Arisen, Book Eight - Empire of the Dead

by Michael Stephen Fuchs

  Homer knew the sailor was right – he could feel the engines powering up beneath their feet. This ship was about to be under way. He motioned to Pred and Henno – the former a land-giant, the latter merely a very big, very strong man – and the three of them dug down and rolled the 1,400-pound mini-sub up over the lip of the dock, and dragged it a few feet across it.

  Homer looked up to Pred – and saw that the man-mountain looked like he was in physical pain. And it wasn’t from the deadlift of the mini-sub.

  But he also looked resolved – and unstoppable. He stood up to his full height of nearly seven feet and said, “If that goddamned warehouse is secure, then we can go there and pull Juice out of it.”

  “Not if this vessel is making way,” Henno said. “The Russians’ll have it. And they’ll also have him.” He looked across at Homer, who was still bleeding on the dock. “C’mon, mate. Hospital for you.”

  Homer shook his head. “No time. Got an aid kit? Grab it and follow me…” When Pred didn’t immediately follow, instead gazing forlornly out over the sea like the French Lieutenant’s Woman, Homer gripped his arm and said:

  “Come on, brother. We can still get him back. Oh, and grab some duct tape, if you’ve got it…”

  Predator looked like he was on the verge of tears. But he knew from long experience that in his worst moment… his best bet was always to trust his teammate.

  So the three Alpha men together climbed up and away from the dock, as the carrier started churning great gouts of water and steaming north. Leaving behind them the naval base… and the indispensable supplies…

  And the beloved bearded commando.

  The Honor of Commanding

  SAS Saldanha - Main Warehouse

  Well… maybe I am going to die in Africa after all.

  Juice spat weakly on the bare concrete – just making it far enough out to hit a non-bloodied spot. Thirty minutes after ordering the Marines to leave him, he was still sitting in the same spot – up against the crate that was sealing shut the warehouse.

  He’d finally got the arm wound wrapped up. But it was still seeping. He’d also rewrapped the through-and-through wound on his leg – but that was an even worse story. He was pretty sure now his femoral artery had been nicked, probably in a ragged way, and no amount of pressure was going to fix it. He’d put his one tourniquet on the leg, as that wound was clearly worse. But it still didn’t totally stop the bleeding. Realistically, it was going to need trauma surgery to get it properly staunched.

  And he wasn’t likely to get that anytime soon.

  The Marines had humped a number of bags of plasma in with them – most teams did on combat ops – but they’d also humped them right back out again. And Juice didn’t have any himself, because plasma was heavy, and he needed to save the weight for his toys, his electronics. Not to mention all the batteries they required.

  His juice.

  He snorted in amusement. Now he had juice for all his many devices… but none for himself. No Juice juice. That was typical.

  It occurred to him that there absolutely had to be medical supplies in this warehouse somewhere, including plasma – it seemed to have every other damned thing – but he was loathe to go rummaging around looking for it, tearing into plastic-wrapped pallets and sealed crates. Basically, the more he moved, the more blood he pumped around his body – and then right out of it again.

  So. He’d just sit here and take it easy. And probably they’d come back in time. But if they didn’t… well, that wasn’t actually so bad.

  Juice tallied his results for the day. He’d taken some bad casualties, including two KIAs – and some of the wounded might yet die. But, on the other hand, he’d gotten home most of the men he’d been given the honor of commanding.

  And, even more importantly: he’d achieved the mission objective. He’d secured the supplies. Even if he was dead by the time the others came back, they would find him right here – still faithfully guarding what they had sent him out to find.

  So perhaps they would think well of him.

  More importantly, his brothers in Alpha would know he hadn’t let them down. That he had completed the mission they needed him to. That he had gotten it done. So even in death he would remain in the brotherhood. And that meant everything.

  Juice also knew he could now think well of himself. Because he had finally conquered his fears. His fear of death, his fear of inadequacy, his fear of not really deserving to be a Tier-1 operator… and his terrible fear of letting his brothers down. All of these had fallen away.

