Five Tribes

by Brian Nelson

  Captain Everett: “They must be from the Liaoning. Either they detected you leaving, or someone there at the compound called for help.”

  Sawyer: “How long?”

  Night Owl: “Less than two minutes.”

  Sawyer to Patel: “Let’s get under those trees before they get here.”

  Night Owl to Captain Everett: “Permission to engage, sir.”

  Captain Everett: “Negative. Do not engage.”

  Back on board the USS Gerald Ford, Captain Everett had a difficult decision to make. The beauty of the new technology was that it was undetectable. No one could prove they had started the mutiny, and the Chinese would have no way of knowing the US was involved. But if his drone pilot shot down a Chinese gunship, that would change. There would be an investigation, and shrapnel from the Stingray missiles would be found. Besides, there was no way of knowing if the drone could take out all four of the gunships by itself. “Zulu Five One, is there any way you could help us out here?”

  “I don’t think so, sir,” Eric replied. “The programming would take too much time.”

  Captain Everett would just have to hope that his team got back to the ship without being detected. But why had the gunships come? If it were just because of the mutiny, they would remain near the compound. But if they somehow knew that the USS Gerald Ford had two Valors and a drone in the area, they would be looking for them. “Proceed as planned,” he said. “But, Night Owl, keep a lock on those gunships in case this gets ugly.”

  Xiao-ping heard an unearthly roar and looked up to see five strange aircraft crisscrossing overhead like huge bats silhouetted against the night sky. They were just suddenly there, on top of them, so low he could feel the rush of their spinning propellers. They were part plane, part helicopter, with two rotors on their short wings. Cries of alarm and fear went up from the prisoners.

  The gunships opened fire on the camp. Orange tracer rounds arced out of their front cannons, ripping open the night, and cutting down dozens of men in seconds. The sound was deafening. One aircraft attacked the men fleeing through the front gate, killing some but forcing the others back into the compound. Another engaged the mutineers on the bulldozer. The gunship turned in a semicircle around it, firing the whole time. It was as if the nose of the aircraft was attached to the bulldozer by a long florescent orange string as it poured tracer rounds into metal and flesh and bone. Xiao-ping heard the ping-ping-ping-ping of the rounds as they smacked into the bulldozer’s blade. The eight or nine men who had been on or around it were literally obliterated. The huge cannon rounds blowing them apart.

  To Xiao-ping, it seemed like giant winged demons had risen from hell, from the very pits they were mining, to annihilate them.

  Chapter Five

  Hide and Seek

  Peng watched as the tide of battle suddenly reversed. Instead of fighting for his life, Peng and the Corpse Squad were now helping the guards and the gunships massacre the prisoners. He and his friends picked up more rifles from the dead prisoners and—thanks to the uncontrollable rage still running hot in their veins—began slaughtering the other prisoners. Peng shot one man in the back then turned. That’s when he saw Yong, the pathetic little worm. He had somehow made it through the first perimeter fence and was heading for a thicket of trees. At this distance he was just a dark silhouette, but Peng recognized his profile. Peng called to his friends and pointed, then the three of them opened fire.

  Sawyer heard the shots and knew they were aimed at them. When a bullet is coming at you, it makes a distinct sound, a hypersonic t-chew. He didn’t panic, but it wasn’t a sound he liked to hear. “Keep ’em moving,” he said to Patel, then he quickly turned and knelt. He saw the three prisoners with rifles and shot one in the chest. The other two didn’t react right away because they couldn’t see him.

  Then he heard Patel’s voice. “No, wait!”

  Sawyer turned to see the other prisoner, Yong, running wildly away . . . not toward the cover of the trees but perpendicular to it. It was the dumbest thing he could have done. The other gunman kept firing and even though they were poor shots, they managed to hit him before the three SEALs who were hiding in the woods cut them down.

  Sawyer ran over and picked him up. He was moaning in Chinese as Sawyer carried him into the cover of the woods. Once concealed in the shadows, he set the man down. “Why couldn’t you do what I told you?”

