ARISEN, Book Eleven - Deathmatch (13 page)

“Oh – radio Charlotte our new grid coordinates here. It will help if the plane, and the fuel for it, all end up in the same place.”

Gibson nodded.

Eli put the men in patrol formation.

And Jameson led them into the still and silent darkness.

* * *

“Akela, there’s an outgoing transmission.”

It was the radio operator, and Akela strode over to that station. “Is the message encrypted?”

“It was. Decrypted now.”

Thank you, Oleg Aliyev
, Akela thought.

“And as long as you speak English.”

Akela did, reasonably well. The two sides of the conversation were short and to the point. “Give me a transcription,” he said. A minute later, he had it on his tablet and read it again. “Have you triangulated the source?”

The radio op nodded. “Yes. It’s from within the city limits, to the northeast, roughly three to eight kilometers. It’s hard to get a perfect fix on distance with a transmission at ground level.”

Akela squinted, then pointed the tablet outward, showing the map reference that had been read aloud in the transmission. “Is your fix consistent with these grid coordinates?”

“Yes. Precisely.”

Akela nodded. “Transmit this grid reference to Viper One. Then put me through.” When it had been done, he touched his headset. “Lyudmila. Receive that?”

“Affirmative. We’re already up and moving.”

“Good. Capture the plane and any personnel. I want them alive.”

“No problem.”

“There’s also another aircraft inbound, rotary-wing.”

“Refueling bird?”

“That’s my guess. The pilot’s a woman.” Akela could sense Lyudmila shrugging over the line. It was neither here nor there for her. The Red Army had been basically gender-neutral for decades. And it was far too late in the day, and the post-Apocalypse, to start getting sentimental about chivalry.

“Get it done,” Akela said in closing. But as he signed off, he began to wonder:
What else do you know, Oleg Aliyev?

Moreover, and again, why was the Kazakh so important as to be worth a cross-continental rescue mission? As the original designer of Hargeisa, he could of course be invaluable in Britain’s own vaccine effort. But Akela had a funny feeling it was something else. That there was something the Kazakh wasn’t telling him.

He got up and headed back to that interrogation room.

Thirty seconds later, a communications specialist came into the TOC looking for him. But Akela hadn’t told anyone where he was going.

“Just put it in e-mail,” the radio op said. “He’ll get it.”

The specialist nodded – but hesitated.

Shotgun Shell Shag

Moscow – Northwest Edge of Red Square

The first active undead that One Troop encountered were in Red Square itself. They managed the five-click march across Moscow virtually without contact – and without once waking the dead. They saw plenty of dormant Zulus, in ones, twos, and a few disturbingly large groups. But in every case they were able to detour around – or else clear a bottleneck with a few well-placed and silent shots.

This was why only was One Troop was One Troop.

By this point in the day, no other small infantry unit that Jameson knew of had spent half as much time in overrun territory, and lived to tell the tale. No other unit had anything like their skills in operating in areas denied by the dead. And no one but Jameson could run them like such a perfectly oiled machine. This was why he made the decision to lead the team on this mission himself – no other conductor could direct this orchestra of controlled violence. And the ten Marines he and Eli had picked were all first-chair players – the survivors of the survivors.

So far, the men were more than validating the faith Jameson had placed in them – and they in him. They were back in the game. And doing what they did best.

But as they moved in darkness and silence to the edge of Red Square, they realized what they faced now might be a challenge of a new order. There were more dead in the square than they’d seen anywhere else – a lot more. And they were moving. Someone had riled them up. Something had gone down here a lot more recently than the fall. Within hours, if Jameson was any judge.

Maybe it was just the crash-landing of the helo flown by the man they were here to extract.

Or maybe it had been something else.

* * *

“There,” Jameson whispered. “The helo.” He had his NVGs flipped up, using a magnifying night-vision monocular optic to scan the square.

“Got it,” Eli whispered. It was pretty clearly a crash-landed helicopter, distinct even at this distance.

