by Mel Odom
Blood welled from an ugly wound in the side of Strahan’s neck. For a moment Robinson thought the man was dead. Then Strahan reached up and caught his arm.
“Help … me,” Strahan wheezed. “Please. Help … me.”
Praying out loud, Robinson grabbed for a field dressing from his kit and slapped it against Strahan’s neck to stop the bleeding. From the amount of blood, he knew he had only minutes to stop the flow before his friend bled out.
More bullets ripped through the canvas over the truck’s cargo deck. Robinson wanted to scream at the men doing the shooting and ask them if they knew the trucks were loaded with munitions. Instead, he kept his head low and kept pressure on the field dressing.
Local Time 2118 Hours
“Drifter Leader, this is Base. Do you copy?”
Goose heard Remington’s voice in his ear over the headset’s crackling connection. Even though they had access to geosynchronous communications satellites, the connections weren’t always solid.
“Drifter Leader,” Remington said again, “this is Base. I repeat, do you copy?”
Goose didn’t want to take the call; he knew how it was going to go, but he didn’t have a choice. He couldn’t blame Remington. He sat in the passenger seat of the Hummer and held his assault rifle canted forward. The seat-belt harness cut into his hips and chest, but it was the only thing keeping him from flying out of the seat. At times in its mad dash across the uneven terrain, the Hummer was airborne.
“Base, this is Drifter Leader.”
“Goose, that convoy is under attack. Where are you?”
The news hit Goose like a sledgehammer. He’d guessed that the convoy might get attacked, but he’d hoped the radio silence had been because everything was okay. They’d tried to reach the convoy, but the hills had interfered with the signal.
“On our way back now,” Goose said.
“You shouldn’t have left them.”
“No, sir,” Goose agreed. “I shouldn’t have.”
“What were you thinking when you—”
“Begging pardon, Base, but unless you have pertinent information I need right now, I suggest we shelve that particular topic.”
“That’s fine,” Remington said. “We’ll make time for it when you get back.”
“Yes, sir. Can you tell me how many hostiles we’re looking at?”
“We read nine vehicles.” Remington’s voice calmed as he focused on the mission.
“Manpower?”
“That’s unknown at this point. The nine vehicles are all light and fast. No heavy rolling stock.”
“Copy that.” Tanks wouldn’t have been able to keep up with the convoy, but Niyazi and his people could have been waiting in ambush with heavy weaponry. Goose glanced at his watch automatically. Running gun battles generally didn’t last more than a few minutes.
And they were behind.
When he glanced over his shoulder, Goose saw the jeep carrying Danielle Vinchenzo trailing by only a few feet. The reporter’s face was a pallid oval in the passenger seat as she clung to the seat belt and roll bar.
“Harlan,” Goose called over the headset.
“Yeah, Sarge.”
“You were a state police officer in Tennessee, weren’t you?”
“You bet. Got called up in the reserves for the Iraq situation and decided I’d stay on.”
“Do you know how to get that vehicle out of our hair without hurting anyone?”
“Yeah.” The grin was apparent in Harlan’s voice. “It’s called a PIT. Pursuit Immobilization Technique.”
“I’d rather the civilians didn’t arrive with us. I want them out of harm’s way.”
In the jeep, Danielle turned around in her seat and pointed at one of the Hummers coming up on the left. She shouted at the driver. Her actions let Goose know she was monitoring his ops frequencies.
Harlan was a better driver than the man handling Danielle’s vehicle. He crept up on the left side and gently nudged the left rear quarter panel with the right front bumper of his Hummer. Danielle’s vehicle launched into a spinout and came to a dead stop in a whirl of dust.
“Man,” Cody Brenner said behind the steering wheel of the Hummer Goose occupied, “Harlan makes that look easy.”
“My daddy taught me how to do that when I was twelve,” Harlan replied. “Before I took up with the state police, I ran stock cars on circuit racing.”
