Arisen : Genesis (6 page)

Zack squinted at his own view on the battle. “No. It’s a solid guess, but a guess. Hey, wait a minute – who the fuck are those guys?”

“The foot mobiles?” Bob asked. “To the west?”

“Yeah.”

“NFI.”

Dugan leaned in to Zack’s monitor. They could both now make out a number of figures to the extreme west, but moving forward into the area between the two forces. They looked to be unarmed, and were wading in from the side – wading into both positions. Zack zoomed the optics on the no-man’s land in the middle, trying to pin one of the figures. When he did, and managed to hold it for a second, Dugan said, “Guy looks like Joe Shit the Rag Man.”

“Copy that,” Zack said. “So, seriously – who the hell are they?”

“Shotgun X, we have reestablished commo with our ODA. Patching you through…”

“—ger that, Silo, standing by.”

This last was one of the SF guys on the ground. Zack slapped it on room speaker, then jumped in. “Break, break. Triple Nickel, this is Reamer Five-One, an MQ-9 on station over your position, standard armament and playtime of approx one hour, how copy?”

“Reamer, Rumpus – yeah, we can hear you up there. Welcome to the party. We’re taking heavy SAFIRE and RPGs from that structure, and could use some TGO on it. Let me talk you on.”

The four men in the TOC could in fact hear, on the open channel, a significant volume of small-arms fire, not a little shouting, and then one big-ass explosion – all in the time it took the Green Beret to say it.

“Roger, Rumpus, go ahead.”

“Okay, you see the treeline running northwest to southeast, bordered by the rock features to the north?”

“That’s a-ffirm. We are visual on the treeline.”

“Okay, that’s us. You see the big-ass rectangular compound one-seven-five meters to our northeast? With the big-ass Sangar sticking out of the south corner?”

“Roger, visual on compound and Sangar.”

“Right, that’s them. Kindly light them the fuck up. Attack vector southwest to northeast, your choice of ordnance. I have weapons release authority. I am also lasing the target and data-link messaging you a ten-digit target grid reference. In case you need that.”

They didn’t need it. It was pretty obvious what they were shooting at. “Roger, Rumpus, we are tipping in now.” Bob had been following all this, and already had his attack run lined up. “Rumpus, Shotgun, confirm no change friendly positions and clear hot.”

“Rumpus confirms. You are cleared hot, repeat, cleared hot.”

Bob proceeded to drop not one but two Hellfires right on the tower. As this is a missile designed to defeat
any known armor
, that’s twice as many Hellfires as you generally need to destroy anything.

“Munition away,” Zack added hastily, so the friendlies would know to go firm and get their heads down.

Two black shapes came in from the bottom left and right of the video window and zoomed in on the tower like nuclear-powered darts. The tower disappeared in a fireball that whited out the screen, then an expanding cloud of smoke that grayed it out. When the explosion settled there was nothing there. There was hardly any compound around it.

Zack started to get on the net to give Rumpus a BDA (“target obliterated” was what he had in mind), when he was interrupted on the CAS channel – presumably by someone else on the ground. And it was a female voice. Everyone in the TOC looked at everyone else. However, all of them knew that SF ODAs sometimes have female attachments, usually CSTs (cultural support teams).

“Break, break, Jim, it’s me…”

“Copy that, switch to squad net, buddy. Reamer, this is my guy I sent out to check activity on our flank, wait out.”

But before he could finish, or Zack could respond, or anyone could switch channels, this one overloaded with a blood-curdling shriek. Not a shout, but a scream – the kind of noise an animal makes only when reason and hope have abandoned him. Or her.

Zack, lips parted, turned and looked at the others. In a lifetime of operational work, he’d never heard anything like it. From the expressions of the others, neither had they. Everyone in the TOC was now looking at Zack – including the guy flying the aircraft – six white eyes peeled and shining in the low light.

Zack shuddered reflexively, seized with a sudden chill.

What the hell was that?

PART TWO

“Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it.”
– Genesis, 1.28

AMF

“Their team, their rules,” Zack said around mouthfuls of steel-cut oats. “Fair play, I guess.”

Maximum Bob just grunted in response, conveying his sum total view of that.

