by Glynn James
“Dude, what the fuck?” said one of the junior officers, echoing what everyone felt. How had this thing flown right up to them totally unopposed, never mind undetected?
The officer at the radar station clicked at his mouse like he was trying to break it. “It’s a mini-UAV – too small to show up on normal radar sweeps, unless we were specifically looking for it, which God knows we weren’t…”
Jesus, thought Drake, his head still swimming, what else could I possibly miss today?
He could practically hear the captain of the Russian battlecruiser strutting across his own bridge, chuckling, and thinking: Who brought the knife to a gunfight NOW, asshole?
Drake shook his head, for what felt like the thousandth time. There were others under his command who might have caught some of these things that were slipping through his fingers. But ultimately, of course, it was all his responsibility.
It was only a few seconds later that everyone there also heard the automatic weapons fire start up. Handon and Fick strode out the hatch and onto the observation deck. Two levels below them, a couple of NSF guys had set up an M240B medium machine gun, and were running belts of 7.62 through it, trying – but so far failing – to bring down the buzzing drone.
“Well,” Fick said. “At least somebody’s on the stick and reacting. Even if they can’t hit shit.”
The drone was now overflying the wreckage of the missile impact point at the front of the flight deck. If the Russians had been in any doubt that their attack had messed up the Kennedy’s air capabilities, that had been removed now.
Fick looked across at Handon, who quickly glanced back into the bridge. Drake still looked like he was down for the count – and he’d taken Abrams out of action with him. Suddenly Handon thanked whatever gods there be that he’d sat in on their briefings. So someone combat-effective still knew what the hell was going on.
“Listen,” he said, reaching across and grabbing Fick’s granite-like bicep. “The only reason this ship is still floating is the Russians don’t know our close-in defenses are all down.”
Fick nodded. “Though if that thing’s been cruising above us all this time, spying down from altitude, then the bastards have been playing us the whole time.”
“Maybe. But until they come down and get a close-up look at the Sparrows and CIWS, they wouldn’t be able to tell they were destroyed or out of ammo – right?”
Fick squinted. “Maybe. The ones on the starboard side that were blown to shit would be hard to miss.”
“But the ones on the other side?”
“A real close-up would show there are no missiles in the launch tubes. And the ammo belt for the CIWS does actually hang down beneath the gun, so they could see there isn’t one. Anyway, there’s no question the more they see, the prettier the shit we’ll all be in—”
But Handon cut him off, pointing. “Look.”
The drone, still unaffected by the machine gun fire, had just plunged down below the starboard edge of the deck, up near the fore. It started the first of a couple of close passes, right alongside the blown-up Sparrow and CIWS weapons.
“Fuck me,” Fick said.
They could both see where this was going.
The 240 gun crew was still chattering away without effect. Such a tiny buzzing mosquito, Handon thought. So damned hard to hit. And yet that tiny toy could have enormous consequences for everyone. It was another illustration of the old maxim that those who stay alive in combat are the ones who know what the hell is going on.
Intel was life. And, right now, only the Russians had any.
“Fuck this noise,” Fick said finally, turning and flying down the outside ladder, while shouting up at Handon: “I’ll be back – try and keep it the hell away from the other side!”
Handon got it. Though he wasn’t sure how he was going to distract, never mind destroy, a mini-UAV on his own.
But as Fick disappeared, a high-pitched whine drew Handon’s gaze – it was the Seahawk helo sitting on the deck, below the island on the starboard side. Its APU had started up, and its rotors began turning slowly. Handon cast around him urgently, and then down at his belt.
His .45 was the only weapon in sight.
Circling the Drain
SAS Saldanha - Main Warehouse
Juice, hunkering down in the middle of the sudden and savage firefight now shredding the air of the warehouse, looked to his side, where he found Sergeant Lovell. He gave him a look which he hoped would convey his displeasure that the Marines had disobeyed his order and returned.
“Hey,” Lovell shouted, “nothing blew up! And you didn’t come back!” With that, he popped up, squeezed off a dozen rapid rifle rounds, then dropped down again.
“What are you engaging?” Juice shouted.
“I don’t know, man! I just figured one of us should fucking return fire!”
He had a point.
Underneath the pummeling roar of the incoming volleys, Juice could hear the squad net going manic. To their credit, the Marines were self-organizing, and mounting a defense. They were also following their excellent training, which told them never to hang around trading rounds. You never wanted to be in a firefight, you wanted to dominate it – with crushing fire superiority, and maneuver warfare.
Unfortunately, the Marines still didn’t really understand the caliber of opponent they were up against.
He heard Raible shouting, both over the net and live to his immediate left, “I can roll their left flank! Bounding!” He was up and moving before Juice could physically grab and stop him.
“Negative, negative!” he shouted into his chin mic. “Maintain position!”
The Marines were bred to be aggressive – using surprise, speed, and violence of action to shatter the enemy’s cohesion, and put them into a turbulent and rapidly deteriorating situation with which they could not cope. But Juice knew what Raible didn’t: that surprise had evaporated, speed differences were negligible in tight quarters – and these Marines would never be as violent in their actions as Spetsnaz.
