Arisen, Book Nine - Cataclysm (32 page)

Just draw, point, and shoot.

But maybe everything was easy when you had no choice. And Aliyev had decided, and he felt in his bones the truth of this, that the only way he was getting out of that campfire circle of sinister farm boys, out in the Russian hinterland, was to start shooting first – and to finish shooting last.

Then again, perhaps shooting the first Russian redneck had been so easy because the man had been blind and screaming, his hands covering his face, after Aliyev threw his cup of scalding coffee in it. Yes, shooting that man, who had been standing two feet in front of him, blind and screaming, had been very easy indeed.

Then turning to target the second, the one who was beside and slightly behind him, had also gone well. He shot that guy before he could get his gun clear. But, finally, Aliyev had neither the speed nor the skills to get the drop on and gun down four armed and alert men, however much coffee he threw around.

It had gotten messy from there. And Aliyev had legged it for the helo.

And so now there were either two of them, or maybe only one, one or both possibly wounded, still out there, just outside the weak ring of firelight, plinking at Aliyev as he dove through the door of the helo. In a last stroke of life-saving good luck, they had scampered off in one direction and he in another, and the direction they picked was not toward the helicopter, and the one he picked was.

Now Aliyev turned, raised his weapon, and fired six shots out into the darkness. Then he leaned out, reached down, and grabbed both his bug-out bag and his shotgun, hauled them inside – and finally pulled the cargo door shut. As he did, two incoming shots hit the outside of the door, but didn’t come through. That meant the metal of the helicopter body stopped bullets – or stopped their bullets, anyway, which was all Aliyev gave a shit about.

He turned forward, climbed into the front, and took the pilot’s seat.

A bullet hit the section of cockpit glass directly to his left. And this time it came through – and went straight back out the window to his right. In the middle it must have passed an inch in front of his face.
Fuck!
Aliyev leaned across the cockpit to the left – pilots sit on the right in helicopters – slid open the side window, stuck his gun out, and triggered off probably half the remaining rounds in his pistol’s big-ass thirty-round magazine. He didn’t bother aiming.

He was just trying to put their heads down for the little time he needed.

Then he started bringing the engines up – not giving short shrift to the pre-flight checks this time so much as completely ignoring them. Every few seconds he paused what he was doing and fired a couple of unaimed shots out that window, praying they would be enough to keep the surviving farm boys from swinging around to his front and shooting him to death through the cockpit glass.

When his mag went empty, and he was still on the ground, and the shots to the front of the helo didn’t stop, he realized this plan was a loser. They were going to get him before he could get airborne.

“Fuck it,” he said aloud. “And fuck these guys.”

He clambered back into the cargo area, slid the top off the wooden grenade case, and regarded the big matrix of fuck-shit-up inside. He’d never thrown a grenade before, but like everyone else had seen it in the movies a thousand times. It looked easy enough. He grabbed one in each hand, pulled the pins with his teeth, got the cargo door open a couple of feet – and started chucking.

The field began blowing up, plus whizzing with zipping shrapnel, plus flashing and banging. Aliyev couldn’t tell the types of grenades apart in the low light, and he sure wasn’t going to pause to puzzle them out now. He just distributed them around the field liberally – and when he’d thrown eight or so, he shoved a couple more in his pockets, climbed back in front, and resumed the start-up procedures.

There was no more incoming fire. Whether the last farm boys were dead, wounded, cowed, or run off, Aliyev hardly cared.

A surprisingly small number of lifetimes later, he was actually throttling up, pulling on the collective, and rising up out of this very poorly picked empty Russian field. And now he could once again make out the sounds of the Cossacks plinking at him from below – the grenade shower must have just got their heads down, which was enough for Aliyev. He could hear both the shots, and the tinny impacts they made on the underside of the airframe – but that was no longer his problem, because once again: he was in the wind.

“
Ha! I’m out of here, bizzles!
” he shouted, for the second time.

That line had been working for him.

