Fury in the Gulf (Brannigan's Blackhearts Book 1)

by Peter Nealen

  It was something of a blessing, Brannigan thought, as he kept the boat’s bow steady to the northeast, that they had run into trouble at the checkpoint. They no longer had to worry about the guards there hearing the boats and possibly taking them under fire. They could also stay closer in to shore, reducing the distance they had to cover to get to their insert position.

  He was keeping one ear cocked, trying to hear over the slap of the waves, the hiss of water against the rubber gunwales, and the grumble of the engine. If Aziz’ diversion took longer to kick off than planned, then they would have to find a spot on the coast to go to ground and wait; he wasn’t going to loiter directly under a wall that had Iranian gunmen patrolling it.

  Come on, Aziz, give us a good, old fashioned, Middle Eastern street fight.

  ***

  The AK-12 barked, spitting a pair of rounds so close together that they almost made a single sound. His aim was still off. The Iranian standing up in the hatch beside the 20mm didn’t go down in a splash of gore. He didn’t appear to have been hit at all.

  He had noticed, though. Maybe the rounds had hit low, smacking off the armored vehicles’ glacis plate. Or maybe they’d gone high, ripping past his head with loud, supersonic snaps.

  Do 5.45 rounds stay supersonic that far out? Aziz didn’t know, and it annoyed him that he’d even mentally asked the question. He started to squeeze the trigger again, even though he had no idea where the rounds were going at that point.

  But the Iranian had apparently decided that he was taking small arms fire from the crowd, and began to react accordingly.

  He dropped down into the AMX’s hull, and no sooner had he disappeared than the 20mm began to depress.

  For an instant, seeing only that the cannon’s barrel was moving, Aziz was seized with the certainty that they had seen his muzzle flash, and that he was about to die in a hail of 20mm fire. There would barely be enough left of him to bury. He sucked in a breath to curse Brannigan for bringing him along on this suicide mission before he died, only to see the 20mm suddenly gout flame, spitting heavy slugs into the crowd at what amounted to point-blank range.

  Wherever those rounds hit, people died. Not in ones or twos, not at that range. The heavy penetrators smashed through stacks of bodies ten or twelve deep, blowing people in half and pulping limbs and organs into fine red sprays.

  In a moment, the guards up on the walls were also firing into the crowd. But the crowd didn’t disperse in shock, though a lot of the Loyalists were trying to. No, a good chunk of the crowd started shooting back.

  An RPG exploded from a nearby rooftop with a puff of smoke and a sluggishly following bang. The projectile hit the AMX’s flank in almost the same instant; the RPG gunner was that close. An ugly black puff of smoke and debris momentarily eclipsed the armored fighting vehicle, and the 20mm fell silent. A moment later, the AMX was burning fiercely, the crew burning alive inside, presuming that any of them hadn’t been instantly killed by the blast and fragmentation of the round as it penetrated the armor.

  All hell broke loose in the next few seconds. Someone up on the barbican opened fire with a machinegun, tearing hell out of the rooftop where the RPG had been fired, and everyone else up on the wall with a weapon started shooting. The crowd, what was left of it, was shooting back, flickering muzzle flashes visible even against the growing glare of the burning AFV.

  A moment later, the AMX’s ammunition started to cook off, at the same time that a volley of four more RPGs slammed into the battlements above the gate.

  Aziz decided that that was a good enough diversion. That should keep the Iranians focused on the gate and the Old City. It was time for him to leave, before he attracted any more attention.

  He wriggled backward a few feet before heaving himself to his feet and heading for the stairway. He had trotted down two floors when he suddenly froze, listening.

  It took a moment before he could filter the sounds through the growing roar of gunfire and explosions half a kilometer away. Someone was coming up the stairs. Several someones.

  His heart stopped. His mouth was drier than the Sahara. He was going to die, right there in that shitty, unfinished high-rise, in the middle of some shitty island city that had no right to be its own country in the first place. All because he’d let Brannigan and Santelli talk him into a job that had sounded a bit better than babysitting entitled millennials going to school on their parents’ dime, for reasons they couldn’t articulate.

