ARISEN, Book Twelve - Carnage (10 page)

But now Henno laid these flexible panels over the bagged-up body lying in the middle of the cabin. Then he stood over it, a leg on either side, rising to his full height, standing like David, rifle at the ready.

And he thought:
Even if we crash and go down in flames, if I can somehow protect the brainstem of this dead bastard
…

Then Patient Zero wouldn’t be destroyed.

Which meant they were still in business.

Or whoever was left alive would be.

* * *

Remaining strapped into his own seat, Reyes had been letting his mind wander – and had been thinking about his daughter. There was this one playground he used to take her to, part of an urban reclamation project in East L.A. It was kind of the one nice place within walking distance of their home – which was in a neighborhood he could afford. Joining the Marine Corps had been an attempt to secure a steadier income.

To help build a better life for her.

But he had just started to call up that image – the mind, as everyone knew, did crazy shit in combat – when he realized there actually was something useful he could do in this aircraft, other than wait for it to crash, or to not crash. And it was because he saw Handon up on his feet – hauling open the cargo door, snapping into the safety harness, and then hanging his ass halfway out into open air to engage the other helo with his rifle. Reyes probably couldn’t shoot around him. But there was the window on the opposite side.

He unstrapped, rose, moved to it – and leaned out as far as he could, rifle first.

Initially, he couldn’t see the Black Shark.

But then, as it drifted with wind, and gunfire, and the vagaries of backward flight and nose-to-nose combat – there it was.

Reyes started firing, as fast as he could pull the trigger.

* * *

Ali dug down. She fought through the pain in her arm and chest. And she steadied herself and her rifle. She had to make this shot. She had to finish this motherfucker – or they were all finished themselves. But suddenly she realized she didn’t have to do it – not on her own, anyway. She didn’t have to do this alone.

Fick was back on his feet – it took a lot to knock him down, and nothing had yet been found that could keep him there – and he was shooting from between the seats again. And Ali couldn’t see it, but with her eerie talent for feeling the battlefield, she knew there was outgoing fire coming from both sides of the airframe. And now it was obvious the others were pitching in.

That her brothers were in the fight right alongside her.

There were now four weapons engaging the Black Shark – and engaging Vasily, the sonofabitching sniper in its open cockpit.

And now Ali remembered an old chestnut. The first rule of gunfights was: “Bring a gun.” But the second was: “Bring all of your friends who have guns.” Some fights you had to face on your own.

But most were won or lost as a team.

* * *

“That’s it,” Nina said, rounds from four rifles pouring in on them now. “We’re done.” She reached across Vasily to close the cowling.

“No!” he shouted, still firing and chambering, firing and chambering. She got it, she really did. He had the scent of prey, of his frustratingly resilient arch-enemy. And he wanted to finish her this time.

But in the last two seconds at least two incoming rounds had found their way into the open window and ricocheted around in the goddamned cockpit with them. And, unlike the Apache, Ali’s old ride, the Black Shark had a single cockpit for both pilot and gunner. And as bloodthirsty and hard-bitten as Nina was, she wasn’t enthusiastic about being shot to death in her own aircraft.

At least not just so Vasily could have his prize.

She broke off their attack.

* * *

The incoming fire stopped, and Ali saw the Black Shark pull the equivalent of a bootlegger turn – first breaking to one side, then spinning around to face forward, and blasting off ahead, going north, without ever really slowing. Ali almost didn’t even know how the pilot did that. And she didn’t care.

Because now she felt their own helo starting to spin.

Looking over, she instantly knew why. Cleveland was dead – his chin lay on his blood-splashed chest, lifeless feet on the pedals. Somewhere in all that chaos, Vasily had shot him to death.

This has been a tough campaign for helo pilots
, she thought.

She quickly took over the controls from the left-side seat and brought them out of the spin, the wound in her left forearm throbbing. But even as she leveled them out, something exploded behind and overhead. This could have been the engines. It could have been the transmission or the drive train. It didn’t matter. Because they were losing power and the controls were becoming unresponsive.

