But she had to try.
She dragged her right hand through their crushed-together vests, got it around her pistol, flipped the thumb break—
But she was already too late.
Before she could get her weapon free, the Russian had his knife clear from a vest scabbard and was bringing it around toward her throat. Her breath went away as she realized: this was it. She was done.
This was where her story ended.
But then a whole other body crashed into the descending knife hand, wrenching the arm around and half pulling the Russian off her. Even as he flashed by, Armour could see it was Parlett. He was alive. He was a bloody awful mess, but he was alive. And he had just kept her that way for another few seconds.
The Russian used Parlett’s momentum to fling him away, intending to deal with him later, then fell back down on Armour, eyes inches from hers again, knife flashing up and around.
But now it was his eyes that went wide as he felt the muzzle of her pistol jam into the bottom of his jaw. Parlett had bought her the two seconds she needed. She held the man’s gaze as she pulled the trigger. Chunks of his brain exited out a hole in the top of his helmet, and he slumped forward as Armour was coated in gore.
But at least it was non-infectious gore – for once.
Small blessings, she thought, pushing the body off her.
* * *
Down in the nuclear reactor control room, Captain Martin stood his post – or, rather, sat it. He still couldn’t stand, his legs totally unresponsive after getting shot low in the belly by the Spetsnaz infiltrator. But he still held the compartment.
As he waited for someone to come – either to relieve him, or to relieve him of his life and his burdens – he thought about the one working nuclear reactor on this vessel. He had shut both of them down, to stop the Zealots crashing the ship into the coast of Virginia – and then personally broke one of them, pretty much for the duration, trying to get it started ahead of the incoming storm of the dead. Yeah, Commander Drake had ordered him to try it, even after he told him it was a terrible idea.
But it had been a terrible idea because Martin didn’t know what the hell he was doing. He hadn’t been up to the job. So even aside from being in charge of engineering, he felt a sharp sense of responsibility for the one working reactor. The lives of everyone on the ship depended on it. Without it, there was no power, no propulsion – and no drinking water, when the desalination plant shut down.
They would all be dead in days.
So it weighed terribly on him to know that if this reactor got turned off, or spiked, or otherwise damaged, they might never get it running again. And the JFK would be out of the fight – forever. And now the only thing between that reactor and the invaders was a lone British officer, one who couldn’t even stand, armed only with pistols, and growing weaker by the minute from blood loss.
He was also an Englishman – one who was growing afraid. Not for the loss of his life.
But of failing in his duty.
He only realized his head had started to loll when something moved in his visual field, causing him to jerk upright, his adrenaline spiking and his senses spooling up.
It was two dark and heavily armed figures, stepping smoothly through the hatch, one going left, the other right. And it was only because Martin was down on the deck, and motionless, that they took a second to spot him. He made the most of that second – shooting the one on the right ten times, dropping him to the deck, and driving the other back out the hatch with the remaining six rounds in the mag.
Feeling like Mr. Orange in Reservoir Dogs, he limply let the empty mag drop out the pistol and into the blood pool before him, then tried to seat a new one from the pile in his lap. But before he could get it lined up, two grenades tumbled in the open hatch. One landed beside him, and he tossed it back, his strength and dexterity somehow dialing up when they absolutely had to. The other landed behind a bank of stations. He rolled over and away from it and covered up.
Both munitions went off – one outside, one inside.
The latter left a deafening ringing in his ears, and a seeming inability to get his breath. He figured the explosion had used up all the local oxygen. And he had plenty of problems already, without being unable to breathe.
But it was no good wishing things were different. As he wheezed, he sat back up and managed to get the pistol reloaded. As he did, he discovered some unexpected good news: he was starting to get some feeling back in his legs. Maybe it was just swelling around his spine from the bullet lodged in his back.
Maybe he wasn’t paralyzed.
