ARISEN, Book Twelve - Carnage (21 page)

“Suck this cock,” Misha said, not raising his voice – but lowering it, which made it scarier. “I’m not about to be stopped by these two assmasters – at
most
two.” He spat. But Kuznetsov did have a point. Team 3 had already reported they were engaged with the first American force at the airport, and had them pinned down. But now, with this egregious fucking delay, the second group of Americans was going to get to the airport before Misha and Team 2 did.

Misha hit his radio. “Team 3, fucking come in.”

“Go ahead.
” There was a lot of gunfire, both suppressed and not, leaking through the speaker.

“Unless you can successfully locate your nutsacks and finish that fight in the next few minutes, you are about to be facing a second force – and you are going to get your asses flanked.”

“Received, Colonel.”

Misha wrinkled his massive brow and considered. “Have any aircraft touched down since you’ve been there?”

“Negative.”

“Nothing inbound now? Or sitting out on the tarmac?”

“Negative on both counts. The Akula also hasn’t seen anything flying on radar, anywhere in the region.”

Misha considered. What the hell was their plan? It probably wasn’t to just die at the fucking airport. “Okay. They must have an aircraft in one of the hangars. It’s the only explanation. Those hangars are all bunched up in a row, right?”

“Affirmative.”

“Okay. Here is what you do…”

After he got off the radio with Team 3, Misha stood up and spoke to what was left of Team 2 on the riverbank. And he didn’t use the radio. He just raised his voice and bellowed loud enough to be heard up and down the valley.

“Listen the fuck up! We finish this thing!”

* * *

With his arrival, Handon had well and truly resurrected Henno’s one-man defense. With two of them, they had a greatly improved ability to hold the base of the bridge and the riverbank around it. They could also keep themselves, to a limited extent, from getting fatally flanked. Or, at any rate, they could shoot in two directions at once when they were. And now they were making Spetsnaz pay in blood – for every step, for every attempt to cross the bridge or the river below, every time they popped to shoot, or attempted to maneuver.

The two of them were everywhere at once, fighting like demons, moving from position to position, one covering while the other moved, needing no words or even hand signals to coordinate – just preternaturally in sync and effective, a two-operator machine, a matched pair of the last best commandos on earth.

Together they were a dynamic last-ditch defense that also attacked, reaching up to bite wherever it was tested, then disappearing and moving elsewhere to bite again, a deadly ghost-like force in the frenetic, vicious, bloody forest fighting. Every time Spetsnaz thought they had them dead to rights, they were somewhere else – exacting a terrible price, culling the Russians almost as fast as they entered the woods.

But they were also paying a price themselves. Henno had been wounded already when Handon found him. He was wounded again several times again in the next few minutes, though he didn’t complain, and only stopped fighting to wrap up anything bleeding badly enough to endanger his combat effectiveness.

But if Handon had gotten hit, he wasn’t reporting it. Henno wondered if his long unwounded streak was continuing even into this meat grinder – and, if so, how that was even possible. But he had little time to ponder it. He’d lost sight of him during their last sequence of maneuvers, but now saw him appear again twenty meters to his left. And then a streaking rocket, an RPG, came in right between them – with too little warning to react.

The two Alpha men were blown off their feet in opposite directions, and both hit the ground hard. When next Henno saw Handon, they were dragging themselves into the same little depression that overwatched the foot of the bridge. Smeared with mud and blood, they realized they were both out of rifle mags and grenades, as both drew and chamber-checked their pistols, hunkering down and waiting for the last rush.

When it didn’t immediately come, Henno ducked down and tightened his bandages, slowing the blood loss to give himself a little longer in the fight. As he did so, he said, “Oi – you’re
seriously
not hit anywhere?”

Handon just shrugged as he lay there and covered the two approaches, with a .45 in each hand. Henno crawled back up to face the bridge. And the two of them caught their breath, relishing this tiny lull of silence and peace, waiting to get their last licks in.

Waiting for the end, like Butch and Sundance.

