ARISEN, Book Twelve - Carnage

by Michael Stephen Fuchs

  As Henno’s slide locked back on his last pistol mag, and it looked like Handon was about to pass out due to exhaustion and blood loss from a wound he hadn’t admitted and Henno hadn’t seen… and as murderous fire came in and chipped up everything around them, and grenades and rockets exploded in the trees close enough to warm them both even as their bodies began to chill…

  Henno simply stood up and walked out of the forest, right up to the foot of the bridge – and then he strode out onto it, upright and tall, and within full view of virtually every one of the Spetsnaz shooters left. He was now impossible to miss.

  But for some reason, he didn’t get shot. It could only be that, in the first few seconds, the Russians were too surprised to take a shot on a man just walking calmly out into the middle of a death storm. And in the next few seconds after that, they were too impressed and in awe to take the shot. This was clearly a legendary maneuver they were witnessing. One they all wished they had made themselves, and all now ardently hoped to pull off when their time came.

  Striding out onto the bridge as the guns went silent, Henno unclipped his rifle and tossed it away into the river to his right, then did the same with his pistol, throwing it off to the left. He kept walking. Then he unsheathed his big-ass commando knife from its chest rig – then un-Velcroed the vest, pulled it free, and let it fall to the deck behind him. And still walking, reaching the narrow girder section of bridge, he raised his voice and shouted across.

  “Hey, Misha – you puffed-up wanker! Why don’t you come out and have a go… if you think you’re hard enough?”

  With that Henno stopped in the middle of the bridge.

  And he waited.

  * * *

  But he didn’t have to wait long. Misha knocked two of his own men to the ground, one of them almost going into the drink as he pushed them out of his way to get to the bridge. He tossed his rifle vaguely to someone, then drew his Desert Eagle, dropped the mag, racked the slide, ejecting a single giant round, and paused long enough to thunk both pistol and mag down on the foot of the bridge.

  He then drew his Melita-K commando knife, with its wicked serrating, razor edge, and curved and tapering point – the same one he had stuck in Lance Corporal Jenkins’s eyeball back in Saldanha. Finally, he shrugged out of his own vest, letting it fall.

  And he powered out onto the bridge – accelerating.

  Henno didn’t wait, but came straight for him, in that SAS do not fuck with me walk that others had disregarded to their cost.

  They met in the middle and instantly went at it – knives, fists, knees, and foreheads pistoning, wheeling, and smashing, taking each other apart piece by piece. Both men were strong as rampaging bulls, and fast for men of their size. Misha had about sixty pounds and a good five inches on Henno. But Henno was the meaner of the two, which was saying something.

  And the Spetsnaz commander had something like a sense of humor, a warrior’s joy in lethal combat, a lion’s playfulness in taking down prey. But the Brit was utterly serious, focused like a laser beam, and dialed in to this fight. Henno was, absolutely, under no circumstances, and in no conceivable way, fucking around. He was all business, every cell, until his last second on this earth.

  Both men worked as professional gunfighters, but either could have held their own as professional knife-fighters, and both knew the drill. Henno held his blade in close to his body, left hand extended in a guard position, his body in a fighter’s stance, left leg forward, right leg back. Misha however stood square, both hands down at his thighs, elbows bent – perhaps because he could no longer straighten them. When Henno slipped forward and feinted with his knife, Misha simply ignored it, leaned forward, and blasted Henno with a vicious left hook to the side of his head.

  This staggered him, but Henno spat blood, reset – and came in again. This time he led with a punch of his own – knuckle-striking Misha in the throat with his left hand, then twisting back at the waist, unleashing forward again, and smashing him in the ribs with his right hand, which was wrapped around the thick grip of his knife. Misha in turn hit him with a straight right, knuckles also wrapped around his knife pommel. It was like they were now so intent on beating each other to death they had both forgotten they were holding knives.

