Reflexive Fire - 01 (26 page)

   Sergeant Sasha depressed the clacker.

   Twenty-four Yugoslavian claymore mines had had their backs removed by the demolition team.  Small amounts of the mine's TNT explosive had been extracted, and then detonation chord had been substituted and strung from mine to mine, daisy chaining them down the entire length of the linear ambush.  The center mine had a blasting cap inserted into it with the clacker attached by a wire.

   The mines exploded, shredding human flesh, shattering glass, and pock marking steel.  The awful sounds of the dead and dying filled the sulfur-laced air with their screams.  The ambushers opened fire with machine guns and assault rifles.  The RPG teams had rockets primed and laid out next to them, firing shot after shot in rapid succession.

   The lucky ones were killed in the initial blast; the less fortunate UWSA irregulars were left wounded, only to suffer the gunfire and anti-tank rockets that slammed into the wreckage of the trucks.  The fuel tank on one of the surplus cargo trucks ignited, lifting the back two tires clean off the ground in a brilliant fireball.

   Another truck skidded through the mud with two burst tires, before rolling on its side.  As it slammed onto its flank, the dead militiamen riding in the back were flung into the air. 

   After a full minute, the onslaught was completed, and Sasha called for a ceasefire over his radio.  They listened for the sounds of anyone left alive.  Moans and groans sounded ahead of them on the road.  Someone was yelling for help in his native tongue.  Sasha was distracted by something out of place in the trees above him.

   The light produced by the burning truck illuminated the woodline and allowed him to discern what he was looking it.  It was a human torso thrown into the trees, intestines unraveled behind it and strung through the branches.

   “Assault!”

   The ambush line picked up and moved forward to finish the job.

   Chuck took aim at the nearest sentry and milked the trigger, the Kazakh next to him doing the same a fraction of a second later.

   The two sentries collapsed, head shots making sure that they never knew what hit them.  Closing the distance, a First Squad trooper opened the heavy steel door to the ammunition factory and held it for Chuck to drag the two bodies inside.  The UWSA gunmen guarding the compound were now so spooked by all the shooting going on at other objectives that they were shooting at ghosts outside the wire and sending up flares every thirty seconds.

   Two shots were not enough to alert them to what was actually happening under their noses.

   Pulling the corpses inside, the mercenaries shut the door, posting one man as a guard.  Through the windows running along the warehouse, they could see shadows darting back and forth.  Full-blown panic was taking hold of the militiamen at this point, fear eating them from the inside out.

   Chuck could now see the equipment needed to manufacture the ammunition laid out in an assembly line fashion.  There were furnaces for melting lead, with various sized bullet molds, presses, and boxes full of spent shells for reloading, but what was most interesting were the drums full of magnesium phosphate, used in the production of tracer rounds, and drums of white phosphorus, for making incendiary rounds.

   The ex-SEAL felt like he had just scored the winning touchdown of the Super Bowl.

   “Go to work.”

   The Kazakh mercenaries fanned out while one man watched the door.  Chuck assisted in the placement of the satchel charges.  Several of the twenty pound satchels were spread around the fifty-five gallon drums of explosive chemicals.  The squad hurried, placing other charges around the presses and other machinist tools used for production.

   “Sergei,” Chuck whispered to get the Kazakh's attention.  The troop guarding the door looked back at him.

   “Are we clear?”

   The mercenary cracked open the door and peered out to make sure their route back to the trench line was unobstructed.  Looking back, he nodded his head to the big American.

   “Everyone ready?”

   Seven sets of eyes drilled into him, ready to go.

   “On three,” he ordered.  The satchels had one minute of time fuse on them and needed to be initiated simultaneously.  It wasn't the most precise way to use explosives, but it would get the job done.  If anything, this much demo was overkill.

   “Three, two, one-”

   The Kazakhs pulled the pins on the fuse igniters, beginning the burn sequence on the time fuse.  Lining up on the door, they flowed back outside, Chuck moving out last to make sure no one was left behind.

   Like race horses out of the gates, the squad ran at full speed back towards the trench where their comrades lay in wait.  Each of them had plenty of motivation to put distance between themselves and the factory as their lungs burned, chest rigs bouncing back and forth full of grenades and spare magazines.

   They were half way to the trench when another flare shot up into the sky.

   Popping once it reached altitude, the flare illuminated the squad, and they came under fire a heartbeat later.  Staccato bursts of machine gun fire searched them out.  The militiamen occupying the other bunkers sent gunfire in three hundred and sixty degrees, crisscrossing the entire compound.  Tracers skipped by, missing them by inches, stray bullets kicking up dirt at their feet.

   The mercenary squad ran even harder, their strides eating up the ground in front of them.

   The Samruk soldiers crouching in the trenches returned fire, shooting at the other bunkers.  One mercenary cut loose, blasting one of the outbuildings with a RPG that exploded into the wall and collapsed it.  First Squad dived back into the trench, Chuck sliding into home and falling on top of another one of the mercs.

   “Everyone down!” he yelled.

   The Kazakhs ducked as Chuck fired his own red pin flare into the air, signaling the support by fire line.  Four PKM machine guns fired on automatic, sweeping the objective with 7.62 rounds for several seconds until the ammunition plant exploded, turning night into day.

