Direct Action - 03 (46 page)

Cruising through the apocalypse on a Vespa was not one of Deckard's career highlights.

The cars took some sniper fire at one of the cross streets. A bullet slammed into the roof of Tiger's sedan and chipped the paint away around the hole it left. Deckard ducked as he gunned it across the intersection, knowing he was one of those yellow ducks that kids shot at with bb guns at a carnival game. But the shot never came and he continued on.

They took another turn and passed through a Nusra checkpoint. Pops and cracks sounded somewhere up ahead, the shots echoing between the buildings. A SA-7 anti-aircraft rocket whooshed off into the sky, its heat-seeking warhead tracking something up in the sky that Deckard never caught sight of.

Before long they had snaked through so many streets and back alleys that Deckard wasn't even sure where in the city they were. They stopped alongside a Toyota pickup truck that had been modified in someone's garage to fire rocket artillery. Metal pipes had been fitted to the bed of the truck on a rack, the pipes propped up at an angle so the rockets would be hurled like giant spitballs over the roofs of the buildings and into the positions held by the Syrian Army. Or at least somewhere in the same neighborhood.

The cars stopped and Tiger got out to haggle with the vehicle's owner. Meanwhile two other Nusra fighters came running down the street. They were both bloodied and one looked like he had lost his weapon. When they got near they started yelling at the Chechen. Deckard rode his scooter closer to listen to what was being said.

The Nusra fighters were telling Tiger that they couldn't go down that street. The Syrian Army was on the offensive and had just taken several buildings that allowed them to cut off that avenue. Nusra was being beat back in Homs and the frontlines were shifting minute to minute.

“What the hell is going on Deckard?” Bill asked as he stepped out of the car.

“Syrian Army up ahead. It's a no-go.”

“So we got the Army to our rear and to the front?”

Deckard continued to listen to the Nusra fighters.

“And our flanks. This neighborhood is a major pocket of resistance that is holding out as the Syrians encircle them,” Deckard said knowing full well that it was his own men who held the rear area and prevented their escape.

“Motherfucker,” Bill said. “We will have to hard point in one of these buildings and wait for night before attempting a break out.”

Four more fighters came running down the street, each one lifting a wounded fighter by an arm or a leg. They arrived panting and struggling to catch their breath. Behind them, an artillery barrage slammed into a building, probably the one they had just left. The arty barrage completely collapsed one of the exterior walls which slid apart like a Jacob's Ladder and blocked off half of the street.

Now a full-blown shouting match had erupted between Liquid Sky's Chechen escort and the other jihadists. Deckard was struggling to keep up with all the different accents and dialects. Everyone was losing their composure as they came to realize that they were now boxed in by the enemy.

“This is bullshit,” Bill said. “I want a hard point secured for the night.”

He pointed to the nearest building.

“Get in there and empty it. We own this place now.”

Rick and Paul took the lead, kicking in the flimsy metal door and entering the ground level. The Operator and Ramon followed them inside. Deckard left the scooter on its kickstand and went towards the door. He was prevented from entering as several civilians came pouring out of the door screaming. Armed foreigners were now breaking into their home and forcing them out.

Several women were crying, one holding a little girl at her side. A man came stumbling out of the house, and then a teenage boy. Inside, Rick was barking orders. Nadi came up alongside Deckard and started yelling at the civilians in Arabic, attempting to get them to shut up and move along.

Another man was pushed out of the front door. He stumbled before he caught himself and then began calling back inside. A boy who Deckard took to be his son ran around Ramon as he stood in the hallway and joined his father outside.

Paul stepped around the shattered door and back outside.

“It's empty,” Paul said to Bill. “We can move the weapons in.”

Just then, the man broke away from his son and ran up to Paul. The Syrian got right up in his face, screaming in Arabic. Deckard knew he was saying that they were wrong for kicking them out of their own home and that they had no right. Paul didn't speak Arabic and had no idea what he was carrying on about. The Liquid Sky member reached out and pushed the civilian back.

“Get the fuck out of here guy.”

Deckard spoke up in Arabic to try to get him to calm down but to no avail.

The Syrian was waving his finger in the air and shouting at Paul. He stepped forward, closing the distance again.

Paul snapped into a ready-up drill and pumped two shots from his AK-47 into the man's chest. He fell like a marionette with its string cut. The civilian was dead before he hit the ground, lights out. Deckard stopped in his tracks.

The little boy ran to his father's corpse and threw himself on top of him as tears streamed down his cheeks. As he cried, he began sobbing for his father to wake up. The kid couldn't have been older than eight or nine.

Paul stepped forward and put the barrel of his AK to the boy's head.

Deckard never remembered reaching for his weapon.

No matter how hard he tried, he was never able to remember his fist closing on the pistol grip of the Kalashnikov, or his thumb sliding off the safety level, or bringing the stock into his shoulder. The rifle was just there, the front sight post gently bobbing as it aligned with the rear sight.

He did remember squeezing the trigger and watching the back of Paul's scalp tear off and fly through the air with a lump of hair still attached.

36

Deckard ran.

The kid disappeared through the door to his house.

Deckard jetted down the road that was getting shelled by the Syrian Army. Gunfire chased after him. Voices yelled behind him. His boots beat the street. His heart was beating right out of his chest as he did the only thing he could do.

He ran.

Deckard swerved down a side street as another burst of AK fire skipped off the pavement behind him. He was vaguely aware of the black bars closing in on either side of his vision as he sprinted for an open doorway. He was getting tunnel vision, target fixation. Flight was his only option. Fight would be like a suicide mission but worse.

Deckard ran.

His legs powered him up the stairs. He could hear footsteps beating up the steps after him. On the second landing, he pivoted and fired off a ten round burst with his rifle into the shadows below him before charging back up the stairs.

