ARISEN, Book Eleven - Deathmatch

by Michael Stephen Fuchs

  He never went unarmed.

  Because his position as leader of one of the most fearsome SOF and counter-terror units in the history of the world made Akela a modern-day warlord. But even after the fall of the world, and of the Russian Federation, he and Alfa Group had more resources and firepower at their disposal than Genghis Khan could have dreamt of. Human nature changed very little. Only the killers’ tools did.

  Akela’s radio headset perked up. “TOC from Viper One-One.”

  He pulled his big, lean, and muscular frame upright, and stood with hands on hips, legs slightly spread, chest broad and open. “Go ahead, Lyudmila,” he answered. He had sent his favorite team leader out to run this latest patrol, and the two of them had long been on a first-name basis.

  “We’re at the tank and have scoured it. There’s nothing.”

  “Okay,” he said, his voice low and lethal, but a spark of cagey intelligence in his eye. “Check the crashed helo.”

  “Understood. Viper out.”

  Yes, like the Khans and their followers through history, Akela led from the front, first and fiercest. And like their namesakes, the wolves of Alfa Group would tear to pieces any leader less fearless or lethal than they – or who showed weakness, or any mercy to the enemy. This was one reason Alfa Group’s most infamous counter-terror operations – the Moscow theatre hostage crisis, the Beslan school massacre – had resulted in the deaths of everyone.

  Absolutely everyone died – terrorists, hostages, bystanders.

  Killing the wrong people could be forgiven. Letting the wrong ones live – never. No weakness, no hesitation, no mercy. Just viciousness, strength, and pure resolve.

  As Akela checked the latest shift reports on a tablet handed to him by an ops officer, he considered how those same qualities had been shared by the dead man buried down in there with them. Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, more commonly known as Lenin, had led the 1917 October Revolution that established the Communist Party and led to the creation of the Soviet Union. He survived two assassination attempts as leader, the second of which injured him badly. And, in the end, his pure will and resolve had done much to shape the modern world.

  In a way, Lenin’s work had also led to the end of the world.

  Had there been no Lenin, there would have been no Soviet Union – and thus no Biopreparat, the secret bioweapons program, and no Oleg Aliyev and his chimera virus: Hargeisa, the zombie virus. The Kazakh worm was currently cooling his heels in their interrogation room. And it had taken the application of very little force to get him to confess his sins.

  And those sins involved nothing less than the near total destruction of humanity. Aliyev had seemed strangely eager to confess what he’d done. Akela considered that perhaps the little man had not talked to a single soul, ensconced in his bunker in the Altai Mountains, since the fall of civilization.

  But for some reason, Akela and his men had so far been unable to convince Aliyev to give up the encryption code he’d used to radio the Brits and Americans – a call he had made right in Akela’s own backyard. They had of course intercepted the transmission. They just couldn’t decrypt it – yet. The Kazakh had keyed the encryption code into the tank’s radio, and he sure as hell hadn’t memorized it. It had to be written down somewhere.

  Which was why Akela had sent Lyudmila out – to find it.

  As he squinted into the dark corners of the TOC, lost in thought, someone addressed him by rank. He turned to find one of their IT guys standing behind him in the glowing dimness, palming a phone – specifically, Aliyev’s, which he’d been tasked with scouring. Leaning in and looking at it, Akela could see a photo on the screen, showing some kind of snowscape, as well as a radio set.

  “Zoom in,” the IT guy said. “Bottom right corner.”

  Akela did so. And what resolved was a scrap of paper with twenty handwritten two-digit numbers on it.

  “The dumb Kazakh son of a bitch,” Akela said, a smile spreading across his face. He hadn’t needed IT experts to scour the phone. The encryption code was probably on fucking Instagram. He touched his earpiece. “Lyudmila – disregard my last. Abort patrol and bring it back in.” Then he moved to the radio operator’s station and told him to open a channel to the Spetsnaz Naval Commando team known as Mirovye Lohi, on the ground in East Africa.

  Akela knew their commander was about to owe him – big time.

