by Peter Nealen
***
One of the other trucks flashed its lights twice. “I think they found it,” Brannigan said.
“Let’s hope so,” Wade replied. “It’s damned near one in the fucking morning.” It felt later than that.
He turned toward the flash and they rumbled over the uneven terrain toward it. The other truck had stopped, and they could see the draped parachute and container in the splash of the headlights as a figure got out of the Land Rover.
Flanagan, Bianco, and Jenkins were already opening the container when Wade and Brannigan joined them. “Weapons, ammo, and optics first, in that order,” Brannigan said as he got out of the pickup, though he soon saw that he needn’t have bothered. Flanagan was already handing Para model FALs, with collapsible stocks, two at a time to Bianco. Jenkins was hauling out an ammo crate. Flanagan was already on top of it.
Which was about what he’d come to expect from Flanagan. The younger man was quiet, and had never even made Staff Sergeant, but there was a competence and foresight to him that had Brannigan seriously thinking about making him Santelli’s potential replacement. He didn’t want to lose Carlo, but the presence of a kid was going to complicate his old Sergeant Major’s life considerably.
Wade got out, circled around the front of the Toyota truck, and joined Jenkins. They’d had to carry only the most innocuous pocket tools they could, so none of them had the appropriate multi-tool, but Wade grabbed the ammunition crate and bent the wire closure open with his thumb and forefinger. He pried the crate open, snapped the ammo can’s retention band, and started pulling boxes of 7.62 NATO ammunition out.
“Looks like we’ve got a pretty good load, sir,” Flanagan reported, straightening. “Ten rifles, one hundred magazines, Rhodesians, bump helmets, PVS-14s, and encrypted radios.” The “Rhodesian” he was referring to was a particular pattern of load-bearing gear, and the PVS-14s were old but still reliable night vision monoculars. “He sent us L1A1s instead of FALs, though.”
Brannigan accepted one of the rifles. “Hardly matters,” he said. “They use the same ammo.” He snapped the buttstock open and peered through the sights. No optics had been included; they were limited to the iron sights. “I hope that Mark actually got the irons zeroed this time.” The G3s they’d jumped into Burma with had had high-end red dot sights, but Van Zandt hadn’t been able to confirm that the iron sights had been zeroed to match. Fortunately, none of them had run out of battery life while on the ground in the Golden Triangle, so they’d never had to find out the hard way.
Wade finished jamming a magazine and tossed it to Brannigan. “Your choice, sir,” he said. “Hold security, or jam mags?”
“I’ll hold security,” Brannigan said, rocking the magazine in and yanking back the charging handle. He glanced over as a pair of headlights approached, and took a knee. He only had one magazine, but it was better than nothing. He was fairly certain that that was the other Toyota, with Hart and Curtis. But it never paid to assume, particularly not when you’re pulling illegal weapons out of an airdrop at one in the morning in what can only be called hostile territory.
Sure enough, the truck pulled up and Curtis stuck his head out the passenger window. “It’s me, Joseph, so don’t get too trigger happy, thinking the Chadian Army’s coming after you.”
“You’re too fat to be a Chadian, Kevin,” Flanagan replied, his voice deadpan. “And too loud.”
“Knock it off,” Brannigan said, momentarily missing both Santelli and Hancock. Flanagan and Curtis were like brothers, but it could get to be a bit much sometimes. And when they only had one rifle up, this was one of those times. “Get over here and start getting loaded out.”
Flanagan had all the rifles laid out, with chest rigs, helmets, optics, and magazines, and was already hard at work shoving rounds into an FAL mag. As soon as he had it loaded, he hastily made his rifle ready, laying it against his knee as he bent to keep loading more magazines.
“No machineguns,” Bianco grumbled.
“What?” Curtis asked, entirely too loudly, and he got several glares before he subsided, or at least lowered his voice. “No belt-fed goodness? This is a serious oversight, sir.”
