Chapter 40- Battle Zero

Chapter 40

Battle Zero

Sat-Com, Somewhere In Virginia

“Is it over?” she asked him.  The old man didn’t reply, sat back in his chair, a hand resting under his chin.

“Sir?” she asked him again.

General Petersen’s mind had wandered back to the year he got his bars.  He was a buck Lieutenant, just graduated from West Point and serving his first tour in Vietnam.  General McDowell had personally pinned his bars onto him and he had felt an intense pride and a sense, this is who he was.

General Petersen had at that time, just Lieutenant Petersen then, decided he would die one day in this uniform.

Of course that had been day one of his near nine hundred days “in country”.  He had seen some awful things, a lot of dead soldiers and a few too many incidents that were hushed up.  He had grown up fast in those three years and over the next thirty five years he had risen the ranks but lost much of that idealism that had gripped him so tightly.

This, this was the first time he had ever felt ashamed to wear the uniform.

“Sir?” she asked him again.

General Petersen turned around in the chair and looked at Lt Walker.

“How old are you Lieutenant?” he asked her.

“I’m twenty two in three weeks sir,” she replied.

“Twenty two,” he said whistfuly.

“Sir?” she asked again.  “Sir what are we going to do?”

After Vietnam had come Germany, the cold war and the Fulda Gap.  He had advised President’s and the Joint Chief’s but never quite been invited to join their illustrious ranks.  He had been considered to be a specialist, too useful to waste on a desk job.

“Sir?” she asked.  She took a step closer to him.

Iraq, Somalia, Afghanistan and Iraq again.  There had been a procession of plans and theatres of war.  Petersen saw them vanish behind him in a blur.

“Sir we need you,” she said imploringly.

Petersen finally opened his eyes to her and her question.  What to do now?

“Have we heard back from Cavill?”

“Yes sir, Captain Thomas has made contact.  The town is infected,”

“Good God,” replied the General.  “And Cyranno?”

“No sign of anyone alive down there sir,”

“I see, “ replied General Petersen.

“Sir?”

“Lieutenant, do you still remember when you got your bars?”

“Sir?”

“Do you remember when you passed Lieutenant?” he asked her.

“Yes sir.  It was the proudest day of my life sir,” she said with a smile.

“Who gave you your bars?”

“You did sir,” she said, the emotion thick in her voice.

“The next orders only I can give,” said Petersen.  Tears stung his eyes for a moment.  He took the radio mic and opened the channel.

“Sabre Four, are you there?”

“Sabre Four here, go ahead,” came the tinny voice.

“Son, what’s your name?”

“Sir?” asked the voice.

“What’s your name son?” he asked again.

“Captain Michael Cappener,” replied the pilot.

“Captain, I want you to do something terrible now.  I’m sorry that this falls on you,”

“Roger that sir,”

“Initiate Plan-Green,”

“Understood sir.  Sir, it’s been an honor serving with you,”

“The honor was all mine,” replied the old General.

He got to his feet and looked around at the young faces that surrounded him.

He walked past them , stopping here and there to speak to one or the other.  He had trained many of them, showing them how to be a better officer, to be a better person.  He walked up the stairs, the pain in his hands forgotten for a moment.

He opened the door to his office, walking across the room and sat down at his desk.  He took a swig of his drink, a last shot of scotch.  He opened the draw and took out his notepad, writing a final note, a summary of his career.

The muffled gun-shot brought them up to the office.  A single line had been written on a blank sheet of paper that was now dotted with blood.

“You already know how this will end,”

Washington, D.C

The door to the oval office opened again.  Hayden couldn’t help it, his natural respect for the office made him straighten up and button his jacket.  He walked in stood near the General, who was still sat on the couch chair rather than behind the President’s desk.

Internally, Hayden realized that he would hate the man that much more the first time he saw him sat behind that desk.  It wasn’t just the symbol of it, it would be an insult to the President and to all of the President’s who had trod this road before this General had come along with his emergency and taken the office for himself.

