ARISEN, Book Twelve - Carnage (29 page)

Campbell said, “Upstairs right now, some Spetsnaz guys are shitting knishes.”

In exactly another three minutes – Drake had them come around at a safe rate of one degree a second – the
Kennedy
was facing the opposite direction, back toward the Gulf, and was soon steaming in that direction and accelerating toward her blistering top speed of forty knots.

Drake sat back in his chair and smiled. He looked up to the big screen where the CCTV guy had gotten a rear camera on the Russian sub – which was now quickly disappearing in their wake. “You jackasses have fun trying to catch us at ten knots,” he said. That was the
Akula
’s top speed while surfaced.

An ops officer at the next station said, “They can make thirty-five if they submerge.”

Drake looked over. “I don’t give a shit. Plus shut the fuck up.” He’d just saved all their asses.

The least they could do was let him bask a little.

* * *

Lovell, Park, and Sarah hugged a bulkhead and strained their ears. Lovell had thought he heard something up ahead and to the right – it definitely wasn’t a gunfight, but something was happening. Or maybe he was losing his mind. He shook his head, both to clear it and to shake off the accumulated sweat droplets.

Nodding to the others behind him, he moved out again silently and rounded the corner, slicing the pie a quarter at a time. And what he saw down there sent his heart into his throat – it was two boarders literally just turning away, fractions of a second too soon to see him. Lovell figured they had been doing the same thing – standing frozen and silent, thinking they had heard something around the corner. If Lovell had turned that corner a second earlier…

Now he had a decision. The last thing he needed was a shoot-out. But Sarah and Park were safely around the bend behind him. And these two Spetsnaz were directly between them and the little outside cargo deck they were trying to reach. And he had them dead to rights.

Fuck it – and fuck them.

He took a bead on the one in the rear and put a suppressed round into the back of his neck. The man crumpled, revealing the other spinning around.

Damn, these guys are switched on
.

Lovell dropped to a crouch and squeezed off ten rounds. And he hit the guy before he could hit him.

But then he heard full-volume unsuppressed gunfire from his six, and spun to see Sarah firing down the opposite direction. He had been about to get hit from behind. He rose and fired around her, at vague blurs of movement at the far end of the passageway. The incoming fire ceased and the blurs disappeared, but still he yanked her back into the cross hallway, where Park still was.

“You have to fucking stay with Park!”

“If I had, you’d be dead,” Sarah said.

Lovell shook his head and ground his jaw. And then they all heard shouting in Russian from somewhere. Sarah’s big noisemaker had shaken the hornet’s nest. They had to get the hell out of there.

As they retreated back the way they came, Sarah said, “Where to now?”

After he got them out of that vicinity, Lovell led them into another compartment, just to get off the street. When he closed the hatch and turned around, he could see Sarah had propped her rifle and was trying to tear the sleeve of her shirt off. Then he saw why – her hand was covered in blood.

“You’re hit,” he said.

“It’s just a bullet fragment. A ricochet.”

He grabbed her hand and held it up. That was no fragment – she’d actually been shot right through the palm, through-and-through. Lovell rested his rifle on his sling, dug into his aid kit, came out with a pressure bandage, and started wrapping it around her hand. As he did so, he said, “We’re cut off now. And all those frames up ahead look like they’re occupied.”

“Where does that leave us?” Park asked, taking over the wrapping so Lovell could get back on his rifle.

Lovell took a deep breath. “Up to the flight deck. Straight across it in the open. And then down a ladder to the winch deck.”

Park looked up. “Any idea what’s going on up there?”

Lovell hit his radio. “Meyer, Lovell.”

“Meyer here, Sarge!”

Lovell was about to ask him for a sitrep. But he had just provided one. His two-second, three-word transmission had been backgrounded by firing, explosions, and shouting.

“That doesn’t sound good,” Park said, tying off the bandage.

Lovell exhaled mournfully. They’d just deal with it.

* * *

In the reactor control room, a Spetsnaz operator squatted down in front of Captain Martin, his face inches from the Brit’s. Both of Martin’s pistols lay empty beside him on the bloody deck, amid a pile of empty magazines and ejected casings. Looking down, he figured he must have expended all his ammo. He also guessed he must have passed out, because he didn’t remember these guys entering.

