Terminal Impact

by Charles Henderson

  Carefully, Jack reached inside his vest and felt his command radio. He wanted to turn it off and save the battery. When he gripped hold of it, however, he felt it sizzle and smelled faint electrical smoke. He checked his GPS position locator transmitter receiver; it too had died.

  He had heard nothing of his Marines over the intercom since they left. With the two other radios gone, that worried him. Of course, on the move, dodging an aggressive enemy, they would spare words.

  “Cotton, you copy?” Jack whispered over the hands-free, looking up the dry riverbed from a small hole by the rock. He hugged his M40A3 sniper rifle that he had in his hide with him, along with his pack full of .338 Lapua Magnum ammunition and four canteens of water that his team had left in addition to his own four bottles, plus two bags of dehydrated food. They had packed food and water for a couple of days, so Jack knew he would have to make every drop of water count and stretch every crumb of food.

  While Cochise Quinlan had buried Petey Preston’s Vigilance semiautomatic support rifle and his satchel full of .338 magnum ammunition, he had tossed aside Corporal Preston’s backpack and what was left in it. Simply too much nonessential crap to carry in addition to his own pack. Plus it offered a distraction to the enemy. However, the emotional sergeant had unintentionally left behind his entrenching tool, stuck in the sand by an empty hole. It reminded Jack of a grave marker. All it needed was an empty helmet hung on top of it and empty boots at its base.

  To help disguise the gunny’s hide, the team had dug several other shallow fighting holes and made sure they all had ample spent brass in and around them. They also left plenty of tracks running every direction, on their way out, to draw the enemy away from Jack.

  “Cotton,” Gunny Valentine called again. No answer.

  For a minute or two, which seemed like an eternity, the world fell silent. Jack felt his heart pound in his ears, and he held his breath.

  Then all hell broke loose.

  Machine gun fire swept up and down the dry riverbed, sending bullets into every aspect and angle.

  “Here’s where I die,” Jack told himself, anticipating a burst hitting him where he lay. The dirt and rocks on top of him would do little to repel .30 caliber hot lead.

  Somehow, God must have heard his prayers. Bullets landed around him but not in him. Then, moments later, a dozen-plus Hajis came charging into Jack’s position, shooting up the world even more. A gang of them walked directly on top of him several times. One gunman even stood in the middle of Valentine’s back, searching for clues.

  One man picked up Corporal Preston’s backpack and dumped out all the contents. Socks, two douche-bag dinners, water bottles, some empty spare ammunition magazines for the Vigilance, a pair of binoculars, a bottle of Cholula chili sauce. But no ammunition or much else of real value.

  The Haji threw the pack in the dirt and kicked one of the MRE bags like a soccer ball off the side of his foot at another gunman who kicked it back. Then the two men began playing football with the brown-plastic pack of dehydrated food. Jack smiled.

  “This just might work,” he told himself.

  Another enemy gunman took Cochise’s forgotten entrenching tool, gave it a good look, started to keep it but decided it would be in his way. So, he stabbed it in the ground next to the rock hiding Gunny Valentine’s face. The little shovel blade just missed his head.

  A voice in the wadi, far behind the gunny, yelled something in Arabic, and other voices approaching in the wadi from the west answered. Then everyone took off running and jabbering to each other.

  Moments later, pickup trucks rumbled along the top of the dry riverbed, running along both sides. Several other Toyotas rolled up, stopped, and took on passengers. Then all of them sped off. Jack supposed they went in chase of his Marines, following their tracks.

  “Cotton!” Jack said above a whisper, gambling that no one waited behind.

  “You’re alive!” Staff Sergeant Martin answered, breathless, still shouldering Chico Powell as he ran hard.

  “Yeah,” Valentine responded. “They’re mounted in trucks, hot on your six.”

  “We’re a hundred yards out of our rally point,” Cotton said. “We’ll set up defensive positions in those rocks and fight it out there.”

  “I can hear Ospreys,” the gunny said, to give his brother hope.

  Cotton stopped and listened, and he did in fact hear the beating propellers of the V-22 tiltrotor planes growing louder, approaching him.

