by Isaac Hooke
He could have remained safely behind, four kilometers to the west, in the camp of the other battle sheiks and generals, sipping cardamom-spiced black tea on fluffy pillows while the men fought, but that was not his way. The trenches were his home. Besides, the men respected him more for it.
The enemy was holed up inside a mosque on the opposite side of the village. Their artillery was hidden behind a towering wall, directed by spotters who stood on the walkways. He couldn't get his own field guns into position on the hill to the south of the village, not while the enemy artillery remained intact. He needed a distraction.
He went to the truck. The cab had been filled to the brim with C4. "Osama," he told the driver in Arabic. "You feast in paradise tonight."
The driver had a fervent look to his eye. "Thank you for choosing me, emir."
Dmitri suppressed a smirk. He would never so willingly throw his own life away, but such fervency in others had its uses. "Die well." He grabbed the Hytera from a harness on his chest. "Covering fire," he said into the radio.
The mujahadeen lining the rooftops unleashed suppressive fire toward the mosque, forcing the spotters from sight.
"Go, Osama," he told the driver.
The suicide bomber accelerated the truck into the street, driving over the potholes at eighty kilometers an hour. He swerved past several large blast craters, moving relentlessly toward his target. When the truck impacted the defensive wall, the C4 detonated and the entire mosque was obscured by an orange fireball. A large plume of black smoke curled skyward.
"First technical, away!" Dmitri said into the radio.
A pickup truck with a ZU-23 anti-aircraft gun in the bed rushed forward, firing its 23mm shells into the smoke plume.
"Artillery, into position!" Dmitri called over the comm.
Through his Baigish 12x binoculars, he watched as Mitsubishi pickups towed the Type 59-1 Field Guns up the hill to the south of the village.
He returned his attention to the battlefield.
The first technical abruptly flipped into the air, apparently struck by an RPG.
"Second technical, away!"
Another pickup truck swerved onto the street; the mujahid in the back unleashed the anti-aircraft gun indiscriminately toward the mosque.
"Artillery in position," came a voice over the radio.
"Fire!" Dmitri said.
The Field Guns on the hill erupted, spraying the sky with deadly shells. One of them whistled rather loudly during its descent, and Dmitri realized it was going to fall dangerously short. He resisted the urge to seek cover. He had to appear strong in front of these madmen. It was the only way to lead them.
The shell struck some fifteen meters from his own position, spraying concrete from a nearby building onto some of his troops. Another shell impacted the second technical dead on. The friendly pickup spiraled into the air in a spray of body parts and shrapnel.
"Fools," he muttered.
The men operating the Field Guns finally sighted the weapons properly, and the shells began to strike the courtyard interior. In moments it was all over. Some of the enemy spotters had begun to wave white flags—they were immediately shot down. The rest retreated; through his binoculars, Dmitri peered past the mosque and saw pickup trucks fleeing across the desert by the score.
"The village is ours," Dmitri announced.
"Allahu akbar!" the men around him shouted. "Allahu akbar! Allahu akbar!"
"Not Allah, but Dmitri," he said softly.
In that moment he reminisced, as he often did, on the path that had brought him to that place. So long, so tortuous, like the plumes of smoke rising from the destruction his men wreaked. He wondered what his old commanders would think of what he was doing there. They probably wouldn't care. Russia wasn't overly concerned about the Islamic State presence, not in Iraq at least. Few governments were. In fact, the Kremlin probably secretly approved of the Iraqi Civil War—the jihad was a useful sink for radical Chechens, drawing them away from the motherland to fight in faraway wars. His former commanders would applaud Dmitri for performing his patriotic duty and sending those Sunni Chechens to their deaths.
The Islamic State's incursion into neighboring Syria, however, was another matter entirely. Russia backed the Shiite president, of course: anyone who was an enemy of both the United States and the Chechens was clearly a friend of Russia. Already Dmitri had heard rumors that an advance force of his countrymen had infiltrated Syria, likely preparing for the arrival of a bigger deployment in the months ahead. If ever Dmitri found himself facing a Russian-backed force, he would know he had overstayed his welcome in the region. But until then he was happy to pit savage against savage. A man had to earn a living, after all.
