ARISEN, Book Eleven - Deathmatch (18 page)

The Russian helo may have gone. But they were still in the middle of the Islamist Stronghold, surrounded by over a hundred armed Somalis – and, despite the fact that neither Alpha nor al-Shabaab had kicked it off, this had in fact turned into a gunfight.

And right now they were on the losing end of it.

Pushing her vision out farther, Ali quickly determined the MG wasn’t the only threat targeting Handon and Henno. Surviving fighters on the walls were following its tracers, adding their fire. It was like they’d been whipped into a frenzy to have a vulnerable, pinned-down target to shoot at – taking out their frustration at having the shit hammered out of them by Spetsnaz, perhaps.

But the machine gunner had to die first.

Only Ali didn’t have a shot. The emplacement was well designed, with only the barrel protruding – and the Seahawk would have to basically descend right in front of it for Ali to shoot inside. And while the PKP machine gun didn’t have the steel-shredding power of a minigun, she was pretty sure Reich and Muralles weren’t going to be enthusiastic about having 800 rounds per minute of 7.62 coming right at their faces.

Ali pushed her mind into overdrive for a solution.

And then a solution came and found her. A door on the side of the guard tower opened, a fighter dashed out of it – and he didn’t close the door behind him. As Ali squinted into her scope, she saw most of this tower, like the rest of them, was covered with that scrap-looking steel plate.

“Time to channel Don Hollenbaugh!” Ali shouted. “Move!” She needed Kate’s spot to do this. And they were going to be out of view of the doorway in seconds.

“No!” Kate said. “I can do it!”

She pulled in her rifle, sighted in – and started putting rapid shots through the doorway. Firing fast, she panned her aim up then down, left then right. At about shot fifteen, the machine gun went silent. They could even see its barrel tilt up toward the sky. She’d done it – banked her rounds off the back wall into the gunner inside.

“Handon – go!” Ali shouted over the squad net. But even as she said it, she could already see him and Henno leaping out and sprinting for better cover.

When she glanced over at Kate, the other woman was smiling at her. “Master Sergeant Hollenbaugh, right?”

The kind of trick shot she had just pulled off had been made locally famous by Delta operator Don Hollenbaugh, who singlehandedly defended an entire rooftop in Fallujah after most of the forty Marines he went in with were wounded. Eventually, last man standing, he had prevented the building from being overrun by shuffling among all six positions on the roof, singlehandedly keeping 150 attackers at bay. At certain points, he’d had to make shots on guys he couldn’t even see – and did it by banking rounds off hard surfaces into their backs.

Ali nodded. “Yeah, exactly. How’d you learn that one?”

Kate said, “Kwan, our Bravo, taught it to me. How about you?”

Ali shrugged. “Don Hollenbaugh taught it to me.”

* * *

But then Ali quickly got her rifle back up and her head down, because they still had three men in heavy contact on the ground. Her first order of business was checking that guard tower, to make sure no one else jumped back on that MG. But it turned out this wasn’t going to be a problem.

Because as Ali glassed it, the entire structure went up in a blistering fireball, hundred-foot flames shooting out the firing ports even as the walls disintegrated, a column of black smoke climbed into the sky, wood and steel shrapnel and debris shot out and rained down across the entire courtyard – and out beyond it, onto the heads of the dead, who didn’t care, or notice.

As the thunderclap roar of the explosion echoed over the surrounding forest, the shockwave caught the orbiting Seahawk, picking it up and shaking it, and sending Ali, Kate, and Juice tumbling the full length of their safety harnesses, which went taut and jerked them to painful stops. Finally, the blast wave passed through, leaving them still flying.

Ali’s first thought was that Kate had hit some heavy ordnance inside the guard tower, and it had taken a few seconds to cook off. But as she opened her eyes, which had slammed shut from the bright light, pummeling noise, and overpressure, she now saw the thing she had expected to see earlier.

Emerging from the heart of the settling explosion, whipping away smoke and falling debris with its rotors, shark-nose angled down and forward like a great white, another helicopter blasted out into the heat-distorted air over the courtyard.

