Doctors of Death

by Peter Nealen

  “Fuck!” he bellowed, twisting around to return fire. He didn’t even bother to aim, just throwing a fast six shots at the Chadians to try to get their heads down. Even as he did so, a burst of 12.7mm hammered through the truck’s cab, shattering glass and smashing gaping holes in the metal. The truck shuddered and rocked under the fusillade, sparks flying as the heavy rounds tore the vehicle’s cab apart.

  Glancing to one side, he saw Bianco wriggling backward, crawling in reverse, as flat to the ground as he could get. Without much else in the way of options, he fired back at the Chadians and began to do the same.

  It felt like a long, long way back to the wadi, even though it was only a few dozen meters. Rifle fire was starting to boom to either side of him as those who’d crawled faster than he had got to covered positions and started shooting back. Wade wasn’t a small man, and he’d never liked crawling in the first place.

  He finally got some terrain between him and the Chadians, and was able to take a breath and reassess. Lying flat, just below the lip of the wadi’s bank, he peered at the line of vehicles. Two of the machineguns had gone silent, their gunners reloading. But the foot-mobiles were still blazing away, some of them starting to dash forward.

  His muzzle just above ground level, he took a breath and squeezed off a shot. The 7.62mm round took the first Chadian high in the chest and he dropped. Then he shifted and dropped one of the gunners just as he slapped the loading cover closed.

  The machinegun fire intensified a little, rounds hammering into the ground and the increasingly perforated wreckage of the vehicles. But the Blackhearts—and Price’s people, off to the right—had good cover in the wadi.

  It couldn’t last, though. They just didn’t have the firepower or the ammunition.

  Brannigan fired a fast five shots over the rise, then dropped back down into the wadi and reloaded. “Get ready to head down the wadi to the southeast,” he panted. “By twos.”

  Wade nodded, popping up to take a couple more shots. Then Brannigan did the same before barking, “Now! Go!”

  Flanagan was already moving, with Jenkins right behind him. Wade kept shooting, hoping to keep the Chadians occupied until one of the other pairs could cover for them. If they ceased fire altogether, he imagined that the Chadians would just drive right up to the wadi and then gun them all down.

  He didn’t know why they’d just opened fire. He didn’t especially care, and didn’t waste the mental energy speculating. They’d shot at the Blackhearts, so they were fair game. That was all that mattered to him.

  Fire picked up from off to the right, so he slid down the bank, glanced over to see Bianco doing the same, and scrambled to his feet. Time to go. With Bianco right behind him, he started to sprint as best he could down the wadi’s bed. The sandy soil made for bad footing, but he forged through it, his legs pumping and his head down; the wadi wasn’t that deep.

  He and Bianco pounded past Brannigan and the rest, forging toward the far end of the rough and ragged line of contractors. It was a maneuver called the “Australian peel,” and one that Wade and most of the rest were well familiar with.

  The wadi was getting shallower, but the acacia trees would provide some concealment. Wade aimed for a steep embankment, and started to sprint toward it, when movement ahead caught his eye.

  He dropped flat, as a bullet ripped through the air over his head, hitting the ground hard with a puff of grit, almost knocking the wind out of himself. There were figures down in the wadi, moving along the banks, crouched low as they rushed forward, firing as they came.

  Bianco reacted faster, his rifle thundering, the echoes all but lost in the cacophony of machinegun fire coming from the Chadian vehicles. Wade, refusing to let the younger man get the better of him, joined in a second later, chasing one of the camouflaged figures into cover with a fast trio of shots.

  But return fire kicked grit into his face and forced him to scuttle into a cut in the bank to his left. They were cut off that way. They’d been flanked.

  ***

  Bianco huddled in the half-exposed root system of an acacia tree, painfully aware of how exposed he was.

  He was on the southwest bank of the wadi. He could actually see the Chadian vehicles and their gunners from where he was. This wasn’t a good position. But whoever was out there on the flank was going to shoot him dead if he moved.

