Both went off – nearly in Nina’s face.
* * *
Handon watched as the first missile zipped in and exploded below and beside the helo – and then the second one exploded on it, or so close he couldn’t tell the difference.
He knew Juice was not a full-time drone pilot, never mind fighter pilot, and the mini-GCS didn’t have proper controls for advanced air-to-air weapons systems like the ASRAAM. Juice also either didn’t know about the minimum 5km range of the missiles, and their difficulty correcting inside of it, or just couldn’t do anything about it given Handon’s instructions. So this was probably never going to be the guaranteed kill that an F-35 would have gotten with the same munition.
And when the explosions cleared, the bird was still somehow in the air. But it was also on fire and smoking and flying erratically, careening back toward the right, as well as emitting an atrocious whine as the one surviving engine tried to pick up the slack for the destroyed one on the other side.
Whining, smoking, screaming, the mortally wounded bird of prey continued to veer off to the right, just clearing the tops of the trees on the north side of the river. And then it disappeared behind the forest.
Watching it go, Handon hit his mic. “Juice. Spetsnaz ground force is next – hit ’em. Two Hellfires. I’ll lase the target for you.”
“Roger that. Next attack run in thirty seconds.”
Handon then hailed his guys on the ground. “Ali, Henno, and Baxter – get ready to disengage, run like hell, and then cover up.” Still standing out on the riverbank, he flicked on the IR aiming laser on his barrel rail, brought his rifle to his shoulder, and pointed it at the backs of the Spetsnaz positions in the trees.
And he started swinging out and walking them down.
Get Some
Nugal River Valley – Just North of the River
As the three Marines, one of them seriously wounded, one carrying a body, all smashed through the heavy bush, they could already hear the Spetsnaz ground convoy arriving behind them. The two guardians of P-Zero had set up under cover, but close to the road that ran through the forest and met the destroyed bridge at water’s edge. They had been waiting for their ride.
It was here too late for them – but too early for the Marines.
They could hear the trucks rumbling through the rutted forest road behind them, moving at speed. And, as usual, Spetsnaz were switched on. Somebody in the first vehicle spotted them – and went leaping out to give chase.
Hearing rounds snapping through the air close to his head, Reyes stopped, spun, dropped down, and engaged. Confident, aggressive, the Russian commando was focused on catching his prey, not having the tables turned. As he blasted out of the bush, Reyes fired and cut him down, sending him sliding into the mud at his feet.
When he faced forward again to catch the others, Reyes found they had turned back and caught him. Or, rather, Brady had, with Fick following and hissing at him to get the hell back there.
“I’m taking rear ambush,” Brady said, his face shining with sweat, and pale from blood loss. “You guys go.”
Fick and Reyes instantly knew what he was thinking: that the enemy was too close, and he was slowing them down too much. They couldn’t get caught and lose their prize now.
“Fuck off,” Fick said. “I’m on rear ambush.” He turned to face Reyes, and tried to hand over the body.
But Brady shoved him in the chest, hard, and not for the first time. “All due respect,” he said, echoing his line from the last time he had threatened to kick Fick’s ass to save his life, “but get the fuck out of here, Master Gunnery Sergeant.”
Fick narrowed his eyes, but he didn’t move.
Reyes fidgeted, but didn’t lower his rifle, covering to their rear. “Hey,” he finally said. “Fuck it. I’ll stay. You two go.”
“Screw both you guys,” Brady said. “I’m not carrying that heavy dead son of a bitch. Now go before I’m forced to take your asses down – and then we’ll all still be here on the ground when the Russians show up.”
Fick swallowed heavily. He’d sworn to never do again what he did in Australia with their lieutenant – run away, while leaving a younger man to die holding the line behind them.
Brady shoved him again. “Seriously. Don’t make me kick your ass, Master Guns. I can still do that, I just can’t run anymore. You’ve got to finish this thing.”
