Standing Before Hell's Gate

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Standing Before Hell's Gate Page 38

by William Alan Webb


  Leaning into the command Bradley, he told the driver to head west at maximum speed. No sooner had the vehicle turned and started down the slope of the ridge where they’d parked than four groups of men moving forward toward the wall disappeared from sight.

  #

  Chapter 71

  What is more rare in war is a general who can learn from experience.

  paraphrased quote from Shelby Foote

  Two miles west of Shangri-La

  1638 hours, April 30

  The old Forest Ranger road climbed a hundred-foot-high hill and ended there. The cracked and crumbling pavement brought them through the ravines and forest to a point due west of Jemez Springs, with only a short expanse of prairie and a long, high ridgeline to get over. From his vantage point, Lieutenant Hakala knew that was easier said than done. Turning to the four vehicle commanders assembled around him, he laid out the plan. “Bravo Two, you remain here. This will be our rally point.”

  “She can make it, Lieutenant.”

  “No reason to risk it. And if you see us coming back over the mountain at high speed, you’ll know we need fire support. Now, see that over there, next to that sheer cliff? Our two guides, Qadim and Billy, both say that ground is solid enough to hold the LAVs. If you look right there, that blackish-looking line about halfway up, that’s where the slope’s angle up changes, but to the right of that is another, lower-angle slope that will get us to the top. Under no circumstances are you to continue if you believe your vehicle is in danger of sliding or falling. The safety of you and your LAV are of paramount importance, clear?”

  They all nodded.

  “Once we top that ridge, be ready to engage the enemy. We don’t know their exact location or strength, so expect the worst. Any questions?”

  “What are the ROEs, Loot? Do we fire only in self-defense?”

  Hakala paused. Until that point, everything he had done was on the direct orders of his commanding officer. Whether or not that violated orders from up the chain of command wasn’t his problem; it was Captain Sully’s. But the answer he gave now could change all of that. The company had been given direct orders not to initiate combat with the Sevens, and indeed not to return fire if fired upon, but instead to retreat. Giving his men orders to fire first, while knowing that it was in direct conflict with orders from higher command, was a court-martial offense.

  “Negative. If we are separated, you may fire on the enemy at the moment you judge it tactically sound. Otherwise, wait for me to fire first. But let me repeat that the safety of your men and your vehicle comes before all other considerations.”

  They all grinned. “So in plain language, we’re good to send those motherfuckers to hell,” said the commander of Alpha Two.

  Hakala gave him a thumbs-up. “With extreme prejudice.”

  #

  New Mexico Highway 126

  1647 hours

  During a short break in the fighting northwest of Shangri-La, Tracy Gollins heard several distant explosions followed by small arms fire. She also thought, but couldn’t be sure, there was more firing in the east. That meant both Sati Bashara and General Muhdin might beat her to the big prize, just as they’d always said they would. She’d sworn she would prove her worth in battle, but the infidels had fought harder and died harder than anyone had given them credit for, and her losses had been high. Even with single-shot rifles, they’d taken a heavy toll on Mecca Regiment and the most obvious lesson so far was that accuracy trumped volume of fire. The infidels rarely missed while her people rarely hit anything, even with automatic weapons. And now the ammo was running low.

  Ahead, the road curved out of sight to the southeast. Beyond that was supposed to be a last stretch of Highway 126 before it merged into Highway 4 north of Jemez Springs. From there it was about five miles into Shangri-La. Gollins pulled up the picture of the map in her mind… if Bashara was still pushing through the opposition on the east, then she had a chance of getting onto Highway 4 before he did. And if she did that, anything was possible.

  “Get moving!” she yelled, stalking down the highway through the debris of battle. Branches, leaves, pine needles, spent cartridge casings, flies circling and lighting in puddles of blood and on corpses, none of them mattered to her in the least. “Get your Allah-loving asses in gear, you worthless dogs! Move out!”

