Arisen : Nemesis (2 page)

MICHAEL STEPHEN FUCHS
, in addition to co-authoring the bestselling ARISEN main series with Glynn James (over 175,000 copies sold), wrote the bestselling prequels
ARISEN : GENESIS
and
ARISEN : NEMESIS
. He is also author of the D-BOYS series of high-tech special-operations military adventure novels, which include
D-BOYS
,
COUNTER-ASSAULT
, and CLOSE QUARTERS BATTLE (coming in 2016); as well as the acclaimed existential cyberthrillers
THE MANUSCRIPT
and
PANDORA’S SISTERS
, both published worldwide by Macmillan in hardback, paperback and all e-book formats (and in translation). He lives in London and at
www.michaelstephenfuchs.com
, and blogs at
www.michaelfuchs.org/razorsedge
.

ARISEN : NEMESIS

Michael Stephen Fuchs

For Mandy – one of the two highest-quality human beings I’m privileged to call friend

PART ONE

“Therefore they had arisen and fled at the beginning of the night and had left their tents and their horses and their asses, even the camp as it was, and had fled for their lives.”
- 2 Kings 7:7

The Wire

Camp Lemonnier, Djibouti

Staff Sergeant Kate Dunajski reflexively ducked her head at the wicked snap of an air pocket collapsing overhead. This was caused by a 7.62mm round passing within a few inches of her face. The sharp crack of the AK discharging reached her a fraction of a second later. This meant the shooter was close – and also straight ahead. Her mind drifted a little, and she wondered what the hell she’d gotten herself into.

She’d only been on the ground eight minutes.

She’d find out later that the military charter 737 she came in on would be the last scheduled flight to land at Djibouti–Ambouli International Airport, which was adjacent to Camp Lemonnier. Everything after that was either helo medevac flights coming in carrying wounded, or panicked evacuation flights going out.

And there would be damned few of the latter.

Crouching low in the dust, Kate looked out to the north and realized with a sinking feeling that the camp gate at the main entrance was basically a chain-link fence. It was reinforced with steel bars, which might stop attackers getting in. But it wasn’t going to stop anything the size of a bullet zipping through. And the growing mob out behind it didn’t seem to lack for either arms or ammo. They were also getting rambunctious enough that she wasn’t real optimistic about the gate stopping them.

Squinting deeply, Kate instinctively scanned over the top of her rifle sight, trying to ID a shooter. But with the riot of scurrying foot mobiles and vehicles out there, she couldn’t make out much. The gunfire outside the wire and across the town was still sporadic.

But it was ramping up.

And then another incoming round sparked into the blacktop not ten meters from her boot soles, skimmed the pavement, and bounced right up and smacked into her plate carrier, dead in the center of her chest. This smarted, but the heavy bullet had expended most of its velocity – which was damned lucky because she didn’t have her ceramic plate in. The heavy fabric of the plate carrier alone was enough to stop the round.

She realized now that she was still rooted to her spot – frozen, basically.

She had been under fire before, taking various flavors of incoming on her three previous deployments to Afghanistan. But it hadn’t happened often enough for her reactions to really be wired in – just enough for her to think she knew what she was doing, and how to react to contact. Pilots sometimes called this “the 200th hour” – when you knew just enough, and were confident enough, to make your first really big fuck-up.

And she definitely wasn’t used to taking fire while inside the damned wire. These were some ballsy locals.

Kate blinked once, hard, to clear her head.

I’m in an exposed position. I’ve got to move.

Inhaling two quick sharp breaths, she pushed her body up out of her crouch and took off straight for the nearest solid cover. Her legs felt weak with the first step, a result of the adrenaline and her muscles tensing up in the crouch. Luckily that cover was close, and turned out to be the building she’d been headed for anyway – the JOC, or Joint Operations Center. This was the beating heart of Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti, and of CJTF-HOA – the Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa.

Aside from being a major subordinate headquarters of AFRICOM, DoD’s Africa Command, this was also the nerve center for all of America’s counter-terror, shadow war, and counter-insurgency (COIN) activities in the region, as well as humanitarian and development efforts. Shooters, spies, diplomats, analysts, aid workers, deminers, doctors and many others deployed out of here to all parts of Somalia, Ethiopia, Djibouti, Eritrea, and sometimes even Kenya. The mischief they got up to in these places was legendary.

