Kingdom Come

by David Rollins

  Four

  Ronald V. Small @realSmall

  Big thanks to our Military, the best in the world. You keep FREEDOM SAFE!

  The senior airman brought the message to the duty officer, Air Force Major Jillian Schelly, who was deep in conversation with another major about the rising cost of a latte.

  “Five bucks!” said Schelly, looking into the disposable cup as if the ring of foamed half-and-half deserved serious contemplation.

  “I know. Ridiculous, right? I read somewhere the coffee plant is temp sensitive. Gonna cost ten bucks a cup once global warming’s done with it.”

  “Excuse me, ma’am,” said the senior airman hovering nearby.

  “What is it?”

  “A SPIREP, ma’am.”

  “Source?”

  “Quickstep 3.”

  “You wanna put it on my desk?”

  “I think it’s important, ma’am.” Otherwise I wouldn’t be hovering nearby to hand-deliver this here special intelligence report, his body language implied.

  It’s from Quickstep, the reason you’re still here working at zero dark whatever. Focus, Major. Schelly took the paper, read the decryption and raised an eyebrow at it. “Thank you,” she said. Then, to the climate change expert: “Duty calls.”

  Twenty minutes later, Major Schelly went to knock on the door of the Senior Watch Officer, US Air Forces Central Command Combined Air Operations Center. The door was closed, but she could still hear the conversation on the other side. The colonel was on the phone. She glanced at her watch, sighed and waited.

  “Just get your lawyer to call my lawyer, why don’t you?” Schelly heard him say. “And then they can bill us each another hour and further reduce the settlement to us both. You know crazy this is, right?”

  Silence. Enough of it for Schelly to consider the call had ended and that it was safe to let her knuckles get on with the job.

  “Come…” said the voice.

  Schelly walked in. Colonel Desmond Gladston was moving papers around his desk, clearly not a happy camper, his unpleasant divorce an open secret. “Make my day, Jill, and tell me they’ve nuked Buckhead, Atlanta.” Gladston paused for a moment, realizing he’d said more than he meant to. “It has been a day. Or, I should say, night. What you got there?”

  Schelly pretended that she’d heard nothing untoward and passed him the SPIREP. “Sir, a Quickstep unit has observed two Russian Hinds downed in northern Syria. One was a definite missile shoot down, the other a probable.”

  “Probable as in a second missile strike?”

  “No, sir. As in no confirmed impact.”

  “Nothing about survivors?”

  “No, sir.” Schelly didn’t need to assure the colonel that Quickstep intelligence was reliable.

  “The Kremlin will be thrilled,” Gladston observed drily, unconsciously decoding the acronym stew in the report. “This is less than complete.”

  “Yes, sir. We’ve lost contact with the Quickstep unit.”

  “Why?”

  “Enemy activity in the area, sir. They had to break off transmission.”

  Gladston took a moment to consider. “You worked up the appropriate due diligence on this?” he asked. “Map references and so forth?”

  “Whatever we had prior to contact being broken off. Yes, Colonel.”

  “Cross sightings from other assets in the area?”

  “None, sir. No other assets in the area.”

  “So supporting intel is on the thin side.”

  “I would say non-existent, sir.”

  “Well if we don't know where that second Hind came down, neither do the Russians, but they’ll be running around like headless chickens trying to locate it. Kick it upstairs to the usual suspects. This is gonna brighten a lot of folks’ morning.”

  The usual suspects meant the Joint Intelligence Center, Central Command at MacDill Air Force Base; Defense Intelligence Agency, Bolling Air Force Base; the Organization of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon; and CIA, Langley.

  “Maybe we can get on top of this with a little help from a Reaper. I’ll handle the request.” Gladston shuffled Schelly’s paperwork into an ordered stack, closed the folder and held it toward her. “That it, Jilly?”

  “Yes, sir.” She accepted the folder. Jilly? How’d you like it if I called you Desie?

  “Damn. And I had such high hopes for a mushroom cloud over Atlanta.”

  ***

  The tangos came up fast and stayed off the path, strung out in a staggered line abreast. They appeared to be methodical, cool-headed and seasoned - a cut above the last patrol.

