ARISEN, Book Eleven - Deathmatch (27 page)

So the hunters were still the hunted.

Though Nina didn’t see it that way.

Bazarov, Nina’s co-pilot, didn’t understand what her plan was. Then again, he didn’t have to understand it. He certainly didn’t have to like it. He just had to do it. Theirs wasn’t the kind of outfit that rewarded independent thinking – never mind the kind of thoughts Bazarov was having lately.

Like the ones he’d had back in the Stronghold.

Bazarov had never before seen anyone fire two 122mm rockets – into a single enemy soldier. But Nina had done just that. When the wall came down behind the vaporized guy, he thought maybe that was what she was going for. Maybe that was all the explanation he needed. He wasn’t going to get more.

His job was to monitor the sensor suites and radios and maintain situational awareness of the battlespace. Then, as now, Nina was both flying the aircraft and controlling the weapons systems. But when she’d started fire-hosing men on the ground with the autocannon – guys who were no more than a minute away from being devoured by the dead anyway – Bazarov couldn’t stop himself from saying something.

“Why,
tovarisch
? Why are you doing this? We’ve already got what we came for – it’s miles away from here.”

“Why? Because I don’t like fucking Islamists. They’re a threat – and much better dead.”

Bazarov shook his head remembering this. He still didn’t understand why they had to kill everyone who wasn’t Russian.
Surely, they are living people just like us
, he thought
. We should be natural allies.

Now, with the report of the new F-35 coming toward them, Bazarov truly believed they should clear out and put some distance between them and it. They couldn’t begin to match up against that fighter. But he’d learned his lesson about second-guessing the commander of this aircraft, so he held his tongue.

Nothing ever scared Nina.

And that scared the hell out of Bazarov.

* * *

“Got ’em,”
Firecrotch reported on the CAS net.
“They’re moving overland through heavy bush, but I spotted them on infrared.”

“Copy that,” Handon said “Can you transmit their coords?”

“Lased them, and sending grid reference now via data link.”

Handon watched Muralles, the co-pilot/ATO, monitoring a small data terminal, until he nodded up at him. They had it.

“Listen, Cadaver, I’m going to try to rodeo these guys for you a little. Or at least slow ’em down. A little strafing in front of their path should box them in.”

Handon didn’t love this plan. But before he could protest, or remind Firecrotch the Russians might now know he was coming, he heard:

“Don’t worry, I won’t hit anyone – alive or dead. Tipping in now…”

* * *

“Boss,” Misha’s RTO said. “Intercepted transmission. That F-35 is inbound on us now. Gun run.”

Misha hadn’t stopped humping through the bush when they heard something jet-powered blasting overhead – and none of the others were stopping if he didn’t. But now he turned on a dime, stalked back through the column to the Runt and relieved him of one of the Grinches. He powered it up and popped out the sights, just as the forest ahead started exploding with cannon fire.

Gah,
Misha thought.
This guy couldn’t hit my gigantic nutsack if it were mounted on a pedestal…

While the rest of the team dispersed into cover, Misha didn’t flinch. He stood erect, missile on shoulder, tracking through the forest canopy something that couldn’t yet be seen. And then it blasted by overhead, too fast to track with the eye.

But not too fast to track with infrared homing. Misha snap-fired the missile with hair-trigger reflexes – and the Grinch nearly instantly locked onto the F-35’s hot exhaust trail, Misha panning the launcher to follow the plane’s path. The missile blasted out of the tube. It climbed above the trees. And then it took off behind the fighter.

At nearly 1,300mph.

* * *

“Ah, shit,” Handon said. Still leaning into the cockpit, he and the pilots could see the whole thing happen right in front of them.

The F-35 had ascended a couple of hundred feet above tree level, come around, and then descended on a southwest to northeast attack line, its nose-mounted autocannon firing a sparking line of tracers down into the bush, which rippled with foliage and wood being kicked up by small explosions.

