ARISEN, Book Eleven - Deathmatch (3 page)

Putting his ballistic Oakley wraps up on his head, Jake hefted his Beowulf 50-cal assault rifle with one hand under the magazine well, then led Handon and the others inside the wire. Sparing a quick look up at the hand-carved “Camp Davis” sign, he closed and barred the front gate, then turned to face the newcomers. “Guess you’re going to want to rearm and refit.”

Left unsaid was:
And then get back out there
.

Handon nodded. He could already tell he and Jake were on the same page. Handon was slightly tempted to ask about the possibility of a hose-down. After a full day and night of operations and desperate fighting in the bush, they all felt like they were wearing half of Somalia.

But the world was dying, and seconds were precious.

Jake tossed his head. “Armory’s there. Take what you need. I’ll meet you in the center of camp after I’ve gotten myself and my team squared away.”

“Thanks,” Handon said, shouldering his ruck and trudging forward, his bruised and battered team following behind – into the most civilization they had seen in a while. The camp boasted a handful of canvas and nylon tents of varying sizes, interspersed with stacks of crated supplies and Tuff-Boxes full of equipment, with a big fire pit in the middle, and a slit-trench latrine and bag shower out at the edge. Rough and minimal – but squared away and operational.

And someplace to operate from was exactly what Handon needed right now.

Watching them march off in file, Jake waited for Kate, then said to her, “Take first watch.”

She nodded and headed toward the one small sangar, which looked like a stubby guard veranda, nestled at the junction of two stretches of wire, in the southwest corner of camp. Instead of falling in at the end of the Alpha train, Predator stepped off in the other direction with her. “I’ll come along,” he said. “Help keep you awake.”

A tiny part of Kate wondered if the huge man thought she couldn’t handle guard duty. But she dismissed that, knowing the two teams were going to have to work together, right out of the gate.

Plus she already liked this guy.

* * *

There was still a morning chill way up there on the mountain, so Jake got a fire going in the “Dakota fire hole” they had built in the middle of camp. The sunken pit ensured that the flames stayed out of view of prying eyes, dead or alive. And the chimney and airway tunnel ensured that it burned hot, keeping smoke to a bare minimum. A pile of sand and an entrenching tool nearby meant it could be extinguished in seconds.

The fire was crackling by the time the others had finished helping themselves to the ammo stores and started trickling back in ones and twos and circling around.

“Thanks for the top-up,” Handon said, Velcro’ing down a last mag pouch on his vest as he took a seat, then laying the vest on the ground beside his rifle. The nearby “camp armory” had turned out to be a corrugated metal shed, and inside Handon and the others had found tens of thousands of NATO standard rounds, as well as standard magazines. There were 30-round STANAG mags for the rifles, 15-round Beretta mags for M9 pistols – and 8-round 1911 mags for the .45s that were rather more popular among special operators. There were also magazine loaders, and several of the Alpha guys spent a good twenty minutes pushing 5.56 or 7.62 rounds into their empties.

Those with non-standard mags always carefully slotted them back into their pouches when reloading. Yeah, the extra half-second might get them killed – but not as surely as being unable to reload at all in the next engagement. And, this being the ZA, there was always a next engagement. Plus they all knew the next time they found replacements for their special-snowflake mags might be long past the end of the world.

As the others in Alpha filtered back in, they took up places around the fire – as Zack and Baxter, the Agency men, ferried out stacks of MREs and bottles of water. It had been many hours since anyone in Alpha had fired down anything more than a quick energy bar, washed down with hot water from their CamelBaks. Most of them were dehydrated from the daytime heat, the walking and running in full combat load – and the nearly non-stop fighting, much of it in a building that was burning down around them.

And all of which had gotten them, Handon could not forget for a second, exactly nothing.

“We tried to radio the carrier as soon as we saw it steam into the Gulf,” Jake said to Handon. “Didn’t get a response. Are you using new encryption keys? And forgot to update us?” Jake sure hoped they were. CentCom had made them all standardize on one encryption key over a year ago. And, as far as he knew, they hadn’t issued a new one since.