“You are a very brave maritime nuclear engineer,” said the man with his face stuck in Martin’s, in very passable English.

Trying to focus, Martin could see this man was unwounded, but couldn’t really tell if he was the one who had stuck his head in before, or else was somebody totally new. There was definitely some variation in his uniform, weapons, and tactical gear versus the man on the ground, who Martin had killed, and the other one now standing at the control console. Special operators everywhere were usually custom jobs. But, then again, his head was swimming too much to really track the differences.

“
Reaktor otsutstvuyet, serzhánt
,” said the man at the console. Martin was pleased to have caught two of the words, despite speaking zero Russian. And he could hazard a pretty good guess about the meaning of the word in the middle. Not least because he could no longer feel that gentle hum below of the reactors driving the turbine that coupled through a gearbox to the ship’s propellers.

At least they had brought the reactor offline safely, rather than spiking or otherwise sabotaging it. But now that he had a close look at these guys, Martin’s assessment of them changed. They radiated caginess and competence – and ambition. They weren’t here to destroy stuff. They were here to hijack it. To take it for their own.

And to Martin’s considerable surprise, the man before him pulled a pouch off the side of his belt, removed a big bandage, and started wrapping Martin’s belly wound. Looking down, he could see the gauze pad he’d put there was soaked through. Martin’s expression must have betrayed his surprise.

“I think we will keep you alive,” the Russian said, gently leaning Martin forward to wrap around his torso. “To help us when we need to restart the reactor.”

Martin snorted. He was too weak to resist, even if he wanted to, but not too weak to laugh. “Sorry, mate. Can’t help you there. Tried to restart it myself once. Spectacular disaster.”

“Oh, I find that hard to believe.”

Leaning back again, Martin said, “It’s true – whatever the hell you believe. But even if I could help you, I wouldn’t. Obviously.”

The Russian tied off the bandage. “Oh, you’ll help us – as well as tell us anything we want to know.” But then he squinted, belatedly noting Martin’s accent, and uniform. “Wait – you are a Brit?”

“British Forces, Her Majesty’s Corps of Royal Engineers. Very much not at your service.” Martin winced at the pain of saying that much, and drew a sharp breath.

The Russian finally stood up, and looked down at him. “I like your
esprit de corps
, Captain. And your excellent English manners.”

Martin looked up at him. “Is that so? Well, then you cunts can just fuck right off.”

To Preserve Life

JFK – CIC

Drake gave himself one minute to savor his victory in retaking control of the ship, and then got back to work – helping Campbell and her staff coordinate the scattered and confused defense of the ship.

“LT!”

“What now?”

“Aw, shit…”

“Care to elaborate?”

“We’re slowing… the engines are losing power. Oh, God – I think the reactor’s offline.”

Drake looked up from his station. “You can’t
tell
?”

But Campbell was already moving to check the CCTV feeds. “Okay, I’ll bite. Anyone know if we hold the goddamned reactor control room?” The ensign at that station flipped through camera views at a dizzying rate, until the correct compartment came up. No one spoke, though all could see it. There were a bunch of goddamned Spetsnaz in there.

And the ship was slowing. Which meant that, very soon, the sub would be catching them again.

* * *

When Lovell stuck his head out onto the flight deck, all was chaos – even deadlier and more confused than the background noises from Meyer’s radio had suggested. Now he was going to have to lead Park and Sarah in a death-defying mad-dash sprint across 150 meters of open flight deck to reach the ladder that led down the outside to that winch deck.

“Stay here,” he said. But then he hesitated. Getting himself killed was definitely preferable to getting Park killed. Then again, if he fell, Park’s survival odds dropped way down. Not least because Lovell had the boat in a bag on his back. And he knew without having to ask that neither Park nor Sarah could carry it.

Fuck it
, he finally decided. Moving targets were hard to hit. He unslung the bag, climbed out of the enclosed internal ladder, put his head down, and sprinted toward the island. Rounds flecked off the deck at his feet, one actually creasing his calf – either on the way in, or after ricocheting. It hardly mattered. Lovell crashed into the steel-hard lee of the island, still alive. That was the good news. The bad news was that Corporal Meyer was pinned down there, with his dwindling force.

