ARISEN_Book Thirteen_The Siege Read online

  But also a serious impediment to battlefield awareness.

  As his laughter finally trailed off, Elliot said, “We can’t see what’s coming for us now.”

  Bhardwaj’s mirth also bled away, but he slung his rifle and dug into a square pouch on his vest, emerging with a boxy little ruggedized tablet, which Elliot knew to be an mRover handheld video terminal. As the little screen came to life, it lit Bhardwaj’s face from below, giving him the aspect of an arch-villain. He didn’t protest when Elliot leaned in for a look. The camera on the orbiting drone was still right where they’d last had it pointed.

  And as Elliot made out the scene, he pivoted to block the screen from the view of the five surviving members of his section, in the skirmish line to his right. He looked up into Bhardwaj’s dramatically lit face. He said, “Don’t show this to my men, yeah?”

  Bhardwaj looked into Elliot’s shining eyes over the top of the screen. “Yeah, no worries, matey,” he said, powering off the terminal, slipping it back into its pouch, and raising his weapon again. “Go – look after your lads.”

  Elliot did so, leaning down and checking on each man in turn. And he tried not to think about what he’d seen on the screen – about what was coming for them. Bhardwaj had warned him the lulls between the runner packs might end. But it wasn’t just that. Of course the runners had reached them first, being fastest. But they were never going to be the last.

  And now the rest were here – or nearly so.

  It was the great stumbling mass of slow ones, the Zulus.

  And what the drone camera had showed was: an unbroken sea of them, stretching all the way out to the horizon, in every direction. The sky was finally starting to lighten with dawn, so Elliot had been able to make it all out. But he wished he hadn’t. Based on what he’d heard about the fall of the south, they were facing at least two million dead. Nearly the entire population of southeast England.

  And there were fewer than a hundred Paras left on their feet. And yet still they had to try to hold – as long as they could, until the twice-ravaged Wall could be built back up as high as possible. They had somehow to buy a little more time.

  But the outcome of this battle couldn’t be in any doubt.

  They were all doomed.

  Faces

  Handon awoke to the sound of a splash.

  He was badly weakened, and no longer anything like combat effective. But he was also not out of the fight – because you were never out of the fight. And a Delta operator with over twenty years in was supremely dangerous in almost any state, short of being deep under the ground.

  As he heard something approaching through the brush, he dropped out the empty mag from his right-hand .45 and felt around for another one. Nothing. He looked and patted around for single loose rounds. There might have been some, but he couldn’t pick them out. Because he was lying in a pile of his own shell casings.

  Correction – his and Henno’s shell casings.

  Nonetheless, he laughed at this. He was going out just as he’d always planned – dying in a pile of his own brass. He remembered the old prayer, popular in the Ranger Regiment: “Lord, make me fast and accurate. Let my aim be true and my hand faster than those who would seek to destroy me. Grant me victory over my foes and those that wish to do harm to me and mine. And Lord if today is truly the day that you call me home, let me die in a pile of brass.”

  And he also remembered Rule #10 of gunfights: “Someday someone may kill you with your own gun, but they should have to beat you to death with it because it’s empty.”

  The mind does funny shit in combat, Handon reflected.

  But he was okay with being black on ammo, just as he was happy enough to be facing the blackness of his own extinction. Because the job was done – or so close as made no difference. It had to be. Because as far as he knew, there was now nothing between his team, with Patient Zero, and their flight out of there – nothing but a few kilometers of open road, and maybe a few stumbling Zulus at the airport. And Handon was still between them and the enemy.

  And he still had his knife.

  As the rustling came closer, he snapped the thumb break on his vest sheath, and pulled out his good old Mercworx Vorax combat knife. It was all he had left, but he was damned glad to have it. Though, with that, his cursedly heavy eyelids tried to go down again. And when he levered them back up, he saw, not Spetsnaz coming for him – but Henno.

  Somehow, he was back.

