ARISEN, Book Twelve - Carnage (9 page)

Before she could decide what to tell him, the whole airframe rocked and tilted – due to a high-power turboshaft aero engine, and eight 23-foot-long coaxial rotor blades, churning and rumbling the air not fifty feet from them.

They were being passed – in the fast lane. As the black beast roared by, Ali caught the briefest of looks into the cockpit.

The left-seater wasn’t wearing a flight helmet.

* * *

In only a couple of minutes, Baxter had positive control of their old Predator with the Universal mini-GCS. And he had it winging its way toward them at its top speed.

Looking over his shoulder, then checking his watch, Juice said, “It was a great idea, dude. But it’s not gonna make it in time. Not before the UCAV gets here.”

Baxter shook his head. “No, no – it doesn’t have to get here in time. It just needs to get within Hellfire range.”

Juice squinted, thinking through this. “You really think you can knock the UCAV down with a Hellfire?” Launching anti-air missiles from the UCAV with the mini-GCS had already stretched the limits of the possible. But the Hellfire was a ground-attack missile, intended for use against tanks and APCs.

“Why not?” Baxter said. “I’d say we can totally knock it down with a Hellfire. With the warhead on that thing, it’ll blow a drone into scrap – and then melt the scrap.”

“Yeah – but one problem.”

“What?”

“You actually have to hit it – and I mean hit a maneuvering jet aircraft going seven hundred miles an hour, after launching it from another aircraft. And you’ve actually got to land it on the UCAV – there’s no proximity fuze on a Hellfire. Impact fuze only.”

Baxter’s forehead wrinkled as he considered this.

Juice went on. “And, yeah, you can fire the missile from five miles out, which is the Hellfire’s operational range. But can you laze a high-subsonic jet aircraft from that distance?” He gestured at the small screen of the mini-GCS. “With the resolution on that thing?”

Baxter looked up from his piloting of the Pred, then grabbed the barrel of Juice’s rifle. He quickly found a vice-like hand locked around his arm. Grabbing an operator’s weapon was a dodgy proposition at best. But what Baxter was looking for was already in view – the AN/PEQ-2 laser aiming device on his barrel rail. He looked up and locked eyes with Juice. And he didn’t even have to say it.

Juice could laze the target himself, from right there. And the Hellfire would ride the beam in.

Juice twisted his mouth up. “But from the top of a moving bus?”

“Think of the cool points.”

It was such a batshit insane idea that Juice laughed out loud. “Yeah, okay. What the hell. I love it. What’s the range and current airspeed of your drone?”

Baxter told him.

Juice checked his watch. “Well… it’s gonna be damned close.”

Then, without another word, he stood up on a seat, engaged the skylight emergency exit release, pushed the panel out, and clambered up onto the roof.

Baxter looked at the GCS screen and willed the Pred to fly faster. And then he spared a look for the back of al-Sif’s head, way up in the driver’s seat. And he tried to decide how bad to feel about him and Juice having agreed to make him expendable. He figured he’d just better save them all with this plan. Because, if the bus was destroyed…

He and Juice were pretty much dead anyway.

Black Beast

On Board Jesus Two-Zero – Cockpit

Black beast
. Ali laughed at having thought of the Russian helo that way. It was totally apt. But it also happened to be her call sign from a past life, back at the Unit:
Bête Noire
. Sometimes
Betty
for short.

Black beast
was the literal translation of the French phrase
bête noire
. But what the expression really meant was: an anathema, the bane of one’s existence, your nemesis. That one thing in the world that just really got on your personal dick.

And, as she watched the Black Shark’s rotorless tail boom pass in front of their nose and start stretching out the distance to about a hundred meters, then fall in right in front of them, Ali could already see which way this was going. But she couldn’t have anticipated the truly twisted route it was going to take to get there.

Because now the pilot of the Black Shark pulled a maneuver that demonstrated that she – and Ali knew it was a she, after the fight at the Stronghold – was a world-class combat helicopter pilot. The Black Shark accelerated powerfully, pulling way out ahead, which wasn’t hard with them barely ticking over at 100mph, until it was a dark speck on the horizon again.