“Mr McDonald,” said the General, looking up from a report.  “What do you have for me?”
Hayden took a beat, counting to two in his head, and spoke.

“I’ve managed to get you control of all of the civilian agencies you will need during the crisis.  A number of them want reassurance that you will surrender power after the crisis has ended,”

“You can tell them what you need to,” said the General glibly.

“You want me to lie to them?  Or do you really plan on handing back the keys once the Visigoths are gone from our gates?”

“I wish it were the Visigoths,” said Colonel Carpenter, speaking from the other side of the room.  “Then we could just pay them off with Wyoming and a few million dollars,”

“Wyoming is a beautiful state,” said the General vaguely.

“Mr McDonald, we’re glad you’ve been so cooperative,” said Colonel Carpenter.

“You’ve done what I’ve asked, I’ve honored my side of this.  Is there anything else you need me for?” asked Hayden.

“Yes,” replied the General simply.

Colonel Carpenter walked Hayden out of the oval office again. 

“Forgive the General, he’s tired.  We’ve been working for forty eight hours now with no sleep,”

“We’re all in the same boat in that respect,” replied Hayden curtly.

“True enough.  The pressure on General Pierce is somewhat greater than for a humble cog or gear like you or I,”

“Save it Colonel, I’m not convinced he’s any great hero,”

“Hero’s exist in books Mr McDonald, General Pierce is utterly real.  And real people are falable.  What we need is your help here to make a plan,” stated Colonel Carpenter, those grey eyes boring into Hayden.

Hayden knew enough not to look away.

“You want my help again?  What with now?  You’ve got the civilian agencies,”

“We need a new plan,” Said Carpenter.  “We’ve lost containment in Virginia and there is now an outbreak on US soil.  This requires a radical solution, post haste,”

Hayden drew in his breath.
“Colonel, what is it exactly you are asking for here?  I’m not a solider, I don’t know about battle plans,”

“I know that.  But you do know how to control this country during a crisis.  That’s what we need.  This thing could get away from us.  If the center does not hold?”

Hayden looked out the window, a Stryker armored personnel carrier blocked most of the view of the lawn.

“What rough beast indeed,” he said softly.

Villa Cyranno, Venezuela

Another body was turned over but there was little way of telling who this one was.  The burns were severe.  Oscar had now reached a point where each body was just a pile of rubble, rocks or tree trunks.  They were not people, they certainly weren’t people that he had known.

“No, no survivors,” he muttered to himself.

“What was that?” replied Hannah.

“Nothing,” he said back softly.

“How many?  How many did you find?” she asked him  It had been her idea to make a count of the dead and to see if anyone had managed to escape.  Oscar had known the answer to that without the count but he didn’t want to argue with her.

“I counted eighteen, give or take one.  Some of them are in a very bad state,”

“All of them, really,” she said back.  “I got twelve.  That leaves us at least ten short,”

“Yep,”

The silence blew through the air like a fell wind and Oscar felt his body shaking.  He wanted to close his eyes and sleep.  The air stank in a way that he hoped he would live to forget but something told him that this would be with him for whatever remained of his life.

Hannah looked over at him and a moment passed over them both. The first fragile rays of dawn rose above the mountain and Hannah closed her eyes for a moment.  When she opened them, the moment was gone.

Oscar wiped the tears away from his eyes and sat back against the wall.  Hannah, a soldier and a scientist, began working again.  She dug through rubble and bodies, finding weapons and clues, diamonds on her desert island.

Oscar tried to remember that day when he had decided to leave the village in which he had grown up, he tried to remember the arguments with Don Brazzo and the political conversations with Ivan.  But in the end it seemed like nothing but this night existed in his mind anymore.

It had all been turned into something it wasn’t.

“Okay, can you work a P-90?” asked Hannah, hefting another sub-machine gun.

“Yeah I think so.  Never fired one before but I’ve got some small-arms experience,”

“Good to hear that.  It’s simplicity itself, line up the dot on what you want to die and pull the trigger.  It’ll pull to the left a bit but compensate.  Aim dead Centre, get close and try for battle-zero,”

“What?”
“Point blank to a civie,” she replied with a faint smile.

