Exile

by James Swallow

  The fighters imagined hordes of helicopter gunships out there in the black night, locust-swarm masses rolling in over the shore to drop squads of horribly beweaponed Western soldiers. Some of them fired into the dark, convinced they saw enemies in every jumping shadow.

  Others – the older men who had fought in real battles rather than the days of turning guns on panicked civilian apostates – kept themselves in better order, watching the outbuildings where the enemy infidels had to be hiding.

  The door at the rear of the garage opened briefly, enough to show a narrow sliver of darkness within, and then it slammed shut once more. All guns turned toward it as motion caught the eye of the fighters, and for a moment the idling Osprey was forgotten.

  Something small and fast came bouncing over the flagstone path that wound its way through the gardens of the Amadayo mansion. No larger than a beer can on its side, the device rolled toward the men in cover and dragged behind it a makeshift train of plastic strips and green, fist-sized spheres. A glassy eye in the middle of the little machine got a glimpse of a black-hooded rifleman staring blankly at it, and the robot accelerated toward him.

  The rifleman shouted in alarm as his mind caught up to what he was seeing. He brought his AKM to his shoulder and opened fire, trying to shoot the drone before it could get close, but he was too late. Hauling a cluster of M67 fragmentation grenades with it, the throwbot sped into the middle of the group of fighters and self-destructed. Chain-fire detonations of the grenades turned the blast into a sustained rumble, and even as the sound was fading, five figures burst from inside the garage. Throwing smoke canisters to cover their exit, they sprinted through the chaos toward the Osprey.

  *

  Marc charged into a wall of wind as he rushed for the grounded VTOL, and again the aircraft’s massive rotors swallowed up all other sounds around them. He threw a look over his shoulder and saw Lucy firing from the hip as she came up behind him.

  Back past the gap between the mansion house and the outbuildings, someone was trying to manoeuvre the Toyota technical so that the heavy machine gun in the flatbed could be aimed in their direction. As he looked, the muzzle of the big MG grew a flickering crucifix of fire, and tracer rounds marched up the lawn toward them.

  He followed Lucy and the man called Saito to the rear of the Osprey, ducking under the H-shaped tail to scramble up the cargo ramp and on board. Saito went back to haul in the body of a dead man lying on the grass, and as Lucy put down cover fire, the other two mercenaries from the garage climbed in.

  The Osprey’s interior was loud and vibrating with the endless rumble of the props. It had the same stripped-to-the-bare metal look as the Hercules that brought them from Oman, every surface covered with pipework and cable conduits. As he dashed forward to the cockpit, Marc felt more than he heard the low thuds of stray .50 calibre bullets punching through the aluminium fuselage and out the other side.

  A horror was waiting for him up there. Slumped forward over the central control console was another of Saito’s team. The pilot’s face had been destroyed by a high-velocity round that had hit him in the cheek, and there was a mess of blood, brain matter and bone fragments across the inside of the canopy. He fought down an instinctive urge to retch and dragged the dead body away from the controls, dumping it back on the floor of the crew cabin.

  Marc dropped into the pilot’s chair and let experience and muscle memory take him through the next few moments. He secured his seat belt, put his feet on the pedals, and then allowed his hands to fall naturally to the joystick and throttle. His eyes scanned the digital screens in front of him and he automatically wiped one clean of the blood droplets that had spattered across it.

  ‘Get us airborne!’ Lucy was suddenly at his shoulder, shouting into his ear. ‘C’mon, do some of that pilot shit!’

  He reflected that now was probably a bad time to tell her that he had exactly zero hours on this type of aircraft. Thanks to his naval training and his time with the SIS OpTeams, Marc was experienced with a half-dozen models of helicopter, and he did have enough fixed-wing hours to get most things off the ground and down again in one piece. The Osprey was half-helo, half-prop plane; how hard could it be?

  But he had been expecting to find something that resembled a helicopter’s control set, not the hybrid laid out in front of him. Marc gripped the joystick and felt the vibration from the rotors through his fingers, felt his gut tighten. Time slowed. It was all on him now. Ten seconds more and the Al Shabaab fighters would be swarming them.

  He shook off the flash of fear. The Osprey’s engine nacelles and rotors were aimed up at the sky, which meant right now it was acting like a helicopter. That, I can fly.

