by Peter Nealen
It wasn’t much, just hollow wood, so I didn’t even have to reach for the sledgehammer strapped to my back; I just kicked the door in, planting my boot about an inch below the handle. The latch broke away from the door and splintered the jamb, then I was in, Jim on my heels, my rifle up and ready to end anything that looked like it was going to put up a fight.
The hallway went the full length of the building, with doors on either side, most all of them closed. I simply flowed to the first one, kicked it open, and went in, immediately clearing the corner in front of me, then sweeping across the room. Jim was on my ass through the door, button-hooking around to cover the other corner. Nothing. Mark the room, move on.
We came back out into the hallway, and into a shitstorm.
Apparently, one or more of the rooms down the hall were sleeping quarters for tangos. They were spilling out into the hall, in various levels of undress, with weapons. One of them saw me come out of the door and yelled, raising his pistol.
I was already halfway out into the hallway. I just kept going, charging toward the opposite door, even as I smashed the shouter to the floor with a pair of suppressed shots. I slammed my shoulder against the door and it splintered and gave, spilling me into the opposite room. There was another gomer lying on a mat on the floor, reaching for his Kalashnikov, and I shot him, even as Jim opened up from the last room.
A quick glance showed me that this room was clear; somebody was looking out for me. One-man clears are very, very inadvisable. I moved to the door, leaned out into the hall, and added my fire to the devastation that Jim was already causing. I tracked my muzzle back and forth across the tangled mass of bodies in the hallway, pumping rounds into heat signatures. My mag went dry, the bolt locking back, and I ducked back into the room, ripped the empty out, and rocked in a fresh one before sending the bolt home and getting back into the fight.
I leaned out just in time to see Jim put a single round into the head of the last tango moving, who was trying to crawl away. With no more movement in the hallway, I crouched to retrieve the empty mag, and slipped it into my drop pouch before marking the room I was in. I looked across at Jim, who nodded, still covering down the hallway. I came out of my room and headed for the next.
The rest of the sweep was quick and uneventful. Apparently, the gomers had all piled out into the hallway at once, making things much easier for us. Three rooms were obviously sleeping quarters, with the floors practically carpeted in sleeping mats. Another looked like it had been a kitchen.
“Coconut, Hillbilly. Building Three is clear,” I called. “No hostages, approximately twenty tangos, no unknowns, two shooters up.”
“Building One, clear,” Alek replied. “No hostages, two tangos, no unknowns, four shooters up. Moving to Building Four.”
“Roger. Moving to Building Four.” I tapped Jim on the shoulder, where he was covering the front door. He came smoothly to his feet and followed as I headed back to the door we’d breached on the way in. “Hidalgo, Key-Lock, this is Hillbilly. Two coming out.”
“Roger, come ahead,” Nick called. I wouldn’t have exited the building until I got the go-ahead from the inner cordon. Doing otherwise is a good way to get shot by your own team.
I led the way, rounding the corner and heading for the north end of building two, keeping low to avoid any fire from the windows. There were no lights on, and it was dark enough inside the compound that I didn’t figure they could see us, but it never paid to take chances. In less than a minute we joined Alek, Rodrigo, Bob, and Larry at the front door. Alek was in the front of the stack, where he preferred, and he kicked in the door and went in as we fell in at the rear.
There was no hallway; the entire building was one large room, with scattered mats on the floor, and several stacks and crates of weapons and comm gear. There were only three gomers. One of them lifted a FN 5-7 and was smashed to the floor by at least three pairs of shots. A second ran toward us, shouting, “Allahu akhbar!” and met the same fate. The third stood there, waiting for us.
We didn’t have our lights on, the NVGs were enough. There was a lantern in the room, illuminating the jihadi flags on the walls, including the black and white al-Shabaab war flag. There was a table covered in pictures, two laptops, and several weapons, Kalashnikovs and Makarovs.
