ARISEN, Book Eleven - Deathmatch (8 page)

Her nemesis
.

He was back.

* * *

A small, hunched shape slipped away into the shadows cast by the forest canopy, and slithered down the steep and dripping slopes of the mountain. This humanoid shape also had something long and thin strapped to its back. Facing forward and picking up speed, he scanned the forest through slitted eyes – and one of those eyes was circled by a target reticle. It was the same crosshairs he saw every day through the scope mounted on the SV-338 sniper rifle on his back – but tattooed in black and red ink around his right eye.

And it wasn’t the only tattoo on his face.

While he jarred visually, Vasily moved without sound. It was a big part of his job to get into and out of places in silence. And right now he was getting out – descending the sodden slopes, and descending farther, leaving the summit behind. It was a long walk down the mountain and back to the forest encampment Vasily called home for now. But he didn’t mind. Anyway, he was home wherever he laid his sniper rifle.

He was home as long as he was close to the fight.

As he slipped through the shadows of the dripping forest, he reached up to scratch his earlobe – forgetting once again that it wasn’t there anymore. He felt constant phantom sensations from the shot-off ear: phantom pain, phantom irritation – and goddamned phantom itching.

These phantasms were a haunting legacy left to him from the ghostly sniper chick he had faced, in dueling helicopters, over the open water of the south Atlantic. Vasily felt he knew a great deal about this enemy sniper, after only one engagement.

He knew she was good – seriously good. But anyone could tell that about her, probably from over 1,500 yards out. And she was smart. She was also tough and determined – which were more important than being smart or good, more important than almost everything else. But not everything.

Because Vasily also knew this: she wasn’t vicious enough.

And it was because of this failing that he had won his sniper duel with her. Their skills were closely matched. But she simply didn’t have the necessary savagery.

And that had cost her – nearly everything.

She had managed, it now appeared, to get away from that engagement alive. But it was Vasily who had flown away with the prize – the American pilot, the commander of the carrier’s air group. And soon Vasily and his team, the
Mirovye Lohi
, were going to leave with the real prize: the Index Case.

And they alone would have the key to curing the plague.

They would be immune – and immortal.

* * *

In silence, Vasily leapt down a last series of crumbly banks that led to level ground, and stepped on to a rutted path that led out of the forest, and to the closest thing to a road in northern Somalia. There was still a lot of solo walking left to do, but he was very comfortable in his own company.

Spetsnaz didn’t let in men who weren’t totally self-reliant, nor too many who would win congeniality contests. They looked for men who could operate without support, without sleep, without medical care, hungry and cold, wounded, half dead, in terrible pain…

The imaginary pain in Vasily’s ear reminded him of the woman sniper again. The fact that she was a woman was nothing to him. The Motherland had always given capable women equal footing in the military, and many had distinguished themselves in the Red Army. During the Great Patriotic War, which is what they called WW2, over 2,000 women had served as snipers.

Though barely 500 had survived.

The most famous, Lyudmila Pavlichenko, had been credited with 309 confirmed kills – including
thirty-six enemy snipers
. Winning that many sniper duels was not luck. It was due to skill, resolve, and the absolute determination to prevail.

And it required real viciousness.

So Vasily knew women could fight. As could the one he’d faced in the air. He thought he had her dead to rights with a headshot more than once – but somehow she had slithered free each time. In the end, he’d had to take out the whole helicopter around her, including both pilots, as well as both minigunners.

And that was how Vasily knew this sniper lacked the necessary viciousness. Because she had been down on the deck taking care of their wounded crew chief, instead of throwing herself back into the fight. The Russians’ own minigunner had been hit, too. But Vasily had taken his eye from the scope only long enough to tell the moaning man to get up and get back on his weapon. But he had whimpered that he was too injured to do so.

“Then what good are you?” Vasily had asked.

And so he had won the fight himself, while the minigunner bled out down on the deck. And that was the difference between him and the woman sniper: weakness. She had not ruthlessly rooted out every bit of weakness in herself – every trace of compassion, of humanity.

She was weak, and so she had lost.

