Arisen : Nemesis (28 page)

Whenever people would express envy at his knack for languages, he’d always say: “It’s not a knack. It’s a commitment. Anyone can learn a foreign language if they want to.” He knew all it took was a genuine desire to learn – and, mainly, the discipline to practice. He also went out of his way to find and practice with native speakers. It was a great way to build connections with foreign people – and to share with them the truth of Christ. And he found that each language he learned was easier than the last.

Just as each new convert made his heart sing.

* * *

Alone in the TOC, fingers caressing the GCS, Elijah took a look up at the region maps he had originally posted up in there.

He was a studious guy and had memorized a social science textbook’s worth of information about Somalia, the Sanaag region, the Darod clan – the complete environment the team would be operating in. He was also an extremely devout Christian, who felt he had a duty to preach the word of Christ and share his teachings. Occasionally this had come into conflict with his job as an SF soldier. But never with his medical work – that fit perfectly. He liked ministering to people, especially those who needed help and care.

And it had made him light up when he was able to give life-improving, and sometimes life-saving, care to the Warsangali. He grew to know and love them. He even went so far as to recruit a young Warsangali boy and train him up to work as his “physician’s assistant.” He’d also started doing twice-weekly Bible study sessions with the boy, who was eight years old and named Dalmar. The Warsangali were Muslim, but Dalmar was an orphan, so had no parents to object. And his relatives in the village who looked after him liked that he was a favorite of the Americans.

The Warsangali village had been nearly as isolated as Camp Price. And its residents might even have survived the fall, as had half of Triple Nickel. They did survive nearly a month into the ZA, not least because of Triple Nickel’s warnings and instruction. But then a small herd was spotted close by and, as was their way, the men went out to fight them – without telling Eli or the other soldiers first. They were defeated. And when the survivors returned, many of them wounded, the women brought them back in to care for them. Which was also their way. They knew what was likely to happen. They didn’t care.

And that had been the end of the Warsangali village. The end of the Gs.

And it was when all of them had died, including little Dalmar…

Well, after
that
, Elijah was never the same again.

Bushmaster

Camp Price - Outside the Team Room

“’Sup, B!” This was Todd, along with Kwon, coming out of the team room behind Brendan – and trying on his line again. Brendan hadn’t felt like playing back on the tarmac of Djibouti Airport, when they were still a long way from home or safety. Now he delivered his expected line.

“Nothin‘. Watchin‘ the game. Havin‘ a Bud.”

“True, true,” Todd said, closing it out. He pulled up beside Brendan and looked off at Jake and Kate moving side-by-side out the front gate, heading for the garage. He suddenly noticed they were walking pretty close together. He said, “Hey, you don’t think those two…”

“No,” Brendan said. “Jake would know better than to try it on.”

“I don’t know,” Todd said. “I say she gets assignments to go off and work with him way more than chance would explain. And he makes most of the assignments.”

As far as any of them knew, in their first eighteen months of isolation, everyone on the team had been too professional, or too scared, to try anything with Kate. With more women in combat roles, guys had slowly learned to behave.

Todd cocked his head. “I wonder if anyone in her last unit tried it on.”

“I heard one did,” Brendan said.

“What happened?”

“An episode involving his own K-Bar knife and his dangly bits.”

“Holy shit,” Todd said. “Are you going to finish that story?”

“You want me to?”

“…No.”

“Don’t worry, I think you’re safe from your own Yarborough knife. You know better.”

The Yarborough knife was the trademark SF knife – one was given to every graduate of the Q-course, with special engraving and serialization on the blade. It was named for William P. Yarborough, the Special Warfare Center commander who convinced John F. Kennedy to authorize the green beret in the first place.

Todd turned to Brendan. “Here’s a question I forgot to ask. Why didn’t you shoot that dude?”

“What dude?”

“That unarmed guy who stepped out between us and al-Shabaab, to try and stop the fight. The Western-looking dude.”

Brendan paused. “Because I know him.”

Todd’s eyes went wide. “You’re kidding. Who the hell is he?”

Brendan took a breath. “His name’s Zack – Aldridge, or something that sounds like that. He was an Agency analyst. Detailed to the HOA Task Force.”

Now Kwon raised his eyebrows. “So what the fuck is he doing rolling with al-Shabaab?”

