ARISEN_Book Thirteen_The Siege Read online

  The face – no beard, hulking, staring, blacked-out and invisible in deep shadows – slowly shook from side to side.

  “No, mate, it’s not bloody Dragur. I’m the last, not the first.”

  Handon blinked again in the darkness.

  HENNO.

  Muzzle flashes, grenade blasts, back in the porthole glass again. The cabin shaking around him. A battle raging, only a few feet away through the thin skin of the aircraft. Voices, still coming out of the handheld radio that sat on the deck, a few panicked, most composed.

  Henno’s dangerous whisper could be heard over it all.

  “Now you listen to me, Handon.”

  Handon blinked. He still couldn’t make his voice work.

  “You listening? Here it is. YOU CAN’T DIE. You’re not fucking allowed to die – because this shite isn’t over. Have you learned anything? Do you finally get it now?”

  Handon tried to nod, but his head wouldn’t move.

  He wanted to tell Henno he did get it. That Henno’s lessons had seeped into his battered flesh, into his tired soul. That resolve was everything; and that everyone was expendable. That one man, with the will to do whatever was required, could accomplish anything. But that he had to be willing to pay any price – to sacrifice anything. His own life. The lives of anyone under his command.

  But Henno just shook his head darkly.

  “Oh, no. Not this time, Handon. It’s gone past that now. There’s only one way this gets fixed. And spending your own life isn’t going to be enough. Nor just the lives of your team.”

  Handon didn’t understand.

  He tried to open his mouth to ask Henno what he meant.

  But the ghost of the dead SAS man just shook his head – which faded into the gloom as a running body blasted up the stairs and in through the rear hatch, followed by another, and another, all of them shouting…

  “Go, go, go!”

  “All in! All in!”

  All four turboprop engines beneath the ponderous wings revved up to a dangerous roar, and the cabin around him lurched as inertial forces tore at Handon’s body, which he still couldn’t move, and outside bodies continued to slam into the fuselage even as it powered forward, the landing gear below ramping and bouncing over piles of corpses as the plane picked up speed and lightened and began to defy gravity…

  And then all the sounds muted to silence.

  And the whole world faded again to black.

  Souls

  Onboard the Fat Cow – 1,000 Feet Above the North Sea

  The creasing bullet wound in Jameson’s upper arm throbbed like an angry heartbeat. It was a deep and insistent pressure, and he just abided with it, sitting wide awake in the blacked-out and thrumming helo cabin. It was only one of many sources of pain for him right now.

  And he sat with all of them alone.

  He was slumped in one of the jump seats mounted behind the flight deck of the “Fat Cow” Chinook twin-rotor heavy-lift transport helicopter. The bench seats that lined both sides of the cargo area were piled with rucks, rifles, and vests. And the men who owned them were piled like discarded luggage on the deck below – or rather on the nearly empty fuel bladders that had settled like leaky air mattresses over the course of their nearly 1,600-mile flight from Moscow back to London.

  All of the Royal Marines were asleep, first to last.

  They were exhausted body and soul.

  But now at least they had the blessing, the succor, the balm and peace, of unconsciousness – of not having to think about and regard all they had done, and suffered, and lost. Even Colour Sergeant Croucher – the unblinking Eye of Horus who watched over the men – even he slept. Even Younis, with his severe leg and arm wounds, had been sedated and sent floating out of this tortured waking world, dozing now on some higher and peaceful plane.

  The Kazakh scientist, Oleg Aliyev, was also out cold – with his arms wrapped around and head resting upon his clinical coldbox, which contained his last designer pathogen: the Meningitis Z, or MZ. The disease so lethal it was said to even kill the dead. Soon they might have the chance of finding out if it worked. If all their sacrifices in completing this impossible mission to retrieve the pathogen, and its creator, had been worth it. Aliyev had for some reason been unwilling to be separated from it. Like it was his own heart beating inside that box.

  Or maybe his soul.

