Allies

by Wolf Riedel

  Norowz looked over to his right where under the bower of an almond tree at the edge of the irrigation ditch two riflemen were engaging the compound.

  “Batoor!” he called. No response.

  “Batoor!” he called again only louder this time. The man turned to face him.

  “Now is your time, Batoor,” he called over. “Take them.”

  The man nodded back at Norowz and began issuing his orders down the line while Norowz used his walkie talkie to tell the commander of his lead delgai that Batoor’s was coming forward so that both units could assault together. To the two flanking delgais he directed that they increase their covering fire during the assault.

  As Batoor’s men started to move forward, Norowz picked up his assault rifle and moved forward with them. On his radio he could hear Tofan ordering the vehicles to move forward to the rendezvous points from the wadis where they had been hidden. They were preparing to pick up the lashkar for a quick withdrawal. They also carried extra ammunition in the event that they had to fight their way out.

  There was little fire coming from the compound and, as he neared the wall, he could see his men on the left and right being given a boost up over them. A scattering of shots inside and the main gate was opened.

  Norowz called off the supporting fire and directed the fire bases to switch to cut-off fire.

  The compound stank with the spilled offal and excrement of two disemboweled donkeys and three mangled men one of whom must have been virtually hit by an RPG based on the fact that his clothes had been mostly torn off his body which itself had its chest shredded and one arm and the head severed. These new smells reinforced the older stench of garbage and dung that littered the compound. Norowz gave them a quick glance to assess their condition; dead or nearly so. Three others sat on their haunches against a shed covered by one of his own men. Ahead, two more stood on either side of a doorway into the compound’s main residence which was a large house composed of two storeys for the most part.

  Norowz entered into the dim, cool entry which opened onto a large room whose dirt floor was covered by large opulent carpets. Two bodies stained the carpets with the blood that continued to leak out of their broken bodies. One had been hit outside by a large RPG splinter that had ripped his side open; a trail of entrails was strung out behind him back to the doorway. Four wailing women and six children were sitting in a corner, their hands holding their chadors over their heads and faces.

  Batoor’s face peered at him from a doorway at the back of the building.

  “Commander! Over here!” he called.

  Norowz entered the room where two youngsters in female dresses sat on the floor. There was no need to ask. The two boys were dancing boys employed in the practice of bacha bazi—playing with boys. He had been told Khan was a pederast and here was the proof. The two prepubescent boys had undoubtedly been abducted from their families and employed by Khan as dancers at parties and for sexual gratification. The act had been made illegal by the Taliban as incompatible with Shari’a and punishable by death. While the practice was still illegal the law, however, was rarely enforced because it was mostly practiced by the more powerful and influential warlords like Khan.

  “Find out who they are and where they come from,” said Norowz.” Dress them properly and we will take them back to their families.”

  “Do we have Khan?” Norowz asked.

  “Upstairs, Commander.”

  Norowz made his way to the ladder, stepping around yet one more body. This time it was one of his own men with a massive wound that had taken off most of the left side of his head splattering the wall next to the ladder with blood, brains, bone chips and hanks of bloody hair.

  Upstairs, three wounded men sat against the wall under the guard of four of Norowz’s men.

  “Khan?” he asked. The man in the middle and the one on the left both made a fearful glance to the one on the right. Even without their tell, Norowz would have picked Khan out immediately by the high quality of his clothes, the jewel encrusted rings that covered his fingers and the beard and hair dyed a garish deep maroon.

  Without a word, Norowz slung his rifle and drew the rifle’s bayonet from its sheath. As a knife the bayonet was a poor tool, it lacked balance and it was hard to keep an edge on the blade but Norowz had taken it off a dead Russian paratrooper when he was a younger man and it, together with the old Russian combat jacket that he wore into battle, was one of the few affectations that he had. He took a step toward Khan, grabbed his hair with his left hand and, as he pulled the head back he slashed across Khan’s throat with the bayonet. Khan squealed in fear and attempted to resist by throwing up an arm. He succeeded in part and deflected the blade slightly so that it only grazed his throat and tore across his cheek. Norowz knew instantly that the slash had not been mortal, recovered the stroke with a stab under the chin and slid the blade up all the way into the man’s brain stem. He pulled back and wiped his blade clean on Khan’s kameez.

