by Dale Brown
“I’m in,” said Sugar, landing just to his left on the roof of the building in the center of the targeted compound.
Danny touched down a few seconds later. He quick-released his chute gear and sprinted toward the rooftop defense position. Sugar had already secured it, ramming what looked like a small stopper in the mouth of the machine gun in place there.
“Fire in the hole!” she yelled, somewhat dramatically.
Danny turned away as the charge in the stopper ignited. The blast ripped back the barrel of the gun, rendering it impotent. The sound was lost in the crescendo of the attack near the front gate.
“Let’s go inside,” said Danny as the other two members of his fire team reached the roof.
* * *
Melissa was thrown against her restraints as the Osprey pitched hard to get on a new course, avoiding the MC-17 swooping in low over the compound. As the black cargo aircraft came in, two large containers trundled down the interior rail system to the rear bay doors. The large rectangular boxes looked like smaller versions of the shipping containers that carried so much freight around the world. Long droguelike parachutes deployed as the boxes left the aircraft, slowing their descent just enough to allow the cushioned bottoms to properly absorb the blow from the fall.
The flat screen at the forward station in the Osprey’s hold received input from the MC-17’s target-drop system; it declared the boxes had hit exactly 13 and 27 centimeters from their “optimum” positions.
“Good enough for government work,” joked the crew chief, watching over Melissa’s shoulder.
As they hit the ground near the larger citadel, the sides of the large crates unfolded, revealing a quartet of TinkerToy-like objects on a platform. These odd contraptions, known to the Whiplash team simply as Bots, could be configured for a variety of tasks. The eight that had just landed were all equipped with M-134 Gatling guns, essentially the same weapons fired by a door gunner in a helicopter or a crewman on a riverine boat. Moving on tanklike treads, the bots fanned out around the larger of the two central compounds, taking up predesignated positions.
As the last bot reached its destination, all eight began to fire, peppering the exterior of the half-dozen buildings with a barrage of gunfire for exactly twenty-two seconds. As the last bullet hit, a dozen small munitions, launched from the “arms” of the Osprey Melissa was riding in, struck their targets, removing the roofs from the buildings.
Melissa jerked up as the crew chief tapped her on the shoulder.
“Be ready to land in zero-five,” said the chief.
She gave him a thumbs-up, then keyed the screen to show the area Danny was attacking to the northwest.
* * *
Danny came in through the door as the flash-bang grenades exploded, his visor automatically adjusting for the burst of light. Something moved on his left; he turned and tapped his trigger, killing a Brother gunman instantly. This was a “full prejudice” mission — no holds barred. The rules of engagement allowed anyone inside to be shot. Everyone in the compound had already declared themselves a member of the Sudan Brotherhood, and the unit’s alignment with al Qaeda made them a legitimate enemy of the United States.
The team moved through the room quickly, reaching the exterior hallway. The next two rooms were unoccupied — the walls were so thin they could see the heat signatures on their helmet screens — and they reached the hallway in seconds.
“Fire in the hole!” yelled Nolan.
Standing at the head of the stairs, the trooper dropped a frag grenade down. As soon as it exploded, the team descended to the first floor of the two-story building. Nolan stayed on the steps while the rest raced to check the rooms.
The walls were either thicker or insulated, and they could no longer count on their infrared images or MY-PID’s interpretation. They swept each room methodically, hitting them with grenades and then coming in. Each room looked like a classroom, with a small desk and a number of chairs — a finishing school for terror.
When the last room had been cleared without finding anyone, Danny checked in with the team that had landed on the building at the diagonal corner from them.
“Flash, what’s your situation?”
“Building cleared. Twelve enemies encountered, twelve down.”
“Move on.”
“Moving.”
“Got all the action over there,” quipped Nolan. “I picked the wrong team.”
Floor cleared, Danny was about to move on to the next building when he heard a shout from Sugar in the back room. He ran over in time to see her pulling a desk away from the side. She kicked the corner of the carpet behind it, revealing a metal trapdoor on the floor.
“Used a string to close it,” she told him. “Squeezed past the desk.”
Danny covered her while she opened it, revealing an unlit staircase.
“Drop a grenade,” he told her.
She did.
“Goes down pretty far,” she told him after it exploded. “Then in that direction, to the north.”
“We’ll have to come back and check it,” he told her. “Help me with the desk.”
They turned the desk on its side and slid it over the hole. Then Danny posted a pair of small video cams, one on the desk and the other at the side of the room, and had MY-PID monitor them for any movement. He also added a pair of charges near the hole so they could blow up anyone trying to escape by remote control.
MY-PID had apparently not discerned the tunnel because of the building structure and angle, which either by design or accident obscured the image on standard radar techniques. The computer calculated — with a 43.5 percent certainty, an admission that it was just guessing — that the tunnel was connected to a mine shaft some two hundred yards away, which had been seen by the radar.
“Target the mine shaft opening,” Danny told the Ospreys. “See if you can bomb it closed.”
