ARISEN_Book Thirteen_The Siege Read online

  “Come on, there must be some badasses here?” he persisted, walking the lines and reviewing the men. “What would your mothers say if they knew you had such low opinions of yourselves?” Fick paused, looked around, then raised his voice to be heard in the back. “Now, listen, don’t worry, there are two women I will never comment on – your mothers, and your wives.”

  He lowered his voice and moderated his tone, though not enough to be inaudible. “I did fuck all your girlfriends, though.”

  Screw it, he thought, finally just picking out basically the dozen biggest men from the unit.

  Lance Corporal Schmuckatelli wasn’t among them.

  Wesley just looked on, keeping his mouth shut, but silently wondering and worrying: Was McNiven right? When the Wall around London falls… is there any longer a point? Fatalism was, unfortunately, a very English trait. But Wesley hadn’t been hanging out with Englishmen recently.

  He’d been hanging out with operators.

  And his attitude had gotten an overhaul.

  He braced himself to roll up his sleeves – and get to work.

  Fly For the Guns

  ZPW – Directly in Front of the Gap

  Sergeant Bhardwaj was gone. Elliot couldn’t believe it. But he hadn’t seen or heard from 2 PARA’s last and almost certainly final commander in what felt like ten lifetimes. And he absolutely didn’t have time to look for him now. Moreover, and much worse, the battalion was down to no more than fifty soldiers left on their feet. And that, more than anything else, made Elliot sure Bhardwaj had fallen. There was no way he would have let that many men go down while he still stood.

  He led from the front. And he led out of love.

  Elliot tried to do no less. But his own 2nd section was down to two survivors. The Battle for Britain was going exactly as it had for Elliot since the very start, except worse now, and faster. He still couldn’t protect his brothers, or keep anyone alive. But now they were going down in droves.

  Another crate of magazines got shoved out the back of the ammo truck that had fallen from heaven – what surely had to be the last, or close to it. Worse, when the man who’d shoved it out crouched on the edge of the bed to leap out, he was taken down and over by a Foxtrot who leaped around from behind it. And, once again, Elliot was faced with a horrifying moral calculus: if he tried to fire surgically, shooting around his mate, he’d just miss the Foxtrot, and it would tear into more of the survivors. And the man was infected already. There was just no winning.

  There was only battling to stay alive.

  Elliot flipped his fire selector to full auto and tracked the two tumbling bodies, pouring rounds into both, his section-mates doing the same behind him. It was like machine-gunning his own exposed heart. He didn’t know how he could bear it, or for how much longer. He just knew he had no choice.

  Then again, this was all going to be over soon.

  The walking mortar barrages were still going in, out beyond the front ranks of attacking dead – just far enough away to avoid splash damage to the beleaguered Paras. But Elliot figured there were only so many mortar bombs laid in behind that Wall. And, even while they lasted, they were only thinning the masses of incoming dead. They definitely weren’t stopping them. And they weren’t even thinning them enough. Hundreds were still getting through.

  And much worse, the Paras were not only getting reduced faster all the time, but the survivors were getting herded into a small defensive knot in the center of the gap. They no longer had the manpower to defend the whole thing, and the dead were starting to pile up at both edges. Soon the last Paras would be dead. And the gap would be swamped. And then it would finally end. All the horror and heartbreak would be someone else’s problem.

  Elliot stole a glance up at the top of the Wall.

  * * *

  And at the same instant Jameson spared a look down, locking eyes with the shockingly young man forty feet below him. The paratrooper looked to be little more than twenty years old. But his eyes, even across all that open air, seemed to have been staring out upon death for twenty thousand. Like he’d seen and absorbed every horror in the history of the world.

  And, for only the second time since they arrived, Jameson considered putting One Troop down on the ground, out in the mix. There was the fact that the Paras were getting rolled up on both flanks, shoved into too small a formation to defend the gap. But it wasn’t even that. It was that Jameson wasn’t sure he could stand to let them die down there all alone. To watch it all play out from box seats, like a spectator to a car crash.

