ARISEN, Book Twelve - Carnage (40 page)

* * *

All the air left Juice’s lungs as he got brutally back-punched by the cabin floor. Worse, he had the full weight of a rampaging Russian warlord on his chest. For a second, Juice and Misha were eye to eye. And if Juice had the slightest doubt he was back, he could easily make out the МиШа tattoo on his neck, right where he’d first seen it. But now there was also an angry and unhealed wound, right down his cheek and across much of his neck.

And Juice had a bad feeling he’d given that to him.

“Hello, operator,” Misha growled. “Remember me?”

Before Juice or anyone else on board could react, Misha was back on his feet, also startlingly fast for a huge man, and hauling Juice up with him. In the half-second he had, trying to get his breath back, Juice could see two more Spetsnaz guys – and by no means the least badassed he’d ever seen – pulling themselves in the same hatch Misha had just come through.

It was now a full-blown invasion of their plane.

“Take the cockpit,” Misha said to the others. “I’ll be there in a minute.”

But then Juice felt himself picked up by his vest and hurled into the opposite bulkhead, the air slammed out of his lungs again, his body stunned…

And the entire aircraft cabin actually rocking.

* * *

“Hell, yeah!” Pete shouted, as he finally snipped the fat hydraulic line, with authority. “Got it, bitches!” He then looked up and smiled at Ali – as the whole plane rocked underneath them, dipping the right wing, and causing Pete to slide across the rain-splashed surface, his wet pant cuff tearing free from Ali’s hand.

He tumbled off the front of the wing to the tarmac below, then disappeared from sight.

With the prop brake disengaged, the engine screamed and the four-bladed propeller spun up, way too close to Ali’s boots, flinging rain at her with violence and verve. And she quickly realized it wasn’t the only one. Looking up, she could see the Black Shark helo diving at her and doing much the same. At about fifty yards out, it banked and went broadside, and Ali could see the rifle barrel inside tracking her out the open side window.

Vasily – back again. Truly the bane of her life.

She rolled on her back, thumbed her fire selector, and started shooting. Her goal was to do on her own what her whole team together had managed last time – namely put enough rounds into that window, bouncing off the armor glass and zinging around the cockpit, to convince them to close it again. No, scratch that – her goal was to bounce those rounds into pilot and sniper, killing or incapacitating one or both. And she knew she had better shoot fast, and perfectly.

There’d be time to mourn Pete, and his heroism, later.

Maybe.

Shovel to a Knife Fight

Dash 8 – Main Cabin

Noise’s first impulse had been to cut away Jake’s body armor so he could assess the worst wounds and get pressure on them. But now he hesitated. It looked more than a little like Jake’s body armor was the only thing holding him together. So instead, he got Kate to apply direct pressure, while he got a plasma drip in his arm.

But then, as he heard the right-side engine start up, and felt the rocking motion of the plane settle, he looked up to see a fight forming up in the rear of the cabin. And he knew his role of saint-healer was about to change again – back to
Sant Sipahi
.

Saint soldier.

* * *

Fick turned and squared up to the rear of the plane, where he could see a Russian the size of a horse tossing Juice around the cabin like a chew-toy. But before he could put his head down and charge, he found himself cut off – by two more Russian dudes climbing in the rear hatch, both turning his way, and both looking profoundly evil.

A rifle barrel appeared by Fick’s left ear, and he batted it away. Looking over, he saw it wasn’t al-Sif, who had been beside him a minute ago – but Wesley, who had rushed toward the front from his briefly occupied seat.

“You depressurize this cabin,” Fick said, “and we’ll be flying on the deck all the way to London. And that’s if we’re lucky and you only pierce the skin. This plane is barely flyable as it is.”

Wesley nodded, wide-eyed.

But then a shot sounded from behind them anyway.

That
was al-Sif.

* * *

Juice got smashed in the back by the deck again, and then Misha landed on him again, his tree-trunk legs pinning Juice’s arms, his fingers wrapping around his throat.

Leaning down, only inches away, Misha whispered: “And now, vagina-face, you will become fender meat, dying slowly and in painality. As did my men, the
Spetsnaza
warriors you hit with their own IEDs in that warehouse.”

