Burmese Crossfire (Brannigan's Blackhearts Book 2)

by Peter Nealen

  Brannigan gave them a few minutes to sort themselves out and get ready to make the assault. They had some time, and patience now would pay off later. Again, this wasn’t a hostage rescue mission, and they did not have a strict timetable. They could set their own.

  It was curiously liberating.

  As he crouched in the bushes, Brannigan remembered many an operation with higher headquarters somehow hovering over his shoulder, whether it was by VTC aboard the USS Boxer when he’d been a MEU commander, or a lieutenant demanding regular reports over the radio when he’d been a team leader. Always there had been someone, somewhere far away from the battlefield—or the training area—trying to puppeteer the action from a distance, trying to dictate his every move.

  Now, as un-ideal as the overall situation was, he found himself finally in the position many a warrior quietly longed for. He had his “Commander’s Intent,” he had his team, and he had the battlefield. And that was it.

  The team was ready. He tapped Childress’ shoulder. Time to go.

  Childress rose and started down the hill, moving from tree to tree, keeping to the deeper shadows between them as much as possible. There was almost as little illumination as there had been the night before, and the grass in the open areas rose well above the men’s waists. It made it hard to see Childress, even only a couple of yards ahead. But Brannigan knew where he was going, and even when he lost sight of the silent point man, he could usually pick up his movement a moment later.

  With the faint hiss of vegetation against soaking-wet fatigues, rucksacks, and dripping weapons, they slipped down the hill. Brannigan kept his head on a swivel, watching for sentries, listening posts, predators, or even enemy forces coming north from the fighting near Lontan during the day. It was entirely possible that whatever forces had attacked Lontan, or whatever their target had been nearby, had stayed on-site. It was equally possible that they had been repulsed or destroyed, and that the opposition force was even now advancing north.

  There were no friendlies. Anyone in northern Shan State who wasn’t one of Brannigan’s Blackhearts was an enemy.

  Reaching the bottom of the valley, they halted briefly, settling down on a knee, heads almost all the way below the tips of the grass, watching and listening. They couldn’t be too careful.

  All they heard was their own breathing and the night noises of the jungle. Childress, without prompting, rose and continued the advance, starting to work his way up the hill.

  About halfway up, still in the shadows of the trees, he held up a hand and slowly, slowly sank to a knee. Brannigan, keeping his own movements carefully controlled, so as not to give their position away by sudden movement, followed suit, scanning uphill, looking for what might have warned their point man.

  There. It was barely visible, but there was a fighting position right below the crest of the hill. It was sandbagged and camouflaged, but it was definitely there. That hump couldn’t be anything else.

  So far, there was no sign that anyone inside the position had seen them. It couldn’t stay that way, but if the Norks didn’t have night vision, they still had a chance.

  Looking back, he quickly assessed their approach. Details were now impossible to make out; the landscape was a curious mélange of deeper and lighter shadows in the green of his NVGs, lit once again only by the stars, muted by the smoke that still hung over the hills from Lontan. Even when the moon rose, it would only be a tiny sliver.

  The line of trees where they were currently crouched was the only concealment they had. Most of the rest of the hillside to the west was open, except for the grass.

  Looking back up, he searched for any sign of another post. There was nothing within his line of sight. Only the one.

  He took a deep breath, tapped on Childress’ shoulder, and indicated he should drop his ruck, even as he did the same. Then he turned back to Santelli, who had moved up behind him, along with Hancock.

  “I’m taking Sam ahead, see if we can get close to that post,” he whispered. “Get ready to come running if things clack off.”

  He got his acknowledgements, then moved back up to Childress’ side. Together, as low and silent as they could be, they started up the hill.

  Brannigan remembered training stalks, half a lifetime ago. Trying to get close enough to the truck with the observers without being spotted. This was the same thing, except the cost of being spotted wasn’t a “no-go,” it was getting shot and bleeding out on a hillside in Burma.

