“Well I’ll tell you, that’s exactly what I suggested to General Præsidium himself. And you know what he said? He said he didn’t give a shit if it was your goddamned mothers. God save us, he seems to think you precious snowflakes are the best shooters currently residing on this base. And the commander has no intention of losing you. Not when there’s rioting in the town and we just repulsed a legit, no-shit attempt to overrun this base. We still don’t have any good idea of what the fuck is going on out there, and it doesn’t look like getting any fucking better.”
He paused and spat, right onto the floor.
“So be advised. You floppy-hat-wearing motherfuckers are restricted to base, by order of the commander of this task force. Your rescue mission is a fucking no-go.”
The CSM disappeared from Kate’s view as the bright slit went dark for a second. It resolved again as the team captain, Brendan, stepped forward. To Kate’s amazement, he got right in CSM Zorn’s face. It was like an adolescent facing off against his very traditional and intimidating father. Kate actually had to make a mental effort to remember that the Captain outranked the CSM.
“Sergeant Major,” he said, his voice level and calm. “Now you be advised: we are not in General Præsidium’s chain of command. We are under this command’s operational control in your AO. But we work for the United States Army Special Forces Command (Airborne), and we get our taskings and mission planning approved by them.”
Holy shit. Kate blinked a few times into the light.
Brendan concluded: “You can indicate your understanding of this organizational structure by saying, ‘Yes, sir.’”
A very heavy beat passed.
The CSM snapped a salute, said the words, turned, and exited.
Jake rose and gave Brendan a big smile and a high-five.
Everyone else on the team clapped.
* * *
With this drama concluded, Kate backed away from the door and sat back on the bed. She could still hear everything outside and listened to about fifteen minutes of rapid operational planning – by guys who knew how to do it.
But they were out there together and she was here by herself, set apart.
And sitting there alone in the dark, she found herself experiencing a strange rush of claustrophobia. She was suddenly aware of being there in this beleaguered, possibly shrinking bubble of life and light, Camp Lemonnier – while all around them surged the darkness and chaos of Djibouti Town, and the rest of Djibouti out past that, and the entire Horn of Africa, most of it probably equally blacked out and maybe growing sicker and crazier by the minute, and beyond that all the rest of what had been known for centuries as the Dark Continent, all of it strange and new and menacing, and pressing in on her here in this tiny bed, with the bunk above it ten inches from her face.
She also realized she had no idea what the hell was going on out there.
But she decided she wasn’t in any big hurry to find out.
She’d just decided to do as instructed – get some sleep – when her eyes spontaneously developed gigantic lead weights, and a profound soul-tiredness squeezed her body. Within seconds, the darkness of oblivion came rushing up to embrace her. She’d had no idea she was so exhausted, until suddenly she was.
Maybe getting some rack actually was the most useful thing she could do right now. She might have a lot more to do, and to prove, in the morning – whatever that might bring. Two minutes earlier, she wouldn’t have imagined she could sleep, not after that firefight. But two minutes was a long time. Evidently things around here moved in seconds and minutes, rather than minutes and hours, as they had in Afghanistan.
The last thing she heard from out in the Team Room was:
“Wait – how the hell do we actually get out the gate?”
“I like the odds of our gun trucks versus the gate at 60mph.”
“True, that. Okay. Let’s run it.”
And after that, it was all Kate had left in her to get the headphones on her head and the shemagh wrapped around her face, before she fell into sleep like a gallows sandbag dropping.
And her consciousness shut like a slammed door.
Falling
Camp Lemonnier - 555 Bunk Room
Falling.
She felt herself falling through empty space—
But her body convulsed as an iron grip seized her bicep and yanked her out of the air. She sat bolt upright, clawing at her face and struggling for breath.
“Kate! Get up!”
The world was black and heavy, and she was buried and drowning – until the shemagh got unwound from her face and the two levels of ear-pro pulled clear of her head. It was still dark – except there were short, bright flashes coming in the window from outside.
And there were new sounds: sirens, shouting, and gunfire. And screams.
There was also Elijah, shaking her roughly, and shouting at her from one foot away. “Kate! We gotta go! Get up – NOW!”
“What? What’s happening?” She blinked rapidly, still not convinced of any reality beyond her dream, which still clung to her.
“The camp’s falling! We gotta go!”
She just looked at him stupidly for a second in the darkness. Despite the sounds of chaos, what he was saying was impossible. She couldn’t process it. She also couldn’t believe how hard she had slept, or how groggy she still felt. “How long was I out?”
“It’s almost dawn.”
“Jes—”
“I put an Ambien in your water bottle.”
“Motherfucker.”
“Staff Sergeant! You gotta shake it off! Grab your shit and get moving – now!”
Kate took a huge indraft of breath, like a baby coming into the world and breathing for the first time.
And while Elijah went back and forth from the window to the door, she got kitted up in the fastest such maneuver of her life. She was still badly confused and disoriented, but by this point she could also strap on her weapons, ammo, and armor while unconscious – and she damn well knew that whatever the hell was going on, she’d much rather face it tooled up than not.
