Escape 3: Defeat the Aliens (10 page)

“
Lā ʾilāha ʾillā-llāh, muḥammadur-rasūlu-llāh,”
he said, speaking the
shahada
, the first pillar of the Islamic faith. He’d learned to speak Arabic with a Somali accent as part of his training for the operation.

“Stupid believer!” growled someone from the other side of the door. “Kneel on your prayer mat outside!”

“I have no mat,” he called loudly. “It was stolen from me by the infidels in my village. Allow me inside to pray beside our brothers.”

The sound of a single person moving about came to his ears. The click of a safety being released was loud. Likely from the AK-74 carried by the door guard. A screech came as the door lock was turned. It sounded rusty. The left side half of the double door pushed outward. The nose of the AK filled the slit opening. Above it gleamed two eyes that scanned him.

“Your clothing is not local,” the man hissed. “Where are you from? Quickly!”

“From Puntland,” he said, naming a semi-autonomous region just to the north of Adow.

“Did you pass through Galkayo?” the man asked, not opening the door further.

“Never been there,” Bill said, knowing that was the town where the two demining workers had been kidnapped. “Let me in! I must join the brothers in paying homage to Muhammed and Allah!”

The wooden door swung out further, revealing a lanky Arab man dressed in dirty white robes with a reddish-brown cap on his head. The man was full-bearded. Beyond him lay four one-story buildings. Keeping his rifle on Bill, the man gestured with an elbow toward the largest of the clay-walled buildings. “In there! There is a small courtyard. Enter and kneel with the brothers. Hurry! I must resume my own prayers here.”

A gray and brown cloth prayer mat lay to the back of the man, next to the inner side of the wall. Bill touched his forehead and walked through the doorway. “Allah bless you!” Keeping both empty hands in clear view, Bill slowed as his peripheral vision showed the dark shapes of his teammates sliding down on ropes to the inner ground. The building where the captives were held was to the far left. He turned toward that building. “This one?”

“No, you idiot offspring of a camel!” the man cursed, moving up behind Bill and reaching for his right arm. “The center building! Go there and—”

Bill pulled the man’s right arm forward with his right hand even as he pivoted in place and struck the man’s neck with a left hand chop. He continued the pivot and grabbed the AK-74 at the trigger guard, inserting his finger into the firing loop and holding tight so the man’s falling body could not fire off a shot. He knelt as the unconscious man fell to the group. Dislodging the rifle from the man’s grip, Bill rose, felt for the safety release, touched by feel its setting as to full-auto or short-bursts, found it set at short-bursts, then grabbed the man’s cap and put it on his head. The robes he wore were typical of northern Somalia and did reflect the style as now worn by villagers in Mudug province, part of the Puntland region. They were close to those worn in Galguduud, the northern province that contained Adow and its countryside. Anyone looking out from the center building would see a lanky, bearded man wearing the reddish cap, holding a rifle and assume it was the door guard. He moved back toward the closed door and put his back to it. He aimed the AK-74 toward the inner cluster of buildings, ready to take out anyone carrying a rifle who wore light-colored clothing. His SEAL comrades all wore ash black clothing, night vision goggles and carried M4A1 carbines fitted with M203 grenade launchers. The captives would be unarmed. At his feet, the door guard groaned.

“Allah! Aid me—”

Bill kicked the man’s head, rendering him silent.

The left side building was entered by his teammates, a shout came from inside, followed by a single shot of 5.45 mm ammo.
Fuck
!

The thick curtain that covered the center building’s entrance was flung aside. Three pirates rushed out bearing AK-74 rifles and turned toward the captives building.

Atop the roof of the captives building were five SEALs. They saw what Bill saw.

“
Zing, zing
!” came the sound of rounds hitting the rocky walls of the center building as Bill opened fire with the guard’s rifle.