“I know,” Brannigan said. “They’re probably in one of the other drops. There should be three, you know. You can run a rifle until then. You didn’t have a belt-fed in New Mexico.”
“Yeah, he did,” Wade said. “He grabbed one of those Fightlite Industries things as soon as a narco dropped one.”
“Just shut up and load magazines,” Brannigan growled. Yeah, I definitely miss Carlo and Roger. They usually keep the kids in line for me.
“Kill the lights,” Flanagan said. “I’ve got my NVGs up, and we might as well have a beacon out, saying ‘We’re here!’ in big neon letters right now.”
Wade started a little and hurried back to the truck. Brannigan thought he looked a little abashed as he went; it was something he should have thought of.
“Get loaded fast,” Flanagan said as the headlights died. He was staring off into the desert, his helmet already on with the night vision monocular suspended in front of his eye. “We’ve got company coming.”
Brannigan reached down and grabbed his own PVS-14s, lifting them to his eye. He followed Flanagan’s gaze, though it took a moment to locate what he was looking at.
Sure enough, there were two trucks coming toward them, a pickup and a much larger, mid-sized transport truck.
And the pickup had a machinegun mounted in the back.
“Get to cover,” he snapped. “Away from the vehicles. Take what ammo you’ve got loaded.”
To their credit, despite the bullshitting, each man already had at least three magazines loaded and stuffed into a chest rig. Grabbing rifles and gear, the Blackhearts scattered, spreading out and getting down on their bellies in the dirt.
Brannigan followed suit, finding a slight depression next to a scrub bush and throwing himself flat. There was little to no actual cover in the Sahel, at least this part of it. They’d have to rely on the dark and the fact that a lot of people tend to shoot high, especially if they’re not sure where their targets are.
He shoved at the PVS-14s, craning his neck to see. The NVGs were invaluable in many ways, but their mounts were rarely constructed to be used well in the prone. And the bump helmet, which was little more than a high-speed bicycle helmet with an NVG mount on the front, wasn’t all that well-fitted yet. The back kept pressing against his neck, trying to force the helmet down over his eyes, and the NVGs toward his cheek.
He finally got up on a knee as the two trucks roared across the veldt toward them, and the machinegunner opened fire. The bad guys must have decided that the lights going out meant they had been spotted, so it was time to go loud.
The bright flower of the muzzle blast flashed and flickered in the night, and green tracers flew wildly overhead. The movement of the truck alone would have made it next to impossible for the gunner to hit anything, even if he could see what he was shooting at.
Brannigan shouldered his L1A1, only to discover that not only weren’t there optics, but there wasn’t a laser sight that he could use with his NVGs. Oh, well. The old-fashioned way it is, then. He knew that his accuracy wasn’t going to be that great; the NVGs could only focus on one distance, and he needed them focused a lot farther out than the front sight post of his rifle. But he put the sights, blurry as they were, in the green circle of his optic, flipped the selector to “Semi,” and fired.
The 7.62 rifle boomed in the night, and the machinegun fire suddenly went even wilder, before the truck swerved hard to one side. The mid-sized truck went the other way, even as the rest of the Blackhearts, taking his shot as the initiation signal, opened fire.
Muzzle flashes flickered along a ragged line, and the rolling thunder of gunfire echoed out across the Sahel. They couldn’t be hitting much, not with the limitations of the gear and the darkness, but they seemed to have thrown their attackers into a panic. The big truck swerved too fast and started to
tip over, even as bullets smacked sparks and flashes from the body. What might have been a corpse fell out of the back, as the driver got the truck back on six wheels and started to beat a hasty retreat.
He turned his attention back to the technical. There was no sign of the gunner, though the pickup was now circling around toward their left flank. He heaved himself to a knee and leveled his rifle, once again getting the fuzzy dark blob of his sights against the much clearer, light-green shape of the HiLux.
He got one shot off before the blacked-out vehicle went behind a bush and seemed to disappear. He could still hear it, but the driver wasn’t sticking around.