  He panted, trying to slow his heart rate down as he leveled his L1A1 over the acacia’s roots, blinking sweat out of his eyes. Been spending too much time at the hospital or in the game room, Vinnie. Not enough time training. Being as concerned for Sam as he had been, he’d lost track.

  But that wasn’t the worst part. The worst part was that he’d gone right, instinctively, when the bad guys down the wadi had appeared, and now he was stuck. It was a rookie mistake, and he fully expected it was one that was going to get him killed.

  Something moved on the other side of the acacia, and he fired, the L1A1’s recoil thumping back into his shoulder. His muzzle blast kicked up dust and grit ahead of him, and he suddenly found himself the focus of far too much attention.

  Bullets spat bark off the tree’s bole overhead, and then he was taking fire from his left, too. He threw himself flat, trying to get as small as possible, as grit and shredded bark rained down on him. He squeezed his eyes shut, trying to swallow the fear that suddenly threatened to overwhelm him. He was stuck, pinned down, and knew that he was going to die any minute. He’d never been this scared in his life.

  Then, over the snap and crack of bullets and the thunder of rifle reports, he started to hear a distant, growling roar.

  He knew he was dead, then. The helo that they’d exchanged fire with the night before was back, and they were pinned down in the wadi. It was over. He squeezed his eyes shut, waiting for the end.

  He actually felt the wind as the helo snarled by overhead, and heard the rattling roar of machinegun fire. But to his surprise, none of it tore into him, and he opened his eyes.

  The bird was past, banking to come around for another pass. But it wasn’t the Z-9 they’d fought before. This looked like a Huey variant with four blades, and the door gunner was hammering away at the Chadians, not the Blackhearts in the wadi.

  A second helicopter roared overhead, adding its fire to the first. Suddenly, Bianco realized that the incoming fire had stopped. He picked himself up and peered over the acacia’s roots, looking for the men in the wadi who’d stopped their peel cold. They’d disappeared, either dead or running for it.

  He glanced over at Wade as he stood cautiously, but the other man wasn’t looking at him. He gulped. He really hoped that Wade hadn’t seen how unmanned he’d been a moment before. Of all the Blackhearts, Wade would have the least sympathy.

  But if he had seen anything, Wade didn’t comment. He stayed on a knee, watching down the wadi, alert for the enemy’s return. So, Bianco did the same, his mouth tasting ashen, feeling a faint tremble in his limbs.

  ***

  Price walked along the wadi’s bed to join Brannigan, a radio in his hands, as the birds circled overhead. “A little surprise I decided it was wise to keep in the wings,” he said. “They’ve been orbiting five mikes to our south since we started moving, just in case.”

  “Can’t say I’m disappointed,” Brannigan said, stepping down the bank to join him. “They saved our asses.” He didn’t show it, but he was rattled. That had been far too close. Only years of discipline kept his expression stoic as he faced Price. “I’m afraid the locals shot our rides to shit.”

  “That’s not a problem,” Price replied, pointing to where one of the Bell 412s was flaring to land on the far side of the wadi from the two Chadian vehicles that remained, smoking. “We’ll continue by air. The bad news is that this set us back.”

  Brannigan turned to join him as he started toward the helicopter, the other Blackhearts falling into a loose V formation around them. “How so?”

  “The new WHO team landed early,” Price shouted over the roar of the heli
copter as they climbed out of the wadi, leaning against the rotor wash. “They’re already on the way to one of the affected refugee camps. And my ISR assets tell me that the Humanity Front just had a helicopter and a five-vehicle convoy leave their camp, heading in the same direction.

  “And they’re thirty klicks ahead of us already.”

  Chapter 18

  The two helicopters, laden with armed men, raced over the Sahel toward the east.

  Flanagan held onto the strap on the inside of the fuselage as the wind beat at him through the open side door. It had been a long time since he’d flown in a Huey, and while the 412 wasn’t quite the same thing, it was close enough.

