Alone and Unafraid (American Praetorians Book 3) (28 page)

One of the Dillon SUVs suddenly pulled up between us and the west side of the square, blocking some of the fire.  The gunner waited until the vehicle steadied from its rocking stop, then returned that fire with interest, the buzz-saw noise of the minigun drowning out most of the rest of the racket on the street.

Now that we were as covered as we could expect, by Little Bob on the MAG in one direction and the guy on the minigun in the other, Black slung his rifle and reached down to help me move the casualty.  The poor bastard screamed again as Black grabbed his legs, probably stripping burned skin off.  There wasn’t much left of the guy’s clothes; I could now see, unfortunately, that it was a guy.  It would be a miracle if he survived as far as Baqubah, but as long as he was breathing, I wasn’t leaving him.

We carefully lifted him over the tailgate, but couldn’t help scraping his body a couple of times, accompanied by the same wet chorus of agony every time it happened.  It couldn’t be helped.  As soon as we got him down, Black threw a tarp over him to try to shield him from the cascade of hot brass coming off the MAG, then climbed back in and braced himself against the cab, bringing his AK to bear again.  “I’ve got him, boss,” he yelled to me over the cacophony of weapons fire.  I gave him a thumbs
-up, and ran back around to jump back in the cab.

No sooner was I in than Nick was mashing the gas again, getting us moving.  We were now almost at the rear of the column; most of the other vehicles had passed us by, unwilling to stop or even slow down for a casualty.   I think I invented a couple of new obscenities in the course of describing the drivers who had valued their own skins over a fallen comrade
who wasn’t quite dead yet.

We roared out of the square and up Nidhal Street.  Firing continued, but was more sporadic, as the gunners took snap shots at anything that looked threatening.  Likely a few innocent people went down in front of our guns that night…nothing to be done. 
It’s an unfortunate truth of urban warfare, a constant that’s been there ever since we started killing each other in cities.  Once the shooting starts, any of the civilian population still in the city is in the line of fire.  It just comes to a point where you can no longer take chances, and we’d passed that point several miles back.

Nidhal Street was a fairly empty gauntlet of a few random cars and trucks parked haphazardly at the sides of the street, the occasional potshot, an RPG that missed, plowing into a storefront instead, and one IED that similarly went off too early, showering the lead vehicle in debris but not doing much else.

We took a hard right on Muthanna Al Shaidan Street, and ran head-on into a militia convoy of technicals.

They were most likely Jaysh al Mahdi or AAH
on the way to engage with ISIS—it really didn’t matter which.  The initial shock of the encounter meant nobody did anything for a second.  The lead vehicles had almost collided.  Then the shooting started.

The lead vehicle didn’t have a mounted machine gun, while the first militia truck did.  The shemaugh-wrapped gunner leveled his PKP and opened fire on the lead Land Cruiser’s windshield.

The Land Cruiser skidded to a halt.  While armored glass
will
eventually fail under the kind of onslaught that a Pecheneg machine gun can put up at close range, I thought the driver had probably panicked, rather than gotten shot.  Fortunately, the next vehicle back had an up-gun, and once the driver pulled partway around the beleaguered Land Cruiser the gunner started shooting the shit out of the militia Ranger.  The local truck was not up-armored, and the gunner soon collapsed in a welter of blood and ripped tissue, while the windshield shattered, the spiderwebbed remnants of the glass splashed with stains that just looked black in the orange half-light of the burning city.

Ventner’s vehicle was behind ours, so he couldn’t really see what was going on.  I was only able to see from where we were through a fluke of positioning as soon as the convoy braked to a panicked halt.  Looking around, I could immediately see that we needed to get moving again, as fast as possible.  Of course, to do that, realistically, we needed to hammer the militia back, break their cohesion as fast as possible, and at least leave them rattled enough not to try to follow up.

