How had things gone to hell so fast? He thought he’d been prepared for anything. But he hadn’t been prepared for this. With his team’s dwindling strength and numbers, with everyone exhausted and wounded, with live and dead attackers advancing from all sides and from above, Handon was just about out of faith this was going to work out. But even as he thought that, he knew the solution was the same as it had always been.
Somehow, he was going to have to dig down again.
Life these days was just one lethal trial after another, seemingly without end. But life had always been a series of trials. As the Haitian proverb had it, “Behind mountains are more mountains.” Handon knew Elysium was a myth. One didn’t overcome an obstacle to enter the land of no obstacles. There was always more adversity, usually bigger and worse than what came before.
The question was always how you responded to it.
Handon hunkered down further against the steel rain scything the woods. The Black Shark was triggering off three- and five-round bursts, spreading them around for maximum coverage. It was eventually going to find the range, not to mention take down the intervening trees, and finally wedge lethal fire into every corner of the forest, killing them all. Probably sooner than later.
Something had to change.
Handon decided he had to take out one of the two attacking aircraft if they were to have any chance. And it wasn’t going to be the jet-powered UCAV. No, the only tactical advantage he had was the fact that the Black Shark was currently static over the river – settled in, feeling safe, and shooting from a hover. As he tortured his brain, trying to formulate some new super-heroics for man vs. Black Shark, a body crashed into him from the right. Turning into it and raising his .45, Handon saw it was Henno, tumbling into Handon’s position of cover.
Nonplussed, Handon said, “Radio broken?”
Henno didn’t answer, but just looked straight at him. Handon could see half his face was covered with blood, and he looked like he’d taken a few small hits from shrapnel or bullets in multiple places around his body. Without breaking eye contact, reloading his rifle by touch, he said: “So – you want to go do something about that fucking helicopter? Or do I have to?”
He finished his mag change, popped up, and started shooting.
“And I bloody well charged the last one.”
* * *
Out on the right flank, curled up on the ground, waiting for the bullet or bomb that would finish him and exterminate his helpless terror, Baxter felt strong hands on him. For one second he thought they were pulling him to safety, or maybe just pulling him up to get back in the fight.
But they were actually taking the RPG-32 off his back.
He opened his eyes. It was Handon.
Slinging the long tube over his own shoulder, he patted Baxter once. His expression said: I can’t ask you to do more than you’ve done. “Hang in there,” he said.
And then he was gone, disappearing into the maelstrom.
* * *
Inside the dark cabin of the crashed Seahawk, Juice stripped wire ends with his multitool like a man possessed. That done, he folded the knife blade away, flipped out a Philips head, and opened up the panel in the helo’s APU. He then switched to pliers and used them to expose two wire leads, then got one end of his scavenged power cable connected.
He squatted down to the mini ground control station, already out and open on the deck. It sat side-by-side with his Tuff-book, also powered up, and connected to the mini-GCS by serial cable. Juice didn’t even have a control transfer code for the UCAV – and the Kennedy hadn’t responded to any of his hails for at least an hour. But he didn’t need a transfer code. As he’d told Handon, there were plenty of known exploits for hijacking drone control connections.
And Juice had one of his own.
He’d already wired the mini-GCS to the Seahawk’s much bigger antenna – and now connected the end of the power cable. He said a silent prayer the device could actually handle the huge surge of juice Juice was about to blast into it.
He powered it up. It didn’t blow.
He searched for signals on the GCS, and found exactly one asset in range. He then turned to the Tuff-book and kicked off his exploit from the command line. Streams of output scrolled by as the hack tried to overwhelm and hijack the control connection. The fact that he was transmitting from significantly closer than the Russians would help. But he still was not remotely sure this was going to go.
If it didn’t, they were well and truly fucked.
The scrolling lines of output stopped. No error code.
