Rotters (Book 2): Bravo Company Read online

  ROTTERS:

  BRAVO COMPANY

  Carl R Cart

  ROTTERS: BRAVO COMPANY

  Carl R. Cart

  Copyright Carl R. Cart, 2014

  Published by Spore Press

  All rights reserved.

  eISBN:

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

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  PRINTING HISTORY

  Spore Press eBook/ February 2014

  Spore Press Paperback / February 2014

  For information, address: Spore Press Marketing,

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  Spore Press Books are published by Spore Press LLC

  SPORE PRESS and the “Spore” design are trademarks of Spore Press

  Edited by Mark Francis / Cover design by Alan Davidson

  Dedication

  This book is dedicated to every man and woman who found themselves in a trench or foxhole.

  Acknowledgment

  Rotters Bravo Company was only made possible by the generous help of my very good friends Captain David West Reynolds and Jack A. Bobo.

  Captain Dave and I shared many hours discussing the fate of Bravo Company. Dave came up with the horrors of the Sample Tent.

  Jack, or as I call him, Tony, is the first to read my rough drafts and provide me with critical analysis of my stories.

  My works are always made better by the help of these two scoundrels.

  Matt Bliss, who once again provided military intelligence.

  I would like to thank my publisher Keith Henning and the staff at Spore Press; this book and the series would not exist without them.

  My friend Jamey Aebersold always helps me with formatting and proofreading.

  Another close friend, Kelly Pitt, generously assists me with his printing expertise and first runs on rough drafts.

  Finally, my thanks to my wife, Jennifer, who always reads my stories, and tries not to think too hard about the inner workings of my twisted mind.

  The Characters of Bravo Company

  For the sake of my readers who are not familiar with military ranks and language, I have included the following chart of ranks and characters. A person in the military can be called by their rank alone (Sergeant, Major, etc.), or by their last name (considered disrespectful of senior NCOs and officers), or frequently by a nick-name (often derogatory). Note also that even though Colonel Warren outranks Major Dorset, Dorset is technically the commanding officer of Bravo Company. Commanding officers are typically known as the CO. As the senior noncommissioned officer (NCO), Master Sergeant McAllister is in command of both platoons, under the authority of the company’s officers. Senior NCOs are often more experienced than officers, and may be unofficially in command. Almost everyone in the military gets a nick-name at some point.

  BRAVO COMPANY

  Commanding Officer (CO) Major Dorset (AKA The Old Man, The CO, The major)

  Commanding Officer Medical Corp - Colonel Warren (AKA The colonel)

  First Platoon

  Lieutenant Reid

  Master Sergeant McAllister - AKA Sarge

  Second Platoon

  Lieutenant Beckham

  Sergeant Price

  First Platoon, First Squad

  Specialist Sadler

  First Platoon, Second Squad

  PFC Parsons

  PFC Harde (Hard-on)

  PVT Jones (Jonesy)

  PVT Hernandez (Gunner)

  Second Platoon, Second Squad

  PFC Smith

  PFC Jacobs

  Prologue

  04:35 a.m. Zulu

  Village of Mumban

  Democratic Republic of Congo

  Micca sat bolt upright in her narrow bed and looked around in terror. She wasn’t sure what had awakened her until she heard the screams begin again. She leapt from the bed and pulled on her thin dress and old sneakers. Pausing only long enough to grab up her late father’s burnoose, she bolted into the street and ran headlong for the forest.

  She ran for her life through a bedlam of fire and massacre. The village was going up in flames all around her. The leaping conflagration threw long, grotesque shadows upon the thatch hut walls. The mud streets ran red with blood, and butchered, headless bodies lay in heaps in all directions. Smoke drifted on the breeze, carrying the smell of burning meat. The stuttering bark of an AK-47 sounded nearby. Micca flinched, and ran faster. She knew that sound all too well.

  Terror almost overwhelmed her. She forced herself to stop as she reached the last hut at the edge of the village. A clearing fully one-hundred meters wide lay between her and the safety of the rain forest. Micca lay on her stomach and wiggled forward until she could cautiously peer around the hut’s thatch wall. Her eyes widened with fear as she witnessed the horrors before her. She jammed her knuckles into her mouth to stop her sobs.

  Rebel soldiers walked calmly around the perimeter of the burning village, guns in hand. Micca stifled a scream as two small children ran from the ruins. Three soldiers fired into their tiny bodies, mowing them down in a hail of bullets. One of the killers stalked forward, a machete in hand. He knelt down and brutally decapitated the murdered children. The monster calmly stood and carried their severed heads to the edge of the wood. He and another soldier jammed the heads onto sharpened wooden poles, and set them upright into the ground next to the other grizzly, dripping trophies already there.

  In growing horror Micca realized there were dozens of them in a circle surrounding the burning village. The soldiers turned from their work, and as she watched, the small headless bodies were tossed back into the burning buildings. Tears blurred her vision.

  The thatch pressed against her stomach suddenly grew painfully warm. Micca squirmed away from the wall as small tongues of flame burst through the thin wooden wall. Smoke stung her, and the heat began to become unbearable. She could barely breathe. Micca held on as long as she could; finally the torment was too great.