  He turned to the guards and pointed at the two prisoners.

  “Kill them!” he ordered their leader. “Then fall back on the vehicles. Kill any males older than twelve and be quick about it.”

  Norowz’s radio crackled. It was Tofan calling.

  “You have a group of four American gun trucks coming in on your position from the north. Another four are leaving their compound in the south.”

  Norowz acknowledged the call and turned to his men.

  “Kill them now and go,” he said.

  A burst of rounds—heavy rounds—stitched across the road and the GMV giving off two distinct clangs as one tore off a piece of hood and the other tore off a piece of the passenger side window frame at the roof line showering sharp pieces of metal into the cab.

  “Dushka! Dushka!” The yell came over the intercom from the turret gunner manning the .50 M2 heavy machine gun. Dushka was the Russian nickname for their DShK 13.5 millimeter machine gun. Dushka meant sweetie in Russian and the gun was their equivalent for the Ma Deuce that sat atop their own vehicle.

  Kurt had cleaned up the chain of command for this operation before they had left the compound. While Lesperance commanded this group of men and vehicles and Shirazi Paulson’s group north of Khalkari, Kurt had overall command of them both. His vehicle was the third one in the small group of four GMVs; Lesperance was in number two.

  They had just emerged from one of Khalkari’s sub-hamlets situated at least a kilometer south of the main village. Here the road crossed a tributary that flowed from their left into the valley’s main river that paralleled the road to the team’s right. A line of wells stitched their way along the stream’s bed following at least one karez that flowed down from the ridgeline in the distance to their left front. It had been to this ridge that Kurt’s attention had been drawn when the machine gun impacts thundered in.

  “Ambush left! Ambush left!” The call came over the radio without an identifying call sign. Individual vehicles quickly scrambled into hull down positions using the folds in the ground and the numerous walls surrounding the fields. Turrets and weapons swung left and randomly returned fire.

  Kurt forced himself to look to the right. The turret gunner would be scanning to the left for signs of the source of the fire even as he haphazardly threw rounds up the ridge. Kurt, on the other hand, was looking for signs of the second part of the ambush site; teams of machine guns and RPGs amongst the close-in tree lines and handful of compounds stretching down to the river but saw nothing.

  A burst of rounds exploded around Lesperance’s vehicle throwing up rock fragments and dust. His truck’s .50 responded with bursts of its own.

  Kurt watched the tracers arc away and up onto the ridge but again saw nothing.

  “I got fuck all,” yelled his turret gunner but nonetheless peppered off a few more rounds in the general direction of the ridge. Kurt could hear him yell “Die, Motherfucker! Die!” as an aid to help him time the length of his burst. When in doubt, shoot.

  Kurt dismounted from his o
wn vehicle so that he would have the room to deploy his ACOG to scan the ridge. The four power Trijicon advanced combat optical gunsight mounted on the top of his M4 carbine was part of its Special Operations Peculiar Modification—SOPMOD—kit. It provided an enhanced optical capability to acquire and engage targets to the M4’s effective range of six hundred meters while providing an iron sight to allow for the rapid engagement of close quarter battle targets. In this case, however, he was using it as a poor man’s binoculars to get a better view of the ridge which appeared well beyond the range of the rifle.

  He guesstimated the range at around a kilometer and a half. While technically that made the ridge appear to be only four hundred meters away through the sight, the view was blurred by the heat shimmers in the air.

  He braced the rifle on the vehicle’s hood but the engine’s vibrations made the sight bounce. He moved up to the front bumper and sat on a mound of earth behind a low wall, his legs crossed, his elbows resting on his knees and again scanned the ridge. He still saw nothing.