  He forced his heart to start again, tearing his wide-eyed stare away from the stairway below him, looking for a place to hide, any place. Of course, there were dozens of the thick, square, concrete columns. Cursing himself for a moron, Aziz turned, slipped on the dust and grit on the concrete stairs, almost fell, then got his balance and scrambled out of the stairwell and across twenty feet of bare concrete floor, taking cover behind a column, hoping that there wasn’t anyone on the stairs with an angle to see through the presently non-existent walls to shoot him in the back.

  The intruders climbed higher, chatting in Arabic in low voices. He recognized one of the voices as the trio got closer. He’d remember that voice until the day he died. Abu Sayf.

  He was presently crouched with his back pressed against the cement pillar. Taking a deep, shaky breath, he slowly turned, easing one eye around the corner of the pillar.

  Abu Sayf and two of his henchmen were climbing the stairs. They weren’t moving quickly; there was no urgency there. The sadistic bastard wasn’t going to risk his own skin in the hellish firestorm up there in the square. He was looking for a vantage point where he could watch other men fight and die for his bullshit cause.

  Aziz almost shrank back behind the pillar to wait until Abu Sayf was gone. He could imagine a platoon of Al Qaeda fighters in the floors below, just waiting to come swarming up and kill him as soon as he made a noise.

  But the team could be gone by the time Abu Sayf and his bodyguard left. And if Aziz had seriously contemplated, without scruple, abandoning the rest, the very thought of being abandoned himself almost made him want to vomit.

  So, he tucked his AK-12 against his chest and came around the pillar, bringing the weapon to bear as fast as he could, the red dot settling just below Abu Sayf’s collarbone.

  He hadn’t safed the rifle. The two-round burst smashed through the top of Abu Sayf’s heart and lungs, and he dropped, spitting flecks of blood. Aziz switched targets faster than he ever had in his life, putting a two-round burst into each of the other two before Abu Sayf had even hit the concrete. It had been an amazing bit of shooting, if anyone else had seen it. To Aziz, though he would never admit it to anyone else, it had felt like frantic spray-and-pray.

  He quickly shot each man twice more, just to be sure. Then he was moving, circling around to try to get a shot at anyone else coming up the steps.

  Great job, fuckwit. You’ve now given your position away, and probably trapped yourself on the fourth fucking floor, with a bunch of rabid Al Qaeda types about to come up and finish your dumb ass off. So much for being the smartest guy on the team.

  But after he had hunkered down behind another pillar, aimed in at the stairwell, determined to sell himself as dearly as possible, he realized that there were no yells of alarm coming up from below, and no one was coming up after him or Abu Sayf.

  They’re waiting in ambush. They know better than to try to fight up the stairs. That’s a nightmare for shit-hot Delta guys, never mind these assholes.

  He almost stayed where he was. He was certain that if he started down those stairs, he was going to be shot and killed. And the only other way off was a four-story jump onto a pile of cinderblocks and rebar.

  He had no idea how long he stayed there, still aimed in on the stairway, sweating through his fatigues and dishdasha, unwilling to move or even breathe deeply, as the thunder of the fight up the hill intensified. It was probably only five minutes—though it seemed like five years—before he finally forced himself to move. The same horror of being left behind was
the only thing that got him moving. Even then, he was sure he was going to die as soon as he descended.

  The third floor was empty. So was the second. And the first. There wasn’t even a driver in the Kia van parked outside the construction site.

  Unable to believe his luck, Aziz plunged into the nearest dark alley and started making his way out of town.

  ***

  The roar of gunfire and the sharp detonations of RPGs were clearly audible, even on the other side of the Citadel and its rocky hill. Brannigan looked right and left, trying to make eye contact with the other coxswains, and then started the boat moving at a faster clip toward the breach. It was time to go.

