If only there were something he could do, some way he could make it right. But, as things stood, Zack was a million miles from being able to do anything. He was below ground, buried, underwater, stuck at less than zero. He was impotent.
All he was… was alive.
With his survivor guilt. He had been there, at the right time and in the right place, better positioned than anyone in the world to catch the pandemic before it started. He’d had the ability, for a time, to save the entire world. But he hadn’t – the virus had gotten out anyway.
And the world had ended after all.
And, as far as Zack could tell, the only people left alive on Earth were these fucking nutjob Islamists – along with him and Baxter. And, until just a few minutes ago, he’d thought that was all there’d ever be. But now there was a wrinkle. There was someone else alive. And close. And presumably heavily armed.
Zack thought desperately about what that was going to mean.
And if Godane, having discovered Abo, was even going to let Zack live long enough to find out.
War Council
Camp Price - Team Room
“Well, at least all the fucking al-Shabaab guys are dead.”
Jake had actually said that at some point over the past year and a half. It was probably around the time when they worked out that pretty much everyone everywhere was dead. Jake hadn’t been a huge al-Shabaab fan. Now, he leaned back slightly in his chair at the head of the table, and watched as the others filed in.
The team had spread out their sleeping quarters but they still maintained a traditional team room. Like the one at Lemonnier, it held a U-shaped table encircling a sand-table board, with whiteboards surrounding that, and the walls covered with lockers and shelving for weapons, ammo, and other operational gear. This one was big enough to hold a split team comfortably, or the whole detachment crammed in. That meant it was plenty big enough to hold the survivors now.
They were there to have their war council. Jake had called it.
The others filed in and took seats beneath the overhead lights, which turned the room into a cone of glare in the middle of millions of hectares of darkness. All the windows could be, and had been, blacked out.
Soon everyone was inside.
Jake, who as team sergeant generally ran the meetings and planning sessions, opened without preamble. “Okay, guys, basic game theory: what’s the enemy going to do now? Put a better way: what would we do if we were Godane – and had just found out we’re here?”
Todd said, “Do we even know it’s still Godane running the show there?”
Jake snorted. “He’s in there. I can smell him. He was the only sufficiently cockroach-like warlord to survive the end of the world.”
Kwon said, “He’s the guy I’d pick. Remember how Lemonnier went down, from letting infected soldiers back inside the wire and into the hospital? Somehow I don’t think he’d have that problem.”
“So the question remains,” Jake said. “What does he do now?”
Todd said, “Hellfire the shit out of us?”
Brendan, who hadn’t sat down but stood slightly apart in the corner, spoke. “There’s nothing in that for him. Just the loss of an irreplaceable munition.”
Jake looked up at him. “There certainly is something in it for him – elimination of a lethal threat.”
Brendan cocked his head. “Are we a lethal threat?”
Jake just looked at him, his expression at a low simmer, as if the question were beneath answering.
* * *
Kate looked pained at this and finally spoke up: “Sorry, but why would anybody, however deranged, go out of their way to pick a fight they didn’t have to? In a world where survival is so precarious in the first place?” She paused and looked around the table. “Surely we can get along – or at least leave each other alone, with so many miles of wasteland between us. His own self-interest should dictate that.”
Jake answered. “What Godane’s self-interest will dictate is getting hold of our gear and supplies: the gun trucks, the quiet generator, the arms and ammo, the explosives. Maybe the well pump. And based on the intel workup we had before, not to mention the drone video we all just saw, he’s got a big enough force to march over here and take it all. To overrun the camp, wipe us out, and capture everything we’ve got.”
Kate said, “Surely he’s already got most of that stuff if his group has survived this long? How many well pumps does the guy need?”
Kwon shook his head and traded a knowing look with Jake. “You don’t know these people. You never fought them – or saw what happened to the civilians they deemed not godly enough, or too friendly to the crusader imperialists.”
Jake picked up the theme. “Godane is a butcher – he’s beheaded journalists, sent suicide bombers into markets full of grandmothers, and organized shooting sprees in elementary schools. There can be no accord, accommodation, or coexistence with this guy. Believe me. And it would be a total mistake to imagine he or his people are rational, much less reasonable.”
Jake paused and looked around the room. “They know we’re here. And they’re going to come for us. Either because they want what we’ve got. Or simply because they’re sons of bitches.”
“And if not that,” Kwon added, looking calm and mean, “then because they know they’ve got to do it to us first. Or else we’re going to do it to them.”
“Yeah,” Brendan said, finally sitting down, “except that we’re not going to do it to them.” He shook his head. “This is like the tragedy of the armed homeowner who meets the armed burglar. Neither has any desire to shoot the other. But each fires, just to keep the other one from doing it first.”
Jake let a long pause draw out before replying. “Yeah. That’s exactly what it is. And do you want to be the one who doesn’t shoot first?”
Brendan shook his head, then opened his mouth to speak – but shut it again.
Kwon drummed his fingers on the tabletop. “Our problem’s actually bigger than that. This camp isn’t defensible.”
“The defenses are of your design,” Brendan said.
