Reflexive Fire - 01 (16 page)

   Kurt considered his options.  At any moment the ZSU gunners were liable to see him, and he didn't have any illusions about a few rocks protecting him from twin streams of 23mm bullets.

   “Mendez, this is Kurt.  Fire mission, over.”

   “Kurt, this is Mendez.  Fire mission, over,” the radio crackled.

   “Grid mission,” Kurt said, looking down at a topographical map.  “42S 1350 7595.”  He rattled off the most accurate grid possible under the circumstances.  Reaching into the pocket sewn onto the shoulder of his fatigue jacket, he retrieved the Silva compass he had carried since his orienteering days as a teenager.  “253 degrees.”

   The compass only read degrees, so Phil would have to convert the number to mils for use by the mortar teams.  Really it was the least of his problems.  The anti-aircraft gun chopped away at the mountainside with a hailstorm of automatic fire.

   He had a fat finger trying to read digits and analyze terrain features in the dark with just a small red lens flashlight.  At any rate he was definitely into the red with this one.

   “Danger close.  Anti-aircraft cannon, no overhead cover.”

   “Roger.”

   The pause seemed to go on forever while he waited for Mendez to get his guns aligned.

   “Shot, over.” 

   “Shot, out.”

   “Splash, over.”

   Kurt's jaw tensed.  There was a certain margin of error when using mortars at over a klick away and having them land right in front of you.  He was only a hundred meters from the intended target.

   The 82mm HE round went wide, landing to the right of the ZSU-23.  Kurt blew out his cheeks.  Not that he didn't have faith in the mortar section or anything.

   “Splash, out.  Left two hundred meters.”

   It was hard to adjust fire at night with limited equipment.  He could have Mendez fire an illumination round first to light up the area, which would give him forty seconds or so of light to make adjustments, but in the meantime who knew how many hidden mercenaries he'd be buddy fucking if the light revealed their positions and subjected them to more than half a minute of fire from that cannon?

   He'd just walk the rounds laterally until he got them behind the gun and then walk them in.

   “Shot, over.”

   “Shot, out.”

   “Splash, over.”

   The mortar round exploded smack dab behind the ZSU.

   “Splash, out.  Drop fifty meters.  Fire for effect.”

   “Drop fifty.  Fire for effect.”

   While the mortar tubes could be heard bellowing in the distance, the rounds themselves didn't whistle as they soared overhead.

   Three 82mm mortar tubes hung ten rounds apiece in rapid succession, the high explosives detonating all around the ZSU, rocking the gun and its crew with blast after blast that lit up the night, casting spooky shadows across the rocky ground.

   By the time Phil and his boys were done, there probably wouldn't be enough of the bad guys left to soak up with a sponge.

   “Let's go, lift that cross bar,” Deckard ordered, stepping forward to help the five Kazakhs struggling with the heavy wooden beam.  With a final grunt, the six of them were able to lift the beam from the metal braces it sat in and drop it on the tunnel floor.

   The twin metal doors sounded like nails on a chalkboard as they were pushed open.  Deckard gave the halt sign to the Kazakhs with a closed fist and began walking towards the mouth of the tunnel.  Linking up with friendly forces in the middle of a firefight had an exceedingly high probability of some kind of blue on blue incident going down.  Friendly fire usually wasn't.

   Confronted with a series of ninety degree turns, he snaked through the passage, which was wide enough to drive a truck through.  The turns were designed to prevent Uncle Sam from launching a cruise missile straight into the mountain fortress through the front door.  Feeling his way through the darkness, he could hear the occasional
crump, crump, crump
of mortars.

   The fight wasn't over yet.

   Turning the last bend, Deckard could see the mouth of the tunnel and flipped on his radio just in time to hear someone who sounded like Mendez making a transmission.  It was coming in garbled and undecipherable, due to him still being underground.

   The ground shook hard enough to knock Deckard to his hands and knees.  His first thought was an earthquake, until he registered thirty or more mortar rounds striking a position that couldn't be more than fifty meters from where he stood.

   As the tunnel flooded with dust, a supporting beam jutting across the ceiling fell free, shaken loose by the onslaught outside and landed with a crash just inches from Deckard's head.

   Coughing and spitting out dust, he snapped a green chem stick and tossed it outside the mouth of the tunnel, giving the all-clear signal.

   “Any station on this net,” he choked out, “this is Samruk Six.”

   “Hey, O'Brien.  This is Kurt.”

   Apparently call signs had fallen by the wayside during the fog of war or something.

   “You see my green chem?”

   “
Scheisse
.  Is that you?”

   “Yeah.”

   “Are you okay?  There was an anti-aircraft gun right next to the opening of the tunnel.  I didn't even know it was there until you mentioned the chem stick you just threw out.”

   “I'll live.  Move up and secure this area.  As soon as that's done, I need you and Adam in here.”

