Allegiance (42 page)

They located the
stairwell just around the corner from the dead elevator. Tice moved forward and
scoped the door. “Clear,” he called out.

It took Cade almost a
minute to open the locked door using the lock gun while Tice continued watching
the LCD screen. “Still clear,” he added.

Suddenly memories of
Maddox, Desantos, and a host of other dead and gone shooters Cade had served
with flooded his head. Not only did he miss Darwin’s skills as a lock pick, he
also missed the camaraderie and the operator’s ability to always have the right
quip or observation in the chamber and ready to go. Cade also lamented the fact
that since that day in Grand Junction he hadn’t been able to properly mourn the
man’s death.
Something I’ll need to tackle back home
, he thought.

Tice retracted the
flexible shaft and Cade eased the door open. Light streaming from the skylights
above made their NVGs unnecessary.

Sweeping the Glock in
order to cover the stairs to his right, Cade entered the stairwell and padded
down them two at a time. Light on the balls of his feet, he cut the corner to
his left in a combat crouch, keeping his elbows in and the polymer pistol at
the ready.
Clear.
He silently motioned the others forward and covertly
peered through the two-foot-square window inset into the metal door.

The east parking lot
spread out before him. There was a large contingent of dead ambling among the
abandoned cars baking in the high noon sun. He returned his gaze to the faces
of the civilians packed on the rise above him and quickly laid out the rest of
his plan. And when he had finished, the skeptical looks the survivors shot his
way didn’t surprise him in the least. Hell, he expected nothing less. After
all, he and his team were for all intents and purposes kidnapping these folks
from a friendly sovereign nation. That they had yet to put up any kind of a
fight, let alone a full-on mutiny, had Cade scratching his head.

Tice craned his neck to
get a look through the window. “How many out there, Captain?”

“A few dozen...
or
more
,” replied Cade. “
Pinche demonios
,” added Lopez as he made the
sign of the cross.

“At least you’re not
humping the
Alpha
right now,” Cade said, flashing a rare grin.

In fact, it was the
first emotion Lopez had seen the man exhibit since they’d left Schriever.
A
good omen
, he thought to himself.

“Come in One-Two... this
is Anvil Actual. I am in the stairwell at the east end of the sky bridge. I
need you to lay down some fire in the parking lot ASAP.”

“Copy that,” said Ripley
all business-like. “Rolling in.”

The skylights above
vibrated as an ominous shadow momentarily blocked the incoming light. Cade
holstered the Glock and readied his M4. He peered out the window just in time
to witness every one of the Zs stop in unison, turn their pallid faces skyward
and fix their milky eyes on the noisy Osprey. As he watched it enter the
airspace overhead, slowly the big propellers became rotors, and Jedi One-Two’s
forward momentum all but ceased. Then all at once, the dual nacelles finished
rotating up and locked into the upright position, the black aircraft assumed a
wavering hover, and the rear ramp motored down, exposing a chalk of eager Rangers
and the crew chief behind a heavy machine gun.

Suddenly a buzzsaw-like
sound filled the air as the remotely operated mini-gun on the craft’s belly
began belching hot lead into the seemingly hypnotized Zs. And a heartbeat
later, the crew chief manning the M2 Browning on the tail ramp began hammering
away at the undead below.

Using the cacophony
created by the massive rotors stirring the air and the gunfire lancing down
from the hovering craft as a diversion, Cade made his move. He hit the push bar
and peeled left while keeping close to the wall, and at the next corner he
curled left again with Lopez and Tice close on his heels. The trio ran under
the sky bridge and moved single file along a sidewalk on the left that ran
between a ten-foot-tall chain link fence to the left and a row of
twenty-foot-tall trees, spaced roughly twenty feet apart, paralleling the road
on their right. Cade stopped at the first of the six trees preventing the
Osprey from setting down. While he coiled the self-adhesive breaching charge—a
flexible type of explosive sprouting a length of det cord attached to an
electrical firing device—around the tree’s thigh-sized trunk, he noticed the
other two operators split up, and each of them moved towards a tree across the
narrow drive. He waited a few moments until both men were finished setting
their charges. “Good to go?” he said into the comms.

