by David Poyer
He breathed out. And was beginning to rise when the distant whack-whack wheeled and came back.
This time it passed over higher, maybe two hundred feet, and faster, turbines whining. At the same moment other engines, diesels, growled to the south.
Then, the chatter of automatic fire.
Harch, above him. “Y’okay, Master Chief?”
Surely the idiot hadn’t been on his feet when the chopper had gone over? The lieutenant stood taller than any bush. Even motionless, he’d cast a long shadow. But here he was, still talking, grabbing Teddy’s arm as if to yank him to his feet.… He shook him off as the lieutenant muttered, “That’s some kind of reaction force hitting Team Two. Hear that? That’s an M240. And that—” A deeper, slower tap-tap-tap that seemed to echo in a way the lighter fire didn’t.
“A DshK,” Teddy supplied.
“Probably light armor. And troops on trucks. Get ’em moving, Master Chief. Another hundred meters, and let’s lay that egg.”
Teddy didn’t like armor. Not since a BMP had busted through the wall of a mud house at a Taliban ops center north of Kandahar. They’d almost got wiped out before catching a lucky break: the driver had never qualified on the main gun. They’d finally got a Spectre gunship to lay a round on it. The high-explosive 155 had split the night open like one of Jove’s thunderbolts.
Carlson’s Raiders had had the submarines, with six-inch guns. Harch didn’t have six-inch guns, or Air Force gunships, on call. And Moogie only had seven guys out on the causeway. They’d probably blown it by now, although the noise and flashes of the air strike made it impossible to be sure. They had mines and light antitank weapons.
But if the Chinese got through them, with light armor and seven hundred marines, Echo was gonna be the filling in the biggest shit sandwich in SEAL history. He craned around for Wasiakowsky, Jamison, Harch, but didn’t see them. He lifted his voice. “Suck it up, SEALs.” Labored forward, and seized the line. Put his weight on it. Halfway up the hill he glimpsed Harch again, huddled with the radioman down in defilade.
As they hit the top, incoming started. Green tracers, from their right. Sounded like 5.8s. Not close, but aimed in their direction. He could still hear motors from the causeway, but Harch would have told him if Moogie had reported a breakthrough. Bent double, he put all his strength into getting the burden through a clump of scrub.
Okay, far enough. This was a vantage spot: he could see almost back to the beach. He dropped to a knee and signaled for a perimeter. Shadows settled into defensive positions. “Designate Rally Two. Down in this hollow. Bury the fucker here,” he croaked, and the others dropped the tow lines and unsheathed entrenching tools.
Package One was going in, but the instructions for the O-10 had been more exacting. The three-foot discoid, weighing 310 pounds, had to be at least a hundred yards from the EMP device. Even if it only partially exploded, the pulse would fry it any closer than that. Package Two had to be buried on the western slope of the highest dune, no less than two feet and no more than four feet deep. Level, with the indentation on the side aimed due west. It also had a photosensitive booby trap. After five hours, if light hit it, a shaped charge would destroy it, and probably also the poor bastards digging it out. Finally, of course, all signs that anything had been buried there had to be erased.
But where was its team? They’d been behind One back at the beach. He almost pressed Transmit on his bone phone, but didn’t. So far, no one knew Echo Two was here.
Shadows, slipping and cursing. Swager’s voice. “Obie? Master Chief?”
They bumped heads. Knobby muttered, “We got hung up. Had to chop down a couple of bushes to get through.”
That wasn’t good. “The bushes—”
“We buried ’em. Smoothed the sand. Jockstrap’s making sure we’re not leaving any traces.”
Teddy nodded. They both shot bearings, and came up with a hillock fifty yards away. He did the math to make sure that would be at least a hundred yards from the first burial, and came up safe. He looked up into the dark sky. There was supposed to be a drone up there, observing. But who? The CIA? The Navy? Air Force? He coughed, muffling it with a fist. “Okay, see that hill out at two six zero? Move out.”
Swager passed it on in a whisper. Obie looked around for Harch, then remembered: he hadn’t seen him since down in the hollow. He stood, slowly, and peered south. Fires still flickered, but the rattle of small arms had ebbed. Not a good sign. “I can give One a call,” Wasiakowsky muttered, hunkered beside him.
