Rend, p.6
Rend, page 6
Before she began, Allyson stood up and paced around the room. Asher smirked to himself at his lack of skills with women; whether in interpersonal relationships or professional matters, he was just all-around bad with them. She calmed herself down again and sat on the bar stool opposite him. “I’m sorry. This is an important mission for me.”
“It’s okay, take your time. Coffee?”
“No, thank you. Okay, here it is. The government has been lying to the public for the last six years. The unofficial number of zombies in The Wall’s containment area has always been around the ten or fifteen thousand mark. In truth, there are millions of them.”
For the first time that day, she was rewarded with a look of shock from Asher Hawke. He recovered quickly though. “So there are millions of them,” he replied. “That’s why the previous administration didn’t make any efforts to go into the city and reacquire the items, not the radiation.”
“The radiation is a very real problem, but it’s manageable. You’re right, Mr. Hawke—”
“Call me Asher, please.”
She nodded. “Alright, Asher. You’re right. The zombies are a bigger problem. The administration thought that they could risk it and sent in a team. We had HRT escort a team of museum specialists behind The Wall. They made it to the National Archives building where the three documents that we want to recover are housed before we lost contact with them.”
“HRT? Why did you use the hostage rescue guys?”
“They’re the best shooters we have in the Bureau. We figured that we’d need their marksmanship to take out the zombies that would surely attack them,” she answered.
“What about using current Army Delta or SEALs for the security element?” Asher asked.
“The Director fought the battle with the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and won. He convinced the president that since we also wanted to investigate the kidnappings in addition to recovering the artifacts, the FBI should be the lead agency. The president agreed with him.”
He nodded and then went back to what she’d said a few moments before. “Wait, you said three documents?”
“The Constitution, the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Independence, the so-called Charters of Freedom. All three of those were on display at the Archives when the Air Force detected the inbound missile. Since none of the Archive employees who were working that day survived, we don’t know if they followed emergency protocol. In the event of any type of emergency, they were supposed to secure the documents in an underground safe. We’re also interested in safeguarding several other documents that were in the Archives, but the primary mission is the preservation of the Charters. The other documents that we eventually want to secure include the Emancipation Proclamation, the Louisiana Purchase Treaty and the certified copy of the Magna Carta from 1297.
“But there may be a bigger problem than the zombies,” Allyson said in an attempt to get back to her original line of thought after being temporarily sidetracked. “The team leader reported that they were taking gunfire from one of the rooftops before he stopped communicating.”
“What do you mean?” Asher asked. “I thought the city—the entire area inside The Wall—was abandoned.”
“So did we. Actually, let me back up. The Bureau has an ongoing missing persons investigation for several thousand people who’ve gone missing in the past three years. We have strong evidence to suggest that at least some of those people have ended up inside The Wall and are now zombies.”
“Shit. So you’re saying someone is kidnapping people and disposing of the evidence by turning them loose inside The Wall?” He slapped his open hand on the countertop and Allyson jumped. “Sorry. It’s almost perfect. If you can keep evidence at the initial kidnapping site to a minimum and you can avoid detection getting the victims inside, then they just vanish without a trace. Is this mob related?”
She stared at him with a newfound appreciation. “That took our analysts years to figure out, Asher. And that was even with photographic evidence that some of the victims may have been in the city. Satellite pictures,” she answered his unspoken question.
“So the Bureau believes that the mob is somehow dumping kidnapping victims. Are there more of these kidnappings compared to the old-fashioned mob murders?” Asher asked.
“Wow, you’re full of insights,” she smiled. “No, when we compare the number of kidnappings that we believe are involved in this scheme with the historical trend of murders in the same areas they are roughly equal.”
“So it’s business as usual for the mob, they just have a new business model.” Inwardly he beamed because he was using knowledge from his Business Management 101 course last semester.
“Something like that. It’s actually been easier for the local police since they’re not dealing with bodies and stray bullets, but that brings me back to my point about our team that we lost contact with. The team leader clearly said they were taking fire from the rooftops before his commo cut out. I believe that the mob kidnappings and the shooters inside The Wall are related.”
He stood up to refill his coffee and thought about it for a minute. “Did you have UAV support for your team?” he asked.
She looked away in embarrassment and replied, “No. The Bureau didn’t see a need to do so.”
“Pardon my French Miss Harper—and to whomever is listening—but that’s the dumbest fucking thing I’ve ever heard in my goddamned life,” he snapped. “It wouldn’t have been hard to task a single UAV with over-flight of the target area while your team was on the ground. The eye in the sky could have told them when zombies were closing in on their location or even given them updates on the structural integrity of the locations that they were entering.”
“The request went up, but it was denied somewhere along the chain so the mission lead made the call to go ahead with the operation without the UAV coverage,” she said quietly.
“Well, that guy is a fucking idiot,” he retorted.
She whipped her head around and Asher saw that her mascara was running down her cheeks. “It was my call. I made the choice to send that team in there and now they’re dead. I’m the one who planned this op and I’m the one who’s responsible.”
