ARISEN, Book Twelve - Carnage (3 page)

And to save everyone who was left.

Safely bagged up, the very first Zulu, which had ultimately infected another seven billion, writhed slowly on the deck at their feet. And all of the operators sitting around it were experiencing a very strange sensation.

It felt something like… victory.

It was damned pleasant to win for once, especially after so much suffering, struggle, and sacrifice, and so many terrible setbacks. But the whole point of the operators, what made them who they were, was resilience and resolve – resilience to all difficulties, and the resolve to never quit.

And now, on the impossible mission that nevertheless could not fail, they had gotten it done. And they had almost made it to the other side – maybe all the way to the other side of death. This could be the road to redemption. The end of what had looked like the end.

And the beginning of a new beginning.

* * *

Even as the cool air wicked away his sweat, and the after-effects of the adrenaline bled away, Command Sergeant Major Handon sat still and silent and tried to decide whether he could let himself relax now, or feel any satisfaction.

When he looked up from staring down at Patient Zero, feeling like he was in a good dream for once, he caught Henno looking at him across the dim cabin – and the British hard man didn’t look away. Knowing he should stop himself, Handon said something anyway. He was human, and couldn’t resist pointing out that they had succeeded in their mission, under his leadership – which Henno had all but said was never going to happen.

“A pretty good result,” Handon said.

But in a turn that shouldn’t have surprised anybody, Henno just shook his head darkly. “The only result is when we get this thing back to Britain – along with Doc Park. And then bring a close to the fucking Zulu Alpha. Until then it’s all half-measures.”

Handon sat up a little straighter. As usual, Henno’s head was probably in the right place – and proving a useful corrective to Handon’s thinking. And he was smart and humble enough to know it.

“You’re right,” he said. That was all he had to say.

He looked to one side of Henno and smiled to see Ali’s head lolling on the Brit’s shoulder. The ability to rack out anywhere was a great operator skill. And it was one of Ali’s special talents to make him smile, even in the worst moments. Just as it was Henno’s job to keep him honest. And just for this moment, Handon was glad he hadn’t had to kill him. He wondered if Henno was thinking the same thing.

Probably not
.

He looked out the window and belatedly realized this aircraft was flying at what suddenly seemed like hot-air-balloon speed. He’d been so happy to be out of the bush and moving, he hadn’t noticed until now. He figured he knew the reason already, but wanted to confer with the pilot on a couple of things anyway. And, in part to get out of the way of Henno’s judging gaze, he went up to the cockpit to speak in person.

“What kind of airspeed you call this?”

The pilot, Cleveland, snorted in response. “I call it powered aerial flight, and I call it a damned miracle.”

Handon nodded. “So not much chance of bringing us up to your never-exceed speed?” That was understood to be about 207mph.

Cleveland all but slapped his knee.

“Top speed, then?” That was about 168mph on a healthy and not too overloaded MH-60 Seahawk.

Cleveland said, “Could have sworn I already mentioned the bailing wire this thing is lashed together with.”

Handon checked the airspeed indicator. They weren’t even breaking 100. He opened his mouth again to argue. But as he looked up, he belatedly felt wind on his face – and saw the ragged bullet holes that spider-webbed the cockpit glass, two or three each in front of the left and right seats. And now he remembered: Cleveland’s brother pilots had been killed and grievously wounded, right where they now sat. He looked around for bloodstains, but those must have gotten cleaned up somewhere along the way.

He took a breath and decided to let the airspeed issue go. They were in the air, and they were going the right way. And Cleveland was right – pushing it would be unwise. Hell, sitting in this thing was already dicing with death – even just flying with the weakened cockpit glass wasn’t a great idea. He gave up and switched topics.

“Any contact with
Kennedy
?”

“Negative,” said Cleveland, without looking over
.
“Silent as the grave. Comms still totally down – or out.”

Handon twisted at the waist, looked back, and spotted Fick in the main cabin. The old warrior sat still and upright, staring straight ahead, like a granite statue of a Marine. Or like a man at a funeral. He had been losing Marines out here on the shore mission – two of the three he went out with, so far. And now he knew he was also almost certainly losing them back on the carrier. And not only couldn’t he lead or aid his men back there – he didn’t even know what the hell was going on.