“Every vehicle with an up-gun, push forward and engage those technicals,” I called over the radio.  “Everyone else who can, push to the right, around the hospital.”  As the first of the un-armed vehicles started jockeying to get out of the line of fire, I realized I needed to clarify.  “Kemosabe, take point around the hospital,” I ordered.  It briefly flashed across my mind that the last time Jim had taken an up-armor by a hospital, he’d gotten blown up, but I shoved it aside.  This was no time for superstition—hell, there really wasn’t a time for it.  Jim was positioned to take point and get the unarmed trucks away from this fight, so he’d have to take it.

“Roger,” he replied, without hesitation.  His HiLux accelerated around mine, and pushed past two more pickups and a Suburban, almost forcing the Sub off the street before taking lead down the side street.

“Get us through this shit and up front, if you can,” I told Nick.  He nodded and began threading us through the press of vehicles trying to get off the street.

The fire from up front was still sporadic, as the militia tried to get off their back foot.  That lead Ranger was fucked up, the windows shattered and the hood riddled with holes.  The PKP was unmanned and pointed at the sky.  A HiLux and a minigun-armed Suburban were flanking the stricken vehicle now, and hammering the militia trucks as they tried to pull back from the murderous storm of fire crackling down the street.  After a couple more minutes, the survivors had vanished down a side street, leaving several broken, smoking vehicles and shattered bodies littering the street.

It took a minute to turn around and follow the rest of the column around the hospital.  We might have been able to push through on Muthanna Al Shaidan Street, but neither Ventner nor I wanted to split up the column.  We simply didn’t have enough up-guns.  There were plenty of contractors and Marines in the armored SUVs who were willing and able to fight, but most of the vehicles were simply not designed to fight from.  The warriors and their weapons were closed up in armored glass and rolled steel, and couldn’t engage without stopping and getting out.  And stopping long enough to fight on foot was not an option, barring the worst happening.  And I didn’t even want to think about trying to do the Mogadishu Mile with the State weenies just to get out of Baghdad, never mind for the two hundred twenty miles to Erbil.

The convoy sped down the side streets around the hospital, coming out onto the Mohammed al Qasim Expressway without further incident.  The chaos on the streets seemed to be intensifying.  The flashes and thunder of explosions seemed to be getting closer together, and the skyline was a row of under-lit columns of smoke.  The rattle of small arms fire was unending now.  Tracers stitched across the sky, shooting at who kn
ows what.  So far I hadn’t heard any aircraft, but that was only a matter of time.

The most intense fighting seemed to be off to the west, on the other side of the Tigris.  Since that was where the main dividing line had fallen between the Sunni militants and Saleh’s Shi’a loyalists, that made sense.  I wasn’t relaxing though; we were a prize to both sides, and they weren’t about to just let us go, no matter how badly they wanted a piece of each other.

We raced up the Expressway, heading north.  We encountered no resistance for almost three miles, until we got to the intersection with Thawra Street.

“Hillbilly, Kemosabe,” Jim called.  “We’ve got an IA checkpoint up ahead at the intersection—looks like two BTRs and a BMP.”

That wasn’t good.  That BMP alone had the firepower to cut every up-armor in the column to ribbons, and aside from the handful of RPG-27s we still had in our two trucks, we couldn’t touch it.  And I really didn’t think it would be a good idea to try to stop long enough to fight through the checkpoint anyway.  “Divert,” I told him.  “We can’t go toe-to-toe with that.”

“Roger.”  Unfortunately, we were in the middle of an industrial area, with lots of walls and warehouses and not many side streets.  Marcus turned their truck sharply around, skidding off the street and onto the wide open dirt area on the left, jamming
onto the packed dirt track lined with shanties, cargo containers, and rusting vehicles.  The vehicle behind them almost didn’t figure it out, and almost rolled over trying to follow Jim’s HiLux off the Expressway.

By the time the column got turned off, the checkpoint troops had noticed us. 
The BMP was rumbling forward, that 100mm gun starting to track toward us.  It didn’t fire, though, at least not before the last vehicle had rolled out of sight in the semi-industrial warren on the side of the Expressway.

Unfortunately, we were now heading in the wrong direction, back toward the shitstorm engulfing the city.  At least, until Jim got out onto the street we’d just crossed and gunned it, racing across the Expressway as fast as Marcus could get the up-armored HiLux moving in such a short distance.