  He just hoped and prayed that the Iranians were being sufficiently challenged at the gate to move all their firepower to the defense. After all, amphibious insertions leading into climbing up cliffs wasn’t usually an Al Qaeda technique.

  The waves were crashing against the cliffside as they passed under the corner tower, right at the edge of the cliff and the outer curtain wall. Brannigan kept his neck craned to watch that tower, struggling a little to keep the green circle of his NVGs centered on the battlements, looking for any sign of sentries, or simply machinegun barrels poking through the crenellations. If they were spotted, they were dead.

  But the tower remained quiet and dark. Maybe the Iranians had never manned it at all, figuring that they didn’t really need to worry about the seaward approaches. After all, if they could detect a Navy aircraft, leading to a hostage’s death, they must have gotten pretty confident that their only immediate threat came from the Salafists in town.

  The seaward wall probably hadn’t been really kept up in over five hundred years. For the most part, as far as Brannigan had been able to determine, the Citadel hadn’t been a genuine defensive fortification in at least that long. It hadn’t even been much of a tourist attraction; the Al Qays kings had used it as a palace and mark of status, little more. So, the breach wasn’t all that surprising.

  Centuries of waves had slowly eroded parts of the cliffs beneath the Citadel, and at that point, just north of the southernmost tower, part of the cliff had given way, tumbling into the sea. It had undercut the wall enough that a good chunk of the sandstone had gone with it. There was a mound of detritus beneath the breach, now little more than shallows in the ocean, as more years and decades of wave action had washed much of it out into the Gulf.

  Brannigan eased his boat a short distance out, trying to get a better angle on the breach itself. In the bow, Childress was behind his AK-12, aiming it up at the gap in the dark expanse of the wall.

  Movement caught his eye, and he glanced back down, seeing that Hancock was taking his boat in toward the cliffside. The former platoon sergeant was going to take advantage of Brannigan’s angle to cover the ascent.

  Bringing the boat to a halt, about seventy-five yards out from the cliff, Brannigan hissed at Villareal. “Doc, take the tiller,” he said. “Hold us steady.”

  Villareal nodded and moved to take his place, while Brannigan unslung his own AK and lay down across the boat, setting his back against the starboard gunwale, leveling his rifle at the gap.

  He would have preferred to be the first one up the ladder and into the breach. It was the way he’d always approached combat leadership, and he believed, all the way down to his bones, that that was a leader’s responsibility; to be the first one into danger, not to ask his men to do anything that he wasn’t going to go do first. But at the same time, he was also a believer in small-unit initiative, and he couldn’t fault Hancock. He had to roll with the punches and “fill, flow, and go,” as the old CQB saying about “initiative-based tactics” had said. There was no other way to work, not with such a small team.

  So he gritted his teeth, shoved his pride to the back of his mind, settled in behind his rifle, and covered for Hancock and Flanagan.

  ***

  The caving ladder was little more than a telescoping pole with flip-out rods for rungs and a hook on the top. As Hancock brought the bow of the boat up against the cliff, applying just enough throttle to keep them tight to the rock and keep them from drifting, Flanagan got the ladder out and started extending it.

  I hate these things. Flanagan had had to use them on maritime interdiction and a couple of compound raids in Afghanistan. They always felt flimsy, like they would buckle under the weight of a grown man and his kit at any moment. But he knew that there wasn’t any better option; Curtis had, of course, suggested ropes and grappling hooks, with “ninja” grappling hook launchers, but the odds of the hooks actually getting a decent purchase on the wreckage of the wall were too long. The ladders would have to do.

  Hell, is this thing even going to reach? He peered up the dark, wet rock of the cliff, trying to gauge just how high the breach was. It would really suck if the ladder only extended halfway. Then they were well and truly screwed. They’d have to head back with their tails between their legs, probably give the Tannhauser Petroleum people their money back, just because they’d miscalculated how high the breach in the wall was above the water.

  Screw that. He’d never admit it within Curtis’ hearing, but Flanagan had brought a collapsible grappling hook along with the decent length of climbing rope in his assault pack. If need be, he’d climb as high as he could on the caving ladder, then throw the hook and rope climb the rest of the way.

