But as he started to turn, he paused and took one hand off his weapon, just to reach down and pull his drawers out of his ass-crack. Ahhh. That had been bothering him since he hit the deck, but he hadn’t had two seconds to fix it. Nice.
And as he smiled out loud at the feeling of relief, he heard a wild shrieking noise, coming in on him fast – and a heavy weight landed on his back and shoulders from behind. It could only be a leaping Foxtrot, and so it was, flailing around on his back like a hyperactive five-year-old. Pred reached up behind him to yank it off. But even as he did so, one of the sailors on top of the forklift depressed his shotgun, sighted in carefully, and fired a single 12-gauge buckshot round.
His aim was perfect.
The Foxtrot’s head exploded like a shotgunned watermelon.
Brain matter, blood, and viscera splashed full across the side of Predator’s face, coating his head with gore, which dripped thickly from his eyes, his nose, his chin…
Still on his way back in to the lines, Handon looked up to see what had happened. “Nooo!” he shouted, racing forward toward his friend.
Predator shook his head once. He dropped the Paul Bunyan club where he stood. It fell to the deck and hit with a low-pitched double clang, one end then the other settling, droplets of water splashing up gracefully at either end. Pred could feel, taste, and smell the foul, infected, rotten viscera thickly coating and running down his face. And he could hardly see at all – but he knew exactly what had happened.
He blinked heavily, twice, but to no effect. He shook his head again.
And now, as he stood otherwise motionless in the center of the two lashing storms, his right hand moved smoothly up to his pistol in its rig on his tactical vest. He snapped away the thumb-break, drew the weapon, and flipped up the safety with his right thumb. And as he hauled the hammer back, and raised it up toward his own right temple, his lament from back in the bomber played back in his head:
Maybe the only thing that can kill Predator is Predator…
A sharp pain flared in the top of his gun hand as something whacked into it with wicked force. It was Handon, making a precise barrel strike with the end of his rifle as he raced up, causing Pred’s fingers to flex open involuntarily, and the pistol to fall to the deck.
Handon followed this up with a heel strike to the back of Pred’s knee, which sent his leg out from under him, dropping him toward the deck.
In almost the same motion, Handon let his rifle go, drew his Vorax knife from his chest rig, and slammed it down, also with wicked force, straight into the forklift – or rather into the keg-shaped fuel tank that was mounted at head height on the rear platform, just above the engine. Having impaled this, Handon pulled and tore. Only the indestructibility of the knife, and his own desperate strength, made this possible. The relatively thin skin of the fuel tank ripped into a jagged gash.
Finally, taking no more than a second for all of this, and with no room for hesitation or error, Handon found a nerve point on Pred’s neck – he knew he had no chance of forcing the 315lb giant anywhere he didn’t want to go with only arm strength – dug three fingers into it, and pressed down desperately, bowing Predator’s head beneath the thick stream of gurgling gasoline that splashed from the gored tank.
Predator bellowed again from the pain and shock of the gas dousing his face, sounding like a wounded T-Rex, or a healthy lion. Nearby militia staggered backward, shocked and terrified and having no idea what the hell was happening.
“Don’t move!” Handon shouted, working to keep the huge head in place. “Hold steady! I got you. Don’t move.”
When finally the tank went dry, and Handon let him pull away and straighten up, Predator immediately reached up toward the agony that screamed in his eyes. But Handon said, “Don’t wipe it away – let it run.” He didn’t have to try to restrain him again. Predator understood, and did as he was told.
Finally, Handon took the blinded giant by the elbow, and led him unsteadily through the lines and back toward the rear.
Their battle was over for now.
* * *
All the way back at the island, almost at the stern, Handon helped Pred down to the deck, and got him sat with his back up against the huge structure, just to the side of one of the damage control stations. He then turned to open the plexiglas panel and started unreeling a length of fire hose – but then realized there were three other people behind him.
It was all three of the survivors of his mission to Ammo City.
