The Flood (37 page)

She only knew that she had to, somehow – to save her life.

Raised in a traditional Somali Muslim family, she’d been shuffled off by her father at age sixteen into an arranged marriage with a cousin she had never even met. Luckily for her, the cousin was in Toronto – and her flight connected through New York. There, her heart in her throat, she got off the plane, marched up to passport control, and requested political asylum.

And she never looked back.

Back then, she had been a frightened young girl, with only the barest inkling of what the possibilities of life were, or what she might be capable of. But somewhere deep down she knew she was capable of more – more than being a wife, mother, and subservient domestic servant, as her birth and family tried to dictate.

And she had a groundless faith that there must be more to life.

This time, coming back to Hargeisa, a million years and several lifetimes later, she was a fully realized and superbly accomplished human being – and she had seen and done more than she ever could have dreamed when she first left. She had become so much more.

Now, alone up on this mountaintop in the gentle sunlight, she tried to tease out her feelings, what she felt about going back to the place of her birth – seeing it and everyone in it totally laid to waste. But she simply didn’t know. It was all too complex, and it had gone by too fast.

Though there was one nice thing about there being no locals in Hargeisa. Ali didn’t have to scan the faces of the dead looking for her sister – Amina, the younger girl she’d had to leave behind. She honestly had no idea how she would have reacted if she’d seen her. The other members of her family she would have been fine with. Amina, though – who hadn’t been able to escape as Ali had, who never got anything from life, never had any chances, never got to develop herself into anything – that would have been too sad and scary and hard. As it was, Amina already haunted Ali across the years and the many miles.

She had loved her sister so much. But she had been unable to protect her, to bring her along – or, finally, to save her. And Amina’s fate had ultimately been a terrible one. She spent the rest of her youth in the servitude of an arranged marriage. And then, beyond almost any doubt, she had died in the fall.

And that was it for her.

Now, for some reason, Ali flashed back to that reflective time she had spent on the carrier’s voyage around the southern tip of Africa – time alone, sitting on that Sparrow missile launcher deck Homer had shown her. Though it had been painful to admit, even to herself, it was then that she had connected her decision to end her relationship with Homer to the death of her friend Tim in Delta. His loss had been the worst pain she’d ever known. And maybe it had left her afraid of love.

Too afraid of experiencing another pain like that. Terrified of losing Homer, and what that might do to her.

But maybe she was actually wrong there. Maybe her fear of love, seeing it as a dangerous thing, full of potential pain, went much deeper – all the way back to her roots in Hargeisa, and leaving her sister behind. And her sister meeting such a terrible end. But there had been nothing she could do for her.

Or at any rate she hadn’t done anything.

She told herself that her decision to break things off with Homer was an operational one – that it was about preserving combat effectiveness, and about the mission. Most of her did still believe that.

Part of her felt like she had to believe it.

* * *

Smoothly panning the barrel of her rifle, scanning the forested hills through her scope, she picked over her feelings, and recent history, once again. Had she really come as far as she thought? Was she really so much more? Was she really the perfect, exalted instrument of war that she imagined herself to be?

Because the evidence wasn’t totally on her side anymore. A few days earlier, she’d come in a not-very-close second place in an aerial sniper duel with that tattooed Spetsnaz son of a bitch. The guy had been good – seriously good, and even more vicious. But Ali had very little experience of losing, and even less of a taste for it. It sat very poorly with her. And now, in the silence and isolation of the windswept mountaintop, it made her wonder:

Was she really still at the very top? Back in the world, she had been considered the best long-gunner in the Unit – which made her, plausibly, the very best sniper in the world. But did she still wear that crown? Or had its weight bowed her head? And this was the feeling of her wings touching the ground?

Maybe this was it. Maybe she had peaked.

She remembered now a line from the Bible, the Book of Lamentations, she thought. And she could only have picked it up from Homer.
The Crown is fallen from our head: woe unto us, that we have sinned.

