ARISEN, Book Eleven - Deathmatch (16 page)

But then Ali saw another figure on the ground, running through the maelstrom. And he was not only running out in the open – but heading directly toward the Orca.

Henno
.

* * *

“Hullo, mate!” Henno shouted as he slammed into the steel superstructure of the Russian helo. In a quirk of battlefield geometry, there was only one weapon or firing port on that side – and while it had been focused on murdering Handon, Henno was able to run right up to it at an angle, getting inside its fighting arc.

Now he simply drew his pistol, stuck it in the open doorway and into the gunner’s face, fired twice – and blew the contents of the man’s head out the back of his helmet.

But his position outside that port also allowed him to see why the Orca had landed like this. The minigun faced out, covering them – while, on the opposite side, the big cargo door was open and disgorging a dozen tooled-up shooters from the main cabin. And it was only because they faced away, spilling out on to the ground on the opposite side, that they didn’t see Henno.

Then again, Henno figured they’d be coming around the sides, and be on top of him, in the next three seconds. He spared one look toward the body bag, lying 25 feet away. He might get to it. He might even get it up over his shoulder. But he’d never walk away with it.

He put his head down and sprinted toward Handon’s shed.

* * *

Ali and Kate, circling above it all and half-hanging out the helo on their safety straps, had a box-seat view to what happened next. With the Orca’s minigun silenced, they’d persuaded Reich to stay in the air – though he also increased their airspeed and altered their flight pattern to make them a harder target. Which also meant it was still nearly impossible for Kate or even Ali to make shots.

But they could see what played out with perfect clarity.

Almost before the Orca had settled in the mud, two columns of big and heavily armed shooters spilled out from around behind it, and pushed out a salient in front. They fired in all directions, mostly up at the al-Shabaab fighters on the walls. The jihadis, despite their elevated firing positions and advantage in numbers, were instantly back on their heels. Smacked in the nose with speed, surprise, and violence of action, they panicked, shot wildly, and seemed to have very little idea what the hell was happening to them.

Ali could see they were utterly outclassed.

Kate, never having seen that Orca, nor any soldiers like these, shouted across ICS,
“Hey – who the fuck ARE these guys?”

Ali knew exactly who they were. The way they moved and shot, their uniforms and weapons, the brutal and menacing vibe they gave off, all made them unmistakeable – unlike anything else in this world or the last one.

“Russian Spetsnaz!” she shouted in answer.

She always knew it. She’d known it up on that mountaintop – known they were back. And, though he hadn’t yet shown himself, her nemesis was with them, too. Ali rarely doubted her instincts. And she had never really doubted this one.

Now she just had to work out what the hell to do about it.

* * *

Henno was only halfway to Handon’s shed when, preparing to hurdle another of those holes in the ground, he saw Handon pop out of it, rifle to shoulder. He’d repositioned himself there in the seconds after Henno silenced the weapon that had been turning his concealment transparent.

Henno dropped down in beside him, Handon taking a few rapid but aimed shots to cover him. But suddenly an insane amount of fire was coming in on them – most of it from a machine gun in one of the guard towers, which had zeroed them and now went cyclic. So they both indulged the better part of valor and pulled their heads down where they were more likely to keep them. At least until the MG chewed through all the dirt between it and them.

“Who’s in the goddamned helicopter?” Handon asked.

“Sodding Spetsnaz. Squad-strength.”

“What?” Lips parted, Handon tried to make sense of this impossible fact. Tumblers turned in his mind as he re-evaluated everything he thought he knew about the tactical situation, in light of this new fact. Al-Sîf hadn’t double-crossed them. Somehow the goddamned Russians had found them.
But why, in God’s name…?

“Where’s P-Zero?”

“Couldn’t get to it. Still on the ground last I saw.”

Handon flashed back to his game of chicken with that transport helo. And then the last tumbler clicked. He and it had been headed toward the same spot. This couldn’t be happening. But all kinds of shit kept happening lately that couldn’t happen.

“Where’s Baxter?” Handon asked, finally.

