by Glynn James
The dead guy paused, looked down, raised his arms – and headed straight into the beam of light, following it directly toward him. He looked for all the world like Juice’s long-lost nephew, rushing up to embrace him.
Juice sighed out loud again.
There was no question – death certainly was going to embrace him, one of these days. But it wouldn’t be today. Because he still had shit to do.
And his brothers were counting on him to do it.
The tired, grizzled, bearded warrior hauled himself to his feet. Glancing down into the container, he saw the timer still showed twelve seconds.
Plenty of time.
He slipped his multitool out of its belt pouch. And his combat knife, in the other hand.
To welcome his long-lost nephew.
Balerion
JFK - Outside the Alpha Team Room
“Goddamnit,” Ali said as she opened the team room hatch to walk out of it, and saw Homer standing behind it. “This is like a bad rom-com. Could we stop meeting cute, please?”
Homer didn’t smile in response. Instead he said, “I need your help.”
Ali’s annoyance evaporated as she realized he was serious. The two of them went back inside, where Pred and Henno just gave them inquiring looks. Homer instantly began briefing the team, as well as giving instructions for exactly what he needed from them – while simultaneously also yanking out boxes of gear, uncharacteristically heedless of the disorder he was causing.
When he found the box he was looking for, he worked the catches and flipped the lid, all at pit-stop speed. Inside, stowed and carefully arrayed, were his wetsuit, Draeger rebreather, rocket fins, dive booties, mask and snorkel, and regulator. There was also a dive computer, pressure gauge, buoyancy compensator, diving lamp – and titanium dive knife. Homer’s frantic energy finally settled down, and he exhaled.
Now this was more like it.
Looking up, he saw the others were already hoisting their own gear – as well as pushing that boat in a bag, the CRRC, across the deck.
They’d never really stowed it after last time.
* * *
Up on the bridge, Drake stuck a phone to his ear, and his face to the port-side screens. He nearly had to press his face to the glass, but he could see their two F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighters in position at the foot of the angle deck. The tow-locks were already into the noses of both, the blast screens up behind them – and when both jets turned over their afterburning 43,000lbf jet engines, everybody on the ship knew about it.
The borderline chaos on the bridge couldn’t compete with the roar of those.
Drake knew they’d need at least a few seconds while the engines wound the kinks out, and the last checks were done. He decided to take the time to tell the pilots again what they already knew – mainly to ease some of his own anxieties. Because he knew full-well this mission had been thrown together very quickly, perhaps too quickly. They should have done more planning between the first attack and now. But they hadn’t.
And now they’d just have to wing it.
This mission was like nothing any of them had done in a long time – nothing they had ever done, in fact. If, back in the world, they’d ever found themselves engaging a Russian battlecruiser in an attempt to sink her with all hands aboard… well, that in itself might have signaled the Apocalypse.
And the stakes today were higher than they ever could have been before. Today, everything hung on this.
Drake grabbed a radio hand mic, keyed it, and hailed the lead element by its mission call sign, and using his own – as commander of the supercarrier, hull number CVN-79.
“Balerion One, this is Seven-Nine Actual.”
“Seven-Nine, Balerion, send it.” All business, zero hesitation. Drake also instantly recognized the voice – it was the CAG himself in that lead aircraft. Drake felt his temper rise, but pushed it aside.
Realistically, if he thought the CAG was going to sit this one out, he was even stupider than he felt right now. This might be the last chance the fighter jocks ever had to fly anything like the kind of mission they’d trained for their entire lives – and the first combat sortie against an enemy surface vessel since, probably, the 2003 Iraq War. Which the CAG had almost certainly missed, due to being in middle school at the time.
And this was proper air-sea battle stuff – a aerial combat mission against a gigantic Russian ship-of-the-line. Not only did that not come along every day; it had never come along before, and almost certainly never would again.
So Drake resigned himself to the CAG commanding from the air, and just worked with it. “Confirm weaps package,” he said into the hand mic.