  And, just like the rest of them, Major Jameson was also exhausted body and soul – or, rather, had passed through and beyond exhaustion, to some place of Valhalla-like silence and stillness. He sat in the black space and white noise of the cabin as it blasted through the night sky over the empty North Sea, and watched over his sleeping Marines. And he gave thanks that, as commander, it had been only his own soul that had taken such a terrible blackening on this mission – tricking and murdering the Alfa group ground team in a circular firing squad from up on that rooftop; then flooding their entire underground complex with thousands of dead, dooming everyone inside to an unimaginable fate.

  No, the Marines of One Troop had been spared having to make those terrible decisions. They’d only had to execute them. And now they slept, safe in the sight of their leader.

  But not all of them slept here.

  Four of the men who had gone to Moscow lay there still: Webb, Snipes, Thomas, and Nicks – the first three buried in that underground complex, shot down by Spetsnaz in the fight for the bunker, and now interred with Comrade Lenin down in his tomb, forever. Unable to chase these visions away from his mind’s eye, Jameson for the hundredth time saw Snipes falling in the rear of their formation as they tried to get out of the bunker – then Thomas getting hit, and taking cover behind the other man’s lifeless body, too wounded to walk.

  And then, eyes wide open, Thomas choosing to stay behind, firing his weapon and chucking grenades, while the others escaped with the mission objective.

  Choosing to spend his life so that his brothers might live.

  So that everyone left in Britain might live.

  And now Thomas slept forever, along with Webb and Snipes – and also Nicks, who had died guarding the others in their building strongpoint, even as the survivors now slept at Jameson’s feet. He sat there alone in the dark, abiding with his thoughts and his memories and the weight of all that he had done. And with the four dead men who weren’t there at all. But they were not even the most conspicuous absence, nor the most painful.

  Finally, Jameson looked down in the dark at the scuffed-up notebook that lay in his lap. He regarded the bent wire binding, and the fraying edges of the cardboard cover, the fingers of his right hand moving toward it, starting to flip it open. But then he stopped.

  He couldn’t do it.

  He exhaled and tried to understand what was stopping him. And he realized it was as if these 200 spiral-bound pages somehow contained the soul of Staff Sergeant Eli – his inner and most sacred self. And Jameson realized that to read his words would feel as if it were a eulogy – or, rather, like Eli speaking to him from the grave. His posthumous testimony.

  And he wasn’t ready for that.

  Eli wasn’t dead – nor were Halldon or Sanders, the other two men who had been left behind on the roof of that mausoleum along with their troop sergeant. And Jameson had to believe they were all coming back. Or surely at least Eli was. And he was merely holding on to his notebook for him. Either way, he damned well wasn’t going to go through the man’s effects like just another KIA.

  Jameson breathed quietly and rested his hands on the cover of the notebook, feeling its rough contours. He wished he could say to himself: Now I’m going to find out how much I relied on Eli. To keep the team together. To keep things from falling apart. To keep him going.

  But he already knew all that – knew it full well.

  He’d known it all along. He’d never believed he could make it five minutes without his trusted troop sergeant. But now he was somehow going to have to try. And, sitting alone in the dark, he realized something else. While the Royal Ma
rines of One Troop, all those peaceful figures sleeping at his feet like little boys waiting for Christmas morning… while they were all his men, and would follow him to Hell and back – had already done so, in fact, many times…

  Eli was different. Eli was Jameson’s brother.

  And now his brother was gone.

  The red blackout lights started to come on around the interior of the cabin. Though he couldn’t see it in the darkness of the very early morning, Jameson knew it was because they were almost home. Even the thought of it made him weak with gratitude. Home. He’d lived to see it one more time.

  He watched the men begin to stir – those of them who were left, who had also survived to see home once again. Back when they had last come home – then raced into action to put down that outbreak in CentCom, literally having been on the ground less than five minutes after Dusseldorf – One Troop had already been down to six fire teams of four men each, from their original strength of 36 men. They’d picked up only one replacement – Colour Sergeant Croucher – and now they’d left seven more behind in the fallen Russian Empire.

