Todd was in the meeting, back from the garage. Being a superstar, he’d completed all the repairs he could do with the equipment they had, including a lot of welding, in the time it took Brendan and Jake to drive out and back.
Kwon was also there. Brendan had radioed back from the road to tell him to stand down from air watch duty – shortly after he noticed the large and bulky case the two newcomers wrestled into the back of the truck with them. Neither Brendan nor Jake had been able to resist cracking a smile when Baxter told them what it was: al-Shabaab’s ground control station.
“So Godane’s Predator—” Jake said.
“Yeah,” Baxter answered. “Is now just a very heavy, ugly lawn ornament.”
Zack and Baxter’s stock with Triple Nickel had gone up instantly. So much so that the two Agency men were even part of the full team meeting.
And this was perhaps the most important such meeting they had held in the entire ZA. The war with Godane and al-Shabaab had gotten extremely bloody on both sides. And it was far from clear who would be the last survivors standing.
“When next they come,” Brendan said, pretty much picking up where he’d left off in the truck, “I won’t say they’re just going to waltz in. But they’re facing a degraded force now. We’ve suffered fifty percent casualties, captured and wounded.”
Kwon, leaning back coolly in his chair as usual, flexed his bandaged-up right hand – and regarded it with his one unbandaged eye. “These casualties can fight.”
Brendan gave him a grudging but admiring nod. He did have to admit that al-Shabaab were going to have to hit their weapons sergeant harder than that if they wanted to knock him out.
“Noted,” Brendan said. “But that was still way too close-hauled out there. We can’t afford to lose even one of us.” He didn’t need to elaborate that they were too few. Everyone knew that, even Jake. “Current trends are unsustainable. We’re burning through too much irreplaceable ammo, spare parts… people… and luck.”
Todd spoke up now. His color was back, after getting a couple of pints of plasma pumped in him. He was holding his right arm carefully, but otherwise seemed pretty okay – for a guy only a few hours out of surgery. He said, “They’re also not going to just walk into another ambush like that. That card has been played.” He paused and looked around the table. “So what’s our play next time?”
Jake, sitting for once, looked measured. Brendan tried to work out if his unshakeable confidence had been shaken. But he looked at Brendan and said, “First off, I knew they’d come. I told you that. Secondly, we got burned because they fucking knew we were going to be there. The question is how? This is the second time this bullshit has happened.”
Brendan said, “Aerial surveillance is my bet. That Predator can fly way too high for us to see it – but still see us just fine.”
“No,” Jake said. “We were deep in the bush. We did not move in the open. There’s no way it was a drone that spotted us.”
The young newcomer, Baxter, cleared his throat and spoke. “It wasn’t the Predator that spotted you.”
“Yeah?” Kwon said. “And you know because…?”
“Because I was flying it.”
Silence settled across the table. It remained a mystery – and a goddamned dangerous one. Brendan noticed Zack looking at him. The look seemed to be trying to tell him something – something he couldn’t say out loud.
But the moment passed.
* * *
“What we actually need from you two,” Jake said, “is to know where Godane’s holding our team member, what kind of security is on her…” He paused. “And what he’s likely to do with her now.”
“As for where,” Zack said, “he’s got a row of primitive jail cells, underground, on the lowest level of the Stronghold. Just dugouts in the dirt, with wooden doors and padlocks.”
“Guards?” Brendan asked.
“Not historically, not specifically for down there. But I imagine he might make an exception this time. And in any case, the whole place is crawling with armed fighters.”
“How many?” Jake asked.
Zack nodded. “We never knew for sure, and we’re less sure after all the ones you killed. There were probably 350 to 400 originally.”
Jake looked at Brendan and said, “I estimate we got seventy at the ambush. Another fifteen before that at Lemonnier.”
Brendan looked at Zack. “What’s he going to do with her?”
Zack sighed. “I’m sure you’ve seen the same videos I have.” He meant the beheading videos – and worse.
