The Flood (3 page)

* * *

Handon stood off to the seaward side of the vehicle and away from the team – entirely alone.

Which was precisely how he was feeling at the moment.

The first stage of the mission had nearly resulted in total disaster – yet again. Admittedly, it had been due to a confluence of unlikely factors. But unlikely factors always shaped the battlespace, and it was their job to succeed anyway.

His guys had once again demonstrated the skills and resourcefulness, the resilience and resolve, to fight their way out of the shit, and come out on top. They always did. But, then again, if they kept pushing this envelope, over and over again, the law of large numbers was eventually going to catch up with them. The operators had to be lucky every time. The ZA only had to be lucky once.

And nobody could be lucky forever.

Moreover, they simply weren’t getting the damned job done. Which was unacceptable.

And Handon knew he had better get it together – and bring all this to a conclusion, ideally damned quickly. But between humanity and any kind of happy ending still lay Hargeisa – the exact ground zero of the fall of man. Handon didn’t know what would be waiting for them there, and he didn’t like to think about it.

But they’d all be finding out soon enough.

And along the way, he still had personnel issues dogging him. Namely, Henno.

It occurred to Handon now to wonder if, when ordering the team not to go back for Henno when he was covering their retreat from Thunderdome… maybe he’d actually been trying to get the Brit killed. Of course, he’d told himself it was all about safeguarding the mission, and about force protection – because completing the mission required somebody left alive to accomplish it. He’d had to keep
all
of them from getting killed back there.

But there was also no denying that if Henno happened to fall, that would eliminate a major problem for him. Even crazier and more shameful… it might eliminate a rival – both for control of the team, and for a certain woman back on the carrier. Handon shook his head. Of course those things couldn’t be true. But he didn’t even know for sure himself at this point.

His head was all over the place.

Henno certainly hadn’t questioned Handon’s decision to leave him behind. His whole position was that anything that needed to be sacrificed for the mission got sacrificed. And that obviously, and emphatically, included him.

Henno was still Captain Ainsley’s man – in the best possible way. A man of duty. Henno had loved and respected Ainsley, and still did, not because of his captain’s stars – but because of what Ainsley did, what he was prepared to do, and what his actions represented. Henno was all about actions, not words. And he was prepared to take any action necessary to make the mission succeed.

But he seemed to believe Handon didn’t have that willingness.

Technically, of course, Handon outranked him. But the two of them came from, not just different units or even service branches – but whole different nation’s militaries. Different worlds. And spec-ops guys were never impressed with rank anyway – Henno even less so than the average.

Handon looked up now as he heard a faint buzzing from over the water, and he could just make out the Seahawk blasting toward them at high speed. It was a speck, but swelling quickly.

He had also overheard Fick threatening to send Brady and Reyes back on that bird. And it occurred to him, in a musing way, to try the same thing with Henno. Try to send him back. But he could already hear the Brit’s answer:
No way am I leaving you to fuck this up. The LAST thing I’m doing is going back.

Surprisingly fast, the big Seahawk was flaring in to land on the road, its big rotors thrumming through the ground, and through the bodies of the operators as they moved to set security. Handon just observed and let them handle it.

Deep down, he still felt he was making the right decisions for the right reasons. But he couldn’t deny that if Henno
had
gotten killed back there, part of him would have been relieved. Henno was a huge problem, and making Handon’s command, and his mission, a lot more complicated and difficult than it needed to be.

Or then again… maybe this tension between them, between Henno’s total viciousness and pragmatism, and Handon’s more measured concern for ethics and right action, was actually what was needed. Maybe Henno was simply that ruthless part of Handon’s own soul he didn’t like very much, and had somehow externalized. And maybe it was exactly that ruthless part he desperately needed to do his job now. To get this done.

Maybe Henno was the devil perched on Handon’s shoulder.

And maybe it was only the whisperings of that demon which would help him to get anyone at all out of this living hell they’d all found themselves in.

