Task Force Desperate (16 page)

I looked over my shoulder, and the ragged band of hostages looked to be all out in the courtyard, some coughing as the thick white smoke from the grenade started rolling over the top of the wall. I nodded at Alek, and we both grabbed concussion charges. Lighting the time fuses, we both started to whirl the charges on the end of the nylon, getting them some good momentum before we lobbed them over the wall. No sooner had mine left my hand than I was diving for more smokes.

The charges went off thunderously in the street, blowing smoke and dust up over the wall, and shattering glass all over the block. We immediately followed with about six smokes, as fast as Alek and I could pull pins, throw, and grab the next ones. As we were lobbing smoke grenades, Larry and Colton pushed out onto the street, firing as they moved.

Sweeping my rifle back up from where it dangled in front of my chest, I hefted the duffel and tossed it to the fittest-looking hostage I could see who didn’t have a weapon. “Hold on to that!” I yelled. “Now move!” Then I charged out the gate, and took a knee near, but not on, the wall, facing north.

The intersection to the north of the complex was like a scene out of hell. The gomers had rolled tires out into the middle of the intersection and set them on fire when they started attacking us. One of the concussion charges had landed on one, and scattered burning rubber all across the street. Flames flickered on the ground, through the roiling clouds of smoke, while muzzle flashes strobed above, bullets snapping by overhead, seeking our lives. The fire had slackened, and several bodies lay in heaps on the streets, from both our fire and the explosions. Some of the gomers were still staggering around, firing wildly in our direction. They were blinded by the smoke. The thermal elements of our NVGs removed any such handicap from us.

We gunned them down in the street with their fellows.

Larry, Colton, and I formed a line of shooters across the street, trusting to our fire to keep us alive, as Alek, Tim, and Bob chivvied the hostages down the street, toward the open desert, where we hoped that Kohl and his buddies could pick us up. Tim still had his prisoner, holding him by the collar with one hand, pushing him down the street. I could hear more shooting behind me, as they fought their way through another group of gomers trying to come around to the south. I couldn’t focus on them. My fight was to the north.

Time seemed to slow down, and everything took on a certain clarity that only comes to me when things have well and truly gone south. Larry was shooting so fast it sounded like his DSA FAL was on automatic, but I could hear every single shot. Colton was actually firing bursts. I was simply shooting pairs, every time my IR laser settled on a target.

Gomer. Two shots. Next target. AK in hand. Two shots. Gun goes dry, yank a fresh mag from its pouch, use it to hit the mag release, and sweep the empty mag out of the well. Rock the fresh mag in, and send the bolt home. Shotgun. Two shots. Next target.

We were holding the line, but the hostile fire was getting more intense, not less. Jim hadn’t been kidding; gomers were flooding out of the alleys and back streets of Balbala. We had well and truly kicked the hornet’s nest. Dimly, through the noise, I heard Alek yelling over the radio. “Hillbilly! Bound back!”

I was close enough to Larry to hit him on the shoulder, and he immediately ceased fire, came to his feet, pivoted, and dashed to the south. A few seconds later, he opened up again, his shots snapping past to my left, and I followed suit, bounding past him about ten meters. I pivoted on my right foot, dropping to my knee and bringing my rifle up, and started firing again as soon as I stopped moving. Colton turned, coming to his feet.

The bullet caught him at the base of his jaw.

He spun halfway around and dropped to the pavement like a sack of rocks. I was moving before I could even yell at Larry to hold, running forward to grab him. Larry was right next to me, laying down fire to cover my rush to Colton.

He was still alive, gurgling through the ruin of the lower half of his face. There wasn’t time to do anything for him; can’t put a tourniquet on a face wound. I grabbed his arm, and hoisted him into a fireman’s carry. Fortunately, he was a skinny guy, and I hefted him easily, while Larry kept shooting, cursing a blue streak.

I tried to settle Colton across my shoulders as I ran. Larry keyed his radio as he dashed back behind me. “Seabiscuit’s down, Hillbilly has him, coming to you!”

“Roger,” came Alek’s reply. He was breathing hard, his voice rasping over the comm. The firing behind us picked up, as we dashed past Tim and Bob, who opened back up as they saw we were clear.

