Last Stand Read online

  ARISEN

  Hope Never Dies.

  First published 2019 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 of the first eight books of the bestselling ARISEN series, and solo author of Books Nine through Fourteen (the climax and conclusion of the series), as well as the stand-alone prequels ARISEN : Genesis, ARISEN : Nemesis, and ARISEN : Odyssey – which have repeatedly been Amazon #1 bestsellers in Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction, #1 in Dystopian Science Fiction, #1 in Military Science Fiction, #1 in War Fiction, and #1 in War & Military Action Fiction, as well as Amazon overall Top 100 bestsellers. The series as a whole has sold over a half-million copies. The audiobook editions, performed by R.C. Bray, have generated over $3 million in revenue. He is also author of the D-BOYS series of high-tech special-operations military adventure novels, which include D-Boys, Counter-Assault, and Close Quarters Battle (coming in 2019); as well as the existential cyberthrillers The Manuscript and Pandora’s Sisters, both published worldwide by Macmillan in hardback, paperback and all e-book formats (and in translation). He lives in London and at www.michaelstephenfuchs.com, and blogs at www.michaelfuchs.org/razorsedge. You can follow him on Facebook, Twitter (@michaelstephenf), or by e-mail.

  About the ARISEN Series

  The eighteen books in the bestselling, top-ranked, and fan-favorite ARISEN series have repeatedly been ranked #1 in five different Amazon category bestseller lists, as well as in the Top 100 across all of Amazon. Collectively, they have earned over 5,000 reviews averaging 4.7 stars out of 5.0 (Including a 4.9-star average for each of the last two books in the series, The Siege and ENDGAME.) Readers call ARISEN:

  “thoroughly engrossing, taking you on a wild ride through utter devastation” … “the best post-apocalyptic military fiction there is” … “Wall to wall adrenaline - edge of your seat unputdownable until the very last page” … “the most amazing and intense battle scenes you've ever experienced” … “rolls along like an out of control freight train” … “They grab you on the first page and kick your ass through the entire series” … “insane propulsive storytelling” … “You feel like the explosions are going off beside your head” … “you never know what the hell is coming at you next” … “Every time I think it cannot get any better, BAM!” … “Blows World War Z out of the water” … “The Game of Thrones of the Zombie Apocalypse” … “Like a Michael Bay movie on steroids” … “like trying to ride a bronco in a tornado” … “roars out of the gate at 200mph and just keeps going” … “If you haven't read these you need to reevaluate your life” … “dials the volume to the point of annihilating the sound system” … “A superb ending to an absolutely mesmerizing and phenomenal series. This was an experience I'll never forget.”

  ARISEN

  LAST STAND

  MICHAEL STEPHEN FUCHS

  For Tim.

  (Friends stick around.)

  PART ONE

  “Out of every one hundred men, ten shouldn't even be there, eighty are just targets, nine are the real fighters, and we are lucky to have them, for they make the battle. Ah, but the one, one is a warrior, and he will bring the others back.”

  - Heraclitus

  The first half-dozen enhanced-fragmentation grenades went into the open ground exactly between the weapons squad in the rear and the two rifle squads up front. I figured this was either incredibly good luck – nobody got splashed with shrapnel, despite having no time to cover up – or else it meant we were all completely screwed. Because we were facing an auto-grenade-launcher team capable of getting their weapon online and engaging, with that degree of precision, in exactly two seconds.

  Which was how long it took the op to go completely to shit.

  Then again, two seconds is a long time in a combat situation. So now the men of Two Bravo – 2nd platoon, B Company, 3rd Ranger Battalion – were hand-paddling at high speed up the old proverbial creek of feces. And the culprit was the usual one: fucked-up intel. Really, I should have known.

  Donkeys are almost always bad news.

  And I realized that to fix this, I was probably going to have to go down there into the killzone and hang my ass out in the steel wind. And for some reason – the mind does funny shit in combat – I remembered someone once saying that courage in war simply is love, nothing more or less, for the man on either side of you.

  At least somebody got something right.

  * * *

  Two minutes earlier, I’d been telling the men to cut the chatter and stay off comms. I didn’t mind the junior enlisted, E-3s and E-4s, making the new guy eat a little shit on his first rotation. But what I didn’t want was my Rangers getting complacent. The enemy sure wasn’t. They had continued to learn and adapt across almost two decades of the Global War on Terror. I was in a position to know.

  I’d been fighting them the whole time.

  On the day of 9/11, I was working as a pipe-fitter’s apprentice in New Jersey, from which location I could actually feel the Twin Towers come down. I walked out, went straight to the nearest Army recruiter, and enlisted on the spot – then did well enough at Basic and AIT that I was invited to RASP (the Ranger Assessment and Selection Program), followed by Ranger School. And I’ve been in the 75th Ranger Regiment ever since – probably the best-trained and most professional light infantry force in all of world history, with the possible exception of the Roman Legions in Gaul.

  Ultimately, I rose to the rank of Sergeant First Class, or E-7 – and platoon sergeant of Two Bravo.

