Reflexive Fire - 01 (13 page)

   “Mida, mida!”

   Mendez turned around, recognizing his name in Kazakh dialect.  As per common sense, the worst soldier in the mortar section got assigned to monitor the field telephone.  This guy couldn't lay on a mortar system if his life depended on it.  Thankfully, the rest of the section was full of fast learners.

   “Yeah,” Mendez said, holding the receiver to his ear, fighting the urge to light up a cigarette.

   “Hey, it’s Frank.”

   “What's up?”

   “The boss wants you to fire up the TRPs in, hold on,” Frank paused for a moment, “exactly three minutes.”

   “No shit?”

   “No shit.”

   “Okay, better keep your head down.”

   “It's not me you need to worry about.”

   Mendez passed the telephone back to his make-a-wish foundation soldier and consulted his Fire Direction Center board.

   “Gun One.”

   All three gun teams jumped to their feet.  It was time to work.

   “Five rounds, HE Quick.  Deflection-”

   “Three o' clock, three hundred meters,” Piet whispered, one eye fixed on his target through the magnification of his Leopold scope.  “Three boogers behind the stone wall.  AKs.  Looks like a DShK mounted behind the wall as well.”

   “Da,” Nikita and Askar answered in unison.

   The Kazakh snipers lay side by side the South African watching, unblinking through their sights.  With the proper night vision not having arrived in Astana in time, they were reduced to duct taping the standard PVS-14 NVG tubes to their sniper scopes to see at night.  It was primitive, but effective.  When their American commander had seen their improvised night scopes he had remarked to them,
if you can’t duck it, fuck it
.

   “Quarter value wind, right to left.  Hold a heavy quarter on him.”

   They breathed shallow breaths.

   In the distance they could see the insurgents up close and personal through ten-power scopes, watch them laugh amongst themselves and smoke cheap Pakistani cigarettes.  They'd spent weeks training, and now Piet would observe his students under combat conditions.  No one would shed a tear for dead terrorists, but it would be a blow to his ego if they missed the shot.

   “Steady,” he whispered, not expecting a reply.  By now they were focused, breathing and body position already relaxed.  They watched their targets and waited.

   Somewhere behind them, Piet heard the retort of three mortar tubes as 82mm high explosive rounds shot into the air on trajectory for enemy positions to their front.  Through the green tint of the night vision, they saw the reactions of the insurgents as they looked back and forth for the source of the distant sound.

   Piet turned the knob on his Motorola radio.  Open channel traffic would be used, once things went overt.  If he remembered the correct data from his days as a young gun bunny in the SADF, he estimated a time of flight of about twenty-five seconds.

   He had to adjust the knob as the Kazakh squad leaders jumped the gun by a few seconds and Russian chatter came over the net.  Then he realized he might be a few seconds off as the HE rounds slammed into enemy positions on the mountainside, detonating as they made contact with the ground, one after the other.

   Nikita and Askar gently squeezed the triggers on their rifles.   Piet watched their targets disappear behind the wall, impacts to their chests knocking them backwards.  Before they could transition to secondary targets, the support by fire line opened up, muzzle flashes lighting up the night as six PKMs went cyclic.

   The entire mountainside was lit ablaze.

Eleven

   The vibrations caused by exploding mortar rounds shook dirt loose from the ceiling.

   “Do it.”

   Richie pulled the pins on the dual primed initiation device, setting off the double strand of detonation chord taped in a circle around the stone wall.  Deckard had personally supervised to make sure that this time
P
was not applied to the breaching charge.

   The overpressure was intense.  The assault teams bore down with earplugs firmly in place, the force of the explosion knocking most to their knees and a few off their feet.  Deckard slammed one boot down on the floor and pushed off, sprinting fifty meters to the breach.

   Sure enough, the charge had crumbled the stone wall.  The rocks having been stacked on top of each other without any mortar being used meant that it didn't take much.  Glancing back to ensure the assault teams were on his heels, Deckard stepped through the breach.  The blast had taken out a few bulbs in the hallway, leaving him in the shadows.

   One of the insurgents leaned out of a doorway down the hall, investigating the blast just in time for Deckard to gain target acquisition with the VSS rifle.  Two rounds center mass dumped him on the ground for someone to clean up later.