The little video window on the GCS flickered to life – and showed a fast-moving color view of the forest and river valley scrolling by below. It was the view from the UCAV, and it was nose down, descending toward an area of forest that looked from above like it was exploding.
It was making another attack run.
Juice gripped the controls on either side of the keyboard. He pulled the joystick smoothly up and left. The view of exploding forest disappeared out the bottom and right of the screen, replaced by swirling gray sky.
He had it.
“Ha!” he shouted out loud. “Nostrovia, motherfuckers!”
He hit his radio and hailed Handon.
* * *
Handon took the update as he hurdled a fallen tree, hauling ass around the left side of their line, west and upriver of the enemy. He was flanking the entire battle, leaving Henno to anchor the middle alone. He wouldn’t be able to do it for very long.
But none of them had long anyway.
One advantage to being way out on the flank was that the forest was exploding less around him, meaning his life expectancy was longer. Initially, there was also less incoming small-arms fire – but then someone on the right of the Spetsnaz line spotted him and started lighting him up, tracking his run through the hellscape forest.
If he’d had time to think about it, Handon would have been amazed to run through this much exploding and bullet-torn forest without getting hit. His suit had been pelted a couple of times, but nothing that penetrated. And he was still totally uninjured. Like he’d just stepped off from Hereford over three weeks ago.
Instead of having just fought through half the ZA.
But the downside to the flanking position was a greater concentration of undead. Handon didn’t take time he didn’t have to shoot opponents he didn’t care about – but merely gave the stiff-arm Heisman treatment to any who got in his way. Otherwise, what was the point of the bite-proof suit? Anyway, he figured he was moving too fast to be infected.
Or something.
* * *
Misha knew when he had an opponent on the ropes. And he knew that was the time to take the gloves off – and rip that opponent’s throat out. They’d slipped a trick on him with that envelopment – but then Nina had arrived and put their heads down, good and hard. And now Misha doubted they would ever come up again. He decided to tell Nina to cease fire, so he could sweep forward and finish it.
He was actually pretty sure there was only one shooter left in the center of the American line. Someone had either gone down or turned tail. Which meant their enveloping position was moot – they were too badly outnumbered and outgunned to leverage it. The angles couldn’t hold.
“RTO!” Misha bellowed.
“Da, Polkóvnik!”
“Tell the corpse-sitters on the other side of this river to be ready to move. We’re finishing this – now.”
“Da…” But thirty seconds later, the RTO came back on. “Polkóvnik, the Akula says they’ve lost control of the UCAV.”
Misha’s forehead wrinkled in deep folds.
Something exploded above and behind him.
* * *
Handon emerged from the forest into the open air along the riverbank, the RPG-32 already up on his shoulder, its collimating sight powered up, warhead armed, and safeties off.
He turned to the right, facing downriver, and took a knee.
The Black Shark hovered over t
he river eighty yards away, drifting slowly from side to side as its autocannon chattered and systematically reduced the forest ahead of it.
Handon sighted in on its right-side engine.
He let the rocket go.
It streaked off on a trail of smoke and flame and a half-second later caught the helo square on the engine cowling, just below the base of its rotors, and just above the weapons-laden stub wing.
A vicious explosion obscured most of the aircraft.
Handon let the empty launch tube fall from his shoulder and brought his rifle up as he ID’ed a shooter – one with a sniper rifle – lying on his stomach on the base of the destroyed bridge, also about eighty yards out. Handon lit him up, wood splinters chipping up around the sniper’s body – but the man rolled quickly and smoothly off the far side of the bridge and out of sight.
The RPG explosion overhead cleared – and the Black Shark was still there behind it, still flying, though swaying and rocking more than before. But it looked undamaged. No effect whatsoever… except to get its attention.
Which was exactly what Handon wanted.
It started to pedal-turn in his direction, spinning 90 degrees to its left, lining up all its weapons on him – and he stood alone and exposed out on the riverbank. Handon was actually close enough to lock eyes with the pilot across open air. Her neck stretched forward, eyes first wide, then dangerously narrowed.
