ARISEN, Book Eleven - Deathmatch (12 page)

Zack was already prairie-dogging up in the turret behind the 50-cal minigun. He was hardly visible, though, as the steel gunner shields had been extended up and over, completely enclosing the turret with welded-together steel plates. At the same time, Noise reposed himself in the open bed in back of the Humvee, the barrel of his AA12 full-auto combat shotgun resting on the tailgate.

Beside them, Homer was gunning the engine of the Land Cruiser, with Pred riding shotgun, his own weapon resting on the lip of the open window.

Handon nodded to the others, then headed out toward the helo at a trot, his mixed Delta/SAS/Activity/Agency/SF team following behind. In another thirty seconds they were in the air.

And flying into destiny.

Stream of Metal

Spetsnaz Forest Camp

“
Da
,” Misha said, taking the sheet of paper the RTO handed him. It was a transcript of an intercepted radio transmission. He read it, handed the sheet back, and said, “I want rotors turning on both birds,
now
– and get the Orca here, fast.” He turned around, cupped his hands, and started bellowing orders to the camp.

In seconds, two dozen merciless Spetznas predators were moving fast, jocking up – and preparing for the hunt.

* * *

“
Da. Ponimal.
” Nina tossed the handheld radio back on the cot in the small fly tent she shared with Bazarov, her co-pilot and gunner, who was still lying on his cot.

“Get your ass up,” she said. “We have a mission.” She was already zipping up her form-fitting flight suit, and shrugging into her vest, with the weapon harness that nestled under her arm. The weapon it held was a KBP PP-2000 machine pistol.

This was a personal defense weapon (PDW), like the H&K MP7, but meaner, with sharper lines and angles – as if it were capable of caving someone’s skull in if the ammo happened to run out. Firing a 9mm round at 800 rounds per minute, it was effective out to about 200 meters. It was also specifically designed for quick-reaction access in confined spaces, like cockpits – and with the big space inside the trigger guard, it accommodated Nina’s flight gloves.

She kept a 20-round mag loaded up for comfort – but also had a bunch of the oversized 44-round mags where she could reach them. All of these were filled with armor-piercing rounds, to go through Kevlar body armor. The weapon also mounted a laser sight under the barrel for convenient one-handed aiming.

Of course the Kamov Ka-50 Black Shark attack helo that Nina piloted had weapons that dwarfed her personal one. But she was not merely a Russian military aviator. She had been on attachment to Spetsnaz since the fall. And, like them, she was willing, able, and happy to kill from up close.

Nina approached her ride at a trot, threw herself inside, and raced through the startup procedures. Following behind, Bazarov climbed into the left seat, the gunner’s seat, beside her in the single cockpit, as she finalized the checks and start-up tasks. She knew their other helo, the Ka-60 Orca transport, parked in a different clearing a few miles away, would soon be hauling ass to pick up Misha and his team. You didn’t keep Misha waiting. Or, at any rate, you wouldn’t get a second chance to keep him waiting.

She grunted in approval as the dual rotors above her head started spinning in opposite directions. The coaxial design meant the Black Shark didn’t need a tail rotor – which in turn meant it could perform flat turns at any speed the aircraft was capable of, up to 195mph. But more importantly it massively reduced its vulnerability to ground fire or mechanical failure. And those twin rotors could shrug off hits from small arms, or even smaller cannon projectiles.

Hell, Nina and her Black Shark had personally soaked up direct RPG hits, in the fighting in Chechnya before the fall – shrugged them off, and flown away smiling. Or, rather, killed the RPG gunners, then flown away smiling.

Equally tough were the helo’s twin 2,200-horsepower turboshaft engines, located on opposite sides of the fuselage. Virtually every system was redundant, with duplicated systems physically separated as far from each other as possible. The helo’s transmission could operate for a half-hour even if it lost all lubrication. And its landing gear could soak up much of the shock of a low-altitude crash.

The cockpit Nina and Bazarov sat in now, along with all the helo’s critical systems, was protected by over six hundred pounds of armor; and the cockpit windows themselves were made of armor glass – 55mm thick, and utterly bulletproof.

