Alone and Unafraid (American Praetorians Book 3) (22 page)

He stuck.

Yusuf and Hassan had ranged pretty far out of the neighborhood after a while, so as not to arouse suspicion about two unfamiliar loiterers that close to an ISIS outpost. 
We stayed in place, watching the school.  It soon became obvious that it was essentially serving the purpose as an ISIS FOB in the neighborhood.  Patrols came and went, several of them dragging locals along, presumably for judgment over some point of Sharia Law.  A couple of supply trucks showed up, too, bringing what looked like food and munitions.  At least one of the drivers looked scared shitless as he unloaded.

The guards prayed when the muezzin called the faithful to prayer, their rifles close at hand.  They went inside when it was time to eat, presumably watching the gate, but not visible from the street.  That was interesting.  It was a noticeable vulnerability, but not one I was prepared to try to exploit with only a single team when it was still light out.

Clouds were moving in as the sun went down, and a few drops of rain pattered on the roof of the van.  That was good.  Even the most committed jihadis generally didn’t like going out in the dark; never mind the rain.  It sucks to get rained on, but it’s good hunting weather.

By two hours after dark, there wa
s a decent drizzle going on, and the streets were empty.  I was pretty sure ISIS was enforcing a curfew on the locals, but the rain would have kept most of them inside anyway.  I called Hassan.  It was time to go.

He and Yusuf were already on their way back.  It was getting too late to be out and about without appearing strange, so they’d started to circle back around to the van before I called.  They came around the corner while we were still on the phone.

The two of them got back in the van while the rest of us piled out, including Black.  We were kitted up for a hit, plate carriers, mags, and all.  The guards hadn’t come back out to the gate, which was still open.  They must be pretty confident in the security afforded by the locals’ fear.

This wasn’t a “kill or capture” mission.  As far as I was concerned, we were out to kill everyone in that place.  To that end, we had more grenades on us than we had mags.

We stayed away from the gate.  Why make things easy for ‘em?  While the guards were no longer visible, I doubted they would go completely without sentries; I suspected they were at the main building instead of on the wall.  And they were probably watching the gate, which was why we jogged quietly north to the far corner.

Larry and Little Bob, being the biggest, set their backs to the wall and cupped their hands to act as stirrups. 
Bryan and Nick went first, slinging their rifles and clambering up and over the wall.  It was only about five feet tall, so we’d been able to peer over it briefly to ensure the far side was clear.

Two by two, we all followed.  I went next with B
lack.  Larry and Jim were last, with Jim hauling Larry up the wall with a grunt.  As heavy as he was, Larry still dropped to the ground with hardly a sound.

We spread out.  Larry and Marcus went south; to take up cordon positions on the southwest corner, while
Bryan and Nick took the northeast.  They’d engage anyone bailing out of the building once the rest of us started moving through.  We’d have to watch our fire as we approached those parts of the school building; the windows aside, I didn’t necessarily trust the cinderblock walls to stop bullets all that well.

The rest of us crouched by the northwest corner of the building.  The layout was roughly in the shape of an “H” on its side, with another wing tacked onto the south side.  Each arm
had been a classroom, now a bed-down team room for ISIS fuckstains.

The first noise of the night was the tinkle of glass as Jim and I tossed a pair of frags in the windows of
the first classroom.  We stayed low, below the windows, until the frags went off with a bone-shaking double concussion, shattering the rest of the windows.  Smoke, dust, and debris roiled out of the windows, as we rose up behind our rifles.

NVGs don’t penetrate smoke very well.  They operate by intensifying the ambient light, so if there’s smoke, fog, or dust, they don’t magically see through it.  Thermals are a little better,
though still not perfect by any means, and we had the thermal attachments on our PVS 14s.  They weren’t the best thermals in the world, but they did the trick.

The smoky interior of the room was now nothing but wreckage and twisted, cooling bodies.  It looked like there had been maybe half a dozen fighters sleeping on the classroom floor, with the old desks shoved up against the wall.  One of the frags had landed smack dab in the center of the gro
up.  None of them were moving.

