by Clay Martin
“Alright then. We have a few things to do then. Final load of the trucks, fuel, water, and bullets are priority. And the chutes, obviously. We need an OP to cover the approach from the back side, I don’t want a surprise. And one tower covered up front. If we have to fight out of here, we are going to have to keep from getting flanked. We need to string razor wire at a minimum. I don’t care about dismounts, but we have to keep enemy vehicles from immediate pursuit. I doubt they are packing bolt cutters, concertina wire will hold for a short time. And I suggest we rig the fuel to blow. At least maybe we can go out with a bang if this gets sideways. Mr. Dodge, your input would be appreciated here.”
Scott already had the wheels turning in his head. I knew he would. Base defense plans are like porn to 18 Charlie’s, and I just gave him an all access pass to the VIP room. “We only have enough wire to cover the North side, not the South. But that part will work. The terrain favors us that way. To the South, I suggest a fire moat. We have a metric fuck ton of fuel, we might as well use some of it.” That sounded medieval, and certainly against EPA regulations. But he had my attention. “We can string all the hoses and PVC pipe we can find, cutting holes every foot or so. We use diesel for that, it doesn’t evaporate as fast. When the time comes, we light it off. A single car could easily ram through it, the flames will only be a foot wide. But they won’t know that. And the smoke will help cover our withdrawal. We are low on explosives, but I also think four barrels of foo-gas are in order. There are four spots they can drive across the dirt besides our access road to get to us. We cover those with a nasty surprise.” (Foo Gas was a Vietnam special, invented by some crafty bastards back in the jungle. It was essentially a 55 gallon drum of napalm, with a chunk of C-4 in the bottom. When you sparked it off, it blasted burning gel in a 50 meter fire storm. Napalm was actually very easy to make, since we had fuel for days.) “For in here, I’ll show you which blast walls to remove for maximum carnage. If we can draw them into the COP before we blow it, we can do some serious damage.”
Frank was already packed, so he took the rear gate OP. It was highly irregular to send just one guy, but we were damn low on manpower. A Kurd took the front tower. His life was on the line as much as ours, I trusted him to handle the job. Bazan got his truck loads of “liberated” fuel and ammo staged, while Scott set about implementing his plan. He had a moment of brilliance, and decided to collapse the rear gate on command too. If we took a frontal assault, all we had to do was run out the back, hit the charge, and wait. As soon as the jihadis stopped running in the front, we could cook off the main fireworks, and leave a pile of charred bodies in our wake. He was rigging a ladder charge to the Hesco baskets as I set off to run the concertina wire with Willie. A ladder charge was a pain in the ass to make, but he only way to defeat a grid like the Hesco metal used for rigidity. You had to put a little tiny cutting charge on each metal cross, to ensure it actually collapsed. Painstaking work, but it was the only way.
Funny how I drew the manual labor job of pounding pickets. Fearless leader and all. But that is how Special Operations worked. No one was too good for cleaning toilets or digging ditches, and if your specialty wasn’t need at the moment, you were on the less pleasant details. Not that that was going to keep me from bitching about it. Willie drove the pallet of wire in a truck, while I walked ahead hammering stakes in the ground. Every 50 meters would have to do. It wasn’t ideal, but we didn’t have time for ideal. Real Combat Engineers can built an obstacle using just pickets and wire that will stop a tank. It is amazing to behold, I saw them do it once on a training exercise. There wasn’t a need for stopping tanks very much in the GWOT, the A-10’s mopped that up pretty quick back in 2003. But it will work. A single strand would at least play hell with a pickup, we all knew that first hand. Every one of us had spent time under a Humvee, wire clippers in hand, cutting it out of the drive shaft and axles. Hadji was pretty good at turning that one back on us, and it gave us a healthy respect for working on a shoestring budget. I didn’t need it to hold the Caliphate goons forever, but I did need it to funnel them towards the front side of the COP. With 100 meters to go, I got the call I had been dreading.
“Incoming, from the North. Flying the Green IC flag. Time to party,” Scott crackled over the radio.
