Task Force Desperate (25 page)

“Me, too,” I replied, glancing at the coxswain. “Danny can repeat what the Agency says all he wants. I don’t think it was a very good idea to trust these assholes. Especially now that they’ve got our money.”

Imad nodded. “Head on a swivel?”

“Hand on a gun,” I replied, and tried to lean back against one of the rucks.

It was a short run to shore. The coxswains took the skiffs all the way in, beaching them in water ankle deep. There were a ragged assortment of Bongo trucks, Toyota Land Cruisers, and HiLuxes arrayed on the beach, along with what looked like entirely too many young men wearing loose clothing and shemaughs and carrying weapons. AK-47s, FALs, PKMs, RPGs, and even a couple of FN MAGs could be seen. There was a lot of firepower on that beach. I flexed my hand around the pistol grip of my rifle, and saw the rest of the team start doing similar things, checking mags were seated, quick, surreptitious brass checks. This didn’t look like a welcoming committee so much as it did an ambush.

Granted, I am a bit paranoid. I came by that paranoia honestly, though, and so did the rest of us. We got off the skiffs and started pulling our gear out, as the pack of Somalis started down the beach toward us.

I glanced around at my compatriots. Everyone was calm. Nobody was obviously ready for a fight. At first glance, the untrained eye would only have seen eleven men unloading piles of gear from two boats and carrying it onshore. Innocuous, unremarkable, and non-threatening.

But there was a tension, a coiled-spring alertness, to everyone’s movements. No one picked up more gear than they could drop easily to get at a gun. Eyes, while never settling for long, never really left the Somalis.

Ibrahim walked up to meet the heavily armed group of Somalis, and started jabbering quickly to the man in the lead, a tall, rangy type with a round face and aviator glasses on. The man handed him an FN HiPower.

One thing this particular band of skinnies wasn’t very good at was concealing their intentions. They started telegraphing their envelopment before they’d even started moving, and that was a bad idea.

A split second after the first gun had started to come up, we were all up, facing outboard, guns up and covering them. The look of shock that they all, to a man, had on their faces was fucking priceless.

Imad barked at them in Somali. At first they balked, though none of them was stupid enough to try to bring his gun up while being covered by eleven battle rifles. I was keeping my muzzle pointed at one of the MAG gunners. Those machine guns could do a lot of damage if they didn’t go down first, and there really wasn’t any cover here. If any of them so much as twitched, I was drilling them first. I could see by the look in the guy’s eyes that he understood that, and didn’t want to die.

The tall guy in the lead was pissed. He snapped something at Imad, who replied shortly. I kept watching my chosen machinegunner, who was getting more scared by the second. I was suddenly tempted to grin at him, just to see what his reaction would be. Funny, the thoughts that go through your head in such situations. One wrong twitch and this beach could turn into a bloodbath, and I was getting tempted to mess with one of the bad guys’ heads.

Imad took a step forward, menacingly raising his weapon for emphasis. It looked kind of like skinny posturing, but I knew Imad well enough to know that he had just shifted his point of aim from the tall guy’s chest to his head. A glance at the tall guy confirmed that, mirrored shades or no, he had seen that as well. He spat something angrily in Somali, and, holding out his hands, bent to put his AKS-74U in the sand.

One by one, the others followed suit. Alek stepped up beside Imad. “On the ground,” he snarled. Imad translated, jerking his weapon for emphasis. Slowly, glowering at us, the tall guy waved at his compatriots, and took a step back, away from his weapon. The rest did the same, with varying levels of alacrity. Then, one or two at a time, they got down on their stomachs in the sand. Ibrahim and the tall guy were the last to comply.

Alek jerked his head, and Tim, Larry, and Hank moved forward, digging in their gear to come out with zip ties to use as hasty handcuffs. They weren’t gentle. Hands were jerked behind the pirates’ backs and hastily though thoroughly cuffed with single zip ties. Some of them winced, and a couple of them actually cried out as Hank yanked the ties tight, but the tall guy stayed impassive, staring at Imad with what I expected was supposed to be a wordless promise of bloody retribution to come.

Bob, Nick, and Jim hurried to the trucks behind our captives, and began checking them out, while Alek and I covered the pirates and Rodrigo and Danny started collecting the weapons that were now strewn on the beach.

