Task Force Desperate

by Peter Nealen

  The dust plumes were getting bigger now, and we were starting to see little glints of sunlight on metal or glass at their bases. They were definitely vehicles; the only question was, whose? I peered through my scope, but couldn’t make out much detail. They were pickup trucks, and had either a bunch of cargo, or people, in their beds. That was all I could see.

  They were moving fast enough to kick up dust, but out in the desert, that isn’t necessarily that fast, and going too fast without a road is a ticket to a bad day. They wouldn’t be in range for a while yet.

  I called Alek. “Are we setting in and waiting for these guys, or heading out as soon as that truck is up?”

  “I’d rather not have them tagging along all the way to Garbahaarrey,” he replied. “We’ll stay put and see what they do. If they’re just nomads, once they’re out of sight, we move. If they’re coming after us, we educate them as to exactly why that is a very bad idea.”

  “Roger.” I couldn’t argue with his reasoning. In his place, I’d probably make the same call.

  It was hot as hell, lying there in the dirt with my vest and my mags digging into my ribs, feeling where the bits of brush had made their way into my shirt and my trouser legs, hot, sharp rocks digging into various parts of my anatomy. None of us talked; there wasn’t a lot to talk about, and all of us had developed the habit of quiet in tactical situations a long time ago. We just lay there, sweated, hurt, and watched.

  As the oncoming trucks came closer, they started to resolve into what were unquestionably technicals. They were mostly HiLuxes, with a few older two-and-a-half ton trucks, with gunmen in the beds and hanging out passenger windows. At least two had heavy guns mounted; I saw what I was pretty sure were a couple of PKMs and a DShK. That pretty much sealed the deal--they were LaB, and they had to be looking for us.

  So much for the city holding all their attention.

  But did they know where we were? Had they spotted where we had stopped, or were they still searching? Could we lie low and hope they’d pass us by? Or should we ambush them, and hope we could take them all out with minimal losses?

  After all, as much as these particular assholes might need killing, they weren’t the particular assholes we were there to pick a fight with. The mission came first, and the mission was to get to the hostages and get them out. Fighting these punks if we didn’t have to endangered that mission.

  Not that I didn’t want to waste the whole lot of them.

  Scanning across the dust cloud, I noticed something. There was one HiLux well out in front of the two deuce-and-a-halfs, and two more well out to the flanks. Somebody had sure been teaching these guys tactics; they had point and flank security out. Used to be that such things were pretty much beyond these gomers, but it appeared that the Kalifah support had taught them a few things. Of course, the GWOT had taught the Kalifah Arabs a few things about tactics, too, often courtesy of American trainers.

  There was a tall guy in the back of the point HiLux, with a radio. At first, even through the scope, I couldn’t tell what he was doing, but soon enough I figured it out. He was looking at the ground ahead of the truck.

  Motherfucker was tracking us.

  I called Alek. “Coconut, Hillbilly. We’ve got technicals, and they’re following our tire tracks. They’re going to come right to us.”

  “They in range?” he asked.

  “About two more minutes,” I answered.

  “Waste ‘em.”

  “Roger that.” I looked over at West Texas. “You guys ready?”

  “We’ll initiate on you,” he replied, without looking up from his own Leupold scope, which looked downright weird sitting on an R4 in the middle of East Africa.

  I set my eye back on my own scope, and settled the sights on tracker boy. It was still a decently long shot at six hundred, though easily within the capabilities of even a short-barrel M1A. It was a little far for the R4s, so I held off a little bit longer. I still wanted to hit them at least one hundred meters outside the range of the AKMs most of them appeared to be packing.

  I waited, breathing slow and easy, watching the tracker bob in my sights. When he filled enough of a milradian, I started shooting.

  Now, I was a sniper when I was a Marine. One shot, one kill was the mantra, but it rarely worked out that way in real life, especially if the target was moving as much and as randomly as a guy standing in the back of a moving vehicle. Often it boiled down to taking a shot, watching where it impacted, and adjusting to get the target with the next shot. You had to be quick on that follow-up shot, too, because very few people will just stand still and look around when a bullet just cracked past them.

