Arisen : Genesis (2 page)

And this of course also included peering down on things from an armada of “ISR platforms” – which was the roundabout Agency term for aerial drones, or UAVs. In various sizes and flavors, these flying robots were stacked up over the Horn halfway to the moon – hand-launched mini- and micro-UAVs skimming the rooftops, Predators at a few thousand feet, Reapers and Global Hawks at thirty thousand, and mil-sats in geostationary LEO. And all of them peering down on their heads and spooling oceans of digital video to disk.

But some human brain still had to turn all that data into actionable tactical intelligence.

And that brain was Zack
.

And what about him, then – how did Zack get to this place? His tale was a much longer one than young Baxter’s, and sadder as well. But it began as all stories do: with a birth.

Zack was born here.

Actually, he was born a few hundred miles to the southwest, in Kenya – a country he considered to be much less of a basket case than Somalia. To that fact he attributed Kenya’s Britannic inheritance – English language, impartial courts, a Westminster-style mini-Parliament. Plus engineering skill, self-reliance, and other characteristically British virtues. As a matter of historical fact, having been part of the British Empire was one of the better things that can have happened to a country on the road to modernity.

It usually made it less fucked up.

Zack, too, had a Britannic inheritance. He just wasn’t sure it had made him any less fucked up. It certainly hadn’t earned his affection, or made him want to hang around. In fact, never had a boy worked so hard to escape a place as Zack did from there. And he succeeded, too – for a time. But when he got where he was going, he found himself shipped right back. Immediately, and seemingly irretrievably.

That was a long time ago.

Now, in addition to everything else, Zack was feeling too old for the game. He was only 36. But this work aged you in a special way. Every morning when he looked in the mirror, he imagined he could see the mileage beginning to show.

And he also imagined he could see… the end of the road.

* * *

“Shotgun X, this is Assman One-One, how copy?”

This was one of Zack’s radios perking up. He flipped the channel onto the room speaker, figuring he’d let Baxter feel like a part of things today. In response to the hail, he spoke in a regular voice, smooth and deep, the sound picked up by his wireless headset.

“That’s a solid copy, Assman. Send traffic.”

“Just a commo check, over.”

“Copy that. No worries. Call any time.”

Zack knew that this JSOC team, currently out on the ground, were accustomed not only to calling their own shots and running their own ops, but also to having their own direct access to drone video. It usually fed onto a palmtop or tablet, or got beamed directly into a headset monocle. But this team had just rotated into theater, and their kit wasn’t compatible with local data feeds. While they waited for upgrades, this left Zack as the shooters’ single Eye of God – hopefully an unblinking one. It worked, but it was clunkier, and left the operators feeling less in contr—

“Convoy inbound!” said Baxter, straightening up in his seat.

Zack leaned in to his screen, face still a mask, reflecting back the LCD glow. Yes, those were definitely al-Shabaab vehicles rolling – the exact crew they’d been waiting for. “That’s POSIDENT,” he said aloud. But what the hell was the convoy doing on that map square? Zack hadn’t seen them because he hadn’t been looking for them there.

Score one for the kid.

“Assman One-One, be advised.” Zack’s voice was now crisp and all business. “We are visual with target Victors. They are inbound your position, zero-four light trucks, approx two-five enemy pax. How copy?”

“Assman copies all. But we’re not seeing or hearing anything. Interrogative: are route and approach as projected, over?”

“NEGATIVE, negative, target Victors are approaching your killbox from the SOUTH, via Wadada Daami, repeat, approach vector is from south on Wadada Daami, how copy?”

Zack sat with his finger on his transmit bar as the seconds stretched out. Nothing came back. Only silence, and the ever-present dust, filled the TOC. He repeated the transmission. “All Assman call signs, how copy? Acknowledge…
Fuck
.”

Baxter sat looking at him expectantly, and it occurred to Zack that this was where the “senior” bit in “senior analyst” came in. Denying himself any more time for critical thought, he hopped up from his chair and gathered up a tactical vest, a team radio, his gunbelt, a light jacket, and a tablet computer. While he pulled up the mid-altitude drone feed on the tablet, and checked the data link, he rapid-fired instructions to his subordinate.