  Tonight, I got my tired old platoon-sergeant ass up out of my fighting hole, and drifted like lethal fog across our ambush lines, weapon at low-ready, sinking down again when I reached the new guy in question, one Specialist Smith. He’d been shuffled into Two Bravo from RASP 1 basically just in time to catch our deployment flight out – if he ran down the tarmac screaming with his head on fire – and had been given the usual new-guy role of assistant gunner in the weapons squad. His job as AG was to hump a thousand rounds of belted fuck-shit-up, and try to stay alive long enough to take over if his gunner went down. But he was a good kid – he did his job and kept his problems to himself, and had spent the whole flight over practicing clearing and reloading drills with his Mk 48 Mod 2 machine gun, laid out right in the goddamned aisle.

  “Smith,” I breathed. “Get on the gun.”

  The two men in the fighting hole wordlessly switched places behind the weapon. If Smith felt any anxiety about firing his first rounds in anger, at targets who bled instead of tore, he didn’t betray it.

  “Two Bravo from Hotel X, how copy?”

  “Hotel X, this is Two Bravo Actual, solid copy, send it.”

  That was our JOC-side mission commander, exchanging pleasantries with Two Bravo’s actual ground commander, one Captain Darby – who was nearly as new as Smith, and sometimes seemed as young. Like most officer
s in Regiment, he’d come here after leading a platoon in a conventional infantry unit. After a couple of tours with us, he’d go back to one. But senior NCOs like me are the Illuminati – eternal and unchanging, running things from the shadows.

  “Be advised, Two Bravo: aerial ISR shows approx two-zero foot mobiles moving into your AO from the south. All are military-aged males, armed with AKs and RPGs. Range two-hundred, time ’til contact approx two mikes, how copy?”

  “Two Bravo copies all.”

  The Tier-1 guys from JSOC, Delta and DEVGRU – who we sometimes worked with, and who all the young Rangers idolized and wanted to grow up to be – usually gave themselves badass call-signs like “Homicide One” or “Broadsword Two Zero.” And in any normal battlespace, conflicted and crowded with multiple operational units, Two Bravo would have been given a mission-specific call-sign. But tonight we got to go out as ourselves – because we were just about the last American boots on the ground in the entire Syrian civil war.

  “Two Bravo, be additionally advised: enemy element is rolling with a donkey cart, over.”

  “Yeah, roger on the donkey. Interrogative: what’s on the cart?”

  I just shook my head. This kind of command douchebaggery didn’t bother me, just as I rarely worried about the larger political picture. We had a job to do here in theater, and it was a righteous one: protect Kurdish civilians and fighters from the large variety of people in the region who wanted to kill them – Syrian regulars, pro-Assad militias, Iranian Quds Force, Russian “advisers.” We now had the first combat veteran since Bush the Elder as commander in chief, and he had chosen to honor America’s goddamned commitments for once – in this case, to the world’s largest stateless people, and our steadfast allies, the Kurds.

  Of course, Rangers don’t do guard duty, and we couldn’t realistically fight the Russians or Iranians, so instead we were going out every night and fucking up ISIS remnants before they could get anywhere near a Kurd. This was an outstanding mission, and it got me out of bed with a bounce every morning. Like most 9/11 veterans, I signed up to make a difference. Life, especially the austere life of a Ranger, goes down better with some meaning and purpose.

  Now I watched as 36 green IR lasers flicked on and shot out from our prepared ambush positions – shifting, self-organizing, dividing the ground – then flicked off again. Night-vision gear had gotten so cheap and widespread we could no longer assume the enemy didn’t have it. And, much like tracers, aiming lasers work in both directions.

  “Two Bravo, the cart’s covered with a blanket or something, but shows no heat signature. We’re thinking supplies. Possibly hay. Over.”

  I shook my head again, but wasn’t too worried. Any halfway decently organized ambush, like the one we had – with security teams to the rear and sides, a killzone trapping the enemy force and covered with interlocking fields of fire, and escape routes mined with claymores – ought to result in a very short, sharp, one-sided firefight.

  “Yeah, solid copy on the hay. Going dark now. Stand by.”

  And that was the last calm thing anybody said for a while.

  * * *

  It takes a certain level of liquid nitrogen in the veins to stay upright and switched on in the middle of a balls-out grenade volley, which was probably why I was the only one doing it.

  I quickly worked out the first failure of intel: namely the stark absence of any hay on that cart, and the presence instead of two guys with a Russian AGS-40 auto-grenade launcher. Designed to murder the shit out of Chechen rebels dug into hardened urban positions, it boasted better range and accuracy than its predecessor – but, hilariously, also had an attached seat, which its operator was currently using to kick back in ergonomic comfort while raining down exploding death and hate on my Rangers’ heads.

  I went ahead and killed the AG, four rounds to center of mass, mainly because he exposed himself. Then I traversed to the gunner and continued taking rapid, aimed, single shots with my M5 battle rifle, chambered in the new 6.5mm Creedmoor round – which not only had better range than 5.56 and less recoil than 7.62, but was said to be “boringly accurate.” Right this second, though, its accuracy didn’t matter a sweet rat’s, because the gunner was completely covered behind a combination of the weapon itself, its side-mounted 40-round drum mag, and the side wall of the cart.

