ARISEN_Book Thirteen_The Siege Read online

  “Oi, bone idea, Major,” Croucher shouted at him – spotting Jameson unclipping his rifle, shucking his body armor, and climbing out on some scaffolding at the edge of the gap, making like some half-assed Bob the Builder. Jameson didn’t think Croucher was wrong – he’d very nearly not lived to regret it last time he’d ditched his protective kit, trying to increase his foot speed away from that overrun building in Dusseldorf. He’d gotten new armor after Dusseldorf and before Moscow. But now here he was getting his kit off again, this time to maneuver out somewhere he really shouldn’t be going in the first place, perhaps only to fall to his death in the process.

  I should have my sodding head examined, he thought.

  A few seconds later, he had the pulley arm positioned where he needed it. But as he started to climb back, he was paid in full for his recklessness – a small flurry of ricochets pummeled the stone over his head, causing a mini-collapse, and at least one or two bounced off and smacked into his ribs, neither penetrating, but both stinging like a son of a bitch, all of it forcing him to dig in and battle to hold on and not fall.

  As he hung by both hands, he looked around, but the ricochets could have come from anywhere – weapons were rapid-firing every direction he looked, including up and down. Two Marines and two builders leaned out and latched onto him, then pulled him to safety. Ignoring his bruised and bleeding ribs for now, Jameson got the builders lowering the ammo crates over the side. He did put a hand to his ribcage, over the rips and blood-stains in his shirt.

  Now he was fucking wounded – again.

  And he remembered the realization he’d had in Moscow: whatever the legend, however many battles and campaigns survived, One Troop’s commander was still just vulnerable flesh and blood. He could be gunned down, blown up, or infected, in one single very bad heartbeat.

  Or crushed by gravel, he thought. Or fall to my death.

  Croucher appeared out of nowhere, tearing open his shirt and slapping a pressure bandage on the wound, then personally getting Jameson back into his body armor. They both craned their heads over the edge just in time to see two crates, being lowered on ropes from the pulley Jameson almost died for, hitting the ground. Instantly, the frenzied Paras tore into them; in seconds, both had been picked clean, only empty husks remaining – and then all the rounds that had been inside them started going right back out the red-hot barrels of the defenders. It was obvious they’d be empty again in minutes.

  “This’ll never work,” Jameson said.

  Croucher grunted. “Like dropping a bucket of chum in a shark feeding frenzy.”

  Jameson looked around at all the chaos and peril. His eye went up, over, and back to the hulking construction crane, then down to the Fusiliers’ trucks and CP on the ground behind them.

  “We’re gonna need a bigger boat,” Jameson said, as he ran back and mounted the ladder again.

  Croucher gave him a deeply blank What the hell does that mean? look.

  Jameson just smiled as he disappeared down the ladder.

  * * *

  “Cartledge, Jameson, status.”

  Captain Cartledge touched his radio. The Fusiliers and the Royal Marines had tied in commo, at least the command elements had, which meant his new pro tem commander might be shouting in his ear all day long. He gave a pained look to his 2IC, who was on the same channel.

  “Mortar crews still emplacing, give me five minutes on those. First ammo truck unloaded, starting in on the second.”

  “Negative, leave it. No time.”

  The Marine commander sounded like he was doing something strenuous, and Cartledge’s 2IC pointed up toward the scaffolding, where Jameson was visibly dashing down it again. But when he hit the ground, he didn’t head for the CP.

  Instead he ran toward the crane, shouting at its operator.

  * * *

  “What the flapping fuck!?” Private Elliot heard one of his section-mates shout. Suddenly everyone was looking up – then jumping up and legging it.

  Elliot just shook his head. Now he’d seen everything. A goddamned half-ton truck was coming down directly on their heads. They cleared out just far enough for it to set down, the four lengths of thick chain wrapped around its axles settling with loud clanks on the ground. A voice shouted down at them, and he looked up to see a burly-looking Royal Marine leaning over the top of the Wall, hands cupped around his mouth.

  “Ammo drop, you gobshites!”

  Elliot took a knee and fired into the eternally advancing line of dead, covering 2nd section while they clambered into the back of the truck and started unloading it. He looked up as Bhardwaj clapped him on the shoulder, firing over and behind him. “When all this goes completely to hell,” Bhardwaj shouted over the roar of the guns, “we can just drive ourselves out of here – Calais, maybe. Normandy’s nice!”

  Elliot didn’t laugh. He was pretty sure the Channel Tunnel wasn’t open; and that no part of France was any longer nice. But at least now they had ammo. And they could go down shooting.

  Unfortunately, it suddenly looked like that might happen right now. With fewer shooters on the line, and too many men hauling down ammo crates and digging into them, the dead had surged again. A great black line was coming at them hard and fast, a few runners breaking free – and the stumblers simply pouring over the piles of destroyed ones, within seconds getting closer than they had yet.

  Elliot stole a look over his shoulder at the sheer wall to their backs. Nope, there still wasn’t anywhere left to retreat to. “Up on the line!” he shouted to the men carrying and reloading to his right, even as he could hear Bhardwaj doing the same to the other side. They had to re-form and generate some concentrated fire – and they had to do it fast.

