Arisen : Nemesis (35 page)

More time passed.

The last vehicle in the convoy rolled inside.

The gates started swinging closed.

Zack stood up, almost involuntarily. Something had caught his eye in the last truck. Even in the low light, he instantly recognized the big form of al-Sîf driving. But sitting in back was a smaller, very differently shaped form, wearing a sleek black t-shirt, hands bound behind the back.

It was a female. And she was white.

The grenade went up, flashing and crumping in the black and quiet night, about as far away as you could get and still be inside the Stronghold.

Shouts went up, men started running – and every eye went to that spot.

Baxter grabbed Zack by the arm and bodily hauled him forward. Crouching, heads low, seizing the instant of distraction, they raced out through the six-foot gap in the gates and were quickly swallowed up by the night.

They were free.

* * *

Jake and Brendan had topped the tank, thrown in a few more cases of belted ammo for the machine guns, and were just putting their asses in the front seats of the other gun truck, the one that hadn’t been shot up – when both their radios went.

“Bren, Jake, Eli.”

“Go ahead,” Brendan said into his chin mic.

“Stand down, guys. Repeat – stand down.”

Jake clicked on. “What? Why?”

“They’ve got her. Godane and al-Sîf. They’ve got Kate.”

When the two leaders got back to the TOC, Zack and Baxter weren’t on the radio channel anymore. But Elijah reported on what they’d told him, and what they had seen. He gave them both a second to absorb that.

“One other thing. They want to know if they can get a ride.”

Brendan shook his head.

Jake kicked something solid, hard.

Talisman

Nugaal District of Somalia

Jake and Brendan rode in silence. Jake drove, Brendan rode. It was mom and dad again, and the marriage was under strain.

Both parents, or rather both team leaders, were on chauffeur duty tonight because there was no one else to do it. Elijah was on double duties in camp, both manning the radio in the TOC and piloting the Shadow – and his drone surveillance had to monitor the huge incoming herd, look for other ones, and watch for follow-on ground attacks from al-Shabaab.

Kwon and Todd were both injured, and had both just started recovering – if there was even going to be time for recovery. Someone had to be on anti-air duties at all times, manning the Stingers and watching for the return of Godane’s Predator – which would almost certainly presage incoming Hellfire missiles and the destruction of the camp, and probably only by a few seconds. That someone was Kwon. He insisted he could operate the shoulder-fired missiles with his off hand and his off eye.

Todd had immediately gone back to work repairing their shot-up and damaged gun truck. It still ran, but you wouldn’t want to take it out for a long drive in the middle of nowhere. And everywhere was the middle of nowhere now. Having only one reliable vehicle, for any length of time, was unacceptable.

There was no one left but Jake and Brendan. And they went out on this errand together because no one ever went anywhere alone. Everything in SF worked on the buddy system.

Brendan spared a look across at Jake. He was driving with NVGs, lights off. And there was some serious atmosphere building up in there – despite the open air. The un-damaged gun truck was also the roofless and doorless one. On the upside, they still had a good couple of hours of darkness left. They’d already driven down off the mountain, out of the forest, then south out of the Sanaag region, crossing two others on their way into Mudug.

Zack and Baxter didn’t, it turned out, have any kind of GPS device. So they’d had to try to organize a pick-up point based on maps and terrain features. It wouldn’t be far over the border into Mudug. The two escapees from the Stronghold were moving fast on foot, putting as much distance as possible between them and Godane.

Brendan looked across again to Jake. He had some things to say to his team sergeant. Jake’s perfectly planned ambush had ended far from perfectly – and they had all gotten singed badly, flying way too close to the flame. Even so, it could have ended up worse than it did – much worse.

Brendan cleared his throat and finally said, “That was too fucking close, Jake. We can’t keep playing this way. We’re going to crap out.”

Instead of responding to this, Jake just pointed and said, “There.”

It was four very quick flashes of white light, up ahead and in the woods beside the road. Jake slowed, wrestled two wheels onto the shoulder, and rolled to a stop. Two dark figures darted from the treeline and climbed in back. Jake put it back in gear, turned them around by rumbling over both shoulders, and accelerated north again.

