Task Force Desperate (49 page)

His pistol had just cleared his lapel when I shot him.

The round hit him just to the left of the bridge of his nose, and blew the back of his skull out, splashing the white thobe of the Bedouin-dressed man with blood and brains. In the next second, the other three were shot dead, before they could do the same.

We didn’t stop to reflect on what had just happened. That could come later, provided there was a later. As we moved to the next door, leading out into the hallway, the radio came to life again.

“Coconut, Speedy,” Mike called. “We’ve got Yemeni security forces at the gate. They’ve got armor, and we can hear at least one helo incoming. We have to go, now.”

Chapter 34

“R
oger,” Alek responded. “All callsigns, primary target is down, I say again, primary target is down. We are moving to extract. Fall back by pairs to the west wall.” He turned from the door we were stacking on. “Back the way we came!” he said, heading for our breach point. “We’ll use the building to shield us from the armor.”

We pounded across the room to the shattered door, and stacked on it quickly. A bare second’s pause to ensure everyone was ready, and we flowed out and into the hallway. Jim almost collided with the hajji who had led the way up the stairs.

The man wasn’t ready for us to come boiling out of the conference room, and staggered back, staring in shock. Jim muzzle-thumped him in the throat, squeezing the trigger even as his suppressor crushed the guy’s larynx, blowing fragments of his spine out the back of his neck.

He dropped like a rock, clearing the guy behind him, who was bringing up his SIG 550 as I shot him in the head. It was a fast shot, and just blew out the side of his skull. He spasmed in pain, his finger tightening on the trigger, and shot Jim in the leg as he fell.

Jim grunted and staggered, as the 5.56 round blew a chunk of meat and blood out the back of his calf. Alek and I raked the rest of the fire team coming up the stairs, pumping shots as fast as we could, just making sure that there was a body in the sights each time we squeezed the trigger. Several of our shots hit body armor, but enough were placed well enough to kill or wound, driving the team back down the stairs, stumbling over the bodies of their dead, or their thrashing, screaming comrades.

Larry got to Jim before his leg collapsed under him, whipping out the tourniquet that Jim had strapped to his vest and hastily wrapping it high around Jim’s wounded leg. Jim leaned on him, his rifle pointed, if somewhat shakily, at the corner where anyone coming from the other stairway would have to expose themselves.

“Can you move?” Alek asked, facing toward the opposite corner, while I covered the stairs.

“Damn straight, I can,” Jim growled. “I might be a little slower, but it’s either that or stay here and die.”

“Fucking right,” Alek said. “Jeff, you take point. Larry, you stay with Jim, I’ll take rear. Let’s get down the stairs and out of this building before the Yemeni Army decides to come in.”

I didn’t wait for much of an acknowledgement. Larry reached out and thumped me in the back of the shoulder with a meaty fist, as I pulled my last frag out of my vest and prepped it. “Frag out,” I called over my shoulder, and chucked it down the stairs, hard.

There was a burst of panicked shouting in Arabic from below, cut off as the grenade exploded. I followed the jarring explosion down the stairs, intent on not giving the bad guys time to recover.

There were still five of them alive at the base of the stairs, though two of them were rolling on the floor screaming, clutching at mangled or flat-out blown-off limbs. I worried about the ones that were still standing, halfway down the hall, trying to shake off the concussion and bring their AKs to bear. I shot two of them, and a shot from above me took out the third. I glanced over my shoulder. Larry had both hands on his FAL, and Jim was holding on to the drag handle on the back of his vest to hold himself up as he hobbled after him. Good thing Larry’s a big guy.

I drove on, pushing through the short hallway to the side door. “Speedy, Hillbilly, four coming out,” I called. “Kemosabe is hit, but mobile.”

“Roger, we’ve got you covered,” Mike replied. “We are at the south wall, taking heavy fire from the gate. Rock is down. We’re going to have to blow the wall and go out this way. We’ll rendezvous at the BLS.”

“I copy, Speedy,” Alek replied. “Shiny, we’re coming to you, north side of building one.”

“Roger, come ahead,” Bob answered. “Make it fast, we can see the helo. Looks like a Kamov.” That was some good news, anyway. The Ka-29 couldn’t carry more than about six people; they weren’t going to be dropping troops on us with it, at least. On the other hand, it could be fitted with a minigun or cannon, which would be a bad day. Better to just get the hell away from it.