“No comms.”
“Then why’d we bring the fucking 117, Master Chief?”
“Receive only, Loopy. And cut the crap.” Teddy rotated again, slowly, with the night-vision goggles on. Where the fuck was Harch? He dropped and slithered down the dune, following Knobby’s guys.
When he got to the dune they were digging like mad. He could see why: the dune stood right on a small east-west road whose empty concrete shone in the starlight. The poles he’d seen earlier marched along the shoulder. Windows glowed on the far side, a couple hundred meters away. A generator throbbed. The air strike must have taken out the power station. And was that a fence? Too far away to see. Even as he watched, shouts bounced across the sand. “They’re deploying,” he murmured to Knobby.
Swager was knee-deep in the hole. Each SEAL stepped in, shoveled furiously for sixty seconds, then broke off, to be relieved by the next. A tarp lay to one side. When you built a hide site, you kept the topsoil separate from the stuff lower down. You spread it on top again when you were done. Teddy stepped in and took a turn. Then lay on his belly catching his breath, listening to the shouting. Chinese. It was clear what was happening. A line, a perimeter, anchored on the road. After they got set up, they’d sweep out from it. Which made his position dangerously exposed. On the other hand, if the idea was to orient the eavesdropping device toward the installation, he could hardly do better. The CIA would have a direct line of sight from here. “How deep?” he grunted.
“Three feet,” someone said, not Swager.
“Deep enough. Get it in the fucking hole. Make sure that nipple’s pointed west. Knobby, soon as you get it dug in, pull your guys over the crest. Run a gear check, make sure we’re not leaving anything.” He chanced another brief stand-up, cranking his height up centimeter by centimeter, so as not to present a sudden motion to anyone watching through a riflescope. Where the fuck was the lieutenant? They’d drilled this, and so far it was going reasonably according to plan, but it would be nice to have leadership in sight.
A whisper came up, but he didn’t catch it. “Say again?”
“R-T says they got through Echo One. A hundred effectives, on foot over the causeway. Echo One, four wounded, one KIA. Starbursting and rallying on you.”
That changed things. “Got it. Knobby, take the rest of your guys. Spread out along this dune line and get ready to suppress these hostiles on the other side. One’s headed back to us, probably down the main road.”
Swager shook his head. “They wouldn’t take the main street, Obie.”
“If Moogie’s still in charge, he’ll take speed over concealment. Trust me, they’re gonna hammer down that north-south road. Put the 240 on the left.”
He rolled over and checked on the burial party. The last guy was finishing up, hand-sprinkling the top sand over the disturbed area, then bending to whisk out any remaining bootprints with a branch. He rolled back and checked his weapon, made sure his magazines were loose in the pouch, and focused on the far side of the road. The first responders would be base security. Drilled to set up a perimeter and hold it against an assault. The bushes rustled and crackled as the team took overwatch. Teddy backed up, making sure to smooth the sand as he retreated, then low-crawled up the road, staying behind the dune.
A hundred yards on, he scrambled down to the pavement and dropped flat in the drainage ditch, looking south. Chance it? The MX-300s were scrambled, but the enemy could still pick up the location of a transmission. He decided,
and hit the bone mike. “Moogie, you there?”
No answer. He tried once more, then let it alone. Stared into the dark, hoping he wasn’t screwing up. If Two was working back through the dunes, it would take them an hour to reach him. And he didn’t have an hour. They’d get pinched from two sides, with the sea at their backs. Worst case, the marines were loading into boats, to hit them from seaward as well. Then they’d really be in the shit. Time to wrap this up! He tried the MX again. No answer. He clicked the NVGs on, staring down the road.
Was that motion? A glint? A shadow?
Men running, doubled over, on both sides of the pavement, half hidden by the ditches?
And if it was … was it Moogie’s guys, or Chinese? He laid his sights on the lead shape’s chest.
Until the man halted, then dropped. His MX hissed. “Team Two, Team One.”
“This is Obie. Moog?”
“That you up ahead? In the ditch?”
