Whiskey Delta – Chapter 21

“Sometimes, in the trenches, you get the sense of something, ancient. One trench we held, it had skulls in the side, embedded, like mushrooms. It was actually easier to believe they were men from Marlborough’s army, than to think they’d been alive a year ago. It was as if all the other wars had distilled themselves into this war, and that made it something you almost can’t challenge. It’s like a very deep voice, saying; ‘Run along, little man, be glad you’ve survived.”

― Pat Barker, Regeneration

The sun was beginning to set when they reached the junction. A four lane highway became a single thread in a mass of tangled ropes. Empty vehicles were everywhere, and not all of them had come to before they had been abandoned. Under the overpass, they saw a few which had apparently fallen, their crushed remains strewn in piles across the road, front ends or rooftops smashed flat.

Whitman began to slow down. Dezba turned from his panel and noticed the way he was staring up.

“Why are you slowing down, Private?”

He kept staring upwards. “Shit man, those people fell from up there.“

Braun looked at the overpass. He was right. The guard rail was broken, and a smashed bumper was hanging over the edge.

“Looks like they got shoved off. People probably driving in a panic.”

“Guess they didn’t feel like stopping.”

Dezba pointed to a gap on the left. “Take the shoulder, we got room.”

Whitman checked it, shook his head. “No, too narrow. What kind of vertical climb does this thing have?”

Dezba searched his memory. “Forty-five degrees, easy enough. But we’re carrying a lot of weight, Private.”

Braun looked back and checked on the grunts. They were all strapped in now, a necessary precaution once the ride started getting bumpy. Quick deployment took a back seat as soon as they realized they might start picking up remains in their wheels. Under the circumstances, a little climbing wouldn’t hurt them.

“Do it, Private! Let’s see what this baby’s got!”

Whitman nodded and revved the engine a few times. He looked over his shoulder.

“You might want to strap in too, sir.”

Braun jumped into his seat and attached the restraints, just in time for Whitman’s little charge on the pile up. A loud crunch sounded through the cabin, followed by several more. The engine squealed a few times as Whitman adjusted the wheels and gave her more power. Braun felt every lurch from his seat, which seemed to be strategically poised to take the worst of it. By the time he was sure his guts were hemorrhaging, they reached the summit and things began to shift to the rear.

“Here comes the drop!” Whitman yelled. Everyone grabbed a handful of something and hung on for dear life. The front end began to dip and they felt the full force of gravity pulling them down. When they landed, the front tires bounced a few times, absorbing most of the force. Everyone was about to breath a sigh of relief, until Whitman hit the gas again. The final push cleared their rear wheels, and the resulting fall made everyone’s guts jump into their throat.

“We’re clear!” said Whitman, and gunned the engine again. With their guts now firmly back in their stomachs, Mill was sure to lob some expletives their driver’s way.

“Billy, you cock-faced prick!”

“Tell it to the LT, man!” he said with a raised finger.

Braun straightened his helmet and checked his nose for blood. He looked back at the twelve angry eyes who were staring at him. He didn’t bother to apologize. One of the perks of being the LT was you never had to explain yourself to underlings. Of course, if they blew out a tire before reaching their objective, he was sure he’d be answering for it one way or another.

*                    *                    *

The beeping had become a constant presence. Louder and louder it had become, until Saunders deployed the laptop and began tracking it actively. They were still a few kilometers out, but every inch of ground they crossed felt like a marathon. Nothing to do but listen to the approaching sound.

The skyline was directly in front of them now. Traffic had thinned out this close to downtown, which made sense since that was precisely where everyone was trying to flee when it hit. Whiskeys were drawn to heavy concentrations of flesh, hitting the cores and sending everyone to the peripheries. He could only imagine what they’d find it they took the time to wander out to Anaheim or Long Beach. Houses boarded up, strip malls and convenience stores raided for supplies, the signs of a people going to ground and cocooning in their homes. And in the end, it made little different. The scourge still found them.

Perhaps they’d find some survivors, but odds were that anyone clever enough to survive wouldn’t be easily found. Bomb shelters were one precaution that came in mighty handy under the circumstances, as were panic rooms and sealed studies. The only problem was, they had to come out sooner or later. And if no one was there at precisely the right time to find them, they usually took to wandering. Poor fools always thought they could find their way to safety…

The carnage was impossible to avoid now. Even Braun found himself getting mesmerized with it. From a distance, the wrecked skyscrapers that occupied downtown were quite the sight. Shattered, craggy things that looked like some kind of messed up fractal art. Beautiful, if in a totally messed up kind of way.

Up close, there was nothing beautiful about it. Burned out recesses, cratered holes, columns and entire sections hanging by bent steel beams and girders. It had the effect of taking one’s breath away. It was like looking at a killing field, but worse in some ways in that no bodies were visible. One could only imagine the terrible loss of life and feel a creeping sense of dread about it.

He noticed the grunts in the back were looking at it too. Sooner or later, they’d all be getting an eyefull of it, and some perspective might come in handy.

“Remember folks, most of what you’re seeing out there was done by our units. One-fifty-fives and cluster bombs, HEAT rounds and guided munitions. The only ones who suffered were the Whiskey.”

A few heads nodded. They knew what he was trying to say. The enemy had no done this. They had only been the reason for it. They were not to be credited for all the carnage that was out there, only blamed for it. He wasn’t sure it helped him much to put it in those terms, but he hadn’t said it for his own sake. All that mattered was when they deployed, they not feel overwhelmed by the scenery and miss their objective.

He noticed they were beginning to slow down a bit. Whitman’s instinctive response to the noise coming from the back. He must have thought they were coming into the ballpark.

“Range, Corporal?” he said to Saunders.

