ARISEN, Book Twelve - Carnage (16 page)

He threw the driver’s-side door open.

He raised his Beowulf – which also fired 50-caliber projectiles, albeit ones with a hell of a lot less propellant in them, and only one at a time – and he began to engage the target. And he shouted his order, and his decision, to the others.

“Engage!” he said. “We stand and fight – right here!”

Zack spun the minigun up overhead, its whine and roar atrocious, painful – and deeply heartening.

Jake smiled as he tried to put rounds through the cockpit glass of the helo. They were all probably going to die in the next few seconds, and Jake was singing his death song. But today, right now, for as long as fate allowed him, he was alive, on his feet – or rather on his one foot and his prosthesis – and he was fighting.

He was a happy warrior.

* * *

Kate felt ridiculous – just as she had on her first day in country in East Africa, which had also been the first day of the ZA. She had run around then trying to keep her head on, trying to be effective and do her job – and mainly trying not to get killed. It was a damned miracle she hadn’t. In retrospect, she gave herself about 80/20 odds against. But those were pretty decent odds compared to this fight.

She mainly felt ridiculous because she had basically brought a Nerf gun to a gunfight – an absolutely hellacious and high-powered gunfight. Ahead of her, shooting from behind the open front passenger door, was Noise, the calm and bad-ass Sikh dude – firing his high-capacity combat shotgun on full auto. On the other side of the vehicle, Jake was engaging with his Beowulf 50, its powerful reports punching through even the sonic chaos that surrounded them. And, of course, overhead, up in the turret, there was Zack, shrieking away with the minigun.

The odds were against any of those weapons penetrating the armor of the attack helo. But they at least stood a chance.

Kate, on the other hand, had only her M4, a 5.56mm pop-gun, which she fired from behind the right passenger door, kneeling in the mud. Her shooting stance was excellent, and her rounds were landing on target.

It just didn’t matter.

And that’s when the 30-mil autocannon on the Black Shark perked up. The front of the gun truck, which was their only real cover, blossomed into fire and violence, and everyone around it hunkered down and covered up – or tried to. Her senses overloaded from the bombardment, Kate realized she was still alive only because of the armor package on the gun truck, specifically in the doors.

Then again, that heavy steel door had just crashed into her from the impacts and explosions on the other side of it, and was trying to smash her into pulp by beating her between itself and the truck. As her vision swam, she figured if she could stay on her feet, she could live another few seconds.

But that was the best-case scenario.

* * *

The 30-mil holocaust coming in from the Black Shark paused. It was because Nina was switching ammo – from explosive incendiary to armor-piercing. And that was the good news. All Kate knew was the coast was clear – for that one instant. She raced from the truck to the treeline on the right, instantly working out that the others had done the same, all of them abandoning their position at the truck.

It was their only hope of survival.

Noise now stood with his back against a tree ten feet ahead of her. And Jake had gone diving and rolling into a stand of trees on the other side of the road. That left…

Kate’s neck snapped to the left – and she saw Zack’s head appear behind the armor glass of the gun truck turret. He was changing out the ammo can. Finishing that, he got the weapon back up – pouring 50-cal hate and vitriol into the Black Shark. He was responsible for their only big gun in this fight.

And he had stayed on station.

Two seconds later, the helo’s autocannon started back up, with armor-piercing rounds this time. The whole front of the gun truck began turning to scrap.

Hearing the crescendoing cannon roar and engine noise, Kate looked out to see the Black Shark, nose slightly down, inching forward over the remains of the bridge, closing the range to the gun truck in the forest. The cannon on the side of the airframe continued to bark in three- and five-round bursts. Kate looked over again. Somehow Zack still had the minigun up, blasting away. She could even see it starting to take its toll – the shark nose on the helo was deforming and discoloring from the impacts, and there were bits of metal flying off the engine cowling, the stub wings, and the weapon mounts underneath.

The 50-cal minigun was dishing it out. It was just taking worse.

