ARISEN, Book Fourteen - ENDGAME

by Michael Stephen Fuchs

  They looked particularly beleaguered because none of the Nepalese men were taller than five-eight, most much shorter, and some as little as five-three (the regiment minimum) – and the dead, being British, towered over them from all sides. But, also as usual, the Gurkhas punched far above their weight, and every one of them fought like four. They never backed down or retreated from a fight, and they definitely never panicked, no matter how bad things got.

  And in another few seconds, they were up on the tank with their commander, circling around to every side of it, and setting up all-round defense. Sun gave his position to someone else to defend, climbed up on the turret, banged his barrel three times on the hatch in the Commander’s cupola, then stepped back as it flipped open and out. A man in a bulbous helmet with goggles on top, a cut-out for a radio earphone, and a chin mic emerged, blinking into the bright lights and splashing rain. “Fuck me,” he said. “You came for us.”

  Sun smiled. “We came for all of you.” He nodded back to the west, where the bright glare of the spots illuminated similar scenes in five other locations: about ten Gurkhas each up on a stranded tank, defending them in 360 degrees, while the crews climbed up out of hatches into the rain and peril.

  “Not all,” the tank commander said. He pointed out to the center of the meat wall. The gap they had bashed through in that spot had now been totally overrun by climbing, flailing, struggling bodies. And the tank plugging that gap, the one with their commander in it, had disappeared entirely.

  “Crap,” Sun said. He’d forgotten about that one.

  The tanker reached forward and twiddled Sun’s radio channel for him. And suddenly the squadron commander, Captain Windsor, spoke in his ear.

  “—ooks like we’re a bit jammed up. But it’s all right, lads. You get yourselves out of here. And that is an order.”

  Sun didn’t like it, though he was pretty sure the men in the Royal Hussars liked it a whole lot less. But they could all see exactly what he could: their commander and his whole tank had been buried alive. Short of heavy excavation equipment, there would be no getting him out of there.

  But even in the time it took him to hear and see this, and look back down, Sun saw the situation on the ground all around them had gone from terrible to impossible. Many hundreds more dead had flowed in, despite the heroic supporting fire from the walls, and now bashed around in the mud and rain. And while the Gurkhas and tank crews were still managing to defend their six little islands of humanity…

  That “just enough clear ground to maneuver” they’d enjoyed on the way out here had been a one-time deal. Now the wet ground was not only packed with bodies like a mosh pit, nearly every square inch of no-man’s land, but in some places the dead were starting to pile up vertically. If the Gurkhas and tankers jumped down and tried to fight their way back through that, they’d just die down on the ground around the tanks – instead of a little later up on top of them.

  For all the Gurkhas’ heroism and solidarity…

  It looked like they were just going to die with the tankers, everyone standing up on top, firing in all directions.

  And then a dragon flew over the walls.

  * * *

  “SHIIIITTTTT…!!!”

  Jameson definitely wasn’t prone to freaking out, much less to theatrics, and God knew he’d been in more than his share of absurdly terrifying situations lately. Hell, he’d been in the next ten thousand guys’ share of terrifying situations.

  And when Charlotte first took them rocketing off the wet grass of the Common into the dark and equally wet night sky after a lightning start-up and no checks, then dropped them down again on the other side of the walls like the first plunge of the best roller coaster in the park, and his stomach banged down into his anus and then back up into his throat, he’d just clenched his teeth and grabbed onto whatever in the front seat didn’t look like a control, or at least not an important one.

  But then, after doing a quick loop to assess the tactical situation, which was laid out vividly below them like a floodlit diorama, without any hesitation nor word of explanation, she had dropped it all but literally down to the deck… tilted her nose forward so the front tips of her 48-foot rotors were no higher than the nose, which Jameson was pretty sure was going to start making furrows in the dirt any second…

  And she started mowing the goddamned grass.

  * * *

  Sun had definitely never seen anything like it in his life – and he’d served three hard tours in the brutal fighting of Helmand, where getting rescued from close contact with overwhelming Taliban forces by Apaches was a frequent occurrence. He knew what a remarkably agile aircraft this attack helo was.

  But he didn’t think what he was seeing now was possible.

  Nose and rotors angled steeply forward and down, tips of the blades at nearly exactly neck height, fixed-landing gear practically scraping the carpeting of bodies, the damned thing did a wide circuit of three sides of no-man’s land, just outside the meat wall, and around both sides. And everywhere it went, it carved a perfect path through the landscape of dead – liquefying heads and bodies and spraying the remains in all directions, like the very weed-whacker of God, beating back the entire great rainforest of the dead.

  The terrain was pretty flat, but Sun still had no idea how she didn’t snag something and crash – and in fact expected her to do so at any second. The good news, he figured, was that a helo didn’t have a stall speed, like a plane. In theory, it could go as slow as it liked, all the way down to sitting in place at 0mph. The bad news was that the way it speeded up was by tilting its rotors forward – so it could only go so slow with them tilted all the way down at or below head height, while still keeping the rest of the aircraft above ground. And “only so slow” pretty much meant “bat out of hell” speed.

  And it was that speed at which the helo did its circuit.

