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Noon, Sunday, May 1
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State Road 143, West of Kendalia, TX
Cobb had a short run of luck after losing his driver. He’d only driven three miles west of Kendalia when he’d come across an accident. Several days earlier, a car traveling at high speed rear ended a big farm tractor towing an implement. There wasn’t enough left of the car to tell what it was. Judging by the smell of rotting flesh from the wreck, no one in the vehicle survived. The tractor was abandoned, no sign of who was driving it, or even if it was being driven at the time of the collision.
Acting on a hunch, he parked behind the wreck, left the Stryker idling, and got out to examine the tractor. The hitch was a hopeless jumble of bent metal, which explained why it was left here. It was unlikely the tractor would’ve gotten far dragging a couple tons of twisted steel behind it. He went to the tractor, which was a 200-horse power John Deere 7210R, with dual rear wheels. One of his neighbors a few miles away had had one. More importantly, it boasted a fuel tank that held more than 100 gallons. He climbed up in the cab; the keys were gone, but the tractor had a gauge check switch. He flipped it and the controls came to life. Fuel registered as a quarter of a tank.
“Bingo!” he said and returned to the Stryker. He climbed up into the turret and took a good look all around. It was a wide-open stretch of Ranch Road 473 with nothing but fields on both sides. Since it was only May, they were largely empty, probably just planted. Still, he took his time looking. The infected had shown startling cleverness back in Kendalia. Confident he wasn’t about to be ambushed by a horde of ravening cannibals, he shut the vehicle down and went to work.
It took a few minutes to remove the anti-siphoning device from the tractor, then he snaked the hose into the tank. It was high up on the engine compartment, and the hose barely reached the ground. That worked to his benefit as he sucked on the hose until he felt a puff of air. He put the hose over the entrance to the fuel can, and, a second later, a stream of diesel began to spurt out. He got three cans filled before he lost the siphon.
“Damn,” he said and climbed back into the cab. It still read an eighth of a tank. The hose must not reach to the bottom. He was in the middle of trying to find a solution when he saw the truck. It was a pickup coming from the same direction he’d come from, still about a mile off. Judging by the dust it was throwing up, they were moving at a good clip.
Cobb didn’t know what made him head back to the Stryker. He’d done convoy duty a hundred times while still active duty, and every time he’d encountered civilians, they’d been courteous and often inquisitive. This time felt different. They were the first civilians he’d seen since Ft. Hood fell. It brought back a memory of Kathy and their last night together before the evacuation. Was she even still alive? He chased the thought away.
He quickly moved all three filled cans back to the Stryker, retrieving his fuel hose and closing the tank on the tractor, just in case, on the last trip. He had some money in his pocket and decided if the tractor belonged to whoever was in the truck, he’d offer payment to them. Somehow, he didn’t think that would be the same as before. He raised the ramp shortly before they arrived. From the direction they were approaching, nobody in the truck would have seen him move or the gate go up.
Cobb watched through one of the mirrored ports as the truck slowed. It was a late model Chevrolet, and there were at least a dozen men in the back. The bed bristled with guys in coveralls and all manner of long arms, from shotguns to expensive, customized AR-15s. For a second, he thought they were going to just drive by, then the truck turned sharply by the tractor and stopped.
“Lookit’ that big gun up on top,” Cobb heard one of them say, and he silently cursed. Of course he hadn’t taken down the .50 caliber. When had he had a chance?
“I see it Tom,” another man spoke, “but maybe we should leave well enough alone.”
“Shut up Edwin,” the first man, Tom, replied. “Shit just lying around, it’s ours now.” Others were beginning to speak up.
“Maybe you should listen to Edwin,” Cobb spoke loudly, bringing the conversation to an instant end. Almost every gun moved, though none were pointed at him. Yet.
“Who’s in there?” the man named Tom called. “Whatcha got in that tank? There’s fuckin crazy cannibals everywhere, y’all should be sharin’!”
“None of your business,” he called back, “you just mind your own.” He decided he wasn’t going to show them his face unless he had too. Right now, the bunch of rednecks couldn’t know whether they were dealing with one guy, or a dozen. “You don’t cause no trouble, and we won’t finish it.” Cobb let his own Texas accent slip through on purpose, along with saying ‘we.’ With a hand, he reached up and unlatched the turret hatch. “Go on now, git.”
He watched through the vision port as they talked it over. Tom was a huge dude riding in the back with a fully accessorized AR-15 cradled lovingly in his arms. Cobb knew the type. That floating barrel, skeletonized forward grip, and EOTech scope had probably cost him a couple months pay, but it gave him street cred at the local range. The cheap 40-round knockoff magazine spoke volumes to Cobb about any real ability this character had. Or rather, the lack thereof.
Clearly Tom wanted to make a go of it, while his friends figured to leave well enough alone. Eventually brains won over brawn, and the Chevy started up, spun its oversized tires, and raced off to the west, continuing in the direction they’d been heading. Cobb got a last, clear look at the expression on Tom’s face and guessed it wasn’t over yet.
He waited in the Stryker until the truck was lost in the distant heat shimmers of the road before dropping the rear ramp and dumping all three cans of diesel into the main tank. He stowed the cans in their rack on the rear of the vehicle and buttoned back up. With a roar the Stryker’s engine came back to life, and he followed the truck’s route.
He set a speed of 45 mph, well below what the truck had been doing, and checked his fuel level. The computer said he had 17 gallons of fuel, 30% of the Stryker’s 53-gallon capacity. The computer instantly analyzed the fuel running into the power plant and adjusted performance. It was designed to use JP8 aircraft fuel, like most military vehicles; however, it also had the ability to use standard diesel, though that resulted in a 5% performance degradation.
“A hundred nineteen miles,” he said, reading the display. It was a hell of a lot better than the 15-mile range he’d started off with. He checked the road ahead through the periscope, all clear, then glanced at the radio. He’d left it on since leaving the Texas Guard unit behind. “No Signal” was displayed in unending flashing LEDs.
He alternated between watching the road ahead and fiddling with the GPS navigation system. He couldn’t get any kind of long-range comms, but at least the GPS was still working. Whatever had FUBAR’d comms had mercifully left GPS alone. He didn’t want to think about trying to maneuver the 20-ton, 8-wheeled behemoth around Texas using local road maps. That would’ve been hard enough before the rest of his team bought it. The other thing he was missing, without his team, was anyone to watch the rear of the vehicle. The Stryker didn’t have a rear camera.
The seemingly chance encounter had him on his guard, and he kept the speed way down, allowing him to see the roadblock in time. He applied the brakes and the Stryker came to a quick stop. The low hill to his left that’d shielded the ambush point from his view until he turned the corner was too high to easily mount, and the drop off to the right was around 10 feet. Challenging, even for the Stryker.
Five hundred yards down the road, just short of the tiny town of Sisterdale, a semi-truck was sideways across the road. It was a flatbed with a stack of steel oil well casings on the back. Cobb used the FLIR camera on the front of the APC to zoom in and saw the heat signatures of more than ten people hiding behind the pipes. On the other side of the truck was a familiar Chevy pickup.
“Son of a bitch,” Cobb said, shaking his head. He didn’t want to kill any of these rednecks. He really, really didn’t. He sighed. As a soldier, his job was to protect Americans, not shoot them. Protect the United States of America from all threats, foreign and domestic. Edwin might be a threat to local commerce, but he was not one to the United States. Then he considered how many infected he’d shot. Were they a threat? Any more than Edwin? He looked over the terrain again and decided. “Fine,” he said and accelerated.
The Stryker was quiet for a 20-ton armored troop transport, but it wasn’t small. The ambush crew saw it the second Cobb came around the corner. They were proud of themselves for picking this location. The road was narrow; it would be hard for the tank to turn around. With high ground to one side and a steep drop-off to the other, their target had nowhere to go. Edwin was sitting in the driver’s seat of the pickup smoking a joint and grinning.
“He’s comin’ this way!” Tom yelled from the top of the trailer. Edwin took a toke and grinned bigger. “He’s speedin’ up!”
“He’ll slow down,” Edwin said. A few seconds later, the sound of the Stryker’s racing engine reached his ears inside the truck. It didn’t sound like it was slowing. In fact, it’d increased in pitch!
“It’s not going to stop!” one of the men yelled on the back of the truck. Edwin thought it was Tom’s second cousin. He saw the man leap down and run. Edwin popped the door, a small cloud of smoke wafting out into the air.
“Ain’t no way that little tank can crash through a semi-truck!” he yelled at the running figure’s back. Startled yells of fear made him look up at the men still holding position. Tom was looking down at Edwin, his eyes wide in terror. Edwin heard engine noise, the Doppler Effect making it sound surreal as it approached. The eight tires were almost louder than the engine. Edwin leaned over, looking under the trailer to see how close the tank was. He had a fraction of a second for his THC-fuzzed mind to comprehend that the Stryker was only yards away, before it hit.
Cobb shifted his angle slightly toward the rear of the trailer. There was almost five feet between the end of the trailer and the overhang on the left side of the road. He maneuvered so the wheels of the Stryker were almost brushing the edge of the overhang. He’d floored the power when he was within a hundred yards, accelerating the 20-ton vehicle to its top speed of 60 miles per hour.
The rednecks had had a good idea, blocking the road with a loaded semi-trailer, they’d just failed to execute it very well. The truck and trailer were jackknifed in the center of the road, with the truck part to Cobb’s right. The trailer was angled way from him. If it had been the opposite way, he might have been in trouble. In Iraq he’d seen Stryker drivers use the transports almost like tanks, crashing through buildings and ramming trucks off the road. They did those things at 10–20 miles per hour. At its top speed of 60, the Stryker possessed a devastating amount of inertial energy.
It slammed into the rear of the trailer like a train. The truck’s left tires were pushed down by the impact, then the trailer rebounded upward, even though the outer two tires exploded from the impact. Restraining poly-straps holding the 16,000 pounds of steel casings were ripped away, sending the pipes flying in a scattered jumble. The trailer itself was propelled away from the hurtling APC, and into Edwin. His brain was unable to register the pain in the fraction of a second it took the trailer to smash him into his pickup truck.
“Fuck!” Cobb yelled as the Stryker collided with the trailer. The steel, Kevlar, and aluminum-armored glacis plate of the APC collided with the aluminum-alloy chassis of the truck’s trailer, and the Stryker won. Still, the armor was severely deformed on the nose, and the armor overlay on the right front quarter was sheared away, leaving the gleaming white aluminum chassis visible.
The Stryker tried to skid left into the embankment, but Cobb was able to control it. The front four tires, the steering axles, swung to compensate, and he brought it under control. The semi-trailer spun away, slamming against the cab of the tractor and sending both careening off the right side of the road. Pipes and men cartwheeled through the air. When the pipes hit the road, they rebounded with almost musical notes. When they hit men, they left red smears and body parts.
Cobb had a second’s view of the once-beautiful Chevy pickup, catapulted into the air by the impact, as it pin wheeled off to the right. He let the Stryker pick up speed again, not wanting to take any fire if he could avoid it. Another corner was 200 yards further, and he took it at speed, the 8 wheels easily maintaining traction. He needn’t have worried. None of the ambushers were able to fire at the retreating Stryker; they were all dead.
He didn’t stop in Sisterdale. It didn’t look like much of a town anyway, just one of those places where two roads came together that someone had given a name. Ranch Road 473 veered north and joined with Ranch Road 1376, and he followed it. He passed a vineyard and a small country auto mechanic on the left while doing 50mph. The mechanic’s building was smoldering, having burned sometime in the last few days. He didn’t have time to look too closely because the few buildings of Sisterdale were racing by.
He saw a tiny post office, a saloon, and a wedding chapel of all things. A dozen cars were parked in front of the latter, and he’d wonder for the rest of his life about that site. The Sisterdale Volunteer Fire Department passed on his right, but he’d had enough of fire departments to last him a lifetime. He slowed as he turned to stay on 473, leaving Sisterdale behind forever.
As he completed the turn, he saw a crowd of about thirty people in the road. He took his foot off the gas, and they turned as one to look at the Stryker. He was maybe 200 yards away. None of them moved to get off the road, wave, or do anything except cock their heads in that disconcerting reaction he’d seen many times now.
“Damn it,” he said and slowed still more. Nowhere to dodge. They all ran at him, arms held out as if to embrace the Stryker, and he had no choice but to drive right through them. The thumping and crunching of human bodies impacting on the glacis at 35 miles per hour only caused a slight shudder to pass. A second later he was speeding up again. Were they the wedding party, overcome by the infection while trying to celebrate a union? No man had put it asunder, but Strain Delta had.
Cob drove on, alone with his thoughts, trying to forget the sound a body makes when it hit armored aluminum. He was five miles out of Sisterdale when there was a loud BANG from the rear of the Stryker and he surged a couple miles per hour. Something had rear-ended him. With no mirrors or a camera, he had no idea who had done it, or why. A second later he was hit again. Whatever it was, it was fairly large to cause a 20-ton Stryker to speed up.
“Okay,” he said in the driver’s compartment, “safe to say it isn’t someone friendly, or they’d have just pulled up alongside and waved.” He checked his belt and waited. Another impact, then he came to a sharp bend in the road to the left. He slowed slightly, then accelerated into the corner. Even with eight wheels, he felt a second of jaw-clenching drift before coming out of the turn and surging forward. Now came the guessing.
Cobb hadn’t heard a crash, so he knew that whoever it was, they were still back there. He reached up and popped the driver’s hatch, unbelted, and quickly stood. He had to crane his head around the hatch, which opened rearward, to see. There was a big farm truck, a sort of dump truck for grain. Like the pickup, this one was full of men and guns. He guessed he’d really pissed someone off. It was gaining pretty quickly, now that they were on a straightaway. That truck wouldn’t have a governor, unlike the Stryker.
