Echo Platoon (30 page)

0227. W
E PUT
H
AMMER IN POSITION FIRST, EASING HIM
up atop the warm steel of the corrugated cargo container. He slithered across the top of the container, settled into a prone position, put the rifle to his cheek, then swept the area with his night-vision scope and pronounced it clear.

0233. I made my way inch by inch across the gravel, picking my way carefully, until I reached the deck area that abutted the larger of the two one-story buildings, and pulled myself underneath it. I lay there, sweating, the ache in my foot pulsing contrapuntally to my accelerated heartbeat, thinking about how much God loves me. I edged forward, only to smack my skull against a concrete footer. It is good to know that some things, like pain, are constant in my life. Thirty seconds later, I was joined by Nod, whose night vision was good enough so that he crawled around the thick, rough footer. Half a minute after that, Duck Foot and Timex made their way under the wooden planking. They were followed by Gator and Boomerang.

We lay on our backs, with half a foot between the tip of my much-mashed nose and the bottom of the
unevenly spaced deck planks. There was no need to communicate: each man knew what he had to do.

I checked my watch. Nineteen minutes to go. Duck Foot and Timex kept moving, working their way deliberately toward the aft end of the deck, where they’d be able to stage their assault on the single entrance to the classroom building. As they hit their target, we’d hit ours. I lay on my back, running my hands over my equipment, making sure everything was where it needed to be.

Which was when I heard the door just above my head creak open, followed by the sound of feet on the creaky wood planks. All movement stopped. I lay there, my heart pounding in my ears. Talk about pucker factor; I don’t think you’d have been able to get a fucking straight pin up my sphincter right then.

I heard the unmistakable scratch of a match swiping against wood, a secondary pause, an intake of breath, and the satisfied exhale/sigh of a serious smoker as he took his first drag of the day.

He stood where he was for about a minute and a half, although it felt like a fucking hour and a half to me. Then he ambled over to the edge of the deck (four more footsteps). There was rustling, and then the noisy drizzle of piss on gravel as the motherfucker stood at the edge of the deck and relieved himself. Then he farted long and hard—geezus, what the hell had he been eating?—shook off, flicked his cigarette out into the darkness, and walked back inside.

This was not good news. As I’ve told you, folks like me are at our most vulnerable when we are in the staging portions of our operations. That’s when we’re unprotected, and it is hardest to achieve the critical mass of surprise combined with violence of action
that allows us to overcome the enemy’s superior numbers.

And with at least one tango awake, surprise was going to be a lot harder. Not to mention the fact that our approach was now going to have to be even more silent than ever.

But what is life without a challenge every now and then, right?

0246. I crawled out from under the decking as far away from the piss puddle as I could manage, the muzzle of my MP5 up and ready, my night-vision goggles turned on and secured tightly around my forehead.

I rolled onto my back, and signaled that it was time to go to work. Nod and Gator started toward the secondary doorway, some thirty feet away, moving sans sound.

Thirty seconds after they’d made their move, I crept six feet to the edge of the deck, slid out from underneath, hunkered, then climbed between the deck’s rough-hewn posts and rails, c-a-r-e-f-u-l-l-y crossed the planking sans making any noise, eased on up to the building itself, and pressed myself against the outer wall, just to the left of the doorway, on the same side as the hinges. Boomerang followed—but obviously not in my footsteps. I winced as the deck creaked under his weight. If I hadn’t been concentrating so hard I would have given him a dirty look. He knew how to move better than that.

Then it was Nod’s turn. The former Green Beret moved like a fucking ghost. So did Timex. Their expressions told Boomerang they knew he’d fucked up.

Once they’d crossed the deck, we shifted position to the side of the doorway opposite the hinges. Boomerang
stacked behind me, Nod behind him, and Timex played rear security. I could feel Boomerang’s fingers patting, probing, and poking to make sure that everything I was carrying was secure and ready to go. As he was checking me, Nod was doing the same for him, and Timex checked Nod’s equipment, pronouncing him ready with a squeeze on his right shoulder. Finally, Nod spun Timex around and made sure everything was where it was supposed to be. My quartet squeezed off from the rear, and when I felt the pressure of Boomerang’s hand on my shoulder, I knew we were ready to go.

