ARISEN, Book Eleven - Deathmatch (33 page)

Hailey banked around to try to get a better look through the thick foliage beyond water’s edge, which the rafters had just disappeared into, toting their body bag.

“Cadaver, they appear static. Looks like they’ve set up camp about fifty meters inside the treeline.”

“Outstanding, Thunderchild. I want you to lase their position and transmit a ten-digit grid reference to our mutual friends, just as soon as you’re high enough to reach them.”

“Got it,” Hailey said. Her sensor pod was already pointed right at these guys. Ranging it with the targeting laser, which also revealed the grid coords of the target, was a one-press operation.

“Good. Now get your ass up top.”

Hailey shook her head. That was exactly what the air-wing LPO had told her in that head, what felt like a hundred lifetimes ago now.

Oh, well. If she was going to have to keep doing what she was told, she was at least going to have some fun with it. Another amusing thing an F-35 pilot could do with 43,000 foot-pounds of thrust was put it on its ass and climb straight up, like a moonshot rocket – at a thousand miles per hour.

You didn’t get to do that shit in an office job.

* * *

“Goddammit,” Misha said as rounds started impacting around his position – damned close to his position, in fact. Then something streaked in from the forest and exploded in one of the defensive barricades they’d set up. Wood splintered and scattered.

“Motherfuckers!” he said. He was pretty sure that was one of their own RPG-32s.

Ducking down out of the line of fire, Misha turned and scanned out over the river. The raft was now across and his men off it. The timing of the attack, of the Americans catching them, wasn’t ideal. But it was about what he expected. The main thing was he’d gotten the Index Case across the river where it was safe from the attack. Now he just had to hold on long enough for the cavalry to arrive, namely his Team Two ground convoy. He hit his radio.

“Team Two, what’s your motherfucking ETA, over?”

“Misha, we are approximately thirty minutes from your location. Well – from the opposite side of the motherfucking river.”

Misha lifted up his rifle, an Izhmash AK-9, a special-forces-only weapon. Looking like a sleek, black, compact AK-47, it had a short (8-inch) barrel with integrated silencer, and fired a subsonic 9x39mm cartridge – a bullet with twice the mass of the standard 7.62x39mm cartridge fired by most AKs. This round also featured an air pocket in the tip, which increased its ability to yaw after impact, and thus its traumatic effect in soft tissue. Totally silent and able to pierce the latest bulletproof armor, it was a proven man-stopper, with twice the muzzle energy of the suppressed Heckler & Koch MP5SD that was the closest Western equivalent.

Misha kept his mounted with an EOTech sight, given the subsonic ammo limited its range to about 400m anyway. But, like the rest of his men, except more so, he preferred to kill up close. It hardly counted if you couldn’t hear your victim’s last breath.

He looked over to Vasily, who was back and dressed again, albeit still looking very damp, and moving into position – the highest one locally, up on the base of the destroyed bridge.

“We hold here,” Misha barked to what was left of the original fourteen-strong Team 1 – now down to eight men, including himself and Vasily. Two had gone down in the Islamist fortress, one got useless in the helo crash, and two more were across the water guarding their dead guy until their ride arrived.

And the Runt was out in the Indian Ocean.

* * *

And just like that it was a gunfight. Handon had formulated a hasty plan of approach and assault – one that would pin down their opponents, without putting his own guys at undue risk. And they executed it like bosses.

But their opponents were bosses in their own right, and reacted on a dime, with violence and ferocity – and seeming a lot like they had been waiting for them. Handon could already feel the stiffening of the resistance. This was not a conventional infantry engagement, nor was it going to be anything like easy or safe.

Cornered Spetsnaz are MEAN
, he thought.

Everyone shooting here was shooting suppressed – so it was like the silent disco version of a balls-out firefight. And it was conceivable they might get to conduct it unmolested, murdering one another in peace without waking the dead, depending on how close the nearest ones were.

That opening RGP shot hadn’t been quiet, and had been a calculated risk. But Handon needed to fix the enemy in place, so had decided to announce their arrival with authority.