  Step. Feel the ground. Make sure there’s no branch under your boot about to crack and make noise. Put your weight on that foot, then move forward to repeat with the other foot. Keep low, right at the top of the grass. Move slowly; don’t disturb the vegetation any more than necessary.

  There was no wind. The air was heavy and humid, redolent with the smells of smoke and rotting vegetation. It made movement that much harder, because any disturbance was going to be visible to anyone watching. Only the lack of illumination made up for it.

  The trees thinned out as they got closer to the top. Brannigan realized that the fighting position was actually on the crest of the hill. He crouched lower as he saw a roof loom above it, just beyond. They were at the camp.

  He and Childress stopped, almost as if reading each other’s’ minds. They were on the target. It was decision time. And the decision was Brannigan’s.

  He stayed there on a knee for a long time, just watching the sentry post. There was no movement there, no sign of anyone occupying the position. He could hear some activity beyond it, now; someone was playing music on a radio. A low-pitched voice spoke, was answered. There was still no movement or sound from the sentry post. If there was a guard in there, he was extraordinarily disciplined.

  Of course, he mused, he should probably expect that from a Nork.

  Childress looked over at him and caught his attention. The lanky man had one of his grenades in his hand, and was hefting it. The suggestion was pretty obvious.

  Brannigan shook his head. They were still out of position. He turned back down the hill and signaled with his IR flash on his NVGs, praying that the Norks really didn’t have night vision, and that he wasn’t about to give them away.

  There was no reaction from the direction of the camp, but he got an answering flash in reply. Then the rest of the Blackhearts were coming up to join them, dark specters in the night, their faces dimly illuminated in his NVGs by the faintly reflected glow of their own green phosphor tubes.

  As they gathered in a tight perimeter in the shadows of the trees, he continued to watch the hump of the fighting position. There was still no movement, no sign that they’d been detected. He was beginning to believe that it was abandoned. What exactly that meant, he still wasn’t sure.

  He laid out the plan in as quiet a whisper as he could, breathing the words directly into each man’s ear. The assault element would continue to circle around to the east; the base of fire would stay there, clear the fighting position with grenades, then move up and provide fire support against the camp while the assault element swept in from the flank.

  It was simple; it had to be. Complicated plans would only go awry in the darkness and the confusion. It was another lesson he’d learned long ago.

  Once again, with Childress leading the way, they slipped around the side of the hill, leaving Hancock’s element and the linguists behind.

  Villareal was right behind him, his hands empty but his med bag on his shoulders. He was most likely to be needed with the assault element, so he was going, without saying anything or needing to be told. The man might be averse to doing violence, but he was no coward.

  Slowly, quietly, they spread out in a ragged line along the eastern perimeter of the camp. Through the scattered trees and the bushes, they began to pick out details.

  There was another sentry post halfway around the camp, as dark and silent as the first one. The camp itself was a collection of bamboo huts, most with either grass or tin roofs, arranged in a rough triangle. There was a small fire b
urning in the center of the triangle, and two men in camouflage uniforms were standing near it, both with Type 88 rifles slung over their shoulders. Both were also staring into the fire; they would be completely blind if they looked out into the night.

  Brannigan realized that what he’d taken for tents in the overhead imagery that Van Zandt had showed him were actually the tin-roofed shacks. And there definitely were bunkers in between them, two of them, dug in and covered with logs and sandbags. He couldn’t see any firing ports, so maybe they were simply for cover from indirect fire. Or maybe they’d been built just to give the soldiers something to do.

  He had worked his way through the line to get to where he was closest to the outer sentry post. He’d be the one to initiate the attack. Just as Childress had wanted to, he pulled one of the HG 84 grenades out of his vest, prepped it, pulled the pin, and lobbed it at the sandbagged position, aiming to drop it behind the hump of the sentry post.

