Lines in Shadow: Walking in the Rain

by William Allen

  With that train of thought, Scott felt a sudden wave of apprehension as he hoisted his pack back into place under the Ghillie suit. Thinking about it, Scott dropped the pack and shucked out of the Ghillie suit and tried to neatly fold up the overalls festooned with countless strips of fabric and fake foliage. Won’t be using this again tonight, he realized, and then his mind went back to the previous train of thought.

  He worried about all his men, especially the young men, and now young women, he’d been tasked with training. Though Scott tried not to let it show, he was not unaware that he was old enough to be the father to many of them. While still struggling with guilt over Mike’s wounding, Scott nonetheless felt surprised at the depth of his reaction to the thought of Sarah suffering a similar fate. Or, God forbid, the idea of having to bring her body home to her daughters.

  “Head back in the game,” Scott subvocalized to himself. They were vastly outnumbered and would shortly be announcing their presence to a cold-blooded and capable enemy. That should be enough to distract anyone from maudlin soul-searching for a little while.

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  Killing the two remaining sentries proved to be no challenge, as Tommy predicted, as each man used their suppressed pistols to deliver a pair of double-taps to the skull of their chosen victims. Scott, aware of a similar effort being undertaken by Max and Team Echo on the other side of the camp, wished them the same luck.

  The doomed guards never even noticed the quiet men moving into place at their backs. The sight of the dead men collapsing served as the signal for their men to redeploy, and the rest of their team rushed forward to set up a defensive ring around the buses.

  As Tommy and Scott approached the secured flap leading into the first tent, Scott saw Sarah and PFC Wallace worked to cut the chain holding the doors shut on the first bus. These two would be their bus drivers, spiriting the liberated slaves out of the camp and on to the new rally point where Yalonda and a team of medics would take over. Of course, Yalonda complained about being left behind, claiming she would be vital if someone was wounded on the mission. She was correct, but Scott wouldn’t budge on the issue.

  That Wallace could drive a bus came as no surprise, but Scott had been somehow pleased to find out Sarah had driven a bus route for a few years for the local school district while she’d attended college. Pleased, because that meant she would be in the first group to exit the camp and hopefully, be out of harm’s way.

  “Any idea how many hostiles inside?” Tommy asked softly.

  Scott shrugged as he paused, replacing the two expended cartridges from his magazine. “Don’t take any chances. We don’t need prisoners, and if they worked here, then they deserve to die. Left or right?”

  Scott saw the man’s teeth glint in the dark and he replied, “Left, high.”

  “Right, low,” Scott responded as he lined up to enter first.

  Just across the narrow alleyway between the tents, Scott saw Arness and one of the other National Guardsmen, a PFC named Chandler, readying their own suppressed pistols to clear the other tent. From the way the two men moved together, they’d done something like this before, likely in a land far away with place names that sounded strange to the Western ear.

  “Watch lines of fire,” Scott murmured to Arness, sure the other man heard him by the slight nod of his head. Wouldn’t do any good to shoot their own men through the flimsy walls. Friendly fire, wasn’t. Feeling he’d done everything he could to prep, Scott stacked up with Tommy behind and entered the lit space inside after a hasty three-count.

  The large canvas tent was set up inside like Scott figured, barracks style. A string of LED lights hung from the center line of the tent, suspended by wire about ten inches from the canvas roof and giving the two men enough light to see by, but the long shadows made each man cautious. A single open hallway ran down the middle with curtained bays off to each side. The single guard sat dozing on a folding metal chair, and the corpse made more noise falling out of the seat than the pistol shot did. Scott swore he could hear the action cycling as the spent casings ejected.

  Because they were using subsonic ammo, Scott and Tommy made a point of giving each of the men they eliminated two or more shots. They found six hostiles in the tent, along with sixteen naked women and girls chained to their bunks. After the first woman screamed, Scott expected a response from the other cribs, but no one came to investigate. Screams must not be that uncommon, Scott realized with an angry rush. Scott and Tommy took turns killing the rest of the otherwise occupied men.

