Arisen : Nemesis

by Michael Stephen Fuchs

  The two team leaders faced their weapons sergeant and Brendan said, “We’re giving you your real assignment for tomorrow now.”

  “So I’m not going to be out on the ground with Jake?”

  “Negative. Jake’s going to be on his own.”

  Kwon looked satisfied, like Okay, I can see that. “Why the hush hush?”

  “We may have some OPSEC issues,” Brendan said. He didn’t look like he was going to elaborate. He was just making Kwon’s assignment need-to-know.

  Kwon looked to Jake, who nodded his agreement.

  Brendan spread out a map sheet on one of the bunks.

  * * *

  The sun hadn’t yet cracked the horizon as the two seriously up-armored and up-armed gun trucks rumbled through the dense trees and heavy undergrowth, a tunnel of menace in the impenetrable darkness.

  Kwon looked up to Todd, driving, and Jake, in the front passenger seat. No one spoke. No lights were lit. The moving map GPS on the dash cast a slight glow. Glancing at it, Todd rolled them to a stop in a stretch of black bush that looked exactly like every other stretch.

  Kwon opened the rear door and stepped out into darkness. He reached back and pulled his pack after him, and shrugged into it. Then his rifle. As he put his hand on the door to shut it again, it looked like nobody was going to say anything now either.

  But at the last second, Todd waved over his shoulder, mocked up his best Billy Crystal, and said, “Have fun stormin‘ the castle.”

  As he shut the door and moved out into the equally impenetrable bush and darkness, Kwon silently remembered the next two lines from the film.

  “Think it’ll work?”

  “It would take a miracle.”

  * * *

  Some of the best Special Forces tricks are simple ones. Having picked out what he figured was going to be the right tree for his overwatch point (OP) – he’d only know for sure once he got up there – Kwon got out his slingshot and aimed for a big branch about sixty feet up.

  What he was launching up there was a small lead weight. Attached to the weight was a long string. And what was attached to the other end of the string was his knotted climbing rope. When the lead weight came down, Kwon hauled on the string until he’d pulled the rope over the branch.

  The trick had originally been developed for stringing antenna wires up over high branches. But it was adaptable.

  As Kwon tied off the end of the rope, grasped it with both hands, and put his left boot up against the tree, he remembered the discussion from back in their hooch – when he’d pointed out that the only position from which he was going to get any kind of elevated look into the Stronghold was from up in a tree.

  “Kwon,” Brendan had said, “you know why we don’t go up in trees. You’ll get some good kills from up there. But you’ll never get down again.”

  Jake had looked like he didn’t want to agree. But he did. “As soon as they spot you, it’s a turkey shoot.”

  Kwon had shrugged. “I can climb down if it gets too hot.” Anyway, they all knew there was no alternative. “I’ll take my chances.” That had settled it as far as he was concerned.

  Now, he walked himself up the vertical surface of bark, hand over hand, rifle and pack on his back – and with his right hand still bandaged up and only at about fifty percent capacity.

  The darkness was only just starting to melt.

  As he went higher and higher, Kwon was glad he’d be in position before he could see down to the ground.

  * * *

  He adjusted the variable magnification of the Leupold scope until he could see what he needed to see – namely, everything moving in the Stronghold. The only trouble was he was looking through his left eye. His right one was also still bandaged up, trying to heal from the splinter shrapnel of that other tree Todd had blown up.

  Also, he was having to shoot left-handed. The trigger finger of his right hand was still a mess and in no state to do precision shooting.

  But these problems were less dire than they might have been.

  Years before, when Kwon learned that Delta guys routinely practice shooting off-handed, with both pistols and rifles, mainly to be able to engage effectively around right-hand corners, he had started spending a portion of his range time shooting lefty. Then later, when he read that Navy SEAL Adam Brown had suffered injuries that forced him to learn to shoot with his off hand and off eye – and then made it into SEAL Team Six anyway – Kwon started doing that sometimes, too.

