by Don Bentley
That was going to leave a mark.
My chaperone on the other hand had been wearing his seat belt. The restraint had worked as advertised, tightening across his torso, which meant that his arms were still locked in place.
But mine were not.
Torquing from the waist, I snapped a right jab into his temple. His head thudded against the window before rebounding into my left cross. I turned my shoulder into the punch, locking my elbow just as my fist crashed into his skull. The quick one-two wasn’t enough to kill him, but the blows certainly rang his bell.
I scooped up the pistol, shoved the weapon into his face, and squeezed the trigger twice. Now, like Arnold, I was free to work the problem of recovering Laila on my terms.
The life-and-death struggle in our car went largely unnoticed by the surrounding traffic. Probably because the other drivers were too busy attempting to escape the still-active ambush behind them. Drivers were fleeing in every conceivable direction like cockroaches scattering from a sudden onslaught of light.
Slamming the car into reverse, I tucked the still-warm Beretta under my leg and joined the exodus. But instead of escaping, I pointed my rear bumper at the profile of the pickup truck with the long recoilless rifle and punched the accelerator.
Crazy? Maybe. But crazy or not, there was no way I was leaving fellow Americans in harm’s way. Over the years, I’d sacrificed a good many things for this job.
Honor wasn’t one of them.
THIRTY
Reacting to a near ambush was one of the first battle drills infantrymen mastered. The drill was both simple and effective. When caught in a kill zone, attack. Even so, I doubted that my wise instructors at the Infantry Officer Basic Course had this particular contingency in mind.
Steering in reverse at fifty miles per hour was an acquired skill, as my numerous contacts with other cars could attest. Still, the unintended impacts were bumper to side panel for the most part. This meant that while my speed abated temporarily, none of the glancing blows were stop-where-you-are crashes.
Besides, the drivers caught at the edge of a kill zone were remarkably forgiving. The ambushers were still raining lead down on the disabled convoy, and rounds were ricocheting in all directions. While none of the civilian vehicles had been intentionally targeted so far, no one seemed inclined to stop and exchange insurance information either.
Put another way, the scene on the roadway more resembled a demolition derby than commuters heading home after a hard day’s work. Cars were bouncing off one another with the randomness of exploding popcorn kernels as traffic used any available avenue to get the hell out of Dodge.
For my purposes, the confusion was perfect. Even though I crunched off a few more bumpers than I would have liked, the overall pandemonium was flawless cover. With all the beeping horns, squealing tires, and metal-on-metal collisions, the fray of civilian vehicles didn’t seem to be attracting the gun crew’s attention. Instead, the ambushers were focused on killing Americans with ruthless efficiency.
Time to give them a taste of their own medicine.
After banging against a Toyota Land Cruiser, I shot off the pavement onto the sandy soil. The car’s back end fishtailed on the loose gravel. I downshifted, hoping the front tires had enough purchase to launch me up the hill. If not, my little act of defiance would be about as short-lived as Custer’s.
And just as successful.
The car’s engine went from a whine to an all-out scream as the gerbils under the hood gave it all they had. Judging by my slow progress up the hill, that wasn’t very much. If God wasn’t outright laughing, He must have at least been smiling. After a heart-lurching moment, the front wheels caught, and I rocketed up the last section of hill before cresting the top. For the first time, I could see sky instead of just the sloping hill behind me.
Spinning the wheel one-handed, I centered the back bumper on the recoilless rifle and red-lined the engine. The car bounced across the hilltop, each pothole sending my head crashing into the ceiling. Even so, I was closing ground.
About half a second before impact, I suddenly had the urge to scream ramming speed, but didn’t. Instead, I tucked my head below the seat, clamped my jaw shut, and braced for what I was certain would be a bone-jarring crash.
I was not disappointed.
One second I was huddled against the seat’s sweat-soaked upholstery. The next I was pinballing between the steering wheel, dashboard, and door handle. For a moment or two, I thought the collision had dislodged both vehicles, sending my car tumbling downhill.
