Baxter said, “When it all kicks off, once the shooting starts, there’s not going to be much question of that herd just passing by and leaving the Stronghold alone.”
“No,” Brendan agreed. “There’s every chance it will become a singularity. But as long as we get out before it does, then I’m happy for that to be Godane’s problem.”
Baxter’s expression said: Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.
Brendan looked around the room then said, “Okay. Back to the infil route for the assault team. I need to understand the layout of this tunnel system…”
Keeping their heads down and deep in planning was a way to avoid thinking about what pretty much everyone involved with this mission knew: that what they were planning was probably just an elaborate way to commit mass suicide.
But there was also no question about mounting the mission. Nobody had even suggested not doing it. If Zack was right about Zulu Zero, then their lives were nothing as against that.
Moreover, none of them could avoid thinking about what might be happening to Kate down in that dungeon. Or what her fate would be if she spent the rest of her days there. She was waiting for them.
And they would be coming.
Barrage
The Stronghold - South Gun Truck
Two hundred yards south at the other gun truck, Jake didn’t have to negotiate the rubble of a ruptured building to get out on the field. As his boots hit the dirt, Todd was already climbing out of the driver’s seat and up into the gun turret. It was only the two of them on this whole side of the Stronghold.
But they were extremely well armed.
Todd was going to be rocking the Mk 47, a full-auto grenade launcher.
And Jake had his terrifying Beowulf .50 back in action. He wore an FN Herstal high-capacity .45 pistol, finished in a “flat dark earth” polymer, in a quick-draw vest rig. He also had his MP7 machine pistol strapped to the outside of his right thigh, in a holster that reached nearly to his knee. And he was festooned with a shit-ton of magazines, three types of them, and also grenades – not to mention his team radio, blow-out kit, and other combat essentials. But he moved like he wasn’t carrying sixty pounds of combat load, striding powerfully ahead through the shadows that still fell dark and heavy behind the buildings that stood around the southern side of the courtyard.
Jake was going out on the ground because somebody had to. However powerful their weapons, however thick their improvised armor, they couldn’t stay buttoned up inside the vehicles. Decades of urban warfare had demonstrated that even tanks couldn’t survive without infantry. There had to be men on the ground, who could see, who could move, who could shoot – and who could keep the enemy from walking up and pouring grenades or satchel charges down every hole in the vehicle.
Jake was doing this on his own for two reasons – one, he could. Everyone knew he was the only one who could stay alive and on his feet in the thick of hundreds of swarming al-Shabaab fighters. It was he who had to be the assault force’s one-man mobile reserve.
And, two, he was all they had. Everyone else already had a job.
When he jumped out he left the dead-man’s trigger in the truck, seriously doubting it would stop anyone from shooting him once this all kicked off. Even if Godane wanted them not to, and al-Sîf tried to enforce it, Jake knew they wouldn’t have the discipline. He also didn’t think the GCS – which was mounted right in front of the turret with Zack in it in the other vehicle – was likely to survive the rain of fire that was about to pour down. With luck, it might buy Zack a few seconds or a minute of relative safety.
But, if nothing else, there was going to be so much lethal fire pouring out of their vehicles that al-Shabaab were going to have no choice but to try to take them out.
And Triple Nickel had to do it to them first.
* * *
The instant Todd had suppressed – or, more accurately, obliterated – all the immediate threats in his sector with the Mk 47, he blasted into action on his second tasking, which was at least as critical as the first. Everything he had to do in this fight was absolutely critical. As was everyone else’s jobs.
He engaged the safety on the Mk 47, dropped out of the turret, fell into the back seat, snatched up a tall desert tan backpack, and got both it and him out the door. He ducked around to the front of the truck in the rear – the safest spot, though there was already a lot of lead coming in from everywhere – squatted down, flipped open the pack, and pulled out their Aeryon SkyRanger quadcopter.