“Five klicks, north by north east.”

“Gun it, Private! We’re still five klicks out.”

Whitman obliged and hit the gas. They continued to move down the highway, taking to a slope and proceeding between two major buildings. Braun unclicked himself and headed to the side port. He could just make out the ostentatious sign at the top of the brown brick one on their right.

Hotel Rosseyn. He was sure that name had meant something at some time. Now, it was a pockmarked surface. From the looks of it, it had been an armored column that had turned it into Swiss cheese, peppering the sides with 20′s and 105′s in the hopes of taking out a nest.

Such highrises always did become nests, the perfect example of how human instincts led inevitably to bad tactical situations. Those who found themselves inside during an attack always thought they’d be safe from the carnage below. Then, when it finally came for them, they were trapped, nowhere to go but to the roof, where they would be stranded and forced to wait for help. Perhaps some came, in the case of this particular building. More than likely, no one was left alive when the armor moved in , prompting them to open fire on it with everything they had.

Failure to plan ahead… always the thing that did the civvies in. It made him wonder if perhaps men like Haynes were right, that maybe the fault lay in not dropping the bombs soon enough. Hell, if they dropped THE bomb, turned LA into glass, the virus might never had spread. A terrible deed, but what price had they paid for holding back in the end?

He shook that thought off. There was no way to be sure that the virus wouldn’t have found its way out anyhow. Speculating on what ifs and I told you sos were what made men like Haynes into the unbelievable hard asses they were in the first place. And Braun was going to be damned if he -

“Private. Halt!”

Whitman hit the brakes, nearly sending Braun into the back of Dezba’s seat. Naturally, he turned his head to see what was going on.

“Sir, what’s going on.”

“Sergeant,” he said, straining to see clearly the distant object clearly through the porthole. “Bring the turret around to ninety-degrees and zoom in.”

Dezba did as he was told. The display terminal slowly panned to the right, moving from the mottled grey surface of the hotel to the white and grey picture of the side road they had just passed. A strange, bright white shape lay to one side of it, and Dezba stopped there.

“That, sir?” he said, pointing to it. Braun moved up behind him and looked closely at it.

“That’s the one,” he said, wrapping him on the shoulder. “Zoom in again and tell me what that looks like.”

Braun was sure to cycle the camera this time, not wanting to repeat that old mistake. The image switched from IR, to negative IR, and then to enhanced camera display. With this last mode, the digital representation of what they were seeing was unmistakable.

“Is that a Sea King?” Dezba asked.

“Looks like. And if those marking on the side are right, it’s DHS.”

“Sir, what are you talking about?” Whitman was practically leaning across his lap at this point, trying to get a clear view himself. Dezba noticed and shifted ever so slightly to his right. Braun explained.

“That’s a Homeland Security chopper, from the looks of it. Secret Service were most likely using to fly an HVI out of here.”

“Yeah, and then they went down. Which means whoever they picked up is either dead or was marooned out here.” Dezba zoomed in on various parts of the chopper, trying to assess the damage. It didn’t look too severe, more like the result of an emergency landing than a crash.

“And if their escort survived, we might have DHS personnel and one HVI in the area still.”

There was a moment of silence as Braun pondered their options. Whitman waited anxiously, looking back and forth between his controls and the display screen. No one liked to be sitting idly in the middle of a combat zone, least of all the driver. He eventually said something.

“Sir, if they went down, wouldn’t they have a transponder going? Someone was sure to already get them by now.”

“Right you are, Private. But not if they crash landed after the battle here was over and the last of our forces pulled out. Then there’d be no one to rescue them because no one bothered to come this way. Hell, aside from the tag team that came in here looking for Papa Zulu, do we know of any units that still conduct patrols this far out?”

“Fuck no,” said Dezba.

“Yeah, but that’s because we’re grunts and we don’t know shit as it is.”

Braun smiled. Whitman had a point there. The Mage always played his hands close to his chest, and outisde of their own ranks, they really had no fucking idea whatsoever what other military units were up to. All of that shit had been filed under a need to know basis long ago. What’s more, they had been given precise instructions, and any diversions would cost them valuable time. But still, something told him the sight of a DHS helicopter, still intact this close to their target area, was not to be treated idly.

“Lieutenant?” Saunders called. Braun turned to look back at her.

“What is it, Corporal?”

“It’s the target sir, it’s on the move.”

Braun came to her side. In the commotion, he had failed to notice that the laptop was beeping louder. He checked the display screen, noted that the overhead map showed that the Papa Zulu designate had closed position since they stopped moving. Curious.

A thought hit him quite suddenly, thought it would have been more accurate to describe it as a searing burst of revelation. He couldn’t be sure, but that was they way of such things. He wouldn’t know until they investigated further. And Papa Zulu was making it easy for them with the way it was behaving.

“Private, take a right turn and start heading East. Papa Zulu is Oscar Mike.”

Whitman gave him the thumbs up and hit the gas, happy to be moving again. Bringing them into a nice, civilized turn, he put them on the same road as the wrecked chopped and they took off. Braun looked back to the display and watched the indicator blink. A throbbing red light, waves of red extending out from it with every beep. A strange sense of deja vu was coming over him, the feeling of once again breaking with their regularly scheduled orders in order to pursue something else. However, this time around, all he really had was a hunch…

“Sir, isn’t that a little of course?” whispered Saunders. Braun smiled and shook his head.

“Maybe, but I got a hunch there’s more going on here than we know.”

“What do you mean?”

Braun wasn’t sure he could explain. It was still fresh in his head, but it didn’t long to distill. A sign that this was a good hunch rather than a misguided effort.

“Just wondering,” he replied, staring intently at the red indicator, “if maybe we’re not the only ones out here looking for this fella.”