Unto The Breach

by John Ringo

  "My force has been chasing these bastards for the last nine hours," Bukara said, patiently. "Now, as the wolf pack changes members to drag down the deer, we shift over. There are six hundred of you with your combined groups. There are only a bare hundred of them, now that we have done cutting them down on the chase. I have taken nearly a hundred casualties. But if you're afraid of a few Keldara . . ."

  "We are not afraid," Sorrano said. He was a big man, dark of face and hair, wearing bandoliers of ammunition for the PKM he carried across both shoulders and four gigantic daggers on his belt.

  He probably thought it made him look fierce: to Bukara it made him look like an idiot. Some of the links in the bandoliers were clearly kinked; if he tried to use the ammunition, his gun was going to jam. And Bukara, who had been in more than one hand-to-hand battle, had never used more than one knife in his life. His experience of "hand-to-hand" was that you generally used the biggest, heaviest thing you could get your hands on, generally an empty rifle. Knives were weapons of absolute last resort.

  "Then don't you think that over six hundred of you are capable of killing less than a sixth your number?" Bukara asked, patiently. "My men will be in support. We will establish a base of fire on the hilltop to keep their heads down. My mortars will be in support shortly. You should have fire from them before you reach the objective. All you have to do is run up a hill and kill them. What could be easier?"

  * * *

  "Hey, boss, we got movement," Adams said.

  Mike lifted his head out of the bunker and looked down the hill. Sure enough, there were figures moving on the hilltop below.

  "Guess they got done with their little colloquy," Mike said, pressing his throat mike. "Gonna get hot soon. Tell the guys as soon as they push back this attack we've got fresh food."

  "Now that's motivation," the former SEAL replied. "It's cold as hell out here. And I are hungry."

  The clouds were clearing off rapidly and the sky was turning a beautiful blue. Mike stopped as he saw some movement in the sky, wondering if the Chechens had gotten air support. But it was only birds. Ravens.

  "How do they know?" Mike asked, slipping back into the bunker.

  "The ravens fly?" Olga asked, smiling. "The eyes of the Father of All are upon us this day."

  "The bird of wisdom," Mike said, frowning. "You know, I think it finally makes sense."

  "What?" Vanner asked, not looking up from his pad.

  "The bird of wisdom," Mike said. "You can just see it. There was some shaman who was teaching a kid the different animals. He gives them all attributes, just cause they're easier to remember that way, right? So the kid sees a raven. 'Hey, shaman dude, what's that?' 'That's a raven. He's the bird of wisdom.' 'Why's that?' 'Cause he never lands until after the battle is over.'–"

  "Sort of like lawyers," Vanner said. "The ambulance chasers of the animal world."

  "They just turn up to pick the dead," Mike said, frowning. "Be damned if any lawyers are going to pick over my dead. What's the intel on this group?"

  "I get a count of about one kay, boss," Vanner replied. "That's based on prior intel on the different groups that have arrived. There's about six. The main group is a guy with the code name of Commander Bukara. Former Soviet lieutenant went over to the Chechen resistance quite a ways back. Was in on the battle of Grozny and a couple of other major actions. Had about five hundred. According to the ladies he's been bitching on open channel about casualties in the pursuit."

  "He don't know for casualties, yet," Mike said.

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Salah El Ezam was seventeen, born on a small farm in the mountains above Grozny.

  Salah could write, barely, and read a bit. He had been taught some words of writing by the mullahs in the town's madrassa. But he knew the words of the Koran, and especially of the Hadiths, by heart.

  From the time he was born he could remember men talking about the Great Jihad. To die in battle in the jihad was the highest honor a Muslim could attain. Such a martyr was guaranteed a place in heaven at the Prophet's side.

  The Prophet, peace be upon him, had spoken Allah's will, that the entire world must be in submission to the will of Allah. All Muslims were slaves to Allah: the common name "Abdullah" simply meant Slave of Allah, and Islam, in Arabic, meant submission. Men were in submission to Allah and women in submission to men. It was through the men in their lives, their fathers when they were growing up and their husbands when they married, that women worshipped the True God.

  Any who were not in submission to Allah were infidels. The only true submission was through the laws of Shariah being the highest law of the land, the laws of submission to Allah.

  This was the jihad, the will of Allah, to place the world under submission. Some were called to preach but Salah had never been a great speaker. His calling was to place the world under submission through the gun, as the Prophet also had decreed in the Hadiths.

  There was no fear in his heart as he crossed the hilltop and first saw the small cluster of boulders on the ridge above that protected the pagan Keldara. Allah had decreed that the world would be in submission to his will. They could not fail; Allah, the Victorious, the Beneficent, would not permit it.

  "Okay, now that is an A-Number-One clusterfuck," Adams said with a sigh. The Chechens were coming, oh, yeah. Lots of the motherfuckers. But they were just straggling over the hill that the snipers had been trying to use for cover and heading up the ridge any old way. It was almost sad. He hoped they'd cluster up a bit towards the end or the Keldara weren't going to get enough of them.

