Arisen : Nemesis (48 page)

He looked out over the courtyard to the south-east. He looked over the wall. He peered off into the tall trees of the forest, which was strung with thick vines and symbiotic vegetation.

He couldn’t see a damned thing out there.

But he could be seen – by someone who wasn’t going to make him say thank you.
“No problem, Cap. Now get your overloaded ass moving again.”

Kwon. Up in overwatch.

Brendan nodded his thanks and respect, having no doubt his weapons sergeant could see the gesture through his massively magnified rifle optic.

And then he got his overloaded ass moving again.

Sniper Support

Camp Price - Jake and Kwon’s Hooch
[The Night Before]

Jake opened the gun cabinet in the near dark.

He took his Beowulf off its place in the rack, held it diagonally out before him – and blew the dust off. He’d also be giving it a thorough cleaning and oiling. He had a pretty good idea it was going to get a workout in the morning.

As he reached for the cleaning kit in the bottom of the cabinet, he sensed more than heard Kwon coming back in. Rising and turning to face him, he smiled at what the man was carrying. He had a 100m coil of nylon rope over one shoulder and a serious-looking slingshot in the same hand. But in the other he was carrying a truly beautiful piece of hardware.

“Let me see that,” Jake said.

Kwon nodded and handed it over, then dropped the rope on his bunk.

Jake hauled the long charging handle back and inspected the chamber, then eased it forward again. The weapon was a SCAR Mk 20 Mod 0 Sniper Support Rifle (SSR) – essentially an accurized version of the 7.62mm SCAR-H, but with a twenty-inch barrel, precision stock with adjustable cheek rest, and extended receiver with extra rail space for accessories. Some of its other high-end features weren’t visible, but Jake knew they were there: a strengthened barrel extension that reduced barrel whip and increased accuracy; an enhanced, modular trigger assembly; and accurized internal mechanisms.

This one was mounted with a Leupold 3-10x day optic, which was a very serious scope, as well as a fold-out bipod and a quick-detachable suppressor – which made the shooter of this thing much harder to spot by eye or ear.

Jake was pretty sure this weapon was going to get a workout, too.

“Anybody see you pull this stuff out of stores?” he asked.

“Negative.”

* * *

Brendan entered the hooch a minute behind Kwon.

The two team leaders faced their weapons sergeant and Brendan said, “We’re giving you your real assignment for tomorrow now.”

“So I’m not going to be out on the ground with Jake?”

“Negative. Jake’s going to be on his own.”

Kwon looked satisfied, like
Okay, I can see that
. “Why the hush hush?”

“We may have some OPSEC issues,” Brendan said. He didn’t look like he was going to elaborate. He was just making Kwon’s assignment need-to-know.

Kwon looked to Jake, who nodded his agreement.

Brendan spread out a map sheet on one of the bunks.

* * *

The sun hadn’t yet cracked the horizon as the two seriously up-armored and up-armed gun trucks rumbled through the dense trees and heavy undergrowth, a tunnel of menace in the impenetrable darkness.

Kwon looked up to Todd, driving, and Jake, in the front passenger seat. No one spoke. No lights were lit. The moving map GPS on the dash cast a slight glow. Glancing at it, Todd rolled them to a stop in a stretch of black bush that looked exactly like every other stretch.

Kwon opened the rear door and stepped out into darkness. He reached back and pulled his pack after him, and shrugged into it. Then his rifle. As he put his hand on the door to shut it again, it looked like nobody was going to say anything now either.

But at the last second, Todd waved over his shoulder, mocked up his best Billy Crystal, and said, “Have fun stormin‘ the castle.”

As he shut the door and moved out into the equally impenetrable bush and darkness, Kwon silently remembered the next two lines from the film.

“Think it’ll work?”

“It would take a miracle.”

* * *

Some of the best Special Forces tricks are simple ones. Having picked out what he figured was going to be the right tree for his overwatch point (OP) – he’d only know for sure once he got up there – Kwon got out his slingshot and aimed for a big branch about sixty feet up.