  And through every inch of it, the effect was like dropping an outboard motor into a lake filled not with water, but with frogs – then hauling ass all the way around it. Pureed meat, blood, viscera, black gunk, body parts, really just liquefied people, hundreds and then thousands of them, sprayed a hundred feet into the sky, and equally far ahead and out to the sides. When the Apache finished going all the way around, it had created a new narrow strip of true no-man’s land.

  Then it came back around and did it again.

  In the opposite direction this time.

  * * *

  Okay, Wesley thought. I was wrong again. There actually IS something more fun than watching zombies being crushed by tanks.

  Suddenly he realized he should have joined the army ages ago, back when he was a young man.

  He’d been missing all the fun.

  * * *

  The video was on the big screen of the JOC now. Aside from muted gasps, no one spoke. Finally Jones looked up to Miller.

  “Still above our pay grade?”

  Miller declined to take his eyes from the screen when he answered. “I think they’re actually paying us way too much. And her not nearly enough.”

  Then he shut up – and just pointed, lips parted.

  Charlotte was coming around again.

  * * *

  “Fuck sake – Captain Maidstone!”

  That was what Jameson had for her when he managed to speak coherently, after the initial involuntary monosyllable.

  Charlotte just shrugged as she took them up to the lofty height of fifty feet and scanned her floodlit handiwork below through the rain-splashed canopy. Those were the King’s Royal Hussars and Royal Gurkha Rifles down there – she’d been nearly close enough to recognize their cap badges – and they were Charlotte’s boys back in Afghanistan long before Jameson’s Marines were. She simply wasn’t going to let them die out there, not if there was anything she could do to help.

  Now that he’d found his voice, Jameson wasn’t quite done. “Seriously – what the sodding hell?”

  “I may not have dragon-fire left to breathe, but my wings can still
do some damage.”

  “You don’t have wings!”

  “Sure I do. That’s why they call it a rotary-wing aircraft.”

  Having surveyed the scene, it was obvious what Charlotte had to do next. Clearing around the periphery had eased the pressure on the beleaguered Gurkhas and tankers. But it wasn’t going to be enough to get them home. The area between them and the walls was still thronged. She was going to have to make one more pass. Or maybe two. And this time it wasn’t going to be quite as safe or easy as before.

  “What now?” Jameson asked, at least sounding more resigned and less astounded, as Charlotte lined them up.

  “Don’t worry, Major. I’m really, really good at this.”

  Once again, she didn’t imagine that if she still had a squadron commander, he would authorize this maneuver, or anything remotely like it. But it would hardly be the first time she’d had to improvise.

  Bloody Jug Room Fort all over again…

  This time she put it on the deck well inside no-man’s land – meat wall and crescent of armored vehicles on the right, twenty-foot stone walls of the prison on the left… and a half-dozen main battle tanks dotted all around in between. Each of these was covered with a dozen or more vulnerable fleshy soldiers, all still firing to defend themselves. If she misjudged by an inch, she’d liquefy the men she was trying to save.

  But, more importantly, if she misjudged by an inch, she’d hit a sixty-ton steel tank and be dead too quickly to feel bad about it. The helo would tumble into a crunching heap of metal and glass in two seconds. At least, with no ordnance and almost no fuel, they probably wouldn’t explode.

  “SHIIIITTTTT…!!!”

  Jameson once again reverted to only the most autonomous and instinctive power of speech as Charlotte slalomed them through the rain and around spotlit tanks at head height, once again turning the thick crowds of dead into spraying meat stew. When they came out the other side they were still in the air. She took them up, spun in a tight loop, dropped down…

  And took them right back in again.

  She took a different route this time to rack up her bodycount, reckoning that after this pass she’d have destroyed a good fifty percent of the dead in the area, all in less than ten seconds. The bodies, tanks, APCs, walls, and cheering men blurred past on both sides. They were almost out the other end of the tunnel. They passed the last tank on the far right flank.

  Their rotors clipped something hard, its barrel most likely.

  And those rotors shattered and fell to pieces.

  * * *

  A mighty shout went up from every point on the north walls when the sixty Gurkhas and twenty-four tankers leapt from the tops of their tanks, and started hauling ass back toward the walls.

  They were having to fight like hell, and for their lives, through the non-trivial and quickly growing crowds of dead out in no-man’s land. And they were being covered by every single gun on the walls, the combined roar of which was deafening – but which still didn’t drown out the sound of cheering human voices. And still there was absolutely no guarantee they were going to make it.

  But if they didn’t, it wasn’t going to be because their brothers on the walls weren’t putting out every single round they could in support, and cheering for them with every bit of strength and every breath of air in their lungs. The men running for their lives out on the ground were being cheered on like the biggest underdogs in World Series, Super Bowl, or World Cup history.

  The only thing Hackworth had ever personally heard to compare with it was when Team GB runner, Somali immigrant, and beloved national hero Mohamed (“Sir Mo”) Farah took his second gold medal in the 5,000 meters at the London 2012 Olympics – when the crowd noise was so loud it made the cameras shake and distorted the photo-finish image.

