by Mack Maloney
This brought a great cheer from his Zabul friends. The CO said to Ozzi: “Whole city. Busy signal now… ”
“Exactly,” Ozzi replied.
Two down, one to go.
They regrouped and made their way toward the last major building in the circle, the Khrash Electric Plant.
They were ready to give it the same treatment when suddenly long streams of tracer bullets cut through the chaotic night. Ozzi and the Zabul hit the dirt immediately. The stream of gunfire was not aimed at them. Rather, it was going across a marsh — and right into the neighborhood fifteen hundred feet away where Ozzi knew Hunn and his men were doing their thing.
Damn…
Ozzi didn’t even think about it. He crawled as close as he could to the electric building and clicked down his NVG gear. The building was a three-story clay structure, almost tent shaped, surrounded by gaggles of wires and transmission poles. The strange thing was, Ozzi could see people moving around inside the building — carrying candles. Candles? he thought. In an electric plant?
It was obvious these people could see and hear Hunn’s assault about a quarter-mile away. There was a .50 caliber machine gun set up on the third floor of the electric plant — it was the one doing all the firing. But Ozzi also observed other mooks setting up more weapons on the first and second floors. These firing positions were also aiming at Hunn’s attack.
This was all Ozzi had to see. He told the Zabul to stay in place and keep low. Then he pulled out the other weapon he was carrying in addition to his M16. It was a 25.4mm Czech-built naval-load flare gun.
He loaded one of his huge cartridges into the gun, aimed, and pulled the trigger. The cartridge exploded from the barrel, rode a short arc, and landed practically on the back door of the electric plant building. Everyone inside the building saw the bright green glare, and after much rushing about, a number of those weapons previously pointing north at Hunn were now pointing at Ozzi and his troop.
The mooks quickly opened fire on them, but Ozzi kept shouting to his guys to stay down, stay cool, and hold their fire. And they waited. Thirty long seconds while the flare burned and the men in the power plant continued shooting at them.
Then came the noise they’d been waiting for. The rumble of rotor blades, the high whine of its supercharged engines.
It was one of the three Blackhawk helicopters. And it came in shooting.
One of the precious Hellfire missiles went right over Ozzi’s head. It went through the back door of the power plant and detonated somewhere inside. The building went up like it was made of matchsticks. A huge ball of flame, followed by a tremendous explosion. Ozzi yelled for his guys to still keep their heads down, as they were soon pummeled by a rain of flaming debris.
The helicopter banked hard, came back around, and opened up with its forward-pointing cannons. They tore into the rubble for five long seconds before the copter once again pulled up hard and then fluttered away into the night.
Ozzi then stood up and yelled, “Let’s go!” The Zabul leaped from their positions and charged the power plant, guns blazing.
Their attack was ferocious and loud, as it was supposed to be. But it lasted only as long as it took Ozzi and his men to reach the building. When the smoke cleared, they realized there was nothing left of it but a pile of sizzling rubble.
Ozzi yelled to the Zabul to stop firing. The destruction of the power plant was so complete, there was no way anyone inside could have survived.
Ozzi turned to his two lieutenants and shook hands with them.
“Get the flag,” he told them. “That was easy.”
* * *
Ryder had 8 bombs left.
He’d taken off from Obo with 12 under his wings. Two of them helped Kennedy’s guys get into the Old Quarter. One had hit a blockhouse on the edge of the same neighborhood — a place Murphy had tagged as a police interrogation headquarters. Another smashed into an ancient bell tower, just a few blocks from the center of the city. There must have been more than bells inside, though, as it went up like a box of matches.
