***
“They’re running dark,” said Bo, having suspended the task of stuffing gear into his pack to listen. “Can't see ‘em.”
“They ours?” Jimmy enquired.
Maybe someone up there looking down had seen just how shitty things were gonna get for us, decided to be a little proactive and do something about it. Which is about when I started to think an alien spaceship landing in Washington DC with a delegation of purple man-lizards would be more likely. “Russian,” I ventured, squinting into the night. “Two of ‘em.” Russian helos made a different noise from Blackhawks, Lakotas and Apaches, which gave a low flat snarl. Russian jet engines were a couple of generations behind and screamed like ours used to.
“Boss, twelve o’clock low,” Alvin’s voice said in my earpiece.
A quick check on the warehouse showed it disgorging a hoard of jihadists like flies departing a disturbed corpse. The fighters swarmed out onto the road and gathered around the Scorpion. Quite a few were armed with RPGs.
Seconds later the Russian aircraft skimmed over our hill, engines shrieking, low enough that we could see their underbellies. Hinds, the heavily armed attack fuckers that even the unimaginative would agree resembled obese locusts. They’d come from the direction of the areas most heavily targeted by the bombing campaign. Perhaps they were doing recon, checking on the destruction, spotting for tomorrow’s sorties. They climbed steeply overhead and changed course to the east, the general direction of Khmeimim, the Russian air base near the coast south of the city.
But then, as I watched, one of the aircraft seemed to explode from within, a gaping hole suddenly torn in the side of the fuselage between the main rotor and cockpit. Both engines began to spit gouts of flame from each end as if the aircraft had a dose of bad gastro. They’d devoured something that didn’t agree with them, metal debris most likely.
“Anyone down there at the warehouse get off a shot?”
“Negative,” came the unanimous reply.
Even so, I didn’t need to ask to know that the jihadists would be cheering, patting each other on the back, owning the destruction in the sky. Instead I kept my eyes on the bird. It was spinning on its axis, pitching back and forth and yawing, out of control. Maybe the pilots were dead in their seats. By a miracle I’d survived several crashes involving helicopters and had good reason to hate the things. Half a mile away and drifting to the east, the wounded Hind staggered about the sky like a drunk.
I checked back in with the Scorpion and his men, just as one of them wearing night-vision goggles separated from the crowd and hoisted a long tube to his shoulder. This was no rocket-propelled grenade.
“Boss. Heads up. MANPADS,” said Bo, incredulous.
A man portable air defense system – MANPADS. Or, to be clear, a shoulder-launched anti-aircraft missile system packing, presumably, a missile. Like Bo, I was surprised. Where the hell did they get that? I was only just getting my head around jihadists having NVGs. What other modern battlefield aces did these assholes have up their sleeves?
The shooter flipped up his NVGs and, a moment later, a missile jumped from the tube, ignited, and flew on its way. The wounded bird was a sitting duck, pirouetting on the spot, its engines coughing flames and sparks, smoke and more flames pouring from the rent in its side. And then a shadow orbiting around 500 feet above it began spraying decoys, a continuous stream of white-hot flares. The foundering Hind wasn’t the missile’s target, but the accompanying bird. It dove out of the patch of sky it had been occupying, clawing to get away from the killer punch closing on it at around three times the speed of sound. The bird never stood a chance. An instant later an explosion flared in the night scope, searing my eyes with bright green light. A direct hit. The Hind dropped out of the sky, a fireball of burning fuel growing in size and intensity. Seconds later, it smashed into a thicket of nearby trees with massive secondary explosions that rolled over our hill, stole the air from my lungs and punched into my eardrums.
Meanwhile the wounded aircraft had stopped spinning in midair. Its nose dropped and it appeared to fly with some limited control, heading generally further east. Maybe the pilots were still alive after all. I kept my eyes on the Hind until it disappeared behind a ridge between two and three miles to the east-northeast. No explosion, the aircraft was simply swallowed by the night. But I was as sure as I could be that, short of witnessing a fireball, it would ultimately crash.