“Okay, what’s the plan Lieutenant?” asked Oscar.  They had packed up medical supplies and Hannah had a flame-thrower strapped across her back.  Hannah’s face had taken a stark tone.  She had high cheek bones but a vivid bruise stood out under her left eye.  Oscar supposed her body was trying to shut down, shock.  Shock was sure the right word for it.

Oscar had long since given up on the idea that he would wake up and it was all a dream, that the things that had taken over and killed so many people were just a figment of his nightmares and paranoia.  He had given up on that hope.  But now, with a weapon in his hand a sense of direction, he started to feel the first golden touches that it wasn’t all over yet.

“Good to go?” asked Hannah.

“I guess so.  There’s another village over the mountain, it’s nearly twenty miles away,”
“They have a huge head-start over us. I think we’ll struggle to catch up.  But we’ll make good time if we leave now.  We’ll rest soon too,”

Oscar nodded and the two of them got to their feet.  Oscar left his home, a little later than expected but just as finally.

Chapter 39- The Dragon's Teeth

Chapter 39

The Dragon’s Teeth

Cavill, Virginia

A terrible shriek split the night air.  A pair of doves broke from their tree and flew away as fast as they could, finally settling on a telegraph pole.  Above the central junction of this two horse town, they looked down on the desolate high street.

Smoke was rising from the chimney of one house and floating up into the sky, obscuring the silent stars above.  In the backyard of another building, a man was digging a hole and putting bloody rags into them.

The apparent serenity was shattered again as there was the rumble of “distant thunder.”  Gun shot after gun shot echoed through the street.  Further along, stood outside an open door, lit by the one of the few remaining house lights, was a solitary figure with a rifle in his hands.

Behind him, cowering the doorway was another man who was looking out past him, looking at the crumpled figure in the road.  There was a splash of blood on the floor and the man in the doorway called out.

“Jesus Tom, you shot him!”

Tom didn’t reply.  He shouldered the modified M14 rifle and moved carefully toward the now prone figure.  He didn’t recognize the man; his face was torn to shreds and not by Tom’s gunshots.  The first round had pulverized his elbow on his right arm.  The second and third had punched dime sized holes through his chest.

“Tom, what’s going on?” called Mike from his shop.

Tom didn’t reply.  He stood over the prone figure and was about to turn around when he heard a hissing growl from the floor.  Tom’s reactions were sharp, perhaps not as fast as when he had been on active duty in Afghanistan but they were still fast  He spun around and fired a shot with the rifle.

Bullets leaving a rifled barrel can spin at over 100,000 revolutions per minute (rpm) depending on the muzzle velocity of the bullet and the pitch of the rifling.  The five point five six milimetre bullet fired from the M14 Garand spun around in a dizzying fashion, reaching an incredible speed.  The bullet slammed into the face of what may have once been a man but was no longer.

There was a small explosion and a splash of blood threw the man’s face back into the cold ground.  There was a terrible guttural moan from the figure on the ground.  Tom, who knew that a shot in the head at this range was one hundred percent sure to kill someone, stepped back.

“Ammo, do you have more ammo for this thing?” he called back.

“You shot him!  You shot him in the head,”

“Yeah I did. But he isn’t dead.  I don’t know what’s going on but he’s not dead.  Now do you have more ammo?”

“What the hell?” asked Michael.

At that point, as if to underline the hell that they were living in, the figure began to drag itself back to its feet.  It’s head was a crumpled ruin, one half of it a dark red cave that dripped black blood to the floor in an obscene rain as it stumbled forward.

Before it reached the light, it seemed like it had no eyes, the one side of its facing missing.  But something became clear as it became visible to Michael.  It had new eyes, three or four of them, Micheal didn’t stick around to count them. They had pushed through the other side of its face and were clustered in the left hand side of its face, sitting above a huge mouth that was filled with jagged black teeth.