  But he had to make a stone of his heart and command based on tactical and strategic imperatives. He looked around at the builders, still gamely trying to pile up every possible additional inch of stone, to extend the Wall upward, in the seconds they had left. Marines and reservists were periodically having to shift firing positions, while new stones went in right under them, and trowels of wet cement got slathered on. But when Jameson looked out from there, to the rising tide of dead on both sides of the gap, it was totally obvious.

  The building wasn’t happening fast enough.

  They weren’t going to outpace the rising tide. They weren’t even going to keep it out for another ten minutes. And, with that, Jameson heard the whistling overhead stop, and saw the last explosions out in the field winding down. When he spared a look behind, he could see all the mortar crews standing up and reaching for their personal weapons. That was that.

  Jameson snorted and shook his head, and tried to remember what the hell they were even fighting for. And the first thing that appeared in his mind’s eye was… Josie, Amarie’s little girl, way back behind them, tucked away inside CentCom. Then he looked around again, frowning, and grabbed a Tunneler who was running by and hauling a heavy ammo can in each hand.

  “Where’s Amarie?” he shouted. He’d just realized he’d never seen her among the Tunnelers, not over the course of the whole battle.

  “What?” The Tunneler looked at Jameson with uncomprehending animal eyes. But as Jameson opened his mouth to repeat it, the guy got it. He twisted at the waist and pointed down to the truck Hackworth had shown him before as having extra ammo in it. “She’s there!” Then he dropped the pair of ammo cans, and took off for the ladders again.

  Jameson scanned the ground. The truck was behind the tower, rather than the gap, which meant it would be safer, for longer. Then again, when the gap was swamped, it would happen on the edges first. And even that didn’t matter. When the Wall finally fell… no one would be safe.

  Not anywhere.

  * * *

  “I’m going up top,” Brown said, trying to rise to his feet, and reaching for the one Glock pistol that had been left for them.

  He, Amarie, and old Cherie were still in the back of the Army truck, reloading the great stacks of empty magazines the others occasionally ran by and dumped through the rear flap. The driver, Liam, had also found them some magazine loaders from somewhere, and taught them how to use them. This both speeded the process and made it less painful, particularly for Amarie’s delicate fingers.

  “Non,” Amarie said as Brown rose, easily shoving him back down, and sliding the pistol closer to herself, before he could get to it. Brown had been shot in the leg on their escape from central London, and Amarie could see the bandage around it was bloodier than it had been before.

  “You stay,” she said. “We all do.” But she wasn’t really protecting the poor wounded man. It was just that there were only three of them there in the cocoon of the truck.

  And she was terrified of being alone.

  And not because the dead might come, she thought, looking down at the pistol beside her. No, it was because her heart was broken, with her little girl left behind, taken away from her. Without Josie, all her hope was gone. She no longer cared if she lived or died.

  And she was afraid of what she might do.

  The sounds of the battle, the firing and shouts of angry and panicked men, grew suddenly louder, and Amarie realized the dis
tant whumping of explosions beyond the Wall had stopped.

  But then they started up again – much bigger and louder.

  And the air around them buzzed and thrummed.

  Brown reached for the flap that covered the back of the truck, but she pushed his hand away, and handed him an empty magazine. “We keep working,” she said.

  The work kept her from thinking.

  * * *

  Personally anchoring the left of the line put Jameson at the pointy end of the fight. He’d also had one of the reservist machine-gun crews emplaced beside him, and since then they’d been pouring in fire. But now they were firing point-blank, the dead barely ten feet below the level of the gap.

  Now their last belt ran through a barrel that was already on the verge of burning out from nonstop firing. The gunner and loader, one male soldier and one female, looked around for another belt or box, but there was nothing, the ammo bearers nowhere in sight. And that was when Jameson realized ten feet was effectively zero feet – because a Foxtrot leapt up that distance like stepping over a puddle, and fell upon the MG and its crew, tearing into the two soldiers in a whirling jumble of violence and manic energy.

