Hoda and Jake

by Richard Booth

  Time passed.

  Caron calmly said, “Now, Jake.”

  “Black six to Red One. Engage.” It took a second for the Arabic officers to send the message down their own line; it didn’t do for Jake to give orders directly to their tank commanders.

  Almost simultaneously, three GIATs exploded, and the other four followed suit.

  Jake’s glasses were downrange. One, two, three… there!

  A yellow-orange flash converged on a dust speck, and then continued to burn. Jake could just make out the husk of the tank, obliterated by a direct hit. There were no others in the first salvo, though two or three near misses.

  The GIAT had a hydraulic auto-loader, and a high rate of fire. The second group of sabot rounds was tearing downrange. Flash-flash-flash! Flash-flash! Could it be? Had they scored five hits already? It looked through Jake’s glasses as though they could, and did. Six enemy vehicles dead already.

  Too bad that infantry was out of range. Jake had wanted four-deuce mortars, the big 4.2-inch ones, but couldn’t get any approved. All they had were 81-millimeter company mortars. But those would make cover scant and dangerous for the advancing infantry when they got within range.

  Here came a new sound, and Jake’s trusty glasses confirmed his first suspicions: gunships!

  He peered through the binoculars. There! Russian-built Hinds. That was their NATO designation, anyway. Fine ground support—and superb anti-armor platforms. One, two, three…Jake counted four. He was up and out, sprinting for the triple-A battery.

  “There!” he cried, pointing, but the gun captains had already spotted them. The tubes were up out of supports and traversing, each picking different targets. Jake saw the phone talkers communicating; excellent! Without preamble, one of the twenties began to speak, every fifth round a tracer. Jake abruptly turned to see the rounds track downrange: there was the target, the closest Hind.

  The model Rheinmetalls somebody supplied came with organic—attached—radar fire control. That was a double-edged sword: the radar made their aim true, but the radar pulses also gave the enemy a clear vector back to the guns, and Jake was positive the Hinds carried air-to-ground missiles. If they got lock, it could be bad.

  The first Hind never did; twenty rounds of API—armor-piercing incendiary—from the first gun dissected its rotor head, and the aircraft plummeted straight to earth. Helicopters were limited in their combat role by a low glide ratio, namely about zero.

  The other twenty was hammering at a Hind hull, and not getting as far; the Hinds were as heavily armored as an aircraft could reasonably be without affecting its flight characteristics. Still, the gunship didn’t fire any missile, and turned away trailing smoke. Something happened in the fusillade.

  Jake didn’t want to spend anymore time with triple-A; they seemed up to the task He sprinted back to where he’d left Caron, but he wasn’t there. The RTO was alone.

  “Where’s the captain?” Jake asked him.

  The radioman pointed off to the line’s left. “Checking a hit,” the RTO said in accented English. Jake had to ask him to say it three times in the din.

  “Hit?”

  “One of the tanks.” The radio crackled.

  “It’s the captain,” the RTO said, holding out the handset.

  Jake took it. “Guy?”

  “One of the Leclercs is passé,” Caron said. “Hind hit with missile.”

  “Come on back here. Black Six, out.” Jake passed the handset back.

  “How’s the circuit been?” Jake asked the RTO. Though his English wasn’t pristine, he was a first-rate radioman, and knew what Jake meant: how had radio discipline been? Was there idle chatter, or did all stations keep silent?”

  “Good,” the RTO nodded.

  Excellent! Communication in battle was key.

  Jake checked the front: six, seven eight, nine…ten pyres signaling a burning Syrian government tank. Dared he hope? That was great shooting! And their infantry didn’t look like it was advancing very fast. It would be awhile before the foot soldiers came within range of even the crew-served weapons.

  Jake checked the enemy, looked twice to make sure. They were retreating. No question.

  “Black Six to Red One, cease fire! Say again cease fire.” He said it calmly, so as not to overdrive the mic in the handset. It took several seconds for the tanks to stop shooting, at least several expended rounds better saved.

  The silence was eerie, at least for a moment. Then someone cheered, and the cheering spread across the line. In all the victories won by FSA forces in this civil war, this was the most lopsided.