“JSMs and LRASMs. Plus autocannons.”
That was what Drake wanted to hear. Joint Strike Missiles, and particularly Long Range Anti-Ship Missiles, were without question a few of every enemy ship captain’s least favorite things. And nobody liked a 25mm Gatling gun, at least not on the receiving end. Then again, Drake was going to shit a skillet if his fliers got close enough to strafe them.
“Be advised, Balerion: you come back here without all of those 25mm rounds, and you’re paying for them.”
“Roger that.”
The CAG sounded like fighter jocks invariably did when in their element: like total unflappable badasses. Drake supposed it made sense. What they did was basically fly around in a suit of Mach-5, unseeable, unkillable, death-and-destruction-from-above.
And Drake was okay with all of that.
Today, in fact, he was betting everything on it.
* * *
Master Gunnery Sergeant Fick was once again racing up the main companionway of 02 Deck, making tracks for the island – though not having to battle through a panicked, wounded mob this time. He’d been working down in the MARSOC team room. Moreover, he’d been very carefully staying out of CIC – or anywhere he might be on the receiving end of any real-time updates about the shore mission.
He pretended he just couldn’t be bothered to watch, and had better shit to do. But the reality was he found it way too stressful. If he wasn’t driving the train, he couldn’t bear watching it. It always felt like the damned thing was about to derail, every second, and catastrophically, and he wasn’t there to fix it, and it was all his fault. He could feel the cortisol flooding his veins, and no doubt shortening his useful lifespan.
No, his Marines could just tell him all about their wacky adventures after they were all back safely.
But now he too had gotten the memo – about the return of the Russian warship – and he once again needed to get somewhere he could be apprised in a timely fashion of what the fuck was going on.
Racing now past a cross companionway, he stopped dead in his tracks – again.
“Motherfuckers,” he muttered.
There went Alpha, dashing in the opposite direction again. And once again hauling their goddamned Combat Rubber Raiding Craft. It was as if these guys just couldn’t wait to abandon ship.
“Fuck it,” Fick said, taking off again.
He hoped they enjoyed their pleasure cruise.
* * *
Drake wasn’t quite done with the CAG.
“Balerion, be advised. I know you have your mission profile dialed in. But here it is again for the cheap seats. As soon as you’re airborne and formed up, you hit your waypoints, and you stay outside the range of their S-300s.”
“Break, break.” This was Campbell cutting in. Both she and the Air Boss would be monitoring the air-mission net. “Commander, can you join me on a private channel?”
Handon, who had once again taken up a position holding up an out-of-the-way bulkhead, looked across at Drake. He seemed like he was pained by this interruption. Or maybe he was just in pain. In truth, Drake’s post-grenade killer headache had resurged again. And that veil of gauze was threatening to descend over his thoughts. He felt like he needed to get this mission launched, while he was still functional.
“Wait out, LT,” he said into the mic, basically s
hutting her down. “Balerion, be advised: the range of those S-300s is 200 kilometers. The range of your long-range anti-ship missiles is 370. So inside that band is your happy hunting ground. You get up, you keep your asses well outside that 200-klick kill radius, and you won’t even have to worry about optimizing your stealth profile. You loop north and west, then approach the target from the seaward side. You launch your missile spread, and get your asses back here. Stick to the plan, and you’ll be home for supper.”
“Roger that. Balerion copies all.”
Drake nodded. He absolutely needed those planes back, not to mention the pilots. Both were currently in painfully short supply. He looked down now to see his phone light flashing. He scooped it up. It was Campbell again.
“Commander, urgently request permission to send up an unmanned surveillance aircraft to overfly the target vessel. We can stack up the attack fighters at stand-off range while we recon the target first.”
Drake boggled. “What – and give the Russians the courtesy of a heads-up, right before we attack?”
