Handon shook his head. “Yeah, that would have been helpful, to say the least. But things have gone south in Britain. They had a bad outbreak – right in their strategic command center.”
“Jesus,” Zack Altringham said. That was about as much as he was going to say. While Zack had spent a lot of his career in the company of operators, he was the least operational person there, so the odd man out. But this news was dark. He figured if Britain was under that kind of threat, the virus was on the verge of completing its work – of taking down humanity.
Handon shrugged. “The outbreak was contained, but with bad losses – including all their senior commanders.”
“So who the hell’s in charge there?” Jake asked.
Handon’s face was noncommittal. “A Royal Marine platoon leader, I think.”
Now Jake said it: “Jesus.”
* * *
Kate and Predator shared a cordial silence in the tiny guard tower, Pred staring off into the forest, while Kate stole glances at his bicep and deltoid, both of which looked like they’d been inflated. “Damn dude,” she finally said, mainly just to make conversation. “What do you do in the gym?”
Pred looked over at her. “Basic compound exercises, mainly – bench press, squat, deadlift…”
“So you’re trying to get bigger?”
Pred shrugged. “Go big or go home. Plenty of women do the same stuff where I lift.”
Kate nodded. “Yeah, no doubt… So – what’s the deal with the woman on your team?”
Pred considered this while he dug out his dwindling pouch of Red Man chewing tobacco. Absently, he opened it and offered it over. Kate shook her head. He shoved a wodge in his cheek, then started talking around it.
“Ali? Don’t mind her,” he said. “She’s not used to sharing the battlefield with other women. Plus she just had a bad break-up.”
“Seriously? That’s why she snapped at me?”
Pred nearly smiled. “Love in the time of Hargeisa. Anyway, she’ll get used to you.” He stole a look at Kate’s uniform and insignia. “You were a CST.” He knew about the Cultural Support Teams, the female soldiers who had been trained up and attached to Special Forces ODAs and SEAL teams to help deal with female members of local communities, back in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
She nodded.
Pred nodded back his respect. He’d heard enough about how these women were selected and trained, and how well they had performed, to know they were warriors – and that some had died as warriors. If this one had managed to live this long, she had to be an asset to her team.
“What about Ali?” Kate asked. “I didn’t see a unit patch on her.” Or on any of them, for that matter. “Where’d she come from?”
“The Unit was her unit. We served together there.”
Holy shit, Kate thought, though she didn’t say it out loud. Like every female soldier in the combat arms, she’d heard about – or heard rumors about – the woman who made it into Delta.
And now that woman was up on Kate’s mountaintop.
* * *
“So you two jokers know each other,” Handon said to Jake and Juice, around mouthfuls of beef ravioli, the entree in the MRE box that lay open in his lap. He wasn’t enjoying it, just fueling up, ensuring operational effectiveness. All around the circle of stones, Henno, Homer, and Juice were doing the same, while Zack and Baxter respectfully watched. Noise had sent himself off on a one-man patrol, implying that more security wouldn’t hurt.
Or maybe, Handon thought, he just didn’t like MREs.
Juice smiled at this comment, slurping up spaghetti with meat sauce. “Jake was my first team sergeant – and our first deployment together was crossing into Afghanistan, from Uzbekistan, October, 2001.”
Jake nodded. “We were both in Triple Nickel a lot of years after that. Until we finally lost him to the Army of Northern Virginia.”
Baxter looked blank, and Jake caught the look.
“Yet another name,” he said, “for the Intelligence Support Activity. After they moved their HQ to Fort Belvoir, Virginia.”
“And after we got moved under JSOC,” Juice added.
Jake smiled. “Which also meant their personnel went on the Department of the Army Special Roster – and thus didn’t exist anymore. Didn’t see his hairy face again until it came crashing down in a PC-12 a couple of miles from our bush camp.”
Handon put his empty food container down and sized up Jake – including the Ranger tab on his shoulder. “You were in the regiment before SF?” he said.
Jake nodded. “First bat. Three years in.”
“Second bat.” Handon and Pred both had served in the 75th Ranger Regiment, 2nd Battalion, before going on to Delta selection. Handon exhaled. This was a man he could do business with.
Not to mention count on.
* * *
“Ali was in one of the first graduating classes of women from Ranger School,” Predator said. Ranger School was the notoriously brutal 61-day combat leadership course, which accepted only outstanding infantry soldiers to start with, and still had a pass rate of barely fifty percent. It had only been opened up to women in 2015 – and damned few of them then.
Kate was either liking this woman more, or less, all the time. “And her Ranger tab helped her get a spot in Delta selection?”
“No. That she got by winning a bet.”
Seriously? Kate thought.
“She went to Ranger School later – after joining Delta.”
“Why?”
“To prove she could, obviously.”
Prior to today, Kate had believed herself to be the most accomplished and senior female soldier anywhere in military special operations. Suddenly she was an also-ran.
She’d just have to deal with that.
* * *
Jake knew Handon was going to allow about four minutes for dealing with anything not related to his mission. So he got down to it himself, before being told to.
