by Peter Nealen
Then he was clambering down into the hole.
It was almost too narrow to fit himself and his gear through. A rickety wooden ladder led down into the dark, and he had to turn his back as he descended, his G3 hitting his knees between his legs as he held onto the ladder. He got down as quickly as he could, taking a knee at the base of the ladder and turning, bringing his rifle up awkwardly. He had to tuck the buttstock under his arm in order to maneuver it in the tight space. Fortunately, it was close enough quarters down in the tunnel that point shooting would be more than enough.
He was faced with five openings; this was apparently a hub for the tunnel system. That wasn’t good. He shuffled forward to get out of the way, as Flanagan started down the ladder behind him.
“Hell,” Flanagan said, seemingly right in his ear. The other man had seen the layout, too, and didn’t like it any better than Brannigan did.
But Brannigan was already calculating the layout in his head. If his sense of direction was right, then four of the passages would lead to the houses clumped around the one just overhead. Given the fortifications they’d found, that kind of made sense. Instead of a trench system, this little strongpoint had tunnels allowing traffic back and forth between the fortified houses.
That left the passage directly in front of him. He didn’t doubt that the network was a lot bigger; the spider hole that had led to Villareal’s death was evidence enough of that, not to mention the sudden disappearance of the opposition in this little ville. The bad guys had to have gone somewhere, and he figured that the tunnel he was looking at was where.
“I’m going to move ahead,” he whispered to Flanagan. The sound of his voice seemed horrifically loud in the confined space, and he winced a little at the thought of how far down the tunnels it was probably carrying. “Make sure these other side passages are being covered, at least until we’re sure that nobody’s coming out of them.”
Flanagan squeezed his shoulder by way of acknowledgement, and he started to duck-walk forward. It wasn’t comfortable, and it was going to get really tiring after a short while, but it kept him from trying to peel his scalp off on the ceiling of the tunnel. Though he’d probably just get his boonie covered with mud. It wasn’t like the tunnel was carved into the rock, like the cave complexes in Afghanistan.
It was almost pitch-dark down there. Above, the sun was starting to brighten the eastern horizon, but that light wasn’t going to reach underground. And even if they’d had flashlights affixed to their rifles, Brannigan wouldn’t have wanted to risk it. Sure, the old tunnel rats had used flashlights and .45s down in the Vietcong tunnels. But they hadn’t had night vision.
Reaching up, he turned on his IR illuminator on his NVGs, and made sure it stayed on. If the bad guys had night vision, it would mean he was lighting his own position up as thoroughly as if he’d been using a flashlight, but he’d seen no sign of any such equipment, so far. So, he should be able to see them long before they saw him.
Within a few feet, the side passages were gone. The tunnel sloped slightly downward, but not dramatically so. Even so, if he judged things right, they were going deeper into the mountain. The ground above was sloping upward, toward a saddle where the next “neighborhood” sat.
His IR light swept the packed-mud walls, reaching several dozen feet ahead of him. The tunnel was apparently deserted, but he was moving slowly and carefully, trying not to make too much noise. The tunnel would act like a megaphone, amplifying any sounds and letting them carry much farther than they might above ground.
Step. Step. Stop. Listen. Repeat. It was agonizingly slow, but that was the price to be paid.
After about ten yards, he stopped, listened, and then froze, holding up a clenched fist to signal Flanagan, who was moving slightly behind him, to stop. He’d heard something.
He strained his ears. None of the Blackhearts could say they had the greatest of hearing anymore; they all had too many years of helicopter rides, gunfire, and explosions behind them. His left ear tended to ring all the time; he’d even gotten some disability benefits from the VA for it.
Sure enough, there was definitely movement ahead of him. He could hear the rustle of faint footsteps and the occasional clink of a buckle or something touching a rifle’s receiver. He shifted slowly, getting a knee under him, and lifted his G3 to his shoulder, pointing the battle rifle down the tunnel ahead. The red dot glared brilliantly in his NVGs, and he had to turn off the IR illuminator, as it blazed against the rifle and the sight, nearly blinding him.