“How?” she tried again, while rapid-lacing her boots. “We fought off the incursion. Are they back?”
“It’s not the jihadis. It’s the sick people.”
Kate’s face twisted with confusion. “What? What does that even mean?” She stole a glance out the window, where she could see lights arcing by, silhouetting the outlines of figures running – and somebody staggering as if he’d been wounded, or stunned by an explosion…
And then the window glass crunched two feet in front of her and both of them bounced away in reaction, Elijah snapping his rifle to his shoulder. The glass pane had spiderwebbed in a large oval pattern – and what had impacted it was a human face. It was still pressed against the indentation in the glass, but backlit, so no features were visible. As the two of them stood frozen to their spots, the face withdrew, its owner presumably walking it off somewhere else.
Kate picked up her rifle with trembling hands, and muttered a silent curse or prayer. Elijah grabbed her arm again and yanked her to her feet. And as he started to physically pull her out the door, she resisted, reached back, and snatched his shemagh off the bunk, getting it looped around her neck as they ran.
And as they dashed through the team room, she saw there were a lot fewer weapons on the racks than there had been last night.
The outer door was wide open to the madness beyond.
* * *
As she rushed out behind Elijah and the warm air hit her face, the scene now made last night’s chaos seem like the Pax Romana – a thousand years of peace and order. Fighting off the attack on the wire, she’d at least had something solid to her back. Now the threat was everywhere, bedlam swirling around her on all sides, and instantly threatening to envelop and subsume her.
The only advantage they had was that the team room was near the edge of camp, providing some kind of safety on that side – but this instantly went away as they started to run for
, well, wherever the hell Elijah was leading them.
Holding her rifle with arms that felt too weak for it, she scanned over her ACOG, trying to resolve the kaleidoscope of shapes assaulting her visual field. At least one building was on fire somewhere nearby, not quite in sight, but its evil orange glow painting the low black sky. The acrid and particle-thick smoke made it even harder for her to breathe – on top of the running, the adrenaline, and the panic.
She saw two guys in hospital scrubs chasing a wounded-looking dude, then attempting to restrain him. He shrugged them off, then wheeled on them, furious, like he was possessed or delusional. She caught two frames of that, then it panned out of sight as she raced after Elijah in the open area between two rows of CLUs. As they passed another gap in the buildings, she looked down the same direction, back toward the med shack. Something frenetic was going on there – violence and motion and animal panic, but it was too far and too dark to make out and it all disappeared behind the next structure a second later anyway.
She suddenly had the sense that she’d goddamned well better generate some SA if she intended to survive even the next few minutes of whatever the hell was happening. She scanned from side to side, then extended her focus of vision out ahead – and she immediately saw a jihadi coming for them, diagonally from one of the gaps between structures. He was obviously an invader, from the pajamas and black hood – but he carried no weapon.
She scanned frantically for the bulge of a suicide vest, but in fact his top was hanging open, revealing rolls of flesh beneath. He was running at them with arms extended. Attacking them literally barehanded.
What the fuck?
Before she could get a sight picture, Elijah knocked the man down with four quick shots to the center of mass, and they were both running past him.
Now Kate realized her reflexes had also better tune up – and right now. Shots were still being fired, but if there were any geometry to this battle, it totally eluded her. She remembered the old rule that the number-one trick to surviving combat was figuring out what the hell was going on. She grimaced at that, and tried to manage her breathing.
Elijah turned a corner on the left at a dead run and Kate followed, skidding on the rubber matting. As they emerged into an open area, the first thing she saw resolving from the darkness was a soldier in tan ACUs – tackling another one, identically dressed.
Seriously – what the FUCK?! This made zero sense. She shouted ahead. “Elijah, what the fuck is going on?”
“It’s the sick people, man,” he shouted over his shoulder. “Keep moving!”
“What does that mean?” She racked her brain. Was it like rabies, or psychosis – or was it some kind of chemical or biological warfare agent they’d been hit with, and that was making people wig out? She knew al-Shabaab had a history of trying to acquire chem-bio weapons. But she had neither the wind nor the attention to have this or any discussion with Elijah right now. Instead she focu—
A body slammed into her from a tiny dark alley she hadn’t even seen. She bounced off it and reacted by giving him a mighty shove with her weapon and the figure stumbled back into the darkness from which it came. She started to bring her weapon up to fire, but thought better of it and just kept moving.
Her Under Armor shirt, beneath her LBE, was soaked with sweat now – and bits of loose hair floated out from under her ARMY cap. Everything was still thoroughly kaleidoscopic and she didn’t feel like she was getting any more of a grip. Rather, she felt like the odds were tipping against her.
And if the camp was going down… would she go down with it?
No, she decided. No, I’m fucking not.
And she remembered another principle: the people who survived catastrophes, riots, natural disasters, ambushes… were the ones who absolutely resolved themselves to.
Elijah darted down another row and they came back out against the wire, with something solid on one side of them again at least. He turned right and took off, and Kate accelerated to follow – and immediately felt another body crashing into her again, from the right side now, out of another gap. She pivoted, and used his own body weight to throw him to the ground.
It was an American serviceman.
