Arisen : Nemesis (36 page)

“What’s in them?” Zack said, facing out again, looking urgent.

“What’s in what?”

“The survivor broadcasts.”

Brendan, eyes red but voice alert and serious, said, “A lot of motivational pabulum, mainly. Number of babies born in the UK, security of their borders. Progress on the vaccine research.”

Zack’s eyes narrowed instantly and dramatically. “Wait – there are people out there…
working on a vaccine
?”

“Yeah,” Todd said with a snort. “If you want to call it that.” He mocked up a proper, plummy English accent, and singsonged some words they had all obviously been hearing for a long time: “
Britain still stands. We continue to pour all our energies into the search for a cure. Do not give up hope. Stay healthy. We will come for you…
”

Zack still looked like someone had just told him the world wasn’t flat.

“It seems to be more of a search than research,” Brendan said. “They’ve been going out to all the big biopharma labs, looking for clues to a working vaccine.”

“Have they come
here
?” Zack asked.

“What? No. The military in Britain is degraded, not to mention their industrial infrastructure. They don’t have the force projection capabilities to push out this far.” Brendan paused. “Wait – why would they come here?”

“I just didn’t know…” Zack muttered. “Didn’t think it mattered…”

“
What
,” Jake snapped.

Zack looked up. “I didn’t know there was anybody left out there to save – much less people with labs who might develop a vaccine.” He looked around the table. He hadn’t been in combat as they had, but he had obviously been exhausted and pummeled by the stress of events. “Because if there is, then that’s not just ‘the original victim’ Godane has got down in his basement. It’s Patient Zero.”

“What does that mean?” Brendan asked.

“It means it has incalculable value for vaccine research. Understanding the origin and early form of the virus will be incredibly helpful.”

“How do you know?” asked Kwon.

Baxter said, “He has a degree in cellular biology, for one thing.”

Zack waved this off. “I’m nothing like an expert. But virology and immunology became an amateur obsession of mine for a while. And I’d place a very large bet that, if humanity lives long enough, some day some bioscientists are going to come here looking for that first victim.”

“And he’s locked up in Godane’s basement,” Brendan said.

Jake looked unimpressed. “I’ll tell you who’s locked up in Godane’s fucking basement – Kate, our teammate. And we’re damn well going to get her out.”

Brendan looked up tiredly, anticipating another showdown. “You can’t be suggesting an attack on the Stronghold. Five attackers against 300 defenders?”

Jake looked over at Zack and Baxter. “No. There’s another way.”

Baxter snapped his fingers. “He’s right. Because there is actually one thing Godane values more than the moldy dead guy in his basement.”

Jake nodded. “His Predator drone.”

“And we’ve got the keys.” Baxter smiled. He’d done better than he knew.

“Godane,” Jake said, “has got to have that GCS back.” He looked to Zack to verify this.

Zack nodded tiredly. “Yeah. It’s a big part of how he’s survived this long. Without it, he’s blind and helpless tucked up in there.” He paused. “It’s his baby.”

“A trade,” Todd said. “Genius.” He paused. “One thing, though. It’s not Patient Zero.”

Zack squinted. “Why not?”

“The patient died, doc. It’s Zulu Zero now.”

And so it was.

* * *

“How do we arrange it?" Brendan asked.

“What?” Zack wasn’t sure whether the Captain was speaking to him or to Jake.

“How do we contact Godane? Or do we just roll up flying a white flag?”

“They’ve got radios,” Zack said. “Walkie talkies for a guys outside the wall – and a bigger set in a room we don’t get let into.”

“I’ve seen it,” Baxter said. “They’ve also got an aerial on top of one of the guard towers.”

Brendan said, “Is it scavenged military gear?”

“No,” Baxter said. “I think it’s the same crappy civilian stuff they had before.”

“COTS,” Brendan said. “Commercial off-the-shelf. It’ll almost certainly be VHF, then. The question is what frequency.” He wished, not for the first time, that Pete, their other Echo, were still alive.

“My guess,” Zack said, “would be whatever it was set on when it came out of the box.”

“Okay,” Brendan said. He made a note to use their AN/PSC-5D, the big radio in the TOC, to scan common civilian frequencies. And have Elijah to keep an eye on it.