What he was launching up there was a small lead weight. Attached to the weight was a long string. And what was attached to the other end of the string was his knotted climbing rope. When the lead weight came down, Kwon hauled on the string until he’d pulled the rope over the branch.

The trick had originally been developed for stringing antenna wires up over high branches. But it was adaptable.

As Kwon tied off the end of the rope, grasped it with both hands, and put his left boot up against the tree, he remembered the discussion from back in their hooch – when he’d pointed out that the only position from which he was going to get any kind of elevated look into the Stronghold was from up in a tree.

“Kwon,” Brendan had said, “you know why we don’t go up in trees. You’ll get some good kills from up there. But you’ll never get down again.”

Jake had looked like he didn’t want to agree. But he did. “As soon as they spot you, it’s a turkey shoot.”

Kwon had shrugged. “I can climb down if it gets too hot.” Anyway, they all knew there was no alternative. “I’ll take my chances.” That had settled it as far as he was concerned.

Now, he walked himself up the vertical surface of bark, hand over hand, rifle and pack on his back – and with his right hand still bandaged up and only at about fifty percent capacity.

The darkness was only just starting to melt.

As he went higher and higher, Kwon was glad he’d be in position before he could see down to the ground.

* * *

He adjusted the variable magnification of the Leupold scope until he could see what he needed to see – namely, everything moving in the Stronghold. The only trouble was he was looking through his left eye. His right one was also still bandaged up, trying to heal from the splinter shrapnel of that other tree Todd had blown up.

Also, he was having to shoot left-handed. The trigger finger of his right hand was still a mess and in no state to do precision shooting.

But these problems were less dire than they might have been.

Years before, when Kwon learned that Delta guys routinely practice shooting off-handed, with both pistols and rifles, mainly to be able to engage effectively around right-hand corners, he had started spending a portion of his range time shooting lefty. Then later, when he read that Navy SEAL Adam Brown had suffered injuries that forced him to learn to shoot with his off hand
and
off eye – and then made it into SEAL Team Six anyway – Kwon started doing that sometimes, too.

Special Forces guys were supposed to be ready for anything.

Today was going to test that to the limit.

Overwatch

350 Yards from the Stronghold - Kwon’s OP
[Twenty-five minutes ago]

Kwon’s only regret as the engagement kicked off was that neither Godane nor his sword-swinging lieutenant were in his sight lines – both were covered up by an extended section of wall that rose above the parapet.

What he did have a look at was a whole row of Godane’s Praetorians, the big-ass dudes in the body armor, who were spread out to one side of the leadership element. So Kwon began his day by walking down the row of them, Sergeant York style. He got four before they raced under cover.

With all the chaos and shooting coming up at the walls from down below, no one really figured out they were also being engaged from behind and above. The bodies sprawled face down with exit wounds where their faces ought to be should have clued somebody in. But it was harder to tell with center of mass shots, which was mostly what Kwon was taking. Conservative.

Now his job was mainly to figure out where his rounds could have the most impact – were most likely to turn the tide of the battle.

Even more important, much more important, was protecting his teammates on the ground. He could see much that they could not.

And when Todd got the quadcopter up, and overhead video started streaming into the handheld in a clear pouch on Kwon’s forearm, he could see even more.

Even before that, though, he could see that the thin scattering of dead moving around when they first got there was thickening up. And he didn’t need the drone for that. He could just look down. And his tree was to the south-east of the Stronghold.

Nearly the opposite direction the herd was coming from.

* * *

Kwon’s OP was to the south-east mostly so he could keep Zack alive, in his gun truck by the north wall. Todd, in the south gun truck, had Jake out on the ground protecting him. You didn’t need much more than Jake.

Kwon spent the early minutes of the fight mostly taking single RPG gunners off the walls and from beside the towers – those who survived the minigun and Mk 47 fire from below. There were just so damned many of them, and even from his excellent position, he did not have a look at a majority of those positions. He had to hope Todd and Zack had the rest.