  The man muttered something in Chinese.

  “He says he’s sorry,” Xiao-ping said.

  Specialist Loc, a medic, looked him over using a small pen light. The round had hit him in the left hip and exited out the right. Loc pull down the man’s pants and saw that the bullet had gone through his buttocks. “I’m sure this hurts like hell but you’re one lucky son-of-a-bitch. It’s missed all the major arteries and your hip bones. You’ll be fine.” He stuffed some QuikClot packets into the wounds.

  Yong grimaced and stiffened as Loc shoved the gauze in, then Loc gave him a shot of morphine. Yong panted and blew out air. “Tā mā de!” he cursed, but after a moment he blinked, surprised that the pain was already subsiding.

  From the cockpit of his Z-15 Black Widow, Second Lieutenant Wen Fan saw three prisoners shooting at someone heading toward the woods. But then something very strange happened. All three of the prisoners with guns were cut down, but he couldn’t tell from where. Were there gunmen in the trees? He banked over the woods to get a closer look but saw no one. When he glanced back, the dead man was somehow moving. He saw it for only a moment before his angle of flight cut off his line of sight, but the dead man seemed to be floating, as if an invisible force were carrying him. It happened so fast that he didn’t believe his eyes. By the time he could bank to get a closer view, the man had disappeared into the woods.

  Eric felt a sudden nausea when he realized that the prisoners were shooting each other. It was a scenario he never considered, and his lack of foresight now jeopardized the mission. He should have guessed that with the complicated social networks created in such a brutal place that there would be bitter vendettas. Now his friends were at risk because of his mistake.

  It felt like things were about to unravel. First the Chinese gunships, now a wounded man. He hesitated. Should he try to find a way to down those gunships or should he just focus on getting the team back to the Valor safely? He decided on the latter. The Chinese pilots would have little reason to suspect that the US had a team on the ground, and if he could get everyone safely away, they would never know they had been there.

  The problem was the wounded man. The team was still five hundred yards from the landing zone for EXFIL. There was protected tree cover where they were now and on the near side of the LZ, but in between was an open stretch of mud and dirt that ran between two of the mines. With their camouflage the SEALs and Xiao-ping could move through that open space without being detected, but the wounded man would give them all away.

  It was a bitter lesson to learn on the battlefield: The technology only worked if everyone had it.

  Eric’s instinct was to simply leave Yong. He wasn’t the mission, and his presence was putting everyone’s life in danger. But Xiao-ping would not go easily if they tried to leave him, and that would jeopardize the mission, too. And there was one other reason—the ten weeks he had been imprisoned in China. How would he have felt if his friends had left him behind?

  “Sawyer, take off your undershirt and put it on Yong. I should be able to reprogram it for camouflage.”

  Sawyer quickly complied.

  Each of the SEALs had an armored T-shirt in addition to the outer shell that was both armored and camouflage. With the neural net cuing up his commands on the monitor, Eric took one-tenth of the nanosites from each of the SEALs’ armor and reassigned them to Yong’s shirt. “Just sit tight. I need a minute to copy the new program.”

  “Make it quick,” Sawyer said. “The sun is coming up, which means it’s goin
g to be a lot easier to spot us in these woods.”

  Yong glanced back toward the prison camp. The gunfire had died down, and he only heard the occasional pop. The mutiny had failed. Yong could see that many of the prisoners had surrendered and were now lying face down in the mud. He saw a guard step up behind one of them and shoot him in the back of the head.

  “Here, put this on.” A soldier gave him a white cotton T-shirt. Once it was on, the man said, “This is going to feel a little weird.” A moment later, Yong felt the strangest sensation, as if a coating of cold paint had suddenly been sucked to his skin by a powerful magnet—from the tips of his toes to the top of his head. It made him shiver all over. He looked down and found he was a ghost like the others.

  Sawyer waited anxiously for Hill to finish his work. He hated sitting still; his instincts rebelled against it. “Duncan, as soon as we’re ready, pick him up.” He gestured to Yong.