  “Trouble’s coming, boss,” said Jimmy in my earpiece. Trouble – exactly what I was thinking when they came into view, creeping up the path, unfortunately not all conveniently bunched up for McVeigh’s ka-bar to shish-kebab.

  “Any of ‘em got NVGs?” I asked.

  “No, sir.”

  We did, so that would give us an advantage even though it was not an especially dark night.

  “Gonna have to engage, sir,” came Bo’s quiet summation.

  “Roger that,” I replied. As I said, getting into firefights was not our job, but there was nothing we could do at this point to avoid one.

  “Coming up on the tangos’ six now, working around to the west. Acknowledge.”

  Alvin. He was approaching the bad guys from behind before clearing the kill zone. “Got it,” I replied.

  “Roger.”

  “Ditto.”

  The roger and ditto were from Bo and Jimmy respectively. I said, “We’re firing west to east, our line twenty yards east of the path. Your ETA?”

  “Twenty seconds to clear blue on blue,” Alvin replied, voice low.

  “Hold fire,” I said, not wanting my guys taking each other out with friendly fire. Being experienced Special Ops assets of course they knew that too, but a few words on the obvious every now and then couldn’t hurt.

  Eight tangos moving slow but steady, with purpose. I could see five of them; four armed with standard AKs, one carrying some variety of squad automatic weapon, probably a Russian PK pried from the dead fingers of a Syrian army infantryman.

  “Choose your targets. The SAW’s mine,” I said.

  The tangos were equipped with body armor, quality Russian issue.

  “Got a visual on you, Alvin,” Bo informed us. “You are clear of the kill zone.”

  “Roger,” he replied.

  “On three,” I said. The approach to the crest was through scrubby terrain – a mixture of stunted, water-starved trees, a type of poison ivy and dry grass. Plenty of cover for visual purposes though not much of it would stop a bullet. I had taken a knee behind a screen of shrubs, nettles and ivy, and could clearly observe the lead tangos walking stealthily, hunched over their weapons, concentrating, listening, taking in what smells hung on the night air. Our line was upwind of them and their rank, unwashed body odor, heavily mixed with acrid tobacco smoke, spoke of men long in the field. Maybe they’d been out here so long they hadn’t heard the news that tobacco kills. “One, two -” I was about to say “three”, when one of the tangos dropped to the ground and began yelling at the top of his lungs. An instant later that SAW blazed away on full auto, its tracer rounds etching a wide arc as the jihadist reached out blindly to kill. All his pals joined in, firing wildly, reacting as men do when they are armed and spooked. The sparks of Russian tracer rounds, green pencils of light that zipped through the night, flew briefly across the darkness, but none of them at us.

  My infrared dot danced on the jihadist’s body armor, jiggling around the region of his sternum. His feet had taken root and his body was crouched to take the forces unleashed by his machine gun as it chewed through a belt of ammo. My index finger squeezed quickly. Once. Twice. Phut-phut. The lightweight M4 jumped and two rounds of 5.52 millimeter steel-encased lead, sixty-two grams apiece, flew on their suppressed way. The tango went over backwards despite his feet placement, the barrel of his weapon spitting and cracking tha
t tracer up into the night sky in a pretty arc. A slight shift of my head, eye line and arms, and my index finger squeezed again. Two suppressed shots. Phut-phut. Scratch tango number two.

  The SS109 ammunition fired by the M4A1 rifle would penetrate three millimeters of steel plate at 600 yards. Tonight’s range was closer to 100 yards. Quality Russian body armor or not, a pair of jihadists were now rolling up to the pearly gates, or whatever the architecture happened to be over their welcome mat.

  The night was once again comparatively quiet with Bo, Jimmy and Alvin having also dispatched their chosen marks. I stood and stepped carefully toward the newly dead. Jimmy McVeigh was there before me. “Sorry, boss,” he said.

  “Sorry for what?” I asked him.

  He motioned at the ground where one of the tangos had stepped on a jihadist Jimmy had knifed earlier. That’s what had spooked the machine gunner.

