by Peter Nealen
Wade and Kirk moved to the door, even as Brannigan and Santelli piled into the pit, with the others taking up defensive positions outside. There wasn’t room for the whole team, as reduced as it was, inside.
“Gambler, Kodiak,” Brannigan called. “Collapse in.”
Curtis replied in the affirmative, and the machinegun fire aimed at the upper position died away as Curtis and Bianco broke down and got ready to move.
“Keep eyes and weapons on that other emplacement,” Brannigan said. “They’re going to react to losing this one.”
Wade glanced over at the defenders’ radio, wondering briefly why it wasn’t squawking. Then he saw that he’d put a bullet through the antenna when he’d shot the man. It wasn’t receiving or sending any time soon.
That wasn’t going to keep the enemy from counterattacking, and soon. And even as he tested the door handle, a questing burst of automatic fire snapped overhead, smacking dust and grit off the hillside above them and ripping more holes through the camouflage canopy. Javakhishvili and Burgess returned fire from the draw, more dust kicking up from their muzzle blasts, but at that distance, and with what they could see, it was going to be mainly just suppressive and harassing fire in both directions.
The handle turned under his hand. He looked at Kirk, who had his muzzle pointed at the door. Kirk nodded. He was ready. Wade hauled the door open, dropping his own muzzle down to cover the opening over Kirk’s shoulder as the shorter, bearded man went through the opening.
They found themselves in a long, narrow tunnel, lit about every twenty feet by fluorescent lamps bolted to the walls. Cables and conduits ran across the ceiling. The entryway appeared to be concrete, but after about ten yards, it turned into bare rock.
Right at the moment, it was empty, but if he listened, Wade could pick out what sounded like movement and faint voices, echoing from far down the tunnel. There was someone down there, and they were probably armed. Which meant that the counterattack was probably already on its way.
It wouldn’t be the first firefight Wade had been in in a tunnel. They’d gone into a Communist tunnel complex in Burma, too. It had sucked. Tunnel rat wasn’t a job that he’d ever wanted. Just reading about the guys who’d done it in Vietnam had given him the willies.
He crouched inside the tunnel entrance, as close to the wall as he could get, as far out of the light of the fluorescents as possible, his rifle aimed down the tunnel. If he could get the first shot off, he wasn’t going to hesitate.
“What have we got?” Brannigan’s voice was pitched low, so as to travel as short a distance as possible.
“Tunnel,” Wade replied. “Looks like it goes a long way in.”
“Great,” Brannigan grumbled. He was probably remembering Burma, as well.
Wade hadn’t turned his head; he was seeing Brannigan out of the corner of his eye, while he kept his eyes and his muzzle trained down the tunnel. He did not want to get caught flat-footed when somebody popped into view, with no cover and nowhere for the bullets to go except up and down the tunnel. But he saw Brannigan glance back behind him, thinking.
“Tom, Carlo, stay here and wait for Kevin and Vinnie,” he said. “The rest of us are going to push until we find a better foothold. Have Kevin and Vinnie set up here in the emplacement and hold our exit; those belt-feds aren’t going to be that useful in close quarters. They can link up with Mario and Joe when they catch up, too.”
Santelli muttered his acknowledgement, and Wade saw the light from behind him dim as more of the Blackhearts pushed into the tunnel. He moved forward with Kirk, getting deeper into the light cast by the wall lamp than he liked, but then, he wasn’t going to be as silhouetted by the entrance.
He paused, sinking to a knee against the wall, and listened. “Everybody freeze and shut up for a second!” he hissed. It took a moment, but everything went quiet as the rest of the Blackhearts caught up and stopped moving.
There. He knew that sound, as faint as it was. Gunfire. There was a firefight going on somewhere deeper into the complex, the sound transmitted by the ventilation ducts overhead.
“You hear that?” he asked.
“Yeah,” Brannigan answered at his shoulder. “That explains why they’ve been so uncoordinated outside. We’re not the only ones after Bevan. We need to move.” He squeezed Wade’s shoulder. “Let’s go.”