In the meantime, the rest of Danny’s team cleared the second building, a one-story structure where three fighters attempted to hold out. Armed with AK-47s, all three were quickly overcome.
“Running out of buildings,” said Flash, reporting that his team had cleared its next objective.
“Keep moving,” barked Danny.
* * *
Nuri ducked as a sudden burst of gunfire bounced through the rocks just to his right. The bullets themselves were well off the mark, but they shattered the nearby rock outcropping, sending a fusillade of chips showering in every direction. Several hit his helmet so hard that he fell down. He had an instant headache — but it was far better than what might have occurred had he not given in to Pierce’s “extremelystrongpersonalrecommendation, sir!” that he don a Marine helmet to go with his Whiplash-issued armored vest.
Shaking the blow off, Nuri rose in time to see the Marines he’d been with pump several grenades into the position behind the flattened bus. One of the grenades hit a small store of ammo. This resulted in a cascade of shrapnel even larger than the one that had engulfed him, but it didn’t stop the Brothers who were several yards behind the position from firing.
The Marines countered with a heavy dose of lead from their M-16A4s. Nuri added some rounds from his own SCAR, then saw two of the enemy soldiers running down the hillside on his left. As he swung around to fire, one of the men dropped straight back, taken down by a Marine sniper.
The other tossed a grenade, big and fat, directly at him.
* * *
As the rest of his team headed to take down their third and final building, Danny diverted to check on the “spikes” that had been launched and planted just after the start of the mission.
The “spikes”—they had no official name beyond a series of letters and numbers — were a quartet of long metal tubes that were literally rocketed into the ground after being launched from the MC-17. After insertion, a network of small wires shot from the bodies of the spikes, creating a field of electric current — a virtual electric fence, or for the more sci-fi oriented, a force field. Anyone attemptin
g to run through the area protected by the spikes would receive a massive jolt of electricity, roughly the equivalent of three hits from a commercial grade Taser.
The system wasn’t foolproof. A very determined enemy willing to sacrifice a few men could conceivably force his way through. And an enemy that knew what he was dealing with could punch a hole through the defenses by destroying two of the spikes. But in the dark, a confused and unsophisticated enemy would be surprised and stunned by the force of the blow: as evidenced by the two twitching men lying on the other side of the fence Danny saw as he approached.
With the assurance that the spikes were working, he took a quick detour to his left, running in the direction of the citadel cluster where the bots had landed. Here another set of spikes had embedded themselves between the closest ring of defenders and the buildings. Covering a wider ground, the spikes were backed by two of the bots. At least a half-dozen bodies lay on the other side of the virtual fence; from where Danny was, it was impossible to see if they were dead or merely stunned by the shock.
The bots had the buildings under siege. A violent firefight flared at the southeastern corner. Danny considered calling in another round of mini-JDAMs to subdue the resistance, but decided not to — too much damage and they’d never be able to recover the missing UAV parts if they were inside.
By the time he returned to the buildings he’d attacked, both teams were engaged in a gun battle with several Brothers around the last unsearched building.
“I figure this much resistance, it’s a good bet what we want is inside,” said Flash, who was huddled behind the corner of the building across the way. “What do you want to do?”
“Put some grenades through the window,” said Danny. “Lives are more important.”
Strictly speaking, that wasn’t true — everyone on Whiplash was expendable, and they knew it — but Flash complied. He loaded a round into the snap-on launcher beneath his SCAR’s gun barrel, sighted on the window the Brothers were firing from, and pulled the trigger.
An ordinary grenade fired by a skilled fighter would have a fair chance of getting through the window, but even a novice could have succeeded with Flash’s setup. The grenade was a guided munition, designed to follow the beam projected by the laser at the top of Flash’s gun. The round flew through the window and exploded inside, instantly killing all three fighters.
The gun battle continued. There were four men up on the roof of the building. Two had machine guns, and with constant fire they were able to keep the team at bay. Flash had sent two troopers around the side, and he was reluctant to fire any grenades near them, fearing they would be crushed by the wall if it collapsed. Their positions were marked out on his screen by MY-PID, which kept track of the members by reading the location of the transponders in bracelets each wore.
Danny finally decided the best solution was to call in a laser strike.
“Team, stand by,” he told the others before connecting with the laser plane.
“Alert,” said MY-PID, interrupting his transmission. “Four subjects are exiting from Mine Entrance X-ray Dog one five.”
The attack by the minibombs had failed to close the entrance. Danny told the laser ship to stand by, then called up to the Osprey, where his four-member team of reserves, including Melissa, were waiting for their part in the assault.
“We have a slight change in plans,” he told them. “We have people coming out of the mine.”
“We’re just talking about it now,” said Shorty, handling the team communications. “We’ll get them.”
“Melissa, are you all right with this?” Danny.
“I’m anxious to get going.”
“Roger that. Whiplash Six out.”
* * *
Nuri cursed as the grenade exploded a few yards away. By then he was facedown in the dirt, the rest of his body hunched flat. The concussion slammed him flat so hard he blanked out. He came to a moment later, feeling as if the back of his skull had been blown straight off. But only his helmet had been forced away, the chin strap sheared off.