  Special Forces guys were supposed to be ready for anything.

  Today was going to test that to the limit.

  Overwatch

  350 Yards from the Stronghold - Kwon’s OP

  [Twenty-five minutes ago]

  Kwon’s only regret as the engagement kicked off was that neither Godane nor his sword-swinging lieutenant were in his sight lines – both were covered up by an extended section of wall that rose above the parapet.

  What he did have a look at was a whole row of Godane’s Praetorians, the big-ass dudes in the body armor, who were spread out to one side of the leadership element. So Kwon began his day by walking down the row of them, Sergeant York style. He got four before they raced under cover.

  With all the chaos and shooting coming up at the walls from down below, no one really figured out they were also being engaged from behind and above. The bodies sprawled face down with exit wounds where their faces ought to be should have clued somebody in. But it was harder to tell with center of mass shots, which was mostly what Kwon was taking. Conservative.

  Now his job was mainly to figure out where his rounds could have the most impact – were most likely to turn the tide of the battle.

  Even more important, much more important, was protecting his teammates on the ground. He could see much that they could not.

  And when Todd got the quadcopter up, and overhead video started streaming into the handheld in a clear pouch on Kwon’s forearm, he could see even more.

  Even before that, though, he could see that the thin scattering of dead moving around when they first got there was thickening up. And he didn’t need the drone for that. He could just look down. And his tree was to the south-east of the Stronghold.

  Nearly the opposite direction the herd was coming from.

  * * *

  Kwon’s OP was to the south-east mostly so he could keep Zack alive, in his gun truck by the north wall. Todd, in the south gun truck, had Jake out on the ground protecting him. You didn’t need much more than Jake.

  Kwon spent the early minutes of the fight mostly taking single RPG gunners off the walls and from beside the towers – those who survived the minigun and Mk 47 fire from below. There were just so damned many of them, and even from his excellent position, he did not have a look at a majority of those positions. He had to hope Todd and Zack had the rest.

  Where he was more effective was on the ground of the courtyard. There wasn’t a lot of moving around the al-Shabaab guys could do down in there without exposing themselves to Kwon in his Olympus-like aerie. He had to make some shots on moving guys, which was not simple at 350–400 yards – and less so shooting off-handed. But Kwon was making a difference. And he could feel it. Also, he was so far undetected.

  No one had engaged him.

  Not only was his weapon suppressed, not only was he a significant distance away – but there was so much chaos on the ground that one guy more or less getting randomly shot was no cause for the enemy to reassess their tactical posture.

  Kwon shifted on the thick branch he was perched on.

  Feeling invisible, unstoppable – and invulnerable.

  * * *

  The battle had been going a good ten minutes before he spotted the first hunter-killer RPG team on the ground. They were starting to get organized and maneuver in on the trucks – which were under good cover, but had the disadvantage of being static. Eventually, they were going to get taken out.

  But Kwon could definitely push that moment back.

  Four gu
ys broke from cover while Zack’s gun was down, presumably reloading. They found a position they liked, took knees, and started taking the safeties out of their warheads. The thing about RPGs is that, unlike AKs, they’re pretty hard to shoot while moving, never mind running.

  The third and fourth guys started to figure out that something was wrong by the time Kwon had taken out the first and second, but then he shot them, too.

  He smiled to think of Zack coming up with his replacement can of ammo and seeing the present Kwon had left him.

  Like a cat leaving a dead bird on the doorstep.

  Or rather four dead birds.

  * * *

  He did the same thing for Todd a couple of minutes later. He didn’t know why these RPG gunners had been able to work up so close to Todd’s position.

  Where the hell was Jake?

  But Kwon was listening in on the squad net, and the radio chatter finally clued him in. Jake was going up on the wall to take out a guardhouse. This wasn’t really in the plan, but Kwon implicitly trusted Jake’s instincts and improvisation, and assumed the team sergeant knew what the hell he was doing.

