Ali and his comrade, an Arab that Yusuf recognized but did not know, grabbed a pair of RPG-7s leaning against the windowsill and ran for a doorway at the end of the room, motioning for Yusuf to follow them. He did so, catching a glimpse through the window of the truck-mounted rocket launchers on the roadway outside. They had been destroyed, utterly destroyed, as if a giant had smashed his fist down on top of them. The wreckage was aflame, and occasionally small explosions tossed twisted metal refuse into the air as ammunition or fuel cooked off. Of the janissaries, or the foolish drunken pirates as he thought of them, there was little to be seen beyond a few chunks of burning meat and random limbs scattered here and there.
It meant nothing to Yusuf. The carnage of battle was familiar to him, even if the terrible intensity of the American attack was something new. Feeling dizzy, with his legs wobbling and his ears ringing, he hurried to catch up with Ali and the other fedayeen. The rolling thunder of rocket and bomb blasts had abated somewhat in the last few minutes, giving way to an increasingly furious crescendo of gunfire and the clattering roar of helicopters. The three men ran toward an internal staircase, passing a couple of pirate mercenaries on their way. The pirates were no longer laughing and singing. They looked shocked and furious. Indeed, so murderously angry did they first appear that Yusuf thought it possible they might turn their weapons on the fedayeen. He almost raised his own gun, but Mustafa Ali was in the way. Probably a good thing. The pirates would almost certainly have turned on them if he had reacted that way. Instead they simply ran past one another, shouting incomprehensibly in some language he did not recognize. Yusuf followed Ali up the staircase, covering two flights of steps in what seemed like no time.
The Arab and the Pakistani exchanged a few brief words on the second floor and came quickly to an agreement. Beckoning Yusuf to follow them, they ran down along the corridor with ruined offices on one side and a long line of mostly shattered windows looking out over the burning wreckage of the rocket launchers on the other. Every inch of flesh on Yusuf's body crawled sickeningly as an American helicopter swept by. It was one of the fat troop transports they called Blackhawks. A door gunner seemed to look right into his eyes as he worked frantically to clear a jam on his weapon. Yusuf jumped in surprise as Ali fired an RPG out of the window without any sort of warning. Thick acrid smoke filled the corridor and burned his eyes, but he was still able to watch the long looping flight path as the rocket-propelled grenade sped out of the building and flicked across a short distance to the second lumbering metal bird, striking it squarely in the cockpit.
All three of the fedayeen warriors yelled in surprise and delight as a greasy orange ball of flame engulfed the front of the Blackhawk, wrenching it out of its flight path. Yusuf saw the door gunner flung backward into the cabin just before a secondary explosion tore the main body of the helicopter in two. It dropped from the sky with sickening speed, spilling four-no, five-of its occupants out into clear air. Two of them were engulfed in flames, but the others looked like rag dolls as they fell. Exaltation and horror swirled in Yusuf's mind. He made to run over and congratulate Ali on the fluke shot, but even as he took the first step, his comrades flew apart in front of his eyes, their bodies disintegrating as the corridor around them suddenly was chewed up by a savage storm of return fire.
The boy soldier dropped to the ground without conscious thought. He could hear the pounding thrum of the helicopter that had swept in immediately after the first one had gone down. It must have been very close, because the sound of its miniguns spewing thousands of rounds into the space where his comrades had stood, living and breathing just half a second ago, seemed to fill the world right out to its very edges. Though he couldn't see it, he thought it must have been one of the small egg-shaped helicopters from the gunfire, which sounded like the ripping of a great sail. They had warned him about those metal devils. Giving no conscious thought to his actions, Yusuf moved with animal quickness, crawling through the nearest open door and getting a couple of inches of solid brickwork between himself and the lethal rain of fire. Not that he had any illusions about the safety of hiding behind a wall should the Americans turn one of their satanic cannons on him, but by hiding at least he might escape their attention.
