Sword of the Caliphate

by Clay Martin

  John and I took up positions in the damaged med shed, which gave us a clean view of the gate. Ranger kept feeding us information as the headlights got closer. One vehicle only, he was positive. I sat with an itchy trigger as light finally spilled across the gate and into the compound.

  Another ubiquitous white Nissan pickup, same as we saw every day. At one point, the US Government had been handing them out to literally anyone that said he was a farmer. There were hundreds, if not thousands, in this country. The Nissan did a lazy circle inside the gate, ending with its nose pointed back out. The engine died, and the driver’s side door opened. A portly man with a flashlight and a long object in his other hand exited the vehicle.

  From the way he was acting, I instantly got the feeling this was not a hardened IC fighter. The guy looked nervous, walking around in the dark, shining his light into rooms he was staying well back from. When he finally walked past us, I saw that he was carrying a stick, not even a rifle. A clear picture formed in my head. This was a local villager, no doubt pressed into service by the Caliphate goons to act as night watch. And I bet when they did, someone got executed as an object lesson. It would also explain why the place was abandoned. The real forces were needed elsewhere, and they would have the population around here cowed into not robbing the place blind. If that happened, Mr. Night Watchman here would probably be in for a Black and Decker party, like the bodies we found earlier. Poor bastard. Even with all that had happened, I couldn’t bring myself to shoot him. I have never been shy about dropping the hammer, but this one just felt wrong. But we were also running out of night. I motioned John to cover me and stalked out of our hiding spot.

  Mr. Night Watchman was now peeking into the CHU’s, thirty feet away. He was holding his flashlight next to his head, destroying even residual natural night vision he would have left from using one in the first place. I snapped my NVG’s up on my helmet, to reduce the chance I broke them with what came next. I waited until he was walking again, and struck from behind. Dropping my carbine onto its sling at the last second, I drove onto my lead knee, scooping him up from behind in a reverse fireman’s carry throw. He was fat, but not heavy, an unique trait I noticed all over the Middle East. It wouldn’t have mattered anyway. Judo was my favorite hobby besides drinking, and my youth had made me good at it. With one hand on his collar and my forearm planted in his groin, I drove my legs upright with enough force to lift a bull, simultaneously twisting my shoulders. He pin wheeled through the air over my head, and I let go at the top of the arc, dropping him on the ground like a bag of surprised potatoes. The reverse angle of my attack meant he landed head first, negating the need for a follow up muzzle strike to the forehead. He was out cold. Possibly dead, a throw like that generates a lot of force. Well, I wasn’t going to lose any sleep over it. I wasn’t excited about shooting him, but it’s a hard world sometimes. I at least tried not to kill him, that should count for something. I leaned down to check. He was bleeding, but still breathing. Good enough. I slapped a set of zip ties on his wrists, and got back on the radio.

  “Problem solved. Let’s wrap up and get out of here.”

  No one questioned my handling of the situation, because none of us were psychopaths. I am sure at one time or another, all of us had left someone alive we could have killed by the rules of engagement. I am also sure all of us had shot someone that maybe we shouldn’t have, particularly when we were younger. As we say in the business, can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs. It might seem odd not shooting someone likely to die in a nuclear fireball in the near future anyway, but it didn’t at the time.

  John and Steve managed to round up the requisite number of uniforms, and not long after we had everything we could carry. Now the question of the bodies.

  “Guys, we are in a tight spot here. We could load your five on the hoods of our trucks, but space is pretty tight. And the best they are going to get then, is buried at our COP. It’s logistically a bridge too far to even consider taking them with us to Nasiriya. I propose a compromise.”

  John and Steve looked at me anxiously. The mission at hand had taken up a lot of focus, but there was no denying their teammates presence as we went about our work.

  “I saw red phosphorus rounds when we were loading the 81’s. How about a Viking Funeral Pyre?”

