by Bentley, Don
Wind was a fickle thing.
Frodo stomped on the gas. The Range Rover surged forward.
Tails.
A blast of heat, blinding light, and a breeze tickling my cheek. Then silence. Pure and absolute silence as my overloaded senses struggled to recalibrate. It was like the violence of the explosion had short-circuited my nervous system. For that blessed amount of time, which seemed like minutes but was only a fraction of a second, I floated outside myself.
Then the world crashed back into place.
I could smell melting plastic, burning fabric, and the tang of superheated steel. And flesh. The unmistakable scent of charred flesh.
I shook my head, trying to clear the afterimages. The cabin seemed much too bright. Then I realized why. The formerly sealed Range Rover was now open to the afternoon sun. The IED had punched a hole straight through the up-armored doors like they’d been made of balsa wood.
I looked left, reaching for Frodo, only to find that the steering wheel was missing, along with a good section of Frodo’s left arm. He liked to drive with one hand on the wheel and one hand on the gearshift. Now his driving arm ended in a blackened stump.
Frodo sat unspeaking, slowly moving his ruined arm back and forth as if his eyes were playing tricks on him. He hadn’t started to scream. Not yet. Like mine, his nervous system had been overwhelmed by the tsunami of stimuli, but that neural logjam would clear at any second. Once his brain started taking calls, he’d descend into life-threatening shock in minutes.
Assuming, of course, he lived through the pending violence of the next few seconds.
In the almost decade and a half since the U.S. had embarked on our ill-fated foray into Iraq, several generations of IED bombers had come of age. Technology and tactics had matured far beyond simple command-detonated IEDs. Today’s roadside bombs were used to trigger complex ambushes much like my predecessors had used claymore mines to initiate attacks against the Vietcong in the jungles of Vietnam. If these jihadis followed form, the ambush would begin in earnest at any moment.
If it hadn’t begun already.
The ringing in my ears eased enough that I could hear what sounded like rain falling on a tin roof. But rain didn’t fall from a cloudless sky. The metal-on-metal pinging came from a more sinister source: high-velocity rounds flattening themselves against what remained of the Range Rover’s ballistic armor.
Thumbing loose my seat belt, I reached for the vehicle’s center console and slapped an innocuous-looking aftermarket button centered next to the hazard light button. A series of pneumatic thumps echoed through the cabin as dispensers hidden in the Range Rover’s front and rear bumpers lofted smoke canisters into the air.
On the positive side of the ledger, it was hard to hit what you couldn’t see. The dense white smoke pouring from the ruptured smoke canisters was specifically modified to defeat even thermal sights.
On the negative, the smoke’s presence let our attackers know that we’d survived the initial IED blast. Playing possum was no longer an option. As the smoke settled around us in a noxious gray cloud, the pitter-patter of bullets turned into a full-fledged hailstorm.
“My fucking arm,” Frodo said through gritted teeth, fumbling with his seat belt.
“Come on, buddy,” I said, releasing his seat belt buckle and grabbing his shirt. “We’ve gotta find you another ride.”
Opening the passenger door, I pushed myself out, butt first, pulling Frodo on top of me as I fell. His stump banged against my chest as we bounced off the pavement, and though he kept from crying out, his black skin turned an alarming shade of gray.
“Stay in the fight,” I said, leaning him against the front tire. “Tourniquet your arm.”
I could apply the bandage for Frodo, but a good part of combating the devastating effects of shock was mental. The treatment included giving the victim something to focus on, usually by asking a series of questions.
Unfortunately, we didn’t have time for a fireside chat, so I gave Frodo a task instead while I retrieved my M4. Peering around the front bumper, I scanned the grove of trees through my red-dot-equipped EOTech sight.
Things were not good. In between shifting clouds of smoke, I counted at least six muzzle flashes. Five had the flashbulblike signature of small arms, but the sixth was a doozy. The cantaloupe-sized ball of fire had to come from a crew-served weapon.
Smoke screen or not, a whole bunch of lead was headed in our direction.
