He thought of the millions relying on them back in Britain, with the final noose of death and doom closing around London. His memory ranging out from there, he remembered his cousin, back in his hometown of Canterbury – seeing her face, so familiar and previously so lovely, through his scope in the battle there. Knowing he had come too late to save her.
And that all he could do was put her down.
Was he now too late to save everyone else? Or were he and his single squad of Marines just too little? Was he too weak, too frail? Or maybe just too damned unsure.
Jameson thought of the little girl, Josie, who had come out of the Channel with the Tunnelers – a vision of perfect innocence, deserving so much better than she was likely to get. And not even old enough to understand what was happening to her – only knowing terror and abandonment, separated as she had been from her mother. And what could Amarie be feeling in that moment, what was she going through even then? Jameson could scarcely imagine. Would mother and daughter ever be reunited? Would either of them even survive? Or were they doomed to not live out the week?
The weight of those fifty million lives back home was crushing. But it was also abstract. Josie and Amarie were real, and concrete, and totally vivid to him. He could picture both of them perfectly, the beautiful face and bright eyes of Amarie, the perfect and vulnerable alabaster skin of the little girl.
And in that moment, Jameson decided.
He wasn’t going to let them suffer the same fate as his cousin. And he wouldn’t let Josie never see her mum again. Even if it meant the deaths of him and all his Marines. Or all but one. One of them would retrieve the Kazakh, and his zombie-killing virus, and get him and it the hell out of there. And get them both back.
There was simply no choice. They had to.
And Jameson was going to make sure they did.
* * *
Thirty seconds later, as he was about to hail Thomas to come take over the post, Thomas came and found him.
“Sir!” he said. “You need to get up top.”
Jameson rose and moved out and up. As he mounted the stairs, he asked over his shoulder, “Preview?”
“It’s Sanders.”
But by then he was already leaping up, powering his combat-loaded body up three stairs at a time. The burning of lactic acid in his legs made him flash back to climbing for dear life up that building in Dusseldorf. But, amazingly, this mission was more important. And he had a bad feeling it was going to be even more costly.
“Sitrep,” he said as he hit the open air of the roof.
Eli just pointed out across the square, while Croucher handed him the binos, and the RTO pressed a phone handset on him. “Report,” he said over the radio. But even as Sanders answered in a calm whisper, Jameson could see it.
“Two-man patrol coming out of the target structure.”
“Got it,” Jameson said. He gritted his teeth – kicking himself again for leaving only a single man there. There was no way Sanders could capture two by himself – not two Alfa operators. He decided in an instant. “Kill them both. Single headshots. Do not fucking miss. And don’t cause a ruckus. Acknowledge and confirm.”
“Acknowledged.”
“Do it now. And do not fuck this up.”
Jameson knew this plan was supremely dangerous, and could go wrong in a thousand ways – not to mention that it was supremely brutal and cold-blooded. But it was also necessary. And the time for kid gloves was over. There was simply no way the rest of them could get over there in time.
And they had to get inside that building.
Jameson panned the binos left and picked out Sanders leaning around the edge of the tomb, a tiny green-and-black shadow nestled among deeper shadows, raising his rifle. He then panned right, his gaze settling on the two Russian soldiers. Without a sound, the one on the right one crumpled to the ground.
The second spun around electrically, dropping into a crouch and raising his weapon. He didn’t check on his teammate. He merely pulled his rifle into his shoulder and leaned into it, ready to engage.
His head jerked once.
And he fell over the body of his fallen comrade.
And that was it.
“Everyone downstairs,” Jameson said. “We step off in two minutes.”
* * *
Exactly two minutes later, the full team was mustered on the ground floor, and Jameson gave them final instructions. There was no more time for planning. They were going to have to rely on their skills, experience, and training as a team, and on their resourcefulness and resolve.
