by Mel Odom
Suddenly a shot rang out, and one of the Marines staggered. Pabest knew that Sadim had fired the shot to start the battle, and he hoped that his commander had scored a kill. The message would be received by the American Satans.
Mastering the excitement that filled him, Pabest squeezed the trigger and watched as the RPG took flight and sailed out the window. All around him, the crackle of gunfire split the stillness that had hung over the area. A moment after that, the explosives that had been planted in the ruins erupted in sudden fury, throwing dirt, stone, and mortar into the air in long plumes. Craters opened up in the ground as Pabest fitted another rocket to his launcher and readied his weapon again.
There would be no escape for the American Marines.
“Get down! Get down!” As the explosions vomited up from the alley and ruins around her, Bekah swung around to survey her team, fearing she had already incurred a loss.
Trudy had gone to ground as a matter of course. She’d been under fire several times in Afghanistan. She lay on the ground only a few feet away, her right hand on her rifle and her left hand clamped reflexively on her helmet.
Tyler was stretched out as well, but he had his head moving, looking around.
Ten feet away, Pike Morgan squatted calmly against what remained of a stone wall. The building’s foundation had become a maze of sorts, filled with half-destroyed walls where the structure had once been. Piles of rubble had been picked over for salvageable items, but they provided further hardships for anyone traveling through them.
A sandy-yellow haze created by the dust from the explosives planted in the ground drifted slowly over the battle zone. That was what the area was now. Before, it had been a trap, and Rifle Platoon Indigo had stepped right into the middle of it. Harsh cracks of small-arms fire punctuated the ringing that filled Bekah’s ears, and she tried in vain to track the sounds coming from all around her.
Bullets chopped into the ground near Trudy, tracking closer to her as the shooter adjusted his shots.
“Trudy! Get up! Move to your left to Pike!” As she yelled the order, Bekah tasted the alkaline dust on her tongue.
Immediately, Trudy got up and ran toward Pike, who still hadn’t moved from his crouched position. A small smile quirked his lips, and Bekah would have sworn the man was enjoying himself.
“Tyler! Move!”
The Marine surged up and raced to join Pike and Trudy.
Bekah fell back as well and kept her M4A1 up and ready. She keyed her MBITR comm device when she heard the lieutenant calling for casualties. “This is Indigo Eight Leader. We’re good.”
Four of the other fire teams hadn’t fared so well. Indigo Three and Five had wounded, and Indigo One—the point guys—had taken two casualties and one wounded. One of the casualties was the team leader, and the young private who had survived was totally losing his mind.
“I got two dead, Indigo Leader! Team leader is dead! The other guy looks like he’s bleeding out! I need a corpsman!”
With the wall at her back, Bekah tried to figure out where Indigo One was. They had to be up ahead of her.
“Indigo Eight.” Lieutenant Bridger sounded calm, but there was tension in his voice.
So much for keeping everyone intact, Bekah thought, then immediately felt guilty. Marines were dead. More might be dying. She replied in a hoarse voice. “I read you, Leader.”
“You and your team are solid?”
“Affirmative. I think we’re also the closest to Indigo One at this point.”
“You are. They need you to assist. Can you provide support?”
“We’re on our way.”
“We’re going to give you some cover.”
Bekah rose into a crouch and motioned to her team as the firing from the Marine positions escalated. Pike stepped into the right-wing position beside Bekah like he’d been there all his life. His rifle was up and ready.
Bullets continued peppering the area from gunners in the surrounding buildings. Every now and again, a rocket warhead hit the ground and split the earth, throwing up another cloud of dirt and dust.
“Right side.” Pike’s warning came at the same time Bekah noticed him in motion, twisting to the right and bringing his rifle around.
21
THROUGH THE SMOKY, DUSTY HAZE that filled the immediate area, Bekah barely spotted the five men running toward them. All wore the red-and-white-checked keffiyehs and long jackets that marked them as al-Shabaab. They carried AK-47s and SAR 80s, already firing, and the harsh crack-crack-crack of the weapons sounded muted and far away because her ears still rang from the explosives that had detonated.
