Task Force Desperate (40 page)

It took a few moments to send this, as I was sending in bursts of no more than a few seconds at a time. When I finished with, “Over,” I got back simply a double squelch-break. We were taking Baird’s warnings seriously.

The four of us stayed put, spread around the open space where we could see out onto the streets, with Jim and Tim covering the general area to the north, while Bob and I kept our eyes south, toward the target area. Staying on a knee for a long time gets tiresome and painful, but we didn’t dare relax too much so we endured the discomfort while we waited for the rest.

It took about thirty minutes for the lead pair to link up with Jim and Tim, and make their way into the little staging area. Glancing back, I could see by movement and profile that Alek and Larry had led the way in. Figures, put the two biggest guys on the team on point. I’d give Alek shit about it later. For now, as the next two came in, Jim, Tim, Bob, and I moved out, going deeper into the house of our enemies.

A short distance from our little staging area, two compounds sat close enough together to form a narrow alleyway that we immediately made use of, slipping between the two walls in the shadows and out of sight. Then we hit a sticking point.

There was a solid wall of interlinked compounds facing us. We’d have to either go around, which at least to the southwest led straight to another major road, or try to go through. I dropped to a knee while still in the alley, and took my time, looking it over, acutely conscious that time was ticking by, and we were losing darkness with every passing moment.

Finally, since I couldn’t see any other way, and there was no sign of human or canine movement nearby, I decided to chance going through. I signaled to Jim to stay put, and led Bob out toward the walls.

I crept to the base of the compound wall I’d picked as our tentative entry, and went to a knee, waving Bob in close. I grabbed him by the shoulder and, my lips less than an inch from his ear, barely whispered, “I’ll be the base. You peek over the top, see if the compound is clear. If it is, we’ll signal to Jim and Tim and go over. If not, we move.” He nodded, and I braced my back against the wall, carefully slinging my rifle across my chest to keep it from banging against the cinder-block, and interlaced my fingers as a stirrup.

Bob slung his rifle tightly to his back, put his boot in my clasped hands and his gloved hands on my shoulders, then carefully lifted himself up to the top of the wall.

My arms and shoulders started to ache almost immediately. Holding a man in full gear above you with main strength is a bitch. I had to keep my head down, too, to avoid having my NVGs catch on his kit. So I stared at my knees and Bob’s boots, trying not to shake with the effort of holding him up, all the while hoping that no Shabaab patrol happened by while we were doing this.

It seemed like forever, but was really only a few seconds before Bob stepped back down. “Clear,” he whispered. “Not even any animals.”

I nodded, and signaled “come ahead” to Jim and Tim, then bent down, reaching into my shoulder pocket. I pulled out a tiny triangle of glint tape, and stuck it to the base of the wall, then got back into position. It wouldn’t be visible unless you were looking for it, but it would reflect enough ambient light to show up like a beacon on NVGs if you were. The last man over would retrieve it, leaving no sign of our passage except for footprints and scuff marks on the walls. “You first,” I murmured. Bob nodded, and as quickly as he could while being as quiet as possible, stepped up and pulled himself up on top of the wall.

He stayed there, pressed as flat to the top of the cinderblocks as he could. Fortunately, the Somalis didn’t line the tops of their compound walls with broken glass or nails like I’d seen done elsewhere. As soon as he was set, he reached a hand down to me. Once my own rifle was slung securely, I reached up and grasped his wrist, and he helped haul me up the wall. There was some noise, as my boots scuffled on the wall for purchase, then as I dragged my gear over the edge and lay out on the top, facing Bob. He nodded, and spider-dropped off, hanging down by one hand and one foot as far as he could before letting go, keeping the actual drop as short as possible. I followed, as Jim and Tim got to the base of the wall.

Coming to my feet, I scanned the courtyard, keeping close watch on the house that squatted at the center of the back wall. It was silent and dark. Thermal showed nothing moving, either. Watching my footing carefully, I moved toward the back wall.

Now that we were in the compound, I wasn’t entirely sure about the wisdom of going through this way, but we were pretty well committed. We’d have to go over the back wall closer to the house than I’d like. On the other hand, a careful, guarded look at my watch showed it was almost 0200. Time was a-wasting.

