When Handon added it all up, he figured it was a damned miracle anybody on either team could even walk at this point.
But they could – and they were going to have to.
They were all going to have to reach down one more time.
And they were going to have to, finally, once and for all, get this shit done.
* * *
“I am aware that the further into the bush you go, the greater the risk to the team.”
When Handon focused back on the room, he saw that Dr. Park had taken the lectern – their special briefing guest star.
“But the closer we get to the original victim, the better our odds that the final vaccine will be universal. Patient Zero, the first victim, is the ideal. Every additional transmission past him slightly decreases the likely or statistical effectiveness of the vaccine. How low are we willing to go?”
Judging from the silence in the room, the gravity of this had sunk in.
Park resumed. “Since you’re starting at Camp Lemonnier, yes, an American soldier would be a good start. I gather the camp went down very early – plus we’d have something, a sample much earlier than the ones I have now. At the same time, anything you can find out about the origin of the virus is potentially helpful.”
Graybeard raised his hand. “Is this a Zulu hunt – or a fact-finding mission?”
Before Park could answer, Brady mocked up a whiny voice and interjected, “Is this gonna be a standup fight, sir, or another bug hunt?”
Fick leaned forward. “You secure that shit.” Everyone seemed to be waiting for it. Fick sighed out loud. “Hudson.”
Park blinked heavily. “It’s a Zulu hunt. That’s absolutely the key. Get me a victim from inside Hargeisa, and I all but guarantee I can complete the vaccine. Information is secondary. Just please don’t throw away any you come across. Curing a pandemic is like solving a complex puzzle wrapped in a deep mystery…”
* * *
LT Campbell stepped up to the lectern. She not only didn’t laugh at the periodic jokes and wisecracks – she looked like she’d never found anything funny, cute, or charming her whole life. “Your top cover will be F-35s flown by Morris and Wells,” she said. “They’re our only two breathing and healthy fighter jocks, and will be alternating – providing one hundred percent coverage with the air mission.”
“Trust we won’t hear them – those afterburners?” Ali asked.
“Affirmative,” Campbell said. “You won’t even see them – unless you need ’em.”
Handon looked around. “And for the team on the ground, it’s melee weapons as long and as much as possible. We need to try to conserve ammo, due to the difficulty of resupply by air – as noted, the helo’s too loud, and the carrier air wing no longer has any palletized air-drop capability. But, mainly, the last thing we want to do is start shooting, even suppressed, if we can avoid it. It’s noise discipline first, last, and always.”
“Yeah,” Graybeard said. “Africa was kind of a crowded place back in the day.”
Fick nodded, seeing that everyone got it, but decided to stress the point anyway. “If I hear so much as a roach fart in that mother, I will smoke the shit out of every last swinging Richard in this bitch.”
Everyone got that.
* * *
As Campbell finished up her segment, Handon turned to Fick and lowered his voice. “After everything we’ve faced so far, how much worse could Africa be? It’s just more dead guys, right?”
Fick smiled that terrifying smile back at him – though he’d been practicing, under the tutelage of Emily, the civilian girl they rescued from the pirates, and was getting better at it. “Yeah, I’m sure you’re right. And this is a solid plan, for being totally batshit crazy and thrown together on the fly.”
Handon nodded once. As always, the guys who were doing the planning were the ones who would be executing the mission – and whose asses were on the line. And Handon couldn’t ask for a better co-commander than Fick. The two had only fought together briefly, in just two engagements – the airfield fight and extraction, and the very tail end of the flight deck battle. But each knew the other’s capabilities, and each knew the other was at the peak, and probably the end, of an extremely accomplished military career. And each would also be leading their very best surviving operators – from the front.
If they couldn’t get this done and save the day, no one could. Humanity was sending its last and best out as champions.
As Campbell finished and stepped down, Handon straightened up, faced the room, and put his platoon sergeant voice back on. “Okay,” he said. “Briefing ends. Everybody get back to work. It’s already tomorrow, and there’s a lot more coming at us.”
Fick also stood tall and spoke loudly. “It’s a hundred hours sailing around the Cape. Let’s try to be more ready at the end of it than at the beginning.”
Handon took one more look around the room. “One last thing. There is no one else to do this. We are it.” He scanned the faces in the room. “This is the team. Selection’s over. So let’s get it done.”
As the men began to file out, the commanders lingered up front.
Handon squared up to Abrams. “Commander. What exactly is our plan for getting the mission objective – plus Park, his research, and ideally his vaccine – back to the UK? I know the original idea was the plane that brought the other scientists in. That’s out, obviously.”
Abrams clapped Handon on the shoulder. “Way ahead of you, Sergeant Major. We’ve got an identical aircraft, another Beechcraft, inbound from Britain.”
“Great,” Fick said, standing nearby. “Try not to push this one over the side with a goddamned tractor.”
“Roger that, Master Guns. Negative on the goddamned tractor.”
* * *
As the two teams gathered up their notes and crap, and filed out and back to their duties, Handon’s last comment about selection was causing more than one of them to think back to the beginning of the long journey that was culminating with this mission.
