Hunting in the Shadows (American Praetorians) (14 page)

             
“Acknowledged,” I sent back.  “Key-lock, Hillbilly,” I called.

             
“Send it, Hillbilly,” Nick replied.

             
“Status at the breach point?” I asked.

             
“In the clear for the moment,” he answered.  “Apostle and I are keeping any interference from the east away, but Albatross and Slapdash are taking heavy fire.”

             
“Affirm.”  Surprisingly, I wasn’t irritated by the repetition of information.  I guess I had too much else to worry about.  “Shiny, Hillbilly.  We’re moving back to the breach point.  You take point; we’ll bring up the rear.”

             
“Roger,” he replied.  “Moving now.”

             
I looked at Larry, who was watching down the hall through the open door.  He nodded as he saw the Bobs come out, with their charges in tow.  I turned to ours and barked, “Let’s go, on your feet, we’re getting out of here.”

             
The noise of the firefight outside had quite a salutary effect on getting them to move quickly.  All four scrambled to their feet and started to crowd toward the door.  I put out my arm to block Somoza.  “Stay behind Monster,” I said sternly.  “Do not pass him, do not go anywhere but where he goes, and absolutely DO NOT step in front of him.  Do you understand?”

             
Somoza looked at me with a combined expression of fear, anger, and desperation.  Finally, without a word, tight-lipped, he nodded, and fell in behind Larry.

             
“Coming out!” Larry called out to the Bobs.

             
“Come ahead,” was the reply.  Larry moved, Somoza and the other three on his heels.  I took up the rear.  I’d be the last one off the target site.

             
Little Bob was holding on the corner of the hallway, watching the unopened door that led to the collapsed part of the building.  Larry took up security and pushed the civilians across to Little Bob, who led them out the breach point, where Bob had already taken the first batch.  I bumped Larry across, and took up position covering the door while he crossed the hall.

             
Just then the door slammed open.

             
Once we’d gotten inside, we had raised our NVGs and gone with the white-light flashlights on our rifles.  If we’d been trying to do a soft hit, we’d have kept the NVGs and IR lasers and floodlights, but identifying the civilians, and getting them out without them stumbling all over each other and turning it into a shitshow, had taken priority, not to mention the fact that our explosive breach had pretty well killed any chance of doing this stealthily.  So when the first Iraqi commando came bursting through that door, he got an eyeful of two 200 lumen Surefire Scout Lights.

             
That kind of candlepower has an interesting effect on the human nervous system.  While it isn’t as devastating as some might hope, it is a shock to the system, and can cause disorientation.  Enough disorientation to clog up their stack, at any rate, and let us get the first shot off.

             
We got rather more than just the first shot off.

             
Larry and I opened fire on the one-man at almost the same instant, the suppressed rifles still cracking loudly in the confined space of the hallway.  The first shots just staggered him as they thumped into his chest plate, but the follow-up brain shots smashed the contents of his skull across the inside of his helmet.

             
He crashed backwards into the next guy in the stack.  The lot of them got tangled up in the doorway.

             
There’s a reason we call a doorway and the space right in front of it the “fatal funnel.”  You get caught up in it during a firefight and you’re probably going to wind up dead.

             
It was interesting targeting, but we kept shooting until nobody in the heap was moving anymore.  It wasn’t exactly surgical shooting, but under the circumstances, it did the trick.

             
We weren’t waiting around to make sure of any of them.  I flowed across the hallway, keeping my muzzle on the heap of dead and dying Iraqi commandos, and passed Larry, who stayed barricaded on their entry point.  Once I got to our breach point, I stopped, turned, and yelled at him, “Turn and go!”

             
He peeled off and ran past me, heading toward our breach in the wall.  Most of the civies were already through and headed for the airstrip.  I could just barely hear the helos coming in to pick us all up.

