Arisen : Nemesis (40 page)

Because it was too damned easy.

Zack’s biggest challenge was keeping his focus as large chunks of the wall and guard tower above and behind him rained down on his turret and vehicle and for about as far as he could see in every direction. This would be Todd, dismantling the guard tower with his Mk 47 from the other side of the courtyard. Zack couldn’t see the fat 40mm rounds arcing in over his head. But he could definitely feel the effect. It was like being in the ground floor of a building demolition.

But that notwithstanding, he kept his red dot where he wanted it – and in ten seconds every al-Shabaab fighter arrayed on the south wall and parapet was dead, dying, and/or in chunks and/or falling down into the courtyard, along with their weapons, many of which had also been cut in half.

It was the intoxicating power of the man-killing device that made Zack shout. But it was when he realized he was actually sawing off the top of the wall that he also started laughing.

He stopped laughing pretty quickly when the first massed RPG attack started raining down on him. Sometimes the battle goes your way for a while.

Then it goes the other guy’s way.

* * *

A few seconds earlier, he had been down inside the vehicle – buckled in and tucked up and bracing for impact, as they raced across the courtyard and straight into this building at high speed. The crash had been violent and jarring, but if anybody had been injured they weren’t complaining about it. And even as Zack unbuckled himself with shaking fingers, climbed up into the turret, and got on his gun…

The other three occupants were hauling ass out the doors and spilling out into the building, weapons up and seeking targets, and instantly moving fast – straight into the interior.

And from there down into the bowels of the underground complex.

It was Brendan in the lead – completely kitted up and loaded for bear. He wore a lightweight tactical helmet, clear shooting glasses, chin mic curling around his emotionless face. Bulging off his torso was full body armor including side plates, tactical pouches stuffed to bursting with rifle and pistol magazines, plus more than a few grenades in various flavors. Hanging down beneath the vest in front was one of those catcher’s-groin-protector looking flaps the Delta guys wore, with an extra four mags stuffed in its pouches.

It even provided a little groin protection. It might stop some shrapnel.

Shit got dark fast as they moved inside, so Brendan switched on his weapon-mounted light, with the button on the vertical foregrip of his SCAR-L, which stuck out before him with its long custom suppressor. The darkness lit up in a cone ahead, and Brendan instantly found the stairs and took them down.

In his back pocket, leaping down the steps behind him, was Baxter – also heavily kitted up, at least for an intelligence analyst. He wore the same body armor, a less elaborate tactical vest with only six rifle mags, and carried an M4 – because it was what he was trained on – but tricked out with some accessories on the rail. He also wore an assault pack on his back, stuffed to bursting – and he had a second M4 slung over his shoulder and cinched to the pack, to keep it from bouncing around.

Pulling rear security was Elijah, kitted out much like Bren, with his own SCAR, pistol, and mags, but fewer of them. On his back was his big medic’s ruck. If someone went down, he could keep that person alive and stabilize him to about seventy percent of the capability of a hospital emergency room. This was miles ahead of what had been possible before the radical advances in combat medicine of the last decade and a half.

Then again, if more than one or two people went down, they were all dead anyway. It was already about three hundred to seven.

Ignoring the sounds of chaos and combat fading behind them in the outer courtyard, Brendan kept his game face welded on as they descended into the menacing darkness – his vision and hearing ranging out in all directions, totally clued in, wired up, and switched on. In the cramped and twisting warren, this was going to be CQB – extremely close-quarters battle – and the difference between life and death would be measured in microseconds and millimeters.

Not slowing or looking back, but counting on the others to stay on him, Brendan turned the ninety-degree kink in the first stairway – and his suppressor banged into the face of a shocked al-Shabaab guy. He and his buddy, toting AKs and wearing vests full of mags, were racing up the stairway, right into the group of three descending – probably responding to the crash of the gun truck into the building.

Bren shot the first one in the face twice, and as he fell, did the same to his friend. The range went from one inch to one foot. The result was the same.

