Read Tom Clancy's Act of Valor Online
Authors: Dick Couch,George Galdorisi
Tags: #War & Military, #Historical, #Fiction
The four SEALs in the hut’s short hallway paused to listen. All they could hear were low moans coming from deeper inside the building. The interior walls were a combination of plywood and wallboard. The doors were cheap hollow-core wood. Nolan knew they had to get to Morales quickly, but they couldn’t advance without neutralizing any threat behind them. There were three doors at the end of the hallway. They smoothly set up at the left-hand door—standard room clearance. A.J., Sonny, and Mikey popped through the door and pried it out. Nothing but trash and two soiled mattresses. It was the same for the door on the right. The center door led to a larger room with dirty dishes on card tables and a half dozen rusted metal folding chairs. They cleared it quickly. Another door led to an adjacent room; Morales had to be behind that door. They moved quickly to the door and were about to make an entry when the door and wall in front of them exploded.
Nolan and the other SEALs dove for the floor as the automatic-weapons fire scythed back and forth, chewing up the wallboard, belt high. All made it safely except Mikey. A round caught him just under the lip of his helmet, snapping his head back. Blood immediately washed his face as he lay inert on his back in front of the door. Chief Nolan, seeing him go down, grabbed him by the collar and dragged him to the relative safety of the exterior side wall.
The gunner in the next room was relentless. After a quick magazine change, he again opened up, but this time he was clearly shooting high. Sonny low-crawled to the door, kicked it open, and rolled in a flash-bang grenade. Following the explosion, A.J. dashed through the door in an instant and double-tapped a Tango trying to work the bolt on an AK-47 that had jammed. But it was a small room, more of an anteroom, with yet another door behind it. A.J. and Sonny were now on their own, and both knew they had to keep moving. Stepping over the body, they paused for a fraction of a second. Then A.J. gave the door a strong kick.
Just before the shooting started, Tommy—having abandoned the drill and donned leather gloves—was about to give Morales yet another vicious backhand. She was now semiconscious and probably wouldn’t feel it, but he really did enjoy hitting women. Yet he knew he had to be careful. Fun was fun, but Christo wanted information, and he couldn’t take the chance of killing her—yet. But just one more backhand would probably be all right. Then the guard in the next room went full automatic with his AK-47. The sound through the thin walls was deafening. There was a brief silence and then more firing. There were two others there in the room to help Tommy with the interrogation. They were both cartel security retainers and stood by passively while he worked on Morales. When the firing started, they reacted much more quickly than Tommy did. Both turned in unison and bolted through the rear entrance. Tommy, not wanting to leave Morales, took up his Glock .45 and turned back to the sound of the shooting. A loud explosion followed by more shots caused him to hesitate, but then he put his eye to a crack in the door to try to see what was happening—at the precise moment A.J. kicked the door in from the other side.
Stunned, Tommy staggered back and tried to raise his pistol just as Sonny barreled through the door. The two crashed against the opposite wall chest to chest, too close for Sonny to get the barrel of his SAW level, but he Slev. T managed to block Tommy’s gun hand, forcing it up and away. Tommy was bigger than Sonny but not nearly as strong. Locked together, Sonny forced Tommy back against a wall and drew his Sig Sauer 9mm. He rammed the barrel of the automatic under Tommy’s chin, and while he was eyeball to eyeball with the big Chechen, he blew off the top of his head. A.J., having no angle to get off a shot, could only clear the rest of the room and watch.
“Clear,” A.J. shouted. Then turning to Morales, he keyed his radio. “Hey, Chief, I think we got her.”
Nolan quickly came back on the net. “Roger that. Ray, get in here. Mikey’s down and I need you with him.”
Ray raced through the building to where Nolan was tending to Mikey. He was unconscious and making incoherent sounds. But his airway was clear and he had a strong pulse. Mikey was the squad medic by training, but every SEAL is a medic through cross-training. Now those men Mikey had trained would have to try and save him.
“He’s bleeding but he’s breathing,” Nolan told Ray. “Do what you can to stabilize him and get him ready to travel.” Then he went to find Morales. Ray knew the drill—keep him breathing and keep the blood inside, and there was plenty of blood. He removed Mikey’s helmet and began to apply a pressure bandage.
An instant later, Nolan was at Morales’s side. She was semiconscious and could only mumble over and over,
“Bastante
—
no mas.”
Nolan took her face in his hands, none too gently. “Miss Morales. We are Americans, and we are going to get you out of here.” He wasn’t sure, but he thought he saw a glimmer of recognition.