Sometimes they even managed to do some good.

When Kate crashed through the front door of the JOC, not one of twenty-plus faces inside turned to look at her, or in any way took notice of her ungraceful entrance. There was too much going on – it was like a beehive, one that had just been kicked, and Kate sensed that the JOC staff was approaching task saturation.

She straightened up, pulled the door shut behind her, and stood there dully, breathing hard and scanning the room, her eyes adjusting to the dimness. Officers, NCOs, and enlisted personnel sat or stood at a variety of stations, interacting with computers, keyboards, tablets, and actual papers, plus radios, landlines, and cellphones. Three large video screens at the front of the room showed three different dusty scenes, transmitted by overhead drone cameras, lazily spinning in counterclockwise arcs. Radio chatter leaked out of speakers in various corners. And everyone was talking at the same time – not panicked, but urgent. Intent.

As she stood near the entrance casting around, her ears automatically locked on to one of the streams of radio traffic. This one seemed to be playing loudest, perhaps for the benefit of the whole room.

“Shotgun X, this is Bravo One Actual. Peltier Hospital is a no-go. I repeat, the hospital is lost. We do NOT, repeat NOT, have the force prof—”
This was followed by a series of gunshots and shouts that overwhelmed the rest of the transmission.

“Bravo One, Shotgun X – repeat all after ‘force profile’, over.”

Then Kate realized at least one person in this place had actually noticed her entrance. This was a tall, powerfully built man standing in the center of the maelstrom, as if holding court. He wore crisp tan digicam ACUs with a single black star in the middle of his chest on a Velcro patch. The star meant he was a brigadier general. And his rank almost certainly meant he was the commander of the entire task force. The curved Ranger tab on his shoulder was even more impressive, and caused Kate to straighten up. Rank insignia were one thing – all kinds of guys climbed the ranks.

But they didn’t just hand out Ranger tabs.

Under the gaze of this man, even lasting as it did only a second, Kate was suddenly seized by self-consciousness. She cursed her luck and timing, and hoped she at least looked squared away. She did.

Beneath her tactical load-bearing vest, she wore only a black Under Armor t-shirt – even in November, East Africa could still be hotter than two rabbits fucking in a wool sock. An aid pouch, a smoke grenade, a real grenade, and a GPS unit stuck out from the sides of her load-bearing equipment (LBE). On the back of that she wore a mid-size assault pack with most of the rest of her key tactical gear.

Below the waist, she wore tan Ghostex Advanced Camouflage System pants, somewhat like the general’s, but more expensive. Wrapped around her right thigh was a drop-leg holster with her M9 pistol, the standard 9mm Beretta 92FS with 15-round magazine. Attached to a single-point sling, she carried an M4 assault rifle mounted with an ACOG 4x-magnification red-dot sight and PEQ-15 laser sight/illuminator attached out on the barrel rail, just ahead of a vertical foregrip.

Her straight, slightly coarse, straw-blonde hair was tied into an efficient knot, which stuck out the back of an olive-green baseball cap emblazoned with the single word
ARMY
on the front. She wore tactical gloves and unfashionably black (not tan) Hanwag Special Forces GTX boots – pretty much her only really expensive indulgences, gear-wise, aside from the Ghostex. Never skimp on boots. She was thirty-one years old and in excellent physical shape. Fine lines around her eyes when she squinted or smiled, and an open but intelligent and cagey cast to her face, said that today wasn’t her first rodeo.

“Hey. You must be the new guy.”

She turned away from the commanding presence of the general. To the left of her, having approached from a tight little group in the front left corner of the JOC, a group within the group, stood a slim African-American sergeant of medium height with puffy and not-quite-military short hair and a thin mustache. He was compact, but projected energy and fitness. His green eyes seemed to be lit with intelligence. A silver cross on a chain was visible above the undone top button of his ACU blouse.

Kate mustered up a smile, took her right hand from the pistol grip of her rifle, pulled her glove off, and stuck her hand out. “Good guess. I’m Kate.”