Back to the beginning of their careers as Tier-1 operators.
Homer thought back to BUD/S, the initial selection course at the beginning of the years-long training pipeline for SEALs. He remembered the endless PT, thousands of push-ups face-down in the freezing surf, flutter kicks in the sand until their midsections burned, then lost all feeling, and then burned again… teams of exhausted SEAL candidates carrying giant logs through the darkness of the Coronado beach on their shoulders. And then Hell Week, with its 200 miles of running and 20 hours of PT per day – all on four hours total sleep for the week.
Ali and Pred remembered the quiet horrors of Delta selection – the relentless overland navigation exercises in the mountains of Appalachia, crushingly heavy packs burning on their backs, weeks of physical and mental stress, with no one telling them what the standards were, and zero feedback on their performance. Just a quiet winnowing of hundreds to a handful.
Henno was flashing back to the 20-hour timed ruck marches in the outrageously tempestuous weather of the Brecon Beacons mountain range in South Wales, plus the jungle training in Borneo, the hazing and abuse, and impossible tests and insoluble puzzles, candidates dying occasionally from heart and kidney failure.
In every case, whatever their differences of emphasis or surface dissimilarities, each of these selection courses was designed to do exactly one thing: break the candidates down completely – so the instructor cadre could see what they would do, when there was nothing left in the tank.
This was not by accident. It was by careful design.
Starting with the best people anywhere in the service, they systematically made candidates so miserable, exhausted, physically drained, and mentally crushed, that only those with superhuman resolve and resilience would stick around. By the end, because it had been so monumentally difficult and unpleasant, anyone remotely willing to quit anything under any circumstances had by then already thrown in the towel.
And what was left at the end was
: only those who “had no quit in them.” And that – in addition to being pro-level athletes with high intelligence and staggeringly large and diverse skill sets – was why they were unstoppable.
In a way, the careers of everyone there had been one long selection process – a Darwinian one, which had led finally to those still standing being it, the final champions and flame-carriers for all of mankind… on this, humanity’s last lunge at survival. These were the last men standing.
And, as one, they were all doing the same thing now.
They were reaching down for what they had left – when they had to, when success was their only option, and when there was absolutely no choice but to dig down, Ranger up, and get it done.
Even when there was nothing left in the tank.
Especially then.
All In
JFK - Hangar Deck
Suppressed gunfire. Slow and steady. Backgrounded by quiet grunts and deep intakes of breath. The whoosh of melee weapons cutting the air.
The JFK Hangar Deck had started life as home to an air wing of over eighty combat aircraft – plus the maintenance and engineering facilities needed to service them. After most of the planes had been pushed over the side, it had been repurposed into an organic farm, needed to keep the thousands of personnel on the carrier strike group alive.
And now a sizable corner of it had been repurposed again – requisitioned, commandeered really, by CSM Handon. This corner now served as a gun range, close combat dojo, and general operator training facility. These things had become necessary because a hundred hours – the travel time for them to transit around the Cape of Good Hope and back up the East African coast to the Gulf of Aden – was a long time to go without training.
Tier-1 guys operated on a razor edge of painstakingly honed skills. And every one of those skills was perishable. Either they were operating, or they were training – or they were progressively becoming useless. Those were the options. It was also notoriously difficult to stay in shape on board a ship under way. Just ask any SEAL. Guys in the surface fleet who had SEAL teams aboard joked that it actually stood for Sleep, EAt, and Lift.
Anyway, this training area would help.
Handon had his HK416 assault rifle broken down on a waist-high table set up for the purpose, as a gunsmith work bench. This was a few meters away from their little two-lane firing range. It wasn’t long enough for them to stretch the legs of their weapons. But it was long enough to zero them, and tease out any mechanical issues or irregularities. The carrier already had a little live-fire range on another deck. But Handon wanted a place where they could all train and do pre-mission work-up together.
Right now it was being used by Henno to teach Sarah Cameron some of the finer points of CQB shooting. He was standing behind her – not to mention right up against her – as he adjusted her shooting posture.
That wasn’t precisely what Handon had in mind when he set this up.
Law of Unintended Consequences, he thought, forcing himself to look away and back down to his own weapon. He considered asking Sarah why she wasn’t with Doctor Park, the protection of whom was her main job. But, ever since taking that assignment, she didn’t work for him anymore. Technically, she worked for LT Wesley, or whoever was in charge of the Naval Security Forces (NSF) these days. Also, Handon knew he’d be playing right into Henno’s hands if he said anything.
Slapping the lower receiver of his rifle back into place on the upper, and then hefting the weapon, Handon looked up to see Juice approaching across the big dim space – with his SIG assault rifle held by the magazine well, low by his side. He nodded as he approached, and for a second Handon considered asking him what he was doing out of bed. But it was a stupid question.
“How you feeling, Juice?” he asked him.
“Good to go,” Juice said, clearly looking around for somewhere to spit tobacco juice. He rolled the shoulder of the arm that had been shot through and through. “Just need to keep from popping the stitches. No real damage from either wound.” He didn’t add that he’d nearly bled to death from the nick in his femoral artery.
