Task Force Desperate

by Peter Nealen

  We were taking fire, but it was mostly high, as the enemy was suppressed by the withering barrage of machinegun fire. I kept killing anything that presented itself, listening for the shout that everybody was on the trucks.

  Finally it came. “Let’s go!” Bob yelled from the back of the lead truck, even as he leaned out the back and kept shooting. Looking back, I saw that Kohl, Alek, and I were the last ones on the ground. I punched Kohl’s shoulder, and he got to his feet and ran for the truck. A moment later, Alek tapped me, and we got up and ran.

  Helping hands reached down to pull us into the back of the truck. They didn’t have a lot of strength left in them, but those hostages who still had some spark of defiance in them were determined to help. Sack was on his belly on the truck bed, leaning out below Bob, shooting the AK I’d handed him. As soon as I was on, I reached down and grabbed the tailgate, hauling it up and cutting off Sack’s fire, as Alek pounded on the back of the cab. With a lurch, the truck was moving, the Legionnaire on the gun up top still laying down the hate.

  We rolled toward the open desert, leaving the hell of smoke, fire, and blood behind.

  Chapter 12

  It had been a long, bumpy ride. Kohl’s driver, Leon, had taken a winding mess of barely rutted tracks, wadis, and occasionally just cutting cross-country, into the desert south of Djibouti City. We wanted to get as far away from Balbala as possible, before we even thought about heading back to our HQ. Odds were good that we’d have to relocate that pretty soon, anyway.

  For the moment, we were stopped, the engines shut off, in a small wadi, surrounded by acacias that loomed like black umbrellas against the lighter background of the desert at night. Nick and Rodrigo were in the backs of the trucks, looking over the hostages. Some were rather the worse for wear, and a few really hadn’t handled their captivity well. Two were almost catatonic, and had needed to be lifted by main force into the trucks.

  The rest of us, Alek, Bob, Tim, Larry, and I, stood a little way away, in the bottom of the wadi. Colton’s body lay at our feet.

  His face had been covered by a bloody shemaugh, and his gear had been stripped. Looking down at him, he looked…shrunken. He’d always been skinny. We’d blamed his unnatural speed on the fact that he wasn’t much more than skin and bones; he didn’t have as much weight to drag around as the rest of us. That, plus his first name, had led to his callsign.

  But now, skinny-ass Colton looked frail, like the flesh had all melted off his bones. The clinical part of my brain explained that this was due to the fact all his blood had run out. The rest of me could only stare, numbly, at my friend’s corpse.

  Colton wasn’t the first brother I’d lost, and wouldn’t be the last. It’s a dangerous profession we’d chosen. It didn’t make it hurt any less when another one of us went down.

  “We’ve got to bury him,” Alek said quietly. “No way are we going to be able to take him back with us.”

  There was a general murmur of assent. Getting out of here, especially with hostages, was going to be hard enough. Plus, we had no way of preserving his body. He’d rot before we got within a thousand miles of the States.

  For another long moment, no one said or did anything. I could see Bob shaking, silently weeping. He and Colton had been pretty tight, as the soft-spoken runner had been the most welcoming to the new guy on the team. After a moment, he turned, his shoulders still shuddering, and walked to one of the trucks. He returned with a shovel, and began digging in the dry, hard-packed dirt.

  As the grave got deeper, the sound of an approaching vehicle could be heard. Alek turned away, listening, and then keyed his radio. “Roger, that’s us…Affirm, I have eyes on you. Come on in.”

  A blacked out HiLux soon trundled into the wadi and coasted to a stop next to one of the 5-tons. The engine went quiet, and a man got out and walked toward us. As he got closer, I saw it was Danny. He didn’t say a word at first, just walked up to Alek, grasped him by the hand, and pulled him in close. “I’m sorry, brother,” he said quietly. Alek just nodded; then Danny faced the rest of us. He walked over to Colton’s body, and bowed his head.

  Bob had stopped digging, and was staring at Danny. “What the fuck are you doing here?” he asked.