             
“Turn and go!” he called, and I ran to join him at the wall.  Now we had to collapse the two elements at the corners of the building.  Nick and Paul hadn’t been engaged yet, but Bryan and Malachi would need some pretty heavy supporting fire to make it back.

             
As if the increasingly hot response to our prisoner grab wasn’t enough, at that point I got a call from Hal.  “Hillbilly, Dave.  We are taking heavy fire from the gate area, and what appears to be an Iraqi Army patrol just came up on our three-o’clock.  We are pinned down and need support.”

             
“Roger, stand by,” I replied.  “Shiny, Hillbilly.”

             
“Send it, Hillbilly,” Bob answered.

             
“Get Chickenhawk on this push,” I told him.  I didn’t want to change channels in the middle of a firefight to talk to the birds; better for Bob, who didn’t have to coordinate between two teams and two helos, to do that.

             
A moment later, a laconic voice came crackling over the radio.  “Hillbilly, this is Chickenhawk One.  Send your traffic.”

             
“Chickenhawk, Team Dave is pinned down near the main gate under heavy fire,” I reported.  “Can you do a couple of gun runs to take the heat off them?”

             
“Roger, be advised, from what we can see it’s a little confused down there,” Sam replied.  “I need some kind of marker to tell the Cowboys from the Indians.”  There was no questioning the sudden change in plan, which had been for them to swoop in, land under cover of Jim’s and Juan’s sniper fire, pick us up along with the civilians, and get the hell out.  Close air support had not been in the briefing for this one, but all our helos went armed, though sometimes covertly, depending on the venue.

             
“Chickenhawk, this is Dave,” Hal came back over the net.  “I can use an IR laser to lasso the IA unit blocking our exfil.  Will that work?”

             
“Affirm, Dave,” Sam replied.  “Stand by, we’re coming around.”

             
Overhead, the two Iroquois helicopters roared by at barely two hundred feet, circling around to come at the IA patrol on the road to the north.  I could see the figures of the door gunners leaning out in their slings, directing the FN MAG machineguns on their swing-arms forward.

             
We had been largely using Bell 407s before, the civilian version (albeit highly modified) of the Army’s Kiowa Warrior scout helo.  Before we’d deployed to Iraqi Kurdistan, however, the Colonel had decided we needed heavier-duty helos.  He’d scraped up some surplus Bell 205s, and then had them torn apart and rebuilt.  They were now as close as we could get to the US Marine Corps’ UH-1Y Super-Hueys.  Further modifications had made them into passable gunships.

             
I tore my attention away from the birds.  We now had more problems on the ground.

             
I pushed back inside the breach in the wall.  The Bobs had the civies against the wall, and crouched low, while they held security.  I keyed the radio.  “Albatross, turn and go.  Keep to your left, against the building, until you’re even with the outer breach.  Monster and I will provide cover fire.”

             
Even as I got an acknowledgment from Bryan, I heard the hammering of the Iroquois’ gunners opening up on the IAs on the road.  The chatter between them and Hal was background noise at that point.  I had my NVGs back down, and watched Bryan and Malachi move along the wall of the target building at a fast trot.  I laid the faint dots of my sights on the corner and waited for the first Iraqis to come around after Bryan and Malachi.

             
Instead, I was rewarded by a burst of small-arms fire crackling
way
too close to my head.  I ducked back outside the wall for a second.  “Motherfucker!”  I hadn’t seen the shooter.  Either they were shooting at likely spots, or I was silhouetted more than I should have been.  With the ambient light being as dim as it was, it was hard to tell.  I dropped lower, yelling at Little Bob, “Get everybody flat!  We’ve got to hold here for a few more minutes!” Then I leaned back out and aimed my rifle back at the corner.

             
More rounds snapped and cracked overhead, smacking into the wall or sailing out over the airstrip.  Larry leaned out and pumped half a dozen shots at the corner, then dropped back.  I waited until a target presented itself, then triggered the laser, and fired as soon as it settled on the helmeted head leaning out around the corner, behind an M4.  He vanished; whether I hit him or not, I don’t know.

