Black Flagged Redux (24 page)

Daniel immediately saw what Farrington meant. A smoldering crater now covered the left side of the road less than fifteen meters ahead of them, created by an explosive force ten times more powerful than a rocket propelled grenade. By swerving right and taking them below the level of the road, Farrington had shielded the entire vehicle from the fragmentation effects of the Improvised Explosive Device (IED). Farrington continued to impress Petrovich.

"I'm glad you didn't. We're in a bad way here!" Daniel said.

The road around Farrington and Petrovich started to explode with the impact of bullets and the distinctive crack of near misses filled Daniel's ears, barely competing with the prolonged bursts of thunderous fire from Farrington's rifle. A few seconds later, Farrington's rifle fell silent and one of the assault rifles on the other side of the road picked up the slack. Farrington started to reload again, but Daniel slapped him on the back.

"Get across, I'll cover," he said and dropped to the road next to Farrington, shouldering his own AKS-74 toward the village.

Through his Trijicon 4X ACOG, he lined up a target partially obscured by one of the buildings on the left side of the road and pulled the trigger twice, absorbing the recoil in his collarbone. He wanted to clear as many of their attackers from the eastern side of the road as possible so they could fully use the elevated road as cover. Anyone firing at them from the eastern side of the road would be able to shoot right down the exposed axis of his team. Focused on his new job, he barely noticed Farrington scoot over his legs and dive for cover among the group on the other side of the road.

He saw the figure he had just shot stumble into the open and crumple to the ground. Satisfied that the ACOG scope was sufficiently zeroed for this range, he started to systematically acquire and shoot any targets that presented him with enough surface area for a clean shot. He didn't require much of a commitment in terms of exposure at this range. At roughly 150 meters, if the enemy gave him three quarters of a human skull for more than a second, he could remove most of it.

Two quick shots, one second of silence. He repeated this three more times, silencing four more shooters on the eastern side of the road before the intense volume of fire concentrated on Daniel's location forced him to vacate his overly exposed position.

He rolled off the road and righted himself, searching around for Dusty. The CIA agent lay huddled against the shallow road bank, assembling the team's satellite phone for mobile use. Daniel turned toward his team, all of whom were frenetically engaging targets with semi-automatic fire.

"Start moving up the road. Keep one weapon up for suppression. We need to close the distance to the village. If our air support shits the bed, we won't last long out here. Fuck! Crossing! Take them down!" he screamed and stood up to shoot at several figures sprinting across the road.

Every weapon on the road and in the village started to unleash long sustained bursts of automatic fire at his team, as the enemy tried to suppress their efforts to gun down the squad sent to cross the fifty-yard stretch between the western and eastern sides of the village. Despite the incredible volume of incoming fire, Petrovich's team held steady and concentrated all of their fire on the ten men trying to cross the road. Each man in his team crouched low, reducing their exposure to enemy fire as much as possible, while keeping their rifle optics trained on the erratically moving targets over a football field away.

Daniel put the ACOG sight's red arrow tip a few notches ahead of the lead runner, and squeezed the trigger twice, briefly seeing a dusty red aerosolized cloud erupt behind the soldier. He tracked another target and fired twice, sending the man into a momentum fueled tumble across the gravel road. The intensity of fire was unbearable, and Daniel could barely hear the sharp cracks of his team's rifles over the hisses and snaps from hundreds of incoming rounds. He ducked down further and took his eyes off the scope to assess the damage they had done to the squad sent on the suicide mission.

Through the cloud of dust, he saw several lifeless clumps spread out along the road, confirming the massacre. He started to lean back into the scope when he saw Andrei's head snap back, followed by a dark red shower that stained the grayish brown dirt in an arc five feet behind the body. Daniel's eye was back on the scope before Andrei's body hit the ground.

Daniel resisted the urge to check Andrei and squinted through the scope at the lone soldier who had succeeded at crossing the murder zone. The man threw his body over a low stone wall that ran parallel to the road and straightened up for the short run to the safety of a one-story cinder block building. Petrovich put the tip of the scope's red arrow one notch over from the moving figure and pulled the trigger, stopping the soldier in his tracks. The red arrow quickly found the soldier's now stationary head, and the reckless charge across the road ended unceremoniously.

