Task Force Desperate

by Peter Nealen

  Imad squinted. “Too dark, can’t tell. I think he’s a little too short to be our boy, though.”

  I looked at my watch, checked against the position of the sun. “Almost sundown.”

  “Yeah.” He pulled out his Kimber and brass-checked it for the third time. Satisfied, he holstered it and pulled his shirt back down over it. “Game time.” His voice was already slipping into his East African accent.

  We got out and shut the doors. I walked around the front of the truck to join him, and he led off toward the farm. I kept about five meters distance, to the right and slightly behind him.

  The farmhouse was surrounded by a five-foot sheet-metal fence, along which grew a row of acacias. The house walls were built from what looked like cinderblock, with a dusty metal roof. There was a lot of junk piled against the inside of the fence.

  We walked slowly through the gate, if that’s what you wanted to call it. It was really just a gap in the fence. There were four young men standing or squatting around in the dusty yard, watching us intently. One of them pointed toward the house, but none of them spoke. Imad nodded to them, and we walked up onto the rickety porch. There were two windows and a badly-fitting screen door. I stationed myself next to the door while Imad went inside. I leaned my back against the cinderblock wall, and watched the four young bucks watching me.

  The screen door slammed, and a man spoke in Somali, greeting Imad. Maybe it was me, but he sounded nervous. I folded my arms loosely, trying to look non-threatening, while still being in a position to get to my gun fast.

  The conversation continued in the house. I knew it could take a while. Members of tribal societies rarely get straight to business. There has to be a certain amount of small-talk and “getting to know one another” beforehand. I couldn’t understand more than a few words, but it seemed to be going amicably enough.

  Outside was uncomfortable. Not only were the bugs coming out, including swarms of mosquitoes, which made me glad of the mefloquine that Colton insisted we take every week, but there was something else, a certain tension. The four guys in the yard kept watching me, without speaking. The two squatting near the west fence would occasionally talk to each other quietly, but I couldn’t pick anything out. There was none of the friendly welcome that could be heard inside.

  The sun was below the horizon, and the sky was quickly going from orange to purple and black. The shadows were getting deeper, though one of the squatters was smoking, so I could see the two of them well enough. The heat was starting to recede. It was probably down to a hundred already, and felt comfortably cool. The air smelled of dust, shit, and smoke.

  Voices from inside started to get more animated. Imad was getting insistent about something. It sounded like he was pressing his questions, and they weren’t being answered. The other man was making placating noises. My paranoia was starting to make itself felt, especially as one of the loitering young men in the yard walked around back of the house. Soon enough, the one who had been standing by the gate followed him. The other two stayed squatting by the fence, next to a pile of straw.

  Imad was getting loud. Whatever the other man was saying, Imad didn’t like it. I carefully flexed the fingers of my gun hand. I could feel the situation going to hell already.

  There was a crash from inside, and Imad let out a particularly vile curse in Arabic. It wasn’t just indignation; that was our gone-to-shit signal.

  I came off the porch, one hand going for my gun while I pressed the push-to-talk with the other. “Wildfire, wildfire,” I sent, as my Springfield cleared holster and shirt. My off hand met the grip on the way up and out, and the tritium sights settled on the squatting man pulling an AKS out of the straw. My finger was already taking up the slack on the trigger as the gun came to full extension, and I fired, the .45 roaring in the evening quiet. The first round took him high in the chest, the second in the throat, and he crumpled back against the fence, his hand held uselessly to his throat to try to stem the spray of arterial blood.

  His buddy was going for the Kalashnikov, but I lined him up as I went for the far side of the yard, and fired twice more. He collapsed on top of his buddy, half of the top of his skull blasted away. I needed to calm down. I was shooting high.

  The other two came running around the side they’d disappeared around before, even as gunfire erupted inside the house. I cranked off the last five rounds in the gun at them, and they ducked back behind the cinderblock, as I jumped behind a pile of trash and rubble, dropping the mag out and grabbing a fresh one from my belt. The pile wouldn’t provide much cover, but I didn’t intend to stay there that long.