  I wasn’t looking for a precision kill this time, though. While single disabling shots was still our standard, there were more people and a vehicle to put holes in, so general area was acceptable. I made sure to aim each shot, but I wasn’t adjusting much.

  The booming reports of the Praetorian .308s were quickly joined by the lighter cracks of Baird’s guys R4s. Dust flew up from the muzzle blasts all along the line.

  I saw tracker boy drop. Bullets smashed through the HiLux’s windshield, and it suddenly veered to the left, as a red splash appeared on the spider-webbed glass behind one of the bullet holes. The death-spasm-induced turn was too tight, and the HiLux flipped over with a horrendous crash, sending bodies flying out of the bed.

  The rest of the LaB vehicles tried to jam on the brakes, as one of our M60s opened up to my left, and hammered rounds across the cab of the right flank HiLux. That truck simply slowed to a stop, as its windshield shattered and its grill came apart. I saw one fighter try to leap clear of the bed and run away, and gunned him down with two shots that smashed him sideways to the dirt.

  The rear vehicles were trying to pull backward, out of the kill zone. I loosed a couple of shots at one of the deuce-and-a-halfs, to little apparent effect. They were backpedaling fast, leaving the three trucks we had caught on the X to their fate.

  The two HiLuxes that remained were trashed, their occupants obviously dead or soon to be that way. The lead deuce-and-a-half, however, while disabled, wasn’t out of the fight. There was still a DShK mounted over the cab, and several of the fighters in the bed had survived, and were now on the ground and starting to shoot back.

  Our M60 thumped again, raking the truck. Dust kicked up and the truck rocked as bullets slammed through its skin. Fluids were already visibly dripping from the shot-through engine, and its tires were shredded. I came up to a knee, saw movement near the rear of the truck, and slammed off two quick shots. I don’t know if I hit anything.

  Looking past the kill zone, even while AK rounds snapped past, I saw the rest of the enemy trucks had halted their headlong flight and were starting to turn. I looked down at the rest of the guys. “We’ve got to finish these motherfuckers off before their buddies can come back around and flank us,” I yelled, trying to be heard over the gunfire. Nobody said anything in reply, but West Texas, Jim, and Larry all started getting up out of the prone.

  I dashed forward, aiming for an angle that would put the wrecked HiLux between me and the shooters for as long as possible. Sporadic gunfire kicked up dust around me, and snapped painfully through the air overhead, as I sprinted across the uneven ground toward the overturned truck. I half-slid/half-dove into the meager cover provided by the smoking engine, and planted my hiking boot in a muddy puddle of fluids that was seeping into the ground. I steadied myself, swept up my rifle, and was about to pop up over the wreck when I heard something to my left.

  I looked over to see a badly wounded gomer crawling toward an AK. I didn’t hesitate, but shot him in the top of the head. Blood, brain, and bits of bone splashed away from the entrance wound. I didn’t see the bullet come out. He dropped face down in the dust and didn’t move.

  I quickly looked over the rest of the bodies lying around the truck, even as Larry ran up to drop to the prone nearby. Before the booming reports of his FAL drowned him out, I heard him yell, “You gonna start s
hooting or what?”

  “Once I’m not going to get shot in the back, sure,” I yelled back. Satisfied that everyone who had been in that particular HiLux was dead, I popped over the side of the overturned pickup and searched for a target.

  Jim and Baird’s boys were keeping the bad guys at the deuce-and-a-half generally pinned, though as I watched, two of them tried to rush forward under cover of hastily and poorly aimed covering fire, only to be beaten back by a flurry of 5.56 fire. One cried out as a bullet smacked into his calf, blowing out a splash of meat and blood, and limped the rest of the way back to the cover of the big truck.

  A third gomer stuck his head around the stricken truck’s tailgate. By a terrible coincidence, he did so just as my scope settled on the very space where he stuck his head.

  I was a little startled, enough so that I almost didn’t get the shot off. The timing couldn’t have been better; I just wasn’t expecting old boy to try to hit my bullet with his head. But he did, my rifle boomed, his head jerked back, and he dropped like a marionette with its strings cut.