He took her hand. “Elijah, detachment junior medical sergeant. Welcome to CJTF-HOA.” He pronounced it
C-J-T-F-Ho-Ah
. “And welcome to Triple Nickel.” And by this he meant Special Forces Operational Detachment-Alpha (ODA) 555, which was what Kate was now detailed to, for at least the next eight months.

Based on how her first eight minutes here had gone, she was already thinking this might be a long deployment.

Triple Nickel

Camp Lemonnier - Joint Operations Center

“Hey, come help me hold up this wall,” Elijah said, motioning her toward the far left side of the room, about halfway back. “Right now our number one tasking is to not be in the way.” As he moved, the unbuttoned collar of his blouse shifted, revealing what looked like a weeping Jesus tattoo on his chest. It was hard to tell on black guys.

Kate nodded, followed, and looked over toward the part of the JOC her eye had been immediately drawn to. It was that group within a group, circled around a tactical station toward the left front. Some drone video, of a forest rather than urban scene, was playing on a monitor there. As she eyed the backs of them, two of the men, one seated, one standing but hunched over, turned in toward each other and back around, then locked eyes with her.

She nodded, but they were both already turning away again. The older one had wavy black hair, slightly swept back; and the younger one straight sandy hair, parted on the side. But somehow they looked oddly like mirror images of each other, just with one perhaps fifteen or even twenty years older than the other – lines around the eyes, a bit of gray at the temples. But the younger one looked like an old soul in a young body, or like he had a lot of troubles. Kate blinked.

The intensity of their gazes, particularly the older one, slightly rattled her.

“That’s us,” Elijah said, sidling up close to her and leaning in, both of them pressed up against the wall. “Or most of what there is of us right now. We’re running split-team, half the guys out in the boonies with an SNA patrol.”

Kate nodded. She knew that a twelve-man ODA had two of most things – two weapons sergeants, two communications, two engineering, two medical – a senior and junior of each. She also knew that training and mentoring the Somali National Army, as they resisted and hunted al-Shabaab, the powerful local al-Qaeda affiliate, was a major job of the ODAs here.

“Slightly more than half,” Elijah amended. He told Kate that their Fox – 18F intel sergeant – was also out, as was their Chief – chief warrant officer, second in command under the captain, and who was leading the split team.

“So what’s going on?” Kate asked.

“What, here or there?” Elijah didn’t wait for an answer, but lowered his voice slightly. “Officially, it’s a mentoring patrol. That’s how we got it signed off. But in reality, SNA completely lost a recon element yesterday. Platoon-sized. Right off the map.”

Kate’s eyebrows went north. “That kind of thing happen a lot?”

“Yeah, unfortunately. Many of their senior officers couldn’t reliably find their own rectums with spelunking gear and road flares.”

Kate laughed despite herself.

“Luckily, helping them isn’t actually our main job.”

“That would be working with the Warsangali, right?” Some of Kate’s homework had involved classified material, and the specific activities of the task force.

“Yes,” Elijah said, “though that’s too hard to say all the damned time, so as usual we just call them the Gs – for guerillas. They’re one of the oldest clans in Somaliland. They’ve gotten badly kicked around by al-Shabaab, who have been trying to impose sharia law out in the provinces, ever since they got driven out of the cities.”

“
De oppresso liber
,” Kate said with a half-smile. It was the Special Forces motto: “to liberate the oppressed.”

She knew that the two great specialties of SF were unconventional warfare (UW) and foreign internal defense (FID) – more commonly called counter-insurgency. Both of these involved training and mentoring foreign soldiers. UW meant training guerrilla fighters to overthrow a despotic government or invading power. FID was training a country’s military to resist an insurgency. At heart, Special Forces soldiers were teachers. But like all good teachers, they first had to be masters of their trade, and their trade was the art of war.

Kate further knew that Army Special Forces, sometimes referred to as “Green Berets,” was the largest special-operations unit in the U.S. military. Each ODA specialized in either HAHO parachute ops, underwater/scuba, urban combat, maritime, or mobility (vehicle). And each of the five active SF groups had a theater of responsibility – for 5th Group, Triple Nickel's parent outfit, it was the Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia. Which meant they had been busy.