by Peter Nealen
Both men crawled backward, getting below the crest of the hill as another bullet ricocheted overhead with an angry whine. That one had come from a slightly different angle.
“Well, if we were wondering whether they had drones up and were actually paying attention, I think we got our answer,” Brannigan said. The likelihood that the Humanity Front’s perimeter guards had just decided to get in a little target practice on the rock where they’d taken cover was slim to none. Which meant that the clock was ticking.
He pointed down-slope, as more shots ripped through the air overhead. “Time to go,” he said. “We don’t want to be around here when their react force comes looking.” He glanced down at the LZ, where the birds were just touching down. There was no way that Flanagan and his element were going to get into position before the bad guys’ Quick Reaction Force came calling.
To his credit, Price kept pace, as they slid down the slope, keeping as low as possible until they were far enough below the crest to be able to get their feet under them. Only then did they stand up and really start moving, angling down the hill and to the north. There was some low ground to cross, but they should be able to find a new covered and concealed position. The trouble was that with those drones overhead, they were going to have a bitch of a time getting eyes on without the enemy spotting them and bringing fire on their position again, while their QRF maneuvered on them.
Fortunately, Price had still come prepared. The big, pasty guy named Max had brought that anti-drone weapon, and was lugging it in a pack meant to carry a bolt gun. A few meters down the hill, Max halted and swung the pack off his back, while another one of Price’s guys covered him. Even as the Blackhearts made tracks for the fallback position and the helicopters started to take off, Max had the sci-fi-looking device in his shoulder and was scanning the sky above them.
Brannigan had gotten about ten paces before turning and scanning the terrain around them, looking for the enemy react force. That was when he saw Wade signal for his attention and point to the south.
He squinted. There was a cloud of dust down there, pointing like an arrow straight at their position. And it was moving quickly.
They were running out of time.
***
Lung Kai and his men were in their own vehicles this time. He didn’t want to take the chance that they’d be cut off and scattered if Goukouni’s men broke and ran like they had under the helicopter’s aerial fire before. And with the haboob looming on the northern horizon, and the Chadian formation getting slower and more erratic, he knew that he was right to have made the decision.
“Sir,” Lu Feng reported from the back seat of the Iveco VM 90, “the drone is about to run out of dwell time. It will have to return to the base soon. We are also getting some interference; I think the target is using their anti-drone device again.”
Lung Kai glared at the oncoming dust storm. If they lost their drone coverage now, they weren’t going to get it back before that storm hit. Which meant they’d be groping through the dust after their target. No matter how he motivated Goukouni, Lung didn’t think that the Chadians were going to go into that storm. They’d scatter before it hit, though they might not make it out from under it. But there was no way that they were going to fight in it.
Of course, he knew that a few of his own men weren’t going to be particularly eager to go into that dusty hell, either. And he was all too aware that there were those on his team who would eagerly report him to the Central Committee if he went too far, or even if they simply felt that he had. Some of them had connections in the Party. He did not.
He said nothing at first, but just watched the helicopters lift off and fly east, calculating. “Did all of the target’s fighters get on the helicopters?” he asked.
“Negative,” Lu Feng replied. “Only five boarded the aircraft.”
Would the target have left his men behind and fled? He might. He is a capitalist, after all. And no reports placed him on the ground in the Anambas, or in Colombia last year.
But pursuing the aircraft was currently impractical. And they were steering well clear of Goukouni’s trucks and his own Ivecos. We can destroy some of his support mechanism, however. If his ground forces are all but eliminated, and we control the airport, he will be on the run and cut off. He would have to be patient, and handle the target one step at a time.
“We will continue with the current plan,” he said. “We can track them until the drone has to return, and move on them from there. They have no vehicles. They won’t get far.” He squinted at the dust storm as it loomed ahead.
Time was pressing.
***
Max worked fast. Brannigan saw the impact as one of the drones hit the dirt at the top of the hill. The second one went sailing overhead to crash into the brush at the bottom, not far from the LZ.
