ARISEN, Book Twelve - Carnage (15 page)

Handon had just absorbed the bad news when Juice came back on.
“Hey, it’s actually a good news, bad news, good news joke.”

“Send the other good news, over.”

“While we didn’t stop the Russians for long, we did stop them just long enough to pass them in the outside lane. Check your six.”

The group of five living people and one dead one was just climbing a modest rise. As they crested it, the final river valley before Djibouti spread out before them. And when Handon turned around from this elevation, he could see a colorfully painted bus bouncing up the road behind them and to their right, from the southeast.

“Oh, thank fuck for that,” Henno said.

But they weren’t out of the woods. Because also visible to the naked eye, behind and to the east of the road, their left, was the crawling line of the reduced Spetsnaz convoy. And while it was farther away than the jingle bus, it wasn’t a hell of a lot farther away.

And it was definitely moving faster.

“Come on,” Handon said, pointing toward the road. They had a ride now. The last thing he wanted to do was push their luck by making it go off-roading to pick them up. Four minutes later, it skidded in the mud and the door whooshed open, admitting the rest of the team, who went spilling in – and, reunited, they all accelerated away again, in seconds.

Still sucking wind and dripping sweat, Handon did a double-take on the driver on his way in, then button-holed Juice, pushing him up the aisle toward the back, and giving him a
What the hell?
look. Juice knew what he meant – why the hell was al-Sif driving their vehicle?

“He’s with us now,” Juice said. “Sort of.”

Handon shook his head.
Jesus
. “Your responsibility,” he said. He already had way too much to keep his eye on. He nodded over Juice’s shoulder, where Baxter was flying the drone in the back. As they moved back there, he said a single word: “Misha.”

“He survived,” Juice said.

“You’re sure?”

“He’s hard to miss.”

Handon cursed silently. “We have got to end that guy.”

“Ya think?” This was Henno coming up the aisle behind them.

Handon raised his eyes to Henno’s, then looked back to Juice. “What’s the speed of the Russian convoy?”

“They’ve been pushing one-forty.”

“And this thing?”

“Tops out around ninety.”

“Goddammit.” Handon leaned over Baxter – who he noted was now for some reason wearing that Milkor multi-grenade launcher slung on his own back – and had him call up the map, then did some back-of-the-envelope calculations. They’d make it across the river and into Djibouti ahead of the Spetsnaz convoy. But they’d be caught shortly after that. “No munitions left on the Predator’s rails?”

Juice shook his head. “That well is dry.”

“Okay,” Handon said. “Then I need you to be ready to crash the drone into the lead Spetsnaz vehicle – and make sure it’s the one Misha’s riding in this time.”

Juice’s eyes went wide. “Not sure that’s such a stellar idea, boss. Taking out one dude isn’t worth blinding ourselves for. The Pred’s the only air asset we’ve got left – and battlespace awareness is priceless. They’ve also demonstrated that taking out a vehicle or two only buys us a few minutes.”

“Yeah,” Handon said. “But it degrades their force. So maybe we’ll have a fighting chance when they do catch us. And if we kill their commander, so much the better.” He stood up straight, holding onto a seat with his free hand against the rocking and bumping, and exhaled heavily as he finally caught his breath.

“Be ready. But I’ve got one last thing I want to try.”

He locked eyes with Henno, who read his look. It said:

But you’re probably not going to like it…

Warriors

Northwest Somalia – Spetsnaz Convoy

Kuznetsov mentally catalogued their losses and their remaining resources. Misha had managed to lose all of Team 1 – excepting only himself and Vasily, the spooky sniper who was like Rasputin to Misha’s Tsar – and in the bargain also lost their mission objective, Patient Zero. And his own Team 2 had just lost four killed and two wounded – wounded too badly to carry on. Now those men lay dying in the desert, sacrificed on the altar of Misha’s crusade. Though they wouldn’t begrudge it, or complain. Everyone knew what they were signing up to when they joined this unit.