  In a ditch near a steep hillside, a young girl crawling onto the pavement trailed a smear of blood. She reached out to Gollins, tears staining a face that couldn’t have been older than sixteen. “Help me,” she said in a weak voice. Gollins shot her in the head.

  Her men saw it. The ones who’d been resting stood up and started moving. Some didn’t move fast enough and earned a kick in the ass. When she told one man to get up, he showed a bloody left hand and stayed in the grass. She touched the rifle barrel to his forehead. Eyes wide, he got up and joined the others moving forward.

  She’d be damned if the boys would beat her to Shangri-La.

  #

  Chapter 72

  I knew that if the feat was accomplished it must be at a most fearful sacrifice of as brave and gallant soldiers as ever engaged in battle.

  General John Bell Hood

  Los Griegos Peak, 6 miles as the crow flies north of Shangri-La

  1654 hours, April 30

  Bullets ricocheted off the Bradley’s armor as it moved up the north slope of Los Griegos, the 10,000-foot peak overlooking their travel route on the south. APCs weren’t built for climbing rugged mountains and Sati Bashara ordered it stopped a few hundred feet up. Three hundred yards ahead, an infidel bunker had his men pinned down as they tried to clear the mountain of enemy forces. Most of Rashū Regiment and all of Ayyub continued down Highway 4 as it headed for the ninety-degree turn from an east-west axis to one heading due south.

  Bashara was eager to get back to the highway, but he couldn’t leave infidels on his flank, and if his men could capture the summit of the mountain, they’d have a full view over the battlefield. He hadn’t yet had to expend any 25mm ammunition, but the bunker had to be taken quickly and it was the only heavy weapon they had. The fortification was nothing elaborate, like so many of the other traps they’d encountered that day, just a stack of small tree trunks laid out in a triangle with an unknown number of enemy behind it. There was no cover, however, so when his men charged, they’d be cut to pieces and casualties had already been high. He ordered the Bushmaster brought to bear.

  “Blessed General,” said the gunner in Arabic, “I don’t think the cannon will cut through those trees, unless, perhaps, we use all of our ammunition.”

  Bashara’s initial instinct was to tell the man to shut up, but he stopped himself. Ammunition was precious and the gunner knew his weapon’s capabilities far better than Bashara. “What do you suggest?”

  “We have two missiles left.”

  “Those are our last two. There are no more.”

  “Yes, General.”

  Bashara thought about it. He didn’t know much about TOW missiles, except that they were deadly. And the afternoon sun was beginning to wane… “Very well. Prepare to fire at the direct center of that fortification. And Tamid… do not miss.”

  “I will not, Blessed General.”

  Five seconds passed and then Bashara heard a loud thunk, like someone hitting an old plastic bucket, followed less than a second later by a loud explosion that sounded like a massive shotgun blast, followed by a whoosh. A red dot sped from the Bradley’s TOW missile firing mount on the left side of the turret and raced away. Bashara watched it impact the bunker, but if the explosion was smaller than he’d expected, the effect was greater.

  His men charged forward from a tree line 100 yards from the bunker and met no resistance. Instead the defenders fled up the slope, where they would be no danger to his attack. It was the previous year in reverse. Then, his men had been the ones unblooded against modern weapons, and when the artillery strike had hit them, they’d broken and fled. But now he commanded the combat veterans and it
was his enemies who ran from a missile strike.

  After turning the Bradley around, it was mere minutes before they were back on the highway, where Haleem met him with the latest news.

  “There is a roadblock ahead, Sati, made from large trees and rocks. Many infidels are there. I believe it to be the last defensive position on this road. You should also know that we hear small arms fire coming from the east. It appears Mecca Regiment may have broken through.”

  “No!” Bashara barked. “That… woman…” He said the word like it tasted bad. “…will not beat us to the prize. Follow me!” He turned and called to the men passing by on both sides. “Follow me! Our next stop is the infidels’ camp!”