Then I realized that the tumbling was occurring only inside my throbbing head.
Disorientation—check.
Nausea—check.
Mother of all headaches—double check.
Hello, concussion.
Shaking my head in an effort to clear the cobwebs, I patted the floorboards until my fingers found the Beretta. Then it was time to go to work.
Opening my door, I slid out with the grace of a drunken elephant. The world wasn’t still spinning, but neither was it behaving. Turning my head, I dry heaved until a torrent of acidic bile rushed up my esophagus.
Maybe this line of work just wasn’t for me.
Wrapping my left hand around the doorframe, I yanked myself upright, leading with the Beretta. I thumbed off the safety and stretched around the door, leaning heavily against the frame. I still didn’t trust myself to walk, so hopefully I could take care of business from here.
The first thing I saw was encouraging in a macabre kind of way. One of the gun crewmen was sandwiched between my car’s bumper and the truck’s rear quarter panel. He was thrashing from side to side while coughing up blood, but his hands were empty. Since he clearly wasn’t going anywhere, he could wait.
His partner had been luckier. Apparently, he’d been thrown clear during my kamikaze attack, because he came running around the front of the truck, screaming in Arabic. This did nothing for my headache. Nor did the Beretta’s loud report as I put two rounds in his chest and one more in his head.
Then it was the first man’s turn.
After that, my section of hillside was much quieter.
At least until the DShK put another controlled burst into the convoy. Green streaks slapped into the Hummers before the heavy bullets ricocheted, spinning into space like fireballs spit from a Roman candle.
My new vantage point offered a clear view of the entire convoy for the first time. What I saw wasn’t good. Like the lead vehicle, the trail Humvee was nothing but billowing flames. However, a couple of the vehicles in the center of the group were still relatively intact. Two of them were Hummer gun trucks, but the third was different. Its roomier cab was designed to carry troops. Judging by the star-shaped black scorch marks, the vehicle had taken a hit from the recoilless rifle or an EFP near its drivetrain. The ordnance had disabled the vehicle, but the all-important crew quarters had escaped serious damage.
For now.
If I hadn’t seen the precision with which the gun crew had employed the recoilless rifle firsthand, I would have thought this was the result of a lucky shot. Now I wasn’t so sure. It was as if the attackers wanted the vehicle disabled rather than destroyed.
Why?
The answer to my unspoken question became clear a moment later. Soldiers dismounted from the other stricken vehicles and ran toward the disabled troop carrier, attempting to form an ad hoc perimeter. Someone important was inside. Someone the people running the ambush intended to capture.
The DShK lit into the unprotected soldiers, shredding the front rank and sending the survivors scattering. At the same time, the enemy fighters I’d seen dug in around the technical got to their feet and began bounding down the hillside. The DShK, along with a second machine gun mounted to the far truck, provided covering fire as the assault team moved.
Shit fire.
This was no ragta
g band of Sunni extremists or a half-trained Shia militia. These were soldiers. Light infantrymen with obvious combat experience. Unless I did something fast, they would be on the troop carrier in seconds.
Every infantryman, from the most experienced Delta operator all the way down to the lowliest private in the 82nd Airborne, likes to think of himself as an unparalleled weapon. A weapon that could single-handedly fight and win a war without help from the Army’s more cumbersome branches, like artillery or armor. And yet, when the shit hit the fan, every single one of those tough guys would admit that there was nothing quite so comforting as seeing an M1 Abrams main battle tank cresting a hillside.
Right about now I’d have given my left nut for a battery of 105mm howitzers on call, a platoon of Bradleys, or even a Stryker or two. But I didn’t have any of those. What I did have was a Beretta pistol, two dead jihadis, and a recoilless rifle.
That would have to do.