  This was deemed an appropriate and fitting solution. Most team guys are at least half Pagan anyway, it seemed good way to handle the situation. We carried the men we could find to the mortar pit, laying them in a line. In short order, we had arranged all the remaining 81mm rounds atop them, along with scrap plywood soaked in diesel. I said a few words, then we left John and Steve a few minutes with their team alone. The flames reached toward the heavens as we drove out of the compound, onward toward our own fate.

  CHAPTER NINE

  We arrived back the COP just as the sun was coming up, exhausted from twenty four hours of constant operations. Frank and Willie had made breakfast, which I was thankful for. Every time you eat a piece of bacon, a terrorist goes to hell. We told them about our night’s adventure as we wolfed it down, complete with our success acquiring parachutes. The plan was still completely insane, but having the chutes made it seem more real. We had found a piece of the puzzle, and that made it feel like it was closer to actually working. A mortar made assaulting an airfield seem a lot more likely to succeed. All we needed to do now was cross 200 miles of enemy held territory, locate an airplane driver, hot wire a multimillion dollar jet, and fly halfway around the world over top of potentially hostile nations with first rate air defenses. Piece of cake.

  I called for four hours sleep, then a general planning session. We had all run longer in training and real operations, but we were unlikely to get any rest in the coming days. Sometimes, a power nap is worth its weight in gold for combat effectiveness. On top of our current fatigue, we had a list of preparations a mile long. Frank and Willie took the watch, keeping some of the Kurdish forces on the perimeter, while Bazan herded the rest of the cat’s at his own tasks. As I was walking out of the Ops Cen, I noticed John booting up a laptop. Thinking he must have something on his mind, I reversed course and took a seat next to him.

  “Big day coming up, and probably some more after. You should at least try and get some sleep.” I tried to keep it down, but annoyance was creeping into my voice. I get irritable when I am tired, and my fuse gets a lot shorter.

  “Yeah, I know, and trust me, my tank is about empty too. But something has been nagging me, now that I have had some time to think.”

  “Where the hell did you get this laptop anyway?” I asked, questions slowly forming in my foggy mind.

  “It’s mine, I had it stashed in an Ark bag for the haboob. You know how the dust gets,” he started. An Ark bag is a commercially available Mylar bag, made by the company CrossBreed. It features a water tight seal, and is supposedly also EMP resistant. “Anyway, it was in my gear box, they must’ve overlooked it when they tossed my room. They didn’t walk off with any electronics as far as I could tell anyway, found it under a pile of my socks. Before the storm hit, my sister had sent me a message on Red Net(classified internet, standard item for a team house). She works for Homeland, so she has a clearance too. She sent me a real weird email, with an encrypted attachment. I put it on a thumb drive and mostly forgot about it.”

  “Must’ve been some message, for you to risk taking it off the Red Net and opening it on your laptop.” That was a huge violation of OPSEC procedures, not to mention difficult. Ever since the treason of Bradly Manning, most Red computers won’t even recognize USB ports.

  “It was. She never contacts me on Red email, so she obviously took the time to find my address. No small feat. Then she sends this mostly nonsense email, tells me the invitation to mom’s surprise party next month is attached, hopes I can make it. Mom’s birthday is in the spring, it’s not even close. And surprise party is spelled sURprisE PaRTy!!”

  The bo
oting screen was finishing up, John typed in his password, then slid a thumb drive into the computer. The file was relatively large, and encrypted.

  “How did she further encrypt a message on Red? I didn’t even know that was possible. Also, why? Red is already secure?” I was getting an unhappy feeling in my pants. The Red Net goes right through the heart of the system, a message like that was going to set off fireworks if they caught it. And goodbye Homeland Security job, no matter the message contents.

  “Good questions.” He said, only half paying attention to me. The decryption key had him stumped. He tried several combinations, to no avail. Good thing it didn’t have a three attempt limit, we would be screwed.

  “Do you guys have some phrase you use to communicate? Like something from when you were kids?”

  “Not really. I already tried everything that comes to mind, including three versions of mom’s real birthday.”

  “How about that surprise party, spelled exactly like in the message?”

  John slapped some keys, and we were rewarded with a new folder. John clicked the folder, bringing up a new document.

