by Rick Partlow
“Oh, shit,” he spat, realizing what I was saying.
“Get everyone mounted up,” I told him. “We’re rolling hot.”
Was I scared? Hell yes, I was scared. The Strykers were good vehicles, for all that they’d originated with the damned Army, but the streets were narrow and if there likely wouldn’t be IED’s here in their home territory, there would be lookouts who might have spotted us already. They would have RPG’s at a minimum, maybe even Russian Kornet crew-served anti-armor missiles. Hell, maybe even our own stuff from back when Venezuela had been an ally.
But when I tromped back up the ramp, I popped the hatch behind the gunner position and stuck my head out the top, resting my M27 across the roof. Alvarez grinned as he took back his fifty and I returned it, keeping the fear out of my expression. I wanted the gun. It was a totem, a shield, and a magic sword all rolled into one, and if it did nothing but make me a bigger target, well, it felt like it did something. I pulled the stock of my Heckler and Koch carbine into my shoulder and whispered a prayer of thanks to the military procurement gods that we weren’t still using M4’s like when I’d enlisted out of high school. Two years with the direct impingement weapon was enough to convince me I hated it, and when I’d come back to active duty after four years of college and the reserves, they’d handed me the piston-driven HK M27 and I’d fallen in love.
Now if they’d just get around to issuing us the 6.8mm versions instead of this wussy 5.56, I might actually feel adequately armed with just a carbine.
“Six-Three, this is Four-One. Take point. We’re heading southwest into the alley where the SUV’s are parked. It’s marked on your mapping software. And haul ass. The only thing slow and cautious will get us is more time for one of these assholes to call out all his buddies and their rocket launchers. Over.”
“Ooh-rah, Four-One! Over.”
The engines of the Strykers were obscenely loud in the quiet night, and I knew someone was going to hear us. The ancient, battered apartment buildings and rowhouses stared down at us in forlorn silence, lightless and lifeless, but not unoccupied. They held eyes, maybe electronic, definitely human, kids charged with being the lookouts for the EPV, paid in food or drugs they could sell to get food. They’d have AK’s and maybe be stupid enough to try to use them, but the most dangerous weapons they’d have would be hardline comms, impossible to jam, run underground so we couldn’t find them and cut them.
A mile and change, maybe four minutes if we didn’t hit a snag. One minute in, someone shot at me.
The crack of the rifle was high and spiteful, the whine of bullets off metal petulant, the attack more a teenage temper tantrum than any real threat, but Gregory took it as one. The full-throated roar of his M2 was an adult yelling at those damned kids to get off his lawn, the slugs turning mortar and cement into powder and fragments on either side of the window where his weapon sights had seen the muzzle flash, their software showing him where to shoot. That was new, barely beating us into service in Venezuela and it didn’t always work. When there were a lot of lights and very little contrast, it couldn’t pick out a target. But in a situation like this, it was gold, and if whoever had taken the potshot wasn’t dead or wounded, they were in no mood to stick their head out of what was left of that window.
The downside, of course, was that everyone else’s heads were sticking out of their windows.
“Faster, Six-Three,” I snapped, sweeping the muzzle of my M27 from one window to the next, searching for weapons. “Go fucking faster. Over.”
He didn’t reply, likely because he couldn’t hear me. We were well into the jamming now. I switched to the wired intercom and yelled at my own driver instead.
“Get up on Six-Three’s ass, Gomez. Maybe honk your horn and flash your brights at the son of a bitch until he speeds up or pulls over.”
“Phillips can’t drive for shit,” Gomez commented, his words punctuated by the engine revving, closing the distance between us and Gregory’s vehicle to less than twenty feet.
I don’t know if Phillips, the driver, saw us in his rearview camera or Sgt. Gregory did, but the lead Stryker sped up and opened another twenty yards, just in time to hit the brakes again and cut a sharp, right turn into the alley between our target and the abandoned, burned-out building next door.
