Terminal Impact

by Charles Henderson

  —

  “Ghost One, Corsair Three. React team notified,” one-five’s operations chief told Jack Valentine on the crypto secure command and control voice network.

  As he said it, Alvin Barkley and a fifty-man strike team already knelt at the edge of their landing zone, waiting for air lift to arrive to take them to the endangered Marines. With them was Jack’s Mob Squad. The first sergeant knew he couldn’t keep Iceman, Nick the Nose, Pizza Man, and Momo out of the fight. He didn’t even try, but called them first. Besides, the four MARSOC Marines had a kitful of Fleet Anti-terrorism Security Team training. They’d be handy.

  Sergeant Jorge Padilla and the big brindle Malinois with titanium canines, Rattler, knelt close to First Sergeant Barkley and listened to the voice exchanges coming from the handset on the radio strapped to the communications Marine squatting on the other side of the strike-force leader with the big knife. Next to him, all four members of the Mob Squad listened, too.

  With every tick of the second hand on Jack’s wristwatch, the fire intensified and focused as the enemy force maneuvered closer to the low ridge over the shallow dry streambed where Valentine and his seven Marines lay.

  “Gunny,” Cotton called over his intercom. “Them closing on three sides, leaving a door wide open to the east for our retreat means only one thing.”

  “Copy that,” Jack said. “We gotta go that way regardless. Trap or no trap. We move in wide intervals and amp up situational awareness. To our advantage, they’ll want us all in the kill zone when they open fire, and we won’t do it. Put Petey and Chico on point.”

  “You copy that? Petey? Chico?” Cotton said.

  “Roger, copy all,” Corporal Preston answered.

  “Roger,” Randy Powell said.

  “You two hold your position for now,” Cotton said. “Sage and I are coming to you with the SAW. You take fire, open up across their front. Move to lateral cover and the rest of us will come on flank with you.”

  “Good. Thanks,” Petey Preston said, his voice jangled with intense nerves.

  “Chico, Petey,” Jack said. “You can do this. Trust your training. Put those nerves in your locker. You hear me?”

  “Roger, Gunny,” Petey answered, and took a deep breath.

  Jack knew that was almost certainly a death sentence for his two corporals, but he had no choice. Someone had to hit the trap first. He hoped that the two young Scout-Snipers would see the danger area before stepping too deep into it. He hoped that the M249 light machine gun, formerly known as the squad automatic weapon or SAW, would give them the intensive suppression fire they needed to move out of the kill zone and find a covered firing position.

  “Cotton, you and Sage hold on to your SAW,” Jack said after thinking about it. “We’ll huddle up before we run. I’m giving Petey and Chico the other SAW me and Cochise have. I want both machine guns on that end, now that I think about it. One behind the other. Bronco and Jaws? Any cans of five-five-six you’re carrying, make sure they get with the two machine guns. You copy?”

  “Roger, Guns,” Jaws said. “I got four cans in the pack. Bronco has a couple, too.”

  As Jack looked over the top of the ridge, he saw a line of six or eight Toyota pickup trucks curved from the north side around to the east side, gunmen atop the vehicles firing machine guns. And more trucks behind them. A cloud of dust rose high along the horizon, and curved from north, across the west to the south. At their flanks, Hajis on foot ran a charge a thousand yards out.

  “Let’s move!” Jack yelled to his team. Then he pushed a button and called out on the command radio.

  “Corsair, Ghost One. We gotta bug out now,” Jack reported over his hands-free Telex Stinger 700 headset plugged into the Modular Integrated Communications Helmet he wore, a radio-equipped K-pot that all of the MARSOC Marines wore. “Our position not viable! We wait? We’re dead. Ghost Team One taking a run for it down the wadi.”

  A moment of silence. Then Lieutenant Colonel Black Bart Roberts came on the net. “Roger, Ghost One. Corsair Actual here. Deploy to your rally point marked Whiskey Tango Foxtrot. Copy?”

  “Roger. Last-resort extraction point.” Jack laughed, bullets thudding and blasting through the dirt overhead. “Copy, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot. Departing now.”

  “Wolf commencing salvos on your position in three mikes,” Black Bart said. “Can you be sufficiently clear?”

