Zack couldn’t tell whether this was because of the jihadis rolling through town earlier, and the aborted ambush – or maybe the kidnapping. Or else perhaps it was because of the outbreak thing. He asked Dugan what he thought.
“Got me, man. I’ll never understand this country.”
Dugan was doing his usual scanning alleys and rooftops routine – ready to target-discriminate, or to crank the volume up, all on a dime if need be. If things did kick off, Zack would take Dugan’s two guns against any two dozen raggedy-ass militia, any day.
Then again, he knew the guns-out-in-the-open thing was also a show of dominance, meant to head off trouble. They were never going to look like Somalis, even Zack, who was Kenyan – maybe especially Zack. So they might as well look like westerners who were seriously not to be fucked with. To the best of Zack’s knowledge, those two ideas – dominance before, and dominance during, a firefight – were the twin pillars of Dugan’s tactical philosophy.
The pair kept moving for the four blocks to the main arterial drag, then kept on that almost straight to the hospital. They stayed far enough from the middle of the street to be inconspicuous, but not so close to the structures as to risk getting jumped from them. There were a few people about, but mostly head down, moving like they were going somewhere. They got one or two friendly smiles. Somalis, the regular people, were almost always very friendly. That made Zack feel worse for all they suffered at the hands of the Islamists, the battling warlords, the khat junkies, and the other various assholes who made the lives of regular people miserable.
As they turned onto the side street, with the hospital still two blocks out, and the hulking off-white structure came into view, Zack reached into his cargo-pant pocket. He produced two cloth face masks and four blue latex gloves, handing half to Dugan – who gave him a bit of a look, but finally masked and gloved up.
If Japanese tourists do it on BA flights from Tokyo to Heathrow, Zack thought, we’ve got every reason.
But then Dugan stopped with one glove on. “What the hell’s that?” he said. Dugan had eyes like a cop – he was usually dealing with problems before Zack had even clocked them. In this case, it was a big white tent billowing out from the side of the hospital. This was new. And not good. Zack knew what it was.
“Quarantine tent.”
This was the part where normal civilian people would run away from danger. But the Company men ran instead toward it. They were obliged to.
“Come on,” Zack said. “Quick poke around. We won’t get too close.”
“No problem, Zack,” Dugan said. “On me.”
Fearing nothing, man or virus, he took the lead.
* * *
Their walk back from the hospital was a brisk one – brisk as in quick, not cold. Though Zack shuddered nearly half the way – not from the temperature, but from what he’d seen in there.
As Zack and Dugan hoofed it at the double time, the sun was getting low behind the structures, and the wind picking up. And the town was even more deserted than it had been on their way out. This desolate vibe seemed to accelerate Zack’s dark thoughts about man’s deep inhumanity to man.
It was because of what he just saw, and because the two were walking in silence, that he let his head get back into his two pet topics: terrorism and pandemics. And it was due to the dangerous confluence of these two that Zack knew so much about virology. Because bio-terror was on the Very Short List of Shit That Can Go Wrong Which Everyone Would Much Sooner Not Think About. And Zack didn’t have the luxury of not thinking about it.
Also, the vibe in town conduced to brooding. Basically, everything had gotten spooky as hell, and when they were nearly back, Zack heard footsteps, heavy ones, from somewhere behind them, but of strangely indistinct origin. “Dugan…”
“Yeah, check, I hear it, Zack. Move.” Zack broke into a run, trusting that Dugan was behind him, and ten seconds later reached the safehouse. He squared up to the door, jammed his card in the reader, and stuck his face in the camera. This resulted in Baxter buzzing them in, the buzz followed by the heavy steel clunk of the bar sliding away.
He darted inside, breathless, and began pulling off his mask and gloves – while Dugan backed in, his scanning eyes still missing nothing out on the street. Zack imagined that some part of the operator was still seeing what got burned onto his retinas back there at the hospital. They took the stairs two at a time up to the TOC, where Baxter and Maximum Bob sat, ready to be briefed.