And now the shooting of the farm boys became their fucking problem – because they were making a bunch of noise, and they wouldn’t have any ammo left when the walking dead got there, as they inevitably would.

As Aliyev continued to climb, and put himself back on the correct heading, he was feeling well pleased with himself.

Maybe he had a future as a post-Apocalyptic bad-ass after all.

Autorotation

Fifteen Hundred Feet Over Western Russia

“
No, no, no, no, no…
” But even as Aliyev denied it, he knew he was seeing it right. The low fuel warning light on the helicopter’s dash had come on bright and yellow. When he’d touched down in that misleadingly empty-looking Russian field, he’d had more than half a tank. Now, less than thirty minutes after his totally death-defying escape, the yellow light indicated he was down to fifteen percent.

Then, as he stupidly tapped at it – he didn’t know why, maybe in case there was a needle stuck behind the color touch-screen display? – it turned red on him. That meant he was down to ten percent. And there was absolutely no way he had used five percent of a tank in the last minute. That could only mean one thing.

The fucking Cossacks had got the last laugh. They’d hit his fuel tank.

Aliyev almost jumped out of the pilot’s seat as a sultry female voice said, “
Warning. Low fuel.
”

He dropped back into his seat, breathing fast.
Crap!
he thought.
Damned luxury helicopters for rich assholes with spoken audio warnings!
Everything was just getting on his dick today.

“
Warning. Low fuel.
”

But he had much bigger and more urgent problems than the aeronautical equivalent of Siri annoying the shit out of him, and he had to focus on these now. In actual fact: he was now pretty much completely hosed.

Well and truly screwed.

He scrabbled around for his NVGs, managed to get them on his face, and cast around frantically below him for someplace level to set it down. He figured “level” was about the absolute best he could hope for at this point. And even that, a safe landing, might only keep him alive for a few minutes longer than otherwise.

But then his heart sank as he realized that staying alive for a few minutes longer was actually well beyond anything he might hope for.

Because down below him, sketched out in night-vision green and black, was a riot of industrial buildings, overpasses, train tracks – and even a few high-rises, a bit farther off in the distance. He was over a city. Even aside from the total absence of large flat places where he might set it down… this was pretty much the worst conceivable place for him to be stranded. He had no idea how many dead would be down there – tens of thousands or millions.

He only knew it would be way too many for him.

“
Warning. Critically low fuel.
”

“I know! Shut the fuck up!”

Now for some reason he remembered the people who had jumped from the World Trade Center on 9/11. The thought of falling a hundred stories to their deaths hadn’t become any less terrifying. It was just less bad than the prospect of burning to death in the jet fuel inferno behind them. But Aliyev found he was different from them. He decided that dying right now in a crashing helicopter somehow seemed worse than dying ten minutes from now being torn apart by the dead. Surely the latter would be more painful.

But he just wanted those ten minutes.

He wanted to keep living.

To do so, he had to find a level spot somewhere, anywhere… there had to be something…
there!
It was off in the distance, but maybe just close enough. He could now see it was surrounded by giant hulking square buildings, and even what looked like pointy onion domes… but it was a gigantic flat spot, huge and totally level, and it even appeared bricked over or paved.

“
Warning. Fuel exhausted. Engine shutdown imminent.
”

But the engines started shutting down even before the automated bitch finished saying it. Hyperventilating, Aliyev tried to judge the distance to that square. And, much more critically, he racked his brain for the memory of how to do autorotation. He remembered the fact that, as improbable as it seemed, a helo with engine failure was actually more survivable than a plane in the same situation. Its salvation was in its spinning rotors.

All he had to do –
and what he REALLY had to do
– was use the helicopter’s forward momentum, as well as the upward flow of air from its descent, and most of all the kinetic energy stored in the spinning blades, to keep the rotors turning long enough to allow him to set down. To keep him from crashing and being turned into charred meat waffles in the urban shitscape below. And he knew there was basically one critical step he had to take to make this happen.

