Devil's Guard- The Complete Series Box Set

by Eric Meyer

  “The cowards, they should stop and fight.”

  “They may be unarmed, Luk,” I pointed out. “They could be here for maintenance and repairs.”

  He nodded. “I guess so.”

  Rachel was taxiing out to the main runway, and I was scanning the instruments to assess our ability to take off. Everything looked ok, so I shouted at Luk to strap in, then made a final check. We were as ready as we could be. I turned to Rachel.

  “Take her straight out, and try to steer clear of the fighting.”

  “No worries, I had the exact same thought,” she said grimly.

  She hit the throttles forward, and the aircraft leapt ahead. We were unladen and only needed three hundred yards, maybe less, to get off the ground. Except that the wind was in the wrong direction.

  “Max, we need to turn at the end of the runway and take off into wind!” she shouted.

  I glanced at the windsock. Sure enough, the wind had changed. We could take off with the wind, but we’d need a much longer take-off roll, and maybe more than could be accommodated, especially, as we’d be under fire for every yard of the way. The aircraft was rushing towards the end of the runway, and I made the decision.

  “Make the turn, we have to do this properly, otherwise we’ll be a target for every Taliban shooter within half a mile.”

  She started to slow as we neared the downwind end of the runway. A pair of Stryker APCs rushed past us, heading straight for the enemy. No troops were visible as they were all tucked safely inside the hull. But the top mounted M2 .50 caliber machine gun was traversing, seeking its target.

  “They’re remote controlled, those things,” Luk pointed out. “The crew are safe inside the vehicle, and they’re controlling the .50 cal from inside there. They’re almost unstoppable, those things.”

  Almost, but not quite, and two missiles slammed into the lead Stryker in quick succession. The remarkable armor prevented any damage to the crew, but obviously some of the drive components were damaged when the missiles hit. Smoke was rising from the hull. The door slammed open, and the crew burst out. The other Stryker had stopped, and its own door opened to admit the men from the first damaged vehicle. Then it accelerated away again towards the source of the missileer who had just hit them. Now the gunner inside the armored hull had located the nearest insurgents, and he locked the .50 caliber heavy machine gun onto its target.

  The stream of bullets smashed into a group of about fifty Taliban who were racing forwards. It was like a First World War battle; a line of screaming and heavily armed men running into the attack, only to be cut down by machine gun fire. They were decimated by the unremitting gunfire that tore them to pieces. A few survivors ran for cover or flung themselves down, but for most of them their most pressing need was a decent burial. The Stryker bumped over several bodies that lay on the ground as it pressed forward, searching for the next target. The invisible gunner found it; a second group that had smashed through the perimeter fence and were circling around to the south side of the airfield. The .50 opened up, and bodies were tossed into the air and thrown to the ground like wheat before a farmer’s thresher. But they didn’t have it all their own way. Another missileer, a survivor from the first group of fifty, had hidden in a shallow fold in the ground. Abruptly, he stood up and took aim. The gunner saw him at once, and the .50 caliber barrel began to traverse. They both locked on at the same moment. A stream of heavy shells flew towards the missile shooter, and he disappeared in a ragged mess of shredded flesh, but he’d done his work well. His missile flew away directly towards the Stryker. It struck just forward of the center of the vehicle, low on the port side. Two of the vehicle’s eight wheels flew high into the air, but incredibly the APC kept going. But only just, the steering gear had obviously been damaged, and the driver was forced to stop, and the crew began to abandon.

  “Max!”

  I turned to see what the problem was. Rachel had spotted two fighters on the runway, four hundred yards ahead of us. They were lying prone, firing at the defenders as the private security men, infantry and Afghan regulars tried to regroup and deploy for an assault that would sweep the attackers back the way they’d come.

  “Keep going. We don’t have a choice.”

  “But they’ll see us in a few seconds, and they’ll start shooting up the aircraft.”

  “Ignore them, just get us off the ground.”

