Alone and Unafraid (American Praetorians Book 3) (35 page)

Jim loomed out of the dark between buildings, and looked down at the body.  I was starting to shake a little.  There are few more personal ways to kill a man than to stab him to death.  While it was as fair a killing as I’d done in a while—he was armed and facing me when I stabbed him—that didn’t make it any easier.  Shooting a man at distance feels cleaner.

“You saw that?” I asked Jim.

“Yep.  Can’t say he didn’t have it coming.”

“You think they got the message?” I asked.  I didn’t have to say who I was talking about.

He looked in the direction of the gate.  “I think so.  They sure seemed pretty rattled.”

“How are the rest?”  I pulled myself together.  I could worry about the reaction to killing a man at bad-breath distance later.

“Marcus broke cover to take out that second VBIED,” he said grimly.  “He’s pretty fucked up.  He’s going to lose an arm and an eye, at the least.”

“Fuck.”  He’d probably saved our asses, but paid the price.  He’d be done, provided we ever got out of this shithole.  “How are we fixed for ammo?”

“We brought a lot, but we’re burning through it pretty fast,” he replied.  “We’ve got four RPGs left.”

“Damn, I wish we had some fucking air,” I said.  It was a pointless wish; there was no one within range to help us.  We were truly on our own out here.  We’d get out by our own efforts, or we’d die.

“You can wish in one hand…” Jim began, but I held up my hand to forestall him.  I’d heard something…

It took a few moments to figure out just what I’d heard.  It got louder as they got closer; a rumble of engines and a rattle that could only be tracks.

Tanks.

Chapter 23

I ran to the nearest north-facing loophole, Jim on my heels.  I dropped down next to Lee, and nudged him aside to peer through the hole.

At first, I couldn’t see shit.  I remembered I was still lugging around the thermal imager, and pulled it around, hoping it hadn’t been wrecked by all the explosions and flying debris.  It was still working, if a little fuzzy.

I immediately recognized the three low, squat silhouettes that glowed white against the gray background of the desert.  Two T72s and an M1A1 Abrams were sitting up the road, well beyond the range of anything
we had to shoot at them.

“Motherfuck.”  They were jockeying for position, spreading out, their turrets aimed in at the factory.  I knew what was coming next.

“Get everybody flat and toward the back of the compound!” I called over the radio.  “Incoming!”

I’d barely finished speaking before the image of one of the T72s belched flame.  I ducked my head down and put my arms over it.  A fraction of a second later, the shell howled in and blew a section of the wall to my left to gravel.  T
he shockwave hammered me even flat on my face on the ground.  Debris whickered through the air, pelting anyone not under cover.  A moment later, two more hits slammed into the wall.  There were now two breaches; neither one was wide enough to let infantry through, but that was only a matter of time.  They could sit back there, safely out of our range, and pound us to sand.

“Fall back!  Fall back to the rear of the compound!”

I suited actions to words, picking myself up off the ground and sprinting for the next building back.  Another HEAT round hammered into the wall behind me and knocked me flat.  Most of my wind blew out as I hit the ground, and I struggled back to my feet, sucking hard to get my breath back as I staggered, half crouched over, toward the shelter of the concrete building ahead of me.  The air seemed full of dust and hot metal.

I got to the building just ahead of another round that ripped by overhead. 
It sounded like the world’s biggest sheet being torn in half as the 120mm shell bludgeoned its way through the air.  I staggered inside and collapsed against the wall, gasping for breath.  My chest felt like it had been hit with a sledgehammer.  My throat and lungs burned as I desperately dragged some air in.  Two more guys scrambled inside as I sat there.

Two more shells slammed home, shaking the very ground with their impact and hammering the sides and roof of our little shelter with shattered concrete and rocks.  They were going to reduce the entire east side of the factory to a pile of rubble at this rate.  Then they could just roll in.

I forced myself up off my ass.  It seemed to take a monumental effort.  My throat was dry and burning with smoke, dust, and dehydration.  My entire body felt like one enormous bruise, my joints felt like they were full of ground glass, and my head was pounding from the impacts we’d already taken.  But it was move or die.

“Come on,” I rasped.  “Back to the main building.”  I had to haul one of the other guys up off the floor.  It was Herman, one of Mike’s boys.  “Let’s go.  We can rest later.”