“Okay, we can play this your way,” he said, and took another look. He made a mental estimate and dropped back down into his seat. He didn’t bother with the belt. Speed would count. Instead he counted down. “Now,” he said to himself, and jammed the brakes hard. All eight wheels locked up with a grinding squeal of heavy rubber on asphalt. Cobb imagined he could hear the farm truck driver scream in surprise as the armored rear of the Stryker came at him at a ridiculous speed.
CARRRUNCH! With his brakes set and his weight advantage, this time the Stryker didn’t surge forward. However, it did spin it sideways. He guessed the truck had unsuccessfully tried to veer to the side at the last second and had hit him off-center. The Stryker swayed on its suspension, and Cobb thought for a second it would flip. It righted itself, spinning almost 180 degrees, before coming to a stop. Outside he heard bending metal and flying dirt.
Instantly, Cobb locked the transmission, extracted himself from the driver’s compartment, and moved rear. He shoved the turret cover aside, stood on the riser installed for the purpose, and came up into the turret. He swept the lock off with his left hand, oriented on his target, and spun the turret around just as a round went Sprang! off the gun shield. The farm truck was off the road about fifty yards away. Its hood was at least a foot shorter and was pouring prodigious amounts of fluids onto the ground.
“Quit shooting and it ends here!” Cobb yelled as loud as he could. They didn’t want it to end, and more bullets bounced off the heavily-armored shield. “Fucking idiots,” he snarled, and charged the big .50 caliber gun.
Several in the back of the farm truck realized their peril and ducked down behind the cab just as the Ma Deuce began to roar. Cobb put the first five-round burst up the truck’s engine compartment and into the cab. There was at least one person in there because the windshield was punched into a spider web, and painted bright red. Range acquired, he let fly with a sustained ten-round burst, working it across the front of the truck.
Between the cab and the bed of the truck, there was almost an inch of steel. The .50 caliber BMG armor-piercing round could punch through two inches of steel. In penetrating the bed, the rounds fragmented and caused the steel bed wall to spall, or throw off bits of shrapnel, at greater than the speed of sound. Seven of the ten rounds penetrated the cargo compartment of the farm truck’s bed, turning it into a slaughterhouse.
Cobb didn’t bother checking the results or firing anymore. Even without direct visibility, he knew all too well what the .50 caliber was capable of against light military armor. Besides, he’d seen the blood flying, and what he was pretty sure was at least one severed head. He relocked the gun, slid the turret closed, and returned to the driver’s compartment. A second later, the Stryker was roaring off to the west.
Unlike the ambush back near Sisterdale, someone survived this encounter. Twenty-five men had crowded the back of the Kerr County Coop Feed and Grain truck as they caught up with the Stryker, including a driver and a man riding shotgun. The latter two were both casualties from the initial short burst. The seven rounds from the second burst that penetrated the back of the truck had shredded the occupants. Eighteen of the twenty-five died instantly from slugs or spall. Six of the other seven would take between five minutes and eight hours to die from their wounds. The last sat on the floor of the bed in almost an inch of blood screaming over and over. There would be no more pursuit from this group.
* * *
Entrance to the Columbia River Channel, Cape Disappointment, WA
They were falling further behind schedule. Being under-crewed wasn’t helping, and neither was running into one adrift vessel after another. Not stopping to check each one was tearing at Lieutenant Grange’s soul. The mission statement of the USCG was to render maritime aid where it was needed. Sailing past a boat adrift that sent a distress signal was difficult. The risk of putting a team from her already short crew aboard a ship that might be full of infected cannibals, though, was too great.
They’d boarded three boats that’d had people on deck waving, not drooling to eat them. In those three boats, they’d brought aboard thirty survivors. Those men and women were now quarantined in unused spaces. According to the info she had, the infection took over in less than 24 hours. The first group would get out that evening. She consoled herself with the knowledge that she’d saved those people, at least. The huge pleasure yacht with a running battle on its deck was the hardest to sail by. But their firing at the Boutwell when she didn’t slow validated Grange’s decision to pass it by.
The Hamilton-class Boutwell had been slated for decommissioning soon, after nearly 50 years of distinguished service. She’d sailed more than a million nautical miles, rescued hundreds of people, participated in the Gulf War, and had seized hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of illegal drugs. Her 14,000-mile range made her an incredibly versatile vessel. Grange had been honored to have Boutwell as her first assignment as a Lieutenant Junior Grade, even if it was the ship’s last cruise. It was the ship’s age that was killing her, and the reason they were laid up where they were.
“Captain, engine room,” the squawk box sounded. Grange reached over from her commander’s chair on the left side of the bridge and flipped the transmit switch.
“Captain here, go ahead, Warrant.” Chief Warrant Officer Manning had previously been in charge of small motor maintenance for the various craft. When the death of Ensign White had left Engineering without any leadership, she’d pressed Manning into the job. He’d worked on the Midgett as an assistant engineer, a different class but with similar propulsion.
“It’s the oil pump, ma’am.” His voice was squeaky over the old PA system. “Looking at the maintenance log, Ensign White was just stringing it along. There’re no spares on board.”
“Can you get it operational?” A long moment of silence followed. Grange guessed Manning was likely talking with his overworked team and digging through the store’s lists.
“I believe so.”
“How long?” she asked the big question. The trouble light had gone off four hours ago, “Oil Under Pressure.” They’d slowed but kept steaming until reaching the entrance to the Columbia River, when it gave out entirely. She couldn’t sail up the river without both engines. No way.
“I need to dismount it, which means draining the engine. We don’t have a lot of spare oil, so we need to save it.”
“How long, Warrant?”
“Twenty-four hours, ma’am.”
“Do the best you can,” she ordered and turned off the box.
“Anchor set, Captain,” the watch commander said. It was a job she used to do; now it was being done by a chief.
“Understood. Watch her swing to leeward, we don’t want to run up on the chain.”
“Aye, aye, ma’am.”
There was a small Coast Guard station on the other side of Point Disappointment. They were tasked with river patrol, but they didn’t have any boats over 10 meters. Still, it might have surviving personnel or equipment. Nobody answered the radio, but someone might still be alive there. Maybe she’d send a boat over to check while repairs were under way.
A loud Spang! sound echoed onto the bridge from down the companionway. Grange’s head spun around and she looked down the corridor. It sounded like something metal failing. She opened her mouth to ask the watch commander to check when another one, louder, came from the deck below.
“Bridge, mess hall!” the squawk box sounded. “We’re taking fire! A round just came through the bulkhead.”
“General quarters!” Grange snapped. A second later the alarm began to wail. “Watch, find who’s shooting!” Another hit, this one off the superstructure above the bridge. She grabbed the PA. “This is the captain. We’re under fire, all personnel clear the starboard side.” The watch commander held up her body armor, and she put her arms up and slipped into it, then grabbed her helmet from its peg. In seconds, everyone on the bridge was armored up. “Drop the bridge shields.” The heavy steel shutters were lowered and latched. A second later, one of the starboard shields rang, deforming from a massive impact.
“Shooter in the lighthouse,” the watch called, “bearing 175.” The monitor in the bridge, fed from a high definition FLIR on the mast behind them, spun to show the lighthouse. Several people were there with rifles. They even had some sand bags.
“What the hell is that all about?” Grange wondered as one of them fired. A second later a round hit her ship.
“Looks like .50 caliber rounds,” one of her few damage control people reported. “That hit was just below the water line, starboard crew birthing. It’s plugged.”
“That’s enough,” Grange said. “Fire control, wake Oto up!” The main gun in its forward mount suddenly aimed up at the sky then back with the horizon. “HE, target the top of the lighthouse.” The turret spun incredibly fast, barrel elevating. The shooting stopped, and the figures in the lighthouse started to move. “Three-round burst. Fire.”
Boom, Boom, Boom! The gun fired with a half second between each round. On the FLIR the first figure had just picked up something long and glowing hot when the top of the lighthouse exploded. The 76mm high explosive rounds fired by the Oto Melara cannon each carried a kilogram-sized charge. More than enough to turn a small house into kindling. The three-round burst opened up the top of the lighthouse and rained concrete and brick for a hundred yards in every direction.
“Good hits,” fire control announced.
“Movement at the base of the lighthouse,” the camera operator said. A pair of black Humvees were spinning around in the gravel and racing along the trail away from the lighthouse.
“Starboard Bushmaster,” Grange said, “Engage both targets. Fire at will.”
“Fire at will, aye, aye!” the fire control officer said. The M242 Bushmaster was the same gun the Bradley fighting vehicles mounted. The Boutwell sported two, one on either side, rearward, near the helicopter deck. The gun was alive and moving almost instantly. A TV monitor showed the weapon’s crosshairs, the gunner expertly leading the front vehicle. As soon as he was satisfied, the weapon fired. At eight rounds per second, the 25mm cannon was devastating. The effect wasn’t as impressive as Oto, but the lead Humvee was torn to shreds from several impacts. The gunner switched his aim and fired on the second one, with similar results. He must have hit the fuel tank because flame flew in a cone.
“Cease fire,” Grange said. The admiral had informed her she was under war-time footing when they’d headed north. Despite that, she’d not expected to have to use the ship’s main armament. This was an unpleasant surprise.
Grange decided against standing down from GQ. She ordered a review of the ship’s condition and heightened observation of the shore. They were more than a mile from the southern mouth of the Columbia River. While it wasn’t out of range for the type of .50 caliber rounds recently fired at them, it was a much longer shot, especially at a ship rolling in the river’s outflow. Thirty minutes later she had the damage report. No essential systems damaged, nobody injured.
For now, they were stuck here while repairs on the engine were made. She needed to go up the Columbia to complete the admiral’s last request. If it weren’t for the crew the admiral had sent with her, she would’ve bypassed it. Going up the Columbia was a risk. Now that mysterious people were shooting at her ship, it was more risk than she liked. While Boutwell wasn’t a long ship at 378 feet, it also wasn’t short enough to be playing games in tight river channels. There were answers ashore, and she had time.
“Prepare a RHIB,” she ordered, “and a team. I’m going ashore.”
* * *
It ended up being two teams in two boats. Senior Chief Howell insisted, as she’d left him in command. “An E-8 in command of a cutter,” he’d said, shaking his head. “I’ll be dammed if anyone calls me captain!”
“Steady as she goes, coxswain,” Grange said as they approached the shore. Ten of them were armed with Remington shotguns, herself included. The final two had the ship’s only M16s. Neither were qualified with the rifles. Everyone who had been was dead.
“Got it, Captain,” the coxswain said. A few seconds later, the two RHIBs slid onto the rocky shore. The lighthouse was above them, smoke curling from its destroyed top. She’d agreed to the larger team because the Coast Guard station was only a short walk beyond.
Four of the team, two from each boat, leapt off as soon as the boats came to a stop. They moved up the beach a few yards and went to their knees, weapons facing outward in a semi-circle. The next four followed a second later, running even further up the beach before kneeling, and the first group then moved. Bounding overwatch had luckily been part of the crew’s basic training. Grange and the last three of her crew climbed out. The two men with the M16s had them shouldered and sweeping side to side. No one came running out of the trees or from behind the boulders to attack them.
“Clear,” the lead up the beach called, and they moved toward the lighthouse.
During Grange’s career, she’d participated in several live-fire exercises. Plywood targets, painted red and suspended from floats, were towed by remote control for Oto to punch holes in. The first time it was exciting; after that, it was just paperwork for the expended ammo. She looked up at the shattered remnants of the lighthouse, the piles of shattered masonry, and a bloody chunk of meat a few feet away. Oh fuck, she thought, swallowing her rising bile and putting on her command face. The remains of the Humvees were a short distance further.
The people in the trucks had fared no better against the 25mm slugs than the ones in the lighthouse had against the 76mm. The second one was shredded and burned. The first was torn in half. Her lead team members reached that one and stopped. A young seaman backed away, bent, and became violently sick. Grange got closer and saw one of the occupants had been cut in half by a 25mm round. Judging by the claw marks in the dirt, he’d lived for a few second at least. She might have joined the seaman in emptying her stomach if not for his dress. Black BDU style clothing, weapons harness, and a black baseball cap to top it all off.
“Two more in this half of the Humvee,” the coxswain yelled. She went over to see. These two had died from shrapnel created when the rounds tore their vehicle in half. They were both missing parts of their legs, so they wouldn’t have likely survived regardless. Both had holstered pistols, compact little foreign-looking machine guns on slings, and lots of magazines.
“Search them,” she ordered. “Anything at all, see what they have on them.” Not everyone proved able to rifle through the mangled corpses, so it took a couple minutes.
“Nothing,” the coxswain said, “not so much as a library card.”
“Found this,” a young PO3 said and held out a radio. Grange took it, examining the design. A low whistle followed.
“This is impressive,” she said, “last time I saw one of these it was some SEALs over in the sandbox.” The men and women of her command all looked at her for orders. She pointed to a pair who’d handled the gore best. “Collect all the weapons and ammo,” she ordered. “Go through the Humvee that didn’t burn for any other clues. Take anything, even if it’s a business card or a gas receipt. Understand?”
“Yes, Captain,” the older of the two said.
“Then return to the RHIB and keep an eye out. The rest of you, let’s go to the station.” She gestured and the rest all headed down the trail. Grange activated her own radio link with the ship. “Boutwell, this is Grange.”
“Boutwell here, Captain,” came Howell’s comforting voice immediately. She was regretting not sending the 40-year-old senior noncom. He’d probably done shit like this before. She quickly described what they’d found.
“Sounds like government agents,” he said, immediately echoing what she’d thought.
“But why would they fire on a US Coast Guard ship?” she asked. “It’s not like the big white ship with the red slash is hard to mistake.”
“Not to mention the country is in the middle of its worst disaster ever.”
