Direct Action - 03

by Jack Murphy

  “How would you know? Have you ever taken one before?” Paul said.

  “Yeah, what is the quality assurance on these things?” Ramon started in. “I would hate to have it only be half effective.”

  “And walk around like the fucking window-licker for the rest of your life,” Rick added.

  “Knock it the fuck off and keep those pill packs on you at all times. You won't be fucking laughing if they grab you and Jackie the fucking Iraqi is sawing your still-beating heart out,” Bill yelled.

  Turning, he stormed away from the group.

  “Fuck,” Rick cursed.

  “Stress must be getting to him,” Ramon said.

  “When the time comes, I will take this pill,” The Operator said flatly.

  Everyone turned to look at him for a moment and then went back to doing whatever they had been doing before Bill's team huddle.

  33

  The interior of the Casa 235 was cramped, claustrophobic, and hot.

  The passengers rocked around the inside of the plane as it skirted low over the surface of the earth to avoid surface-to-air missiles. They flew blacked-out, in the dark, the free fall jumpers sitting on the cold metal floor while their bodies quickly heated up the Casa's innards. Sweat beaded and then ran down their faces. After a few hours their stomachs churned and their heads swam. Burdened by the rucksacks clipped into their parachute harnesses, weapons, and other gear, it got really humid really fast.

  Deckard closed his eyes as he began to get dizzy. This was the most dangerous part of the mission, the part where you have time to think. Time to doubt your preparations, your training, your mission. Time to doubt yourself. And when you blew off all your very rational fears, you just doubted in general because you had nothing else to busy yourself with. But like all good soldiers, Deckard possessed that psychopathic part of his brain that allowed him to arrogantly push on, figuring he could somehow survive.

  Fuck it.

  It wasn't like he planned to live forever.

  The loadmaster standing near the ramp of the aircraft indicated that they were twenty minutes out. They could already feel the aircraft gaining altitude. This would be a straight high altitude low opening jump. No high-speed HAHO sky-pirate business, no wing suits. Just pop your chute and get to the ground without dying.

  Liquid Sky snapped their Ops-Core helmets on; then, flipped on their oxygen tanks before securing the rubber oxygen masks over their faces. Then, they began the long, slow, and painful process of dragging themselves to their feet. It was then that another feeling washed over Deckard. He stood on shaky feet but the ghost of a smile was on his face behind the oxygen mask. He was going to war. Not with the Syrians, but with his own kind. He had witnessed the scalpings, the murders first hand. He had two options, join Liquid Sky and fully commit, or complete his mission.

  Deckard would complete his mission.

  War was the only time that life made sense to him.

  Everything was finally starting to come back into focus.

  The Operator was at the rear of the plane, standing next to the ramp alongside the TORDs bundle that he was tethered to. The bundle sat on rollers right next to the edge of the ramp. The freefall jumpers did one last check of their own and their teammates' equipment to make sure everything was in place. As they reached altitude, the loadmaster lowered the ramp. He was a contractor, working for who only knew what company.

  When the green light came on, Rick helped roll the TORDs off the ramp, The Operator chasing it into the night. Bill held the drogue chute that would help stabilize The Operator in free fall. He released it into the night as the bundle jumper disappeared off the back of the ramp. The rest of the team waddled out the door right behind him, nearly on top of each other as they leaned forward and fell off the back of the Casa.

  Deckard was the last one out.

  At night, you intellectually knew that you were jumping off a plane, thousands of feet up in the sky. You knew a thousand things could go wrong and you could die. But in the dark, with your hearing restricted by ear plugs and only a single dim light to show you the way off the plane you got tunnel vision. You focused on what you had to do, your equipment, the actions you were required to do one step at a time. The night helped you focus, your brain not really registering the gravity of what you were doing.

  Deckard was still smiling when he went off the end of the ramp, knowing that this would be a one-way trip.

  He could smell the fuel and feel the heat from the engines as he fell. Riding the hill of air off the back of the plane, he pivoted his hips forward, kept his arms out at his sides, and made sure his knees were bent, but out. With the rucksack hanging between his legs, he wouldn't need to have his legs as outstretched as normal in order to get into a stable body position.

  A light stick was rubber-banded to the altimeter on his wrist. A small slit was cut in the wrapper so that just enough green light escaped to light up the dial. He looked at it briefly as his body seesawed in the air. At 17,500 feet, he was having a hard time getting stable in the air. The other jumpers were out there, somewhere, but he couldn't see them in the dark.

  Deckard continued to wobble in the air. He tried to sink his hips lower and get his arms and legs out in the most symmetrical pattern possible. Nothing seemed to be working and he knew that at this point he was just going to have to ride it out. Keeping his eyes on where he thought the horizon was, Deckard glanced again at his altimeter.

  Suddenly, he dipped down. Trying to compensate in free fall was difficult and now the wind resistance against his body spun him right around onto his back. Deckard was now falling at 6,000 feet above the surface of the earth, on his back and looking up at the stars. He made one attempt to do some sort of situp in the air and get himself turned back around, but with all the kit he wore, that simply wasn't happening. He was frozen in position.