  Even as I bunched my muscles to move again, one of them stuck the barrel of an AK-47 around the corner and opened fire, spraying the corner of the yard on full auto. The rounds cracked overhead and smacked into and through fence and trees, as I dropped to my belly, and tried to get a shot. In the background I could hear an engine roaring, and hunkered back away from the gate.

  There was more gunfire from the far side of the house. It sounded like a .45, and was answered by a scream. The gomer shooting at me ran out of ammunition, and I took the opportunity to fire a couple of covering shots, then scrambled to my feet and ran for the back corner of the house. If I could circle around behind him while he reloaded…

  The engine roar got louder, along with the sound of flying gravel, and then the Range Rover was smashing through the gate, and skidding to a stop. The windows were open, and two battle rifles were stuck out and began to spit flame. Heavy 7.62 rounds started pulverizing the corner where the shooter had been.

  “Hillbilly, going around the southeast corner,” I sent. “Watch your fire.”

  “Affirm,” Larry’s voice came back.

  I heard footsteps pounding on the porch in front as I went around back, gliding along in a slight crouch, my pistol at the low ready. There was the familiar rattle of the gomer’s AK as he tried to blindly return fire, but as I peeked around the corner, he was too far back from the corner to have a hope in hell of hitting my teammates. I leaned out, put the front sight post on his center-mass, and shot him. He crumpled, and everything went quiet.

  “Hillbilly, coming out.” I did not want to be mistaken for a gomer. Unlikely, given my size and build, but it always pays to be careful. I reloaded with my third and last mag as I came back around to the front.

  Imad was already in the truck, and Larry and Jim were on a knee to either side, rifles up. Alek was behind the wheel. “Get in,” he said. “We’ve got to get moving.” I complied quickly enough, grabbing my rifle off the floor in the back. We hadn’t wanted to leave anything in the Defender when we’d left it, so we’d stashed our heavy stuff with the backup vehicle. As soon as I was in, Jim got in the passenger seat, and Larry squeezed into the back.

  As Alek threw the Range Rover into reverse, and roared out of the farmyard, Larry started patting me over. “I’m fine,” I told him. He finished his blood sweep anyway, and then leaned across me to Imad. I pushed his arm back. “I’ll check him.” It was standard procedure for us to check each other after a firefight. Sometimes you can get hit, and the adrenaline is just going so strong you don’t even notice. I ran my hands over Imad’s arms, legs, and back, checking for blood. Nothing.

  “What the hell happened?” Alek asked, over the noise of the engine and the gravel under the tires.

  “It was a simple robbery,” Imad said. “They didn’t have any info; they just knew we had money.” We stopped at the Defender, and, instead of continuing the debrief, Imad and I jumped out and ran to our vehicle. Imad slid behind the wheel, while I got in the passenger side, reloaded my .45, and pulled my rifle up onto my lap. The rest of what had happened could wait until we got back to the compound.

  We split off from the Range Rover. We’d take different routes back to the compound, to keep our footprint small. This wasn’t like Afghanistan or Libya, where there had been an established presence, and convoys were common.

  As we pulled away, headlights off, we
could see people starting to converge on the farm, as well as a couple of HiLuxes, each with several armed men in the back. I took a closer look with the NVGs, and they looked like militia, not official security forces. In fact, I couldn’t hear any sirens, or see any flashing lights. It looked like things had gotten so bad the local authorities really weren’t venturing anywhere outside their strongholds in the city.

  This was probably going to create a stir. I doubted that the guys we’d shot were the only ones who knew there were going to be Westerners at that farm tonight, and the shootout was probably going to tip somebody off that there were more than just scared tourists and idealistic humanitarian organizations in town. I cussed under my breath. Between the lack of support from the States, and now this, the job was looking more and more impossible by the hour.

  If they thought the US had sent JSOC after them, the bad guys were likely to just kill the rest of the hostages, or, almost as bad, move them. Not that we had any sort of reliable intel on even their general location.

