“Bones, Gardner,” he said into his mic again as he stood and made for the bunker entrance.
“On my way,” came the response, needing no answer. It left a feeling of satisfaction in Troy’s chest that his team were just as switched-on as ever, despite the shit storm they were all now in.
Bones, real name Andy Bonham, was the team’s only SEAL; a fact which he was never allowed to forget. The majority were marines, albeit from different specialisms to give their team the vast array of skills needed as a collective, and both Troy and Chalky were Rangers through and through, but their resident SEAL was alone in his discipline. As the team medic, medic being a technical term as he was so highly qualified and experienced that in just about every country in the world he would be called a doctor, he had been introduced as their new sawbones, and the nickname had stuck from day one. Whether he had a nickname already was a fact not featuring on the relevance scale, but he had demonstrated his ability not only to diagnose and undertake emergency field surgery to save the life of a marine injured by an explosion on their last tour, but he had done so under sparse cover and whilst being the subject of a half-dozen interested Taliban, each showering him with gifts of incoming 7.62. He had completed the surgery in record time—record time for a surgeon in a hospital—closed off the bleeding arteries and stitched the guy back up. He then pulled the guy’s camera from the pouch on his webbing, snapped them a blood-soaked selfie as the injured man raised a shaky thumb and cracked a grin through the pain, then went on to assist in eliminating the enemy threat. Troy suspected that the man’s heart beat maybe two or three times a minute, because he never once seemed under pressure.
The two men passed in the entrance, exchanging a nod as they squeezed in to make the necessary space for two big men in full war gear, and Troy carried on to the command center where Dillon was showing a woman with dark hair how to reprogram their radios. Dropping his multitasking with Gina, the young pilot who always seemed to be pissed at Troy, he tore off the sheet of paper which had been decrypted and was just finishing rolling off the old-fashioned printer. Without reading it first, he handed it to Troy who calibrated the appropriate arm length to read the small print; he still refused to admit that reading glasses were an enemy looming over the near horizon. Troy read in silence before lowering the paper and hitting his radio transmit button.
“Everyone to the briefing room,” he called simply. Knowing that the sentries posted outside would assume that this didn’t include them, he added, “Bones and Ghost too.” He glanced at Gina. “Round up the rest of the Night Stalkers,” he instructed, prompting a smile of pride at his use of her unit’s special moniker. He looked to Dillon, “Get the Apache crews?” Dillon nodded, and Troy was left alone looking at the report again.
“Command elements are still active in Alaska,” Troy told the assembled and extended team, all crammed into the small room. “Anti-Ballistic Missile site is still active but bombing and nukes have crippled the military and law enforcement. We have no carriers stateside, and just about every base has been hit.” He paused, not relishing giving the information he was about to repeat. “That includes Fort Campbell. Anyone still on base as of 0900 is gone.” He let that hang, hoping that they all got the subtext that they were likely the only intact unit to escape the base.
He scanned for reactions in the room. His operators all wore stony expressions; no weakness broke through their exteriors but the pilots all reacted. They weren’t top tier operators, but they were experienced and disciplined enough not to shout out pointless questions.
“And now for the bad news,” Troy said, earning a few raised eyebrows from his team. “D.C. is gone so we currently have no Commander in Chief. Also,” he said, telling them that shit did indeed get worse, “Alaska is tracking a serious amount of incoming. Likely an invasion force.” That did spark a question, and it came from Air Force Colonel Simon. Troy looked at the man, seeing his slightly pale but intense face wearing a mask of thinly veiled murder. “NorKs?” he asked.
“Unknown at this time,” Troy said, suspecting that the North Koreans would have an interest in any attack on the US, “but attacks have also come from the east coast so we don’t know who our enemy is yet, and we have to be prepared that it’s not just one enemy”—he cut the speculation off there—“that may or may not be something which hits our radar soon, but first we have a mission,” he told them, seeing trepidation overtaken by eagerness on more than the nine faces he expected it from.
HEADING OUT WEST
Saturday, 12:18 p.m. – Highway 78, Near Clinton
The three occupants of the truck were exhausted but tried not to let it affect them. They switched drivers often as none of them had slept for almost two days and even then, the excitement had prevented that sleep from being a full recharge. Now they were fleeing, heading inland as fast as they could.
After the initial attacks and the chaos which had spread across Manhattan, things had started to happen which weren’t in their game plan. Leland Puller, in breach of all protocol, had used the burner cell to call the number which had given him the command to begin, but as he expected it was dead. He destroyed the SIM card and broke the phone in half, allowing some if his frustrations to pour out in the small act of destruction. After it was clear that the bombs and fires weren’t anything to do with any plan they had been read in on, they still stayed put believing that it was an OpSec issue; there were other Movement soldiers in play in the city that they didn’t know about. That notion was abandoned as soon as the news reports showed nuclear attacks on both east and west coasts.
Committed to the cause or not, that shit he just wasn’t down with.
He decided it was time to leave, leave everything, but they were trapped in the maelstrom they had helped create. Two of the Movement soldiers stuck to him like glue, both former marines and inexorably drawn back to the command of something—someone—they felt comfortable following. Leland hefted his AR15, strapped in, and set off into the streets with his two marines trying to match his pace. The sight of three armed men skulking along in the shadows raised sufficient suspicion to earn a challenge from a pair of NYPD cops, and the ensuing gun fight was brief but bloody. The heavier caliber of their weapons, combined with the far superior rate of fire and the sheer element of surprise when they opened up left the two cops dead, and they ran before they attracted more attention that required a ballistic response.
Even though the echoes of peak physical fitness still sounded quietly in their heads, neither had maintained themselves to a standard to match Leland’s and he found himself facing the choice to rest them or leave them behind. Kicking in the side door of a small store he rested them for a few hours before they became liabilities. In the pre-dawn he woke them, setting a slower pace on the short distance to the river to find a way across.