  Myrmidons

  Spetsnaz Forest Encampment

  “Runt!”

  The Runt scurried toward the sloping back and giant shoulders from which this monosyllable issued. He didn’t need to get very close before he could see the angry, red, and not nearly healed wounds on those shoulders and neck. He’d been told that Misha still had ball bearings embedded in his back, too close to his spine to be removed. Quite a few of Misha’s cadre were wounded, after the warehouse fight at SAS Saldanha.

  But, then, all of them fought wounded. Those too wounded to fight had simply been left behind.

  “Runt. Refill my motherfucking bad coffee!” Misha never worried about noise when they were on the ground. The dead didn’t scare him. Nothing did. Now, the back didn’t even turn from the big tree stump upon which it perched, but merely presented a tin camp cup over one shoulder.

  The Runt took it and wordlessly scurried back to their fire pit. Using a sock to grasp the coffee pot, he refilled Misha’s cup, then carried it back over.

  And then he made himself scarce, fast.

  The funny thing was that the Runt would have been a pretty big badass at a Gold’s Gym in West Philly, or even in most Western white special operations units. It was only here, at the center of the lead unit of the premier Spetsnaz naval brigade – in Mirovye Lohi, The World Fuckers – that he was the weakest link. But of course everything was relative. And this was one place you didn’t want to be regarded as weak, relatively or otherwise.

  There was little question of Misha being warlord of this team, biggest and baddest of a group of highly trained operators and killers – Achilles to the Myrmidons of Spetsnaz. And Spetsnaz, particularly Mirovye Lohi, were known to eat their young – and to devour the weak. The weak inside, or out of, the unit.

  The weak absolutely anywhere.

  * * *

  Misha took a sip of his shit coffee. It was still shit. But it was all they could scavenge from around here, on the even shittier side of Africa, which was what they were stuck in now. They’d had some of the good stuff back on the other coast, in South Africa. But now they didn’t, because all that had been taken from them.

  So shit it was. For now.

  “Privet, boss,” Vasily said from behind him – but not too close behind. Carefully approaching his commander from the rear, he’d cautiously nodded his regards to the large and diverse variety of tattooed, heavily muscled, and even more heavily armed Lohi who made up Team 1, and who now filled this forest encampment.

  These men sat or stood in or around rudimentary tents and lean-to shelters, shaving, sharpening blades, cleaning weapons, and otherwise getting ready to go out and kill people. Which they were always ready to do at a moment’s notice.

  Team 1 were Misha’s favorites, his blooded and unstoppable cadre, his professional killers – his Myrmidons. From first man to last, they believed their leader to be not only the most fearsome and lethal warrior among them – but many actually believed him to be literally unkillable. Many had died trying. They had seen it – everyone had. Misha led from the front. And he rarely let anyone do any fighting or killing that he could do himself.

  Or, as Juice had intuited the instant he laid eyes on him, back in that warehouse – you could always tell a warlord from his minions. He was usually the scariest dude there. And there were a lot of seriously scary dudes here – because they were some of the same ones. Swarthy and unshaven hard men, some with black skullcaps, mixed unmatched fatigues or scavenged outdoors gear. A lot of shaved heads, bulging muscles, scary guns, and gigantic knives – most from Melita-K, the Russian manufacturer beloved by Russian sp
ecial operators.

  They were armed mostly with advanced late-model AK-100 series assault rifles – with skeletonized stocks, integrated suppressors, transparent mags, polymer furniture. Very expensive optics. And high-quality accessories on the barrel rails: visible and IR lasers, Surefire tactical lights, day and night magnifying optics, EOTech holographic sights. No expense spared. Spetsnaz had been a major funding priority for both the Supreme Soviet and, later on, for Putin’s Russian Federation.

  And ever since the fall, they took what they wanted.

  Like Misha, more than a couple still nursed bad wounds from that warehouse fight – or, rather, from the treacherous use of their own IEDs against them. But none of the wounds were so severe as to slow them down. Just bad enough to make them really mean… and really pissed off.