As if to emphasize the point, a round pinged off the bumper, peppering my cheek with metal fragments. “How’s the tourniquet coming?” I said, jerking back to the meager protection offered by the wheel well.
“Fine.”
I looked over my shoulder to check. The tourniquet was on, stopping the spurting arterial blood, and Frodo had given himself a morphine shot. Good. But he was also starting to slur his words.
Not so good.
“Still with me?” I said.
“Who the fuck you talking to? I’m a goddamn Airborne Ranger. Point me in the right direction, and I’ll put some motherfucking lead into somebody’s head.”
Except with one arm, Frodo wasn’t going to be leading a bayonet charge anytime soon. I risked a glance over the bumper only to get chased back by a fusillade of bullets.
Sliding onto my belly, I looked under the Range Rover’s undercarriage, panning the EOTech’s red dot until I saw several pairs of feet. Easing the M4’s selector switch from safe to single shot with my thumb, I centered the crimson dot on the closest pair and squeezed the trigger. The M4 barked, impossibly loud in the close confines, and the feet exploded into a cloud of red mist. The jihadi trying to flank us fell to the ground, and I put two more rounds into his prone form.
No quarter, no surrender. Welcome to big-boy rules, motherfucker.
“Matty, if we’re going to do something, we need to do it soon. My arm hurts like a bastard.”
“Hang in there, brother,” I said, firing another pair of aimed shots at a set of retreating ankles before I joined Frodo behind the wheel well again. “The shit’s about to get real.”
My suppressive fire sent the jihadis attempting to rush us scampering for cover, but I knew our victory would be short-lived. Once the ambushers got their act together, they’d kill us both without breaking a sweat. All they needed to do was swing their crew-served weapon about thirty meters to their right, pinning us in a classic L-shaped ambush. When that happened, our life expectancy would be measured in heartbeats.
“How we looking, Matty?”
“About how you’d expect.”
“That bad?”
Instead of answering, I thumbed the transmit button on the MBITR radio strapped to my chest. “Wolfhound Main, this is Lonestar. Over.”
The MBITR was a nifty radio: compact, lightweight, encrypted, and with no analog parts. This meant that, like with most products of the digital age, its performance was binary. It either worked like a champ or had the functionality of driftwood. Normally, the radio chirped when I pressed the transmit button, signifying that its onboard encryption fills were still active. But when I’d just tried to transmit, I’d heard nothing but static. Today was looking like a driftwood kind of day.
I fumbled with my throat mike, checked my Bluetooth-enabled earbuds, and pressed the transmit button again.
“Wolfhound Main, this is Lonestar. Over.”
I’d last used the radio minutes before to call in a checkpoint, but now the fifteen-thousand-dollar device might as well have been an Easy-Bake Oven. Awesome.
“Frodo, try your radio.”
“Wolfhound Main, this is Lonestar. Over. Wolfhound Main, Lonestar, over. Nothing, Matty.”
Fuck me running. That both of our radios had failed at exactly the same time was ominous, but addressing it was not at the top of my priority list. No, that distinct honor belonged to the pair of jihadis moving
the crew-served weapon to the other side of the grove.
Shit fire.
Rounds pinged against the Range Rover and the road, sending stone shards into the air.
Frodo and I were in trouble. We couldn’t call for air support and couldn’t move without getting shot. If we stayed put, the shitheads with the crew-served weapon would stitch us full of 7.62mm slugs from crotch to cranium. Not good at all. Looking over my shoulder, I eyed the series of concrete-and-stucco houses about fifty meters away.
Frodo and I had both spent time in the Ranger Regiment, which meant we were joint heirs to something called the Mogadishu Mile. In 1993, a squad of Rangers had run a mile through Somalia’s unforgiving streets during a gunfight after their brothers-in-arms had accidentally left them behind. If Frodo and I somehow survived this shit show, maybe someday someone would christen this the Syrian Sprint.
