Six

by Charles W. Sasser

  As tension mounted, leaves and twigs crunching underneath advancing boots echoed in the stillness. Bear Graves looked stressed, tense, angry. Ortiz wore his game face. Chase was unable to rid himself of the image of the slaughtered family left as carrion. A large bird flitting from a nearby tree startled him. He fell into a crouch, weapon snapping to the ready. Fucking bird.

  The bird had also rattled Buckley and Fishbait. They grinned at Chase and shook their heads in self-deprecation.

  At the edge of the village where the forest fell back, Buckley leapfrogging on flank came upon what looked to be a fresh grave. Cautiously, amped up and ready with his weapon charged, he approached the first hut. He stepped over a fallen tree trunk and froze. There at his feet in the weeds sprawled a dead African with a number of bullet holes in his back. They were fresh wounds and still draining blood. The man wore the mixed uniform of a Boko Haram fighter.

  Nearby, Buddha Ortiz came upon another Boko Haram fighter shot dead. To his twelve, Alex Caulder slipped past a tree and stopped. He caught Graves’s attention and motioned downward with his eyes to a skinny kid lying face up in the grass. He had been shot through the back with exit wounds coming out the front of his tunic. His mouth hung agape, leaking fluids, his vacant eyes gazing up into the trees. His rifle lay unfired at his side.

  What the fuck had happened here?

  These men had died within the past hour or so. By the looks of things, death had caught them completely unaware, by surprise. Thick foliage and distance had absorbed the banging of rifles other than at that one point when Caulder thought he heard gunshots. It would probably have all been over within a minute or two at most. Call it planned treachery and assassinations.

  A vehicle engine sparking to life on the other side of the village disturbed the stillness. Shit! Graves threw Caulder a Go! The band of SEALs in fire team battle formation charged out of the trees and into the village for what Graves feared might be a last-ditch effort to rescue their former team leader—or to recover what was left of him.

  Chapter Seventy-Seven

  Abandoned Village, Nigeria

  Bear Graves had no time to waste waiting for Senior Chief Mule’s team to arrive on his flank and get into position to assist. All he could do was coordinate Mule’s eventual participation by radio while his own team stormed posthaste into the village. As his operators spread out through the outermost huts and shacks, he signaled Buckley to drop back with his 7.62 heavy machine gun to cover the advance.

  Several more bloodied bodies lay strewn among the buildings. A single shot cracked from ahead. A giant of a man armed with a crossbow went down execution style with a bullet through his cranium moments before a blue SUV roared out of Dodge from the opposite end of the village, headed out on the road that led deeper into the park. Graves caught only flashes of it between huts before it was gone in a tornado of dust. He was unable to tell anything about passengers or how many there were.

  Graves observed the crossbow man’s executioner and a number of other fighters assembling in a stay-behind force to cover the SUV’s escape. That meant a VIP or possible HVT was about to get away. But there was little he and his men could do about it now. They had their hands full.

  The foreign-looking fighters gathered around a pair of dark SUV vehicles to block the pathway through a clutch of buildings. They were garbed out in what Graves took to be surplus US camouflage BDUs. Even more astonishing, they were not Africans, but looked probably Eastern European. They seemed as surprised to see the SEALs as the SEALs were to see them. One of the men yelled something in Russian and ducked behind the driver’s door of the lead vehicle. He swung his rifle toward the SEALs. Fishbait picked him off with a single bullet through the head.

  His comrades dived for cover behind and underneath the two vehicles and opened up on the SEALs with a fierce crescendo of automatic rifle fire. Graves and his troops scattered for cover among the huts and rusted car bodies and returned fire for fire. Tracers crisscrossed between the SUVs and the abandoned hovels and shacks. Ghetto Chase plucked off one of the enemy soldiers as bullets thumped into wood, metal, and thatch and spanged off vehicles to ricochet with keening whines into the sky.

  Graves went for his radio, shouting into it to be heard above the deafening bedlam of battle. “This is Foxtrot Delta One. We are troops in contact.”