  ‘Hang on to something.’ Marc pushed the thrust control lever forward, applying power to the rotors, and the Osprey leapt off the ground far quicker than he expected. The tail slewed around as Marc over-corrected, shredding the canopy of a stand of acacia trees as the VTOL slipped through the air, threatening to yaw away from stability and spin them back into the ground.

  His gaze locked on the controls, Marc saw flashes of muzzle flare at the periphery of his vision as the Osprey’s nose swept past the fighters shooting up at them. Marc’s thumb found the wheel switch that controlled the angle of the aircraft’s wing-tip engine pods and clicked it forward. The nacelles tilted past a sixty-degree angle and suddenly the Osprey was behaving like a fixed-wing aeroplane. The transition moment came as a shock. Acceleration pushed on him as the aircraft thundered above the heads of the gunmen, flashing over the roof of the mansion and across the grounds toward the high walls of the estate.

  Marc chewed on his lip as he struggled to find the rhythm of the VTOL’s flight, over-correcting again as the Osprey’s centre of gravity shifted. He aimed the aircraft away from the surrounding residential district filled with two-storey houses, and followed the open road. His first instinct was to micro-manage the Osprey’s fly-by-wire digital controls and he smothered the urge, letting the aircraft find its own level. If I can just get the pace of this bird, I can do this . . .

  But this had been a lift-off from a hot LZ and the escape was by no means assured. Marc flinched as bright orange jags of tracer lanced past the nose and he shot a look out of the canopy to the dusty highway below. A trio of technicals, most likely reinforcements called in by the extremists, were racing along the road in the wake of the VTOL. Each carried a heavy gun in the rear aimed directly at the Osprey, bracketing it with streaks of fire as they pursued.

  Once more, Marc felt the hits as the aircraft took rounds in the belly. Red warning lights flashed on the screen in front of him, signalling damage to the hydraulic systems. He worked the nacelle controls again, trying bring the rotors to full horizontal flight mode, but the Osprey fought him. He tried to work the flaps, and found no joy there either. The VTOL dragged in the air, refusing to answer his commands. ‘We got a problem,’ he shouted over his shoulder. ‘I can’t gain altitude!’

  *

  Lucy pushed away from the cockpit and scrambled back down the length of the Osprey’s cargo compartment.

  Saito’s injured man was already down on the deck, leaning up against the fuselage. He was pale and sweaty, on the verge of passing out. She dismissed him and stepped over the body of the mercenary who had been hauled in before take-off. The two surviving, combat-capable men were crouched at the open cargo ramp in the rear, trying to pick off the drivers of the pickups with their carbines. They were having no luck; Lucy was an exemplary shot, and even she would have admitted that firing from a moving airborne platform at a moving ground target at these speeds was nothing but a waste of ammunition. For a moment she wished she had her custom sniper rig with her.

  ‘What is he doing up there?’ Saito’s teammate was Hispanic, but that was all she could be sure of about him, other than the fact that he was pissed as all hell. ‘He said he could fly this thing!’

  ‘Damage,’ she shouted back, ducking as a hot round whickered off the lowered ramp. ‘What e
lse you got on this bird?’

  Saito glanced back at gear bags secured to the walls of the compartment. ‘I don’t think that –’

  Lucy didn’t wait for him to finish. She went to the first bag and tore it open. Inside was crash-survival gear for water or desert landings. She kicked that one away and moved on to the next. It had a lock on the zipper, and she sawed at it with her combat knife, slicing through the ballistic mesh of the bag instead. Saito was reaching out to stop her, but she was already in.

  The knife cut through cloth and plastic and into wads of paper. The bag was filled with used currency, US $100 bills wrapped into individual bricks. ‘Hey, Benjamin,’ she said aloud, seeing President Franklin’s face staring up at her. Lucy turned back to Saito. ‘Bribe money?’

  ‘Emergency funds,’ he called back.

  Lucy gave a nod. ‘I’d call this an emergency.’ She ripped the cash bag from the straps holding it to the wall and dragged it to the cargo ramp. Before Saito or the other mercenary could stop her, Lucy had slashed open the bottom of the bag and booted the contents of it into the Osprey’s rotor wake.

