Arisen, Book Eight - Empire of the Dead

by Michael Stephen Fuchs

  …yanked one free, rammed it home in his stolen rifle, charged it – and shot the sentry in the face from below as he startled, looked down, and tried to react.

  From this position, the remainder of the dive team, the bulk of their original force, was visible. Two were operating a big and sleek mini-sub, while two others floated nearby, doing something up against the carrier’s hull – attaching a limpet mine, Homer assumed.

  The mini-sub was a wet submersible, much like the SEALs’ own SDVs (Seal Delivery Vehicles). It had no pressurized interior, so those using it relied on the air in their own scuba tanks. It was more like a big torpedo that the divers clung to, using it to take them much greater distances, at much higher speeds, than they could swim on their own. It also had an onboard guidance system, power, and an additional air supply they could tap into.

  The two working at the hull were head-down in their work – but the two at the mini-sub looked up in surprise and alarm as Homer swam up to them, fins kicking smoothly behind him, rifle pointed forward, leaving a blood trail in the water behind him – and closing to within twenty feet.

  From there, he emptied half the rifle’s magazine into the pair, taking care not to damage the mini-sub behind them. The Russians’ wetsuits blossomed with red divots, and they did a jerky undersea pantomime, as the long and thin 5.45mm PSP rounds tore into their bodies and killed them.

  The noise of this was muted underwater, but not totally silent, and the two at the hull turned around at the sound of it. Homer had to be even more careful with them, with what he thought was a high-explosive behind them, so he switched the fire selector to semi-auto, and started putting aimed single shots into the pair as they kicked frantically toward him, knives in hand. One of them made it to within five feet.

  Homer paused, exhaled heavily, and blinked slowly. He still didn’t particularly like killing people, even ones who badly needed killing. But he sure as hell preferred this to getting stabbed to death in installments.

  And he thought: I really must remember to bring a gun to future knife fights…

  Finally, he reloaded the ADS, then swam over to the mini-sub and checked the power, systems readout, and storage bay. Now he had some work to do – namely harvesting all those limpet mines. But at least he had a big tractor to take them all in with.

  When he moved to get started with the mine this team had just been attaching… he found it wasn’t a mine after all, but a big thermal imaging camera, of the type tactical teams use to peer through walls, and see what’s going on inside a target structure.

  I knew it, Homer thought.

  He was tempted to leave these dead guys where they floated, but he also knew they were likely to have exploitable intel on them. So he went around dropping their weight belts, and one by one they floated up to the surface, where Pred and Henno could police them up.

  Because Homer still had a mine harvest to bring in.

  Time For You To Go

  SAS Saldanha - Main Warehouse

  Alone again, and now sealed back inside the warehouse, Juice wasn’t feeling particularly excited about having to clear a large structure – one with bad lighting, twisting and narrow corridors, and an unknown number of Zulus – all on his lonesome.

  Then again, he wasn’t all that worried either.

  And he definitely wasn’t leaving until this place was properly sealed up.

  Once he cleared the area around their improvised exit, he had something like a wall to his back. Now he just needed to follow the trickle of dead back to their source – whatever hole in the dyke it was they were coming in from. He gathered, both from the drone pilot and from facts on the ground, that this was somewhere in the long northeast wall – but on the opposite end from the one which Spetsnaz had cleared out of.

  He clicked on his weapon-mounted light again – both to augment the weak and flickering overhead lighting and because, as before, he actually wanted to attract the dead. And he started walking smoothly but quickly, weapon up, right across the middle of the warehouse.

  He spotted one coming straight at him twenty yards out. Two quick and easy shots to the mouth put it down – but distracted him from one coming from the side as he hit an intersection. This was slightly awkward – he had to back-pedal quickly, then get off two shots in very close quarters. Those were also the last two in his mag, but they got the job done.

  When he changed mags, he found he was down to his last one. This slightly surprised him – but, then again, it wasn’t all that surprising, not after the heavy contact with the Spetsnaz pipe-hitters. It was pretty damned amazing how much ammo you could run through in a close-quarters, balls-out firefight. Generally, the last thing you were thinking about was saving ammo for later. Hell, if you lived until two minutes later it sometimes seemed like a miracle. And should you live that long, you could hope maybe more ammo would fall from heaven.

  Basically, discounting the future was rational behavior in this line of work – namely gunfighting.

  Juice decided to go ahead and fix his bayonet – because that next mag change after this one was going to be a long way off. He also did a count of pistol mags by touch.

  And then he got moving again.

  Every second he spent here screwing around was more dead guys he had to deal with.

  * * *

  He got where he was going, and found the spot he was looking for, three minutes later. By then, his rifle was dry, and he had it slung, with his pistol out and up in a two-handed Weaver stance. He looked balefully around him, at all the shrink-wrapped palletized crates, many or most of them without a doubt containing ammo. It would just take too damned long to tear them open, never mind reload mags from the boxes of loose rounds inside.

  Finding crates of ammo always seemed so straightforward in video games… he thought. You just walked over them and your weapons reloaded.

