Islands of Rage and Hope

CHAPTER 32

“Think you have enough weapons, Lieutenant?” Hamilton asked, looking at Faith’s rig-out.

Faith was rigged up the way she’d been since the Voyage Under Stars, now with more ammo. She had three pistols, twenty magazines for those, Saiga, forty magazines stuck absolutely everywhere, grenades in pouches, kukri, trench knife, half a dozen other knives tucked in various places including hanging off of magazines, Halligan tool and machete strapped to her assault ruck, and Trixie staring out of the back of the ruck.

“This is going to take some serious clearance, sir,” Faith said, squirting some CLP into the action of her Saiga and cycling it. Then she tucked Trixie into the ruck all the way and zipped the top. “I’m pretty sure this is going to be all hands. If I bring any of the ammo back you can take it out of my pay, sir.”

“Oorah,” Hamilton said. “The real question is can you handle the fast rope with that much weight?”

“Just watch me, sir,” Faith said, tapping the helmet cam she was wearing. Due to the questions about what, exactly, they were supposed to be looking for and where it might be, all of the Marine “leadership” down to team leaders were wearing helmet cams.

“I shall be,” Hamilton promised. “Let the grunts take the lead, Lieutenant. That is their job.”

“There’s a time to lead from the back and a time to lead from the front, sir,” Faith said. “When I need to lead from the front, sir, I am going to lead from the front, sir. With all due respect, sir.”

“Understood,” Hamilton said. “But you can’t lead from either position if you’re dead.”

“Zombies don’t bother me, sir,” Faith said, dimpling cutely. “They’re insane, hungry, angry animals. They won’t kill me from professional courtesy, sir.”

“Mr. Walker,” Sophia said uncomfortably, as the “civilian” walked out of Grace in full clearance rig. Somewhere, he’d found a complete set of Army combat gear. Instead of bunker gear he was wearing Army camouflage rain gear, Army kevlar helmet and body armor. He had at least as many weapons and as much ammo as Faith. And an H&K 416 instead of M4. “I don’t remember including you on the mission plan.”

“Ensign?” Walker said. “You know that at some level I outrank you, right? And you need the help. Both in looking for the materials and as a shooter. You’re not questioning my abilities as a shooter are you, Ensign?”

“No, I’m not,” Sophia said. “I’m questioning your age… sir.”

“I think I’ve got one last battle in me, Ensign,” Walker said, grinning. “Ever heard the line that ‘a general should die with the last bullet of the last war’?”

“No…sir?” Sophia said.

“Remember it. It is appropriate to the situation.”

“This is a big one!” Faith boomed as the chopper cycled up. “As always, when possible, let the zombies come into your fire zone, don’t sneak into theirs. But do not allow that to stop you moving forward. WE NEED TO SECURE THIS BUILDING. Hit them! Hit them hard! Keep hitting them! MARINES ARE THE FINEST SHOCK TROOPS ON EARTH AND TODAY YOU GET TO PROVE IT! The Marine battle cry ‘Oorah’ dates all the way back to when we took the fortress of the Bey of Tripoli. ‘Urah’ is Turkish for ‘Blood!’ And if you don’t want to drink the blood of the infected, Marines, THEN YOU ARE IN THE WRONG UNIT! IT’S SCRUMMIN’ TIME!”

“OORAH!”

“OOORAH!” Faith shouted, sliding down the fast-rope. There were infected pouring onto the roof but that was what a Saiga was made for.

She dropped off the rope and went to pistol since it was faster, targeting the infected and backing away from the rope to let Sergeant Weisskopf have room to land.

Fire started to pour in from the door gunner on the Seahawk. They’d gotten the helo into operation overnight and Captain Wilkes and Colonel Kuznetsov had split duties with Harry taking the copilot position on the Super Stallion. The combined fire of the landed Marines and the machine gun quickly had the roof cleared.

She dropped the pistol and went Saiga, pumping out shotgun rounds until the last infected was cleared.

“MOVE!” Faith bellowed while reloading, her voice muffled by the gas mask. “DOOR, DOOR, DOOR!”

Speed was paramount. The door was the choke point and taking that was just about the most important portion of the mission. They had to fight their way down to the bottom floor, find all the doors and get them closed so they could clear the massive research facility. But first they had to take the high ground.

“Weapon, ma’am,” Sergeant Weisskopf said, picking up her .45.

“Thanks, Andy,” Faith said as the lead squad piled up on the door. They were pouring fire into the interior but clearly not making much headway.

“CLEAR!” Faith yelled, charging the doorway, kukri in one hand and a grenade in the other. “IT’S SCRUMMIN’ TIME!”