I jumped in the truck with Willie, and we hauled ass back to the safety of the walls. The truck we were using wasn’t one designated to go with us, so Willie parked it next to the Ops Center. I ran the short distance to Scott, so I could see for myself. Getting my eyes on the spotting scope, I watched as Scott filled me in.
“Looked like eight to ten, they stopped two klicks out. Probably making a plan, or talking about skull raping infidels. Or both.”
Arabs were notoriously bad at reading maps, or visualizing the birds eye view. It was a cultural quirk, we had all had trouble teaching our own host nation guys to do it. So it would make sense they would stop roughly in sight, to make an assault plan. And it never hurt to give a motivational speech right before you sent your troops to certain death. That is a story as old as Soldiers. While we waited on them to start the party, I checked in with Frank. All quiet on the back side. It was still two hours to nightfall. I watched a dozen more vehicles reinforce the IC, and knew we weren’t going to make it that long. We were facing minimum eighty bad guys, and up to two hundred. They must’ve realized what we had, and really wanted that fuel. Hopefully, that meant they would keep the rockets out of the mix. Be a shame to catch on fire in our own trap.
“New plan. Bazan, get your people out of here. I need Scott, Ranger, Paul, and Jim to stay with me. John, you and Steve get the mortar set up with Frank. We are going to need some steel rain to get out of this one. Leave us one truck. Running, this is no time for shenanigans. Ranger, I need you to cover the wire with a 240. We didn’t make it all the way, so watch the far end. You have to keep that shut down, or we are toast. Scott, what did you finish?”
Scott hit me with the news while the rest of the crew scattered to their tasks. “Compound is wired, two minute time fuse. Fire moat is pumped full, and two foo gas are emplaced. Lucky for us, both on the North side.”
“Alright everyone, on my go. We are going to let them get close, but not too close. John, that mortar is fire at will once you see us go hot. When we run out the back, the fuel is on a two minute burn. This is going to be a big one, we need to get behind the ridge-line at a minimum.”
I didn’t need to brief that the hardest part of this was going to be making it look plausible. Like we broke and ran, in a full retreat. The enemy wasn’t stupid, that is a young man’s mistake. Civilians talk a lot about dirt worshiping heathens like they are dumber than a box of rocks. Absolutely not true. As we learned early on, you must remember your enemy is also a human being. And human beings are adaptable. After the tactical Darwinism early in the war cleaned up the gene pool, the jihadis got more dangerous by the minute. Just like us, every fight they survived taught them new and valuable lessons. They had some tricks of their own, that I never would have imagined in a millennium of trying. We had to sell this, and count on the bloodlust to drive them after us. A universal truth historians don’t like to discuss, humans have the same pounce instincts as big cats. The most dangerous thing you can do is turn your back in the face of a fight. Most of the casualties a Greek Phalanx took came after they broke and ran. We like to think we aren’t back stabbers, but unearthed remains and prison psychology say different. As a race, we don’t just accidentally cut down our fleeing opponents. We prefer it.
Now we were in a Mexican standoff. I kept my eye glued to the spotter, waiting on the first sign of movement. Scott had a clacker in each hand, ready to knock the safeties off. Everyone else was standing close, with a weapon at the ready. Absolute silence took hold as the seconds ticked by.
“More to the South.” Ranger broke in over the radio. “Looks like four.”
Paul slid out of the gate, peaking around the wall with a set of bino’s.” Bloc
king position, they are deployed across the road.”
Peachy. This showed a level of coordination and planning we hadn’t seen yet. We must’ve really pissed them off earlier. But it showed something else, mainly a lack of reconnaissance on their part. They were blocking us from escaping on the road. They didn’t know we had another out.
No sooner was the road block in, that the assault from the North commenced. They fell upon us like a whirling dervish, a suicidal charge of man and machine, pedals to the metal. Bumper to bumper, jostling for position, in true desert raider fashion. I could hear the high pitched ululations, all that was missing was scimitars hanging out the windows. Saladin would have been right at home.
“Mr. Dodge, the honor is yours,” I said, tossing the spotting scope in our getaway vehicle, and scooping up my rifle.
