Swiftshadow

by D S Kane

  The day grew hotter, and she suspected they’d gone into the caves for respite. As the trucks ground to a stop, she heard the buzzing of flies. The voice inside her head remained quiet. She calculated probabilities, then calmed herself until she felt no emotion.

  As the mercs emptied from the vehicles, Cassie used her GNU radio to receive updates of the intel from the mole and send them to the heads-up displays of her mercenaries for the upcoming battle.

  The mole’s intel showed thirty-two tunnel entrances and seven of them showed infrared traces of human heat. Of the remaining twenty-five entrances, seven emitted nothing at all and eighteen had no connection to any heat source in any tunnel.

  Of these seven logical target tunnels occupied by humans, all had both an entrance and a separate exit.

  * * *

  The trucks halted just outside visual range of the tunnels. One of the mercs put up a tent with a campaign chair for Major LeFleur just in front of the Land Rover and out of the line of sight to the caves. The merc saluted and LeFleur said, “That’ll be all, Corporal.” The merc turned and ran to rejoin his team.

  All members of the seven-man explosives team ran to wire the back exits of their seven tunnels with triggers reactive to human heat signatures. The explosives and trips they used would close the entrances when someone tried passing through. One of them went over a checklist. “Plastique to fuse.” Another held his hand in thumbs-up position. “Fuse to detonator.” Again, thumbs up. “Wireless ready.” Another thumbs-up. Then they rejoined their battle teams.

  LeFleur’s force included seven such teams, one for each of the tunnels, each with a ten-man complement. These included one team leader, one explosives expert, one sniper armed with a Tango 51 sniper rifle and infrared scope, six attack soldiers armed with fully automatic Ruger Mini-14s, and one communications officer carrying the GNU radio with a wireless connection to a cell phone host through the Stillwater microSD card. The communications officer wore an infrared vid-cam atop his helmet, rigged to the GNU radio. In his tent, LeFleur watched the video sent by the vid-cams, but they were laggy, jagged, and dark.

  All wore Kevlar body armor with ceramic plate inserts, bulky and heavy. The armor was black in the bright, hot, summer heat but it was four times more effective than a simple Kevlar vest. One of the mercs complained, “Shit, I’m steamin’ in this Santa suit.”

  Once the tunnel exits were rigged, each team entered its assigned tunnel. Cassie and her team waited behind, under cover in the command tent, listening to Major LeFleur direct and coordinate the action. LeFleur used plain old telephone—POTS—voice communication over hard-wired landline communicators because satellite communication wasn’t possible within the tunnels. There were hundreds of feet of plastic-coated copper wire running from LeFleur’s tent all the way into the caves. Should any of the assault teams need to leave the tunnels, they would use the GNU radio connection to inform LeFleur landlines were no longer functional. Both the landlines and the GNU radio communications were secure lines.

  Team One, commanded by Captain LeRoy O’Malley, entered the southeast-most cave and found nothing for the first two hundred feet. Then one of their forward point men saw movement and O’Malley paused to communicate with LeFleur. The Major told him, “Hold position and ready your sniper.”

  Their sniper, Corporal Charles Isley, a stocky, quiet man from the deep South, looked through the night scope and whispered to O’Malley, “No dice, Captain, no clear shot, and there’s three more coming who could see my work before I eat ’em.”

  Cassie heard the voice of Captain O’Malley, reporting in to Major LeFleur in a whisper. O’Malley said, “Too late for sniping. Gonna put ’em to sleep with gas. Okay with you, sir?”

  The Major confirmed permission. As O’Malley moved his hand toward his self-contained breathing apparatus, the soldiers all donned their own masks, and the explosives expert turned a switch. In response, a powerful but quiet battery-operated fan began blowing gas toward the chatting hostiles.

  Team Two entered their cave 200 feet west of Team One’s entry point. This entrance was twelve feet down a steep slope from Team One. The team had just completed establishment of their cover point when they heard footsteps coming toward them. “Team Two, Captain Cassavilla, we’re about to have contact. Sniper indicates no love. Should we follow alternate plan?”

  Twenty feet in front of LeFleur’s tent, Cassie shouted “Yes!” over the land line.

