WWZ fanfic: Operation DRYPOOL and the fall of Britain

XLV


The Mayor of London hosted a meeting at his office at City Hall. It wasn’t a public affair and those who attended came without any sort of fanfare. The Met. Police commissioner was there and so too was the minister for policing, a junior minister at the Home Office. Furthermore, two Cabinet-level secretaries of state – holding the business and culture, media & sport portfolios – were present. The director-general of MI-5 showed up as well. Invited but not attending was the chief of the defence staff: as much as he had disagreements with the government ministers at COBRA, he wouldn’t attend the mayor’s meeting. However, the CDS did send one of his senior people from the MOD to go and talk to those meeting at City Hall on a strictly unofficial basis.

In many countries, a meeting like this would look like the first signs of a coup d’état. Nothing silly like that was on the mind’s of those who attended but there was an awareness of what it might look like hence the secretive manner in which the head of the Security Service showed up and the absence of the nation’s most-senior military office. They all had knowledge of what was going on with the Undead though some had more of an understanding than others. They each had their own motives for being here too: even the RAF officer who had volunteered to go on behalf of the CDS. Both the mayor (a member of the opposing party to the government) and the senior policeman were concerned about London primarily. The junior minister knew what was happening with the nation’s police forces with the deaths and the abandoning of posts from officers. The business secretary was a Kent MP who had had no contact with his constituency for several days now while his Cabinet colleague might often be referred to as just the culture secretary yet the media role was currently of more importance. As to that civil servant who led the country’s domestic intelligence service, he watched in horror as those at COBRA were letting this all happen while they acted like (ineffective) dictators.

What brought them together was the fact that they had been cut out of not just the decision-making process when it came to what was currently tearing the country apart but also denied access to information. They wanted to know what was going on then give an input to how to act. That was initial intention anyway.


Group Captain Green – that military officer sent here from the MOD – was asked by the mayor to give them the latest overall reports on what was happening with the spread of the Undead. He informed those listening just how far and wide that they had reached. Focus from the mayor was on how close they were to London considering their presence in large areas of Kent: he wanted to know how effective the containment he understood was in place on the very edges of the city’s suburbs were at keeping them back. Gp.–Capt. Green said that those holding what was being called the ‘M-25 Line’ were likely to lose control there within the next twenty four hours. There were too few troops left and their defensive line was nothing of the sort. People infected with Solanum would soon be crossing in number to flee Kent and therefore the Undead would be present within London. This at once brought forth questions about how troops left in the capital were going to deal with that. The RAF officer told him and the others that there were very few troops left in London, those trained to deal with the Undead and those not, after the majority of them had already been either dispatched to Kent or sent to the East Midlands. London would be suffering with outbreaks of the Undead soon enough and there was no one going to be able to deal with them.

The Met. Police commissioner and the policing minister each confirmed to those with them what they had already heard reports of when it came to police overstretch and officers not showing up for work. Many of London’s officers had been loaned to other forces where they had become casualties. This had led to the panic of others when they were informed via rumours of what became of their fellow officers. The two secretaries of state, both sitting MPs like the junior minister, spoke of how there was uproar among their fellow politicians at the whole situation with COBRA doing what they were doing. The prime minister and others with him weren’t talking to anyone else and had made sure that Parliament wasn’t sitting. Journalists were almost breaking down doors trying to get information out to the public on what was really going on but were being legally frustrated in doing this due to the censorship taking place. Moreover, the culture secretary had received instructions from COBRA to now stop them covering the outbreaks of looting & criminality elsewhere in the country away from where the Undead were with the aim of ‘maintaining law and order’ through silence on that. While being an MP whose constituency was ‘lost’ brought him here, the business secretary was watching as wat remained of the battered British economy was collapsing. Road and rail connections nationwide were cut, telecommunications blackouts were occurring and that violence unrelated to the Undead were all having a tremendous effect.

No one had anything to say that pleased anyone else to hear. There was no good news. The mayor asked MI-5’s director what was happening across in America. They’d been hit with outbreaks of the Undead, hadn’t they? How were they dealing with that? Was there anything that could be taken from their approach that could be used to save his city from what was about to come?