  Like Scott, Tommy carried a pair of short handled bolt cutters strapped to this pack, and the two men started at opposite ends of the tent, rapidly severing the chains as high as possible up the metal ankle shackles used to secure the prisoners.

  The first woman Scott cut loose just laid in her bunk until Scott ordered her to stand, but the second, a tall slender woman in her twenties with short cut brown hair and fresh bruising around her wide blue eyes just started talking as Scott worked.

  “What’s going on? Where are the guards? Is this a rescue?”

  Listening to the woman, Scott was not displeased by her questions. If she could engage in conversation, then she wasn’t too deep in shock to help with her own liberation.

  “Yes, ma’am. This is a rescue, but we need you to help. Can you stand?”

  “Hell, mister, I can run if you’ll get me out of here.”

  “No need to run. My associates are getting the buses ready, but we need some help getting the other ladies together. Some of them don’t seem to be doing so good,” Scott replied, glancing suggestively over his shoulder at the first woman, who still had not emerged from her cubicle.

  “That’s Sally. She’s been here awhile. I’d say she’s been here too long, but five minutes is too long. Plus,” the woman continued, dropping her voice to a whisper, “I heard they killed her kids when she was brought in.”

  The horrific news didn’t shock Scott in the least. Gesturing for the woman to stand, he saw she also had fresh bruising on her sides, curling around her bare hips.

  “Seriously, can you walk without assistance? We’ve got medical, but they are standing by at the aid station outside the fence.”

  She turned, and Scott saw the bruising became bloody welts crisscrossing her buttocks and back.

  “Like I said, I can run if I have to, mister. You got a name?”

  “Scott. What’s yours?”

  “Melba. I can walk, and if you’ll keep doing what you’re doing, I’ll get Sally. Okay? I really want to get out of this place.”

  “Deal,” Scott replied, headed for the next cubicle. Inside, he found a girl of no more than fourteen or fifteen years old, naked and bruised, curled up in the stinking sheet of her cot and slowly rocking herself, her brown eyes staring off into the distance.

  “God, help me.”

  Scott seldom prayed, and when he did, it was seldom for himself, but suddenly, he felt the need. Stooping, with his eyes averted, Scott set the teeth of the cutter against the steel links and bore down. With a snap, the link parted, and Scott heard the girl let out a whimper.

  Standing, Scott reached out, gently touching the girl’s shoulder. When she flinched back, Scott instead took a grip on the dirty sheet and pulled it free.

  “Stand up, please,” Scott instructed, and to his mild shock, the girl did as she was told. Taking the sheet, he wrapped it around the trembling girl and tucked it in on the side, sarong-style. He was careful not to touch the girl’s bare flesh.

  “Follow Melba,” he said gently, “she is helping us get you ladies out of here.”

  “Home?” the girl said, her voice cracking with either disuse or emotion.

  “Something like that,” Scott forced himself to say as he moved on, still aware of the swift passage of time.

  Finally, when the last of the sixteen women was freed, many copying what Scott had done and at least wrapped with a sheet, Scott left Tommy to check on the progress outside. Melba wanted to go
as well, but Scott was careful in saying that he needed to make sure the way was safe.

  “The rest of my team will be watching for me or Tommy coming out. They don’t like surprises,” he explained as gently as he could manage with his blood up. What he’d seen inside might not have been as bad as the scenes he’d witnessed in Lowell, but the knowledge that the source of all that evil waited only a few hundred yards away made Scott want to scream. Or start shooting randomly into the camp. Instead, he went to the adjacent tent and glimpsed Arness coming out, wiping the blade of his knife on the dirty canvas wall as he stepped out into the dark.

  “How many?”

  “Fifteen,” Arness replied. Looking at the knife, he just shrugged. “Only two customers and a single guard. Saved the ammo. Only the guard was armed, and that was a pistol. How about you?”

  “Sixteen, and six hostiles. Same, just one guard with a pistol. They ready to come out?”

