Operation Wild Tarpan (7 page)

Shells continued to rain down, the Rats’ DEW-CIWS systems only able to shield the most heavily populated parts of the peninsula. But even where the laser web was concentrated, artillery slipped through.

Miller watched in muted dread, chewing the inside of his cheek until he tasted copper. He watched as shells struck buildings he knew held civilians, refugees, and employees. Tiny dots scrambled on the phablet screen. People were running for their lives, trapped like fish in a barrel.

It seemed to go on forever, but eventually the air attack silenced Stockman’s artillery. It had only been twenty minutes, but the damage was extensive.

Miller found an open relay channel and heard the cheers, but it was more than a minute before the shells already in flight finished landing on the peninsula.

Taking the opportunity, Miller and his team made it back overland, taking the footbridge over to Wards Island, and the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge back to Queens and the Astoria compound.

B
Y THE TIME
they arrived, the worst of the attack was over; but the city surrounding the compound had been reduced to smoking ruins, obliterated where the DEW-CIWS had simply let the shells fall.

Miller and the others pushed through the rubble. Climbing over fallen walls and hopping over piles of brick and concrete, they inched toward the compound too stunned to speak. The damage was immeasurable, the city unrecognizable.

And irreparable. S-Y hardly had the resources to reconstruct the damage to the wall and the infrastructure inside the compound, much less the surrounding areas outside the Astoria Peninsula. Manhattan was a ruin, and likely to stay that way.

As Miller ambled around a crater in the middle of 27th Street a surprisingly profound grief flooded him. To his mind, the heart of New York had just stopped beating. He kept his eyes ahead, looking directly at the compound gate a block away, trying not to see the details, but they were impossible to miss.

As he fought to gain control of his emotions, he heard the roar of a crowd.

On his left, a mob of Infected rushed in a screaming horde directly at them.

Civilian men and women in tattered clothes and in various stages of starvation shrieked and clawed the air on both flanks. Men in military uniforms ran at the centre of the mobs, armed and firing at Miller and the others.

Jarred into action, Cobalt-2 sprinted toward the gate with every ounce of strength they had left.

What was left of Switchblade guarded the entry. They exited the confines of the walls and maintained access to their entry point, randomly shooting to provide cover, but it was all for nothing.

Once the Infected had mobbed on the left, another approached on the right and Cobalt-2 were soon surrounded. They had no choice but to fight hand-to-hand and inch their way through the swarm.

Firing at will, throwing punches, Miller ran and shot, twisting on his feet, running a few metres, then smacking a civilian out of his path, only to come face-to-face with an Infected officer. Without hesitation he lifted his Gallican and put a bullet straight through the officer’s eyes.

With a surge, the Infected civilians surrounding that officer spilled out and away, into the street in scattered formation. Miller watched them recede and shouted to the others on the top of his lungs, “Take out the officers!”

Bullets pierced the air from all sides. With awful precision, Cobalt-2 and Switchblade drilled the soldiers to the ground. Most of the Infected civilians spilled away, but others did not, and those left behind, still trying to further the attack toward Miller and Cobalt, were soon mowed down.

Miller and his team killed, again and again, without respite.

It was a bloodbath.

Eventually, Cobalt linked up with the team from Switchblade at the gate, and fought through together. Once the entrance was closed behind them, Cobalt were ushered away from the front lines.

Miller heard the Switchblade commander order his troops to kill anyone in the vicinity of the compound wearing anything other than an S-Y security uniform. He was sickened with himself when he subconsciously nodded in agreement.

Just as he turned to count the heads of his team, three attack helicopters zoomed overhead. Miller understood now: with air support, the Infected assault would likely be fought back down to a siege and eventually stopped. The remains of Stockman’s assault would slink back into the rubble of Manhattan like cockroaches and Miller would live to see another day.

He tried to be relieved.

I
N THE AFTERMATH,
and on the faltering bandwidth keeping the White House alive on the internet, the President addressed the nation and the world on a backdrop of S-Y workers picking through the wreckage of the refugee shanties.

