Ragnarok

THREE

Mount Kadam, Uganda

3 November, 0600 Hrs

Shin dae-jung, callsign: Knight, lay perfectly still in the long, yellowed grass, with the black combat boot-clad foot of a soldier standing on his hand.

He was invisible in the long grass, with his ghillie suit covered in more of it, but if the soldier were to glance down, Knight might still be spotted. His trigger hand throbbed from the weight of the soldier’s foot, but he didn’t dare to flex it even slightly. Knight’s left hand was clenched firmly on the handle of his KA-BAR knife, still sheathed on his chest. If the soldier made him, or worse-tripped over the camouflaged experimental EXACTO sniper rifle on the ground in front of him-Knight would launch upward and thrust the blade of the Marine Corps knife deep into the Ugandan soldier’s chest. But right now, Knight’s cover was more important, so he remained still, barely breathing, in tiny increments.

If it hadn’t been for the damn shooting, I would have heard this bastard before he was on me. The group of soldiers he had been watching fired their weapons in the dawn sky like idiots after a rousing speech from their leader.

Knight had been deployed to Uganda to perform surveillance on a small offshoot guerilla faction. Led by Romeo Kigongo, the United Faithful Army was a militant and unruly branch of the Lord’s Resistance Army. The LRA had recently come to the attention of the world for the atrocities they perpetrated on the weak and poor of rural Uganda, as well as for their incursions into neighboring African states using child soldiers as cannon fodder. The Ugandan military had been hopeless in tracking down the LRA, but eventually the world media began focusing on the group and its leader, Joseph Kony. When the world finally started clamoring for Kony’s head in 2012 (the United States and other nations had labeled him as a terrorist of special interest years earlier), many of Kony’s lieutenants-Romeo Kigongo included-simply formed their own splinter groups and returned to the life of pri-vacy their smaller fiefdoms had previously provided them. Kigongo’s group, the UFA, would probably have gone unnoticed for years if they hadn’t made an incursion into Tanzania to steal eight hundred million dollars worth of uncut diamonds. Now funded properly, they were taking the next step in the Interna-tional Bad Boy game. They were seeking a portable nuclear device.

Knight and a teammate had been sent to the grassy plateau near Mount Kadam to watch the early morning deal go down, mark the players and then, if possible, kill the UFA members with knowledge of the deal and deactivate the device. Knight and his teammate would then be extracted with the nuclear material.

The only problem was the timing. As a part of the former Delta group known as Chess Team, which was now part of a larger black ops organization known as Endgame, Knight was privy to all kinds of intelligence, but in this case, his headquarters-based handler, callsign: Deep Blue, named after the chess-playing supercomputer, had only been able to provide him with a location and a general timeframe.

No exact date.

No exact time.

Knight had been lying in the grass for three days now.

It’s a wonder he can’t smell me.

The soldier hadn’t moved from Knight’s hand in twenty minutes. Deep Blue had been tracking the operation through an NSA satellite and communicating with Knight through a tactical earplug, but Deep Blue hadn’t said anything in hours and Knight guessed that was just plain bad luck. If Deep Blue had been watching, he would have warned Knight of the soldier’s arrival long before Knight’s digits got mashed into the soil. All he could do now was wait. If the solider moved on, fine. But if he stayed put much longer, Knight would have to break cover and risk the noise of killing the man-his hand simply couldn’t take too much more.

“Please tell me that tango isn’t standing near you.” Knight’s partner, Erik Sommers, callsign: Bishop, spoke so softly and calmly in Knight’s earphone that the man could have been resting in an easy chair. Bishop was somewhere off to Knight’s left across the huge field. Knight didn’t know exactly where Bishop was, but he knew that the man probably would have had a great view of the guerillas down the slope of the field. He wouldn’t have been keeping an eye on Knight’s position for the most part. Deep Blue was supposed to do that.

Unable to respond verbally, Knight slipped his tongue out of his mouth and touched the sensitive lip-microphone he wore. The resulting sound would be an audible click in Bishop’s earpiece. A yes.

“Is he on your hide?”

Another flick of the tongue. Yes.

Bishop let Knight hear his chuckle. “Figures. Deep Blue, you copy? Could use some eyes in the sky right now.” Bishop’s voice still stayed soft and level, as if he held no real interest in the fact that his teammate was close to being compromised. It almost sounded like the man was about to fall asleep.

Deep Blue did not respond, which was unusual, but far less strange than Deep Blue not warning Knight about incoming enemy forces.

“Knight, you want me to intervene?” Bishop inquired, almost Zen-like in his serenity.

Knight considered for just a moment. His hand was sore as hell, but if the soldier needed to be taken down, it would probably be better for him to do it with the knife than for Bishop to come across the field with his custom-modified XM312-B machine gun that could turn the soldier into paste, but which would also alert half of Uganda. He slid his tongue out twice to touch the lip-mic. No.

Knight was about to call it a day and unsheathe the knife when Deep Blue finally spoke in his ear.