“Check it out, stud,” I said, lightly slapping Frodo on the cheek to get his attention. “We’re getting the fuck out of here over to those houses at our six o’clock. I’m going to carry you, and you’re going to cover us. Got it?”
“Love to, Matty,” Frodo said, the spacing between his words growing as shock and blood loss took their toll. “Where’s my weapon?”
“One second,” I said before diving back into the Range Rover’s cab.
This time the hail-on-a-tin-roof sound of bullets smacking into the Range Rover was accompanied by the angry-fucking-hornet sound of rounds breaking the sound barrier inches from my head. The smoke was starting to clear and the jihadis’ aim was improving.
I reached for the electronic display in the middle of the Range Rover’s console, pried it loose, and slid out of the car just as a line of fire opened across my shoulder.
“Shit,” I said, clattering to the ground next to Frodo.
“You hit?”
“Just a graze,” I said, eyeing the red patches blossoming through my shirt. “Ready for some payback?”
“You know it.”
“All right, here goes nothing.”
This was what was referred to as the moment of truth in those literary novels my high school writing teacher loved. But since I’m a simple man with simple tastes, I liked to think of it as the we’re about to find out if we live or die moment. Seems less pretentious that way. In any case, I thumbed the power button to the iPhone-sized electronic display and prayed that the team of contractors who’d retrofitted our low-visibility vehicles had done their jobs. The technicians had assured us that their new system would function without vehicle battery power in the wake of a traumatic event.
Come to think of it, they’d never really defined the whole traumatic event part, but if getting T-boned by an explosively formed penetrator didn’t qualify, I’m not sure what did.
As the first bit of good news in the last ten minutes, the screen glowed to life. A second later, I heard the whine of activating hydraulics. So far, so good.
“Here,” I said, handing the device to Frodo. “You should be able to do this one-handed.”
“The screen’s glowing red, Matty.”
One look at the Range Rover told me why. The device had elevated out of the rear of the vehicle as promised, but the turret seemed to be damaged. One of the struts was bent, preventing the device from articulating.
Fucking defense contractors.
“Looks like you’ve got a fixed gun,” I said. “Come to think of it, that might actually be better. You’ve only got one hand, but we both know you couldn’t shoot for shit even when you had two arms.”
“Fuck you.”
“Language, please,” I said, cinching the M4 across my chest. After making sure the rifle was securely fastened, I reached down, grabbed Frodo, and hoisted him into a fireman’s carry.
“All right,” I said, trying to ignore my throbbing shoulder, “drop the hammer.”
Frodo grunted, and for a heartbeat, there was nothing. Then, with a sound like the world’s biggest chain saw belching, the minigun on the roof roared to life.
If you’ve never seen a Dillon Aero six-barrel minigun let loose a torrent of bullets at a rate of six thousand per minute, then you, my friend, have not really lived. To be fair, since I was on the nonbusiness side of the remote-controlled weapon, I wasn’t in the best position to observe its performance.
But the jihadis were.
One moment, incoming rounds were pinging off the Range Rover like a Texas hailstorm. The next, enemy fire ceased as the minigun sent a torrent of tracers hurtling toward our ambushers in a rippling crimson stream.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to properly appreciate the shock and awe Frodo was laying down, since I was too busy lumbering toward the concrete walls in front of us with the elegance of a drunken hippopotamus. In any case, our respite was temporary. Say what you want about the jihadis, but they hadn’t survived three years of constant civil war by being stupid. It didn’t take them long to figure out that the minigun, for all of its glory, couldn’t traverse. So while it made a lot of noise and spewed bullets like a fire hose, as long as you weren’t standing directly in front of it, you were relatively safe.
I’d covered half the distance to the stucco wall when miniature dust devils began springing to life at either side of me. At least one jihadi seemed to be ignoring the minigun’s fireworks display in favor of taking potshots at the two guys running for their lives.
I’d halved the distance again to less than twelve meters when a burst of automatic weapons fire slapped the wall in front of me, cratering the stucco in a half dozen places.
