Arisen : Nemesis (8 page)

Elijah turned his back to reach for something on a plywood shelf and turned around with a liter bottle of water. “Hydrate,” he said – and, when Kate hesitated, he added, “ – or die.”

“I get that,” she said. “The CamelBak slogan.” He was right, of course. It was easy to forget to drink water, particularly in a combat situation. And dehydration fatigue could sneak up on you, often before you even felt thirsty. Hydrating turned out to be a major component of combat effectiveness. She started getting the lukewarm water down.

The sound of a low, fast helo flight zoomed by outside.

Kate stopped chugging long enough to ask: “Reinforcements?”

“No.” Elijah shook his head sadly. “Medevac flights. Been going all day. Ferrying in wounded from units who’ve been cut off outside the wire.”

“Jesus.”

“I’m afraid they’ll be coming and going all night – at least as long as they can safely set down anywhere outside to pick people up.”

Kate resumed chugging from the bottle.

Elijah nodded his approval. “Okay. I’ll be right outside.”

“Until you’re not,” Kate corrected, having killed the bottle. “How are you guys planning on getting out there? To wherever it is you’re going.”

“We’ve got three of our gun trucks here – in a garage we control, not the camp motor pool.” Kate knew from her advance studies that SF gun trucks bore only a passing resemblance to the standard Humvees they were based on. They were usually unarmored – due to speed and tactical requirements – but armed to the gills with heavy weapons. Their mindset was: mobility good, firepower very good. Move fast and hit hard. The extensive modifications to the vehicles were the evolution of decades of trial and error – what worked and what didn’t – and this knowledge was handed down from team to team.

The SF guys also liked to maintain them to an exacting standard themselves – engine maintenance, beefed-up suspension, and even welding extra shit onto the chassis as mission parameters dictated.

Kate guessed that three of these monsters, stored in their own private garage, were another reason the commanding general was such a big fan of this team.

“It’s close by,” Elijah added, pivoting to look out the window as the bright light of vehicle headlights flashed by, accompanied by shouting voices. The walls were thin and there appeared to be nothing like blinds or drapes for the window.

Elijah went back to his shelf and now produced a pair of big headphones – shooting cans. “Put your Peltor ear-pro back in, wear these over them, and you can sleep through the apocalypse.” He also pulled out a large black-and-flat-dark-earth shemagh with a ragged fringe, and draped it around her neck. “And this’ll keep out the blinding flash of the end days.”

He smiled, and so did Kate – she actually did appreciate his sense of humor.

Something banged loudly from out in the team room – the outside door, Kate presumed. And one second later an extremely gruff and severe voice said: “
Well, well – don’t you boys just look as cosy as a bunch of faggots in a dick tree.
”

Elijah grimaced, turned, and went out to face whatever the hell that was.

* * *

Kate was left alone in the dark – but it was only near dark, because the door to the team room didn’t quite close. At first she resisted the temptation to peek through the crack. But she could hear everything that went on out there, and every word that passed.

“Sarn’t Major.” That sounded like Kwon, greeting the newcomer, his voice quiet and emotionless.

“You want to tell me what the fuck you guys are planning?”

A couple of beats of silence suggested that no one did.

“Half our guys have disappeared into the bush.” This was Jake.

“Loss of commo doesn’t mean your guys are lost, or even in trouble. They’re fucking snake-eaters – their whole goddamned job is surviving alone in the boonies.”

At this point Kate lost her sense of discretion and put her eye to the crack, looking out into the brighter room outside. She could see a seriously squared-away and intimidating man standing two feet inside the door. It was the Command Sergeant Major she’d seen in the JOC. She could see now his nametape read
Zorn
. She could also see that he, too, wore the Ranger tab on his shoulder. For some reason, she remembered someone writing once that “Sergeants Major are the walking, breathing embodiment of Everything That’s Right in the U.S. Army.” This guy looked like the rule that proved the rule.

Jake spoke again. “Our split team was under heavy fire at last contact. We had to give up our drone coverage.” He paused. “And there was something else.”

