Charles Henderson - Terminal Impact

“God is great!” Zarqawi smiled.

“Yes, brother,” Umarov said, “God is great!”

Sweat oozed into the corners of Jack Valentine’s eyes, burning them as he crouched in the blackness of a storm culvert, near a spot along the Euphrates called Alaleya, squinting into the hot Iraqi night. He blinked, reacting to the sting, and with his knuckle, wiped clear the trickles, smearing the black-over-brown camouflage tiger stripes surrounding his eyes and lined down his cheeks.

The four-foot-diameter water chute, where Jack hid, ran beneath a desolate stretch of Highway 19, the hard-top main roadway on the east side of the Euphrates River that ran from Hit through Haqlaniyah north to Barwana and Haditha. He and his seven painted devils had hunted without success since they left the rocky hillock where they had eaten their supper. Now they searched the farmlands and road area as they moved along the river, eyes open for likely suspects to bring home alive for interrogation.

As they came nearer to the river and its fertile valley, with farms scattered one after another, up and down both sides of its length, they anticipated that their luck might change. More people, more potential. Likewise, more risk. Especially if they triggered the local dog population to start barking.

If dogs began barking, they would have to head back east, out into the desert, and wait for them to go quiet. Then move north to another area, where the neighborhood alert system had not sent the bad guys back in their holes.

They worked toward the night’s objective and morning extraction point, the train tracks and bridge over the Euphrates, southeast of Haqlaniyah, and west of where the railway crossed ASR Phoenix on the east side of the river. Jack hoped to present something more to Black Bart Roberts than empty hands and ghost stories, at the very least a few worthwhile skulls. But so far the patrol offered no prospects, and he badly wanted a live prisoner singing about the latest enemy happenings in the hoods around Haditha and those areas south, along the river where al-Qaeda and its allies seemed forever fruitful.

Peering from the dark hole with his night-vision optics, Jack focused on the slow-moving, ghostlike figures of his men drifting across the open ground, on the east side of the road, ahead of him. One after another, they moved swiftly and silently.

The two teams of MARSOC operators that slipped across the open terrain ahead of the gunny, cloaked by the moonless night, had broken into their two-man teams, working in parallel, as they had planned, searching for bombers and gunmen as they zigzagged northward.

With his last man now passing a point marked by three plate-sized flat rocks piled together by the first four-man team out, making a small, discreet pyramid, indicating the distance he had traveled from the culvert during his initial five-minute interval, Jack Valentine pressed the stem of his fat, black wristwatch, lighting the green luminance of its face, showing him the time. He estimated that he had three full hours of good darkness left before the moon would rise. A risen moon always caused the fish to stop biting and al-Qaeda gunmen to go into hiding. “Plenty of time to get set before that happens,” he thought.

Bronco Starr and Jaws had made the initial departures, always-impatient Corporal Cortez first and, after five minutes, Jaws came across. Cochise Quinlan then followed the first pair. Jack had teamed with Cochise since they both shot the same zero.

On this mission, in addition to his support gun, Jaws took along an M82A3 SASR, Special Applications Scoped Rifle: a .50 caliber sniper rifle fed by a ten-round box magazine, designed and built by big-bore-gun guru Ronnie Barrett at his shop in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. Because of the two-thousand-meter distance that the SASR could fire its 660-grain bullets, and the tremendous power that it carried from muzzle to impact, Jack’s snipers had come to call the big gun’s round, Whispering Death. The Hajis never heard it coming before it took one of them out with devastating force. All an enemy would ever see was the red spray of blood in the air and the scattered remains where his suddenly dead cohort had previously stood.

With its wide variety of .50 caliber ammunition, ranging from incendiary rounds to Raufoss penetrators and depleted-uranium-tipped projectiles, the Barrett .50 could shoot through walls, cars, buses, engine blocks, and buildings. Qaeda could run, but they couldn’t hide. And like Jaws liked to say, “If they run, they just die tired.”

As he watched Corporal Gomez disappear into a dip that provided the first team a slight defilade for concealment, Jack eased himself out of the big storm pipe and gave one last look up and down Highway 19 above him.

Just as Gunny Valentine put his head up to look down the roadway toward Hit, he heard the sounds of fast-moving engines and noticed the silhouettes of two vans stirring a cloud of dust as they raced toward him with their lights turned off. Quickly, he put the night-vision scope to his eye to get a better look, and immediately knew these Hajis were an IED or sabotage team, most likely moderately armed but carrying a sizeable cache of explosives.

Bronco Starr heard the sound of the two vans’ engines, then spotted the vehicles. He had just taken his place next to Jaws, when he drew bead on them through his scope. Cortez gripped his sniper rifle with his right hand, finger next to the trigger, and wrapped his left arm under his grip, taking aim, loaded and ready. Jaws hurried to off-load his backpack and unstrap the SASR.

Since Sergeant Quinlan lay in the open, easily seen by the Hajis if he moved, when he heard the two vans approaching, he stopped crawling and lay flat on his stomach, his rifle tucked by his face. Calmly, the sniper slipped out of his backpack, tucked it at his side, and unrolled a camouflage cover that he kept stashed for occasions like this. He had made it like his Ghillie suit, decorated in frayed-out brown-and-tan-burlap strips. Quickly, he got into firing position with his rifle aimed toward the oncoming traffic, and covered up.

When Cochise Quinlan slipped beneath the sheet, he virtually disappeared. Even if someone looked right at him from the roadway with an infrared scope or other night optic, he would remain invisible, as long as he didn’t move.

Carefully, Cochise snuggled into his rifle and took aim at the roadway above the culvert where Gunny Valentine had frozen in place, and waited for the two unlighted, speeding vehicles to come within range.

“They slowing down?” Bronco whispered to Alex Gomez as he focused his night-vision spotting scope on the lead van.

Jaws said nothing but sighted through the illuminated optics of the Schmidt and Bender scope mounted on the rail atop his .50 caliber rifle, trying to settle the crosshairs on the driver of the first vehicle. As he twisted the telescopic sight’s zoom ring back from twelve to six power, giving him a wider and steadier field of view, the two vans slowed, then stopped.

The corporal from South Central LA took his eye from the gunsight and looked at his partner, whose mouth had dropped open in reaction to what he saw, and under his breath said, “Oh shit.”

“Oh shit!” Jack Valentine shouted in his mind as he heard the two vans halt directly above his head. When he heard four doors slam almost simultaneously, and the sound of heavy footsteps crunch toward him on the road, he drew his Lippard 1911A2, 45 caliber, Close Quarters Battle Pistol. With it held next to his face, a 950-feet-per-second plus-performance hardball round locked in the chamber and the hammer cocked to the rear, the gunny hoped that he would not have to use it.

All too quickly, the gunny realized the four insurgents who had gotten out of the vans had no clue about his team’s presence. The al-Qaeda quartet laughed and played grab ass as they chattered at each other in Arabic and began dragging what sounded like heavy metal containers from the back of the vehicles.