“You’re here for Patient Zero,” he said. “An early-stage victim.” He locked eyes with Zack across the fire. Zack had always said someone would come looking for it. Or, at any rate, if someone out there was making any kind of effort at saving the world by developing a vaccine, they’d need to come here first.
Handon nodded.
“So there is a vaccine?” Zack asked.
“Maybe. If we can fill in the last piece of the puzzle.” Handon didn’t bother briefing these guys on what filling in the puzzle so far had entailed – for his team, or for all the others who had supported his mission. And for the many who had fallen. There wasn’t time, and there was little point.
Jake said, “So you’ll have already worked out that dead Somalis, early-stage victims, are thin on the ground here. Absent, actually.”
“Yeah, that’s what we found,” Handon said. “We were told they were swept away by big herds.” Then again, they’d heard this from the profoundly untrustworthy Sergeant Major Zorn, the last survivor of Camp Lemonnier. Handon didn’t mind getting some confirmation.
Jake nodded. “Not big – huge herds. As bad as the singularity in Hargeisa last night was, that was nothing. I don’t know if it’s because Somalia was ground zero, or what. But we’ve had a few truly gigantic ones blow through, each bigger than the last. Millions strong. The last one, about six months ago, cleared the whole place out. Haven’t seen a single native Somali since then. Alive or dead.”
Handon looked across the circle. “But Baxter says you’ve got an alternative for us.”
“Yeah,” Jake said. “The bad news is it’s perhaps your only alternative. And the really bad news—”
Baxter finished the sentence: “The really bad news is that it’s in the middle of an Islamist fortress with twenty-foot walls, manned by hundreds of twitchy al-Shabaab guys, all of them armed to the teeth, and led by an unkillable badass with a giant sword. With the whole thing now surrounded by a heaving singularity a half-mile deep, all of it way out in the middle of the Galmudug bush.”
Handon didn’t visibly react. He just spoke calmly, looking levelly around the circle. “There’s always a way.”
And he knew that, on this one, there had to be.
Not getting it done simply wasn’t an option.
Every Cali Left
Camp Davis – Guard Sangar
The silence between Kate and Predator had come back. While Kate was ruminating on Ali, Pred had been getting lost back in his memories. They weren’t good ones, and his stony face started to reflect that. Kate half-smiled and said:
“So a horse walks into a bar, and the bartender says—”
“‘Why the long face?’” Pred had heard that one before. He turned to the concerned-looking woman beside him. She was still curled around her rifle, facing out into the bush, all business. But Pred could also feel the human compassion and concern coming off her.
Fuck it, he thought. Life was very short, and not getting any longer these days. He shrugged, exhaled, and looked back out at the trees before speaking. “I guess lately I’m having trouble caring whether I make it though this or not. Like I’m only really hanging on for the mission. And for my teammates.”
Before she could figure out what to say to this, he went on.
“Juice told me something not long ago.” Kate had already worked out that Juice was Predator’s battle buddy. The body language, the way they stayed close and looked at each other before moving or speaking. “He said I just have to break through.”
“Break through what?”
“Through death – to the other side. He said life waits for me there. And that it’s very beautiful.”
“Your friend sounds like a lovely man.”
“He is. But he’d also just had a near-death experience.”
“That doesn’t mean he’s wrong.”
Pred smiled sadly. “No. I guess it doesn’t. But he can’t lead me to this place he talks about – and I can’t seem to find my own way. Somehow, death never does take me, no matter the odds, or the risks I take. But I still can’t see the other side. And I can’t stop thinking about everything I’ve lost.”
Kate understood that. Everyone had lost so much. That she still had some of her team, which was also her home, was nothing short of a miracle. And it was all that really got her through. She could now see tears glistening in Pred’s eyes, and she took a guess.
“You lost your wife?”
He nodded, seeming not quite able to speak. But he mastered himself and said, “I should have been with her. Not off on my twenty-sixth deployment. I should have been home. I could have done something. But I wasn’t, and I didn’t. And I can’t stop feeling one inch tall because of it.”
Kate saw the irony, but there was nothing funny about it.
She took her hand off her rifle and put it on the big man’s shoulder. “Hey, my team captain, Brandon, as well as our senior Bravo, Kwan, and our junior engineer sergeant, Todd, all died rescuing my damsel ass from the Stronghold. And all because I wasn’t smart enough to keep from being pulled out from under a gun truck, kicking and screaming like the little girl in Aliens. So believe me when I tell you: you are not, by a long shot, the most pathetic or guilt-ridden person in this sangar.”
Pred turned his head and looked at her. She got it. He could see that. And it actually did help, somehow.
Looking back in time now, he remembered thinking he had put his grief aside, after his unholy rampage on the flight deck in the Battle of the JFK – and the miracle of him coming out alive, or of anyone coming out of that alive. But now he realized: that was all he’d done – shove the grief off to one side. He hadn’t dealt with it, never mind worked through it properly, which might be the work of years. He hadn’t even really unpacked it.
And it was not only still there waiting for him. It was growing. And maybe shoving aside whatever vulnerability, whatever humanity, whatever will to live was left inside of him. Until maybe all that would be left was his raw physical strength. And his sense of duty.
And he didn’t know if those were enough.
