Liebowitz raised a hand. ‘What about air support?’
‘We won’t know until nearer the time,’ Balmer told him. ‘Hopefully, we’re not going to need it.’
Gray turned to the map and pointed out where he wanted to deploy the Claymores and the mortar teams, and where the men would be stationed. Suggestions were thrown his way; some of which he agreed with, others he dismissed. But after half an hour they had their defences defined.
‘I hope they turn up after all this.’ Tristram Barker-Fink laughed.
Balmer looked him in the eye. ‘Careful what you wish for.’
Chapter 22
It was just after eleven p.m. when the flare shot into the sky a mile from the south wall.
‘Contact south,’ Gray said over comms. ‘One mile out, sector seven.’
The area around the camp had been broken into twelve sections to mirror a clock face, dead north being twelve, dead south, six. Gray looked through his binoculars as the flare parachuted leisurely to the ground, but couldn’t see any movement. Once it died, he switched to the night vision glasses. But still nothing stirred. The playbook said that if a flare was fired into the air, you hit the ground. If you tripped one, you ran like the wind. Either these guys didn’t know or were ultra-disciplined and hoping it was chalked up to a stray animal.
‘Three hours early,’ Balmer replied. ‘Looks like they planned another stealthy approach.’
‘Let’s see what they do now that that plan’s gone to shit.’
The immediate answer was a resounding nothing. The entire camp was on alert, everyone tense with pre-battle nerves, but the night remained silent.
After fifteen minutes, Gray still wasn’t convinced that a wandering animal had tripped the flare. It could have been a wild rabbit or something of a similar size, too small to be seen at such a distance. But his gut told him it was the prelude to an assault.
‘Mike-zero-seven,’ Gray said. ‘Give me one round, seventeen hundred yards, bearing two-one-five.’
The team manning the L16 81mm mortar at the south-west corner of the base acknowledged the order, and twenty seconds later a shell shot into the air. When it exploded a mile away, Gray was watching for movement in the blast vicinity.
Nothing.
‘Looks like a false alarm,’ he told Balmer. No-one was disciplined enough to remain calm and lie still while bombs fell around them.
Gray checked in with the other teams. They’d divided the available men into four units; one for each wall, with the longer north and south aspects getting a larger allotment. Gray was heading Alpha. Balmer, Bravo. Smart, Charlie. And Lomax was in charge of Delta. None of them had anything to report.
Something was afoot, though—Gray could feel it. A sixth sense that told him danger was close by.
An hour passed, and the feeling still hadn’t deserted him. He’d considered sending up flares at irregular intervals, but that would have told the Taliban that they were expected—not that the mortar round wouldn’t have given them a heads-up if they’d been within sight of the compound at the time. He’d decided against it, instead relying on the keen eyes of the men manning the walls. They only had forty pairs of NVGs between them, and every set was focused on the desolate land surrounding them.
Gray tucked into a chocolate bar as his eyes swept the horizon for the thousandth time, frustrated at the lack of movement. If they were going to repeat the tactics used at FOB Tork, then with under two hours to go he expected to see something. Perhaps that had been a trial, to see if it was possible to get in close to a fortified base without being seen. And after that failure they’d written it off as impractical. That seemed the most likely scenario at present, which meant there was just over an hour and half until it all kicked off. Plenty of time to take a piss.
He was halfway through emptying his bladder in the nearest toilet block when a shout came over the radio. He stopped in mid-stream and started running back, only for it to be declared a false alarm. Someone had seen movement in the far distance. But it turned out to be a dog, or possibly a wolf, on a nocturnal hunting trip.
Gray had to wait another eighty-two minutes before things got real.
At seven minutes to two, one of the men on the south wall noticed a dust cloud. Gray spotted it moments later, and within a minute he could see that it was preceded by at least two vehicles—Toyota trucks by the look of them. He informed the other team leaders, warning them to concentrate on their own sectors in case it was a multi-pronged attack.