They fucking saw us now. Heads popped out of windows and dark-clothed figures ran out of doors. They carried AK-103’s, the most prolific weapon among the EPV’s, twenty years old and imported from Russia by the old regime, the one that had run the country into the ground and then had the poor grace to not stick around for the inevitable civil war. The weapons were basically the same AK-47’s that had been around since just after World War Two, copies of the German StG-44, polished and made cheaper and easier to produce and used for the last fifty years by just about every evil son of a bitch who ever thought that they were doing what God would have done if only He’d been aware of the facts of the matter. It was the one thing they all had in common, the Avtomat Kalashnikov, the peasant’s weapon, reliable and durable and if it wasn’t accurate, well, to quote Joseph Stalin, quantity has a quality all its own.
I’d gotten very accustomed to the bark of the 7.62x39 cartridge in the last two months, though I’d first heard it as a PFC on a deployment at the border when the cartels had gotten frisky. It had been distant then, a defiant spit at our feet from across the border and across the desert. This was a knife in the dark instead, way too up close and personal. I put the red reticle of my M27’s optical sight over the sunken chest of a slender young man firing an AK from the hip and pressed, not pulled, with the pad, not the joint, just the way they’d taught me in Boot Camp seven years and a lifetime ago. There was next to no recoil, not with the 5.56. I’d shot the 6.8 and that thing had a kick to it.
The skinny kid didn’t fly backwards the way people did in the movies when they got shot. He lowered his rifle and stumbled a step, like he’d realized something had happened, something hurt, but he wasn’t quite sure how bad it was. Then the fifty from the lead Stryker turned him and everyone standing with him into hamburger, their blood neon red in the artificial, computer-enhanced light of my goggles. Anime hell.
I tried not to stare at the sight as we drove by, but I did anyway. It had caught my attention and wouldn’t let go and a tinge of nausea tugged at the bile in my throat.
M2 machine guns slammed a sledgehammer into the concrete behind me while M27s barked around the edges, like a yappy little Chihuahua standing behind a Rottweiler and pretending to be tough. I wish I could have heard what they were targeting, but we had no comms and we had no time. In seconds, we were even with the SUVs, a pair of pristine, late-model Range Rovers and a handlebar mustache stepped out from behind one to meet us, attached to a deadly scowl and the red eyes of night vision goggles.
The man was tall and lean and wearing tactical gear over a beat-up tiger-stripe BDU top and blue jeans and I knew immediately what he was. Not that I was some seasoned expert on all aspects of the military, but everyone had seen these guys around, usually from a distance. When General Baldwin stopped by to visit the troops, you’d see these guys, dressed in odd combinations of military gear and civilian clothes, their hair shaggy, bearded or mustached, wearing shades and carrying chopped-down SIG M68’s in 6.8mm with suppressors at the end. Or sometimes when we drove by the CIA compound in the FOB, they were there, talking to the field officers.
I knew SEALs, and these guys weren’t SEALs. Not even DevGru looked like these guys. These dudes were older, more chill, less tightly wound. They were Delta. Delta Force, Combat Applications Group, First Special Forces Operations Detachment Delta, whatever you wanted to call it, they were the OG doorkickers. And this one looked like he wanted to kick me in the teeth.
“Who’s in charge?” he asked, a slight twang in his voice that could have been Texas or thereabouts. “Who the fuck is in charge of this clusterfuck?”
Yikes. I was almost level with him, looking down from the rear hatch, my M27 trai
ned back the way we’d come, off to the side so I wasn’t sweeping my own vehicles.
“I am.” My voice did not break. I was very proud of that. “Listen…”
“Do you know how many weeks we’ve been planning this shit?” he snapped, waving at the others in his team, who were blending in with shadows I couldn’t see through my enhanced optics. “We had an HVT in there! Had! He’s probably halfway to Maracaibo by now thanks to you fucking Marines! What the fuck do you—”
“Shut up,” I snapped, slamming my palm against the roof of the Stryker.