  Jake and Caron let the Syrian officers calm down their men—boys, really, Holman reflected for the umpteenth time—and deal with their dead. And dead there decidedly were, from the missile hit. None of the three Leclerc crewmen could have survived.

  Holman went to his Landcruiser, first drinking thirstily from a water bag, and then booting his laptop. He typed a fast, expert after-action report, deployed the satellite phone umbrella, and sent the encrypted report to Langley for the eyes of John Robinson, his CIA supervisor. Then there was more work to be done.

  Feed the men. Check and redistribute ammunition. Check for casualties beyond the three dead tankers. And Holman thought of something else.

  “Guy, don’t we have some concertina wire in the trucks?”

  There was no direct equivalent in French for “coiled razor wire,” so Jake had to explain it two more times.

  “Ah! D’accord!” Caron said. There was.

  “Let’s get it out and around. We need it, in case they close on us overnight. And clear fields of fire outside the wire. I’ve an idea we hurt their feelings today, and they might want to get their pride back by slitting our throats.”

  It was almost duhr, noon prayer, so the work delayed until afterward; but it was not done by asr, the late afternoon prayer, nor even by maghrib. Only by isha, evening prayer, was Jake satisfied. Before full darkness they’d repositioned the mortars and machine guns, and discussed a fire plan for overnight attacks. Finally, Jake and Caron suggested the Syrians post guards and further suggested everyone sleep with their boots on. Each man had been given a pair; it made prayer sightly more inconvenient, done as it is shoeless or even barefoot, but combat boots made soldiers far more effective.

  By any standards, they’d enjoyed a spectacular day, and the men knew it. Ten enemy vehicles destroyed—in all probability, all heavy tanks, though there was no way to confirm that—and repulsing a superior enemy intending to take the town by coup de main. They might just go away, but then again they might not. If they hit that night, chances were good they wouldn’t have air support. And in any case, given the relative thinness of Assad’s air arm, their group had given the régime a bloody nose.

  Jake lay down intending to nap, but Caron gave secret orders Jake was not to be awakened, and both leaders slept into the night. They had had almost six hours by 0300, when peace turned into mayhem.

  Police whistles were the first sign: coming from all around the perimeter, the shrill blasts signaled open fire, and the camp was instantly filled with small-arms bullets.

  Holman and Caron were up in a flash, intent on rousing the troops, but there was no need; men were sleeping at their stations, and in three places around the inside of the camp the cough of mortars told that crews were following orders. Seconds later, “whumps” ushered illuminating rounds, bathing the camp in light—including the Assad soldiers charging the wire. There they balked, held up in the concertina, which their reconnaissance hadn’t accounted for.

  By prearrangement, Caron and Jake skittered from pit to pit, reassuring the crew-served weapons and seeing all functioned. One of the M-60 American NATO machine guns had a stovepipe jam, which Jake Holman expertly cleared. But by the time he did, the wire at its front had been compromised: attackers tangled in the wire depressed it, leaving an avenue for their comrades as they died. A dozen foe were rushing the pit as the weapon chattered back to life.

&
nbsp; Holman stood up in the pit, ignoring enemy fire, and calmly killed six charging enemy with the .45 Colt automatic he carried. Slapping home a new magazine, he searched for new infiltrators, but the combination of nearby rifle pits and the rejuvenated machine gun had ended the threat.

  There were a half-dozen friendly dead near him; couldn’t be helped. Cost of war. He was off to the next pit.

  It was turning into a near thing. What turned the tide, as it turned out, was French military genius. Designers of the Leclerc tank wanted to protect it from marauding enemy infantry, and equipped the AMX-56 with numerous fixed exterior launchers for firing smoke and fragmentation grenades. The tank commanders stoutly lobbed fragmentation projectiles into the oncoming enemy waves, effectively breaking the charge and thinning their ranks.

  With surprising suddenness, the firing died away, leaving the battlefield sporting an uncanny silence. Smoke drifted across it, gradually dissipating and blowing downslope. The solace lasted but a few seconds; then the groans of the wound started, hollow and resonating like animals. The unit had more than its share of physicians, such was the composition of the FSA, and Jake was confident they could tend to the stricken. He searched for the RTO, who miraculously found him in the darkness. Jake checked his watch: the firefight had taken just about an hour even. Time enough to live and die in war.