With clackers in hand
and a good standoff distance between them and the charges they had rigged, Tice
and Lopez flashed Cade a thumbs up from across the street.

“Fire in the hole,” Cade
called out as he turned his face away from the impending blast and worked his
clacker.

The three nearly
simultaneous explosions resulted in a brief cloud of white smoke followed by
all three trees lying down as if a giant invisible scythe had ripped through
them.

“Holy weed-whacker
Batman,” said Ari as he tore his eyes from the destruction being wrought on the
dead by the Osprey and watched the three trees nearest the sky bridge topple
over in unison. Piloting the Ghost in a tight orbit above the Osprey, Ari
watched Jedi One-Two circle the parking lot, hosing down wandering Zs while
destroying a large number of cars in the process.

From the port side of
the Ghost Hawk, Gaines spotted a legion of zombies streaming in from the plaza
to the northwest. “Heads up Anvil,” said Gaines. “You have Zs moving in on your
six from the northwest. How copy?”

“Roger that, General,”
said Cade as he readied another tree for demo. “Should have the LZ prepped in
two mikes.”

“Make it quick, Grayson.
You’re in clear and present danger of being overrun.”

Cade said nothing. When
he’d finished wrapping the next tree, he glanced over his shoulder to the area
under the sky bridge where a number of Zs staggered rigidly from the lawn onto
the entry drive. Then he checked to make sure the other operators were finished
setting their final charges. “Lopez... Tice... you ready?” he inquired over the
comms.

Voices crackled in
Cade’s ear bud as the operators called back, indicating that they were good to
go.

Clacker in hand, Cade
backed away from the tree, and shifted his gaze between the diminishing amount
of real estate separating him and his teammates from the advancing crowd of
flesh eaters. “Fire in the hole,” he exclaimed as he squeezed the clacker,
sending electrical current into the det-cord leader.

Another series of
explosions rumbled and echoed off of the metal and glass building, and the
trees hinged to the ground in different directions. Cade watched as his tree
canted over, hit the barbed wire atop the fence, and then rolled off without
causing any noticeable damage. Satisfied with the newly created LZ, he adjusted
his M4 so that it dangled behind his back and clambered over the splintered
trunk, then crossed the sidewalk and the buffer of dried grass between it and
the fence and fished out his last breaching charge. He adhered a three-foot
length of the tape vertically, rolled out a dozen feet of leader and attached
the clacker. When he fired the charge, the explosion ripped through the galvanized
steel wire and left a smoking gash just big enough to admit a person.

Cade gave his handiwork
a cursory glance, and though not as dramatic as falling a tree, he deemed the
result acceptable.

Next, he called up Jedi
One-Two and requested an immediate exfil for the nineteen survivors. Then he
called to Agent Cross, who was presumably still sheltered in place with them in
the sky bridge stairwell.

Cross acknowledged the
call and listened as Cade brought him up to speed. Then he sprang into action,
jammed the push bar and held the door wide with one hand and brandished his MP7
with the other. “Go, go, go,” he bellowed at the survivors, and fired his
machine pistol one-handed, stitching a decomposing first turn from sternum to
forehead.

He looked over his shoulder,
and when everyone was accounted for he lined up the three scientists on his six
and set off at a slow jog inside the fence line.

Pushed along by fear and
confusion, the scientists and civilians followed closely in his wake. As soon
as Cross arrived at the breach in the fence, he helped Cade peel it back and
hold it open while all nineteen Canadians filed through.

The guns on the Osprey
went silent and the craft broke orbit and descended rapidly; in a matter of
seconds it was wheels down and the Rangers were charging down the rear ramp.

Cowering amongst the
fallen trees, the Canadians kept their heads bowed to protect against the
flying debris whipped up by the whirring rotors.