Henno glanced over, the whites of his eyes red with blood. “Think we’ve given the others enough time?”

Handon nodded tiredly, answering around deep breaths. “Yeah. They should be in the air any minute.”

“Thank fuck for that,” Henno said. “It means we can lie down and die soon. Because I for one am fucking knackered.”

Handon laughed weakly. “Isn’t that just like a Brit. Dying for Queen and country out in some dusty, backward, far-flung corner of the Empire.”

“Born to rule and sacrifice,” Henno said.

But then they both stopped talking. There was little or nothing more to be said. They were both feeling the same thing, and each knew the other was: that they were at peace now – with themselves, with each other, and with the universe. Henno because he knew the mission was finally going to succeed. And Handon because he could finally be sure he was sacrificing the right life, at the right time, for the right purpose.

His own, now, to get the others out.

And though neither said it, they both knew this: they were brothers again. Even if only in death.

Both started shooting again.

That last rush was coming.

The Bridge

Somalia – Northwest River Valley

But it turned out Henno wasn’t content simply to lie down and wait for the end, nor just wait for death to take him. No, he was going out to meet them both – kicking ass the whole way. Handon, who had served with Henno for over two years, and already respected him as the hardest man he knew… well, even he didn’t know he had it in him.

As Henno’s slide locked back on his last pistol mag, and it looked like Handon was about to pass out due to exhaustion and blood loss from a wound he hadn’t admitted and Henno hadn’t seen… and as murderous fire came in and chipped up everything around them, and grenades and rockets exploded in the trees close enough to warm them both even as their bodies began to chill…

Henno simply stood up and walked out of the forest, right up to the foot of the bridge – and then he strode out onto it, upright and tall, and within full view of virtually every one of the Spetsnaz shooters left. He was now impossible to miss.

But for some reason, he didn’t get shot. It could only be that, in the first few seconds, the Russians were too surprised to take a shot on a man just walking calmly out into the middle of a death storm. And in the next few seconds after that, they were too impressed and in awe to take the shot. This was clearly a legendary maneuver they were witnessing. One they all wished they had made themselves, and all now ardently hoped to pull off when their time came.

Striding out onto the bridge as the guns went silent, Henno unclipped his rifle and tossed it away into the river to his right, then did the same with his pistol, throwing it off to the left. He kept walking. Then he unsheathed his big-ass commando knife from its chest rig – then un-Velcroed the vest, pulled it free, and let it fall to the deck behind him. And still walking, reaching the narrow girder section of bridge, he raised his voice and shouted across.

“Hey, Misha – you puffed-up wanker! Why don’t you come out and have a go… if you think you’re hard enough?”

With that Henno stopped in the middle of the bridge.

And he waited.

* * *

But he didn’t have to wait long. Misha knocked two of his own men to the ground, one of them almost going into the drink as he pushed them out of his way to get to the bridge. He tossed his rifle vaguely to someone, then drew his Desert Eagle, dropped the mag, racked the slide, ejecting a single giant round, and paused long enough to thunk both pistol and mag down on the foot of the bridge.

He then drew his Melita-K commando knife, with its wicked serrating, razor edge, and curved and tapering point – the same one he had stuck in Lance Corporal Jenkins’s eyeball back in Saldanha. Finally, he shrugged out of his own vest, letting it fall.

And he powered out onto the bridge – accelerating.

Henno didn’t wait, but came straight for him, in that SAS
do not fuck with me
walk that others had disregarded to their cost.

They met in the middle and instantly went at it – knives, fists, knees, and foreheads pistoning, wheeling, and smashing, taking each other apart piece by piece. Both men were strong as rampaging bulls, and fast for men of their size. Misha had about sixty pounds and a good five inches on Henno. But Henno was the meaner of the two, which was saying something.

And the Spetsnaz commander had something like a sense of humor, a warrior’s joy in lethal combat, a lion’s playfulness in taking down prey. But the Brit was utterly serious, focused like a laser beam, and dialed in to this fight. Henno was, absolutely, under no circumstances, and in no conceivable way, fucking around. He was all business, every cell, until his last second on this earth.