Todd said, “At least he can’t put her on YouTube now.”
No one laughed, and even Todd looked like he was trying to use humor to mask his mental suffering. Everyone there knew how close he and Kate were.
“I don’t know what he’s likely to do with her,” said Zack. He started to touch his forehead with his fingers, then noticed the bandaged and missing fingertips – as if for the first time. “He’s probably capable of anything.”
“Basically,” Baxter chimed in, “the man is batshit crazy.”
“Can you elaborate?” Jake’s face was freezing into some kind of death mask of resolve and cold hatred.
Zack was thinking he wouldn’t want to be on the receiving end of that. He made a dismissive gesture, like he didn’t even know where to start.
Baxter knew where to start. He said, “Godane’s such a freak that he’s still got the original victim of the whole pandemic locked up in one of those cells.”
“What?” Todd looked like this was at once hilarious and horrifying. “Why?”
Zack waved at the air again with missing fingertips. “It’s like some kind of totem for him. A talisman.”
“Like, what, a voodoo doll?”
“Something like that. As if he’s got the over-soul of all the dead locked up in his power. And he thinks maintaining possession of it makes him unkillable, his people immune to the virus – and his fortress unconquerable. That it’s the source of his power. He thinks the plague was the hand of Allah – that it wiped out the infidel, but spared him.”
Kwon said, “Why the fuck would he think that?”
Zack sighed. “It’s actually not entirely without justification.”
Jake said, “Most bullshit mystical thinking has a kernel of truth at its center.” Brendan was glad Elijah wasn’t in the room. Religion had been an ongoing sore spot between them, with Jake provoking him at every turn. “What’s his?”
Zack sat up straighter. “The fact that he started the plague.”
Zulu Zero
Camp Price - Team Room
Zack looked around the table – and quickly worked out that no one here knew this. Why would they?
He took a deep breath and gave them the five-minute version of the end-of-the-world story. How it had been a planned bioweapons attack by al-Shabaab on the deminers working out of Camp Lemonnier. How they had commissioned a custom chimera virus from a rogue Kazakh bioweaponeer. About how the CIA, JSOC, and Delta had disrupted the attack, killed the previous head of al-Shabaab, and – they thought – destroyed all the virus stocks. But how a single infected lab monkey had been attacked out in the bush by wild dogs, in which the virus then mutated with a strain of rabies.
And which then came back – as a dead, very hungry former al-Shabaab guy.
“Who then proceeded to bring the whole world down,” Zack concluded.
“Almost the whole world,” Todd amended.
“Yeah,” Zack said wearily. “There’s still us in this room. And Godane tucked up in his fortress.” His tone indicated how much of a consolation he thought that was. It also seemed to say that he didn’t rate himself very highly in the scheme.
“Plus Britain,” Todd said, eyeing the two newcomers.
They both eyed him back. “What?”
“Britain,” Brendan said. “You must know? They transmit their daily Survivors Broadcast every day at 16:30 GMT.”
Zack’s lips were slightly parted.
Finally, he muttered. “Tea time…”
“What?” Jake demanded.
Zack snapped out of it. “Godane hasn’t let us anywhere near a radio for a year and a half. They told us everyone was dead – everyone, everywhere.”
“And you believed him?”
“The way we saw things going at the end, it wasn’t hard to believe. You’re telling me Britain still stands?”
“Yes,” Brendan said. “Plus tiny pockets of survivors, all over the globe. But because of the 11/11 attacks, the UK’s completely intact. They closed their borders right before the fall.”
Zack and Baxter turned and looked in at each other, both flashing back to those frenetic hours immediately after the attacks, when they had been manning the TOC at the safehouse in Hargeisa. “That was just before it all came down,” Baxter said. “And they really did lock down – no flights, no ferries, no trains. It makes a certain amount of sense.”
“What’s in them?” Zack said, facing out again, looking urgent.
“What’s in what?”
“The survivor broadcasts.”