And another missile was already slipping off the rail on its right stub wing, riding on a blistering trail of fire straight into the guard tower directly opposite the one just destroyed – which now also erupted in an identical maelstrom of flame, smoke, noise, and blast wave. Bracing for the shockwave, Ali gritted her teeth, which rattled in her head.

Well, there’s my damned attack helo
, she thought.

She knew she hadn’t imagined it. And it wasn’t a great white. No, it was worse. It was a Kamov Ka-50, known as the
Chornaya Akula
.

A Black Shark.

And that was the last look Ali was going to get at it for a while. The Seahawk pilots up front were already jumping through their own asses to get them really the hell far away from there. Because Seahawk versus Black Shark was not a sea-creature fight you wanted to be on the losing end of.

* * *

Handon and Henno covered their heads as flaming debris rained down around them. They had just reached hard cover – a wooden structure that abutted the outer wall – and even with guard towers exploding over their heads, they still stacked up on either side of the door. Handon kicked it in, and charged the heavy side, left, while Henno went right.

Handon ran straight into three armed men, looking like they were hiding out in there. But they also raised their weapons, so Handon put them down with rapid shots to center of mass, even as he heard Henno’s suppressed rifle chug behind him. By the time he spun around, Henno had cleared his side and shut the door.

Another crushing explosion echoed from outside – and Handon got to a window just in time to see the constituent parts of another guard tower, and its occupants, raining over a wide area. He was also just in time to see their Seahawk taking off like a fly out from under an incoming swatter, disappearing over the eastern wall and out of sight.

Fair enough
, Handon thought. He wouldn’t want to be sharing the air with a Russian attack helo either. But he hailed Juice, to tell him to address the damned problem – to get their top cover into the fight. They had air dominance. They just needed to use it.

“Already on it, top,”
Juice answered back.

But for the moment the Black Shark was alone in the air over the Stronghold, and it came around again, like it was on such a kill-crazy rampage that it hadn’t noticed the Seahawk, or couldn’t be bothered to chase it. Most likely, it just didn’t consider it a threat. Now its side-mounted autocannon started up, firing short bursts of 30-mil and sweeping the remaining defenders off the walls.

Correction
, Handon thought, hunkered down at the corner of the window and peering out at the gratuitous violence. It was actually exploding them off the walls. He was pretty sure those were 30mm explosive incendiary rounds, each of which had an explosive charge for blast, casing fragments for shrapnel, and a zirconium ring to ignite anything flammable, at up to 1,000 degrees Celsius. Basically, not the kind of thing an unarmored person wanted to see coming at him while standing on a wooden stockade.

In seconds, the parapets were coming apart, the al-Shabaab guys on it disintegrating, and the walls themselves burning.

Handon shook his head in wonder. That Black Shark was just pouring down hate and discontent like a mother. He wondered where so much hatred would come from. The Russians already had what they came for. Why murder everyone after they had their prize?

Maybe some guys were just built that way.

Clown Cannon

Stronghold – Another Hole

Al-Sîf attempted to calm his rapid breathing, crouching down at the bottom of his own hole. Like Baxter, he’d gotten down in one fast as soon as the shit kicked off – just not quick enough to avoid getting shot, luckily in his own armor plate. He tapped it gratefully – but then immediately stopped.

Even tapping hurt like hell.

He had been shot twice in the chest with some seriously big, fast bullets, about one second before the American got shot in the back and went down in front of him. Luckily, the shooter had then switched fire to al-Sîf’s minions. By the time they were dead and on the ground, al-Sîf was thirty yards away in this hole.

And here he had stayed, despite the sounds of the battle raging around him – and the panicked shouts and cries of his own men on the radio, and on the open air. He felt absolutely no sense of responsibility for their welfare, no desire to organize or lead them. His sole motivation was to somehow get out of there alive.

Shortly after the guard towers started exploding, he heard the sound, then felt the shadow, of a sleek and fast-moving helicopter cruising by overhead. Hunting. And al-Sîf had the unmistakeable sensation of being a rabbit when the shadow of the hawk passes by – feeling that primal panic when the predator shape blots out the light.

