by Peter Nealen
I could almost hear Dwight groan as he got up, just as I glanced back. Dwight was past fifty. If any of the rest of us were hurting, he was probably hurting twice as much.
Phil led the way uphill, though he angled his route to lessen the slope somewhat. None of us were young anymore, and hiking “cross-compartment” wasn’t something any of us relished.
We worked our way over the shoulder of the hill, and then I could catch glimpses of Borinka through the trees below us. Most of the roofs were red tile, glaring through the gaps in the trees.
Phil kept us to the thicker stands of beeches and oaks, avoiding the narrow meadows between. The clearings weren’t large, but with peacekeeper drones overhead, we didn’t want to expose ourselves to the sky any more than necessary. Especially not in daylight.
He slowed as we got closer to our target, placing his feet carefully so as not to make noise, pausing every few steps to watch and listen. Visibility was sharply limited by the trees, but it was quiet enough in the woods that noise was going to travel far.
That was how we knew we were in the right place.
A raised voice sounded up ahead in Albanian. The man’s words were sharp, like a command. I couldn’t make out the words said in reply, but the voice was definitely American. Slightly high-pitched, like a young man, and with a tone that suggested a combination of fear and weariness.
Phil looked back at me, his eyes bright within the green and brown mask of his camouflage paint. I nodded. Jackpot.
He moved forward to another tree and eased himself down onto a knee. I joined him moments later, peering through the trees toward the red-roofed house just a few dozen meters from us. There was movement back there, but I couldn’t see enough to be sure of what was happening.
I knelt next to Phil, who was staring hard through the trees. “I think they’re letting him piss outside,” he whispered. “This could be our chance.”
It was almost too good to be true. If they were out there for a couple more minutes, we could swoop in and grab England before they even knew we were there, and be in and out without having to actually go into the house.
It wasn’t to be, though. Even as Greg joined us and I got a semi-clear glimpse of England, still in his OCP cammies, and the bearded, tracksuit-wearing militiaman escorting him, the militiaman got tired of waiting on England and grabbed him by the collar, snatching him around and shoving him toward the house. England squawked with the sudden movement, and I was pretty sure he’d just pissed all over himself. Moments later, they disappeared back into the house, which had a second-floor entrance against the hillside where we crouched.
I didn’t speak as the rest of the element converged on the tree. There was nothing for it; our golden opportunity had evaporated, and now we were going to have to do it the hard way. No point in complaining. I’d seen enough, between my handful of combat experiences in the Marine Corps and the fighting Stateside in recent years, to know that things often just went pear-shaped, without any rhyme or reason that we could necessarily see or plan for. You just had to roll with the punches.
Once all of us were gathered, I tapped my head, and every other one of us started dropping his ruck. Taking full rucksacks into a close-quarters fight was not my idea of a good plan. We needed to be agile and mobile, and seventy-pound packs were not conducive. We’d retrieve them again on the way out.
There were all sorts of ways that plan could go wrong, but another lesson I’d learned in recent years was that there’s no such thing as a perfect plan.
And I had no idea just how true that was going to turn out at the time.
Once we’d all dropped our rucks, hastily camouflaging them with spider mesh and leaves, I looked around one more time and then tapped Phil on the shoulder. Go time.
He rose smoothly to his feet and moved toward the house. I gave him a couple meters, then followed.
We slipped through the trees like shaggy specters, moving from trunk to trunk, watching for sentries or booby traps. Intel and recent news reports had suggested that the Kosovars and Bosnians were just as eager to blow people up remotely as their Syrian co-religionists were. And there had been a few ops the peacekeepers had run that had gone badly wrong because of perimeter IEDs around target houses.
The woods actually made such traps far easier to conceal. A trained eye could pick out disturbed leaves and undergrowth, but haste and the pre-combat adrenaline dump—coupled with the poor training most of the peacekeepers had gotten in observation—could lead a soldier to easily miss the indicators. There was just a lot of visual noise in the woods, that training geared toward desert and urban environments for the last twenty years didn’t necessarily prepare a man for.
But we got within meters of the house without spotting any traps. No pressure plates or mines, so far. It might not last, but I was thankful. Mines and IEDs give me the screaming willies. I’d been involved in more than one hit against People’s Revolutionary Action terrorists that had used them extensively, and they never got easier to deal with. Miss one detail, and you were pink mist.
The door in the back had a glass window filling the upper half, so Phil veered toward the corner of the house as he came out of the trees, and I followed, falling in next to him. He’d noted the position of the door handle, and shifted to that side. It would make it easier to open without exposure to the window.
Greg and Jordan pushed past us to cover our six o’clock, while Dwight joined me and Phil. Jordan and Greg would come in after us, but we didn’t want to all be focused on the door if one of the militiamen decided to go for a stroll in the woods, just in case.
Phil had his rifle pointed at the door, and I paused to glance around for a second to see that we were all set, before I stepped out and reached around him to check the door. If England’s escort had locked it behind them…
But it unlatched quietly and swung open easily. I threw it the rest of the way open and Phil went through as I slapped my off hand back on my OBR’s forearm and followed him, my muzzle dropping level over his shoulder as we went.