There was a scuffle by the trucks, and I glanced up to see Nick choke-slam a pirate against the hood of a HiLux. The kid’s weapon clattered to the ground, and Nick tossed him in the sand on the other side of the truck, then stepped over to put a boot in his back. Another quick zip-tie, and the last pirate was trussed and out of trouble. For the moment, at least.

Danny and Rodrigo were now festooned with slung weapons, and were trudging over to the trucks to deposit them in the backs, assisted by Tim, Larry, and Hank, who were now free to help. Imad, Alek and I advanced on the bound pirates, and Alek dug his boot toe under Ibrahim’s chin.

“Don’t think we’ll forget this,” he said, glowering down at Ibrahim, who was squinting up at him, his neck bent at what had to be a painful angle. “If I had more time, I’d make you and your boss pay now. But I haven’t got the time, and I’m not in the habit of shooting people with their hands tied behind their backs. So just make sure it sinks into that thick skull of yours, and tell all your buddies, too--” He crouched down to get closer to the pirate, and grabbed him by the beard, twisting his head up further to make solid eye contact. “--We’ll see that this kind of backstab doesn’t go unpunished. Rest assured. But before that, make sure nobody follows us, because if we see dust behind us, we’re likely to make life very short for anybody making it. I don’t give a fuck if they’re just watching. We’ll kill them anyway. And when we’re done with our business down south, we will come back here and kill every single living thing in this town. Clear?” Using the man’s beard as a lever, he forced Ibrahim to nod his understanding, then dropped his head in the sand and stepped over him.

Keeping an eye on the pirates, we moved to the vehicles. Nick had grabbed a HiLux with a PKM mounted in the bed, while Bob and Jim had each snagged a Land Cruiser. The Bongo wouldn’t have done all that well cross-country, so I was glad nobody had decided to try to take one of those. Alek waved everyone in next to Nick’s HiLux.

“All right, change of plans,” he said, as half of us listened while facing outboard, particularly facing the town. There was an increasing amount of movement over there, and I could make out more than a few faces turned our way, watching curiously. We were still over four hundred meters away, and there had not been any shots, so they probably couldn’t tell what was going on over here on the beach, but it was only a matter of time before some of the pirates’ buddies figured out something wasn’t right and came to investigate. Knowing Hobyo’s reputation as a pirate town, I had no doubt that if that happened, about half the population of the town would be coming at us. Maybe not quite as bad as Black Hawk Down, but pretty fucking close, and we were out here in the open with no cover. It was not a comfortable-making situation.

“Nick, how much fuel have we got?” Alek asked, pausing in his rundown of the change of plans.

“The trucks are all around three-quarters, and we’ve got about four five gallon jerry cans in the back of the Land Cruisers,” was the reply. “It’ll get us a ways away from here.”

Alek grimaced. “Not far enough, but we’ll have to chance it.” He looked over at Danny. “Where can we find fuel around here?”

The spook scratched his beard. “There aren’t exactly Shell stations on what passes for roadways here. We’d have to find somebody with a fuel truck, or a working gas station, and those are pretty few, from the briefings I’ve gotten. Especially in the last couple of years. Harardhere will almost certainly have fuel, but it’s crawling with pirates, and Al-Jabarti will probably have agents there, if not a cell of his own. The guy’s got his fingers everywhere in the area.”

“Can we make it to Harardhere on the gas we’ve got?” Alek asked Nick.

The Texan was studying the map. “Should be able to. Looks like about seventy-five, eighty miles. Some rough country along the way, but no reason we can’t make it, unless one of the trucks catches a bullet in the gas tank.”

“Uh, Alek?” Larry said. “We might want to get moving, and finish this planning session on the move.” He nodded toward the town. “We’re getting a bit more attention than I like.” He wasn’t kidding. There was a crowd gathering on the south end of town.

Alek looked up, squinting slightly. “Right. Everybody mount up, and have your comms live. We’ll finish this Oscar Mike.”

We scrambled into the vehicles, and Nick gunned the HiLux’s engine even as Bob grabbed on to the grips of the PKM to keep from getting thrown out of the bed. Sand blew up from three sets of tires in rooster tails as we fishtailed into motion.

Behind us, Hobyo exploded into activity as the pirates figured out what was happening.

