ARISEN, Book Eleven - Deathmatch

by Michael Stephen Fuchs

  * * *

  Ah, our target, Nina thought.

  That was what really got her up in the morning. Because as tough, survivable, and heavily armored as the Black Shark was, that wasn’t why the men in Spetsnaz loved it, nor why they loved her. No, it was because she and it together made a peerless and unmatched hunter.

  The external hardpoints on the helo’s two stub wings held pods of 122mm rockets, capable of cratering runways and penetrating hardened bunkers, or scything and scattering infantry in the open. It also had twelve Vikhr (or “Whirlwind”) laser-guided anti-tank missiles. Designed specifically to defeat explosive reactive armor at ranges up to 10km, their HEAT shape-charged warheads created a high-velocity stream of liquid metal that could punch through up to 1,000mm of armor.

  They also had proximity fuzes which made them lethal even in misses of up to five meters – which allowed Nina to use them to engage air targets moving at up to 1,100mph.

  And if anything lived through the rockets and missiles, Nina also had at her disposal a side-mounted 30mm autocannon, loaded with 460 high-fragmentation, explosive incendiary, and armor-piercing rounds. (She could select the type of ammunition in flight.) The semi-rigid mounting of the cannon improved its accuracy, giving it a longer range and better hit ratio than the free-turning autocannon turrets on the American and British Apache attack helos.

  The Apache was the closest Western equivalent – though a strong case could be made that the Black Shark was superior. But armor, weapons, and dick-measuring aside, Nina knew the real difference between the two types of aircraft was… the mindsets of the pilots who flew them.

  Nina had known and even cross-trained with a number of American and British Apache pilots – including another woman pilot in the British Army Air Corps. And while, like many of her peers, that woman saw her great purpose as protecting “her boys” on the ground, Nina viewed her role very differently. Sure, she was closely bound to the ground pounders in Spetsnaz. But she wasn’t up there to protect them.

  No, her job was to help them hunt.

  She and her bird were like a perfectly trained hunting hawk – and when Misha took the hood off and set her loose, there was little she could not take down for him. Nothing evaded her sight – her multi-sensor suite and finely cultivated vision. And nothing below could survive her devastating weapons.

  Nina lived to seek and destroy.

  Now, reaching their assigned stand-off point with time to spare, she took them down close to the deck – where the ground clutter would make them unresolvable on radar – and began a slow circuit, waiting for the order to go in. She was now a caged tiger, pacing back and forth, mentally filleting zoo visitors with her eyes.

  Nina sometimes wondered where all of her anger, aggression, and viciousness came from. Maybe it had been bred into her, from the bloody soil of oft-invaded but never-conquered Russia. Maybe the ZA had made it necessary – where only the supremely vicious survived. Maybe Spetsnaz had nurtured it – no better environment for the cultivation of violence and aggression could be imagined.

  Then again, maybe it had begun earlier, with her family – first her birth mother, who left had her on a frozen doorstep in Kapotnya, perhaps the very shittiest and most dangerous district of Moscow, before going off to drink herself to death. Or maybe it was the loss of her adoptive parents in her teen years – killed by the Islamist bastards of ISIS when they bombed the plane they were on, killing everyone on board.

  Nina’s only family now was the one that had chosen her in later life: the hard pipe-hitters of Spetsnaz and Mirovye Lohi. But they were all she needed. And her fondest wish was to be worthy of them – and to be just like them.

  A stone-cold killer.

  * * *

  While the Black Shark was already on station and waiting for the call, the Kamov Ka-60 Orca transport was just flaring into a clearing near the Spetsnaz encampment, sending wind whipping through the trees and the tents. Misha and Vasily, along with a dozen hand-picked killers, trotted out to meet it. They were tooled up, heavily armed and armored – locked, cocked, and ready to rock.

  The rest of the camp’s garrison, another dozen, were jocked up as well. But they were staying put for now, along with their large and impressive collection of scavenged vehicles – pick-up trucks, Western SUVs, even a couple of American Humvees.