             
Then more fire started up from the other corner of the building.  Nick and Paul were lighting up the Iraqi commandos trying to come around the other direction.  This was getting serious.  If we stuck around much longer, we’d be flanked out here in the open, and then that was that.  We’d be done.

             
To make matters worse, Somoza chose that very instant to be an idiot.  “This is insane!” he yelled, coming off the ground where Little Bob had pushed him.  “You are starting a shooting war with the Iraqi government!  We never wanted this!  What the fuck are you doing?!”

             
I took another pair of fast shots at another Iraqi commando who tried to pop around the corner, then twisted around and pointed at him.  “Get on the ground and shut the fuck up!” I bellowed.  “Little Bob, if he so much as moves without your say-so, tie him and bag him!”

             
“No, goddamnit!” Somoza yelled.  “I am not letting you fucking cowboys do this!  There are channels and procedures to run!”  He was up and moving, gesturing angrily.  Damn it.  We did not have time for his stupidity.  “The company lawyers would…”  I didn’t give him time to finish.  I kicked out and caught him in the stomach with my boot.  The air whuffed out of him, and he crumpled, doubled over.  At the same time, I felt a brutal thump in my back plate, followed by the hammering of Larry’s FAL as he dumped half a mag at the far corner.  I’d taken a round while I was trying to keep Somoza from getting shot.  I twisted back around and added my own fire, while Larry knelt next to me and started checking me for holes.

             
“I’m fine!” I snapped.  “Little Bob, get Somoza fucking secured!”  This time, as I fired, I was rewarded by seeing an Iraqi commando who’d been a little too aggressive drop, and get dragged back around the corner.  We had a stalemate at the moment, but that was bound to end any moment.  “Key-Lock, turn and go, get back here!”

             
Bryan and Malachi had joined us, running across the open ground in a crouch and firing toward their former corner as they went.  Now Nick and Paul started bounding back.  Larry was now crouched above where I lay in the side prone, and we concentrated on the west corner, while Bryan and Malachi were on the other side of the breach, ready to cover Nick and Paul.

             
I heard Bryan yell, “Shit!” and then he and Malachi were pushing back into the compound.  Larry kept up his fire while I stripped my empty mag and rocked in a fresh one hastily, trying to get back out to cover Bryan and Malachi.

             
There was more shooting from our side of the wall.  “Contact west!” Bob shouted over the reports of his OBR.  So, they were coming around to flank us on the airstrip.  We were screwed.

             
Bryan and Malachi were shooting so fast it was almost a solid, continuous noise.  Inside their line of fire, Nick was helping Paul limp/hop toward the breach.  It looked like he was hit, but I couldn’t spare the attention to see how badly.

             
There was a louder
crack
to the west, and then Jim’s calm drawl came over the net.  “Hillbilly, Kemosabe,” he said.  “We’ve got your back.  Pull everybody off the breach.”

             
Somoza was struggling with Little Bob, or trying to.  The big man had a knee on the small of his back, and was keeping his face in the dirt.  The rest of the civvies seemed cowed by the treatment Somoza was getting.

             
Just then, the Iroquois roared by overhead, the door gunners hammering at the interior of the compound, and the fire from the Iraqis on our position slacked off.  “Get away from the breach, and out to where the helos can pick us up!” I yelled over the roar of the rotor wash.  “Bobs, you take point, Nick and Paul in the middle with the civilians, the rest of us will hold the rear until everybody else is on the choppers!”

             
The two helicopters swung and the first flared savagely, dropping to the tarmac like a stone.  The second remained aloft, orbiting the compound, its door gunners working over any ISOF shooters who tried to get to us, as well as anybody who appeared to be carrying an RPG or MANPAD.  The civilians ran to the grounded chopper, pushed and prodded by Nick, Bob, Little Bob, and Paul, who seemed to be doing better, though favoring his right leg, which was dark with blood.