Both men worked as professional gunfighters, but either could have held their own as professional knife-fighters, and both knew the drill. Henno held his blade in close to his body, left hand extended in a guard position, his body in a fighter’s stance, left leg forward, right leg back. Misha however stood square, both hands down at his thighs, elbows bent – perhaps because he could no longer straighten them. When Henno slipped forward and feinted with his knife, Misha simply ignored it, leaned forward, and blasted Henno with a vicious left hook to the side of his head.

This staggered him, but Henno spat blood, reset – and came in again. This time he led with a punch of his own – knuckle-striking Misha in the throat with his left hand, then twisting back at the waist, unleashing forward again, and smashing him in the ribs with his right hand, which was wrapped around the thick grip of his knife. Misha in turn hit him with a straight right, knuckles also wrapped around his knife pommel. It was like they were now so intent on beating each other to death they had both forgotten they were holding knives.

Until they remembered – and both went for killing stabs through the upper ribs, straight into the heart. They were like mirror images of each other, both twisting away from the slashes, even as they orchestrated their own. Both had the skin and hard muscle over their ribs laid open by the razor-sharp blades. But then Henno latched onto Misha’s knife hand with his left, and because he was off balance, managed to pull him forward and smash him in the forehead with the pommel of his knife.

This would have knocked most men cold – but Misha just put his head down, went with the pulling motion, and smashed into Henno’s blood-slick chest, his massive bulk knocking him backward. Henno went over and hit the bridge on his back. He knew enough to know if he stayed on the deck he was dead – plus wasn’t going to get a lot of time to get up. So he also went with the motion, kicking his legs over his head, and rolled back up to his feet.

His vision swam, and blood and sweat dripped into his eyes.

But he was still standing.

Moving his hands like a boxer, flipping his knife into an overhand grip, Henno waded back in. He had no intention of ceding any ground to this asshole. Declining to play defense, ignoring Misha’s height advantage, he raised his blade up, gripped it with both hands, and came down in a furious top-down strike at the Russian’s sternum. As he’d gambled he would have to, Misha used both hands to stop it.

This left Misha’s knife pointing at his own face – and Henno threw his whole weight behind it. But Misha didn’t care to play defense either. He simply dropped his own knife, wrenched both of Henno’s arms to the side, and hauled him right over the edge of the girder. Suddenly only open air and river lay below him.

But as Henno passed his center of gravity, with Misha the only thing to hold onto, the Russian caught and stopped him. He didn’t want Henno going over the side any more than the Brit did. He couldn’t kill him down there. Arresting his fall, he wrenched Henno the other way, slammed him down to the deck – then aimed a full-leg, organ-pulping kick at his midsection.

It landed – and Henno rolled ten feet, back onto a wider stretch of bridge. As he lay there and coughed up blood, Misha calmly bent over and retrieved his knife. By the time he straightened up again, Henno was back on his feet. And he even managed to straighten up, standing tall and indomitable again.

The two blood-streaming men eyed each other and reset.

Misha nodded. He liked guys who never went down.

But now Misha’s men on the bank behind him were shouting out, begging him to let them kill the Brit – who was giving their leader a tougher fight, and a more serious threat, than any of them had ever seen him face before. Hearing the shouts, Misha held up a finger to Henno, who nodded and paused, both of them taking the opportunity to grab a breath.

Misha then turned back to the bank and, sucking wind, dripping blood, and glowering like a fallen god, spoke to them in Russian. “I will personally gut any son of a Kazakh whore who stops this fight. Come out here between the two of us at your own personal fucking peril.”

Turning back, he and Henno nodded at each other.

And they got on with it.

* * *

That was the last thing Handon saw or heard from his position on the far bank. He had let Henno get up and go out there by himself for two reasons. One, he knew there was no way he could stop him. Henno had stopped obeying Handon’s orders long ago. There was absolutely no reason to think he was going to start again, in his last hour.

Second, he couldn’t get up.