On the rise across the estuary, Engel and Weimy heard the shooting and saw the flash-bang, but there was little they could do. At the first burst of gunfire, Engel radioed Whiplash and requested they come at top speed. Both he and Weimy were on the tactical net, so they both knew that the team had Morales and that Mikey had been shot—neither knew how bad. Engel had been here before: There’s a fight, he has men down, and he’s tethered to his radios. But he knows Nolan and the others can do the job, and though he’s anxious to know what’s going on, he also knows Nolan will tell him when he’s able. All he could do now was to focus on the Raven presentation and look for threats. Then the two men bolted from the back door of the long hut.
“I got two squirters,” Weimy said on the net.
“Take ’em,” Nolan confirmed immediately.
Weimy sent a round between the shoulder blades of the first man, just missing his heart but collapsing a lung. He staggered on a few steps before a second round, two inches left of the first, severed his spinal cord, pitching him face forward to the ground. The second Tango made it to a beefy, extended-cab pickup truck and slipped behind the wheel. Before he could close the door or start the engine, Weimy took him through the rear window of the cab with a head shot, painting the inside of the windshield with bone fragments and brain tissue.
Inside, Nolan snatched a curtain from the wall and covered Morales’s bruised and battered body. She was bleeding from cuts and burns all over her torso and limbs, as well as from her nose and mouth. He took a scarf from his neck, wet it, and dabbed Morales’s dry, cracked lips. She was now weeping softly. “Okay, listen closely—this is important. What is your mother’s maiden name?”
“R-Rosales,” she whispered.
“What street did you grow up on?” She gave him a puzzled look. “Please, what street did you live on when you were a little girl?”
“Hot Springs.”
“Good girl.” He keyed his mic. “Boss, we have her and a positive ID, stand by.” Then he went over to where Ray was tending to Mikey. “How’s he doing?”
“Hard to tell, but I’ve slowed the bleeding. No way to tell how bad it is, but it’s not good. We need to get him help.” Ray had his head swathed in bandages. Mikey looked like a mummy.
Nolan again keyed his mic. “Okay, Boss, Mikey is down with a head wound—looks serious. We’re getting him and the package ready to move.”
“Roger, copy. Put a rush on it—we got company.”
“Say again.”
“I said we have company. There are two trucks inbound from the west on the main road. They appear to be loaded with Tangos. Get out of there, Chief. You’ve got five minutes at best.”
“Christ, the fun never stops.”
On the rise outside the camp, Engel could do nothing but watch on his computer screen as the quick-reaction force, a crew-cab pickup with eight or ten men in back and a Ford Explorer loaded with men, made their way down the access road toward the compound.
“Whiplash, this is Blackbeard, over.”
“This is Whiplash, over.”
“Whiplash, we have a QRF inbound, and I have wounded. How far out are you, over?”
“Blackbeard, I’m fifteen mikes from the primary. How many pax, over?”
“Six effectives, two wounded. Plan for a hot extraction, over.”
“Blackbeard, I copy six effectives and two wounded for a total of eight pax, and a hot extract, over.”
“Good copy, Whiplash. Blackbeard, out.”
* * *
“Two Boat,” Bautista said on their tac net, “you copy that?”
“Roger that, One,” Dial replied. “I’m right behind you.”
Ricardo Bautista had been a Special Warfare Combatant-craft Crewman since their small, tight-knit community was officially formed in 2000—back when he was a second-class petty officer and still new to the Special Boat Teams. He knew that as leader of a two-boat SOC-R element, it would all be on him. A hot extraction meant that his SEAL brothers would be running for their lives and that he and his boats’ gunners could mean the difference between getting them out safely and watching them perish. He had to stay cool, yet his excitement was palpable. Ten years of ground wars in the Middle East and Southwest Asia in landlocked places like Afghanistan generated few combat opportunities for his fellow swicks and their highly capable watercraft. Now, for better or for worse, they were in the mix.
The two SOC-Rs came up on step and leapt forward as Bautista and Dial slammed their respective throttles forward and the crafts’ twin 440 Yanmar Diesels responded at full power, thrusting each boat forward at their redline speed of forty-plus knots. It was showtime, and Bautista was both in charge and on the spot. The mission would succeed or fail, and men would be saved or would die, based on his decisions over the next few minutes. He had a good crew; he knew that—he’d trained them. But they were green. For most of them, this would be their first combat engagement.