As little as he really wanted to get deeper into a tunnel complex, which was already more than they’d expected to find up there, Wade got to his feet, his rifle in his shoulder, the muzzle only depressed a few inches from his line of sight, and started forward. Kirk was right beside him, their twin weapons trained down the tunnel, both men tense and alert.
Behind them, another four trained killers followed cautiously. They were on unfamiliar ground, and were just then starting to discover how incomplete their intel had been.
It was starting to dawn on all of them that they’d jumped with both feet into a situation that was a lot nastier and more uncertain than they’d thought.
Chapter 18
Flanagan skidded to a halt behind a boulder overlooking the riverbed that split the ridgelines, and peered around it, fighting to keep his breathing deep and even.
The pressure had dropped off significantly. He and Gomez had covered most of a klick, the rest of the way to the riverbed, without seeing or hearing any more contact from the valley on the other side of the ridge. No more kamikaze drones had been launched, though the surveillance drones were still circling overhead like vultures. It was as if the enemy had given up.
Flanagan didn’t like it. If an enemy with the numerical and firepower advantages that the Front had up there seemed to give up, it usually meant that they had something nastier up their sleeves.
Gomez caught up with him and took a knee. If anything, he looked fresher than Flanagan felt, despite the dust and the sweat. But that was just Gomez. Flanagan had learned that the other man could be hurting worse than any of the rest of them, and still wouldn’t show it.
Flanagan scanned the valley below while he concentrated on breathing and slowing his heart rate down. The shadow of a drone skittered along the desert floor, but there was nothing else moving that he could see; even the gates to the compound were closed, and when he peered through his rifle’s optics, he couldn’t see any of the security men on the wall or the roof anymore.
Then he heard a rattle and roar of automatic fire echoing across the hillsides from above them. Looking up, he could see some dust and smoke rising from a point above and just around the curve of the finger across the riverbed.
He pointed it out to Gomez. “Let’s get up there, get eyes on, and see who we need to kill,” he said. Gomez just nodded.
They didn’t know who was up there doing the shooting. It sounded like MAG-58s, but he couldn’t be sure. So, they’d have to move quickly and carefully, and get to where they could see and start identifying targets.
Gomez led out, scrambling down into the riverbed and moving across in a crouch. Flanagan followed only a few paces behind. Ideally, they’d leapfrog, covering each other as they moved, but with only two of them, and the ground being relatively wide open, something closer to traveling overwatch seemed like a better idea.
Flanagan didn’t want to get separated from Gomez, especially if Gomez ran into something he couldn’t handle alone in the brush on the far side.
It was a short dash, though the altitude made it seem longer. The rattle and thunder of small arms fire up the draw continued to rise and fall, until it suddenly seemed to die away altogether. That was when he finally heard Brannigan’s voice over the radio.
“Gambler, Kodiak. Collapse in.”
Gomez glanced back at him, and he nodded. So, that had been Curtis and Bianco up there. And now they were moving again. The two of them were still behind. Without a word, Gomez clambered up out of the riverbed, looking for a route up the steep, rocky slope that loomed above it. He didn’t wait for Flanagan to catch up, but started up what might have been a goat
path, or simply a slightly less forbidding section of the slope, clambering up over rocks and heading up the western side of the ridge.
Flanagan paused for breath at the top of the bank, took a pair of deep heaves of the cool, dry air, and followed.
His feet were starting to ache, and every muscle was starting to feel vaguely rubbery. The demands that they were putting on their bodies in the thin atmosphere were taking their toll. But he gritted his teeth and drove on.
He was in better shape for the altitude than most of the rest, after all. He couldn’t flag if the rest weren’t. Least of all Gomez. With Childress out of the fight, the competition for top woodsman had narrowed to the two of them.
They climbed and scrambled up the ridgeline as fast as they could without simply putting their heads down and running, though Flanagan frankly doubted that either of them could have managed to run at that point. The ridge was between them and the rest of the team, and they could hear more gunfire, mostly automatic, echoing off the slopes around them. The fight wasn’t over.
