by Peter Nealen
“All right, change of plans,” he said, as half of us listened while facing outboard, particularly facing the town. There was an increasing amount of movement over there, and I could make out more than a few faces turned our way, watching curiously. We were still over four hundred meters away, and there had not been any shots, so they probably couldn’t tell what was going on over here on the beach, but it was only a matter of time before some of the pirates’ buddies figured out something wasn’t right and came to investigate. Knowing Hobyo’s reputation as a pirate town, I had no doubt that if that happened, about half the population of the town would be coming at us. Maybe not quite as bad as Black Hawk Down, but pretty fucking close, and we were out here in the open with no cover. It was not a comfortable-making situation.
“Nick, how much fuel have we got?” Alek asked, pausing in his rundown of the change of plans.
“The trucks are all around three-quarters, and we’ve got about four five gallon jerry cans in the back of the Land Cruisers,” was the reply. “It’ll get us a ways away from here.”
Alek grimaced. “Not far enough, but we’ll have to chance it.” He looked over at Danny. “Where can we find fuel around here?”
The spook scratched his beard. “There aren’t exactly Shell stations on what passes for roadways here. We’d have to find somebody with a fuel truck, or a working gas station, and those are pretty few, from the briefings I’ve gotten. Especially in the last couple of years. Harardhere will almost certainly have fuel, but it’s crawling with pirates, and Al-Jabarti will probably have agents there, if not a cell of his own. The guy’s got his fingers everywhere in the area.”
“Can we make it to Harardhere on the gas we’ve got?” Alek asked Nick.
The Texan was studying the map. “Should be able to. Looks like about seventy-five, eighty miles. Some rough country along the way, but no reason we can’t make it, unless one of the trucks catches a bullet in the gas tank.”
“Uh, Alek?” Larry said. “We might want to get moving, and finish this planning session on the move.” He nodded toward the town. “We’re getting a bit more attention than I like.” He wasn’t kidding. There was a crowd gathering on the south end of town.
Alek looked up, squinting slightly. “Right. Everybody mount up, and have your comms live. We’ll finish this Oscar Mike.”
We scrambled into the vehicles, and Nick gunned the HiLux’s engine even as Bob grabbed on to the grips of the PKM to keep from getting thrown out of the bed. Sand blew up from three sets of tires in rooster tails as we fishtailed into motion.
Behind us, Hobyo exploded into activity as the pirates figured out what was happening.
Chapter 18
Our three vehicles bumped and rattled onto the hard-packed track that passed for a road out of Hobyo, heading southwest along the coast. Nick led the way in the white-and-rust-colored HiLux, while the two brown Land Cruisers followed in trace. This might not have been the best decision tactically, as the HiLux was the only truck with a mounted machine gun, but in our Land Cruiser in the rear, Jim pulled one of the two M60E4s out of its case strapped to a kitbag, and broke out the back window. We now had a rear gunner.
And it looked like we were going to need it. In defiance of Alek’s warning to Ibrahim, dust was rising in great plumes over the outskirts of the town, as a veritable mob of trucks and SUVs came roaring out after us. Already, a few of the more enthusiastic gunners were firing away, their muzzle flashes blazing in the dust, even though they didn’t have a hope in hell of hitting us from that distance and on the move.
Jim, wisely, held his fire. We’d likely need every round. Wasting ammo wasn’t our way, anyway.
Nick was pushing hard, and the SUVs were struggling to keep up with the HiLux. The cloud of dust we were putting up was fast getting thick enough to act as a smokescreen. Trouble was, it also pointed out where we were as effectively as a big neon arrow in the sky pointing to us. Not that there was really anywhere to hide. The Somali coast is flat and dusty, with little more than knee-high scrub. The acacia groves that had grown in Djibouti were nowhere to be seen.
Fighting the wild bouncing of the Land Cruiser, I clambered over the back seat and onto the pile of rucks in the rear, trying not to bounce into Jim too much, or hit him with my rifle. There was too much dust to see much through the scope, and we were moving too violently for anything resembling a good shot, but having another gun facing our pursuers might be a good idea.