With four flips, he had its rotor arms and landing struts all locked out, and then he pulled the controller, a tablet computer, out of its sleeve on the backpack, swiped the screen, started the four rotors turning, and got the thing climbing – fast. He spared a look up at its fat underslung sensor ball, and said a silent prayer that it would get out of small-arms range before being hit. It was pretty damned small, though, and the whole joint here was blowing up, so he reckoned its odds were good.
While it climbed, he called up the area topo map on the screen, removed the stylus from the tablet, and touched four corners of the map, which would set its automated flight pattern. That should do it – they’d have fifty minutes of tactical ISR over the Stronghold. He flipped windows again, and saw it was already streaming HD video live and in color – video of himself and the gun truck shrinking below, and their side of the courtyard expanding into view. The same encrypted stream was available to everyone on the team who had the app on their handhelds.
Anyone who wasn’t, you know, already tied up fighting for his life.
Still keeping his head low and body doubled up, he threw the backpack in through the truck door, followed it in, climbed back up into the turret, propped the tablet on a ledge to his right, and got the Mk 47 back online. He did a quick scan for targets, popped off a couple of three-grenade bursts, watched the explosions blossom a second later exactly where he put them, scanned again – then stole a God’s-eye-view look over at the video.
Shit, he thought. That doesn’t look good.
It was like the Stronghold was an organism they had invaded – and its immune system had just sprung to life. There was movement creeping up on both vehicle strongpoints, from pretty much all directions. Much worse, there was smoky streaking RPG fire, and lots of it, arcing down from at least two of the guard towers. That probably meant there were two guard towers undestroyed.
Which was a serious problem.
He looked across to the north truck just in time to see the RPG barrage come in and explosions ripple like lightning all around.
* * *
As Jake passed openings between buildings, he started taking shots on jihadis moving out on the ground. They were already trying to creep up on both vehicle strongpoints, under a base of fire from the elevated machine guns. It was pretty decent small-unit infantry tactics, fire and movement.
Jake’s job: fuck that shit up.
He moved up to the mouth between two buildings, took a corner and a knee, and went to work. He ignored the growing carnage on the parapets and guard towers, which was courtesy of the truck-mounted weapons, and focused on the precision tasks, taking out individuals maneuvering in on them around the sprawling courtyard. As he made center of mass hits his targets were knocked back startling distances from the force of his giant rounds. Their buddies usually caught the panic quickly and got under cover. Though within a few seconds Jake had been zeroed by surviving shooters in other places on the walls, and the area around him started to get lively with incoming AK rounds.
Time to move.
He’d be doing a lot of that. It was going to be the key to doing all the killing he needed to do, and staying alive long enough to make it all happen.
Jake could also take comfort in the knowledge that AKs weren’t very accurate, and these guys didn’t know how to use them very well, so he didn’t sweat the peppering of rounds in his vicinity. He knew that, on pure statistics, one of them would eventually get lucky. But if the assaulters had any luck themsel
ves, they’d be out of there before that happened.
As he moved out again, he realized he was going to have to be careful about where he put his damned feet – as he nearly fell into an entrance to one of the underground tunnels. Zack and Baxter had warned them that the courtyard was riddled with them – sinkholes that could quickly be leapt into, many with doors that could be sealed, and all of which led to various parts of the warren below. These guys had lived like rabbits, with drones in the role of hawks.
As he moved to his next position, looping around the sheltered rear of a building while changing out mags, Jake heard a clattering of explosions that were bigger than the little booms of the 40mm grenades going off. As the courtyard came into view, he could see explosions blossoming all around the north vehicle – the ground, the building it was sticking out of, the front of the truck itself.
It was an RPG barrage coming in from above.
He cursed, as the guard towers were all supposed to be either taken out or suppressed by this point. He couldn’t see the point of origin of these rockets – it was one of the guard towers or wall segments on the south side, out of his range of vision. Poking his nose out from between the buildings, ignoring the incoming rounds tearing out divots of wood above him, he focused on one guard tower he could just see in the north-west corner, out ahead of him and to his left.