Asher didn’t give a flying fuck if the pretty redhead in front of him made the call or some crusty old FBI douche at their headquarters did it, sending a team in without proper support was the wrong thing to do, period. “Well, you fucked up,” he said flatly.
Any hope that they’d be friends likely disappeared right then, but if she was the mission lead for this thing, she needed to know it. Too many times in his career he’d seen things go badly for the team in the field because people were afraid to step up and say that the plan was flawed, or even worse, just outright wrong. He assumed that she was here to either get his advice about field ops or to ask him to join her so she needed to know that he called things the way they were.
She wiped away the tears with the back of her hand. “I know, Asher,” she mumbled. “Believe me, I know…”
He pushed past the emotional crap and carried on. “Is the Bureau certain that your team received incoming fire and not ricochets? I’m sure that zombies surrounded them; maybe they accidentally fired into their own group. When you’re firing in every direction, an operator can become disoriented and things become confusing.”
“We don’t have anything to go on other than the audio. By the time we got the helicopters back on station, there were only blood smears on the steps where the team used to be.”
“So for all you know, they may have been wiped out by a massive zombie attack,” he speculated.
“The team leader was our best operator, but yeah, we don’t know anything for sure.”
“Okay, so what are you doing here in my house?”
“We need you, Kestrel,” she replied. The use of his codename wasn’t just an accidental slip-up. “You’ve led teams in some of the shittiest environments on earth and lived to tell about it. Even though I don’t know your full bio, Mr. Smith let slip that you were absolutely the right type of person for this job and you received glowing recommendations from the Agency.”
“Great, but I’m retired.”
“But you’re looking for a way back in, or at least you were in November,” she countered.
“You’ve got me there. I don’t know what Smith did or didn’t share with you, but I’ve never even seen a zombie. I spent most of my career in our enemies’ backyards. Surely, there are people that are more qualified. We had some of SEALs and Delta guys that fought during the initial outbreak. I’m sure there are still plenty of those guys around.”
“You’re right, there are. And you weren’t our first choice.”
“Who was?” he asked in the off chance that he knew the Bureau’s number one choice to lead the mission.
“My first choice was the team leader that killed the remaining Type One zombies in the National Harbor. He’s a former Delta operator named Dawson. He—”
“Hank?” Asher sputtered around the rim of his coffee cup. “I know that son-of-a-bitch! Bastard was just here a few months ago, but he never told me that he was involved in that shit.”
“They signed an explicit non-disclosure agreement. In fact, it took a direct order from President Wilson to make him even talk to me.”
“Makes sense, Hank’s a family guy now. He’s got two kids, a wife, a dog and twenty years of fucked up memories to keep him company.”
“That’s pretty much the same thing he told me,” Allyson remarked. “You were my second choice.”
“So the mission is to go in, recover the documents and search for evidence of kidnapping victims inside The Wall who are now zombies?” he asked.
“That’s basically it,” she answered. “Believe me though, the primary mission is to get the artifacts and if we happen to find evidence that can be exploited, we will. We’ve been given that mandate, but I don’t know how we could possibly follow through with it in a city filled with a couple million zombies.”
Asher drummed his fingers across the bar while he considered her offer. He looked around his sparse bachelor pad at all the secondhand furniture. His ass was just starting to reshape the previous owner’s groove in his leather reading chair. If he’d owned a dog or had any real responsibilities then he could have used them as an excuse, but as it was right now, he didn’t have any reason to avoid this mission.
“I’ll do it,” he finally answered as he met the operation lead’s green eyes. “What’s the timeframe?”
She smiled and held up two fingers. “We go in two weeks, but I’ll need you in Quantico in one so you can meet the team and talk with our consultants who’ve been up close and personal with these things.”
“One week to shut down my life?” he asked. “Seems kind of compressed, the documents aren’t going anywhere. Since I’m the team lead, I want a month of training with my team before we go in.”
“Who said you’re the lead?” she countered.
“I thought that’s what you wanted me for.”
“I want you for the tactical team lead, but I’ll be the mission commander in charge of both your team and the documents collection team.”
He thought for a moment and then replied, “Fine, but my orders supersede yours in a tactical situation.”
“Done,” she reached out and grabbed his hand to shake it. “As to the timeline, this is what we go with. The president wants the documents recovered within his first sixty days in office and we’re already a month in.”
“I don’t like tying tactical missions to political goals. We did that shit in both Iraq and Afghanistan and neither of those worked out for us in the long run.”
“It is what it is, Asher. We can’t change the directive that we’ve been given.”
He nodded slightly in acceptance, “Alright, I’ll pack my stuff and drive up to Quantico.”
“Don’t worry about your house or school,” she said. “We’ll have agents watch your home and by the end of the day, you’ll be on medical convalescent leave from the college so they won’t legally be able to suspend you for any missed classes or exams.”
“Hmpf, efficient.”
“We’ve been doing this for a long time, pal,” she replied with a wink.
“I’m glad to have you on the team,” Allyson continued. She slid a handwritten note across the counter toward him. “Report to this address a week from today with a few days change of clothes and any personal weapons that you are legally allowed to carry in the United States. We’re still the FBI after all.”
