Countdown: The Liberators-ARC

by Tom Kratman

  "How many slaves in the town."

  "Hundreds," Dayid said. "Too many. Mostly individually owned, and . . . maybe, too . . . maybe all not that unhappy."

  In a way, the discussion of the plight of the slaves put Terry in the proper mood. Thus, even though he might have been able to force the guards on the gates to Dayid's house to surrender, the thought didn't even cross his mind. The limo rolled up; a guard came over, and Terry shot him down like a dog even as Pigfucker cut down the one on the other side.

  Then Terry got out of the limo, shot first one then the other man again, to make sure. He opened the lift gate himself, then waved Hammell through. A few brisk steps brought him to the guardhouse, a small mud brick structure built against the wall. That half-sleeping guard he shot with a short burst, every round of four slamming the man's midsection.

  "Go round up your family," He told Dayid. "Pigfucker, go with him."

  As Dayid and Hammell walked off, Terry called out, "Semmerlin, come with me. Hey, Mr. Dayid, where's the guard barracks?"

  While Mr. Dayid and Pigfucker, along with several men of Dayid's family, helped children and older people onto the back of the fiveton, Graft standing just behind the cab, with a machine gun, watched Welch and Semmerlin walk back from the barracks. Both Terry's submachine gun and Semmerlin's VSSK smoked from their muzzles. A half dozen veiled women walked behind the two. Some of the women wept, softly, half bent over, bodies shuddering with shock and fear. Still others skipped on dancing feet.

  "You always were a soft touch, Terry." Graft shouted. "How the fuck you plan on fitting them all in two helicopters?"

  "I don't fucking know. Have them all piss, shit, and puke first, maybe?"

  D-Day, Bandar Cisman, Ophir

  While bullets still occasionally snapped overhead, the shooting was rather desultory now, on both sides. That was fine, as far as Cazz was concerned. He wasn't expected to take the town on his own, anyway.

  And fat chance I'd have doing it, with seven or eight hundred armed men in the buildings, and a hundred and twenty or so of us, and no heavy armor.

  Besides, I'm only required to make sure everyone stays put until the Irish bastard gets back with the heavy shit and his captives.

  Cazz hadn't yet had call to use either the one helicopter-Fucking green beanies; I was supposed to have two-or the two armed CH-801s to actually strike the town. The Hip was engaged in running ammunition, especially mortar ammunition-seven and a half tons of it-and small arms to his own men, while the two fixed wing jobs, having wrecked all the boats, circled counterclockwise above, keeping well outside of machine gun range, reporting whatever there was to be seen.

  Another reason Cazz was perfectly happy to wait to assault was that the dustoff bird, carrying the colonel's lady, so he'd heard, was off somewhere to the west where Reilly had apparently executed the ambush he'd intended.

  D-Day, Rako-Dhuudo-Bandar Cisman highway, Ophir

  The CH-801 seemed to be straining to get back in the air, shuddering as its engine and propeller pushed almost enough air to lift it, then lost that air behind and below. The propeller also picked up smoke from the still-burning vehicles, sucking it in like a fan with cigarette smoke, and pushing it out behind, too.

  "I could use some more morphine for my nine expectants," Coffee said to Phillie. "Expectant" was a code word for "expected to die." Since the Ophiris, who made up Coffee's entire population of expectants, were unlikely to speak English, it didn't really matter if they'd spoken freely. Still, old habits die hard.

  "There are ninety one-hundred-milligram ampoules in the plane's kit," Phillie answered. "You can have half. I'll need the rest to sedate our own."

  "Fair enough," Coffee agreed, turning for the plane.

  Phillie, an ER nurse with several years experience of terribly hurt people behind her, couldn't quite figure out what was wrong with the scene. It wasn't the burning vehicles or the rent, burnt, crushed, and sundered bodies littering the road. It wasn't the smell. It wasn't the roar of armored vehicle engines as Reilly's first sergeant lined them up to push on. It wasn't . . .