  Until they remembered – and both went for killing stabs through the upper ribs, straight into the heart. They were like mirror images of each other, both twisting away from the slashes, even as they orchestrated their own. Both had the skin and hard muscle over their ribs laid open by the razor-sharp blades. But then Henno latched onto Misha’s knife hand with his left, and because he was off balance, managed to pull him forward and smash him in the forehead with the pommel of his knife.

  This would have knocked most men cold – but Misha just put his head down, went with the pulling motion, and smashed into Henno’s blood-slick chest, his massive bulk knocking him backward. Henno went over and hit the bridge on his back. He knew enough to know if he stayed on the deck he was dead – plus wasn’t going to get a lot of time to get up. So he also went with the motion, kicking his legs over his head, and rolled back up to his feet.

  His vision swam, and blood and sweat dripped into his eyes.

  But he was still standing.

  Moving his hands like a boxer, flipping his knife into an overhand grip, Henno waded back in. He had no intention of ceding any ground to this asshole. Declining to play defense, ignoring Misha’s height advantage, he raised his blade up, gripped it with both hands, and came down in a furious top-down strike at the Russian’s sternum. As he’d gambled he would have to, Misha used both hands to stop it.

  This left Misha’s knife pointing at his own face – and Henno threw his whole weight behind it. But Misha didn’t care to play defense either. He simply dropped his own knife, wrenched both of Henno’s arms to the side, and hauled him right over the edge of the girder. Suddenly only open air and river lay below him.

  But as Henno passed his center of gravity, with Misha the only thing to hold onto, the Russian caught and stopped him. He didn’t want Henno going over the side any more than the Brit did. He couldn’t kill him down there. Arresting his fall, he wrenched Henno the other way, slammed him down to the deck – then aimed a full-leg, organ-pulping kick at his midsection.

  It landed – and Henno rolled ten feet, back onto a wider stretch of bridge. As he lay there and coughed up blood, Misha calmly bent over and retrieved his knife. By the time he straightened up again, Henno was back on his feet. And he even managed to straighten up, standing tall and indomitable again.

  The two blood-streaming men eyed each other and reset.

  Misha nodded. He liked guys who never went down.

  But now Misha’s men on the bank behind him were shouting out, begging him to let them kill the Brit – who was giving their leader a tougher fight, and a more serious threat, than any of them had ever seen him face before. Hearing the shouts, Misha held up a finger to Henno, who nodded and paused, both of them taking the opportunity to grab a breath.

  Misha then turned back to the bank and, sucking wind, dripping blood, and glowering like a fallen god, spoke to them in Russian. “I will personally gut any son of a Kazakh whore who stops this fight. Come out here between the two of us at your own personal fucking peril.”

  Turning back, he and Henno nodded at each other.

  And they got on with it.

  * * *

  That was the last thing Handon saw or heard from his position on the far bank. He had let Henno get up and go out there by himself for two reasons. One, he knew there was no way he could stop him. Henno had stopped obeying Handon’s orders long ago. There was absolutely no reason to think he was going to start again, in his last hour.

  Second, he couldn’t get up.

  Handon had in fact finally been wounded, hit from behind. He didn’t even know whether it was a “seeing-eye” round or else a piece of shrapnel from an exploding grenade or rocket. Hell, it could have been a bullet fragment or tiny sliver of casin
g. That’s all it took. And this one had snuck up just underneath his vest, in the small of his back. There, he was pretty sure, it had done two things.

  One, it either had severed or else just put severe pressure on one of the posterior lumbar nerves that emerged from his spine, on the right side. The pressure felt low, and it probably was, because the lower ones served most of the muscles up and down the leg. And Handon could neither feel nor move his right leg – not any part of it. It definitely wasn’t following his orders. This might be temporary (pressure), or it might be permanent (severance), but either way it was probably forever – due to Handon being unlikely to live long enough to recover or convalesce.

  Because that same chunk of metal had also nicked or severed an artery, and he was now losing blood, a lot of it, from that same little hole in his back. He could feel the warmth and wetness of it drenching his legs – or his left leg, anyway. His guess was it was the lumbar artery. And because of where it was, and also because it wasn’t close to the surface, there was no way he could get it tied off or even wrapped up.