She hit the infected at the top of the stairs at chest height, knocking him over and riding him down the avalanche of bodies following him. With only her own mass it probably wouldn’t have worked. Another hundred plus pounds of ammo and guns did the trick. She took out a throat at the same time as she pulled the pin on the grenade and tossed it over the side of the stairs down to the other landing. The fragments from a grenade in such a confined space should have bounced all over the place. Instead, they were caught by the press of bodies below.

Then she got down to some serious scrumming…

“Oh, good Lord,” Hamilton said, holding his head in his hands. “I knew I should have gone along.”

Of course, it was now hard to see out of Faith’s helmet cam since it had immediately splashed red.

“We are missing this!”

Since Faith’s exploits tended to be a bit of a morale boost, if not for the squeamish, the helmet cam videos were available for public view. And the Gurkhas had decided to see who this child was who carried a kukri as if she was due and was going to “instruct” them on clearance.

“I can go to war!” Lance Corporal Ombahadur Ghale shouted. “I can fight! Let us go to war!”

“There will be war aplenty to come,” Sergeant Jitbahadur Rai said. “We must regain our strength to fight these battles. And if this is the way of such war…A great war it shall be! Oooiya Ghorkali! Look at her go!”

“Oooh,” Lieutenant Commander Tuttle, commander of the Louisville, said as Faith swung a Halligan tool into an infected’s crotch. “That had to hurt….”

The video was sent without sound. Only the leadership was on the broadcast which had been upgraded to continuous two way. So Colonel Hamilton, along with any “higher” who wished to listen in, was getting Faith’s usual running commentary. And he was starting to wonder if she really enjoyed being an officer…

“You want some? How’s this for a mission plan! Action plan my fucking ass, you bastards! Sure, here’s an acronym for you! And you! I’ll PowerPoint you, asshole! There, I just transynergized your fucking head! It’s time for BUZZWORD BINGO MOTHERFUCKERS…!”

“Your daughter scares me, Captain,” Under Secretary Galloway said quietly.

“She scares me, sir,” Steve said. “But she is well suited to the present situation.”

“Oh, screw this,” Januscheitis said. They’d dropped a few grenades over the side but they couldn’t fire into the mass swarming the lieutenant. “I’m going in…”

He pulled himself up on the railing and dropped off onto the lower stair. It would have been a boneheaded move dropping nearly a story, sure to bust an ankle if not his neck, but he was cushioned by the tide of infected. Not to mention all the bodies, blood and guts.

“IT’S SCRUMMIN’ TIME…!”

“Oh, hell, yeah!” Lance Corporal Freeman said, climbing up after him. “TIME TO HIT THE BEACH, MARINES!”

“Mr. Walker?” Gunnery Sergeant Sands said as the diminutive “technical expert” trotted past him. Most of the Marines were now clogged into the stairs, scrumming the zombies, creating a macroscopic version of antibodies fighting an infection.

“You’re seriously going to miss out on this, Gunnery Sergeant?” Walker said, pausing to draw a trench knife. “What has the Marine Corps come to?”

“Well, when you put it that way,” the gunny said, pulling out a Ka-Bar. “Can’t let the Army have the glory. After you, sir.”

“Once more unto the breach, dear friend,” Walker said, breaking into a sprint. “OR CLOSE THE STAIRS WITH OUR AMERICAN DEAD…!” Despite being nearly seventy and carrying as much weight as any of the Marines, the “civilian technical expert” cleared the rail in a bound and disappeared into the maelstrom below.

“Civilian, my ass,” Gunny Sands growled. “LEAVE SOME FOR ME!”

“In retrospect,” Faith said, sharpening her kukri, “we should have let them get up on the roof and machine-gunned them from the choppers.”

It had taken nearly thirty minutes of scrumming to clear the top two floors of the stairs. And they were still coming up. While the rest of the Marines got their combat time in, Faith was sitting on a good zombie while ammoing back up and fixing assorted “issues” that had cropped up during the scrum. Like her kukri needing sharpening, and straightening out her machete.

“But sometimes it’s just good to get your mad out,” Faith added.

“Probably would have worked better, ma’am,” Gunny Sands said, pouring some water into one of Faith’s magazines to get it half-ass cleaned. “And I’m not sure it was precisely necessary to scrum the stairs, with all due respect, ma’am. Once we had the landing, we could have used firepower.”

“Really, Gunnery Sergeant?” Walker said. “It would have been a superior choice to pour fire into a stairwell that is angled so as to bounce at least thirty percent of the fire back at your position? Especially given that five-five-six would pass through the bodies and continue to rebound?” He was honing his own blood-splattered trench knife.

