Short Season

by DJ Scott

  “And you don’t think a column of Yemeni infantry with an armored vehicle on my flank presents a threat?”

  “My judgment, sir is that Admiral Tucker’s operations staff would probably say they aren’t, not yet anyway. There may be a way we can handle this problem ourselves.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “We could get our engineers up there in fifteen minutes. It’s a small bridge, and they can blow it almost immediately. The topo map shows the sides of the wadi are steep in that area—no way vehicles can cross without that bridge.”

  “Let’s do it. You there,” Mark shouted at two Marines from the engineering unit waiting by a truck about fifty meters away. They trotted over to him. “How are you guys fixed for explosives?”

  “Got almost hundred kilos of C-4 in the truck. Didn’t take much to blow the door on that warehouse. We’re just waiting to see if there is any other demolition work,” explained a staff sergeant who looked much too old for his rank.

  “As a matter of fact, there is. I’ll get you an escort while my ops and intelligence officers explain what we need.”

  “Aye, aye sir.” The staff sergeant snapped a salute and motioned for a young corporal to join him.

  To his radio operator he said, “Get me that MP Major.” In a moment Mark was given the radio handset. “I have a mission for you,” he said and quickly explained what he needed.

  Major Jim Griggs had about forty of his Marines deployed along the south side of the town providing security for the warhead trucks as they departed. “We’re on it Colonel, Raven actual out.” To his company gunnery sergeant he added, “Get me everyone left from first platoon plus five Marines from second and have them loaded into a truck and a Humvee in three minutes.” He gave him the names and walked over to Kelli Moore, who was double checking the security of the buildings along the south edge of town.

  “Captain, I’m taking what’s left of first platoon plus the five men left in second for an urgent mission. You’re in charge here.”

  “You’re taking the men from my platoon?” Moore asked. “What’s going on Major?”

  “We’re heading west to cover the engineers who are blowing a bridge in advance of a Yemeni column. If we don’t get there first, it could get very ugly, and I just don’t need any women in a force on force action.”

  “This is bullshit! Sir.”

  “Watch yourself, Captain. Look, I know you think I’m a sexist, and frankly I don’t care. It’s bad enough having to worry about you and your girls clearing buildings. This could be an infantry fight, and I’m just not sure you’re up to it. Now shut up and keep this area secure. With luck we’ll be back in less than an hour.”

  Kelli Moore did not say another word to her commanding officer. She walked over to her platoon sergeant—Brenda Leach, an eight-year veteran with two tours in Afghanistan, and explained the situation. Leach nodded, took a sip from her canteen and spit, vigorously.

  Chapter 39

  September 13, 2017 1050Z (1350 ASTl)

  West of Arad

  Ali al-Ahmar rewrapped the scarf around his face. Even with the windows closed, the choking dust filled his vehicle. His company was way behind schedule, and he was now traveling much too fast for this single lane, unpaved road headed for Arad. He had four American Mk-23 trucks, the same as the American forces now looting their warheads, but his weren’t well maintained. First, one of the trucks wouldn’t start, so he packed his troops into the remaining three, and left behind his supply and intelligence officers.

  About an hour into the road march another truck hit a large rock and had damaged its transmission. He ordered it abandoned, packed the troops into the remaining vehicles, and moved out. He was now only a few minutes west of the critical bridge across a deep, but unnamed wadi. Once past the bridge, he could travel at speed across the desert to attack the Americans.

  Assuming his remaining, woefully overpacked, trucks survived.

  The four-vehicle convoy traveled with more than twice the force Colonel Mark’s intelligence officer had estimated. Each truck now had twenty-five infantrymen sweltering in the back and four in the cab. The BTR carried another fourteen miserable men in the back in addition to its crew of three. Finally, al-Ahmar’s Range Rover carried the four company officers, plus a driver. A total force of eighty.