  They’ve got better fire control than the average Talib, he thought. Usually by now the small convoy would have been raked by a continuous patter of fire. The Talib worked on a spray and pray philosophy that had at its heart the idea that if you put enough rounds into the air then God would guide at least one to your target. The absence of this fire gave Kurt two thoughts: they’re disciplined and they’re conserving their ammo because they’ve achieved their objective to stop us.

  “Fuckin guy’s lost on what to do without McLean to tell him.”

  The voice had been that of Kurt’s driver, Staff Sergeant Andej Janecek—Andy—one of Lesperance’s four augmentees. The thirty-year old had come from Czechoslovakia as a young boy when his parents left Prague to immigrate to New York City during the interval between the Velvet Revolution that restored democracy to the country and its breakup into two separate countries; the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic. Andy had joined the army the day he was legally allowed to and had stayed even when his parents, two years later, had decided to return to Prague.

  Janecek and his buddies came from the 2nd Battalion. The turret gunner—the same young man Kurt had seen as the shirtless sentry listening to his boom box the day before—was another. O’Donnell had spoken to them all earlier that morning.

  Kurt moved back from the vehicle’s hood to stand next to his door leaning casually on the structural B-pillar separating the right front and right rear door openings. He didn’t say a thing. He knew Janecek would continue.

  There were soldiers who would never hesitate to speak disparagingly about their superior officers regardless of their actual abilities. Others would rarely voice their concerns to outsiders even when fully justified. Kurt had originally put Janecek into the latter category but the discussions the young staff sergeant had previously had with Shirazi and then O’Donnell had broken down his reserve. He’d been quite forthcoming that while Lesperance was a thinker and a schemer, he was not a tactician nor a leader; that was McLean. Both Lesperance and Roper deferred to the team sergeant on anything even remotely related to operational matters.

  “You on board with what Colin promised us?” Janecek asked.

  Janecek’s position with O’Donnell that morning had been simple: there was no way they could talk openly and stay at POWDER with McLean; the risk was just too great.

  Kurt nodded. “You’ll come out with us when we leave this afternoon.”

  “If we can still get away today with this shit going on.”

  “If we can leave by sixteen hundred we should be able to make it,” said Kurt.

  “Is the QRF on its way?” Janecek asked.

  Kurt nodded again. “Lesperance called SWEENEY for help as we left.”

  Janecek mulled that over thoughtfully. “That must have him worried. He’s never called them for help before. My guess is they’ll put an ANA platoon on the road to us.” He sat quietly for another minute pondering things. “What will happen to the patrol base if the team has four guys heading back up to Kandahar? It’ll be hard to keep it going without us.”

  “Not my problem,” said Kurt. “That’s up to Task Force 31 to sort out.”

  “You’ve got the authority to do this?” Janecek asked.

  Kurt nodded one more time. “Yup,” he said. There was nothing in his terms of reference that expressly allowed him to yank people out of the field but being a senior member of the SOCCENT staff gave him some fairly heavy clout seeing that TF31 and its senior headquarters in theater all came under SOCCENT’s command while deployed in Afghanistan. He’d deal with Phil later on this but for the time being he’d do what was necessary to sort out the problem he’d been sent here to sort out.

  “This looks like a hit and run to me,” Kurt continued. He’d gotten a feel for the enemy’s fire: it wasn’t the type that came from fanatic zealots who let loose with pent-up fury, nor was it the jumble of noise that comes from nervous inexperienced fighters. What they were experiencing was the measured, controlled burst of professionals which wandered back and forth over the convoy with the intent to suppress its activities. “It doesn’t feel like an ambush . . . more like a flank guard for whatever’s going on in the village. They’re trying to keep us from getting through.”

  As if to underscore the point, measured bursts of DShK fire again erupted from the ridge and wandered along the line of the four vehicles; several banged into the turret of their truck.

