Arisen, Book Eight - Empire of the Dead

by Michael Stephen Fuchs

  This time, Drake responded before Abrams could. And Abrams was nothing but relieved. The last thing he wanted was to see the strike group’s acting commander so incapable that he had to be worked around, or kicked upstairs.

  “That’s understood,” Drake said. “Make it happen.”

  “Already in progress,” Campbell said.

  Abrams moved to the starboard screens and could now see the sleek and faceless little helo drone zipping out over the waves, low enough that it was probably getting wet.

  “How long until we’ve got our eyes back?”

  “Wait one for ETA.” They all knew this was basically a simple function of the Fire Scout’s top speed, and the max effective range of the Starstreak missiles.

  The answer came back: “Six minutes sixteen seconds to safe distance. Then probably another 100 seconds for it to climb to sufficient altitude to reacquire the surface contact.”

  Drake and Abrams looked at each other while the seconds ticked away. Then again, a lot of people on the bridge were looking around at other people. It was all incredibly tense. But it looked like this might be okay. They’d been blind, but not for long.

  Tick, tock.

  The camera view from the Fire Scout was now piped to the one overhead display on the bridge. It showed water zipping along underneath, close enough to make out the ripples.

  Mainly just for something to do, to keep from screaming out loud from the tension, Abrams checked the shipboard status boards, and Drake flipped through damage reports – there were too many now for any one man to keep track of – on the touchscreen at his station.

  Finally the video view showed the water receding, as the helo drone ascended at its maximum rate of climb.

  Tick, tock.

  “Commander! The Admiral Nakhimov is on the move!”

  Fuck fuck fuck. Obviously the drone had gotten just high enough to reacquire the Russian ship on radar.

  Drake cursed, thinking that their timing in being blind couldn’t have been worse – it was totally rotten luck.

  Abrams, who was thinking a lot more clearly, knew this wasn’t any kind of luck at all. They had been blinded right then on purpose, their drone shot out of the sky specifically as cover for the battlecruiser’s new advance.

  It had all been carefully coordinated.

  And, as usual in this engagement, they were being played like a cheap fiddle.

  * * *

  Corporal Raible found himself floating up toward the light.

  At first his reeling and drifting consciousness thought this was it – the light. But it turned out it was only the sun, high up in the sky now, and somewhat bright despite a scattering of high cirrus clouds.

  Also, both the sun and clouds were bouncing around crazily. That didn’t make any sense.

  No, wait, Raible thought. That’s actually ME bouncing around. He belatedly realized he was flat on his back – and, luckily for him, strapped down. He felt something squishy and cold by his side. Raising his head the inch or so he was capable of, he saw a clear bag of plasma nestled between his hip and arm.

  Wait, who the hell’s that for?

  “Hey…” he croaked, trying to speak through a mouth that was paper dry. “Did somebody get hit?”

  He couldn’t even tell if he’d spoken audibly or not, because of the percussive roar of rifle and pistol fire cranking off crazily on all sides of him. But beneath that, he could also make out that terrible moaning of massed dead in frenzy.

  Holy shit… he thought.

  And then he saw two brilliant streaking flashes from overhead, a pair of firework-like projectiles zipping across the sky and striking down at the ground ahead, the explosion of their impacts shaking the Earth, and unbalancing whoever was carrying whatever the hell he was lying on. Brass casings were also showering down around him from all directions. Raible could see them bouncing off his body, though he couldn’t feel them.

  Wait… Now Raible realized it was a gurney he was lying on, and which was bouncing him all over the place as he was carried forward at a run.

  Huh. I guess it was ME who got hit… Well, shit.

  There was clearly some morphine in that IV drip. And he had absolutely no memory of the explosion that had taken him down, and nearly taken him out. Why would he?

  Now he could also hear guys yelling, as the whole world bounced around him:

  “Nine o’clock, nine o’clock!”

  “Runners, dude – fucking light ’em up! Shoot! Shoot!”

  “Frag up!”

  “Reloading!”

