by Leigh Barker
Shaun thought it through. “We should just sit back, let them kill each other, and arrest the survivors.”
“Yeah, like Baxter’s going to buy that,” Danny said with contempt. “When he can be the hero.”
“At our funerals,” Shaun added.
“Hey, don’t say that,” Danny said. “You don’t want to get his hopes up.”
20
They were missing a paddle and up shit creek. Harry saw them first, about a microsecond before Tom spotted the two pickups full of gunmen blocking the narrow, elevated track. He stood on the brakes and brought the truck to a sliding halt in a cloud of dust. The men in the trucks all started firing their AK-47s, but at a thousand yards, they might as well have been throwing rocks, but for the truck-mounted 50-cal machine gun, they were well within range. A fact that became all too obvious when the bullets started kicking up the track on both sides. It was only a matter of time.
“Get us outa here!” Harry screamed.
Tom was already on it and slammed the Toyota into gear, ripped the steering wheel to the right, and floored the gas, sending the truck over the edge of the track and hurtling almost vertically down through the rocks and scrub, losing itself in a choking cloud of dust.
Harry hung on to the seat and the door, trying to keep his leg from flailing around, and failing. He was screaming and cursing, but it was as if it was coming from someone else. Tom joined in the cursing as the truck hit a boulder, bounced to the right, and climbed onto two wheels. He wrenched the wheel and got the truck back down on all fours, but just in time to slam into anther boulder the size of a tank. The left wing of the truck disintegrated like tin foil, but they were still moving, even if they didn’t know where to.
“Oh shit!” Tom said and stood on the brakes again.
Harry’s eyes were tight shut as the pain blazed through him, but he opened them in time to see the line where the desert ended. Deserts don’t just end, his brain reasoned through the pain. Yes, they do, it answered, when they get to a cliff. “Shit!” he shouted, joining in.
They were going too fast and bouncing around too much for the brakes to have a hope in hell of stopping them, and they went over the edge, followed by an avalanche of rocks and shrubs down their crash dive descent.
Master Sergeant Ethan Gill was resting his eyes and leaning back in the passenger seat of the Humvee as it bounced along the rutted track that was probably a freeway to these people. Manuel Alvarez was driving, and Eddie Elward and Al Caponetto were in the rear trying to catch some Z’s. Ethan eased his back and tried to ignore the tuneless crap coming from the radio station Manuel favoured.
“Yeehar, fuckin’ ariba!” Ethan said without opening his eyes.
“What was that, boss?” Manuel asked, knowing damn well what it was.
“Can’t you get anything decent on that thing?”
“No, boss. Don’t you like mambo? Good for the soul.” Manuel chuckled quietly.
Ethan was about to tell him exactly what mambo was good for, but Al leaned forward and pointed up the almost vertical slope stretching up into the hills. “Please, boss, can we play sliding down the mountain as well?”
Ethan opened his eyes and followed Al’s pointing finger to the Toyota heading straight down the hill, bouncing over boulders and bucking like a fairground bull. Manuel pulled the Humvee over, and they waited for the truck to flip and explode, like in the movies. Cool.
Tom was far from cool, fighting the steering wheel as it snapped left and right, and hoping to God that they didn’t hit anything bigger than that last boulder, or they’d flip and breakfast would be milk and honey on a cloud. Heaven? I don’t think so.
He felt the truck slew left and tip to an impossible angle, giving him a panoramic view of the desert and the boulders waiting to mash them. A teeth-rattling collision with another house-sized rock and the view changed to take in the upside of the cliff as the truck ran backwards for a bit of a change. They slammed into what used to be a tree before it got depressed and died. The impact crushed them back into the seats, but at least they had stopped. Safe. The truck creaked and complained and rocked from the impact.
“Shit! Shit! Shit!” BJ said.
The others let their breath out slowly, and Tom pulled a stupid grin. “Christ, that was—”
The Toyota slid right, and the depressed stump climbed out of the sand and joined them on their little trip downhill to mangled mush. Tom pulled the steering wheel full right, and for a second the wheels found purchase enough to get the nose round and pointing down the incline, but then nothing.
