Free Arisen, Book Six - The Horizon by Glynn James, Michael Stephen Fuchs Page B

not one to return to. But it didn’t matter now. The first proper home she’d ever known was in the British Army Air Corps, which had taken her in, and taught her to fly – in every sense. It had allowed her to make something of her life.
    Later, her family and home had been among the operators and support personnel of USOC, the Unified Special Operations Command, to which she had been detached for the past eighteen months. Her job had been to provide close air support (CAS), casevac security, and if necessary defense of the very base itself.
    She had found a place where her skills and contribution were valued, where she was esteemed and loved for who she was – a place where she truly belonged.
    But, in the last few days, many of the teams at Hereford had been thrown into the desperate defense of the southeast – trying to reverse or at least stem the terrible outbreak. They said it had come from out of the Channel Tunnel – then rampaged through the county of Kent, and spilled out across the borders into Essex and Sussex. And now it was racing mindlessly, implacably, and seemingly unstoppably toward the Capital.
    London.
    Maybe they’d gotten complacent, letting themselves start to feel secure in the moated castle that was Fortress Britain. After all, no one had successfully invaded England’s green and pleasant land since the Norman Conquest – back in 1066. Even Hitler’s thousand-year Reich, and the blitzkrieg of his Wehrmacht, hadn’t laid so much as a single tank tread on Her Majesty’s soil. No, they had always been safe there, defending their island home, as the Great Man, Churchill, had put it.
    Well, sure enough, now they were fighting in the goddamned fields – ones less than fifty miles from the bloody M25, which was the ring-road, and now the ZPW (Zulu-Proof Wall), that defined the outer border of London.
    No, Charlotte’s parents weren’t down there, and she wouldn’t recognize them even if they were. God knew they wouldn’t have had the strength, or the adaptability, or in particular the resolve, to survive the Zulu Alpha. But Charlotte did. She was damned well going to survive all this. And so were her friends in the Army.
    And so was Britain.
    The next wave of surging dead was still nearly two kilometers back behind what had been defined as the MLR, the main line of resistance. But she was due to be relieved in this sector, and this carve-up of airspace, in a few minutes. And she still had a lot of ordnance left. There was little point in spending the fuel to ferry those heavy rockets and missiles all the way out here, and then right back to base again.
    Moreover, Charlotte suddenly just found herself not in a defensive mood. And she was under her own tactical control right now – CentCom seemed task-saturated, as it woke up to the seriousness of the threat, and tried to run the many fronts of this battle from their Joint Operations Center (JOC) in Oxfordshire. Come to think of it, she hadn’t heard from the USOC TOC at Hereford in hours, either.
    Fuck it , she thought. We’re not backing up anymore. Not today. Not on my watch .
    She didn’t know for sure what unit was meant to replace her. But whoever it was, she was going to make damn sure their backs weren’t up against the sodding wall.
    She revved up her bird’s dual custom Rolls-Royce engines to something in the ballpark of their peak 2,100 horsepower, climbed until she’d gained 400 feet, and the engines, wind, and rotors were all screaming around her. And then she put her targeting laser just ahead of the next rank of advancing dead, out on the left flank. And she fired all four Hellfire missiles from her rail, moving the targeting laser a half a kilometer to the right each time. She then put her remaining rockets into the surviving dead behind that. And then she played clean-up with her 30mm auto-cannon, dropping dozens of the rapid-fire high-explosive rounds into groups and singles that were somehow still on their