Rend, p.10
Rend, page 10
“Look, I spoke to Kestrel about what happened,” she said. “I don’t think he’ll apologize to you for it, but he understands now that we work differently in the Bureau than in the—” she caught herself just in time. “Than in the organization that he works for.”
“I get it,” he replied. “He’s got a lot of responsibility on his shoulders as the tactical team lead, but that was way out of line.”
“I know and he knows it too. This mission isn’t some dick-measuring contest, we all need to work together to recover those artifacts.”
“Just keep him outta my way and we’ll get along fine. I’ve gotta take a quick piss before we load the birds. Are we done?”
“Yeah. I just wanted to let you know that I talked to him and that it won’t happen again.”
As he walked toward the restroom she headed toward the gun locker. Each member of the team had the option to choose from several silenced weapons and she’d chosen a simple AR-15 tactical carbine. It was the exact same weapon as the military’s M-4, including a retractable butt stock, thirty-round magazine and a rail system for attaching all sorts of gadgets to the rifle. She chose to go for less and had a simple red-dot sight mounted on the rails. Since projected the mission would take all day, she liked that the weapon only weighed a little over six pounds fully loaded, which was small for such a good weapon.
She picked it up and pulled the charging handle back while she inspected the chamber to ensure that the weapon was clear. She let the bolt carrier group slide forward and verified that it was on safe before slapping a magazine into the rifle. Then she slung it across her shoulder and began loading extra magazines into her pouches. The standard load for an Army infantryman going into combat was 210 rounds, one magazine in the weapon and six loaded magazines in the ammo pouches. Asher insisted that they carry double that, plus each person had a butt pack with another twenty boxes of ammo in strip clips, which could be used to quickly refill the magazines if they needed it.
The ammo added a significant amount of weight to everyone’s load, but if things went bad and their efforts to draw the zombies away didn’t work, then the extra ammo would be a huge help defending whatever structure that they could barricade themselves inside. Satellite imagery showed a lot of debris on the roof of the Archives, so the plan called for landing the helos on the National Mall, then the teams would move north between the Natural History Museum and the Gallery of Art to Constitution Avenue. Once they secured the perimeter, they’d enter what remained of the Archives.
She felt a presence slide up close beside her and Asher began grabbing the larger 7.62-millimeter ammunition for his MK-17 Special Operations Forces Combat Assault Rifle, known as a SCAR. When they were discussing weapon selection the other day, he’d stated that there were better weapons for close combat, better ones for firing at targets at a distance and even ones that had a faster rate of fire, but there was nothing that could compare to the SCAR in all three categories combined. He’d carried the same weapon during his missions for the CIA, so she assumed that he was extremely comfortable with it.
“Are you ready?” Asher asked her.
“Yeah. I’m a little nervous though,” she replied.
“That’s to be expected,” he said as he checked his watch. “Five minute warning. Do you want to call it or do you want me to do it?”
“I’ve got it,” she brushed her hand lightly across his. He set the box of ammo down and placed his hand reassuringly over hers.
“You’ve got it,” Asher agreed. He picked up the ammo and sauntered over toward the back of the group.
She took a quick breath to steady herself and turned around. Twenty-one sets of eyes watched her intently. “Alright, this is it. Five minute warning. We activated the sound buoys last night and the techies at headquarters are manipulating which ones are turned on and off in order to draw the creatures the farthest away from us as possible. We’ve also got Little Birds with snipers up around the Archives already. They have more than five hundred rounds of ammunition per shooter, four shooters per bird, so our guardian angels should have a good time. Let’s go over the assignments one more time. Kestrel will be in the lead helicopter with HRT 24. Immediately behind them will be HRT 27 and I’ll be in the trail helo with Keith and the rest of the artifacts recovery team.
“You are cleared to engage moving targets not wearing this uniform,” she said as she patted her black utility vest that said “FBI SWAT” in bold white letters. “We will make our way to the Archives and immediately begin searching for the documents. Any questions?”
“Yeah, one thing you forgot, Allyson,” Asher spoke up. “Everyone physically do a check that you have your A-Coll treatment syringe. I know we’re all big boys and girls, but if the shit goes down, we may have to use it.”
Allyson patted the small pouch attached to the front of her ballistic vest like everyone else to ensure that the capped syringe containing the anti-venom for the zombie virus was present and then said, “Okay. Let’s seal our masks, do a quick commo check and load up.”
She opened the radiation protective mask carrier that she wore on her leg and pulled out the mask. It was a newer model developed exclusively for the FBI and featured a full-face shield instead of the traditional goggle-style mask that the military wore. She preferred this one much better because she didn’t have the rubber of the old mask cupped right around her nose and chin, plus she could tell who she was looking at. The mask was rated at forty-eight hours in a contaminated environment, but the Bureau HAZMAT guy had told the team that since they were going into an area so close to ground zero of the nuke’s blast that he wouldn’t vouch for it beyond twenty-four. They better be in and out before that time expired.
The mask also had built-in external and internal microphones and earpieces for communication. She did a few commo checks on the general team frequency and then on the leadership frequency that only piped into Asher and Kevin’s mask. “Is your team ready to go, Kevin?” she asked the recovery team’s leader.