But he couldn’t remember what it was.

Though, once again, he probably had the rest of his life to figure it out.

Then it came back to him.
Collective pitch! Lower the collective pitch!
That was it. It had to be. It would reduce both lift and drag and put him into an immediate descent. Aliyev hesitated and looked below him. It didn’t look like anywhere he wanted to immediately descend.

Fuck it
.

He could go down smooth, or he could go down hard. Either way, he was going down. Swallowing a big lump of terror, he took his left hand and jammed the collective into the floor.

The erratic motion of the aircraft immediately settled down. He was still moving downward, but also forward, and the flight path seemed stable. The weirdest thing was the eerie silence. He’d never been in a flying helicopter with the engines shut down – and the odds were extremely good he never would be again.

Now he also remembered that he could control his rate of descent by trading it off with his airspeed, using the cyclic normally. Increasing his airspeed would slow his rate of descent – up to a point! – and then the opposite would start to happen, when he’d be out of lift and start to plummet again.

Aliyev very quickly identified that spot on the curve, as he tried to urge this dying aircraft over the warren of buildings below him and into that open square. He eased the cyclic back until the combination of airspeed and rate of descent seemed to maximize the distance he could go before he ran out of sky, and fell the hell out of it. The sweet spot.

But he was having to eyeball all of this.

And as he angled in toward the roof of the last building before that square, and as he realized he genuinely had no idea whether he was going to just make it, or just miss it… something about one of the buildings on the far side of the square grabbed his attention and wouldn’t let go. He couldn’t make out any real details in the NVG view but the shape was extremely distinctive – and equally familiar to him.

And now Aliyev’s throat closed in horror as he realized there
couldn’t
be two buildings shaped like that – not in the whole world. It consisted of four or five big onion domes arrayed underneath a spire with a smaller onion dome of its own at the top.

And now he was sure. It was what he used to know as
Sobor Vasilija Blazhennogo
. It couldn’t be. But it was – the fucking Cathedral of Vasily the Blessed, otherwise known to the world as St. Basil’s Cathedral.

He simply couldn’t be here. But somehow he was – a quick glance down at the GPS moving-map display, which he hadn’t had time for in a while, verified it was true. Those were the buildings of Moscow spreading out below him. And, like it or not, Oleg Aliyev was, seriously, coming in for a crash landing…

Right in the middle of Red fucking Square.

American Zulu

Camp Lemonnier - Southwest Guard Tower

When the single grenade sounded out near Thunderdome, followed by the first gunshots, Command Sergeant Major Zorn eyed the weird Indian dude out of the corner of his eye to see how he reacted. The man put his hand to his radio – but then stopped. Zorn assumed he’d decided to keep the channel clear, and let the men on the ground hail him if they needed him.

Not a terrible call. But it also meant that the man’s attention was still on him.

So Zorn rose slowly and moved out to the railing. He pointed into the distance and said, “I think your guys are in trouble.” That didn’t work either – his captor stepped away from him, and actually swiveled to face him more.

Dammit.
Zorn was about to sit back down, when he saw the Indian’s hand go to his radio earpiece. From the way the man’s expression darkened, Zorn guessed it was a call for help. Which wouldn’t surprise him a bit.

And then the man rushed to grab the gate control box, leaning over and turning away from him.

That’s all Zorn needed. He snatched up the wooden leg of the bench he had been working loose while sitting on top of it, and gave it a full-arm swing at the back of the man’s head. He went down like a sack of cement.

It took him a few minutes to disarm his former captor, get the man’s wrists and ankles tied with his own flex cuffs, and then take his radio off him. By the time he did and got the earpiece in, the secret squirrels’ leader was on the channel, shouting.
“Noise, Handon, I say again – we need you to get that last gate open RFN. We are inbound, ETA two mikes! How copy?”

Zorn pressed the transmit button. “I read your cool operator ass just fine. But that gate stays closed.”