by Peter Nealen
“Hell of a fix we’ve gotten ourselves into out here, ain’t it?” he said, watching ahead through the dusty windshield as we lurched into motion.
Things started to go poorly within the first hour. We had to divert farther to the north around Geedaley than we’d planned, as we ran into an impenetrable wall of sand dunes. If we’d had better vehicles, not to mention more confidence in our equipment should one get stuck, we might have gone straight through, but we didn’t trust them that far. We wound up going another fifteen klicks north just to get around the dunes, and even then, there were a few iffy parts where sand started to go soft under the tires, and only skillful driving kept us from digging a truck to the axles.
We found ourselves getting into the eroded badlands that Alek had specifically talked about avoiding. The ground, while peppered with brush, was either carved into runnels and pits, or was soft riverbed-type sand where it lined the channels. We actually did get one of the SUVs stuck, and it took almost a half hour of backbreaking, sweaty work in 120-degree heat to get it moving again. More lost time.
We had to cut hard south for about fifty kilometers to make sure we got well clear. By this time, the sun was already starting to dip toward the western horizon. It would be dark before we got even half the distance we’d been hoping for.
There wasn’t any griping; there wasn’t a man here, except maybe for Bob, who hadn’t had at least eight years’ experience in the field before going to work for Praetorian. Once you leave the wire, Murphy takes over, like it or not. There’s an old saying; “No battle plan survives first contact with the enemy.” I’d revise it to say, “No battle plan survives the first step outside the wire.”
The sun disappeared under the horizon, and we continued through the brush-strewn plains, driving without lights, our NVGs lowered in front of our eyes. We might be heard, but we wouldn’t be seen, especially not by the dirt-poor nomads who lived out there in the hinterlands. It was not the most comfortable I’ve ever been driving at night, especially since we didn’t have any IR headlights. We were driving on ambient light alone, and there was precious little of that.
Finally, as the terrain started to get bumpy again, and we almost lost the HiLux to another sand hole, Alek called a halt. We’d get moving again just before first light.
“Fuck.”
It was the first word either Jim or I had uttered in about two hours. It also seemed entirely appropriate, given the noise we had just heard.
“Coconut, Kemosabe,” Jim called over the radio. It was his turn in the passenger seat. In the back, Larry and Hank had been awakened by the loud bang from the undercarriage. “Need to call a halt. We’ve got a mechanical problem back here.”
I heard Alek’s voice, tinny and quiet, through the handset that Jim had attached to the radio. “Roger. We’ll be back at your pos in a second.”
I pushed open my door, which creaked and rasped from all the dust and sand in the hinges, and levered myself out into the only slightly more unbearable heat outside. The A/C in the truck worked, but only barely. I knelt down in the dirt and sand, shoving a low, prickly bush out of the way and peered into the shadows underneath.
“Yep,” I called out heavily. “Axle’s broke like a fucking twig. We ain’t going anywhere.”
We were still thirty klicks shy of the Shabelle River. Every direction was the same dun, green-spotted plain. The land was a lot flatter than I had expected from the imagery, but that didn’t mean it was smooth. We’d hit a rut, and the axle had snapped, loudly and finally. I pulled myself back up tiredly. My buttocks ached from the hours spent in the vehicle.
The HiLux came back around in a wide turn, and rolled to a stop a few yards away. Alek got out tiredly, as Larry and Hank clambered out of our stricken heap. “What’s up?” Alek asked.
“Broken axle,” I replied. Larry and Hank were already pulling gear and supplies out of the back.
“Son of a bitch.” There was almost no inflection in Alek’s voice. “Guess we’re spread-loading.”
“Yep,” Jim replied, pulling his own ruck out and starting to haul it toward the HiLux. “Clown car time.”
Danny and Imad were already climbing out of the other SUV and coming over to help. We’d have to strap more of the rucks to the outside and tops of the vehicles, to have room for men inside. Not just clown car time; it was gypsy wagon time.
I reached into the back for the shitty tool bag that we’d found under the floorboards. “Might as well strip it,” I said. “If one of the others breaks down, we should have some spare parts--spare tires at least.”