“Okay, listen up. This is gonna be a hot extraction—damn hot,” Bautista said into his boom mic. “I want all weps-trained to starboard. We’re still,” he paused, glancing down at his Garmin 720 Marine Navigator, “about eight miles away from the primary extraction site. I want the Two Boat in loose trail until we get to where we’re going. Then, at the extraction point, I want us no more than ten yards offshore and ten yards bow to stern. Remember, get a clear field of fire for every weapon. Got it?”
“Yep, Chief . . . Got it, Skipper . . . No worries . . .” and other short replies told Bautista his crews were up on step, just like their boats. “Remember our creed, boys,” he said, referring to the six-paragraph SWCC Creed each of them knew by heart: “‘I will close and engage the enemy with the full combat power of my craft. I will never quit and I will leave no one behind.’”
The answering mic clicks told Bautista all he needed to know. The boat guys,
his
guys, were ready. What they had trained for, for most of their professional careers, was about to go down.
* * *
At Engel’s position on the shallow rise, the first hint of dawn was creeping into the eastern sky. All he could do for the moment was stare at the scope and watch the quick-reaction force close on the compound. Daylight would make their movement out of the camp easier, but they would also lose their night-vision advantage.
“Get out of there, Chief.”
“Working on it, Boss.”
Occasionally, there was the soft bark of the Mk12 as Weimy found a target. The Tango sentries on the far side of the camp who responded to the initial bursts of gunfire were quickly taken out. Several others appeared but soon went into hiding when they realized there was an accomplished sniper out there. They were content to remain hidden and alive, at least for now.
Sonny searched the room while A.J. did what he could to get Morales ready to travel. Suddenly Nolan was at his side. “How’s she doing?”
“She’s passed out, and there’s no way she can walk. How’s Mikey?”
“Not good. Sonny, we done here?”
“Yeah. I got a laptop, a cell phone, and two flash drives. That’s about it.”
“Bag it and go help Ray with Mikey. We got a QRF breathing down on us. I’ll take her, and we’ll go out the back door. A.J., take us out of here and make for the first rally point.”
“Hurry, Chief.” There was an urgency in Engel’s voice. “They’re closing fast.”
“Copy, Boss. We’re out the door now.”
Engel and Weimy watched as A.J. led them from the building toward the first rally point, a predetermined meeting place on the road that led north out of the camp toward the river. They left the building at a slow run, with Sonny carrying Mikey like a sleeping child and Nolan with Morales draped over his shoulder. A guard along their route saw an opportunity and moved from behind a tree. Before Engel could shout a warning, Weimy’s rifle spat a round and took him in the chest. He went down to all fours, and a second round knocked him flat.
“Good shooting. Now, we gotta get out of here.” Engel no longer needed the Raven display to track the QRF; he could hear them coming. He snapped the Toughbook computer shut and stowed it. Seconds later he and Weimy sprinted down the hill toward the rally point. Just outside the camp, this initial rally point was also only about a quarter mile from the river. If they could meet there and get into the bush before the QRF trucks were on them, they had a chance. If not, the trucks would run them down and that would be that.
Nolan and his team were moving at a jog trot at best, and he knew they were moving way too slow. But once clear of the building, he saw the truck with the dead guard slumped at the wheel.
“A.J.!” he shouted. “The truck!” but A.J. was already heading for it. He grabbed the dead Tango by the collar and jerked him from behind the wheel, dumping him unceremoniously into the mud. The keys were in the ignition. The engine turned over once, then twice, and finally caught. Nolan laid Morales into the truck bed as gently as he could and jumped in after her, followed by Ray. Sonny put Mikey in the rear seat of the extended cab and jumped in with him.
“Any time now!” Nolan yelled to A.J., who had just wiped away t S wito the he last of the blood and brains from the windshield. He jammed the truck into gear and mashed the gas. In a flurry of mud flying from all four tires, the truck slewed around and headed for the back road that would take them from the camp. As they cleared the compound, Nolan saw the two trucks from the QRF enter the compound on the main road and charge after them.
“Damn,” he said, to no one in particular, “we were almost home free.” He keyed his mic. “Hey, Boss, we’re clear of the camp en route to the rally point, but we got two Tango vehicles on our tail, and they look pissed. The good news is that we have wheels and should be at the rally point in less than a minute.”
Engel and Weimy got to the road and the rally point just ahead of the SEALs in the truck. Engel carried the squad’s one and only LAAW—a light anti-tank/assault weapon that was more than capable of dealing with a truck. He pulled the launcher over his head and discarded the carrying strap, slinging his M4 rifle in the LAAW’s place. He quickly extended the launching tube, removed the safety pin, and kneeled down with the rocket on his shoulder, just as A.J. and the SEAL truck rounded a bend in the road. They flashed past him and slowed to a halt.
