But then, inevitably, the wheel turned. As they approached an intersection of hallways, Jameson “sliced the pie” to the right, clearing around it fast but a few degrees at a time, knowing Sanders would be doing the same on the left, while Halldon faced forward. And down at the next intersection were two real shooters – advanced AKs, vests, and NVGs. They were facing ninety degrees away, looking back down a parallel hallway in the direction Jameson’s team had just come from.
He hesitated for only a fraction of a second, knowing even as he did that hesitation was going to get him killed. The man in the rear spun to face him even as Jameson squeezed his trigger, missing low and catching him in the throat. The man crumpled forward, hands going for his neck. By this point, his buddy was spinning, sliding into cover, and firing – all at once – engaging more quickly than Jameson could have predicted, or could even believe. Luckily, he was already dropping to the deck and the rounds snapped over his head.
But smashing into the tile floor, he knew in his bones this guy would be able to hit him in his prone position before he could fire again. And at this range, there was little chance he’d miss. But then he saw the man jerk from a hit in the head as his NVGs sprayed glass and plastic, and he pitched over backward. In the same instant, Jameson saw a suppressor and barrel extending over his head, as Halldon pushed out over the top of him, covering his commander, and teammate.
Jameson tried to get his breath. And get back to his feet.
Because they weren’t nearly done. And, as the seconds ticked away, this wasn’t going to get any easier.
Some Fights Chose You
On Board Jesus Two One, Over Central Somalia
Handon thundered back from the cockpit into the main cabin of the Seahawk like a man on a mission, which he was. Those in back worked out what that mission was from the G-forces that once again pulled at them and pressed them into bulkheads and one another.
It was to get this goddamned aircraft – which the pilots had understandably gotten away from the Stronghold and immediately taken in whatever direction seemed safest – getting this goddamned aircraft turned around and flying at its top speed in the direction the Russians had disappeared in. With Handon’s goddamned mission objective, namely Patient Zero.
Now Juice, Henno, Baxter, and Ali all fell into a pile of bodies as the helo came out of a severe banking 180, straightened up and leveled out, put its nose down again, and blasted forward. But somehow, alone of all of them, Handon didn’t fall over, or even lean. It was as if he had his own personal gravity field – as if his will and resolve alone made him impervious to the laws of physics.
As Juice straightened up, Handon grabbed him.
“What the hell happened back there?” he asked.
Juice spat tobacco juice out the gunner’s window as he considered this question, which he knew was a good one. How the hell did the Russians know exactly where and when Alpha would be taking receipt of Patient Zero?
“My guess? Hacked comms. They just listened in on us setting up the whole thing with al-Sîf.”
Handon shook his head in disbelief.
Juice shrugged. “Listen, this could get worse before it gets better.”
“How?”
“If the Russians hacked CentCom’s old encryption key, what else can they hack into? Russian cyberwar teams were as good as anybody before the fall – as good as the Chinese, better than the Israelis.”
Handon cocked his head and considered this.
“We need to think about control connections to things like drones. When we’ve got something flying over our heads with thousands of pounds of explosives, we really want to make sure we’ve got positive control.”
Handon said, “You mean the drone jocks on the Kennedy need to make sure they have positive control.”
“Not necessarily.” Juice reached into his ruck and pulled out a device that looked like a hardened laptop, but with video game controls on little wings on either side, and a rubberized antenna. Handon recognized it as a Universal Mini Ground Control Station (UmGCS), used for controlling drones from the field.
“That the one Zorn had in his MRAP?”
“Thought it might come in handy.”
“So you plundered it.”
“Seemed a shame not to.”
But Handon waved this off, along with the concerns about Russian hacking. They had more urgent problems right now, and he couldn’t worry about everything, or consider every possible risk point at once. Right now, aside from actually catching the goddamned Russians, he needed to think through the ramifications of their comms being compromised.
As was common in tight units, Juice read his mind. He tapped his own radio. Handon took his point. Juice had insisted they all manually rekey their team radios every two weeks.
“But this still means our comms with everyone but us are compromised. The carrier. Our air support…”
Juice smiled again. “Thunderchild has got our new key.”
“What – seriously?”
Juice nodded again.
Handon switched to the CAS net and hailed her himself.
* * *
Five thousand feet over the spinning rotors of that Seahawk, a couple of miles north and going 400mph faster, Hailey “Thunderchild” Wells was in pursuit – of that Black Shark. After bailing out of the Stronghold, the Russian helo had dropped down into the ground clutter of the Galmudug bush – but Hailey knew it had to be down there somewhere. She just had to spot it. CIC had reported that, before they were lost to radar, the two Russian aircraft, Orca and Black Shark, had split up and headed in different directions.
And right now Hailey needed to find that damned attack helo. Because while it wasn’t a threat to her, it was still extremely dangerous to the shore team – half of whom were crawling south in defenseless ground vehicles in open desert, the other half piled into an unarmed and unarmored Seahawk.
She intended to find, fix, and finish the threat.
But now her radio went. “Thunderchild, Cadaver One Actual.”
“Go ahead, Cadaver.”