There was a fractional pause on the other end. “Commander, I want to confirm the Nakhimov’s air defense package before we send our fliers into the teeth of it. We’re making a lot of assumptions.”
Drake shook his head and blinked. He could hear that ringing in his ears again. It wasn’t drowning out other stuff – yet. Anyway, he firmly believed that reacting quickly – what they called “getting inside the enemy’s decision loop” – was exactly how you stayed alive in combat.
Air-sea battle was a contest of seconds, and inches.
He steeled himself, trying to block out the ringing noise. “Negative, LT. This is exactly what we’ve drilled for. I personally know the armaments of every Russian warship, down to the side arms of the senior officers. Anyway, we’d only get five seconds of video before they blew us out of the air. And drones don’t grow on trees.” He glanced at his watch, and then up at the mission status board, which was now displaying a countdown – the time remaining until they were in Shipwreck range.
“And there’s no time.” Drake did believe that – didn’t he? “We need to do this now.”
That clock was counting down the seconds the carrier had until it either steamed away and abandoned their shore party – or else went straight to the bottom. The time they all had left to live.
Everything was on the line. They had to get this right.
He put the phone down with one hand, and raised the radio mic with his other.
“Okay, Balerion. Get it done.”
МиШа
SAS Saldanha - Main Warehouse
Juice stepped out into the cavernous, enveloping darkness of the main warehouse, still alone. He could have called the team back to support him, almost certainly should have. But some part of him was enjoying operating on his own, ranging ahead, exploring, feeling alive.
He felt as if he had been given a whole new lease on life, and he wanted to road test it a little.
He also told himself that, with at least part of this building wired to blow, he ought to clear the rest of it without putting the others at risk. Of course, he knew that was bullshit. The Marines were pros, and this was exactly what they were here for. Nonetheless, he carried on alone.
And he quickly worked out where all the supplies had gone – everything from the entire base and depot. It was all right here. This was the motherlode.
Every conceivable type of military ordnance was in evidence, even in just the first few rows of stacked pallets he checked – crates of ammo in every caliber, explosives, grenades, rockets. Cases of MREs. Piled up and sprawling barrels of fuel – gasoline, kerosene, oil, and jet fuel. Hell, there was even a parked-up, six-wheeled refueling vehicle – and Juice was willing to go out on a limb and guess it wasn’t empty.
He started clearing his way down the pitch-dark and narrow aisles, using his weapon light to illuminate a narrow cone of path ahead of him, panning periodically from side to side, and mentally cataloging this bonanza. The place was a giant warren, a real maze. It was also a room-clearing nightmare – nothing but corners, narrow aisles, blind spots, impossible fields of fire, and ambushes waiting to happen.
Slow is smooth, smooth is fast, he recited to himself as he cleared forward, stepping heel-toe. And he remembered what might be the original Latin: festina lente – “make haste slowly.” But he wasn’t sure he had the luxury of that now.
The whole world was nearly out of time.
He soon stepped out into a wide, open, central area, in the middle of the building, and at the very center of the piled-up mountains of supplies. Turning and panning his light up, down, and around, he paused a second here to catch his breath, and just to look around in wonder. Somebody had clearly found everything worth scavenging in this entire naval depot – and thoughtfully consolidated it in one convenient, central location.
There was only one problem – and Juice didn’t quite see it coming.
“Somebody’s been sleeping in my bed,” he whispered under his breath, taking his hands off his weapon and bringing them slowly out to either side. And as he slowly turned around in place, he concluded:
“And he’s still here.”
The overhead lights came on with a loud clack. And Juice laid eyes on the three bears.
Only there were six of them.
And they also pretty much made bears look like baby hamsters. They made grizzlies look like pussies.
The half-dozen men standing before him in this warehouse, which turned out not quite to have been abandoned…
Well, they even made Juice look like a girl.
* * *
The man in charge of the six smiled and nodded.
This had the exact opposite effect to that normally intended by smiles – it doubled Juice’s unease, and made the thick mat of hair stand up on the back of his neck. And he didn’t need to guess that this was the one in charge. It was obvious.
