by Peter Nealen
But he didn’t have to. Jenkins broke into a loping double-time, and soon the five men were jogging toward the helicopters in a loose line. They all knew what was happening. They knew how tight the timing had to be.
Fortunately, the helos had landed closer to the hill than their initial LZ. Flanagan found himself sweating buckets, his breath rasping in his throat and his mouth as dry as the Sahara to the north as he neared the birds. I’m a mountain critter. Don’t like all this desert stuff. Too damned hot. The Sahel was technically not considered desert, but it was close enough for Joe Flanagan.
He still got to the helicopters almost at the same time as Jenkins, turning and taking a knee, his L1A1 held across his thigh as he counted the others on. As he did so, he saw the rest of the Blackhearts, along with Price’s guys, moving down the hillside behind them, angling toward the north.
I wonder if they got spotted. Damn, I hope not. If we’re burned already…
But Brannigan didn’t call him back, and Curtis ran past him, sweating but looking indecently chipper for a bodybuilder while running, and thumped him on the shoulder. “Last man!”
The mission was still on. He got to his feet and clambered into the Bell 412 behind Curtis, swinging up behind the door gunner and grabbing hold of one of the straps. “All in!” he yelled. The crew chief gave him a thumbs up, and a moment later, the pitch of the rotors changed and dust billowed around the helicopter. He felt the aircraft surge off the ground, and then the nose dipped and they were racing out over the dusty landscape.
He peered back toward the hillside and the Humanity Front camp, but the pilot had turned sharply south, masking his flight path with the terrain. He couldn’t see what was happening.
With a glance at the growing wall of dust and sand to the north, he flexed his hand around the strap and hung on. They had more than one time limit.
He just hoped that they could move fast enough.
Chapter 20
The pilots stayed nap-of-the-earth as they headed east. Peering out the open door, Flanagan could see the acacias speeding by so close beneath them that he could almost stick a leg out and touch the crowns. Dust billowed in their wake as they raced over the Sahel.
A hand tapped at his shoulder. He looked back to see Vernon, wearing an intercom headset, tapping his ear and pointing to another set hanging just behind the cockpit. He nodded, making sure that his L1A1 was securely slung in front of him, and pulled the headset on.
“The drone operators are reporting that the convoy just left the refugee camp, heading back toward the target,” Vernon said, still having to shout to be heard over the roar of wind and engines, even with the intercom working. “They’re not moving fast, so whatever the bad guys might have spotted from the base camp, they haven’t called an emergency yet. Surveillance is going to have to pull off soon; the drones are already having some trouble with the edges of that storm.”
“How much time do we have?” Flanagan asked.
“If they maintain their pace, it’ll take them about an hour and a half to get back to the base camp,” Vernon said. “Which means we’ve got a lot less than that.”
Flanagan nodded, looking out the open door. “Not a lot of close terrain around here,” he said. “We’re either going to have to be really well concealed, or we’re going to have to find a choke point that they have to go through.”
“Yeah,” Vernon replied. “Choke points aren’t exactly a dime a dozen around here. Desert combat has to be mutual consent, most of the time. But I’ve got an idea.” He moved seats to get next to Flanagan, pulling out a well-worn topographic map of the area. “There’s a wadi here that they’ve got to cross, just southeast of Iriba. We’ve been in it before; there’s a dam upstream, so there’s a little bit of water in it, even at this time of year, but the bottom is soft as shit. No real problem for those Hawkeis, but if we can knock one of them out, they might go firm to protect it.”
“Assuming they don’t either just cross-load or leave the guys in the truck for the wolves,” Flanagan said. “If these are the same fucking psychopaths that we’ve crossed paths with before, they might just do that.”
He could feel Vernon’s eyes on him, even as he kept his own gaze directed out through the open door, past the door gunner. He could almost hear the wheels turning in the big man’s head.
“That’s not the first time I’ve heard it mentioned that you guys have crossed swords with this bunch before,” Vernon said. “What happened?”