Gomez slowed as they neared the top, not far from where Flanagan had seen the puffs of dust from Curtis’ and Bianco’s muzzle blasts. Brass glittered in the rocks. Both men got on line together, moving forward on knees and elbows, rifles held in front to keep them out of the dirt as much as possible. It wasn’t comfortable, but with exchanges of machinegun fire still roaring down below, neither one wanted to silhouette himself.
They reached the crest and wormed their way to where they could see the draw below them. It took Flanagan’s exhausted mind a second to put the picture together.
Tracers were flickering down the slope toward a dark spot on the opposite finger. There were puffs of dust that weren’t from bullet impacts, and the occasional flicker of muzzle flash from that spot, which after a few seconds Flanagan recognized as a dug in defensive position, to show that whoever was down there was still in the fight. The lack of tracers from the lower position told him that Bianco and Curtis were down there.
The volume of fire coming from the upper position was intense enough that his eyes narrowed as he scanned the lower ground. They had to know that they weren’t going to accomplish much, just pouring machinegun fire downhill. Unless they were laying down suppressive fire for someone else…
There. The gray fatigues stood out, though not as much as they would have in open desert. He counted three right away, but after a moment, he picked out two more. Then a sixth. They were moving carefully down the draw toward the lower position, covered by the depth of the wash and the machinegun fire hammering at Curtis and Bianco.
It wasn’t far; only just over three hundred yards separated Gomez and Flanagan from the men working their way down to flank the other two Blackhearts.
Neither man needed to even glance at the other. The situation was clear enough to both of them. Already down in the prone, they settled in behind their rifles.
Flanagan’s trigger broke a split second ahead of Gomez’s. The ACE 52 boomed, though the report was all but lost in the rattle and thunder of machinegun fire. Grit sprayed out away from the muzzle brake as he recovered from the recoil, to see his target stumbling another half step before slumping to the ground. Gomez’s target had vanished, disappearing in the shadows of the draw.
Flanagan didn’t spend a lot of time watching his fallen target. He looked just long enough to be reasonably sure the man wasn’t getting back up, then transitioned to the next man. That one was already looking for cover, peering up at the hillside, looking for the source of the gunfire. Flanagan put the top of the man’s torso between the three hundred and two hundred-meter hashmarks in his reticle, and fired again. The man jerked, then fell on his face.
The machinegun fire from the upper defensive position seemed to stutter. The gunner—by that time Flanagan had figured out that there was only one—had noticed that his maneuver element was taking fire from up on the ridgeline. But he was still taking fire from Curtis and Bianco, which intensified in the momentary pause, driving him back down into cover and cutting off his suppressing fire altogether.
Flanagan could see him moving, though the emplacement set into the hillside was almost directly across from him, only a little over four hundred yards. He left the bad guys down in the draw to Gomez, and drew a bead on the vague outline of the man crouched behind the concrete parapet that was getting chewed up by the Blackhearts’ machinegun fire.
He let out a breath as his finger tightened on the trigger. Just before it broke, he eased off, taking another breath. It was hard to see his target, between the shadows and the clouds of dust and concrete chips kicked up by the machinegun bullets.
There. He squeezed, the rifle thundering and kicking back into his shoulder. His position was good; he didn’t quite lose his sight picture. He saw the jerk of the machinegunner’s head as the bullet punched through it, or at least took a chunk out of him. The man vanished beneath the parapet.
The whole time, Gomez had been shooting evenly and methodically, even as some return fire from the wash had started to pepper the mountainside, spitting fragments and dust from impacts all around them with sharp little snaps. Meanwhile, Gomez had been silencing them with slower, heavier thunder. Crack. Crack. Crack. Gomez was no slouch. With each shot, a man died. Flanagan shifted his hips to bring his own rifle back to bear just in time to see one more of the gray-clad men dash for the cover of the bank on their side, only to see Gomez catch him with a round on the fly. The man staggered, but they were wearing plates, which had to be slowing them down. Flanagan followed up with a pair of tightly-spaced shots, and the man dropped.
