by Brian Nelson
“I’m sorry I didn’t do more to protect you.”
The old man shook his head, and with a feeble hand he touched Eric’s cheek.
“No, you were a good son.”
Then the hand slipped from his face and Khamko closed his eyes.
Eric’s heart seemed to snap in two within his chest. He squeezed his eyes shut tight. How could this whole world be destroyed in just a few minutes? The joyful afternoon in the cave now seemed a lifetime ago.
He tried to stand, but his stomach muscles were so torn up, he couldn’t. So he began to crawl on his hand and knees, one hand holding tight to his stomach. Perhaps if he could find a rifle, he could . . .
He could barely think straight, another symptom of shock. He had no idea what he should do. He was about twenty feet outside the cave now. He could hear the gunfire and screaming, but it was more distant now, coming from lower in the dell.
He had begun shivering and felt nauseous. The shock was taking its toll. He lay down for a moment and closed his eyes.
“You sure have a way of finding trouble, don’t you?”
The sound of the voice startled him. He opened his eyes. There was no one there.
“Let’s take a look at you.” He felt invisible hands touching him, trying to pry his hand from his guts. “Take it easy. Just lie back.”
“Sawyer?”
“Yeah, it’s me.” A second later the SEAL’s face appeared in the dim light. “Please don’t die on me. Not now.”
“Sawyer, listen to me. You have to stop this. How many men did you bring?”
“Four squads.”
“Thank God! You have to help them. They don’t understand night vision. Send your men into the woods.”
“Just lie back. Everything’s going to be fine. Let Loc take a better look at you.” A penlight flashed, and he felt hands probing the wound.
Then he heard Loc’s voice. “Severe abdominal trauma. Missed the spinal cord, but it’s leaking intestinal fluid and bacteria. Blood loss is heavy, possible nick to the SMA. He’s in the golden hour, Sawyer. We have to get him out of here now.”
“Roger,” Sawyer tapped his mike. “This is Papa Six Four Actual, we are exfiling in two minutes with a CASEVAC. Teams two and three cover our movement to the LZ.”
“Wait!” Eric grabbed Sawyer’s arm. “We can’t leave. We have to help them.”
Sawyer’s eyes shifted away then came back to Eric. “I can’t. You’re the mission. Not them. Remember last time?”
A combat stretcher was laid out, and Eric was lifted onto it. He tried to sit up, but Loc pushed him down.
“Sawyer, please. For God’s sake!” The other men started to carry him away, but Eric grasped the SEAL’s hand. The orange firelight played on the side of the man’s face, his expression was grim, but Eric could see the conflict.
“Goddamn it, Sawyer! Do the right thing! In five minutes you can stop this, you know you can.”
“Those aren’t my orders,” and he pulled his hand away. “Take him.” Then Sawyer engaged his armor and disappeared into the darkness.
Karuma tumbled through the underbrush. He was bleeding from his face, legs, and hands where the thorns and branches had scratched him. He was covered in dirt and sand, and the gritty taste of it was in his mouth. There was a hot burning on his left arm where one of the bullets had grazed him. He trembled and looked around frantically, eyes darting, panting, trying to see the demon-men who were hunting him. Someone had set fire to the woods, and now smoke stung his eyes. He knew he had to keep moving because these demons sent by //Gaunab had been given magical powers and could see in the dark. He had watched how !Nanni and her son had found a hiding place not ten feet from him, behind a thicket of buckthorn, yet somehow the men had seen them and poured their orange metal fire into them, ripping their bodies apart.
He had to keep moving. If he stayed still, they would eventually find him. He ran deeper into the dell, spotted a fat baobab tree and hid behind it. His grandfather often said that he was the child of Heitsi-eibib, the trickster, but Karuma could find no way to outsmart this enemy. Every time he tried to circle around, they saw him. There were at least three of them tracking him. Every now and then he heard their magical talk. They talked low and quiet, but their comrades still heard them from far away. With his back to the baobab tree he tried to control his frantic heart but he could not. He realized this was not an enemy he could trick or outsmart. He was merely delaying the inevitable. He needed his mother, his grandfather, his people. But he also knew they were just as helpless as he was.
A part of him felt safe behind the old strong tree, but he knew he couldn’t remain. Just because the demon-men had not shot at him, did not mean that they had not seen him. They might be coming closer so that when he ran again they wouldn’t miss. He was now in the lowest point of the oasis. From here, the ground sloped gradually up to the far lip. He knew there was a cave there. It was very small and did not lead to the underground lake. He had played there when he was younger. Perhaps he would be safe there; perhaps //Gaunab’s demons could not see through rock.
He listened to the darkness. For the moment it was quiet. He heard the crackle of a distant fire. He peeked around the trunk of the tree and stared into the darkness. Nothing. He turned back to gather his courage. A shot rang out, and he jumped. But it seemed farther off. Two more shots followed. He decided to chance it. He sprinted for the next big tree, trying to move as quietly as the darkness would allow. Almost immediately, shots rang out so loud they filled his head with their terrible sound. Long lassos of orange light cut through the air around him and wood splintered.
Like a terrified springbok, Karuma ran for his life.