“Giving you an IR flash … now.” He hit the button, got a double flash back. “Guide in on me, but keep to your right. Hostiles on the other side.”
At that moment, at least three automatic weapons opened up from the woods on the far side, from the direction of the windows. Tracers. Most too high, over their heads, but some digging into the dunes. Didn’t sound like either AKs or M4s, the report was sort of in between in timbre, but whoever was blasting away, it was spray ’n’ pray time. A lone sniper with an IR scope would’ve been more dangerous, but a random bullet could kill you just as dead. Teddy lined up and fired out a magazine in single shot, putting each round as close to the muzzle flashes as he could. The weapon quit firing, but he couldn’t tell if he’d hit anything or it was just a mag-change-and-shift.
A blundering shadow. Moogie, whooping air and stumbling under the weight of another man. They dropped alongside him as the SEALs opened up. “Get your dudes over the dune,” Teddy told him. “How many?”
“Five. Two WIA.”
“Who’d you lose? Never mind, let’s get you into cover.” He grabbed one of the wounded guy’s arms, and slipping and sliding they climbed the dune, bullets popping into the sand around them. The roar of counterfire from Echo Two was nearly continuous; under it the fire from across the road slackened, especially when several rifle grenades went off over there. He got to the top, and they handed the wounded guy down to the radiomen. “Anybody see the L-T?” Teddy asked them. They shook their heads.
Okay, well. Forget running covert. He keyed his MX. “Echo, this is Oberg. You on the net, sir?”
“This is Echo actual. Where the hell’d you go, Obie?”
“We got separated, I guess. On the road now. Where you hear the fire. Where are you?”
“Rally Two. Over.”
“Echo One just came in. Three effectives, two wounded, one unaccounted for.”
“We don’t leave men behind, Obie.”
Moogie came up on the net. “We had to starburst, sir. They were pincering around behind us, over the reef. Hundreds of ’em. I got one guy down hard. JC. The other’s either still on his way, or the Chinese’ve got him. That’s Sapperdoo.”
“SEALs don’t leave SEALs, Kaster.”
Kaster was Moogie’s last name. Teddy wanted to say, SEALs don’t use real names in radio comms, either, but didn’t. “Sir, we’ve gotta leapfrog back to Rally One and get off this island. Or we’re all gonna get encircled and either captured or wiped out.” Even at their best, a platoon wasn’t up to a lengthy engagement. SEALs had a saying, “The fight doesn’t start until you’re wounded,” but one by one, they’d be cut down, till they were overrun. “Sir, you got comms with Higher? We can probably hold off these local guys, but if those marines get across in force … Can they call in a strike on the causeway, something to keep ’em occupied while we extract?”
Silence. Then, “I’m trying to get through. Rally on me, Master Chief.”
The words sounded right, but Teddy didn’t like the tone. Or that he’d apparently had to remind the L-T they had Higher on the line. Fuck, they could argue later. He hit the intrasquad again. “Knobby, Moogie’s guys are coming back. Moogie, guide on Two. All hands: Fall back to Rally Two.”
Retracting off a hot beach was about the sketchiest maneuver imaginable. SEALs did contact drills, retreats under fire, until no one had to think what to do. Each squad split into two fire teams. Constantly looking for safe escape routes, they leapfrogged back, each putting out horrendous volumes of fire as the other gave ground. The Teams had developed the tactic in the jungles of Vietnam.
Unfortunately, there wasn’t as much concealment here on the dunes as there was in a tropical environment, and one of those fire teams was now without its pig. His job, aside from helping Harch coordinate, was to make sure nobody got left behind. He popped his head up, to see muzzle flashes closer in. Whoever was out there, they were working their way forward. “Okay, move.”
Their single 240 would be the key. He slid in beside it. The gunner was taking it slow, working one set of muzzle flashes at a time. Like stamping out a grass fire. A burst was supposed to last only three or four seconds. Long enough to mutter, “Die, asshole, just fucking die.” The assistant gunner, an arm’s reach to the side, was shooting too, and the riflemen were laying down grenades. Behind them shadows loped over the dunes, running and dropping, staying low.
