Arisen : Genesis (15 page)

“Is that SNA?” Baxter asked.

“Yeah,” Bob said, taking up his assault rifle from where he’d laid it in the footwell alongside him.

The thunder and lightning had now resolved into firing – both of small arms, and of heavier guns. And they could clearly see from the video, even in the settling dusk, that what they were approaching was an armored column: trucks, armored personnel carriers, and even a couple of medium tanks. The APCs were old Soviet BTR-50s; and the tanks absolutely ancient Soviet T-54s. But they all had pretty big guns, as did the people riding on them.

And they were all just schwacking the fuck out of everything as they rolled with impunity straight down the highway, or what passed for a highway in Somalia. They were lighting up everything. Zack guessed maybe they’d had a bad experience giving somebody the benefit of the doubt somewhere along the line.

Baxter said, “It’s SNA, so they won’t fire on us, right?”

Dugan had braked them to a near stop, and now wrestled the truck onto the shoulder and took it off-road. Ahead of them, thirty meters from the roadside, was a sparse treeline. He was making for it.

Baxter persisted. “C’mon, they’re our allies. And we’re not sick. Or dead. Or whatever.”

“Yeah, well,” Dugan said, as he steered around a stump, and then over a large fallen log. “You try getting their attention and explaining all that to them.”

The vehicle continued to turn and buck over and around fallen trees, stumps, and underbrush, also running down several small saplings. Soon, but not soon enough, they had some forest between them and the road. By this time the firing of the SNA column had grown all the way to shit’s-getting-real volume.

“Everybody out,” Bob said. “Get down behind the truck.”

They piled out and complied. The sun was nearly down now, and the foliage of the trees made it even darker where they were. Zack realized he couldn’t draw his handgun – it was on his left side, underneath his slung and useless left arm. He reached around and teased it out of his holster with his right hand. Spec-ops badasses, he knew, often trained for thousands of hours to shoot ambidextrously. But he sure hadn’t.

By now the storm was nearly on them, and the first few stray rounds started zipping by. One thwacked audibly into a nearby tree. Another caused that characteristic
snap
noise of an air pocket collapsing as a supersonic round passed just a few feet over Zack’s head. When one hit the truck with a loud clang, Zack bent over and covered up his head with his pistol and good hand. But he could see that the two SEALs, one at the front of the truck, one at the back, were still holding their rifles in the low ready position. And, mainly, they were maintaining situational awareness.

The noise was huge and terrifying now. There was the starting and stopping chatter of three or four medium or heavy machine guns, probably mounted on the BTRs. They traded off lines like soloists in a jazz concert in hell. Underneath that were lots of single shots, from personnel with rifles most likely. And all this was punctuated by the periodic boom of the tanks’ big three-inch guns.

Zack didn’t know what the fuck they were shooting at – everything? Nothing? He recalled they had passed one tangle of vehicles shortly before this point, and there had been a few more visible up ahead. But it had been easy enough for the Tahoe to just go around them. Rather than blowing the fuck out of everything.

Maybe the Somalis were shooting at something Zack and his team couldn’t see? Something on the road – or, shit, off in the treeline? Zack swiveled his head, left and right, up and down, peering into the dark tangle of woods around them. But he saw nothing – nothing but gnarled limbs and trunks, bushes, knots of thorns, and deep shadows spreading as the last of the light bled away.

After the eternity that being under fire always feels like, the bee-swarm racket of zipping rounds passed away down the road, growing quieter, and finally fading out. The four men stood up, still looking over one another’s shoulders, peering into shadows. Dugan and Maximum Bob pushed out a 20-meter perimeter, and did a walk-around to secure the immediate area.

Zack leaned up against the truck, holstered his pistol, and felt up his own arm. It was tender as hell and didn’t want to move. Baxter stood nearby, his breathing slowing and quieting down. And Zack realized that the silence now was worse than the shooting had been. The silence here was like the sound of the darkness flooding in.

It was like that of the grave.

* * *

The devil and the deep blue sea.

Everyone knew that one. They now had a fateful decision to make. The four squatted or knelt in a small circle, facing in, a few feet from the Tahoe, in what was near total darkness now. Baxter had flicked on a flashlight, but Dugan had immediately doused it. It was much more important that they not be seen, than that they be able to see.