Gp.–Capt. Green was given the nod by the intelligence chief to tell those here at City Hall what was occurring over in the United States. Atlanta and parts of Georgia plus neighbouring states were seeing similar scenes to what was going on in the East Midlands here. That outbreak which had started in Newark was consuming much of northern New Jersey and had stretched into Pennsylvania too. Moreover, infected people had already brought it into New York: no one had shut the tunnels and bridges in time. NYC was, like London, very soon going to have the Undead throughout. American soldiers and police officers (the latter all armed, unlike the few British police who carried weapons) were engaging the Undead where they found them and coming off best almost each time but they had no restrictions on movement of people and the Undead were thus rising everywhere. Overall, trying to look for inspiration with ideas as to what to do was a non-starter.

However, there was one thing that could be done.

Leaving that hanging there for a second, in a rather dramatic fashion, the RAF officer waited for a response. The commissioner asked him what that was. The reply came from the MI-5 head, not Gp.–Capt. Green. It was to tell people what was happening. Everyone in America knew the Undead were active in their country – so many were fighting back – but so few people in Britain didn’t or if they had an idea, it was only partial. We need to tell the general public where the Undead are, he said. In addition, knowing what the Solanum infection was, a dropping this stupid African Rabies lie, would mean that the public could protect themselves and others as well.

Agreement all round came to this.


There was a question also put to the CDS’s dispatched briefer to them from the business secretary. Gp.–Capt. Green was asked what was Operation DRYPOOL. The Cabinet member hadn’t been told what it was: he’d just heard that it was something said by some that could stop the Undead but others said it would mean the death of the nation. Surely, he and those here should hear what it was. This intrigued that others… apart from the director-general of MI-5 who knew what it was.

Those gathered at City Hall were told what DRYPOOL was.

The mass abandonment of huge areas of the country, leaving people behind to the Undead, and the establishment of complete cordons around them. No one would go in nor come out. Gunfire would meet anyone approached the outer lines and there would be the use of heavy weapons – air strikes, artillery and munitions such as napalm – all across those abandoned areas. It would defeat the Undead, they were told, and put a stop to the spread of infection.

There was only shaking of the heads present here at the idea of that. Like the government, those meeting in secretly at the mayor’s invitation wouldn’t countenance such an idea. Who could have come up with such an idea? Who would ever agree to what would be the wholescale murder of countless numbers of people that that madness would entail?

What they did agree to do was to make things public. The culture secretary, aided by MI-5, would make sure that COBRA couldn’t stop this. The mayor with the commissioner alongside him would go on television this evening. There would be no censorship of this and they would tell Londoners, but also the whole country too, what was happening. Gp.–Capt. Green urged them to consider taking the government into instigating DRYPOOL as well but that had already gone down like a lead balloon. The focus among the politicians here was now about saving the nation’s capital and its people via knowledge of the Undead. They committed themselves to acting alone, making the decision to do what they did and no longer working out how to get those at COBRA to consult with them.

When his subordinate reported back to him at the MOD, the chief of the defence staff applauded the decision that those at City Hall had taken yet told Gp.–Capt. Green that overall it was a matter of ‘rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic’. They weren’t going to save London and this wasn’t going to save the country.

Only DRYPOOL could.

That won't be the case. The biggest danger to the public, those who will cause the greatest loss of life, will be those in charge: before and after the DRYPOOL decision is finally taken. Lives will be taken to save others and it will all go wrong.

So the COBRA bunker isn't safe anymore?

XLVII


The Culture Secretary was called to see the Prime Minister at Downing Street (above where the COBRA bunker was) and asked to explain himself. Why had he failed to ensure that the media didn’t broadcast what the Mayor of London had said about the Undead? He told the prime minister what he’d done and why he’d done it: he had done everything to ensure that the media covered this with the intention of saving the country.

Asked to resign, the culture secretary refused to. He was fired instead.

In parting comments, the prime minister was told that his leadership – such as it was – was finished. The now-fired culture secretary had dozens of MPs supporting what he had done already and by the end of the day would have most of the party onside as well. This couldn’t go on, things had to change and if they didn’t, this would be the end for them all: not their political careers, but their lives.

No proper response came to this. The prime minister wasn’t listening to him nor anyone else whom the Chancellor would soon afterwards state when they spoke back down in COBRA as being ‘off-message’. They would stick with what they were doing in following the Operation BANKSIDE protocols in dealing with the Undead. That damn, infernal DRYPOOL which the culture secretary had spoken of – and who had told him about that, eh? – wouldn’t be employed!


