Countdown: H Hour (19 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY

[Contrast] the behavior of the men on the
Titanic

who . . . went down with the ship and those of the

École Polytechnique in Montreal decades later who, ordered to leave the classroom by a lone gunman,

meekly did as they were told and stood passively in the

corridor as he shot all the women. Even if I’m wetting

my panties, it’s better to have the social norm of the

Titanic
and fail to live up to it than to have the social

norm of the Polytechnique and sink with it.

—Mark Steyn

Bajuni, former Federation of Sharia Courts, Africa

The first contact by anyone on Blackmore’s thin perimeter was over on the left, and just slightly north of the western shoulder of the peninsula that defined the beginnings of the Old Port. Sergeant Moore had posted a single machine gun team there, three men with a Pecheneg, covering the major avenue of approach, the street. They’d taken up position under a car sitting above the crumbling pavement, with several concrete blocks under each wheelless rim. When a dozen or so locals had come scampering up the street, quite possibly mindlessly fleeing the mayhem being inflicted on their brethren by the two gunships, the gunner had opened up with a fifteen-second burst, making the underside of the car flash like a strobe, expending that entire belt of ammunition, and leading five or six of the hostiles in a nice rendition of the Spandau Ballet. The others dove to the sides of the street, taking what cover they could, and returning a none-too-accurate fire.

Nice t’ing about de Pecheneg
, thought the gunner, as his assistant helped feed in another belt.
You can fire off de whole belt wit’out overheatin’ de bitch.

The team’s diminutive Anglo-Nepali squad leader was crouched behind the car in seconds. Odd bullets impacted on the frame and body, but many more of them hit the street or passed harmless overhead. “What’a’ you got?”

The gunner reported, adding, “De fire’s comin’ fum de six o’ eight I didn’t get.”

“Right,” said the Gurkha, wincing from the passage of an altogether too close miss. It was a tracer and its passage left a dark line burned into the sergeant’s retina. “Wriggle back out of there. I’ll show you an alternate position.”

“Wilco, Sergean’.”

That was the first contact, outside of the aid ship. Within twenty minutes, almost every one of the men was engaged, this even after tossing in the extra squad that had done for porter and crowd control duty, and the special ops team that hadn’t accompanied Pierantoni. The mortar section had chunked out enough rounds that they were already reporting, “Low on HE.” The CH-750’s quickly expended their very limited on-board ammunition and punched out, heading for the ship to be rearmed.

One Eland was in front of Blackmore, facing and firing west up the main coastal avenue. The other was maybe one hundred and fifty meters to the east, likewise engaging up the main drag to the east-northeast. The enemy wasn’t showing himself enough, generally speaking, to justify using the cannon. Mostly the Elands supported with their machine guns, for which they carried, oh, a
lot
more ammunition than any ground-pounding machine gun team could hope to.

It was mostly exchange of fire, with few being hit on either side, and no one seeming particularly keen on getting to knife fighting range. The few friendly casualties were carried back, mostly in fireman’s carries, to an ad hoc aid station set up right in front of the LCM landing point.

Simon knelt in the moon’s shadow, beside a mud brick shack, maybe sixty or seventy meters from the spot of beach where the LCM had deposited him. His RTO crouched beside him. Adam sat with his back to the wall.

At the sound of booted feet, crunching on gravel, pounding hard toward him, Simon
almost
fired.

He hoped he got his muzzle down before Sergeant Major Pierantoni noticed.

“Glad you think before shooting,” said the sergeant major. “Sir.”

Damn; he noticed.

Without waiting to be asked, the sergeant major said, “I’ve got the ex-hostages down by the landing point. Hallinan and Feeney are guarding. I needed to leave Hallinan because, frankly, sir, while Feeney needs some psychiatric help, Hallinan can usually talk sense to him. Most of the tranzis are snubbing us but a couple have kicked in to help with the wounded. The rest of mine are dragging the boats to the east side of the spit.”

“Your other team is on line to the east,” Simon said. “You can find them by the sound of the Eland. So far, they’re doing fine. No casualties, last they reported.”

“Who
are
these guys?” Pierantoni asked rhetorically.

Unexpectedly, Adam answered. “To the east is probably my cousin Nadif’s band. Just rifles and machine guns, and a few RPG’s. Northeast and north is my cousin Asad. He’s got everything except tanks and aircraft. Well . . . he
has
tanks, two of them, but they don’t run. Northwest is my uncle, Korfa. His faction’s small, but relatively well trained. At least Labaan—”

“Here, Adam.”

