Arisen : Nemesis (27 page)

Before he could react, Zack felt four strong hands on his arms, seizing him from behind.

Ah, shit.

In seconds they had him at Godane’s desk, his right hand stretched out and pressed down flat on its surface. Zack struggled, sort of automatically, but it was just pro forma. These guys were a lot bigger and stronger than him. Whatever was going to happen now was going to happen.

Godane leaned forward and looked Zack in the eye. “They stole from me. My trucks, my men. And you will pay in their stead.”

Zack was too scared now to look away – until a shadow passed over him and he twisted his neck to see al-Sîf stepping up beside him. It was obvious that today the man was going to earn not just his paycheck – but his nickname.

This was really happening.

Oh, well
, Zack thought. At least he’d be finished with Godane’s bullshit. Considering the quality of medical care available there, not to mention the dirt and squalor, he was unlikely to survive amputation. If blood loss didn’t get him – and he didn’t see anything like a C-A-T military tourniquet lying around – infection would.

He looked back as Godane spoke. “I am done trifling with the Americans. I am going to blow them into meat and smoke.”

Zack squinted. He might have one last thing he could do here – one last good act in this life. “You can’t do that, Emir.”

“Why not?”

“You can’t send the Predator over their compound again. They have Stinger missiles now, taken from Camp Lemonnier. I saw the crates on the back of the truck. If you send the drone, they will shoot it down before it even gets close.”

In point of fact, to the best of Zack’s recollection, the range of the Hellfires might actually be slightly greater than that of the Stingers. But Godane sure as hell didn’t need to know that. And he’d probably fuck it up anyway.

Godane nodded to al-Sîf.

Zack looked up. Al-Sîf was trading some kind of look with him.

As the scimitar fell, Zack hauled on his arm for everything he was worth. His hand moved a couple of inches – and he was almost certain the blade was off by at least a couple more.

It took off his middle and ring fingers at the first knuckle.

He screamed like a banshee. The sound must have carried through the entire Stronghold. Zack lurched away, jamming his left hand in his right armpit.

Oh, motherfucking son of a BITCH.
That smarted.

He stalked around like a headless chicken, blind with pain, and before he knew it tears were streaming down both cheeks.

“You are a woman,” he heard Godane sniff. “Take him from my sight.”

Zack was led away again, back down into the dark.

Because You Didn't

Camp Price - Team Room

Sitting up against the back wall of the Team Room, Elijah disinfected and rewrapped Todd’s thigh wound. Todd had stripped down to his Ranger panties – the black silky short-shorts that spec-ops guys loved and hated to wear for PT. Todd was always perfectly comfortable in them – the others a bit less so, due to the intermittent flashes of his nuts they made pretty much inevitable. Right now, the Ranger panties definitely facilitated access to his creasing bullet wound – which was alarmingly high on the inside of his thigh.

“You should be more careful,” Kwon said. “You almost got your best feature shot off.”

“Hell,” Todd said, “when it all kicked off, the only cover I had was from the waist up. I was trying to crawl inside my own boots.”

Everyone was back in the Team Room now, seated around the table.

They’d already stripped, cleaned, reloaded, and repacked all their weapons, gear, and assault kit. That was job one when getting back inside the wire. You never knew when you were going to have to rush back to the walls of the camp to defend it – or race outside to rescue somebody else. There wasn’t anybody else anymore, of course, but they had hung on to many of their old TTPs – tactics, techniques, and procedures.

Many of them were still good habits.

Kate said, “Nigga forgot to duck, that’s all.” Everyone laughed, including Elijah. The line was from
Glory
– Denzel Washington, 1989. Kate had long ago become one of the boys, participating in the bonding ritual of trading favorite immortal movie lines. Sometimes, on deployment, in a remote area, it was all the entertainment they had. She belatedly noticed that Todd also had some scorch marks of indeterminate origin on his face. RPGs probably.

“They can’t touch me, man,” Todd said with an arrogant tilt to his chin. “I’m a bandit for life!”

Kwon snorted. “
Ass
bandit for life.”

Kate and Todd were seated side-by-side. She looked at him seriously and said, “You can be my wingman anytime, Maverick.”

