Arisen : Nemesis (41 page)

As he moved out again, he realized he
was
going to have to be careful about where he put his damned feet – as he nearly fell into an entrance to one of the underground tunnels. Zack and Baxter had warned them that the courtyard was riddled with them – sinkholes that could quickly be leapt into, many with doors that could be sealed, and all of which led to various parts of the warren below. These guys had lived like rabbits, with drones in the role of hawks.

As he moved to his next position, looping around the sheltered rear of a building while changing out mags, Jake heard a clattering of explosions that were bigger than the little booms of the 40mm grenades going off. As the courtyard came into view, he could see explosions blossoming all around the north vehicle – the ground, the building it was sticking out of, the front of the truck itself.

It was an RPG barrage coming in from above.

He cursed, as the guard towers were all supposed to be either taken out or suppressed by this point. He couldn’t see the point of origin of these rockets – it was one of the guard towers or wall segments on the south side, out of his range of vision. Poking his nose out from between the buildings, ignoring the incoming rounds tearing out divots of wood above him, he focused on one guard tower he could just see in the north-west corner, out ahead of him and to his left.

The first thing he saw was the black flag of jihad flying above it.

But there was also something strange about the color and texture of the wood. And he realized that was because it wasn’t wood.

He hadn’t been able to tell before now in the early morning light but it was in fact surfaced with fucking iron or steel panels, covering almost the whole inside-facing front of the goddamned thing.

An armored guard tower.

That definitely hadn’t been there when they did their aerial surveillance.

And he saw guys popping out of it and firing RPGs straight down toward the truck Todd was in, about fifty meters to Jake’s right. Having loosed their barrage, they all ducked back inside – a split second before the parapet to the right started blowing up, as Todd peppered it with a long burst of high-explosive 40-mil.

On the upside, that meant Todd was alive, and still operating.

On the downside, so were all those assholes in the armored guard tower. As the explosions settled and the smoke started to clear, Jake could see the structure appeared undamaged.

And then a head popped out around the near side, poised over the top of a 5.56 rifle, not an AK – and with the recognizable glass-and-plastic square of an expensive EOTech sight on top.

Jake could hardly believe his luck.

Al-Sîf
.

Hellhounds

Camp Price - Garage
[The Night Before]

Todd moved across the cramped space to one of the stacks of what looked like scrap steel. “Here,” he said to Zack. “Help me move these plates.”

“What are they for?”

“For our biggest job: turning this here dune buggy into a tank.”

As Zack hefted one end of a sheet of heavy steel, he looked over at the big crew-served weapons and asked, “Am I going to get some range time before I’m expected to fight with these?”

As they circled around the vehicle carrying the plate, Todd said, “Do you want to shoot off a bunch of 40mm grenades – with that herd coming in?”

“No. I suppose I don’t.”

“Good, because we don’t have the ammo to spare anyway. Or the time. Or a live-fire range. But I do give a kick-ass instructional lecture.”

They put the plate down and Todd stepped over to something very bulky under a sheet of heavy plastic, which he then pulled away. Underneath was a chunky weapon on a tripod – but it was also beautiful, sleek and black and high-tech, with expensive-looking optics and a video display mounted above the twin pistol grips. It looked to Zack like the Mk 19 grenade launcher – except one from the future. It also looked like it had just come out of the packaging, which it had.

Todd saw his look of recognition. “Yeah, the Mk 19 was a cool weapon – but the 47 is unbelievable. You won’t believe what it can do. You just put the laser on the target, match the sighting mechanism to the laser, and fire. It’s a Nintendo game. Your first round is on target – one shot one kill.”

Zack looked impressed – but daunted.

Beside the Mk 47 was a stack of ammo cans, each filled with linked 40mm grenades. Two of them, set off to the side, were marked with red flames stenciled on the side.

“Are those ones special?”

