ARISEN, Book Eleven - Deathmatch (29 page)

Davis took the sheet and reviewed it, but still didn’t move.

“Seriously,” Wesley said, tossing his head up at the island. “This comes from the top.”

“Okay,” Davis said. “Come with us and we’ll get our shit.”

The five of them headed for the nearest aircraft elevator. On the way, they passed the drone mechanics, who had about five external panels on the UCAV open. This made it obvious to the F-35 guys that they had no idea what was wrong.

“You jackasses have a pleasant afternoon,” Pete said with a smile and cheery wave as they passed by.

But as they stepped onto the huge elevator platform, and Davis started to lower them, at the last second, they realized they could see something else coming up on the elevator opposite them. It was their second Seahawk. The one that had been ruled unflyable, due to being more Swiss cheese than aircraft. Its bullet-riddled state wasn’t lost on the NSF guys.

“Christ, can that thing fly?” Burns asked.

“Not really,” Davis answered.

“Don’t worry,” Wesley said. “We’re not flying – we’re taking one of the Marines’ jacked-up motor rafts. Just have to go find one of the blighted things…”

But the helo disappeared from view as they dropped below the level of the deck, and descended into the shadows and artificial lighting of the hangar deck below. The very last thing they saw was a tight knot of armed sailors running by on the flight deck, looking mean. Wesley wondered who the hell those guys were and where they were going. They definitely weren’t NSF.

Oh, well
, he thought.
No one tells me anything around here…

Too Dangerous to Live

Nugal River Valley, Northeast Somalia

“I hate being shot down in Somalia,” Juice said, sucking wind. He was running behind Handon, and like all of them working hard to hang in. Handon was not moderating their brutal pace. Spetsnaz wouldn’t be, so he couldn’t afford to.

On the other hand, Handon also had to balance the risk of failing to catch the Russians at all with the lethal hazard of being so winded and exhausted when they did that they all got cut down in a quick and ugly firefight. Handon had little doubt those Spetsnaz guys would be in superior physical condition.

His own guys had done the best they could through the ZA, and more recently for three weeks stuck at sea on the carrier. But they were not at peak performance, endurance-wise. Worse, they were all nursing injuries – knife wounds, gunshot wounds, bullet fragments, punctured biceps and wrenched backs…

But of course the maximum range of an excuse was still, and always would be, zero meters.

And even with the injuries, Handon knew the four of them – himself, Henno, Ali, and Juice – made an extremely formidable maneuvering fire team: tough, quick, cohesive, and with razor-edge tactical skills. (Baxter, though clearly game, obviously couldn’t play on the same field.) Handon would put them up against any comparably sized SOF team, never mind a conventional force – to whom Alpha would be a blinding and unstoppable nightmare, moving and shooting too fast to see, never mind oppose.

But this Spetsnaz team was not comparably sized – it probably still outnumbered them at least two-to-one – and they were not just any SOF team, and light-years away from the conventional. Spetsnaz were the real deal. They’d proven it in their engagements so far. Handon also didn’t have a great sense of the enemy’s strength and disposition, armaments, or how many of them were wounded, if any. But from what Ali had told him, he guessed they wouldn’t be carrying many wounded.

And now Alpha didn’t even have the advantage of air support. They had nothing flying to replace Firecrotch yet – while the Russians still had that lethal Black Shark lurking around out there somewhere. The only thing keeping it off them right now was probably the forest canopy.

When Alpha did catch their quarry, assuming they weren’t caught from above first, all Handon and his team would have going for them, and only if Handon played it right, was surprise, speed, and violence of action – Delta’s three pillars. But Spetsnaz would not react like some random terrorists caught in the headlights. They wouldn’t be rattled, and they would respond instantly, and in kind. Nonetheless, Handon had to somehow leverage their small advantages, make them be enough… and make it work with what they had.

He slowed their pace slightly – because he knew they were getting close to the Russians’ crash site.

The first choke point.