All this happened during his first 5 minutes over Khrash. Now the battle was nearly 10 minutes old and already approaching a sort of critical mass. Ryder had spent the last few minutes buzzing the city, holding on to his bombs until needed and using his cannon sparingly. At the moment, his part of the plan called for him to fly low and create as much noise as possible to add to the substantial commotion the Psyclops plane was already making. He would do this by climbing very high over the city, then putting the Bombcat into a heart-stopping dive, kicking in the afterburner and breaking the sound barrier on his way down. Each time he did this, he had to use all his muscles to pull the plane back to level, rocketing over the center of the city, usually cracking the sound barrier once again. The pair of sonic booms, traveling at approximately the same speed, arrived at approximately the same time, shaking the ancient city right down to its last bloody nail.
At one point, he flew in formation with the strange Psyclops plane, going right over the center of the city and watching the mooks scatter below. But what the EC-130 was putting out over its loudspeakers was so intense, Ryder found the sound waves actually rattling the rivets in his beat-up F-14. It got so bad, he had to peel off and get away from the racket.
He then returned to his own buzzing spree, on several occasions flying down the wider streets of the dirty little city no more than 50 feet off the ground. He was flying so low, some unusually brave mooks still stuck up on the roofs by the Chief’s defense plan were shooting down at him.
So far it seemed that the Americans’ plan was working. The confusion throughout the city was huge. Traffic jams, people running through the streets, antiaircraft fire being shot off wildly, causing tons of spent shells to fall back onto the city and sometimes onto the gunners who had just fired them. It was all so persuasive Ryder himself had to resist the temptation to glance upward every once in a while just to make sure a flight of B-52s wasn’t up there somewhere.
He could see many fires below him, much smoke, and a real beautiful sight: many small American flags flying from buildings in the eastern part of the city. The flags were Murphy’s idea, and it was a good one. It looked like a wave of America’s red, white, and blue was slowly engulfing the city.
So this was how they were going to do it. What was the best way to get Jabal Ben-Wabi? By killing every mook in Khrash and hoping he was among them.
They still had a way to go, though. And it was inevitable that someone in Khrash would figure out that a massive bombing raid wasn’t coming. What would happen then was anyone’s guess. But so far, so good.
All of this excitement was doing something else, too. It was preventing Ryder from thinking about the Ghosts of Li and his wife, and all the personal stuff that had been tearing him apart ever since this mission began. It was all still there. All the flying and strafing and buzzing and bombing was just a diversion from these disturbing thoughts. And like everything that was repressed, he knew he’d have to deal with it sooner or later. But in this case, it would be preferably later.
It was on one of his buzzing runs that Ryder noticed somehow a flash of light out of the corner of his eye. It wasn’t coming for a weapon of any kind. It was more like the light for an acetylene torch.
The strange part was that he’d spotted it in the southern part of the city, a place where absolutely nothing was happening at the moment. No fighting, no confusion. Nothing.
Very weird.
He swung out extra wide this time and rocketed over where he’d spotted the light. It was actually coming from an unblocked window in one warehouse that sat among a sea of warehouses.
It was strictly on instinct or maybe a whim, but he turned again and laid one of the five-hundred-pound bombs right through the window of the place. It went up like a fireworks factory. In seconds a huge fireball was rising in the sky above the southern part of the city.
“Damn,” he whispered to himself. “I wonder what that was?”
&n
bsp; * * *
There were a dozen intersections leading to the center of Khrash. Crowded with shops, bazaars, and apartment buildings, these crowded crossroads possibly made the most perfect defensive position an army could want in an urban combat setting.
By their very nature, intersections offered fields of interlocking fire. Two weapons were all that was needed to cover four streets. Double that number, with a gun at every corner, and passing in any direction became impossible. Plus, an observer stationed in any building on the four corners could see attackers approaching from any of four directions.
There was a particularly wide intersection in the Old Quarter, just down from where the Eastern Moon Mosque had been destroyed. At the moment, this intersection was bristling with weapons; many of the fighters that Kennedy’s 2nd Delta had chased out of the mosque’s neighborhood had regrouped here, and indeed they had set up heavy weapons on every corner.
That’s why Kennedy had signaled for the strike force’s one and only pair of tanks. Within five minutes of his making the call, the two T-72 monsters smashed through the wadi and came rumbling through the hole in the Old Quarter’s wall.
