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Jabal Ad Dhibban, Anbar Province

The ground hadn't heated up yet, but Hunter had already stepped in enough goat turds to be on the lookout for the nearest mosque so he could help himself to some sandals left outside the entryway. One of the nasty little pellets had wedged between his toes and others were smashed onto the bottom of his feet. He heard some occasional AK and M4 fire, but nothing serious. Two more Black Hawks had flown in operators and a Little Bird was hovering overhead. Kids were playing in the streets, running and pointing at the circling helicopters. Locals went about their routine business, apparently numb to helicopter swarms. Hoping to slowly work his way outside of their search grid, he kept his head tucked and did his best to waddle down the dirt road like a very expectant Muslim lady. He laughed to himself. His buddies were right—Stella really was a ball breaker. She had reduced a warrior to the kind of guy his buddies had always insisted that she wanted—barefoot and pregnant.

Gunfire echoed from a few streets away. In seconds, the casual shots turned into a heated exchange. The locals melted into the buildings as one of the Black Hawks dipped down and the Little Bird seemed to maneuver low to get a better view of the action. Suddenly, several AKs fired and the place sounded like New Year's Eve in Chinatown. The celebration was moving toward him.

Jabal Ad Dhibban, Anbar Province
A Few Minutes Earlier

In '04 Camille had personally joined one of her advance teams, quietly paying house calls to some special residents on the eve of the Battle of Fallujah before the Marines moved in. Together with her operators, she had raided apartment buildings with sarin and VX chemical weapons labs. She had liberated torture chambers and walked through execution rooms right after tangos had finished live internet broadcasts. All of that was preferable to bursting through the doors of innocent civilians, violating every inch of their lives, and having to make split-second decisions as to whether they were grabbing for a gun. Anyone raising a weapon against them was an insurgent, they all told themselves as they squeezed the trigger.

The village was quiet except for stray gunshots and the whoosh of the helicopters. As Camille and her team left a building, she noticed the streets had suddenly cleared of children and locals. Her team leapfrogged across an intersection to the next block. When G
ENGHIS
was halfway across, an AK began popping nonstop and his right leg collapsed under him.

Rubicon.

G
ENGHIS
tumbled in a roll, stopping behind a rusted-out truck and returning fire. Camille had a clear shot at a Rubicon soldier. Whether she liked G
ENGHIS
or not didn't matter. He was part of her team and if a teammate was hurt, so was she. Without a thought to the larger political consequences, she squeezed off, but not for Black Management. Those shots were for G
ENGHIS
.

 

The Rubicon pilots were fucking crazy, even by Beach Dog's admittedly low standards. Everywhere he tried to move his Little Bird, one of the Rubicon Mi-8s blocked him. Twice they'd come within two rotors' distance. He could feel their breath, pushing hard against his helo.

“I say we take them out before those dickheads accidentally get us all killed,” Beach Dog said as he hung nose to nose with a Rubicon bird.

“Maintain position,” Iggy said as he watched the movement on the ground.

Beach Dog flipped them off. They returned the salute.

“Feel better now?” Iggy said.

“Not yet, sir.”

 

Camille keyed her mike and contacted Iggy. “T
IN
M
AN
this is L
IGHTNING
S
IX
. We're taking fire. Request some heat.”

“I'm having trouble keeping an eye on you and don't want to risk friendly fire. Rubicon's birds are playing chicken with Beach Dog,” Iggy said.

“Understood. Do what you can.”

Camille instructed her team to lay down suppressive fire and work their way one by one across the intersection to join G
ENGHIS
. Just as she started across, movement from a rooftop caught her eye. An arm holding an AK dropped over the side and blindly pelted the road. Camille ran ahead anyway and slid onto the ground beside G
ENGHIS
. “You okay?”

“Nothing like a little fresh lead in the morning to kick-start the day.” G
ENGHIS
ignored the wound, fired, and a tango collapsed. Without missing a beat, he retargeted and shot another one.

Weapons fire erupted from the rooftops. Iraqis with assault rifles jumped outside of doorways, fired, then sprang back inside.