"Keep moving forward and don't let anyone cross that fucking road," Daniel said. "Do you have the Predator?" he yelled to Dusty.

"I don't have shit yet. I can't get through to the Ops center!" Dusty screamed desperately.

"Are you shitting me? Fuck! Is the Goddamn thing working?"

"It's working. Nobody is answering…"

Three smoke trails arched lazily out of the western village, deceptively slow at first, until they passed the team's position and raced about twenty meters past them toward the vicinity of the Land Cruiser. One of the rockets skipped off the road, unexploded, and sailed at a forty-five degree angle skyward. The other two exploded on the western bank of the road, presumably destroying their truck. Although they didn't see the rockets hit the SUV, one of the vehicle's side view mirrors landed in the middle of the road, confirming the assumption.

"Keep trying and stay with the team. Pick up Andrei's rifle. He's gone," Daniel said and jogged back to his team.

Farrington and the two remaining combat operatives directed their fire at the soldiers in and around the houses on the western side of the village. Dozens of bullets skipped off the road, kicking up dust and pelting their exposed faces with stinging bits of rock that caused them to frequently shield their eyes behind their weapons.

Another round of rockets sailed out of the western village, heading toward their position, and Daniel could immediately tell that two of the 85mm high explosive warheads would fly harmlessly overhead. The third had frightening potential. He was pretty sure it would slam into the road bank on the western side, but knew from experience that these things never flew a completely straight path.

"Down! Down!" he screamed, and the team slid below the top of the road.

Everyone ducked except for Farrington, who sat firmly in position against the road, firing continuously at targets as the warhead exploded against the steep road bank opposite the team. Daniel popped back up and followed one of the smoke trails back to its point of origin. He stared through his scope and found a team of two men reloading the RPG-7. This was the first time he took a few moments to study their attackers.

Dressed in local garb, neither of the two men would have attracted his attention from this distance, beyond the fact that they were reloading a Soviet-style rocket launcher. He had half expected to see Kazakhstan Special Forces, but their presence would have indicated a major problem. His team's visit to the area wasn't openly approved by the Kazakhstan government; however, through back channels within the Interior Ministry, they had been assured that no organized military or local interference would become a problem, as long as they were relatively discreet.

Daniel zeroed in on the shooter's upper chest and started to squeeze the trigger when he noticed an earpiece with a thin microphone. He paused for a second to confirm the microphone set, which meant they were dealing with a more sophisticated force than he had originally suspected. None of this was a good sign. He confirmed the presence of a similar communications rig on the man reloading the rocket tube and returned the scope's view to the man holding the tube. Two quick shots and the man crumpled out of sight behind a stone wall. The second shooter disappeared.

"Keep going! We need to get into those buildings! Let's go!" he said and signaled for Dusty to close the gap.

They started to make some gains toward the buildings ahead of them, passing the crater from the roadside bomb meant for their truck. The crater still hissed and smoked from the sizable explosive and was large enough to accommodate at least one of his men. He considered stuffing Dusty in the hole, where he'd be safest, but didn't want to separate any members of his team under the circumstances, especially the one carrying their satellite phone. Not that it was doing them any good at the moment.

The four men moved in teams of two, one team rushing forward ten meters, while the other fired at targets of opportunity in the village. Using this hasty method, they closed the distance to the village to fifty meters, but they also didn't hit any targets along the way. They had sacrificed accuracy for speed, which wasn't the only bad news. The drop-off on their side of the road had gradually faded, forcing them to press their bodies into the dried mud and low-crawl toward the village. Daniel knew they had gone as far as they could go like this. He felt high velocity rounds slice through his backpack with regular frequency, and if they crawled any further, these rounds would start to strike home in his back. He squirmed back until the backpack was protected by the lip of the road.

"Stay put!" he yelled to Farrington.

"No shit…that fucker better get Langley on the line, or this is going to end badly for us," Farrington said.