  But he was face down, pulling himself through the mud, crawling back to the little depression they had both so recently occupied. He was also soaking wet. Only now, Handon could see, Henno had one hand over his belly – and was trailing a rich dark blood trail behind him. Henno was bleeding out.

  Because he had been gutted.

  As he rolled back into the glen, he wheezed and said, “Didn’t think I was gonna leave you on your own to fuck this up at the end, did you…?” But then his strength gave out, and his cheek slumped in the mud, eyes still looking toward Handon.

  Handon held Henno’s familiar flinty gaze.

  Even as the light went out of his eyes.

  Henno wasn’t given to speechifying. But now he stood, picked up Dr. Park’s laptop, pointed toward the back exit, and spoke.

  “The man just outside that door sacrificed himself – and he didn’t do it to save you lot. He did it for the whole world. For his children. So just maybe they’ll have a world to grow up in. And we fucking well will get this vaccine out of here and back to Britain.”

  No one spoke for a second.

  “He’s right,” Handon finally said. “So saddle up. Take everything. We’re moving out.”

  “Where to?” Homer asked.

  “Far side of the bunker for now – if the fuel tank out in that hall goes, I’m not sure I see the inner door holding. We’ll think of something else from there.”

  “Hell,” Predator said, levering his huge bulk off the couch with three limbs. “I’m not sure I see this side of the structure not collapsing…”

  As the commandos began an accelerated process of strapping everything back on, Pope sidled over to Handon. “Quick word with you, Top?”

  The two of them led the exodus down the hall, then stepped off alone into the kitchen, as the others filed by. Suddenly Handon noticed Pope wasn’t looking too good. He saw the sweat beading on his forehead. The temperature in the bunker was rising now, but was still relatively cool. And when Handon squinted, focusing on Pope’s face, he saw the early signs – those tiny black lines spreading out from the eyes and the mouth, faint red spots around the face and neck, and that strange glazing of the eyes.

  “Ah, shit, Pope,” Handon cursed, shaking his head.

  “Yeah,” sighed Pope, flexing his right hand and peering at the white dots already appearing on his fingernails. Body proteins being destroyed.

  Handon looked Pope straight in the eyes. “Why didn’t you say anything?”

  “I didn’t know until just now. Thought I was still just out of breath. Something. But that roll-around, during the run here, must have splashed me. On a bit of mucous membrane probably.”

  Handon held the other man’s eye. “Do you want me to do it? Or on your own?”

  “Neither.” Pope spoke levelly and carefully. He knew there was no one else that he would have wanted to end it, but he had another plan. “Use me. To get out of here.”

  “How?” asked Handon.

  “Diversion,” replied Pope, nodding in the direction of their blocked exit. “Send me up out the main exit.”

  Handon thought seriously about this. He didn’t have much time to ponder, but it depended on the dead doing exactly as predicted, and they weren’t always predictable.

  “And what if they don’t follow you?”

  Pope smiled. “Well, you’ll have nearly a half-hour to think up a new, better plan.”

  “Jesus.” Handon shook his head – 98.5% of humanity dead, and yet they still managed to produce heroes like this one. Right now, though,
he would have given all of those others to hang on to this one for even just another day. For two years they had been the only team in USOC – perhaps the only deployed military unit anywhere in the ZA – never to lose a man. Now they’d lost two in the space of ten minutes. It felt like the world, or what was left of it, or maybe just their little sane corner, was falling to pieces. Handon pushed the feeling away, shoving it deep down inside him.

  “You’re ready to do that?” he asked, knowing the answer already. It was a stupid question.

  “Oh, yes.” Pope held up his hand and showed Handon the lesion that had appeared on the back of it, a long thin line that had already turned black, the edges starting to seep and grow raw. “I’m on my countdown anyway, and I don’t want to be around long enough for the bell to toll. Let’s do this.”

  Handon paused for the briefest of moments, held Pope’s gaze again, and then nodded.

  “Okay,” he said.

