A movement out of the corner of my eye distracted me. It was a truck coming down a side street. Fast. I turned to watch it pass behind us. Shit! It was going to hit the—
I heard Ambrose say, “What the fuck—”
And then my neck snapped around as my head whipped to the right, hitting the door frame. My helmet strap tore at my chin and I bounced into Masters. We’d been rammed in the side by a truck—not the one I’d seen crash into the pickup behind us, but another that had launched into us from out of shadows. Ambrose fought with the wheel. We were being shouldered into a row of houses by the truck. The Toyota’s tires screamed in protest and then we slammed into a stone staircase. The front of our vehicle buckled. The air bags deployed across the dashboard, pinning me against the seat. The vehicle rolled. Everything became a tumble of grinding metal and breaking glass. We clipped something, smashed into another wall, the front windshield shattering, splintering the light. It happened so damn quick. We hit something solid and the Toyota bucked high and came down again hard. The world fell silent.
Ambrose and Masters were below me. No one moved. I smelled gas. Either the tank had ruptured or the fuel lines had ripped out. I reached down, twisting the ignition key to the off position. The engine died. Steam sprayed from the buckled hood. Someone groaned—Masters, I thought. The bags deflated. I checked the backseats. I counted the Fijians. At first there were two. But then, as my head cleared, the two became one. And the one that remained was clearly now consorting with his ancestors, or whatever it was that Fijians did when they left this life. The odd kink in his neck and the blank stare were dead giveaways.
“The windshield—kick it out,” Ambrose stammered. He was hurt, and the fact that he was straining beneath the weight of both Masters and me pressing down on him wasn’t helping any. I got a boot to the glass and it separated from its seal on the third kick.
I climbed out and fell onto broken masonry. I turned and helped Masters out. She fell and rolled on her side with a grunt. I reached inside the cabin. Ambrose gripped my hand and pulled himself up. His arm shook with the strain. He winced and I saw that his teeth and gums were red with the blood streaming down his face from an ugly gash above the bridge of his nose. “You okay?” I asked.
“My arm,” he said.
He didn’t need to elaborate. I could see it for myself. The wrist of his free arm had a depression in it like it had gone through a metal press that stamped out frying pans from sheet steel. The truck had hit our Humvee just behind Ambrose’s shoulder. His body had absorbed the full impact. I helped him out as flames leaped from under the hood. They seared my face. The pool of fuel under the vehicle erupted into a wall of flame with a
whoomp
sound. Masters came forward and helped me lift Ambrose. I noticed that my boots were on fire. We made it across the floor of what appeared to be a bedroom in someone’s home. There were sheets and blankets and I used the fabric to extinguish the flames, beating them out, just as my feet were beginning to feel the heat.
Masters and I led Ambrose through the doorway, into a hall, away from the burning vehicle. I noticed that a man with his wife and three children were on the other side of the room, huddled in the doorway. He had an AK-47 in a one-handed grip, his other arm around his sobbing family, holding them close. The weapon’s muzzle made small circles in the general direction of my testicles. Ambrose said something in Arabic that I assumed was along the lines of “We come in peace,” but I didn’t think the man would buy it, given that we’d just demolished the front of his house with two tons of Japanese steel and were now burning the remainder of it to the ground.
After a momentary standoff, our host decided it would be best to retreat. He backed his wife and kids beyond the doorway, not taking his eyes off us, and was gone. A small explosion erupted from the front room. I felt the heat of it on my back and the concussion in my eardrums. I wrapped an arm around Ambrose’s torso to help him walk and he sagged against me. I knew why instantly. Several of his ribs were broken. He could also have internal injuries, I realized. Ambrose was a big man; Masters and I struggled to get him to the door.
We made it, finding ourselves in a high-walled courtyard with a wood-paneled gate through which the man of the house had presumably left with his family. A load of washing was left half finished in a stone sink. There was a knee-high garden bed bordered with brickwork where various herbs and vegetables drooped in the heat. A small amount of some kind of animal droppings—goat or donkey, I guessed—had been shoveled into a corner of the courtyard. The animal itself was nowhere to be seen. Perhaps it had departed with the occupants. Here and there were toys, reminders that this was a family home. Through no fault of our own, we had brought the war into this house.
