by Peter Nealen
I moved back to the door we’d come in through, with eyes on the wrecked courtyard and the main station. There were four windows in the upper story of the main building, but so far we hadn’t taken any fire from them. Apparently, the remaining personnel inside were a little too busy with all the fire coming from the other directions.
There was a lull, briefly, at least for Little Bob and me at that door. There was a roaring fusillade of gunfire from the north side of the station, as the occupants engaged the fighters coming from the north. It was answered with nearly the same volume, bullets chipping concrete and stucco off the side of the building with puffs of dust.
I keyed my radio. I had to yell to be heard over the noise of the firefight outside. “Speedy, Hillbilly,” I called.
“Good to hear you alive, Hillbilly,” Mike drawled over the net. “Any casualties from that explosion?”
“One. Bandito is down,” I told him.
There was a short pause. “Damn,” he replied. “What’s your status?”
“We are strongpointed in Building Three,” I told him. “There’s too much fire from too many directions for us to push any farther.”
“Roger,” Mike replied. “Hold tight; Hussein Ali is pushing his men up. We’re not taking as much fire as we were, probably thanks to that explosion. I’m going to take my team out to the east and come in to link up with you at the breach point.”
I was interrupted by the harsh reports of rifles from the back of the building. “Be advised, there are hostiles to our east as well,” I told him.
“Roger,” he said. “We’re on the move. See you soon.”
I leaned out the door just in time to see another pair of fighters running toward the station, using the cars parked to the north as cover. I shot one of them as he got up to dash around the front of a sedan with PPF colors. He staggered and fell, bouncing off the sedan’s bumper to fall on his face in the dirt. The second one ducked back behind the cab, and I hammered four rounds through the doors. I couldn’t tell immediately if I’d hit him, but he didn’t reappear. Cars make shitty cover.
I admit I was a little torn. We had enemies inside, and whoever these guys were, they definitely weren’t our friends. I was sorely tempted to just let them have at it and kill each other, except we needed that station at the very least, as a rallying point and a symbol that the Mullah’s people were taking over. I also wanted Qomi alive if possible; if we could make him talk, we might be able to roll up a good portion of the Iranian operations in Basra.
Still, bullets coming at you pretty much outweigh any other considerations.
Several PG-7V rounds banged in out of the buildings to the north, slamming into the side of the station with savage thuds, spraying grit and shrapnel with enough force to flay the skin off a man. I had to duck back as the overpressure slapped through the doorway. Whoever these assholes were, they were more concerned with killing everyone in the police station than with taking it.
That fact got reinforced when I saw the dump truck trundling down the road and slowing to turn in toward the station.
Now, there was no big neon lettering that said “IED” on the truck—there never is. But a large truck coming into a firefight just sort of spoke to me. “VBIED, two o’clock, seventy-five meters!” I yelled at Little Bob, and opened fire on the cab, hoping to kill the driver before it could get too close. A truck that big, packed with explosives, was going to make one hell of a boom. It didn’t take much more than a heartbeat before Little Bob was joining in.
I saw the windshield spiderweb and shatter under our shots. The truck wobbled, then turned abruptly and plowed into an ILAV parked just outside the station. A moment later it blew up.
This time I was ready for it, having ducked back inside the door before the fucker went off. It still rocked me. I don’t know what they’d packed that thing with, but the blast was deafening, the shockwave shattering any windows that hadn’t gone with the first blast. Rocks, shrapnel, and pieces of anything in its way slapped through the open door like a solid wall. The entire building shuddered with the force of the explosion and dust sifted down from every joint in the structure.
I tried to shake off the ringing in my ears, and looked at Little Bob. The big man looked a little dazed, but he gave me a thumbs-up and got his rifle back up.
Outside, everything was dark with dust and smoke. Looking up, I could see the mushroom cloud of the explosion rising into the morning sky. Everybody in Basra had to know that had gone off. Hell, I wouldn’t have been surprised if they’d heard it in Khorramshahr, twenty-five miles away.
