Last Stand Read online

  “You know you’re doing the mission,” she said. “Because it’s worth it. Priceless gear for us. Freedom for you. And for your beloved men.”

  Katya. Jesus Christ. The bitch was tough, mean, and highly trained – but then again she didn’t have my upper-body strength. I flipped her over on the bed, pressing my full weight down on her hot body underneath me, and pinning her hands with my wrists.

  “And I told you,” I said through gritted teeth. “I’m—”

  “Da,” she said, bucking her hips, kicking one of my legs out, and flipping me over on my back now. “You told me you’re not doing this anymore.” Her face moved within inches of mine. “You may fool your men, but not me. I see you. All your life was about believing in something – something bigger than yourself. Now you believe in nothing. And that void is killing you. But you must embrace it.”

  I closed my eyes. “How the fuck do you embrace a void?”

  She smiled at this. While gorgeous, it wasn’t a soothing effect. I could see her canine teeth again, but closer up. She answered me through full, perfectly shaped, and slightly glistening red lips. “It is like the sky. You fly through it – untethered, and free.” She must have seen my disgusted look, because her smile melted away, disappearing just as completely, no doubt, as had her former enemies – and probably her former lovers. “Fine. Refuse the freedom. Be miserable, in the lonely prison of your head. But in that case, since you believe in nothing, what does it matter what we do? The body still needs what it needs.”

  I sighed. “It matters because it makes me feel even worse.”

  “Fuck your feelings. You want to stop me? Here’s your knife. Here’s your pistol. Stop me.” I didn’t stop her. And, not for the first time, she literally ripped my clothes off.

  Katya wasn’t irresistible the way some other women are.

  * * *

  “You deploy with us,” I said to Uron. “Hang your own ass out, boots in the mud and blood, ride or die. That’s the only way this happens.”

  “Hmm,” Uron said, spinning to face me where I stood again in the hatch of CIC. “Makes a certain poetic sense. You can’t trust me to deliver your men to the JFK. Not unless I offer myself as hostage.”

  “You’ve got your own hostages,” I said. What I meant was the four men of mine he was already planning to keep on the Gorshkov while we ran the mission – and who would keep the rest of us from just fucking off and making our own way to the Kennedy. “And now I’ve got mine.”

  “Good enough,” he said, putting his hand out. I took it. His grip was steel. “I am Spetsnaz GRU. But I am Spetsnaz.”

  I took his meaning – he was a shooter first, and he could deploy, and fight. But I also knew he wasn’t like other Spetsnaz, at least not the other three on this ship. Katya told me once: “Spetsnaz soldier is a skeptic, a cynic, and a pessimist. He believes in the depravity of human nature, and knows that, in extreme conditions, man becomes beast. He does not believe in justice, goodness, or humanity. He exists in a state of freedom – where he fears no one, trusts no one, and asks no one for anything. Especially mercy.”

  So, yeah, sure – Uron was as ruthless as the others. Like them, he believed the last man standing wins. And, given current events, he might actually be the last man standing, on the whole of the Earth. “The Red Army didn’t defeat Hitler or Napoleon,” he told me one time. “The Russian winter did. But what you must realize is… we lived through the same winter. We were just harder to kill.” But that was the strange thing about Uron. I was pretty sure he actually did believe in something. He believed in himself.

  And that was one thing he had on me.

  * * *

  The Kamov Ka-27 “Helix” lifted heavily off the rear deck into the dark.

  The sixteen of us, with weapons and full battle rattle, sat crammed in back of the bulbous helicopter, its twin coaxial rotors screaming away overhead. On all our previous scavenging missions, we’d always had to leave a few guys behind, anyway – the specs rated this bird for transport of 16 combat troops – but this time was different. Those we were leaving behind might really be left behind. Uron had promised to radio back and have my other four men put out to sea in a lifeboat, with a radio transponder, so we could find them.

  Just as soon as he had the goods in hand.

  And that moment, right before he headed back to the frigate, would be the last one where we outgunned him fifteen to one. So it shouldn’t be possible for him to double-cross us. No, check that – I hadn’t yet figured out how he was going to double-cross us.