  A rustle of bush caused me to turn my head as the covered face of a jihadist dived at me with a short sword raised for the slash. My M4 was pointed at the ground and I knew I would be dead before I could raise it and shoot. Funny how a fraction of a second is all you need to process all the angles and the distances and consider the inevitable outcome of what’s coming at you, but not near enough time to react in a positive way to defend yourself. A silver blur fluttered in my peripheral vision and the fighter with the short sword suddenly found his mouth full of ka-bar hilt, the blade protruding from the back of his neck. The guy was consorting with virgins before his body hit the weeds.

  Alvin stepped over, put his boot on the deceased’s neck and extracted his knife with a jerk, the blade coming free with that disturbing crunch of cartilage amplified by the cavern of the dead man’s open mouth. “He worked his way round the back of the troop, sir. Couldn’t get a clean shot.” The shrug of Alvin’s shoulders added apology to his words.

  What can you do, right? “Better late than never,” I told him.

  A phone started ringing. One of the deceased jihadist’s pockets was lit up. I reached down and extracted an old cellphone, the battery held in place with dirty scotch tape. There was a missed call on the screen. I pressed a few buttons and what I found was troubling. “Can you believe they got three fuckin bars of signal here? Looks like he made a call a minute ago. If we’re lucky a guy on a pizza delivery bike will be turning up within ten minutes. If we’re not, it’ll be some more of the folks from down below. Bo, you get off the news about the Russian Hinds?”

  “Yes, sir. The positive ID on the Scorpion too. Ran outta time when it came to the alternate.”

  “Break out Mumbles and let Slingshot know before someone comes along to investigate the racket. Alvin, keep an eye on the warehouse. Jimmy, let’s get us some overwatch on the path. Keep it simple. Anything moves, kill it.”

  “Roger that, boss.”

  While Bo unpacked the radio transceiver and SATCOM antenna, I patted down the dead and confiscated half-a-dozen phones, all of them old tech. I pocketed the SIMs; a present for the intel folks back at the base, then stomped on the handsets. The task completed, I stood around and thought about … well, actually, in truth I didn't think about a hell of a lot, that being the reason I asked for this gig. I moved a little upwind of the freshly killed jihadists, where it was cool and clean and untainted by the smell of blood and torn intestines, breathed deep and took in the night air. Ah, the simple life. Nothing to figure out; no puzzle to unravel; no cunning ploy to thwart; no crime to solve; no evil genius to outwit. All I had to do was to make sure my shit was bagged and packed – check; all my guys were alive – check; I had clear orders – check. Everything was, as my Brit buddies say, tickety-boo – check.

  Bo advised, “Major, comms are Tango Uniform.” He held up one of the boxes and pushed a gloved finger into a ragged hole that shouldn't have been there. Tango Uniform for Tits Up, or, in other words, dead. The other side of the box was blown out. “Must have taken a ricochet.”

  Re tickety-boo. Uncheck.

  Five

  Ronald V. Small @realSmall

  Syria’s refugees. Who are they REALLY? Look what they did to Syria! They destroyed it. Very sad.

  The ambulance bounced as Farib pushed down on the end of a wooden beam, using it as a lever to open the crushed hood. The beam began to crack and splinter, but then a metal latch gave way and the crumpled hood sprang ajar.

  Refugees began to gather on the road, the night now relatively quiet but for distant explosions.

  Mazool helped Taymullah lift the hood, and glanced around self-consciously, anxious to be on the move. Snipers. It was never safe to be standing around in one place. The two men folded the hood back, propped it open with the length of wood and peered into the engine bay. “We’re in luck. The noise was just the engine fan,” Taymullah observed, squinting into the darkness. “Half the blades are broken off.”

  “Any other damage?” Mazool enquired as several armed men darted from one building and ran into another. “We must decide what to do quickly.”

  Taymullah, the son of a motor mechanic who had wanted to follow in his father’s steps, but had been prevented from doing so because of the war, reached down into the bay’s bowels. He brought his hand out slick with blue coolant. “One of the blades cut the lower radiator hose.”