“Yeah, you could say that.” Todd popped the top of one of the cans. “These are Hellhounds. They were brand new at the time of the fall. HE thermobaric rounds – hands down the most lethal 40-mil grenades in the world. They were designed after some Tier-1 guys expressed a need for something more lethal than the standard rounds – and also capable of taking out a building wall with one shot, then neutralizing everyone inside. These have twice the lethal kill radius of the old ones – but they’re also armor-piercing. On impact, the back-charge produces a jet of molten metal and fragmentation. Basically it will cut through armor plating – and then disperse a large shrapnel pattern behind it, totally lethal out to ten meters.”

Todd picked up one can and put it by the first truck, then the other by the second. “We’ve only got two cans of these, so we’ll divide ’em up. If things get so bad that we need them, maybe one of us will still be alive to use them.”

But then he looked up at Zack and his mood visibly lightened. “On the other hand, the Mk 47 is the kind of tool you use to level whole buildings. So we’re not going to put you on it unless we have to. If Brendan does ask you to start cranking off with it, it will be because our tactical situation has already taken a huge shit.” He reached across and pulled the plastic sheeting off a second brand-new minigun. “This one is you. At least to start.”

Zack nodded. If he was going to be firing a large automatic weapon in combat with minimal training, he preferred that the rounds not be grenades. He looked up at Todd and recited four lines of verse: “Whatever happens / We have got / The Maxim gun / And they have not.”

Todd laughed out loud. “What the hell is that from?”

Zack sighed. “Hilaire Belloc. Just a little techno-military triumphalism, from the empire upon which the sun never set.” He paused and exhaled. “Okay. Show me how to use it.”

Todd laughed. “Hell, Nintendo’s complex compared to this. Ever used a weed whacker? Then you’re all set, dude.”

Zack smiled, looking relieved.

“Yeah – technology rocks.” Todd looked back to the Mk 47. “But if we’re all still on the target fifteen minutes after insertion… well, all bets are gonna be off anyway.”

Gunfight

The Stronghold - North Gun Truck

Zack had once read a WW2 memoir by one of the Easy Company paratroopers – the Harvard man in the original Band of Brothers – a comment of whose had stuck in his head: “Artillery takes all the joy out of life.”

Zack decided this was at least as true for RPGs.

As recently as two minutes ago, he’d been having the time of his life. Rocking that all-singing all-slaying minigun, he’d never felt so alive. Maybe after eighteen months of taking shit from Godane and every al-Shabaab guy in this joint, he’d been ready for some goddamned payback.

So he had fired with wild abandon, shrieking out loud.

He’d never really been a shooter before, and he decided these were the guys who had it going on – who had it right, who had all the fun.
I should have joined the Army instead of the CIA
, he thought.
This rules!

But when the incoming RPGs started to explode, very suddenly shit got a lot more real. The truck began to shake all around him and he was knocked about, bruising his arms and knees on the sharp corners of the turret. He also started getting peppered with non-stop machine gun fire from across the courtyard and above – a steady rain of
clank-plink-clank
all over the truck and gun turret. Eventually, he figured, one or more of those rounds was going to find the tiny gaps where the minigun stuck out – and Zack didn’t like to think about what a bullet would do once it started ricocheting around inside.

Now the earth was exploding and splashing up geysers of dirt all around him and especially to his front, like asteroid strikes in the ocean. And he was in a game of cat and mouse with RPG gunners in the tower opposite him on the south wall, to the left of where he could see Todd in the other truck, littering the battlefield with exploding munitions of his own at a high rate of fire.

But Todd couldn’t help him – he and this guard tower were side by side, only about fifty meters apart.

And whenever Zack fired at the guard tower, it reacted very differently from that section of wall he had sawn off with his minigun. His rounds – however gigantic, however many of them he spat per second – just seemed to fleck off in showers of sparks. Much worse, there were at least four guys with RPGs, and their strategy was to pop out of the sides of the tower, launch their rockets, then duck back in before he could saw them in half.

This is some BULLshit
, Zack thought.

Combat was a hell of a lot less exhilarating when it wasn’t crushingly one-sided. And then he remembered a quote he’d heard from a Delta guy once: “The only fair fight is the one you just lost.”