  But I had a little time yet.

  Though it was barely a minute of flight time over open water before the blackness flashing by below us stopped glinting, telling me we had made landfall. Now if we went down – and, from the minute it comes off the assembly line, all a helicopter wants to do is kill you – we’d die burning in the mountains, instead of drowning in the sea.

  We had launched in the middle of the night this time for an actual reason – because time was the only thing on our side. We’d had the good luck to be cruising the Gulf of Oman – still 605 miles from FOB Chapman, but a lot closer than the Kennedy, which was steaming south from the Persian Gulf. Hopelessly outclassed by their guns and air power, our only real chance was getting in and out before they arrived.

  Did I mention the ferry range of the Kamov was exactly 600 miles? That would leave no less than a five-mile hump over crushing terrain for those of us in the assault force – and a one-way trip for the helo. But first on Uron’s list of Christmas goodies he wanted from Chapman was a V-280 Valor tilt-rotor aircraft. The successor to the V-22 Osprey, it had massive built-in stealth tech – including noise-canceling rotor blades, engine, and exhaust – and for that reason would be the ultimate pimped ride in the ZA, where any noise woke the dead. And with 360-degree AR (augmented reality) displays – letting you look around and see anything outside the helo that radar could see – plus a top speed of 322mph, and range of nearly 2,500 miles, it would give the Gorshkov a compelling advantage in any future scavenging contests.

  But not us.

  Assuming Uron kept his word, we would be left on the ground after we took the base – and then get picked up when forces from the Kennedy arrived. They’d be too late to the party to get any favors, and might be seriously fucked off that the base had already been cleaned out of goodies. But on the upside, they’d get a shiny new Ranger platoon – okay, a badly dinged up, degraded, and demoralized Ranger platoon – but still one with solid zombie-fighting and scavenging experience.

  In any case, getting in before them still sounded a hell of a lot better than overlapping with their scavenging mission – and possibly ending up in a midnight blue-on-blue firefight with naval security forces. Or, worse, Navy SEALs. This way, after Uron left in the Valor, we’d just stand out in the open with our hands in plain sight – talking real fast and moving real slow. And then, with any luck… with our first real luck in a long time…

  We’d all be going home.

  As the pitch of the rotors changed, the engines screaming against the load, we started to climb from the alluvial plains of Helmand up into the foothills of the eastern mountain ranges. It all looked pretty much the same undifferentiated black to me, even through NVGs. Illum tonight was negligible again. I got up and went to the end of the row of bench seats – where to my surprise and annoyance, I found Specialist Smith.

  “Hey,” I shouted. “What the fuck are you doing here?”

  I’d specifically assigned Smith to the hostage group being left behind. Spending the rest of his life as a scavenging slave for the Russians wouldn’t be fantastic. But it still beat being dead – or, worse, undead. And I figured a dispassionate assessments of the odds would show them to be against any of us surviving this mission. Also, I had an irrational attachment to keeping Specialist Smith alive. Probably best not to drill down too much on that one.

  Smith looked up at me with wide and innocent eyes. “I switched with Wójcik,” he said. T
hen, more than a little like a chastened child, possibly even pouting, he added: “I didn’t want to miss anything.”

  “Jesus Christ.” I saw he didn’t have his phone in his lap this time. All cell signals, never mind news broadcasts, had gone black months ago. And 28 Days Later was playing around the clock, available for streaming by looking out any fucking window.

  “I’m squared away, Top. Ready to fight.”

  And he was. Somehow, after all this – the fall of human civilization, our imprisonment on the frigate, the deaths of five of our guys on shore missions, the lack of anything to hope for or any kind of a future worth living – young Specialist Smith had kept his faith. He still believed in the team. And he believed in his mission to protect them. This was almost enough to give me a little hope.

  Almost.

  * * *

  We lay prone in our security perimeter in a ragged circle around the grounded bird until the last echoes of engine and rotor noise faded. Helo landings in high-altitude mountain ranges are dodgy at the best of times, never mind when you’re using the very last fumes in the tanks. But we were safe and on the ground. On the ground, anyway.