Both were now heading for the intersection.
* * *
The man they called the Chief was sweating bullets. He, too, was at the intersection, huddled behind some of the flimsiest barricades imaginable, several dozen of his fighters on hand and psyched that he was in their midst.
This was no place for him to be, though. He was much too important to actually see combat. Never mind risking getting wounded — or worse.
Yet here he was… and not by choice.
After he’d recovered from the surprise of the air raid by the two Bombcats earlier in the evening, the first place the Chief wanted to go was the area around the Eastern Moon Mosque. All indications were that the holy building might have been one of their targets, and he had to see for himself the destruction the two shit-box airplanes had caused, if any. There was so much equipment, ammunition, and rifles stored inside the mosque that if the building was damaged, which at first he’d doubted, his intention was to gather as many of his men in that area as possible and recover anything of value they could find. Up to that point he, too, had been fooled into thinking the Americans would never directly bomb a mosque.
It had been a grave mistake, for once he arrived on the scene, he saw that not only was the mosque and everything in it gone, but the six blocks of houses and several secondary weapons storage places around it were gone, too. The Chief couldn’t believe it.
Moments later, he found himself talking to lieutenants he’d sent out to check on the city’s other two mosques and realized the news was the same. Both had been demolished as well, as had their neighborhoods, and everything within was lost. Just like that, more than half the city’s storage of weapons and ammunition and explosives and fuel was gone. Ballsy was the American word for it. Insane was what the Chief thought of it. But it was the first time the Chief thought that maybe Jabal Ben-Wabi had a reason to pee his pants anytime the notion of the Crazy Americans was brought up.
This did not deter the Chief, though. Not completely, anyway. There was still a fight to be had here — and it would best be coordinated back at the Holy Towers. That’s why after hearing that all three mosques had been destroyed, the Chief ordered his bodyguards to get him back to his main headquarters right away.
And this they were doing, preparing to rush him back, when they first heard the sounds of B-52s dropping bombs.
The Chief’s convoy made it exactly a half-block when he ordered his driver to stop and took cover along with everyone else. The distinct racket made by B-52 engines and their bombs was known to anyone who’d fought with the Taliban. They knew the only hope of survival was to get down at the first sound of a bomb whistling through the air and stay there until the mighty airplanes passed over or blew you to bits.
So they hid in a tea shop. Huddled on the floor, hands pressed against their ears, the Chief and his bodyguards waited for the final blow. When it did not come, though the racket and chaotic sounds of a massive air raid continued, they crawled back out onto the street, saw the light glowing from the eastern edge of town, and assumed the Strato-fortresses had dumped their loads over there first. Which meant that they would be back, usually very, very soon.
Again the Chief wanted to convoy back to the Holy Towers, but no sooner had he and his bodyguards started out a second time when they heard two more tremendous explosions in their vicinity. Looking just down the street, they saw a huge hole had been blown in the Old Quarter’s wall not 200 yards away and that several more buildings had been blown away even closer to their position.
Again they thought these were bombs from B-52s — it was only when one of the ugly jet fighters that had leveled the mosque suddenly streaked over their heads that they realized that at least one of the mosque bombers was back and that it had just delivered the one-two blow a few blocks away.
Seconds later they saw the black-uniformed soldiers start pouring through the hole in the wall. Not the Chief nor any of his men stayed around long enough to count exactly how many Americans were rushing through the breach. Instead, they finally got aboard their vehicles and squealed away in retreat.
But for a third time, they didn’t get very far. They reached the intersection a few blocks up from where the mosque used to be and found it crowded with religious fighters fleeing what they perceived to be a massive American ground attack through the hole in the wall. Explosions, jets in the air, the chop-chop of helicopters added in. The sounds of their comrades being slaughtered just down the street only confirmed the reason for their alarm.
In fact, there were so many fighters and their vehicles in the intersection, there was no way the Chief and his convoy were going to be able to get through.
