Task Force Desperate (29 page)

He squatted down and pulled out his knife to point to the map. “We don’t have a lot of up-to-date intel on what areas to avoid here, so we’re going to have to play a lot of this by ear. Terrain looks mostly flat, but as we all know, flat is relative in the desert, especially when we’re dealing with vehicles. We haven’t got much in the way of parts, fluids, or even spare tires.” He traced several lines with his knife point. “These are known major roads or tracks. We want to avoid them as much as possible, and see if we can’t arrange to cross any of them that we have to at night.” There were a number of semi-amused grunts, and he shook his head. “I know, I know. Probably not going to work out that way.”

He continued to use his knife as a pointer, this time tracing a thin black line drawn with a map pen. “This looks to be the most direct path we can take to the vicinity of Baardheere, while avoiding most habitation. We can’t guarantee that we’ll miss the nomads, of course, but we can avoid any towns or villages.” The knifepoint slid along the acetate-covered paper. “We push inland from here, and pass about thirty klicks north of Geedaley before turning south again.” He circled a spot on the map. “Imagery shows what looks like some pretty rough country here; we’ll avoid it if we can, but keep an eye on it as a bolt hole if we take contact. From there,” the knifepoint continued its path, “we should have a fairly straight shot for about two hundred fifty kilometers before we start running into the rougher country near the Shebelle River. I’m not going to lie, that river is going to be a major obstacle. Imagery shows it lined with farms; we’re going to have a tough time finding a covert way across it. We may have to cover a fair amount of ground north or south before we can find a crossing point.

“Once across, we’ll continue to push west for another fifty klicks, and then turn south. Like Geedaley, I want to skirt wide around Baidoa. We’ll come out on the plains to the south, and push for the Juba north of Baardheere. Once we’re in place on the northern outskirts, it’ll be up to Danny to get us in touch with our contact.”

He looked around at us again. “We’re looking at something over seven hundred kilometers, and I want to get us there in two days. If you’re not driving or on lookout, try to get some rack time in the trucks while we move. There won’t be a lot of halts, I hope.”

He proceeded to list off a series of tentative rally points. With such a long route, there were a lot of them. We hauled out little waterproof notebooks to write them down. We went over reaction to contact and down vehicle SOPs one more time.

Alek called Hank over to go over the comm stuff, and Danny took his place on security. Hank started ticking things off on his meaty hands. “We’re low on batteries. Most of the short range radio batteries I can recharge; I brought a solar charger for that, but the big-ticket stuff is getting low. Unfortunately, I don’t know of any good way to procure more, especially in the disputed areas around here, so go easy on the radios. If you’re not a VC or a lookout, keep your radio turned off.”

There weren’t all that many questions; we had all done this before. There was no fire support piece, either. We had no support; no air, no fire support, no casevac. I don’t know about the others, but I tried not to think too hard about it.

Before we climbed back on the trucks, Alek went around to each of us, asking pertinent questions. It was a good way to make sure everybody had the plan set in their mind. Satisfied, he grunted, “Let’s go, gents. Miles to go before we sleep.”

With various creaks, groans and cracks, we got up and headed for our vehicles. I slid into the passenger seat next to Jim; I’d be taking the vehicle commander slot for the first leg. I gave Jim the brief rundown of the plan. He asked a few clarifying questions, then nodded.

“Hell of a fix we’ve gotten ourselves into out here, ain’t it?” he said, watching ahead through the dusty windshield as we lurched into motion.

Things started to go poorly within the first hour. We had to divert farther to the north around Geedaley than we’d planned, as we ran into an impenetrable wall of sand dunes. If we’d had better vehicles, not to mention more confidence in our equipment should one get stuck, we might have gone straight through, but we didn’t trust them that far. We wound up going another fifteen klicks north just to get around the dunes, and even then, there were a few iffy parts where sand started to go soft under the tires, and only skillful driving kept us from digging a truck to the axles.

We found ourselves getting into the eroded badlands that Alek had specifically talked about avoiding. The ground, while peppered with brush, was either carved into runnels and pits, or was soft riverbed-type sand where it lined the channels. We actually did get one of the SUVs stuck, and it took almost a half hour of backbreaking, sweaty work in 120-degree heat to get it moving again. More lost time.