Once Jim and Tim were in the courtyard, we repeated the same dance on the back wall. This time, we found ourselves in a compound that actually had an open gate in the general direction we wanted to go. Easing my way around the wall at the gate, I saw just brush-scattered ground between us and the target.

That wasn’t all I saw, either. There were sentries on the roof of the University, and from their body language, they were alert. The place was also lit up like a Christmas tree. That might well explain the widespread blackouts in the city; all the juice was going to Shabaab’s headquarters, or whatever the fuck they had this place staked out for.

I ducked back inside, as a Bongo truck practically overflowing with armed men bounced past, apparently circling the University. They weren’t taking any chances with security on the place, that was for sure. And if all the higher-ups were gone, that probably meant the hostages were in there.

Probably wasn’t going to be enough, though. I eased back until only the eye with the NVGs over it was exposed, and watched the target, thinking. As I did, Jim and Tim joined us in the compound. Jim leaned forward and whispered, “Rest of the team is inbound. Next element is in the staging area.” I nodded, and went back to watching the target.

There was a low wall running all the way around the campus, except for two large gaps, one of which was directly ahead of us. It looked like it opened on the soccer field, with one of the three large main buildings beyond it. Not many of the windows that I could see were lit, but the field lights were on, bathing the open ground in harsh white light. We weren’t getting across there without being spotted.

As I looked at the main building, I began to wonder just how the hell we were going to find the hostages in that mess. Those buildings were huge, guarded, and well-lit. Finding anything in there was going to be dicey, not to mention getting back out. For all our determination out in the desert, this was looking more and more unlikely.

But, as I watched, I started to think I saw an opening. Not the obvious wide open gap in the wall, but a shadowed area further down the southwest wall. There was a shack up against the wall, and not a lot of illumination. In fact, the more I looked at it, the more I saw a gap in their lighting, and a path up to the wall of the main building that would be generally out of sight, unless they had somebody in the windows with night vision. Which they might, but we’d scan it thoroughly with thermals before we even tried going over the wall.

It was so thin a chance as to be damned near transparent, but it was the only chance we had to find these guys. I dropped back into the compound, as Danny and Rodrigo came over the wall behind us. Alek and Larry were already in, so I hunkered down with Jim and Alek to explain what I’d seen.

“I think we might be better off taking a house and setting up surveillance, to be honest with you,” Jim said. “Sooner or later there’s got to be some outward evidence of the hostages. I don’t like this setup.”

“I don’t like it, either,” I said. “We should just get eyes on over the wall first; see if we can locate anything from outside. Going in should be our absolute last resort.”

“Agreed,” Alek said. “But if they’re deep inside, we won’t see shit.”

“Only so much we can do with this situation,” I pointed out. “This is worse than we thought. I say we get close, see what we can see, see if we can grab anybody of medium importance who might know more, and get the fuck out.”

Alek nodded. “Let’s do it.” He laid a hand on my shoulder. “You guys have been on point for the last couple hours. Let’s push the next element.” I nodded tiredly, until Danny and Rodrigo stepped up.

“Danny?” I whispered. “Aren’t you supposed to kind of hang back and let us expendable contractors do the dirty work?”

“Like hell,” he murmured, as he slipped out of the compound with Rodrigo, Nick and Hank standing by to follow them.

The new point element moved carefully through the spaced-out buildings and bushes, working their way toward the corner of the main wall. Once there, they sent a quick glint to signal that they found a decent staging point. I led out, as their thermal signatures disappeared around the corner of the wall.

The staging area turned out to be some thicker bushes surrounding what turned out to be an abandoned house. We went into the house, relying more on the brick to mask us than the brush. I found a window facing southeast, where I could watch the point element get into position.

I watched as they set in between the wall and a small shack, that, if I was reading the ground right, was just across the wall from the shack I’d seen inside. I took my eyes off them to scan the roof of the University building, and spotted one of the sentries, who seemed to be pointing toward the wall…

The night exploded.

