Task Force Desperate (26 page)

“ACE reports!” Alek snapped over the radio. “Everybody all right?”

I rocked the mag out of my M1A, checked it, and shoved it in my dump pouch with some difficulty, as I was half-sitting on the pouch. As I rocked in a fresh one, I called up, “Hillbilly, used eighteen rounds, up and up.”

Jim had checked his M60’s box. “Kemosabe, one hundred fifty rounds expended, up and up.”

One by one, each member of the team checked in, giving their ammo expenditures and affirming that they were unhurt. A couple of 7.62 rounds had impacted the HiLux’s bed, as Bob rather shakily reported. It sounded like one or two had come uncomfortably close to him.

As we got further away, and the initial dust cloud started to disperse, we saw that there were still pirate trucks on our tail, but they had been thinned out considerably. I found myself wishing for mines.

Once all the ACE, or Ammo, Casualty, Equipment reports were in, Alek came back on the net. “Listen up. It looks like we thinned the herd some, but we need to break contact with these mothers. Five hundred meters, we brake-check again. If that doesn’t sufficiently discourage them, then we bombshell. Right seaters, get ready to copy the rally point.”

I was keeping an eye out for more bad guys, but I could hear Rodrigo up front call out, “Ready to copy,” which was chorused by Hank in the other Land Cruiser.

“Coordinates are--” Alek spooled off the numbers. “The rally point is south of Harardhere. I don’t want to make a straight line in there, in case these punks have called ahead. Upon reaching the rally point, if none of the other trucks are there, attempt to get comm, and hold position for no more than six hours. If there is no contact after six hours, move to the secondary rally point.” He rattled off another string of coordinates. “If you cannot reach the rally point, attempt to get comm, and, if necessary, move on foot to the secondary rally point.”

I glanced over at Jim. If it hadn’t been obvious just how far out in the cold we were on this job before, it sure was now. We were making plans that in the old days, working for Uncle Sam, would have ended in escaping and evading for friendly lines. Here, there wasn’t any such thing as friendly lines. Bad-guy country was everywhere.

Just as I was thinking that, Danny broke in on the circuit. “If you can’t link up with the rest of the team, find a way to make it to Gaalkacyo. It’s the capital of Galmudug, and it’s big enough you should be able to lose yourselves long enough to arrange a flight out. Just make sure you ditch your long guns before you go in. The security forces might get a little twitchy.”

Alek agreed. “You can still get a flight to Kenya out of Gaalkacyo. If you get cut off, get the fuck out.” I hoped and prayed that nobody got cut off. We couldn’t really afford to lose a third of the team at this juncture.

We were coming up on five hundred meters. Easy to do, when you’re tear-assing across the desert at forty klicks an hour. Which isn’t all that fast on the road, but offroad, it’s pretty fast.

It was a repeat of the previous engagement. Alek counted down, the drivers stomped on the brakes, and we lit up our pursuers. This time, they were a little more ready for it, and the return fire was getting pretty thick, especially since they slowed down when we did, so as not to pile into a big jumblefuck when we suddenly stopped.

It didn’t do them a lot of good, though. As a rule, Middle Eastern and East African troops don’t do much aiming, apparently going by the principle that Allah will make the bullets hit. This tends to mean that they quite literally “spray and pray,” most of their fire going high, and sailing off to Lord knows where, and probably killing some hapless sheepherder a mile away. We didn’t work like that.

In spite of our less-than-optimal shooting positions, sitting braced between back seat and back door, on an uneven jumble of rucksacks and gear, Jim and I made the best of it. Jim held the 60 tight into his shoulder with the broom handle foregrip, and stitched tight, thumping bursts into the enemy trucks. I propped a knee up on a ruck, and rested my elbow on it, to get a little bit more stability. The 8x magnification on the scope still made things bounce a little, but it was easy enough to get on target, at least as far as it went. The dust and grit was still obscuring everything, and a lot of the finer dust was settling on my scope lenses, in spite of the shock of the rifle‘s firing.

Bob was laying it on, hammering at the HiLux in the lead. Even through the clouds of dust and flying sand, I could see the puffs of dust, shrapnel, and smoke coming off the truck as it was peppered with a heavy stream of 7.62 fire. Jim was alternating between that truck and an ancient Land Rover, which now had a smoking engine compartment and shattered windshield.

