ARISEN, Book Twelve - Carnage (18 page)

She moved away from the crash site, and stumbled up a small rise nearby. Scanning the horizon, she could see that while she hadn’t made it to the airport, she’d made it close. She could make out the runway and terminal building from here, and adjacent to that the neat rows of buildings of Camp Lemonnier. And Djibouti Town out beyond that. These were the only signs of civilization visible in any direction. And she figured they weren’t going to come to her. So she got her aching body moving.

Stumbling through the brown wasteland like a zombie herself.

* * *

After barreling through the wooded area on the southeast side of the valley, still pretty much at their top speed, al-Sif brought the jingle bus to a sliding, shuddering halt at the bank of the river, and the base of the mostly destroyed bridge. This led to some white-knuckling among the passengers. But Handon and Henno both nodded in approval. Juice’s bus driver was earning his stripes.

Speed was life for them now.

In seconds, Handon was sergeant-majoring everyone off the bus, and also admonishing his people – Ali, Juice, Henno, Fick, Reyes, Baxter, and now al-Sif – to take nothing but ammo. And to move like a lot more than their own lives depended on it.

There was no choice but to proceed on foot. They only had about eight kilometers more to go. But as everyone moved out across what was left of the bridge, trying not to look down below the single steel girder in the middle, Handon looked back. And he could already see the dark line of the approaching Spetsnaz convoy. It was coming up fast. And Handon remembered their first footrace, back in that other river valley. And how Spetsnaz had thoroughly outpaced them, until they were finally stopped at the river.

And this time around, the good guys were not only on foot, but carrying a dead body, plus all exhausted body and soul – from non-stop running, and fighting, and being shot down in helicopters. And presumably all these new Spetsnaz guys, being chauffeured right to the foot of the bridge, were fresh as daisies. And Handon knew it in his bones – they were going to catch them before they reached the airport.

And then they were going to kill them all, first to last, and take Patient Zero back. It was like the predetermined outcome of a mechanical process set in motion long ago. And Handon didn’t know how to stop it. He decided to just get everyone the hell across the river.

And hope he thought of something after that.

Contact Right

Alfa Group Bunker, 100ft Beneath Red Square

In the Spetsnaz bunker deep under Lenin’s tomb, the lights finally came back on – the instant Alfa Group commander Akela powered back into his TOC. This instantly revived the wicked headache he’d had since watching a flashbang go off ten feet from his face through night vision.

Shortly after that, the goddamned invading British force had made their escape – having rescued Oleg Aliyev, the Kazakh worm who had previously been Akela’s prisoner – and, further, had managed to collapse the entire stairwell with explosives. Since they’d done a similar job to the elevator on their way in, this meant Akela and his Wolf Pack were completely trapped down here in this tomb.

They were… entombed. And they were helpless.

Worse, this also meant the invaders were up top in Red Square now, with a free run to the Kazakh’s crashed helicopter – which Akela finally knew had the MZ, the zombie-annihilating virus, in it.

With the lights up, Akela yanked his NVGs off and dropped them on a station, while rubbing his temples. “Report,” he said.

“Engineering routed around the surged transformer. We’ve got power back – for everything.”

Akela grabbed his headset and hailed Lyudmila. His favorite team leader, she was commanding the squad of shooters he had sent to capture the British plane, and kill all the men who flew in on it. Hers was also the only unit he had on the ground. They were it. Over the channel, Akela said, “Get to that helo crash site in the square. You’ll find a coldbox in the back of the cargo area. Secure it –
now
.”

He took a quick look at some initial casualty reports from the assault into the bunker, and their attempts to fight it off, before handing over the TOC and heading back to that collapsed stairwell. Passing the elevator, he could see it was a total write-off – but men were already clearing rubble from the bottom of the stairs. Shoving his way forward, Akela put himself in the lead, deadlifting a giant block of concrete and hurling it out of the way. Warlords led from the front, regardless of the task.

And they couldn’t afford to stay trapped down there.