“We are, today, a wounded nation. A broken nation. No matter what tribulations we face, our hearts bleed for our families, our friends, our countrymen in New York City today.” Huxley Fredericks gazed down the camera lens with all the majesty a dozen sessions with Gray’s plastic surgeons could bring. “This tragedy, this violence striking at the heart of us all has one origin behind it. The Archaean Parasite.

“But we cannot blame the Parasite alone. For those who wilfully pursue infection, who attack those trying to cure the sick, their own sickness cannot, will not, be a shield for them to cower behind. They are criminals.

“Major-General Stockman, and regretfully the entirety of the 11th Infantry Division, are criminals. Criminals against humanity,
war
criminals, for we are now at a time of war. Not only for survival, against climate change, ecological catastrophe, and famine, but against ourselves. This is a civil war against our country, and our enemy is within.” The President stiffened, leaning in towards the camera. “As we all know, we are at a low tide, but American will and strength of heart are as strong as they’ve ever been. So I call on you all, servicemen and women, citizens, our allies within NATO and our other friends internationally, to come to America’s aid.

“The Archaeans
must
be stopped.”

O
PERATION
W
ILD
T
ARPAN
was on hold, pending nightfall or a secured perimeter. Besides, they couldn’t go after Stockman until Northwind had time to track him down. Right now, all drones were buzzing over the compound to monitor possible security breeches.

No time for a shower, this go around. Out of the refugee rags and poured back into combat gear, a plastic-wrapped mealpak and some water each, Cobalt were kicked out of the personnel halls and onto the walls, whether they were ready or not.

Doyle stood, body erect and face tired, rifle at his shoulder, shooting Infected who tried to swim around the wall’s side and climb back onto shore.

Miller watched him at work, almost numb to the repetitive
bang, slap
, the bodies in the river, the gouts of blood and water.

He tried taking out one of his earpieces, but the rifle’s blast hurt his ears, so he set it back in place and tried to understand why the Infected continued to doggy-paddle out into the river, one after another. There was a string of corpses floating in the muck. In fact, some were already being gnawed by black eel-like creatures downstream. You’d think that would have been clue enough that they should stop. But they didn’t.

Miller didn’t get it.

How could that kind of horde mentality be stopped? What was it even
for?

Miller preferred trying to understand the Infected rather than trying to understand Doyle, who paused for a sip of water, then latched a fresh magazine into his weapon’s stock and began killing over again.

Miller had lost count of the people he’d killed that day. Not because of the extent of the number—it couldn’t have been more than six, including the fight through to the compound and the solider in the Marcus Garvey Park building—but because he didn’t want to remember their faces. Didn’t want to remember the sound and feel of his knife cutting into flesh and bone.

He wiped sweat from his face, and got up behind one of the sniper screens of heavily layered gauze across an armoured slit in the compound wall’s upper lip. It was possible, just, to focus his binoculars through the rough weave to get a darkened picture of the streets below.

With their forward operating base trashed, the 11th Division were having trouble with Northwind’s drones. The drones had been loaded with electronics jamming packages that could, now that the FOB’s electronic warfare section was down, intercept and block almost all military communications within the city at will.

Trouble was, the Infected weren’t
stupid
. They weren’t using the radios anymore, even though each transmission tied down a helicopter sent out to drop a missile on them. But they
were
sending wretches out into the water for Doyle and the other snipers on the walls to hit, over and over.

Why?

Were the swimmers laying down a pheromone trail, like ants, and the Infected were helplessly chasing it to their doom?

The Infected were staying out of sight, mostly. Just recon by fire, two or three fighters popping their heads up from the rubble to make sure the machine guns were still working, to take pot shots and see what shot back. But they weren’t throwing away their lives. So what was the difference?

It didn’t take long, staring at the bodies being torn up in the river, for Miller to feel sick. So he put down the binoculars and pulled up one of the drone imagery feeds, hunting through the recent imaging map for clues.

