Zombie War: An account of the zombie apocalypse that swept across America (8 page)

I was puzzled. “Couldn’t you get that intelligence information from satellites?”

The general tried to smile, and then decided it just wasn’t worth the effort. “Sure,” he conceded, “but apart from the real-time delays between when the information is gathered, and when it was passed through to SAFCUR Command, have you ever seen a satellite rescue a refugee?”

I got the point.

The general shook his head. “Satellite imagery was helpful, but not telling,” he said. “Sure, we’ve got a sky full of birds and I could have tasked every one of their cameras to scour Alabama and Georgia as the plague swept north. But satellites are just photos. They can tell you the ‘what’ but they can’t tell you the ‘why’. They can’t tell you about the on-ground factors. Even the live-feed drones that relayed images back were barely useful because there was nothing vital they could tell us. HUMINT was more precious to me.”

“HUMINT?” The military has a profound fascination for acronyms.

“Human intelligence,” the General explained. He looked at me as if it was a term I should have known. “Eyes, ears… men on the ground. It was risky work for those men in the Humvees, but it was essential. And the Black Hawks crews took great risks too, probing deep towards Columbia, Atlanta and Birmingham in the search for survivors.”

General Horsham looked pointedly down at his wristwatch and then at the closed door of his office, as though he was expecting to be interrupted at any moment. I sensed my time with the man was running short. I started to close my notebook, and then tossed out my last question like it was a hail Mary pass that I hoped he would catch and run with.”

“Why didn’t we base our response to the zombie outbreak on CONOP 8888?” I asked.

Silence.

Not the amiable silence you experience when two old friends have run out of things to talk about and are happy just to sit and reminisce – this was one of those ominous silences that precedes a thunder storm. The atmosphere in the office suddenly became charged.

“That plan was a load of shit,” Horsham exploded. “A useless piece of marketing trash that made no strategic or tactical sense. Christ, it was supposed to have been a Pentagon document, but I tell you, no one I came across even knew it existed until the media got hold of it.”

On April 30
th
2011, the US Strategic Command drew up a document that outlined the way the American military should deal with an undead apocalypse, entitled CONOP 8888. The plan was also known as ‘Counter-Zombie Dominance’. The document came to light in 2014 and was featured on hundreds of online blogs, with commentators going to great lengths to point out the glaring inadequacies of the policies outlined.

“It was a joke,” Horsham's tone was almost offended. “Some hair-brained idiot’s idea of a way to fictionalize preparedness for a raft of real world threats. We looked at that plan for five seconds and threw it in the trash.”

“Like that promotion the CDC came out with at the same time?” I asked. “That Preparedness 101 for Zombies?”

“No,” Horsham shook his head. “Not like that at all.” The big man was bristling with frustration and temper. He got up from his chair and leaned across his desk, planting his big hands on the tabletop and thrusting out his jaw. “The CDC plan was actually useful. It alerted people to natural disaster preparedness by using a fictional zombie apocalypse as a way to attract interest from the public. It served a very valuable purpose. CONOP 8888 was the opposite. It was a destructive divisive load of rubbish that should never have been written, and never seen the light of day.”

BARKSDALE AIR FORCE BASE, LOUISIANA:

608
th
AIR OPERATIONS CENTER

Lieutenant Colonel Greg Pike wanted to make one thing clear.

“The Air Force didn’t bomb every bridge along the Mississippi River,” he explained to me patiently as we stood outside the Air Operations Center at Barksdale. “The Air Tasking Order we worked off specified seventy-two bridge structures. They’re the ones we bombed.”

“How many B-52 aircraft were involved in the mission?” I asked. I had my notebook ready, pen poised.

“Nine,” Pike said easily. “The 8
th
Air Force was tasked with the mission and the job fell to the 2
nd
Bomber Wing here at Barksdale, and elements of the 5
th
Bomber Wing, stationed at Minot Air Force Base, North Dakota. They were responsible for the most northern bridges across the river.”

“Only nine B-52’s? That doesn’t seem like a lot of aircraft for such an extensive operation?”

Pike gave me the kind of special look I imagined he reserved for journalists and politicians. “The ordnance we dropped were JDAM Mk 84 bombs,” he explained brusquely. “They’re two-thousand pound bombs. We allocated two weapons for each bridge and each of the aircraft carried sixteen bombs. Do the math.”

I did, and then asked another question quickly.

“Can you tell me how long the actual procedure took, from start to finish?”

The Lieutenant Colonel smiled amiably enough. He grabbed at his nose and tugged at it, then stared up into the sky for a moment as if he could hear an aircraft overhead. “We flew the missions over two consecutive days, right at the very outset of the infection,” the man said. “This would have been around the same time the President approved the plan for the Danvers line. We had the job of securing the west flank of the perimeter. Most of the work was done on the first day of the operation. On the following day a three-ship cell went back over the targets to re-strike any bridge still standing.”

There were over two hundred and twenty bridges along the Mississippi River. Seventy-two accounted for roughly a third of those. I stared at the Air Force Lieutenant Colonel and made a face to express my confusion.

“What happened to the rest of the bridges?” I asked.

Pike was a tall man, and when he smiled, it reached all the way to his eyes and left little dimples in his cheeks. He was immaculately dressed in uniform, his regulation-length hair neatly parted on the side and just beginning to turn from black to grey. His eyes were bright, and he had that peculiar far-away gaze I had seen in other pilots – the look of a man who was accustomed to staring at far away distances. He had a high forehead and perfect white teeth.

He smiled again, as if to show them off to me.

“The smaller bridges were left in the hands of the Army Corps of Engineers,” Pike explained. “They were demolished at the same time, and the ferries that operate on the Mississippi as far north as Memphis were all moved to the west bank and placed under the control of elements of the Arkansas and Louisiana National Guard.”

