Burmese Crossfire (Brannigan's Blackhearts Book 2)

by Peter Nealen

  As they rounded the corner of the far hut, he heard a rustling ahead of them, and he froze. Hart hadn’t heard it, and took two more steps before he realized that Tanaka wasn’t moving anymore.

  Tanaka was peering hard through his NVGs, trying to catch a glimpse of what might have made the sound, his rifle in his shoulder, ready to snap it up and put a 7.62 round or five through the North Korean commando he was increasingly convinced was out there, crouched in the dark and waiting to kill him.

  Even with the flickering light of the fire behind him, casting some illumination out into the bushes and trees around the camp, he couldn’t see anything. He strained his ears, listening, almost defeated by the pounding of his own heartbeat.

  There it was again. And was that a faint moan he heard?

  Hart heard it that time. He turned to the left, his rifle raised, and Tanaka followed the line of his gaze.

  There was movement, close to the ground, right behind the long hut. It was furtive and somehow desperate, even though he couldn’t make out a shape. Taking his hand off his rifle’s forearm, he reached up and turned on his IR illuminator.

  There was a girl sitting in the dirt behind the hut. She was sitting with her knees drawn up, her almost skeletally-thin arms wrapped around her shins, and her face buried in her knees. Her dress was a filthy, tattered rag, not much bigger than a pillowcase. She was shaking like a leaf.

  She was also tied to a stake that had been driven into the dirt just outside the wall.

  “What the fuck!” Hart hissed, barely keeping his voice down. “I mean, what the fuck?”

  Tanaka hesitated. For one thing, Hart was starting to freak out, and it threw him a little. It wasn’t what he’d expected of the man—it did not fit with the image of the hard-core badass he had built in his mind. On the other hand, he wasn’t sure just how to approach this. What if the girl screamed? With the gunfire and explosions having gone silent, he’d gotten wrapped up enough in his own thoughts that he’d forgotten that anyone who was within a couple of miles of the camp already knew that there were hostiles there by then. What if it was a trap, and the girl was either booby-trapped, or waiting with a knife or a grenade? Every story about the nastiness of the Vietnam War, not to mention some of the awful things he’d seen children used for in Afghanistan, was suddenly looming in his imagination as he looked down at the cowering figure of the girl.

  “This is fucked up, man,” Hart was muttering. It suddenly dawned on Tanaka that the other man wasn’t sure what to do, either, and that the sight of the girl tied to a stake had seriously rattled him. “Those motherfuckers.”

  Taking a deep breath, Tanaka carefully slung his rifle behind his back and slowly moved toward the girl. “It’s all right,” he said softly, even though he was sure she couldn’t understand him. “Nobody’s going to hurt you.” He honestly wasn’t sure about that; it would depend in large part on her reaction. But he hoped that at least the tone of his voice might soothe her fears a little.

  “What kind of fucking animals…” Hart was still angry and freaking out, though he now had his rifle aimed out at the forest again, at least holding security for Tanaka.

  “Don,” Tanaka said, as the girl flinched at Hart’s litany of angry profanity, “go get Towne and Sanda, will you? Hopefully one of them can talk to her.”

  Hart fell silent for a moment, then said, “What about security?”

  “I can handle it,” he replied, keeping his voice as even and calm as he could. Somewhat to his surprise, faced with Hart’s emotional reaction and the girl’s evident terror, he was finding that his play-acting at being calm was becoming more real by the second, mainly by necessity. Somebody had to keep it together.

  Hart mumbled something that Tanaka couldn’t catch as he turned his attention back to the girl. He wanted to untie her, but at the same time, he was afraid that she’d bolt, and make things even worse. He felt like a monster for it, but he left the bonds in place. He reached for her shoulder. “It’s okay,” he said softly.

  She flinched away from his hand in horror as soon as he touched her. He snatched it back as if he’d burned himself. “Okay, okay, fine,” he said. “Okay. Take it easy. We’re not going to hurt you.”

  Footsteps rounded the corner of the hut behind him. “What’s up, Alex?” Brannigan’s deep voice asked.