His eyes went wide, the corner of his mouth twisting into the beginnings of a snarl. Where I got the balls to say that to a Delta operator, I have no idea, but this guy was reminding me of every asshole who’d ever dressed me down and the annoyance together with the gathering fear of standing around here worked a testicular miracle. Which wasn’t going to save me from getting my ass kicked, so I talked fast.
“These fuckers tried to ambush us on Route Fairbanks five klicks northeast of here. We trashed their IED and chased them back here. Everyone inside was going to be awake and waiting for you, so your op is fucked. I saw you on a long-range drone feed, which is the only view we had because they have a shitload of broad-spectrum jamming coming out of those fucking dishes.” I pointed at the roof, where transmission dishes sprouted like flowers off a vine. “And I could have just left your ass to deal with all those fuckers by yourselves and un-assed the area to call for help outside the jamming.” I waved a hand at my platoon convoy. “I can still do that if you like. Or you can get in those pretty Land Rovers and use us for cover to get the hell out of here. You’re the snake-eater, you tell me.”
The man squinted up at me, not shaken by the gunfire echoing off the walls around us, seemingly not offended by my tirade, just smiling crookedly. He obviously found the whole thing funny as hell.
“Are you fucking sure you’re a second lieutenant?” he asked, nodding at the rank on the Velcro tab on my tactical vest.
“Lt. Andrew Clanton, Fourth Battalion, First Platoon,” I rattled off automatically. “My friends call me Andy. We’re out of COP Morton. And I’d dearly love to get back there ASAP.”
A round spanged off the side of the Stryker, a fragment of the bullet smacking me in the shoulder, embedding itself in my vest. I cursed and fired at a side door across the street in the supposedly abandoned building. A full squad of EPV were charging out of it and I caught the first one with a burst to the chest, but the next one out was carrying an RPG and the guy in front just wasn’t falling out of the way fast enough.
The round flew so close by my head that the heat from the rocket exhaust singed my neck, travelling about two feet over the Delta team and slamming into a staircase. The explosion dumped me back down the hatch and I held myself up with a hand against the bulkhead, my ears ringing again, head swimming from the concussion. I looked down at myself, expecting to see blood, but I didn’t see any frag wounds.
Alvarez had ridden the storm out and the vibration from his fifty firing vibrated through the skin of the Stryker, in chorus with Sgt. Gregory’s gun. I climbed back up and wondered if the guy I’d been talking to would be dead.
He was still standing there, the suppressor at the end of his 6.8mm carbine glowing red from the burst he’d just fired. Smoke poured from the doorway into the back corridor. The door had been blown inward by the explosion and I suppose most of the fragmentation had been contained inside. The Delta operator cocked his head toward me.
“All right, Andy,” he said as if our conversation hadn’t been interrupted by an RPG. “I think I’ll take you up on that offer. He whistled sharply and spun his finger in a circle, looking back over his shoulder at the others.
“Mount up boys, show’s over.”
The rest of them moved smoothly, with rehearsed precision, eeling out of the shadows back into the seats of the SUV’s. The big man with the mustache turned to join them, but paused.
“By the way,” he told me, “I’m James Bowie. But my friends call me Jambo.”
Of course they did.
Chapter Four
“Wait,” Zack said, stopping in his tracks, despite the fact that we were in sight of the parking lot and my Bronco was in view, full of shade and air conditioning and a cooler with iced Diet Cokes. “That was the James Bowie? The guy who died out in space, your friend? The guy who got the Medal of Honor?”
“He was my friend,” I confirmed, smiling despite the sudden stab of pain in my gut. It hadn’t been that long. “And there was only one James Bowie.”
“So what happened then?” he prompted. “Was that it? Did you see him again? I mean before the Selenium?”
“Well…” I began but a persistent beeping interrupted my continuation of the tale. I scowled, ripping at the Velcro fastenings of a pouch on the belt of my backpack. “Damn it.”
“I thought there was no cell signal up here,” he said, frowning deeply, no doubt suspecting I'd lied to him about the cell reception.