Alek was talking over the radio, but I couldn’t hear him. Turned out that my earpiece had fallen out, so I hurriedly stuffed it back in, managing to punch myself in the ear a couple times in the process, as well as bouncing off the Land Cruiser’s roof and possibly bruising my tailbone on Larry’s ruck frame. “…lose these guys,” Alek was saying. “If we can’t do it by ten klicks from Harardhere, we’re going to have to turn and fight.”
Struggling to hold down the 60 with one hand, Jim keyed his radio. “Boss, if we try to stop these guys cold, they’ll chew us to pieces.” He squinted through the dust, which was billowing into the vehicle through the broken rear window. “I can see at least ten technicals; figure about eight to ten guys in each. I say we brake-check these mothers and see if we can chew ‘em up a little at a time.”
“Good call,” Alek came back. “Vic One, Vic Two, spread out and fall back to come on-line with Vic Three.”
No sooner had the transmission ended than I could see, through the shifting clouds of brown to our flanks, the other two trucks veer off to come alongside us. I looked over just in time to see the back window of the other Land Cruiser break, and two muzzles poke out of the dark cavern of the back. Bob was braced in the back of the HiLux, crouched behind the PKM. I turned my attention to the rear, as Alek called over the radio, “Brake-check in ten seconds. Be advised, we’re going to be moving again about ten seconds after that, so make it count. Five…four…three…”
I braced my back against the back of the seat in front of me, and leveled my rifle. Beside me, I could feel more than see Jim do the same. Then, suddenly, Tim mashed the brake, and we were shoved hard against the seat back, then lurched toward the open window as the vehicle came to a skidding stop in a billowing cloud of grit.
I recovered fast, bringing my eye to the scope, even as Jim opened up, the heavy, rapid thumpthumpthump of the M60 filling the back of the SUV with cordite and hot brass. I could see silhouettes, but little more through the dust, but that was all that I needed. I milked the trigger, slamming a 7.62 round into a gomer briefly visible as a darker shape in the brown before he dropped like a puppet with its strings cut. I tracked across the jumbled line of enemy vehicles, which were veering and skidding to a panicked halt, as the combined storm of fire from Jim’s M60 and Bob’s PKM shredded the lead vehicle, an old deuce-and-a-half with a DShK mounted on the cab. Targets appeared as fleeting, man-shaped shadows in the haze and confusion, and I probably missed at least as often as I hit, but I saw enough go down, hurt or dead, to be effective.
A moment later the tires were spinning, throwing up billows of sand and dust between us and our targets, and we were shoved back toward the rear door again as Tim stomped on the accelerator and started us moving again. A massive dust cloud rose behind our three vehicles, completely obscuring us from the enemy’s sight, as well as hiding whatever devastation we had wreaked on our pursuers.
“ACE reports!” Alek snapped over the radio. “Everybody all right?”
I rocked the mag out of my M1A, checked it, and shoved it in my dump pouch with some difficulty, as I was half-sitting on the pouch. As I rocked in a fresh one, I called up, “Hillbilly, used eighteen rounds, up and up.”
Jim had checked his M60’s box. “Kemosabe, one hundred fifty rounds expended, up and up.”
One by one, each member of the team checked in, giving their ammo expenditures and affirming that they were unhurt. A couple of 7.62 rounds had impacted the HiLux’s bed, as Bob rather shakily reported. It sounded like one or two had come uncomfor
tably close to him.
As we got further away, and the initial dust cloud started to disperse, we saw that there were still pirate trucks on our tail, but they had been thinned out considerably. I found myself wishing for mines.
Once all the ACE, or Ammo, Casualty, Equipment reports were in, Alek came back on the net. “Listen up. It looks like we thinned the herd some, but we need to break contact with these mothers. Five hundred meters, we brake-check again. If that doesn’t sufficiently discourage them, then we bombshell. Right seaters, get ready to copy the rally point.”
I was keeping an eye out for more bad guys, but I could hear Rodrigo up front call out, “Ready to copy,” which was chorused by Hank in the other Land Cruiser.
