ARISEN, Book Twelve - Carnage (39 page)

But it was holding for now, which was a damned good thing, or their take-off would be even bumpier than it already was.

Bringing his vision back in, Pred then started formulating plans and contingencies for when the stand-off with Spetsnaz ended, as it was sure to. And some sad, despairing part of his brain hit him with the idea that he could just jump out in front of the convoy, blocking it with his oversized body.

Jesus.
I really don’t have much to live for anymore, do I…?

It was all seeming pretty damned pointless lately.

Still, he thought, maybe he’d make a decent speed-bump – or even cause one of the top-heavy SUVs to roll over. The vehicle opposite him, though, with the MG mounted in back, was more low-slung, looking like some kind of safari truck. It was bigger than a pick-up, with both its bed and cab uncovered. In addition to the driver and passenger, there were three more shooters plus the machine gunner in back, all displaying that familiar spec-ops laxity of uniform and creative choice in weapons and gear. As the vehicle pulled closer, Pred could see the four in back were sharing the bed with what looked like a casualty, strapped down to a stretcher.

Huh – that’s weird
.

Pred had yet to see these dudes evacuate a single one of their wounded. But then the uniform on the wounded man grabbed Pred’s attention as if squeezing his testicles, and he leaned so far out that only his huge left arm on the lip of the hatch kept him from falling – while he both squinted and opened his eyes like high-beams, his gaze locking onto the face of the unconscious man strapped to the litter.

HANDON.

Sleep

Somalia – Northwest River Valley
[Two Hours Ago]

“Warriors wage war,” Misha rumbled, looking down at Handon, and pointing all fifteen inches of his 50-cal Desert Eagle at his head. But both his voice and his gaze betrayed something few men in that clearing had ever seen or heard from him before – respect.

“But for you, now – sleep.”

Misha wound up his hand and pistol to the right, then brought it with a crack into the side of Handon’s head. He knew the blow might kill him – but if nothing they’d tried so far had killed this tough son of a bitch, he gave him pretty good odds of surviving a knock to the head. Handon collapsed back down into the mud.

The men looked at Misha in confusion. They’d never seen him not kill somebody before.

“Secure the prisoner,” he said, the words tasting strange.

Nodding, two of the men knelt down, unclipped the big American’s rifle, got his vest off, and zip-tied him at the wrists and ankles. But they were half-covered in blood before they were done, and one looked up at Misha and said, “He’s bleeding out.”

“Move,” Misha said, pushing them aside, and rolling Handon onto his stomach. “Get me an aid kit.” He pulled up Handon’s blood-soaked shirt and found the entry wound in his lower back. He then took out his own knife, still crusty with Henno’s blood, widened the incision, and quickly found the bleeding end of the severed artery. “Give me some ligature thread,” he said. When that was produced, he tied off the end of the artery – hoping it didn’t serve anything too important – then packed the wound with gauze, slapped a bandage over it, then wrapped surgical tape around Handon’s torso.

Finally Misha stood. “He’ll live – a little longer.”

Kuznetsov, standing beside him as usual, asked, “Why?”

“We might be able to trade him for Patient Zero.”

Kuznetsov looked across at him. “I can’t imagine they’d be such amateurs as to trade their whole mission objective for one man.”

Misha looked him in the eye. “I can easily imagine it. This is what they are like – weak, sentimental. They have too much attachment to life, and to each other. No, I wouldn’t be the least surprised.”

“I’m also surprised you’d let any of them live at this point.”

“I’m not saying I will. But dangling this one in front of them might make them come out from cover. Let their guard down.”

Kuznetsov shrugged. Maybe Misha was right. In any case, they had to get moving. He looked around. “I don’t suppose anyone has a stretcher.”

Misha grunted, his look saying,
Why the fuck would we have a stretcher?
“Check the gun truck. Special Forces guys are all Boy Scouts. They’re always prepared.” Sure enough, a quick search of the bed produced an expensive Talon folding litter.

Handon was loaded onto it. Two men were assigned to carry it.

And Spetsnaz resumed the pursuit – at a run.