His skin felt as though he were on fire. He realized he had soiled his pants, but it did not matter. At least he was alive. The frightening hammering sound of the helicopter's machine guns trailed off, and with it the dull thumping beat of its rotor blades. He gave himself a minute to recover from the shock before crawling out of the room and into the corridor, where all that remained of Ali and the other man whose name he did not know were a few bloody rags and scraps of smoking meat. Yusuf kept his head down and his weapon in front of him as he belly crawled away from the horrible scene as quickly as he could. He was certain he could hear harsh flat voices shouting in English somewhere nearby, and he imagined the whole building filling up with cruel American soldiers. There was nothing for it but to get himself away from here so that he might fight another day.
Reaching the stairwell up which they had just climbed, he dragged himself back to his feet and hurried down unsteadily. He knew that to run out of the building was to invite almost immediate death from the circling helicopters, and so as soon as he reached the ground floor, he turned down another hallway and ran as fast as he could on rubbery, shaking legs and with his lungs burning as though he were drowning in blazing gasoline. He did not see any other fighters, which was probably a good thing. If they were as traumatized and unbalanced as he, they were likely to kill one another. Hurrying away from the part of the island where the rocket launchers had been parked, he found himself in unfamiliar surroundings. The noise of battle dropped away just a little, but his confusion increased. He soon found himself at the end of the hallway where a door, apparently shattered by gunfire, opened onto an area of concrete tarmac and beyond that the water. Driven by fear now, and humiliation, Yusuf threw his assault rifle away and sprinted out the door and into daylight, covering the short distance to the edge of the water in just a few seconds. A single loop played in his mind. He could not let himself be captured. None of the fedayeen were to allow themselves to be captured. Gunfire cracked somewhere behind him, and it felt as though every muscle in his back was clenched tight in anticipation of the bullet that must surely be coming for him, but he ignored it and ran on, launching himself into the air and out over the dirty green water. He did not expect to survive.
6
New York "Incoming fire!" the Blackhawk pilot shouted.
Milosz winced as his headphones amplified the man's cry to painful levels.
Between the crackle and chatter of the headset and the hammering blades of the helicopter, Sergeant Fryderyk Milosz could not hear the distinctive and all too familiar sound of the BM-21 rockets that were pounding Castle Clinton. But he didn't need to. He could easily follow the bright arc of their flight paths as they zipped in over the river, and the results were laid out beneath him like a grotesque work of art painted in blood and fire. It greatly distressed the former Polish Army GROM operator to see his new countrymen scurrying about, trying to avoid the pepper-black bursts of high-explosive warheads. It distressed him even more to see some of them fail. Scattered around the grounds of Castle Clinton were a number of mangled bodies, some still crawling, some limping heavily, others writhing on the ground in agony. Here and there a few crimson lumps did not move at all. Fortunately, the bastards behind this atrocity were very poor artillerymen. Many of the rockets fell short into the river, throwing up plumes of dirty brown water or not exploding at all. A handful of warheads flew wide, crashing into the surrounding skyscrapers, detonating with extravagant blasts of color that rained deadly shards of glass into the concrete canyons of the city below. A largely empty city, he thought, thank the Virgin Mary.
"I have them. The island at two o'clock," Milosz called out over the intercom, pointing at a collection of massive, aged brick structures on the island to the north of the big Liberty Lady
statue. "In the car park behind the buildings. There! See?"
He pointed out the launch plumes to the ranger fire team in the cabin. Great eruptions of smoke and flares that would not have been visible from ground level on Lower Manhattan, hidden as they were behind the buildings.
"Copy that," the pilot said. "Viper one-three, this is Saber six-one, approaching Ellis Island from the northwest for a visual."
"Viper one-three copies," Milosz's headset told him. He glanced out over the water to see if he could catch a glimpse of Viper one-three, an Apache tank killer assigned to the security detail. He found the helicopter and turned his attention back to the island. "Approaching low from the east. ETA thirty seconds."
"They are BM-21s!" Milosz shouted, scoping the truck-mounted launchers with his rifle. They were still too far off for a decent shot. Plumes of smoke obscured one or more multiple rocket launch systems, Katyushas. As the Blackhawk, flying high and out of reach, orbited Ellis Island, a voice in his headset crackled, "I count six, seven… no, make that a dozen combatants and two launchers."