“Let’s go,” Jim yelled. “I’ll hobble as fast as I can. Let’s blow this Popsicle stand.”

I dug in and sprinted to the northeast corner of the big building, pivoting and dropping to a kneeling stance as soon as I got to it. The Yemenis weren’t advancing into the compound very quickly, thanks to Mike’s fire, but that wouldn’t last long, especially if Charlie was out of the picture. Larry and Jim ran/limped past me, heading toward the far end of the building, then Alek ran past all of us to take point. I held on the corner for a few more moments, and then started after them.

We ran through Bob’s position, past Chris and Marcus, and headed toward the breach in the wall, as they got up and came after us. Some fire was starting to snap past us from the gate, but it was unaimed and didn’t come close.

Coming around the corner of the three-story building that butted up against the west wall, I saw that Chris and Marcus hadn’t fucked around. There was a thirty-foot hole blasted in the wall, and it looked like part of the corner of the building had taken some damage from flying debris. There were fragments of concrete and brick strewn around for a hundred feet. The crater was still smoking.

Alek rounded the crumbled edge of the wall, as Larry popped the opposite direction. There was a crackle of gunfire, and Larry yelled, “We’ve got company!”

Alek grabbed Jim and kept going down the length of the wall, heading for the road. I dropped to a knee beside Larry and took up firing on the hazy shapes of armed men coming toward us from the north. Bob skidded to a halt next to me, but I yelled at him, “We’ve got this! Go! We’ll catch up!” He looked at me for a second. I could see him out of the corner of my eye, even as I took a shot at another armed silhouette and missed. Then he was gone, sprinting toward the road.

There was more gunfire from behind me, back in the compound. I risked a glance back to see what looked like Mike’s team trying to bound along the inside of the wall, laying down fire with the remaining rounds for the M60. One of them was lugging a body in a fireman’s carry. It looked like Bo, which meant the body was probably Charlie.

“We’ve got to hold,” I hollered at Larry, over the noise that seemed to be tearing apart the night itself. “Mike’s coming.”

“He’d better hurry the hell up,” Larry yelled back over his shoulder.

I scrambled back to the hole in the wall, dropping to the prone in the crater, to try to help cover Mike’s team’s fallback. There were Yemeni troops starting to fan out into the compound, following an AML-90 armored car. They were shooting, but not heavily. They seemed more interested in keeping the AML between them and Johnny’s M60. Most of their shooting was definitely of the “spray and pray” variety, which helped. It didn’t look like they could see very well, either; no night vision.

We didn’t have anything that could even scratch that armored car, at least not without getting way too damned close to it. The fact that Mike wasn’t using his MGL told me he was already out of grenades for it.

I lined up the first Yemeni soldier who got a little too aggressive, and squeezed the trigger. He dropped, and his buddies scrambled to cram behind the AML. I kept up single shots whenever I saw a target, as Mike, Bo, and Johnny came closer. Mike was on point, and Johnny was taking up the rear, firing short bursts from the M60, and immediately moving. The AML was returning fire, but it was slow and inaccurate; I could only guess that they didn’t really have night sights on the vehicle, either, which was good news, such as it was.

Mike led the way into the breach, pounding past me and up to Larry’s side. Larry was putting out a constant barrage of fire to the north; it sounded like the bad guys in that direction weren’t getting the message. A moment later, Bo staggered through, carrying Charlie’s body over his shoulders. I pointed him toward Alek, Jim, and the rest, down by the road, and he kept going. Johnny dropped down next to me with the 60. He was wrestling with a 150-round “nutsack,” one of the soft-sided ammo carriers we’d gotten for the machine guns. “Last belt,” he gasped.

I drilled four more shots toward the AML and the advancing Yemeni infantry. I couldn’t tell if I’d hit anything or not. The soldiers didn’t seem to be getting any more eager to charge forward, and their sporadic fire was still high and wild. It was the AML I was worried about. That 90mm gun could make it a very bad night.

However, even as the air above us started to be ripped by bursts of 7.62 fire, the main gun stayed silent. I guess they had orders not to blow up too much of the city, at least apart from the damage we’d already done, but at the time, we couldn’t take the chance. “Larry, everybody’s through, let’s go!” I bellowed. My throat hurt from the yelling, the smoke, and the dust, but I hardly noticed it. I would later.