  The Bradley roared off toward the roadblock. Bashara told Tamid to be prepared to fire the last TOW missile and then use the Bushmaster to break through. Nothing was going to stop him from beating Tracy Gollins to the prize.

  Nothing.

  #

  1700 hours

  Would it work? Johnny Rainwater wondered, staring through a rifle port in the stone wall. The explosions and increased shooting at Highway 4 worried him, but he couldn’t leave the wall until he knew the latest trap had worked. It should buy them time, at the least. But had they designed it correctly? Would it work?

  Seconds later, he got his answer. Twenty of the enemy approached in five groups, spread out over a hundred-yard front. One hundred thirty yards from the wall, the group in the center ran forward, crouched and with rifles at the ready, and then disappeared into the ground. The group to their left and the one on the far left flank also vanished. A fourth group stopped and knelt, and Rainwater could tell they had been lagging behind and hadn’t yet reached the trench. The fifth foursome kept coming beyond it, only kneeling once they had passed the danger zone. By sheer bad luck, they’d found the narrow causeway across the fire trench.

  He turned his head and shouted behind him, “Light it!”

  An older man fifteen feet back put his head into a hole in the ground and repeated the order. Rainwater heard the next man in the tunnel leading to the trench also yell the command, but not the ones after. He said a silent prayer that this would work.

  The trench stretched across the entire valley floor for nearly one hundred fifty yards. It was eight feet wide and eight feet deep, and had taken three years to dig. At the bottom were the usual sharpened stakes, with the recent addition of a flammable mixture based on a formula found in some old books that called it Greek fire. The ingredients had taken a long time to find and assemble. Small-scale tests had showed that it worked, but spread across a long trench filled with dry grasses and anything else that would burn was a different matter. He pictured the men at the bottom either skewered or standing in puddles of the tar-like substance, sunk to their knees in branches and grasses. Those who weren’t killed by the stakes or the fall would be calling for help.

  “Come on,” he said, staring for the slightest wisp of smoke. Three tunnels led to the trench. The last two feet of each one narrowed so a man couldn’t crawl through without extensive digging, but would allow an outstretched arm to light the mixture with a torch.

  Without warning, a sheet of flame erupted from the trench with a roar. Even so far away, Rainwater could hear the screams of men being burned alive. Let’s see them attack through THAT!

  Every rifle behind the wall concentrated either on one of the two narrow causeways over the trench, where flames licked at the edges, or the strips of land on either end of it. They didn’t have long to wait. Four-man teams ran forward at all four spots and got hit by a wall of bullets. The homemade mortar started firing its homemade rounds, filled with old shards of glass, porcelain, and stones, chiefly quartzite, whose edges had been chiseled to a lethal sharpness. Flame rippled from the muzzles of the single-shot muskets, bolt-action hunting rifles, and the few semi-automatic rifles modified to automatic capability.

  Of the first wave of Sevens, fifteen out of twenty fell before crossing the trench line. The survivors immediately dove to the dirt on the other side, the side closest to the wall, and opened fire at the rifle slits to cover another four groups. Rainwater took aim at one of the prone riflemen and pulled the trigger. He had the satisfaction of seeing the man’s head knocked backward, after which the body twitched for a few seconds before lying still.

  He pulled away from the rifle port at exactly the right moment. A bullet struck the inside wall of the slit and ricocheted harmlessly past him in a spray of rock splinters. Had he been peering through while reloading, the bullet would have hit him in the face. A glance down the wall showed two people lying in unmoving heaps, and a third crawling backward using one hand as blood poured from the other shoulder.

  Once he’d reloaded, Rainwater didn’t hesitate to stick his rifle into the slit. Bullets smacked around the outside wall as he took aim at one of the causeways, waiting for a target to appear. He only waited seconds and then fired at a large man in a flapping white robe and with something tied across his face, most likely to block the smoke. The heavy lead slug struck him dead center in the chest, right under the sternum. He jerked upright, and a man running behind hit him in the back. As Rainwater watched, both men toppled into the trench, and seconds later the flames there flared higher.