  He was free now.

  And if he died, he died a happy man.

  * * *

  “Big Teddy Bear, how copy?”

  Juice wasn’t sure he’d heard that right. He had drifted half off to sleep. His head still wobbling unsteadily, he looked down his chest at his radio.

  “Big Teddy Bear, acknowledge. I know you’re in there.”

  Juice smiled tiredly. Well goddamn, I DID hear that right. It was a female voice – and definitely not LT Campbell. No, this was a voice that was much more familiar to him, and much more beloved. He squeezed his PTT button.

  “Hey, Ali. What the heck are you doing here?”

  “I was just on my way back to the carrier. Heard those dumb Jarheads forgot you. Need a lift?”

  Juice laughed weakly and nodded. “Yeah, love one. But I don’t think you’re going to find any place to park. And I’m not real optimistic about being able to leave the building.”

  There was a brief pause. “I might be able to help you with that. Wait out, Elvis.”

  * * *

  “Yeah,” shouted the Seahawk co-pilot over ICS, albeit weakly, from back in the main cabin. “I actually CAN get the minigun up, if you give me a minute. We’ve got a spare feeder on board.” The man was audible, but Ali could tell the morphine was slurring his speech for him.

  Ali, up front at the pilot’s controls, keeping them in a banking racetrack pattern around the naval base, wasn’t all that surprised to hear this. CSAR wasn’t the kind of mission you could just postpone due to defective equipment, and failure wasn’t on their menu. So a major theme would be replacement parts for things.

  She was also aware of what the co-pilot wasn’t (yet) saying: that they had critical casualties on board, who were this guy’s brothers, and they needed to get back to the carrier where they could get desperately needed medical care. But the co-pilot also knew Ali’s own brother was in peril, and had been left behind, so he was keeping his problems to himself – for now.

  When he reported the minigun was back online, Ali formulated a plan of action – then communicated it to Juice on the radio. He had a brief debate about whether it was better to stay where he was, keeping more of his blood in his body, and wait for the real cavalry – if they ever came. Or else gamble now by trying a risky, frantic breakout. In the end, he was game.

  Get on the train that’s at the platform, he thought, perhaps discounting the future again.

  Ali felt the same – not least because she was flying around in an aircraft full of gore, with two dead men and two badly wounded ones, all lying in pools of blood back there. The least wounded, the co-pilot, was now her door gunner. And she’d better make use of him while he was still on his feet.

  She revved up the engines and pointed the nose east – and down. So far, she’d been keeping her distance from the legions of dead swarming around below – lest the noise of the helo rile them up and make Juice’s problems even worse. But now she used that noise tactically, flaring in close to the south corner of the warehouse – about 50 yards from the breaching hole she could see had been blown in the southwest edge of it.

  And the massed undead in the area got very interested in her, very quickly. Keeping it about 25 feet off the deck, she began to slowly circle the building counter-clockwise – leading most of them on that side on a merry circuit around to the far side of the building. And once she was exactly opposite that breaching hole, she yanked the cyclic, climbed v
iolently, popped right over the top of the building, and dropped down again. It was a decent little bit of flying.

  Lining up the minigun port perfectly with the open area in front of the exit, Ali keyed her mic and said: “Light ’em up.”

  The devil’s whine of the minigun started up now – the co-pilot, no expert on the weapon but not quite a newbie either, was spraying hundreds and thousands of rounds out the door, and mowing the grass in front of the exit. Those dead who either hadn’t followed Ali’s Pied Piper routine, or else had wandered in since, went down as if being weed-whacked. Others were coming to take their place – but the area was getting clear fast and, God willing, would stay that way long enough to get her man out.

  Not a moment too soon, she saw that closed-up hole open up again, from the inside – so she flared in to land, and to get her friend the hell out of there. Now she could see Juice bent over at the waist and emerging, pistol in hand. He took a couple of shots on nearby dead. But he was moving slowly, and didn’t seem to be in a good way.