  Nobody's whining, she thought. There's no "oh, my back," no "oh, the pain, the pain," no ‘I wanna lawyerrr!' They're stoic and tough. I didn't know people could be like this.

  Somebody did groan, though. Phillie looked over and, by the light of the burning tanks, saw someone being bounced on a stretcher.

  "Gently, you assholes!" she shouted.

  "Yes, ma'am," the two men at either end said, together. "We thought speed . . . "

  "Speed won't do a fucking bit of good if you put him into shock."

  "Yes, ma'am."

  "It's a tough call, Phillie," Coffee said.

  "Yeah, I know," she answered. I'm a big girl. If I stay here, we can fit four of the worst wounded on the plane instead of three. They won't have any medical attention in flight, but the flight will only be about fifteen minutes. And they are tough men; they don't need me holding their hands which is nearly all I could do in the cramped confines of the plane.

  And here there's enough work to keep me busy for a while. And Coffee's got to move out with the main column . . . and . . .

  "Can you leave me one medic?" she asked. "And some guards?"

  "I know Reilly," Coffee answered. "He won't give up able bodied troops for guards. Hell, he's taking some of the walking wounded with him. But . . . three or four of our wounded can still use a rifle. He's leaving them to guard prisoners. Will that do? And I can leave a medic. My junior one."

  "It'll have to," Phillie said. "I'm staying. I'll go out with a later flight."

  Coffee nodded and began to turn away. He turned back, suddenly, and said, "Phillie, I'm awful sorry for dumping you into the mud back in Brazil."

  "Oh, shush," she answered, reaching out to spin him back around and send him on his way. "Don't sweat it; did me a world of good."

  D Day, Bandar Qassim Airport. Ophir

  As with the other strike, the one on the truck convoy, this pilot led off with an illumination rocket. Having seen and heard what followed the previous such, the Ophiris dotted about the landscape of the ridge's northern slope-about half of them-dropped their crap and began to leg it for the north.

  The rockets came fast after that: Flechette-which whined in with the drone of thousands of homicidal bees, high explosive, incendiary, high explosive, incendiary, flechette again, another flare, more flechette, and then three HE, interspersed with two incendiaries. They came in close enough together in time, if not in space, that the crest of the ridge lit up as if by strobe light.

  Buckwheat doubted they hit much of anything-well, except maybe for the flechette-but that almost wasn't the point of an airstrike, which was usually much more about frightening and disorganizing people than about killing them.

  "All right, Rattus, you maniac," Buckwheat Fulton shouted, kicking the back of the medic's seat, "fucking charrrge!"

  The engine was already running. Hampson slammed on the gas, causing the Hummer to lurch forward, spitting rocks and gravel out the back. Fulton barely hung on to the rollbar and the bungeed machine gun. Off to the left, they heard Fletcher howling with pure delight.

  The Hummer crested the ridge, launching itself into the air for a moment before slamming back down. Buckwheat waited for it to settle a bit from the pounding, then opened up with the machine gun, spraying ball and tracer pretty much at random to the front. Below him, Rattus drove with his left hand, firing a rifle out the right side. If either of them hit anything, moving and bouncing like that, it was a miracle.

  Still, they didn't have to. After the strike on the truck convoy, the second strike on themselves, and the totally unexpected charge of the light vehicles, most of the Ophiris who had pursued the snipers up the slope broke and ran. Neither Rattus nor Buckwheat tried to kill them. Rather, they fired more to encourage them in their flight.

  "Shit," Fulton said. "We might just get away with this."

  Sergeant Nurto Nuur, fiercely scar-faced, shook
his head with disgust at the younger generation. So the bandits raiding them had called in a little air strike. So what? He'd faced worse, more than once, fighting Americans, Ethiopians, Malayans, Kenyans, his own former countrymen . . .

  Bah. Fucking cowards.

  Some of his own men had tried to run off, right after the light went off overhead. Nuur wasn't sure he could have restrained them except that the first real war rocket had killed the first man to get up and run, and done so faster and deader than a stomped mouse. That had made the rest listen to him, and crouch down behind his protecting rock.