Then again, his relief was short-lived when he reflected that he was probably going to die in the next few minutes anyway. Keeping one eye on the hatch, he catalogued his remaining ammo. No worries there. When no one came for him, he arched his eyebrows and thought that maybe the grenade he threw back had done its work. Then again, he was pretty sure there’d be more of them.
Come and have a go, he thought.
If you think you’re hard enough.
* * *
Armour holstered her precious and now life-saving M9 pistol, got her hands around her rifle, and started to climb back up and into the fight. And when she looked back, she realized: everyone had followed her out that hatch – without hesitation. They had all raced to her aid, going into what looked like death and destruction in the passageway, with the defenders slaughtered and piled up, and attackers overrunning the barricade.
The others had seen Armour go out without fear. So they did no less. And now they were the ones rampaging. Instead of climbing to her feet, Armour crab-crawled away, to make room for the people spilling out. They were needed – because the remaining three Russian attackers had not backed down or laid off for a second. They were still coming hard.
The result was toe-to-toe fighting, a smash-mouth gunfight in a phone booth. It was a bunch of people shooting each other to death from three feet away. Armour saw one of her guys go down from a headshot, another with his body armor blown away, a third, a fourth. But that was it. And when it was over, with everyone still left alive deaf from the non-stop pummeling gunfire in the tiny space – the XM-29s had no suppressors – there were still plenty of defenders standing.
And four Russians lay dead on the deck.
The field was theirs.
* * *
Running back to the lab from the front of the hospital, toting his big ruck, now almost empty of ammo, Sergeant Lovell heard a familiar voice call out to him. Looking across, he saw it was Corporal Raible – laid up in his hospital bed, with third-degree burns and only one and a half legs. Lovell had known he was there, had come and visited him several times, in fact. But in his single-minded urgency to get to Dr. Park and protect him, and then to resupply the defenders, he had walked right by him twice.
Lovell still had serious shit to do, but he couldn’t ignore his brother wounded warrior, so he dashed over. It turned out Raible wasn’t calling him over for a chat, and had serious shit to do himself. “Give me a weapon,” he said.
Without hesitation Lovell drew his MARSOC CQBP .45, reversed it, and handed it over. Raible looked like shit, but his eyes were bright, and his grip steady when he took hold of it. Lovell pulled all four of his pistol mags and laid them on the bed near Raible’s left hand. He looked over at the door to the lab, barely ten feet away.
“You know who’s in there?”
“Yeah. I know.”
“It’s your fire watch,” Lovell said seriously. And he meant it. Plenty of Marines had taken on duties while wounded worse than Raible – though never had those duties been so important. Lovell squeezed Raible’s arm. “Get some,” he said, rising.
He returned to the lab and shut the hatch. Inside, he could see Sarah still in the corner with her satphone to one ear and a finger in the other. Park and Close had finished packing up their research – laptops, samples, and slides. Almost all of their work was on Park’s laptop anyway, which was in its satchel, looped diagonal
ly over his shoulder. But Park was also standing over the photocopier-sized gene sequencer – the one Wesley had brought back from Jizan. “We’ve got to take this,” he said.
“What?” Lovell’s expression said he thought Park was nuts.
Park crossed his arms in front of his chest. “Men died getting this for me.”
“Sunken cost fallacy,” Lovell said. “Those guys are dead – whether or not we all get killed over it now.”
“I don’t know what’s going to happen,” Park said. “But I need this device to finish the vaccine. And I can shave days off by doing it wherever we are, and before we get back to Britain. And days count.”
Okay, fuck it, Lovell thought. We’re already carrying a damned boat.
He turned over his ruck, dumping out the remaining ammo and ordnance. As he pulled the mouth of it around the sequencer, and Park lifted it up, it looked like it was just going to fit. But it was going to be heavier than hell, and Lovell only hoped the straps would hold – not to mention that he would, underneath them.
As they performed this operation, Sarah put her phone away and returned to the group. “I do know what’s going to happen now.”