  It was also heavily loaded. The 412 was a more muscular bird than the old UH-1Ns, but despite the twin engines and four-bladed rotor, it still had an upper limit, and between the seven Blackhearts and ten of Price’s people, the birds were pretty full, especially when adding in the two door gunners per bird, each of whom was still watching the landscape fly by beneath them, their MAG-58 machineguns still in their shoulders.

  He peered through squinted eyes at the landscape beneath, mostly dusty grassland dotted with occasional acacia trees and riven by dry riverbeds. The helos were flying low enough that the wind coming in the door felt like the world’s biggest blowdryer.

  The copilot turned around and said something to Brannigan, who was sitting in one of the seats just behind the cockpit. Brannigan’s face went stony, and he nodded. Without a headset, Flanagan couldn’t hear what was said over the roar of the engines and the wind, but he could guess.

  If Price had ISR—Intel, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance—assets up, he was probably keeping track of the WHO convoy. And if the bad guys had gotten to it first, then that was probably what had just been reported.

  There wasn’t much to do but stare at the landscape and wait. They were along for the ride. He’d already topped his rifle off, and confirmed that he still had six loaded mags, about as many as the rest, except for Curtis and Bianco, who had gotten a little…enthusiastic in their return fire. One hundred twenty rounds didn’t seem like much, but it was going to have to do. They’d just have to be sure of their shots.

  But somehow, given the increasingly grave look on Brannigan’s face, he doubted they were going to have much to shoot at when they got where they were going.

  He turned back to the view outside, his jaw tightening under his beard. Flanagan was a fighter and a brawler, and he knew it. He was a combat-hardened killer who had signed on as a mercenary. He had no illusions about that.

  But deep down, nothing infuriated him more than the slaughter of the innocent—or, as the case may be, simply the defenseless. He’d been on more than one operation where the Marines had been held back, or actually pulled back, and forced to let the bad guys slaughter unarmed people. He’d known of far too many locals who had helped the Americans, only to be left to their own devices and later murdered.

  He had about as much regard for the WHO as Wade did. He knew they were, by and large, a bunch of elitist assholes who promoted what he saw as tyrannical government measures and took in a whole lot of money, none of which really seemed to help anyone but the paper-pushers, in the name of “world health.” As something of a gun nut, his disdain for the WHO had been cemented by their constant drumbeat for gun control worldwide. As if that would happen.

  But to him, that didn’t mean that they deserved to be gunned down without a chance of defending themselves. They were assholes, sure. But Flanagan had never considered being an asshole to be grounds for murder.

  He’d always drawn a line between killing in combat and murder. It was a line that he knew far too few men drew, in either direction. There were those, like the WHO personnel whom he was pretty sure were lying dead on the Sahel at that moment, who equated any killing with murder, and considered him a criminal and an evil man for the men he’d killed, regardless of the fact that every one of them had been trying to kill him, his teammates, or people they were protecting. Others made the same equivalence, but didn’t see anything wrong with killing at all.

  The door gunner pointed. Hanging onto the strap, Flanagan leaned out a little to see.

  Sure enough, black smoke was rising above the faint track of the dirt road heading toward Sudan. They were too late.

  The two helos circled the site. One of the five white-painted SUVs was on fire. The others were stopped, their doors open. Bodies were sprawled in the dust. Nothing was moving.

  Brannigan said something to the pilot, and then they were spiraling down toward the ground.

  Just before the rotors kicked up a brownout, Flanagan saw the sun glint on something in the sky in the distance. He squinted, and just made out the outlines of two helicopters burning hard for the north.

  Then they were coming down to land, and the dust hid everything.

  As soon as the skids touched the ground, Flanagan was stepping off, actually beating Brannigan to the ground for once. He stepped away from the helo and took a knee, as Jenkins and Curtis moved out to flank him.

  The helo pulled for the air, blasting them with its rotor wash, grit scouring at the back of his neck. The dust started to settle a little, and he could see more.

  The attack site was a slaughter. He’d already been pretty sure what they would find, but being on the ground left no room for doubt. The men on those two helicopters had killed everyone.

  The SUVs had been riddled with bullets, holes tracking through doors and up the hoods. It looked like they’d been strafed from the air before the helos had set down.