"Viper, this is Saber. Did you copy last?"
"Viper copies. Stay clear of the island. It'll be rotten with RPGs," Viper one-three said.
"No! Get us closer," Milosz insisted, taking aim at one of the combatants, African by the look of him, clad in ragged olive drab fatigue pants and a ludicrously loud yellow and red patterned shirt. "I can take them. Get us in there."
"Not no, but hell no," the pilot called back.
"But if you get us closer, I can take them out," Milosz argued.
"Negative, Sergeant," the pilot replied. "They'll be waiting in there for us with RPGs."
"Saber six-one, this is Viper one-three. I count fourteen combatants around four truck-mounted BM-21 launchers parked in the parking lot of Ellis Island on the west side. Possible combatants in the museum complex. I am not authorized to fire on a historic landmark," Viper said.
Milosz felt as though his head was going to turn inside out.
These Americans will lose their country yet, he thought, amazed and not a little angry at their reluctance to fire on the enemy. He gauged the range at well over a thousand meters away, too far to make a decent shot with his M14 rifle. It was a good weapon, especially with the Leupold scope, but not quite what he needed for the nig nogs on the island. Now, if he had a fifty-caliber, the story would be very different. Milosz had to content himself with scoping the launchers as a furious exchange went back and forth between the pilot and somebody higher up his chain of command. Even at this distance, with the vibration of the Blackhawk shaking his view in the sight, he could tell the pirates were whooping it up down there, loving every minute of this. They danced and twirled, and a few even performed somersaults as the rockets flew away. Milosz shook his head.
Fools. He tuned out an argument between the Blackhawk's crew chief and the pilot over whether to engage with the M240 door gun. The crew chief lost the argument, fueling Milosz's frustration that much more. He lowered the scope and shook his head at the other three rangers in the bird: Wilson, Sievers, and Raab. Hollywood pussies, he had once called their sort, and his time among them had not changed his opinion entirely, even if it had made him more circumspect about expressing it. They were good men, dedicated, but not as dedicated as his former comrades in the Polish Army. When Germans and Russians have had their boots on your throat for generations, you learn to explore new whole levels of dedication to the task of defending yourself from their ilk.
"Eager to die for your new home, Fred?" Master Sergeant Wilson asked, a thin black man who served as Milosz's squad leader.
The Pole shook his head. "No, I am eager to kill the enemies of my new home."
"The chance will come soon enough," Wilson said, holding a pair of binoculars up to his face. "Looks like Africans or Arabs, do you think? Maybe Jamaicans."
"What does it matter?" Raab asked. "One dead fucker's the same as any other, right?"
"Angolans or Yemenis most likely," Milosz replied, ignoring Raab's contribution.
"Why do you say that?" Wilson asked.
"Those states operate that particular model of BM-21," he said. "They have many to spare and run big looter gangs here, no? It is nothing to loan one to these so-called pirates. That is why I say this."
"Could be anyone," Wilson said, examining the scene below as they banked around to the west.
"We shall see," Milosz said. He watched a U.S. Army AH-64D Apache Longbow come to a hover over the water, outside the reach of the few on the ground who noticed it.
"Stand by," Viper one-three said over the headset. "Engaging. Missile away."
"Put a hurtin' on them fuckers," the Blackhawk pilot said.
Smoke and the flame of more steel javelins climbing away from the launchers in the parking lot obscured the enemy, but as Milosz watched, a barrage of 2.75-inch folding-fin Hydra 70 rockets sliced through and struck the vehicles, tearing them apart in a maelstrom of explosive fire. The cabin of one truck went spiraling high into the air, lazily describing a tumbling flight path back toward a big patch of cleared ground on the Jersey side of the bay but falling well short, dropping onto the causeway that ran out to Ellis Island.
