“Yeah. They’re handy in a tight spot,” I stated.
Tam took a pull on his canteen. “We got them, and we’ll keep our Falcos up. Speaking of which… any sign of our neighbors from last night?”
Poet9 shook his head. “Tracked ’em for three hours. Whoever it was, they’re good in the woods. They landed, angled east toward Saylac city on the coast and disappeared. I’ve kept a bird on our left the as long as I could. My guess is they were another hired crew with a different itinerary.”
“No sign of anybody else?”
“Nada.”
“Good. I like a war zone where I can work in peace,” I noted dryly.
Tam swigged and spit. “Fine by me too. Let’s move.”
Motors hummed, and we took off through the trees down into the vast sun-bleached grasslands.
***
The Triplets spotted the kid four hours later.
Tucked in the low split of an acacia tree, he must have been hiding from the noon heat because his bright red shirt stuck out like a ripe fruit in the fern-like leaves. He was dozing, hugging an AK-74 to his chest, oblivious to the world. Cottontail kept an eye on him while Flopsy and Mopsy reconned the area. He was all alone.
“That our guide?” Curro asked, peering through binoculars.
“No,” Tam said. “We’re still a ways away from the coordinates. He’s a tripwire. SNA gets close, his shots will warn the real guides. We show up, he’ll bring us to them.”
“That’s cold. He’s like, ten years old,” Curro said. “How can they give him a rifle?”
Tam took the binoculars. “He’s probably a bit older. Malnourishment has a way of stunting your growth. AKs and kids like him are cheaper than dirt in these parts. Why send a soldier when you’re tripping over war-orphans?”
“We can go wide and be on our merry. No need to disturb his beauty sleep,” I said.
“No,” Tam said. “Have the Triplets mug him, bring him over.”
A couple of words in my throat mike and five minutes later, the boy was dumped on the ground in front of us. Flopsy and Mopsy loomed over him. Cottontail was holding his rifle and a brand-new, lime-green chest pouch. The boy knelt there, zip-cuffed and trembling. His red shirt was smudged with camo grease; torn shorts and flip-flops completed his uniform. A dark stain spread around his crotch. The seven of us stood and glared down at him.
“Speak English?” Tam snapped.
He nodded quickly.
“You have a name?”
The boy nodded again and gulped. “Abdi.”
Tam slipped his Kershaw out of his shoulder sheath and knelt down. “You a spy for the SPLM, Abdi?”
The boy shook his head.
“Yes, you are. You’re a rebel spy. A traitor. Where did you get the rifle?”
No answer.
“Who gave you the gun, Abdi?” Tam stabbed the knife into the dirt near the boy’s knee.
Abdi flinched and squeaked out, “My cousin. Ghedi.”
“Why does your cousin want you to shoot us? He’s SPLM too, isn’t he?”
The boy shook his head again.
Tam slowly waved the long gray blade in front of the child’s face. “You know what General Dhul-Fiqaar does to traitors and liars, Abdi?”
The boy’s shoulders quivered. No answer.
“I asked you a question.” The knifepoint traced small circles in the air.
Panting, tears dripped off smooth brown cheeks.
“Answer me, boy!” Tam roared, and his knife sunk to the hilt in the soil this time.
Abdi shrieked. We flinched. “I know, I know!” he screamed. “My mother, my father, my family all dead. They raped, lit my sister on fire. I know what he does, and I hate him. I hate the general. Do you hear?”
His little body shook. He glared at Tam, weeping, face blazing with rage.
Tam stared back.
Then, without a word, Tam stood and stepped around behind the kneeling boy. Abdi sagged, defiance spent. The trembling started again. Tam shifted his grip on the knife. We stayed silent, watching.
Tam cut the zip cuffs. “Stand up.”
He helped Abdi up gently and turned him around. The boy wobbled, uncomprehending. “We’re here to help the Professor. Hired guns. You understand? Pro-SPLM.”
Abdi blinked and cuffed away tears and snot. Finally, he nodded.