They’d completed their job of providing a diversion for the inside assault force to get to CIC. But now their asses were hanging out the wind. The Russians still held most of the island, including the bridge, which was a seriously elevated position relative to them. And they were shooting down and also dropping grenades on Meyer’s team with abandon. And there was nowhere they could go – not up the outside ladder, not across the deck to another ladder belowdecks – that wouldn’t get them killed faster than staying where they were. But staying there was getting them killed pretty fast, too.

Lovell was already standing between two bodies when he started shouting back and forth with Meyer.

“Corporal!” he yelled.

“Sergeant!” Meyer said back, without lowering his weapon.

“Listen up! I’ve got Dr. Park over there!” And he pointed to the inside ladder that Park and Sarah were cowering in.

“The dude with the vaccine?” Meyer said.

“Affirmative! And I’ve got to get him over there!” He pointed to the edge of the flight deck on the opposite side and nearly a hundred meters to the fore. “You and your people have got to keep the Russians off us while we maneuver!”

Meyer looked at Lovell and blinked once, slowly. He was clearly working hard to keep it off his face, but Lovell could read it anyway:
Oh, great – another suicide mission.

But he just dropped his mag out and checked it, then patted himself down for additional ammo. There appeared to be exactly one rifle mag left in his vest. “You better go now, Sarge.” But then he also flipped open the grenade launcher under his barrel. It had a 40mm grenade in it. So that was something.

Lovell nodded, took a few deep breaths – and got ready to run back across the open deck. So he could run back across it again one more damned time, leading the others.

He hoped Meyer was going to make that grenade count.

* * *

“So that’s it, then,” Armour said in CIC. Like the others, she was now watching the camera view that showed the Russian sub and its 200 fresh fighters gaining on them – and faster every minute, as the carrier’s momentum bled off and it slowed to a stop. “They’re going to catch us and capture the boat.”

She wasn’t the type who was prone to despair, and she was fighting it off now, not least for the sake of the men and women who had followed her this far. But she had also done an awful lot of fighting today, and pulled off more than a couple of minor miracles. Now, after all that, after the team had come together and hit their stride so magnificently, it looked like it was all going to be for nothing.

They were going to lose the damned ship anyway.

And she didn’t even want to think about what was going to happen to her – and, worse, to the people who trusted her. Would they even be allowed to surrender? Or would it be a choice between execution by gunshot, or jumping off the deck and drowning?

Now she felt an overwhelming urge to escape the dark prison that was CIC. Not because it wasn’t safe. But because she needed to get back out there, and get back in the fight. Handon would want her to. If they were all going to go down, she wanted to go down fighting.

“Come on,” she said to her team. “We’re going back out.”

“Wait,” Drake said, physically restraining her. “Not so fast.”

She looked at him with eyes shining in the dimness.

* * *

“Ready to run?” Lovell asked Park and Sarah. They both gave adrenaline-fueled rapid head nods. He nodded once himself and turned to face forward. And he waited for it.

When Corporal Meyer organized and led an attack, he didn’t screw around. Starting out huddled around the island, his surviving team members all moved as one, perfectly coordinated. First militia and NSF leaned out and started putting out heavy and rapid small-arms fire. Then, under cover of that, the three Marines stepped way out from cover – and all fired 40mm smart grenades up at the Russians on the outside ladder and observation decks. The whole outside of the island rippled with explosions.

Lovell could see one of the Marines buckle and go down to a knee, but he had gotten his grenade off. Lovell could do no less – he rose and took off, Sarah right behind him, and Park to the right of both of them, shielded by their bodies. All three put their heads down and hauled ass – as much as they could under their heavy loads. They could all feel, hear, and see in peripheral the brutal fighting to their left, as it also receded behind them. Someone up on the island was targeting them too – Lovell could hear collapsing air pockets snap over their heads, and see the deck below spark and smoke from rounds flecking off it. But they were all still on their feet.