“Coordinates are--” Alek spooled off the numbers. “The rally point is south of Harardhere. I don’t want to make a straight line in there, in case these punks have called ahead. Upon reaching the rally point, if none of the other trucks are there, attempt to get comm, and hold position for no more than six hours. If there is no contact after six hours, move to the secondary rally point.” He rattled off another string of coordinates. “If you cannot reach the rally point, attempt to get comm, and, if necessary, move on foot to the secondary rally point.”
I glanced over at Jim. If it hadn’t been obvious just how far out in the cold we were on this job before, it sure was now. We were making plans that in the old days, working for Uncle Sam, would have ended in escaping and evading for friendly lines. Here, there wasn’t any such thing as friendly lines. Bad-guy country was everywhere.
Just as I was thinking that, Danny broke in on the circuit. “If you can’t link up with the rest of the team, find a way to make it to Gaalkacyo. It’s the capital of Galmudug, and it’s big enough you should be able to lose yourselves long enough to arrange a flight out. Just make sure you ditch your long guns before you go in. The security forces might get a little twitchy.”
Alek agreed. “You can still get a flight to Kenya out of Gaalkacyo. If you get cut off, get the fuck out.” I hoped and prayed that nobody got cut off. We couldn’t really afford to lose a third of the team at this juncture.
We were coming up on five hundred meters. Easy to do, when you’re tear-assing across the desert at forty klicks an hour. Which isn’t all that fast on the road, but offroad, it’s pretty fast.
It was a repeat of the previous engagement. Alek counted down, the drivers stomped on the brakes, and we lit up our pursuers. This time, they were a little more ready for it, and the return fire was getting pretty thick, especially since they slowed down when we did, so as not to pile into a big jumblefuck when we suddenly stopped.
It didn’t do them a lot of good, though. As a rule, Middle Eastern and East African troops don’t do much aiming, apparently going by the principle that Allah will make the bullets hit. This tends to mean that they quite literally “spray and pray,” most of their fire going high, and sailing off to Lord knows where, and probably killing some hapless sheepherder a mile away. We didn’t work like that.
In spite of our less-than-optimal shooting positions, sitting braced between back seat and back door, on an uneven jumble of rucksacks and gear, Jim and I made the best of it. Jim held the 60 tight into his shoulder with the broom handle foregrip, and stitched tight, thumping bursts into the enemy trucks. I propped a knee up on a ruck, and rested my elbow on it, to get a little bit more stability. The 8x magnification on the scope still made things bounce a little, but it was easy enough to get on target, at least as far as it went. The dust and grit was still obscuring everything, and a lot of the finer dust was settling on my scope lenses, in spite of the shock of the rifle‘s firing.
Bob was laying it on, hammering at the HiLux in the lead. Even through the clouds of dust and flying sand, I could see the puffs of dust, shrapnel, and smoke coming off the truck as it was peppered with a heavy stream of 7.62 fire. Jim was alternating between that truck and an ancient Land Rover, which now had a smoking engine compartment and shattered windshield.
A couple of savage cracks announced a pair of hits on our vehicle. I glanced up to see the bullet furrows in the roof, and quickly got back on scope to try to find the shooter. Turned out there was a pirate with a SVD crouched in the scrub about twenty meters away from the trucks, taking potshots at us. I pumped three rounds at him, and he vanished into the shrubbery. Then we were moving again, and I couldn’t see anymore.
Again, the ACE reports went up. Larry had gotten grazed this time, but it was nothing more than a burn. I was starting to worry about our ammo stores. We were in enemy territory, without the kind of support we might have gotten as a SOF asset. We had extra ammo in our kitbags, but we couldn’t afford too many of the kind of pitched fights that had been all too characteristic of this job.
“Anyone see any further pursuit?” Alek called. I squinted through the brown fug behind us. My eyes were starting to grate in their sockets from the dust.
After a few moments of searching, I keyed my radio. “This is Hillbilly. I don’t see any sign. Looks like they’re still stopped where we hit them.”
