In the dark heart of the Horn of Africa, our shadow wars rage.
But beneath the violence and terror, a bioengineered serial killer lurks.
Come back with ARISEN and live through the beginning of the end of the world…
First published 2012 by Complete & Total Asskicking Books
London, UK
Copyright © Michael Stephen Fuchs
The right of Michael Stephen Fuchs to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any other means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the author. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
About the Author
Michael Stephen Fuchs is co-author, with Glynn James, of the bestselling ARISEN series of spec-ops zombie-apocalypse dark action thrillers. He is also the author of the D-BOYS series of high-concept, high-tech special-operations military adventure novels, which include D-BOYS, COUNTER-ASSAULT, and CLOSE QUARTERS BATTLE (coming in 2013); as well as the acclaimed existential cyberthrillers THE MANUSCRIPT and PANDORA’S SISTERS, both published worldwide by Macmillan in hardback, paperback and all e-book formats. He is represented by Robert Gottlieb, Chairman of Trident Media Group in New York. He lives in London and at www.michaelstephenfuchs.com, and blogs at www.michaelfuchs.org/razorsedge.
ARISEN : GENESIS
Michael Stephen Fuchs
PART ONE
“What is this that thou hast done?”
– Genesis, 3.13
Command & Control
The Horn of Africa.
That ungainly protuberance jutting out of the eastern edge of the continent of darkness, like a knee to the groin of modernity. Somalia, Ethiopia, Djibouti, and Eritrea, all places of various madness and horror, and surrounded on all sides by countries that can’t even be called sane by comparison: Sudan, Yemen, Uganda, Saudi Arabia.
The Horn of Africa suppurates, like a wound, like an open sore.
A man with a totally unreadable expression sat at his station, in his little Tactical Operations Center, tucked up inside his safehouse. Safe? Maybe. But also surrounded on all sides by the Horn, for many leagues in every direction. What did this man know about this place and its pathologies? Everything. Because this was his station, this was his place of work. This was also where he came from – though he’d stop far short of calling it home. And this was the place some dark part of him felt certain he would never live long enough to escape.
This was surely the place where he would die.
Across the years, at intervals, the Horn of Africa, that sucking chest wound on the corpus of the world, had occasionally looked like it might scab over, finally clot, perhaps even grow some healthy living flesh: decent society, consensual government, the rule of law, all those blandishments of western civilization. The man in the safehouse also knew something about all of that. Because he had lived both inside and outside of the west.
And all things being equal, he much preferred inside.
The man tried to keep these thoughts out of his mind, and especially off his face, as he sat at his station and serenely monitored a half-dozen displays mounted in a jagged hemisphere around him. These screens displayed team manifests, local systems status, real-time mission data – and, in particular, and most critically, live drone video of all the ops that he supported around the region. All this mischief the men of the west make, trying to expand the fragile circle of civilization…
But the spirit of the western world never did find a body to inhabit here. Because that scab, it always got picked off again, seemingly obsessively – by the dirty fingernails of civil war, new rounds of atrocity and retaliation, cross-border raids and brushfire conflict, power grabs by new and ever more depraved warlords. Weirder warlords, worse warlords yet, commanding armies of child war criminals, raping on an industrial scale, hacking off hands and noses.
And behind these atrocity artists, waiting in the wings of this theater of maximal horror, there were those ever-attendant walk-on players: famine, and drought, and nightmare epidemics. The warlords didn’t make these things. But they damn sure made them possible, and made them a hell of a lot more lethal.
So why was this man, the one with the inscrutable expression and the God-like views from up above it all, why was he here in the first place? Because this was where the a-Q franchises were now. And al-Qaeda had America’s attention. Charles Taylor, Idi Amin, Mugabe, all those legacy assholes could rape and murder and impoverish to their black hearts’ content, and they’d disturb only page A-42 of The Washington Post.
Because they only murdered African people.
But put together a few remnants of a-Q, that extended dysfunctional Islamist family who got lucky in New York once, on that beautiful September morning, and watch out. Because here come elite American SOF units, and combined joint task forces, and newly paved runways heaving with Hellfire-armed UAVs. And also the analysts, and operatives, and shooters, in battalion strength, sent forth from a certain three-letter U.S. government agency.
This agency was often referred to in military and paramilitary circles as OGA – for “other government agency” – especially when its involvement in an operation or area was an open secret. Or there was that classic term from old pulp novels, the Company… or Langley, a synecdoche less well-known but inspiring greater dread than the White House… or, occasionally, tongue half in cheek, Christians In Action. Or just the Agency.
This man with the stony poker face, who sat in the secure and high-tech safehouse, was a long-time employee of the Agency. Specifically, he was an analyst, and a very senior one. He had been posted here, yet again, to the dead middle of the Horn of Africa, for the purpose of helping to hunt down a-Q franchises – mainly al-Shabaab in Somalia and AQAP, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, in Yemen. Even years after taking a 5.56 round to the dome, bin Laden (or “UBL” as he was called by those in the game) still went from strength to strength.
