The heavy vehicles peeled off left and right as they neared their side of the bridge, popping smoke from every tube launcher on their prows. In seconds, a dense artificial fog smothered the view.
Echoes bounced and multiplied off the stone cliffs, but Curro caught the diesel roar of more vehicles following close behind.
He wanted to shout out some terse final order, brave words like in the movies, but there was no drama, no ‘Pause’ button here. And if the men didn’t know what to do by now, they were as good as dead already. The Duub Cas were going to rush the bridge, trusting in numbers and firepower to keep him and his men pinned down while they seized it intact. If they made it over the ravine, a handful of Dhubbato men wouldn’t matter. He gripped his rifle’s handle, hunkered down and tried to ignore the stone in the pit of his stomach.
In the last year, anytime he’d been near combat , Tam and Jace had told him what to do. They always seemed to know the next move, to be in motion. Missions had been more exciting than dangerous. A game, a simulation. Even when things appeared bad, like that night on the Latvian coast, death never really seemed possible.
But now, what he wouldn’t give to have Tam, Jace and Poet9 here, the Triplets poised in the rocks nearby.
Seconds dragged into minutes that seemed like hours. More shapes emerged from the smoke.
Four armored SARKOS suits lumbered into view, armored chest plates blazoned with the Duub Cas tiger head emblems. They strode slowly onto the bridge, firing into the terrain on either side of the road and across the ravine. Curro was puzzled. Big, brute-looking armored suits might intimidate unarmed civilians, but certainly not the hardened Dhubbato men waiting in the rocks. Would to God the Duub Cas commander is that arrogant.
Just then, another shape materialized out of the smoke: the hulking slab-shape of an air defense tank, its turret bristling with four rapid-fire cannons. Recognition flickered in Curro’s mind: a ZSU-23-4 “Shilka”.
Poet9’s hyped twang ran though his head. “Ugly bitch is called a ‘Sewing Machine’, the cannons stitch so fast. It’s raining railroad spikes, only like seventy a second at a thousand meters per second. Definite pucker factor.”
The Shilka rumbled to a halt at the far end of the ravine. His men were trading shots with the slow armored suits, but Curro was mesmerized by the Shilka’s cannons. They jerked back and forth, up and down. The turret swiveled slowly back and forth like a metal crocodile head, looking for prey.
It stopped. Pointing directly at him.
“Down!” Wonli screamed.
The Shilka opened fire and the ravine shook with thunder.
Curro cringed behind the boulder. Dust filled his mouth as the cannon’s stuttering blast stabbed pain into his ears. The scorched air hissed with the passage of twenty-three-millimeter rounds. Dirt geysered everywhere, raising a cloud of grit and dust. Stones chipped, crumbled, disintegrated on the hillside, a shower of stinging flint raining down. Curro pressed himself flat, hands over his ears, rifle forgotten on the ground beside him. Seconds, minutes later—Curro didn’t know—the thunder shifted as it targeted a different part of the slope.
Inch by inch, Curro nudged his way forward.
The Otokars at the far end were disgorging troops, Red Berets fanning out, creeping toward the bridge in a haze smoke.
On cue, the machine gun opened up from the rocks high on the left. The government troops scattered for cover. The turret gunners on the APCs sprayed back, trying to silence the Dhubbato men, but they kept firing. An RPG-7 warhead lanced out from the scree below Curro, the smoke trail screaming down the length of the overpass. The warhead exploded and staggered one of the government armored combat suits. It righted itself and kept coming.
At the far end, the Shilka ceased firing, its turret shaking angrily back and forth as it tried to depress its quad-cannons low enough to shred the RPG team.
While the tank and the walkers were distracted, the bell-clang of Bishaar’s recoilless cannon rang out. The hulking SARKOS suit nearest the Shilka disintegrated in a gout of flame and smoke. Alarmed, the tank jinked into the opposite lane and sped up, desperate to close the distance to the other side. The cannons slammed more rounds into the gravel slopes, and Curro saw at least two Dhubbato men torn apart. Pitifully few muzzle flashes winked among the rocks, returning fire. The RPG shrieked again, missed and tore out a length of side railing. The three remaining armored suits formed a protective line, plodding ahead of the tank as fast as they could. The Shilka was the main threat. Behind it, the Red Beret infantry seeped forward, despite the machine gun in the cliffs.