“Nothing,” Flanagan said, turning back to meet Vernon’s curious look. “We were never there, and we never killed any of them. Or lost anybody.”
“Look, I get it,” Vernon said. “I don’t know who you’re working for, and it’s for damned sure that Price isn’t here in any sort of official capacity. But if you know something about these bastards that we don’t...”
“Only their modus operandi,” Flanagan said after a long pause. “We’ve had no clue as to who they are, or who they’ve been working for. Just groups of Western shooters, either acting as terrorists, or trying to kill or capture the guy who might have put us on the track of who they were working for. They’ve shown no scruples, no target discrimination. And they’re competent. That much we do know.”
Vernon nodded. “You’re going to have to tell me the story sometime.”
“I doubt it,” Flanagan replied. They were allies for the moment, but there was no way that Brannigan was going to okay spilling everything to Price’s people. The Blackhearts already had enough security concerns.
Vernon looked at him for a second, then finally, reluctantly, nodded. He got it. After all, he’d been on at least one blatantly illegal op for Price, and had, from what Flanagan had been able to gather, seen the cost of failed security. “So, the wadi?” he asked.
Flanagan nodded. He didn’t have any better ideas, and that haboob was getting closer. The entire northern horizon was now a wall of billowing brown. The birds didn’t have much more air time. “Let’s do it.”
Vernon switched to the pilot’s channel and relayed the instructions. A moment later, they banked slightly south, turning away from the oncoming sandstorm.
But there was no outracing it, not for long. They had to get on the ground and get set in. And Flanagan was all too aware that once they were down, they were set for the duration. The birds weren’t going to be able to come back for them once that storm hit, and they would be on foot.
This was going to be a hell of a long shot.
***
The storm was coming on faster than expected, but somewhat surprisingly, the birds weren’t having too bad a time with it. Flanagan remembered the last sandstorm he’d been in, though; that hadn’t really started hammering them until the wave front hit.
They flared hard, then the nose dipped, the skids just barely touching the dust, the rotors kicking up a whirling cloud of grit. Flanagan didn’t need prompting; he was out and on the ground in seconds, surging away from the bird and dropping to a knee, squinting against the sandblasting as the rotor wash hammered them with dust and sand. A moment later, the birds were pulling for the sky, leaving them behind as the northern sky turned a reddish brown.
The wadi was a dark line of acacias ahead. It was probably the thickest vegetation Flanagan had seen since getting on the ground in Chad. As he eyed the dirt track that passed for a road coming up out of it, he realized that Vernon’s advice hadn’t been bad; the Hawkei armored vehicles were unlikely to get through the thicker trees down there if they tried to go around.
This might just work, yet.
But they had to move. If Vernon’s estimate was on, they had less than twenty minutes to get set in. He hefted the bulky pack that had been aboard the helo, and got to his feet, heading toward the wadi.
It wasn’t a long movement; the birds had taken the risk and set down less than five hundred meters from the wadi itself. Flanagan expected that they’d been spotted, but they were still banking on the same camouflage that the Humanity Front its
elf was using; there were still plenty of NGOs running around near the Darfur refugee camps, and more than one was using helicopters. There would be no way for the enemy to know for certain that the helos were hostile.
They’d find out soon enough, but he hoped that they’d find out the hard way.
Curtis was just off to his left, his short legs pumping fast, almost running. He’d been delighted, as only Curtis could be, to find an Ares Shrike belt-fed aboard the bird, and had traded his L1A1 for the AR conversion. He finally had the firepower that made him happy. Fortunately, they could really use it.
The wind was starting to pick up, and the wall of dust was now filling half the sky. Flanagan thought he could just see the plume of dust from the convoy over the tops of the trees, but it was quickly getting lost in the oncoming sandstorm. He picked up the pace, moving down the shallow slope from the LZ toward the trees below.
The acacias were widely spaced at first, only getting really thick down by the water. Flanagan found a spot and swung the pack off his back. This was going to be an ambush at knife-fight range, but visibility and the need to stop the bad guys and pin them in place made it all but absolutely necessary.