For a moment, everything was pitch black, until Flanagan turned on his own IR light, backlighting Brannigan but providing some visibility down the tunnel.
He waited, finger resting lightly on the trigger. The sounds of movement got louder, though they were still faint, just above the threshold of hearing. Whoever was down there, they were getting closer.
There was a hint of movement, right at the edge of the IR light. Brannigan put his cheek against the buttstock and got his eye behind the sight, taking a breath.
The figure began to resolve itself. It was a small man, dressed like all the opposition had been so far, in plain fatigues, a field cap, and carrying an AK. Brannigan let out the breath and squeezed the trigger.
The G3’s report was deafening in that enclosed space. The muzzle blast slapped the walls and reverberated painfully, even as Brannigan fired ten rounds down the tunnel, as fast as he could squeeze the trigger.
The figure caught in Flanagan’s light had taken the first round through the chest, and fallen on his face. Brannigan couldn’t see any of the others behind him clearly, but there was enough thrashing and screaming back there to tell him that there had been more, and that those bodies were only doing so much to slow the 7.62x51mm rounds down.
He was pushing forward, now in more of a half-crouch, his head brushing the ceiling. To hold his position was going to be to allow the enemy to regroup and find another way to get at him, so he held to form and attacked. He could barely hear Flanagan following along behind him. Flanagan wasn’t a small man, but he wasn’t nearly as big as Brannigan was, and was probably having a bit of an easier time getting through the passage.
Something made him pause, and he hissed, “Down!” He suited actions to words, and not a moment too soon.
Somewhere up ahead, an AK opened fire, flame strobing in the dark. The rattling reports of the Eastern Bloc assault rifle were transformed into a catastrophic, thundering crash in the narrow confines of the tunnel. Bullets slapped into the ceiling, the walls, and the floor, and Brannigan immediately returned fire, having the AK’s muzzle flash to aim at, which was more than the rebel doing the shooting had. He fired three times, the G3 sounding even louder than the AK, and the incoming fire suddenly stopped.
“You good?” he whispered back at Flanagan.
“I’m fine, sir,” Flanagan replied. “You make good cover.”
“I’ll bet,” Brannigan answered, as he got up and started forward again.
***
Carlo Santelli knew that Brannigan wanted those who weren’t down in the tunnels to hold their little beachhead in the fortified village, but Curtis’ close encounter up on the hillside had gotten him thinking. Leaving Hart in the first house, he’d dropped down into the tunnel behind Brannigan and the main assault element, and quickly confirmed for himself that the tunnels within that part of the village formed a simple, roughly star-shaped strongpoint, with the main passage leading west, toward what he could only presume were more side branches and central chambers. Santelli, too, had seen some of the Taliban’s cave complexes, and had those in mind, perhaps more than the VC tunnels that some of the others were thinking of.
He knew that someone had already attempted a counterattack on the flank, probably trying to retake the houses they’d already seized. Though he didn’t know the full extent of the tunnel system, Santelli wanted to be sure that there weren’t any more nasty surprises waiting to come around and bite them in the ass. He defined “nasty surprises” a
s more tunnel exits that could start spilling a substantial force out to assault and possibly retake the initial strongpoint, leaving the men down underground cut off and vulnerable.
The fact that all of the rest of them would already be dead if that happened didn’t matter to Santelli. He was a simple man, and a loyal one. He saw the problem and set about trying to find a solution.
The morning was getting brighter as he stepped out of the northern house and headed across to where Aziz, Jenkins, and Bianco were hardpointed. Soon enough, they wouldn’t be able to use their night vision goggles anymore. That was going to make things harder, since he knew that the NVGs were one of the Blackhearts’ primary advantages. As outnumbered as they were, once the sun came up they’d have a hard time moving around without getting cut off and killed to the last man.
“Friendly,” he called out, before sticking his head in the door. They’d already lost Doc, and while Curtis hadn’t been forthcoming over the radio, Santelli was pretty sure he knew why. He wasn’t going to risk getting his own head blown off by being careless.