  A torrent of money burst into the air and began to fall across the path of the technicals, hundreds of thousands of dollars raining down on the road below. It was enough to stop the shooting, but for a moment Lucy was uncertain her plan would work. The fighters were opportunists, that was true, but were they so pious they would ignore a literal windfall in favour of their righteous anger?

  Not so much, she reflected, as the three pickups skidded to a halt and the men on board spilled out onto the road. Trailing smoke, the Osprey extended the distance between them, its course beginning a curve that would take the aircraft around the northern edge of Mogadishu.

  Saito gave a humourless grunt and stepped away from the ramp, kicking a loose c-note into the wind. ‘That was a very expensive exfiltration. In more ways than one.’ His gaze raked over the injured man and the two dead. ‘Ruiz, secure them.’ The other mercenary accepted the order with a nod and moved off.

  Now that she could catch her breath, Lucy was measuring Saito, searching for tells that could give her a clue as to who he was and who had sent him into Somalia. ‘My guess is you work for someone who doesn’t worry much about money.’ She gestured at the cabin. ‘Gear like this don’t come cheap.’

  ‘American and British,’ Saito said in reply, pitching his voice up over the sound of the engines as he studied her in return. ‘But not military . . . At least, not for some time.’

  ‘Like knows like, right? That practically makes us cousins.’

  Saito smiled thinly. ‘I am not being paid to shoot at you.’

  ‘For now,’ Lucy added, as the Osprey’s deck tilted alarmingly.

  They grabbed at handholds on the walls of the cabin and she lurched to a window, afraid that she would see more ground fire snaking up toward them. The aircraft had gone into a circular path passing over what looked like a set of derelict municipal buildings, a hospital or a school.

  ‘We’re losing height,’ snapped Saito. ‘What is he doing?’

  Lucy saw the engine nacelle at the end of the wing tilting back upward. ‘Landing . . .’ The Osprey hopped over an angled fence and a line of half-collapsed bleachers, kicking up a tornado of yellow dust. Dane was putting them down in the middle of what looked like an abandoned soccer field, and they hit the ground with a heavy crunch that shook the fuselage.

  She worked her way forward as the rotors wound down, and Lucy could smell the acrid odour of burned insulation and the stink of hot engine oil.

  Marc raised his hands off the controls as she reached the cockpit; he was breathing hard. ‘I had no choice,’ he began, pre-empting the question. ‘We got a leak in the hydraulics back there. I was having problems with getting any height and if I keep us in the air, something’s going to seize up. Then we’d go down if we wanted to or not . . .’

  Saito was behind her. ‘We are still inside the city limits. We can’t remain here.’

  Lucy glanced out through the canopy, then pulled the glare cover off the MTM Tactical watch on her wrist and checked it. ‘We’ve got around five hours until sunrise, and then everyone is going to know where we’re at. Locals would have heard the engines but we got decent cover here . . .’ She thought it through. ‘What are our options?’

  ‘If we don’t fix the Osprey, then we are walking out,’ Marc said bluntly. ‘If the damage isn’t too bad, we might be able to patch it . . .’

  ‘Ruiz has experience with mechanical systems,’ said Saito, beckoning the other man over. ‘How long will it take?’

  Marc climbed out of the pilot’s chair. ‘I have no idea.’ He blew out a breath. ‘We should probably have a backup plan, just in case.’

  He gave Lucy a meaningful look and rubbed his earlobe; she got the inference. The drop into Somalia had been set up from the start to be as near to a zero-footprint operation as humanly possible, because the eyes of every major nation’s intelligence agencies would be watching the country like hawks. Long-range communication with Rubicon was only to be initiated in the most extreme circumstances, so essentially Marc and Lucy had been on their own since the moment they jumped from the C-130.

  But all that planning for a stealthy mission had gone out the window with the firefight at Amadayo’s mansion and the chaos of their escape. Making it up as we go, Lucy thought grimly. Again.

  She knew that Rubicon were listening. All it would take to reach them would be a string of code words spoken in the clear over any cellular phone in Mogadishu. The signal traffic analysis programs that Kara Wei had infiltrated into the region’s cell network would pick them out like a whisper among the roar of a crowd. But to do that would be throwing in the towel. Ramaas and the Exile weapon would still be out there, and they would be no closer to stopping him. It gnawed on Lucy that they still didn’t have a handle on whatever the hell the pirate warlord was planning.