Handon almost laughed. They were like puppies. No, scratch that – they were like warriors. And having followed Handon to hell and back, it seemed they planned to stick with him. They knew a good team when they were on one – and a fearless, capable, and self-sacrificing leader rarely needed a T-shirt announcing himself as one.
“You,” Handon said to the nearest, one of the men. “Get that hose deployed and pumping.” To the next, he said, “Get to the nearest aid kit. If it’s got eyewash pods, bring it. If it doesn’t, get down to the hospital and get some there. Go!” That left the woman, who had started daubing at Pred’s face with the sleeve of her blouse. She winced at the angry, inflamed flesh of his eyes, lips, and nostrils.
The other sailor now got the hose going and Handon took it, aiming the stream over Predator’s head and letting it run. They all stood like that for a minute, Pred enduring his waterboarding stoically – at which point the other sailor came back at a dead run, a big green aid kit clutched under his arm. He skidded to a stop, flipped it open, pulled out two fat bottles of saline irrigation solution, and handed one to Handon. Handon tore the top off, tilted Predator’s head back, and started washing out one eye cavity, then the other. He carried on until he had emptied both bottles.
Pred blinked and teared, the whites of his eyes blood-red and ravaged.
Handon looked over his shoulder at his three new attachments from the U.S. Navy. Only now did he have the time to read their name patches: the two men were named Parlett and Roy, the woman was Armour. That seemed apt – she’d certainly been his sword and shield in that last engagement.
Handon took a deep breath, only now internalizing that the five of them were safe-ish again. They weren’t going to die in Ammo City, at any rate. Handon for his part could not remember a closer call in his entire twenty-year-plus operational career. Now wasn’t the time to grieve for the five he had lost; but he could be happy that he’d at least brought these three back. That was something.
And, most importantly, they’d completed their mission.
Handon looked at each of the three in turn, and gave them an approving look – one that said: You did good. But aloud he only said, “Return to your duties.” They all seemed to hesitate. “Go – get back in the fight, where you’re needed. But stay together if you can. I’ll try to find you later.” He almost told them he’d fight alongside them any day; but resisted getting too sentimental, particularly when so much peril still abounded.
The three nodded, hefted their weapons, and headed out at a trot.
The strength draining from his body along with the adrenaline, Handon slumped down on the deck beside his casualty – who had been, before that, his savior. He looked over, in the relative silence of the rear, almost a half-mile back from the front, and just watched as the big man regained control of his face.
Finally, Handon said “What the hell?” That seemed to capture it.
In his basso voice, sounding both more tired and more peaceful than he usually did, Predator said, “Thanks for what you did. But you know it doesn’t guarantee anything. I could still turn.”
“Sure,” Handon said. “But if it comes down to that, I’ll take care of you myself. You’re not allowed to die unless I say so. Anyway, my question stands – what the hell was that?”
Predator shrugged again. “Spare the rod, spoil the Zulu.”
Handon laughed in surprise. “No. I mean, what are you doing here at all?”
Predator sighed. He then levered his enormous frame, big
inflamed face and all, back up off the deck and to his feet. “Oh – that. C’mon, I’ll tell you while we walk.”
Handon stood up wearily, but then hesitated. “Where to?”
“Back to the front. ’Cause does it look like this fight is over to you?” Even from more than half the length of the carrier back, the near continuous firing, explosions, and moans of the dead floated on the air. The battle still raged.
“No,” Handon said. “I don’t suppose it does.”
The two set off at a steady lurch, Handon a little steadier. Pred talked while he lumbered, still favoring his badly wrenched knee. “Basically, I heard your transmission during the drop, then spotted you plummeting into the middle of the fight. Didn’t much like the idea of leaving you on your own.”
Handon tabled for now the disciplinary matter of Predator having not gone where he was fucking well told. It was the logistical matter that confused him. “But you must have jumped half a minute before me. From not much more than three thousand feet.”
Pred nodded. “Hellacious updrafts. I could have flown over this battle all day.”
“Maybe you should have.”
