Baxter exhaled mournfully. “Okay, Zack. Watch your ass.”
They could already hear guys running around in the darkness – assembling men, weapons, and ammo, and getting them loaded into vehicles. Both Baxter and Zack also recognized a rich, deep voice above the general tumult. It was al-Sîf himself, organizing the preparations for the patrol.
It looked like he was leading the goat rodeo himself.
And they would be going out armed for bear.
Convoy
Triple Nickel Garage - Two Klicks From Camp Price
Todd had originally picked the site for their motor pool, not to mention built it from the ground up. So he didn’t have any trouble finding it even in the pitch black of a Somalian forest at 0400. He picked his way quietly down the overgrown trail, navigating from memory.
From the beginning, the option of driving the gun trucks right up to the camp had been a non-starter. Aside from not wanting to clear a path through the forest right to their doorstep, the trucks were simply too loud – first too loud for counter-insurgency, and later too loud for hiding from the dead. Eventually, Todd had done a lot of work making the trucks run quieter than they did initially.
Now his assignment was to make sure they ran at all. It had been a few months since anyone had taken out a vehicle patrol. Todd slightly wondered if they’d all gotten too comfortable there – fat, happy, and lazy inside their walled compound. They’d certainly gotten cliquey. But that was okay, he guessed. He knew how people were, and he could roll with the minor infighting.
He saw the larger hulking patch of darkness ahead, rising up and blocking out the faint light of the stars through the forest canopy. He circled around to the front and began clearing away the living camouflage from in front of the big doors. This took some doing – there was a lot more of it than when he’d left it, and it had recruited allies, growing into the surrounding bush. But in fifteen minutes he had the area out front reasonably clear.
In another fifteen, he had both vehicles checked out and running, and loaded up with every fuel can they would hold.
Seconds later, the rest of the team arrived. They were carrying extra ammo for the machine guns, in addition to their personal weapons, and they mounted up the gun trucks in silence.
This was the entire rest of the team except Elijah. He would be staying behind to man the fort – so if al-Shabaab showed up, at least they couldn’t just walk in and make themselves at home. But, mainly, his job was to fly overwatch for them with the drone. He would cover them for the first couple of hours, before having to turn back.
And then the patrol would be on its own.
* * *
And in barely another nineteen ass-rumbling and alternately stultifying and terrifying hours, they had arrived at the backside of Camp Lemonnier – the side that backed onto Djibouti–Ambouli International Airport, which they’d decided was the safest infiltration route. It helped that what counted as a major highway around there, the RN2, ran from the Somalia/Djibouti border right around the end of the runways, in the finger of land between the airport and the Gulf of Aden.
The drive was supposed to take fourteen hours, and did on paper. The first segment, on Somalia’s “Road Number One” had been uneventful. They had driven through a couple of hours of darkness, then watched the sun come up behind them in the mirrors. They had used standard convoy tactics – tactical spacing, constant situational awareness, and very high speed.
Todd drove the lead vehicle. He was a certified speed freak behind the wheel and had been a big fan of the Fast and the Furious franchise. If he’d had a fourth career after venture capitalist, master carpenter, and Special Forces soldier, it would have been illegal street racer and heist artist.
He still wasn’t totally ruling it out.
But they’d also had to slow periodically for tangles of stopped or wrecked cars, on what passed for a major highway in a country that had basically been living the zombie apocalypse since long before the fall. Being unable to keep up their speed for more than a few minutes at a time badly dinged their travel time.
They also saw a few dozen dead along the way, in ones and threes, standing inert on or alongside the road. These perked up when the convoy blasted by. But none of them were quick enough that the convoy gunners needed to engage – not even the fast ones, the runners, which they had first started seeing about six months ago, but which virtually never troubled them out in the bush.
No, the real delay – and the only serious trouble – came when they had to drive through the Berbera city center to get to the coast road that led to Djibouti. There had been some discussion of sticking to the best highway available across Somalia, which crossed the south of the country far from the coast. The trouble was, to get to it, they’d have to go through Hargeisa. And while no one particularly fancied Berbera, or in fact any big population center… they figured anyplace would be better than Hargeisa.
Which was what they’d named the virus, due to it originating there and all.
But Berbera turned out to be much worse than they’d reckoned on, or even imagined – the surface streets and intersections were a riot of abandoned and crashed cars and trucks. They’d had to double back on themselves an uncountable number of times. And every time they did, they had to face the dead they’d woken up the first time through.
They’d gotten to clear the guns with every mounted weapon they had. And every shot they fired drew more. If they had gotten jammed up, or lost their mobility for any reason… but, thank God, they hadn’t.
Everyone started breathing properly again when they finally clawed their way out of town and onto the coast road, with the shooting dying down and the chaos receding behind them. As they drove away, Todd stuck his left hand out the driver’s-side window and made a long, slow, wide jerk-off motion.
The truck behind them nearly swerved off the road from the tsunami of laughter inside.