With Danielle out of the way—at least temporarily—Goose turned his attention to the coming battle. The Hummer roared over the next hill, went airborne for just a moment, then crashed back to the ground in a skidding, sliding advance.
At the bottom of the hill, the convoy was hurtling cross-country, the Rangers inside fighting for their lives. Muzzle flashes sparked white-hot holes in the night.
“Come up on the left side of the attack vehicles,” Goose directed. “If we can take out the drivers, we take out the attack teams.”
Local Time 2120 Hours
“I can’t believe Gander ordered them to do that.” The driver keyed the ignition and tried to get the jeep started. The ignition engaged and the engine turned over, but the motor didn’t start.
Danielle growled in rage as she watched the line of Ranger vehicles disappear over the ridge. “This is exactly something Goose would do.”
“I thought he was your friend.”
“He is. That’s why he did it.”
The driver tried the engine again. “We could have gotten killed.”
“No, man,” Gary the cameraman said from the back. “That was a classic move. And I know Harlan. Man’s a master of anything with four wheels. He put us right where he intended to.”
“Is this thing going to start?” Danielle asked. “There’s a story breaking right over that hill, and I’m missing it.”
“The way things are going,” the driver said in disgust, “if you miss this one, there’ll be another one tomorrow.”
Danielle barely checked an angry reply in time. The driver was new to her.
“Dude,” Gary said, “out here you don’t just want another story. You want Goose’s story. That guy’s like a magnet in this whole thing. If there’s trouble brewing somewhere, it’ll find a way to try and get a piece of him.”
Danielle silently agreed. She climbed out of the jeep. “Grab your camera, Gary. We’re walking.”
Frustration chafed at her. With everything she’d discovered since the Syrian attack, she believed she was at the eye of a vast conspiracy. One that seemed to involve her new boss, Nicolae Carpathia. Everything tracked back to him.
But every time Danielle thought she’d unearthed a new lead to the puzzle, someone or something got in her way. Her producer had shut down most of her lines of inquiry, freezing her out from the vast information archives within OneWorld NewsNet. She couldn’t prove that, but she was certain it was true.
Only a couple of weeks before, she’d chatted up one of the new people in research and had been starting to make some headway in her internal investigation of Carpathia. But someone had discovered that. The research assistant was released, and Danielle had been assigned to cover Goose’s convoy. If she hadn’t been thinking about the cover-up, the convoy story would have made sense. It was a good one.
The downside was that she might very well get killed tonight.
If OneWorld NewsNet wasn’t already out to kill her. She still wasn’t certain of that, and the possibility, when she wasn’t scrambling to stay alive, frightened her.
She shouldered her bag and started walking.
“Gimme a sec,” the driver said. “All that whirling around we did in the dust probably choked out the carburetor intake. It’ll clear.” He tried the ignition again. This time the engine caught, blatted unevenly, and finally managed to run steadily.
Without a word, Danielle climbed back into the passenger seat. The driver engaged the transmission, and they got underway. Even over the roar of the engine, Danielle heard the sharp reports of automatic weapons fire from over
the ridgeline.
4
U.S. Rangers Convoy
One Klick North-Northeast of Harran
Sanliurfa Province, Turkey
Local Time 2121 Hours
“Drifter Transport, this is Drifter Leader.” Goose calmly braced his feet against the Hummer’s floorboard and unlimbered his assault rifle. “Do you copy?”
“Transport reads you,” Juan Martinez responded in a stressed voice. “We’re gettin’ all shot up, Sarge. Where are you?”
“We got your six, Transport. Drive it like you stole it.”
“Copy that. I see you now. Bust ’em up.”
“All right,” Goose stated to his team calmly and confidently, like this was something they did every day, which was almost getting to be the truth. “We stay in single file, and we stay together as long as we can. Hold your fire until I give you the signal. So far they haven’t seen us and I want to keep it that way.”
“Won’t stay that way for long.” Brenner had a death grip on the steering wheel.
“Ease up,” Goose said. “You’re fighting the wheel.”