  They were about to be overrun.

  Chunks of stone had also started hitting the ground around him. But Elliot didn’t even have time to worry about that.

  He was already about to die.

  * * *

  “Look out below!” Sergeant Travis shouted as the too-large-for-comfort hunks of rock impacted his position, not to mention his legs and back. His was the left-most position on the entire line in the gap, and closest to the full-height section of Wall and tower that loomed up above them on that side.

  And the swinging chains of the damned construction crane had just cracked into the edge of it, as the arm swiveled and spun back toward the rear after delivering the ammo truck – spinning at what had to be its top speed, the crane operator showing off, or maybe just wanting to best contribute to the fight. And the edge into which those chains smacked, where it had previously been connected to the collapsed section, was visibly ragged – and now proved to be less than stable.

  Debris started raining down on the gap.

  Two seconds earlier, Travis had been focused on redoubling his firing, slapping in mag after mag, getting on the radio to find out where the hell the damned mortars had disappeared to. He could see as well as everyone else up top – the situation down below had gone critical, with breathtaking suddenness. All it had taken was the Paras slackening their fire for a few seconds. Admittedly, their timing had been shit.

  But now they were about to be overrun again.

  Then, from out of nowhere, he’d felt a sharp smack on his leg, another on his back, and heard the violent sounds of impacts all around. Half-rolling on his back, he looked up and to the left, and saw what was happening, the chains smacking the ragged edge of wall. He had no commo with the crane operator, no time to ask Jameson about it – and, mainly, he had absolutely nowhere to go, not in time. So he just shouted up the line, hunkered down, and covered up his head.

  And prayed no one got taken out by the stupid.

  * * *

  “Getting crunchy up here, Major,” Croucher had just reported to Jameson by radio, while the latter coordinated again with the reservists’ commander on the ground behind the Wall.

  Jameson hit his radio. “Can the cherry-berries hold?”

  “Dunno. But I’d get those mortars back online
fast if I we—”

  Croucher simply stopped transmitting, and Jameson looked up at the cracking sound of the dangling and swinging chains smashing into the ragged edge of intact wall on the left as the crane ground its gears and rotated at high speed. Instantly, he saw debris coming down, and heard the shouts of men up in the gap, warning one another to take cover.

  “Oh, for fuck sake,” he muttered, looking around for that construction foreman. He’d never quite trusted that crane, or the whole building-site-in-a-battle proposition. Rubbing at the painful burning in his ribs, he grabbed Captain Cartledge, intending to get him to assign one of his junior officers to take charge of the builders. But even as he opened his mouth to speak, the shouting above doubled, then trebled.

  When he looked up again…

  The whole top of the tower to the left had fallen away – and was tumbling through open air.

  Straight down toward the gap.

  * * *

  “Run, you numpties!” Travis shouted at the top of his voice, hauling the man on his right to his feet, then the man after that, and shoving them all into a headlong flight, up the line and away from what was coming down on their heads.

  There was going to be no time to get down off the Wall.

  But maybe they could get away.

  * * *

  Elliot saw the debris hitting before he heard anything. He and his men were target-locked and firing flat-out, trying to stop, slow, or even just degrade the implacable line of dead bastards sweeping toward them from all points ahead and to both sides, already so close they could see their rheumy eyes and the spider-web lines on their ashen skin.

  The fact that death was now coming for them from the other direction, above and behind, took a second to register – almost fatally too long. Elliot’s breath was already basically gone, so he simply didn’t have any available for shouting, and just started bodily shoving his section-mates out of the way.

  They could hear the crash even as they felt the peppering of debris against the backs of their thighs and rear plates, and dust rose up all round, choking and blinding them. 2nd section had gone right, and Elliot hoped Bhardwaj and the men on that side were going left.

  Because the dead were coming right up the middle.

  * * *

  Jameson watched open-mouthed, his eyes following it down, as the big section of tower, maybe the size of a church clock steeple, impacted and crushed the left-most section of the gap, reducing it to rubble, and bringing it down nearly all the way to ground level. From down here, Jameson could have no idea if the men on top of it had gotten out in time. He chose to believe they had. But it hardly mattered. Everyone suddenly had a much bigger problem.

  Because now, in an instant, the gap itself had a gap – no more than ten feet of piled-up debris on the left side. And, within seconds, the dead were coming over it.

  The Wall was breached.

  And it looked like they were all well and truly fucked.

  Jameson’s eyes scanned the rear, brain whizzing a million miles an hour, trying to formulate some plan, trying to see everything at once, to put together the pieces of some kind of solution, something that might save them all.

  To his right, he saw the reservist commander, shouting into his radio, his men and women running all around him. To his left, he saw the frantic shapes of frenzied dead, clambering over the low piles of rubble that hadn’t even stopped shifting yet – and in, around, before, and behind them, soldiers and builders frantic to get away, running down the rubble slope, hanging and dropping from scaffolding that leaned over at dangerous and crazy angles. The retreating soldiers were all reservists, none of his Marines among them. Jameson knew his men at a glance, their silhouettes and their movement, and those weren’t them.