“Roger,” Alek replied. “We’ll go another five klicks, and then turn inland, provided there’s no further sign of pursuit or observation. I don’t want to be making straight lines out here.” I couldn’t agree more.
It was a quiet five kilometers, except for the banging of the SUVs and everything in them as we bounced across the barren landscape. The dust was filling everything, and I coughed as it coated my throat. I kept squinting against the sandpapery feeling in my eyes, trying to see if our little friends were still up to their mischief. But the hazy horizon stayed clear.
Finally we slowed and started to turn west. The East African savannah stretched flat, dry, and featureless in front of us. This was going to be navigation by time, azimuth, and speed; there weren’t any landmarks to follow.
There also wasn’t anyplace to hide for a long, long way. Which worked against us as much as it did for us.
We hadn’t been on our new course for very long before Jim prodded my elbow. When I looked over at him, he pointed. I peered along his pointing finger and saw the distant plume of dust to our southeast. I lifted my M1A to look through the scope, but we were moving too much, and I couldn’t focus on the dust cloud. I called up to Alek anyway.
“We’ve got a dust cloud, looks like vehicles moving north/northeast from the vicinity of Harardhere. Might be our little pals’ buddies.”
“Any sign they’ve made us?” Alek asked.
“Not yet…” I stopped. The dust cloud had changed, as if it was aimed in our direction now. “Could be. Looks like they’ve turned inland.”
There was a pause, doubtless filled with Alek’s cussing up a storm in the cab of the HiLux. “Push it harder, gents,” he finally radioed. “Let’s try to open up the gap, and keep it open.”
“Gonna be tough, trying to keep the gap wide enough until nightfall,” Jim radioed from beside me. “We’ll be out of gas long before then.”
There was another pause, and then Alek came back over the net, his voice firm. “Plan B, then. Bombshell in five. We’ll see you guys at the RV point.”
“Bombshelling” is an old anti-tracking technique, where if the quarry is a group, they scatter in all directions. The idea is, the tracker can’t follow all of them, and will more likely lose the spoor when it is from one individual, and not going in a particular direction. How well it would work with vehicles on the open savannah, we couldn’t tell, but it was a better chance than just trying to outrun whoever was back there on severely limited fuel.
“Coconut, Hillbilly,” I called. “I’d suggest we hold off until we’ve got some cover. They see us split at a distance, and they’re probably going to just split up to go after us. Let’s find a wadi or something where we can get out of line of sight, then split.”
“I hear you, Hillbilly,” Alek came back, “but there isn’t jack out here. At least not enough to disguise our dust.”
“If we can’t
get something between us and them,” I argued, “we should stick together. More guns means more chances of staying intact. I don‘t feel like getting run down and slaughtered piecemeal.”
“I’m going to throw in with Hillbilly, boss.” It was Hank’s gravelly voice. “If we had a break in contact, then fine, but I don’t think it’ll work this way.”
There was a pause as we continued to bounce brutally across the plain, the dust of our pursuers rising into the brassy morning sky behind us. I imagined that Alek was poring over the maps and imagery he would have had spread across his lap, trying to find a solution.
The fact was, we needed fuel. I didn’t know where there was gas to be had out here, but from what little I knew about central Somalia, there probably wasn’t much outside of certain population centers, and most of those, at least close to the coast, were dominated by pirates. Of the others, we couldn’t be certain which ones were “friendly,” by which I mean wouldn’t shoot us on sight, and which ones were in the hands of Al-Shabaab or one of the other Islamist militias. We had a long way to go, and going on foot wasn’t in the cards. We didn’t have the time.
I kept squinting into the rising sun to try to see our tails a little better. After a moment, in spite of the jouncing, I made out a crucial detail. “Coconut, Hillbilly. Be advised, it looks like our pursuer is just an outrider. I say again, the main body appears to still be heading toward Hobyo.”
“How many outriders, Hillbilly?” Alek came back quickly.
I squinted some more. The dust was coating my Oakleys, making it even harder to see through the haze and glare, but after a moment I called back, “Looks like two trucks, Coconut.”