And with no other preamble, a sleek and silver Boeing EA-18G Growler, with US Navy markings, floated over the walls, clearly at or just beneath its stall speed, flaps and landing gear down, heading for the near edge of the airstrip. It seemed steady enough in the air, but then looked like it might actually undershoot – but it corrected at the last instant with an awkward burst of power, then slammed down unevenly, rocking, swerving, fighting to slow and stay on a straight line as it bounced down the strip.
Everyone watching it gritted their teeth and dug their nails into their palms. But in another fifteen seconds the little jet had rumbled to a safe stop. Ali walked to the roof edge, lips still slightly parted, the other two following and stepping up to either side of her. Among them, only she recognized this as a type of aircraft that had been part of the JFK’s carrier air wing. So only she had a clue about who the hell this might be – and she was starting to feel like she actually had a pretty good idea who it was.
A couple of hundred yards out and down below, looking vaguely toy-like, the canopy of the aircraft lifted up. First a figure climbed out of the rear seat, pulling off a helmet, dark hair spilling out from under it, revealing it to be a woman. She began to climb down. And Ali knew exactly who that was.
Her again, she thought.
Then the pilot stood and also removed his helmet. But as he climbed out of the cockpit and stood up on the extended forewing, he paused and surveyed the scene. And even from this distance, even in the dim light, he could just be seen to smile – like he was both at ease, and happy to be here. For Ali, that smile was, once again, instantly and intimately familiar.
“Jesus Christ, Homer,” she whispered, shaking her head.
The man definitely never lacked for timing, or a sense of Biblical drama. And he certainly got around. Or maybe he was like Odysseus – always somehow making it home.
And… Ali thought, as she stole a look over her shoulder at what was coming for them from the north… he was definitely never one to run out on a fight.
But she also noticed one notable absence – or rather two of them: Benjamin and Isabel. Homer’s kids were not on that plane. Admittedly, they wouldn’t have fit on it. But if Homer had intended to bring them, he would have found a bigger plane. And Ali remembered something Handon once told her: that wherever Homer’s kids were might actually be the safest place on the entire planet. Hell, Homer had singlehandedly sunk the world’s biggest and deadliest warship, the Admiral Nakhimov, just to keep his kids safe back on the Kennedy.
But they were on the Kennedy still. And the fact that Homer had chosen to leave them there seemed to indicate very clearly to Ali that Britain could still go either way. And, if it fell, that would leave the JFK as the final ark for mankind. She exhaled and shook her head. Another omen, definitely not a good one – and not necessarily superstitious.
She looked up for that raven, but it had gone.
Finally, as she turned to go back down, something caught her eye, farther out in the Common, beyond the airstrip. It was in one of the thick copses of trees, some kind of short flash of dark movement – gone as quickly as it appeared. It was far enough, and indistinct enough, that only someone with her remarkable vision would have caught it at all.
She grabbed Jones by the arm and pointed in that direction as they headed for the stairs. “Have a patrol do a sweep of that area – now.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
* * *
Fick and Wesley were first to greet Homer and Sarah, trotting out to the end of the airstrip and the parked plane, its engines still emitting enough heat to make it shimmer in the fading light.
“Putting the Air in SEa Air Land, I see,” Fick said, sticking out his hoary hand.
Homer took it, shaking it and smiling warmly. “It was a little too far to swim from the Gulf of Aden.”
Wesley, perhaps getting less English by degrees, ignored Sarah’s outstretched hand and instead embraced her in a bear hug. The two of them had been through way too much together. She flinched a little as he squeezed her – not from reticence, but from the various injuries she’d taken in the fight for the carrier.
“The Kennedy?” Fick asked.
Homer nodded. “She’s secure. We hold the ship.”
“Is Derwin okay?” Wesley asked, brow furrowed.
“He’s fine,” Sarah answered. “Your dog, too, Judy – she actually tried to jump in the cockpit with us before we took off. Had to haul her back out. Not to mention that she saved my life before that. Again.”