“I left him in the other bloody hole.”

* * *

The Spetsnaz team pushing out on the ground shot, moved, and communicated with supreme skill and unit cohesion – and raggedy militia guys fell from the walls like gunshot-victim rain. There were enough of them up there that occasionally one would score a hit on a Russian. But they must have been either body armor hits, or minor wounds to extremities, because the Russians simply didn’t appear to mind. It was like they were all playing paintball – and also cheating, unwilling to call themselves out when hit.

Getting shot didn’t stop them, or even slow them down.

And as those dozen shooters pushed out their salient in front of the helo, one of them moved to the front, leading the others with total disregard for incoming fire or his own safety. He carried a compact assault rifle, as well as some kind of rifle-sized pistol in a chest rig, but he wasn’t firing. And he was clearly bigger, meaner, and even more fearless than the men he led.

Leaning forward, he powered straight up to Patient Zero, picked it up, and tossed it over his shoulder. He and his supporting team did this all so efficiently that it was a done deal before Ali even realized his plan. She’d been holding her fire while trying to work out the new tactical picture – and also because the Russians were doing excellent work degrading al-Shabaab, work she wasn’t sure they wanted to interfere with.

Somehow, it had just never occurred to her that anyone else would also be looking for Patient Zero – never mind stage an elaborate ambush of their handover to get it. Cursing herself for a fool – and, worse, a slow-moving one – she sighted in on the leader. But by then he had turned away, and started bouncing off at a run – that body bag taking up half her sight picture, its torso and head shielding the man carrying it. She couldn’t risk the shot. Not from an evasively jigging helo.

And as her finger twitched on her trigger, she felt someone big and warm at her shoulder – it was Juice, stepping up beside her in the open door. He was still dealing with radio traffic – “CIC, Cadaver, wait out,” “Thunderchild, make your altitude five-zero-zero and stand by” – but as Ali looked over, he pushed his chin mic away and stared at the last steps of the man walking off with their body.

And she heard him breathe a single word: “
Misha
.”

Before she could ask who the hell Misha was, she could see the leader stomping back up to the helo, and making a whirly motion with his index finger, which caused his team to collapse back on him. And just before he disappeared around the side of the bird, not even looking back, he tossed a pair of grenades over his shoulder, like a parting
Fuck you
– and then stuck his hand up over the same shoulder, showing the bird to anyone watching.

Ali shook her head at the sheer balls on this guy.
Yeah
, she thought.
That’s precisely what it was – a parting Fuck you.

But they hadn’t parted yet. Putting her eye back to her scope and leaning out, Ali shot the two rearmost guys in their column before they reached the cover of the helo. And those guys definitely went down. Ali didn’t shoot paintballs.

Not pausing even a second, she started putting fire into the engine cowling between the helo’s airframe and rotors – trying to disable the damned thing before it could get off the ground. As she shot, she shouted at Kate and Juice to do the same. But even as they started pouring fire in, the Orca lifted off – Russian helos not being notoriously vulnerable to small-arms fire. Its engines whined as it turned and angled away, showing its ass to the Stronghold, and to Alpha.

But as it spun, and the previously dark side came into view, Ali could see a single rifle barrel emerging from it. And as the Orca rose over the walls, that single shooter swept and fired, knocking four al-Shabaab fighters off the wall – all in two seconds, and with perfect accuracy. And that was despite doing it from a shooting platform moving on all three axes.

And Ali knew in her gut exactly who that was.

And if she was right, that meant he had not only made four flawless shots from a twisting, climbing, accelerating helo – but he had done it with a goddamned bolt-action rifle, an SV-338 Lapua Magnum. Which meant he’d had to manually cycle it every time, loading a new round, sighting in, acquiring, and engaging – all in a half-second.

Which was just showing off.

Man, I hate that fucking guy
, Ali thought.

But as the Orca finally disappeared from sight, flying low over the bush, whisking away both Ali’s nemesis and Juice’s, not to mention their mission objective, the last thing to occur to her actually wasn’t about her old pal the tattooed sniper, but about the rest of them – the assaulters, and their leader.