Working against the
clock, Cade first ushered the scientists into the yawning rear opening of the
Osprey, making sure they were belted in securely. Then he waved the remaining
survivors inside and passed them off to One-Two’s strapping African American
crew chief, who in turn showed them to the side-facing jump seats.

Cade raced down the
ramp, and was pleased to see that while he had been in the aircraft the
newly-arrived Rangers seemed to have slowed the advance of the burgeoning ranks
of the dead. Staccato bursts of fire rippled along the phalanx of shooters as
they fired and reloaded. Two Rangers from the 75th had taken up positions on
either side of the road and, using the splintered tree trunks for support, were
busily raking their SAWs—squad automatic weapons—across the Zs with deadly
precision.

The turbine whine
elevated as the dual thirty-eight-foot diameter rotor blades increased in
speed, and Ripley’s voice crackled over the comms. “Wheels up in one mike,” she
said.

Cade hustled over to the
young Ranger master sergeant and motioned for him to have his men fall back to
the Osprey. Then he got ahold of Ari in the circling Ghost Hawk and requested
an emergency exfil.

He flicked his gaze up
to the sky bridge where more Zs had amassed. They were now three deep and
stretching from one end to the other. An icy ball formed in his gut as he
watched the ashen-skinned monsters press against the aquamarine-hued glass,
causing it to flex and bow in places. He feared that if Ripley didn’t clear the
LZ and make room for Jedi One-One quickly, his team would be facing a veritable
waterfall of flesh eaters.

“Waiting,” said Ari
impatiently over the comms. Then Gaines’s voice came onto the net over the SOAR
pilot’s, and with language unbecoming a general he urged the Marine major to
get her bird into the air.

Sensing the Osprey
lifting into the air behind him, Cade braced the M4 on a fallen tree, flicked
the 3x magnifier up, and began picking off zombies. The rotor wash blasted his
back with stinging debris and sent the piles of spent brass around his feet
sliding away across the blacktop as One-Two thundered away to the south. Soon
the rotor noise gave way to the eerie wails of the dead commingled with the
reassuring sharp reports of steady gun fire. Cade looked over his shoulder to
see the black craft bank and make a sweeping turn that once again brought it on
station over the parking lot, where Ripley commenced a hover and the machine
guns once again opened up into the dead below.

Tice, who was a few feet
from Cross and shoulder-to-shoulder with Lopez, watched as Cade pulled a
canister from a pocket and tossed it in the center of the drive near the
mishmash of branches and fallen Zs. A soft pop sounded and smoke billowed out
thick and purple, snaking into the air like something alive.

Cross changed magazines
as he backed away from the moaning Zs and towards the drifting smoke. In his
side vision he could see that Lopez and Tice took a cue from him and were also
backpedaling in the same general direction.

Cade’s voice crackled in
the Delta team’s ear buds just as the sonic
reverberation
of the Ghost’s baffled rotor blades
thumped deep in their chests. “Exfil in minus one mike,” he stated calmly.

Suddenly a sharp sound,
like a berg calving from a glacier, cracked off the building to the left. Then,
like a wave breaking left to right over a reef, a cascade of sparkling glass
and putrid corpses poured from the sky bridge.

Cade’s stomach clenched
as the heavy impacts of flesh and bone against the roadway vibrated through his
boots.

The Ghost Hawk came in
hot from the north and buzzed the top of the sky bridge with just inches to
spare. Through the cockpit glass, Ari’s grin was evident under his smoked
visor, and Cade could see the hard set to Durant’s jaw as the craft slid
overhead, blocking out the sun.

Big black wheels emerged
from the helo’s belly and shells began to rain from Hicks’s buzzing mini-gun as
Ari presented the ship’s starboard side towards the Zs. At the last second he
flared and set the Ghost Hawk down softly in the same spot the Osprey had
occupied seconds before.

Firing as he went, Tice
broke from cover and made a beeline through the flapping branches. He emptied
the mag and then let his smoking carbine dangle as he accepted a hand from
Gaines and scrambled into the helicopter.