Light Up the Night (24 page)

She reached out to find his arm. Finding a spot not covered with armor or a pouch of ammo, she punched him on it.

“I guess not. You good to go?”

“Sure.” She was. The
May
was running clean and Roland would be overseeing the refuel. They'd have two hours of fuel and should need less than half of that. Nothing to rearm at this point as they hadn't fired a single shot during Stage One.

“And?”

Damn him for knowing there was something more. “That thing you said earlier…” She didn't know where to go with it.

“You mean, that I love you?”

“Yeah, that. I, uh, don't know what to say.”

He reached out and grabbed the D-ring on the front of her SARVSO vest. It was there as a lifting hook if she ever crashed and needed to be airlifted out, or to attach a safety line in order to move freely around a larger helicopter while in flight. He pulled her in by it and wrapped an arm around her. Even separated by their vests and the rifle they each wore across their chests, he felt good.

“Don't worry about it, hotshot. It'll come to you.”

“And if it doesn't?”

He shrugged. “Then we'll deal with that when we have to.”

Gods, she felt stupid. Of all things. A wonderful man had said he loved her and she, the woman, who was supposed to be so much more in touch with her feelings, didn't have a clue what to say.

Billy was clearly waiting for something. He was in the middle of a mission and exuding confidence in every direction, because that was his job and his training. And she really wanted to say something, but “love” was way too scary.

“Did you say ‘we' would deal with it?”

“Yeah.” There was a roughness in his voice. He was being casual, but it was costing him.

“I like the way ‘we' sounds. That counts for something, doesn't it?”

His arm squeezed her more tightly for a moment. A clear yes. And it did. It counted for a lot.

It felt as he if might have just kissed her on top of her helmet. “You better get back. Looks like we're almost all refueled.”

“Sure thing, Lieutenant. Except I can't see shit in the dark.”

He laughed and led her back to the
May
.

Galkayo was going to be far trickier. The pirates would be nervous. They had more than thirty hostages, all in a single location. They'd be keeping tight guards around them. So Bill and Michael had cooked up a different tactic, a variation on Mog.

Unlike that strike, which had been in the most populous and most dangerous center of the country's largest city, they'd now convinced Hassan Abdullah Abdi to gather the hostages at a single secure location, his compound. Even if only for one night. He had thankfully built it on the southeast edge of the city, up on a bluff. It wasn't for the view, as he'd built a large wall around it, too high to allow a view of the surrounding desert. It reflected old-style, colonial thinking, from when ground forces were your only threat.

What made it defensible against ground attack had also made it ideal for Bill's air attack plans.
Merchant
and
Max
had refilled their bench seats at the FARP with the other four Delta operators and four of the Rangers' best.

At precisely twenty-two hundred hours, ten at night, they came in fast and hard. Most cooking fires in the surrounding homes were dying out by this time, and little electricity reached this far.

Trisha flew into the power lines feeding the compound, catching the twin lines in a line-cutter that hung between her skids and the bottom of her fuselage. She and Lola had assured Bill it was possible to cut the lines without endangering the chopper, if you knew what you were doing. Apparently Trisha did. He saw the
May
fly clear right after the blackout hit the compound.

Two small courtyards had been identified that allowed the Little Birds to touch down, just long enough for the teams to jump off the seats. Their skids barely touching the soil before the birds were gone again to act as eyes in the sky for inbound reinforcements.

The ground troops broke into four three-man teams.

The instant the Little Birds were clear, the
Vengeance, Vicious
, and
May
climbed into the sky to circle different sections of the compound with weapons at the ready. Between the six miniguns and the two ships with rockets, they should provide excellent coverage.

In another sixty seconds, the two louder Navy Sea Hawks would each deliver four more Rangers outside the front and back gates to secure against reinforcements. The Sea Hawks would climb aloft to assist those teams from above with their lesser machine guns.

Bill's team, which included a Delta and a Ranger, headed for the main house. As expected, the large steel door was locked. The Ranger slapped on a breaching charge, and they ducked behind large stone planters to either side of the door, each holding a dead palm tree.

“Fire in the hole!” The Ranger lit off the charge and the bolt mechanism disappeared. They were almost back to the door when a stream of gunfire roared out the new hole in the door and into the empty courtyard.

Bill pulled the pin on a grenade, counted to three, and tossed it through the hole. Two seconds later, the force of the explosion slapped the door open, and no gunfire followed it.

Leaning into the opening, the D-boy let off six shots in three quick double-taps, then announced, “Clear.”