  “Fuckin’ hell,” yelled Janecek as he tried to duck down, his bulky body armor and tac vest and the array of radio and computer gear mounted between the front seats. It was almost comical if it hadn’t been so deadly serious.

  Janecek scrambled out of the cab and around to the GMV’s lee side where he settled down on his butt with his back against the right rear wheel and his M4 between his knees. He nervously fiddled with his carbine making sure it had a round up the spout.

  “I’ll be damned if we get killed for those drug smuggling fuckers.” He looked at Kurt and said,. “Get us out of here and we’ll give you the whole story about what’s going on down here.”

  CHAPTER 48

  Calle Río Purificación, Reynosa, Mexico

  Monday 19 Mar 07 0500 hrs CDT

  The compound was a beehive of activity. Five pickup trucks—four army, one PFP—had backed under a large tin-roofed lean-to next to the main storage building. Soldiers and PFP officers bustled about loading objects from the building into the pickups. Beside the building sat three individuals with their hands zip tied behind their backs. All were shave-headed and dressed in jeans and checkered shirts; all were wounded to some extent or the other. The youngest was the worst. Blood was leaking from a wound to his belly. Mark saw no attempt to provide this one with first aid. A second had a leg wound that had been tied up over the top of the jeans with a bandage. The third, the oldest in appearance had the smallest wound, one to the upper left arm which was currently being bandaged by a soldier. It wasn’t the wound that caught Mark’s attention however, it was the hatred blazing forth from the man’s eyes; eyes directed specifically at Mark. Six additional bodies were laid out on the ground in front of them, a pool of their mingling blood seeped into the earth.

  “We achieved some real luck here,” said Garza’s voice. Mark hadn’t heard the PFP inspector approach behind him. “The hard case there, that’s Mesquite; Marco Yanez. He’s the top logistician within the Los Zumas. He usually operates out of Ciudad Juarez and we didn’t expect to find him here. Quite a bonus.”

  Mark nodded.

  “The other two?” he asked.

  “Who knows?” replied Garza. “Some common foot soldiers I expect. We’ll get them identified before too long, I think.”

  The four of them, Mark, Garza, Sal and Sage, wandered over to the pickups, took a quick scan of what was being loaded before making their way into the warehouse. The trucks were receiving separate loads, small arms went into two of the army trucks, ammunition into the third and bundled up packages which Ma
rk assumed were drugs into the fourth. Meanwhile boxes of paperwork and filing cabinets went into the PFP vehicle.

  “We’ve got bales of cash and drugs in there that we don’t even have room for. The army has called for more trucks,” said Garza. “At this rate we won’t have enough lift to take everyone back to the cuartel.” He shook his head with a smile on his face. “It’ll be quite the dog and pony show later today.”

  Mark looked back at him questioningly.

  “We make quite a show of all the things which we capture down here; especially the army,” he said. “They’re already organizing a big press conference at the cuartel this afternoon to show off all the weapons, drugs and people we’ve taken off the street. The advantage for you is that everything will be laid out in a hanger at the base and cataloged before lunch. Unfortunately, all this paperwork will take a little longer but, if you want, we can take a quick look through it for what’s left of the night and this morning as well.”

  “I’ve got no reason to sleep,” said Sal. “I’m familiar with this stuff already. If you’ve got someone working on it when we get back I’d like to help.”

  “But of course,” said Garza. “We’ll set up in the same hangar where the army will be doing their work.”

  It was noon and the army had brought hot rations to the hangar from the main mess facilities. At the far end of the hangar—to Mark the thing actually looked like an indoor parade hall with a large fifteen foot square roll-up door at two opposing ends—some cooks and soldiers were setting up tables and hot thermos boxes full of food. Some of the soldiers and police who had been working on the layout and cataloging of the captured gear, were already lining up for the meal.

  “A little early aren’t they?” asked Sal. They’d found lunch, the big meal of the day in Mexico, was usually between one and two.

  “Probably want to get it out of the way before the press conference,” said Sage.