The result of the showdown between those two politicians at Downing Street was something that the Director-General of MI-5 chose to inform the Chief of the Defence Staff about. He called over to the military officer’s office on a private and secured line. They discussed that and several other matters. The line wasn’t secure. It was bugged and being monitored. A transcript of the phone call would be shown to the prime minister, chancellor and a few others of those at COBRA (not all of them though) soon enough. Being the one who ordered the intercepting of that call and passing this onto the prime minister was the head of the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), a civilian servant who was supposed to be above politics.

Tens of thousands of Britons had lost their lives, the Undead were numbering in their many thousands and the country was falling apart. Meanwhile, the nation’s security organs were bugging each other and currying favour with politicians. Those who said Britain wasn’t doomed with this madness underway were fools.


What the intercepted call hadn’t uncovered was what else was going on though when it came to those senior figures who had lost confidence in the government. Over at the Ministry of Defence, the CDS wasn’t talking on the phone when he was making plans for DRYPOOL regardless of what he had been told about it never happening.

The government had long said that all plans were to be ‘burnt to ashes’ but they never had. He himself had never agreed with such a plan of action yet that was before the Undead arrived in Britain. Like a real convert, the CDS now regarded this as the only hope. He was moving assets and people around. He was doing things that he wasn’t supposed to be doing. At any moment, he expected that the defence secretary would ask him to resign due to ongoing disputes with COBRA. However, they hadn’t yet. In the time he had, racing against an unseen clock, he was doing what he could to save what he could and who he could.

Whether it would be enough, he didn’t know. But he would still give it his all.

XLIX


All of that insanity in government wasn’t going to stop the Undead. It didn’t stop them from reaching London, the country’s capital and most populous city.

There had been a major military effort to keep the Undead but also those infected with Solanum from leaving Kent and entering the Greater London area. This was done at the expense of the county known as the Garden of England and all of the people who lived there. Not all of Kent was lost to the Undead, not even half, but it and its residents were doomed. The containment had failed anyway as there had already been outbreaks of the Undead in East Sussex already with West Sussex and Surrey soon to join in as infected parts of the southern tier of the Home Counties.

Greater London was defended by what was called the ‘M-25 Line’. This name didn’t mean what it appeared to be. There was no defensive position which ran as a line along the course of London’s orbital motorway. Where the British Army was operating was actually far forward of that road and there was traffic making use of it too. Motorways running through Kent which connected to the M-25, those being the M-2 & the M-20 & the M-26, were each shut with the junctions closed to access yet the orbital road continued to be used. It wasn’t seen as a full-back position either where a last stand could be made from either. The term was being used by the armed forces because they were used to operations influenced by terrain features and the M-25 was certainly that.

BANKSIDE operations were taking place to the east of the M-25 Line. Soldiers engaged the Undead in search-and-destroy missions through infected areas in the western reaches of Kent and kept forward positions to turn back civilians who were trying to flee. The majority of direct engagements with the Undead turned out as they usually did with one-sided victories by the British Army yet there were the odd few occasions where things went very wrong and the Undead would overcome small groups of soldiers. Solanum was present in many people who had survived encounters with the Undead and they continued to move about before they died and then reanimated. New outbreaks brought in more soldiers to kill the Undead and then engage in the process of chasing down those who had gotten away after being attacked.

The process repeated itself over and over again.

Major engagements with the Undead were now taking place around Greenhithe, the abandoned Bluewater shopping complex, Brand’s Hatch, Shoreham, Otford and Sevenoaks.

The Undead were pretty close to the M-25. There were individuals mainly though also those clusters of them where they bound together for reasons still unexplained in groups of two, three and four. Bigger groups had been seen at times though: half a dozen, even seven or eight of them. There was a worry among the armed forces that those numbers of clusters could reach ten or a dozen… maybe even more. The soldiers fought on foot in the main though did make use of light armoured vehicles and also helicopter support as well. They needed to be out on foot. The boots-on-the-ground issue had been long established as the only way to deal with the Undead. They weren’t always out in the open and staying inside moving vehicles and trying to engage them from ‘safety’, just wouldn’t work.


The Undead now made it to the M-25 now, far beyond that military activity.

