“C’mon,” Todd said, looking incredulous. “It was one of ours.”
“The asset was one of ours,” Kwon said stonily. “Or used to be. But you have absolutely no idea who’s driving that thing. Or where their loyalties are now.”
Brendan shook his head. “I find it hard to imagine anyone but U.S. or coalition personnel piloting anything like that. Allied militaries at worst.”
Jake looked unconvinced, and agreed with Kwon. “It’s just hardware. It doesn’t know or care who’s piloting it. And we won’t be the only ones scavenging former coalition military bases.”
“And if it was friendly,” Kwon said, “why didn’t they make radio contact?”
Brendan had no answer to that.
Kate said, “I took a heading from the Predator as it left. Let’s put the Shadow up on that heading, push it out as far as we can, and see what we can see.”
Jake shook his head. “I don’t think so. Remember what Stephen Hawking said about sending radio signals out into space? He said that if aliens visit us, the outcome would be like when Columbus landed in America. Which didn’t turn out well for the natives.”
He didn’t have to specify that Triple Nickel were the Indians in this scenario.
“We also have to be careful about how we risk the Shadow,” Brendan said. They all knew it was the only long-range drone they had, and in the SOF world redundancy was religion: two is one, one is none. With the SkyRanger quadcopter, they sort of had about one and a quarter.
Also, neither UAV had ever had to face the risk of ground fire before.
“If it’s good guys,” Jake said, “they’ll get in touch.”
“And if it’s bad guys,” Kwon added, “they’ll also probably get in touch.”
“All right,” Brendan said. “We’ll start standing a day watch, in addition to night.” The sun was getting low toward the horizon already. “And we’ll be ready to react.”
“One last thing,” Kwon said. The others looked to him expectantly. “That thing had two Hellfire missiles on its rails.”
Those words just hung out in the air, and the meeting broke up silently.
They all knew it would probably only take one Hellfire to turn all of Camp Price into nothing but brimstone and ash.
* * *
Brendan retired to the hooch he shared with Elijah.
Traditionally, when in the bush the whole ODA lived in a single structure, with three rooms: a team room, like the one they’d had at Lemonnier, where they ate, worked, and stored their gear; a tiny bunk room, also like at the Camp, where they slept – when they did sleep; and a small combination shower/head/laundry.
They had talked about spreading out soon after the fall but initially fell prey to inertia and habit and stayed put, continuing to live on top of one another. They didn’t have much left from the old world – but they didn’t need much. That was the whole point of them. They just needed what SF had taught them.
Eventually, about six months in, the pressures had created fracture lines, and the fractures split them apart: they all moved into double billets. At the time, Brendan didn’t like what it said about what was happening to the team.
But right now he definitely appreciated the solitude, with Elijah out refueling the drone. He needed to think.
He was worried – and not just about who was lurking out there now, with eyes on their camp and very dangerous munitions pointed at them. He was worried about the team dynamics. More specifically, he was worried about his team sergeant, Jake.
And he was worried about maintaining his control of this ODA.
The psychology and dynamics between detachment commander and team sergeant had always been complex, and usually involved some tension. Ultimately, Brendan as commander had all the authority. But the team sergeant had all the experience – in Jake’s case, twenty years of it – and thus all of the moral authority. The team sergeant did what the commander said in the end, because that was the chain of command. But any smart young captain knew to listen very carefully to everything his team sergeant told him.
But the end of the world had muddied those waters.
For starters, there no longer was any chain of command – not that extended past Brendan himself. There was no battalion commander, no general officer in charge of the whole SF group. And there were certainly no courts martial to which Brendan could send mutineers.
So now he actually had to govern by consent. The others would follow him because they saw that he was worthy of being followed – and that he had the skills, judgment, and decisiveness to not get them all killed.
If he did have those things.
Brendan lay down on his rack, steepled his fingers on his chest, and stared up at the bare ceiling through the dim air.
The fact was, he had never really had a chance to grow into his role, and to mature as he was intended to. He’d still been finding his feet when the shit came down – and he didn’t get a lot of time to develop afterward, because every move they made was life or death.
Then again, almost every decision an ODA captain made back in the world had been life or death – and sometimes even higher stakes, like whether an invasion would succeed, or an allied nation would stand or fall. And now Brendan was struggling to understand whether his difficulties were unique in the history of the world. Or whether they were the same old challenges – and he just wasn’t up to them.
He had started off command of this team basically by faking it – hiding his lack of confidence and resolve by making his manner and his tone super-resolute and authoritative, even when he wasn’t feeling that way. Especially then. But what was supposed to be an eighteen-month command had turned into a life sentence, and he was still faking it. And he was starting to feel like a fraud.
He sighed out loud into the quiet air.
Honestly, Brendan felt like the changes and maturity he needed to see in himself were growing farther away, rather than nearer.
It wasn’t ideal.
Then again, he thought, very little is these days…
* * *
Captain Brendan Jefferson Davis… Somehow the title still tasted strange. The middle name was a conscious nod to the Confederacy, made by his old-money family back in the Old Dominion of Virginia.
