ARISEN, Book Eleven - Deathmatch (39 page)

Once again, he temporarily had the upper hand in this gunfight. And while it was now a three-way battle, the dead were at least neutral, and would as happily chomp a Russian as anyone else.

And time was still on their side.

Just as long as Hailey stopped that goddamned convoy…
Suddenly he wondered why he hadn’t heard from her in awhile. He switched channels and hailed her for an update. And then he hailed again, and twice more. Nothing.

He switched channels and tried CIC, and then Pri-Fly, on the
Kennedy
. No response whatsoever. Radio silence all around. The carrier was probably too far to reach with his team radio. But Hailey was practically right over their heads, and he hadn’t had any commo trouble with her. If she wasn’t responding, then the most likely reason was:

Thunderchild was gone.

The convoy must have had SAMs after all, and instead of her stopping them, they’d taken her out – just as this closer force had taken out Firecrotch earlier. Which meant that big convoy was still coming – for both them and Patient Zero.

Anyway, that’s what Handon had to assume.

And this also meant: there was no one flying up there for them anymore. Hailey was gone. The UCAV belonged to Spetsnaz.

And the only other machine left in the air was…

Nostrovia, Motherfuckers

Nugal River Valley – the Forest

Nina took the Black Shark over the treetops at 175mph, then dropped down like a plummeting roller coaster into the center channel of the valley, straightening out and following the river, roaring by ten feet over its roiling surface.

She banked left, then right, following the river channel at their max cruise speed, dicing with death from the trees to either side, spinning blades trimming their edges. She did this partly because she didn’t want to be too late and miss the fun.

And partly because this
was
fun.

As they roared over the remains of the bridge, she brought them around to face the south bank, and found she could just make out the backs of the
Mirovye Lohi
Team 1 shooters inside the treeline.

The trees and thick foliage would be an impediment to Nina raining down death and malice on the heads of the enemy. But not a deal-breaker. She flipped down her helmet monocle and switched to FLIR. The forest couldn’t hide its little creeping creatures from infrared. She started targeting heat signatures in the bush.

“Team One,” she hailed.

“Go ahead.”

“Suggest you break contact and withdraw thirty meters. It will allow me to hit the enemy without risk of hitting you.”

“Stand by… Misha says, and I quote, ‘Fuck you, Siri.’”

Nina shrugged. If Misha was comfortable that close to exploding 30mm rounds – and he clearly was – then she was comfortable, too.

She started triggering off.

* * *

The forest, which up until then had been merely chipping and spitting around Alpha from small-arms fire, or occasionally blowing up from the big JDAM explosions in the treetops, now started exploding continuously, and everywhere.

Within seconds, everyone in Alpha was on the ground and covering up. Baxter in particular went into a fetal ball, trying to burrow into the dirt and escape the HE storm lashing in on them. The 30mm autocannon shells were smaller and less destructive than the JDAMs – but there were a hell of a lot more of them, and they were meaner. These looked to Handon like high-explosive fragmentation tracer rounds, which made them both life-threatening and hope-extinguishing. They streaked into the dim forest on slashes of burning red light and exploded in the trees.

Thank God they were coming in short bursts. Handon knew helo-mounted autocannons typically only held about 500 rounds, and those wouldn’t last long at this rate of fire. He didn’t know whether the Black Shark had been able to rearm after the Stronghold battle, but he sure as hell hoped not.

The forest was providing some protection from the cannon fire. Then again, it was also providing a lot of raw material for shrapnel. Deadly wood chunks and slivers zipped through the air with every impact and airburst, and soon all four of them were getting pelted, smacked, stabbed, and lightly wounded. And the sulfur on the tracers was, despite the dampness of everything, eventually going to set the forest on fire.

Adding insult to injury, the undead wandering through the trees weren’t bothered by the shrapnel in the least. Occasionally, one would take a splinter to the brainstem and go down, or actually get blown apart by an explosion. Still, Handon, Henno, Baxter, and Ali were having to shoot to the rear and flanks to defend themselves from the approaching dead. But they were so hunkered down behind cover, they couldn’t shoot to the front. They also couldn’t get shot from there. For now.