  But as he and the other Blackhearts advanced on the stricken vehicles and the bodies lying in the dust, it was obvious that it hadn’t stopped there. The rotor wash had blown away any footprints, but there was brass in the dirt, and it was clear from the attitude of several of the bodies that they’d been shot down while trying to run.

  He stood over one, a young man with blond hair and a day’s stubble on his jaw. There were powder burns around the bullet hole in his forehead. Someone had stood over him and shot him in the skull, close enough that they’d probably gotten splattered with blood and brain matter.

  Flanagan looked around at the carnage, his teeth clenched. He’d known men who would have done that, and he could almost hear the laughter at the spatter.

  These bastards need to die.

  Brannigan stepped up next to him, and with a glance, Flanagan could read the same thought on the Colonel’s face.

  The second helo was setting down, and Price came out of the dust cloud as it lifted off again.

  “We need to move,” he said, holding up a radio. “We were too late for these people, but that motorcade is still on the move, and the sons of bitches who did this are heading back toward the Humanity Front’s camp.” He looked at Brannigan. “I take it you don’t have any doubts anymore?”

  “No,” Brannigan said coldly. “Not anymore.”

  “We need to bury them,” Curtis said quietly. Flanagan turned to look at him, an eyebrow going up. The little man looked a little abashed, and shrugged. “Doesn’t seem right, you know, just leaving them like this?”

  “They’re dead, man,” Jenkins said. “They ain’t gonna care anymore.”

  Flanagan honestly wasn’t sure what to say. On the one hand, he agreed with Curtis; it seemed indecent to just leave the bodies to the vultures that were already circling. But on the other…

  “There’s no time, anyway,” Price said impatiently. “If we’re going to handle this situation, we need to move fast. Their security is split right now; some are in the air, some are on the way to their next target, and that leaves their camp vulnerable. If we’re going to hit them, we have to do it soon, while they’re between ops.”

  Brannigan said nothing at first. He squinted at the bodies, then at the horizon, thinking.

  “Unfortunately, Price is right,” he said. “We can’t afford the time to bury them. We’ll mark the area and send a message to their support people back in Abeche. We
’ve got to move.”

  Price was already turning back toward the helo, which was sitting on the ground with its rotors still turning. “The birds can drop us off with some standoff so that we can move in on foot,” he said. “Then they’ll head back to Abeche to pick up my react force.

  “I have a feeling that we’re going to need it.”

  ***

  Lung Kai walked into General Goukouni’s office, still covered in dust and still wearing his chest rig and carrying his NAR-10 rifle slung. “I need every infantry and armor unit you can muster,” he said.

  Goukouni looked up and glared at him. Unlike ninety-nine percent of his soldiers, the General was fat, his head and neck seeming to bulge out of his collar. The deep scars of the Sara coming of age ritual he had gone through as a boy seemed to gape wider on the bulge of his cheeks, especially when he grimaced in anger.

  “How dare you?” Goukouni demanded. “How dare you, foreigner, come armed into my office and make demands? You are a guest in my country.”

  Lung Kai stood in front of the General’s desk. He was not a large man, even by Chinese standards. If Goukouni stood up, he would stand almost a head taller than the Chinese Shao Xiao. But he was harder than the fat General, and he knew he had all the leverage he needed. Goukouni was just another kleptocrat, the same as all the ones that the Soviets and Cubans had manipulated in the ‘70s and ‘80s, and the Chinese had quietly stepped in to do the same since the ‘90s.

  “I dare, General,” he said, in his halting, accented French, but still managing to put every bit of menace possible into the words, “because you owe the security of your position to the People’s Republic of China. Because if you do not, Beijing will not be pleased, and you will shortly find yourself maneuvered out of your position in disgrace.”

  He was sticking his neck out, and he knew it. If this didn’t work, then Beijing would quietly disappear him; the Central Committee was not about to broadcast its failures to the world. They certainly would not approve of a mere Shao Xiao on a secret assignment in Africa making policy.