  The ping of the spoon flying free was impossibly loud, as was the dull thump of the little, barrel-shaped hunk of steel and explosive hitting the ground, right about where he’d wanted it. The men by the fire gave no sign that they’d heard it.

  When it went off with a flash, an earthshaking thud, and a cloud of smoke and debris, then they noticed.

  With yells of alarm, both men swung the Type 88s off their shoulders, searching for the source of the attack. A moment later, another grenade went off to the south with another flash and a thud, as Hancock’s element hit their sentry post.

  Brannigan was already on his feet and moving, sprinting toward where the smoke from his grenade was still settling, trying to get to the sentry post before anyone who might still be alive inside could recover from the shock of the detonation. He wasn’t immediately concerned with the two men by the fire; they wouldn’t be able to see him yet. They would be completely night blind from the fire.

  The sentry post had a few logs and earth laid over it, but was still little more than a sandbagged foxhole. And it was also empty. There was no sentry inside.

  He dropped to a knee, bringing his G3 to his shoulder, putting the red dot on the nearest North Korean by the fire, just as a long, roaring burst of machinegun fire nearly cut both men in half.

  One folded over as his midsection erupted with a spray of blood and fell into the fire. The other tried to duck away, but caught nearly ten rounds to the upper chest and head anyway, collapsing in a bloody heap only a few feet from the fire where the corpse of his comrade was starting to smolder.

  A rattling burst of 5.45mm fire sounded, but Brannigan couldn’t see where it was coming from; whoever was shooting was blocked by the huts ahead. But the shooting was answered by two more ravening bursts, and fell silent.

  Looking to right and left, he made sure that the rest of the assault element was roughly on line, then rose and started to advance into the camp.

  It was now strangely quiet; Curtis and Bianco were holding their fire, conserving ammunition when they didn’t have targets. It could mean that all targets had been effectively eliminated. It could also mean that there were plenty of nasty surprises waiting in and around the huts. With North Koreans, Brannigan was expecting the worst, and he knew that the rest of his men would be, as well.

  Off to his left, Flanagan and Wade were starting to fade around the far side of the first hut. Brannigan held his position, just behind the corners of the second and third, with Childress. They both stayed low; if Flanagan and Wade had to engage while clearing that first hut, their bullets were going to zip right through the bamboo walls.

  A long moment passed. There was no shooting. Brannigan got up and murmured to Childress, “On me.”

  “With you,” Childress replied. Brannigan started around the corner, careful to make eye contact and positively identify Flanagan and Wade as they came out of the first hut. Apparently, that hut was clear.

  He swung in the open door of the second hut, Childress turning to follow him at the last moment, Wade and Flanagan holding their position to cover the rest of the center of the camp.

  The interior was dark; the only light was coming from the fire outside, shining through the door and the gaps in the bamboo. There were mats on the bamboo floor, several big bowls of rice, and three crates that looked like they probably held weapons or ammunition. There were no people.

  He came back out to see Hart and Aziz coming out of the third hut. Tanaka was on a knee next to Villareal, guarding the doctor and providing more security on the far bunker and the last hut.

  Flanagan and Wade headed for the final hut, a long, single-story structure that looked like a barracks. A corpse was lying halfway out of the far door.

  ***

  Flanagan didn’t even pause at the door. He knew Wade was with him, keeping right at his shoulder, his G3’s muzzle visible just out of the corner of his eye in the firelight. He just stepped up onto the bamboo floor and swept into the long room, scanning the darkened interior with his NVGs, his red dot just below his eye.

  The room was lined with sleeping mats and what looked like small footlockers. There was a makeshift rifle rack at the far end, with one AK-style rifle and a strange-looking machinegun that looked to his eyes like an old British Bren sitting upright inside it.

  As he swept across the open space with his muzzle, he saw two human shapes. One was the dead man in the far doorway. The other was lying on one of the sleeping mats, halfway down the length of the room.

  “Clear this way,” Wade murmured.