Ali twisted in her seat and traded a look with Cleveland. In their banged-up, unarmored, and totally unarmed Seahawk, there was nothing they could do against this predator, whatever it was planning to do to them. They just had to sit there and take it.

They both watched as the other helo described a wide banking turn out at the edge of vision – and then simply spun around in mid-air. When it was close enough to make out again…

It was flying backward.

Leaning way back, nose tilted up, its twin rotors were pulling it back through the air. But even to get up to 100mph, Ali was pretty sure the pilot would have had to engage thrust reversal of its twin turboshaft engines – or, rather, its single engine. When it had passed by them, she’d seen only one was operating.

Which made this feat of flying even more terrifyingly virtuosic. With asymmetric thrust, trying to spin the helo into backward flight without stopping… well, Ali was in a position to appreciate how truly badass that was. But she only had a couple of seconds to admire it. Because once it was back to within a hundred meters of them, but nose-to-nose this time, and matching their speed, the left-side cockpit window flipped out and up, and out of it leaned…

Vasily. The motherfucking Spetsnaz sniper.

And his SV-338 rifle was already leveled out, pointing right in Ali’s face – or, rather, in the face of Cleveland, the pilot, beside her. And Ali realized with a shock of ice-cold horror that this evil sonofabitch was simply going to do exactly what he had done last time – shoot the pilot to death, and then probably the co-pilot, too.

Wait, I’m the co-pilot,
Ali thought, as she remembered she was occupying that seat.

And then down they would all go.

And the cocky bastard might actually do it right through the same fucking bullet holes he made the first time.

* * *

As Ali stared into Vasily’s yawning muzzle, and struggled to get her own weapon up in the tight confines of the cockpit, time massively slowed and dilated for her. This was one of the secrets of her success – being able to operate, to move and shoot, in what was effectively her own personal bullet-time. In the crucible of combat, her senses got jacked up to maximum sensitivity, and everything around her slowed to a frame-by-frame crawl – in which she could pick and engage targets before they could react, move before she was seen, and think six moves ahead in the high-speed chess game, the lethal geometric dance, that was gunfighting.

But there was only one target right now, there was absolutely nowhere for her to move… and all she could think about in this frozen moment was:

It was
him
– and it had been all along. She fucking knew it. She’d known it was him skulking around that mountainside forest. It had been him on the dark side of the Orca in the Stronghold, shooting like a boss – even as his own boss stole P-Zero out from under them.

And it was him now.

And, utterly beggaring belief, he was about to do the
exact same shit
he did on the day they first tangled over the south Atlantic, also in dueling helicopters.

Ali had let herself get beaten that time. And everyone on her crew had paid a terrible price – all of them killed or grievously wounded, down to the last man. Everyone except her. And even she had ended up lying flat on her back down on the deck, just waiting for the aircraft to hit the Atlantic and come apart, and kill her. Just waiting for what was coming. Well, that wasn’t fucking good enough. It hadn’t been then, and it definitely wasn’t now.

And that shit was
not
happening again.

Because, right now, sitting behind Ali were Handon, Fick, Henno, and Reyes – all her brothers, all men she loved. And at their feet lay the key to saving everything that was left of humanity.

She jammed her rifle barrel through one of the old bullet holes in the windscreen and aimed across a hundred yards of turbulent air at Vasily’s face, and she shot like she had never shot before – even as she could already see, hear, and feel his incoming rounds landing on and around her. And as she fired, she wondered why the hell he hadn’t just taken out their tail rotor from behind. His rifle was a hell of a lot smaller than 30mm, and there was nothing stopping him. He could have forced them down, with no risk to himself or his aircraft.

And then it hit her: this guy didn’t just want them. He didn’t even just want Patient Zero. He wanted
her
– Ali, personally. That other cocky Spetsnaz bastard they’d captured then executed back in the clearing had been telling the truth before he died.

That Vasily was out here looking for her.

