Alone and Unafraid (American Praetorians Book 3) (33 page)

You sometimes have to make do with what you’ve got, though, and we had minutes at most to get set.  I got my team and the Project guys set around the gate, using the buildings and the remains of the HESCOs as best as we could, as Mike’s guys brought the trucks inside.
Jim and I scattered the handful of Project types through our ambush.  We didn’t want them all in one place, in case they got any funny ideas. I got the M60E6s set pointing out the gate, and on the south flank, aimed along the wall to cut down anyone coming through the gate.  We had a hasty L-shape on the gate; it wasn’t much, but it was going to have to do.  The headlights of the oncoming trucks were starting to cast shadows inside the compound.

They were moving pretty fast, though the recent rains meant they weren’t kicking up a lot of dust. 
From my position on the roof of the low, concrete building facing the gate, I peered through my scope at the lead vehicle, and laid my crosshairs just above the headlights.  The round would strike slightly lower, but bullets tend to be deflected upward when they hit windshield glass.

We waited, letting them come in.  The closer they got, the better chance we had of killing enough of them to break their cohesion.

Apparently, Carnivore, or one of his cronies, didn’t agree.

A 416 roared to my right, the muzzle flash strobing out into the dark, quickly joined by three more.  The trucks were still a good seven hundred meters off.

“Motherfuckers,” I snarled, settling behind my scope and adjusting my hold.  The trucks had braked, hard, and were spreading out to avoid colliding with each other.  I steadied the illuminated reticle, took a breath, let it out, and squeezed off the first shot.  The rifle bucked, but the reticle didn’t move much, though the contrast of the headlights and the darkness made it impossible to see if I’d hit.  Instead, I just got the sights back on, and squeezed off another shot.

The sound of the ambush, such as it was, thanks to those assholes, was a combination of full-auto fire from the Project idiots, and measured 7.62 fire from the rest of us. 
It was also the sound of failure, in spite of the lack of return fire.

The ambush might have been a success if we’d sucked them in far enough to hurt them badly.  The survivors might have scattered, giving us time to break out and escape.  As it was, we’d probably done little more than startle them, and alert them to the fact there was resistance here.  They were spreading out as they pulled back, even the truck I’d shot at.  If we’d managed to hurt them at all, it damned sure wasn’t enough.

“What the fuck!” I all but screamed.  I found I was shaking, both with rage and the realization that trying to extract these dogfuckers was now almost certainly going to get us all killed.

“Hey, you never specified how the ambush was getting kicked off,” one of the Project fucks said sullenly.

“I shouldn’t have had to!  It’s common fucking sense!  Or do some of you actually think you could be remotely effective with a 5.56 on full auto at seven hundred meters?”  I had to force myself to calm down.  As fucked as the situation was, freaking the fuck out about it wasn’t going to change anything, and it sure as hell wasn’t going to help our chances.

I looked back out at the ISIS vehicles.  I had absolutely no doubt that they were ISIS.  We were in southern Al Anbar, in Collins’ last redoubt.  No one else was positioned right, or had the reason to come out here.  One of the Project guys who’d known about the factory must have spilled his guts before they sawed his head off with a dull knife.
  They also had to know something about what might be here, otherwise they would never have tried to come out in the dark.

“Hey, who the fuck cares?” Carnivore said.  “They’ve pulled off.  We can mount up and get out of here to the south.”

“No, we can’t,” I said, pointing out into the desert.  There was a group of vehicles speeding off to the south, out of effective range of our weapons.  There wasn’t really anything down there short of Karbala, which was solidly in Jaysh al Mahdi hands, so the only reason they could be going that way was to set up a position to intercept us if we tried to go out that way.  “If we’d hurt them badly enough, we might have been able to get out while they sorted themselves out.  As it is, they just got early warning, and now it’s too late.

“I guarantee there are more
on their way, and they’re not far off.  This is now the Alamo.”

We had a breather, though not a long one.  “We’ve got to get some fighting positions around the perimeter,” I said.  “We’ll have to knock some loopholes in the walls.  They won’t stop too much heavy stuff, but they’ll stop small arms and most machine gun fire.”  I looked over at the Project guys, who had clumped together behind the gate positions.  “Since you fuckers want to try to throw a monkey wrench into this operation, you get to do most of the work.  Find some tools and get to it.”

