ARISEN, Book Eleven - Deathmatch (2 page)

MICHAEL STEPHEN FUCHS
, in addition to co-authoring the first eight books of the bestselling ARISEN series with Glynn James, wrote the bestselling prequels
ARISEN : GENESIS
and
ARISEN : NEMESIS
(an Amazon #1 bestseller in Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction and #1 in Dystopian), as well as Book Nine (#1 bestseller in War, #1 in Military Science Fiction) and Book Ten (an Amazon overall Top 100 bestseller). The series as a whole has sold over a quarter million copies. The audiobook editions, performed by R.C. Bray, have generated nearly a million dollars in revenue. 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 2017); as well as the 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
. You can follow him on
Facebook
,
Twitter
(@michaelstephenf), or by
e-mail
.

ARISEN

BOOK ELEVEN

DEATHMATCH

MICHAEL STEPHEN FUCHS

For 1SG Don Harper – for your service, goodness, and friendship (and the awesome militaria). SUA SPONTE.

“But you will chase your enemies and they will fall before you by the sword; five of you will chase a hundred, and a hundred of you will chase ten thousand, and your enemies will fall before you by the sword.”
– Leviticus 26:7-8

“What was the lesson here? Simple. Don’t quit. Never quit no matter what. Keep going until someone tells you to sit down. Keep going as long as you’re able to move, no matter how poorly you think you may be doing. Just don’t quit.”
– Eric L. Haney,
Inside Delta Force

The Beginning is the End is the Beginning

Djibouti–Ambouli International Airport

Hailey “Thunderchild” Wells bloodlessly grips the control wheel and throttle lever of an aircraft she wouldn’t have expected to be piloting if she lived until the end of the ZA. All around her, the Bombardier Dash 8, a big turboprop passenger and cargo plane, rattles and crashes as it accelerates down a rutted and overgrown runway, accelerating madly toward takeoff.

Unfortunately for Hailey, as well as everyone else on board who would like to escape Africa in this thing, it is also accelerating directly toward another aircraft – a Russian attack helicopter, a Kamov Ka-50 “Black Shark.” Battle-scarred and menacing, it bristles with laser-guided
Vikhr
(“Whirlwind”) anti-tank missiles, 122mm rocket pods, and a 30mm autocannon – all of them pointed directly at Hailey’s face.

And it is hovering over the end of the runway – exactly in the airspace the plane will have to pass through in order to take off.

Even if the Russian pilot chooses not to turn the plane to flaming wreckage and kill everyone on board, there is no way they are taking off through it. And there isn’t a damned thing Hailey can do about it.

“Oh, fuck it,” she says out loud. She pushes the throttle into the console. In games of chicken, in her experience…

The bigger player usually wins.

* * *

Outside the hurtling plane, blasting and bouncing down the runway alongside it, are more than a half-dozen vehicles – SUVs, muscular pick-up trucks, even a couple of American Humvees – all of them bristling with weapons, as well. There are mounted 7.62mm and 50-cal machine guns, stacks of RPGS, and at least a dozen tattooed, scowling, and heavily-armed Spetsnaz – Russian special-forces commandos.

This caravan of badass is now racing the aircraft – trying to pull ahead and cut it off, to keep it from leaving the ground.

Right now, many of the occupants of the caravan are also trying to keep from being murdered – by Predator, who stands in the back of one of the open-bed trucks, bellowing, and bodily pulling occupants out of their seats and hurling them like rag dolls over the side and onto the blurring tarmac below.

Some of the Spetsnaz in the other trucks are targeting Predator with their weapons – but he is moving a million miles an hour. Others, in the truck he’s in, are trying to grapple with him – but he’s nearly seven feet tall, 325 pounds, strong as Odin, and fast as a rattlesnake. He relieves the front passenger of his rifle, then his pistol (when he draws that), then knocks his knife away with a vicious backhand slap – and finally picks him up by the strap on his plate carrier and hurls him out entirely.

The screaming man hits the tarmac, bounces once, and disappears.

* * *

Just behind the cockpit, the front-left hatch of the plane is open – and US Army Staff Sergeant Kate Dunajski peers around its edge, curled around her M4 assault rifle. She steels herself and leans out into the blasting air, bringing the rifle to her shoulder and taking aim through her ACOG red-dot sight at the hovering attack helo directly ahead.

But before she can even line up a shot, an incoming high-velocity round smashes the edge of the door frame, inches from her face, shattering and sending bullet fragments into her flesh. Reflexively, Kate ducks back inside, then hits her radio.

“There is a fucking
sniper
out there, and he has got me
seriously
dialed in…!”

* * *

On the outside of the plane, First Sergeant Aaliyah “Ali” Khamsi clings to the edge of the bucking right wing, both her rifle and her body hanging down and swinging with the wild motion of the plane. She starts to pull herself back up to safety, but another incoming round hits the fuselage in front of her, sending bullet fragments into the bandage on her cheek – which is already covering wounds from previous near misses.

“Yeah, roger on the fucking sniper. Over.”

