Sabre Dancing with the Dead Ch 39
Tokonosu, April 26 20xx
Day 21.
17:45
The Major was in constant touch with the operations center at the Island Airport, giving them updates on progress and fuel consumption. The General had made no comment until about 1645, when he told the Major to drop down to street level, circle the wagons and shut down. Taking a page from the club's operations, he had had his engineers put together a couple of dozen nixies. He had then commandeered a helo from the fleet, and was preparing to deploy them in sequence on rooftops along the route as needed. This way, the journey would certainly take longer but give the ground team a much better chance of not getting into trouble. This was met with smiles from the entire ground team.
The convoy threaded it way down the ramp to the street, and the tanks bulldozed a fair sized patch of street clear of vehicles, pushing them into jury rigged barricades, with enough space for all units to get inside, and then they pushed the last few into place to seal the gap. The deaders inside, those which had not been turned to jam were quickly dispatched with pig stickers and the crossbows. A few people got out of the vehicles to stretch their legs but quickly came back inside once they saw the gore clinging to the outside of their APC or truck.
Hearing about this Shizuka started to demand that they somehow be able to wash down the units before anyone be allowed out. This was one thing they'd not taken into consideration. Listening in, Wolf got on the radio to speak to the General about it. Admittedly there was nothing that could be done at the time but the General had been pushing his engineers and other troops hard to build a compound inside the gates of the JSDF Shipyard compound that the convoy could park in over night, and they would all be hosed down with gasoline driven fire suppression pumps.
Half an hour after the radio call, while they were dealing with the deaders inside their little pen, the sound of a chopper was heard coming in their direction. The deaders outside noticed the sound too, and some started shuffling off in that direction. The chopper went up a side street about a half kilometer ahead and dropped the nixie on a flat roof. The nixie was turned on by the simple expedient of pulling an insulating chunk of plastic from between the jaws of a clothes pin which had both power leads wrapped around them. Their version of the nixie was built up on a small wooden pallet, complete with the battery and the simple wiring. It was deployed by two men in the chopper lowering it down on the roof by rope and then yanking the plastic out.
The chopper appeared again, out from the side street, and headed further up the road towards the ship yard. It hovered over another flat topped building about 1200 meters away and two troops could be seen fast roping onto the roof before the chopper headed even further up the road. A few minutes later, one of the roof top troopers called in on the radio to advise them of the plan to get them to the base.
The sound of the nixie was quite clear but fairly low in volume, so the entire convoy went silent. Talking only in whispers, so as not to draw any deaders who had very acute hearing. Sipping from their canteens, and munching on rations, they waited. Major Sagawa and Shinji stood up in the commanders cupola, and watched the ones outside the jury rigged compound. Gradually the little buggers all tottered away, stumbling into the faces of various buildings as they tried to walk straight to the noise. Gradually, they bumped along as the horn blaring drew them away.
It took a while, the better part of an hour until most of the corpses had made it to the corner and disappeared up the side street. Looking at that corner through binoculars, Major Sagawa wondered if they could block off the side street, but gave up on the idea when he realized that they would just walk around and out through the alleyways. Not to mention the racket made by the engineering tanks would draw them back within 15-20 minutes. Better open the compound and boogey. As the General said, it was going to be a while to reach the JSDF base.
Major Sagawa gave the "wind em up" hand signal and all of the vehicles in the convoy fired up within a couple of minutes. Sitting at low idle to warm the engines, the ARVs were the first to move, opening a hole in the wall. They immediately pushed forward, and headed towards the JSDF compound at about their best speed. They both shoved cars and trucks right and left, No finesse at all, and advanced even further along than the chopper crew had anticipated.
Deaders started staggering out of the side streets again, heading towards the roaring vehicles. As the convoy was already well past the rooftop nixie, the two troopers fired up their nixie, in an effort to snag and keep some of the critters occupied while the convoy pushed on. In the mean time the chopper returned to its original site, dropped a troop to reattach the lift rope, recovering both.
By coordinating with Major Sagawa, they evolved a pretty good method for keeping the number of deaders directly on the convoy down. The nixie on the roof behind them snagged a lot of the shuffling mass, and once the convoy had pushed well beyond them they shut down and were recovered.
The plan they were following now involved planting the nixies on side streets 500 to 1200 meters East, on roads spaced evenly along the route of march. The chopper was a CH-53E Super Stallion, deployed from one of the Japanese Helicopter carriers. It wasn't Japanese, rather US Navy, having been bingo fuel as they closed on the fleet a couple hundred miles off shore with evacuees. Safety said land on the first available deck, and there they'd remained til the fleet was anchored off the Island Airport.
The Stallion was a big chopper, made an amazing racket, and with its large fuel capacity and 20,000 lbs cargo capacity, she was ideal for honking off the deaders. Watching the deaders get blown all over hell's half acre when the chopper hovered low over a roof was hilarious. The General's engineers had stripped batteries and horns out of ever car or truck they were using to build the compound inside the gate, and had put together about 25 of the nixies, on hastily knocked together wooden pallets with rope bridles for lifting.