It took me a moment to realize that Mike was calling me over the radio. “Hillbilly, Speedy!” He sounded a little frantic. “What’s your status?”
I took a second to take stock. Little Bob and I had been closest to the blast, and we were relatively unharmed, just rattled. Jim stuck his head in from the back room to announce that we were all up. I keyed my radio. “Speedy, Hillbilly,” I sent. “We’re all up. The explosion was on the far corner of the station.”
“Roger,” he replied, relief evident in his voice. “Watch your fire to the east, we’re coming up.”
“Affirm.” I yelled back at Jim, who acknowledged that he’d heard it.
Looking back out at the blasted hell of wreckage and burning cars that was left over from the IED blasts, I couldn’t pick out any targets. There was too much shit in the air. It wasn’t deterring the gunmen on either side, though, as both the Iranians and PPF inside and the unknown attackers to the north were now blindly firing into the dust and smoke. Little Bob and I held our fire, preferring to preserve some of our ammo.
I noticed after a minute or so that the firing on both sides wasn’t as intense. It was also ragged, sometimes coming in long bursts, other times fading to a few desultory shots. I suspected that both the attackers and the defenders had taken a hit from that IED—more than likely the attackers had been closer to the blast than they’d planned for.
About at that point, Jim yelled from the back that they’d made contact with Mike and his boys. I started thinking fast. With Mike’s team with us, and apparently everybody else in disarray, we might have a chance to push this fight now. Not getting shot or blown up was going to be interesting, since there was still plenty of shooting going on, but who wants to live forever?
Mike joined us at the door, and I grabbed him and pulled his ear close. “I don’t know who these fuckheads to the north are, but I think they blew their load too soon. They’re getting ragged, and so are the bad guys inside. I think we can breach the station and get in if we move fast.”
“The guys to the north are irregulars, and I’m pretty sure they’re AQI,” Mike replied. “We shot a few of them on the way up here. Black turbans, and a couple of black headbands with white lettering.”
That sounded like AQI, all right. “Have you guys still got one of the 27s?” I asked.
He nodded. “Bo’s got one.”
I pointed at the wall of the main station house. “Get him up here and have him make us a door.”
Mike yelled back for Bo. The big man came squeezing through the door behind me, and the three of us cleared away from the outer door. I’d had my bell rung enough for one day; I didn’t want to play around with the backblast from an RPG-27.
Bo unslung the tube from his back, cocked it, dropped to a knee just inside the door, and brought the weapon to his shoulder. He looked back once to make sure there wasn’t anybody standing in his backblast, then triggered the rocket.
It hit in an eyeblink, the shaped charge blowing a pretty decent hole in the cinderblock wall. It looked small enough it was still going to take some contortions to get through it, but it was big enough to be a breach point.
Bo had immediately stood up and gotten out of the doorway. Little Bob beat me out by a hair, and then the four of us were sprinting for the opening.
It took only seconds to stack up next to the hole. I yanked a flashbang out of the pouch on the back of Little Bob�
�s vest, pulled the pin, and lobbed it into the hole. A bang that seemed muffled after all the explosions and gunfire of the day sounded from inside, and then we were going through.
There were four men in the room, most of them looking out the windows. Little Bob all but dove in, going right. I went left.
I shot the first man, who looked like he’d just come through the door, high in the chest. He staggered back against the wall, leaving red blotches on the white stucco, and started to slide toward the floor. I was already tracking in on the next man, who was turning away from the window. He was dressed in the PPF’s tan uniform, with a black armor vest. I shot him in the face. Blood and brains splashed against the wall behind him, and he fell on his face.
Little Bob, Bo, and I shot the next man at the same instant. His head jerked back and he crumpled, red splashed against the wall behind him.
I tracked back across the corpses. All were evidently dead, though the first guy I’d shot was slumped against the wall in a sitting position, with his QBZ-03 still held in his hands. I shot him once more in the top of the skull. He slid over onto his side. I stepped over and kicked the rifle out of his hands before stacking up on the door he’d just come through.