Vasily, like everyone in Spetsnaz, knew you had to kill the weak parts of yourself, just as you killed everything in your way. To prevail, it was necessary to sacrifice humanity, compassion, weaker comrades – anything that compromised their strength, or their victory.

And especially in a dead world that was trying to eat you alive, humanity was a luxury that could not be afforded – and love even less so. You had to do without love, and you had to overcome your own humanity, so as to become stronger than death, even more unfeeling than the dead.

Only when they were stronger than death could death hold no terror. Then, death had no power over them. And death could not beat them.

Nothing could.

* * *

“Vasily to Team One.”

“This is Team One Actual.”
It was Misha himself who answered. That rumbling warlord basso voice was unmistakeable.
“What up, my negro?”
Never mind his highly eccentric use of language.

“I am mission complete, ETA twenty minutes.”

“And what have you got for me, Vashushka?”
Vasily didn’t like it when Misha used a diminutive form of his name, particularly one with a pejorative tint. But of course there wasn’t a goddamned thing he could do about it.

“They’re here,” he said simply.

“All of them? The sniper?”

“Yes, her.”

“And the bearded one?”

“Him, too.”

“Okay – bring it in. And shake a tail-feather, mutha.”

Vasily didn’t bother signing off. Misha liked having the last word.

Even if it often made no sense.

Warlord

Moscow, Red Square – 100 Feet Beneath Lenin’s Tomb

Akela, commander of the Spetsnaz Alfa Group team known as
Volch’ya Staya
(the Wolf Pack) walked the aisles of his high-tech Tactical Operations Center (TOC) – which was what leading from the front often meant these days. Though he still personally led ops out on the ground as often as he could.

Right now, he still wore his dark gray assault suit with a small, dimmed-out tricolor Russian flag on the shoulder, from the patrol he’d taken out to reel in the Kazakh asshat and former bioweaponeer who had inexplicably crash-landed in their backyard. Akela had shucked all his weapons and tactical gear – except his side arm and spare mags.

He never went unarmed.

Because his position as leader of one of the most fearsome SOF and counter-terror units in the history of the world made Akela a modern-day warlord. But even after the fall of the world, and of the Russian Federation, he and Alfa Group had more resources and firepower at their disposal than Genghis Khan could have dreamt of. Human nature changed very little. Only the killers’ tools did.

Akela’s radio headset perked up.
“TOC from Viper One-One.”

He pulled his big, lean, and muscular frame upright, and stood with hands on hips, legs slightly spread, chest broad and open. “Go ahead, Lyudmila,” he answered. He had sent his favorite team leader out to run this latest patrol, and the two of them had long been on a first-name basis.

“We’re at the tank and have scoured it. There’s nothing.”

“Okay,” he said, his voice low and lethal, but a spark of cagey intelligence in his eye. “Check the crashed helo.”

“Understood. Viper out.”

Yes, like the Khans and their followers through history, Akela led from the front, first and fiercest. And like their namesakes, the wolves of Alfa Group would tear to pieces any leader less fearless or lethal than they – or who showed weakness, or any mercy to the enemy. This was one reason Alfa Group’s most infamous counter-terror operations – the Moscow theatre hostage crisis, the Beslan school massacre – had resulted in the deaths of everyone.

Absolutely everyone died – terrorists, hostages, bystanders.

Killing the wrong people could be forgiven. Letting the wrong ones live – never. No weakness, no hesitation, no mercy. Just viciousness, strength, and pure resolve.

As Akela checked the latest shift reports on a tablet handed to him by an ops officer, he considered how those same qualities had been shared by the dead man buried down in there with them. Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, more commonly known as Lenin, had led the 1917 October Revolution that established the Communist Party and led to the creation of the Soviet Union. He survived two assassination attempts as leader, the second of which injured him badly. And, in the end, his pure will and resolve had done much to shape the modern world.

In a way, Lenin’s work had also led to the end of the world.