  “Reloading!”

  “I’m out! Who’s got a rifle mag?!”

  “FUCKING KEEP MOVING! Another hundred yards!”

  That last voice he recognized as Sergeant Lovell’s. And it was pretty much the only sound in this whole auditory horrorscape that was anything like reassuring.

  But it was. And it was enough.

  Raible could now feel hot pains across his arms and legs and torso – burn wounds? – where he was strapped down, particularly now that he was being carried across the hard dock, and handed over into the boat they’d come in on.

  That’s good, he thought, drifting back away from consciousness again. Looks like we’re getting out of here…

  And that was when he heard the glorious whine of the boat-mounted minigun start up. It seemed to be firehosing right over his head, spitting out thousands of rounds a minute, sweeping from side to side, and pouring oceans of brass over the side into the Atlantic.

  “Get the fuck aboard! Get aboard!”

  “We’re not leaving yet!”

  “What?!”

  “Set a perimeter! WE HOLD HERE!”

  The small-arms fire redoubled in intensity, and more explosions echoed out in the grass behind them – the guys were chucking grenades now, dozens of them. Raible vaguely remembered they’d brought more ammo on the boat with them. That was good, too. Finally, he just let his heavy eyelids drift down to half mast, and enjoyed the sight of the blue sky and the drifting white clouds above.

  The furious firefight all around him was wrapped in soft cotton wool, and the gentle rocking of the boat on the sea – as the whole structure of it vibrated with the electric death hum of the minigun – lulled him back to sleep.

  Hatred’s Little Victory

  JFK - Bridge

  “Range, speed, and heading!” Abrams barked. The Russian battlecruiser was on the move again. And now he desperately needed to know where to, and how fast.

  “Range is 382, speed 32 knots, headed straight for us, dead on!”

  Drake looked at Abrams, who said, “Whatever damage we did to them, it wasn’t enough.”

  Drake swallowed heavily. “Our hand’s been forced. We have to launch now.” He meant the single combat aircraft they had left which was anything like launch-ready. He was reaching for his phone to call PriFly and issue the order… when Campbell broke in on the open channel.

  She’d obviously overheard all this. She said: “Negative, negative, Commander, we canNOT launch aircraft.”

  Drake’s hand froze, halfway to the phone handset. “What? Why?”

  There was a long pause on the other end, during which Abrams would have sworn he could hear Campbell actually grinding her teeth.

  Drake’s phone lit up and buzzed. He answered it. It was Campbell, on a private channel again. Her voice said she was battling to keep her tone calm and neutral. She said:

  “Commander, I explained this to you.”

  “No,” Drake said. “I relent. You win. Let’s do it. Launch the one bird, alone. I don’t care.”

  Now Campbell’s tone said to Drake that it had required a great deal of willpower on her part not to say this over the open channel – where everyone in CIC, and everyone on the bridge, more or less all of Drake’s senior officers, would have heard it.

  “Sir, we’re still outside of the 200km radius of their anti-ship missiles. But we are now INSIDE the 400km radius of their S-400 surface-to-air missiles. Anything
we put in the air now is going to be blown right back out of it. In seconds.”

  Understanding slowly blossomed in Drake’s battered mind. Basically, even if they were still outside of one circle of death… they were now just inside a larger one.

  Somehow, Drake had fucked up again.

  And he had zero idea about what to do about it now.

  * * *

  Looking around at all the gore on the Seahawk’s flight deck, Ali realized she was very tired. And she didn’t have the strength to argue with the co-pilot – to try to convince him that they should take this torn-up bird, with its wretchedly shot-up crew, back into the fight.

  So instead she just unbuckled the dead pilot, grabbed him under the arms, and dragged him back into the main cabin. For two seconds, she thought about starting chest compressions on him. But she could see he was gone – as was a chunk of his head, inside his blood-dripping helmet.

  Looking down at this pitiable figure, she flashed back to that ice-hate mask she’d seen on the face of the Spetsnaz sniper. And she thought:

  Hatred won its little victory here.