Another flashbang went through the door, and I led the way, rifle up, Mike on my heels.
The room was the station lobby, apparently. It was larger than the last one, with four square concrete pillars in the center, and a desk leading to the back rooms. A staircase led up at the far side.
There was no one in it. None of the doors or windows had lines of sight on either the militia to the south and west or the AQI fighters to the north and east. Everybody was engaged trying to fight off the attacks, apparently.
The cell block was quickly cleared. The prisoners cowered when we came through, but no one offered any resistance. We left them in their cells; there was no time to fuck around with liberating prisoners, and if we did, we were going to have to spend even more time making sure they weren’t going to stab us in the back as soon as we turned away from them. Better to leave them where they were.
By now the rest of both teams were in the building, and spreading out to clear it. I got the ICOM out of my dump pouch, where somehow it had stayed during all the chaos. “Hassan, this is Jeff,” I sent. “Tell Hussein Ali to shift the militia’s fire away from the station. We are in the building, and clearing it now.”
Bryan, Nick, Chad, and Johnny were already heading up the stairs when the four of us came out of the cell block. Seeing that the rest were moving into the southern arm of the building, I pointed up, and we followed Bryan and the rest up the steps.
There was a deafening blast of gunfire at the top of the stairs. We got up to the upper level, which opened on another room, this one apparently office spaces, to find Bryan sitting on the floor against a desk, cinching a tourniquet around his own leg. Nick was standing over him, covering the door out. Johnny and Chad were spread out on the other side of the room. There were two more dead men slumped next to one of the desks, and a third half in, half out of the door.
My little four-man element pushed through the room, aiming for the door. It opened on a hallway, with more doorways off to either side. None of them actually had doors in them; they were just openings. That was going to make this a little more interesting.
I took the long axis of the hall, waving the rest to move toward the short end. We’d clear that first, then move down.
As the three others flowed past me, four men came out of the doorways at the far end, in body armor, their rifles up. All of them looked like brand new Chinese QBZ-03s.
I reacted as fast as years of training and some pretty hairy situations had prepared me. I was barely aiming—I just pumped rounds at chest level as fast as I could, tracking across the narrow hallway. The reports slapped skull-crushing noise off the walls.
Two of them went down immediately, and the other two flinched, trying to get back inside the door. I shot one in the side of the head as he turned to try to get out of the line of fire, and he fell into his comrade, who ripped off an ineffectual burst at me, that plowed stucco and concrete off the ceiling. I tried to shoot him, but he was halfway back through the door, and the round smacked into the corpse that was half-covering him.
I turned and dashed for the short end door, even as the frag that Bo had tossed in shook the floor. Just like the flashbang from earlier, it sounded muted. I was probably going to come through the day with some more hearing loss, provided I survived at all.
The room was smoky and dark when we pushed in, with two PPF officers on the floor moaning, covered in blood. Quick shots finished them off; neither was our principle target, and we weren’t risking leaving live shooters behind us, especially not that day.
Having been the last man in the room, I had turned and covered the door, facing more or less down the length of the hall. When I started to move out, before I could get more than an inch past the doorframe, a storm of automatic fire missed my head by inches, chewing up the concrete and sending fragments whizzing through the air. I ducked back, letting my rifle hang on its sling, while I dug my last frag out of my vest.
“Fuck this,” I pronounced, as I yanked the pin out. Little Bob also had one in his hand. We traded glances and nodded. I dropped to a knee, staying inside the doorway, while Little Bob stood almost on top of me, and then we simultaneously chucked the grenades down the length of the hall.
There was some yelling in Arabic and Farsi, then the grenades detonated a fraction of a second apart, filling the hall with noise, smoke, and shrapnel. Without hesitating, I got up off the floor and moved into the hall, rifle up and ready. There was a lot of smoke from the frags, but I could make out two silhouettes moving, and dropped them with two rapid pairs of shots. I don’t think they ever knew what happened after the grenades came flying out of the doorway.
