Arisen : Genesis

In the dark heart of the Horn of Africa, our shadow wars rage.
But beneath the violence and terror, a bioengineered serial killer lurks.
Come back with ARISEN and live through the beginning of the end of the world…

First published 2012 by Complete & Total Asskicking Books
London, UK

Copyright © Michael Stephen Fuchs

The right of Michael Stephen Fuchs to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any other means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the author. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

About the Author

Michael Stephen Fuchs
is co-author, with Glynn James, of the bestselling
ARISEN
series of spec-ops zombie-apocalypse dark action thrillers. He is also the author of the
D-BOYS
series of high-concept, high-tech special-operations military adventure novels, which include
D-BOYS
,
COUNTER-ASSAULT
, and CLOSE QUARTERS BATTLE (coming in 2013); as well as the acclaimed existential cyberthrillers
THE MANUSCRIPT
and
PANDORA’S SISTERS
, both published worldwide by Macmillan in hardback, paperback and all e-book formats. He is represented by Robert Gottlieb, Chairman of Trident Media Group in New York. He lives in London and at
www.michaelstephenfuchs.com
, and blogs at
www.michaelfuchs.org/razorsedge
.

ARISEN : GENESIS

Michael Stephen Fuchs

PART ONE

“What is this that thou hast done?”
– Genesis, 3.13

Command & Control

The Horn of Africa.

That ungainly protuberance jutting out of the eastern edge of the continent of darkness, like a knee to the groin of modernity. Somalia, Ethiopia, Djibouti, and Eritrea, all places of various madness and horror, and surrounded on all sides by countries that can’t even be called sane by comparison: Sudan, Yemen, Uganda, Saudi Arabia.

The Horn of Africa suppurates, like a wound, like an open sore.

A man with a totally unreadable expression sat at his station, in his little Tactical Operations Center, tucked up inside his safehouse. Safe? Maybe. But also surrounded on all sides by the Horn, for many leagues in every direction. What did this man know about this place and its pathologies? Everything. Because this was his station, this was his place of work. This was also where he came from – though he’d stop far short of calling it home. And this was the place some dark part of him felt certain he would never live long enough to escape.

This was surely the place where he would die.

Across the years, at intervals, the Horn of Africa, that sucking chest wound on the corpus of the world, had occasionally looked like it might scab over, finally clot, perhaps even grow some healthy living flesh: decent society, consensual government, the rule of law, all those blandishments of western civilization. The man in the safehouse also knew something about all of that. Because he had lived both inside and outside of the west.

And all things being equal, he much preferred inside.

The man tried to keep these thoughts out of his mind, and especially off his face, as he sat at his station and serenely monitored a half-dozen displays mounted in a jagged hemisphere around him. These screens displayed team manifests, local systems status, real-time mission data – and, in particular, and most critically, live drone video of all the ops that he supported around the region. All this mischief the men of the west make, trying to expand the fragile circle of civilization…

But the spirit of the western world never did find a body to inhabit here. Because that scab, it always got picked off again, seemingly obsessively – by the dirty fingernails of civil war, new rounds of atrocity and retaliation, cross-border raids and brushfire conflict, power grabs by new and ever more depraved warlords. Weirder warlords, worse warlords yet, commanding armies of child war criminals, raping on an industrial scale, hacking off hands and noses.

And behind these atrocity artists, waiting in the wings of this theater of maximal horror, there were those ever-attendant walk-on players: famine, and drought, and nightmare epidemics. The warlords didn’t make these things. But they damn sure made them possible, and made them a hell of a lot more lethal.

So why
was
this man, the one with the inscrutable expression and the God-like views from up above it all, why was he here in the first place? Because this was where the a-Q franchises were now. And al-Qaeda had America’s attention. Charles Taylor, Idi Amin, Mugabe, all those legacy assholes could rape and murder and impoverish to their black hearts’ content, and they’d disturb only page A-42 of
The Washington Post
.

Because they only murdered African people.

But put together a few remnants of a-Q, that extended dysfunctional Islamist family who got lucky in New York once, on that beautiful September morning, and watch out. Because here come elite American SOF units, and combined joint task forces, and newly paved runways heaving with Hellfire-armed UAVs. And also the analysts, and operatives, and shooters, in battalion strength, sent forth from a certain three-letter U.S. government agency.