Juice frowned behind his beard. “Unfortunately, no. I’ve been yelling at anyone who will listen over there to update their damned keys on some kind of a schedule. They say they don’t have the resources, and already have more critical problems than they can handle. And, of course, that there are no living enemies out there trying to listen in.”

Juice, after the brutal fight with Russian Spetsnaz in the South African warehouse, was in a unique position to know there were still enemies out there – as was everyone on the carrier, which had nearly been sunk by a Russian battlecruiser. But Juice figured that was probably a briefing for another time. He shrugged. “We religiously update our team radios every two weeks.”

Jake smiled at Juice. He couldn’t conceal his pleasure that, of the tiny fraction of humanity that had survived the fall, one of his old teammates – and one of his favorites – had somehow made it this far. The two men had a lot of history together.

Jake looked back to Handon. “We also tried to contact you through CentCom, but couldn’t even get through – to anyone there. Didn’t they tell you we were here? We’re on their damned survival registry. What’s the point of the thing?”

Handon shook his head. “Yeah, that would have been helpful, to say the least. But things have gone south in Britain. They had a bad outbreak – right in their strategic command center.”

“Jesus,” Zack Altringham said. That was about as much as he was going to say. While Zack had spent a lot of his career in the company of operators, he was the least operational person there, so the odd man out. But this news was dark. He figured if Britain was under that kind of threat, the virus was on the verge of completing its work – of taking down humanity.

Handon shrugged. “The outbreak was contained, but with bad losses – including all their senior commanders.”

“So who the hell’s in charge there?” Jake asked.

Handon’s face was noncommittal. “A Royal Marine platoon leader, I think.”

Now Jake said it: “Jesus.”

* * *

Kate and Predator shared a cordial silence in the tiny guard tower, Pred staring off into the forest, while Kate stole glances at his bicep and deltoid, both of which looked like they’d been inflated. “Damn dude,” she finally said, mainly just to make conversation. “What do you do in the gym?”

Pred looked over at her. “Basic compound exercises, mainly – bench press, squat, deadlift…”

“So you’re
trying
to get bigger?”

Pred shrugged. “Go big or go home. Plenty of women do the same stuff where I lift.”

Kate nodded. “Yeah, no doubt… So – what’s the deal with the woman on your team?”

Pred considered this while he dug out his dwindling pouch of Red Man chewing tobacco. Absently, he opened it and offered it over. Kate shook her head. He shoved a wodge in his cheek, then started talking around it.

“Ali? Don’t mind her,” he said. “She’s not used to sharing the battlefield with other women. Plus she just had a bad break-up.”

“Seriously? That’s why she snapped at me?”

Pred nearly smiled. “Love in the time of Hargeisa. Anyway, she’ll get used to you.” He stole a look at Kate’s uniform and insignia. “You were a CST.” He knew about the Cultural Support Teams, the female soldiers who had been trained up and attached to Special Forces ODAs and SEAL teams to help deal with female members of local communities, back in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

She nodded.

Pred nodded back his respect. He’d heard enough about how these women were selected and trained, and how well they had performed, to know they were warriors – and that some had died as warriors. If this one had managed to live this long, she had to be an asset to her team.

“What about Ali?” Kate asked. “I didn’t see a unit patch on her.” Or on any of them, for that matter. “Where’d she come from?”

“The Unit was her unit. We served together there.”

Holy shit
, Kate thought, though she didn’t say it out loud. Like every female soldier in the combat arms, she’d heard about – or heard rumors about – the woman who made it into Delta.

And now that woman was up on Kate’s mountaintop.

* * *

“So you two jokers know each other,” Handon said to Jake and Juice, around mouthfuls of beef ravioli, the entree in the MRE box that lay open in his lap. He wasn’t enjoying it, just fueling up, ensuring operational effectiveness. All around the circle of stones, Henno, Homer, and Juice were doing the same, while Zack and Baxter respectfully watched. Noise had sent himself off on a one-man patrol, implying that more security wouldn’t hurt.

Or maybe, Handon thought, he just didn’t like MREs.

Juice smiled at this comment, slurping up spaghetti with meat sauce. “Jake was my first team sergeant – and our first deployment together was crossing into Afghanistan, from Uzbekistan, October, 2001.”

