by Peter Nealen
“Can’t go that way,” I panted.
“There are more on the street,” Jordan said. “They’re canalized by the courtyard out front, but we’re not getting out that way, either.”
Stepping back behind Phil and Greg as they covered the back door, I found my radio transmit switch. “Mike Five Zero,” I called, “Golf Lima Ten-Six.”
“Go ahead, Deacon,” Victor Draven, the mortar section team leader replied a moment later.
“Immediate fire mission,” I told him. “Targets Alpha One Seven Seven, Alpha One Eight Seven, and Alpha Two Three Three.” Part of the planning process had involved setting pre-arranged targets for the mortar section that had infiltrated with us, and was currently set up about three kilometers away. If anything, they’d had a more grueling movement than we’d had; even 60mm mortars ain’t light, never mind the rounds themselves.
“Stand by,” Scott broke in. He sounded a little breathless, and there was a different sound to his transmission. I strongly suspected that Scott and the Bravo Element had already broken down and were on their way down the hill from the ruined castle. “Do not fire on Alpha Two Three Three. I say again, do not fire on Alpha Two Three Three!” There was a brief pause. “There is an American patrol entering the town from the northwest. Avoid firing on the northwest of the town.”
I keyed my mic twice to acknowledge that I’d heard. More fire was hammering at the sides of the house, and Jordan was shooting from the landing again. “This is not a good defensive position, Matt!” Dwight bellowed over the noise.
“I know,” I replied. We were hemmed in by buildings to either side, with the woods behind us and an open street—clearly covered by fire—in front of us. Dwight had pushed up into the common area and was barricaded at the top of the stairs with his Mk 48 pointed at the back door as we pushed past him. “We’ll hold here until the mortars can clear them out or at least make some of them go to ground.”
I knew it was risky. Mortars weren’t always the most accurate; during that dust-up on the coast of Lebanon a few years back, I’d lost five friends when one of 3/1’s mortar sections dropped five hundred meters short. But we were five guys and a hostage surrounded by way too many bad guys. We needed all the firepower we could get.
That brought me up short. Leaving Dwight and Phil to cover the back while Jordan and Greg covered the front from the landing, I moved to the stairs and tore the FAMAS out of one of the dead Kosovars’ hands. Getting his chest rig off took a bit more effort, but I stepped up to England where he was crouched as far back in the corner as he could get.
Squatting down, I held out the French bullpup. “You ever fire one of these?” I asked.
He shook his head, his eyes wide, but he took the weapon. I was pretty sure he was a support soldier, but he had to have fired a rifle at some point. He didn’t speak for a moment, in large part because Dwight ripped off a burst out the back door. A 7.62mm machinegun gets loud in enclosed spaces.
“I haven’t,” he croaked. It was almost more of a squeak. He was scared stiff, despite having just been rescued from certain, painful death. Granted, the contempt that I felt for him was based on my own hopes that I would have fought rather than let myself get scooped up by a bunch of Albanian jihadi savages, but he needed to harden the hell up fast.
“Mag well, mag release, bolt release, selector,” I said loudly, pointing out each control. “You call yourself a soldier, so it’s time to cowboy up. You’re one of my shooters until we deliver you to your command.” Probably to face a very thorough inquiry, but that wasn’t my problem.
He nodded shakily, looking down at the rifle in his hands and not making eye contact. I shoved the chest rig jammed with FAMAS mags at him, then moved to look over Phil’s shoulder.
Just then, there was a brief lull in the gunfire, and I listened hard. Yes, I could hear it, just barely. A faint but rising whiffling sound.
If you’ve ever been under a mortar barrage, you’ll remember that sound until your dying day. It’ll make your butt pucker the same way until then, too.
I resisted the urge to drop flat, knowing that they were friendly. Of course, “friendly” has a very loose definition when it comes to incoming fire.
With a crump that shook the house, the first round hit in the street, just two hundred meters to our west. It was quickly followed by several more, as fainter crumps sounded to the north and south of the narrow valley. The incoming small arms fire slackened further.
