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  Halfway there, his radio perked up – Predator hailing him.

  “Yeah, I’m back,” he answered, shifting the mortar tube to get to his PTT button. “With indirect-fire weapons.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Yep.” Fick dropped the hellaciously heavy tube as he reached the shallow pit. “Eighty-one mil HE coming your way. Get ready to cover up – and spot for me.”

  “Copy that.”

  Fick didn’t bother signing off, but just started yelling at the others as they fumbled with the baseplate, mount, and sight. “Never mind, just watch my ass,” he said, jumping into the mud of the mortar pit. It was faster just to do it himself.

  If the other guys kept the bears off him.

  * * *

  It was only when Wesley burst out onto the roof of SHQ that he realized how badly he had been fucking up. From all the way across the Common in quarantine, the sounds of the battle had been bad enough. But from up here, the highest point in CentCom, even in the dark and rain, he could see how dire it really was.

  And it was much worse than he’d imagined.

  When he left his CP, not thirty minutes ago, the dead had been coming for them. But things were in hand. Now the dead were here – seemingly all of them, from everywhere. And things absolutely weren’t in hand.

  They were now getting completely out of hand.

  He had to get back to his post.

  But even as he looked back at Amarie, Josie, and the two boys following him out onto the rooftop, he realized he still wasn’t done. He’d figured the rooftop of SHQ was the safest place in CentCom, and would be the last to fall. He probably wasn’t wrong. But it was also exposed, dark, cold, and pelted by rain. It was a ridiculous place to leave small children.

  “Come on,” he said, leading them back into the stairwell and down again, moving with a purpose, and praying they’d keep up. He threaded them through the JOC and out again, the eyes of bemused ops staff tracking them, then down the hall to the first door he found. It was open, and the room unoccupied, so he hustled the four in, then followed.

  “You should be safe here,” he said to Amarie. “But if things get bad… you know the way back to the roof?”

  “Yes.”

  Wes looked back down at the boys, both of whom looked brave. The older one was still holding his pistol, so he asked, “You know how to use that safely?”

  “Yes, sir,” the boy said. “We’ve been taught.”

  “But it’s our last five rounds,” the younger boy added.

  Wesley smiled and started to hand over his own pistol magazines – before realizing they weren’t nearly the right size or shape. He grinned and shook his head. “Sorry, boys. They always seem to fit in the movies.”

  “You should carry a forty-five,” Aiden said.

  Wesley mussed his hair. “Yeah, that’s what the operators keep telling me. You keep your brother and the girls safe.”

  He hesitated before leaning in and kissing Amarie on the cheek. Then he closed the door on them.

  And he took off at a run.

  Bear Cavalry

  Two Hundred Feet Over CentCom

  Only one person had a better or more elevated view of the Battle for CentCom than Wesley had from the top of SHQ – and that was Captain Charlotte Maidstone, sitting way up above it all in the back seat of her latest dragon, another AH-64 Apache helicopter gunship. She wasn’t merely four stories up, twice the height of the walls, nor in a static position. She was 200 feet up – and she could position herself anywhere she liked. And with her optics and sensor suite, she didn’t even need to. She could pretty much already see everything, everywhere.

  She just couldn’t do anything about it.

  Because while this aircraft, the second-to-last Apache left in CentCom’s informal aircraft repair depot, was flyable, and still had a little fuel, it was bone-dry on armaments. Not a single 30mm autocannon round, never mind rockets or Hellfires.

  And being up over the fight, but not contributing to it, made Charlotte feel damned impotent – though not as impotent as being grounded would have. At least she could overfly the battle, improve their ISR picture, if necessary serve as a comms relay – and, as at the Battle of the Gap, perhaps provide moral support. Radio transmission quality wasn’t brilliant, but she was practically on top of the JOC, so she stayed in regular contact with Miller and his ops staff there.