“Stay on station. Relay all traffic. And keep trying to raise the team. Brief them the instant you do – and call me the next instant.”

So I can get my ass back to safety
, he mentally added.

Because, the thing was, this op was going down less than a kilometer from where they sat – just around the way in the Abaye neighborhood of north Hargeisa. And now Zack had the duty and honor of going out to support the team, live and in person. Or at least closing the distance enough to get commo back. He finished kitting up.

“Got it?”

“Got it,” Baxter said. But he was still looking at Zack like he wanted to ask him what the fuck he was doing.

You and me both
, Zack mused.

He flew out the door, took the stairs a landing at a time, and in five seconds was out on the street.

Running flat out and kicking up dust.

Kidnapped

Weather, buildings, terrain features, somebody’s dodgy microwave – all kinds of things can screw up radio transmissions, or create a temporary radio skip zone. Losing commo when they had was very bad timing, with Zack not knowing whether or not the JSOC team got the updated battlespace intel. Though it probably wouldn’t prove fatal to guys like these – the whole trademark of guys who worked for JSOC was their ability to adapt like a radioactive virus in an improv troupe.

Then again, as Zack knew well, it might yet prove fatal to him.

He hurdled a couple of chickens and a small child as Hargeisa blurred by around him. Brown two-story structures stood back from the street, where grass grew in the gaps between the gravel and cement blocks. A bright but gentle African sun made shadows of the thin shifting clouds, and a few old cars and mopeds threaded the streets. Somalis on foot in ones and twos, wearing western garb or bright dresses and headscarves, spared a glance for the hurtling mulatto in the tan shirt and cargo pants, which pegged him as a westerner.

Zack cradled the tablet under his jacket, trying to keep his side arm from bouncing out of its belt-slide holster, as dust and clipped Somali floated up around him. He was still six run-down blocks from the team, and as he closed the distance he carried on hailing non-stop, alternating between the command and squad nets.

“Assman, Assman, how copy, how copy…”

He was going to keep doing that until he got a response. Or until he got there in person.

Or until he got killed.

While supporting troops in contact wasn’t technically in his job description, it also wasn’t a duty taken lightly by anyone with the privilege of doing it. And, adaptable or not, the JSOC boys were going to find it awkward to have four truckloads of tooled-up jihadis roll into the trap that had been set for them – but from precisely the wrong direction. And it was now Zack’s job to get them this info, even if he had to Pony Express it straight to them.

He slashed through a section of market stalls, knocking some onions off a pile – impolite, but there was zero time for niceties, and he was busy hailing anyway. This was weird. He was two blocks out and still getting nothing.

Somewhere in the back of his mind he thought he should perhaps be thinking more about his own tactical situation, rather than focusing singlemindedly on his task. And as he skidded around a corner, he quickly gained a really salient piece of tactical battlespace intel: it wasn’t weather or microwaves fucking with their radio traffic.

No, it was the al-Shabaab guys themselves, rolling into town like bosses and rocking a portable/tactical radio/RF jammer. You could buy these things on the Internet now, and this one jihadi dude was sitting half in and half out of a truck, one foot on the ground, hugging the backpack-sized device in his lap.

Zack even recognized the make and model.

And with that, and no other preamble, three AK barrels appeared from nowhere and got stuck right in Zack’s face as a group of a-S guys walked him down. Zack’s eyes slitted and he silently cursed himself, knowing he’d blown it. Before he could even react, he felt rough hands binding his arms and bundling him into the back of the truck. It all happened too damned fast. And he never moved even an inch to draw his weapon – a gorgeous HK USP Tactical .45.

Which he now knew he might never get to fire in anger.

* * *

Zack lay face down in the back of the truck, sucking air through a foul burlap hood, a foot pressed into his back, listening to the engine burble up. He was lacerating himself with self-recriminations, all the while knowing full well why he was so angry with himself. It was because Rule Number One in this region was:

DO NOT FUCKING GET KIDNAPPED.

