by Mark Harritt
“That doesn’t help us with our problem now,” Mike pointed out. “Even if we stop them here, they’ll probably come back. It’s too dangerous for them to stay here for the near future.”
Caul nodded, “I explained all of that to him.”
“He doesn’t believe you?”
Caul hesitated, “He stopped at calling me a liar, but it’s obvious that he doesn’t believe me.”
Ken was incredulous that the head man didn’t believe Caul, “But you have witnesses. Our men saw what happened when the Turinzoni came into their village. They saw what happened at the Sjurai base.”
Mike looked at Ken, “That’s actually a good idea.” He turned back to Caul, “Those three misfits that Mickey sparred with. They really hate Sjurai, right?”
A wry smile slipped across Caul’s lips, “That’s an understatement.”
Mike nodded, “Good. Maybe they can impress on the headman what’s about to happen here if he doesn’t move his people.”
Caul put his hands on his knees and stood up, “I’ll go get them.”
Everett stopped him, “Hang on.” He looked over at Geonti, “Geonti, you might want to go and talk to him as well.”
Caul looked at Geonti. Caul tried to mask his concern, but you could still see it on his face. Geonti looked down at the ground, and then nodded, “You’re right. I’ll tell him about Retha, and what they did to her.”
“Are you sure, Geonti?” Caul asked.
Geonti stood up and looked at Caul, “I’m sure.”
“Okay, let’s go get the others.”
Mike looked up at them, “Hopefully this works. Let me know what happens.”
Caul nodded before he slipped into the tree line with Geonti.
Mike turned back to Rieci, “So, the big problem is the amount of time that we have here. Some of the guys might get bored. We need to make sure that they don’t break cover. We don’t want to give our positions away.”
Rieci contemplated Mike’s concerns, “Well, I don’t think that will be as big a problem as you think. Our warriors are all hunters. They’re used to staying still.”
Mike smiled, “I forget about that. Sorry, I’m used to American G.I.s.”
“American? What’s a G.I.?” Rieci asked.
“Long story,” Everett answered, “America is the country that we were born in.”
“Country?”
“Ah, I guess tribe is the closest thing that you’d understand, but on a much, larger scale.”
Rieci took this in, and then pushed to the back of his mind, one more of the unexplainable mysteries about Mike and his team.
Mike continued, “What I’m worried about, is your position close to the mountains. You need to make sure that you have several routes out of the area, just in case something goes bad with this operation.”
Rieci waved off Mike’s concerns, “What could go bad? We know they’re coming, and they don’t know that we’re here.”
Mike shook his head, “Rieci, that’s a bad attitude to have. You never know what might happen. You can plan, and hope that you have good plan, but I can tell you, from experience, nothing ever goes as planned. You think you’re in the perfect ambush site, the enemy’s coming right down the path, about to step into the kill zone, and a soldier sneezes. Or, the enemy planted false information, and they planned an ambush for you. At that point, everything goes to hell, and you’re scrambling to try and get away from the enemy. Believe me, it’s always better to have a route out already planned.”
Everett nodded, “Mike’s right. I’ve been in a lot of operations like this. Most of them went well, some of them went sour. You always want to have a backup plan in place. We like the acronym, P.A.C.E. It means, primary, alternate, contingency, emergency. The more you plan, the less likely it is that you’ll be caught flat footed.”
Rieci looked unconvinced, but he grunted his acquiescence. Mike pointed at the map, “Now, this map is oriented so that the directions on the map are the same as they are on the ground. This is your ambush location. It looks like the best route out is south of the ambush site. The LZ that they might use to is north of there, so if you get attacked, this ravine right here gives you cover and concealment to get out of there. The ravine goes south for about five kilometers, and get deeper the further south you go. When you get to this point,” Mike pointed at another place on the map, “you can work your way to this landing zone for an emergency exfil. We’ve identified this LZ as code word, ‘Tripoli.’ Identify yourself to Shar, and then say the word, Tripoli, and he’ll know where to pick your unit up. This wooded knoll is your rally point.”