By the time the tiny convoy closed to within four hundred yards, a hundred weapons were focused on the fast-moving targets. But the rules of engagement said Gray couldn’t give the order to open fire. The vehicles were not on a collision course with the base, but angled to miss the south-west corner by a couple of hundred metres. If he destroyed both trucks, there would be hell to pay if it turned out the occupants were unarmed. There had to be clear, unequivocal aggression towards the compound before he could even consider firing upon them.
That said, it was too much of a coincidence that they should just happen to be there at that exact moment in time, and if just one of the men currently under his command died because he hesitated, it would haunt him forever.
Sometimes you just had to say, ‘fuck the rulebook’ and follow your gut.
He was about to give the order to light them up when a figure popped up from the lead truck’s flatbed, took a knee and threw something onto its shoulder.
‘RPG!’ Gray screamed. He sent a couple of bursts towards the vehicle and was immediately joined by dozens of other small arms from within the camp wall. A deadly stream of lead slammed into both trucks, putting them out of commission and shredding the occupants, but not before two projectiles—one from each vehicle—were sent hurtling towards the base. One of them hit the main structure of the tower in the south-west corner—blowing the roof off. While the other flew high over Gray’s head and landed harmlessly on a pile of timber.
‘Check your sectors!’
The three team leads reported no movement, but Gray knew this was just the start.
After thirty seconds of silence, he was proved right when the night erupted.
The timer connected to the banks of C4 hidden in the side panels of the trucks counted down to zero. The bullets striking the explosives hadn’t provided enough of a shockwave to set it off, but the blasting caps did. The fifty pounds of plastic explosive in each vehicle had thousands of steel ball bearings pressed into the surface, turning the Toyotas into giant Claymore mines. The explosion lit up the night, and seventeen soldiers from the 667th didn’t live long enough to see the intense flashes of light die away. They’d been looking over the wall and into the night seconds before their corpses collapsed to the ground—most of them headless.
Gray was grateful to the Seabees for providing makeshift armour-plating for the observation towers they’d built. Without it, he too would have been ripped apart. He’d instinctively ducked when the trucks exploded, a natural movement that saved his life.
As Gray stuck his head over the wall of the platform, he could hear the cries of those injured in the blasts. He quickly ordered medics to attend to the wounded and the remaining men to be vigilant. ‘Next time you see anything, open up immediately. Don’t let them bastards get that close again!’
He didn’t have to wait long for the next wave. More vehicles were spotted, this time advancing from the west. Gray spread the word, then instructed the sergeant from the 698th who was coordinating the fire mission to lay down a curtain of fire. Mortar teams Mike-Zero-Seven and Mike-Zero-Eight immediately popped off sighting rounds, their warheads dropping almost a mile away. The sergeant corrected the fire a couple of degrees to the left, then told the teams to dial it back a hundred yards and fire at will. The result was one kill and a vehicle thrown on its side. But two more kept coming. The mortars adjusted their range with every delivery, but the two approaching trucks zig-zagged erratically, making themselves impossible targets to hit. When
they got to a thousand yards from the western wall, the two vehicles split up, heading north and south respectively. As they raced along at a fair clip, Gray could see men in the flatbed readying shoulder-launched missiles.
‘More RPGs!’ he warned.
The maximum effective range for an RPG-7 round against stationary objects was five hundred yards, but it was possible to extend that range to nine hundred and twenty by removing the self-destruct mechanism. If the vehicles managed to get a couple of hundred yards closer, any accurate rounds would be exploding inside the base walls.
‘Sniper, take ’em out!’
* * *
Jeff Campbell and Tristram Barker-Fink were lying on the roof of one of the shops being built in the centre of the base. From their vantage point they could see for miles in any direction, and Campbell had the southbound truck in his sights.
‘Distance nine-sixty, speed fifty,’ Barker-Fink said, spotting for the shooter. ‘No wind.’