But just as the fighter pulled up again, there was a whoosh of smoke from the trees, and a tiny dart zipped up from the canopy and fell in behind it. A dozen bright decoy flares blasted out of the bottom of the F-35 and arced off on smoke trails to either side, looking like some aerial fireworks display. From these, Reich and Muralles knew Morris’s missile warning receiver would be going apeshit, warning him of radar lock. But it would only do so for one second.

Because that was how long the SAM took to catch him.

The Grinch ignored the flares completely and instead flew right up the jet’s exhaust trail, jigging alongside the fuselage at the last second. And before their eyes the sleek aircraft exploded into twisting and flaming debris – wings, vertical stabilizer, and pieces of fuselage all continuing forward with the plane’s momentum, but slowly drifting apart and falling to Earth. Handon thought he could even see most of a human shape in the middle of it all.

Firecrotch never had a chance.

Handon looked to the pilots. “That wasn’t laser-guided.”

“Nope,” Reich said. “Heat-seeking, guaranteed.”

Behind him, Ali watched the smoke trail of the rocket, slowly dissipating in the wind. "Well at least we know where the Russians are now.” The source of the smoke trail was obvious.

Muralles looked over his shoulder, and gave her an open-mouthed look. That was their brother aviator who had just died right in front of them. How could she be so cold?

“Sorry,” Ali said, shrugging. This was war. People died. She didn’t know the dude. And it was evidently his own stupidity, not to mention hubris, that got him killed.

But then the Seahawk’s own missile warning receiver went off. Now someone had a lock on them.

Maybe hubris is going around
, Ali thought.

* * *

Reich put his cyclic all the way left and into the floor, taking them evasive. But even as the G-forces pulled at Handon, hands were yanking him out of the narrow opening to the cockpit.

And Ali jammed herself in his place.

“This one’s not a SAM,” she said, pointing out the cockpit glass at a dark moving shape, in the distance but closing fast.

“Shit,” said Muralles. It was the Black Shark. And it was back – and closing with them fast. With the Seahawk’s top cover in pieces down on the ground, the Russian bird of prey was again free to hunt and destroy. Now it owned the skies. And it had wasted absolutely no time in coming after them.

Reich instinctively angled them away from it, the whole cabin tilting violently around them – but quickly found Ali’s hand wrapped around his on the cyclic, stopping his intended movement, and reversing it.

“No,” she said. “Close! You’ve got to close with it.”

And that’s exactly what they did, the helo rocking the other way and accelerating at the last possible second – as a streaking shape roared by their nose in a wash of fire and smoke. Reich’s mouth opened as he realized it was one of the Black Shark’s
Vikhr
anti-armor missiles. And Ali had just pushed them inside its effective range. If she hadn’t, they’d all be hot magma right now.

But then the Black Shark’s autocannon started triggering off, and the Seahawk was at the perfect range for that – point blank. Ali shrugged as if she had seen this coming.

Hey, we’re alive.
She’d had to pick their poison.

Reich banked and jigged, but explosions and the tearing of metal sounded down the back left side of the airframe, culminating at the tail. A klaxon and red warning light went off on the pilots’ control panel. Ali could see exactly what it indicated: they’d just lost tail rotor function.

Touché
, she thought, mordantly. Turnabout.

As the torque started to build up in the overhead rotors, Reich battled the controls – and gritted his teeth and stared straight ahead as he tried to put their bird on the deck before it did it for them. And there was nothing down below them but heavy bush.

Ali shrugged again and returned to the rear to let them get on with it. And to get herself and the others flat on the deck. The last thing any of them needed was crushed vertebrae. The airframe began to groan and shriek as they went in.

This was going to hurt.

Ass-Rams

JFK, Gallery Deck, Stern Officer’s Head

Hailey splashed water in her face then looked up at herself in the mirror. Normally pixieish and youthful with a few freckles and chin-length brown hair, she suddenly looked a little haggard, even to herself. It had been a hell of a couple of weeks – and it had just culminated with one hell of a mission. Now she had ninety minutes to get herself together before she had to go up again.

Or so she thought.

Because the door to the head banged open, and behind it stood the air wing leading petty officer (LPO). He was unlikely to be here to take a shit. LPOs, as far as Hailey was aware, did not defecate. Except on junior officers who pissed them off. Hailey stared at him over her own shoulder.

