Arisen, Book Nine - Cataclysm (12 page)

Before she knew it, she and her bird were down at 800 feet, pushing 400+ knots, and approaching the stern, a hundred feet or so starboard of the ship. She simultaneously threw the stick over, stood on the left wing, and pulled hard, thumbing out the speed brake and yanking the throttle to idle – which got her down to the 180 knots she needed to be at for this to work.

She dropped her gear, jockeyed the throttles, picked up the landing ball, hit her glide path – and watched with the inevitable and never-fading alarm that always accompanied the giant steel stern of the boat racing at her at over 200mph. She battled to stay on center-line, then put her hook right in between the 2- and 3-wires, and slammed the bird down onto solid steel. Finally, as the aircraft was yanked from its high-speed flight by a steel cable – going from 180 knots to nothing in 300 feet, causing her body to rage against her five-point harness – she retracted the speed brake and put her throttles to full military power, staying there until she came to a complete, jarring, unmistakable stop.

She’d done it again. She was safely down. Another miracle.

She got out of the wires and taxied clear of the landing area in another minute, throwing a thumbs-up to the maintenance chief. His crew chocked and chained the bird, and Hailey raised her cowling, unstrapped her harness, unsnapped her mask, pulled off her helmet, and climbed out.

“Hiya, Chief,” she said, hitting the deck as her chin-length russet hair spilled around her face, and she worked a little to get her sea legs back.

“Hiya, Thunderchild,” he said. “Did we have a pleasant flight today?” The maintenance chief, whose name was Davis, was a Senior Chief with a lot of years in and the worry lines to prove it. His new number two – the best surviving aircraft mechanic after the legendary Stan bought it on Beaver Island – also gave a nod and a cheery wave, and started checking out the aircraft from the outside in. His name was Pete, a happy and funny kid. Hailey liked him.

“Feeling a little wing drop on the left when maneuvering, actually.”

“We’ll take a look,” Chief Davis said.

These two were the domain masters who kept Hailey in the air, post-Stan. She had no idea how they knew enough to do that job. The Lockheed Martin F-35 Lighting II stealth fighter had about 300,000 individual parts, many of them moving – and none with replacements being manufactured anymore.

But these guys did it, and they were amazing, and Hailey loved them for it.

She smiled her thanks and headed below. She had about ninety minutes to get a bite, attend to bodily functions, and basically bleed away the stress of the mission – so she could go up and do it all again when her slot came back around. It was a lot of stress, responsibility – and flying.

But today was turning into just about the best day of her career.

Wrecking Crew

Djibouti-Ambouli Airport - On the Tarmac

When they left the beach and the half-destroyed shore launch behind them, Alpha and the Marines – collectively known as Team Cadaver – still had a little dawn left. Now they used it to get across the open ground of the airport’s runways and taxiways. They had cut into the fence on the seaward side of the airport, just beyond the dunes that fronted the beach.

Handon was thinking that must have made for some damned dramatic sunbathing – with jumbo jets landing right over the beach umbrellas. Then he remembered the swarming sharks, and realized it was unlikely anyone would have been doing any sunbathing there.

And his people weren’t here for sightseeing either.

Cadaver One, namely Alpha, were on their own now, moving stealthily through the dark brown smudged light and broad open spaces of the airport grounds. Cadaver Two, the Marine element – plus Noise, detailed to them to even out the numbers – were separate but just within visual range. The two teams would be infiltrating Camp Lemonnier from different directions, and at different insertion points. This was one aspect of their “eleven eggs, two baskets” strategy, designed to reduce the odds of the whole force being taken down at once. This way, if one got in trouble, the other could come and help – or, more likely, run like hell, as it was absolutely critical that one group survive to finish the job.