Great, Harry thought, now they’d be able to see what was going to squash them.
The front of the truck crashed down into a gulley, sending the back climbing into the air. An instant before the laws of physics flipped the truck onto its roof, it dropped back down with a bone-crunching shock that flipped the wheels out of the gulley and sent them on their way again. Luck doesn’t get any better than that.
The Americans were out of the Humvee now, to get a better look at the idiots in the truck getting squished.
“Twenty says they’re buzzard lunch,” Eddie said, squinting up against the bright sky.
“I’ll take your money,” Al said, but still thought it was a long shot.
“Those are people in that vehicle,” Ethan chided. “But I’ll take that action.”
The Toyota had now slewed forty-five degrees to the left and was bouncing over a long bump that rose out of the sand like a buried tree. The truck lifted onto its right front wheel, pirouetted almost gracefully, and crashed down onto its side, tipping Tom and BJ onto Harry — just in case the pain in his leg wasn’t excruciating enough. It slid, bounced, and screamed for another twenty feet, the rocks shattering the windows and filling the interior with broken glass and dust. Then it stopped. They were alive. God, it was a miracle.
They were perched on the edge of a sheer drop that the kind and bountiful Lord had put there to make sure the last stretch was a doozy. The truck creaked and rocked slowly back and forth as the occupants tried to untangle their bodies.
Tom spat out dust, opened his eyes, and looked straight down onto the track fifteen feet or so below. “Don’t move!” he shouted.
Harry and BJ turned their heads slowly, thinking the worst, but there were no gunmen there, just the drop and the rocks. Great.
“Don’t move,” Tom repeated.
“You know,” Harry whispered, “this reminds me of The Italian Job.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake!” BJ growled.
“How’d that end?” Tom said without moving.
“Hang on a minute, lads. I’ve got a great idea,” Harry said through gritted teeth.
The truck groaned and rocked sideways towards the drop.
“Okay,” BJ said quietly, “what was the great idea?”
Harry shrugged and was going to say the movie ended there, but his movement tipped the balance, and the truck groaned like the death cry of a redwood coming down and went over the edge.
The Americans barely flinched as the Toyota crunched in a mangled heap onto the track and rocked slowly on its roof.
“Pay up,” Eddie said, putting out his hand.
Al groaned and fished about in his pocked for the money that wasn’t there.
Never one to part with cash unless absolutely necessary, Ethan strode off towards the wrecked truck. “It ain’t over till the fat lady sings,” he said over his shoulder.
“Those hajjis are dog meat,” Eddie said with a shrug and reached for his water flask. It was hot, and he was getting a bit bored now the action was over.
Ethan crouched down beside the truck and looked in through the shattered window to see if anybody had survived enough to save his twenty dollars. “Shit!” he said and began pulling at the passenger door, but it was fused into the crushed bodywork.
Eddie and Al exchanged a quick glance and ran over to see why Ethan was so keen to get into the truck. Contraband maybe. It took a single look to recogn
ise the desert camouflage in the heap of bodies.
Al Caponetto was a cruiserweight boxer for the corps, and his 200 pounds was all muscle, so when he pulled on the truck door, it knew better than to resist. With a grinding scream like a living thing, the door came away along with the hinges, and the Toyota gave up the bodies so the Americans could pull them out into the dust. Not elegant, but there were no first responders hiding in the bushes — and no bushes.
“They dead?” Eddie said, leaning over Ethan and Al as they untangled the Brits, “cus if they are, I still win the bet.”
Such deep human kindness just tugs at the heartstrings, and Ethan gave him a long, unpleasant look by way of thanks. “You really are a piece of work, Eddie. You know that?” He rolled Harry over and put his fingers on his neck in search of a pulse.
“This one’s alive,” Al said, feeling Tom’s carotid artery. He turned to BJ and repeated the pressure on his neck. “This one too.”
“Make that a triple,” Ethan said and checked Harry over slowly for broken bones or bleeding, but found nothing. “You lose your bet, Eddie,” he said and dripped water from his flask into Harry’s open mouth.
