Choke Point

by Tom Clancy

  ‘Before what?’

  ‘The Harak are launching a major offensive.’

  Ross got to his feet. ‘That’s it, then. We’re going to the safe house by the port – and you’re taking us.’

  ‘Captain, you don’t understand –’

  30K’s voice broke over the team net:

  ‘Ghost Lead, I got a SITREP you ain’t gonna like. The guards at the checkpoint on Queen Arwa Road are dead. Those Harak guys have brought in some Panhards with ninety-millimeter guns. Count four blocking the whole road with two, maybe three, squads taking up defensive positions, over.’

  The Panhard AMLs were light armored four-by-fours that resembled SUVs with tank-like main guns mounted on their roofs and pairs of 7.62mm machine guns as secondary weapons.

  Ross began to reply when those 81mm rockets began to rain down over the city, popping and booming, reverberating and echoing, as secondary explosions rumbled through the first ones, the cacophony growing near, the building shaking once more, a few rounds sledgehammering into a building just down the street.

  The Port of Aden was under siege.

  ‘Ghost Team! Meet me out back. We’re out of here!’ Ross grabbed his load out bag and started for the door.

  ‘Where are you going?’ asked Naseem. ‘We can’t get to the port. Not now anyway.’

  ‘The hell we can’t. What’s the address of the safe house?’

  Naseem looked confused. ‘I’m coming with you.’

  ‘Fine, but give it to me anyway, in case something happens.’

  Naseem tore free a page from a tablet lying near a landline phone and scribbled down the information. He proffered it to Ross, saying, ‘Not sure this will matter. There may not be a safe place here. Not tonight.’

  Ross took the paper, stole a look, then shoved it into his breast pocket.

  Kozak had gone out on to the apartment’s balcony, where he was now marking the positions of several more roadblocks manned by Harak troops, who were, at first glance, indistinguishable from Yemen’s regular army. The three major highways running through Crater and intersecting with Queen Arwa Road were being cut off by more Panhards, while six M113 Armored Personnel Carriers had pulled up outside the Bank of Aden’s modern office building, with ten troops dismounting from each. These men, Kozak believed, were the regular Army, moving up in timed intervals to confront the rebels.

  ‘Kozak, where the hell are you?’ shouted Ross.

  ‘On my way,’ he answered, then bolted off the balcony, through the apartment, and went slamming out the back door, where he found 30K holding open the side door of a van similar to the one driven by their airport driver.

  He threw in his load out bag, then collapsed into one of the backseats beside 30K, who’d already rolled down the window and had his AK-47 in hand.

  Meanwhile, Pepper smashed open the rear window with the butt of his own AK and was now covering their six o’clock. Naseem was at the wheel, and Ross was up front with him, still working the controls of the second drone, his gaze widening.

  With both drones out, they were getting good intel of the oncoming battle, working with the analysts back home to identify both rebel and government forces on their maps. The GST was monitoring communications between Army forces and the Republican Guard, and Naseem had provided Mitchell with intel sent to him by his commanders.

  Kozak began to designate the blue forces (friendlies) and began observing how those troops were being engaged by Harak forces operating in squads on hit-and-run missions. The rebels seemed to appear from nowhere.

  Not nowhere, actually. They’d been in the city all along, cleaning their weapons, eating a big dinner, kissing their children good night, and waiting for the balloon to go up, which in this case had been represented by that series of car bombs. Those acts had signaled the rebels to move up into their attack positions, and the mortars were the final signal to strike.

  ‘If I can get you to the safe house, I will. But then I’ll need to return to my troops,’ said Naseem. ‘I don’t want them to believe I’m a deserter.’

  ‘I find that ironic,’ Ross said. ‘But okay.’

  Just as they reached the end of the alley behind the row of apartment buildings, a mortar round struck with a blinding flash, as though Thor himself had come down and decided that this building had to go.

  The explosion shaved off the whole side of the structure, with jagged chunks of stone the size of washing machines tumbling end over end to shatter on to the road just meters ahead while, above, laundry ripped from the lines began floating down like tiny, surreal parachutes swinging on a blast wave backlit by tongues of fire.

