Standing Before Hell's Gate

by William Alan Webb

  His brain automatically ran through the plusses and minuses of each choice, the way it always did during combat, and within seconds he’d picked number three. He’d leave now. But what to do about the Rednecks? If he simply sped past them, they might pursue and, if they were dogged enough, catch up tomorrow after he stopped again. Or they might lead a patrolling helicopter to his trail. And what about those strange other flying things he’d seen way off in the distance, the ones that looked like men standing on top of a tiny flying saucer?

  There was really only one choice.

  Getting into the driver’s seat, he checked both of his Desert Eagles to make sure each had a chambered round, strapped on his helmet, slipped on his sunglasses, started the Humvee, and pulled out of the natural revetment. The two horsemen’s camp lay about five hundred yards east and the ground between them looked as flat as could be hoped for. Without hesitation or second thoughts, he pushed the gas pedal and accelerated past sixty miles per hour.

  At such a speed, even small holes sent the Humvee bouncing and bottoming out. Something skittered out of his path, but Angriff was too focused on holding the vehicle straight to notice what. It took all of the immense strength in his wrists and forearms to keep it from flipping over, but slowing down wasn’t an option; even doing sixty, he only closed the 1,500-foot distance at 88 feet per second, which left the Rednecks twenty seconds to react. The helmet softened the blows when his head slammed into the roof.

  The wind had increased in promise of the coming storm, so neither man heard him until he’d closed within 200 yards. From the corner of his eye, he saw the horses jumping and pulling at their reins, and that distracted the men for another two seconds. They grew larger in his sight, the dirty red scarves standing out against their light clothing.

  Five seconds out.

  Both men saw him simultaneously and reached for their rifles. The one closest to his weapon grabbed it, pulled back the bolt, and got off a single shot as the Humvee hit a two-foot-high rise and bounded into the air. The shot went wild a microsecond before the right front tire landed on his chest and smashed it to jelly.

  The Humvee bounced and spun to a stop in a swirl of dust and pebbles. Spinning tires sent a wave of rocks and dirt into the other Redneck’s face. Blinded, he tried to keep his eyes open but couldn’t, and lost orientation. With his rifle set to full automatic, he emptied it into a creosote bush to the northwest.

  Angriff stepped out and drew an Eagle. As the Redneck stood in a pall of dust and tried to blindly change his empty magazine, Angriff closed within ten feet, aimed at the left side of the man’s back, and fired. The huge bullet ripped through his heart and out his ribcage. Death was instantaneous.

  Searching among their possessions, he took all the food and water, one M-16 — the other having been crushed under his tires — a total of nine loaded magazines, plus the empty one. He searched for and found his own ejected shell casing. He wanted to take the saddles with him, but he needed to move east before the storm hit so time didn’t permit. Instead he cut the straps and untied the horses to fend for themselves. The fire he kicked out, scattering the ashes, while he dumped the bodies in a shallow depression and threw some stones on top. From running over the Redneck to getting back into the Humvee took no more than five minutes.

  Angriff thought about lighting a cigar, but only had four left and decided to wait. It seemed callous somehow. He’d killed a lot of people in service to his country, but the stoic face he showed the outside world was just a façade. In truth he hated taking lives, regardless of how necessary their deaths might have been. It wouldn’t slow him down, though; America’s enemies chose their path, and once you chose an action you chose the inevitable equal and opposite reaction.

  “Don’t send to know for whom the bell tolls, Nick. It tolls for thee.”

  A minute later, he changed his mind and brought out a Habana Cubano Monte Cristo Number Three Especiales, inhaled the aroma of the unlit tobacco, and determined to light it the instant full darkness fell. He always mourned the enemies he was forced to kill, just not for very long.

  #

  Chapter 74

  I’m hunting wabbits.

  Elmer Fudd

  Over the Mojave Desert southeast of Groom Lake Air Force Facility

  1717 hours, April 30

  The thunderstorm at their back towered dark gray and black, with lightning flashes high in the towering clouds. It was less of a problem as long as they flew east, although the closer it got the worse the downdrafts became. But unless they hurried, when they turned back they’d have to fly right through it and that would not be fun.