0254. I
tsk-tsked
twice to check on the rest of the team’s preparation, and received affirmative responses. Shit, we were not only ready to go, we were even six minutes early. Well, isn’t it nice that some things actually work out. Okay:
Show Time
. I eased up on the MP5 that was slung over my left shoulder on its worn canvas harness, my left hand on the extra-wide forearm to control the muzzle angle. My right hand went to the pocket on my CQC vest that held one of the three DefTec No. 25 flashbangs I was carrying tonight.

I eased it out of the pocket, and then, holding my hand securely around the spoon, I pulled the pin. Boomerang began tapping my shoulder. I shrugged him off, as if to say, ‘I know, I know,’ straightened the pin out, and hung it on my left pinky. You never want to drop a grenade pin because you might need the fucking thing again, if you decide not to toss the grenade and have to stow it. He didn’t have to remind me of such a basic detail.

Okay, I was armed and dangerous; ready to hop & pop and shoot & loot. And Boomerang was still fucking tapping me on the shoulder.

Which was when the door opened by its own fucking self. Of course, we all know that the door did not open by its own fucking self. It was pushed open by another tango on his way to an early morning smoke ‘n’ piss.

He didn’t see me, because I was pressed back next to the door frame as he pushed the door open. But he sure as shit sensed my presence, because he suddenly pushed against the door, whirled, and slammed me splat in the face with his fucking fist. My night vision went flying. His fist continued in its trajectory, smashing me in the nose. Yes, of course it hurt. It hurt like hell. But since I’m used to pain, I just absorbed it, held my ground, reached up, and swatted at his ugly puss, using the Def-Tec in my right hand as a brass knuck.

The body of the DefTec No. 25 is made of thick steel. It weighs almost two pounds. It makes a hell of an old-fashioned cold-cocker. And between the fucking spider, and my fucking foot, and my currently mashed Slovak snout, I was in the fucking mood to fucking kill somebody and do it soon—brass knucks or no.

I felt the welcome sound of steel on flesh, followed by a gurgle. I rolled on top of the motherfucker and brought him down to the deck. I saw the flash of Nod’s knife and tried to get out of the way so Nod could slit this asshole’s throat. But it was dark and it was complicated and we were all moving at the same time and trying like hell not to make any noise, and the fucking tango was tough and he was wiry, too, and he rolled away from Nod and me, and as he did, he bit me—hard—right through my black Nomex and leather assault gloves, and I reacted by dropping the fucking DefTec.

Which, of course, exploded just as I reflexively looked toward it.

Have I recently told you the specifications of the DefTec No. 25? Of course I have, but since you don’t retain much information, you’ve probably forgotten the pertinent details. Well, here’s a fucking refresher. The DefTec No. 25 has a sound level of 185 dB at five feet, a light level of 1.8 million candela, and a duration of nine milliseconds.

Here is what little good news I can give you: most of the energy of the explosion, which emanates from vent holes in the top and the bottom of the grenade, was absorbed by the unfortunate tango who’d caused me to drop it. It must have gone off pretty close to his face, because there wasn’t a whole lot left of his head.

Not that I could tell. Not right then. Right then, all I saw was fucking dots and spots and a ball of white/ orange/red/white light.

I did exactly what most people do when they are confronted by a distraction device: I fucking froze.

Which did not make the rest of the team’s lives any easier. Perhaps the most basic tactical rule of dynamic entry is KTFM, or Keep The Fuck Moving. If you freeze in a doorway, you will get someone killed, and there I was, frozen on all fours, right in the fucking middle of the doorway, having just told every hostile within three hundred yards that there were visitors in the neighborhood, visitors who were boding them no good at all.

And so, Boomerang, Nod, and Timex, not wanting to become statistics, kept going. They didn’t wait. They leapt over me, their War Faces on, screaming as they made their entry.

I wasn’t about to let ’em go it alone. I might not
have been able to see much or hear much, but there are times when instinct and the WILL TO WIN allow you to do 200 percent more than you ever thought you would be able to. And so, I made myself see; I forced myself to hear; I made myself scan, and breathe, and pay attention to the hostile environment.

No, I was not in good shape. But that was secondary to making sure that Nod, Timex, and Boomerang stayed alive tonight.

