by Peter Nealen
He fired back as soon as he had his AK pointed in at least the general direction of the incoming fire, ripping off another half a magazine at the advancing silhouettes and flickering muzzle flashes. The tactically-minded part of his brain wished that he had a machinegun for suppressive fire, but they had what they had, and they’d have to make do.
He heard a grunt of pain beside him. “You all right, Ortiz?” he yelled, over the ripping roars of gunfire.
“I’m hit.” The man’s voice, tight with pain, was remarkably calm. The time in captivity must have dulled his sense of shock.
“Doc!” Brannigan roared. “Ortiz needs you!” That was all the attention he could spare; he lined up the running form of another Iranian, and put a two-round burst into the man’s center of mass. The charging fighter stumbled, and Brannigan shot him again as soon as the red dot settled. The man pitched forward onto his face. Brannigan switched targets, blasting another four rounds in two trigger pulls at another strobing muzzle blast. Whether the man was hit or not, his rifle fell silent, at least for the moment.
He heard Villareal talking behind him. “You’re all right, Captain, I’ve got you,” the doctor was saying. “It’s just a scratch, you’ll be fine.” It was a tribute to Villareal’s professionalism and calm under fire that Brannigan couldn’t even tell whether he was lying or not.
The wall of the upper courtyard had crumbled in places, and the Iranians were using the rubble for cover as they tried to assault through the gap between the Citadel proper and the inner curtain wall. It was all they really could use, aside from the building itself, since the courtyard was wide open. Of course, that was a problem for the mercenaries and their charges, too. Brannigan was feeling very exposed, lying flat on open ground, vastly outnumbered and taking fire.
They needed to break contact and get through that sally port. They might be vulnerable on the steps going down, but if they stayed put, they would eventually be flanked and annihilated.
He ripped off the rest of the magazine, gripping the forearm of the rifle hard to muscle the barrel down against the muzzle-rise, tracking the long, ravening burst across the gap between Citadel and curtain wall. Then he did a pushup, got his feet under him, and came to a crouch.
Villareal had torn Ortiz’ shirt open and slapped a chest seal on the hole in his side. “Get moving, Doc!” Brannigan ordered. “We can’t stay here!”
Ortiz, wounded as he was, was still in the fight. He lifted the Type 03 and ripped off a burst, though it was shaky, wild, and probably didn’t do much more than make noise and keep some heads down. That was all they needed at that point, though. Brannigan shoved both Villareal and Ortiz toward the other side of the helicopter, then yanked an F1 frag out of his vest.
Please, don’t let me frag myself with this Russian monstrosity. He yanked the pin and chucked the grenade as far toward the oncoming Iranians as he could, before ducking around the side of the Super Puma’s cockpit.
Even as he did so, he ran smack-dab into one of the Saudi prisoners. He stumbled, almost tripping over the man even as the prisoner rebounded off him and fell. At first, he thought the man had simply panicked under fire, until the prisoner kicked out at his legs, trying to trip him.
The image in his NVGs was blurry, but he made out that it was the cadaverous, angry-looking Saudi, the one who had been in charge. And the man was now actively trying to force him back out into the Iranians’ line of fire.
The frag detonated in the next instant, and shrapnel smacked into the side of the Super Puma with a noise like the hammering of the world’s hardest rainstorm on a tin roof. More fragments whispered by, inches from Brannigan’s back.
The Saudi was still fighting him. Whether he was a Wahhabi fanatic who just wanted to see the infidels dead, or an angry egotist with some twisted desire for revenge after having been threatened and glared down by the big American didn’t matter to Brannigan. He dropped a knee in the man’s chest, driving the wind out of him with a whuff that was barely audible over the thunder of the fight around them.
Taking one hand off his rifle, Brannigan reached down and grabbed the man by the throat. “Either you quit, and live, or I toss your ass out into the open and leave you,” he snarled.
The man spat at him and tried to kick him.