Had there been no Lenin, there would have been no Soviet Union – and thus no Biopreparat, the secret bioweapons program, and no Oleg Aliyev and his chimera virus: Hargeisa, the zombie virus. The Kazakh worm was currently cooling his heels in their interrogation room. And it had taken the application of very little force to get him to confess his sins.

And those sins involved nothing less than the near total destruction of humanity. Aliyev had seemed strangely eager to confess what he’d done. Akela considered that perhaps the little man had not talked to a single soul, ensconced in his bunker in the Altai Mountains, since the fall of civilization.

But for some reason, Akela and his men had so far been unable to convince Aliyev to give up the encryption code he’d used to radio the Brits and Americans – a call he had made right in Akela’s own backyard. They had of course intercepted the transmission. They just couldn’t decrypt it – yet. The Kazakh had keyed the encryption code into the tank’s radio, and he sure as hell hadn’t memorized it. It had to be written down somewhere.

Which was why Akela had sent Lyudmila out – to find it.

As he squinted into the dark corners of the TOC, lost in thought, someone addressed him by rank. He turned to find one of their IT guys standing behind him in the glowing dimness, palming a phone – specifically, Aliyev’s, which he’d been tasked with scouring. Leaning in and looking at it, Akela could see a photo on the screen, showing some kind of snowscape, as well as a radio set.

“Zoom in,” the IT guy said. “Bottom right corner.”

Akela did so. And what resolved was a scrap of paper with twenty handwritten two-digit numbers on it.

“The dumb Kazakh son of a bitch,” Akela said, a smile spreading across his face. He hadn’t needed IT experts to scour the phone. The encryption code was probably on fucking Instagram. He touched his earpiece. “Lyudmila – disregard my last. Abort patrol and bring it back in.” Then he moved to the radio operator’s station and told him to open a channel to the Spetsnaz Naval Commando team known as
Mirovye Lohi
, on the ground in East Africa.

Akela knew their commander was about to owe him – big time.

Myrmidons

Spetsnaz Forest Encampment

“
Runt!
”

The Runt scurried toward the sloping back and giant shoulders from which this monosyllable issued. He didn’t need to get very close before he could see the angry, red, and not nearly healed wounds on those shoulders and neck. He’d been told that Misha still had ball bearings embedded in his back, too close to his spine to be removed. Quite a few of Misha’s cadre were wounded, after the warehouse fight at SAS Saldanha.

But, then, all of them fought wounded. Those too wounded to fight had simply been left behind.

“
Runt. Refill my motherfucking bad coffee!
” Misha never worried about noise when they were on the ground. The dead didn’t scare him. Nothing did. Now, the back didn’t even turn from the big tree stump upon which it perched, but merely presented a tin camp cup over one shoulder.

The Runt took it and wordlessly scurried back to their fire pit. Using a sock to grasp the coffee pot, he refilled Misha’s cup, then carried it back over.

And then he made himself scarce, fast.

The funny thing was that the Runt would have been a pretty big badass at a Gold’s Gym in West Philly, or even in most Western white special operations units. It was only here, at the center of the lead unit of the premier Spetsnaz naval brigade – in
Mirovye Lohi
,
The World Fuckers
– that he was the weakest link. But of course everything was relative. And this was one place you didn’t want to be regarded as weak, relatively or otherwise.

There was little question of Misha being warlord of this team, biggest and baddest of a group of highly trained operators and killers – Achilles to the Myrmidons of Spetsnaz. And Spetsnaz, particularly
Mirovye Lohi
, were known to eat their young – and to devour the weak. The weak inside, or out of, the unit.

The weak absolutely anywhere.

* * *

Misha took a sip of his shit coffee. It was still shit. But it was all they could scavenge from around here, on the even shittier side of Africa, which was what they were stuck in now. They’d had some of the good stuff back on the other coast, in South Africa. But now they didn’t, because all that had been taken from them.

So shit it was. For now.

“
Privet, boss
,” Vasily said from behind him – but not too close behind. Carefully approaching his commander from the rear, he’d cautiously nodded his regards to the large and diverse variety of tattooed, heavily muscled, and even more heavily armed
Lohi
who made up Team 1, and who now filled this forest encampment.