  “Roger, Corsair,” Jack said, running hard behind Cochise Quinlan. “Ample time. Three mikes our old position will be overrun. Hajis advancing fast in Toyotas and on foot.”

  Cotton Martin, Sage, Bronco, Jaws, Petey, and Chico ran ahead at a slower pace, waiting on Cochise, Jack, and the SAW exchange. Jesse and Alex had already passed forward their cans of M249 ammo, in running-relay fashion. Once they had huddled on the move and gotten the guns and ammunition passed off, they would spread again to wide intervals.

  “Ghost One, Corsair. Can you give us an enemy estimate?” Black Bart asked.

  “All of them!” Jack gasped, running for his life.

  Black Bart took Jack’s response meaning more enemy than he could count and closing fast in a crescent that wrapped around the eight Marines’ north, west, and south flanks. He called the Tenth Marine Regiment’s battery commander at Wolf, and ordered him to fire for effect on the MARSOC team’s position, and paint the fire in an arc of steel and high explosives from north to south to a half mile west, and at last follow the wadi east a half a mile.

  For the next twenty minutes, the gunners from Tenth Marines pounded the ground inside and around the arc a half mile in every direction. The rain of steel killed half the ground soldiers but none of those in the trucks. They managed to fall back before the incoming artillery landed. They joined the force of a thousand gunmen who lay back with their graybeard boss, Abu Omar Bakr al-Nasser, waiting for the barrage to end. Then they would go after the Marines.

  Abu Omar and his captains watched the salvos at a safe distance and listened to the Marines’ secure command and control voice traffic on four of six captured American radios, lost in action six months ago, which did not have their internal self-destruct codes executed.

  The absconded operation order from First Battalion, Fifth Marine Regiment had given them all the discrete frequencies to monitor and stay one step ahead of the Marines. They knew to fall back after they flushed the MARSOC team, and trusted that their duo of ambush teams, equipped with the other two American radios, would intercept the Americans.

  Jack Valentine and his seven Marines ran hard, loaded with their heavy packs and rifles. They managed to clear nearly a half mile from where they had lain when the first shell from the one-ninety-eights landed.

  Cochise Quinlan glanced back when the first round shook the earth under his feet.

  “Shit!” he said, and ran harder because the explosion felt like it had hit right on his heels. “Fuck, I hate being on the receiving end of artillery.”

  “Don’t worry about the shit behind us,” Jack gasped, charging hard. “Stay focused up front. Situational awareness, Cochise! Situational aware- ness!”

  “Gunny,” Cochise huffed, breathing hard. “I’m so situationally aware right now, I think I might shit my pants. Fuck, I’m scared.”

  “Me, too, Cochise,” Jack said. “Me, too!”

  —

  Ray-Dean Blevins felt like shit. Looked it, too, as he and Freddie Stein and Gary Frank took lead on an executive escort from the embassy to the airport. Already, news spread that one-five had suffered a security compromise and had Marines under fire because of it. Bad news spreads fast, and worse news spreads like lightning in a thunderstorm over Florida flatlands.

  Marines who now worked for Malone-Leyva talked it up on the company network. That news with the hangover from last night and from his vodka lunch break and a line of meth up the snot locker for dessert had Cooder-with-a-D flying high and mad. He kn
ew that Cesare Alosi had capitalized on his treachery to get a CIA contract and a Defense Department contract, seeing the open needs that the plan made visible, and Malone-Leyva jumped first in line, grabbing the business away from all competition.

  But that didn’t bother Ray-Dean so much as his gut feeling that the man with no soul had probably sold the operation plan to the enemy, too, or worse yet, given it to the Hajis so that the Marines would look like losers and allow Malone-Leyva another chance to shine.

  “You want a hit?” Ray-Dean said to Gary Frank, driving the armored Cadillac.

  “Sure,” the lout answered, and took the pint bottle of vodka and turned it up, taking a gulp. Then he let out a Rebel yell after swallowing the firewater, wiped the tears out of his eyes, and passed the bottle back.