  And he could feel his strength ebbing away.

  He laughed to think of all those bullets and explosions he’d dodged by inches, over all those fights and missions. And it all came down to this – one little hole, just in the wrong place. But one bullet, one shrapnel fragment, one tiny hole, was all it took. Handon had always known it was everybody’s day someday. And that, on any given day, anyone could go down. Nobody got a pass.

  Not even Command Sergeant Major Handon.

  And finally, knowing Henno was still out there holding the line, Handon’s eyelids, each weighing a ton, pressed down… and his light went out.

  And CSM Handon lost consciousness and slumped down into the mud.

  Stronger Than Death

  Somalia – Northwest River Valley

  Handon awoke again to the sound of a splash.

  He was badly weakened, and no longer anything like combat effective. But he was also not out of the fight – because you were never out of the fight. And a Delta operator with over twenty years in was supremely dangerous in almost any state, short of being deep under the ground.

  As he heard something approaching through the brush, he dropped out the empty mag from his right-hand .45 and felt around for another one. Nothing. He looked and patted around for single loose rounds. There might have been some, but he couldn’t pick them out. Because he was lying in a pile of his own shell casings.

  Correction – his and Henno’s shell casings.

  Nonetheless, he laughed at this. He was going out just as he’d always planned – dying in a pile of his own brass. He remembered the old prayer, popular in the Ranger Regiment: “Lord, make me fast and accurate. Let my aim be true and my hand faster than those who would seek to destroy me. Grant me victory over my foes and those that wish to do harm to me and mine. And Lord if today is truly the day that you call me home, let me die in a pile of brass.”

  And he also remembered Rule #10 of gunfights: “Someday someone may kill you with your own gun, but they should have to beat you to death with it because it’s empty.”

  The mind does funny shit in combat, Handon reflected.

  But he was okay with being black on ammo, just as he was happy enough to be facing the blackness of his own extinction. Because the job was done – or so close as made no difference. It had to be. Because as far as he knew, there was now nothing between his team, with Patient Zero, and their flight out of there – nothing but a few kilometers of open road, and maybe a few stumbling Zulus at the airport. And Handon was still between them and the enemy.

  And he still had his knife.

  As the rustling came closer, he snapped the thumb break on his vest sheath, and pulled out his good old Mercworx Vorax combat knife. It was all he had left, but he was damned glad to have it. Though, with that, his cursedly heavy eyelids tried to go down again. And when he levered them back up, he saw, not Spetsnaz coming for him – but Henno.

  Somehow, he was back.

  But he was face down, pulling himself through the mud, crawling back to the little depression they had both so recently occupied. He was also soaking wet. Only now, Handon could see, Henno had one hand over his belly – and was trailing a rich dark blood trail behind him. Henno was bleeding out.

  Because he had been gutted.

  As he rolled back into the glen, he wheezed and said, “Didn’t think I was gonna leave you on your own to fuck this up at the end, did you…?” But then his strength gave out, and his cheek slumped in the mud, eyes still looking toward Handon.

  Handon held Henno’s familiar flinty gaze.

  Even as the light went out of his eyes.

  * * *

  Henno could feel the cold mud on his cheek, though he lacked the strength to move his head, or any of the rest of him, anymore. But he sighed in contentment. Because, while he was looking at Handon, what he was actually seeing was… Blakey Ridge, out on the North York Moors, where he had tramped so many times as a boy.

  And somehow he knew that Aiden and Luke, the Captain’s lads, would one day go out there, too. Having no children of his own, he had always wanted to take them there. But they had been too young for real hiking at first, and later on there had been no time – because the world ended, and the long fight began. But now, because of what Henno and their dad had done, so many miles away from home, those boys would one day get the chance to ramble across the moors. And maybe even get a nice pint afterward at the Red Lion Inn.

