Arisen : Nemesis (4 page)

It was at one of those that she had first quickly dropped off her personal gear, before being shot at and diving into the JOC.

Now there were people running in various directions, though not in any coherent one – whatever was going wrong, it kind of seemed to be everywhere all at once. Or else everyone here was as disoriented as she was, with equally little idea of what the hell was actually going on. The sun was heading toward the horizon fast and a breeze was picking up, foretelling night. This multiplied the air of foreboding.

Everything bad happened at night.

Elijah narrated, not slowing his pace. He seemed to have plenty of breath for both. “The General’s like most flag-level officers in the conventional forces – has his reservations about SOF, putting it mildly.”

“Such as?” Kate didn’t quite bring her rifle to her shoulder, but sort of curled around it, like a deadly security blanket. Gunfire was still cracking off outside the wire. No rounds were snapping inches over her head this time, but she still had the strong impression these weren’t strays – but intentional, aimed incoming.

This sense was reinforced when she heard the percussive
BOOM
of a large-caliber, single-shot weapon – her eye moved to the guard tower in the nearby north-west corner of camp. Laid out up in it, she could make out a shooter behind a sniper rifle, as well as a spotter with his scope, kneeling beside him. Both wore reversed ball caps, one of which said “USS—” something. The Oakley shades, expensive Peltor ear-pro, and big Trident tattoo on a bicep told Kate these were not angels on their shoulders, watching over them – but rather frogmen. Navy SEAL snipers. She felt instantly safer.

Though she was also seriously pissed off at whoever was plinking at them. She didn’t mind being shot at herself – but having her teammates shot at was just seriously not okay. It didn’t matter in the least that she’d only been on this team fifteen minutes.

Looking down again from the guard tower, she realized Elijah was answering her last question, albeit now from ten yards ahead of her. He didn’t seem at all worried about the incoming, his rifle resting on its single-point tactical sling, and his bandana-covered head not ducking all that much. Maybe he figured his God would protect him – or else if now was his time then off he would go with a joyous heart. Kate had her reservations about God people. But you had to admire their serenity.

“…he also doesn’t like SF poaching his best, smartest, and most experienced soldiers. He doesn’t like that we have our own chain of command – one that operationally bypasses him, the nominal battlespace owner. He’s pretty sure his guys could do our jobs, if they had half our budget and training time. He really doesn’t like our hippie grooming standards. And, if I’m honest, I don’t think he likes our fancy rifles, either.”

Kate had noticed that most of the SF guys carried SCAR-Ls – the expensive SOF Combat Assault Rifle, Light version in 5.56mm.

Her head continued to rotate on her neck, trying to generate a coherent picture. There were too many pixels in her field of vision and everything was moving – and judging by those last snippets of drone video she saw, everything outside the wire was writhing like snakes, or aliens. There was also way too much noise, but her gaze was instantly drawn by a guy twenty yards away, running in their direction, who went sprawling out headlong, tangling up with his rifle. At first Kate thought he’d been shot. But he’d just tripped on one of the thick rubber mats they put down between buildings to flatten the mud into submission.

“What were you doing before you got here?” Elijah said. He was starting to almost sound like he was exceeding his resting heart rate.

“What, me? Familiarization patrols in Chora for my replacement, inventorying and booking in team equipment, and filling out approximately one metric shit-ton of change-of-station paperwork, which I didn’t have time to do earlier.”

Elijah nodded. “It was a six-month tour in Urōzgān Province right? So back-to-back deployments now?”

Kate shrugged. Everybody was doing multiple deployments.

They reached the med shack – just as the first truck of wounded was hitting the front gate. She was glad she didn’t have the MPs’ job of getting them inside the wire safely. It looked like death on a stick out there.

Elijah held the door open for her.

A stray round thwacked into the wood as she entered.

Rage Boy

Camp Lemonnier - Med Shack

The next two hours were a technicolor, Ninth-Circle-of-Hell, nauseating blur. There were blasted and burnt guys, one or two gunshot wounds – and more than a couple of traumatic amputations. There were third-degree burns and a lot of horrifying soft-tissue damage. The wounded, and their buddies, were also pretty gender diverse. This had been one of the Medical Expeditionary Teams that had gotten hit – basically a hospital on wheels, ready at a moment’s notice to go out to the aid of civilians in need of care. As such, they had more female personnel than a combat unit, or the task force at large for that matter.