The first thing he saw was the black flag of jihad flying above it.
But there was also something strange about the color and texture of the wood. And he realized that was because it wasn’t wood.
He hadn’t been able to tell before now in the early morning light but it was in fact surfaced with fucking iron or steel panels, covering almost the whole inside-facing front of the goddamned thing.
An armored guard tower.
That definitely hadn’t been there when they did their aerial surveillance.
And he saw guys popping out of it and firing RPGs straight down toward the truck Todd was in, about fifty meters to Jake’s right. Having loosed their barrage, they all ducked back inside – a split second before the parapet to the right started blowing up, as Todd peppered it with a long burst of high-explosive 40-mil.
On the upside, that meant Todd was alive, and still operating.
On the downside, so were all those assholes in the armored guard tower. As the explosions settled and the smoke started to clear, Jake could see the structure appeared undamaged.
And then a head popped out around the near side, poised over the top of a 5.56 rifle, not an AK – and with the recognizable glass-and-plastic square of an expensive EOTech sight on top.
Jake could hardly believe his luck.
Al-Sîf.
Hellhounds
Camp Price - Garage
[The Night Before]
Todd moved across the cramped space to one of the stacks of what looked like scrap steel. “Here,” he said to Zack. “Help me move these plates.”
“What are they for?”
“For our biggest job: turning this here dune buggy into a tank.”
As Zack hefted one end of a sheet of heavy steel, he looked over at the big crew-served weapons and asked, “Am I going to get some range time before I’m expected to fight with these?”
As they circled around the vehicle carrying the plate, Todd said, “Do you want to shoot off a bunch of 40mm grenades – with that herd coming in?”
“No. I suppose I don’t.”
“Good, because we don’t have the ammo to spare anyway. Or the time. Or a live-fire range. But I do give a kick-ass instructional lecture.”
They put the plate down and Todd stepped over to something very bulky under a sheet of heavy plastic, which he then pulled away. Underneath was a chunky weapon on a tripod – but it was also beautiful, sleek and black and high-tech, with expensive-looking optics and a video display mounted above the twin pistol grips. It looked to Zack like the Mk 19 grenade launcher – except one from the future. It also looked like it had just come out of the packaging, which it had.
Todd saw his look of recognition. “Yeah, the Mk 19 was a cool weapon – but the 47 is unbelievable. You won’t believe what it can do. You just put the laser on the target, match the sighting mechanism to the laser, and fire. It’s a Nintendo game. Your first round is on target – one shot one kill.”
Zack looked impressed – but daunted.
Beside the Mk 47 was a stack of ammo cans, each filled with linked 40mm grenades. Two of them, set off to the side, were marked with red flames stenciled on the side.
“Are those ones special?”
“Yeah, you could say that.” Todd popped the top of one of the cans. “These are Hellhounds. They were brand new at the time of the fall. HE thermobaric rounds – hands down the most lethal 40-mil grenades in the world. They were designed after some Tier-1 guys expressed a need for something more lethal than the standard rounds – and also capable of taking out a building wall with one shot, then neutralizing everyone inside. These have twice the lethal kill radius of the old ones – but they’re also armor-piercing. On impact, the back-charge produces a jet of molten metal and fragmentation. Basically it will cut through armor plating – and then disperse a large shrapnel pattern behind it, totally lethal out to ten meters.”
Todd picked up one can and put it by the first truck, then the other by the second. “We’ve only got two cans of these, so we’ll divide ’em up. If things get so bad that we need them, maybe one of us will still be alive to use them.”
But then he looked up at Zack and his mood visibly lightened. “On the other hand, the Mk 47 is the kind of tool you use to level whole buildings. So we’re not going to put you on it unless we have to. If Brendan does ask you to start cranking off with it, it will be because our tactical situation has already taken a huge shit.” He reached across and pulled the plastic sheeting off a second brand-new minigun. “This one is you. At least to start.”
