Arisen : Nemesis (23 page)

The NVGs he wore were the most advanced model the world had produced by the time it ended, combining a fourth-generation light-magnified view with an infrared or thermal picture. The resulting field was extremely vivid and less two-dimensional than the old light-only green-blob NVGs. Also, human figures tended to leap out of the background due to their body heat, which was very helpful when you were shooting at them, or trying to shoot around them.

The trouble now was: the dead didn’t have body heat.

But the airport, as far as they could make out, and at least in the restricted out-of-doors areas they drove through, was so far pleasantly free of dead guys.

Todd already knew exactly where they planned to stash the vehicles according to the mission plan and made a beeline for it now. Basically, they couldn’t risk bringing the trucks closer than about a kilometer to the base. They were quiet, but they weren’t that quiet. He navigated using the Blue Force tracker on the dash. The satellites had started getting unreliable by this point, but GPS still worked more often than it didn’t.

Reaching the waypoint coordinates, he rolled them silently up into the deeper shadow beside a maintenance structure by the side of the main taxiway. Wordlessly, the four SF men and their female CST unassed the two vehicles and slithered forward into the darkness. In ten minutes they’d reached the wire – the fence at the back of Camp Lemonnier.

Todd pulled a pair of wire snippers from a pouch on his belt and in thirty seconds he had made a gap big enough to ride a tricycle through. He held the flap open for the others, but also made as if to pat each of them down, like he was a club bouncer. Jake wordlessly stuck his index finger in Todd’s face, which was the tactical hand signal for
Knock it the fuck off
.

After the others were inside, Todd slipped in after them – then turned back around and sealed the lacerated fence back up again with cable ties. They didn’t want anyone following them in there.

No doubt the camp would already be crowded enough.

Peace Corps With Guns

Camp Lemonnier - 50 Meters from Heavy Weapons Locker

But, weirdly, Camp Lemonnier actually didn’t appear crowded. Instead, it was still and silent as the tomb. And Triple Nickel moved through it like grave robbers.

Ten minutes after breaking them all in, Todd was on his own again. They couldn’t bring the vehicles into camp – but they also wouldn’t realistically be able to walk the heavy weapons out of it either. So the plan was to patrol in on foot, then find a truck they could get running again and requisition for temporary use.

And by “they” of course what they actually meant was Todd.

Once they had it loaded up with their booty, they would fire up the engines and blast out of there, back to the parked gun trucks, no longer giving a damn if they made enough noise to wake the dead.

It hadn’t taken long to find an abandoned M1081 LVAD – basically a 2.5-ton cargo truck with a walled but open bed – within fifty meters of the weapons locker. Now, while the others did whatever hoodoo was required to break into the secure facility – he gathered blowtorches were involved – Todd was making sure the truck would start when they needed it to. He had humped in a battery, two quarts of oil, and three different types of engine fluids. Checking and replacing it all took no more than ten minutes.

He couldn’t test his handiwork by turning the engine over.

But he didn’t doubt it would work. He was very good at his job.

Now he sat alone in the dark of the cab and kept watch. They’d been equally happy, surprised, and relieved to find almost no dead so far. This was unexpected. Then again, not utterly so – they’d picked their point of entry to be close to the locker, so they had little ground to cover to get there. They had been prepared to silently take down any that got in their way. But so far, the only ones they’d seen had been standing catatonic out in the open, mostly in the middle distance, and could be easily detoured around. The operators were very good at moving silently.

And not a single Zulu had perked up so far.

Maybe the rest of the team had to take some down nearer the locker. But if so they hadn’t felt the need to make a radio report about it.

So now Todd was in one of those weirdly peaceful moments that sometimes happen in the middle of stressful or dangerous missions. Just waiting, watching, and willing nothing to go wrong. Todd slumped down in the bench seat, coolly scanning the enhanced darkness, basically just kicking it.