   The Samruk assaulters stepped through the breach, stacking up along both walls.  Deckard took the first door on his left, tossing in a FMK2 hand grenade.  A few seconds later the combination of recrystalized hexogen and TNT exploded, turning the grenade's metal body into fragments that shot out in all directions in a fifteen foot radius.  Flowing into the room before the smoke dissipated, Deckard cleared the right corner, the Kazakh behind him clearing the left.

   As the rest of the assault team entered and cleared their sectors, several Afghan terrorists struggled out of their cots with blood streaming from their ears.  Breaking down their sectors of fire, the assaulters fired two rounds apiece from their AK-103s into the enemy before they had a chance to reach for dusty pistols and rifles.

   Deckard joined the Kazakhs in a preliminary search of the room while grenades were detonated outside by other assault teams.  Kicking over beds and overturning carpets produced nothing of immediate interest.

   Lining up on the door for an organized exit, Deckard was about to call them out into the hall, when one of the PKM gunners opened up.  A few screams later, and one of the Kazakhs yelled to the machine gunner pulling security down the corridor.  The gunner yelled something back, and the stack flowed back into the hall.

   Stepping over several fresh corpses, the assault team leapfrogged past another team clearing what looked like a kitchen area and lined up on the next available doorway.  With the second man in the stack preparing another frag grenade, the gun team picked up their machine gun and ammunition, coming up alongside to provide cover fire as needed.

   The assaulter winged the fragmentation grenade into the room and waited.  Without warning, one of the insurgents came running through the door, trying to avoid the blast.  The lead Kazakh slammed the muzzle of his AK into the Afghan's chest, knocking him back through the door as the grenade detonated.

   This time Deckard was the last in the stack and patiently followed the mercenaries as they took their points of domination inside the room.  Striding through the door, he felt like the entire room was flashing in slow motion.  The muzzle flash of an enemy's AK-47 blinked like a disco strobe light in the dark as he blasted away, 7.62 rounds spraying everywhere.  Deckard sidestepped out of the door as quickly as possible, the Kazakh standing to his flank dropping to the ground like a marionette that had its strings suddenly cut.

   The remaining assaulters turned their guns on the muzzle flash, emptying magazines at the threat.  Riddled with bullets, the insurgent was punched backwards by the hail of gunfire.  As the mercenaries secured the room, Deckard moved to evaluate the injured assaulter.  No need, he realized.  The enemy's shots had caught him in the face and neck.

   Deckard made a mental note that this room needed to be searched and marked for demolition.  The walls were stacked nearly to the ceiling with wooden crates showing dust-covered Cyrillic writing.  He recognized most of them as being ammunition crates, mostly for PG-7 rocket-propelled grenades and 7.62x39 AK rounds.  Others he wasn't so sure about.  Blasting the stanchions that ran down the center of ammunition depot would probably do it.

   The commandos quickly took turns loading fresh magazines into their rifles before Deckard yelled out to the machine gun team.

   “Coming out!”

   “Da!”

   Back in the corridor, Deckard glanced down the hall.  The barricaded entrance to the bunker complex at the end would lead outside.  He was surprised how fast they were clearing and advancing through the complex, even with six assault teams leapfrogging each other.  Collectively, his team cringed as another group let loose a grenade across the hall.

   Reaching over and grabbing the PKM gunner to bring him down the hall with them, Deckard was preparing his assaulters to take the next room, when an Afghan calmly walked into the middle of the corridor from the room at the end of the hall.

   Everyone shouldered their weapons just a moment too late as the terrorist leveled an RPG-7 launcher in their direction and pulled the trigger.  

   Chuck Rochenoire had lived his life by some very simple words.

  
When in doubt, shoot from the hip and go with what you know.

   Hence the six lines of green parachute chord, tied to the web gear of each PKM gunner on the support by fire line.  After all six guns went cyclic on the target area for fifteen seconds the former SEAL yanked the strings, signaling them to cease fire.

   Next he pulled the string tied to the first gunner and let him fire for five seconds before pulling the string tied to the second gunner.  When gun two fired, it was the signal for gun one to shut down.  After another five seconds he tugged on the string tied to gun three, and the process continued all the way down the line as they swept the enemy with a powerful base of fire.  Chuck would continue to use the 'dopes on a rope' method until the machine gunners gained more experience.  Eventually they wouldn't need him or the parachute chord to dump huge amounts of coordinated fire on the enemy.