It was also enough light to see the mocking smile on the third terrorist’s face, as he watched us, his hands at his sides. Bob and Larry started to glide along the wall toward him, as the rest of us kept our rifles trained on him. He just stood there, that small smile on his face.
Just before Bob got within arm’s length of him, he said something in Somali, smiling broadly, then raised his hands and shouted “Allahu akhbar!” I saw his hand curled around something, and yelled, “Trigger!”
Six suppressed shots still made a pretty impressive noise as Mohammed Khasam’s head was splashed into a red mist of blood, brain, and bone, and he dropped to the floor like a puppet with its strings cut. Ordinarily, bullet impacts will not cause explosives to detonate by themselves, but none of us wanted to take that chance, or that a suicide vest would stop the rounds and give him time to hit the trigger. When he collapsed and did not explode, we all breathed a tiny sigh of relief. Larry moved up and carefully removed the trigger from his hand. He held it up; it was a garage door opener.
“Figure he’s still live,” Alek said quietly. “We’ve got five minutes. Tear this place apart. Kemosabe, let’s arrange a tragic bomb maker’s accident.”
Rodrigo and I took security on the door, while the rest of the team went to work. Jim checked the corpses for explosives first. The runner had had a grenade, which he hadn’t pulled the pin from. Khasam had nothing on him, but Larry called Jim over a moment later.
The IED was under a tarp next to several crates of PETN. It would have been a hell of a boom, and none of us would have left much to get sent home. Maybe some teeth, if they could be found. It made Jim’s job easier, though.
“Don’t even fuck with it,” he said, picking up the trigger from where Larry had set it on the table. “We’ll get a decent distance away, and use this on the way out.”
Alek and Bob were going over the materials on the table, shoving pictures and documents into drop pouches. How much of it would be useful, we didn’t know. It didn’t matter. The longer we were on the target site, the more chance Murphy had to rear his ugly head.
We had been on-site for about four and a half minutes when Alek keyed his radio. “Cleghorn, Coconut. Ready for exfil, meet us at the gate.” He let off, then keyed again. “All stations, collapse on the gate.”
There was a chorus of acknowledgments, then Alek was behind me, thumping me on the shoulder. I went out the door we had come in, rifle still up and ready. Nothing. An IR light flashed from the far corner, and I returned the flash. A moment later, Tim and Hank came around the end of the east building, where they had been holding inner cordon duties. I heard footsteps behind me, where Rodrigo was covering, as Nick and Colton closed up with the rest of the team.
A moment later, we heard the rumble of a diesel engine, and then the 3-ton was out front, with Jon and Chad in the back, manning two of our M60E4s, which they had laid over the top of the slats around the bed. It wasn’t fancy, and accuracy was going to suffer, but it would work for a hasty technical.
The guys who had been on inner cordon set up hastily on a knee around the truck, while the rest of us piled on the back. The bed was positively bristling with weapons by the time the last two got on. Alek beat on the roof of the cab, and Cyrus hit the accelerator, speeding us out of there.
Chapter 8
The team room was quiet. Colton and Nick were going through the pictures and laptops we had taken from the target site. Most of the rest of us were sitting on our cots, sweating and cleaning our rifles.
Something was bugging me. I tried to just focus on weapons maintenance, but finally gave up. The M1A didn’t get all that dirty anyway. I finished putting my rifle back together, stood up, and walked ov
er to Alek’s cot.
“We need to talk,” I said.
He looked up from his OBR. “Uh-oh. Have I been leaving the toilet seat up again?”
“Oh, fuck off,” I replied, as he laughed. “We’ve got some serious shit to discuss.”
“All right, all right,” he said, still chuckling. “Let me finish putting this back together, and then we’ll have a sit-down.” I went back to my bunk, shaking my head.
It didn’t take long. Alek put the rifle back together with a speed and ease born of long practice, then came over and sat on Bob’s cot, across from me. “All right, Jeff, what’s on your mind?”
I leaned forward, my elbows on my knees. “What would we have done if we hadn’t schwacked everybody on that target site last night? What if one or more of them had surrendered?”
