Charles Henderson - Terminal Impact

With every tick of the second hand on Jack’s wristwatch, the fire intensified and focused as the enemy force maneuvered closer to the low ridge over the shallow dry streambed where Valentine and his seven Marines lay.

“Gunny,” Cotton called over his intercom. “Them closing on three sides, leaving a door wide open to the east for our retreat means only one thing.”

“Copy that,” Jack said. “We gotta go that way regardless. Trap or no trap. We move in wide intervals and amp up situational awareness. To our advantage, they’ll want us all in the kill zone when they open fire, and we won’t do it. Put Petey and Chico on point.”

“You copy that? Petey? Chico?” Cotton said.

“Roger, copy all,” Corporal Preston answered.

“Roger,” Randy Powell said.

“You two hold your position for now,” Cotton said. “Sage and I are coming to you with the SAW. You take fire, open up across their front. Move to lateral cover and the rest of us will come on flank with you.”

“Good. Thanks,” Petey Preston said, his voice jangled with intense nerves.

“Chico, Petey,” Jack said. “You can do this. Trust your training. Put those nerves in your locker. You hear me?”

“Roger, Gunny,” Petey answered, and took a deep breath.

Jack knew that was almost certainly a death sentence for his two corporals, but he had no choice. Someone had to hit the trap first. He hoped that the two young Scout-Snipers would see the danger area before stepping too deep into it. He hoped that the M249 light machine gun, formerly known as the squad automatic weapon or SAW, would give them the intensive suppression fire they needed to move out of the kill zone and find a covered firing position.

“Cotton, you and Sage hold on to your SAW,” Jack said after thinking about it. “We’ll huddle up before we run. I’m giving Petey and Chico the other SAW me and Cochise have. I want both machine guns on that end, now that I think about it. One behind the other. Bronco and Jaws? Any cans of five-five-six you’re carrying, make sure they get with the two machine guns. You copy?”

“Roger, Guns,” Jaws said. “I got four cans in the pack. Bronco has a couple, too.”

As Jack looked over the top of the ridge, he saw a line of six or eight Toyota pickup trucks curved from the north side around to the east side, gunmen atop the vehicles firing machine guns. And more trucks behind them. A cloud of dust rose high along the horizon, and curved from north, across the west to the south. At their flanks, Hajis on foot ran a charge a thousand yards out.

“Let’s move!” Jack yelled to his team. Then he pushed a button and called out on the command radio.

“Corsair, Ghost One. We gotta bug out now,” Jack reported over his hands-free Telex Stinger 700 headset plugged into the Modular Integrated Communications Helmet he wore, a radio-equipped K-pot that all of the MARSOC Marines wore. “Our position not viable! We wait? We’re dead. Ghost Team One taking a run for it down the wadi.”

A moment of silence. Then Lieutenant Colonel Black Bart Roberts came on the net. “Roger, Ghost One. Corsair Actual here. Deploy to your rally point marked Whiskey Tango Foxtrot. Copy?”

“Roger. Last-resort extraction point.” Jack laughed, bullets thudding and blasting through the dirt overhead. “Copy, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot. Departing now.”

“Wolf commencing salvos on your position in three mikes,” Black Bart said. “Can you be sufficiently clear?”

“Roger, Corsair,” Jack said, running hard behind Cochise Quinlan. “Ample time. Three mikes our old position will be overrun. Hajis advancing fast in Toyotas and on foot.”

Cotton Martin, Sage, Bronco, Jaws, Petey, and Chico ran ahead at a slower pace, waiting on Cochise, Jack, and the SAW exchange. Jesse and Alex had already passed forward their cans of M249 ammo, in running-relay fashion. Once they had huddled on the move and gotten the guns and ammunition passed off, they would spread again to wide intervals.

“Ghost One, Corsair. Can you give us an enemy estimate?” Black Bart asked.

“All of them!” Jack gasped, running for his life.

Black Bart took Jack’s response meaning more enemy than he could count and closing fast in a crescent that wrapped around the eight Marines’ north, west, and south flanks. He called the Tenth Marine Regiment’s battery commander at Wolf, and ordered him to fire for effect on the MARSOC team’s position, and paint the fire in an arc of steel and high explosives from north to south to a half mile west, and at last follow the wadi east a half a mile.

For the next twenty minutes, the gunners from Tenth Marines pounded the ground inside and around the arc a half mile in every direction. The rain of steel killed half the ground soldiers but none of those in the trucks. They managed to fall back before the incoming artillery landed. They joined the force of a thousand gunmen who lay back with their graybeard boss, Abu Omar Bakr al-Nasser, waiting for the barrage to end. Then they would go after the Marines.

Abu Omar and his captains watched the salvos at a safe distance and listened to the Marines’ secure command and control voice traffic on four of six captured American radios, lost in action six months ago, which did not have their internal self-destruct codes executed.

The absconded operation order from First Battalion, Fifth Marine Regiment had given them all the discrete frequencies to monitor and stay one step ahead of the Marines. They knew to fall back after they flushed the MARSOC team, and trusted that their duo of ambush teams, equipped with the other two American radios, would intercept the Americans.

Jack Valentine and his seven Marines ran hard, loaded with their heavy packs and rifles. They managed to clear nearly a half mile from where they had lain when the first shell from the one-ninety-eights landed.

Cochise Quinlan glanced back when the first round shook the earth under his feet.

“Shit!” he said, and ran harder because the explosion felt like it had hit right on his heels. “Fuck, I hate being on the receiving end of artillery.”

“Don’t worry about the shit behind us,” Jack gasped, charging hard. “Stay focused up front. Situational awareness, Cochise! Situational aware- ness!”

“Gunny,” Cochise huffed, breathing hard. “I’m so situationally aware right now, I think I might shit my pants. Fuck, I’m scared.”

“Me, too, Cochise,” Jack said. “Me, too!”

Ray-Dean Blevins felt like shit. Looked it, too, as he and Freddie Stein and Gary Frank took lead on an executive escort from the embassy to the airport. Already, news spread that one-five had suffered a security compromise and had Marines under fire because of it. Bad news spreads fast, and worse news spreads like lightning in a thunderstorm over Florida flatlands.

Marines who now worked for Malone-Leyva talked it up on the company network. That news with the hangover from last night and from his vodka lunch break and a line of meth up the snot locker for dessert had Cooder-with-a-D flying high and mad. He knew that Cesare Alosi had capitalized on his treachery to get a CIA contract and a Defense Department contract, seeing the open needs that the plan made visible, and Malone-Leyva jumped first in line, grabbing the business away from all competition.

But that didn’t bother Ray-Dean so much as his gut feeling that the man with no soul had probably sold the operation plan to the enemy, too, or worse yet, given it to the Hajis so that the Marines would look like losers and allow Malone-Leyva another chance to shine.

“You want a hit?” Ray-Dean said to Gary Frank, driving the armored Cadillac.

“Sure,” the lout answered, and took the pint bottle of vodka and turned it up, taking a gulp. Then he let out a Rebel yell after swallowing the firewater, wiped the tears out of his eyes, and passed the bottle back.