None of them moved as the vehicles disappeared into the night. They were professionals. They knew that a follow-up attack was possible, of not probable. This didn’t look all that organized. The attackers might have been nothing but desert bandits, who happened to be awake enough to see the headlights.
Or, that might have been what it was supposed to look like. None of them felt like taking chances. Even Curtis was silent, lying only a few meters away, peering into the dark over his rifle.
Watching and listening, they stayed where they were, waiting for the follow-up attack.
***
A follow-up attack never materialized. The attackers had disappeared into the African night, apparently deterred by the rather fiery response they had received. After an hour had passed with no sign of their return, Brannigan carefully got to his feet and scanned the Sahel around them.
It was as empty and silent as if none of the violence had ever happened. The stars gleamed in the sky, illuminating the landscape with a faint green glow in his NVGs. Aside from the cone-shaped outcroppings, the Sahel was flat and pale, dotted with the darker spots of the ubiquitous scrub bushes.
He started forward. There was one flaw in the flat landscape around them; a crumpled form lying in the dirt where it had fallen from the transport truck. His rifle held ready, Brannigan advanced on it, as Wade got to his feet and followed, his own L1A1 up and pointed, the muzzle just a few inches below his line of sight.
Brannigan advanced slowly and cautiously. He was fairly certain that if the form was a body, it was a dead one. There had been no sound, no movement, for over an hour. But it never paid to assume such things. So he kept his rifle trained on the shape as he got closer.
It was a corpse. He had to adjust his NVGs’ focus to get a good look. The dark stain on the side of the man’s light-colored shirt indicated he’d been hit in the side. That he’d died so quickly meant it was a heart and lung shot.
He was dressed in loose, baggy trousers, soft shoes, and a turban. An old AK chest rig was slung around his chest, though he had no rifle; it had probably stayed in the truck when he was hit.
“Jihadi?” Wade asked softly.
“Maybe,” Brannigan said. “There are sure enough of them around. Sudan’s just over that way, and while I know there haven’t been any raids that anybody’s talked about, I still wouldn’t put it past any of them.” He looked toward the eastern horizon. “Check him for anything useful, but I doubt we’ll find anything.” As Wade moved to search the body, Brannigan scanned the landscape around them again.
Maybe it was random, maybe it wasn’t. Maybe this deep mystery we got sent out here to uncover isn’t anything except the usual in Africa. People come here and never leave. There are certainly bandits and terrorists enough to account for a few missing doctors.
He knew that if that was the case, they might never know for sure. Or, they’d find out when a video was released on the internet. But by then was usually too late.
Even as Wade straightened, Brannigan was thinking of their next move. He had information on the jihadist groups operating in Chad. The trick was going to be finding them.
Chapter 9
They got back to Abeche just before dawn. It had been a tense thirty minutes after the brief firefight as they had unloaded the rest of the container, making sure they had enough magazines loaded to constitute a decent fighting load, then throwing the rest in duffel bags in the back of the Land Rover. There was more room in the Toyota pickups, but they wanted this stuff as out of sight as possible when they got back into the city.
Brannigan had his L1A1 next to his leg, with a cut-off section of the parachute over it, as they rolled into the city, and his Rhodesian rig at his feet. He tensed a little as he saw the Chadian National Army checkpoint on the road ahead. That hadn’t been there when they’d left the night before.
There wasn’t a lot of vehicular traffic on the road; most of the locals were on foot, many leading donkeys or oxen. But being Westerners in a vehicle didn’t get them waved through, even as the soldiers, many of them already wearing sunglasses, even though the sun was behind them and it was still early, were checking each of the other newcomers. Brannigan noticed more than one “sample” of the locals’ produce or livestock disappearing into the soldiers’ truck. The soldiers were grinning as they took chickens, vegetables, and other goods. If anyone objected, they suddenly became much more threatening and intimidating.
Brannigan had seen it all before. It was the way things worked in the Third World. Those with guns were the strong, and the strong ruled the weak. The best the weak could hope for was to be left something to keep body and soul together. That was the sign that the men with guns were being magnanimous.
