The Return Of Dog Team

by William W. Johnstone

  Nobody at the farmhouse knew it yet, but it was the sound of the Dog Team’s Kilroy and Vang Bulo taking apart Colonel Munghal’s convoy.

  It was a distraction, a diversion for the farmhouse gang. The bunch in the garage came out first to investigate. They stood facing east, watching a line of fire rise from somewhere in the pass of the Rock of the Hawk. The sentries on the farmhouse roof lined the east rail to see what was happening. A couple of men came out of the front door into the yard. Another stood in the doorway, looking out toward the hills. They were calling back and forth to the crew from the garage, trying to find out what was happening. No one had a clue.

  The Special Forces unit took advantage of the opportunity to tighten their cordon around the target area. Niles in First Squad was crossing an open space between two sheds when one of the gang in the yard saw him. A burst of auto-fire ripped out as the gang member shot but missed.

  The fat was in the fire now. Special Forces team leader McBane gave the GO signal. The two squads moved into action.

  Steve Ireland armed and activated the stun bomb. He moved a half dozen paces to the right of it. He crouched down, covering. He counted off to himself, “One one thousand, two one thousand, three one thousand.” He squeezed his eyes shut, covered his ears with his hands, and opened his mouth to equalize the coming pressure.

  The stun bomb detonated, going off like a sonic boom, shaking the farmhouse on its frame. The concussion caused a cloud of dust to leap from the walls into the air. The blast was about equal to that of a quarter stick of dynamite. A bit more powerful than what Steve Ireland had been counting on. It not only blew the shutters off the window but blew the window in, too, glass, frame, and all. Smoke poured out of the blank oblong hole where the window had been.

  Steve’s ears rang and he felt more than a little bit stunned himself, but not so much that he froze instead of reacting. He stuck his machine gun muzzle in the lower-right-hand corner of the window frame, into the room. He wielded his weapon from a crouch, showing as little of himself as possible.

  The room, what he could see of it, was square sided, starkly funtional. Visibility was poor due to all the smoke and dust in the air. Stone dust rained down from the concrete ceiling. Manlike shapes stumbled around inside, flailing and coughing.

  An explosion went off on the east side of the farmhouse. Shots banged in the yard. Gunfire rattled, increasing in firepower and fury. There were shouts, screams. Some of the latter were drowned out by more gunfire and abruptly silenced. The guns remained vocal. It sounded like a pretty hot firefight.

  A man loomed up at the window and stood there, swaying. He must have been standing directly in front of the window when it blew. His face and body bristled with glass shards that had penetrated his flesh. He was streaked from head to toe with ribbons of red stuff.

  Steve Ireland fired a blast into the other’s middle at point-blank range. He fell backward violently, toppling from sight.

  Another man swam up in front of him. He wore a navy blue jogging suit with white racing stripes and a heavy-banded gold wristwatch, and carried an AK-47. Steve fired first.

  The man in the jogging suit backpedaled, staggering rearward until he slammed into the opposite wall. He stood leaning against the wall, eyes bulging, mouth gaping, head lolling. He was still holding on to his weapon but it wasn’t pointing at Steve anymore. His legs bent at the knees, and he slid down the wall, sitting down on the floor. A dark red vertical smear that could have been laid on with a stroke of a housepainter’s brush marked the wall. He fell forward, and the weapon fell, clattering, from his hand to the floor.

  Steve Ireland had already moved on to the next opponent. The key to clearing out multiple foes was to not freeze and hang on one target, but to stay loose and fluid and move on to the next and the next, knocking them down one after another until there were no more targets left.

  Several men stood clustered diagonally across from him in a corner. One wore a dark turban and a bowling shirt. Another wore a T-shirt bearing the logo of a British soccer club. He was pulling a long-barreled .44 out of a shoulder holster. The shoulder holster reached from under his arm to the top of his belt. It had a spring catch and flew open at the top to facilitate the shooter’s draw.

  A third wore a pale yellow button-down short-sleeved shirt, brown baggy slacks, and sneakers. He had wavy hair that fell in a curling lock over his forehead; moist, wide, dark brown eyes; sharp features; and a thin wisp of a mustache. He looked no more than eighteen years old. He was snatching up a rifle from where it stood leaning against the wall.