Where he was more effective was on the ground of the courtyard. There wasn’t a lot of moving around the al-Shabaab guys could do down in there without exposing themselves to Kwon in his Olympus-like aerie. He had to make some shots on moving guys, which was not simple at 350–400 yards – and less so shooting off-handed. But Kwon was making a difference. And he could feel it. Also, he was so far undetected.

No one had engaged him.

Not only was his weapon suppressed, not only was he a significant distance away – but there was so much chaos on the ground that one guy more or less getting randomly shot was no cause for the enemy to reassess their tactical posture.

Kwon shifted on the thick branch he was perched on.

Feeling invisible, unstoppable – and invulnerable.

* * *

The battle had been going a good ten minutes before he spotted the first hunter-killer RPG team on the ground. They were starting to get organized and maneuver in on the trucks – which were under good cover, but had the disadvantage of being static. Eventually, they were going to get taken out.

But Kwon could definitely push that moment back.

Four guys broke from cover while Zack’s gun was down, presumably reloading. They found a position they liked, took knees, and started taking the safeties out of their warheads. The thing about RPGs is that, unlike AKs, they’re pretty hard to shoot while moving, never mind running.

The third and fourth guys started to figure out that something was wrong by the time Kwon had taken out the first and second, but then he shot them, too.

He smiled to think of Zack coming up with his replacement can of ammo and seeing the present Kwon had left him.

Like a cat leaving a dead bird on the doorstep.

Or rather four dead birds.

* * *

He did the same thing for Todd a couple of minutes later. He didn’t know why these RPG gunners had been able to work up so close to Todd’s position.

Where the hell was Jake?

But Kwon was listening in on the squad net, and the radio chatter finally clued him in. Jake was going up on the wall to take out a guardhouse. This wasn’t really in the plan, but Kwon implicitly trusted Jake’s instincts and improvisation, and assumed the team sergeant knew what the hell he was doing.

But Kwon hadn’t seen al-Sîf in that guardhouse.

And neither Jake nor Todd had mentioned it on the radio.

And so right now Kwon had a new job: keeping his team sergeant alive on his madcap dash across the courtyard, and then along that parapet at the top of the wall. He heard Todd shouting a warning to Jake about his six – but Kwon had it.

He shot twice, even as Jake was turning to engage.

And, way underneath the ice-cold professionalism, was a small glow of pride. Jake will have known who did that for him.

And who always had his back.

* * *

Kwon checked his watch. They were supposed to be getting the hell out of there by now. What was the hold-up?

Whatever the cause, the result wasn’t likely to be good. Every additional second of time-on-target increased the likelihood that the defenders, who massively outnumbered the attackers, would get their shit together and overrun the tiny assaulting force – and also the proximity of the herd, and thus the number of dead they were going to have to wade through to get the hell out of there.

When Kwon put his eye back down to his scope, four significant things happened, one right after the other.

First, the tower Jake had been fighting inside went up in a truly spectacular fireball. That was fine, and Kwon presumed as intended.

But, two, a few seconds later, he spotted Brendan – out in the open, and with something big and bulky thrown over his shoulder, and by the east wall. And that was not where he was supposed to be. He was supposed to be back at the north gun truck, with Elijah, Baxter – and Kate.

Moreover, if Kwon could spot him, the enemy could as well. And they did – but Kwon got his gun on them first and put down three in a row. It was a close-run thing though – he could not acquire and engage targets as quickly as usual, shooting lefty. But he got it done.

He touched his radio button, for the first time in the battle.

“No problem, Cap. Now get your overloaded ass moving again.”

But then, third, Kwon’s real problems started. Somebody among the enemy had figured out they were being slow-motion murdered from somewhere outside the walls. And then spotted him, probably with binoculars. And that guy was now, evidently, rapidly telling all his friends.

Because Kwon started taking some pretty serious potshots, zipping through the foliage around him, one or two thwacking into the trunk and branches of the tree itself. They probably weren’t going to hit him any time real soon at nearly 400 yards. On the other hand, they also couldn’t keep missing forever. Eventually the law of large numbers was going to catch up with him. Meanwhile, they might get a machine gun into play. Or even a sniper rifle, or at least something with a longer effective range than the AKs.