Task Force Desperate (10 page)

I keyed my radio. “Coconut, Hillbilly. Kemosabe and I are in position. One tango down at the breach point.”

“Roger,” came Alek’s muted voice. “There’s some activity at the front; looks like they heard something, but they’re not sure what.” There was a pause. “Shiny, Monster, you in position? We’ve got to kick this pig soon.”

“This is Monster. Thirty seconds.”

“We’ve got company,” Jim hissed. I started moving toward the breach point, even as I heard voices raised in Arabic. They’d spotted the body. “Coconut, Kemosabe. We’re made; we’ve got to go loud, now.”

“Do it.” There was no hesitation in Alek’s reply, and I immediately heard the muted cracks of suppressed fire toward the front. I went in the breach point fast but smooth, coming around the crumbling edge of the wall with my rifle already coming level with the bright thermal silhouette of one of the tangos, who was walking warily toward his buddy’s corpse, his AK already half-lifted. The bright IR dot settled, and I squeezed the trigger twice. With two hushed
crack
s blending almost into one, the tango crumpled.

Jim was right on my heels, and slammed two rounds into another tango coming around the corner of the building, just as I shot two more behind the first, tapping one in the chest twice, then shifting to the second as fast as my brain registered that the first was down.

Colton and Nick were coming through behind us, to take inner cordon duties; making sure that not only did no squirters get out through our breach point, but that when we went in the house, nobody came in behind us and shot us in the back. They took a knee at the corner of the first house, positioned to cover the west and south sides. Jim and I dashed for the door.

It wasn’t much, just hollow wood, so I didn’t even have to reach for the sledgehammer strapped to my back; I just kicked the door in, planting my boot about an inch below the handle. The latch broke away from the door and splintered the jamb, then I was in, Jim on my heels, my rifle up and ready to end anything that looked like it was going to put up a fight.

The hallway went the full length of the building, with doors on either side, most all of them closed. I simply flowed to the first one, kicked it open, and went in, immediately clearing the corner in front of me, then sweeping across the room. Jim was on my ass through the door, button-hooking around to cover the other corner. Nothing. Mark the room, move on.

We came back out into the hallway, and into a shitstorm.

Apparently, one or more of the rooms down the hall were sleeping quarters for tangos. They were spilling out into the hall, in various levels of undress, with weapons. One of them saw me come out of the door and yelled, raising his pistol.

I was already halfway out into the hallway. I just kept going, charging toward the opposite door, even as I smashed the shouter to the floor with a pair of suppressed shots. I slammed my shoulder against the door and it splintered and gave, spilling me into the opposite room. There was another gomer lying on a mat on the floor, reaching for his Kalashnikov, and I shot him, even as Jim opened up from the last room.

A quick glance showed me that this room was clear; somebody was looking out for me. One-man clears are very, very inadvisable. I moved to the door, leaned out into the hall, and added my fire to the devastation that Jim was already causing. I tracked my muzzle back and forth across the tangled mass of bodies in the hallway, pumping rounds into heat signatures. My mag went dry, the bolt locking back, and I ducked back into the room, ripped the empty out, and rocked in a fresh one before sending the bolt home and getting back into the fight.

I leaned out just in time to see Jim put a single round into the head of the last tango moving, who was trying to crawl away. With no more movement in the hallway, I crouched to retrieve the empty mag, and slipped it into my drop pouch before marking the room I was in. I looked across at Jim, who nodded, still covering down the hallway. I came out of my room and headed for the next.

The rest of the sweep was quick and uneventful. Apparently, the gomers had all piled out into the hallway at once, making things much easier for us. Three rooms were obviously sleeping quarters, with the floors practically carpeted in sleeping mats. Another looked like it had been a kitchen.

“Coconut, Hillbilly. Building Three is clear,” I called. “No hostages, approximately twenty tangos, no unknowns, two shooters up.”

“Building One, clear,” Alek replied. “No hostages, two tangos, no unknowns, four shooters up. Moving to Building Four.”

“Roger. Moving to Building Four.” I tapped Jim on the shoulder, where he was covering the front door. He came smoothly to his feet and followed as I headed back to the door we’d breached on the way in. “Hidalgo, Key-Lock, this is Hillbilly. Two coming out.”

