Reflexive Fire - 01

by Jack Murphy

  Richie stormed out of the kitchen, ego bruised, but reputation still about par for the course.

  Back out in the hall, Deckard grabbed several Kazakhs who were standing by for further orders.

  He had no way of knowing the status of the assault topside, but it was time to open the bunker doors and find out.

  The only way left to go was up.

  One of the Kazakhs leaned against the cliff face, making stirrups with his hands.

  Putting a hand on the merc's shoulder to steady himself, Kurt stuck a booted foot in his hands and sprung upwards, searching for and finding purchase on a rock sticking out of the dirt. Scrambling up, he found himself on an embankment that looked to offer an easy way forward over open terrain.

  Leaning over the edge, he gave his squad the thumbs up to begin climbing up.

  Offering his hand, Kurt helped the next Kazakh up the slope, preventing him from sliding back down. Grabbing him by his belt, the German's bicep flared as he lifted and flung him onto the embankment. The Kazakh stood up, dusting himself off, when the hand of god seemed to swat the mercenary right out of the air, literally tearing him to pieces.

  His face now splattered with his comrade's blood, Kurt rolled out of the way as large caliber rounds tore apart the ground he had occupied a fraction of a second before, churning up a cloud of dust in their wake.

  The noise was deafening, twin barrels chewing apart everything in their line of fire. What had become merely sporadic bursts from the support by fire line now ceased completely, the assault's momentum lost.

  Kurt rolled right, finding concealment if not cover behind a few rocks piled on top one another. Stealing a glance at the enemy's hard site, he confirmed what he already knew from sound alone. Another ZSU-23, so named for the dual 23mm anti-aircraft cannons, now turned on unarmored ground troops to ruthless and morale-depriving effect.

  With its crew spinning the gun turret's wheels, the cannon rotated, raking the side of the mountain with fire, causing both platoons to find immediate cover or be taken apart like a holiday turkey. The ZSU was roughly one hundred meters away over sloping but open ground. A frontal assault was out of the question.

  “Piet,” Kurt called to the sniper team leader on his radio. “Do you see that other ZSU?”

  “No, the elevation is too high. We can't see it from here but can sure as hell hear it.”

  Kurt considered his options. At any moment the ZSU gunners were liable to see him, and he didn't have any illusions about a few rocks protecting him from twin streams of 23mm bullets.

  “Mendez, this is Kurt. Fire mission, over.”

  “Kurt, this is Mendez. Fire mission, over,” the radio crackled.

  “Grid mission,” Kurt said, looking down at a topographical map. “42S 1350 7595.” He rattled off the most accurate grid possible under the circumstances. Reaching into the pocket sewn onto the shoulder of his fatigue jacket, he retrieved the Silva compass he had carried since his orienteering days as a teenager. “253 degrees.”

  The compass only read degrees, so Phil would have to convert the number to mils for use by the mortar teams. Really it was the least of his problems. The anti-aircraft gun chopped away at the mountainside with a hailstorm of automatic fire.

  He had a fat finger trying to read digits and analyze terrain features in the dark with just a small red lens flashlight. At any rate he was definitely into the red with this one.

  “Danger close. Anti-aircraft cannon, no overhead cover.”

  “Roger.”

  The pause seemed to go on forever while he waited for Mendez to get his guns aligned.

  “Shot, over.”

  “Shot, out.”

  “Splash, over.”

  Kurt's jaw tensed. There was a certain margin of error when using mortars at over a klick away and having them land right in front of you. He was only a hundred meters from the intended target.

  The 82mm HE round went wide, landing to the right of the ZSU-23. Kurt blew out his cheeks. Not that he didn't have faith in the mortar section or anything.

  “Splash, out. Left two hundred meters.”

  It was hard to adjust fire at night with limited equipment. He could have Mendez fire an illumination round first to light up the area, which would give him forty seconds or so of light to make adjustments, but in the meantime who knew how many hidden mercenaries he'd be buddy fucking if the light revealed their positions and subjected them to more than half a minute of fire from that cannon?