“Oh, yeah?” Lovell said. “What?”
“I know where we’re going.” She nodded at Park. “Where we’ve got to get him to.”
If we can even get the hell out, Lovell mentally amended.
He tried the weight of the pack. It was a sonofabitch.
* * *
Armour climbed to her feet amid the carnage. Everyone left was looking to her – all except the badly wounded, and those caring for them. There were so many bodies down in this tiny stretch of passageway there was almost no room to stand. She could also see their makeshift barricade had basically been destroyed by the incoming volley of smart grenades and the hand-to-hand fighting.
She assigned two guys to rebuild it, and supervised moving the wounded inside, while the others reloaded, topped up on ammo, and tried to get their breath back. When they’d consolidated, Armour took stock. Looking around, she could see that something like three-quarters of the small arms in the armory had been handed out, to groups of sailors who now roamed the ship, making themselves dangerous to the invaders. And the inflow of militia guys looking for weapons had slowed to a trickle.
When a hand touched her elbow, she turned – and was shocked to see Parlett on his feet. He looked like he had been spray-painted with blood, but his wounds had been bound up, and it must have looked worse than it was, because he was holding a weapon – not to mention standing upright.
“What now?” he asked.
She decided in that moment. “Now we go. It’s time.”
“Where to?”
“To find the Marines.” It was the Marines who had led the militia in the flight deck battle. And while Armour and her teammates had just proven they could fight on their own, she knew they were going to need real combat leadership to take the ship back.
“Where the hell are they?” Parlett was voicing a doubt everyone had. The Marines were supposed to be, if not the first, then the most furious line of defense for the ship. And they were nowhere to be seen.
Someone said, “I heard they were mustering on the hangar deck.”
Armour looked around until she found someone with a radio. “Get on the horn with CIC. See if you can verify that.”
But she didn’t wait for confirmation. Instead she assigned two sailors to stay and guard the remaining weapons in the armory, as well as the wounded and their caregivers. And then she led the remainder of them out – a dozen militia looking to get their guns in the fight.
No one hesitated a second before following her.
And she never had to look back to know they were.
The Lost Convoy
Northwest Somalia
The lost convoy. That’s how Homer was coming to think of it. Of course it was nothing like the original lost convoy of Black Hawk Down fame – which had battled through the streets of Mogadishu, taking heavier and heavier casualties, until one of Homer’s forebears in the SOF community lamented, “We’re going to keep driving around until we’re all fucking dead.”
By comparison, this convoy’s trials in Somalia had been mere annoyances. First they’d trailed the team in the Seahawk, heading south for the Stronghold – and then, after the helo was shot down, went racing for the crash site. Not long after, Handon had told them to reverse direction and head for Djibouti. And now that they were nearly there, he was back on the radio, telling them to turn around yet again.
This was just as they crossed over the final bridge, and last swollen river, before the Djibouti border. The airport itself was only seven or eight clicks beyond. And the two vehicles with their six occupants – Jake, Noise, Zack, and the recovered Kate, leading in the gun truck; Homer and Pred trailing in the Land Cruiser – were finally making good time. Predator, driving the SUV, sighed with relief as they rumbled off the bridge and onto solid mud – no guarantee any of these bridges was going to hold them – when Homer took Handon’s call.
“Yeah, Homer – we need you guys to turn around again.”
“No problem,” Homer said, displaying that easygoing and get-it-done SEAL attitude in the face of shifting mission priorities. “What’s our new tasking?”
“Come pick us up. We got shot down again.”
Homer slightly wanted to ask: Seriously? Again? But of course Handon was virtually always serious. He didn’t have the kind of job that let him indulge in a lot of hijinks.
“Roger that. Wait one.” Homer switched channels and hailed the lead vehicle. “Jake, we’re turning around – stop your vehicle.” Brake lights were the only acknowledgement he needed, or got. Pred was already slowing them way down, and as the Land Cruiser rumbled over vegetation in the verge, Homer flipped back to Handon. “What’s your location?”
