But the upshot was that the Black Hawks weren’t on station to evacuate the wounded.
“Tomcat, this is Wizard. Can your team hold the area long enough to extract the wounded by ground? Over.”
“Roger, Wizard. Tomcat’s got four shooters on station. Situation’s complex, lots of civilians and reduced visibility from smoke, but we can provide top cover for”—Fleischer checked the fuel totalizer readout on the multifunction display before him—“another fifty minutes. Black Hawks would be better. Over.”
“Roger, Tomcat. Understand about the Black Hawks, but we need them to stay where they are. We’re sending back two trucks and two Humvees from the Bushmaster Three element. What’s the situation with the westbound civilian traffic? Over.”
As Lee spoke, Fleischer heard another transmission on one of the side channels—an RTO dispatching the movement orders to the Bushmaster Three element.
He looked around, trying to figure out what was going on below. A lot of civilian vehicles were on fire, but many were not. Cars and trucks were jockeying all over the place, trying to get the hell out of Dodge. He reported that to Lee, adding, “Doesn’t look like the convoy’s under any direct threat at the moment. Over.”
“Roger, Tomcat. Thanks. Hold station until we can get our people out of there. Over.”
“Wizard, this is Tomcat. Roger that. We’ll maintain top cover for as long as we can, but we don’t have a lot of station time left. We also need to start rotating the scouts out for refueling. Tomcats Two-Seven and Two-Nine will take over aerial recon while the Birddogs do what they gotta do. Over.”
“Roger, Tomcat.”
Fleischer gave his unit and the scout team their orders. The OH-58D Kiowa Warriors would transition their scouting mission to the two AH-64Ds that were relieving them, then they would fly to Wooster Regional Airport to refuel and rearm. Once they returned, the Tomcats would bug out for the forward area refuel point, platoon by platoon. Fleischer was happy that Lee had thought to secure enough fuel to keep the battalion going, because their organic fuel supply wouldn’t get them through the day at their current operational tempo.
The trip was going to be long, and so far, it had been one hell of a busy morning.
FIVE.
Sergeant Sandra Rawlings watched as a fireball, wreathed in a halo of black smoke, climbed into the sky. The thunder of the explosion seemed to roll right through her, though the truck she rode in was well over half a mile away. Debris rocketed upward then slowly returned to earth like some dirty rain, tumbling and spinning. Rawlings didn’t know what had happened, and neither did the soldiers seated around her. Everyone was on their guns, maintaining readiness as the big M925A1, positioned somewhere in the middle of the convoy, lumbered down the Union Turnpike.
Rawlings looked at the lightfighters seated across from her on the opposite side of the M925A1’s wide bed. Like her old unit—the 164th Transportation Battalion of the Massachusetts Army National Guard—they were a mix of young and old, a hodgepodge of races and body types. Unlike the Muleskinners, though, the composition of the 1st Battalion, 55th Infantry Regiment was almost entirely male. There were few women amongst the light infantrymen, and most of those were in the unit’s supply company. Rawlings didn’t have to wonder why. Though feminists and liberal-minded do-gooders had finally knocked down all the road blocks that separated women from joining the fighting ranks of The Men’s House, as the Army was occasionally known as, few females had the appetite for actual combat. To find herself floating alone in a sea of testosterone was not unexpected, especially when her new temporary duty station was with the storied 10th Mountain Division (Light Infantry).
Virtually all of the soldiers around her had become combat-proven long before the Boston “peace-making” operation had begun. Rawlings knew that the 10th’s units in Afghanistan had been rotated home just months ago, so the division could rest, refit, and retrain. It was called a “reset” in military parlance, where an over-optimized unit was taken off the line so it could get its collective shit squared away. New faces would fill old spaces, and old faces would rotate out to other units and share their experience or simply leave the service and enter a hopefully safer civilian society. No matter which avenue they took, it was a fool’s errand. The Bug had seen to that.
Gender aside, it was obvious she wasn’t one of them. They all wore multicam combat uniforms issued during Operation ENDURING FREEDOM in Afghanistan: advanced combat helmets, tactical rigs bulging with spare magazines and other gear pulled tight over body armor, CamelBak hydration systems, many with M9 pistols strapped to one thigh, gigantic rucks full of tactical gear, additional ammunition, Meals Ready to Eat, sleeping bags—their usual load-out exceeded a hundred pounds on a given day. Half of them were in MOPP gear, while the others had their protective paraphernalia laid out and ready to be donned in an instant. “Light infantry” had nothing to do with the weight of their equipment. Even though the 10th didn’t have much in the way of tanks or heavy armor, they probably carried more equipment on their persons than their counterparts in the line infantry.
For her part, Rawlings was clad in a filthy Army Combat Uniform and a patrol cap. She had no armor, no hydration system, no MOPP equipment, and no rucksack full of gear. In the pockets of her uniform, she had two energy bars, four spare magazines of 5.56-millimeter full metal jacket ball ammunition, and a tire pressure gauge, the only holdover from her previous occupation as a Heavy Equipment Transportation System driver. And clipped to her waistband beneath her ACU blouse was a sheathed K-Bar knife.
Basically, she was a leaf-eater surrounded by carnivores.
She tried to imagine Scott Wade hanging out with soldiers like the ones she was currently riding with. When she’d found him, he was basically a broken kid, his platoon downed by the Bug and cut off from the rest of his battalion. She’d helped build him back up during their brief time together, and truth be told, he had done the same for her. She’d had maybe six or seven years on him, but in the situation at Harvard Stadium, the age gap didn’t seem to matter. And even though he’d looked like a kid, he’d fought like a man. Then he’d been infected and turned into a Klown. He had charged her, his crazy eyes full of murder, and she’d shot him with her M4 at a range of maybe ten feet—three times, because one hit was usually not enough.
Only death cured the Infected.
“So what’s your story?” someone asked, over the rumble of the truck’s diesel engine.
Rawlings looked up from the floorboard she’d been staring at. The big soldier sitting almost directly across from her had his hands draped around his M4/M203 combo weapon. His posture looked almost casual, but Rawlings doubted that to be the case. She was certain the man could go operational in a second’s notice, swing his rifle around, and zero any Klowns who might want to start something. He wasn’t wearing MOPP gear, but the soldiers on either side of him were. The pattern was that every other soldier was in MOPP IV, so Rawlings was also hemmed in by similarly protected soldiers. She couldn’t see his eyes behind his sunglasses. The nametape on his vest read MULDOON.