“Good.” Tam pointed at Curro. “My man will help you. When you’re clean, you can lead us to the soldiers by the river.” Tam looked at Cottontail. “Give him back his rifle when we move out.”
When they were out of earshot, Poet9 and I approached Tam. “The hell…?” I asked.
“Yeah. Little rough on the pequeño, weren’t you?” Poet9 accused. “I thought you were going to slot him.”
Tam seated the Kershaw back in its sheath. “I had to be sure he wasn’t a dupe.”
“Did that for sure,” I said.
Poet9 scoffed. “Can’t fake hatred like that.”
“No,” Tam said softly. “No, you can’t.”
***
Two kilometers out from the rendezvous, the wind carried the sounds of a firefight—the stutter of heavy automatic weapons, and the thump, thump, thump of grenades. I heard rifles reply, brief and scattered, then the roar of an explosion drown them out. Smoke bloomed over the trees ahead of us. Someone was catching hell.
“Echelon left. Advance to contact!” Tam shouted. “Poet9, keep Curro and Abdi here. Get a Falco overhead RFN.”
The Triplets roared ahead on my right, disappearing up and over the hump of a small hill. Last thing I saw was Mopsy yanking his minigun from the back one handed.
Tam and I swung our rifles around, Tavor TAR 28s with integral 40mm grenade launchers, and sped after them. We crested the same rise and slammed to a halt. The scene on the veldt in front of us was straight war-pig lunacy.
A rutted dirt track cut through the tangles of scrub brush and stunted trees. A kilometer away, two ancient Russian GAZ 66 trucks lay on their sides, burning fiercely, oily coils of black smoke slithering into the sky. I could see a dozen bodies torn open around them, scattered wet and ripe in the dusty grass. A handful of survivors in mismatch fatigues—Somaliland militia—cowered on the road and were firing blindly across the plain at their attackers.
Advancing on them wasn’t a platoon of army regulars or a clutch of jeeps with heavy machineguns; it was three pods of Gladiator TUGVs—Tactical Unmanned Ground Vehicles.
The remote-controlled mini-tanks looked fresh off the showroom floor—crisp, desert tan paint jobs, clean black tracks and shiny sensor suites. About the size of our ATVs, a dozen of the squat little bastards were trundling over the broken ground, machineguns and launcher tubes firing non-stop. Twelve machineguns, one hundred twenty launcher tubes; there were about ten thousand bits of metal down there flying around at high speed looking for a home. The noise alone was hellacious.
Tam and I slid to the ground fast. No sign of the Triplets. For big men, they could vanish like ghosts. Suddenly, Cottontail’s voice came over my headset. “Requesting target.”
“Hold fire. Hold positions,” Tam answered. “Poet, where’s my God-view? I got a dozen Wallys bearing down on what’s left of our escort. I need to know if there are more hostiles in the neighborhood.”
“Fast as I can,” Poet9 answered.
“Another minute, there’s not going to be anybody left.”
“Heard you the first time. It’s coming.”
The militia’s return fire died down to nothing. The Gladiators had halted a hundred yards out and were raking the road on full auto like a shooting gallery. The two burning trucks started disintegrating. One of the militia popped up and tried to sprint away. Four of the Gladiators targeted him and swiveled their M60s. A dozen steps, and the ground around him erupted. He came apart in chunks.
Never try to outrun bullets.
Movement on the road. I flipped down my Oakley’s visor and tapped the magnification; one of the surviving militia was crawling
towards a body.
He rifled through bloody pockets. I thought he was frantic for a grenade. Smoke, phosphorus, or something exotic like an EMP—any kind of hardware to help him get the hell out of there.
He pulled out a whistle.
What the hell? That would do about as much good as a pair of ruby slippers.
Two blasts, shrill and long. He kept blowing them over and over until the sound carried above the din of gunfire.
Tam and I looked at each other.
Then, far out on the plain, past the Gladiators and the trucks, I saw silver flashes like curtains swept aside and children rose up out of the grass.
Children with guns.