  “That’s enough, Bob,” Alek growled, but Bob wasn’t going to be put off. He was digging his best friend’s grave, after all.

  “No, this motherfucker stayed back, while we went into that fucking hornet’s nest, and now Colton’s fucking dead. And he’s got the balls to come here and say he’s fucking sorry?!” Bob’s voice was starting to rise in volume.

  “I said shut your fucking mouth, Bob!” Alek snapped. “I made the call as to who went, and who stayed back. I was the one who decided Danny had to stay back and work support. This motherfucker has been through worse shit than you can imagine, so shut the fuck up.”

  Bob shut up. It was hard to see his face in the dark, but he still didn’t look happy about it. Danny, if anything, seemed even less so. If he had worked with Alek before I knew him, that meant he had been in on some hairy shit. I wondered how many other friends and comrades he’d had to bury. I decided I probably didn’t want to know.

  After a few minutes, Larry stepped down into the grave. He put his hand on Bob’s shoulder, and gently took the shovel from him, then started digging, while Bob stepped up out of the grave. While Larry dug, Danny motioned to Alek and me to come with him.

  We walked around behind the HiLux, where Danny blew a deep breath up past his nose, folded his arms, and leaned back against the tailgate. “You said you picked up one of the gomers?” he asked, all business.

  “Yeah,” Alek said. “An Arab. Young kid, too, maybe twenty. He’s in the truck with two of the Legionnaires watching him.”

  “Not sure I like having them too involved,” Danny said.

  “I don’t either, but we all needed to be down here,” Alek said, indicating Colton’s shrouded body.

  “I understand. Let’s just get him somewhere where I can talk to him soon, okay?” Danny replied. “And I mean soon. I got word from Langley just before I came out here. The Ethiopians crossed the border an hour ago.”

  “Well this just keeps getting better and better, doesn’t it?” I said. “Fuck. How long does that give us?”

  “Depending on how fast they move, they could be at the city by sunup,” Danny replied.

  “Motherfuck,” Alek swore. “We’ve got to get these guys out of the country now, then.”

  “And try to find out where the rest are,” Danny agreed. “Twenty is something, but it’s supposed to be only about a tenth of the number they grabbed. Which means that the rest are in even worse danger now.” He rubbed his chin. “I think we do need to move our operation out of the city, though.”

  “I agree,” I said. “No way we’re going to be able to work much inside the city with the Ethiopians steamrolling it.” That gave me pause. “How are they justifying this? Peacekeeping? The official government’s still intact, if a little pinned down at the moment.”

  “I don’t know, I haven’t heard,” Danny replied. “We have to assume that they’re moving to secure the port, though, which means they’ll have the city locked down in a matter of hours.”

  Danny looked over at the 5-ton, where our unwilling guest was sitting in the bed, with a black Legionnaire watching him, FAMAS pointed loosely in his direction. “I’m afraid our guy here might be the key to getting to the rest of the hostages in time. As soon as we’re settled, I’m going to need some time with him.”

  “Agreed,” Alek said, starting toward the grave. “I’ll speed this up. We need to move.”

  In the end, there wasn’t any ceremony. Those of us who prayed, prayed silently, as we gently lowered Colton’s body into the hole, and covered it over. Bob marked the grid on his GPS, in case we ever managed to come back. It wasn’t likely, but there had to be hope.

  Then we loaded on the trucks and got back in the war.

  We roared up the road, following much the same r
oute to the compound that we had on the first day. We were still ahead of the Ethiopian incursion, but Danny was getting semi-regular updates from a satellite as it passed over. There was almost an entire mechanized division heading for Djibouti City. They weren’t stopping or securing anything else as they went, not that there was much between the Ethiopian border and the port. They were coming, and coming hard.

  Our little three-vehicle convoy rolled up to the compound just as the sun was coming up and the call to prayer was starting to echo across the city. Hank came out and pushed open the gate. Pulling all three trucks inside, we started getting the hostages out and under cover. Dave would have his hands full for most of the day.