Brendan sometimes wondered if the tensions between him and Jake were really a class thing. Whereas Jake had grown up in a working-class family in New York and enlisted in the Army straight out of high school, Brendan was a West Pointer and the privileged son of a patrician family from wealthy northern Virginia.
But it had been a family with a strong tradition of service. His father had been an Army officer and later a case officer in the CIA – and Brendan had grown up all over the world, at home everywhere and nowhere. Though his good command of Arabic made it obvious which region his father had specialized in.
They had finally settled down in Arlington, Virginia – not far from CIA headquarters in Langley – and Brendan had gotten to go to the same high school for a couple of years in a row and from there straight to West Point. He always figured he’d end up following his father into the intelligence services, after he finished his military career.
That was off now, obviously.
In a way, it was a relief. In Brendan’s heart, his first love was actually Russian literature, which he had studied at West Point. And what he’d always secretly wanted to do was go back to get a Ph.D. and then teach. But he could never figure out how to have that conversation with his father.
After being commissioned a second lieutenant upon graduation, he was assigned to the 86th Airborne, where he’d served two combat tours as an infantry platoon leader in Afghanistan. The trouble was, both of them had been during the U.S. drawdown, when the serious fighting was done, and the main focus was force protection – that is, hiding out in gigantic bases and not getting anyone hurt.
So, having missed the action there, Brendan put in for SFAS – Special Forces Assessment and Selection – mainly because the spec-ops guy
s were still seeing action. It had been the aspiration of the U.S. president to do with a few hundred SF guys what he’d been unable to do with tens of thousands of conventional soldiers.
After he made it through SFAS and the Q Course, he was assigned to 5th Special Forces Group, which had primary responsibility for the Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia. Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF), the official name for the war in Afghanistan, had already expanded into the Horn of Africa to take on al-Shabaab, AQAP, and other tendrils of the network of global jihad.
So off Brandon went with his new ODA, setting up shop in CJTF-HOA. He’d thought he would do a six-month deployment there then move on.
That’ll teach me to make plans, he thought with a sad smile.
It had always been the fate of an ODA team leader to move on to the life of a staff officer after eighteen months in the field. (The fact that commanders came and went, while team sergeants were forever, was another source of the creative tension between them.) Brendan had been hoping maybe for a White House fellowship or else an appointment to study for a master’s degree at the prestigious Naval Postgraduate School after this.
He’d also planned on retiring from the Army with a higher rank – but when the world ended he hadn’t been anywhere near the promotion list for major. Now he never would be. His whole chain of command was dead.
Almost everyone he’d ever served with was dead.
As was his father. But somehow the man was still watching over him. Waiting for him to become the man, and leader, he was supposed to be.
* * *
Having dozed off in the cool and dim hut, Brendan was jerked back awake from two noises nearly at once. The first was a muted buzzing in the air – but aggressive, like a big mean insect.
The second was Todd’s voice, close. “Up and at ’em, Bren.”
He took a deep breath and sat up.
Todd’s lively blue eyes were shining at him in the dimness.
“It’s back.”
Shadow
Camp Price - In the Courtyard
Outside, the first thing Brendan saw was Kwon up in the west sangar – removing an M240 from its mount so he could point it at the sky.
“I got it…” he said as he started tracking the slow, low-flying aircraft.
“Hold fire,” Brendan said, running outside. “Don’t be crazy.”
He reached the rest of the team, all of whom were outside, but not necessarily out in the open. Most were under cover or at least close to it.
Kwon complied the with the order, lowering his weapon. But he also said, “One flyover might be happenstance. Two is hostile reconnaissance.”
Brendan just shook his head. The more Jake turned into his own separate command, the more openly rebellious Kwon seemed to get. He evidently imagined himself to be Jake’s army of one.
Reaching cover, Brendan said, “It’s a Predator. It’s one of ours.”
“Then why have they come back twice – without making contact?”
Brendan spun and saw that this was Jake speaking to him, from out of the shadows beside the TOC. He stood cool and upright, his weapon slung.
Brendan had no answer to this. And when he thought about it for two seconds, had to admit Jake had a point. They didn’t always agree. But they didn’t always disagree either. He wondered how much of the latter was Jake using Jedi mind tricks on him. Now he looked past Jake and saw Elijah inside the TOC at the GCS. “Is the Shadow loaded up?”
Elijah nodded. “Fueled and pre-flight checked.”
“Launch it.” He looked back to Jake. “How many passes has this thing made?”
“This is its third circuit.”
“Jesus.” Brendan shook his head. Somebody was seriously eye-fucking them. And at this point they really needed to know who it was. At the very least, they couldn’t have that big noisy aircraft flying low over their heads all night – and potentially leading the dead to their doorstep.
But, more to the point, a secret redoubt in the mountain forests offered a lot less safety and security… when it wasn’t secret anymore.
* * *
By the time the Shadow was airborne, the Predator had just turned and headed off, back toward the south-west again. Evidently whoever was on the other end had gotten enough of a look.
“Follow that car,” Todd said, leaning back on a nearby desk in the TOC, looking relaxed. He was as usual laid back, literally in this case. The others were looking over Elijah’s shoulder at the screen of the GCS. Everyone was in there now except Kwon, whose watch it was.