  Major LeFleur’s face showed his annoyance. “There can be only one person running an operation.” Didn’t she know that? He responded, “Oui.”

  Cassie paced in circles, her eyes facing the cave entrances.

  Cassavilla made a switching motion with his empty hand and pulled on his self-contained breathing mask with his other hand. All his team members followed suit with their masks. The explosives expert turned on a small canister with a fan attached to its nozzle. The thin, almost gray cloud dispersed, blown into the cave. As the hostiles closed the distance they staggered, stumbled, and fell.

  Team One’s attackers advanced and broke the necks of their enemies’ unconscious bodies using simple hardware store hammers. When both sides in a battle were armies without countries, no rules of engagement and no Geneva Convention applied. The only objective for the mercenaries was to minimize their own casualties as they obliterated their enemies.

  Team Three had begun using gas as well. So far, Cassie counted thirty-seven of the Houmaz camp dead and almost 15 percent of the total length of all tunnels cleared by all her teams.

  She could see no one outside the caves during this, the hottest part of the day. Cassie assumed no one knew her mercs were there yet. She’d overheard all the teams talking on the radio, and watched the video reported from the helmet cams on LeFleur’s computer monitor. Sooner or later, they might reach a cavern with a ceiling too high for the gas to be effective. Then the hostiles would notice them and all hell would break loose.

  The infrared satellite photos had identified a total of about seven hundred warm bodies in the camp as of three days ago, making the body count so far about 5 percent of their total goal.

  Cassie heard gunfire at last from inside Team Five’s cave. Over the minutes the gunfire intensified. Since her teams used their ammo only where a fatal hit was at least 75 percent probable, most of the gunfire—automatic weapons fire—came from the hostiles. From the sound she suspected they used AK-74’s in place of the old standby AK-47 and ancient Kalashnikov machine pistols. Someone had spent a great deal of money and had powerful connections to arm them. Cassie figured they were bought from the Russian mafiya and shipped south through Tajikistan.

  Her body was tense and rigid inside the Kevlar suit. The heat of the day made the fabric slick against her sweaty skin but she hardly noticed. The voice in her head cried bitterly about what she imagined must be happening to the men fighting for her.

  A loud pop followed by a small avalanche closed one of the exit tunnels. Cassie feared the explosion might have hurt or killed some of her own soldiers, and shook herself. But it would be the hostiles that died, wouldn’t it? Some rats trying to leave their sinking ship.

  * * *

  “Status?” begged Lee.

  “They are about two-thirds of the way to the ends of the caves. The hostiles tripped the explosives on six of the seven alternate cave exits, and explosive in each blast closed those exits forever. So far, two-hundred-sixty-nine hostiles have been rendered, and we’ve called for their surrender in Arabic, Pashto, and Dari.” Shimmel shrugged, looking at his watch. “No reply. They’ll get two more minutes before we stop using sleeping gas and begin using nerve gas.”

  “What if they decide to surrender?”

  Shimmel laughed. “You, my friend, are very naïve. If they do surrender, we’ll kill them anyway.”

  Lee’s jaw dropped. “That’s outright murder.”

  Shimmel shrugged his shoulders. “They’re terrorists! If we can convince them to surrender, we’ll recover any
weapons we think might have value before we close all the cave entrances. Surrender will take less time for us, and time is critical. With Drapoff holding the communications in Riyadh at blackout, our biggest exposures to danger is that someone in Riyadh becomes suspicious before we mount the second attack. Communications failures in Riyadh happen sometimes so we can get away with it up to half a day, but no more. We don’t want telephone company repair teams in Riyadh to discover the problem is external to their systems.”

  Lee had never been in combat, and he tried to understand. He felt deeply disturbed and found himself wringing his hands. He wondered, weren’t the Muslim extremists still human? Were they beyond redemption? And what about him and Cassie, and their mercenaries? Was there a difference between attack in combat and murder? For the first time since they’d spent their first night together at the Mandarin Oriental, Lee doubted Cassie and her plans for vengeance.

