Clandestine-IsaacHooke-FreeFollowup (26 page)

"I'm just surprised you haven't targeted the forward camp here, yet," Ethan said.

"Actually we did." Aaron scratched an ugly bite above his beard. "This is the
new
forward camp. The old one had the shit bombed out of it while we were on the front, thanks to our intel."
 

"Good job."

Aaron shrugged.

Ethan figured he'd interrogated his fellow operatives enough for the night, so he walked his friends to their respective lodgings and bid them goodnight. Then he made his way back to his own barracks and lay down. He was lulled to sleep by the distant sounds of sporadic machine gun fire and mortar explosions.

The next morning, after prayers and a breakfast of nuts and rice, Abdullah gave a short speech.

"Today we go to the front lines, my wolves," the emir said. "By following the path of jihad, inshallah, you shall all be granted a place in the garden of paradise. A place as vast as the world itself. A place with pristine blue lakes and pure emerald fields lying between mountains of musk, with golden palaces in the sky grander than anything man could ever make. A place where there is no war, and the peace of Allah rules all." He shifted his gaze from face to face. "Remain pure of heart my wolves. Fight the infidels, the enemies of Allah, without fear, because what we do here is right and just." He patted his M16A4. "With these we will remove all tyrants. With these we will erase all borders. With these we will establish a worldwide Caliphate. Die well!"
 

"Takbir!" Suleman shouted.

"
Allahu akbar!
" the group responded.
 

"Takbir!"

"
Allahu akbar!
"
 

"Takbir!"

"
Allahu akbar!
"
 

W
olf Company marched through the streets toward the north side of the village. The smoke was billowing in full force from the rooftops, blotting out the sky.
 

The unit arrived at what could best be described as a pre-staging area. Several Kia pickup trucks idled in a row along a wide street. The members of Wolf Company hopped into the beds of two of those trucks, while other mujahadeen loaded into the remaining vehicles.
 

The leftmost pickup drove away, and the next vehicle in line waited half a minute before following. The succeeding pickups departed in turn after similar delays, until all of them were traveling en route to the city in a long, strung-out convoy. The vehicles had to circumnavigate several blast craters along the way. Potholes were prevalent, too, jolting the occupants almost constantly. The fires blazed on the rooftops around them.

Eventually the convoy reached what could be termed a staging area. At the edge of a village, heavy artillery in the form of long-barreled Type 59-1 Field Guns were spread in a wide row, ready to lay down covering fire. There was scant protection beyond—according to Ethan's offline map, the border of Kobane lay about a mile ahead, and no buildings resided between the village and there. He could see the city up ahead, past that gap, sprawling ominously on the plains.
 

The pickups lined up in pairs, grouped by unit. When the last set of vehicles arrived, the Field Guns began to fire. Their targets appeared to be near the center of Kobane, judging from the smoke and debris that spewed skyward from the city. More artillery launched into Kobane from a rocky knoll just south of the city, which the offline map labeled "Mistenur Hill."
 

The two pickups in front suddenly accelerated, racing across that empty region between the village and the outskirts of Kobane. The next trucks in line advanced to fill the gap, halting at the village edge. The succeeding vehicles slid forward and revved their engines impatiently.

The next pair took off about a minute later. And the subsequent group a minute after that.

Wolf Company's turn finally came. Ethan's pickup broke free of the village and raced toward Kobane, competing with its twin to be the first into the city. The militants with him appeared eager. Excited. On the road, returning trucks raced past.
 

He glanced uncertainly at the sky, which was open, and free of smoke. He knew a bomb could strike anytime. Indeed, he saw the crisscrossing exhaust left behind by several jets.

And then they breached the eastern perimeter of the city. Low-lying concrete buildings similar to the ones in the outlying villages hemmed the pickup on all sides. Closely packed white brick exteriors, flat rooftops, broken windows. Notable was the absence of any burning tires—the militants were probably too busy getting shot at to set up rooftop blazes. Or maybe they'd simply run out of tires.
 