  “I hear them, too!” Martin came back, and Jack was surprised, because in truth he had not heard a thing.

  “Take cover, bro. Kill as many as you can,” Jack said, just as he heard gunfire open up to the south.

  “Fuck! Those guys are fast!” Cotton said, taking fire from several dozen pursuing al-Sunnah gunmen riding in the fleet of pickup trucks.

  “Gunny!” Cochise Quinlan shouted on the intercom. “Soon as we get these guys killed out, we’re coming to get you. Sit your ass tight.”

  “No can do,” Jack said, pulling himself out of his hide. “I got to move out while I have the chance. All you guys hear me?”

  “Yup. All of us hear you loud and clear,” Cotton said, helping feed ammo to Sammy LaSage’s light machine gun, chopping away at the Hajis that had now leaped from the trucks and scattered behind rocks and mounds.

  “I’m heading west, back up this wadi about twenty kilometers, maybe thirty,” Valentine told them as he gathered up Petey’s discarded meals and water. He left the backpack because his own was enough to haul. But he did grab Cochise Quinlan’s entrenching tool.

  “Then I’m going to make a big-ass circle north, arc back around east, and I’ll head to Haditha Dam, following parallel to MSR Bronze,” Jack told them as he did a quick look around the area and headed out. “You copy that?”

  “That’s one big-ass circle,” Cochise said. “Why not go straight east from where you are? We’ll have people out looking for you, air and ground. Be where we can find you.”

  “Hajis will be looking for me to go east, direct to friendly lines, or south toward Wolf. If they know I’m left behind,” Jack explained. “I’m hoping they don’t figure that out. But if they do, they’ll be turning over every rock searching for me. I want them where I’m not. The long way is the best way. I got food and water. I’ll be fine.”

  “Roger that,” Cotton said, talking and shooting.

  “Make sure that no one says anything on the command net about me out here,” Jack said.

  “Why’s that?” Martin asked.

  “I think the Hajis captured some crypto radios and have our command frequencies monitored. That guy calling me Ghost One. A dead giveaway,” Jack said.

  “You know,” Cotton said. “I did a double take on that, too. They had to be listening. Think they have this net?”

  “No,” Jack answered. “They would have killed Chico if they’d heard us talking to him playing dead.”

  “Makes sense,” Cotton said.

  “But keep word of me off the net,” Jack said. “If they don’t know I’m here, that’s best.”

  “They’ll figure that out pretty quick, though, after you kill a few of them,” Cotton said. “I don’t see how you can go that distance without running into a Haji or ten.”

  “I don’t plan on their seeing me,” Jack said, jogging west with the pack on his back, his M40A3 rifle slung across one shoulder and the Vigilance rifle in his hands.

  “Well, Gunny, you know how that always seems to work out,” Cochise said.

  “Yeah, unfortunately, I do,” Jack said, huffing along, his signal getting scratchy and weak.

  “We get in the Ospreys, what’s to keep us from swinging out where you are and grabbing you?” Cotton said.

  “That’d be great if I didn’t have my world crawling with Hajis, and if I had a working GPS so I could give out coordinates,” Jack sai
d. “It’s dead as a mackerel along with my command radio. Fried like bacon. Don’t know what did it, but they’re toast. All I got is this weak-ass intercom, and it’s about out of range. So good luck finding me.”

  “We can give it a try anyway. Take a run or two up the wadi,” Martin said.

  “Oh, definitely do it,” Jack said. “If you can get them to swing out here. I’m beating feet west, fast as I can haul ass. But I also have to keep off the skyline, and that makes me a little difficult to spot from the air.”

  A few minutes later, he had run out of range. All he heard now was static, so he shut off the intercom radio to save his battery.

  More than a hundred of Abu Omar’s Jamaat Ansar al-Sunnah jihadi fighters converged on Cotton Martin and the six MARSOC Marines huddled in the cluster of rocks at the alternate rally point they called Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, Plan B.

  “I’m down to my last magazine,” Jaws said, now working his Vigilance support rifle, having already depleted his .50 calibers and set aside the Barrett Mark-82.

