Terminal Impact Page 13

  “If they’re set to ambush us, how you going to flush them out?” Bower asked, his South Boston brogue strong as the anticipation of yet another fight tightened his jaws.

  “I’ve got a little something that just might rattle ’em loose,” Billy said. “Give me a call back when you’re ready for me to kick off this rodeo.”

  Billy and his Marines watched the soldiers climb up the gully walls and take position on the high ground at the right and left of the farms. He already had his eye to his riflescope and finger on the trigger when Connor Bower offered one word on the radio.

  “Go,” Bower said, and Billy-C broke his first round.

  One of the gunmen had hidden behind a water trough made of stones, clay, and tar. While his front was amply covered from the approaching American soldiers, his back was wide open to Billy. The .50 caliber Raufoss round disassembled the Haji in a burst of body parts.

  Two other jihadi brothers had taken ambush positions behind some adobe feed bunks, and when their friend exploded only a few feet from them, it sent them running for a nearby adobe wall. The first man vaulted over the top, but the second gunman caught one of Randy Powell’s .338 Lapua Magnum 250-grain hollow-point boat-tail Sierra MatchKing bullets between his shoulder blades.

  Three more Hajis squatted behind the mud fence and had the wall of a house two feet behind them. When they popped their heads up and fired their AK rifles at nothing, Petey Preston splashed a Lapua round on the wall behind them.

  The three Marine Scout-Snipers waited for movement among the houses, but not a soul stirred.

  “They’re hunkered down.” Randy sighed.

  “And they’re not moving,” Billy-C said. “Let’s see what happens when I start blowing holes with Raufoss rounds.”

  Claybaugh then took a breath, steadied his crosshairs on the adobe wall where he anticipated an al-Qaeda gunman squatted, and let one go.

  A hole the size of a dinner plate blew through the mud fence, and the adobe wall of the house behind where the gunman had squatted glistened red and wet with blood.

  “Fuck! That’s nasty!” Powell said, and fired his magnum at the house, trying to ricochet lead at one end of the wall and hold the enemy in place while Petey Preston put shots on the opposite side.

  “Once more,” the staff sergeant said, and squeezed off another explosive penetrating shot. It, too, blew a big hole in the fence and left the house sprayed with blood and bits of another dead al-Qaeda.

  Billy cycled his bolt and chambered another big round, and in the periphery of his riflescope he caught movement in a window. Someone stood just to the side of the opening, so he moved his crosshairs there and blew a hole in the house.

  As the shot exploded, the round must have barely grazed the man standing there with his back against the wall by the opening. He came spinning out the window, half-alive, his right arm and a good part of the right side of his upper torso torn off. He hit the ground dead.

  That was all the remaining al-Qaeda needed. They poured out of their positions and ran for the gullies, where several gunshots turned them around. Rather than running toward the deadly sniper fire, they chose to try to make it around the first bend in the road, where the overhead rocks and hills gave them closest cover.

  Billy, Randy, and Petey chased them with shots, making sure they all got around the corner.

  “You got ’em,” Claybaugh said on the command channel as Connor Bower and two of his solja-boys opened fire with their machine guns and mowed down the rest of the Hajis.

  —

  Ray-Dean Blevins waited until he had driven outside the secured perimeter of Camp Victory before he stopped his Escalade, pulled the envelope from his waistband, and opened it. His eyes scanned down the cover page of the First Battalion, Fifth Marine Regiment’s top secret operation plan. As the impact of what he had stolen took hold, he let out a breath that ended with, “Fuck!”

  For about two beats, he considered trying to sneak the classified package back to the pile of crap on Elmore Snow’s desk. Then he thought again.

  It was bad enough just getting his hands on a shred of any kind of information that might get Cesare Alosi off his ass. But this was way too much, and putting the envelope back now, way too risky.

  He pounded the steering wheel with both fists. The magnitude of what he had stolen went far askew of the boundaries of even his corrupt sense of right and wrong. Way over the top of anything Cooder-with-a-D anticipated he might swipe for his boss.