  * * *

  Agha Hassan Raman was proud that his brother, Sultan Raman, had been selected by Pesi Houmaz to be one of the mujahidin on an important mission. His brother told him nothing, except that it was critical. The teen looked up as the noise of footsteps filtered down the cave. The muted sounds of far-off explosions sang into the air. Explosions were common enough here, where the training exercises were a constant nighttime activity, but this was daytime.

  Agha Hassan practiced putting on and taking off the bomb vest he’d someday wear as a suicide bomber. He fiddled with the C-4 vest under civilian clothing. He could put on the vest and arm it in less than thirty seconds. Raman held the vest in his hands with the triggering switch set to “off” when scuffling sounds and whispering came toward him from the cave’s entrance and grew louder. He stood before the cave’s heart, a large cavern where the Muslim extremists held their inventory of high explosives. Raman donned the vest and armed the trigger switch. He yelled over his shoulder to one of the others, “Salomon, tell the others we’re under attack. Hurry!”

  He faced the incoming strangers. Raman held his hands upward and clasped them together on top of his head, the universal gesture of surrender, with the device’s switch clasped in the palm of one of his hands. He walked toward the soldiers he heard in the tunnel. He spoke loud in Pashto. He walked closer. He would certainly kill his comrades by igniting the vault.

  Nearby were over 200 pounds of C-4 and twenty surface-to-air missiles, as well as other munitions. Those weapons were valuable and it was unfortunate to waste them. But this was the fate Allah had left to him. This would be his only opportunity to kill infidels.

  Two gray-clad men in body armor emerged from the dark sides of the tunnel, each armed to the teeth and shouting in a language he didn’t understand. Raman looked over his shoulder and saw he stood too close to the cavern dome. But, as they closed the distance to him, he knew they’d soon see the explosives in his vest.

  Raman mumbled a brief silent prayer. He took a deep breath, ready to squeeze the button.

  Two mercenaries shouted in Arabic at the Muslim extremist. For a second everything stopped. One of the mercs pointed to the vest containing the C-4. But it was too late. Shrapnel blew Raman’s skull apart, sending a stream of his brain tissue out in a storm along with the full destructive power of the bomb. Pieces of his dismembered body splashed out at over a thousand miles per hour.

  Massive amounts of shrapnel from the nine-inch nails and bolts in the vest bomb exploded into the arsenal. The secondary explosion from the weapons stored there caused the cavern to collapse, dropping the mountain on the spot where Raman had stood. Rocks tumbled down, closing the cave behind the entry point of Team Six. Two of Cassie’s mercenaries were crushed flat, never having a moment to realize their lives were ending. Four of her mercs were mortally wounded but still alive when the cavern in front of them blew up. The four remaining members of Team Six were wounded and trapped as the cave closed both before and behind them.

  The roar shook the entire mountain.

  * * *

  “What the fuck was that?” Cassie pointed to the dust cloud rising off the peak. She watched from outside LeFleur’s command tent and looked through binoculars just in time to see the entire mountain rise and fall back on itself, followed by a funnel of dust pouring from Team Six’s tunnel entrance. “Get LeFleur on the GNU radio,” she said to JD. He dialed a number into her cell phone and handed a headset to her. “Major, what happened? Have you heard anything from Team Six?”

  “No, Mademoiselle Cassie. Their line is dead. I believe Team Six may have fired a shot into the armory and exploded the entire cave.” His voice expressed anger and dismay at this turn of events.

  She pushed into LeFleur’s tent, her hips rigid as she ran, making her state of panic obvious. Her worst fears had been realized, her emotions already in overdrive. She was now responsible for up to ten deaths; these men had died serving her. Some among her army would die, but her heart sank anyway. Please, make it not true.

  “Send someone in there to find out!” She glared at LeFleur. “That’s ten lives.”

  His eyes raged back at her. “Send who? There’s only myself here, Mademoiselle, and I’m busy trying to coordinate all aspects of the attack.”

  Cassie faced JD and Ari. “Both of you, come with me.” She pointed over her shoulder toward Shimon and Lester, as she sprinted toward the smoking cave. “You two monitor LeFleur and tell me everything he says.” JD and Ari faced each other and privately shrugged, trotting behind her.