Together, the three of us half ran, half staggered back, still getting hammered from behind by the shock of the tank rounds impacting.  The further we got into the complex, the more cover we could put between us and the incoming fire, so the hammering got a little more bearable, for certain values of “bearable.”

Everybody was moving, getting away from the tank fire and falling back toward the two-story main factory building. 
It was a short run, but it felt like ten miles.

We staggered in through the big roll-back doors at the front.  A glance showed they were just sheet steel; they wouldn’t provide any protection against even small arms, never mind the big stuff.  The walls were pretty solid concrete, though.  As long as we stayed back from the main doors, we’d have some shelter.  The roof wasn’t going to provide a lot of overhead cover, however, being just more sheet metal.  If they started dropping mortars on our heads, we were in for a bad time.  As if it could get much worse.

Getting through the doors and into a corner, I looked around.  It was even darker inside than outside, and I had to flip down my NVGs.  At first I thought they’d been hit, as I couldn’t see shit, but then I realized that I just had to turn them back on.  Damn, I was fucked up.

I took stock, picking out thermal signatures around the hulks of abandoned machinery and old, unfinished armored vehicles.  I counted eighteen, including Marcus, who was lying against the far wall, thoroughly out of the fight.  Even in the low light, with the thermals, I could see his left
arm was mangled, a tourniquet keeping him from bleeding out through the torn meat.

“Everybody roger up!” I croaked.  “Who are we missing?”  I already knew there were only about five Project guys left, since Carter and Carnivore were both dead.

“Chris is gone,” Mike said.  His voice just sounded dead.  “He was on a loophole right beneath a tank round.  The rest of us are up.”

“We’ve got everybody,” Jim reported.

I made my way over in the direction of Mike’s voice.  I found him sitting against a wall, his M1A across his knees, and his head back against the wall.  Even as little more than a thermal silhouette, he looked utterly spent.

I knelt down next to him with a barely suppressed groan, and grabbed his shoulder.  I had to speak up over the thunder of the bombardment that was still shaking the entire compound.  Dust was sifting down from the roof.  I barely noticed that the mortars had started up again; it took a round impacting just in front of the doors and spraying frag and detritus through the opening for it to register.  “Stay with me, brother,” I yelled.  It hurt just to talk.

He heaved his head off the wall, and seemed to shake himself a little.  “Yeah…yeah, I’m here,” he said.  He looked up at me.  “We can’t take much more of this, Jeff.  We’ve got to break out somehow, or we’re gonna get slaughtered in here.”

I shook my head.  “They’ve got us boxed in, and there’s nothing but open desert for miles,” I said.  “We’ve got to find a way to take the pressure off before we’ve got a hope in hell.  We wouldn’t make it a mile right now.”

“If you’ve got any ideas, I’m all ears,” he said.

I looked around. 
My brain felt sluggish.  I was starting to get an idea when a burst of rifle fire, sounding light and tinny compared to the hellish thunder outside, erupted toward the north end of the building.

Both Mike and I heaved ourselves to our feet and ran, or shuffled, toward the noise.  We burst into one of the side offices, or whatever the empty rooms along the periphery of the factory had been. 
Bryan and Lee were crouched by the window, their rifles trained outward.  “They’re inside,” was all Bryan said.  He sounded as bad as I felt.

“They breached the wall and rushed in,” Lee said.  “About six of ‘em.  We got at least three.”

“They’re using the bombardment to cover their infiltration,” I said.  I keyed the radio.  “Eyes out!  We’ve got foot mobiles inside the compound.”  A moment later, a burst of small arms fire spattered against the wall in front of us.  A few rounds whipped through the window and smacked plaster off the ceiling.  Bryan responded immediately, blasting four shots in reply.  The shooter outside went silent.

Back in the main bay, I heard a sudden fusillade of rifle and machine gun fire.  One of our M60 gunners let out a long burst.  More shots popped in the dark.  I was standing over Bryan’s shoulder, watching the breach in the wall, when a small object sailed through and landed just inside the compound.  A second later, it started belching thick smoke.

While it’s a bitch to fire a scoped weapon with PVS-14s in front of your face, it is doable, especially if you’ve got the NVGs in front of your non-firing eye, and shoot with both eyes open.

The first shapes through the breach were greeted by another fusillade of shots.  Two crumpled immediately, one slumped over the low point in the wall. 
The next few fell back from the breach, but not for long.  One of them stuck his AK out and dumped the mag at the building, forcing us all back from the window.  When our fire slackened, theirs increased, as more piled through the breach.