The really crap ideas never seemed to die.
And that’s why people like this inscrutable analyst still languished in the Horn of Africa. And why people like him would perhaps never leave. Not until he was rolled onto a C-130 in a flag-draped tube of steel.
* * *
“Zack. I think I’ve got something on FLIR.”
Zack was the name the analyst went by. He rolled his chair over to the other man’s station, still perfectly erect, face still devoid of emotion. He paused while peering into one of the other man’s screens. The other man was much younger than him.
“It’s nothing,” Zack said finally. “It’s dust. FLIR is for peering through dust. You have to look past the dust.” He rolled himself back to his station.
In fairness, he thought, as he settled back in, Hargeisa is virtually all dust. Particularly this far out of the rainy season. On the upside, November was also halfway between the ass-kickingly hot season and the freeze-your-nuts-to-frozen-peas season. In the Horn, it was always something. There, in northwest Somalia, which was also known as semi-autonomous Somaliland, it was extremes of climate.
Zack was alone with the other man in the TOC today. They did have two other attachments at this station, shooters, both former Team Six SEALs, and both d
eadly as Marburg. They went by the names “Dugan” and “Maximum Bob.” But Dugan and Maximum Bob were currently out on the ground, supporting some JSOC tactical guys in an op that was going down in their backyard. Their backyard consisted of the northerly suburbs of Hargeisa – which was known as “Somalia’s second city.”
This always made Zack laugh. Second to Mogadishu?
Cynical and unhelpful thoughts like these had been running through Zack’s mind a lot lately. But they still had to be kept far from his face. Zack enjoyed a solid reputation for unflappability in the intel and spec-ops communities. And this was something you really wanted to have. You didn’t want to lose your shit out there. And if you looked like you were prone to losing your shit, you would lose the one thing keeping you alive: the willingness of the men on either side to risk their necks for you.
Zack eyed the man to the side of him right now, the much younger one. This man, who was called Baxter, had recently been posted there as junior analyst. Zack believed Baxter to be not more than six weeks out of training at the Farm – otherwise known as Camp Peary in northern Virginia. How Baxter drew this posting was unclear to Zack. But he imagined it involved really pissing off one or more of his instructors.
“Check the Threat Matrix Board for me,” Zack said. He didn’t really need the info. He just wanted to see if the kid knew where to find it.
The mini Tactical Operations Center in which the two men sat looked like a very cramped version of NASA Mission Control – piled floor to ceiling with HD plasma displays, stacks of ruggedized laptops with hardware-encrypted drives, and multiple glowing radios, many with satcom capability, also encrypted to hell and back. Incongruously, all of this sat in a building that looked like it was falling down in real time. But the structure, too, had been reinforced. This was down to hard experience, on the part of Agency guys who came before them.
“Nothing new from start of shift,” Baxter reported.
Zack nodded his approval, eyes still on his screens. The duty he was pulling today was called “C2” – though Zack would be more precise and call it “C5I,” for “Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Combat systems, and Intelligence.” While virtually anything could come up on a given shift, today this mostly involved monitoring radio traffic on a half-dozen channels, distributing real-time intel from Langley – and, basically, helping to keep the lid on an operation that would scald a lot of people if it boiled over.
And this of course also included peering down on things from an armada of “ISR platforms” – which was the roundabout Agency term for aerial drones, or UAVs. In various sizes and flavors, these flying robots were stacked up over the Horn halfway to the moon – hand-launched mini- and micro-UAVs skimming the rooftops, Predators at a few thousand feet, Reapers and Global Hawks at thirty thousand, and mil-sats in geostationary LEO. And all of them peering down on their heads and spooling oceans of digital video to disk.
But some human brain still had to turn all that data into actionable tactical intelligence.
And that brain was Zack.
And what about him, then – how did Zack get to this place? His tale was a much longer one than young Baxter’s, and sadder as well. But it began as all stories do: with a birth.
Zack was born here.
Actually, he was born a few hundred miles to the southwest, in Kenya – a country he considered to be much less of a basket case than Somalia. To that fact he attributed Kenya’s Britannic inheritance – English language, impartial courts, a Westminster-style mini-Parliament. Plus engineering skill, self-reliance, and other characteristically British virtues. As a matter of historical fact, having been part of the British Empire was one of the better things that can have happened to a country on the road to modernity.
It usually made it less fucked up.
Zack, too, had a Britannic inheritance. He just wasn’t sure it had made him any less fucked up. It certainly hadn’t earned his affection, or made him want to hang around. In fact, never had a boy worked so hard to escape a place as Zack did from there. And he succeeded, too – for a time. But when he got where he was going, he found himself shipped right back. Immediately, and seemingly irretrievably.
That was a long time ago.
Now, in addition to everything else, Zack was feeling too old for the game. He was only 36. But this work aged you in a special way. Every morning when he looked in the mirror, he imagined he could see the mileage beginning to show.
