The Crisis (53 page)

His eyes met Kaulukukui's across the four feet of space between them.

The big Hawaiian said, “War's a motherfucker, ain't it?”

Before Teddy could react he stepped over it and crouched, putting himself between Teddy and the grenade.

“No! Sumo!”

The shattering crack of high explosive interrupted him. Kaulukukui shuddered. He half turned, a smile still curving his lips.

Then he toppled, exposing the raw bleeding mass into which the fragments had chewed his back.

Teddy couldn't grasp it for a long second. “SEAL down,” he croaked, reflex again, because he was still staring. Then he sucked a breath, kneeling beside his friend, pumping burst after burst blindly up at the gallery.
“SEAL down!”

A sudden tremendous bang shook the walls, filled the air with flying debris, and he dropped next to his swim buddy. The gallery separated from the wall and pitched downward, throwing screaming men to the hard-packed floor.

The smell told him it was C4. Giving up on getting past the machine gunner, the other team had set its remaining explosive against the wall closest to him and blasted it down.

He got to his feet, drew his pistol and shot both insurgents, double taps to the chest and a head shot, then charged up the ramp that the now-collapsed gallery made to the upper floor. Arkin and Kowacki bulled through the doorway below. He twisted as he ran, screaming down into their upward-aimed muzzles. Then twisted forward and fired to take down
a man aiming from the opposite gallery. Behind him came boot thunder as the other SEALs buffaloed after him up the makeshift ramp, which shuddered and swayed beneath them.

Another door, which he simply crashed through, pistol extended at eye level, and took each target as it presented itself.

Suddenly it was over. No tunnel. Only a final bunker where those left living had taken cover. Metal thudded and jingled on a scarred wooden floor. Those not already dead were on their knees, hands raised. Panting, Oberg put his sights on one forehead, then another. He could kill them all. Article 556 them, like the major said. But then there'd be no one for intel to interrogate.

Fuck intel. They'd killed Sumo.

No.
Professionals.
They were
professionals.

“Where's Assad? Assad?” he shouted so hard phlegm flew and they closed their eyes.
“Wayn fareek? Fareek? Wayn Abdullahi Assad?”

With a shaking hand, a kneeling man pointed. Kowacki, still covering them, bent to put a hand on a uniformed body. Felt the neck. Then, making sure he was on the far side, in case anything explosive lay underneath, levered it over.

The face was that of the man in the photo.

General Assad was off the board.

The killing fever ebbed. Teddy sucked thick gas freighted with smoke and the stench of blood and voided bowels and earth. That putrid stink seemed to underlie everything in this fucking stinking country filled with stinking, treacherous skinnies. He raised the pistol again, then cleared his throat and spat. “Sumo took a grenade. Stepped in front of it. So it wouldn't get us both.”

“Go take care of him, Obie. We'll zip 'em.”

He ran back to the killing room. Swung his way down the collapsed gallery, the beams creaking and groaning, to where the Hawaiian had dragged himself against the wall. He unslung Kaulukukui's weapon and put it on the dirt. Then knelt.

His swim buddy was still twitching, but his eyes were rolled back and the twitches felt wrong, as if something were trying to get out from beneath those big soft muscles. Teddy searched frantically. He stripped off his harness and e-bag and belt. Kaulukukui shuddered, breath fast and shallow. Teddy got Sumo's body armor off and felt the wet under it. Unbuttoned his blouse and pulled it out.

Wet and sticky, right where the armor ended. This was bad. Kidneys, liver, maybe spine. He'd turned his left side to the grenade.

Behind him came shouts and blows as Bitch Dog and Whacker pushed
their captives down onto the dirt. “How's he look?” Arkin said. “Gonna make it, right?”

“I don't know.”

“That was Assad, all right. What about these guys? We really need 'em for intel?”

They'd suckered them in. Trapped them. And killed Kaulukukui. “I don't need 'em,” he said thickly. “You want to fuck 'em up, okay by me.”

He was shaking even as some obscure corner of his mind fabricated a justification. They couldn't get Sumo up to the roof and guard prisoners too. And they had to get him up there, now.

When the firing stopped he keyed the handheld. “Mountain Air, Rogue Hammer. SEAL down. SEAL down. Medevac, roof of Building A. Over.”