She knew she had to put them on the deck – fast.

But even as she started to do so, what really tortured her brain, what she really didn’t understand, but desperately needed to, was this: was it just because they were in a half-dead aircraft, finally giving up the ghost, after too much strain? Or had a stray round hit something vital enough to put it in its grave?

Or else, worst of all… had Vasily shot intentionally, perfectly, some part of the aircraft they couldn’t do without – perhaps even when he flew by them the first time – but that wouldn’t take effect right away? As if he had lit a fuze to take them down. One that had enough time on it for him to try to kill her first.

Ali resigned herself to the thought that she might go to her grave without ever knowing the answer. And it didn’t really matter anyway. She snapped back to her task, and shouted over her shoulder to those in back to brace for impact.

The grim brown body of Somalia raced up at them.

Take it up the Tailpipe

On Board the Jingle Bus

At the same instant Ali was staring into her doom, Juice was bus-surfing. He’d done stupid shit like this as a teenager, climbing out on the roofs of moving cars, like the goddamned idiot adolescent he had been. This time he was at least sitting down, cross-legged, and not standing up with bent knees like some half-assed
Point Break
reject.

But somehow he didn’t feel any smarter now.

Because not only did he have to keep from tumbling off the roof of this rickety-ass bus as it bounced over the series of escalating ruts that passed for roads in Somalia. But he had to do it while spotting non-stop for a pilotless jet fighter coming in from the north. And then he’d have to keep a tiny laser dot on it long enough for another unmanned aircraft coming from the opposite direction to land a Hellfire on it – from five miles away. It might be a little less than that. But it wasn’t gonna be much less. Because, checking his watch, squinting against the wind, he saw it was either going to get there at the last possible second.

Or, more likely, get there a little too late.

And if this crazy-ass plan Baxter dreamed up didn’t work, then Juice was going to be spotting instead for a small missile coming in at them at 1,000mph. And then he would try to leap off the moving bus before the missile impacted. Because the explosion made by an incoming Hellfire made the road-rash from landing on pavement at ninety miles per hour look like a pretty good outcome.

Scanning the sky, Juice hit his radio. “Baxter, update.”

“Pred is twelve miles out.”

Juice didn’t need to ask for an updated ETA. He could work out on his own that even at its top speed, with the little lawnmower engine in that thing, it was going to be more than three minutes until it got within range.

Something appeared out on the horizon.

At first it was just a tiny silver speck. But Juice put his eye to his scope, struggling to hold it steady, and the speck resolved as the UCAV. And it was low, under 500 feet, which was something. But it was also probably going five times as fast as the Pred, and coming straight at them. So even if the Russian pilot held his fire much longer than he needed to…

The Pred wasn’t going to make it in time.

* * *

Baxter tried to project his brain waves through the screen, staring daggers at the ground spooling out in front of the Pred, willing it to go faster. But the old first-generation UAV was still winging its way toward them at its totally inadequate top speed.

He sat, as Juice had suggested, in the last seat in the back, beside the emergency exit, which he had already unlocked. He spared a nervous look up toward the front – and wondered if he should be up there supervising al-Sif. He’d just have to trust him to do his job.

Juice popped up in his ear.
“Baxter – we’re out of time. You’ve got to launch the missile.”

He checked the range. “Still six miles out!”

“We’ll all be dead by the time it’s five. But maybe the UCAV will close the distance while the missile’s in the air.”

Baxter shook his head at no one. “If we do, we’ll definitely be dead before it closes the distance – we’re driving
away
from the Pred, with the UCAV coming in from the opposite direction! Do the geometry. If we fire now, there’s no place the UCAV and us intersect that’s any closer to the Pred than we are right now! The missile will splash down after five miles – and definitely south of us.”

“Goddammit.”

“Listen – you’ve just got to keep the UCAV off us for… another seventy-some seconds.”

