Both sides were conserving ammo now, as both had only been able to hump so much through the bush. Juice knew from long experience that ounces added up to pounds, and pounds equaled pain – and, worse than pain, they made you slow. Probably no one out here was down to their last few mags yet. But they could all see it coming. So this was more like a cat and mouse game now, than a balls-out firefight.
There were two Spetsnaz positions Juice had been trading rounds with. He saw the dude in the right one pop, presumably after a move or a mag change. Before the dude could acquire and engage, Juice put two right into the poor bastard’s EOTech sight, and smiled as the guy went down. But then he popped a foot over, still on his feet – how he had survived being shot through his sight was beyond Juice – but he was at least reduced to using his back-up iron sights.
But he was using them well. Now Juice had to move again.
Handon was still briefing him. They were all having to do all kinds of shit while fighting. But the ability to do everything at once was why they got the big bucks. There were no time outs in gunfights. “When the UCAV comes on station, I want an immediate attack run, on an east to west vector – right up the river channel. No recon. Just come in fast and hard.”
Juice nodded. Smart – don’t give them a chance to get SAMs up. “Roger that, wilco.”
“A couple of 250-pound JDAMs on that riverbank ought to mess up Ivan’s day pretty well.”
“Roger that. Will instruct the pilot and come back to you when we’ve got ten seconds to cover up.”
“Copy that. Let’s put the damage in.”
* * *
Hailey’s first attack run on the convoy was like ducks in a barrel – except with no barrel. The poor bastards were all laid out right in a row, exposed and vulnerable in open desert. It was like the highway of death in Desert Storm all over again. Nowhere to run and nowhere to hide.
By coming at them straight on, with her exhaust facing away, Hailey increased her survivability if they did have heat-seeking SAMs. If on the other hand they had laser-guided ones, like the Starstreaks, then it might be a short attack run.
She also kept her airspeed up, to make it harder to get a laser on her. And she came in on them so fast they couldn’t react before exploding cannon rounds were tearing through their column, seventy per second. They’d barely looked up before she had blasted past them, a hundred feet over their heads.
She banked sharply and brought it back around to check the result, and found her gun run had disabled two of the trucks. Both were stopped on the road and pointed at odd angles, one of them lying on its side. She could see the survivors climbing out. But the main result, and the one she was really looking for, was that the six other vehicles had peeled off to either side, like a cloverleaf, reversing direction and hauling ass back toward that last river valley. They’d be trying to get under cover, away from the steel rain splashing damage on their heads.
Ha – they’ve seen nothing, Hailey thought, arming her first Damnation ground-attack missile. As she came around to take them from behind, she saw they were no longer keeping their spacing – this was now a panicked rout.
Perfect. BOHICA, boys – bend over, here it comes again…
But then she saw a blossoming of fire, and four streams of bright tracers tore through the sky at her. It was a four-barreled DuSHKa – a 12.7mm anti-aircraft gun, or four of them, really – mounted in the back of one of the open-bed trucks. This was a fairly serious threat, but dangerous mainly to helos or slower fixed-wing aircraft. Hailey was moving too fast for this guy to hit her, on what was going to be her last pass anyway.
DuSHKa Guy can’t touch me, she thought, banking around again. I’m too fast, too pretty…
She figured she’d better update the ground team. “Cadaver from Thunderchild, be advised: convoy has reversed direction, and is scattering back into cover one valley up from yours.”
“Copy that, Thunderchild. Nice job.”
“I’m tipping in to finish them now.”
She lined up her attack run on the asses of the retreating vehicles, locking in her targets, finger hovering over the weapons-release trigger. The surviving vehicles raced at full speed now toward the forest cover of the treeline ahead of them. And they were actually going to get pretty close.
But they weren’t going to make it.
The DuSHKa gunner was triggering off at her desperately from the rear vehicle. It was going fast enough that, with Hailey coming in from behind, his odds were slightly better.
Then again, they still weren’t great.
And in just a few seconds, it was going to be: No more Mr. DuSHKa Guy. He and his buddies were about to be nothing but meat and metal.
Hailey’s finger twitched on the trigger.
Airburst
Over Central Somalia
With unbeatable target lock, and two seconds to weapons release, both the F-35 and the convoy racing toward the treeline at the edge of the river valley, Hailey shot a quick look down to her RWR – the radar warning receiver. The panel was still and silent. But it was at least conceivable they had been keeping a heat-seeking SAM in reserve.
Her finger tensed on the weapons-release trigger, and her eyes flicked back up – just as the RWR went apeshit, yanking her gaze back down. But then she saw it wasn’t the RWR, but the smaller LWR alongside it – the laser warning receiver.
She was being marked with a targeting laser.
And as her gaze rocketed up and forward again, she was confronted with the last thing on Earth she expected to see.
The Black Shark.
It was climbing straight up from the river valley ahead, like Venus rising from the sea – and from behind the heavy forest on both sides of the river, which had completely concealed it from both sight and radar. It was also rising on a pillar of cloud – the thick and billowing smoke trails of four Vikhr missiles already blasting off its stub wings.
And all four of them coming right at Hailey’s face.