“Do you know why?” I asked.

“Why do you think?” The Lieutenant Colonel fixed me with a stare. He folded his arms across his chest.

“To prevent opportunists from operating the ferries during the outbreak?”

Pike smiled, and nodded his head. “Exactly,” he said. He glanced pointedly at his wristwatch. “Are we done here?”

“Not quite,” I said quickly. Pike sighed and shuffled his feet. “Look, I was told this would be quick,” he said, and there was a grumble of aggravation in his voice. He didn’t want to do this interview.

“Can you tell me what it was like to fly those missions?” I asked. I wanted to know how they were different from other similar tasks the B-52’s might have been called upon to perform in overseas theaters of war.

The Lieutenant Colonel suddenly became more serious, as though this question was at least deserving of his attention.

“It was surreal,” he said, like he was confiding something personal. “It was the most poignant mission I have ever been a part of.”

“Poignant?” I frowned. It was such a powerful word, and so unexpected. “In what way?”

Pike unfolded his arms and wrung his hands. “It was on home soil,” he said. “That was the first thing. In my life I never thought I would see the day when war came to America… when we were fighting to defend our own nation, rather than protect another.” He shook his head. “It really hit home – flying over those bridges and knowing we were destroying history and infrastructure because war had come to the USA. It still gets me…” his voice trailed away and for a moment he was silent and lost in a rising tide of his own emotions.

“And in other ways also?” I prodded gently.

He nodded. “The B-52 is the mother of all killing machines,” he said with a pilot’s passion. “For over fifty years those BUFF’s have been the backbone of America’s strategic bombing capabilities. Hell, during Desert Storm a flight of B-52’s flew from here to Iraq, bombed targets, and then flew home again,” Pike said proudly. “We were in the air for thirty-five hours and flew fourteen thousand miles non-stop. Now, suddenly, we were flying short hop operations and hitting targets just over the horizon.”

I began to understand the impact the bridge-bombing missions along the Mississippi had had on this man. For the first time, perhaps, warfare was incredibly personal.

“You called the planes BUFF’s a moment ago. What does that mean?”

“Big Ugly Fat Fucker,” Pike seemed to take some delight in sharing the term of affection. “Or if you prefer the sanitized version, Big Ugly Fat Fellow.” He smiled then, but I wasn’t sure if it was because he was pleased, or because the joke was on me.

“Did it feel like other bombing missions at all?”

“No,” Pike admitted. “Not to me, anyhow. It was devoid of every stimuli.”

What the?

I looked at the pilot, puzzled. “Um… what?” I tried to be delicate.

“Flying those missions was almost like operating a simulator,” he explained. “There were no nerves, and there was no sense of flying into danger like every other combat mission. No one was firing at us. No one was trying to defend the bridge. No enemy fighters were hunting us. There was nothing. It was so antiseptic, and yet at the same time incredibly harrowing, because of the significance of what we were doing.”

I had imagined high altitude bombing would create a sense of distance and remoteness for these pilots – something I thought I would be less likely to find in the soldiers who fought so close to the enemy. I was wrong. Distance did not diminish the wrench of a man’s patriotism, nor the anguish of the duty they were called on to perform.

It was a somber, sobering moment for me.

“Dropping bombs on a target from high altitude must be fraught with its own perils,” I said slowly. “Things like accuracy, for instance…”

The Lieutenant Colonel shook his head. “It’s not like what you imagine,” he said. A little bit of color came back into his face, as though he had brought his emotions back under control. “In World War II, high altitude bombers were happy if they landed ordnance within three thousand feet of their target. Today, we’re accurate to forty feet because of the GPS power of the JDAM attachments.”

I was impressed. He saw it on my face. But I was also a little confused.

“Forgive my continuing ignorance,” I began, and Pike went out of his way to stifle a meaningful laugh, “but what exactly are these JDAM devices? You mentioned them earlier in the interview as well.”

“JDAM stands for Joint Direct Attack Munition,” the Lieutenant Colonel said, then waited impatiently until I wrote everything down. “It’s a guidance kit that we use to convert ‘dumb’ bombs into all-weather ‘smart’ munitions. Once a bomb is equipped with a JDAM kit, it is guided to the target through a guidance system that works in conjunction with a GPS receiver.”

“And that’s what makes it accurate?”

“Yeah,” Pike said dryly. “What we aimed at, we hit. All the bridges tasked to us were destroyed.” Pike’s expression remained bleak, but despite the emotional strain of the bombing mission, a tiny trace of pride crept into his voice for a mission successfully accomplished.

“I just hope I never have to fly another mission like it,” he said softly.

NAVAL STATION NORFOLK:

NORFOLK, VIRGINIA

The Petty Officer shook my hand and smiled because he was supposed to, not because he was pleased to see me. “You’re John Culver?” He glanced down at the credentials clutched in my fist that I had carried through the security checks.

“Yes,” I said.

The man nodded. “I’m here to escort you to the Vice Admiral’s office. He’s been waiting for you.”

I shrugged an apology. Gaining access to the world’s largest naval base wasn’t just a stroll through the gates. “Sorry,” I said. “I wasn’t expecting such a lengthy processing procedure.”

The Petty Officer looked at me like maybe I should have. He turned on his heel and I scurried to follow.

I got lost in the maze of buildings. The vastness of the naval base was overwhelming.

“Naval Station Norfolk supports seventy-five ships and over a hundred aircraft,” the Petty Officer sketched an outline of the base as we walked. “It is made up of fourteen piers and eleven hangars. As well as being the largest naval base in the world it also has the highest concentration of US Navy forces.”

I didn’t write any of this down. I was struggling to keep pace with the sailor.