Brendan stepped over the bodies, getting blood in his assault boots, hit the landing, stuck his head out in the corridor, cleared in both directions, then carried on down.

Their final destination: the very sub-basement.

Dumb Son of a Bitch

Camp Price - Team Room
[The Night Before]

“I agree with your assessment,” Baxter said. “It’s a safe bet she’ll be down in the cells. Tucked away.”

Brendan nodded. He leaned over the table, arms crossed in front of him. “You don’t think Godane will even give us a look at her? Pretend to be making the trade?”

Baxter shook his head. “No, why would he? Once he’s got us inside the walls, he’ll figure he’s holding all the cards. Plus he actually
will
think we’re stupid enough to believe him – that he’d just let us all go once we give him the GCS.”

Brendan nodded. “So we can act on that basis. We don’t even need some clever, pretend, plausible insurance policy against getting double-crossed.”

“Exactly,” Baxter said. “Because we already know we’re going to get double-crossed. And that dumb, arrogant son of a bitch will have no trouble believing we’ve just walked into his trap.”

Brendan smiled. Zack was right – this was an excellent kid.

Elijah was the third occupant of the room. He listened, but so far didn’t contribute.

Baxter said, “When it all kicks off, once the shooting starts, there’s not going to be much question of that herd just passing by and leaving the Stronghold alone.”

“No,” Brendan agreed. “There’s every chance it will become a singularity. But as long as we get out before it does, then I’m happy for that to be Godane’s problem.”

Baxter’s expression said:
Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.

Brendan looked around the room then said, “Okay. Back to the infil route for the assault team. I need to understand the layout of this tunnel system…”

Keeping their heads down and deep in planning was a way to avoid thinking about what pretty much everyone involved with this mission knew: that what they were planning was probably just an elaborate way to commit mass suicide.

But there was also no question about mounting the mission. Nobody had even suggested not doing it. If Zack was right about Zulu Zero, then their lives were nothing as against that.

Moreover, none of them could avoid thinking about what might be happening to Kate down in that dungeon. Or what her fate would be if she spent the rest of her days there. She was waiting for them.

And they would be coming.

Barrage

The Stronghold - South Gun Truck

Two hundred yards south at the other gun truck, Jake didn’t have to negotiate the rubble of a ruptured building to get out on the field. As his boots hit the dirt, Todd was already climbing out of the driver’s seat and up into the gun turret. It was only the two of them on this whole side of the Stronghold.

But they were extremely well armed.

Todd was going to be rocking the Mk 47, a full-auto grenade launcher.

And Jake had his terrifying Beowulf .50 back in action. He wore an FN Herstal high-capacity .45 pistol, finished in a “flat dark earth” polymer, in a quick-draw vest rig. He also had his MP7 machine pistol strapped to the outside of his right thigh, in a holster that reached nearly to his knee. And he was festooned with a shit-ton of magazines, three types of them, and also grenades – not to mention his team radio, blow-out kit, and other combat essentials. But he moved like he wasn’t carrying sixty pounds of combat load, striding powerfully ahead through the shadows that still fell dark and heavy behind the buildings that stood around the southern side of the courtyard.

Jake was going out on the ground because somebody had to. However powerful their weapons, however thick their improvised armor, they couldn’t stay buttoned up inside the vehicles. Decades of urban warfare had demonstrated that even tanks couldn’t survive without infantry. There had to be men on the ground, who could see, who could move, who could shoot – and who could keep the enemy from walking up and pouring grenades or satchel charges down every hole in the vehicle.

Jake was doing this on his own for two reasons – one, he could. Everyone knew he was the only one who could stay alive and on his feet in the thick of hundreds of swarming al-Shabaab fighters. It was he who had to be the assault force’s one-man mobile reserve.

And, two, he was all they had. Everyone else already had a job.

When he jumped out he left the dead-man’s trigger in the truck, seriously doubting it would stop anyone from shooting him once this all kicked off. Even if Godane wanted them not to, and al-Sîf tried to enforce it, Jake knew they wouldn’t have the discipline. He also didn’t think the GCS – which was mounted right in front of the turret with Zack in it in the other vehicle – was likely to survive the rain of fire that was about to pour down. With luck, it might buy Zack a few seconds or a minute of relative safety.