  A portable air conditioner slammed into the windshield on the passenger’s side, shattering the glass and dropping away with a metallic thud. More muffled thumps came from the rear, and Kozak craned his head and grimaced as shredded bodies struck in mangled, twisted heaps.

  Naseem shouted something lost in the booming, but it was enough to draw Kozak’s attention back to the front.

  ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa!’ hollered 30K.

  ‘You gotta turn, dude!’ added Pepper.

  ‘Don’t go in there!’ Kozak cried.

  Before Naseem could shift the wheel to navigate around the growing debris field, a dust cloud swept over them, the van’s headlights unable to penetrate the blinding wave, the tires crunching across newly laid carpets of glass.

  ‘Brake!’ screamed Ross in Arabic. ‘Brake!’

  Kozak gasped as a boulder shaped like a jagged tooth materialized ahead and came cartwheeling toward them.

  Naseem slammed his foot on the brake pedal, and Kozak felt his neck snap as the van’s tires locked up – even as Naseem cut the wheel, banking hard around the boulder, which collapsed on to its side just behind them.

  Without missing a beat, Naseem hit the gas again, tossing Kozak back into his seat as dust poured in through the open windows, choking the air and sending him into a fit of coughing.

  And just as quickly, the dust cleared and Pepper shouted, ‘Hey, I think I got something back here!’

  FORTY-THREE

  They emerged from the walls of dust like Celtic warriors on an early-morning battlefield –

  Six men pairing off, one pair on each flank, with another dropping to cover behind a sedan whose windows had been blown apart by the mortar shell.

  ‘You know what they’re doing, don’t you?’ cried Naseem, pounding his foot once more on the brake pedal. ‘They’re shelling the city so they can blame it on the Republican Guard!’

  After Pepper and the others were thrown forward, he shifted his aim back out the rear window and shouted again, ‘Contacts to the rear! Two on each flank. Two more behind the car!’

  With that, he opened fire, pinning down the two troops behind the car while their comrades on the flanks began to move up, shouldering the walls between alcoves and then dropping to their haunches –

  To open fire.

  Pepper could not scream any louder for Naseem to roll the wheel and get them around the debris as rounds popped and began punching into the van’s tailgate.

  At the same time, 30K braced his legs between the seat and hung out the open window, resting on his stomach so he could roll sideways and open fire, striking both troops to their right while Kozak had set down his remote and was delivering volleys of suppressing fire to the men on their left, his AK spitting out three-round bursts that sewed a jagged line in the wall above their heads, rounds ricocheting to strike a few more of the parked cars.

  The van jerked hard to the right, hitting what felt like back-to-back speed bumps before the road leveled off and they cleared the debris, the piles of stone now shielding them from more incoming fire.

  Pepper watched as Kozak gaped at the drone’s remote, now piping in a wide view of the city. The rapid-fire thunder of mortars was increasing. ‘Hey, boss, mortars have hit the bank, police station, even the clock tower, which is now blown to shit,’ he reported. ‘They’re starting shift fires to the north, while
the troops down near the bank are engaging rebels at the roadblocks. If they keep shelling Queen Arwa Road, they’ll tear it up so much that nothing will get through. We’ll be hiking over the mountain, and we’ll never reach the port in time. Not on foot anyway.’

  ‘Naseem?’ called Ross. ‘Slight detour. We need to take out those mortars. Get us down to the cemetery.’

  Between the dust caked on the driver’s side window and the shattered passenger’s side, Ross wondered how Naseem could see anything at all. Ross shoved himself forward, balancing his elbow on the dashboard, and reached out through the hole in the glass to begin wiping it off with his sleeve, but then Naseem cut the wheel hard left, throwing Ross back and taking them down another alley. Naseem cursed and bit his lip.

  Two more buildings up the road had been shelled, the rubble blocking their path, the air filled with the scent of leaking natural gas and shattered concrete while women and children were evacuating the buildings, screaming and crying, running along the sidewalk.