Bishaar’s Carl G rang out again. This time, the round threaded a gap in the suits and hit the Shilka’s right front wheel. There was a massive clang and a shower of sparks as the tank ground to a halt, its tread spooling out onto the roadway. The vehicle slewed sideways, engine howling in frustration. The turret traversed, cannons hammering the walls of the narrow valley.
One lane blocked.
At the sight of the crippled Shilka, the two Otokar APCs at the far end surged into action, rolling in tandem on the narrow highway onto the bridge. Half a dozen more armored vehicles poured into the far side of the valley.
Come and get them? Here they come.
Thirty minutes. That’s all I’m asking for, Lord.
If we can clog the bridge…
The Shilka’s cannons hammered at the ridgeline where the machine-gun crew was hidden, gouging savage rents in the rocky cliff side like the finger of God. The area disappeared in a swirling mass of dust and lethal shrapnel. The air around Curro and Wonli buzzed and crackled as the gunners on the APC’s had found their range. Wonli lay on his stomach, firing single shots at the SARKOS suits, hoping to hit a vital joint or the head cowling. Curro began to do the same, to no effect. The armored suits lumbered on, concentrating their fire on the boulders where the RPG team was hidden.
Out of the corner of his eye, Curro saw Bishaar and Ali scurrying to a new position, trying for a better angle on the advancing armor. The machine gunners in the APCs saw the movement too and chased them into a small fold in the earth with their fire. The Red Berets on the bridge grew bolder, running forward, firing into the hills. The volume of fire was rising, the small valley shuddering with the noise.
The Dhubbato men fought back, darting from rock to rock, doing everything they could to stem the flood, but there were too few of them. There were simply too many government soldiers. If they didn’t block the bridge, they wouldn’t last another ten minutes.
On his right, Bishaar and Ali popped up, struggling with the cannon’s tripod. Dirt fountained around them as the machine gunners found them again. Curro saw Bishaar tumble backwards, and the cannon canted muzzle first into the gravel, Ali franticly tugging. More long bursts. Ali went down.
The SARKOS suits were still firing into the rocks where the RPG had last been seen. Nothing moved there except bullets. The Otokars swung around the damaged Shilka, nearly halfway across the span.
Block the bridge. Just block the bridge.
“Grenades!” Curro shouted to Wonli. “Give me your grenades.”
Wonli paused long enough to roll two F1s across the dirt.
Curro tugged out his own grenade. “Cover me.”
“What?”
Curro jabbed his finger at the bridge. “I’m going down there. Cover me.”
“No. We have to go!” Wonli screamed. We have to run!”
Curro shook his head and began crawling down the slope. “There’s no time. Nowhere else to go.”
He half-crawled, half slid down the slope from boulder to boulder until he came across two bodies down near the road. The launcher’s optics were smashed, but the yellow cone of the last warhead sprouted from the front.
The blunt prows of the Otokar were a hundred meters away.
Hands trembling, Curro rose to his knees, hefted the launcher to his shoulder, and sighted straight down the tube. The grip was sticky with blood, the metal smooth and cool against his ch
eek. The green-striped front of the right-hand APC filled his vision. The ringing in his ears, the roaring engines, gunfire, screaming, all of it receded. He and it were all that existed that moment.
At the halfway point, the two APCs shifted to the left lane to avoid the white U.N. Jeep.
He squeezed the trigger.
Nothing.
He squeezed again. Nothing happened.
Puzzled, he swung the launcher up, and the motion caught the turret gunners attention.
The first round hit his shoulder, a millisecond later a second smashed into his chest plate, knocking him on his back.
In the mansions bright and blessed, he’ll prepare for us a place…
Curro lay there, numb, warmth spreading along his neck. He could feel individual rocks poking his skin through the fabric of his pants and sleeves. Far above, shreds of pale clouds drifted in the pale blue sky. The sun didn’t seem hot any longer. He heard his heartbeat, and the sound of his own breathing.
All at once, the bedlam, the chaos of battle rushed back in, joined by a new noise.
