I had been thinking about how the bright lights of the camera had brought the Zs running. If we could rig up a distraction, concentrate them en masse, then rip the crap out of them with some firecracker rounds, it would make our job of going through West Point a helluva lot easier. Once a Z got stirred to activity they would stay active for a few days, hunting for fresh, live meat. So for the next couple of days, West Point was going to be crawling with active Zs. Don’t ask me how it worked, that’s just the way it is, and I planned to take advantage of that. Before we were going to do a sneak and peek, now we had to do something different.
I hopped up into the FDC trailer and sat down with the Fire Direction Officer and the FDC Chief, a Staff Sergeant I knew well. We had been coordinating artillery fire all the way from the ruins of Syracuse.
“First, I just wanted to say thanks for the quick reaction last night. I know it was early in the morning, but the crews were right on it.” I did appreciate it. There is a difference between waking a gun crew up, with all the slow reaction time that implies, and having them ready to throw rounds downrange at a minutes’ notice. It could mean our lives.
I took a seat at the map table and said “Here’s what I’d like to do…” We sat and worked out the details for an hour, until I was sure the Artillery guys had my plan down tight.
My next stop was the CP, but along the way, I met LT Carter coming down the trail, back toward the boats. I stopped short, then stood aside to let him pass. He knew where I was going, and why. I was surprised when he stopped too, and I got ready for the verbal abuse I fully expected.
It never came, though. He stood for a second, and I took a good look at him. His eyes were red, and his face looked pale and drawn.
“Sergeant, I, um…”
I stood there with my arms folded. He started to turn red.
“Sergeant, uh, I’m sorry.” He sort of mumbled it under his breath.
“What, Sir? I couldn’t hear you.” This was great.
“Don’t be an asshole, Sergeant. I know I screwed up.”
“Pretty much.”
“Lesson learned, then.”
“I’m not the one you need to apologize to, Sir. You need to apologize to the team.”
He stared at me for a minute, then looked at the ground.
“Sir, you put their lives at risk and blew the mission because you wanted to make the front page of a paper. You’re lucky none of them pushed you off the boat last night on the way back. None of the boat crew would have cared. You put their lives at risk too, by forcing them to come back for us. You’re actually lucky that camera guy is alive, because Brit wasn’t shooting to disable him. We don’t do that; she was just off her game because she’s still recovering from a gunshot wound. By all rights, he should be dead.”
“I know, I know. I just got my ass reamed by the CO.” He meant the Infantry Company Commanding Officer, who had overall command of the Firebase.
“Really? What did he say?”
“Uh, he said I should suck my thumb and let you change my diaper when I crapped myself, and that I wasn’t in charge of shit.”
I laughed out loud, and he cringed. “Sir, this is real life now. Learn a few things and you can be in charge. I don’t know why you’re out here with us, instead of learning the ropes on a line platoon, but if you stay alive, you will learn a good bit and be better off for it.” In fact, I did know why he was with us; because Major Flynn was punishing me for what he suspected happened to LTC Jackass, but I wasn’t going to say that.
“I guess so, Sergeant. Do I have to apologize to the whole team?”
“If you want to live through our next encounter with Zs, it’s probably a good idea.”
He did apologize. Everyone took it well, except for Brit, who called him a dumbass and some other pretty abusive things until I told her to lay off. Like I said, we worked for the Army, but we weren’t part of it.
We set out again later that afternoon but without all our gear. This time was killing time. The boats pulled up off the landing, about one hundred meters. A large crowd of Zs was milling around the parking lot, stepping on the remains of the ones the firecracker rounds had shredded last night. The guys started popping shots at them, but hitting a target the size of a head from a hundred meters away, on an anchored boat slowly rising and falling is almost impossible. Only Ahmed was scoring hits on a regular basis. I let Redshirt and Mya the LT continue to fire, though, because they needed to get accustomed to shooting at real dead targets instead of pop ups.
Beside me, Jonesy lined up his 203 launcher.
“Did you get any flashbangs?”
“Nope, but I did manage to work a thumper into a shell. Only about one in three survive the shot, so I brought twelve.”
“OK, I think we’ll only need two.”
“On the way!” He set the timers and fired six quick rounds into the parking lot. We waited a few minutes and I listened for the music to start up.
“Beastie Boys? REALLY?” The strains of “No Sleep Till Brooklyn” started filling the air. It sounded like three of them were working, each a second or two off the other.
“Hey, them white boys are the shit, Nick.”
We watched as more Zs started to shamble down the road to the parking lot. We waited half an hour, then an hour. It was a packed, milling mass, and we pulled back a few hundred meters and off the Gun – Target line, in case of a misfiring fuse. Nine hundred steel pellets would shred one of these boats, and us, in short order.
“Cockers, this is Lost Boys, FIRE AA4037, over.”
“Lost Boys, Fire, AA4037, out.”
Two minutes later the rounds started detonating over the parking lot. Sharp cracks, blinding even in the sunlight, left small puffs of smoke. We could see where the water on the edge of the river got ripped up by the BBs and a few even skipped across the water towards us.
“Lost Boys, this is Cocker, rounds complete, over.”
“This is Lost Boys, Rounds Complete, estimate two hundred plus rendered ineffective. Thanks, Lost Boys out.”
We pulled back in towards the parking lot. Blood and ooze ran down into the river, and here and there individual Zs stumbled about. Jonesy shot another four thumpers with their timers set to half an hour, an hour and six hours. Hopefully they would draw any more Zs down to the river.
The boats engines kicked out and we sped downriver, around to the south side of point, and tied off to the remains of the dock there.
This wasn’t going to be a sneak and peak anymore. The Zs were too stirred up for that, and no way were we going to go blundering around at night. This was going to be a balls-to-the-wall, run across campus, killing everything in our path, plant the flag and GTFO. With pics to prove it happened.
Chapter 36
We ran. Fast. Run. Stop. Aim. Fire. Run. We ran uphill from the dock, shooting everything that moved. One team up one side of the street, another up the other side.
There weren’t that many Zs but what there was made me sick. Many of them were in the tattered remnants of uniforms, both the cadets and regular soldiers, and it hurt to shoot at them. It was one thing to watch from five hundred meters away while the artillery pounded them, another to stop, aim, and place a .22 slug in the center of their faces from twenty feet.
We had made it almost halfway to our objective, Trophy Point, overlooking the Hudson Valley, and were just coming out of the tunnel leading to the parade field when we ran smack into group of Zs. They were headed in the same direction as us, coming from around a corner, and in an instant, we became a maelstrom of yelling, cursing, clubbing and firing, trying to break through without getting bitten. I hit one as hard as I could with my reinforced rifle stock, straight across the face and hopefully smashing its nose into what was left of its brain. I fired into another on the downswing, a quick burst that caught it in the throat, shoulder and leg. Beside me Jonesy was using his barrel like a club, probably ruining it forever, smacking it down on the heads of any Z that came near him.