“Speaking of radio traffic,” Jake said, looking at Zack. “Why do I feel like I recognize your voice from somewhere?”

Zack cocked his head. Then it hit him. The big Triple Nickel insignia on the wall was a giveaway. “You were the ones out in the bush, right before the fall. Calling for close air support.”

“Not us,” Jake said. “The other half of our team. You were controlling that Reaper, and those Hellfire missile strikes, weren’t you?”

Zack nodded, then exchanged a look with Brendan. “What happened to your guys? We got that air asset yanked from us by Lemonnier, mid-mission.”

Silence descended on the table.

“We never saw them again,” Jake said.

“Ah, hell,” Zack said. “I’m sorry. We thought they were going to be okay.” As he looked around, he realized there was an implication in the air – or at least on the face of Jake. That somehow he and Baxter were responsible for the deaths of their team members. Zack really didn’t think that was the case. But this didn’t seem like the moment to start an argument about it.

Instead he said: “Wait a minute. If you weren’t the half of your team out in the bush… then you must have been at Lemonnier. When it fell.”

The SF guys nodded.

“Jesus,” Baxter said. He looked across to Zack. The two of them had actually seen these guys – what must have been the exact men they were sitting with now – racing out the gates of the fallen base, blasting everything to hell and back. Zack shook his head minutely. It said to Baxter:
One big revelation at a time.
Some things were so strange they could only happen in real life.

Baxter kept quiet.

Squinting in thought himself, Kwon said, “So you two ran the CIA safehouse in Hargeisa.”

Zack and Baxter both nodded.

“Then you must know what happened to Maximum Bob. And the other SEAL.”

“His name was Dugan,” Baxter said. “They didn’t make it.”

“How’d they die?”

Zack and Baxter looked at each other again. “Saving us,” Baxter said.

When that atmosphere seemed to hit again, Zack added, “It was their job.” He immediately regretted saying this. It didn’t help.

The air in there was curdling, almost visibly.

“Okay,” Brendan said. “We’ve all been up way too long. Everybody gets their heads down – now. Jake and I take the watch. Everybody else sleeps – two hours. We meet back here…” he checked his watch, “at oh-nine-hundred.”

No one looked thrilled about being ordered to bed.

But it was an order.

“Dismissed,” Brendan said.

Ego

Camp Price - Team Room

As they filed out, Jake said to Brendan, “I’ll spot Eli on the drone.”

Brendan nodded and said, “Good. I’m in the south sangar.”

He then grabbed Zack by the elbow and nodded in that direction. Zack got it and followed him. Behind them, they could hear Todd saying to Baxter, “Come with me, man, you can have the captain’s rack for now…”

In another minute, Brendan and Zack had climbed the wooden ladder eight feet to the small guard tower, which perched above and just behind the wall. Looking like a reinforced wooden gazebo, it had not a thatched roof but a properly tiled one. It was well sheltered from both sun and rain, though there was only room for two bodies, or three at a pinch. An M240 medium machine gun, perched behind a sandbagged position, took up much of the space. Brendan motioned to the one chair, and put his own ass against the railing.

With his usual serious face on, Brendan said to Zack, “I know you from before those radio transmissions. From before the fall even.”

Now Zack looked genuinely surprised, in addition to exhausted.

Brendan pointed to his nametape on his blouse. When Zack shook his head, he looked down and realized he wasn’t wearing nametape. He said, “My name’s Brendan Davis.”

Zack squinted up at him very deeply indeed. “Jack Davis’s son?”

Brendan nodded.

“You sure grew up. You’re in charge of this outfit now?”

Brendan shrugged. “At some times more than others.”

“Jesus,” Zack said. “What are the odds?” He meant that two of the very few people left alive would have a past connection like that.

Brendan shrugged again. “The intel community…” he said.

Zack finished for him. “…is a small one.” Now Zack looked around him at the thick forest that surrounded them, dappled with early morning light. And he exhaled, as if he had been holding his breath for a long time, and slumped down into the chair.

“Glad to be here?”

Zack shook his head. “You can have no idea.” He paused, listening to the faint chirping sounds of the forest waking up, and breathing the clean air. Feeling alive again, for the first time in a very long time. “Listen,” he said. “There’s something I need to tell you.”

