by Rick Partlow
“And unless these fuckers are different than any of the rest of these EPV assholes we’ve run into, that barricade is rigged with an IED. You got any ideas on how to avoid that? Over?”
“I have just one,” I said, “and I don’t know if the Captain would like it. Over.”
“Then I’ll probably be tickled pink. Don’t let me stop you. Over.”
“Hold your position then. And hold your ears. Out.” I switched over to the driver. “Gomez, take us forward twenty meters. We’re going to be driving through that shit in a second.”
“Sir, there ain’t no way we can drive through that. Even if the cars wasn’t there, those tires would bog us down.”
“Just get ready.” Back to Gregory. “Six-Three, there’s likely an IED in that shit ahead and an ambush waiting, and I’d like to spoil their timing. How’d you like to finally use that TOW missile launcher? Over.”
“You serious, sir?” Gregory was a hardened veteran, one of the few NCOs in my platoon with prior combat experience, but he sounded like a kid in a candy store. None of us had gotten to live-fire a TOW missile out of the Strykers since we’d gotten them. “Over.”
“Serious as a court-martial.”
Using the magnification built into the scope mounted on the machine gun, I scanned the blockade. It seemed deserted, but that was an illusion. A pair of twenty-year-old Ford pickups formed the center hold of the thing, parked nose to nose, their tires flattened. Purposefully easy to clear. A temptation to just send a squad over to it and put the things in gear and push them out of the way by hand. But was the bomb in the pickups or in the tires? They were stacked four high, flames licking around them, black smoke pouring up into the night sky. Again, the barrier was small enough to make me want to send Marines to move them. And again, why I shouldn’t.
I couldn’t see anything to either side of the intersection, couldn’t tell if there were a thousand troops on either of the connecting streets, or no one at all. And of course, I could be totally wrong about this. I could be about to waste thousands of dollars of Marine ordnance. I could and probably should launch a drone, but doing that would probably force their hand. I wanted this done on my schedule, not theirs.
“Aim for the engine compartment of the vehicle on your right,” I told Gregory. We were still about three hundred meters from the intersection, which should be plenty far enough. I hoped. “When I give the word, fire that missile and hit the gas at my word. If you see a way through the roadblock, take it and don’t stop unless I tell you to. We’re charging through this and through whatever’s on the other side of it. Target the thing and get ready. Out.”
One more frequency switch, this one to the COP, Combat Outpost Morton, at the edge of town, ten klicks away.
“November One-Four, this is Bravo Four-One, do you copy? Over.”
“I got you, Bravo Four-One. This is One-Four Bravo. What’s up? Over.” Not Captain Glenn, who would have been One-Four Alpha. This was First Lieutenant Fielding, the XO, the guy whose job I should have already had.
“I just hit a roadblock at Checkpoint Alpha on Route Fairbanks. Suspect IED and am about to attempt to circumvent. Over.”
“Circumvent?” Fielding repeated. “Circumvent how? Over?”
“Loudly. Out.” Back to Gregory. “Fire.”
I wanted to see it, wanted to keep my head stuck out there like some tourist watching Old Faithful erupt, but training and common sense told me to duck down behind the shield of the machine gun. I ignored common sense. The Tube-launched, Optically-tracked, Wire-guided BGM-71 TOW missile has been around since the 1970s and, like the Browning M2 fifty-cal, it stays around because no one has designed anything as cheap, simple and effective, and because the US keeps fighting enemies who it works against. Plus, it was just really cool.
The missile was kicked out of the tube by an initial charge, a punch to the chest, then it seemed to hang there for a beat, just long enough to see it for a split second with your naked eye but you could really catch it if you watched a slow motion video. The main rocket engine ignited just as the back of the missile began to sag downward, whipping it forward, guided by a wire I could almost see in the enhanced optics of the night vision goggles.
I wondered if any of the EPV were watching nearby. I hoped they were. I hoped they were huddled right by the damned rear bumper of the truck and got to watch the big, black dot backlit by the rocket engine for just a single second before it hit the engine compartment.