They had minutes to get set up.
***
The sandstorm hit, the wave of dust sweeping across the landscape. The wind snatched at clothing and gear, making the acacias wave and sway as it blasted dust and sand carried from the Sahara in the north against everything in its path. In moments, visibility dropped sharply as the entire world turned a hellish orange. Flanagan wrapped a shemagh around his mouth and nose, pushing sunglasses over his eyes to try to keep the worst of the grit out. The dark lenses made it somewhat harder to see in the dust-obscured dimness, but it beat having his eyeballs sandblasted.
The next few minutes felt like an eternity, staring into the swirling dust, waiting. He kept his L1A1 laid over his pack, which was now considerably emptier than it had been when he’d dismounted the helicopter, watching the road just over the sights. He’d wiped down every part he could before the storm had hit; oil on a weapon in a dust storm was a recipe for disaster.
Movement caught his eye, and he flexed his hand around the rifle’s grip. Here they came.
The lead Hawkei was moving slowly, easing its way down the slope into the wadi. Visibility was bad enough on foot; through the smaller windows of the armored vehicles, it had to be miserable. Especially as the grit collected on the armored glass. He suspected—he hoped—that it was even worse for the CROWS turrets, as the camera lenses got covered in a thickening layer of dust. At the engagement range they were set up for, he was intending to take care of those quickly, anyway.
He took his hand off his rifle’s forearm, moving it to the initiator lying in the lee of the pack, as the point Hawkei started down into the muddy trickle of a stream running through the wadi. Almost there…
He squeezed the clacker. The fifty pounds of explosives they’d hastily buried in the mud just on the near side of the stream detonated with a heavy thud that shook the ground and momentarily made the Hawkei disappear in a cloud of dust, smoke, and flying clods of mud.
It hadn’t been a shaped charge; that had been too much to prepare with the time they’d had. He’d have preferred to plant an EFP charge, and Explosively Formed Projectile. The Hawkeis were built to resist IED blasts, with V-shaped armor plating under the cab to disperse explosions. It was a design going back to the South African Ratel armored personnel carriers, and more recently adopted in American MRAPs and MATVs. With what they had, a hard kill wouldn’t be possible.
So, Flanagan wasn’t counting on a hard kill. But in that spot, all they really needed was a mobility kill. And as the cloud of smoke and debris was rapidly whipped away by the wind, he saw that they’d succeeded. The Hawkei’s front was a mangled, crushed mess of fiberglass and metal, the front tires shredded and the one wheel he could see clearly was canted at such an angle that he was pretty sure the axle was broken.
He was already on his sights, and shifted to center the CROWS turret in the aperture. He let out a breath and fired, the L1A1 hammering back into his shoulder as its boom was quickly snatched away by the hiss and howl of the sandstorm. He squinted against the flying grit, but was pretty sure that he’d hit the turret’s camera. He fired twice more, just to be sure, then shifted to the next vehicle back, but another barking report to his right announced Vernon taking that one under fire.
The vehicles had halted, but the lead was still staying buttoned up. As a result, the ambushers held their fire for the moment. They had brought the explosives, but no RPGs or similar anti-armor weapons, and 7.62 and 5.56 fire wasn’t going to do shit against that armor plating.
Fortunately, the rest of the convoy had halted, instead of simply reversing out and leaving the lead vehicle, like Flanagan had been half-afraid they would. A wild burst of machinegun fire ripped out of the sandstorm, but the vehicle the fire was coming from, which was only visible as a vague shadow in the orange haze, was mostly blocked by the three Hawkeis in front of it, and only managed to scourge the acacias off to the right, some distance from the other shooters. Then the fire fell silent, and for an eerie moment, the only sound was the low, moaning roar of the sandstorm.
“Come on, come on,” Flanagan whispered. He knew what they were doing; the bad guys weren’t stupid. They’d demonstrated that in Mexico and again in Transnistria. These bastards were a far cry from the “Allahu Ackbar” jihadists that he’d cut his teeth fighting in the sandbox. They were taking advantage of their armor for the moment, sheltering inside the vehicles while they assessed the situation and coordinated their response.