But Handon knew if they didn’t get back in the fight in the next thirty seconds, Spetsnaz were simply going to walk through their lines and murder them where they lay.

There was just no getting up into the exploding maelstrom the Black Shark, hovering ten feet over the river, was pouring into the forest over the heads of the Russian team. And Handon couldn’t even tell, over the rolling mini-explosions and splintering wood, whether the UCAV might be making another attack run.

With their top cover shot down, Spetsnaz advancing, and both the UCAV and the Black Shark turning their positions into a lethal hellscape, Alpha’s lifespan could probably be measured in seconds. Time not only wasn’t on their side anymore.

Time was coming after them with daggers drawn.

* * *

Handon had never really thought it was going to be easy – just touching down in the Stronghold and taking receipt of Patient Zero. Then again, he had never imagined it would be this hard, either. With breathtaking suddenness, it had turned into a war – with Alpha on the losing end.

A small tree to his right went up in a 30-mil explosion, and Handon ducked his head as shrapnel peppered his assault suit, and the tree fell over on him. When he opened his eyes again, there were two hurtling dead apparitions coming out of the smoke, both of them runners, and both looking more like strips of bacon than people. God knew how they were still on their feet, never mind ambulatory. But they were practically in Handon’s lap by the time he saw them. He yanked his .45 from his vest and triggered off while holding it in tight to his chest with two hands, elbows in at his ribs, until both of the animated meat skewers tumbled down at his feet.

How had things gone to hell so fast? He thought he’d been prepared for anything. But he hadn’t been prepared for this. With his team’s dwindling strength and numbers, with everyone exhausted and wounded, with live and dead attackers advancing from all sides and from above, Handon was just about out of faith this was going to work out. But even as he thought that, he knew the solution was the same as it had always been.

Somehow, he was going to have to dig down again.

Life these days was just one lethal trial after another, seemingly without end. But life had always been a series of trials. As the Haitian proverb had it, “Behind mountains are more mountains.” Handon knew Elysium was a myth. One didn’t overcome an obstacle to enter the land of no obstacles. There was always more adversity, usually bigger and worse than what came before.

The question was always how you responded to it.

Handon hunkered down further against the steel rain scything the woods. The Black Shark was triggering off three- and five-round bursts, spreading them around for maximum coverage. It was eventually going to find the range, not to mention take down the intervening trees, and finally wedge lethal fire into every corner of the forest, killing them all. Probably sooner than later.

Something had to change.

Handon decided he had to take out one of the two attacking aircraft if they were to have any chance. And it wasn’t going to be the jet-powered UCAV. No, the only tactical advantage he had was the fact that the Black Shark was currently static over the river – settled in, feeling safe, and shooting from a hover. As he tortured his brain, trying to formulate some new super-heroics for man vs. Black Shark, a body crashed into him from the right. Turning into it and raising his .45, Handon saw it was Henno, tumbling into Handon’s position of cover.

Nonplussed, Handon said, “Radio broken?”

Henno didn’t answer, but just looked straight at him. Handon could see half his face was covered with blood, and he looked like he’d taken a few small hits from shrapnel or bullets in multiple places around his body. Without breaking eye contact, reloading his rifle by touch, he said: “So – you want to go do something about that fucking helicopter? Or do I have to?”

He finished his mag change, popped up, and started shooting.

“And I bloody well charged the last one.”

* * *

Out on the right flank, curled up on the ground, waiting for the bullet or bomb that would finish him and exterminate his helpless terror, Baxter felt strong hands on him. For one second he thought they were pulling him to safety, or maybe just pulling him up to get back in the fight.

But they were actually taking the RPG-32 off his back.

He opened his eyes. It was Handon.

Slinging the long tube over his own shoulder, he patted Baxter once. His expression said:
I can’t ask you to do more than you’ve done.
“Hang in there,” he said.