All four members of the team were now sitting in what passed for a mess in the safehouse – a tiny kitchen, with a tinier, round, rough-hewn table and four chairs arranged in the center. The lights weren’t great in that part of the building. But at least the team kept it tidy. Shipboard habits, maybe.

They were all getting some chow down. They had the time now – because they had been stood down. Lemonnier suddenly, and seemingly with uncanny timing, managed to get their air assets online. Partly to deconflict the airspace, and partly because the Reaper’s remaining linger time was running low, they were ordered out of the fight. And then they had to hand their shiny toy back to the Air Force.

Actually, to be specific, they had to click on the
Land
button, and then the Reaper flew itself back to Lemonnier, with nobody controlling it.
Our age of wonders
, Zack thought.

Bob worked to swallow a huge mouthful of chicken breast and steamed vegetables. He was one of those no-carb freaks, a paleo-dieter, which explained his negligible body fat. But it was unclear to Zack how he kept up his huge body mass on that. Finally he said, “Anybody else think that was some spooky shit?”

Zack thought he wasn’t wrong. Shortly after that inexplicable violation of radio protocol – the woman’s scream – they lost contact with Rumpus 555 entirely. The last they saw of them and their SNA charges, the whole formation was retreating back into the treeline, where the aerial video couldn’t follow.

“Thanks for your help,” was the last transmission Zack got from the SF TOC. He also got the vague impression they were launching a heliborne QRF.

“What I’d like to understand,” Baxter said, showing keen understanding of the job of the analyst (understanding things), “is who those foot mobiles were. Could they have been, like, refugees? Fleeing the epidemic?”

That hadn’t actually occurred to Zack. He did a little quick mental geo-mapping, and concluded that their location and direction of travel would put their origin roughly on a vector with the tussle at that outlying clinic. This kind of dot-connecting was why Zack got paid the big bucks.

“And by spooky shit,” Bob said, “I also mean the fact that we got stood down right as whatever was going down went down. Like maybe somebody thought it was better if we didn’t know about it. Containment sort of thing.”

“Five points for creativity,” Dugan said, pushing his half-full plate away from him. He was on full blast all the time, and bird-like in both energy level and food consumption. “But minus 200 for paranoia. You’ve worked for the government too long to imagine they have the resources or competence to cover shit up. Never attribute to conspiracy that which can adequately be explained by clusterfuckery. Which is pretty much everything.”

Baxter shifted in his seat, adjusted his glasses in the middling light. “What did you guys find out there, anyway?”

Zack arched his eyebrows back at him.

“At the hospital.”

“Oh, right.” In all the madness after their return, Zack had completely forgotten to brief the others on it. Never mind write it up. He pushed his chair back and cleared his throat.

“There was a quarantine tent, outside the building, local medical personnel running it.” He paused, not sure how much to disturb the two who hadn’t been there.
Fuck it
, he thought. “It was a horror show. Blood sprays on the inside of the plastic. Writhing guys strapped down on cots and gurneys. Doctors and nurses in biohazard outfits. Or what passes for them around here – gowns, gloves, and face masks. Goggles for a few.”

“They’re brave sons of bitches,” Dugan added. His eyes looked like they were seeing something elsewhere.

Bob squared up his bulk and a thought visibly crossed his face. “How close did you get?”

“Don’t worry,” Zack said. “Basically we just took a couple of peeks through the flap as guys came and went.”

“And we had gloves and masks,” Dugan said. “Thinking-ahead points for Zack.”

On a certain level, Zack felt, everything was a game to the SEALs. Or, at least, everything was competitive. That was the thing about real high-performers – they were virtually never not performing. Also, Zack knew they were technically
ex-
SEALs, but it seemed more distinction than difference, so he continued to think of them that way. And he was pretty sure they still thought of themselves that way.

“I’ll file it after this,” Zack said.

“Still nursing your pet bioweapons theories?” Dugan asked. Zack half-remembered he had let some of his ideas about this slip to Dugan along the way.

“And you never did tell me what went down here, the virus thing, before I rotated in,” Baxter said.

“Yeah,” said Bob.

Okay
, Zack thought.
Maybe I let it slip to everybody
. He pushed his own bowl away and wiped his mouth.
Can’t somebody do something about the slasher-movie lighting in here?
he thought. Actually, as he knew, that wasn’t fair. The SEALs were pretty kick-ass handymen. Guys like them tended to be.

