The Flood (13 page)

“That’s not bad,” Jameson said. “This man might even still be alive by the time we got there.” He flashed back to what the Americans had told him:
This guy is alone on the ground, he’s trapped, he’s completely surrounded. He could die at any second. We need you to extract him NOW.

Miller looked back down at the specs. “Trouble is… the max range of the Beechcraft is 2,075 miles. So you could get there—”

“But we’ll never get back,” Jameson said.

“Some rescue mission,” Eli said.

“What about mid-air refueling?” Jameson asked, knowing the answer before he asked the question.

Miller looked up. “Still only one tanker flying. And it’s halfway to Somalia.”

Jameson exhaled. “Can we turn it around? Re-task it?”

Miller shrugged. “Maybe. But if we did…” and he went back to a map with live air mission statuses on it, “At this point, it would have to return to RAF Brize Norton to refuel itself.”

Eli leaned back in his chair, and tugged at his body armor. “Never mind that we’d be giving up on the bloody vaccine.”

Miller flipped maps. “It gets worse. From the best intel on enemy positions we have, Brize Norton is about to be under serious threat. There’s no guarantee the refueling crews wouldn’t all be slouching and moaning by the time the plane got back. Never mind the runways still being clear…”

“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” Jameson said. “Jesus.”

“I’m not sure it even matters,” Miller said. “There simply aren’t any pilots left to fly the Beechcraft. Not fixed-wing pilots. All of them died in the hangar explosion. I mean, obviously, we could try to get someone in from another RAF base…”

Jameson drummed his fingers on the desktop. Every time he’d requested resources, he’d either been laughed at – or the call hadn’t been answered at all. British Forces had basically stopped being one entity, and started being a bunch of clans and individuals fighting for survival. This, evidently, was what it looked like when everything well and truly fell apart.

And to the best of his knowledge, there was only one pilot of
any
description left alive on this base. Jameson decided he needed to talk to her. Maybe what he needed was some fresh air. He hadn’t left the JOC since he could even remember.

He stood up and looked down at Eli. “Keep putting together a mission plan. Assume we can insert by air somehow. I’ll be back in ten minutes.”

Before the others could answer, he was out the door and speaking into his radio: “Wyvern Two Zero, this is CentCom Actual.”

“Go ahead, Major.”

Jameson stepped up to the blown-out window and cast around. “Yeah, can you set down and meet me on the hilltop overlooking what’s left of the hangar?”

Slight pause.
“Affirmative, wilco.”

Jameson turned around, threw his team radio on the desk – then pulled off his headset and tossed it as well. He was damned well going to be unreachable for ten minutes, for once in his life. As he strode across the barely controlled chaos of the JOC toward the exit, ignoring the eyes on him, he thought:

The world will just have to hold itself together for that long.

* * *

The little bare hilltop was a strangely peaceful spot. By the time Jameson hiked up to it, a big Apache AH-1 attack helicopter had already set down, its rotors had just about spun down, and a certain Captain Charlotte Maidstone had climbed out of the cockpit and onto the ground. The only sound was the breeze, and they had a view down to most of the areas of the sprawling base, walled in as it was within the grounds of the former Wandsworth Prison.

It was this compound that Charlotte had been instrumental in saving in the recent outbreak, just as she had singlehandedly pulled Jameson’s ass out of a very bad fire in the Dusseldorf mission – using her rockets and autocannon to cover his breakout, then plucking him out of the water and flying him home to safety.

Speaking even as he was striding the last few yards, Jameson said, “I need to get to Moscow – me and all or part of One Troop. How do we get there?”

Charlotte, her big £22,000 custom helmet in hand, nodded and took this in her stride. “I’d take the Fat Cow,” she said.

Jameson had to presume that wasn’t a joke. Nothing was a fit subject for humor these days. “Go on,” he said.

“It’s a Chinook variant – a CH-47D fitted with the ERFS II – Extended Range Fuel System – in the cargo bay. It’s three or four large fuel tanks attached to a refueling system. Holds about 2,400 gallons – on top of the bird’s internal fuel load of 1,050. Normally they use it as a mobile refueling point for other helos. But there’s nothing stopping it from using the fuel itself.”

“Can it get to Moscow and back? That’s fifteen hundred miles one way.”

Charlotte did math in her head. “Yes.”