“Time to go,” I announced. I keyed the radio again. “Mike Five Zero, Golf Lima Ten-Six,” I sent. “Repeat all.” Once again, I was taking chances, but with the initial rounds close enough to the targets, and not falling on our heads, I was breathing a little easier. We weren’t likely to get dropped on by our own guys.
“Roger,” Draven replied. A moment later, that same nerve-shredding whiffle was sounding overhead again, but we were already pushing for the back door.
“Weeb, Deacon,” I sent. “We’re moving to the near RV point. We’ll link up there.”
“Roger,” Scott gasped in reply. He had to be moving fast. Knowing Scott, he was anxious to get down the hill and get stuck in. He had to already be chafing about just having to watch, the day before. “Air is on the way. Crossed into Slovak airspace five minutes ago.”
Holy hell, had it been five minutes already? Time gets funny when you’re in the middle of a firefight.
Phil led the way out the back door, though he preceded his exit with a high-concentration smoke. It wasn’t going to keep the bad guys from spraying bullets into the cloud, but it would give us some concealment on the way out.
He pushed out into the smoke with me on his heels, dragging England behind me, just as the next round of mortar strikes landed. The impacts and explosions shook the ground and rattled the windows of those houses that hadn’t already had theirs shattered. Black smoke and dirt fountained up into the morning sky as we pushed out of the cloud of white obscurant and into the woods.
I could distantly hear the squeal of tracks. I glanced northwest, but there were too many trees and too many houses between our side of Borinka and the Army patrol coming in. Or at least, approaching. Despite the gunfire and mortars, I doubted that the patrol was going to actually move into the town right away. The rules of engagement were way too strict for that. They’d set up outside and monitor the situation while they waited for word from FOB Keystone as to whether they were allowed to load their weapons or not.
It briefly occurred to me that we could try to link up with the patrol and drop England with them. Questions would be asked, but we’d have to deal with far more of them if we showed up at Keystone with him. Granted, we’d have to fight our way through what increasingly sounded like dozens, if not closer to a hundred, insurgents to get there.
No, better to break contact under cover of the mortars and the incoming gunships, and then find a way to get England back to the Army later.
We were all out of the house and pushing up the hill when things went really pear-shaped.
There was a sudden, wild exchange of gunfire ahead, and Scott was practically screaming in my ear. “Deacon, wave off! Contact, contact, contact!” He couldn’t say anything more, but by then he didn’t have to. There was a cacophonous, crackling roar in the woods above us. Scott and the Bravo Element had to have just run into a sizeable force moving through the forest. Probably moving to try to cut us off.
At almost the same time, a massive explosion at the northwest end of Borinka shook the ground, making the trees wave as the shock rattled my teeth. I looked over to see a towering cloud of dust and smoke rising over the far end of the town.
I already knew what had happened. The American peacekeepers had gotten a little too close, and the bad guys had had an IED waiting for them.
A moment later, I heard the familiar bang of an RPG, and a moment later, ugly black smoke started rising above the red tile roofs.
Borinka had turned into one hell of a mousetrap. Except we were Triarii. Not mi
ce.
“Push,” I told Phil, as a bullet slapped bark and splinters off the tree just in front of us. I pivoted, dropping to a knee and returning fire, the second of my hasty pair of shots taking a man in a Multicam jacket and track pants in the chest. He twisted and fell.
Phil was already moving, pressing toward the stand of trees where we’d left our rucks. Under the circumstances, donning the heavy packs might have seemed like a bad idea, but we needed everything in those packs if we were going to get out of Slovakia and back to Hungary alive.
Short of turning ourselves over to the Army, of course. Given the state of things back home, that could either be a good idea, or a death sentence. It largely depended on the news cycle of the day, and the leanings of the commander. It was depressing, that the unrest and sociopathic violence back home had even spread its rot into the Armed Forces overseas, but those were the days we were living in.
I had no idea, at the time, just how bad it could get.