Maybe twenty of them. They’d been hiding under foil emergency blankets, masking their body heat. Most had AKs, but it looked like the littlest ones were armed with nothing but pistols and machetes. I saw one lanky kid wobble forward with an RPG as tall as he was. He got his footing and sent the rocket whistling into the side of the nearest robot. It lurched, venting smoke, and stopped shooting. Rifle rounds sparked off armor plate and several of the Gladiators stopped, turning to face the new threat.
Then the children charged.
“Shit,” Tam said. “Cottontail, engage the Wallys. Poet…”
“Engaging.” There was a prompt rasp of miniguns, the bell ring of a Carl G, and the Gladiator nearest to us exploded.
Poet9’s voice came over my headset. “Falco on station.”
Tam and I jumped back on our ATVs. “Find me the MCP. Abdi’s pals are out there.”
“I make a probable mobile command post three point two klicks to the west. Uploading GPS to your tac-maps now. No sign of other hostiles.”
“On it.”
As Tam and I rode as I used my Oakleys again.
I tapped the UAV feed button, and a small window popped up in the lower right of the visor lens. It showed the countryside around us from three thousand meters up—a grainy top-down mini-map of the battlefield. The burning trucks were white shimmering blobs, the scared militia identifiable only when they popped up and ripped off a burst. Best count I could make was five survivors.
The Gladiators appeared as a line of fat beetles darting tongues of flame as they fired. The children were a mob of mites surging towards the remotes’ position, their little bodies blinking in and out of sight under the flapping thermal blanket capes. Several Gladiators turned and started firing on them.
This was like some twisted cyber-version of a Grimms’ fairy tale.
The GPS coordinates blinked in the lower left of my visor, and as Tam and I raced through the brush, my anxiety and the firefight rumble blended into a heavy background hammering. The mini-map in the right window scrolled as we drove. Three minutes later, a red dot appeared ahead of our position—the mobile command post.
You’ve got three options fighting remotes: wreck the machine, kill the operators, or cut the leash. Trouble with the first is that drone developers hate it when their toys get smashed, so their creations are buffed with ceramic composites and solid defensive systems. They were military-grade killing machines that were extremely lethal and notoriously tough to kill.
Problem with killing the operators is they’re nowhere near the battlefield. That’s the ‘remote’ part. Operators are on the other end of a long electronic leash, siccing their state-of-the-art killing machines on whoever is in their sights. Most aerial drone kills are committed by pilots hundreds of kilometers away—sometimes halfway around the world.
The final option is to cut the leash, by “jam or slam” as Poet9 always says. Either block the controlling signal with viral code or interference, or put a HE round into the side of the transmitter—either works. The length and strength of the leash is dependent on the technology of the deploying army. Mega-corp or nation-state meant encrypted satellite links to controllers in another time zone. Entry level TUGVs for a third-world despot meant a mobile command post in a truck with a massive transmitter and signal relay.
We found the MCP in the dip between two rocky hills. Three civilian flatbed trucks were parked in a rough triangle around the control vehicle—an old, boxy American M577 command track. Bottom-of-the-barrel surplus, no one had even bothered to paint over the speckled gray Taiwan Army urban multi-cam or the big ROC ident-markings. No one was on guard; all the Somaliland soldiers were clustered at the back door, shouting encouragement at their buddies at the control workstations. They were laughing, pointing at the screens, and slapping each other on the back. I saw money change hands; it was a game for them.
The tall white and blue, bullet-shaped “R2” relay unit sat humming outside the perimeter in a clump of tall grass. I lased it, got the range, then thumbed my Tavor’s grenade launcher on.
Tam whispered in the radio to Poet9. “Got ’em. Give us five minutes. Then you and Curro take Abdi and see if anyone’s left who can get us to the SPLM camp. We need to be there by nightfall.”
Four minutes, three rifle magazines and two grenades later, Tam and I hadn’t only cut the leash but had eliminated the operators as well.
Some days, two out of three isn’t bad at all.
CHAPTER TWELVE – A Thing for Strays
Somaliland/Ethiopian border, near Biye K’obe, Ethiopia
We didn’t bury the bodies.