Handon planted his feet. He stole a look at his watch.
And then he brought his rifle up to his shoulder.
* * *
On the opposite side of the river, fifty meters inside the forest, two big and blank-faced Spetsnaz commandos maintained a wary vigil over a bagged-up body, which undulated slowly on the swampy ground between them. They had been given the honor of protecting the mission objective – the Index Case.
Standing to either side of it, slightly hunched over, scanning the thick bush, they both wore dark gray fatigues, body armor, and tactical vests; knives and handguns on duty belts and chest rigs; alert and emotionless faces marked with soot, dirt, and sweat. Both held black AK-100s to their shoulders, textured polymer Magpul magazines protruding below, EOTech sights on top.
One put his hand to his radio earpiece.
“Da, Polkóvnik.” Speaking over his shoulder to the other, he said, “Be ready to move. It’s nearly done.” The other nodded and monitored his sector. A faint noise sounded from the forest, perhaps a crunching branch – causing him to hunch down more, squint out into the thick vegetation, and raise his weapon from the low to high ready position.
A single round caught him in the throat, spinning him halfway round. Both he and his buddy reacted instantly, dropping down into cover and lighting up the section of forest the shot had come from. More rounds cut the air and foliage around them.
Right behind them came three crashing bodies.
We’re In Ur Base, Killin Ur Dudz
Nugal River Valley – North Side of the River
[Ten Minutes Ago]
“I’m definitely getting too old for this shit,” Fick muttered.
This was the second time in his life the grizzled Marine Master Gunnery Sergeant had used that line. But the last time, on Beaver Island, shit had been blowing up too spectacularly for either Brady or Reyes to hear it.
This time they did hear, as the only noise was that of the autocannon on the Russian helo, chattering off in the distance – and the heaving and grunting of their own labored breathing. Fick and what was left of his senior fire team had been hauling ass overland all day, ever since Handon had made radio contact and got them moving on an intercept course with the fleeing Russians. They had first found an abandoned vehicle they could roll start, and had driven it like maniacs all the way to the edge of the river valley. They’d been forced to abandon it there, and had been hauling ass on foot through the bush for the better part of an hour.
By the time of Handon’s final transmission and instruction – that Patient Zero was static on the ground and only guarded by two shooters, along with a ten-digit grid reference for its location… and also reporting that Alpha was in a gunfight that could end with them all dead in minutes…
Since that moment, the Marines had been on a hell of a clock. And they had been sprinting through the bush of the Nugal River Valley, Fick only stealing looks at his GPS to make sure they were still vectoring in on their target.
They didn’t even slow when they reached the spot, raising their rifles and firing flat out as they blasted into the little clearing like the wrathful ghost of Chesty motherfucking Puller. But the two Spetsnaz didn’t back down an inch, they certainly didn’t run – and they didn’t stop fighting when they got hit, one of them right through the neck.
It turned into a quick and ugly fight in close quarters, nearly point blank, suppressed rounds spitting back and forth, and only ended when Fick dove on the last Russian standing and held him down while Reyes shot him. When it was over, Brady had been wounded, a gunshot wound to the side of his groin.
But the clearing was theirs. Patient Zero lay undefended on the ground at their feet.
They’d done it.
Correction, Fick thought. Handon did it. We’re just his loyal minions at this point.
But they were also out of time. Even as Brady jammed a gauze pad against his inner-thigh wound and Fick picked up the bagged body and threw it over his shoulder, his radio went. He was expecting Hailey, who’d been acting as their comms relay with Alpha when they were too far away, or in bush too thick, for their team radios to carry. But it wasn’t her. It was Juice.
“Cadaver Two from Cadaver One-Five: be urgently advised – fighter top cover is down. And Thunderchild did NOT stop that Spetsnaz ground convoy. How copy?”