  I heard her mutter something about, ‘at this rate we’ll never get off the fucking ground’, but I ignored it. We were in an exposed place, stationary at the end of the runway ready to depart. Sooner or later someone was going to start shooting at us, and I calculated our only option was to go straight ahead. Maybe we’d strike lucky and run the two fighters down with our landing wheels. Or they’d get lucky and shatter the cockpit with salvos of bullets fired from their rifles.

  “Luk, is there any way you can get a shot at them?”

  “No way, that side window is the wrong angle entirely. I’m sorry, Max.”

  “Get the rifle ready to fire, and poke the barrel out of the side window. I’ll try and get you an angle on them.”

  “Er, Max, you’re in the way.”

  “Then lean across me,” I shouted. “Just do it, Luk. Rachel, I’m taking over the controls.”

  “It’s all yours,” she replied, glancing over to make sure I had my hands on the control column. Her expression changed to one of horror.

  “Max, you can’t take off with Luk draped across you! What the hell are you doing?”

  “I can do it, just leave me alone,” I snapped with irritation. I looked forward again, working out the angles. Rachel automatically took up the role of co-pilot.

  “Ground speed fifty knots, instruments are all good. Ten degrees of flap.”

  “Roger. How far until we hit the shooters?”

  “About a hundred and fifty yards.”

  “Ok. Flaps up, we’ll manage without them.”

  There was a brief silence. Then, “Flaps going up. About a hundred yards to the shooters.”

  The air in front of us was like a Fourth of July fireworks display. The dark night was lit by thousands of flashes from small arms fire, punctuated by explosions from heavier ordnance fired by both sides. The thick fog of war already covered the airfield, and smoke and debris swirled everywhere making it difficult to see who was fighting where. Then I kicked on the rudder and swerved the aircraft over to starboard, exposing the shooters to the port window where Luk waited. I didn’t need to tell him. He fired, once, twice, and then the whole clip was emptied. But he’d only knocked down one of them, and the other leveled his assault rifle and began to shoot at our cockpit.

  Three shots struck the side of the nose of the aircraft, and one hit the sliding window, punching a hole clean through. Rachel screamed. I shouted at Luk.

  “For Christ’s sake, hit the bastard! I have to turn back onto the runway in a couple of seconds.”

  There was no reply. I realized that his body was resting on me, but it was a dead weight, and not that of a man who was active and moving. I didn’t have time to speculate. I peered over his lifeless form and looked out of the windshield. We were running out of room. I kicked the rudder again the opposite side, and the aircraft lurched back towards the runway. When the wheels were stable on the tarmac, I corrected our heading and continued on our take-off roll. Two more shots hit the nose, but fortunately none damaged the windshield. I couldn’t worry about Luk or the shooter, or anything other than getting airborne.

  “Call it, Rachel!”

  A fraction of a second’s hesitation, then, “Fifty-five knots, V1.”

  Where was the shooter? I had a brief glimpse of a turbaned man frantically loading a fresh clip into his assault rifle, but then he disappeared, and there was a ‘bump’ as our wheels went over him.

  “Sixty-five knots, rotate!”

  I hauled back on the column and felt the Twin Otter straining to get into the sky. I’d not used flaps, so it meant that we’d have a fast, sha
llow ascent, rather than a slow, steep ascent that would leave us at the mercy of the shooters on the ground. We screamed over the airfield, narrowly scraping over the roof of the control tower, the highest point, and then we were airborne and away. A few rounds followed us as the attackers tried to prevent our leaving, but no more shots hit us, at least, none that we felt or could see.

  We climbed to three thousand feet, at which height I felt reasonably safe and circled the airfield. The battle was at its peak. Broken aircraft burned, and they sent plumes of smoke high into the sky. A few hundred yards away a squadron of Apache Longbow helicopters had formed up and was swooping down to attack. The Boeing AH-64Ds were equipped with a chain gun mounted under the chin, and I knew that within seconds their targets would be shredded to little more than matchsticks, if they could identify them. Their opponents weren’t fools, and they wasted no time in infiltrating the Allied positions. It was going to be difficult for the brutal helicopters to wreak their terror on the attackers below. In which case, they would need to be eliminated one by one on the ground. It was going to be a slow, bloody and painful process. A pair of Apache Longbows loomed in front of us, and I threw the control column over sharply to keep out of their way. They were concentrating on the ground, not the sky. But a collision would be as deadly as a Taliban rocket. I turned to speak to Rachel and felt the heavy weight that pressed down on me. Luk!