“Is there one of these bovine monstrosities on this base?”

“Yes.” Charlotte pointed down to one of the helo parking lots. They could both see a normal-looking Chinook squatting there.

Jameson exhaled.

Now Charlotte hit him with the bad news. “But… it’s going to be pretty damned weighed down with all that fuel, and won’t fly blazingly fast. It’s also not going to have a hell of a lot of room for your team. It’s going to be full of fuel bladders.”

Jameson deflated. “Damn. How few?”

“Not sure. Maybe three or four men at most, at a guess?”

Jameson shook his head. That wasn’t enough. He couldn’t take a single fire team into the middle of the Undead Red Army.

“There’ll be a bit more room for the return trip, when half the fuel’s expended. Though I guess that doesn’t help you much…”

No
, Jameson thought.
It didn’t
. “Wait. Could its fuel bladders refuel, say, a Beechcraft King Air?”

“Sure. No reason why not.”

Jameson looked down and squinted in thought. The Chinook couldn’t refuel the Beechcraft in mid-air – but it wouldn’t have to. The little plane had enough range to make it to Moscow, just not back. It could refuel on the ground. He replayed Charlotte’s words: w
on’t fly blazingly fast.
He looked up at her again. “How slow?”

Charlotte did more math, but out loud. “Normal max cruising speed of the CH-47 is 196mph… I don’t think you’ll average better than about 150 in this one fully loaded. So that’s about ten or twelve hours one way.”

Damn again
. That was a long time – particularly to sit on overrun ground waiting for refueling. But it was what it was.

“Okay. One last thing – can you fly it?”

This seemed to take her aback. Then she realized there simply was no one else. “Ish,” she said. “I’m not rated for the CH-47. But I can make it go.”

“Okay,” he said. That was what he needed to know. “You okay?”

“All squared away, Major.”

“Good job ignoring my advice to go to the Pilots’ Ready Room.”

They could both see it still smoldering from their spot on the hilltop.

Jameson turned and marched back down the hill.

Laugh or Cry

CentCom Strategic HQ

And then he marched relentlessly back in through the same (formerly) glass-fronted lobby he’d strode out of ten minutes earlier. Only this time, facing the other direction, he saw what he hadn’t before: the civilian woman and three children who had been brought in from the front gate earlier – the ones with the civilian access ID Jameson had never seen before and didn’t have time to care about. He must have walked right past them on the way out. The four of them were camped out on a couch, the generic kind that graced lobbies everywhere.

Except the floor of this lobby had rather more shell casings, broken glass, and smears of black gunk than average. Stark reminders of the recent outbreak.

For a second, Jameson was just going to pass them by again – to say he had shit to do would be beyond understatement. But the woman looked up and they locked eyes, and for some reason he couldn’t just march on.

He veered over, looked down, and said: “Have they not got you settled yet?”

The woman smiled sadly, full of forbearance. “They told us to wait here for now.”

Jameson frowned. “How long ago was that?” He realized he’d totally lost track of the passage of time.

“About two hours.”

“Jesus,” he breathed, taking a seat beside her. She was still holding the little girl – and the two boys were sitting patiently, or maybe just exhausted, on her other side. “No food? Water? Cot for the little girl?”

She shook her head no. Jameson got the impression she’d survived worse – and was committed to surviving more. Whatever it took.

“May I ask your name?”

“Rebecca. Rebecca Ainsley.” She produced a hand for him to shake, the little girl in her arms shifting – and she shifted herself to better cradle her. As she did so, the blanket fell away from the girl’s face.

Jameson looked down at her, his distraught expression becoming one of disbelief. “Wait a minute… that can’t be… Josie? Amarie’s little girl?”

Rebecca looked back up at him, her own expression startled now. “You know them?”

Jameson just nodded. It could hardly be, but he couldn’t deny it. Amarie, the young Frenchwoman with those Tunnelers, hadn’t put the girl down once as Jameson and his Marines walked them all out of Canterbury, just ahead of the surging flood of dead. He’d seen her face many times during that exodus. Now the girl’s eyes opened and she looked up at him. And Jameson imagined that she recognized him, too.

He leaned closer and said, “Where’s your mum, Josie?”

She immediately started crying, and stuck her head back in Rebecca’s breast. Jameson pulled back – he’d obviously said exactly the wrong thing. He looked back up at Rebecca and she was shaking her head:
No.