“I’m behind you,” I shouted—at least that’s what I think I said.

“Going left.” That’s what Boomerang’s hand signal told me. Just to make sure I understood, he kicked the port-side door in and tossed a grenade.

The concussion lifted our feet off the floor. It was echoed by more explosions, coming from the other end of the hallway, where Gator and Nod had staged. Then Boomerang disappeared through the doorway. He’d already fired off two three-round bursts by the time I made entry, my back sliding along the right-hand wall, MP5 muzzle up and scanning.

Something at eleven o’clock—well within my field of fire—moved. I shot in its general direction. Heard a scream. Fired a three-shot burst toward the sound. Now more motion. Spray-and-prayed the opposite wall until I heard Boomerang scream, “Clear-clear-clear . . .”

He backed out, pulling me by the straps on my vest, making sure I stayed close.

More explosions. Nod and Timex were working the opposite side of the hallway, leapfrogging Boomerang and me. I began to be able to make out the sounds of return fire coming through the cinder block walls. Shit, the fucking cinder blocks were thin and porous,
and rounds were cutting through ’em. Talk about your fucking second-rate government contractors.

I dropped to the deck and started crawling. War may be hell. But close quarters battle is worse than hell. We are talking pure chaos here, friends, coupled with the nasty reality that everything happens within a few feet, and takes only a few seconds.

I pulled myself around Boomerang, rolled over onto my back, and kicked in the next door, only to be greeted by what sounded like a fucking brigade of AKs spraying and praying. How many were really firing? Two, maybe three. But who the fuck cared. One’s enough to wax your ass.

I backpedaled, sucked more concrete, turned around, stuck the business end of the MP5 around the door frame, and squeezed off a mag’s worth of jacketed hollowpoint.

From the return fire we were getting, my fucking fusillade hadn’t seemed to do any good.

“Motherfucker—” Boomerang’s high voice cut through the noise. I turned to look at him. He’d been caught by a fragment of cinder block or a jacketed ricochet and was bleeding heavily around his Oakleys.

Then it was my turn. I’d just dropped the empty mag, shoved a new one up and into position and slapped the bolt forward when a fucking baseball bat whacked me in the left arm, knocking the subgun out of my hand. As I reacted to that, the business end of a church key slashed me from my right ear down to my chin. I tried to make the fingers of my left hand work—but I couldn’t. Meanwhile, blood was beginning to obscure the vision in my right eye.

“Use the fucking Mark-Three, Boss Dude,” Boomerang shouted in my virtually deaf left ear. He was
right, of course—and now I realized what he’d been trying to tell me when he was tapping me on the shoulder outside. Well, fuck—wasn’t I the fella who told you a few pages back that we wouldn’t be concerned about taking prisoners tonight? Well, fuck—wasn’t it time to get serious? Well, fuck—weren’t we here to kill people and break things? So, fuck—why risk an entry into a room full of hostiles when you can Boehm ’em: fuck the fucking fuckers with a grenade, and then go in with a dustpan to sweep up the pieces.

Good question. Sometimes I am a dense fucking Rogue. But never for too long. I tore at my CQC vest until my fingers found one of the four Mark 3A2 concussion grenades I was carrying tonight. Mark 3A2s contain half a pound of TNT. They work wonders in enclosed spaces, like the interior of T-72 tanks, or small rooms. I forced my left hand up, inserted my index finger in the ring, pulled the pin, let the spoon fly, screamed,
“Fire in the hole,”
and rolled—rolled, not tossed—the fucking thing, around the doorway into the room.

Why am I emphasizing
roll?
You want to know that
now?

Quick answer: because if I tossed it, Mister Murphy would probably catch the fucking thing and toss it back at me. By rolling it, I made sure it wouldn’t bounce off anything and come back my way.

I dropped as close to the deck as I could and pressed my body over Boomerang’s. Even so, we were both lifted off the floor by the explosion, picked up, then body-slammed onto the hard concrete.

But there was no time to complain. I struggled through the doorway, the acrid smell of high explosive permeating my nostrils, Boomerang in my wake.

Scan and breathe. Search for the threat.
I wiped blood out of my eye, blinked, tried to focus, blinked again. All I saw was body parts.