  “Dust cloud at two o’clock,” Pra Sakoya said into her helmet mike. “Bearing one three five.” She lowered the binoculars and turned toward the pilot, Ted Wang. “It’s gotta be him.”

  “I’ve got it,” Wang said.

  Tank Girl responded to his touch like a lover, the bank to the southeast done so gently that he didn’t feel his body tighten against the minimal G-forces. Wang had to admit that Rossi and her crew knew their way around an AH-72. He’d never had one of the flying tanks feel so responsive, so… right. He wondered if Randall had modified it somehow and made a mental note to find out. After all, if Randall and Carlos never came back, Tank Girl would be his and he was already picking out potential new names. Asian Avenger was leading so far.

  Despite the storm to their west, sunlight poured through the Comanche’s overhead canopy and would have blinded them if not for their anti-glare visors. But while they could see, even with the air-conditioning cranked to max, the UV radiation heated the cockpit until he felt sweat running inside his flight suit.

  When Wang’s right hand touched the throttle, Sakoya spoke up. “Do you wanna do that?”

  “If I don’t, we might lose him. That storm’s movin’ fast.”

  “If you say so.”

  They turned heads toward each other, despite being unable to see past the dark helmet visors. He and Cochran had only been a team for six months and he didn’t want her to misread his deeper voice tone, or that it signaled his disagreement with her analysis. He wanted her to tell everybody back home how mission-oriented he was, how determined, just in case somebody else tried to make a case for taking over Tank Girl.

  Then he glanced at the instrument panel, more to mollify Cochran than anything else. Fuel showed a hair under half full. Air speed indicated one hundred forty knots. He knew instantly how much flying time they had left at their current speed, factoring in altitude and weather, and how much they would lose by increasing to maximum. She had a point.

  He finally responded to her last statement. “It’s a good call, Pra. We’ve got less time than I thought we did, but I still want to check out that dust cloud.”

  “Thank you,” she said, and he heard the surprise in her voice. He didn’t hand out compliments very often.

  Wang smiled, even though she couldn’t see it. Perfect.

  #

  Fine yellow dust coated the Humvee’s windshield despite the wipers moving at full speed. Although his run at the Rednecks had topped sixty, Angriff otherwise tried to maintain a steady forty miles an hour speed lest he break an axle or blow a tire, but over the rough terrain even that was too high to be realistic. He’d slowed to twenty when a deep hole appeared ten feet to the front. Jerking the wheel left, he barely missed going front-first into the depression. For a few bumpy yards he steered due north, and that was when he saw it — the glint of sun off a distant helicopter.

  The left rear tire hit another hole, and pain lanced through his buttocks and up his spine. He squinted through the swishing wipers and tried to see the helicopter again, but while driving there was simply too much dust, so he stopped and left the engine idling. Fresh winds drove the dust cloud to the east, a sign of the storm coming out of the west. Standing on the door frame, he blocked the overhead sun as best he could and used his hands as sunscreens. This time he got a better look at the aircraft, which was unmistakably an AH-72.


  Shit!

  Had they seen him? It was hard to tell the helicopter’s attitude at that range, but within ten seconds he knew, without a doubt, that it had changed course directly for him. Without wasting another second, he jumped back in, turned around, and headed back the way he’d come, directly at the towering black clouds.

  Within fifty yards he stopped. The winds screamed over the desert, throwing rocks and dirt against the windshield like a giant badger burrowing underground. He couldn’t see anything and the Comanche had to be closing in. With no other choice, he turned around a second time and sped east. With any luck, the winds would be too much for the Comanche.

  #

  When Sakoya had first spotted the telltale cloud of something fast moving over the desert, it had been eight or ten miles distant. As they flew toward it at an increasingly dangerous speed, however, it vanished, dissipated by the increasing winds ahead of the thunderstorm. Four long minutes later, they flew over the spot where both of them estimated it should be.