“Listen up,” Jameson said, scanning faces, NVGs pulled down in front of helmets all around. “There’s no more time for creeping around dodging the dead. As soon as that patrol doesn’t report in, that’s us fucked. So we’re going to push straight across the square – hard and fast, but silent as long as we can. Anything gets in your way, put it down. And keep moving.”
Jameson looked to Eli. He had nothing to add.
“And when we get inside that building, we’re all going to have to move a million miles an hour. This isn’t zombie-fighting, and slow-and-steady is not going to win the race. We’re facing not only human opponents, but seriously fucking talented ones. Killers who know how it’s done. We stop, we slow, we get jammed up in there… and none of us are ever getting out. You got me?”
He considered adding that if they got jammed up, everyone they knew and loved back home was also going to die. But that went without saying. Also, he didn’t want to put any more weight on their shoulders, no more than every man there felt already. Anyway, that burden, of completing the mission, was his alone.
He exhaled before concluding.
“Don’t stop, don’t trip – and, whatever you do… don’t miss.”
He turned and pulled open the door.
And Major Jameson led the way out, first and fiercest.
Hollenbaugh Shot
The Stronghold – Handon and Henno’s Trench
“Handon, it’s Juice – the Russians got the mission objective. Patient Zero has left the building.”
Well, so much for an easy conclusion to their mission. So much for luck. But as he exhaled and reset, Handon figured he should be used to this kind of shit by now. It did keep happening. And of course there was only one thing to be done now – track down those thieving sons of bitches.
And get their goddamned zombie back.
* * *
“Copy,” Handon said from down below. “Now I need you to suppress the MG that’s got us pinned, then put the bird on the deck and extract us. Because the bad guys are getting away.”
Ali didn’t respond to this, letting Juice deal with comms. She merely gritted her teeth and followed the stream of full-auto rounds still pouring onto Handon and Henno’s heads. Its source was one of the guard towers, where a medium machine gun was hammering their position.
The Russian helo may have gone. But they were still in the middle of the Islamist Stronghold, surrounded by over a hundred armed Somalis – and, despite the fact that neither Alpha nor al-Shabaab had kicked it off, this had in fact turned into a gunfight.
And right now they were on the losing end of it.
Pushing her vision out farther, Ali quickly determined the MG wasn’t the only threat targeting Handon and Henno. Surviving fighters on the walls were following its tracers, adding their fire. It was like they’d been whipped into a frenzy to have a vulnerable, pinned-down target to shoot at – taking out their frustration at having the shit hammered out of them by Spetsnaz, perhaps.
But the machine gunner had to die first.
Only Ali didn’t have a shot. The emplacement was well designed, with only the barrel protruding – and the Seahawk would have to basically descend right in front of it for Ali to shoot inside. And while the PKP machine gun didn’t have the steel-shredding power of a minigun, she was pretty sure Reich and Muralles weren’t going to be enthusiastic about having 800 rounds per minute of 7.62 coming right at their faces.
Ali pushed her mind into overdrive for a solution.
And then a solution came and found her. A door on the side of the guard tower opened, a fighter dashed out of it – and he didn’t close the door behind him. As Ali squinted into her scope, she saw most of this tower, like the rest of them, was covered with that scrap-looking steel plate.
“Time to channel Don Hollenbaugh!” Ali shouted. “Move!” She needed Kate’s spot to do this. And they were going to be out of view of the doorway in seconds.
“No!” Kate said. “I can do it!”
She pulled in her rifle, sighted in – and started putting rapid shots through the doorway. Firing fast, she panned her aim up then down, left then right. At about shot fifteen, the machine gun went silent. They could even see its barrel tilt up toward the sky. She’d done it – banked her rounds off the back wall into the gunner inside.
“Handon – go!” Ali shouted over the squad net. But even as she said it, she could already see him and Henno leaping out and sprinting for better cover.
When she glanced over at Kate, the other woman was smiling at her. “Master Sergeant Hollenbaugh, right?”
