When they reached the back of the terminal, they found a series of a half-dozen double doors, outside of the departure gates, and out of which fliers would have exited and crossed the tarmac to board planes via rolling passenger-loading stairs. Ali was prepared to breach, but the first door she tried was open. And at that point, she revisited her dynamic entry plan. Going in stealthy seemed better.
Turning to the others, she issued orders. “Juice and Reyes on me for the assault. Fick guards P-Zero, with Baxter and… dreadlock guy, whoever the hell you are.” She hadn’t heard Juice’s explanation to Handon about al-Sif, but presumed someone had brought him to the party, for some reason that made some kind of sense.
She then turned, pulled open the door, raised her rifle, hunched her body over and around it, and led the way in. It was even darker in the terminal than in the thin early-evening light of the stormy day outside, but it wasn’t too hard to find the fight. She followed the whispered chorus of silenced rounds – and, more easily, the shouts in English and Russian and occasional grenade blasts – away from the departure lounge, and down a short corridor toward the back side of airport security.
She made a hand signal for cover, and behind her, Juice and Reyes complied. Squinting ahead, trying to work out the tactical picture, she knew something wasn’t right. When she thought she’d figured it out, she turned and made a hold gesture – then rose out of her crouch and slipped forward, disappearing into the shadows, alone.
She swung left, around the back side of the Russian force, and soon the back of the first shooter was visible, conspicuously foreign in his slate-gray fatigues, and only meters away. Silently, she angled a little further around until she had a look at the second one, farther on and to her left. Then she raised her rifle and shot the first in the back of the head – then pivoted and shot the second in the side of his head. They dropped within a second of each other.
She hit her radio. “Juice and Reyes, bring it up. Cadaver Three, this is Cadaver One – friendlies coming in from your twelve.”
She rose and walked up to the security station, beside the conveyer belt of the X-ray machine, and then through the metal detector. On the other side, there to greet her, was Homer. After a brief pause, they lowered their weapons, stepped forward, and embraced – but also briefly.
When she pulled away, she said: “Jesus, you let yourselves get pinned down by two guys?”
Homer looked beyond her at the two bodies. “Swear on my soul there were more of them.”
Jake stepped out from under cover. “They must have slipped away during the fight.”
Homer said, “The question is why. And where to–”
“Never mind for now,” Ali said. “We’ve gotta go.”
She looked up to see Juice and Reyes had arrived, and the rest of the other team had come out from under cover. And they looked pretty dinged up. Noise had a red-splotched white bandage wrapped around his upper arm. And, Jesus, was that Zack? As he hobbled up, Ali went to him, they locked eyes – and she hugged him, as well. No one reacted to this, though Ali knew everyone had to be wondering.
And a few feet away, wordlessly, Juice and Predator also embraced, enthusiastically man-patting each other’s broad backs with blows that would stun lesser men.
“Hey, lovebirds,” Ali said. “That’s sweet, but get a room – later.”
Finally, she turned and led them all at a trot back to the departure gates, and out back to where the rest of her group waited – and where more reunions commenced. When Baxter saw the state Zack was in, he said, “Holy shit, dude,” and hastened to take over holding up one side of him, while Kate stayed on the other.
“Big man!” Noise said to Predator.
“Hey, dude,” Pred said, smiling at him before turning toward Fick. “Hey, Master Guns,” he said, obviously pleased to see the grizzled Marine Master Gunnery Sergeant, and see that he was still alive. “That what I think it is?” he asked, pointing to the body bag over his shoulder. But when Fick didn’t have the wind to answer, but just nodded wearily, Pred said, “Oh, for God’s sake, give me that.” He lifted Patient Zero off Fick’s shoulder with one hand and just held it by his side.
While all this was happening, Jake was walking forward in silence, his brow lowering and expression growing dark. “Motherfucker,” he said, approaching al-Sif. Jake looked like he couldn’t have been any more surprised – or displeased – if the zombie of Osama bin Laden had turned up with the other team.