First there was a woman. She was a Kent native who was running from two of the Undead who were coming after her. She reached the motorway near to the village of Darenth – an area recently swept and declared ‘all clear’ – and ran out among traffic early in the morning. A car hit her. A second car hit the first after it suddenly came to a stop. Other vehicles managed to avoid getting into a multi-vehicle pile-up but things were a mess. No one was sure what was going on at first. Several 999 calls were made with the police and an ambulance requested. There was beeping of horns from people who couldn’t see what exactly had happened and then the siren of a police car responding.

This attracted the attention of the Undead, the pair of them who had been following the woman who been hit by that car and had lost sight of her before. They now heard the commotion and the Solanum in their brains drove them towards that. It was the early hours of the morning and while not completely dark, there wasn’t that much light. The first of them wasn’t seen by the commuter he attacked until it was too late. The screams from that incident were joined by shouts of alarm from other people who saw the second one of the Undead. They fled in terror. Neither of the officers from that responding police car moved forwards towards the danger. They got back in their car and called for assistance: stories had been heard by both of them of Met. Police & Kent Police officers who’d disappeared and they didn’t want to share their fate.

The Undead were killing people and attempting to do the same to others. Several people fought back with their bare hands or any improvised weapons they could find. Others fled though, getting in their cars to drive away. Two of them had had very close calls indeed with the Undead with transfers made to them of Solanum.

To Romford in East London one of these civilians would make it before he died. The other went into South-East London and to the inner-city suburb of Woolwich.

The armed forces response down on the motorway near Darenth was quick and effective but it was fast understood that the damage had already been done. Hundreds of potentially infected people had left the area before a quarantine was put into place. Identifying them was just the first of many challenges: they would have to be then tracked down and checked. It wasn’t known that only two carried Solanum with them and the matter had to be addressed as if they all might have been. The task was impossible but it was going to be tried. This was all far too late.

The Undead would be making their presence felt in London before the end of the day with two major, uncontainable outbreaks far from the M-25 Line about to occur.

L
(50)


West Midlands Police and West Midlands Ambulance Service each provided emergency coverage across a wide area and not just the city of Birmingham. Police officers and ambulance crews from each had been involved in first contact with small numbers of the Undead in the urban areas of Coventry, Dudley, Walsall and Wolverhampton. They had seen personnel killed and witnessed the activities of soldiers on BANKSIDE missions. There had been a transfer of these personnel out of the West Midlands to Leicestershire early on to aid efforts in that county when the outbreak first erupted there. All of this brought about missing first responders (everyone knew they were dead but officially they were ‘missing’), high numbers of absenteeism and also an unwillingness of put themselves in danger. Their job was to protect and aid the public but they were human being after all.

Four small-scale outbreaks within Birmingham’s suburbs got going and grew in scope before they could be confirmed. The emergency services were under the pressure that they were and before they as first responders arrived where the Undead were, there was nothing that they could do to save people from what was happening. Their urgent messages up the chain of command brought forth a military response and they were pulled back.

The armed forces weren’t in any better shape though. As the Undead brought terror to the East Midlands and expanded into the West Midlands, the deployments of BANKSIDE-trained soldiers dragged them everywhere. The cupboard was almost bare and when the alerts came from Birmingham there were too few men tasked to do too much.

In the Aston part of the city, the Undead there were dealt with but in Harborne, Saltley and Sparkbrook the soldiers failed. They lost a few of their own men and couldn’t stop the rapid growth of numbers of the Undead. Worse, their cordons were ineffective and people who had been infected with Solanum after escaping from the Undead managed to get away.

The morning and afternoon of gunfire in the suburbs would be followed by an evening and then a night-time of utter terror. The Undead were seemingly everywhere. They were attacking people all over the city. The streets filled with people which left the soldiers in Birmingham unable to get anywhere and soon involved in engagements away from where they had been sent to. Three companies of soldiers, a couple of hundred men, were all that there were available to try to contain this. They failed to do so.

Faster than anywhere else beforehand, Birmingham was lost to the Undead. Casualty numbers were ‘only’ in the thousands. Yet, there were hundreds of thousands of people who left who all could potentially be carrying Solanum elsewhere and there were still over a million people inside the city with the Undead among them.

Who was going to save them from the ever-increasing growing number of the Undead who had the one sole, irrational desire to kill them and try to consume their remains?

No one could nor would.