   The explosion blew the factory's roof sky high, throwing debris everywhere as the C4 ignited the phosphorus and magnesium.  The fireball rose into the air like a miniature mushroom cloud, finally burning off into a thick plume of dark smoke.

   Most of the platoon had to pick themselves up and out of the mud, the blast having knocked them off their feet; then they hit the ground again as debris began raining back down to earth.  Hot pieces of metal hissed as they fell into the muddy puddles.

   Chuck glanced back in the bunker.  The twelve-year-old kid was still squirming against his restraints, trying to yell through the gag secured over his mouth.  He looked back at the flaming wreck that had been an ammunition plant until a moment ago.

   “Damn,” he said, shaking his head.  “This is your lucky day, kid.”

Twenty Two

   Liora turned her cell phone over in her hand, wringing it in her pants pocket.

   For the first time, she cursed her high scores on placement exams, the ones that earned her a potentially career making opportunity, working out of the nondescript building just outside Tel Aviv.  She had looked forward to conscription, but if she got caught now, well, she knew Shin Bet would make sure she never saw the light of day.

   Ignoring inappropriate glances from her male co-worker, she excused herself to use the restroom as she set her headset down and got up from behind her station.  She didn't know what he was looking at with all of her buried under her ill-fitting olive drab uniform. 

  
Whatever.

   With all the action popping off tonight, she had to hurry before the brass started showing up.

   Unit 8200 was the Israeli answer to signals intelligence analysis.  They took the information gathered by the Urim signals unit in the Negev Desert and rendered the intercepted data into actionable intelligence before delivering the intel packets to the Israeli Defense Forces and Mossad.

   As a girl she had read lots of science fiction, quickly growing bored with school work, but even she was shocked by some of the technology she'd been exposed to since she started working at the unit.  They tracked everything going through the air in four continents, not to mention underwater, Mossad units having installed taps on underwater communications cables that linked the Middle East to Europe by way of Sicily.

   They monitored Inmarsat, commercial satellite communications, used direction finding stations to track maritime shipping, and listened in to diplomatic traffic between embassies.  That wasn't even including mobile SIGINT platforms that flew orbits over the Palestinian territories day and night.

   Making sure the coast was clear, she ducked into the female restroom and locked herself in a stall.  Officially the building was a Faraday cage that stifled civilian cellular signals.  Realistically, a girl with an IQ well into the genius range finds ways to piggyback on existing military systems.

   Flipping open her cell phone, she made the call.

   The Iridium phone rang again and again amidst the chaos of the field hospital.

   A stainless steel bowl filled with bloody medical instruments fell to the ground with a crash while patients wailed in pain.

   Nick muttered something under his breath in frustration.

   He'd lost two patients.

   The filled body bags lining one of the building's walls didn't let him forget that fact.

   He didn't know the mercenaries personally, but like a sniper missing a thousand meter shot, it was a blow to his professional ego.  The former Special Forces operator turned surgeon wasn't used to losing.  Not a life, not a drag race, not a video game, not anything.

   The Kazakh on his surgery table had stepped on a landmine, a toe-popper, with just enough sauce in it to take off his foot up to the distal tibia and strip away a good portion of the soft tissue around his lower leg.  Thankfully, his teammates had been well trained and immediately applied a tourniquet to their injured buddy's leg, or he would have bled out in under a minute.

   Nick treated the casualty for shock, administered antibiotics, and was now putting a nerve block around several key nerve clusters in the limb to ease the pain.  In the past, such a procedure would only be conducted in the sterile medical setting of a hospital.  Combat had a way of shifting priorities.

   Using a large gauge syringe, Nick went into what was left of the amputated limb and injected a combination of lidocaine and epinephrine.  The bulbous sack of painkillers would rest against the nerve endings, slowly diffusing across them to relieve the casualty's agony until he was received in a proper facility.

   The injured mercenary looked a lot better than when he had arrived at the field hospital but the men waiting in triage didn't sound so hot.

   “Let's get this guy moved,” Nick stated gruffly.

   The Kazakhs assigned to his detail moved in and transported the casualty off the gurney to make room for the next guy who had been waiting on deck, another kid, this one with a serious looking stomach wound. 

   Stripping off his surgical gloves, Nick found a towel and wiped the sweat off his brow.  If the rest of the battalion got chewed up as bad as Charlie Company he was in for a long night.  Bringing over a sterile set of medical tools, Andy was still on assist.  Setting them down, he bent over to clean up the tools that had been dropped to the floor.

   Nick immediately set to work on the gutshot mercenary as the detailed men brought him over and set him on the table.

   Setting the blood and gore-covered tools to the side, Andy thought he could hear something above the racket and went looking for its source.  He found the phone sitting on top of a tan colored assault pack.  It was the Charlie Company commander's satellite phone.

   The new CO and another guy with a sniper rifle slung over his shoulder were talking to each other in hushed tones in the corner of the building.

   “Hey,” Andy said, getting their attention.  “Someone's trying to call.”

   The balding commander walked over and took the phone from him.

   “Thanks,” he said, repositioning the phone's antenna.

   His green camouflage uniform was splattered with bits of bone and specks of blood.  He stank of cordite and death.

   “Hello,” Adam said, taking the call. 

   As the voice on the other end spoke, his eyes grew wider.