving around the edge of the mess, but carefully avoiding contact. This went on for a few seconds, and Wesley was just about to try the words again, when she started off through the rows of pallets.
“Oh yeah,” Wesley heard Melvin mutter. “Dog’s got a whiff of something.”
Wesley followed, keeping his distance so Judy could do what she was trained for, and signaled to the others to do the same. She darted around the back of a large pallet stacked high with metal cylinders, and then came back out the other side, heading quickly out onto the main corridor between storage areas. Browning and Burns, still standing at the other end of the large vaulted room, turned as she scampered toward them, her head low as she sniffed.
The two men looked bemused as Wesley caught up with the dog, just as she was passing them, but then she turned right, heading toward the corner of the storeroom. Wesley looked up and ahead, seeing that she was heading into a darker area. He lifted his light and his handgun, and aimed them both into the corner.
There was no movement as Wesley squinted into the darkness, and followed Judy toward a hatch that was slightly ajar. He pointed the light at the exit, expecting her to head to it, but she turned instead into a gap between the pallets – and then barked.
Wesley circled the pallet and immediately saw what Judy had found.
A human hand. Just a hand.
It was stuck between two wooden planks of one side of the pallet, with no arm or body attached to it, only severed tendons and gristle covered with dried black gunk. Wesley cringed, but then Judy was off again, heading toward that door in the corner, sniffing at what he now saw was a thin trail of black gunk smeared across the floor.
“Hold,” he said, and Judy stopped, waiting for him.
Melvin stepped past him and lifted his rifle, pointing it toward the doorway, while Wesley took out the map, laid it on a nearby pallet, and tried to locate both this hatch, and the corridor that lay behind it. He found them eventually, but the markings were so small they were difficult to make out.
“It looks like there’s a few smaller storage compartments through here,” he said, looking up and seeing that Browning and Burns were also now covering the hatch. “Most of them aren’t marked, though. There’s six of them along the corridor, which should, I think, lead to a dead end, presuming I’m reading this correctly.”
“What’s in ’em?” asked Melvin.
“No idea,” said Wesley. “Does it matter?”
“No, I guess not. Unless it’s explosive. Probably should have brought some of the new recruits down here. You know, them being Stores folk and all. They’d know.”
“Good point.” Wesley grabbed his radio. “Jenson?”
“Jenson here.”
“South end of the main Stores area on this deck is a corridor with six rooms and then a dead end, according to the map.”
“Yeah I know it,” said Jenson. “Wood stores.”
“Just wood?” asked Wesley. “No explosives or other potentially dangerous crap?”
“Nope. Just wood.”
Wesley looked to Melvin. “Wood stores,” he said, then turned back to peer into the gloom beyond the hatch.
There had been very little noise while they ran this clearance op. Wesley’s team certainly wasn’t making much, and everyone who worked nearby had been told to clear the area. The hatches had been dogged and marked as Off limits. But an even deeper silence now greeted Wesley as he pushed open the hatch and shined the light inside.
The companionway was barely thirty feet long, with six hatches, as expected, leading off it. All were shut, and from the dust on the floor Wesley gathered this area was even less used than the others. The dust formed a fine unbroken skin across the deck – except for a single pair of footprints, which went the full length of the corridor, disappearing into the very last hatch on the left.
Wesley pointed at the footprints, and Melvin and Browning both nodded in acknowledgement.
Okay, so someone has been this way recently, Wesley thought – also noting there were no footprints coming back from the room. Maybe there was another way out, and the person had just passed through? But the pattern of the prints made him uneasy. They didn’t go in a straight line along the center of the corridor, but wavered and snaked from side to side. Every few steps there was a long gouge in the dust, as though the person had been dragging their feet some of the way.
But if it had been one of the dead who came through here… then the door at the other end shouldn’t be shut, should it?
He started forward again, handgun raised, light darting into the corners as he moved. Judy was just ahead of him now, sniffing at the footprints. When Wesley arrived at the far end, he stood outside that last hatch and listened, indicating to the others to be still.
No sounds came from the compartment.
But Judy began to quietly growl.
You’re So Dead
JFK - Stores
The companionway was silent as the four men backtracked down it, the dog still sitting quietly before the hatch at the end – the one with the footprints leading to it. Wesley had decided they needed to go back and clear all the less suspect compartments before tackling the final one.
He took the lead now, aiming his light and his weapon into the corners of each room as Melvin eased the hatches open. The first two were empty and looked as though they had been that way for a long time. The floors were dust-covered, the corners filled with cobwebs, and no supplies, wood or otherwise, could be seen. Not even any debris.
They moved on to the next two, and found these to be very different. They were still covered with a fine layer of dust, but were piled from floor to ceiling with stacks of treated wooden planks. They looked like the kind used to build decks in a yard – and, when he thought about it, Wesley recognized them as identical to those that made up the borders around the planting areas he’d seen in the farm on the Hangar Deck.
They searched these two compartments, crawling over the tops of the wood stacks to peer down into the gaps between them. However unlikely it was that anything could have gotten stuck down there, Wesley was taking no chances. It would be incredibly embarrassing to mark the area as clear, only to have a deader crawl up out of there weeks or even months later. Wesley didn’t even like to think about what Commander Drake’s reaction to that would be.
But, soon enough, they found themselves reunited with Judy, back outside that final hatch. There was nowhere else to look, so there was no more putting this off.
Someone or something is in there, Wesley thought. He honestly wasn’t sure if searching the other compartments first was just an excuse to delay the inevitable encounter, or if he was being smart, covering their backs and making sure they didn’t get cut off. A bit of both, probably.
The dog
sat perfectly still, just watching the closed hatch, but now also making quiet whining noises that made Wesley nervous.
He reached out and turned the latch halfway, indicating to Melvin and the others to be ready. He swung the hatch inward and stepped aside as the others aimed their weapons inside.
“Anybody home?” called Wesley. But after a few seconds there was still no movement, and no noises of something stumbling or rushing toward them. There was nothing.
Belatedly, Wesley realized the small space was already dimly lit – by an oil lamp on top of a crate, and that in itself was puzzling. It had to be a living person down here, he thought. And they couldn’t be long gone if that lamp is still burning.
Panning his light around, he also saw empty cans of food discarded nearby, and a plastic water bottle, half empty, sitting on a crate next to the wall. Strewn across the deck were used bandages – quite a lot of them, many of them blood-smeared. There were stacks of boxes in the corners, and a pile of blankets, or maybe towels, a few feet from the makeshift table.
Wesley stepped further inside, still panning around carefully, covering the corners behind the boxes. There were more signs of recent occupation, but still no occupant. Judy scampered about, sniffing at everything, but didn’t make any noise.
Wesley turned to find Melvin frowning.
“So where the hell is he?” asked the Scotsman. “Or it. Nothing came back out of here – no footprints leading out. And the hatch was shut.”
Wesley nodded, and looked around the room one more time. “Weird, huh?”
“No other way out. No hatches in the ceiling, or a ladder. Doesn’t make any sense, brother.”
“Agreed,” said Wesley, as puzzled as the rest of them.
Burns and Browning, still in the entrance, peered back down the companionway, checking for footprints they might somehow have missed.
