Arisen, Book Nine - Cataclysm (13 page)

A few of the visible structures had been damaged beyond reasonable repair. But even the debris from those had been tidied away. There wasn’t so much as scraps of trash blowing on the ground. Henno squinted deeply. They had come to East Africa, ground zero for the fall of man.

And it was like the ZA had never hit here at all.

Well, aside from the place being totally depopulated.

Which led to the most striking feature of all… there were no dead. No active ones standing or moving around. And no destroyed ones on the ground.

So far Alpha hadn’t ventured into the center of the sprawling camp, instead keeping the wire on their left elbow. But looking out through the gaps, they’d now seen a fair bit of the installation. And, aside from being without a garrison, it looked like this place was ship-shape and squared away – to rigorous military standards.

Had someone come in and cleared the joint?
Henno wondered.
Maybe the same people who cut that hole in the wire.
He didn’t know.

But he didn’t like it.

* * *

Handon wasn’t enormously pleased by all this, either. Their mission plan had them quickly bagging up a Zulu in American uniform, which would have locked in some gains. Then they would know they had a much earlier-stage victim than any Doc Park had seen before. But once again, the first time their mission was to find the dead was also the first time they weren’t swarmed by hundreds or thousands of them.

Now it seemed like they couldn’t buy a dead guy.

But Handon pushed that thought away and got back into his “three-foot world.” This was a notion he’d picked up from Homer – a mindset that reminded you to focus on what you could affect, the stuff directly in front of your face and within reach, and to let the rest go. It was not only liberating, it was also a short-cut to winning. Because it was usually executing the fundamentals well, and not losing focus on your objective, that were the keys to success.

Bitching or worrying about the unchangeable was a ticket to fail.

Handon had to continually remind himself of this – another price of excellence was teaching yourself the same damned lessons over and over again – but more so since he took command of Alpha. Since then, worry had tried to settle on him like a suffocating and scratchy blanket, virtually every morning he woke up. And that blanket would tangle him up if he let it.

He had to choose not to.

Up ahead, Henno got up and got moving again, and the team followed at a slow and deliberate pace, everyone methodically covering their sectors and checking their corners. The famous “Don’t run to your death” rule definitely still applied, after being cemented into the heads of the Tier-1 guys in Iraq and Afghanistan. It was still relevant in zombie warfare, plus today they arguably faced a higher risk of encountering opponents with brains and guns.

Certainly the dust-up with the Russian Spetsnaz teams, and the various bloody noses they took in that one, had reawakened them to this risk.

Handon stayed in the number-two position behind Henno. When they reached the first guard tower, still on the south fence but closer to the southeast corner, they finally turned to head in toward the interior. They’d dipped their toes in, and seen enough to tip the odds in their favor.

Instead of staying on point, Henno took a knee beneath the tower and strong-pointed while the others filed by. Handon didn’t know what his thinking was, but he decided to trust it and go with it – and he stayed back with him, taking a supporting position.

As Juice filed by, Handon traded a look with him – both of them remembering the dead that had littered the ground at Saldanha Naval Base, their brainstems cleaved by the sharpened shovels of those Spetsnaz guys. Handon had seen it on drone video, and Juice had seen it up close. And there was none of that here. No dead destroyed by any method.

But as Handon knelt there in the dirt, he took one hand from his rifle, reached down, and picked up a handful of dry soil, crumbling it in the palm of his shooting glove. It was faintly dark on the surface – and when he dug deeper, it got sticky and tar-like, fouled by the black blood of the dead. Some had been spilt in this spot.

But then someone had come through and raked over the dirt.

Someone had not only cleared this place. They had cleaned it.

Handon briefly wondered if it was possible that a group of tightly wired civilian survivors had re-secured and occupied the camp. If so, they all needed to watch their six. And they had all better have their weapons in condition one.