Four vehicles made it across before the BMP fired.  Fortunately, the gunner opted for the 100mm gun.  He’d have had a better chance with the 30mm.  The tube barked, the low-pressure charge barely louder than the rest of the noise of combat echoing across the city, and the shell missed, sailing down the street to smash a car half a mile farther away.  By then, the next vehicle had raced across the Expressway.

It was only a matter of time before the gunner or commander figured it out and engaged with the 30mm.  A fully automatic stream of 30mm rounds could cut one of our vehicles in half.

But the drivers were catching on, and while the gunners directed streams of fire at the BMP—ineffectual, of course, but we were just hoping to keep them rattled long enough to get everybody across—the column raced across the danger area.  Apparently the gunner was still thinking that bigger was simply better; he fired the 100mm again, and missed again.

While it felt like it was taking forever to get the convoy across, in fact it was only moments before it was our turn.  Nick stomped on the gas hard enough to make the truck fishtail a little as we accelerated through the intersection.  Another 100mm shell wailed overhead, and even through the armor, I heard Little Bob’s bellowed, “FUCK!”

Then we were across, sheltered by buildings and the mass of vehicles packed in between them.  I couldn’t tell if the BMP gunner fired again, but looking back, it looked like the last few SUVs got through without being hit, though it looked like some automatic weapons were reaching out for them before they got across.  Tracers zipped through the air, and impacts threw dust and grit off the surface of the street.

We were in the middle of Camp Gaylani, a weird combination of steel, glass, and concrete high-rises, industrial buildings, and what amounted to scrap yards of dozens, if not hundreds, of trucks, cars, and busses, just lined up and sitting there.  While the street we turned up had a tree-studded median, it ran along a regular maze of stationary vehicles and sheet-metal warehouses on the right.

Jim banged a right on Thawra Street, and we took some sporadic fire from the checkpoint we’d just bypassed as we sped toward Imam Ali Street, the next major thoroughfare running northwest to southeast, and hopefully our best, reasonably unobstructed shot at getting to Highway Three and out of the city.

I was also well aware, and I was sure Ventner was as well, that we were getting uncomfortably close to Sadr City, still Jaysh al Mahdi’s primary power center and source of a lot of their recruiting.  We were a long way from
being out of the woods.

There was a burning truck on the bridge across the canal that ran down the middle of the hundred-meter median at the center of Imam Ali Street, and it looked like there was some shooting going on across the street.  The most likely scenario was a Sunni group trying to hit a Shi’a neighborhood, because with all the other shit going down in Baghdad that night, why not?  I really didn’t know, and at the moment, as long as it didn’t escalate into IEDs, heavy artillery, or RPGs directed at the convoy, I didn’t care.  Let ‘em slug it out, as long as we got our people out.

Jim apparently said, “Fuck it,” and turned left on the first ramp, going the wrong way on the southbound side of the road.  It didn’t ultimately matter that much, since there wasn’t a lot of traffic out that night, for obvious reasons, and nobody asked any questions over the radio.  I think even the more politically correct Staties were either in shock or had gone into survival mode by then.

We had three miles of straightaway ahead of us, and we covered it in what had to be record time for up-armored vehicles. 
We’d just gotten to the entrance of Highway Four when the helos showed up.

They came in low and fast from the southeast, two Mi-35s and four EC635s.  The Eurocopters had shooters in the doors, legs hanging out over the skids.

“Motherfuck,” was all I could say.  We were not equipped to deal with enemy helicopters.  This wasn’t like a video game, where you just had to shoot them enough times.  Sure, machine gun fire could do a number on the Eurocopters, but those Hinds were fucking tanks.

Sometimes, though,
you just have to be glad that your enemies hate each other
at least
as much as they hate you.

Somebody had been waiting for air to show up.  Several heavy guns opened up from multiple points to the north, their massive tracers reaching out like glowing strings whipping toward the helicopters.  From somewhere else, no less than three SAMs rose into the night sky, bright points of fire against the smoke and flames of a city embattled.