He looked out upon the dead base, smiled, and thought:
Freakin’ Lemonnier. Back to CLUville…
From where he sat up high in the truck, Todd could just see the endless
rows and stacks of Containerized Living Units, those anonymous white boxes for people, one of which he used to walk past day after day. It was always strange visiting old haunts.

Then again, what a long strange trip his whole life had been.

* * *

Raised in wealthy Marin County, north of San Francisco, Todd earned a double BA in studio arts and mechanical engineering from Cal Berkeley – hence the ever-present and now very well-worn
Cal
hat. After college, he went to work as an analyst for a venture capital firm – while studying in the evenings at the San Francisco Art Institute.

Restless, he tended to find a productive use for every minute in the day.

He soon became a master carpenter, crafting clever little boxes and cabinets in his workshop. He’d always been great with his hands – after he singlehandedly built the set for his high school musical, his teacher said it “looked like Grauman’s Chinese Theatre.” An avid cyclist, he blasted through the Bay Area on his way to work or classes, usually listening to heavy metal at high volume.

But it turned out all of these pursuits were ultimately just a distraction. What he’d been trying to distract himself from was all the genocide and injustice in the world, all the global suffering he read about each week in
The Economist
. And he certainly wasn’t doing anything to stop any of it as a venture capitalist.

It ate at him.

Eventually he decided he was going to have to personally do something about it. And his decision ultimately came down to either joining the Peace Corps or enlisting in the military. His parents had been very liberal, and patriotism hadn’t been a major theme where he grew up – none of the older kids in his neighborhood had enlisted after 9/11. He hadn’t liked this “too good for America” mindset and had wanted to rebel against it. It just took him a while to put his money where his mouth was.

When he read that Army Special Forces was “like the peace corps with guns” he was half sold. But when he found out that as an engineer sergeant he could spend half his time building things with his hands – and the other half blowing shit up – he was totally sold.

He got accepted into the X-Ray program – which enlisted exceptional civilians into the Army and direct to SF Assessment and Selection. You weren’t guaranteed a spot – just a shot. Todd could have gone in as an officer, but didn’t want to do so just because he had a college degree. It would have been just another form of privilege. He wanted to earn his stripes, and learn his trade from the ground up.

In a story that followed him around, he got terrible blisters in Basic Training and his boots actually filled with blood soon after that at Jump School. He threatened everyone in his class that he’d slit their throats quietly in the night if they told on him. He had no intention of missing his spot in SFAS, the last stop on the road to the infamous Special Forces Q Course.

After earning his Green Beret, he also volunteered to go to Ranger School – the notoriously brutal 61-day combat leadership course. Earning his Ranger tab was the hardest thing he’d ever done – harder than Berkeley, harder than the long hours in the venture capital world, harder even than the decision to enlist.

But it was obvious to anyone paying attention that he had something to prove.

In the later stages of the Q Course, he learned everything about construction: how to pour foundations, set joists, frame in windows, hang doors, install roofing, pull wiring. There had been classes on construction design, reading blueprints, masonry, structural calculations, and materials management. He had to be able to do it all, do it a million miles from civilization – and do it all strictly to the federal building code.

After that had come the fun stuff: tactical demolitions, charge calculation, target analysis, firing assemblies, calculation of fuse burn times, radio-control devices. Formulas for how much explosive was needed to shatter, crack, cut, or penetrate a wide variety of materials and obstacles. Charge placement, safety and handling, the murky world of IEDs and render-safe procedures. Practical exercises in planting charges – on bridges, buildings, tanks, towers, trucks, trains, artillery pieces, helicopters, cruise missiles.

As the junior engineer sergeant on this deployment, it had been his job to assist the senior man in designing and building their bush camp. He also had primary responsibility for maintaining the vehicles, was a specialist on terrain features, headed up tactical resupply including pallet airdrops, and managed storage of munitions and demolitions.

When he had knocked all that off – in the Army he remained a high-energy overachiever – he tended to spend his time sunbathing shirtless in his Ranger panties, his blond flop of hair pushed back from his face, and the three tattoos on his upper body out in view: the Metallica logo on his pec, his Special Forces tab permanently inked on his shoulder – and van Gogh’s
Sunflowers
on his bicep.