  As they crested a small hill about four hundred meters before the bridge, he saw vehicles approaching from the east. Just as the thick dust had obscured his own convoy, al-Ahmar couldn’t gauge the enemy’s strength. If they charged across the bridge, his company could be destroyed if there was a superior force behind that dust cloud. He quickly ordered his vehicles to back up a hundred meters so they couldn’t be seen from the bridge. He had his men dismount, except for the crew of the BTR which he moved to the front of the convoy. He took personal charge of one platoon, twenty-five men, and gave detailed orders to his second in command.

  Al-Ahmar and his men moved quickly away to the north.

  Chapter 40

  September 13, 2017 1100Z (1400 AST)

  West of Arad

  The small convoy—one truck and a Humvee—approached the bridge from the east. Major Jim Griggs, with eighteen MPs and two engineers, stopped about a hundred meters short, stepped out, and looked past the bridge with binoculars. A vague cloud of dust was barely visible just beyond a small hill. He waited a few minutes and, seeing nothing more, decided to go ahead.

  “All right men. Dismount.”

  The MP’s set up a defensive position east of the bridge. The Humvee pulled forward to within twenty meters of the bridge, where the engineers began to unload C-4 and several types of detonators. The senior of the engineers, who did demolition work as a civilian, looked the structure over then came back to join Griggs.

  “This isn’t complicated, Major. If we blow the support on this end, the whole thing will just drop into the wadi.”

  “Get at it then. We expect company in a few minutes.”

  The two engineers quickly packed explosives on and around the steel supports and inserted two detonators. Griggs meanwhile focused on the road leading west from the bridge, where he’d seen the little dust cloud. Based on what Colonel Mark had told him, the enemy column should be kicking up a big cloud that should be easily visible by now. He was tempted to walk across the bridge and have a look when the staff sergeant told him they were about to blow the bridge. Once the bridge was down, he reasoned, the enemy’s location would no longer be an issue.

  The engineers backed away from the bridge, unspooling their fuses. Griggs signaled to his men to fall back towards the truck. His driver was turning the Humvee around. Griggs took a few steps towards his vehicle when he heard a loud ‘whoosh’.

  He turned just as an RPG-7 blew off the front of his truck, killing the driver and disabling the vehicle in less than a second. This was followed immediately by the staccato of more than a dozen AK-47’s.

  The sound was coming from about fifty meters north of the bridge where there was a low rise and a scattering of boulders. Dammit! The Yemeni soldiers had somehow flanked them!

  Griggs signaled his men to move towards the wadi where they fell to the ground and began to return fire. The engineers lit the fuse and added to the defensive fire. The Marines were still exposed, but they were better marksmen with more fire discipline. Each side was taking casualties about equally when the BTR-60 pulled over the hill and opened fire with its 12.3 mm heavy machine gun. Three Marines were killed immediately.

  Griggs was running out of options. He was about to order his survivors to jump into the wadi in hopes a few might escape when the bridge blew.

  The engineers had used a small charge, but Griggs and his men were only thirty meters away and in the open. Only one Marine was wounded, but everyone was stunned, their ears rang, and their lungs ached.

  Within seconds of the blast, the Yemenis came out of the rock
s and rushed Griggs’ position. It was over in less than a minute.

  Griggs’ Marines had already lost eight men, with five seriously wounded. He was in an exposed position under attack by a platoon-sized force and was taking fire from the rear. There was no choice. Griggs rose to his knees and raised his hands. At least he had the satisfaction of accomplishing his mission.

  And no women had been lost on his watch!

  One of the Yemenis, presumably their leader, shouted at the Marines, “On your feet. Hands in the air.”

  Seven men rose, three of them with minor wounds. The more seriously wounded remained on the ground.

  The Yemeni, caked in dust, sauntered over to him. “You Americans think you can invade anyone, any time,” he said in passable English. “You destroy our homes, spit on our customs, and then go back to America as if nothing had happened. Times are changing, my friends. They are changing right here. Today. Turn around and walk to the wadi.”