Dugan took a seat, but Zack paused just inside the doorway. The others looked up at him.
“I, uh… just give me a minute in my room, all right?”
No one objected. Their guy had been in enemy captivity only hours ago.
Zack ducked out down the hall and into the bedroom he shared with Baxter. He shucked his gear, then sat on the bed, just breathing. Why did he have such strong feelings about all this? Why did he jack up into condition yellow every time there was an outbreak of the sniffles in his area of operations (AO)?
Because he once got too close to the fire.
It was only a couple of years ago, in this very city, that Zack had helped foil a bioterror plot – one in which a certain familiar Islamist terror franchise had procured a bioengineered substance from an impoverished and disaffected Kazakh bioscientist. Al-Shabaab had planned to use this virus against the demining teams based at Camp Lemonnier – really good people who were already risking their lives trying to turn the booby-trapped hellhole that was the Horn of Africa into a livable place.
In the end, that threat had been neutralized, and Zack and his team had destroyed the virus stocks, as well as the conspirators. But Zack knew that there was always another disaffected Kazakh, and always another threat.
With this, the safehouse-wide alert buzzer went off, honking in every room.
Evidently Zack’s minute was up.
Firefight
“Sitrep,” Zack said, striding in, his marble mask back in place.
Maximum Bob was still there, and Dugan slipped in behind, returning from kitting down in his room. Baxter was at his station on a secure desk phone, but quickly handed it off to Zack, who got busy listening and nodding.
“Altringham. Yes… affirmative… understood. Roger that. Send a grid reference and wait out.” He hit a button on the console, put the phone down, then turned to the room and its three expectant faces. “It’s the Army SF Ops Desk at Lemonnier. They’ve got troops in contact in Somaliland, and their armed air assets are cycling. They want to know if we can scare up something for them, RFN.”
Baxter swiveled back to his station and started flipping through windows. “I’ll see if I can find a local Predator… something being flown out of Creech that we can re-task…”
But Zack was already logging in to his station and flipping through things himself. “Hold that. I’ve got a Reaper.” Twice the size, twice the endurance, and four times the payload and weapons mounts. Because eight Hellfires are always better than two…
It took Zack about four minutes to get operational control of the MQ-9 Reaper, call sign Reamer One-Five, and get it inbound and streaming video from over the right coordinates. At that point, a couple of things quickly became obvious.
“Not our guys,” Dugan said, leaning in over Zack’s shoulder.
“Not our guys,” Zack agreed.
He’d got the drone doing a wide racetrack circuit around the grid coords that had been passed by the SF ops guys. The high-res color video feed made the absence of Americans fairly obvious.
“Fucking chaos down there, though,” Dugan said. “Get him to come around again.”
So far, there were only two groups visible in this boonie firefight – the raggedy-ass Islamist militia types; and the uniformed soldiers, who were clearly SNA, Somali National Army. Though one did have to be careful not to assume the raggedy-ass guys weren’t American operators, with spec-ops laxity of uniforms…
“Definitely looks like a militia versus SNA scrap,” Baxter agreed, assessin
g the same feed from his station.
“Yeah,” Dugan said, “but that doesn’t mean we don’t have people down there. Could easily be a mentoring patrol, with a small SF element, and we’re just not seeing them yet.” It was true that one of the main jobs of Army Special Forces (Green Berets) was mentoring local friendly forces. And that was definitely something the SF ODAs out of Lemonnier had been doing – training up SNA, so the Somalis could control their own territory and take the fight to a-S and other Islamist insurgents.
Zack instructed the drone pilot, who was sitting in a trailer in Nevada, to tighten up his circuit; and then started zooming the optics around, looking for Special Forces guys. But he quickly decided what he really needed to get patched through directly to the team on the ground. When supporting troops from the air, nothing is to be avoided so much as middlemen.
Fuck it, he thought, I’m going to disintermediate two at once. He started with firing the drone pilot.
“Bob, can you go get ready to fly this Reaper?” Tier-1 guys have sprawling skill sets, and Bob’s extended to piloting UAVs.