  Misha clapped his lieutenant, the leader of the group that was to remain, on the back. “You are Team Three, now – ponimayu?”

  “Da.”

  “Hold here and be ready. As soon as we have the objective, we will meet Team Two on the coast for sea extraction – and get our beautiful black asses back to Moscow. Of course, anything can still happen – and I may still need you driving the Bronco.” He meant he might need them to be an accessory to a crime, probably some horrible one. “So be ready. But we are almost done here.”

  Misha looked positively jolly as he clapped the man on the back for a second time, almost knocking him down, then hefted his rifle and took off at a jog for the idling Orca, where Vasily and the others were already loaded up.

  They were all definitely driving the Bronco today.

  Horse Shit

  5km Northwest of Moscow

  “I don’t like Russia,” Private Simmonds said. “It smells like shit.”

  A big part of a troop sergeant’s job was discipline – keeping the men in line so their officer didn’t have to, as well as keeping them ready to do what needed doing, instead of fucking around. Jameson was already about to regret bringing Simmonds, but Staff Sergeant Eli grabbed him by the ear and dragged him around the tail of the plane in the pitch dark, hissing in his ear.

  “You’re going to be smelling it from a hell of a lot closer up if you don’t cut out the fucking chatter…”

  The rest of the team was crouched down in a defensive perimeter around the still and quiet Beechcraft, while Jameson consulted his paper maps – once again, no bloody GPS fix – which he had spread out on the left wing, just ahead of the open hatch, which also made up the fold-down stairs. He was making a quick improvised plan of action with Group Captain Gibson, the pilot, and still ranking officer on the mission.

  It was also Gibson who had pulled off the miracle of finding them an alternate landing strip in downtown Moscow. Even if, Jameson thought, sniffing the cold air, it really does smell like shit. Horse shit, specifically…

  It turned out the only open and unobstructed stretch of flat ground within marching distance of Red Square was the Moscow Hippodrome. Jameson knew shit didn’t stink for two years, so some horses must have somehow survived. But other than perhaps serving as a hopeful sign, a flicker of life in this dead place, it wasn’t his concern.

  He had his own shit to deal with.

  Starting with, as the map quickly made clear, a five-click tab across post-Apocalyptic Moscow to Red Square. And God even knew if their mission objective, the Kazakh named Aliyev, would even still be there, never mind alive, by the time they arrived. They’d need God on their side just to complete the journey intact themselves.

  “This looks like our best option, route-wise,” Jameson whispered to Gibson, tracing his finger on the map, which was illuminated with a red-lensed combat light attached to his vest.

  As he said this, Eli returned from his disciplinary errand. “Agreed,” he said. “Though we have no idea what we’re going to find inside the sodding city. So we’d better be ready to pivot.”

  “Agreed,” Jameson said. They were already making this up as they went along. And at this point, though not quite as cynical as Eli, Jameson saw no reason to think their luck was going to change.

  “Either way,” Gibson said, “I’ll be here when you get back.”

  “About that,” Jameson said. He knew this was another critical decision point. Did he leave men here to guard the plane? They were already under-manned. On the other hand, if anything happened to the aircraft, they were all going to die in Russia.

  Reading his mind, Gibson hefted an L22A2 carbin
e, with a short barrel, vertical foregrip, and suppressor on the end of the barrel. Jameson never saw him take it out of the cockpit, but knew the compact weapon had been designed for tank and APC crews for emergency action out of vehicle – and that a lot of pilots kept them handy for the same reason.

  Still Jameson hesitated and scanned the black horizon.

  Gibson said, “We’re a million miles from anything, and this place is enclosed by the viewing stands. If the dead had heard us land, they’d be here already. It’ll be fine. I’ll just hunker down, kick back, and reread The Sword of Honour trilogy until you rock back up.”

  Jameson traded a look with Eli, whose expression said it was the commander’s call. Jameson decided to believe Gibson – because he wanted to. He had no idea what they’d be facing in Red Square, and he wanted his team’s full strength going in there. He nodded, hefted his own weapon, and pulled his NVGs back down. In any case, they definitely needed to move out, smart-ish. But as he turned, he remembered one last thing.