  Griggs glanced at the wounded, still lying on the ground; two of them moaning.

  “Don’t worry about them,” the Yemeni officer ordered.

  Griggs and his men, five MPs and the engineer corporal, stood in a ragged line about six feet from the edge of the wadi. He had a bad feeling about what would happen next.

  “Burn in Hell!” screamed the Yemeni as he opened fire.

  Engineer Ryan Smith, on the left end of the line, didn’t wait for what came next. He took a step forward and leaped into the wadi, just as the shooting started.

  It was almost ten feet to the bottom, but a mound of soft sand cushioned his landing. In a second he was up and running, ignoring the bodies of his fellow Marines hitting the sand beside him.

  Smith held his company record in the three mile run, but he was damned well going to break that record today.

  Al-Ahmar thought at first he had hit the American, but when he looked down into the wadi, he saw his enemy running hard and rounding a turn that protected him from fire. He pointed at two of his men. “You and you. After him. Cut his heart out. Do not return unless you are covered in his blood.”

  Both men jumped into the wadi and took off after Smith.

  There was a shot behind him. Al-Ahmar spun around. One of the wounded engineers on the ground behind him had managed to draw his Beretta, and while everyone was mesmerized by the executions, he shot Sergeant Karman in the groin. Al-Ahmar dispatched the staff sergeant and the other wounded Marines with long bursts from his AK-47. But then he had to watch Karman bleed out—the damned American had apparently hit the femoral artery.

  He hated when that happened. It was bad for morale.

  Smith had his ears tuned like never before. When he first started running, there were two sets of footfalls echoing behind him. Then one slowly dropped away. But the other one was steadily drawing closer. If that Yemeni was even slightly better conditioned, he would soon get close enough for a good shot.

  Smith had dropped his rifle when he surrendered, but still had his Beretta strapped to his right thigh. He rounded a turn and he saw a long straight section of the wadi stretch out ahead of him. Just what he was looking for. He tucked himself against the wall and waited. In less than ten seconds the Yemeni—a short, thin young man—rounded the turn and took two long strides before he realized there was no one ahead of him. He stopped short.

  Before he could figure it out, Smith shot him twice in the back.

  Smith listened for a moment, but the second man had either given up or was far enough behind that it didn’t matter. He took a long drink from his canteen, lifted the Yemeni’s canteen, and started to lope along the wadi while looking for a safe place to climb out.

  Ali al-Ahmar heard the shots and knew that either his men would soon be back with the American’s heart, or they would never be back. In the meantime, he had moved his dead, six of them, into a covered position where American drones could not see them. The American bodies, on the other hand, were neatly lined up near the end of the bridge they had destroyed. With four wounded, the Captain worked his way back up the wadi to the point where they had crossed not long before, and then back to his vehicles. He needed to contact both Major Ishmail and his Uncle. The plan had to be revised.

  Chapter 41

  September 13, 2017 1200Z (1500 AST)

  USS Ashland

  The USS Ashland, LSD-48, was cruising at barely six knots on the smooth expanse of the Arabian Sea. By this time her LCACs had delivered five of the six warhead transport boxes and the sixth was inbound. Each had been lifted by Ashland’s heavy crane onto the after deck where a strange looking contraption had been constructed to open them.

  Captain Eric Lutz, who began his career as a Navy salvage diver and was later commissioned, had been whisked from his billet as senior engineer at the Norfolk Naval Shipyard to design and construct equipment to rapidly open the Russian shipping containers without damaging the warheads.

  What he came up with was a modification of a high-pressure waterjet system used for cutting steel at the shipyard’s massive machine shop. Water at 80,000 pounds per square inch, and mixed with an abrasive could cut through steel with more precision and less damaging heat than any cutting tool. In this case, the thickness and the high strength of the steel in question required a larger nozzle, higher pressure, and two nozzles spraying liquid nitrogen to prevent heat build-up.