Maybe it was better that way.

Handon faced forward again, dug into a duty pouch, pulled out his satphone – then said a silent prayer to the satellite gods.

And he tried Sarah again, on board the beleaguered carrier.

* * *

Back at the river valley crash site of their first Seahawk, Juice was getting into the swing of playing drone jockey. And their forest clearing was getting positively homey, since Baxter had turned up, assigned by Handon to provide security. Juice had put him to work doing… well, everything but flying the UCAV.

He could have put the drone on autopilot. He just didn’t want to. Anyway, they were only looking at another ninety minutes of linger time on that jet-fuel-slurping beast. Whatever good it was going to do, they would have to do it fast.

Juice was currently flying it about fifty clicks ahead of the Seahawk, scanning both air and ground for threats – hoping to spot any before they became a danger to the team, and the mission objective. But he was also doing periodic circuits around them, which was pretty easy at its nearly supersonic top speed, and with the Seahawk barely crawling across the sky.

He’d range forward to look for threats ahead, then circle back to make sure they weren’t followed, shadowed, or just shot out of the sky from behind. In a way, he was blocking for the team’s end-zone run. And, with the armaments left on the UCAV, he had a few lethal stiff-arm shoves still available to him.

He stole a look over his shoulder at his new minion.

Baxter was working on their fixed defensive positions, piling up fallen trees into a sort of palisade outside the cargo door of the downed helo. He seemed happy enough to be doing the grunt work. Though, in fact, he was an accomplished drone pilot in his own right. He’d learned to fly them pre-ZA, back in the CIA’s Hargeisa safehouse, mainly because Zack, his boss, had wanted to train him up. Then, for the first eighteen months of the ZA, he had served as lead drone jockey for the al-Shabaab commander, Godane.

But now he was on construction duty, following Juice’s orders as he called them out, policing up the area and turning it into a serviceable combat outpost (COP). Juice figured this was like having an intern, or a buck private in a conventional unit detailed to him. Then again, Baxter had already demonstrated – not least in his handling of their Spetsnaz prisoner – that he was a lot smarter and more skilled than most infantry grunts. Maybe he would have more moments to shine.

When Handon hailed him on his team radio, Juice paused his supervision and went back to flying. Unless he could figure out how to use the UCAV as a radio relay, he guessed this might be one of their last secure transmissions, as the Seahawk winged its way northwest.

“This is Juice, send it, Cadaver One.”

“Interrogative: Baxter find you okay?”

“Affirmative.”

“Good. You guys are now call sign Cadaver Four.”

“Copy that. Wait, are there even still four of us left alive?”

Handon chose to ignore that.
“A more urgent question: how the hell did the Russians hack our drone?”

Juice wasn’t surprised Handon was getting around to asking this, but he still had to swallow his annoyance.
Oh, so NOW he wants to talk about that shit
. He slightly wished Handon had listened to him on their first Seahawk ride, when he had tried to warn him about the possibility of this happening. But the Alpha leader had a lot on his plate then. Still did.

“My guess? Either the Russians have still got active cyberwar units, which were always top-tier – or else they just bought the hack off the shelf from the Chinese, before the fall. Like the Iranians did in 2011.”

“Okay. So where the hell are they controlling it from?”

“My half-assed triangulation had the control signal emanating from offshore – somewhere in the Gulf, but north of the
Kennedy
.”

“So the Russians have got another seagoing vessel out there somewhere.”

“Yeah. But it might be a rowboat.”

“And it might be another battlecruiser.”

“We’d have seen that on radar.”

“We have no idea what the Kennedy can or can’t see on radar at this point. They’re fighting for their lives against a heavy force of Naval Spetsnaz borders.”

“Holy shit. Over.”

“Yeah, roger that. Cadaver Four, how’s our air?”

“Cadaver One, we show clear skies and smooth sailing all the way to the border.”

“Okay. That makes a change. Stay in touch.”