“Is it?” Grange said aloud. “I mean, now I’m wondering. We haven’t heard word one from Washington. All the satcoms are down, and no one is talking.” She looked around at the woods on either side of the trail. The tire tracks of the Humvees coming in were obvious. The ground was damp, and any others would have shown up easily. They’d come in only a short time ago. Someone had known they were coming. But why open fire on them? “Howell, keep a close eye on radar. Don’t let anything sneak up on us. Have fire control manned 24/7. Oh, and unship the .50 calibers and find someone who can use them.”
“You’re starting to worry me, Captain.”
“I’m worrying myself. We’ll report back when we get to the Coast Guard station. Grange out.”
They moved carefully, staying to the edge of the trail to make use of cover from the trees. The sun was high but not visible through the clouds. A light rain began to fall, a common thing in this area. It was quite a bit cooler than San Diego, and Grange found herself missing the warmer climate now that it was peeing on her.
As they approached the edge of the hill that blocked the view of the station, they slowed and began moving forward to cover each other. The buildings came into view; they were all smoking ruins.
Grange had the group spread out and search in teams of two. They didn’t find any bodies or materiel. The buildings around the headlands were intact, but also stripped. The only thing still there was the armory, and it was locked. Effectively a big concrete bank vault, someone had taken an acetylene torch to it, a crowbar, and who knows what else, but had been unable to get into it. The military built armories well, since they’d hold everything up to 25mm ammo for their Bushmaster, though not the bigger 76mm. Only the station commander and the armorer would have the combination.
“Looks like maybe our people took the boats and evaced. They might’ve taken all the small arms; I can’t be sure.” She looked around as Howell reported that there’d been no other ships moving in the area. Something about the situation made a shiver run up her spine. “No sign of military personnel, civilians, or infected.” Nearby one of her men was coming out of a maintenance building. She looked at him and he shook his head. Nothing. “Okay,” she said, finally. “We’re returning to the ship,” she said.
A few minutes later she gathered the team up and headed back to Boutwell, all the while feeling like someone, or something, was watching her.
* * *
The Flotilla, 150 Nautical Miles West of San Diego, CA
Dr. Lisha Breda chewed her gum and watched Grant Porter pound on the plexiglass door. He was like a metronome. In fact, she’d timed his beating. It was within one or two minor deviations of perfect. Exactly 2.46 hertz, which matched the former researcher’s brain frequency. She’d been running a record of his brain frequency for days now. Nine days, to be precise. The sensors had been installed in his cerebellum at the same time she’d removed a significant part of his brain for examination. A surgery that should have left him unable to live.
Thump, thump, thump...on and on it went. She leaned over the computer and scrolled through the data. At installation, the readings had all but flat-lined, as she’d expected. The biopsy (more like a mutilation) removed parts of his brain which governed how his body worked. She’d expected a coma, followed closely by organ shutdown. Yet, ten minutes after she’d closed the incision and placed the brain samples into containment, his brain...rebooted.
“Rebooted.” She chuckled in the quiet lab. It was a ridiculous term to use in relation to a human brain. Was Grant human anymore? She looked at the data from nine days ago. Flat-line. No mental activity for ten minutes. To a human brain, ten minutes was forever. Nothing, then blip, everything started up again, but at exactly 2.46 hertz. That frequency hadn’t changed for nine days. The human brain didn’t work that way. It wasn’t a computer.
She examined the data again. The startup blip was a long one. Was it really a blip? She loaded an analysis package to examine the signal. It was recorded at an extremely high data rate. Lisha ran the data through the analysis software. The blip exploded.
“Holy shit,” she hissed. The tiny blip became an entire sonata. The saw tooth ridges of a massive mountain range that went on, and on, and on. She recorded it all in another file and started playing with it. An hour later she sighed and got up to stretch her legs. Thump, thump, thump. “Oh, knock it off,” she said. Porter’s eyes followed her every move as he pummeled.
“You okay, ma’am?” She looked over and saw Oz peeking in. Jon “Oz” Osborne was a member of the group who called themselves the Zombie Squad, three of the rig crew who’d brought guns and gear along, presumably for target practice, and were now eagerly awaiting the next outbreak so they could shoot more people. Still, they made her feel slightly more secure than scared, so she tolerated their fun and games.
“Fine, Oz,” she said. “I just need to stretch my legs.”
“No problem, ma’am, I’ll get Robert to escort you.”
“I’m not going to be ambushed by the undead while walking on the deck.” Oz frowned, hand on the huge handgun he wore on his hip, then nodded. “Keep an eye on Porter there, will you?” Oz looked at the former researcher pounding on the glass, his eyes narrowing.
“We should just pop it in the brainpan and drop it to the sharks.”
“Just keep an eye on him?” she asked, then walked out of her lab, through a door, and up a series of metal steps. At the top was another door, which opened into the bright noon sun. Sea spray filled her nostrils as she stepped out on the walkway which circled the platform and breathed in the clean air. The atmosphere cleaning system on the rig was world class—one of only a handful of BSL 4 facilities in the world which were not owned and operated by a government. Containment was crap now, because of all the shit they’d been through. One of her priorities was getting protocols back in place. She shook her head. There was no way she could do it with so few people.
She looked to the south where clouds were moving west and saw all the Navy ships moving with them. The small carrier was going with them, and it was moving pretty fast, she thought. Footsteps on the walkway made her jump as her mind instantly turned to zombies.
“Dr. Breda, I’m sorry,” a man said. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”
“Oz, damn,” she laughed.
“Who did you think I was?”
Grant Porter. “Nobody,” she said, and shook her head. “What did you need? I thought you were watching the subject for me.”
“I know you were just humbling me. No human could break through two inches of solid Lucite.” She looked at him with an appraising glance.
“What do you do on the project?”
“Computer engineer,” he said.
“Right, I’d forgotten.”
“Not all gun-nuts are rednecks, ma’am.”
“Sorry,” she said.
He shrugged. “I noticed the data you left up on the screen.”
“Yes?”
“Can I ask what it is?”
“Sure. It’s a tiny segment of a brain scan from the subject you were watching.” The brows on the man knitted as he thought about that. He looked confused.
“How tiny?”
“It was quick,” she said. “I’d have to say less than a hundredth of a second. I was using the analysis software because I had the crazy idea it was a computer program or something.” She laughed and shook her head again. “I must have gone loopy to think that.”
“You know what I did before I went into biomedical IT work?” he asked. She’d never even laid eyes on him until everything had gone crazy. Recruiters had hired him and sent him out to HAARP to do a job. The financial backer took care of all that sort of stuff, so she was free to do the project’s real job.
“I’m sorry, Oz, I have no idea.”
“It’s okay, I didn’t expect you to.” He took out a small tablet from his pocket, and she came closer to look, “I was into computer games.” She chuckled and so did he. “Big surprise, right? Well, the industry evolves almost faster than you can keep up. Especially an old guy like me. I’m 51 years old, and that’s an old fart for the gaming industry.” The tablet showed an image from a game. It was simple graphics—something like you might have seen in the 80’s. A primitive image of a zombie. That wasn’t surprising either.
“Oz, do you have a point?”
“Sorry, ma’am...”
“Stop apologizing, Oz, and get to the point.”
“Okay,” he said. “I couldn’t keep up with development back in the day. I was a good engineer, but the games were evolving faster than my skillset, so I went into biomedical IT. Basic data instead of games. Then, the old games got new again.”
“Sure,” she said, “retro.”
“Right,” he agreed. “Well, I dusted off some of the old zombie games I wrote and started selling them. I wasn’t making a lot, but it was enough to be worth my time between gigs. When this job came along, I was in the middle of rehabbing an old zombie maze game I wrote in 1990. That game used raster graphics. I was vectorizing the raster graphics so they could run on modern mobile devices, like this little tablet.” He pointed back to the lab. “The raster graphics data looked like the data you had on your screen. Well, not just like it, but it looked like the same format.”
Lisha felt a cold chill run down her spine, like someone had dropped an ice cube down the back of her shirt. What Oz had said sent a flood of ideas exploding in her brain. Connections and interrelated ideas collided, moved, and rejoined again in a flood. She was physically staggered, and Oz grabbed her to keep her from dropping to her knees.
“Doctor, are you okay?” She looked up at him in a daze. His eyes were wide in fear, obviously afraid she was having a seizure or something.
“Data,” she said, “but like an image file?” Oz shook his head, not understanding. “Bio encoding in the form of images.”
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“I need to get to my workstation,” she said, coming back to herself and shaking him off.
“Should I call someone?”
“Yes,” she said, then shook her head. “No, I’ll take care of it.” She was nearly running as she threw the door open and used the stair’s handrails to half slide down. “Beth!” she yelled for her assistant as she threw open the door to her lab. The younger woman let out a surprised yelp as Lisha burst in. “Get someone from the DNA team in here, ASAP,” she instructed. “I also need one of the super-computer operators.”
“They’re all dead,” Beth said, looking shocked. “Remember?”
“Oh, right, well whoever is keeping things going, get them in here. We need to run some data. And find Oz, I need to design an interface.” Lisha grabbed a notebook from a table, tore off pages of someone’s notes to find a clean page, and wrote furiously, completely unmindful of what important research she might be tossing aside, just like she’d already forgotten that she’d just been talking to Oz. “We have a lot of work to do.” In the next room Grant Porter continued to beat on the plexiglass at a rate of 2.46 times per second.
* * *
Lt. Andrew Tobin squatted at the edge of the USS Gerald R. Ford’s flight deck and watched as the team of plane handlers examined the C-17 with an appraising eye. They’d been going over it for an hour now. They were obviously trying to come up with the best way to get the huge cargo transport off the deck.
A roar echoed across the waters as an F-18 catapulted into the sky off the Reagan in the near distance. Less than ten seconds later, another took off. The Carl Vinson and the George Washington’s decks were alive with helicopters taking off and turning east.
Andrew knew what was going on, thanks to Commander James Young. After they’d met in the hangar deck, the two had talked for a while. In a way, the pilots were in a similar situation. Andrew didn’t have an F-15 to fly, the fighter he’d spent thousands of hours flying. Commander Young’s craft of choice was stranded. What surprised Young was realizing they’d worked together in development. They were both in the same boat, so to speak.
Andrew went below decks. Time to look up an old friend. Andrew wasn’t supposed to know where he was, but scuttlebutt existed on every base, facility, and of course, ship. All you had to do was shut up and listen.
He ended up in a nondescript hallway at an equally nondescript door. He walked one watertight doorway past it and stopped to lean against the companionway and wait. It only took five minutes for him to show up.
“Wade Watts,” he said, almost startling the overweight computer geek out of his skin. “Imagine meeting you here!”
“Andrew!” Wade said, nearly dropping the armload of potato chips and soda cans. “W-what are you doing here?” He looked spooked.
“Wondering how you got access to the ship’s SCIF?”
“Skiff? What do you mean?”
“Wade, old buddy, don’t play coy with me. Who dragged you all the way from Monterrey, Mexico and got you out alive?”
“You did, of course.” Andrew grabbed a bag of corn chips, tore it open, and popped a couple in his mouth. “W-what do you want, Andrew.”
“Lieutenant Tobin,” Andrew corrected him. “If you’re going to work for the military, you need to know these kinds of things.” Wade looked confused and a little insulted. “And you know perfectly well what a SCIF is, since that’s your new hangout. Got some nice computers in there?”
“Yeah,” Wade said, his eyes betraying his excitement, “the Ford is new, and they had a lot of plans...” he tapered off and looked around. “What do you want, Lieutenant Tobin?”
“To know what you’re up to in there.”
“I can’t tell you that!” he whined.
“Yes, you can.” Wade shook his head, but Andrew continued. “If Chis and I hadn’t gotten you out of Monterrey, you’d be dead a dozen times over.”
“I helped,” Wade said, still whining. Andrew stared him in the eye, and the overweight geek broke eye contact.
“I’m not asking to get in there,” Andrew said, tipping his head toward the nondescript hatch a short distance away, “just what you are up to?”
Wade looked at Andrew, then at the closed hatch, and thought. Andrew could see him weighing options. “I’m trying to break the comms shutdown.” Andrew’s jaw dropped. That was an option he hadn’t thought about.
“That was some government press suppression program gone wrong, right?”
“No,” Wade said, lowering his voice so Andrew had to lean in close. “This was on purpose. It’s a sophisticated virus. Makes the Stuxnet virus look like Tinker Toys. It was written by someone—I don’t know who—and released into all the computers, everywhere. It just sat around, a line of code here, a line of code there, until someone triggered it. We think it was the president’s decision to activate the internet suppression program, which was legit and meant to stop private communications. Only they got much more than they’d bargained for. Not just the country, the world. There isn’t a cell phone or telephone that’s computer-controlled on the planet that’s working, probably.” Wade sighed. “This thing is insane. It’s also responding to our attempts to stop it.”
“You’re talking like it’s alive,” Andrew said.
“I think it is.”
Andrew stared at him. “That’s nuts. You mean like Hal 9000, or something?”
“No, not a computer program, a worldwide program.”
“Who could do that? Iranians?” Andrew asked, laughing a little.
“Same ones who turned lose an alien zombie virus on the planet.” Andrew stopped laughing. “Yeah.” More silence before Wade continued. “Look, I need to get back in there. We’re getting close.”
“You can stop the virus?”
“No.” Wade laughed this time. “I don’t know if that’s possible. We’ve figured out a way to go around it. GPS is still working—you know that?” Andrew thought about flying the C-17, then nodded. “Well, we’re still getting carrier signals from the military comms satellites. They’re up there and unaffected. They were designed not to accept groundside input without the right codes, so they weren’t susceptible. Some probably were, but the newest weren’t. We don’t know many, but we’re working on getting some gear set up on this side that can communicate. We’re having to program it all from scratch.” He shook his head. “I haven’t keyed in raw code since I was in college! None of the kids I’m working with have ever done it.”