“Roger, come ahead,” Nick called. I wouldn’t have exited the building until I got the go-ahead from the inner cordon. Doing otherwise is a good way to get shot by your own team.

I led the way, rounding the corner and heading for the north end of building two, keeping low to avoid any fire from the windows. There were no lights on, and it was dark enough inside the compound that I didn’t figure they could see us, but it never paid to take chances. In less than a minute we joined Alek, Rodrigo, Bob, and Larry at the front door. Alek was in the front of the stack, where he preferred, and he kicked in the door and went in as we fell in at the rear.

There was no hallway; the entire building was one large room, with scattered mats on the floor, and several stacks and crates of weapons and comm gear. There were only three gomers. One of them lifted a FN 5-7 and was smashed to the floor by at least three pairs of shots. A second ran toward us, shouting, “Allahu akhbar!” and met the same fate. The third stood there, waiting for us.

We didn’t have our lights on, the NVGs were enough. There was a lantern in the room, illuminating the jihadi flags on the walls, including the black and white al-Shabaab war flag. There was a table covered in pictures, two laptops, and several weapons, Kalashnikovs and Makarovs.

It was also enough light to see the mocking smile on the third terrorist’s face, as he watched us, his hands at his sides. Bob and Larry started to glide along the wall toward him, as the rest of us kept our rifles trained on him. He just stood there, that small smile on his face.

Just before Bob got within arm’s length of him, he said something in Somali, smiling broadly, then raised his hands and shouted “Allahu akhbar!” I saw his hand curled around something, and yelled, “Trigger!”

Six suppressed shots still made a pretty impressive noise as Mohammed Khasam’s head was splashed into a red mist of blood, brain, and bone, and he dropped to the floor like a puppet with its strings cut. Ordinarily, bullet impacts will not cause explosives to detonate by themselves, but none of us wanted to take that chance, or that a suicide vest would stop the rounds and give him time to hit the trigger. When he collapsed and did not explode, we all breathed a tiny sigh of relief. Larry moved up and carefully removed the trigger from his hand. He held it up; it was a garage door opener.

“Figure he’s still live,” Alek said quietly. “We’ve got five minutes. Tear this place apart. Kemosabe, let’s arrange a tragic bomb maker’s accident.”

Rodrigo and I took security on the door, while the rest of the team went to work. Jim checked the corpses for explosives first. The runner had had a grenade, which he hadn’t pulled the pin from. Khasam had nothing on him, but Larry called Jim over a moment later.

The IED was under a tarp next to several crates of PETN. It would have been a hell of a boom, and none of us would have left much to get sent home. Maybe some teeth, if they could be found. It made Jim’s job easier, though.

“Don’t even fuck with it,” he said, picking up the trigger from where Larry had set it on the table. “We’ll get a decent distance away, and use this on the way out.”

Alek and Bob were going over the materials on the table, shoving pictures and documents into drop pouches. How much of it would be useful, we didn’t know. It didn’t matter. The longer we were on the target site, the more chance Murphy had to rear his ugly head.

We had been on-site for about four and a half minutes when Alek keyed his radio. “Cleghorn, Coconut. Ready for exfil, meet us at the gate.” He let off, then keyed again. “All stations, collapse on the gate.”

There was a chorus of acknowledgments, then Alek was behind me, thumping me on the shoulder. I went out the door we had come in, rifle still up and ready. Nothing. An IR light flashed from the far corner, and I returned the flash. A moment later, Tim and Hank came around the end of the east building, where they had been holding inner cordon duties. I heard footsteps behind me, where Rodrigo was covering, as Nick and Colton closed up with the rest of the team.

A moment later, we heard the rumble of a diesel engine, and then the 3-ton was out front, with Jon and Chad in the back, manning two of our M60E4s, which they had laid over the top of the slats around the bed. It wasn’t fancy, and accuracy was going to suffer, but it would work for a hasty technical.

The guys who had been on inner cordon set up hastily on a knee around the truck, while the rest of us piled on the back. The bed was positively bristling with weapons by the time the last two got on. Alek beat on the roof of the cab, and Cyrus hit the accelerator, speeding us out of there.