This agency was often referred to in military and paramilitary circles as
OGA
– for “other government agency” – especially when its involvement in an operation or area was an open secret. Or there was that classic term from old pulp novels,
the Company
… or
Langley
, a synecdoche less well-known but inspiring greater dread than
the White House
… or, occasionally, tongue half in cheek,
Christians In Action
. Or just
the Agency
.

This man with the stony poker face, who sat in the secure and high-tech safehouse, was a long-time employee of the Agency. Specifically, he was an analyst, and a very senior one. He had been posted here, yet again, to the dead middle of the Horn of Africa, for the purpose of helping to hunt down a-Q franchises – mainly al-Shabaab in Somalia and AQAP, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, in Yemen. Even years after taking a 5.56 round to the dome, bin Laden (or “UBL” as he was called by those in the game) still went from strength to strength.

The really crap ideas never seemed to die.

And that’s why people like this inscrutable analyst still languished in the Horn of Africa. And why people like him would perhaps never leave. Not until he was rolled onto a C-130 in a flag-draped tube of steel.

* * *

“Zack. I think I’ve got something on FLIR.”

Zack was the name the analyst went by. He rolled his chair over to the other man’s station, still perfectly erect, face still devoid of emotion. He paused while peering into one of the other man’s screens. The other man was much younger than him.

“It’s nothing,” Zack said finally. “It’s dust. FLIR is for peering
through
dust. You have to look past the dust.” He rolled himself back to his station.

In fairness
, he thought, as he settled back in,
Hargeisa is virtually all dust
. Particularly this far out of the rainy season. On the upside, November was also halfway between the ass-kickingly hot season and the freeze-your-nuts-to-frozen-peas season. In the Horn, it was always something. There, in northwest Somalia, which was also known as semi-autonomous Somaliland, it was extremes of climate.

Zack was alone with the other man in the TOC today. They did have two other attachments at this station, shooters, both former Team Six SEALs, and both deadly as Marburg. They went by the names “Dugan” and “Maximum Bob.” But Dugan and Maximum Bob were currently out on the ground, supporting some JSOC tactical guys in an op that was going down in their backyard. Their backyard consisted of the northerly suburbs of Hargeisa – which was known as “Somalia’s second city.”

This always made Zack laugh.
Second to Mogadishu?

Cynical and unhelpful thoughts like these had been running through Zack’s mind a lot lately. But they still had to be kept far from his face. Zack enjoyed a solid reputation for unflappability in the intel and spec-ops communities. And this was something you really wanted to have. You didn’t want to lose your shit out there. And if you looked like you were prone to losing your shit, you would lose the one thing keeping you alive: the willingness of the men on either side to risk their necks for you.

Zack eyed the man to the side of him right now, the much younger one. This man, who was called Baxter, had recently been posted there as junior analyst. Zack believed Baxter to be not more than six weeks out of training at the Farm – otherwise known as Camp Peary in northern Virginia. How Baxter drew this posting was unclear to Zack. But he imagined it involved
really
pissing off one or more of his instructors.

“Check the Threat Matrix Board for me,” Zack said. He didn’t really need the info. He just wanted to see if the kid knew where to find it.

The mini Tactical Operations Center in which the two men sat looked like a very cramped version of NASA Mission Control – piled floor to ceiling with HD plasma displays, stacks of ruggedized laptops with hardware-encrypted drives, and multiple glowing radios, many with satcom capability, also encrypted to hell and back. Incongruously, all of this sat in a building that looked like it was falling down in real time. But the structure, too, had been reinforced. This was down to hard experience, on the part of Agency guys who came before them.

“Nothing new from start of shift,” Baxter reported.

Zack nodded his approval, eyes still on his screens. The duty he was pulling today was called “C2” – though Zack would be more precise and call it “C5I,” for “Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Combat systems, and Intelligence.” While virtually anything could come up on a given shift, today this mostly involved monitoring radio traffic on a half-dozen channels, distributing real-time intel from Langley – and, basically, helping to keep the lid on an operation that would scald a lot of people if it boiled over.