The pickups abruptly pulled to a stop and Ethan and the others jumped out. Several militants waiting in a long queue by the side of the road immediately boarded the vacated truck beds and the vehicles turned around and accelerated back the way they had come. The
exhausted-looking men who remained in the queue were probably returning from the front lines.
 

Ethan watched as the emir of another freshly-arrived unit moved between his troops, pumping epinephrine directly into their hearts with a US-issue autoinjector. The epinephrine basically turned them into berserker units—it would take several shots to down those men until the effects wore off. One young fighter collapsed after the injection, probably suffering a cerebral hemorrhage from the sudden spike in blood pressure.
 

Ethan couldn't help but smile at the hypocrisy of it. The Islamic State banned those under its rule from smoking or drinking alcohol, but injecting your heart with epinephrine was perfectly acceptable. Oh sure, some sheik had probably issued a fatwa permitting the hormone for jihad, but the irony wasn't lost on Ethan.
 

Abdullah led the unit down a side street. A couple of technicals—Kia 4000s cab overs with Soviet ZU-2 anti-aircraft artilleries in their beds—sped past, heading west toward the front. Wolf Company piled behind a T-55 that was slowly advancing toward the city center. Ethan and the others crouched low, letting the tank guide them in.
 

He spotted the odd sentinels perched on the rooftops alongside the black standards of the Islamic State, and the occasional technicals positioned at intersections, anti-aircraft guns pointed at the sky.

Kobane. A city founded in the wake of suffering. After the Ottoman Empire's Armenian Genocide of 1915, refugees started a village near a train station on the Konya-Baghdad Railway. They named their city Kobane, or "company," after the German company that had built that portion of the railway. Kobane had grown to a population of forty-five thousand by 2004, though when combined with the population of the outlying villages, its citizens had numbered in the hundreds of thousands. Those numbers began to drop with the 2011 civil war, and when the Islamic State invaded, the population levels nosedived. Most of the inhabitants fled north across the border into Turkey.

Ethan regarded the white brick buildings around him uncertainly. The damage alternated between moderate and extreme. In the moderate cases, the white-brick buildings bore machine gun marks and rocket cavities, with only the occasional collapsed structure among them. In the extreme examples, the damage was surreal. He'd be walking along a seemingly ordinary street when all of a sudden the buildings would recede, replaced by an avenue whose structures were completely torn open and gutted as far as the eye could see, the asphalt a jumble of concrete, rebar, mattresses, clothes, TVs and other personal belongings, with bodies burnt beyond recognition thrown into the mix.

The frequency of ravaged buildings and blast-damaged roadways increased the farther into Kobane the unit went, bearing witness to the relentless mortar and artillery barrage the Islamic State had inflicted upon the city. That the defenders had yielded territory before such a horrendous assault was not surprising.

The T-55 took a left, turning south, and Wolf Company abandoned it to proceed westward alone through the rubble. There were more fallen buildings than intact ones, there. The desolate landscape looked like something out of a post-apocalyptic nightmare. Blankets and tarps hung from cloth-lines looped between the few standing buildings, shielding the unit from enemy snipers. The sounds of shelling and impacts grew louder the further west the company traveled.

The group reached an open area and dashed across the street. They should have used bounding overwatch, Ethan thought, where half the platoon stayed behind and provided overwatch while the others moved forward, but Ethan wasn't about to start making strategic suggestions, not unless his life was in imminent danger. He was embedded with the enemy, after all, and he wasn't sure yet how much he actually wanted to help them.

Abdullah made Wolf Company hug the line of buildings as he headed northwest. In a reversal of the trend, most of the structures proved intact, there. Ahead, several platoons of mujahadeen were queued against the edge of an intersection. Artillery shells from the Field Guns outside of town were battering the neighborhood beyond. The rumble of exploding matter was almost deafening.

Abdullah glanced over his shoulder at his unit and smiled widely. "They are softening up the Kurds for us!" he shouted. It seemed risky as hell to be that close to the barrage, but none of the militants seemed to mind.
 

