by Baen Books
“What’re you doing?” I shouted over the chaos.
“My men? They’re in no shape to fight. So I figure, nothing I can do for them,” he shrugged. “You could use the help. Might as well go fight.”
I couldn’t argue with that.
He stuck out his hand. It was calloused and strong. “Call me Carl.”
I had been going by Ozzie for the last year, but I knew that I couldn’t go back. Even if I lived through this battle, it would be best if I disappeared. I knew that the diamond exchange could not afford to allow any of SWITCHBLADE to survive, knowing the things that we knew. And if they didn’t get me, then Decker might very well try, just to tie up loose ends. It was time to start over, to disappear, to become grey again.
I said the first name that popped into my head.
“Lorenzo... My name is Lorenzo.”
#####
Sweothi City, Central African Republic.
December 15th, 1993.
2:15 PM
The crowd thinned out enough for the two of us to break into a run, counter intuitively, toward the sound of gunfire. Normally I was the type that liked to plan, but there was no time for that.
This part of Sweothi City was rougher than the rest. Half the buildings were the stacked mud brick type, but compressed between them was a maze of shanties built out of things like chicken wire, packing crates, and old tires. Some of them were already burning.
Carl grabbed me by the arm and pointed down the street into the emptying marketplace. Black smoke was rising from the neighborhood behind it. “The irregulars will come through here.”
“How do you know?”
“I’ve been fighting in Africa since my people lost Mozambique. They’ll come through here because they’re stupid rabble and it’s obvious. They’ll want to loot the shops, rape the stragglers.” He swept his hand to the right, and pointed down the other intersection. “When the Cubans come, they’ll move up this street, and then try to flank us through the shanties on the north. That’s how those commie bastards will do it.”
I nodded quickly, trying to burn the layout into my mind.
“Stick and move. Don’t let them pin you down. Most of these s*** birds can’t shoot, but they shoot a lot.” Carl hefted the massive PK. “Always attack. Make them react. Got it?”
“Got it.”
My pulse was pounding in my head as I turned and headed into the market and toward the rising smoke plumes of black tire-fueled smoke. The 75 round drum in the RPK was heavy and pendulous at the balance point as I let the muzzle lead the way. I moved in a crouch, Carl slightly behind me, gun shifting toward every sudden flash of movement. Several scrawny dogs ran past, tails between their legs.
Then I saw the first of the rebels. I raised my fist, signaling contact. We both crouched low and moved into the shadows beneath a meat stand. A thick black cloud of flies covered the hanging goats and chickens. A can of generic bug spray was under foot, surely used to spray the meat down to keep the flies off.
The first of the MLC were making their way through the bazaar, kicking over stands, and picking up anything left that looked shiny. They really were rabble. Nothing like the disciplined troops we had fought earlier. Most of them were scrawny, malnourished, conscripts wide-eyed with fear, or barely coherent on khat. I hunkered down, waiting for more of them to come into view before I opened fire.
Then there was a scream to the side. A woman. Carl and I both jerked toward the noise, just in time to see two of the rebels dragging a young girl by the hair from one of the brick houses into the street. She was hysterical, with tears running down her dark cheeks.
Carl’s machinegun shifted toward the two men, but I grabbed his arm and shook my head. The rebels hadn’t seen us yet. I jerked my thumb toward myself, made a slashing motion across my throat, and then pointed at the two would be rapists. Carl nodded, and trained his weapon back at the rebels collecting in the market. We only had one belt for the machine gun, and needed to make the most use of it.
I put the RPG, RPK, and Ithaca on the ground, as quietly as possible, and drew the Vietnam-era Air Force knife from my belt. I slid under the booth, and crawled through the dirt, brushing between hanging meat and half gutted chickens, using every shadow and piece of cover. Luckily my Rhodesian camouflage was so crusted with filth that I was the same color as the earth. I covered the thirty feet to the first rebel in a matter of seconds. This was my element. No one could move quieter or faster than I could.