The bullets, however, weren’t far away. They tore into the earth in front of her and pinged off the nearby rubble. Chunks of stone leaped into the air.
Something slammed into Bekah’s helmet as she returned fire. Her head bounced back slightly, but she quickly recovered. She knew she’d been hit by a round but that the helmet had stopped it. She also knew the round had to have been one of the 5.56mm rounds from the SAR 80s instead of the heavier rounds fired by the AK-47s, otherwise the impact would have been much more serious.
But she’d come only inches from leaving Travis without a mother.
Pike fired from the crouched position, squeezing off exact three-round bursts into their attackers. Two of the al-Shabaab terrorists went down almost immediately. The three remaining gunmen recognized that they weren’t going to easily overpower their prey as they’d believed and split up.
Slightly leading the gunman who had run off to her left, Bekah aimed for the center mass of the man’s body and squeezed off two bursts. The gunman’s gait suddenly lost rhythm, and he fell in a headlong rush as the AK-47 tumbled free of his hand. He rolled and landed on his back, reaching for the assault rifle. Bekah took aim again and fired another burst of rounds into the man’s head and chest. The terrorist shivered and lay still, and the amount of bright blood spilling out across the ground under the late-morning sun told her that he wasn’t getting up again.
When she’d first gone into combat, Bekah had never thought about the emotional consequences of killing others. That was something a person didn’t talk about back in the real world. Sometimes a civilian asked a question like that, and she ignored it. Most military personnel who had been in combat acted the same way. When a Marine went back to the civilized world, they tried to keep the war in a different place.
She didn’t think about the number of opponents she’d killed. Or possibly killed. With everything that happened in a battle, it was hard to know for certain.
But she knew she’d killed this man, and she accepted it just as she had all the others that had been confirmed.
The two remaining al-Shabaab fighters tried to reach cover, but a hail of bullets knocked them to the ground.
“Let’s go.” Bekah glanced at her team and made certain they were in one piece. Then she rose in a crouch and ran forward to confirm that the men were down.
All of them were dead.
Tyler looked at the men and quickly turned away. His eyes had rounded behind the John Lennon glasses. Whatever exposure he’d had to combat, it hadn’t been this up close and personal. Bekah made a mental note to talk to him later, see where his head was at. Having him freeze up at some point would be dangerous for all of them.
On the move again, Bekah led the team into an alley on the other side of the broken remnant of the building and resumed her heading toward Indigo One’s position. The firefight continued, only this time a new sound entered the fray: a roaring engine.
Glancing ahead toward the end of the alley, Bekah paused next to a doorway as a pickup truck with a 7.62mm machine gun mounted on the rear deck screeched around the corner and sped toward them. She lifted her rifle and opened fire, a half second behind Pike.
Their rounds bounced off the thick metal plate welded to the front of the pickup. More metal covered the windshield, giving the driver a narrow field of view. The vehicle looked like a bulldozer coming at them.
/> “The door! Move!”
Pike heaved himself at the flimsy wooden door and crashed through into the room beyond. Trudy and Tyler went through on his heels as Bekah brought up the rear. She crouched on one knee in the doorway, barely having time to drop into position before the pickup raced by. Thankfully the room was empty and no noncombatants were endangered by the exchange.
Pike was already down and swinging around with his rifle in his hands. “Get down!” Trudy dropped and went flat. When Tyler didn’t react quickly enough, Pike kicked the Marine’s legs out from under him just as the pickup truck drew even with the room.
The machine gun ripped a ragged line of bullet holes through the wall just over Bekah’s head. She had seen that the machine gun’s field of fire was limited by the sides of the vehicle and hoped her low profile would keep her safe. As the pickup roared past, Bekah stepped out into the alley and fired her rifle dry, but she got chased back to cover by the support riflemen using small arms on either side of the machine gunner.
