ARISEN_Book Thirteen_The Siege Read online

Because Jameson had just hot-mic’d the channel.

  Job one in halting the retreat was getting the goddamned Fusilier captain to stop ordering them to do it. Now, next one was… his eyes rapid-scanned the ground as he ran forward.

  Looking for that flag.

  * * *

  “Well, if it isn’t Benjamin fucking Martin, the Patriot.” Croucher sounded truly in awe, and even took the time to hit his radio before he said it. He wanted this to go out on to everyone.

  And even the focused and unrelenting Colour Sergeant had to get off his weapon for five seconds to watch this. Because running up the rubble pile from the rear, pouring his bruised and bleeding body into the center of the breach, was Major Jameson himself – not shooting or even aiming his weapon, but instead waving that threadbare Union flag from side to side overhead on its improvised pole, taking one hand off it only to physically latch onto fleeing reservists, physically turn them around, and shove them forward again. All throughout, he shouted over the noise of the battle:

  “No retreat! Hold the fucking line!”

  Even more remarkably, this cheesy Hollywood shit was working. Wide-eyed and hyperventilating Fusiliers who seconds ago had been heading for Hastings now turned and raced back into the gap – and they were battling as they went. Even the reservists’ rear-echelon soldiers, non-combatants, were pouring themselves into the fight.

  And the troops were not only rallying, but winning. Those remaining dead stumbling through the twice-sundered gap were going down. And as the reservists got back up on the line, they found it still anchored by the Royal Marines, who were totally unflappable – or who weren’t, at any rate, being allowed to flap, by Croucher. Only One Troop had the discipline and leadership to stand as the unbreakable spine of this rabble in arms. It was all turning into an effective fighting force again.

  And at the core of that force, of this rally, of the reversal and retaking of ground, was the decision and resolve of a single man. Now Jameson climbed back up on top of the intact gap, planted his flag, and drew great sucking breaths.

  “Freedom!” Croucher shouted in his best Scots brogue.

  “Shut the fuck up,” Jameson managed, around heaving breaths, and bringing his rifle up. “Keep shooting.”

  Croucher got back on his machine gun.

  * * *

  Elliot hailed him again. And a third time. There was no answer. He simply couldn’t believe Staff Sergeant Bhardwaj was gone. He wouldn’t believe it. The man was just busy. Or his radio batteries died. That was all.

  Nonetheless, in this terrible frozen instant…

  Elliot was on his own.

  And he had to make a decision. He had to act.

  The battle was turning. But the site of the second collapse was still undefended on the ground out in front of it, because the Paras had been cut in half. Elliot didn’t bother getting on the radio, instead just shouting above the noise of the fight at the men around him, and letting his body do the talking.

  He ran back and to the left, stopping only when he was directly in the center of the gap in the gap, twenty meters out front. “Two PARA on me!” he shouted, intending to anchor a new line. And in seconds, the surviving paratroopers were falling into a single rank on either side of him, taking knees or going prone, firing and reloading, and firing some more. The dead never stopped coming.

  But the line was intact again. Which meant the Wall was.

  A few seconds later, Elliot felt more than saw something massive coming at his head from behind. When he spared a look over his shoulder, he saw that this time it was a gigantic steel plate descending from the sky. The crane was lowering it into place, inserting it deep into the settled rubble, its edges matching up roughly with the edges of the second collapse. Inside, around and through the gaps, he could already see movement – workers sealing it up with stones and cement.

  Now, suddenly, the Wall was really intact.

  And the Paras were being entombed outside it again.

  Which was how it had to be.

  A man in 2nd section screamed and went down somewhere off to the right. Elliot couldn’t help him. He had to keep shooting.

  And he had to lead the fight – whatever was left of it.

  * * *

  “Where’s Travis?” Jameson asked.

  Croucher just shook his head.

  Goddammit. It wasn’t even so much that Jameson’s heart couldn’t bear any more painful losses. It was that their defense couldn’t. He was just about out of senior combat leaders. And this thing wasn’t nearly over. He finished walking the lines and settled down into position, anchoring the left flank himself now. The left edge of their line wasn’t where it used to be – now it ended at the steel plate, which no one could stand on or fight from. This made their job harder.

  But that was a mere feather on the pile of their burdens.

  As Jameson checked and charged his weapon and got busy personally shooting over the heads of the remaining Paras – every gun was needed in the fight now – he tried to develop some appreciation for the fact that, once again, the tactical situation had been recovered, and even stabilized.

  Once again – for the moment.

  Because the horizon was still black with massing dead, advancing mindlessly and implacably. There was only one way this could end. And Jameson knew they were just hunkering down and waiting to die. To die in place, in order to buy time. There was no way they could last. All they could do, what they absolutely had to do, was hold as long as they could.

  He mentally replayed Colonel Mayes’s last words to him. The dying CentCom commander had just told him about Operation Secunda Mortem – the USOC mission to recover a scientist trapped in the US, who had a working vaccine. And then he said: Every senior officer in the field is needed there to keep the defense from falling apart, to delay the siege and destruction of London – until we can get the vaccine out.