And then Jake saw the SCAR sniper rifle al-Sif was carrying – the one that had belonged to Kwan – and his knife flashed in his hand. His voice a lethal rasp, he said, “You make a real habit of taking weapons from better men than yourself—”
“Not the time – not here, not now.” This was Ali, giving Jake a not-to-be-ignored shove in his shoulder. “Settle your score later. Right now, I need everyone alive and shooting.”
When Jake paused and looked over, Baxter said, “He helped us fight Spetsnaz, and he drove us here. He’s with us now.”
Jake clearly didn’t believe that, and he certainly didn’t like it, if he even really heard it. But he sheathed his knife and stepped away. He obviously couldn’t stand to even look at that man.
As this was going on, Predator had been scanning the group – and now that the conflict between Jake and al-Sif was defused, he looked at Juice and Ali. “Hey – where the fuck are Handon and Henno?”
Juice shook his head slowly.
“What?” Pred looked like he’d had his testicles squeezed.
Quietly, Juice said, “Holding action.”
“And you just left them?”
“Yeah,” Ali said, rounding on him. “We did. And that’s why the rest of us are here now – if those two hadn’t gone back to delay and harass twenty-plus Spetsnaz, we’d all be face down in the desert, dead. So let’s not fuck it up now. Come on – get moving.”
And everyone there knew full well, anyway: Tier-1 guys were never dead until you saw a body – and saw it being lowered into the ground in a flag-draped coffin.
Still, Pred exhaled numbly, his expression shell-shocked. But, like the rest of them, he knew he had to remain operational – for every second this mission was still on. He tossed Patient Zero over his shoulder like a rag doll, and hefted his rifle one-handed with the other.
Ali also took a breath. She had no idea how she’d ended up with the job of keeping the world’s most diverse spec-ops team from devouring itself – there were way too many interpersonal dynamics going on right now – but here she was. A tight-knit SOF team didn’t necessarily need anyone in charge, because everyone knew their jobs, and nobody had to be told to do them. But this was no longer a tight-knit team. It was more like a school field trip.
They were back up to twelve now: four members of Alpha (exactly half the original team), namely Pred, Juice, Ali, and Homer, with the new addition of Noise; two MARSOC Marines, Fick and Reyes; two Triple Nickel SF soldiers, Jake and Kate; two Agency guys, Zack and Baxter; and one fish-out-of-water former al-Shabaab commander, al-Sif.
Ali angled Predator aside for a quick word. Standing close enough that she had to look up at him like he was in a tree, she said, “You’re most senior now.” As a Master Sergeant, he was ranking NCO… with Handon gone.
He shook his huge head, looking down at her, tears still wet in his eyes. “I don’t want it, man. I’m not taking Handon’s job. You’re doing just fine.”
Ali took a breath and nodded. That was what she’d been afraid of.
Pred said, “He would have chosen you, anyway.”
“I’ll just keep the seat warm ’til he gets back.”
And so, finally, herded by Ali, the reunited teams, battered and bloodied and badly reduced, drew themselves up and headed away from the terminal at a run – doing the Mogadishu Mile down the tarmac in the fading light, led by Juice this time.
“Where the hell are we going?” both Jake and al-Sif said at the same time, perfectly in sync. It wasn’t clear which of the two was more horr
ified to realize it. And no one answered. They all just followed Juice toward the big rows of aircraft hangars. And nursed their faith that they would soon find out.
And soon be free of this fell place.
* * *
But they weren’t free yet – and Homer’s question about where the other Spetsnaz ambushers had gone was answered sooner than anyone would have wished. As Juice led them at a run along the front of the row of hangars, and at an angle toward the one on the end, the air came alive with killer hornets – 7.62mm rounds cutting the air around them, fired by an unknown number and disposition of attackers under cover somewhere to their left.
Everyone dropped to the blacktop. It wasn’t clear who had been hit in the initial barrage, but it was probably wasn’t no one.
Man, this happened again fast, Homer thought, falling flat, then chucking a couple of grenades and going cyclic with his rifle as per doctrine in an ambush. Moreover, these new attackers seemed to somehow know exactly where they had been going.