Jenkins was on a knee just inside the door, Aziz was still covering the tunnel entrance, and Bianco was next to one of the sandbagged windows, his MG 3 propped against the parapet, the muzzle sticking out of the firing port that had once been a window. Apparently, the training the Kokangs had been getting from the Norks hadn’t included setback from firing ports.
“Bianco, Jenkins,” he called, “you’re with me. Bring the pig.”
“Where we going?” Bianco asked as he hauled the machinegun off the sandbags. There was blood on his face, a darker streak in the greenscale image of the NVGs, but he seemed to be moving all right, and wasn’t slurring his words. Which meant he probably didn’t have a concussion, or at least not a serious one. Not that they had the time or the manpower to put him out of the fight for it even if he did.
Jenkins stood up, grimacing a little under his sweat-streaked camouflage face paint. Aziz looked up from the hole in the floor.
“What the fuck?” he demanded. “You’re just going to leave me here?”
“Put yourself in the corner, where you can cover the door and the hole at the same time,” Santelli snapped. He had no patience left for Aziz’s attitude. “Or fall back to Building Three, if you’re really that worried about it. We need to push the flanks out if we’re not going to get taken in the rear.” If any of them noticed the double entendre, they were all too tired to comment on it. “Come on, you two,” he said. “We’re going spider hole hunting.”
“Is that like wabbit hunting?” Bianco quipped.
Santelli looked at him. Bianco hadn’t known Villareal, and the doctor’s death probably wasn’t hitting him like it was the original team members. Wisecracks were also a good way to ease the tension of this kind of situation. But he was momentarily tempted to bite the other man’s head off anyway. He resisted it, telling himself that it wouldn’t do any good. It sure as hell wasn’t going to bring Doc back.
“The difference is, spider holes don’t move, and they’re always in season,” he replied. “Come on. Keep low, and keep quiet.”
It took a little doing to get Bianco over the little sandbagged rampart across the door, but then they were heading south, back toward the road. Behind them, Santelli heard Aziz calling, “Friendly!” as he ran for Building Three, where Tanaka and Wade were holding security. He sneered a little and shook his head. Leave it to Aziz to think about his own neck first.
Of course, if he was being fair, Aziz had gone into Khadarkh City alone, twice, to arrange the diversion that had allowed them to get into the Citadel. He wasn’t lacking in courage. He was just enough of an asshole that he tended to make people forget that.
In the growing light of dawn, the three men slipped across the road and into the brush on the far side, before turning west and starting to parallel the hillside. There were trees spaced irregularly along the roadway and in clumps trailing down the hill. They kept to those clumps as best they could, trying to stay out of the open.
Santelli was on point, with Bianco lugging the MG 3 behind him and a few paces to his left, Jenkins trailing behind both of them. It wasn’t a perfect formation, but with the terrain and vegetation being what it was, it would have to do.
The contrast in his NVGs was fading; the world was turning into a flat mass of the same shade of light green. The western sky was brightening, and it would soon be sunrise. Santelli reached up and pried the goggles away from his face, flipping them up on their mount and bending the brim of his boonie hat up in the process. He blinked, letting his eyes adjust to the suddenly darker scene in front of him, just as movement caught his eye, barely detectable across the road.
It took a second to discern what he was looking at, though he had frozen still as soon as he’d seen anything out of the ordinary. As his eyes adjusted, he saw that a section of the hill just on the other side of the road had risen up, and now there were nearly a dozen figures, most of them small, coming out onto the road.
Looking left and right, he saw that the spider hole was sited right on a hell of an ambush site. The road curved around the shoulder of the hill at that point, and an ambushing force would be able to cut off anyone on the road, or even cut a column in half, making it next to impossible for either end to support the other.
All of that was an academic observation. Santelli saw it as naturally as a man might note that a tree was green, or that a river was running high. He turned, slowly and carefully, and made sure that Jenkins and Bianco both saw what he was seeing. Then, he lifted his rifle to his shoulder, found the red dot with his eye—now actually red, instead of the green-tinged white it had been in the NVGs—and opened fire.