Ambrose was close to collapse. We laid him on the ground and tried to make him as comfortable as possible, which amounted to making sure we didn’t step on him. There wasn’t a hell of a lot else we could do, except maybe get him to a hospital, and quickly. “You okay?” I said to Masters.
“Yep.”
“Did you see what happened to the pickup behind us?”
Masters shook her head.
“Don’t expect any help from them,” I said.
Suddenly, a mushroom of flame bloomed in the wall that surrounded the courtyard. The sheer violence of it confused me for a moment. How had it happened, what caused it, and why? The Toyota was behind us and we were on the other side of the house. What was going on? The flame rolled into a black ball that boiled up into the sky. A hole the size of a man’s fist was left in the wall. As I watched, another ball of orange-and-black-streaked flame erupted on the wall, close to the first explosion. Something whizzed by my face. I glanced down and saw blood dripping onto my singed boots. I put a dirty hand to my face and pulled it away, bright red with blood.
Yet another ball of flame burst through the wall. I felt the pressure wave wash over me and then an entire section of the wall fell inward.
A projectile slammed the wall at the back of the house, inside the courtyard this time. I felt the power of the hit vibrate through the soles of my feet. Concrete dust and masonry fragments blew outward. A fragment of something fizzed past my ear at supersonic speed and buried itself in the wall by my shoulder, sending out a cone of chips that nicked the skin on the back of my neck. I rubbed it and my hand again came away bloody. I threw myself on the ground, pulling Masters down beside me. I knew what was going on. The wall retaining the garden bed exploded into dust and earth and plants slid out of the breach.
The wood-paneled door was next to go, bursting into a hail of splinters. I buried my head under my arms as they rained down on us and stuck into the exposed skin on my hands and arms like porcupine quills. I gagged in the dust.
“It’s an AMR,” I shouted. Barrett guns were used to take out bad guys hiding behind walls. Apparently, a Barrett worked equally well against good guys doing the same.
“What?” said Masters as more rounds slammed into the wall, causing a large section of it to collapse into the street.
“Never mind!” I’d explain later, if there was a later. It occurred to me that, as far as I knew, the Barrett gun was not a weapon used by the insurgents, which either meant they’d figured out its advantages, or we were being attacked by…who? Our own people? Peyton Scott had been executed with a round from a Barrett. I grabbed Ambrose under an armpit and began to drag him back to more secure cover. Masters realized what I was doing and did what she could to help, lifting one of Ambrose’s huge legs, staggering a little under his weight. We were retreating back inside. In my view, we had a better chance of surviving snuggling up to the burning Toyota than behind a single barrier made of Third World–strength concrete.
Ambrose was drifting in and out of consciousness. We propped him against a wall. Now we were trapped between the burning vehicle behind and the steady destruction of the building in front. Ammunition in the vehicle began cooking off, copper jackets whining as they ricocheted off the brickwork in the sunroom by the front door. Whoever was operating the AMR wasn’t satisfied with the job done on the external courtyard wall and had begun shooting out the back of the house. I pulled the M9 from the shoulder holster and popped the clip, making sure. Fifteen rounds. No spare magazines. I pulled back the slide and thumbed the safety. Even though we were completely outgunned, I at least had something I could fire in anger. I reholstered the weapon. AMR rounds began finding their way into the back of the house, carving out enormous holes in the wall and showering us with stone chips. Fragments of concrete and metal peppered my helmet. Masters and Ambrose were bleached white with dust except where blood oozed or trickled from numerous cuts and gashes. We had to get out.
I patted down my pockets, looking for something—anything—that might help. I had a CAC card, a couple of Tylenols. I also had a…hang on, the CAC card, a
get-around
card! Christ! Of course. We were spliced into the army’s patrol system. If we could get word to central command, they’d send the cavalry. I bent over Ambrose and unhooked his Iridium phone. All I had to do was punch the redial button and I’d get through to Teddy back at MaxRisk and…Shit! The damn thing was crushed, its plastic case cracked, the screen smashed. It was as dead as the Fijian. The brickwork behind my head exploded, showering me with rubble. The force of the pressure wave knocked the wind out of me. A fragment from the round pinged off my helmet: The impact felt like someone had slammed my head with a baseball bat. I fought for breath. It came eventually, along with a cloud of dust that penetrated deep into my lungs and gave me a coughing fit. I dug into Ambrose’s other pockets to see what else he had: a big, fat nothing.