One of two things could have happened when it hit. If I was wrong about there being an IED, or if I’d misjudged where it was hidden, the warhead would blow the shit out of the trashed Ford pickup and we’d have to go move the damned thing anyway.
The other thing happened.
Most IEDs are made from artillery shells, and how big of a bang they make is usually determined by how many shells the assholes managed to stuff into them. Looking back, I figured what they must have done was remove the engines of both pickups and just stuffed artillery shells under the hood, because when that missile hit, not only did it blow both of those trucks about thirty feet into the air, it also blew out the front walls of the stores on all four sides of the intersection and pushed Gregory’s Stryker back three feet before the driver could hit the brakes.
The concussion hit me like a fist in the face and knocked off my goggles—would have ripped off my helmet if it hadn’t been for the chin strap. I grabbed at the fifty for purchase, trying not to fall back into the vehicle like an idiot after claiming the gunner’s position from the vehicle commander, which would have done more damage to my pride than to my body, given the amount of body armor and padding I was wearing.
I might have done some permanent damage to my hearing, though. A maddening, tinny whine drowned out the crackling of fires, the patter of debris and what was likely a chorus of interrogatives in my headphones, and I wondered if maybe I should have had the column back up just a little more before Gregory fired that TOW.
Black clouds drifted through the intersection, blinding us more effectively than any smoke grenade, glimpses of hellish red glinting through the haze from the small fires burning fiercely and bits of flaming debris, though the larger ones that would likely rage for hours in the surrounding buildings weren’t yet visible. And I had to take a chance whether the blast had cleared the intersection, because sitting here in a line with buildings all around us, I might as well have hung a target on my neck.
“Six-Three,” I yelled into my mic, barely hearing my own voice and hoping like hell he would. As an NCO and therefore, by definition, having more sense than me, he had likely been inside the vehicle when he fired the TOW. “Six-Three, this is Four-One. Advance. I say again, advance through the intersection and do not stop until the last vehicle is through. Do you copy? Over.”
I thought heard him say that he copied, but whether he heard me or not, his Stryker started moving forward, trailing wisps of smoke where the heat of the blast had seared off a layer of paint. He disappeared into the roiling cloud and we rumbled after him while I tried to keep an eye on our surroundings, hoping if there were any EPV fighters inside the smoke, I would still spot them on thermal.
Since they were evil rather than stupid, there hadn’t been any of them close enough to get killed in their own explosion, but they had to be watching. And they would have a backup plan to use, once they figured out that they hadn’t taken us out with the bombs. I tried to radio the trail vehicles to make sure they were following, but Moore beat me to it.
“Sir, we got multiple vehicles coming up on our six about a half a klick back and closing. Technicals, three of them.”
That meant commercial pickup trucks with crew-served weapons bolted to the beds, sometimes heavy machine guns, sometimes missile launchers, either of which could cause us some serious problems. We could take three of them. I could have the trailing vehicles traverse their turrets and take them out, but they knew that, too. Evil, not stupid.
“Forward, pedal to the floor,�
�� I said over the platoon frequency. “All Bravo drivers, full speed. Over.”
We surged forward and I traversed the fifty to the left, following what felt like a gut instinct but was more likely a fifty-fifty guess.
“Contact left!” Gregory yelled, letting me know I had guessed correctly. “Technicals! Lots of technicals!”
Chapter Three
Staff Sergeant Alvin Gregory wasn’t using proper radio etiquette, but I didn’t think even Gunny Moore would give him shit for it at the moment. His warning came about two seconds ahead of the pickup trucks sliding into view, piercing the veil of smoke and catching sight of us about the same time I saw them on thermal. It was an Old West showdown at high noon except it was closer to midnight, and we were trying to outdraw each other with heavy machine guns.