“Copy that. Fly safe.”

Juice signed off, and only realized Baxter was looking over his shoulder when the younger man said, “So, wait, you—”

Before he could get the next word out, Juice twisted at the waist and gave him a forearm shove. “Eyes front!” he said. “Weapon out. Posture vigilant. You trying to get us all killed?”

Baxter immediately complied, embarrassed that he had taken his eye off his one job: defending Juice, the crash site, and control of the drone. He also shut the hell up, and moved back to the line of fixed defenses – and then he heard Juice’s voice again, softer this time.

“Now you can ask your question. Just don’t forget what you’re doing. You’re the only security this position has got. And I’m not going to let you fuck it up, which if you do you’ll never forgive yourself for… for however many seconds you have left to live.”

Baxter nodded. He got it. He paused and scanned 180 degrees of forest over the top of his M4. In a very real way, he was now finally living out his long-imagined boy’s own operator adventure. He was teamed up with a no-shit legit Tier-1 guy. He was getting real-time and real-life tactical instruction. And everything he did now mattered. Once he had satisfied himself the forest was devoid of life – or the dead, for that matter – he whispered his question over his shoulder.

“You said the Iranians bought off-the-shelf hacks from the Chinese?”

“Yeah.”

“So the stealth drone the Iranians brought down in 2011 actually
was
hacked?” That was the claim the Iranian mullahs had made. The U.S. government had kept stonily silent on the topic.

“Oh, absolutely,” Juice said. “We were never going to admit it. Also, like I said, the Iranians didn’t do it themselves – they just bought the code from one of the Chinese cyberwar units, who were happy to sell it to them. And who almost certainly developed it by hacking into Lockheed Martin’s systems.”

“Holy shit.”

“I’d tell you never to tell anyone any of that, but it hardly matters now. Or, wait, maybe it does again…”

Baxter shook his head in awe. This dude could not only give him world-class tactical instruction. He could also see through the matrix of cyberwar.

Stirring him from his reverie, Juice said: “Go do a patrol loop to check our six – and the rest of our perimeter. Start on the other side of the bird, push out fifty meters, then do a full circuit.”

“Wilco,” Baxter said.

He patted himself down to make sure his weapons and ammo were where he expected them to be – and, mainly, that nothing was loose and would rattle when he moved. Then he headed out around the barricade and started circling the clearing and the wrecked airframe. He had his rifle at low ready and his head on a swivel.

As he ducked under the angled tail boom, a sound up ahead made him freeze. He crouched down for a full minute. When nothing appeared, and the sound didn’t recur, he rose and moved out again. As he ducked around the last mass of foliage and into the tiny clearing on the opposite side…

He froze dead again – even as he raised his rifle to his shoulder. There was a man there – pointing a rifle right back at him.

“Hello, white boy.”

Baxter wasn’t cool enough to deliver his expected line. He just gulped, and slowly lowered his weapon.

Al-Sif.

Dead Stick

Seahawk Crash Site, Nugal River Valley

“Whatever you do,” Baxter said to the river valley’s most unexpected visitor, “do
not
raise your weapon when we go around this aircraft.”

Al-Sif looked truculent, which Baxter thought was a bit rich, all things considered. The dude was lucky to be alive at all – this being only his latest encounter with a whole bunch of guys, namely the operators, who were in every way his superior. Baxter figured he had actually better do some due diligence before he allowed al-Sif into the their camp. Juice might not be pleased with what he brought back from his patrol.

“What are you doing here?” he asked.

“I came to collect… my ticket out.” He meant the ride back to Britain he had been promised in return for handing over Patient Zero. But then al-Sif spat in the dirt, and both of them glanced at the grounded and utterly ruined helicopter beside them.

“I don’t know what to tell you,” Baxter said.

Neither could resist smiling at this.

“Okay,” Baxter said. “How’d you get here?”

“Drove the jingle bus,” al-Sif said, tossing his head toward the rear. Baxter actually knew what he was talking about. That ridiculous vehicle had been parked by their overrun airstrip outside the Stronghold for ages. “Then followed the smoke trail.”