She sensed Zack elevating his aim – and targeting the armor glass of the cockpit. He was too close to miss now. They were both just blasting the hell out of each other from point-blank range. Kate could see that the glass was starting to crack and splinter. And she could also see the pilot behind it. And even inside the bulbous flight helmet, Kate recognized her. It was the same spooky bitch who had flown over the Stronghold, murdering the shit out of all those al-Shabaab guys. And whose face Kate had a righteous shot on – but hadn’t taken.

The minigun went down, empty again.

The helo’s autocannon stopped chattering.

And now two unguided 122mm rockets whooshed out of the pods underneath the stub wings. Kate threw herself face down. The world to her left exploded. When both the explosion and the debris settled, she turned her head and opened her eyes.

The entire turret on the gun truck was gone.

Zack was gone.

* * *

Kate stayed down on the ground, in the mud and mulch, in part because she felt like she’d live longer there. But mainly because in this moment she felt one inch tall. That fucking stone-cold killer Russian pilot, who Kate had failed to take out when she had the chance, had just killed yet another one of her friends. Zack, who with the others, had risked his life a hundred times in a row to rescue her from that horrid Stronghold dungeon.

She also knew – and if she didn’t, she knew Jake was going to tell her pretty damned soon – that she had about another three seconds to indulge her grief, her remorse, and her terrible regret. And then she was going to have to start being operational and effective again.

She was going to have to do her fucking job.

No matter how bad things got, no matter the despair you felt, no matter the desire to just lie down and die – you never stopped, quit, shut down, or stopped trying. Jake had taught her this.

Kate took a few rapid steadying breaths, adjusted her grip on her weapon, and low-crawled closer to the edge of the treeline. And she could immediately make out the Black Shark, still hovering dead ahead. It wasn’t firing anymore, but it was still flying, creeping over the near end of the bridge, the start of the forest, and the rutted dirt road that cut through it.

Coming for them. Anyone who was left.

Kate felt it deep in her gut. Zack, Predator, and Homer were dead. But this predator, woman and machine, were not going to be content with destroying both vehicles and half the team. She was going to hunt them down from above, until the last of them had fallen.

Kate pulled her rifle to her shoulder and took a closer look through the scope, and through tears of grief for her fallen friend. Before he went down, Zack had done one hell of an exfoliating job on the Black Shark. Much of its forward-facing airframe and features were all fucked up, at least cosmetically. Though that didn’t seem to be affecting it functionally. But as she panned around, one thing jumped out at her.

The missiles suspended under the stub wings. One of them was bent at a crazy angle. Moreover, the protective tube that encased it had been partially torn away, presumably by a hosing of .50 BMG rounds. The warhead was now exposed. Kate knew that, unlike in the movies, missiles and bombs usually had things like warhead safeties and thick steel casings and didn’t always go boom when you shot at them.

But it was something.

Before she could do anything about it, though, the helo moved, taking that wing out of her sight – and a rumbling, booming voice came over the squad net.

“Hey, can you guys keep that sonofabitching helo facing your way for the next ten seconds or so?”

The voice was unmistakable.

Predator
.

Crowning Moment of Badass

Somalia – Northwest River Valley

The Black Shark didn’t look particularly like turning around anyway. Nonetheless the team instantly reacted to Pred’s call for diversionary action – Noise first.

While still under cover, he dropped and checked the hubcap-sized drum magazine from his AA12 assault shotgun. He’d just reloaded, so inside it were 32 twelve-gauge shells – but they were all double-ought buckshot. He let out a resigned sigh as he reseated it. If he’d had slugs, they might actually have stood a chance of penetrating the weakened armor glass in front of the Black Shark’s cockpit. Buckshot, with about nine pellets in each load, would make a real mess of a human, never mind a Zulu. But it had little penetrating power.

Though it just might do as a distraction.

He stepped out to the edge of the treeline, brought the weapon up, its fixed stock tight in to his shoulder, and depressed the trigger. Shotgun blast after blast, five per second, boomed off – and scores of pellets pelted and ricocheted off the face of the Black Shark like horizontal steel rain. It must have been a mesmerizing sight for those inside. Anyway, Noise hoped it was.