  “Fuck! Shit!” one or both of them yelped as Jameson swiveled to try to help, cursing out loud himself: “Jesus Chri—” but a whirling leg caught him in his rifle barrel as he brought it around, and he couldn’t work out what to shoot at anyway, and even as he stepped back, reset, and tried to engage—

  All three bodies, plus the MG, the tripod of which was tangled up with them, rolled and clattered over the edge of the gap and down into the heaving mass of dead below. The whole crew and its weapon… just gone.

  Jameson stepped to the edge, raised his rifle, and took aim. His intention was to kill both of the reservists. Nobody deserved to die like that, particularly not these two. But he couldn’t even do that for them – because there were runners tear-assing up the rising pile of destroyed dead, and another Foxtrot trying to push past them from behind. Jameson flipped his fire selector to full auto, emptied the mag – then armed and tossed two grenades, then dropped down and covered up.

  But even as he heard the dual whump and steeled himself to hurl his body back into the fight, he knew it wasn’t going to matter. It was too little. They were tossing firecrackers at the Wehrmacht, trying to stop the Blitzkrieg with peashooters. And then he suddenly had cause to be glad he’d paused before getting up from cover.

  Because another explosion sounded out on the ground beyond the Wall – one that made his grenades seem like less than firecrackers, and more like party poppers. It was followed by a second explosion, then two more, a series of rippling, crushing, roaring paroxysms that sent rolling fire pouring across the battlefield, consuming dead bodies in a maelstrom of infernal destruction.

  And infernal is just the right word for it, Jameson suddenly realized. They’re literally being consumed by hellfire.

  An AH-64 Apache Longbow helicopter gunship blasted low over the gap in the Wall, its rotors beating the air like doomsday, twin Rolls-Royce engines thundering like volcanoes, and spitting from its stub-wing hardpoints a dozen 122mm rockets, which zipped off behind the Hellfire missiles, all of this destructive power piling straight into the teeth of the horde fighting its way toward the Wall, and reducing the undead army to great towering, splashing, showering masses of meat, gristle, infection, and smoke.

  Jameson stood and pumped his fist skyward.

  Charlotte.

  She was back.

  * * *

  “Miss me, Major?” she asked, banking around and firing another spread of flechette rockets into the thickest concentration of dead she could find – but at a minimum safe distance from the boys on the ground, who were still stuck out on the wrong damned side of the Wall. Because her first job was never to kill. It was always to protect.

  Jameson answered in her ear. “Bet your sweet arse we did.”

  Charlotte smiled. It was nice to hear his voice.

  As she zoomed around again to face the Wall itself, she could see the defenders out front, as well as those up top, all of them extremely closely engaged – and she could see they needed more precise CAS than she could provide with missiles or rockets. She switched to autocannon, pouring in 30mm HE rounds much closer than she could safely fire rockets, never mind Hellfires, trying to relieve some of the immediate pressure on the defenders. This she managed to do, but it was also obvious it was going to be a short-lived relief. She pushed power, whirled around again, and put her nose down toward the incoming sea of ambulatory corpses.

  And she started seriously putting the hurt in. In thirty seconds, she’d expended all of her rockets and missiles.

  This is like bloody Jugroom Fort all over again, she thought, shaking her giant-insect-helmeted head, then zooming back around again, and switching back to autocannon.

  “And happier to have you back with us than you can know,” Jameson said, around heavy breathing and firing. “But I’m afraid it’s not going to be enough.” She guessed he was looking at her now empty hardpoints, as well as the largely undiminished horde still out there and coming in.

  “Tsk, tsk, Major,” she said. “Have a little faith.”

  And as she held hover facing the outside of the Wall, peering through the high-zoom optics that fed into her helmet monocle, and pouring precision autocannon fire into the worst spots in front of and to both sides of the gap… the sea of dead out behind her erupted in a whole new profusion of cataclysmic explosions.

  One that made her own volley look like firecrackers.