Wesley almost teared up to hear all this. He wondered whether Judy had been trying to come find him, to get back to her master. Or if maybe she was just attached to Sarah at this point – she had after all fished her out of the Red Sea after both of them had been washed away out of Jizan. He guessed he’d never know for sure. But, either way, that was definitely a dog who knew where her duty lay. And he knew he’d see her again.
Fick, on the other hand, did not tear up. “And Spetsnaz?”
Homer said, “Boarders all dead or driven overboard.”
Fick looked skeptical. “There’ll be a handful still hiding out, somewhere belowdecks, just waiting to wreak havoc.”
“Yeah, I know,” Homer said. “And so do Drake and the crew. They’ve put Judy to work sniffing them out.”
Wesley smiled at this, and Fick shrugged. “Yeah, and I guess at least the Russians won’t cause a damned outbreak.” They had faced dead belowdecks, after the earlier Battle of the JFK. Fick paused, looking like he was bracing himself for something painful. “Casualties?”
But just then, both Fick’s and Wesley’s radios went. It was the JOC, telling them to check out some suspicious movement in a copse of trees nearby in the Common.
Wesley straightened up. “I’ll take it,” he said, hugging Sarah again quickly, nodding to the others, then heading out at a jog while he switched channels and called his team.
Fick turned back to Homer, who looked solemn. “Casualties across the ship were heavy. I’ll brief you in full. But right now I need to see Ali.”
“Check,” Fick said, twisting at the waist. “She’s—”
Homer cut him off. “She’ll be up there.” He nodded at the top of the tallest local structure, namely SHQ. But even as he did so, her amplified voice emerged from it, and from tannoy speakers mounted all over the complex, echoing throughout the prison and also across the Common.
“All CentCom personnel and teams be advised. The dead are two hours from our walls, and we are about to be under siege. Make your final preparations to defend this base, the work being done inside it, and everyone you serve alongside – as well as everyone left alive everywhere. Ours is the last mission, and it’s for everyone. Fight accordingly.”
The cold and wet wind gusted, chilling those on the ground.
The First Cali
Southwest London
Pred and Juice merely tried to flag down the first couple of cars that went blasting and swerving around them on the road, as they walked up it, pushing their cart. None of them stopped, and it wasn’t hard to guess why. The two men were the size of bears, maybe one black bear and one grizzly, both heavily armed – and they were, rather inexplicably, pushing a cart full of guns down the road.
“Paintball guns,” Pred muttered, sullenly.
Juice shrugged. “They’re British people. They probably don’t even know the difference.”
Pred’s sullen look said he wasn’t entirely thrilled to be conducting humanity’s last stand in this particular country, nor to be serving as a glorified UPS man – and now doing it on foot. He had been kind of grumpy in general lately, so Juice didn’t react to this. But then both of them turned at a sudden and distinct noise from the treeline that bordered the road – Pred spinning, raising his rifle, and engaging all in the same motion and in the same second.
It was a pack of runners, tear-assing out of the treeline, only thirty feet away, and on them in seconds. Juice also spun, crouched, raised his rifle, and poure
d in fire, as he covered the cart with his body. Suppressed gunshots, drill-press-rapid and also precise as a power tool, filled the air, and rotting bodies dropped to the ground on the grass and the edge of the road – as if God were sucking their souls up into the sky at high speed. They fell like wheat.
Juice maintained his position guarding the mission objective, but Pred was forced to bob and weave, dancing and pivoting through the last half-dozen as they reached him, knocking bodies to either side, drilling them as they flew by, as usual moving his seven feet and 325 pounds so fast it all looked wrong, like a tractor-trailer had been dropped into a Formula One race – and was winning.
In five seconds, fifteen dead bodies lay destroyed on the ground, and both warriors were doing tactical reloads, resetting, and pushing their situational awareness out in all directions, scanning for additional threats. There weren’t any.
There was however a vehicle coming up the road.