Sawyer watched as his men carried Hill toward the awaiting Valors. Thunder cracked overhead, and the air seemed to grow heavy. He checked the time. The first aircraft could be airborne and cloaked in less than three minutes. The storm would hit in ten. Sawyer considered his options. With Eric safely away, he could delay the departure of the second Valor for no more than five or six minutes.
Hill’s words lingered in his mind.
The last remnants of Earth’s oldest civilization were being massacred around him, but he wasn’t allowed to get involved. Five and a half weeks of looking for Hill, and this is how it was going to end?
Chapter Fifty-Two
The White Hand
A mere two hours ago Sawyer had been aboard the USS Gerald Ford, fighting off a mixture of fatigue and frustration. For the past six days they had been trying to find the Sān tribe, scouring satellite and drone footage that covered hundreds upon hundreds of miles. But the epiphany of where the Sān were had not come from any of Sawyer’s efforts, but from a lucky tip from the CIA.
Three days ago, Lang Song had arrived in Windhoek, Namibia. She was the pretty niece of Tú Meili, the Ivory Queen of Africa and the world’s top supplier of illicit wildlife products to Asia. Over the past twenty years, Tú had built a vast empire throughout the continent that not only employed thousands of poachers, but also greased the wheels of vice by bribing and intimidating thousands of public officials—from heads of state down to the local police and park rangers.
In a stroke of luck, the CIA had been able to hack her niece’s satellite phone, giving them some of their first ever direct surveillance on the Ivory Queen. While the CIA had initially thought that Lang Song’s visit was to influence key members of the Namibian government, they soon realized she was here for something else entirely: to hire a private military contractor (PMC) known as the White Hand.
But the CIA had been keeping the information close to the vest, not wanting to risk any leaks that might make their way back to the Ivory Queen’s contacts in the Chinese government. Besides, they did not think her activities had anything to do with the navy’s ongoing search for a “downed airman.”
It was only that afternoon when the CIA
had asked for a naval drone out over the same airspace where Sawyer was looking for the Sān that he became curious. He contacted the CIA desk at the US embassy in Windhoek, but got jerked around by the staffers. He gave up and called an old friend at Langley directly. In the meantime, the drone was sent up. Luckily Sawyer had enough clearance to monitor the footage being fed to the spooks.
Before long it was over its target: a line of Range Rovers rolling across the Kalahari, leaving a long plume of brown dust behind it. Less than a minute later, his phone rang. It was the spook from the US Embassy in Windhoek. His voice was trembling and he kept calling Sawyer “sir.” Sawyer had grinned. His phone call to Langley had gotten the right person’s attention.
“Yes, sir, we are tracking a group of armed men that we know have been contracted by a POI named Tú Meili.”
That’s when he’d felt the spike of adrenaline. The ivory.
On the monitor in front of him the line of Range Rovers had stopped, and several figures were milling about. The resolution was so clear that he could see that one was Caucasian, one was Asian, and one was very small, the size of a child. It was a bushman, and he was kneeling on the ground, showing the other men something he had found. Then the men rushed back to the Range Rovers and sped off.
Sawyer had hung up quickly, mustered his men, and Captain Everett had swiftly approved the operation. In less than thirty minutes his team were in the Valors and airborne. But it was a race against time to beat the mercenaries. As the Valors sped over the ocean toward the Namibian coastline, the sun was already going down behind them. For Sawyer, the failing light and long shadows were a visual hourglass that seemed to taunt him, reminding him that time was running out, that he had been too slow. You aren’t going to make it.
But he couldn’t dwell on that. He had to lead the mission and that meant he had to find out as much about his enemy as he could before they engaged. Using his neural net, he brought up the CIA’s intel on Tú Meili, her niece, and the mercenaries they had hired. He was dismayed by what he found. Over her long career, Tú had grown obscenely wealthy off the wildlife trade, and she had hired the best (and most brutal) money could buy. White Hand: a private military company made up of hardened commandoes, rōnin from the wars in Angola, Zimbabwe, and Sierra Leone.
Their leader was a fifty-nine-year-old former South African colonel named Julius Strasser who had been part of the famous Koevoet—“crowbar” in Afrikaans—a special forces group created during the South African Border War and implicated in thousands of atrocities. Most of Strasser’s commandos had long histories working as private military contractors. Some were veterans of Executive Outcomes—arguably the very first modern private military company that had crushed the UNITA uprising in Angola in the 1990s—while others had fought under the US flag in the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria.
As Sawyer looked through the dossiers of White Hand’s fighters, his deep disdain for PMCs sank to a new low. These men sold their services to the highest bidder, regardless of whether it was right or wrong. They fought for money, not God and country. It was the most deplorable thing for a soldier to do.
Sawyer shook his head. The situation was turning into a major clusterfuck. The Sān had poked the beehive in a way they could never have imagined. From their perspective they had killed four poachers who had trespassed on their hunting ground—retribution for slaughtering the animals that provided their livelihood. But what they had really done was disrupt a multimillion-dollar industry with the capacity to wage war when it felt threatened.
Sawyer’s commlink clicked on. It was Captain Everett.
