Terminal Impact Page 11

  When the front half of the two-story house came down, the gang of Hajis inside the second-story room had no place to go. They clung to what they could but soon fell into the rubble. It reminded Billy of breaking open a rotten log filled with termites. After the grenade salvo from the MRAP, those not killed came staggering out, firing their rifles.

  Petey Preston busted two gunmen with his Lapua Magnum. Randy Powell splashed three more with his Vigilance. Billy-C laid crosshairs on the back of the sixth man, who clutched a Dragunov for dear life and tried to run after seeing his cohorts die. The staff sergeant coolly squeezed off a .50 caliber Raufoss round that nailed the Haji right between his shoulder blades. The man exploded like a watermelon dropped off a tall building.

  “He’s the one that got Rowdy,” Preston yelled over the intercom. “You see that Russian sniper rifle he had?”

  “Roger that,” Billy replied. “He was shooting out of that top window, right in line with our truck. We get the chance, I’m taking that rifle home with us and mounting it on the HOG Wallow wall back at Camp Swampy.”

  “Put Rowdy’s name on it,” Petey said.

  “Fuckin’ A,” Billy came back. “His picture by it, too.”

  One of the two KBR truck drivers manned the .30 caliber machine gun on Billy-C’s Hummer and helped Sergeant Quinlan keep belts fed in his .50. Two men, two machine guns, and no extra help. Everybody else had deployed to cut the heart out of the ambush.

  Likewise, in Cotton Martin’s Humvee, Bobby Durant ran the Maw Duce and the other KBR driver manned the M240 Golf .30 caliber machine gun. Luckily, both truck drivers had prior Army infantry experience and knew how to rack a machine gun, pace their fire, and not melt the barrels.

  Lieutenant Phipps did everything he could to help in the fight, keeping the crew busy on the MK19 grenade-launching machine gun, ducking fire while lobbing all they had against the sizeable enemy force. Despite the one building taken down and its rat pack of fighters now killed, seven other Haji gun nests kept pouring lead on the MRAP. The dozen infantry soldiers could do little more than hunker inside the armored truck and wait for a break to kick open the back doors.

  Two brave souls inside the Cougar HE popped open the top hatches at the back of the truck in an attempt to fire machine guns at the al-Qaeda attackers, hoping to set up a base of cover fire so that the rest of the troops could scramble outside and go to work. Rooftop guns quickly poured their wrath on the opened lids, and sent lead and copper fragments spraying inside. When the soldiers finally got the hatch covers closed, four men had suffered flesh wounds in their arms and legs.

  “Can you Marines move up to cover our position so we can get the fuck out of this death trap?” Lieutenant Phipps called to Billy-C and Cotton.

  “Roger dodger. On our way, sir,” Cotton answered, and started maneuvering his team forward.

  Machine guns on the two Humvees shifted their fire to the buildings that flanked the front of the caravan and began focusing their streams into open windows and rooftops.

  “Air strike about now’d be real nice,” Cochise Quinlan sang from behind his .50, ammo links rattling in the Hummer like popcorn pouring out the popper at the Carmike Majestic in downtown Chattanooga. The former Marion County, Tennessee, sheriff’s deputy who went active duty from the Marine Reserves when the planes crashed into the World Trade Center and Pentagon rode the big gun hard, trying to shut down the enemy’s rooftop fire on the column’s left flank.

  “A reinforced Marine infantry company would work even better,” Cotton Martin came back.

  “Meantime, we make do,” Billy-C added. “Boys. Tuck it up. We gonna leapfrog to the front. Fire and movement. Cochise and Bobby, you and the truckers work those machine guns so the rest of us can maneuver up. Once we get them solja-boys outta that tin can, where they can sling a little lead, then us snipers’ll go do our thing.”

  “Kill ’em all, Billy. Let God sort ’em out,” Jack Valentine broke into the conversation on the operations-office radio.

  “We kilt a bunch of ’em, Gunny, but they’s a whole bunch more still needs killin’,” Claybaugh answered, now in his mental groove. “Shore wish’t you an’ the rest of the tribe was here with us, to enjoy the moment. Share the wealth. I feel downright greedy havin’ all this fun, and you girls sittin’ there with your hands in your lap, nothing better to do than gather round the campfire, braid each other’s hair, and sing ‘Kumbaya.’ As you say, we got ourselves a target-rich environment. Except right now, we’uns is mostly the targets they’s a shootin’ at.”

