ARISEN, Book Twelve - Carnage (12 page)

Walker pulled her trigger.

The top half of the man’s face disappeared.

She retrieved the weapon, pumped the slide, and started sliding shells into the loading port, her back up against cover. At this, the wounded NSF guy, Toussaint, popped and started putting out fire. But he rocketed backward as he took a round in the face from a Spetsnaz guy who had his position zeroed, and had simply been waiting for him.

Patrick threw his last two grenades over what was now Spetsnaz’s barricade. And that did it. They retreated back into the passageway.

The defenders had driven them off a second time.

But they had paid a heavy price for it.

Patrick dragged himself back behind cover, where he immediately found himself inches from the staring dead eyes of Toussaint. As he reloaded his own weapon, he couldn’t resist shouting over to Walker: “Sucks to be Kurt Cobain over there.”

“What?” she shouted back.

“Never mind.” Now Patrick need to focus on wrapping up his own wounds enough to stop the bleeding. When next they came, there’d be no time – and there would be no stopping them.

Not here, anyway. They were going to have to fall back.

* * *

“Holy fucking shit,” someone in CIC muttered.

Thinking,
Okay, what the hell now?
LT Campbell moved to that station – one of the two displaying CCTV video feeds from all over the ship. Right now this one was cycled to a camera on the outside of the island, which pointed straight ahead up the length of the flight deck and out to sea. The ensign controlling the feeds had been trying to figure out where the ever-loving hell the Russians were taking them. But now he saw something he wouldn’t have expected in a thousand boardings by Naval Spetsnaz.

There was something in the water, just visible, way out ahead of them.

“Zoom,” Campbell said, hunching over his shoulder. “Zoom, damn you.” The ensign complied.

And then they could both see it.

“Put it up, center screen.”

It went up overhead – and now everyone could see it.

And there could be no mistaking it now. It was a submarine, breaching the ocean surface. And it sure as hell wasn’t theirs – it wasn’t the
Washington
, the strike group’s
Virginia
-class fast attack sub. No, that would have been like mistaking a rodeo bull for your pet schnauzer.

“Profile,” Campbell barked. She turned and looked behind her. “Profile the enemy surface contact, dammit.”

The ensign responsible for this was having to eyeball it. “
Akula
-class, ma’am.”

Campbell exhaled and sagged slightly. She already knew it. She’d just been hoping she was wrong. But of course she could see it herself now, perfectly well. The Russian
Akula
(or “Shark”) nuclear-powered attack sub was, by a comfortable margin, the largest submarine ever built by man. It went 175 meters long – just shy of two football fields – and displaced 48,000 tons, with a normal complement of 160 crew. When the first boat of this class had appeared at the tail end of the Cold War, it had shaken everyone in U.S. naval surface warfare. No one had expected the Soviets to be able to produce such a vessel for at least another ten years.

And absolutely no one had been in any hurry to fight one.

As Campbell straightened up and walked around the row of stations to stand beneath the overhead display, she considered the aptness of this class designation. The gigantic sonofabitch really did look like Jaws, moving half-submerged through the water – as fast and terrifying as it was huge, and dwarfing all other submarines just as the great white dwarfed other sharks.

But as big as it was, they had never seen it coming. Campbell knew it must have been lurking outside their sonar detection range of about 100 kilometers. But now it was breached, the submariner equivalent of full frontal nudity. And there wasn’t a goddamned thing the
Kennedy
could do about it.

“Enemy surface contact is making ten knots, CBDR.”

“Yeah, I can see that,” Campbell snapped. Constant bearing, decreasing range. Coming straight at them.

And then it got worse.

Campbell leaned forward, squinted, and said, “More zoom.” But that was it, there was no more. It was only a CCTV camera, not meant for surveilling enemy vessels. Nonetheless, everyone in CIC could see what was happening.

Figures were spilling out of the sub’s hatches and mustering on the sprawling deck, even as water continued to sheet off it. Campbell had exactly one guess who those people were: more goddamned Naval Spetsnaz. And even if they were only regular sailors, they were all armed.