This rule was in place because nearly anything was better than being taken alive. You’d much rather take your chances in a street shoot-out than end up squinting into a knock-off Chinese camcorder, kneeling over your own grave, which you just dug, while some monobrowed assclown with a keffiyah over his face stands behind you ranting in Chechen-accented demotic Arabic and waving a machete around.

Just…
no
.

This was all understood in the special operations community, the intel services, even amongst the adventure journalists and aid workers now. Basically, they were not going out like punks.

And yet there Zack lay. As the vehicle jerked and rumbled forward, he started counting off the seconds of travel time, marking the turns, and memorizing sound markers – clucking chickens, a jingling doorbell, chanted prayers. But that was all just the training, just muscle memory. All
pro forma
.

Because the first thing the a-S guys did, after disarming him, was to locate his phone and fling it as far as humanly possible – all jihadis who’ve lived this long understand cellphones to be basically homing beacons for Predator-launched AGM-114 Hellfire missiles. But in the end their greed got the better of them.

And they kept his tablet.

Zack grinned at this. Because they did it not knowing, or perhaps not caring, that the bigger device was every bit as trackable as the satcom/tri-band GSM phone they just left in the weeds.
Jesus
, Zack thought.
At this point even civilians can click on “Find My iPad.”
And civilian tablets didn’t have satcoms plus radio transponders. So Zack knew that, basically, about 15 minutes after he didn't turn up, and Baxter and the tactical boys saw his transponder signal making a run for Gebily or some other outlying shithole, they would scramble a quick reaction force (QRF) from Camp Lemonnier.

Or closer, if Zack was lucky.

He was now lying on a sheet of plywood, surrounded by debris and rags and terrible smells, and as the truck bounced on the dirt and gravel, his spine took a pummeling. Also, the question of where he was being taken made him ardently hope for the closer QRF option. Because his captors might not just make a run for the bush of outlying Somaliland. They might go south instead, into the (also semi-autonomous) Galmudug Region – an amazingly lawless and dangerous place, even by local standards.

There was a time not so long ago when al-Shabaab controlled half the territory of Somalia – including both Mogadishu and the major port city of Kismaayo. But after relentless hunting by government forces, they had finally been pushed out of the cities and into the bush. And rumor, plus Zack’s best intel workup, had their last big stronghold, a veritable Islamist fortress, located somewhere in the Algula District of Galmudug.

And, as much as Zack would like to prove his pet theory about this, he didn’t want to do it by becoming a human homing beacon for a thousand-pound GBU-16 laser-guided smart bomb. Because the stronghold was believed to be hard enough of a target that it couldn’t be taken down by a light-footprint SOF raid.

And that would mean destruction from the air.

Zack didn’t know the exact location, but he did know it existed. How he knew was because of Abo – Zack’s CI inside al-Shabaab. His asset. Abo had actually been to the stronghold himself, twice – though blindfolded going in and out. And he had described the place in detail. Zack wondered if he’d ever hear from Abo again.

Then again, he might be seeing him in person, all too soon…

But, assuming he didn’t end up at the stronghold, and depending on who the QRF on duty was, and how the rescue played out, Zack knew he would either be killed in the takedown, or else actually rescued. And he knew his historical odds weren’t great there. Hostage rescues were very hit-and-miss things. But both of those outcomes, as well as the smart-bomb one, actually, were so much better than the beheading-video scenario that he almost didn’t care which.

So he figured he could kind of kick back and relax now.

In fact, speaking of the horrors of East Africa, he was almost more worried about the hood on his head, and where it had been kept – in animal shit? – as well as when the guys who tied him up had last washed their hands, if ever. Because these were very strange days they were having, public health-wise… One got a sense of this when one had access to the intel feeds, as Zack did.

He could hear the guys up front barking into their radio, presumably on some channel they weren’t personally jamming. It was Arabic, which Zack could follow perfectly well, and they were telling their guys in the other three trucks to bail – as well as that they had a hostage in the back of theirs. Between this and there not being any audible gunfire, Zack assumed their op simply didn’t go down. The bad guys had withdrawn – but the good guys will have too, presumably unhurt and all accounted for, which wasn’t a terrible outcome.