“Roger that,” he said to Zack’s back, moving his big bulk smartly over to the portable UAV Ground Control Station they had wedged into the corner. This consisted of a wide, rugged, lightweight, black case set up on its own spindly legs, like an electric piano stand. When Bob flipped the case open, inside was a small docked laptop on the left, a block of electronics (like a rack server) on the right, a 17-inch LCD above that, two stubby radio antennas, a mouse – and a PlayStation-style controller, once Bob pulled that out. He started the laptop booting and bringing the whole system up.
Meanwhile, Zack got the pilot’s boss on the line. “Reamer Five-One, Shotgun X requesting talk-through to your command element, over.” There was a distinct pause, then a crackle as the line patched.
“Shotgun X, this is Crazy Horse Six, go ahead.”
Zack cleared his throat before pressing the transmit bar. “Crazy Horse, we are supporting troops in contact in AO Hotel Alpha. Reamer Five-One is the lead and only air element at this time. And we’re going to need tactical control of your asset here, over.”
There was another very distinct delay. Basically, the Air Force hated to let anyone else play with their toys. If it had been an Agency asset, it wouldn’t be an issue. But Zack was prepared for some pushback from the flyboys. Finally:
“Roger that, Shotgun X. We’ve keyed transfer of the platform to your GCS there. You can pick it up any time. Out.”
“Bob?”
“Got it, Zack. We’re stylin‘…”
Zack switched channels to the Lemonnier TOC. “Silo X, Shotgun X requesting direct patch-through to your ground element.”
“That’s a solid copy, Shotgun. But be advised that we have lost radio contact with our team at this time.”
Shit. That wasn’t good. That was bad. Meanwhile, Zack could see the drone video getting radical, as Bob stretched out the bird's wings.
“We got a new call sign for this air mission?” Bob asked over his shoulder.
“No, fuck it, no time. Stay on as Reamer Five-One, Creech won’t reuse it today.” The transmit bar went down. “Silo, Shotgun, interrogative: what is the number and disposition of your team, over?”
“Shotgun, Silo. We’ve got a detached half of ODA Five-Five-Five, doing a joint LRP with SNA elements in company strength. They are call sign Rumpus Triple Nickel, over.”
“Okay,” Zack said aloud to the room. “That makes sense.”
Dugan nodded. “Six snake eaters handholding a hundred skinnies.” He used the derogatory terms for both Green Berets and Somalis, which Zack guessed was at least even-handed.
“Coming around again,” Bob said, from the controls. The others could see this on their own monitors.
“Keep both your altitude and air speed up,” Zack said. They weren’t taking ground fire yet. But sometimes the first volley was the one that got you.
“Can we do CAS without a FAC on the ground?” Baxter asked, half-twisted in his chair to face the others. He had a point. Dropping ordnance, never mind Hellfires, without a forward air controller was dodgy at best.
“I’ve got a good sight picture,” Bob said. “See here. Looks like it was an ambush from this compound as the friendlies patrolled past. Enemy pax are definitely clustered in and around it, with SNA 200 meters southwest in the treeline. I can see heavy incoming fire from this tower in the compound. And I can easily take it out.”
Zack squinted at his own view on the battle. “No. It’s a solid guess, but a guess. Hey, wait a minute – who the fuck are those guys?”
“The foot mobiles?” Bob asked. “To the west?”
“Yeah.”
“NFI.”
Dugan leaned in to Zack’s monitor. They could both now make out a number of figures to the extreme west, but moving forward into the area between the two forces. They looked to be unarmed, and were wading in from the side – wading into both positions. Zack zoomed the optics on the no-man’s land in the middle, trying to pin one of the figures. When he did, and managed to hold it for a second, Dugan said, “Guy looks like Joe Shit the Rag Man.”
“Copy that,” Zack said. “So, seriously – who the hell are they?”
“Shotgun X, we have reestablished commo with our ODA. Patching you through…”
“—ger that, Silo, standing by.”