  As the machine guns focused on the front two buildings on both sides of the road, the seven MARSOC snipers on the ground kept the remaining four enemy positions covered. Any shots or movement in an open window, from a rooftop or around the junk on the ground drew hot lead from Marines.

  With every fifth round coming from all four machine guns a red tracer, fires in the shot-up debris and in several of the buildings began to burn. When Billy-C saw the erupting flames, he got an idea.

  “Lieutenant Phipps!” Billy called on the command channel. “You boys got any sort of incendiary grenades for that mark 19? Maybe like illuminations or flares?”

  “Stand by one and I’ll check with my gunner,” the Army officer said. A few seconds later, he answered, “A couple or three belts of green and red clusters, and a belt of illumes, but mostly we’ve got H-E-D-P fragmentation rounds. Why?”

  “Have your gunner load up with the incendiaries. Anything that ignites a fire. Those willy-peter illumes are dandy. Lob it on all these buildings and set ’em ablaze,” Billy-C said. “Smoke from fires started with our tracers is blowing south. If we set the neighborhood ablaze, lots of smoke, it’ll totally fuck up the Haji’s shit. Smoke inhalation, burning eyes, you know the drill. And it won’t be in our faces at all. Besides, a fire might burn a bunch of these sand rats out of their holes, so we can shoot ’em.”

  “I like your idea, Sergeant,” Jeremy Phipps said. “We’ll give ’em all we got. Maybe we can get out of this tin can before they figure out how to put an RPG into it.”

  “Right, sir,” Claybaugh said. “Light ’em up!”

  In a few seconds, the MK19 began hosing red and green flares, and white phosphorus illumination rounds into the windows of every building within reach. Three belts later, rising flames and smoke enveloped the whole neighborhood.

  —

  Just as Jack looked up, the operations-hooch doors burst open, and the six remaining MARSOC-Iraq snipers and both detachment armorers rumbled inside. The eight men huddled around the gunny’s desk, picking up on the action over the intercom radio’s speaker.

  “Smedley says Billy-C and the boys gettin’ hit hard,” Sergeant Sammy LaSage, whose name everybody had shortened to just plain Sage, growled. “What’s the damage on our side?”

  “Three dead. Two truck drivers and one of our own, Rowdy Yates,” Jack said, looking around the crowd that now made up the rest of the Iraq detachment. “Staff Sergeant Claybaugh just set the world afire, down by Fallujah. Rough count, our guys splashed a dozen Hajis, and they’re still fighting.”

  “Target-rich. We ought to be there,” Sage said.

  “Billy’s got this,” Jack said.

  “No doubt, Guns,” Sergeant LaSage agreed. “I’m just saying it seems a shame we’re not there to help out.”

  Valentine smiled. “Billy said nearly the same thing.”

  Sage nodded. “Right on.”

  Sammy LaSage grew up in Albuquerque and got drafted by the Colorado Rockies baseball club out of Manzano High School. He played two years of single-A shortstop for the Modesto Nuts before giving up the dream. Then he enlisted in the Marine Corps when he decided that playing more years of farm-team baseball with holes in his jeans, cold chicken in a box lunch on the team bus, and a rattrap pickup truck to drive did not quite cut it. Cooperstown would not be his.

 
So with his high school diploma and not much else, Sage went looking for more meaningful work. Not many demands outside the diamond for a five-foot-nine-inch athlete with a rocket arm, quick hands, and a good eye for a cut fastball.

  Down to his last nickel and a quarter tank of gas in his twenty-year-old Dodge, Sammy LaSage took note of a Marine Corps recruiting office next to the Church’s Fried Chicken store, where he had just filled out an employment application, on Juan Tabo Boulevard just south of Manuel. He didn’t have to think much about it to decide that a Marine uniform fit him better than a chicken outfit, so he filled out an application there, too.

  Good eyes, quick hands, and strong arms worked well for the Marine Corps, too, and Sage found his new home and life.

  Bronco and Jaws served on Sergeant Sage’s team, along with a dark green Marine named Craig Heyward, a corporal from Garland, Texas, the Dallas suburb where Hank Hill and his oddball King of the Hill family and friends also lived. Propane and propane products made Garland great, and Calvin Johnson was proud of that fact, along with the Dallas Cowboys, who Hank Hill and the boys also loved. God bless Tom Landry!