I had to get back to the Toyota. There was a radio there. I hadn’t noticed whether it had survived the crash. And, if it had, what were the chances that it wasn’t burning or shattered by stray rounds? Another AMR round drilled into the wall, forcing Masters to curl into the fetal position.
Much of the external wall had collapsed now, providing whoever was shooting at us with an increasingly clear shot. It was now or never. I crawled on my belly back through the house. The ammunition in the Toyota was still exploding, although at a much reduced rate. A round of something cracked off the ceramic plate on the back of my flaks. The gas fire had died a little, the source of the leak either pinched off or the fuel consumed. I made my way through flames to the steering wheel. I pulled myself into the vehicle. The power light on the radio’s face was not lit. I took another chance, reached down and turned on the ignition. Shit! The light came on. I grabbed the receiver, hit the send button, and told whoever was out there that we had crashed and were under fire.
I hoped the friendly radio stations in the vicinity were manned by diligent, able persons itching to play their part in our rescue, like they are in the movies, not the overworked, underpaid, and underlaid people who seemed mostly, at least in my experience, to occupy the real world. I had no idea whether anyone received the broadcast. Nothing came back through the speakers.
Then, the light on the radio winked off. It had died. Shit. I tapped the set with the microphone: nothing. I had a quick look around the vehicle to see if there was anything we could use, in particular Ambrose’s rifle, Marlene. I couldn’t see it. It had probably been flung from the Toyota along with one of the Fijians.
Snaking on my belly, I made my way back to Masters, where the world had miraculously stopped collapsing. The boiling dust clouds began to settle. Masters and I both coughed to clear our lungs of the grit. Ambrose was oblivious to it, lying as still as a fallen onyx statue. “Help me move him into a corner,” I yelled to Masters. If the shooting started again, I wanted Ambrose sheltered by as much of the remaining walls as possible. We wrestled him into a more protected position.
In the back of my mind, I wondered why the shooting had stopped, but I didn’t want to tempt fate by thinking about it too hard. I crouched and tried to peer through the settling dust to the road beyond. It appeared that the house we were in backed onto a large intersection with some kind of well in the middle of it. The area was deserted. If Ambrose had been on his feet, I’d have considered making a run for it—but he wasn’t, so that plan was out. And, besides, where would we run to? Okay, dumb idea. I was considering the options when I saw it. Movement. Four figures dressed in light clothing and black ski masks. They were maneuvering for a better position. Jesus. They were about to fucking assault our position! “Can you see them?” I yelled to Masters.
“Yeah, I see them,” she said calmly, like she’d asked me to please pass her the cream and sugar. Her M9 was in her hand. She thumbed off the safety. I removed my weapon and ran to a corner of crumbling brickwork. It was odd, but I was relieved that we could now see who we were fighting. At last, we had some targets of our own.
The enemy moved forward in pairs, covering each other. Whoever they were, they’d done this before. They carried Kalashnikovs—AK-47s. Our M9s were outgunned, like taking on swords with plastic airline cutlery. We didn’t even have hollow-points, bullets that might have mounted a persuasive argument on our behalf to fuck the hell off. Instead, we had regulation U.S. Army 9mm ball—nice hard rounds that went in clean and tidied up after themselves on the way through.
As I looked, the enemy took cover around two hundred and fifty feet away. I placed a few ranging shots in the vicinity of one of the insurgents and was rewarded with two puffs of dust against the side of the well he was crouching behind. But any satisfaction I might have had was short-lived. Another man stood up behind the well and raised a weapon to his shoulder. Oh, Jesus…“Incoming!” I yelled. I buried my head between my arms, pulling it down into my chest. If I could have, I would’ve brought it down farther and kissed my ass good-bye.
I heard the characteristic sound of an old sheet being torn, the sound of a rocket-propelled grenade through the air, ripping it apart as it accelerated on its vapor trail. I had a fraction of a second to consider this before the warhead covered the short distance across the square. I felt an enormous pressure on my chest and then everything went out and a solid black nothingness filled the gaps.