We started leapfrogging, as the enemy picked up their fire again, laying down our own covering fire as we went. Those with rifles tried to keep it to single shots and pairs, looking for targets before we fired, but Dwight was doing what a machinegunner was supposed to do. He was raking the treeline below us with long, ravening bursts of fire, smacking plaster off of walls, shredding leaves, splintering trees, and forcing the enemy to get their heads down or die.
Phil reached the rucks first, dropping to a knee and searching for a target while I ran to join him, my fist clenching the strap of England’s chest rig as I propelled him forward. He’d fired a few rounds, but the unfamiliar rifle and his own disorientation was making him almost as dangerous to the rest of us as the enemy.
Jordan and Greg passed Dwight, who was still laying down the hate toward Borinka. In retrospect, there were probably still some Slovak civilians living there; I just hoped that they’d had the good sense to keep their heads down as soon as things started cooking off. After all, they had to have had some warning when the bad guys started taking over their houses, patrolling their town square, and laying IEDs on their road.
More gunfire rattled and echoed through the woods above us as Dwight ceased fire and lumbered the rest of the way to the stand of trees. The bad guys seemed to have backed off a bit for the moment, but even so, it sounded like Scott and the rest of the team were in a bad spot up there.
“Deacon, Weeb,” Scott called. The noise of gunfire was almost drowning him out over the radio, coming through my earpiece as well as echoing down the hillside. “Hold your position; we’re coming to you!”
Before I could answer, I spotted a figure dashing from behind a building toward a tree, downslope. I didn’t have much of a shot through all the vegetation, but I pivoted and fired. I might have hit him, but I was pretty sure I missed. “This is not a good position, Weeb!” I replied.
“Friendly!” Chris was yelling from upslope. Phil already had his OBR pointed at him, and shifted as he came through the trees, the jute string and leaves on his ghillie flapping with the movement. He was pelting down the slope while more gunfire hammered uphill. A moment later, Scott came down after him, while another long burst echoed through the forest. That would be Tony.
“Dwight!” I barked. “North!” There was still a substantial threat in the town, but if the bad guys were breathing down Bravo Element’s necks, that was going to be the most immediate problem.
Chris skidded to a halt near us, dropping to a knee, his breath heaving as he brought his rifle up. Scott joined me a second later, as a new group of ten or fifteen shooters in a rag-tag assemblage of camouflage, tracksuits, and civilian clothes came boiling out of the gap between Building 345 and 346. Jordan was on his belly behind a tree, and dropped the first with a single shot before shifting to the next one, even as Greg and I opened fire, killing three more and scattering the rest.
Scott was panting as he reloaded. “There’s at least a company up there,” he said, his chest heaving. “They walked right into us as we were coming down the hill. Fucking trees.”
I didn’t reply right away, having to duck down as a burst of 5.56 fire stitched the trees just overhead, raining splinters and bits of leaves down on our heads. And just as I opened my mouth to say something, a new sound drowned out a lot of the gunfire.
The heavy, metallic thunk, thunk, thunk of an M5’s 50mm gun was pretty unmistakable. The peacekeepers had decided to stop sitting there and taking it.
Things had just gotten a lot more complicated.
Chapter 5
Muzzle flashes flickered in the woods above us, and bullets smacked into tree boles and kicked dirt and leaves up around us. Tony swung his Mk 48 up and ripped off the rest of his belt in reply, the stuttering roar seemingly amplified by the strobing flame spitting from the machinegun’s shortened barrel.
The volume of fire was just too high, though. There was no way we were getting up over the ridge; the bad guys were pushing hard to get above us, and they were going to cut us off. I glanced over our position. It wasn’t good. We had a little bit of cover there in that stand of trees, but there was high ground on one side and houses on the other, with far too little standoff. We were dropping the bad guys as they showed themselves, but there were a lot of them. Too many to just be hanging out in Borinka just because.
This had been a trap, and England had been the bait.
“The birds are about ten minutes out,” Scott said between shots.
“We might not last ten minutes!” David yelled.
Unfortunately, he was right. Let the militia get the high ground in these woods and we’d be done for. “Back to the town,” I snapped. “By twos, fall back.” We were going to have to find a different way out.
