Arisen, Book Nine - Cataclysm (27 page)

Elliott took a couple of deep breaths as he changed out his radio battery. Then he dropped out and checked his rifle mag and reloaded. He didn’t think he’d hit anything just now, but he’d shot a lot. Once again, facing down a fast-moving and coordinated pack of runners was not something he was used to, and had definitely never been trained for.

Less than a minute later, the sergeant came back to the line of hastily scooped-out trenches, from which his riflemen were now firing slowly but steadily at the approaching ranks of dead in the distance, and he started barking orders.

“Look lively! There’s an artillery barrage coming in to screen our withdrawal. We’re moving out by sections, while D Company covers the movement. We’re going now. Move out!” There was little preamble, and no ceremony.

Elliott got to his feet and fell in. The platoon he’d been thrown in with seemed happy to have another sharpshooter – destroying the dead farther out was better than letting them get close. Elliott would have liked to hold this position longer, and cover his new team’s withdrawal. But his brothers in D Company were doing that. They’d do a good job. And maybe, after this, he could hook back in with them.

With his best friend Amit gone, he’d really like all his next-best mates around him. Jones, Leakey, McKay, and the lads, all mucking in together again.

That was something to look forward to.

* * *

Running again. Bouncing, trying to keep drawing breaths, trying to keep his feet. Everything slightly blurry. The sun had gone away again, a thin rain had begun to fall – and mists on the ground had started to roll through once more. Elliott tried to stay on Sergeant Bhardwaj’s ass. It was comforting. He felt he couldn’t go far wrong if he stayed close to the platoon sergeant.

Except he could also hear him conferring with the platoon’s officer as they ran. They were both poking at a plastic-covered map sheet. “Definitely east after north?”

“Definitely!” Bhardwaj said. “And it shouldn’t matter, anyway – as long as we get far enough north, we’ll be clear!”

“Yeah,” and the lieutenant stuck his finger into the map, “But is
that
the grid square we’re supposed to be in? Or is it the northernmost one of the barrage?”

“Christ – I’m not sure.”

“Can you get battalion on the blower?”

“I can’t get anyone. The channels are saturated.”

“Does battalion even have commo with the artillery batteries?”

“Dunno. I say we just run like hell and get as far north as we can!”

Overhearing this, Elliott took deep sucking breaths and willed his legs to keep pumping. As little as he had wanted to fall off the back of the formation before… he was seriously motivated to keep up now. But ultimately it didn’t matter.

Elliott’s fate was sealed the moment he landed in C Company.

Fail Hard

CentCom HQ - JOC

Jameson stood at the shot-out windows with his mouth wide open, watching his salvation fall to Earth in great gouts of flame. The gigantic explosion in the aircraft hangar was taking down the two incoming Chinooks with breathtaking violence. Worst of all, easily worst, in a competitive field, was the individual figures he could just make out – flailing and falling and covered with flames – spilling from the cracks between the broken-apart sections of the ungainly helicopters and tumbling to earth.

Merciful God…

He instinctively brought his hands up to protect his face as all four halves of the two helos slammed into the ground in all-new fireballs and more hurtling debris. In a vague way, he knew he should get under cover. A counter-intuitive principle, but one that had been drilled into him, was: if you can see the explosion, the explosion can see you. Basically, shrapnel could fly mind-boggling distances. Miles in some cases.

But then it was all over, and nothing had hit him. But Jameson still felt like he’d been punched in the gut.

Confusingly, he now heard helicopter rotor noise. Stepping closer to the window, he craned his neck up and out… and there in the sky was Charlotte in her Apache. The mean-looking attack helicopter was rolling slightly from side to side, like it had been rocked by the explosions. But she had survived it.

And Jameson remembered he had tried to order her back to the pilots’ ready room. The one located in the hangar that was now a three-alarm fire. By staying in the air, she had perhaps just become their last surviving pilot.

Smart girl
, Jameson thought.

And that was the last idle thought he was going to be able to allow himself. Because now he and his Marines were right where they had started the day – in charge of this place, and everything in it, and the entire battle for the south.