  “Why the fuck would anyone with half a brain leave something this deadly just lying in a pile of mail?” he said, looking at the red TOP SECRET stamp on the op plan’s cover page. Then he rationalized, “Assholes fucking deserve to have it stolen.”

  Blevins thought about burning it, or tossing it in the trash somewhere back on post. “That’d serve ’em right.” But he had to have something to hand to Alosi, or it was literally his ass.

  “Fuck this,” Ray-Dean finally resolved, as he did so many other perplexing matters, and tossed the envelope on the passenger seat. “What’s done is done. Let the chips fall,” he said as he tromped on the gas on the company Escalade, heading back to his hotel in the relative safety of the Baghdad Green Zone.

  Ray-Dean went straight to his room, tossed the envelope on his bed, then did an about-face and shot the gap down to the hotel lounge, a poor attempt at a luxury cocktail bar serving an ever-changing variety of smuggled liquor and homemade Iraqi moonshine.

  Most of the “good stuff” came from a British paratrooper major turned private-security operator named James, who came from Leeds in England. With an Iraqi named Ajax, a procurer of anything one might want, legal or otherwise, he had opened a well-hidden but very popular joint called the Baghdad Country Club.

  James and an enterprising blue-eyed Kurdish businessman named Ahmed, who owned nearly all of Iraq’s duty-free rights, had partnered in late 2005 and began trucking in booze from the north. A very dangerous business in a mostly Muslim country with restrictive alcohol-prohibition laws and radical booze-hating zealots at every turn.

  No less than twice a week on differing days and never the same times, and sometimes more often, depending on demand, the hotel hospitality manager had a laundry truck stop at the Baghdad Country Club and restock the bar with whatever James from Leeds had available. Loading the hotel laundry truck always involved a game of cat and mouse to avoid detection, especially by the club’s nosy neighbors, moving the boxes wrapped in bundles of bed linen and towels. Ironically, the Baghdad Country Club sat behind a wall in a garden behind a second, foliage-covered outside wall, next door to the powerful Iranian-controlled, Shiite-based Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq. But then, Baghdad has always lived as a city filled with contradictions.

  Hacksaw, Habu, Kermit The Frog, and many of the other Malone-Leyva operators frequented the Baghdad Country Club, a watering hole that James and Ajax had patterned after the infamous Rick’s Café of Casablanca, but most nights, the place seemed more like Chalmun’s Cantina in the pirate city Mos Eisley from Star Wars.

  Cooder-with-a-D was not nearly the social animal and war-story teller that the pirate trio Walter Gillespie, Kermit Alexander, or even Cory Webster were. Baghdad Country Club, with its mix of contractors and reporters, mercenaries and gunrunners, hookers and hoods, had a little too much social mix for Ray-Dean’s taste. He mostly drank alone.

  When Blevins stepped through the beaded curtain that hid the goings-on inside the dark hotel lounge, he locked eyes on Francoise, the loud-smelling French reporter with the inviting snatch. She sat in a booth, basking in the red glow of a candle in a net-wrapped ruby-glass snifter, nursing a tall brown drink with half-melted ice and a cherry floating on top. In her fingers she held a long, thin pink cigarette with a gold ring above a black filter tip that she lipped deep in her ample mouth, sucking her lungs full of designer-flavored smoke.

 
“Got another one of those?” Ray-Dean said as he took a seat across from her and tossed his sweat-ringed Malone-Leyva operator’s ball cap on the table.

  “Sure,” she said, and passed him the gold-trimmed pink-and-black flat cardboard box.

  Blevins took one out and lit it with the candle. As he exhaled, he smiled. “Whatcha drinking?”

  “Supposed to be Long Island Iced Tea,” Francoise breathed back, her husky voice saying fuck me between the lines. “Only God knows what they used as liquor.”

  “Long as it gets the job done, who cares? In this place? Be thankful you’ve got ice,” Ray-Dean said, snapping his fingers at the bartender, pointing at Francoise’s drink, then pointing at himself. The barkeep nodded and took a glass off the counter and began mixing Blevins a Baghdad version of the wicked cocktail.

  “So . . .” Francoise said, cigarette smoke curling out of her mouth, then swirling up her nostrils. She leaned toward Ray-Dean so he could see down her blouse, pressed her breasts’ cleavage together, and smiled at him with her eyes sagging half-shut. “What’s news?”