“
Wells
,” he said. “Get your ass up top –
now
.”

She turned to face him, water still dripping from her chin. “What? What happened?”

“Morris got shot down.”

Hailey’s mouth opened, but nothing came out. She was instantly back in the same bad dream as before – when the CAG and Tom-o had been shot down by SAMs from the Russian battlecruiser. And once again there was no one for them to send back out there – no one but her.

“Did he punch out?”

“Move your ass! We need to cycle you –
now
. On me!”

Hailey wiped her face with her sleeve and followed – at a run.

* * *

Buried down in CIC, LT Campbell spoke into her headset while staring up at the three large video displays at the front of the room. “Cadaver, be advised,” she said. “That missile launch profiles as an SA-18 Grinch. It’s a MANPAD – newest and best, with imaging infrared homing.”

“So much for stealth fighters,”
Handon said across the net.

Campbell could practically hear the Air Boss, monitoring this channel from PriFly, gritting his teeth. She said it so he wouldn’t have to: “Cadaver, we stopped configuring our birds for serious stealth some time ago.”

“Maybe you should have fucking well started again after you lost your two top pilots to Russian SAMs.”

Campbell bit her tongue. And then she didn’t. “The
Admiral Nakhimov
is at the bottom of the ocean. We weren’t focused on fighting the last war—”

“Because you thought it was won. But it’s not. It’s still very much on. Keep us posted. Cadaver out.”

* * *

Handon replaced the hand mic on the Seahawk radio. This was the last use they were going to get out of it. Not to mention their last use of the helicopter itself – and the pilots. He put his right hand on Reich’s slumped shoulder, and his left on Muralles’s. Both men were dead. He’d verified this as soon as everyone in back recovered from the crash landing.

As far Handon could tell, the two pilots had put the nose of the bird in first, to safeguard the lives of the men in back. They had managed to get them down into something like a clearing. But, mainly, they had eaten the crash themselves, face-first, so that the others might live – and carry on the mission. They had judged that the task, and the lives of the operators charged with it, were more important than their own.

Handon knew he would remember that lesson.

But now he didn’t have any more time to grieve or to honor them. When he exited the half-twisted and smoking airframe, out onto the muddy and foliage-strewn ground, he saw Henno and Ali pulling crash-site security – God knows they knew the drill – while Juice taped down a gauze pad on Baxter’s face. It looked like the kid had eaten a corner of bulkhead during their hard landing.

Baxter looked up and said: “Is there a rescue coming?”

Handon gave him a single hard look. Baxter wasn’t the only one banged up from this. Everyone was bruised and shaken, at best, with a few other lacerations and contusions – and maybe some back trouble that wouldn’t be diagnosed until later.

But none of it mattered.

Handon said: “Get up, ruck up, move out.” His intent was obvious. By air, or by foot, the pursuit was still on. And they would not relent for a second.

Henno was way ahead of him – pack on and cinched, rifle cradled, eyes clear and serious, obviously good to go and ready to move. “I guess that’s one more boat burned,” he said, looking at the bent blades of the ruined helo.

Handon scanned the forest, then looked down at the GPS and compass on his watch. “Yeah, but we’re also going to need a way to get back to the
Caravel
at some point.”

“
Caravel
?”

“Cortés’s ship. And his only way back to Spain.”

Henno got it. If and when they recovered Patient Zero, they were going to need some way back to the
JFK
– and then to Britain.

Handon asked him, “Have you updated the ground convoy?”

“Aye. They’re heading straight for us – or as straight as they can with the medieval motorways in this bog of a country.”

Handon almost laughed. It was a good thing they’d had the ground vehicles follow them. Sure enough – another damned helo shoot-down.

“But,” Henno said, “they’re not going to get here fast enough. We need more air.”

Handon nodded. “Way ahead of you.”

* * *

When Hailey ran out into the moist air of the flight deck, storm clouds pressing down from above, she was still shrugging into her survival vest, and trying not to drop her helmet, or go sprawling out on a deck obstruction.