Hopping onto the truck bed, I gave the recoilless rifle a quick once-over. While I’d never operated this variant before, we had something similar but smaller in the Ranger Regiment. That man-portable work of art was known as the Carl Gustaf. This vehicle-mounted version was much larger, but at the end of the day, a recoilless rifle was a recoilless rifle. I mean, let’s face it: Infantry weapons were simple by design. This was partly because infantrymen were not bred to be rocket scientists and partly because the life expectancy of the average rifleman in combat was not terribly long.
Put more delicately, every member of an infantry platoon had at least a passing familiarity with each weapon the platoon employed. Just because you were a machine gunner today didn’t mean you wouldn’t become a mortarman tomorrow once bullets started flying and casualties started falling.
Hunkering down beside the long tube, I located the firing mechanism and verified that the breech was locked. This meant that the cannon was already loaded. Next, I checked that the traversing mechanism still worked by spinning the flywheel and watching the gun tube move accordingly. In a bit of luck, the force of the crash had canted the gun truck to the left, swinging the rifle’s muzzle toward my intended target.
I put both hands on the metal flywheel and cranked as quickly as I could, but the barrel only inched along. Acutely aware of the ever-present thump from the two DShKs, I cranked harder, knowing I was in a race against time. After an eternity of cranking, the flywheel stopped. The traverse mechanism had hit its limit. I scrambled behind the gun and looked down the iron sights.
My plan had hit its first snag.
While my kamikaze attack had pushed the truck in the correct direction, the collision had also done a number on the gun’s iron sights. The metal cross in the center of the sights was significantly tilted off axis. I’d have to do this the old-fashioned way.
Sighting down the length of the barrel, I found the technical with the mounted DShK.
The good news was that I seemed to be lined up in azimuth. The bad news was that the barrel looked a bit high. I located the wheel that controlled the gun’s elevation and cranked down until the front sight post was centered on the DShK. Then I breathed a prayer, opened my mouth to equalize pressure against the coming concussion, and squeezed the trigger.
The ensuing backblast was ferocious. Like most Rangers, I had a love-hate relationship with the Gustaf. The ordnance it launched could reduce reinforced bunkers to clouds of dust like nobody’s business, but that firepower came with a price. The explosion of gases propelling the shell down the Gustaf’s rifled barrel smashed into your chest with the force of A-Rod swinging an aluminum bat. To ensure Gustaf gunners didn’t permanently damage their hearts, each Ranger could fire the weapon only three times in a twenty-four-hour period.
At least in theory.
But with that theory or not, this vehicle-mounted variant put the Gustaf to shame. The report deafened me while the blast wave pounded against my fledgling concussion. I literally saw stars—an entire constellation’s worth. My stomach heaved. I draped my head over the side and vomited onto the dead jihadi still pinned to the truck by my sedan’s bumper. If I’m going to be honest, I found his predicament kind of funny. I mean, I’m sure the little fucker had given some thought to how his day might go, but I have to imagine that having his corpse puked on by a punch-drunk American probably hadn’t made the list.
* * *
—
Hauling myself upright, I looked over the rifle barrel at the fruits of my labor. I smiled. At first. Orange flames covered the hillside as thick black smoke curled into the blue sky. And then my little celebration came to a screeching halt. The flames were coming from the Hilux beyond the one I’d targeted. My Kentucky windage had been a wee bit off. I’d put the first round over the DShK gunner and into the vehicle beside him.
Whoops.
And now the gunner was traversing his machine gun away from the convoy of disabled vehicles toward yours truly.
Double whoops.
I threw open the gun’s breech, yanked out the hot shell, and sent the spent brass clattering over the tailgate. I scooped up a round from the ammo pile at my feet and fed it into the gun. The tank-killing projectile felt amazingly light to my adrenaline-soaked muscles, and I slammed the breech-locking mechanism closed with a bit more force than necessary. After grabbing the elevation flywheel, I began to turn just as the DShK cut loose.
On the off chance you haven’t experienced it, getting shot at with a crew-served weapon is life-altering. One moment, I was certain I was about to send my jihadi friends to paradise. The next, slugs the size of golf balls were tearing sections from the pickup truck. Metal splinters whistled through the air as chunks of aluminum spun into space.
