Arisen : Nemesis (21 page)

He still had a little time here. The others were back in the team room, working up the mission plan. It was a simple enough template that Jake didn’t feel he needed to supervise it all. And Kwon was up in his aerie, keeping watch.

So Jake was alone.

He shook his head in the dark and laughed mirthlessly. Brendan almost seemed like he wanted to try to work with al-Shabaab. All be friends. Like, hey, they were still alive, so who gave a shit about who was on what side in a long-gone war for the future of a vanished civilization?

But one thing Jake agreed with Brendan about: the two of them were different in large part because they came from such different backgrounds.

He let his mind range back.

* * *

Jake had been thirty-nine at the time of the fall, an extremely experienced Master Sergeant who had been in the Special Forces Groups longer than God.

Born and bred in New York, mostly in Queens, he’d not only enlisted straight out of high school – but got married at the same time. He used to joke that he received his initial cross-cultural training from his Irish-Jamaican wife, who grew up on the next block over from him. His father was a forty-year veteran of the Fire Department of New York, who had been at the Twin Towers when they came down. He’d lost six friends and a cousin that day. Later, serving in the War on Terror, Jake said: “It wasn’t about revenge. It was about civilization versus barbarity.”

But no one who knew him thought he was averse to a little payback, either.

After three years in the 75th Ranger Regiment, a unit renowned equally for skill, discipline, austerity, and crushingly hard work, he sailed through Special Forces Assessment and Selection (SFAS) – and, later, was around for so many legendary SF engagements that it was like he’d never not been in the groups.

He’d just gotten posted as junior weapons sergeant to ODA 555 when they were sent as one of the very first units into Afghanistan. Over four tours there, he developed deep ties to the Afghans he worked with and mentored, becoming embedded into Pashtun culture – and committed to seeing that country succeed. He still cursed the President’s name for withdrawing before the job was done. He said, “For the nation, it’s pulling out. For us, it’s leaving behind friends we promised to stand alongside – until they and their families could be safe.”

He was also there in the initial Iraq invasion in 2003, when a single Special Forces battalion took over the entire northern theater of the war, which had been intended for a full mechanized infantry division – but which the Turks decided not to let pass through their territory. He was up to his neck in it in the Battle of Debecka Valley, when twenty-six SF guys with thin-skinned Humvees and Javelin missiles laid to waste an entire Iraqi motorized company, destroying four troop trucks, two tanks, and eight armored personnel carriers.

He quickly rose to senior weapons sergeant (18B), and then operations (or team) sergeant (18Z). Remarkably, he spent his entire SF career with Triple Nickel – with the sole exception of a six-month attachment to a CIF company (Combatant Commanders In-Extremis Force) – a specially trained and resourced element used for direct-action and counter-terrorism missions. There was little question he was good enough to be in that “elite of the elite” unit.

But somebody wanted him back in his ODA. He had never admitted whether that person was him, or someone up the chain of command.

He had finally stopped even keeping track of deployments, instead keeping a tally of the countries he’d served in: forty-three in twenty-one years. Hardly anyone in SF had been operational that long – and nobody had stayed in one team. But there was some kind of feeling among command that taking Jake out of Triple Nickel would cause the wheels to come off – not just of that ODA, but the entire world. Like he was the linchpin of American military dominance, perhaps even of the whole global order.

Multiple tours in the ’Stan (Afghanistan) had given way to multiple tours in the ’Raq (Iraq). He lost his right leg in the brutal fighting in Ramadi. While on overwatch with some SEALs in a house they’d cleared, a guy got badly wounded, and they called for a Bradley fighting vehicle to medevac him. But when they came out of the house fast, trying to improve the casualty’s chances for survival, someone had stuck a mine under the doormat – which blew Jake’s leg off. The mine also had white phosphorus in it, which nothing could be done about – they just had to let the chunks buried in his flesh burn themselves out. And he had too bad an arterial bleed for the medic to risk morphine.

He just had to bull it out.