  “Can it be driven?”

  “Yes, but how far I don't know. I can bandage it but it’s a pressure system and it’ll leak no matter what I do. With no coolant the motor will overheat. It will help if we can keep filling the reservoir with water, but we don't have any water and without a new hose…” He shrugged.

  “We will risk it.”

  A short while later the ambulance was on the move again, hoodless and minus a windshield, joining the throngs of people on foot and in vehicles fleeing the city. The ambulance proved to be excellent cover. It was waved through multiple checkpoints manned by a variety of groups, some friendly some not, but all respecting the red crescent daubed roughly on its doors.

  “Mazool, tell me again why we are chasing the helicopters?” Taymullah asked as they left the safety of the more familiar inner city for the open spaces of the outer suburbs.

  “Hostages,” Mazool replied.

  “What need have we of hostages?” Farib chimed in. “We are not bandits or fanatics.”

  “Do you not want vengeance for what the Russians have done to our homes? Killing our families and friends?” Mazool examined the faces of the two supporters, young men who had become like brothers to him, and saw timidity. And in truth, the more he thought about what they were doing, the more he himself felt unsure about it. Taymullah had rightly pointed out that the downed helicopters would be magnets for trouble. But if they could manage to get to the Russians before anyone else … Mazool laughed at the uncertainty lining the faces of Farib and Taymullah, but it was a laugh devoid of humor. “You are afraid of the dark, that’s it isn't it? Afraid of the wide-open spaces and also the shadows that lurk in corners. Are you boys or men? I thought you were men. You have the beards of men. But perhaps they are not real.” He moved to tug Taymullah’s thin adolescent growth and found his hand slapped away.

  “Out here we have no support,” Farib pointed out. “Out here, it would be easy to disappear and no one would ever know what happened to us.”

  “You have listened to too many gossiping women,” scoffed Mazool. He leaned forward and patted the dashboard. “And besides, as we have already observed, we have the best disguise.”

  “Yes,” Taymullah said, “until someone asks us to remove a bullet.”

  Farib nodded. “Or worse, deliver a baby.”

  Mazool shook his head. “I am glad I chose to team up with lions.”

  The smell of a hot engine reached through the opening where the windshield used to be. Taymullah was the first to notice it. “We will soon need to find water for the radiator. What does the temperature gauge say?”

  Mazool peered at the gauges. The needle was in the red. “It’s okay, the needle is not yet in the red. We
should keep going.”

  The ambulance turned a corner and, ahead, the night was lit up bright orange by drum fires clustered around the road. A handful of heavily armed fighters were setting up barricades against a warehouse, while a utility vehicle drove into place to form the other side of the barricade. Men were herding all vehicles off the road and inspecting them.

  Mazool braked in the darkness, beyond the circle of light thrown by the fires.

  “Are they ours?” Taymullah wondered aloud as a man was dragged from his car by two others and kicked repeatedly on the ground until he crawled away and became lost in the stream of restless refugees.

  “I don't think so,” said Mazool.

  Black standards unfurled from the utility’s windows confirming his suspicion.

  Taymullah was puzzled. “They are Ad-Dawlah al-Islamiyah. With enemies all around, why do they advertise themselves so brazenly?”

  “Because there are many of them,” Farib concluded. “Perhaps they are looking for a fight.”

  “What do we do now?” Farib asked after a pause.

  Taymullah didn't need to think about it. “We must go back.”

  “No,” said Mazool. “They will let us through.” He put the ambulance into gear and drove forward.

  He caught Farib and Taymullah sharing a look as though they expected he would surely get them killed. They had scarcely advanced into the light when several Daesh fighters waved them off the road with flashlights, AKs and RPGs. Mazool felt the blood drain from his face. The feeling that he needed to shit was almost overwhelming. The fighters aimed their weapons at him, the driver. One of their number, a large fat man with wild hair and Arabic that sounded foreign, shouted, “Get out of the car. Hurry, before we shoot you in the face so that not even your mothers would recognize you.”

  “Are there weapons in your truck?” asked another. “If we find weapons we will shoot you! Out!”