Handon said, “Listen carefully. Do you still have our squad’s radio frequency – and encryption key?”
Hailey looked down to her radio display and saw the actual Post-it note stuck on the console. Containing a channel number, and a sequence of two-digit numbers, this had been pressed into her hand by the bearded commando, Alpha’s JTAC, at their last mission briefing. “Just in case,” he’d said.
She was surprised she had even remembered to bring it, or that it had survived in her cockpit this long. But there it was.
“That’s affirmative, Cadaver.”
“I need you to key that in – and switch channels.”
Hailey’s eyebrows went north, but he sounded serious. “Roger, Cadaver, wilco. Meet you on alternate channel.”
She let the plane fly itself for ten seconds while she typed the encryption key on a touchscreen keypad. Then she switched channels.
“Cadaver One, Thunderchild, commo check.”
“Solid copy, Thunderchild. What’s your location and status?”
“About thirty clicks north of you now. I’m going to pursue and destroy that Black Shark. You’re not safe until I do.”
“Negative, negative. That target is a luxury right now. You have to follow the other air contact, the Orca – and you HAVE to stay visual with it. Repeat, do NOT lose that Orca, how copy?”
Hailey considered. Evidently Handon had the same report from CIC she did – that the two aircraft had split up, and both dropped below radar coverage. And it was the second one he was interested in. She got it.
“Roger that, Cadaver. Will reacquire the Orca as priority tasking, and update status then.”
“Thanks, Hailey. And stay on this channel. Cadaver out.”
Hailey switched off – and then took her F-35 into a banking turn that generated significantly more G-forces than even the most agile rotary-wing aircraft on the planet.
Or in history.
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br /> * * *
Handon instructed Juice to update Cadaver Three, their trailing ground convoy, about the compromised comms – and to use only their own squad net to talk to them, when at all possible. After that, he considered his next task – and realized it might actually be resetting his head. Because mindset was everything, and his had just had a hell of a shock. It was going to require a big mental adjustment.
He sure as hell hadn’t expected to end up fighting Russian Spetsnaz, or chasing them across half of Somalia to recover their mission objective. None of them had – with the possible exception of Juice. But they were now fighting enemies who were a thousand times more unpredictable than the dead, and a hundred times more skilled than half-assed pirates, or Islamist militia. Enemies who could outwit them, outmaneuver them, lure them into compromised tactical postures. And who also had explosives, attack helicopters, and God knew what else at their disposal.
This was an incredibly dangerous situation to be in.
And it was also incredibly galling. After all they had gone through, suffered and endured and overcome… only to have the prize snatched from out of their hands at the final moment. And Handon still couldn’t quite believe the conclusion he’d come to in his hole with Henno.
Why were these assholes back? Could it really for the same reason we are?
He pressed his helmet up against Ali’s and asked for her take on that question. She said, “I saw that Orca set down inches from Patient Zero. And they jumped out and grabbed it in seconds. Those guys knew exactly what they were there for.”
Handon shook his head in disbelief. “So you think they’re doing the same thing here we are?”
Ali shrugged. “If they’re trying to develop a vaccine, it makes sense they’d need an early virus sample. It’s probably what brought them to Africa in the first place.”
Handon straightened up, shut up, and thought on this.
So the situation was dangerous and galling. But it was also the situation they were in. And Handon knew he had to master his anger and disbelief, which would get them exactly nowhere. Conditions were always changing. And the response to it always had to be the same: adapt and overcome. If they packed it in every time things didn’t go their way, they’d have had very short careers.
Mistaking the nature of Handon’s silence, Juice said, “Damn, top. I saw you run through that wall of lead back there – then survive downrange of a minigun. Clearly God is on your side. Next firefight, I’m standing beside you.”
His expression darker than the storm-tossed sky outside, Handon said, “If you’d been standing next to me back there you’d have gotten shot.”
Juice took his point – dozens of rounds must have missed him by inches. Fuck it, he thought. Can’t win. He let it go.
But Baxter also failed to pick up on Handon’s mood, and ran with the theme. “We probably all should have died back there. Getting us all out alive… that was nothing short of a miracle.” But then he fell silent and his own expression darkened. And the others knew why – because of course they hadn’t all gotten out. His teammate, Kate, was still back there. For a second, he’d somehow forgotten this. Maybe it seemed too unreal to him.
Finally Handon spoke, obviously not thrilled by the self-congratulations. “Yeah, we keep surviving. But getting no closer to completing our goddamned mission.” He paused, lowered the tilt of his head, and looked around at the others. He then raised his voice to be heard by everyone.
“And not achieving the mission is bullshit. It’s unacceptable. Survival’s not the issue – hell, maybe survival has become the enemy of the mission.” He scanned faces, and saw a look of approval on Henno’s. “Maybe it needs to be the other way around. Maybe we all need to be dead. But finally mission complete. Once and for all.”
He went up front to make another radio call.
* * *
Ali watched Handon turn away and lean into the cockpit. From his hunched back muscles, she could see the tension in his body. She was worried about him.