  But Kwon hadn’t seen al-Sîf in that guardhouse.

  And neither Jake nor Todd had mentioned it on the radio.

  And so right now Kwon had a new job: keeping his team sergeant alive on his madcap dash across the courtyard, and then along that parapet at the top of the wall. He heard Todd shouting a warning to Jake about his six – but Kwon had it.

  He shot twice, even as Jake was turning to engage.

  And, way underneath the ice-cold professionalism, was a small glow of pride. Jake will have known who did that for him.

  And who always had his back.

  * * *

  Kwon checked his watch. They were supposed to be getting the hell out of there by now. What was the hold-up?

  Whatever the cause, the result wasn’t likely to be good. Every additional second of time-on-target increased the likelihood that the defenders, who massively outnumbered the attackers, would get their shit together and overrun the tiny assaulting force – and also the proximity of the herd, and thus the number of dead they were going to have to wade through to get the hell out of there.

  When Kwon put his eye back down to his scope, four significant things happened, one right after the other.

  First, the tower Jake had been fighting inside went up in a truly spectacular fireball. That was fine, and Kwon presumed as intended.

  But, two, a few seconds later, he spotted Brendan – out in the open, and with something big and bulky thrown over his shoulder, and by the east wall. And that was not where he was supposed to be. He was supposed to be back at the north gun truck, with Elijah, Baxter – and Kate.

  Moreover, if Kwon could spot him, the enemy could as well. And they did – but Kwon got his gun on them first and put down three in a row. It was a close-run thing though – he could not acquire and engage targets as quickly as usual, shooting lefty. But he got it done.

  He touched his radio button, for the first time in the battle.

  “No problem, Cap. Now get your overloaded ass moving again.”

  But then, third, Kwon’s real problems started. Somebody among the enemy had figured out they were being slow-motion murdered from somewhere outside the walls. And then spotted him, probably with binoculars. And that guy was now, evidently, rapidly telling all his friends.

  Because Kwon started taking some pretty serious potshots, zipping through the foliage around him, one or two thwacking into the trunk and branches of the tree itself. They probably weren’t going to hit him any time real soon at nearly 400 yards. On the other hand, they also couldn’t keep missing forever. Eventually the law of large numbers was going to catch up with him. Meanwhile, they might get a machine gun into play. Or even a sniper rifle, or at least something with a longer effective range than the AKs.

  Then again, Kwon realized as the first two arced through the air like comets and exploded in the branches over his head, close actually counted in three things: horseshoes, hand grenades… and RPGs.

  Kwon’s sniper hide was quickly turning into a live-fire range.

  But suddenly none of that mattered. Because when he looked back to the other side of the courtyard, he saw that Jake had broken cover and was running flat out through the middle of the maelstrom.

  And then the unthinkable happened.

  Jake went down.

  Achilles

  The Stronghold - Middle of the Courtyard

  Jake felt the impact smash into his only flesh-and-blood lower leg.

  He was even pretty sure he saw the weapon that got him – an RPK “Super Kalashnikov” – which he’d caught a glimpse of, with its distinctive long barrel and 75-round drum magazine.

  But then he was looking at nothing but dirt rushing at him at high speed. One minute he’d been moving fast across open ground, ranging over the battlefield like he owned the damned place. And the next he was hit and immobilized. There was absolutely nothing he could do for the moment.

  The law of large numbers had caught up with him.

  And he was going down.

  And being horizontal, it turned out, didn’t mean he was going to get shot at any less. Probably more. The guys blasting away at him, from all kinds of angles and elevations, had the scent of the kill. Rounds were kicking up dirt on all sides and he was definitely about to be hit again. He dragged himself into what looked like a shell crater nearby, which on closer inspection was maybe a half-collapsed tunnel below. Maybe a bit of both. In any case, it was the only cover going, and Jake got down into it and assessed his leg wound.