Not to mention that this whole place is almost certainly wired to bl—
KA-BOOM!!!
A raucous explosion thundered from out on their left, and forward – and Raible had almost certainly walked right into it. Smoke coiled and billowed around, as Juice felt the moorings of his command coming undone.
He tried hailing Raible, but got the response he feared – silence. Steeling himself, he touched the panel on his left forearm, and switched his monocle video view to Raible’s shoulder cam. The one-inch screen before his eyeball went dark. At first, Juice thought the camera had been destroyed in the blast. But then the dimness resolved, and it was actually a swatch of concrete floor, from a few inches away.
Raible was face down on the deck.
Juice put another order out on the squad net – promising hellfire and damnation on the head of any Marine who advanced from under cover.
“Do not advance!” he shouted. “Repeat, do not advance! Hold position! The area to our front is wired with anti-personnel charges!”
Of course, they had to put out rounds, and be in the fight, just to keep from getting overrun. But Juice also knew they weren’t going to outmaneuver or dominate the force they were now facing. And if they tried, they were only going to walk into more decimation.
Then Juice heard another voice – faint, but also shouting right in his ear, and as a result audible. It was fucking CIC on the carrier again. “—say again: Biltong, be advised, you need to complete mission and return to base, NOW! This is a very real possibility that this vessel will soon be going off-stati—”
GodDAMMIT.
Juice slapped at the radio, turning off the command channel entirely. He was already being overloaded with sensory data, and he couldn’t deal with micromanaging from goddamned TOC jockeys right this second.
What he really needed was tactical intel, from right here in the fight he was actually in.
He wanted to know if Raible was alive – as well as
Jenkins for that matter. Replaying his mental movie, he realized it had been a glancing head wound that had caught him, and there was a chance he was still breathing. Juice knew the rest of the Marines were damned well going to assume that he was, and do whatever was required to retrieve him – living, dead, or indeterminate.
But Juice needed to have a better idea what they were facing first.
He sat down under cover, shielded from the horizontal bullet storm coming in on them, and laid his rifle in his lap. Then he looked down and popped the tiny Gadfly ornithopter from its base station on his arm, turned it on, gave it a paper-airplane toss into the air – praying it wouldn’t instantly be shot down in the hail of incoming lead – then switched his monocle video to its camera feed, and took the controls with his right hand.
First, he flew it out around the flank and forward until he found Raible. The Marine was indeed face down – but still alive. Juice could tell because he was trying to drag himself back under cover. And Juice could also tell, from the amount of blood on the floor, not to mention Raible’s inability to stand or even crawl, that the kid was basically circling the drain.
He didn’t have much time.
And then Juice realized, with a shock of horror, that Raible wasn’t trying to drag himself under cover.
He was trying to drag himself out to Jenkins.
That’s what he had really been doing in the first place – trying to push out a salient to cover and retrieve his fallen man. Which also explained why Juice hadn’t been able to stop him: there was no stopping Marines from going out to bring back one of their own.
Navigating by the gnat’s-eye view, he now flew the synthetic bug out into the open center area and buzzed Jenkins. When he was able to get around in front of his face, he could see the kid’s wide-open staring eyes and slack mouth. He was gone. Juice climbed again, headed for the ceiling, and rotated the camera down to get a view of the Spetsnaz positions.
Unfortunately, nearly the first thing he saw was the giant yawning barrel of Misha’s Desert Eagle, looming up from behind a crate. The equally scary and savvy son of a bitch had somehow spotted Juice’s three-inch, half-transparent flying bug. Before he could dart away, the mammoth .50-cal boomed, just one time.
Juice’s aerial view of the battle went dark.
Son of a BITCH. One shot? Seriously?
But he had seen one other thing before the screen went black. And that was at least one other IED, planted on the periphery of the central area.
The Russians had prepared the ground well.
If Juice had been doing it, he first would have seeded charges in all the avenues to the open space – then tried to draw the opposing force into advancing into them. Which they had successfully done, right off the bat.
Within ten seconds of the start of the engagement, he had two men down – one KIA, and one critical WIA. The rest of his team were completely pinned down, with no chance of support, aerial or otherwise. And they were facing an enemy force that was bigger, meaner, faster, better armed – and demonstrably superior tactically.
Not only did Juice see no way they were going to come out of this with the critically needed supplies they’d been tasked with securing.
He didn’t even see how any of them, those seven still on their feet, were going to walk out of there at all.
They were all circling the drain.
Machine Gun to a Missile Fight
JFK - Bridge
Drake waved Abrams away, and tried to straighten up, not to mention draw breath. The news of their pilots getting blown out of the air, coming across the open channel from CIC, had been like a punch to the gut. A massive wave of pain rolled across Drake’s skull, causing his knees to buckle. And the dizziness, headache, and nausea that had been dogging him all day surged up and overwhelmed him.
All of Drake’s worst fears were coming true, right in front of his face. He had just committed a catastrophic error of command – getting the assessment of the enemy’s air defenses wrong, and overruling his subordinate who wanted to take the time to double-check them. And, because of that, people had died. They were hardly the first to fall under his command. But those pilots were irreplaceable – never mind their aircraft, none of which would ever be built again.