Mike looked at Rieci, “you got all of that?”
Rieci looked at the map. Rieci’s expression changed. Now he looked overwhelmed, “No, not at all.”
Mike grinned, “It’s okay. We have two days to do a ground reconnaissance. Everett’s working with your team, so he’ll take you and your squad leaders out to get the lay of the land. Run everybody through that ravine so that they know where it is and how to get to the LZ.”
Everett held out his hand for a fist bump, “Don’t worry, I’ll make sure that you’ve got it down pat, no prob.”
Rieci did a fist bump with Everett. Once again, he looked unconvinced, “I hope so.”
“Crawl, walk, run, Rieci, crawl, walk, run. You’re out of the crawl phase. Now you’re steppin’ up to the walk phase. I won’t let you down.”
Rieci still looked unconvinced. They went over it one more time, and then he got up to go check on his men. He was shaking his head as he walked away.
After Rieci left, Mike sighed and looked at Everett, “Are we doing this too soon?”
“What choice do we have? We leave and those people in the village have to endure the same horrors that Althus’ village did. I couldn’t live with myself if we let that happen.”
Mike shook his head, “I don’t know. I understand what you’re saying about the village, but I don’t know if these men are ready for combat.”
Everett shrugged his shoulders, “We’ll know after tomorrow night. They’ll succeed, or they’ll fail.” He paused, and looked at Mike, “It’s a hard world, Mike. They learn how to fight, or they die. They don’t have any other choices.”
Mike frowned, “Well, at least they’ll have us there to help them.”
----------------------------------------------------
The next two days went well. Geonti and Caul, along with the three troublemakers, were able to convince the local headman that he needed to move his people out of the area, at least for the duration of the operation. Mike hoped that they would reconsider staying after the operation against the Turinzoni, but who knew what would happen. They could only do so much. Horse to water, etc., etc.
Mike focused on the mission and on training the Contai. He was working with Lech and Lech’s team, so Mike worked him constantly. He also had Ken with him, so he was mentoring both of them, and the two squad leaders. Lech had caught onto the finer points that Mike and the team trained him on, and knew the basics of small unit tactics, answering every question that Mike asked correctly, so Mike let him run the show. If he saw something that needed to be corrected, he’d ask questions, trying to get Lech to think about what he was trying to get accomplished, and the best way to accomplish it.
Mike did the same thing if he thought Lech might have forgotten something. After a little while, his four protégés began to realize that when the questions started, they’d probably done something wrong or hadn’t thought something out all the way. So Mike switched things up on them, and started asking questions not only when they were doing something wrong, but also when they were doing something right. That threw them off for a bit, but they started to have fun with it.
“Lech what do you do if …”
Lech held up a hand, “At this point, I think I would probably stamp my feet, then beat my hands against the ground.”
Mike opened his mouth to say something, but Ken interrupted him, “Scream like a little girl
. I think I would definitely scream like a little girl. And run around in circles.”
Mike looked at all four of them. He saw the same resigned on all four faces, “Too many questions?”
Almost in unison, they nodded their agreement.
Mike laughed, “Okay, I’ll stop asking questions.”
They perked up and started smiling.
“I get it. We’ve done enough rehearsals; I’ve asked enough questions. Give the men a break. The next time we move, no rehearsal, we move into position and wait for the Turinzoni to show up.”
Mike kept to his word, and didn’t bother them anymore. They rested until the sun started to recede from the sky, and the shadows from the western mountains spread across the valley. They knew that the Turinzoni would come in the middle of the night. The Contai were hunter/gatherers, so they rose with the morning sun, which meant they went to bed early. The Turinzoni would use the villagers’ circadian rhythm against them. The warriors moved into their ambush positions, prepared to stay in place until the Turinzoni showed up.