  Hank helped Rodrigo manhandle our unwilling guest out of the back of the 5-ton, and into the shed against the seaward wall of the compound. He’d stay there for a while, until Danny went to have a chat with him. The Legionnaires then loaded back up, while Kohl shook our hands and thanked us for the excitement. They left after that, going back to where they were supposed to be.

  Then most of us went inside, and promptly collapsed into an exhausted sleep, some of us outwardly trembling from the adrenaline dump. Unfortunately, grief and the memories of the night before precluded it being a restful sleep.

  When I cracked my eye to see that it was Bob shaking my ankle, I groaned. “Not you again. What’s gone to hell now?”

  “Something’s going on up north,” Bob said, looking slightly confused. I guess my crack about him being the permanent bearer of bad news went over his head.

  I swung my feet out of bed, still in my boots. None of us undressed much to sleep anymore. My drop holster clipped onto my belt, and I scooped up my rifle before lurching over to our little op-center while I tried to rub the ache out of my eyes.

  Larry and Rodrigo were still getting up as well, but the rest of the team was gathered around the feed from one of Danny’s UAVs. At first I couldn’t tell what it was showing, exactly, just a cloud of dust and smoke. Then, as I looked closer, I swallowed, hard.

  “Is that the Presidential Palace?” I asked carefully.

  “Yeah, it is,” Jim said heavily.

  The southern half of the crenellated palace was a smoking crater. It looked like whatever had gone off, had exploded right at the base of the palace. I was betting truck bomb, but a rocket was also conceivable. Even as we watched, through the pall of smoke and still-settling dust, what was left of the southwest tower crumbled, slumping into the crater with another billowing cloud of dust.

  “How’d they get that close?” I asked.

  “Suicide bombers,” was the reply. The camera panned back, showing the trail of devastation along the west road. It looked like they’d had enough car bombs to take out any checkpoints, then blast through the outer wall, before letting the final strike in to the palace itself. The entire western harbor was overlaid with a pall of black smoke.

  “Any word on the president?” Rodrigo asked.

  “Right now, the rebels are saying he’s dead,” Tim answered. “The government radio station is insisting he’s alive, and safe.” He shook his head. “Looking at that, I’m a little inclined to take the rebels’ word for it.”

  “What are the Ethiopians doing?” Jim asked. Tim tapped a key, and the scene shifted to outside the city.

  There was a FOB growing in the desert, straddling the N5 highway. I was reasonably sure there was another one on the N2. There were already berms going up, and as the tiny UAV whirred silently overhead, it showed columns of trucks, troop transports, and tanks. There were also several Hip and Hind helicopters, both on the ground, and orbiting above. I was frankly surprised our UAV hadn’t been detected and shot down, yet.

  “There’s a lot of chatter, but no movement, yet,” Tim said.

  “Only a matter of time, regardless,” Larry said. He stroked his goatee. “Even if the president’s alive, they’ll probably move in to shore him up.”

  For a while we watched the beehive of activity outside the city, as a relatively modern FOB that didn’t look too much different from one of ours before the big draw down, took shape. Finally, Alek spoke.

  “Start getting the gear ready to move. We’ve got to be ready to head for the beach tonight.”

  “We calling it, then?” Nick asked, hooking his thumbs in his pistol belt. “I thought we were doing pretty well, running around with all this going on.”

  “We’re at least getting out of the city,” Alek replied. “Whether we’re canc’ing the whole thing or not probably depends mostly on what Danny finds out from our guest in the shed. But movement in the city is going to be severely hampered if the Ethiopians take over. Most of their COIN doctrine and tactics come from us. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather not have to deal with that, especially if it turns out that the hostages are somewhere else, and we wind up playing hide-and-seek with the Ethiopians instead of the fuckasses we’re supposed to be hunting.”

  “And what about the targets here?” I asked quietly. “Are we just going to let them go? Figure they’re out of our reach?”

  “You’re talking about the bastards who led the attack in the first place,” Alek said. It wasn’t a question, but I nodded anyway. He sighed. “I don’t like it any more than you do, but we were hired to find the hostages, not get the bad guys who took them. If we can do both, so much the better, but the hostages are our objective. We simply don’t have the manpower to do both.”