And now he’d found her. From his backward-flying helicopter, he actually had a more stable firing platform than she did, as she struggled even to get her eye down to her scope, firing out through a bullet hole in a helo windscreen.

And as the two master snipers and arch-enemies blasted away at each other across open sky, Ali felt one of his rounds land on her – right in the chest, blunt trauma impact stopped only by her ceramic insert. Struggling to stay upright and keep her weapon online, she threw her bent elbow up in front of her face.

Because she knew the headshot was coming next.

* * *

Firing from up in the cockpit. Shouts, tumult, and the ping of incoming rounds ricocheting off steel. And the Seahawk’s already wobbly flight getting even less steady, fast.

And, wait – firing? What the fuck was Ali doing up there?

Master Gunnery Sergeant Fick sat up even straighter on his hard jump seat and looked around the cabin. Everyone was still strapped in – good practice in a helo that was half shot-down already, and now evidently also under attack. But then he thought:

Wait – this bird can’t go down.

He knew that – it couldn’t go down because he had to be last. Fick knew it in his bones now, and he had made peace with it. Every one of his Marines was going to go down before him, as they all battled to complete this mission. And he was going to have to watch them fall, one by one – if he didn’t actually send them out to die himself. And he wasn’t going to get the privilege of dying until this shit was finally at an end.

He had been cursed to be last man standing.

But then he looked across the cabin at Reyes. The big Angeleno looked relaxed and vaguely amused, as he usually did in combat or other mortal peril. He had clearly concluded that either they were going to be shot down, or they weren’t, and all he could usefully do was stay the hell out of the way.

And then Fick realized: Reyes was sitting right there beside him in this levitating tin can – one with its own tin-shredding blades built in, just waiting to detach and tear through the airframe, and the even softer human flesh within. And, aside from the two of them, every one of the living MARSOC Marines was back on the carrier right now. And all Fick knew for sure about their status, all he’d been told, was that they were fighting for their lives – and fighting for the life of the ship. For all Fick knew, or could possibly know, they were all dead already. And if they were, then that was it.

It would be just him and Reyes left.

Fick shook his head, as a ricochet pinged into the bulkhead beside him. And he thought:
With my luck, I’ll survive the helo crash – just long enough to see Reyes die horribly and in pain.
Just like in that fucked-up dream he’d had in the bomber.

But then he thought:
No – fuck all that.

He tore at his safety strap, hefted his rifle, and launched himself toward the cockpit.

Because he wasn’t going out like a punk.

* * *

No sooner had Ali thrown up her forearm in front of her face than the arm took an incoming round, meant to finish the fight by shooting her in the head. And she instantly had cause to regret that they had replaced their bulletproof liquid Kevlar assault suits with these goddamned bite-proof ones.

Because now it felt like her radial bone had been shattered. Later, she’d work out that it was just cracked – and that the round had glanced off it and angled up to skate off the top of her helmet – then ricocheted off the bulkhead, finally coming to rest in the pilot’s thigh. Right now all she knew was that her arm erupted in pain, her head snapped back, and Cleveland started hollering.

Chaos and madness.

But in this moment, Ali mainly regretted that being shot was seriously fucking with her ability to do her own shooting – to engage Vasily out in the other helo.

Unbelievably, she was losing this fight to him, again.

But now a rifle barrel appeared to the right of her head, coming out of the back and between the two pilot seats. And it started firing. Ali looked back and saw it being operated by Fick. And he wasn’t shooting out of the existing bullet holes in the glass. No, he was just blasting away straight through it, making his own firing ports, like goddamned Robert DeNiro in the bank robbery scene in
Heat
.

He nearly instantly took a round in the chest himself and fell over backward. But he’d bought Ali a priceless second.

Or maybe a lifetime.

Maybe both.

* * *

Even as Fick had bolted forward to the cockpit, Henno was unstrapping himself and standing up – and then he started pulling Kevlar panels off the bulkheads. These were lashed there to provide some protection from gunfire to those in back. But they also came off, which was most often helpful after you’d been shot down, and needed to defend the crash site.