In fairness, that did still leave twenty-six combat-effective shooters in the four remaining vehicles – plus the dozen in Team 3 still up in the north. Those two groups together, or even individually, handily outnumbered the Americans they had seen so far – not to mention outclassed them. But Misha still had to know they were being attrited, worn down.

He just didn’t care.

The American commander on the other hand was not only fearless – he was also damned smart and cagey. He had so far managed to keep his people alive and his resources intact. And he was slowly but steadily evening the odds.

“
Polkóvnik
,” the RTO said from the back seat, his head still banging into missile tubes, RPG-32s and Grinch AA missiles. For some reason the two other shooters who had been shoved into the back seat with him weren’t having that problem. And Captain Kuznetsov couldn’t help but notice that his own men basically ignored him when Misha was around. But he didn’t say anything about it. In so doing, both he and they were maneuvering for their own advantage – and survival.

“
Da
,” Misha grunted over his shoulder.

But no answer came. Kuznetsov twisted at the waist in the passenger seat. “What? What the hell is it?”

“We’ve intercepted and decrypted another American transmission.”

“So. What’s the message?”

“It’s the American commander. He wishes to speak to Misha.”

“What?” Kuznetsov said. “Who’s he talking to? And on what channel?”

“It’s one of the enemy long-range frequencies. But there’s no one on the other end. He’s addressing us – directly. He’s asked the colonel to join him on an unencrypted channel.”

Kuznetsov faced forward, but looked at Misha. “So you were right. They do know we’ve hacked their encryption.”

But Misha ignored this, instead banging on the steering wheel with his non-steering hand, bellowing with gorilla laughter. “Ha, ha, ha, ha… I love these fucking guys! They’re all about to die, and now they want to talk! Give me the fucking handset.”

He switched to English and said, “Hello, asshole!”

* * *

Handon didn’t react to Misha’s unconventional radio protocol – he wasn’t about to be rattled by an insult. He had his earpiece out, and his radio’s speaker projecting so the others could hear this. Henno was, inevitably, giving him one of his Henno looks.

Handon said, “This is Misha, I presume.”

“At your fucking service!”

Handon drew a breath. “All right, listen. We’re running out of time. So I’m going to say what I called to say.”

“I’m listening.”

“Here’s my offer: we’ll share Patient Zero with you.”

This seemed to bring everyone on both sides up short. If anyone else had thought of this before, they weren’t saying so now. When no reply came back after a few seconds, Handon kept talking.

“There’s no need for this fight – for any of it. Both sides can easily get the virus samples we need. There are billions of strands of viral RNA in this body – enough for thousands of samples.”

Handon paused and looked around the bus.

“There’s no need for more bloodshed. We can end it.”

* * *

Handset to his huge head, Misha ground his teeth, building up a head of steam. Kuznetsov watched him arch his back, unconsciously or not he didn't know, where he still had several steel ball bearings embedded near his spine. Misha was nursing several bad wounds from their first encounter with the American special operators in the South African warehouse. Many of the men were.

Finally Misha spoke. “Funny how suddenly you are so interested in a peaceful resolution – now that you are minutes away from being caught, killed, and relieved of what you have stolen from us. Always jacking our shit, you fucking Americans.”

Kuznetsov realized he was unconsciously moving away from Misha on the bench seat. However much exposure you had to him, Misha simply never stopped being scary.
Come to consider it
, Kuznetsov mused,
he gets scarier the longer and better you know him…

When Misha spoke again his voice was deeper and more lethal than ever. “Now you listen to me you Yankee doodle dick-smoker. I offered to have a nice civilized conversation with your bearded tech guy back in that South African warehouse. And do you know what he did? He threw a motherfucking flashbang in my face… started a balls-out firefight…”

Kuznetsov noted with alarm that as Misha’s anger built up into a towering stormfront, his already casual high-speed two-finger driving was growing more erratic – making it even easier to imagine the vehicle, with its high center of gravity, rolling on the rough terrain.