“Sorry I was away. I’ll explain later. Knight, I see you’re in the shit. Stay down, I’m sending Bishop to you. We need to abandon this op.” Deep Blue’s voice, masked by voice modulation in case anyone were to pick up on their frequency, was still full of tension. Something was deeply wrong. The team rarely abandoned an operation. Anticipating the reaction of his teammates, and the questions Bishop would pose because Knight was unable to speak without giving away his cover, Deep Blue continued. “I need you both in Cairo an hour ago. Something huge is going down. Bishop, kill the tangos. Hit however many of the soldiers downfield as you can. Transport is inbound to your location and should arrive in less than two minutes. Go.”

With that, thunder filled the air as Bishop stepped out of cover on the edge of the field. Despite his adopted Scandinavian-American name, Bishop was a huge mountain of a muscled man, with deep chestnut Persian skin that revealed his true heritage. He looked perfectly at home holding the long-barreled machine gun. It boomed with each shot, sending. 50 caliber rounds scorching through the air at a rate of almost 800 rounds a minute. The top half of the soldier standing on Knight’s hand turned to a cloud of mist with the first hit, and the man’s legs fell over onto Knight’s back.

Knight didn’t stand. There was no point. His weapon was already aligned with the bulk of the soldiers down the field, and they had all stopped to turn and stare in Knight’s direction, temporarily dumbfounded by the roar of Bishop’s machine gun, which sounded like a fleet of supersonic jets each crossing the sound barrier, one after another. Boom. Boom. Boom. Knight swept his sore hand to the grip of the weapon, glanced down the scope and began taking out his own targets. He went for headshots, and one after the next, removed another fanatical Ugandan terrorist from the world.

Bishop began stalking across the field toward Knight, sweeping the barrel of his XM312-B to the side of him as he went, mowing down wave after wave of the enemy combatants. In many cases, Bishop’s indiscriminant sweep hit the living and dead-men on the receiving end of Knight’s long-range, 50 caliber sniper rounds.

“Where’s that pickup?” Knight asked.

“It’ll be here,” Bishop said, his calm only slightly interrupted by the pounding of his weapon’s vibration on his body.

The still-living members of the UFA had hit the dirt and were firing back with Russian AK-47 assault rifles, which only had an effective range of about 450 yards-nowhere near the distance away that Bishop and Knight were-but Knight had also spotted them readying a few rocket-propelled grenades and he knew those could reach his position. Still, it would take little effort for him and Bishop to hold off the 30 soldiers still in the fight.

Knight picked up his EXACTO, short for EXtreme ACcuracy Tasked Ordnance, which made hitting targets a mile away much easier thanks to its “fire and forget” ammunition, which stayed on target by changing shape while in flight. He changed positions quickly, focusing on the small breakaway group to his right, across the field. The ones with the rockets. He assumed a kneeling stance and launched a few rounds toward the group. He took two men with one bullet, piercing the first man’s head and the second man’s chest.

So much for -

Then the ground at the front of the field, between his position and the terrorists, erupted in a spurt of flame. Dark-colored soil launched into the air. Knight moved his eye from the scope and looked up to see an A-10 Thunderbolt II ground attack fighter. The plane was commonly known as the “Warthog” and it bristled with armaments and a GAU-8 heavy rotary nose-mounted cannon. The plane was painted olive drab green, but its belly was painted in garish, thin, black, red and yellow stripes.

At first, Knight had thought their transport was here. But the Warthog’s color scheme said otherwise. The plane was one of twelve fighters in the Ugandan People’s Defense Force Air Wing. The government forces had arrived, but it seemed they weren’t targeting the UFA soldiers. The ground in front of Knight was chewed up by the 30 mm Gatling-style cannon on the nose of the plane, and then the cannon fire was gone as the plane blasted by overhead. The gouge in the field was almost a foot deep, as if a tractor had just come by and ploughed a furrow. The dark line was less than a yard from Knight’s position in the grass. Bishop stood just to the other side of the line in the earth and looked at Knight. He had stopped firing his XM312-B.

“That was damned close,” he said. For once, his reserve of calm was shattered.

Knight stood and turned to look up at the A-10 as it banked in the sky for another attack run. “Deep Blue, we need that transport, now!”

Knight ignored the scattered AK-47 fire from further down the field. Many of the UFA soldiers had fled with the arrival of a UPDF plane, but the few left were still firing at Bishop and Knight. None of them had figured out they didn’t have the range to hit their targets. Knight looked at Bishop and had an idea.

“Stand still, Bish.”

Bishop did as he was asked without any query. Knight walked over to him and laid the long barrel of the EXACTO sniper rifle on the man’s shoulder from behind. With Bishop being almost a foot taller than Knight, the little Korean American didn’t need to even squat to get the right angle. He lined up the scope on the returning Warthog and took five quick breaths, then slowed his breathing to several shallow ones.

The Warthog was lined up perfectly, on an attack run for their position, and it opened up fire with the rotating cannon spitting out a line of fire at 60 rounds a second. The fire scoured a fast approaching line into the ground. If they didn’t move, they would be cut in half.

“Better know what you’re doing,” Bishop said. “And do it fast.”