  She sprang to her feet and ran for the tree line; her long legs flashed in the firelight. From the corner of her eye she registered the muzzle flash; then darkness reached out and took her.

  Chapter 1

  10:15 a.m.

  Emergency Medical HQ

  Village of Lat, the Congo

  Colonel Ortega could feel his control of the situation slipping away, inch by inch. Everything that could go wrong had gone wrong; Murphy’s Law was in full effect. Chaos lurked just below the thin layer of organization that the colonel was managing to maintain. Ortega ran his fingers through his thinning hair, and exhaled loudly. Files and reports covered every inch of his make-shift desk, and the uneaten remains of his last meal sat untouched on a plastic tray. He was running on cold coffee and sheer stubbornness.

  Ortega had brought his small medical unit to this forsaken village three days ago with specific orders. It was his mission to stop a viral outbreak, an epidemic that had decimated the indigenous population, and quickly spread beyond the local government’s ability to counter or control. The virus w
as unlike anything Col. Ortega had ever encountered. Every single member of the small village had contracted the disease, except for the handful that had fled into the surrounding forest. Roughly a hundred moaning victims of the virus were spread throughout the village’s tiny clinic and the Army tents surrounding the HQ. None of Ortega’s staff had become infected yet, but the colonel knew it was a grim possibility. They were losing a race against time.

  Ortega was sure that the virus was being transmitted by fluidic contact. He hadn’t ruled out aerosol transmission either. He and his staff wore protective gear at all times outside the clean command laboratory tent, and followed all standard decontamination protocols.

  The virus was extremely fast acting and caused death through high fever and resultant brain damage. Although they had identified the virus, it had so far proved resistant to any counter measures. It seemed to be something entirely new. The colonel was at a loss. All of the modern equipment at his disposal, all of the protocols, all of his work; none of it seemed to matter. The virus was winning.

  A makeshift morgue had been set up in the village’s church. The priest was in no condition to complain; he had been one of the first casualties. The locals had been burning the dead before the unit’s arrival. Ortega quickly put a stop to the practice, over the objections of the village elders. At first he had needed some of the bodies for autopsies, now there were far too many to bury or burn. They were stacked like cord wood inside the small chapel. Hardened as he was to death, Ortega could barely manage to approach the morgue. The flies and the stench had become absolutely horrific. Africa was not a pretty place to die.

  The colonel had just gone back to preparing a report when his second in command entered the lab. Ortega continued to type as Captain Forsythe approached his desk.

  “Sorry to bother you, sir, but we have a serious problem,” the captain reported.

  Ortega looked up. The captain’s face looked grim. His second wasn’t given to exaggeration. “Another problem? What is it now?” he replied.

  “You had better come see this for yourself,” Forsythe said curtly.

  “You can’t just tell me?” Ortega asked.

  “No sir, you wouldn’t believe me,” the captain answered.

  The officers suited up and left the laboratory tent. As they stepped outside, the heat hit Ortega like a physical blow, and he began to sweat immediately. The suit was stifling and constricting on a good day; the African heat made working in the protective suits almost unbearable.

  Capt. Forsythe led Ortega through the deserted village to the chapel. They stopped before the front steps. The small church’s foyer looked like a slaughterhouse floor. The front door hung askew by one twisted hinge, and blackened blood covered the wooden floorboards and the rough plank walls. Thousands of bloated black flies covered the church in a crawling, buzzing mass.

  The colonel looked around in puzzlement.

  “Where are the bodies?”

  “We honestly don’t know, sir,” Forsythe replied.

  “The villagers must have taken them out to burn them,” Ortega suggested.

  “I thought that at first too, sir, but there aren’t any villagers left capable of that,” the captain reported sadly.

  “What?” the colonel queried.

  “All of the villagers are sick or dead, sir; all of them,” Forsythe answered.

  “Why would outsiders come into the village to remove these bodies?” Ortega asked.

  “They didn’t,” the captain offered. “Look at the footprints, sir.”

  Ortega walked slowly around the chapel’s entry. All of the bloody footprints came out of the church; there were no prints going in. The colonel knelt down and scanned the muddy ground closely. All of the prints led outward, into the forest.

  “There are no drag marks either, sir,” Forsythe observed dryly.

  “What are you suggesting?” Ortega asked.

  “I don’t know,” the captain replied. “I just don’t know.”

  Chapter 2

  2:44 p.m. Zulu

  Village of Umjebec

  Ethiopia, Africa

  “I fucking hate Africa and I hate Africans!” PFC Harde grumbled as he struggled to load another fifty-pound bag of rice onto the light cargo truck.

  “That’s okay,” I laughed. “I’m pretty sure Africa hates you back.”

  “Fuck you, Parsons,” Harde replied wearily.