  Sergeant Sammy LaSage went to work with his bolt-action sniper rifle, after setting aside the SAW, having spent its last can.

  Bronco had run out of all his rounds and huddled next to Jaws with his pistol out, and two .45 magazines handy to reload. Chico Powell and Petey Preston had nothing but short guns left, either.

  Cotton Martin tossed his next-to-last rifle magazine to Jaws and kept the last one for himself. That’s when he looked up and saw the first of two Super Cobras swing low and open fire on the jihadis, putting two rockets and several acres of 20-millimeter gunfire into their midst. Hajis scattered in every direction, running for their lives.

  Hot on the attack helicopters’ tails, three Ospreys set down and dropped their ramps. Sixty strike-force Marines poured out of the aircrafts’ bellies, shooting and snarling, with Alvin Barkley at the lead, his big knife on his leg, charging out of the first bird to set down, Sergeant Jorge Padilla and Rattler hot on his heels. Staff Sergeant Marcellus Jupiter brought the last twenty men out of the third V-22 aircraft, the Mob Squad among them.

  It didn’t take long, and they had the Hajis scattered and mostly dead. Anything that even remotely resembled a Toyota truck got blown to pieces. Toyota wreckage and enemy bodies littered the desert.

  After loading the seven Marines and the strike force, the trio of Ospreys launched to the north and turned west, following the dry wadi where Jack had fled. They made three low passes, going well beyond a distance any human on foot could have run.

  Jack had to hug the ground in a clump of rocks and dirt. As the planes flew overhead three times, he could do nothing. He couldn’t breathe a word. Just yards ahead of him, he watched a dozen al-Sunnah gunmen also hiding from the aircraft.

  He had no clue whether the Hajis had come in search of him or just happened to be crossing the desert plains. Regardless, he decided to hold tight a few hours until full nightfall. They’d be gone by then, and he could move out.

  While he waited, well hidden, he checked his gear. Curious about the dead radios, and hoping he might revive them, Valentine carefully and quietly slipped them out of his operator’s vest.

  As he looked closely at both radios, he saw the trouble. A shred of copper bullet fragment had somehow gone down his Kevlar vest, ripped through the back of the command radio, and struck the top of the GPS, where it lodged.

  “Crap,” he breathed to himself and checked to see if his intercom radio had taken a hit, too. It seemed okay as he examined the case, then he remembered turning it off to save the battery. He looked at the sky as the dozen Hajis departed out of the wadi, and he wished that the planes would now make a fourth pass. But they didn’t.

  “I should have taken the chance and called them down!” Jack said to himself, and shrank into his hiding place. A sense of loss and utter frustration suddenly drained him.

  Then he took a deep breath, stuffed the radios back in their pouches, and told himself, “Suck it up, Jack. You’ll be fine.”

  —

  Ray-Dean Blevins leaned against the passenger-side front fender of the Escalade, a sneer on his face, belching bad gas, watching State Department security officers and US Agency for International Development workers helping Iraqi police and Red Crescent attendants tend to the wounded. He considered it a waste of time. His face and posture visibly projected his surly attitude.

  Freddie Stein sat in the backseat of the Cadillac, brooding, while Gary Frank stood on the other side of the car, trying to shake dry his pissed-wet pants and blubbering incoherently to anyone who had the misfortune of coming near him that he had nothing to do with the shooting.

  “I was just driving!” he whined. “I followed orders.”

  It didn’t take long for Cesare Alosi to roll onto the scene in his Cadillac behind a second car with a three-man crew of pipe-hitting shaved heads who looked like he had recruited them from a California prison. One even had a face tattoo. Spiderwebs across his cheek. A black widow by his eye. He and his partner, a guy with Nazi SS lightning bolts on his neck, both had UDT Freddy the Frogman inked on their forearms but wore navy blue ball caps with gold SEAL eagle, anchor, pistol, and trident emblems embroidered on them.

  “SEAL, huh?” Ray-Dean said to the oversized thug with the face tattoo.

  The guy touched his ball cap, and said, “Oh yeah.”

  “What team? Six?” Cooder asked.