  Steve thrust the machine gun deeper into the room, aligning it with the trio. He opened up, squeezing off a series of bursts. The .44-toting gang member was fast. The gun was in his hand, bucking, pumping lead, the reports deafening. He missed. One slug buried itself deep in the window frame and the other sailed harmlessly through the window and over Steve Ireland’s head.

  Steve didn’t miss, placing a quick three-shot burst in the middle of the gunman’s face. The youth in the short-sleeved shirt had his rifle in hand, but he was still turning when Steve cut him down. The youth spun, toppled, crashed. The man in the turban was empty handed, but Steve cut him down anyway before he could fill his hand with a firearm. The room was clear of foes, as far as Steve could tell. The room was thick with smoke and dust. He couldn’t see the captive.

  There was a lull—at least, nobody else was shooting at him. For now. Steve used the opportunity to clamber up to the window sill and hop down into the room. He landed lightfooted, catlike. A thought came to him, something about going from the frying pan into the fire, but he brushed it aside.

  He was breathing heavily through his mouth. Gunsmoke choked him, making it hard to draw a breath. It stung his eyes, too. He got his back to a wall to one side of the window and looked around, scanning as much of the scene as he could. The stun bomb had blown out the ceiling lamp.

  A couple of construction-style portable electric lamps in wire holders were hung from hooks and pegs on the walls. They provided some light to see by. At the southeast corner of the room, a doorway with no door opened into a hall where lights burned. Some of their glow shone through into the room.

  Shooting sounded in the hall, and outside the farmhouse, too. Lots of it.

  Steve still saw no sign of the captive. Bodies littered the stone floor. One was that of a hooded man bound to a chair that lay on its side on the floor.

  Steve felt fairly sure in guessing that that was the captive. The captive was motionless. There were no wounds on him that Steve could see, but visibility in the room was spotty.

  A figure darted from the hall into the doorway. He was a big man with dark hair and a thick mustache. He wore tinted glasses that veiled the tops of his eyes but that were clear at the bottom rims. He wore a light blue polyester leisure suit, a shirt with floppy airplane-wing collars, and a black leather belt several inches wide with an ornate and oversized square silver buckle. His shiny square-toed black boots had silver buckles on their uppers and three-inch heels. He held a machine gun.

  He rushed in the room unware of Steve’s presence, which took him by surprise. Not a happy surprise, either. His expression was outraged, as though amazed by the American’s Yankee Doodle effrontery. He had even more reason for outrage an eyeblink later, as a burst from Steve’s weapon cut him down. Steve stitched a diagonal line across the other’s torso.

  The gang member bounced around in the doorway, half turning, half falling into the hall. His finger tightened on the trigger of his machine gun. Lead sprayed, tagging the stone walls and floor. Concrete and rock shards flew upward. Steve shot him again, and the other dropped the machine gun, silencing it. He fell down and was dead.

  Steve tried to look everywhere at once and cover everything with the muzzle of his M4. He panted for breath, as if he’d just finished running several miles. He was stifling inside his helmet, body armor, and fatigues. Sweat seemed to start from every pore. He realized he was grinding his tee
th.

  The room was a butcher shop, and Steve Ireland was the meat cutter. He felt slightly sick, the residue of the juices of fear and adrenaline.

  A body on the floor twitched, and he fired a quick burst into it. Good thing it hadn’t been the captive. The captive continued to be motionless.

  Steve stepped through the doorway into the hall. A Special Forces trooper stood there: Garza. He and Steve saw each other at the same time. It was a good thing that neither of them fired by reflex.

  The farmhouse’s front door was open. Through it, Steve could see a couple of bodies of Akkad gang members sprawled in the yard.

  Another Second Squad member entered, coming in from the yard. Calhoun. Calhoun was a medical specialist.

  Steve said, “Am I glad to see you! Come take a look at al-Magid.”

  Calhoun said, “How is he?”

  “I don’t know, that’s why I want you to take a look at him.”