We were in a short corridor, with an open door to the right, a closed door to the left, and what looked like an open common area straight ahead. Phil moved to the open door, pausing for only the fraction of a second it took for me to drive my knee into the back of his leg, almost catapulting him through the door with me right on his heels.
The room was a bedroom, fully furnished but filthy. It looked like a bum had been squatting there for a while. It was also empty. We swept the room with our muzzles, then turned and started back out, even as Greg and Jordan kicked in the opposite door with a crash and Dwight, who had swept past the door to cover the open space ahead, fired a short burst.
The thunder of the shots hammered at the walls and reverberated through the house. I came out to see the red-bearded man wearing a light-colored jacket and an AK chest rig poorly stuffed with FAMAS mags stagger back against the wall before falling on his face, leaving a red splatter on the white plastered wall behind him.
That tore it. We were made. Without missing a beat, I kneed Dwight with a snapped, “With you,” and we drove forward into the common area.
Clearing with a 7.62mm light machinegun wasn’t ideal, but it was what we had.
The common area was as deserted as the trashed bedroom had been, and there was more trash and needles on the coffee table in the center, along with some very sketchy-looking stains on the chair and couch. Those details were taken in at a glance as we both turned toward the stairway around the corner.
A man was running up the steps, an MP7 in his hands, and I double-tapped him. With vicious thunderclaps blending together into a catastrophic clash of sound, two 7.62 bullets smashed into the man’s chest and head, sending him tumbling backward down the stairs in a welter of blood spatter, his limbs suddenly loose as he crashed down the steps.
There was another door next to the stairwell, and the two of us pushed toward it, with Phil and the rest in tow, Phil posting up on the stairs as Dwight ki
cked the door hard enough that it cracked the jamb and then Phil and I went inside.
I’d half expected it to be empty, given that nobody had stuck their head out after the gunfire outside. I was right; it was piled with boxes and dark. I flicked on the lights just long enough to make sure that there wasn’t anyone hiding the shadows, waiting for us to turn our backs, and then we were moving again.
England’s life expectancy had started dropping precipitously as soon as the first shot had been fired. If we didn’t find him fast, the odds that we were going to find him alive at all were going to shrink to zero. Especially given the people who were holding him.
Even so, we didn’t just race down the steps. That was suicidal, and you didn’t get selected for the Grex Luporum teams by being a suicidal moron. We cleared the turn and proceeded at a measured pace down the stairs, leading with our muzzles, careful not to expose ourselves unnecessarily.
None of us were wearing body armor. Risky, yes, but when everything is going in on your back, you’ve got to make some compromises.
Which was why, as we neared the base of the steps, where the stairwell opened up on what looked like a very open floor plan, Jordan lobbed a flashbang over our shoulders.
It wasn’t unexpected; Jordan wouldn’t have screwed us that way. We had, in fact, discussed the tactic and trained for it. It took careful timing, which doesn’t always work in a combat situation, but this time, it did. Sort of.
There was a man crouched behind a couch, aiming a G36 at the steps as we came down. I spotted him just as Jordan pulled the pin, and I snapped my rifle toward him and fired. I was definitely at a disadvantage, despite having the high ground of the stairs. He had a better angle on me than I had on him.
I was a split second faster. My rifle roared, spitting fire in the dimness of the stairwell. The first round punched through the couch and into him, making him flinch and sending his own burst into the ceiling over my head, showering me with pulverized plaster. Only Hartrick’s ruthless training kept me from flinching, even as the trigger broke on the second shot and Jordan’s flashbang went off.
We’d trained to slow our roll and look away when the flashbang detonated, but the necessity of finishing my target kept me from doing that. I ate the bang, the brilliant flash stabbing through my skull while the concussion rocked me and made my teeth snap together with a painful clop. My head immediately started aching, and there was a big green blotch in my vision, but I drove through it as Dwight and I hit the bottom of the stairs and split, sweeping the ground floor with our muzzles.
Dwight was already shooting as I hooked around the bottom of the stairwell, my equilibrium rocked and trying to see past the spots in my vision. A silhouette filled my sights and I took a half-second to identify the fact that the man had a pistol in his hands, even though he was blinking like he’d just looked straight at the sun. I shot him, putting a single round in his skull from fifteen feet away, and was tracking to my left even as he dropped and Greg came up beside me.
The back of the main room of the bottom floor was set up with a hanging screen, a camera on a tripod, and various crates of weapons, along with a flag I recognized as belonging to the Greater Western Caliphate, the organization that had “replaced” the Islamic State in Europe. Two men with jihadi beards stood there, flanking England, who was already on his knees in front of the camera.
One was pointing his submachinegun at us, and Greg got to him first. Greg’s muzzle blast slapped me in the side of the face from less than two feet away, as he put a bullet into the man’s chest, and then a follow-up into his head. I was a touch slower, but was already lining up the other one.
That man had a black-bladed knife to England’s throat, and was yelling something in Serbo-Croatian. I cut him off with a bullet.
My rifle coughed, and his head snapped back with a crimson spray spattered against the screen behind him. He slumped down, dragging England with him, the knife falling from nerveless fingers.
