ARISEN, Book Twelve - Carnage (13 page)

“You know who’s in there?”

“Yeah. I know.”

“It’s your fire watch,” Lovell said seriously. And he meant it. Plenty of Marines had taken on duties while wounded worse than Raible – though never had those duties been so important. Lovell squeezed Raible’s arm. “Get some,” he said, rising.

He returned to the lab and shut the hatch. Inside, he could see Sarah still in the corner with her satphone to one ear and a finger in the other. Park and Close had finished packing up their research – laptops, samples, and slides. Almost all of their work was on Park’s laptop anyway, which was in its satchel, looped diagonally over his shoulder. But Park was also standing over the photocopier-sized gene sequencer – the one Wesley had brought back from Jizan. “We’ve got to take this,” he said.

“What?” Lovell’s expression said he thought Park was nuts.

Park crossed his arms in front of his chest. “Men died getting this for me.”

“Sunken cost fallacy,” Lovell said. “Those guys are dead – whether or not we all get killed over it now.”

“I don’t know what’s going to happen,” Park said. “But I need this device to finish the vaccine. And I can shave days off by doing it wherever we are, and before we get back to Britain. And days count.”

Okay, fuck it
, Lovell thought.
We’re already carrying a damned boat.

He turned over his ruck, dumping out the remaining ammo and ordnance. As he pulled the mouth of it around the sequencer, and Park lifted it up, it looked like it was just going to fit. But it was going to be heavier than hell, and Lovell only hoped the straps would hold – not to mention that he would, underneath them.

As they performed this operation, Sarah put her phone away and returned to the group. “I do know what’s going to happen now.”

“Oh, yeah?” Lovell said. “What?”

“I know where we’re going.” She nodded at Park. “Where we’ve got to get him to.”

If we can even get the hell out
, Lovell mentally amended.

He tried the weight of the pack. It was a sonofabitch.

* * *

Armour climbed to her feet amid the carnage. Everyone left was looking to her – all except the badly wounded, and those caring for them. There were so many bodies down in this tiny stretch of passageway there was almost no room to stand. She could also see their makeshift barricade had basically been destroyed by the incoming volley of smart grenades and the hand-to-hand fighting.

She assigned two guys to rebuild it, and supervised moving the wounded inside, while the others reloaded, topped up on ammo, and tried to get their breath back. When they’d consolidated, Armour took stock. Looking around, she could see that something like three-quarters of the small arms in the armory had been handed out, to groups of sailors who now roamed the ship, making themselves dangerous to the invaders. And the inflow of militia guys looking for weapons had slowed to a trickle.

When a hand touched her elbow, she turned – and was shocked to see Parlett on his feet. He looked like he had been spray-painted with blood, but his wounds had been bound up, and it must have looked worse than it was, because he was holding a weapon – not to mention standing upright.

“What now?” he asked.

She decided in that moment. “Now we go. It’s time.”

“Where to?”

“To find the Marines.” It was the Marines who had led the militia in the flight deck battle. And while Armour and her teammates had just proven they could fight on their own, she knew they were going to need real combat leadership to take the ship back.

“Where the hell are they?” Parlett was voicing a doubt everyone had. The Marines were supposed to be, if not the first, then the most furious line of defense for the ship. And they were nowhere to be seen.

Someone said, “I heard they were mustering on the hangar deck.”

Armour looked around until she found someone with a radio. “Get on the horn with CIC. See if you can verify that.”

But she didn’t wait for confirmation. Instead she assigned two sailors to stay and guard the remaining weapons in the armory, as well as the wounded and their caregivers. And then she led the remainder of them out – a dozen militia looking to get their guns in the fight.

No one hesitated a second before following her.

And she never had to look back to know they were.

The Lost Convoy

Northwest Somalia

The lost convoy. That’s how Homer was coming to think of it. Of course it was nothing like the original lost convoy of
Black Hawk Down
fame – which had battled through the streets of Mogadishu, taking heavier and heavier casualties, until one of Homer’s forebears in the SOF community lamented, “We’re going to keep driving around until we’re all fucking dead.”