“Funny,” Eddie said with a shrug, “but I don’t seem to mind much.”
“Well, ain’t that big of you,” Al said, grasping BJ under the arms and dragging him away from the truck.
“Yeah,” Eddie said, repeating the move with Tom, “my mom used to say I’m all heart.”
“How is your mom?” Al said, checking BJ over for breaks. “Tell her Lover Boy says hi.”
“No probs,” Eddie said. “And tell your sister I said—”
“If you two boneheads have finished,” Ethan said, “shall we get these boys out of here. We’ve got company.”
Al and Eddie straightened up, looked up the hill, and heard the sound of engines rolling down to meet them. A moment later came the unmistakable thump of a 50 cal opening up.
“Shit! Eddie said and stepped closer to the Toyota.
“That won’t save you from a 50 cal,” Ethan pointed out. “Okay though, they can’t depress the gun enough to tag us here.”
“Oh, that’s reassuring,” Al said, “but their truck has wheels, so they can come on down, and I bet they have AK—”
AK-47 rounds zipped past, kicking up dust between the upturned Toyota and the Humvee. The three Americans grabbed one Brit each by their webbing and dragged them up against the vertical drop the truck had crashed down and hoped they were out of the firing line.
Harry opened his eyes and then closed them again against the painful sunlight. “Shit!” he groaned.
“Yeah, man, and we’re all in it up to here,” Ethan said, risking a lean forward and a quick look up the hill and being rewarded by a blizzard of small arms’ fire.
Maybe it was timing, or the familiar sound of AK-47s, but both Tom and BJ came round and sat up slowly against the cliff. Neither man spoke, but it was clear from their expressions that they knew what it was they were in and how deep it was.
Harry looked over at the Toyota where their weapons still lay and stood up shakily, gripping his leg with his left hand for support and to try to suppress the pain. He edged along, keeping his back to the rock until he was level with the upturned truck.
Ethan watched him with a slow shake of his head. “Your buddy seems to have hit his head in the fall,” he said to Tom, who was now also on his feet.
“No,” Tom said, following his friend slowly, “he was crazy before the fall.”
“Shall we give them covering fire?” Eddie asked, unslinging his M16.
Ethan looked at him steadily. “Sure. You go first.” He pointed at the clearing and the dust from the barrage of bullets.
“We’ve gotta do something, boss,” Al said, licking his dry lips. “Those insurgents’ll be rolling down the road with their 50 cal any second now.”
Ethan knew that, but the question was, what was the something they gotta do? Running out into the open and firing blind up that hill was a one-way ticket to a full military send-off in Arlington, but staying put was, as Al pointed out, going to get them just as dead.
Harry ended the analysis by taking two steps out into the open and diving under the truck’s upturned flatbed. Bullets whined off the bodywork and ripped into the tyres, sending them spinning, but the flatbed had been reinforced to carry something heavy — and almost certainly illegal. He crawled up to the cab, forcing his leg to push him, and fumbled inside through the shattered rear window. He found what he was looking for, pulled out the L115, and kissed its stock. He rolled out from under the truck, keeping the reinforced flatbed between him and the hill, crouched behind the front wheel, rested the rifle on the underside of the engine, and waited.
He didn’t have to wait long. A few seconds later they all heard the sound of approaching vehicles and knew it was the truck with the 50 cal and the other pickup carrying the rest of the insurgents. The first truck rounded the bend five hundred yards up the road. Harry killed the driver with a single shot through the chest. The truck seemed to wobble and then dipped and flipped, spewing a dozen gunmen into the desert.
Harry swore noisily, and Eddie frowned at Ethan. “Wrong truck,” Ethan explained without taking his eyes off the second vehicle carrying the 50 cal as it slewed to a stop next to the wrecked truck and its troops scattered in the dust.
