John Ringo
ISLANDS OF RAGE AND HOPE
As always
For Captain Tamara Long, USAF
Born: May 12, 1979
Died: March 23, 2003, Afghanistan
You fly with the angels now.
Prologue
“Sergeant Hoag, pull your team out,” Gunny Choy radioed.
“Never leave a Marine behind, Gunnery Sergeant,” Sergeant Sheila Hoag replied.
The gunny’s Humvee was high-sided on a pile of infected. More were piling on as he radioed. The team of Marines and some civilian and Navy refugees stuffed into the Humvee were safe. For now. On the other hand, they couldn’t get out.
Hopkins was blazing through ammo on the 240 but the infected were swarming onto their Humvee, too. If she didn’t watch it she was going to be in the same boat as the gunny.
“Gunnery Sergeant,” Hoag radioed, backing around to try to keep some of the infected guessing. “I think if I can get in behind you I can push you off the pile.”
The H7D3 virus had hit the base in waves. There had been, in retrospect, a slew of “patient zeros” in a large-scale Navy personnel transfer. There were only 7500 people on the sprawling base and when they were up to four hundred infected in “temporary care facilities” that made the worst gulags on Earth look like a picnic, and another four hundred dead from the virus itself, the base wasn’t running so well.
Then the second wave hit. And all hell broke loose.
“If you don’t get out of here, you’re going to be in the same boat, Sergeant,” the gunnery sergeant replied calmly. “We’re clocked out on 240. You’re about to be clocked out. We just had a civvy turn and bite one of the Navy guys. You are hereby ordered, Sergeant, to save your team and passengers. Make for the log buildings as previously ordered. Conserve your rounds. You’re going to need them. Now, go. That’s an order.”
“Aye, aye, Gunnery Sergeant,” Hoag said, putting the Humvee in reverse. She did, in fact, run over two or three infected but managed to keep from getting stuck. She spun out at one point, trying hard not to think about what she’d spun out on. Most of the infected were adults. Most.
“I swear to God if any of you turn on me I will fucking shoot you in the gut,” Sergeant Hoag said, backing the Humvee up as fast as it would go. She hit a good place to turn around and practically spun the vehicle out.
They’d gotten the word that the fallback point was the logistics buildings around the piers on Corinaso Cove. The problem being, they were on Corinaso Point. The piers were in sight. If they wanted to try to swim, then fight their way into the buildings through the infected, in hand-to-hand presumably, that would be totally golden. Right now they had to drive from point A to Point B around the cove while not hitting enough infected to get stuck.
She weaved around a couple of zombies and heard the breach click on the 240. They’d started off with three thousand rounds and gotten a resupply at one point. There were only 7500 people on the base. Where the fuck did the ammo go?
She wasn’t even sure which log building to make for. There were several around the piers.
“Hopkins, you see any sign of resistance?” she yelled.
“Building Fourteen,” Hopkins called. “Riflemen on the roof.”
The problem being, there were infected swarming all around Building Fourteen like yellow jackets from a kicked hive. There was no way to get in there.
Two of the main doors slid open and a fire team started wasting infecteds at the opening while someone stood behind them, waving for the Humvee to enter.
She floored it, heading straight for the riflemen and the line of infected. She slammed infected to either side, plowing through them and hoping like hell she wasn’t going to get high-sided. She practically jumped the last few as a Marine lance corporal dove to the side to avoid the oncoming vehicle.
Once through the doors she slammed on her brakes and skidded to a stop just short of hitting a pallet of water bottles.
“Everybody out,” Hoag said. “Just get the fuck out.”
There was a Navy lieutenant JG shoved in the back and that wasn’t how a Marine was supposed to address an officer. The pogue could just put her on report for all she cared.
She sat there looking at those water bottles for a long time.
“We currently have an adequate stock of water. We’ll see how long that lasts.”
Lieutenant Colonel Craig “Kodiak” Hamilton was a WB: a waterboarder. Camp Delta most officially did not use waterboarding on the detainees. They did use various other methods, mostly psychological, to extract information from the detainees. Colonel Hamilton was one of the intelligence officers “involved” in such extraction. In his case, most figured that he just grinned at detainees and they gave him the locations of their blessed mother. He was 6’4” in his stocking feet and had won a silver medal in “all class” wrestling in the Olympics.
Right now, the whole issue of “perpetual detainment” and the IRCC and Human Rights Watch and all the rest was as relevant as… Well, right now Hoag couldn’t really think of anything less irrelevant. Camp Delta had been reformatted, early, for “infected care,” then it all went to hell. All Hoag knew was that none of the bastards were in the two facilities designated as fallback points.
The whole group was sitting in the meeting with their ankles tied. That had been practically the first order given. Get separated, tie your ankles. Request permission to untie. If you don’t, don’t be surprised if you get shot. The riflemen on the roof, still waiting, probably in vain, for more customers, were shackled. Chains allowed them to walk but they could barely run. And they had orders to shoot anyone who turned.
The only group not tied was the response team. And there was another team, tied, eying them. Everybody was eying each other. Too many times people had just turned out of the blue.
“There was a team out shutting off flow to other areas of the base,” Colonel Hamilton said. “We’re not sure how far they got and we’ve lost contact at this point. But we have free flow of water from the main tanks to these two buildings. As long as the water holds out, we’ll be fine. It will, however, be rationed and we will fill every container we can find or make while it’s running.
“Brigadier General Zick has the other building. The plan is to wait until the infected levels drop to the point we can make a breakout. If they do not drop, we will have to wait until someone comes along to break us out. There is a very adequate stock of food for the forty of us. Literally years worth. We will begin processes after this meeting to capture any rainwater we can. Are there any questions?”
“Any idea how long, sir?”
Ryan “Robot” Harris was the Navy lieutenant JG she’d carried in. He worked in base operations was all she knew about him.
“The last word we had was that everyone was in the same boat, Lieutenant,” Hamilton said. “But I’m sure that as soon as they can restore order in the U.S., they’ll send a team down to pull us out. Or, if we can, we’ll self extract back to the U.S. There are boats here that we can do that with.”