  * * *

  Jameson dropped flat to the deck again as the air over the gap filled with a zipping storm of rockets and missiles, all of them moving too fast to see, but not too fast to hear and feel as they tore the air – and right behind them, another dozen Apaches, moving faster than hell in a tight formation, the nearest of them less than fifty feet away from his covered-up helmet.

  A dozen Apaches made the sky into a death hurricane.

  Jameson’s head swung back and forth on his neck, trying to track the swarm of deadly insects, and as the last of them blasted over, he could just make out the stencil-painted text beneath the cockpit:

  663 Squadron Army Air Corps: “We Fly for the Guns.”

  Charlotte came back in Jameson’s ear.

  “Say hello to my best mates from RAF Wattisham.”

  Jameson, for once, was speechless.

  * * *

  Giant 30mm shell casings pouring out of the sky, glowing red-hot, bouncing on the ground, clanging off helmets and plate carriers, hazards in and of themselves. The ripping and crackling of the autocannons shredding the morning air. The whump and crack of rockets going in, too close and yet too far away, exploding and sending thousands of razor-sharp flechettes scything through the air and cutting through rotten flesh, everything whistling and screaming. The whump and bone-deep pounding of Hellfire missiles impacting and exploding like the end of the world all over again. The power and air displacement of the rotors and engines, roaring, swooping, hovering overhead. The acrid smell and taste of exhaust, accelerants, cordite, black powder, and incinerating flesh. The very air burning.

  And then the ecstatic whooping.

  Elliot’s exhausted, decimated, and demoralized Paras actually managed a collective shout, cheering at the Apache pilots and gunners overhead to “Give it to the fuckers, good and hard!” Enough of them had fought in Afghanistan to know that having Apaches overhead was like having Odin, Horus, Mars, Athena, Shiva, and the God of the Old Testament, every known god of war, all watching over them at the same time – all-seeing, protective of the faithful, but also merciless and lethal beyond imagining.

  But Elliot didn’t participate in the brief moment of exultation. Because he knew two things. One, they were too closely engaged for even the mighty Apache – the best, most powerful, and most discriminating close-air-support platform in the history of aerial warfare – to save them from the front ranks of dead that were right
in their faces, trying to rip them off. But, two, the attack helos could and did alleviate much of the pressure of the masses behind those front ranks – providing them with an opportunity.

  And the exhausted Paras somehow had to seize it.

  And Elliot had to lead them. He was already at the front and center of the shrinking formation, so all he could do physically was dig down and charge. As he did so, he shouted, both over the radio and loud enough to be heard by those nearby, which was pretty much everyone at this point.

  “Push out and assault! Follow me!”

  They had to regain some ground, some breathing room. They had to destroy the local threat while they had this one chance to do so. They had to try to secure the length of gap in the wall. And they were going to have to spend more lives.

  To buy a little more time.

  * * *

  Fucking magnificent, Jameson had to admit, even if only to himself, in the two seconds he had to appreciate the Paras’ dauntless advance out into death itself.

  But then he was out of time for admiration – because he had to lead a similar maneuver himself. The dead were at the top of the Wall now, spilling over and through the gap, raging through their lines, and spilling into the so-called rear area. And Jameson had to lead One Troop, the Marines themselves leading the Fusiliers, in also seizing this opportunity, and getting the situation cleared up and reclaimed.

  He stood and charged down the line, firing point-blank, pausing to body-check a runner off the edge and back over, its mottled limbs windmilling as it fell. Explosions still blossomed and screamed out to the front, the Paras fired and shouted and fought below, the dead shrieked all around, giant killer-insect aircraft swooped and hunted and destroyed, and all the while soldiers and Marines fought a smash-mouth battle in their lines at the top of the Wall to clear the gap, and the area out front. It was utter chaos and madness – and yet Jameson felt a bizarre and unfamiliar sense of aliveness.

  It was like running amok, or bloodlust.

  They were fighting for their lives. And that made him feel totally alive. Or maybe it was just the floods of adrenaline. Either way, it was beyond tactical, beyond even the strategic, or the mission, the imperative of keeping humanity alive.