  “Don’t need a lot of manpower to take people out,” Hank remarked. “Rescuing people seems to take a lot more.”

  “It does,” Jim said, siding with Alek. “But that doesn’t take away from what we were hired to do. There are still a lot of hostages left, and their life expectancy probably just got a lot shorter, thanks to what we did last night. They can’t afford side missions.”

  He was right, and I conceded, as much as I was hungry for blood after last night. As exhausted as I was, I had still seen Colton falling to the street every time I closed my eyes. I could still see the faint echo of that image, lurking behind my eyelids. It went together with the Senior Airman getting his head sawed off, simply for being an American in territory the Salafists claimed. Fuck them. I wanted them all dead.

  Fortunately or unfortunately, rage alone cannot dictate operations. Alek and Jim were right. I didn’t like it, though, and I confess I let my bitterness over Colton’s death get the better of me. I stalked off to my rack and sat down, with my back to the rest. Childish, I know. I’m not proud of it. But I just had to get away a little bit, and try to restrain the roiling urge to smash, rend, and destroy that was threatening to claw its way out of my chest.

  As I sat there, grinding my fist into my palm, Alek suddenly loomed over me. “Come on, brother, let’s walk,” he said. I didn’t say anything, didn’t even look at him at first, but finally heaved myself to my feet. He clapped one huge hand on my shoulder and steered me out of the room, into the hallway between the team room and the clinic.

  He turned to face me as the door closed, and folded his arms. I couldn’t meet his eyes at first. Alek and I had known each other a long time, and we’d had to bury several of our brothers. He knew how I reacted, and I knew that understanding, concerned look in his eyes that he got every time. And right at the moment, I didn’t want to see it, because it might dampen my fury.

  “I worry about you, Jeff,” he said finally. It was the same way he’d started every one of these conversations for the last ten years. “I know what you’re thinking. You want to go back in there, and burn the whole city to the ground. You want to make a mountain of dead bodies and blackened skulls, as retribution for Colton.”

  “And all the others those motherfuckers murdered,” I snarled. “Including that kid who lost his head on the fucking internet.”

  “I know, brother.” Alek kept his voice low and inexorably understanding. “You’re a barbarian, a berserker. A fucking Viking. But I know you, and I know that you still understand why we can’t do that. And that you wouldn’t,
not really, even if I gave you the chance.”

  I glanced sharply at him. “You don’t think so?”

  “I know you better than that.” He nodded. “You’re still a good man, the same good man who was ready to shoot another team leader when he started acting like he was going to use those Libyan farmers as target practice. However strong your rage-monster is, that conscience of yours is stronger. I’ve seen it. And I know you know it.”

  I studied the dirty floor under my boots. He was right, and at that moment I hated both of us for it. It’s a conflict I’ve had to live with my entire adult life, and it’s one that’s cost me a lot of sleep, and probably a few years of my life. Part of me is a throwback, a savage killer from a long-lost century. In another life, I might have been a reaver, leaping off a longship with an axe in my hand. But another part followed the old code my Dad had taught me that a real man always followed. Never cheat, steal, lie, murder, or disrespect a woman. It kept me in check. And at times like this, my bloodlust cursed that part of me, the part that wouldn‘t let me cut loose and sate my appetite for death and destruction.

  Most of the time, I’m very glad of that cast-iron moral compass. It keeps me a man, instead of a monster. It also helps me to keep sight of what can and can’t be done, regardless of my own personal desires.

  But sometimes, like now, the sheer inability to follow through only made it worse. I raged, gritting my teeth together at the sheer injustice of life and the fucked-up world we live in.

  Alek had seen it all before, and continued to talk, softly. “If we had time, I’d be right there with you. We’d find a way, Ethiopians or no, to make these bastards bleed for this. But we don’t have the time. More importantly, the rest of those boys and girls who got dragged out of Lemonier don’t have the time. As soon as we hit that place last night and found hostages, the countdown timer started. We’ve got to move, and hope we can come back and settle the score later.”