And he could tell that predator was reducing this place out from under him. He had to get out before it was all embers and rubble. He eased his head up above ground level. The first thing he saw was one of the fighters he had abandoned.

The man stood at the base of the north wall and fired an RPG up toward the rear of the helicopter. Seeing it for the first time, al-Sîf didn’t know what kind it was, or who flew it. He only knew he didn’t want any. It looked scary as hell, all muscular lines and sharp angles, its engines and rotors roaring, wings bristling with row upon row of weapons.

As al-Sîf watched, the RPG gunner made a direct hit – and the helicopter simply shrugged it off. The blast didn’t even look like it scratched the paint. Reacting instantly, it spun in place like a weathervane and snap-fired a pair of rockets into the spot where the RPG gunner stood.

The man disappeared in the rippling double explosion.

Al-Sîf watched frozen as debris and wood shrapnel shot out the bottom of the wall. And then the wood groaned, loud enough to be heard over the gunfire, explosions, and engine noise, as the entire section, all forty feet of it, shuddered and fell forward, finally crashing into the mud like a drawbridge coming down.

And one second later, using it just like a drawbridge, the dead came charging across it – hundreds of them, most of which had already been pressed up against the other side, stacked ten feet high. Now the wall was breached. And very soon the thousands of undead bastards in the singularity outside would all be inside.

Al-Sîf seriously had to go.

But before he could overcome the paralysis of his muscles, he saw something else. It was his pet white boy, Baxter, leaping out of another of the trenches like he’d been launched from a clown cannon. He then went sprinting across open ground toward one of the buildings on the wall, clutching his rifle, head ducked low.

With the flood of dead rushing right behind him.

* * *

“Open the door!” Handon shouted to Henno from the window. This was going to be an interesting test of their relationship, given the chaos outside, and that Henno couldn’t see what was going on. But he yanked the door open with no hesitation.

And Baxter flew through it, running flat out.

As he skidded into a table, Henno slammed the door shut again and nodded at Handon. Weirdly, having been right on the verge of killing each other a couple of hours ago, they were working together better than ever.

“
Time… to go…
” Baxter panted, turning around and sucking wind. Handon didn’t ask him why – he could see perfectly well out the window. The walls were down. And the rising tide of dead was going to submerge this place in minutes, if not seconds.

“Up,” Baxter said, hefting his rifle and heading into the interior, Handon and Henno following.

As they ran, Handon got on the radio with Juice.

If they were going up, then someone with an aircraft was going to have to come retrieve their asses from there.

* * *

“Turn it around,” Ali said to Reich and Muralles, torso stuck back in their cockpit again. The Seahawk was already two miles from the Stronghold and stretching out the distance. For the pilots, there couldn’t be enough space between them and a Black Shark.

“What?” Reich said.

“We’ve got to extract my team,” Ali said. She didn’t belabor the fact that her guys were trapped in an enclosed structure that was falling to explosion, fire, shrapnel, and the dead.

Reich nodded fast enough to make it clear he had a lot of adrenaline in his system. But still he tried to reason with her. “Okay, I get that we’ve got to pull your guys out. But we can’t go back in there and take on a goddamned Russian attack helo. It’s got at least three kinds of fuck-shit-up that will take us down in seconds.”

Ali tried reasoning back. “And my guys only have minutes to live. They are about to stick their heads up – and we
will
be there pull them out.
Capisce
?”

Juice came on over ICS.
“Team confirmed inside under hard cover. I’m bringing the noize. TTI one mike.”

“One mike ’til
what
?” Muralles said. “What noise?”

“Just turn us around and get back in there –
now!
” Ali stayed half-stuck in the cockpit for now.

To make sure they did.

* * *

That left Kate and Juice in back, and with him still working the radios, she was the sole shooter. As the helo banked around again, and G-forces pressed her up against the bulkhead, Kate imagined she could feel the blood cool in her veins. She took a steadying breath. As the walls of the Stronghold reappeared, and the Seahawk slowed, rose, and peeked up over them, she leaned into her safety strap, pulled in her rifle to her shoulder – and prepared to engage.