Milosz heard the words "chain gun" through a rush of static just before dark charcoal-gray bursts of smoke began chewing over the parking lot, which quickly disintegrated into a storm of torn steel and fleeing men. Meat and metal swirled in the air, caught in a tornado, as the 30-millimeter cannon fire set off secondary explosions in the wreckage of the Katyusha launchers.
"Yeah!" the Blackhawk pilot whooped. "No one's coming back from that party."
Weapons fire winked at them from one of the larger buildings, a rather beautiful and ornate structure to Milosz's mind, somehow reminiscent of a wedding cake, with four green domed turrets, at least two of them occupied by hostiles. He instinctively reached for a grab bar as the chopper dipped and turned to avoid a line of tracer. The brutal ripping noise of the chain guns sounded again, and when the helicopter had leveled out and he had regained his balance, Sergeant Fryderyck Milosz could see that those turrets were no more.
So much for not shooting up historical monuments, he thought wryly.
"It is good, yes," he said to nobody in particular. "Better that monuments get shot up than Milosz."
An RPG spun forth from a window on an unerring heading, straight toward the Blackhawk.
"Incoming!" Milosz shouted.
The chopper banked and surged, and his stomach felt as though the patron saint of alcoholics had reached inside him and tried to rip it out through his ass. G-forces pressed him down into the deck, and he had trouble holding his head up to watch the action below.
His efforts were rewarded by the sight of another Blackhawk taking an RPG round in the cockpit.
The fast rope insertion went without incident. The four-man team dropped onto the flat roof of what looked like the second largest building, under the shadow of a towering water tank and northwest of what Milosz continued to refer to as the wedding cake building. He thanked the Lord that no shooters had thought to position themselves up there, although he had to admit, that if they had, the Apaches would have reduced them to pink gruel by now.
"On me," cried Master Sergeant Wilson, and the operators rushed to follow him across the roof toward the small cabin that would give them access to a stairwell dropping down into the structure. It was maybe a hundred yards, but it felt like a mile to Milosz, who could not help glancing over at the smoking wreckage of the nearest turrets on the wedding cake. What chance that some new hobgoblin would suddenly pop up there and start spitting fire at them? The hammering thud of an orbiting gunship providing them with cover allowed him to wrestle his thoughts back to the here and now. He fingered the safety on the matte black Mossberg 590 shotgun he had substituted for his M14 back on the chopper. The first shot in the chamber was a breaching round, a shell filled with wax-bound metal powder that would be no good in a fight unless you jammed the muzzle right
into the face of your man. It was, however, purpose-built to destroy deadlocks, hinges, and door handles. The team made the entry point as a stray bullet caromed off the sheet metal roof structure. Milosz heard the sudden roar of the Apache's chain gun but did not turn around to see the results. Wilson and Raab took up positions on either side of the door.
Milosz wasted no time, calling out "Clear!" as he ran up, took aim, and blasted a melon-size hole where the door handle had been. Racking another round into the chamber, a man killer this time, he kicked in the door and fired into the interior.
"Frag out!" Raab called as Miloz sidestepped and the corporal tossed a grenade into the breached doorway. They all took cover from the explosion, which seemed to shake the entire roof structure beneath their boots. Sievers entered with his M249 squad automatic weapon up and ready to hose off any resistance, but no answering shots came from below.
"Man in left," he called out, and Milosz entered, his finger with a half pull on the trigger, the muzzle pointed down the dark musty stairwell. The rangers switched on their tac lights, illuminating a small world of mold, peeling paint, and pigeon shit. The stairs were slick with four years of inattention to care and cleaning.
Wilson and Sievers followed him, the team moving down the steps like a death adder with its teeth out. The crash and uproar of the battle outside fell away only marginally, and Milosz could tell from the heavy drilling sounds below them that at least one heavy weapon was still firing from this building. Every so often, he could hear the whoosh of an RPG climbing away.
Wilson held a closed fist up to halt the squad in place in the stairwell while he queried the enemy's position via his headset. Milosz moved up with Sievers to cover the door leading to the top floor.
"This is Romeo one-one to any element," Wilson said. "We've effected entry. Request location of hostile elements, over."
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