Arisen : Nemesis (22 page)

Zack knew he was now in a very narrow corner.

“Emir, I don’t think you want to fight these men. We’re in a precarious position already, surrounded by the dead. We don’t need to be shooting and drawing them to us with the noise. Even if you win the fight, you might only get to enjoy the victory for a few minutes. Be smart here.”

Godane actually hit Zack – the back of his hand right to the cheek. Zack straightened up and took a step back. He briefly considered tearing out the son of a bitch’s throat. He’d wanted to forever. There was no one else in the room now and the guards outside couldn’t get in there before he had a foot of open air between Godane and his windpipe.

On the other hand, he’d be dead ten seconds later – and Baxter ten minutes after that. That thought calmed him down. He didn’t do anything. He just waited.

“You will tell me what equipment they have.” Godane swiveled the laptop screen. “Look. That is a generator. Those are solar panels on the rooftops. I am not stupid. What weapons do they have, what supplies!”

Zack steeled himself and tried to focus – and then tried his peacemaker strategy again. “Emir, whatever they have in that compound, I tell you they will extract too heavy a price from you if you go there and try to take it.”

Godane made a dismissive noise. “God’s soldiers are strong. The infidels are weak, and few. But if I cannot take what they have, I will take from them their lives. I will not suffer them to live – they are too dangerous.”

Zack sighed. “The soldiers won’t want to risk a war anymore than we will.”

“No, they are too dangerous. If I must, I will destroy them – with the drone.”

Zack kept breathing. “Emir, we only have the two Hellfire missiles for the Predator. And the day may come when we need them to survive.”

“We will get more.”

Zack leaned in slightly. “You remember how dodgy that scavenging mission to Camp Lemonnier was. We lost half the men you sent.”

When he and Baxter originally brought the UAV in and traded it for their lives – and two spots in this bastion of the living – its two weapons rails had been empty. They had used both the Hellfires blasting their way out of Hargeisa. A few months later, Godane had sent them out to scavenge more. That had not been a fun afternoon.

Zack racked his brain for some way to convince Godane to steer clear of Triple Nickel. “Emir, the war between the mujahideen and the Americans is over. Now there is only the war with the dead. Maybe you can even work with the Americans, like you work with me and Baxter.”

Godane sneered. Rationality wasn’t his strong point at the best of times. And right now it was clear Triple Nickel was making his ass twitch. “They are sons of whores. They hunted us like dogs. They trained the SNA apostates to hunt us. They drove us into the wilderness. There can be no accord with them! There will be only death for them, and hellfire!”

Zack threw in the towel. He could already see it in Godane’s eyes – the implacability of ego. He knew the Emir’s ego was generally caught up with absolutely everything – his reign over the Stronghold, the lackeys he controlled and ordered around, Africa, the dead, the Americans. He was a monster of pure ego. And the worst kind – he professed that it was all in the cause of Allah and the
Ummah
, the people. But it was really all about him. It was always about him, and the gratification of his ego.

And right now his ego was seriously fucked off by a handful of surviving snake-eaters out in the bush.

* * *

One of those lackeys came in and whispered something in Godane’s ear. He kept on whispering.

After he left, Godane said to Zack: “The
kaffirs
are on the move.”

“What – the Americans? Where are they going?”

Godane stroked his beard. “Indeed. Where are they going, half-caste?”

Zack’s eyes narrowed. What the hell kind of game was this?

Godane played another card. “They are traveling west. What’s to the west, half-caste?”

“Ethiopia. Djibouti.” But Zack could only play so stupid. “Camp Lemonnier.”

“And what is it they seek at Camp Lemonnier?”

Zack tried to keep his poker face, while cursing inside his head. He actually had an excellent idea of what Triple Nickel might be running there for. He’d known about the heavy weapons locker the Task Force kept there, since well before the fall. And he’d taken some risks to make sure Godane never found out about it. The last thing the post-Apocalypse needed was Islamists running around with mini-guns and artillery.