  “This better not be dick pics John. Your sister a sicko?” I offered, then immediately started wishing it was dick pics. Or zoophile pics. Anything would’ve been better than what we got.

  The first folder was a word document, obviously hastily written. It said, “I hope you get this brother, things are going bad. I don’t know what you guys have been told over there, but it’s worse than you imagine. Stay safe, I’m taking Mom and Dad to Uncle Randy’s.” Great. Things like that always preceded good news.

  Next was an item stamped TS//SCI, written in red letters on white, all official like. It was from the CDC in Atlanta, sinking my morale like a super-cavitating torpedo hitting a bass boat. It had highlights like major cities across the country, 80-90% fatality rate, unknown incubation period, and thought to be airborne. After that, some pictures of people in hospital beds, showing symptoms very much like in the jihadi rap video we had seen earlier. Then came the kicker. CDC was calling it the flu, to keep the panic down. But they recommended grounding all flights, closing the interstates, and using the National Guard to quarantine twenty five different population centers. And it was dated two days before the haboob took out our communications.

  I didn’t have the bandwidth to process this right at the moment. I was too frazzled to think about the potential scale. I bid John a good night, and stumbled off to try and get some rack time. I nodded off quickly, probably an evolutionary method to allow my subconscious to sort things out. At least I was treated to dreams about people bleeding from the eyes mixed in with zombies. If we had still been on mefloquine, I might’ve eaten a bullet right then.

  Frank snapped my door open a few minutes later, interrupting my beauty rest. As he shoved a cup of coffee in my hands, I noticed the sun was high in the sky. Good man, I guess it had been longer than a few minutes. Coffee doesn’t taste the same when it is ninety-five degrees out, but I needed the wake up. I was already soaked in sweat from my Rob Romero nightmare, a hot drink would go perfect with that. I pulled my sunglasses on before my eyes melted, and made my way to the Ops Center again.

  Everyone from the American side of the house was present, some showing obvious wear. John and Steve had been through the worst of it, but Ranger still didn’t look exactly ready for the cover of Well Dressed Commando. In short order, people settled into seats with coffee or Rip It energy drinks, the KBR special. I thought Rip It was a generic DOD owned brand until I saw them at a gas station outside of Bragg. Maybe it was a local hadji, and he finally found a way to export to the land of the big PX. I had John hook his laptop to the plasma screen, and started into the new information.

  “So as you can see, not only are we up shit creek, we now have turds for paddles. We were thinking chemical or biological, with thousands of casualties at most. This information points to biological, but a virus, not an agent. That would make it significantly larger, I don’t think it is an exaggeration to say tens or even hundreds of thousands. The CDC did a remarkably good job shutting down the Ebola that made it to the United States years ago, but that is a much different animal. Ebola is transmitted via bodily fluids. If this truly is airborne, we may have a very serious problem on our hands. Frank, anything to add?” As a medic, I was hoping he had some kind of input. But then, trauma is a long way from epidemiology.

  “A lot depends on incubation period, and other details we don’t know. But say for a second, a carrier is contagious for a single day before he is noticeably sick. He goes to the airport, and has contact with twenty people. In the case of breathing the same air, you might as well say a hundred. Depending on how aggressive the virus is, how many people actually catch it, factors in a lot. But at a rate of even one fifth, you could decimate the country in just a few days. Hell, if you were trying to spread this, one man could do a lot of damage by himself. Imagine two cross country flights in a single day, with two connections on each. Then the people from your connecting flights get on their connecting flights. In 24 hours, you could have infected people in every major city in the nation. The lethality rate they mention is without precedent, but that doesn’t mean impossible. The CDC is very good at what they do, but there are still limits to controls. Once something like this reaches a certain tipping point, even the CDC doesn’t have enough resources. It was just about a hundred years ago that influenza killed fifty million people, and that was spreading by horse and buggy for the most part. We haven’t faced a plague in modern history, so we really don’t know,” Frank concluded. He was full of good news. Regular goddamn ray of sunshine that one.