“Yes,” Brendan said. “And you needed to tell me alone. I got that.”

Zack blinked into the patches of sunlight falling on the tower. “I think you may have an informer in your camp. Someone talking to Godane.”

“Impossible,” Brendan said. He said it calmly, as if he knew this to be fact – not defensively, as if he were asserting it. “It’s got to be something else.”

“Maybe so. But Godane has known things about your movements in advance – things I can’t account for any other way.”

Brendan smiled. “The old ‘argument from personal incredulity’.”

Now Zack smiled. He got it. Brendan was saying that Zack’s inability to imagine anything else didn’t mean there
wasn’t
something else. And the line also told him something else: that this was a very smart young man.

“There could be another explanation,” Zack said. “But I’m telling you it’s something. He knew you were going to Lemonnier for weapons. And he knew you were set up to ambush his assault force. And that information did not come via the Predator. I know because Baxter flies it.”

Brendan shrugged. “Maybe he’s got another drone. Would he make a point of telling you if he did?”

“No.”

“Maybe he’s got scouts out scouring the ground. Maybe he’s also got a U.S. radio with our encryption protocols keyed in. What do these things have in common?”

Zack sighed. “He wouldn’t tell me about it.”

“Exactly.”

Zack held Brendan’s gaze for a few seconds, each of them feeling more comfortable now. Both men were thinking the same thing: that they’d found, if not an ally, at least a like mind or kindred spirit. Both were educated. Both were calm and methodical. They felt like they understood each other – including, perhaps, their failings.

Zack acted on this growing intimacy. He said, “At some times more than others? You meant Jake. Your team sergeant.”

Brendan shrugged. “That relationship is always a complex one.”

“He’s a lot older than you.”

“Among other differences.”

“Such as?”

Brendan looked out at the thick forest. “Well, for starters, I probably would have had us work harder to avoid this war with Godane.”

Zack nodded. “Why does Jake hate him so much?”

Brendan looked back in and down. “Aside from the bombings, the beheadings, the shopping mall shooting rampage? That kind of thing?”

“Yeah. Aside from that.”

“Al-Sîf almost certainly killed one of his close friends. I should say ‘executed’.”

Zack squinted back into memory. “That expensive rifle al-Sîf carries.”

Brendan nodded. Then his expression softened. “But, as usual, Jake also has some very good points. We can’t just sit here at the mercy of Godane, and whatever attacks he wants to throw at us. Peaceful coexistence may just not be possible now.”

Zack nodded. “I suppose not. The die was cast when our Predator overflew you. I wish Baxter had picked another route.”

“Or kept what he saw to himself.”

Zack made a pained expression, but kept his tongue. He didn’t think it would help explaining this one, either.

Brendan caught this look, and softened. “He seems like a good kid.”

“He’s excellent,” Zack said. “He was top five percent of his class at the Farm. And his language concentration was Russian, which is no picnic. Mainly, he’s loyal and reliable, even when things get bad. Especially then.”

Brendan smiled and said, “
Druz’ja poznajutsja v bedé.
”

Zack shook his head. Russian wasn’t one of his six languages.

“‘You know your friends when trouble comes’.”

Zack nodded. He had that right. He switched back to current events. “Unavoidable or not, Godane knows you’re here now. Can you leave? Up stakes?”

Brendan shrugged. “I think it’s an option. But Jake’s much fonder of the one where we kill Godane, kill al-Sîf, and kill all their guys. Then put our feet up on their corpses and have a drink.”

Zack took that on board. “Even with the damage you’ve inflicted… you’re still outgunned about seventy to one.”

Brendan smiled. “I have no doubt Jake thinks he can find a way. We’re all about force multipliers here.”

“You could easily get half your team wiped out trying. Or all of it.”

“I think Jake would prefer that to any kind of accord, or compromise.”

Zack shook his head. “There’s no question Godane’s a monster. But you don’t have to go out and slay every monster in the forest.”

Brendan looked down at the older man, his eyes clear. “Jake won’t even consider making peace with Godane.”

He turned to face the forest again.

“And I’m not sure what’ll happen if I order him to.”

* * *

Now Zack laughed, and shook his head.

“What’s so funny?”