Chapter 18

O
ur three vehicles bumped and rattled onto the hard-packed track that passed for a road out of Hobyo, heading southwest along the coast. Nick led the way in the white-and-rust-colored HiLux, while the two brown Land Cruisers followed in trace. This might not have been the best decision tactically, as the HiLux was the only truck with a mounted machine gun, but in our Land Cruiser in the rear, Jim pulled one of the two M60E4s out of its case strapped to a kitbag, and broke out the back window. We now had a rear gunner.

And it looked like we were going to need it. In defiance of Alek’s warning to Ibrahim, dust was rising in great plumes over the outskirts of the town, as a veritable mob of trucks and SUVs came roaring out after us. Already, a few of the more enthusiastic gunners were firing away, their muzzle flashes blazing in the dust, even though they didn’t have a hope in hell of hitting us from that distance and on the move.

Jim, wisely, held his fire. We’d likely need every round. Wasting ammo wasn’t our way, anyway.

Nick was pushing hard, and the SUVs were struggling to keep up with the HiLux. The cloud of dust we were putting up was fast getting thick enough to act as a smokescreen. Trouble was, it also pointed out where we were as effectively as a big neon arrow in the sky pointing to us. Not that there was really anywhere to hide. The Somali coast is flat and dusty, with little more than knee-high scrub. The acacia groves that had grown in Djibouti were nowhere to be seen.

Fighting the wild bouncing of the Land Cruiser, I clambered over the back seat and onto the pile of rucks in the rear, trying not to bounce into Jim too much, or hit him with my rifle. There was too much dust to see much through the scope, and we were moving too violently for anything resembling a good shot, but having another gun facing our pursuers might be a good idea.

Alek was talking over the radio, but I couldn’t hear him. Turned out that my earpiece had fallen out, so I hurriedly stuffed it back in, managing to punch myself in the ear a couple times in the process, as well as bouncing off the Land Cruiser’s roof and possibly bruising my tailbone on Larry’s ruck frame. “…lose these guys,” Alek was saying. “If we can’t do it by ten klicks from Harardhere, we’re going to have to turn and fight.”

Struggling to hold down the 60 with one hand, Jim keyed his radio. “Boss, if we try to stop these guys cold, they’ll chew us to pieces.” He squinted through the dust, which was billowing into the vehicle through the broken rear window. “I can see at least ten technicals; figure about eight to ten guys in each. I say we brake-check these mothers and see if we can chew ‘em up a little at a time.”

“Good call,” Alek came back. “Vic One, Vic Two, spread out and fall back to come on-line with Vic Three.”

No sooner had the transmission ended than I could see, through the shifting clouds of brown to our flanks, the other two trucks veer off to come alongside us. I looked over just in time to see the back window of the other Land Cruiser break, and two muzzles poke out of the dark cavern of the back. Bob was braced in the back of the HiLux, crouched behind the PKM. I turned my attention to the rear, as Alek called over the radio, “Brake-check in ten seconds. Be advised, we’re going to be moving again about ten seconds after that, so make it count. Five…four…three…”

I braced my back against the back of the seat in front of me, and leveled my rifle. Beside me, I could feel more than see Jim do the same. Then, suddenly, Tim mashed the brake, and we were shoved hard against the seat back, then lurched toward the open window as the vehicle came to a skidding stop in a billowing cloud of grit.

I recovered fast, bringing my eye to the scope, even as Jim opened up, the heavy, rapid
thumpthumpthump
of the M60 filling the back of the SUV with cordite and hot brass. I could see silhouettes, but little more through the dust, but that was all that I needed. I milked the trigger, slamming a 7.62 round into a gomer briefly visible as a darker shape in the brown before he dropped like a puppet with its strings cut. I tracked across the jumbled line of enemy vehicles, which were veering and skidding to a panicked halt, as the combined storm of fire from Jim’s M60 and Bob’s PKM shredded the lead vehicle, an old deuce-and-a-half with a DShK mounted on the cab. Targets appeared as fleeting, man-shaped shadows in the haze and confusion, and I probably missed at least as often as I hit, but I saw enough go down, hurt or dead, to be effective.

A moment later the tires were spinning, throwing up billows of sand and dust between us and our targets, and we were shoved back toward the rear door again as Tim stomped on the accelerator and started us moving again. A massive dust cloud rose behind our three vehicles, completely obscuring us from the enemy’s sight, as well as hiding whatever devastation we had wreaked on our pursuers.