Arisen : Nemesis (12 page)

Unfortunately, the direction he was moving was right into the gap between the rear two trucks – and he was totally oblivious to them. No one could know what the hell this guy was trying to do, and there was no time to ponder it. The third gun truck swerved out of line and more than half out of the road to avoid him. But even as it went sliding left through the dust, the grenade detonated in the dumb son of a bitch’s hand, the explosion half-disintegrating him – and blasting into the right side of the hurtling truck.

Instead of swerving right, back into the road, it carried straight on and plowed into one of the trailer-like CLUs, half disappearing inside the flimsy structure.

And as Kate watched, open-mouthed, the second truck locked up its brakes and cranked its front wheels, spinning around in the dust and coming to a shuddering stop. Then its tires spun up again, spewing dust behind it, and it blasted off back where they’d come from.

Right back toward the crashed vehicle. And if both those vehicles stopped back there, they’d be overrun – in minutes, if not seconds.

And just like that, Kate and Todd were alone.

She tried to breathe, and traversed the .50 around to the front again.

Maybe she could still keep them from ending up like the others.

Rocket Dance

Camp Lemonnier - Out in the Open

“We’re okay, we’re okay!”

Kate recognized Jake’s comic book superhero voice over the squad net. So now she knew who at least one of the men was in the crashed vehicle.

And then she heard frantic non-stop firing – first through the open radio channel, and a second later live and fainter from back down the road. In her mind’s eye, she could imagine what would happen to a vehicle in this convoy that came to a stop.

She pictured ants swarming over a carcass.

Then, underneath that, she heard Brendan’s younger and reedier voice. But equally calm.
“Yeah, Kwon and I are gonna set up security while Jake and Pete get their truck out of this building, over.”

“We’re coming back around.”
This was Todd, who she could see driving one-handed while he jammed his radio PTT button.

“Negative, negative,”
Brendan said.
“Keep moving, do not get jammed up back here with us.”

Kate stole a look over her shoulder. The crash site was fast receding. But the firing was still ramping up even more. And she could see, through the dust, a crowd of bodies converging. It looked like the end for everyone who was back there. For anybody who wasn’t moving at least 40mph…

“Do NOT fucking stop, Todd.”
This was Jake, and he sounded like the team sergeant now – laying down the law and cracking the whip.
“Head for the main gates and blast a way out of here for us. Get that gate open.”

“How?”
Todd said.

“Improvise. Out.”

As the sound of firing redoubled, Todd cranked the wheel and took them in a skittering right-hand turn. Hanging onto the twin handles of the M2 for dear life, Kate tried to straighten up and focus. There were fucked-up figures in the middle of the road dead ahead of them now.

She depressed the butterfly trigger of the M2 and held it down.

The five-foot-long weapon came to life in her hands, jerking and thrumming with unrestrained power. Kate could see the rounds hitting all over – in the road, in the structures beside it… and in the bodies of people she was going to have to find some way to stop thinking of as people. It was the only possible chance of her doing what everyone else here had not: surviving.

Out past the falling figures, the front gate appeared. It was a straight shot.

But the gate itself was closed.

And the heavy-gauge, concrete-reinforced steel bar was still down.

They didn’t slow. Instead, Todd gunned the engine and accelerated up this stretch of straightaway, and directly at the barred exit.

* * *

Kate wasn’t sure what to freak out about first – her doubts that the gun truck could smash through the gate and fence without crashing or being badly damaged, perhaps even disabled. Or that they
would
make it through – and then they would be
it
. One vehicle, two guys, just her and the surfer dude, striking out for the horizon, with God only knew what lay out beyond it – or what was waiting for them in the wilds of Africa, well beyond the safety and shelter of an American mili—

“—the AT4 out! Get it out!
”

This was Todd, screaming at her over the wind and engine noise. He was evidently having to repeat himself. Kate’s vision refocused close in on the forty-inch-long tube, flared at one end, and 84mm in diameter, that was lashed to the roll-bar in front of her face. She let the M2 go and yanked at the bungee cords that held the AT-4 rocket in place.

“
Have you ever shot one of those?”

“
Yeah!
” The bungees didn’t want to cooperate, so she got her knife out and slashed them. “
But only with practice rounds!
” Bunker-busting warheads were kind of expensive for training purposes, at least where she came from.

Her hands were trembling again – or maybe it was the motion of the hurtling vehicle, the suspension of which was not engineered for comfort – but she managed to find and remove the safety pin at the rear of the tube. She then took up the best firing position she could, given where she was. As per training, she also turned around, verifying that no one was present in the back-blast area. Because the AT-4 was recoilless, it was almost as lethal to anyone standing behind it as in front.

“Take your time!”

Somehow, she didn’t think he meant that. The gate was swelling and blasting at them at a thousand miles an hour now.

She yanked off the front and rear sight covers and the sights popped into position. She removed the first safety by moving the cocking lever forward. Then she took aim, while holding down the red safety lever – the second safety. There was only one step left to discharge it. She put her thumb on the red firing button…

Motion ahead caught her eye.

Two figures were coming around either side of the guard shack beside the gate. They were MPs. One of them looked like the NCOIC she had seen earlier, now with his side arm drawn. She couldn’t tell whether he was healthy or not.

She had also forgotten that the hands tend to go where the eye does, and her aim had drifted off slightly to the left.

The truck bounced over something in the road, probably a body.

The sound of a bomb erupted by her right ear as the rocket fired, sonic booms warping out ahead of the hurtling truck, and with no discernible delay the guard shack went up in a crashing explosion of black smoke.

She’d just killed both the MPs, and anyone else who was in there.

“Goddammit,”
Todd said, over the radio this time.
“That was our only one.”