There were four more doors to clear. By that point, without discussing it, we mutually decided to quit fucking around. As I covered the long axis and the other three stacked up on the first door, Bo tossed another frag in before they flowed in.
The room was empty, aside from the lockers on the walls. There were no windows, which kind of explained why there wasn’t anyone there—you can’t very well defend a building from a windowless room. Without wasting any time, we were out and moving on the next room.
They were ready this time—they must have hidden behind the desks when the frag went in. Bo was the first man in, and took five rounds in half a second. His face just disappeared as a round hit him across the cheekbones. He dropped, already dead. Mike and I were going in after him, with Little Bob behind us, making sure no one from the last two rooms shot us in the back as we went.
My sights filled with the first man, his head and rifle barely exposed over a desk. It was a tough shot, but while the first round missed, smacking fragments off the desk into his face, the second took the top of his head off. I tracked in on the next guy to his left, who was trying to lean around the corner of the desk. He was exposing a little bit more of himself. I shot him three times, the rounds going into his shoulders and upper chest over his plates.
For a few seconds the room rang with gunfire. By the time I was on the next man, his head was already a misshapen, broken lump of bone, blood, and shredded meat from Mike’s and Little Bob’s shots, leaking fluids and gray matter on the floor.
There was nothing we could do for Bo; that was evident without even checking him. I checked for a pulse anyway. Nothing. He was gone. I got up, feeling numb, and pointed to the door. We still had two rooms to clear.
No sooner had I gotten to the door, however, when more gunfire rang out from the next room. Nick, Johnny, and Chad had pushed up and were already clearing the room on the right. We’d take the left.
This time, Mike had the frag. Bo and I were both out. He tossed it high, bouncing it off the ceiling, hoping to get it where somebody hiding behind a desk wouldn’t be able to avoid it. It blew with a thud and a storm of smoke and frag, and t
hen we were in.
There was only one man still standing in the room. He was bloodied, but not dead. He dropped his rifle and lay down on his face with his hands on the back of his head. Mike moved to him, kicked the rifle out of reach, and wrenched his hands down behind his back to flex-cuff him.
There was another man lying on the floor near him. This guy seemed to have taken more of the grenade blast—he was still breathing, but he was pretty tore up. He wasn’t so far gone that I couldn’t recognize Qomi from the photos we had. Whether he’d live to be any use intelligence-wise was up in the air, but we had him.
Nick called out from across the hall. “Room’s clear, Jeff. What’s your status?”
“We’re clear here,” I said. “We’ve got Qomi.” I keyed my radio. “All teams, status?”
“First floor’s clear,” Jim reported.
“Front outbuilding clear,” Eddie replied.
“Objective clear,” I said. “Hold what you’ve got; we’ve still got AQI to the north and east.” I was also fully expecting a PPF counterattack—we’d hurt them, and taken down their leadership, but there were still a lot more PPF soldiers than we’d faced here.
I fished the ICOM out. “Hassan, this is Jeff. Tell Hussein Ali that we’ve taken the station. He needs to move his men up to secure the perimeter. Tell him there are AQI fighters to the north. They’re a little disorganized at the moment, but they’ve got a lot of firepower, and they’ve already set off two bombs.”
“Yes, Mister Jeff, I will tell him,” Hassan replied eagerly. “This is good news.”
Sure it was. I suddenly felt tired as hell. My ears were ringing, I felt like I had half the desert in my joints, and my head was really starting to hurt. I shook it off and went to make sure we had the building secured enough to turn back any outside assault.
Epilogue
The PPF counterattack didn’t really materialize. It turned out that Hussein Ali and Mullah al Hakim had enough pull, either through bribes, threats, or blood ties that more of the PPF than I’d expected had gone over. It was enough to paralyze the PPF and give the friendlies enough time to kill or capture most of the Iranian officers. Hussein Ali’s cousin had taken the northern base that we’d scoped out a few days earlier, and was in position to be the number three man in the new PPF.