“Good idea,” Alek said. “Let’s siphon the gas tank, too.”
Stripping an SUV in the middle of the desert with minimal tools really is as hard as it sounds. Maybe harder. The worst part was getting the tires off. We didn’t have a jack, and ended up having to work out a lever arrangement with some pipes that had been in the back of the HiLux when we grabbed it, that fortunately we hadn’t thrown out. Finding a place to carry all the crap we stripped off the kaput Toyota was even worse. We now had eleven men, their weapons and gear, and spare parts, tires, water, and fuel, to cram into or onto two vehicles.
“We’re going to have to go more slowly,” Nick said, standing next to the cab of the HiLux. “I’d say no more than ten miles an hour; five would be more like it. Especially with the extra weight, these trucks aren’t going to last much longer against this abuse.”
Alek started to lean against the fender of the defunct SUV, then snatched his arm away with a curse. Jim chuckled tiredly. “Metal tends to get hot in the sun, Alek,” he pointed out. Alek flipped him off.
“It’s already midday, and we’re not even across the Shebelle yet,” Danny pointed out. “Can we afford to lose the time?”
“We’ll lose even more time if we lose another truck,” Nick pointed out reasonably. Danny nodded, scratching his salt-and-pepper beard. He looked at Alek and shrugged.
“So much for two days,” he said with a rueful chuckle.
Alek half-grinned, half-grimaced. “Par for the course. I guess I was being too optimistic.”
I grunted as I heaved another tire into the bed of the HiLux. “How many times have I told you? Optimism just gets you screwed. Accept that the world is fucked, that everything is doomed, and when things work out, you’re pleasantly surprised.”
“Okay, Voice of Doom, we get it,” Alek retorted. I laughed at him as I pointlessly dusted my hands, which were encased in tac gloves anyway.
Alek looked around. “We probably should hold here until dark, anyway,” he mused. “We’re less than twenty klicks from the river. If the imagery isn’t lying--” he tried to glare at me before I could add any of my words of wisdom on the likelihood of that “--there should be a place to ford pretty much straight ahead.”
The Webi Shabelle, or Shebelle River, starts in the Ahmar Mountains in Ethiopia, and meanders southeast into Somalia, before turning southwest to parallel the coast past Mogadishu, until it joins with the Juba River and flows into the sea just north of Kismayo. Along with the Juba, it is one of two primary sources of water and irrigation in Somalia. Its floodplain could be a breadbasket, but the chaos in Somalia since the fall of Barre’s regime in 1991, coupled with destructive flooding and severe droughts, had taken a severe toll on Somali farming.
We were hoping that some of that destruction of farms might have opened up a place for us to cross relatively unobserved.
Our two remaining vehicles rolled across the Shabelle floodplain, trying to drive as close to silently as possible.
Of course, there’s only so quiet you can make a vehicle, especially at night. The air cools, most of the daytime sounds die away, and any sounds that are made travel farther, and stand out more jarringly. The internal combustion engine is not a fundamentally quiet mechanism, and one that has been subjected to the rigors of operating in East Africa is even less so. Add to that the crunch of gravel and sand under the tires, the creak of the suspension, and the occasional
bump of equipment or weapons against metal or plastic when a bump is hit, and it gets even worse. The slower, the better.
However, we couldn’t afford to go too slowly, as the floodplain was soft and sandy, and we were constantly at risk of getting stuck. Get stuck out here, and we were made, no question about it. We probably wouldn’t be able to get unstuck and across the river before daylight.
The preoccupation with stealth, while we had been tearing pretty handily across the desert until the axle snapped, was due to the fact that the Shabelle floodplain was some of the extremely limited fertile farmland in central Somalia, and so was thoroughly lined with farms. If anyone was up and about, which was still possible, they’d notice us. We didn’t want any word of our whereabouts getting to the bad guys, whether by force or bribery. As for our presence, we were pretty sure that was already known; shooting the shit out of the Hobyo pirates had to have made the word-of-mouth version of the six-o’clock news, which anyone who has been in the Third World can attest, is faster than anything on the 24-hour news cycles back in the States, even before half the cable companies went under.