“—Labaan says they are. Me, I don’t know enough to say. And west is either my cousin, Abdikarim, or my cousin, Taban. Or both.”

“Both, I think,” added Labaan. “I saw too many bodies and parts of bodies for it just to have been one faction.”

“Think they’re cooperating?” asked Adam.

“Anything’s possible, for a rich enough prize or a bad enough threat,” said the older man. “Possible for a
while
anyway.”

At that moment, the Eland to the front fired its cannon. Dust flew out from the cracks of the adobe shack. A fraction of a second later there was a much smaller boom, farther west. Then there came the sound of a muted massacre, screaming, coughing—from blood-filling lungs—and sobbing, as flechettes apparently butchered some knot or other of some cousin or other’s band.

“I used to think,” said Labaan, softly and sadly, “that nations in Africa were a mistake, that we should have organized on blood, clan and tribe. Now that I see blood ties breaking down, I don’t know what to think.”

While I understand your feelings, old man,
thought Pierantoni,
who gives a shit right now
?

He didn’t say anything to that effect though.
What the hell; under similar circumstances I might be a little melancholy too.
Instead, the sergeant major asked, “Whatcha gonna do, PL?”

No way a Brit’s going to get that joke. “When Murphy shows up and shit goes to hell, whatcha gonna do PL
?”

MV
Richard Bland
, Coast of Africa, city of Bajuni, Africa

The crane was
still
hauling up loads of displaced locals. Oh, they were cooperating, as well as they could. It was just slow. And Warrington didn’t want them trying to scamper up the nets.

On one wall of the red-lit bridge, a headset-wearing trooper had scrubbed away the previous operations matrix—which made damned little sense anymore—and plugged in new, additional tasks, numbers, and timelines. All of those were at least somewhat iffy.

Stocker snarled. He was none too happy about having his XO and some of his troops out on the bleeding edge and himself left behind, anyway. “The problem is the damned tranzis. We should just leave them behind, use the cover of the aircraft to help our people get out, and then
get out
.”

“You ever take in a stray dog, Andrew?” asked Warrington.

“Well . . . yeah. So what, eh?”

“You can leave a stray dog out on the street, no guilt involved. But once you take it in, even for a single meal, that dog becomes
your
responsibility. If you’re a decent human being, it does, anyway. You can’t just kick it out again.”

“These aren’t dogs,” said the Canadian. “Dogs are loyal. Dogs are Plato’s good citizens. Dogs didn’t bring the world to the state it’s in.”

“Neither did these people,” Warrington answered. “And certainly not intentionally. Ignorance . . . well . . . ignorance is just part of the natural state of man.

“No matter. I’m in charge and I say we’re not leaving anyone behind. Not them. Not ours.

“But the problem remains. We can’t get them and us out on the same lift. We knew that when we started. What we didn’t know, not for sure was—”

The loudspeaker’s mounted on the walls crackled with Simon’s distorted voice, superimposed over the rattling of rifles and machine guns. “Where the fuck are my gunships? I need them ten minutes ago.”

“The first one just took off,” Warrington answered into the mike. “The other’s going to be a while.”

“Roger.”

“What we didn’t count on,” Warrington continued, “was the landing party getting decisively engaged. So we’re going to have to break contact to get them out. Hardest thing in the world, you know. Not just withdrawal while in contact, which is very damned hard.
Amphibious
withdrawal while in contact. For that, we need to attack to get some breathing space.

“Assemble your remaining two platoons, minus, by the nets. When the locals are done offloading, even before they’re done, if you can, load your boys up. Head in to one flank or the other—best we confer with Simon as to which one—and attack. Sweep them from the flank and drive them back. Once that’s done, get the Elands loaded and as many troops as will fit. If we need to, we’ll land the CH-750’s on the ad hoc strip. Likewise, the gunships will return, rearm, and make a single pass, expending their next load of ammunition, then land to pick up six or eight. If it takes longer we’ll have them rearm twice.”

“You’re making the problem worse, though,” Stocker said. He didn’t push the idea too vigorously, since he
really
wanted to get ashore and get stuck in. “We can’t lift out the original load and fifty-odd tranzis in one lift; how do we get out another eighty people over and above the initial load?”