I checked my watch. “I’ve got a few minutes before zero two hundred,” I said to Bo. “Mark the time and call in those helos. And let Slingshot know we’re moving to the alternate. Also call in a positive ID on the Scorpion.”
Baker reached for his pack and pulled out the multiband multi mission radio, the MBMMR or Mumbles, as he called it, for obvious reasons. It was a box about the size of three stacked house bricks, with a separate SATCOM antennae. Mumbles sent and received encrypted messages of the top-secret kind to military comms sats in geodesic orbit. Two Russian Hinds downed in one go, with possibly significant loss of life - that would be something the folks who paid our salaries would want to know about.
The task would take the sergeant less than three minutes. There was time before the jihadist patrol arrived. Maybe.
Three
Ronald V. Small @realSmall
ISIS, America won’t take its foot off your neck. GREAT VICTORY AHEAD!
Known by some in Tbilisi as Temurazi Kvinitadze Sumbatashvili, and in these parts as Abu Bakr al Aljurji, a.k.a Abu Bakr the Georgian, a.k.a Al-Aleaqarab or the Scorpion, the jihadist commander stared hard at the hill overlooking the road as if attempting to penetrate its secrets. It was overgrown, rocky, and crowned with a thicket of scrubby trees and bushes. Not much to look at, but its crest was elevated enough to command the road from both directions. For the military-minded, it was a hill that needed occupying. A patrol had been dispatched there twenty minutes ago, ample time to reach the summit, but they had not returned the signal: a simple wave of a flashlight. Perhaps his men had met with a wayward unit of Jabhat Fatah al-Sham, or the Kataib Ansar al-Sham, or any one of countless others fighting over the scraps of Syria. Some groups were hostile to Ad-Dawlah al-Islamiyah, some others not. And allegiances changed, sometimes overnight. As this war ground on, friends one day were enemies the next. I can imagine you up there sharing bread and cheese with friendlies, your flashlight set aside with their weapons. And I can also picture you slaughtered, ambushed, tossed into the bushes, a red smile cut across your throats.
Al-Aleaqarab had once trusted his instincts, but they had let him down too many times to be relied on. Had he not almost been killed twice by the Americans; once in an airstrike in Al-Shaddadah, northern Syria, and then again in a village south of Mosul, Iraq, with a drone strike? Only the will of God had enabled him to escape both times, although with major wounds. The ISIS commander was aware of his own grim smile.
Smoke from the drumfires and the dust kicked up by the shambling masses of refugees on the road came and went in waves.
If trouble was to be found up there, his men would not be unprepared a second time. He watched as the second group climbed the steep path that snaked up the side of the hill until they were lost in the night shadows.
“Amir, we are ready!” The call came from a lieutenant buried somewhere within the dust and smoke. The lieutenant, a minor one whose name was Abdullah Abdullah, ran up to him. Abdullah was a recruit from England, a fat man with a round face haloed by hair and beard. “Amir, please,” he panted, “do you have instructions for the men staying behind?”
The Scorpion thought for a moment. “We need greater mobility, Abdullah. Gasoline, too. Requisition all passing vehicles for the glory of Allah and his caliphate.”
“I will see to it, Amir,” Abdullah Abdullah smiled, clearly glad of a task to acquit while the Scorpion was away.
A sky blue Toyota technical flying many black standards, a captured Syrian ZPU quad-barrel machine gun installed in the bed, drove by slowly and stopped ahead of t
he parked BMW. The rest of the column began to form up behind the white sedan. The Scorpion walked towards it and the passenger door opened for him. Inside, the black leather interior smelt new. It also smelt of a woman’s perfume, he observed, as he placed his boot up on the dash. Yes, of all BMWs, this was his preferred model. Not too small, not too big. A five series, the four-door with turbo diesel, sat nav, self-driving, suspension that was both firm yet subtle … He nodded with appreciation. Luxury and performance. If only the roads were in better shape. If only life had taken another path. If only I had finished the engineering degree and become a builder of things instead of a destroyer. He rolled his shoulders and allowed the firm seat to massage the tension from his back muscles. The car’s interior was clean, antiseptic. Sitting in its comfort was like taking a bath. He felt cleansed.