* * *

“Ha ha, you sad wankers!” Staff Sergeant Eli laughed as the surviving Royal Marines reached ground level – knowing there was now no way they could be followed. After climbing ten flights of stairs in full combat kit and night-vision goggles, they were all gulping for air like fish that had just been netted. But they were safe, at least for the moment.

Even their commander, Major Jameson, couldn’t resist smiling out loud. Getting out alive, when the prospect looked seriously in doubt, was one of the most exhilarating experiences in life.

“Hey, gimme your crowbar,” Colour Sergeant Croucher said to Eli, who pulled it out of his belt pouch and handed it over. Croucher used it to lever open the elevator doors in the pitch-black ground-floor anteroom of the tomb, pulled them wide, then handed the crowbar back. “Watch this,” he said with a cheeky grin. And he pulled the pins on two grenades and simply dropped them down the open shaft. Eli and Jameson burst into cackles of laughter, until Halldon pissed on the parade.

“I’m glad the command element is having a jolly day out,” he said, which was the most anyone had heard him say in a long time. “But we’ve all still got to get through that.” In night-vision green and black, he motioned at the front doors – the other sides of which were still being energetically banged on by a large number of dead hands.

“Do it,” Jameson said, his amusement subsiding.

Halldon looked around the room as the other Marines got into position, then yanked the doors open and backed up fast. The dead came tumbling in, falling on their faces, tangling up in their Red Army greatcoats. Others behind kept their feet as they climbed over the fallen.

The Marines’ suppressed rifles chugged non-stop, and dead bodies fell.

* * *

“Go ahead,” Akela said into his headset to Lyudmila, stepping away from the rubble-clearing operation and out into the hallway, while monitoring the flow of men and materials. Right now two men were pushing a wheelbarrow of rubble away down the hall.

“Approaching the square. Five minutes to target.”

“Copy that.”

A staggered double explosion blasted out of the open elevator shaft, taking down the two men and the wheelbarrow, all of them rocketing away down the cross hallway as the wheelbarrow’s contents clattered out on the floor. If those two men got up again, Akela didn’t see it.

“Motherfuckers,” he said.

* * *

As the ravenous crowd trying to shove through the doorway of Lenin’s tomb turned into a circular pile of twice-dead bodies, Jameson personally led the breakout. Working hard just to keep his rifle to his shoulder and his breathing steady, he vaulted the ring of bodies and pushed out onto the short set of stairs out front and into the less oppressive darkness of the square. There he anchored the center of what became a skirmish line, firing steadily through most of 180 degrees, clearing and holding the area outside while the others exited – including Aliyev, the Kazakh bioweaponeer and the objective of their mission, now being babysat by Sergeant Eli.

Croucher’s hand slapped Jameson’s shoulder. “All out!”

Jameson nodded – and without turning, led the team into the square at a run. Their goal: the north corner, which Jameson remembered as the gateway to Tsverskaya Street, which would in turn take them most of the way back to the Hippodrome – where their plane and pilot were parked. But the most direct route to that corner also took them diagonally back across half of Red Square.

From the instant their boots hit the ground, they were all having to shoot fast and thick, making shots while running – or, when they missed, just body-checking undead that got too close. At least the open square didn’t have the density of dead that had gathered around the tomb door. Jameson was so happy to taste the cold open air, and feel the cobbles under his boots, it took him a couple of seconds to register that Aliyev was shouting at him.

Turning his head, he said, “What?”

“I said,
wait
! Where are we going?”

To Eli, who was literally keeping Aliyev at arm’s length, that sounded like ingratitude, and the troop sergeant gave the Kazakh a shove along with an answer: “We’re getting your precious arse the hell out of here is where we’re going.”

Aliyev pushed back. “No,
no
! We need to get the MZ!”

“The M-what?” Jameson asked, finally slowing and lowering his weapon.

“The virus! The zombie-killing pathogen! The whole point of this fucking exercise!” And with this Aliyev came to a stop, and Jameson did as well, the rest of the team stringing out ahead of them. With their NVG blinders on, they only slowly realized the train was stopping. But the shooting wasn’t – it couldn’t.