Unholy Rampage

Djibouti Airport – Wing of the Dash 8

“Hey, Ali.”
It was Juice, on the radio.

“Go ahead.” She squinted into the wind-blown raindrops, which at least were mostly blowing away from her. She was still facing the rear, belly-down on the wing, watching for more vehicles on this side – though Spetsnaz seemed to have learned their lesson on that one. She was also holding onto Pete, beside and behind her. He was now hanging half off the wing, leaning down into the open engine hatch, reaching out with the wire snippers on Ali’s multitool, trying to reach the hydraulic line that fed the jammed propeller brake.

“Yeah,”
Juice said,
“I’m monitoring the CentCom channel – and the freaking Spetsnaz commander just popped up. He’s asking for you.”

Jesus Christ
, Ali thought.
Oh, what the hell.
She switched channels and said, “Yeah, go ahead.”

“I presume this is the new American commander.”

This guy sounded like a warthog in human form. “Affirmative.”

“Well, we have your old commander. He’s still alive. Throw Patient Zero out of the plane and we’ll leave your man on the tarmac. And then we can all go home.”

Ali didn’t know whether to believe this guy or not about Handon. She also didn’t care, because it didn’t matter. Without a word in response, which would have been wasted breath in her view, she just switched channels back to the squad net, then shouted to Pete.

“Hey, are you close, or what?”

* * *

Predator wasn’t on that channel, so he didn’t hear the exchange. And he also didn’t care. He simply unclipped his rifle, laid it down on the deck, then coiled his enormous thighs – and he leapt.

Straight out the hatch, across blasting open air, and into the back of the safari vehicle. His landing rocked the shocks of the truck so much it almost spun out, but the driver managed to keep control. And the other Russians in the vehicle couldn’t have been any more surprised if Conan the Destroyer had landed in their midst.

But they would have been a hell of a lot safer.

Pred grabbed the barrel of the mounted machine gun and gave it a wicked spin, slamming it into the face of the dude manning it, who got an arm up, but it didn’t matter. The pummeling force knocked him over backward like a bowling pin, and he tumbled over the railing and out, flapping and rolling on the tarmac behind, the hard surface breaking bones and tenderizing flesh.

The quarters were too close for any of the other Russians in the truck bed to realistically bring a rifle to bear. And Predator was simply too fast for anyone to get a pistol or knife into play. At nearly seven feet tall and 325 pounds, he looked nothing like it, but Pred was lightning fast –
for a man of any size
. For the three men sharing the open truck bed with him, it was more like being trapped in an enclosed space with an alien, rather than a Predator.

The one closest to him tried to knuckle-punch him in the throat – but he had to angle it up so much it had little force. Pred just absorbed the jab, then grabbed the top of the man’s hand and bent his arm all the way around, wrenching the shoulder out of its socket, and nearly pulling the arm off entirely. With his other hand, he grabbed him by his webbing belt, lifted the 190-pound man like a rag doll, and hurled him over the side, screaming.

Of the two others, one got a knife clear and the other his pistol in a lightning draw from a chest rig, keeping it held in tight to avoid being disarmed. That also didn’t matter. Even as he was brushing at the safety, Pred planted his back leg, leaned in, and simply shoved – but with the force of a wrecking ball. The man went over backward and flipped through the air, before hitting the ground headfirst, collapsing and rolling in a way that did not suggest an intact spine inside his body.

The other managed a knife strike, going for the left side of Pred’s neck, but Pred simply shrugged his shoulders and caught the blade in his left tricep. The Russian maintained his grip, so Pred wrapped his hand around it, pulled the knife free, and reversed it – snapping the man’s wrist – then plunged it into his throat. He collapsed and fell over the side on his own.

An AK barked twice, but both rounds slammed high into Pred’s rear plate – he went with steel rather than ceramic, because the weight didn’t bother him – and it stopped both. He spun to find the passenger pointing a rifle at him over the top of his seat, a look of panic in his eyes. He fired twice more, but they just bounced off the front plate – also high, but not quite high enough – and then Pred took it off him, snapping the clip on its sling, and dropped it in the bed.

