ARISEN, Book Eleven - Deathmatch (25 page)

She tried to buck herself up by remembering her engagement in support of Alpha over Hargeisa. When all had looked lost for them, she had been called on to put in a bunch of danger-close air strikes right over the heads of the men fighting on top of that burning and collapsing hospital. She’d somehow managed it – and helped get them all out of a situation not so much sticky as totally lethal.

And which, beforehand, she wouldn’t have imagined she was remotely capable of. So maybe she could do this, too. Not least because she had to. Then again… maybe what she needed was to think of some way to make it less impossible.

She racked her brain.

* * *

She did another circle around the Orca, even as it pulled farther away from the Seahawk and got closer to wherever the hell it was going. Which, for all anybody knew, was someplace with more Russians – more Russian aircraft, warships, AA missiles, like the ones that had taken out the two top pilots in the air wing.

Russian
… Hailey though back to her intensive Russian language module – which she had been given not during the Cold War, but when Putin was being particularly douchey, and the odds of American pilots having to go over there and risk getting shot down were relatively high.

Could she get the helo to stop somehow? That would definitely make the shot doable.
Think, think…
What if she fired an airburst munition in the air somewhere within sight… and then another on the ground… then got on the radio and made a mayday call – in Russian? Trick them into thinking she had shot down their Black Shark. Would the Orca stop for that?

Jesus
. The question answered itself. Even if all of that ridiculousness worked, which was doubtful in the extreme, of course they wouldn’t stop.

Airburst munitions…

And then it came to her, all in a single rush. If stopping this thing wasn’t possible, then slowing it would have to do. The math was still too much for her to face – or at least too time-intensive – so she got on the radio.

“CIC, Thunderchild, urgently requesting ballistics calculations support, how copy…”

* * *

Captain Gromov kept his course and heading as Misha instructed – and, more importantly, kept the cyclic pressed into the dash and the throttle wide open. They were well north of their cruising speed – slightly north of even their rated max speed – but he didn’t want to be the one to tell Misha they had to slow down.

No one did. No one ever wanted to tell Misha anything he didn’t want to hear. It was a slightly tone-deaf leadership style, but it seemed to work for him.

Shit definitely got done.

And they would be at the coast in less than forty-five minutes. The American helo couldn’t catch them. And the American jet couldn’t stop them.

And just as Gromov was starting to relax slightly – due not so much to the absence of Americans in his airspace as the absence of Misha in his cockpit – something caused his eyes to narrow, and his attention to focus like a hammer coming down. He leaned forward and squinted ahead.

Yep, something was definitely coming directly toward them.

And then a large and bright explosion blossomed directly in their path. On their current heading and speed, they would crash into whatever the hell it was in about one second.

Gromov did the helo equivalent of stomping the brakes and twisting the wheel, radically reducing their airspeed and banking hard to the left, in an effort to miss whatever the ever-loving shit was exploding in the air in front of them.

And as he did so, he saw there was something behind the explosion, coming in even faster.

And it was whited out by the flash of some kind of weapon. And then a very bad sound came from the rear of the helo – and finally another aircraft blasted by way too close. And a warning klaxon sounded and a red light flashed from his control panel.

He steeled himself to look down and see what it was.

* * *

Hailey’d had to get way out in front of the Orca to make this work. And then she came directly at them, head on. With the numbers provided by CIC, she had dialed in the airburst parameters for the missile, then set a timer to tell her exactly when to launch it.

As she blasted straight toward the helo, and the seconds ticked away, she’d tried to calm her nerves by reciting a line of dialogue that seemed right for the occasion. In her best crisp tactical controller voice, she said: “
Luke – you’ve switched off your targeting computer! What’s wrong?
”

But then she was out of time.

She fired the missile. It slid off its rail, blasted forward – and exploded in mid-air ahead.

The Orca did exactly as she expected, or at least hoped – it slowed and banked, both radically.

And in the next fraction of a second, Hailey got her look. There was the tail rotor inside its housing. Not in full profile. But also not going by at 200mph in front of her, its relative lateral speed much lower. Not nothing, but lower.