And he also imagined he could see… the end of the road.
* * *
“Shotgun X, this is Assman One-One, how copy?”
This was one of Zack’s radios perking up. He flipped the channel onto the room speaker, figuring he’d let Baxter feel like a part of things today. In response to the hail, he spoke in a regular voice, smooth and deep, the sound picked up by his wireless headset.
“That’s a solid copy, Assman. Send traffic.”
“Just a commo check, over.”
“Copy that. No worries. Call any time.”
Zack knew that this JSOC team, currently out on the ground, were accustomed not only to calling their own shots and running their own ops, but also to having their own direct access to drone video. It usually fed onto a palmtop or tablet, or got beamed directly into a headset monocle. But this team had just rotated into theater, and their kit wasn’t compatible with local data feeds. While they waited for upgrades, this left Zack as the shooters’ single Eye of God – hopefully an unblinking one. It worked, but it was clunkier, and left the operators feeling less in contr—
“Convoy inbound!” said Baxter, straightening up in his seat.
Zack leaned in to his screen, face still a mask, reflecting back the LCD glow. Yes, those were definitely al-Shabaab vehicles rolling – the exact crew they’d been waiting for. “That’s POSIDENT,” he said aloud. But what the hell was the convoy doing on that map square? Zack hadn’t seen them because he hadn’t been looking for them there.
Score one for the kid.
“Assman One-One, be advised.” Zack’s voice was now crisp and all business. “We are visual with target Victors. They are inbound your position, zero-four light trucks, approx two-five enemy pax. How copy?”
“Assman copies all. But we’re not seeing or hearing anything. Interrogative: are route and approach as projected, over?”
“NEGATIVE, negative, target Victors are approaching your killbox from the SOUTH, via Wadada Daami, repeat, approach vector is from south on Wadada Daami, how copy?”
Zack sat with his finger on his transmit bar as the seconds stretched out. Nothing came back. Only silence, and the ever-present dust, filled the TOC. He repeated the transmission. “All Assman call signs, how copy? Acknowledge… Fuck.”
Baxter sat looking at him expectantly, and it occurred to Zack that this was where the “senior” bit in “senior analyst” came in. Denying himself any more time for critical thought, he hopped up from his chair and gathered up a tactical vest, a team radio, his gunbelt, a light jacket, and a tablet computer. While he pulled up the mid-altitude drone feed on the tablet, and checked the data link, he rapid-fired instructions to his subordinate.
“Stay on station. Relay all traffic. And keep trying to raise the team. Brief them the instant you do – and call me the next instant.”
So I can get my ass back to safety, he mentally added.
Because, the thing was, this op was going down less than a kilometer from where they sat – just around the way in the Abaye neighborhood of north Hargeisa. And now Zack had the duty and honor of going out to support the team, live and in person. Or at least closing the distance enough to get commo back. He finished kitting up.
“Got it?”
“Got it,” Baxter said. But he was still looking at Zack like he wanted to ask him what the fuck he was doing.
You and me both, Zack mused.
He flew out the door, took the stairs a landing at a time, and in five seconds was out on the street.
Running flat out
and kicking up dust.
Kidnapped
Weather, buildings, terrain features, somebody’s dodgy microwave – all kinds of things can screw up radio transmissions, or create a temporary radio skip zone. Losing commo when they had was very bad timing, with Zack not knowing whether or not the JSOC team got the updated battlespace intel. Though it probably wouldn’t prove fatal to guys like these – the whole trademark of guys who worked for JSOC was their ability to adapt like a radioactive virus in an improv troupe.
Then again, as Zack knew well, it might yet prove fatal to him.
He hurdled a couple of chickens and a small child as Hargeisa blurred by around him. Brown two-story structures stood back from the street, where grass grew in the gaps between the gravel and cement blocks. A bright but gentle African sun made shadows of the thin shifting clouds, and a few old cars and mopeds threaded the streets. Somalis on foot in ones and twos, wearing western garb or bright dresses and headscarves, spared a glance for the hurtling mulatto in the tan shirt and cargo pants, which pegged him as a westerner.
Zack cradled the tablet under his jacket, trying to keep his side arm from bouncing out of its belt-slide holster, as dust and clipped Somali floated up around him. He was still six run-down blocks from the team, and as he closed the distance he carried on hailing non-stop, alternating between the command and squad nets.
“Assman, Assman, how copy, how copy…”
He was going to keep doing that until he got a response. Or until he got there in person.
Or until he got killed.
While supporting troops in contact wasn’t technically in his job description, it also wasn’t a duty taken lightly by anyone with the privilege of doing it. And, adaptable or not, the JSOC boys were going to find it awkward to have four truckloads of tooled-up jihadis roll into the trap that had been set for them – but from precisely the wrong direction. And it was now Zack’s job to get them this info, even if he had to Pony Express it straight to them.
Arisen : Genesis Page 1