  “Oh – radio Charlotte our new grid coordinates here. It will help if the plane, and the fuel for it, all end up in the same place.”

  Gibson nodded.

  Eli put the men in patrol formation.

  And Jameson led them into the still and silent darkness.

  * * *

  “Akela, there’s an outgoing transmission.”

  It was the radio operator, and Akela strode over to that station. “Is the message encrypted?”

  “It was. Decrypted now.”

  Thank you, Oleg Aliyev, Akela thought.

  “And as long as you speak English.”

  Akela did, reasonably well. The two sides of the conversation were short and to the point. “Give me a transcription,” he said. A minute later, he had it on his tablet and read it again. “Have you triangulated the source?”

  The radio op nodded. “Yes. It’s from within the city limits, to the northeast, roughly three to eight kilometers. It’s hard to get a perfect fix on distance with a transmission at ground level.”

  Akela squinted, then pointed the tablet outward, showing the map reference that had been read aloud in the transmission. “Is your fix consistent with these grid coordinates?”

  “Yes. Precisely.”

  Akela nodded. “Transmit this grid reference to Viper One. Then put me through.” When it had been done, he touched his headset. “Lyudmila. Receive that?”

  “Affirmative. We’re already up and moving.”

  “Good. Capture the plane and any personnel. I want them alive.”

  “No problem.”

  “There’s also another aircraft inbound, rotary-wing.”

  “Refueling bird?”

  “That’s my guess. The pilot’s a woman.” Akela could sense Lyudmila shrugging over the line. It was neither here nor there for her. The Red Army had been basically gender-neutral for decades. And it was far too late in the day, and the post-Apocalypse, to start getting sentimental about chivalry.

  “Get it done,” Akela said in closing. But as he signed off, he began to wonder: What else do you know, Oleg Aliyev?

  Moreover, and again, why was the Kazakh so important as to be worth a cross-continental rescue mission? As the original designer of Hargeisa, he could of course be invaluable in Britain’s own vaccine effort. But Akela had a funny feeling it was something else. That there was something the Kazakh wasn’t telling him.

  He got up and headed back to that interrogation room.

  Thirty seconds later, a communications specialist came into the TOC looking for him. But Akela hadn’t told anyone where he was going.

  “Just put it in e-mail,” the radio op said. “He’ll get it.”

  The specialist nodded – but hesitated.

  Shotgun Shell Shag

  Moscow – Northwest Edge of Red Square

  The first active undead that One Troop encountered were in Red Square itself. They managed the five-click march across Moscow virtually without contact – and without once waking the dead. They saw plenty of dormant Zulus, in ones, twos, and a few disturbingly large groups. But in every case they were able to detour around – or else clear a bottleneck with a few well-placed and silent shots.

  This was why only was One Troop was One Troop.

  By this point in the day, no other small infantry unit that Jameson knew of had spent half as much time in overrun territory, and lived to tell the tale. No other unit had anything like their skills in operating in areas denied by the dead. And no one but Jameson could run them like such a perfectly oiled machine. This was why he made the decision to lead the team on this mission himself – no other conductor could direct this orchestra of controlled violence. And the ten Marines he and Eli had picked were all first-chair players – the survivors of the survivors.

  So far, the men were more than validating the faith Jameson had placed in them – and they in him. They were back in the game. And doing what they did best.

  But as they moved in darkness and silence to the edge of Red Square, they realized what they faced now might be a challenge of a new order. There were more dead in the square than they’d seen anywhere else – a lot more. And they were moving. Someone had riled them up. Something had gone down here a lot more recently than the fall. Within hours, if Jameson was any judge.

  Maybe it was just the crash-landing of the helo flown by the man they were here to extract.

  Or maybe it had been something else.

  * * *

  “There,” Jameson whispered. “The helo.” He had his NVGs flipped up, using a magnifying night-vision monocular optic to scan the square.