Scott waited impatiently for the middle of the pack, which had clearly been tasked with taking the North flank. Four trucks passed, bound for the direct assault on the front gate. The fifth turned off the road, right where he had predicted they would. Scott watched with the eye of a true artist, and hit both clackers simultaneously. The fire moat roared to life, but it was a side show. The white Nissan pickup leading the flankers disappeared in a flaming mushroom cloud, as a thunderous boom split the air. I felt the concussion, and it almost knocked me off my feet. Ranger opened up on the two coming for the Southern flank, shredding the first into Swiss cheese. An 81mm shell fell long of the road, then another short. John had the range now, and the next landed smack in the middle of the asphalt. The shrapnel blasted out the windshield of a Corolla, and blew the rear tires off the car in front of it. Paul, Jim and I poured fire into the leader coming for the gate, praying it wasn’t full of Semtex. We cut it to ribbons, but the two behind didn’t even slow down. They dove to either side, jumping back onto the road with the wheels throwing rooster tails of rocks and sand. Scott brought another 240 to bear, spraying the windshield of one and then the other. Jihadis were pouring out of disabled vehicles, bringing a withering fire to bear on the front gate. I ducked behind cover as a fusillade of bullets snapped past my face, the distinct crack of close rounds rending the air.
“Time to go. Ranger, your first.” He bounded off the wall, tossing this machine gun in the back of our getaway car as he dove into the driver’s seat. Paul and Jim came around the corner holding pre staged RPG’s, firing a salvo at the mass of cars still on the road. No time to see an impact, we had to go. Scott was already in the back of the truck, standing on the right rear bumper to grab his ladder charge detonator. The rest of us piled in the back, and I slapped the roof of the cab.
“GO GO GO!” I screamed, a fresh onslaught of IC thugs closing the distance on us. A mounted RPK ripped fire at us, the drivers enthusiasm the only thing keeping us alive. Ranger hit the gas, swerving down the path to the rear gate. He locked up the brakes, almost tossing us all out, and skidded to a halt five feet past the dangling fuse ignitor. Scott jumped out and managed to find it waving his arms in the dust cloud, which would have been comical if crazed gunmen weren’t in hot pursuit. Scott jumped back in, and I pounded on the cab again. We tore out of the gap in the walls as right behind us, tiny cutting charges climbed the Hesco barriers. The baskets collapsed from the bottom up, dirt cascading into a six foot pyramid. Good enough to stop a car, good enough for me. High velocity rounds continued to zip past us, RPK man must have been close.
“What about the main charges?” I screamed in Scott’s ear. The close range RPG fire had done a number on my hearing, ear plugs or not.
“I lit it before we left.” He yelled back. Oh fuck. That wasn’t the sequence we had planned on. That meant we had about half the time to get away as previously briefed.” All stations. Haul ass. Short fuse, short fuse!”
Ranger must’ve heard me, he corrected steering to take us right over the ridge, road be damned. We made the far side just as an unearthly guttural explosion fractured the sky. We were six feet below the hilltop, and I felt the heat. The shockwave passed over us, and I felt the air forced out of my chest by overpressure. A dirt cloud and fireball appeared that looked like Hiroshima’s big brother, while an earthquake underfoot bounced us off the sides of the truck. I tried to climb inside my helmet as chunks of concrete and flaming rubber littered the landscape, like an angry god had smote the Michelin factory. Finally, it passed.
“Jesus Christ Scott, I didn’t tell you to split the Earth in half!” I barked.
“We ran out of time. And forgive me for not calculating the NEW (Net Explosive Weight) on a goddamn fuel farm. It’s the first one I’ve ever blown up. The Charlie book doesn’t cover a couple million gallons of gasoline.”
I was pissed, but not too pissed. I was still alive, so I had that going for me. Time to make sure everyone else was.
“All stations, report.” I said into the mike. Calmly, at least that was what I was going for. Let’s leave it at said into the mike.
“Frank here, with John and Steve.”
“Willie, Gabe, and Bazan, in one piece.”
“Roger, Bazan’s guys all accounted for?”
“Affirmative, we made a little distance after you said short fuse.”
“Roger that. Pick up the mortar tube, and head to the rally point.”