Shifting his weight and getting off of him, Brannigan hauled the Saudi physically up off the ground and threw him six feet, out beyond the Super Puma’s nose.
More rifle fire roared. Three shots hit the Saudi in the chest and head. He jerked and was still.
Hancock was at the sally port. More machinegun fire was rattling from below. The volume of fire from the Iranians by the Citadel was increasing, bullets hammering at the Super Puma’s fuselage relentlessly.
“Go, go, go!” Brannigan yelled. Hancock was on a knee by the sally port, firing back toward the Citadel. Childress was shoving hostages through the gate and down the steps. There was no sign of the corn-fed kid who had picked up one of the enemy rifles; he’d probably expended all of his ammunition and been sent down the steps. Santelli was shooting under the helo. Villareal was half-dragging Ortiz toward the gate.
“Get to the gate and get down!” Brannigan yelled. He was already pulling another F1 out of his gear as he grabbed Santelli by the straps of his vest and shoved him toward the sally port. “Move!”
He didn’t know for sure if this would work; even if the Super Puma was fueled, there was no guarantee that an explosion would blow up the fuel tanks. He was hoping it would, though.
More bullets snapped overhead and smacked grit off the ground only a few feet to his right. Several of the Iranians had come around the far side of the Citadel, and were trying to flank them. The grenade dangling precariously from its pull-ring, Brannigan snapped his AK-12 to his shoulder and shot back, tearing through another half-mag. He still had seven left, but they were burning through ammo fast.
The Iranians ducked back as his burst ripped through the air at them, but then immediately countered with a ravening storm of fire that shredded the air around him and forced him to hit the ground. He responded with three shorter bursts. One took the lead shooter in the midsection, folding him over his own weapon as he crumpled. The other two only forced the remaining shooters to scramble back, out of the line of fire.
“Come on!” Santelli was roaring. “Last man!”
Brannigan scrambled to his feet, yanked the pin out of the grenade, and lobbed it under the Super Puma before turning and running toward the sally port. Santelli was barricaded on the threshold, firing single shots back toward the Citadel as fast as he could pull the trigger. Brannigan ran through the gate behind him, and almost ran into Villareal and Ortiz, who were shoving the remaining Saudi prisoners ahead of them.
Lifting his muzzle, Brannigan reached back and grabbed Santelli by the vest, pulling him through the gate and into the shelter of the wall, just before the grenade detonated and the Super Puma exploded in a massive fireball. Fragments of fuselage and rotors whickered through the air and chipped out baseball-sized chunks of the wall, which cascaded down on their heads.
***
The crackle of the ammo cooking off in the stricken AMX was dying down, but the volume of fire from beyond it was picking up. Bullets were starting to smack into the seaward wall above their heads, and a few tracers flashed above and sailed out to sea. Flanagan fired a burst down the side of the AMX, blindly, since the fire was whiting out his NVGs.
He and Curtis started up a rhythm as more muzzle flashes flickered at them from the dark beyond the burning armored vehicle. Curtis would fire a long burst, then Flanagan would pick up with a few short ones. Aziz was joining in sporadically, though he was busy prepping the rest of the RPGs and generally keeping his head down.
“Can you hear that?” Curtis yelled after finishing a burst of his own.
Flanagan fired at another muzzle flash before answering, “Hear what?”
“I think there’s another APC coming!” Curtis yelled, before tearing the n
ight apart again with another long, stuttering burst. All three men had been nearly deafened by the racket of the fight by then, but if they concentrated between bursts of gunfire, there might have been the all-too-familiar squeal and clank of treads in the background, somewhere beyond the smoke-belching, burning APC squatting in the middle of the courtyard.
“We’ve only got two RPGs left!” Aziz hollered. “After that, we’re fucked!”
“Well, we’re fucked now if you don’t start using them!” Flanagan snapped back. The dark wedge shape of another AMX-10 was starting to rumble around the side of the burning hulk. “Shoot that son of a bitch!”