He twisted the wheel and took them into another shuddering right-hand turn, obviously willing to do just about anything to keep them alive at this point – except stop. Kate watched the mostly demolished security shack spin away out of view, hot tears once again leaking from the corners of her eyes.

This time she didn’t wipe them away.

The wind pulled them right off her face.

Sergeant Major Badass

Camp Lemonnier - Near the Main Gate

Absurdly, Kate realized her hat was gone.

Some of the atrocious back-blast of the AT-4 must have pulled it right off her head. She’d had that hat forever, through every one of her deployments. She loved that hat.

“Get the fifty up! Get the fifty up!”

Kate blinked and realized they were all about to die, and she was worrying about her hat. Maybe she really was a girl after all.

Thunk-thunk-thunk
, Ma Deuce was right where she left her – good to go and instantly banging away. Kate faced forward, firing at standing or lurching figures in the road in front of them. She didn’t like those guys’ odds against the steel cattle catcher gate on the front of the blasting six-ton truck. Then again, she really didn’t want to see how many they had to hit before the suspension got gummed up or they threw an axle. As it was, they were ramping over bodies like it was a gentrified neighborhood with too many damned speed bumps.

For some reason she recalled the memorably crass words of the guy who had trained her on this weapon. He said the M2 was great because of its knock-down power – because “it really puts their dicks in the dirt.”

They hung a shrieking right, back in toward the center of camp, and then an equally G-force-pummeling left. Now, closer in, the haze of hanging smoke was making it hard to see more than a hundred feet ahead. Kate paused firing and heard a steady
pop-pop-pop
’ing sound. She realized they were back near the JOC. The swirling smoke blew away for a moment and she did a double-take.

Ahead and coming up fast was Command Sergeant Major Zorn, still alive and on his feet, standing in the open door of the JOC – and discharging his side arm, a Colt 1911 .45. At his feet were two discarded M4s and a lot of empty mags, and there was a ring of bodies out about twenty yards from him. He wasn’t moving – just standing erect and firing one-handed.

Holy shit…
Kate could almost see, or maybe just remembered, the Ranger tab on the man’s shoulder. The guy might have been an asshole, but he was clearly a major badass, and evidently an unkillable one.

And then he disappeared into the haze again.

The squealing of the tires and another turn brought her attention back to the front, and she resumed
thunk-thunk-thunk
’ing away. Then Todd spoke in her ear, only audible because of her pricey Peltor ear-pro, which muted gunfire and explosions, but amplified voices, and piped radio traffic straight into her brain.

“We’re gonna go out one of the side entrances. Only, last time I checked, it wasn’t in use – it had concrete barriers in front of it. Your job: fuck that shit up!”

Kate blinked and nodded. She knew .50 BMG rounds would eventually crumble concrete – pretty quickly, in fact. She just had a hard time imagining she’d have enough time to make that happen. Then again, she had no choice but to make it happen.

The absence of alternatives clears the mind marvelously…

She worked out now that Todd had taken them on a wide loop south through the base – presumably so they’d have some runway as they approached the other exit, which was also on the northern wire, but to the east of the main one.

Maybe she could do this after all.

And then the weapon jammed.

The Browning M2 heavy machine gun is so perfect in design that it hasn’t been updated
since World War One
. Among its innumerable virtues was the fact that it
never
jammed.

And somehow Kate had gotten this one to.

And she thought:
This must be why I’m not an 18-Bravo weapons sergeant…

She hauled on the charging handle for all she was worth, but the bolt wouldn’t budge. She yanked and yanked, but couldn’t clear it – there was a badly bent shell casing wedged in the ejection port.

“I’m jammed!”

Todd hesitated one beat.
“Drive!”

When she looked down and forward, he was practically already climbing into the back of the truck. He was certainly as far out of the driver’s seat as one could be while still steering the damned thing. She slithered forward and into his spot from the passenger side. They didn’t crash – they’d just lost momentum in the break between feet on the accelerator, which might almost be worse.

There were nightmare figures converging on them from the sides, and filling the road up ahead.

* * *

Wriggling her hips as her Ghostex crawled up her ass on the cracked upholstery, Kate jammed the gas pedal, and stole a look in the rear-view. She saw Todd’s big bicep swell maximally beneath the Crye as he hauled on the charging handle, cleared the chamber, and got their main gun up again. And she looked on as this blond surfer dude/golden god masterfully rocked the M2, with the sun rising right behind him.

Who were these guys? She hadn’t yet begun to understand them. But she’d seen enough already to count herself hellaciously lucky to be with them. Later, she would learn that most of the world had gone down like she nearly did first thing this morning – in confusion and terror, and with it all happening too fast to even understand what was going on. That Kate hadn’t was solely because she’d just gotten stuck in with one of the most adaptable and fast-moving military teams in the world. Now, she hunkered down slightly as the five-inch brass casings showered down around her.

But, more importantly, bodies also started to tear apart and hit the ground ahead of them. She had the vague, utterly horrifying impression that even these terribly maimed figures were not dead, but still animated, moving in chunks on the ground… but that was surely just their residual motion as they got knocked down by the force of the rounds. Right?

She was starting to appreciate that there wasn’t any time to think about any of this. Now, she simply steered to avoid the biggest piles of bodies and parts. The Humvee’s center of gravity was spectacularly low, and its stability legendary, but she didn’t want to tempt fate, nor knock her gunner around any more than strictly necessary by ramping over torsos.

Focusing farther out again she saw the smaller gate coming up fast.

It was blocked by God knew how many big concrete barriers – and which were basically designed to stop vehicles with bombs in them driving through. And, six tons and low center of gravity or not, she did
not
like their odds against those things…

Todd’s fire was trained dead on them now, and she could see chunks of disintegrating concrete falling away and a thick and spreading haze of cement dust. He was fucking that shit up, but she seriously doubted whether he was doing so fast enou—