There was gunfire on the hill behind him.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE – The Three Rs
Presidential Palace, Hargeisa, Somaliland
Thanks to Hester’s files, Poet9 could identify the control-node for the automated defenses to our front. It was disguised as a brick pump house for a string of ornamental koi ponds, nestled a kilometer away in a grove of fruit trees. I wanted to sit back and mortar the shit out of it, but the government anti-air and counter-battery systems meant we needed to take it out up close and personal.
So we had the Ukrainians make slingshots.
Giant slingshots. Four-meter iron uprights hammered in the ground with elastic tie-straps hooked to an empty ammo bin. Chupalov and the boys set up half a dozen of them then launched load after load of rocks, flares, and the occasional hand grenade over the walls onto the estate grounds. They sent anything that would overload the automated weapons’ sensors and trigger fire. Explosions rippled through spider minefields as the little bastards chased bouncing debris, latched on and detonated. Once a turret ran out of ammo or paused to reload, we crept forward and blew it to scrap.
In an era of the cybernetic battlespace, real-time satellite feed, remote-operated military drones, and laser-guided missiles, we were using to Bronze Age technology to oust a tyrant.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Major Sajiid kept throwing SPLM troops at the estate’s defenses while Eshu and the Legion crept forward. I heard afterward that the Professor broke down and wept at the casualties, even ordered the major to stop at one point, but with world media in the wings and his promise to broadcast from the mansion’s steps, Secretary Ghotta insisted they keep attacking. He claimed any hint of retreat would undermine global opinion and damage rebel morale far more than a high body count. Call me cynical, but I didn’t see any of Ghotta’s men catching bullets for the cause.
The result was slaughter. Whether revolutionary zeal, a diversionary tactic, or a lack of confidence in our plan, it didn’t matter. A pall of smoke hung over the estate, and the air was heavy with the stench of blood, shit, burning rubber and scorched steel.
Battlefield heroes look good in movies. In real life, they might even win a battle and get a medal—usually posthumous, but the brutal fact is, combat and corporate management are two of the only career paths where methodical sociopaths come into their own. Cold, calculated destruction wins wars.
I’m not owning that diagnosis, but the SPLM lost over three hundred men and a dozen vehicles that morning, acting on the tactical delusion that bullets are deflected by noble intentions and mad courage. As if more proof were needed how utterly indifferent they really are.
For us and our Ukrainian friends, there was no Charge of the Light Brigade, no heroics, just five hairy hours of playing hide and seek with a violent, automated death.
We stuck to the three Rs: rocks, rockets, repeat. One turret, one minefield, one booby-trapped stretch of lawn at a time. We lost eleven men, but by three o’clock that afternoon, we’d cut a hundred-meter wide lane across the grounds to the center of the estate. The mansion’s red ceramic roof tiles peeked over the treetops five hundred meters ahead.
Tam, Poet9 and I were tucked behind a laurel hedge topiary shaped like a charging elephant, sucking water from our CamelBaks, when Tam spotted the SPLM command vehicles a thousand meters behind us. Accompanied by an equal number of Sai-qa commandoes and news reporters—they obviously smelled victory. We could see Professor Hamid, Secretary Ghotta and Major Sajiid near two boxy M577A6 mobile command posts. A pair of diminutive Wiesel air-defense vehicles hunched on either side while a Centauro wheeled tank loomed in the rear like a guardian rhino. All three the fashion from two wars back, but functionally lethal in a third-world brawl like this. The Egyptians fanned out in a protective cordon while a flock of cameramen scattered across the grounds, shoulder-mounted camcorders like weird beam-weapons, searching for grisly filler footage.
“They better not wander far,” Poet9 commented. “Plenty of live ordinance still looking for a home.”
On cue, someone on the edge of the cleared zone started yelling. We looked up in time to see a man hopping up and down, a spider mine clamped to his leg. A flash and a ‘whump’, his torso flew backwards, and his JVC camera tumbled across the grass. Another reporter stooped and picked it up.
“Bet that footage makes the six o’clock news,” Poet9 coughed.
“You are one sick dude,” I said.
“You’re just working that out now?” he laughed. “The fact we’re here means we’re all a bit unhinged, don’t you think?”
“No comment,” Tam replied.