“How long?”
“Probably a couple more days, if it works. Look, can I go now?” Andrew didn’t stop him as the other man pushed past and shambled down the hall. Alien virus, both biological and computer? God, were they being invaded? He stood there for quite some time, uncertain what to do.
* * *
Marine Colonel Tad Alinsky watched from the bridge of LCAC 20 as they rounded Point Loma. The Landing Craft, Air Cushioned was the USMC’s ultimate expression of rapid mobility. Fast, nimble, and able to project force beyond the horizon, they were fantastic. They were quick, but loud. A hundred yards to the left, on the end of the point, was New Point Loma Lighthouse. Around its base swarmed several dozen denizens. The LCAC always drew a crowd when it skimmed past a populated area, but usually it was beaches full of people waving and filming. These people were screaming and wading out into the water, and many of them were naked and covered in blood. They were infected, and they wanted to kill him.
“Jesus Christ,” Senior Chief D.R. “Doc” Zinn, in command of the LCAC, hissed as he looked in the direction the colonel was watching. “Is the whole country like that now, sir?”
“I don’t know,” Alinsky admitted.
He’d elected to take Company A himself for the hardest objective. Admiral Tomlinson hadn’t agreed with that. He’d reminded the admiral that he had no say in how the Marines executed their mission. This landing would likely be the most contested of the two, but it was essential if they were to seal off the Silver Strand at a controllable choke point.
A quarter of a mile behind them was LCAC 19. Like his own, he carried four LAV-25s, the Marine version of the Army’s Stryker light-armored combat vehicle. Another two hundred men were huddled around the LAVs, ready to assist with their off-loading and to create an armed perimeter. He dearly wished he had AMTRAKs instead of the LCAC. He could have landed considerably more men with Assault Amphibious Vehicles, AAV-P7s; he could’ve moved most of his force ashore in one wave. He’d have to send the LCAC back on a second trip, and that meant time.
“ETA to target?” he asked the pilot.
“Ten minutes, Colonel.”
“Hug the western shore, near Point Loma Naval Base,” Zinn ordered.
“Aye, aye.” Alinsky smirked. He always liked the Navy and their quirks.
As they passed the piers, Alinsky saw they were teeming with infected. There were so many that some of them were shoved into the water by the press of bodies. The USS America was tied up there, halfway through a refit. Many more milled on her decks, as well. A lot of them wore the remnants of white uniforms. Alinsky’s jaw muscles bunched as he was forced to remember that soon he would be shooting U.S. military personnel. Infected and insane though they were, they were still his brothers and sisters in arms. This sort of thing hadn’t happened in the U.S. in more than 150 years. He bunched his fists until the nails bit into the flesh. By God, there will be a reckoning someday, he vowed.
As LCAC 19 rounded the point, it slowed so they’d be coordinated in their actions. His craft passed the last of the Navy piers to the left. A lone cruiser was docked there that appeared to be listing badly. Ahead was the Shelter Island Yacht Basin, and opposite on the same spit of land was the America’s Cup Harbor. Once home to thousands of expensive boats, most were either now sunk or missing. A few smoked. How many had died here hoping for escape? The boat ramp seethed with hundreds of infected. Some were even swimming out toward the LCAC as it roared past at 40 knots.
To his right, they were coming around the wider part of Coronado. A carrier was tied up there; he couldn’t remember which one. The admiral had listed it as a tertiary objective in the mission briefing. Planes and helicopters were on its deck, and hundreds more infected. Some were visible on the Navy piers as well, though fewer than on shore. Maybe this wouldn’t be as bad as they’d feared? As the LCAC began turning right, he glanced left and saw the old USS Midway, now a tourist attraction. The figure running down its fight deck didn’t appear to be sightseeing.
They were drawing a real crowd along the San Diego side of the piers. Hundreds were growing into thousands as the Coronado Bridge climbed skyward in front of them. Several of the warehouses on the pier had big red FEMA banners on them. He grunted. So, the Federal Emergency Management Agency had used the huge warehouses as an evacuation point. Judging by the number of screaming infected running along the pier in the direction the LCAC was traveling, things hadn’t worked out very well. Earlier overflights by Marine V22 Ospreys and Navy F18s with reconnaissance gear had confirmed little or no tangible sign of intelligent activity. They passed under the bridge.
“One minute!” Zinn said. Alinsky thanked him and went to the bridge door. The sound of the powerful drive fans and lift motors went from a loud hum to a roar as he opened the door. His XO, Major Richard Hartman, entered and handed him his Kevlar. He put it on and buckled the strap.
“One minute!” he yelled over the roar. Hartman nodded and spoke over the radio to the LAV commanders. Immediately engines roared to life. The Marines who’d been sitting and standing next to the vehicles got up and began to check their weapons. Most of the men moved to the far sides and rear of the LCAC’s ample cargo area, while Navy crew moved forward and prepared to free the LAVs.
The LCAC made a sharp turn and slowed. Alinsky knew they were close now, lining up with the ramp at NABC, Naval Amphibious Base Coronado. A second later, both the .50 caliber M2 machine guns began to chatter. Hartman looked at him.
“Clearing the ramp,” Zinn said, and the other man nodded. “Brace for landing!” he barked, and the call was passed around. A second later, the turbine noise got louder, and the entire craft angled slightly upward. The .50 calibers continued to fire in continuous three-round bursts. A few seconds of climbing, and the LCAC’s drive fans suddenly cut, and the bow ramp began to drop. The huge transport started to settle, and the bow door fell.
The front two LAV’s were released, and, with a blast of diesel smoke, first one then the other rolled down the ramp onto solid ground. One turned right, the other left. Immediately their 25mm Bushmaster main armaments began to fire. Now Alinsky was concerned.
“Hold the next two,” he ordered, “get a platoon out to assist the LAV—” He was cut off as a dozen screaming infected ran up the ramp and leapt onto the group of Navy men who were getting the chains out of the way. Blood flew, and screams filled the air.
“Clear them away!” Hartman barked. The nearest Marines moved, then stopped, unsure. They couldn’t fire without hitting the sailors who were being torn to pieces. Alinsky looked, eyes wide, as the lead LAV out on the concrete was suddenly covered in infected. “Mother of God,” Hartman breathed.
“Fix bayonets,” Alinsky said, an order which hadn’t been given since Vietnam. “Fix bayonets! Get us off this damned LCAC before we’re swamped!” As the Marines overcame their surprise and began to fight, Alinsky activated his radio. “Alinsky to Admiral Tomlinson; we’re ashore and in hand-to-hand combat. Request immediate air support!” The dozen infected in front of the LCAC grappling with the now mostly dead sailors were being bayonetted by his men, just as dozens more came rushing up the ramp. The .50 calibers on the bow of the LCAC were firing continuously, as were the 25mm guns on the LAVs. He could hear the screams of a thousand infected rushing toward them. He drew his handgun and prepared to meet them.
* * *
“Alpha Mike Leader, Marine 2/1-A, over.”
“We’re being overrun, I repeat, we’re being overrun. Need CAS ASAP, over.”
“Fucking hell,” Lieutenant Jamie Ibson hissed from the front gunner seat of the Marine AH-1Z Viper. Four thousand feet below them, North Island Naval Air Station was passing by at 130 knots.
“Weapons hot,” Captain Steve Taylor, pilot and commander, said on their internal comms before switching to radio. “2/1 this is Alpha Mike leader, inbound weapons hot. Advise friendlies?”
“Two LAVs 10 yards off the bow, none on foot.” The voice was full of stress, and constant small arms and machine gun fire made it challenging to understand the besieged Marine. Taylor switched frequencies again. “Alpha Mike 2 and 3, on me.”
“Copy,” Alpha Mike 2 said.
“Roger,” Alpha Mike 3 added an instant later.
Taylor pushed the cyclic forward, and the Viper nosed over, rapidly descending and accelerating. The two other gunships in the flight mirrored his dive precisely. The craft’s airspeed climbed precipitously close to its never exceed rating as he finally leveled out at 300 feet, and banked left. The town of Coronado raced by below, and they were flashing over Glorietta Bay.
“Target ahead, Jamie,” he said to the gunner, who was already examining the Amphibious Base through his gunsight.
“Oh, there are targets all right,” Ibson said. He saw what the gunship saw through an eyepiece fitted to his helmet and over his right eye. FLIR, or forward looking infrared, was selected and he looked across the Amphibious Base LCAC parking area. A pair of large maintenance hangars were to the right of the parked LCAC, and a grassy multi-use field complete with two baseball diamonds and a tennis court in his flightpath. There were no less than 500 crazy fucking infected tearing across the field toward the boat deck. The FLIR clearly showed the LCAC heavily besieged by hundreds more who were flowing out of the buildings. It looked like someone had kicked over an anthill.
“Target the field,” Taylor said, “break up the wave.”
“Roger that,” Ibson said, “firing.” He selected the two M261 pods on each stubby wing, flipped the control to Ripple Fire, and squeezed the trigger. Each pod held 19 Hydra 70 missiles which fired one from each side every ¼ second in a continuous stream as long as he held the trigger down. The helicopter jerked as the missiles fired one after another. The other two Vipers fired as well.
Aimed at the northwestern edge of the park, the gunships walked their fire across the park toward the boat basin, unleashing 48 rockets in two seconds. The munitions raced away, accelerating to 1,500 miles per hour in just a second, and flew for three seconds before the tiny radar in their noses sensed the ground was the correct distance away, and sent a signal to the warheads.
The M255 warhead was a massive supersonic shotgun shell of 2,500 flechette darts which deployed 200 meters above the target and spread out to a kill zone 20 meters across. The tiny darts shredded anything they contacted, up to light armor. The 500 mostly-naked infected racing across the field never heard the approaching high-speed gunships; the missiles exploded in a rolling meat grinder of slaughter.
The width of the field was hit with overlapping explosions. In two seconds nothing in the kill box was still alive. Dozens at the edge were maimed and bleeding out as the Vipers roared overhead, flaring their noses up and bleeding off speed as they spun about.
“Going live on guns,” Ibson said. The chin-mounted 20mm chain gun was the principle weapon on the gunship. Linked via a complicated arrangement with the gunner’s helmet and eye piece, wherever he looked, the gun targeted. When armed, the three barrels spun constantly. All the gunner needed to do was squeeze the trigger to unleash 1,500 rounds per minute. With only 750 rounds in the magazine, though, sustained fire would burn through all of it in about 30 seconds.
As an experienced gunner, Ibson fired three-second bursts at the biggest concentrations of infected. The FLIR didn’t show him what the massed people looked like, and for that he was grateful. They would largely be Navy and dependents. He kept that thought away and concentrated on his aim. The 20mm rounds were hell on anything lighter than a main battle tank. Against human flesh, it was devastating, and each round tore through multiple infected. Any that missed exploded on the concrete and caused additional shrapnel injuries. It was a slaughter.
The three Vipers took over staggered positions as their gunners chewed the attacking mob to bloody pieces. In seconds, the pressure on the LCAC decreased, and the Marines aboard began to breathe again. Men could be seen climbing onto the two LAVs still in the back LCAC and raking the infected with their M4 carbines. Ibson carefully avoided firing any closer than 20 meters from the besieged LAVs to avoid fratricide.
“They’re pouring from that hangar,” Alpha Mike 3 called. Taylor looked to his right and saw it. One of the hangar’s huge doors, big enough to admit an LCAC, was open just a few meters, and a continuous stream of infected was pouring out. They must have been using it like a nest.
“Take out the hangar,” he ordered.
“Roger that,” Alpha Mike 3 replied. “Switching to Hellfire.” A second later, a single AGM-114 Hellfire missile left the rail and shot away with a jet of fire, hitting the hangar a second later. The eight-kilogram warhead was designed to defeat tanks; it blew the shit out of the hangar door, which was only made of corrugated metal. The infected inside didn’t fare very well, either.
“Marine 2/1-A to Alpha Mike, good support, hold one.”
“Roger that, Marine 2/1-A, standing by.” The three Vipers slowly orbited the LCAC as the Marines cleaned up the enemy and moved out to begin establishing a perimeter. Both the LAVs that had landed were still swarmed with infected pounding, clawing and even biting at the armor. A squad of Marines used precision rifle fire to clear them away. The LAVs were covered in blood until it ran off the armor in little rivulets.
“This isn’t battle,” Ibson said. “This is a massacre.”
“Inbound!” Alpha Mike 2 barked. “Southwest down Tulagi Road.”
Taylor killed their forward speed and used the pedals to spin the Viper around to face southwest. A quickly growing flood of infected was tearing down the road toward the boat basin.
“Marine 2/1-A,” he called, “we’re going hot on missiles, be advised you have massing forces from the southwest.” Switching to inboard he said, “Fire when ready,” and leaned them toward the approaching horde. As soon as the bow was low enough, the gunner unleashed more Hydra missiles. At the first several explosions the flood of infected spread out across the parking lots and grass on both sides, racing around the explosions and the dying.
“That’s it for the missiles,” Ibson said. “Switching to guns.” The M197 buzzed to life, hurling 20mm rounds at the rushing infected. They were concentrated groups this time. Many fell, though not nearly as many as before. The three gunships worked their fire together as long as their ammo held out, eventually running the guns dry.
“Marine 2/1, we are out of ammo and returning to Essex.”
“Roger that, Alpha Mike, we’re establishing a perimeter. Thanks.” As he banked his gunship around to the west, Taylor had a last glimpse of the LCAC rising back onto its cushion, turning around, and heading toward the ramp.