  The front door was to Steve’s right. It opened on to a wide hall, where a stone staircase with wooden banisters and railings took a zigzag course upward to the roof.

  A rattle sounded at the top of the stairs. Garza was facing in that direction. Steve and Calhoun had started for the north end room. Steve glanced at Garza. Garza did a double-take that was almost comical in its extremes. His eyes bulged, his jaw dropped. He took a deep breath to shout a warning.

  Steve was already moving, pivoting toward the direction where Garza was standing, swinging the machine gun along with him.

  A gang member crouched at the top of the stairs, just below the roof, where he’d been hiding. He fired his rifle. He was shooting downward at a sharp angle and missed all three Americans.

  Steve pointed the machine gun at the top of the stairs and sprayed lead. The gang member was neatly pinned inside the stairwell, half crouching, half sitting on the stairs just below the wooden landing.

  He cried out and fell, dropping his weapon. He tumbled down the first flight of stairs and across the landing, crashing into and through the wooden railing and banisters, and landing with a sound like wet laundry thumping to the floor.

  Garza covered the stairs and front while Calhoun followed Steve into the north room. The captive lay on his side, with his hands tied to the back of the overturned chair. Steve stood on one knee beside him. He checked for booby traps and other devices. Iraq was the home of the IED, or improvised explosive device, and he wanted to make sure that the Akkad gang hadn’t been doing any improvising of diabolical mechanisms on the captive. He found none. While he was checking, he had to handle the captive. The other’s flesh was warm and in his chest a heartbeat.

  “He’s alive,” Steve said. He reached for the hood to unmask the man. Hand on the bottom of the hood, he paused. He said, “I just had a hell of a thought—what if it’s not al-Magid under the hood? What if they switched him for a ringer? Then what do we do?”

  Calhoun said dryly, “Keep on going straight into Iran.”

  Steve pulled the hood off. Calhoun pressed in, looking over his shoulder.

  “Ali al-Magid,” Calhoun said, a bit breathlessly.

  Steve said, “All right.”

  Ali al-Magid was unconscious. His skin was sallow, his breathing labored. Clusters of half-healed cuts and bruises showed on his face. His mustache was straggly and drooping, he had an eight-day growth of beard. A string of saliva leaked from a corner of his mouth, leaving a wet, glistening patch of drool on his chin.

  Steve said, “Is he knocked out?”

  “Drugged, I think,” Calhoun said. “Help me untie him.”

  Steve used his knife to cut the ropes binding al-Magid to the chair. He and Calhoun eased the unconscious man to his back on the floor. It was as good a place as any. The room had been shot up pretty bad. There was a lot of blood on the floor on the other side of the room, where most of the bodies had fallen.

  Calhoun hung up one of the wire-basket electric lamps nearby. He opened his doctor’s bag and went to work.

  Steve Ireland would only be in the way. He went out, into the front hall. Garza and Ervil, another squad member, were coming down from the roof, descending the stairs. Ervil had a long, narrow fish face and pale, watery eyes. Everything about his face was hard and bony, except for the eyes, which were like skinless green grapes.

  “We cleared the roof,” he said. “Nobody up there.”

  Steve indicated the view through the front door to the yard and outbuildings. He said, “Out there?”

  Garza said, “A turkey shoot. The gang outside was obliging enough to bunch up when we caught ’em in a crossfire.”

  Niles appeared, coming out of the south wing of the building. He was a light-skinned black guy with pointed features and almond-shaped eyes. “All clear,” he said. “Me and Creedy did a room-to-room search and didn’t find anybody else. Not even a body. Most of the gang must’ve gathered outside to see what the shooting was all about.”

  Steve said feelingly, “What was it all about?”

  Niles shrugged. “Damned if I know, but it sure was convenient. It flushed most of the bad guys out into the open.”

  Ervil said, “Some border dustup, most likely. More of these bastards double-crossing each other.”

  McBane reported in by his communicator that the site was secured. Steve Ireland went outside to see what there was to see and to determine what he could do, if anything. Even sandstorm murk felt refreshing after being penned in the farmhouse miasma of smoke, blood, and stink.