  Fuck the hotel entrance, Ainsley thought, shooting out a pane of ground-floor glass, and leading the group straight inside the hotel at a gallop. In the rear, Handon turned around and started moving backward, making rapid single shots on swarming, enraged, starving, hyper-powered soulless, now moving to follow them in.

  Within thirty seconds, they found a service stairwell. Down, fuck it, down, Ainsley thought. They were so close – but playing it too close to the bone. There were also a few strays inside the building, converging on the noise. The operators put them down in close quarters, just trying to keep themselves on their feet. But behind them, through the shattered glass, a greater mass of undead was sluicing into the building, filling up the space behind Alpha like air into a vacuum.

  Which floor? Which fucking floor? Ainsley gritted his teeth. Fuck it, he thought – in for a penny, in for a pound. He’d take them all the way to the bottom. If there was no secret door there, well, it was a perfect place to be buried.

  Buried under the weight of thousands of dead.

  “Room clearing drill!” he shouted across the net. It was the quickest way to scour every room on the level. “Looking for a secure door!” Out of habit, he went to the heavy side – the one with a pair of Foxtrots coming to life and leaping down the dark and dirty corridor. Indoors, thank fuck, they couldn’t dance around so damned much. On the other hand, it was so tight they were on you in fractions of a second.

  Handon took the light side – but it didn’t stay that way long. He knew the other six would be dynamically making decisions about movement and fire, based on a hundred factors, including visible opposition, the layout of the structure, and what the guy ahead of him was doing. They flowed through and across and around the floor in a slithering flash, dropping attackers at fast-forward speed, passing in full view of other operators and holding fire, a supremely controlled chaos. This was what they were very, very best at.

  It was only twenty seconds later Homer announced: “Found it! North edge, beyond the boiler room.” By the time the group converged, Homer had the code entered and the door open. But by the time they were all through it and inside, the mass of dead were on them.

  Juice and Predator, the two biggest men, pushed on the door with all their strength, while the others fired out the slit into hissing mouths and undulating dead flesh outside. Finally, Pope got a tiny look at open air and tossed two grenades through. “Frags up!” he shouted and everyone hunkered down. The explosions didn’t even kill the ones against the door, shielded by the bodies of others. And the sheer mass of corpses was too much now – animated or not, they were keeping this door open.

  While the others held the dyke, Handon scouted forward. Dim blue LEDs illuminated the floor – it was only twenty meters of corridor, running alongside a scooped-out enclosure of chugging machinery, which Handon clocked as a large diesel generator, and then terminating in another door at the end. This one was steel, and solid, and had no keypad or reader. The handle wouldn’t budge – locked from the inside. Fuck. But then his peripheral vision registered movement – a mini-CCTV camera above and in the corner. Its active red LED was lit. And Handon was sure it had moved.

  And then… the door simply opened. A youthful man with short dark hair and brown-framed eyeglasses stood behind it. For a quarter-second neither seemed to know what to say. Then they both spoke at once:

  “Get in!” shouted the man.

  “Make way!” shouted the sergeant major.

  Juice and Pred stayed in the rear, covering the withdrawal. They stepped backward down the dark hallway, Pred dragging his swollen and immobilized leg, both of them firing incessantly. They got in sync – each reloading at the midpoint of the other’s magazine, empties dropping out and hitting the floor with a clunk. Ejected shell casings hit the walls and the floor with a tinny sound. And the rifles roared.

  The dead flew at them with ravenous single-mindedness.

  As they neared the back end of the corridor, Pred emptied the remaining four buckshot rounds from his underslung Metalstorm launcher – then jammed in a pack of five high-explosive (HE) rounds. Juice gave him a look – in this enclosed area, the overpressure caused when the rounds exploded could seriously fuck them all up. As in kill them. But there was nothing else for it. The horde was too close, on top of them – the dead would reach the inner door at the same time the last living tried to go through it. Then they wouldn’t be able to close that one, either – and all of them would be doomed.