* * *
Now she had to do everything at once: going evasive – accelerating, banking steeply, and pulling up – while simultaneously switching her fire control to ASRAAMs, releasing two of the missiles, and making a mayday call to the Kennedy, or whoever was listening.
The one thing she didn’t have to deal with was countermeasures. The plane did that itself, or rather its electronic warfare/countermeasure system did, instantly blasting out a dozen flares and two big clouds of chaff, while also emitting radio-frequency countermeasures to confuse the Vikhrs into exploding early, reversing direction, or plowing straight into the Earth.
But Hailey knew the Black Shark pilot had nailed this, releasing the weapons at the perfect range: just far enough to aim, acquire, and arm – but too close to evade or counter. Even worse, Hailey realized in the single drawn-out second left to her that the range to enemy contact was inside the effective range of her ASRAAMs. But it was also just outside the effective range of her autocannon.
Not that she was going to get to use that.
Technology was great. But aircraft were flown by people, and stealth didn’t help when the enemy saw you coming a mile away. The human being was still, as it always had been, the most dangerous weapon. And the pilot of this Black Shark, whatever nameless badass he was, must have hugged the forest line, blades brushing the foliage, wheels inches from the deck, then followed it all the way around, and finally hid away in the middle of this river valley, biding his time – and setting the perfect trap.
And Thunderchild had walked right into it.
Nonetheless, her countermeasure system was unrivaled, and she’d reacted quickly. As outrageous G-forces tore at Hailey’s body and brain, and the aircraft shrieked around her and struggled to survive, the Vikhrs started detonating, set off by chaff or EW jamming – one, two, three explosions erupting to her right and rear – and she thought for one instant she was actually going to survive this, struggling to hold the turn and keep from blacking out…
But the fou
rth one, the very last, she actually saw streaking up in the corner of her eye. It was one too many. And it set itself off by proximity airburst. When it exploded, it couldn’t have been twenty meters from her cockpit. Her canopy glass cracked and shattered, the airframe buckled and twisted around her, and – her overloaded nervous system taking a second to signal it – hot pains erupted all along the right side of her body.
Struggling both to breathe and to keep her eyes open, she tried to point the aircraft north, back in the direction of the Kennedy… and then she willed her kitten-weak finger toward the autopilot button…
As darkness descended over her vision.
* * *
The radar warning receiver in the Black Shark sounded strangely similar to the one in the F-35, but it was having a totally different effect. Though Bazarov was fighting to maintain bowel control, beside him Nina was doing what she had been fully prepared to do from the start.
Her own missiles away, and the F-35’s ASRAAMs on their way in, she put their nose down and right and jammed the collective forward, diving them and shedding altitude at a rate that solved Bazarov’s bowel control problem – nothing inside his body was going anywhere but up now.
As they plummeted back down into the river valley and behind the treeline, the ASRAAMs were too close to correct. First one, then the other exploded in the trees – the last close enough to pick them up and shake them, and pepper their tail with shrapnel.
But then they leveled out, and Nina flew away – laughing.
The hunting ground was hers again.
* * *
“Nice fucking job,” Misha said to Nina, from the middle of his own fight. “Stand by.” He passed the radio handset back to the RTO – who just handed it back to him five seconds later.
“Go ahead,” he said, not bothering to duck down, but shooting steadily, trying to get enough of a bead on the slippery sons of bitches encircling them to put one down. They kept slithering out of his sights. Plus shooting pretty damned well themselves.
It was the radar operator on their Akula. “New enemy air contact, inbound your position. ETA eight minutes.”
Misha grunted. “Signature?”
“It shows as UCAV drone – based on the Grumman X-47B. Which is excellent news.”
“This is good news?”
“Da. Right now it’s flying blind and uncontrolled, with the American carrier’s transmitters down. Electronic warfare officer says he can hack it.”
“Fucking outstanding! How long?”
“About two minutes, no problem. Just in time to drop bombs on their heads instead of yours.”
Misha grunted again, then laughed. “Ha, ha, ha, ha. We’re in ur base – hackin’ ur drones! Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha…!”
He put his eye back down to his HDS, wishing for once he had a magnifying optic. Because he’d really like to see the face of the American commander when his own UAV came in and bombed his ass flat.
When drones attack, bitches…
* * *
Baxter was in serious trouble now, even worse than before. Everywhere he moved, the shooters opposite him seemed to know it in advance, and rounds were thwacking into everything around him almost before he got there. It was all he could do to take occasional aimed shots – and not well aimed ones.
He could hardly move at all now. He was pinned down.
He didn’t even realize that Henno to his left, and Ali behind him, were taking up most of the slack in his sector. He only knew – and he believed this in his bones – that he was going to get shot in the next second. He couldn’t stand up in this storm forever – or even for another minute.
But then he heard a jet engine approaching overhead, and for the first time thought he might survive this after all. It was their air support. And it was going to relieve the terrible pressure on them, and do what Baxter couldn’t – kill some of these gunfighting demons out there, before one of them killed him.
Something exploded.
But it exploded in the trees overhead. Super-heated gases and debris blasted down on Baxter’s helmet. Followed by the top half of a tree.