A black-clad individual approached. "Commander." It was one of his Russian lieutenants, Pyotr. "There is a call for you. It is the shef."
Dmitri returned to the Iraqi M1114 Humvee, which acted as his mobile command center, and picked up the Thuraya satphone.
"Yes?" he said in Russian.
"Greetings, comrade," Victor's cheerful voice came over the line.
"What do you want?" Dmitri said. "I'm busy."
"I know you're busy."
He could hear the contempt in Victor's voice. Contempt, spite and distaste, all rolled into one. Dmitri swore he would kill the pompous whoreson someday. But as his employer, Victor did have his uses. For now. But as soon as the man stopped finding well-paying jobs, he was dead.
"I need you back in Mosul," Victor continued. "An unexpected... prize... has fallen into our laps."
1
Through his range finder, Ethan watched the two laser-guided JDAMs slam into the apartment building. The resultant smoke obscured the field of view instantly, while the rumbling explosion drowned out the retreat of the bomber overhead. He raised his head to observe the distant cloud with his own two eyes.
The PRC-153, one of two radios in Ethan's harness, crackled to life.
"Goddamn," William said over the encrypted channel. "Take a good, long look. That was my kill."
"Just because you tagged the building doesn't make it yours," Doug returned over the comm.
"Sure it does," William transmitted. "The boots on the ground always get the credit."
"Right," Doug sent. "Tell that to the Air Force."
"I will," William quipped in return.
Ethan lay flat on the white-brick rooftop, the LRB 20000C laser range finder mounted before him on a mini tripod. Beside him resided Alzena, dressed in combat fatigues and a camo cap. He was training her to use his M24A2 sniper rifle, "Beast."
Sensing his gaze, she reverently lowered the sniper rifle and glanced his way. A native Syrian, born in Aleppo, she was half Kurdish, and looked like a dark-haired, blue-eyed, olive-skinned cover model. With Ethan's help she'd fled the Islamic State's brutal reign of terror in Raqqa, their self-proclaimed capital in southeastern Syria. He had been embedded in IS as a foreign jihadist, and shortly after her evacuation he'd found himself assigned to Kobane; when he'd abandoned the deathtrap of the battle there and crossed over to the Kurdish side, he'd discovered her fighting amongst the rebels.
He returned his attention to the streets below. Abutting the paved roadways were low-lying, flat-roofed buildings made of white bricks, much like the house he perched upon. Roughly half the structures remained intact. The rest, collapsed husks, crowded the streets with their rubble. The macabre, fly-covered bodies of dead militants blemished the debris in places. Ethan hated those flies with a passion; the face-swelling lumps they inflicted could itch for days.
Kurdish fighters were perched on most of the surviving rooftops; a group of them emerged from the clearing smoke near the cratered apartment. Miscellaneous chatter erupted from the second radio Ethan carried, a Hytera TC-610, as the Kurds exchanged unintelligible words in their native tongue over the unencrypted channel.
He glanced at Alzena questioningly.
"They've given the all clear," she explained.
What a punish
ing last few months it had been. The Kurdish defenders had pushed the Islamic State out of Kobane and were now routing the invaders from the surrounding villages. It was a long, arduous, village-by-village and house-by-house operation, but the Islamic State was slowly retreating, thanks to the relentless airstrikes.
Ethan and two other teammates had stayed to train the Kurds. Officially, theirs was a consulting role, but they couldn't help but fight in the thick of it. They had all been members of special forces teams before contracting with the DIA. For himself, Ethan wasn't going to sit idly by while his trainees fought and died: warriors fought when in war, and that was all there was to it.
"That was the last of them," Doug radioed. "Regroup. Follow the yellow brick road."