“…and then he used our own defensive munitions against us, wiping out half my team in the blink of an eye – and fucking up the other half in ways that will never go away. Then you jacked all our fucking supplies. And today you murdered my best team, every man, with a cowardly missile strike. So forgive me if I don’t particularly feel like making a fucking deal with you motherfucking cockroaches.”

Kuznetsov thought Misha – his face red now, particularly the angry unhealed shrapnel scar – looked like he wanted to start banging the radio handset against something. Perhaps his own head.

Misha paused to listen for a response. None came. He took a breath, and some of his crashing anger bled away, though his voice still rumbled. “But you know what? All of that is okay. The deaths, the pain, the loss. Even the wounds. And do you know why? Because it feeds our anger. It powers our rage. It inspires the men’s ferocity and their hunger for revenge, their commitment to never losing another fight again, ever – whatever the cost.”

Misha held the handset out in front of his face.

“Hell is coming for you. And we’re close behind.”

* * *

Henno watched Handon consider his response.

“Warriors wage war,” he finally said into the radio. “It’s what we know. Maybe things didn’t have to play out the way they did in that warehouse. Maybe they did. Maybe the same is true of the fight on the riverbank. Either way, whatever happened before, we make our choices now.”

Now Handon paused to wait for a response. Nothing.

He drew a breath. “What if humanity makes it? What if we, or you, are successful in producing a vaccine – and clearing out the dead? What will be left then? What kind of species will we be? One that just makes the same mistakes all over again?”

Henno rolled his eyes, and Handon didn’t miss it.

And, a second later, Henno was about as surprised by Misha’s response as he was by the rising of the sun every morning.

“I have no doubt humanity will fuck shit up all over again. It’s what they are good at. But not for us – never again the same mistakes. And I will tell you what is going to happen now. We are going to hunt you down like the cockroach genitalia you are, we are going to take back the Index Case, and then we are going to shoot each of you in the back of the head – and leave your carcasses in the desert. Not to rot, but as food for the dead.”

There was a heavy beat, with only the sound of the rattling bus, engine, and road around them.

“Just as even now we are taking your aircraft carrier, as reparations for your destruction of our mighty battlecruiser, and the murder of everyone on board her. And we are going to put the crew of your ship to the sword, and drop them over the side – as food for the infected sharks in the Gulf.”

Handon realized he had locked eyes with Henno as they both listened to this.

“No – never again the same mistakes for us. And when Russia, and Russia alone, has the vaccine, then the Russian Empire will resume its rightful dominion over the world. And when the world is rebuilt, we will fashion it in our image – with our values of martial spirit, and strength, and victory always. And we will rule all of it.”

Handon sighed out loud. He’d tried.

“Okay,” he said, looking down at Baxter. “Do it.”

Happy Warrior

Somalia – Northwest River Valley

The job of a Special Forces ODA team sergeant stretched to a thousand tasks and standards – but perhaps at the very top of the list was making split-second life-or-death decisions for the team in combat. If Jake waffled, people died. And, as the saying went, a decent plan executed now beat a perfect one executed five minutes from now – when everyone was dead.

As Jake stared out the cracked windscreen of the gun truck – looking up the road, across the ruins of the bridge, and straight into the guns of the hovering Black Shark – he had a couple of critical data points that played into his decision.

One – the Alpha guys, Homer and Predator, were almost certainly gone. Even if they were alive, there was absolutely nothing the survivors in the gun truck could do for them right now – not with that attack helo perched over the river like a really big, angry insect.

Two – they were never going to get a better chance than right now. The Black Shark was pointing all its weapons at them. But it was also close to ground level, and nearly static. And they were pointing all of their guns right back – including the 50-cal minigun in the turret. Their weapons didn’t remotely match up – and it was unlikely in the extreme that anything they had was going to take down the heavily armored Black Shark. But, then again, nobody, in any known vehicle, could totally disregard 2,000 rounds per minute of .50 BMG.

Finally, they were already under the best and only cover they were going to get, this bit of riverine forest – perhaps for the rest of their lives. And, finally, hey, you had to try, right? Jake knew if they ran, they would only die tired. Plus – it was never over until it was over.