  With the two others hidden behind the deuce-and-a-half, Larry and I were clear. I tapped Larry hard on the shoulder with my non-firing fist, and came up to a high crouch, then ran around the far side of the HiLux. If I could get in position while the pinned gomers concentrated on Jim and the others shooting at them, I should be able to get a decent shot.

  My lungs were starting to ache. Regardless of what kind of conditioning you may be in, sprinting in body armor, however minimal, at midday in East Africa is murder. Sweat was dripping down my entire body mingling with the dust and grit and smearing my Oakley lenses. I was panting as I hit a knee, and brought my rifle up.

  There were three left, huddled in the lee of the truck, as bullets pinged off the metal or smacked into the dusty ground near them. There were at least three more bodies on the ground, and I saw a foot hanging off the end of the truck bed. That was all I had time to see before my finger finished its squeeze, and the trigger broke on the first shot.

  It was short, brutal, and to-the-point. They never even had a chance. I tracked across them, putting a single round into each torso, then back, finishing off the crumpled bodies. Only one had been still trying to move. The range was way too short to miss something vital.

  “Cease fire,” I rasped into my radio. “Truck’s clear.” The shooting tapered off, then stopped.

  We weren’t out of the woods yet, though. The other trucks were still out there, and as I straightened up out of my fighting crouch, I could see them coming on line out to our east. They wouldn’t be so surprised the next time.

  Chapter 25

  Jim and I descended back into the wadi to find Alek. Larry stayed up on the lip with Baird’s guys. We could see the remnant of the LaB force closing on us, but they were moving at the pace of a slow walk; they had been hurt bad, and were being cautious. They had to be well aware of what had befallen their comrades who had stumbled into our ambush, and had no desire to repeat the performance. Their problem was that slow and cautious only works in combat when the enemy doesn’t know you’re coming.

  We found Alek already on the flank where the LaB fighters were coming. He was watching them with binoculars, over the hood of one of the UAZs.

  “So, we fight this bunch, or run?” Jim asked without preamble.

  “Fight,” Alek said flatly. “If we run, they can still follow us. We’ve got a decent position here, especially in this direction.” He pointed. “They don’t see it yet, but that side wadi is going to funnel them in to a group about two trucks wide, and it’s right at five hundred out. That’s when we hit ‘em. Even if we don’t get all of them, the survivors aren’t going to be very enthusiastic to keep coming after us. They’re ready to break already.” He half-grinned, half grimaced. “Garbage.”

  I nodded, squinting toward the line of technicals and fighters. The ones we’d already wasted had been little better equipped than most militias we’d seen out here; they were dressed in mostly long, baggy shorts or pants, t-shirts or wife beaters, and had minimal equipment aside from their rifles, most of which they’d probably been using before the new Chinese stuff started showing up. I suspected that was why they’d been sent after us, instead of getting to join in the storming of Baardheere. These were the dregs, the guys that Malouf wouldn’t miss when they got shredded.

  Of course, there were a lot more of them than there were of us. Even with Baird’s guys, we still only came to about twenty-five strong. It looked like most of a company out there; we were outnumbered about three-to-one. We had the advantage of skill, but numbers can count for a lot, especially over mostly open ground.

  For almost half an hour, the enemy fighters paced toward us in relative silence. There was only the whisper of the slight wind that did next to nothing to cool the sweat gathering under our gear and clothes, and the faint buzzing of the insects that gathered in the brush. They had stopped the vehicles almost fifteen hundred meters away; they were that unenthusiastic about coming to grips with us.

  After what we’d done to the front three vehicles of their little strike force, who could blame them?

  I had briefly argued for pulling out the .338s. The long guns could easily reach that far out, and shooting a few of them from five times the max effective range of their weapons might just break them without having to come to grips. Alek had declined, preferring both to save the sniper ammo, which we couldn’t restock anytime soon, as Baird didn’t have any, and to really waste as many of them as possible, to make sure the message got across loud and clear.

  Do. Not. Fuck. With. Us.