The men were distracted. The first had shoved the girl down and was trying to rip her clothes off as she thrashed and screamed. He was obviously inexperienced at this whole pillaging thing, and the girl was wailing on him.
The second man got tired of waiting, lowered his machete, and pushed the younger man aside. “Ashti sangha m’baka, dummy.”
I moved in a blur, my knife humming through the air. I hit the first man in the base of the neck. The knife jabbed in under his ear, and out in a flash of red. The second man had time to turn, shock registering on his face, just as I kicked his knee cap backward. He went down on top of the girl. I grabbed him by the hair, jerked his head back, and slashed him across the jugular.
Neither man was making noise now, but both were thrashing, spraying arterial fluids everywhere. They would be dead in seconds. The girl looked up at me in shock as I grabbed the rags that served as her assailant’s shirt and hauled him off of her.
“Run.”
She heeded my suggestion, leapt to her feet, and bolted, trying to hold her torn clothing closed. I heard motion coming from the open door of her house, and quickly moved against the hot brick wall. Dripping knife held in a reverse grip, close to my chin.
Another rebel walked out of the house, AK in one hand, dangling useless, the other hand was holding some gaudy, cheap, necklace up to the sunlight. He was grinning from ear to ear, pleased with his plunder.
Enjoy it, mother-f***er.
He paused, realizing that his two friends were the source of all that blood, just as I grabbed him by the top of the head, jerked it back, and rammed the combat knife straight down, just above the junction of his neck and sternum. I used the knife against his ribs like a lever to force him to his knees as I sawed through his aorta. I yanked the blade out and let him thud lifeless to the ground. I wiped the knife on his pants, sheathed it, and grabbed his AK. The whole thing had taken less than twenty seconds.
Carl was staring at me in slack-jawed wonderment as I slithered back through the hanging meats.
"Filho da Puta…”
“Yeah. I get that a lot,” I muttered as I slung the RPG tube and the shotgun. I now had a Kalashnikov in each hand. This was getting kind of extreme.
“Contact right,” Carl hissed.
Sure enough, there was the main body of the irregulars. Now they were clustered in the marketplace, fighting like dogs over the scraps of a ruined civilization. There were at least thirty of them, armed with everything from meat cleavers to grenade launchers, and they were not in the least bit worried about resistance.
“On three,” his voice was a whisper as he slowly extended the PKM’s bipod. “One mag, then run like hell back to the intersection.”
“One.” I proned out behind the AK, using the magazine as a monopod, and centered it on a knot of men. They were less than one hundred meters away.
“Two,” Carl hissed as he took up slack on the trigger.
“Three,” I moved the selector to full.
BBBBRRAAAAAAPPPPP... BBBBRRAAAAAAPPPPP...
The PKM was horrendously loud as it cut a swath through flesh and bone. Whole knots of the rebels disintegrated in clouds of red as the 7.62x54R tore into them in great piercing blows. As Carl was swinging the reaper’s scythe, I tried to pick out anything he was missing. I centered the front sight on a running rebel, and cranked off a burst.
The wall three feet to his side exploded under the impact.
“Damn it!”
The sights on this thing were so far off that aim
ing was useless. I held the trigger down and swept the muzzle across the market, emptying the magazine in one burst. I let go of the AK and let it flop to its side. I was to Carl’s left, and the steel cases from the PK hit me with brutal impacts. I scooped up the RPK and prepared to cover his withdrawal.
Carl was saying something repetitive in Portuguese with every burst. In seconds, our hundred-round belt was gone. “Moving!” Carl shouted as he jumped up from behind the smoking beast.
“Move!” I answered as I scanned for threats. Carl ran for the intersection while pulling the Aug from its makeshift sling. The market was a mess, with the dead and dying spread everywhere. The rebels were in disarray, but that wouldn’t last long. Already there was movement as more came in from the south. I sighted in on one charging man, and stroked the trigger. The Yugo barked, and the man pitched forward into the street. At least this one was sighted in.