He started telling the tale. “A few deployments back. We had some grade-A nightmare-fuel intel. It was sketchy and incomplete, but double-corroborated from independent sources. Anybody remember Sheikh Atom?”

Baxter all but raised his hand. “Sheikh Mohamed Said Atom – arms smuggler, warlord, and al-Shabaab commander. Deceased.”

“He is now. Prior to that, we learned he had hooked up with a former Soviet bioscientist, a project leader at their bioweapons research facility at Stepnogorsk. In Kazakhstan.” Zack paused to search his memory. “Guy was a Kazkah. Hungry. No loyalties. Didn’t give a shit, especially after the Cold War. Really good at making things like antibiotic-resistant strains of killer diseases. Domain expert in smallpox and plague. Might have been involved in bioengineering what they call chimera viruses – hybrids that would give you Ebola and smallpox in a single bug.”

“Sounds like a nice man,” Bob said. “Was Atom shopping?”

“We thought so. Didn’t know exactly what for. But we knew it couldn’t be good. And we needed to find out for sure – so we could secure and destroy any stocks of pathogens, as well as whack Atom, who was becoming a real pain in everybody’s ass. So JSOC sent us two Delta shooters, one of whom had deep local knowledge. Perfect Somali, perfect English, good Urdu, a little Pashto. Good Arabic. We were able to get this person inserted, undercover, posing as a Pakistani bioweaponeer, to help them weaponize whatever stocks they had.”

“Did it work?” Dugan said.

“Yeah. She secured the virus stocks. And then she killed Atom.”

“Shit – she?” Both Bob and Dugan sat up straighter.

Zack ignored this. “She was also able to tell us exactly what they thought they had, which we also later verified in the lab.” He paused, pinned the eyes around the table in turn.

Dugan said, “Enough with the spooky pauses. Say it.”

“It was a chimera virus: a combination of myelin toxin and smallpox.”

Baxter looked more wide-eyed than usual. “Myelin toxin?”

Zack stood up. “That freshman elective lecture will be delivered at a subsequent class. Right now I have to file the hospital report. And then I think I need to talk to my CI.”

“Abo?”

“Yeah. I’m hoping he’ll have a view from the other end of that ambush out in the boonies just now, if it was in fact a-S guys jumping our ODA. Also, maybe how it played out after we cleared out.”

“Good idea,” Dugan said. “That reminds me I need to do a video call with Chloe…”

“Oh, so that’s your mother’s name,” Bob quipped.

“Not quite. She’s a fashion executive in Paris.”

“And former model, no doubt,” Zack said as he cleared away his plate. Dugan just grinned, winningly. Before turning to leave, Zack signed off with, “Alpha Mike Foxtrot.”

“AMF?” Baxter asked.

“Adios… my friends.” And with that he was gone.

He could hear the SEALs guffawing behind him. It also sounded like maybe one of them slapped Baxter on the head or chest.

It was all part of the fun.

Chimera

It only took Zack thirty minutes to write up the brief on the hospital quarantine, working from notes he’d made at scene. He also included some photos he shot on his phone. He attached flags to the report that he hoped would ensure it got looked at promptly, and distributed widely. Really, they should be calling CDC on the red phone.

And so that just left his phone call. Zack was self-admittedly super-paranoid about calling Abo, his informer in al-Shabaab. He always did it in the bedroom he shared with Baxter – without Baxter in it. Barring emergency, there were only two times a day when he was allowed to call or text. That’s if Abo didn't text first to tell him not to.

The time was now.

Zack pulled out the new phone he’d drawn from stores, pressed the door shut, and sat on his rack. He told the phone to use the satnet. GSM worked most of the time around there, but you didn’t want to depend on it.

Abo didn’t pick up. Zack only let it ring twice. You never knew if he’d have a gun in his mouth and a jihadi staring at the phone’s screen, reading, “
Baba wito…
” Zack’s Swahili was fine, but he didn’t fancy his chances impersonating Abo’s father. Who, incidentally, was dead.

Both of Abo’s parents were – of AIDS. Zack was amazed Abo wasn’t dead as well, of any of a dozen causes.