The loudspeakers crackled again. “Direct the second gunship to the mortars!” Boom. “I’m taking serious fucking mortar fire!” Boom. Boom. Boom. BOOM! “Jesus Christ, get those fucking mortars!”

“I never knew he swore,” said Stocker, wonderingly. “I’ll get my boys by the gunwales. Somebody here can figure out how to make the horse sing.”

“The sergeant major’s down! I’ve got wounded!”

Cagle added, “I think I’ll be coming along, too. Give me five minutes to grab an aid bag and a couple more of supplies.”

Warrington considered that.
Sure, nothing he can do here that TIC Chick, can’t. And, speaking of which,
“Skipper, you can handle air-sea-ground ops as well as I can, as long as we’re not talking about fixed bayonet levels of operations. Maybe even better. I think I’d better be going, too.”

Pearson nodded, then held up one hand. “Ummm . . . we’ve never used them, but we have a load of Russki PFM-1 mines. Four or five men can carry about two thousand of them and arm and drop them behind as you clear the perimeter. That would buy a little more time. Help?”

“Four or five tow poppers per meter?” mused Warrington. “Might.”

Bajuni, former Federation of Sharia Courts, Africa

“Jesus Christ, get those fucking mortars!” Simon shouted into his mike from under a pile of mud brick, blown on top of him when a largish mortar shell—his guess was a 120mm—landed inside the roofless shack next to which he’d set up his little command post.

Someone—Adam, Simon thought—was screaming, “My back! Allah . . . my back.” Through the insulating layer of the mud bricks on his own back, the sound was distant. More worrisome was that it was only the one man screaming.

Coughing in the fumes from the shell filler and the dust from pulverized mud brick, Simon forced his own back up through the shards and looked around. Labaan was tending to Adam, who had gone from screaming to moaning. The old man seemed fairly hale, as much as one could tell by limited moonlight, anyway. Pierantoni was breathing, but otherwise still. His RTO was . . .

Shit; his fucking head is gone.

He still had hold of the mike. Lifting it to his lips he sent, “The sergeant major’s down! I’ve got wounded!”

Simon shouted, “Medddiccc!” Then, inanely apologizing to the headless corpse—“I’m sorry, Private, I’m so very sorry.”—Simon rolled it over and eased the radio pack straps out from the dead boy’s arms. With a couple of low grunts he tugged the radio on over his own shoulders. His bulky armor made it a tight fit.

“Sergeant Moore, report.”

The platoon leader sent back, “I just left second squad and the porter squad, way over on the left, and they’re holding fine. I’m with third, in the center. They took a couple of casualties to the mortars, one dead, one wounded—”

“We will
not
leave our dead behind,” said Blackmore.

“No, sir, we won’t,” agreed Moore. “The KIA’s the squad leader, so I’m sticking here. From where I am, I can hear first’s firing and they sound like they’re holding on handily. I can’t tell about the SF team on the extreme right.”

“Roger, break,”
Hmmm . . . what was that sergeant’s name? Damn if I can remember. No matter, everybody’s got a number.
“SF Team Three, report.”

“They’re out there in front of us; but they’re kind of leaving us alone, EllTee,” sent the American back. “We had some contact a bit ago, but they broke and ran. I think maybe they were spooked by our night vision capability. They don’t seem to have any.”

“Seems likely,” Blackmore agreed. “That, or they just ran out of batteries for whatever they did have. Keep me posted.”

“Wilco, EllTee. I sent my medic back to find you.”

Simon shook his head.
Of all the wretched horrors the Americans have inflicted on God’s language, English, there is nothing more vile than “EllTee.”

Someone took a knee next to Simon. “Sergeant Rogers,” the man said. “You need a medic, sir?”

“Yes, Sergeant, that and litter bearers. Your sergeant major needs help, too.”

“On it, sir.”

“Very good. Sergeant Balbahadur!”

“Sir!” answered the Gurkha, from thirty or so meters off.

“Give us ‘The Black Bear,’ and make it loud!”

“Sir! And maybe a little ‘Scots Wha Hae’ after that?”

“Excellent choice.”

Again the radio crackled. “Simon, Warrington. We’re all a’comin’ to the party. We’re going to attack around the perimeter to get a little breathing space. Which flank do we go in on?”