  They wouldn’t run – but they couldn’t salvage the situation alone.

  Jameson’s eyes ranged out to the mortar pits, where their crews were still unboxing big mortar bombs, fast-turning their elevating cranks, looking around panicked and trying not to run for it – and evidently waiting for orders. One.

  He spun once more and spotted the crane. Its operator was still in the cab. That giant steel plate was still upright, propped against an intact section of Wall. Two.

  And, finally, in the muddy ground behind the new collapse… a faded and torn and dusty Union flag on a bent pole. It lay practically at his feet. Three.

  * * *

  “Incoming mortar barrage, YOUR LOCATION. Repeat, we are dropping ordnance ON YOUR POSITION, and on your heads if you’re still there in fifteen seconds, how copy?”

  “Solid copy, area clear, repeat, Paras are clear!”

  “Area bombardment going in now, cover the fuck up!”

  This was Staff Sergeant Bhardwaj, shouting back and forth with the Marines on their new joint command channel, Elliot listening in. The Paras were in fact all clear of the collapse site, their line sundered right through the middle, and now Elliot and his section and the right-most half of the surviving Paras were no longer fighting to defend the gap – but fighting to survive, their formation broken, the dead right in their ranks.

  Elliot dug down, knowing he was a combat leader now. And a leader had to organize, even when everything had gone well and truly to shit – most especially then. No one else was going to do it, to keep the men upright and fighting, to keep everything from falling apart. He stopped shooting, and instead started pushing men into something like a skirmish line, then out into a defensible salient. Zulus and Romeos were inches away, crashing into them, hissing and thrashing, Paras firing point-blank into open mouths, or even fighting hand-to-hand, and Elliot had to ignore it all. If he got bitten or taken down, then he died.

  He knew he was dead already.

  And then the world started exploding again, to their left this time – and much closer. They were dropping mortar rounds directly on their broken line – sealing the breach with explosions and zipping shrapnel. And this time it wasn’t just dirt and meat, the ground and the dead, geysering into the air. The deadly high-explosive rounds were coming down on the rubble of the collapsed section of gap itself, churning it into a lashing stone storm – firing rock shrapnel at the men still on their feet.

  And they couldn’t even take cover.

  They had to stand and fight. Or they were all dead.

  * * *

  And it was much the same for the Marines who remained up top. Croucher had looked over and seen Sergeant Travis and the men on the left of the line sprinting toward them as the gap collapsed behind them, practically out from under their feet.

  And then Travis, bringing up the rear, had disappeared.

  The others made it.

  Now, amid all the chaos and panic, Croucher calmly hit his radio: “One Troop holds the line. Cover the percy pongoes down below. Ignore the breakthrough.”

  A panicking reservist machine-gunner tripped over Croucher’s splayed legs, which were out in an impeccable prone shooting posture. Raising his head and looking right, he saw the emplaced Gimpy, right where the man had abandoned it.

  Nice, he thought, moving one position over and taking control of the weapon. With one hand, he grabbed another fleeing Fusilier and hauled him down beside him.

  “Load,” he said, traversing the weapon and opening up.

  * * *

  Jameson tried to breathe as he ran from the mortar pits back to the window of the crane cab. A few more seconds spent organizing commo beforehand would have saved him running himself half to death. But if my grandmother had balls she’d be my grandfather, he thought, having no idea why he would spend the energy to think that, except that the mind does absurd shit in combat, when death could come at any second.

  Up ahead and to his right, the walking mortar barrage in the gap was already winding down – he’d stayed with the mortar crews long enough to make sure they did exactly what he ordered them to – and now he could survey the result as he hauled ass. And the barrage had in fact done what he wanted: the thronging mass of dead coming o
ver the rubble had been destroyed, or mostly destroyed.

  So had any living unlucky enough to be in there.

  And so had much of what was left of the Wall in that spot. Even the ten-foot pile of rubble had been reduced. This had been a barrage right in their lines, which was all you could do when you were overrun. A terrible price had been paid. But the breakthrough had been stopped. A few of the invading dead were still on their feet somehow, stumbling forward single-mindedly, one or two lurching around in circles, and many lying in wiggling pieces on the ground. But most were meat waffles smeared across the stone, gravel, and dust piles.

  Finally reaching and mounting the base of the crane again, Jameson stuck his head in the cab window, and started shouting more instructions. The man at the controls stared back at him with eyes the size of cricket balls. But he nodded his understanding. Moreover, he was still at his post. Jameson admired that. Turning and leaping off, he found a small knot of builders huddling behind the crane itself – and he got them briefed, organized, moving toward the steel plate, and doing what he needed them doing.

  When he turned around again, he saw that the bloody reservists were still retreating, sliding down off the rubble, or climbing down intact sections of scaffolding. It was a complete rout at this point. In the military they say courage and calm are contagious; but of course panic is as well. Jameson flipped to the reservists’ command channel, and heard their commander’s voice.

  “—mative, accept your recommendation that you cannot hold in place. Withdraw all your men, then re-form and rally around the trucks and CP for now and we wi—” But then he shut the fuck up.