“I shouldn’t have to remind you about the ROE, Master Sergeant, but I’m going to do it anyway.”
Sawyer had figured this was coming. “Go ahead, sir.”
“You may not fire unless fired upon. And since it’s a night op and you are using the Venger system, that better mean that you don’t take any fire. Do you understand? Even if you do take fire, as long as your armor is protecting you, do not return fire unless you feel someone’s life is in jeopardy.”
The captain continued, “Hill is the mission. If he’s there, bring him home. The last thing I want is for you to get in a rumble with White Hand, especially if Hill isn’t even there. You got that?”
“Aye, sir.” There was a pause on the line as Everett seemed to consider how to drive the point home, but Sawyer’s quick acquiescence had made it impossible.
The captain sighed. “Godspeed,” he said.
“Roger.”
Sawyer frowned. Everett was still dealing with the fallout from the botched raid on the mining camp and was worried about losing his command. Still, Sawyer thought, that didn’t give him the right to cut off my balls the moment me and my soldiers are about to go into combat.
As always, Sawyer focused on the things that he could control—himself and his team. He shared the information about White Hand with his men.
“It looks like approximately thirty PMCs. They will be well-armed, possibly with fourth gen night vision.”
Just then the drone pilot cut in.
“Sir, I’m almost out of gas and need to head for home.”
“Roger that.”
“I’ve found the bushmen’s camp. The bad guys are already there and appear to have taken many of them captive. I’m sending the footage to you now.”
Sawyer cleared the footage so that his whole team could watch simultaneously.
The images were amazingly clear—a mix of the latest night vision overlaid with infrared data and enhanced with AI.
They saw a circle of rock formations with a forest in the middle. It was like a tropical island in the middle of the Kalahari. The camera zoomed in. Laid out on the ground were the bodies of the Sān, many still moving. They showed brighter because they were mostly naked, while the White Hand soldiers were darker. On the rocks overlooking the camp was a Sān boy. And lying next to him, nearly naked, was a much larger figure. Sawyer recognized the athletic frame and the black hair. The distinctive profile of an AK-47 in his hand.
His team began to discuss the best way to assault the camp, but Sawyer froze for a moment, realizing they were probably too late. The fight was happening right now . . . and he was missing it.
He banged his fist against the bulkhead. “Come on!”
Now he stood in the Sān camp. They had found Hill but he was in critical condition, and the Sān were being massacred all around them. Another flash of lightning, quickly followed by a boom of thunder that bounced and echoed off the rock formations.
In five minutes you can stop this. You know you can.
Sawyer was not the type of man who hesitated, but for some reason he could not make up his mind. All the mantras and adages that had guided him in combat seemed to have lost their currency. Hell of a time for an existential crisis.
It would be a lie to say that he always followed orders, but throughout his long career his deviations had always been relatively minor and had always yielded the best results so that, when the dust settled, the XO had always seen it his way. That wouldn’t happen this time. He would almost certainly go down for this.
Yet, in all the battles he had fought in all the corners of the globe, never had there been a more noble reason to fight. A true warrior defended the defenseless. He fought for what was right and he didn’t turn away when it was convenient. He fought and he gave everything he had, and he didn’t ask for protection or expect sanctuary.
But what about his men? It was one thing to go rogue himself, but the moment he did, it could endanger the lives of his team. If something happened to him, they would pile into the fray. Yet, he had the Venger Program, had been practicing with it for months, and he was confident of its effectiveness.
Gunshots rose from the dell, a long stream of fifteen shots, as a whole clip of ammunition was fired at a helpless enemy.
God and Country.
Sawyer realized there was a reason they were in that order. One came before the other.
Sawyer felt a slap on his arm. It was Patel. “What are you doing?” he asked.
“Nothing. Head to the LZ, I’m right behind you.”
Patel looked at him. “Bullshit, I’m staying with you.”
“That’s an order. Get going.”
Patel didn’t move, a look of annoyance on his face. Yes, it was an order, but it also violated all their protocols. Patel knew Sawyer was up to something.
Sawyer covered his mike. “Just give me five minutes. That’s all I need. If there’s trouble later, I don’t want you going down for it.”
“I’ll gladly take the trouble for a shot at these assholes.”
Sawyer looked at the younger man and was about to argue but realized that would just waste more time.
He fingered on his mike. “This is Papa Six Four Actual, as soon as the package is aboard, get the first Valor airborne. Valor Two, you hold. We are going to make a last sweep of the area to ensure that no sensitive equipment was taken from the crash site with Hill. ETA, five minutes. Over.”
“Roger, Paper Six Four, Valor One is airborne, Valor two is holding.”
At just that moment Sawyer heard the high-pitched whine of the first Valor’s twin turboprops as she rose up and sped into the night.
Sawyer started the timer on his watch.
5:00:00
4:59:15
He nodded to Patel, and the two men moved off into the woods.
Lightning stabbed down from the high clouds and thunder boomed.
Get ready motherfuckers, it’s time for some twenty-first century scunion.
The Venger package for each SEAL contained four swarms and each of those swarms could autonomously provide defense, offense, surveillance, and communications, so that in the case of swarm failure, a soldier could fully function with only one swarm.