They were lucky, because the Turinzoni had to lift off from the Sjurai base. Luis and John were monitoring the base, and would give them a heads up when the Turinzoni transport lifted. At approximately one hundred miles from the base, it would take the Turinzoni a little over an hour to get to the village.
It was well past midnight when the radio earpiece in Mike’s ear crackled with the news.
“Mike, this is Luis, over.”
Mike answered, “Luis, this is Mike, over.”
“Roger Mike. You have lift off. I say again, you have lift off, over.”
“Luis, roger, we have lift off, over.”
“Mike, this is Luis, out.”
Mike waited for a moment, then he called the other teams, “Teams, did you get that?”
“Team 1, roger.”
“Team 2, roger.”
“Team 3, roger.”
Caul answered last, “Roger, Mike.”
Mike rolled over and tapped Rieci, “One hour.”
Rieci did the same, and relayed the information the man next to him. It went all the way down the line, and soon, since he was the last man in line, Ken walked up and told Mike that everybody down the line had received the word, and were ready for the ambush. He headed back into the gloom to his position.
Time passed slowly. Mike kept looking at his watch, but the minute hand seemed to creep along. He was looking at his watch again when he felt Rieci’s hand on his arm. Mike looked over, and saw Rieci rubbing his jaw, next to his ear. It didn’t take long until Mike felt the sensation at the back of his teeth. Mike listened until he could hear the faint thrum of the turbines.
“Damn they’re quiet,” he thought to himself as the aircraft passed over. Since the anti-gravity engines did most of the heavy lifting, the engines didn’t have to create as much thrust to get the aircraft moving. It was a good thing they felt the antigravity field as the aircraft came close and passed over, otherwise they’d never even know the aircraft had arrived.
Mike felt the movement of the field above him, and then felt it pass over and beyond. In the sparse moonlight, he could see the square, blunted aircraft track through the night sky. The aircraft seemed to be heading southwest, which meant that the Turinzoni would be approaching the village via one of two routes, either the route that Mickey was on, or the one that Tom was on. But, they couldn’t be absolutely positive until the shuttle landed and unloaded the slavers.
“All teams, be advised, we have a transport inbound,” Mike relayed to the other team leaders.
After receiving replies from the other teams, Mike relaxed, listening to the area around him. While this seemed to be as straightforward mission, it never paid to get cocky. Mike knew that when things went south, they went south quickly and fairly dramatically.
Hopefully the Turinzoni wouldn’t expect a thing. If things were normal, the Turinzoni would deploy out of the smaller shuttle, and move toward the village, deploying the electronic net that paralyzed the villagers. Once the Turinzoni had all of the villagers collared, they would cull the old, the infirm, and the troublemakers. Then they would call in the larger transport aircraft to load the newly made slaves onto. That would be the beginning of the nightmare. The slaves would be taken back to the Turinzoni compound and treated like experimental animals.
Tonight though, was a new beginning for these men who, with their families, had been terrorized and murdered by the Turinzoni and the Sjurai biological engineers. Tonight the Turinzoni were going to learn that it wasn’t business as usual out here in the mountains, on this continent. God alone knew how many of the Contai on planet Earth had been tortured by the Sjurai aliens. From what Mike could figure out after talking with Shar, Daijj and the mechanics, there had been a systematic eradication of the Contai by someone called the Dostori Rev. If Mike and the team could train the Contai so that they could fight their own battles, then the depredations of the Turinzoni and other Sjurai would hopefully stop as the price of operations in men and equipment mounted.
Now, Mike felt the sensation in his jaw decrease as the transport settled on the other side of the village. Suddenly, Mike felt like he was in data withdrawal. He’d gotten so used to using the helmets with all of the sensory data feeds that he felt naked without them. It had been a very long time since he was in the field leading this many men. The last time was when he stepped into the platoon sergeant position in Baghdad as a young staff sergeant, back in the Ranger Regiment.