  As she’d been shown by Adam Mahee, she began stringing out a landline as they ran. They neared the entry point. “Masks on,” she yelled, as the three of them entered the tunnel. They peered through the built-in night scopes in their helmet heads-up displays. The display showed heat sources everywhere, smoldering debris. They moved slowly into the tunnel, taking care not to trigger booby traps.

  After two hundred feet, they found a solid wall of boulders blocking their path. They tried in futile desperation to move the boulders. Cassie spoke into her helmet microphone, transmitting over the landline trolling behind them, “Lester, Shimon?”

  Shimon answered, “I’m here. Cassie, what’s the status?”

  “Looks like a solid wall of rock with no way through. After the attack is complete the mercs can enter again in strength to dig them out, but it looks like LeFleur was right. They may all be lost if the tunnel caved.” She tried to keep tears from clouding her vision, choking her voice. She took a deep breath. I must do this. Be brave.

  “Cassie, get yourself, JD, and Ari back here. It’s not safe in there, and we need you alive to pay the bills.”

  Stunned, she laughed awkwardly. “Returning now.” She ignored the wailing voice in the back of her head as it screamed her guilt for all the death. The three walked back in silence. Cassie, lost and alone, felt bereft, realizing the real cost of lives lost so far.

  Halfway to the tunnel exit, Ari held up his arm. “Shh. I hear the footsteps.” Bullets flew at them from directly ahead. One of the shells hit just above Ari’s head, sending a rain of rock splinters cascading down into his face. “Shit. Can’t see. Blind from the dust.”

  JD tackled Ari to the ground. Cassie dropped flat, crawling with them to cover behind a large rock near the wall created by the explosion they had come to investigate. “Where’d they come from?” she wondered aloud. She hit the Talk button on the land line. “Major LeFleur, we’re under attack. Can you tell us what’s happened? And please send us assistance ASAP!”

  “Mademoiselle Cassie, Team Four was overrun. Everyone in that tunnel was lost. From the sounds I suspect the enemy used a grenade gun to blow the team apart. No radio contact. Probably no survivors. Then the hostiles entered tunnel six where you are. I can send Team Two but it will take time for them to reach you.”

  Cassie counted the origin points of the bullets. At least seven. She motioned to JD. “Get Ari and you out of the center of the path. Move quickly to the side of the cave. Major LeFleur said they have a grenade laun—”

  Before she
could finish a bright bolt of light spouted in front of them, followed immediately by an explosion at the wall behind them. They moved fast, settling behind another boulder further from the wall. They sat, waiting for the inevitable. If a grenade hit near them, it would be all over.

  Another loud pop, followed by a bright explosion further back against the wall. Rock shreds sprayed over them.

  “That was too close,” said Ari. He rubbed his eyes. “I can see now.” He set his Ruger Mini-14 for single shot, aimed, and pulled the trigger. They heard a human wail of pain. “One down, six to go.”

  More shots came from a long way down the tunnel. The hostiles were surrounded. “They’ll be more desperate now,” said JD. “Ari, take the right side. Cassie, come with me.” JD positioned her behind a large rock. “Stay here. Do not move. Understand? Go nowhere.” He placed his hands on her shoulders and pushed her to the ground. “We’ll take care of this. No matter what, you must live!”

  “Okay.” She held the screeching voice in her head at bay and nodded. “I’ll behave.” JD and Ari looked at each other, their expressions indicating they weren’t convinced. Firing their Mini-14’s, they moved carefully forward, toward the tunnel exit.

  Far away on the other side, she heard the mercs’ guns roar, as the hostiles fired back at attackers who rushed at them from both directions.

  One more grenade passed over JD and Ari, headed directly for the spot where she hid. The explosion brought a wall of rock and dirt down on her. JD and Ari turned back and ran to her. JD lifted a large rock from the dirt covering her body. “My God, she’s buried.” They both dug with their hands, rapidly sweeping away the debris.

  Less than twenty feet away, the skirmish raged between the mercs and the hostiles.

  Ari cleared the dirt from her face. “She’s breathing.” He gripped both hands on her shoulders and gently lifted her head. “Cassie, can you hear me?”

  Cassie coughed out some dust. “Raughh?” She tried again. “What happened?”