Pred gave Juice a look, and he got it: This is bullshit.
This one they didn’t just try to flag down.
* * *
“Sir, we are really sorry,” Juice said, leaning into the driver’s side window – on the second try, as it wasn’t on the side he was expecting it to be on. Pred was letting him take this, because Juice was a bit more human-sized – and because Pred could kind of singlehandedly block the road.
The vehicle was a tiny, older-model Mini Cooper with a roof rack, and it contained a family of four. It had stopped, but so far nobody was getting out. Juice was trying to coax the father out, while the mother sat twisted around trying to reassure the two small children in back. Meanwhile, Juice just kept apologizing. They weren’t really here to perpetrate armed carjacking on an innocent civilian family.
Then again, the fate of the world was kind of on the line.
Pred fidgeted and listened to several versions of Juice’s apology and explanation before finally checking his watch, raising his rifle – though taking care the safety was on – and bellowing in a voice that could probably be heard in Poland, “Hey, just get the fuck out of the car, okay?”
The man finally did, shoving open the driver’s side door violently enough that Juice had to hop out of the way. But when he had done so and sprang from the little vehicle…
He was holding a handgun – pointed at Juice’s chest.
“Move,” Pred said, raising his rifle and advancing – but Juice was standing between the two of them, and didn’t have his own weapon up. Instead he had both hands raised, palms out, and was speaking in reassuring tones.
“Sir, you need to put that down. We’re on an official military mission and we just need your vehicle. We absolutely don’t mean your family any harm.”
But even as he said this, he could see from the man’s eyes that it wasn’t registering. He and Pred wore irregular uniforms, with no patches or insignia – and not to mention Juice’s beard, Pred’s gigantic bulk, and their foreign accents. This guy clearly thought they were just marauders, jacking their shit – and probably planning to leave them dead on the side of the road.
But there just wasn’t time to explain or win this guy’s trust. Juice took two steps forward, figuring he could disarm the guy before he got up the nerve to fire – but he figured wrong, and the weapon, an ancient little Luger with a short and spindly barrel, starting sparking off, rounds cranking into Juice’s body armor, one creasing his ear, as he dove out of the way, and Pred sighted in behind him—
But already too late. A round exploded in the barrel of the pistol and the man screamed once, then fell to the ground and went silent. The wife leapt from the Mini and ran to him, but he didn’t respond to her shaking or cries.
“What the hell?” Pred said, advancing.
Juice climbed out of the culvert, holding his nicked and bleeding ear, and kicked the pistol away. “Probably a converted replica. That’s most of the handguns in this country.”
“Converted retardation,” Pred said.
Juice didn’t disagree. He looked over at Pred with a pained expression, then at the car. “We’ve got to get the kids out.” It was obvious why – there wasn’t room in the cramped little Mini for Pred, Juice, the paintball stuff, and the family as well. Hell, it would be a miracle if Pred would fit inside at all.
But then, as Pred looked down at her, the wife looked up.
Ah shit, Juice thought.
* * *
“Every Cali left.”
Juice just gave Pred a blank look. He didn’t have to say What the hell does that even mean? He didn’t really have to say anything. The two were now in conference twenty feet up the road. The widow and mother was with her two small children in the car, keeping them from seeing their dead father where he lay on the ground. Juice had the car keys.
And, looking back, he could see her face again: fair skin, chin-length blonde hair, button nose – and tear-stained cheeks. She just HAD to look like Pred’s dead wife, Juice thought. Hell, the kids probably looked exactly like the ones Pred would have had with Cali, if they’d ever gotten the chance.
“Look,” Juice said, turning back to his friend. “I get you. This sucks. I hope the GIs behaved better than this when they were here during World War Two. But I just don’t see ho—”
Pred shook his breadbox-sized head. Again, Juice could read his look perfectly, without him having to say a word: Not doing it – not taking their vehicle and leaving them to die, without protection. Putting them out on the road as runner food.