“This is Mountain Air. Get him to the roof. Bushido Six One inbound for casevac.”

They hoisted Sumo to their shoulders, three on one. His buddy's head lolled onto Obie's chest. His open mouth snagged on his spare knife, rigged to his harness. Teddy gently unhooked it. His shooting gloves were slippery with blood, Kaulukukui's or the Ashaaran's, it was all over the room where the high-velocity bullets had blown it.

Through the door. Left turn, everyone suddenly energized again after the agonizing intensity of the fight.

The man they gripped heaved, seemed to ripple. His arm flung out. His eyes blasted open. He muttered something in a fluid language too fast to understand.

Then he died. Teddy knew; he'd seen it enough. Smelled it, too. Still they pressed on, up the stairwell, hustling, until they emerged into dust-whipped air and strobing lights, the flutter-thump of blades and the reek of exhaust. Tears slicked his face. “You fucker,” he kept saying. “You rat bastard. You fat-ass Hawaiian asshole, you fucking prick.”

“We got him, Teddy. Nobody left behind. We got him.”

“Take it frosty, Obie. Corpsman'll fix him up.”

He bowed his head, trying to breathe around something in the way. A howl like an animal would make being crushed welled from his gut and almost made it out before it died behind clenched teeth.

A guy swung out of the helicopter. “We got him. Slide him in. Anybody else? Prisoners?”

“Nobody else. Don't take him—Yeah. Take him, the stupid motherfucker.” He stepped back and lifted his gloves, realizing only then they were empty, somehow he'd done the unimaginable, left his primary weapon on the dirt floor, by the bodies. “Fucking asshole,” he said, punching the flaccid shoulder as the crewman rolled the body into the helo. “Fucking
asshole. Fucking asshole.” Hands gripped him, pulling him back. The strobes made him blind. He stared up into them as the shrieking filled his ears.

 

DAN still had an operational Pioneer at five thousand feet. The DSs patched it through to the central screen as Ahearn boosted himself into the commander's chair. The picture jumped like an amateur horror film, but showed the ridgelines pinching into a defile a mile ahead of the convoy.

The very place he'd picked as the most likely ambush site.

Juggling windows at his terminal, Dan estimated the point Humvee of Viper was less than a mile from the pinch-in. He put the headphones on in the middle of a transmission from the drone pilot in the control van and his next-level supervisor. “. . . to fourteen.”

“Sure they're not sheep?”

“Gettin' so I can tell sheep from goats, and these ain't hoofies. Unless sheep carry things.”

The image trembled and zoomed, monochrome in chlorine and charcoal, but now he saw them: pale blobs, undulating across the desert. Shapeless and fuzzy-edged, Michelin Man rotund in the poorly focusable infrared. One bent for a moment, put down something long that glowed less brightly. Its arms worked around its head. Then it bent again and, like a white cell engulfing a bacterium under a microscope, sucked up the long rod into the central blob. The frame pulled back. He counted ten, twelve, fourteen, maybe more, undulating in clots toward the overlook. Some blobs smaller than others, moving differently, though he'd have been hard put to say how.

He took deep breaths, fighting a bad feeling. Not wanting to be here, in the seat he was occupying.

The corporal was still talking to the UAV. “Still seeing movement . . . catch the four guys on the left. Back and forth, then they go down prone.”

“Aiming?”

“Don't know. Doin' something weird.”

Dan was rechecking the coordinates reading out at the edge of the Pioneer download against a paper UTM chart of central Ashaara. The numbers matched, but his unease deepened. He knew where it came from. Years before, he'd had to defy an incompetent commodore to save a column of marines inside Syria.

Was Commodore Isaac Sundstrom's indecision, the wavering Dan had rejected with a young man's contempt as incompetent dithering, now infecting him?

The murmuring grew louder. Dan toggled to audio, hopped channels. Thirty-eight miles to the north, in Fenteni, the quick reaction force was hitting resistance at Assad's western headquarters. The J-3's voice:
“This is Desert Darkness, Desert Darkness
.
Is Arrowhead Two One on station?”

“Two one, copy, on station.”

Dickinson asked for an ordnance-remaining report and got back seven hundred rounds of twenty-millimeter and all eight Hellfires aboard the Cobra. As the J-3 acknowledged, Dan switched channels to the AC-130H Spectre, orbiting far overhead.