Fifteen other vehicles, a ragtag mixture of stolen cars, utilities and trucks, lined up behind the BMW and the column rolled forward. Several vehicles peeled off early and headed for the Hind downed nearby, a forest fire marking the spot. The Scorpion kept his eyes forward. Surviving such a crash would be impossible. The prize was the other helicopter, the one that had disappeared into the hills. With luck there would be survivors. Captured Russians… He gestured at the driver, a young Chechen whose name was Ortsa. “Faster,” he demanded and underlined it with a flick of his hand.
“Yes, Amir.” Ortsa planted his palm on the horn and gave it several blasts, urging the technical with the ZPU ahead to pick up speed.
The Scorpion massaged his hands without realizing what he was doing. The skin on them was like melted wax, pink and fissured here and there with deep cracks which wept tears that dried a crusty yellow. As always, he picked at these scabs absently, ignoring the pain where there should be none. The fingers, the source of the ghost pain, were long since gone. A downed Russian helicopter. Russian prisoners. A rich prize to turn the heads of even the fools that remained on the military council. He glanced at Ortsa who quickly turned away as if caught in the commission of a crime. “Do you want to look, boy?”
“Look at what, Lord?” came the nervous reply.
The commander held up his left hand.
Ortsa’s eyes left the road and took in the ruin and saw that only the thumb and forefinger remained attached to what was left of the amir’s hand.
“A shard of stone,” Al-Aleaqarab explained, “which an American drone missile turned into a butcher’s saw. And this one?” He raised his right. “The work of a Russian detonator.” The forefinger and middle finger were missing and what remained was even more misshapen than the left.
He knew Ortsa saw not hands but a pair of claws, the nightmarish appendages of another creature entirely - the scorpion.
“And my face. It too is the work of the detonator.”
Ortsa could not help but stare at the man who led them, the man about whom so many stories were told. He swallowed, a display of fear that he had no control over. The wreckage of the Scorpion’s face was no less difficult to look at than those hands, the skin a collection of deep scars, nicks, chops, and melted tissue that prevented the growth of his beard. Instead, there was a patchwork of pink scarring amid islands of grizzled red and gray hair.
The young Chechen said, “When you arrive in Paradise, Amir, the virgins will fight over someone so gloriously wounded in the service of Allah.”
The Scorpion continued to rub the round stumps of ruined flesh and bone with his remaining fingers. He growled, “What would you know of Paradise, boy?”
“I know only what is written in the Qur’an and the hadiths,” the fighter admitted. “It is my ambition to serve Allah as you have served.”
“Then I would hurry. We have little time left.”
“It’s true? We are retreating?”
We have lost Mosul, Abu Ghraib, Aleppo, Ramadi, Raqqa, Fallujah, Tikrit, Dabiq … We have been chased from Iraq. And now we run from Syria. No one is being paid. We steal our supplies. We cannot use the radio. We cannot use the phones for fear that missiles will rain down on us when we do. We cannot receive orders. We do not know who among our leadership is alive or dead. The military council, what remains of it following incessant drone attacks, still talks of victory when all we do is show our backs to the enemy’s bullets. Yes, there is almost nothing left to show from all the fighting. All that’s left is the promise of Paradise. “We do as Allah wills,” he said.
Al-Aleaqarab glanced at the young Chechen behind the wheel, concentrating on the road ahead, as they drove along in silence. It was easy to say what needed to be said when the conversation was only in one’s head. Some jihadists were certain that the demise of Ad-Dawlah al-Islamiyah was the will of Allah and only temporary. Others whispered that Allah had deserted the caliphate. Was there even such a thing as a caliphate left? Or was a caliph, a successor to the holy prophet Mohammad, no more than a notion? It had been so different when the armies of Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant were winning. Women were claimed as prizes as they rolled from one victory to another in the deserts, ignoring borders, killing and raping, taking what was rightfully theirs - whether money or slaves - young men from around the world flocking to the black standard along with women willing to lie with the warriors of Allah and bear children for the caliphate. But those days were a memory. The west had woken from its torpor. Alarms had sounded. Now all that remained was to fill the hole created by killing. And when the killing came to an end, Paradise awaited.
