District: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse (32 page)

“After we got him to divulge the true goal of the Fort Meade
mission, he stopped talking.” Nash turned and jabbed a finger at the air in
front of the monitor. “That’s why I’m convinced this column has something to do
with their interest in the NSA facility.”

Shrill said, “If their mission is to get at the intel on
those servers, why go to D.C. first? Especially with all the dead in that
city.”

“I don’t think we’re looking at all of their assets, here.
That column had to have come from the flotilla we lost track of in the
Atlantic. Besides”—Nash edged closer to the monitor and pointed to a number of
the vehicles—“Those APCs are not amphibious. Therefore, they had to have been
brought ashore by landing craft.”

“This changes everything,” Shrill said.

The President’s head was panning back and forth as she followed
the conversation.

Nash turned from the display and looked to her analyst.
“Pull up everything you’ve archived since the Keyhole came on station.”

“That’s only about thirty minutes’ worth of feed, Major.”

“It’s all we’ve got to go on,” Nash said. “Enlarge and
backtrack south and east from where the column is now. I want every eyeball
available searching waterways and shorelines for signs of PLA activity.”

The President nodded her obvious approval and folded her
arms across her chest.

Nash looked to another airman. “Do we still have a presence
in Dover?”

“Limited,” the young airman acknowledged, absentmindedly
stroking his dark five o’clock shadow with one hand.

“Better than nothing,” Nash said, still under the watchful
eye of the President, a full bird colonel and a half-dozen airmen wearing
expectant looks and obviously awaiting new orders. “One of you get Colonel
Frederick on the horn ASAP. If Kellen’s no longer with us, I want to speak to
his successor.”

One airman nodded and began the process of placing a call
that, if Mr. Murphy was still behaving himself, would be routed to the red
phone at Dover Air Force Base by way of one of the 50th Space Wing’s few
remaining military-grade communications satellites.

Dover AFB, Dover, Delaware

“Sir, you sure you want the birds readied and pulled from
the hangars?”

Colonel Kellen Frederick regarded his most senior airman
with a look that could freeze water.

“That’s exactly what I said, Master Sergeant.” The base
commander raised his binoculars and scrutinized the far fence line. Hardly
practicing what he preached—let alone what the rules and regs called for—he had
let himself go. His uniform was thrown together piecemeal and rumpled and
creased. He wore a weeks’ old growth of facial hair and hadn’t had his hair cut
since Z-Day plus twelve. He brushed a stray gray lock behind his ear and began
to count the dead pressing against the outermost ring of fencing.

“They have all worked so hard on their noise and light
discipline,” Master Sergeant Michael Cassidy—a hard-working cog in the Dover
AFB wheel—said in a respectful, almost pleading tone. “The men and women who
are still here were instrumental in getting the biters to forget about us.”

“Not these twenty-seven pusbags. They’re going to have to be
dealt with before they attract friends.”

“With all due respect, Colonel. If we launch even one sortie
the Zs will be back in full force. As it stands, we barely have enough
ammunition to save our asses and get out of here if they breach the wire.”

“Believe me, I know.” The colonel removed his navy ball cap
and set it on the desktop below the east-facing windows. He performed a
four-point turn, stopping at each compass direction to peer out the sloped
glass windows. While he felt it would be easy to suddenly become trapped in the
control tower should the dead flood onto the base, it was the one place on the
entire four-hundred-and-fifty-acre plat of land where he had yet to suffer one
of his crippling anxiety attacks.

“Send a team out to clear the fence,” said the colonel. And
though there was no reason to expect anything different from his little band of
survivors, he added, “Tell them to do it fast and quiet.”

“Yes, Sir.” Cassidy picked up a radio handset and was about
to issue the new orders. The first of which was still absolutely baffling to
him, because they hadn’t conducted air operations out of Dover for weeks. There
just wasn’t the fuel to do so. And secondly, the amount of dead the roar of a
single jet engine would attract significantly dwarfed the relatively small
number currently clutching the fence. So many so that the skeleton crew that
was left would likely have to mount a hasty evacuation and leave one of the few
remaining airstrips on the Eastern Seaboard to the undead scourge.

“And Mike,” the colonel said, catching the airman before he
reached the door. “This comes down from Colorado Springs. From Major Freda Nash
via President Clay, no less. If it wasn’t important, she wouldn’t have ordered
it. President Clay is a good woman. She’d never ask us to draw attention to
ourselves if there was another option.”