  And she intended to stay up here as long as she was remotely useful – or as long as she had fuel in her tanks, and breath in her lungs. There was also the painfully real possibility that CentCom would be overrun soon – and she would never be able to set down there again. But being the sole survivor and escaping from the base was the last thing on her mind.

  She couldn’t go back to her Army Air Corps squadron at RAF Wattisham, which had already been completely overrun. And she couldn’t go back to her truest family at Hereford, namely USOC – the Unified Special Operations Command – all of whom had inexplicably decamped, leaving her baffled and heartbroken. This was what she had discovered, a surreally depopulated base, that last time – probably the last ever – she had set down there. And of course her biological family, even if they were still alive, were long gone, not a part of her life for many years. She’d never liked them anyway.

  No, the only family she had left were below her right now. Jameson and One Troop were once again fighting for their lives, and for everyone else’s, right down there on those walls beneath her. And, one way or another, she was staying with them.

  She came around in the dark and splattering rain to face north again, flipping her PNVS monocle from TADS back to infrared, and going into a hover. Now she could clearly see the River Thames snaking by a mile to the north, and central London out beyond that. Fires were burning in multiple places, lighting up her night-vision view, and bespeaking the doom of the world’s last capital.

  But she wasn’t even really looking at that.

  She was looking in closer – at the nearly unbroken carpet of dead that covered the ground between CentCom’s walls and the river, all of it moving toward them. And then she pedal-turned, mainly to see how bad things were getting to the south of them, and as she scanned the ground from east to west, something utterly unexpected caught her eye.

  It was so unlikely that it took her a few seconds to understand what the hell she was even looking at. But it was a convoy, a dozen vehicles in a line, coming up fast from the southeast. And not just fast – they were absolutely hauling ass up the South Circular Road, bashing dead out of the way and into the air as they went, obviously stopping for nothing.

  And then Charlotte realized it wasn’t just a convoy.

  It was a military column – an armored one.

  * * *

  Homer already had one gloved hand pressed up against the big timber gate in the west walls, the soldiers up above it having cleared the area beyond, perhaps enough for them to slip out, when Ali hailed him.

  “Homer, Ali.”

  He reeled in his hand and hit his radio. “Send it.”

  “Yeah, can you listen in on thirty-six dot seven-one?”

  “Copy.” He did it, of course, because it was Ali telling him to, but it was hard for him to imagine why. That was the US Army convoy frequency. When he flipped over to it, a voice with an English accent was mid-sentence. Homer thought it was Miller, back in the JOC.

  “—own armored column, CentCom HQ repeats: do NOT approach this installation, over.”

  “Oh, we’re approachin’ all right. You just stand by.”

  Homer squinted in thought behind his NVGs. It was taking him a few seconds to place that second voice… Meanwhile, Miller’s beat of silence had the flavor of cursing under his breath. Finally he came back on.

  “Unknown convoy, be further advised: our gates are NOT opening, and you are NOT coming in. I repeat: the base gates will not be opening for you.”

  “Not necessary, boy. Now you just watch this shit.”

  And finally Homer got it. He fl
ipped back to his working channel with Ali, and found her still there. He said: “It’s the Colonel, isn’t it?”

  “You know anyone else who sounds that much like Sam Shepard?”

  Homer shook his head. He surely did not.

  Ali said, “You three stand fast until this all plays out.”

  “Copy, standing fast.” He stepped back and hailed the guard over. “Lock the gate again, please.”

  The man shrugged and complied.

  And now they’d just wait – and see how this played out.

  * * *

  Charlotte’s heart cycled through emotions almost as quickly as her optics scanned through zoom levels. First was awe and amazement, as she got in tight enough to resolve the specific types of vehicles in the blasting convoy, thoroughly blacked out and displaying tactical speed and spacing.

  It consisted of huge, boxy, and slant-nosed Foxhounds; a couple of Huskies, a little smaller but still large, like badly overgrown Humvees; a Panther, a bit smaller yet, like an overgrown Land Rover; and at the very head of the column, a gigantic Mastiff 2 MRAP, like an overgrown Brink’s truck, all 50,000 pounds of her tearing down the road, hurling walking dead off the solid steel grille that surrounded it on all sides.