But that was then. Now, he had to decide:

Was this a test? Did Godane already know – and was just trying to learn the extent to which Zack was fucking with him? If he got caught in an outright lie, his life expectancy there, already not real great, wasn’t going to improve.

Godane didn’t quite reveal his hand. He said, “They are going there for something to fight us with. It is the only explanation. But they will not commit their treachery unmolested.
La ilaha illa Allah
.”

* * *

Scurrying fast, Zack found Baxter in one of the garden patches inside the walls, struggling with a hoe in the near dark. The big expanse of vegetable garden was lit only with a couple of low lights with red filters over them.

He pulled Baxter in close and whispered: “Godane’s turning out the militia.”

“What? Where to?”

“Camp Lemonnier. He’s going to ambush the Special Forces team that’s heading there.”

“Fuck.”

“Yeah. And it’s even worse than that. I’m going with them.”

Baxter pulled back slightly and looked Zack in the eye. “I’ll go in your place. I can convince Godane. You’re in no shape for it.”

Zack shook his head sadly, and managed a weak smile. “No. It’s got to be me. You’ll be safe here as long as Godane needs you to pilot the drone—” He cut himself off and suddenly looked baffled. “Wait a second. Is somebody else flying the Predator?”

“No. I’ve been following the plan – putting off Godane’s requests that I train up his guys. But I’m running pretty low on excuses.”

Zack shrugged that off. “Never mind that. My question is, if you’re here, and the Pred is on the ground… how the hell did Godane know Triple Nickel’s on the move? Much less where they’re going?”

Baxter shook his head. “No idea. Maybe he’s got other intel sources. He does often seem to be kind of everywhere all at once.”

Zack squinted off at nothing in the dark. “Could he have another drone we don’t even know about? Some satellite feed that’s still up? What?”

Zack cursed quietly. This was another wrinkle, another damned puzzle, and not something he had the bandwidth to try and solve. It was hard enough to play chess against Godane when they were basically kept blindfolded and not let in the room with the board. It was too much to mentally grapple with at once, and his head hurt.

Baxter started to protest again about Zack going to Lemonnier.

Zack cut him off. “No. Like I said, you’ll be safe here. Whereas if you go out on this goat-fucking rodeo, you’ll probably just end up getting shot by Triple Nickel – when they schwack the shit out of Godane’s raggedy-ass militia.”

Baxter cocked his head. “So you’re calling it for SF in a walkover?”

“I don’t like al-Shabaab’s odds. And all of Godane’s goons don’t actually get slotted, they’ll probably just get infected by the dead. And even if you do survive, you’ll come back here to find me up there on that cross, after he cuts Abo down. No, it’s gotta be me.”

Baxter exhaled mournfully. “Okay, Zack. Watch your ass.”

They could already hear guys running around in the darkness – assembling men, weapons, and ammo, and getting them loaded into vehicles. Both Baxter and Zack also recognized a rich, deep voice above the general tumult. It was al-Sîf himself, organizing the preparations for the patrol.

It looked like he was leading the goat rodeo himself.

And they would be going out armed for bear.

Convoy

Triple Nickel Garage - Two Klicks From Camp Price

Todd had originally picked the site for their motor pool, not to mention built it from the ground up. So he didn’t have any trouble finding it even in the pitch black of a Somalian forest at 0400. He picked his way quietly down the overgrown trail, navigating from memory.

From the beginning, the option of driving the gun trucks right up to the camp had been a non-starter. Aside from not wanting to clear a path through the forest right to their doorstep, the trucks were simply too loud – first too loud for counter-insurgency, and later too loud for hiding from the dead. Eventually, Todd had done a lot of work making the trucks run quieter than they did initially.

Now his assignment was to make sure they ran at all. It had been a few months since anyone had taken out a vehicle patrol. Todd slightly wondered if they’d all gotten too comfortable there – fat, happy, and lazy inside their walled compound. They’d certainly gotten cliquey. But that was okay, he guessed. He knew how people were, and he could roll with the minor infighting.

