Task Force Desperate (35 page)

The man looked startled, and immediately got on his radio, speaking rapidly and excitedly. His goons still weren’t standing down, though they did keep glancing nervously toward the river, as well as the swelling cacophony of gunfire and explosions to the south. I really didn’t like this. They were scared and probably a bit trigger-happy already, and with the real bad guys closing in on them, it was going to get worse. I traded a quick look with Jim, and he nodded fractionally. He felt it, too. We had to stay calm and collected, and not give these guys a reason to go over the edge and start shooting.

Alek was now standing back from the parley, his hands noticeably resting on the buttstock of his rifle, not the firing control. Baird had his hands spread in a pointedly non-threatening gesture, and Danny was leaning against the hood of the UAZ, his arms crossed, looking nonchalant. It was a marked contrast to the Kenyans.

It also seemed to be lost on them. The officer was looking more and more agitated, and wasn’t calming down with Baird’s reassurances. That was bleeding over to his subordinates. I didn’t see anybody who looked like an NCO; that was a major problem with militaries that didn’t have a solid NCO corps. There wasn’t the practical voice of experience to calm down the connected amateur that was “leading” the unit.

That was when Spider stepped in. To this day, I don’t know what he said, but the officer went very still all of a sudden, just staring at him. Then he waved to his subordinates, turned around, and left.

Just like that.

My estimate of Spider went up several notches.

The officer climbed back into his AML, and they did a reasonable formation turn away from us and back toward the FOB, as the MD-50 roared by overhead, its rotor wash beating at us, the door gunners still not
quite
aiming their HK machine guns at us. Alek turned back to the rest of us and made the raised-hand circle signal.
Mount up
. I nodded, and Jim and I climbed back into the Land Cruiser. Rodrigo put the vehicle in gear as I slammed the door, maneuvering my rifle so that I could point it out the open window if need be.

“We good, then?” he asked.

“I guess,” I replied. “They’re leaving and not forcing us to go with them. I’m going to take that as ‘we’re free to go.’”

Rodrigo pointed toward the river. “You guys see that over there?”

“Yeah, we did,” Jim said. “So did the Kenyans, and I’m guessing they figured that those guys are more of a threat than we are, so they skedaddled to get some HESCOs between them and the Lashkar assholes.”

“Maybe,” I said. “They didn’t look too interested in letting us go until that Spider dude said something to the officer. Then they took off like scared rabbits.”

“What’d he say?” Rodrigo asked, as we started bumping across the ground again.

“How the hell should I know?” I replied. “I was back here. Even if I wasn’t as deaf as I am, I wouldn’t have been able to hear it.”

“Who cares?” Jim pointed out. “We’re on our way.”

He had a point, but I couldn’t help but wonder just what was going on with Baird’s lanky associate. It usually takes more than a few words to get a uniformed bureaucrat to shut up and leave you alone, especially in these Third World shitholes. It implied a few things about Spider that made me curious. And yes, a little more suspicious.

We went bouncing and roaring north, rattling over farmland, following the narrow tracks between fields that often weren’t much more than footpaths. It was a painful ride, and I wondered how much longer the suspension on the Land Cruiser was going to last, even as my knees ached from my rifle banging into them. We had to fare pretty far north to find a river crossing; we didn’t want to try too close to the LaB boats. As it was, we were kicking up plenty of dust; they could probably see us heading north. The question, that none of us asked as the noise of our passage was generally too loud and none of us felt like yelling, was would they bother following, or write us off and go after the big prize of the city? I was reasonably certain that they would choose the latter, but it never hurt to be a little paranoid.

Baird’s people already had a crossing picked out and scouted, and we splashed across the Juba where it doglegged to the east, then turned to the northwest and banged out into the badlands. Familiarity didn’t make the roughness of the ride any less painful, I’m afraid.

I kept an eye on the battered, dusty rearview mirror, trying to pick out signs of pursuit through our own not-inconsiderable dust cloud. I couldn’t see anything, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t there. I stayed tense until well after the low outline of Baardheere and the plumes of black smoke and dust rising into the midday sky above it faded into the horizon.