  There were a number of familiar faces missing, though. Some had been left behind – under the earth or on top of it, to rot or be eaten by the dead. Some, too wounded to travel, had been left behind to fend for themselves. Knowing these guys, though, Vasily would have been unsurprised to see some of them turn up again later, like Leonardo DiCaprio in The Revenant.

  Except dragging the dead bear behind them.

  All the losses meant there were openings in some of the team’s senior operational roles. And the Spetsnaz soldiers were already jockeying for them. Mainly, this meant figuring out how to kill their rivals in their sleep – before it was done to them first.

  Weakness and humanity were always the enemy.

  * * *

  When Misha finally turned to face Vasily, he revealed another angry wound, right down his cheek and across much of his neck. It looked like it had been salved with something to prevent infection. But Vasily knew Misha wouldn’t have taken anything for the pain. Painkillers would have dulled his senses.

  And dulled his fury.

  Misha was currently armed only with his Desert Eagle .50 AE pistol, worn over his heart in a custom-made chest rig. The holster was custom-made because Misha – alone of anyone in world history as far as Vasily knew – insisted not only on carrying the Desert Eagle with the 10-inch barrel, but also on wearing it on his vest.

  “So,” Misha rumbled. “The American pipe-hitters are here.”

  Vasily nodded. “Da.”

  “But – can you tell me why? And why here?”

  Vasily nodded again. “It is just as you predicted. They have some kind of an inside line on the Index Case. At any rate, unless my English or my lip-reading fail me, they just spent much of the morning talking about ‘Patient Zero’.”

  Misha squinted in thought, then tapped his pistol. While he did so, the Runt appeared again. “Colonel—” he said.

  “You again,” Misha barked. “Get off our penises! The geniuses are thinking. We don’t need your negatons right now.”

  “I’m sorry. But there’s an urgent radio call for you. It’s Akela. In Moscow.”

  Hearing this, Misha rose from his tree-trunk throne and strode over to the tent with their long-range radio set, Vasily following. Their radio telephone operator (RTO) was already holding out a phone handset for him. He snatched it and stuck it up to his gigantic head.

  “Da.” He listened for five seconds. “Menya? I’m on a boat, bitch! Ha ha ha ha!!” This last he said in English, before roaring with laughter. When he regained control of himself, he straightened up and said, “Okay. Chto u vas yest’ dlya menya?”

  Then he listened for another thirty seconds, nodding occasionally – then made a vague and increasingly violent scribbling motion in the air, until someone handed him writing materials. He took them and began scribbling.

  “Da. Ponyal. Fantastika! Molodtsy, volk.” He tossed the phone back to the RTO, and stuck the sheet of paper in Vasily’s face, writing side out. Vasily pulled back far enough to focus and read the page, which contained twenty two-digit numbers.

  “The radio encryption key of the American and British asshats. Now we don’t have to read lips.” He handed the sheet to the RTO. “Get this keyed in. And start scanning every frequency. Twenty-four hours, day and night, up and running five minutes ago, we never sleep.”

  “Da, boss.”

  “And now,” Misha said, grunting and stalking back toward his stump, “we shall see if those dickasses actually know anything…”

  Live By the Sword

  Clearing Outside Camp Davis

  The air between Handon and Henno rippled with imminent violence, nothing moving in that clearing. Both still had their hands on their knives. They were like two freight trains racing toward each other at full speed, set to meet at the center of a trestle bridge over a deep canyon.

  One that had been destroyed by air strikes.

  But then an unfamiliar voice spoke out. It said:

  “Wait – there’s another way.”

  Faces blank, both Handon and Henno turned their heads to look at the newcomer.

  “What?” Handon said.

  Through the red mist that had descended over his vision, he recognized Baxter, driver of the gun truck that had extracted them. And, after their eight-hour overnight drive, Handon also knew he was a 25-year-old Georgetown grad, junior CIA analyst, and operator fanboy. Now, he was for some reason taking his life in his hands by venturing into the middle of the slow-motion collision between two truly fearsome operators, both with murder on their minds.