Where was he going?

A Syrian fighter jet screamed overhead and dropped its ordnance somewhere in the Nusra-controlled neighborhood. The building shook on its foundation as the bombs detonated. Deckard didn't give it much thought, but simply steadied himself and continued on.

His heart rate had to be close to 120 beats per minute at this point. Deckard kept moving, unable to process the fact that he was operating at sub-optimal levels, unable to make the most rational decisions. The little reptile brain in the back of his head was threatening to take the wheels from him. Deckard's legs were burning when he reached the fifth floor and burst out onto the roof.

Where was he going?

Deckard ran.

He sprinted hard.

Holding the Kalashnikov in one hand, he pushed off into a long jump that ate up the distance between the rooftop and that of the adjacent building. He landed on the balls of his feet and kept moving. Half of the building had imploded on itself, the roof having collapsed but still hanging on by the metal rebar inside it. The cement slab created a ramp. Another gunshot snapped from behind him as he slid across the final few feet off the remaining rooftop like a baseball player and then skidded right down the collapsed roof that sloped down at an angle.

He slid down to the fourth floor surrounded by a cloud of dust. Bouncing to his feet, he scrambled through what was left of someone's kitchen and down a hallway with cracking stucco on the walls and ceiling. Behind him, he heard the Liquid Sky members who had slid down behind him and were now shouting at each other as they looked around for him.

Finding an open door in the hallway, Deckard took it and ran into another apartment. This one still had civilians in it. An old woman wearing a scarf over her head pushed two grandchildren into a bedroom as Deckard ran through the living room. There was a small balcony that looked over a narrow side street. Deckard quickly judged the distance. A squad of soldiers was moving down below, several of them smoking cigarettes. There was no way to immediately tell if they were Nusra fighters or Syrian Army.

Deckard planted one foot on the railing and propelled himself into mid-air, to the balcony across the street. He barely cleared the ten-foot gap, stumbling over the railing and tripping over himself. The wooden doors that led inside were locked, but had some give to them. He was about to kick them in when he heard a burst of gunfire. Ducking down below the railing, AK fire chopped through the wood and sprayed him with splinters.

Down on his hands and knees, he saw a loose panel on the door and pushed it in. Tossing his rifle ahead of him, Deckard slithered through the hole like a worm while the door continued to be reduced to toothpicks. Staying low to avoid the hail of gunfire, he rolled into the next room just as a grenade went off on the balcony he had just left, blowing both doors off their hinges. He didn't bother to look back.

Arriving at the apartment door, Deckard twisted all three of the locks open and was back outside in another hallway. He still didn't know who the armed men were below and in a moment of clarity he realized that he had moved far enough through the urban sprawl that he had no idea where he was. Was he still in Nusra territory or had he crossed into a neighborhood held by the Syrian Army? Maybe he was in the no-man's land in between.

The hall was lit by a column of sunlight cutting down through a gaping hole in the roof. Finding the stairwell, Deckard took it up figuring he would be safer moving across rooftops then risking it with the roving patrols on the ground level. It was a calculated risk; there would still be snipers, indirect fire, and airstrikes to contend with.

This was no surgical raid he was on now. This wasn't Special Operations, it was straight-up combat that had more in common with Hue City, Fallujah, or Stalingrad.

Half of the staircase had crumbled away along with the exterior wall. Deckard turned sideways and moved foot over foot, carefully edging his way up to the roof as he looked out over the city. Black smoke rose from a dozen places in Homs. Another surface-to-air missile rose from a street up into the sky. The boom of the main guns on former Soviet tanks sounded. In between the cannon fire, Deckard thought he heard footsteps in the hallway behind him and hurried up the stairs.

The sun beat down from the morning sky, causing him to squint. He continued to stay low. Approaching the lip of the building, he turned his head sideways and slowly lifted it high enough to see across the way. There was a full street between the building he was on and the next so he moved to another side of the roof, looking for a way to cross. This time there was only a narrow alley between the two buildings. Deckard quickly vaulted to the other side. Once across, he breathed a sigh of relief. If there were any snipers out there, they hadn't bothered shooting at him.

He was able to move down the city block by crossing from rooftop to rooftop. Deckard heard a few shots crack, but none of them felt close enough to be meant for him. Eventually, he got to the end of the block. There wasn't a stairway that led below, so he had to drop down to the balcony on the top story and push inside. Down on the street, another T-72 tank rumbled towards the front lines. Did it belong to the Army, or was it one of the Nusra-captured tanks? The battlefield was a confusing zigzagging patchwork of terrorists, soldiers, and para-military forces.

Moving down to the ground level, Deckard waited in the alcove where the front door lay ajar. It was basic infantry training taking over. Stop, look, listen, and smell. He opened up his senses, alert for sounds of the enemy. A few voices sounded from outside, but then they passed and moved on. Deckard slowly inched to the door to take a look outside. It was a ghost town out there. A breeze carried the smell of diesel fuel and burning trash but nothing much was moving.

Deckard knew he had to press on. He had to put some distance between himself and Liquid Sky. That was his immediate concern; then, he could regroup and figure out his next move. Across the street he saw a garage. It had one of those metal roll up doors which had been crinkled and ripped away by an explosion sometime in the recent past.

Watching and listening for a few more seconds, he decided the coast was clear and sprinted out of the alcove and across the street. This time someone did shoot at him. A lone gunshot snapped behind Deckard as he ran. Whoever fired needed to learn how to lead a moving target. Deckard ignored it and continued running, then ducked, and glided right through the gap between the garage door and the concrete wall. He was glad to be back behind solid cover, even though he tripped over debris on the floor as his eyes adjusted to the darkness.