  “Right, me and George,” the face-tattoo guy said, nodding toward his ugly partner.

  “Seems like every guy I ever met with a shaved head and Navy tattoos was in SEAL Team Six. Kind of like Marine Snipers,” Blevins said. “George there your swim partner?”

  “Naw. What do you mean, swim partner? I worked alone. Special missions,” he said, and George gave Cooder a look.

  “All top secret, huh?” Ray-Dean said, nodding.

  “Yeah,” the face-tattoo guy said.

  “What was your class?” Blevins asked, his bullshit meter pinging. Even a slimeball Marine like Cooder has one.

  “What do you mean, class?” George said, and he turned his SEAL cap around backwards.

  “BUD/S class, dude. What class?” Ray-Dean asked, now having fun with the two phony apes, probably biker-gang dropouts. Maybe not even that.

  “You know, that was quite a few years back,” George said. “What was it, Ken?”

  “We went to SEALs straight from Army Green Berets,” Ken said. “They gave us a pass since we was already trained. We went to UDT school at Pensacola.”

  “I never knew SEALs or even UDT had a school at Pensacola,” Blevins said.

  “What were you, some kind of know-it-all jarhead?” Ken with the face tattoo said.

  “Yeah, that’s me,” Cooder said.

  “You assholes don’t know shit, so shut the fuck up,” George grumbled.

  “I guess all your other team guys are dead, too? Some badass operation in Somalia?” Ray-Dean smiled. “All missions top secret and that bullshit?”

  “Yeah,” George said, getting more pissed.

  “What kind of medals you two collect? I bet you got a chest full. Those top secret missions and all. Lots of bragging rights, huh?” Blevins grinned even bigger.

  “Fucking Navy Cross, and Ken has four, count ’em, four Silver Stars, shit stick,” George came back.

  “Oh! Badass!” Ray-Dean exclaimed, half-drunk and smelling like shit.

  “Keep up your wise-ass shit and we’ll show you badass,” Ken with the face tattoo growled.

  “Just curious,” Ray-Dean said. “No disrespect, dude. What about Freddy the Frogman on your arm there? You UDT and SEAL both?”

  “Fuckin’ A,” George said. “What the fuck did you ever do besides chop down all these unarmed civilians?”

  “Shit, dude,” Blevins said. “Like I said, Marine Corps. All I got is an honorable discharge. I’m a pure piece o
f shit, and I know it. But hey, dude, I don’t claim to be someone I’m not.”

  “What you saying?” George snarled, his hand going on his Glock strapped in a rig across his chest.

  “Not a thing.” Blevins shrugged. “You got it, you wear it. I know a couple guys on SEAL Team Three, down at Ramadi, and a guy on their new Team Seven. I think he’s back at Coronado. I just never met anybody really from Team Six. That’s all. Until I met you two.”

  “Shows what you fucking know,” Ken with the face tattoo said, and walked to the front of the Escalade, where Cesare Alosi busily talked with both hands to the US embassy chief of security.

  “Yeah. I know shit. Fucking posers,” Ray-Dean grumbled, watching George walk to the front, too, and join the important people in conversation. Like he and his asshole buddy belonged in charge, too.

  The embassy security boss shook his finger in Alosi’s face, and that made Ray-Dean grin, feeling a great deal of satisfaction, seeing the slick asshole getting a taste of shit put back in his mouth for once. Then Cesare glared at Blevins and came to him as the human waste leaned on the Cadillac’s fender looking narrow-eyed back at his master.

  “You and these two idiots you call a crew, go pack your trash. You’re leaving Iraq,” the Malone-Leyva boss told Ray-Dean. “I’m booking you on the next flight out of Baghdad that has three open seats. Cargo or first class, it doesn’t matter. You’re out of here. I’ve had it.”

  “Where to, sir?” Freddie Stein chirped, standing up through the sunroof. He had quietly put down the Escalade passenger window so he could hear what the boss had to say.

  “Anyplace. I don’t give a shit. As long as you’re gone from my life,” Alosi answered. “Get as far from me as possible. You three are finished. Terminated. Fired. Let payroll know where to send your checks after we deduct today’s damages.”