By comparison, this convoy’s trials in Somalia had been mere annoyances. First they’d trailed the team in the Seahawk, heading south for the Stronghold – and then, after the helo was shot down, went racing for the crash site. Not long after, Handon had told them to reverse direction and head for Djibouti. And now that they were nearly there, he was back on the radio, telling them to turn around yet again.

This was just as they crossed over the final bridge, and last swollen river, before the Djibouti border. The airport itself was only seven or eight clicks beyond. And the two vehicles with their six occupants – Jake, Noise, Zack, and the recovered Kate, leading in the gun truck; Homer and Pred trailing in the Land Cruiser – were finally making good time. Predator, driving the SUV, sighed with relief as they rumbled off the bridge and onto solid mud – no guarantee any of these bridges was going to hold them – when Homer took Handon’s call.

“Yeah, Homer – we need you guys to turn around again.”

“No problem,” Homer said, displaying that easygoing and get-it-done SEAL attitude in the face of shifting mission priorities. “What’s our new tasking?”

“Come pick us up. We got shot down again.”

Homer slightly wanted to ask:
Seriously? Again?
But of course Handon was virtually always serious. He didn’t have the kind of job that let him indulge in a lot of hijinks.

“Roger that. Wait one.” Homer switched channels and hailed the lead vehicle. “Jake, we’re turning around – stop your vehicle.” Brake lights were the only acknowledgement he needed, or got. Pred was already slowing them way down, and as the Land Cruiser rumbled over vegetation in the verge, Homer flipped back to Handon. “What’s your location?”

Handon read out a grid reference, which Homer keyed into a handheld GPS and passed over to Pred, who jammed the accelerator – launching them straight back toward the bridge they’d just crossed.

But then Handon said:
“One more thing. There’s a Russian attack helo, that Ka-50, still flying. And it might be headed your way.”

“Copy that. We’ll see you shortly. Three out.”

Homer opened the sunroof, and climbed half out of it with his rifle. And he got busy scanning the skies.

* * *

It had been a hell of a rough landing, but Ali got them down on the deck alive – everyone but Cleveland, the pilot. He had met his end, courtesy of Vasily, up in the air. The man never had a chance. But he died flying, and carrying the mission forward.

Trying to get them all home.

And Ali wasn’t going to forget that. She liked military aviators – she used to be one herself. But, that aside, these were the guys who got her to her mission insertion points safely and on time – and then got her out alive again. And that tattooed Spetsnaz son of a bitch had now shot one too many of them for her to let it go.

Now she was out here looking for him, too.

But right this second, their job was simply to Charlie Mike – to carry on without the aircraft, and somehow still get P-Zero out of there. Helo shoot-downs happened sometimes – rather a lot, actually, to special operators – and there was little point bemoaning it. They were just part of the terrain over which the battle had to be fought.

While Handon got on the radio, standing a few paces away from the destroyed airframe, Ali supervised casualty assessment and helped unload the bird – until Reyes saw her bloody and half-lifeless forearm. He gently dissuaded her from her task, got her sat down in the mud, and started bandaging it – much as Predator had patched him up in the bomber after Beaver Island. The great wheel always turned. When he was done, she opened and closed the fingers of that hand – around the barrel of her rifle. They would do.

And her shooting hand was just fine.

As she stood up, she saw everything had been pulled out of the bird that was coming out – mainly ammo, and Patient Zero, which Fick had slung over his shoulder again.

They were moving out.

“Northwest,” Handon said, nodding in that direction. “We’re only ten clicks from the border. And the ground convoy is en route back here to pick us up.” No one was going to suggest they sit down and wait for their ride. They all knew you kept moving, as long as you could move. And, anyway, Handon’s radio went again – and what came in from the other end sealed it.

They absolutely couldn’t sit around waiting to get picked up.

Instead, they all took off – at a run.

* * *

“How the hell did they get around us?” Juice asked. He felt as if he had lost a full day, rather than only a minute or so, after his tumble from the bus. But now that Baxter had a Predator to fly, he could once again stare down on the battlespace like the unblinking eye of God, or maybe Stan McChrystal.