  First clearing his throat, Baxter repeated himself. “I said, there’s another way to get Patient Zero. One that doesn’t get a bunch of kids killed – or sacrifice your irreplaceable Marines and sailors.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Henno said. “And what’s that?”

  “The Sword.”

  * * *

  Back in camp, as the rain tailed off, the others had slipped back out of the team tent, and were already around the fire pit when these three returned from the dripping forest. As they circled around again, Baxter caught the eyes of Kate and Jake – but particularly Zack. He realized Handon and Henno were watching him and waiting.

  “Look,” he said, finally. “I think we all know Godane is dead. We saw Zack blow him back into his own fortress with the minigun.”

  “We never saw a body,” Jake said, his face neutral.

  Baxter nodded. “No. But we also never saw him alive again. Not once in all our surveillance and patrols since then. I say he’s gone.”

  Kate said, “I think Baxter’s right.”

  “And if I am right, and Godane is an ex-Sheik, then that leaves al-Sîf in charge.”

  Handon said, “Who’s al-Sîf?”

  “The previously mentioned unkillable badass with a giant sword.”

  Handon didn’t look like he thought this was a big improvement. He also saw Jake’s expression darken at the mention of this guy. It looked like maybe the two of them had history.

  Baxter scanned faces around the circle. “You’re going to have to bear with me here. But, basically, I believe al-Sîf is reasonable.”

  Jake shook his head, obviously working to hold his tongue.

  “He’s not a zealot, or even an Islamist. Hell, he’s not even religious – which means he’s not superstitious. Godane thought Patient Zero had magical powers. But al-Sîf knows better. I’m betting he kept it because the rank-and-file still believe Godane’s spooky bullshit. But he doesn’t.”

  Henno said, “How do you know?”

  “We were locked up in there a long time. And he and I had… I wouldn’t exactly call it a relationship. I was more like his pet Westerner. But we talked. And I think he’ll just give it to us, if we ask. No assault necessary.”

  He could see skepticism on a lot of faces.

  “He doesn’t think the plague was Allah wiping out the unbelievers – he knows it’s just a horrible disease. And he doesn’t want to be in charge of a new Caliphate – he just wants to survive. He’s a pragmatist. If we tell him we can cure the plague, he’ll see reason – if only because he’ll want the vaccine for himself. Worst case, we have to pay or bribe him somehow.”

/>   Henno shook his head darkly. “No, it’s not. The worst case is we ask him, he tells us to piss off – and now we’ve told him exactly what we’re here for, and that we’ll be coming for it. We try this and it doesn’t work, then we’ve given a heads-up to the defenders, making the assault five times as hard. And that’s us fucked.”

  Handon considered this. As usual, Henno’s thinking was clear and incisive. But was the risk he pointed out fatal? Because this might be a chance to avoid a frontal assault that would be extremely risky and costly, at best. Not that Handon was counting the cost at this point. But this thing wasn’t over, and someone had to stay alive to finish it.

  “Can we contact him?” Handon asked.

  “Absolutely,” Baxter said. “We can even do it encrypted.”

  Handon looked over to Jake, who said. “Yeah. They ended up with some of our radios after the battle there. One vehicle set and three team radios.”

  Left unsaid was whose radios those had been. Fallen friends.

  “How do you know?” Handon said.

  “Because they’re dumbasses,” Baxter said. “And don’t even know how to update encryption keys. We’ve been listening to their radio traffic at will for the last six months.”

  “I’m not convinced,” Handon said.

  Henno nodded. “Now you’re using your fucking head.”

  “But I’m not ruling it out, either.” Handon knew he had to make a decision, and without a lot of delay. But it was a huge decision point, and he was determined to take a few minutes with it. In fact, he wanted to talk it through – with someone he could confide in, and who wasn’t Henno.

  Ali – that was who he needed.

  “Top.”

  He turned to find her standing ten feet behind him. Jesus, he thought. You’d think I’d have gotten used to her doing that by now…

  “I need to brief you,” she said. “Urgently.”

  Handon looked around the group. He trusted everyone there – he had to. And there wasn’t time to pick and choose who got read in. “Go,” he said.