Zack nodded. If he was going to be firing a large automatic weapon in combat with minimal training, he preferred that the rounds not be grenades. He looked up at Todd and recited four lines of verse: “Whatever happens / We have got / The Maxim gun / And they have not.”
Todd laughed out loud. “What the hell is that from?”
Zack sighed. “Hilaire Belloc. Just a little techno-military triumphalism, from the empire upon which the sun never set.” He paused and exhaled. “Okay. Show me how to use it.”
Todd laughed. “Hell, Nintendo’s complex compared to this. Ever used a weed whacker? Then you’re all set, dude.”
Zack smiled, looking relieved.
“Yeah – technology rocks.” Todd looked back to the Mk 47. “But if we’re all still on the target fifteen minutes after insertion… well, all bets are gonna be off anyway.”
Gunfight
The Stronghold - North Gun Truck
Zack had once read a WW2 memoir by one of the Easy Company paratroopers – the Harvard man in the original Band of Brothers – a comment of whose had stuck in his head: “Artillery takes all the joy out of life.”
Zack decided this was at least as true for RPGs.
As recently as two minutes ago, he’d been having the time of his life. Rocking that all-singing all-slaying minigun, he’d never felt so alive. Maybe after eighteen months of taking shit from Godane and every al-Shabaab guy in this joint, he’d been ready for some goddamned payback.
So he had fired with wild abandon, shrieking out loud.
He’d never really been a shooter before, and he decided these were the guys who had it going on – who had it right, who had all the fun. I should have joined the Army instead of the CIA, he thought. This rules!
But when the incoming RPGs started to explode, very suddenly shit got a lot more real. The truck began to shake all around him and he was knocked about, bruising his arms and knees on the sharp corners of the turret. He also started getting peppered with non-stop machine gun fire from across the courtyard and above – a steady rain of clank-plink-clank all over the t
ruck and gun turret. Eventually, he figured, one or more of those rounds was going to find the tiny gaps where the minigun stuck out – and Zack didn’t like to think about what a bullet would do once it started ricocheting around inside.
Now the earth was exploding and splashing up geysers of dirt all around him and especially to his front, like asteroid strikes in the ocean. And he was in a game of cat and mouse with RPG gunners in the tower opposite him on the south wall, to the left of where he could see Todd in the other truck, littering the battlefield with exploding munitions of his own at a high rate of fire.
But Todd couldn’t help him – he and this guard tower were side by side, only about fifty meters apart.
And whenever Zack fired at the guard tower, it reacted very differently from that section of wall he had sawn off with his minigun. His rounds – however gigantic, however many of them he spat per second – just seemed to fleck off in showers of sparks. Much worse, there were at least four guys with RPGs, and their strategy was to pop out of the sides of the tower, launch their rockets, then duck back in before he could saw them in half.
This is some BULLshit, Zack thought.
Combat was a hell of a lot less exhilarating when it wasn’t crushingly one-sided. And then he remembered a quote he’d heard from a Delta guy once: “The only fair fight is the one you just lost.”
And now his minigun went dry as Zack burned through the last of the giant ammo can sitting beside it on the weapon mount. So for the next rocket barrage, those bastards popping out of the tower were able to take their sweet time. Their aim still sucked, but that couldn’t go on forever. As long as they had that sanctuary, they were eventually going to take him out.
This belief was validated when Todd came on the radio. “Zack, Todd!”
Zack felt around for the PTT button on the cord snaking between the team radio in his vest and the headset under his helmet. As he did, he belatedly noticed the intense vibrations of the minigun handles had caused his missing fingertips to start bleeding again. Elijah had cleaned them up, cauterized the ends of the blood vessels, filed down the exposed bits of bone, and rebandaged everything – but the stumps hadn’t had time to start healing yet. Now the left handle of the minigun was slick with blood, and Zack didn’t even have time to wipe it off.
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