* * *
Colonel Alinsky watched as LCAC 20 roared down the ramp and back into the water. Aboard were seven dead sailors, along with twelve dead and eleven wounded Marines. In less than ten minutes, he’d lost 10% of his effectives. The men were setting up firing positions while the LAVs were unloading cases of loaded magazines, seven M240 machine guns, and a pair of Mk19s. They had other goodies to help carry out their mission, if a perimeter could be established.
The men made use of existing cover, such as cars and equipment crates. One platoon was spread across the avenues of approach, firing steadily, as the remainder of the company armed up and improved their positions. As he oversaw the work, he called, “Company B, Company A actual, over.”
“Company B actual, how are you doing, Colonel?”
“Ten percent losses; our landing was heavily, I repeat, heavily resisted. Alpha Mike is already RTB. Status update?”
“We’re offloading onto the pier, minimal resistance. We’ll establish a perimeter and wait for the Ospreys.”
“Understand, Captain. Keep your eyes open, Nick. See you in a few hours.”
“Roger that, Colonel. Semper fi.”
“Oorah,” the colonel said and stuck the mic to his load-bearing harness. “Captain, how are we doing?”
“Constant intrusion attempts to the perimeter,” he said. The field across Tulagi Road was a sea of bodies, and still dozens more were vaulting over the corpses and racing toward the Marines. “Three o’clock!” Hartman barked, and the rifle team to his right pivoted, dropped to one knee, and began firing steady semi-automatic shots. In seconds, all the attackers were down. “That field is going to be a problem. Any chance of area denial?” he asked the colonel. The commander used his radio again.
“Marine 2/1-A actual calling Reagan, over.” As he waited for the response, the expected rain began to fall. As usual for San Diego, it went from drops to a deluge in moments. He wondered if it was foolhardy to hope it worked against the infected.
* * *
Lieutenant Commander Allen “Slackjaw” Phillips was the flight leader for eight F/A-18Es from the “Tophatters” of Strike Fighter Squadron Fourteen (VFA-14), who were circling above Coronado at 18,000 feet. Between the Reagan, Carl Vinson, and George Washington, the fleet should’ve had better than 150 fighters, an aerial force almost as large as was involved in the 2nd Gulf War. Instead, they only had one carrier, the Reagan, capable of launching and recovering aircraft. The Carl Vinson could launch from her waist catapults only, but couldn’t recover, leaving only the aircraft from Carrier Air Wing-9 onboard the Reagan. Forty-eight Super Hornets of two variants.
They’d come on station just before the Marines made their landings and could stay there for about 30 minutes. Phillips was listening in on the tactical channel, and he knew they wouldn’t be there nearly that long. He heard the Marine request for area denial and consulted his map.
“We can accommodate you, Marines, but that’s going to chew up a lot of real estate.”
“Understood,” the Marine said, “please drop as requested.”
“Roger that,” Phillips said. “Flight, this is Lead, transmitting target package. Let’s give the leathernecks some breathing room.” Thirty-two GBU-32 1,000-pound bombs fell away toward the ground below. Each plane’s guidance system led the bombs onto their precise targets 18,000 feet below. A vast swath of Naval Amphibious Base Coronado went up in fire and fury.
Ordnance on target, Phillips moved the camera with the joystick, panning it around the area. He flipped the control to FLIR and instantly stopped. There’d been some signs before the bombs, but now it was everywhere. The town was absolutely coming alive with movement. Oh shit, he thought. He called the carrier.
* * *
“Let’s see it,” Tomlinson said in the Reagan’s CIC. One of the big high-definition displays lit up with a line of computer text, syncing with the F/A-18 high over Coronado. It was the town itself—twenty thousand or so houses—valuable real estate. The FLIR images were shaded from black for cold to bright white for hot. The houses were light gray, streets slightly brighter, and people the brightest. There were thousands of moving white spots emerging from houses, garages, abandoned cars, and anything else that provided cover. “Intel, estimates?”
“Twenty thousand, minimum, and climbing,” the analyst said. “Continuing to grow.”
“Why didn’t we have a visual before?” Tomlinson demanded. There was a quick discussion. Finally, a lieutenant commander in charge of the intel group ventured a theory.
“It’s possible the infected stay low when they’re not actively hunting.”
Tomlinson grunted; it was as reasonable an explanation as any other.
“Second strike force coming on station,” one of the flight coordinators said.
“How soon to rearm the first?”
“We’re just now beginning launch of the third,” a coordinator announced. Tomlinson ground his teeth in frustration.
“The targets are responding to the bomb strikes,” another analyst said. Twenty thousand infected were heading toward Colonel Alinsky and his single company of Marines.
“Give me Captain Woods on the John Paul Jones.”
* * *
“Fire mission!” the controller in the John Paul Jones’ CIC ordered. On the aft deck, five of the 96 cells on the ship’s VLS, or vertical launch system, exploded as the cruise missiles they contained blasted into the rainy sky.
The rocket-assist lofted each one to an altitude of 200 feet, then the motor dropped away, the cruise missile’s wings extended, and the turbofan engine ignited. The missiles aligned on their targets using GPS and dropped to 50 meters off the water as they raced eastward. The entire launch took less than a minute to send the wave of five missiles on their way. John Paul Jones was slowly cruising five miles off San Diego’s coast. At 550 miles per hour, they were on target in 32 seconds.
* * *
Admiral Tomlinson watched the live feed as the five Tomahawk cruise missiles slammed into the southern edge of the town of Coronado. Their warheads released 250 submunitions to rain down on the town, wreaking havoc. The FLIR didn’t provide a detailed image of people, yet shapes could be discerned. The rain of bomblets blew bodies through the air. Some were in pieces, while others sprayed in brighter white across the concrete before the sum of a thousand explosions whited out the screen.
“My God,” someone said in the CIC.
“Do your jobs,” the combat operations commander barked. On one screen they were replaying high-definition video shot by an orbiting MH-60R Seahawk that was below the cloud deck. Tomlinson just happened to glance over as slow-motion video showed a group of four running infected, two of them obviously children under 10, a boy and a girl. The entire group was naked. An instant later a pair of bomblets detonated in their midst and blew the group apart.
“Second flight of Super Hornets relieving the first.”
“Admiral,” the combat commander said, holding a phone, “the president wishes to talk to you.”
Tomlinson picked up the phone and spoke. “This is Admiral Tomlinson.” He listened for a moment. “Madam President,” the admiral implored, “we don’t have the manpower for any other kind of interdiction. This airfield is the only one we’ve located in our area of operations capable of accommodating the E4 safely.” He listened again. “I’m aware of that, ma’am, which is why we’re prosecuting this operation the way we are. We’ve discussed the other option. Your pilot is certain you can safely parachute—” The sailors closest in the CIC could hear the POTUS screaming into the microphone on the other side. “Is that a direct order, ma’am?” he asked. “I understand.” Tomlinson handed the phone back to the combat commander.
“Controllers,” he said, “we’ve been ordered to cease the use of high explosive ordnance and avoid injuring minors.” The entire room fell deathly silent. “Get the loadmasters aboard Essex to load zip-cuffs on an Osprey and get airborne ASAP. Get me Colonel Alinsky right away.”
* * *
“With all due respect, Admiral, you have got to be fucking kidding me!”
“No, Colonel, I am not. I have a direct order from the Commander-in-Chief to cease the use of high explosives in general, and to avoid injuring any infected who are minors. They are to be detained by non-lethal means and held for treatment.” Major Hartman stared at his commander with open-mouthed astonishment. “They’ve retasked an Osprey to bring us zip-cuffs and tear gas.”
“There are thousands on this island,” Harman said, “maybe tens of thousands.”
“I know, Major. That’s why we’re not going to tell the platoon lieutenants.”
* * *
LCAC 20 finished maneuvering away from the basin and turned around at the Amphibious Base to begin the return to Essex. Without the Marines and the four LAVs, the LCAC was able to move a lot faster, and it quickly approached its maximum speed of 47 miles per hour. With no civilian traffic, there was no concern about an accident. The rain had no effect on the air cushion vehicle’s performance, only on visibility. Normally they’d slow down due to the reduced visibility, but in this case, the commander kept it at full speed. The radar showed no other craft, and the spotlights gave decent illumination.
“Approaching the bridge,” the navigator announced.
Zinn nodded. “Understood. Steady as she goes...” The bridge was visible as a hazy line across their path. Before the world had burned down, driving the LCACs under the bridge always caused traffic to back up as civilians slowed and sometimes got out of their cars to watch. The LCACs were loud, running on four huge gas turbine engines, driven forward by two massive four-bladed fans, and steered via two ducts.
He glanced forward at the .50 caliber gunners who maintained their stations. They were just finishing up, reloading the guns and checking their functioning. It was a shitty job in the rain. The air cushion tended to throw a spray over the bow on a good day; the driving rain was making it much worse. But if the guns weren’t oiled, the salt spray could do real damage in hours. As they raced closer, the rain seemed to be getting heavier. A lot heavier. Then one of the forward gunners yelled something unintelligible over the radio. The commander looked through the windscreens, wipers whipping back and forth every second. The gunner was facing the bridge and waving frantically.
“Say again?”
The observer called over the radio, “Falling, they’re falling!”
“What’s falling?” Zinn asked. A second later, the LCAC skimmed into a human waterfall.
The Coronado Bridge was built in 1969 as a way to increase road traffic onto and off the Coronado peninsula. Five lanes wide, the bridge boasted a carrying capacity of 68,000 vehicles per day. It was 11,179 feet long and 200 feet above the water at its center, making it tall enough for the largest military ship to sail under at low tide.
Since the previous afternoon, Navy and Marine helicopters had been almost continuously flying around Coronado, examining the situation on the peninsula in preparation for the coming landing. A week before all civil control was lost, the warehouses in and around the base of the bridge had become the center for FEMA’s efforts to control the virus and provide aid. When that collapsed, over half a million infected were left to wander the area to feed on whatever they could find, including each other.
The helicopter flights were a strong source of interest for the infected. Vehicles of all types seemed to be natural draws for them. Pilots had noticed a fair number of them on the bridge the night before, running under the helicopters, reaching up toward them, and screaming at the sky. One Marine Seahawk had hovered over the center span of the bridge for several minutes, its 500,000 candlepower light illuminating their bloody, insane faces staring up at them before turning south to fly over the island. They never saw the flood that attempted to follow the departing bird up and onto the bridge. Unknown numbers wandered down the other side, and by morning, the bridge was largely empty again.
The arrival of the LCAC drew them back. Thousands found the piers and tried to reach the passing hovercraft. As the rain started, thousands were in the middle span, looking for the source of the noises they’d heard earlier, some drinking the water that pooled on the bridge, others considering which ones would make the weakest and easiest prey. Then the LCAC came back.
They couldn’t see it through the rain, but the sound of the four powerful turbines and the drive propellers was clear below them. So many crowded the edge of the bridge that the suspension cables groaned slightly. When the LCAC’s forward spotlights finally cut through the rain, they had a target. One jumped, then another, and another. In seconds, it was a tidal wave.
“They’re jumping off the bridge!” the gunner screamed into his microphone.
“Oh fuck!” the navigator yelled.
“Hard about!” Zinn ordered. The pilot just stared. “I said hard about!”
The pilot came to his senses and spun the control yoke. The LCAC maneuvered through a combination of vanes on the back of the drive propellers which acted like rudders, and a pair of large angled tubes which could direct its jet exhaust 360 degrees. It made the craft maneuverable...at slow speeds. At its top speed, the LCAC required a quarter of a mile to turn about, and nearly that much distance to perform a 90-degree turn. It didn’t turn like a ship; the effect was more like a race car drifting around a corner.
The pilot throwing the yoke over only succeeded in spinning the LCAC so it was skimming sideways over the water as it intersected the rain of human bodies. A 180-pound human being falling from 200 feet up hit with enough force to bend two-inch steel plating. The LCAC’s armor, however, was on the sides; the top was relatively thin metal. Bodies fell and exploded across the hull as the craft passed under the bridge. One hit the starboard .50 caliber gun station, destroying the gun and killing the hapless operator. Another slammed into the starboard aft engine housing, blasting bone and meat through the filter and into the jet intake, which impacted the delicately-balanced compressor blades, causing the engine to explode.
A pair of infected hit the LCAC’s bridge, completely collapsing the superstructure. The collapsing structure killed the pilot, navigator, and slammed Zinn to the deck, breaking his back. In all, 52 infected slammed into the careening LCAC like sacks of wet cement, crushing structures, wrecking equipment, and denting decking designed for M-1A Abrams tanks.
Bereft of navigational control, the LCAC spun wildly, eventually slamming into the stern of a decommissioned Navy tender tied up at Ancon Marine Supply & Salvage’s dock. Gunfire from the surviving .50 caliber made the warehouses’ current residents open the hatches to see what had happened. Moments later hundreds of infected flowed off the tender and docks, and onto the LCAC.
* * *
“Roger that,” Colonel Alinsky said and turned to his XO. “The LCAC is down. They don’t know why. A helo is vectoring in to check on them.”
“There goes reinforcement in force,” Hartman said coolly. “Time to improvise, adapt, and overcome.”
“Yep,” the colonel agreed. Fire from the defensive positions had slackened off slightly as an effective kill zone was established. The pair of MK19 grenade launchers were set on the two avenues of probable attack, one to the northwest, and the other facing southwest. The collapsed warehouse the Vipers had taken out with a Hellfire provided decent cover in the center.
The back of the command LAV had been dropped, and Alinsky was using the fold down table there to coordinate his forces. A map of Naval Amphibious Base Coronado was displayed on a ruggedized laptop. He traced a line on the screen. “We can’t wait for reinforcements.” Once their casualties were evacuated, he’d folded 4th Platoon into the other three. It was a drill they’d practiced before. “Leave 2nd platoon to hold the basin for now. One of the MK19s, two of the 240s.” Hartman followed the colonel’s finger. “You take 3rd Platoon to the truck park here; I’ll take 1st Platoon to the armory there.”
