Read Arisen : Genesis for Free Online

being there, they’d almost certainly let it slide. He’d probably need to account for the lost phone, and the lost handgun, as well as the tablet, at some point. But those weren’t even rounding errors in their budget.
    And why the gun, anyway, if he was just an analyst? Because this was HOA. Even the cooks went armed when they went outside the wire.
    Dugan wandered into the TOC, unintentionally stealthily as usual. “Hey, Zack,” he said. “What’s up?”
    Zack swiveled to face him. “Thinking about a field trip. Up for chaperone duty? Might be dodgy.”
    “Hey, if it doesn’t suck, we don’t do it,” Dugan said with a grin.
    This was another on a long list of SEAL expressions for the affirmative.
    As far as Zack knew, they had no expression for negative.

Field Trip
    The two of them were kitted up and out the door in five.
    For Zack, this was basically the same outfit he got kidnapped in: duty belt with (new) handgun, team radio, and body armor, all under a light jacket. The plates in his vest would stop a 7.62 round – and there were just way too many of those zipping around the region. It wasn’t worth the risk, at any weight. And the plates were ceramic, so relatively light.
    Dugan didn’t bother covering up his weapons or tactical kit. At this point, there was so much Coalition and SOF and executive protection activity in the region that he didn’t stand out. He wore 5.11 tactical clothing, radio earpiece, HK416 assault rifle on a single-point tactical sling. A SIG in .45 ACP sat in a drop-leg holster. Extra mags were distributed in pouches around the vest, all of it tightly wrapped around his lean and muscular frame. And the wrap-around ballistic Oakley shades, of course.
    As they strode out, Hargeisa had an even weirder vibe than usual. The sun was still an hour or two above the building tops, but everything had cleared out – empty shells of market stalls, steel grates pulled down over shopfronts, debris blowing in the street on swirls of dust. The very late afternoon breeze foretold of night.
    Zack couldn’t tell whether this was because of the jihadis rolling through town earlier, and the aborted ambush – or maybe the kidnapping. Or else perhaps it was because of the outbreak thing. He asked Dugan what he thought.
    “Got me, man. I’ll never understand this country.”
    Dugan was doing his usual scanning alleys and rooftops routine – ready to target-discriminate, or to crank the volume up, all on a dime if need be. If things did kick off, Zack would take Dugan’s two guns against any two dozen raggedy-ass militia, any day.
    Then again, he knew the guns-out-in-the-open thing was also a show of dominance, meant to head off trouble. They were never going to look like Somalis, even Zack, who was Kenyan – maybe especially Zack. So they might as well look like westerners who were seriously not to be fucked with. To the best of Zack’s knowledge, those two ideas – dominance before, and dominance during, a firefight – were the twin pillars of Dugan’s tactical philosophy.
    The pair kept moving for the four blocks to the main arterial drag, then kept on that almost straight to the hospital. They stayed far enough from the middle of the street to be inconspicuous, but not so close to the structures as to risk getting jumped from them. There were a few people about, but mostly head down, moving like they were going somewhere. They got one or two friendly smiles. Somalis, the regular people, were almost always very friendly. That made Zack feel worse for all they suffered at the hands of the Islamists, the battling warlords, the khat junkies, and the other various assholes who made the lives of regular people miserable.
    As they turned onto the side street, with the hospital still two blocks out, and the hulking off-white structure came into view, Zack reached into his cargo-pant pocket. He produced two cloth face masks and four blue latex gloves, handing half to Dugan – who gave him a bit of