Nonetheless, for the entire 6.4 seconds it took to empty that drum mag, he fully expected to see the autocannon blossom fire and deliver him to his liberation – the
mukti
, as faithful Sikhs knew it, when he would find a blissful reunification with the creator.

But when the heavy bolt of the shotgun locked back… he was still standing in this world, at the edge of the road. And the helo was still hovering at the junction of forest and river, over the foot of the bridge, just staring him down.

Then the right-side window tilted up and open.

And the pilot actually leaned out and forward – and started spraying at him with a machine pistol.

Noise exercised the better part of valor and dove back into the woods. When he got there he had a couple of small holes in him.

But he was still in this world.

* * *

Holy shit
, Jake thought. He knew the fearsome reputation Sikhs had as warriors. And he had even shared a battlefield or two with the bearded ass-kickers. But he had certainly never seen bravery or badassery like that – man versus attack helo, toe-to-toe.

As Noise went to ground under the full-auto pop-gun barrage unleashed by, of all people, the pilot of the fucking helicopter, Jake popped from the opposite side of the road, leaned around a tree, and engaged the aircraft, which was still hovering with its landing gear less than ten feet off the deck.

That dumbass pilot – and, wait, was it a woman? – had just volunteered to give him an open shot at what was, by a very large margin, the most vulnerable part of the aircraft. Perhaps the only vulnerable part of the aircraft.

Namely her – the pilot.

His first round crashed into the headrest behind her as she leaned forward. She reacted instantly, turning and engaging Jake. He had to decide whether he was going to be driven under cover or not. Whether to shoot it out nose to nose. He decided he was never going to get a better look than this one. None of them were.

But as he sighted in again, the window came back down.
Dammit.
The pilot had evidently had enough of trading rounds – or didn’t like the exchange rate, anyway: her little 9x19mm SMG rounds for Jake’s 12.7x54mm ones. He cursed under his breath – he’d had one shot and he missed – and he now tried to formulate his next move. Whatever the winning tactics were in a man versus Black Shark fight, they had definitely not been taught to him at the Special Forces Q-Course.

But then, in the next few seconds, he learned where such tactics evidently were taught: at the Unit Operator Training Course. Because he was about to get a masterclass.

At first all he saw was a man-mountain emerging from the steep bank that led down to the river. He was a broad-shouldered, angry-visaged, vengeful god, rivulets of water still streaming off his massive and massively muscled body. He was running and leaping and powering up the slope, and as all of him finally made it to level ground, he accelerated his enormous bulk even more, faster than should have been possible – straight at the side of the hovering helo.

And with a mighty shove of his tree-trunk back leg – he leapt through the air and up onto the side of it.

* * *

The bank of the river was covered in thick mud and riddled with tree roots. But, even at 325 pounds, Predator’s power-to-weight ratio was prodigious, so he powered up it like King Kong climbing the Empire State Building – all dominance and rage and unreflective belief in his own indestructibility.

What Pred really couldn’t understand – as he unclipped his rifle, let it fall in the mud behind him, grabbed two grenades with a single alien-face-sucker-sized hand, and pulled the pins – was how the hell Homer had managed to rescue-swim his ass to safety.

When the SUV went off the bridge, both of them whirling inside it like socks in a clothes-washer spin cycle gone horribly wrong, picking up speed at 9.8 meters per second per second, and then crashing into the river and going straight to the bottom, it had been Homer who maintained consciousness, while the blackness took Predator. He didn’t know whether it was due to blunt head trauma, G-forces, the spinning, or the impact with the water, and he didn’t care. All he knew was he had blacked out, and would have drowned to death in seconds.

But that righteous, God-fearing Navy SEAL had somehow hauled his 325-pound ass out of an SUV that was two-thirds buried in the silty river bottom, gotten him to the surface – and then swum both of them to the bank. Both of them in full combat gear.

And both with their rifles still clipped to them.

That shit should have been by no means remotely possible. But Homer had somehow done it. Whatever open-water survival magic they taught these dudes at Coronado and Dam Neck, Predator sure wanted some. Anyway, he was damned glad Homer had it.