  Naseem threw the truck in reverse –

  Just as another explosion erupted from the ground ahead and Ross didn’t need an engineering degree to know that the leaking gas had ignited.

  His ears rang as Naseem swung around, rolling the wheel like a stunt driver, the van listing badly, tires squealing and burning as he hung a right at the next corner.

  Allowing the man to drive had been a calculated risk – and a test. Naseem knew the city better than any of them, and if he wanted to prove his loyalty, he could do it right now, and the rebels provided plenty of opportunities to do that.

  Ross shifted his attention to his Cross-Com, where the drone’s feed had been updated to show a wider overhead image of the cemetery, the mortar teams hard at work, dropping shells into the launch tubes and rolling back, the tubes flashing brilliantly like a formation of lightning bugs as the rounds arced skyward. It was an indirect fire operation as deadly as they came, turning corners of the city into piles of debris and half-buried corpses. Typical fire missions included forwarded observers who made calls for and adjusted fire on the enemy, and Ross realized now that all those ‘snipers’ they’d seen on the rooftops were actually serving double duty as FOs. There was usually a fire direction center that computed range, trajectory, and shell use info to the gunners, but Ross suspected that the teams were speaking directly to their FOs and putting fires on grid coordinates northeast, directly north, and northwest of their positions.

  ‘I want to come in behind them, so take us west of the mosque, get around it, then get us as close to the wall as possible. After that, we’ll move in on foot,’ Ross told Naseem.

  Naseem shook his head in disbelief. ‘How will you take out ten mortar positions with just four men?’

  ‘What do you mean four?’ asked Ross. ‘I’m going to do it with just one.’ Ross glanced to the back seat. ‘30K? You in?’

  30K grinned like a werewolf.

  FORTY-FOUR

  Kozak imagined the gravestones as pillars carved with hieroglyphics that told stories of how space travelers arrived on Earth millions of years ago to seed the human race. All right, his nerves had, admittedly, allowed his imagination to run wild. Time to buckle down and get to work. He ran his fingers along the headstone behind which he hid, then held his breath and peered out.

  About fifteen meters ahead was the line of two-man mortar teams, positioned about twenty or thirty meters apart, standing before cases of ordnance and working like well-oiled machines, rounds dropped and fired, the chaotic explosions so loud that Kozak had shoved a plug in his exposed ear, the other filled with the Cross-Com’s receiver.

  The cemetery’s perimeter wall was about two meters high, and the teams all stood within a few meters of it, utilizing the heavy barrier to shield them from any interference – gunfire or otherwise – from the road outside.

  ‘Kozak, how we looking?’ called Ross, his voice barely discernible above the din.

  ‘Stand by, boss,’ he answered, then consulted the drone’s remote. He thumbed a button, and his HUD lit with a data box showing the drone’s overhead point of view, a wireframe grid superimposed over the cemetery and marking the positions of each mortar team, along with a ruler overlay showing the length and width of the wall.

  ‘Okay, Ghost Lead, good to go from here,’ Kozak said. ‘I’ve got positions and the overlay.’

  ‘Pepper, SITREP?’ ordered Ross.

  The chest pains were just indigestion, Pepper thought. Famous last words of all heart attack victims, right?

  His love affair with food had to end. He couldn’t ride the roller coaster anymore. He was kicking out that bitch, and no, he didn’t care to know her name. Just leave – and take all your calories and bad health with you.

  He swallowed hard and balanced his elbows on the edge of the balcony. He’d traded out the AK for his trusted M24A2 Remington and now clutched the sniper rifle, hoping the wood and smooth metal would help calm him. He’d found the mosque empty, the locks easy to hammer off, the staircase leading up to the minaret and balcony a bit too steep for his liking. Now the damned pizza was waging war with his gut, his breath shortening, his ribs feeling as though they were caving in.

  ‘Pepper, are you there? SITREP?’

  ‘Ghost Lead, Pepper here. I’m in position.’