He picked up the slip of paper and pinned it to the corkboard on the kitchen wall. “I’ll see you there, Miss Harper.”
“Please, call me Allyson. We’re going to be working together over the next few weeks so I’d like you to be comfortable around me.”
He nodded slightly and replied, “Looking forward to it, Allyson.”
*****
26 February, 1817 hrs local
Elk Neck State Park
Cecil County, Maryland
The diver turned the LED display dial on his mini-submersible sled all the way back near the zero and then flipped the run switch to the on position. He settled slowly onto the small board and pushed off to catch up with the rest of his team. Once the eight men were floating in six-foot deep water, he gave a signal and they tilted their bodies to angle the sleds under the water. When the sled balanced out at a depth of five feet, they turned on the propulsion system which would carry them rapidly south toward The Wall and allow them to fight the current on the way back when their mission was complete.
The Spanglini Family had hired him to perform this gig and the group had made the same dive about two times a week for the last two years. It was about a twenty-five mile swim to where The Wall cut across the Chesapeake near Hart-Miller Island. What most Americans didn’t know—or didn’t care enough to ask—was that The Wall became an iron fence across the Bay so it didn’t impede the flow of the water from the headwaters out to the ocean.
The Navy used small river patrol boats to search for zombies above the water, but there was little risk of discovery for a trained scuba diver. Bodie Clifford was an Army diver for three years before they booted him for larceny. He’d learned the valuable skills of underwater recovery and repair that paid dividends when the mafia hired him for this gig. The Spanglinis gave him and his local diving buddies a generous contract, sweet new diving gear and a free reign to do whatever he wanted inside The Wall as long as his crew brought back enough cash, jewelry and artwork each trip. Even though he worked for the “mob,” he was able to convince himself that it wasn’t stealing because the stuff was just sitting around with no owners. He fancied himself as more of an explorer who brought back artifacts from the past and had to fight zombies in order to secure the goods. He was like a real-life Indiana Jones!
The zombies were an annoying pain in the ass, so they’d had to stay near the water for the most part, but he’d gotten extremely adept at reading when a situation would go bad and when to get his team back in the water. Good thing the zombies were shitty swimmers. They could doggie paddle and stay afloat, but they were no match for trained divers wearing flippers. Every member of Bodie’s crew was a crack shot with the silenced Navy M-14 Enhanced Battle Rifles that his employers equipped them with, so he usually chose to stay and fight when there were less than twenty zombies in the area. That unwritten rule had cost the team a few times though. Out of his original group of ten men, four had died and they’d replaced two others with new hires over the years.
Bodie glanced at his watch; they had reached the fifteen-foot cruise depth so he leveled out and turned on the sled’s propellers. It would be about an hour of underwater travel until they came to The Wall and then once they negotiated through the openings that they’d cut at twenty-two feet, they’d return to fifteen feet for the remaining ten miles or so into Baltimore. From there, they would go to the inner harbor to raid a promising set of townhomes. It was rumored before the blast that a famous US Olympic swimmer owned one of the waterfront homes and with the price tag on those places, there was sure to be a lot of stuff that his crew could grab quickly and hop right back in the water if things got hairy.
The time came and went while Bodie played games in his mind to help it pass. They finally cruised into the harbor and he checked his GPS. They were cruising in-between Canton and Locust Point. They’d hit both areas in the past and he knew there were hundreds of homes that were tantalizingly close if only they’d venture a little farther inland. He’d told his contact about the potential but they’d been required to stick close to the water for now.
He didn’t know for sure, but Bodie had a feeling that the Family had other crews going further inland for the big-ticket items like the banks. Sure, he’d brought back easily one-point-five to two million in goods over the last two years, but that was small potatoes when you looked at the potential down south in DC, or anywhere else in the region for that matter. This was one of the most prosperous areas in the nation before the zombies and the nuke, so it just made sense that the Family wasn’t just focusing on the Baltimore waterfront for extra cash.
It was fully dark by the time they surfaced and coasted the final thirty feet to the pier. The crew switched between dive masks and gas masks with practiced efficiency while a couple of zombies wandered aimlessly along the composite plastic decking above them. Bodie motioned to the diver beside him that he’d take the one on the left and the other man had the one on the right. His partner—he couldn’t tell who it was with the blacked out wetsuits and protective radiation oversuits that they wore—nodded and they both fired nearly simultaneously. The creatures toppled into the water with a loud splash.
“Shit,” Bodie muttered. “I hope that doesn’t draw any more of them.”
They’d learned through trial and error that the zombies were attracted to sound, sudden movement and light. It was almost like their brains entered a dormant state until some type of stimulus reawakened them. The movie about the outbreak never mentioned anything like what his team had discovered so he knew that the events in the movie were total bullshit lies developed by the government. He believed that the military accidently, or maybe purposefully, released a military-grade virus in the city and that we nuked DC when things got out of hand. There was a ton of evidence online to support his theory and a lot of people agreed with him, so he was convinced that he was right. Regardless of whether he was correct or not, cleaning up after the mess made for a hell of a career for him.