  Gathering his wits, Deckard brought in one arm and held his hand against his chest. With the other arm still out, it acted like a giant rudder in the wind and propelled him back over onto his stomach. Deckard turned his wrist towards him and looked again at the altimeter from the corner of his eye.

  4,200 feet.

  Careful not to accidentally grab the hose running to his oxygen mask, he pulled his ripcord grip. The MC-5 parachute deployed above his head, the leg straps biting into his thighs as it felt like he was being dragged upward. In reality, he was just slowing down, losing descent speed as the parachute grabbed some air for him.

  Once he had a canopy above his head, Deckard checked for the three S's. Square, stable, and yanking down on the parachute toggles he found that, yeah, it was steerable too. With a starry sky and a sliver of moon showing through the clouds, the freefall jumpers were able to get into a file formation as they glided towards the ground.

  A few hundred feet above the drop zone, Deckard pulled the release tab and dropped his rucksack on a nylon tether beneath him. When he heard his rucksack hit the ground, Deckard pulled his toggles half way down to put the parachute at half breaks. Keeping his feet and knees together, he impacted the rocky ground and flopped over on one side.

  He came down hard, same as every jump, but was alive. He pulled one brake line in hand over hand, collapsing the parachute. Deckard was more than happy to free himself from the parachute harness and get his AK-47 into operation. Next he balled up his parachute and packed it inside an OD green kit bag he had brought along with him.

  A few other silhouettes could be seen walking against the skyline so it didn't take long for Liquid Sky to link up. Their drop zone was right next to a river so the team loaded large rocks into their kit bags with the parachutes and then one by one they hurled the parachutes into the river to sink them to the bottom. The last thing they wanted was to leave a bunch of military parachutes laying around to telegraph their presence in Syria.

  The Operator had no problem landing the TORDs. Inside the cylinder were the two mustard gas bombs along with stretchers that they would lay the weapons in to help carry
during transport. It would take at least two men to carry each one of the bombs. The others would walk point and pull security for them.

  Deckard hefted the weight of the metal poles up onto his shoulders as he took the rear of one stretchers and Paul took the front as they walked. They had a couple of kilometers to move through what had been viable farmland before the war broke out. Their next task was perhaps the most risky part of their mission and the part that none of them were looking forward to.

  The link up.

  Their client had a line of communications with them and assured Liquid Sky that the road had been paved for them, but the bottom line was that they were about to link up with the most dangerous and ruthless fighting group in Syria. Al-Nusra. They were Syria's version of Al Qaeda, Islamic extremists, terrorists who killed anyone who didn't buy into their version of Islam. Many of them were foreign fighters. They came from Iraq, Pakistan, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Chechnya, and even from American, Canada, and Germany. They came to fight. They came to die.

  Liquid Sky came to fight as well, but there were only seven of them with nothing but the weapons and equipment on their bodies to defend themselves in a denied area with thousands of enemies around them, both rebels and regime forces.

  As they neared a road intersection, Bill told them to halt. Those carrying the two packages postmarked from Libya were happy to set their load down. Bill got out his red-lens flashlight. This was where they were supposed to meet with Nusra. A bunch of former American soldiers joining forces with hardcore Jihadi terrorists who beheaded Shias, Christians, Jews, and Alawites alike in village squares just for shits and giggles.

  Fuck me, Deckard cursed himself internally.

  Bill flashed the bonefidis. Three red flashes of his light directed towards the road.

  A pause.

  Two red flashes answered in return from the road.

  Deckard drew the bolt back with the charging handle on his AK and did a press check to make sure he had a round chambered.

  Here we go again.

  34

  Pat cursed as machine gun fire rattled his vehicle.

  It was the third time that night and they had only been in Syria a matter of hours. Tartus had been an obvious no-go to make port in so they had to come in at a much smaller port to the north. The logistics themselves were an absolute nightmare. With such a time crunch there was no way he was going to be able to get Samruk International's gun trucks into country. That alone put them at a major disadvantage. They had to use their operational funds to buy four two and half ton trucks in Egypt and travel with them by boat to Cyprus and then on to Syria. He didn't even like to think about how much he had to bribe the ship's captain to run a Han Solo style pirate run on the Syrian coast to drop them off.

  They were gunning it through their third ambush. In addition, they had bribed their way through one checkpoint on the road and shot through another. This was the fight to get to the fight. The only good news was that he had a platoon of trained and battle-hardened Kazakh mercenaries. From the beds of the transport trucks, they returned fire on enemy positions up in the cliffs to their side. Led by Western advisers like Kurt Jager of Germany's GSG-9 and Leszek of Polish GROM, Samruk International definitely had their shit wired tighter than the regime thugs or the rabble that passed for a rebellion that they had encountered thus far.

  The problem was that they could still be nickled and dimed until they were a bloody mess by the time they rolled into Homs in the morning. Out here they had no support, no back up, no resupply.

  Another thing they didn't have was an update from Deckard. The last text he had gotten from the cell phone Aghassi had left for him was that the mission had the green light and they would be jumping in tonight on a drop zone near Homs.