  “I’ve got negative visual,” she said.

  “Winds are increasing. We’ve only got a few minutes left. Look for tire tracks.”

  “I can’t see much through all that blowing dust.”

  Wang throttled down to eighty knots and dropped to one hundred feet altitude. Increasing winds buffeted the giant helicopter and Cochran felt herself first thrown upward and then sideways, but she never stopped scanning the desert floor.

  “I’m heading for Creech.”

  “No, there, look!” The dust cloud thinned enough to see the desert below and Sakoya pointed to fresh tracks in the dirt on the leeside of a hill. Wang turned Tank Girl sharply to the left, then eased back on the throttle. They picked up an immediate tailwind, and then it swirled, coming first from the southwest, then the northwest, then the west, and back again. Keeping the Comanche trimmed took all of Wang’s concentration. If they didn’t spot Angriff within two or three minutes, they’d have to gitfoh.

  #

  Angriff’s shoulder hit the doorframe as the Humvee lurched left, bouncing and jostling him like rattling dice before throwing craps. He followed no road, only the curves and undulations of the moonlike landscape of the eastern Nevada desert. After hitting a deep hole, he crested a small hill and slammed on the brakes. Thirty feet directly ahead of where he stopped, a fifteen-foot-wide ravine cut the desert floor like cracks inside an overripe watermelon.

  Climbing out of the Humvee, he felt something running down his left temple and touched a sticky, dirt-covered streak of blood running from a shallow cut. He didn’t know when it had happened and didn’t at that moment care. Running to the edge of the crevice, he looked down, hoping it was shallow and might offer a hiding place. Swirling dirt got in his eyes, but instead of being ten feet deep, as he’d hoped, the bottom was at least one hundred down.

  He heard the whump whump whump of helicopter blades even over the wind, and he knew his time was nearly up. They’d caught him. But as he looked at the ravine’s walls below the lip, filled with holes and cracks, and then estimated the distance across the yawning gap to the other side, a desperate plan formed.

  #

  The slackening of winds didn’t last long and dust clouds again made it feel like flying under the waters of a muddy river. Wang keyed his mike to tell Pra they were turning for home when he glimpsed something to one side. “Tire tracks at one o’clock!”

  “Roger that. I’ve got ’em,” she said as Wang added thrust. Tank Girl moved that way even as the gust front buffeted her. They’d gone half a mile when the tracks led over a fifty-foot-high dune… and straight into a ravine beyond. Flying over at three hundred feet, they both stared into the darkness at the bottom and saw yellow-orange flames billowing upward from a wrecked Humvee.

  “Oh, shit,” Sakoya said. “Oh, shit, oh, shit.”

  “Keep it professional, Pra.”

  She’d forgotten that her mike was on. “Sorry. I can’t see much, but there’s no way a man could survive that fall. It must be at least a hundred feet. Not to mention the explosion.”

  “I agree that nobody could survive that. And even without this weather, the ravine’s too narrow for us to get down there to verify. It’ll take grappling gear. See if you can raise Prime and tell them what we found.”

  “Overtime Prime, this is Ripsaw Real,” Cochran said. There hadn’t been time to change call signs. “Over.”

  Hovering in high winds was dangerous. They were reminded how dangerous when a strong downdraft drove them from 200 feet to 50 in less than three seconds. Wang said nothing as Sakoya told Prime what they’d done and seen. He was too busy trying to keep the helicopter in the air. Finally stabilized and back up to 500 feet, he firewalled the throttle and headed due east. Once far enough ahead of the storm, he turned south, then west back to Creech.

  “Ripsaw Real, this is Prime, copy three.” Their signal was understandable, but only with difficulty. Cochran thought she knew all of the comm. people who usually dealt with the attack squadrons, but this one was unfamiliar. “Be aware that radio protocol two is in place.”

  Sakoya looked up at that, to see if Wang reacted the way she did. Protocol two meant imminent threat of a compromised transmission. Even so, the emotions of the moment choked her and Sakoya had to clear her throat before continuing the radio call. “Whiskey tango foxtrot, Prime. Over.”