  She turned now to the rescue swimmer, who had made it up onto his hands and knees, and seemed to be fighting through pain and panic, to the point of being able to function. She got him up into a sitting position, then pulled his hand away from his face to check his injuries. It looked like he had actually been hit both with fragments from the destroyed minigun feeder and the ricocheting sniper round.

  The fragments had made a mess of his right eye. And the bullet had created a small dark entry wound underneath his jaw on the right side. The exit wound, in the middle of his right cheek, was less small, and a lot less neat. It was a miracle this guy’s airway was intact, but his breathing seemed okay for now.

  Ali dug out an oversized Kerlix pad from her aid kit and got it pressed up against the side of his face, covering most of the wounds at once. She hadn’t forgotten the first rule of battlefield medicine. She just didn’t give a shit right now.

  And then their flight path suddenly started to go squiffy again. Fuck me…

  Ali could hear a faint voice, and realized it was leaking out from the swimmer’s ICS headset, which was lying on the deck, probably shot right off him. She picked it up and put one cup to her ear.

  “—ay again: can somebody come back up here, please?”

  Ali swivelled the chin mic. “What do you need?”

  “Well… it’s just that I’m probably going to pass out from blood loss.”

  Ali found her energy returned when needed, and she leapt back up to the flight deck – just in time to see the co-pilot slump over his controls.

  Well, hell, she thought. He wasn’t being dramatic after all… half the crew really had been wounded. It turned out he’d been shot high in the left shoulder, where she hadn’t been able to see it before.

  The Spetsnaz sniper had gotten both of them.

  Ali poured herself into the lead pilot’s seat on the right side and took control of the aircraft. She’d never flown an MH-60 Seahawk before – but she had a good hundred or so hours in UH-60 Black Hawks, and the differences were relatively minor.

  It was only when she saw all-new droplets of blood falling on the already blood-splashed controls that she remembered: she’d been hit, too. She could feel the sting of the shrapnel and bullet fragments in her neck and cheek now, as the adrenaline finally bled away.

  With one hand on the cyclic, she used the other to dig out another gauze pad, ripped it open with her teeth, and pressed it against her own face and neck. It stuck.

  Only now, finally, did her thoughts return to the Russian helo – and to their downed pilot. She brought the battered bird around again, and onto a heading that would take them back toward the transponder signal. As she did so, she could just make out the shrinking speck of the Orca – heading out for the southern horizon.

  They must have recovered their swimmers.

  Ali frantically checked the color multimap readout on the instrumentation panel, looking for the signal from the CAG’s beacon. To her amazement, it was still there, it was static – and it looked to be right where they had first picked it up.

  For a second, Ali’s heart leapt with hope.

  She picked up airspeed, then slowed and dropped them down, eyes scanning the trackless ocean surface. Casting around the cockpit, she found a pair of NVGs, powered them up, and put them to one eye.

  And there it was, bobbing on the thick swells kicked up by the rotor wash: the flashing infrared strobe on the CAG’s life jacket. The location transponder was sewn into the fabric of the life preserver and survival vest – which just floated there, empty, upon the chop.

  It was over. The Russians had their CAG.

  The CSAR mission had failed.

  For about two seconds, squinting off into the distance, Ali was seized by the manic urge to give chase. But of course she knew that would be folly. Even if there were anyone alive and unhurt left on Jesus Two Zero to carry on the fight, they would be blasted out of the sky .05 seconds after coming within range of the Admiral Nakhimov’s AA batteries.

  No. They’d lost this one.

  They say you win some and you lose some – but Ali had never really reconciled herself to losing some. She intended to win all of them. And she was going to be a long time sorting through what she had done wrong here – why she had failed to accomplish the mission, safeguard the crew, or kill that sonofabitching Spetsnaz sniper before he did such horrendous damage.

  About the only thing she had really accomplished was keeping the aircraft in the air, which was little enough.