And then he was gone, disappearing into the maelstrom.

* * *

Inside the dark cabin of the crashed Seahawk, Juice stripped wire ends with his multitool like a man possessed. That done, he folded the knife blade away, flipped out a Philips head, and opened up the panel in the helo’s APU. He then switched to pliers and used them to expose two wire leads, then got one end of his scavenged power cable connected.

He squatted down to the mini ground control station, already out and open on the deck. It sat side-by-side with his Tuff-book, also powered up, and connected to the mini-GCS by serial cable. Juice didn’t even have a control transfer code for the UCAV – and the
Kennedy
hadn’t responded to any of his hails for at least an hour. But he didn’t need a transfer code. As he’d told Handon, there were plenty of known exploits for hijacking drone control connections.

And Juice had one of his own.

He’d already wired the mini-GCS to the Seahawk’s much bigger antenna – and now connected the end of the power cable. He said a silent prayer the device could actually handle the huge surge of juice Juice was about to blast into it.

He powered it up. It didn’t blow.

He searched for signals on the GCS, and found exactly one asset in range. He then turned to the Tuff-book and kicked off his exploit from the command line. Streams of output scrolled by as the hack tried to overwhelm and hijack the control connection. The fact that he was transmitting from significantly closer than the Russians would help. But he still was not remotely sure this was going to go.

If it didn’t, they were well and truly fucked.

The scrolling lines of output stopped. No error code.

The little video window on the GCS flickered to life – and showed a fast-moving color view of the forest and river valley scrolling by below. It was the view from the UCAV, and it was nose down, descending toward an area of forest that looked from above like it was exploding.

It was making another attack run.

Juice gripped the controls on either side of the keyboard. He pulled the joystick smoothly up and left. The view of exploding forest disappeared out the bottom and right of the screen, replaced by swirling gray sky.

He had it.

“Ha!” he shouted out loud. “
Nostrovia
, motherfuckers!”

He hit his radio and hailed Handon.

* * *

Handon took the update as he hurdled a fallen tree, hauling ass around the left side of their line, west and upriver of the enemy. He was flanking the entire battle, leaving Henno to anchor the middle alone. He wouldn’t be able to do it for very long.

But none of them had long anyway.

One advantage to being way out on the flank was that the forest was exploding less around him, meaning his life expectancy was longer. Initially, there was also less incoming small-arms fire – but then someone on the right of the Spetsnaz line spotted him and started lighting him up, tracking his run through the hellscape forest.

If he’d had time to think about it, Handon would have been amazed to run through this much exploding and bullet-torn forest without getting hit. His suit had been pelted a couple of times, but nothing that penetrated. And he was still totally uninjured. Like he’d just stepped off from Hereford over three weeks ago.

Instead of having just fought through half the ZA.

But the downside to the flanking position was a greater concentration of undead. Handon didn’t take time he didn’t have to shoot opponents he didn’t care about – but merely gave the stiff-arm Heisman treatment to any who got in his way. Otherwise, what was the point of the bite-proof suit? Anyway, he figured he was moving too fast to be infected.

Or something.

* * *

Misha knew when he had an opponent on the ropes. And he knew that was the time to take the gloves off – and rip that opponent’s throat out. They’d slipped a trick on him with that envelopment – but then Nina had arrived and put their heads down, good and hard. And now Misha doubted they would ever come up again. He decided to tell Nina to cease fire, so he could sweep forward and finish it.

He was actually pretty sure there was only one shooter left in the center of the American line. Someone had either gone down or turned tail. Which meant their enveloping position was moot – they were too badly outnumbered and outgunned to leverage it. The angles couldn’t hold.

“RTO!” Misha bellowed.

“Da, Polkóvnik!”

“Tell the corpse-sitters on the other side of this river to be ready to move. We’re finishing this – now.”

“Da…”
But thirty seconds later, the RTO came back on.
“Polkóvnik, the Akula says they’ve lost control of the UCAV.”