  And sharing it with the dead.

  In an overrun world, you always were. The only question was how many, and how close they were. Actually, there was suddenly a new and much worse question: would they be the new, pants-shittingly terrifying, running kind? If so, God save us all. Until now, in a world overrun by the dead, at least you could always outrun the wheezing bastards – barring the kind of perfectly-timed sprained ankle The Walking Dead liked so much. Now I wasn’t entirely sure they couldn’t run faster than us.

  When I was finally convinced we weren’t going to be jumped by a gaggle of Pashtun Zulus, moving at whatever speed, I silently got the men up and moving out. And very quickly, it became abundantly clear we were going to be in for a night of intense and unrelenting pain – five nonstop hours of humping up and down rugged goat paths, over and around cliff edges, through avalanche debris, and across steep and muddy terraces barely wide enough for our boots. All of it while racing dawn, with zero time to waste.

  At one point, Smith slipped and fell fifteen feet down into an irrigation ditch, which turned out to have a submerged dead guy in it, nearly making the fall a lethal one. After destroying the Zulu, we had to get Smith out of there, which with the thousand MG rounds strapped to him, was a lot harder than it sounds. On long humps, ammo equals pounds, and pounds equals pain. But we were going to be 600 miles from the closest support or resupply, and there would be exactly 16 of us to assault a fixed defensive position held by, according to our best estimates, 150 Taliban fighters.

  When we finally reached our first line-of-sight vantage of the FOB, I lay down on top of the steep ridge with my light-enhanced binos to my face – eyeballing the defenses directly, live and in person. As I did so, I felt as much heard Uron whisper in my ear: “So. What do you think?”

  I snorted. “I think the only difference between this and the Alamo is Davy Crockett didn’t have to fight his way in first.”

  Somewhat inexplicably, the camp sat down in a deep bowl – it had been sited and constructed in contradiction or just ignorance of the just about oldest rule in warfare, which says the battle is usually won by the guys who take the highest terrain – and overlooked by three towering mountain peaks, along with various elevated ridge lines. Not only would it be stupidly vulnerable to counter-attack – should we manage to take it in the first place – it would also be like a tub-drain for the dead, whenever they woke up.

  With us playing the role of the plug.

  We had only encountered a couple of Zulus on our way in, but that was down to careful route selection, and probably dumb luck. The basin Chapman sat in, I knew, was surrounded by a half-dozen Pashtun villages, perched up in various places on the slopes. And one thing we had learned from our scavenging missions was, if you made noise, the dead found you. Always.

  And unfortunately another near-universal rule of warfare is: battles are fucking loud.

  * * *

  Binoculars stowed away, cheek now down to the stock of my battle rifle, I ground my jaw and steadied my breathing, trying to focus on executing the plan. Execution is almost always all mental. Which presented a few small problems for me tonight.

  On the one hand, I was mentally done running missions for Uron. The gloss had worn off a long time ago. And the success of this one would just mean more and better weapons for him and his maritime mini-Red Army to rape and pillage whatever was left of humanity – perhaps drunk on the vodka we’d just scavenged for him. But, on the other hand, if completing this mission could also get me and my men out, away from this nightmare indentured servitude, and safely onto an American vessel…

  That was something worth fighting for.

  I scanned the five guard towers one by one, through my light-enhanced 3x magnifying optical scope. Unfortunately, only the squad and fire-team leaders had these. And Uron’s goons had taken all our PEQ-15s off us, not wanting us to use them to signal overflying U.S. aircraft with their IR lasers or illuminators.

  “How the fuck are we supposed to shoot at night without IR aiming lasers?” I’d asked him, my view of this op getting dimmer all the time.

  “Kentucky windage,” he said, patting me on the shoulder.

  He’d also taken our team radios off us, for the same reason – low-flying planes, or even the Kennedy itself, might be close enough to contact with them. So, basically, this was going to be like fighting with our dicks tied behind our backs. Not only had we been reduced to one of the three essential commando tasks – move, shoot, and communicate – we also couldn’t radio the frigate for help, support, or casevac. So now it was going to be the 16 of us, trapped in this death bowl, with 150 unprecedentedly well-armed Taliban fighters. Ones who had already literally survived the end of the world.