* * *

Over 100 miles southeast of there, a lone jingle bus bounced and hurtled across the wide-open and undifferentiated semi-desert of central Somalia. It wasn’t totally clear what the actual top speed of this vehicle was – but it was clear the suspension was shot, and the faster they went, the likelier it seemed that Somalia’s spine-pummeling roads were going to bounce or puncture them to a premature stop. But it was at least putting distance between them and the fallen Stronghold, and maybe even getting closer to catching up with the Seahawk.

Just not as fast as either occupant would have liked.

Al-Sîf sat in the driver’s seat, which rocked on loose springs, sending his head through the bits of colorful crap that hung from the ceiling. He stared ahead, focusing on the road, willing the bus to go faster – and trying to ignore the vibe in there.

Kate sat in the first bench seat back, on the right, rifle propped beside her, working on her shot-out radio with her multitool. But she didn’t hold much hope for it. The device was well and truly wrecked. Which meant that for the foreseeable future, she was stuck with this sinister clown.

And al-Sîf was much worse than a clown to her.

Because he had killed her friends. In the terrible aftermath of the first Stronghold battle, Jake had let slip to her that it had almost certainly been al-Sîf who killed Brendan – with Kwan’s own rifle. Which she could see propped up beside his seat right now. Its very presence was an outrage.

Kate thought about how Brendan, one of the best human beings she had ever known, had died running over open ground under withering fire trying to recover Patient Zero. How he had spent his life without hesitation, trying to give humanity a better shot at some kind of a way back. And al-Sîf, fighting for nothing but himself, and his head-hacking asshole of an emir, had gunned him down – while at the same time, perhaps shit-canning all hope for humanity.

That was a kind of amorality it was hard to accommodate with. And, for Kate at least, it could never be okay.

And it could never be forgiven.

But she also couldn’t get off this damned bus. Without being able to contact her guys to pick her up, she would perish alone in the desert. But that almost seemed a better option than staying here. She pulled out a paper map pack from her thigh pocket and unfolded it. She knew their ground convoy had been heading south toward the Stronghold, following behind the air mission. Maybe there was some possibility of intersecting their path.

And her getting the hell out of there.

“You have a map?”

Kate looked up and locked eyes with al-Sîf in the rearview. It was not a kindly gaze.

“Show it to me,” he said, his voice imperious.

Kate’s hand, almost involuntarily, went to her pistol.

* * *

Handon, still in the lead, smelled thermite, burning rubber, and spilled engine fluids, well before they got within view of the Russian crash site. But soon the bush opened up to reveal the ravaged airframe of the Ka-60 Orca.

It was so tight in there, at least on this side, it was like the jungle had already swallowed the wrecked airframe. Ali was well and truly impressed the Russian pilot had gotten them down in this little glen.

She and Juice fanned out to either side of Handon as they moved through the site in a sort of skirmish line. Handon had ordered Baxter to stay back and pull rear security for now. And Juice had told everyone to touch nothing. As he’d learned to his cost, it would be unlike Spetsnaz
not
to booby-trap their aircraft before abandoning it. But, unless they were somehow still here with Patient Zero, Handon had no intention of spending more than a minute here anyway.

The glen was so quiet, and the team moving silently enough, that Handon heard the spoon pop on the first grenade. He hadn’t touched anything, and knew the others wouldn’t have either. That meant only one thing: ambush.

“Contact front,” he said, visibility going to nothing as he dropped into the heavy ground cover, knowing the others would be doing the same. The grenade went off – close by, but harmless.

It was followed by full-auto AK fire. Handon couldn’t identify the source. The foliage muffled the sound signature, like the forest itself was going cyclic all around them. This was some serious Viet Cong jungle ambush shit.

“Hold your fire,” Handon said across the net.

More grenades thumped in the thick vegetation to his right.

* * *

Captain Gromov pulled the pin from his last grenade. Either Misha hadn’t trusted him with a rifle, or he had just forgotten. Either way, he tried to do what was expected of him, even as his insides – ravaged by his own flight controls as he used them to get the others down safely – felt like they were tearing him apart. The bloating of his abdomen told him he had internal bleeding. So he was probably not long for this world, no matter what happened now.

