Rend, page 11
“Understood Agent Harper, switching them on now,” a voice drifted through the speakers. She was rewarded with a low thrumming noise that was loud enough to feel deep in her chest, but not quite loud enough to vibrate her teeth. She watched the shifting mist expectantly as more than half of the creatures paused and then headed back toward the source of the clamor.
“Thanks, Allyson,” Asher answered over the command channel. He switched to the group frequency and said, “Agent Harper has activated the sound buoys to pull the furthest creatures away. Finish the nearby targets and let’s move into the Archives.”
Within minutes the way northward toward their mission target lay open with no zombies before them. Allyson breathed a sigh of relief and started to move toward the rest of the team when she stumbled. The goddamned dead zombie’s hands still clasped her ankle. She stepped on one wrist and jerked her foot out of its grasp.
*****
08 March, 0812 hrs local
The National Gallery of Art
Washington, DC
“Shit. Get the boss on the horn, Jeremy,” the sniper said as he continued to peer through his rifle’s scope.
Jeremy complied and pulled out a ruggedized satellite telephone. He dutifully dialed the number to the switch in Prague which would re-route the call through Rio de Janeiro, then to Mexico City, through Los Angeles and finally to a cellular telephone that one of Tony Marchione’s bodyguards carried with him. He held the phone up to the side of his gas mask and listened intently as the connection made the untraceable switches. After a few moments a deep gravelly voice answered on the other end.
“Yeah?”
“Hey, uh it’s Jeremy in DC. We got a problem.”
“Put Chandler on the phone.”
Jeremy handed the phone to his partner who placed it to his ear and said, “Chandler.”
“This is Marc. What’s going on?”
“The feds just inserted another team. I counted twenty-one. Looks like they’re headed toward the Archives for the documents the president wanted.”
“No way you can take that many,” Marc grunted.
“That’s my assessment as well. They’ve also got helicopter support with snipers this time. I can’t provide overwatch to the team inside without being able to constantly observe the area for zombies and the helos are making my job harder.”
“Hmpf,” Marc snorted. “How much longer does the team have?”
“I checked with them fifteen minutes ago, before the feds arrived,” Chandler answered. “They estimated at least another two hours to get this shipment shrink-wrapped and properly waterproofed.”
“Alright, let me ask the boss. Hold on.”
Chandler handed the phone back to Jeremy and said, “We’re on hold. Listen for Marc to come back on and then give me the phone. Two more fucking zombies just came into my kill zone. Goddamned feds and their stupid fucking helicopters.”
He looked through the 20X’s magnified scope on his silenced 30.06 rifle and placed the intersecting vertical and horizontal reticle pattern directly in the center of the lead creature’s head and gently held his breath after he exhaled. The meaty part of his finger squeezed lightly on the trigger and the zombie’s head exploded. Fragments of bone, skin and whatever the hell the things used for blood splattered all over the second creature as it continued its slow, uncaring plod toward the museum.
Chandler lined up for a second shot but one of the government helicopters zoomed into view and caused the two men on the roof to dive for cover before he could fire the round. Fuck! he screamed internally. He’d been doing this same job for weeks and they’d almost cleared everything out of the National Gallery of Art. They probably had two more trips, three tops, and they could move on to another location. Now the goddamned feds were back in here and it could jeopardize the whole operation.
The Marchione crime family had moved beyond the petty theft that their rivals the Spanglini Family were carrying out up north. Although to give credit where credit was due, if Tony Marchione hadn’t been fucking Thomas Spanglini’s old lady after he got thrown in jail, they would never have thought about going into the destroyed city and stealing the artwork. Babette Spanglini told Tony how they used divers to go behind The Wall and rob the abandoned banks and homes along the waterfront in Baltimore.
Tony’s a big thinker and he was able to see beyond the shortsighted Spanglini method. Sure, once they learned about how easy it was to slip past the Navy, they robbed some banks, but the real long-term money was in the artwork. Once they figured out a way to waterproof the priceless pieces of art, the only thing left to do was to enter the city and take it. That’s where Chandler came in.
His job was to keep the zombies away from the building so the team could work in relative safety. He and Jeremy had posted themselves on the roof of the Gallery for weeks and shot everything that came within three hundred yards of the place. Then out of the blue a few weeks ago, a helicopter dropped out of the sky right in front of him. There were only seven of them and the noise from the helicopter brought every damn zombie within twenty blocks right to his doorstep.
The assholes had non-silenced weapons and for each zombie they shot, the noise drew in three more. He had to take action and he’d eliminated the feds before they brought every creature in the city to join the party. Tony was livid at first, but after realizing that his team—and more importantly, his merchandise—was in danger, then he agreed with it. After that, the zombies would tear the bodies apart, effectively eliminating any evidence of a shooter, and then they eventually wandered off to do whatever the fuck they do when people aren’t around. After a few hours of laying low the team was able to sneak back to the Potomac and head back downriver to the waiting yacht five miles off the coast in the Atlantic.