Their relief were all dead and charred and in pieces on the ground.

* * *

Out near the helipad, Private Simmonds slowly uncurled out of the fetal ball he had spontaneously rolled into, after being knocked to the ground by the force of the first gigantic explosion in the hangar. When the two helos had also gone up, then crashed to the ground in smaller but closer explosions, Simmonds had only curled up on the ground more tightly. But now as he forced his eyes open, and tried to see through the stinging black smoke and around the flaming pools of aviation fuel, he had just a single thought:

No one could have fucked up as badly as I just did. NO ONE.

He didn’t know what had actually happened to cause the cataclysmic explosion inside the hangar. Probably no one would ever know. But he had been responsible for the sweeps there, and making absolutely sure the place was safe and squared away, in advance of the command contingent from CentCom North arriving. And he also remembered joking about the grenades carried by the RMPs he had sent in there. Maybe that was related. Maybe not. It didn’t matter.

“No fuck-ups,” had been his orders.

He couldn’t have failed any harder if he’d worked at it for a hundred years.

Now he climbed to his feet and tried to imagine a way to organize some kind of rescue or recovery effort. It was impossible to imagine there was anyone to rescue – the hangar looked like a total loss, and both Chinooks were in flaming pieces spread across two hundred square meters of ground.

But he had to try. He had to do something.

* * *

And now everything was kicking off again all over – both there in the JOC, and everywhere else.

When Jameson had dealt with the first few emergencies – those related to the explosion and helo crash, and those not – he felt a tap on his shoulder and turned around. There was an enlisted woman he didn’t recognize behind him, and she had a group of civilians in tow – a woman carrying a little girl, and two young boys. “Sir,” she said, “the RMPs at the front gate sent these four up. Evidently they’re authorized to be here.”

Jameson boggled. “What – here in the JOC?”

“Um. No, sir. On base. They’ve got proper credentials.” She produced a laminated card. Jameson didn’t even look. It occurred to him that he wouldn’t have known the proper credentials if they’d crawled up his trouser leg and gnawed his knob off.

“The RMPs didn’t know what to do with them, so they’ve sent them to you.”

Jameson paused to actually look at the newcomers. The woman was mid-thirties, attractive, smart-looking – she nodded at him, seeming both alert and anxious. The tiny girl she carried was adorable, and the boys certainly seemed like nice lads. And for just one second he thought of his own childhood, in Canterbury, which now felt a million years away at the bottom of a black hole – as was, indeed, Canterbury. But of course he couldn’t begin to give a damn, or even think about these people.

“Take them somewhere else,” he said, turning away.

* * *

Second Lieutenant Miller was one of the two surviving ops officers in the JOC – one of the two people remotely qualified to keep the place running, and keep the hundreds of military units spread across the south, and increasingly the rest of the country, from falling into total chaos.

Now he pulled off his radio headset, shakily got to his feet, and started walking over to where Major Jameson once again stood gawping out the windows at the carnage around the hangar and helipad, while also taking a phone call. Along the way, he passed several tactical and comms stations that had either been abandoned, or just didn’t have personnel to man them at all. He heard a frantic voice leaking out of a radio headset lying on a desk.

“—rgently requesting confirmation of nine-line fire mission. Repeat, we need confirmation and final grid coords and parameters for walking artillery barrage. This is a priority flash transmi—”

But then he was past it and reached the commander. He paused before speaking, waiting for Jameson to deal with what he was dealing with that second, which he gathered was a strained conversation with the Ministry of Defence, and until then he just looked upon the hellfire and carnage out the window.

“Yes, sir,” Jameson said into the phone. “I do understand that you speak for the Chief of the Defence Staff… Yes, sir… Yes, we can certainly look into that… We will, by all means. Thank you, sir.”

He then banged the phone on the window ledge before him three times, hard. “Fucking MoD! They actually let these idiots be
in charge of people
?”