I was also worried about those Army cats in the armored vehicles up the road, for a couple of reasons. I was pretty sure they’d gotten hit, hard. The black smoke that I could just see through the trees, rising into the sky to the northeast, suggested that at least one vehicle had been the victim of a catastrophic kill. Possibly more than one.
On the one hand, having American soldiers engaged within weapons range of us was a problem, simply because I didn’t want my team on the receiving end of 50mm HE shells. We hadn’t exactly coordinated with the Army. The Triarii don’t risk that, as a rule. Or we didn’t at the time.
But just like in Marianka, I didn’t want to just let those kids get slaughtered. Our country might be coming apart at the seams, but they’d still signed up to defend her, and hadn’t asked to get thrown into a snake-pit of a “peacekeeping” operation, with one hand tied behind their backs and their fellow peacekeepers watching them with an eye toward slipping a knife between their ribs.
I did some quick mental calculation and called Draven again. “Mike Five Zero, Golf Lima Ten-Six. Adjust fire from Alpha Alpha One Eight Seven, left five hundred, drop thirty, fire for effect.” It was a quick and dirty solution, but I thought it might be close enough.
I was going to use every trick I had up my sleeve.
“Roger, left five hundred, drop thirty,” Draven replied. A moment later, though the distant pops of the discharges were drowned out by all the other weapons fire around us, the 60mm shells came screaming down out of the sky and impacted on the hillside above us, shaking the ground with heavy thuds and blowing vicious black clouds of dirt, debris, and smoke into the sky. The fire from above slackened considerably.
With that brief respite, we moved fast, sprinting in long bounds back toward the target house. It wasn’t ideal from a defensive standpoint, but it would provide some cover and concealment, more than we had out there in the woods.
I ended up behind Jordan, who had taken lead. We moved from tree to tree, having to pause about every other bound to fire at somebody in one of the windows ahead or ducking around a tree to the east or west. The little bastards were everywhere. There had to have been two or three hundred militia crammed into tiny Borinka.
And I was pretty sure that none of them were Slovaks.
&
nbsp; We got to the back door, where we’d first made entry, the rest of the team fanning out around us to cover our backs. Scott had corralled England and was keeping him close, sparing him as much attention as possible to keep his rifle pointed in a safe direction.
The door was still open, the jamb chewed and splintered by bullet impacts and the grenade explosion. Those two corpses were still in the doorway, too. With a quick breath, Jordan and I plunged inside behind our rifles.
The hallway was clear, and we quickly flowed into the first room while Phil and Reuben took the door across from us and the rest moved toward the common area. A quick glance confirmed that the room was as empty as it had been when we’d left.
It might seem a little redundant, clearing a building we’d evacuated only minutes before, but you just never knew. We’d given up the real estate, and it was entirely possible that some of the bad guys had taken it back in our absence.
Within a minute, the house was confirmed clear. The bodies were right where we’d left them. Scott shoved England into the same corner where he’d been ensconced before, and I got on the radio. “Whiskey Six-Four, Golf Lima Ten-Six.” I wasn’t sure if the birds were in range yet, but the sooner I could get in contact with them, the better.
“Go ahead, Golf Lima Ten-Six.” I’d worked with our lead gunship pilot, Gene Keck, before. The guy had more rotary combat time than just about anyone else in the Triarii. He’d been flying birds in Afghanistan in 2002, for crying out loud.
“We are hardpointed in a two-story building,” I sent. I rattled off the rough coordinates that I’d read off the map. Again, after the GPS system had gotten spoofed twice, once resulting in an entire platoon of Rangers in Syria getting decimated, we didn’t trust it. “Look for green smoke in the courtyard.” I pointed to Chris, who dug a smoke grenade out of his rig and headed downstairs. “Beware of mortars from the north; Mike Five Zero is set up and supporting us from there. Advise you stay over the town itself. Also, be advised, there are Green Force vehicles under fire at the northwest end of the town. Appears to be at least one vehicle burning. Watch your fires in that direction.”