The Infected in the river were emerging from between a set of buildings in good cover. Sheltered, shallow. There were a mass of soldiers nearby, hunkered down in an alleyway with a fire going, roasting a slab of flesh—Miller couldn’t tell if it was human or something torn from one of the Archaeobiome’s creatures.

Lured in by the scent of food, maybe, Infected civilians wandered closer in ones and twos. If there were any more than that, the soldiers lifted their rifles and made them come in one by one.

Flicking back and forth through the timestamped images and footage, trying to figure out what happened in the gaps, Miller couldn’t understand why the Infected citizens who were accepted into the group then left to go into the water. None of the soldiers did it. It was only after watching a thin, bedraggled specimen going down to the water, then coming back, and repeating the trip until at last three soldiers came along and watched the poor civilian swim out into the open, that Miller understood.

The only Infected they sent out were sickly, thin, ravaged by famine. Almost all of them were covered in scabrous rashes, lichens and moulds blossoming on their skin. The healthy ones, the ones who could fight, were sent deeper into the city to join the fire teams and pick up weapons. The few sickly souls were left behind with dozens of single-minded soldiers around them.

They weren’t being coerced. Not physically. Not tortured. Miller couldn’t know for sure, not without being able to listen in, but it looked like the Infected were
peer pressuring
the sickly, those who needed help, into wandering out into the water for Doyle’s gun.

If they didn’t want to go, enough Infected brought them up to the shoreline that they couldn’t think for themselves, and they fell prey to the group’s desires.

Hell, maybe it was about
philanthropy
. This was about killing off the weak.

Racing through the other footage nearby, Miller also found a pattern in the boiling movement of the Infected through streets and alleyways. Here, there. A soldier being ‘protected’ from a larger mob of friendly Infected, a leader—often an officer—gathered up friendly faces to form a larger mob that swallowed up fire teams and spat them out at the compound wall for another round of recon by fire.

The Infected weren’t
telepathic
. It was all pheromones and body language, the Archaean Parasite forcing them to respond.

Jimmy Swift was very nearly his old, smooth self when he was separate from the mob. On television, Major General Stockman had been his own man at the far end of a table from Swift.

Could the Infected be
controlled?
Not simply given orders by military leaders, but manipulated? Almost bullied into compliance, like those poor souls walking out into the water for Doyle?

“Doyle?” Miller said.

“Nngh?”

“They’re using you.”

“I know, suicidal little shits.”

“Not like that.” Miller showed him the footage, tried to explain.

Miller wasn’t certain about it, couldn’t be sure, but Doyle latched onto his half-theory, staring at an image of the soldiers around the fire with venom.

“Bastards,” he growled. “Come on.”

“Huh? We’ve got orders to hold the wall.”

Doyle glared at him. “Did you never learn, in all the years of your Army career, how to interpret orders
flexibly?
”

It wasn’t any particular demonstration of leadership, but Miller followed Doyle down from the wall, carrying his empty magazines and trailing along like a porter after the troublingly colonial image of Doyle the big-game hunter. Down onto the floating pontoons the Rats had set up as a temporary dock, and from there they could watch an unfortunate Infected paddling desperately through the water.

The eel-like creatures thrashing around the dead bodies were shearing flesh off her, piece by piece. Doyle ended that with his first shot, before even flipping down his rifle’s bipod.

Without the Infected’s screaming, just the watery rustle of the black serpentine lengths moving just beneath the surface, it almost felt like setting up for a peaceful day’s fishing.

Almost.

It took a few moments, but the instant the Infected soldiers came to the alley mouth with the next sickly ‘volunteer,’ Doyle had one’s head off. A second shot, maybe deliberate, maybe not, cut through a soldier’s thighs, sending them down, bleeding and helpless, barely in the open, screaming for help.

Miller dimly watched as the Infected returned fire. White flashes followed by watery plops of bullets as they came up short and hit the water. The army’s carbines, shortened assault rifles, didn’t have the barrel length to take advantage of a rifle cartridge’s full power. Compared to Doyle’s custom .388, and at this range, it was like spitballs versus meteorites.