by Clay Martin
I have seen a lot of terrible things in my life, but this is the one that was going to give me PTSD. I quickly checked the outside of the door way, and bounced out of the bunker at a near run. Anywhere but here. I turned the corner and ran smack into Willie, almost sending us both ass over tea kettle. We picked ourselves up, and he motioned toward a bunker two down. Just inside were Paul and Scott, literally in stitches on the floor. So much for concern for my well-being. Willie had a shit eating grin of his own as he took a position looking out, while the other two continued to try and laugh quietly. Eventually, Willie tapped me on the shoulder and pointed. I watched the star crossed lovers walk out the gate the way they had come, a little more pep in their steps. Sons of bitches.
Confident they were out of voice range, we circled up to talk for a minute.
“Find a load of useful stuff?” Scott asked, emphasizing the word load, as he collapsed in a giggling fit again.
“Fucking grow up, Scott,” I said back, which ended Paul’s ability to contain himself. He had another fit himself.
Eventually, my extremely professional counterparts regain enough composure to have an adult conversation. Scott had found the jackpot, the EOD bunker, while Paul located a warehouse sized rack of LAW rockets. So the night wasn’t a complete waste. We reconvened to the EOD stash, where Scott loaded each of us up with what he thought was needed. A cornucopia of blasting caps, C4, claymores, and det cord filled our bags. We were out of time, so we headed back to the fence.
Getting out was just as easy as getting in, with Willie policing up all the used zip ties as we cut the first fence. Scott cut the second, as Willie and I zipped the interior up tight. Repeating the process on the outside, we just had to hope no one noticed over the next 12 hours. Maybe they would all be worn out from extracurricular activities in the dark.
Steve and Jim flashed their IR lights at us as soon as we got close to them, making link up easy. Jim lead us back to camp as I absorbed all I had seen that night. All of it.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
As soon as we made it back inside our perimeter, I dropped my ruck and headed straight to the glove box of my truck. I grabbed my flask and sat down in the front seat, not quite convinced I could wash the dirt off my soul. But if your demons won’t drown in whiskey, I am out of advice for you. Frank gave me a stern look and I could see the lecture forming on his lips, when Willie intervened with the tale of my love bunker.
“And I hate to tell you this, Derek, but they got ya. Your walking wounded. Look at your leg, just above the knee.” Willie concluded, looking at me deadpan.
I searched his face for a chink in the armor, a sign that he couldn’t possibly be serious. I didn’t want to look. The mark always looks. And I also didn’t want to know. If it was true, I definitely didn’t want to know. Willie looked back at me stone faced. Slowly, I lowered my gaze to my pant leg, willing it to not have happened. All four of them collapsed in howling fits. Of course there was nothing. Not that I would omit it from my story if there was. Scouts honor.
Once my extremely disciplined and experienced fighting force got its collective shit back together, we went right to the sleep plan. Protocol would be a debrief first, followed by checking our score for intelligence value, then weapons and finally rest. We were running an extremely light force to the ragged edge though, and concessions had to be made. No one had gotten a wink of sleep last night, between the recce and everyone else on strip alert in case we had to go hot. Besides, there was zero chance of sleeping once the blazing sun turned our open camp into an oven in a few hours anyway. I volunteered for first shift, both to sort out the KC-130 books, and because I was afraid of my dreams for once. The rest of the recce team would sort their packs on their respective watches as well, so we had a clear answer by planning time. We also decided to pair one recce member with a stay behind per guard shift, so they could be brought roughly up to speed.
Around 1100, we started the planning sequence for the final assault. To maximize our personnel present, we dropped security to just two men. Gabe took the rear, since as an interpreter he had a valuable skill set, but no business making tactical decisions. Ranger volunteered for the front/ airfield observations since he was “happy to shoot whoever we decided he should shoot.”
“I have a rough sketch of a plan, but we need to fill in some detail,” I began. “There is a lot to do, and we are going to have to execute an extremely complicated plan if we have any chance of succeeding. The three most critical points are securing the pilot, the towers that cover the runway, and the 14.5s. In no particular order, because the failure of anyone of them means the mission is over. Fueling the bird is next on the list. It is only a lower priority because if we can get it in the air, even 2000 miles from here is better than here. But all the way would be ideal, I think we can all agree to that.
So let’s start with the pilot. If we can pull it off, a quiet rescue would be ideal. With the number of guards, that means three of us with the silenced Nordics, minimum. I would prefer four, we just don’t have it. And it’s as simple as stack on the door, kick it open, and hope we can put them down before they get a shot off. Single room, gunfight at the OK corral style, nothing fancy about it. That does help solve some the later aircraft problems, because it gets us six more bodies on our team. At the same time, Scott and Steve use the sniper rifles to take out the 14.5 crews. They are suppressed, and relatively quiet for supersonic bullets. I think the generator noise down there will cover most of it. Scott, that keeps you tied up though. Once they are cleaned off, you will have to keep playing whack a mole until we can get them taken out permanently. I would prefer to disable them with demo, it’s just too risky. If we got compromised with our forces on either side of the base, we would be screwed.