He’d also lost his right earplug. He fished around for it — the plug had his radio headset embedded in it — but couldn’t find the wire. It had been severed in the explosion.
Amazing I wasn’t hit, he said to himself.
He glanced at his right arm and realized that wasn’t true — blood was running down the front of his bicep, soaking into the skin.
Shit.
“Sir! Sir! You OK?” yelled a corpsman, running to his position.
Nuri flexed his fingers.
“I’m OK,” he told him. “Help some of those guys.”
“Where?”
Nuri looked in the direction of the Marines who’d been with him earlier, expecting to see them lying on the ground. Instead, they were charging the gate position.
“I’m fine,” he yelled to the corpsman, hustling after them.
* * *
Melissa gripped the assault rifle and tried to steady her breathing as the Osprey sailed toward the hill where the men were escaping from the mine. Despite her best efforts, she was hyperventilating, gulping huge wads of air into her lungs.
The aircraft began to stutter. Melissa looked up, worried that they were about to go down.
“They’re firing rounds to try and stop them,” explained Shorty. “The pilots will herd them into a corner, assuming they don’t kill them. Be ready.”
“I’m ready,” she yelled. “I’m as ready as ready.”
* * *
Danny turned the corner just behind Flash as the laser took out the last of the gunmen on the roof. Already Sugar and one of the other troopers were at the door; within seconds there was a double explosion inside — a pair of grenades tossed by the two Whiplashers. Smoke rose from the building, and then the wall at the corner of the house furled downward, collapsing from the force of the blast.
“Shug!” yelled Danny.
“I’m OK, Colonel. We’re here. All present and accounted for.”
The team pushed into the house, moving quickly through the first floor. The only people they found were dead — a dozen fighters, all with weapons either in their hands or nearby.
Danny had concluded by now that either his guess on where the UAV parts would be found was wrong and they were in the second cluster of buildings, or they had never been in the camp to begin with. The search of the second floor, which had suffered considerable damage and was missing half its roof, seemed to confirm that, though they did retrieve a desktop computer from one of the rooms where the wall had partially collapsed.
“Sugar, secure the computer CPU with the drive and everything,” said Danny. “Everybody else, we’ll form up outside and take the other cluster.”
Danny did a quick review of the situation. The men who’d come out of the mine shaft were being pursued by the team in the Osprey; MY-PID could track them relatively easily now and they wouldn’t get far. The defenses at the southern wall of the compound had been almost completely neutralized. Upward of four dozen individuals were hunkered down in the huts and tents scattered on the northwestern side of the compound; they showed no inclination to join the fighting. MY-PID’s analysis showed these were mostly women.
But resistance at the last citadel remained strong. Apparently realizing the bots wouldn’t go inside the buildings, the men in the outer ring of houses had spread out, firing intermittently and quickly retreating. This made it more difficult for the robots to concentrate their fire. While the guns did a reasonable job of chewing into the outer walls, the Brothers had begun firing from well inside and in some cases behind the buildings.
Danny had the laser pick off anyone who was uncovered. Then he called over to the Marine captain to get him to move his mortars so they could target the complex.
“I don’t want them to fire unless I give the order,” Danny told Pierce. “But it may come to that.”
“Will do — we have a couple of hard knots of resistance on the western and eastern ends,” reporte
d the captain. “We’ll keep them engaged.” His voice calmed somewhat under fire — truly something you’d only find in a Marine.
Danny circled around toward the north side of the second compound. Flash had repositioned the bots to support their assault. He released two to go back and cover the approach from the gate area, in case the Brothers there tried rallying and ran through the spikes. And he detailed one to accompany them inside the buildings, giving them extra firepower if necessary.
Flash looked up as Danny came around the corner to join the small group. “We’re ready,” said Flash.
“Textbook,” said Danny, raising his hand and waving them to start.
* * *
The Marines cleared the gate positions and ran toward the charred remains of the bus. Nuri realized they weren’t going to stop.
“Wait!” Nuri yelled. “No! No!”
He couldn’t tell if the Marines heard him or not. Between his headache and unbalanced hearing, the entire world seemed off-kilter, a crazy quilt of explosions and gunfire.
“Stop, damn it! Stop!”
There were some barks over the radio net — garbled communications that literally sounded like dogs yapping. Nuri sprinted over two dead bodies and caught up to the Marines as they broke past the rocks on the other side of the bus. One of them looked back, but if he saw him, he obviously thought he was urging them on — they continued running, clearing the second set of defenses and the bodies clustered there.
Screaming at the top of his lungs, Nuri tried to warn them about the spikes. There were several bodies near the invisible fence, Brothers who’d been knocked out by the voltage or possibly shot in the cross fire. The Marines seemed intent on getting beyond them before they stopped running.
Nearly out of breath, Nuri was about to give up — the hell with the damn jerks if they couldn’t obey an order not to attack past a certain line. The spikes would teach them a thing or two about being overaggressive.