  They were being whittled down.

  And Jameson didn’t know how many of them, if any, would be left at the end of all this.

  If it ever did end.

  * * *

  But at least they were being reinforced – or rather reunited.

  When the ungainly Fat Cow settled down onto the CentCom helipad in the near dark, every Royal Marine of One Troop left behind from the Moscow mission was there to greet it – also like kids just rising on Christmas morning. As the others stumbled wearily down the back ramp, the huge twin blades spinning down slowly overhead, they were met with handshakes, hugs, high-fives – and tears. The tears mainly started when those who had been closest to the fallen, or those left behind, demanded to know where their friends were…

  And got the news. Their friends were gone. Or lost.

  Jameson was last off, supporting the badly wounded Younis from one side while Croucher held him from the other. There was already a med team waiting on the tarmac with a gurney, because they had radioed ahead. At first Younis refused to get on the gurney – but the doctor leading the team slapped him down fast, and hard. “Do we look like we have time to hang about watching you limp all the way there? Get the fuck on the gurney.” Younis complied, laughing, and was wheeled away.

  Jameson looked across and traded a look with Croucher. They were the only two men, other than Eli, who had been wounded in the vicious fighting in Moscow, and both only lightly. Neither were going to the med wing.

  “Get the men fed,” Jameson ordered.

  Croucher nodded. “And you?”

  “In the JOC. Getting briefed on what the hell’s going on.”

  Croucher nodded, turned, and started shoving and haranguing the Marines to get moving. Then Jameson remembered Aliyev – but before he could start to deal with that, he was accosted by a squared-away female British Army officer, a lieutenant colonel.

  “You in charge of this gallimaufry?” she asked. Jameson nodded. “I’m Nesbitt. Run the Bio Labs. Where’s your scientist?” Jameson pointed him out. Without another word, Nesbitt turned, grabbed Aliyev by the elbow, and hustled him off, coldbox in hand, Apocalypse bug-out bag bouncing on his back. They headed away across the grass toward the Biosciences complex, the giant white circus-tent structure that sat out in the Common, apart from the main prison facility that was the heart of CentCom. Jameson paused for a second just to watch them go.

  He thought: Well… job jobbed. It was something.

  Then he turned back to the Fat Cow, as the last energy bled out of the blades and they spun to a stop. The rear ramp was still down. But no one else was coming off. Jameson’s men had fallen on foreign fields, and there they would lie. For no good reason, he thought of the last verse of the famous WW1 poem:

  If ye break faith with us who die…

  Not being able to bring those men home again scraped at Jameson’s already ravaged soul. Then again, not having to watch their lifeless bodies being carried down that ramp was a small mercy.

  He walked over and stuck his head in the cockpit, where the pilot, Army Air Corps Captain Charlotte Maidstone, was out of her helmet and unstrapping herself.

  “Thanks for coming to get us,” he said.

  She smiled brightly at him. “Always, mate.”

  Jameson felt like crying, weepingly grateful to have a comrade-in-arms that faithful, even more grateful for that than for being back on home soil. Of course, crying was something he couldn’t allow himself to do. Not yet, not until this was over.

  He turned and headed toward the JOC.

  * * *

  But the JOC found him first, Second Lieutenant Miller trotting up through the near dark straight at him.

  “Morning, Major!”

  Jameson blinked, belatedly realizing the darkness was lightening – dawn was just starting to break out beyond CentCom’s twenty-foot walls, behind him to the east. And soon the sun would be coming up. Jameson wondered if it would be the last sunrise any of them would see. Maybe they were already too late.

  “And well done.” Miller – one of CentCom’s last two surviving ops officers, and one of the few people who always seemed to have a good handle on what the hell was going on – had already been briefed via radio that One Troop’s mission to Moscow had succeeded.

  But his expression, dark, belied his cheery words.