Behind them, the foliage rustled and Reyes’s weapon chugged again. Another big dead Russian slid into the ground at his feet. “Out of time!” he said.
And now Fick finally realized the prophecy couldn’t be escaped. No matter what he did, or how hard he tried to take the brunt of it himself, he was doomed to watch his Marines go down one by one. His duty would require him to sacrifice them, probably everybody under his command, before this was all over. He pulled the RPG off Reyes’s shoulder and stuck it in Brady’s chest.
“Get some,” he said.
Brady nodded, then lowered himself down to the dirt. Reyes rolled one of the dead Russians in front of him for cover. When he went for the second one, though, he found the dude was still alive.
He looked down to the ZPW kit on his belt.
* * *
Handon wasn’t even sure himself what possessed him to walk up on the entrenched Spetsnaz positions, even from the rear. Much less why he would be approaching the site of an incoming Hellfire missile strike.
Was it because he felt immortal, untouchable? After walking through the fire of dozens of furious engagements in this campaign, unscathed? Or was it the opposite – that this time he knew he was going to die?
That, like Ainsley, he had a premonition of his death?
Whichever it was, still he peered calmly around and through the glass square of his holographic sight, stepping methodically forward and right, out into the shallows of the river itself. He was so focused, he didn’t notice when two Zulus jumped him from behind. He turned at the last second, but just let them come and body-checked them into the water. He didn’t dare take his aim away from the living enemy.
“Ten seconds to impact!” Juice reported. “Cover up!”
Handon instructed the others: “Break contact and haul ass to the rear. And try to get under hard cover.” But, having told them that, for some reason he still kept walking forward – right toward what was about to be the missile impact point.
And then… and then he saw him, live and in person, for the first time – the Spetsnaz commander, breaking cover and marching out of the woods and on to the open riverbank. He was a seriously big sonofabitch, and he moved with the utter confidence and pure will of an apex predator. This was a man who feared nothing.
They weren’t that close, but Misha immediately spotted Handon, snapped his weapon to his shoulder, and started firing – then started advancing rapidly, accelerating to a run.
Handon tensed but kept walking forward, and also started firing. He could feel the collapsing air pockets of rounds snapping around his head on both sides – and knew he hadn’t gotten shot in the face only because Misha had traded accuracy for aggression. He obviously made a living intimidating his foes and reducing them to helpless terror. But Handon was far too experienced, tough, and blooded to be intimidated.
He landed two rounds on Misha’s center of mass, but the man didn’t go down. Handon elevated his aim. He knew that, at this range, coming straight at each other, even with both of them bouncing as they charged, he could make the headshot. But as he put his red aiming dot on the bridge of Misha’s nose, he heard a shriek over his head and behind him.
It was the incoming Hellfire missiles.
Shit – the laser marking.
The Hellfires were following his IR laser. And as pleasant as it would be to spend the munitions on reconfiguring Misha’s face, he needed them to take out the rest of the Spetsnaz team. So instead of taking the headshot, he pivoted to the right, putting the invisible laser dot on the rear of the enemy positions – at the same time two black darts zipped by o
ver his head and into the treeline.
Right behind them came the blurred silver wedge of the UCAV, blasting overhead at nearly Mach speed, even as the Hellfires erupted in the forest, producing a tidal wave of rolling and rippling fire that shot into the woods to the southeast, but also in every other direction. The blast wave hit the riverbank, picked Misha up, and carried him off.
It was close enough to Handon that it singed the skin on his face and knocked him right on his ass, back into two feet of river water. When he sat up and raised his rifle…
Misha was gone.
And when his whited-out hearing came back, he could just make out the sound of suppressed shooting from the forest – but only from one side. It was Alpha pushing out and mopping up.
And then even that wound down. They’d finished it.
The battle was over.