The four pickups were all Toyotas. They were always Toyotas, no matter whether the terrorists were in Libya or Iraq or Venezuela, and I wondered if there was some sort of word-of-mouth advertising going on, like some big terror trade show held in a secret location every year talking about tips and tricks. The drivers and the gunners wore the universal trademark of the EPV, black balaclavas. I’d seen some of them sporting older-generation night vision, but not these guys. Their eyes were right out in the open, so I could see them get really wide when they saw the barrel of my M2 pointing their way.
There were few things in life I enjoyed more than firing a fifty-cal at pop-up targets at the range, but I had not shot one at what Gunny Moore acerbically referred to as “reactive targets”—humans. Until now. The weapon shuddered in my hands, its cyclic rate so slow I thought I could have fired a semiauto faster, but we didn’t use the thing for its rate of fire, we used it because a 360-grain tungsten penetrator did really nasty things to vehicles, equipment and the human body, sometimes all with the same shot.
We were at about two hundred meters and at that range, with the optical sights mounted to the gun, it was almost impossible to miss. I walked the burst up from the driver’s seat to the gunner, coating the interior of the cab with a red mist before the next two rounds smacked into the receiver of the DShK heavy machine gun, an old, heavy piece of Russian metal that saved the little shit’s life, for the moment. The truck fishtailed, driverless, and the gunner honored the miraculous intervention of Saint Dushka by leaping out of the bed of the pickup and hitting the pavement at about twenty miles an hour.
I hoped he at least got a nasty case of road rash from the fall, but I had more important things on my mind, like the 12.7mm slugs smacking into the armored Stryker only a few feet from my head. I didn’t try to find the one who was shooting at me, because all of them were shooting now and getting rid of the next one was the most important thing in the world at the moment.
Brass cases as long as my hand whipped sideways through the air out of the receiver of the Browning, black metal links spinning off them to bounce off the surface of the Stryker’s roof and skitter into a pile near the edge. Some of the casings would gather there as well. I’d seen them rolling across the roof after the gunner had cut loose with a few bursts at enemy positions, though we usually never saw whether we’d actually hit anything.
This time, I hit something. Three bullets right through the engine compartment of the next truck in line and it drifted forward, black smoke pouring from under the hood. I slewed the barrel upward, knowing the DShK was still dangerous even if the truck was disabled. Its muzzle flared and I swore as a slug sparked off the ring mount of the M2, but I didn’t let go, clinging to the handles like they were the last life preserver on the Titanic and thumbing the butterfly triggers. This time, I didn’t settle for Russian metal, putting three rounds into flesh.
The fifty-cal does nasty, nasty things to a person and I tried not to look too close, satisfied that what remained of the man tumbled out of the truck. I hunted for another target, but Gregory hadn’t been sitting on his ass. The other two trucks were still rolling forward, guided by momentum, but no living hand was at the wheel and no one was shooting at us.
I swiveled the turret around to the right, my heart thumping like a snare drum inside my chest, the beat of my pulse in my ears drowning out the hollow whine. Nothing. Nothing to the front either. But there were those trucks in the rear.
“Four-One, this is Four-Two,” Moore growled into my headset. “The technicals behind us are bugging out, pulling a suicide U-turn and heading back south. Over.”
I should let them go. I knew it. It would be the safe thing, the thing that would get me in the least trouble with the captain, the colonel and everyone else in between. But they’d been specifically trying to kill me and my platoon and while I knew it was nothing personal, it sure felt personal.
“Six-Three,” I said to Gregory. “Use the intersection. Pull a U-turn and head back the way we came. Out.” Back to Moore. “We’re turning around. We’re going to chase these motherfuckers down. Over.”
“You sure that’s a good idea, sir? Over.”
“No,” I admitted. “But it’s what we’re going to do. Out.”
I let go of the gun, suddenly conscious of the reality that I’d killed three people. Not dwelling on it, not panicking about it, just aware, the way I was aware it was night time and eighty degrees and humid as hell. I was tired. I was hot. I was sweating. I had killed three people. I wasn’t sure if they were my first because we usually didn’t even see what we were shooting at, but they were the first I’d seen die.