Farrington was right. They were out of fresh options. Like the enemy soldiers that had tried to cross the barren stretch of road a few minutes ago, Daniel's team wouldn't make it halfway to the buildings forty to fifty meters directly ahead of them. He counted roughly fifteen shooters still operating in the western village, some firing from positions closer than seventy-five meters away. They'd be dead or bleeding out within a few seconds of standing up for the run. He rolled over onto his side and twisted his body so he could see Dusty. The CIA agent looked terrified and shook his head slowly, staring into Daniel's eyes with a look of extreme regret. He didn't need to ask. No air support.

"Fuck. No air support guys. Any ideas?" Daniel said.

Sergei spoke for the first time since the SUV slammed into the ditch. "We spread out along the road and trim their numbers. They might withdraw at some point. Maybe the fucking Kazahk army will show up and finish this for us."

"They aren't making the same mistakes anymore. It's getting harder and harder to hit any of them. We'll run out of ammo long before any sizable Kazakh force arrives," Farrington replied.

"We're pretty much fucked. I'm down to two mags," Leo added, tapping one of his two remaining thirty-round magazines against the front hand guard of his weapon before inserting it.

"I'm down to one," Farrington stated, between rapid trigger pulls.

Daniel reached into one of his cargo pockets and removed two additional magazines, tossing them at Farrington.

"We'll be down to pistols in less than ten minutes," Farrington stated matter-of-factly, casually retrieving the ammunition magazines from the dirt.

"We could try to get back to the Land Cruiser. We have a couple of marking grenades stashed in the rear. Doesn't look like they detonated with the RPG hits. Might get us across," Sergei said.

Daniel gave this a few microseconds of thought, but dismissed it just as quickly. The wind swept east to west and would not laterally cover their north to south route. Plus, the marking grenades didn't generate the same amount of smoke as a standard screening grenade. It would put out enough red smoke to be easily spotted by a passing aircraft, but would not adequately obscure their passage. Still, it might come to this. Daniel ran the remaining option through his head. None of them looked good.

In all of the noise and confusion, nobody lying along the road heard the armed MQ-1 Predator drone pass overhead. It also went unobserved by everyone inside the village.

**

Major David Adler pulled back gently on the joystick, sending "Crabby Girl" upward to gain another 1000 feet of altitude for its initial attack run. Everyone in the Ground Control Station (GCS) in Kyrgyzstan was nervous about this flight. First, the fact that they had been abruptly awoken at one thirty in the morning and handed a last minute CIA mission didn't sit well with any of the three Air Force personnel. Learning twenty minutes later that the Predator drone had been fitted with two AGM-114 Hellfire missiles made them even more nervous. Nobody inside the air-conditioned, camouflaged metal box sitting next to the main runway had previously flown a live armed mission.

The crew stationed at Manas had previously flown routine reconnaissance missions in support of Tajikistan/Afghanistan border tightening measures. Major Adler hadn't even been aware that the base stored Hellfire missiles. To put it mildly, the "pucker factor" was high in the GCS, and Sergeant Juan Salazar had almost walked off the mission when they were given the initial flight path vector: north into Kazakhstan airspace. Only one of Staff Sergeant Kelly McIntyre's patented pep talks kept him in his seat.

All of them nearly stormed out of the GCS when the flight's operational commander, CIA Assistant Counter-Terrorism Director Karl Berg, gave them the final coordinates of the Predator's "bullpen." The holding area was located 535 miles into Kazakhstan airspace. In another 30 to 40 miles, "Crabby Girl," named affectionately in honor of Salazar's opinionated six-year-old daughter, would cross its Point of No Return.

The drone had a maximum range of 675 miles and needed to return to base shortly if it were to be landed safely. Clearly, this was not part of the CIA's plan. Now they'd be the "crew" that lost a Predator drone. None of them needed this kind of shit, but they didn't have the authority to abandon the mission. The door to the GCS was sealed, and Berg had been given legitimate command over the mission by their superiors. They all settled in for the steaming shit sandwich they had been served, which only seemed to get tastier every time Berg's voice came over the secure communications link.