He ducked down and covered his head with both hands.
* * *
“Blue on blue!” Handon shouted to Juice on the radio. “Abort, abort! Wrong target coords!” He’d also been hit with falling tree branches. And only his assault suit had saved him from some sharp, red-hot splinters of tree shrapnel.
Juice sounded strangely resigned when he responded. “I don’t have comms with the drone pilot. There’s no response.”
Handon squinted in desperate thought. This would be the worst possible luck in the world – fried comms at the exact moment the UAV was bombing friendly positions, instead of enemy ones. Unless…
“I think we’ve lost control of the asset,” Juice said.
But before he could elaborate, Handon heard the UCAV blasting in again from the opposite direction. And as it zoomed overhead, he could hear the tiny whistle of the next munition coming in.
He swore under his breath. A minute ago they were about to dominate the battlespace with two aircraft, waiting for the drone to arrive and bail them out of this ugly firefight. Now it was here – and it was bailing the enemy out. Which meant they were twice as fucked as they had been before, which was already pretty fucked.
Handon ducked down and covered up his own head.
* * *
Juice slithered out of his ruck, jammed his back up to a tree, and tore into the pack – coming out with a chunky electronic device, looking like a walkie talkie with a ten-digit keyboard and a big-ass rubberized antenna. It was a mil-spec handheld portable radio scanner. Thirty seconds later, during which half the tree behind him got chewed through by incoming fire, he knew what he needed to know.
“Handon, Juice!”
“Go!”
“The control signal for that drone is not originating from the Kennedy!”
“You sure?”
No, Juice wasn’t sure. With only one device and one antenna, he could only do half-assed radio direction-finding. But it seemed to be coming from farther north than where the carrier was parked. One thing he could tell for sure, though – while it was the right frequency for a drone control channel, the energy of the transmission was lower than it ought to be.
But he didn’t have time to explain any of that, so he just said, “No, not sure about the signal source! But we can’t raise the pilot and the aircraft’s dropping bombs on our heads. Taken together, I call that compelling!”
“So it’s been hacked.”
Juice had no desire to tell him I told you so. “Affirmative! But I can hack it back!”
“What – how?”
Juice patted his pack. “The Mini GCS I swiped from Zorn! But I can’t do it from here! I need a more powerful transmitter, and a bigger antenna, so I can overwhelm their control signal!”
“Too bad we don’t have either of those lying around.”
“We totally have those lying around – in the crashed Seahawk! It’s got a skin-mounted HF radio antenna – plus there should still be a shitload of power left in its APU.”
There was a pause on the other end, as Handon thought through this, but it wasn’t a long one. “Do it. Ali – get up on the line. Take Juice’s position.”
Juice raised his rifle, faced forward – and started putting out brutal covering fire, so Ali might make it to him alive. And he started sucking deep breaths of air, topping up on oxygen.
Because he was about to have to haul some serious ass.
For Queen and Country
Moscow – Alfa Group Bunker
Jesus, Jameson thought, pulling himself to his feet, fighting against waves of adrenaline and nausea, and moving out ahead of Sanders and Halldon again, as they continued to sweep through the sprawling underground bunker. His instant of hesitation in his first real engagement with Spetsnaz had very nearly resulted in his death. Only Halldon’s coolness and quick reactions had saved him.
Jameson now r
ealized with a cold shock that he was going to have to stay precisely focused on each task the instant he had to perform it – or he was going to get killed, and fast.
Nonetheless, he couldn’t stop thinking about the fact that he’d just shot a living human being – for the first time in years. They’d encountered few survivors, hostile or otherwise, on their long trek across Europe after the fall. And before the ZA, on his one tour of Libya, and another of Syria, he had generally been unable to tell whether he’d personally hit anyone. In most cases, it was air strikes that took the enemy out.
As Jameson and his team moved quickly but smoothly forward through the night-vision-green darkness and constricting maze of the bunker, heel-toe, rifles panning, heads on swivels, Jameson blinked hard to clear his head. Killing the living was what was required now – to save everyone left alive. To save his countrymen. For Queen and country, maybe. Because if he didn’t…
The Russians were definitely going to do it to him first.
This was a fight to the death.
And his job now was to stay alive long enough to find their objective, the Kazakh – and do whatever killing was required to make that happen. As they moved forward, and the scale of this place became evident, Jameson realized they were never going to be able to clear it all. Not before the defenders, who must outnumber them badly, organized and counter-attacked. Right now, they had surprise and speed going for them.
But that advantage was going to evaporate fast.
So while he scanned and shot, Jameson also yanked open doors – every one he passed. Any locked ones, he shot open. Aliyev had to be behind one of them. As he moved, shot, and searched, Jameson radioed his fire team leaders for updates.
* * *
“Eli, Croucher, sitrep.”
Eli was named first, so he went first. “No joy yet. No casualties.”
“No sign. No casualties.” That was Croucher.
Eli shook his head minutely in the dark. That no one was hit yet was great – but he knew in his bones that every second they stayed down here dinged the odds that any of them would ever get out alive. With or without the Kazakh.
ARISEN, Book Eleven - Deathmatch Page 27