And now his minigun went dry as Zack burned through the last of the giant ammo can sitting beside it on the weapon mount. So for the next rocket barrage, those bastards popping out of the tower were able to take their sweet time. Their aim still sucked, but that couldn’t go on forever. As long as they had that sanctuary, they were eventually going to take him out.

This belief was validated when Todd came on the radio.
“Zack, Todd!”

Zack felt around for the PTT button on the cord snaking between the team radio in his vest and the headset under his helmet. As he did, he belatedly noticed the intense vibrations of the minigun handles had caused his missing fingertips to start bleeding again. Elijah had cleaned them up, cauterized the ends of the blood vessels, filed down the exposed bits of bone, and rebandaged everything – but the stumps hadn’t had time to start healing yet. Now the left handle of the minigun was slick with blood, and Zack didn’t even have time to wipe it off.

“Todd, Zack, copy!”

“Dude! That tower you’re taking fire from! By any chance is it covered in welded steel panels?”

Zack had just leaned down inside the truck to grab another can of minigun ammo, and was trying to haul it up into the turret – but the shit was heavy. He set it down and stole a look out the plexiglas viewport.

“Affirmative.” That explained a lot. He wasn’t sure why he hadn’t worked this out on his own. Bad light, maybe, or euphoria. And terror.

“Okay. You’re gonna have to take that shit out.”

Zack could actually hear the
thunk-thunk-thunk
of Todd’s Mk 47 firing while he spoke, picked up by his chin mic – and then he could see the explosions blossom, generally in pockets of maneuvering al-Shabaab guys, one second later:
thunk-thunk-thunk…BOOM-BOOM-BOOM
.

“Remember how I said if we were here longer than fifteen minutes you’d have to use the Mk 47?”

“Affirmative,” Zack managed. He was breathless from trying to haul the ammo can up again. Plus from the terror. That last wave of RPG hits had been way too close.

“Forget that crap. You’ve gotta use it NOW. And you’ve gotta load up the Hellhounds. And you better haul ass, man, ’cause those RPG gunners are gonna take you out, dude!”

Zack briefly wondered how Todd knew that, since there was no way he could see the guys shooting at him.

Then he remembered the quadcopter – and that he had forgotten to take out his phone with the video feed on it. Well, no damned time now.

He dropped back down into the truck and started scrabbling through the stacked cans of 40mm grenades. Blood from his hand was getting on everything, turning every surface slick with hazard and frustration.

The whole truck rocked from an explosion, which also blew out the plexiglas viewport on the turret. Zack felt a hot pain in his shoulder, and looked across.

There was a little spike of plexiglas shard sticking out of it.

And he didn’t even have time to yank it out.

Basically, he didn’t have time to bleed.

* * *

Brendan was in a gunfight now.

The three of them were on the last level before the cells. The stairwell down to them was in the middle of a corridor. And at the far end of it were two guys with AKs. They’d been waiting for them. Now they were hunkered down on opposite sides of the cross hallway at the far end.

And Brendan was at this one, Baxter and Elijah behind him – and that was where he was keeping them. Dirt sprinkled onto his head as AK fire tore up the dirt walls above and around him. At the far end, the two jihadis were basically just sticking their weapons around the corner and triggering off long bursts. Brendan was crouched down, and leaning out to trigger off careful, aimed, single shots.

Until he finally got sick of that shit.

He stood up, let his weapon dangle on its sling, pulled out a fragmentation grenade from its vest pouch, pulled the pin and popped the spoon, did a four count – then leaned out, estimated the range, gave it an underhand toss, and ducked back around the corner, pushing both Baxter and Elijah farther back.

Unseen, the grenade did exactly what he intended it to: it hit the ground just before the end of the hall, bounced once while still moving forward – then detonated at waist height in the middle of the intersection.

When Brendan swung around the corner, bringing his rifle up in the same motion, no one was shooting at them anymore.

He pushed out toward that last set of stairs.

No Guarantees

Camp Price - Team Room
[The Night Before]