Hell, even I don’t know where we’re going…
Homer reckoned the ambushers were positioned between the second- and third-to-last hangars – and they looked to be well dug in. Moreover, his own team was completely exposed out on the open tarmac, trying to melt into micro-features of the terrain. While the less experienced guys were actually trying to climb up inside their own helmets, the operators laid down covering fire, allowing all of them to take cover behind a wall of lead. It was only the withering return fire they were putting out – also as per doctrine in an ambush – that was keeping the ambushers’ heads down, enough to keep them all from being murdered out in the open.
But at this rate, soon they’d be out of ammo. And they might not even make it that long – particularly if and when the enemy started chucking grenades, or using even heavier weapons or ordnance. Exposed out where they were, their life expectancy in a grenade or rocket barrage would be measured in seconds.
Pred, who had his huge bulk curled around over Patient Zero to protect it, and was thus sticking up even more than he would have otherwise, underscored this on the radio. “Hey – I don’t think we can live another minute in this shit-storm. And today’s my damned birthday…”
“Seriously?” Reyes radioed back. “Happy birthday – you’re about to get shot in the face, bitchacho!”
Someone chucked a grenade from their own lines. Juice – who had, for understandable reasons, totally forgotten it was Predator’s birthday – came on and said, “Hey, check the grenade fire. We can’t risk damaging the aircraft.”
Homer was thinking, Oh, good, there’s an aircraft.
The grenade chucker must have been Kate because she came on and said, “What do you expect us to use, man—”
She was interrupted by return grenades erupting close – way too close. When the explosions settled, at least three or four people were trying to get on the channel to finish the line for her. “—harsh language?”
They were all about to die – but, bizarrely, they were making jokes. Homer had seen it before. The adrenaline spiked to a point where the fear turned to giddiness. Sometimes that was all that let you keep a handle on it. Still, they were going to have to act soon.
Or they were all dead.
When Homer looked over and locked eyes with Ali, he could tell they were thinking the same thing: as bad as things were right here, there was also an elephant in the room: Handon and Henno’s holding action. Because – presuming the two of them didn’t wipe out that other Spetsnaz team on their own – once they broke through, they were going to turn up here. Right in their rear.
And then they were definitely all freaking dead.
Gunned Down Like Dogs
Djibouti Airport – Perimeter Fence
Hailey sawed through the chain-link fence that bordered Djibouti-Ambouli International Airport, using the serrated saw-blade edge of her survival knife, while stealing occasional anxious looks over her shoulder – and resolving never again to complain about the damned survival vest.
This was a fairly bulky affair that all pilots were obliged to wear in the cockpit. The vest itself served as an extraction harness with an attached D-ring, and had a CO2-charged life vest around the collar. In its various pouches, it contained a small first aid kit, one-handed tourniquet, firestarter, pen flares, 12oz of drinking water, fishing kit, a signal mirror, an orange VS-17 signaling panel, Mylar survival blanket (also orange), a PRC-9 radio, visible and IR strobe, a good ole compass, whistle, knife, and duct tape. Not to mention her M9 pistol and two spare mags in a shoulder holster.
Basically, this was a lot of crap to strap to someone who was already squeezing into a tight cockpit – and performing one of the most physically and cognitively taxing activities in the entire sphere of human endeavor, namely piloting an F-35. And the fact was that on 1,000 out of 1,000 missions, absolutely none of it was needed. In reality, you were never shot down. And if by some anti-miracle you were, then 1,000 times out of 1,000 you were going to be recovered, usually by the CSAR bird, within minutes.
But not this time. Finally, the unthinkable had happened. Hailey had been shot down in the wilderness.
And she was on her own.
Now, as she folded away the knife and pocketed it, then peeled away the snipped section of fencing and squeezed through, she guessed this was just that one time in a thousand – in another thousand – when the survival vest paid for itself. It made sense. If there had ever been a one-in-a-million mission, surely this was it. It was by far the most critical one she’d ever performed – never mind that she had assigned it to herself, blatantly disobeying the orders of virtually everyone in the chain of command. As well, everything that could go wrong had gone wrong. And yet, she had performed up to a standard that maybe only one in a thousand fighter jocks could have achieved.