I was on him in seconds, Greg following me with Phil right behind him. I kept the dead man covered, even though I knew he was dead, then knelt to pull England away from him.
“Specialist England!” I shouted, my voice slightly too loud on account of my hearing having been brutalized by not only the gunfire but also the flashbang. He was going to be just as deafened, though, and even if he wasn’t, I didn’t especially care. Not the time or the place to worry about decorum. “Are you all right?”
Ordinarily, I’d have personal questions to ask him, that would have verified his identity. We didn’t have access to that kind of information, however, even if it had ever been recorded. The regular Army wasn’t doing too good with preparations for separated personnel at the time. Besides, his photo had been pretty conclusive. This was him.
He wasn’t responding, but he was clearly breathing, staring up at me in shock. I didn’t know what this kid’s MOS had been, and frankly, I didn’t care. I dragged him out from under the dead terrorist and quickly ran my hand over him, checking for blood. Nothing. I hauled him to his feet.
“Time to go, kid,” I said. The words were barely out of my mouth when Dwight yelled from the front of the house.
“We’ve got company!” He was cut off by the thunder of gunfire. “Shooters coming from next door!”
“Upstairs,” I barked. “We’ll go out the back, the way we came in.”
Dwight and Jordan were blazing away from the front, suppressing the oncoming militia. With my off hand twisted in the back of England’s blouse and my muzzle pointed at the ceiling, I started for the stairs, Phil moving fast to get in front of me.
We pounded up the steps, and that was when I realized that Scott was calling me over the radio. From the tone of his voice, he’d been yelling for me for a while, but the gunfire and my battered hearing had conspired to keep me from hearing him.
“Deacon, Weeb!” He was practically yelling into my ear.
I groped for my transmit switch and keyed the radio as we got to the top of the steps. More gunfire was echoing from below. “Go, Weeb,” I called.
“You’d better hardpoint, buddy,” Scott said. “I hope you found the package, because you kicked the hornet’s nest. There are militia coming out of the woodwork all over the town. You’ve got a couple minutes; I think they were all up to the northwest, but they’re coming, and they’re heading into the woods, too. You’re not going to get out before they’re on top of you.”
I didn’t have time to respond. A silhouette appeared in the doorway as I shoved England into the common area and out of the line of fire. I slapped my off hand back onto my rifle and fired a split second behind Phil.
The man with the black balaclava covering his face and a short-barreled rifle in his hands staggered backward as our bullets tore into him. He didn’t fall immediately, apparently because of the second man behind him. We kept shooting, our rifles thundering in the narrow hallway until both dropped.
A small object sailed through the doorway, bounced off the wall, and landed right in front of the two bodies, rolling to come to a rest just against the wall before it exploded, blotting the hallway out in an ugly black cloud with a tooth-rattling thud.
Chapter 4
Instinct, hard-wired by brutal training and even more brutal experience, was what saved my life.
As soon as that frag had hit the wall, I had thrown myself out of the hallway, flattening myself against the wall behind Phil, who had ducked back at the same instant. I got the first syllable of, “Grenade!” out before it blew.
Fortunately, Greg had seen it, too, and thrown himself back down the stairs, colliding with Dwight on the way and sending both of them tumbling in a heap to the landing. But they were alive and clambering back up, even as Jordan continued to lay down covering fire from the base of the steps.
I didn’t dare hold position for long; that frag hadn’t been a final solution. There were going to be more militiamen coming in after it. I stepped back out and drove down the hallway, Phil getting up a
nd coming with me, our rifles up and pointed at the back door.
Acrid smoke was still swirling in the narrow space as I stepped over the mangled bodies lying in the doorway and pushed outside, Phil right behind me.
I almost collided with a man in a thick jacket and Islamic cap. He stared in shock for a second, his FAMAS off-line, while my OBR’s muzzle jammed into his upper chest.
I pulled the trigger in a near-panic, hammering three rounds into him at contact range, just as fast as the trigger would reset, leaning into the weapon as the muzzle blast blew bits of fabric and chunks of flesh, blood, and bone everywhere.
I kept tracking up as he fell backward, my last round blowing off the top of his skull before he dropped out of my sights and exposed the man right behind him. He was already staggering and starting to fall; my bullets had punched clear through the first man and into him. I still finished him off with a headshot, just before a long, panicked burst of automatic fire tore into the side of the house and shredded the air over my head with a painful, staccato ripping sound.
I threw myself flat as I returned fire, knowing that I wasn’t going to get anywhere close. The best I could hope for was that a few rounds going in their general direction was going to give them pause.
More return machinegun fire raked the ground next to me as I shrank back against the wall, kicking up little showers of dirt and shredded vegetation. I heard three shots from behind me, the muzzle blasts smacking me in the back of the head, and then Phil was yelling at me to get up and get back inside.
On my elbows and knees, I scrambled backward until Phil reached out and grabbed my belt, hauling me back through the door. I knocked an elbow painfully against the jamb as my rifle almost got caught up. More bullets smacked splinters off the door overhead as we drew back inside the house.