  “Got it,” Eli whispered. It was pretty clearly a crash-landed helicopter, distinct even at this distance.

  “Now look past it – to the left.” Beyond it was a hulking shape. It was indistinct, but it had to be the tank being used as a hiding place by their presumptive rescuee, Oleg Aliyev. And, due to Sod’s Law, it was nearly at the far end of the damned gigantic square. Worse, staggering bodies were moving in front of it, in one direction and then the other, at regular intervals.

  “Maybe we should have left a few of the lads behind after all,” Eli whispered. He didn’t mean he was worried about Gibson or the plane. He meant moving the group of a dozen men through the shifting labyrinth of the overrun square was going to be a tricky business.

  “Think we should split up?” Jameson whispered back, pocketing his optic and pulling his NVGs back down. “Two search teams?”

  Eli considered, then shook his head. “Nah. I don’t like splitting us up. Not this deep in the woods.”

  “Okay. We’ll make it work. One column, you and me, top and tail.” Eli was, frankly, a better route-picker than Jameson. He had some preternatural way of sensing dead, or any kind of trouble, before the others blundered into it.

  Eli squinted as he scanned the terrain. “Reckon our best move is to slip around the perimeter on the left. Stay fast and silent, dodge if we can, shoot to clear if we have to.”

  “With a nice solid wall on our left.”

  “Precisely.”

  Jameson let Eli move out and stood watch as the rest of the column slithered by. Ten Marines, weapons up, kit cinched down and squared away for silence, moving heel-toe in boots far too well broken in to ever squeak.

  As the last man slipped by, Jameson fell in at the rear. And he started stealing looks over his own shoulder.

  At ten-second intervals.

  * * *

  There were too many dead on their feet and moving around for One Troop’s comfort. But there were also an awful lot of them destroyed and on the ground – almost all wearing the greatcoats the Red Army had used to get through the kinds of hellish winters that doomed the invasions of both Napoleon and Hitler.

  Led by Eli, One Troop stuck to the shadows. A line of sad-looking trees on the left side of the square fronted what looked like a lot of expensive shops. Jameson clocked a Louis Vuitton store before he got his attention focused back on what counted – the
dead, and staying the hell away from them. The trees and doorways provided a little cover – but only for a couple of Marines at a time, so they were starting to get strung out.

  They were also having to stop for long-ish periods to let the wandering stars of the dead wander on by again. So far they’d only had to take down two – both of which Eli dispatched with his knife in perfect silence. And they were now what looked to Jameson to be a little more than halfway down the length of the square. The gaudy onion domes of St. Basil’s Cathedral on the south edge were starting to loom, somehow seeming colorful even in monochrome night-vision green and black. And the massive open expanse of the square seemed to want to suck them out there, like the vacuum of space.

  In not much longer, they were going to have to leave the safety of the shadows and venture out into the open square. They moved swiftly and silently past the sad and hunched shape of what looked like it had once been a very nice helicopter. It also had a small pile of bodies beside its open side cargo door.

  In another minute they came even with the tank, which was closer in to the edge of the square. One lucky thing. And, so far, they’d managed to slip by all the undead guardians of Moscow without drawing attention.

  Long may our luck hold, Jameson thought.

  They’d been in similar situations many times. But never so far from home, so cut off from any support. And definitely never with so much on the line. Usually, it had just been their own lives. Now the One Troop commander knew their lives were the least of it. He was having to shift his operational focus. His priority could no longer be safeguarding the lives of his men. It could only be safeguarding the life of a single man.

  One he had never even met, and might not even like.

  Maybe Dusseldorf was a dress rehearsal, he thought. There, he’d had to spend the lives of good men, with whom he had served for years and been closer to than brothers, all for a dismantled pile of machine. A bloody piece of equipment. But he couldn’t afford to get too philosophical right now. He had to focus on the job in front of his face. And just get it done.

  Taking a couple of deep breaths, he started to move up, passing each man in the column in turn, touching each lightly on the back or shoulder. In thirty seconds he was up in the lead position with Eli. And he made a decision.