  Jameson shook his head in disbelief, that he was now one of those officers. It certainly beat trying to command the entire war from its center. But the question remained: Where the bloody hell was that vaccine? Because they definitely couldn’t hold forever. They couldn’t even keep doing it for much longer. The undulating black line of the horizon told a tale with only one possible ending.

  It told Jameson everything he needed to know.

  That it was only a matter of time.

  Promoted

  CentCom SHQ – JOC

  “How long do we have?” Ali asked.

  “Very hard to say,” Miller said.

  Ali’s expression made it clear how much time and patience she had for things that were hard to say – for any type of glad-handing or equivocation.

  “Okay, it’s not good,” Miller said, his face darkening. He was repeating himself, but at least coming clean with her. “The Paras have been reinforced by a company of reservists, and some Royal Marines.”

  “How many Marines?”

  “A troop. Or what’s left of it.”

  Ali just shook her head. “And the collapse in the Wall?”

  “It collapsed again. A collapse of the collapsed section. They’re building it back up. We’re still fighting. And it’s not over. But the end is definitely in sight.”

  Ali tried to count her blessings. It had quickly become apparent to her that 2Lt Miller was the man most wired in to what the hell was actually going on, both here and everywhere else, his sensors and tendrils inserted into every battlespace, anywhere the living were still fighting. She was working out that he’d been here since the beginning, seen it all ramp up, and survived as it all crashed down. And she realized that, while the Coldstream Guards had been nominally in charge, Miller had effectively been running the show.

  Now Ali needed him to help her run it – just as he’d helped Jameson before her.

  The two of them sat at a small table in one of the half-destroyed offices off the main JOC, along with Master Gunnery Sergeant Fick, as well as a taciturn second lieutenant from CentCom’s Royal Military Police d
etachment. Ali was getting a more comprehensive strategic briefing than the quick summary she’d gotten on the walk there. She also needed to work out the ramifications for what they were trying to do here – how much time they had, and how they were going to hold long enough to do it.

  “And the south is entirely lost,” Ali said. It wasn’t a question. “How much of your total strength can we recover? Get back inside the Wall for a last stand?” She was thinking this was the nation that had pulled off Dunkirk, saving nearly 400,000 men when all had seemed lost, so they’d know something about it.

  But Miller just shook his head. “Any forces left outside the Wall are badly dinged up. Mini-outbreaks have been taking down command elements, headquarters elements, pilots in midair… What units have survived can’t maneuver around the dead tide that’s overrun the countryside and is converging on London, can’t break through it. Like I said, the Wall is ringed in one to two miles thick on all sides now. Some units have been trying to get back, but they can’t get here – and if they could, we couldn’t risk opening the gates to let them in. More importantly, half the surviving units, if not all, will have infected men in them, and there will be no sorting them out in the chaos, especially with their mates covering for them – insisting, and probably believing, that the men they’ve been living and fighting side-by-side with for years aren’t actually infected.”

  Ali knew how it was – the unbreakable warrior bond. It was what had doomed virtually all of the world’s militaries, including her own – letting the infected back inside the wire. Refusing to leave any man behind, even if he was only going to remain a man for a few more minutes. She took a deep breath.

  “C&C?”

  Miller gestured at the JOC outside. “You’re looking at it. Military command and control has basically collapsed. There’s definitely no command structure above us now, not above CentCom and what you see here in SHQ. The Ministry of Defense has decamped entirely, along with the rest of the central government, to the Isle of Man.”

  “Wait – what?”

  He just shrugged again. “They’re gone. It’s a final fallback location.”

  “And what the hell do they plan to do once they get there?”

  Miller had no answer to this.

  “And how many helicopters and troops did they take with them?” But Ali instantly blinked and switched mental gears, realizing the pointlessness of getting upset about that now. She had long ago internalized the first lesson of the Stoics: to carefully distinguish between the things we can control, and those we can’t – and everything in the past we can’t. She had to focus on what she could do in the present, in order to save the future – on what actions could have a critical impact now. “Never mind. Talk to me about the rest of the perimeter. Is there fighting on other parts of the Wall?”

  “Sporadic,” Miller said. “The dead are still mainly making a beeline for the gap in the north, our weakest spot.” He shook his head. “They’re implacable – but it’s almost like they’re not mindless. Like they know exactly what the hell they’re doing. Where to attack us.”

  Ali brushed this off. “Defensive forces left inside London.”

  Another grim nod. “That’s the problem. All of our serious combat units were outside, fighting the outbreak in the south.”

  “You must have kept some in reserve?”

  “For a while. But they all got thrown into the fight pretty quickly – it happened incredibly fast. Sooner than we imagined, we were fully committed. And you know how outbreaks are – later is not the time to stop them. The thinking was that if the dead broke out of the southeast, the country was lost. We had to stop them there. So now it’s only home guard, some reservists and the police, inside the Wall. We tried to reinforce the gap in the north by air. It almost got everyone there killed.”

  “What about armor? Tanks and APCs?”

  “It was all out in the field. Now it’s all trapped – we can’t get them back in. They’re actually vulnerable to getting their treads jammed up in dead that thick, and there are also the defensive trenches that ring the perimeter. Anyway, like I said, even if they got through all that and we opened a gate to let them in, the dead would just flood right in with them.”