“Go!” Carl shouted as he took up position behind a brick wall.
I sprang to my feet, and leapfrogged past him, sliding into a position behind a bank of broken cinderblocks. The RPG on my back made it hard to maneuver, and damn near impossible to get low.
Several of the very brave, or very stupid, moved out into the open. In African warfare, you could often get away with this, as the fundamentals of marksmanship were not really known or taught by very many people here. For Carl and me, however, marksmanship was apparently not a problem. The rebels went down in a quick hail of gunfire.
The street was silent.
We had bloodied them, but I didn’t know what it was going to take to get those Cuban’s attention and get them off that damn road.
“Give them a minute, to get puffed up, get over the shock, and then they’re gonna charge. Then it won’t stop until we’re dead, or they’re dead. So let the dumb ones get popped in the open, and then we’ll fall back into the houses and alleys,” he jerked with his head in one direction, “and counterattack. When we hear the commie’s vehicles, move so we can hit the intersection.”
And then it was on. Rebels poured through the marketplace. Some ran straight at us, firing from the hip, others hung their guns around corners and blazed away. It was chaos. None of them could shoot worth a damn, but they made up for it in volume. Bullets tried to fill all the empty spaces. The cinderblocks around me exploded into powder and clouds of dust, and I swear some of those guys must have been shooting black powder from all the smoke. I fired at everything that moved and put rounds through anything that looked suspicious.
“Reloading!” Carl shouted as I hammered a line of impacts through some shanties. “Move to the buildings! Go! Go!”
The whole world had gone insane. I was up and moving as fast as I could, hot lead all around me, sounding like angry bees. The RPK sparked hard and spun from my hands, torn nearly in half. The hot muzzle smashed me in the face and my feet flew out from under me. I crashed into the gravel as gouts of flame tore all around.
“Technical!” Carl shouted as he lumbered past me, grabbing me by the straps of my LBV and pulling me up. This particular technical was a red Toyota pickup with a massive 12.7 DhSK machine gun mounted on the back. I hadn’t heard it roll up behind us in the intersection.
The huge gun tracked over us, spitting bullets past, and into the soldiers on their own side. Carl shoved me through an open doorway and into the cool darkness.
I lay on the floor, breath coming in ragged gasps. It was actually quiet. Or I think it was quiet. It was hard to tell over the ringing in my ears.
“Are you hit?” Carl shouted as he quickly poked his head through the door.
“I don’t think so,” I answered.
“Good.” Carl pulled back, just as the doorway exploded into mud fragments. The DhSK was seeking us again, probing for us with bullets bigger than my pinky finger. “Fodas!”
Now it was brighter as sunshine streamed through the fresh new holes in the wall. This home was a simple, one-room dwelling. There was a backdoor. I crawled toward it, rolled over, yanked Cuzak’s 12 gauge, and kicked the simple plywood door open. Leaning out, I could see that the door led into an alley. I scanned the other direction and—
CRACK
“Damn it!” I screamed as the bullet flew through the plywood and past my face. I fell into the dirt alley, right at the feet of a rebel. He looked down at me in surprise as he tried to work the bolt on his Mosin Nagant. I smashed the Ithaca’s steel buttplate into his groin. He stumbled back as I rose and smashed his skull with another butt stroke. I brought it down twice more in rapid succession, each impact a meaty thud. He slid slowly down the wall.
Someone else appeared around the corner, and I raised the shotgun without thinking, front bead centering on his head. I froze, as the unarmed old man raised his open hands and begged for his life. My trembling finger had almost pulled the trigger.
“Get down!” I shouted at the old man as the DhSK raked through the house again, with the bullets passing through multiple walls and into the alley. The old man vanished back around the corner.
I had to take out that machine gun. Now. I sprinted down the alley in the direction of the noise. I could hear Carl breathing hard as he tore after me. The alley was long, and twisty, with each mud house having a backdoor. “Watch our back!” I shouted as I thought about all those openings behind us.