  Cooder-with-a-D leaned toward Francoise and let his eyes go half-shut as he smiled back at her. “Want to go to your room to fuck?”

  Then he smiled more. “Or . . . We can go to mine.”

  “Got anything to drink up there?” she asked.

  “Old Fuad keeps a stash of Stolichnaya vodka that he sells me, straight out of Moscow by way of Istanbul,” Ray-Dean said. “I’ll pick up a bottle to keep us warm.”

  “I like Beluga.” Francoise shrugged. “Have you had it? It’s new from Russia. Everyone in Paris is drinking it.”

  “This ain’t Paris,” Blevins said, as the bartender brought him his Long Island Iced Tea. “Like I said, you’re lucky to get ice. And Stoli sure as shit ain’t rotgut.”

  “I’m waiting for a friend,” the French reporter said. “You know Paolo? The sound tech for CNN, he’s from Milan.”

  Ray-Dean took a sip off the top of his tea. “Naw.” And he gave her a second look. “You’d rather fuck him than me?”

  She shook her head and added a horny smile. “I thought he might join us. A ménage à trois. You like?”

  Cooder laughed. “Fucking nasty bitch.”

  She smiled more. “He’s bisexual, you know.”

  “Oh, fuck no!” Blevins let out so loud it made the barkeep turn and look. “I’ll go for you and another bitch, but no dudes. I make it a rule. I don’t cross swords.”

  “You’ve never tried it?” Francoise asked.

  “No, and never will,” Ray-Dean came back.

  “It is so hot to see a man with a man, and then me with them both,” she breathed hot, licking her lips.

  “You want to fuck? I’ll fuck you ’til your eyes pop. I’m all the man you need,” Cooder bragged.

  Francoise shrugged and smiled more. When she had Ray-Dean’s full attention, she tapped her finger on her nose.

  “Yeah,” Cooder said, “I know what you want. I got a bag of blow so good it’ll make you wet your pants. Couple hits, you’ll want to fuck a lamp pole.”

  Francoise licked her lips. “Does talking so vulgar make you excited? It does me!”

  Ray-Dean grinned. “Yeah, baby. I’m so hard right now, my dick can cut diamonds.”

  “Bon.” She smiled.

  —

  Captain Mike Burkehart rolled hard and fast behind the assessment team’s command Humvee, driving Colonel Snow’s MARSOC Hummer that Corporal Butler normally piloted. The skipper had grabbed an unsuspecting Marine private first class nicknamed Eugene the Jeep, who was cleaning a coffeepot in the operations office at the time, and told the lad to ride shotgun with him. Another operations Hummer with a machine gun topside rode tail-end-Charlie behind them.

  When the MARSOC executive officer approached the ambush scene, he could only think that this was how Hiroshima must have looked right after the atom bomb exploded there, or pretty close to it. Fire consumed everything on both sides of the road, pouring black smoke in the air. Little of any kind of structure stood, most everything that used to be houses burned in fallen piles with only bits and pieces of the buildings pointing skyward among the unchecked flames.

  Smoke obscured the afternoon sun. The whole place felt hotter than hell and looked like hell, too.

  First elements of the reaction force had landed by Black Hawk helicopters and immediately begun securing the area surrounding the ambush site, searching for any enemy stragglers. Their reinforcements arrived just ahead of Captain Burkehart and set up checkpoints at both ends of the village.

  When the skipper stepped out of his Hummer and looked for his Marines, he couldn’t find any of them except the zippered black bag that held Rowdy Yates. The Army team had thoughtfully laid the Marine’s body aside from the two dead KBR truckers, likewise bagged and tagged. They had only found parts of the body of the one driver who had died in the bomb blast.

  “My Marines,” he asked the Army captain who commanded the re- action force. “What’s their status?”

  “On their way in,” the officer told Burkehart. “Should be here any minute. They chased down the main force that initiated this ambush and by all reports killed most of them. Last enemy body count was twenty-eight. We estimate they had somewhere between thirty and fifty combatants. Not bad shooting. Not bad at all.”