The big man scanned the increasingly hazy sky above one more time, then started shoving the drone gun back into its pack. “Can’t see the other one,” he said.
“We should go ahead and move, anyway,” Price said. “If we can’t see it, it can’t see us. It might take a few minutes to find us again if we relocate.”
“Or we can hope that they pull it back as the storm gets closer, having already lost more than one,” Brannigan said. “They’ve got extensive resources, but they’re not unlimited. How many of those have you shot down?”
“A few,” Price said, still scanning the sky. “But you’re right; they’ve had plenty of resupply flights coming in. Almost one a day.”
“They won’t be able to fly once that storm hits,” Bianco said. “Even those beefed-up military models.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Brannigan said. “They know roughly where we are, so we need to be somewhere else. Wade, you’ve got point.”
***
Don Hart was sweating, his breath coming in gasps, as he forged up the hill behind Bianco. He’d done some hard stuff with a prosthetic leg, including parachuting into Burma, but after the last few months staying put in Northern Virginia, sitting next to Sam Childress’ bedside, he was out of shape, and the peg leg wasn’t helping.
I shouldn’t be here. I should have stayed back there, with Sam. Leaving his wounded comrade had felt like a betrayal, even before he’d found out that the terrorists had struck at them at home.
He didn’t know how Sam was doing. He knew that Hancock and the rest had rescued him, but details were slim beyond that. And that worry was weighing on his mind more than the weight of his gear and the rifle in his hands was slowing him down as he struggled up the hill.
The haboob was almost on top of them. The dust was already getting thicker in the air as they climbed. Hart coughed as the dust caught in his throat, and his prosthetic slipped, dropping him to a knee.
It saved his life. He’d been so caught up in the effort and his worries about Sam that he hadn’t looked back in too long, so he hadn’t spotted the trucks speeding down the wadi at the base of the hill. But the snap of a bullet past his head woke him up quick.
He dropped onto his side, trying to twist around and get a return shot. Two Iveco trucks had stopped on the bank of the wadi, about two hundred meters behind them, the noise of their approach masked by the rising hiss of the wind and dust. They were partially obscured by acacias, but he got a snap shot off anyway, smacking bark and dust off a trunk well wide of the target.
Bianco had heard the shot, too, and had dashed to a nearby jujube tree and gotten low. His L1A1 boomed three times in rapid succession as he returned fire at the small figures below, even as the air was torn by a staccato, crackling roar as the shooters down below opened fire in unison, spraying fire up the hill toward them.
The rest of the Blackhearts turned and started returning fire quickly, the thunderous reports increasingly muted by the wind. Hart struggled to get a better position, painfully aware of how exposed he really was. The rising wind was making shooting more difficult, but impacts were starting to kick grit up around him, getting uncomfortably close.
Hart shrank down against the ground, trying to get some cover, but he was out in the open on the slope. More bullets smacked bark off the jujube tree nearby and spat grit into his face. He fired back, emptying the L1A1’s magazine in a near-panic. The rifle thundered, sand and dust blasting away from the muzzle brake, and for a moment, the fire on his own position slackened.
Bianco picked up his own rate of fire, bellowing over the growing hiss of the storm and the thunder and crackle of gunfire, “Don! Turn and go!”
Hart barely heard him, only then registering that his last trigger squeeze had resulted in nothing but a click. He desperately racked the charging handle, to be rewarded with the same horrifying click. He ripped the mag out. Empty. The L1A1 didn’t have a bolt hold open like an M4; it wouldn’t lock the bolt on an empty magazine.
Bianco was still hammering rounds down toward the figures flitting from tree to tree at the base of the hill. “Don!” he screamed. “Go!”
Hart scrambled to his feet, fumbling for a fresh mag from his chest rig. But he had already lost precious seconds hesitating.
Bianco’s mag went dry as Hart got to his feet and started to run up the slope, aiming past Bianco and toward where Brannigan and one of Price’s guys were down behind trees or folds in the ground, returning the enemy fire.