  He'd just walk the rounds laterally until he got them behind the gun and then walk them in.

  “Shot, over.”

  “Shot, out.”

  “Splash, over.”

  The mortar round exploded smack dab behind the ZSU.

  “Splash, out. Drop fifty meters. Fire for effect.”

  “Drop fifty. Fire for effect.”

  While the mortar tubes could be heard bellowing in the distance, the rounds themselves didn't whistle as they soared overhead.

  Three 82mm mortar tubes hung ten rounds apiece in rapid succession, the high explosives detonating all around the ZSU, rocking the gun and its crew with blast after blast that lit up the night, casting spooky shadows across the rocky ground.

  By the time Phil and his boys were done, there probably wouldn't be enough of the bad guys left to soak up with a sponge.

  “Let's go, lift that cross bar,” Deckard ordered, stepping forward to help the five Kazakhs struggling with the heavy wooden beam. With a final grunt, the six of them were able to lift the beam from the metal braces it sat in and drop it on the tunnel floor.

  The twin metal doors sounded like nails on a chalkboard as they were pushed open. Deckard gave the halt sign to the Kazakhs with a closed fist and began walking towards the mouth of the tunnel. Linking up with friendly forces in the middle of a firefight had an exceedingly high probability of some kind of blue on blue incident going down. Friendly fire usually wasn't.

  Confronted with a series of ninety degree turns, he snaked through the passage, which was wide enough to drive a truck through. The turns were designed to prevent Uncle Sam from launching a cruise missile straight into the mountain fortress through the front door. Feeling his way through the darkness, he could hear the occasional crump, crump, crump of mortars.

  The fight wasn't over yet.

  Turning the last bend, Deckard could see the mouth of the tunnel and flipped on his radio just in time to hear someone who sounded like Mendez making a transmission. It was coming in garbled and undecipherable, due to him still being underground.

  The ground shook hard enough to knock Deckard to his hands and knees. His first thought was an earthquake, until he registered thirty or more mortar rounds striking a position that couldn't be more than fifty meters from where he stood.

  As the tunnel flooded with dust, a supporting beam jutting across the ceiling fell free, shaken loose by the onslaught outside and landed with a crash just inches from Deckard's head.

  Coughing and spitting out dust, he snapped a green chem stick and tossed it outside the mouth of the tunnel, giving the all-clear signal.

  “Any station on this net,” he choked out, “this is Samruk Six.”

  “Hey, O'Brien. This is Kurt.”

  Apparently call signs had fallen by the wayside during the fog of war or something.

  “You see my green chem?”

  “Scheisse. Is that you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Are you okay? There was an anti-aircraft gun right next to the opening of the tunnel. I didn't even know it was there until you mentioned the chem stick you just threw out.”

  “I'll live. Move up and secure this area. As soon as that's done, I need you and Adam in here.”

  “Roger.”

  “Got it,” Adam's voice came over the net.

  Standing at the entrance to the tunnel, Deckard watched sunlight creeping over the horizon, casting long shadows across the mountains. It created a panorama that looked like a Nicolas Roerich painting.
The infiltration and assault had taken all night. With pilots unwilling to fly into such a hotly contested area during daylight, they were stuck out in the hinterlands until nightfall.

  Motherfucker.

  Reconsolidation and reorganization took an additional forty-five minutes. Deckard knew from past experience that it would take some time to get their act together with the entire company spread out over difficult terrain. All troops had to be accounted for. Wounded needed to be identified and treated. Dead needed to found and gathered in a centralized location.

  After writing the final numbers down on an index card, his eyes seemed frozen on the figures. Twelve dead, twenty-three wounded. Most of the wounded were ambulatory, but three, including the sucking chest wound he had observed earlier, were urgent surgical.

  Sliding the card into the front pouch of his assault rig, Deckard knew the mission was far from over. Not until the helicopters set down at Bagram Airfield would he even begin to let his guard down.