* * *
“There’s an issue we have to deal with first,” Handon said, looking like he wasn’t thrilled about bringing this up. Almost unconsciously, he put his hand to the bandage on his neck.
Jake’s brow furrowed, as did those of the others.
“It wasn’t a dead human,” Handon hastened to say.
Jake relaxed slightly. “Zombie critters.”
“Yeah,” Handon said.
Zack jumped in. “What kind?”
“Both Pred and I got small chunks taken out of us by bats.”
Now Zack relaxed. Jake picked up again. “We started seeing the first ones, the infected hyraxes, about four months ago. The bats we haven’t seen ourselves – but al-Shabaab have.”
“We monitor their radio traffic,” Baxter said. “They’ve had guys bitten by bats. None of them turned. So you’re probably okay.”
Handon’s eye darted to the pouch on his belt with the serum in it. He wouldn’t have to explain about that now, which saved time. More importantly, he wouldn’t have to keep giving himself and Predator injections. But that didn’t mean they wouldn’t need the serum at some point. They were far from out of this.
Zack spoke up. “The baboon troops on the other hand…”
Handon’s look said they had seen them, too.
Jake picked up the topic. “Mean bastards. Vicious fighters. And they’re all fast ones.”
“Are they infectious, though?” Homer asked. All of Alpha had gotten way too close to an awful lot of them in Hargeisa, though no one had been bitten – yet.
“We don’t know,” Zack said. “As far as we know, everyone who’s been bitten… has also been torn into small pieces.”
Handon slightly wondered why the virus had started in on the animal kingdom. Maybe it ran out of humans. Maybe it got hungry, or greedy.
Probably it didn’t matter.
* * *
Kate took her hand off Predator’s arm and returned it to her rifle. Then she put her head down, peering through her scope.
Pred perked up. “Got something?”
She didn’t answer right away, but finally pulled her eye away. “No. I don’t think so.” She took a deep breath and slowly exhaled. “This part of Somalia was always sparsely populated. So with no undead population now…”
“You’ve still got forest creatures,” Pred said. When the dead couldn’t find any other living people, they were known to feast on whatever they could get their claws on – anything that ran, slithered, or scampered.
“Yes,” Kate said.
“I bet that’s nice.”
“Nice – except for the forest noises. And never getting out of condition yellow.”
Pred snorted. “I haven’t been out of condition yellow since the nineties.”
Kate smiled. “True. True.”
But then Pred paused and looked up at the sky, his own smile melting away. “Suppose we do manage to save the world? How am I supposed to live in it? Because she won’t be there.”
Kate turned to look at him again. “I mentioned Todd.”
“Your junior Charlie,” Pred said, meaning 18C Engineer Sergeant.
“Yes. He and I were close. And he was an amazing guy – super-smart, outrageous skills, great heart.”
Pred nodded. He sounded like a lot of young guys in special operations. They were all amazing kids – too many of whom had died, in the last war, and in this one.
“When we were trying to get our gun truck running again, Baxter and I tag-teamed on the repairs. We didn’t really have the skills. So I just channeled Todd, who was an ace vehicle mechanic on top of everything else. Every time we got stuck, I just asked myself, WWTD? The answer was always the same: He’d make it work.”
Pred smiled. “So a bit of a Jesus figure.”
“More than you know.
In the end, he spent his life saving ours. Without a second’s hesitation. Only after he was gone did I realize how much I’d relied on him. It was like losing a limb. I constantly wanted to give up, to chuck it in. It was all too hard without him – and any world that could chew up and swallow a person like that… well, it didn’t seem much like a world worth living in.”
“So how did you keep going?”
Kate shrugged. “I thought about what he would have done if the roles were reversed. Sure, he would have grieved for me. And he would have hated it. But he also would have found a way to pull himself back. And he would have Charlie Miked – because he still had a job to do, and had teammates depending on him to do it. And, eventually, I think, he even would have found joy again.”
Pred looked off into the forest. “It’s out there just beyond sorrow, Juice says. But I can’t see it. All I can see is the mission. It’s the one thing I’ve been hanging onto. Maybe it’s good that it never seems to end.”
Kate heaved a heavy sigh. “The fact that Todd is gone forever – that so many of our brothers are – is bullshit. And nothing’s going to change that. But we can learn to live with it. Maybe we have to.”
Pred looked over at her again. “Maybe so.”
“What was her name?”
“Cali. Her name was Cali.” Pred exhaled. “I couldn’t save her. But maybe I can still help save somebody else’s Cali.”
Kate smiled. “Absolutely – we totally can. Every Cali that’s left.” She put out her hand.
Predator took it in his – disappearing it, as usual.
If he could make a new friend, and teammate, here in the post-Apocalypse, out in the bush of Somalia… well, maybe that was something he could build on. To find a way back.
Or at least through.
Hard Rain
Camp Davis
“Okay,” Handon said crisply, already having spent more time than he cared to on anything but plans to complete their mission. “Your intel says there’s an early-stage victim in the basement of this Islamist fortress.”
Zack shook his head. “No. Not an early-stage victim. The literal Patient Zero. The first human victim of the plague.”
ARISEN, Book Eleven - Deathmatch Page 2