“That’s the spirit,” Poet9 said. “Denial works every time. Until it doesn’t.” He cabled his Brain Box back into his Ono-Sendai, and went back to monitoring both the rebel and estate’s tactical networks.
Secretary Ghotta had played his part pitch-perfect: he kept the Professor and the journos updated on our progress. Just like the aftermath of Bowna, Eshu International was lauded as heroes of the revolution. My guess was the man wanted us up on a pedestal, setting us up for the fall. He wanted everyone watching us, not him. Nothing like a good story to cover the real story.
I pointed toward the command track. “Ghotta’s going to make his play soon.”
Tam wiped sweat from his eyes and nodded in agreement. “There’s still some heavy lifting. He’ll wait until we’ve taken the mansion.”
“About that… you got anything like a plan yet?”
His response was to snap a fresh magazine into his Tavor and chamber a round.
“That a ‘no’?” I asked, reloading my own rifle.
“That’s an ‘it’s in development’,” he sighed. The tension in his body relaxed fractionally as he looked at me. “I feel like I’m caught in a riptide and I’m fighting to come up for air,” he confessed.
“Don’t get all repentant now. This was your idea,” I pointed out.
A metallic bang like two garbage trucks colliding interrupted our conversation. The ground convulsed and a greasy smear of smoke heaved into the sky on our left. The Triplets jogged out of a hedge maze ten seconds later, smiling.
Their disguises were holding up, not because they were effective, but most of the SPLM was nowhere near our position, and the Ukrainians that advanced with us had their heads down, trying to not get killed. Besides, Flopsy, Mopsy and Cottontail were too damn good at destroying things not to generate a healthy dose of awe and gratitude. More than once, I heard the Legion boys thanking God they were on the same side. The three of them hunkered down beside us, waiting for new orders.
I eyed the SPLM command tracks. “No sign of Alpha. Should I be worried?”
“Yes,” Tam answered.
“Nah,” Poet9 spoke up. “Dratshev and Sveta skipped town with a metric-ton of khat and a cargo container of 14-year-olds. Vorovskoi mir—thieves’ world—is more the
ir style. Bullies don’t like anyone who can fight back.”
I spun around to see if he was serious. “You’re kidding, right?”
Poet9 looked up from his Ono-Sendai. “Sorry. Little joke there.”
“Hilarious. Where are they?”
The splicer nodded back towards the command vehicles. “Nearby. Sveta’s lurking on the Grid. Sounds like they’re cooking up some mierda to throw at us. I’ll let you know in a minute.” Poet9 jacked a cable into the slot above his right ear then shook his head as his fingers flew over the keyboard. “Quedada thinks she can hide from me.”
I looked at Tam. “Ghotta’s playing them against us?”
“It’s what I’d do if I was a traitorous shithead,” he replied. “Have one batch of foreign infidels take the fall, have their rivals clean up the mess. Keeps his hands clean.”
Cottontail spoke up out of the blue. “We can kill Alpha now?” The three of them had been sitting there, still as statues. Tam and I looked at each other, surprised.
“Well, ahh…” Tam stammered.
Poet9 looked up. “I vote ‘yes’.”
I studied the three clones, who stared back with genuine anticipation. “It’s a fair question,” I said to Tam.
“They fire on us, we fire back. No holds barred,” Tam answered.
The Triplets nodded once, satisfied. “We’ll be ready,” Mopsy concluded.
On either side of the huge elephant bush, Chupalov and the Ukrainians were setting up the slingshots one last time for our approach to the mansion. Hester’s files said the automated defenses stopped at the inner defensive ring. It was smart meat and dumb machines here on in. But in the spirit of obsessive paranoia, we figured better safe than sorry.
Behind us, an armored Red Crescent jeep pulled away with what was left of the reporter. The command vehicles’ engines roared to life, then sat there idling. The SPLM leadership was anxious for us to get on with their revolution.
The Ukrainians loaded up the first volley of rocks and flares. “Five minutes!” Tam called out. “We shower blessings on Dhul-Fiqaar, trip any systems, then move forward in a skirmish line. Stay low, stay together, watch your flanks. We’re almost there.”
Shift Tense: Eshu International Book 2 Page 27