Brendan clenched his jaw. He looked over at Jake, who was watching him silently. They both knew the game. Jake saved his political capital for the leadership and tactical questions that were most important – that might get people killed if the calls were made wrong. This wasn’t one of them. Yet.
Brendan checked the moving map on the control station. “A little longer,” he said.
Elijah flew in silence for another minute. Kate kept zooming. They had to be getting close to the limit of the optical zoom now.
“Cap…”
“Wait,” Brendan said. He pointed at the screen. “They’re descending.”
And then they saw something looming in the distance and underneath. Rolling hillsides had sprung up, with sections of low and thick forest and undergrowth blanketing them. The bush. But there was one section coming up that was even thicker – strangely so. It didn’t look like natural growth.
Kate took their camera off the Pred and zoomed in on whatever it was. It swelled, then stopped. “That’s all,” she said. “We’re out of zoom.”
“Hold it there,” Brendan said.
“Cap…” Elijah repeated.
“What the Sam Hill is that?” Todd interjected. He was ribbing Elijah.
“I think those are walls,” Kate said. “It’s a fixed fortification. And it’s big.”
Once they knew what they were looking at, it started to resolve – what looked like their own fixed wood-post walls, except at least twice as high. And encompassing an area perhaps ten times as big as Camp Price. It also looked like an attempt had been made to camouflage it from the air – living foliage on the walls, and on netting that partially covered whatever lay inside. But much of the greenery and netting had rotted away, and not been replaced.
“Holy shit,” Kwon said. “What the hell is that?”
Brendan saw Jake looking over and checking the paper map. But he was still keeping his silence.
“I know what that is,” Brendan said, finally.
“Well, keep us in suspense, by all means. More fun that way.” Todd’s eyes twinkled in the dim light.
Brendan took a breath. “It’s the Stronghold.”
Elijah looked over his own shoulder. “The al-Shabaab Stronghold? I thought we were never convinced it existed in the first place. Never mind survived until now.”
Brendan said, “Can you think of a better set-up for surviving this long? Totally isolated, totally hidden – and totally self-sufficient.”
A beat of silence hung in the air.
Brendan realized Jake had his finger stuck on a spot on the map. “It’s right where we thought it would be,” he said. “Galmudug. In the seam between Algula District, and Xingod.” He looked up and held Brendan’s gaze.
“Well, damn,” Todd said. “The Pred wasn’t one of ours after all. Point to Kwon.”
Kate leaned in, boggling at the size of the compound on the video, and in particular at the height of the walls. “Jesus,” she said. “That’s one fixed position I wouldn’t want to have to assault.”
“Wait,” Brendan said. “What’s that on the walls?”
The light was fading now and the video on the day optic getting grainy and indistinct. Kate switched to the IR camera. Now they could make out heat blobs on the walls. Some of them were moving. And they looked armed.
“Switch back,” Bren said.
Now that they knew what they were looking at, they recognized the tiny figures walking the walls, presumably on a parapet mounted behind it. They were Somali by their color and shape, raggedly dressed, and carrying AKs. They could also see guard towers in all the corners, five or six of them. In the closest, they could just make out a mounted machine gun. Over the top of it flew a tattered black flag, with white writing in Arabic and a white circle below that.
It was the flag that had been used by ISIS, al-Shabaab, AQAP, and a few others. It was the black flag of jihad.
“Don’t overfly them,” Brendan said. “We don’t want to risk losing the drone to ground fire.” With the powerful zoom, it wasn’t nearly as close as it looked. But they were getting closer.
“Not an issue,” Elijah said. “We do not have the fuel to overfl—”
He was cut off by Jake. “More importantly, we need to not let them see that we have eyes on them.”
Brendan nodded at Jake. “Yeah. That was the mistake they made with us.” The two leaders were in agreement.
“Captain,” Elijah said. He started to bank the aircraft around on his own authority.
“No, wait,” Brendan said. “Where’s the Predator?”
Kate zoomed out and panned around until she found it. By this point, it had touched down on what looked like a packed-dirt airstrip, just outside the walls to the south. It was now rolling to a stop.
And there was a human figure walking up to meet it.
“Zoom, zoom,” Brendan said.
The figure resolved as tall and lanky. He was wearing Western clothes. He seemed be wearing eyeglasses and had short curly hair.
And the hair looked blond or straw-colored.
“Okay, I’ll bite,” said Todd. “Who’s the John Walker Lindh-looking motherfucker?”
“The white boy jihadi?” Elijah asked.
“Yeah.”
“NFI, man.” Elijah shook his head. “No freaking idea…”
White Boy Jihadi
ma’Qal (“The Stronghold”) - Just Outside the Walls
Baxter watched the last long shadows around the clearing stretch out into what would soon be all-consuming darkness, as he put the tow rope over his shoulder and hauled the Predator off the landing strip and into its storage shed.
They had built the airstrip outside the walls – not so much because the Stronghold wasn’t big enough to hold it, but because the walls were so high, and a hazard to take-offs and landings. And they were only getting higher – Baxter could even now see guys up there at work, extending them up beyond their original twenty feet, due to current events. Also, the Pred needed a good 1,500 meters of hard runway to get off the ground safely. They’d decided not to mess around with it.