  Jake didn’t reach for the handset; instead, he said to the RTO, who translated into it, “Black Six to all Red Leaders. Report casualties by messenger and redistribute ammunition. Support units resupply tanks.”

  Not waiting for reports, Jake trooped the line from tank to tank, getting a count on ready ammunition for both primary and secondary weapons, and casualty reports. One tank lost, no others there; but out in the perimeter some 25 FSA souls had met their end. More than 40 wounded, a dozen expected not to make it. Jake glanced at the men using makeshift stretchers to carry the wounded to an improvised aid station. The dead were lined up in rows, covered with jackets to hide their faces.

  Captain Caron loomed in the darkness, some freak of light glinting off the Foreign Legion device on his soft cap. “How’d you do?” Jake asked.

  “It was very close, where I was,” Caron answered. “But we made do. We’re repairing the wire, getting the bodies out of it. Taking weapons and ammunition. You never know.”

  No, you didn’t.

  “Think they’ve got much fight left?”

  “Don’t know,” Caron said. “We took a big bite out of them today and tonight.” He was proud of his American idiom.

  “We sure did. Proud of the boys,” Jake said, a little loudly. He wanted people to hear.

  For someone unused to infantry action at night, the unimaginable noise and confusion, the pyrotechnic glare and proximity of death cannot be explained. To fight and win under such circumstances gave the Free Syrian Army solders every right to be proud. This wasn’t some village skirmish; they’d destroyed ten heavy tanks, and three Hind gunships.

  “We were lucky they didn’t use their remaining tanks tonight,” said the RTO, in an uncharacteristic contribution to the conversation.

  “They couldn’t,” Caron said.

  “We’d have heard from miles off,” Jake explained. The RTO nodded.

  Jake walked to the Landcruiser, got his laptop, and pulled a poncho over his head to boot the machine. In ten minutes he had another report to Robinson written, saying he would follow up next day with more. He sent the encrypted file.

  Surprisingly, his satellite phone rang. That could only be one person.

  ***

  In her office at Johns Hopkins Hospital School of Psychiatry, Hoda Abdelal was studying for yet another high-stakes exam when a fellow student stuck his head in her open door.

  “Didn’t you say your husband was working in Syria for the UN?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Turn on channel 64,” he said, and was gone.

  Hoda never watched the television that came with the office, but she turned it on and punched the six and four; she didn’t even know where the remote was.

  “…And reports are filtering out about a pitched battle between Free Syrian Army forces and those loyal to the al-Assad regime.” Behind the newscaster, a graphic highlighted the town where Jake said he might go. Hoda felt her insides tighten. She watched all the news channels, checked Internet feeds on the fight, and called the common secretary all the psychiatric students shared.

  “Sharon, I have a family emergency, I’m going home early,” she told her. Sharon said she’d pass the message along.

  But Hoda didn’t go home. She dialed a number, was connected, and then drove straight to the Central Intelligence Agency. The guard at the gate was expecting her.

  So was John Robinson, her sometime supervisor at the CIA, the man who had arranged her transfer from the Army Intelligence branch to the CIA, and whose professional checkbook was paying her way through medical residency. Hopkins wasn’t paying her salary.

  “Send her right in,” he told his fiercely protective administrative assistant. Hoda knocked on Robinson’s inner door, and entered when bid to do so.

  The Princeton Tiger in Robinson had him standing when Hoda came through the door; he seldom stood for her husband, though she didn’t know that. “Please, Hoda,” he said in a pleasant voice. “Come in. What can I do for you?” This was entirely unlike the John Robinson Jake Holman saw.

  “Is Jake in that Syrian fight?”

  Robinson sighed. “You know I can’t tell you anything, Hoda.” He pronounced her name the correct way, “Hudda.”

  “Yes, you can. He’s my husband, and I work for this agency, Mr. Robinson. And I’ve a right to know. Now, is John in that Syrian fight? The one on the news?’

  “Yes.”

  “Is he alive?”

  “Yes.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I received a report from him three minutes ago.”