Brendan shrugged. “I don’t know. But my guess would be, same as everyone else: surviving.”

Kwon looked like he wasn’t buying that. “If he just showed up at the al-Shabaab Stronghold, why wouldn’t they shoot him on sight?”

Brendan held his gaze. At thirty, the junior weapons sergeant was actually two years older than him. He said, “I honestly don’t know. Maybe he had an asset inside who vouched for him. Maybe he had something to trade. Or maybe you’ll get to ask him yourself.”

“How?”

“I have a feeling we might be hearing from him.”

Kwon narrowed his eyes. “And if we do hear from him, why should we trust him?”

Brendan didn’t react. He said, “My father did. He worked with him.”

Todd looked amazed and amused. “What, at Agency? No shit.”

“He actually came over for dinner with our family once, in Arlington, when I was sixteen.”

Todd laughed. “Dude, that’s hilarious.”

Brendan shrugged. “My father had just done back-to-back tours as assistant station chief in Cairo. I hadn’t lived in the States in years. And I remember this man told me something I never forgot. I said I wanted to join the Agency some day. And he told me not to do it.”

“Why?”

“He said… he said they’d just send me back there, to Arlington. Or else to Cairo. Whichever place I hated most.”

Kwon said, “He’s from HOA, isn’t he?”

“Yes. Born here. But he got his master’s degree from Princeton, if I recall.”

Todd straightened up. “Right, enough tales of the bizarre. Gotta hit it.” He looked at Kwon. “You coming, dude?”

“Yeah. I’ll be there in a minute.”

“No worries. I gotta draw up some building plans first, anyway.” He loped off in his long-legged rock-star stride.

* * *

Kwon was alone with Brendan now. Expressionless, voice super-cool as always, he said: “Hey, Captain. Did you see al-Sîf? On the battlefield?”

Brendan looked surprised. “What? Godane’s enforcer? He was at Lemonnier?”

Kwon nodded. “Yeah. I glassed him from my OP, right at the end.”

“If you glassed him, why didn’t you shoot him?”

“I actually mainly saw his sword, hacking above the fray. He was moving fast. And at that point I had to jump for it.” He blinked once, slowly. “If you didn’t see him, then you didn’t see what kind of rifle he was carrying.”

“No. Can’t say I did. Why?”

Kwon seemed to consider, then decided. “You probably need to know this. Two deployments back, before you rotated in. One of Jake’s close friends, Jim Rierson, was killed. He was in our sister team, 578.”

Brendan nodded. “I heard about him. Didn’t know he and Jake were tight.”

“They went way back. Fought together in Syria, Iraqi Kurdistan. Even before that, during the insurgency in Ramadi, it was Jim who helped Jake off the field after his leg got blown off.”

Brendan nodded. He knew not to say something facile like,
I’m sorry Jake’s buddy got killed
. Instead he said, “How did Rierson die?”

Kwon’s expression didn’t change. “Badly. It was an ambush. He was out in the bush mentoring a patrol from Alpha Group.”

Brendan nodded. He knew Alpha Group was the first element of the U.S.-backed Somali special operations counter-terror force known as
Gasshan
, or The Shield. He also knew 578 was one of the ODAs given the job of standing that unit up and getting them operational.

Kwon continued. “We think somebody sold them out. It wasn’t like Jim to just walk into some shit like that.”

“Mole in the SNA? Or Somali government?”

“Yeah. Could have been either. Anyway, everyone in the patrol was killed or captured. The two captures turned up later on YouTube.”

Brendan got it – beheaded. “Jesus. Not Rierson?”

“No. Jim wasn’t going out like that. When we recovered his body at the site of the ambush, he’d been non-mortally wounded in six different places. He was also completely out of ammo – lying in the middle of a ring of his own rifle and pistol brass. He went down shooting, defending his guys.”

“So what killed him then? He bled out?”

Kwon shook his head slowly. “Head shot. Close range. Execution-style.”

Brendan shook his own head now. “Ever get payback?”

“We sure as hell tried. Never knew for sure exactly who was behind it. Except that Jim happened to be carrying a Bushmaster ACR when he went down. As far as I know, it was the only one in HOA. And his body had been stripped of it.”

“Ever see it again?”

“Yeah. Yesterday.”