  She recognized all of these vehicles, their shapes perfectly familiar to her after all that time flying top cover for them in Afghanistan. They represented just about every armored vehicle in the British Army’s stable. And virtually all of them had crew-served weapons up top in armor-protected turrets.

  But the magnification, light-amplification, and particularly image-stabilization on Charlotte’s optics were so good that she could actually zoom in enough to make out the faces of some of the personnel riding in the convoy. First she checked out a turret gunner in one of the Huskies. He was wearing NVGs, so she couldn’t see his face – but the uniform, kit, and general bearing were familiar.

  He looked like an operator.

  And all the operators in the UK had been posted to one unit.

  Echo team, maybe? she thought, still disbelieving.

  She zoomed out and in again, until she saw a bare face in the front passenger seat of another of the trucks, very much visible to her through the glass.

  Doc Bryan. Oh, my God…

  Finally she panned up to the top of the Mastiff in the lead position, which wasn’t mounted with a turret gun, but just a hatch. It was flipped open, and a figure was standing erect in it. He wasn’t wearing NVGs, but instead scanned the terrain ahead through what were probably night-vision binoculars. When he lowered them, his face became visible – and also perfectly clear in Charlotte’s helmet-mounted monocle.

  It was the Colonel. The USOC commander himself.

  Oh my God, she thought, shaking her head and tearing up a little. After all this time, they’re alive… The family she thought had abandoned her was coming home.

  The Unified Special Operations Command was back.

  * * *

  “Not necessary, boy. Now you just watch this shit.”

  Ali was still shaking her head at that comment, and wondering what exactly the hell they were all about to watch. But from her position in the northeast guard tower, the designated sniper OP, where she’d intended to provide overwatch for Homer’s mission beyond the walls, she was going to have a good seat for it. She already had a good vantage on the incoming convoy, simply by pivoting right – away from two exploding mortar rounds out at the edge of no-man’s land - and spotting the vehicles coming in from the southwest, then swinging around the CentCom walls to the north, as if circling the base counter-clockwise. Pretty quickly it became apparent what the show was going to be.

  Though soon Ali would have to flip up her NVGs to watch it.

  First the convoy rumbled off the road and up onto the grassy hillocks that lay outside the walls – but it didn’t slow down. Then it veered in toward the ring of the walls themselves, hugging them so close the trucks were practically scraping paint on their left sides.

  Ali actually physically recoiled as the lead vehicle, a colossal MRAP, moving at a speed probably not at all safe for its 25 tons driving off-road, bashed into the sea of dead thronging in front of the CentCom walls – like a steel tidal wave. Nothing could remotely stand before it, certainly not flesh, not even fifteen-foot piles of it. Zulus, Romeos, and Foxtrots, all got crushed into meat pudding, or hurled fifty feet in the air.

  Suddenly Ali was grateful she had backed up, as body parts, gobs of unidentifiable flesh, and pure slime slapped into the side of the guard tower she was standing in. The Mastiff blasted by like a freight train at night – or, rather, like a locomotive, with the other eleven armored vehicles in the column playing the role of the box cars. Anything left intact by the Mastiff was taken apart by the vehicles that followed – smaller but still huge, and equally solid – and which shifted to the right, out into an overlapping flying wedge, covering even more ground.

  Ali stood up from behind the railing again as it passed.

  And, just like that, literally in seconds, the great heaving piles of attacking bodies before the walls, active and destroyed both, were simply gone. Some had been crushed or hurled way out in into no-man’s land, but most had been turned into mulch and reunited with the earth, exactly twenty feet below the tops of the walls, where the ground should have been.

  And with them, the convoy was also gone.

  But not for good – not even for long.