The 50 cal opened up, tearing chunks of sandstone from the rock face a few feet above the Americans’ heads as the operator found the range. Harry put a round into his heart as he stood wide open behind the pedestal mount. With a feeling of deja vu, he dropped the next man to take the weapon’s stock, and the next. It was beginning to look like he was going to stop this on his own. Some of the scattered gunmen recovered their wits and started running towards him, joined by six more from the truck with the working but unmanned 50 cal, all firing wildly as they came. There was no way he was going to stop them, not with a sniper rifle.
Tom appeared behind him, having retrieved his sub-machine gun from the truck using Harry’s technique. “Any left?”
Being hit by fire from the running gunmen would have been just bad luck, but the rounds coming from the gunmen up the hill were well aimed and punched into the truck’s bodywork, and it was a racing certainty that one of them was going to get hit real soon.
BJ arrived with the first part of the solution in the form of his C7 assault rifle. Harry jabbed his finger up the hill and then at the under-barrel grenade launcher.
BJ looked up the steep slope and grimaced. “That’s a hell of a long shot at this angle and blind.”
Harry shrugged. “Don’t need you to hit them,” he said, snapping the bolt back on his rifle. “Just make some dust and some noise.”
BJ slid the grenade launcher barrel forward, pushed in a high explosive round, snapped the launcher back, and reached into his pack for the next round. “Say when.”
“When,” Harry said and stepped forward, with Tom moving in behind him and taking up covering position against the rapidly closing gunmen.
Harry sighted up the hill as the first grenade exploded among the rocks, with exactly the desired result. The gunmen ducked behind any handy cover and waited for the other grenades. Harry counted silently and breathed out very slowly. “Three,” he said, and right on cue, the gunmen started to put their heads up to see if it was over. And it was for them. Moving with the smooth action of a machine, Harry shot one in the head, snapped back the bolt, shifted his aim, and put an 8.6 mm round into the next gunman’s chest. Again the bolt clicked back, but before he could fire, his target sprayed blood, spun, and went down. Harry didn’t look, he knew the sound of M16s on full automatic, and letting the Americans do what they were doing real well, he stepped back up to the side of the Toyota.
The eighteen or so gunmen were now less than fifty yards away, and their firing was getting a hell of a lot more accurate. Tom got to work with the sub-machine gun, and BJ with his assault rifle on automatic, but it wasn’t going to be enough
. The Americans ran up the slight rise to the truck, threw themselves onto the sand and opened up with their M16s. Better. The gunmen were being blown backwards, sideways, and apart, and showing good sense, dived to the ground behind the boulders Mother Nature had rolled down the hillside over a million years ago just to provide them with some cover. So, it was going to be a protracted shootout. Seriously bad news, with ammunition for the good guys being pretty much what they had in their webbing or stowed away in the Humvee.
Harry looked around for a way out, but saw only flat killing ground and the sheer rock face. So, it looked like he was going to get killed again, and this time for real.
One of the Taliban touched his ear, and Harry knew he was receiving instructions, probably the best way to slice open an infidel. The gunman shouted something, and the rest of them hightailed it back to the remaining truck.
Not going to die, then, that’s always a good result.
“What the hell?” Tom said, lowering the sub-machine gun with its empty mag.
“They’re leaving,” Eddie said, standing up for a better look.
“Ya think?” Ethan said, pulling Eddie’s legs and crashing him to the sand. “Let’s wait for them to go before we start waving, shall we?”
The truck fired up as the gunmen piled into the back, spun its wheels in the dust, and headed on out.
“They’re in a hurry,” Tom said quietly. “What just happened here?”
Harry shrugged. “Looks like somebody pulled the plug on this little fracas. But why they quit is beyond me. They had us dead to rights.”
“Not quite,” Eddie said, standing up again. “I think there would’ve been a few more funerals in the old Bedouin camp if they’d tried it on with old Eddie Elward.”
Harry and Ethan exchanged a long look, and Ethan shrugged. “Inbreeding.”
Harry nodded — he’d seen Deliverance. “Any chance of a lift?” He pointed towards the Humvee. “I’d rather be somewhere else when they change their minds.”
Ethan smiled. “Grab your gear.”
