by Leigh Barker
BJ sighted, fired, and ducked behind the wall. “So soon, I was just getting started.” He hooked Harry’s arm, and they ran and stumbled to the doorway.
Ethan and Al gave them covering fire from either side of the doorway before following them in and slamming the door.
“Oh, good,” Harry said, catching his breath from the pain. “We’re safe now, then.”
Ethan gave him a dirty look and led the way down the stone stairs past the first floor room that was the main living area for the family with the kid’s toys that would never be played with again. He stopped for a second at the door to the street, checked both ways, and when the others caught up, pointed across a wide, dusty wasteland at a small building inside a compound with low walls. “There,” he said. “That’s defensible on all sides.”
Harry shook his head. “We go in there,” he said, “we’re never coming out again.”
Ethan shrugged. “I’m open to other offers.”
“We have to circle round back to the Humvee and call in air support,” Harry said.
Ethan shook his head. “Tried that, the radio’s dead. Must have taken a round or something.”
“Shit!” Harry said, summing up everyone’s thoughts on that. “Then it’s the Alamo over there, then.”
“What about circling back to the Humvee and just getting the hell outa town?” BJ said.
For a second they thought about it, but then Harry reminded them about the trucks and the 50 cals. “We wouldn’t get a hundred yards before those guns turned the Humvee into scrap metal.” He was about to expand on the full-of-holes theory when they heard the sound of many feet coming down the stairs. “Shall we go, gentlemen?” he said and lifted his arm before BJ did it for him.
They left the house at a run and were halfway across the wasteland, heading for the compound, when the insurgents rounded the corner of the buildings at the end of the street. They stalled for a second of indecision, surprised to see the infidels out in the open, but then opened up. Bullets zipped past on all sides and kicked up the old familiar toadstools of dust around their feet. They weren’t going to make it unless they did something. And BJ did the something. He dropped Harry, pumped three grenades into the group of fighters, and a second later they lost interest in the attack amid the shrapnel and body parts.
Somebody should have shouted, “Go! Go!”, but that somebody was as eager as everyone else to get the hell out of the open ground and into cover. BJ hooked Harry under the arms again, and they ran. Al hit the wooden front door at a dead run, smashing into it with his shoulders. Either the door was going to give, or his collarbone was. The door crashed inwards, followed by Al, who executed a forward roll and came back to his feet in the middle of the room. He ran back to the door and covered the others as they half fell half ran inside.
Harry would have applauded, but the sound of AK rounds slapping into the brickwork kinda broke the moment. He pushed the door closed, mostly to spoil the view for the insurgents spilling out of the house they’d just vacated, and those running into the street from both ends. Here we go again, he thought as he checked his ammo. You’d think they’d stop for afternoon prayer and give us a nice rest. The wooden door was splintering, and rounds smacked into the walls opposite.
“Hey, did anybody see any RPGs out there?” Harry said. “Because if there are, we are in deep shit.”
Good point, well put.
“Harry, for Christ’s sake!” BJ said and muttered obscenities.
Ethan and Al gave him a long questioning look, but he ignored it and pointed at the stone steps leading to the upper floors. “We’d better get the hell out of here.”
The Americans were confused, that much was clear from their expressions.
“Go!” Harry said, limping across the small room and heading up the stairs. “Before they fire the bloody RPG I just wished on us.”
The Brits were crazy, the exchanged looks said that, but they got the hell out of the room anyway, not because of the superstition or any of that shit, but just because the rounds coming in through the door were annoying.
They fell behind the parapet surrounding the wide roof and took a careful look over. The RPG operator was just finishing aiming the weapon and pulled the trigger, sending the grenade screaming across the wasteland and into the ground floor room they had just exited — for non-superstitious reasons. The explosion blew out the damaged door and the three windows, but the thick mud-brick was too much for it, and the house stayed built.
Harry had already started bringing his M16 into line the moment he looked over the parapet and fired a burst at the RPG operator readying the weapon for another shot, dropping him onto his weapon. The man behind him rolled him off and bent to pick it up, which was plenty of time for Harry to take more careful aim. Time to play knock over the idiots again, he thought as he squeezed off the shot.