A couple of savage
crack
s announced a pair of hits on our vehicle. I glanced up to see the bullet furrows in the roof, and quickly got back on scope to try to find the shooter. Turned out there was a pirate with a SVD crouched in the scrub about twenty meters away from the trucks, taking potshots at us. I pumped three rounds at him, and he vanished into the shrubbery. Then we were moving again, and I couldn’t see anymore.

Again, the ACE reports went up. Larry had gotten grazed this time, but it was nothing more than a burn. I was starting to worry about our ammo stores. We were in enemy territory, without the kind of support we might have gotten as a SOF asset. We had extra ammo in our kitbags, but we couldn’t afford too many of the kind of pitched fights that had been all too characteristic of this job.

“Anyone see any further pursuit?” Alek called. I squinted through the brown fug behind us. My eyes were starting to grate in their sockets from the dust.

After a few moments of searching, I keyed my radio. “This is Hillbilly. I don’t see any sign. Looks like they’re still stopped where we hit them.”

“Roger,” Alek replied. “We’ll go another five klicks, and then turn inland, provided there’s no further sign of pursuit or observation. I don’t want to be making straight lines out here.” I couldn’t agree more.

It was a quiet five kilometers, except for the banging of the SUVs and everything in them as we bounced across the barren landscape. The dust was filling everything, and I coughed as it coated my throat. I kept squinting against the sandpapery feeling in my eyes, trying to see if our little friends were still up to their mischief. But the hazy horizon stayed clear.

Finally we slowed and started to turn west. The East African savannah stretched flat, dry, and featureless in front of us. This was going to be navigation by time, azimuth, and speed; there weren’t any landmarks to follow.

There also wasn’t anyplace to hide for a long, long way. Which worked against us as much as it did for us.

We hadn’t been on our new course for very long before Jim prodded my elbow. When I looked over at him, he pointed. I peered along his pointing finger and saw the distant plume of dust to our southeast. I lifted my M1A to look through the scope, but we were moving too much, and I couldn’t focus on the dust cloud. I called up to Alek anyway.

“We’ve got a dust cloud, looks like vehicles moving north/northeast from the vicinity of Harardhere. Might be our little pals’ buddies.”

“Any sign they’ve made us?” Alek asked.

“Not yet…” I stopped. The dust cloud had changed, as if it was aimed in our direction now. “Could be. Looks like they’ve turned inland.”

There was a pause, doubtless filled with Alek’s cussing up a storm in the cab of the HiLux. “Push it harder, gents,” he finally radioed. “Let’s try to open up the gap, and keep it open.”

“Gonna be tough, trying to keep the gap wide enough until nightfall,” Jim radioed from beside me. “We’ll be out of gas long before then.”

There was another pause, and then Alek came back over the net, his voice firm. “Plan B, then. Bombshell in five. We’ll see you guys at the RV point.”

“Bombshelling” is an old anti-tracking technique, where if the quarry is a group, they scatter in all directions. The idea is, the tracker can’t follow all of them, and will more likely lose the spoor when it is from one individual, and not going in a particular direction. How well it would work with vehicles on the open savannah, we couldn’t tell, but it was a better chance than just trying to outrun whoever was back there on severely limited fuel.

“Coconut, Hillbilly,” I called. “I’d suggest we hold off until we’ve got some cover. They see us split at a distance, and they’re probably going to just split up to go after us. Let’s find a wadi or something where we can get out of line of sight, then split.”

“I hear you, Hillbilly,” Alek came back, “but there isn’t jack out here. At least not enough to disguise our dust.”

“If we can’t get something between us and them,” I argued, “we should stick together. More guns means more chances of staying intact. I don‘t feel like getting run down and slaughtered piecemeal.”

“I’m going to throw in with Hillbilly, boss.” It was Hank’s gravelly voice. “If we had a break in contact, then fine, but I don’t think it’ll work this way.”

There was a pause as we continued to bounce brutally across the plain, the dust of our pursuers rising into the brassy morning sky behind us. I imagined that Alek was poring over the maps and imagery he would have had spread across his lap, trying to find a solution.

The fact was, we needed fuel. I didn’t know where there was gas to be had out here, but from what little I knew about central Somalia, there probably wasn’t much outside of certain population centers, and most of those, at least close to the coast, were dominated by pirates. Of the others, we couldn’t be certain which ones were “friendly,” by which I mean wouldn’t shoot us on sight, and which ones were in the hands of Al-Shabaab or one of the other Islamist militias. We had a long way to go, and going on foot wasn’t in the cards. We didn’t have the time.