No one ever really got used to female casualties. Even Kate didn’t.

Everyone in her old unit had been trained as a combat lifesaver (CLS) – the basics of hemorrhage control, tourniquets and pressure dressings, and packing large wounds, as well as emergency airway management. She’d had additional medical training as part of her outreach role – in Urōzgān they’d done clinics for the locals. Now she piled in everywhere she could lend a hand – often literally, pressing down on wounds while others did the skilled work.

A lot of the wounded were doing self-care. They were best trained to do it.

And this first group, from the destroyed truck, were not the last. Scuffed-up peacekeeping units and combat patrols continued to trickle in. Kate got the strong impression these guys had
fought
their way back to friendly ground. Shit was getting ugly out there. She was very glad she was in here, insulated from it.

For now.

She stayed close to Elijah and followed his lead. He clearly knew his stuff. Kate knew that the six-month Special Operations Combat Medic Course, run at the $40-million-dollar Joint Special Operations Medical Training Center at Fort Bragg, was one of the most challenging courses in this or any military. Few got through it in one go. And that would have been only the beginning of Elijah’s training.

Within two hours, triage was done, the most urgent cases had been stabilized and/or wheeled in for trauma surgery, and Elijah all but dragged her to a sitting position up against a far wall.

“You’re taking ten,” he said.

“I’m fine.”

“Well, I’m not. We’re taking ten.”

Kate swallowed her objections. She knew that much of what passed as heroism was really about managing your resources. Focus and commitment were great. But the game was usually really about endurance.

They slumped down side-by-side against the slightly out-of-the-way wall and breathed. Elijah looked over at the pouches under her eyes, and the redness around the edges of them. He said, “You sleep on the flight over?”

“Not really.”

“Hitch a ride on a cargo flight?”

“No, civilian aircraft – but military charter. They normally would have flown me commercial through London. But the UK seems to be shut for the duration.”

“Right,” Elijah said. “11/11.”

Kate got the vague impression he might actually have forgotten about the worst terror attacks since 9/11, what with all the local madness here.
Two BA 777s fall out of the sky over London, and they hardly notice here…
For her part, the attacks did at least underscore the immediate importance of everything she was doing – why she was serving in combat overseas in the first place.

She asked, “Did they put the base on heightened security?”

“Sure. But with the entire region going up in flames, it’s kind of a distinction without a difference.”

Kate nodded tiredly.

Elijah looked back over at her. “So help me out – what do CSTs do again?”

“You really don’t know?”

“I don’t have the mental bandwidth to know half of what I need to know for
my
job. Plus nobody tells me anything.”

Kate nodded again. “The Cultural Support Teams were brought in to do things that were awkward or impossible for male soldiers. Frisking women in burqas, for example. But the work expanded fast. Locals resented night raids, in which foreign men entered and searched homes – the traditional realm of the women. So they brought us in. We were trying to apply COIN principles – protect civilians and get them to reject the insurgents – but we weren’t reaching seventy-one percent of the Afghan population: women and children. Once I took off the helmet and put on the headscarf, all their fear would dissipate.”

“Sounds like missionary work.”

Kate smiled. “It kind of is, but for a secular religion. When women and girls in a traditional society see a professional woman carrying a rifle, their sense of the possible is expanded. And they also see us practicing what we preach. I’m like a walking, Pashto-speaking, gun-toting Statue of Liberty. But we could also identify insurgents disguised as women, or figure out when women were being used to hide weapons or explosives. And we could fight.”

“How often did that come up?”

“More often than you’d think. First Lieutenant Ashley White died on October twenty-second in an IED blast that also killed two Rangers. I was in the vehicle right behind her. We had to shoot our way out and push through that kill zone.”

Elijah nodded respectfully. “What did you do before the military?”

“I was a paralegal, looking to go back and study for a BA in Criminal Justice, and joined the Army Reserve to help pay for it. Maybe law school after that. But when I put in for the CST program, that pretty much guaranteed I was going to be called up and deployed.” She didn’t add what her ultimate motivation was in all this, and almost everything she did: the belief that she could do more. “After my first deployment, I felt like I had a place here, I was just getting good at it – and I was needed. So I stayed.”