Everybody on the road below saw where the shots were coming from and opened up, and those who didn’t see, pretty soon got the idea. Harry sat back against the thick wall and grinned at the others, confirming his mental status, but that didn’t bother him because they’d all be dead pretty soon, and the state of his mind wouldn’t really count.
“Take a look what’s happening,” he said to BJ with a grin.
“Yeah, right,” BJ said as bullets slammed into the brickwork and whined off into the bright sky. “I like this pretty face, and so does the missus.”
“You guys are totally crazy, you know that?” Al said, shaking his head to emphasise the point, and then grunted sharply and bounced back off the parapet.
“Sniper! Sniper!” Harry shouted, and they moved.
Harry dropped the M16, hugged the L115 to his chest, and rolled forward, coming to his feet and running in a single painful move. He hit the stone dome above the stairwell and pressed against it just as BJ arrived and sat down. “Cheers,” he said with a stern look. “I carried you through no-man’s land, through thick and thin and mostly thin. And what do you do?” He shook his head. “You take off at the first little istsy-bitsy drama and leave me to it. My superhero.”
Ethan looked back across the roof at the crumpled body of his friend and knew this was what awaited them all, even the Brit making jokes to cover his fear. “Did anybody make the sniper’s position?”
“No,” Harry said, “but to get the angle over the parapet, he has to be higher than us, and I don’t see any—”
“There’s a water tower past the end of the road,” BJ said. “Saw it when I was carrying your ass across no-man’s land.”
Harry nodded. “Okay, then that has to be it.” He put his head round the end of the dome and took a quick look, and a bullet took a chunk of brick out of the wall just above his head. Not bad for a snapshot, he thought as he pulled his head back into relative safety. “Yeah, he’s in the water tower.” Which was a serious bugger, as the only way to get a shot from this side of the building was to step out into the open, and nowhere in the manual did it say that was a good idea in a firefight.
“We are seriously in the smelly stuff,” BJ pointed out helpfully. “They’re going to be all over us if we don’t get back to the wall and stop them crossing the yard.”
“Off you go, then,” Harry suggested.
“I was thinking,” Ethan said, interrupting their banter. “Somebody killed everybody in this village, right?”
They nodded, good deduction, what with all those bodies.
“And my bet is it’s these boys here.”
Another nod, same deduction.
“Then how come they don’t hightail it out and just chemical us to death, then?”
Harry and BJ exchanged looks. “Got any other thoughts?” Harry asked and then raised his hand. “Cus if you have, you just keep them to yourself, okay? I’m having trouble keeping my shit together as it is.”
Ethan shrugged. “Just thinking, that’s all.” He tilted his head questioningly. “So, got any sniper-ass ideas on how to get rid of the guy in the tower?”
Harry thought about it some more and then pulled a slender dagger from his belt and began testing the sand between the blocks forming the battered dome. It took a second for the other two to work out what he was doing, then Ethan nodded. “Hey, it could work, the mortar looks crappy enough.”
Ethan stepped back through the roof door into the dome and began scraping the mud-brick mortar from around one of the blocks. It was basically just sand, and in a couple of minutes, the foot-square brick moved and wobbled. “Okay,” he called over his shoulder as he worked the brick out. “New window conversion complete.”
Harry edged up to the hole and took a fast look through before pulling his head back. The tower was twelve hundred metres away, so the insurgent sniper was no dunce to have hit Al with one shot, but he would have to be a superstar to put a round through the foot-square hole, so Harry took another long look.
The sniper was on the tower, sure enough, but the thing was built on a plinth made of the good old mud-brick, and all Harry could see through his spotter scope was the shadow of his rifle protruding through a gap in the top of the low wall. What he needed was one of those M82 Special App 50-cal sniper rifles he’d fired on the range, with that and a Raufoss 50-cal round it would be a done deal. The round would have hit the wall and made a little hole, but on the other side, it would have become a shotgun blast, killing everything in its path, but that beast was a tank killer, and he always favoured the lighter L115; it was his baby, and he knew its every mood and idiosyncrasy, but even so, this was going to be a tough shot.