I kept squinting into the rising sun to try to see our tails a little better. After a moment, in spite of the jouncing, I made out a crucial detail. “Coconut, Hillbilly. Be advised, it looks like our pursuer is just an outrider. I say again, the main body appears to still be heading toward Hobyo.”

“How many outriders, Hillbilly?” Alek came back quickly.

I squinted some more. The dust was coating my Oakleys, making it even harder to see through the haze and glare, but after a moment I called back, “Looks like two trucks, Coconut.”

“Are they continuing to pursue?”

I was about to say yes, when I noticed the dust seem to dwindle, then change direction. “Negative, negative,” I called back, breathing a sigh of relief. “They are turning back and rejoining the rest of their convoy.”

“Bet their homies told them that the bad guys who hit them were way more than just three trucks worth,” Tim cracked. “I mean, they couldn’t admit that they got shot to shit by only eleven guys.”

“Good point,” Alek conceded, “but not one I’m willing to bet the farm on. Keep an eye on ‘em, and let’s start figuring out where the hell we’re going to get some gas. I think Harardhere is probably out. More than likely, the bad guys called ahead, and they’ll be waiting for us.”

“Nearest town is Balli Gubat,” Imad announced. “Don’t know much about it, but there was something in the briefings we got from Danny that the Galmudug military had an outpost in or near it these days, to threaten the pirates.”

“What do we know about the Galmudug military?” Larry asked.

“Their leadership is mostly what’s left of Aidid’s boys from the ‘90s and early ‘00s,” Danny replied. “They’ve got a reputation for being ruthless, hard as woodpecker lips, and some of the most efficient, experienced, and well-trained soldiers in Somalia. The only thing that’s really kept them from overrunning the operations in Hobyo and Harardhere is their logistical and money shortfalls.”

“Aidid?” Imad asked. “Is it really a good idea to risk tangling with them?”

“Well…” Danny sounded a little hesitant. “I’m reasonably sure they won’t shoot us on sight, which is more than can be said for the people behind us. If we can manage to convince them that we’re here to put the hurt on Al-Shabaab and Al Masri’s merry motherfuckers, I’m hopeful that they’ll at least sell us some gas.”

“’Hopeful?’ I’m not all that comfortable with ‘hopeful,’ Danny,” Jim replied.

“Everybody pipe down for a minute,” Alek called shortly, and the net went quiet.

For rather more than a minute, we bounced across the desert in relative silence. I watched the dust cloud to our east, but it didn’t come any closer, as the sun climbed in the sky. Finally, Alek made his decision. “We get close to Balli Gubat, and lay low until sundown. Then we’ll send Imad in, with four of us close by as backup. If we have to, we steal the gas and get out. If we can, we’ll see what supplies we can buy from the Galmudug troops, and hopefully some kind of safe passage, at least through the region itself.”

It wasn’t perfect, but it was a plan.

Chapter 19

L
arry, Hank, Bob, and I scrambled forward through the scrub, bent half over, our NVGs lowered in front of our FAST helmets, before spreading out and going to ground, crouching in the low, prickly brush deep enough that we would be lost in it to an observer from the town, without obscuring our own view.

In my head, I was cussing. It had been a pretty hellish five-klick movement from the shallow wadi where we had done what we could to conceal the vehicles. The oppressive heat hadn’t lifted much once the sun went down, so we were all sweating profusely under our kit, which had included about three liters of water per man. The ground had been soft and sandy most of the way, which makes it twice as hard to walk as over firm ground. Add to that the vicious, thorny tangle of the brush out in the desert, and we were all about as miserable as we could get. I was reasonably sure I was bleeding in several places under my trousers, but with all the sweat, it was hard to tell.

Focus. On task. I swept my gaze across what I could see of the tiny town of Balli Gubat, the darkness turned to shades of green. Directly ahead I could see a large enclosure made of shrubs just like many of the livestock enclosures that we had been seeing all over the place out here, only this one was considerably taller and thicker. From the imagery, there were a handful of these thicker, taller enclosures in the town, all apparently around wells. For obvious reasons, water was the primary concern of the people who lived here.