  Ali took a look over at Fick. He just sat there in silence, as he had the whole meeting, but obviously listening closely – and watching. Ali got the strange impression he was waiting for his moment. Then again, the RMP commander opposite him was doing the same. It was almost like they were squaring off.

  Ali wouldn’t bet on the other guy.

  Miller took a breath. “As I said – there are still isolated units fighting outside the Wall. Some are even combat effective – but for the most part they’re not mobile. In the end, they’re not really any help. They’re just trying to stay alive themselves.”

  “What about airlift?” Ali asked. “Get them back over the top of the Wall, rather than through a gate.”

  “There’s no significant air assault or airlift capability.”

  Ali couldn’t quite believe this. How could all the British Forces’ airlift power not be enough to get anyone back home? Miller read her look.

  “Most of our airlift is fixed wing, not rotary wing. And while we’ve got four airports inside the M25, and can land planes here, we can’t bloody well land them in the overrun countryside. Our rotary-wing capability was limited to start with – ask all the units who took IED casualties in Afghanistan because they were forced to move around on the ground, because there were never enough helos. We’ve got a certain number of Chinooks, Pumas, and Merlins – but not all that many, and fewer all the time, plus fuel problems. And even the Chinooks can only ferry thirty troops – or a light APC and about five troops, namely its crew.”

  Ali got it. It wasn’t enough to make a difference.

  “There were originally two hundred thousand troops in the field fighting the outbreak in the south,” Miller said.

  “And how many left now?”

  “The question is: how many are fighting for the other side?”

  Ali’s look invited him to answer it.

  “The last serious estimate we tried to do of the dead was almost three days ago. And it came in at between one and two.” The unsaid last word hung in the air. Million.

  One to two million dead coming for them.

  And more every minute.

  * * *

  Staff Sergeant Kate Dunajski tossed her assault pack on the little single bed – but propped her SCAR Mk 20 rifle carefully in the corner. Turning to see Baxter basically doing the same thing on the other side of the small double room, she almost laughed out loud.

  “You look like hammered shit,” she said. “Or Frankenstein.”

  He smiled back at her – then immediately winced as the movement pulled at the brand new stitches in the cut across his cheek. His hand instinctively went for it, but then stopped as the sutured and bandaged wound on his upper arm made him wince. They had both just come straight from the med wing. He shook his head. “I don’t think I want to be here when the drugs wear off.”

  He sat down shakily on the bed, more of a cot.

  “You don’t want to be here when the walking dead arrive,” Kate said, likewise sitting down on her own rack, and also cradling her newly bandaged arm. “What we both need in the meantime is sleep.”

  The two regarded each other across the dim and dusty air of the small and spartan room. They were in one of CentCom’s guest billets – what had formerly been, unmistakably, a prison cell, part of a whole large cell block. Despite the superficial decor changes, and replacement of bars with plaster walls and flimsy doors, the basic motif and layout were pretty obvious.

  Baxter took a breath. “We should return to duty.”

  Kate shook her head – and then smiled faintly as she remembered how Brendan and Elijah had forced her to sleep on her very first night in Africa, right before it all came down. Hell, Elijah had drugged her water bottle to knock her out. “No,” she said. “You’ve go
t to rest, and recuperate. We both do.” He tried to object, but she cut him off. “We’re both going to be needed, and we’re going to have to be operational.”

  Woozily, he nodded, and started getting his boots off.

  But then Kate cocked her head, and said, “Hey, what the hell is that?” Baxter blinked dazedly, but it was suddenly impossible to miss – some kind of rumbling, grinding industrial noise coming from close by, rising and falling, and shaking the thin walls. It sounded like it was coming from the next room over. Kate, looking concerned, got up and went out to investigate. However, when she padded back in, she was smiling.

  “God, he’s cute,” she said. She was prepared to explain who she was talking about, but found Baxter already asleep, snoring himself, albeit at one-sixteenth the volume of Predator next door. She sat down, got her own boots off, then swung her legs up, and laid her head back on the thin pillow in the dim and dusty air. If both Juice and Predator were grabbing some rack, that said her instincts were spot on.

  “We’ve all got to be operational,” she muttered, breathing deeply and fading fast. “Because this definitely isn’t over…”

  * * *

  Ali drummed her fingers on the tabletop, carefully considering everything Miller had just told her. She was a Delta scout sniper by trade – which meant she was a thinker first, shooter second. “Okay. Tell me about the local tactical situation.”

  Miller shifted gears. “What – CentCom itself? Twenty-foot walls all around. A whole shedload of ammo in the armory, which is located deep inside the old prison complex.”

  “How the fuck much exactly is a shedload?”

  This was Fick, finally speaking.

  Miller looked at him, then across at the RMP officer. Ali noted again that British Army uniforms, for whatever reason, never had nametape on them. Ali remembered Miller had introduced the RMP as McNiven. But then again she didn’t care that much. Now he also spoke for the first time. “I don’t have exact numbers to hand. But it’s millions of rounds of small-arms ammunition. Enough for a lengthy siege.”

  Ali nodded. That would do for now.