“Peel off!” Mike shouted, and slapped Larry on the shoulder. Larry got up immediately and trotted toward the road, while Mike kept shooting at whoever was trying to get at us from the north. He yelled over his shoulder, “Jeff, get ready to shift your fire north!”

I came up to a knee, as Mike turned and pounded past, and turned up the alley. The bad guys weren’t trying to advance up the alley, as it turned out, but they were peeking around the corner and trying to get shots off. I discouraged that by sending 7.62 rounds skipping off walls and blowing concrete in their faces whenever they tried it.

I gave Mike ten seconds, then turned, thumping a fist into Johnny’s leg as I went, and he took my place, as I sprinted, my knees protesting and my lungs burning, south toward the road. Ahead of me, Larry and Mike had already stopped halfway, and were waiting for us to clear them before they opened fire. My hearing was so shot by that time I couldn’t hear Johnny running behind me, but Larry started shooting, so he must have turned and started back.

I pounded to the end of the wall, to find Alek kneeling behind it, and the road filled with thick white smoke. He waved me toward the road and the brush beyond. “Armor at the intersection!” he yelled at me. “Keep moving!”

I did, running across the road in the haze of HC smoke, and skidding to a stop next to Chris, who was on a knee behind a low tree, watching back toward where we had come. I bumped him and took his place as he fell back toward the shore.

Shortly, Mike, Larry, and Johnny came sprinting out of the haze, followed by the errant cracks of wild, unaimed gunfire, with Alek taking up the rear. I waved them past me, toward the shore. I’d take the rear.

Just as Alek ran past, the helo arrived, and things got more complicated.

It roared over, low, the downblast from its coaxial rotor shredding and tattering the smoke that was hiding us from the limited eyes of the ground forces. It didn’t fire, but looking up I saw that there was indeed a weapon slung underneath the bulbous cockpit. I hoped it wasn’t as big as I was afraid it was, but even if it was a light machine gun, it spelled bad news.

“Cover!” Alek bellowed at the top of his lungs. Except there wasn’t any. We might be able to dodge the helo in the bushes, but we were exposed on the long flat run to the beach.

“Fire on it!” I yelled, as I tracked the helo with my own rifle and started suiting actions to words. “Get some lead on that motherfucker!” I remembered learning about VC and NVA counter-aircraft techniques, some of which were still taught in the Basic Reconnaissance Course. It was a long shot, but there was a chance to bring down a helo with massed small arms fire.

In a staggered line leading toward the beach, the teams started opening fire, even as we fell back toward the water. I was banking on the Kamov being thin-skinned enough that we could either hit something vital in the engine, or kill or maim the pilot. It swung out over the water, and started in on its first firing pass. Most of our smoke was gone, torn away by the helo’s low passage. I tried to ignore the blossoming muzzle flash in its nose as it bore down on us. Gouts of sand and gravel were blasted into the air along the beach as the pilot walked his fire toward us.

I was aiming for the windscreen, dumping the magazine as fast as I could squeeze the trigger and get the muzzle back on target. Nearby, Johnny was dumping the last of his M60 ammo into the oncoming helicopter.

The Ka-29 suddenly banked sharply, or was it veering out of control? It almost half turned over, seemed to right itself drunkenly, then nosed down and started to drop. Somebody must have hit the pilot. Unfortunately, it was dropping straight toward us.

Johnny and I had nowhere to run but back toward the road to try to evade the plummeting twelve tons of metal, fuel, and spinning rotor blades. As we scrambled out of the way, more shots crackled overhead. I glanced toward the road, and saw two AML-90s rolling toward us, firing their coax machineguns, followed by what looked like close to a company of Yemeni infantry.

The helo hit with an earth-shaking impact, the fuselage crumpling and the rotors spinning into whirling shrapnel as they bit into the earth. Dust and sand blew outward with a hammering shockwave that knocked both of us off our feet. Sparks and flame started to pour out of the engine cowling as the engine seized and caught fire, then the fuel tanks exploded.

A massive orange fireball lit up the night, and the heat hit us like a wall. I scrambled up on my feet, grabbing Johnny by his kit as I went, and shoved him toward the west, away from the Yemeni troops. A glance showed they’d been rocked by the crash, and it would take them a few precious moments to get their shit together after that. I was determined to take advantage of the shock.