“Which was what I was thinking, believe it or not,” Faith said, looking over at him curiously.

“That is a point, sir, ma’am,” Gunny Sands said thoughtfully.

“You just did it ’cause you enjoy scrumming, Faith,” Sophia said. She’d stayed out.

“Well, that too,” Faith said, standing up and putting away her kukri. “But I think I got one of my filters clogged with blood. That’s a first.”

“And the colonel sent that he’d appreciate it if you could wash off your helmet-cam, Faith,” Mr. Walker said.

“Where’s my water bottle…?”

Hamilton reran the video from Faith’s entry and considered how the rounds would have bounced around in the stairwell. Then he frowned.

“I hate when she’s right,” he muttered.

Dr. Rizwana Shelley had wanted to see the conditions of London so she had accessed the camera video as soon as the group left the boat. The young lieutenant and one of her sergeants had spent the flight at the back of the helicopter which had given an unfortunately complete view of the conditions. Idly—and if truth be told, somewhat morbidly—curious, she had continued to watch as the assault took place.

So far she had only thrown up once. But she had not stopped watching.

“There’s no doors to close, ma’am,” Januscheitis radioed.

“Say again, over?” Faith said, holding her earbud to try to hear over the continuous fire. She was firing a pistol one-handed while she held it.

The fricking infected were swarming from EVERYWHERE. Every corridor was choked with them and the Marines were literally having to wade through the bodies. They also were clocking out on ammo.

The gunny and Walker were back to back pouring fire in both direction. She’d heard her sister talking about the “civilian shooter” who turned out to have been “someone” but even Sophia had never seen him in a serious battle. The little shrimp was a fucking machine. Every shot was a head shot; he was getting pretty much thirty infected for every magazine. Even the Gunny wasn’t that good. ’Course, it was good he was a machine, since there were too many fucking infected. Finally the latest tide receded but they could hear more closing in.

“This building has all glass at the bottom, ma’am,” the staff sergeant radioed. You could hear continuous fire from Condrey’s Singer in the background. None of this “five-round burst” shit. “We’ve gained the lobby. Multiple panes are gone, ma’am. They’re pouring in. Estimate over one thousand infected in view, street is choked…. We’re only holding this balcony ’cause of the two-forty.”

“Seahawk,” Faith said, thinking about the map. “I need fire on all approaching infected on St. John Street. All teams, this is an abort; hold positions, prepare to extract. Anybody stuck?”

“Team six,” Hooch called. “We’re on the third floor, east. We’ve got overwhelming force both ways and we’re clocking out.”

“All teams, move towards third floor, east to extract team six,” Faith said.

“Belay that order, Lieutenant,” Hamilton said, cutting in on the command channel. “Pull your teams out and head for the roof.”

“Stand by, all teams. Hold current positions,” Faith said, switching frequencies and reloading at the same time.

“Sir,” Faith said. “Did you just override your ground commander, sir?”

“You need to extract what you can, Lieutenant,” Hamilton said. “With the entire ground floor open to infiltration there are approximately six million infected heading to your location and you cannot fight that, Lieutenant. When you’re down to fifty Marines, total, ‘leave no Marine behind’ is not the way to handle it. As your father said, we cannot afford an Iwo Jima. You need to extract while you still can.”

“Understood your order, sir,” Faith said, scrabbling for a magazine. “Understood the reasoning. Do not concur. We can push to Hooch’s position. I’m on fourth floor, central. I can make it. So can Janu and the Dutch Marines. We assemble on his position, cross-load ammo and blow our way to the roof. We can do this, sir. And, sir, if we lose every last Marine in this building, sir, you just got an infusion of seventy Gurkhas, sir. People die, sir. But honor does not. And if we don’t have honor, sir, what do we have left? A planet of death and misery and blood and shit. That’s all we’ve got, sir. And if that’s all we’ve got, what’s the fucking point? If you want to throw my HONOR on that pile, sir, I respectfully resign my commission, sir. And I will fucking well fight my way through to Hooch BY MYSELF!”

“Lieutenant, I appreciate your passion. The order stands. Gunnery Sergeant Sands, if the lieutenant does not obey the order, you will remove her from the building by force if necessary.”

“Like hel—!” Faith started to scream when Walker shut off her radio then caught her arm before she could strike back.

“Belay that,” Walker said quietly.

Faith, under the best of circumstances barely capable of discipline, dropped her arm and nodded.

“Yes, sir,” Faith said, looking at him curiously.