“Don’t want to rush you,” Ethan said quietly, interrupting his wishful thinking, “but the Indians are off the reservation and strolling across the road and will be up here any minute to kill our asses.”
Harry nodded without really listening, taking the time to estimate the distance to the target and to confirm there was no wind. He continued to watch the shadow of the sniper’s rifle while he doped the scope on the L115 to 1200 plus 2 and smiled. Twelve hundred metres plus two minutes of angle to give it the trajectory, it was an estimate, but one he’d done a thousand times, so now it was just instinctive. The L115 may not have the shotgun blast potential of the M82, but the mud-brick wall for a water tower would be thin, just enough to stop idiots falling off, so it should be no problem. The trick was to put the bullet where the sniper was, and since he was behind a wall, that wasn’t an easy shot.
He took slow tactical breaths to steady himself and calm down, fired, and saw the puff of dust as the round penetrated the mud-brick, and then the sniper’s head appear above the wall as his body was blown up and back.
“Okay,” he said and slung the rifle, “we can say hi to the visitors now.”
They crouched and ran back to the parapet and knelt beside Al’s body. The insurgents were on the wrong side of the building to see their sniper go down, but the bodies of their comrades scattered across the road and onto the waste ground had given them good reason to think twice before rushing the compound. They assumed that the enemy was just waiting for them to run out into the open, and right when they decided they were mistaken, the enemy was in fact behind the wall waiting for them to rush out into the open. They obliged.
Two or three at first, running out into the road, stopping and bolting back for cover to draw the defenders. Ethan was watching them from the corner of the roof where a stump had been nailed up for a washing line, giving him the little cover he needed not to get his head blown off. He waited. Then they came en masse.
“Showtime,” he said as he swung up his M16, aimed, and fired rapid single shots. A less experienced marine might have set his weapon to full auto to knock down as many of the charging insurgents as possible in the shortest time, but that would have burned his ammo that was already in short supply. So he killed them one at a time. By the time he’d dropped the second man, the two Brits were in action also on semi-auto, either following his lead or because they’d been around the block a few times too.
The insurgents were determined to put an end to it once and for all and just kept coming. Something needed to be done before they got close enough to the house to be out of the kill zone, and BJ did the something. He stood up, leaned over the parapet, and fired the first grenade from the launcher into the dozen insurgents racing for the door, elated they’d made it alive. There’s a saying about counting chickens from unhatched eggs that would have summed it up for them, if they’d known it, or been alive to consider it. He unlocked the breach and swung it out, fed in another grenade, snapped it shut, aimed, and fired again in less than four seconds. And repeated the move, again, and again.
The effects of a rain of high explosives on the insurgents would have been amusing if it hadn’t also been deadly. They stopped in their tracks as the grenades exploded amongst them. Some running right, some left, some just standing and staring up at the building in disbelief. A few raised their weapons, but Harry and Ethan stopped that nonsense before it began. After a minute of carnage, the wasteland was littered with bits of humans and wrecked weapons.
They had broken the charge, but the price was high. BJ slumped to his knees, groaned once, and fell forward, his head resting against the wall keeping him on his knees.
Harry dropped down beside him, turned him, and sat him down, but it was clear from the rag-doll way he flopped to his left that he was gone, and Harry reached over and closed his eyes with his fingers. “Thanks, BJ,” he said softly and sat back against the wall, all the strength draining out of him. He put his hands over his eyes and tried to shut out the world for a moment, to keep his sanity.
Ethan glanced down at him, moved over to the corner of the roof, and scanned the empty street and the buildings, which were probably teeming with insurgents. He looked up at the sky and then at his watch. Almost seven, so it would be dark soon, so no snipers, which was good, but the insurgents would be able to stroll on over and kill them, which was bad, probably. He looked over at Harry and was relieved to see he had put aside the loss of his friends and was scanning the buildings through his spotter scope. Okay then.