Handon read out a grid reference, which Homer keyed into a handheld GPS and passed over to Pred, who jammed the accelerator – launching them straight back toward the bridge they’d just crossed.
But then Handon said: “One more thing. There’s a Russian attack helo, that Ka-50, still flying. And it might be headed your way.”
“Copy that. We’ll see you shortly. Three out.”
Homer opened the sunroof, and climbed half out of it with his rifle. And he got busy scanning the skies.
* * *
It had been a hell of a rough landing, but Ali got them down on the deck alive – everyone but Cleveland, the pilot. He had met his end, courtesy of Vasily, up in the air. The man never had a chance. But he died flying, and carrying the mission forward.
Trying to get them all home.
And Ali wasn’t going to forget that. She liked military aviators – she used to be one herself. But, that aside, these were the guys who got her to her mission insertion points safely and on time – and then got her out alive again. And that tattooed Spetsnaz son of a bitch had now shot one too many of them for her to let it go.
Now she was out here looking for him, too.
But right this second, their job was simply to Charlie Mike – to carry on without the aircraft, and somehow still get P-Zero out of there. Helo shoot-downs happened sometimes – rather a lot, actually, to special operators – and there was little point bemoaning it. They were just part of the terrain over which the battle had to be fought.
While Handon got on the radio, standing a few paces away from the destroyed airframe, Ali supervised casualty assessment and helped unload the bird – until Reyes saw her bloody and half-lifeless forearm. He gently dissuaded her from her task, got her sat down in the mud, and started bandaging it – much as Predator had patched him up in the bomber after Beaver Island. The great wheel always turned. When he was done, she opened and closed the fingers of that hand – around the barrel of her rifle. They would do.
And her shooting hand was just fine.
As she stood up, she saw everything had been pulled out of the bird that was coming out – mainly ammo,
and Patient Zero, which Fick had slung over his shoulder again.
They were moving out.
“Northwest,” Handon said, nodding in that direction. “We’re only ten clicks from the border. And the ground convoy is en route back here to pick us up.” No one was going to suggest they sit down and wait for their ride. They all knew you kept moving, as long as you could move. And, anyway, Handon’s radio went again – and what came in from the other end sealed it.
They absolutely couldn’t sit around waiting to get picked up.
Instead, they all took off – at a run.
* * *
“How the hell did they get around us?” Juice asked. He felt as if he had lost a full day, rather than only a minute or so, after his tumble from the bus. But now that Baxter had a Predator to fly, he could once again stare down on the battlespace like the unblinking eye of God, or maybe Stan McChrystal.
The jingle bus was rolling again, al-Sif faithfully driving them. Baxter was looking at the bouncing mini-GCS screen, which showed an aerial view of the big Spetsnaz ground convoy – the one that had been chasing them out of the Nugal River Valley. Now it was chasing Handon and the rest of his team. And he had just reported to Juice that it was only forty miles behind the others – and closing damned fast, now that they were on foot.
Baxter kept his eyes and hands glued to the controls and screen. “How they get around us was, basically, they cut the corner off. While we took the most direct road from the south, they cut straight through open country.”
“Really? Jesus.”
Baxter shrugged. “Open terrain in this part of the world can actually be easier going than the roads – which have been rutted to hell by the rains. Anyway,” and he nodded at the screen, “they’ve all got four-wheel-drive vehicles, presumably with intact suspension. They’re doing about a hundred and forty right now.”
“Show me on a moving map.”
Baxter switched the display and pointed. “Them. Us.”
Juice squinted at it. They were actually, if not neck and neck, then side by side, one on the road, one off it – both the good guys and the bad guys racing northwest toward the new Seahawk crash site. The bad guys were slightly ahead.
ARISEN, Book Twelve - Carnage Page 9