“Fucking Jack-in-the-box
muj
,” G
ENGHIS
said. A spot was growing on his 5.11s as if he had sat down in blood. The unit's medic ran over to him and started cutting away the seat of his pants.

Camille leaned around the old truck and fired at a Rubicon soldier. The sound of AKs got louder by the second as word of the action spread from one Iraqna cell phone to another and more and more insurgents joined in.

The ants had discovered the picnic.

Beach Dog maneuvered the Little Bird toward the highway that bordered the village. It was the main road linking Fallujah and Ramadi—the tango turn-pike. They swooped down low enough to get a good view of a parking lot that was filling with mopeds and old trucks that looked like they wouldn't move even on a downhill slope. Over one hundred men stood around, each of them carrying an AK. All of them wore the green headbands of the Mahdi's Army and several carried green flags.

Iggy keyed his radio. “C
HALK
O
NE
this is T
IN
M
AN
. We're monitoring hostile traffic coming into town. I'm moving you to join up with C
HALK
T
WO
. Head back west, two blocks, then take a right and stand by.”

“L
IGHTNING
S
IX
here. Situation deteriorating. Taking it from all sides—Rubicon and tangos—pinned down. You're authorized to use necessary force.”

 

Iggy studied the crowd through a pair of binoculars. Beach Dog was amazed at Iggy's use of the prosthetic hand. The digits didn't seem to move all that well, but the guy sure knew how to get everything he could out of them. Another truckload of tangos arrived.

“I'm telling you, man,” Beach Dog said. “They're not here for a church picnic. Those dudes are looking to pick up chicks—as in seventy-two virgins.”

“I don't like turkey shoots if there's a chance civilians are mixed in.”

“There's going to be a turkey shoot, but our guys are going to be the turkeys,” Beach Dog said.

Beach Dog thought he saw a
muj
carrying a long tube. Something flashed and a smoke trail streaked toward them.

“RPG!”

Beach Dog slammed the controls and the Little Bird went sideways up into the air, leapfrogging over a Rubicon Mi-8. Before he could take a breath, a fireball engulfed the Rubicon helo. Like a cartoon character who had run off a cliff, the helicopter spun around once in place in the air, then plummeted straight down to earth. A main rotor hit a house, then the others snapped off one by one. Beach Dog pushed the Little Bird into a steep climb and looked away. Witnessing a bird's death throe was too painful.

 

Camille saw a flash of flames in the sky. She and G
ENGHIS
made eye contact. She was thinking it, but G
ENGHIS
said it. “Mog.” Mogadishu. The Somalian capital was the site of the battle that every operator had on his mind as soon as things started going to hell.

 

“I'm telling you, man, we're looking at Mogadishu—Black Hawk down. I know what I'm saying. I flew strafing runs nonstop thirteen hours straight,” Beach Dog said, shaking his head as he remembered the afternoon mission in 1993 that was supposed to be a thirty-minute cakewalk, but instead had dragged into a long, bloody night of urban warfare that left eighteen dead and every one of the one hundred sixty warriors wounded—one way or another. Beach Dog stared at the downed helicopter and could remember the thick black smoke from the two downed Black Hawks curling into the dark blue African sky that day. What he was staring at didn't look so different. He could feel his frustration from trying to direct lost Delta Force and Rangers through Mogadishu's windings streets and his helplessness as he had watched thousands of militia crawl all over them. He took a deep breath and felt his stomach muscles clench as he watched more tangos arrive in the parking lot below. “I'm telling you, we've got to take them out now.”

“I know,” Iggy said as he watched more packed trucks pull up. “We're not going to have a repeat on my watch. Waste the motherfuckers before they scatter. I don't want a single
muj
to walk out of that parking lot”

“You got it. I'll work the gun unless you have a real hankering for it.”

“Do it.”

The comm was jammed with everyone talking at once. Iggy raised his voice to shut them up, then gave instructions to the two Black Management Hawks which were flying under the call signs P
ANTHER
O
NE
and T
WO
. “P
ANTHER
O
NE
, T
IN
M
AN
. Your sector of fire is the northwest side of town. Engage tangos turning off the highway. Do not engage Rubicon vehicles at this time. P
ANTHER TWO
maintain your overwatch position in the center of town and engage rooftop targets at your discretion.”