“Indigo Eight, have you reached Indigo One yet?” Gunshots echoed over the connection to the lieutenant, and Bekah knew he and his group were taking heavy fire as well.
“Not yet. On our way.” Bekah reloaded her weapon from the ammo rack across her Kevlar vest. Pike had already taken a support position near the door.
“Pickup’s gone. Ran out onto the next street.” Pike scowled and spat.
Bekah nodded. “Let’s go.”
Pike headed out the door and took point. Bekah followed close behind the big man, surprised at how athletically he moved despite his size. He was like the wind, every movement fluid and natural.
Less than a minute later, while the ambush continued around them, Bekah and her team reached what remained of Indigo One. They had to stay low because the al-Shabaab had a sniper’s nest in a nearby building. The gunmen inside popped out occasionally to pepper the area with rifle fire or launch a rocket-propelled grenade.
The only protection Indigo One had was an L-shaped wall remnant no more than five feet tall. Pike and Bekah kept sporadic fire on the building window to pin the snipers down, but she’d already detected other terrorists running into the building. She didn’t know if the men were trying to retreat or intended to provide additional support.
“Bekah,” Trudy called out from a kneeling position beside a wounded Marine who was bleeding profusely. “I need another pair of hands.” Tyler had joined her there, but he was providing cover fire with the surviving Indigo One Marine.
Bekah swapped looks with Pike. She had worked field medical triage with Trudy before.
The big man nodded as he reloaded his weapon. “I’ve got this. I’ll cover you.”
When Pike started firing, spraying rounds across the window where the snipers were, Bekah darted toward Trudy and the wounded Marine. The other two Marines in the fire team lay a few feet away in the open, torn apart by one of the ground-emplaced explosives. They’d never had a chance.
Bekah took up a position opposite Trudy over the wounded Marine. “What do you have?” She laid her rifle nearby and focused on the mass of blood-soaked material stretched across the Marine’s midsection.
“Abdominal bleeder. Bullet must have taken a weird bounce and got up under his armor. Or he took shrapnel. I can’t tell. I need to get under there and clamp it off if I can, or he’s going to bleed out. Help me get the vest off him.” Trudy pulled at the vest on her side, freeing the Velcro closures. Her hands were covered in blood.
Ignoring the sounds of the battle and the flying stone chips that rained down on her from the sustained sniper fire, Bekah grabbed the vest and tugged at the closures on the wounded man’s side. They opened with a rip. Then she reached for the closures at his shoulders and saw his face for the first time.
“Hey, Marine.” The young man smiled at her, and it took Bekah a second to realize the first time she’d seen his face had been at the auto parts store. His voice was hoarse and shaky, and his eyes looked dull and glassy from shock.
“Hey, Private Caxton.” Bekah put a smile on her face even though she wasn’t feeling it. He was in trouble, maybe dying, and they weren’t far from that fate themselves. The young man was badly hurt and needed to know he was in good hands. “You’re not supposed to get wounded on the first day of the job. I guess you missed that at the briefing.”
Ralph Caxton tried another smile, but he broke into a coughing fit that left bloody spittle around his lips. He tried again. “It’s just a flesh wound.”
“Bekah.”
Looking back at Trudy, Bekah noted the concern on the other woman’s face. She shifted her gaze to Caxton’s stomach. There wasn’t one wound there. The young man had suffered what looked like three, all close together, all jagged and irregular. Bekah realized then that he must have been standing close to the two Marines who had lost their lives. He hadn’t caught a bullet. He’d been hit by shrapnel, and those shards were probably still inside him keeping the wounds open.
Blood poured out of the Marine like water from a boot.
Trudy gazed at Bekah helplessly.
There was nothing they could do for Ralph Caxton, and Bekah knew it. The pain of the loss coupled with the shock of recognition hit her like a fist. She pushed those thoughts away and took a breath.
Deal with this. He needs you to be strong. Deal with it. Maybe a corpsman will get here in time. Maybe he’ll pull through. Don’t give up on him.