She steered into it as she triggered her cannon.

She only got off about twenty rounds – less than a half-second’s worth – before the two aircraft had blasted by and out of sight of each other. And she figured three-quarters of them missed entirely.

But the rest hit.

* * *

Captain Gromov swallowed dryly. Not because they had just lost their tail rotor. But because Misha was back.

“
What’s crackalatin’, playa?
” he asked in that way of his.

Gromov blinked once and tried to explain what he thought had just happened. But, mainly, he told Misha what the result was – total loss of tail rotor function. Then came the hard part: trying to tell Misha that they had to land. Or else die.

Misha wasn’t interested. “No, you will do it big – and you will keep us in the air. My pimp hand is strong.
Ponimayu
?”

“Yes, I do understand you. But I’m sorry,
Polkóvnik
…”

That was Misha’s rank in the Russian Army – the equivalent of colonel. But no one gave a shit about rank in Spetsnaz, Misha least of all. Everything was strictly merit-based. Or rather brutality-based.

Gromov finished his dangerous thought. “…this aircraft is not staying in the air. It is out of my hands now.”

Misha pulled his gigantic Desert Eagle 50-cal – which looked less gigantic in his hands, versus in the hands of non-gigantic people. He put the yawning muzzle to Gromov’s helmet. And he hauled the heavy hammer back, cocking the weapon.

Evidently that was all he had to say about that.

Gromov swallowed. He hoped he had enough saliva left to say this next bit. “Look. We
are
going down. The question is how. You can kill me now – and we come down hard and fast. You let me land, and we will come down soft and fast. Or you make me keep flying… and we’ll go down hard and slow.” He swallowed again, without looking up.

“I leave it to you.”

* * *

“Kickass,” Ali couldn’t resist saying, even over the open channel.

Handon actually smiled – then squeezed Ali’s bicep, and patted Reich energetically on the shoulder. Then Muralles as well, so as not to leave anyone out. He hit his radio. “Thunderchild, great job.”

“Roger that, Cadaver. Be advised, I am five minutes from bingo fuel, so am going to RTB. LT Morris, call sign Firecrotch, will be coming on station to take over.”

Handon contained his amusement at the other pilot’s call sign. Though he really wondered how he’d got stuck with that… But he did smile again, as they were able to see, albeit way out at the edge of vision, the Russian helo going down.

But it was where it was doing so that became Handon’s next concern. Stretching out ahead of them, in the northeast of central Somalia, a number of river valleys meandered in from the coast – or, rather, the rivers themselves meandered out to the sea. Three big ones in particular lay right across their flight path. And they were just as Jake had warned – large, lush, and strangely overgrown, especially surrounded as they were by semi-arid desert.

And the Orca was already descending into the middle of the first of these riverine valleys – the biggest one.

Spetsnaz, and Patient Zero, were disappearing into the bush.

Ranger Up

Somalia – Sool Region

In the ZA, you rarely needed to pull over. So Jake just rumbled the shot-to-hell and apocalyptic-looking gun truck to a stop right in the middle of the wide track of mud that passed for a road in Somalia. Ordinarily this road would be pure dust. But the rains had at least cured that.

The two-vehicle convoy was heading south, out of the Sanaag Region in the north that was home to Camp Davis, down into central Somalia, and toward the Stronghold – at high speed. But now all that speed bled off. Jake was driving the lead vehicle, so he didn’t need to ask anyone’s permission to stop, either. He just did it. The Land Cruiser rolled to a halt behind him.

Ten seconds later he, Predator, Homer, and Noise were hunched over the hood of the SUV, plastic-covered map pack laid out in front of them – while Zack stayed on his minigun, watching the road ahead from the turret. In addition to getting briefed on what had happened at the Stronghold, they had just gotten the most up-to-date heading from the Seahawk, so they could maintain an intercept course with them, on the ground. Luckily, both the American and Russian helos were heading north, reducing the distance between them and the ground convoy.

Predator wasn’t thrilled by the stop. He also figured consulting the map wasn’t why they had pulled over. He was right.