The man got his pistol out, but Pred batted his hand, flinging the handgun into the head of the driver, who yelped and winced, causing the vehicle to swerve. The passenger’s knife came out next, and Pred backhanded that away, then lifted him out of the seat by the drag strap on his vest with one hand, grabbed the back of his belt with the other – and hurled him out, all the way over the tailgate.

It was a full four seconds before he hit the ground.

* * *

It also took Juice a good few seconds to wrap his head around what he’d seen. Yeah – his best friend had actually just leapt out of the hatch of an aircraft taxiing at 50mph.

Jesus, only Predator…

It took him another couple of seconds to clear his head and run to the rear hatch – both to see what the hell had happened to Pred, and to take over his post. “Oh, thank fuck,” he said out loud, his vision instantly going to the safari truck racing alongside.

But Pred was still standing facing the same direction he had first leapt – away. And Juice was fixated on his friend, and trying to figure out where he could make a shot to support him. So neither saw, until it was too late, Misha’s Humvee finally catch up with both the plane and the convoy, and slide in on the inside track between safari truck and aircraft, cruising up right beneath the rear hatch.

Grabbing the Runt’s hand, pulling it across, and putting it on the wheel, Misha climbed up and onto the roll bars. At this point, Juice could no longer miss him, and started to depress his rifle. But Misha was already leaping over and across.

He flew through the open hatch and slammed into Juice like a cement wall, knocking him back into the cabin, and down onto the deck.

* * *

Pred wasn’t surprised to start taking fire from the rear – specifically, the next vehicle back. It wasn’t right behind them, but it was sure close enough for effective rifle fire, even despite the high speed and rutted runway. A few rounds bounced off the truck around him, then another hit his body armor, then one creased his shoulder.

In less time than it takes to describe, he drew his high-capacity FN .45 from his chest rig, stuck it into the driver’s neck hard enough to bounce his head off the steering wheel, and shouted, “Drive, motherfucker!” Then with his left hand he snatched up the AK-100 he’d ripped off the passenger, thumbed the fire selector to full-auto, brought it to his shoulder, and held it rock steady with one hand as he poured the entire mag into the vehicle behind them. The windshield glass of the SUV spider-webbed, turning white and opaque, with a dozen and then two dozen holes in it. The driver and passenger bounced in their seats like electro-shock victims, and the truck swerved sharply and rolled over, sliding on its right side at high speed down the tarmac, shooting fifteen-foot sheets of sparks behind it.

There had been a guy leaning out from the right-side back window, firing from it. Pred didn’t like to think what had happened to him, but it probably involved getting ground down to a nubbin, all the way to his waist. The guy firing out the other side was now surfing.

Heh
, Pred thought.
Unexpected advantage of being out of the airplane.
He could trade lead with people again. “Fire away, motherfuckers!”

But he had also been facing the rear for just a second too long, forgetting the caliber of opponent he was dealing with. The driver of the safari truck was Spetsnaz, and if Pred thought he was going to follow orders and drive him around just because he had a gun to his head…

Pred realized this when he felt an iron grip on his right wrist – which instantly turned into a vicious yank that pulled him off balance and half into the front cab, bent at the waist over the partition. A commando knife in the man’s other hand instantly came at his face. This meant no one was steering for the moment.

Which was the least of anybody’s problems.

* * *

Pete was now well past his center of gravity, hanging off the bouncing and vibrating wing of the plane, trying to reach the hypertrophic hydraulic line – while Ali clutched at his pants leg with one hand to increase his odds of staying on the aircraft.

“Almost there!” he shouted. “Six more inches!”

Six more inches and you’ll be getting a pavement shave… not that this kid needs to shave
. But she firmed up her grip and steeled herself for him to get heavier as he leaned farther out.

And then she heard incoming rotor noise.

Oh, holy mother of God.

A look up and to her left told the tale. It was the motherfucking Black Shark, it was hauling ass toward them, probably only about ten seconds out – and the left-side window was flipping up…

With the barrel of that fucking sniper rifle emerging from inside.