My lungs were burning, and every muscle was protesting under Colton’s weight, as he bounced painfully against my shoulders. My left shoulder and arm were wet with his blood. I panted with exertion, but didn’t dare slow down.

We cleared the south end of the complex, and sprinted across the road, heading for the mounds of dirt and tailings that had been left from the construction of the complex and similar projects nearby, hoping to find some cover. I was trying to gasp some encouragement to Colton, trying to keep him fighting to live, but all I managed were hoarse pants.

I staggered around the edge of a berm where Alek had gathered the liberated hostages, and slumped to the ground, trying to ease Colton off my shoulders. Two of the hostages were there as well, and helped me lower him to the ground. I made sure to put him on his side; on his back, he’d likely choke to death on his own blood.

I ripped out the med bag at his waist, and went to work, daring to use a small red lens flashlight. They knew where we were, anyway, as Rodrigo and Nick were on top of the berm with M60s, laying down covering fire as soon as Tim and Bob got out of the way.

I needn’t have bothered. Colton was dead. Either the bullet or the fragments of his jaw must have severed his carotid artery. I was covered in his blood, and he wasn’t moving or breathing. His eyes stared sightlessly at the night sky.

I threw the med bag in the dust in fury and grief. “Where the fuck is Kohl?!” I bellowed at Alek.

Alek just pointed, where two old 5-ton trucks were rolling up the road, flame stabbing from the FN MAG machine guns mounted on the cabs. The lead truck skidded to a halt between us and the gomers in a cloud of dust and gravel. Kohl leaped out of the passenger door, FAMAS cradled in hand, and ran around to the rear, where he sent a couple of desultory bursts downrange before unhooking the tailgate and letting it fall. Then he waved us toward the truck, while taking a knee and starting to suppress the enemy.

I was starting to lift Colton’s body when a hand clasped me by the shoulder. It was Sack. “We’ll get him. I think we need you to shoot right now.” I almost decked him and went back to carrying my brother-in-arms, but his common sense penetrated the emotional shock, and I remembered that the more guns we had in the fight, the more likelihood we had of getting the rest of us out of this alive. It was too late for Colton. Maybe it wasn’t too late for the rest of us.

Bending low, I dashed forward, coming to a knee next to Kohl, and opening fire. A group of gomers was trying to rush us from the small cluster of huts on the other side of the north-south running road. They didn’t make it far. Kohl, Alek, and I gunned them down, even as three machine guns swept across them, peppering the shacks at the same time.

Kohl was a good shot, I’ll give him that. He kept his rifle on semi, putting controlled pairs into any target that presented itself. And there were plenty. The militia was enraged that we’d invaded their turf and taken their hostages, and they were out for blood. Another group of about twenty came boiling out of the alley between building complexes, and into Rodrigo’s fire. He laid windrows of them down in the dusty street.

We were taking fire, but it was mostly high, as the enemy was suppressed by the withering barrage of machinegun fire. I kept killing anything that presented itself, listening for the shout that everybody was on the trucks.

Finally it came. “Let’s go!” Bob yelled from the back of the lead truck, even as he leaned out the back and kept shooting. Looking back, I saw that Kohl, Alek, and I were the last ones on the ground. I punched Kohl’s shoulder, and he got to his feet and ran for the truck. A moment later, Alek tapped me, and we got up and ran.

Helping hands reached down to pull us into the back of the truck. They didn’t have a lot of strength left in them, but those hostages who still had some spark of defiance in them were determined to help. Sack was on his belly on the truck bed, leaning out below Bob, shooting the AK I’d handed him. As soon as I was on, I reached down and grabbed the tailgate, hauling it up and cutting off Sack’s fire, as Alek pounded on the back of the cab. With a lurch, the truck was moving, the Legionnaire on the gun up top still laying down the hate.

We rolled toward the open desert, leaving the hell of smoke, fire, and blood behind.

Chapter 12

I
t had been a long, bumpy ride. Kohl’s driver, Leon, had taken a winding mess of barely rutted tracks, wadis, and occasionally just cutting cross-country, into the desert south of Djibouti City. We wanted to get as far away from Balbala as possible, before we even thought about heading back to our HQ. Odds were good that we’d have to relocate that pretty soon, anyway.