The three of them moved in, dropping an extra shot in the heart of each of the gunmen and kicking their weapons clear of dead hands just to be sure.

A second team moved in close behind them. That meant the guardhouse was secure.

***

That was Trisha's cue. As soon as she saw Michael's team enter the main house behind Billy's, she fired her first infrared illumination rocket. It burst over the center of the compound, giving them three minutes of light for their night-vision gear that would make the compound even brighter than daylight for them without offering any assistance to the Somali pirates and guards.

Then, per plan, she targeted the pair of Land Rovers parked close to the main house. Three rockets away and the SUVs were history, lighting up the night with visible fire that glared so brightly with heat that it was hard to look in that direction through the night-vision gear.

Vengeance
took out four parked technicals with rockets. They purposely left the large truck. In case everything else went wrong, they could try driving the hostages out.

Gunfire streamed up toward the choppers from a third-story window. A burst from the
Vicious
cut that off.

With
May
's jammer running, none of the baddies would be able to call for help. But this was Somalia. Billy had warned them. It was a country with eight million people and fourteen million guns. Children were taught how to shoot by the time they were seven, and not BB guns, but AK-47s and RPGs.

That was another thing that had happened in the Battle of Mogadishu. When Task Force Ranger arrived, they were facing twenty or so armed men. By the time they exited the building less than ten minutes later, they were facing a hundred. Before the night was over, more than ten thousand men, women, and children had fired at them. All that had happened without much planning. A firefight had started and everyone simply came running.

For the moment they had the advantage of surprise, but that wouldn't last for long.

Sure enough, she saw a tracer-line stream down from one of the Sea Hawks hovering over the back gate. Every fifth bullet was an infrared tracer round. It wouldn't look like much to the naked eye, a dull red line, but through night-vision gear it reported a long, heavy burst and allowed the Navy crew chief to see exactly where his bullets were arriving. The size of the resulting explosion on the ground, though she couldn't see it outside the wall, indicated it was a technical that had been roaring up the road. They weren't supposed to be responding that fast.

“First technical down, Billy,” she called to him. It was one of the markers of the battle's progress she'd been told to announce.

The compound below them had more than a dozen buildings. The guardhouse had been cleared by one of the ground teams. That so few guards had been there didn't bode well. What intelligence Bill and Michael had gathered said about thirty shooters would be there. Maybe more after picking up the fifteen hostages from Garowe. If they weren't in the guardhouse, then where were—

“Check the heat signatures of the pool house.” AMC Stevenson looking down from his drones.

Even as Trisha turned to look, the ADAS screamed in her ear. She slapped the bird hard left. An RPG flashed by just feet away. Gunfire erupted from the pool house, and she answered it with a pair of rockets and a burst from the miniguns.

They scattered. That's clearly where the guardhouse shooters had been restationed. Either it held more people or the pirate lord was just that smart to know any attack would have identified the guardhouse as a point of first attack.

Two of the pool-house shooters dove into the pool with their guns and then resurfaced, bracing their rifles on the edge of the pool to shoot at her. They were hard to hit that way, only their heads and guns showing above the concrete lip.

“In the water.” Roland called out the suggestion.

“Do it!”

He fired a rocket, their seventh and half of the total they carried. It impacted in the pool and exploded. Whether the shock wave killed or merely knocked out the shooters didn't matter. The gunfire from the pool had ceased.

***

Bill and Michael's teams were moving fast inside, clearing room by room. They could hear the battle raging on the two floors above them. Gunfire directed at the choppers and the other two ground teams. That was the outside teams' job. Secure the compound and keep the upper-floor occupants busy.

The most likely place for the hostages to be was in the basement. Hassan Abdi wouldn't have put them in a remote building; he'd like having tight control on them. He was a very smart pirate. Hopefully this one night they'd be smarter than he was.

Bill sprinted ahead while others were clearing rooms, and Michael fell in close behind him. Just around the corner from the main stairs, Bill stopped. He felt the quick double-squeeze on his shoulder from Michael indicating he was ready.

Bill dove across the stairway, managing two wild shots before he tumbled past the far wall.

A stream of gunfire tried to follow him. Michael, shooting left-handed, leaned around his corner and fired rapidly. Two bodies tumbled down the stairs. Bill heard another land, but it apparently remained on the landing above.

“Hassan,” he called up the stairs.

“Bill! Thought you were dead, man.” The pirate's accent reflected his London education before he'd returned to Somalia. His parents had taken him out of the country to save him from the civil war of the 1990s, and he'd returned to extort millions of dollars from shipping insurance companies.