Harry could see them in the shadows and in the alleyways, just waiting like predators for nightfall. He shifted his weight off his leg in a vain effort to ease the stiffness that had replaced the pain. “Ethan,” he hissed and waited for the marine to look his way and then signalled him to come closer.
“I’ve been thinking,” he said to the American now sitting with his back to the low wall. “In about half an hour, they’re going to be scuttling over us like cockroaches on a jam sandwich.”
Ethan nodded and looked over at the dome and the door to the stairs. They’d come that way, they’d pay a high price, but the end result would be the same.
“So,” Harry said, following his gaze. “I think you should get the hell out of here.”
Ethan jumped a little in surprise and opened his mouth to speak, but Harry waved him silent.
“Let me finish,” he said firmly. “We’re dead here, I know it and so do you.” He tapped his leg. “I’m not going anywhere, but you could get out of here if you tried, right?”
No doubt about it.
“Then you go.” Once again he waved Ethan silent. “I’ll cover you and make a bit of a fuss.” He could see by the way Ethan looked around that he was weighing it up. He was going to say no, that was a certainty. “Somebody has to tell the brass about the chemical attack here. This wasn’t some accident or reprisal, this was a test.” Ethan knew that too, he could tell. “Can you imagine what this would do to the boys at Camp Bastion?”
Ethan sucked his teeth. “It would be a massacre,” he said almost to himself. “They’re supposed to be prepared, but that’s bullshit, nobody could be prepared for this.”
“Then you have to get out and tell them about it,” Harry said.
Ethan looked at him for a long time, knowing he would be leaving him to die, but staying just doubled the number and did nothing to shorten the odds. He looked up at the sun sinking in a brilliant colour show on the horizon.
If he was going, he needed to go now. He put out his hand.
“Okay then,” Harry said, shaking the hand of the man he’d known only a few hours, but already felt like an old friend. He looked around quickly. “Help me get the weapons up onto the wall. Say five feet apart.”
Ethan chuckled. “Like Beau Geste, right?’ Nod received. ‘Okay, but can you move enough to make it work?”
“What do I have to worry about? If I bugger my leg up, what difference is it going to make?”
Ethan picked up BJ’s assault rifle and Al’s M16 and placed them on the wall, their barrels extending out far enough to be seen, but not so far as to be obvious. Then he put his own M16 on Harry’s right and waved down Harry’s protest. “Hey, if I need it when I’m out there, I’m dead anyway. It’ll do more good here.”
Harry watched him move quickly to the stairwell at a crouching run, stop at the top, and nod a quick goodbye. Okay then, just me and a hundred Taliban, what’s wrong with those odds? Not much. He watched the night shadows race across the rooftop and climbed up to an excruciating crouch behind his M16 wedged on the wall.
At the first sign of men coming out of the buildings, he opened up on full auto, spraying the doors and the windows, and when the clip was empty, he moved to Ethan’s M16 and fired that, and then onto Al’s, firing up and down the street and at the buildings and hoping they would think the boys were all still in town.
He left BJ’s C7 on semi-automatic, picking targets that showed up as darker shadows against the pale mud buildings. He thought about getting any remaining grenades from BJ’s pack, but the thought of kneeling down and having to get up again put the idea to bed. Pretty soon they would suss that there was only one rifle firing, then—
They rushed the compound again. Harry fired down at them without bothering to aim, emptied the C7, and slid down to sit against the parapet. He reached over and pulled his sniper rifle onto his lap, snapped back the bolt to chamber a round, and pointed it more or less at the stairway.
Funny, really, way things turned out, he thought. He’d come back to thank the old guy for saving his life and got himself killed doing it. And his friends, and that was the hardest thing to swallow. Tom Daley, consummate soldier and nutter. He smiled. And BJ. He looked down at his friend almost lost in the dark shadows. A giant of a man in more ways than just physical strength. Both gone now, and for what? This shithole? He closed his eyes and said thanks to his friends. His eyes snapped open at the sound of men on the stone stairs. Well, if I knew any prayers, or could think of anyone to say them to, now would be a good time.