The rearmost man fell from Bill’s fire. The other two died under a zipping rush of full and semi-auto fire from the SEALs atop the left side building. Suddenly, five SEALs exited that building, their M4s aimed toward the center building. Behind them stumbled two half-dressed Anglos, the woman Jessica Buchanan and the Dane Poul Hagen Thisted. They were held up by other SEALs. They moved toward Bill’s position.

“Brothers!” screamed the door guard who rolled away from Bill’s position, got up and ran toward the center door. “Come to my aid! The infidels have—”

Bill fired at the man’s back even as two SEALs ahead of the captives fired at the door guard.

The remaining four pirates exited from the building’s front entry, firing as they ran.

Bill dropped low to his knees and fired on them even as rooftop and on-foot SEALs returned fire, their 5.56 mm bullets including a few tracer rounds that arced in a straight line to the enemy jihadists.

The smell of cordite hung over the landscape as eight dead men lay unmoving on the dusty ground.

His ears told him two rounds had passed above his head. The crowd of SEALs rushed up to him. He moved to the right. He gestured left. “It opens outward!”

Saying nothing, a dozen SEALs rushed past him with the two captives in their midst, moving outside. Four other SEALs jumped from the roof of the left side building to nearby building roofs, their rifles aimed low and ready for any moving target. Four SEALs rushed into the center building, moving high and low and spraying the inside with bullets even before the curtain stopped swinging. The lieutenant in charge of the team stepped outside and moved toward Bill.

“No one left alive, eight down plus the man in front of you. Follow us out.”

Bill turned to follow. Just as he followed the last of the SEALs out, something clicked from behind him. From the guard he and the others had shot.

The doorframe blew up just after he passed through it, blowing him forward into two team buddies. The left side of his head felt pain as something struck him there. He fell to his knees.

“Fuck!”

Strong arms grabbed him and lifted him up. His boots scraped the ground as his teammates carried him down the zigzag pathway.

“Where are you hurt?” called the team’s lieutenant from Bill’s right side.

“Left side head,” he replied, wincing a bit as the pain hit him. “Shrapnel or something got me.” He blinked, took a deep breath. “Let me stand. I can keep up.”

“Go ahead of us then,” the lieutenant said briskly. “We’ll catch you if you black out.”

With that IED blast still echoing in his head, Bill stood and ran ahead, putting the injury behind him. With his escape from the blast, he became the last SEAL to exit the compound where nine pirates had held the two Western demining people captive. The pirates had refused a $1.5 million bounty. With the health of the woman captive declining, according to word from elders in Adow, the JSOC Task Force at Camp Lemonier in Djibouti had mounted the operation he’d just completed.

He blinked, pulling back from the memory. Green dots glowed amidst rivers of energy in the green starburst that surrounded him. “Pretending to be someone you are not is deception,” he mind-talked to the AI. “I lied to the door guard so my SEAL teammates could find and rescue two unarmed people. People held as captives the way Jane and I were held as captives by Diligent Taskmaster. Understood?”

“
Understood
,” the ship AI hummed in his mind. “
You wish me to do something similar when I am in neutrino contact with other ship minds at Kepler 62?
”

“Yes!”

The green energy flows grew stronger within him. “
What do I do if another ship mind threatens to reveal your presence?
”

He knew he could not say
kill it
. “You disable it. We disable its ship. You find a way to fool it into thinking you are someone you are not.”

“
How do I pretend to be what I am not?
” the ship mind hummed in Bill’s brain.

He felt sudden electric tingling along his glowing arms and legs and inner body. “What are you doing?”

“
Searching for your method of pretending to be someone you are not. You have a memory there, of some place called Kunduz where
—”

“Stop!”

♦   ♦   ♦

Jane saw Bill’s arched body fall back into the elevated seat, his arms falling away from the armrests. It looked as if her husband had lost control of himself. Or been hurt, somehow.

“Cassandra! What’s happening?”