Handon couldn’t disguise a concerned look.
Juice shrugged. “I’m just gonna do some light shooting for now.”
Handon nodded. Part of him would like to tell him no. But he really didn’t have the luxury. He needed everyone.
Looking up, now he saw Henno walking toward him – or really just walking by. Handon nodded and asked, “How’s your chest?” He meant the wound from the crossbow bolt that half-assed pirate had buried in him just under his clavicle – and which had then been driven in deeper by the hull of their speeding ship – plus all the 9mm rounds he’d caught in his body armor in the fight to take the wheelhouse.
“What about my chest?” Henno countered, not slowing as he went by.
Handon shook his head. Whatever else, Henno was hard to the end – not even willing to acknowledge he’d been wounded at all. In his mind, he probably hadn’t been. A thin puncture wound, plus some bruising, were nothing more than normal wear and tear to him.
Handon counted his blessings. With only twenty-four hours left until they stepped off, this was now crunch time, and the moment when he was going to have to make some hard in-or-out decisions on team assignments. Henno’s was one less role he had to worry about.
A hatch on the near wall banged open, and two big bodies spilled down the ladder behind it and onto the deck. It was Reyes and Predator, both dressed out in their PT kit, and both covered with a sheen of sweat and breathing hard. They’d become flight deck jogging buddies while Juice was laid up. The fact that they were both nursing banged-up legs also made them a good match. They rolled into the cavernous hangar deck in on a wave of energy and rumbling laughter that nearly filled the place. They were laughing at their own gimpy movements.
“And this is the ZA,” Reyes said. “Where, if movies and TV are to be believed, a twisted ankle is invariably fatal.”
“Heh,” Pred said. “Or at least requires you to shoot the guy next to you – so he’s even slower!”
“True,” Reyes said. “You don’t have to be faster than the runner…”
“…you just have to be faster than the slowest guy running from the runner!”
Passing Handon at the gunsmithing bench, they both nodded to him, then moved on toward the sparring mats.
Ali paused a series of elaborate kendo routines with her wooden sword, and stepped off the mats to greet them, as Handon watched. Earlier, in private, he had also tried to give her the option of hanging back – after the wounds and stress she’d suffered in her aerial duel with the Russian sniper. “Yeah, right,” she’d said. “All I did was sit in a helicopter and take some potshots.”
Now Handon smiled to see them all lined up, quietly and professionally carrying on with their training and mission work-up tasks. He’d definitely had his doubts about how many of his and Fick’s people were going to be combat ready and mission-capable in time for this. Or whether they were going to have to try to sub in surviving – and in almost all cases junior and inferior – guys from the MARSOC teams.
Now he had his answer.
They weren’t going to let this mission go forward with contributing to it. And they definitely weren’t going to let their teammates go out without them.
To the last, they were: all in.
* * *
“What we really need is a powered melee weapon.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, swords, knives, and axes are silent. But they all require arm strength – and they tire you out.”
The operators were discussing force innovation again – a topic they felt they’d neglected in the face of the urgent need to stay alive, and keep Britain from falling, for the first two years of the ZA. They all sat at their regular table in the 02 Deck Galley, firing down a fifteen-minute lunch in the middle of their work day. The sailors who crewed the carrier had started giving this table a wide berth, even when Alpha wasn’t at it.
Everyone sitting there knew that swinging melee weapons tired you out, more quickly than most people realized, even guys in superior physical shape. This was hardly news to Juice – never having been any good with a sword, he usually mounted a bayonet. But that required swinging and stabbing his whole rifle, which was even heavier than a sword.
But right now he just ate and listened to the discussion in silence.
“You know what I’m talking about. When you’ve been in heavy contact, out on the ground, sometimes for hours… exhaustion from swinging those damned things can be a real risk factor.”
“True. It’s when you get exhausted, and surrounded, that you risk getting in trouble.”
“So what would a powered melee weapon look like? A chainsaw?”
“Fantastic. You’d never get tired hauling around a goddamned gas-powered chainsaw. Sign me up.”
Juice just squinted in thought, and chewed silently.
* * *
An hour after the lunch break, Juice reappeared in the Hangar Deck dojo – with a satisfied look on his face, and his weapon in hand. But now it had some kind of long thin attachment along the outside of the barrel – and from its near end emerged a curly cable that extended to a metal canister protruding from his pocket.
He made a beeline to where Ali was whirling in circles around a boxing/MMA dummy, ritualistically slicing and stabbing at it with her wooden sword – and silently lamenting, for the thousandth time, that Pope was no longer around to give her a proper kendo sparring session.
But now she turned and ducked as Juice brought his rifle up, it emitted a barely audible sound like a puff of air, and a spike shot out the end of it into the dummy’s head. By the time Ali had blinked, Juice was already retracting the spike, with a flick of his left thumb on a button fixed to his vertical foregrip. It seemed to be a rifle-mounted pneumatic spike, run on compressed air.
Arisen, Book Nine - Cataclysm Page 3