  “Moving,” was all Flanagan said in reply, as he stepped out from the wall and advanced on the prone figure on the sleeping mat. The bamboo floor creaked under his boots, and then again as Wade came with him.

  He didn’t have a flashlight on him; he’d left it in his ruck, stashed against a tree back in the last covered and concealed position. Staging an assault on a possibly fortified position with a ruck on your back is a pretty good way to get slowed down enough to get dead. He reached up and turned on his IR illuminator on his NVGs.

  The man lying on the mat was clearly sick. His color was impossible to see in the green monochrome of the NVGs, but he was obviously sweating and shuddering with fever. But Flanagan didn’t relax. “I’m turning him over,” he said.

  “I’ve got you,” Wade replied. Flanagan didn’t know Wade’s full history, but he knew the man had been in enough places not to trust the wounded, or even the dead.

  A quick search turned up no weapons, no grenades hidden under the sick man’s body. “Clear!” he called out through the window over the man’s sleeping mat. “We’ve got somebody for Doc!”

  Brannigan came in, followed by Villareal, who went to the sick man’s side, pulling out a red-lens flashlight and beginning to examine him. “We don’t have a Korean linguist, do we?” he asked.

  Brannigan’s mouth thinned. “No,” he said. “Can’t say we were expecting to be interrogating any of them.” He looked around. “This just got a lot more complicated.”

  Flanagan knew what he meant. The main North Korean force wasn’t there. Which meant they would be coming back, and they would know that somebody was in the area and gunning for them. At least part of the element of surprise had been lost. The “get in, hit ‘em hard, and get out” model of mission planning was now no longer viable.

  “Are we sure he’s Korean?” Wade asked. “Is it possible we just stumbled on a Kokang camp?”

  “They’re Korean,” Childress said from where he was holding security on the door. “We saw a DPRK flag and a picture of Kim Jong Un in the smaller hut over there. Must be the commander’s hut.”

  “Hey, Tanaka!” Aziz called from the other door, where he was standing over the corpse.

  Before he could ask his question, though, Tanaka’s voice came out of the dark. “I don’t speak Korean, asshole,” he said, “I speak English and Spanish. And in case you couldn’t tell from my last name, my grandparents were Japanese, which means they didn’t speak Korean, either.”

  “That’s enough,�
�� Brannigan growled. “Aziz, go signal Hancock to bring the base of fire in, then we’ll start bringing the rucks up. We’ve got to consolidate and figure out our next move.”

  CHAPTER 11

  Alex Tanaka was starting to wonder if he wasn’t in over his head. First of all, he’d just done his first ever combat jump, and he was now hundreds, if not thousands, of miles away from anyone or anyplace that he could consider “safe” or “friendly.” Sure, he’d seen enough of Brannigan and the rest of Brannigan’s Blackhearts to be pretty sure that there wasn’t another team he’d ever want to go into something like this with, but they were still a long way out in the cold, and it was making him nervous.

  He tried to counteract his nervousness by focusing on the job at hand, trying to be just as much of a professional as Brannigan, Hancock, Santelli, or the quiet guy, Flanagan. They seemed perfectly cool and at ease in this environment, and Tanaka was determined not to betray any fear or other sign that he wasn’t just as good as they were. He didn’t want them to start to think he was out of his depth.

  So, when Hart came and joined him, he started moving out to the north side of the camp to take up security, his face carefully composed as if his stomach didn’t feel hollow and a little sick.

  Hart, he knew, was tough as nails. Of course, he didn’t actually know the man that well, but Hart had jumped into Burma with a prosthetic leg. He had to be hard-core to do that.

  They circled around the last huts in the dark, keeping their rifles out and looking for another defensive position like the two that had already been destroyed with grenades. Tanaka really didn’t think that any Koreans who might have been in any of the outer posts would have hunkered down and stayed hidden during the brief, ferocious firefight for the camp. At least, he hoped they wouldn’t have. He really didn’t want to run into a North Korean in the dark.