Juice croaked, “Hey, man – it’s not my fault if you don’t bother to encrypt your radio triggers.” He managed to yank an arm free, balled up his fist, and swung it with all his power into the side of Misha’s head. This had no visible effect.

But then Misha’s eyes darted left and he pushed himself up off Juice in a flash. An incoming round actually creased Juice’s beard. Juice had seen others try to take headshots on Misha before and fail.

The Russian’s reflexes were amazing.

* * *

After perforating Juice’s beard, al-Sif’s round ricocheted around the cabin before coming to rest in a fire extinguisher clipped to a bulkhead in back. Pressurized white powder sprayed out, giving everything nearby – which included the DNA sequencer, and Patient Zero – a Christmas-y dusting.

Fick looked back at al-Sif and grimaced. “And if somebody hits the goddamned electronics or hydraulics underneath the deck or in the bulkheads, never mind a fuel or oil line, then we’re all fucking dead in the water. Plus dead.” This aircraft had few redundancies and no spare parts – and as far as Fick was aware, there was no fallback air-extraction plan.

Al-Sif took the hint and retreated back to the seats.

Drawing his K-Bar knife, Fick faced forward while eying Wesley, to his side. “So – you here to film a recruiting commercial? Or actually use that thing?”

Wesley swallowed and drew his Marine sword.

The cabin was narrow enough that two men could block it. Right now, those two men were Fick and Wesley. And it was two men coming straight at them. The one on Wesley’s side looked a lot older, and wore a blank but lethal expression. He reached over his shoulder and produced a spade, but with a wickedly honed edge on it. The other, who looked like he might plausibly be only half Fick’s age, drew two knives in a blur, twirled them across the tops of hands and down again, then gave Fick a leering smile that said:

I’m really going to enjoy this
.

Fick spat off to the side.
Oh, no you’re not
.

But to Wesley, he said: “Whatever happens, we cannot let these fuckheads get past us to the cockpit. You understand?”

Wesley nodded.

Fick hoped he did. Because if Spetsnaz took the cockpit, they took the plane – and they stopped it.

And then they were all done.

* * *

“Goddammit,” Nina said over ICS, turning the stick and punching the throttle, which rolled the helo on its side and veered them away – with incoming rifle rounds still practically ricocheting around the cockpit.

“
What?
”
Vasily said, pulling the window closed.

“You can play with your mouse later. Right now, we’ve got a job to do.” Nina meant they had to stop this plane before it could take off. She put their nose down and blasted toward the end of the runway – where the two aircraft, and everyone aboard both, would have another rendezvous soon enough.

Vasily could have his sniper duel then.

Nina was also wondering what the hell it was about this one target of his, and if Vasily was becoming obsessed – or unhinged. “Why do you keep missing that girl?”

She could hear the defensiveness in his voice when he answered. “The enemy always gets a vote.”

Still… Nina had never seen him miss before.

* * *

A body crashed into the front of the DNA sequencer, knocking the man hiding behind it to the deck. In his left hand, Dr. Park still held a syringe with a brand new first-stage virus sample, taken straight from Patient Zero. In his right, he had the crowbar he’d grabbed in the hangar.

Just on the other side of the sequencer, he could hear someone growling in Slavic-accented English, and at roughly the frequency of an earthquake. Stealing a peek around the side, he saw Juice down on the deck with a gigantic Russian on his chest.

He looked from the crowbar to the syringe, and back again.

His eye went up to the fire extinguisher clipped to the bulkhead above him. It had finally stopped dusting white powder over him, Patient Zero, the sequencer, and all his work. And all of which were his responsibility – to protect.

He tried to figure out if that responsibility entailed watching Juice die right in front of him.

* * *

Wesley still had little idea how to use a sword. Only now he wasn’t using it to shish-kebab the heads of brain-dead dead guys – but to actually try to spear a living one, an elite operator with superb strength, speed, and combat skills.