  Henno left this world knowing that he had done the job. That he had fulfilled his duty. Just like his revered commander, Captain Ainsley, he had given his life to get it done. To do whatever was necessary to bring it home. For England, for Queen and country.

  For the world.

  And he died knowing that all the sacrifice hadn’t been in vain.

  * * *

  Slumping down in the mud alongside his brother warrior, Handon realized that his final vision might actually be of… Sarah Cameron.

  He would really have liked to get back and reconcile with her, to work things out. He hated leaving it like they had. But of course he chose the mission in the end. Which was the way it was supposed to be. And he had a funny feeling she’d find someone else – probably fast. She had never seemed like a one-man kind of woman, anyway.

  But, ultimately, Handon had to forgive her. Because, in the end, she did know what her duty was. She knew what was important – even if she forgot sometimes, and frequently didn’t act like it. But she had sacrificed a great deal for the mission. And their last words to each other, over that satphone connection, had been about the mission.

  But there was something else.

  Handon also wondered if they had all paid a price for the influence she’d had on him. Maybe if he had been tougher, not been weakened by his dalliance, not had that epiphany at her cabin about the importance of preserving their humanity… maybe things would have played out better, or the mission progressed faster. Maybe not so many would have had to die.

  Maybe Henno would even still be alive.

  But Handon couldn’t make himself believe that. In the end, he knew they had to save humanity – but also find a way back to their own. And maybe their own humanity, their love for one another, was the only thing that would save them in the end. Maybe only love was stronger than death. He knew the others would have time to figure that out now. And, whatever else, Sarah had given him an experience of life, and love, and joy, that he had never believed he was going to find again in this world.

  He closed his eyes for a few seconds.

  And he found his last vision wasn’t actually going to be of her. Because when that dark theater descended, onto the stage of his consciousness walked players he had known a lot longer, and held a lot dearer: Ali and Homer… Predator and Juice… even Ainsley and Pope, who had bowed out of the great play weeks ago. And in the final hour, it occurred to Handon that he didn’t even need to make it home from this mission. When he was with his
team, with his brother warriors, when they were all together in the fight… he was already home. And he was across the bridge.

  This was the place where he belonged.

  He knew no other. And he needed none.

  * * *

  When Handon levered his eyes open again, and fought to focus, it was on Misha’s evil eyes staring back at him. The big Russian warlord was squatting down in the mud beside him, regarding Handon with something like curiosity. It definitely wasn’t compassion. Misha was also streaming with blood. Whatever happened out on that bridge, Henno had definitely gotten his licks in.

  And Misha was like a living rebuke to Handon’s belief that love was stronger than death. Misha and his whole existence, his brutality and mercilessness, the only-the-strong-survive and devil-take-the-hindmost attitude his men showed to one another… all of it was a denial and a negation of the Americans’ belief in humanity and right action, in brotherhood and love for their fellows.

  Misha’s survival, and Handon’s defeat, said: only strength could vanquish death. Only viciousness and brutality could survive. Humanity and love were for the weak, and the fallen. Only by destroying their humanity – and all trace of weakness, of sentimentality and compassion – could man conquer death.

  Handon mustered a last pulse of strength and brought his knife out from under his body, striking toward the side of Misha’s neck. But either the Russian was faster than he looked, or Handon was moving slower than he thought, because the knife struck Misha’s forearm, which he had brought up beside his neck. He didn’t even block the strike, but just took the stab in his arm, holding Handon’s gaze, fascinated. Finally he reached around, wrapped Handon’s knife hand in his, pulled the blade free, and regarded it.

  “Excellent knife,” he said. He then pulled out a square of cloth, which actually looked to Handon like a Harley bandana, wiped the blood off the blade, then tied the cloth around his arm wound.

  He then touched his radio and said, “Polucheno. Pomnite – NE vykhodyat iz stroya, chtoby zakhvatit’ ikh samolet.” But when he released his radio button and focused on Handon, he saw the American was pressing his own, holding the channel open. Almost gently, Misha pulled the wire from the radio.