The first shot from the other team cracked over their heads. The gunner jerked the bipod out of the sand. Teddy grabbed the ammo box and followed them down, then uphill, then down again. His goddamned leg was really hurting now, but he didn’t have time to favor it.
They set up and started hosing again. But this time, the muzzle flashes were from atop the dune they’d just left. Not good. Whoever was out there was on their heels. Firing and moving, too, almost in step with them, rushing hard as the SEALs pulled back. Teddy fired out two more magazines. “Get the ammo off the wounded,” he put out over the MX. “We’re gonna run dry if they keep pushing like this. Echo? Echo on the line?”
“Echo actual.”
“We’re falling back on you, L-T. We’re gonna—”
His mouth was still open when the lights came on. White hot, brighter than a thousand suns, they rose from above the dune behind them. Accompanied by the whock of blades, and followed by a ripping fire that blew off the top of the hillock in a million stinging splinters of sand and lead.
The gunner bucked and fell over onto him. The corpse shuddered as more bullets plowed into it. Explosions quaked the dune as if it were made out of Jell-O. Teddy moled into the sand, fingernails snapping off, digging his face in. Miniguns, someone back in his brain said. Rockets. You saw the Taliban getting worked over. Now it’s your turn. But there didn’t seem to be anyone listening, just a terrified reptilian body digging for a safety that didn’t exist.
The firing stopped, leaving his ears ringing. The black massive fuselage of the gunship helicopter moved over him, blasting down the brush and trees with its rotorwash. He could have reached up and grabbed its skids. He dug for his rifle, but couldn’t find it. He pulled his SIG and pumped round after round after the pterodactyl shadow, knowing the full metal jackets would just bounce off the bottom armor of a battle copter. The miniguns blazed again, a white-hot stream of incandescence searching here and there in the dunes. A second pod of rockets blazed, and the blasts rocked the air.
Teddy heaved the gunner off his back and checked him. Not much he could do; the guy was bleeding out from four or five heavy-caliber wounds. The pig was wreckage. A “hurrah!” from behind jerked him around.
When he turned, they were running down the slope of the dune, running and firing from the hip. His fingers found his rifle at last and he turned the IR illumination on and took down one after the other, rapid fire, prone, just like at the 300 yard line at Camp Perry. Only at Perry he wasn’t deafened and seeing double from concussion, and the targets weren’t dropping and firing back, at his flashes, the way he was at theirs.
* * *
SOME time
later, he must have blanked out there, because he was down behind a different dune, not the one that had been rocketed, and somebody was helping him drag a body. They were making heavy weather of it, and bullets kept cracking into the sand and spraying grit. A conviction of disaster rode his shoulders, though he somehow couldn’t quite recover what was going on or where they were. Still, he knew they had to press on. Something dangerous was on their tails. Echo Two, second fire team—it was coming back now, and he waggled his head and more rushed back, all at once—was laying down cover as they dragged the limp weight toward a clump of trees. But there was light back there, too, too much of it, as if the beach was on fire. Someone was yelling at him. “Master Chief. Master Chief! You copying me? Answer up!” He looked around blankly, then remembered: the bone phone. “Here.”
“Where are you? Wait. I got you in sight. We’re back at the rally. The emplacement. See my strobe? Guide in on me.”
A strobe. An IR strobe … He shouted, “Turn it off, L-T. Turn it the fuck off!”
“Marking our position, Master Chief. Guided munitions coming in. Don’t want to land them on us.”
A distant growl. The whock-whock of blades, behind them. The realization they’d just blown it, blown it all. Harch had fought in Afghanistan. In Iraq. But the hajjis didn’t have IR imaging.
Teddy screamed, “Turn it off, Harch! Gunships incoming!”
He dropped to a knee, racked and tapped, and lifted his weapon. The thousand suns rose again. Two helos lifted over the dune, coming directly at him. Even in the dark he could make out the pilots’ faces behind the windshields, their eyes masked by some sort of point-and-shoot headset. The muzzles of the miniguns, like red flashing eyes. The last thing so many insurgents, Taliban, al-Qaeda, ISIS fighters, must have seen.