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one of our CRRCs – combat rubber raiding craft. Rubber hull, compartmented air cells, seats ten max – six or eight more comfortably.” Sitting down now, Wesley flipped the display to a picture of one. “It’s got an outboard engine, removable roll-up slatted decking, paddles, a bow line for securing it to a dock, and a ‘righting’ line which is used to flip the boat in event of capsizing.”
    The audience, which had started to realize the seriousness of all this, now realized it even more. Someone raised a hand, and Lovell nodded.
    “It’s hundreds of miles from here to Saudi,” Browning said. “Surely we’re not taking a zodiac the whole way?”
    Lovell frowned. “It’s not a zodiac. It’s better. But in any case, it’s roughly five hundred miles from here to Jizan – and, no, you won’t be taking the boat the whole way. We’re going to sling-load it under a Seahawk helo, go by air until you’re five miles out, insert onto the water, motor in until you’re a mile out – then paddle in the final stretch for silence, just as slick as shit.”
    Wesley flipped back to the map, then stood up again.
    “As Sergeant Lovell says, doing it this way will keep from waking the deaders. We insert here” – and he pointed to a spot at the edge of the port – “move ashore, do a quick recon of this large building here,” (he pointed to the building Campbell had indicated, modifying the plan on the fly), “then move quickly and quietly toward our target here. We find the device, get it back to the dock, get back on the boat, paddle out – and the helo will return and pick us up again.”
    He refrained from concluding with, “Easy, right?” Because the way he had put it, it actually did sound easy. Which almost certainly meant he was doing it wrong, or missing something important – perhaps a great deal that was important.
    “Waterfront villas, huh?” Burns said. “What was the population of this place?”
    Wesley swallowed. “Three hundred thousand.”
    “And what happens when the shooting starts – and they wake up?”
    Wesley nodded. “That’s what we’re going to avoid. If there’s any fighting to be done, we’ll use melee weapons.”
    Browning hesitated, but then said, quietly, “NSF doesn’t have melee weapons.”
    Wesley sighed. “I’m working on that. For now, I believe you all have knives.”
    He could immediately see from the expressions around the room how little these men relished the prospect of fighting zombies with knives. They might have made it look on easy on The Walking Dead , but those guys also lived in some weird universe where getting splashed head to toe with the blood of the infected somehow carried no infection risk. Even that aside, nobody really enjoyed getting within arm’s reach of a large creature furiously trying to kill and eat you.
    In fact, that was pretty much what guns had been invented for.
    Wesley felt like he was forgetting something – or maybe a hundred things. But then it hit him.
    “Oh, yeah. I’ve been informed our call sign for this mission is… Mutant .”
    * * *
    After the briefing broke up, turning into small groups of unsettled and worried people, Wesley quietly pulled aside the men he had, almost unconsciously, decided he wanted on the team.
    First, Melvin and Browning, the two most senior NSF personnel, and the two Wesley most trusted – they’d all been through hell and back together, which counted for everything. Also, Browning was by far the best shot on the team – and if there had to be any shooting, Wesley wanted it to be “one and done.”
    Next was Burns, the former leader of the group of American survivors. Wesley knew maybe he should have taken someone with more military experience. But Burns had been around the block, surviving two years out on the ground in the ZA – and probably had as much hands-on zombie fighting experience as anyone on board the JFK right now.
    More importantly, he had experience dodging