Weimy was at Engel’s side with a hand on his other shoulder. They were both breathing hard from the dash to the rally point. “Steady, Boss. Sight picture and trigger squeeze.”
“Sight picture and trigger squeeze,” Engel repeated.
The pickup truck rounded the bend well ahead of the Explorer. It was a big Ford extended-cab 250, and its bed was crowded with armed men. Engel pressed the trigger detent and the rocket leapt from the tube. It took but a nanosecond for the missile to cover the thirty meters between the LAAW launcher and the grill of the Ford. The force of the blast pushed the engine back through the firewall and essentially buckled the frame from the dashboard forward, causing the truck to hinge, nose down. With the nose of the truck burrowing into the mud, the inertia of the vehicle generated a forward flip, with the truck bed careening over its front bumper, tossing close to a dozen stunned Tangos into the dirt in front of the two SEALs. Engel, momentarily frozen from the blast of the rocket, recovered in time to dodge a bouncing tire that almost took him out. Weimy calmly shot two of the shaken Tangos who tried to get to their feet. What was left of the pickup slid into the far ditch on its top.
“Today, gentlemen, if you don’t mind!” Nolan yelled at them. “There’s another fuckin’ truck coming!”
Weimy and Engel turned as if poked by a hot iron and ran for the truck. They dove into the bed, careful to avoid hitting Morales, who was curled into a fetal position. A.J. stomped the accelerator. With the other vehicle in pursuit, there was no time to unload everyone and carry their wounded through the bush to the primary extraction site; they had to keep moving. Engel keyed his support-net radio.
“Whiplash, Blackbeard, over.”
“This is Whiplash, go ahead, over.”
“Make for the secondary ext Ssecard, ovraction site—I say again, secondary extraction site, how copy, over?”
“Blackbeard, Whiplash. Understand secondary extraction, over.”
“Roger that, Whiplash. Blackbeard, out.”
Nolan put a hand on Engel’s shoulder. “Good show, Boss. Now what are you going to do with that?”
Engel glanced at the empty, now-worthless rocket-launcher tube. “Oh, yeah,” and tossed it from the truck. He then took his M4 from his shoulder and checked the action. “How’s Mikey?”
“He’s holding his own, but we got to get him some attention.”
On a straight stretch of road, the Explorer came into view. It was gaining on them. Several rounds pinged on the tailgate as Tangos leaned out the window to shoot at them. Nolan dropped onto the curled form of Morales to shield her from fire. Ray and Weimy began to return fire, with steady well-aimed rounds. A puff of smoke was emitted from the Explorer, and there were several spiderwebs in the windshield, but still they continued to come.
“A.J.,” Engel called over the tac net, “how far to the secondary?”
“Maybe five minutes, maybe less.”
A lifetime, Engel thought, wondering how A.J. could drive so well and still key his radio. “Drive on, brother. Smooth is fast.” Then switching radios, “Whiplash, Blackbeard, over.”
“Whiplash here, over.”
“We’ll be at secondary in four mikes, over.”
“Copy four minutes. See you there. Whiplash, out.”
The secondary extraction site was four miles downstream from the primary. While this meant four miles in the truck getting shot at, it also meant four fewer miles for the SOC-Rs to travel. At the secondary site, the road passed close to the bank of the river before veering away. Again, Engel reckoned it was going to be close.
The Explorer was still coming after them, but no one was leaning out the window shooting at them anymore. Ray and Weimy continued to fire—steady and measured, with each round finding the windshield or the grill of the vehicle. Then the Explorer slowed and began to drift back. Either the truck or the men inside, or both, had lost the will to continue. Nolan looked up from where he was shielding Morales and grinned.
“Guess we showed those assholes what they get for tailgating a bunch of SEALs.”
Weimy and Ray matched Nolan’s smile, each slumping into a corner of the truck bed at the tailgate. For Engel, it was a wave of relief, now that they had a clear shot to the secondary extraction site. Then, suddenly, a Dodge Ram crew cab swung in beh S swaveind them from a side road, and they were again under small-arms fire. If possible, there were even more Tangos in the Ram than in the first pickup.
“E-fuckin’-nuff already,” Weimy shouted as he and Ray began to return fire. There was no burst of fully automatic fire or even rapid fire. They both went back to steady, rhythmic shooting, making every round count. The truck dropped back momentarily in the face of this precise fire, but it was still coming. Behind the Ram, a stake truck appeared with a dozen or more Tangos. Suddenly, the back window of the SEAL pickup exploded, which for some unknown reason revived Mikey, who popped upright.