Peering out through the dim and dusty air, Handon could see the other group moving smoothly and stealthily down the other side of the main runway. Both teams were covering basically the same ground to start with. This consisted of a lot of flat, sandy, scrubby, medium-brown dirt – much of which had blown onto the paved runway and adjacent taxiways. The landscape between the paved sections was dotted with scrub brush, but it wasn’t much as far as concealment goes, and it wasn’t any kind of cover at all. As they got closer to the main airport complex itself, small outbuildings and maintenance sheds started to spring up, followed by hangars of various sizes.

There were no aircraft visible on the ground.

Yeah
, Handon thought.
I wouldn’t have left any here either.

Looking behind and around him, he could see all his people had their primary weapons up and out – but their melee weapons close to hand. With a glance, he could make out Henno’s cricket bat, and Homer’s boarding axe, protruding from the tops of their rucks. Ali wasn’t wearing a short sword in its usual spot, side-draw configured in the small of her back, as Handon did. Instead, on this one, she decided it was better to go out loaded for bear: she’d brought her katana, a proper samurai long sword, secured between her back and her ruck, with its long cloth-wound pommel emerging diagonally from over her shoulder, in top-draw configuration.

Gaze shifting, Handon noted the slim profile of the tube attached to the side of Juice’s barrel – terminating at the back in a spiral hose that connected to the air canister cinched to the side of his pack. His pneumatic spike, dubbed the OJ.
Now THAT’s force innovation
, he thought. He could hardly wait to see it in action.

Beyond Juice was Predator, who had force-innovated himself. He decided he was on to something with his hard pipe-hitting rampage with that iron bar on the flight deck battle, in which he had turned a couple of hundred undead into choice butcher’s cuts – and, not incidentally, saved Handon from certain death or infection. Swinging that bar was basically a way to convert his outrageous upper-body strength into rapid destruction of the dead. So he had dug around the
Kennedy
’s sports and rec stores until he found himself a nice aluminum baseball bat. Not as big or deadly as the scavenged iron bar, but a lot lighter and easier to pack and hump around.

Now it was cinched to the outside of his pack, just a quick draw away.

But Pred also his had his full-size high-capacity (15+1) FN .45 autoloader, finished in flat-dark-earth, nestling in its chest rig. Pred was one guy who not only didn’t need a more compact pistol – but with his catcher’s-mitt-sized hands, he couldn’t even use one. And, Handon silently hoped, there wouldn’t be another near-infection episode where he had any temptation to turn the weapon on himself.

Handon felt safer just thinking about Pred and his rampages. If the shit really came down, Alpha’s man-mountain and one-man wrecking crew might actually be able to tear a giant hole through the heart of undead Africa… or at least one big enough for the team to escape out of.

But, so far, they had encountered zero Zulus on the tarmac, or in this area at all.

Typical
, Handon thought, still moving forward smoothly and monitoring the terrain.
We spend our whole deployment trying to stay clear of the dead. Now when we actually want one, there are none to be found.

This was unexpected, but also made a certain amount of sense. The fence around the airport was intact. No one would have been authorized to be out there other than fueling and loading crew, aircraft dispatchers, pushback guys – and they all would have cleared out before the end, probably as soon as the flights ceased. And now there wasn’t really anything to go in there for – nothing worth scavenging for the living, and no living as meals for the dead.

This place was basically secure.

As the main terminal started to loom ahead of them, and the team passed silently around the air traffic control tower, Handon saw another large structure behind and beyond it. An aircraft hangar. He decided to make a quick diversion to recon it. With hand signals alone, he motioned for Juice to come with him – and the others to find cover and go firm.

Henno gave him a look, roughly translatable as:
Side trip a good idea, mate?
But he complied with the order. And Handon appreciated that.

Because the time might soon be coming when he wouldn’t.

* * *

The hangar looked sealed up as they did a quick circuit of it, finally returning to the human-sized door around the side. Juice drew his breaching tool, but Handon made a
Quiet
signal, and Juice took out a lock-pick set instead. In ten seconds he had the door open and held it for Handon, who led them in.