***
Mazool ran to an ambulance that had stopped half way up a pile of rubble, one of its rear wheels off the ground, spinning slowly. The motor was still running, a cloud burbling from the exhaust pipe. The front windshield was smashed, as was the driver’s side window, the driver slumped against the bloodied door, his head lolling out. There was enough light for Mazool to see that the man’s eyes were open, gazing unblinking in different directions - the stare of death. Mazool pushed the man back inside the vehicle and checked inside. There was no one in the back. “We will take this!” he shouted. Taymullah and Farib stopped their own search for a vehicle, gathered up their weapons and ammunition and ran to the ambulance. Pulling open the door, Mazool cleared the airbag from the driver‘s knees, grabbed two fists of the man’s shirt, dragged him out and laid him on the broken ground. Mazool closed the man’s eyes and hurriedly said the common prayer for occasions of death, one that was now all too familiar to him. “O Allah, forgive this man and elevate his station among those who are guided. Send him along the path of those who came before, and forgive him and us, O Lord of the worlds. Enlarge for him his grave and shed light upon him in it.”
“This is lucky,” said Taymullah, regretting the comment when he saw the dead driver beside the front wheel.
“At least if we should be injured, an ambulance will be close by,” Farib shouted as he flung open a back door.
Mazool clambered behind the wheel and put the gearbox in reverse. “It didn’t help the driver. And it won’t help you if you don't get in.”
Farib jumped into the passenger seat and pulled the door closed behind him as the ambulance slowly backed down off the rubble. The interior air reeked of blood and antiseptic from a couple of heavy-duty black plastic bags full of soiled medical refuse. There were old, bloodstained clothes too. Farib picked up a pair of pants, a filthy T-shirt and a black niqab and stuffed them in the bags. He was about to close them up when the ambulance shot forward and caused him to bash his head against a railing. “Hey!”
“Hold on,” said Taymullah too late as Farib clawed his way forward and wedged himself between the front seats.
Mazool wrestled with the steering wheel and the ambulance turned sharply, avoiding craters, potholes and fallen masonry that loomed as obstacles or deep shadows in its headlights. The black sky was tinged with an orange haze, the dust kicked into the air by the bombs reflecting the light from the many fires.
“Is this a good idea?” said Farib. “There will be others drawn to the Russians.”
“Whi
ch is why we must hurry.” Mazool glanced at the young man. “That flag around your neck. Take it off before someone shoots you because of it. Where did you find it?”
“I picked it up off the road.”
“Take it off.”
“I wish to burn it,” said Farib.
“It is you that flag will burn if you do not remove it.”
Farib found the knot under his chin and loosed it one-handed.
“It is dangerous enough fighting these criminals without having to worry about our own patriotic Syrians ending your foolish life, which they would do if they found that flag on you.” Mazool continued. “And then I would have to answer to your mother, who I fear more than Al-Aleaqarab.”
“Am I a child?” Farib asked.
Taymullah was smirking at him, enjoying his discomfort.
“You are always a child to your mother,” Mazool pointed out to him, “no matter how thick and gray your beard becomes.”
Farib removed the flag from around his neck and stuffed it inside his shirt as a building collapsed right in front of the ambulance. Mazool took evasive action, pitching their vehicle onto two wheels where it seemed to teeter for precarious seconds before righting itself with a jarring bounce. The building collapse triggered an unexploded bomb, which threw shattered concrete, cinderblock and tiles into the sky, smaller pieces of brick and masonry raining down on the ambulance, filling the cabin with stone chips large and small, and then a crash that almost caused Mazool to lose control of the vehicle as a solid chunk of brickwork slammed into the hood, crushing the metal like it was paper, before rolling off. A loud clatter screamed from the engine before it died. Mazool wiped the dust from his eyes with a dirty hand, his heart racing. Another foot and the missile would have come through what remained of the windshield and killed him. You are already dead, fool. Do not think otherwise. The only thing that matters is to keep going. The ambulance, however, was going nowhere.
Kingdom Come Page 3