Holding the stairwell door open with a knee, the stocky,
blond master sergeant asked, “So how do we keep the fences clear when the dead
do come in the kind of numbers they did those first days?”

“You’ll see,” Colonel Fredrick said cryptically. He pressed
the Steiners to his face and glassed the northern perimeter. “You’ll see.”

NSA Building 9, Fort Meade, Maryland

The architectural stylings from the plaza fronting the NSA
building were carried over into the lobby. Lots of wood, glass, and steel, the
lines curved to mimic nature, had dominated there.

Here at the far corner of the building, the designers had
seemingly run out of imagination—or budgeted dollars. Square cubicles were the
norm. Every few hundred feet there was a glass-enclosed, electromagnetically
shielded room used for holding meetings in utmost secrecy.

Time to try and hail Schriever,
thought Cade, halting
the team in front of an unmarked and nondescript steel door next to a similarly
bland bank of elevators—the fourth such set since leaving the lobby and dozens
of twice-dead Zs behind.

Since sharing the last SITREP with Nash and Ari from just
inside the front entry, the comms had been silent.

Meeting Cross’s quizzical look, Cade said, “Schriever TOC,
Anvil Actual. How copy?”

Nothing. Not even a faint hiss of static to confirm his
comms were still powered on.

Cade moved a few feet down the hall. Standing over a female
Z that he had dispatched moments earlier with a dagger to the temple, he looked
at the ceiling—as if that would help the reception—and tried again.

Still nothing.

As anticipated, the team’s lifeline to the outside world was
down. Not only could they not communicate with the TOC, Jedi One-One, or the
two gen-3 Stealth Chinooks transporting their QRF force, they were off the grid
visually as well. With no politicians crowding the situation room at the White
House in order to get the ubiquitous
I was there when
photo for their
wood-paneled office wall, and no JAG lawyers waiting in the wings to view the
post-mission video footage in order to make sure the enemies’ feelings weren’t
hurt, the miniature body cameras that Cade used to wear on high-profile Delta
missions were deemed unnecessary. Which was a good thing. The fewer people Cade
had to answer to, the better. The people that mattered to him at this very
moment were the shooters stacked at his back and awaiting word on what lay
behind the unmarked steel slab door.

Standing there in the dark bowels of the seemingly dead building,
Cade conceded to himself that there was nothing sexy about this part of the
mission. There were no scientists to pluck from danger and spirit back to
Schriever. There were no bad guys bent on world domination to bring to justice.
And, fortunately, since the alternative would mean another one of his friends
or loved ones had been harmed, no personal scores to settle as there had been
with Pug, Robert Christian, and, to a lesser extent, the turncoat, former Navy
SEAL, Ian Bishop.

So, following the same protocol Tice had established at the
Canadian research facility, he shrugged off his pack and from a side pocket
extracted the lock-picking gun, a flexible fiber optic periscope, and its
four-inch color display. He handed the latter two items to Cross, who promptly
began mating the small parts.

Momentarily taking his eyes off the far corridor, Axe peeked
over Cross’s shoulder. “That gizmo see in the dark, too?”

Griff stared daggers in the dark through his own NVGs. “Eyes
on our six,” he reminded Axe.

“Take it easy, mate. We’ll hear the slimy buggers coming
before they see us anyway.”

“It’s their eyesight that’s compromised,” Cade reminded.
“Not their hearing. With the three hundred-or-so-person skeleton crew that was
supposedly inside here when the place fell, one would expect more of them than
we’ve already come across.”

“Copy that,” Griff said. “Let’s keep our fingers crossed
they’re not all behind this door.”

Cross said nothing to that. Instead, aiming to find out, he
forced the slender flexible fiber optic stalk under the door. As if the probe
was hitting some type of an airlock seal, there was great resistance beyond the
flush-to-the-floor door sweep. However, after lubing the stalk with a few drops
of gun oil from a tube taken from his pack, and going at the door near the
bottom corner, the device made it past the jamb and the entire landing and two
runs of stairs were showing up clearly and in full color on the little display.