For the moment, we were stopped, the engines shut off, in a small wadi, surrounded by acacias that loomed like black umbrellas against the lighter background of the desert at night. Nick and Rodrigo were in the backs of the trucks, looking over the hostages. Some were rather the worse for wear, and a few really hadn’t handled their captivity well. Two were almost catatonic, and had needed to be lifted by main force into the trucks.

The rest of us, Alek, Bob, Tim, Larry, and I, stood a little way away, in the bottom of the wadi. Colton’s body lay at our feet.

His face had been covered by a bloody shemaugh, and his gear had been stripped. Looking down at him, he looked…shrunken. He’d always been skinny. We’d blamed his unnatural speed on the fact that he wasn’t much more than skin and bones; he didn’t have as much weight to drag around as the rest of us. That, plus his first name, had led to his callsign.

But now, skinny-ass Colton looked frail, like the flesh had all melted off his bones. The clinical part of my brain explained that this was due to the fact all his blood had run out. The rest of me could only stare, numbly, at my friend’s corpse.

Colton wasn’t the first brother I’d lost, and wouldn’t be the last. It’s a dangerous profession we’d chosen. It didn’t make it hurt any less when another one of us went down.

“We’ve got to bury him,” Alek said quietly. “No way are we going to be able to take him back with us.”

There was a general murmur of assent. Getting out of here, especially with hostages, was going to be hard enough. Plus, we had no way of preserving his body. He’d rot before we got within a thousand miles of the States.

For another long moment, no one said or did anything. I could see Bob shaking, silently weeping. He and Colton had been pretty tight, as the soft-spoken runner had been the most welcoming to the new guy on the team. After a moment, he turned, his shoulders still shuddering, and walked to one of the trucks. He returned with a shovel, and began digging in the dry, hard-packed dirt.

As the grave got deeper, the sound of an approaching vehicle could be heard. Alek turned away, listening, and then keyed his radio. “Roger, that’s us…Affirm, I have eyes on you. Come on in.”

A blacked out HiLux soon trundled into the wadi and coasted to a stop next to one of the 5-tons. The engine went quiet, and a man got out and walked toward us. As he got closer, I saw it was Danny. He didn’t say a word at first, just walked up to Alek, grasped him by the hand, and pulled him in close. “I’m sorry, brother,” he said quietly. Alek just nodded; then Danny faced the rest of us. He walked over to Colton’s body, and bowed his head.

Bob had stopped digging, and was staring at Danny. “What the fuck are you doing here?” he asked.

“That’s enough, Bob,” Alek growled, but Bob wasn’t going to be put off. He was digging his best friend’s grave, after all.

“No, this motherfucker stayed back, while we went into that fucking hornet’s nest, and now Colton’s fucking dead. And he’s got the balls to come here and say he’s fucking sorry?!” Bob’s voice was starting to rise in volume.

“I said shut your fucking mouth, Bob!” Alek snapped. “I made the call as to who went, and who stayed back. I was the one who decided Danny had to stay back and work support. This motherfucker has been through worse shit than you can imagine, so shut the fuck up.”

Bob shut up. It was hard to see his face in the dark, but he still didn’t look happy about it. Danny, if anything, seemed even less so. If he had worked with Alek before I knew him, that meant he had been in on some hairy shit. I wondered how many other friends and comrades he’d had to bury. I decided I probably didn’t want to know.

After a few minutes, Larry stepped down into the grave. He put his hand on Bob’s shoulder, and gently took the shovel from him, then started digging, while Bob stepped up out of the grave. While Larry dug, Danny motioned to Alek and me to come with him.

We walked around behind the HiLux, where Danny blew a deep breath up past his nose, folded his arms, and leaned back against the tailgate. “You said you picked up one of the gomers?” he asked, all business.

“Yeah,” Alek said. “An Arab. Young kid, too, maybe twenty. He’s in the truck with two of the Legionnaires watching him.”

“Not sure I like having them too involved,” Danny said.

“I don’t either, but we all needed to be down here,” Alek said, indicating Colton’s shrouded body.

“I understand. Let’s just get him somewhere where I can talk to him soon, okay?” Danny replied. “And I mean
soon
. I got word from Langley just before I came out here. The Ethiopians crossed the border an hour ago.”

“Well this just keeps getting better and better, doesn’t it?” I said. “Fuck. How long does that give us?”