  Duncan nodded.

  “You’re good to go,” Hill finally said.

  Patel picked up Yong and raced under the trees toward the LZ. At the edge of the first woods Sawyer held up his fist and everyone stopped. He knew that the new camouflage was good, but it wasn’t perfect. To run across open terrain with gunships overhead was dangerous.

  Dawn was upon them, filling the world with a weak light. Sawyer pulled up his night-vision goggles. The landscape before them looked like heaven and hell had collided. In the foreground were three open-pit mines, gaping wounds in the skin of the Earth. In the half-light of the sunrise, the copper-colored mud looked like crimson blood. The rims of the pits were dotted with dead trees, earth-moving equipment, and trash. From the nearest pit came a stench of decay and rot that forced its way up his nose and into his brain. It was a smell that Sawyer instinctively recognized as death.

  Yet beyond the mines was a scene of breathtaking beauty. Thick green woods dominated the hills around the mines, and the trees thinned into an open savannah. The first rays of morning lit the emerald and golden treetops with a warm light. Through that expanse of greens and golds, a wide, clear river meandered toward the foot of a distant sierra, the water twinkling and flashing with the light of the new sun.

  They would have to run two hundred yards along the ridge between the two pits to reach the next patch of woods. Waiting for them on the far side was the Valor that would take them home.

  Sawyer opened a channel to Night Owl. “Please give us the all clear.”

  “Hold tight, Papa Six Four.”

  A moment later one of the gunships came roaring over the treetops, banking hard. As soon as it was gone, they got the all clear. “Make it snappy.”

  “Go! Go! Go!” Sawyer told them.

  They ran like hell. Patel was on point, Duncan carrying Yong in the middle. Sawyer took up the rear with Xiao-ping just in front of him.

  Xiao-ping looked over his shoulder as he ran and saw in the distance the gunships swarming like giant dragonflies over the camp, occasionally opening fire.

  It was slow going through the thick mud. He just couldn’t get his body moving at full speed. He slipped once, but Sawyer caught his arm and with incredible strength picked him up with one hand and kept him running.

  Once in the far woods, two more ghost men appeared from the trees and silently escorted them down a wide trail. The morning sun was sending long shafts of gold light through the dusty air, and as the men ran through each beam, their ghost armor made it appear as if the light were passing through them. Watching the men move, the way they communicated with their hands, and the speed at which they worked was soothing to Xiao-ping. Lili was right. Everything’s going to be fine. Just believe.

  Five hundred yards to the east, Black Widow pilot Lieutenant Wen Fan did a slow sweep of the camp. The ground was strewn with at least a hundred bodies: prisoners, guards, and some of the mine managers. Many had been blown to bits by the Black Widow’s massive chain gun. Some prisoners were being led back to their cells while others were being forced to lie on the ground. Fan figured the future wasn’t bright for those on the ground.

  With the fight all but over, his thoughts returned to the floating man. He knew that the USS Gerald Ford lay thirty miles off the coast. Was it just a coincidence? No, he didn’t think so. What a discovery it would be to find evidence that the Americans were behind this. Was the floating man a clue? Even if it was just a trick of the darkness, the man had still managed to get into the woods.

  He pushed on the control stick and the nose of the aircraft dipped as he headed north toward the small woods. He did a slow circle around the two-hectare copse of trees but saw nothing. Then he widened the search to the mines and the outer fence. Here the morning sun was brighter and he turned off his night optics. He swooped in close to one of the pits and saw that it was infested with vultures. Underneath were skeletons and rotting carcasses. It occurred to him that a clever man might hide in there and play dead, but he dismissed the idea. Any man who tried that would soon have the vultures pecking at him. He moved on.

  Xiao-ping did his best to keep up with the others. Sawyer kept urging him on. “Just a little farther now.” The trail through the woods sloped down then abruptly stopped. At the tree line, Patel extended a palm behind him. All the men stopped. Then he made a circular motion near his ear, and the men rallied around him.