A dozen suppressed shots made sure.

We didn’t dawdle.  The bad guys had just been given a high-explosive wake-up call, and I didn’t want to give them one second more to get their shit together than we had to.  It briefly crossed my mind how much easier it would have been to just be able to call in a Hellfire or two from a Reaper drone overhead, but not only weren’t we “fully sanctioned,” the capability just wasn’t there anymore.  Between the political backlash from using drones on any target that presented itself, often without boots on the ground to verify the target, to budget cuts and the increasing loss of bases in the region, drones weren’t nearly the go-to option they had been a couple of years ago.  I put the thought out of my mind and pushed toward the next classroom.

It was the same drill. 
Little Bob had moved to the point position, and paused just short of the first window.  I was right behind him, my rifle already slung and frag in hand.  He pulled a frag out of his own belt rig, yanked the pin out, and tossed it sideways through the window.  I gave mine a little more
oomph
, managing to get it through the next window down.  Once again, the two grenades exploded with almost one deafening sound, sending more clouds of crap billowing out of every opening in the building.

We spread out, quickly moving down the length of the room, rifles tracking in on the windows as we came abreast of them.  This room had apparently been empty.  There were plenty of chairs and desks now reduced to kindling by the explosions, but no bodies.  Fuck.  Wa
sted time and wasted grenades.

“Next wing!” I bellowed.  There was no point in being quiet now. 
Black was now the closest to the corner, so he went around it at a sprint, Jim hard on his heels.

I got around right behind
Little Bob, to see Black fire several shots into the next window, just before letting his rifle hang, pulling a grenade, yanking the pin and fastballing it in the window, all without slowing down.  He dropped on his face as soon as the frag left his hand, and the rest of us followed suit.

The grenade must have hit something going in the window; because I’m pretty sure it detonated right at the window instead of deeper in.  Jim picked himself up off the ground as soon as the shrapnel had stopped pattering against the concrete overhead, and tossed in another, which went deeper before it exploded.  Then we were all up and moving in a line toward the windows, weapons up and looking for targets.

My radio crackled in my earpiece.  “They’re awake,” Larry sent.  “Movement in the southeast rooms.”

I really wished we could have done this simultaneously, but
we simply didn’t have the manpower.  This would have been a platoon-sized target to do it that way.  With only a nine-man team, it required a little more methodical approach.  Unfortunately, that gave the bad guys some breathing room.

“Inside,” I ordered.  As we moved up to the shattered windows on the third wing, sweeping the room with rifle muzzles and hitting any human forms with double taps to make sure, Little Bob moved to the first window and heaved himself through.
  There was still a hitch in his movements as he pulled at the bullet wounds that hadn’t had time to fully heal, but he never complained, and kept driving on.  The rest of us followed.

A storm of AK fire rattled from the classroom door.  They weren’t aiming, just sticking the muzzle through the doorway and spraying.  We hit the floor almost as one. 
Rounds smacked off the walls and ricocheted around the room, but seemed to all stay high.  I rolled onto my side, yanked a grenade out of my belt, primed it, and chucked it through the door.  I heard at least two more clunk in with it.

Oh fuck.  I rolled back over, trying to tuck as much of my body behind my back plate as possible.  This was going to suck.

WHAM
.  The overpressure washed through the open door and hammered us into the floor.  The very ground seemed to rise up and slap me, hard.  I saw stars.

Shrapnel ripped through the air, albeit a narrow cone defined by the door.  I was sure some of us caught some of it.  I was too befuddled by the triple blast to even be sure I hadn’t.

I forced myself to my feet.  Earpro or no, I was rocked.  My ears were ringing and my head was starting to hurt something fierce, along with the rest of me.  I wasn’t quite seeing straight, either.  But we didn’t have time to collect ourselves; we had to push the fight and finish this fast.  I reached over and helped Little Bob pull himself to his feet, then brought my rifle up and moved on the door.