Jake nodded. “We were both in Triple Nickel a lot of years after that. Until we finally lost him to the Army of Northern Virginia.”

Baxter looked blank, and Jake caught the look.

“Yet another name,” he said, “for the Intelligence Support Activity. After they moved their HQ to Fort Belvoir, Virginia.”

“And after we got moved under JSOC,” Juice added.

Jake smiled. “Which also meant their personnel went on the Department of the Army Special Roster – and thus didn’t exist anymore. Didn’t see his hairy face again until it came crashing down in a PC-12 a couple of miles from our bush camp.”

Handon put his empty food container down and sized up Jake – including the Ranger tab on his shoulder. “You were in the regiment before SF?” he said.

Jake nodded. “First bat. Three years in.”

“Second bat.” Handon and Pred both had served in the 75th Ranger Regiment, 2nd Battalion, before going on to Delta selection. Handon exhaled. This was a man he could do business with.

Not to mention count on.

* * *

“Ali was in one of the first graduating classes of women from Ranger School,” Predator said. Ranger School was the notoriously brutal 61-day combat leadership course, which accepted only outstanding infantry soldiers to start with, and still had a pass rate of barely fifty percent. It had only been opened up to women in 2015 – and damned few of them then.

Kate was either liking this woman more, or less, all the time. “And her Ranger tab helped her get a spot in Delta selection?”

“No. That she got by winning a bet.”

Seriously?
Kate thought.

“She went to Ranger School later – after joining Delta.”

“Why?”

“To prove she could, obviously.”

Prior to today, Kate had believed herself to be the most accomplished and senior female soldier anywhere in military special operations. Suddenly she was an also-ran.

She’d just have to deal with that.

* * *

Jake knew Handon was going to allow about four minutes for dealing with anything not related to his mission. So he got down to it himself, before being told to.

“You’re here for Patient Zero,” he said. “An early-stage victim.” He locked eyes with Zack across the fire. Zack had always said someone would come looking for it. Or, at any rate, if someone out there was making any kind of effort at saving the world by developing a vaccine, they’d need to come here first.

Handon nodded.

“So there is a vaccine?” Zack asked.

“Maybe. If we can fill in the last piece of the puzzle.” Handon didn’t bother briefing these guys on what filling in the puzzle so far had entailed – for his team, or for all the others who had supported his mission. And for the many who had fallen. There wasn’t time, and there was little point.

Jake said, “So you’ll have already worked out that dead Somalis, early-stage victims, are thin on the ground here. Absent, actually.”

“Yeah, that’s what we found,” Handon said. “We were told they were swept away by big herds.” Then again, they’d heard this from the profoundly untrustworthy Sergeant Major Zorn, the last survivor of Camp Lemonnier. Handon didn’t mind getting some confirmation.

Jake nodded. “Not big –
huge
herds. As bad as the singularity in Hargeisa last night was, that was nothing. I don’t know if it’s because Somalia was ground zero, or what. But we’ve had a few truly gigantic ones blow through, each bigger than the last. Millions strong. The last one, about six months ago, cleared the whole place out. Haven’t seen a single native Somali since then. Alive or dead.”

Handon looked across the circle. “But Baxter says you’ve got an alternative for us.”

“Yeah,” Jake said. “The bad news is it’s perhaps your only alternative. And the
really
bad news—”

Baxter finished the sentence: “The really bad news is that it’s in the middle of an Islamist fortress with twenty-foot walls, manned by hundreds of twitchy al-Shabaab guys, all of them armed to the teeth, and led by an unkillable badass with a giant sword. With the whole thing now surrounded by a heaving singularity a half-mile deep, all of it way out in the middle of the Galmudug bush.”

Jake shook his head. “I’m sorry, brother. I honestly don’t think there’s any way of digging it out at this point.”

Handon didn’t visibly react. He just spoke calmly, looking levelly around the circle. “There’s always a way.”

And he knew that, on this one, there had to be.

Not getting it done simply wasn’t an option.

Every Cali Left

Camp Davis – Guard Sangar

The silence between Kate and Predator had come back. While Kate was ruminating on Ali, Pred had been getting lost back in his memories. They weren’t good ones, and his stony face started to reflect that. Kate half-smiled and said: