Hunting in the Shadows (American Praetorians) (46 page)

             
I ducked back behind the container, and waved the rest of the team up.  This had to happen fast.  I left Bryan with the PKM to cover the windows, Jim to cover the rear, and the rest of us moved out at a dead run for the back door.

             
The police station wasn’t a single building, but rather a collection of outbuildings mostly connected with a central two-story building.  There were small walls connecting a couple of the outbuildings, but we didn’t have to go over or through it to get to a breach point.  The outer door to the back outbuilding was closed, but it didn’t look too solid.

             
Little Bob pulled ahead and hit it at full tilt, rebounding and rolling out of the way as the metal door slammed inward.  Juan took the lead, flowing into the station with Nick and I right on his heels.

             
It was dark inside the station, at least as compared to outside.  There were a few lights on, but it looked like they were keeping them off to make it harder to target the shooters in the windows.  It was still light enough to see the two men in PPF uniforms at the southwest windows, turning in surprise as we burst through the door.

             
Juan and I had them dead to rights.  Their KH-2002 rifles were still pointed out the windows.  They tried to pivot toward us, but we were already up on target.  Two pairs of shots each hammered them against the wall, where they slumped and slid down to the floor.

             
Juan advanced on them while I finished clearing our half of the room.  I heard the clatter of the rifles being kicked away from their limp hands.  By then the rest of the team was in, the room was clear, and Larry and Little Bob were already advancing on the next door.

             
We moved through the outbuilding quickly; there were plenty of supplies, explosives, weapons, and ammunition, but no more shooters.  So far, with the intensity of the fighting to the south, there was no sign that the PPF or their Iranian handlers even knew we had penetrated the station.

             
I took a pause right at the door leading into the courtyard and called Hassan again.  “Tell Hussein Ali to break contact and pull back,” I told him.  “We are in the station now, and if he keeps shooting at the PPF in here, one of us is going to get hit.”

             
“Yes, yes, Mister Jeff, I will tell him,” Hassan almost shouted.  There was a lot of gunfire in the background.

             
We had to hold for a while.  I was waiting for the bad guys to figure out what was going on, and start trying to swarm the outbuilding.  Finally, Hassan came back over the radio.  “Hussein Ali does not want to fall back, Mister Jeff,” he said.  “He says that he must keep the pressure on the Iranians.”

             
“Tell him that that’s what we’re in here for, but I’m not getting my guys shot by friendly fire because of his pride,” I snapped back.  “We are on the objective and we will clear it, but he needs to shift fire away from the station.”

             
“I will try to tell him, Mister Jeff,” Hassan replied.

             
Naturally, that was when all hell broke loose on the objective.

             
The back door of the main station building slammed open.  I almost didn’t hear it over the roar and crackle of gunfire.  I was, however, in a position where I could see the first tan-uniformed men in body armor with Khaybar rifles coming around the corner toward us.

             
I snapped my rifle to my shoulder and opened fire, hitting the first man in the plate.  He staggered under the impact.  I didn’t get to see much more than that, as his fellows behind him opened fire and I had to duck back behind the doorway.  Chips of concrete spat off the wall near my head as the rounds smacked into the stucco with harsh cracks, a few of them ricocheting away with high-pitched, whizzing whines.

             
They kept up the fire as they moved on the door, making it impossible to lean out and shoot back.  So I changed the rules.  I reached into my vest, pulled out a frag, yanked the pin out, and rolled it into the courtyard.  Fuck you assholes, if I can’t shoot you, I can still blow you up.

             
There was some frantic yelling in Arabic, then the grenade went off with a tooth-rattling
thud
, filling the courtyard with dust, smoke, and whickering shrapnel.  The gunfire slacked off considerably, and then I was out the door, rifle to my shoulder, pumping half a magazine in the direction I’d last seen them, Juan on my heels.

             
As the dust cleared, I started to be able to see the enemy, some moving painfully, others starting to pick themselves up off the ground.  Juan and I started shooting, tracking back and forth across the courtyard until nothing was moving.

             
More gunfire erupted from the corner, and Juan and I threw ourselves in opposite directions, as Little Bob opened up from the doorway behind us, suppressing the shooters trying to get into the courtyard to support the guys we’d just killed.

             
Meanwhile, the loud cracks of rounds going by overhead continued, and redoubled.  I couldn’t hear if Hassan had called me back; I was too busy trying to stay alive in this little cramped corner of hell.  Even if he had, it was pretty obvious that Hussein Ali wasn’t pulling back, and wasn’t shifting his fire.  This was a very, very uncomfortable place to be in, especially as I could see that with more PPF trying to get at us in the courtyard, any attempt to fall back was going to run the very real risk of being shot in the back.

             
Then a hammer blow blanked out everything.  The world became nothing but noise, darkness, and pain.

              I don’t know if I blacked out, or for how long if I did.  When I could see again, the air was still full of dust and smoke.  My head hurt ferociously, and the rest of me ached.  It took me a second to figure out where the hell I was, and what the fuck was going on.

             
It slowly penetrated through the pounding in my head and the ringing in my ears that somebody had blown up the north side of the station.  There was a gaping crater in that direction, and bodies and pieces of bodies were strewn across what was left of the courtyard.  Part of the main station building had collapsed, and the shed/outbuilding on the corner was just gone, reduced to a pile of rubble.

             
VBIED
, my aching brain registered.  Somebody had tried to blow up the PPF station.  Under other circumstances, I might not mind so much, but my team and I were in it at the time, so that kind of pissed me off.  I was still thinking too slowly to register who might have done it, when we were there, and Hussein Ali’s people were in the opposite direction.

             
It did register that I had to get the fuck off the ground and get ready to fight.  Even through the fog of pain and wooziness, I still knew that this shit wasn’t over.  My rifle was still connected to me by the sling, but the ocular lens of the scope was cracked.  My iron sights still worked though.

             
Apparently the guys in black who rushed across the crater weren’t expecting anyone to be alive.  My first shots were wild, but I forced myself to steady down and dropped two of them with rapid pairs to the chest, more by instinct than conscious targeting.  The rest scattered for cover.

             
I took the momentary breather to try to assess the situation.  The courtyard was scattered with rubble and debris.  There was still smoke in the air, and I was starting to hear well enough to make out the continuing gunfire going overhead.  A silhouette started to run toward me from my right, and I almost shot Little Bob before I focused enough to see it was him.  He fired a few more shots toward the figures running toward us from the north, then dropped to a knee next to me.  More fire started to come from the door he’d come out of, as some of the rest of the team took up covering fire toward the corner of the station building and whoever had launched that IED.

             
Little Bob was checking me over for wounds.  I was trying to fight him, trying to get back up, but he knocked my hand away, and continued to do his blood sweeps.  Only once he was satisfied that I had just been knocked around, and wasn’t bleeding out, did he turn back to the enemy, who were avoiding the ferocious covering fire coming from the doorway.

             
My head was starting to clear, though I still couldn’t hear very well.  My ears were ringing, and my head felt like it was being split open with an axe.  I was still able to get my feet under me, and got achingly to a knee, to snap a pair of shots at a hazy outline with a rifle peeking out from behind a car.  That was when the bolt locked back on an empty magazine; I’d lost track of my round count for some reason.

             
I ripped the mag out, dropping it on the ground instead of in my dump pouch, and fumbled to rock a fresh one in place.  I wasn’t moving as well as I should have been; I was still pretty rocked.  I was still keeping my eyes on the threat, so I saw him pop back up and level his weapon at me, while I still had the magazine only halfway into the mag well.

             
Little Bob snapped his rifle over and shot the bad guy in the face.  I got the mag the rest of the way in, racked the charging handle, and put a pair of shots into another man, in track pants and a t-shirt, running toward us with an AK.  He went over his feet and fell on his face in the dirt and gravel.

             
I took stock.  Little Bob was next to me, down in the prone, shooting at anyone who moved in the dust and smoke to our north.  Larry and Nick were in the doorway, similarly throwing lead at targets of opportunity.  Juan…

             
Juan’s shattered torso lay face-down on the ground, six feet from the crater.  At least one of his arms was gone, along with both legs, and a substantial portion of his skull.

             
I was off-balance already.  My brain was rattled, and the shitstorm that this op had turned into wasn’t helping things.  I saw Juan’s destroyed body and damned near broke.

             
Now, I’m not going to get all mushy and say that Juan was one of the greatest friends I’d ever had.  He wasn’t.  We’d worked together for most of a year.  He was competent, and generally a decent fit for the team, but we weren’t all that close.  There was always a distance with Juan.  As professional as he’d always been, I still think that he hadn’t quite gotten over his rank on retirement.

             
That said, he was still a good operator.  He was still one of mine.  And he was the third man I’d lost in the last month.

             
“MOTHERFUCKERS!”  It came out as half a scream of rage, half a sob.  I started to surge to my feet, to head out into that bunch of fucking savages, and kill every last one of them, with my bare hands if it came to that.

             
Little Bob planted a meaty hand on my shoulder, staggering me and clearing my head the rest of the way.  I couldn’t go berserker.  I was the team leader, I still had five other guys to keep alive, and we were in the middle of a gunfight, not a medieval battle.  I nodded to Little Bob, took a deep breath that stank of metal, smoke, blood, and shit, and got my mind back in the fight.

             
It took me about two seconds to see that as much as I didn’t like it, we were going to have to strongpoint.  We were effectively surrounded.  I couldn’t count entirely on Hussein Ali’s militia to support us, though I suspected they were pushing further north as the Iranians and PPF in the station reacted to the attack from the north.  Retreating wasn’t really an option.  I grabbed Little Bob and yelled in his ear, probably louder than need be thanks to the ringing in my own, “Back inside!  We’re going firm!”

Chapter 29

              Nick and Larry rolled out of the doorway to let us in.  I dropped to a knee by the wall, covering for Little Bob to get inside, then followed him when he yelled at me.

             
“Sitrep!” I demanded as soon as I was in.

             
“Everybody in here is up,” Jim replied, coming into the back room with us, as Little Bob pushed toward the entrance.  “We’re all at about fifty percent on ammo.”  He looked around us.  “Juan?” he asked.

             
I shook my head.  “Fuck,” he said.  His shoulders slumped a little, but only for a moment.  We didn’t have time to mourn Juan or Paul, at least if we wanted to survive to see the next day.  “Any idea what the fuck just happened?”

             
I shrugged.  “Somebody drove a VBIED into the north side of the station.  Don’t know who it was, but I doubt it was our guys.”

             
“AQI?” he asked.

             
“Maybe.”  I looked around the building.  There wasn’t a lot to it, but that kind of simplified things.  It was still just a standard cinderblock building; it wouldn’t necessarily stop much in the way of explosives or heavy machinegun fire, but it would have to do.  “It doesn’t really matter at the moment.  We can’t move any farther in; we’d be taking fire from two sides plus the defenders in the buildings.  We’ll strongpoint here, at least until Hussein Ali and Mike can get to us.”

             
“And if they send another VBIED?” Jim asked quietly.

             
“Then we probably all die,” I replied.  There wasn’t anything else to say.  There wasn’t any magic wand that could be waved and make our situation any less fucked up.  Jim just nodded, and headed for the back.

             
I moved back to the door we’d come in through, with eyes on the wrecked courtyard and the main station.  There were four windows in the upper story of the main building, but so far we hadn’t taken any fire from them.  Apparently, the remaining personnel inside were a little too busy with all the fire coming from the other directions.

             
There was a lull, briefly, at least for Little Bob and me at that door.  There was a roaring fusillade of gunfire from the north side of the station, as the occupants engaged the fighters coming from the north.  It was answered with nearly the same volume, bullets chipping concrete and stucco off the side of the building with puffs of dust.

             
I keyed my radio.  I had to yell to be heard over the noise of the firefight outside.  “Speedy, Hillbilly,” I called.

             
“Good to hear you alive, Hillbilly,” Mike drawled over the net.  “Any casualties from that explosion?”

             
“One.  Bandito is down,” I told him.

             
There was a short pause.  “Damn,” he replied.  “What’s your status?”

             
“We are strongpointed in Building Three,” I told him.  “There’s too much fire from too many directions for us to push any farther.”

             
“Roger,” Mike replied.  “Hold tight; Hussein Ali is pushing his men up.  We’re not taking as much fire as we were, probably thanks to that explosion.  I’m going to take my team out to the east and come in to link up with you at the breach point.”

             
I was interrupted by the harsh reports of rifles from the back of the building.  “Be advised, there are hostiles to our east as well,” I told him.

             
“Roger,” he said.  “We’re on the move.  See you soon.”

             
I leaned out the door just in time to see another pair of fighters running toward the station, using the cars parked to the north as cover.  I shot one of them as he got up to dash around the front of a sedan with PPF colors.  He staggered and fell, bouncing off the sedan’s bumper to fall on his face in the dirt.  The second one ducked back behind the cab, and I hammered four rounds through the doors.  I couldn’t tell immediately if I’d hit him, but he didn’t reappear.  Cars make shitty cover.

             
I admit I was a little torn.  We had enemies inside, and whoever these guys were, they definitely weren’t our friends.  I was sorely tempted to just let them have at it and kill each other, except we needed that station at the very least, as a rallying point and a symbol that the Mullah’s people were taking over.  I also wanted Qomi alive if possible; if we could make him talk, we might be able to roll up a good portion of the Iranian operations in Basra.

             
Still, bullets coming at you pretty much outweigh any other considerations.

             
Several PG-7V rounds banged in out of the buildings to the north, slamming into the side of the station with savage
thud
s, spraying grit and shrapnel with enough force to flay the skin off a man.  I had to duck back as the overpressure slapped through the doorway.  Whoever these assholes were, they were more concerned with killing everyone in the police station than with taking it.

             
That fact got reinforced when I saw the dump truck trundling down the road and slowing to turn in toward the station.

             
Now, there was no big neon lettering that said “IED” on the truck—there never is.  But a large truck coming
into
a firefight just sort of spoke to me.  “VBIED, two o’clock, seventy-five meters!” I yelled at Little Bob, and opened fire on the cab, hoping to kill the driver before it could get too close.  A truck that big, packed with explosives, was going to make one hell of a boom.  It didn’t take much more than a heartbeat before Little Bob was joining in.

             
I saw the windshield spiderweb and shatter under our shots.  The truck wobbled, then turned abruptly and plowed into an ILAV parked just outside the station.  A moment later it blew up.

             
This time I was ready for it, having ducked back inside the door before the fucker went off.  It still rocked me.  I don’t know what they’d packed that thing with, but the blast was deafening, the shockwave shattering any windows that hadn’t gone with the first blast.  Rocks, shrapnel, and pieces of anything in its way slapped through the open door like a solid wall.  The entire building shuddered with the force of the explosion and dust sifted down from every joint in the structure.

             
I tried to shake off the ringing in my ears, and looked at Little Bob.  The big man looked a little dazed, but he gave me a thumbs-up and got his rifle back up.

             
Outside, everything was dark with dust and smoke.  Looking up, I could see the mushroom cloud of the explosion rising into the morning sky.  Everybody in Basra had to know that had gone off.  Hell, I wouldn’t have been surprised if they’d heard it in Khorramshahr, twenty-five miles away.

             
It took me a moment to realize that Mike was calling me over the radio.  “Hillbilly, Speedy!”  He sounded a little frantic.  “What’s your status?”

             
I took a second to take stock.  Little Bob and I had been closest to the blast, and we were relatively unharmed, just rattled.  Jim stuck his head in from the back room to announce that we were all up.  I keyed my radio.  “Speedy, Hillbilly,” I sent.  “We’re all up.  The explosion was on the far corner of the station.”

             
“Roger,” he replied, relief evident in his voice.  “Watch your fire to the east, we’re coming up.”

             
“Affirm.”  I yelled back at Jim, who acknowledged that he’d heard it.

             
Looking back out at the blasted hell of wreckage and burning cars that was left over from the IED blasts, I couldn’t pick out any targets.  There was too much shit in the air.  It wasn’t deterring the gunmen on either side, though, as both the Iranians and PPF inside and the unknown attackers to the north were now blindly firing into the dust and smoke.  Little Bob and I held our fire, preferring to preserve some of our ammo.