And for some reason she now remembered a Hebrew phrase she’d learned from an IDF sniper she cross-trained with: Dvekut baMesima – literally, “glued to the mission.” Mission-focused. That was clearly Handon now, from top to bottom. It was great as far as it went. But like everything, it could be taken too far.
She thought back to those Spetsnaz shooters in the Stronghold, leaving their fallen men behind without so much as a backward glance. That was being mission-focused up to and past the point of sanity. Past the point of even being human – if, as Ali believed, it was our love for one another that made us human.
And she didn’t like it.
Fighting guys who didn’t fear death, who had no care or compassion for their own brothers, who’d forsaken love and humanity, who had perhaps jettisoned the very categories of morality, of good and evil… well, it put you at a big tactical disadvantage, to say the least.
And Ali was afraid they actually might all end up dead before this was over. Maybe having achieved their mission objective. Or maybe not. But all dead.
She mentally shrugged. As always, there was no choice but to carry on, and deal with the threats they faced. She’d been around the block enough times to know that some battles you chose, or at least could see coming. But others came out of nowhere.
And some fights chose you.
Dude, Not Funny
JFK, Fantail Deck
[28 Hours Ago]
Commander Abrams stood at the railing, wide-eyed and blank-faced, and listened more than watched as the ship’s launch disappeared into the darkness of pre-dawn – and into the greater darkness of the shadow cast by the African continent. And Fick’s last words before stepping off echoed in his head:
Let’s get this over with.
Abrams exhaled into the cool air of the early morning. As usual, their grizzled Marine commander had it about right. And he had definitely captured the general sentiment, shared by everyone both on and now off the carrier. Everyone was tired – exhausted, really. It was easy to feel like they were all out of strength, maybe even out of resilience and resolve – those two priceless commodities Abrams knew the operators had in spades.
Alpha and MARSOC would carry on to the bitter end.
But could the rest of them?
Abrams increasingly doubted this, doubted it even about himself. He just wasn’t able to admit it to others. The commander of the vessel could never show weakness, or exhaustion, or despair. And keeping up this facade of hope, of optimism, of can-do good cheer… well, it created an enormous strain. And that was on top of the already crushing weight of command, of responsibility for the ship, and everyone on it, for the mission. For the survival of humanity.
And the longer Abrams walked around in Drake’s old shoes, the more convinced he became that it was this strain that had done him in. It wasn’t the gunshot wound, or even the grenade blast beside his head. No, it was the heavy gravity field of command – which no one could stand up in forever. It was the loneliness at the top. It was every decision, every buck, stopping with the commander.
And having absolutely no one to pass it to.
Staring out across the water as the coast of Africa slowly grew visible in the smudged morning light, Abrams already ached with his very cells to see that launch come back – with all the same passengers it went out with. But, much more importantly, with their mission objective on board – the first undead man, and maybe one of the last. Then he could put it on a plane back to Britain and steam the hell out of this spooky gulf, and away from this fell continent. This place that had already been so brutal, and so costly for them.
Thinking of it, Abrams decided to go back to the bridge and check on the progress of that damned plane.
But then he hesitated – and decided first to go down the ladder and exchange a few words with the two armed guards, both new additions to NSF, now permanently posted to the rear dock. This watch had been set up ever since Alpha team’s SEAL, Homer, had issued such eerily pre
scient warnings about the Russians in general – and Naval Spetsnaz units in particular.
Lucky for us, Abrams thought as he descended the steps, Homer also singlehandedly sank the Russian battlecruiser. So that threat was now gone. Nonetheless, their bloody tangling with Spetsnaz – not least those combat swimmers planning mines all over their hull – had awakened them to their vulnerability.
And the ship-wide security posture had changed.
Some.
* * *
A half-hour later, the horizon out over the Indian Ocean was still lightening – and the two dock guards, Nelson and O’Malley, were trying not to fall asleep on their feet. This was despite the admonitions of Commander Abrams, who had clearly dropped by just to keep them on their toes. But with him gone, the dark, the silence, and the lapping of water were making it hard for them to keep their eyes open.
They were also brand new to Naval Security Forces, and had received only rudimentary training so far from Derwin and his cadre. Before this, they had both been Stores crew. But with NSF’s losses, and with the increasing demands of shipboard security, a lot of random bodies were being thrown at the problem. Unfortunately, Nelson and O’Malley’s bodies were both used to working regular daytime watches, and sleeping at night.
They both perked up, startling and turning, at the sound of some indistinct scraping noise. Both turned and raised their rifles toward the black maw of the fantail deck, behind and above them.
“Who’s there?” Nelson asked, his voice sharp. “Identify yourself and your business on this deck.”
No answer came back. There was only the quiet lapping of the dark water against the dock at their feet. The two turned in and looked at each other.
Nelson shrugged. “I’ll go take a look.”
O’Malley nodded. Watching the other ascend the ladder, he kept him carefully covered with his rifle. Only once did he steal a look over his own shoulder, at the glassy black surface of the ocean behind him. And he slightly wondered if he should be covering the other direction, facing out. His training hadn’t extended to this situation. But there was only one of him down there now. And Nelson was his teammate.
ARISEN, Book Eleven - Deathmatch Page 16