Dead Storm: The Global Zombie Apocalypse Read online

  Dead Storm:

  The Global Zombie Apocalypse

  Nicholas Ryan

  Copyright © 2019 Nicholas Ryan

  The right of Nicholas Ryan to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors’ imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any other means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the author. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  LG, A – PBS&ST

  From the author:

  Hundreds of hours of research and reading have gone into the publication of this novel, but I am most indebted to the vast array of former military personnel and geopolitical experts who generously offered their expertise and experience to make this novel as accurate as possible. To everyone who helped – you have my sincere, profound gratitude.

  A full list of everyone who contributed appears at the end of the book.

  Also by Nicholas Ryan on Amazon:

  Ground Zero

  Die Trying

  Dead Rage

  Zombie War

  Brink of Extinction

  Last Stand for Man

  Chapter 1:

  KWAIL AIR BASE

  NORTH HWANGHAE PROVINCE

  NORTH KOREA

  Devastation. Utter chaos.

  Defeat.

  Major Pae Tai-jun cuffed irritably at a trickle of blood that ran down his muddied cheek and then stared one last time at the remains of Kwail airbase through red-rimmed eyes. He felt his humiliation scald the back of his throat as he ducked inside the cramped confines of his command APC. His hands were shaking with the after-effects of adrenalin; the nauseating cocktail of fear and exhaustion still fizzing in his blood.

  He squeezed his eyes shut for a long moment, and then reached for the radio.

  The driver of the modified VTT-323 had the personnel carrier idling, so that the Major had to raise his voice above the rumble of the diesel engine to make himself heard.

  “I need to talk directly to the Defense Minister,” Pae’s voice rasped hoarsely over the command frequency. “Immediately.”

  The vehicle was concealed behind a small rise, two kilometers north of the burning airport. Oily black pyres of smoke smudged the sky, turning the sun blood red.

  It took almost a full minute for the message to be relayed to the North Korean command bunker deep beneath the capital. The Major waited impatiently. The deafening sounds of battle still echoed in his ears, his senses still reeling from the smoke, the fire, the blood… the disgrace.

  “This is the Minister,” the voice on the other end of the line sounded scratchy and ethereal, as if it came from a thousand miles away. Pae Tai-jun straightened his back reflexively, and let out a long shuddering breath.

  “Comrade Minister, this is Major Pae, reporting in as you instructed. Kwail airport has fallen. We have been overrun by the enemy.”

  There was a long numbed silence. The Major felt himself sway on the vehicle’s narrow steel bench, as if in the grips of vertigo.

  “Repeat your last message,” the Minister’s voice became gruff. He barked the words so that they sounded like a challenge.

  Pae hung his head and the crashing waves of shame and defeat overwhelmed him. He heard himself sobbing, each word choked in his throat.

  “We were heavily outnumbered, Comrade Minister,” he explained in short stabs. “The Imperialists had air support and artillery. My men were entrenched beyond the northern perimeter of the main airstrip…”

  “How heavy were your losses?” The Minister for Defense snapped.

  The Major licked cracked bleeding lips. Minister Choe Pu-sik had a fearsome reputation. Even over the radio, the veteran army officer felt himself quail. “Severe,” the Major admitted in a whisper. “Three of the Air Force’s remaining Mig-21 fighter jets were caught on the runway and destroyed before they could take off. The airstrip has been heavily cratered. The heliport, the maintenance building and the air force hangars have all been destroyed by enemy artillery fire. My men were – ”

  “I don’t give a damn about your men!” Choe roared.

  Standing in the hardened underground command bunker beneath Pyongyang, breathing in the sterile air-conditioned air, the North Korean Minister for Defense felt his hands bunch into fists of frustration and ominous foreboding. The loss of the airbase meant that the lead elements of the despised enemy were now barely one hundred kilometers from the capital; the North Korean Army’s right flank was in danger of complete collapse.

  Major Pae sat in stony silence, his body beginning to sag and hunch with exhaustion and the heavy burden of defeat. The door to the APC hung open, and he turned his head slowly towards the fading afternoon light. In the mud, buried in a shallow trench made by the heavy command vehicle’s tracks, lay the broken mangled body of one of his soldiers – a thin, emaciated face barely recognizable amidst the shattered pulp that was his corpse.

  “Are you still under attack?” the Minister seethed.

  “No, Comrade Minister,” the General said. “The enemy ground units appear to be consolidating their positions around the airport. Their fighter support has returned to the south. I have ordered the remnants of my force to withdraw along the Youth Hero Highway.”

  “No!” Minister Choe Pu-sik’s temper turned into white rage. “You will not withdraw, Major. Instead you will re-gather your forces, and in the morning, at sunrise, you will launch a successful counter-attack to re-take the airport.” He paused for a moment, feeling the flush of his fury spread across his cheeks so that his face felt like it was on fire. “There can be no retreat. Do I make myself clear?”

  Major Pae flinched under the lash of the Minister’s outrage. He nodded his head with the slow bovine obedience of a condemned man.

  “I understand,” he said.