After that, it was just the hiss of their tires on the thin covering of sand that had drifted onto the road and the cool offshore breeze, all the way to their destination.
But Berbera had cost them, not just in terms of ammo expended but also in minutes of daylight burnt. When they crossed over the border into Djibouti, the sun was already splashing down in the Indian Ocean far behind them.
* * *
Driving with NVGs now, Todd led the two-vehicle convoy across the sprawling tarmac of Djibouti Airport’s taxiways and runways. Getting in had been no problem. They’d just knocked down a chain-link fence with the cattle catcher on the front of the first truck and rolled in, lights out and engines barely turning over.
The NVGs he wore were the most advanced model the world had produced by the time it ended, combining a fourth-generation light-magnified view with an infrared or thermal picture. The resulting field was extremely vivid and less two-dimensional than the old light-only green-blob NVGs. Also, human figures tended to leap out of the background due to their body heat, which was very helpful when you were shooting at them, or trying to shoot around them.
The trouble now was: the dead didn’t have body heat.
But the airport, as far as they could make out, and at least in the restricted out-of-doors areas they drove through, was so far pleasantly free of dead guys.
Todd already knew exactly where they planned to stash the vehicles according to the mission plan and made a beeline for it now. Basically, they couldn’t risk bringing the trucks closer than about a kilometer to the base. They were quiet, but they weren’t that quiet. He navigated using the Blue Force tracker on the dash. The satellites had started getting unreliable by this point, but GPS still worked more often than it didn’t.
Reaching the waypoint coordinates, he rolled them silently up into the deeper shadow beside a maintenance structure by the side of the main taxiway. Wordlessly, the four SF men and their female CST unassed the two vehicles and slithered forward into the darkness. In ten minutes they’d reached the wire – the fence at the back of Camp Lemonnier.
After the others were inside, Todd slipped in after them – then turned back around and sealed the lacerated fence back up again with cable ties. They didn’t want anyone following them in there.
No doubt the camp would already be crowded enough.
Peace Corps With Guns
Camp Lemonnier - 50 Meters from Heavy Weapons Locker
But, weirdly, Camp Lemonnier actually didn’t appear crowded. Instead, it was still and silent as the tomb. And Triple Nickel moved through it like grave robbers.
Ten minutes after breaking them all in, Todd was on his own again. They couldn’t bring the vehicles into camp – but they also wouldn’t realistically be able to walk the heavy weapons out of it either. So the plan was to patrol in on foot, then find a truck they could get running again and requisition for temporary use.
And by “they” of course what they actually meant was Todd.
Once they had it loaded up with their booty, they would fire up the engines and blast out of there, back to the parked gun trucks, no longer giving a damn if they made enough noise to wake the dead.
It hadn’t taken long to find an abandoned M1081 LVAD – basically a 2.5-ton cargo truck with a walled but open bed – within fifty meters of the weapons locker. Now, while the others did whatever hoodoo was required to break into the secure facility – he gathered blowtorches were involved – Todd was making sure the truck would start when they needed it to. He had humped in a battery, two quarts of oil, and three different types of engine fluids. Checking and replacing it all took no more than ten minutes.
He couldn’t test his handiwork by turning the engine over.
But he didn’t doubt it would work. He was very good at his job.
Now he sat alone in the dark of the cab and kept watch. They’d been equally happy, surprised, and relieved to find almost no dead so far. This was unexpected. Then again, not utterly so – they’d picked their point of entry to be close to the locker, so they had little ground to cover to get there. They had been prepared to silently take down any that got in their way. But so far, the only ones they’d seen had been standing catatonic out in the open, mostly in the middle distance, and could be easily detoured around. The operators were very good at moving silently.
And not a single Zulu had perked up so far.
Maybe the rest of the team had to take some down nearer the locker. But if so they hadn’t felt the need to make a radio report about it.
So now Todd was in one of those weirdly peaceful moments that sometimes happen in the middle of stressful or dangerous missions. Just waiting, watching, and willing nothing to go wrong. Todd slumped down in the bench seat, coolly scanning the enhanced darkness, basically just kicking it.
He looked out upon the dead base, smiled, and thought: Freakin’ Lemonnier. Back to CLUville… From where he sat up high in the truck, Todd could just see the endless rows and stacks of Containerized Living Units, those anonymous white boxes for people, one of which he used to walk past day after day. It was always strange visiting old haunts.
Then again, what a long strange trip his whole life had been.
* * *
Raised in wealthy Marin County, north of San Francisco, Todd earned a double BA in studio arts and mechanical engineering from Cal Berkeley – hence the ever-present and now very well-worn Cal hat. After college, he went to work as an analyst for a venture capital firm – while studying in the evenings at the San Francisco Art Institute.
Restless, he tended to find a productive use for every minute in the day.