The wash was steep enough at that spot that his body rolled a couple of times before coming up against the curve of the bank.
The gunfire fell silent then, leaving only the dying echoes rolling across the face of the ridgelines. Flanagan shuffled backward until he had more of the terrain between him and the draw, the lump of the defensive position where the machinegunner had been set up just barely visible, before he heaved himself up to a crouch and started to move up the ridgeline, relocating before exposing himself again. He wasn’t absolutely sure they’d eliminated all of their adversaries, and he wasn’t going to take unnecessary chances, not when there were only two of them.
“Woodsrunner, Gambler.” Curtis’ voice sounded faint and tinny in his earpiece. “Is that you up there?”
“Affirm,” Flanagan replied, somewhat nonplused at how hoarse and out-of-breath he sounded. “We’re maneuvering to get a better view before we collapse on you.”
“Take your time,” Curtis said. “The rest of the team is inside. We found a tunnel behind this position, heading into the mountain.”
Flanagan immediately thought back to the nightmare that had been the Kokang tunnel complex leading toward the Chinese border from Burma. “They’ve got tunnels?” he asked.
“Looks like they’ve got a lot more than that,” Curtis answered. “This villa in the mountains looks like it’s not just a villa in the mountains.”
“No shit,” Flanagan muttered, though he didn’t send that part. He was creeping back up to the top of the ridge. Getting flat again, he wriggled forward until he had an angle on the wash at the bottom of the draw again, and he leveled his rifle, peering through the scope.
Nothing moved. He could see three of the gray-clad bodies, one of them lying motionless on its face.
He stayed where he was for a long moment, watching and listening. Gomez had moved up beside him, even farther up the ridge, and was every bit as silent and still. Both men were hunters. They could be patient, and both of them knew that the price of impatience in combat was often death.
“Gambler, Woodsrunner,” he finally sent, keeping his voice pitched low. “We’re moving down to you. Cover us.”
“I gotcha,” was Curtis’ reply. “I don’t think those guys are going to be doing much anytime soon.”
Flanagan didn’t reply, but carefully got up, staying low as he moved over the crest and down the slope into t
he draw. Gomez was a few paces behind him.
It had been harder than he’d liked to pick himself up. The exertion, the fighting, the altitude, and the lack of sleep were all starting to take their toll.
The slope was steep and rocky; much of the surface soil and rocks were loose and prone to giving way under a boot. The two men half-climbed, half-slid down toward the wash, putting up unavoidable plumes of dust. Flanagan gritted his teeth and started to accelerate his descent. If any enemy shooters were still down there alive and able to fight, they couldn’t miss the giant clouds of dust pointing out where their adversaries were. He felt exposed and helpless on the slope, and wanted to get down to where he had some cover as fast as possible.
But nothing happened, even as his anxiety mounted, as he waited for the bullet that would rip the life out of him. He finally skidded down into the wash, hitting a knee and snapping his rifle up the line of the creekbed above him, fighting to moderate his breathing. A moment later, Gomez arrived, dropping down in front of him and making him lift his muzzle to keep from flagging his comrade. Gomez landed with slightly less grace, having to drop one hand to the sandy bed of the wash to catch himself before he fell on his face.
They paused for a moment, then Flanagan took the lead, moving across the wash to the steep-sided bank on the far side. He crouched below the bank, his rifle pointed up the wash, while Gomez dashed across to join him, pointing down the other direction.
He keyed his radio, keeping his rifle up. “Gambler, Woodsrunner. Friendlies coming in, coming out of the wash to your west.”
“Roger,” Curtis answered. “Come ahead. We’ve got you.”
Flanagan heaved himself up out of the creekbed. It was only about a four-foot climb, but it felt far longer and steeper. He paused at the top, taking a knee and covering up toward the higher defensive position for a moment, before reaching down and helping Gomez up out of the wash.
“You good?” he asked.