  Thus when Jack Valentine began calling Corporal Heyward Ironhead, the young man who lived and breathed Cowboys blue had mixed emotions about it. Sharing the same name with the hard-hitting NFL running back who gained righteous fame on the New Orleans Saints and Atlanta Falcons, long-standing rivals of Dallas, rubbed against his grain more than just a tad bit. He didn’t like it at all. But that hardly mattered to Jack. Ironhead was Ironhead, and that was that.

  The other four Marines who jammed in tight with Sage and Ironhead, surrounding Gunny V, Bronco, and Jaws, Jack had lovingly named the Mob Squad. He also called them by a few other creative names like “Mario Brothers” and “Donkey Kong.” But “Mob Squad” seemed most popular.

  Sergeant Carlo “The Iceman” Savoca, a six-foot-tall, good-looking Marine, born and raised on Staten Island, headed up the Mob Squad. His father and grandfather, and as far back as he knew, men of his family for many generations carved Italian marble and granite for a living. They didn’t just make grave memorials but architectural works of art and fine sculptures. People called Sergeant Savoca the Iceman because nothing ever rattled him. On the trigger, he was all business.

  Also a native of New York City, Corporal Salvador “Sal the Pizza Man” Principato called the borough of Queens his home. His dad was a cop, a lieutenant on the Big Apple’s SWAT team. Sal’s father had survived the falling towers of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, among the last policemen to clear the street before everything came crushing down. Now, five years later and counting, Lieutenant Salvador Principato Senior fought the early stages of lung cancer and mandatory retirement.

  Sal Principato had openly wept with his father as the families said good-bye to their Marines as MARSOC Detachment, Iraq, boarded their flight at Cherry Point. Both Marine and New York policeman wore their uniforms proudly that day.

  Corporal Nicholas “Nick the Nose” Falzone, the third of the four-man Mob Squad, lived at the opposite end of the Verrazano Bridge from Sergeant Savoca, in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn. His mother and father owned a popular restaurant on Fourth Avenue just past Marine Avenue, toward Ninety-ninth Street.

  For Nick Falzone, a nickname like Nick the Nose didn’t bother him. But he warned everyone, including Gunny Jack and Colonel Snow, and especially Captain Burkehart, who always loved using nicknames, to nix it on the Nick the Nose anytime anyone from his family was around. They wouldn’t understand the affection that went with it and would feel insulted by it. Nick’s father, Anthony, carried a nickname of “Big Tony” from childhood. Little Tony Falzone was a kid up the block that grew up with his dad, also from a Sicilian family, but no relation. While Big Tony Falzone had never even gotten a parking ticket, and took pride in building and owning his own business the hard way, Little Tony Falzone had gone with the mob, robbed an airline with three other Bay Ridge boys, and now was spending the rest of his life in Attica.

  Last but not least, Corporal Marcello Costa came to the team already named Momo. His mother in Hoboken, New Jersey, heard Frank Sinatra call one of his buddies Momo, so she decided her son, Marcello, should be Momo, too.

  Jack Valentine loved the Mob Squad. He hadn’t put them together, they chose each other. Sergeant Savoca had suggested it early in their training, even while paring down the detachment to eighteen operators plus Jack, the captain, and the colonel, two armorers, and the one supply and administrative clerk they called Smedley.

  “Make a hole. Let me in where I can hear the radio,” Staff Sergeant Dennis J. Drzewiecki, chief detachment armorer said, pushing from the rear. He and his armory partner, Sergeant Andre Romyantsev, whom Jack Valentine called Rasputin the Devil, mostly because he and everyone else on the team had trouble getting Romyantsev off their tongues, had followed the crowd to the operations hooch when they heard that some of their brothers had hit trouble.

  Jack had shortened Staff Sergeant Drzewiecki’s name to simply Sergeant D, for the same reason Romyantsev became Rasputin.

  “Gunny,” the staff sergeant added. “Captain Burkehart told me to tell you that he’s headed up to MAF operations to catch a ride with the assessment team. They’re heading out to the ambush site right behind the reaction force.”

  “With you and Rasputin here, who’s minding the store? Smedley? Again?” Jack asked.