“We’re not your bitches,” one of them said.

“You’re going to be my fucking sandbags in a second if you don’t move your fucking asses!” I roared.  A couple of them started to show some cracks in their sullen bravado, and moved to comply, looking for some rebar or something to knock holes in the walls.  Carnivore was the last to move, trying to stare me down.  I just glared back at him. 
If it comes to it, you’re the first one going in the dirt, fuckstain
, I thought.

“Jim, keep an eye on those dogfuckers,” I said.  “I want at least one gun behind each of them while they work.  Mike, keep your guys on the gate for now, and keep eyes on those assholes out in the desert.”

Both of them acknowledged without comment.  Even in the dark, though, I could see the set of Jim’s bearded jaw.  He was thinking the same thing I was. 
We should just smoke these motherfuckers and fight our way out
.  We didn’t have what we’d come for, though, and it was too damned late for that, anyway.

Just how late was reinforced by Mike’s sudden announcement that rang through the darkened compound like a gunshot.  “I’ve got eyes on more lights from the north.  A lot more.”

Reinforcements were on the way.

Chapter 22

The next assault didn’t come right away.  We had time to get the loopholes knocked through the walls, and get better situated, now covering all four sides of the factory
.  Mike had Eddie and Lee go through the back building, where they found a treasure trove in the form of a stack of portable hard drives, thumb drives, phones, and several laptops, along with several duffel bags of papers and currency.  There were dinar, Reichmarks, dollars, yuan, and raw diamonds.  How much of the phones and drives had been wiped they couldn’t tell immediately, but they stuffed them in a go bag and shoved them into Mike’s truck for transport.  We could let Renton worry about how much was or wasn’t on them.

There were easily thirty trucks outside by now, spread out in a rough crescent that left little in the way of escape routes.  Most of them, through thermals, appeared to be technicals, sporting everything from PKMs and DShKs to what looked like a couple of ZU-23s and some kind of mounted rocket or missile launcher.  I thought it looked like a TOW, but couldn’t be sure.

In short, they had us outgunned and outranged.

It had been quiet, except for
the sounds of men and vehicles moving, engines revving, and yelling in Arabic.  Now the quiet was ripped apart as the heavy weapons opened fire on the compound.

The line lit up with enormous, brilliant muzzle flashes, as fire roared across the desert.  On our end, it was like being on the receiving end of a metal hurricane, only worse.

Everything from 7.62 to 23mm hammered the outer wall or raved over it, tracers lashing overhead with supersonic
crack
s that were loud enough to hurt, all blending together into a blast of unbearable noise from the sheer volume of fire.  It would have been devastating if we hadn’t all been pretty close to flat on the ground, watching through loopholes at most a foot above the ground.  Don’t get me wrong, it was still horrifying, and we were getting pelted with grit and chunks of concrete as the fire ate away at the top of the wall. 

A few of the Project idiots were trying to shoot back, uselessly.  I let ‘em waste the ammo.  I was beginning to seriously doubt if any of them were going to be useful at all
, and the less ammo they had at the end of this, the better.  Somehow I doubted they were going to go back to Erbil with us without problems, to say the least.

At first, I thought the
enemy were shooting high because that’s what Arab fighters tend to do; every fight I’d been in with any of them aside from the ISOF we’d gone up against near Kirkuk tended to blaze away overhead.  But a glimpse of movement in front of me suddenly revealed that they were shooting high for a very calculated reason.

It was hard to see, between the darkness, the headlights, and the muzzle flashes.  Even with the thermal attachments on the NVGs, they were getting whited out to the point of uselessness.  I’d flipped them up
and was squinting through my scope.  It took me a second to figure out what I was looking at, then I blanched.  “Fuck!”  I squeezed the trigger three times, as fast as I could reset and get the crosshairs back on what I could see of the target.  The RPG gunner stumbled and fell on his face.

“Look low,” I ordered over the net, as I transitioned to another crouched figure that looked like he was lugging a backpack.  I was reasonably sure the pack was full of explosives.  “They’re sending foot-mobiles under cover of the heavies.”
  I pumped two shots into the guy with the pack and he fell, then started to crawl, until I put another round into him.  He lay still, and I went back to hunting for more targets.