We had to cut hard south for about fifty kilometers to make sure we got well clear. By this time, the sun was already starting to dip toward the western horizon. It would be dark before we got even half the distance we’d been hoping for.

There wasn’t any griping; there wasn’t a man here, except maybe for Bob, who hadn’t had at least eight years’ experience in the field before going to work for Praetorian. Once you leave the wire, Murphy takes over, like it or not. There’s an old saying; “No battle plan survives first contact with the enemy.” I’d revise it to say, “No battle plan survives the first step outside the wire.”

The sun disappeared under the horizon, and we continued through the brush-strewn plains, driving without lights, our NVGs lowered in front of our eyes. We might be heard, but we wouldn’t be seen, especially not by the dirt-poor nomads who lived out there in the hinterlands. It was not the most comfortable I’ve ever been driving at night, especially since we didn’t have any IR headlights. We were driving on ambient light alone, and there was precious little of that.

Finally, as the terrain started to get bumpy again, and we almost lost the HiLux to another sand hole, Alek called a halt. We’d get moving again just before first light.

“Fuck.”

It was the first word either Jim or I had uttered in about two hours. It also seemed entirely appropriate, given the noise we had just heard.

“Coconut, Kemosabe,” Jim called over the radio. It was his turn in the passenger seat. In the back, Larry and Hank had been awakened by the loud bang from the undercarriage. “Need to call a halt. We’ve got a mechanical problem back here.”

I heard Alek’s voice, tinny and quiet, through the handset that Jim had attached to the radio. “Roger. We’ll be back at your pos in a second.”

I pushed open my door, which creaked and rasped from all the dust and sand in the hinges, and levered myself out into the only slightly more unbearable heat outside. The A/C in the truck worked, but only barely. I knelt down in the dirt and sand, shoving a low, prickly bush out of the way and peered into the shadows underneath.

“Yep,” I called out heavily. “Axle’s broke like a fucking twig. We ain’t going anywhere.”

We were still thirty klicks shy of the Shabelle River. Every direction was the same dun, green-spotted plain. The land was a lot flatter than I had expected from the imagery, but that didn’t mean it was smooth. We’d hit a rut, and the axle had snapped, loudly and finally. I pulled myself back up tiredly. My buttocks ached from the hours spent in the vehicle.

The HiLux came back around in a wide turn, and rolled to a stop a few yards away. Alek got out tiredly, as Larry and Hank clambered out of our stricken heap. “What’s up?” Alek asked.

“Broken axle,” I replied. Larry and Hank were already pulling gear and supplies out of the back.

“Son of a bitch.” There was almost no inflection in Alek’s voice. “Guess we’re spread-loading.”

“Yep,” Jim replied, pulling his own ruck out and starting to haul it toward the HiLux. “Clown car time.”

Danny and Imad were already climbing out of the other SUV and coming over to help. We’d have to strap more of the rucks to the outside and tops of the vehicles, to have room for men inside. Not just clown car time; it was gypsy wagon time.

I reached into the back for the shitty tool bag that we’d found under the floorboards. “Might as well strip it,” I said. “If one of the others breaks down, we should have some spare parts--spare tires at least.”

“Good idea,” Alek said. “Let’s siphon the gas tank, too.”

Stripping an SUV in the middle of the desert with minimal tools really is as hard as it sounds. Maybe harder. The worst part was getting the tires off. We didn’t have a jack, and ended up having to work out a lever arrangement with some pipes that had been in the back of the HiLux when we grabbed it, that fortunately we hadn’t thrown out. Finding a place to carry all the crap we stripped off the kaput Toyota was even worse. We now had eleven men, their weapons and gear, and spare parts, tires, water, and fuel, to cram into or onto two vehicles.

“We’re going to have to go more slowly,” Nick said, standing next to the cab of the HiLux. “I’d say no more than ten miles an hour; five would be more like it. Especially with the extra weight, these trucks aren’t going to last much longer against this abuse.”

Alek started to lean against the fender of the defunct SUV, then snatched his arm away with a curse. Jim chuckled tiredly. “Metal tends to get hot in the sun, Alek,” he pointed out. Alek flipped him off.