The Aug barked twice. “On it!” Carl answered.
There was movement ahead, one of the plywood doors flew open, and the muzzle of an SKS snaked through. The rebel stepped through the doorway and I blasted him in the face with a round of double aught, pumped it, and swung around the door. The little house was packed with soldiers. Packed.
They looked at me. I looked at them. That one second stretched into eternity.
Then everybody moved.
Cuzak’s gun was the old style with no disconnector, so you just held down the trigger and pumped and it kept shooting, it also had an extended magazine, but I didn’t stop to think about those facts at the time.
BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM click
“Meu Deus,” Carl gasped as he viewed over my shoulder.
I reached one shaking hand into my pocket, pulled out some more buckshot, and started feeding them into the loading port.
“We’ve got to keep moving.”
2:22 PM
####
Sweothi City, Central African Republic.
December 15th, 1993.
2:35 PM
“We need to kill that technical!” Carl shouted into my ear as the walls exploded around us from heavy machinegun fire. Whoever was manning that DhSK was just working it back and forth across the houses. They didn’t know which house we were hiding in, or we would already be dead.
“Ya think?” I screamed back.
This was the third home we had leapfrogged into after the shotgun massacre. The area was covered in rebels now, shooting at anybody who didn’t look like they were from around these parts. Carl and I sure didn’t look like locals.
“You gonna use that thing--” he gestured at the end of the RPG launcher sticking above my shoulder like a psychotic blunderbuss. “Or just carry it around all day?”
I flipped him the bird, and pulled the heavy tube around in front of me. “Head for the alley so the back blast don’t kill you.”
He nodded once, rolled over, and low crawled for the back door. I knew once I opened that front door, I would have a clean shot at the intersection, but every scumbag in a three block radius was going to zero right in on us. I wouldn’t have much time.
I made sure the rocket was fully seated, the hammer cocked on the launcher, and push button safety deactivated. This was it. I stood, risked a quick peek through one of the approximately fifty-caliber holes through the wall, and spotted that damn little Toyota, parked in the middle of the road about ninety meters away. The tube settled heavy on my shoulder.
The plywood door flew open with a bang, powered by my boot and a whole lot of adrenalin. I centered the front sight through the lowest aperture, f
ocused on it, with the Toyota a blur behind.
But then something caught my attention. I don’t know if it was the rumble of the heavy engines, or the crunching of debris under its tires. The RPG dipped slightly as I turned toward the lumbering thing coming from the direction, that sure enough, Carl had predicted the Cubans would use.
“BTR!” I screamed, as I pivoted toward the massive Soviet armored personnel carrier. It was all angles and armor, ugly, and swarming with Cubans. I aimed the RPG at the new, deadlier threat, and yanked the trigger. The tube boomed against my face and years of dust billowed from every surface inside the tiny African home. The rocket streaked to its target. It was deafening and awe inspiring.
The front of the BTR seemed to shiver for a brief instant before the grey steel tub belched flames in every direction. Several quick, massive blasts shuddered through the hulk, and I could see figures tossed, wind-milling, and spinning through the air.
I had not seen the second BTR enter the intersection. But it had seen me. Its cannon swiveled toward me. I turned and dove back into the house.
Suddenly the world was white. Brilliant flashing white. Up was down, and the ground was somehow now far below. It came up to meet me, very quickly.
Then nothing.
2:37 PM
####
Bob looked grim when he walked out of the hospital room and into the hallway. His eyes were red, puffy from crying, and at that moment he looked aged far beyond his seventeen years. My heart broke when I saw him, because Bob was our rock.
“Mom’s on her way,” I said quickly. She had been hysterical on the phone.
My older brother put one massive hand on my shoulder, using me to steady himself on wobbly legs. He towered over me, intimidating in his size and mass, though he never meant to be. “Dad wants to talk to you,” he croaked. Bob then let go of me, and seemed to melt, as he slid down into one of the waiting-room chairs. “You better hurry.” He put his head down and started to sob.