Ali shakes her head wearily.

Oh, GodDAMMit – not THIS sonofabitch again…

* * *

Master Sergeant Jake Redding of Special Forces ODA 555 (“Triple Nickel”) leans out a hatch and engages the pursuing Spetsnaz convoy with his Beowulf .50, the two-inch slugs from which can penetrate an engine block. In this case, they easily penetrate a windshield and cause the driver’s chest to explode through his body armor.

But that same vehicle also mounts a Browning M2 50-cal heavy machine gun in its open bed, the gunner of which now targets Jake, and the hatch around him starts erupting with impacts. He pulls back inside, but it doesn’t matter – the high-powered rounds tear through the plane’s fuselage, and then the bulkhead inside. Jake is hit and goes down.

Stepping up to take his place in the hatch is Agency analyst Baxter, carrying a Milkor six-shot multi-grenade launcher. He leans out, sights in on the hood ornament of the lead vehicle – and fires off all six 40mm grenades. The truck’s nose goes into the tarmac and the entire three-ton vehicle tumbles ass over teakettle, launching Spetsnaz guys out of the bed while doing flaming backflips down the runway at high speed.

One down.

Always a Way

Camp Davis, Near the Summit of Mt. Shimbiris, Northern Somalia
[Twelve Hours Earlier]

The bullet-pocked, soot-streaked, and gore-splashed Special Forces gun truck shuddered up the dirt path, emerging from the thick forests that blanketed the lower slopes of Mt. Shimbiris, rumbling into the softly breaking dawn on the mountaintop. It looked like it had been through the wringer, flailed, pummeled, and then shat out the other side.

“Joe Shit the Gun Truck,” as Juice had first called it.

It was followed closely by a lumbering white SUV, a v8 Toyota Land Cruiser, which also had a Level III armor package due to its previous owners being private security contractors. This was the vehicle the survivors of U.S. Army Special Forces ODA 555 (“Triple Nickel”) had scavenged and used to get around in, before frantically getting the gun truck running again – when it had suddenly appeared they might have a mission for it.

Seeing the USS
John F. Kennedy
steam into the Gulf of Aden, two days before, had changed everything for them.

Ultimately, Triple Nickel had opted to leave the SUV a few miles outside Hargeisa, before blasting in to rescue Alpha in the gun truck, its 50-cal minigun cutting a channel through the sea of multi-species dead rising up to submerge then, along with Hargeisa Hospital. Shortly after their escape, they retrieved the Land Cruiser and offloaded half the combined team, which relieved the overcrowding in the first vehicle. While the six operators of Alpha had been pleased to emerge alive from the burning, collapsing, exploding gravity well of Hargeisa, no one had really relished an eight-hour drive over rough terrain with ten people in a single open-bed Humvee.

Now, as both vehicles rolled into a dirt parking area outside the gates of Triple Nickel’s bush camp, their home for the last six months, the occupants wasted no time in staggering out. Some pushed thick piles of expended bullet casings before them, which spilled and clanked on the ground, even as they enjoyed the blessed relief of getting solid dirt under their feet.

Command Sergeant Major Handon, Alpha team leader and former Delta CSM, emerged from the front of the gun truck along with Baxter – the young CIA analyst who had survived the fall from its center in Hargeisa, then survived eighteen months in the al-Shabaab Stronghold, before escaping to hook up with Triple Nickel. Out from the rear of the gun truck climbed Predator (former Delta), Henno (SAS), and Noise (recent Sikh attachment and former SAS Reserve).

Master Sergeant Jake Redding, the Special Forces team sergeant for Triple Nickel, was driving the Land Cruiser, sitting up front with Staff Sergeant Kate Dunajski – their Cultural Support Team (CST) attachment and de facto SF soldier, who had survived the fall of Camp Lemonnier, and escaped with her new team, the very day of her arrival in Somalia. Ali (Delta), Homer (SEAL Team Six), and Juice (The Activity, former SF) rode in back with them.

Unfolding her limbs and gliding out of the rear of the Tahoe, Ali slung her rifle and nodded to Handon. “I’m going up on overwatch.”

Handon nodded. “Where to?”

“On the summit. Single best view in this shitty country.”

Kate, climbing out of the other side of the truck and coming around, said, “Best overwatch point is—”

“I can find the top of the mountain,” Ali said. And just like that she was gone, evanescing into the misty dawn. Kate watched her go, wondering what she’d said wrong.

But she didn’t watch her as intently, or as wide-eyed, as did Zack Altringham – the senior CIA analyst, Baxter’s boss, and the man who had predicted the end of the world – as he stepped out of his tent and walked to the gate to meet the others. For a second, he imagined he recognized Ali – but quickly decided he must have been hallucinating. His lips remained parted, though, as he surveyed the dirt-streaked and heavily armed newcomers, the addition of whom nearly tripled the size of their group, literally overnight. When Zack saw the others off the day before, there had been exactly four of them. Now Baxter pulled him back toward the tent they shared, filling him in as they walked.