  "Teams," Adams said, touching his throat mike. "Let them get in close. Do not open fire until I initiate. Keep under cover during their approach then bugger the bastards when I give the signal."

  There were two reasons for that order. The first was that it was the best way to break an attack. Letting a group close on you and then hitting them, hard, at the last minute, tended to break their will. Especially if you waited until they thought they weren't going to be fired on at all.

  The second reason, though, sucked. The M4s that many of the Keldara carried had a problem. They were great weapons out to 250 meters. Beyond 250 meters, though, the muzzle velocity fell off, sharply. The upside was that you could carry a hell of a lot more of the rounds than, say, a 7.62 weapon for the same weight. However, in a situation like this he could wish they were all carrying German G-3s using NATO 7.62 rounds. Those fuckers were killers out to about a thousand meters. Hell, the Keldara could start picking them off from here.

  But what they had were the M4s.

  "Vanner," he said, after switching frequencies.

  "Go, Tiger Three."

  "Make a note for me to talk to Mike about our weapon choice when we get back."

  "Will do," Vanner said, a note of humor in his voice. For sure he knew the reason, but what he was probably finding funny was the "after we get back."

  Well, fuck that. Adams had been in some nasty clusterfucks in his time and walked out of every one. This one wasn't going to be any different. He did not intend to die on a ridge in fucking Chechnya.

  The Islamics wanted to be martyrs and go meet Allah. He was here to give them their wish.

  This wasn't Kiril's first battle by any stretch. He had had a small piece of the last Chechen attack to cross the mountains and threaten the Keldara. But, more, he had been on the teams that had assaulted the Albanian town of Lunari and fought four times their number of Albanian defenders to a bloody standstill. He bore scars from that, as well, and the memory of an interesting encounter shortly after the extraction birds landed with not only the Keldara but several dozen former sex slaves, many of whom were very happy to be out of Albania.

  He wasn't planning on getting laid right after this battle, not given the ambiguous situation with Gretchen, not to mention not being married to her, yet. But he fully intended to survive it. While the Keldara felt that there was no higher honor than dying in battle—being a hero was, after all, the only way t
o get to the Halls of Feasting—they believed just as deeply that your status in the Halls depended on how many had preceded you. One of the DVDs that was played over and over was an American movie about one of the greatest of their generals, a man named Patton. It was one of the ways they practiced their English. There was one part where he was making a speech, presumably to some of his troops, and said in it: "No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won by making the other poor bastard die for his!" Whenever that part of the movie came around the roars in the barracks were deafening.

  Now he poked his head up, briefly, taking the chance that any sniper would get his MICH-2000 helmet, then dropped back down. The Chechens were coming in a straggling herd. Hundreds of them.

  Good. The Keldara believed in making the other bastard die. They didn't even have the bare mercy for them the American had professed. The only good target was a serviced target. And it was going to be a target-rich environment.

  Adams wasn't about to poke his head up; he had a small video camera set up on his position and was watching the take on his BFT pad.

  The lead Chechens, who were slowing down from their run and puffing pretty hard, were about eight hundred meters out. He briefly considered engaging them with the SAWs, which had the range. Then he shrugged.

  Let them come.

  Salah tried to shout in triumph. They were barely five hundred meters from the line of rocks that marked the Keldara positions and still the cowards didn't fire. He held his weapon forward in one hand and triggered a long burst of fire from the AK, joined by dozens, hundreds, of others. They were going to completely overrun these cowards, these pagan pigs, and then they would go on to the valley that whelped them and wipe them out for all time.

  Three hundred meters. As AK rounds cracked overhead Adams looked over at Oleg and winked.

  "Wait till you can see the whites of their eyes, eh?" the former SEAL said, grinning.

  "That one I'm not familiar with," Oleg admitted. "Patton?"

  "You guys need to watch some other movies for God's sake," Adams said with a sigh as a spent bullet tumbled into the position. Two hundred. "Bunker Hill. Big battle during the American Revolution."

  "I wasn't even aware you'd had a revolution," Oleg said. "I will study it."

  "Do," Adams replied. One hundred. He keyed his throat mike and lifted himself up to just below the rock lip of the fighting position. "Teams. Prepare to engage."

  They were on them now! There was no way to stop them!

  "Alahu Akbar!" Salah shouted with what air he could spare. "God is Great!"

  "Open fire," Adams said, straightening up and searching for a target.

  That wasn't exactly tough. As he'd expected between the rough ground to their front and the steep slope, the Chechens had both tightened up and slowed down. He targeted one of the screaming horde, a young guy holding his AK at his hip and just starting a "spray and pray" burst and fired three rounds into his upper chest. Then he tracked right to the next target.

  Kiril lifted himself and poked the barrel of the SAW out of the trench, opening fire before he really aimed. From his perspective he might as well; keeping the barrel down there was virtually no way to miss.