In that duel, she had somehow fallen short when it really counted. It tormented her, that missed first shot on the enemy shooter. She never missed a first shot. And if she had only made that one, she could have saved their helo pilot, and probably the crew chief and rescue swimmer. Not to mention their fighter jock down in the drink, waiting for rescue. Things would have ended very differently.

But she simply had to accept it. Even at her level, nobody hits every time. Even she missed sometimes. But she couldn’t reconcile herself to it. Basically, it galled her that this dude – with that cocky-as-hell crosshair inked around his eye – had thwarted her in her mission, had captured their CAG, and had all but shot down the CSAR bird Ali was supposed to be protecting.

And, worst of all, he had lived to fly away, no doubt grinning like Yakov Smirnoff all the way home at his victory. And, unquestionably, he was still out there somewhere.

The consummate professional in Ali, the seasoned and emotionless Unit operator, knew it would be much the best outcome if she never saw that guy or any of his Spetsnaz comrades again. But a not-so-small part of her hoped she would – the part that hated coming in second, and which knew that finishing that fight, once and for all, would give her peace. Would give her redemption.

But, beneath even that, way deep down, a tiny little part of her, one she declined to even acknowledge, was afraid she would meet him again. And that she would be found lacking – again. And the price paid then might be much higher than the loss of a single pilot, or a single helicopter. Because maybe that duel in the air wasn’t the one that really counted.

Maybe the one that did was bearing down on her even then.

And that one would be for the whole ballgame.

* * *

As that asshat Zorn had said, Tier-1 guys always thought they were saving the world. And to a certain extent, they always had been. But now it was literal. This was the real deal. And Ali was going to have to dig down. And find her faith in herself again. And no one was going to be able to help her do it.

Maybe there wouldn’t even be anyone else there by the end.

Because she was also worried about the team. Anybody with a pulse couldn’t have missed the powder keg that was smoldering between Handon and Henno. Predator had told her about their punch-up in the guard tower at Lemonnier – how they had literally come to blows, ending in a vicious ground fight that Pred had to break up by hurling them apart. And all while the shit was still coming down around their ears, the undead garrison seconds from bashing through the last gate.

Right now, and since Captain Ainsley’s death, Handon wore the crown.

But, ironically, it was Henno, the Brit, who didn’t give a damn about hereditary titles. Generally, in special operations, no one was anointed or born to rule. Everyone had to earn it, every single day. And, for Henno, Handon had not been earning it, so wasn’t deserving of respect. And it was becoming clear that Henno would knock the crown from Handon’s head – or maybe even slit his throat – if that was what completing the mission required.

Ali sighed out loud. If it was true this team was falling apart, then the stakes were higher than even she knew. And it all might ultimately come down just to her. If Handon lost effective control, if the others went down… she might have to finish this herself.

Maybe that was her destiny.

It also might be her atonement. Because if there was any truth to that CIA report Juice had pulled off that drive in the safe house, and it really was the al-Shabaab chimera virus – the one it had been Ali’s job to stop in a past life – that had mutated into the zombie virus and ultimately brought down the world…

Well, she had a hell of a lot to atone for.

And this also meant she was uniquely motivated to fix it. To make it right. Because it had been her fuck-up that had allowed it to happen in the first place.

She took her eye from the scope and checked her watch, eyes half-lidded. It had now been almost thirty-five hours since she last really slept – and that had been only four restless hours the night before they stepped off. The nod she’d gotten in the truck on the journey here had only been a fugue state, in and out of consciousness, and not really restful. Now she was having trouble keeping her eyes open – or, it seemed, thinking straight.

Basically, she’d been on the verge of nodding off for a while.

But she couldn’t nod off on overwatch. Many years of training and operational experience told her what she could and must do. She took a deep breath and put her eye back to her scope.