They’d find out soon enough.

Asshole of the Universe

Somalia - Berbera City Limits

Within four minutes, the ammo and other supplies had been parceled out or trans-shipped to the MRAP, the team had saddled up, and the helo was lifting off again. And Handon got them all moving down the coast road. Zorn had earlier told them the inland road to Hargeisa went through town after town – Jidhi, Harirad, Gebilay… while the coast road pretty much just went through Berbera. That had been a big population center. But they’d had to pick their poison.

And now it was coming up fast.

Handon unbuckled himself from the front passenger seat and stuck his head in back. He could see everyone wedged into the bench seats, trying to make the best of it inside the bouncing truck. A vehicle designed to survive the most massive IED explosions known to man was not, alas, known for the smoothness of its ride or suspension.

But discomfort was perhaps about to become the least of their problems. The town up ahead, Berbera, had been home to nearly a quarter-million souls – now a quarter-million bodies. And while their new ride was probably the most invulnerable mode of transport yet created by man, that hadn’t prevented them from nearly getting wedged up and killed the last time they tried to surf through a tsunami of the dead.

Noise shouted down from the gun turret. “Multiple targets, spanning ten and two o’clock, range two hundred and closing. Shall I engage?”

Handon considered. “Conserve ammo,” he shouted back up. “Only engage thick concentrations, and
only to our twelve
.” Maybe the .50 could serve as sort of a long-range windshield wiper. Handon hoped so. He hoped they were learning something – they’d better be.

He turned forward and climbed back into the passenger seat. The view from up here, particularly since Brady cleaned the windscreens, was pretty great – or would have been if the view itself hadn’t been so terrible. Berbera was clearly a shithole of the first order – and had been even before the fall. Handon figured that even to Reyes, who had worked as a bounty hunter in south-central LA, this probably looked like the asshole of the universe.

Handon shook his head. Somalia had arguably been the most screwed-up place in the world, back before the fall. Arguably, it had also been the scene of the first battle of modern warfare, with the events of
Black Hawk Down
. So why was he not surprised that it had finally turned out be the starting point for the end of the world – and even less surprised it was where they had to go on what would almost certainly be their very last mission… to try and save what was left of the world.

Sand-covered roads with no discernible curbs snaked through one-, two-, and three-story tan buildings, all of which squatted in brown dirt. A few of the structures looked kind of colonial, but others were mere shanties. Telephone poles and antennas dotted the landscape, though many were now horizontal after having come down during or after the fall. The city fronted the harbor – but it was a working port, industrial and not the least picturesque.

The Apocalypse had of course provided dramatic accents to this tableau: burnt-out buildings, devoured bodies and bones on the ground, crap spilled and blowing everywhere – and, most conspicuous as well as dangerous, entire fleets of third-world vehicles jamming up Berbera’s roads and alleys.

As usual, the operators were learning about the next threat only as it materialized. Very soon, Brady was taking them up onto shoulders, onto porches, and finally onto and over cars and trucks themselves, as he tried to negotiate the maze of narrow roads and abandoned vehicles. It was like everyone had tried to drive out of Berbera at once – and all failed.

And now the stranded drivers and passengers were all stumbling around and converging on the MRAP, particularly as Noise started to put
thunk-thunk
-ing short bursts of .50-cal into the ones directly ahead. Their arrival was clearly the most exciting event in Berbera for ages, and everyone was coming out to see it.

Handon clenched his jaw. They had to drive through the city center to get to the connecting highway that led south. There was no way around it. And by staying buttoned up in the vehicle they were “safe” – but they also risked finding themselves jammed up in another building, or tangle of vehicles. But he tried to count his blessings – thinking how very, very shitty it would have been to negotiate this labyrinth in a regular vehicle, or even a Humvee or up-armored SUV. At least they could bash through obstructions with the MRAP.