  While I had nothing like an open look at him, I also remembered, as he may have not, the critical lesson that concealment isn’t the same as cover. But when I poured the rest of my own 24-round mag into that flimsy-looking wooden cart wall, absolutely nothing happened. The cagey fuckers must have bolted steel plating or something on the inside of it.

  An up-armored fucking donkey cart. But nothing’s shocking anymore.

  As I ducked down and went into my reload, I thought how the presence of these guys on the cart strongly implied it hadn’t been a mere blanket covering them – but Russian multispectral camo, masking their heat signatures from the IR cameras in the drones circling overhead.

  Dialing up my situational awareness, I then worked out the second intel failure: a whole system of irrigation trenches to the rear of our so-called killzone. It was narrow and irregular enough that ISR had missed it, and I was going to hell for not having found it myself by conducting a patrol leader’s recon. (So much for mining the escape routes.) But we sure knew the trenches were there now, because the enemy fighters who’d survived our initial enfilade were using them to haul ass out of there, largely covered from our rifle fire – and even better covered by their grenadier.

  “You gotta die, grenade man!” I shouted into the exploding maelstrom around me. This guy was putting out blistering point-blank fire, basically suppressing our entire platoon, all of whom were huddled up at the bottom of their fighting holes, trying not to get filleted and flambéd. Plus probably trying to tunnel to a nice safe land war in East Asia. All of us but me. Correction – all but me and Specialist Smith. Hearing full-auto chattering underneath the grenade holocaust, I stole a glance back – and saw Smith was still on his MG, head down, going cyclic on the enemy’s asses as they legged it.

  Doing his job – like a boss.

  Finishing my reload and dropping the bolt home, I kept shooting, but also kept failing to nail the grenadier, in part because he was occluded, in part because his own fire was making the ground under me, and upon which I braced my rifle, rock like the Vans Warped Tour. On the other hand, if this son of a bitch somehow failed to kill me for another second or two…

  Yep, there it was – his big drum mag finally went empty. I expected him to abandon the position and leg it himself at that point. He’d already gone above and beyond to cover his buddies’ escape. But instead of fleeing… he just calmly went into his own reload, smoothly swapping out drum mags. And suddenly I understood what I was looking at here.

  A last stand.

  And kind of a fucking magnificent one. You almost had no choice but to admire it. This dude was absolutely resolved to stand right here, and die in place, to protect his brothers. For the better part of a second, as he exposed himself, I simply didn’t have the heart to slot the heroic bastard. My finger wouldn’t squeeze. But then I remembered if this Islamist dick-suck got his weapon back online, he was going to turn my own brothers into smokey pulled-pork barbecue.

  I took the shot.

  My first round caught him high. He spasmed and slapped at his destroyed clavicle, and as I reacquired to finish the job, it turned out this crazy-ass mission had one more surprise in store. Two shadowed and fast-moving guys darted back out of the trench system, leapt up on the cart, and tackled the grenadier, dragging him down and out of sight. In the spectral night-vision green and black, I couldn’t even work out what the hell was going on – pistoning limbs, arcing blood droplets.

  But that wasn’t even the strangest thing – which was this fun fact: our high-priced NVGs work just like the drone cameras, not only amplifying ambient light, but also overlaying a thermal image on top. And if mine were to be believed, t
hese two new guys – emitting exactly zero body heat – were also wearing multispectral camo, from toe to crown.

  Or else they were already dead.

  And as I squinted into this creepy chaos, imagining I could hear muted screaming… a hand slapped down on my shoulder from behind. I flipped on my back like an electric cat, slapped at my M17 in its drop-leg holster – then saw the man crouching behind me was in fact Captain Darby.

  “Hey,” he said. “You off comms?”

  I touched the PTT button clipped to my vest and followed the wire by touch toward the team radio on my back. Sure enough, it had been cleanly severed, no doubt by one of the hundreds of pieces of red-hot shrapnel that probably should have severed my carotid artery.

  “Get the men up,” Darby said. “We’re RTB.”

  I glanced back down into the kill-zone, and the riot of bodies lying in ugly, tangled piles there. Ordinarily, we’d sweep forward and exploit them for intel. But tonight I honestly felt zero desire to set foot down in any of that. And right now I needed accountability – the location and status of my men. I quickly learned that no one had been hit, the only casualty being my own radio. Sometimes combat is like that – a thousand incoming rounds, or a thousand-pound IED detonating beside the vehicle, and everyone’s miraculously left unscathed.

  That was the main thing, obviously. The tribe was intact, all my guys unhurt, and we would live to fight another day. The war on terror, and our entanglement in the Middle East, was pretty much the forever war at this point, and it would still be on when we got up in the morning.

  Half our targets had escaped, which was far from ideal – and the drop they’d gotten on us with that grenade gun also left me very uneasy. We’d missed a serious trick, and the whole thing could easily have gone another way. Between that, and whatever the hell had I’d witnessed at the very end, I found my mood had been left uncharacteristically dark.