“Solid copy, Cadaver One,” Fick said. So, more bad news. There never seemed to be an end to it. He watched while Reyes pulled an RPG from under the body of one of the Russians, with an Ooh, this might come in handy look on his face.
“Cadaver Two, be further advised – that convoy is inbound your location.”
“ETA?”
“Pretty much any second now. You gotta bounce, Master Guns. And so do I.”
Fick didn’t bother signing off, but just turned to start hauling ass through the forest, back the way they came, and away from the road the convoy would be coming in on. Except this time with eighty pounds of dead guy over his shoulder.
He put his head down and focused on running.
* * *
Huddled up in his version of a drone control trailer in the Nevada desert, Juice sat on the floor of the Seahawk cabin with his back against a bulkhead, boots flat on the ground, knees up, and the GCS in his lap – following Handon’s instructions.
He brought the UCAV’s airspeed up as fast as he dared – and this aircraft could seriously tear up some sky – as he navigated the twisting and narrow channel of air ten feet over the Nugal River, between the edges of thick forest to either side.
He was going to have to time this shit perfectly.
Then again, he was pretty sure he wasn’t going to be too early. But too late would be a big problem, not least for Handon. Juice stared daggers at the screen as he played history’s most high-stakes video game.
The river blasted by below, trees blurring by on both sides.
* * *
Before the explosion of the RPG on the Black Shark had even settled, the airframe still rocking, Nina executed her ninety-degree pedal turn like the last best helo jock in the world, which she was, the world spinning as if on an axis beneath her.
Ten feet below, the river surged, twisting through the lush valley toward the Indian Ocean. To her left, just inside the edge of the forest, Team 1 of Mirovye Lohi took the fight to their enemies.
And directly ahead…
Directly ahead was a single enemy soldier, standing tall on the bank of the river, RPG tube at his feet, rifle to his shoulder. Unlike with her last two RPG attackers, which Nina snap-fired two rockets into and personally machin
e-gunned to death, respectively, she was so bemused by whatever the hell this guy was doing that she held her fire for a second.
Index finger curled around the autocannon trigger on the front of the cyclic, half the slack already out of it, she squinted into the eyes of this man, who was only eighty yards out – hell, scarcely the safe distance of the autocannon, not that she worried too much about safe distance.
And then this complete maniac started shooting at her – with his personal weapon. She had to give him credit. Rounds flecked off the armor glass right in front of her face, in a grouping maybe only two inches wide. Ten points for marksmanship, she thought.
But minus several million for target selection – and stupidity.
Her finger tightened on the trigger.
* * *
Handon saw the UCAV, and its missiles, at the same time he heard them. All three – the drone, and the two ASRAAMs, already off their rails and surging forward – were moving near the speed of sound. And all three appeared in an instant from the bend in the river behind him, missiles first, blasting up the river channel.
The air buffeted Handon as the munitions flashed overhead. He stopped shooting and lowered his rifle.
And he waved a lazy salute at the Black Shark pilot.
* * *
Nina’s radar warning receiver went apeshit at the same time she saw the sleek silver blur of the UCAV round the bend in the river – right behind two anti-air missiles. And this time, she had no forest cover to drop back down into. She was already in it.
And she was in it deep.
With the RWR shrieking, Bazarov shouting out headings and ETIs, the countermeasure system spitting out red flares to either side, heroically trying to confuse the infrared homing of the missiles, Nina pushed the engines to max power and tilted the bird to the left, sending it careening toward the forest edge on the south side, at the same time climbing with both collective and engine power for absolutely everything the aircraft was worth.
A half-second later, the helo was buffeted and thrown across the sky by first one explosion and then another, much closer – both of them low and to the right, where they had been hovering a quarter-second ago. The ASRAAMs were heat-seeking, but they also had laser proximity fuzes. And instead of passing harmlessly beneath or alongside…
ARISEN, Book Eleven - Deathmatch Page 30