Hartman nodded. “We’re proceeding with primary objective,” Hartman said.
“Yes,” Alinsky said with a smile. “We need to cut off the peninsula from possible reinforcement.”
The four LAVs roared to life and moved out of the basin; the bodies of the dead infected smashed and splattered as they went. Marines manned the gun turrets of each LAV as the rest quick-marched behind the armored vehicles. Once on the road past the boat basin, they split into two teams of platoon size. The numbers of infected at the base were greatly reduced, thanks to the bomb runs and helicopter gunship strafing. Even so, the two groups faced constant attacks as they advanced through the pouring rain.
The major reached his destination first. After his platoon breached the perimeter fence, one squad held the gate, another cleared the office, and the final split into fire teams to search for vehicles and provide additional security. All were experienced with the variety of trucks the base had. By the time the squad returned from the office with the keys, the trucks had already been inspected once. Less than five minutes after entering the park, a dozen trucks were roaring out of it, led by a pair of LAVs.
The colonel’s platoon at the armory found stiffer resistance, as the infected seemed to like the cavernous building. At least a hundred had to be killed before the armory was considered secured. A squad held the armored entrance, while the colonel and a squad entered the command center. The generators used solar backup, so they still functioned. He used the codes provided by Admiral Tomlinson on the computer and was quickly granted access to the vaults.
Their small arms ammo was in pretty good shape, so he passed on that. What he wanted was a little more energetic. A door was remotely unlocked, and the platoon secured functioning forklifts to begin moving pallets to the loading docks. As the trucks secured by 3rd Platoon arrived, they backed into the docks to find forklifts idling and huge green pallets on their tines.
“Glad to see you made it,” Colonel Alinsky said.
“No problem so far,” Major Hartman waved as he swung down from the first truck. 3rd Platoon’s LAV idled by the gate with one from 1st Platoon. The security detail’s sporadic fire was picking up in tempo.
“Let’s get this ordnance loaded,” Alinsky instructed. “Have a squad relieve the security team in 10 minutes, and once the first six trucks are loaded get another squad to secure extra ammo.” He took a minute to make sure everything was going as planned, then nodded to himself and used the radio. “Marine 2/1-A actual, we’ve secured primary objective. Update on LCAC 20?”
“Marine 2/1-A actual, LCAC 20 is lost.” Alinsky cursed under his breath. How the fuck had that happened? It wasn’t like the infected had guns. “Reinforcements by Osprey are ready to dust off once you’re at Objective Bravo. 2/1-B is secure on site and facing light resistance. Do you want to retask LCAC 19 to your position instead? It just arrived at Essex and is beginning to embark Charlie Company.”
“Negative, negative,” he said. “Main objective remains securing the landing field. Send 3rd platoon and heavy weapons on two Osprey, we’ll hold with that. All other forces to land at Point Kappa. Confirm?”
“Confirmed. Out.” He put the mic away and went to help load the trucks.
* * *
The Navy Seahawk helicopter hovered a hundred feet above LCAC 20, its gunners leaning out both sides to look for signs of survivors on the hovercraft or in the water. The landing craft’s rear quarter was crumpled against the old tender, and the whole thing listed to starboard. Hundreds of infected swarmed over every inch of it, their sheer mass threatening to flip the otherwise inherently stable vehicle.
“Can you see any of the crew?” the helo’s commander asked.
“Negative, Commander. Only infected. They’re feeding on each other,” one of the door gunners said, disgust obvious in his voice.
“The fucking bridge is smashed!” the other gunner said.
“What the fuck?” the copilot wondered. “Are there goddamned giant-sized infected or something?”
The pilot’s eyes narrowed as he used the pedals and stick to back away so he could see better. Just as his gunner said, the bridge was smashed flat, like someone had dropped something large onto it. Or...like something fell on it. He glanced to the right where the dim outline of the Coronado Bridge was visible. The massive bridge stood even higher than the 100 feet the helicopter hovered at.
“Oh shit,” he said and brought the nose toward the bridge. He just hovered there for a few seconds looking at the bridge. He thought he saw movement. “Climbing toward the bridge,” he told his copilot.
“What do you think?” his copilot asked.
“I’ll let you know.” He gave it enough collective that the Seahawk climbed quickly, angled slightly forward so they closed on the bridge. Before long, they were roughly the same height as the bridge and closing at just five knots. He slowed their climb so that as they got within a hundred yards of the bridge, the helicopter was 30 or 40 feet above it. The commander narrowed his eyes, trying to make sense of what he was seeing. It looked like the bridge deck was covered in a mottled level of clumps flowing to his right. His copilot figured it out first.
“Mother fucker!” he yelled.
“What?” the commander asked.
“People, infected, thousands of them. Tens of thousands!” The commander moved the stick a bit further forward, and they jumped forward. He was careful not to hit any of the guy-wires. In a second they were over the center of the bridge deck, the rotor wash blasting the sea of humans moving toward the island.
“Skipper, we weapons free?”
The commander considered his orders as he looked in horror at the flood of infected people. Coronado should have held 30,000 or so people, but San Diego had been home to more than a million! How many an hour were racing across the bridge? They had a thousand or so Marines over there, or soon would. His orders said not to harm minors. But good lord, this was insane.
“Open fire,” he ordered. “Try to get them to stop.” Both M240 machine guns opened up, ripping into the flood below them. Both his gunners were experienced at their jobs, and they used their tracers to walk the fire back and forth across all five lanes. “Navy Six Bravo to Essex, we have a situation!’” As the pilot relayed what he was seeing, the river of infected continued to move, barely slowed, toward Coronado.
* * *
Flight operations never stopped on the USS Ronald Reagan. If they weren’t launching F/A-18 Super Hornets, they were recovering them and refueling/rearming them for the next cycle. With the POTUS ruling out the use of high explosives, the fighters were reduced to low-level strafing runs on identified clusters of infected moving on in on the Marines. These attacks were vastly less efficient, as the infected made effective use of cover where they could find it, a tactic they’d probably learned to avoid being food for each other.
The result was each Super Hornet shot out their ammo load with massively reduced enemy casualties. They still took off with a pair of bombs, just in case, but were banned from using them by direct Presidential order. The presence of the bombs still on the aircraft was by Admiral Tomlinson’s orders. He believed in contingencies.
The flight deck crew of USS Ronald Reagan was working at a furious rate, even for a highly-trained crew such as the one on the Gipper. With dozens of Super Hornets in the air at all times, and helicopters coming and going, the flight deck was a chaotic place with no room for error. The Reagan had left port as the crisis spiraled out of control, and 227 crewmen hadn’t made it aboard in time. Dozens of vital positions were desperately short of crew to work the extended hours they were now being forced to serve.
The first planes were catapulted into the sky an hour before dawn, and they had been going nonstop ever since. The crews were tired and, more importantly, hungry. Kitchen staff were just as stretched. The ship was crowded with personnel from other ships and former military personnel located in the flotilla which were being pressed back into service. They were so crowded that a young cook hurrying to duty collided with a civilian on a ladder and broke his ankle. Down a cook, and having to deliver food to the flight deck for desperately-hungry team members, several staff were put to work without much training.
One such volunteer, an Army assistant cook, found himself in a much more crowded and crazy kitchen than he was used to. His job was to prepare meat for sandwiches, one of the few quick to eat and portable meals the flight deck crew could handle. The problem was the CPO who’d taken charge of him didn’t brief the man very well.
“It’s all in the cool locker,” he’d said. “Follow the posted notice on the door. Find some meat. Move it.” The CPO was off before the Army cook could completely digest the instructions. Now he was alone with a cart full of bread and several gallon jugs of condiments, but he had nothing to put inside the sandwiches. He looked around until he found the door marked “COOLER #2-B.”
“Must be the place,” he said and opened the door. It was just above freezing, and everything had been staged for use. “Now what notice?” he wondered and looked around. There was a clipboard hanging on a shelf. “Ah hah,” he said and grabbed it. Sure enough, it was a spreadsheet of all kinds of recently-defrosted food items. They were categorized A, B, and X. He puzzled over that for a second.
In the Army, they used stores by order of age. Always use the old stuff first. There were no dates, so maybe the letters corresponded to use dates. If that were the case, then X must be the oldest. He moved his finger down until he found, “Chicken/White Meat/Chunk.” There was mayo, mustard, and relish on the cart. Chicken salad would make a good sandwich, and almost everyone loved that. He noted the ID number and moved down the line of shelves. At the end, near the floor, were bags containing all kinds of meat. Each one had a Sharpie written “X” on it. “Bingo,” he said and grabbed several of the bags.
Returning to his work area, he got a dozen huge metal bowls and started dumping chunk chicken into them. The rest was easy: split a gallon of mayo between the twelve bowls, then dollop in mustard and relish until it looked right. He stirred them all using the big Cuisinart blender with the single whip attachment, then added a couple tablespoons of paprika. Using a spoon, he tasted one, then added some more paprika. Perfect.
Half an hour after he got the order, he had a hundred slices of bread laid out and was slapping a big spoon of chicken salad onto each one. Another volunteer saw him working and quickly jumped it, putting a piece of bread on top of each one and stacking them on trays, two high, forty to a tray.
“Got anything ready?” asked a tired runner who came by the work area.
“Yeah,” the Army cook said, “sandwiches. I think they’re for the flight crew?”
“Reactor room gets first dibs,” the sailor said. “Gimme one of those trays.”
The cook thought about looking for the CPO first, then decided against it. He had enough chicken salad for another hundred sandwiches, so he shrugged. “Find some plastic wrap,” he told the guy who’d jumped in. A few seconds later the runner was hurrying down ladders, a plastic-wrapped tray heavy with chicken salad sandwiches and a jug of coffee slung over a shoulder.
“Grub!” he yelled as he entered the reactor space. The compartment hummed with power as the two Westinghouse A4W reactors heated steam to run the ship’s systems.
“About time!” said Commander Seamus Curran, who oversaw the watch. “We’re short-staffed and haven’t been off duty in 16 hours. McNeal, take some of those sandwiches down to Reactor Two?”
“Aye, aye, sir!” the young seaman said, grabbing a dozen sandwiches. He stuffed one into his mouth before he headed off. Curran nodded, took one for himself, and bit into it. His eyes went wide with delight as he chewed.
“Chicken salad!” he said, excitedly. “Tell cookie he’s a lifesaver. I don’t know where he found this, but we’re sick of over-cooked fish, no matter how much hot sauce they use!”
“Will do, Commander,” the runner said. He pulled a coffee jug from the strap and sat it on the table. “Do you mind, sir?” He asked and gestured at the rapidly-emptying tray.
“Help yourself, Son.” The runner grabbed one and bit into it greedily.
“Thanks,” he said around a mouthful. “I haven’t eaten since dinner last night.” A short time later he was heading up-ladder again, empty tray and jug under one arm. In no time, he had another tray of sandwiches and was heading to the bridge with it.
All in all, the helpful Army cook prepared and served over 500 chicken salad and roast beef sandwiches to the hungry crew of the Ronald Reagan. A tray even made it into one of the squadron ready rooms, where it was almost instantly devoured. Then the cook was pressed into service helping move buckets of soup into the chow line. When the meat sandwiches stopped appearing, there were a lot of disappointed sailors; word had travelled fast.
The first to get sick was the runner, who’d helped himself to a sandwich even before he’d asked Commander Curran in the reactor room. He collapsed just off the flight deck less than two hours after he’d eaten the sandwich. A pair of corpsmen took him on a stretcher down to medical. By the time they got him there, he was unconscious. The doctor on duty was just finishing setting the ankle of the cook who’d broke it trying to get on duty. No one noticed when the runner suddenly sat up, eyes wide, and looked around. They did notice when he screamed incoherently and jumped on the nearest orderly, ripping the hapless man’s ear off with his teeth.
A pair of orderlies managed to bring the runner under control, though both had been bit before it was all over, and he’d been strapped to a cot. The surgeon in charge, unaware that Strain Delta could also be passed by bite, treated the wounded orderlies for superficial bites and ordered them to return to their bunks to rest. Then he called the bridge to report the incident.
Since the Reagan had joined up with the flotilla and Tomlinson had taken command, the ship had experienced three Strain Delta outbreaks. Through a quirk of chance, none had managed to bite anyone else before being detained. All outbreaks were traced back to undeclared food, usually stashed in a sailor’s or transferred civilian’s personal goods. Many still didn’t understand the risk of foods processed in the last few weeks before the outbreak, like bulk-packaged and frozen meats.
Had the Army cook looked closer, he’d have noticed the clipboard his supervisor mentioned on the inside of the door. On it the code letters were described. “X” marked possibly tainted meat loaded just before Reagan left port as the outbreak was spreading. He didn’t cook any of that meat. Why would he? It was all clearly marked ‘precooked.’ The department head had held onto it for possible use after being carefully re-cooked at very high temperature, just like the fresh fish. He never had time to regret the decision; one of the assistant cooks ripped his throat out.
The ship’s captain immediately assumed the outbreak was the result of the runner having a stash and sent security to check his bunk without bothering to find out where the man’s duty station was. Had he known it was the galley, he might have had a small chance of controlling the situation.
Down in the reactor space, Commander Currant didn’t feel well, so he’d retired to his office to sit for a bit and run reactor numbers through the computer. No one saw him turn. When his assistant went to check on him, Currant screamed and tore into the man with teeth and fingernails. It wasn’t an isolated incident. Inside of 10 minutes, more than 400 crewmen had succumbed to Strain Delta.
* * *
“Jesus Christ,” Alex West hissed as he fought the helicopter’s controls. The shimmy had become a violent shake. He’d been forced to slowly descend from the cruising altitude of 8,000 feet to only 3,000 feet before it became manageable. He was now afraid the damned tail rotor was about to fly off. He might be able to auto-rotate down safely, and right into the sea. “Do you know how far to the OOE platform?” he asked the pilot of the other helicopter, Patty Mize.