I shifted course to the right, attempting to put the Range Rover’s hulk between the jihadi riflemen and me. My efforts were in vain. At five meters from safety, the bullet I’d been dreading found its way home. One moment I was running, and the next, I was falling forward as a single round tore through my left leg.
The pain was brilliant—white-hot, like the time I’d grabbed ahold of the cow pasture’s electric fence as a child. Except this time, there was no one to rescue me from my stupidity. I went down hard, turning my head at the last moment. I didn’t break my nose, but I still impacted the grime-crusted street with the dull thud of a bag of Quikrete tossed from a pickup truck’s bed. Frodo’s shoulder made a popping sound as he bounced off the ground. The remote firing device flew from his hands, skidding across the concrete, where it came to rest against the pockmarked wall. Five meters from safety, but it might as well have been five hundred.
We were done.
I pressed my body into a push-up position, then flopped onto my back. Then I pushed against the ground with my good leg until my shoulders bumped into Frodo. Forcing myself into a seated position, I rested my back against his prone form while trying to ignore the waves of agony coming from my leg. If I didn’t apply a pressure bandage soon, I’d pass out from blood loss, but that wasn’t the priority at the moment. With the minigun silent, the smoke gone, and my left leg no longer functional, living long enough to bleed out was nothing but pure fantasy.
Frodo was strangely quiet, either knocked unconscious or having finally succumbed to shock, but I was still conscious. That meant I had a legacy to uphold. Rangers subscribed to a certain philosophy when it came to dying. Namely, that you faced death with your rifle in your hands, and when your rifle ran dry, you drew your pistol. And then you unsheathed your knife. So, since my M4 still had a full magazine, I was a long way from quitting.
“Matty?”
Frodo’s question sounded more like a croak than an intelligible word, but I knew what he was asking. He wanted to know where I was. When it came down to it, no one wanted to pass from this life to the next alone.
“Here, brother,” I said, sliding closer as I unslung my M4. I wedged my back against Frodo’s chest, making a T of our bodies. Pulling the rifle into my shoulder, I switched from the EOTech reflex sight to the Trijicon 4x32 optic meant for distance shooting
. I panned across the grove, looking for one more target before the inevitable burst of machine-gun fire tore into us.
Faces swam into view, but rather than taking a shot at the first jihadi, I waited until my scope seemed to stop of its own accord. A man with intelligent eyes, a luxurious beard, and graying temples stared back at me. As I watched, he lifted a Motorola radio to his mouth and spoke. Then he traded the radio for a cell phone.
Perfect—a battlefield commander. If I was going down, he was going with me. Evening my breathing, I used the scope’s etched markings to estimate distance. Two hundred meters. Usually a walk in the park with an optic like this, but I was shooting from a less-than-stable platform while injured.
Still, as the SEALs liked to say, the only easy day was yesterday.
Centering the man’s head in the crosshairs, I took a breath, released it, and squeezed the trigger. The shot broke just as an errant breeze slapped against my cheek.
Wind is a fickle thing.
The man’s head snapped back, but didn’t disintegrate into a cloud of red mist. Instead, a furrow opened on his cheek from jaw to ear. Dropping the cell phone, the man pressed his hand to his face, blood streaming through his fingers. But rather than duck, he stared in my direction as if he could see my face. And then he did the damnedest thing. Instead of ordering his men to finish us off, or grabbing a rifle, he issued orders with the jerky hand motions of a man who was accustomed to obedience. In response, the jihadis picked up their weapons and melted back into the grove, leaving Frodo and me to die in peace.
* * *
—
Mr. Drake? Sir?”
In an instant, I was transported from the blood and dust of Syria to the Gulfstream’s climate-controlled cabin. I lurched upright, my brow slick with sweat. My breathing was as labored as it had been on that day as I’d watched the jihadis mysteriously withdraw minutes before two Black Hawk Direct Action Penetrator gunships graced the horizon. Turned out, the rescue birds had been summoned by our Range Rover’s emergency locator beacon. The IED blast had automatically triggered the device, ensuring that our GPS location and status had been transmitted to Wolfhound Main.