The man writhed on the ground and scrabbled at her boots.
She kicked him away hard, rolling his body up the narrow alley.
Looking over the wriggling body, she could see Elijah disappearing into the darkness up ahead. He didn’t know she had stopped – that she’d been cut off. The soldier thrashed on the ground between them.
Kate backed away and brought her rifle to her shoulder as the whacked-out soldier lurched to his feet, instantly moving toward her again. His head was down so she couldn’t see his face, but from the way he moved the dude was not in a good way.
She had absolutely no idea what to do now.
“Shoot him!” she heard. It was Elijah, who had turned around finally and seen her. He was now quick-walking back.
She blinked hard. This couldn’t be happening.
She depressed her M4 and shot the advancing man in his right thigh. A dark hole appeared in his fatigues. But he didn’t slow and he didn’t even look down.
The wound had absolutely no effect.
Sorry About Your Face
Camp Lemonnier - Beside the East Wire
HOLY MOTHERFUCKING SHIT.
Hands pawed at her, enveloping her flesh, a fetid mouth opening and snapping at her face, at her bare neck. Kate tried to grapple, her rifle wedged between their struggling bodies, the soldier’s starched ACUs scraping against her bare arms and covered thighs, way too intimate, like a teenage boy groping and fumbling…
She could see his face now – and he may well have still been a teenager. He was a young kid, a dog-faced soldier, a ground-pounder – and he was so fucked up she could barely recognize him as another living human being. Mottled skin, grayish-green, with patches of flaking red sores. Faint black spiderweb patterns around the eyes and under the thin skin at his temples. Milky and opaque eyes – looking for all the world blind, but still locked onto her with some inexplicable, single-minded intensity.
She couldn’t think, she was only reacting – she dropped her rifle on its sling and grabbed his head with both hands, using all her strength to keep it off her, and the vulnerable flesh of her face and neck. The dude was all over the place, writhing and thrashing, both arms wrapped around her shoulders, and a lot stronger than a sick guy ought to be – stronger even than a healthy one.
She was half bent over backward now, all her leverage gone, angles awkward and worsening, relying on pure forearm and hand strength – which was evaporating fast. The open mouth, and those perfect middle-American teeth, an inch away from her nose. She had no fucking idea whatsoever what she was staring in the face, or what this dude’s deal was – she only knew she absolutely didn’t want any.
She pivoted ninety degrees, putting her back to the fence, and braced her back leg behind her – then rallied her last strength to shove the horror-movie visage a few inches farther away…
And the entire face, and the head it was stuck on, disappeared. It just went away from between her hands, stopped existing, wasn’t in this world, or in her face, anymore. Her hands held nothing. A fraction of a second later she heard the percussive boom of a heavy weapon – Jake’s .50-cal, roaring from twenty yards back down the alley.
Instantly, she felt a strong and irresistible shove in her shoulder, and a deep bellow at her ear: “GO! Keep moving!” The shove sent her half-tumbling into Elijah, who had reached her from the other direction. He turned on his heel and led the way forward, Kate striding behind, now sandwiched between a fearless badass and a man of God… which surely represented, by far, the most safety she’d enjoyed today.
Or maybe ever would again, for all she knew.
Hot tears leaked at the corners of her eyes, and she took her hand off the vertical foregrip of her weapon to wipe them away.
* * *
As she ran with the wire just
off her left elbow, Kate could only think one thing now: Keep moving. She had to keep moving. And she wasn’t sure she could think about anything else.
Thought was shutting down.
She had to battle to stay functional. And she knew it was in those moments when things went kinetic, and everything went wrong, that the operators were separated from the conventional guys. That ability to improvise, to adapt, to change up – and to never give up. Resilience to chaos, and resolve to keep going. She had been trying to prove something last night.
Today was no different. Just worse – and harder.
She almost laughed aloud at that thought, as something blew sky-high off toward the center of the camp, sending tendrils of orange flame and plumes of heavy black smoke into the slowly lightening sky.
But, explosions or no, morning would eventually come.
And she fucking well was going to be there for it.
The three of them finally reached the end of the row of buildings that backed onto the east wire and dispersed out into an open area, each quick-walking heel-toe, weapons up to shoulders in high ready. Instantly, Jake pivoted and engaged something to the right, and out of Kate’s adrenaline-constricted cone of vision; Elijah was doing the same to the left. She focused on the middle sector – across which moved two palsied figures, backlit by the flames that were now in view a hundred yards away.
She gained a sight picture on the first – then stopped walking, drew up, shooting posture perfect, regulating her breathing, fundamentals perfect. It was the training that made this possible – shooting fundamentals drilled in until they were pure muscle memory, which was the only way they were going to work in the stress of combat.
She squeezed her trigger, putting two rounds, then two more, into center mass on the charging figure on the right.
And, in the moment that she fired, she honestly had no idea whether her target was American or Somali, Islamist or southern Baptist. She only knew she was fighting for her life now. And it was a fight she had zero intention of losing. And if she did lose, it wouldn’t be because she failed to try. She would go down fighting.
Arisen : Nemesis Page 6