Ahearn got up and came to the watch officer's terminal. Dan felt the two fingers on his shoulder, like being seized by vise grips. “Can we divert the gunship yet?”

Dan wasn't sure whether he meant the Cobra or the C-130. Both were called “gunships” in different contexts, by different services. He said carefully, “We've got a problem on the ground in Fenteni, sir. But the Cobras have IR capability too. And so far it's localized to one building.”

“You're saying, put Jockey over the convoy? Commander?”

“Jockey” was the Spectre's call sign. “Yessir. My recommendation. But I have to check with the aircraft. Their fuel state's close to bingo, I know that.”

Ahearn muttered, “Fuck.” Then added, “Do it. If you can.”

Dan spent the next minutes relaying that order to the Air Force special tactics sergeant controlling the AC-130H. The okay came back, but it sounded reluctant. “We only got twenty more minutes on station,” the sergeant told him. “It's a long flight back to Mombasa.”

“Right, the general understands. Can they vector?”

“Vectoring now. Time on top, time three seven.”

When he got back to his seat Ahearn and the J-3 were back to the UAV imagery. “Can we get lower?” Ahearn called, elbows on knees, intent on the screen.

Dan made out the convoy. The lead vehicle's hood was a glowing glob, with a tenuous, ever-shifting ghost from the exhaust. Rocks coruscated, pinpoints of solar energy retained from the bake-oven day.

And above them, gathered in a ragged line, the milling, faceless biped amoebas that could be identified no more closely than as human. Dan conned back and forth between the image, the overlay, the paper map. The overlook wasn't that high. Ten, fifteen meters.

But made to measure for an ambush. Once into the pinch, the convoy was committed. Pick off the lead Humvee with a rocket-propelled grenade, and they could shoot up the thin-skinned trucks at their leisure. If
the civilians fled on foot, they'd be lost in the desert, miles from water or help. Many of the aid personnel were in their fifties or sixties, volunteers who'd finished one or two careers and gone out to the wastes of the Third World to give back.

But who were these onlookers? If he could just catch one clear image. If it were only daylight. But of course, they wouldn't attack in daylight. In the constantly jerking scramble of motion he caught one queer frozen image. A blurred figure, head tilted back, hesitated between craggy rocks. Was that an RPG it carried? Or sticks picked up for a fire?

Would women be out this late picking up firewood? Not from what he'd seen of Ashaari society. They kept close to home after dark.

Complicating everything was the village. It lay north of the road, on another slow slope upward. No gunship fired straight down. Grazing fire was most efficient, impacting at a shallow angle to the terrain. Because of the convoy, they'd have to fire south to north.

Any overshoot or ricochet would put high explosive in the village.

His fingers raced over the keyboard, querying both the lance corporal flying the UAV, miles to the west, and the duty force J-2, the intel weenies, four terminals away. Answers glowed on the screen.
Unsure, possibly hostile
. The J-2:
Probably hostile
. Dan hesitated, fingers poised, brain searching for certainty.

There was no certainty.

The fog of war lay thick over the battlefield.

On the screen, a bloom of incandescence. The lead vehicle careened off the road. Small figures detached from it and staggered back toward the body of the convoy. Dan frowned. What was going on? He'd seen no flash of heat from the gaggle on the hilltop. A rocket motor put out thousands of degrees and an immense backblast. He switched channels, put the convoy on one ear, the AC-130H on the other, processing visual, double audio, and at the same time keeping half an eye on Ahearn. Voices streamed through his head, text scrolled, images blurred. He hovered above the battlefield like a god of war, the finger of death pointing where he willed.

Nothing was in his hands. Everything was in his hands.

He felt immense doom, immense responsibility. His heartbeat expanded as his mouth went dry. He fought for the rationality that had come before in battle. But this didn't feel like battle. He didn't know what it felt like.

Something like cold steel chilled his back. This was the war of the future. Where machines and computers watched, judged, executed from afar. What Admiral Contardi and Dr. Fauss were striving to perfect. It felt not just inhuman, but antihuman. Not antiseptic, but profoundly evil.

From the stream of frenzied voices he plucked IED. An improvised
explosive device. Something about a pile of debris that had concealed something less innocent.