It was properly dark inside, nearly pitch-black, and Handon switched on his weapon-mounted tactical light. In another half-minute they had circled the perimeter, cleared the small office in the corner, and emerged back into the dark airy space of the main hangar.

At its center, taking up almost all the available room, was a single big white aircraft, with twin prop engines slung underneath its wings, which were mounted high up on the fuselage. This gave it the feel of a bush plane, but an unusually large one. Handon panned his light from the large
T
tail, upon which was written “WFP” in light blue letters, all the way to the cockpit, just behind which was written “United Nations Humanitarian Air Service” in the same color.

He recognized the aircraft as a de Havilland Dash 8 – a medium-range turboprop commuter plane that held about thirty passengers. It had no visible damage, which was consistent with the hangar being sealed up. Then again, that was a far cry from being flyable. It had been sitting here for two years with its seals drying out, air filters molding, fluids congealing, and parts rusting. Hell, there were probably rodents living in the air filter box – and they’d probably chewed through all the wiring for good measure.

Nonetheless, he and Juice relocked the door on their way out. As they made their way back to the team, Henno, out at the front of the formation, spoke quietly on the squad net.

“In your own time.”

Handon clenched his jaw. They were operational now, no one was more mission focused than him, and he certainly wasn’t out here for his own goddamned amusement. As soon as they got back within visual range of the others – though you had to know where to look for them – he made that same hand signal again he’d made for Juice.

Fucking noise discipline.

Same signal – slightly different emphasis.

* * *

Ten minutes later, the team reached the inner wire, the edge of Camp Lemonnier itself, at the point they had picked for their infiltration. The Marines were out of sight now, having circled around to the western edge of the base for their own infil. Silently, Juice moved up to cut in to the fence. But he froze and instead motioned Handon forward.

When he got there, and looked where Juice was pointing, he saw it. Someone had already cut into the wire at this exact point. And then, using cable ties, that mysterious someone had sealed it up behind them again.

Alpha might or might not be here alone.

But they were definitely not here first.

Primus Inter Pares

Camp Lemonnier - Inside the South Wire

Henno took point as Alpha flowed into the camp.

No one told him to, and nobody said he could. He was leaning forward, so he gravitated to it – the pointy end of the spear. Anyway, this kind of fluidity was par for the spec-ops course, particularly in CQB, when they flowed through targets and structures like a self-organizing organism.

They operated under principles, not rules.

Still, Henno could see this made Handon nervous. As did anything that suggested erosion of his authority. But was Henno bothered? Not in the least. He was here to do a job. And authority among operators came from ability, and from trust. It wasn’t granted, it was seldom conferred, and it definitely couldn’t be demanded.

From Henno’s first step through the wire, which Juice had cut open in the same spot like an incision through a healed-up scar, he had felt Handon’s eyes on his back. As far as he knew, there had never been any scientific verification of this fact, but he knew people could feel eyes on them, even from directly behind, and generally turned around to look. This was why smart snipers refrained from looking at their targets until they were ready to take the shot.

It didn’t make sense. But you trusted what you’d experienced.

As he stepped smoothly heel-toe, rifle panning mechanically, Henno slowly became aware there was another set of eyes on him. Not Handon’s, and not those of anyone else on the team. No, this was new. And whoever it might be was properly eye-fucking them.

Henno scanned over his rifle sight through all angles and planes, trying to work out where from. He was leading the team around the perimeter of the camp, just inside the outside wire and behind buildings – stopping to peer out through the gaps as they passed each of them. Now Henno stopped at a corner, took a knee, and inhaled a steadying breath. The others, dispersed behind him at wide enough intervals that they didn’t make one fat target, paused and crouched down as well.

Henno exhaled. It could have been his imagination.

But he didn’t think so.

He looked down at the smooth dirt beneath his boots, then up at the building to his right. There were bullet holes in most of the camp structures around them, as well as scorch marks.

But there were no shell casings on the ground. Not one.

Something big and nasty had gone down here. But some time afterward, someone had gone around and policed up all the brass.