  Looking over his shoulder and down the corridor, he could hear the muffled sounds of Adam interrogating the two prisoners in a side room. The walls of the hallway were littered with empty crates and what looked like oversized sardine tins, all three platoons having replenished their AK magazines from the enemy stockpile. Richie directed the several Kazakhs assisting him in setting the charges, linking them off the line of detonation chord running down the hall.

  Piled at the mouth of the tunnel were several crates of recovered 82mm mortar rounds.

  “Richie, how long?” Deckard shouted down the hall to him.

  “Five minutes,” Richie shrugged.

  “Kurt,” he said, walking into the kitchen area that had been converted into the casualty collection point, “do me a favor and tell the platoon sergeants that I want all three platoons moved out of here. Find some fortified areas outside to hunker down in until nightfall and move the dead and wounded there. We're going to demo this place in ten minutes,” he said, adding a buffer to Richie's estimation.

  “No problem,” Kurt said looking up from one of the wounded Kazakhs he was tending to.

  “How is Chuck?”

  “Concussion. He'll be okay in a few days. When you suffer that kind of blast, your brain gets bounced around and bruised pretty bad. That's why he looks drunk right now.”

  Looking across the room, Charles Rochenoire did indeed look like he'd been on all-night bender, and if Kurt had not vouched for the salvo of RPG fire he was in the middle of, Deckard probably wouldn't have believed the concussion story.

  Supposedly, a Kazakh corporal had found Chuck wandering around the mountain absentmindedly with a PKM, firing at any rocks or sandbags that looked at him the wrong way.

  “I also want Third Platoon to carry those recovered mortar rounds down to Mendez and then reinforce the mortar section.”

  “That's a hike.”

  “I don't want to leave him out there by himself all day. If need be, he can collapse back to our position. I don't like splitting our forces in half, anyway.”

  Moving back outside, Deckard took a knee as Third Platoon came pouring out behind him, carrying the crates of mortar rounds. The men looked tired but motivated, several of them walking wounded. Deep down he knew they were better then he deserved.

  “Mendez,” he said, keying the radio. “I'm sending Third Platoon down to you with a resupply.”

  “Ah, okay,” the mortar section leader paused. With the sun cresting above the horizon, he probably hadn't waited a moment longer to light up a smoke. “Cool, I'll be waiting for 'em.”

  “Roger, out.”

  Deckard watched Third Platoon as they made their way down the mountain on the donkey paths, the mercenaries growing smaller as they got farther away until they looked like a line of ants. By then First and Second platoon were emerging from the bunkers, carrying the dead and dying on improvised stretchers. Chuck stumbled along with them incoherently. Frank brought up the rear. His assault pack was overflowing with potential intelligence sources he'd found on the objective.

  “What have you got?”

  “A laptop, a few hard drives I pulled out of computers, bunch of documents, a couple Thuraya satellite phones, took down serial numbers off of everything including the lot numbers off the ammo crates.”

  “Don't let that pack leave your sight. I want you and Adam all over that shit as soon as we get back to Astana.”

  “Right on.”

  “Alright, get up there and assist Kanat and Alibek for now.”

  “Groovy.”

  Frank grunted, following the Kazakhs up to another fortified area they had found.

  Deckard moved back inside, personally checking each room to ensure that no one was left behind. All he found were the bodies of insurgents with flies crawling across their lifeless eyeballs.

  “Adam,” he said, finding the ad hoc interrogation room. “Move those two jokers out of here with the rest of the company. This place is about ready to go.”

  The two prisoners had had their hands tied with some rope as they were not carrying flex cuffs or other conventional restraints. One of them was a grimy looking creep; the other an older guy with a beard.

  “Alright,” he responded momentarily, switching from Pashto to English. “Too bad. I'm about done with these guys. We could just leave them here and drop the roof on ‘em.”

  “I can give you a few more minutes.”

  “Nah, I'll get them out of here.”

  “Have it your way.”