  Joe Flanagan didn’t like to lose.

  Carefully, his muscles straining against the poor leverage of the ladder at full length, he started to lift it against the cliff. The aluminum tubing was entirely too flexible at full extension, and bounced with every move. He slowed his movements down; even with the increasingly intense noises of what sounded like one hell of a firefight out in the city, he didn’t want the ladder banging against the rocks. Flanagan appreciated stealth; his own silence was often a point of pride. He hadn’t had a lot of time to get to know Childress, but there was already something of an unspoken, friendly rivalry developing between them as to just which one could be quieter and sneakier.

  He finally got the top of the ladder, waving like a whip antenna, straight overhead. Slowly, trying not to slip on the wet deck of the boat, he eased it against the cliffside. It came to rest with a slight clink. Not bad.

  He squinted up the cliffside. No, it hadn’t made it all the way to the breach, but it looked like it was close enough that he should be able to reach up and pull himself over without needing the rope. He’d still find a way to secure the rope and drop it down the cliff. That would be a better way to ascend than the ladder, with the base set on a boat, that could drift.

  Slinging his AK-12 on his back and cinching the sling down as tightly as he could, he drew his Makarov, shaking some of the water off of it and hoping that the Bulgarian pistol would still function despite the dousing it had gotten. He mounted the ladder, making sure his boot was securely on the rung before reaching for the next; the wet aluminum could be slippery. The boat creaked a little under his weight, as all two hundred plus pounds of man, weapon, and equipment was suddenly focused on a point barely two and a half inches across, but Hancock kept it steady.

  Neither man had said a word during the entire process. It wasn’t a time for talking.

  Slowly, keeping his knees as close to the cliff as he could, Flanagan began to ascend the ladder.

  Between the unavoidable movement of the boat and the flex of the ladder, it was probably the hairiest climb Flanagan had ever been on. He had to stop several times, clinging close to the ladder, trying to use his weight to press it as close to the rock as he could as the hook scraped against the rocks above him. Twice, he was dead certain that he was about to fall off the side of the cliff. He glanced down, trying to see where he should aim his fall, to give himself a little bit of a chance of surviving the impact with the water and however many rocks were underneath it.

  After what felt like an eternity, Flanagan was finally within arm’s reach of the breach in the wall. There was actually something of a crack in
the cliff where the collapse had occurred, and that, he saw, was the only reason that the ladder hadn’t slid off to one side and dumped him onto the rocks. The hook was just barely lodged in that crack.

  That could have been unpleasant. Flanagan’s mental commentary was usually as laconic and dry as his speech.

  The sea spray didn’t usually reach that high, so the rocks were dry and dusty. That just meant that his own soaked fatigues and gloves were going to be covered in salty mud in short order. Which was also going to present a few problems when it came to climbing the rocks.

  Lifting his foot to the next highest rung, Flanagan reached up into the crack, looking for a handhold. His sodden gloves weren’t getting much of a purchase; the dust immediately turned to mud and made the rocks slick, and the gloves didn’t want to hold. Even when he could get some friction, the gloves squished and stretched, sliding around on his fingers.

  Balanced precariously on the top of the ladder, Flanagan pulled his hand down, ripped the glove off with his teeth, and let it fall. He’d probably tear his soaked hands up on the rocks, but at least he’d know that he had a purchase.

  After repeating the same procedure with his other hand, he reached up again, wincing slightly as the rocks skinned his wet knuckles. But he found a grip and hauled himself up to where he could let go of the ladder with his other hand and grope for another handhold.

  He hooked his fingers on a protruding rock, only to have it shift as soon as he started to put weight on it. After a moment, he figured out that it was a fragment of one of the blocks of sandstone the wall was made of, that had become lodged in the crack during or after the collapse.

  Some more exploration got him what felt like a solid handhold, and, digging his fingers in as best he could, he hauled himself up until he could just get his NVGs over the rim of the breach.