“Mr. Under Secretary, are you up on this frequency?”

“Yes,” Galloway replied.

“Ensign, turn your helmet cam on me,” Walker said, just as quietly. His demeanor had changed to anything but laid-back. Despite wearing Army gear, until that moment he’d still been “Mr. Walker,” surprisingly good at all sorts of things, especially combat, but in some fashion easy to overlook. Unless you knew him, you hardly noticed him.

Now, he seemed to fill the corridor. Barely five two, he suddenly seemed taller, broader. Without any discernible change, he was suddenly the center of attention.

He reached into a pouch and started pulling out velcro patches, slapping them rapidly onto spots on his armor and uniform. Pathfinder, Master Parachutist’s Badge, Scuba Badge. Combat Infantry Badge, two stars. Joint Special Operations patch, left shoulder. An odd and very rare patch that looked a bit like the SAS badge, right shoulder.

Last, he pulled out two strips of cloth and slapped one on his helmet and one on the front of his body armor.

Each strip bore three black stars.

“Activating at this time, Mr. Under Secretary,” the lieutenant general said. “Assuming command of this mission.”

“General on deck!” Gunnery Sergeant Sands said.

“As you were,” the general replied, potting an infected offhand, left-handed, while returning the salute. “That means cover us while we work this plan, Gunnery Sergeant.”

“Do I get to know who this general is who just popped up in my command, ma’am?” Steve said. “You said you were aware of him.”

“Lieutenant General Carmen Montana,” General Brice said, speaking rapidly. “Handle: Skaeling, Translation: ‘He who walks as death in the night.’

“Seventeen years enlisted Army Special Operations, mostly Delta, directly promoted captain from sergeant major after Mogadishu. Actions in Mog still classified, awarded Distinguished Service Cross to be considered for upgrade to Medal of Honor after declassification. Additional twenty years officer. Former commands: Delta Force, Fifth Special Forces Group, Joint Anti-Terrorism Task Force, Army War College, and Joint Special Operations Command. Turned down SOCOM and retired. More medals than Audie Murphy. Speaks something like thirty languages fluently. Parachuted solo into Dagestan under cover on Nine-Twelve. He was sixty-three at the time. The rest would take hours. Questions?”

“No, ma’am,” Steve said. “Not even terribly surprised.”

“Bottom line: He outranks everyone but Mr. Galloway. Pre-Plague Joint Chiefs and SecDefs stood up when Night Walker entered the room. I’m not going to argue with him because I know he knows what he’s doing.”

“You’re a vice admiral?” Sophia spluttered. “Sir? I was thinking chief, maybe colonel!”

“Lieutenant general, Ensign,” said “Walker,” reloading. “My last name is actually Montana. My first name is General. Do you understand that, Colonel?”

“Yes, sir,” Hamilton radioed.

“Primary mission abort,” General Montana said. “Do need to extract. No one left behind. Shall make it out. All of us. Time to unpack my adjectives. Lieutenant Smith, call the plan: They know your voice.”

“Yes, sir!” Faith said, changing back to the platoon frequency. “All teams fifth floor and above, move to the roof and extract by helo. All teams below fifth floor, converge on floor three, east. If you get stuck, don’t worry, take open order, lie down and sit tight. We will come for you…”

There wasn’t a thing that Steve could do to support his children in the maelstrom. Which he had become as comfortable as any father was ever going to get about long ago. So he picked up the phone and dialed a number.

“Medical Wing, Nurse Black speaking.”

“Tina, could you please get me Lieutenant Fontana if he’s available?”

“Yes, sir. One moment, please.”

“Fontana.”

“Turns out Walker’s a lieutenant general?”

“Guess he decided to break cover, Captain?”

“Yes. You knew?

“Duh. Everybody in SF knew Night Walker. It’s like asking a Marine ‘have you ever heard of some guy named Chesty Puller?’ Or, you know, Audie Murphy, Alvin York, Patton…Except nobody without a TS was supposed to know his name. It’s why he turned down SOCOM. It was a publicly posted position. That and it was all politics.”

“And you never even thought to mention this? I mean, the first time you met him, you didn’t even blink, Falcon.”

“Of course not. It was Night Walker, Steve. And under cover. Of course I didn’t blow his cover. He’d have killed me. It’s an SF thing. You wouldn’t understand…”

“This is probably a stupid order, COB,” Commander Vancel, skipper of the attack sub Alexandria said. “But I don’t want book on this one. Not this one.”

“The guys already shut it down, sir,” the chief of boat said seriously. “And, with respect, sir, until they get out, or don’t, pretty much everything’s shut down but reactor watch, sir.”