This last was one of the SF guys on the ground. Zack slapped it on room speaker, then jumped in. “Break, break. Triple Nickel, this is Reamer Five-One, an MQ-9 on station over your position, standard armament and playtime of approx one hour, how copy?”
“Reamer, Rumpus – yeah, we can hear you up there. Welcome to the party. We’re taking heavy SAFIRE and RPGs from that structure, and could use some TGO on it. Let me talk you on.”
The four men in the TOC could in fact hear, on the open channel, a significant volume of small-arms fire, not a little shouting, and then one big-ass explosion – all in the time it took the Green Beret to say it.
“Roger, Rumpus, go ahead.”
“Okay, you see the treeline running northwest to southeast, bordered by the rock features to the north?”
“That’s a-ffirm. We are visual on the treeline.”
“Okay, that’s us. You see the big-ass rectangular compound one-seven-five meters to our northeast? With the big-ass Sangar sticking out of the south corner?”
“Roger, visual on compound and Sangar.”
“Right, that’s them. Kindly light them the fuck up. Attack vector southwest to northeast, your choice of ordnance. I have weapons release authority. I am also lasing the target and data-link messaging you a ten-digit target grid reference. In case you need that.”
They didn’t need it. It was pretty obvious what they were shooting at. “Roger, Rumpus, we are tipping in now.” Bob had been following all this, and already had his attack run lined up. “Rumpus, Shotgun, confirm no change friendly positions and clear hot.”
“Rumpus confirms. You are cleared hot, repeat, cleared hot.”
Bob proceeded to drop not one but two Hellfires right on the tower. As this is a missile designed to defeat any known armor, that’s twice as many Hellfires as you generally need to destroy anything.
“Munition away,” Zack added hastily, so the friendlies would know to go firm and get their heads down.
Two black shapes came in from the bottom left and right of the video window and zoomed in on the tower like nuclear-powered darts. The tower disappeared in a fireball that whited out the screen, then an expanding cloud of smoke that grayed it out. When the explosion settled there was nothing there. There was hardly any compound around it.
Zack started to get on the net to give Rumpus a BDA (“target obliterated” was what he had in mind), when he was interrupted on the CAS channel – presumably by someone else on the ground. And it was a female voice. Everyone in the TOC looked at everyone else. However, all of them knew that SF ODAs sometimes have female attachments, usually CSTs (cul
tural support teams).
“Break, break, Jim, it’s me…”
“Copy that, switch to squad net, buddy. Reamer, this is my guy I sent out to check activity on our flank, wait out.”
But before he could finish, or Zack could respond, or anyone could switch channels, this one overloaded with a blood-curdling shriek. Not a shout, but a scream – the kind of noise an animal makes only when reason and hope have abandoned him. Or her.
Zack, lips parted, turned and looked at the others. In a lifetime of operational work, he’d never heard anything like it. From the expressions of the others, neither had they. Everyone in the TOC was now looking at Zack – including the guy flying the aircraft – six white eyes peeled and shining in the low light.
Zack shuddered reflexively, seized with a sudden chill.
What the hell was that?
PART TWO
“Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it.”
– Genesis, 1.28
AMF
“Their team, their rules,” Zack said around mouthfuls of steel-cut oats. “Fair play, I guess.”
Maximum Bob just grunted in response, conveying his sum total view of that.
All four members of the team were now sitting in what passed for a mess in the safehouse – a tiny kitchen, with a tinier, round, rough-hewn table and four chairs arranged in the center. The lights weren’t great in that part of the building. But at least the team kept it tidy. Shipboard habits, maybe.
They were all getting some chow down. They had the time now – because they had been stood down. Lemonnier suddenly, and seemingly with uncanny timing, managed to get their air assets online. Partly to deconflict the airspace, and partly because the Reaper’s remaining linger time was running low, they were ordered out of the fight. And then they had to hand their shiny toy back to the Air Force.
Actually, to be specific, they had to click on the Land button, and then the Reaper flew itself back to Lemonnier, with nobody controlling it. Our age of wonders, Zack thought.
Arisen : Genesis Page 4