Juice looked down to the dead man on the tarmac. He knew Pred looked at that man and saw himself lying there – the husband powerless to protect his wife. It couldn’t have helped that he’d had to shoot that woman back at the paintball arena – hell, two of them. It had all somehow been building up to this. Pred was clearly done with failing to protect the innocent.
Especially ones who look like his wife…
Wordlessly, Pred stomped over to the car, grabbed the roof rack, which was at about waist height for him, and shook it – shaking the whole car on its shocks.
“Oh, no, man…” Juice said. “That’ll neve—”
“EVERY CALI LEFT.”
Juice just exhaled, backed down, and let him get on with it. He didn’t quite understand what the hell was going on with his friend, not exactly. But he didn’t have to. He would stand with him – always, and forever. Also, this was the most animated and engaged he had seen the big man since he’d saved Handon – and Juice hadn’t even been awake for that.
Maybe this was a good thing.
Maybe Pred was finding his way back.
Discord
CentCom – JOC, Ali’s Office
“Didn’t realize you could fly jet aircraft.”
“Heck, I can’t fly prop planes. You saw my carrier landing.”
Ali smiled to remember Homer’s last dramatic homecoming, when he’d barely managed to land that little Beechcraft on the deck of the JFK, returning from his North American odyssey with Sarah, and the rescue of his kids.
But then her thoughts shifted to the very last time she’d set eyes on him – when he was heading out of that besieged hangar in Djibouti to try to get back to the JFK again. And when she was about to try to fly them all out of there on that UN bush plane. More to the point, she vividly recalled the epiphany she’d had in that moment, their last one together, the great truth she had finally perceived.
She’d already realized that breaking up with Homer had never been about operational efficiency, or safeguarding the mission, as she had tried to tell herself. No, it had simply been about her fear of losing him, and the unbearable pain of that loss. But what she finally came to understand in that last moment was: it wasn’t finding a way to protect her heart that she needed. What she needed was to find a way to protect Homer. To be with him, to never let him out of her sight again.
And now he was back, inches away from her.
And her heart swelled.
She realized he was still talking at her.
“
The Growler pilots on the Kennedy tried to tell me it’s much like flying a Cessna, just faster – the HUD and velocity vector make it a no-brainer, the engines are very responsive, you have plenty of thrust to get out of most situations, and it requires very little trim and even auto-trims for pitch. The pilot relief modes are excellent. It was mainly the high speed of the landing and not getting on the back side of the power cur—”
Ali shut him up by kissing him.
When she pulled away, he said, “And with extended tanks and no ordnance, the ferry range is actually two thous—” so she shut him up again.
She only stopped when Sarah Cameron walked in.
* * *
“I found her unconscious on the cargo deck, from grenade blasts,” Homer said, looking warmly at Sarah, who had a bandage wrapped around one hand, and another slightly bulging through her shirt at her waist. “But with three dead Spetsnaz lying around her.”
Ali didn’t look on Sarah nearly as fondly as Homer did, and for a whole bunch of reasons. One of them was the ambiguous nature of the woman’s relationship with Homer – and all the time the two of them had spent alone on their North American road trip. But that wasn’t even the main issue.
No, Ali’s principal concern was that the civilian survivalist woman was a complication, a wild card – and she seemed to sow discord wherever she went. She’d been a bad distraction for Handon, at the best of times – and had caused the simmering feud between him and Henno to nearly turn lethal, back in that forest clearing in Somalia. Ali had watched the two of them teeter on the brink of gutting each other like fish with their commando knives. And her lip-reading was good enough to know they had been talking about Sarah at the end.
So at the very least, she had exacerbated the feud, the one that had nearly ripped Alpha apart at the seams.
No, it would have been a lot easier for Ali, and much the best thing from her point of view, if Sarah hadn’t made it off the carrier alive. Or, having survived, at least stayed there.
“Where’s Handon?” Sarah asked now.
ARISEN_Book Thirteen_The Siege Page 25