“Now look past it – to the left.” Beyond it was a hulking shape. It was indistinct, but it had to be the tank being used as a hiding place by their presumptive rescuee, Oleg Aliyev. And, due to Sod’s Law, it was nearly at the far end of the damned gigantic square. Worse, staggering bodies were moving in front of it, in one direction and then the other, at regular intervals.

“Maybe we should have left a few of the lads behind after all,” Eli whispered. He didn’t mean he was worried about Gibson or the plane. He meant moving the group of a dozen men through the shifting labyrinth of the overrun square was going to be a tricky business.

“Think we should split up?” Jameson whispered back, pocketing his optic and pulling his NVGs back down. “Two search teams?”

Eli considered, then shook his head. “Nah. I don’t like splitting us up. Not this deep in the woods.”

“Okay. We’ll make it work. One column, you and me, top and tail.” Eli was, frankly, a better route-picker than Jameson. He had some preternatural way of sensing dead, or any kind of trouble, before the others blundered into it.

Eli squinted as he scanned the terrain. “Reckon our best move is to slip around the perimeter on the left. Stay fast and silent, dodge if we can, shoot to clear if we have to.”

“With a nice solid wall on our left.”

“Precisely.”

Jameson let Eli move out and stood watch as the rest of the column slithered by. Ten Marines, weapons up, kit cinched down and squared away for silence, moving heel-toe in boots far too well broken in to ever squeak.

As the last man slipped by, Jameson fell in at the rear. And he started stealing looks over his own shoulder.

At ten-second intervals.

* * *

There were too many dead on their feet and moving around for One Troop’s comfort. But there were also an awful lot of them destroyed and on the ground – almost all wearing the greatcoats the Red Army had used to get through the kinds of hellish winters that doomed the invasions of both Napoleon and Hitler.

Led by Eli, One Troop stuck to the shadows. A line of sad-looking trees on the left side of the square fronted what looked like a lot of expensive shops. Jameson clocked a Louis Vuitton store before he got his attention focused back on what counted – the dead, and staying the hell away from them. The trees and doorways provided a little cover – but only for a couple of Marines at a time, so they were starting to get strung out.

They were also having to stop for long-ish periods to let the wandering stars of the dead wander on by again. So far they’d only had to take down two – both of which Eli dispatched with his knife in perfect silence. And they were now what looked to Jameson to be a little more than halfway down the length of the square. The gaudy onion domes of St. Basil’s Cathedral on the south edge were starting to loom, somehow seeming colorful even in monochrome night-vision green and black. And the massive open expanse of the square seemed to want to suck them out there, like the vacuum of space.

In not much longer, they were going to have to leave the safety of the shadows and venture out into the open square. They moved swiftly and silently past the sad and hunched shape of what looked like it had once been a very nice helicopter. It also had a small pile of bodies beside its open side cargo door.

In another minute they came even with the tank, which was closer in to the edge of the square. One lucky thing. And, so far, they’d managed to slip by all the undead guardians of Moscow without drawing attention.

Long may our luck hold
, Jameson thought.

They’d been in similar situations many times. But never so far from home, so cut off from any support. And definitely never with so much on the line. Usually, it had just been their own lives. Now the One Troop commander knew their lives were the least of it. He was having to shift his operational focus. His priority could no longer be safeguarding the lives of his men. It could only be safeguarding the life of a single man.

One he had never even met, and might not even like.

Maybe Dusseldorf was a dress rehearsal
, he thought. There, he’d had to spend the lives of good men, with whom he had served for years and been closer to than brothers, all for a dismantled pile of machine. A bloody piece of equipment. But he couldn’t afford to get too philosophical right now. He had to focus on the job in front of his face. And just get it done.

Taking a couple of deep breaths, he started to move up, passing each man in the column in turn, touching each lightly on the back or shoulder. In thirty seconds he was up in the lead position with Eli. And he made a decision.

He put his mouth to Eli’s ear and said, “Wait here. Just me.”