But nothing said we had to make it any easier for the bastards.
The HiLux seemed to slow ahead of us, and then slewed hard to the left, then the right. Nick had hit a soft spot, and had to act fast to wrench the truck clear of it before he bogged down. At the wheel of our Land Cruiser, Jim made sure to go wide around it.
I was riding shotgun at that point, having relieved Danny about an hour before. I checked the GPS and the map with my key-fob-sized red lens, under my shemaugh to cover any light from being seen outside the cab. We were just about to our near-side rally point. I keyed my radio. “Coconut, Hillbilly.”
“Roger, Hillbilly, I see it,” Alek called back, before I could say anything. “Another two hundred meters.” Which was damn near spitting distance, and Jim took his foot off the gas. We were barely idling as it was, but we still had enough forward momentum to coast to a stop near the HiLux.
Ahead, I could barely see the darker line of the low trees that covered the banks of the river. The moon wasn’t supposed to rise for another hour, so we didn’t have a lot of light to work with, aside from IR floods from PEQ-15s. There was enough to see that we were a good distance away from any human habitation. The desert was flat and empty, dotted with the dark spots of the ubiquitous low bushes.
I got out as Jim killed the engine, leaving us in relative silence, aside from the noises of the cooling engine and what sounds we made moving around. I didn’t dally, but slung my rifle, checked my radio, and headed over to the hood of the HiLux, where Alek and Hank were already on a knee, facing the river.
I came up and sank to one knee beside Hank. “You ready?” I whispered. He just reached out and tapped my shoulder with a fist. I tapped Alek in turn, and led out. Hank rose smoothly to follow me, and we headed down toward the riverbank.
We moved carefully and smoothly, hands on our rifles, but not up and in the red. At least, not until we heard the grunting down by the water.
Unless you’ve ever heard a crocodile grunt close to you in the dark, you don’t really know what fear is. I’d face a twenty-to-one firefight happily long before I want to hear that sound again. When I realized what it was, I damn near shit myself. Nobody in their right mind wants to go fucking around with crocs in the daytime, much less at night, when you can’t see the scaly fuckers.
I immediately turned on the thermal feature on my NVGs, only to remember that the crocs are cold-blooded, and probably wouldn’t show up very well. “Fuck!” I hissed under my breath, as I sank to a knee in the sand. Hank came up next to me and took a knee at my shoulder.
“What’s up?” he asked, his voice barely a whisper.
“Crocs,” I replied, and I heard muffled swearing.
“We’ve got to get across somewhere,” he said after a moment.
“I know,” I whispered in reply. “And there isn’t likely to be anyplace else on this fucking river that doesn’t have crocs, too.” I gnawed at it in my head, but couldn’t see any way around it. We were going to have to ford in the face of crocodiles, and to do that, we’d have to go in and check that the river was fordable before we tried to drive vehicles into it. Damn it.
I didn’t turn to look at Hank, but kept my eyes out, watching the only faintly visible long shapes down by the shore moving around. “We still have to do this, but I’m going to call the rest of the team up to cover while we do. I am not going into that water with all those fucking dinosaurs in there, with just the two of us.” Without waiting for his reply, which turned out to be little more than a fist thumped lightly on a shoulder in agreement, I keyed my radio. “Coconut, Hillbilly. At the river. Be advised, there are crocodiles on the banks at the least. Request you bring up the rest of the team to cover while we conduct Fordrep.”
“Roger, Hillbilly,” Alek called back at once. I breathed a little easier. It was still going to be risky as hell, but I felt a little better about checking out the river crossing when there were other guys with thermals and guns ready to kill any ancient reptilian predators that wanted to make me or Hank into midnight snacks.
The two vehicles growled up to us, starlight glinting off the windshields, and came to a stop about fifty meters from the riverbank. The rest of the guys got out, weapons ready, and spread out, while Alek came over to where we were kneeling.