“They should have patched me into the command net. I could have run the whole battle like some kind of grandmaster chess match.”
Handon looked down at the little glass bubble of the catapult control pod protruding from the deck as they passed it. Speaking of running the battle, it occurred to him that when things got worse up here, that would be an excellent place to position someone in command, where he could monitor the battle close up, but from safety. With the catapult officer long gone, it now sat empty.
Handon clapped Pred on the shoulder. “They’ve got drones for that, they don’t need half-assed Predators sailing around with parachutes. And I ought to give you a fucking-off for disobeying orders and following me in. But maybe I’ll let it go this time.” Left unsaid was: Because you completely saved my ass.
And with this, they found themselves only a few meters behind the front line again. And that was probably all the time they were going to have for shooting the shit. Handon started looking around for how next to make himself useful. He spotted a few of the Marines doing their regular routine of running around and shoring up the lines. Then he realized two of them weren’t Marines. One ran right by him.
He could hardly believe it – it was Juice.
Handon grabbed him by the arm. As the bearded one was yanked to a stop, Handon looked past him – and immediately picked out Henno anchoring the right flank, and heading up the defense of the vulnerable gash in the hull. Handon muttered, “Oh, you incorrigible sons of bitches…” These two must have landed behind the lines while Handon was trying to get himself killed up at Ammo City, and hadn’t been in a position to notice much of anything back here.
They had all followed him in.
Also, sure enough, Handon saw that Henno was rocking one of the XM29s, presumably picked up off the deck, where there were in fact a whole lot of them lying around – just as he’d predicted. Though Handon also noticed that Henno now failed to catch his eye or return his look. Whatever had led him to decide to follow the others down here, after being so adamant that they all needed to jump for the destroyer, was going to remain a mystery for now.
But as Handon watched those two work, it occurred to him that the quick reversal of the militia’s rout, and the successful re-forming of their lines, might have been in no small part down to them. He could already see they had wired themselves into the Marines’ defense, and fallen into combat leadership and mentor roles, which they were now executing with energy and efficiency.
Scratch that, Handon thought, thinking back to the utter chaos that had reigned on deck when both the destroyer’s guns had gone silent. It wasn’t that the reversal and re-forming had happened quickly – it was that it happened at all. That breakthrough had been twice as bad as the earlier one. The defenders might well have been totally overrun and wiped out, and it had looked like it was going that way. Maybe now Handon knew why it hadn’t.
The quick, decisive actions of a few professional, capable, and confident operators, at exactly the right place and time, can make all the difference.
Serving as frontline infantry in a fixed battle wasn’t by any means the best or most appropriate use of exquisitely trained special operators like those on Alpha team. But that didn’t mean they couldn’t do it. SOF skills were always built on a base of exceptional conventional soldiering. And the Alpha operators, particularly as combat leaders, had incalculably augmented the effectiveness of the force on that flight deck.
Handon shook his head. “Well, I guess it’s just disobey fucking orders day again…” He let Juice go, to get on with whatever urgent task he had been headed toward. And he regretted only that Henno wasn’t close enough to hear him recycle Captain Ainsley’s line from that rooftop in Chicago. It was a suitable homage. Maybe he’d tell him later, if they both lived.
He spotted Coulson nearby and, before going to link in with him and take his place back in the line, he looked up at Pred one last time in wonder, shook his head, and said:
“Well… at least Fick and his Marines are safe on the destroyer.”
Open Water
Ocean Surface, off the Coast of Virginia
Mist. Darkness. Water below, all around – and also above, falling from an evil sky.
Thick, heavy raindrops splashed and churned on the ocean surface, reducing visibility to a few meters. Near darkness reigned overhead, in a stone-gray skyscape of towering, churning clouds – rent at intervals by bright white sheets of lightning, not to mention the much more unnatural, and more incessant, angry-red shooting stars of tracer rounds. These streaked across the sky overhead, going from an origin he couldn’t see to a target he tried not to imagine.
He only hoped they knew what they were shooting at.