  Having seen these fighters and heard them shouting in Russian, Bear had no further doubt about who these mystery troops were. It all added up—outmoded surplus BDUs, Caucasians, speaking Russian … They were Chechens. Bear had run up against them in Afghanistan where they fought as allies with al-Qaeda and the Taliban. They had also been found fighting with ISIS in Syria and Iraq, in Africa, and elsewhere on the wrong side of the War on Terror. Rip Taggart had compared Chechens to Viet Cong guerrillas fought by US troops during the Vietnam War. They were a different breed, he said.

  “They fight till they die. They have more passion, more discipline, and less regard for life. They will transplant anywhere. I don’t think they ever eat or that they’re clear as to why they fight. They fight most of the time, anytime, anywhere. It’s like a fire in their bellies.”

  What surprised Bear most was finding them in Africa fighting Boko Haram, both of whom were ostensibly allies of ISIS and each other. He knew it wasn’t because the Chechens had turned righteous, that they were in Africa to wipe out this one particular Boko Haram cell. Treachery was somehow involved.

  The catalyst seemed to be Rip Taggart, or perhaps one or all of the other hostages. What else could it be? And if they came to seize Taggart from Boko Haram, what did they want with him? Unlike the relatively unsophisticated Jihadists of Boko Haram, they must know the United States never paid ransom.

  The escaping SUV concerned Bear and made it imperative that he and his team locate Taggart with haste. But first they had to deal with the Chechens.

  The Chechens were skilled warriors. Each side in the fight jockeyed for an advantage to defeat and kill the other. It was run-and-dodge fighting, a chess game played with life and death in the balance, with everything geared up by adrenaline and testosterone. Each passing second could deliver a man’s final breath.

  The deep coughing of a heavy Chechen machine gun erupted from a hut next to the cornered SUVs, its muzzle flickering and flashing from within the hut’s dim depths. Buckley crawled up along the side of a building and pumped a fifty-round burst into the hut. The Chechen continued pouring out lead to pin down Fishbait in an old sewage drainage ditch.

  Seeking to gain a better angle, Buck swept up his machine gun and dashed across an opening between two huts. The enemy gunner tracked him across the open with a cone of fire. Buck went to ground, skidding in behind a pile of mud bricks.

  Several Chechens had spread out into the village to bring the fight to the SEALs one on one. One of them heaved a grenade at Graves and Caulder as they jockeyed for position against the fighters at the SUVs. The two SEALs hit the dirt behind a hut just as the little hand bomb detonated with an eardrum-busting Cra-a-a-ck! The explosion tore out one side of the bungalow and peppered the air with shrapnel and debris.

  Uninjured, but with ears ringing, the two SEALs scuttled like lizards across the ground on their bellies to seek cover in a copse of gnarled fruit trees. Two Chechens pressed the matter and darted forward to the rusted hulk of a Toyota with its rubber rotted off and jacked up on its rims.

  Lying flat on his belly among the fruit trees, Bear rolled over on one side where he could look underneath the carriage of the Toyota to see boots on the other side. A squeeze of his H&K’s trigger blew a foot out from underneath its owner, dumping the man on the ground and exposing the full length of his body to Graves. He tapped a round underneath the abandoned car and into the Chechen’s screaming head, exploding it like a pumpkin struck by a sledgehammer.

  Caulder took care of the second Toyota Chechen the same way. He grinned at Bear. These poor fuckers will never learn.

  The tempo of the fight quickly turned in favo
r of the SEALs. Buddha Ortiz dumped an enemy fighter and then, sprinting through a hail of bullets, dived through the open door of a hut that, by the smell, must have served as a barracks, and which he hoped would give him an angle on the machine gunner who had Buck pinned down behind his pile of bricks.

  That didn’t work. The gunner switched from Buck to home in on Buddha. Fire chewed at Ortiz’s hut, stinging his face with wood splinters. Pinned down himself, he hugged the floor.

  Buddha’s action relieved Buckley of attention and provided him the opportunity he needed. He switched cover from the brick pile to a hut nearer his target where he opened up on the machine gun. A shriek of pain from inside the house told him he had scored. The gun went dormant.