  While moving to this position, he’d racked his brain trying to figure out how the hell they had missed a hole in the wall on their sweep earlier. The two teams had circled the warehouse completely, and both had hugged the outside wall. But when he got there, Juice realized:

  No, we didn’t hug it. We approximated it.

  He now put a single shot – double-taps were out the window again – into the face of a skinny-ass dead guy crawling out from under a pile of crates, and then waited for his buddy behind him to show himself enough to get the same treatment. What they were crawling out from under was essentially a narrow path between the outside wall, and a row of pallets stacked a few feet away it. And this short, narrow corridor had gotten an IED emplaced inside it – a perfect little kill-zone for whoever might have tried to slip around the Russians’ flank on this side.

  When the IED did go off, it knocked over several of the higher stacked crates, turning the corridor into a tunnel – and closing off one end. That had been the side Juice and Vorster had come from, and they hadn’t looked back once they were past it. From their point of view, it just looked like a jumbled pile of crates at the outside edge of the room.

  Also, obviously, the IED had blown a hole in the wall.

  Not a big one – and, Juice guessed, not big enough initially to admit bodies. But then, he figured, one or two enterprising dead guys had managed to peel back the splintered and weakened metal just enough to make it work.

  They were bum-rushing the show even now, squeezing in through the small hole one at a time, leaving chunks of themselves smeared on the jagged metal around the edges.

  Luckily, the fix for this was straightforward. Juice holstered his pistol, put his back up against the nearest crate, and shoved like hell. This time, he didn’t even bother clearing the hole before he sealed it – and he ended up with a seal that was half crate, half dead guy. No, scratch that – the crate was the seal. The dead guy was the sealant. Like putty.

  Nice one, as Henno would say.

  * * *

  Now – there was the small matter of getting his precious ass out of there. “Biltong Two, send status, over
.”

  Lovell came back instantly. “Yeah, man, we’re propping open the door for you. But we can’t hold this pier much longer. We’re getting very popular at this location. And our minigun just went dry.”

  Juice didn’t really have to be told. He could hear the furious firing, shouting, and moaning over the open channel. He gave Lovell a lot of credit for keeping his cool and sense of humor in the middle of a shitstorm like that.

  “Wait out,” Juice said, then switched to the command net. “CIC, Biltong, how copy.”

  “Solid copy! Send it.”

  “Yeah, how’s the southwest side of this building look?”

  There was a pregnant pause on the other end. “Biltong, your target structure is completely overrun. There are dead on all sides, no gaps.”

  Juice sighed. “Copy that. Any chance of a little rocket action, to clear me a hole to punch out of here?”

  Another pause. “Negative, 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."

  Juice acknowledged that, then got back on the squad net. “Biltong Two, this is Actual.”

  “Send it.”

  “Shove off, Lovell. It’s time for you to go.” Juice could sense the Marine sergeant trying to formulate some objection to this. But there was no possibility of them fighting their way back to retrieve him. Hell, they probably couldn’t even stay where they were for more than another minute or two.

  So he made it easier for him. “Go, Sergeant. You’ve got critical casualties. And I’m fine here – this place is all sealed up. Get to the carrier and lead them back here for the supplies. I’ll just keep an eye on it all for you. GO.”

  “Roger that, will comply. Out.” Lovell’s voice was flat and affectless. It was clear to Juice that the man was faithfully doing his job, even when he didn’t like it.

  And he had also probably been thinking exactly what Juice was: the JFK either would be, or would not be, coming back for those supplies. Lovell’s radio was tuned to the command net as well, and he probably heard the news about the carrier steaming north, same as Juice had.

  Neither of them been told the reason, but Juice had a pretty good guess: it was huge, had a shitload of missiles, and was named after a Russian naval officer. And if that thing came back, the Kennedy had no choice but to go – whether they still had men on shore or not.

  Juice was still sitting on the concrete floor, with his back up against the crate he had been shoving. As he shifted to get more comfortable, his ass – the flesh, the underwear, the uniform – all squished together. He looked down to his right side and saw it was covered with blood.

  Hmm. I’d probably better wrap up that arm wound now…

  He had no idea how long he was going to be here.

  * * *

  Handon stood now at the stern edge of the flight deck, on the starboard side – the very back left corner of the ship. This was as far south and east as he could get without getting wet. He’d come out here pretty much the instant both the shore team and the CSAR mission had radioed in – the moment they both proved to still be alive.

  He told himself this was so he could see both teams as soon as they were inbound and in visual range. He was also willing to admit that he needed some air – for the enormous breath of relief he had to take. But he would deny it was also because the strain of listening to the live ops from CIC had gotten to be too much for him. He’d had people out in harm’s way uncountable times. This shouldn’t be any different.

  But somehow it was.

  He turned around when he heard footsteps behind him.

  It was Fick. The Marine senior NCO stepped up very close to Handon and said, “The shore team’s inbound. ETA five mikes. But, listen…” And with this he paused and gripped Handon’s bicep, as Handon had gripped his before.

  “Your man isn’t with them.”

  Handon didn’t visibly react.