“As ready as we’re going to be, Allyson,” he replied. “Let’s just get in there and get this over with.”
She nodded and then mentally slapped herself when she realized that he couldn’t see her nodding her head. “Okay, let’s load up,” she said on the entire team’s radio channel and led the way to the door which opened out onto the tarmac. Allyson knew that being the first through the door was a symbolic message that wouldn’t go unnoticed by the men in the HRTs.
The group moved along slowly as everyone adjusted to the multiple layers of clothing that they wore. Each member of the team wore a set of thin full-body undergarments, followed by the sharksuit, covered with military-style utility uniform, enclosed within a protective HAZMAT suit and then topped off with the Bureau’s bulletproof vest with ammunition pouches. It seemed like overkill, but she’d watched the classified videos of these creatures in action so she’d take her chances with dehydration rather than face a zombie without the protective layers.
Three Army UH-60 Blackhawk helicopters waited for them about two hundred feet from the hanger. Allyson could hear the dull thump of the rotor blades through the mask as the pilots sat in their seats ready to go. When she reached the index marks painted on the concrete, she took a hard left turn to lead the artifacts recovery team to the helicopter staging point. When she was even with the side doors of the Blackhawk she stopped and watched the crew chief for the clearance to approach the bird. He raised his hand and beckoned her over.
She walked confidently toward the helicopter. The first few times that they’d rehearsed boarding the helicopters, she’d ducked low to avoid the blades. Since then, she’d learned that there wasn’t a need to do so. When the blades were turning like they were now they were easily twelve feet off the ground. It was a strange sensation to see the crew chief’s uniform moving in the rotor wash and not being able to feel the sensation of the wind herself. The multiple layers of protective clothing had almost completely removed her sense of the environment around her.
When she got to the crew chief he saluted her and she awkwardly saluted back. She’d never been in the military so it was a little odd to her that the man would do such a thing. He pointed to the back row, center seat and indicated that was where she should sit. The rest of the artifacts recovery team filed in around her while she tried to work the five-point harness. Once it clicked into place she breathed a sigh of relief and within moments the crew chief had climbed in to check all the passengers’ safety harnesses.
Once he was satisfied he wormed his way up to his seat behind the machine gun and pushed the microphone close to his face to say something. Allyson quit watching him and stared intently out the sides of the helicopter until she heard, and felt, the engine power increase and the bird lifted into the air. She noticed that the military helicopters didn’t really take off straight up like civilian helicopters. Instead they lifted off and began moving forward at the same time.
Allyson watched the ground fall away below her and the roof of the FBI building came and went. They were less than ten miles from The Wall and a total of twenty-five miles from their target destination so if they flew at the standard 150 miles per hour, they should reach The Wall in about four or five minutes and arrive at the National Mall in about ten.
This was a momentous occasion for the young agent. She’d spent her entire career behind a desk, working her way up the ladder and only occasionally assisting in the field. After the previous mission had gone so horribly wrong, she insisted to her supervisors that she should be present on the ground for command and control. They’d finally relented to her constant requests and here she was on a real field operation, nervous, but prepared.
The man sitting beside Allyson on the right side of the helicopter patted her leg and pointed toward the front. They were flying northeast from Quantico toward the old capital and The Wall stretched away as far as her eye could see in either direction. Almost immediately she noticed a murky brown mist that filled the open bowl on the interior side of the barrier. She’d heard about the radioactive fog that permeated the landscape inside the Dead City, trapped forever by the ten-foot high wall. The fog was one of the reasons they wore the radiation suits on top of their uniforms and that concentration of radioactivity low to the ground was why the Bureau’s HAZMAT officer had told her that he wouldn’t trust their masks to last more than twenty-four hours.
The helicopters zoomed along over the broken terrain. They flew high enough that if any of the old structures remained standing, they’d be above them. From her viewpoint in the center seat it was hard to see the ground below, but she could see massive destruction through the open doors. It was hit or miss whether the taller buildings were still standing in the turmoil below. Some seemed to be fine except for broken windows while others were twisted, broken and shattered. One building seemed to have fallen intact onto another and lay at an angle against it. Allyson had seen the satellite photos from directly above, but nothing prepared her for the emotions that seeing it in person evoked. She couldn’t wipe her tears away through the mask so she had to squeeze her eyes shut several times to try and clear the salty drops.
She was startled when both the crew chief and the second door gunner on the opposite side began firing their weapons downward. She strained to see what they were firing at, but it was a lost cause. The helicopter banked suddenly to the right and began a rapid descent. The broken dome of the Jefferson Memorial appeared out the right door so she quickly looked to the north through the left-hand door and then there it was.
The White House had sustained a lot of damage. Four of the six pillars of the famous South Portico no longer stood. The result was the roofline leaning drunkenly to the west from the force of the blast a few miles to the east. Blackened skeletons of the once-magnificent trees stood in stark contrast to the ash-covered white walls of the mansion. There was definitely movement all around the building, but at this distance, she was unsure what it was.