Jake looked up at the others. “We have to go get her.”

Pred rolled his eyes. “What, go back to the Stronghold? There is no Stronghold anymore. You heard Baxter yourself. It’s overrun, blown up, and burned down.”

Pred had been monitoring the same channel. But from Jake’s expression, he realized he’d said the wrong thing. Because Jake’s teammate, Kate, was still back there. Then again, he didn’t care that much, so he just went on.

“Even if we did go back, what are the odds she’s still alive? Or that we’d find her? And it doesn’t matter anyway. You heard it yourself – the salvation of the world just got swiped and is winging its way in our direction.”

Jake didn’t look like backing down, and he also didn’t look like he was intimidated by Predator. He said, “Handon should have fucking listened to me in the first place. Dealing with al-Sîf was a shitty idea. Now you still don’t have Patient Zero, and I’ve lost Kate.” Jake had been trying to raise her on the radio ever since they got the news, with no success.

Noise said, “Just trust in Ik Onkar, brother. Kate will be taken care of.”

Now that pissed Jake off. He knew it was men alone who made all the evil in the world. And it was only the decisive actions of the resolute and the good who ever made anything better. “Have you looked around you?” he said. “Does it look like God is taking care of anyone?”

Homer stepped in, hoping he could head off any more discord. Because if these two teams couldn’t work together, they were in big trouble. He also saw Predator checking his watch, and knew the big man had a point: they needed to get moving. To Jake, he said, “Look – I respect your responsibilities as team sergeant. But you’ve got to see there’s a lot more at stake.”

Jake backed down slightly. Of course he did see that. He wasn’t an idiot, or unaware of his duty. He was just distraught. “I’ll go alone, then. Just give me one vehicle. We’ll split up. It’s a reasonable compromise.”

“Not happenin’, man,” Pred said. “We need the redundancy, and we need the firepower.” He sighed loudly. “Look, dude, I know she’s your guy.
But she’s just one guy.
”

Jake squinted up at him. “She’s not just one guy to me.”

Both Jake and Pred were master sergeants, so it wasn’t clear who got to be in charge. But then, unexpectedly, Predator softened. He thought again of Cali – and it occurred to him there might be something more between Jake and Kate than just the job. He squeezed Jake’s shoulder. “I know how you feel, man. Maybe you’ll see her again. But right now, we need to get out there and save the world. C’mon, dude.”

He left the rest unsaid – that they all had a job to do, and that even in the face of terrible losses they were expected to Ranger up and get it done. Pred knew Jake would get that without hitting him over the head with it. He did.

They all saddled back up. The two big engines fired up, and both vehicles accelerated to 110mph and blasted south again.

But as they did so, Homer silently wondered whether he could leave Ali behind, if the mission, and the fate of the world, required it. Worrying about this problem was, he was pretty sure, why she had broken things off with him.

Maybe love was the enemy of survival.

Jingle Bus

Stronghold – Air Traffic Control Tower
[Thirty Minutes Earlier]

After al-Sîf hauled Kate back up into the guard tower, the first thing he did was check behind him. The GCS, which had been the source of the explosion, was missing its lid – plus much of what had been inside, namely a hardened laptop, second screen, controls, electronics rack, etc. But because the cover had been closed, most of the grenade blast had been contained, or directed in a harmless direction, namely up.

This was particularly nice for al-Sîf and Kate, who had been down on the deck. It occurred to him for one second that his good deed – saving Kate from falling to her death into the swarm below – had perhaps saved his own life. But he didn’t give much significance to this, and he definitely didn’t dwell on it.

Because not only was the entire Stronghold burning and being overrun all around them – but undead were also racing up the stairs behind them. Al-Sîf threw his shoulder into the door and got it closed and latched again, with no time to spare. It bucked with the impact of heaving bodies behind it. He spared a look over his shoulder and saw Kate – pointing her rifle at his face.

He rolled his eyes. It seemed totally obvious to him that their only chance of survival lay in working together – or at least not fighting each other. And al-Sîf had an excellent nose for the requirements of survival. He might actually end up being the last survivor of al-Shabaab.