“What’s the matter, gunfighter? Some lizards got you shaky?” Alek whispered. I couldn’t see his grin, because I was still watching the crocs, but I could hear it.
“Fuck you, Alek,” I replied. “You go down there and wrestle with those fuckers.”
He clapped me on the shoulder with a plate-sized hand. “I’m just fucking with you, brother, good call. I wouldn’t want to chance that shit, either, and there’s no good reason to. Damn it,” he continued. “We should have thought of this during planning.”
“Too long out here, and no real place to go firm and get some rest,” Hank pointed out. “We’re going to have to watch that, or we might miss something even worse.”
“Amen, brother,” Alek agreed. “Hopefully we can stand down for a day or two whenever we link up with this contact, though the way the rest of this clusterfuck has been going, I’m not counting on it.” He blew a huge breath out. “Now, has anybody got any ideas as to how to scare away crocs without waking every nomad, farmer, or local militia within thirty miles?”
“Anybody here from gator country?” I asked. “I knew one weird Cajun back during my time in Recon who might have had an answer, but I don’t, aside from driving the trucks right up to the shore.”
“Which kind of defeats the purpose of doing a ford recon, but I see your point,” Alek said. “And no, we don’t have any swamp runners on the team, but you knew that.”
I heard the rasp of his hand rubbing his stubble. “I guess we go ahead and try to ford, one vic at a time, and if we start running into trouble, either back up, or get pulled out. We’ll just have to take it slow, so that we don’t get stuck. I still don’t know what this riverbed is made of, and for some strange reason, there’s next to no information on it in any of the intel we’ve got.”
“Figures.” I took my eyes off the crocs long enough to look back at him, even though he wasn’t much more than a looming shadow at my shoulder. “Call the play, boss.”
He reached back to key his radio. “All pax, back on the trucks. Due to reptile hazards, we’re going to wing this one. HiLux goes first, with tow lines ready in case we’ve got to yank it out. We’ll be fording blind, so we’ll take it slow. Go ahead and hook up the tow lines first, just keep them slack until they’re needed.” We had managed to find some very long ropes, almost 120 lines. They were a lot longer than the tow straps that we’d used in the military, which were twenty feet long, if you were lucky. Of course, there was the question of how well they’d hold up to the vehicles’ weight, but then again, they were all we had.
It took a few minutes to get the lines out and
tied securely. Most of us were out around the vehicles, on a knee in the sand, on security but mostly handling croc watch. Nobody wanted to tangle with those things, which made me feel a little better about borderline freaking out about them.
Finally, the murmured command, “Mount up,” came over the radio, and I piled back into the right seat of the Land Cruiser. The HiLux was already moving; we had lost enough time here already.
Jim moved the Land Cruiser close behind the other truck, and only stopped at the edge of the bank, which was steeper than I’d anticipated. It still wasn’t bad, and really was nothing to these vehicles, but it wasn’t as shallow as I might have expected a ford to be. The HiLux’ nose dipped down to almost a forty-five degree angle, as Nick eased it toward the water. I couldn’t see a lot of detail aside from the thermal signatures, but Bob looked to be holding on to the PKM in the back for dear life.
The truck nosed into the water…and kept going. Fortunately it was a HiLux with a snorkel. I’d been pleasantly surprised to see that, though I realized that it was unlikely that the pirates had known what it was for, or cared. The water was up to the hood, and was threatening to go higher, but then the truck leveled out, and continued to push across the river.
About halfway across, the left front corner suddenly dipped, almost throwing Bob out of the bed and into the water. The truck stopped almost as abruptly, and then started to ease backward, as Nick worked to get them out of the hole in the riverbed. Jim had his hand on the gearshift, ready to throw the Land Cruiser into reverse to pull them back out if Nick couldn’t recover.
But the HiLux eased backward, righted itself, then turned about forty-five degrees to the right and forged on ahead, pushing around the hole. The rest of the riverbed failed to produce any similar nasty surprises, and soon the HiLux was clawing up onto higher ground. Jim threw the Land Cruiser in gear and started forward, before the tow line could go taut.