  Buck’s gun also fell quiet. Nearby, Chase assumed his teammate may have run out of ammo. He ripped open the Velcro on the outside pouch of his pack where Caulder had advised him to store extra ammo and made a dash prepared to offer Buck a spare belt of 7.62. Buck, looking stunned, stood with his back against the outside wall of the building.

  “You low on rounds?” Chase asked him, panting from exertion and excitement. This was worse than Monster Mash.

  Buckley gave Chase a searching look. “Nah, I’m good.”

  He staggered back, clutching his side. “Ah, crap!”

  That was when Chase saw blood seeping out between Buck’s fingers. Buck crumpled to the ground, still hanging on to his weapon. A lucky round had found the opening between the SEAL’s protective torso plates above his hip. Buck was lapsing into shock.

  Buckley now lay fully exposed to the sonofabitch up-range who had shot him. Chase spotted the guy peeping around the corner of a nearby building trying to get a second shot at Buck to finish him off. Chase snap-fired. The shooter went down hard and final.

  Now in the clear, the FNG darted from cover into the open and dragged Buckley behind the hut. “Man down! Behind southwest building!” he radioed through his helmet mike.

  Having secured the wounded SEAL, Chase scooped up Buck’s machine gun and hustled to the corner of the hut to resume Buck’s cover position. He opened up on his first available target—a Chechen running from the hut where Buck had killed the previous gunner. This guy had apparently gone in the back door and recovered the dead man’s heavy weapon. He avoided Chase’s fire and ducked behind the first of the two bullet-riddled SUVs.

  On the other flank, Ortiz was ready for him. He released a 40mm round from his H&K M320 GLM. The grenade hissed across the abandoned village and through the sagging open door of the SUV behind which the Chechen had gone to ground. The white-hot explosion hurled the Chechen soldier’s body out from hiding. He was dead by the time he hit the ground.

  The SEALs looked about for fresh targets as a sudden, eerie silence fell over the village. There was no immediate sign of further life other than Bear’s team. Bloody corpses of Chechens killed by SEALs and Boko Haram fighters executed by Chechens lay strewn on the battlefield. The firefight was over. It had lasted less than five minutes.

  Senior Chief Mule and his backup team arrived too late to get in on the action. Bear’s team had suffered one casualty—Petty Officer Buck Buckley. An air force pararescueman, a PJ, accompanied Mule’s SEALs.

  Buck lapsed into semiconsciousness. The PJ removed his patient’s protective plates and slit open his cammie jacket and trousers to expose bright blood gushing from a bullet wound low on the SEAL’s side just above his hip. The wound was bad; the aorta may have been severed.

  “You see an exit wound?” the PJ asked Ortiz as he applied a field pressure bandage.

  Buddha quickly inspected the rest of Buck’s body. “Negative.”

  Buck went into convulsions, coughing violently and spraying Buddha with blood.

  Chapter Seventy-Eight

  Abandoned Village, Nigeria

  The abandoned village was now definitely abandoned, except for the temporary presence of the SEALs and the eternal occupancy of the ghosts of those who died here today. SEALs rushed hut to hut to secure the area. They found food and weapons and fuel and items of clothing stored in some of the huts, along with bedding and personal items. One of the huts containing prayer rugs and a few copies of the Quran apparently served as a mosque. A flatbed truck and a Humvee were parked near what appeared to have been a HQ of some sort and the residence of a warlord. There was little else that might have transformed this village into a real home. It had simply been the temporary base of bloodthirsty and cruel terrorists that needed to be wiped completely off the map. Senior Chief Mule suggested they burn it to the ground when they left.

  Alex Caulder discovered the holding cell. The first thing he saw when he entered the hut was the corpse of a large, long-limbed African male wearing the makeshift Boko Haram uniform, slumped against the wall just inside the door. A machete lay on the floor next to him. Like the others, he appeared to have been taken by surprise and executed.

  Aabid the Boko Haram warlord and terrorist was full of bullet holes, having died in violence the way he lived.

  Signs of occupancy confirmed that a number of people had been confined for quite some time—water gourds, bits of cloth, small bare footprints on the dirt floor that must have been made by the seized schoolgirls, larger adult prints of at least five adults.