Then I tried to settle into the battered stuffing of the seat, keeping the increasingly hot metal of my rifle and the vehicle door off any exposed skin, and held on for the ride.

Naturally, we had to stop in the middle of nowhere.

The pitch of the Land Cruiser’s engine changed, and Rodrigo started cursing, before he keyed his radio, and called Alek. “This piece of shit is overheating, we’ve got to stop.”

“Roger,” Alek called back. “All stations, we’re halting for ten minutes. Circle up, Hillbilly’s truck in the center.”

The UAZ in the lead immediately slowed, and the HiLux pulled off to one side. With trucks alternating directions, we soon had a ring of vehicles in the desert, facing out, with the Land Cruiser in the middle. No sooner had we halted than the dismounts started getting out, rifles out and ready. Rodrigo piled out of the driver’s seat, and popped the hood. I took the opportunity to get out, my M1A hanging from its sling, and walked over to Alek’s HiLux. As I did so, I looked around some more. There wasn’t much to see. Miles and miles of rolling red dirt and low brush. There was little other sign of life aside from our little band of trucks.

At least, there was until I turned my eyes south, and saw the reddish plume against the horizon. It was still a long way off, but something out there was kicking up dust, and coming our direction.

I continued the last ten paces to Alek’s vehicle, keeping my eyes locked on that plume. When I reached the HiLux, where Alek had just finished pissing against the front tire, he looked at me and immediately asked, “What is it?”

I just pointed. Alek followed my finger, and squinted. “Somebody’s moving out there,” he said.

“Yep,” I replied. “Any guesses as to who?”

“A couple. And only one fits.” He keyed his radio. “Stand to, we’ve got company.” At this point, he didn’t really have to say anything more.

I joined Jim and Larry moving to the south side of the perimeter. Since we had stopped in the bed of one of the many wadis that made up the tortured terrain of western Somalia, we had high ground to our south, at least for certain values of high ground. It didn’t really afford us any elevation advantage on whoever was coming toward us, but it did offer some cover.

Several of Baird’s guys were already down in the prone against the side of the wadi; little but their heads and weapons would be showing to the south. It was a pretty good position, and the three of us spread out and set in among them. I found myself between a massive black man, who greeted me with a glance and a “What’s up, man?” in a distinct West Texas accent, and a skinny blonde white guy who didn’t even look in my direction, but kept his focus solidly on the south.

I nodded to each of them, and concentrated on setting in, without tearing myself up too much on the rocks and stiff desert brush. We were actually on a slight rise, so we could see pretty well. I had been worried about getting up here and finding ourselves staring at just more brush, or even facing an uphill slope, with visibility that cut off barely a few tens of meters in front of us. It was a relief to see that we had a good field of view for several hundred meters.

The dust plumes were getting bigger now, and we were starting to see little glints of sunlight on metal or glass at their bases. They were definitely vehicles; the only question was, whose? I peered through my scope, but couldn’t make out much detail. They were pickup trucks, and had either a bunch of cargo, or people, in their beds. That was all I could see.

They were moving fast enough to kick up dust, but out in the desert, that isn’t necessarily that fast, and going too fast without a road is a ticket to a bad day. They wouldn’t be in range for a while yet.

I called Alek. “Are we setting in and waiting for these guys, or heading out as soon as that truck is up?”

“I’d rather not have them tagging along all the way to Garbahaarrey,” he replied. “We’ll stay put and see what they do. If they’re just nomads, once they’re out of sight, we move. If they’re coming after us, we educate them as to exactly why that is a very bad idea.”

“Roger.” I couldn’t argue with his reasoning. In his place, I’d probably make the same call.

It was hot as hell, lying there in the dirt with my vest and my mags digging into my ribs, feeling where the bits of brush had made their way into my shirt and my trouser legs, hot, sharp rocks digging into various parts of my anatomy. None of us talked; there wasn’t a lot to talk about, and all of us had developed the habit of quiet in tactical situations a long time ago. We just lay there, sweated, hurt, and watched.