Gripping the sword with both hands to control it, Wes sized up the man coming for him. Warchild was a truly grizzled badass – salt-and-pepper crewcut, dozens of deep lines around the eyes and forehead, evil ice-blue eyes that had seen every manner of atrocity. And as he stalked up to Wesley, swinging his shovel, it became clear his plans did not involve stopping.

Wesley tried a quick jab at the man’s midsection, but Warchild knocked it away and kept coming, already inside the range of both their weapons – and delivered a powerful left jab into Wesley’s nose, knocking him half-senseless.

Wesley reeled, backing up and trying to keep his feet.

* * *

To Wesley’s immediate right, Badger – the leering young Spetsnaz knife guy – came at Fick, dual knives akimbo and dancing in the air. Fick just stood tall and wide, his expression somewhere between bored and pissed off, and waited for him.

Finally, the two flashing knives came in at him from two directions, and Fick was forced to react, parrying one strike and then the other with his bigger and heavier K-Bar, retreating one step and then another, giving himself space to react.

After the initial flurry, Badger stepped back and reset. He smiled at Fick. And he came in for him again, knives flashing.

Fick spat, and met him head on.

* * *

Up on the flight deck, Hailey was blissfully unaware of the mayhem back in the cabin. No one had to tell her the right-side engine had come back online – the effect was instantaneous. The plane stopped pulling to the right like a lunging pit bull, and they started picking up speed.

Now she squinted down the runway, trying to judge if they had enough left to get off the ground. She had no idea what the minimum take-off distance was for this aircraft. She did know, however, that this runway had 500 feet of concrete overrun at its end – and, after that, nothing but dirt, a little beach, and then the Gulf of Aden. There was the perimeter fence, but that was nothing to a plane of this size. There were no trees, buildings, or other obstructions she had to get over. If she could get them one inch in the air before running out of ground, they’d be okay.

She decided she had to give it a shot.

Something in the distance flew into her visual frame, spun around, and then settled down twenty feet off the deck.

Right over the end of the fucking runway.

It was a helicopter – and it was now occupying the exact airspace she would need to go through to take off.

Hailey froze, wide eyes staring ahead.

“Oh, fuck it,” she said out loud. She pushed the throttle into the console. In games of chicken, in her experience…

The bigger player usually won.

* * *

Battling to focus through tears, Wesley batted away Warchild’s strikes with his sword – once on the right, the impact jarring through his arms and making them buzz, then again on the left. But when he tried to block again on the right, the force of it knocked the sword out of his hands entirely.

His eyes darted down, but Warchild stepped forward and sent the sword skittering down the deck behind him with his boot. He then wound up a two-handed strike with the sharp edge of the spade, which seemed likely to take Wesley’s head off.

With inspiration born out of desperation, he rushed forward inside the strike, put his head down and to the side, wrapped his arms around the Russian’s legs, and executed the most basic rugby tackle – front-on with a roll to the side. The Russian went down on his back, Wesley rolling on top of him and then jumping to his feet and backing up.

But the Russian also bounced to his feet.

And Wesley’s sword was still on the wrong side of him.

* * *

Still leering, blades flashing, Badger smiled at Fick’s K-Bar. “You’ve only got one knife, old man – and it’s almost as old as you are.”

Okay
, Fick thought.
I’m officially sick of this horseshit.

And he did what he’d been dying to do all along: he put his own head down and charged, smashing into Badger before the Russian could orchestrate a killing strike – but not fast enough to avoid getting cut. Fick absorbed the slashes on his upper arms as they crashed to the deck. Knives or no knives, now it was a ground grapple.

And Fick liked his odds there.

He’d take age and upper-body strength over youth, speed, and a smart-ass attitude any day.

* * *

“Wesley, mate!”

Figuring he was going to regret this, Wesley looked over his shoulder just in time to see Noise tossing something at him. Catching it through some combination of necessity and divine intervention, Wes found himself holding a cricket bat. Where it came from, he hadn’t the vaguest idea. But he did know how to use one – not so much from cricket, which had never been his sport, but from his days as a bouncer in dodgy clubs in the Midlands.

When he turned around, he found Warchild swinging for his head again, and gave the spade a two-handed slam with the bat. And this time it was the Russian who absorbed all the force, staggering and spinning to his right.