  Two things about it were immediately obvious.

  One, a plum-size chunk of his calf had been blown out.

  And two, a jagged edge of bone was sticking out the hole. His shin bone had been shattered and broken in half by the impact of the bullet. He was bleeding moderately, but that wasn’t what worried him. The real problem was there was almost no way he was going to be able to run on this thing. Jake knew better than anyone his own toughness, resilience, and imperviousness to pain.

  But he also knew something about biomechanics. And this piece of machinery was badly broken.

  He got a bandage out of his blowout kit and got the wound wrapped up. That seemed to stop the bleeding for now. Then he reported his status over the radio, in exactly two words. He wanted to do that before what came next – because of what might happen to his voice after that. He dug out a role of 100-mph tape from his pack and set it in the dirt beside him. Then he gripped both ends of the shin bone, which were a good three inches apart.

  And he shoved them back together.

  He wasn’t sure whether the sound he made when he did this was audible over the noise of the battle. But he hoped not.

  Then he began wrapping the whole shin, bandage and all, in the heavy-gauge tape – round and round and round again.

  And pretty soon he was going to find out if enough 100-mph tape could actually bear a man’s weight.

  * * *

  “I’m hit.”

  Those two words sent a chill through Brendan’s exhausted body. He had never heard his team sergeant utter them before. It was like Achilles had fallen – unthinkable. He keyed his radio.

  “Jake. Where are you? How bad?”

  But it was Todd who answered. “I’ve got eyes on him. He’s pinned down – basically dead center in the middle of the courtyard.”

  Brendan spared exactly one thought for the very important dead man on his back. Then he found something like a safe place to stash it – in another shell crater, which he then kicked some dirt over. He keyed his radio:

  “Jake, Bren. I’m moving to you.”

  And then he took off running through the fire raking across the middle of that courtyard.

  Without a body on his back, he felt surprisingly spry.

  * * *

  “I’m hit.”

  These two words affected Kwon much more than the incoming fire. At this
point, AK rounds were tearing up foliage, and occasionally bark, all around him and RPG explosions were raining burning bits of wood on his head. The whole tree around him was waving like it was in a gale.

  And then he heard Brendan’s next transmission and saw his team commander sprinting through the open, to the spot where his team sergeant was pinned down.

  And Kwon dropped out his mag in a flash, reloaded, got his eye back on the glass – and started sniping like he never had before in his life.

  He knew he would be pretty much the only thing keeping Brendan alive now.

  * * *

  “Kwon, Todd.”

  “Send it.”

  “Yeah, buddy, you’re going to have to displace.”

  “Copy that.”

  As usual, Kwon sounded like he was shooting at the rod and gun club, rather than in a kinetic combat situation where he could be killed or injured at any second.

  Then again, Brendan thought, I may be the only member of the team who’s ever actually belonged to a rod and gun club…

  He was listening in while running flat out through the open, dodging holes and debris, watching the ground churn up around him from incoming fire. He was quickly becoming the center of attention for every bad guy left breathing air in this joint, all of whom were shifting their fire from Jake to him. Bren was also firing from the hip, but hardly aiming. He had a pretty good idea why he had lived this long into his run, and it was speaking in those ice-cool monosyllables from up in his OP.

  Brendan was, for the moment, shielded in a cloak of Kwon.

  “No, seriously, dude,” Todd said. “I’ve got a bird’s-eye view of more and more shooters on the walls turning to engage… And they’re zeroing you. Even you can’t have missed those incoming RPGs. You gotta go, man.”

  “They can’t hit shit at this range. I’m fine.”

  Goddammit, Brendan thought, continuing to pump his arms and legs and suck air. He keyed his mic. “Kwon, Bren. Do what the man says. Get down from there. That’s an order.”

  He stole a look up at the distance he still had to cover to Jake’s spot. And he steeled himself against the reality that he was going to have to cover it on his own now – without overwatch.