  In any case, Jameson ignored the congratulations and physically turned Miller around, angling them both back toward CentCom’s Strategic Headquarters (SHQ) building – the big and modern four-story structure that backed up against the stone walls of the original prison complex on its east side.

  “Brief me en route,” Jameson said. “What’s our situation?”

  Miller quickly shifted gears. “It’s not good.”

  “Elaborate.” The two fast-walked side-by-side.

  Miller sighed. “The south is completely lost. Virtually all our combat units outside the city and on the ground – never mind supply and logistics units – have been killed, turned, or scattered. Almost none have made it back inside the Wall.”

  “What’s the point of the damned gates, then?” Jameson asked.

  “It all happened too fast. With the collapse, the dead encircled London in hours. Now we’re ringed in a mile deep. Two miles. We can’t open those gates – probably ever again.”

  Jameson shook his head. “And the gap in the Wall?” He’d still been in command, briefly, when the gigantic section of ZPW in the north had collapsed.

  “The engineering personnel we’ve got up there are trying to rebuild it. And the gap is still being held – by 2 PARA.”

  “Them and who else?”

  Miller shrugged, obviously long ago numbed by reversals, setbacks, and ridiculous odds. “You know how it is, Major – the units on civil guard duty inside the Wall were never front-line, hardcore infantry. Virtually none are combat veterans. They’re panicking in advance – we’ve already had reports of mass desertions, troops defying orders and legging it. A few units, or parts of them, are moving north – but they’re having to fight through the flood of refugees already fleeing south. We tried reinforcing the Paras by air.”

  “How’d that go?”

  Miller gave him a look that said, Don’t even ask.

  “Okay. How many men do the Paras have left?”

  “Half the battalion? Less? And what’s left is going down fast – or, worse, getting infected and switching sides. The whole defense could collapse any time.”

  Jameson stopped walking. They’d just reached the glass front doors of SHQ. He didn’t go in, but instead stopped and shook his head, clearly in disbelief. Numbly, he reached for his radio and flipped channels. “Wyvern Two-Zero, One Troop Actual, message, over.”

  “Charlotte here, Jameson. What’s up?”

  “How far can you get us with the fuel left in the Fat Cow?”

  “Dunno. How far you need to go?”
<
br />   Jameson looked at Miller. His forehead creased before answering. Jameson repeated it: “Fifteen or sixteen miles.”

  “Um – yeah, probably. Sure.”

  Jameson paused. “Can you get back again?”

  “Less sure of that. But not your problem.”

  “Meet us back on the tarmac. Out.” Jameson flipped channels again and hailed Croucher. “Top up ammo and water, everything you can carry. Mainly ammo. Then grab everyone and muster back at the helipad.”

  “Copy that, Major.”

  Jameson paused before keying his mic again. “Sorry about breakfast.”

  Croucher was unperturbed. “We’ll grab a fucking sandwich.”

  * * *

  When their commander met the rest of One Troop back beneath the twin rotors, the unit was not only back up to its full remaining strength – but also in possession of a big cardboard box of, yes, sandwiches, wrapped in paper napkins, and another one of bottled water. More strikingly, virtually all of the men labored under huge bergens sagging under the weight of what Jameson was pleased to think must be hundreds of rifle magazines and thousands of rounds of ammunition.

  But, oddest of all, bringing up the rear was Croucher himself, along with the junior man Simmonds, the two of them pushing two big rolling carts. To Jameson’s amazement and admiration, sitting on the first were the disassembled components of two 81mm mortars – tubes, bipods, base plates, and sighting units. On the other cart were stacked cases of high-explosive mortar rounds.

  Jameson squinted. “Don’t you think they might need those?”

  “Not yet,” Croucher said. Jameson took his point: whoever these belonged to wasn’t going to need them as urgently as One Troop was about to.

  “Ask before you took ’em?”

  “Nope.”

  “Good man. Now hustle them up the damned ramp before anyone notices.” Jameson put his shoulder down and helped. They were damned heavy, and the ramp suddenly very steep.