  But she also knew the enemy always gets a vote – and so do the other people you have to depend on to complete your mission. In fairness, she knew that no one had been more motivated to recover the CAG than this aircrew. And they’d paid with their lives attempting to do so. That they’d gotten trapped into a pattern of wild evasive maneuvers, which made it hard or impossible for Ali to do her job, was neither here nor there, and not really anyone’s fault.

  No. Ultimately, Ali had just been beaten, and by another sniper no less. That had never happened before. And she felt an intense desire to see that it never happened again.

  Operators don’t do regret – they do resolve. In this case, it was her solemn resolve that nothing like this ever happen again.

  * * *

  Having explained to Drake why it was fatally impossible for the Kennedy to launch any aircraft now, Campbell failed to resist the temptation to tell him I told you so. “This is why I STRONGLY recommended putting up our air while we still could.”

  “What?” Drake said. “When?”

  “When I called you an hour ago. When you were down on the deck, by the elevator. I made this VERY clear, and got you to verify that you understood.”

  Drake blinked stupidly, racking his brain. He had absolutely no recollection of this conversation. And it was, it seemed, more than he could do to admit to it now. He knew he had fucked up again. And this would be just one fuck-up too many. So instead, he battled to clear his mind, and to try to become effective again.

  Looking up, he saw that Abrams had picked up a handset, switched to this channel – and was now carefully following both ends of the conversation. Drake mustered himself and said, “Okay, so we head north. Increase the distance, get out of range of their SAMs again. And then launch.”

  There was another short pause. “Sir, that enemy ship is now steaming toward us at its top speed of 32 knots. At our top speed of 40, we’ll only get one mile further from them for every four we travel. And that’s four miles farther away from the shore team. And four miles farther away from our CSAR mission. We might even sail outside the combat radius of the Seahawk entirely, in which case they’ll be following those F-35s right into the drink. Even if we left this second, we’d still have to travel over 100km to make up the distance and get out of SAM range again.”

  Drake stared into the distance. He muttered, “So there’s no choice no
w. We have to go.”

  Abrams looked up and spoke now. “Commander, the LT is right that we’re going to have to go. But – if we go now, we leave both the shore team and the CSAR crew with their asses hanging out in the wind.”

  Drake looked up. “It’s better than losing the ship.”

  “Yes. But we don’t have to leave now – not until the Russians approach that 200km circle. The range of the Shipwrecks.”

  Drake still felt stunned, but he had a moment of clarity. “But when we do leave… we lose the base, and we lose the supplies. If the Nakhimov moves back into that harbor, we’ll never dig them out again. And without those supplies…”

  Abrams persisted, not to mention kept his cool. “Maybe so. But we can deal with that then. Right now, we have to get our people back. While we still can.”

  Drake just nodded. “Make it happen.” He stood up. “I’ll be… back there,” he said, heading toward the Captain’s Ready Room again. In that moment, Abrams wouldn’t have been able to say whether Drake would be coming out again.

  Nor did he know if that wouldn’t be better.

  * * *

  Having assessed her defeat, resolved to bounce back from it, and put it fully behind her… Ali knew the best she could do now would be to get the wounded back alive. As she put the Seahawk on a heading for the carrier, she found the pilot’s headset, got it seated, and prepared herself to update CIC with their status. But of course, the damned radio didn’t work.

  However, they were elevated, over open water, and quickly closing the distance to the JFK, so she dared hope her own team radio might reach them. She tuned it to the air mission frequency. It worked, and she issued that status update: mission failed, two KIAs, two litter-urgent casualties, and a badly shot-up bird – all coming in fast.

  That grim task complete, she figured she’d try the support channel for the shore mission, and catch up on current events there. When she did, the very first thing she heard was: "—ative, negative. Biltong Actual, be advised – your air cover has gone OFF-STATION, repeat, CAS is DOWN. The Fire Scout has been urgently re-tasked with priority mission. No ETA on replacement air. We cannot clear you a path to the boat. And there is no clear exfil route, no path that we can see to the extraction point."