“We’d have grabbed them,” he replied.
“And done what?” I asked. “We could lock ‘em up in a room in that garage out back, but then what? None of us are trained interrogators. For fuck’s sake, we’ve got twenty-five guys on the ground, hanging in the wind, fuckin’ blind. We can’t afford to take detainees, at least not for any length of time. We’ve got to keep ‘em fed and watered, at least, and we don’t have the time or the facilities to interrogate them effectively. And I’m not sure I’m comfortable with the options I could come up with.”
For a long moment, Alek sat there and thought, looking at his hands. “You’re right,” he said quietly. He stood up and started toward the comm end of the room. “Come on. We’ve got a call to make.”
It was the middle of the night back in the States, but when the Colonel came on the satellite link, he didn’t look like a man who had just been awakened. I suspected that he had been up already. “What’s up, Alek?” he asked.
“Problems,” Alek replied. “We hit Khasam’s hideout last night, killed everybody and we’re sifting through what the site exploitation brought out. Fortunately, none of them surrendered, so we didn’t have detainees to deal with.
“Jeff brought it up just now, and I agree with him,” he continued. “If the Agency wants us to do the dirty work on the ground, they need to provide some more support. We’re undermanned for this, and we have zero room for error. We also don’t have the training, facilities, or gear we need for the intel side of this operation. If they want us to find these guys, we need intel, we need backup, and, if it comes to it, we need somewhere to take detainees for processing. We can’t do it. We don’t have the time or the logistics.”
Heinrich shook his head. “I’ve been trying, Alek. So far I’ve been stonewalled on most of it. They’re telling me that there are no assets available in that part of the world.”
“Bullshit,” I put in. “There was a JSOC compound at that base, and they expect us to believe that they don’t have any assets at all?” I folded my arms. “Bullshit.”
“Look, gents,” the Colonel said, “there’s a lot of politics going on behind all this. I don’t know all of it, but it’s putting a real monkey-wrench in trying to get you guys more support. The military has been warned to keep out of Djibouti’s territorial waters and airspace. I’ve been told it’s because of worries about casualties, but the fact is, I just don’t know.” He gusted a sigh. “Look, get me a list of what you need, and I’ll make a few more calls. Maybe I can get somewhere this time.”
“We need real-time sat and electronic intel,” Alek said, ticking points off on his fingers. “We need everything they’ve got on recent terrorist movements in-country. I know that everything those boys in Lemonier saw got sent back to the States and backed up. We need all of it, if we’re going to come anywhere near finding those hostages. You know, I know, and they know that we’re dealing with a finite time schedule here.” He tapped another finger. “We need somewhere to process and deliver detainees. I don’t care if it’s offshore, over the border, or in the middle of Bumfuck, Egypt, we need somebody here who is trained on this sort of thing. We’re trigger-pullers, not interrogators.”
He took a deep breath. “And, on top of all that, we need to know what the plan is to get these guys out when and if we find them. They’re talking something close to 200, most of whom will be in need of medical attention and transport. Who’s coming for them? Where? Where’s extract for this operation? We have to have that information, and we need it yesterday.”
The Colonel just nodded. “I’ve been harping on half of that list for the last week, Alek. But I’ll try again, and see if I can get something more substantial than the bureaucratic runaround I’ve been getting. I’ll call you guys back when I’ve got something.” The link went dead.
Things were getting worse out in the city. The Islamist militias were now openly attacking government forces wherever they could be found, which was fewer and fewer places as they went to ground and hunkered down behind walls and barbed wire. The president was running scared, especially with few of his European backers even bothering to return his calls. Given what we had heard of the chaos in Europe after the collapse of the euro and the subsequent disintegration of the EU, that should have come as a surprise to no one.
It had turned out that the Sudanese butcher, Omar Sadiq Hasan, had insinuated himself into the opposition to such a point that he was being put forward as the next leader of an Islamic Djibouti. This was bad news, especially as we suspected, from what Imad had heard, that he had had some part in the attack on Lemonier. The question was, did we risk taking him out? We needed more information.