  He was searching for priority targets: RPGs, other machine-gunners, leadership. But while he did that with one part of his mind he was engaging lower-priority targets, firing short, controlled bursts from the SAW.

  He'd ganged three of the ammunition boxes together in anticipation of a hot fight. Normally the ammo box of the SAW hung on a holder on the left-hand side. In this case he'd dug out a small shelf just before the opening of his fighting position and placed the boxes there. Now they emptied their linked 5.56 into the weapon without him having to worry about reloading. He had six hundred rounds and way more targets. The sky was clear, the thin air blew cold down the trench and the ravens, harbingers of battle, were in the sky; the eyes of the Father of All were upon them.

  It was a good day to do battle.

  The fucking Keldara bastards.

  Sorrano was watching his command broken and he could not believe it possible.

  The fuckers had waited until the last possible moment to fire and now they were slaughtering his men on the very edge of victory. It could not be possible. They were so close he could see their eyes, yet his men could not reach them.

  To the right, though, they were getting closer. There didn't seem to be as much fire there.

  "RIGHT!" he screamed, pointing and slapping some of the fedayeen in that direction. "GO TO THE RIGHT!"

  "Left. Big guy with a PKM. Looks like a leader."

  Lasko tracked to the left and saw who Pyotar meant. The man had bandoliers of PKM ammunition crossed on his chest. Lasko automatically targeted the X point where they crossed and triggered one round.

  Sorrano grunted and looked down at the red welling in his lower chest. One hand raised to it in surprise. He couldn't figure out where the blood had come from.

  Suddenly the hole began spitting crimson and he fell to his knees as his legs lost all strength. He tried to prop himself up with his weapon but that, too, fell from his hands and he slumped forward on his face.

  He was looking at a boot. It was very worn. They needed to get the men some more boots . . . soon . . .

  Fuckers never learned.

  When a gun was fired, the barrel tended to track upwards from recoil. Depending on how cases were ejected it could be pushed to one side as well.

  When an automatic weapon was fired, the barrel tracked up and up and up. So when firing on automatic, the only way to keep the weapon from tracking off the target, unless you had a very firm position, was to fire in three- to five-round bursts.

  Professional militaries knew that and trained their people to either fire in bursts or, more often, individual rounds. But groups like the Chechens, and the Taliban he'd fought in Afghanistan and Al Qaeda he'd fought in Iraq and various tribal militias he'd fought in Africa, the FARCs in Colombia . . . Christ it was a long list . . . they never seemed to learn. They'd just hold the weapon at their side, press the trigger and spray. Even if the first round was anywhere near the target all the rest tracked up and, in the case of the AK, generally to the right.

  It gave you a great feeling to just yank the trigger and spray. He'd done it a couple of times for the fuck of it. But you didn't hit shit.

  He hadn't even heard a medic cry from their side and the Chechens were getting slaughtered. The rushing attack was broken no more than thirty meters from their position with hundreds of bodies scattered on the ground. Most of them were wounded rather than dead, the fucking 5.56 tended to do that, but not many of them were still trying to fire.

  The rest of the Chechens, though, were still charging. He dropped the spent mag out of the well, slapped another in and fired three rounds at one of the screaming horde. The guy kept coming so he put another two in his head. That dropped him.

  On the right the Chechens were heavier; the slope tended to push them that way. Some of them were making their way through the fire and were nearly to the trench. That was Sawn's sector. The Makanee kid was good; he could handle that.

  Kiril fired upwards as the Chechen came over the lip of his position then dropped the empty SAW and drew his hatchet.

  The Keldara practiced at throwing axes but that wasn't the only skill they knew. As the next Chechen tumbled into the position Kiril's axe darted forward, fast as a snake, struck the man in the side of the neck and returned to guard position. The Chechen grabbed at his throat as the carotid began spurting high-pressure arterial blood across the position. With his hands clamped on the wound it still squirted out, but now in a spray that turned to a sanguine mist in the thin air.

  Suddenly there were more of the screaming Islamics in the position and it became a bloody melee. Kiril blocked an empty AK upwards and kicked the Islamic in the crotch then brought the back of the axe across his face, smashing his cheek in and spraying teeth across the trench. Swinging it back so fast the head seemed
to disappear he sank it into the upper arm of another of the Chechens, nearly severing it as the sharpened blade broke through the humerus bone and severed the brachial artery.

  Back again to strike the man with the smashed face on the side of the head, crushing his occipital bone in a spray of blood and brains, across to catch another on the throat, tearing out his windpipe, down in one continuous motion to bury it in the neck of the one whose arm he'd cut off.

  The last Chechen dropped as Sawn suddenly appeared in the opening to the position. The team leader wrenched his own hatchet out of the back of the man's neck and looked around.

  "What are you doing just standing there?" Sawn asked the panting and blood drenched SAW gunner. "Get the bodies out of here and get your gun back in action. This ain't no ice-cream social!"