He had positioned his team at twenty-five-meter intervals, in a crescent seventy-five yards from the Spetsnaz positions, enveloping their fixed defenses on the riverbank. He and Henno anchored the center of the line, with Juice out on the left flank, and Baxter on the weak side, the right. He’d left Ali floating free, roaming in their rear to take longer shots of opportunity, as well as to guard their six. The enemy looked to be about eight shooters, hunkered down behind natural terrain features and piled-up wood, stone, and debris. They wouldn’t have been able to dig in much in the wet and sandy soil of the riverbank.

Attackers who were outnumbered two-to-one by defenders probably shouldn’t be attacking. But, as Handon had told his team, they didn’t need to kill the enemy, or even overrun their positions. They just needed to keep Spetsnaz in them.

Handon paused shooting to touch his mic. “Fire discipline – shepherd your rounds.” It was a lesser known rule of gunfighting that often the loser was the first side to run out of ammo. And because ammo is heavy, and they had all been humping through the jungle, they only had so much – with no resupply in sight. But that was only one reason Handon issued this order.

The other was because he needed time to be on their side.

* * *

Hailey pulled her stick back and started climbing, until she was perfectly vertical. And then she accelerated until she hit Mach 1 and kept blasting right through it, to nearly 27 kilometers a minute. Her bird was now pointing straight up – and doing 1,000mph on its ass.

Less than ten seconds later she had climbed up to 12,000 feet, and her brain was smushed against the back of her skull, with all her blood in the rear half of her body. She leveled it out, checked her position and heading, and began to circle around Cadaver’s AO. Of course now she was well above the weather that was still socked in down there. But FLIR was pretty much designed to see through things like clouds and smoke. And from up here, she’d have a pretty good idea what was going on, for a long way in every direction.

But as she scanned up and out to the northeast, she suddenly wished she hadn’t. Whatever Cadaver’s plan down there was, they were going to have to execute it fast.

Because the only cavalry about to arrive was Russian.

* * *

Unfortunately for their ambitions about keeping the dead away, the silent-disco shootout quickly devolved into a grenade-throwing contest. Maybe it was Handon’s fault for launching that RPG. Maybe he’d positioned them too close, just within throwing range. But once the first grenade took wing, they were off to the races. This was always a temptation with dug-in opponents – to dig them out with explosives.

Now shrapnel whistled through the forest, schwacking into trees, occasionally body armor – and at least once or twice into flesh. Barring bad luck, probably no one was going to get killed this way – though the superior athletes in both Tier-1 forces could definitely chuck a long bomb with some accuracy.

Over the settling explosions, Handon heard a voice in his ear. It was Thunderchild. “Send it!” he shouted.

Hearing him shout caused her to shout in turn.
“Cadaver, be advised: there is another ground force inbound your location!”

“Disposition?”

“It’s a ground convoy – eight vehicles, big ones, trucks and SUVs. Unknown number of enemy pax. They’re on the other side of the river, coming in from the north. With the bridge out, they’ll have their work cut out getting to you.”

Handon cursed as he fired. The fact that this new force couldn’t get across the river was little comfort to him. Because Patient Zero was over on that side of the goddamned river. And when this ground convoy arrived, their prize was as good as gone.

Suddenly, time was very definitely not on their side.

Just a Girl

JFK – Outside the MARSOC Team Room

Two sleekly powerful and menacing figures in dark gray assault suits moved like wraiths down a side passageway of 02 Deck. Both carried compact assault carbines, and both wore tactical vests stuffed with magazines, midsize assault packs, and side arms. Their primary weapons were raised to their shoulders, panning and sweeping as they cleared ahead of them, moving fast.

Finally they stopped outside a closed hatch. Stenciled on it in white paint were six characters in all-caps:
MARSOC
.