  We wound through the streets, taking a complicated and serpentine route back to the compound. There wasn’t a lot of traffic. The streetlights were on, and there were people out walking around, but there was a furtive undertone to their movements. People were scared.

  When we got to the compound, we found quite a crowd there. The lights were on, and Billy was walking along a line of locals, most of them showing injuries, directing some to one room or the other. I got out and walked over as Imad parked the truck, careful to leave my rifle in the cab, and my pistol concealed. These people didn’t need to see what we really were.

  “What’s going on, Billy?” I asked, as I walked up.

  He didn’t look up from the woman he was examining. She was bleeding from a wound on her head. There was quite a bit of blood, but head injuries are like that. I didn’t see any flowing, just a slow ooze. “There was a riot in the southern slums a couple hours ago,” Billy said. “Nobody seems to know what started it, but it turned into Afar versus Issa really quick. Sounds like a few people died, and we’ve gotten a few dozen wounded and injured here. Dave and Colton are inside, treating the worst of them.” He pointed one gloved hand toward the side of the building that Dave had turned into an aid station. “You want to help me triage?”

  “Let me make sure tonight’s trip is put to bed; then I’ll be back out,” I said. I pushed past the line of wounded Djiboutians, and into the main building. The line continued in the hall, leading to the southeast wing of the building, while the door to the northwest wing, our team room, was tightly shut, with a sheet tacked over it. I slipped under the sheet and opened the door.

  Alek, Jim, and Larry were coming in from the other side, with Imad. Imad had my rifle in his hand and held it up for me before putting it on my rack. I nodded my thanks, and waited at the map table as the others secured their gear.

  “I told Billy I’d go out and help him triage the local wounded after this,” I announced, as the night’s team gathered at the map table. Alek nodded his acknowledgement.

  “So,” he began, “How does this affect our situation?”

  “We can’t know entirely,” Jim said matter-of-factly. “It’s going to depend on how many people knew about what was going down tonight, and how closely they connected Imad with us here. Worst-case, the bad guys know there are some heavy hitters in town, know it’s us, and act on it.” He rubbed his jaw. “Not to put too fine a point on it, but it sure as hell didn’t help us, any way you look at it.”

  There was a moment’s pause, as we all thought over the implications. Then I had an idea. “Wait, we know that Khasam and Farah are in town. We don’t know what Al Masri looks like, but we’ve got photos of those two. Anybody want to bet they’re taking a big part in the demonstrations that keep turning into riots around here?” That got everybody’s attention. “Maybe, if we start watching the demonstrations, we can get eyes on one of these fuckers and tail them. They might lead us to the hostages, or at least to somebody else who can.”

  Everybody mulled it over for a moment. “We’d still need to be able to trail him inconspicuously,” Alek pointed out. “As we’ve discovered before, that can be difficult here.”

  “Overwatch team,” Imad put in. “I’d be on the ground. Two teams in vehicles on the outskirts, positioned to move in and take up the trail when he leaves the crowd.”

  “It could work,” Jim said.

  “All right,” Alek said. “We’ve got some planning to do. But first, for the sake of OPSEC, let’s go help get these locals treated, and out of here.”

  Leaving our weapons with Rodrigo in the team room, we crossed over to the aid station to lend a hand. There were probably upward of twenty people in the room, men, women, and children. Most of the injuries were blunt trauma, from beatings or thrown rocks, but some sported lacerations, likely from knives or tapangas. Colton was stitching a young woman’s arm, where half her bicep had been cut off, and had been dangling down to her forearm. The kid next to her looked to have been hit with a rock; he was bleeding from a nasty abrasion on his shoulder. I pulled on a pair of latex gloves and squatted down in front of him, to start to clean the wound.

  “Fuckin’ nuts, man,” Colton declared as he tied off another suture. “Nobody can tell me why it started. None of these people ever did anything to anybody, and it’s not like it’s their fault their president’s a fucking klepto.”