Upon the rooftops at either side, Ethan saw mortar men adding to the assault by repeatedly dropping 82mm shells into their Soviet M-37 mortars. He spotted DShK machine guns mounted behind sandbags on some of the buildings, and these fired randomly into the same general area.

The main artillery bombardment abruptly ceased. The mortar men and machine gunners noticed a few moments later and stopped firing in turn.

The front became eerily quiet.

Ethan could feel the tension in the air. It was almost electric.

"Go go go!" came the order over the two-way radios.

The mujahadeen queued at the edge of the intersection diffused into the ravaged neighborhood like termites spreading over a burnt log.

The house-sweeping had begun.

Abdullah split the group into two squads and gave Suleman command of the second.

Ethan was part of Abdullah's squad. The emir led them past the collapsed houses beyond the front, which he inspected only cursorily. He paused before an intact building sandwiched between two caved homes. The squad lined up on either side of the doorway, backs to the wall.
 

Abdullah waved Baghdadi forward.

The Tunisian slid in front of the door and kicked it open.

The next thing he knew, Ethan was sitting on the ground about five feet away with a sudden pounding headache. Fida'a lay on top of him. Ibrahim, underneath.

He shoved Fida'a off of him and helped Ibrahim stand. Everyone was accounted for save Baghdadi—the only sign of the Tunisian were the simmering boots still standing in the obliterated doorway.
 

"Zarar, Sab," Abdullah pointed at the charred entrance.

The two of them maneuvered inside. The big man went low, Sab high.

"Clear!" Sab said, peering out the door. That was a mistake: the moment he spoke the word he shook violently, and chunks of gore spat from his chest in multiple places.
 

Zarar unleashed his assault rifle at an unseen attacker inside the house as Sab collapsed.

"
Now
it is clear." Zarar dragged the lifeless body of Sab out of the way.
 

"Don't touch anything," Abdullah said. "Booby traps could be anywhere."

The squad split up and cleared the remaining rooms. Ethan kept back, happy to let the others martyr themselves, but they encountered no further resistance.

He heard an explosion in the next room, followed by, "I'm okay!"

Ibrahim emerged, covered in soot. He was grinning sheepishly. "Found a booby trap."

Ethan shook his head. The youth was lucky to be alive.

In the main room lay a bricked up staircase.

Fida'a rushed forward, sledgehammer in hand. In moments he'd broken through.

Zarar went first, poking his head and upper body through the trapdoor in the ceiling. "Clear!" he shouted down.

The others climbed the stairs onto the roof, where they crouched and fanned out.

The eastern rim had small crenelations filed into the stone, probably by Kurdish snipers. The western rim, which faced the town center, didn't have any.

"Sniper," Abdullah commanded.

Ethan low-crawled to the emir, who lay prostrate on the northwest corner of the roof. The man was peering past the rim. Ethan followed his gaze; he had a clear view of the street from there.
 

"Stay here," Abdullah told him. "Provide cover."

Ethan nodded. He was just about to suggest the same thing. And not because he wanted to cover Wolf Company.

The others absconded the roof.

Ethan settled into an overwatch position. Below, he saw mortar men and machine gunners following the house-sweeping squads. Some of the DShK gunners set up at the intersections, while the mortar men joined the squads inside the buildings and took up residence on the cleared rooftops.

Ethan was used to sniping in teams of three, taking turns with another sniper while a heavy gunner guarded the rear. While that setup worked well, Ethan was glad to be alone in that particular situation. It allowed him to perform certain clandestine duties.

E
than plugged the USB stick into his Android phone via the adapter, extended the RF antenna, and activated the DIA messaging app. Death Adder and Constrictor were online. Like Ethan, William and Aaron were the designated snipers in their platoons, and had ample time alone to set up their smartphones.
 

A third member was online. Black Mamba. Doug.

Hey mambo man
, Ethan sent.
Ready to dance?