Brendan put all this together. Al-Sîf. His voice dropped lower. “Does Jake know?”

“Yeah. He knows.”

Kwon turned and headed out, leaving Brendon standing alone, beneath the moving cloud shadows of the late afternoon. In the near silence and solitude, the pain from the minor wounds in his hand and ear came creeping back. He’d hardly felt them before, with the adrenaline and the stress and the burdens of leadership.

Now, the pain felt real. And uncomplicated.

* * *

Brendan closed his eyes for a second, realizing he had a bigger problem with his command than he’d known. Jake had been implacable and bellicose on the subject of al-Shabaab before this. But now that he knew al-Sîf had killed one of his best friends… well, if there was anyone who might restrain him now, that person probably wasn’t Brendan.

He exhaled and looked around the clean and well-ordered camp. Everyone was out of sight now, back at work. He was alone with his doubts, and with the weight of command. If he really even was in command. Once again, he was having to face his greatest fear – failing as a leader. And proving to be what he feared his father always thought he was: weak.

He simply didn’t have the innate strength that Jake did. And he was nothing like as vicious as Jake could be in a fight. It was kind of annoying, actually. In addition to Jake’s other natural advantages and attributes – his decisiveness and resoluteness and natural air of command – he was simply a fearsome fighter. Just lethal, super-skilled, and totally unflappable.

Most likely, none of them would have even made it out of Camp Lemonnier alive in the first place if it weren’t for Jake.

So Brendan knew he wasn’t as strong or as skilled a soldier as Jake. He certainly wasn’t as experienced.

But he also knew Jake could sometimes be too self-assured, too convinced he had seen it all – and thus very quick to believe he had a situation all figured out. And his certainty could lead to a deficit in restraint – he knew what needed doing, and he was damned well going to do it. In fairness, he usually did have things figured out, and had the right action pegged.

But one day, Brendan worried, Jake’s confidence was going to overreach itself and was going to turn into hubris.

And someone, not necessarily Jake, was going to pay a bad price for it.

Driven to the edge of rage by his hatred of al-Shabaab, of Godane, and now of the man, al-Sîf, who had executed his friend… that day might be coming. And if Brendan couldn’t find the strength and resolve to oppose him, he had a bad feeling Jake was going to get them all killed, in a bloody and pointless war between Triple Nickel and al-Shabaab. The first shots had already been fired. Godane had been bloodied. And he almost certainly had a lot more bodies to throw into the scrap.

But they weren’t there yet.

Brendan still had a couple of cards to play.

* * *

He found Elijah in the TOC, preparing to launch the Shadow. He stuck his head in.

“Eli.”

“Yeah, Cap.”

“Do me a favor and keep the PSC-5 powered up.”

“Sure.” Elijah’s brow wrinkled. They normally used the big high-power radio set to communicate with patrols outside the wire – usually far out. But the gang was currently all tucked up at home. “What am I listening for?”

“Stay on channel 23. You’ll know it when you hear it.”

“Roger that.”

Brendan withdrew again and walked half the length of the camp back to the team room, where he found Todd and Kwon. They were poring over Todd’s hasty but skillful drawings of the defensive emplacements they needed to modify or build from scratch. He stuck his head in again. “How’s it going?”

“Good,” Todd said. “We’re gonna turn the first spade in a few minutes.”

“Okay. I’m heading over to stores. Need anything?”

“Not yet,” Todd said. “What are you getting?”

“Need to draw a new team radio.”

“What happened to yours?”

Belatedly, Todd noticed the long pouch on Brendan’s tactical vest was empty. “I dropped it.”

“What – where?”

Brendan didn’t smile. He rarely did.

“Out the window of that cargo truck.”

Gun Safety

The Stronghold - Zack and Baxter’s Room

“Jesus Christ, Zack. Godane already thinks you’re a spy. Now you’re actually gonna become one.”

Baxter and Zack both sat regarding the boxy team radio where it lay on the bed. It was an AN/PRC-152 Multiband Handheld Radio – the newer, higher tech version of the old AN/PRC-148 MBITR (pronounced “embitter”). Rolled out in 1990, the MBITR was what the vast majority of infantry used for squad-level communications, as well as comms back with their fire base. Not long before the end, spec-ops got the new one. It had excellent range and power, and was satellite and data capable.