She realized too late that they were flying too low along the approach to The Mall. Something didn’t seem right and then she understood what it was. The Washington Monument was no longer standing as an impediment to the flight of the helicopters. She’d looked upon the obelisk almost every day of her childhood and even when she went “away” to college at Georgetown, she’d never strayed far from the watchful eye of the Monument. Yet another piece of her soul was crushed.
The gunners continued to pound away at unseen targets and Allyson began to become concerned. They had to be less than a quarter-mile out from their insertion point and the gunners were firing non-stop at something. She keyed her microphone and asked across the team’s general frequency, “What are they firing at? I can’t see.”
The radio crackled inside her helmet and Asher’s voice filled her head, “This is Kestrel. There’s a slight concentration of zombies on the ground. I’ve tried to get them to stop firing at the goddamned things, but they refuse to comply. On the off chance that the helicopters didn’t alert them we were coming in, these hotshots in the gunner seats surely did.”
“Acknowledged,” she replied. “Recommendation?”
“I’m not sure if they’re gonna land or if we’re gonna have to jump. Ensure you don’t switch your weapon to fire, keep it on safe.”
Allyson looked left and right as the members of her team each chambered a round in their carbines. “Your call boss,” Asher continued. “Looks like we’re going into a hot LZ and we’ll need to come out shooting. Do you want to proceed with the mission?”
A hot landing zone. One of the worst things that a group inserting by helicopter could possibly encounter is an unsecure landing zone. The birds were extremely vulnerable while they were on the ground and if a zombie were to get inside the helicopter somehow, it would be all over for the crewmembers who were strapped securely in place by their safety harnesses. The mission could be a failure before they even stepped foot on the ground and made any movement toward recovering the documents. She couldn’t let that happen.
“We’re a go,” she said with more confidence than she felt.
“Beginning descent now,” Asher’s voice called out as the engines in her helicopter changed pitch again. The crumbled red brick remains of the Smithsonian Castle slowly slid by the right doorway and then the helicopter landed with a slight bounce on its wheels. She tried to stand up but the harness kept her firmly in place. Goddamn it! her mind screamed at her incompetence as she quickly glanced around, hoping no one saw her mistake. She reached down near her navel and gave the lock a twist. The belts fell away and she was free.
She rushed off the helo to the north like they’d rehearsed the day before. She’d barely cleared the door when the helicopter leapt into the air following its brethren toward the safety of the skies. The force of the rotor wash blew her already overloaded body forward onto the ground. The door gunners, who had stopped firing when the teams offloaded, began firing immediately after they had clear fields of fire over the heads of the team on the ground.
“What the fuck?” she screamed into the void of her helmet.
In response to her unheard question, Asher’s voice sounded in the earpiece. “Alpha Team, targets, fifty meters west. Take your time, headshots only.” The low pfft-sound of a few rifles barked in response to his directions.
“Bravo Team, targets east, one hundred meters,” his voice barked again. The HRT from the second helicopter fired toward the east at the slowly advancing cluster of zombies.
Allyson stared in shock at the creatures that in some cases were less than the distance from home plate to the outfield grass on a baseball field. She’d read as much as she could about Doctor Collins’ research on the creatures and even seen pictures and videos of the specimens as he dissected them to study while they stared at him in hatred, but nothing prepared her for the things that appeared out of the murky fog.
The creatures were nude for the most part, their clothing long since rotted off from the never-ending cycle of the changing of seasons on the East Coast. They moved faster than what she thought Grayson Donnelly had described, but it was still not much more than a slow walk. Even from this distance the zombies seemed able to see them through the murky fog and picked up their pace toward where the helicopters had touched down.
Allyson was focusing so intently on the creatures emerging from the mist that she didn’t notice the zombie reaching out for her leg. It clasped its hands around her calf and she shrieked. The thing bit into the soft area of her calf muscle, but the sharksuit did its job and retarded the bite. One of the men ran over and grabbed its feet to pull it away from her but the door gunners had done their job of firing into the crowd of zombies too well. When her teammate pulled on the legs, they fell away from the torso and the man fell hard on his ass.
She beat against it with the end of her rifle and when she finally got a good enough of a hit to dislodge its teeth from her leg she jammed the silencer into the creature’s mouth and pushed against it with all of her strength. Even with only half of a body, the thing was damn near stronger than she was, but the agent was able push it away enough to get an angle so that she wouldn’t end up shooting herself in the process. She squeezed the trigger and the back of the zombie’s head exploded onto the ruined ground and it collapsed instantly.
She stared in horror at the monstrosity that still clung to her ankle. Besides the physical characteristics that Grayson had described, it also had tumorous growths protruding all over the place from its body. The zombies may be more or less impervious to the radiation but their bodies definitely had some type of reaction to it.
“Boss, need you to get that first ring of sound buoys pulsing right about now!” Asher called over the team leader net.
Huh? Oh shit, she thought as she tore her eyes from the creature and looked toward her teammates who were firing into the zombies advancing from between the buildings toward the LZ. “Acknowledged, I’ll call it up now,” she replied and then switched her radio to the FBI’s mission command frequency. “This is Harper. We landed in a hot LZ. I need the internal ring of buoys broadcasting now.”