With a moving target, Campbell had to lead it. That meant shooting where he expected the target to be by the time the bullet got there. Also, the vehicle wasn’t heading across the horizon, but approaching at an angle which made the shot more difficult to calculate. He set the crosshairs just forward of the truck’s nose, breathed out, then squeezed the trigger. The .50 calibre round took a shade over one second to travel to the target, but the man kneeling in the back didn’t flinch.
‘Reduce your lead by five yards,’ Barker-Fink said.
Campbell made the adjustment, and his second shot found its mark. He immediately turned his attention to the other vehicle; the RPG was the immediate threat.
‘Distance nine hundred, speed…sixty-five, no wind.’
Campbell fired, and his spotter reported his shot to be a few inches high and three yards wide. The second round was much closer.
‘Come on, you prick… die…’ Campbell squeezed once more, and the third found its mark.
Campbell now focused on stopping the vehicles. He put four rounds in the engine block of the first one, bringing it to a halt seven hundred yards from the base perimeter. The second managed to get closer, just under five hundred yards from the wall before a thumb-sized bullet took the driver’s head off.
* * *
Gray called upon the mortar teams to neutralise the remaining threat, and it only took a handful of rounds to reduce the two Toyotas to burning hulks. They hadn’t been packed with explosives like the first wave.
‘I make that ten down,’ Gray told Balmer. ‘There’s plenty more out there.’
‘We’ll keep ’em peeled.’
Gray then asked for updates from the corporal tending the wounded. He confirmed eighteen fatalities, including one who’d just passed away. Another twelve were being stretchered to the base hospital by the Seabees of the naval construction battalion. It wasn’t yet fully operational, but there were two military surgeons on standby.
What have you got planned? Gray wondered. The Taliban wouldn’t keep throwing men and vehicles at the base, now that the element of surprise was gone. It would be a dreadful waste of resources. But then, what option did they have? The allied forces ruled the skies—the Afghan Air Force consisted of little more than a few helicopters, and none were in rebel hands—so they couldn’t attack from above. And it would take years to dig a tunnel long enough to penetrate the base from below. All they could do was continue to send men across the desert floor to die.
That was fine with Gray.
‘Durden wanted an update, so I told him what we’ve had so far,’ Balmer said over the air. ‘He’s also asking if we need air support.’
‘Negative,’ Gray replied. ‘If they do come at us again, we’ve got them covered.’
‘I concur. I’ll let him know.’
To anticipate the enemy’s actions, you had to think like them, so Gray put himself in their shoes. It didn’t help much. In this situation he would call off the attack, recognising the futility. There was nothing to gain from going up against greater numbers, with strong defences and superior firepower.
‘Movement south.’
Gray picked up his night vision binoculars and looked out over the wall. Yet another vehicle was entering the fray. It was around two miles out and heading directly for the base.
‘Target acquired,’ Gray told the two mortar teams. He gave them the rough bearing and distance as well as the rate of closure, but before they could get a round away, the truck pulled to the right and stopped.
‘Hold,’ Gray instructed them.
Four men climbed out of the truck. The figures were hazy because of the distance, but Gray could see them put weapons over their shoulders and he squinted as he shook his head.
They were a mile beyond the maximum range of an RPG-7. Firing from that position would just be a waste of ammo.
‘What are they up to?’ he mumbled to himself.
He adjusted the magnification until the targets were in focus. That’s when he spotted something wrong.
Whatever they were carrying, it wasn’t RPGs. Those had a warhead that was roughly the thickness of his arm, but these weapons were much larger. The only thing he could think of that was that size and capable of firing a missile two miles was the FGM-148 Javelin—a US-built fire-and-forget anti-tank missile.
His fear was confirmed when four streaks of light flashed into the sky.
‘Incoming!’