  And it was only when he heard a motorboat engine going by on the surface of the ocean far below, and moved to identify it, that he remembered what Ali had told him about Homer – and his intention to dive and sweep the hull for mines. And Handon belatedly realized that he had not two people in peril, but three.

  More than half of his surviving team members.

  When he craned his head far out over the deck edge, what he saw down there was their own CRRC burbling by, heading for the dock at the stern, with Predator and Henno manning it.

  And behind that was… well, Handon did a cartoon double-take, and Fick just breathily intoned:

  “Holy shit – that glorious green-faced son of a bitch of yours was right…”

  The French Lieutenant’s Woman

  Ocean Surface, Off the JFK’s Starboard Side

  Predator and Henno were just debating going for help – despite there not being any more combat divers on board the Kennedy than before – when the mini-sub breached five meters off their bow. It was fully twenty feet long, with space for eight swimmers, plus the storage bay. It was as if Homer had gone off on his own – and come back riding a small whale.

  Not to mention that the ocean surface all around them was now littered with the floating bodies of dead Spetsnaz combat divers.

  Predator shook his huge head and spoke across the open water to Homer. “We were all like, ‘Let’s take this thing out and see what we can do to support Homer!’ Turns out – not a thing! You’re a goddamned one-frogman armada.”

  “Yeah, nice one,” Henno said, understated as usual.

  Homer took his regulator out and removed his mask, but didn’t say anything. He just waved toward the stern of the Kennedy, and the dock there. Pred fired up their outboard motor and led them back.

  When both craft and all three operators cruised up to the dock, Pred and Henno got their raft up out of the water and up onto it. The mini-sub seemed too big and heavy for that. But Pred grabbed its stern, and pulled it in to the edge of the dock, where it hit with a clang.

  “Go easy with that,” Homer said.

  “Yeah, why?”

  “Because there’s 47.5kg of explosives in there.” Homer pointed to the mine-filled storage bay.

  Predator peered inside. “Seriously? Holy shit, dude.”

  It was only then, when Pred looked back up, that he noticed Homer was bleeding from at least six different places.

  “Holy shit, dude!”

  His two brother operators helped him out and onto the dock. Once his feet hit, he pulled his rocket fins off – then knelt down and touched the deck. “The engines are back up,” he said.

  Henno ignored this. “C’mon, mate,” he said. “Let’s get you to hospital.”

  But even as he said it – the hospital came to them.

  They heard banging and voices from up above on the fantail deck – and then looked up to see LCDR Walker leaping down the ladder like the ship was sinking and she was heading for the lifeboats. Right behind her was a train of doctors, nurses, medics – the operators couldn’t really tell them apart. And before they could ask the stupid question about whether all this was for Homer…

  The ship’s launch came blasting around the stern from the landward side, kicking up a curving wave of spray five feet into the air as it cornered like an F1 motorcar, and came sliding sideways into the dock. The pilot reversed the engines violently at the last second, bringing them to a perfect stop at water’s edge.

  Homer, Pred, and Henno leapt out of the way, particularly as they saw what was inside the boat: two fire teams of Marines – a third of them wounded or dead, one lying prone down in the bilge, and at least one other severely wounded. Two of the healthy ones were doing chest compressions on the prone one. His name tape said “Raible” – and he was clearly in a bad way.

  The Alpha operators’ first impulse was to try to help – b
ut they were also smart enough to know when they would only be a hindrance. So instead they moved away, to let the medical personnel leap past them and into the boat, where they started checking vitals and transferring Marines onto litters. Two of them took over compressions on Raible, relieving the two distraught Marines.

  They started coming out of the boat seconds later. The one walking wounded insisted on coming out under his own power. “Never let the bastards see you coming out prone,” he muttered. Within a minute, this whole mobile naval surgical hospital, along with their patients, were out of the little boat, and moving inside the big one.

  And that’s when Henno whispered to Pred and Homer: “Eight Jarheads go out. Six come back.”

  Predator stepped forward muscularly, rumbling, “Nine went out.” He then raised his voice considerably and said, “Where the fuck’s Juice?”

  * * *

  The last Marine out was one they recognized as Sergeant Lovell. He looked up and said, “He didn’t make it.”

  “WHAT?” Predator was now standing over him, blotting out the sun.

  Lovell put his hand up – either in a gesture of placation, or maybe just in self-defense. “He didn’t make it out. He’s still there, in the warehouse at the depot. But we secured it.”

  “Is he alive?”

  “Yes – to the best of my knowledge. He’s wounded, but he was on his feet when we left him.” Lovell clearly instantly regretted putting it that way – that they had left him – and was perhaps about to regret it more, when a pair of sailors dashed between him and Predator. Overhead, four heavy winch lines with iron tackle were coming down, and the two sailors instantly started securing them to the ship’s launch.

  One of them noticed Homer’s captured mini-sub up against this dock. “This pleasure craft belong to one of you?”

  “Aye,” Henno said.

  “Well if you want to keep it,” the sailor said, cinching the last line and giving it a yank, “you’d better find some way to bring the sumbitch aboard – now.” The launch started rising smoothly out of the water, shedding streams of water – tinted slightly in places with Jarhead blood.