  KA-BLOOM!!!

  Something exploded behind her – and Ali wished she could say she were more surprised. This aircraft had very recently been shot all to hell, and any number of systems could be failing now, from stress, or leakage, or insufficient redundancy.

  Not surprising, she thought. But really shitty timing…

  But, then, when the co-pilot didn’t respond to her hail, and she clocked that the minigun was down, she turned and craned her head into the rear cabin, and saw what had actually happened: the minigun receiver had exploded. Most likely it had been damaged by a round from that Spetsnaz sniper.

  Ali really fucking hated that guy.

  The co-pilot was now down on the deck, barely moving and borderline unconscious. He was sharing that space with two dead men, and another too grievously wounded to see, or to help in any way. Ali was truly the last man standing.

  This just really isn’t my day, she thought.

  She’d already begun to abort her landing, and now brought the nose around and surveyed the scene. With the minigun down, the space she’d intended to land in was already filling up with walking and running dead.

  And Juice’s escape from the warehouse had also been cut short. He was barely twenty feet from the entrance, firing and reloading his pistol constantly. With the minigun down, he was being swarmed again. So he began to retreat, backing toward the hole he’d just emerged from. She saw him half collapse, and drag himself into it. The dead were right on his heels.

  Everything had gone completely to shit. But that was always the time to step up and operate more effectively, not collapse in a puddle. Ali slapped at the controls, looking for the Digital Automatic Flight Controls System (DAFCS), and hit the Barometric Altimeter hold, which put them into an auto-hover. Then she unstrapped herself, leapt back into the main cabin, and grabbed her rifle up off the deck.

  Stepping into the open doorway, she started doing precision shooting like her brother’s life depended on it – which it emphatically did. She waited until each pursuing Zulu or Romeo was right at the breached entrance – then she put it down with a brainstem shot. One by one, they started to pile up – until the ones behind couldn’t get around the destroyed ones at the front.

  In a few seconds, a dozen bodies effectively blocked the entryway. But Ali could still just see around and behind them – and finally saw something solid, probably a crate, slide into place. Juice was safe, at least right this second.

  But he was also entombed again.

  And, now… he didn’t respond to her hail on the radio.

  But Ali still had critically wounded men depending on her to get them to safety. And there was nothing more she could do here. So she climbed back into the cockpit, turned off the auto flight controls – and, feeling very much alone, blasted the Seahawk off to the west, back out to sea.

  And finally, at least, toward home.

  Loya Jirga

  JFK - Bridge

  At least half the bridge crew stood up in shock as a man in a dripping wetsuit strode through the hatch and straight into the middle of the room. It wasn’t the water still streaming from his figure that stoppered the mouths of those there.

  It was the streaming blood.

  This man was visibly bleeding from God only knew how many wounds, with all but those on his face partially or fully hidden under slashed folds of neoprene. Two extremely scary-looking dudes – one of them big, the other gigantic, and both very obviously not Navy surface-fleet personnel – were trying to tend to the diver’s wounds.

  But he wasn’t staying put long enough.

  He also carried something big, metallic, and heavy.

  “Commander Abrams,” Homer said. “I need to brief you – plus Drake, Handon, Campbell, and Fick. And right now.”

  Abrams stood and looked him in the eye. That told him everything he needed to know.

  “I’ll see who can be spared,” he said.

  * * *

  Six minutes later, everyone Homer had requested had been assembled. Drake had been pulled out of isolation in the Captain’s Ready Room, still looking weak and fluttery. Handon and Fick had been called back in from out on the flight deck. And, with the shore mission back – or all of it that was coming back – and the CSAR bird winging its way home, plus the Kennedy now steaming north toward relative safety, Campbell had been willing to be pried away from CIC, at least for a few minutes.