  I could see his point. In fact, in an observation that got me a grimace and a glare without much force behind it, I told him I was starting to rub off on him. I punched him in the shoulder and went to find a firing position before things cooked off.

  I wound up finding a lump of slightly higher ground on the side of the wadi that I could sort of squeeze myself behind, and got down in the prone. Kneeling or standing shots at five hundred aren’t easy, especially when the target is moving. I settled myself in behind the rifle, peered through the scope as I blinked the sweat out of my eyes, and settled on a skinny guy who was charging forward a little more enthusiastically than his fellows.

  As Alek had said, we had established the wadi as a limiting feature that was about five hundred meters out. It was our trigger line, a concrete gauge of when to open fire, without need of any overt commands. They pass that line, they die. That simple.

  They passed the line. We started shooting.

  The initial fusillade roared out over the desert, smacking half a dozen Somali jihadists into bloody heaps in the dust in seconds. At least two rounds hit my guy; I’m pretty sure one of them was mine. There was a mad scramble for cover, and I’m pretty sure one of their trucks ran over at least two of their own men trying to get out of the kill zone.

  Most of what the rest of the line was doing faded slightly into the background, as I picked off another gomer running for a hillock. I led him a little too much, and the round smacked into his outer ribs. He staggered, and kept running behind the hillock, where I lost track of him.

  By now, they were starting to shoot back. Puffs of dust and faint flashes that were almost completely lost in the sun’s glare started to flicker across the desert where they had gone to ground, and a breath later, a cacophony of harsh snapping noise started crackling overhead. One or two rounds smacked into the dust way too closely in front of me, throwing grit my way. I flinched backward, ducking down as several more rounds passed close enough that I could feel the shockwaves.

  They might still have crap equipment, but it looked like their advisors might have started actually teaching them some marksmanship. Either that, or they were getting lucky through sheer volume of fire.

  I glanced back down the line. Their fire was getting close in a couple places, and was nowhere near others. It looked like their accuracy was still pretty hit-and-miss. Good. I rolled back up, leveled at
one of the dust puffs, and started squeezing off shots. It only took two before the shooting from that position stopped; whether from his being hit or suppressed, I couldn’t tell. I shifted right, and dropped a skinny who was running forward with a round through the upper chest.

  Then they were pulling back. Some were careful, moving in short, bent-over sprints, trying to keep cover between themselves and us. Others just ran, and paid for it, as our .308s reached out across the distance to knock them on their faces in the dust.

  Finally, they were far enough away that Alek had to yell at a couple of us to cease fire. I levered myself to a knee, watching them go, then stood up, my knees starting to protest, and started making my rounds to make sure everybody was all right, and see what our ammo situation was.

  I kept an eye down the wadi as I went, watching what the gomers were doing. And damned if they weren’t rallying. Our hoped-for rout had just turned into a tactical withdrawal.

  That wasn’t good.

  I finished my rounds and came back to Alek, who was back to watching the gomers through his binoculars, his OBR hanging from its sling across his chest. “Everybody’s up. Tim caught a ricochet in the meat of his shoulder, and one of Baird’s guys got grazed, but nobody’s hit bad. Ammo’s at about eighty percent per remaining.”

  He nodded without taking his eyes out of the binos. “Good. We may need it. These guys may be the dregs, but somebody with them is a pro. Whoever he is, I’ll bet he’s got them back on us in another half hour.”

  “Attack, or move?” I asked.

  He finally lowered the binoculars, and kept watching to the east, thinking. It was a tough call. Attacking might take the initiative away from them, but it was pretty damned risky, with the shoestring we were operating on. We stood a good chance of losing people, and, aside from the immediate desire to continue breathing, we really couldn’t afford to lose anybody this side of Kismayo, at least. The mission still had to have priority.

  Baird and Danny came over to the UAZ. Baird was impassive; Danny had that expression of weary unhappiness that he’d been wearing for some time now. He had the look of a man who was caught in an avalanche, knew it, and couldn’t do a damned thing about it. I didn’t know what he was getting from his bosses back in Langley, but given what we had on the ground here, it wasn’t much.