“Yeah. And it was designed in two phases. First to be a light-footprint bush camp, able to fight off an al-Shabaab patrol using moderate fire superiority – and calling on air support if we got in trouble. But then it became a place to hide from the dead, and Todd and I made changes to focus on that.”
Todd took up the theme. “Kwon’s right. For instance, rather than clearing kill zones out beyond the wire, instead we brought the foliage in as tight as possible, to camouflage us. We still have elevated platforms, with interlocking fields of fire – but no real hard cover, because no one was going to be shooting back anymore, never mind lobbing bombs at us.”
Kwon summarized. “Basically, at no point was this ever meant to be a fortified fixed position that could withstand a deliberate, planned assault. A sustained attack. Never mind a long siege.”
Brendan took this on board. “Can you Alamo us up?”
“Sure, some,” Kwon said. “But it’s not even so much the configuration of the defensive emplacements. What we need is heavy weapons. That’s how we can defend this place.”
Brendan sighed. “I was afraid that was where this was going. You want to go back to Lemonnier. The heavy weapons locker.”
Jake spoke now. He and Kwon had obviously discussed this beforehand, offline. “Two Mk 47 Strikers. Both our miniguns. And a shit-ton of ammo for both.”
The Mk 47 was the latest generation of 40mm automatic grenade launcher, with a laser range-finder and integrated fire-control system, capable of launching smart programmable grenades for airburst – with perfect accuracy. The miniguns were everyone’s favorite – the GAU-19 electric Gatling gun in .50-caliber. It was like the M2 – except firing 2,000 rounds a minute, instead of 650. It not only took heads off bodies, it took tops off buildings. Both weapons systems had mounting kits for either the rooftop turret-rings on the gun trucks, or for fixed defensive positions.
And all of these had been confiscated by General Præsidium when the team had rotated into theater, and then locked up in their secure weapons locker.
“And not only our stuff,” Kwon said. “There will be more heavy machine guns, mortars, light field artillery. Shoulder-fired rockets, claymores. The Mk 47s alone will be decisive. Whoever has them is going to have a crushing firepower advantage.”
Todd chimed in. “I can build emplacements for all of those weapons systems. And turn this place into a veritable Masada, impregnable up on our cliff top.”
Kate said, “I like where your head is at.”
Todd winked at her. Then he said: “But everyone died at Masada. What happens when we start shooting all these cannons off? Won’t this joint just become an all-night dead-guy dance party? With us and al-Shabaab middle-school couple-dancing in the middle under the disco ball? Godane’s traveling ass-clown circus will never get out of here alive. But neither will we.”
Jake let Kwon tackle Todd’s objection. “Maybe,” he said. “But we deal with that then. And it’s better than all of us getting shot to death and Camp Price being renamed Camp Jihad, with the black flag hoisted over our TOC.”
Brendan almost laughed. “These are all valid points. But going back to Lemonnier is too risky. We’ve talked about this. There’s a reason we’ve never tried it.”
Kate seemed inclined to agree. “With both the former garrison of the camp and the entire population of Djibouti Town all shambling around in close proximity…”
Neither Jake nor Kwon looked worried.
“There are any number of risks,” Brendan said – then started ticking them off. “Some or all of us could be killed – or, worse, infected. We could draw the mass of dead back here, after all this time. We could get in a fight with al-Shabaab or other survivors – and that would bring the dead down on us. Finally, we don’t even know for sure those weapons are still there.”
Jake arched an eyebrow. “Did you see any come out during the fall of the camp? Or since? Only a tiny handful of people had the code and keycard access to that building. You think any of them survived?”
Brendan couldn’t respond to any of that.
Jake looked around the table. It seemed the factions that had shaped up were him and Kwon on one side, Brendan and Kate on the other. But Kate weighed less in the balance. She was still new. Todd would be cool and roll with whatever the group decided. And Elijah hadn’t even spoken yet, sitting off in his own world.
Kwon drummed his fingers again, slouched way back in his chair. “There’s something else in that locker. Something we have to have.”
“What’s that?” Brendan asked.
“At least a dozen Stinger anti-air missiles, which we can use to take out Godane’s Predator. Because even if we fight off his ground incursion… the minute he realizes it’s either impossible or just too expensive to take us down, he’ll simply immolate us from the air with those Hellfire missiles.”
No one else spoke.
The vision of literal Hellfire raining down on their heads kind of brought the general mood down.
Soft Tissue
Camp Price - the Courtyard
Jake walked alone in the dark back to the hooch he shared with Kwon.
He was alone now with his thoughts. And he knew Kwon had it right: if Godane found them too strong to take down, then he’d decide they were too strong to let live. And Jake would be damned if he’d let his team run away. They’d been kicking Godane’s ass all over the map before the end of the world.
And that was not going to change now.
The compromise he and Brendan had ultimately reached with regard to the al-Shabaab burglar problem was this: at the very least, they had to have the bigger gun. And they had to have it cocked and ready to fire.
They had to run the mission to clean out that heavy weapons locker.
Jake checked his watch as he threaded through the blackness of the camp courtyard. The sun would be up in a couple of hours. And they were looking at a drive of fourteen hours to Camp Lemonnier, assuming no delays or disasters, at which time the sun would be going down again. But they couldn’t wait. After months of endless dragging hours, suddenly they had no time.