“Will someone get some goddamn suppressing fire on those fuckers, for Christ’s sake?”
As Sonny grabbed him and pulled him down in the seat, several more rounds came through the nonexistent rear window and stitched the windshield. A.J., in the act of a contortionist, kept his left foot on the gas and kicked out the spiderwebbed and brain-streaked windshield with his right. Nolan continued to shield Morales while Engel joined Ray and Weimy returning fire. They came to another straight stretch in the road, and someone in the bed of the Ram fired an RPG that whizzed just over their heads and exploded in a stand of trees well in front of them. First one rear tire, then the other, began to come apart from multiple bullet strikes. They slowed, and the pursuing trucks drew nearer. Engel dumped the rest of his magazine on full auto and keyed his mic.
“Whiplash, you with us, over?”
“Whiplash here. We’re thirty seconds from the secondary extraction, over.”
“So are we,” Engel replied, having no idea how close they were and not even sure they could last another thirty seconds in this wild chase, “and we are
extremely
hot, over.” He did a quick mag change and rejoined the fight.
A.J. felt the truck dying underneath him. At every bend in the road he expected to see the river, but each time he was disappointed. Then, suddenly, he saw it at the end of a long straight stretch. He stomped on the gas pedal even though it was already on the floor. He rammed the shift lever into low trying to gain more purchase on the muddy road. The engine screamed as the truck slewed side to side. The rear wheels were still shedding rubber and spitting mud—the front wheels were dragging the truck along. Suddenly he lost the right front and it was all he could do to keep the truck on the road.
“Come on, bitch!” he screamed. “Just a little farther.”
They were losing speed rapidly, but they were almost at the bank. He could see the shallow berm ahead on the right that separated the road from the river. “Hang on!” he yelled over his shoulder, both hands on the wheel, “we’re going in!” The road veered sharply to the left and there was a barrier straight ahead. Just before they got to the barrier, A.J. swerved to the right, never taking his foot off the gas. The truck climbed the berm, just missing the barrier, and nosed over into the slow-moving river.
In the rear seat, Sonny grabbed Mikey and he S Mihe ld his head to his chest for the impact. In the back, Chief Nolan wrapped his arms around Morales from behind, clamping her hips between his thighs. Engel, Ray, and Weimy knew what was coming, but they kept shooting until they were airborne. Just before Engel hit the water, he caught a glimpse of two shapes on the water about twenty meters from the shore and thirty meters downstream, gliding toward the extraction point. When his head broke the water after the dunking, he was wearing a grim smile. They’d been outmanned, outgunned, and running for their lives. Now all that was about to change.
Chief Bautista saw the SEAL pickup charging toward the river and the two Tango trucks in hot pursuit. He quickly grasped the situation. He turned the One Boat to port so that the Two Boat following closely in his wake would also have a good field of fire. Moments earlier they had cut their engines, come off step, and were now coasting toward the extraction site, pushing a large bow wave into the gentle current.
The men in the two pursuing trucks held on as their vehicles skidded to a stop right where the SEAL pickup had jumped the berm. They were suddenly and acutely aware of the two strange craft closing on their position. Some of the Tangos were training their guns on the heads that were popping up to the surface as the pickup began to drift and sink lower in the water. Others were turning their attention and their guns toward the two strange craft. For most of them, it would be their last conscious thought. As the two trucks slammed to a halt, Chief Bautista came up on his tactical net.
“Okay, boys, bring the pain.”
Simultaneously, four Dillon M134D electrically driven Gatling guns, often called mini-guns, opened up on the two trucks at a range of thirty yards. In the first five seconds of this one-sided encounter, the two trucks absorbed close to two thousand rounds of 7.65mm NATO standard coming at them at 2,800 feet per second. In those five terrible seconds, the two trucks received more than forty pounds of brass-encased steel in 150-grain increments. That was in the first five seconds, then there was another five seconds, and another five seconds after that. Incidental to the mini-guns were the four .50-calibers that contributed another two hundred rounds in focused bursts of fire during each of those five seconds. The .50s deal out far fewer rounds, but the armor-piercing, incendiary, and tracer slugs go through
everything
, save for the few rounds that found the engine blocks. The sound was deafening, and the carnage unimaginable. Trucks and Tangos shredded into an amalgam of blood, bone, mud, and metal.