Miller started to elbow in and speak, but he was pre-empted by a queue-jumper, who shouted around him. “Major, there’s no response from the pilots’ ready room.”

So Miller waited and carried on looking out upon the burning inferno of the main aviation hangar, and the first units from the London Fire Brigade rolling through the front gates.
No, there wouldn’t be any response from there
, he thought.
It’s on fire.
He also guessed, correctly, that Jameson was trying to get hold of the pilots to help organize another flight to pick up operations officers from Edinburgh. But Miller could already tell him that wasn’t going to happen.

Jameson cursed, only half under his breath. “Then get me, um, Private Simmonds.” But then he realized he didn’t need help for that – and instead spoke into his own team radio. “Simmonds, Jameson.”

“Go ahead, sir.”

“What’s the status of the pilots in the ready room?”

There was a terrified pause.
“Completely gone, boss. There is no pilots’ ready room. Just charred bodies and warped tin. And fire.”

Jameson hurled the radio down onto the nearest desk.

Finally, Miller infiltrated into this opening: “Major, we have an urgent transmission from the ZPW Security Station South.”

Jameson just nodded now. He looked like he was going numb.

“They’re experiencing additional crumbling of some of the hastily extended sections of wall down there.”

Oh, dear God,
Jameson thought. Just as the dead were imminently reaching it, the goddamned Wall – the only thing standing between them and total destruction – was falling down around their ears.

“How bad is it? Is it actually falling down?”

“No, sir, I don’t believe so. As I said, it’s some of the extensions at the top. I gather the lower sections still seem to be solid.”

“Well, thank God for that. What now?”

“They’re requesting additional construction and engineering resources to get it handled – before, well, before…”

Jameson blinked heavily. “Do we have additional resources?”

“I don’t know, sir. I can try to find out.”

“Tell Station South to deal with it – and you deal with them. You’re deputized. Get them workmen, don’t get them workmen, I don’t care, just deal with it.”

“Yes, si—”

But Jameson was already turning away, as someone else came running up, holding a headset and saying, “Sir, it’s the OC of the Royal Artillery, I think you’d better take this…”

Miller walked numbly back to his station. As he passed that same abandoned headset, he could hear what almost sounded like screams leaking out of it now:
“For the love of God – you’re murdering us out here…!”

Miller just kept walking woodenly by.

They were all getting murdered everywhere.

God of War (Cataclysm II)

Kent - Two Miles South of the ZPW

The land had turned to sea.

Great frothing geysers of earth launched twenty-five feet into the sky. The ground that wasn’t actually breaking like waves instead rolled like the ocean, undulating in a way that solid ground never should. And the air was alive with evil zipping hornets of shrapnel.

And the bodies. Every time Elliott stole a look over his shoulder, he could see two things – the incoming explosions, the walking artillery rounds, coming closer. And the men running behind him, those still on their feet, growing fewer.

They were just being churned up back there.

The whole of Kent around them had erupted into pure malevolence.

Being under an artillery barrage – including a friendly one – was just about the worst and most terrifying experience possible in life. For some reason now Elliott remembered the quote by Stalin: “Artillery is the God of War.” Today he was learning the undeniable truth of this. And also that it was a vengeful, wrathful, and implacable God. And its retribution, its steel rain, fell equally on the heads of the just and the unjust.

And there was no escape from its sight.

Everything was happening in such slo-mo razor-vivid detail that Elliott could actually see glowing red pieces of shrapnel cutting the air around him. It was menacing him terribly, threatening to kill him at any second – but it was actually doing it to the guys to his rear. It was just tearing them up.

Ahead of him, he could see Staff Sergeant Bhardwaj, legs and arms pumping, and audibly shouting (even over the thundering explosions) into his radio, to Battalion, to for the love of all that was holy get the artillery called off. Elliott had no doubt officers at Battalion were even then also screaming at CentCom, or maybe at the gunners themselves, if they could make commo with them.

But, whether it was overloaded channels, or an overrun artillery or command unit, or just crossed wires… nothing anyone was doing was helping.