And she was even still alive, after all of it.
She didn’t have any other big ideas about how to get rescued, or keep herself alive, other than to try to get indoors and regroup – and keep hailing the carrier on the radio, getting absolutely no response. But she had also seen the flashes of light in the airport terminal building. Which meant that someone else still alive was in there.
And now that she was inside the perimeter fence, it was impossible to miss the two armed groups battling it out down on the tarmac, by the hangars.
Hailey intended to find out who they were.
* * *
“Okay,” Homer shouted to Ali, since she was conveniently tucked up beside him in the ambush shit-storm. “I’ve got a plan!”
The unified but dispirited dozen were right where they’d started – pinned down, running out of ammo and options, and on the verge of firing their last rounds just to keep themselves alive. Homer reflected that, although this ambush had started about twenty seconds ago, as usual in a lethal firefight, they all felt like they had been on this bit of tarmac, on the verge of being shot to death, for years.
“I’m listening!” Ali said, not taking her eye from her scope. It was clear she wasn’t going anywhere. She was also perhaps the only one inflicting any casualties on the enemy. While everyone else was blasting away and going cyclic simply to stay alive, Ali – preternaturally cool and effective as always – used her big Leupold optic to take the tops off one or two heads that popped up from cover for too long.
Looking ahead again, Homer said, “The good news is it should allow us to break contact and withdraw!”
“And the bad news?”
“It’s almost certainly going to get two people killed!”
Ali pulled her eye from her scope for one second and regarded the prone bodies around and behind them – particularly Predator, hunched over Patient Zero like it was a baby bird he’d rescued. She actually saw two incoming rounds fleck off the body armor on his back.
She looked back to Homer and shrugged. “Hell, I’m not doing anything else.” The two of them were closest to the front, and closest to each other, already in position. And neither of
them was going to hesitate a second before deciding to spend their lives for the team and the mission – both because that was just who they were, and because there wasn’t time.
“Here’s the play—” Homer said, wincing as a round kicked up blacktop fragments into his face.
“Wait,” Ali said, before he could go on.
Homer faced forward again, and the two of them now saw something utterly unexpected. The Spetsnaz shooters were still hunkered down, or occasionally maneuvering, spectral and indistinct in their dark uniforms with their custom weapons and gear.
But suddenly they started to fall.
And there came the sound of significant unsuppressed firing.
As superb shooters as Alpha and MARSOC were, from their prone positions there wasn’t much chance any of them, Ali excepted, were making killing shots on equally superb operators dispersed in prepared ambush positions. No, their opponents were getting shot from some other quarter, which became obvious as they started turning to their rear and shouting in alarm.
Some armed force was behind them – right in their lines.
And gunning them down like dogs.
* * *
The combined team down on the tarmac instinctively stopped shooting – all except al-Sif, who kept firing until Baxter knocked his weapon away and off the line. Even Baxter had worked out there were friendlies in their background now. But he didn’t manage to do so before he saw a figure who was definitely not Spetsnaz go down in the distance, in the alley between the warehouses. And it looked an awful lot to Baxter like he’d been shot by al-Sif. He’d been in the open, and exposed – and al-Sif took the shot.
Baxter was seized with a terrible fear about who that might be. But the fear was vastly outweighed by relief – that they weren’t all going to die in the next minute.
Still – who the hell had just been responsible for their deliverance?
Straight-Up Warriors
Djibouti Airport – UN Hangar
[Two Minutes Ago]
Inside the last hangar on the row, five men hunkered down around a UN World Food Programme de Havilland Dash 8 prop plane, listening with deep apprehension to the crescendoing sounds of a battle outside – albeit another silent-disco gunfight with mainly suppressed weapons. But when the grenade explosions started, there could be little doubt that something serious was going down out there.
ARISEN, Book Twelve - Carnage Page 20