The engines thrumming and screaming, Nina increased power and pulled the collective, smoothly and powerfully bringing them off the ground and then above the level of the trees. She turned, put the nose down, and got them moving – fast. She checked their course and heading, their waypoints and stand-off point…

And, finally, the location of the target.

* * *

Ah, our target
, Nina thought.

That was what really got her up in the morning. Because as tough, survivable, and heavily armored as the Black Shark was, that wasn’t why the men in Spetsnaz loved it, nor why they loved her. No, it was because she and it together made a peerless and unmatched hunter.

The external hardpoints on the helo’s two stub wings held pods of 122mm rockets, capable of cratering runways and penetrating hardened bunkers, or scything and scattering infantry in the open. It also had twelve
Vikhr
(or “Whirlwind”) laser-guided anti-tank missiles. Designed specifically to defeat explosive reactive armor at ranges up to 10km, their HEAT shape-charged warheads created a high-velocity stream of liquid metal that could punch through up to 1,000mm of armor.

They also had proximity fuzes which made them lethal even in misses of up to five meters – which allowed Nina to use them to engage air targets moving at up to 1,100mph.

And if anything lived through the rockets and missiles, Nina also had at her disposal a side-mounted 30mm autocannon, loaded with 460 high-fragmentation, explosive incendiary, and armor-piercing rounds. (She could select the type of ammunition in flight.) The semi-rigid mounting of the cannon improved its accuracy, giving it a longer range and better hit ratio than the free-turning autocannon turrets on the American and British Apache attack helos.

The Apache was the closest Western equivalent – though a strong case could be made that the Black Shark was superior. But armor, weapons, and dick-measuring aside, Nina knew the real difference between the two types of aircraft was… the mindsets of the pilots who flew them.

Nina had known and even cross-trained with a number of American and British Apache pilots – including another woman pilot in the British Army Air Corps. And while, like many of her peers, that woman saw her great purpose as protecting “her boys” on the ground, Nina viewed her role very differently. Sure, she was closely bound to the ground pounders in Spetsnaz. But she wasn’t up there to protect them.

No, her job was to help them hunt.

She and her bird were like a perfectly trained hunting hawk – and when Misha took the hood off and set her loose, there was little she could not take down for him. Nothing evaded her sight – her multi-sensor suite and finely cultivated vision. And nothing below could survive her devastating weapons.

Nina lived to seek and destroy.

Now, reaching their assigned stand-off point with time to spare, she took them down close to the deck – where the ground clutter would make them unresolvable on radar – and began a slow circuit, waiting for the order to go in. She was now a caged tiger, pacing back and forth, mentally filleting zoo visitors with her eyes.

Nina sometimes wondered where all of her anger, aggression, and viciousness came from. Maybe it had been bred into her, from the bloody soil of oft-invaded but never-conquered Russia. Maybe the ZA had made it necessary – where only the supremely vicious survived. Maybe Spetsnaz had nurtured it – no better environment for the cultivation of violence and aggression could be imagined.

Then again, maybe it had begun earlier, with her family – first her birth mother, who left had her on a frozen doorstep in Kapotnya, perhaps the very shittiest and most dangerous district of Moscow, before going off to drink herself to death. Or maybe it was the loss of her adoptive parents in her teen years – killed by the Islamist bastards of ISIS when they bombed the plane they were on, killing everyone on board.

Nina’s only family now was the one that had chosen her in later life: the hard pipe-hitters of Spetsnaz and
Mirovye Lohi
. But they were all she needed. And her fondest wish was to be worthy of them – and to be just like them.

A stone-cold killer.

* * *

While the Black Shark was already on station and waiting for the call, the Kamov Ka-60 Orca transport was just flaring into a clearing near the Spetsnaz encampment, sending wind whipping through the trees and the tents. Misha and Vasily, along with a dozen hand-picked killers, trotted out to meet it. They were tooled up, heavily armed and armored – locked, cocked, and ready to rock.

The rest of the camp’s garrison, another dozen, were jocked up as well. But they were staying put for now, along with their large and impressive collection of scavenged vehicles – pick-up trucks, Western SUVs, even a couple of American Humvees.