Brendan, eyes red but voice alert and serious, said, “A lot of motivational pabulum, mainly. Number of babies born in the UK, security of their borders. Progress on the vaccine research.”
Zack’s eyes narrowed instantly and dramatically. “Wait – there are people out there… working on a vaccine?”
“Yeah,” Todd said with a snort. “If you want to call it that.” He mocked up a proper, plummy English accent, and singsonged some words they had all obviously been hearing for a long time: “Britain still stands. We continue to pour all our energies into the search for a cure. Do not give up hope. Stay healthy. We will come for you…”
Zack still looked like someone had just told him the world wasn’t flat.
“It seems to be more of a search than research,” Brendan said. “They’ve been going out to all the big biopharma labs, looking for clues to a working vaccine.”
“Have they come here?” Zack asked.
“What? No. The military in Britain is degraded, not to mention their industrial infrastructure. They don’t have the force projection capabilities to push out this far.” Brendan paused. “Wait – why would they come here?”
“I just didn’t know…” Zack muttered. “Didn’t think it mattered…”
“What,” Jake snapped.
Zack looked up. “I didn’t know there was anybody left out there to save – much less people with labs who might develop a vaccine.” He looked around the table. He hadn’t been in combat as they had, but he had obviously been exhausted and pummeled by the stress of events. “Because if there is, then that’s not just ‘the original victim’ Godane has got down in his basement. It’s Patient Zero.”
“What does that mean?” Brendan asked.
“It means it has incalculable value for vaccine research. Understanding the origin and early form of the virus will be incredibly helpful.”
“How do you know?” asked Kwon.
Baxter said, “He has a degree in cellular biology, for one thing.”
Zack waved this off. “I’m nothing like an expert. But virology and immunology became an amateur obsession of mine for a while. And I’d place a very large bet that, if humanity lives long enough, some day some bioscientists are going to come here looking for that first victim.”
“And he’s locked up in Godane’s basement,” Brendan said.
Jake looked unimpressed. “I’ll tell you who’s locked up in Godane’s fucking basement – Kate, our teammate. And we’re damn well going to get her out.”
Brendan looked up tiredly, anticipating another showdown. “You can’t be suggesting an attack on the Stronghold. Five attackers against 300 defenders?”
Jake looked over at Zack and Baxter. “No. There’s another way.”
Baxter snapped his fingers. “He’s right. Because there is actually one thing Godane values more than the moldy dead guy in his basement.”
Jake nodded. “His Predator drone.”
“And we’ve got the keys.” Baxter smiled. He’d done better than he knew.
“Godane,” Jake said, “has got to have that GCS back.” He looked to Zack to verify this.
Zack nodded tiredly. “Yeah. It’s a big part of how he’s survived this long. Without it, he’s blind and helpless tucked up in there.” He paused. “It’s his baby.”
“A trade,” Todd said. “Genius.” He paused. “One thing, though. It’s not Patient Zero.”
Zack squinted. “Why not?”
“The patient died, doc. It’s Zulu Zero now.”
And so it was.
* * *
“How do we arrange it?" Brendan asked.
“What?” Zack wasn’t sure whether the Captain was speaking to him or to Jake.
“How do we contact Godane? Or do we just roll up flying a white flag?”
“They’ve got radios,” Zack said. “Walkie talkies for a guys outside the wall – and a bigger set in a room we don’t get let into.”
“I’ve seen it,” Baxter said. “They’ve also got an aerial on top of one of the guard towers.”
Brendan said, “Is it scavenged military gear?”
“No,” Baxter said. “I think it’s the same crappy civilian stuff they had before.”
“COTS,” Brendan said. “Commercial off-the-shelf. It’ll almost certainly be VHF, then. The question is what frequency.” He wished, not for the first time, that Pete, their other Echo, were still alive.
“My guess,” Zack said, “would be whatever it was set on when it came out of the box.”