  As Pred slammed shut the receiver on the five-round munition tube, an unseen hand grabbed his collar and pulled him backward. As he staggered backward, his assailant pulled his rifle out of his hands. It was Ainsley. He pivoted and gave Juice a shove with his right arm, then turned away, into the horde. Pred and Juice tripped over each other – falling right through the doorway and into the others inside.

  The first HE round went off only a few feet down the corridor. It ruptured the eardrums of both Juice and Pred, and sucked the air out of the lungs of everyone behind. The overpressure also slammed the door closed with a whump.

  Behind it, four more explosions sounded dully.

  “Simon Park,” the young man said. He was trembling badly. “Doctor Simon Park.”

  Handon took his hand.

  Park pointed at the door. “Your… your friend… Jesus…”

  “He’s gone,” Handon said, re-enacting a scene he’d performed a hundred times. He turned toward the others. “And we pick up his banner and carry on. While there’s breath in our bodies.” The others nodded. There hadn’t been any real need to say it. But it served as a passing of the torch of command. Ainsley had made his choice, spending his life gloriously.

  And they were all alive because of it.

  A hundred re-enactments of that same scene – and a hundred other faces, each unique and unforgettable.

  And each gone forever.

  Faces spooling out across oceans of time. And the voices attached to them. Laughter. Cries of pain. Last breaths wheezing out. An endless parade of faces, spinning and spooling out backward in Handon’s vast operational history, face after face, name after name… mission upon mission, battle after firefight, year after long year. War upon war. A decade, then another, then even a bit more.

  Faces, voices, laughter, cries.

  Last breaths.

  Infected and turned. Infected and put down. Infected and took care of themselves. Or just torn to pieces by the dead.

  Before that, in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Yemen… gunshot wounds, grenade blasts. Lucky headshots, seeing eye rounds. Shrapnel and unlucky grenade rolls. Friendly fire, blue-on-blue – or green-on-blue, on seemingly safe bases right inside the Kabul city center. Errant air strikes – danger-close CAS that went in a little too close, misjudged, or maybe there’d been no choice.

  Bad falls. Training accidents. Parachuting accidents.

  Back to Iraq, back to Syria, hunting ISIS with the ETF and Kurdish Peshmerga… back home again, men lowered into the ground in flag-draped coffins. Men sat down in wheelchairs, forever. Blind
men, the medically retired, PTSD and flashbacks, crushed and ruined vertebrae.

  But mainly dead men.

  IEDs. More, bigger, worse IEDs. AQI and ISIS safehouses wired to blow. Barricades built behind front doors by jihadis tipped off to the raid, firing AKs blindly over the top, making lucky headshots on the first two guys through the door, one of whom was on the last raid of the last night of the last deployment of his twenty-year career, and had stayed only to finish training up his replacement – who was the other one to fall.

  Faces, voices, laughter, cries.

  Last breaths.

  Eyes closing.

  Eyes opening, and blinking.

  The face of a young man, eyes wide open, shining and bright with life. Resilience and resolve, strength and courage, the willingness to get it done. To do what was necessary. To spend his life in the cause.

  He said it again: “What’s the plan, Top?”

  Master Sergeant Handon’s mind raced. He glanced down at the nametape of the young and newly minted operator crouching in the darkness before him.

  DRAUGUR.

  Blood

  On Board the de Havilland Dash 8 – 10,000 Feet Over Sudan

  “He’s dreaming.”

  Predator put his hand on Handon’s fevered forehead, trying to calm the unconscious man, and somehow soothe away his night terrors. But then he stopped and wiped away a thick sheen of sweat. “And his body’s fighting infection.”

  “A fight he will not lose,” Noise said. “It is not his time.”

  The two of them squatted down on the cold hard deck, in the improvised in-flight hospital they had set up behind the three rows of seats, and which had previously been their casualty collection point during the fight. There were only a few dim running lights lit across the long cabin, making gloom and shadows of most of it. Around them, the long-neglected and now somewhat shot-up turboprop airplane winged and rattled and buzzed its way through the black and empty sky, high above the northeast edge of Africa, where it bordered the Red Sea.