The Stryker began to turn, coming close enough to the burning buildings at the corners of the intersection for waves of heat to wash against my bare face, and we were turned around, heading back the way we’d come. The sorry bastards would run, and I had a feeling they’d run home. Unfortunately, they’d reach it a lot faster in the pickups than we could.
“Six-Three,” I transmitted to Gregory, “launch a camera drone and follow these assholes.” My lips peeled back from what might have been a smile but felt more like a rictus. “They wanted us and now they’re going to get us.”
***
“There they are,” Chamberlain said, tapping the screen on his tablet with a stylus.
“Thanks Mr. RTO,” Gunny Moore murmured, grabbing the display and holding it between the two of us. “I never would have recognized those Toyota pickup trucks with Russian Dushkas on their back if you hadn’t pointed them out for me.”
“It’s my job, Gunny,” the kid said, his tone plaintive, a sour expression on his face. “You’d get mad if I didn’t do it.”
“I would,” Moore told him, arching an eyebrow in a way I knew could be dangerous, even if Chamberlain hadn’t experienced it yet. “And I’m annoyed now, and neither is a good thing, so perhaps you should do your best to stay off my radar, Lance.”
“Yes, Gunny.” The kid was at least smart enough to slink off and go back to our Stryker. I would rather he have taken his M27 and gone out to guard the perimeter like the rest of the platoon, but away was good enough for now.
We’d pulled the Strykers into what I thought had once been a parking garage, though it was hard to tell with one wall down and the roof gone. The platoon was guarding the entrances except for me, Gunny Moore and the vehicle crews, and I kept glancing around at the inky blackness pouring into the place from outside, chasing phantom movement.
“This building is two klicks south of here,” Moore said, reading the mapping overlay on the drone transmission. “Right in the heart of what our briefings all say is an EVP hotbed. The trucks parked at this side and the tangoes went into the northeast entrance here.” He tapped at what looked like a side door to the crumbling apartment building. It was L-shaped, with a long alley between it and the one next door. “That was about five minutes ago, so they should still be inside.”
He eyed me sidelong.
“Have you talked to higher about this?”
“I tried.” I tapped the radio control at my shoulder. “It’s not getting through. Chamberlain’s rig couldn’t, either. And you know what that means.”
“Broad-spectrum jamming,” he said, shaking his head, lip curled in disgust. “And there’s only one place they could have gotten that kind of tech. Fucking Chinese.”
“Every time Chamberlain tries to take the drone closer in, the control signal fritzes out.” I gestured at the view, which was from an oblique angle. “This is a klick away and that’s about as close as we can get. The camera is zoomed in pretty far.” Which was obvious from the way the image shook violently with every gust of wind.
“What the fuck is that?” Moore demanded, pointing at movement in the alley between the buildings. It was a vehicle, about the same size as the Toyota pickups.
“Is it another technical?” I wondered, trying to zoom the view in more but only succeeding in making it fuzzier.
“No, it’s an SUV. Two SUVs. See, the second one is parking behind the first.”
Tiny figures swarmed out of the vehicles, what looked like six from each, and the computer recognition algorithms flashed red indicators, telling us they were carrying what it had decided were rifles.
“Great,” I sighed. “More tangoes. We’re going to have to pull back somewhere on the far side of this jamming and call in air support.”
“I don’t think so, sir,” the Gunny mused, tapping a knuckle against the screen. “Look at the way they’re moving. They’re not coming home, they’re moving tactically.”
I frowned. He was right. The figures were spreading out from the vehicle, taking up watch positions around it, up and down the alley.
“Oh, shit,” I murmured. “That’s one of ours.”
“Who the fuck would be way out here alone?” Moore snorted a humorless laugh. “Except our crazy asses, I mean.”
“SEALs?” I shrugged. “MarSoc? Someone who thinks their shit don’t stink. Problem is, they’re heading into that same fucking building, Gunny, with one team and nothing heavier than a few suppressed rifles. They think everyone’s going to be asleep, that no one is going to be ready for them. And we just chased, what? Six or seven armed tangoes? Right into their line of advance. And we can’t even warn them because of the jamming.”