  “Found a girl tied up back here, sir,” Tanaka said. “She’s scared shitless; I think maybe she’s been abused.”

  The slight form of Ma Sanda slipped in beside him, kneeling beside the terrified girl. The little woman spoke softly in Burmese, as she reached out to put a hand on the girl’s shoulder. That time, the girl didn’t flinch away, but she didn’t answer, either.

  Sanda repeated the question. That time she got a reply, though it was in a low, quavering voice that Tanaka almost couldn’t hear. Sanda said something else, then started to gently untie the rope around the girl’s ankle.

  “Is that a good idea?” Aziz asked. “If she runs for it…”

  “Then one of you big, strong soldiers can catch her,” Sanda snapped. “Though you might have a bit of a fight on your hands, since she thinks that you’re going to do things to her, like the North Koreans did.”

  Sanda finished untying the girl’s ankle. Surrounded by a semicircle of what Tanaka realized must be looming, ghostly figures, looking somewhat inhuman with their combat gear, rifles, and NVGs, she shrank back against the wall behind her, but Sanda, speaking softly and soothingly, drew her to her feet and put an arm around her shoulders. Sanda herself didn’t look much more human than the rest of the Blackhearts; she was carrying a pack and had her own NVGs sticking out from below the brim of her boonie hat. But she didn’t have a rifle, and she was speaking gently in a language the girl understood. The girl didn’t bolt.

  Brannigan stepped back, and after a moment, Tanaka realized that he had probably better do the same. He almost tripped over Aziz, who was standing behind him.

  “Watch it, new guy,” Aziz said, prompting a warning glance from Brannigan. Aziz probably hadn’t seen it, though, as he was watching out toward the forest. Hart was still muttering to himself, standing behind Brannigan.

  Sanda began to usher the girl around the corner of the hut, still murmuring softly to her in Burmese. Towne had stepped aside, and was crouching over one of the fallen North Koreans in the center of the camp. He looked up as they came into the firelight, then stood up.

  Sanda let the girl sit down in the door of one of the huts, away from the fire, the corpses, and the long hut with the sick North Korean in it. She started to talk to the girl quietly, the tone of her voice suggesting that she was asking questions. After listening to several nearly inaudible replies, she looked up at Brannigan.

  “She says she’s from Namsala, southwest of here,” she said. “She was orphaned, and got picked up by the local pimps, then got traded up here. She’s been a ‘comfort woman’ for the North Koreans since a General Cao gave her to the Korean commander.”

  Hart’s stream of passionate profanity got a little louder. There was a sudden, brittle tension around the group that had heard what Sanda had said. The only one who seemed relatively unfazed was Aziz.

  Sanda asked the girl another question, then looked back at Brannigan. “She also says that if the North Korean in the hut is acting like he only speaks Korean, he’s lying. She says that all the ‘advisors’ speak Mandarin and a little bit of Burmese.”

  “Well, then,” Jenkins said from the door to the long hut, “maybe we can get something out of this guy, after all. Nothing like a good, solid bit of righteous anger as motivation to work somebody over.”

  “Nobody’s working anyone over,” Villareal called from inside. “He’s my patient.”

  “I don’t give a flying fuck if he’s your patient, Doc,” Jenkins said. “He’s a Nork, and he’s apparently a rapist, too. I can’t think of a more justified target for an ass-beating.”

  “Why is it suddenly more justified now?” Aziz asked flatly. “
She’s not your kid.”

  “You’re a fucking asshole,” Jenkins started, but Santelli cut the entire conversation off.

  “Shut the fuck up,” he snarled, his voice pitched low so that it wouldn’t travel beyond the huts. “You’d think you idiots were still in fucking high school. Everybody had better get out on the perimeter and hold security, and keep their damned mouths shut, or I’m gonna start putting my boot in some asses.”

  The group broke up, the men drifting out to the perimeter to stand watch. Tanaka followed suit, heading back toward where he and Hart had initially been going to set up, though not without a backward glance at the battered, abused Burmese girl.

  He thought he understood why Hart was so upset. He was, too. But for whatever reason, his own fury was compartmentalized, shut away to a place in his mind where he knew it was there, but it did not directly affect his actions.