Michael Cristakis, a simple soul, broke from his door and ran back into his shop.  Tom  McVay, a much more troubled soul, turned and got inside the shop, slamming the door behind him.  He grabbed the dead bolt and slid it across as the shambling figure slammed into the door.

The plexi-glass buckled under the impact and Tom put his shoulder into the door.  The figure on the other side was strong, stronger than Tom.  Tom had always been stronger than he looked; it was encoded into the McVay DNA.  But there were limits to human strength and endurance.

The being on the other side of the door, slamming away with two huge clawed fists, appeared to have no limit to either.  There was another huge impact and Tom was thrown back.  He redoubled and got back to the door.

He became fairly sure at this point of two things.  One was that Michael Cristakis, the friendly Greek American owner of the pizza shop, had run for his life.  The other was that he was going to die very soon.

Tom had been expecting to die nearly every day since his first fire-fight in Afghanistan, was not especially afraid.  He would die, that was everyone’s fate.  What bothered him was the thought that he was about to beaten, to be overcome.

The door cracked and the entire window buckled inwards.  Tom stepped back and prepared to swing the rifle like a club.  The door cracked again and this time it was wrenched clean of its hinges.

“Tom!” shouted Michael.  He threw a box of shells underarm to Tom who caught it and walked backwards away from the bleeding figure that was now stood in the doorway, where Michael himself had been not long ago.

Tom reloaded as fast as he could.  He flipped the M14’s selector switch to automatic , braced himself and fired from the shoulder.

There was a roar of fire and flame, the store front lit up again as if from some artificial sun and a series of flashbulb images struck Tom’s eyes as he fired.  The strange man-shaped creature jigged and jumped as bullets slammed through it, knocking it backwards and out of the wreckage of the store.

The silence was intense and even with Tom’s experience of combat gunfire, he felt the pressure on his ears.  He dropped the magazine from the rifle, smoke pouring from the barrel and the ejector port.  He loaded a fresh magazine and approached the prone figure but, even at five foot, he could see that it was still moving.

“It’s still not dead,” he said, pretty much to himself.

It lurched back to its feet with an alarming speed and violence.  Tom stepped backwards quickly and fired twice from the hip as he went.  The gunfire had torn its arm from its shoulder and its body was a bloody ruin.  There was a terrible ripping sound and its torso began to split at the neck.  A ragged seam opened up and to Tom’s horror, he saw that a huge maw of teeth had formed in the middle of its body.

Tom stumbled backwards and tripped over the wreckage.  He scrabbled backwards as fast as he could dragging his rifle with him.  The beast lurched in after him and followed him with a lumbering gait.

Tom rolled and fired as he went.  One round hit the ceiling, releasing a cloud of dust and rubble.  Another round exploded into the chip fryer and there was a dull thud, followed by a hiss, followed by a spark, followed by an explosion.  Fire spread with speed across the shop’s ruined interior.

Chapter 38- An Exercise Of Control

Chapter 38

An Exercise Of Control

Washington D.C

“I understand what you mean Gerry.  I know how you feel.  But the reality of the situation is the way I described it,” said Hayden McDonald with some tiredness in his voice.  This was now his thirtieth phone-call of the day and he had been through some degree of resistance and incredulity from each person he had called.

“Gerry, Gerry, there is no point in sitting on your hands.  This is the way it is.  The President is not calling the shots at the moment and we need to expedite the situation.  For the good of the Republic,”

Hayden was used to pressure situations.  He was the Whitehouse Chief of Staff, a political powerbroker.  And even before the President had asked him to be his chief, he had worked for the Senate Majority Leader.  Hayden was a very accomplished person.  But this was a challenge that was stretching him to the limit of his extensive capabilities.

“Gerry I don’t know how much plainer to make it to you.  If you don’t go back to your agency and get them to play ball, then the General will send some officer over there and he’ll either arrest you or shoot you.  Then someone else will do it.  No one thinks that this fucking guy calling the shots is a good idea.  But it is a political reality.  Now we either accept that and adapt or we render ourselves obsolete,” Hayden waited for the tirade to cool and for Gerry to accept what he had said.