To which he replied, “The defense department regrets to inform you that your sons are dead because they were stupid.”

“What were you thinking?” Kate deadpanned.

“You don’t have time to think up there! If you think, you’re dead.”

The two of them cracked up helplessly, while the others just looked annoyed. Todd had
Top Gun
on his laptop, which he and Kate would constantly sit around watching, often with popcorn, giggling all the way through to the end, enjoying it more every time. Everybody else on the team, despite having seen all the other movies in their collection at least twenty-five times, steadfastly refused to watch
Top Gun
. They called it “the homoerotic seamen movie” and gave Kate and Todd endless shit about their devotion to it.

Now somebody had to take control of the bullshitting, or the two of them would be trading off
Top Gun
lines for the rest of the night, if not the rest of the post-Apocalypse.

“You’re trapped in a well with a goat and a slinky,” Kwon said. “Describe how you will escape.”

“I don’t know,” Todd said, as Elijah taped off the end of his bandage. “But it doesn’t end well for the goat.”

Brendan smiled, and remembered that surviving an ambush always made everyone giddy. They were equally happy and amazed to be alive, and suddenly everything was hilarious. “Hey, Kate,” he said. “You know the difference between a Boy Scout troop and a Special Forces ODA?” She shook her head. “Adult supervision.”

Brendan had caught a piece of shrapnel himself, which had scored the top of his hand – and he hadn’t even noticed the tip of his ear had been shot off. Elijah, welcoming them all home, had instantly been back on the job as medical sergeant. He’d already wrapped up Brendan’s hand and painted the ear with orange-brown Betadine antiseptic, which was about all that could be done with that.

But now, all the urgent and non-negotiable tasks having been squared away, this was going to be an all-team meeting – and, ultimately, a serious one. In a way that hadn’t been true in a long time, their lives were suddenly on the line. There was a time when their missions were often more important than their lives.

But surviving was their only mission anymore.

At least for now.

* * *

Jake motioned for everyone to stop the hi-jinks, stood up, and started the meeting. And he got straight to the point.

“Okay, guys, two things have happened. One, we achieved our mission objective – the heavy weapons are ours. Two, we bloodied Godane’s nose. My feeling is that both those facts militate for the same course of action now: we get those weapons emplaced and we fortify the camp.”

Brendan didn’t wait to jump in this time. He felt too strongly about this one. “There’s one thing that hasn’t changed. If we get engaged here and start blasting away, the dead will be right behind al-Shabaab. And none of us will ever get out of here again.”

Todd looked across at Brendan and shook his head slowly. “
Au contraire, mein freund
. That’s changed, too – it’s gotten worse.” He looked around the table before continuing. “Look, Kwon and I can get the Mk 47s and miniguns emplaced in the towers. And we build us a nice mortar pit. And after that, we can open multiple large cans of whoop-ass on anybody who comes after us here. But in the past, if the noise drew a bunch of walkers or runners, we might have a chance to fight our way out before they ringed us in a mile thick. But these new ones… I’m not sure they won’t just leap right over the wall and drop on our heads.” He looked up to Jake, then over to Kate. “You guys got a better look at them. Am I right?”

“Yeah, maybe,” Jake said.

Kate said, “The new ones aren’t good.” She didn’t say more, but her expression did: she was worried. These things were dangerous. They’d adapted to the walkers and even the runners, and were confident they could survive them.

But the game had just changed.

Jake turned to look down and across at Brendan. “Okay, what’s our alternative, then? Run for it? Take to the forest, like some half-assed band of merry men?”

Brendan took a second to answer. “Nobody wants that. I don’t even like the thought of it. But there’s no way to make Godane unlearn our location. Now that he knows we’re here, whether he comes for us or not is outside our control. Abandoning the camp and going elsewhere may become our only option. And we can either mount those weapons on the wall – or we can mount them on the trucks.”

Jake shook his head. “Sir, due respect – but fuck that. We’ve all worked too long and hard to secure this place. To make it defensible, to make it work. It’s our home. I’m not getting run out of here – at least not by that bearded, wild-eyed ass-clown.”