  “We secure here?” Burkehart asked, giving the area a scan. Lots of rear-echelon gagglers running around lax and slack like highway patrolmen at an interstate wreck scene. The Marine Mustang captain knew better than to just prance around the open spaces like a spring fawn. He kept covered.

  “Oh yeah,” the soldier assured him with a casual shrug.

  As the Army captain walked away with a talkative and overly excited master sergeant decked in clean uniform and newly issued combat gear jabbering at his side, Mike Burkehart noticed Cotton Martin maneuvering with his three Marines through the debris field on the right side of the roadway. He, too, remained cautious of a possible unseen enemy straggler hidden in some rat hole.

  “Skipper!” Cotton let out, glad to see his captain, Hot Sauce, Jewfro, and Hub Biggs smiling behind him. “As they say, the proverbial shit hit the fan here. We had an overwhelming enemy force laying for us.” Then as Staff Sergeant Martin got close enough to speak in a low voice, “They had it planned to the T. Somebody on the inside had to have fed them all our dope. Cost us one of our own.”

  Both men gave the body bag that held Lance Corporal Yates a long look.

  “Maybe they had eyes on you when you departed the wire,” Burkehart said, raising his eyes.

  “No way they could see us then and have time enough to put together an ambush of this size and complexity, and with the kind of weaponry they used,” Cotton said, looking cold at the skipper. “They knew we’s coming from the get-go. They were set up in the upper rooms and rooftops, hides in junk piles and old cars. That’s not some quick setup. No, sir. They got inside intel. I’m sure of it.”

  “Any word from Staff Sergeant Claybaugh and his team?” the skipper asked.

  “Last check? I’d say he’ll come through that smoke on the left, over yonder, any second,” Martin said, pointing toward the smoke pall on the opposite side of the road.

  He had no sooner spoken and was still pointing when the silhouettes of the three Marines came into sight. Billy-C saw the captain and Cotton, and gave them a wave. Then he broke off from Petey Preston and Randy Powell, and jogged to the body of the dead sniper with the bloody Dragunov rifle lying gripped in his lifeless hands.

  “What’s up with that?” the captain asked, seeing the staff sergeant break off from his two compadres.

  “War trophy, I suppose,” Cotton answered, seeing Billy bend over to grab the sniper rifle from the dead enemy.

  Corporal Powell had kept moving, but Preston waited for his staff sergeant, his Vigilance r
ifle cradled across his arms, ready, just in case.

  “Billy says that’s the motherfucker that killed Rowdy,” Cotton added.

  “Going up on the wall at the Hog Wallow?” Burkehart said.

  Cotton nodded. “Yup. I expect so.”

  Billy-C held the Dragunov up for the captain and Staff Sergeant Martin to see, then bent over to pick up something else just as a lone rifle shot cracked from a smoldering rubbish pile a football field away. The impact of the bullet sent Claybaugh headfirst into the dead Iraqi insurgent’s body.

  Petey Preston caught the movement in the rubbish pile and shot the sniper as he tried to flee. The impact of the Lapua Magnum took off an arm and made a mess of the chest, killing the man before he hit the ground.

  Randy Powell made a beeline for his downed staff sergeant as Billy-C scrambled back to his feet.

  A bloody patch spread across the seat of Claybaugh’s trousers, as Corporal Powell ducked under Billy’s shoulder and helped him walk, the Dragunov still clutched in his hands.

  “Laid open my left ass cheek,” the staff sergeant said as he hobbled toward the captain, Cotton, and the others with Randy Powell as his crutch. “But I got that dead motherfucker’s rifle.”

  “Guess you bent over at just the right time,” Mike Burkehart said.

  “Motherfucking AK bayonet. Dead guy had it on his belt,” Billy said, holding up the multipurpose knife and fighting tool that also slides onto the muzzle end of an AK-47 rifle. “I’ve been wanting one of these suckers for a long time.”

  “Got shot in the ass for your trouble, too,” Cotton said. “I guess you paid the price for it.”

  “Guy that shot him paid a bigger price,” Corporal Preston said, coming in behind Claybaugh and Powell.