Charles Henderson - Terminal Impact

Grigory Romyantsev hit the roof, not wanting his son anywhere near the American military. Tapeesa and her entire Iñupiat clan celebrated her son’s becoming a warrior, and Marines stood at the top of their list of heroes. They held a big party in Palmer for Andre, and tossed him high in the air from a blanket, in the Iñupiaq tradition, celebrating his departure to the Marines.

More adaptable to cold than hot, Sergeant Andre Romyantsev found working under the air conditioner in his T-shirt and PT shorts most to his liking while the Iraqi world outside the armory burned in the desert heat. When he followed Sergeant D into the operations hooch, that’s what he wore. Flip-flops, PT shorts, T-shirt, and a bush hat.

“Rasputin,” Jack Valentine said, eyeballing him behind Staff Sergeant Drzewiecki, “if I need fresh utilities with zero wear, I can always find a set in your wall locker.”

“Help yourself, Gunny V,” Romyantsev said. “Unless we’re standing parade or inspection, I intend to wear what works in the shop.”

“Fucking Eskimo,” Jaws grumbled.

“Fucking El Centro gangster,” Andre shot back.

“South Central, ass-wipe,” Gomez growled. “El Centro’s some shit hole down on the border near Arizona with orange groves and coyotes.”

“Jaws. Who peed in your Wheaties?” Jack said, turning from the radio and Billy-C’s gunfight to look at Gomez. “Cut Rasputin a little slack. He may not know Pico-Union from Alameda, but what the fuck do you know about Alaska?”

“Fucking cold, polar bears, and I don’t give a fuck if I never see it. That’s what I know,” Jaws came back.

“You need to branch out, dude,” Rasputin said.

“Branch this,” Gomez said, grabbing his crotch, then grumbled as he turned back at the radio, “Fucking Eskimo.”

Heavy black smoke boiled out of the buildings as the fires took over the neighborhoods on both sides of the road. The gunner on the MRAP had belted up more high-explosive dual-purpose grenades and now belched them from his MK19 machine gun into the flaming structures. With each explosion, a fountain of red embers blew into the sky.

“Now we’re cooking!” Billy-C said on the intercom. “Watch for movement and shoot what moves. Nothing but bad guys out there.”

Jeremy Phipps kicked open the back doors on the Cougar, and a dozen grunts plus a medic poured out of their tight-fitting entrapment. Six warriors and the doc followed him on the left side, and five ran right, tailing their top kick, Sergeant First Class Connor Bower, a genuine Boston Southie with an attitude, hailing from Beantown’s Irish hood near the Red Line’s Broadway Station off Dorchester.

The main gun operator in the forward turret with his assistant feeding up fresh mark 19 belts of grenades, two more gunners, top hatches open and running a pair of M240E1 machine guns mounted at the truck’s rear, and the driver with a second assistant gunner, both hustling ammo, stayed inside, pouring cover as their infantry deployed.

Braving a burst of hot-running enemy lead, the Army lieutenant from Fayetteville had just gotten his sixth man set along the low mud fence that flanked much of the road when three AK rounds found him. Two of the bullets took him off his feet, slapping into the back of his body armor, more painful than damaging. However, the third slug shattered his left elbow and left his arm twisting like a wet rag.

Phipps pulled himself up to the mud wall, bleeding badly, and announced on his radio, “I’m alive, boys. They just winged me.”

The medic, who had taken cover ahead of the officer, just missing the AK burst, threw a compression wrap on the lieutenant’s arm and hit him with a shot of morphine.

As Jeremy Phipps’s eyes rolled up, more from shock than drugs, Connor Bower came on the command radio with his unmistakable Southie brogue. “L-T’s down, but okay. I got command now. Sah-gent Bower, if yah askin’. Hah ’bout you jah-heads? Ready ta kick some ass?”

“Fuckin’ A, dude,” Claybaugh came back.

“We’ll run straight at ’em, then push around our end,” Bower said. “You jah-heads cover the flanks on your end and kill ’em when they flee. Don’t let any a dese rat bas-tads escape. You gat dat?”

“We’re already on the move,” Billy answered.

Bullets flying, Bower left a sergeant in charge of his right echelon and ran to the back of the Cougar. He slammed his hand against the steel doors while hot lead slapped all around him. “Open up! Wounded man comin’ in!”

Then the medic and another soldier dragged the half-conscious lieutenant back to the MRAP, where the driver and an assistant gunner pulled him inside.

Billy-C watched the fearless sergeant leading his warriors, enemy lead in the air and him standing amidst it.

“You guys catching this John Wayne moment? That’s one insane motherfucker,” he said on the MARSOC intercom. “I like him.”

“Insanity don’t make him bulletproof,” Cotton Martin said, then splattered an al-Qaeda gunman with an AK who appeared at the corner of a burning building, taking aim at the crazy Irishman. His .50 caliber Barrett sent the enemy’s head tumbling high in the air like a football over a goal post while an arm and a leg flew right and left, and the rest of the body sprayed red chunks on the stucco wall.

“Fuck!” exclaimed Byrd Clingman, who the crew had named Jewfro, because of his curly brown hair. “Downright spectacular when those Raufoss penetrators hit somebody.”

As Connor Bower scattered his warriors on both sides of the road into well-dispersed assault lines, and began to move them forward and push an angle on the Hajis’ lower flanks, using fire and movement tactics, Billy-C spread his two snipers even wider from his center position, curving around the enemy’s opposite end.

“Hook on around, Cotton. We’ll blindside ’em when they run for it,” he told Martin, who had also spread his operators and maneuvered to hook around the enemy on his side of their ambush positions.

With everything on both sides of the road now ablaze, funneling fire and smoke through the neighborhoods parallel to the Fallujah-bound road, al-Qaeda gunmen began to dash out of back doors and gallop down alleyways.

Hub Biggs, the tall boy out of Kerrville, Texas, had stayed even with his Scout-Sniper partner, Corporal Clyde Avery McIllhenny, whom the team called Hot Sauce.

Point of fact, Clyde McIllhenny came from Lafayette, Louisiana, was a member of the Tabasco Sauce McIllhenny family, and was the great-grandnephew of one of Tabasco’s more legendary bosses, Brigadier General Walter Stauffer McIllhenny, who led Marines on Guadalcanal in World War II.

Tabasco Mac, as his fellow Marines had nicknamed General McIllhenny, in addition to his heroism, for which he received the Navy Cross and Silver Star, also had great talent with a rifle and pistol, earning Distinguished Marksman in both disciplines. Likewise, Hot Sauce had a natural marksmanship talent, and sought to earn Double Distinguished ranking like his famous uncle who had made Tabasco a Marine Corps staple.

“Yo, Hot Sauce. You seeing this?” Hub Biggs said in a soft voice over his comm link.

“You talking about the dude who ducked behind the car?” McIllhenny answered.

“You see what he’s doing?” Biggs asked.

“Not hardly,” Clyde came back. “I’s waiting for him to run, then pop him on the fly. Looked like he’s carrying a scoped rifle. You got a shot?”

“Oh yeah,” Biggs answered.

“What ya waiting on? Weather to change?” Hot Sauce said.

“I just feel bad taking advantage of a man with his pants down,” Biggs said. “Poor bastard’s got the runs. Must be all the excitement. Soon as he got behind the car, he dropped bloomers and let fly. Squirting like a fire hose.”