No way we were going to have an explosion like that and not at least see the result. Ranger turned the truck around, and drove us back to the top of the ridge. The scene below was utter carnage. Most of the debris had landed on that side, little dabs of fire were everywhere. The Hesco barriers that had once walled our home were scattered like Lego blocks tossed by an angry toddler. On the road, a lone pickup was flipped on its roof. The rest of the vehicles had been blown into the sand, in various states of twisted metal. An orange and white taxi cab was stuck nose first, rear wheels in the air, slowly spinning as one burned. All in all, I considered our tracks covered. We headed off to the rally point, for the next phase of our harebrained scheme.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The sun was setting as we pulled up at the rally point, a shallow wadi five miles into the desert wasteland. We said our goodbyes to Bazan and his Kurdish militia men, with promises of meeting again and wishes of good health and luck. Cultural politeness notwithstanding, it was obvious they were ready to be on their way. They had a lot of hostile ground to cover too, and an equally uncertain future in the near term. Once the IC finished consolidating power, the apostate Kurds would be a ripe target for a centuries old animosity. That blood feud was about as likely to end as the Jewish and Palestinian one. Arabs are the world champions of grudge holding, with a memory that seems to get even better with power.
Now we were well and truly alone, ten men against a hostile nation. We had all been in some nasty fights in our day, fought some dire odds. But nothing even close to this. We didn’t have a friendly within a thousand miles we could count on, and our air support consisted of loud cursing combined with jack shit. The jury was still out, but Jack might’ve switched sides on us. At least under cover of darkness, we cut the odds of being stumbled upon down to nil. Willie and Scott goggled up to keep a look out, while the rest of us circled up for a quick after action.
“Good shooting back there, all around. John, glad to see my tax dollars were wasted on your mortar training. That was spot on, considering the circumstances. How many rounds left of 81mm?” I asked. It was easy to lose track of things like that, and it might matter later. I had counted the three, but I had a lot on my plate back when the COP was being overrun.
“Fifteen HE, and three White Phosphorus rounds.” He shot back. Must’ve counted on the way here, anticipating I would ask. HE stood for high explosive, what we generally think of a mortar round doing. It explodes. White Phosphorus is an incendiary round, great for setting things on fire. It also produces a thick smoke as a side effect, useful for covering your movements.
“Everyone double check the important stuff? NVGs and guns? If it was back
at the 7/11, it’s gone now. But better to know right now, than when we need it tomorrow.” Of course they had. But it was still my job to ask. I was dealing with almost 200 years combined Special Operations experience, not some cherries fresh off the assembly line. Mission critical is still mission critical though.
There wasn’t anything else left to say. Since no one bought it during our retreat from the COP, we already had a load plan. Paul drove the lead truck, since he knew the way. I sat up front with him, since I was running this goat rodeo. We had a turret gunner, logical as we were up front. Next came two trucks with a driver and passenger each, a necessity given our load of equipment. And Jim drove the rear truck, also with a passenger and turret gunner, since they were in the back.
Our movement across the open desert was slow, under ten miles per hour. That was the price of moving under green. On paved roads, any one of us could drive 80 mph, touching bumpers with truck in front and behind, and never miss a beat. You might even say that was the gift this war had given us. No one on Earth could match a SOF Veteran in a race wearing Night Vision Goggles. Born of necessity, we could drive almost as fast in the dark as the daylight. But that was with predictable city street patterns. Across open terrain the relative short range of goggles, 150 meters or so, combined with the depth perception problem they created, slowed us to a crawl. Unless we wanted to break a tie rod or bend a rim, a risk we couldn’t take at the moment. Our lack of satellite imagery didn’t do us any favors either. More than once, we drove down a wadi only to find no exit, forcing us to turn the column around and find an alternate route. As the night wore on, and I got further and further from the adrenaline dump of the days fight, I found myself struggling to stay awake. My main job at the moment was to keep Paul from nodding off at the wheel, a very real danger given the circumstances. I finally settled for resting my head on the dash with my eyes closed, while I quizzed him about “What if” scenarios. Sometime around” Rosie O’Donnell, that has been in a sweat box for a month without a shower, or an Antifa dude with a copy of Hustler taped to his back” I must’ve nodded off.