“Another 15 miles,” she said. The inflection of her voice suggested that his craft looked as bad from the outside as it felt on the inside. He consoled himself with the fact that if he hadn’t done the crazy maneuver to get rid of the infected hanging on the doors, he’d be dead anyway. He also hoped he’d bought himself more than a few extra minutes of life. A mumbling from the other seat made him look. “Boss, you awake?”
“What the hell happened?” Jeremiah asked. The president and founder of OOE had seen better days. Partially-dried blood coated the right side of his face where he had hit the helicopter door during the spin, and his white shirt was black with dried blood, too.
“We had an incident,” West said. Jeremiah put a hand up to touch the side of his head; it came away wet with congealing blood. Jeremiah’s eyes went wide in terror. “You hit your head on the door, you didn’t get attacked.”
“How long have I been out?” he asked.
“Maybe half an hour.”
“Why does the helicopter feel like it’s about to fly apart?”
Because you’re not wrong. “We got a little banged up in our escape from Catalina Island.”
“Oh,” his employer said. He looked to be quickly coming to his senses. That was good, it meant less chance of a concussion. “Where’s the other chopper?” West locked the collective arm with the friction brake and pointed. Jeremiah followed the arm and saw the other helicopter several thousand feet above them. “Is there a reason they’re so much higher?”
“Their helicopter isn’t damaged,” West explained, deciding on the simplest explanation.
“Are we going to crash?” West was again forced to decide on an answer. He knew Jeremiah was an aerospace engineer, and he likely knew that a helicopter acting like a pissed-off bronco wasn’t a healthy one.
“That is a possibility.”
“Oh, hell,” Jeremiah said and tightened his seat belt. With nothing more to be said, West released the friction lock and took full control back. Jeremiah craned his head around, wincing a little as he did, and saw Alison in a bunch in the back seat, seemingly covered in blood. “What happened to her? She bit?”
“In answer to your first question, she hit the door, too, only she wasn’t strapped in like you were. To the second, no.” A master alarm on the console started flashing. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I think we’re running out of time.” Jeremiah stayed silent and watched West with wide eyes. He gripped his chair’s arms with white-knuckled intensity.
West examined the lights. “Tail Rotor RPM.” Yeah, that was a bad one. He reduced power to the engine. If it seized, they were going down immediately. He also saw the hydraulic pressure to the rotor was high and climbing. A hose pinched? He looked at their air speed, 100 knots, ran it against the distance Patricia had given him, and how long ago that’d been. They were at least five miles out. A few of the flotilla’s outlying ships were already visible below.
A few were adrift, likely abandoned. A couple were all but sunk. One was on fire, black smoke climbing into the morning-bright sky. Ahead a few miles, he could see a line of storm clouds moving east. They were about where OOE’s ship should be. As if landing this busted bucket of bolts in perfect weather on the ship’s rather small platform wouldn’t be hard enough?
“Is that a carrier?” Jeremiah asked. This time he was pointing out the chin bubble on his side. West leaned over and looked. Holy shit, it was a carrier! Was that a damned C-17 on its nose? It was just completing a turn to the north and appeared to be speeding up. West turned on his radio and tuned it by memory to a Navy channel.
“Navy carrier, this is the OOE helo about one mile off your stern, coming in from the east.”
“OOE helo, this is the USS Gerald R. Ford Departure Control. We have you on radar. Steer clear, your ship is four miles south southwest.”
“Negative Ford, we are declaring an emergency. My craft has sustained damage, and I must land immediately.” The radio was silent for a moment before the controller came back on.
“Helo, confirm if you have any infected aboard.”
“That is a negative, Ford. We have two wounded but not infected.”
“How were they wounded?” West ground his teeth. He couldn’t tell them they been in a fight with infected on Catalina Island. He’d seen Navy helicopters out that way. They probably already knew the island was crawling with infected.
“We had a malfunction of flight controls. They were injured in a violent maneuver.” West was sure someone on the carrier probably had glasses on him right now. He was having a harder time keeping the helicopter flying true, so he knew it was at least convincing. Another alarm went off; hydraulic pressure was falling. Swell, the line must have parted.
“OOE, is that second helo with you as well?”
“Yes, Ford, that’s correct. I’d love to answer all your questions, but this bird is getting worse by the minute!”
“Observers confirm you are smoking from the tail boom,” the controller said. West swallowed. “You are granted permission to land on the fantail, as far aft as possible.” He sighed. “I’m handing you over to the tower. Commander Beeker.”
“Understood,” West said, and began to descend quickly.
“OOE helicopter, this is Commander Beeker on Ford. I understand you’re in distress?” West described the Jet Ranger’s condition. “I see; can you land without making a mess on my flight deck?”
“Sir, I believe so.”
“Very well. Captain Gilchrist also orders your other helicopter to land as well.”
“No,” Jeremiah hissed. He had gotten his headset on finally. With half his face and neck covered in blood, he looked like one of the infected.
“Commander, we’d just as soon have our undamaged helicopter return to our ship.”
“Mister, we’ve observed some unusual comings and goings of your people. The captain wishes to have a word with you. Down here. Now. You will instruct your other bird to set down forward of wherever you manage without making a mess. Is that understood?”
“Perfectly,” West said and began changing frequencies back to give Patty the news.
“What if she ignores them?” Jeremiah asked. “They won’t shoot her down.”
“You want to risk five lives on that bet?” Jeremiah looked upset but shook his head. “Grab a water bottle and wash some of that blood off. If they think you’re infected, they’ll probably shoot us all.” He changed the channel and called Patty as he worked the controls with shaking hands. He was getting really tired, and the bird was as responsive as a cement truck.
A few seconds later he was straining against the collective, trying to build enough thrust as he pulled back on the cyclic to bring the nose up. He was approaching the Ford from behind, trying to eyeball the ship’s speed against his own. His years of flying said it was close. The carrier had to be doing 25 knots. As he pulled back and slowed, the shimmy became a death rattle.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” he said and worked the pedals. The helicopter was starting to spin no matter what he did. A sailor in a white vest was standing in the middle of the flight deck, about 20 yards from the end of the fantail, a bright red Ping-Pong paddle held in each hand. He was making like a flapping duck. Wave off, West thought. It was land, swim, or crash into the towering ass of the carrier. He decided it was option one or bust. He slammed the pedals over onto the stops, and the turn just barely stopped. He was at least 45 degrees sideways to the deck as he dropped toward it. The sailor in the vest gave up signaling and ran. West pulled as hard as he could on the collective. The stall warning screeched. The skids hit the deck.
For a sickening moment, he thought they were going to flip in the direction of his landing. He pulled the cyclic opposite the impact and prayed to whatever gods might have a soft spot for barely-trained helicopter pilots. The tortured Jet Ranger did a bunny hop and came back down, scraping several feet on the rubberized steel plates of the flight deck’s fantail before coming to a shuddering stop. West’s hands were shaking like a drunk with DTs as he madly flipped switches to shut the engine down. Hydraulic failure, tail rotor failure, and turbine fire were only a few of the warnings.
A miniature truck roared over, a dozen men in red vests piling off in an amazing series of jumps even before the truck stopped. Several began grabbing tools and equipment, while others hefted huge portable extinguishers. They hadn’t been on the deck for five seconds before fire-retardant foam was hosing the engine compartment.
West verified all the important switches were off before turning to tell Jeremiah to get out. He needn’t have bothered; his boss had bailed the second the helicopter settled to the deck. West felt a single semi-hysterical laugh escape his throat before he grabbed the handle and opened his own door. He needed to get Alison out of the back. However as soon as his feet hit the deck he found himself staring at a pair of shotgun barrels. One of the two wasn’t wearing a vest, but he had the most intense stance of the pair.
“Don’t move,” the man said.
“You aren’t military,” West noted. Even though the man had on NavCam, he didn’t have any insignia.
“Volunteer,” the man said. “I’ve killed a hell of a lot of infected and won’t hesitate to blow your brains all over the deck if you so much as lick your lips at me.”
“Easy,” West said. “Easy.”
“Ain’t you never seen a wave off?” the man in the white vest came over and asked. Like the gunmen, he kept his distance. West hooked a thumb back at the smoldering helicopter.
“With all due respect, I knew what it meant, but my helicopter didn’t.” The man grunted and gave West a half smile.
“Mr. Tucker, will you please have these people inspected for bites? Especially the loud one in the fancy clothes face down on the deck over there?”
“That would be Jeremiah Osborne, my boss.”
“The Jeremiah Osborne?” the man named Brown asked. West nodded.
“He had blood on his clothes,” the guy with the Ping-Pong paddles said.
“Head injury from hitting it on the door.”
“More of your great flying?”
West rolled his eyes. “I have another injured in the back of the bird,” he said.
The man nodded. “Get a medical team up here to check these people out. I’m going to go talk to the pilot of the other helicopter and see if they corroborate the story.”
Ten minutes later, West was standing by the carrier’s tower as medics worked on Jeremiah and Alison. Jeremiah had a bad bruise and a couple of cuts. Alison was worse. She was still unconscious; the medic said her pupils were equal and responsive, so they’d decided she didn’t have brain trauma.
“Probably a concussion, though,” the medic said as she finished checking Alison’s pulse. “She took quite a hit going through that window.” Patty Mize came over, followed by the four other men from OOE who’d accompanied them on the mission.
“You okay, West?” Patty asked.
“Sure,” he said. “Not a scratch on me.”
“That was, without a doubt, the worst landing I’ve seen in my life.” West gave a little chuckle. “But it was better than the best crash I’ve seen.”
“You two the pilots?” asked a Navy officer who’d walked up.
“I’m Alex West, terrible lander. This is Patty Mize.”
“You two come with me. The captain wants to speak with you.”
“I’d like to come too.”
The officer looked at the speaker. “And who are you?”
“Jeremiah Osborne, president and CEO of Oceanic Orbital Enterprises. These are my employees.” The officer narrowed his eyes but nodded.
“Gentlemen,” Brown said, “a lot of those who’ve come aboard have turned out to be armed. I need your weapons.”
“Do you really think that’s necessary?” Patty asked.
“You will be forcibly searched, if necessary.”
“Fair enough,” West intervened. He slowly removed the gun from his kidney holster, checked the load, and handed it to Brown with the action locked open. Patty did the same. Brown looked at Jeremiah.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” the executive said with an air of aloofness.
“Right,” Brown said, handing the guns to the sailor with him. “Enjoy your visit.” The officer that had come down for them took them inside and gestured to a ladder. He gave Brown an appreciative nod before following them up.
After going up two levels, they arrived at a hatch with two armed guards, who nodded to the officer and ignored the other three while opening the hatch. The room was a small conference room. An oblong table dominated the center with large LCD screens on the walls to either end. Straight ahead, opposite the door, was a logo. It was round with a picture of the carrier in the center. A nautical compass was on top, the signature of former President Gerald R. Ford below. Under the carrier was the motto ‘Integrity at the Helm,’ and CVN-78 on the bottom edge. An officer with the rank of captain sat at one end of the table, with “Gilchrist” on his chest. He didn’t stand as they entered.
“Captain,” West said as soon as he entered.
“Come in,” the captain said, “I have some questions I’d like you to answer.”
“Are we being detained?” Jeremiah asked. The captain looked at him.
“Commander,” he said to the man who’d led them in, “I thought I asked for the pilots.”
“This is Mr. Jeremiah Osborne.” The lights went on behind the captain’s eyes.
“Oh, now that makes a little more sense.” He looked at Jeremiah. “Mr. Osborne, we’re under martial law as decreed by the Commander-in-Chief, and you’re on a military vessel. You can sit down, or I can have you thrown in a cell.” He smiled coldly. “It’s entirely your choice.” The man who’d once been one of the most powerful businessmen in the world pursed his lips as he considered how reality had changed. The two guards outside the room looked at him, and he decided a seat at the conference table was preferable to a seat in a jail cell and took a chair.
“Thank you for your hospitality, Captain,” Patty said as she sat.
“Most definitely, thanks,” West agreed. The captain nodded to the two pilots. Jeremiah just grunted.
“As you might know, my name is Captain Gilchrist, and I’m the commanding officer of the Gerald R. Ford. We were not officially on the fleet register when the pandemic broke out. I didn’t even have a full crew. We were conducting sea trials of our new electromagnetic launch and recovery systems, as well as other classified defense components.” Jeremiah looked more interested now. “So when everything went to shit, we pitched in as best as we could. That ended up being the safe landing of that huge plane you see out there.”
“Whoever landed that is one hell of a pilot,” West pointed out.
Gilchrist looked chagrined and shook his head. “He’s Air Force, actually.
“Can I ask why you’re suddenly steaming south?” West asked. The captain stared at the big logo on the wall for a minute and seemed to be thinking about it, then he spoke again.
“A joint Navy/Marine operation is underway to take and hold Naval Air Station Coronado.” All the new arrivals looked surprised. “We were under orders to accomplish this by the Commander-in-Chief.”
“The president is alive?” Jeremiah spoke up.
“Yes,” Gilchrist said with a terse nod. “She’s been aboard an E4 for almost a week now.”
“What’s an E4?” Jeremiah asked.
“Airborne command center,” the captain explained. “It looks a little like the 747 used for Air Force One, without all the creature comforts, and a full combat war room with all the trimmings. She’s been in the air waiting for the situation to stabilize. Unfortunately, it hasn’t. Certain protocols were enacted to minimize collateral damage, and that so disrupted communications that we cannot gain contact with other military units.”
“How have they kept it in the air that long?” Patty asked.