Needless to say, there wasn’t any more fire coming from the door.  The doorway itself was pretty fucked up; cinderblock doesn’t generally hold up to high explosives very well.  The frame was cracked and it looked like part of the wall was getting ready to cave in.

I figured that the hallway was pretty clear for the moment after that, so I stepped through and hooked left, heading toward the two remaining un-cleared wings.  I felt one of the guys step through behind me, hooking right to cover the rear, just in case.  Then Little Bob was jamming his knee into my thigh and bellowing “With you!” a little too loudly.  We were all a little deaf after being that close to three grenades going off in close quarters.

There were two doors ahead, one leading into the classroom on my right, the other straight ahead, toward the south wing.  There was a shape in the door straight ahead, and I shot it twice, the suppressed 7.62 rounds sounding considerably more subdued than they actually were to my battered hearing.  The man dropped, an AK clattering to the floor underneath him.  Then I was at the classroom door, unlimbering my third grenade of the night.  I could just see Little Bob’s muzzle past my head as he covered the far door.

The door was shut; I suspected that meant the room was empty, but I wasn’t taking chances.  I pivoted just enough to donkey-kick it open, and chucked the frag in, rolling back to flatten myself against the wall as I got both hands back on my rifle.

There was no response from the classroom.  As soon as the frag detonated, sounding more like a muted
thud
than anything else to my abused hearing, I was through the door, rifle up and sweeping from left to right.

The room was clear.  They hadn’t been using it for quarters, but they had been using it for storage.  There were several crates, now
scorched, tossed around, partially smashed, and pocked with shrapnel, that looked a lot like weapons and ammo crates.  I felt a sudden sinking feeling in my gut.  If there had been any serious quantity of explosives in there, and the frag had gone off close enough to sympathetically detonate it, we’d be smears along with everyone else in the compound.

A quick check showed the room was otherwise clear. 
Little Bob and I were the only ones in it; apparently the rest of the team had pushed on toward the southern wing.  That was fine; the faster we cleared this fucking place and got out, the better.

There were two more jarring concussions from the southern wing, and a crackle of small arms fire. 
Little Bob stepped to the doorway and through, covering down the way we’d come, while I moved toward the southern wing.  “Blue, Blue!” I called out, as I got eyes on Black, covering the six.  He lowered his muzzle to let us through.

The southern wing consisted of three offices and a small gymnasium.  The offices were empty, except for one, where the wispy-bearded commander was sprawled on the floor, a Tokarev near his hand and five bloody holes in his center mass.  Jim was coming out of the gym, with Black on his six.  I could see at least two more bodies on the floor in there.  “It’s clear,” Jim said.  “Do we SSE?”

I nodded.  The movement just made my head hurt worse.  I was sure everyone else felt as rocky as I did.  It wasn’t the first time most of us had been too damned close to an explosion, and probably wouldn’t be the last, no matter how much we might hope it would be.  “Quick and dirty, but yeah.  Anything of value, grab it.  There’s a weapons and supply cache in the classroom next door.  Grab what we can, and we’ll burn or blow up the rest.”

I’d thought of just popping smoke, given that it was almost guaranteed
that word had gotten out and reinforcements were on the way.  However, I’d planned ahead for that, and taking anything of potential intelligence value along with destroying any weapons and explosives was very American SOP.  We
wanted
ISIS to think it was Americans hitting them.  That would ensure they’d start looking at their American advisors with more suspicion.

We were hurriedly grabbing ammo, grenades, and some explosives, while Little Bob rigged the cache to blow.  There was very little in the way of intel material there; this was a FOB, and apparently not a central planning hub.  There were a couple of cell phones, and, weirdly enough, an iPad, but no laptops or much in the way of papers.  We grabbed the phones and the iPad, and got ready to roll as soon as Little Bob signaled he was ready.