Aziz might have cursed. It was impossible to hear over the thunder of automatic gunfire, and the sudden titanic explosion up above, near the Citadel itself. A fireball roiled upward into the sky, and jagged, smoking debris started to rain down on them. Then Aziz fired, the shockwave of the RPG-27 warhead’s launch smacking both Flanagan and Curtis with flying grit.
It was hard to see, but the AMX appeared to be trying to maneuver around the burning APC, unable to take a straight-line course through the gap between the wreck and the garrison buildings. The driver seemed to be understandably reticent to drive on the other side, too close to the missile carriers. That same reticence seemed to be affecting the men on foot, as well; Flanagan hadn’t seen anyone try to get to any of the missiles, which meant that the fuses were hopefully still burning.
For a moment, the nose of the mobile APC was visible, just past the burning wreckage of the first one, and that was where the RPG warhead hit, almost square against the vehicle’s flat sides. Without the angle of the glacis to deflect either the round itself or the plasma jet of its detonation, nearly the full fury of the warhead’s shaped charge was spent against the thinner side armor. There was a painful bang, a flash, and a shower of sparks.
The explosion must have killed the driver, because the APC, instead of stopping, surged forward and crunched into the garrison building against the cliff below the inner wall and the Citadel itself. A moment later, it started to burn.
The courtyard was now almost completely blocked in that direction by blazing armored vehicles. Infantry could still get through, though, if only through the same buildings.
Even as Flanagan thought it, muzzle flashes sparked from the darkened windows of the buildings, ahead of the burning APCs. More of the Iranians had come through, and were using the buildings as cover. Cover that the three men by the breach in the wall did not have.
Flanagan shifted his fire and ripped off three short bursts at the flashes in the windows, flattening himself as close to the rocky ground as he could get. He didn’t dare check his watch, but the fuses were getting low. They had to get out of that fortress soon, or they were all dead, anyway.
Then he saw the figures on the steps, coming down from the sally port. And some of them had guns.
***
The burning helicopter back-lit them as they hurried down the steps, and the fires from the destroyed APCs were lighting up the courtyard, though the growing billows of choking smoke served to cut the illumination, making it hard to see what was going on below. Brannigan and Santelli were close behind Ortiz and Villareal, chivvying the prisoners and the hostages down the uneven steps as fast as they could move. They were exposed as hell, and were going to be as long as they remained on the side of the cliff.
There was more gunfire thundering down in the courtyard, most of it aimed at the small knot of figures huddled near the breach in the wall they’d climbed through. Then a burst of fire smacked chips and grit off the rock above Brannigan’s head. Some of the Iranians down below, cut off by the burning vehicles, had figured out that the people descending the steps were not on their side.
He returned fire, though the burst was wild and unaimed, mostly only intended to get their heads down for the few more seconds it would take to get to the bottom.
Then he was rushing downward, hitting the weirdly-spaced steps almost more by instinct than actual agility, plummeting out of the line of fire as fast as he could. He would later consider it a minor miracle that he hadn’t fallen off the side of the cliff.
The courtyard was a hellstorm of automatic weapons fire. Hancock and Childress were just inside the gate, firing at the buildings alongside the cliff. The hostages were huddled as close to the cliffside itself as they could get, trying to make themselves as small as possible as bullets crackled past, smacked into stone and earth, and ricocheted with nasty, buzzing whines. There was an increasing volume of fire coming from the buildings, and the three men by the breach were pouring more fire at them in return, until one of them came up to a knee, a tube on his shoulder.
“Get down!” Brannigan roared, getting every bit of volume out of his lungs that he could. A moment later, the RPG fired with a bang, and the front of the building, not twenty yards ahead of Hancock and Childress, exploded with an earth-shaking thud.
A billowing cloud of dust and smoke slammed out from the flash of the detonation, and chunks of stone and brick flew, most of them hammering into the sides of the wrecks of the APCs. Some of it flew at the mercenaries, though, and the shockwave itself was funneled out the open door that Hancock had been firing through, knocking the two men back on their haunches.