Of course, the Blackhearts had their own problems as the Chadian in tan fatigues and a red beret, a black-furnished AK with full rail system and an EOTech sight attached to the dust cover stepped out in front of the truck and raised his hand for them to stop. They were all armed, and without the documentation that was probably going to be required for Westerners to be carrying battle rifles in Chad.
Not that Brannigan expected this bunch to be overly concerned with documentation and paperwork. This looked like a shakedown post. But at the same time, that didn’t mean that the presence of the rifles was going to be overlooked. In fact, he expected that it would have meant trouble even if they had had the documentation. What better way to shake down Westerners than to insist that they were in trouble with the authorities?
“That EOTech’s going to do him a fat lot of good, bouncing around on the dust cover like that,” Wade commented as he slowed and stopped just before the Chadian soldier. There was no other choice. It was either that or run the checkpoint, and they didn’t need that kind of high-profile incident at the moment. The firefight out in the hinterlands was bad enough.
“They’ve all got them set up like that,” Brannigan said, as Wade started to roll his window down. He didn’t roll it down all the way, but just enough that he could talk through it. The doors were already locked. It wouldn’t stop bullets, but it might give them the split second they might need to start shooting if this went bad.
The Chadian soldier came to the window and yanked on the door handle, saying something in a mangled mix of French and Arabic. Wade just shrugged, indicating that he didn’t understand. Although Brannigan was sure that a long career in the Army had left Wade well-versed in that particular act, in this case, it wasn’t an act. Brannigan knew a little of both languages, and what the soldier had just said had sounded like nothing but gibberish.
The soldier repeated himself, yanking harder on the door handle and lifting his AK with the other hand. He couldn’t point it, but he was clearly indicating that he had it, and that meant that he had to be obeyed.
“No Francais,” Wade said through the crack in the window. “No Arabee.”
There was a shout, and then another soldier in a red beret was approaching, even as the first took his hand off the door handle to lift his rifle as if he was about to break the window with the buttstock. This guy was dressed in tricolor desert camouflage, and had shoulder boards with some kind of rank on them. The boss had arrived. He stepped up to the door, waving the other man away.
“You are Americans?” he asked, his accent thick but his English decipherable.
There was no point in denying it.
Their passports were US passports; Van Zandt had balked at trying to get them Canadian or Australian passports, not that any of them could really have passed for Australians.
“We are,” he said. “We’re here as observers for…”
The Chadian soldier cut him off. “You are a long way from Nigeria and Boko Haram, Americans.”
He thinks we’re with the SOF guys out that way. Or it was a convenient accusation. He still wasn’t sure which.
“No,” he said, “We’re with an international organization…”
“Let me see your passports,” the Chadian interrupted again.
This was a potentially delicate situation. If this really was just a shakedown checkpoint, they might make it out with the fat wad of CFA francs that Brannigan slipped into his passport. If it was in any way official, though—and there was a very, very thin line for that distinction in the Third World—they didn’t have the diplomatic top cover that they might have had working for an acknowledged government agency, even one that wasn’t technically supposed to be in the country.
The soldier took the money, pocketing it without comment as he studied their passports and peered at them. Don’t notice the cloth-wrapped objects sitting next to our seats. Don’t look too hard in the cab at all, for that matter.
“You say you are not American military?” the soldier asked. “Why are you here, then?”
“Like I was saying, we’re part of an observation group reporting on conditions in and around the refugee camps,” Brannigan said, trying to put on the earnest NGO do-gooder act. He doubted he was doing that well; his own voice tended toward the gravelly, and he knew that his perpetual squint and hardened frame didn’t look like your average internationalist. And Wade was worse; he looked like a recruiting poster for doorkickers. “We report to several UN offices…” He wasn’t just making this up on the fly; he and Chavez had carefully designed this little legend, including a list of obscure UN offices that probably couldn’t be contacted from Chad.