But that lull in the fire from having both Hart’s and Bianco’s rifles down meant that some of the shooters down the hill weren’t under fire. A renewed storm of gunfire tore uphill, hammering bullets into the trees, the ground...and Don Hart.
He felt a savage blow to his prosthetic leg, and then another in his lower back. He started to crumple, twisting under the impact as his shattered prosthetic collapsed.
Then another bullet tore into his upper torso, and his world dissolved into pain.
***
Bianco saw Hart get hit and start to tumble down the slope, even as he rocked a fresh magazine into his rifle and racked the charging handle. He aimed downslope and snapped off a rapid trio of shots at the nearest silhouette he could see, a small man in brown with a rifle. The first two missed, but the man staggered under the hammer blow of the third, and fell behind the acacia he had been dashing toward.
“Man down!” he yelled. He started to get up to move down toward where Hart had come to a stop, after he had fallen and rolled and tumbled several meters downhill, but was forced back as another burst of fire ripped through the air far too close to his head.
He returned fire, acutely aware of just how fast they were burning through ammunition. His target ducked out of sight, and he had nothing to shoot at for a moment. He started to move again, and was force back again as a bullet spat dirt in his face.
Don’s hit. He might be dying. You’ve got to get out of this hole and go get him. But for a long moment, Bianco couldn’t move. He felt the same faint tremor in his limbs that he’d felt in that wadi.
The memory pricked at him. He looked down the slope, even as the haboob swept over the hill, dimming the sun and engulfing them in an orange murk that lashed at skin and eyes with stinging particles of sand and dust. Suddenly, Hart was little more than a vague shadow on the ground in the distance.
The enemy, whoever they were, hadn’t stopped shooting, but with visibility as cut as it was by the storm, their shots were getting wilder. They were guessing and shooting at shadows.
It didn’t matter. Bianco took a deep breath that tasted of dust and grit, lunged out of cover, and ran down the slope toward Hart’s still form.
Bullets snapped overhead and kicked dirt and rock fragments into the air around his feet. He skidded to a half-sitting position next to Hart, getting down behind his rifle, but the storm had obscured the enemy, and none of their fire was getting that close anymore.
Footsteps pounded nearby, and he heard another body drop with a whuff next to him. He half-rolled over to see Brannigan, caked with dust, leveling his own L1A1 down the slope. “Don?” the Colonel asked.
Bianco turned to Hart. The other man had come to rest on his side, still tangled in his rifle sling. He still wasn’t moving.
One look at the growing dark stain in the dirt beneath him, and a check for his pulse was enough. Don Hart was dead.
For a long moment, Bianco just stared down at the body. He’d been less than impressed with Hart’s attitude before, but now that he was staring down at his corpse, he couldn’t think of any of the reasons he’d disliked him. He could only see a man who had lost a limb and yet stayed in the fight, who had bent over backwards to help Sam Childress after he’d been shot, now nothing but cooling meat, lying in the dirt.
“Vinnie!” Brannigan barked. Bianco looked up, to see that the Colonel had gotten up on a knee, his weapon trained down the slope. He’d taken in the situation at a glance. “He’s gone! There’s nothing we can do for him now! Grab his ammo and let’s go!”
Bianco didn’t want to go. He didn’t want to leave Don behind, on his face in the dirt. But another bullet passing too close shook him out of it. Hart’s chest rig was too entwined with his limbs to pull it off easily, but he was able to quickly tear the remaining magazines out of their pouches, stuffing them in pockets and his own chest rig. He wrenched Hart’s L1A1 away, slung it across his back, then scrambled to his feet. He hesitated suddenly, then dropped back down, digging into the blood-stained shirt. He found the pouch with Hart’s passport and emergency cash and pulled it off, over his head. Then he got back up and followed Brannigan as the Colonel led the way back up the hill, toward the north.
Hart’s body quickly vanished into the dust behind them. Bianco spared it one last glance, then he had to watch his footing, leaning into the wind and the sandblasting of the storm.