  ‘Okay.’ She folded her arms across her chest, putting that problem aside for the moment. An unpleasant awareness was pushing its way to the front of Lucy’s mind as her gaze left Marc’s face and turned back to Saito and Ruiz. ‘If we’re going to work together, then we need to put all our cards on the table. You agree?’

  Saito gave a wary nod. ‘Agreed.’

  The Brit had been on the money when he pegged these guys as contractors, but the vibe coming off them was leading Lucy toward one unpleasant conclusion about their origins. She decided to roll the dice and see what came up. ‘So why don’t you start by telling me what made your bosses in the Combine send you down here?’

  Saito’s poker face wasn’t quite good enough to hide his tell. ‘You are a perceptive woman,’ he replied, after a long moment.

  At her side, Marc’s reaction was exactly what she’d expected it to be. ‘Wait, what?’ His hand snatched at the Glock pistol holstered on his thigh. ‘The bloody Combine? Lucy, when did you know that?’

  ‘About a second ago,’ she told him. ‘It’s the only explanation that makes any sense.’

  ‘It would appear you have an unresolved issue with my employers?’ Saito said lightly. ‘I am dismayed.’

  Ruiz snorted. ‘Don’t you get it, man? These two? They work for the African. Ekko Solomon.’

  ‘Ah.’ Saito’s head bobbed in a sage nod. ‘Of course. A truth dawns. Yes, that explains much.’ He gave a grunt of amusement. ‘Fate is not without a sense of irony.’

  Marc came forward with the gun in his fist, but Lucy put a hand on his arm. ‘Easy now, cowboy. Let’s not do anything we might regret.’

  ‘Like throwing in with these pricks?’ spat Marc. ‘My friends are dead because of the Combine and their fucking games!’

  Marc’s anger rolled off Saito. ‘I know nothing of that. You and I have never met . . .’ He trailed off, and looked at the Brit as if for the first time. ‘But you are familiar to me. Yes. I’ve seen you before.’ He leaned back, nodding to himself. ‘You were in Split. The Queen’s High casi
no. You failed to stop Ramaas from making his escape with the device . . .’

  ‘How do you know that?’ Marc demanded.

  ‘I viewed footage from the casino’s security system.’

  ‘Those hard drives holding that video were stolen,’ said Marc. ‘By Franko Horvat.’ He paused, as if he was connecting the dots. ‘You were there. In the bank. You’re the reason he’s dead, I’ll bet.’

  Saito cocked his head. ‘And now I am here.’

  Marc looked at Lucy. ‘That’s how the Combine tracked the nuke. The Kurjaks to Horvat, Horvat to Ramaas, Ramaas to Amadayo.’

  ‘Except we were set up, eh?’ interjected Ruiz. ‘The intel was a trap.’

  ‘My heart bleeds for you,’ growled Marc.

  Saito eyed the gun in Marc’s hand. ‘If you want to turn this into another firefight, it is your choice to make. I have a rudimentary grasp of this aircraft’s controls but I would prefer you to pilot it for us rather than have to kill you.’

  Lucy’s hand dropped to her own weapon, and she saw Ruiz do the same.

  ‘Do you want to do Ramaas’s work for him?’ Saito said lightly. ‘You may find it hard to believe, but the Combine want the same thing you do. We are here to neutralise Abur Ramaas and the Exile nuclear device he has taken possession of.’

  ‘Why? So you can turn it over to your bosses?’ Lucy eyed him.

  ‘Think what you will,’ Saito replied. ‘The fact remains, the Combine is interested in maintaining global stability. A pirate warlord with a weapon of mass destruction in hand cannot be allowed to threaten that.’

  ‘The last people I knew who threatened the Combine’s stability,’ Marc began, his voice low and cold, ‘I had to watch die in a firestorm. I’d rather shoot you in the head and take my chances.’

  Saito’s gaze shifted back to Lucy, unfazed by the threat. ‘Do you feel that way? I sense not. You are more the pragmatist than your English friend. You understand there is a tactical decision to be made here, yes?’