Arisen, Book Nine - Cataclysm by Michael Stephen Fuchs Page A

listened stonily as he was informed that it was 3,758 miles from London to the Gulf of Aden where the JFK was anchored – and that the B200, their little Beechcraft twin-turboprop utility plane, the only aircraft type on base that could land on the carrier, had a maximum range of 2,075 miles. Getting it there, never mind getting it back again, was going to require mid-air refueling.
    Jameson further gathered that this operation had been done once before, when they sent a team of bioscientists and a load of scientific equipment out to the carrier. But he hadn’t been around for that, and he was damned if he knew how all that worked – aeronautically, logistically, or (most of all) administratively.
    Luckily, one of the actual ops officers working at a station nearby overhead this exchange, despite being involved in a half-dozen stacked-up radio transmissions. He was a second lieutenant and Jameson seemed to recall his name was Miller.
    “Brize Norton,” Miller said, covering the mic on his radio headset. He meant the RAF base in nearby Oxfordshire. “101 Squadron has Voyager KC2 and KC3 AAR tankers.” Jameson must have looked blank. The ops guy looked annoyed. “Air-to-air refueling aircraft.”
    Jameson restarted his breathing. “Can they support this flight?”
    “Last I heard there was exactly one Voyager still flying and mission-capable. And that’s if Brize Norton isn’t overrun.”
    Jameson’s expression darkened. “What? We don’t even know?” How could they not know which British military bases were overrun?
    The ops guy pointed to the huge, and now completely shattered, digital display at the front of the JOC – the one that had previously displayed in high resolution the entire battlespace of southern England, including the lines of advance of the dead, as well as the location of all military units fighting them. Jameson got it: their big picture had been blown into a thousand shards – and everything they knew they were having to cobble together piecemeal.
    He looked down and said to Miller, “Can you organize this refueling?”
    The man made a fucked-off expression and pointed at his headset – out of which were leaking multiple voices, urgent and panicked, all clearly expecting support and coordination from CentCom. And all of which support was being provided by a tiny handful of personnel, most of them ill-trained for the job, rather than the forty full-time subject matter experts and TOC jocks who were supposed to be running this place.
    Jameson shook his head, looked around at the several other people who had queued up needing something from him, and looked back to the ill-trained corporal. “Organize the refueling mission. Make it happen. Do whatever it takes. Don’t bother me about it again until it’s done.” Delegating was his only chance of keeping his head above water here.
    But then Jameson grimaced. He had already told the Americans they we were sending an aircraft, in response to their request. He figured that as soon as that started being true, he’d better ring them back up and give them an updated ETA.
    For that matter , he thought grimly, I wouldn’t say no to an ETA on that vaccine of theirs – if such a thing actually exists, or is even possible…
    But he pushed that thought away, and turned back into the maelstrom.
    * * *
    A few minutes later, though it felt much longer, Jameson sensed as much as heard Sergeant Eli behind him. His long-time troop sergeant, and best friend, was now pretty much the only thing allowing Jameson to keep any of the wheels on this wagon. He was now serving as his acting 2IC both in running this base, and in managing the chaos that was the JOC and the fight for the south.
    “Sir,” Eli said, looking and sounding as unfazed as Jameson hadn’t felt in a long, long time. That was the great and indispensable thing about grizzled NCOs. Experienced and hard-bitten, they remained untroubled and combat effective however crazy things got. Jameson