  Under the light of the overhead flare, Nuur counted six others, not all of them from his own squad. One of these had a machine gun, and had managed to retain his ammunition. That was to the good. Nuur gave the boy a terse commendation.

  They almost bolted again, when the bandits' vehicles topped the crest and charged, spitting bullets. Then, Nuur had had to put his rifle on his own men to hold them in position.

  "Stay put, unless you want to die," he'd said, without reference to whether he meant die from the enemy's bullets, or from his own.

  His judgment had been proved correct when the bullets that had been pinging off the great boulder to his front had stopped moments after they'd begun.

  They can't control the machine gun from a moving vehicle, he thought. They're doing well to keep them going generally to the north.

  "Give me your gun," Nuur then demanded of the machine gunner, holding his hands out to receive it. The gunner passed his machine gun over without demur. Nuur took it, gave it the most cursory inspection under the waning light of the overhead flare, and told the others, "Get behind me."

  Then he took a prone firing position and waited. He didn't have to wait long.

  Rattus heard Buckwheat's shout, "Shit, we might just get away with this,"and laughed.

  "Of course we . . . "

  Hampson stopped speaking as a long stream of bullets, one in five a green-flaring tracer, passed around and-based on sound and feel-through his Hummer. They came from behind him, to his right. His windshield cracked, physically and audibly. He couldn't return fire.

  "Buckwheat!" Rattus called, "get . . . "

  He didn't bother continuing as Buckwheat had slumped forward onto his right shoulder. The medic's nose was assailed by the smell of blood and shit. Rattus aimed for the field and drove like a madman.

  D-Day, Airfield, Five north-northeast of Nugaal, Ophir

  Between Dayid's extended family, the liberated slaves, his own people, and the translator's body, Terry had eighty-nine people to shove, somehow, onto two helicopters.

  He had one of his people, Graft, explaining through the remaining translator what they had to do. That wasn't a problem- "No water, no food, no baggage, no arms, no . . . "-until he got to the real stickler- "and get rid of any clothing that isn't absolutely essential to minimum modesty. That means shorts, ripped off skirts, and bras; no more."

  When the people, other than the troops and the liberated slaves, began to rise in protest, Terry said, "Mr. Dayid, please go and explain to your relatives that they either do what they are told or they get left behind to the tender mercies of your clan chief while we do whatever it takes to extract the necessary information from you despite what will happen to them."

  "Yes, sir," Dayid said, then hurried over to calm his people down. He must have been persuasive, because the men began removing trousers and robes as the women began to strip.

  Venegas was on the radio to higher. Two of Terry's men had had to go and bring him in, but he could still run communications well enough.

  "Two choppers inbound in five, Terry," Venegas said, his voice a study in nausea-induced weakness.

  "Start splitting them into two groups," Welch ordered. "By weight, best you can judge it."

  D-Day, Bandar Qassim Airport, Ophir

  Hampson slammed on the brakes not far from where the medevac CH-801 had touched down. He didn't bother with lights; the entire field was still well lit by the hulks of burning aircraft.

  As soon Hampson's feet were on the ground he was checking Fulton for vital signs. Weak, fast pulse . . . but at least he's still alive. A bullet cracked overhead, precluding any more careful diagnosis and all chance at treatment. He pulled the unconscious man out of the back, slung him over a shoulder, and began to race for the waiting plane.

  Biggus Dickus met him halfway there. "Where's your wounded Brit?" he asked.

  "Back of the Hummer," Rattus shouted, as the two passed by each other. As soon as Hampson was at the plane, he dropped the small ramp that made up the lower half of the tail and pulled out a low wheeled stretcher. He laid Buckwheat on it as carefully as possible, then pushed the stretcher in. He managed to lift the ramp and secure it by main force, then got into the plane himself and started digging frantically in its medical kit for an oxygen mask, a syringe, and drugs to keep blood pressure up. Bandages could come later.

  Biggus came back and tossed Vic Babcock-Moore into the passenger seat next to the pilot. Vic groaned with the pain.