  “He doesn’t mean anything personal by that, Gordo,” I added in apology to our interpreter. Gordo was assigned to our squad; he was a college grad who could speak about a dozen of the local dialects. Technically, he was a civilian contractor assigned to our company. Ironically, his family had immigrated to the United States to get away from Africa, but once he opted to work for the Army they sent him right back. He was sharp as hell, but he wasn’t quite as crude as the rest of the grunts. Gordo was a good guy. He didn’t just talk; he worked hard and pulled his weight.

  “It’s alright,” Gordo grunted as he threw a bag into the truck. “Africa is not for white men,” he laughed.

  “Fuckin A right,” Harde agreed. “It’s too damn hot all the damn time.”

  I had to agree with Harde, or as we called him, Hard-on, on that one. I was originally from Detroit, and hadn’t stopped sweating since I had stepped off the plane. Our company had been deployed from Afghanistan to help with humanitarian aid and emergency food distribution after a bad drought in Africa. We had bounced from one Third World shit-hole to another one.

  All we had done in Ethiopia was load fucking rice onto trucks by the mother fucking ton. Either that or stand guard and sweat while the other guys in the company loaded rice.

  Personally, I hated rice. Worst invention ever. Our CO, Major Dorset, had joked that one billion Chinese couldn’t be wrong. Fuck that; they were wrong. Rice sucked dick and so did Major Dorset.

  Of course, the major hadn’t loaded any motherfucking rice, or done anything else work related that I had ever noticed. He left that for me, Hard-on, Gordo, and the rest of Bravo Company.

  The company currently consisted of two combat platoons of ten men each, a transportation unit, and for this mission, a medical corp. Normally, we fielded roughly fifty enlisted men and officers, give or take a few. Our squad leader, Specialist Tucker was away on leave, so we were currently one man short. Bravo was a combat infantry company, so we pretty much got all the shit jobs. If there was a shitty job in a shit-hole town, in a backward-assed part of the world that needed doing, you could bet that Bravo Company would end up there doing it.

  Our real job was combat, but since there wasn’t always fighting to be done we ended up doing shit jobs like loading rice into trucks; a lot.

  Don’t get me wrong; Ethiopia was a pretty dangerous place. Gunner and Jonesy, the other two members of our fire squad, stood guard while we worked, and Master Sergeant McAllister supervised. They had to. The local gangs liked to hijack the food deliveries. In this part of the world, food was power. Civilians couldn’t work under these conditions, so the infantry had to do it. We all understood that, but it didn’t keep us from bitching about it. Bitching about what you were doing was as natural as breathing in the Army. As soon as we finished loading the truck, another empty one pulled up to take its place. The hot sun beat down on us out of the bright blue, Ethiopian sky.

  “Are we doing this again tomorrow, Sarge?” Hard-on groaned.

  McAllister looked up from his clipboard. “You never know what tomorrow will bring, that’s the best thing about being in the Army. You losers load this last truck and we’ll call it a day.”

  We didn’t know it at the time, but we had all loaded our last bag of rice.

  OPS ORD 9-22

  US ARMY MAJ. DORSET, CHARLES, M. AIRFIELD GRANDSTAND

  EXECUTE IMMEDIATE REDEPLOYMENT OF BRAVO COMPANY TO VILLAGE OF LAT, DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF THE CONGO.

  EXTRICATE MEDICAL UNIT THAT LOCATION.

  DETAILS OF UNIT PERSONNEL AND MISSION TO FOLLOW.

  VIRA
L OUTBREAK THAT AREA, DETAILS TO FOLLOW.

  IMPLEMENT SAFETY PROTOCOLS 34-7 AND 34-20.

  TRANSPORT EN ROUTE YOUR LOCATION

  ORDERS END

  Chapter 3

  08:33 p.m. Zulu

  Air Field Grandstand

  Ethiopia, Africa

  The East African sun slowly sank below the horizon of the forward airbase’s flight line. An incoming C-130 transport plane kicked up a swirling dust cloud that danced in the dying red light. We had a clear line of sight from our tents to the landing field. Hard-on looked up from his card hand and shaded his eyes. A second and a third C-130 followed the first plane in. The muted roar of their engines came dimly to us across the tarmac.

  “That’s weird,” he muttered as he pushed his discards across the empty shipping crate we were using as a card table.

  “Not really,” I replied. I threw in my cards and took a pull on my warm beer.

  “Yeah, you’re right,” Hard-on shot back. “I’m sure that’s just our monthly shipment of strippers and crack comin’ in.”

  Hard-on was from New Jersey and a real smart ass. He was a big guy and very muscular; he worked out with weights whenever our unit had any downtime. He considered himself a real ladies man. His real last name, Harde, had been changed to Hard-on the day he had joined the platoon. Everyone ended up with a nickname eventually. Some of them stuck, some didn’t. Hard-on liked his.

  “Would you two just shut up and play the game?” Jonesy complained. He pulled in the discards and shuffled the cards before dealing us all another hand. Jonesy was from Birmingham, Alabama. He had grown up in the city, and was streetwise and sharp. He was of medium build, but was very strong and fast. He had run track and wrestled in high school. Jonesy had a smooth deep voice with a strong southern drawl. If you got him drunk enough he would sing old blues songs.