  UNDERGROUND BUNKER

  PYONGYANG

  NORTH KOREA

  It was a surprisingly simple room, modestly furnished by just an antique desk strewn with maps, and two chairs. On one wall hung a portrait of the Supreme Leader and on the opposite wall was an equal-sized portrait of the young man’s father. The windowless space was painted white – stark and glaring under the fluorescent lights.

  Minister Choe stood on the threshold for a final moment to steel his resolve, and then quietly entered the room. He walked until he was standing before the desk, cowered by the dire news he carried. The tie around his neck felt like a noose, the uniform he wore fit like a straightjacket. He drew himself to rigid attention for long moments, staring down at the head of the man seated behind the desk, watching until he had finished scanning a yellow-paged report. The man stopped reading and placed the page into a thick folder marked ‘Secret’.

  The silence in the room seemed almost painful, humming with strained tension. The Minister felt an icy trickle of sweat run down his spine. At last the young man looked up and stared at the Minister for Defense.

  The young man had a round, unremarkable face, the defining lines of his features blurred beneath indulgent flesh. He wore his dark hair in a close crop. He was wearing a steel grey Mao jacket, buttoned to the neck. His gaze flicked across the Minister’s face, and then the corner
s of the man’s mouth slowly turned down in an attitude of petulant contempt.

  “Yes?” Kim Jong-un, Supreme Leader of North Korea, asked. His voice sounded surprisingly thin and reedy.

  The Minister for Defense bowed deeply. A rash of sweat suddenly broke out across his brow. He straightened and focused his gaze a little to the left so as not to look the country’s dictator in the eyes.

  “Dear Leader,” the Minister hesitated. Fear had turned his mouth dry. “The Major charged with the honor of defending Kwail airbase reports that his forces have been overrun by the enemy.”

  “When did this happen?” Kim’s voice grew as menacing and pointed as a blade.

  “Fifteen minutes ago, Dear Leader,” the Minister hurried. “I have given orders for the man’s family to be executed for his failure, and I have told the Major personally that there can be no retreat. He will counter-attack the South Korean position at sunrise tomorrow morning.”

  Kim Jong-un’s expression turned glowering. He pushed himself away from the desk, and the chair crashed against the wall.

  “Who is this Major who has failed me? Who has failed the Motherland?” the Supreme Leader’s voice quivered into a strident shout.

  Choe swallowed nervously. He had good reason to be filled with fear. His predecessor had been executed for disloyalty and merely showing disrespect to the young dictator, and another twenty high-ranking officials had been publicly executed since the young man had come to power following the death of his father. Choe Pu-sik was a lifetime military man who had been promoted to Defense Minister just eighteen months earlier. He wondered if he too would pay with his life for the failings of others. “His name is Major Pae Tai-jun,” the Minister saw his opportunity to deflect blame for the military disaster and leaped at the prospect. “He was given his command by General Sun – against my protestations.”

  Kim Jong-un glared at the Defense Minister. His mouth pouted into a sneer of distaste… and then in an instant the young man’s whole demeanor seemed to collapse into deep despair. He bowed his head, and his shoulders slumped.

  “The enemy has turned our flank,” he said softly, and then lapsed into a long contemplative silence. “What can we do… what can we do?”

  The Defense Minister said nothing.

  Suddenly Kim took a deep breath and then stared defiantly at the older man. His eyes were filled with patriotic passion. “We can fight!” he hissed. He went to the desk, casting maps hastily aside until he found one that showed the country’s southern region. He stabbed a pudgy finger at the map. “We disengage the enemy in the west and contract our forces. We consolidate! We bring the 806th Mechanized Corps closer to the capital, and we draw our two reserve mechanized corps into the battle across this line,” the young dictator scored a crease in the map with his thumbnail. “We form a hard shell, and then push the enemy back when they have exhausted themselves on the break wall of our defenses.”

  When Kim looked up again, he was breathless. The zealous fervor still burned in his gaze, the set of his features compelling.

  The Defense Minister hesitated. He felt the sting of tears in his eyes, and his terror became so palpable that his hands clasped behind his back shook.

  “Dear Leader,” the man hesitated, the words strangled in his throat. “The 806th was destroyed in the first few days of the war. They were positioned close to the Demilitarized Zone and were broken by the first enemy counter-attack across the border. And the reserves…”

  The bright light of hope went from the young dictator’s eyes. His gaze glazed over, and then his features seemed to collapse. A long sigh of sobbing despair hissed from between his clenched teeth.

  “We have been beaten?” he asked in a whisper of disbelief and dismay, the tone of his voice suddenly child-like.

  The Minister said nothing.

  Kim Jong-un clasped at the edge of the desk and the weight of realization seemed to double him over. The Minister heard the young man sob. “Leave me,” the dictator muttered.

  Minister Choe turned on his heel and scampered quickly from the room.