Eli gave him a look. But he stayed put.

* * *

Keeping low and moving fast, Jameson waited for a gap in the shambling bodies and then moved out into the open. Instantly, he could feel the absence of any safety, anything solid to put his back up against. He was out in the open now, and he could get hit from any direction.

Or all of them at once.

He was fairly pleased with the total silence he moved in for the first half of the forty meters he had to cover – but then his boot crunched loudly on something. He stopped and went firm, waiting to see what would come.

Nothing did – yet.

Slowly, he reached down and felt around for whatever the hell he had stepped on. Some sixth sense told him it might be important. When he brought it up in front of his face, he could see it was an empty 12-gauge shotgun shell. And when he rose up into a crouch again, he could see there was a trail of them.

And he was following it – straight to the tank.

He got into the shadow of the thing without further mishap. It was even bigger than it had looked at a distance – much bigger than the Challenger main battle tanks in the British arsenal, bigger than the Abrams, or any tank he’d ever seen. Circling around to the opposite side, he found more destroyed dead that he had to step over – but then stopped in his tracks again. Around the bodies was a thick carpet of rifle brass. Picking one up, he found it was 7.62mm – but 7.62x39mm, not the NATO standard. Eastern bloc.

No surprise there
, Jameson thought.

But he was out of time for investigating mysteries. Keeping as low as possible, he climbed up on the front of the tank, where there were a couple more bodies sprawled out – but then to his dismay he found the front hatch standing straight up and open. He could think of a few reasons why the Kazakh might prop the hatch open – but none that would justify giving access to the undead population of the square.

Crawling forward, he drew his pistol with one hand and removed his red-lensed light from his vest with his other. He knew there wasn’t going to be enough ambient light inside for his NVGs to work. Slithering forward, he put his face inside the hatch, behind the light and handgun. It was big inside, with what looked like stations for at least three crew. But it was also immediately obvious it was unoccupied.

There was no one here. But he was wrong about the light.

A lonely green chem-light glowed faintly on the floor – which meant Jameson didn’t need his, so he put it away. He was briefly at a loss. They were here to pull this man out. But he wasn’t here – so now what the hell did they do? Suddenly he had all the time in the world for investigating mysteries.

He lowered himself down through the hatch.

To look for more clues.

Finish This Thing

200 Feet Off the Deck, 200km from the Stronghold

Up above northern Somalia, as the forest and mountains both dropped away behind the blasting Seahawk, Kate was able to point out to Handon what Jake had been telling him about. Much of Somalia remained what it had always been – a semi-arid desert where virtually nothing grew, and there were no natural resources. Much like what Henno and his British Army mates in Afghanistan had called the GAFA – the Great Afghan Fuck-All.

Handon idly wondered why the places with absolutely nothing worth fighting over were always the most war-torn.

Now, with Kate pointing them out, he could see fingers of oasis dividing the wide stretches of flat and dusty brown nothingness, slithering inland from the coasts, particularly the east coast, out on the Indian Ocean. They were river valleys, many looking implausibly lush, considering the near desert that surrounded them.

Almost anything could hide in there.

But Handon had no intention of finding out what. With any luck, they’d never go anywhere near them, and only be on the ground four minutes. Now he watched the sparser bush of the Galmudug region coming up ahead of them. And as the wind whipped through the cabin and pulled tears from the corners of his eyes, he found he was actually feeling pretty relaxed about what was about to happen.

As usual, the threat of imminent death calmed his nerves.

The stresses of this mission so far had stretched him and his team to the breaking point. But now, perhaps, they had passed through all that. There was a reasonable chance they had the endgame in sight – and had a way to complete their mission that might not get anyone else killed or infected.

Yeah, maybe Jake was right, and they would end up battling 200 al-Shabaab fighters to the death for control of Patient Zero. But if that was their fate, then that was what they’d do. And if so, Handon was at peace with it – like a samurai about to confront dozens of opponents with his one sword alone.