Unfortunately, at that distance, Flanagan didn’t want to leave cover to maneuver. They had cover and concealment at the moment, and the trees were tight enough that the Hawkeis couldn’t maneuver, either. They’d have to dismount, or reverse out and try another crossing, leaving the disabled vehicle behind.
“Movement,” he heard Jenkins call out. Jenkins was on the other side of the road, next to Curtis and the wiry dude named Sam, one of Price’s guys. A moment later, rifle fire thundered in the dusty murk, answered by lighter cracks from the enemy’s F2000s, only to be drowned out by the rattling roar of Curtis’ Shrike.
Flanagan resisted the urge to look over to see. If Curtis needed help, he’d yell. He needed to focus on the fight in front of him.
A moment later, he saw movement through the murk as doors opened and men started piling out of the rear vehicles. They were little more than dim silhouettes in the dust storm, their bullpup rifles held at the ready.
He shifted his aim, laying the front sight post on the first figure that was moving toward the trees on the far bank, evidently trying to move downstream to try to flank the ambush.
It was less than a hundred-meter shot. He barely had to lead the guy. He knew the shot was good as soon as the trigger broke, the L1A1 bucking into his shoulder with a thunderous report. The man staggered as the bullet tore into his chest, just behind his front armor plate, and he fell on his face.
The man just behind him reacted immediately, even as Vernon opened fire, dropping to a knee and firing a burst back at the ambushers. Bullets snapped overhead and smacked into the acacia’s trunk with loud thunks, raining bark and leaves down on Flanagan, though most of them were whipped away by the sandstorm. Another opened fire as well, covering for his buddy as that one sprinted back to the cover of the Hawkei.
They left their fallen comrade in the dust.
Wriggling backward, Flanagan started to relocate around the other side of the acacia. He had an idea. While the L1A1 was no Barrett M107, the 7.62 rounds might still do some damage in the right place.
He didn’t have the shot he wanted, so he started low-crawling toward Vernon, two trees over, his rifle held in the crooks of his elbows. The bad guys were still shooting, tearing into the south bank with long bursts of 5.56 fire, but without targets, they were just throwing suppression.
But wild gunfire at that
range could still be deadly. He had to stop, pressing himself flat to the ground, grinding his cheek into the dirt, as bullets went by his head so close that he could feel their passage more than hear it.
It would really suck to get killed when the bad guy’s not even aiming at me. But the fire slackened again, and he hastily dragged himself toward the next tree.
Scrambling behind the trunk, he got his rifle up and searched for his shot. He grimaced behind the shemagh; it wasn’t perfect, and he couldn’t swear that it was going to do any good, but he braced the L1A1 against the tree and dumped the rest of his magazine into the hood of the rear Hawkei. Even at a hundred meters, he could barely see the vehicle’s outline, but it was enough.
Ducking back behind the tree, he ripped the magazine out and rocked in another, then leaned back out, searching for targets. The storm was getting worse. Visibility was dropping even further.
He saw a figure dash from the second vehicle back toward the rear vehicle, and snapped off a shot at it. The man stumbled but kept going, and Flanagan shot him again. This time he dropped and stayed still.
The storm was working to their advantage for the moment, but he knew it couldn’t last. Sooner or later, the Humanity Front shooters were going to get their shit together and counterattack effectively. They needed to be gone by then, vanishing into the haboob.
But they had to hold on for a little bit longer, first. Just long enough for the enemy to call for reinforcements.
He scanned the line of vehicles over his sights, waiting for the radio call from Brannigan, hoping that it came through the storm before it was too late.
Chapter 21
Flanagan and his recon element had just gotten to the base of the hill when a harsh snap overhead sent Brannigan and Price flat to the dirt.
Another shot smacked grit off the rock in front of them. The report of the shot echoed across the Sahel.