  Adam led the two Afghans out at gunpoint while Richie was uncoiling time fuse towards the entrance.

  “Is this shit going to work?”

  Richie gave him a what the fuck look.

  “Awesome.”

  “You ready, boss?”

  “Do it.”

  Richie turned the pins on the fuse igniter, and with a snap and fizzle, the time fuse began to burn.

  “Three minutes,” Richie announced.

  “Three minutes until detonation,” Deckard announced over the net as they cleared the tunnel entrance.

  Following the same path as the two platoons, they climbed past the wreckage of the ZSU-23 that Mendez had mortared. Distracted, his eyes were drawn to the ridge line above them. They had good coverage from where they were but no vantage point at the summit of the mountain.

  “Piet?” he called into his radio.

  “Yes?”

  “Think your snipers can cheat forward up to the top to the ridge and give us eyes on the other side of this hill?”

  Static hissed over the radio.

  “Yeah, give me a minute to get the boys moving.”

  “Roger, let me know when-”

  Deckard's words were cut off as gunfire smacked the ground on his flanks, the muzzle flashes clearly announcing the enemy gunfire from the ridge above them.

  Twelve

  Unblinking dilated eyes fixated on the flat screen television.

  The incoming feed was displayed in black and white with data plates arrayed along the edges of the frame, showing azimuth heading, altitude, wind speed, time on target, and other critical data. Fifty-something crazed Islamists flooded down the side of the mountain, clashing with Kazakh mercenaries and their American compatriots.

  Flashes across the screen showed the exchange of gunfire, the Taliban gunmen taking the brunt of it as the Kazakhs fought back with a vengeance. Rockets shot through the air, some creating a splash to great effect as seen by the forward looking infrared system on the unmanned drone's observational camera package.

  Larger impacts walked across the crest of the mountain, devastating the platoon of mujahedin fighters. Below, Hilux pickup trucks ground to a halt at the base of the mountain, each vehicle disgorging another small army of fighters. Just then, the entire mountain shuddered as the bunker system was collapsed by explosives. A dark pillar of smoke poured out of the tunnel's mouth.

  His heart beat faster as the firefight raged on.

  The footage fizzled across the screen for a mom
ent before returning to normal. The drone circled overhead at twenty thousand feet, its sophisticated cameras zooming in close enough to see individual soldiers. With MIK gone, the Taliban knew there was a power vacuum and wanted to fill it, regardless of the foreign invaders who had done them the favor of disposing of their rival.

  The disruption of the live feed distracted him for a moment. Losing focus, his heart rate began to return to normal. During the height of the insurgency in Iraq he was able to watch every night, watch the various Army units trade fire with terrorists as they raided house after house. Some days he was lucky enough to see an IED blast kill some of the blood bags riding in the vehicles. Now he had to savor these moments.

  It wouldn't be enough to watch a recording. There was nothing like watching death in real time.

  His pulse quickened again, endorphins coursing through his bloodstream. The battle reminded him that this was foreplay compared to what was coming, what he was creating. The great culling would come, and his new plaything on the screen, fighting for its life, would be an instrument of that harvest.

  Kammler swallowed hard.

  The Gulfsteam 550 banked, finding a new heading toward Eurasia.

  “Hey boss,” -the drone was also intercepting all radio traffic coming from down below- “I know this isn't the time, but I don't want to move these guys again. The younger prisoner is a foot soldier, but it turns out the old guy is MIK’s number two, his brother actually. What do you want me to do with these clowns?”

  “Do 'em.” It was the voice of the man he had met at the Grove. O'Brien.

  On the plasma screen a flash of gunfire could be seen independent of the ongoing firefight.

  “Done deal,” the other voice answered back.

  Kammler took a deep breath, forcing himself to relax.

  This O'Brien was special. Another dumb animal to be expended, yes, but an animal with its uses. He was resourceful and ruthless; the Afghanistan mission had been a testament to that. He took the big risks, expecting the big payday.