  “Rachel, get Luk off me and see how he is.”

  “What happened to him?” she cried in alarm.

  “He was hit by that shooter on the runway.”

  She was already pulling him off me. “He looks bad, Max. I don’t even know if he’s breathing.”

  I felt my guts churning. I was already working out what to say to his father, Abe Woltz, the man who’d been with my grandfather during the dark days of Vietnam. And now this, no!

  “Rachel, do whatever’s necessary. You have to keep him alive. I’ll find somewhere to land near a hospital.”

  “I think that would be a good idea, Max. I can feel a faint pulse now, but he needs a medic, and fast. An army medic might be best in this country.”

  “You can forget Kabul. They’ve got their hands full, and I doubt they’d even let us land.”

  “Jalalabad?”

  “Sounds good,” she replied. “I’d call them up on the radio.”

  The reply was prompt. “Don’t even think about coming here. We’ve got our hands full sending out reinforcements to Kabul International. The airport is shut down for non-military operations. Try Kandahar.”

  I punched in the coordinates. It was two hundred miles away.

  “I have a casualty, and he won’t live that long. I must land at Jalalabad.”

  “That a negative, Helene Air. You come here, and you’ll circle the city until you run out of fuel. Your best bet is Kandahar. Try and keep him alive, good luck, buddy.”

  “Yeah.”

  I told Rachel.

  “You’re not serious? How long will it take us to reach Kandahar?”

  “About an hour and a half.”

  “Fuck it. You’ll have to go for it, Max. I’ll try and keep him alive.”

  That was when the next blow hit us, in a message that came over the radio.

  “Helene Air, this is Walker. We’re ready for the pickup.”

  I hit the transmit button. “That’s a negative, Walker. We have a casualty on board. He needs urgent medical treatment, and we’re heading for Kandahar.”

  The radio went silent for half a minute. Then Walker came back on.

  “Hoffman, I don’t think you understand whose paying the bills. Your job is to get your ass here fast and pick us up. We’ve just finished a successful fire mission, and we don’t want to wait around for the ragheads to get their shit together and come after us with all guns blazing. We blew those fuckers apart, and they never knew what hit them.” He sounded exultant, as if he was on some kind of a drug high. Or perhaps it was the way men behave when they’d just bathed in their enemy’s blood. He cleared his throat and continued. “You can forget Kandahar. A group of our people is overdue on the border near Tora Bora. They’re a mixed group, a military escort with civilian medics who were making the crossing through the Khyber into Pakistan, some kind of aid mission. We’ve been tasked to locate them and get them out of trouble. It’s not going to wait. They’re pinned down under fire, so your guy will have to hang in there.”

  I felt my anger begin to boil over. “Look, we’re taking our guy to Kandahar for treatment. We’ll come and…”

  That was as far as I got.

  “Hear this, Hoffman. I’m about to relay an order for Kandahar airfield to be closed to your aircraft. You try it, and they’ll shoot you out of the sky. Now get that fucking plane here and pick us up. I won’t tell you again!”

  The radio went dead. The conversation was over, and I knew we had no choice. I turned to look at Rachel. She was kneeling over Luk, applying a pressure bandage to stop the blood loss. “You heard?”

  She nodded. “Yeah, I heard. The bastard.”

  “Can he hold out for long enough to make the pick up?”

  “He’ll have to,” she growled, her voice bitter and angry.

  “Anything I can do, Rachel?”

  “No, you fly the aircraft. I’ve had elementary battlefield first aid training in the Air Force. I’ll do my best for him. I’ve found Luk’s satphone. I’m going to find a signal and call his father, Abe Woltz. How long before we pick up Walker’s team?”