He saw the larger hulking patch of darkness ahead, rising up and blocking out the faint light of the stars through the forest canopy. He circled around to the front and began clearing away the living camouflage from in front of the big doors. This took some doing – there was a lot more of it than when he’d left it, and it had recruited allies, growing into the surrounding bush. But in fifteen minutes he had the area out front reasonably clear.

In another fifteen, he had both vehicles checked out and running, and loaded up with every fuel can they would hold.

Seconds later, the rest of the team arrived. They were carrying extra ammo for the machine guns, in addition to their personal weapons, and they mounted up the gun trucks in silence.

This was the entire rest of the team except Elijah. He would be staying behind to man the fort – so if al-Shabaab showed up, at least they couldn’t just walk in and make themselves at home. But, mainly, his job was to fly overwatch for them with the drone. He would cover them for the first couple of hours, before having to turn back.

And then the patrol would be on its own.

* * *

And in barely another nineteen ass-rumbling and alternately stultifying and terrifying hours, they had arrived at the backside of Camp Lemonnier – the side that backed onto Djibouti–Ambouli International Airport, which they’d decided was the safest infiltration route. It helped that what counted as a major highway around there, the RN2, ran from the Somalia/Djibouti border right around the end of the runways, in the finger of land between the airport and the Gulf of Aden.

The drive was supposed to take fourteen hours, and did on paper. The first segment, on Somalia’s “Road Number One” had been uneventful. They had driven through a couple of hours of darkness, then watched the sun come up behind them in the mirrors. They had used standard convoy tactics – tactical spacing, constant situational awareness, and very high speed.

Todd drove the lead vehicle. He was a certified speed freak behind the wheel and had been a big fan of the
Fast and the Furious
franchise. If he’d had a fourth career after venture capitalist, master carpenter, and Special Forces soldier, it would have been illegal street racer and heist artist.

He still wasn’t totally ruling it out.

But they’d also had to slow periodically for tangles of stopped or wrecked cars, on what passed for a major highway in a country that had basically been living the zombie apocalypse since long before the fall. Being unable to keep up their speed for more than a few minutes at a time badly dinged their travel time.

They also saw a few dozen dead along the way, in ones and threes, standing inert on or alongside the road. These perked up when the convoy blasted by. But none of them were quick enough that the convoy gunners needed to engage – not even the fast ones, the runners, which they had first started seeing about six months ago, but which virtually never troubled them out in the bush.

No, the real delay – and the only serious trouble – came when they had to drive through the Berbera city center to get to the coast road that led to Djibouti. There had been some discussion of sticking to the best highway available across Somalia, which crossed the south of the country far from the coast. The trouble was, to get to it, they’d have to go through Hargeisa. And while no one particularly fancied Berbera, or in fact any big population center… they figured anyplace would be better than Hargeisa.

Which was what they’d named the virus, due to it originating there and all.

But Berbera turned out to be much worse than they’d reckoned on, or even imagined – the surface streets and intersections were a riot of abandoned and crashed cars and trucks. They’d had to double back on themselves an uncountable number of times. And every time they did, they had to face the dead they’d woken up the first time through.

They’d gotten to clear the guns with every mounted weapon they had. And every shot they fired drew more. If they had gotten jammed up, or lost their mobility for any reason… but, thank God, they hadn’t.

Everyone started breathing properly again when they finally clawed their way out of town and onto the coast road, with the shooting dying down and the chaos receding behind them. As they drove away, Todd stuck his left hand out the driver’s-side window and made a long, slow, wide jerk-off motion.

The truck behind them nearly swerved off the road from the tsunami of laughter inside.

After that, it was just the hiss of their tires on the thin covering of sand that had drifted onto the road and the cool offshore breeze, all the way to their destination.

But Berbera had cost them, not just in terms of ammo expended but also in minutes of daylight burnt. When they crossed over the border into Djibouti, the sun was already splashing down in the Indian Ocean far behind them.

* * *

Driving with NVGs now, Todd led the two-vehicle convoy across the sprawling tarmac of Djibouti Airport’s taxiways and runways. Getting in had been no problem. They’d just knocked down a chain-link fence with the cattle catcher on the front of the first truck and rolled in, lights out and engines barely turning over.