  He hadn’t known he was capable of it. Maybe, in having to stay calm when he really hadn’t felt like it, he’d learned something about himself.

  ***

  Leaving Sanda with the girl, Brannigan turned toward the long hut. “Towne,” he called. “Come with me.”

  Towne was standing up, one of the North Korean rifles in his hands. Brannigan frowned. Towne hadn’t signed on to carry a weapon; in fact, he’d pointedly declined to take one, insisting that he wasn’t a trained soldier anymore, which was true enough. But now he was standing over one of the corpses, a rifle in one hand and the North Korean’s blood-spattered chest rig full of magazines in the other.

  “I thought you weren’t going to carry a weapon,” Brannigan noted.

  “I wasn’t,” Towne said. He was a smaller man, though more wiry and compact than purely skinny. He had a backpacker’s build, curly blond hair running a little long, and equally blond stubble was starting to poke through his camouflage face paint. “That was before I got this close to a firefight. Now, well…going unarmed really doesn’t seem like a good idea.”

  Brannigan felt a flicker of irritation. It would have been better to get that sorted out in training. Now, they had to worry about a man without the same level of training with a gun. “Just be damned careful where you point that thing,” he growled. “Now come on, we need to talk to our prisoner.”

  He led the way inside. Jenkins was still standing there, his rifle held ready, holding security on Villareal and the sick North Korean. Brannigan led Towne over to stand over the North Korean.

  Villareal was sitting back on his haunches. “Not too much I can do for him, actually,” he said. “I’ve given him some water and some salt tablets, but I’m frankly reluctant to expend one of our IV bags on him. I also don’t know for sure what he’s got, or how contagious it might be.”

  “So why worry so much about kicking the shit out of him?” Jenkins asked.

  Villareal turned a reasonable imitation of Brannigan’s basilisk glare on the former SEAL. “Because he’s sick and he’s fucking helpless, that’s why. It wouldn’t be right.”

  “Somehow, I doubt he had the same level of consideration for the girl tied up out back, Doc,” Brannigan said before Jenkins could get going again. “But under the circumstances, we’ll go with your way for now. But he doesn’t get shit for care again until he answers some questions.” He turned to Towne. “Ask him where the rest of the ‘advisors’ are.”

  Towne crouched down next to the North Korean, his rifle between his knees, and rattled off a question in Mandarin. The North Korean just stared at him through rheumy, miserable eyes, and kept his mouth tightly shut.

  Towne tried again. Same result. Their prisoner might be borderline delirious with fever, but he was dedicated. He wasn’t going to talk.

  “I’m telling you,” Jenkins said. “Pain is the only thing these assholes understand. For fuck’s sake, they’ve been living their entire lives in a prison camp for a country. Do you have any idea how that’s probably warped their minds?”

  “I’ve got a good idea, yes,” Villareal snapped. “That doesn’t change anything.”

  “What, you think there’s a ‘moral’ way to wage war, Doc?” Jenkins sneered.

  “Shut your damned mouth,” Brannigan growled. “When I want your opinion on Doc’s code of honor, I’ll give it to you.” He turned to Towne. “Keep at it, and make it clear that he doesn’t have many options.” Exactly what he was going to do with a deathly ill North Korean prisoner, he didn’t know. This hadn’t been in the plan, either, and for this kind of an operation, prisoners were largely out of the question anyway.

  For that matter, so were battered, abused Burmese prostitutes. He really didn’t know what they were going to do with the girl. He certainly didn’t want to leave her there, but he wasn’t sure they could bring her along, either. She might end up being more of a liability than the Nork.

  There was a darker possibility, but he refused to even consider it.

  He snapped his head up, and Jenkins and Villareal looked as well. There was a new roll of thunder off to the west. And there weren’t any clouds in the sky.

  “Watch him,” he ordered, pointing to the sick North Korean. He strode out of the hut and looked off to the east.

  There were some trees in the way, along with some of the terrain of the ridge, but the flashes and the accompanying booms and crumps were unmistakable. Somebody was hammering Parsenkyaw with artillery. And given the fact that the intel brief had said that Parsenkyaw was a pretty solidly Kokang Communist haven, that meant that the Burmese Army had probably just gotten involved.

