John Gilstrap - Hostage Zero

A burst of machine-gun fire from close behind made Jonathan slide to a stop and bring his weapon to bear. It was Boxers, and his weapon was up, his eyes focused to the southwest corner of the compound. He followed his sight line and turned in time for a second burst to drop a soldier who’d been readying a shot of his own.

“Make it fast, Dig!” Boxers shouted. “This is spinning out of control. We are officially in trouble.”

Jonathan could count on two hands the number of times he’d heard his friend sound this unnerved. Whatever advantage they’d earned through their massive diversion had now been lost. In fact, the diversion itself had become their biggest problem. With the element of surprise squandered, this whole mission would come down to marksmanship.

Harvey pulled on the barracks door, trying to get it open. It was not lost on Jonathan that none of the local soldiers or bosses were doing anything to help the children.

“Move, Harvey,” Jonathan barked. He let the M4 fall against its sling, and raised the Mossberg. He jacked the breech open, ejecting one of the buckshot rounds, then reached to his bandolier of shells and thumbed out a slug round. He slipped it into the breech and closed it before sweeping Evan and his friend behind him. He placed the muzzle two inches away from the shackle loop, calculated the ricochet angle, then pulled the trigger.

The Mossberg bucked, and the lock disappeared. He slid the bolt to the side, pulled open the door, and children tumbled out into the night. They coughed and cried, their faces blackened with soot and smoke, but Jonathan didn’t see any burns. Next to him, Harvey did his best to examine them as they streamed by. Apparently, they were all healthy, because he didn’t stop any of them for further treatment.

A ripple of bullets chewed the wall just to the left of the door, followed an instant later by the sound of the gunfire that launched them. The children yelled and scattered, causing Jonathan to reflexively look for Evan. He was still right where he was supposed to be, his friend close enough for them to share a heartbeat.

As much as he wanted to bolt out of there, he had to look inside to make sure that he hadn’t left any living children to burn. He cleared the two steps in a single stride. Keeping close to the floor, where the air was still breathable, he crawled a few feet inside and took a look. Just an empty room on this end. On the far end, a wall of fire had become a living monster, consuming everything. If someone had been left behind, they were dead now.

He scooted back outside.

The children from the burning barracks weren’t going anywhere. They clustered around Boxers and Harvey, and now that Jonathan had rejoined the scene, they clustered around him, too. One boy of about twelve who appeared in the firelight to be missing his right eye and ear from an old injury grabbed Jonathan by his web gear and said in Spanish, “What do we do? Where do we go? Please take me with you.”

Others were doing the same with Boxers and Harvey. These kids were in a total panic, yet somehow they knew that the strangers with the rifles provided a better future than the locals who paid for their labors.

Jonathan said nothing. What could he say? This mission was coming unzipped in enormous proportions.

“We’ve got to move!” he shouted to his team.

“Guns to the north!” Boxers yelled.

Jonathan pivoted right and dragged Evan to the ground by cupping the back of his neck with his left hand while shouldering his M4 with his right. A dozen or more men in various stages of uniform undress had left their instinct to fight the fires and were dialing in to the real threat. Word was passing quickly among them, and many were assuming shooting positions. Jonathan dropped two with two three-round bursts.

Bad guys opened up from what felt like every compass point. It was panicked fire, largely unaimed and therefore not particularly dangerous, but the old adages of war still applied: If you throw enough lead out there, something’s bound to get hit.

The children scattered. Most of them. In the barracks hut behind them-Building Hotel, the one still locked but not burning-children screamed and pounded on the walls, no doubt terrified by the bullets that missed the intended targets and slammed through the wooden panels as if they were not even there.

Jonathan and Boxers both dropped to their bellies to present smaller profiles, Jonathan’s body covering Evan, who was squirming like a grounded fish to get the weight off him. “Get the PC under cover!” Jonathan yelled to Harvey, who seemed momentarily to be frozen in place, neither standing nor crawling, but stuck somewhere in between.

“Harvey!”

That snapped him back to awareness.

Jonathan rolled off of Evan. “Take Evan behind Building Hotel and sit on him. Anybody comes close you don’t recognize, shoot him.”

For the first time, Harvey seemed to fully understand the stakes, to become fully aware of his surroundings. He stooped low, grabbed Evan under his armpits, and pulled.

Evan needed no additional encouragement. Once he was free of Jonathan’s weight, he darted like a loose rocket behind the center hut. Charlie, too. Harvey had to hurry just to keep up.

“We can’t stay here!” Boxers shouted. Bullets kicked up dirt in the space between them, and the Big Guy drilled the shooter.

Jonathan knew he was right. There was no way to spirit Evan out through all of this. Two-and three-man battle teams were forming all over the compound now. Their movement and their muzzle flashes marked their locations, but with so many of them and one common target, it was only a matter of time.

“We can’t defend this position!” Jonathan yelled, firing at a running target and missing.

“Oh, ya think?” Boxers yelled back. He dropped a magazine and slapped in another one.

“We’re gonna move left,” Jonathan announced, this time using the radio so Harvey would know, too. “Harvey, stay put. Box, our rally point is the black side of the burning barracks.” He dropped a magazine that still had six rounds in it and inserted a fresh mag of thirty. “Okay, Big Guy, you shoot everything north of two-seventy, I’ll take everything south. Covering fire!”

Moving with remarkable harmony, they let go with a hail of barely aimed bursts of machine-gun fire as they rose to a deep crouch and made their move for cover. Jonathan dumped his first thirty rounds in seven seconds and two seconds later had a fresh mag that he emptied in six seconds. The goal here was not to kill-although he’d take whatever he could get-but rather to land rounds close enough to the enemy that they hit the dirt. Another basic rule of warfare was that you can’t cower and kill at the same time. Calmness under fire was the single deadliest trait that separated professional soldiers from amateurs. Well, that and the ability to hit what you’re aiming at.

To Jonathan’s right as they moved to cover behind the inferno that used to be Building India, Boxer managed to unload ninety rounds with such speed that Jonathan never heard his pauses to reload.

Jonathan arrived to relative safety in the shadow of the burning building first, followed by Big Guy just a couple of seconds later.

“No return fire,” Boxers said. His eyes were wide with anticipation, his face as anxious as a kid awaiting his turn with Santa. “We can take them.”

Jonathan nodded. Covering fire, or suppressing fire, was as much a test as a strategy. You learned how thoroughly the enemy cowered under fire. If the roles had just been reversed, and two amateurs had been fleeing a dozen pros while randomly shooting into the night, the amateurs would have been easily dispatched.

“We have to move fast, though,” Jonathan said. “We’ll roll them up from left to right.”