             
I noticed after a minute or so that the firing on both sides wasn’t as intense.  It was also ragged, sometimes coming in long bursts, other times fading to a few desultory shots.  I suspected that both the attackers and the defenders had taken a hit from that IED—more than likely the attackers had been closer to the blast than they’d planned for.

             
About at that point, Jim yelled from the back that they’d made contact with Mike and his boys.  I started thinking fast.  With Mike’s team with us, and apparently everybody else in disarray, we might have a chance to push this fight now.  Not getting shot or blown up was going to be interesting, since there was still plenty of shooting going on, but who wants to live forever?

             
Mike joined us at the door, and I grabbed him and pulled his ear close.  “I don’t know who these fuckheads to the north are, but I think they blew their load too soon.  They’re getting ragged, and so are the bad guys inside.  I think we can breach the station and get in if we move fast.”

             
“The guys to the north are irregulars, and I’m pretty sure they’re AQI,” Mike replied.  “We shot a few of them on the way up here.  Black turbans, and a couple of black headbands with white lettering.”

             
That sounded like AQI, all right.  “Have you guys still got one of the 27s?” I asked.

             
He nodded.  “Bo’s got one.”

             
I pointed at the wall of the main station house.  “Get him up here and have him make us a door.”

             
Mike yelled back for Bo.  The big man came squeezing through the door behind me, and the three of us cleared away from the outer door.  I’d had my bell rung enough for one day; I didn’t want to play around with the backblast from an RPG-27.

             
Bo unslung the tube from his back, cocked it, dropped to a knee just inside the door, and brought the weapon to his shoulder.  He looked back once to make sure there wasn’t anybody standing in his backblast, then triggered the rocket.

             
It hit in an eyeblink, the shaped charge blowing a pretty decent hole in the cinderblock wall.  It looked small enough it was still going to take some contortions to get through it, but it was big enough to be a breach point.

             
Bo had immediately stood up and gotten out of the doorway.  Little Bob beat me out by a hair, and then the four of us were sprinting for the opening.

             
It took only seconds to stack up next to the hole.  I yanked a flashbang out of the pouch on the back of Little Bob’s vest, pulled the pin, and lobbed it into the hole.  A bang that seemed muffled after all the explosions and gunfire of the day sounded from inside, and then we were going through.

             
There were four men in the room, most of them looking out the windows.  Little Bob all but dove in, going right.  I went left.

             
I shot the first man, who looked like he’d just come through the door, high in the chest.  He staggered back against the wall, leaving red blotches on the white stucco, and started to slide toward the floor.  I was already tracking in on the next man, who was turning away from the window.  He was dressed in the PPF’s tan uniform, with a black armor vest.  I shot him in the face.  Blood and brains splashed against the wall behind him, and he fell on his face.

             
Little Bob, Bo, and I shot the next man at the same instant.  His head jerked back and he crumpled, red splashed against the wall behind him.

             
I tracked back across the corpses.  All were evidently dead, though the first guy I’d shot was slumped against the wall in a sitting position, with his QBZ-03 still held in his hands.  I shot him once more in the top of the skull.  He slid over onto his side.  I stepped over and kicked the rifle out of his hands before stacking up on the door he’d just come through.

             
Another flashbang went through the door, and I led the way, rifle up, Mike on my heels.

             
The room was the station lobby, apparently.  It was larger than the last one, with four square concrete pillars in the center, and a desk leading to the back rooms.  A staircase led up at the far side.

             
There was no one in it.  None of the doors or windows had lines of sight on either the militia to the south and west or the AQI fighters to the north and east.  Everybody was engaged trying to fight off the attacks, apparently.

             
The cell block was quickly cleared.  The prisoners cowered when we came through, but no one offered any resistance.  We left them in their cells; there was no time to fuck around with liberating prisoners, and if we did, we were going to have to spend even more time making sure they weren’t going to stab us in the back as soon as we turned away from them.  Better to leave them where they were.

             
By now the rest of both teams were in the building, and spreading out to clear it.  I got the ICOM out of my dump pouch, where somehow it had stayed during all the chaos.  “Hassan, this is Jeff,” I sent.  “Tell Hussein Ali to shift the militia’s fire away from the station.  We are in the building, and clearing it now.”