And there were soon two hundred of them forming up into ranks. Campbell figured it must have been pretty damn tight with all of them down inside that thing. But it didn’t matter. Because when that sub reached the
Kennedy
, and reinforced the substantial force already kicking their asses…

They were well and truly done.

Come and Have a Go

JFK – Armory

With zero hesitation, Seaman Alisa Armour rushed into the breach, and the carnage and chaos outside the ship’s armory. As best she could tell in the two seconds it took her to get there, the Spetsnaz soldiers down the hall had fired smart grenades over the top of their barricade, behind which Parlett and Roy, and two other militia members, had been taking cover and holding the line. She was able to work this out because she had been trained in the use of the smart grenade launcher on her own weapon, the XM-29. What that thing had done to rampaging zombies was hugely gratifying.

But what it had just done to her four teammates made her eyes slit and her blood chill in her veins. They were all down on the deck in a tangle of limbs and weapons, a horrifying and bloody mess. There was some movement, so someone had survived. But she couldn’t tell the wounded from the dead, and it didn’t matter anyway, because as much as it wrung her heart, she had to ignore them for now.

Right now, their entire line was down. And if they were overrun, everyone was going to die – not just the wounded.

She launched herself out the hatch and turned to the front, but before she could square up, a big armored body crashed into her.

They were already being overrun.

She was knocked to the deck with the big Russian on top of her, and both slid backward from the momentum of his leap over the barricade, their rifles skewing between them at strange angles. Her own eyes wide, Armour could see the flecked green of her attacker’s, inches away, like lovers in an intimate embrace. And it was intimate – one of them was going to kill the other in the next few seconds. And Armour didn’t see how it was going to be her doing the killing.

But she had to try.

She dragged her right hand through their crushed-together vests, got it around her pistol, flipped the thumb break—

But she was already too late.

Before she could get her weapon free, the Russian had his knife clear from a vest scabbard and was bringing it around toward her throat. Her breath went away as she realized: this was it. She was done.

This was where her story ended.

But then a whole other body crashed into the descending knife hand, wrenching the arm around and half pulling the Russian off her. Even as he flashed by, Armour could see it was Parlett. He was alive. He was a bloody awful mess, but he was alive. And he had just kept her that way for another few seconds.

The Russian used Parlett’s momentum to fling him away, intending to deal with him later, then fell back down on Armour, eyes inches from hers again, knife flashing up and around.

But now it was his eyes that went wide as he felt the muzzle of her pistol jam into the bottom of his jaw. Parlett had bought her the two seconds she needed. She held the man’s gaze as she pulled the trigger. Chunks of his brain exited out a hole in the top of his helmet, and he slumped forward as Armour was coated in gore.

But at least it was non-infectious gore – for once.

Small blessings,
she thought, pushing the body off her.

* * *

Down in the nuclear reactor control room, Captain Martin stood his post – or, rather, sat it. He still couldn’t stand, his legs totally unresponsive after getting shot low in the belly by the Spetsnaz infiltrator. But he still held the compartment.

As he waited for someone to come – either to relieve him, or to relieve him of his life and his burdens – he thought about the one working nuclear reactor on this vessel. He had shut both of them down, to stop the Zealots crashing the ship into the coast of Virginia – and then personally broke one of them, pretty much for the duration, trying to get it started ahead of the incoming storm of the dead. Yeah, Commander Drake had ordered him to try it, even after he told him it was a terrible idea.

But it had been a terrible idea because Martin didn’t know what the hell he was doing. He hadn’t been up to the job. So even aside from being in charge of engineering, he felt a sharp sense of responsibility for the one working reactor. The lives of everyone on the ship depended on it. Without it, there was no power, no propulsion – and no drinking water, when the desalination plant shut down.

They would all be dead in days.

So it weighed terribly on him to know that if this reactor got turned off, or spiked, or otherwise damaged, they might never get it running again. And the
JFK
would be out of the fight – forever. And now the only thing between that reactor and the invaders was a lone British officer, one who couldn’t even stand, armed only with pistols, and growing weaker by the minute from blood loss.