While one turned and covered behind, the other tried the latch. Instantly, he spun in place, and the other dug into his pack and pulled out a compact plasma cutter. While one covered the passageway, the other sparked the torch and started cutting through the precise two-inch sections of hatch behind which the locking dogs lay. Showers of sparks splashed out onto the deck, and in less than a minute all the dogs had been severed. He handed back the torch, then both men stacked up on the hatch, kicked it open – and flowed into the compartment, one going left and one right.

In five seconds, they’d cleared the MARSOC Team Room, and one had dragged Emily out from behind a pile of crates – the suppressor at the end of his carbine stuck in her face. Watching this, the other hit his radio: “Target Beta-One clear. No Marines. Just a girl… Got it.” He moved his hand back to the vertical foregrip of his weapon. “Do it,” he said.

But the other man hesitated – she was indeed just a girl, and a small and pretty one at that. “She might have intel,” he said, looking down at her, his slitted eyes meeting her wide ones. She was on her knees before him, fists clenched by her sides. She pretty clearly didn’t understand the Russian the two Spetsnaz naval commandos were speaking. But her eyes spoke clearly enough.

They said she was defiant, probably to the end.

The first one moved over to the desk. “What – intel like the profile for their shore mission?” He held up a thick white mission binder. Putting that down, he picked up an electronic keycard. “Or maybe access to their armory?”

The second man exhaled and nodded, then turned back to the girl, raising his rifle. But her right arm was already flicking forward, fist opening and releasing something.

His world went completely white – and then black.

* * *

Wesley and his two-man NSF special-mission team, Jenson and Burns, along with the two aircraft mechanics, Chief Davis and Pete, ascended toward the flight deck. Being on the platform of one of the gigantic aircraft elevators while it raised or lowered through the huge cut-out notch in the flight deck was like being in a Christopher Nolan film, watching the buildings move and fold around you.

They came level with the deck just in time to see the antenna array at the top of the island detonate overhead. Stretching between fifty and a hundred feet above the great expanse of the flight deck – and as much as two hundred feet above the surface of the ocean – its destruction looked like the dismantling of an entire futuristic city, suddenly exploding, coming apart, and collapsing.

And then it all came crashing and exploding down around the island, seemingly in slow motion, struts and catwalks and sections of antenna and cracked domes and cleaved radar dishes, as well as miles of thick cabling, much of it electrified and sparking and smoking, all of it whipping and cracking with wicked force and violence – a fifty-ton steel avalanche bearing down on them.

With no time to reflect, and the violence of the spectacle overloading rational thought anyway, the five men on the elevator leapt up the last two feet to the deck on a wave of adrenaline and legged it at full speed in the opposite direction, toward the front edge of the ship.

As they hauled ass toward safety, or something like it, all Wesley could think about – other than not getting tangled up with his sword – was his radio call with Handon, which had taken place less than thirty minutes ago. And it occurred to him that whatever the hell was going on aboard this ship, whoever had caused this chaos…

That might be his last transmission with them for a while.

* * *

Less than a hundred meters away, but encased in steel at the bottom level of the island, CIC was a buzz of frantic activity. The sound of the crashing antenna array – perfectly audible even through all that steel – hadn’t even settled before LT Campbell and her staff were moving a million miles an hour.

Getting ready for war.

Job number one was actually securing their outer hatch. CIC was the most invulnerable and survivable of the three thousand compartments on the 110,000-ton warship. It had been constructed as a veritable bank vault – but one supplied with air, water, power, and comms links to everything – where ops staff could run the carrier’s offensive and defensive operations, direct the whole strike group, fight and win a large set-piece naval battle, or even run an entire war.

And they could keep doing it even if the world burned down around them – just as long as the ship stayed afloat, and the nuclear reactor and batteries kept the power on.

After battening down the hatches, Campbell didn’t need to instruct her staff to start contacting every critical station on the ship, and after that the non-critical ones – getting status reports, issuing orders, collecting intel… and coordinating the defense.

Campbell liked going to war. It was her job.

* * *

Far below the uncontrolled chaos of the flight deck, Armour and Parlett pounded down the main passageway of 02 Deck at full speed – hauling ass for Roy’s duty station. But something up ahead stopped them in their tracks.