Forced back onto home soil, he went straight from Walter Reed to physio – where, from the first minute, he had only one goal: getting back to his team. His PT scores had always been outstanding, due to him being a fitness fanatic and gym nut. But they actually went up after his injury, to a perfect 300. Some guys ribbed him that the lighter prosthetic leg made pull-ups easier, and it did. But his five-mile run time also went down – by nearly a minute.

Jake was bruising, ripped, muscular, and obsessive about gym time. He had an amazing physique for a guy five seconds from middle age. He was also a dedicated runner, and clambered through steep mountain trail runs with the best of them. He could out-run, out-press, and out-squat any two-legged member of the team. His fake leg, attached just below the knee, was the end product of a decade of well-funded practical research in prosthetics, courtesy of the IEDs of Afghanistan and Iraq.

He was easygoing but essentially private, careful and skeptical, while maintaining an outward affability. His attitude was that a soldier did whatever it took to get the job done. If your best wasn’t good enough, that wasn’t good enough. He was confident, serious, and dominant in running his team of sergeants.

He was known as a stickler for sound tactics and procedures, who scrutinized everything his sergeants did to ensure there were no lapses. He resonated authority, power, and competence. He never had to yell, as it was agreed he was scarier the quieter he got. He inspired loyalty among his guys by working even harder than they did. On deployment, his people knew they were expected to work seventeen hours a day – and use the other seven for sleep, exercise, and meals.

“What do you need?” was his constant refrain.

He had the even temper of a soldier who had seen it all. He was caustic and skeptical, which tended to balance the energetic optimism of the team captains, who came and went. He didn’t think there was any magic in the world, and hadn’t for a long time. There were only the fearless and skilled acts of the resolute and the willing. He thought that was exactly as true now, after the end of the world, as it had been before. It had always been a deadly biosphere they lived in, even when the veneer of civilization was laid on top of it. Almost all games were zero-sum, in Jake’s view.

And the great thing was to make the other guy pay first.

* * *

Brendan didn’t always see things that way, to say the least. And Brendan was, at least nominally, still in charge of Triple Nickel.

As Jake lay back on his bunk in the dark, he knew the real reason Brendan had compromised, despite the dangers of going back to Camp Lemonnier. It was to maintain his shaky authority. But Jake had compromised for exactly the same reason. He needed to prop Brendan up and keep him making enough of the right calls to keep them all alive.

Because the second-to-last thing he wanted was to have to stage a mutiny in this outfit – which would carry all kinds of costs and risks of its own.

But he also knew – and nobody had better make any mistake about this – ultimately he was going to do whatever it took to keep his guys alive. Right now, that was propping up Brendan. But if it stopped being that and started being something else, Jake would do something else.

At bottom, what he feared most was failing his men and having them get killed on his watch. He’d already seen far too many great soldiers die in front of his face. He was also haunted by the men he hadn’t seen die: those on the split team, including their Fox, the other CST, most of their senior sergeants, as well as their chief warrant officer – who had led the team on that fateful mission into the bush on the day the world ended.

Maybe if Jake had insisted on taking that patrol out himself instead of letting the Chief do it, things might have played out differently.

Right now, in his view, the immediate danger was Brendan – his lack of strength and resolve. And he was afraid those things might get them all killed. With Godane and al-Shabaab out there gunning for them now… playtime was coming to an end.

From here on out, Big Boy Rules were going to apply.

Goat Rodeo

The Stronghold - The Emir’s Chamber

Zack stepped quietly into the big creepy room. There was little light and zero sound. He hadn’t even had to request an audience. Godane had summoned him first.

“Come in,
h’jyn
.”

H’jyn
– the Arabic word meant half-caste. That was the Emir’s charming pet name for Zack, who had been born to an English mother and Kenyan father.

Before Zack could think of an innocent-sounding way to raise the subject of Abo, Godane did it for him. “I am sorry about your friend. You saw him hanging on the walls? He was a hypocrite and an infidel. He was an enemy of God and the people.”

Zack probably really needed to downplay his friendship with Abo at this point. But he didn’t know how much Godane knew – and it was important that he not get caught out in a lie. Speaking very evenly, he said, “How did the Emir learn Abo was ungodly?”