“There isn’t,” I promised. “This isn’t a cell phone.”
It wasn’t. It picked up cell signals, too, but also laser-line-of-sight, satellite, shortwave, just about everything. And it was partially based on Helta technology. We called them comm units and while I had felt pretty confident leaving my cell phone in the car, I’d been obliged to bring the comm unit along.
I pulled the earpiece out of its niche in the side of the device and wiggled it into place before I pushed the button on the side of the device.
“Clanton,” I answered. It was not how I usually answered the phone. I knew guys who answered the phone like that and I always thought they were douchebags. But there was a protocol to answering the comm unit.
“Sorry to interrupt your leave, Andy.” It was General Olivera. I didn’t have to look at the caller ID to know his voice. “There’s a situation. We need you back at Alpha.”
Shit. I wanted to be annoyed, but I knew exactly how useless that would be.
“Yes, sir,” I said. “But I’m with my son and I’ll have to drop him back in Austin first.”
Zack looked at me open-mouthed, as if I was betraying him and I winced.
“Understood.” Well, he might have understood, but he didn’t sound too happy about it. “Can he travel alone?”
Now I did get annoyed.
“Not if I ever want his mother to let me see him again,” I growled. This might have been life or death, end of the world and all that shit, but Zack was my son.
Olivera sighed, as if all this human connection shit was such a burden for him.
“Fine. We’ll send a Gulfstream out to McCarran. It can take you to Austin, then back to the Alpha Site in maybe three or four hours.”
“Copy that,” I said. “We’re heading back to Vegas now.”
I glanced over at Zack, who still looked hurt.
“I have to go?” he asked. “I thought we had a couple more days!”
“It’s apparently an emergency.” I gestured with the comm unit before I put it back in its pouch. “That was General Olivera and they need me back at our base in Idaho ASAP.” I grinned. “But I did get us both a ride in a private Gulfstream. Paul ever get you guys a ride on a private jet?”
“Yeah, one time,” he said, then he seemed to understand he was one-upping me. “But we had to share it with this friend of his and his whole family,” he went on hurriedly, “so it wasn’t just the three of us.”
“Nice save,” I told him, nudging his arm. “Come on, we’ll stop and get some lunch on the way.”
“But what if it’s urgent?” he asked, quickening his pace toward the car.
“If it was really urgent,” I assured him, “they’d have sent a shuttle.”
Now, that would have impressed him.
***
Staging Base Alpha was, for once, beautiful.
In the summer, it was sweltering, in the winter, frostbite-cold. But there was a brief period in spring and again in the fall when t
he weather was perfect. And in the fall, just after the leaves turned, I could convince myself that this part of Idaho was the most beautiful place in the world.
Until I saw the base. Military bases are never beautiful, at least not since they closed down the Presidio, well before I was born. They share a utilitarian ugliness, built by the lowest bidder on the public dollar by a bureaucracy that cares a lot more about funneling money back to the constituencies of the congresscritters who vote for overly complicated weapons systems than they do about providing comfort to the men and women who have to use them.
“Need any help with your luggage, sir?” the corporal who’d driven me from the airfield down to the base asked, the look on his face bright and hopeful, like a man waiting for a tip. Since I knew he didn’t actually expect me to slip him a few bucks, I had to think he was actually hoping I’d say no.
“Naw, I got it, thanks.”
The two duffel bags had been mostly packed before I’d left with Zack to go camping and I’d taken the time to swing by my place and pick them up before heading to the airport because I didn’t know how long this “emergency” was going to keep me tied up and I couldn’t see going weeks without a stash of Diet Cokes and Sour Patch kids. I slung them over opposite shoulders and waddled into the admin building, flashing my ID at the clerk manning the front desk. He barely looked up, with the universal assumption that if I’d made it this far, I must belong here, as if he’d already forgotten the Russian mercenaries who had invaded the base not that long ago. Or maybe he just knew me. It wasn’t as if I was anonymous, not after the Selenium and the Medal of Honor ceremony, which had been internationally televised.