“Okay,” Brendan said. He made a note to use their AN/PSC-5D, the big radio in the TOC, to scan common civilian frequencies. And have Elijah to keep an eye on it.
“Speaking of radio traffic,” Jake said, looking at Zack. “Why do I feel like I recognize your voice from somewhere?”
Zack cocked his head. Then it hit him. The big Triple Nickel insignia on the wall was a giveaway. “You were the ones out in the bush, right before the fall. Calling for close air support.”
“Not us,” Jake said. “The other half of our team. You were controlling that Reaper, and those Hellfire missile strikes, weren’t you?”
Zack nodded, then exchanged a look with Brendan. “What happened to your guys? We got that air asset yanked from us by Lemonnier, mid-mission.”
Silence descended on the table.
“We never saw them again,” Jake said.
“Ah, hell,” Zack said. “I’m sorry. We thought they were going to be okay.” As he looked around, he realized there was an implication in the air – or at least on the face of Jake. That somehow he and Baxter were responsible for the deaths of their team members. Zack really didn’t think that was the case. But this didn’t seem like the moment to start an argument about it.
Instead he said: “Wait a minute. If you weren’t the half of your team out in the bush… then you must have been at Lemonnier. When it fell.”
The SF guys nodded.
“Jesus,” Baxter said. He looked across to Zack. The two of them had actually seen these guys – what must have been the exact men they were sitting with now – racing out the gates of the fallen base, blasting everything to hell and back. Zack shook his head minutely. It said to Baxter: One big revelation at a time. Some things were so strange they could only happen in real life.
Baxter kept quiet.
Squinting in thought himself, Kwon said, “So you two ran the CIA safehouse in Hargeisa.”
Zack and Baxter both nodded.
“Then you must know what happened to Maximum Bob. And the other SEAL.”
“His name was Dugan,” Baxter said. “They didn’t make it.”
“How’d they die?”
Zack and Baxter looked at each other again. “Saving us,” Baxter said.
When that atmosphere seemed to hit again, Zack added, “It was their job.” He immediately regretted saying this. It didn’t help.
The ai
r in there was curdling, almost visibly.
“Okay,” Brendan said. “We’ve all been up way too long. Everybody gets their heads down – now. Jake and I take the watch. Everybody else sleeps – two hours. We meet back here…” he checked his watch, “at oh-nine-hundred.”
No one looked thrilled about being ordered to bed.
But it was an order.
“Dismissed,” Brendan said.
Ego
Camp Price - Team Room
As they filed out, Jake said to Brendan, “I’ll spot Eli on the drone.”
Brendan nodded and said, “Good. I’m in the south sangar.”
He then grabbed Zack by the elbow and nodded in that direction. Zack got it and followed him. Behind them, they could hear Todd saying to Baxter, “Come with me, man, you can have the captain’s rack for now…”
In another minute, Brendan and Zack had climbed the wooden ladder eight feet to the small guard tower, which perched above and just behind the wall. Looking like a reinforced wooden gazebo, it had not a thatched roof but a properly tiled one. It was well sheltered from both sun and rain, though there was only room for two bodies, or three at a pinch. An M240 medium machine gun, perched behind a sandbagged position, took up much of the space. Brendan motioned to the one chair, and put his own ass against the railing.
With his usual serious face on, Brendan said to Zack, “I know you from before those radio transmissions. From before the fall even.”
Now Zack looked genuinely surprised, in addition to exhausted.
Brendan pointed to his nametape on his blouse. When Zack shook his head, he looked down and realized he wasn’t wearing nametape. He said, “My name’s Brendan Davis.”
Zack squinted up at him very deeply indeed. “Jack Davis’s son?”
Brendan nodded.
“You sure grew up. You’re in charge of this outfit now?”
Brendan shrugged. “At some times more than others.”
“Jesus,” Zack said. “What are the odds?” He meant that two of the very few people left alive would have a past connection like that.
Arisen : Nemesis Page 27
