Tom Avitabile - The Hammer of God

To the doomed lookouts at the forward post, there was only the sudden percussion of 250 heavy white-hot bullets slamming into and shredding them and everything around them. They never heard or saw the black copters approach.

On the co-pilots HUD, all he now saw were cooling pieces of bodies and glowing hot holes where the bullets either lay embedded cooling in the night air or starting small fires where they met something material. What a few seconds earlier were four distinct heat signatures, was now a mess of green dots and clumps.

“Target neutralized,” crackling over the pilots headset, was the only epitaph the dead men, who they were now zooming over, would ever get. Foxtrot Alpha flared up at 100-feet and held off at 50-yards, its co-pilot picking off random targets in the compound, while Foxtrot Bravo went in for a strut jump. Hovering four feet from the ground as the men piled out 50 yards from the main building 20 seconds later, Foxtrot Bravo was 12 feet off the roof as five repel lines sprang out from each side. A door gunner training his counterbalanced 7.62 mm mini-gun down onto the roof to clip anybody trying to stop the deployment.

“Eight kills, 35 seconds into breach, and no sign of counterattack,” the Captain manning the console reported to the room in the Pentagon. He was watching an array of monitors that showed him every feed of video and GPS data. He had seen the action of the gunners much the same as they had through their HUDs.

“Good, then the bastards don’t even know they are under attack. This might just work,” Pickering said.

?§?

As if that comment was heard a third of the way around the world, an explosion rocked the building and blinded most of the heat-sensitive night scopes.

“What the hell was that?” the squad commander yelled into his helmet-mounted tactical radio mike.

“Jonesy tripped a booby trap wire, but he felt it. There was a delay and he was able to get to cover. No one hurt.”

“All units, go, go, go!”

Their presence no longer a secret, the men were turned loose to enter, interdict, and neutralize the enemy with all due haste. They moved with lightning speed. Three-shot bursts from their MP-5s crumpled startled terrorists who didn’t have the benefit of night vision goggles. Each trooper had memorized the face of the two high value targets believed to be in this complex — the ambassador and Jamal. One they wanted to save, the other they wanted to boil in oil, but were under orders to retrieve for his intelligence value.

The great unknown here was the number of bad guys in the center of the building. The metal roof and pipes made it impossible for the infrared to get an accurate reading. They could be facing one hundred armed men or two night janitors wielding mops. The fighting became intense as they neared the center of the complex. It turned out that some of the terrorists were in fact equipped with night vision goggles. Two squad members were being pinned down in a hallway from a night-vision-capable gun at the far end of the hall. One motioned to the other and, on the count of three, they flipped up their night vision sets and threw a flare into the hall. As soon as it lit off, they were up and firing, guided by the same intense light that was blinding the goggled terrorists. It only gave them a one-second advantage, but when you are the best of the best of the United States military and qualified to brag about it every month, one second can be the enemy’s life expectancy — which it proved to be.

Two operators were equipped with infrared scopes/vision assist. That meant they could literally see through walls. They saw the outlines of two armed men lying in wait behind an overturned desk. Seeing no one else, like a hostage, they simply chucked a grenade into the room. The blast flattened the desk against the wall along with the two men. Overall, the resistance was sporadic with no real counteroffensive. By neutralizing their lookouts, the captors weren’t expecting a raid and they certainly weren’t alerted before the choppers hit.

A flash-bang grenade went off down the hall and three troops ran to it. They were into the room before the sound stopped echoing off the walls. Tied to a chair, his ears bleeding and rolling his head side to side to ward off the pain, was the ambassador. Jamal and two others were writhing on the floor in the immediate aftershock of the blast. Two troops put themselves in front of the ambassador, shielding him with their bodies, their guns trained outward. Another operator put a round each into the heads of the other two men in the room. Jamal was wire-tied and brought to his feet.

The troopers started to assemble in the room. Fifteen of them surrounded the ambassador and Jamal and started leading them out of the building. Two operators were down. Luckily, Kevlar vests protected their vitals, but both suffered leg wounds.

Not taking chances, the 15 stopped at an obvious ambush point before the exit of the building, lobbing five grenades into the area as they all took cover. Grunts and moans accompanied the explosions. Two scouts went ahead to clear the way. A few shots rang out, all U.S. weapons, as the scouts made sure no one was playing possum.

Foxtrot Alpha circled and secured the area as half the team boarded Foxtrot Bravo . Then Alpha landed as Bravo kept guard. That’s when the Datsun approached the LZ. Instinctively, the men boarding the copter trained their guns on the vehicle.

“They’re friendlies!” the squad commander shouted. “Hold your fire!”

Everybody laughed when Ross and Bridgestone came out of the car.

“Shit, Ross, we almost blew your fucking heads off!” an operator yelled.

“Bullshit. You couldn’t hit the broad side of a bull stopped to fuck a cow.”

“What’s that?” the squad commander asked as Bridgestone and Ross carried the wrapped body from the back seat towards the copter.

“Salinda. I didn’t want to dispatch her in case we still needed info.”

“What are we supposed to do with her now?”

“Could make Jamal more talkative if he sees she’s at risk.”

“Okay. Get her on board and let’s get the hell out of Dodge.”

They clamored aboard the craft as it lifted off.

As soon as they were on board they unwrapped the sheet revealing Salinda, Jamal saw her. He was shocked, but his situational awareness clicked in. He looked to his right and saw the open door of the chopper. He bolted up, jumped on Salinda, and grabbed her in his wire-tied hands, rolling with her out of the open door. Their bodies fell more than 200 feet and broke on a rocky ledge below.

“Ah, shit!” a disgusted Ross said as he tossed the severed pinky out of the same door.

“They got him.”

A small smattering of applause broke out around the Sitch Room following the Captain’s announcement.

“Casualties?” the President said quieting the room.

“Two leg wounds, non-life threatening.”

“Thank God. Enemy killed?”

“Sir, give us some time to debrief first,” the Chairman of the Joints Chiefs said. “It will all be in a report in the morning.”

“Thank you all. Good work. Hank, I think those men earned some shiny hardware tonight.”

“Roger that, sir.”

?§?

After-action jitters were a phenomenon that most battle-hardened commanders had seen. The adrenaline rush of combat and intense mental alertness often had residual effects once the nervous system calmed down. So Jonesy vomiting into his helmet was to be expected. He took some ribbing for it, but not from three of the men who were also looking a little green around the gills. Within two minutes, four troopers upchucked their guts into their Kevlars and were lying on the floor of the chopper.