  “Yeah, Chandler is helping one of the woman. He thinks her arm is broken.”

  “Get them out, Corporal. We are out of time here.”

  Before the last word left his lips, the first of the mortars started arriving, punctuating Scott’s declaration with a rolling series of bangs. Zero hour, he thought.

  “That’ll be the barracks,” Arness hissed. “I hope they used the Willie Pete. These fuckers deserve to burn all the way to Hell.”

  Couldn’t have said it better myself, Scott thought as he whirled in place, eager to get this part of the mission completed.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  With thirty-one prisoners liberated, Scott intended to get the two buses on their way to the eastern gate immediately. But, despite PFC Wallace’s assertion that he could get anything with an engine running, keys or no keys, he was stumped by the second Greyhound. The engine refused to even turn over, which made him think the battery was the problem, except when he checked, his effort to span the gap produced a spark.

  “Five minutes, Sergeant,” he promised Scott, but the scout decided they were out of time.

  “Load them all on the one you got running,” Scott shouted, vying to be heard over the sound of the incoming ordnance. “Tell Joe he’s going along to ride shotgun.”

  He then turned to Arness with his next order.

  “Get on the horn and give Sergeant Barden the code word. Thirty seconds and they are rolling his way.”

  Not waiting for the corporal’s acknowledgement, Scott ran to the bus and started helping hand the women up the steps. Even with just one bus, Scott calculated all the liberated prisoners would fit with room to spare. Not like they had any luggage.

  Sarah, ensconced in the driver’s seat, gave him a searching look that he caught but forced himself to ignore. Their plan had two options at this point, and Scott gave no sign he planned to bug out with the rescued hostages. Option B was to hold in place and repel any efforts by the trapped camp personnel to exit the gate behind them. Their team would wait for reinforcements to arrive in the form of additional National Guard troops, hopefully already on the way. Scott in the end opted to hold their beachhead here, keeping the second bus, if Wallace got it running, as an escape vehicle if they enemy looked to overrun the position.

  Scott watched Sarah wheel the Greyhound around and for a split second, the two shared that long look he’d avoided earlier. She seemed to read his thoughts, and a short nod was all she gave as the bus pulled on past Scott’s position.

  With that chore out of the way, Scott turned his focus on the status of their hastily-erected position. They had two M-249 Squad Automatic Weapons, packs bulging with spare ammunition boxes for the SAWs, their personal weapons, and a few grenades. Shallow fighting positions, or what the Brits called shell scrapes, formed their only defense against over two thousand angry soldiers and paramilitary troops being now hammered with indirect fire.

  With the mortar rounds falling, distracting the enemy for the moment, Scott ordered his men to make every effort to improve their fighting positions. The race was on, and folding shovels, hatchets and helmets were pressed into service, resulting in soil and small rocks flying in the night air, as men struggled to deepen the holes that might serve as their graves. Or keep them from a grave.

  The enemy had their own mortars, several towed howitzers, and a company of M113 APCs being prepped for an assault, plus their drones of an undetermined number but so far, the reaction remained scattered and ineffective. A fatal hailstorm of metal fragments could do that, and Scott saw the high explosive rounds interspaced with the wispy pale gauze of smoke signaling a barrage of white phosphorus. The barracks tents in the center of the camp already burned fiercely, and the three wooden-framed permanent buildings looked to be close behind. Willie Pete, Scott knew, burned those struck with even a pinprick of the substance, and from the agonized screams sounding over boom of the explosions, many suffered with more than a mere pinprick.

  The billowing smoke obscured their vision out past four hundred yards, Scott judged, and he worried about what was happening beyond his view.

  “This won’t last,” Tommy said, mirroring Scott’s own thoughts as he hunkered down in the next foxhole over. “The colonel is burning through his ammo reserves to plaster these mutts, but he only has so much.”

  “Yeah,” Scott agreed, “pretty soon he’s going to be limited to using the 105s.”

  “If they can take out all those APCs, I’ll be happy,” Tommy replied. “We can punch through with the .50 caliber, but that’s not going to be fun.”