   With their barrels beginning to glow in the darkness, the titanium frame Russian machine guns were proving their worth, alongside the gunners themselves.  Assistant gunners reloaded and readied fresh belts of 7.62x54 rimmed ammunition during down periods.  Meanwhile, each gunner actively tracked targets, carefully using the red arc of his tracers to walk his fire less than a dozen meters in front of the advancing assault line.

   By the time the enemy was out from under the onslaught of machine gun fire, the assault line composed of two entire rifle platoons would be right on top of them.

   Chuck was laughing on the inside.

   Kanat grabbed the rifleman, pulling him backward to stay parallel with the rest of the assaulters on line with each other.  Some of the mercenaries were getting over excited and scrambling ahead of their comrades, sending the platoon sergeant into fits of rage, barking corrections as the assaulters stalked forward.

   Arriving at the first of the enemy positions, the platoon sergeant reached into his pocket, retrieving a chem stick.  Snapping it mixed the chemicals inside, causing it to glow bright orange.  Hurling it across the objective, he gave the signal to the support by fire line to shift fire.

   Seeing the tracer fire move from their immediate front to lay suppressive fire deeper into the objective, the platoon sergeant yelled to the riflemen to sweep and clear.  Second and Third Platoon advanced forward, individual squad leaders taking change and clearing stone pill boxes and mud huts built into the side of the mountain, finding plenty of fresh corpses created by mortar and machine gun fire.

   In between the rapid bursts of PKM fire, individual rifle shots could be heard as the Kazakhs double-tapped downed enemy combatants, assuring that the dead were truly dead.

   Kurt Jager terminated a brief conversation with Chuck over his Motorola radio and ducked as a grenade exploded, showering him with rock and debris.  More rifle fire was exchanged in the distance.    Having established a foothold within the enemy's fortified positions, they would now wait for weapons squad to displace themselves to somewhere that they could better support the assault.  The objective area was simply too big to be adequately covered by a static support by fire line.

   Kurt yelled to several Kazakhs and pointed out where he wanted them to pull security until Chuck arrived.  Taking cover behind a dirt berm, the mercenaries almost immediately began taking enemy fire.  Stepping over the bodies of several insurgents that the sniper team had eliminated before they arrived, Kurt moved to a DShK heavy machine gun mounted on a tripod.

   Thankfully, the enemy had been deprived of the opportunity to use it against them, but now he had to act fast.

   Reaching into his cargo pocket, he pulled out a flex linear charge he had made out of detonation chord, deciding to improvise a bit to destroy the machine gun before moving on.  The last thing they needed was an insurgent getting behind them as they continued to clear the area and man the 12.7mm Soviet cannon.

   Kurt wrapped the door charge around the barrel and affixed the time fuse in place.  He was just about done with the square knot when he heard someone shout in Pashto.

   A single shot cracked in the darkness.

   The German shuddered, expecting an impact.

   Turning, he saw an insurgent on the roof of a hut ten meters away pitch forward over the edge and crash into the ground below, taking a long dirt nap.

   “Watch yourself,” Piet's voice said over the radio.

   Kurt shook his head, finishing the preparation of the explosives as Chuck and his PKM gunners came shuffling toward him, ducking their heads as green tracer fire crisscrossed the night sky.

   “Chuck, glad you could make it.”

   “Wherethefuckarethesemotherfuckers?”

   “We should keep three guns on our right flank, so we can hold the high ground.  Detach the rest of the guns to the assault squads for immediate support by fire.  The terrain looks rough ahead.”

   “Got it,” Chuck said.  “I'll take the three gun teams and leave the other three with you, so you can explain it to them.”

   Kurt nodded in agreement.

   Chuck Rochenoire policed up his men and headed uphill, eyes already scanning for a new place to station his men for the duration of the assault.

   Turning away from the DShK, Kurt began speaking in Russian to the remaining machine gun teams, knowing that lost time meant the assault lost momentum.  Seconds later, the Kazakhs acknowledged their understanding and began to break off to find individual squads. 

   Standing up, Kurt was about to call Chuck over the radio, when something heavy rolled between his feet.