In fairness, Brendan reflected, and despite Kwon’s attitude, everybody did feel better with him up in that sangar behind a machine gun. He was an artist with the weapon, and could cut small things in half with it from a very long range.
“Yeah, small problem with the follow-that-car plan,” Elijah said. “The Predator’s got a small but non-trivial speed advantage on us. If they put the hammer down, they’ll pull away.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Brendan said. “As long as it stays within sight.”
Being newer, the Shadow actually had better optics – a gimbal-mounted, digitally stabilized, liquid nitrogen-cooled electro-optical/infrared (EO/IR) camera.
As Elijah brought the Shadow around on the same heading as the Pred, they could make out its backside on screen. Elijah’s left hand moved to the camera controls and zoomed. The distinctive tail of the Predator, with its down-pointing stabilizers, beneath a rear-mounted propeller, swelled to fill the screen.
Then Elijah said, “But we’ve actually got a bigger problem. The MQ-1 has a slightly bigger engine – but it’s got an enormously bigger fuel tank. And thus a much longer range. Something like 600 miles, to our 180.”
Brendan squinted down at the digital status indicators on the GCS. “I thought the solar-cell package on the wings extended our range?”
“It does, in theory. But how much sunlight do you see out there right now?”
There wasn’t much. The sun was almost down.
“What do you estimate our combat radius to be right now?” Brendan asked. “Okay, never mind. We simply follow until we’re at bingo fuel. We’ll either make it to the Predator’s point of origin or we’ll be forced to turn back.”
He didn’t add, And then come up with some other plan…
Elijah shook his head. “Yeah, well, unfortunately, bingo fuel is a slightly fluid concept. If there’s less sunlight on the way back than on the way out…”
Now Jake spoke. He was standing a bit to the side, still in shadow. “We can’t do without that asset.”
Brendan knew his team sergeant was right. He said, “We won’t risk it.” He pivoted and looked at the region map spread out on the table. “So what’s out there – down the heading this thing’s currently on? Mogadishu? Nairobi?”
Kate took a pencil and protractor, double-checked the heading from the control station, and drew a line from their point of origin.
Brendan scanned the map and shook his head. “Jesus. There’s nothing out past that. Just a whole lot of Galmudug bush… and the Indian Ocean after that. Where the hell are they going? It makes no sense.”
He looked up to see Jake eyeing him from under lowered brow. If Jake agreed it didn’t make any sense, he was keeping his own counsel about it.
On the screen, the soaring hills of the Cal Madow mountain range dropped away, as did the thick forests. They were now heading out over rutted and parched wastelands. But they could already see the foliage springing back up in the distance – that would be the Galmudug region of central Somalia. The area had been semi-autonomous even back when there was such a thing as a Somali government – and it had also been totally lawless and dangerous, the true wild west of what was already an extremely anarchic country.
Also the sun was now disappearing to the west – behind all of Africa.
They were being led away into darkness.
* * *
“It’s pulling away,” Brendan said. At their fixed lev
el of zoom, the Predator was shrinking – slowly, but perceptibly.
Elijah exhaled. “I’ve already maxed us out. We can’t go any faster.”
Brendan leaned in at the systems readouts. The current airspeed read 114mph. “I thought we topped out at 127?”
Elijah nodded. “Under ideal conditions. We’ve probably got a headwind.”
“Can you get above it?”
“I’ll try it out.”
As he started to climb, the distant Predator moved out the bottom of the screen. “Do not lose that thing,” Brendan said.
Kate leaned in to take over the optical controls, so Elijah could concentrate on flying. The Pred came back into frame, and stayed there… until it didn’t. A few seconds later, the view started to vibrate, then bounce – and then buck wildly.
Their airspeed started to drop, quickly passing down through 100mph.
“Son of a motherless goat,” Elijah said. As their designated religious guy, he had all the creative curse words. And now he didn’t have to explain that they had moved into a section of air with serious turbulence – and a much worse headwind.
“Back down?” Elijah asked. “Or try up higher?”
Brendan hesitated. He knew it was not unheard of for these drones, especially the small ones, to just fall out of the sky – from turbulence, downdrafts, uncaught mechanical issues. They could get knocked around, stall out, lose a propeller or strut… And they weren’t exactly manufactured to the same safety, stability, and redundancy standards as manned aircraft. For pretty obvious reasons.
“Go higher,” Brendan said. No one else spoke.
Elijah put the elevators up and the nose followed. They started to climb. The camera still bucked like a dog that didn’t want a bath. Kate zoomed out to keep from losing the Pred, which they were now looking down on. They all waited.
The bucking turned back to vibrating, and then went away.
And the airspeed climbed… all the way to 129.
Elijah smiled. “Slight tailwind.”
Todd clapped him on the shoulder. “Rock out with your socks out, brother.”
Elijah exhaled. “We'’re keeping up. But I don’t know that it matters much at this point. We’re approaching what I’d realistically call bingo fuel.” Bingo fuel meant you had enough to return to base – and no more. “We should RTB. If not now, then soon. Very soon.”
Arisen : Nemesis Page 12