“Approved,” Vancel said. “Please God, they make it out. I don’t know how we’d keep up morale without the Bobsie twins.”

One by one, the helmet cams of the leadership, and then the radios, succumbed to continual scrums with infected. Along the way, however, the viewers got a new appreciation for the word “fury” watching the combination of Night Walker and Shewolf. The helmet cameras of the whole group had to be doused down frequently as the seventy-something general and the “almost fourteen, damnit!” ieutenant cleared corridor after corridor, room after room, again and again.

Night Walker turned out to have a lot of adjectives he hadn’t unpacked. No single human could carry the entire battle, but the phrase “freak of nature” was applicable. The general had immense natural talent and nearly forty years experience of bringing death and destruction to America’s enemies. Single-handedly, the diminutive septuagenarian added at least the weight of another platoon. And if his age showed at all, no one could tell the difference. Even the gunny couldn’t keep up.

If this was to be the last battle of the Night Walker, it was an achievement to equal any in history.

After two hours the last word that higher had was link-up with Sergeant Hocieniec’s Team Six. But Sergeant Weisskopf’s team in Fourth floor South was cut off by then. When Weisskopf went into a scrum and his radio was ripped off his gear, that was the last transmission.

The helos continued to circle. Infected were being drawn by the sound from all over London and St. James Street and Pentonville Road were piling up with bodies. The Seahawk RTBed once for gas and ammo and to drop the Marines it had picked up, then returned. And still there was no sign of the rest of the party. Just more and more infected crowding in. Many of them were stopping in the street to feast but others seemed drawn to the sound of conflict in the building and were wading through the fire from the helos to close with the embattled unit.

Finally, eight hours after entry and six hours after the last transmission, a sole blood-covered Marine stepped out of the door carrying another Marine on his back.

But he was followed by more.

In ones and twos, bloodied and battered Marines stumbled out onto the roof and took up defensive positions around the door. Most of them didn’t have functioning weapons anymore. M4s were bent. Knives were gone. Many of them had pistols in their hands, gripped by the barrels, that had obviously been used as clubs. Some of them were stumbling out and hitting the deck, flaccid in exhaustion. But they were all alive. Helmets were missing. Some of them might have bites. A few were badly wounded. Sophia’s team, less General Montana, burst out in a group. Sophia staggered away from the door, took off her respirator and helmet, threw up, then staggered away a few feet and lay flat out on the roof. Olga just hit the deck facedown.

Thirty Marines, four Navy and “The General” had been left below and Hamilton slowly got a head count. There was a steady trickle. Two, ten, twenty, twenty-five…

“Seahawk, prepare to give cover fire,” Hamilton said as a burst of Marines blew out of the door. “Try to keep the infected from getting on them when they’re boarding.”

“Roger,” Colonel Kuznetsov radioed. “Standing by.”

Finally, Gunny Sands, Januscheitis and General Montana exited the door. Januscheitis was missing his helmet and most of one ear. Sands’ gear was definitely not parade ground and a Marine gunnery sergeant had done the unthinkable and left his rifle somewhere in the building. The general was covered in blood but other than that seemed to be unaffected. And still fighting.

General Montana hacked expertly at the arms of infected using a machete he hadn’t started with while Gunny Sands and Januscheitis dragged the furious lieutenant out of the stairwell by the back of her combat harness. Faith was missing her helmet, too, her gear was torn and ripped by teeth marks and she had a cut on her cheek. But she was still slashing the infected holding onto her with her kukri. As Hamilton watched, she cut off two of the half dozen hands pawing her gear.

She was the last. That was every single person who had entered the building.

There was a distant cheer and he realized the entire boat must be watching the video.

Marines piled into the door with anything they had left: Halligan tools, machetes, bent M4s, prizing the infected off their lieutenant. Then the entire group, directed by General Montana, managed to push the door closed against the mass of zombies, jamming it with anything to hand.

Faith kicked the door several times, then pushed through the Marines until she found one that had a remaining grenade. She walked back to the door, pulled the pin, pushed the grenade through the gap, cut off another hand to get free, then walked away. There was a brief blast of additional blood and tissue out of the gap.

Then she took off her assault ruck and pulled something out. It was a bright blue plastic package. She held it up to the helos and started dancing as the rest of the teams pulled similar packages out and held them up. Everyone had them. With no ammo in their rucks, there had been plenty of room. A quick estimate was that they were carrying a couple of hundred pounds of what had to be polyacrylamide gel powder. More than enough for all the vaccine they needed for the subs.

“I’ll be God-damned,” Hamilton breathed.