So – angry darkness above, and misty grayness around… but it was the almost complete blackness below that terrified him. He hadn’t yet definitely felt anything brush against his legs – but he couldn’t swear that nothing had, either. And his imagination was running away with him. There was no question there were dead in these waters – and a hell of a lot of them, more than he had ever seen before, and many more than he cared to imagine.
He couldn’t see them from where he floated, not with the splashing of the rain on the ocean surface, and the resulting mist and haze. But that only made them scarier.
A lot scarier.
Dr. Simon Park… slightly eminent bioscientist, certainly for such a young man… skilled and keen, if amateur, virologist and vaccine researcher… erstwhile hack survivalist (though, as Juice pointed out, he had survived – unlike everyone else in Chicago)… most recently first-time solo skydiver… and now lone and lost survivor, floating upon the mid-Atlantic dead sea, trapped beneath and in the middle of some kind of vicious and terrifying naval battle.
Also afraid, alone, spatially confused. No real idea where he was. Badly disoriented.
And then there were the sounds. The distant chatter of rifles and machine guns… the lower, guttural roar of what he assumed were bigger ship-mounted guns – and which he also assumed were producing the torrent of red tracers across the sky… the whump of grenades or perhaps other types of explosives… the faint shouts of living people crying out in pain, or fear, or panic, or else trying to rally others… and, beneath it all, only intermittently audible, but more terrifying for all that – the moaning of the frenzied dead.
It sounded like the roar of a stadium crowd from a far distance. Not loud – but rich. Multifold. Made up of too many individual voices to make out. And powerful. Also, it was more like the roar of a hundred stadiums. It raised the hair on Park’s neck and arms.
Or maybe that was the chill from being in the water.
He’d gotten his collapsed and soaked parachute off him, and inflated the life preserver, as Ali had instructed him – a hundred years ago, back in what had seemed like the safety of the pl
ane. Now, every few seconds, he paddled himself around in a tight circle, checking out the water on all sides. He was watching for threats… and looking for friends… alternately possessed of hope and of terror.
God – where was Ali? Where was anyone?
His laptop satchel hung around his neck, pulling him lower in the water than he would otherwise sit. But at least recent events had taught him to turn it off completely, rather than merely put it to sleep. Hopefully Juice could drain it for him again later. Or, actually, he hoped he’d learned something from his time with him, and could do it for himself now.
Crap. He belatedly remembered the IR strobe light, the emergency distress signal, that Ali had shown him, and which was attached to his life vest. He hesitated before activating it, trying to remember – the dead couldn’t see in infrared, could they? No, of course, that was impossible. They were no longer human… but they still had human-issue eyes. And human eyes couldn’t see in that part of the spectrum. It was just basic biology, and optics.
He pressed the rubberized button. Nothing changed that he could see. But of course that was the expected behavior. He couldn’t see in IR either.
He then paddled around in a circle again, scanning frantically.
Nothing.
God, how he wished the rain would stop. Then he wouldn’t feel so… isolated. Trapped. He knew the carrier, and the destroyer, both of which Ali had described to him, couldn’t be very far away. But aside from the streaking tracer fire, he couldn’t see a thing. It was like a bad dream: no idea where he was, no way to get out, only a dreadful and growing feeling that something was coming for him. He tried to fight the panic back down.
The effort cost him.
How long would he have to float here, waiting? Was anyone even coming for him? Had – he hated even to think it, but – had Ali even made it out of that spinning, diving, one-winged bomber at all? Oh, God…
By heroic, Herculean efforts, she had managed to shove him out the door – to save his life, and not for the first time. But he hadn’t seen another chute open above him. Then again, most of what he could see above him was his own chute, as soon as he got it deployed. And then, so soon after, he’d been nearing the surface of the ocean, and had a whole new set of dangers and tasks to deal with… But he hadn’t seen anyone else. Not even Emily, who had gone out before him, and who had almost certainly gotten clear. Maybe her chute hadn’t opened?
Arisen, Book Five - EXODUS Page 23