Jameson’s eyes went wide.

“No,” Rebecca said quickly. “Not that. She’s alive. But she was turned away at the gate. Your guards wouldn’t let her in.”

“What the hell?” Jameson exclaimed. “If I’d been there…”

“I’m sure you would have,” Rebecca said.

Jameson reset. “So where is Amarie now?”

“Out in the city. With the rest of her group.”

Jameson called the Tunnelers to mind, along with their cagey leader, Hackworth. That was slightly reassuring – they were a damned tough and resilient group of civilians. But still…

“Is there any chance we can go get them? Bring them back in?”

Rebecca shook her head. “I doubt it. They’re probably halfway to the Wall by now – if they’re even still in London.”

* * *

When Jameson got back to the JOC there were an awful lot of people looking for him. Rebecca and Josie had given him much to think about. But he only had a two-minute walk to ponder it. He’d have to process it all later. Private Simmonds button-holed him at the door. He had a slightly singed captain in a flight suit with him. “Boss,” he said. “This is Group Captain Gibson. He’s a pilot. And he’s alive.”

Jameson pressed his lips together. He could see the man was alive. Then again, the dead did get up and walk around these days, so maybe it wasn’t always so obvious. “Captain,” he said. “What do you fly?”

“Fixed-wing ratings,” he said, sounding somehow jaunty. “Small prop planes, mostly.”

Jameson stared at him. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

“Not at all.”

“Come with me.”

Jameson fast-walked across the JOC, trusting the jaunty English airman to follow, and strode back into the office where Eli and Miller were still hunched over their laptop, surrounded by map sheets and binders.

“This is Group Captain Gibson,” he said to the others. “Captain Gibson – can you fly me and my team to Moscow?”

The man nodded and considered. It looked to Jameson like it was just taking-things-in-stride day around here. Maybe it had to be. “Got an aircraft in mind?”

“I was thinking that last Beechcraft B200 out on the tarmac.”

Gibson thought for a few seconds. “Sure. I just can’t fly you back.”

Jameson smiled. “Oh, yes you can.” The others looked at him like his head was on fire. He told them, in short form, about Charlotte’s Fat Cow – the fuel-glutted Chinook – including its shortcomings. It was slow and, mainly, it wouldn’t hold enough troopers. “But what we can do is fly there in the plane…”

“Which will make the trip three times as fast as the helo,” Gibson added.

“Not to mention hold a team big enough for the job,” Eli said.

Jameson nodded. “We fly in on the Beechcraft, grab this guy – then wait for the helo, which has followed behind, refuel the plane – and extract the hell out of there.”

Sounded perfect. Jameson figured there was absolutely no chance of any of it working. But it sounded perfect.

Eli leaned over the map. “Okay – where the hell do we land the plane?”

“Domodedovo,” Gibson said. “Moscow Airport. Obvious choice.”

Jameson scanned the map on the laptop screen. “Zoom out. No. The airport’s fifty kilometers from the city center – way too far from Red Square.”

“Sod that,” Eli said. “A fifty-klick tab through an urban zone heaving with dead.”

Gibson squinted and looked thoughtful. “You’re going to laugh, but…”

“It’s laugh or cry time,” Jameson said. “By all means let’s hear it.”

Gibson nodded. “In the mid-eighties – eighty-seven, I think. A West German teenager landed a Cessna
right
in the middle of Red Square – right in front of the Kremlin, in fact. Fancied himself on some kind of anti-Cold War peace mission – breaching the Iron Curtain and whatnot.”

Sergeant Eli shook his head. “Yeah. Definitely no idea whether to laugh or cry.”

But LT Miller was already flipping back and forth from maps to specs. “Won’t work,” he reported after a few seconds. “The Beechcraft requires 2,100 feet to land. Red Square looks to be about… maybe 1,000 feet on its long axis.”

Gibson
hmm
’d. “Those are the specs – I could compress a landing down to fifteen, sixteen hundred feet at a pinch, slamming it down hard on the deck. But, then again, not down to a thousand.”

Jameson sighed. “I guess that’s the difference between a tiny Cessna coming from Germany – and a fifty-foot Beechcraft stretching from Blighty. What’s the minimum take-off distance of that thing?”