None of the Spetsnaz shooters on the ground had gone back for the two men she shot. She could see them still lying right where they fell. Now, Ali knew these guys were dead – because she knew exactly where she’d shot them. But their teammates couldn’t have known this. And they didn’t even go back to check.

They just left them where they lay.

And this, more than anything else, made Ali very uneasy.

Safety First

Red Square – Southeast Edge

“What the bloody hell is that nutter up to?” Eli asked Sanders in a barely audible whisper. True to phlegmatic form – and perfect for the environment – Sanders only shrugged. But just when Eli was about to either hail Jameson or go look for him in person, the shadow of the officer appeared on top of the tank again, slithered off, and dashed back to the edge of the square.

Jameson cast around, and then pointed behind Eli. The glass of the storefront behind them was totally missing, and he motioned his senior NCO inside. They quickly cleared the room, then had a rapid whispered confab.

“Well?” Eli asked.

Jameson shook his head. “Nothing. There’s no one there. Found the radio Aliyev must have used, though it was dead. There was also a chem-light.”

“Still lit?”

“Faintly.”

“So at least he
was
there. The question is where the bloody hell did he go? It’s not like we can just ring his mobile.”

Jameson exhaled. “I think he got pulled out.”

“By who?”

“There’s a trail of 7.62 brass leading away.”

“Leading where?”

Jameson pointed over Eli’s shoulder. “Looks like that way.”

Turning, Eli could see a large stone building protruding out into the square on the other side, about halfway up.

Jameson said, “Bring the men inside, clear the building, seal it up – and then strongpoint here. I’ll take one man and follow the trail.”

“Yeah,” said Eli, “and that man is me. Not letting you out of my sight again. Croucher can handle things here.”

Jameson couldn’t argue with that. Croucher could probably do both their jobs – at once. “Let’s bring one more.”

“Sanders.”

Jameson nodded, not having to ask Eli’s thinking.

Sanders could damned well keep quiet.

* * *

The three Royal Marines ended up practically having to crawl the entire width of Red Square. The trail of bullet casings did appear to lead toward the big stone building – but they couldn’t assume it did, so needed to actually follow it, rather than skirting around the edges of the square again. Whoever had left them obviously felt no need to slink, but had marched straight through the middle, standing tall.

It had clearly been a patrol in force.

But while those guys, whoever they were, had shot their way across, Jameson’s team was in no position to do the same. Instead, they followed the trail for about twenty yards, then dropped down and hugged cobblestones when the dead got too near, waiting for them to wander off again. Then they did it again. It was painstaking movement, not to mention nerve-wracking and dangerous.

When they reached it, they found the imposing marble building itself surrounded by a single chain and a low stone wall. Jameson led Eli and Sanders up and over both, then finally up against the smooth red marble of the building, around its left side. When they had been in front, Jameson had seen five huge Cyrillic characters over the entrance:
ЛЕНИН
.

Now, as they huddled up and regrouped, Jameson mentally tried to unpack what he’d seen. “Fuck me,” he whispered, barely audible. “I think this is Lenin’s bloody tomb.”

“
Shh!
” Eli hissed, pulling the other two down to the ground.

It took another five seconds before Jameson could make out what had spooked his troop sergeant.

Voices.

As annoying as the dead were, they never spoke.

Jameson got down flat on the deck, pressed his cheek into the stone, and stuck his head around the corner at ground level – just in time to see two people, living ones, walk up to the entrance and mount the stairs. They were both armed and in uniform, clearly soldiers – and they looked squared away and operational. And while they moved tactically and wore NVGs, neither saw Jameson’s head peeking around the edge of the building.

He said a silent prayer of thanks – then a second one, to cover what he was about to do next. Pulling back under cover, he unclipped his rifle and handed it to Eli, then dashed forward over the low wall that ringed the building, rolling himself silently over it – all the while telepathically hearing Eli shouting at him about what the hell he thought he was doing.

The answer was: putting himself in position to see what the two newcomers did next. Because he had to know.