Now he had even more soldiers under his command, most of them untested in battle. He really wished he had a heads up display with a sit map to show him where his men were in relation to the enemy. That was the problem with relying on high tech solutions. You became too used to the technology, and when you didn’t have it, you felt naked without it.
It wouldn’t be good to rely on that technology, though. Not when training the Contai to conduct operations. The Contai wouldn’t have access to that kind of technology, so they had to do it old school. Everything that Mike and the team were training the Contai how to do had its roots in the guerrilla warfare that had been conducted across continents during the cold war between the USA and Russia. Most of the techniques had been refined during the Special Operations heyday of the Vietnam war, which was perfect when applied to the conditions here.
Mike’s thoughts were interrupted by the ‘KRUMP!’ sound of high explosives going off.
“Surprise, fucker,” Mike thought. The design of a claymore mine was pretty simple. With all the munitions and explosives, they’d taken from the Turinzoni compound, it had been amazingly simple to construct the same approximate weapon using cast iron and polymer compounds.
Mike listened as the claymore was followed by the sound of a M249 SAW shooting a quick burst of bullets, stopping, then shooting some more. That was followed again by the sound of captured Turinzoni rifles killing any of the Turinzoni soldiers that had survived the ambush.
The ambush finished quickly, signifying that they’d planned and executed it well. If the sound of the ambush intensified, that meant that something had gone wrong. It didn’t sound like that was a problem this time though. Mike was pretty sure from the sound of the decreasing gunfire that the ambush was over.
Then, Mike felt the pressure in the back of his jaw start to increase.
“Can anybody intercept that aircraft?” he asked.
“Yep, on it,” Tom replied, with his usual laconic nonchalance.
The sound of gunfire started to increase again as Tom’s team engaged the enemy transport. Mike could see random flashes of light as bullets scored hits along the fuselage of the aircraft. The aircraft gained altitude despite the fusillade of bullets hitting it. It slowly climbed and then turned to take the track that it had followed flying into the landing zone, which would take it right back over Mike’s position.
Mike quickly patted Rieci on the shoulder and pointed up. Rieci barked an order as Mike stood up and stepped out of his hide position
, trying to track the aircraft by the feeling in his ears. The sensation increased, and he could sense that it was heading toward them. Once again he saw the cumbersome shape of the transport in the moonlight. He lifted his rifle and started shooting. The men around him followed his example and started shooting at it as well.
Mike heard the turbines intensity increase as the pilot inside tried to escape the wall of bullets. It didn’t do any good, though. Those bullets were shredding his aircraft. A small flare of light began to spread as one of the turbines caught on fire. Smoke filled the air behind the aircraft, and it seemed to shudder as it flew. Mike realized that his team wasn’t the only one shooting at the aircraft. There was also gunfire coming from Everett’s position.
The fire from the turbine intensified, highlighting the aircraft as flames danced along the entire length of the fuselage. A small explosion caused the aircraft to lurch sideways. That was followed by a much larger explosion that engulfed the entire transport in flames. There was no way that anybody was left alive. The gravitics continued to work, even though the aircraft was functionally destroyed. Its forward momentum slowed as turbine fuel was consumed. The flaming platform slowly descended as the avionics fried in the inferno, until at last, the platform lost its grav drive completely and quickly tumbled to the ground. It looked like some giant had suddenly swatted it out of the air. Another explosion reverberated from the mountainside as the aircraft slammed into the ground, fire leaping through the sky from the impact.
“That’s going to leave a mark,” Mike heard Everett say through his earbud.
Mike turned around to his team, and noticed that everybody’s attention was drawn to the fire burning around the wreckage of the aircraft.
Mike pointed this out to Rieci, who started scolding the Contai about leaving their six and their perimeter unguarded. Mike, who was finally starting to understand enough of the Contai language to have long conversations, grinned when he heard the salty language that Rieci used on his recruits. More than a few English curse words were thrown in for emphasis as well.