But even that might not be the worst of it.
Without those F-35s, now there was a real danger of the carrier going down. And if they were sunk, along with the Kennedy would go down all the hopes of mankind for some kind of happy ending to their two-year, hopeless, apocalyptic story.
They were losing this fight.
To Drake, it felt like it was all falling apart around his ears. It had crashed down so quickly. And all of this, he knew, was because of his own personal failure. And he couldn’t find the strength to try to fix it.
But, then, when he heard Campbell scramble their CSAR bird, over the open channel from CIC, he at least latched onto one thing he could try to affect. Struggling for breath, he managed to raise his voice enough to be picked up by the console speaker.
“CIC, Bridge. Belay that order. The CSAR bird stays on the deck.”
No response came back – which was expressive enough. It was obviously stunned silence – Campbell couldn’t believe what she was hearing. If there was one thing there was never any doubt or hesitation over, it was that they jumped through their own asses to pull downed fliers out of the drink, particularly in a combat situation.
They always came for their people.
Drake fought another wave of dizziness and nausea as he headed for the hatch. “I’m coming down,” he managed, then, over his shoulder to Abrams, “You have the bridge.”
He stopped with his hand on the hatch edge, and shielded his eyes from some kind of brilliant red light suddenly coming through the front screens. It hurt his eyes, and his brain. And for a second he was sure he had lost it, that he was seeing things that weren’t there… but then he looked over his shoulder and saw people on the bridge shielding their eyes, too. They were bathed in a rising and falling red glow.
Well, that’s okay then, he thought. It’s not just me.
He pulled open the hatch and staggered through it.
* * *
Keeping one eye on the Russian UAV, and the other on the big Seahawk spinning up its rotors, Handon took the outside ladder of the island a landing at a time. He reached the deck just in time to see the nearest hatch bang shut, after Fick had blasted in through it.
He hit the deck solidly, and his powerful legs and strong core muscles accelerated him to something like his best 40-yard-dash time of 4.8 seconds. As he ran, he drew his .45 with his right hand, both arms still pumping. In two seconds, he was at the side-door of the Seahawk, its rotors whumping and picking up speed over his head.
The crew chief at the door minigun gave him an unmistakable What-the-fuck? look, even through the helmet and visor that covered half his face. Handon shifted his pistol to his left hand, reached around the man, and grabbed something clip-mounted to the bulkhead. Turning and taking off again, he shouted, “I’ll bring this back!”
Now he had something like an 800-yard sprint to get where he needed to be. That distance wasn’t really his event, but he was in superior physical shape. As he lined up and blasted straight up the empty flight deck, he could now see the little enemy drone rise up from the starboard edge of the deck, having finished its recce of that side.
Handon figured it wouldn’t take the guys on the other end of the drone very long to work out that the Sparrows and CIWS on the starboard side were simply gone. And, as Fick had predicted, it now rose and headed toward the same deck on the other side. When it got there, the news that the Kennedy was defenseless would be out.
Being basically an oversized remote-control toy, albeit with more expensive optics, the Orlan had a low top speed, hardly seeming to move through the air at all. Or maybe that was just the time dilation of Handon’s jacked senses.
Not slowing, he brought up his right hand – which now held the bulk
y flare gun he’d just liberated from the Seahawk – and fired. And he kept on firing. Big red Roman-candle fireballs arced out ahead of him, and passed in front of the nose of the drone – which veered away from them so quickly it almost stalled out. Handon could practically hear the pilot somewhere barking, “Dude, what the fuck?!” – though presumably in Russian.
Whatever the pilot thought was happening, he had definitely lost interest in checking out the port-side weapons deck for the moment. Which was all Handon needed, and exactly what he had in mind.
When the flare gun’s cylinder clicked on an empty chamber, he dropped it in mid-air, switched his handgun to his dominant hand, and started triggering off .45 rounds, leading the nose of the drone by a few degrees, never slowing his flat-out sprint. He doubted he could bring the drone down with his pistol.
Then again, he wasn’t totally ruling it out either.
As the .45 went dry and his slide locked back, Handon swiped with his thumb and dropped out the empty mag, which went spinning away on the deck under his feet. But before he could get a new magazine out and seated, something loud and very fast blasted over his head.
At the sight of that, and after working out what it was, he powered down his sprint to a relaxed trot. And he calmly holstered the pistol, though not before reloading it.
Finally, he just stood there sucking wind, hands on hips, and watched the very amusing aerial show overhead.
* * *
When Ali, having raced up here from the fantail deck, burst onto the bridge cradling her big designated marksman rifle (DMR), it frankly looked like no one was driving the train. With Drake gone, Abrams was conferring with the senior officers, and seemed to be on the line with the Air Boss in PriFly – all of them trying to rise to the challenge of figuring out what the fuck they should do next.
Ali recognized unit combat-paralysis when she saw it, and she didn’t plan to hang around participating in it. So she grabbed the nearest, alertest-looking ensign, and asked her, “Where’s CSM Handon?” The young woman blinked her wide eyes once, then pointed toward the outside hatch.