Rifle and machine gun fire began to roar out from the wall, sporadically at first as guys tried to see the enemy in the sharp contrast of darkness and
flashing flame.  Realizing they’d been discovered, the foot-mobile fighters dropped to their bellies, as the overhead heavy machine gun fire seemed to redouble in intensity.

As I squeezed off another shot at another satchel-carrier, he dropped on his face.  I knew I’d missed; the shot had broken as he started to drop.  I started to adjust, as he pulled an AK up and dumped half a mag in my direction, where he’d seen my muzzle flash.

Bullets smacked off the concrete wall, a few hitting close enough to my loophole to splash fragments of concrete, grains of sand, and probably some bits of the bullets into my face.  I flinched back from the stinging assault, then forced myself to get back on sights and squeeze off a couple of shots at his muzzle flash.  His rifle went silent.

I scanned for another target, only to see the next guy crouched over almost double, hot-footing it away from us, and back toward his support vehicles.  I shot him anyway, knockin
g him on his face in the dirt.

Then they were too far out of range in the dark, while the heavies continued to pound the wall.  They’d knock it down by sheer volume of fire at this
rate.

After another minute, which felt like an eternity, the heavy machine gun fire slacked off, until they were just sending an occasional burst in our direction.  Entire stretches of the top of
the wall had been chewed away.

I called out for ammo counts and casualty reports.  Mike, Eddie, and Jim reported that everybody was good.  The Project guys maintained their sullen silence, and had already drawn back from the wall
, clustered together by one of the corner buildings.  Jim and Little Bob were watching them, hands on rifle firing controls.  Unlike with Black, we weren’t bothering to hide our distrust.

Black, interestingly enough, hadn’t joined them.  He was holding his position on the line and pointedly not even looking in their direction.

He was the one who called out the first warning.  “More incoming, north side!”  Almost immediately, the fire started again, this time from the north and east sides.  The east wall was getting pounded; I was starting to wonder just how much longer it was going to hold.

Making sure that the east side was covered, in case the northern attack was a feint, I ran, doubled over, toward the north wall.  I threw myself down behind a loophole beside Hussein Ali, who was already firing carefully aimed shots with the same AK-103 he’d had in Basra, and got up on sights.  I had to take a couple of deep breaths to steady myself before I could start looking for targets.

They’d learned fast.  The infantry wasn’t trying to sneak up under cover of the machine gun fire this time, but were using fire and movement, dashing forward in short runs while their buddies added AK and RPK fire to the heavies.  The north wall was getting pelted with what seemed like a solid wall of weapons fire.

It required a balance of patience and quickness.  The guys in the prone weren’t good targets, in spite of the muzzle flashes lighting up the desert in front of them.  The guys running forward were better, except they were moving and dark.  The muzzle flashes were fucking with night vision, too, making picking out the darker forms of the foot-soldiers more difficult.

I started tracking in on the muzzle flashes, then waiting until they went dark.  I still could barely see the fighters getting up and running forward after staring that close to the bright flame of the muzzle blasts, but I started to get the hang of it.  One rose up after a long burst, and I shot him.  He fell forward on top of his weapon.

I think they got closer on that attack.  It felt like it took longer to
drive them back.  Time gets funny in a firefight, especially when you’re on the receiving end of so much fire it feels like it’s about to pulverize everything in front of you. 

Once again, the fire slacked off as the fighters fell back.  It never quite quit, but without the need to keep us suppressed, they didn’t waste the ammo.  It was another change from some previous engagements I’d had with jihadis; usually, once they had fire superiority, they liked to keep it, even if they weren’t necessarily hitting anything.  But now, without the need for covering fire, they were just sending a burst our way every once in a while, as if to remind us that they were still there.

The fact that it was now well after dark and they were still attacking was another ominous sign of how things had changed.

Once again, when I came away from the loophole, the Project types were sitting away from the wall, staying low, not doing much.  They’d pulled back as soon as the shooting slacked off, if not before.  Hussein Ali looked back at them, and then looked at me.  While I couldn’t see much of his facial expression in the dark, I saw him shake his head.  “No good,” he said.  “No good.”

“I know, my friend,” I replied.  “But they’re part of the mission, and we need every gun right now.  I don’t like it, either.”