  At that, Wang’s helmet snapped around to look at her. Sakoya could almost hear both his and the woman’s teeth grinding in anger, but for some reason, in that moment, she didn’t care. She’d only met Angriff once, but that had been enough. He was a man whose death was worth grieving.

  The radiowoman’s voice was curt. “Maintain radio discipline, Ripsaw Real.”

  “HVT found,” she said, with as much fuck you flavoring in the words as she could muster. “Target is no longer operative. Over.”

  “Say again, Ripsaw Real.”

  “The target’s Humvee is on fire at the bottom of a hundred-foot-deep ravine. No survivors were observed. Do you copy that, Prime? No survivors. I’m sending map coordinates. Over.”

  “Target is… destroyed?”

  “Affirmative. Ripsaw Real out.”

  Neither she nor Wang spoke for a few seconds. Once they’d cleared the immediate danger zone of the fast-moving storm, they both raised their visors.

  “I never thought I’d see this day,” she said. “It’s like a legend is gone.”

  “Yeah,” Wang said. “Him and his son-in-law both. It’s a damned shame.”

  Even inside his helmet, she could see his smile, and wanted to hit him.

  #

  Chapter 75

  Therefore take up the whole armor of God, that you may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand.

  Ephesians 6:13

  Shangri-La

  1718 hours, April 30

  From atop the ridge, Lieutenant Hakala saw the battlefield spread out below. Using the binoculars, in the far distance he could make out some sort of attack against a fixed position, but up close the picture was much clearer. Half a mile away, a huge tree blocked the highway. On one side were people in civilian clothing shooting all types of weapons to try and hold back a large number of men wearing white robes, men he recognized from the previous year: Sevens. The fighting spilled into the land on either side of the road. What he didn’t see were RPGs. Hakala felt certain they had some, but not seeing them brandished made him think there might not be too many.

  Then he heard a sound that was unmistakable to the ears of Americans who drove armored vehicles: the hammering sound of an M242 Bushmaster chain gun. Trees blocked his view of part of the highway, but only a few vehicles mounted such a gun and all of his were accounted for. Was it somehow another Marine LAV-25? Or any Army vehicle? In his heart, he knew it was neither.

  “Anybody got a line of sight on what’s shooting that Bushmaster out on the highway?” he said over the inter-vehicle frequency.

  “Trees are
in the way,” replied his EO, the commander of Bravo One, situated fifty feet to his right. “But I’ve got a partial sighting on a military vehicle. Stand by, Alpha One, am dismounting for a better look.”

  As he waited, Hakala could make out more details of the battle. The Sevens had rushed the big tree and were trying to get over it, while the people of Shangri-La fought them off. He swept the glasses up and to the north and there, flying in the breeze like something out of a movie, was a giant American flag, colors shining so bright they seemed iridescent.

  Over the screams and gunshots of battle, a deep and distant boom rolled over the fields. Once again the sound was known to every American soldier.

  “Alpha One,” called the commander of Alpha Two, “did you hear that?”

  “I heard it.”

  “That was a tank cannon, Loot.”

  “I know.”

  “Didn’t sound like one of ours.”

  “It wasn’t. That’s a one-oh-five.”

  “Shit, what carries a one-oh-five?”

  They both got their answer before Hakala could respond. “Alpha One, there’s a fucking Bradley down there with Arabic scribbling on its side. It looks to be supporting an infantry attack.”

  “We can take out a Bradley if we have the element of surprise.”

  “Yeah, but we can’t take out the tank that’s five hundred yards south and closing.”

  It only took Hakala seconds to recognize the situation, and what had made the explosion they’d heard a few seconds before. “That’s an M1 Abrams, boys. Carries a 105-millimeter rifled cannon, enough to tear these cans apart.”

  “That thing’ll blow that tree out of the way in no time. What do we do, Loot?”

  “All right, Bravo One, you head north on that highway and see if anything’s coming this way. Alpha Two, station your vehicle behind that tree blocking the highway and assist the defense.”