Just Don’t Fail
JFK – Flight Deck
When the heavy storm of antennas and radar dishes from the sky finally ended, Wesley and his team stopped, reversed course – and ran back across the flight deck toward the island. This was for no better reason than it seemed like a better place to be than standing out in the open. They could all hear gunfire now, but it was impossible to tell exactly where it was coming from. Wesley didn’t want one of his people getting shot while they tried to figure it out.
As they dodged around or leapt over struts, shattered dishes, and twisted sections of catwalk, then finally rounded the side of the island, they could see flight deck personnel in their colored jumpsuits sprinting out and making themselves very busy.
“Air recovery ops,” Chief Davis said.
Wesley squinted in confusion, but then saw Davis scanning the sky to the stern. Following his gaze, he could see a small prop plane in the distance, lining up its approach with the long axis of the ship – or rather with the skewed axis of the angle deck.
But now the sound of gunfire was unmistakeable, though it still kind of seemed to be coming from everywhere and nowhere. Burns and Jenson faced out, scanning in all directions, rifles at their shoulders but still angled down toward the deck. No targets. But all of them were getting jumpier by the second.
Now, out in open air rather than surrounded by solid steel, Wesley’s radio started going manic. It was his NSF guys, reporting in from guard posts and duty stations, or from their own cabins. They were sending first- and second-hand reports of boarders spotted everywhere, seemingly in all parts of the ship at once. They were also requesting orders, wanting to know where everyone else was, trying to figure out what the hell was going on.
But for some reason, Wesley still couldn’t reach Derwin.
This was bad enough, but then he heard a woman’s voice report: “They’re all over the back dock and fantail deck! Repeat, boarders hold the stern. I don’t think we can retake it!” Wesley not so silently cursed. That scuppered his plan to take a motorboat to Djibouti. The back deck was the only place he knew of to launch one.
And then it got worse – the first reports of casualties came across the channel, including both wounded and dead. Many of Wesley’s people on duty were trying to do their jobs on their own – which was to defend their posts. And they were being taken down. The reports were confused and panicked, and in some cases made by non-NSF personnel who had picked up the radios of the fallen.
This was bad. Wesley felt panic tighten around his chest. The shore mission he’d led in Saudi Arabia had been hellish and terrifying. But that had been far away, with a small handful of people. This was their home, suddenly under terrible threat, and it now involved everyone Wesley had been given responsibility for. They’d be looking to him for leadership. And he was up here screwing around on the flight deck with the mechanics.
He turned to face the starboard side as a new sound joined the chorus of confusion – the engines and rotors of that shot-to-hell Seahawk, still sitting on the aft starboard aircraft elevator. Peering into the cockpit at the pilot, Wesley could see he looked pretty unenthusiastic about sitting where he was. Maybe it was his frantic movements as he got the bird ready to fly, but he seemed extremely keen on being anywhere but there.
And Wesley realized he still bore the terrible weight of perhaps his biggest decision ever – should he stay and fight, or should he go? Do his job by leading his people and protecting the ship? Or try to launch the secret and critical mission he’d been assigned by the shore team’s commander?
He had an overwhelming sense that everything hung on what he decided now. And also that disaster remained a very strong possibility, whichever way he decided.
The rotors of the helo whumped and beat the air.
* * *
Far beneath the growing chaos on the flight deck, Armour and Parlett managed to bypass the threats that loomed belowdecks, circling around any sound of firing or shouting. And they quickly found who they sought: Seaman Roy. He hadn’t in fact been on duty. But he was sure as hell at his duty station now – because that happened to be the ship’s armory. The three of them stood outside it, hyperventilating and swapping news, speaking over the warbling din of the general quarters alarm.
“What the hell’s going on?” Roy asked, breathing fast.
“No idea,” Armour said. “But I know I want to be armed for it.”
“Yeah, me, too.”
Once again, they’d all had the same idea. It was as if the crucible of combat had left the three of them with some sort of mystical connection, wired together for life.