  Caulder went to the door and called out to Graves. “No hostages.”

  Bear feared that hostages may have been passengers in the SUV when it sped out of the village. There was no way to know if Rip was among them. Nor, if he had been, why he had been taken and for what nefarious purpose was he being kept alive. It was a mystery with no foreseeable hopes of solving it.

  The large wooden cross in the courtyard with bloody tethers hanging from it was still another mystery. Obviously someone had been hung on it and tortured, perhaps in some kind of bizarre reenactment of Christ on the cross. But this was not Calvary and Rip was not Jesus. If he died on that cross, which seemed one possibility, he was not apt to rise again from the tomb.

  Gloomy and disappointed, Graves and Caulder made their way back to where the PJ was working on Buckley. Gone was the twist of Buck’s lips that gave him the appearance of a hipster vice cop. His dark wavy hair was crusted with dirt, sweat, and blood. He looked pale and lifeless, unmoving, the bandages around his torso soaked in blood. The rest of the team gathered at his side.

  “How bad?” Graves asked the PJ.

  “Is he bleeding out?” Ortiz asked.

  The PJ drew a deep breath and nodded grimly. “Hit between the plates, tension pneumothorax, internal bleeding. He’s urgent surgical.”

  Graves felt gut-punched. He stepped away and got on the radio to Mission Control. “This is Foxtrot Delta One. Execute QRF. We need immediate CASEVAC. Single, Cat Alpha, urgent surgical.”

  Category Alpha meant Buck might be dying, would in fact die unless he received definitive care soon.

  After a break, Bear added, “This is Delta Foxtrot One. Target secure. We have a dry hole. Commence SSF.”

  Buck hung on by one heartbeat after another until, with relief, his comrades heard the thrashing rotors of the approaching Black Hawk medevac kept on-call at the warehouse staging area. Graves, Caulder, Chase, and Ortiz, one on each corner of a poncho, carried their critically-wounded teammate to the village square where Fishbait marked the LZ with a discarded shirt and was hand-signaling the bird in on it.

  Structures surrounding the square and the cross in the center of the small clearing prevented the chopper’s touching down. It hovered in a swirling cloud of dust as a gurney at the end of a cable descended from the aircraft’s open door. The PJ along with Caulder and Chase worked quickly to secure Buck to it.

  Bear Graves stood by while he felt his thoughts haunted by the sermon Pastor Adams delivered last Sunday before Bear received his 999999. They were words spoken by prophets of the Old Testament.

  “The Lord saw how great the wickedness of the human race had become on the Earth …”

  Once Buck was secured on the gurney, Caulder
and Chase stepped away to allow him to be winched up into the belly of the black bird while the PJ hung on and rode up with him. Rotor wash like a wind before rain whipped their clothing and hair. “… and that every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time.”

  Buck’s stricken teammates stared up at the gurney, taking what they feared might be their last look at their brother alive, each of them deeply affected.

  “So the Lord said, ‘I will wipe from the face of the Earth the human race I have created.’”

  Graves couldn’t help feeling guilty, as though it were he who had brought all this on in some way he could not quite understand.

  “‘And with them the animals, the birds, and the creatures that move along the ground …’”

  He sensed Caulder watching him as he tried to deal with his own emotions of concern and grief for Buck and for Rip Taggart. Caulder edged over next to Graves, and the two SEALs together watched Buck disappear into the chopper with the PJ. They stood like that, heads uplifted, watching, until the Black Hawk rose and disappeared over the treetops and into the horizon.

  “‘… for I regret that I have made them.’”

  Continue the Adventure with

  Six: Retribution

  Coming March 2017

  The abandoned village of Boko Haram was now a village of the damned and the dead. Bodies lay strewn in various grotesque positions among the huts and the rubble. SEAL teammate Buck Buckley, wounded in the fight to rescue former team chief Rip Taggart from the terrorists, was unconscious when the Blackhawk medevac chopper winched him into its belly. Bear Graves, Buddha Ortiz, Alex Caulder, Fishbait Khan, and Ghetto Chase watched the departing helicopter, their faces uplifted, until it disappeared toward the warehouse staging area near Lagos.