The showdown between the two team leaders would have to wait.

* * *

But it didn’t have to wait long.

Minutes after their return, everyone was gathered in the team room again as the sun cracked the horizon – everyone except Elijah, who was still on round-the-clock drone duty. He was alone in the TOC now, putting down liters of their hoarded supplies of energy drinks, long a staple of deployments. At this point, they were down to sugar-free pomegranate-and-blueberry Pit Bull, everyone’s least favorite. But Elijah hadn’t gotten his head down in so long that anything with outrageous levels of caffeine was like wine from water.

Todd was in the meeting, back from the garage. Being a superstar, he’d completed all the repairs he could do with the equipment they had, including a lot of welding, in the time it took Brendan and Jake to drive out and back.

Kwon was also there. Brendan had radioed back from the road to tell him to stand down from air watch duty – shortly after he noticed the large and bulky case the two newcomers wrestled into the back of the truck with them. Neither Brendan nor Jake had been able to resist cracking a smile when Baxter told them what it was: al-Shabaab’s ground control station.

“So Godane’s Predator—” Jake said.

“Yeah,” Baxter answered. “Is now just a very heavy, ugly lawn ornament.”

Zack and Baxter’s stock with Triple Nickel had gone up instantly. So much so that the two Agency men were even part of the full team meeting.

And this was perhaps the most important such meeting they had held in the entire ZA. The war with Godane and al-Shabaab had gotten extremely bloody on both sides. And it was far from clear who would be the last survivors standing.

“When next they come,” Brendan said, pretty much picking up where he’d left off in the truck, “I won’t say they’re just going to waltz in. But they’re facing a degraded force now. We’ve suffered fifty percent casualties, captured and wounded.”

Kwon, leaning back coolly in his chair as usual, flexed his bandaged-up right hand – and regarded it with his one unbandaged eye. “These casualties can fight.”

Brendan gave him a grudging but admiring nod. He did have to admit that al-Shabaab were going to have to hit their weapons sergeant harder than that if they wanted to knock him out.

“Noted,” Brendan said. “But that was still way too close-hauled out there. We can’t afford to lose even one of us.” He didn’t need to elaborate that they were too few. Everyone knew that, even Jake. “Current trends are unsustainable. We’re burning through too much irreplaceable ammo, spare parts… people… and luck.”

Todd spoke up now. His color was back, after getting a couple of pints of plasma pumped in him. He was holding his right arm carefully, but otherwise seemed pretty okay – for a guy only a few hours out of surgery. He said, “They’re also not going to just walk into another ambush like that. That card has been played.” He paused and looked around the table. “So what’s our play next time?”

Jake, sitting for once, looked measured. Brendan tried to work out if his unshakeable confidence had been shaken. But he looked at Brendan and said, “First off, I knew they’d come. I told you that. Secondly, we got burned because they fucking knew we were going to be there. The question is how? This is the second time this bullshit has happened.”

Brendan said, “Aerial surveillance is my bet. That Predator can fly way too high for us to see it – but still see us just fine.”

“No,” Jake said. “We were deep in the bush. We did
not
move in the open. There’s no way it was a drone that spotted us.”

The young newcomer, Baxter, cleared his throat and spoke. “It wasn’t the Predator that spotted you.”

“Yeah?” Kwon said. “And you know because…?”

“Because I was flying it.”

Silence settled across the table. It remained a mystery – and a goddamned dangerous one. Brendan noticed Zack looking at him. The look seemed to be trying to tell him something – something he couldn’t say out loud.

But the moment passed.

* * *

“What we actually need from you two,” Jake said, “is to know where Godane’s holding our team member, what kind of security is on her…” He paused. “And what he’s likely to do with her now.”

“As for where,” Zack said, “he’s got a row of primitive jail cells, underground, on the lowest level of the Stronghold. Just dugouts in the dirt, with wooden doors and padlocks.”

“Guards?” Brendan asked.

“Not historically, not specifically for down there. But I imagine he might make an exception this time. And in any case, the whole place is crawling with armed fighters.”

“How many?” Jake asked.

Zack nodded. “We never knew for sure, and we’re less sure after all the ones you killed. There were probably 350 to 400 originally.”