  Then all the time for talk came crashing to an end as the first scattered groups of surviving troops began to emerge from the clouds of smoke and charged the line of waiting soldiers. They ran half-blind, their night vision destroyed by the flashing explosions behind, but the ragtag group of soldiers and contractors couldn’t resist looking back over their shoulders at the next barrage of mortar shells struck.

  “Heavies. Up!” Scott shouted over the noise of the battlefield, holding his own fire.

  The loose gaggle of men, caught glancing back the way they came, momentarily suffered the fate of Lot’s wife as the incoming rifle rounds held them frozen for a moment, stood up by the force of the .308 Winchester slugs impacting them center mass. Then, like pillars of salt, the six men collapsed to the ground and died.

  Team Charlie, Scott’s force, carried a mixture of M4s, mostly for the National Guardsmen, and an array of heavier rifles chambered in .308 Winchester or 7.62x51mm NATO. Scott would have preferred his PTR-91, but he also wanted the ability to lay down suppressing, automatic fire if necessary, so he compromised. His plan here at the beginning was to deny any approaching enemy an accurate count of their numbers by using only the longer-range rifles to snipe at the enemy at first.

  The eleven men on the line held their collective breath, but no one outside their immediate area seemed to have noticed the short fusillade of gunfire over the din of battle. Scott noted with approval as the men who fired took turns reloading their magazines from loose rounds in their pouches, and then hunker back down into their holes, rifles ready.

  They didn’t have long to wait as a second, larger group of soldiers, these all apparently from the Missouri National Guard unit by their uniforms, came charging through the drifting smoke. Scott counted ten men, and he waited until they were within two hundred yards before giving the general order to fire. He had held back the two SAWs from this engagement, wanting to save them and their distinctive noise for later.

  The line lit up briefly with gunfire as all the prone men fired, and once again the opposing force went down like marionettes with severed strings. This time, the team didn’t kill all of the fleeing men immediately, but paired rifle shots from Scott’s own M4 quieted the writhing men’s cries. He was surprised he took no pleasure in gunning the wounded men down, but nor did he feel even a twinge of regret. Those men might have simply been following orders, but any soldier who followed an officer employing rape tents as a reward deserved no better.

  The mortar attack p
etered out sometime during the wait for the more enemies to appear, but Scott could still hear the heavier pounding impacts of 105mm cannon fire striking targets inside the wire. Colonel Hotchkins had two 105 howitzers situated to rain high explosives down on the camp, but Scott had no idea how effective the assault was, other than the obvious explosions. His fight had narrowed down to this small stretch of ground for the moment.

  Five minutes passed before the third challenge appeared, but apparently, someone had been working with their troops at more than organized rate. Hunkered down with the rest of his men, Scott observed the squad approaching in a bounding fashion, half covering while the other half dashed forward. They appeared to have some training, but Scott saw they were out of synch by about half a second. A tiny flaw, but one he was willing to exploit.

  Situated as he was, between Arness on the SAW anchoring one end of the line and Tommy laying with his prized M1A poised to fire, Scott raised his voice slightly to be heard.

  “On the next exchange, open up with all guns. Pass it down.”

  The next time the rear portion of the squad rose to advance, the leading element paused before hitting the ground. It was a minor thing, especially since they apparently hadn’t noticed the pile of bodies in front of the team’s line, but Scott exploited the opportunity and his men blazed away at the ten men all standing at the same time.

  Again, despite the surprise and greater numbers, Scott noted a few of the approaching fighters survived long enough to return fire. Rounds seemed to whip past his head, but Scott ignored the sensation as he continued to service targets. One man managed to take cover behind one of his fallen comrades, but what must have been a .308 round punched through the corpse to strike the living man huddled in his shadow.

  Scott could see more shapes approaching in the smoke and realized his position was in danger of being flanked. Sensing the time was finally here, Scott thumbed the transmit for his headset radio and gave a short set of instructions to his men.