As the oncoming trucks came closer, they started to resolve into what were unquestionably technicals. They were mostly HiLuxes, with a few older two-and-a-half ton trucks, with gunmen in the beds and hanging out passenger windows. At least two had heavy guns mounted; I saw what I was pretty sure were a couple of PKMs and a DShK. That pretty much sealed the deal--they were LaB, and they had to be looking for us.

So much for the city holding all their attention.

But did they know where we were? Had they spotted where we had stopped, or were they still searching? Could we lie low and hope they’d pass us by? Or should we ambush them, and hope we could take them all out with minimal losses?

After all, as much as these particular assholes might need killing, they weren’t the particular assholes we were there to pick a fight with. The mission came first, and the mission was to get to the hostages and get them out. Fighting these punks if we didn’t have to endangered that mission.

Not that I didn’t want to waste the whole lot of them.

Scanning across the dust cloud, I noticed something. There was one HiLux well out in front of the two deuce-and-a-halfs, and two more well out to the flanks. Somebody had sure been teaching these guys tactics; they had point and flank security out. Used to be that such things were pretty much beyond these gomers, but it appeared that the Kalifah support had taught them a few things. Of course, the GWOT had taught the Kalifah Arabs a few things about tactics, too, often courtesy of American trainers.

There was a tall guy in the back of the point HiLux, with a radio. At first, even through the scope, I couldn’t tell what he was doing, but soon enough I figured it out. He was looking at the ground ahead of the truck.

Motherfucker was tracking us.

I called Alek. “Coconut, Hillbilly. We’ve got technicals, and they’re following our tire tracks. They’re going to come right to us.”

“They in range?” he asked.

“About two more minutes,” I answered.

“Waste ‘em.”

“Roger that.” I looked over at West Texas. “You guys ready?”

“We’ll initiate on you,” he replied, without looking up from his own Leupold scope, which looked downright weird sitting on an R4 in the middle of East Africa.

I set my eye back on my own scope, and settled the sights on tracker boy. It was still a decently long shot at six hundred, though easily within the capabilities of even a short-barrel M1A. It was a little far for the R4s, so I held off a little bit longer. I still wanted to hit them at least one hundred meters outside the range of the AKMs most of them appeared to be packing.

I waited, breathing slow and easy, watching the tracker bob in my sights. When he filled enough of a milradian, I started shooting.

Now, I was a sniper when I was a Marine. One shot, one kill was the mantra, but it rarely worked out that way in real life, especially if the target was moving as much and as randomly as a guy standing in the back of a moving vehicle. Often it boiled down to taking a shot, watching where it impacted, and adjusting to get the target with the next shot. You had to be quick on that follow-up shot, too, because very few people will just stand still and look around when a bullet just cracked past them.

I wasn’t looking for a precision kill this time, though. While single disabling shots was still our standard, there were more people and a vehicle to put holes in, so general area was acceptable. I made sure to aim each shot, but I wasn’t adjusting much.

The booming reports of the Praetorian .308s were quickly joined by the lighter cracks of Baird’s guys R4s. Dust flew up from the muzzle blasts all along the line.

I saw tracker boy drop. Bullets smashed through the HiLux’s windshield, and it suddenly veered to the left, as a red splash appeared on the spider-webbed glass behind one of the bullet holes. The death-spasm-induced turn was too tight, and the HiLux flipped over with a horrendous crash, sending bodies flying out of the bed.

The rest of the LaB vehicles tried to jam on the brakes, as one of our M60s opened up to my left, and hammered rounds across the cab of the right flank HiLux. That truck simply slowed to a stop, as its windshield shattered and its grill came apart. I saw one fighter try to leap clear of the bed and run away, and gunned him down with two shots that smashed him sideways to the dirt.

The rear vehicles were trying to pull backward, out of the kill zone. I loosed a couple of shots at one of the deuce-and-a-halfs, to little apparent effect. They were backpedaling fast, leaving the three trucks we had caught on the X to their fate.

The two HiLuxes that remained were trashed, their occupants obviously dead or soon to be that way. The lead deuce-and-a-half, however, while disabled, wasn’t out of the fight. There was still a DShK mounted over the cab, and several of the fighters in the bed had survived, and were now on the ground and starting to shoot back.