Dover AFB, Dover, Delaware

The trio of A-10 Thunderbolt ground attack craft assigned to
the 104th Fighter Squadron, now permanently relocated from Warfield Air
National Guard Base, Maryland, had been gone less than twenty minutes when the
Zs began arriving in droves. Colonel Fredrick watched the small knots of former
human beings stagger from the trees north of the base and come up against the
outermost ring of concertina-topped chain-link fencing. He panned right and
paused with the binoculars trained on the Air Mobility Command Museum located
almost due east of the base proper. A hundred or more dead were parading in
from the nearby feeder road. They bounced off one another as they negotiated
the car-width gap between the Jersey barriers placed there on Z-Day to deter
waves of frantic civilians seeking refuge from the nightmare Dover had quickly
become.

The sheer crush of the combined weight of the arriving dead
was bowing the fencing outward as the Zs in the rear of the pack forcibly
funneled the ones at the head between the abandoned vehicles, breaking off
mirrors and denting body panels along the way. As the dead marched blindly
toward where the continual rumble from back-to-back-to-back take offs had
originated, Colonel Frederick’s gaze was drawn to the steady opening and
closing of their mouths. And though he couldn’t hear the eerie moans and rasps
he knew were creating a sonic maelstrom down below, his imagination conjured up
a spine-tingling soundtrack to go with the image. Hair on his arms standing to
attention, he let the field glasses drop to his chest and scanned the skies
with his naked eye.

“You hear that, Mike?”

Sergeant Cassidy leaned closer to the lightly tinted glass
and shook his head. “Negative, Colonel.” His eyes locked on the large
contingent of dead battering the fences near the main gate. “And I’m damn
grateful that I can’t. Although I’ve always wondered how the hell something
that isn’t breathing manages to do that, I don’t think I’ll ever learn to get
used to hearing that damn noise those dead fuckers make.”

“I’m not talking about the rotters,” said the colonel.
“Listen. We have company coming in from the west.”

“Should we try hailing them?”

“Don’t bother. I’ve been expecting them.”

“Who?”

Frederick looked through the binoculars. “Just watch.”

As if on cue, a low-flying aircraft materialized from the
ground clutter. It was moving real slow, droning on just above the trees before
dropping closer to the deck and skimming the fence bordering the runway.
Lumbering
would be a good description, thought the colonel, just as a white parachute
materialized in the slipstream below the gray turboprop.

In the next beat the parachute jerked the first of the two
promised ammo-laden pallets violently off the canted ramp behind the airplane.
Pallet number two was still making its slow roll down the ramp when the first
pallet hit the runway dead center a hundred feet beyond the
yellow-chevron-painted overrun area. A hazy shotgun-like blast of accumulated
tire rubber blossomed around the four-by-four wooden cube and the chute went
limp as it skittered crazily along the runway, slowly bleeding off forward
momentum the farther it traveled.

The second pallet didn’t fare as well. After coming into
contact with the runway, it clipped one of the marker lights, instantly
altering its trajectory and causing the drag chute lines to wrap around it.
Barely a dozen yards from where it first hit the runway after leaving the
airplane, the cargo pallet careened through the vibrant green infield, along
the way kicking up dark clods of soil still bristling with grass.

“Special delivery from Major Nash,” said the colonel. “She
pulled some strings and had the flight diverted from … somewhere.”

“We just took delivery of an ammo drop destined for another
base?”

The colonel grimaced, but said nothing.

Wisely, Doyle changed the subject. “Shall I send the PJs
out?”

Colonel Frederick tapped the control tower glass, then
pointed in the general direction of the long row of airplane hangars the A-10s
had rolled out of earlier. The massive floor-to-ceiling doors were parted about
a third of their travel and a desert-tan Humvee bristling with guns was already
rolling through with a pair of like-colored pickup trucks close on its bumper.

“They’ve beat you to it, Sergeant.” The colonel turned,
raised the binoculars to his face and tracked the cargo plane as it crossed the
east end of the runway, climbing away from the tower while banking gently to
port. The fuselage was still wide open out back and a human-sized figure was
kneeling near the ramp. The magnified image of the Super Hercules shimmered
slightly as it leveled from the short climb and settled on a northerly tack.
Not a second later the tiny figure the colonel knew was the loadmaster began
tossing Day-Glo orange spheres groundward. After seeing four of the objects
fall to earth north of where Bayside Drive wrapped around the end of the base,
the cargo plane’s ramp begin its slow climb into the closed position.

“What were those?” Sergeant Cassidy asked.

“A distraction,” said the colonel, letting the binoculars
hang by their strap on his chest. “One that was promised by Nash and may have
just saved what’s left of the 436th and 512th Airlift Wings from having to
evacuate this post.”