  He moved back to the door. “Get what you can out of him, but get ready to move and to bring him with us,” he told Towne and Villareal. “I don’t want to be pinned down here when the sun comes up.”

  ***

  Flanagan was sitting perfectly still in the southern defensive position. He’d mentally debated setting up there; if the North Koreans came back, they’d know exactly where it was. On the other hand, it was also fortified with sandbags and had a little bit of overhead cover, formed by several logs with dirt shoveled on top. It had a hasty look to it, at least in his NVGs, but it would do if the shooting started again.

  Curtis was beside him, the MG 3 laid over the sandbags, watching down the slope they’d climbed in the darkness. So far, aside from the mutterings of talk back in the camp behind them, it was quiet.

  “What did you find in there?” Curtis asked.

  “Norks,” Flanagan replied.

  “Well, no shit,” Curtis whispered back. “I knew that part.”

  “Then why’d you ask?”

  “Sit-you-ae-shun-al A-ware-ness,” Curtis hissed, whispering slowly and deliberately as if he was talking to an idiot. “The more we know about what’s going on, the better and quicker we can respond to changing circumstances on the battlefield.”

  Flanagan glanced over at the smaller man. “How long have you been waiting to trot that line out?” he asked. “Since I know you memorized it from a briefing paper or something.”

  “I don’t know, forever,” Curtis said. “Don’t mean it ain’t true.”

  “Still, admit it,” Flanagan whispered, turning back to their sector, “you only asked because the silence was getting to you.”

  “I am not—” Curtis started to protest, but Flanagan cut him off with a sharp jab of his hand.

  He’d seen movement. Someone or something was slipping quietly and carefully through the same trees they’d used to conceal their own approach.

  Slowly, silently, he snugged the buttstock of his G3 into his shoulder, lining up the red dot in his NVGs’ image, scanning the treeline. Beside him, all banter forgotten, Curtis was doing the same with the MG 3.

  The dark line of trees was still. If there had indeed been anyone down there, they weren’t moving anymore. Long moments passed. Insects chirped, night birds squawked, and a monkey hooted. Neither man moved.

  Flanagan strained his ears. His hearing wasn’t what it used to be; even after the damage from years in the military, the fight in the
Citadel on Khadarkh had left his ears ringing worse than they already had been. But that had sounded like knuckles on wood.

  The sound came again. This time he was sure; someone down below was knocking a recognition signal on a rifle butt. The North Koreans didn’t have a lot of high-tech gear, so they were still using linkup procedures that had been fairly standard nearly a hundred years before.

  Which meant that they were now in the fixed position, while the enemy they had come to eliminate was out there, mobile, in the dark. And the North Koreans knew the ground better.

  A moment later, the landscape brightened suddenly, as flashes from the other side of the ridge announced the beginning of the Army bombardment of Parsenkyaw. Beside him, Curtis flinched, ever so slightly. Flanagan didn’t move, didn’t take his eyes off the trees where he’d seen the movement.

  As the bombardment continued, now joined by the distant rattle of gunfire, only occasionally audible over the thunder of the artillery, Flanagan thought he saw another faint suggestion of movement in the darkness. He shifted his sights toward it, but held his fire. Shooting at ghosts and shadows would only confirm to the enemy that they were there. For now, he was pretty sure that the only thing the Norks knew for certain was that their comrades weren’t responding.

  Had he not known Curtis for many years, he would have worried about the other man opening fire. But Curtis was a pro, his demeanor and talkativeness to the contrary. He held his fire.

  Time dragged on, and the bombardment of Parsenkyaw died down, though there were still bursts of gunfire down there. The slope in front of them stayed silent and undisturbed.

  Flanagan knew the quiet was a lie. They might not be under attack yet, but they’d been probed. Silent and tense, the two men waited for the enemy to return.

  CHAPTER 12

  Park made no move as Mun and Jee returned to the rally point, signaling their approach by tapping their buttstocks. Jeon answered the signal, and then the two scouts were back inside the platoon perimeter.