“Sorry to disappoint.”

He and Michael were ready for it when the grenade rolled down the stairs. They'd each moved well down the walls on either side of the stair so they were well-shielded when it went off.

The loud boom in the enclosed space hurt his ears even through his helmet. Concrete dust filled the air.

They counted five long seconds, then Bill stepped back into the stairwell and shot Hassan, poised on the top step to listen, twice in the head and once in the heart. Michael took out the shooter behind him, then lofted a grenade of his own up the stairs.

The explosion above didn't elicit any more screams, but it would certainly make anyone else think twice about coming down.

***

The three choppers were in a constant dance over the compound. Sometimes one shooter, sometimes a half dozen would pop up, fire a dozen rounds, and then disappear. It was like an awful game of Whac-A-Mole.

Trisha figured that the estimates had been low. There were more like fifty or sixty shooters in the compound, though that number was dropping rapidly. She couldn't imagine the ten thousand or more that had fought in the Battle of Mogadishu. The core problem here was that they were spread far and wide over the compound so it was impossible to stop more than one or two at a time.

The two heavier Black Hawks circled fast, three hundred feet above the edges of the compound. Not above ground fire, but far enough into the dark to be plenty invisible. That left the center as her flight pattern, and she bobbed and swirled as they found and hit back at targets.

“We've got the hostages,” Billy announced.

“Still too hot for extract,” Trisha called back. “Keep them inside the main house.” The transport choppers might survive a landing, but the chances of hostages getting hit in the crossfire while running out the door, down the steps, and over to the choppers were way too high.

A vehicle roared out of what had been identified as an animal barn on the far side of the compound. It was an animal alright. A beast.

“ZU-23!” She shouted over the radio and flung her chopper skyward. A technical with a ZU-23-2, a twin-barreled antiaircraft gun, was a lethal opponent. The beast could shoot eight one-inch shells a second up to a mile away in any direction. Almost any direction. Straight up was hard when mounted to a small truck.

Fire raked toward the
May
, bright streamers of shells lancing upward that made the ADAS feed squeal over her headphones as well as making bright arcs across her visor. She managed to get clear, straight above them. The problem was that she didn't have any way to attack straight down.

“
Vengeance
?” she called out. No need to complete the question.

A pair of rockets streaked in from above and blew earth skyward right in front of the vehicle. The technical caught air as it flew through the shower of dirt, jumping the twinned craters. The driver hit the ground and had the vehicle skidding sideways in a sharp turn even as it landed. He kept it moving. He was good and he was still active.

Trisha knew the
Vengeance
would be out of position for a dozen seconds following the necessary maneuver to fire those rockets.

“Going vertical.” Trisha twisted the cyclic and cranked the collective all of the way up. She forced the chopper nose down toward the ground and went into free fall. She kicked the left pedal and Roland fired off two rockets, no chance to target the miniguns.

She pulled back hard on the cyclic and kicked the pedals back to the right.

The rockets' explosions went off behind her just as she pulled level, barely five feet off the dirt and racing straight at the towering compound wall. Half prayer and half luck combined to climb enough to clear the parapet by about three cat whiskers.

Trisha circled hard. The technical was missing its front end. She'd blown the engine and the cab right off the truck.

Despite the crazy tilt of the truck bed, someone was still trying to fire the ZU-23. A barrage from one of the Black Hawks ended that.

“You see anything else, Roland?” They both were scanning, but the compound had gone suddenly quiet.

“Fire in the hole at the barn,” came in on the D-boy frequency. The barn blew apart. Instead of just a clean bang, the explosion rippled and roared for several moments afterward indicating a lot of other weaponry had been parked there rather than animals.

That's when Roland grunted and slammed against Trisha. Then he collapsed forward against thecyclic joystick.

***

Bill knelt well inside the front door of the main building watching the battle; Michael knelt beside him. They had thirty nervous hostages lying on the floor. The Rangers and D-boys were serving as rear guard. To keep this floor secure, Delta snipers sat at the base of the two sets of stairs to the upper stories, picking off the occasional person braving the descent.

There was a brief pause after the antiaircraft gun was destroyed, and then the barn blew.

That's when Bill saw Trisha's Little Bird nose down hard.

He'd barely been able to breathe when she did the dive straight down on the technical with the ZU-23. Not in all his training had he ever witnessed a move like that. Diving straight at the ground from less than two hundred feet up, she'd killed the machine. Not totally dead, but she was absolutely the one who'd killed it.