The shed was there to securely house the drone, without having to haul the two-thousand-pound bird of prey in and out the gate all the time. They flew a lot of missions. The Emir was big on ISR – intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance. Basically, he wanted to know what was going on, at all times – everywhere.
Baxter shrugged. The Emir – at first it had rankled to have to call Godane that. But he’d gotten over it. There probably wasn’t anyone still breathing air, this far into the post-Apocalpyse, who hadn’t made huge compromises to stay alive.
And who hadn’t had his spirit broken, at least a little bit.
Baxter got the drone inside the shed and moved to close the big double doors. But then he hesitated. There’d been a little wobble in the bird’s flight, some tremble in the engine. He should probably check it out while he was here. He took his Gerber multitool from its pouch on his belt and got the screwdriver out. There were real tools in the shed, of course. But using the Gerber made him feel tactical. It was the same model Dugan and Maximum Bob had carried. Like a lot of guys in the conventional military and the intelligence services, Baxter had a bad case of operator envy.
Though it was more like hero worship in his case.
While unscrewing and popping the engine maintenance hatch, he tried to occupy his mind so as not to think about the real reason he was doing this.
He just didn’t want to go back inside.
He didn’t want to have to face Zack – not in his current, and seemingly permanent, state. He didn’t want to return, at least not right this second, to their paranoid subterranean existence, crawling around beneath the earth like moles. Maybe being a live mole beat being a dead human.
But it was hard to appreciate that all the time.
And he definitely didn’t want to risk being summoned by the Emir again. Every such royal audience took it out of him. He’d been a super-hard wo
rker in the Agency, and before that at the Farm, the Agency’s clandestine training facility. And before that Georgetown, and going all the way back, actually. He also had a famously positive and can-do attitude – Zack had always said so, and complained about how bloody insufferable it was.
So Baxter knew how to work, how to put his head down and get on with it. He even knew how to suffer, how to shut up and keep humping.
But bowing and scraping wasn’t in his DNA.
It was just what he had to do now to survive. And survival always required adapting. “Tough shit,” Dugan had told him, on that long harrowing drive away from the Agency safehouse in Hargeisa – which by then was in flames and being overrun by both the dead and heavily armed Somali militias. With the world falling apart all around them, Dugan had given him the secret to survival: “We adapt and overcome.”
Those words still rang in his ears like they’d been spoken yesterday – even though the badass Agency operator and former SEAL was long gone. He had spent his life keeping Baxter and Zack alive, and getting them out of the gravity well of ground zero of the fall of man.
They had gotten out, and they had found a sanctuary from the Apocalypse. For a while, they’d even thought they’d found a home – when the universal onslaught of the dead had made the al-Shabaab fighters and the CIA analysts feel like brothers, working together against a common threat. Godane had even given them their weapons back, after a couple of weeks of pitching in and good behavior.
But it didn’t last. The immediate peril passed – or at least become the new normal – and Godane’s natural paranoia kicked back in. After that, Zack and Baxter went from valued if odd members of the community, back down to vanquished slave labor. Maybe serfs, on a good day.
But it was definitely a seller’s market for sanctuary, so there wasn’t a whole hell of a lot either of them could do about it.
There had been many dark hours in the months since then, when it was only the memory of Dugan’s wise and super-inspiring words that had given Baxter the strength to get up in the morning and put one foot in front of the other. But he had. And he had to continue to be the strong one now. For Zack – who had lost that ability.
The two of them were all they had now.
* * *
He was just getting the engine cowling bolted back down when Baxter realized he wasn’t alone. There was electric light in there, but it was feeble and flickering. And the man who had joined him was notorious for stealth – usually employed in the service of violence.
It was al-Sîf. The Sword.
And, as always, he was wearing his namesake weapon hanging from his belt. Huge bare arms protruded outside his tactical vest, which he wore with no shirt underneath. His taut skin was so black it was nearly purple – but, more strikingly, it sat atop pure muscle. The man had almost no subcutaneous body fat. He was the Emir’s chief lieutenant, which gave him extremely high status around the Stronghold. And he carried himself that way.
Now, he was just standing with his huge arms crossed, watching Baxter work – and how long he’d been there was unclear.
After Baxter saw him, al-Sîf actually smiled, revealing several gold teeth. “How do you know how to do this?” he asked, in accented but regal English, gesturing perhaps at the UAV in general, perhaps at the engine repair he’d just finished.
Baxter shrugged. “It’s just an internal combustion engine. I downloaded the specs and users guides before the Internet went down. I can’t really do the aeronautics or structural stuff. Then again, if this thing crashes, nobody dies – unless they have the bad luck to be standing underneath it when it comes down. But in that case, unless it’s us, they’d be dead already.”
Al-Sîf regarded him. “You are a very strange white man,” he said.
Baxter shrugged again. Tell me something I don’t know.
Al-Sîf dug around his gum line over a gold tooth with a fingernail. “But also you must remember, if this plane crashes, it will definitely kill someone.”
“Really? Who?”
“You, my friend. You.”