Meanwhile, refugees were fleeing the city, and militia checkpoints were going up. The government only owned the port area now, and the Legion’s 13th Demi-Brigade was still staying put.
Imad had slipped back out into the city. He could pass for Afar or Issa if he liked, and was gregarious enough that he could easily slip into just about any group of people and be accepted. I hoped that he wasn’t trying to infiltrate any of the militias, but gathering information was his primary task right now, and he’d do what he thought was necessary to accomplish that.
The rest of us stayed in the compound. The streets were even more dangerous for Westerners now, and all but the hardiest aid workers and journalists had run. Almost overnight, the tourist industry in Djibouti had been extinguished. We could handle ourselves, but Alek had decided that it was going to be more productive to hold tight, and wait for word from Imad or the Colonel, whichever came first.
Of course, given our cover, we qualified as one of those particularly hardy groups of aid workers. There was almost constantly a line outside of Dave’s aid station these days.
As it turned out, the Colonel beat Imad to the punch.
We rolled through the darkened streets in the brown Range Rover, lights out to avoid attracting attention. There weren’t many people out on the streets after dark lately, aside from militias, but there were checkpoints, and we wanted to avoid those at all costs.
Colton was driving, weaving a serpentine route through the streets and back alleys of the city, heading southeast toward the coast. He had his FAST helmet on, his NVGs clipped to them, and his rifle jammed between the seat and the gearshift next to him. Hank was sitting in the passenger seat, similarly kitted up, with his Galil ACE 53 across his lap. Alek and I were in the back seat, fully geared up with vests, helmets, and rifles.
Nobody talked. We didn’t have much to talk about, anyway, and everyone was a little on edge. The reason why became abundantly obvious when we rounded a corner, and abruptly slowed. Colton muttered, “Oh, fuck.”
Alek and I leaned forward to see past Colton and Hank, and saw the checkpoint in the middle of the street. It didn’t look like much, just a pile of junk and old tires across the road, with two gomers lounging next to it. Neither looked to be all that alert; in fact, one looked like he was asleep.
“Plan B,” Alek hissed. He and I immediately bailed out, leaving our rifles. We hoped to get past this without any shooting.
I went left, while Alek went right. I soft-footed it down the side alley, trying to a
void kicking any of the cans or other detritus, and looking for the next break in the haphazard shacks. I found it in seconds, and started working my way around toward the checkpoint.
A dog started barking to my left, and I froze, looking around, but I couldn’t see it, even with the thermal imagery turned on. Whether it had smelled me, or was just barking, I couldn’t tell. Oh well, nothing to do about it. I kept going.
After a moment, I heard the crunch of gravel and trash as Colton started rolling again. I was getting closer; I could hear the two gomers at the checkpoint chatting quietly in Afar. Just as well we were trying to go nonlethal here; from what we’d seen, most of the Afar were miserably poor, and just caught in the middle of the crapstorm that was enveloping the city. These guys were probably just neighborhood militia trying to defend their families.
I turkey-peeked around the corner, and could see the checkpoint. I was about four long strides from them, and they hadn’t heard shit. Plus they were smoking, so there went their night vision. It went away even further as Colton flipped on the headlights.
They both started, and threw up their hands against the glare, squinting and yelling in Afar. I came around the corner and started moving.
I got to my target a second before Alek. I came in low and fast, just behind him as he started walking toward the Defender, loosely cradling an ancient, battered Mosin-Nagant. I wasn’t subtle. I came up and hammer-fisted him at the base of the skull. Lights out. I caught him as he crumpled, and dragged him over to the side of the street. Alek was down on the ground, choking out his gomer. The Afar twitched and struggled a little bit more, then went limp. Alek gently moved him out of the line of traffic, as Colton turned the headlights off again. We got back in, hastily closing the doors, while trying not to make too much noise. Colton was rolling before the latches clicked.