“Refueling tankers. They’ve been dispatching them out of Hickam Air Force Base in Hawaii. They lost Pearl a couple days ago, just before Admiral Tomlinson came over. Hickam fell this morning. The E4 is capable of remaining airborne up to a month, but without refueling it can’t. Three C-130s full of servicemen and dependents and two tankers got off the ground before Hickam fell. They have maybe five more hours before tanks start running dry.”
“So that’s why you had helicopters checking out Catalina,” Patty said. The captain nodded.
“We’ve been desperately trying to find an offshore option and failed. The Navy Auxiliary Field on San Clemente is partially blocked. We have a small team there working quietly and will have half the runway to land the C-130s in a couple hours...”
“But no way you’re getting the E4 down in that small a space,” West said. The captain sighed and nodded.
“That’s correct. Some genius on the president’s staff aboard the E4 came up with Coronado, so here we are.” A junior officer came in, saluted, and handed the captain a red folder. He opened it and glanced at the first page. “Now, ladies and gentlemen, it’s time you answer some questions. Can you tell me what the fuck is in the back of your helicopter that looks like a nuclear bomb?”
* * *
“Reactor One offline!” the technician in the CIC barked. Admiral Tomlinson spun in surprise.
“What do you mean offline?” The CIC lights and every computer flickered and went out, then came back a second later.
“It just went offline, sir. Reactor Two is maintaining the load.”
“Someone go find the captain,” Tomlinson ordered. The Reagan’s captain had left a few minutes ago to get the report of an outbreak of Delta and hadn’t returned yet. “In the meantime, call engineering and find out what’s going on.” Tomlinson’s brows knitted. If they were taking a reactor offline, the watch commander should have called them immediately. Something was wrong.
“Engineering doesn’t answer,” a sailor reported.
“We can’t locate the captain,” another said. Tomlinson cursed. Though he was a flag officer, this wasn’t his ship. He couldn’t give operational orders. The deck shuddered as an aircraft was recovered several decks above them.
“Send a runner to locate the—” he was cut off by the sound of a gunshot outside. In all his years as a naval officer, he’d never once heard a gunshot aboard a vessel he’d served on. It was loud and reverberated through the metal. All the talking in the CIC stopped instantly as the echo seemed to go on and on.
“Halt!” was heard through the open hatch of the CIC. “I said halt!” BANG! Another shot, this time much louder. The sailor who’d yelled stuck his head in the hatch and yelled one word. “Infected!” then slammed the door. The nearest sailor dogged it.
“Sound General Quarters,” Tomlinson ordered, and to hell with the chain of command. “Get me Captain Nelson on the Carl Vinson. Inform him we have an outbreak underway.” The hatch reverberated with shots from the guards outside, and then screams. “Add that we have an extreme situation.”
“Reactor Two is shutting down!” The admiral turned his head and saw all the electronics begin to shut down as the on-demand steam plant quickly lost flow. This time, they didn’t come back, and the blue tinted emergency battery-powered lights came on.
“Did that call go out?” Tomlinson asked.
“No sir,” the radio operator sounded on the edge of panic. “I didn’t get a response before we lost comms.”
“How many birds did we have in the air?” The controllers had flashlights out and were using them to read the grease pencil marks on the plot boards.
“Thirty-nine.” Tomlinson looked at the sailors trying to reach out to the various sections of the ship via the sound-powered phones. Screaming could be heard over one speaker.
“God help those pilots,” Tomlinson said. In the dim CIC, nobody noticed a radar technician slump forward onto his dark screen. He’d only come on duty a few minutes ago. He’d considered himself lucky to grab three chicken salad sandwiches from a tray that was passing by before he came on duty. He brought one to his supervisor, and another to a pretty young PO2 who’d just transferred to the Reagan a week before they’d sailed. They were just as sick as he was.
“Okay,” Tomlinson said a few minutes later when they’d been unable to contact anyone outside the CIC, “I am officially taking command. We need to get someone down to the reactor space and—” He was cut off when the radarman screamed and leapt onto the man sitting next to him. It took a moment in the gloom for anyone to realize what was happening, and even when multiple flash lights lit the scene of screams and spraying blood, more people raced to get away than to help the man being attacked.
“Who’s armed?” Admiral Tomlinson bellowed over the din. “Who has a sidearm?” He was still trying to find out when the next sailor, a female radio operator, snarled and jumped at the admiral’s throat.
* * *
Commander Michael “Shrek” Gorski, the VFA-14 squadron commander, was near the end of his glide path to land on Reagan for the fourth time that day. He was completing a tanker hop that had been somewhat complicated, so as CO, he’d elected to take it himself. When the rain-reduced visibility was factored in, it had only made sense to do it himself.
He’d taken off with full internal tanks, joined with two other Super Hornets and topped them off, then returned home with just enough fuel to make it. The logistics of keeping more than 30 aircraft in the air was daunting.
“Camelot One Zero One,” the approach controller radioed, “contact approach on two three seven five.”
“Roger, switching,” Gorski said and turned the knob that automatically changed the radio to the proper frequency. “Camelot One Zero One, checking in passing Angels 1.0.”
“One Zero One, we have you passing 900 feet,” the controller replied. After a brief pause, he added, “One Zero One, call the ball.”
“One Zero One, Rhino ball,” Gorski replied as he eyeballed the landing area. The meatball was a series of lights on the port side of the flight deck. The angled lights were visible in different directions to allow pilots to judge their landing approach. He saw a line of green datum lights and a central light called the meatball centered between them; his glide slope was optimal.
A few seconds later, the meatball went out.
“What the fuck,” he said, adding power as he keyed his mic. “This is Camelot One Zero One. I’ve lost the ball. Repeat, I’ve lost the ball.” Nothing. He had no choice. He raised his gear and climbed out back up to 1,200 feet. As he passed the carrier, it was obvious the carrier’s screws were no longer turning; Reagan was dead in the water. The chatter from the rest of the planes orbiting was picking up in worried intensity. He glanced at his fuel indicator and ran the numbers. Under 15 minutes.
* * *
“It’s not a nuclear bomb,” West told the captain.
“No shit,” the captain said and flipped through the file. The three seated with him at the conference table could see the pictures. He wasn’t making any real attempt to hide them. It was obvious he’d had the contents of both helicopters examined, and the alien ship had been given intense scrutiny. “Well, it is radioactive. I only have one NBC specialist, and she says it’s not giving off any neutron radiation, so she agrees; it’s not a bomb.” He read from a page. “She says it looks like some kind of ship.” He looked up at Jeremiah. “Is this a prototype or something?”
“Yes!” Jeremiah said, a little too eagerly. Gilchrist’s left eyebrow went up slightly.
“Then why were you out at Catalina Island getting attacked by infected?”
Jeremiah’s mouth dropped open, but nothing came out. West took pity on him.
“We ran a suborbital flight test,” West explained. “We launched two weeks ago, and only just found the thing.”
“And you go looking for it in the middle of the end of the world?”
West shrugged. “Seemed like a good idea at the time.”
“It’s really expensive,” Jeremiah offered lamely. West tried not to cringe and largely succeeded. Gilchrist was about to ask something else when an officer ran in and leaned over to whisper something to him.
“What?” he demanded before the man had finished. “Completely?”
“Yes, sir,” the man said.
“How many are in the air?”
“More than thirty, Captain. The worst has less than ten minutes left.” Gilchrist jumped to his feet and headed for the door.
“Captain, what’s going on?” West asked.
“Security will escort you to the pilot’s ready room just off the flight deck.” He turned to West. “We’re bulldozing your fucked-up helicopter into the water.”
“What?” Jeremiah barked. “That’s a rental!”
“You’re not getting your deposit back,” Gilchrist said on the way out. Brown was there again, the shotgun slung over one shoulder and a pistol on his hip.
“Will you folks come with me, please?” West and Patty got up right away, but Jeremiah delayed.
“I think we should stay right here until we find out what’s going on.”
“You do that,” West said. “I hear this new class of carrier has nice jail cells.” Jeremiah grumbled under his breath but followed nonetheless.
Brown and the sailor assisting him took the group to a more utilitarian sort of conference room. This looked more like a theater with rows of seats facing a stage, LCD screen, and a small lectern. Their four employees were there drinking coffee, including Alison.
“Hey!” West said and hurried over to her. She sat in one of the chairs, holding an ice pack to her head. “How you doing?”
“Well enough,” she replied, a little blurrily. “They X-rayed my head; no serious damage. I got some painkillers, and here I am.”
“You remember what happened?”
“Nothing after the infected jumped on the helicopter and started pounding on the window.”
“Yeah,” West said, “things got a little crazy after that. I’m glad you’re okay. We’ve been through a lot together.”
“And at light speed,” she said with a thin smile. He hardened his face and shook his head slightly. She gave him a curious look, and he looked pointedly at Brown and the sailor with him. “Uhm, okay...” she said and gave a little shrug.
“Please remain in here for now,” Brown said, then left with his assistant.
“What’s going on?” Alison asked. West leaned in to whisper.
“They have the spaceship,” he said, sotto voce, “we spun a cock-and-bull story about it being a prototype orbiter.”
“Weak,” she whispered back.
West shrugged. “Jeremiah was starting to sputter. You’d think a corporate president would be better at lying.” Jeremiah caught their conversation and came over.
“We need to get it back to the ship before these people realize what it really is.”
West winced and spoke quietly, “If you don’t keep your voice down, they won’t need any help figuring it out.”
Jeremiah looked around suspiciously. “So what do we do?” he asked them.
“I don’t know,” West said. “For now, we wait.”
* * *
Andrew Tobin put his cup of coffee down in the officers’ mess and saw the liquid inside was tilted. Instantly he knew the ship was coming about. Something was going on. Luckily, he now had a source. He threw down the last gulp of coffee and left the cup in the sink as he headed down ladders and toward the center of the ship. He wasn’t surprised to find Kathy Clifford at her computer.
“Funny seeing you here,” she said and winked.
“You know what’s going on.” It wasn’t a question.
“What makes you think that?” She looked around the room, double-checking they were alone.
“Because you sit here all the time and listen. It’s what reporters do.”
She gave a little smirk and bid him to come closer. “The Reagan had an outbreak.”
Andrew’s eyes went wide. “How bad? They’re the ones running the flight ops for the assault on Coronado.”
“Bad,” she said. “A controller coming off duty from the CIC a few minutes ago said the carrier was dead in the water.”
“I need to find someone,” Andrew said and took off without another word. A couple minutes later he’d searched almost everywhere and was heading up toward PriFly when he passed one of the squadron ready rooms. He stopped and backed up; there was a group of civilians he hadn’t seen before, and several were bandaged. He stuck his head in. “You guys from the Reagan?”
“No,” a man answered, “we’re from a private company. Those are our helicopters on the deck.”
“Wait, what helicopters? I’m Lieutenant Tobin, USAF.”
“Alex West, test pilot.”
Andrew noticed a guy sitting in a chair wearing expensive North Face outdoor clothes, which had seen better days. A bandage adorned one side of his head.
“Is that Jeremiah Osborne?”
“None other,” the man said without looking up.
“Air Force?” West repeated. “Are you the one who landed the C-17 up there?”
“Yeah,” Andrew said and added a sigh. “Not too popular with the swabbies here because of it, either. Do you know what happened on the Reagan?”
“No,” West said, so Andrew explained what he knew. “So that’s why we’re hauling ass south.”
“Yeah,” Andrew said, “only that big ass transport is in the way of using the flight deck.”
“Tobin!” barked the familiar voice of Commander Beeker, the Ford’s Air Boss.
“Sir?” Andrew said, turning and saluting.
“That big thing out there doesn’t have an ejection seat, does it?”
“The C-17? No sir. Looks bad for the pilot to get out before the passengers.”
Beeker snorted, as close to laughter as he got. “Fine. The captain wants to know if you’re willing to drive it off the bow.”
“Holy shit, are you serious, sir?”
“As a fucking heart attack. We need the flight deck, now. We’re going to start losing birds any minute, and every minute afterward there’ll be more in the drink.”
“I’ll give it a try...” he said, pausing.
“But what? I hear a butt monkey in there Tobin.”
“Sir, there isn’t any room. The nose gear is about 10 feet from the edge. As soon as it goes over, the nose may fold. And if I do get it over, I’m going under the bow. I can’t imagine running over a 100-ton airplane will do your ship any good.” Beeker made a face. Andrew knew that look. He’d been ordered into the air by officers with that look.
“How long to get it running?”
“Say, five minutes,” Andrew said.
“Locker room is over there, grab survival gear and haul ass.” Andrew’s jaw set. “That’s an order.”
“Yes sir,” Andrew said, saluted, and moved.
“You’re sending him out to die,” Jeremiah said.
“Mind your own business, sir,” Beeker said.
“I’m a taxpayer,” Jeremiah replied.
“There are no taxpayers anymore,” Beeker said, and left.
An oppressive silence hovered in the room after Beeker and Tobin left. Everyone looked at anything but each other. West shook his head. He knew what it was like; he’d taken orders. By the sound of it, this was one that needed doing. Only, it didn’t really.
“It doesn’t have to go down that way,” he said aloud.
“What do you mean?” Jeremiah asked.
“We have an alien spaceship, remember?”
“The drives,” Alison said, snapping her fingers.
“The military will know what we have,” Jeremiah said. For a change, he didn’t sound like a kid who was going to lose his toys.
“Yes,” West agreed, “yes they will. But there are more and more compelling reasons to tell them.”
It was Alison who spoke up next. “If I can get some help, I can rig a simple version of what we used on the Azanti.” West nodded and got up, then he found the locker room next door where Tobin was putting on a flight suit.
“Hey, Tobin?”
The pilot looked up and West was surprised to see the man was missing his leg from below the knee. “Yeah?”
“We have another option, but you’re going to have to help us convince the brass here to let it happen.”
* * * * *