Their breathing had only just started to get back to normal when two guys in scrubs with large sheets of plastic shoo’d them off their spot. “We’re setting up a quarantine area here. Move on.”

They both rose, Kate too shocked to act like she wasn’t. “What – because of the epidemic? We’ve got guys who have been exposed to it?”

Elijah shrugged, and found them another wall to hold up.

* * *

Five minutes later a big East Asian dude, tooled up and heavily armed, powered through the swinging doors, spotted Elijah, and made a beeline toward their spot on the floor. They could still hear the chaos outside, crescendoing when the door opened, but they were largely shielded from it in there.

Towering over Elijah and Kate, the newcomer was a solidly built 6’1”, lanky and muscular, with dramatic features and short dark hair, neatly trimmed. Kate figured he was Japanese, maybe – no, Korean, she thought. She wasn’t sure. Whatever his ethnicity, he looked extremely serious, and totally squared away. Looking down, he said:

“You okay, dude?”

“Fine. Kwon, this is Kate, our second CST. Kwon’s our junior Bravo.” This meant he was an 18B, or weapons sergeant.

The two shook hands. His grip was like death.

“Rage Boy posted a new video,” Kwon said.

“They put it up on the big screen?” Elijah asked.

“Naturally. Wanna see it?”

“Yeah. Why not. You won’t leave us alone until we do.”

Kwon produced a smartphone swaddled in several inches of protective rubber, pulled up the video, then palmed it out and down toward the two on the floor. A YouTube video filled the little screen showing a clerical-looking guy in a black robe and turban, with a sparse but long black beard, and wild eyes behind metal-rimmed glasses. But he seemed young for the role. He held a gold-plated AK in one hand, and wore a vest full of banana magazines.

He was lecturing in Somali and waving his index finger around a lot. An elaborate and overwrought logo – flames, birds of prey, and Arabic writing – was plastered on the screen below. There was somebody else visible in the background of the shot.

When Elijah realized Kate didn’t speak any Somali, he translated a few bits: “Just as the knights of Libya gave glory to God by killing the U.S. Ambassador, so the faithful of Somalia will follow in their glorious et cetera et cetera bullshit. This plague sent down upon us is Allah wiping out the unfaithful, laying waste to the
Umma
because of its ungodliness, wiping out our shame from the fall of the Caliphate, yadda yadda, bullshit bullshit. This dude’s completely full of shit.”

Kwon shrugged in his fully loaded tactical harness. “He’s also up to something. Out there, right now. I can smell it.” The three exchanged a heavy beat of silence. “Gotta bounce,” Kwon said. With that, he was back out the door.

Kate said, “If we can get his YouTube channel, why the hell can’t we put some Predator-launched Hellfires on his ass? It worked for al-Awlaki.”

Elijah shrugged. “He’s already survived two airstrikes and a snatch’n’grab, which has buttressed his claim to most-favored-by-God status.”

“Rage Boy?” Kate asked, trying not to smirk.

“Sheik Ali Rage Godane. Leader of al-Shabaab – since Delta took out the last leader of al-Shabaab. We call him that because he’s always outraged by something, and generally looks really irate.”

Kate nodded. “What’s his deal?”

“Fancies himself both a sheik and a mujahid – a warrior of God. In fairness, he does some of the shooting himself. Just usually at defenseless people. He’s beaten more than a couple to death – on camera – and beheaded a few others. Then again, SNA had him cornered one time, and he shot his way out.”

“Jihadi gunfighter.”

“He wouldn’t have gotten away if it had been us outside.” Elijah took a breath, and took a look around the calming chaos of the hospital. “They say he was a child prodigy at Islamic school, but then went to Afghanistan to fight. More recently, he planned the suicide bombing on the Somalian presidential palace – which killed thirty people, almost including the President. Much worse, he was the mastermind behind the four-day Nairobi shopping mall atrocity – he didn’t like that the Kenyan military had been kicking al-Shabaab’s ass all over Somalia. And they didn’t just kill seventy-two people and wound 200 – they tortured, raped, used pliers to remove eyes, ears, genitals…”