Chapter 28

T
he shockwave of the explosion slapped me in the face, hot air rocking me back on my heels. The noise was deafening, even this far away, and I almost didn’t hear the hiss of flares being popped off, or the sporadic pops of small arms fire, as the sentries started shooting into the kill zone.

Through my NVGs the area around the shack was a huge thermal bloom. Smoke and dust was still billowing out from the blast point, and glowing wreckage was strewn across the ground. It didn’t seem possible that any of the point element had survived that. The bullet impacts that were smacking dust up from the ground just seemed to emphasize the hopelessness of it. Danny, Nick, Hank, and Rodrigo were dead.

Somewhere inside the campus, some fuckstick started up a PA, and started shouting “ALLAHU AKHBAR!” at the top of his lungs, over and over. It was so loud it was clearly audible over the steadily intensifying roar of gunfire as the Shabaab fighters hosed down the kill zone frantically with rifle and machinegun fire.

All around us, the city came awake. Engines roared, headlights flared to life, and more small arms fire popped off. My earpiece crackled to life with Mike’s voice.

“Coconut, Speedy,” he called. “All hell’s breaking loose out here; we’ve got mounted patrols coming out of the woodwork. What’s your status?”

“Same thing here, Speedy,” Alek replied. “Hold what you’ve got, we had an IED go off, and we’ve got casualties. I’ll fill you in when we’ve got a better handle. For now, go firm and get ready for us to come to you, fast and hard.”

The rest of the team was already at the windows, guns up and ready, but as yet, no one had started shooting. The flares were starting to white out my NVGs, so I flipped them up and started using my scope. We weren’t taking fire yet, and if the guys out front were gone, we wouldn’t do them any good by bringing hell down around our own ears. Alek came up to me and took a knee, and was about to say something when I held up a hand to stop him.

I’d seen movement, out there in the kill zone. At least one of our guys was still alive. I pointed, and whispered to Alek, “We’ve got to get over there. Somebody’s still breathing. We can’t leave ‘em here.”

He looked at the long stretch of open ground we’d have to cover to get there, the fighters on top of the campus building that were still shooting, and the half dozen trucks that were rumbling in from at least three different directions. “Good thing we brought at least one sixty,” was all he said. He turned, tapped Jim on the shoulder, and pointed toward the roof.

It was going to be a drop in the bucket, but if we were lucky, it would get their heads down long enough for us to get to our casualties. Jim and Larry would stay put, Alek, Bob, Tim, and I would head for the blast zone.

Heaven help us, we were about to run
into
a fucking kill zone. I swallowed the hollow feeling in my gut, and got ready to run.

We peeled out the back door of the abandoned house and headed for the wreckage of the shack at a sprint, as Jim and Larry opened fire on the campus, the
thud-thud-thud
of the M60 being punctuated by the hammering reports of Larry’s FAL. We ran bent over, as friendly rounds snapped past overhead. My body immediately started to protest, and the dusty, smoke-laced air burned in my lungs, as my boots pounded the ground, and my gear bounced and rubbed against my torso with every jarring stride.

We were halfway there when two of the enemy technicals rolled into the open.

Their headlights glared across the open ground and silhouetted us against the wall. I don’t think they knew quite what to do, at first. The sight of four large men running full tilt
toward
the gunfire must have thrown them, because they seemed to falter at first. Then somebody shouted something in Somali, and AK fire started to strobe out of the darkness behind the headlights, reaching out for us.

I didn’t slow down as I returned fire. They were probably the least-aimed shots of my life, but they might have bought us a few precious seconds. One of the headlights shattered, and some of the gunfire slackened, as I heard frantic shouts in Somali. We were almost to the knee-high remains of the shack.

Then Tim dropped on his face. Bob skidded to a halt, turned, and ran back to him. Alek and I dropped to the prone and started shooting at the trucks, concentrating our fire a little better from a stationary position. My chest was heaving, making my aim waver, but they were close. I saw two skinnies drop as I unloaded an entire magazine at the truck, and the rest scurried back to try to shelter behind the bed. I was glad I’d loaded up for bear as I rolled to one side to get a mag out of my vest to reload.