The jingle bus was rolling again, al-Sif faithfully driving them. Baxter was looking at the bouncing mini-GCS screen, which showed an aerial view of the big Spetsnaz ground convoy – the one that had been chasing them out of the Nugal River Valley. Now it was chasing Handon and the rest of his team. And he had just reported to Juice that it was only forty miles behind the others – and closing damned fast, now that they were on foot.

Baxter kept his eyes and hands glued to the controls and screen. “How they get around us was, basically, they cut the corner off. While we took the most direct road from the south, they cut straight through open country.”

“Really? Jesus.”

Baxter shrugged. “Open terrain in this part of the world can actually be easier going than the roads – which have been rutted to hell by the rains. Anyway,” and he nodded at the screen, “they’ve all got four-wheel-drive vehicles, presumably with intact suspension. They’re doing about a hundred and forty right now.”

“Show me on a moving map.”

Baxter switched the display and pointed. “Them. Us.”

Juice squinted at it. They were actually, if not neck and neck, then side by side, one on the road, one off it – both the good guys and the bad guys racing northwest toward the new Seahawk crash site. The bad guys were slightly ahead.

Baxter said, “It’s probably a good thing they bypassed us. If they had caught us from behind, they would have just killed us.”

Juice looked down at him without judgement. “That’s not a good thing, man. Now they’re going to catch and kill the others – and take P-Zero back. Unless we can stop or slow them. Gimme the camera view.” Baxter complied, and Juice looked back at the convoy racing on the screen. There were six big vehicles, probably all loaded with Spetsnaz dudes, and moving with a purpose.

Baxter got it now. “Okay, I see what you mean. As soon as they catch Cadaver One, out in the open, on foot, carrying P-Zero…”

“Yeah.” Juice frowned. “Show me where Cadaver Three is right now. Will our own convoy reach them first?” Baxter zoomed way out, panned up to the northwest, then zoomed again until he found the gun truck and Land Cruiser.

“Holy shit,” they said in unison.

No, Cadaver Three wasn’t going to reach Cadaver One from the north before the Spetsnaz convoy did so from the south. In fact, they probably weren’t going to make it another mile. Because death was coming for them – from above.

Juice got back on the radio – with a purpose.

* * *

The medium foliage of that last river valley between Somalia and Djibouti opened up for the little two-vehicle convoy, Pred and Homer in the lead in the Land Cruiser this time, as they approached the bridge again. There hadn’t been time or space for the gun truck to take the lead, which it had before, Zack on the minigun in the steel-enclosed turret scanning ahead. All that mattered now was getting to Handon, P-Zero, and the others – fast.

Homer reached down from the sunroof and tapped Pred.

“Yeah, what?” But then he could see it himself – a black speck in the distance, in the sky over the trees on the other side of the river. It was still small.

But it was growing fast.

* * *

“Let me get this straight,” Handon said around heavy breathing. Once again, he was leading the team on a loaded run, but in open semi-desert this time. And with the Spetsnaz convoy closing on them fast from the southeast – and their own convoy closing not nearly fast enough from the northwest – they had to keep moving.

“No time to recap it for you, boss,”
Juice said.
“That Spetsnaz convoy is going to be on you in minutes. And the Black Shark is reaching our own ground vehicles up by the Djibouti border RIGHT NOW. We have got ONE Hellfire left on this Predator – and I’ve got to head toward one of those targets to be in range in time. So there’s only one question: where do you want it? Do we hit the convoy closing on you? Or the Black Shark closing on the others?”

Handon grasped the cold reality instantly – that they could either save themselves, or they could save the other half of the combined team. “If you take out the Black Shark with the Hellfire, will our own convoy reach us before Spetsnaz does?”

“Maybe. But that’s IF the Hellfire takes out the Black Shark.”

Handon squinted. They’d seen that sonofabitching helo shrug off RPGs, 25mm Gatling cannon fire – and even ASRAAMs, which were supposed to be the deadliest anti-air weapons on the planet. What guarantee could they have that it would work this time?

“And if we use the Hellfire on the convoy instead?”