  And as on one side of him Colley, and on the other the wounded Brown, and every other one of the Tunnelers hung themselves over the walls in the rain to help pull up the returning men, the Gurkhas refusing to climb until they had boosted up the tankers, half making cradles of their fingers or crouching down to boost them on their shoulders, the others forming a defensive perimeter… whatever doubts Hackworth’d had about coming up here were instantly dispelled.

  And he knew every one of them felt the same way.

  They had so obviously done the right thing. And even beyond their obligations to their fellow survivors, their sacred duty as human beings to pitch in… Hackworth’s heart swelled to bursting with the emotion of this glorious, unified rescue operation. And he knew beyond any doubt that the chance to be part of something like this, the euphoria and brotherhood they were all feeling, right down to their last individual cells…

  This was worth any cost, any risk, any sacrifice or loss.

  This feeling was worth everything.

  This was what it felt like to be alive.

  * * *

  The cheering in the JOC almost took the roof off.

  Miller had to step away into one of the offices, hand cupped over earpiece, to hear the radio traffic from out there.

  “What are your losses?” Wesley was asking.

  “Stand by.” That was the Gurkha commander. “None. Just did a head count. All my men are back, nobody looks infected so far. In fact… there are now twenty-four more of us.”

  “Nice job, Sergeant Major. Reinforcements are good. Please get them slotted in.”

  Then, smiling out loud and pumping his fist in the air, turning to go back out on the floor, Miller heard that same hard-ass American USOC operator from before come on.

  “Hey, guys, fuck what I said earlier. Great job.”

  * * *

  No one in the sniper OP out on the far right flank cheered.

  It wasn’t because Kate, Baxter, Elliot, and Liam were any less moved by the Gurkhas’ and tankers’ thrilling escape – this tiny but symbolic victory of life over death.

  It was because they were the only ones who saw the cost.

  They were the only ones far enough around the right side to behold the fate of the Apache helo, which had singlehandedly made the rescue possible.

  It was almost at their position, having completed its second daredevil sweep of the area in front of the walls, and passing that last stranded tank. And if the angry sparks that cut the night as it roared past didn’t tell them something had gone wrong… then having to duck out of the way of rotor-blade fragments peppering and slashing the tower did. Their reactions weren’t good enough to get them out of the way in time, but they just got lucky, and no one was hit.

  When they popped back up over the ramparts, they could all see that not only had the helo been only a handful of feet above the ground when it clipped its rotors.

  But now it no longer had any lift.

  Its momentum took it around past them to the right, even as the nose slammed into the ground, pushing a thick and ugly furrow of meat and mud out before it – but then it flipped over, starting to tumble and roll, wheels snapping off as the rotors had before. After several revolutions, it finally came to rest out on the far edges and shadows of no-man’s land.

  And every no-man in the area turned and headed toward it.

  What was left of the helo was about to be buried in dead.

  You Hate Me Anyway

  CentCom – Sniper OP

  Elliot was first back up on his feet, and first to get his magnifying optic on the crash site. The ravaged airframe was lying mostly beyond the glare of the wall lights. But Ali’s front-mounted night-vision device on his rifle lit the scene like day.

  The helo was lying on its side, but Apache pilots and gunners get into the cockpit through side hatches in the canopy. First the cracked rear one pushed up and out, and the pilot climbed out into the rain, pushing a short-barreled rifle out ahead – then, sitting on the edge of the airframe, tremblingly pulled off a big flight helmet. And as Elliot settled his 6x-magnifying optic on the emerging face, he could see…

  It was the same female pilot who had rescued them all from the top
floor of the Gherkin. She had saved his life.

  She had also later punched him in the face.

  Now she leaned over and started trying to lever open the front-seat hatch. It was stuck or wedged, but she finally got it up, leaned inside, and hauled up the body of someone who seemed dazed or half-conscious. His head was lolling, so Elliot couldn’t see his face until they both climbed up on the right-side engine of the destroyed aircraft. It was pretty obvious they went there because it was the highest point of an Apache lying on its side – and the first dead hands were already grabbing at their boots from down on the ground.

  It was also obvious from the way they were moving that both were injured – hardly surprising given the violence of the crash, and the tumbling of the airframe. Still looking down, the man shook his head – then leaned down, reached back in the front seat of the cockpit, and came out with his own rifle. And when he finally stood up and scanned around them, Elliot could see his face.

  It was fucking Major Jameson.

  The man who had killed all of Elliot’s friends.

  * * *

  Jameson never quite blacked out, but their rapid deceleration had, to say the least, caused his vision to go black. Which was probably for the best, because when they started tumbling at dryer spin-cycle speed, it wouldn’t have done him the least bit of good to see the world whirling around him that fast.

  Unsurprisingly, he found the world still spinning after they came to rest, and he was mainly thinking these pilots’ harnesses were excellent, because the only injuries he could feel were bruises and burns where the straps themselves had cut into him while restraining his body. It would be another couple of minutes before he felt the pain in his head and realized he’d banged the hell out of it on three sides of the cockpit around him. His own Mk 7 combat helmet was pretty good. Probably the Apache pilots’ was better, but he hadn’t had time to put one on.