The helicopter banked north to cover the advance of the ground team toward the Archives and Chandler popped back up. He rapidly scanned his engagement area for the zombie but he couldn’t see it. “Fuck,” he muttered and leaned out over the roof. Sure enough, it was slowly worming its way up the stairs to the doorway. The damned things couldn’t really climb stairs, but if the angle was low enough, like the steps of the Gallery, then they could eventually make their way up by standing and falling forward repeatedly. He fired straight down into the back of the creature’s head. At this range the round punched rapidly through the skull and shattered the concrete steps underneath it.
He stared in appreciation at his work. What many people failed to realize, primarily due to the bullshit on television, was that the closer you are to your target the more velocity the bullet carries and tends to enter and exit a body rapidly. Usually it resulted in small entry and slightly larger exit wounds. When the distance between shooter and target is increased the round slows down. That’s when the bullet will hit an object and yaw, or zigzag, in the flesh and tends to create the fantastic explosions that are so popular on television. A pool of dark liquid slowly oozed from the zombie’s ruined body and began to drip onto the next step.
Damn I’m good, Chandler congratulated himself. “Hey, Marc is back on the line,” Jeremy interrupted his internal praise.
He took the phone and held it to the side of his mask again, “Chandler.”
“The boss says to keep outta sight. Odds are they’re only going into the Archives today to either scope it out or recover a few documents. Once they’re gone, you’ll just leave like you always do.”
“Understood. What about the radiation?” Chandler asked.
“The boss buys the best gear available, don’t you worry about the radiation. The stuff you’ve got is rated at forty-eight hours continuous exposure. You’ve only been in for about twelve.”
“I know how long we’ve been here,” the sniper replied coldly.
“Yeah. Sit tight, keep the freakos away from the team and once the feds leave, then you can return to the ship.”
“Fine. We’ll be in touch once we pull out and get decontaminated.”
“Bye bye, sweetie pie,” the big man on the other end of the line replied.
Chandler hit the button to terminate the call. God, I hate Marc. That motherfucker is such an asshole. He peeked over the ledge and saw another zombie stumbling across the mall in his general direction. The sniper set his rifle on the ledge to help steady the shot. As he squeezed the trigger he imagined that it was Marc on the receiving end and not some former pencil-dicked low-level bureaucrat who got turned into a zombie.
*****
08 March, 0823 hrs local
The National Archives
Washington, DC
Kestrel stared up at the northern set of steps leading up to the pillars and the entryway to the National Archives. Flanking the entrance on either side were two appropriate statues. The first showed a seated man holding a closed book in his lap. Kestrel thought he was possibly Roman due to the clothing and sandals. The inscription read, “STUDY THE PAST.” The second statue was of a seated woman with an open book. The inscription on this statue read, “WHAT IS PAST IS PROLOGUE.”
When will the human race learn? While Kestrel had certainly taken part in the violence and killings that were a result of the tragedy in DC, he was tired of the fighting. After almost a year out of the system he thought that he wanted back in. But after dispatching those zombies on the Mall, he was sure that after this mission he’d be done. His heart wasn’t in it anymore and he was worried that someone would get hurt because of his inattention.
The fresh bloodstains covering the stairs on the southern side of the building had convinced Allyson to lead the team around to the northern Research Entrance where they now stood. Kestrel wasn’t convinced that the previous team had actually taken fire from some unknown shooter, but the remnants of their shredded bodies meant that at the very least, it was bad karma to take the main staircase.
The first three documents that they were looking for were in the Rotunda on the second floor, so once they secured entry into the building, they’d seal it up and ensure that there weren’t any of the undead inside. After that, it was just a matter of finding the documents, cutting them out of their secured location without damaging the hermetically sealed glass cases, loading them into a cargo sling suspended from a hovering helicopter and then making it out of the city safely. Easy.
During their train-up, Kestrel identified a key question to the exfiltration plan: How would they get out of the building once they’d recovered the documents? Even with the sound buoys blaring away, more of the creatures than they could handle would be attracted to the sounds of the helicopters, so they wouldn’t be able to safely land anywhere close to the building and allow the teams to load up. The best solution that he could come up with was to SPIE-rig the team and lift them out.
Special Patrol Insertion/Extraction, or SPIE, is a long-standing Special Operations technique which involves the operators wearing harnesses that they could snap themselves onto a specially designed rope dangling from a helicopter. The helicopter would lift the entire group out vertically until they were high enough to avoid any buildings or other obstructions and then fly them to safety. It was an invaluable tool for the operators, but he was worried about the men and women of his current team. They’d only had the opportunity to rehearse it twice and those were both quick up and down flights, not a prolonged trip over a region infested with zombies for fifteen miles.
Sparks flew from the doorway as one of the HRT members used the portable grinder to cut through the locks on the door. Kestrel grimaced inside his facemask as the high-pitched squeal of the blade chewing through the metal drifted off into the morning mist. He didn’t like cutting through the door on the street level, but without using the front entrance, it had to be done. They would have to find a way to secure it from the inside once they made it in, but after that, they could just use the roof access for what they needed to do.