  I made a rough calculation in my head. “About an hour, maybe a bit more. I’ll punch in the coordinates and get a better idea. Walker’s people may have a medic that could help Luk.”

  “Only a battlefield medic, and they won’t be any more effective than me. But didn’t he say something about going on to pick up civilian medics? That could mean a doctor, which would give Luk a much better chance.”

  “Ok, I’ll be more cooperative with Walker.”

  She laughed. “I wouldn’t bother. The only way he’ll ever help anyone is at gunpoint.”

  “I guess so.”

  I hit the coordinates for the landing field into the navigational computer. The aircraft swung onto the new heading, and we settled down for the flight across the bleak, harsh grandeur of the Afghan landscape. The flight seemed long, very long. And all the time I thought of Rachel, working to keep Luk alive as he lay on the cockpit floor; his bed a pool of drying blood. At one point she shouted to me over the roar of the engines.

  “I got through to Abe Woltz. He knows some people in Peshawar. He said he’d get them standing by to help if they’re needed.”

  “Help? What can they do? Are they doctors or medics of some kind?”

  “I’ve no idea. He just said they’d be there to help us if necessary.”

  I dismissed it from my mind. I couldn’t see any kind of a scenario where Abe Woltz’s contacts could help out. I flew on, willing the time to pass quicker.

  * * *

  Vince Mason crawled back across the hard packed earth to where Lieutenant Rains was huddled behind a low stone wall. They’d suffered two more casualties, a private and a corporal, and the medics were working on them. He glanced up at the soaring heights of the pass. They should have been over the other side by now. Surely someone would realize they were overdue and send a chopper or a reconnaissance aircraft to check them out. If Rains had held out for Strykers, it would only have cost them an extra day or two, and they wouldn’t be in this position. Neither would they have lost eight dead and two wounded. Let alone be faced with losing the whole platoon. Rains stared at him as he crawled behind the wall.

  “What’s the situation, Sergeant?”

  “The two casualties are out of danger, LT. Those medics are doing a good job of patching them up, but we can’t stay here much longer. They’ll pick us off one by one until we’re all dead. There’s been no sign of that reconnaissance drone coming back, so we may be on our own.”

  “So you’ve worked that one out?
In case you hadn’t noticed, Sergeant, we’ve lost our vehicles. How do you suggest we get out of here?”

  “We’ve got a tradition in the infantry, as I recall. We walk.”

  Rains reddened. “Cut the sarcasm, Sergeant Mason! I’ve considered getting of here on foot. The problem is we’ll be under fire for every step of the way.”

  “Not if they can’t see us. We’ve a couple of mortars, the boys brought with them when we bailed out. They’ve got eight smoke bombs amongst the ordnance. If we lay down a pattern of smoke, we should be able to break out and get up into the hills.”

  Both men looked up at the distant Khyber Pass. It soared three and a half thousand feet above them, winding through a cut in the mountains. They could clearly see the snaking road that was the only way of getting through from Afghanistan to Pakistan.

  “It’s a long way to go on foot and a hard climb,” Rains mused. “I’m not sure we can get our wounded up there. What about the road back to Jalalabad?”

  Mason shook his head. “No chance. The Taliban main force is set up across that road, and they’re expecting us to try it. The road through the Khyber Pass has only a few defenders. They’re not expecting us there.”

  “Because it’s crazy?”

  “I guess, yeah, it’s crazy. It’s also the only way. Either that or wait for help to arrive. And with the Taliban attacking all over, everything is buttoned down, and nothing’s moving. We may be spotted by a passing aircraft or drone, but it’s a maybe.”

  Rains sighed. Whatever he decided, it was going to be bad. He nodded at Mason.

  “Get them together, Sergeant. We’ll go forward, through the Khyber Pass. And God help us all.”

  “I hear you, LT. I kind of assumed you’d go for it. The mortar crews are set up ready. The medics have the casualties strapped to the gurneys, and they’ll carry them while the platoon keeps everyone covered.”