As Brady and Reyes had enthused, this was no ghetto hoochie, but rather the Cadillac Escalade of MRAPs. So they had at least gotten some benefit from not killing Zorn, the deranged Command Sergeant Major and last survivor of Camp Lemonnier. They’d gotten some seriously hardcore transport.

Even if Henno wasn’t quick to admit it.

And, anyway, it appeared they had learned something – by knocking the dead down before the MRAP reached them, Noise was keeping them from piling up in front and obscuring their view. After a couple of nerve-wracking wrong turns and reverses, they finally found themselves on the road south out of town. This led up into some foothills that perched looking down on the coast – and as they descended the back side of them, they could see laid out very clearly what was at the bottom.

A bridge.

And that bridge was a total parking lot, completely blocked by cars and trucks – only some of them upright.

Brady slowed as they approached.

Once again… there was little choice.

* * *

“Why the hell can’t we just bash through that, too?” Fick asked. He’d stuck his head up front both to scope the situation, and to confer with Handon.

“We could bash through the vehicles. But I’m a little worried about what happens to the bridge underneath.”

Brady concurred. “That bridge may or may not be rated for a thirty-thousand-pound truck in the first place. And with all the other vehicles already on it, never mind the stress and jarring of us shoving them all off…”

Handon got up, swinging into the back and pushing Fick ahead of him. “Okay,” he said. “Everyone dismount and push out.” Someone was already opening the hatch. “Ali on overwatch, Brady and Reyes pull front and rear security. Everyone else gets to work clearing the bridge.” Almost before he’d said it, they were on the ground getting to work.

Juice said, “You do know none of those vehicles are going to start?”

“Yeah, but they’ve all got wheels. And they’re virtually all small and light.”

“Except for that one,” Juice said. He was pointing at a big six-wheeled cargo truck that was on its side, sitting half on and half off the bridge at its other end. It looked as if it had slid into position, pushing cars ahead of it.

Handon acknowledged this. “We get the other vehicles cleared, then we winch that one out of there.” He was already swinging around to the rear of the MRAP. He wanted a look at the hill behind them – not far over which Berbera still swarmed with dead. And he could already see the tops of distant heads cresting the hill. Naturally, they’d been followed. So the clock was ticking – yet again.

But Handon could also already hear Ali taking suppressed shots from the roof. How the hell she got up there so fast, he didn’t even know.

Coming back around, he took a look down the slope that swept underneath the bridge. There was a white Chevy Tahoe down there on its roof, riddled with bullet holes and bad scorch marks. It was also surrounded by a veritable mountain of destroyed dead – now rotted down to skeletons. It looked like they had all been converging on the rear of the vehicle.

Handon couldn’t quite picture what had gone down there.

But he was glad he hadn’t been around for it.

And they didn’t have time to worry about it anyway.

Little Velociraptors

Somalia - Bridge South of Berbera

“I’m sorry, but I’ve seriously gotta take a shit.” Predator was singlehandedly dragging a badly clapped-out pickup truck off the bridge, and now pushed it over the lip of the slope. It rolled away toward the trees below and picked up speed, and he started walking down after it. “Be right back.”

He didn’t talk about it (obviously), but Pred had been having tummy trouble since not long after they found themselves on the carrier. When he snuck down to the hospital to get checked out, Doc Walker had told him it was almost certainly the diet on board – too much rice and potatoes. All the starch overfed the bacteria in the gut, tending to make them rampage out of control.

“It’s a shame,” Walker had said with a twinkle. “Good bugs gone bad.”

“What does that mean?” Predator rumbled.

“Your microbiome. The trillions of bacteria in and on you, many of which do critical jobs – like helping you digest your food.”

“Are you saying I’m infected?”

“You and me both, big man. Look, just try to lay off the rice and potatoes.”

“That’s all there is!” And for many meals that was true. They were two of the few foods that could be grown in the hangar deck farm that had enough calories to keep body and soul together. But they also resulted in too many people not being able to do their jobs unless they were thirty seconds from the head.