  The next time he’d reloaded and sought another target, the leading Sevens had closed within sixty yards of the wall. Hundreds had now passed the trench. A sudden nausea twisted his stomach as he realized they didn’t have enough firepower to stop them.

  #

  Highway 4, near Shangri-La

  1507 hours, April 30

  The trunk of the giant tree blocking Highway 4 had resisted efforts to blast a way through, even using one of the three TOW missiles carried by Muhdin’s Bradley, one of which was a reload. Whatever the tree was, two RPGs and a TOW missile had blown a chunk out of its five-foot girth but hadn’t come close to blasting a passage out of the dense wood. Now, instead of pushing forward, an intense firefight raked the highway and surrounding woods with a murderous buzzsaw of bullets. On the road, the infidels reloaded behind the impenetrable tree, popped up, aimed, and fired before his men could take aim. They did the same thing from the ground on either side, using piles of rocks or large boulders for cover. It didn’t matter whether they hit his men or not; it kept them pinned down.

  Muhdin stood behind his command Bradley about four hundred yards south of the main fighting. One of the crew loaded the third TOW into the empty launcher. A messenger from the stone wall told him about the fiery trap and how his men had charged into the intense rifle fire. Currently they were exchanging fire at a range of fifty yards and gathering for a final charge on the wall. Elsewhere, other messengers had brought him up to date on the progress made by Sati Bashara and the hated woman Tracy Gollins. Both seemed on the verge of breaking through to Shangri-La. Victory was at hand.

  “Blessed General,” called the Bradley’s commander, “the Emir wants a report on our progress.”

  He wanted to swear. He was supposed to capture Shangri-La, not one of the others, and here he was held up by a damned tree! Going around wasn’t really an option, either. On the southern side, the ground fell away in a sharp fifty-foot drop, and the northern side, while flatter, had a field of boulders left over from an ancient landslide. No, the only way was through that tree or over it, and that meant firepower.

  “Commander, be ready to support an infantry push with the chain gun.”

  “What about the other missile?”

  “No, it’s time to bring up something bigger. Radio the Abrams to move forward and blast that thing out of our way.”

  #

  Chapter 73

  No man is an island entire of itself; every man

  is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;

  if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe

  is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as

  well as any manner of thy friends or of thine

  own were; any man's death diminishes me,


  because I am involved in mankind.

  - John Donne, MEDITATION XVII

  Devotions upon Emergent Occasions

  Mojave Desert, southeast of Groom Lake Air Force Facility

  1642 hours, April 30

  From ground level, the hiding spot for Angriff’s Humvee meant it might as well have been invisible. Nobody could spot it clustered in the small opening in the jumble of boulders that had spilled from a low hill, not unless they followed the same path he had in parking it there. Between three walls of stone lay a bare patch large enough not only for the Humvee itself, but also to turn around. A short tunnel-like opening about fifteen feet long allowed access through an entrance to the west, which was why the two Rednecks setting up camp to the east hadn’t seen him yet.

  For the past two days, he’d seen helicopters in the distance, presumably hunting him. He’d also seen another contrail from something moving very fast, but too high for him to make sure it was a jet airplane, much like the night before he’d left with Colonel Young. So while it would be much more dangerous, Angriff had decided to travel only at night from then on out as he tried to find a way back to Arizona. With daylight fading and dark clouds in the west, it seemed the perfect time to pull out, except when he climbed to a point where he could scout the desert to the east, in his path he’d seen the two Rednecks building a fire.

  He considered waiting to see if the storm hit that area, but there seemed little doubt. A dark cloud wall stretched from horizon to horizon. He could leave as it raged, but visibility grew dimmer with each passing minute; under such a storm, it might well be reduced to zero. Or he could wait it out and leave after it passed, except there was no way of knowing how long that would be. The only other option was to take off right away and get as far east as possible before it hit, except that meant getting past the two Rednecks.

 

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