Chapter 8

T
he team room was quiet. Colton and Nick were going through the pictures and laptops we had taken from the target site. Most of the rest of us were sitting on our cots, sweating and cleaning our rifles.

Something was bugging me. I tried to just focus on weapons maintenance, but finally gave up. The M1A didn’t get all that dirty anyway. I finished putting my rifle back together, stood up, and walked over to Alek’s cot.

“We need to talk,” I said.

He looked up from his OBR. “Uh-oh. Have I been leaving the toilet seat up again?”

“Oh, fuck off,” I replied, as he laughed. “We’ve got some serious shit to discuss.”

“All right, all right,” he said, still chuckling. “Let me finish putting this back together, and then we’ll have a sit-down.” I went back to my bunk, shaking my head.

It didn’t take long. Alek put the rifle back together with a speed and ease born of long practice, then came over and sat on Bob’s cot, across from me. “All right, Jeff, what’s on your mind?”

I leaned forward, my elbows on my knees. “What would we have done if we hadn’t schwacked everybody on that target site last night? What if one or more of them had surrendered?”

“We’d have grabbed them,” he replied.

“And done what?” I asked. “We could lock ‘em up in a room in that garage out back, but then what? None of us are trained interrogators. For fuck’s sake, we’ve got twenty-five guys on the ground, hanging in the wind, fuckin’ blind. We can’t afford to take detainees, at least not for any length of time. We’ve got to keep ‘em fed and watered, at least, and we don’t have the time or the facilities to interrogate them effectively. And I’m not sure I’m comfortable with the options I could come up with.”

For a long moment, Alek sat there and thought, looking at his hands. “You’re right,” he said quietly. He stood up and started toward the comm end of the room. “Come on. We’ve got a call to make.”

It was the middle of the night back in the States, but when the Colonel came on the satellite link, he didn’t look like a man who had just been awakened. I suspected that he had been up already. “What’s up, Alek?” he asked.

“Problems,” Alek replied. “We hit Khasam’s hideout last night, killed everybody and we’re sifting through what the site exploitation brought out. Fortunately, none of them surrendered, so we didn’t have detainees to deal with.

“Jeff brought it up just now, and I agree with him,” he continued. “If the Agency wants us to do the dirty work on the ground, they need to provide some more support. We’re undermanned for this, and we have zero room for error. We also don’t have the training, facilities, or gear we need for the intel side of this operation. If they want us to find these guys, we need intel, we need backup, and, if it comes to it, we need somewhere to take detainees for processing. We can’t do it. We don’t have the time or the logistics.”

Heinrich shook his head. “I’ve been trying, Alek. So far I’ve been stonewalled on most of it. They’re telling me that there are no assets available in that part of the world.”

“Bullshit,” I put in. “There was a JSOC compound at that base, and they expect us to believe that they don’t have any assets at all?” I folded my arms. “Bullshit.”

“Look, gents,” the Colonel said, “there’s a lot of politics going on behind all this. I don’t know all of it, but it’s putting a real monkey-wrench in trying to get you guys more support. The military has been warned to keep out of Djibouti’s territorial waters and airspace. I’ve been told it’s because of worries about casualties, but the fact is, I just don’t know.” He gusted a sigh. “Look, get me a list of what you need, and I’ll make a few more calls. Maybe I can get somewhere this time.”

“We need real-time sat and electronic intel,” Alek said, ticking points off on his fingers. “We need everything they’ve got on recent terrorist movements in-country. I know that everything those boys in Lemonier saw got sent back to the States and backed up. We need all of it, if we’re going to come anywhere near finding those hostages. You know, I know, and they know that we’re dealing with a finite time schedule here.” He tapped another finger. “We need somewhere to process and deliver detainees. I don’t care if it’s offshore, over the border, or in the middle of Bumfuck, Egypt, we need somebody here who is trained on this sort of thing. We’re trigger-pullers, not interrogators.”

He took a deep breath. “And, on top of all that, we need to know what the plan is to get these guys out when and if we find them. They’re talking something close to 200, most of whom will be in need of medical attention and transport. Who’s coming for them? Where? Where’s extract for this operation? We
have
to have that information, and we need it yesterday.”