  Drzewiecki nodded. “Yup. Corporal Butler has the con.”

  “You know, he ain’t the sharpest tack in the pile,” Jack said, and looked around at his men and saw the smiles. They, too, knew that Ralph Butler, whom they nicknamed Smedley, had real issues with Marine Corps common sense and skills beyond keeping documents filed, making correct entries in service records, which Captain Burkehart supervised closely, and maintaining inventory of detachment supplies.

  Sergeant D cleared his throat, as if he had more to say, but then simply added, “I keep an eye on him. He’s trained to pee on the paper, Gunny, and we don’t let him out of the yard.”

  As he came to know the staff sergeant, Jack had come to highly regard the man. A deep well, and nobody’s fool. The best gun maker in the Marine Corps, with Rasputin the Devil a close second.

  Dennis Drzewiecki grew up in Whiskey Run, Pennsylvania. People who didn’t know better assumed him a backwoods coal thumper, as the name Whiskey Run might imply. And Drzewiecki let them believe it. For Jack, Whiskey Run fit right in with Crazy Woman Creek and seemed totally out of place as a neighborhood on the west side of Pittsburgh. Jack also learned with more than a decade and a half in the Marine Corps that a man’s hometown didn’t make him smart. Elmore Snow from Crazy Woman Creek stood testament to that fact. And poor dead Rowdy Yates, too.

  Jack felt bad as he thought of Rowdy, listening to the intercom chatter with Billy-C and his brothers fighting on. They would mourn their fallen Spartan later.

  Looking around at his Marines, Jack knew one thing as certain as death and taxes—his warriors, even Smedley Butler manning the phone in the headquarters office, had bonded as a family. A few months ago, he had his doubts, especially with someone as far off the normal track as Andre Romyantsev. Rasputin the Devil was an outstanding armorer, smart hunter and outdoorsman, and outstanding rifle shot. A little reconnaissance and sniper training, and Rasputin could do double duty, but beyond that, he was really a different sort of animal.

  Jack thought Rowdy Yates was unique, but not nearly as special as Rasputin the Devil.

  Sergeant Romyantsev was born in the Yukon Territory when his parents tried life off the grid, before it became fashionable among antisocial political zealots of the new age. Although his Canadian birth certificate lists Whitehorse, the territorial capital, as his birthplace, Andre took his first breath in the family cabin on a trail nearer to Dawson City, in the Klondike.

  When Andre turned fourteen, his parents repatriated to the United Sta
tes and opened their own gun store and repair shop in Anchorage. They had not set foot on native soil since his father, Grigory Romyantsev, burned his draft card in 1972. His mother, Tapeesa Ipalook, was only thirteen when the two of them dropped out of sight and ventured to the Yukon from Palmer, Alaska, their hometown.

  Tough as a boot and virtually bulletproof, Andre never caught cold, never had a runny nose, and seemed impervious to weather. He had his mother’s Iñupiaq color and black hair, and her beautiful pixie eyes and smile, but his father’s tall Russian build.

  When a Marine came to his father’s shop, ordering a big-bore rifle for hunting brown bear and Alaskan moose, the idea of seeing the rest of the world appealed to the tall, tan-skinned young man. Andre found a recruiter and signed up when he turned eighteen. Then he told his parents.

  Grigory Romyantsev hit the roof, not wanting his son anywhere near the American military. Tapeesa and her entire Iñupiat clan celebrated her son’s becoming a warrior, and Marines stood at the top of their list of heroes. They held a big party in Palmer for Andre, and tossed him high in the air from a blanket, in the Iñupiaq tradition, celebrating his departure to the Marines.

  More adaptable to cold than hot, Sergeant Andre Romyantsev found working under the air conditioner in his T-shirt and PT shorts most to his liking while the Iraqi world outside the armory burned in the desert heat. When he followed Sergeant D into the operations hooch, that’s what he wore. Flip-flops, PT shorts, T-shirt, and a bush hat.

  “Rasputin,” Jack Valentine said, eyeballing him behind Staff Sergeant Drzewiecki, “if I need fresh utilities with zero wear, I can always find a set in your wall locker.”

  “Help yourself, Gunny V,” Romyantsev said. “Unless we’re standing parade or inspection, I intend to wear what works in the shop.”