Jake looked at Brendan and said, “I estimate we got seventy at the ambush. Another fifteen before that at Lemonnier.”

Brendan looked at Zack. “What’s he going to do with her?”

Zack sighed. “I’m sure you’ve seen the same videos I have.” He meant the beheading videos – and worse.

Todd said, “At least he can’t put her on YouTube now.”

No one laughed, and even Todd looked like he was trying to use humor to mask his mental suffering. Everyone there knew how close he and Kate were.

“I don’t know what he’s likely to do with her,” said Zack. He started to touch his forehead with his fingers, then noticed the bandaged and missing fingertips – as if for the first time. “He’s probably capable of anything.”

“Basically,” Baxter chimed in, “the man is batshit crazy.”

“Can you elaborate?” Jake’s face was freezing into some kind of death mask of resolve and cold hatred.

Zack was thinking he wouldn’t want to be on the receiving end of that. He made a dismissive gesture, like he didn’t even know where to start.

Baxter knew where to start. He said, “Godane’s such a freak that he’s still got the original victim of the whole pandemic locked up in one of those cells.”

“What?” Todd looked like this was at once hilarious and horrifying. “Why?”

Zack waved at the air again with missing fingertips. “It’s like some kind of totem for him. A talisman.”

“Like, what, a voodoo doll?”

“Something like that. As if he’s got the over-soul of all the dead locked up in his power. And he thinks maintaining possession of it makes him unkillable, his people immune to the virus – and his fortress unconquerable. That it’s the source of his power. He thinks the plague was the hand of Allah – that it wiped out the infidel, but spared him.”

Kwon said, “Why the fuck would he think that?”

Zack sighed. “It’s actually not entirely without justification.”

Jake said, “Most bullshit mystical thinking has a kernel of truth at its center.” Brendan was glad Elijah wasn’t in the room. Religion had been an ongoing sore spot between them, with Jake provoking him at every turn. “What’s his?”

Zack sat up straighter. “The fact that he started the plague.”

Zulu Zero

Camp Price - Team Room

Zack looked around the table – and quickly worked out that no one here knew this. Why would they?

He took a deep breath and gave them the five-minute version of the end-of-the-world story. How it had been a planned bioweapons attack by al-Shabaab on the deminers working out of Camp Lemonnier. How they had commissioned a custom chimera virus from a rogue Kazakh bioweaponeer. About how the CIA, JSOC, and Delta had disrupted the attack, killed the previous head of al-Shabaab, and – they thought – destroyed all the virus stocks. But how a single infected lab monkey had been attacked out in the bush by wild dogs, in which the virus then mutated with a strain of rabies.

And which then came back – as a dead, very hungry former al-Shabaab guy.

“Who then proceeded to bring the whole world down,” Zack concluded.

“Almost the whole world,” Todd amended.

“Yeah,” Zack said wearily. “There’s still us in this room. And Godane tucked up in his fortress.” His tone indicated how much of a consolation he thought that was. It also seemed to say that he didn’t rate himself very highly in the scheme.

“Plus Britain,” Todd said, eyeing the two newcomers.

They both eyed him back. “What?”

“Britain,” Brendan said. “You must know? They transmit their daily Survivors Broadcast every day at 16:30 GMT.”

Zack’s lips were slightly parted. Finally, he muttered. “Tea time…”

“What?” Jake demanded.

Zack snapped out of it. “Godane hasn’t let us anywhere near a radio for a year and a half. They told us everyone was dead – everyone, everywhere.”

“And you believed him?”

“The way we saw things going at the end, it wasn’t hard to believe. You’re telling me Britain still stands?”

“Yes,” Brendan said. “Plus tiny pockets of survivors, all over the globe. But because of the 11/11 attacks, the UK’s completely intact. They closed their borders right before the fall.”

Zack and Baxter turned and looked in at each other, both flashing back to those frenetic hours immediately after the attacks, when they had been manning the TOC at the safehouse in Hargeisa. “That was just before it all came down,” Baxter said. “And they really did lock down – no flights, no ferries, no trains. It makes a certain amount of sense.”