“Thank you Gerry.  You’re a good man,” He put down the phone and walked back around his desk.  Jack Krane had been making his own phone call at the same time.  He finished up with a much less forceful tone and hung up too.

“Good news, I got the Department of the Interior to cooperate,” said Jack.

“Good man,” replied Hayden.  He’d had a large number of deputies and lieutenants in his life and generally he had always worn them out.  Hayden’s highly confrontational and adrenaline based management style was often more than people could handle for extended amounts of time.  But Jack Krane had nerves of steel.

“Okay next is the director of the CIA.  That one is going to be a bitch,” said Hayden.

“No doubt.  But he’s a former military man.  He’ll follow orders,” replied Jack.

“He’s also a friend of the President.  He’s unlikely to appreciate the situation the way it is.  Equally he’s likely to think of me as a traitor,”

“Well then he needs to grow up then doesn’t he?” Jack said simply and made his next phone call.

Hayden smiled briefly and then walked over to his window, already dialing the phone.  Somewhere in Virginia right now someone would answer the phone.  Virginia was where the problem was centralized, that was where Briar had been based, that was were Sat-Com was based.  And Sat-Com had dropped the ball and failed to keep the infection from spreading.

“This is Hayden McDonald for the DCI and I don’t intend to hold.  Put him on the line right now,”

The voice on the other end of the phone sounded tired but there wasn’t the resistance that Hayden was expecting, in the end the DCI had accepted the inevitability of what had happened and that it was better to remain a player than to become an observer.

“I want you to direct your agency to cooperate with the current regime in any matters that relate directly to the crisis.  If you’re in any doubt whatsoever, call me or Jack and we’ll tell you which way to go.  But you are a right guy, you’ll figure it out,”

Hayden hung up the phone again and took a deep breath.  It all seemed like a long shot at the moment.  Hayden wondered what the odds of it all coming off were.

An officer, a Captain, opened the door without knocking and came into Hayden’s office.  Hayden didn’t even look up.

“Mr McDonald?” he asked.

“What is it?” asked Jack, who had stood up.

“The General wants to know what you’ve achieved so far,” said the young Captain.

Hayden looked up briefly.

“Tell him I’ve persuaded the intelligence community to cooperate with him.  Not bad for an hours work eh?”

The captain nodded with a smile.

“Do you think when they write the book on me they’ll talk about me like Benedict Arnold?” asked Hayden to the young Captain.  Hayden didn’t even wait for a reply.

Villa Cyranno, Venezuela

Oscar picked up the gun in shaking hands.  There was still blood on the weapon.  He looked around at Lt McPherson.

He cocked the weapon but he didn’t aim it at her, it was a suggestive motion rather than a direct threat.

“Lieutenant, you need to make the call on the radio,” he announced.

She didn’t look up, she was still holding the body of the dead sergeant.

“Hannah, if you don’t get on the radio, we’ll all be killed,” he said with more force.

She nodded.

“Yes we will wont we,” she said with an effort.  She still didn’t move towards the radio.

“Hannah, if we don’t move then we’ll be killed and we wont be able to help them stop this,” he said with a mixture of impatience and force.

Hannah sat up and looked around.

“Okay, okay I’m back in,” she said slowly.  She got to her feet and moved over to the radio.  She began to tune it into the tactical frequency.

“This is Lieutenant Hannah McPherson, 180588K.  I’m the last survivor on the ground here at the initial infection site.  I’m checking in that my team is dead but that I am still able to proceed.  Please advise me,”

There was a crackle of static and then a tinny voice.

“Roger that.  This is Sabre-Two.  We’ll relay that back to command and advise you shortly,”

“Well, they know we’re still alive,” she said.

“No, they know you’re still alive,” replied Oscar.

“You’re non military, I’m keeping you out of this,” she replied.

“No chance of that now,” said Oscar, looking around at the wreckage that had once been his home.