Brenner pushed out his breath and loosened his hands a little. The ride became smoother. “You got it, Sarge.”
“Just hold it steady till I tell you to break. Then check your left side and head that way as quickly as you can. We’ll figure out the rest of it as we go along.”
Brenner nodded.
“Now get us up there.”
The bandit vehicles were running slower than the army Hummers because the cargo trucks’ top speed wasn’t as good as that of the smaller vehicles. Five bandit vehicles harried the convoy on the left side. Four were on the right. Getting all of them on the first passthrough was going to be impossible.
“Twenty feet outside their vehicles,” Goose told Brenner. “Then hold it as long as you can. Or until I tell you to break formation.”
“I will, Sarge.”
The Hummer sped up beside a pickup truck that bounded across the hard-packed ground. The pickup’s shocks were obviously gone, and the front end was a deathtrap in the making. Three men stood in the bed and fired into the rearmost truck.
“You ready, Crain?” Goose asked.
“Yes, Sergeant.” Crain was manning the .50-cal machine gun mounted on the Hummer’s rear deck.
“You’ve got the gunners.”
“I do,” Crain agreed grimly.
Goose lifted the M-4A1 to his shoulder and took aim at the driver of the pickup. The man was barely a silhouette in the rear window when the gunners shifted. Goose waved Brenner forward, then held the rifle again. When the driver came into view through the side window, Goose said, “Now.” His finger tightened on the trigger.
The driver must have sensed something coming up on his side of the pickup. He turned and stared at Goose. The man’s eyes widened, and Goose knew he was about to steer away from them. Before he could, Goose squeezed the trigger and rode out the rising recoil in four three-round bursts.
Most of the bullets caught the man in the face. Others tore through the side of the pickup or the windshield. The vehicle swerved out of control.
“Floor it!” Goose ordered as the pickup drifted over in front of them. At the same time, he was aware of the .50-cal machine gun chattering to sudden life behind him. The three men in the pickup bed fell in rapid succession.
The pickup kept coming.
Brenner started to steer away. Goose grabbed the wheel and held the Hummer steady, then rammed his foot down on top of Brenner’s. The army vehicle surged forward again and locked up briefly with the pickup. Metal grated and shrilled; then the bandit vehicle gave way under the Hummer’s greater weight.
Out of control, the pickup pulled back to the right, narrowly missed the last convoy truck, and slammed into the rear pursuit ban-dit vehicle on the right side. Both vehicles slid out of control and rolled, becoming a conflagration of shattered bodies. Pieces of metal flew in all directions as they came apart.
Goose released the steering wheel. “Good job,” he said.
Brenner just looked at him and said, “Yes, Sergeant.”
Evidently the bandits had some kind of communications system. The other four vehicles ahead of Goose suddenly split away from the convoy. They ran two by two; someone had obviously trained them.
“Up the middle,” Goose directed. “Get them firing at each other.”
“They’re going to be firing at us too,” Brenner protested.
“If you get through them fast enough, they’ll have less time to react. Work on not getting hit.” Goose emptied his rifle clip at a pair of the vehicles. Men inside ducked as others returned fire.
Bullets chopped through the Hummer’s windows, and broken glass sailed. Goose swapped out the empty rifle cartridge for a full one. Gray steam poured back over them from the front of the Hummer. Thankfully the engine didn’t lose power.
Brenner screamed in frustration as the Hummer zipped through the middle of the four bandit vehicles. Goose and his group drew fire immediately, but the move had caught their enemies off-stride. Panicked, the bandits opened fire, but they had a hard time catching up to the speeding Hummer. Instead, they caught themselves in a deadly cross fire.
Driven away by their own fire, the bandits circled wide. They still fired their weapons but became more careful about where those stray rounds went.
In the meantime, the rest of Goose’s team slipped up beside the bandits. The Rangers opened fire at once.