  By daylight, they would need to have something from him. Driving into Homs blind was a death sentence with the city divided down the middle by rebels and regime forces who were slugging it out block by block. The pictures that had emerged from the war torn city looked like Stalingrad in World War Two.

  The only thing they had going in their favor, and it wasn't much, was a local fixer named Ali. Pat had called a friend in the intelligence community to get a recommendation for someone local. They picked Ali up on the side of the road in Tartus after wiring him half of his fee. He lived just outside Homs and could help guide them into their targets. So far, he hadn't been much good at helping them avoid ambushes and checkpoints.

  All they needed was to cross the rest of the war-torn landscape to Homs, get comms with Deckard, and then shoot their way in to secure two chemicals weapons, destroy them, and then shoot their way out.

  “Fuck,” Pat cursed as a RPG streaked through the night to their front. The rocket blasted deeper into the valley and exploded harmlessly against the rocks on the other side. One RPG, one well-placed IED, and they could be put out of business. At least the enemy didn't have much night-vision capability, giving them the advantage at night. Samruk's driver drove blacked-out while looking through NODs.

  The pop-pop-pop of AK-103's sounded in the back of Pat's truck as his men returned fire.

  Cupping a hand over the screen, Pat looked at his handheld GPS. They were about to cruise past Masyaf. It was a medium-sized town but at least they were clearing out of the valleys and into the flatlands. Soon they would be halfway to Homs.

  Another round of AK fire vibrated the truck.

  Pat knew that the night was far from over.

  “Get up front and take the lead, Deckard,” Bill said.

  “Why me?”

  “Because you speak Arabic, and so that you can absorb the first couple bullets.”

  “Nice.”

  “Go up ahead and make nice with the jihadists. We haven't got all night.”

  Deckard took the lead, shuffling forward with the weight of his rucksack on his back. He held his Kalashnikov at the ready. Liquid Sky followed at an uncomfortable distance from him, hauling the two chemical weapons with them.

  As he got closer to the road, he could see some movement. Some of the jihadists were standing and others looked to be popping a squat. Deckard intentionally made noise as he approached so that they knew he was coming. The last thing he wanted was a surprised jihadist pointing a weapon at him.

  “As-salamu alaykum,” Deckard greeted them when he noticed several of the dark forms turn towards him.

  “Ilnash sharaf intuu wiyaana,” someone answered in Iraqi dialect.

  Deckard knew he was entering a world of shit. The Iraqi brand of Al Qaeda, The Islamic State of Iraq, had massive bounties out on the heads of people just like him.

  The jihadists gathered around Deckard. There were about two dozen of them. To his surprise, they held their AK-47s at the ready, weapons on safe, with their fingers off the triggers. These guys had combat training. The war had been going on for a few years though, so maybe it had more to do with military Darwinism: only the hardcores were still left standing.

  One of them, this one with a North African accent, asked him about his trip. Deckard told a joke about falling from the sky and to his relief the Islamic extremists chuckled. All except one. He was a little bigger than the others, light skinned, and with a massive black beard. Chechen. He was eye-raping Deckard up and down.

  After the exchange of pleasantries, Deckard waved for Liquid Sky to come in and meet the Nusra fighters. The Liquid Sky mercenaries set down the bombs and Deckard introduced them by first names only. There was a sudden grumble amongst the Nusra fighters when he introduced Nadi. They hadn't realized that there was a woman in the group.

  They should have anticipated this. In the world the Nusra fighters fought for, strict Islamic law called Sharia would be the law of the land. This Bronze-Age mentality dictated that women were baby factories and domestic slaves. He had to think fast.

  “Nadi and I are bound by contractual marriage,” Deckard said. “She belongs to me. She is our technician who went to university to learn how to build and detonate the bomb
s we brought with us.”

  This brought on another series of strained groans.

  The Chechen interrupted the Nusra complaints.

  “This is acceptable,” he said in nearly perfect English. “But you are responsible. She goes no where without you.”

  “I understand,” Deckard assured him, but he knew that he hadn't heard the last of this. He decided to change the subject.

  “I want to you to take a look at the gifts we have brought Nusra,” Deckard told the group. “This gift comes down to you from the eyes of Allah. These weapons will strike terror into the hearts of your enemyies, destroy their will to fight.”

  “Allah akbar,” several Nusra fighters said in unison. God is great.

  The two chemical weapons were presented to the Nusra fighters along with a small haul of exotic high end pistols and sub-machine guns that they had packed in their rucks after having them shipped in from Libya. Each Nusra fighter present got a party favor.

  Deckard pointed to the two Mazda flatbed trucks parked alongside the road.

  “Can we load the weapons on your trucks and drive to your camp?” Deckard asked.

  The Chechen fighter wagged his finger at Deckard. Bill and the Liquid Sky team stood by and watched as the Nusra fighters began talking over each other in rapid-fire Arabic. Nadi was the only other team member who could even begin to keep up with the conversation. Deckard had to ask them to slow down several times.

  Bill, Ramon, Rick, and Paul began to get twitchy, their thumbs slowly rotating the selector switches on their rifles from safe to semi. This mission looked to them like it was about to go south in a bad way. The Operator stood facing the Nusra fighters stoically.