The orange-haired woman, still standing atop a pedestal that was up as high as Bill’s seat, looked at her tablet, then touched Bill’s right hand. “He’s cooling. His heart has stopped pumping!”

“I’m cutting that fucking optic cable!” she yelled, moving with open shears toward the silvery cable that ran down to the floor socket.

“Wait!” yelled Cassandra. “Give me a few seconds to restart Bill’s heart.” She reached out and placed two small silver disks against either side of Bill’s upper chest. She tapped her tablet. “Three seconds, two—”

♦   ♦   ♦

Bill felt pain deep inside him. Something thumped in his chest. He realized he’d lost awareness for a moment as his heart stopped working. Relief surged through him like an electrical shock as he felt the steady thump-thump of his heart beating. The tingling in his hands and feet disappeared. The green starburst glow surrounding his half-transparent body pulled back from contact with his skin.

“Get the fuck out of my body!” he mind-yelled.

“
Apologies
,” the AI hummed. “
The memory I touched somehow connected to your heart. Why did the word-memory Kunduz create such a bodily response?
”

His head swam with shock, with anger and with relief. He’d already died once when lasered through his heart on the Market world. He had no desire to repeat the event. Losing awareness was far too close to the sensation he’d felt then of being outside his body, watching as it was carried into the transport
Tall Trees
for the trip up to orbit and his wife on the
Blue Sky
.

“Cause it was a place where I almost died!” he mentally yelled.

“
Explain, please, this memory of Kunduz
.”

Bill took a deep breath, recalling the Pamir Hotel in downtown Kunduz, the Taliban attack that had begun days earlier, the enemy’s takeover of the city and his arrival with a few other special operations folks to serve as laser spotters for American planes that were helping the Afghan national army forces retake the city. That day, October 12, 2015, had felt like a good day. The Afghan forces had pushed out most of the Taliban fighters. He and his teammates had helped call in airstrikes, working from the roof of the hotel. Then had come Monday night. The Taliban attacked the hotel four times. He’d used his sniper rifle to take down six Taliban lurking in nearby alleys and under trees. The enemy fell back. Then had come word of attempts to blow up the Chardara and Alchin bridges on the outskirts of town. His SEAL team lieutenant had passed on the word that the Taliban’s new leader, Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Mansour, was part of the group that had tried to blow the bridges. Reportedly the man was camped out on a hill beyond the Chardara bridge. He’d volunteered to infiltrate the camp. Taking out the Taliban’s leader, the man who’d taken control of internally divided Taliban after Mullah Omar’s death, would be a great victory. It would make the Afghan army’s failure to hold the city, with the exception of a fort at the nearby airport, sound like a victory. Instead of the abysmal behavior of 7,000 troops who ran from a few hundred urban fighter Taliban. He and two fellow SEALs had dressed in robes and belts taken from dead Taliban fighters, grabbed AK-74 full-auto rifles and left for the town’s outskirts. Minutes after crossing over the 250 foot long Chardara bridge they’d run into a Taliban checkpoint on the outskirts of Rahmat-Bay village.

“What unit?” called a man from behind a cluster of sandbags, barrels and tarps. Two other Taliban were crouched low, behind the man.

The SEAL on his left side replied in Pashtu. “We are from fighter Alamaden’s unit. Our people were told to come here. We came. Allah be praised.”

The guard rose slightly, exposing his shoulders. He pointed an AK-74 at them. “Do you three hail from Kabul?” he asked in Dari.

“Curse you!” the SEAL yelled. “We are true Pashtun! Let us pass!”

Bill recalled feeling relief at his buddy’s reply. All three of them spoke passable Pashtu, and he knew a little Dari, the dialect spoken by high-class Afghan families. The people who controlled the pretend Afghan parliament and the capital of Kabul. Clearly the checkpoint guard was concerned they might be Afghan soldiers imitating Taliban members. He stepped to the right, raising his right hand and making the gesture known among
mujahedeen
that meant “Allah be blessed!”