Bianco and Jenkins were a heartbeat behind him. They were only three, but surprise counted for a lot, as did Bianco’s firepower. The booms of the two rifles were quickly drowned out by the stuttering thunder of the MG 3. Flame, suddenly bright in the dim dawn light, stabbed, and figures crumpled as bullets ripped through bodies, sparked off of weapons, and smashed the Kokang soldiers into the dirt of the road.
One or two, probably those who had come out of the tunnels last, managed to get shots off. Santelli heard a bullet snap past his head, and he answered with two fast shots, the heavy rifle thumping into his shoulder with each round. He saw the man spin halfway around and fall on his face in the weeds beside the road.
Then everything went quiet. If there were any more Kokangs back in the tunnel, they had apparently decided that discretion was the better part of valor, and had retreated back underground.
“Come on,” Santelli whispered. He didn’t want to stay in the same spot, and immediately headed for another clump of trees, about twenty meters up the road. They should still have good coverage of that spider hole from there, as well as the road in both directions. They’d hunker down and wait for word from Brannigan.
No sooner had they reached the trees and set up, with Santelli and Bianco covering down on the road and Jenkins covering the six o’clock, than they heard gunfire off to the west, on the other side of the saddle that loomed above them. Shortly afterward, the crump of falling mortar rounds started to echo across the hills. Santelli was sure that Brannigan couldn’t have gotten that far through the tunnels yet.
That meant one thing. The Burmese Army had come looking for the Kokang Army and their advisors.
CHAPTER 19
Brannigan kept moving forward, stepping over the bodies as he went, though not before making good and sure they were dead. He had no intention of stepping past a Communist guerrilla playing possum, only to get shot in the back or blown up with a grenade. Most of his foes during his career had been jihadis, but there were certainly enough examples of Communist fighters pulling similar dirty tricks over the decades to make sure he stayed cautious.
So, he and Flanagan thumped eyeballs with warm rifle muzzles and kicked AKs away from clutching hands. Then they kept moving, continuing down the narrow, low-ceilinged passage. The air was stuffy and smel
led of sweat, mud, spices, and other, less wholesome odors.
You couldn’t expect a bunch of people living underground to smell like a basket of roses. Especially not in the tropics.
Even by the light of their IR illuminators, the side passages were difficult to see until they were right on top of them. Suddenly, Brannigan found himself crouched at the threshold of a four-way intersection, with side tunnels branching off to his left and right.
He paused, considering. It was difficult to navigate down there, especially since he’d have a hard time focusing on his compass should he even risk pulling it out. Whether or not it would work underground was irrelevant; he had to keep his eyes and his muzzle up.
He was pretty sure that the passage ahead was the main tunnel, and the side passages were probably leading to spider holes or other fortified houses. Probably. But there was no way to know for sure until they cleared each passage.
Faintly, he suddenly heard gunfire and screaming coming from somewhere down the left-hand tunnel. It was a brief firefight, and soon went quiet. Quiet except for the sounds of movement still drifting up the passage toward them.
There wasn’t room for Flanagan to get past him in the cramped intersection, but he felt the other man level his rifle over his shoulder, pointing down the main tunnel they’d been following. Flanagan had heard the noises, too, and was taking up security forward, allowing Brannigan to deal with whatever came out of that hole.
Once again, he saw the oncoming figures before they could possibly see him. They had lights, bobbing in the dark as they scrambled up the tunnel, their breath rasping ahead of them. Those lights would be glinting off the lenses of his NVGs in another moment, but Brannigan didn’t give them the time. None of the Blackhearts had flashlights, so those definitely weren’t his people. He dumped four rounds down the passage, the concussion hammering at him and the muzzle flashes hitting the NVGs with brilliant light that made a strobe-light effect in the darkness of the tunnel. He fired twice at one light, then shifted and squeezed off a hammer pair at the second, just behind it.