He glanced to where Allyson crouched watching the proceedings with interest. He hoped that after this mission she got the itch to be in the field out of her system and would stay in the command center. Kestrel didn’t have any illusions that what happened last night would lead to anything in the future, that wasn’t why he wanted her to stay at the headquarters. Sure, it might have colored his opinion a little bit, but he thought that she was a liability. All of the artifact recovery team is a liability and shouldn’t be on the mission.
Almost as if she felt him staring at her, she turned and made eye contact with him. Her green eyes shown bright through the face shield and she gave him a huge smile. He felt like an idiot, but he smiled back all the same. Yup, she was definitely a liability. Having her around made it impossible for him to concentrate on his job.
The soft sound of a suppressed round exiting a rifle made him jerk his head around. Out on the perimeter that they’d created around the doorway a puff of white smoke drifted into the air to mingle with the brown fog. He waited a moment to ensure there wasn’t any more action and then flipped the switch that turned his microphone on. “Status?” he hissed.
“This is Campbell. Just had a zombie come around the corner of those buildings across the street to the north at 9th and Pennsylvania,” the man who fired the round said. “I took care of it.”
It figured that Caleb Campbell would be the one to get the first confirmed solo kill. He was the team’s hotshot, the one they all looked up to as some sort of FBI quasi-rock star. Kestrel couldn’t stand him. He didn’t know anything about the man’s past, but what he showed this week in training made Kestrel think that he’d skated by on good looks and a sly tongue. The man was supposed to be a member of the HRT, but he complained constantly about the rehearsals. One of the most important lessons that operators learned was that rehearsals and repetition of skills and tasks helped to solidify connections in your mind so when presented with a situation, you responded immediately out of habit. For Caleb to complain about rehearsals meant that he didn’t care about the mission, it was just another mark toward a commendation medal to him.
“Acknowledged,” Kestrel replied. “Keep me informed if you see any more of them.”
He hadn’t even keyed his microphone off before another man on the line fired into the mist. “What the—”
Several other HRT shooters fired into the murk. He couldn’t see what they shot at, but the number of men firing meant that a lot more of the creatures were beginning to stream in from the outlying areas. He knew better than to interfere with men on the firing line so he stomped forward to where a pair of men used a grinder to cut through the doors.
“How much longer?” he asked the grinder’s assistant. “Some of those creatures that didn’t follow the sound buoys are starting to figure out that something is going on over here and coming to investigate.”
“We’re through two locks,” the assistant replied. “From what we can tell, there’s only one more to go. Should be about three more minutes.”
Kestrel slapped the man on the shoulder and said, “Okay, thanks. We’ll keep ‘em off of you.” He turned and saw that almost every shooter on the line was firing now. He still couldn’t determine what they were firing at, so he rushed the hundred or so feet to where the men knelt, firing into the fog. He crouched beside the darkened figure of an HRT member and squinted into the morning haze.
“Fuck,” he whispered silently to himself where no one could hear. Man-sized shapes shifted and twisted in the distance. Kestrel brought his SCAR up to his cheek and flipped the thermal sight on. It was no use; the creatures gave off no body heat, so he reverted to the regular scope and began firing at targets. Fuck, I shouldn’t be shooting. I should be directing and coordinating our response! he screamed at himself while he continued to pour lead into the shambling horde.
He blew through two magazines and he was certain that each time he squeezed the trigger it had been a kill shot. Finally, he disengaged himself and took over as the tactical team leader. He surveyed the situation and decided that the threat was greater to the east coming up Pennsylvania Avenue. “Left flank, send two men to the right side to assist with the larger threat,” he bellowed on the team frequency. To his satisfaction, two men rushed by him and got on line with their teammates on the right side.
The men didn’t waver. They continued to cull the crowd of zombies bearing down on them. The crush of bodies made it nearly impossible to determine how many creatures were slowly advancing, but Kestrel estimated it at easily five thousand. He made the decision not to use the Sonic Pulse Cannon yet since it was a one-shot deal and took over an hour to recharge. He flipped the switch on his radio and called in the gunships that were on station above the operation. “Gravedigger Seven, this is Kestrel. We need a gun run along Pennsylvania Avenue, over.”
“Acknowledged, Kestrel. I see your IR strobes. You’ve got two birds coming in hot from west headed east, over.”
The gunner hadn’t even finished his statement before 30-millimeter rounds began to decimate the horde on Pennsylvania Avenue and the HRT shooters dove for cover. Hundreds of rounds chewed through the bodies and tore giant chunks out of the pavement below their feet. Once the gunner ran out of chain gun ammo he switched to the little 2.75-inch rockets and fired deeper into the crown where the exploding shrapnel wouldn’t accidently hit any of the men from the Bureau.
Kestrel took the rockets as his cue to direct his troops. “Alright, boys,” he cheered over the team frequency, “let’s eliminate the close targets that survived that wall of steel.” The shooters reemerged from their hiding places and started to dispatch the undead that remained an immediate threat.
“Thanks, Gravedigger,” Kestrel said on the command net. “You guys really saved our asses.”