  As vantage points/sniper positions went, this little nest was first class, giving him a clean shot of any member of any mortar team. He was overlooking the entire graveyard, and if he blurred his vision, the stones resembled the spirits of infantrymen forming up for battle. If his colleagues did their jobs correctly, Pepper would not need to fire a single shot. He was just the All-State man. The team was in good hands.

  A flash from just outside the cemetery caught his attention, and there, at the far end of the road, where Al-Aydarus intersected with another barely pronounceable street to the east, came a BTR-40, a Soviet-made wheeled armored personnel carrier – two operators up front, six troops in the back ready to dismount. The light Pepper had spotted had come from the BTR’s roof-mounted 7.62mm machine gun, winking fire as it had crossed the intersection.

  And then, a squad of troops came running up behind the BTR, attacking the vehicle from the rear, one man pausing in the middle of the road to shoulder and fire his rocket-propelled grenade, the back blast filling the intersection with smoke. A second explosion obscured by the buildings flickered like lightning a second before a mushroom cloud lit from below broke above the rooftops.

  ‘Got some action down the street,’ Pepper said. ‘Better hold up for a minute.’

  ‘We see it,’ said Ross.

  Pepper grimaced and clutched his chest. Now he was just getting paranoid, the chest pains coming on because he was worried about chest pains coming on: stress begetting stress.

  He should never have gone for that stupid physical. All that doc had done was make him paranoid.

  ‘There is no fence to sit on between heaven and hell,’ Johnny Cash had once said. ‘Only a deep, wide gulf, a chasm that is no place for any man –’

  Which was why Pepper knew that when their work was finished here, they needed to leave. This place literally was a crater, a chasm where they did not belong, where the loyalty of men waned and the fires of hatred had burned for thousands of years.

  ‘Pepper, am I clear?’ called 30K.

  ‘Hang tight … and … yes, you are! Go now!’

  The plastic explosives procured for the team’s load out bags had come from the UK, so instead of being supplied with C-4, they were given bricks of PE4, an off-white colored solid whose explosive characteristics were nearly identical to C-4, although PE4 had a slightly greater velocity of detonation: 8,210 meters per second.

  These technical attributes were largely unimportant to men like 30K, men with an affinity for blowing shit up. They didn’t do the math because they always overestimated the amount of explosives required for the job.

  ‘Kozak, you got me?’ he asked as he skulked along the wall outside the cemetery
, his active camouflage on, the pack strapped to his shoulders feeling as though it’d been stuffed with bowling balls.

  ‘Roger, you’re marked. Two meters.’

  30K dragged his elbow across the wall, keeping tight to the shadows –

  ‘Okay, okay, position one. Mark,’ said Kozak.

  Panting now, 30K reached into his pack and produced the first of ten blocks of PE4 fitted inside a shaped charge casing and rigged with a remote detonator. The casings were cone-shaped, and 30K carefully placed the first one at the foot of the wall, then he jogged off, listening for Kozak’s next set of instructions:

  ‘Five meters … three … one … position two. Mark.’

  30K continued placing each of the ten blocks where Kozak indicated so that when he was finished, the explosives all rested directly opposite the mortars, with only the wall standing between them.

  Good old Sun Tzu, author of The Art of War, would’ve been proud. He’d said that subduing the enemy without fighting was the acme of skill. Sure, they could’ve gone into the cemetery as 30K had suggested, letting him do his Rambo/Conan/Gladiator thing, running and gunning like a fire-breathing serial killer inhabited by the spirits of ancient warriors and movie stars, but the chances were high that once he took out the second crew, the others would cease fire and turn their small arms on him, drawing the rest of the team into a firefight that would waste valuable time and even more valuable ammunition.

  And oh, yeah, he could die.

  Besides, the Ghosts were much more cunning than that. Consequently, they’d gone back to the drawing board, or more accurately, gone back to their packs, where they always carried explosives. They relied upon shaped charges for taking out armor or structures like bridges, and they were always looking for any excuse to lighten their packs and satisfy their inner pyros.

  Of course, there were some men like 30K who just wanted to see the world explode …