None of us had used any of our frags yet; we hadn’t been at an appropriate distance to use them.  Now, however, we were close enough.  I yanked one of them out of my kit, even as Bryan did the same, and we chucked them through the window at almost the same time.

It was a testament to how battered we were, even with the electronic earpro in, that the jarring
thump
s of the grenade explosions sounded muted, at least in comparison to the raving storm of the tank and mortar bombardment.

That was what actually made me notice that the bombardment had shifted away from us.  The ISIS fighters were demonstrating
more of the military sophistication they’d picked up in recent years, shifting the base of fire as the assault element moved in.  Doing that with mortars and tank fire took balls; hell, most US military units wouldn’t dream of employing those kinds of stormtroop tactics anymore.  It was too risky.  ISIS was doing it pretty well, and I couldn’t help but think they’d picked it up independently from the Project.

The volume of fire through the breach was still picking up.  They had PKM and RPK gunners on the far side, firing through the breach.  It was risky for them; they only had so much room to move their assaulters through, and the machine guns’ lines of fire were taking up a lot of that room.  They apparently just wanted us suppressed first, then they’d figure something out.

Sitting here trading blows wasn’t going to end well for us.  We had to do something to drive them back, or we’d get torn apart piecemeal.  I slapped Bryan on the shoulder.  “Keep up the fire here,” I told him, over the loud crackle of rounds smacking into the walls and through the windows.  “I’m going to find a way out the side and see if we can’t get a better angle on these fuckers.”

He nodded, leaning into his OBR and cracking off a few more shots out the window at the muzzle flashes beyond the breach.  The smoke grenade had burned itself out and most of the smoke had dissipated. 
I ducked back out the door, keeping low to avoid the bullets snapping through the window to spall chunks off the walls and ceiling.

I grabbed the first three guys I could find.  They turned out to be Larry, Chad, and Black. 
Together, we found a back way out of the factory, next to the west wall.  We went out carefully, covering both north and south.  There was no sign of anyone to the north, and Larry wasn’t shooting south, so that must be clear.  I led off toward the north and the breach.

I eased around the corner, watching to the east, where a few of the jihadis had run after they’d gotten through the breach.  Black shot past behind me, dashing for the wall.  I dropped to a knee, while Chad stood behind me, leaning out with his REPR above my head.

We all started shooting at almost the same instant.  Black picked up a second behind the rest of us, as he waited until he was set before he pulled the trigger.

One of the jihadis was working his way along the side of the building toward the windows where Bryan and Lee were exchanging shots with their compatriots outside the wall. 
His rifle was slung, and I knew without seeing it that he was prepping a grenade to throw in the window.  I gunned him down with a trio of shots that smashed him backward on his ass in the dirt.

The exchange of fire was short and savage.  The jihadis had maneuvered out of the arc of fire from the windows, but they were out in the open from our side.  We cut them down in seconds.  Black moved forward to the breach, let his rifle hang, pulled the pins from two grenades, and tossed them as hard as he could through the hole, then ran back toward the factory building.

“Back inside,” I croaked.  My throat felt like sandpaper.  “They’ll try again from another direction.”

Almost immediately, more firing came from the east side of the factory, as another assault force tried to push in from the gate.  That rapidly devolved into a back-and-forth exchange of shots as the jihadis went to ground in the rubble of the buildings between the factory and the gate.

I found Mike again inside.  “We can’t keep this up much longer,” he said again.  “We’ve either got to get out or get overrun.”

I looked around.  “As things stand now, we’ll get hammered as soon as we get outside the wall,” I said.  “We’ve got to sow enough confusion to let us break contact.”

Eddie had come over, reloading his Galil ACE as he came.  “We’re starting to run low on ammo, even with the extra we brought in the vehicles,” he said.  “I’m down to four mags left, and each of the 60s only has about four hundred rounds remaining.”

I nodded.  “We need to cause some chaos so we can get out in the confusion somehow,” I told him.

He bit his lip, thinking.  “We’ve got some explosives left,” he suggested.  “We could try and do something with them.”

“How much?” Mike asked.  His tone had changed; he was starting to get an idea.

“Three, four satchels,” Eddie replied.

Mike nodded.  I still couldn’t make out his face in the dark, but his movements looked a little livelier.  He had an idea, all right.