For a moment, there almost seemed to be a lull in the fight, though some of it might have simply been the shocked silence of already-brutalized hearing trying to shut down after enduring the shock of an explosion that close. But the brutal blast of that shaped charge would have impacted the fighters inside, as well, and if any of them were still alive, they’d gotten rocked by the explosion, more than the mercenaries outside would have. Those who had been out of range of the shockwave would be blocked by wreckage and debris, at least for a little while.
“Get up!” Brannigan roared, running forward and hauling Hancock to his feet. “Get moving! Get the hostages down to the boats! Childress, go with Hancock! Carlo, you’re with me!”
They had a brief breather, but they still had to buy time. The hostages were malnourished, dehydrated, and shell-shocked. It would take a few minutes to get all of them down the rope.
He ran to the corner of the partially-destroyed building. The flames were playing hell with his NVGs; the green view ahead of him was a flickering mess of white flares that rendered almost anything else invisible. He kept them on, though; and just tried to look away from the fires as much as he could.
He stifled a cough. His throat felt like it was on fire from thirst, the smoke was making it difficult to breathe, and now the nearness of the burning vehicles was adding furnace heat to the sweat, salt, and grit that felt like it was abrading away every inch of his skin. He knew that sheer adrenaline was half of what was keeping him on his feet.
The other half was sheer, determined willpower.
He knelt, using the semi-intact corner of the building as a barricade, searching for targets. There might have been movement beyond the flaming hulks of the APCs, but there wasn’t a clear target that he could see, and he was getting low on ammo.
Behind him, he felt Santelli take a knee, facing in the open door. The other man’s AK-12 rattled off a series of quick shots, but went unanswered. Brannigan stayed facing the way he was, letting Santelli cover his own sector.
Curtis’ PKP suddenly roared out a lethal greeting, and Brannigan risked turning his head to look. The little machinegunner was pouring fire down the other side of the destroyed AMX-10s, closer to the missiles. With their approach through and along the buildings relatively cut off, the Iranians were taking the risk of getting closer to the volatile weapons in order to try to keep their hostages, and the infidel mercenaries, from escaping.
But the shooting died back down fairly quickly. Fanatics they might be, but the Iranians had taken a hell of a shellacking already that night, and they must be pulling back to reconsider their attack plan.
Brannigan glanced back again, to see the first of the hostages starting down the rope. They were moving too slowly.
He turned his head to look up at the sally port above their heads. There was no movement up there, but he realized that it was only a matter of time. He reached back and grabbed Santelli’s shoulder.
“Fall back to the breach,” he ordered, “before they come down the same steps we just used and cut us off.”
Santelli didn’t reply, except to get up, pivot around, and dash as fast as his short legs could take him, back toward the seaward wall. A moment later, Brannigan heard him yell, “Turn and go!”
It was a short dash. He skidded down into the prone next to Flanagan. He and Curtis were covering the courtyard, side by side, while Childress and Hancock got the hostages on the ropes as fast as they could. The hostages were huddled against the wall behind the mercenaries, flat on their bellies while they waited their turn. It was the best they could do with the terrain they had.
“Where’s Aziz?” Brannigan asked Flanagan.
“He went down to get the boats ready to move,” Flanagan said, before triggering another burst at a flicker of movement near the farthest missile carrier. “Ordinarily I’d think he just wanted to get clear of the shooting sooner, but we really do need to hurry up.”
“I know,” Brannigan replied, snugging his own AK into his shoulder and sighting in on what might have been another Iranian shape in the shadows beyond the fires. He rapped out a two-round burst, and the shape vanished.
“No, you don’t,” Flanagan said. “There might be five minutes left on that first time fuse.”
“Oh, hell.”
CHAPTER 18
Esfandiari winced as he got to his feet. The bullet had gone into his side, but he didn’t think it had hit anything vital. It only hurt. He could deal with pain, if it meant the infidels were punished.