  Even as it disappeared out of sight to the left, it could still be heard as it curled around the west edge of the roughly circular complex. The roaring engines were even audible as they circled all the way around on the south side behind – in part because pretty much everyone on the walls had stopped firing now. This was either in simple awe at what was happening, or else because they suddenly had a whole hell of a lot fewer targets. The basso chorus of giant diesel engines carried on, describing a full circuit of the base – still hugging the walls, and presumably clearing any dead on the other sides.

  And in four minutes it was back again.

  And when it came back for its second pass…

  This time it was a good hundred meters out. And as the dozen big trucks moved into a position screening the base directly to the north, they slowed, finally stopping, having moved into a coherent shape. They were now arrayed in a wide arc, seemingly positioned to defend CentCom.

  That’s great, Ali thought, but there are still a hell of a lot of dead between you and us – not to mention big gaps in the line of vehicles.

  She could see the remaining dead stumbling around in no-man’s land between the walls and the trucks – at least temporarily confused about what they were actually attacking, but with nothing keeping them from CentCom’s walls.

  More to the point, there were hundreds of thousands more to the north – and they could just walk through the gaps in the armored vehicles, or go around them. The Colonel and his USOC wrecking crew had done a fantastic job of disrupting the siege, and definitely buying them some time.

  But it was still a half-measure.

  And then, as Ali took a breath and started to turn back inside, her mind racing, trying to develop some plan to leverage the new tactical situation, her eyes slammed shut and her hand instinctively went to her NVGs to flip them up. When she looked back out, she saw what had happened.

  Perfectly synchronized, each of the dozen vehicles in the convoy had hit their lights – every light they had going, which on military armored vehicles was a lot: massively high-power headlights, area-lights mounted on the sides of the truck bodies, and spotlights up on top. Once again, the whole scene in front of CentCom was lit up like Wrigley Field.

  And then, also as one, they hit their goddamned horns.

  That’s a bit much, Ali thought.

  But she pretty quickly saw the wisdom in this, as every remaining intact and upright dead guy between CentCom and the convoy turned and headed away. Toward the convoy. Away from CentCom.

  And then the convoy gunners opened up.


  Not just crew-served weapons, medium and heavy machine guns mounted in the trucks’ turret rings – but also guys leaning out of every window, door, and hatch, firing their personal weapons. Ali instinctively dropped down below the ramparts on the tower walkway, as the fire was incoming. But she quickly realized they were shooting in a careful and controlled way.

  Not only was their fire disciplined and low, aiming down from the elevation of the vehicles, so any rounds that missed or over-penetrated would come to rest in the dirt, or at worst low on the walls. But they were also waiting until the dead were almost on top of them, and then dropping them with precision, in a line ten meters behind the convoy. And when active dead climbed on the destroyed ones, they put them down on top of the pile.

  They were building a meat wall.

  That’s great, too, Ali thought, piling a few hundred up.

  But that still left the hundreds of thousands on the other side of the convoy. Then she realized not all of the crew-served weapons, nor all of the individual personnel, were firing inward. Some were firing out. And as all the living dead in the inner ring turned to destroyed dead, more and more of them were shifting fire to the north.

  Less than a minute later, as Ali scanned the floodlit no-man’s land in the hundred yards between the walls and the convoy, she could see nothing was moving inside that ring but pattering rain. Nothing was even standing upright.

  No-man’s land was truly that. It had been cleared.

  * * *

  Predator had stayed upright as Fick’s first two mortar rounds impacted out beyond the walls, sending mud and bodies, as well as detached limbs, wheeling through the air in a highly amusing fashion. The idea was the first strikes would be out at stand-off distance, so they wouldn’t pose a threat to troops on the walls. And the other idea was Pred was spotting for them, so he needed to see where the hell they hit.

  But suddenly the whole mortar barrage project became moot.

  Pred wasn’t initially sure what the hell he was looking at it, or who was behind it, but it was clearing out the dead about a thousand times faster and more effectively than dropping a little indirect fire on their heads.