  I added my own growing concerns. “If this is so, and the country is in the grip of a no shit outbreak, we need to think carefully about where we take this plane we plan on stealing. We have families spread across the country, and no way of knowing where they are. If the situation on the ground is totally pear shaped, they could have been evacuated, they could be in quarantine zones, or they could have run for the hills. I know this though. If there is a total cluster fuck anywhere, it is the Eastern seaboard. A full third of our entire population lives there, and the area is closer knit by roads and population density than anywhere else. Anyone remember the massive flooding we had back in 2011? Mississippi raging out of control, all that?”

  A couple of hands shot up, and I continued. “I was on the way to some sniper training out West with my team, we were driving due to the massive amount of guns and ammo needed for a two week train up. We took off from Bragg, bound for Utah, and it was the biggest mess I have ever seen. Complete abortion, all the way till Arkansas. After a hundred mile detour in that state, it was like we crossed a magic line. Traffic evaporated, and it was smooth sailing the rest of the way. That was just a flood. Now imagine a tidal wave of panicked people, trying to flee the East Coast. Car crashes. People running out of gas. Minivans trying to go around that in the rain soaked ditches, hopelessly clogging any way forward. I think our best bet is to try and land well West of the Mississippi River.”

  There was some murmuring, and Scott piped up the question, “Where, exactly?”

  “Texas.”

  “Why Texas? Don’t they have a huge population too?”

  “Not where we are going. Most of the population is in South Texas, or East, border with Louisiana. I am thinking West Texas, more specifically, the Llano Estacado. It is one of the least populated places in the nation, because it was one of the last to be settled. It is also large and flat, in case we end up forced to jump. It is basically an ocean of grass. But it has farms, cattle, water if you know where to look, great roads, and airfields. Airfields also being very important in this equation. I don’t mean rinky-dink little ones either. The runway at Amarillo was built to handle B-36 aircraft, the massive mega bombers of the 50s. Tinker Air Force Base is not far north, and it has the same capability. Either would handle a C-5 with ease. Not to be overlooked,
it also has a decent geographical separation from the rest of the country. It’s a hard land, full of hard people. You aren’t walking across it when you run out of gas. Not if you spent the last twenty years on a desk.

  Let us also not forget, Texas itself has other benefits. Strong national identity, refineries and raw fossil fuel resources, food production, and a relatively mild climate. If this virus is on the Biblical scale, I can’t think of a place more likely to survive.”

  The various factions mulled that over for a while, until finally someone asked how I knew so much about West Texas, if the internet was still down.

  “Simple. I grew up there. My family left years ago, but I know that place like an Afghan knows his valley. Hell, I know which gas stations keep nudie mags under the counter, and which liquor stores don’t card. Consider me, your native tour guide. “

  It was settled. We were going to Texas. Provided the wheels didn’t come off our cart before we got started.

  CHAPTER TEN

  “Now that we have a final destination in mind, let’s get to the task at hand. Cause that part is a long way from here, and a lot of cards need to fall in our favor to even worry about it. Reverse planning, let’s start with the mission objective. Get an airplane and a pilot on the runway at Tallil. Who has spent some time there, preferably recently?” All of us had been there, but I never thought I would need to break in. I should have paid more attention.

  “We spend a lot of time there, Military Intelligence detachment we work with,” Steve stood and took the floor,” Layout is pretty simple. Hesco walls facing toward Nasiriya, though it is miles from the town proper. Airfield itself is surrounded by chain link and concertina wire, a runway of that length would require a metric grip of Hesco’s to surround. Guard towers every 300 meters or so around it. The base area itself is maybe a mile square, not counting the hangers. They have real hangers there, it was an Iraqi Air Force base before we, uh, borrowed it for two decades. I never counted aircraft, but at a minimum they have a fighter wing, some tankers, and transports. I have seen both C-130 and C-17 transport craft there, so obviously the runway is capable of both sizes. Small Italian and Latvian presence as well, a smattering of other allied nations. I would estimate total troop strength at most 3,000.”