In addition to the nixies, General Uchimoto had asked for and received all the volunteers he'd ever need to run this particular mission. Major Sagawa had explained the university mission when asking for his volunteers and some guy had asked WHY they needed to do this. Word quickly spread and most of the troops knew just exactly how vital that mission was. When the word came down to get troops for the nixie run, volunteers had to be turned away.
As the drag mission ran, the process evolved, the first deployment by rope was a trial without deploying anyone. The second was deployed by the winch on the starboard side, (the nixie pallet was 18x18 inches and weighed about 40 lbs. While the troops went down off the stern ramp via fast rope, unhooked the nixie and set up. They had an NCO with a road map, sitting at a makeshift table, coordinating the drops. He also made sure the people and devices were picked up after the convoy was well out of sound range of that site.
As it worked out, the convoy never really had any need to stop and hold in place. The nixies being spread out in front, off to the sides and behind diverted enough of the critters to make the advance continuous. The two ARVs snorted and belched black smoke, shoving anything that blocked the road to either side. If things got a little slow with the clearing, then the other vehicles did the "cha cha" as the back and forth movement came to be called.
It was well past dark now, but the spot lights mounted on the wall beckoned. Another hour saw them lined up on the main gate, a hundred meters out. The convoy shut down, and went silent. In the mean time, several more nixies had been planted 400-1000 meters away on their back trail. The rooftop crews turned them all on by command from the gate watch and 4 horns 400 meters back blared to life. It took some time but the dead all behaved as expected and shuffled off to the first row. When a sufficiently large number had congregated, the next ring, 600 meters out were switched on and the 400 meter ring shut down. It took a couple more hours for the vast majority of the dead to be drawn nearly a kilometre away, and for the wall crews to determine if the way was clear to open the gate.
Finally the go signal was given, and the convoy started up as the gate opened. This gate opened at it's normal speed, indicating it had power. How, only the General and his Can Do engineers knew the answer to that. As soon as the gate had opened a vehicle width, it stopped and the convoy rolled in. The few stragglers who'd managed to reach the gate in time to hear it open were picked off individually only if they came close enough to possibly get in. No factory made crossbows here, but among other things some practicing archers among the troops had made long bows and arrows. They'd had three weeks to make them and practice with them. They were pretty good. Most of them were competitive archers, some with awards. These guys were up on the wall, taking out the more inquisitive deaders.
As soon as the back end of Kohta's APC crossed the threshold, the gate closed. The call went out, and the nearest nixies were shut down. The chopper made the rounds, collecting the troops deployed, and then RTB'd to the Island Airport. As that was going on, half a dozen troops in NBC suits fired up the fire pumps and hosed off the vehicles. All the gore was washed into several rows of trenches. Once the job was done, the trenches would have scrap wood and other burnables tossed onto the mess, fuel would be added and the mess lit off.
As the spray crews finished each unit, they rapped on the hull or door, and hollered that it was OK to come out. The convoy people were assembled and fed tea and biscuits and then marched off to temporary sleeping arrangements. Sagawa, his 2IC, Wolf, Kat, Saburo, Shinji, Shizuka and Rika were escorted to the conference center, to debrief with the General who'd come across the bay, leaving the closing phases of the Airport clean up to his 2IC.
Wolf looked around and chuckled. He nudged Saburo, who whispered to Rika and Shizuka. Smiles slowly appeared on their faces as they looked at the R.E. . Their noses were definitely out of join as they watched Uchimoto welcome them with open arms. The day had gone well, and they were that much closer to getting the info they needed to make a go of staying alive.
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NBC: Nuclear,Biological,Chemical suits. Designed to keep the wearer from any sort of contamination.
Author's notes: I don't own HOTD, or any of its characters. I just get to play in their universe. All characters in this story other than those listed below are (So far) my own.
Komuro Tadashi
Miyamoto Rei
Miyamoto Tadashi
Miyamoto Kiriko
Busujima Saeko
Takagi Saya
Hirano Kouta
Marikawa Shizuka
Marasato Alice
Minami Rika
Reviews gratefully accepted, as long as they are constructive and non-abusive.
Anyone interested in following the progress on the real life Sabre Dance is welcome to visit my builder's blog. Just search for Sabre dancing. You'll find it. Currently operations are shut down for the holiday season. Bloody cold out there too, North America got hit with a "BOMB CYCLONE" as the media calls it. Huge amounts of snow, temperatures well below 0C and deaths are starting to mount. More than a million people lost power in the last few days, so staying warm is difficult. Oddly enough I have a mere dusting of snow, mostly grass tufts showing. My area hasn't have serious snow since at least the 90s, although I'd say ever earlier.
Its a tad late to be wishing Merry Christmas, but there it is. A happy New Year to all of you.