You could always tell a warlord from his minions.
When the huge man spoke, it was in comprehensible but thickly accented English. He said: “What’s the dizzle… nizzle?” It was a heavy Slavic accent, but Juice also didn’t need to wonder which flavor of Slavic. Though he did wonder where this dude picked up his English idioms.
UrbanDictionary.com, maybe…
But Juice kept his mouth shut, and merely nodded back, and spat carefully off to the side. And then he did a quick but focused assessment of exactly what he was facing here.
Seriously hard men. A lot of shaved heads, bulging muscles, scary guns, and gigantic knives. They were swarthy, unshaven, a couple with black skullcaps, wearing mixed unmatched fatigues, some of them in that Eastern bloc olive-green that always looked slightly wrong.
They were also a mixed-race group, which might have been surprising. But Juice knew that this particular special operations unit had always recruited the most outstanding soldiers from anywhere in the Soviet Empire – Ukrainians, Latvians, Georgians, Uzbeks…. as well as Turks, Kurds, Greeks, Koreans, Mongolians, Finns, anyone who found themselves for whatever reason living on Soviet soil.
Armament-wise, Juice could see a big 50-round drum magazine on an advanced, late-model AK-100 series assault rifle – an AK-9 or AK-12, he wasn’t sure which. Some of the others carried these, too, with skeletonized stocks, integrated suppressors, transparent mags, polymer furniture. Very expensive optics.
Basically, it was a lot of seriously customized and high-quality hardware.
There were a lot of big sheathed knives, too, looking to Juice like they were from Melita-K, a Russian manufacturer beloved by Russian special operators. With a double-take, Juice saw what actually looked like a Russian Imperial Cavalry sword hanging from one dude’s belt…
Je-SUS… Juice thought, whistling quietly.
He squinted now at one particularly big and jacked badass, who was toting a PKP medium machine gun, with a 250-round box mag underneath. Juice knew off the top of his head that weapon weighed about twenty pound
s, with another seventeen for the ammo belt. And this guy was holding it with one hand like a Nerf gun. He clearly didn’t skip any gym time – ever. All of these guys were pretty shredded.
And then there was the Papa Bear: Misha.
Juice knew that was his name – because he had it tattooed right the way across his fucking neck. Albeit in Russian, Cyrillic script: МиШа. But Juice could unpack that. He was an intel guy.
Though, it did occur to him that this might actually be the name of the dude’s mother. No good way to tell.
In any case, with or without the tattoo, the man looked… well, Juice really wanted to start quoting another favorite film, namely Predator: “You are one ugly motherfucker…”
Misha was jacked, ripped, and totally tooled up, including with a giant Desert Eagle .50-cal pistol in a chest rig. And not to mention a face that would terrify toddlers. This guy struck Juice as something very like if, maybe, Predator had been born without a soul. All that terrifying, dangerous strength – but with nothing underneath.
Nothing you wanted to interact with, anyway.
Juice also couldn’t help but remember another good line, the one from the classic cyberpunk novel, about no longer having to worry about being the baddest motherfucker in the world.
Because the position is taken.
Unmistakably, this cottage belonged to Spetsnaz.
And Goldilocks had just got caught sleeping in Papa Bear’s bed.
Just When You Thought…
CentCom Strategic Command, London
“The Biacore has arrived,” said Broads, switching his headset to mute and glancing over at Colonel Mayes, who stood a little way across the JOC. “The Germany mission just touched down and are disembarking now.”
“The equipment’s in working order?”
Broads flicked the mute off and spoke into the headset. “LandMark One, please confirm status of the recovered equipment. Is it intact?”
Mayes couldn’t hear the reply with all the noise in the room and waited impatiently until Broads looked back up and spoke.
“Seems it’s all disassembled inside its casing, but they’re getting it into the lab and will confirm with us then.”