Ethan scanned the buildings one last time through his range finder. Satisfied that Doug was right, Ethan retrieved his smartphone and connected a USB stick via an adapter. That stick contained an RF antenna that could be used to send encrypted messages, among other things. Doug was using his own stick to radio his position, and it appeared on Ethan's phone as a flashing dot on the GPS map.
Ethan packed his gear into a backpack and stood. He let Alzena carry Beast. The two of them picked their way across the rubble-strewn street, the bricks of collapsed buildings forming long fans across the asphalt—the "yellow brick road." The air felt crisp, the deceptively bright sun imparting little heat to the landscape. It was good to be moving again, if only for the body heat the motion generated. He half-wished he had a sweater layered underneath his combat jacket. A T-shirt didn't really cut it in the middle of winter, not in that country.
Ethan did some impromptu bicep curls with the backpack as he walked. He was still working on building up the left muscle, which had suffered a perforating gunshot wound during his flight across Kurdish lines in Kobane. It had taken three months to heal—in a sling. The muscle had withered from his inability to use it, but as soon as the sling went off he began performing bicep curls at every opportunity. The left bicep was still quite a bit smaller than the right, but he hoped to remedy that in a month or two. The entrance scar on the outside of the muscle was an almost unnoticeable thin line, while the exit scar on the inside of the arm was a large, jagged mess.
"How's it feel?" Alzena asked him.
"Good." He still felt some minor pain deep in the muscle as he moved it, but he wasn't about to tell her that.
They reached the town square shortly. Bronze statues had been spaced around the square on plinths, but most had toppled. Lounging against the yellow rim of a half-destroyed fountain in the center awaited Doug and William. They were dressed in the same fatigues as Ethan and Alzena.
"To a job well done." Doug raised a beer bottle in toast.
"Where the hell did you find beer out here?" Ethan said.
"One of the fridges," Doug said. With his bronze skin, sharp nose, and thick brows and beard, he was the spitting image of a typical Gulf Arab. In actuality he was from California.
Doug took a long sip, spilling suds on his dusty beard, then fetched a bottle from the six-pack beside him and offered it to Ethan.
"No," Ethan said, refusing the beer. "You can't be looting homes like that."
"It's just beer, bro," Doug said. "It'll spoil if we don't drink it. We're doing the homeowners a favor."
"Come on, go ahead," William urged. "I'm sure they won't mind, given all we've done for them." That thick Texan drawl seemed out of place coming from William's olive-skinned face: like Doug, he looked very much a citizen of the Middle East.
Doug pressed the bottle into Ethan's chest.
"All right all right." Ethan snatched the bottle and shoved Doug's arm away. He studied the label. "The hell's this? Al-Shark?"
"Best beer in Syria," Doug said. "Brewed in Aleppo."
Ethan spotted the large deposit of sediment at the bottom and grimaced.
"The beer that drinks like a meal," William commented.
"I'll bet." Ethan placed the seam of the bottle cap against the rim of the fountain and gave the beer a hard tap with his other hand, popping the cap off. He brought the lip to his nose and inhaled. "Smells a bit musty."
William gazed at him, eyes shining with amusement.
"What?" Ethan said.
"Nothing."
Ethan cautiously took a sip and immediately spat it out.
"What's the matter, don't like warm beer?" William said with a chortle. "That reaction was classic."
Ethan grimaced. "Tastes like camel piss."
"You would know what that tastes like." William took a swig from his own bottle. "Isn't the best tasting beer, I admit. But it'll do."
Reluctantly, Ethan forced himself to have another sip. It tasted a little better the second time, and he actually didn't spit it out.
"But you're right," William continued. "Wouldn't surprise me if the jihadis pissed in these bottles and then popped the caps back on. A little parting gift for us."
Alzena shifted beside Ethan. He offered the bottle to her but she shook her head.
"There's no sharia law out here," Ethan told her in Arabic. "You can drink alcohol if you want. This land is free now."
"Free, yes," Alzena said, staring at the ruins. "Though sometimes I wonder at the cost."