“Fuck. Out.”

* * *

Only one remotely decent thing was happening that Juice could see from the top of the bus: the approaching UCAV hadn’t released a munition yet. It could have done so long before Juice ever saw it. But it seemed it hadn’t. Maybe they wanted a good look at what they were about to blow into jingle-bus bolognese.

Juice already had his magnifying sight flipped up behind his holographic red-dot EOTech. It was only 3x magnification, but it was something. And since the bus and the UCAV were coming straight at each other, he was able to keep the drone in his sights, more or less. Not steady, not in the middle, but there. He also knew there was no way he was taking this jet-powered stealth aircraft down with small-arms fire. But there was actually one thing he could think of that might have a prayer of working.

He targeted the sensor ball underneath, which also held its targeting laser – which the laser seeker in the nosecone of the Hellfire would detect and ride in on. If he could somehow destroy that, any missile it launched would be flying blind.

He started taking the most carefully aimed shots he could – from a bouncing bus, and at a stealth drone flying at low subsonic speed. He squeezed off 15 rounds before he reached an unavoidable conclusion: they weren’t landing anywhere near the sensor ball. He couldn’t even see any impacts, any misses, that he could use to adjust.

But then he did see something: an exhaust backwash behind it. It was a Hellfire launching from out of the weapons bay in the drone’s belly. The three of them on the bus were now seconds away from immolation.

Juice got ready to jump for it.

Then he had one last idea – even more batshit-crazy than all the prior ones put together. It was something Baxter had said, about clouds or smoke messing with the laser-targeting. Juice knew the way that worked was by masking the scattering of laser radiation off the target. With nothing coming back to the laser seeker in the missile, it would have no way to find the target.

Juice yanked that smoke grenade from his belt where he had hooked it for easy access. He pulled the pin. Then he got on his stomach and slithered out to the edge of the roof, then out past it – half his torso sticking over, and the hand with the grenade held over and down, stuck right into the windshield.

And as the smoke grenade sputtered to life in a shower of sparks, and started spewing thick white clouds, he tried to make it cover the front of the bus. Even as he did this, he shook his head at the idiocy of it. He had basically just made himself the hood ornament on what was about to be a vehicle-interdiction drone strike.

Let them speak well of me
, he thought.

For being the world’s last biggest dumbass…

* * *

Al-Sif kept the pedal down, little bells rolling and jingling at his feet – and he worked to keep the bus steady, as Baxter had instructed. The bearded one was up on the roof now, and he was evidently the only thing that was going to save them. It was unlike al-Sif to trust in others – anyone other than himself.

But here was the thing: back in the forest, at that crashed helicopter, the bearded dude had said he had a plan for holding off the Russians, and keeping the three of them from being overrun and killed. And he had done what he said he was going to do, and it had worked – but only after al-Sif threw his lot in with them, and got in the fight.

They had survived, and prevailed.

Now, as the driver’s seat of the bouncing bus pummeled his ass through the torn cushion, and he gripped the steering wheel with all his strength, it was hard for him not to conclude:

Maybe this is a team worth being a part of.

Certainly more so than the dipshits in al-Shabaab. He had always felt an affinity with the American operators – their skills, their resolve, the way everything they did was reality-based. He liked these guys. Maybe he just needed to get over himself. He would keep driving, and he would fight, if it came to that again.

He would try to do his best for this team.

So when the bearded face appeared at the top of the windshield, upside down, and white smoke started spewing out and whipping away in the slipstream, and the lips in the beard mouthed,
Slow the fuck down…!
, al-Sif did just that – and he even took care to brake smoothly, to keep Juice from rocketing off the front of the bus.

Very soon, with less air blasting by, the smoke started thickening up. Soon al-Sif couldn’t see a damned thing.

But he kept driving.

* * *

Way in back, squinting into the screen of the mini-GCS, Baxter had the Predator’s optics zoomed all the way in on the approaching UCAV, as both drones raced toward each other at their top speeds.