“How bad is it?” Ralph’s voice was barely more than a whisper, but he sounded calm.
Bekah made herself smile reassuringly while Trudy called for a medic over the MBITR. “I’ve seen worse, Private.” Bekah reached out and took the young man’s bloody hand. “We’re not going to let you get out of this that easily.”
“Okay.” Ralph took her hand, but he had hardly any strength in his grip. The most noticeable thing was the shaking.
Suddenly he convulsed and gasped.
“Ralph.” Bekah leaned more closely over him and looked into his eyes. “Stay with me, Marine. Do you hear me?”
Ralph’s hand went slack in hers. His eyes turned glassy, and the pupils dilated into black pools that nearly filled the irises.
“Ralph!” Bekah squeezed his hand, willing him to be okay and knowing that he wouldn’t be. He’d lost too much blood. A heart couldn’t pump when it was dry, and his body was shutting down. Death was stealing him away.
Mechanically, Bekah released Ralph’s hand, then straddled his body and started doing a series of chest compressions.
“Bekah.” Trudy pulled at her. “Bekah. He needs blood. Lots of it, and we don’t have any. He’s gone. There’s nothing you can do.”
“No.”
“Bekah.” Trudy pulled at Bekah’s arm again.
Stubbornly, working to wall the grief away inside her, Bekah shook off the woman’s hold and got up off the dead Marine. There would be time to deal with the loss later. She told herself as much, just as she had before, but she knew from experience that a person couldn’t really deal with losses like that. A Marine survived them, accepted another scar that no one else could see, and moved on.
She picked up her M4A1 as another rocket went wide of the wall and blew up inside the building that Pike used for cover. Trudy was canceling the call for the corpsman. Bekah crept to the surviving Marine’s side. She looked him in the eye. He was just a scared kid, bony and angular, looking like he’d just graduated high school.
“What’s your name, Marine?” Bekah made her voice neutral.
“Mike. Mike Carruthers.”
“Mike, I’m Bekah. You’re going to be all right.”
He looked at her wildly and held tightly to his rifle. “They’re going to kill us. We walked into a trap.”
“That’s right, we did. And we’re going to walk back out of this. Are you listening to me?”
“Yes.”
“You keep listening to me and you’re going to be fine.” Bekah spoke with more confidence than she felt. She kept remin
ding herself that other Marines were in the area and they were doing all they could to reach them.
“All right.”
Another warhead detonated against the wall. More rubble showered over them as the wall quivered but miraculously remained standing. Bekah pressed herself against the stones and kept her head ducked, listening to the debris ping off her helmet. The dust gathered intensity and thickened so much she had trouble breathing. When the moment passed, she pulled away from the wall again.
Looking at the young Marine, Bekah knew he was frozen. Getting him out of here was going to be difficult with the snipers in place. She looked back at Pike, who was judiciously returning fire. His presence was probably the only thing keeping the terrorists from pouring out of the building and overrunning their position.
“Pike.”
He looked at her as he reloaded his weapon.
“We need the high ground.” Bekah shoved a fresh magazine into her own weapon and checked her webbing for grenades. She had a small assortment of flashbangs and antipersonnel explosives for urban encounters.
Pike nodded. “Me and you?”
“Yes.”
He smiled grimly. “You think we’re that good?”
“We’d better be.”
“We get through this, I’ll buy you a beer.”
“I’ll let you.” Bekah turned to Trudy and Tyler. “Hold your position here. Give Pike and me cover.”
The two Marines nodded and took up positions along the wall.
Bekah shifted behind the wall, crept toward the corner, and glanced back at Pike. “You take the door. I’ll take the window next to it.”
“Good enough.” Pike rose and cradled the M4A1 in both hands. “Whenever you’re ready.”
Bekah took a deep breath and thought of Travis and her granny. You’re going back home. No matter how bad this looks, you’re getting through it. She let the air out of her lungs and raced around the corner of the wall. Pike ate up the distance with long strides and was on her heels as they crossed the alley to the building where the snipers nested.