Roy swiped his access card, then typed a long code into the keypad. The display turned green and the hatch came open. And behind it lay the vast ship’s armory: racks of M4 rifles, Remington shotguns, and M9 handguns. Crates of ammunition and grenades. And much bigger crates of the XM-29 experimental hybrid assault rifles they’d recovered from NAS Oceana.
But even as they started to enter this candy store of death, all three froze – at the approaching sound of pounding boots, down at the far end of the passageway. They ducked around behind the hatch, Armour peeking around the edge. And what she saw caused her stomach to do a backflip and the blood to chill in her veins.
It was a knot of four foreign-looking fighters in gray jumpsuits, so dark in the low light they all but disappeared against the gray of the bulkheads. All four were armed, and moving fast. They came to a stop outside the next compartment down – the ship’s magazine. Even bigger and more secure, this was where things like Sparrow missiles and autocannon shells for the CIWS Phalanx guns were stored. While two of the invaders covered the passageway, one in each direction, the other two squared up against the hatch – and started doing something that quickly produced bright showers of sparks, as well as a loud hissing sound.
Armour was pretty sure she knew what that was, and pulled her head back under cover before the guard facing in her direction could spot her. Darting back inside, leaving the hatch open for now, she found Parlett and Roy already breaking out XM-29 rifles from a crate, then stuffing their pockets with magazines, of both 5.56mm rounds and 25mm smart grenades.
Armour holstered her M9 and grabbed one of the bulky sci-fi-looking rifles.
“Okay,” Parlett said, swiveling to cover the open hatch. “What the hell do we do now?” They’d only thought as far as preparing themselves for battle. Not actually planning or fighting one.
Armour said, “There are at least four of them, right down the passageway, outside the magazine. I think they’re cutting into it.”
“Shit, shit, shit…” Roy said, pointing his weapon at the hatch.
Parlett stepped forward and started to close it. “I say we hole up here. We can barricade the door—”
But Armour shook her head. “No – that’s not good enough. Having the three of us locked up with all the guns doesn’t help the ship. Only us.”
“Then what are you thinking?” Roy asked.
“I’m thinking we have absolutely no idea how many of them there are on board. And the whole militia is going to need weapons, to defend the ship. And e
ach other.”
Parlett said, “You think the others will come here?”
“We did. We were just fastest.” She took several quick breaths, and tried to find the courage to do what she had nearly convinced the others was necessary.
They were all going to have to face down their fears.
And then probably face much worse than fear.
* * *
A mile and a half off the stern of the Kennedy, and less than two hundred feet above the surface of the ocean, one of the world’s last operational Beechcraft King Air 200s was winging its way west. This was after coming around in a wide turn as the plane’s pilot, Captain Burton of the British Army Air Corps, followed instructions to line up his approach on the carrier’s angle deck. And he was doing this without an enormously comfortable amount of fuel left in the tanks.
He was also doing it with the parting instructions of Major Jameson, pro tem commander of CentCom, playing in his head. As Burton had taxied the aircraft away from the remains of their main hangar, and toward God knew what, the Marine officer had made a point of getting him on the radio before he gave launch approval.
“You understand, in full, the nature of your mission?”
“Affirmative. I understand.”
“Everyone left alive is counting on you. Bring back our salvation. Do whatever you have to do. Just don’t fail.”
“Roger that.”
Now those three words – Just don’t fail – played in his head, like a mantra, or meditation. As a guide to action, they were wonderfully simple. What do I need to do? Easy! Just don’t fail!
Burton shook his head in dark amusement, as he lined up his final approach on the stern of the giant warship and floating airport. He was already on edge, due to a stark lack of freaking carrier landings in his flying history, as a result of him being a pilot in the Army Air Corps. He’d done it in cross-training a couple of times. But not in this aircraft, and not in a long time. He was basically learning on the job, with zero margin for error.
ARISEN, Book Eleven - Deathmatch Page 31