“I think we’re better off holing up for the night,” Dugan said.

“The question is,” Zack said, “is it safe here?”

Dugan tossed his head toward the road. “Safer than trying to navigate that junkyard in the dark.”

“What about your NVGs? Might actually be safer moving at night.”

“We’ve got NVGs,” Bob said, “but they’re only the two-tube ones. The viewing angle and depth of field are a bit crap.”

“Too crap for dodging wrecks at speed,” Dugan said. The two operators looked at each other, ruefully remembering the four-tube, $65K NVGs they’d had to abandon in their burning ready room.

“And we’ve only got one spare tire, plus fix-a-flat,” Bob added. “One too many flats, or a bent rim, and we lose our mobility. Lose that…” He mercifully didn’t finish the thought.

In the end, they decided to hunker down.

The SEALs strung up a literal perimeter out of the nylon rope, wide as it would go, hanging something jangly on each segment. Then they got out the blankets and all huddled on one side of the truck in a slightly wider circle. They broke out a big bottle of water and a case of Cliff Bars. They set a watch schedule, but didn’t need it. Nobody was sleeping. Instead they just talked quietly. They were being thrust back into the crucible of pre-civilization. And the way humans had survived it the first time was by trading information, making plans – and coordinating and cooperating.

“What actually happened before the house caught fire?” Zack asked in a near whisper. “With the street battle outside. After I got knocked out.”

It was full dark now, and they were surrounded by the massive black body of the forest, as well as the larger black body of Africa. It was like being in the stomach of a whale – a thirty-million-square-kilometer whale. Either this was a totally moonless night or, more likely given the usual brightness of the stars in this region, an overcast one. Every once in a while Bob or Dugan would click on a red LED flashlight to manipulate, look at, or dig for something.

“The militia lost,” Bob answered.

Dugan made an amused noise. “I figured the Somali militias would be ready for something like this, if anyone was. They’ve basically been living through the equivalent of the end of the world for the last twenty-five years.”

Zack inclined his head “Lost how? Specifically?”

“They got overrun or driven off by the sick,” Baxter said. “There were too many of them.”

Zack both wanted, and didn’t, to ask how many was too many. Before he could, Dugan said, “But not before they set the safehouse on fire with wild RPG hits. It smoldered for a little while first. Once it got going, we couldn’t fight it. Not least because it was on the outside of the structure.” He looked over at Zack invisibly in the dark. “You weren’t even out that long. Maybe six or eight minutes total.”

Zack sat wordless, feeling the weight of the darkness crushing in on him. It was a weird kind of virtual isolation. Disembodied voices floating around him. And God knew what the hell else out was there in the dark, behind the voices. He realized something else was bothering him. Something beyond the huge slate of current events that would bother anyone, except maybe a Viking running amok. Finally it came to him. He wet his dry lips and cleared his throat.

“How exactly did the State diplomatic security guy die?”

He felt the silence staring back at him. It was just on the verge of stretching out too long, when Bob finally answered.

“He stopped breathing sometime during the firefight.” That answer sat out there for a few seconds while the silence crept back in. Bob cleared his throat. “I didn’t hear the alarm on the EKG at first. Over the noise of the battle. When I did, I left my position and pumped his chest, and then got the defib kit on him.”

Zack nodded in the dark. “And?”

“It didn’t work,” Dugan answered for him. “He didn’t revive. And Bob couldn’t sit there doing CPR all day. We were in the middle of a gunfight.”

Zack considered this. It occurred to him that Dugan sounded a little defensive. He wasn’t sure.

Then Baxter spoke up, tentatively. “I think that was also right before we realized the building was on fire. When Dugan and Bob decided we had to abandon the house.”

Zack tried to clock Baxter’s tone with that. But Bob spoke first. He sounded not defensive, but… emotional?

“I don’t know. Maybe we could have revived him…” he said, trailing off. “Maybe if we’d taken him along, he would have made it…”

Zack didn’t want to pile in on Maximum Bob, who he knew was a profoundly good man. But he couldn’t stop himself from saying, “We could have at least taken his body.” He didn’t need to add that they never left people behind. Dead or alive.