The towers are a bigger bite to take, and I am open to suggestion. The only way I see to do it is two truck crews, armed with the Carl Gustov and LAWs. The towers are armored, so chewing them up with a machine gun isn’t enough. If we had 50s it would be enough, but we don’t. And I didn’t see one laying in the dirt over there. Obviously we can’t shoot rockets straight up, the back blast would fry the shooter coming off the ground. But 200 yards should be enough angle, and make it a pretty easy shot. Three towers and two teams means they are going to have to haul ass to hit them before they chew us up. I suggest we make that our first hits after we go loud.
Fueling the plane. We have three problems here. One, it is already full, but of the wrong gas. We have to dump it before we can fill it with the right one. Assuming the tanker is full, it holds 60000 gallons. I learned on my shift that it can offload 600 gallons per minute, which means it take 1.666, repeating of course, hours to empty. It also requires power to do so, this isn’t a gravity feed system. That is problem two. I think we can solve that by using one of the Air Force ground power generator things. It may be loud, so we can cram it in one of the hangers and shut the doors to hopefully mitigate that. They run on diesel, so the fumes will get bad. We just have to bank on enough oxygen in the hanger to keep it running the time we need it. Problem three is filling it back up. Not only do we need to find trucks with the right fuel, we have to drive them over and fill it. There are two fill points, and the trucks offload at 600 gallons per minute as well. I don’t see a way to make that quiet, so let’s just assume we will have to do it under fire. Forty-five minutes to get the plane full in a perfect world. That gives our man Nick time to figure out how to start the engines and get us flying. We have to hold the end of the apron that long, under attack. He will need that position to be able to turn the plane onto the main runway, and these big birds turn slow. So we will need a primary defensive posture there to keep the baddies at bay. He taxi’s with the ramp down, we all hop on board when he turns onto the runway, we are off like a prom dress. Beers all around.”
Steve was looking at me like I had grown a unicorn horn out of my forehead. Or possibly a dick. “Did you just say ‘figures out how to t
urn the plane on’ as part of the plan?”
“Yes I did. Our guy is an A-10 pilot for the Air Force, and flies 727 as his day job. But he has never flown a C-130. Apparently, there is a massive difference in air frames, it isn’t like starting a car. But he is our best shot. I would take a 15 year old with a Cessna rating at this point, we are that low on options.”
So much for boosting morale. General murmurs of disapproval filled the air. John came to my defense.
“I am with Derek on this one. We don’t have a better shot. If this guy is an older pilot, that means he has flown all sorts of airframes on his way to the 727 and A-10. Have a little faith he can figure it out. Besides, what else are we going to do? If Derek and his guys hadn’t come looking for us, Steve, Gabe, and I would already be dead. That Freedom Bird down there is our only ticket out, anything else is just delusional. We either make this happen, or we wander the desert waiting on a last stand. I have two little girls back home waiting on me, and I am not going to fail them. One of my old Q Course instructors, MSG Walker, had a saying for times like this. I need you to find a sack, fill it with some nuts, and mount up.”
Ouch. Nothing like being called a pussy by the new guy. John had just bitch slapped us back to reality, and he wasn’t done yet. Letting his last salvo sink in for a minute to a quiet audience, he continued.
“We need to be thinking of solutions, not problems. Now let’s say all that is going to work. We still have to hold off several hundred fighters. And we have all seen enough combat to know, ten against five hundred doesn’t work without serious force multipliers. We have no support, and this would be hairy even with fixed wing on station. So here is one way I see to help that. When the trucks go to rocket the towers, I will take the third rig with the mortar. If I start firing right after the rockets do, maybe we can make them think it is an indirect fire attack. If they are like us, they will bunker up instead of going out to look. If I space my rounds, I can keep them pinned down for ten minutes at least.”
“Good point, John.” Scott said, taking the reins. He was animated, and I liked that. Here was a man thinking we could win. And courage is contagious. “While the tanker is getting emptied, we have some time to kill. How about if we put some pressure plate IEDs in near the barracks? Just out the front door, and other likely exits. It will thin them a little bit, but more importantly slow them down. Every second they hesitate is a second closer to freedom.”
Frank was involved now. I had watched the calculus playing across his face, and the airplane won out. “Why not rig some of the ordinance bunkers to blow? Put them on time fuse or something, set to blow 5 minutes apart? That does nothing for the tactical side, but it would make some big booms. With some luck, they might even believe we do have fixed wing CAS (close air support).”
How do we get the trucks in? How much det cord is down there? Do we rig the fuel farm too? No, too much light, make it easier to shoot the plane. The questions were coming fast and furious, but so were solutions. When a big problem presented itself, the entire group stopped to solve it. Otherwise, little factions started plotting further detail, of the tasks they had chosen or were assigned.
A few hours later, we had a rough enough plan to go on. We also realized we had enough prep work to require another full night on the airfield. There was just no way to get in all done in one night. As the sun faded across the sky, we steeled ourselves for another tip toe through the hornet’s nest.