“What?” A beat passed, but Zorn didn’t wait for an answer. “So what are you implying? That we’d better not be such dumbasses as to try and stop you guys from going out for your brothers? Is that it?”

This was neither confirmed nor denied by the ODA.

“Well I’ll tell you, that’s exactly what I suggested to General Præsidium himself. And you know what he said? He said he didn’t give a shit if it was your goddamned mothers. God save us, he seems to think you precious snowflakes are the best shooters currently residing on this base. And the commander has no intention of losing you. Not when there’s rioting in the town and we just repulsed a legit, no-shit attempt to overrun this base. We still don’t have any good idea of what the fuck is going on out there, and it doesn’t look like getting any fucking better.”

He paused and spat, right onto the floor.

“So be advised. You floppy-hat-wearing motherfuckers are restricted to base, by order of the commander of this task force. Your rescue mission is a fucking no-go.”

The CSM disappeared from Kate’s view as the bright slit went dark for a second. It resolved again as the team captain, Brendan, stepped forward. To Kate’s amazement, he got right in CSM Zorn’s face. It was like an adolescent facing off against his very traditional and intimidating father. Kate actually had to make a mental effort to remember that the Captain outranked the CSM.

“Sergeant Major,” he said, his voice level and calm. “Now you be advised: we are
not
in General Præsidium’s chain of command. We are under this command’s operational control in your AO. But we work for the United States Army Special Forces Command (Airborne), and we get our taskings and mission planning approved by them.”

Holy shit
. Kate blinked a few times into the light.

Brendan concluded: “You can indicate your understanding of this organizational structure by saying, ‘Yes, sir.’”

A very heavy beat passed.

The CSM snapped a salute, said the words, turned, and exited.

Jake rose and gave Brendan a big smile and a high-five.

Everyone else on the team clapped.

* * *

With this drama concluded, Kate backed away from the door and sat back on the bed. She could still hear everything outside and listened to about fifteen minutes of rapid operational planning – by guys who knew how to do it.

But they were out there together and she was here by herself, set apart.

And sitting there alone in the dark, she found herself experiencing a strange rush of claustrophobia. She was suddenly aware of being there in this beleaguered, possibly shrinking bubble of life and light, Camp Lemonnier – while all around them surged the darkness and chaos of Djibouti Town, and the rest of Djibouti out past that, and the entire Horn of Africa, most of it probably equally blacked out and maybe growing sicker and crazier by the minute, and beyond that all the rest of what had been known for centuries as the Dark Continent, all of it strange and new and menacing, and pressing in on her here in this tiny bed, with the bunk above it ten inches from her face.

She also realized she had no idea what the hell was going on out there.

But she decided she wasn’t in any big hurry to find out.

She’d just decided to do as instructed – get some sleep – when her eyes spontaneously developed gigantic lead weights, and a profound soul-tiredness squeezed her body. Within seconds, the darkness of oblivion came rushing up to embrace her. She’d had no idea she was so exhausted, until suddenly she was.

Maybe getting some rack actually was the most useful thing she could do right now. She might have a lot more to do, and to prove, in the morning – whatever that might bring. Two minutes earlier, she wouldn’t have imagined she could sleep, not after that firefight. But two minutes was a long time. Evidently things around here moved in seconds and minutes, rather than minutes and hours, as they had in Afghanistan.

The last thing she heard from out in the Team Room was:

“Wait – how the hell do we actually get out the gate?”

“I like the odds of our gun trucks versus the gate at 60mph.”

“True, that. Okay. Let’s run it.”

And after that, it was all Kate had left in her to get the headphones on her head and the shemagh wrapped around her face, before she fell into sleep like a gallows sandbag dropping.

And her consciousness shut like a slammed door.

Falling

Camp Lemonnier - 555 Bunk Room

Falling.

She felt herself falling through empty space—

But her body convulsed as an iron grip seized her bicep and yanked her out of the air. She sat bolt upright, clawing at her face and struggling for breath.

“Kate! Get up!”