Misha clapped his lieutenant, the leader of the group that was to remain, on the back. “You are Team Three, now –
ponimayu
?”

“
Da
.”

“Hold here and be ready. As soon as we have the objective, we will meet Team Two on the coast for sea extraction – and get our beautiful black asses back to Moscow. Of course, anything can still happen – and I may still need you driving the Bronco.” He meant he might need them to be an accessory to a crime, probably some horrible one. “So be ready. But we are almost done here.”

Misha looked positively jolly as he clapped the man on the back for a second time, almost knocking him down, then hefted his rifle and took off at a jog for the idling Orca, where Vasily and the others were already loaded up.

They were all definitely driving the Bronco today.

Horse Shit

5km Northwest of Moscow

“I don’t like Russia,” Private Simmonds said. “It smells like shit.”

A big part of a troop sergeant’s job was discipline – keeping the men in line so their officer didn’t have to, as well as keeping them ready to do what needed doing, instead of fucking around. Jameson was already about to regret bringing Simmonds, but Staff Sergeant Eli grabbed him by the ear and dragged him around the tail of the plane in the pitch dark, hissing in his ear.

“You’re going to be smelling it from a hell of a lot closer up if you don’t cut out the fucking chatter…”

The rest of the team was crouched down in a defensive perimeter around the still and quiet Beechcraft, while Jameson consulted his paper maps – once again, no bloody GPS fix – which he had spread out on the left wing, just ahead of the open hatch, which also made up the fold-down stairs. He was making a quick improvised plan of action with Group Captain Gibson, the pilot, and still ranking officer on the mission.

It was also Gibson who had pulled off the miracle of finding them an alternate landing strip in downtown Moscow.
Even if
, Jameson thought, sniffing the cold air,
it really does smell like shit. Horse shit, specifically…

It turned out the only open and unobstructed stretch of flat ground within marching distance of Red Square was the Moscow Hippodrome. Jameson knew shit didn’t stink for two years, so some horses must have somehow survived. But other than perhaps serving as a hopeful sign, a flicker of life in this dead place, it wasn’t his concern.

He had his own shit to deal with.

Starting with, as the map quickly made clear, a five-click tab across post-Apocalyptic Moscow to Red Square. And God even knew if their mission objective, the Kazakh named Aliyev, would even still be there, never mind alive, by the time they arrived. They’d need God on their side just to complete the journey intact themselves.

“This looks like our best option, route-wise,” Jameson whispered to Gibson, tracing his finger on the map, which was illuminated with a red-lensed combat light attached to his vest.

As he said this, Eli returned from his disciplinary errand. “Agreed,” he said. “Though we have no idea what we’re going to find inside the sodding city. So we’d better be ready to pivot.”

“Agreed,” Jameson said. They were already making this up as they went along. And at this point, though not quite as cynical as Eli, Jameson saw no reason to think their luck was going to change.

“Either way,” Gibson said, “I’ll be here when you get back.”

“About that,” Jameson said. He knew this was another critical decision point. Did he leave men here to guard the plane? They were already under-manned. On the other hand, if anything happened to the aircraft, they were all going to die in Russia.

Reading his mind, Gibson hefted an L22A2 carbine, with a short barrel, vertical foregrip, and suppressor on the end of the barrel. Jameson never saw him take it out of the cockpit, but knew the compact weapon had been designed for tank and APC crews for emergency action out of vehicle – and that a lot of pilots kept them handy for the same reason.

Still Jameson hesitated and scanned the black horizon.

Gibson said, “We’re a million miles from anything, and this place is enclosed by the viewing stands. If the dead had heard us land, they’d be here already. It’ll be fine. I’ll just hunker down, kick back, and reread
The Sword of Honour
trilogy until you rock back up.”

Jameson traded a look with Eli, whose expression said it was the commander’s call. Jameson decided to believe Gibson – because he wanted to. He had no idea what they’d be facing in Red Square, and he wanted his team’s full strength going in there. He nodded, hefted his own weapon, and pulled his NVGs back down. In any case, they definitely needed to move out, smart-ish. But as he turned, he remembered one last thing.