The kind of trick shot she had just pulled off had been made locally famous by Delta operator Don Hollenbaugh, who singlehandedly defended an entire rooftop in Fallujah after most of the forty Marines he went in with were wounded. Eventually, last man standing, he had prevented the building from being overrun by shuffling among all six positions on the roof, singlehandedly keeping 150 attackers at bay. At certain points, he’d had to make shots on guys he couldn’t even see – and did it by banking rounds off hard surfaces into their backs.
Ali nodded. “Yeah, exactly. How’d you learn that one?”
Kate said, “Kwan, our Bravo, taught it to me. How about you?”
Ali shrugged. “Don Hollenbaugh taught it to me.”
* * *
But then Ali quickly got her rifle back up and her head down, because they still had three men in heavy contact on the ground. Her first order of business was checking that guard tower, to make sure no one else jumped back on that MG. But it turned out this wasn’t going to be a problem.
Because as Ali glassed it, the entire structure went up in a blistering fireball, hundred-foot flames shooting out the firing ports even as the walls disintegrated, a column of black smoke climbed into the sky, wood and steel shrapnel and debris shot out and rained down across the entire courtyard – and out beyond it, onto the heads of the dead, who didn’t care, or notice.
As the thunderclap roar of the explosion echoed over the surrounding forest, the shockwave caught the orbiting Seahawk, picking it up and shaking it, and sending Ali, Kate, and Juice tumbling the full length of their safety harnesses, which went taut and jerked them to painful stops. Finally, the blast wave passed through, leaving them still flying.
Ali’s first thought was that Kate had hit some heavy ordnance inside the guard tower, and it had taken a few seconds to cook off. But as she opened her eyes, which had slammed shut from the bright light, pummeling noise, and overpressure, she now saw the thing she had expected to see earlier.
Emerging from the heart of the settling explosion, whipping away smoke and falling debris with its rotors, shark-nose angled down and forward like a great white, another helicopter blasted out into the heat-distorted air over the courtyard.
And another missile was already slipping off the rail on its right stub wing, riding on a blistering trail of fire straight into the guard tower directly opposite the one just destroyed – which now also erupted in an identical maelstrom of flame, smoke, noise, and blast wave. Bracing for the shockwave, Ali gritted her teeth, which rattled in her head.
Well, there’s my damned attack helo, she thought.
She knew she hadn’t imagined it. And it wasn’t a great white. No, it was worse. It was a Kamov Ka-50, known as the Chornaya Akula.
A Black Shark.
And that was the last look Ali was going to get at it for a while. The Seahawk pilots up front were already jumping through their own asses to get them really the hell far away from there. Because Seahawk versus Black Shark was not a sea-creature fight you wanted to be on the losing end of.
* * *
Handon and Henno covered their heads as flaming debris rained down around them. They had just reached hard cover – a wooden structure that abutted the outer wall – and even with guard towers exploding over their heads, they still stacked up on either side of the door. Handon kicked it in, and charged the heavy side, left, while Henno went right.
Handon ran straight into three armed men, looking like they were hiding out in there. But they also raised their weapons, so Handon put them down with rapid shots to center of mass, even as he heard Henno’s suppressed rifle chug behind him. By the time he spun around, Henno had cleared his side and shut the door.
Another crushing explosion echoed from outside – and Handon got to a window just in time to see the constituent parts of another guard tower, and its occupants, raining over a wide area. He was also just in time to see their Seahawk taking off like a fly out from under an incoming swatter, disappearing over the eastern wall and out of sight.
Fair enough, Handon thought. He wouldn’t want to be sharing the air with a Russian attack helo either. But he hailed Juice, to tell him to address the damned problem – to get their top cover into the fight. They had air dominance. They just needed to use it.
“Already on it, top,” Juice answered back.