  “How about you, Freddie?” Blevins called toward the rear seat, where the third member of the low-life crew stood through an open sunroof, a Heckler and Koch HK417 automatic .30 caliber battle rifle in his hands. Rather than the M4 carbine or any other of the lighter-caliber 5.56-millimeter variants of the M16 platform, all Malone-Leyva operators carried the hard-hitting, longer-reaching HK black gun that fired the 7.62-by-51-millimeter NATO round.

  “Does a nun have a cunt?” he said, dropping down and taking the bottle.

  “Fuck if I know,” Cooder said, after Fred Stein took his shot of clear hard liquor.

  “Well they do, and I’d fuck one,” Freddie said, and looked behind their Escalade to see the low-ranking State Department’s US Agency for International Development, USAID, civilians and their suitcases, heading to the airport for the night flight back to the world. “Looks like we’re about ready to rumble.”

  “Yeah,” Ray-Dean said, and gave Gary Frank a tap on the shoulder. “Let’s move out.”

  Two other Malone-Leyva armored stretch Escalades with full crews and two State Department security specialists fell in behind Ray-Dean and his boys. Another Malone-Leyva gun wagon manned with three machine-gun-wielding contract operators followed at the tail end, providing rear guard.

  The street outside the embassy gates had filled with afternoon traffic, and the sidewalks were jammed with shoppers in the relative safety of the International Zone, where stores operated and life seemed nearly normal, except for the occasional car bomb and sniping.

  Down the street, a taxi had pulled to the curb and had its hood up. The driver had the breather filter off the air intake, trying to adjust the mixture. He had the engine running, sputtering and coughing.

  As he increased the airflow, the engine began to smooth out, until he went too far. Then he quickly reversed the adjustment, enriching the mixture, and a loud pop came from the tailpipe.

  “You hear that?” Freddie said, shouldering his rifle as they started down the street. People on the sidewalks had stopped in their tracks, reacting to the first loud pop.

  Then the taxi driver turned the mixture again and caused two more loud backfires, one after the other.

  “We’re under siege!” Ray-Dean yelled, and instead of hitting the gas, Gary Frank hit the brakes.

  Freddie Stein didn’t wait for orders, but opened fire and emptied his first magazine before Cooder-with-a-D could get his door open and start firing, too.

  “Light ’em up!” Ray-Dean yelled, tripping out the car door, and started hosing people on the streets with his HK417 assault rifle.

  Like clockwork, Gary Frank pissed his pants and soaked the driver’s seat with urine reeking of Prednisone and other cooked-up steroids he’d been taking, trying to bulk up with the boys.

  Behind the lead vehicle, guns went out and operators searched for targets but found none. No one had shot at the convoy. A taxi backfired three times and the net result left thirty-five dead civilians on the streets of Baghdad.

  Ray-Dean and Freddie never stopped shooting until a heroic State Department security officer maneuvered behind the lead Escalade and took the rifle out of Blevins’s hands.

  He pointed the black gun up at Fred Stein, and yelled, “Stop shooting, you idiot! Do you see any incoming bullet marks on anything?”

  “They’re shooting!” Freddie insisted. “I heard three shots!”

  “Me, too,” Gary Frank chimed in, now out of the car, his pants dripping wet. “I was inside driving.”

  Ray-Dean took out his bottle of vodka and finished it, in front of everyone.

  _ 11 _

  With the revelations of the First Battalion, Fifth Marines’ operation plan to the forces of al-Qaeda Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and Abu Omar Bakr al-Nasser sent word far and wide, urging jihadi faithful from all corners of the earth to come, join them in a great victory over the American infidels. Men and women, even boys and girls, from Europe, Asia, North Africa, and other nations of the Middle East, saw the messages on the al-Qaeda Web sites, and flocked to Syria and southwest Turkey. Day by day, sympathetic zealots filled the insurgents’ ranks; many of them had never before seen war or had even held a rifle. Al-Qaeda Iraq’s numbers grew by thousands overnight.

  Twenty-six gunmen, some seasoned and some green recruits to Omar Bakr al-Nasser’s army of Jamaat Ansar al-Sunnah lay waiting for the eight Marine Scout-Snipers to round the long turn in the dry streambed that ran eastward to rally point Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, another mile away.