Fifteen feet to his right, the other wounded Spetsnaz commando – Gromov didn’t even know his name – lay on his stomach firing and reloading his tricked-out jet-black AK without pause. His grenades were already gone. He was basically spraying the area – in an attempt, Gromov imagined, to not die with any ammo left.

To kill one last time before he was killed himself.

But just as he went dry and pulled another textured polymer magazine – a big black-and-tan pistol emerged out of the forest, and shot him once in each upper arm.

Unable to hold his weight, he went face down in the dirt. Then Gromov saw a big man with sandy stubble, wearing British Army fatigues, instantly but smoothly emerge from the jungle behind the pistol – and his big black boot came down on the wounded commando’s neck, crushing his face into the wet earth.

As Gromov looked up in terror, he belatedly remembered his pilot’s side arm, a Stechkin automatic pistol in his vest. But before his weak fingers could even close around the weapon, he saw that big two-tone pistol pivot in his direction, the muzzle seeming to yawn and beckon him to infinity.

He never heard the shot go off.

* * *

The one surviving but grievously wounded ambusher had now been flex-cuffed and sat down on his ass in the mud in front of Handon, Henno, and Juice. Baxter was carefully searching the burned-out interior of the helo. And Ali was pulling security alone, as Handon still had no intention of being here longer than two minutes.

“Where is your team headed?” Handon said to the dead-eyed prisoner, his own voice pure granite.

Juice translated the question to Russian – then translated the response. “He says they’re going northeast.”

Handon noted that this Spetsnaz commando, who had four bleeding holes in him, a back he couldn’t straighten, and a right nostril full of mud, spoke so calmly it was like he was ordering a beer – in a scary biker bar. No hesitation, no tremor, no fear. A total rock. With a rock’s sensitivity to pain, and fear for its future.

Almost despite himself, Handon had to ask: “Why did they leave you behind?”

A ghost of a smile traced his lips as he answered. Juice hesitated before translating. “He said, ‘It’s easier for the horse when the woman is off the cart.’”

“What the hell does that mean?”

A voice spoke from the open helo door, and it was followed by a face – Baxter’s. “That’s not what he said. Well, it is literally. But it’s a Russian proverb – it means this guy bailed from the hard part of the job, and now it will be easier for the others.”

“We don’t have time for this,” Henno said.

Handon didn’t disagree. Still, intel was life.

Baxter stepped into the circle. “Look – you don’t want to interrogate this guy.”

“What?” Handon said. “Why not?”

“Because his whole job now will be disinformation. And he’ll be well trained at it. Trust me, we will not be better off hearing the words that come out of this guy’s face – every one of which will be designed to lead us into confusion and chaos. He’ll tell us the truth and convince us it’s a lie. He’ll plant bad ideas in our heads. We’ll end up second-guessing ourselves, turned around ass-backwards.”

“How do you know that?” Handon asked.

“Because all I did for four years at Georgetown was study Russian political and military history, with a focus on military and intelligence – including Spetsnaz GRU, the arm of Spetsnaz under the military intelligence service.”

Handon nodded. Baxter would have been in college not only after the end of the Cold War, but also after 9/11 – when everyone who wanted intelligence careers was studying radical Islam and counter-terrorism. Evidently Baxter had been smart enough to know the Russians would be back one day. No wonder the Agency snapped him up.

Baxter said, “You saw how he answered your first question – giving you correct intel he knew you already had? Establishing credibility. I’m telling you – end it now.”

Wordlessly, Henno raised his pistol toward the back of the Russian’s head.

“Hold it,” Handon said, almost instinctively opposing him.

“No,” Baxter said. “Henno’s right. These dudes are too dangerous to live. I don’t care how much you tie him up – not that we have time – he’ll get loose and report everything back to his team. Trust me. He’ll find a way.”

Now Henno nodded at Baxter, who had just earned some unexpected trust and respect from the cynical British hard man. He looked back down the barrel of his SIG and hauled the hammer back with his thumb.

“Wait.” Now it was Ali, who had magicked herself into the clearing without anyone noticing. Henno looked up at her, as did the Russian, as she stepped right up and into his face.

“Your sniper,” Ali said. “Dude with the target reticle inked around his eye.”