Baxter’s smile faded. He knew Godane valued the Predator above all things. It was only because Zack and Baxter had come bearing it that they’d been let into the Stronghold in the first place. And he was pretty sure it was only the Predator, and Baxter’s skills flying it, that kept them alive day to day.
His smile came back a little when al-Sîf clapped him on the shoulder. He knew Godane’s enforcer had something of a soft spot for him – like Baxter was his pet Westerner. And while probably twice as deadly as the Emir, certainly in close combat – where he was rumored to have killed dozens of live men and hundreds of dead ones – al-Sîf was merely half as scary as the al-Shabaab chief. While al-Sîf was for the most part easygoing, rational, and even had a sense of humor, Godane was a nasty piece of work – mean-spirited, officious, petty, ego-driven.
And he wielded power absolutely.
“Time to close up shop now,” al-Sîf said. “The Emir will see you.”
Baxter sagged. He figured that was it – another summons. It was the most obvious explanation for al-Sîf’s presence here.
He locked up the hangar shed behind him.
And began the long walk back – to the opposite of freedom.
The Emir
The Stronghold
The large room where Godane held court, and did much of the business of running his empire, was the deepest spot in the whole underground complex. He also had – Baxter knew, though he was by no means supposed to know this – a hidden tunnel that led from the environs of his chamber, underneath the perimeter wall, and out into the bush, emerging in a hidden spot some unknown distance from the complex.
Baxter assumed this was so the Emir could escape if the Stronghold were overrun, or if he was facing some kind of palace coup inside. He was a truly paranoid bastard and it was like he had collected all the top survival and oppression tricks of all the meanest and longest-ruling despots in world history.
Well, he may be paranoid, Baxter thought, as the gigantic front gate of the Stronghold opened to admit him and his chaperone. But, then again, he is still alive. And that was a lot more than could be said of Saddam, Kim Jong-un, Putin…
Baxter willed his night vision to come online as they threaded through the shadowy structures inside the sprawling courtyard. They had electric power for lights – but they never used them outdoors, and never had. Not once since Baxter and Zack had arrived, a few days after the fall – and after their flight from Djibouti and what was originally supposed to be their place of safety: Camp Lemonnier.
Instead, they had arrived there just in time to see the last living people hauling ass out of it. And by that point they’d also lost both members of their security detachment – Dugan and his large colleague Maximum Bob.
With their situation dire, and odds of survival looking longer by the minute, Zack had developed the desperate and probably insane, or maybe insanely brilliant, idea to take them here, to the al-Shabaab Stronghold. He had guessed it was the one place so hidden, so fortified, and so remote that it might still stand when all else fell.
Zack had further guessed that the Emir – more commonly known as Sheik Ali Rage Godane, leader of al-Shabaab – could be counted on to rule with an iron fist. And to be one of the few guys in charge anywhere sure to have the resolve, not to mention ruthlessness, to kill anybody who remotely looked infected, rather than let them back inside his walls.
It turned out this was exactly what Godane had done. And it worked. The Stronghold still stood. Alone, as far as Zack and Baxter knew, in all of what used to be human civilization.
Then again, it was as if the place had been designed perfectly for this in advance. They’d always practiced fascist noise and light discipline. They’d had to, to keep from being spotted – and, about five minutes later, bombed into mulch – by overflying American jets, gunships, armed drones, heavy bombers…
Originally, most of the complex had been underground, wit
h everything above the surface heavily camouflaged. They’d now let some of that slide.
No one was looking from above anymore.
But for years they’d had to worry about infrared optics and forward-looking infrared radar (FLIR), and all-seeing ISR platforms, and long-range audio-capture devices, plus infiltrating Tier-1 operators with advanced four-barrel night-vision goggles, and not to mention all the overflying keyhole satellites.
And it was now the same skills developed to dodge all of that, which kept them from drawing the dead.
Baxter’s eyes were just starting to adjust to the darkness – though somehow he could always feel the gun barrels trained on him from up on the walls – as al-Sîf opened a heavy wooden interior door and began to walk him down.
All the way to the bottom of the well.
* * *
“So. You’ve found us some living people, kaffir.”
Baxter kept his expression neutral. Kaffir was how Godane addressed him and Zack most of the time. It meant "unbeliever" or "infidel.” Baxter sighed. Whereas most religious nutjobs had, over the course of the ZA, had the courtesy to either renounce their faith or, more often, turn into the living dead, Godane had not only clung to his jihadist salafism – which meant strict seventh-century Islam, to the point of blowing up anyone who disagreed – he’d actually taken the end of the world as an endorsement of his faith.
As Baxter had heard Godane rant many times, the zombie apocalypse was simply a case of Allah wiping out the world because it was ungodly – because there was no longer any Caliphate, no Ummat al-Islamiyah, or Islamic Nation. He further believed that he and his followers in al-Shabaab had been spared for the express purpose of starting over and building a new world for the devout.
The man actually thought he had a divine mandate.
And Baxter, in calmer moments, had to admit the facts were on his side: ungodly world, check; completely wiped out, check; and al-Shabaab spared… check.
Arisen : Nemesis Page 13