  Behind them and outside their flanks, another twenty-six al-Sunnah, al-Qaeda fighters waited in reserve, as reinforcements, should the American strike force land early. Before the reinforced ambush could slaughter the eight Marines running into their grist mill, then depart intact. It all boiled down to timing, and that depended on how fleet of foot were the approaching lambs.

  Jamal al-Hakim, captain in command of the overall fifty-two-man force, hid in a nest of rocks and earth mounds just behind his ambushing force’s left-flank machine gun, listening to the American command channel. He could not monitor the Marines’ covered intercom because that frequency did not appear on the operation plan. Elmore Snow had long ago decided that internal intercom should be exactly that, internal. He didn’t want anyone outside his unit hearing the often-colorful chatter among his operators.

  Hakim had five machine guns. Three he had placed at each end and in the apex of his ambush. The other two waited in reserve, ready to move up, should he need them. He had planted the ambush along a gentle curve of the wadi, giving his center machine gun a clear field of fire a hundred yards down the streambed. The captain’s right-flank gun had the shortest field of fire but covered the dead space at the other end of the curve. His left-flank gun covered nearly the same long kill zone as the center gun.

  A pair of Claymore mines at the head of the ambush, just beneath his machine guns, ensured that once the Marines had filled the kill zone, death would come to them sudden and sure. The antipersonnel explosives made certain that no one penetrated their line, should the Americans turn into the center of fire and charge at them.

  Jamal’s only regret was that he did not have more than the two Claymores. Ideally, he would have had two more at the tail end of his kill zone. A deadly door he could close.

  Lined shoulder to shoulder between the machine guns, fighters with Russian assault rifles waited hungrily. Captain Hakim had told them to exercise great patience because the Marines would likely spread their intervals. Even if the lead members of the team moved past them in the primary kill zone, the reserves could kill those few. He wanted all eight inside the lane before anyone opened fire.

  Lying with the center machine gun, a jihadi with a small digital video camera focused his lens on the kill zone. Just as they had done last year, they would post this triumph over these shayatin mukali, painted devils, on the World Wide Web for all of sympathetic Islam to see.

  Two men down, an especially anxious gunman called Ismail, a Sunni boy of seventeen from a village on the south side of Karbala, listened to the man with the camera chanting Allahu Akbar on the sound track as he rolled vide
o, hearing the Marines approach. Ismail began chanting, too.

  As Ismail blinked, staring down his gunsights, he saw the first Marine running fast into the kill zone. At that instant, the voices filling his heart with Allahu Akbar and visions of Paradise, the young man forgot everything his captain had stressed about waiting.

  “Allahu Akbar!” Ismail cried as his pounding heart sent blood surging through his brain, and he opened fire.

  Two shots struck Petey Preston before he knew what hit him. His body armor caught most of the bullets’ energy, but he still went down hard. Hurt. Bleeding from shallow wounds and broken ribs, he gasped for air. Not fatal but painful.

  Chico Powell ran thirty yards behind Corporal Preston and saw him bite the dirt. Instead of going lateral and opening fire with his support rifle, he ran to his buddy, who lay wailing, kicking his feet something awful.

  Four shots hit Chico before he could reach Petey. One nailed his night optics on the front of his MACH helmet, parted his hair, and knocked him out cold. The other three buried in his armored vest’s Kevlar, not putting holes in his body but also breaking ribs. He looked dead.

  Petey quit yelling when he saw his bro go down, blood pouring over his face from the head wound. He thought the Hajis had killed his pard.

  Instead of pissing and moaning, blinding pain aside, Preston rolled onto his light machine gun and opened fire into the nest of Jamaat Ansar al-Sunnah jihadis. He swept the entire frontage with grazing fire and put all of the ambushing gunmen behind the rocks and earth mounds at the turn in the wadi where they had laid the ambush.

  Petey thought, so close but so far away. Just behind the bastards, east another mile, lay rally point Whiskey Tango Foxtrot and hopeful ex-traction. How did these bastards know to put their ambush here?

  As he suppressed the enemy with his machine gun, Petey moved backwards, past the motionless body of Chico Powell, and found good cover at another turn in the wadi that he reckoned sat just outside the Hajis’ kill zone. He tried to call the gang on his intercom but he couldn’t catch his breath. He tasted blood in his mouth and knew he probably had a piece of bone stuck in his lungs.