The incoming fire slackened and finally died away to sporadic potshots, as the enemy shooters figured out that they couldn’t be sure of the Blackhearts’ positions anymore. The Americans still kept leapfrogging, though, as Brannigan and Bianco dashed past Wade and the big guy named Max. Neither the Blackhearts, nor Price’s guys, were going to take it for granted that their adversaries had given up.
A few minutes and what had to be a couple hundred meters later—though it was hard to tell for sure in the sandstorm—they circled up, this time on the north slope of the hill.
“That was awfully quick,” Wade said, “even coming from the camp.”
“That wasn’t their QRF,” Brannigan replied. “That was somebody else, coming up from the south.” He squinted at Price in the haze. “The Chinese, maybe?”
“It wouldn’t surprise me,” Price replied. “This bunch has been pretty persistent.”
“Maybe that’s our opening,” Wade said. “If we get between the Humanity Front camp and the Chinese...”
“We might just get shot to death from two directions,” Price snorted.
A sudden storm of gunfire off to the southeast crackled over the hiss and howl of the haboob, interrupting Price. Everyone froze for a moment, but none of the fire seemed to be close.
“I think that solves that,” Brannigan said. “The Chinese and the Humanity Front are shooting at each other. We’ve got our Red on Red, whether we want it or not.
“Let’s move before they figure it out.”
Chapter 22
The fire from the halted convoy had died away to almost nothing, and everything but the shifting, whirling sand and dust had stopped moving.
It was making Flanagan nervous as hell.
He had shifted position again, but he was running out of covered and concealed positions with a shot at the convoy. He braced his rifle against the base of the acacia’s trunk, and peered over the sights, squinting as he searched for a target. The dust was stinging his eyes, and it was increasingly difficult to keep them open against the relentless sandblasting, even with his shades on.
He hadn’t heard a call from Brannigan, but with the storm on top of them, that shouldn’t surprise him. They were going to have to move soon, anyway, whether Brannigan spotted the enemy react force or not. With a haboob this bad h
owling across the Sahel, Flanagan would frankly be surprised if any of the others had managed to see the react force leave the camp.
Not to mention the fact that they’d been moving, possibly under fire, even before the birds had lifted.
He scanned the dim, hulking shapes of the stationary Hawkeis again, and suddenly felt an intense sense of urgency to get away from there. The bad guys had hunkered down, and somehow, he knew that things were going to go south in any second.
But even with the storm sweeping waves of dust around them, several times completely obscuring the Hawkei armored vehicles still holding their position in the wadi, he didn’t get up to move. He was too old a hand, too wary for that. Instead, he crawled backward, easing away from the acacia tree until he had some terrain between him and the enemy, regardless of the concealment provided by the storm.
Getting to his feet but staying in a low crouch, that was rendered more painful by years of wear and tear on back and knees, he started back along the edge of the wadi, toward the last place he’d seen Vernon. The grit lashed at him, and it felt like it was abrading every exposed bit of skin. He squinted against the blowing dust, looking for the shapes of his comrades before he stumbled on them.
He fought against the wind, dodging from tree to tree, keeping as low as he could. Vernon was an almost invisible heap under a thickening coat of dust, lying in the prone behind his flat dark earth SCAR 16. His dark skin was powdered with it, what was visible around his tan clothing and the black-and-white shemagh he’d wrapped around his nose and mouth.
Flanagan barked, “Friendly!” as he approached. Under different circumstances, he’d try to stay quiet, but with the storm hissing and moaning around them, their deadened hearing from the gunfire, and the concealment of the blowing dust, he wasn’t taking chances with catching a friendly bullet. Besides, it wasn’t as if the bad guys didn’t already know they were there.
Vernon lifted his head and waved his off hand to acknowledge, and Flanagan hurried over to crouch next to him, barely concealed by the crooked trunk of an acacia tree. “Start peeling down the wadi,” Flanagan said. “We’ve got to move.”