Believing that the center of town may have been pulverized anyway, and due to the fact that when his fighters saw him they started shouting for joy because they knew he would know what to do in their sudden crisis, the Chief realized reluctantly that he had to make some kind of a stand here — at the first intersection.
But what he really wanted to do first was get to a bell and start ringing it — so his Taliban and Al Qaeda brothers would know enough to join the fight. If that message didn’t get out soon, he knew, they were looking at a catastrophe.
His cell phone was dead, killed by electronic interference. So he tried a phone in one of the shops bordering the intersection. He was calling his cadre back at the Holy Towers, located about a half-mile from his current position. If he could get through and the buildings were still standing, someone there would be able to start the bells ringing and get the reinforcements in gear.
But just as someone at the headquarters was picking up the phone, the line suddenly went dead, At almost the exact same time, they all heard another huge explosion go off to the east, in the vicinity of Kuhada Circle, the Chief knew.
It had been at that precise moment that Ozzi had blown up the city’s telephone exchange, mere seconds before the Chief would have been able to put out the all-points signal to immediately bring hundreds of Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters into the fray.
It had been that close.
Once the Chief realized he was stuck here, at the intersection, he dug down into his bag of tricks. Obviously the Americans weren’t coming the way he thought they would. There would be no Mogadishu here. So he screamed at his men to start erecting barriers across the west-facing street, the road that eventually led to the center of town — but he also ordered them that they should erect these barriers of the flimsiest materials they could find.
Then they were to fire at the soldiers accompanying the tanks for just about thirty seconds. Then they were to allow the tanks to bust through the barriers…
It seemed like a suicidal order, allowing the tanks to essentially roll over them, but again, the Chief had fought in the streets before.
This was combat and there really was such a thing as the fog of w
ar. Things happened fast but always seemed to the participants to be moving very slowly. There was also the tendency especially of tank commanders to run over or break through anything standing in their way. Now these two T-72s were heading for the intersection, their orders no doubt were to clear it of the Chief’s fighters.
This was a piece of his own brand of psychological warfare. Why would the Chief instruct his men to erect barricades the flimsier the better? Because he wanted to actually encourage the armored vehicles to smash through them, which was their natural tendency to do. Doing so was a critical mistake, though, because once the tank hit the barricade, his fighters would simply let it go past them — then they would attack it from the rear. The key to this deceit was that no way could a tank turret turn fast enough to fire backward at these attackers. Two or three well-placed RPGs could disable just about any tank from the rear, thus trapping it in the middle of a swarm of fighters. When the crew sought to escape their burning tank, they could be slaughtered almost at leisure. When the Chief fought in Chechnya, this odd strategy had worked every time.
The tanks were now within five hundred feet of the intersection. The first in line fired one round as it was building up speed. The round landed not six feet in front of the first barricade. Curiously, it was not an explosive charge but actually a smoke round. It ignited on impact, and within seconds the entire intersection was obscured by thick white smoke.
The Chief’s men ceased firing on cue and fell back, disappearing behind the barricades as ordered. The Chief knew what was going to happen next. The tank would burst through the intentionally weak barriers, apparently triumphant. But then his fighters hiding nearby would emerge quickly and attack the tank from the rear. That was the trick.
Sure enough, the first tank went through the barricade with ease — just as the Chief wanted it. The smoke obscuring the scene made it hard to get a complete handle on it, but very quickly the bravest of his men ran out and prepared to fire their RPGs at the tank’s vulnerable hindquarters. But just after the second tank went through, a sudden storm of tracer fire erupted, coming from many directions, bullets pinging and bouncing off things everywhere. A moment after that, the worst of the smoke bomb blew away… and finally the Chief and his bodyguards, under cover about fifty feet away, could see what was happening. Both tanks had indeed burst through the barriers. But they had done so with their turrets already turned backward. The two machine guns on the top of the swivel as well as the huge tank gun itself opened up in a fantastic display of pyrotechnics and fiery lead.