He was also an Englishman – one who was growing afraid. Not for the loss of his life.

But of failing in his duty.

He only realized his head had started to loll when something moved in his visual field, causing him to jerk upright, his adrenaline spiking and his senses spooling up.

It was two dark and heavily armed figures, stepping smoothly through the hatch, one going left, the other right. And it was only because Martin was down on the deck, and motionless, that they took a second to spot him. He made the most of that second – shooting the one on the right ten times, dropping him to the deck, and driving the other back out the hatch with the remaining six rounds in the mag.

Feeling like Mr. Orange in
Reservoir Dogs
, he limply let the empty mag drop out the pistol and into the blood pool before him, then tried to seat a new one from the pile in his lap. But before he could get it lined up, two grenades tumbled in the open hatch. One landed beside him, and he tossed it back, his strength and dexterity somehow dialing up when they absolutely had to. The other landed behind a bank of stations. He rolled over and away from it and covered up.

Both munitions went off – one outside, one inside.

The latter left a deafening ringing in his ears, and a seeming inability to get his breath. He figured the explosion had used up all the local oxygen. And he had plenty of problems already, without being unable to breathe.

But it was no good wishing things were different. As he wheezed, he sat back up and managed to get the pistol reloaded. As he did, he discovered some unexpected good news: he was starting to get some feeling back in his legs. Maybe it was just swelling around his spine from the bullet lodged in his back.

Maybe he wasn’t paralyzed.

Then again, his relief was short-lived when he reflected that he was probably going to die in the next few minutes anyway. Keeping one eye on the hatch, he catalogued his remaining ammo. No worries there. When no one came for him, he arched his eyebrows and thought that maybe the grenade he threw back had done its work. Then again, he was pretty sure there’d be more of them.

Come and have a go
, he thought.

If you think you’re hard enough.

* * *

Armour holstered her precious and now life-saving M9 pistol, got her hands around her rifle, and started to climb back up and into the fight. And when she looked back, she realized: everyone had followed her out that hatch – without hesitation. They had all raced to her aid, going into what looked like death and destruction in the passageway, with the defenders slaughtered and piled up, and attackers overrunning the barricade.

The others had seen Armour go out without fear. So they did no less. And now they were the ones rampaging. Instead of climbing to her feet, Armour crab-crawled away, to make room for the people spilling out. They were needed – because the remaining three Russian attackers had not backed down or laid off for a second. They were still coming hard.

The result was toe-to-toe fighting, a smash-mouth gunfight in a phone booth. It was a bunch of people shooting each other to death from three feet away. Armour saw one of her guys go down from a headshot, another with his body armor blown away, a third, a fourth. But that was it. And when it was over, with everyone still left alive deaf from the non-stop pummeling gunfire in the tiny space – the XM-29s had no suppressors – there were still plenty of defenders standing.

And four Russians lay dead on the deck.

The field was theirs.

* * *

Running back to the lab from the front of the hospital, toting his big ruck, now almost empty of ammo, Sergeant Lovell heard a familiar voice call out to him. Looking across, he saw it was Corporal Raible – laid up in his hospital bed, with third-degree burns and only one and a half legs. Lovell had known he was there, had come and visited him several times, in fact. But in his single-minded urgency to get to Dr. Park and protect him, and then to resupply the defenders, he had walked right by him twice.

Lovell still had serious shit to do, but he couldn’t ignore his brother wounded warrior, so he dashed over. It turned out Raible wasn’t calling him over for a chat, and had serious shit to do himself. “Give me a weapon,” he said.

Without hesitation Lovell drew his MARSOC CQBP .45, reversed it, and handed it over. Raible looked like shit, but his eyes were bright, and his grip steady when he took hold of it. Lovell pulled all four of his pistol mags and laid them on the bed near Raible’s left hand. He looked over at the door to the lab, barely ten feet away.