  The dirt and grit out of the gouge in the kid’s shoulder, I reached for gauze and started to gently bandage it. The kid was just watching me, his chin tucked in, not making a sound. “The bad guys are trying to create chaos, so they can take over. Chaos leads to more chaos,” I said. “When you break down a society, everything breaks down, even the decency of a lot of the people, and shit like this is what happens.”

  We continued to work well into the night, patching, stitching, and splinting. Fortunately, there weren’t really any critical cases that we had to either keep around or try to take to the hospital, in the north of town. A little after midnight, we were able to send them all home.

  It was three in the morning when I woke up. I couldn’t remember the dream, just the sick, disquieted feeling it left me with. For a few minutes I lay there, sweating, staring at the ceiling, trying to will myself back to sleep. I had only managed to drift off an hour before.

  It wasn’t working. There was a faint red light splashed on the ceiling, and I looked over to see Larry sitting on his cot, reading by the red glow of his headlamp. Guess he couldn’t sleep, either.

  I sat up with a muffled groan. I didn’t want to be awake, but I knew from past experience that I wasn’t going to get to sleep for a while when I felt like this. Larry looked up, putting a finger in his place in the book as I swung my feet to the floor.

  “One of those nights, huh?” Larry asked.

  “Yeah.” I put my head in my hands and rubbed my eyes. “What’re you doing up?”

  “Same reason,” he said. “Couldn’t sleep.” He held up the book, one of the monster hunter books he’d gotten me hooked on. “Thought I’d catch up on a little reading.”

  Larry and I went back a ways. We’d been on the same team in the Philippines, just before we’d gotten out and hooked up with Alek and Jim to start Praetorian Security. We’d been in half a dozen hellholes together since.

  “You never made it to Libya, did you?” I asked.

  “Nah, just the PI,” he said, setting the book down on the rack next to him. “Twice before our team, then the deployment we did.”

  Suddenly struck by a memory, I grinned. “You remember that one night on Mindanao, something like a week before everything went to shit? We were about two miles outside of that tiny-ass village that nobody knew the name of.”

  Larry chuckled. “When Lucky woke up with a banana spider two inches above his face?”

  “And sat up right into it.” I shook my head. “I’m still amazed he didn’t start shooting. He sure freaked out far enough.”

  “Lucky was
always a little high-strung,” Larry said. “What happened to him, anyway?”

  “Don’t know,” I admitted. “He got out right after we got back from that deployment, and I kind of lost track of him.” Larry just nodded. That happened in this business. A guy you had spent every waking moment with for a year or more got out, went home, and just kind of dropped off the map.

  After a long pause, Larry asked quietly, “Why’d you ask about Libya?”

  “Ah,” I searched for an answer that would make sense. I wasn’t entirely sure, myself. “This just kind of reminds me of the situation over there. What with the complete chaos, what starved, beaten version of a civil society they had there breaking down. It wasn’t pretty. It ain’t going to be here, either.”

  Larry murmured thoughtfully. “Can’t save every situation, brother.”

  I snorted. “Can’t save any of ‘em, is how it’s starting to look.”

  Larry leaned back and swung his feet back up on his cot. It creaked dangerously under his weight. “You know, I remember you saying once, ‘The world is fucked. Any student of history should be able to see that clearly enough. The only thing any of us should worry about is doing the right thing. Probably won’t change anything, but that doesn’t stop it being the right thing.’ Sound familiar?”

  I shrugged. “Yeah, sounds like something I’d say.”

  “It’s a sage bit of wisdom,” he said, putting his hands behind his head. “You should probably think about it.”

  I flipped him the bird and lay back down on my cot. Morning would come soon enough.

  Chapter 6

  Damn, but I was getting tired of the Djibouti heat.

  Larry and I were in the Defender, slowly cruising in random circles in the back streets, about a half mile from where there was another demonstration going on. We could actually hear the rising and falling roar, even over the sound of the engine. Whatever was being said, it was getting them good and riled up.