Not with a fat column of smoke towering over the road. Vultures were circling already; we weren’t going to hang around for the next batch of Somaliland Army regulars.
So we left them: the militia in pieces next to the charred truck frames, the children strewn in the grass like broken toys.
It made me remember why I’d never liked Africa.
Seven of the kids survived, along with three of the SPLM men. The men raged over the bodies of their friends, blaming a new recruit who’d run off at the first shot. They were convinced he’d led the government forces to the rendezvous point, but they couldn’t exactly say how he’d done it , or when. No matter, they said. He was guilty of something.
Tam and I weren’t in the mood to hunt him down and ask. Besides, even if it were true, seeing how the ambush turned out, he was more likely to get a bullet in the head than a fistful of Somali dollars. Smart traitors get paid up front.
Tam gave the soldiers and kids five minutes to scavenge what they could. Water and food were snatched up first, guns and ammo after. I saw an eight-year-old tugging the boots off a pair of legs. The upper part of their former owner stared resentfully from the other side of the road.
Waste not, want not.
The newly promoted militia leader, the one who’d blown the whistle, was a meth-gaunt teenager named Cisman. He bounced around like a frantic, happy puppy after we rescued him, weeping with relief, kissing my and Tam’s hands over and over. We pried him off, and when he realized he was in charge, he made a show of ordering the others around—shouting, blowing the whistle, kicking at the dazed kids—until Tam made him stop.
Cisman was as brown and taut as polished mahogany. He had a Cheshire-smile the same color too, his teeth all rotted from chewing khat. I counted three different sets of corporal stripes on his German tropentarn camo jacket, all of them sewn upside down. Officer material if I ever saw it.
The SPLM men wouldn’t even look at the Triplets, let alone go near them. Guess saving their lives wasn’t enough to overcome all the Boogeyman stories about the chalk-white devil soldiers. Tam had them stand guard up on the rise with Poet9, Curro and Abdi. Too many obambo, wandering ghosts, conjured by those pale blue eyes.
Cisman latched onto us again as we were getting ready to leave. He swore his undying gratitude, insisting he knew the shortest route to the SPLM camp. He flashed that rotten smile and repeating over and over, “Cheap, almost free for you. Top secret road. No drones. No choppers. Trust me—mad skills.”
Tam managed to keep a straight face.
Salvage done, Cisman exercised his battlefield promotion and delivered a rousing speech at the other two militiamen. They stared back, slouched and blank-eyed until h
e finished, then promptly loaded down the children like pack mules and led them away towards the Ethiopian border. I watched them trudge away.
Cisman snapped his fingers. “No worries. They come two days.” A pause. “OK. Maybe three. No worries.” Then he jumped onto the ATV behind Tam and clapped like he’d won a ticket on a carnival ride.
“Careful, Tam,” I called out. “He’s got a serious man-crush.”
Tam rolled his eyes. “Yeah, well, we’re not going to be picking out curtains together.”
He touched his throat-mike. “Poet9, keep the Falco overhead. I’m not sure Kit Carson here could find his own ass with two hands and a flashlight.”
“Already on it,” the little Mexican replied.
We’d picked up another bit of baggage as well; Poet9 and Curro had kept Abdi with them. Apparently, the kid’s older cousin had been leading the crew out on the plain and had been cut down by the Gladiators. What was left of his family was in a refugee camp. As our ATVs started up, I saw him hesitate, then climb up behind Mopsy. Eshu International had this thing for strays, and strange as it seems, the Triplets had a way with kids.
Cisman tapped Tam on the shoulder, pointing vigorously to the southwest. He clutched him around the waste. I laughed. Tam just shook his head and cranked down on the throttle.
The rugged hybrid motors roared, and our little convoy followed the rutted dirt track away from the bloody wreckage across the broken plains into Ethiopia.
PART TWO: SOLDIER DREAMS
“Just drive down that road until you get blown up.”
– General George Patton to reconnaissance troops
CHAPTER THIRTEEN – The Juggler
Somaliland/Ethiopian border, near Biye K’obe, Ethiopia
Shift Tense: Eshu International Book 2 Page 9