More bullets slapped the Hummer’s body with rapid metallic thumps. Goose turned in his seat, ignored the gunner, and aimed at the driver of the jeep just behind them. He squeezed the trigger and watched the driver jerk back suddenly. From the slack way he sat in the seat, Goose knew the man was mortally wounded.
Out of control, the jeep skidded and suddenly flipped sideways, gaining speed and coming right at the Hummer.
“Hold on!” Goose yelled as he braced for impact. “Hold that wheel steady!”
The jeep slammed into the Hummer’s rear bumper, then fell away. Goose jerked with the impact and tried to keep his upper body loose so he wouldn’t get whiplash. His battered knee screamed in agony as he braced his leg against the floorboard.
The machine gunner, Crain, hadn’t been able to get himself strapped in before the impact. He struggled to hold on to the machine gun, but it whipsawed around on the gimbals. Goose reached up and caught the man in one hand, closed it into a fist in the BDUs, and yanked Crain down and forward between the seats.
Brenner fought the wheel.
“Hold it steady,” Goose roared. “Don’t fight it. Ride it out. Get your foot off that brake.”
Brenner nodded and held the wheel steady as he lifted his foot from the brake pedal. The Hummer gradually straightened out and came under his control.
“Don’t stop,” Goose directed. “We’ve still got a convoy to protect.”
“Yes, Sergeant.” Brenner put his foot on the accelerator and downshifted the transmission. They sped back toward the fleeing convoy.
“Thanks, Sarge,” Crain said weakly. “Thought I was a goner for sure.”
“My pleasure.” Goose helped the younger man back to his feet on the rear deck. Knives dug into Goose’s knee, and he knew the joint was going to be difficult to deal with over the next few days.
He turned in the seat and surveyed the battleground. In addition to the bandit vehicle he’d caused to flip, another sat wreathed in flames and a third was overturned and upside-down. A lone survivor quickly scrambled from beneath the disabled vehicle, saw the Rangers bearing down on him, and dropped to his knees with his hands clasped atop his head.
“Base, this is Drifter Leader,” Goose said.
“Go, Drifter Leader,” Remington responded.
“I count four hostile vehicles down.”
“Affirmative, Leader. Four down. Five left in the field.”
Goose spotted one being pursued by two of the Ranger Hummers. That left four on the other side of the convoy. “
Are they still in pursuit?”
“That’s a big roger, Sarge,” someone said. “Guys are climbing onto my truck. I can’t get ’em off.”
The second truck in line broke formation and started weaving back and forth.
“Hold on,” Goose said. “We’re on our way.” He pointed at the truck.
Brenner gave a tight nod and accelerated again. He closed the distance to the truck.
“Stay on this side,” Goose said. “I don’t want the bandits to know we’re coming.” He reached down and unfastened his seat belt. “Crain, you’re with me.”
United States 75th Army Rangers Temporary Post
Sanliurfa, Turkey
Local Time 2123 Hours
“Do you see what Goose is doing?” one of the techs yelled out.
On the screen, Goose climbed from the Hummer onto the side of one of the cargo trucks. He fought his way up the side onto the top of the careening vehicle.
Remington stared at the computer monitor and watched with cold anger. He hadn’t missed the fact that Goose was a favorite among the men. Everywhere Remington had served with Goose, even back when they were both noncoms before Remington had chosen to pursue a path through Officer Candidates School, Goose had had the same response from men. They genuinely liked him.
That was a quality of leadership, Remington knew. But men didn’t have to like an officer to obey him. Fear was another good tool. The British navy under Lord Nelson had employed fear and brutality among the crew, and it had worked.
“Man,” another tech said, “there’s nothing the sarge can’t do.”
“He’s got God looking out over him,” someone else said. “Remember when the Syrians rolled those tanks into the streets? Sarge stood up to one of them and took it out single-handedly.”
“Quiet!” Remington roared. “Do you think this is some kind of ice cream social? or a John Wayne movie? Those are my supplies. Dedicated to my outpost. I want my supplies to reach my outpost in one piece. Do you understand?”