Todd had a rep in the groups as a crazy kid. He was emotional, fiery, creative, and had an artistic temperament. He was a people person – not happy unless he was meeting, greeting, listening, or talking. He’d been known to stop a car just to talk to a total stranger. He was a bit of a smart-ass – but he was both smart and funny enough to get away with it, most of the time.

In the end, his surfer-dude appearance and casual manner belied a masterful level of mechanical and technical skill, as well as an inquisitive and contrarian nature. Brendan, as team captain, could always count on Todd for pushback and sharp-shooting of any idea that was put forward. (Jake got a little more of that than he might prefer.) He was the very opposite of a yes-man. He was also a restless soul, a thinker, and an incessant talker.

At bottom, he had a deep need to be extraordinary – to not merely achieve what everyone else did.

As he sat silently in the dark now, his radio squelched three times – the signal that the team was coming back in. Looking in the large side-view mirror, he could see two of them trundling a big cart over the uneven ground. It was overloaded with bulky crates, indistinct in the dark, but presumably containing heavy weapons and ordnance. Todd eased open the door and swung down to assist, producing neither light nor noise.

The first thing he’d done in the truck cab was disable the overhead light.

* * *

Twenty minutes and four trips later, the truck was loaded up and the team mounted up as well. Brendan swung into the cab beside Todd, while Kate and Jake rode wagon-train style with the weapons in back.

Kwon was another story. He had been assigned to overwatch for the exfil – to do any shooting that was necessary for them to get safely the hell out of Dodge. They hoped they’d be able to start the truck and go blasting out of there too quickly to rouse any opposition.

But one of the first things they teach you in SF is that hope is not a strategy.

Now, through his NVGs, Todd could make one of Kwon’s IR-reflective patches, which most of them wore to be highly visible in NVGs, shimmying up into a guard tower. As fate would have it, the best overwatch point (OP), and the one Kwon had decided on, was the same half-destroyed guard tower he had manned in the defense of the camp eighteen months ago.

As soon as he was set up and in position, he reported it quietly over the net.

Todd put his hand on the ignition – but then froze.

After a couple of seconds had passed, Jake came over the radio from the back.
“What’s the hold-up?”

Whispering, and slumping lower in his seat, Todd answered. “I’ve got movement to our twelve.”

“How many?”

“At least a dozen.” He paused before finishing.

“And they’ve got heat signatures.”

Mexican Zulu Stand-Off

Camp Lemonnier

Both Todd and Brendan swung out of the cab and out onto the ground in the next second. It was doctrine. They were cut off by a superior force of foot-mobiles. They knew that if you stay in the vehicle, you die. Todd for one had no plans to be riddled with bullets while sitting stupidly behind the wheel.

On the other hand, there was no good cover to hand, so both of them leaned out around the sides of the open truck doors, weapons horizontal and steady, pulled in tight to their shoulders by pressure on the vertical foregrips, looking over the tops of their weapons sights. When wearing NVGs, which made using the sights awkward at best, they aimed using the IR lasers mounted on their weapons.

No one fired. There were a variety of reasons for this.

The first and most obvious was that all those heat signatures out there cutting them off could be friendlies. They hadn’t met any friendlies, or living people of any disposition, since the fall. But that didn’t mean some weren’t out there. They were on a U.S. military base, after all.

An even better reason was that they were surrounded by the dead. There were hardly any in sight. But they were sure as hell out there. And while Triple Nickel’s weapons were expensively and effectively silenced, that probably wouldn’t be true of the enemy – whoever they were, and if they were enemies.

As the heat blobs grew closer and resolved, the need for silence became the controlling reason. Because it became clear, to Todd at least, that they were a bunch of jihadi-looking motherfuckers: sandals, robes, turbans – and everyone who didn’t have an AK had an RPG. Some had both. They also outnumbered Triple Nickel about three-to-one. Not that those were necessarily bad odds, given the quality of the opposition.