Godane smiled. Zack knew he was susceptible to flattery. Godane probably knew he knew, and also probably didn’t care. “I have many worries, face many threats,
h’jyn
. I long had my suspicions that Abo was a disbeliever. Yesterday, I had his room searched. We found a Christian Bible, all praise be to Allah and peace and blessings be upon the Prophet.”

Oh, shit
, Zack thought.

“Yes – he lived in secret as a Christian. Lured from the truths of the Prophet in his Church of England school no doubt, living with the imperialists and infidels.”

Double shit
, Zack thought. That was in fact exactly how he knew Abo – they had been schoolmates in Kenya, many years earlier.

Godane let the menacing silence drag out. “Also,
Allahu A’lam
, he made notes in the margins and blank pages of his Christian book. Some about what he planned to do, once he moved to… Los Angeles.” Another pause. “Now, why would Abo think he was going to America? As well a duckling should fly to the moon.”

Zack nodded. “I do not know, Emir. It is very strange.”

Of course, Zack knew exactly why Abo thought he was going to the U.S. It was because Zack had promised to send him there – in return for one year’s service spying on al-Shabaab, on behalf of Zack’s employers.

Who used to have a very nice campus in Langley, Virginia.

* * *

“Come,” Godane said. He’d made his point. Now he was waving Zack around the side of his desk. He wanted to show him the drone video – and, Zack had no doubt, pick his brain. Godane was fucking crazy, but he wasn’t stupid. He knew that intel was life and he knew how to use the resources under his control.

Zack leaned in and blinked at the video window, which glowed in the dimness. An image of thick forest moving below quickly resolved into some kind of well-ordered encampment. As the camera POV looped back and went into an oval pattern around it, he saw the compound’s perimeter wall, a number of huts inside it, and finally men moving around among them.

And then, amazingly, he recognized a unit patch on a shoulder.

Holy shit
, he thought.
It’s Triple Nickel. They’re still alive.

When he looked up at Godane, he instantly knew the recognition on his face had betrayed him. Godane knew he knew who these people were – and if he didn’t tell him, that was probably the end of the road for him right there. Zack thought frantically – and finally told himself that Godane would get no advantage from knowing their unit designation. And he already knew he was going to have to give Godane something – just to keep breathing.

“It’s Special Forces,” Zack said. “ODA 555, known as Triple Nickel.”

“I knew this,” said Godane. “I knew it.” He spat on his own floor.

Back in the world, al-Shabaab’s intelligence sources had told them that ODA 555 was one of the lead units hunting their fighters – and, worse, that they had a central role in training and mentoring the Somali National Army.

Godane spat again. “These men are very ungodly. They helped drive us out of the cities where, praise and thanks to Allah, we enforced God’s laws for all. They hounded us out into the bush. And they consorted with the SNA lackeys of the
kaffir
government in Mogadishu. Truly, they are devils.” He pinned Zack with his wide eyes, the whites shining disturbingly in the near darkness. “And you – you knew they were still alive.”

Zack straightened up. “What, me? How the hell would I know that?” He didn’t add that Godane had basically had him and Baxter locked in the basement for a year and a half.

Godane’s countenance settled. He wasn’t the kind of man who ever suffered from doubt. He said, “Your lies will lead you only to the torments of hellfire. You know these devils. Now tell me what they are going to do.”

Zack took a breath. “
Bismillah
, Emir, I do not know, so cannot say.”

Godane’s face made it clear his patience was being tested. In Zack’s experience, it didn’t take much. “You are going to help me to destroy them.”

Zack took a deeper breath. This was bad.

In the past, his and Baxter’s interests had been at least roughly aligned with Godane’s and al-Shabaab’s – they were all mainly just trying to keep the dead off and stay alive. The dead were everyone’s enemy.

But now… he couldn’t help fucking Godane slaughter a bunch of Special Forces guys. But he also couldn’t appear to be intentionally unhelpful. If he did, he’d pretty quickly find himself nailed to the next tower over from Abo.