   “Roger.”

   “Got it,” Adam's voice came over the net.

   Standing at the entrance to the tunnel, Deckard watched sunlight creeping over the horizon, casting long shadows across the mountains.  It created a panorama that looked like a Nicolas Roerich painting.  The infiltration and assault had taken all night.  With pilots unwilling to fly into such a hotly contested area during daylight, they were stuck out in the hinterlands until nightfall.

  
Motherfucker.

  
Reconsolidation and reorganization took an additional forty-five minutes.  Deckard knew from past experience that it would take some time to get their act together with the entire company spread out over difficult terrain.  All troops had to be accounted for.  Wounded needed to be identified and treated.  Dead needed to found and gathered in a centralized location.

   After writing the final numbers down on an index card, his eyes seemed frozen on the figures.  Twelve dead, twenty-three wounded.  Most of the wounded were ambulatory, but three, including the sucking chest wound he had observed earlier, were urgent surgical.

   Sliding the card into the front pouch of his assault rig, Deckard knew the mission was far from over.  Not until the helicopters set down at Bagram Airfield would he even begin to let his guard down.

   Looking over his shoulder and down the corridor, he could hear the muffled sounds of Adam interrogating the two prisoners in a side room.  The walls of the hallway were littered with empty crates and what looked like oversized sardine tins, all three platoons having replenished their AK magazines from the enemy stockpile.  Richie directed the several Kazakhs assisting him in setting the charges, linking them off the line of detonation chord running down the hall.

   Piled at the mouth of the tunnel were several crates of recovered 82mm mortar rounds.

   “Richie, how long?” Deckard shouted down the hall to him.

   “Five minutes,” Richie shrugged.

   “Kurt,” he said, walking into the kitchen area that had been converted into the casualty collection point, “do me a favor and tell the platoon sergeants that I want all three platoons moved out of here.  Find some fortified areas outside to hunker down in until nightfall and move the dead and wounded there.  We're going to demo this place in ten minutes,” he said, adding a buffer to Richie's estimation.

   “No problem,” Kurt said looking up from one of the wounded Kazakhs he was tending to.

   “How is Chuck?”

   “Concussion.  He'll be okay in a few days.  When you suffer that kind of blast, your brain gets bounced around and bruised pretty bad.  That's why he looks drunk right now.”

   Looking across the room, Charles Rochenoire did indeed look like he'd been on all-night bender, and if Kurt had not vouched for the salvo of RPG fire he was in the middle of, Deckard probably wouldn't have believed the concussion story.

   Supposedly, a Kazakh corporal had found Chuck wandering around the mountain absentmindedly with a PKM, firing at any rocks or sandbags that looked at him the wrong way.

   “I also want Third Platoon to carry those recovered mortar rounds down to Mendez and then reinforce the mortar section.”

   “That's a hike.”

   “I don't want to leave him out there by himself all day.  If need be, he can collapse back to our position.  I don't like splitting our forces in half, anyway.”

   Moving back outside, Deckard took a knee as Third Platoon came pouring out behind him, carrying the crates of mortar rounds.  The men looked tired but motivated, several of them walking wounded.  Deep down he knew they were better then he deserved.

   “Mendez,” he said, keying the radio.  “I'm sending Third Platoon down to you with a resupply.”

   “Ah, okay,” the mortar section leader paused.  With the sun cresting above the horizon, he probably hadn't waited a moment longer to light up a smoke.  “Cool, I'll be waiting for 'em.”

   “Roger, out.”

   Deckard watched Third Platoon as they made their way down the mountain on the donkey paths, the mercenaries growing smaller as they got farther away until they looked like a line of ants.  By then First and Second platoon were emerging from the bunkers, carrying the dead and dying on improvised stretchers.  Chuck stumbled along with them incoherently.  Frank brought up the rear.  His assault pack was overflowing with potential intelligence sources he'd found on the objective.

   “What have you got?”

   “A laptop, a few hard drives I pulled out of computers, bunch of documents, a couple Thuraya satellite phones, took down serial numbers off of everything including the lot numbers off the ammo crates.”

   “Don't let that pack leave your sight.  I want you and Adam all over that shit as soon as we get back to Astana.”

   “Right on.”

   “Alright, get up there and assist Kanat and Alibek for now.”

   “Groovy.”

   Frank grunted, following the Kazakhs up to another fortified area they had found.

   Deckard moved back inside, personally checking each room to ensure that no one was left behind.  All he found were the bodies of insurgents with flies crawling across their lifeless eyeballs. 

   “Adam,” he said, finding the ad hoc interrogation room.  “Move those two jokers out of here with the rest of the company.  This place is about ready to go.”

   The two prisoners had had their hands tied with some rope as they were not carrying flex cuffs or other conventional restraints.  One of them was a grimy looking creep; the other an older guy with a beard.