  And with all the dead of Khost Province waiting in the wings.

  Really, it was like Thunderdome: “Two men enter, one man leaves.” And, ultimately, those two men were me and Uron.

  Or so I thought at the start of the battle.

  * * *

  When my G-Shock ticked over, I took the first shot, though all of us fired nearly simultaneously. All five tower sentries died without ever standing up – probably without ever waking up – and definitely without making a sound. This phase was blessedly silent. Uron had at least left us our suppressors.

  I powered myself up to my feet and moved out fast, Uron running beside and just behind me, along with the other two men in our cobbled-together fire-team. This whole plan had been put together in haste, for obvious reasons – and, without a working radio channel, we couldn’t even audible any changes. But Rangers are elite, trained to operate and think independently. To show initiative.

  And to always be aggressive.

  I reached the perimeter wall in seconds, finding myself standing on a small pile of twice-dead corpses. The closest village was actually only eighty meters away across the river. Evidently, the Taliban – the current garrison at Chapman – had destroyed any dead that wandered too close, before they started moaning, and drawing more from the surrounding hills. Trying not to get infectious gunk on my boots, I got the main gate open with a mechanical breaching tool. I took a breath before pushing in.

  And I said a silent prayer.

  Because another ordinary comfort we didn’t have on this op was drone coverage. With the Aegis Combat System and search-radar arrays in the carrier strike group, which was now close, Uron decided he couldn’t risk putting anything up tonight – nothing but the insertion helo itself, which we’d kept mowing the grass, hopefully low enough to escape detection. Of course, most of me hoped we hadn’t – and the Americans already knew we were here. But, either way, now that we were down from the heights, and drone-deprived… we had absolutely no idea what was happening inside the FOB, even a few meters away. We just had to execute the plan – and pray.

  “Rangers lead the way,”
I whispered. That was my prayer.

  I led the way.

  * * *

  What nobody ever really tells you is that combat can be a total blast – the adrenaline-spiking X-Games adventure sport of a lifetime. Guys get addicted to it. When it’s going sideways, and you think you’re going to die in the next five seconds, a firefight is a very uncool thing to be involved in. But done right – as extreme team sport – it makes you feel alive like nothing else.

  I took a knee at the corner of a wooden structure, leaned out, sighted in – and dropped two robed guys out in the open on the run. That open area was actually the HLZ, which anchored the center of camp – and I could see the dark, sleek shape of the V-280 Valor hulking in the middle of it, its rotors tilted all the way up and drooping heavily overhead. As the two devout dead dudes slid into the dirt beneath them, I saw they were both wearing NVGs.

  It was impressive enough they were fighting, trying to repel our assault. If everything had gone totally to plan, this would have been a group execution of a bunch of sleeping guys in their racks. But something had woken them up – could have been cameras, trip-wires, somebody just out taking an early-morning dump, who knows – and so now we were in a running fight as we swept through the camp.

  Another interesting thing was so far they were all shooting with suppressed weapons. A dozen rounds chipped into the building beside me, causing me to duck back around the corner. It took me a second to ID their signature – Brügger & Thomet APC9s, which had been selected as the first new American submachine gun since WW2, not long before the Fall. The rumor that this place had all the cool toys was looking solid. Fortunately, the sub-guns were chambered in .45 ACP – a slow, fat round that would do hellacious damage to soft tissues, but would also be stopped by our body armor, and even by most of the flimsy building materials of the camp. I’m sure it made an outstanding zombie-fighting weapon.

  But against elite infantry, not so much.

  I stuck a single eye out, found the shooter out on the fence-line to the north, and dropped him as he reloaded. Two other great advantages of our 6.5mm battle rifles were range and accuracy. And, evidently, you could take the AK out of the Pashtun warrior – but not the spray-and-pray tactics. Anyway, the real miracle here was everyone was shooting suppressed, and also not chucking grenades – so far. This meant the fight would stay between us and Terry Taliban, and not involve the entire former population of Khost Province. Our odds weren’t great at 16 to 150.