  From here Xiao-ping could see an open stretch where the trees had been cut down on either side of the perimeter fence. He didn’t want to wait. Beyond that fence was freedom.

  “Papa Six Four. We see you. You’re clear to come aboard, but make it quick. There’s a gunship snooping around the far end of the woods.”

  Aboard? Xiao-ping thought. Aboard what?

  “Here,” Sawyer said, “You’d better take my hand.” Sawyer guided him forward, holding Xiao-ping’s hand out in front of him. Suddenly he touched something metal.

  “Step up . . . there you go.”

  Just as he extended his head forward, everything changed. It was like passing through a waterfall. On one side he saw nothing, on the other side he was inside an aircraft. He gaped at the soldiers inside. How did they do that?

  A female soldier began speaking to him in Mandarin. “Hello, Xiao-ping, I’m Sergeant Kabat, assistant Crew Chief. Do you need anything?” Xiao-ping shook his head vacantly, still looking around in amazement. She guided him to a seat and buckled him in. “Have some water.” He took the proffered bottle robotically then watched as the other soldiers lay Yong face down on a gurney and strapped him in. He had assumed that the owner of the voice in his head would be in the aircraft, but he clearly wasn’t. “Where are you?” he said to the air.

  “I’m in a different aircraft,” Eric replied. “Close, but not too close.”

  In the cockpit of the Valor, Chief Warrant Officer Emilia Bailey was about to start the rotors when she got the call.

  “Sit tight, Baker Five One, you are about to get company.”

  On a normal mission, Bailey would keep the rotors spinning in order to lift off the moment the operators were on board. But the new technology required different procedures. The one flaw in the new camouflage was the rotors, which, when in motion, gave off a slight shimmer. To remain invisible they powered down in the LZ, and before they powered up, they had to be sure that the ninety seconds it required to take off would not be interrupted or they would be a sitting duck.

  A second later she heard the Z-15, loud and flat. The air in the Valor grew tense.

  “Let’s pray they don’t spot us,” she said. She watched out the starboard window as the sleek gunship did a slow bank, its striped rotors spinning so fast it looked like they were ticking backward. As soon as it had disappeared over the tree line, Bailey requested permission to take off.

  “Negative,” Night Owl said, “he’s coming back around.”

  “Shit!”

  Chapter Six

  Home Front

  11:
15 p.m., November 3, 2026

  Washington, DC

  While morning was breaking over Southern Africa, it was still the previous evening in Washington, DC.

  A knock came on Jane Hunter’s door.

  She opened it to find her friend Hwe Lili standing there. The look of conflict on the woman’s face told Jane that tonight was the night. She felt a fear that was oddly familiar, one that she hadn’t felt in a very long time. It took her back to her childhood, whenever her father was deployed or she knew he was going on a particularly dangerous mission. But it was different now because for the first time it was not her father who was going to war, but the man she loved.

  Jane opened her arms, and the woman fell into them. At Jane’s touch, Lili immediately teared up. “I spoke to him, not twenty minutes ago. He sounded so scared.”

  Jane held the embrace, letting her friend get her emotions out. This, too, brought up old memories, because as an army brat she’d learned all the etiquette for moments like this—how to treat one another, how to touch and hug, how to compose oneself—because they all knew someday they could be on the other side. “Try not to worry, okay? Remember they are all very good at what they do. Eric, Sawyer, Patel . . . they’ll get him home.”

  “A part of me knows that, but I’m scared anyway. I’m scared he won’t make it back, but I’m also scared of what happens if he does.”

  Jane pulled back and held the woman at arm’s length. “What do you mean?”

  “Jane, it’s been twelve years since I last saw him. I know I still love him, but some people who are in that long, they’re never the same. Even if he’s okay physically, his mind . . .”

  “Hey, hey, slow down, don’t you think you’re jumping the gun a bit? Let’s get him home safe, then we’ll worry about that.”