“Oh, you are fu—” But Jameson cut himself off, knowing that cursing fate, or the Kazakh, got them nowhere. He grabbed Aliyev by the arm, flipped his NVGs up, and said, “You mean you don’t have it?” He spun him around, but before he could dig into his backpack, the Kazakh pointed back to the southeast end of the square.

“It’s in the helicopter! The helo! And we’ve got to get to it before the goddamned Russians do!”

Fuck
. Jameson and Eli traded dark looks – which had to be quick ones, because only the security perimeter spontaneously being formed by the others was making it possible for them to stay in that spot and live. And it wouldn’t be possible for very long.

“Split up?” Jameson asked. “You get him out, I go for the prize?”

“Nah,” Eli said. “All for one. Either the rest of us are getting out of here together, or we’re not.” Then he hefted his weapon, gave Aliyev another shove, and led the charge this time, keeping close to the long northeast edge of the square – just to keep something like a wall at something like their backs.

They were diving back into the belly of the beast.

* * *

With two men left behind guarding the captured British plane and pilot, Lyudmila now led ten Spetsnaz Alfa Group shooters at a run into the west corner of Red Square. Going straight down the endless stretch of Tsverskaya Street had been the quickest route from the Hippodrome, and they entered the square along the southwest edge – mainly out of habit, as that was the side with Lenin’s tomb on it. She and her team had covered all of this distance at a run, loaded – and all were now winded and hurting.

All except Lyudmila.

Everyone in Alfa maintained a razor edge of fitness, most doing so on the machines in the bunker’s gym. But Lyudmila did fully loaded road runs, wearing a gas mask, out in the city, and by herself. The dead didn’t scare her – but weakness did. Now she was the only one of the eleven-man squad not sucking wind after a 5km combat run.

She kept the team moving southeast just off the long bottom edge of the square, which would get them close to the crashed helo, fast. Akela had been adamant about this.

And letting down Akela also scared her.

* * *

It was Eli who clocked them first. Their NVGs, even the good ones, really did restrict vision to a narrow cone. So it was either the preternatural sense he had for threats, or maybe just good situational awareness, that made him realize.

One Troop had a double, a doppelgänger.

It was another force of tooled-up soldiers, one of nearly equivalent size, and it was mirroring their movement – running southeast through the square, but just off the opposite edge, the long southwest one, almost perfectly parallel to their path along the long northeast one. But then, on a second look, Eli realized their paths actually weren’t parallel – they were angling in toward the center. And the lines their paths described were going to intersect exactly at the crashed helicopter.

Shit.

“Contact right,” Eli announced over the squad net, then brought his weapon up and started shooting as he ran. He’d been around long enough to know that when killing had to be done, there was nothing to be gained by putting it off. The one thing you couldn’t do was hesitate.

It took the others a few seconds to react, and follow suit.

No one stopped running – no one even slowed. It was truly a running gun battle. Eli saw two of the enemy drop before they could return fire. Eli’s senses and reflexes had bought them the initiative, and a couple of free shots. But by this point, both groups were nearly even with the helo crash site, each about fifty yards from it, on opposite sides. And there was absolutely no cover here, other than the helicopter itself.

Both teams instinctively dropped to the deck, going prone and shooting from an inch above the cobblestones, just to get out of the line of fire, and what otherwise would have been two inward-facing firing squads of ten executioners each – all the same men as the condemned. Suppressed rounds snapped inches over the Marines’ heads and cracked into the stones in front of their faces, stinging them with rock fragments. These Spetsnaz Alfa guys could shoot – and they didn’t back down an inch. The Marines waited to get hit, as they energetically returned fire, hoping to do it to their enemies first.

It was not a cool situation to be involved in. Adrenaline and fear surged through the veins of every man there, from Major Jameson down to Private Simmonds. And every one of them had to fight his battle with fear alone, and had to find a way to continue to be effective in spite of it – to keep fighting for the others. If they stopped shooting, or stopped shooting well, if they took the pressure off the enemy for a second, they were all dead.

But with both teams prone in the open with no cover, it wasn’t long before the grenade-throwing started – as both offensive and defensive tactic. And then with the sound of the explosions came the dead.