Gray threw himself off the platform and landed in the dirt. He repeated his warning over comms, then screamed at Mike-Zero-Seven and Mike-Zero-Eight to throw all they had at the last given distance and bearing. Seconds ticked by as Gray scrambled for cover. He found a spot behind a pile of aluminium panels just as the first explosion shook the base.
* * *
Jammas Gulwal heard the series of four quick explosions and knew his time had come. There was a strong chance that he would die in the next few minutes, but that could have happened at any time in the last five hours. That was how long it had taken him to crawl a mile across the desert floor with the camouflaged sheet over his body. His body ached from the relentlessly slow deliberate movements, but he cast his discomfort aside as his time for glory dawned.
Three weeks earlier he’d been working for his grandfather, transporting the crop from the farm to sell in the local town. Now he was about to attack the people who had killed his father the previous year. He’d never even held a rifle until the moment he’d been taken to see Abdul al-Hussain along with four others. That was when he’d been given the injection that had changed his life.
The rockets fired into the south side of the camp would keep the Americans occupied while Jammas and the other thirty men would launch their attack from the north. The Javelins had a feature called top attack mode, where the missile would rise five hundred feet into the air before racing downwards to strike its target. It was designed to hit tanks at their most vulnerable point—from above. That method had been deployed this evening, so that the rounds fell inside the base rather than just hitting the outer wall. As the Americans fought to deal with the resulting carnage, Jammas and the others would strike.
They were now just two hundred yards from the base, and Jammas knew from the intense week of training that he could cover that distance in twenty-five seconds. First, though, he had to assemble the RPG that was strapped to his side. It had made his trek all the more difficult, but it was a necessary price to pay. He slowly untied the four pieces of cloth strapping and carefully pulled the launcher and projectile in front of him, then mated them together. After cocking the weapon, he removed the plastic safety covering on the impact fuse at the nose of the missile. His final act of preparation was to remove his AK-47 from the bag on his back and unfold the stock.
He was set.
Jammas said a silent prayer to Allah then jumped to his feet, casting his camouflaged covering aside. He lifted the RPG to his shoulder, sighted on the wall and squeezed the trigger. The moment the round flew out of the tube, he abandoned it, picked up the rifle and be
gan running.
Within seconds, his lungs were bursting. More RPGs were fired; some from around him, others from between seven and eight hundred yards from the camp. The latter were well outside the effective range of the weapon, but the intention was to make use of the built-in self-destruct mechanism. The rounds would blow themselves up after travelling 950 yards, creating air bursts over the camp and sending shrapnel down to kill or maim anyone in their path.
Jammas could see the opening he’d blown in the wall, and he was only seventy yards from it.
Sixty…
Fifty…
Bullets chewed up the ground in front of him, but Jammas continued, unrelenting—firing back as he ran. He saw one of his bursts take out an American, but according to the intelligence that had been gathered, there were still over a hundred left to deal with. He looked forward to doing his part.
But for Jammas, that kill would be his last. When he got to within forty yards of the compound, the earth in front of him opened up and he slammed into a wall.
* * *
‘Get that fire out before we all go up!’
Balmer pointed to the fuel bowser. The cab was ablaze, flames licking out through the smashed windows. The missile had struck just in front of the truck, and the fire threatened to ignite the thousands of litres of jet fuel in the main tank. Men ran from the wall to help put out the flames, some carrying fire extinguishers, others grabbing shovels to throw dirt at the fire. One of the Seabees jumped on an excavator, jabbed the bucket into the ground to fill it with earth and sand, then trundled over to the truck and dumped the contents on top of the cab. It helped a little, but the fire still raged.
‘Again!’ Balmer shouted from atop his observation platform, as more men rushed forward to help.
Balmer was watching the digger scoop up another bucket of dirt when his earpiece exploded into life.
‘Contact north!’
Balmer spun just as three explosions rocked the north wall. From nowhere, thirty figures emerged as if from out of the sand, racing towards the gaps they’d created in the perimeter.
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