  Mounted on the expansive afterdeck of the Ashland and surrounded by four-centimeter thick polycarbonate to protect the crew and engineers from high-velocity bits of steel and abrasive, the device, nicknamed the ‘octopus’ because of its many hoses and cables, was intended to cut off the end of the steel box so the warhead could be extracted. Included in the design was a live video feed which would go both to the White House and to Admiral Tucker on Essex.

  When the first LCAC had pulled alongside with it two warhead containers, there were a lot of people holding their breath until the crane operator skillfully plucked the heavy steel box from the bed of the truck and lifted it directly into the protective enclosure of the octopus. The second container was placed on the deck just aft of the enclosure, and the engineers got to work. It took some tinkering, but they quickly got the cutter working.

  During this time Captain Lutz patiently responded to a stream of questions from Karen Hiller and Sonny Baker.

  Eight minutes after it arrived, the massive end of the container landed on the protective steel plate welded to the deck with a satisfying ‘clang.’ The warhead was carefully extracted and, using a smaller crane, was lifted out of the protective enclosure and placed on one of six dollies specifically built to receive it.

  Rick Suarez, accompanied by Air Force and Navy nuclear weapons experts, went into action. After taking readings with several types of radiation detectors and removing one of the warhead’s small baseplates, Suarez spoke into his encrypted communications link. “Looks like the real thing,” his broad grin carried live to the White House situation room where the President quietly said, “One down, five to go.”

  The second container was opened easily and its warhead quickly confirmed as genuine. The third, fourth, and fifth followed at twenty-minute intervals as the LCAC crews, crane operators, and engineers fell into a rhythm. By time the LCAC with the sixth container pulled alongside, there were five cut and empty containers on the aft deck, five warheads safely secured below, four trucks returned to the vehicle deck, and all the engineers back aboard, except for the two dispatched with the MPs—whose whereabouts were unknown.

  Up on deck, Lutz directed the opening of the last of the massive steel boxes. As he looked at the deck he realized he had not made specific plans on how to remove the stack of cut ends, each weighing more than five hundred kilos, from the deck. Even as his team prepared box number six for cutting, he began to work on this new, though relatively insignificant, problem.

  The spray of water under immense pressure plus the cloud of condensation
from the liquid nitrogen blanketed the container during the cutting process. Only when they felt the vibration and heard the clang of metal on metal did everyone know the last box was open. The octopus had done its job, and the engineers began to power down the various pumps and motors that drove the device.

  Captain Lutz entered the enclosure, and using a small flashlight peered into the open end of the stainless steel box.

  Chapter 42

  September 11, 2017 1445Z (1045 EDT)

  White House Situation Room

  “Empty? Are you sure?” Karen Hiller shouted.

  “Just a moment,” said Rick Suarez, “I’ll have a look myself.”

  They watched him enter the enclosure on the situation room’s monitors. He emerged seconds later. “There is no warhead.”

  “Jesus Christ,” the President exclaimed. “Now what the hell do we do?”

  Sonny Baker was trying to think of options in a hurry. “Mr. President, I suggest we have the Marines use the radiation detectors they have with them to conduct a quick search of Arad.”

  The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs tented his fingers and looked thoughtfully at Baker for a moment. “Keep in mind that we began pulling our people out of Arad as soon as the warhead containers were clear. We don’t have the forces on site to perform an aggressive search, especially with the limited radiation instruments issued to the Marines.”

  Too much was happening too fast. Baker had to pull it together. “Good point Ted. There may be wisdom in getting out now and dealing with number six later. There are already demonstrations in Cairo, Amman, and Dubai protesting another American invasion of an Arab country.”

  “Just leave a nuclear warhead?” the President said. “Is that your advice? I want to be clear on this?”

  “Not leave, Mr. President. We can begin immediate measures to locate it, but right now we have no evidence to work with. It seems unlikely to me that Nazer would hide a warhead in Arad. He could have just as easily unloaded it before they left Mukalla. It could be anywhere. Before anything else, we need information.”