But for the moment the Black Shark was alone in the air over the Stronghold, and it came around again, like it was on such a kill-crazy rampage that it hadn’t noticed the Seahawk, or couldn’t be bothered to chase it. Most likely, it just didn’t consider it a threat. Now its side-mounted autocannon started up, firing short bursts of 30-mil and sweeping the remaining defenders off the walls.
Correction, Handon thought, hunkered down at the corner of the window and peering out at the gratuitous violence. It was actually exploding them off the walls. He was pretty sure those were 30mm explosive incendiary rounds, each of which had an explosive charge for blast, casing fragments for shrapnel, and a zirconium ring to ignite anything flammable, at up to 1,000 degrees Celsius. Basically, not the kind of thing an unarmored person wanted to see coming at him while standing on a wooden stockade.
In seconds, the parapets were coming apart, the al-Shabaab guys on it disintegrating, and the walls themselves burning.
Handon shook his head in wonder. That Black Shark was just pouring down hate and discontent like a mother. He wondered where so much hatred would come from. The Russians already had what they came for. Why murder everyone after they had their prize?
Maybe some guys were just built that way.
Clown Cannon
Stronghold – Another Hole
Al-Sîf attempted to calm his rapid breathing, crouching down at the bottom of his own hole. Like Baxter, he’d gotten down in one fast as soon as the shit kicked off – just not quick enough to avoid getting shot, luckily in his own armor plate. He tapped it gratefully – but then immediately stopped.
Even tapping hurt like hell.
He had been shot twice in the chest with some seriously big, fast bullets, about one second before the American got shot in the back and went down in front of him. Luckily, the shooter had then switched fire to al-Sîf’s minions. By the time they were dead and on the ground, al-Sîf was thirty yards away in this hole.
And here he had stayed, despite the sounds of the battle raging around him – and the panicked shouts and cries of his own men on the radio, and on the open air. He felt absolutely no sense of responsibility for their welfare, no desire to organize or lead them. His sole motivation was to somehow get out of there alive.
Shortly after the guard towers started exploding, he heard the sound, then felt the shadow, of a sleek and fast-moving helicopter cruising by overhead. Hunting. And al-Sîf had the unmistakeable sensation of being a rabbit when the shadow of the hawk passes by – feeling that
primal panic when the predator shape blots out the light.
And he could tell that predator was reducing this place out from under him. He had to get out before it was all embers and rubble. He eased his head up above ground level. The first thing he saw was one of the fighters he had abandoned.
The man stood at the base of the north wall and fired an RPG up toward the rear of the helicopter. Seeing it for the first time, al-Sîf didn’t know what kind it was, or who flew it. He only knew he didn’t want any. It looked scary as hell, all muscular lines and sharp angles, its engines and rotors roaring, wings bristling with row upon row of weapons.
As al-Sîf watched, the RPG gunner made a direct hit – and the helicopter simply shrugged it off. The blast didn’t even look like it scratched the paint. Reacting instantly, it spun in place like a weathervane and snap-fired a pair of rockets into the spot where the RPG gunner stood.
The man disappeared in the rippling double explosion.
Al-Sîf watched frozen as debris and wood shrapnel shot out the bottom of the wall. And then the wood groaned, loud enough to be heard over the gunfire, explosions, and engine noise, as the entire section, all forty feet of it, shuddered and fell forward, finally crashing into the mud like a drawbridge coming down.
And one second later, using it just like a drawbridge, the dead came charging across it – hundreds of them, most of which had already been pressed up against the other side, stacked ten feet high. Now the wall was breached. And very soon the thousands of undead bastards in the singularity outside would all be inside.
Al-Sîf seriously had to go.
But before he could overcome the paralysis of his muscles, he saw something else. It was his pet white boy, Baxter, leaping out of another of the trenches like he’d been launched from a clown cannon. He then went sprinting across open ground toward one of the buildings on the wall, clutching his rifle, head ducked low.
With the flood of dead rushing right behind him.
ARISEN, Book Eleven - Deathmatch Page 13