But, if nothing else, there was going to be so much lethal fire pouring out of their vehicles that al-Shabaab were going to have no choice but to try to take them out.

And Triple Nickel had to do it to them first.

* * *

The instant Todd had suppressed – or, more accurately, obliterated – all the immediate threats in his sector with the Mk 47, he blasted into action on his second tasking, which was at least as critical as the first. Everything he had to do in this fight was absolutely critical. As was everyone else’s jobs.

He engaged the safety on the Mk 47, dropped out of the turret, fell into the back seat, snatched up a tall desert tan backpack, and got both it and him out the door. He ducked around to the front of the truck in the rear – the safest spot, though there was already a lot of lead coming in from everywhere – squatted down, flipped open the pack, and pulled out their Aeryon SkyRanger quadcopter.

With four flips, he had its rotor arms and landing struts all locked out, and then he pulled the controller, a tablet computer, out of its sleeve on the backpack, swiped the screen, started the four rotors turning, and got the thing climbing – fast. He spared a look up at its fat underslung sensor ball, and said a silent prayer that it would get out of small-arms range before being hit. It was pretty damned small, though, and the whole joint here was blowing up, so he reckoned its odds were good.

While it climbed, he called up the area topo map on the screen, removed the stylus from the tablet, and touched four corners of the map, which would set its automated flight pattern. That should do it – they’d have fifty minutes of tactical ISR over the Stronghold. He flipped windows again, and saw it was already streaming HD video live and in color – video of himself and the gun truck shrinking below, and their side of the courtyard expanding into view. The same encrypted stream was available to everyone on the team who had the app on their handhelds.

Anyone who wasn’t, you know, already tied up fighting for his life.

Still keeping his head low and body doubled up, he threw the backpack in through the truck door, followed it in, climbed back up into the turret, propped the tablet on a ledge to his right, and got the Mk 47 back online. He did a quick scan for targets, popped off a couple of three-grenade bursts, watched the explosions blossom a second later exactly where he put them, scanned again – then stole a God’s-eye-view look over at the video.

Shit
, he thought
. That doesn’t look good.

It was like the Stronghold was an organism they had invaded – and its immune system had just sprung to life. There was movement creeping up on both vehicle strongpoints, from pretty much all directions. Much worse, there was smoky streaking RPG fire, and lots of it, arcing down from at least two of the guard towers. That probably meant there were two guard towers undestroyed.

Which was a serious problem.

He looked across to the north truck just in time to see the RPG barrage come in and explosions ripple like lightning all around.

* * *

As Jake passed openings between buildings, he started taking shots on jihadis moving out on the ground. They were already trying to creep up on both vehicle strongpoints, under a base of fire from the elevated machine guns. It was pretty decent small-unit infantry tactics, fire and movement.

Jake’s job: fuck that shit up.

He moved up to the mouth between two buildings, took a corner and a knee, and went to work. He ignored the growing carnage on the parapets and guard towers, which was courtesy of the truck-mounted weapons, and focused on the precision tasks, taking out individuals maneuvering in on them around the sprawling courtyard. As he made center of mass hits his targets were knocked back startling distances from the force of his giant rounds. Their buddies usually caught the panic quickly and got under cover. Though within a few seconds Jake had been zeroed by surviving shooters in other places on the walls, and the area around him started to get lively with incoming AK rounds.

Time to move.

He’d be doing a lot of that. It was going to be the key to doing all the killing he needed to do, and staying alive long enough to make it all happen.

Jake could also take comfort in the knowledge that AKs weren’t very accurate, and these guys didn’t know how to use them very well, so he didn’t sweat the peppering of rounds in his vicinity. He knew that, on pure statistics, one of them would eventually get lucky. But if the assaulters had any luck themselves, they’d be out of there before that happened.