The world was black and heavy, and she was buried and drowning – until the shemagh got unwound from her face and the two levels of ear-pro pulled clear of her head. It was still dark – except there were short, bright flashes coming in the window from outside.

And there were new sounds: sirens, shouting, and gunfire. And screams.

There was also Elijah, shaking her roughly, and shouting at her from one foot away.
“Kate! We gotta go! Get up – NOW!”

“What? What’s happening?” She blinked rapidly, still not convinced of any reality beyond her dream, which still clung to her.

“The camp’s falling! We gotta go!”

She just looked at him stupidly for a second in the darkness. Despite the sounds of chaos, what he was saying was impossible. She couldn’t process it. She also couldn’t believe how hard she had slept, or how groggy she still felt. “How long was I out?”

“It’s almost dawn.”

“Jes—”

“I put an Ambien in your water bottle.”

“Motherfucker.”

“Staff Sergeant! You gotta shake it off! Grab your shit and get moving –
now
!”

Kate took a huge indraft of breath, like a baby coming into the world and breathing for the first time.

And while Elijah went back and forth from the window to the door, she got kitted up in the fastest such maneuver of her life. She was still badly confused and disoriented, but by this point she could also strap on her weapons, ammo, and armor while unconscious – and she damn well knew that whatever the hell was going on, she’d much rather face it tooled up than not.

“How?” she tried again, while rapid-lacing her boots. “We fought off the incursion. Are they back?”

“It’s not the jihadis. It’s the sick people.”

Kate’s face twisted with confusion. “What? What does that even mean?” She stole a glance out the window, where she could see lights arcing by, silhouetting the outlines of figures running – and somebody staggering as if he’d been wounded, or stunned by an explosion…

And then the window glass crunched two feet in front of her and both of them bounced away in reaction, Elijah snapping his rifle to his shoulder. The glass pane had spiderwebbed in a large oval pattern – and what had impacted it was a human face. It was still pressed against the indentation in the glass, but backlit, so no features were visible. As the two of them stood frozen to their spots, the face withdrew, its owner presumably walking it off somewhere else.

Kate picked up her rifle with trembling hands, and muttered a silent curse or prayer. Elijah grabbed her arm again and yanked her to her feet. And as he started to physically pull her out the door, she resisted, reached back, and snatched his shemagh off the bunk, getting it looped around her neck as they ran.

And as they dashed through the team room, she saw there were a lot fewer weapons on the racks than there had been last night.

The outer door was wide open to the madness beyond.

* * *

As she rushed out behind Elijah and the warm air hit her face, the scene now made last night’s chaos seem like the Pax Romana – a thousand years of peace and order. Fighting off the attack on the wire, she’d at least had something solid to her back. Now the threat was everywhere, bedlam swirling around her on all sides, and instantly threatening to envelop and subsume her.

The only advantage they had was that the team room was near the edge of camp, providing some kind of safety on that side – but this instantly went away as they started to run for, well, wherever the hell Elijah was leading them.

Holding her rifle with arms that felt too weak for it, she scanned over her ACOG, trying to resolve the kaleidoscope of shapes assaulting her visual field. At least one building was on fire somewhere nearby, not quite in sight, but its evil orange glow painting the low black sky. The acrid and particle-thick smoke made it even harder for her to breathe – on top of the running, the adrenaline, and the panic.

She saw two guys in hospital scrubs chasing a wounded-looking dude, then attempting to restrain him. He shrugged them off, then wheeled on them, furious, like he was possessed or delusional. She caught two frames of that, then it panned out of sight as she raced after Elijah in the open area between two rows of CLUs. As they passed another gap in the buildings, she looked down the same direction, back toward the med shack. Something frenetic was going on there – violence and motion and animal panic, but it was too far and too dark to make out and it all disappeared behind the next structure a second later anyway.

She suddenly had the sense that she’d goddamned well better generate some SA if she intended to survive even the next few minutes of whatever the hell was happening. She scanned from side to side, then extended her focus of vision out ahead – and she immediately saw a jihadi coming for them, diagonally from one of the gaps between structures. He was obviously an invader, from the pajamas and black hood – but he carried no weapon.