Ethan didn't have an answer for her. Wanting to distract her obviously troubled mind, he extended the beer again. "Come on, drink. If only to spite the Islamic State."
"I thought you said it tastes like camel piss?" Alzena answered. She could understand most English, but couldn't speak a word of it.
Ethan laughed. "Just a figure of speech."
"I prefer wine," she said.
Ethan shrugged, then downed another mouthful of the terrible stuff.
"Who do you think he was?" William gestured at the bronze statue of some mustached Iraqi standing on a plinth beside the fountain, the only statue that had survived the destruction. The bluish patina coating the surface was a testament to its age.
"Dunno," Doug said. "But if you ask me, he looks like he could use a beer."
"Hey, bro, want a beer?" William asked the statue. He paused. "Says no."
Snickering, Ethan glanced at Alzena. "This is what happens when you get them drunk. They start conversing with statues."
"If a statue survives an airstrike, what does it mean?" William said. "Is it a sign of things to come? Does it symbolize the fight of the people it represents, and their unwillingness to give up? Or is it just some random thing, the arbitrary dispersal of a bomb's fragmentation pattern?"
Ethan mouthed to Alzena: "Drunk."
William caught him. "Hey, I'm trying to have a philosophical discussion here. Something I can't do when I'm sober."
"That's because you're too wound up when you're sober," Ethan said.
"Exactly. In our line of work, if you're not wound up, then there's something wrong."
Ethan pressed his lips together. "I won't argue that." He perched on the fountain beside Doug, and Alzena joined him.
"Got some news on Aaron," Doug said after a short sip.
Aaron was another DIA operative who had been embedded in the Islamic State with them. He was recovering in a German hospital from grievous wounds suffered in Kobane. Though Aaron had put on a brave face, acting like his gunshot wounds were nothing, according to William the former Army Ranger had nearly died by the time they'd made it across the Kurdish lines to safety.
Ethan glanced at Doug expectantly.
"His thigh is healing surprisingly well, apparently," Doug said. "But I've heard unwelcome mentions about possible cane use for life."
Ethan shook his head. "What about his shoulder?"
"It's responding positively to surgery," Doug said. "The doctors are saying his arm should have full range of motion back in six to eight months. That's including the three more surgeries he's scheduled for."
"Good news," Ethan said. When he had seen the injury, Ethan had doubted Aaron would make any sort of recovery at all. His shoulder had been basically destroyed. "The
wonders of medical science."
"Medical science has nothing to do with it," William said. "He's a hell of a fighter. He's not going to let some injury keep him down. And he won't be using no cane."
"He's got heart, that's for damn sure," Ethan agreed.
A gaunt man in his late forties approached. He had a brown beard flecked with gray, a weathered face with sharp lines climbing to his forehead, and dark eyes that could glint with humor one second and cold calculation the next. He would have looked like a street vendor if not for the fatigues.
Battle emir Seyed Baksi.
Three Kurdish deputies, one of them a woman, hovered protectively behind him.
Ethan and the others rose in a sign of respect.
Seyed grinned, shaking each of the operatives' hands in turn. He clutched Alzena's just a little longer than the others, eyes twinkling with obvious attraction. Then he released her hand and spoke in Kurdish.
"He thanks you for helping us in this fight," Alzena translated. "Without you, he fears we would be losing this war."
"Does he mean us, personally?" Ethan said. "Or the airstrikes?"
"Probably the airstrikes," Alzena conceded.
Ethan nodded. Though it pained him to admit it, in truth the operatives weren't making all that big of a difference in the war, not anymore. They had trained the Kurds as well as they could in the art of house-to-house fighting, but more importantly, they'd given them modified LLDR 2H target designators and shown them how to use the devices. Kurdish teams could pick out Islamic State targets for the bombers on their own now. And should the designators ever fall into the hands of the enemy, these versions could be disabled by serial number via a simple radio command.
Yes, Ethan and the others weren't really needed. Doug had already mentioned there was work available in Jordan or Turkey, if Ethan wanted it. That he had stayed as long as he had was only because of one person.