Everyone there knew how Jake felt about the al-Shabaab leader – and they all felt pretty much the same. It was because of Godane’s tireless and utterly unapologetic killing, torture, and oppression of innocent Somalis – who, after a few tours, Jake had started to get as attached to as he had to the Pashtuns and Hazara in Afghanistan, whom he’d fought to protect from the Taliban.

Brendan looked like he had something else to say and was holding his tongue. But then he wasn’t. “Killing Godane’s entire team wasn’t exactly calculated to make him less likely to come after us. You didn’t have to provoke him.”

Looking up, his voice flat, Jake said, “Wrong. Nothing we do or don’t do is going to make that son of a bitch any less of a threat. Our existence will be a provocation. You don’t know him like I do. Some people just need killing.”

Having started down this road, Brendan seemed unable to resist pushing it further. “There was still a chance we could have gotten out of there without a fight, without all the extra risk.” He and Jake were in a staring contest now. “You didn’t have to kill all those guys.”

Jake wrinkled his nose. “Yeah, I did. And you know why?”

“Why?”

“
Because you didn’t.
”

While at or just beyond the border of insubordination, this still silenced Brendan. Maybe it was too close to home, an uncomfortable truth. He was already riddled with doubt about his failure to act in that stand-off.

But he rallied now, shook this off, and used the prerogative of command to make a decision – while not ratcheting up the confrontation any further. “Okay. Here it is. We mount the heavy weapons in fixed positions – for now. But, Todd, I want both vehicles serviced, tanks topped, and MGs cleaned, lubed, and loaded. We prepare for both contingencies – stand and fight, or displace and fight.”

“Good enough,” Jake said, his tone saying he also agreed to this temporary climb-down. “But I need Todd working with Kwon to build emplacements for the weapons. I’ll take care of the vehicles. Kate assists.”

She nodded in assent.

“Also,” Jake continued, “we need to get those Stingers distributed across all three sangars asap, and we institute a twenty-four-hour watch schedule – starting now. Four hours on, twenty off, for everybody.”

“I’ll take the first watch,” Brendan said. He looked down the table. “Elijah, I also want you to start running as many air patrols with the Shadow as you can sustain – in all cardinal directions, but principally west and south. We have to watch for Godane now, which doesn’t mean we can stop watching for herds.”

Jake and Brendan traded looks, seeing if there was anything else, then scanning the table and the team. Jake said, “Okay, you heard the Captain. We make sure we’re prepared. And then we watch and wait.”

Everyone rose and got moving.

It was work time again.

The Gs

Camp Price - TOC

Elijah walked himself back to the TOC alone. And that’s how he’d be working again. But he preferred it that way, for several reasons. He hadn’t overly participated in the tomfoolery and screwing around in the team room – just enough to fit in, really.

He didn’t find it all that funny.

Entering the dim TOC, he put himself in the chair by the GCS and started doing pre-flight for the Shadow. He could do it all on autopilot at this point.

He knew Brendan thought he’d changed after the fall, and after Pete died. And he had. But that hadn’t really been it. It hadn’t been the worst of it. What had really hit him hard was… the deaths of the villagers they were supposed to be out there supporting and protecting. The Warsangali.

Their Gs.

After al-Shabaab had been pushed out of the cities of Somalia, they had taken to the bush – dominating, intimidating, and enforcing seventh-century Islamic law on many outlying villages and the largely defenseless people who lived in them. Hence Triple Nickel’s bush camp – they were there to mentor, support, and train the Warsangali branch of the Darod, the oldest clan in what used to be British Somaliland. In centuries past they had been a Somali Sultanate powerful enough to sign treaties with the British. But in the twenty-first century, they were just farmers and herders living in a few very remote villages in the forested mountains of the north.

Running clinics for the Warsangali had been a major tasking for Elijah. And it had given meaning to his life – it was much like the missionary work he had done for years before joining the Army.

It was God’s work.

Raised in rural Texas, Elijah held an associates degree in Bible Studies from Dallas Baptist University – and was actually a licensed, but non-practicing, minister. After college, he did two-year missions to South America and then to East Africa. Along the way he’d picked up serviceable Spanish, Portuguese, Swahili, Somali, and Arabic.