Any delay might prove fatal.
Nighttime would not be the right time for their raid. Darkness was no impediment to the dead, who seemed to smell the living, or hear the slightest sound – or maybe lock on with some sense the living didn’t have and couldn’t understand at all.
The only advantage the team had was their night-vision goggles (NVGs). But as they normally only kept two pairs of them charged, for use on night watches, now the rest had to be dug out and charged up. That meant at least an hour before they could roll out.
Jake stepped into the darker darkness of his hooch, pulled the door shut, and hit the desktop light. He walked over to the weapons locker against the rear wall and opened it up, revealing a dizzying array of hardware. He and Kwon had started keeping their own mission-essential gear here a while ago, rather than in the team room. An eyebrow or two had been raised. But nobody said anything.
Jake eyed his Beowulf, where it had sat gathering dust in the rifle rack for months. It was impossible to silence properly, no matter how big a suppressor he put on it. So he had regretfully put it on the shelf for the duration of the ZA. Now he lifted out what he had replaced it with: a Heckler & Koch MP7A2 PDW – Personal Defense Weapon. It looked like a smaller version of the old MP5 sub-machine gun, but with the magazine in the pistol grip, an extendable stock, and a fixed vertical foregrip. It also had an EOTech holographic sight and a visible/IR laser mounted on the rail. Even with those, it was compact, light as a feather, and virtually recoil-free.
With its tailor-made silencer it didn’t even whisper when fired. The weapon had originally been designed to defeat body armor. But loaded with 40-round magazines of 4.6mm hollow-points, optimized for energy transfer in soft tissue, it was also excellent at defeating heads.
It had become Jake’s Zulu-fighting weapon of choice.
Back in the counter-terror wars, he personally never would have considered the overgrown machine-pistol a suitable weapon for a serious operator. But times changed. And you adapted. Or you died.
Jake surveyed the rest of the contents of the locker. Also on the rack was Kwan’s SCAR-L, also with an excellent suppressor – most of the noise of it firing was actually the bolt clicking back and forward, making it sound like a toy gun. There were also a few suppressed handguns, an array of knives in varying sizes, and even two hand axes. Finally he closed the doors and took a seat on his bunk.
He still had a little time here. The others were back in the team room, working up the mission plan. It was a simple enough template that Jake didn’t feel he needed to supervise it all. And Kwon was up in his aerie, keeping watch.
So Jake was alone.
He shook his head in the dark and laughed mirthlessly. Brendan almost seemed like he wanted to try to work with al-Shabaab. All be friends. Like, hey, they were still alive, so who gave a shit about who was on what side in a long-gone war for the future of a vanished civilization?
But one thing Jake agreed with Brendan about: the two of them were different in large part because they came from such different backgrounds.
He let his mind range back.
* * *
Jake had been thirty-nine at the time of the fall, an extremely experienced Master Sergeant who had been in the Special Forces Groups longer than God.
Born and bred in New York, mostly in Queens, he’d not only enlisted straight out of high school – but got married at the same time. He used to joke that he received his initial cross-cultural training from his Irish-Jamaican wife, who grew up on the next block over from him. His father was a forty-year veteran of the Fire Department of New York, who had been at the Twin Towers when they came down. He’d lost six friends and a cousin that day. Later, serving in the War on Terror, Jake said: “It wasn’t about revenge. It was about civilization versus
barbarity.”
But no one who knew him thought he was averse to a little payback, either.
After three years in the 75th Ranger Regiment, a unit renowned equally for skill, discipline, austerity, and crushingly hard work, he sailed through Special Forces Assessment and Selection (SFAS) – and, later, was around for so many legendary SF engagements that it was like he’d never not been in the groups.
He’d just gotten posted as junior weapons sergeant to ODA 555 when they were sent as one of the very first units into Afghanistan. Over four tours there, he developed deep ties to the Afghans he worked with and mentored, becoming embedded into Pashtun culture – and committed to seeing that country succeed. He still cursed the President’s name for withdrawing before the job was done. He said, “For the nation, it’s pulling out. For us, it’s leaving behind friends we promised to stand alongside – until they and their families could be safe.”
He was also there in the initial Iraq invasion in 2003, when a single Special Forces battalion took over the entire northern theater of the war, which had been intended for a full mechanized infantry division – but which the Turks decided not to let pass through their territory. He was up to his neck in it in the Battle of Debecka Valley, when twenty-six SF guys with thin-skinned Humvees and Javelin missiles laid to waste an entire Iraqi motorized company, destroying four troop trucks, two tanks, and eight armored personnel carriers.
He quickly rose to senior weapons sergeant (18B), and then operations (or team) sergeant (18Z). Remarkably, he spent his entire SF career with Triple Nickel – with the sole exception of a six-month attachment to a CIF company (Combatant Commanders In-Extremis Force) – a specially trained and resourced element used for direct-action and counter-terrorism missions. There was little question he was good enough to be in that “elite of the elite” unit.
Arisen : Nemesis Page 15