He soon became a master carpenter, crafting clever little boxes and cabinets in his workshop. He’d always been great with his hands – after he singlehandedly built the set for his high school musical, his teacher said it “looked like Grauman’s Chinese Theatre.” An avid cyclist, he blasted through the Bay Area on his way to work or classes, usually listening to heavy metal at high volume.
But it turned out all of these pursuits were ultimately just a distraction. What he’d been trying to distract himself from was all the genocide and injustice in the world, all the global suffering he read about each week in The Economist. And he certainly wasn’t doing anything to stop any of it as a venture capitalist.
It ate at him.
Eventually he decided he was going to have to personally do something about it. And his decision ultimately came down to either joining the Peace Corps or enlisting in the military. His parents had been very liberal, and patriotism hadn’t been a major theme where he grew up – none of the older kids in his neighborhood had enlisted after 9/11. He hadn’t liked this “too good for America” mindset and had wanted to rebel against it. It just took him a while to put his money where his mouth was.
When he read that Army Special Forces was “like the peace corps with guns” he was half sold. But when he found out that as an engineer sergeant he could spend half his time building things with his hands – and the other half blowing shit up – he was totally sold.
He got accepted into the X-Ray program – which enlisted exceptional civilians into the Army and direct to SF Assessment and Selection. You weren’t guaranteed a spot – just a shot. Todd could have gone in as an officer, but didn’t want to do so just because he had a college degree. It would have been just another form of privilege. He wanted to earn his stripes, and learn his trade from the ground up.
In a story that followed him around, he got terrible blisters in Basic Training and his boots actually filled with blood soon after that at Jump School. He threatened everyone in his class that he’d slit their throats quietly in the night if they told on him. He had no intention of missing his spot in SFAS, the last stop on the road to the infamous Special Forces Q Course.
After earning his Green Beret, he also volunteered to go to Ranger School – the notoriously brutal 61-day combat leadership course. Earning his Ranger tab was the hardest thing he’d ever done – harder than Berkeley, harder than the long hours in the venture capital world, harder even than the decision to enlist.
But it was obvious to anyone paying attention that he had something to prove.
In the later stages of the Q Course, he learned everything about construction: how to pour foundations, set joists, frame in windows, hang doors, install roofing, pull wiring. There had been classes on construction design, reading blueprints, masonry, structural calculations, and materials management. He had to be able to do it all, do it a million miles from civilization – and do it all strictly to the federal building code.
After that had come the fun stuff: tactical demolitions, charge calculation, target analysis, firing assemblies, calculation of fuse burn times, radio-control devices. Formulas for how much explosive was needed to shatter, crack, cut, or penetrate a wide variety of materials and obstacles. Charge placement, safety and handling, the murky world of IEDs and render-safe procedures. Practical exercises in planting charges – on bridges, buildings, tanks, towers, trucks, trains, artillery pieces, helicopters, cruise missiles.
As the junior engineer sergeant on this deployment, it had been his job to assist the senior man in designing and building their bush camp. He also had primary responsibility for maintaining the vehicles, was a specialist on terrain features, headed up tactical resupply including pallet airdrops, and managed storage of munitions and demolitions.
When he had knocked all that off – in the Army he remained a high-energy overachiever – he tended to spend his time sunbathing shirtless in his Ranger panties, his blond flop of hair pushed back from his face, and the three tattoos on his upper body out in view: the Metallica logo on his pec, his Special Forces tab permanently inked on his shoulder – and van Go
gh’s Sunflowers on his bicep.
Todd had a rep in the groups as a crazy kid. He was emotional, fiery, creative, and had an artistic temperament. He was a people person – not happy unless he was meeting, greeting, listening, or talking. He’d been known to stop a car just to talk to a total stranger. He was a bit of a smart-ass – but he was both smart and funny enough to get away with it, most of the time.
In the end, his surfer-dude appearance and casual manner belied a masterful level of mechanical and technical skill, as well as an inquisitive and contrarian nature. Brendan, as team captain, could always count on Todd for pushback and sharp-shooting of any idea that was put forward. (Jake got a little more of that than he might prefer.) He was the very opposite of a yes-man. He was also a restless soul, a thinker, and an incessant talker.
At bottom, he had a deep need to be extraordinary – to not merely achieve what everyone else did.
As he sat silently in the dark now, his radio squelched three times – the signal that the team was coming back in. Looking in the large side-view mirror, he could see two of them trundling a big cart over the uneven ground. It was overloaded with bulky crates, indistinct in the dark, but presumably containing heavy weapons and ordnance. Todd eased open the door and swung down to assist, producing neither light nor noise.
The first thing he’d done in the truck cab was disable the overhead light.
* * *
Twenty minutes and four trips later, the truck was loaded up and the team mounted up as well. Brendan swung into the cab beside Todd, while Kate and Jake rode wagon-train style with the weapons in back.
Kwon was another story. He had been assigned to overwatch for the exfil – to do any shooting that was necessary for them to get safely the hell out of Dodge. They hoped they’d be able to start the truck and go blasting out of there too quickly to rouse any opposition.
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