But Handon already knew everyone there had brass-checked their weapons at the water’s edge. This wasn’t a group of twenty-year-old enlisted infantry, and they didn’t need to be coached. They didn’t even really need to be led, or commanded – just let off the chain. And Handon’s role was really only
primus inter pares
– first among equals. Even if Henno disagreed.

As the last of the team slithered by, Handon decided this level of tidiness looked more like the work of soldiers than civilians – and a particular type of soldier. It showed a level of attention to surface matters that was somewhat rare in spec-ops. But which was very common in the conventional forces.

Handon nodded at Henno, then rose and moved out, trusting him to follow.

As he fell in behind the others, he noted that the mottled air was still lightening around them – but there was still no sound from any direction. No birds. No creatures of the forest. No wind. Nothing. It was like moving through a vacuum, or an alien planet, or some weird dreamscape.

But then, just as suddenly, something did make a noise. Whatever it was had been too faint for Handon to identify it – or even to swear he heard it at all. But instinct drove him to stop and spin in place, raising his rifle.

As he did so, Henno spoke a single word over the squad net:
“Disperse.”

As he finished whirling, Handon could see that Henno had moved no more than twenty meters away from the guard tower – and had already turned back to face it, even before Handon did. He had his weapon elevated, aimed up top at the firing platform and the railing before it.

As Handon raised his weapon to cover the same spot, he could now see, mounted on the lip of the railing, just protruding over the edge, the six barrels of a minigun. It hadn’t been visible on their approach toward the tower from the west. A minigun was an unusual weapon to emplace in a guard tower – but not unheard of.

No, the red light was: it was facing
inward
. Toward the camp.

He could sense more than hear the rest of the team behind him scattering, spreading out silently toward the nearest hard cover, while automatically coordinating to cover every sector – all 360 degrees around the team’s now strung-out position.

And while both Handon and Henno held their aim on that spot, they also began to silently side-step away from each other, to be less of a clumped-up target. But they were still both caught out in the open. Actually, there was little point in going for cover now. Everything in sight was made of wood or cement blocks, and would be chewed through by a minigun in seconds if it started going off.

As they did this, Handon had to squint to make out motion up in the tower – and just above the weapon. What he saw was the top of a head. First, the tiniest sliver of salt-and-pepper buzz-cut hair… and then a deeply lined forehead… and finally a single eye, peering through the top-mounted Lead Computing Optical Sight System (LCOSS). This device was actually designed to compute firing solutions at long ranges and high speeds – usually from fixed-wing or rotary-wing aircraft.

But the range between this weapon and the men on the ground could be measured in feet. And now nobody was moving so much as an inch. So Handon didn’t figure this guy was going to need the sight, if he intended to use that thing.

And as he thought this, he saw a bright red dot appear – instantly, perfectly dead-center on the minigunner’s forehead. Henno had flipped on the visible laser on the PEQ15 mounted on his barrel rail. And it told him what he already knew – that his aim was perfect.

And it also told Handon something – that Henno was about to take the shot.

He had maybe a quarter-second to consider this. Once again acting on instinct – it was all happening too fast for methodical thought – Handon side-stepped back toward Henno… and gently but firmly depressed the man’s rifle barrel down toward the ground. He wasn’t trying to shove Henno around the battlefield – it was just the most economical way to tell him to hold his fire.

But instantly Henno’s eyes went wide, he angled his head – and gave Handon a look like he’d just groped his little sister, pissed in his pint, and then shat in his hat. It wasn’t a look anyone wanted to be on the receiving end of.

Henno slapped Handon’s hand away from his weapon and brought it back up.

Now Handon braced himself for this all to kick off – and gave himself maybe even odds that he was about to be ripped into meat ribbons by hundreds of 7.62 rounds spitting from six barrels less than twenty meters away from his face.

If he’d known Henno wasn’t going to be deterred, he would have let him take the shot right away.

Because now it might be too late.