The job was so big, we opted for a full scale infiltration. Every swinging Richard was going in tonight. It was only a matter of time before the IC decided to execute the rest of the prisoners, and finding Nick had been a lottery ticket in the first place. None of us liked the idea of one more day between us and home, but it had to be done. With very little daylight left, we prepped our equipment for the task ahead.
Taking your entire element on a recon mission is not without precedent, but it is risky. There is no one to cover your withdrawal if you get caught, and no way to ensure an enemy doesn’t stumble across your cached equipment and set up an ambush on it. The trucks and bigger weapons had to stay, there was no way around that. The odds of an enemy patrol finding them was slim, but it did exist. To mitigate the chance of someone just booby trapping our gear and leaving, each man emplaced a single pebble on a likely spot. One little rock was unlikely to be noticed if it was disturbed, and we all only had to remember one thing. It wasn’t perfect, but it was better than nothing. As darkness fell, we crept forward to the jump off point from the night before. Normally, going back to the same spot would be a bad idea. But since we had kept it under observation all day, we could know with a certainty it hadn’t been investigated.
Once again, we waited until the midnight shift change. A culture that sleeps in the afternoon also tends to have a later bed time, so there was no point in going in early anyway. Under the shadow of the guard tower, we cut the fence free once again. Inside, we spread out and listened for a minute. With no outside support to cover us in crossing the airfield, we switched to a bounding overwatch tactic. We divided into groups of threes, roughly by task ahead. I was in the first group, and we covered the open space while the other two lay in the prone, ready to cover us if we made contact. Once on the other side, we fanned out and radioed for the next group. Red rover, red rover, let Scott’s team come over. And finally the last team. It’s not perfect, but if a gun fight does erupt, it’s best not to have your entire crew caught out in the open. In anything beyond a short fight, I don’t know exactly what the other six of us were going to do anyway. But pretty much anything beats “get mowed down by a machine gun and die like dogs.”
Jim and Paul were with me, and our first task was to go find Nick again, and pass him the C-130 manuals. John and Steve were on the fuel trucks. Each truck with the appropriate fuel would get a small square of glint tape on the driver’s side door, so it was easy to find again when we needed it. Glint tape is a wonderful thing, designed to reflect IR lasers very brightly. A quick bump of the IR floodlight on each of our PEQ-15s would light it up like a beacon. Frank and Willie were first going to scout the ground into the bunker area, to ensure we could get our trucks in. The ordinance we needed to pull this off was far too heavy to hand carry. As a secondary task, they were going to continue the search of bunkers for other useful stuff. Ranger, Gabe, and Scott were going immediately to the EOD stash, to start working on charges to blow the other bunkers. That kind of thing looks easy on TV, but reality is a long way down the road of hard labor. They were going to spend hours cutting and taping C-4 and caps into useful shapes, not to mention rigging firing systems and lines. We call that assaulter arts and crafts, the Monday morning task for every counter terrorism force on Earth. It was a risk pre building the systems, someone might stumble over them and be curious. But we wouldn’t have enough time tomorrow night. There was so much to do, everyone would end up there once the other jobs were complete. Not to mention everything is so much easier in the dark.
We scouted around the jail and found it very much in the same condition as the night before. I rebuilt my water bottle perch on the belief Nick would be in the same spot, and was rewarded to find him wide awake, in fact looking right at the high bars.
“Are you there God? It’s me, Margaret.” I said by way of greeting.
He lit up like all his Christmas’s came at once. “Standing by. Time to go?”
“Unfortunately, no. Not yet. We ended up with a lot of shit left to do, you’re going to have to wait one more day. Tomorrow night, Hell or high-water though.” It felt weak, but it was true. There just wasn’t any other way. Nick looked devastated.
“I’m not sure we have one more day in us.” He responded. And I started to notice some details I hadn’t before. Nick had a fresh black eye, and blood all over his shirt. The rest of the prisoners showed signs of a fresh beating too. The guy in the cell next to him was holding an arm in a way that likely meant broken. It takes a special k
ind of asshole to beat a prisoner for no reason, or worse for fun.
“Twenty-four more hours. And at least I can assure you, the guards are all going to die in the opening minutes,” I countered, trying to sooth him. “I wish it wasn’t that way, but it is. If we try and pop the cork early, none of us are living through this. The odds are already overwhelming. Stay strong. I am going to get you out of here. But I need you to stay the course.”
He looked pretty far from reassured. If I was in his shoes, I would feel the same way.
“I did bring you a Valentine though.” I passed in the books that seemed relevant, along with some water bottles. “Now, I need some more details on the fueling process....”
Using the brain trust, the prisoners gave me a satisfactory idea of how to set up the hoses and the ground power unit. Those are specialized jobs, but military equipment is generally built towards the lowest common denominator. I didn’t think we could do a good job, but I was banking on a half assed job being good enough. Finally, I had to leave them again. I have done some horrible things in my life, things I’m not proud of. But walking away from that window and leaving those men to another day was the worst. If I live to be a thousand, I will never get those faces out of my mind.