  "Get the fuck out of here," Thornton shouted at the pilot, who nodded and began letting go the brake.

  "What about you?" Hampson asked, as he affixed an oxygen mask over Buckwheat's comparatively pale face.

  "I'm just an old ex-Corpsman. You're an SF medic. I'll get the next lift." Biggus slapped the side of the aircraft. "Just go."

  Before Rattus could answer, the plane was surging down the runway, flanked by the burning wrecks of the Ophiri proto-Air Force. In moments, mere moments, it was airborne with the field and the wrecks rapidly receding below. Rattus looked behind the plane and saw some bright green streaks racing for heaven.

  Already one of the gunships, covered by the other circling overhead, was landing to continue the pickup. It would follow the coast, to continue its original mission, while the dustoff risked its wings heading directly back to the ship at a speed that, strictly speaking, was not good for the plane.

  About halfway back, with the coast visible in the distance, Buckwheat's body began to thrash uncontrollably. It went limp again as Rattus began applying CPR, though this was difficult in the closed and awkward confines of the plane. When Hampson finally gave up, and it was the radical drop in body temperature more than any other factor that made him decide it was hopeless, he said, with tears in his eyes, "We're all glad your multi-great granddaddy got dragged onto that boat, too, Master Sergeant Fulton."

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

  Mama, just killed a man.

  Put my gun against his head

  Pulled my trigger; now he's dead

  -Freddy Mercury, Queen, "Bohemian Rhapsody"

  D-Day, Yemen

  Lada knew the way. More than that, she knew the best way to get from the wall into the house without being seen. That way led a short distance along the wall, to a set of concrete stairs leading to the ground. At the base of the stairs all was shadow, under the parapet. This they followed, Musin lugging one leaking corpse and Kravchenko the other, to a noisy heat pump under the wall. There they dropped the bodies. Galkin and Litvinov, holding the dead guards' rifles, were left behind, manning the wall to cover the eventual retreat.

  Covered by the heat pump's thrumm, Lada explained the next step. "There, through that door," she pointed across a shadowy way, "is a long corridor that runs all the way through the house. Halfway there's a side branch to the right-"

  "What's down there?" Konstantin asked.

  "Servants' quarters," she said, then amended that to, "Slaves quarters. Storage. And some machinery. Two flights of stairs and an elevator. That's on the side branch. I don't have a key to the elevator."

  "No guards?"

  "Only if they're fucking one of the slaves. Yusuf is generous with his property that way."

  "Right," Konstantin said. He considered, Do we go slow up the corridor, listening at each door? No. what would be the point? If we don't hear anything it doesn't prove shit. And if we do, what do we do? Go in and kill the room's
occupants? Too noisy. "Go on," he told Lada.

  "The far staircase," she continued, "goes all the way to the third floor. The nearer only goes directly to the second. We have to go to the far one, go up to the third floor, then come back and use the branch to get to the door to Yusuf's private quarters."

  "Guard on the door?" Konstantin asked.

  "Always. Two of them, sometimes three. And the door will be locked."

  "How thick is this door?"

  "Stout," she answered. "Very stout. Unless you use explosives the occupants of the room are unlikely to hear what's going on in the corridor."

  "Occupants?" the major asked, emphasizing the plural.

  She nodded her head. "Almost always. Sometimes one girl, sometimes two. Sometimes a little boy. Sometimes one of each. Sometimes all three. Or more."

  "How did you-" He stopped his question. For the purposes of the mission it hardly mattered.

  Lada shook her head and answered anyway. "I volunteered. For the Service if not for the mission. Through an intermediary, the old man arranged to have me sold directly to Yusuf." She shrugged. "I'm really twenty-four but I look fourteen. I claimed here to be sixteen. Yusuf figured I was a mature looking thirteen and enjoyed fucking me all the more for that."

  "And once you volunteer for the service," Konstantin added, "you don't get a lot of choice about the missions. Where ‘not a lot of' is defined as ‘none.'"