Beach Dog calculated his approach and egress options with a single glance. The Little Bird would come in steep and fast from the southwest side of the village, hit the target and cease fire right before the highway. He would throw the helo into evasive turns as he climbed out over the gravel piles of a crude cement factory on the other side.

He headed the Little Bird to the southwest side of the village. When he had the distance he wanted, he swung it completely around, aligned it with the main road coming off the highway and checked the Gatling gun switches. “Initiating first pass.” He threw her into a steep dive and yelled, “Banzai!”

A few seconds later, Beach Dog pressed the trigger and scores of bodies tumbled to the ground as if someone had jerked a giant carpet out from under them.

“Nice shooting,” Iggy said with a smile. “And Beach Dog, those of us on the ground that night in Mog appreciated you working overtime.”

“Is that where you picked up the spare parts?” Beach Dog threw the helicopter into a steep climb.

“Afghanistan. Operation Anaconda.”

“Now I heard Anaconda was a real turkey shoot.”

“A cluster fuck's more like it. Turkey shoot's the military's official version.” Iggy looked down to assess the damage. “Take us in for a second pass.”

 

Hunter recognized the sounds and did his best to make a mental picture of the battlefield, but he couldn't figure out what the hell was going on, except that Stella had her hands full with insurgents flocking to the action. There was a reason the good guys worked at night and she knew better than to stick around anywhere for more than a few minutes in the daylight. Her passions always did threaten her judgment, not that she would ever believe it. She would claim it only happened with him and, on second thought, she might be right. They had a way of stirring passion in one another.

He watched the RPG slam into the Rubicon Mi-8, then felt the thunder of the crash. Black Management's Little Bird swooping in behind it with its machine guns blazing blew his mind. He had never imagined that Stella would ally with Rubicon to neutralize him, though he wasn't going to completely rule out that they were both after him, getting in each other's way. At least the woman was making more sense to him as he felt his own anger. The more he thought about Stella in the trailer reaching for a weapon to kill him right after they'd made love, the more the anger grew. A little jealousy over the tattoo with another woman's name on it, he could understand, but she had been out for blood. Before, he had not been able to understand her ferocity, but now he, too, had something burning inside, the flames leaping higher as he thought about the audacity of Stella sending her own private army after him.

He was on fire.

No way in hell was she going to get him.

Gunfire came from all directions. He hunched behind an old wooden cart, closed his eyes for a moment and listened for the distinctive crackle of M4s. The constant AK fire made it nearly impossible to localize any sounds, but he made his best guess and headed away from the Americans, toward the tangos.

 

Camille knew they would take more casualties if they couldn't stop the rooftop action. Had it been Rubicon instead of the insurgents, she was sure that she and her troops would all be dead, but the tangos were sloppy. She was deciding who she would take with her if they had to fight their way to the rooftops when the call came in from Iggy that the machine guns of a Black Hawk were on their way.

“Inform P
ANTHER
T
WO
that as soon as their gunners engage, C
HALK
O
NE
is moving,” Camille said.

“That's affirmative,” Iggy said. “Stay with a compass heading of 220 for one-half click for the nearest possible LZ. We're too tied up here to direct you to C
HALK
T
WO
. You'll rendezvous there.”

Camille listened for the whoosh of the Black Hawks and realized she heard only AK fire and the wailing call to prayer coming from the distance.

Rubicon had pulled back.

She hoped the downed helicopter was enough of a black eye to get them to focus on the insurgents and quit messing with her. She had to get her troops out of there before more tangos arrived and pinned them down.

P
ANTHER
T
WO
roared overhead and its staccato machine gun fire was deafening. Camille flashed hand signals to her men to move out. She extended her hand to G
ENGHIS
and he surprised her by taking it. He pulled himself to his feet, then pushed her away.

Their guns fanning the streets ahead, they worked their way toward the pick-up zone. The situation had gone to hell faster than she'd anticipated and she couldn't risk her troops any further.