With rounds this big, there was no such thing as a grazing wound. A hit to an exposed limb meant instant amputation. A hit anywhere to the torso or head meant lights out.
Immediately.
I stretched out flat against the truck’s bed, desperate to escape the lead hailstorm. But as much as I wanted to stay hunkered down, this would only prolong the inevitable. Hiding was dying. Rolling onto my back, I grabbed the elevation wheel and began to turn. I couldn’t look down the barrel to see when I was on target, so instead I tried to remember how many turns I’d used before.
Ten?
Twenty?
I needed to drop the barrel about six inches, which was about half the distance I’d adjusted last time. If I fired over the DShK again, I was done. If I fired too low and hit the dirt short of the truck, I was done.
Like Goldilocks’s porridge, this shot needed to be just right.
An unseen slap knocked my hand from the elevation wheel, sending pins and needles racing up my arm. For a moment, I thought a ricochet had taken my limb off at the elbow. Then I realized that it must have been the shock wave from a bullet crashing into the recoilless rifle’s metal frame. How close had one of those Humvee-killing rounds come to my wrist?
Too close.
Stretching shaking hands back up to the cold steel, I cranked as metal splinters peppered my face and neck. Ten turns. That would have to do. But after reaching ten, I cranked the wheel one last time for the Airborne Ranger in the sky.
Then I squeezed the trigger.
Underneath the gun, the backblast was even worse. The shock wave crushed me against the truck, driving the breath from my lungs. I would have screamed if I’d had the air. Instead, my mouth just opened and closed like a beached guppy’s. After a second or two, my chest quit spasming, and cool air flooded my lungs.
Rolling over, I vomited. Again. Then I grabbed hold of what was left of the truck bed and hoisted myself up, ignoring the jagged metal slicing my palms.
A glorious sight awaited. The second gun truck was engulfed in flames as secondary explosions sent unspent machine-gun rounds spiraling off in random directions. On the downward slope of the hill, the enemy assaulters had stopped their rush toward the troop carri
er. Now they were retreating to the one remaining technical.
At first, I thought that I was the one who’d broken their morale. But two explosions erupting from the hillside one after the other put that notion to rest. As I watched, a third explosion shredded their ranks, blasting chunks of earth skyward. Then the remaining technical cartwheeled off the hill to the sound of more explosions.
Someone was engaging the enemy with precision fire. The pinpoint strikes were much too accurate to be artillery. The rounds had to be coming from somewhere else.
Scanning the sky, I found the source of the mayhem—a pair of A-10 fighters. As I stood up on wobbly legs to cheer, I realized two things in very short order. One, the flashes of light on the lead A-10’s pylons meant another pair of rockets was heading toward a target. Two, only one target remained.
Me.
I sprinted the length of the truck bed and launched into space. In happier times, it might have been a beautiful swan dive. But today, the maneuver was significantly less graceful. More like a cross between a belly flop and a cannonball.
Fortunately, enthusiasm compensated for my lack of technique. I cleared the truck and the crest of the hill, sprawling down the incline toward the convoy. I had just enough time to consider how stupid I’d look if the pilot hadn’t been aiming at me when the rockets hit.
This shock wave didn’t just knock the wind out of me.
It knocked me out cold.
THIRTY-ONE
I came to my senses slowly, which was becoming an all-too-frequent experience. Once again, my hands and feet were secured. This time, there was the unmistakable feeling of plastic zip ties biting into my wrists. And I was hog-tied. Nothing says bad day quicker than waking up with your shoulders on fire and quads spasming because some jackass decided to tie your wrists to your ankles.
In fact, I might have given my new captor a piece of my mind if not for a couple of extenuating circumstances. And by extenuating circumstances, I mean the scratchy black hood covering my head. Not to mention the vibrating floor beneath my chest and the howling sound of turbine engines. I was in a helicopter, and helicopters were not conducive to talking.