And then she pulled it away again, both eyes going wide, and her breathing instantly going ragged. She actually slapped herself in the face, trying to wake up. Obviously, the sleep deprivation was causing her to hallucinate. Because as she looked through that target reticle inside her scope, she had seen another one – the target reticle tattoo around the eye of the cursed Spetsnaz sniper. Maybe it wasn’t actually a hallucination, but just the daze of half-sleep. Maybe, obsessing about him, she had merely mistaken what she was seeing in memory for what she saw in reality.

When she put her eye back to the scope, only a couple of seconds later, now she saw, or thought she saw, a dark blur of movement in the forest way down below her – like someone or something withdrawing behind cover. That was less obviously her mind playing tricks on her.

Or was it?

She panned around now, thirty degrees in either direction, peering intently into the thick stretches of forest below, then up and down, closer in and farther out. A sudden spike of adrenaline was waking her up – at least for now. Desperate to make something resolve in her field of view, she stabbed her incomparable vision deep into the thick stands of juniper and boxwood trees blanketing the broad slopes below.

But there was nothing.

Now she was tormented. Should she call it in? She couldn’t fail to report possible enemy movement near the camp. But she also couldn’t have Handon think she was losing her mind. She considered going down there to check for herself. But somehow she knew she wouldn’t find anything.

It had to have been her imagination.

Then again, she was not known for seeing things that weren’t there – only things other people couldn’t see yet. In the end, she convinced herself that it was really a half-waking dream – that enemy sniper stuck on her brain.

She had to stop renting him space in her goddamned head.

* * *

Nearly an hour later, she was still up there, still fighting to stay awake. After nodding off again for two seconds, then jerking awake, she had just decided to take herself off duty, get someone up here to spell her, and get an hour or two of rack. But movement below caught her eye – and she panned quickly to zero in on it, half-terrified of what she was going to find.

But it wasn’t a hallucination this time – it was actually Handon, along with Henno. The SAS soldier was following the Delta CSM out into a clearing a couple of hundred yards from the bush camp below. And it was instantly clear from their body language that they weren’t grabbing a quick smoke or having a friendly chat.

Ali dialed in tighter to the scene below her. As a master scout sniper, she was trained in lip-reading. But in this case she was only able to catch about every third or fourth word that passed between them. The distance wasn’t a problem, but there was some foliage in the way, the men’s backs were sometimes to her – and, most striking of all, they were actually
circling each other
.

Ali figured that alone was an incredibly bad sign.

Their fist fight in that guard tower had been worrying enough. Now, as she watched, they weren’t touching each other, they weren’t shoving, and they certainly weren’t swinging. But, in its way, this was much worse. Again, mainly from body language, Ali could tell that the aggression levels were going through the roof in that little forest clearing – way past the level of a punch-up.

The few words she was able to lip-read reinforced this:

“— the fuck up and get back to work—”…

“— cold hard fucking world—”…

“— trust you with her secrets—”…

And then, finally, “—off your goddamned knife, Staff Sergeant…”

That last one was Handon. And when Henno circled back around into view, Ali could see it: his hand was on the pommel of his knife, gripping it bloodlessly.

And then, as the two circled again, she saw Handon’s hand go to his.

Holy fucking shit
, Ali thought.

This had definitely passed beyond punch-up and gone straight into the zone of bloody murder. This could really be it. One of these men was seriously going to gut the other like a fish. Worse, Ali didn’t know who she would put her money on. While obviously rooting for Handon, she had enough street-fight experience to know the meaner man, unconstrained by humanity or scruples, usually won.

And that was Henno down to his bootsoles.

It was possible this actually was going to come down to murder. And there was nothing Ali could do about it from up here. Or was there?

She considered radioing the others back at the encampment – and telling them to get their asses into that clearing. But there might not even be time for that.

For one batshit crazy second, she was actually tempted to shoot one of them – just to make sure one lived, and they didn’t lose both men. (Knife fights notoriously had no winners, just degrees of loser.) Later, she and Handon could make up some story about what had happened to Henno, which might keep the team from falling apart.