  KWAIL AIR BASE

  NORTH HWANGHAE PROVINCE

  NORTH KOREA

  “We lost two of the K2’s, but that’s the only bad news, sir,” a young Captain from the Republic of Korea Army ran obediently to the command vehicle when he saw the four high radio whips mounted on the vehicle. He snapped a salute as Colonel Jeong Jun emerged from the steel enclosed gloom. The Captain looked very young, but with the haggard weary eyes of an old man. His face was smeared with mud, his uniform barely recognizable. He was breathless. “Casualties are relatively light, and they are already being evacuated.”

  As if to confirm the young officer’s report, the air overhead became filled with the sudden clatter of helicopter rotors. Instinctively the Colonel lifted his eyes skyward. Three KAI KUH-1 twin-engine Surions with red painted crosses hung on the horizon, flying low in formation. The MEDIVAC helicopters flared out above the wreckage of the air base then slewed sideways through the thick roiling smoke to land near a cluster of camouflaged K200 APC’s. The Colonel nodded his head at the Captain.

  “Where is your commanding officer?”

  “He was wounded in the battle, sir,” the young officer said.

  Colonel Jeong grunted.

  It could have been worse, he admitted to himself. It could have been much, much worse.

  Past the Captain’s shoulder, the Colonel could see the remnants of the battlefield. A North Korean fighter jet was in the foreground, burning furiously at the edge of the airstrip, and on the ragged fringe of woods from where the advance had originated was the dark hulking shape of a destroyed tank; one of the South Korean Army’s precious K2 Black Panthers. The vehicle was one of the most advanced tanks in the world. The loss of two of them was a painful blow.

  The Colonel swept his eyes across the rest of the battlefield, past the mangled wreckage of the maintenance hangar and burning buildings of the air base, noting the multitude of small dark crumpled shapes that littered the cratered muddy ground, and knowing instinctively they were the enemy’s dead.

  “How did we lose the tanks?” the Colonel was careful to keep any hint of accusation from his voice. His tone was neutral.

  “The enemy hit us hard with artillery fire,” the Captain’s voice became haunted, “just as we came out of the woods. The commander had the K2’s supporting the infantry assault. Both of the destroyed vehicles took hits from the barrage. One of them is still inside the fringe of the woods. Sir.” The young officer added as an afterthought. He was impossibly tired, weary to his bones. The exhaustion came upon him like a great weight so that he had to fight the urge to let his legs collapse from beneath him.

  “They used artillery?” the Colonel was startled. “Even though there was a risk to their own soldiers who were dug in along the perimeter of the airstrip?”

  The Captain nodded. Unlike the Colonel, he was not surprised by the North Korean tactics, nor the enemy’s ‘cannon fodder’ attitude to their own infantry.

  Colonel Jeong narrowed his eyes. “Any prisoners?”

  “Four, sir.”

  The Colonel grunted and began striding towards the burning Mig fighter jet, leaving his staff officers clustered around the command vehicle. The young Captain followed, his legs feeling like lead and the exhaustion now coming over him in a series of nauseating waves. Close by where they walked was one of the forward trenches from where enemy had resisted the advance. The Colonel stepped to the edge of the muddy hole. There were three crumpled bodies in the bottom of the shallow ditch, flung onto their backs. They were young North Korean conscripts, barely beyond childhood. They were dressed in thin drab coats, covered in mud and spattered with blood. The limbs of two of the bodies were entwined – as if they have been thrown together at the instant of their deaths. The pale lifeless faces stared skyward with unblinking eyes, the expressions almost bewildered.

  Colonel Jeong stared for a long time.

  They’r
e kids! These aren’t frontline troops. They’re not the veterans of border clashes and years of hard training. They’re raw reserves.

  “The prisoners were captured at the eastern edge of the airstrip when we swept around their flank.”

  “Did the enemy put up strong resistance?”

  It seemed an unusual question to the Captain, but to the Colonel the answer was critical. He wanted to know the mental state of the forces in front of him.

  “Sir?”

  “Did they fight to the last man, the last bullet… or did they concede ground easily?” agitation crept into the Colonel’s voice. He stopped walking and propped his hands on his hips. The airstrip had been heavily cratered by artillery fire from both sides, and all the support structures around the base had been flattened. The land between where he stood and a small wooded rise to the north looked like a lunarscape. Dispersed between the scatter of crumpled enemy bodies he could see a ragged pattern of defensive foxholes that the North Korean infantry had fought from.

  They looked like freshly dug graves…

  The Captain frowned. “Well their artillery was fearsome,” he said, recalling the first deadly moments of the assault when the K200’s and ground troops had burst from out of the woods under the cover of smoke. “But the infantry… I don’t recall a lot of small arms fire…”

  “How long did it take to secure the airbase?”

  “We took ground quickly,” the Captain said in recollection. “They held us up at the airstrip for a few minutes, but once we had the APC’s on level ground, the enemy fled towards that hill you can see in the distance.”

  “An orderly retreat?”

  “Sir, no sir,” the Captain managed a proud smile. He spoke like an American Marine, even impersonating the accent. His teeth were very white in the dark muddied and bloodied face. “It was a rout.”

  “Aircraft?”

  “Ours, or theirs, sir?”