Not Kids Anymore

CentCom - Main Aviation Hangar

Sergeant Mann of the Royal Military Police reached the back wall of the last room they needed to clear in the hangar complex – and with just enough time to finish it before the helos from Edinburgh were due to land.

The lighting in this section was natural daylight, from large and dirty warehouse-type windows way up on the steel walls. The MP’s normal duties rarely called them to the hangar, and never went back in the bowels of the place, so they’d been exploring as they went. Mann hit that back wall and turned back around to face McDonagh.

“Done and dusted,” he said. There was nowhere to go but back. Their sweep had turned up nothing – which was definitely his idea of success. He clapped his mate on the shoulder.

But then McDonagh flipped his light back on – and shone it down at their feet. They were both standing on a metal grate. And down beneath their boots was a whole other dark space. And as far as they could make out, it was mostly filled with hulking steel containers.

Mann frowned. “Nothing down there but the aviation fuel tanks.”

McDonagh panned his light around. “Yeah. But it looks like there’s some crawl spaces around ’em.”

“Seriously?” Mann said. “We can’t be fannying around in every cranny here.” He checked his watch. “Those Chinooks are due in ten minutes. We’re supposed to be out on the helipad for it.”

McDonagh shrugged. “They said check everything. Won’t take me a minute to have a look around down there. Just watch my six.”

Mann nodded and hefted his rifle as McDonagh found the section of grate that came up, flipped it up on his hinge, and shimmied down. In seconds, the beam of his light was moving out of sight through the cramped darkness.

Mann took a look at the room around him and the door at its far end. He wasn’t thrilled about McDonagh going down there alone. Then again, he figured he’d be fine. Both of them were NCOs of long standing, both solid and experienced, and both had been in the forces almost ten years.

They weren’t kids anymore.

Mann touched his radio button. “Don’t keep me in suspense.”

“Yeah, mate, sorry. There’s nothing down here, and not much room for anything. Just gonna follow it to the end and loop back round. Hang about.”

“Roger that.” Mann peered into the darkness – but there was nothing to be seen.

No, they weren’t kids anymore. But most of the RMP soldiers who had gone down earlier that day were – they were much younger, and had panicked when the shit started flying. In all the chaos, they’d been unable to keep their cool and make their shots when it counted. And they had been swarmed and taken down – especially by the runners, who were on them in seconds.

Most of them never had a chance.

Whereas Mann and McDonagh had stayed in tight formation, watched each others’ backs, and kept their heads – carefully aiming and methodically making their shots. So they had ended up with a lot of destroyed Zulus and Romeos piled up around them – unlike so many of the young squaddies, who’d ended up with dead piling up on their heads, and ripping them to pieces.

And turning them to the other team.

* * *

“Major!”

Jameson turned to look back across the JOC. Right now he was trying to get his head around a planned artillery barrage on the advancing line of dead in the south. The idea was to have the infantry on the front lines retreat and pull the dead into a pre-planned kill box. Done right, it should not only destroy a lot of dead in one go, it might even create a significant chunk of no-man’s-land between the living and the dead, so the troopers on the front lines could break contact cleanly.

But, obviously, getting it all coordinated was of some importance – when you had gunners dropping 105mm rounds all over the place, you needed the men on the ground somewhere else.

But Jameson’s half-cocked radio operator was calling for him.

“Got the
Kennedy
back on the blower for you!”

He figured he’d better take that one.

Making a vague gesture at the two clerks who’d been shanghaied into running the indirect fires control station, he got up and threaded through the general chaos – more and more random officers and men were getting recruited and pulled in for duties in here, and each knew less about what he was supposed to be doing than the last – until he finally reached the radio station near the blown-out windows.

“CentCom Actual, go ahead
Kennedy
.”

“Jameson, it’s Abrams again. Listen, I’ve got our domain expert up here with me, and I’m going to conference him in so we can all get on the same page.”

Jameson took a deep breath, and tried to muster patience and calmness of spirit. “Sure,
Kennedy
. Go ahead.”

* * *