  As they filtered in, most looking edgy to be off-station, and disinclined to stay off it long, Homer leaned back and let Predator and Henno work on bandaging and taping up his injuries. Other than the through-and-through wound in his arm, they were all pretty superficial – just skin and muscle laid open from slashing strikes, though some of them had bled freely. Now the bleeding was being stopped.

  “You should let me properly disinfect these,” Predator scolded Homer.

  “I got them while immersed in salt water. They’re probably pretty much sterile now.”

  Pred pulled out a multi-tool to scissor off Homer’s sleeve and get to the arm wound. But Homer vetoed this, and told him just to duct tape the whole thing up. Pred and Henno looked at each other like, Dude’s planning on going swimming again? But neither had any desire to get between a SEAL and the water.

  And with this, the last of the arrivals filed in and took a seat. Homer reached under the table, hefted the big Russian limpet mine, and dropped it on the table with a resounding clang. If anyone was dozing, this woke them up.

  “I pulled this off the hull of this vessel twenty minutes ago,” he said. “Along with nine others exactly like it. There were also seven Spetsnaz combat divers down there, at work affixing them, with a wet submersible mini-sub.”

  Nobody spoke in response to this. But there was a very palpable Jesus fucking Christ… vibe in the air.

  Finally, Abrams found his voice. “Are you sure you got them all?”

  “I’m sure,” Homer said. “That is, I’m sure I got all the mines. I didn’t get everyone in that Spetsnaz naval brigade, the remainder of whom are still out there somewhere. And I can all but guarantee they’ll be back. Unless we sink the vessel they’re basing off. Which we have to do. Now.” He looked at Drake when he said this. Abrams didn’t feel like explaining that Drake wasn’t the man he had been a few days or even hours ago.

  Drake cleared his throat. He said: “We’re not attacking the Admiral Nakhimov again.” And, with those four words alone, Homer could see it all: Commander Drake was finished. He had been burned badly on this one already.

  And he’d lost his nerve.

  Then again, he also had a point. Now he amplified it, and the others let him speak. “We already lost half our remaining squadron of F-35s in our initial attack. We lost our Predator UAV. Now we’ve recovered the shore team—”

  “Most of it,” Pred rumbled.

  Drake looked pained, but went on. “We’ve recovered the shore team, and the CSAR mission is on its way back in.”

  Now Campbell
rumbled, “Minus the rescue part.”

  Abrams spoke up now. He had his issues with Drake, and serious concerns about the man’s mental state. But he was also able to see both sides of it. And he was loyal. He said, “Then that’s another argument against sinking the Nakhimov. The CAG is almost certainly being held on it now.”

  “Pardon me,” Homer said. “But fuck the CAG.”

  No one moved or spoke. Breathing was minimal.

  Finally, Predator broke the tension. “Damn, dude.” He had never heard Homer talk like that before. And he had been side by side with him, many times, when they were both inches or seconds from death or disaster – usually both. And one thing Homer had never been was rude.

  Homer now looked around the table, pinning each person there with his serene blue eye. When he spoke again, it was in a quiet and calm manner. He had everyone’s complete attention.

  He said: “The CAG knows his duty perfectly well. Even if we’ve temporarily forgotten ours. Alpha has left a man behind, too, in that warehouse. But there are fifty million lives on the line. I’m sure you’re very fond of your man, as we are of ours. But I shouldn’t have to tell you: one man doesn’t matter.”

  He paused again, significantly, before continuing. “And, pardon me putting it this way… but remember the last time we sat around this table? And I told you it was a lot easier to take out a ship at anchor than you thought? And that we needed to be concerned about these Spetsnaz naval units?” He put his hand on the still-wet limpet mine and patted it.

  Drake coughed. “Okay,” he said. “You were right. I was wrong. They did come, and they were trying to sink the ship.”

  “No,” Homer said, shaking his head sadly. “I was wrong.”

  “What?”

  “They weren’t trying to sink the ship. They were trying to take it.”

  There was a faint but audible intake of breath around the table. “Oh, come on,” Drake said. He obviously found this fanciful at best.