“It’s already midday, and we’re not even across the Shebelle yet,” Danny pointed out. “Can we afford to lose the time?”

“We’ll lose even more time if we lose another truck,” Nick pointed out reasonably. Danny nodded, scratching his salt-and-pepper beard. He looked at Alek and shrugged.

“So much for two days,” he said with a rueful chuckle.

Alek half-grinned, half-grimaced. “Par for the course. I guess I was being too optimistic.”

I grunted as I heaved another tire into the bed of the HiLux. “How many times have I told you? Optimism just gets you screwed. Accept that the world is fucked, that everything is doomed, and when things work out, you’re pleasantly surprised.”

“Okay, Voice of Doom, we get it,” Alek retorted. I laughed at him as I pointlessly dusted my hands, which were encased in tac gloves anyway.

Alek looked around. “We probably should hold here until dark, anyway,” he mused. “We’re less than twenty klicks from the river. If the imagery isn’t lying--” he tried to glare at me before I could add any of my words of wisdom on the likelihood of that “--there should be a place to ford pretty much straight ahead.”

The Webi Shabelle, or Shebelle River, starts in the Ahmar Mountains in Ethiopia, and meanders southeast into Somalia, before turning southwest to parallel the coast past Mogadishu, until it joins with the Juba River and flows into the sea just north of Kismayo. Along with the Juba, it is one of two primary sources of water and irrigation in Somalia. Its floodplain could be a breadbasket, but the chaos in Somalia since the fall of Barre’s regime in 1991, coupled with destructive flooding and severe droughts, had taken a severe toll on Somali farming.

We were hoping that some of that destruction of farms might have opened up a place for us to cross relatively unobserved.

Our two remaining vehicles rolled across the Shabelle floodplain, trying to drive as close to silently as possible.

Of course, there’s only so quiet you can make a vehicle, especially at night. The air cools, most of the daytime sounds die away, and any sounds that are made travel farther, and stand out more jarringly. The internal combustion engine is not a fundamentally quiet mechanism, and one that has been subjected to the rigors of operating in East Africa is even less so. Add to that the crunch of gravel and sand under the tires, the creak of the suspension, and the occasional bump of equipment or weapons against metal or plastic when a bump is hit, and it gets even worse. The slower, the better.

However, we couldn’t afford to go too slowly, as the floodplain was soft and sandy, and we were constantly at risk of getting stuck. Get stuck out here, and we were made, no question about it. We probably wouldn’t be able to get unstuck and across the river before daylight.

The preoccupation with stealth, while we had been tearing pretty handily across the desert until the axle snapped, was due to the fact that the Shabelle floodplain was some of the extremely limited fertile farmland in central Somalia, and so was thoroughly lined with farms. If anyone was up and about, which was still possible, they’d notice us. We didn’t want any word of our whereabouts getting to the bad guys, whether by force or bribery. As for our presence, we were pretty sure that was already known; shooting the shit out of the Hobyo pirates had to have made the word-of-mouth version of the six-o’clock news, which anyone who has been in the Third World can attest, is faster than anything on the 24-hour news cycles back in the States, even before half the cable companies went under.

But nothing said we had to make it any easier for the bastards.

The HiLux seemed to slow ahead of us, and then slewed hard to the left, then the right. Nick had hit a soft spot, and had to act fast to wrench the truck clear of it before he bogged down. At the wheel of our Land Cruiser, Jim made sure to go wide around it.

I was riding shotgun at that point, having relieved Danny about an hour before. I checked the GPS and the map with my key-fob-sized red lens, under my shemaugh to cover any light from being seen outside the cab. We were just about to our near-side rally point. I keyed my radio. “Coconut, Hillbilly.”

“Roger, Hillbilly, I see it,” Alek called back, before I could say anything. “Another two hundred meters.” Which was damn near spitting distance, and Jim took his foot off the gas. We were barely idling as it was, but we still had enough forward momentum to coast to a stop near the HiLux.

Ahead, I could barely see the darker line of the low trees that covered the banks of the river. The moon wasn’t supposed to rise for another hour, so we didn’t have a lot of light to work with, aside from IR floods from PEQ-15s. There was enough to see that we were a good distance away from any human habitation. The desert was flat and empty, dotted with the dark spots of the ubiquitous low bushes.