  “How.”

  “Satellite phone.”

  “I want to speak with him.”

  “Hoda, have you taken leave of your senses? I can’t do that.”

  “Yes, you can. You are the one man I know who can do almost literally anything.”

  “It’s completely mad. Totally outside company policy. I’d lose my job.”

  “How? Who’s going to fire you? Congress? You’re like J. Edgar Hoover. You know all their little secrets. They’d never fire you.”

  A cloud passed over Robinson’s face. “Mrs. Holman, I think you’d better stop and think whom you are addressing.”

  “I think I’m addressing the man who sent my husband, the father of my unborn child, into a firefight in a country gone mad with blood lust.”

  Robinson took a moment to absorb that information. “So…”

  “Yes.”

  “Well. I see. That puts a different complexity on things, of course.”

  “I think so.”

  Robinson considered for another minute. “Where are my manners?” he suddenly said. “Sit down, Hoda. Please sit down.” Then, into his intercom, “Get me Jake Holman on priority voice. Now, please.”

  Outside, the admin was nonplussed. In all the years she’d worked for John Robinson, nothing like this had ever happened. Still, hers was not to reason why: she dialed the communications section, which picked up instantly, and all the more quickly seeing whose extension was calling. Mere seconds later, the call routed directly to Robinson’s desk, and when he saw the blinking red light he picked it up.

  “Jake?”

  “Yessir.”

  “Got your report. Sounds like damned nice work. Everything still stable?”

  “Fairly so. If they keep hitting us, it could change.”

  “Well, we’ve done our part. The FSA are a lot further ahead than they were.”

  “No question about that, sir.” It was a pristine connection. Satellite comms were amazing.

  “Hold on, I’ve got someone who wants to talk with you.”

  He e
xtended the handset to Hoda.

  “Jake?”

  “Hoda?”

  “How are you?”

  “I’m good, Hoda. Just fine. What are you doing in Robinson’s office?”

  “I want you home, Jake.”

  “And you went to Robinson? Are you insane?”

  “Don’t be cross, Jake. I couldn’t stand it anymore. I heard about where you are. What you’re doing. You said you’d be careful.”

  “I have been. I’m alive, aren’t I?”

  “For now.”

  “Listen, babe, I can’t stay. You caught me in the middle of something. Put John back on.”

  Hurt, Hoda handed the instrument back across the desk.

  “Yes?” Robinson said. Hoda watched his face intensely, but the long-time operative gave no clues. “Yes, I understand, Jake. Will do. Keep up the good work. Out.” Robinson rang off.

  Hoda sat down on the chair before Robinson’s desk. She began to cry, silent tears streaking her smooth, olive cheeks. This wasn’t the Hoda Abdelal Robinson knew and had heard about; this was someone else entirely, but hormones could account for that. Almost surely did, in fact.

  “I shouldn’t have come here,” Hoda sobbed softly.

  “No, you shouldn’t.” He wasn’t going to insult the woman’s intelligence. “You had your chance. Why didn’t you tell him you were with child?”

  “A man shouldn’t hear that by telephone,” Hoda said flatly.

  “I’m not so sure it would have made any difference in any case. Jake is a professional.”

  “Yes. With all that means. I’m beginning to understand.”

  “I thought you did. I suspect he did, too.”

  “I guess there’s nothing left to do but wait.”

  “Hoda, that’s all I ever do. Welcome to my world.” Robinson softened. “Now, can I get you anything?”

  ***

  It was full daylight now on the hill, as Jake thought of their position. He’d made wudu, ablution, with the FSA soldiers, and prayed fajr. Now it was time for half the soldiers to sleep, while the others had breakfast, and then switch off. The ammunition was evenly distributed, and they’d expended over half. A serious depletion, that. The Syrians used their radios to contact a rear base, and discovered there were a few hundred more tank tube rounds, as well as some 81-millimeter mortar and 7.72-millimeter NATO, back near the Turkish border. A column of pickup trucks was trying to negotiate the road at that moment. Talking it over, Jake and Caron hoped the convoy made it through, and didn’t run into any jets from al-Assad’s air force. They’d be gallery ducks on the open road.