  Several bodies of gang members lay strewn on the ground in front of the farmhouse in the angular contortions of violent death. More corpses lay scattered on the ground in front of the garage. The garage was on fire. A couple of cars and trucks that had been stored in there were now burning. Bullets had exploded the vehicles’ gas tanks, and flaming gasoline had spread the blaze to the walls and roof of the structure.

  Winds fanned the flames, whipping them up like a stream of oxygen fueling a blowtorch. They carried away the smoke, whipping it along in near-horizontal streamers that stretched toward the north. They carried away much of the heat, too.

  The members of ODA 586 had escaped serious injury. Ernie Greco, “the Greek,” had been tagged in his upper left shoulder. He said he was all right, but his eyes went in and out of focus and he was a little wobbly on his feet.

  Calhoun sat him down and patched him up. He’d set up shop in the farmhouse’s front hall. There were too many bodies in the north room. The Greek’s wound had bled a lot, but the bullet had passed through the muscle without hitting any blood vessels or bones.

  The unit had two medical specialists, Calhoun and Paulus. Paulus was examining al-Magid. Team leader McBane was looking over Paulus’s shoulder, watching. Al-Magid lay on his back with a blanket covering him, still unconscious. Paulus thumbed back one of scientist’s eyelids, lifting it, looking at the eye. Paulus said, “Drugged. I could give him more stimulant, but he just had one shot, and it might be a strain on the system to give him another too soon—”

  McBane said, “Don’t bother if he can get along without it. Just as long as he doesn’t die on us.”

  “Not much danger of that. His heartbeat is slow but strong, steady. His condition is serious but not critical.”

  One of the first things McBane had ordered done was to detail a man or two to make sure that all the enemy bodies in the farmhouse were dead. They were. Outside, a couple of unit members carried out a similar task, making the rounds of the bodies sprawled in the yard.

  One Special Forces troop, Creedy, had a face nearly as wide as it was long, a square-shaped torso, and thick limbs. He was eyeing a body that lay near one of the tool sheds southwest of the garage.

  The body was of a sharp-featured, wiry young man in a dark thin windbreaker with white piping. He lay prone, with his head turned to one side and his arms raised.

  Creedy thought he’d seen him twitch. He turned, started toward him. The young man jumped up and started running away. Creedy shot him in the back. The yout
h fell, motionless. Creedy went to him, toeing the body. It lay in a similar position to the one it had been in when the youth was shamming, except that now his eyes were open, and so was his mouth. A cup’s worth of blood had spilled from his mouth, soaking into the ground.

  Garza and Ervil were nearby. They started toward him, weapons at the ready. Garza said, “Trouble?”

  “Not anymore,” Creedy said. “This one was faking. Careful. There could be others.”

  “Not the ones we saw. They were all shot up, shot to shit.”

  “That don’t mean nothing. Some of these babies are tough.”

  “Not tough enough to get around with half their brains leaking out.”

  “Why not? You seem to manage all right.”

  “Now listen, Creedy—”

  Ervil said, “Cut the shit, both of you. We’ve doing a job here.”

  Garza said, “Creedy started it with the trash talking—”

  Creedy groaned. “For Pete’s sake, can’t you take a joke?”

  Ervil said, “Can it.”

  They all went back to work. ODA 586 had accomplished the first part of its mission, namely, securing the person of Ali al-Magid and neutralizing the farmhouse personnel. Now it remained for them to exfiltrate the safe zone of Border Base Foxtrot.

  Tillotson, the comm specialist, had set up in the farmhouse. The winds were muffled, making it easier to hear, and there was less chance of windblown sand getting into the hardware and messing it up. The personal headset transceivers worked on a tight beam that was functional within the area of the farmhouse and its immediate surroundings but that tended to break up outside a radius of several hundred yards.

  A radio was used to communicate with the men left behind at the wadi and at Border Base Foxtrot. Donnicker and Virgil had stayed behind with Prester and the radio at the vehicles. Virgil was radio man.

  Tillotson was preparing to contact Foxtrot to initiate the withdrawal procedue when an emergency message came flashing in from Virgil at the wadi. Virgil said, “Company’s coming!” He sounded excited. “A caravan of hostiles just went by here.”