“Look,” Dugan said. Zack could hear him stand up. “We had two casualties – out of five personnel. We were in danger of being overrun. The fucking place was coming down around our ears. The building was
on fire
. Hell, the whole town was an inferno. We had to bug out.” Defensive again. Something about his tone said the one he needed most to convince was… himself.

Then Zack said something else he might have better left out. Had he not been so spooked, exhausted, and generally frazzled, he probably would have – would have had the self-control and good sense not to say it. “But you managed to go back for supplies.” He had to bite his tongue after this, to stop himself adding that they didn’t even know for sure that the man was dead.

They could hear Dugan stalk over to the truck. “We make the tactical decisions,” he said, his voice flat and emotionless now. “Especially since we were the ones conscious at the time. It’s done.”

Zack took a deep breath. He realized Dugan was right. And even if he wasn’t, the last thing they needed was fault lines forming in the structure of their group. For all they knew, theirs was the last structure going, the last effective human organization anywhere in Somaliland. Anyway, it was all they had. And they’d damn well better keep it together if they were going to make it to Djibouti alive. Or even out of this haunted fucking forest. Zack pulled his blanket around him and curled up.

Before drifting off into a ragged sleep, he thought about his mother and father, only a few hundred miles from there, on the ranch in Kenya where they had semi-retired. He resolved to try and call them in the morning. He thought about them as he drifted off into sweet semi-oblivion. But later, in his dreams, faceless demons with defibrillators chased him through the black forest. They moved silently, neither speaking nor making a rustle, the only sound the rubbing of their defib pads in front of them.

They were trying to keep Zack alive.

So that Africa could torture him, forever.

Burning In

He awoke with a convulsion. Someone had nudged him with a boot toe. A voice hissed, “
Get up. Get ready to move.
”

It was Dugan. There was a fair bit of moonlight now, maybe also some starlight, filtering down through the trees, and Zack could make out Dugan’s face in it. His head was disfigured, the wrong shape. As Zack slowly came awake, he realized the SEAL was wearing his night vision goggles, which jutted out of his forehead. He was also holding his rifle ready. Zack looked around the clearing, and could see Bob shaking Baxter awake in the moon glow.

He checked his watch. He’d barely been asleep an hour.

Then he sensed something else. The drone of an engine.

He stood and blew into his free hand. It had gotten cold in the night. And his wounded arm was very stiff. Also, his headache was back, with a vengeance. He’d been half aware of it in his sleep, moving in and out across the edge of consciousness. Now he thought about going for the med ruck for more painkillers. But he didn’t dare. The engine noise was growing louder. Though he still couldn’t place it. Now, though, he at least recognized that it was overhead.

“It’s a C-130, or variant,” Dugan said, clocking it from the engine noise. Zack knew he was right – he now recognized the distinctive sound of four turbofans. “And it’s headed for Hargeisa.”

Bob threw open the back window on the truck and dug around until he came out with something. When he started speaking into it, Zack realized it was one of the hand-held radios. “Unidentified 130 flight overhead, this is an OGA element on the ground, right in your flight path. How copy?” He let off the transmit bar and waited. Nothing came back.

“There,” Dugan said, pointing through the sparse tree canopy to the north. The others followed his finger and were able to make out, not the aircraft, but a small white blob, growing larger, then another, and another. “Parachutes. It’s a combat drop.”

Bob straightened up. “And the drop zone looks to be just north of here.” He threw his radio back in the truck, then followed behind it. “Get in. Everybody saddle up.” In thirty seconds they and all their gear (they hoped) were back in the womb of the truck. Dugan gunned the engine, and they started rumbling over foliage toward the road.

“Who do you think it is?” Zack asked.

Bob said, “Maybe 75th Rangers, or the 86th. Any airborne unit based at Lemonnier, or passing through.”

“They must be jumping in to secure Hargeisa,” Zack said, almost smiling. “Stability and peacekeeping ops.”

“Kick-ass,” Baxter said, pumping his fist. “Come on, airborne! Now that’s a rescue. A whole company of Rangers, jumping right in…”