How much of what I said he really understood, I don’t know.  He just nodded, and turned his attention back to his rifle and his loophole.  With his team sitting tight back in Erbil, the old man was just another trigger puller on this op.  He was, as usual, stoic about it, like he generally was about everything except maybe killing Iranians or Salafist fighters, but there was a tension about him that suggested he wasn’t entirely comfortable
away from his boys.  Most of them were family, after all.

“Jeff!” Eddie called.  He was watching the gate, at a point where he could see the road leading north to Faris and Amariyah.  I jogged over, giving the Project types the stink-eye as I did, not that any of them could see it.

“What’s up?” I asked, clambering up to the hastily sandbagged position on the roof of the low building by the gate.  Needless to say, none of us had been up there during the assault, but with the fire backed off, it provided the best vantage point to keep an eye on the ISIS fighters’ movements.  He handed me the thermal imager and pointed up the road.

Peering through the eyepiece, I saw another column of vehicles approaching from the north, their engines glowing bright white in the imager.  At least two of them looked big, like five-ton utility trucks or dump trucks.  They looked out-of-place enough that I zoomed in on them.  They didn’t look quite right…then I realized that they looked strange because steel plating had been attached all around the cabs of both trucks.

“Oh hell,” I muttered. I turned to Eddie.  “We need a couple of RPG-27s ready to go,” I told him.  “I think we’ve got a couple of up-armored VBIEDs coming at us next.”

“Shit,” he said.  He didn’t hesitate, but scrambled down off the roof and headed straight for the trucks, grabbing Chad on the way.

I fully understood his haste.  These things had first cropped up in 2013, in Syria.  The back of the truck was generally packed with explosives, and the cab, including the engine compartment, was covered in welded plates of heavy steel, except for a narrow slit for the driver/suicide bomber to see through.  It was then driven up to the enemy position and detonated.  The armored cab made it impossible to take one of the damned things down with anything less than an RPG or ATGM.  We had no anti-tank missiles, but we had RPGs, and quite a few of them.  Unfortunately, our RPG-27s had an effective range of about one hundred forty meters.  That was damned close when you’re looking at over a ton of high explosives.  I was really, really wishing we had TOWs, or even RPG-29s.  Getting the bulky weapons south unnoticed would have been difficult at best, though.  We hadn’t necessarily prepared for the fucking Alamo.  Get in, get what we came for, and get out; that was the plan.  The timing just hadn’t worked.  Murphy is a son of a bitch.

Jim and Mike were moving around the perimeter, checking ammo counts and redistributing some of the extra 7.62 we had brought.  Jim had also thought ahead and brought out a couple more of the RPGs. 
Black was tagging along with Jim, lugging ammo.  I caught up with them by the north end of the back building.  Briefly, I filled them in on the armored VBIEDs.

“Those are some really big bombs,” Jim said.  “I don’t like the idea of letting them get close enough to use these.”  He hefted one of the RPG-27s.

“I don’t either,” I said, “but we haven’t got a lot of other options, do we?”

“We’ve got a couple of satchels,” he said.  We had brought a couple of them, in order to destroy anything sensitive that Collins might have left behind that we couldn’t carry out.  They were
scattered among the vehicles we’d driven down.  “We could plant a couple of shaped charges in the gate, then fall back to the far side of the compound and hunker down behind the buildings.  Keep one eye just far enough out to judge when the first one’s in the gate, then blow it up.”

“That doesn’t solve the problem of the second one,” I pointed out.

Though it was too dark for me to see, I could tell he frowned.  “We might have to chance an RPG shot for that one.”

However we decided to handle it, we didn’t have much time.  I glanced down the wall, to see the same damned clump of fucktards hanging out by one of the buildings, nowhere near defensive positions.  “What’s with your buddies, Black?” I asked acidly.

I heard him sigh, just before another burst of something heavy hammered by overhead, chipping a couple more concrete blocks out of the wall.  “Ledeen’s still on the line,” he said, “but if I were you, I’d put the rest of them in the gate and keep them there at gunpoint.”

“Not your friends anymore?” Jim said.

“Carnivore and Tiburon never were,” he replied.  “I’m not sure those guys have friends.  And Ledeen told me he overheard the two of them talking about how our heads might work as safe passage with ISIS.”